One of my biggest concerns is the written word. What is the future direction of books, newspapers and magazines? I'm the person I am today because I gobbled up that stuff growing up, and you cant find the same quality in a blogger. I've also noticed that the more I use the internet the more lazy I get in picking up a book. I havent bought a newspaper in a year.

"Right now, this is anything but a world that's conducive to production, innovation, and creation of new things..."

I don't buy that at all. For years I've been explaining to people (especially religious nuts) what vertical development is, and that the distribution of labor no longer means "you do the farming, and the doctor does his medicine, and you trade to get what you want".

Vertical development has an unfortunate consequence, though: it removes individual names from the public consciousness. Look at your LCD screen. You can't begin to learn enough by yourself, or gather enough assets to build one on your own.

This is highly insulting to some people - technology they cannot understand is to be feared, is it not?

But teams build the Large Hadron Collider and the Cassini probe. Successes like this aren't news, and so people just don't know about this. They "know" Britney is a bad parent, though.

Newspapers are failing themselves and the public by reporting events, and badly, not by providing information, as they pander to the lowest common denominator. I keep some magazines because they have articles which don't expire tomorrow.

> But teams build the Large Hadron
> Collider and the Cassini probe.

State funded teams, those. What's your point? I'm pretty sure that when Steyn talks about creation, he means wealth creation, not interesting arts & crafts.

My favorite two words for 2009.

See also, via Reynolds.

We have to be careful. Many leftists think we should go back to producing things we no longer have any comparative advantage in producing. That's just plain wrong. We do, however, need to restructure our economies so that property rights are better protected and our tax regimes favour entrepreneurship, investment, and innovation. That way we won't have to run insanely expansionary monetary policies to make up for structural shortcomings in our economies.

It would be nice too if our politicians stopped spending money as if it were theirs ...

"Please, somebody tell me you see hope on the horizon, and please, somebody, tell me who and what form it's coming in, and when."

Sorry, I don't think there is any hope. I think the trick is to learn to adapt and live without it.

That, and don't be surprised when the nice folks from ACORN come around to "liberate" your house in the name of the people.

Jo -

I think you've actually nailed down why Christians are so happy. Even when there's no hope, they still believe that Jesus is gonna save them. They have hope in the face of evidence that none exists.

Maybe they're on to something.

Hey, brian, my mom is a total bible-thumper, and I've been hearing for damn near 40 years that Armageddon is "right around the corner" and God's going to save us. It's stupid beyond belief, but she's managed to make herself feel happier by perpetuating this self-deluding little fiction. In another 20 years or so she will pass away, safe in the "knowledge" that she's going to wake up in God's kingdom. She has said more than once that she believes what she does "because it gives her hope," and I don't have the heart to laugh in her face.

Personally I think there is no hope, not during my lifetime. Humans will do as they have done numerous times in the past - go through a long, discouraging decline, probably lasting decades, maybe even two or three hundred years. Eventually, maybe, a few bright ones will start another revolution and experience freedom and self-reliance for a while. Then, maybe, the suffocating forces of laziness, fear, and bureaucracy will once again crush it, or maybe not - I have absolutely no idea. I'll be long gone, and that will be up to the people who are around then. For all I know the entire world will be living under Sharia law, how should I know. I don't even care. Whatever happens, the world isn't going to end, it's just going to be whatever people make of it, for good or ill.

Standing where I am, looking down the road at a long, downward trajectory that will last longer than my lifetime, I have no hope, yet live happily without it, no sky-dwelling ghosts required. Maybe hope just isn't necessary.

"That, and don't be surprised when the nice folks from ACORN come around to "liberate" your house in the name of the people."

I think the Fourth Amendment prohibits that. If not, substitute Second.

" For the first time in my lifetime, it's no longer enough to be talented and hard-working. Now you also have to be one of the lucky ones whose talent and luck will still bring in a dollar "

It's NEVER been enough just to be talented and hardworking to make a dollar.

If that talent and hard work is directed towards goods/services that people are unwilling to pay for then you are not going to make money. That's no different today than it was at any other time in history.

Describing people who produce goods + services people ARE willing to pay for as "lucky" is flat wrong.

"I think the Fourth Amendment prohibits that. If not, substitute Second."

