“capitalism”

What would you give up first, capitalism or democracy?

Never had the bug bit me before—always thinking crypto-anarchism^WP a hangover from the cyberpunky 80s. It isn’t. It’s pure magic. And it may be anarchy’s best hope—ever.

Timothy C. May’s^WP long, superb essay, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy (which appears in an essay collection^AM around Vernor Vinge’s True Names novel) has made a wild-eyed believer out of me. Fascinating stuff, this. (May, btw, is a former chief scientist at Intel, confirming my hypothesis that the people at the trenches of the Moore revolution had to be among humanity’s very best.)

Never had I been more than casually interested in cryptography. Now my copy of Schneier’s Applied Cryptograpy is on its way. Can’t wait.

.., one of the world’s largest and most influential private-equity^WP firms, is planning an IPO of a minority stake, “perhaps 10%.” Appraisals of the company’s total value range “from $20 billion to double that.”

It has some 750 employees.

Talk about leverage.

Maybe the insolent goal is possible after all.

Considering several friends have bantered—semi-seriously—about starting an online Mexican porn ring, alluding of shocking wind-fall profits, and considering that last year “about 13% of website visits in America were pornographic in nature.. while search engines account for about 7% of site visits,” (Economist, Devices and Desires), it is quite a shock to find in the same article 2002 estimates of the (admittedly hard to track) online porn industry measuring it at only a billion dollars. Shockingly little, I’d dispassionately say.

I’ve treasured this quote since I read it and the crucial semantic confusion—good as in righteous; good as in quality, as in utility—that lies at its heart, the one that English’s irregularity obscures, has never failed to cheer me up. For it’s a confusion I happily share.

Bloody good quote.

The other day dad told me he considered Mexico’s relative economic self-sufficiency—that if we had to, we could, more or less, feed ourselves and scrape some living with only our national resources—one of our greatest strengths. I didn’t buy it. At all. Self-sufficiency seems to me a much overrated, much idealized kind of economic independence.

I’m not self-sufficient, neither is my father, and I’m willing to bet that if you’re reading this, neither are you. Neither is anyone that lives in a city. The only truly self-sufficient people left in Mexico (and in the world)—indians who mostly grow and tend their own food, weave their clothing, and build their huts—live in what we call extreme poverty. Not all poor people are self-sufficient but all self-sufficient people are poor. The more self-sufficient the poorer. The more self-sufficient the more bounded to their own meager abilities, to their own fragile circumstances, to the weather (now when’s the last time you worried about it?).

We, the codependent, have made a different bargain with the world. We betted on specialization and cooperation, and I stand by that decision. It has given us far more wealth and independence than our forebears dreamt of. I don’t think you wake up at night scared of how much the butcher has over you because the only thing you know how to do is sing. Modern cooperation is breathtaking, isn’t it? This MacBook from which I write you, this computer in which you’re reading me—they required the work and talent of thousands of people around the globe.

All this begs the question: Why? What ties these invisible threads of people around the world into building the things you need? Why don’t you fear your butcher will extort you? Why are we all so reckless as to depend on each other for our very sustenance? The answer is trade and competition. Trade is simply the name we’ve given to peaceful cooperation and is the fiber that binds the world. On the other hand, competition, as much as it’s been demonized, is simply the prerequisite of cooperation—rather than being cooperation’s opposite, it is its complement. You don’t fear your butcher because you can always go to another one (or become one!)—it’s as simple as that. Cooperation without competition is indeed the fragile, vulnerable dependence most people rightly fear. Cooperation and competition—free trade, that is—is the resilient, magic codependence to which we owe our wealth and our freedom. (Think about it the next time you hear of a trade barrier of any kind, realize how it ultimately makes you more dependent, more subject to the whims of the special interests pandered.)

So no, I don’t think our relative national self-sufficiency is anything to be particularly proud of. It’s a blessing that we live in such a fertile, bountiful land. If we turn it into an excuse for isolation it’ll be our curse.

Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.

Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.

It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).

As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.

Turns out you can easily break DRM-ed LIT ebooks while as far as I know your PDF ones—if tightly DRM-ed, and these days they all are—are lost for good—leaving you as a sucker who can’t even copy paste and interesting quote; heck, a sucker who can’t even lend the ebook to a friend (hurrah for technology!).

Interesting how piracy can actually be a good thing for business: yesterday I bought a digital version of Peter Watson’s 800-paged Ideas^AM (to go with my paper version) only because it was available as a LIT. I then immediately broke the DRM (Microsoft Reader is a joke) and had the—again, 800-paged book—as an HTML mine to edit and tweak. This is just the encouragement I needed to start reading the book—just imagine, I can now tweak the format just like I want it (and as you may have noticed I am a format freak—I like my italics in a slightly more remarkable tone, my parenthetical text slightly subdued, my quotes highlighted), I can turn footnotes into sidenotes, I can 1-click-Answers.com every word, I can copy-paste to Evernote and Devonthink (these days I just can’t conceive of reading a book without highlighting, now it’s getting intolerable not being able to immediately save select quotes in a digital form¹), I can upload to my webserver and have it always some seconds away, I can read it in my berry, I can print it, I can find-as-I-type, I can link, annotate, or rewrite, I can…

Fees in malls’ parking lots are a recent development here in Guadalajara^WP that has been welcomed with the fervent outrage one would have imagine reserved for true wickedness. It is all the more interesting then how quickly the new mode swept the city—I can only think of two malls that remain complimentary, Plaza Acueducto and Plaza Outlet, and it’s clear that they refrain from charging only to attract customers to their rather forlorn premises.

Despite the somewhat frequent calls that something should be done about this, that some new law should be passed to protect us customers from yet another new instance of capitalistic rapacity, I take them as nothing but inconsequential bursts of anger at the inconvenience. I take it as a given that we can all see clearly that mall owners have the obvious property right to charge whatever they want for the use of their premises. We, in turn, have the corresponding right of shopping wherever we want.

So instead I want to discuss here the deeper question of whether or not these parking fees better society. Is the money Parking Lot Operators (PLOs) earn the reward for a valuable service or ravenous plunder hiding under the banner of property rights?