Computers:

> Shelby,
>
> Well....I looked at the Forum and not much has changed.
>
> Is there any ANALYSIS of individual stocks? (I did the CAPS because I see
> we lost SRSrocco)

I don't think you should be investing in mining stocks, because we are coming to the end of the industrial age.

Software will overtake everything by an order-of-magnitude.

The physical world is fading away.

Physical things are not as efficient.

Hunter & Gatherer Age
Agricultural Age
Industrial Age
Knowledge Age (software is encoding knowledge)

Just as it wasn't worth investing in hunting & gathering in the prior ages, not worth investing in agriculture lately, so it won't worth investing in mining stocks.

I was an early employee of both PayPal and Eventbrite. I know how that works. ANyway, back to metals and miners.

What is your point?

Paypal didn't really increase knowledge much, because they were just an extension of the credit card system. They didn't really impact software.

Eventbrite was part of an evolution to increase the online knowledge about live events, such as concerts. That is a mild contribution to the software knowledge, but not very significant.

Whereas Amazon has the server commodity business, where they sell server time as a commodity. And I think as my Copute destroys Google and Facebook, you will see Amazon's commodity server model rise to the top.

And I am becoming more confident about Copute in the past few weeks as the design and implementation is come together to exceed my expectations. I am serious about the destruction of the large corporations. Read my comments on the following two blog pages:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3634#comments (Ctrl+F then search for "Shelby")
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3689#comments (Ctrl+F then search for "Shelby")

http://augustss.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-points-for-lazy-evaluation-in.html#992454843212471185

Come to find out that I can get the same efficiency as lazy does for 'or . map p', by using Traversable in strict language, where I have a version of 'traverse' which inputs a function that returns Maybe (i.e. can terminate the iteration).

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3634&cpage=4#comment-320849

I am becoming more confident there are no mainstream use cases where FP has disadvantages. And the advantages are beyond orders-of-magnitude, with the power of Reed's Law for composition. Imperative programming isn't generally compositional, and that is fundamental.

I recently explained the O(1) solution to the n-queens using an immutable random access array, which provides evidence that immutable is not likely to be log n slower in mainstream use cases. Today I published a tweak to Traversable so that lazy is not more efficient than eager for FP composition on combinations of mapping and folding.

As best as I can tell, no one other than me, is thinking about the separation of interface and implementation in FP. If anyone knows of anyone, I want to know who they are. So that could be the reason no progress has been made. I had a huge learning curve to climb, starting circa 2008, and I didn't really decide until 2011 that I had no choice but to create a language.

Also I could not achieve my work without Scala. There is no way I could reproduce all that effort by myself in any reasonable time-frame, so initially Copute will compile to Scala, and let the Scala compiler do as much as possible of the heavy lifting. My gratitude to the Scala folks is beyond words. I understand that Odersky's model was to throw in everything including the kitchen sink, because it was a research project to demonstrate that generality. My goal is different. Again too much talk on my part, but I am excited.

And the point that Scala wasn't well known and fully capable until about 2008 roughly, maybe 2006 sans some key features.

Some progress has been achieved, but not so mainstream yet. Twitter is deploying Scala and other boutique JVM languages throughout their server-side.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3634&cpage=5#comment-321156

Shelby wrote:

@The Thinking Man:
The original complaint wasn't about the semantics, but rather the verbosity of:

Code:

NSString *test = [myString stringByAppendingString:@" is just a test"];

The distinction you've raised is not a justification for the extra verbosity of Objective C, but rather the raison d'être for immutability, i.e. purity, a/k/a referential transparency. In an pure language, no object can be mutated, which eliminates the spaghetti nature of cross-dependencies of functions, i.e. any an impure function which inputs a string and appends to it by mutating its input, has modified its input and thus has a dependency on its caller, which spreads out into the program like spaghetti.

In pure language, the string is represented as an immutable list, thus the '+' operator for strings, is the construction operator for a list, which eliminates the wasteful copying and eliminates the other problems you raised:

Code:

List[String] = mystring :: "is just a test"

Pure FP isn't generally slower, and in the above case it is faster except for concatenation of very small strings (which could thus be automatically optimized by the '+' operator to be a copy to new string of only the small portions), because it forces us to use algorithms which make more sense in overall compositional perspective.

Thanks for providing a clear example of why pure FP is what we should all be using.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3689&cpage=3#comment-321161

Shelby wrote:

@Winter: I have a longish post stuck in moderator queue (because it is too long), and I wanted to be clear that the point I am detailing in that post, is that the social structure is not strong in the collectivist model, because it is based on false pricing of relative value. And that also is the essence of the suburbia point I am making. And my overall mathematical point, is that the way collectivism spreads is primarily via the debt model. This is what makes it so impossible to get rid off, and why we end up talking a lot, because we can't fix it. However, I think there is a technological solution, that won't require any more talk.