It's so cute that you think the government still cares about that.

Some in this thread would probably be interested in the new book by Harry Dent:
The Great Depression Ahead

Despite the title it's not a gloom + doom, stock up on ammo book. His theory is that all economic cycles are driven by demographics + periods of technological innovation. He has us in another 20 years or so of a downward economy before we see another upturn when the echo boomers hit their peak spending years.

(International growth in Asia is a different story with their booming populations)

He lets his left wing beliefs leak into his economic theory too much for my liking but his arguments make a lot of sense.

Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."

"Actually, it has. Things have been easy, relative to now. It's harder for people like me who are entrepreneurs, but these days, it's hard for people it's amazing that it's hard for -- just because of the economy."

About 100 years ago I bet there were many hard working and talented buggy whip makers/designers who were saying the same thing.

I think you've actually nailed down why Christians are so happy. Even when there's no hope, they still believe that Jesus is gonna save them. They have hope in the face of evidence that none exists.

Yeah. In the cosmic scale of things, a few decades of pain and misery on earth are insignificant compared to the uncountable eons of happiness in heaven.

Just last night, I was watching part of a multi-part series on the history of Britain. Some seriously dark, disturbing shit. And I was thinking that every generation thinks it's living in the darkest, scariest times.

"And I was thinking that every generation thinks it's living in the darkest, scariest times."

See, this is exactly what I think, when my mom launches into her 'Armageddon' spiel. For as long as I can remember, she's been been certain that it's just about ready to happen. This is because our "end times" make it "obvious" that mankind can't survive without some kind of divine intervention.

Well WTF? What about when the Plague wiped out all those people? What about the Holocaust? What about all the other hundreds of disasters and wars that ruined people's lives? Going back even farther, just imagine how many times human beings have almost been wiped off the planet, because of diseases or ice ages.

And now here we are, sad because we are seeing the end of a period of freedom and prosperity, but then again, if you go back far enough, it's already happened dozens of times. We are still more comfortable than just about anyone in history, and she thinks it's the end of the world, just because the relatively cushy lives of a few fat Americans are going to be disrupted?

I don't for a minute believe there's an invisible man in the sky who has a "plan" for all this. It's entirely up to us. Humanity is never "doomed" or "saved." It just lives day to day by its wits, same as it always has.

Let it be said that in recent years in America, the United Kingdom, and certain other countries the "financial sector" grew too big. In The Atlantic, Simon Johnson points out that, between 1973 and 1985, it was responsible for about 16 percent of U.S. corporate profits. By this decade, it was up to 41 percent. That's higher than healthy, but it wouldn't have gotten anywhere near that high if government didn't annex so much of your wealth -- through everything from income tax to small-business regulation -- that it's become increasingly difficult to improve your lot by working hard, making stuff, and selling it

To buy that the end of this paragraph follows from the beginning requires a massive leap of faith. Especially given that the last decade in the U.S. has been a time of income tax cutting and deregulation. Income taxes, even on high earners are lower than they were between 1973 and 1985, by far.

The bit about it being to hard to make stuff and sell it is also quite a stretch. It's ridiculously easy to set up a small business these days (an LLC filing is quick and easy, even in California), and lots of people have done quite well building their little enterprises. It's easy to sell your stuff and make money to people all over the globe - if they want it. Has Steyn missed the whole interwebs fad? eBay?

-

As far as hope on the horizon, I'm not sure what to say. This recession is likely to do away with lots of overbuilt and underutilized businesses, especially manufacturing and print media. I know more about media than manufacturing, so I'll speak to that.

Big papers are going to die all over the place. Small local newspapers will probably be around for a while longer, because they are often the only news source and advertising outlets for their areas. The web businesses that will replace the big papers will be sites that incorporate both professional and amateur contributors, and will be concentrated in narrow verticals. I think Josh Marhsall's TPM site is doing the best job with this right now - they very effectively, cover U.S. politics from a liberal perspective and feature both syndicated AP content and reporting. Because they use lots of volunteers, they only employ a few people and can afford to run the business on the lower revenues earned from online ads. I expect we will see many other successful enterprises built around a similar model.

One silver lining is that this current recession, while sucking for lots of people, will teach a lot of people more about being frugal and sane in how they manage their personal finances and businesses. I work for a web content company. We're doing well right now. Our founder lost his first company in the 2000 web crash, and learned from the experience. We like to say that we were built for the downturn - we share office space, keep overhead low, have more servers than employees, don't owe VCs a dime (which also means we don't have to listen to their suggestions about how to run things), and have no debts to speak of. The recession will reward these sorts of businesses, and punish the ones that are bloated and were built on speculation. Prudent financial management will become cool. I think that's one thing that gives me some hope.

Oh and this quote, "And I was thinking that every generation thinks it's living in the darkest, scariest times." mentioned in a couple of posts resonated. I mentioned something similar to my wife when we were discussing whether to have kids. We think the environment's going to hell, our financial system is ruined, etc. But our parents raised us under the real spectre of nuclear war. And their parents survived WWII and the Depression. And their grandparents fought in the Civil War, etc. Bad shit does seem to come down on every generation, and yet we seem to muddle through.

cheezburg - if you really believe the environment is going to hell, do us all a favor and don't reproduce.

And if you think it's easy to start a manufacturing business, you've never tried. Getting all the permits lined up, greasing the right wheels (and sometimes palms), licenses, insurance, environmental impact studies, credit, etc. Lots of work if you aren't REALLY sure of success.

Starting a small business that does, say, consulting is easier, but they're trying to make it harder. Eventually, this credential-mania we have is going to legislate me out of existence.

I always want to disagree with Cheezy, but there's not a whole lot to work with.

> the last decade in the U.S. has
> been a time of income tax cutting

State sales taxes in California are nearly nine percent. Sacramento finances are psychotic. During the campaign, our president promised me a tax cut, but in the intervening months he's spent two trillion-with-a-T dollars. Do you think my taxes are going up or going down?

No pussyfooting: Bad things are being done to us by government.

> Bad shit does seem to come
> down on every generation

Yes. Yes; yes! This the quintessence of conservatism. There's nothing new under the sun. Human nature is not in transition. All lives have challenges. Etc., etc. etc...

I wish every liberal could understand that in their marrow: Policy and government and authority can only permit society to improve, they can't direct it to do so.

All I've got for ya is: Suze Orman said that we won't start to see things turning around and won't, collectively, feel a sense of "hope" until about 2015. I don't know much about her or how much trust we can put in her (at least more than Cramer, I hope?!) but still...

Fuck life!

Brian:

if you really believe the environment is going to hell, do us all a favor and don't reproduce.

1. Get fucked. 2. Read Crid's response above for why I brought that up. As long as people have lived there have been reasons to fear for our lives and futures, and yet we seem to figure out how to get past these problems. I think the providing for the lives of 5 billion people (or whatever we're at) and rising poses real risks to the environment. Doesn't mean it has to destroy it though; it does mean we need to figure out how to provide energy and food while not destroying our soil and sources of water.

Regarding your other stuff:
I wasn't speaking about heavy manufacturing cause I don't know that. But if you aren't making tons of noise or releasing hazardous chemicals, small businesses that produce goods are still pretty easy to set up. Again, even here in California if one is willing to pay the taxes. If you move to the South, these things are even easier. I assume that the South is where U.S. manufacturing will end up moving because of regulatory and work laws.

Crid:
Sacramento finances are psychotic.

Yes! Our budgeting process specifically, and government generally here are fucked. I hope redistricting reform makes for some competitive elections so that when officials fail to make intelligent budget choices, they can be fired by voters.

"State funded teams, those. What's your point?"

Funding sources are irrelevent.

The point is that teams, not individuals, make the big advances now. Estelle Bok isn't inventing the Jump vane by herself.

In specific cases, you can find big awards/rewards going to one or two developers, but their work is usually so mind-bendingly obscure that nobody can make news out of it. I mean, look at CNN.com. When they put out a ten-line blurb, they put six lines to summarize it up top because their readership has trouble with c-a-t and d-a-w-g.

"No pussyfooting: Bad things are being done to us by government ...

I wish every liberal could understand that in their marrow: Policy and government and authority can only permit society to improve, they can't direct it to do so."

A-freakin-men.