@Jessica et al, and this false pricing of relative value explains why education is so messed up and concurs with your and Monster's points. Winter, in a non-collectivist, free-market system, the kids and parents who are unmotivated, wouldn't be forced to attend, and the society wouldn't be forced to waste its resources. Collectivism always involves force. Free markets involve choice. When people can choose, resources are not wasted, because ultimately no matter how much we force people, people are only productive the areas they (like and) choose to be. Not everyone is destined to be a highly paid profession, some will be more lowly paid janitors with "on the job" education. In such a competitive model, people have an incentive to improve their education, if they so desire.

Here follows the long post referred to in the above comment.

This will be a bit long, because this requires deeper conceptual exposition.

@Nigel: I misspoke, Ecole Classique is only $5k/yr for high school, competitive AA athletics, and Latin.

I assume you are conflating the price you pay for subsidized wireless, with my assumed higher actual cost of providing of lower density service. And/or it may be that the cost advantage diminishes above some population density, and this would not disprove my unproven theory that providing low density wireless may not have a positive real rate of return on capital.

I don't know if there is an inherent density limit for wireless, or it may be that the mean density of the area around the stadium is much lower than the peak density during event times, and thus sufficient hardware for peak density is not economically justified.

Agreed about processed sewage because the primary cost is the ongoing output per person. We have septic tanks here, which is better because it eliminates another vector towards collectivism and mis-pricing of relative value. Passive sewage systems can be more healthy and produce free methane to power heating and cooking. But of course your local planning board won't allow it, because there is no income for them. Your relatives left Philippines, because they wanted to come avail of the subsidized economy, where they can earn debt-inflated higher wages. But a reversion is coming.

The raw materials cost was not lower for larger sq ft housing, and the land, taxes, permitting, labor, etc.. cost significantly more than without the debt subsidy. And this is precisely my overall point, that this phenomenon is a disconnection of price from resource cost (and relative knowledge value in the society), caused by the debt and government subsidy economic model. It is a problem of uniform distribution, or socialism again. If everyone can get a loan to have the same size house, then all the inputs to housing go higher, and disconnect from the resource (relative value of knowledge) efficiency. Refer back to my prior comments on this page and the prior few blogs, where I explained that uniform distributions are the antithesis of progress, knowledge, efficiency, and prosperity. For example, when a programmer such as yourself who is adding much more knowledge to the economy, has to pay programmer level wages for basic services which do not add as much knowledge, then the economy becomes unproductive (as is the case now with huge and increasing debts). If everyone is rich, then no one is. The fallacy that if everyone is rich, then everyone is more prosperous, is the lie of pulling demand forward with debt, which always ends in loss of production, because of the mispricing of the relative value of knowledge.

Catherine Austin Fitts calls this the Tapeworm economy, where the productive capital of the locals is siphoned off to the capitalists far away.

A definition of insanity is doing the same destructive thing over and over again, and not realizing it. This is the nature of collectivism, and debt is the primary enabling mode of denial.


@Winter: I agree, the "collective idealism" never goes away, because the people never learn. That is why I said there won't be any breakup of the EU, instead the Europeans will prefer authoritarianism, probably leaning towards totalitarianism because of the cultural of idolizing of social contracts. Germany will bailout the PIIGS because they need markets to sell their industrial goods and so they need to force the PIIGS to borrow more money. And Germany will decide that they must force those PIIGS to make the necessary social changes so the PIIGS will produce as much as they spend. Just more top-down futility that ends up likes the 1920s and ultimately 1940. Can you help me to understand, why is this culture so widespread in EU? My vision of American culture used to be one of individuals can do for themselves.

Money is very important, because when it does not represent fairness, then the society becomes violent after a falsely priced utopia. For example, the fractional reserve fiat system is based on the debasement via inflation tax of debt. When it is done by an authoritarian central bank as is the case every where in world now, instead of the free market of multiple fraudulent private banks as was case in USA in 1800s, then people have no choice. This continual transfer of the real capital of productive people to the capitalists, destroys the information in the society about relative value. Thus the society mal-invests and even mal-educates (that debt and welfare is optimal, etc), which results in deeply embedded destruction of fairness and productivity. It a curse so hurtful to the people in it, that I think I know what hell is. Did I answer my own question about what created the culture of Europe? But why do people get stuck in this culturally embedded curse? Well for one reason people think it is more fair, because they have this delusion that man can create superior top-down social control. Buy why are people so stupid? I think it is because if there were no stupid people, then there would be no smart people. So I just have to shrug my shoulders and say "thanks for giving me the opportunity to devise a technology that is more intelligent, rich, and fair". I should note that people do not really have much choice, because money is a social contract, due to the critical importance of fungibility, and thus money will naturally trend towards centralization. This is why I started to look for technological solution to money.

Those capitalists who have the delusion of being a superior race, software is coming and they can't capitalize knowledge, only the capital intensive hardware for deploying knowledge. Their futile useless slavery capital will wither as software is owned by the minds where it resides, because it is never static. And none of their attempts to capitalize the internet can help them. It doesn't matter how much they play their role in the fascist curse, they can't stop the fledgling age of software.

Winter, I think you want people to prosper, so I think you will abandon your love of top-down social contracts in time. Someone just needs to demonstrate another economic model that is working better. Given the unfairness of the collectivist fiat model, the only consolation scraps for the slaves, is the welfare state. So it is not surprising that you would view that as the only option. I come as a lamb in wolfskin, wide-eyed, bearing gifts of a nascent technology and economic model for uncoordinated cooperation. Would you not embrace a working solution that vests mankind in his own capital-- his mind?

Followup:

@Winter: A summary of my link is that a collectivist promises that which is impossible to predict, the future, and thus is a habitual liar. The free market promises nothing, not even freedom, and thus is a habitual truth-teller. I wouldn't want to be known as a liar.

@Winter:

1. So you've conceded that collectivism is about always about force.

2. What is the equation that tells with certainty which skills will be in demand and not oversubscribed in the distant future?

3. If the state forces uniform indoctrination, then how does the workforce adapt to the unknown future? What if the future is we are invaded by aliens and they only need native tribes who know secret herbal medicines, and they kill the rest? What if they only let cannibals live? What if they only let collectivist live? Thus I am okay that collectivists exist, and encourage you to add more to your ranks.

4. Nature requires many finely grained variable outcomes (degrees-of-freedom) in order to anneal the globally optimized best fitness to dynamic outcomes. Less diversity is less degrees-of-freedom, and thus the system can't optimize. This is a scientific proof that collectivism is for those who like sub-optimal results.

5. Even parents can't force a child to be interested in something the child is not interested in, so neither can the state. What the state is good at is making kids so bored and uninterested, that many rebel and hate education. The state can buy off everyone, and this is called a debt bubble. But I think that power will diminish soon with the rise of a new technology.

6. The educational market is efficient now. Proof is I opted out, which has been very efficient in many facets.

7. I didn't write that I am not trading. I decide who and how I trade most efficiently. For the moment, apparently you think you are trading more efficiently in a collectivist model, but that might permanently collapse soon (if I am correct that industrial age is permanently dying). Living together does involve some compromise, but only to the degree that my needs and desires inhibit those of others, e.g. if my neighbor plays their karaoke at 120dB. But I have learned it is more efficient to not involve govt gridlock, and simply talk to my neighbor, or move if we can't agree (which I have done a few times). To the extent I am impacted by the poor education of others (not much), would be more so under this poor education system. However, I see this as an opportunity. I see all those frustrated kids, as fertile ground for my new computer language. Hopefully others also see economic opportunities in providing ways to side-step the morass of govt.

8. The fear-mongering about what would happen without universal, uniform education, is actually the outcome that we are getting with it, and the opposite of the outcome that basic science of fitness, entropy, and annealing says we would get without it. I could explain why in more detail, with numerous examples, but it won't change your mind. The only thing that will change your mind is to diminish the power of the state and the corporation via some technology (e.g. which makes it technically impossible to tax knowledge). Then you will have no choice. That is a theoretical possible outcome of my current work.

9. Regarding #7, I think you are going to be shocked at the severity of the death of the industrial age. It is going to destroy your world. I hope you find the knowledge age. And it will be the antithesis of the collectivist age which relied on material control, industry, and physical assets capital.

This discussion continued at the following link, with "666 will be the collectivists last attempt to tax, as they destroy the industrial age":

http://goldwetrust.up-with.com/t37-666#4565

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3695&cpage=2#comment-321993

Shelby wrote:

@Shelby:

...my less than $100 computer (in 1990s dollars)...
...because the economies-of-scale are increasing...
In short, all profits are derived from the knowledge portion of the business...

So this requires those who produce knowledge must be wealthier than those who don't, otherwise these economies-of-scale (driven by a large population and the declining costs of physical production) are wasted in the collectivist redistribution scam.

The propaganda about overpopulation is merely the calls of passive capital for a bailout from the knowledge age. But no one can bail them, game over, check mate. Do they even know what time it is?

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3500&cpage=1#comment-321307

Unthink is not the breakthrough, because afaik it isn't open source, nor decentralized server databases. Diaspora may be.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3695&cpage=1#comment-321731

Shelby wrote:

The future is in the software that runs on the devices. Thus the competition is really about the model for leveraging the content of the devices.