Suze Orman, with her 2015 turnaround prediction, is hilariously optimistic. Because of what Crid just said: "During the campaign, our president promised me a tax cut, but in the intervening months he's spent two trillion-with-a-T dollars. Do you think my taxes are going up or going down?"

The lifeblood of the world's economy is being sucked dry by a parasite. This is going to continue until the host stops putting up with it, or until the host is sucked dry. There's no 'God' pulling the bloated tick off the dog for us. WE have to do it, and right now I think there are only about twelve people interested in doing so.

So my guess is, the host will simply be sucked dry, and that's what will cause the parasite to collapse. But the world won't end, and humanity won't end. It's just going to be damn uncomfortable for a while. Probably after I'm dead. I'm going to ride my bike this weekend, and it will be just as beautiful as it always is.

'Fuck life,' -- how can you SAY that? Jesus, Gretchen. We're so lucky to have it.

PJ - you don't want to contemplate what happens when society runs out of money.

I just hope I don't live long enough to see it.

"Pj - you don't want to contemplate what happens when society runs out of money."

Brian, these are your fantasies. I wouldn't dare to intrude.

No, nightmares. Fantasies are things you WANT to happen.

It's fixin to get interesting right around 2011. That's when SocSec will have to start selling bonds to get the cash to pay out benefits since they won't be bringing in enough from taxes. One of three things happens then - the cap on FICA taxes goes away (monster tax increase - 15.3% on all income over 100,000 or so), or income taxes go up to pay out the bonds, or the government borrows money from someone to pay SocSec.

None of these are good scenarios.

> Funding sources are irrelevent.

Never. That's never true. They're always relevant... That's the only thing Marx got right, that man is an economic animal.

> The point is that teams, not
> individuals, make the big
> advances now.

Again, the "team" that made the things you mention happen was the taxpayers that paid for them. I think the world of Gene Kranz and Neil Armstrong, but it was the United States of America that went to the moon. If NASA functionaries ever had any doubt about that, it was probably cleared up when their funding dwindled and a lot of their fantasy careers were foreshortened. Resources are always important.

> Estelle Bok isn't inventing
> the Jump vane by herself

I don't think what you're talking about is a new trend. Google was ripe to happen anyway, wasn't it? Two bright guys on a supportive campus lit the fire, but there was kindling all around.

Google was ripe to happen anyway, wasn't it? Two bright guys on a supportive campus lit the fire, but there was kindling all around.

I work in Menlo, just a bit North of the Stanford campus. You're right in a lot of ways about the ecosystem here. There's a lot of research being done in the Bay Area on the various campuses (notably Stanford and Berkeley, but UCSF has some good medical stuff going on). Then there's Xerox research (PARC), which does lots of interesting work in somewhat more applied settings. What makes here different than other places I've been is that there seems to be a lot of smart entrepreneurs who interact with the researchers. The line between science and business is far blurrier here than in some places, where there is a fair amount academic disdain for business, at least among the field I studied in.

Crid, one more time, damnit, vertical development is the point. The "team" can be two guys in a garage or the entire engineering division of Boeing.

Or the gang at Pirate Bay or distributed.net. Or BOINC.

And it doesn't matter if Soros, Gates or turning in aluminum cans funds it, parallel development gets you nowhere.

All the money in the USA won't get you anywhere by earlier models.

No, it's not new. But it's becoming mandatory, like all systems of labor, by getting the consumer, including specialists, accustomed to results.

Less and less of any process is comprehensible to the layman - ask them how DNA is used to identify somebody, how John Gaeta showed us "bullet time", or how any part of the LHC works and you'll get a blank stare, and it's not just because Fox News didn't put it on.

Rad -

It's called the incompetence curve. And we're falling behind it at an accelerating rate.

The world is getting more complex at a faster rate than our little meat brains can comprehend it.

Every year, I know less than I did the year before relative to what I need to know to be competitive.

> one more time, damnit

We're not done until we're done! What you're saying is just not so.

> The "team" can be two guys in
> a garage or the entire engineering
> division of Boeing.

Well, when definitions are inclusively broad, they're entirely useless. Yeah, the whole American economy is vertically integrated, with immigrants to make genius babies, universities to train them, and stupid people to wash their dishes in the campus cafeteria, etc... But scenarios like this don't bring any insight.