Amazon: closed-source portal marketplace
Apple: closed-source one-stop marketplace
Google: open-source marketplace, closed-source derivative ad server marketplace

Google doesn't need to care so much about device content, they only need the internet ad market to continue expanding. Amazon doesn't need to care so much about the qualities of content, they only need the content providers market to continue expanding (which is why I think they offer the commodity server business). Thus Amazon is working for Google. Apple has to micromanage content, because their model depends on their quality being differentiated from the others.

Clearly Apple is more vulnerable to disruption than Amazon.

Thus ultimately they are all working for us– we the open source programmers

Apple: devices – uses content and services to sell devices

That is a subset of the more general model I offered, which is that Apple needs to control content quality in order to differentiate their products. They require that their products be differentiated on quality, in order for the total "Apple experience" to be differentiated. Otherwise there is no compelling reason to enter their jailed garden, where more open markets exist for Android and Amazon. Please realize that as hardware costs decline, all significant nominal profits will be made in software, not in hardware. Apple is thus the most vulnerable to disruption because they depend on being able to offer less choice and higher quality, but that isn't the nature of open source Inverse Commons, where high quality follows from more open choices.

Amazon: store – uses devices and content to sell stuff to people

That is a superset of my model which has no predictive power, because all 3 of them use devices and content to sell something, Google sells derivative ad servers. The significant predictive power quality of Amazon's model, is that is a portal and not a one-stop shop. Thus they are leveraging the devices (Kindle) and commodity servers (EC) businesses to drive more partner websites. Hopefully you have noted that Amazon takes orders for 1000s of partners, where you can find the same product for sale on the partner's website.

Google: ads – uses devices and content to sell eyeballs to advertisers

Yup, and I hope you get the point that the derivative model is immune to need for an result with the devices, other than that no one else can monopolize the devices to block ads. And that the main goal of Google is to lower the cost and increase the number of devices. Google doesn't need to win the device marketplaces.

So two are “working” for me. One is “working” for someone else.

That is the simplistic and obvious relationship, which doesn't capture the more significantly derivative economic relationship that I outlined.

I noted that ultimately they are all vulnerable to open source business models, i.e. Apple is vulnerable to "Web3.0 open apps" (assuming they won't be limted to Flash nor HTML5, but fully programmable), Amazon is vulnerable to open source exchange marketplaces (e.g. what I am working on), and Google is eventually vulnerable to open source decentralized social networking (e.g. Diaspora) where rent-free ad serving and relevancy is inherent in the network.

And they are all working to expand the market, which gives more economy-of-scale to our open source markets. Since closed-source can't scale, I can boldly claim they are working for open source programmers.

Whatever makes people stick to MS Windows, it is NOT the quality of MS technology

Another major factor is the browser runs fine on XP. So this opened up an unlimited world of expansion that didn't require change or OS differentiation. Also most people are task focused, with the minimum disruption possible. An outlier OS presents stumbling blocks along the way, and offsetting theoretical efficiency gains are difficult for the individual to mentally amortize across those. Apple solved this by being a first mover in a new device space.

This is another reason that I am trying to kill project granularity of composition, and this even applies to open source. We wouldn't get so stuck if programs could mutate incrementally "with enough monkeys banging randomly on the source" (paraphrased quote of Esr).

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3695&cpage=2#comment-321973

Shelby wrote:

@Nigel:

but it’s not going to get disrupted in this fashion anytime soon

Disruption is often a waterfall event, that isn't expected by most observers. This is because it is often a surprising technology paradigm-shift, and the nature of new technology, is that it isn't well known before it is created and proven in the market.

I am specifically working on the technology that indirectly could possibly disrupt Apple's "native apps better than web apps" model, and more directly cause imperative programming such as Apple's required development system to suffer an orders-of-magnitude loss in relative productivity, and last night I rough drafted a beginner's tutorial to explain it (section Copute Tutorial at bottom of page). The library and compiler are progressing. Is the 5 line code example in the tutorial not compelling, elegant, and intuitive enough for rapid adoption?

UPDATE: a new post on Entropic Efficiency summarizes perhaps better than this post does.

I have been working 15+ hours per day literally (no joke).

For example, I am working on Copute and I think it could disrupt their plans. Others may be working on disruptive technologies in other fields.

Copute is more likely to disrupt in the sense of "smaller things grow faster". In other words, let TPTB have control over what is a dying morass (the industrial age). Let's take control over the things that are growing faster and are the future.