I and many friends have made a great living in Hollywood as freelance video techs. We aren't integrated into nuthin', vertically or otherwise. We bring our skills to whoever will pay, and then we take them to the next guy.

> it's becoming mandatory, like
> all systems of labor, by getting
> the consumer, including
> specialists, accustomed to
> results.

I haven't a clue what you're talking about. But a friend in the Air Traffic Control business phoned this afternoon and said that in difficult times like these, she's really pleased to be making six figures with generous bennies in a secure government job. (She's a great dancer, so I let it pass.) If memory serves, you're in some sort nuclear materials enterprise in the public sector, so perhaps you're eager to make the same point, and to describe such technocracies as the normative condition.

> Less and less of any process
> is comprehensible to the layman

No. More and more formerly exquisite processes are becoming available to casual students and serious enthusiasts.

This is certainly true in my business. Mediocre laptops toted by schoolchildren can have more image and audio-processing power than the best million-dollar edit suites had when I arrived in Hollywood.

I daresay this is the case in your business as well. Of course, hobbyists often do sloppy work, but the point is that the world's genius is ever-more broadly available.

> The world is getting more
> complex at a faster rate than
> our little meat brains can
> comprehend it.

That's horseshit, of course. You should speak only for yourself.

It's strange that Cheezy –he of the typically miserable liberal condescension– is one the few in this thread ready to resist defeatist rhetoric.

Nothing defeatist about it, Crid.

How many people use a computer every day without understanding any of the principles behind its internal operation? I'd wager it approaches 90%. This is not necessarily a Bad Thing.

However, the ever-increasing complexity on the inside of the box means that people become ever more specialized in order to design them.

Jobs and Wozniak built the Apple I in their garage. The 6502 processor that it used was designed by no more than a room full of guys.

That kind of generalization is not realistic at the edges of the design world any more. That hot new Intel Core i7 processor in your new PC? Hundreds, if not thousands of engineers pushing the limits of our present understanding of physics and chemistry make that happen.

I understand what's going on inside those chips at a cursory level. Back in the bad old days, I could tell you what every piece of the CPU was doing. Now I can't keep that much state in my head.

People want to dismiss miracles. I'll give you one: the modern digital computer. Damn near a trillion transistors, switching on and off a couple billion times a second in perfect synchronization. An almost infinite number of possible states that they can all be in, almost every one of which is utterly useless at any given time.

And we complain when the thing fails once a month.

I think where Rad was going was the idea of the lone gunman is a myth. You just THINK that you are doing your shit solo. You aren't. Neither am I.

We stand atop the shoulders of giants, my friend. If nothing else, knowing what it took to make this conversation possible in the first place humbles me.

> Nothing defeatist about it

Do words have any meaning at all? Every line of the 6:16 comment is defeatist, with the possible (but uncertain!) exception of "Rad -".

> How many people use a
> computer every day without
> understanding any of the
> principles behind its
> internal operation?

Depends on what you call an "understanding" and what you call a "principle". I'm gonna go out on a limb and wager that the collapse of 'understanding' that you and Raddy are most eager to discuss is the one just below your own... Because it's fun to cluck at the unwashed masses. That a nontenured physics professor at any nearby state university could mock your 'understanding' even more ferociously than you'd mock that of others is immaterial: So long as the "internal operations" are reliable, who gives a fuck? These are consumer products in the most exciting market of my lifetime. Design, construction, operation, pricing and sales are firmly constrained by the importance of making customers happy. (Everybody understands the principle of a failed business.) When my computer does something I don't understand, there are three shops within walking distance that will fix it for a few bucks.

> people become ever more specialized
> in order to design them.

At no cost to the rest of us, who weren't eager to get into the microprocessor design business anyway. The internet's done lasting damage to the model wherein everyone runs the fastest honking CPU they can squeeze into their desktop. Cloud computing means never having to write a $500 check to Bill Gates. There are always, always going to be people nourishing the market for less complicated computer designs. The Big Iron of my youth, even in the supercomputer segment, has been completely overwhelmed by blades of micros, because they're cheaper and simpler.