I think I have the technology that will render passive capital useless, and thus their control over passive capital will not help them. The reason is because software is in everything now, even toasters. It is related to the Theory of the Firm, which says that as long as there exists a transaction cost, then the corporation can exist. When corporations exist, it means that passive capital (the capital of the owners of the corporation) is able to grow faster than the capital of the individuals who actually do the work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

What Copute does technologically, is give rise to an economic model, which eliminates the transaction cost for software integration. Thus the corporation no longer has any economic viability. Thus the capital becomes the ongoing minds of the programmers (because software is never static and thus the value isn't the code, but the ongoing knowledge of how to adapt, improve, and integrate it). The economic model is explained here:

http://Copute.com
+ What Would I Gain?
+ + Improved Open Source Economic Model

This uniqueness of Copute's technology is explained in easy words for a non-programmer here:

http://Copute.com
+ Copute Tutorial
+ + Meaning of Computer Language

Think about this too. All engineering disciplines, even marketing, are encoding their work in software.

At the following link I explained more about what passive capital is and its link to the enslavement of mankind.

http://goldwetrust.up-with.com/t44p75-what-is-money#4580

In addition to Copute, I had been working on a Theory of the Universe, which has apparently been proven to true by another scientist and many scientists are now embracing it. He proved Newton's laws of gravity derive from information content, just as I had theorized! Wow! See the following link for details:

http://goldwetrust.up-with.com/t124p15-theory-of-everthing#4581

Here follows an email discussion which was in response to the following link about the timing and method of the coming NWO currency (code-named the Phoenix):

http://goldwetrust.up-with.com/t174-big-picture#4590

Note if you have read the above links previously, you may want to scan them again, as I made some important edits that are clarifications with those prior posts, e.g. the world currency will initially be for international payments only (not all payments as I had originally implied).

> Maybe these assholes will not even be around
> anymore by that time. Who knows. If you had asked
> Louis XVI in 1788 how he sees the future, he
> would have given a slightly different outlook
> than what was to really happen. Same with the
> German emperor in 1913, or the Ottoman sultan, or
> the Russian Czar, or Hitler in 1941, or Kennedy
> on November 21, 1963, or average New Yorkers on
> September 10, 2001, and many others.
> If you believe the SOB's crap too much, you
> predispose yourself to walk on paths created
> specially for that purpose. And if enough people
> believe it, it may actually happen. Think pure,
> act pure. Think dirty, act dirty. They are
> entrapping you with the filth they lay out for
> you. It's up to you not to go for it. We can
> renounce them with what we will not do.
>
>
>
>>Ridiculous except that TPTB published their 2018 prediction (for launch
>> of
>>the Phoenix) in the Economist magazine in 1980s, and so far it looks
>>like they are right on schedule. Switzerland just joined the EU
>>monetary union. Once Swiss central bank distorts the Swiss economy by
>>buying up $100s of billion of Euros, then Switzerland won't be able to
>>unhitch from the EU currency bloc.
>>
>>
>> > Do you realize how it sounds to make predictions
>> > 7 and 13 years into the future?
>> > To me, rather ridiculous.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >>The NWO currency will be a payments only currency from 2018 to 2024, i.e.
>> >>the national or bloc currencies will float against it (the FOFO position
>> >>but not 100% gold backing), then it will become the actual currency
>> >>in 2024. While it is not an exclusive currency within the nations, the
>> >>nations will continue to be wracked by the sins of debt and
>> >>fiscal deficits, so this will push people towards opening accounts
>> >>denominated in the world currency, until it is dominant by 2024.


Here follows an email discussion about what is passive capital:


>>I think I have the technology that will render passive capital useless,
>>and thus their control over passive capital will not help them.
>
> Passive capital is just the portion of their
> wealth that they don't actively use to control
> commerce. The rest is active and people have no
> way to get around it. The passive portion can be
> mobilized anytime if there is danger to their monopoly.
> So I don't see how software can do anything to
> weaken their grip on commerce. You have to buy
> gas from their gas stations. You have to buy food
> and clothes from their stores, etc. How will software make a dent on that?


Good question. Thanks for letting me see where I need to explain more.

First of all realize that "active" means that you are producing value with your own activities, i.e. an engineer creates a new design or an investor researches the technology before he invests and constantly evaluates the technology's progress. Passive capitalists don't do this. They want huge economies-of-scale, where they just count beans in an accounting calculation. They don't want to be bothered with actually creating the knowledge, they think the knowledge workers are just their slaves.

The profit margins on commodities, and even now on manufacturing, are close to 0 and actually I have read that most of China is operating with razor thin to negative profit margins in some cases. China values employment quantity more than profit margins. And now even most of that is being automated and costs reduced further, which will further shrink profit margins.

I am not referring to the knowledge that goes into engineering new designs, but realize this is spread out over billions of consumers now, so that cost is insignificant when it comes to these commodities and basic highly replicated things that everyone uses.