> That kind of generalization is not
> realistic at the edges of the
> design world any more.

You're confusing yourself. By definition, one doesn't look for "generalization" at "the edges of design". In your example:

> Jobs and Wozniak built the
> Apple I in their garage. The
> 6502 processor that it used
> was designed by no more than
> a room full of guys

Jobs and Wozniak weren't amongst them. That proc was sitting there, reliably built and competitively priced, waiting to be dressed up for a new market. The Steves were already in a singularly fertile context. They were bright, sociable, playfully-tempered children of the most technically sophisticated neighborhood in the world, poor examples of incompetence surpassed. These guys weren't ever going to be distracted by farm chores like kids in Kansas, or by hockey like kids in Canada, or by starvation like kids in Bangladesh.

> I think where Rad was going
> was the idea of the lone
> gunman is a myth.

Then he should have said so in as many words... I think he was trying to strike a more panicky note ("All the money in the USA won't get you anywhere"), as were you ("It's called the incompetence curve. And we're falling behind it at an accelerating rate")... Too late to pretend you were being a warm 'n fuzzy futurist.

> We stand atop the
> shoulders of giants

Presumably you followed my earlier link? You missed the bigger point: We stand on the shoulders of middle- and lesser-performers as well. More times that I can count on this blog –usually with this convenient citation– I've bitched about the propensity of modern Americans to imagine themselves as lonely, overachieving heroes who dare to thrive in a world that doesn't care.

We're interdependent as hell. Our lives are longer, richer, safer and more just for getting value out of everyone, whether they're "laymen" or not. Radio guy Prager paraphrases a sentiment from his brother, a doctor with a cardiac specialty in the big city: 'The garbageman who carries your filth away every week does more for your health than I could ever do.'

That's not what you were getting at. There's no point in worrying that reliance on the brightest makes modernity too brittle. It's disproportionate and ungrateful to mock those in less rarefied fields as "incompetent" when they (we) toil as they do to create so much value for everyone.

Apocalyptic fearmongering is for Islam.

I'm not sure if the problem is that I can't write, or you can't read, Crid. I'm pretty sure it's unintentional, but maddening anyway.

I'm optimistic in this issue. I am not (recalling my first post) of the opinion that anything is suppressing innovation, as Amy posits. I am trying to say - despite diversions now into money, government jobs, etc. - that the complexity of production systems hides what's being done, and to a greater extent than before. You don't know the name of the guy who invented the light valve, the LED or the LCD screen because there's not just one guy. Yes, this is not new, but the number of people in systems is bigger and there is more focus on bad news and "newsworthy" events.

But I'm done repeating myself while you invent other angles.

I find myself agreeing with Pirate Jo 100%. Well, almost. I prefer video games and playing with my grandson to biking, but that bit is just personal preference.

It looks damned bleak, not just for me but for T, down the road. Hopefully, his generation will be able to turn it around (and we've still got to teach them to hope or they won't even try) but I don't expect to be around to see it.

I'm just hoping to survive my natural lifetime, in relative peace. But I don't feel even assured of that.

> the complexity of production
> systems hides what's being done

That's easier to agree with, but this...

> the distribution of labor no
> longer means "you do the farming,
> and the doctor does his medicine,
> and you trade to get what you want".

...is not. It's murky and paranoid and off-putting.

> You don't know the name of
> the guy who invented the light
> valve

Well, why would we need to?

> the LED or the LCD screen because
> there's not just one guy.

Or because the contributions of these teams aren't worth getting excited about. Flatscreen technologies in particular are something people having been chipping away at for a century. The progress has been plodding and mundane. It's not a surprise that there's no single Alexander Graham Bell who walks away with all the credit.

(If you were going to credit anyone, George W. Bush might deserve the nod: His tax cuts in the early naughts did a lot to nourish that market and pay off the lab bills.)

> there is more focus on bad news
> and "newsworthy" events.

You're still pissed off about Paris & Britney, aren't you?

I think that when you complain about people who'd rather watch TMZ than applaud the developments of these teams, you're essentially complaining (as I do) that people are insufficiently aware that value in our economy is harvested broadly, and that we're not all lonely cowboys, even when that's how it feels.

Otherwise maybe you're wrong.