So thus the profit that comes from commodities and industry, is dying. It is being automated away to 0.

Thus the bigger slice of the current economy is really the knowledge businesses, which are the various engineering disciplines. But these all rely on software to encode and develop their knowledge base and work output, and most of them are actually software (e.g. biotech, nanotech, etc).

This is why the elite capitalists have been becoming so aggressive at this juncture in history. Their businesses are becoming unprofitable (they own all the industries because they capitalize them via their fiat debt system which they control, so they are the owners of that system and are responsible for its aggregate profitability), and the only way they can maintain their profit margins is to use methods of control which eliminate competition so that they can charge prices that are much higher than the cost of production. They can get away with this for as long as the people have no way to earn an income by working out of their own home individually (producing their own contribution to the total knowledge of the economy).

People can't do that now, because the "transactional cost" (go read that Theory of the Firm to understand the meaning of the term) of producing knowledge forces people to work for a corporation. Examples of transactional cost, are people leave a project, then the project dies, so there needs to be a corporation which can keep things organized in such a way that individual actions don't stop progress.

But with my technological innovation, the individual's contribution becomes referentially transparent. Which means basically that everyone can contribute individually without adversely affecting the progress of the whole system. In fact, under my innovation, then in theory the system's progress will accelerate by Reed's Law factor, due to the networking effects of these individual contributions leveraging each other. This economic model wasn't possible without referential transparency, because the conflicts of interest among individuals would cause gridlock in the overall system, because the individual contributions could be a like a spagehetti or domino cascade into all the other contributions.

This is basically what I was driving at a year ago with my research into the Dunbar number of limit of humans and the effects of transactional cost.

This innovation reforms the large from the small level, i.e. it is naturally grass roots revolution, because it doesn't require anyone to organize anyone else. Each person works to maximize his/her income individually and it causes the decentralized system to become most of the value in the world economy.

TPTB won't be able to do anything. Their capital and control will be useless, because you can't buy the minds of individuals, once they have a way to maximize their income producing knowledge without the need of the corporation.

===========================
Another email exchange with a different person:

> Money is a symbol. It represents something. It represensts objects or services that can be exchanged.
> It also represents objects that can be produced and it represents production itself.
>
> In Asia, for example, the people consider that the action of working is more valuable than the object that
> is being produced. That's how you get people to work for a few dollars/day. That's how Japan rose from
> economic defeat after WW2. It is understood that work itself is what is valuable, not material objects.
>
> People in the West are more materialistic and consider that a job is something that is owed them, and that
> the reward of work is money.
>
> Prior to the industrial revolution of the 1800s, the value of a resource was determined solely by its
> available quantity.
>
> As a result of the tremendous quantities of resources and produced goods since the 1800s, the value of
> these things is determined using lies and falsehoods.
>
> Any knowledge, any object, any production can be equated to and related to man's survival. Those things
> that increase his survival have more value to man than those things which lower his survival.
>
> TPTB control knowledge in may ways. For example, it requires 18-20 years of education to become a
> doctor that may legally practice mediciine. Yet that knowledge may be found in any public library and
> studied and learned well in a few years.
>
> When you get to the point of having to place a value on Copute, i.e. it's economic worth and its value
> as an exchanged thing, think in terms of its ability to increase or reduce survival.

What I think will happen is that once the transactional friction that gives rise to the Corporation is erased by referential transparency of Copute, at least with software and derivatives of software (which is basically everything since s/w is just recursive logic), is that the value of knowledge will be more free market priced, and thus "what was produced" will be determined by the market's valuation of each module of logic.

Thus I have already solved that issue of the pricing being decentralized market driven, and thus the technological inability to manipulate market pricing.

I improved upon all their solutions, which were not first-class:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3508077/does-scala-have-type-disjunction-union-types/7460312#7460312

This is funny, but true.

http://twitpic.com/5xs1vy


One of my talents is I span all 3 disciplines, especially stronger in design than most engineers (I can draw, layout, anticipate market desires/emotions, etc), but my mgmt style is minimalist. I would also brag that I am a strong engineer in the sense of identifying the main focus, simplifying, and achieving it. But pride comes right before the downfall, so this bragging is hereby redacted.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3744&cpage=5#comment-324562

Shelby wrote:

@Doc Merlin:
The key is that without fractional reserve banking, debt isn't nearly as dangerous, because debt bubbles implode expeditiously. But if people demand debt and bonds, they also implicitly demand fractional reserve banking and a govt backstop, because otherwise bond holders consistently end up bankrupted. The 1800s is evidence, the implicit forces of which transitioned us to the central bank in 1913.

Afaics, the only solution is to eliminate the ability to store capital, by making DYNAMIC knowledge the only capital of significance. Then capital becomes active, and debt, bonds, and govt become useless. I am actively developing this solution.

http://fantom.org/sidewalk/topic/675#c11391

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3753#comment-328002

Shelby wrote:

@Tim F.: I humbly ask Esr for one transgression of my 1 comment/day limit (knowing I must accept the consequences), because I want to reply before I sleep (3am) while it is fresh in my mind. Indeed, I was writing about the Dunbar number limit in 2009, before I was aware of Reed's Law. Yet Reed's Law is still relevant in that even the 2^150 Dunbar limited version is an astronomical number, and to achieve the Dunbar limit across a wide range of grouping categories, requires a very large value of N because each category (e.g. interest, hobby, etc) can be sparse in the general population. This is a documented phenomenon with social networks, where grouping size (and marketing conversions) increase with the size of the network (or grouping, e.g. a game's usership). And the Dunbar limit can be exceeded by the fact that people group differently in different categories (e.g. I am interested in jock athletics, programming, math, theology, psychology, dating, natural health, Fukushima, etc.), and also that groupings sometimes don't require personal knowledge of everyone in the group, e.g. I don't remember everyone by name in Esr's blogs. Reed's Law assumes only one grouping category. So thus I although Reed's Law is an incomplete model, I think we can build a model that shows networking effects could scale exponentially with network size, and this has been one my primary motivations for working on modularity, because I think the limit in the s/w realm, is not human cognitive capacity but rather the inability to scale implementation (programming) of feature choices at exponential rates.

We see the grouping effects now with simultaneous synergy and competition between Amazon and Apple, Samsung hiring the Cmod developers, etc.. The potential groupings are limited when there is a walled garden. I do understand that any particular grouping category will plateau in utility, but the number of categories are limited only by the degrees-of-freedom in current technology, market, and legal structure, i.e. no where near a limit in human cognitive capacity because potential knowledge of all potential groupings is exponentially greater than a particular group's knowledge limit.

Afaics, the questions you claim as inconsistencies, instead are consistent. Apple, telcoms, etc. could possibly have been a threat to an open web platform, and now Google has apparently successfully marginalized them and the web has won (partially) because Google has embraced network effects. Afaik, Google is profiting on the ongoing growth of the web population (and afaik there was a potential threat to that before Android), nor do I think the bankrupt developed world is going to maintain its artificially inflated economic value over the developing world (a few more years at most then a currency revaluation which will wipe out everyone in paper assets). I agree that in terms of the implementators of technology, most will come from the developed world, but they will be making products for the world's youth who are coming into their working age, and they are predominantly in the developing world. The numbers (aging population, inadequate youth to pay for it, massive debt, etc) say the developed world can't grow their way out of their bankruptcy without the developing world consuming their technology products. The world has to become more integrated.

Agreed that Google owns the part that has value to Google (per the above paragraph) and lets the networking effects take care of the other parts. While Apple slows themselves down (relative to market share and network effects) by controlling and perfecting. Imagine if Google had allowed the adoption of the web by potential smart phone users to be stagnated by Apple's limited business model.

When I mentioned short-term effects at the cost of long-term gridlock, I wasn't referring to not using Google. I was referring to some nifty features in a walled garden in exchange for a loss of the Reed's Law benefits (groupings and degrees-of-freedom) from exponential scaling of the web platform. Pulling demand forward into a closed paradigm, is in my abstract mind analogous to pulling demand for housing forward (stealing from future demand) by 30 years with 30 year mortgages. In a recent blog, we discussed some of the technological tradeoffs that iPhone has in order to achieve performance now, at the cost of developer productivity in the future, e.g. lack of garbage collection and lack of choice with an outdated programming language.

That Apple can generate $345 billion to passive capitalists and only return $3 billion to all the third party developers who make the platform viable, speaks to me about the ultimate economic failure of the business model. The business model that is able to generate a proportionate share of value for the programmers, is going to kickarse, because none of this happens without programmers. Programmers are highly underpaid, even though they are some of the most highly paid. I predict something radical is going to happen within the next couple of years on this. You can argue that is all that apps can earn, because there are so many free apps. And I can argue that this is due to the structure of the business model. Apparently Apple apps earn more than Google apps. Imo, the problem is too much duplication of effort, because we don't have modularity of reuse. There are zillions of things that not being programmed yet, because they require project-scale, and there is limited project-scale groupings that mesh with the available corporate vested interests.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3753#comment-328383

Shelby wrote:

@Tim F., neither Metcalf nor Reed's Law correctly models the human networking effects, because there isn't only one category that is to be grouped pairwise (Metcalf) or N-tuples (Reed's Law). However, categories (topics that cause people to interact) are numerous and often the participants' set is temporal yet the interaction record is archived and persistently spawning new interaction. People can be in more than one grouping simultaneously, and even temporarily but persistently because they can put it down and forget about it, yet pick it up later at will. Many people remark that Google is their external memory. The Dunbar cognitive limit (~150) on human social groupings applies where we interact with those in the group personally. Technological groupings are not necessarily so limited, because for example with DCVS, it is possible for the effort of some group, to be taken up and extended by other people, without participants even being aware of each other. Although a particular case of interaction may reach diminishing marginal utility, new cases of groupings are spawned. This is life in action, it requires new births and deaths.

Bottom line is that paradigms which are decentralized are able to grow at exponential rates, because plurality of actors are not as retarded by top-down management bandwidth. The linear market-share growth of Google requires an exponential growth of nominal units, and this is possible because Google is not trying to do everything top-down, but instead allowing network effects.

The analysis of any particular company's or person's strategy is not so interesting to me, because by definition of the Theory of the Firm, every company exists because there is some friction in the free market which enables the firm to arbitrage and take a rent on the active capital doing the work (e.g. $345 billion to Apple shareholders, only $3 billion developers market). In other words, I view management as necessary because of friction. One set of people sees the friction and attacks it with management and makes money doing so successfully. Another smaller set of people, sets off to create technology that eliminates the friction (i.e. democratization via technology, e.g. the personal computer). Those who battled the friction with brute-force eventually reach the natural limit of growth that coexists with the friction, and then those who created the technology to eliminate the friction take over to eliminate this limit. This is the cycle of life. The former is order directed, the latter is disorder directed. The thermodynamic (entropic) universe is on an overall perpetual trend towards eliminating friction, i.e. order. Along the way there, we build some temporal orders as stop-gap measures. Often we need these orders to get the work down to eliminate the friction that caused the order.

Google's strategy is to increase as fast as possible, the number of people using the web, because their revenues are correlated. They are employing network effects to commoditize the web access devices, and marginalize the telcoms and others who might try to retard the exponential growth rate of the WAN participation. For me it is not a question of who is good or evil, because every person and every corporation is both. Every actor in the markets is playing their role.

My philosophy is becoming more clear to me. I don't think OSS should be a political movement, rather a technological one that speaks with results.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3790#comment-328795

Shelby wrote:

@Alex: When I say "modularity", I mean higher-level (e.g. category theory) denotational semantics via static typing, and combined with immutability (a/k/a referential transparency) so the invariants are deterministic, and the semantic invariants are enforced at compile-time by the higher-kinded types. This isn't necessarily complex for the user.

Then via the APIs we can capability-restrict unknown Turing-completeness, see Joe E.

Note that invariants which are not encoded into the static typing, are thus not enforced (but one can always increase the sophistication of their types as needed). There is no such thing as a perfect model for security. Even a walled garden (black or whitelisting) is insecure in that you may not be allowed to run something you want for your security, when you want to. Moreover a walled garden relies on testing for invariants, so it is unlikely it can do a more consistently exacting job than a compiler which checks sophisticated typing (this had not been practical with existing programming languages). The security model of gross exclusion (which browsers are heading towards also) is analogous to covering your eyes while driving to avoid crashing. This must be slayed, because given enough time for collectivism to amass, gross exclusion has a least common denominator of gridlock. Apple did what was expedient, because they have an outdated programming language. They succeeded in maximizing what they could do within such a limited model.

In a debate about microkernels, Linus had explained why they would not work, and the only potential solution in that direction would be a "designer language". Link available upon request.

@esr et all: regarding OSS UI, I am looking forward such a blog post to learn from others. My radical claim is that the future GUI will be functionally reactive, so that it maximizes utility of multiple cores and so that it is modularly compositional. I provided the following explanation at my site:

The real world is composed of values which change in time, but a pure functional reactive program inputs real world values and declares its output, independent of the order of time. For example, a pure reactive popup menu function which has a return type of Maybe[Menu], returns a popup menu when the input mouse position is within the input onMouseOver rectangle, and returns the type None otherwise. This pure function does not depend on any state other than its input, and thus it can be generally composed with any other pure function. Contrast this with the imperative event model, in which the event callback handler function can not be generally composed, because the onMouseOver rectangle is stored state in the event callback generation module.

At my site, I proceeded to discuss the coinductive "real world" that UI interfaces, efficiency, and performance.

I believe such a model will enable individual designers to focus their design expertise in their small modular cathedrals (which they may open source), which then interopt in a bazaar model. Even within these "cathedrals", I see module-wise forge features, so they are modular orthogonal bazaars, which interopt in larger bazaars. This is the grouping of Reed's law (see the prior blog where I explained Reed's law is not an exponential fantasy model).