The Morning Stampede

 

I had an Atlas Shrugged moment today.

 

In the middle of part 1, after Dagney Taggart and Henry Reardon successfully created their high-tech railroad line in Colorado, as they rode in the engine on the maiden voyage along the line, at 100 miles per hour (book version... it was elevated to 250 MPH in the 2011 movie) (and Dagney took a moment for herself to step into the aft corridor of the locomotive to basically have an objectivist orgasm while feeling the power of the diesel engine throbbing against her body as she broke down in total awe at the power of mankind to create total awesomeness) there was a mental diatribe presented to the reader by Ayn Rand in the form of an observation of what the mind of man can accomplish, and an example of what it looks like, in a snapshot of it in action. The awesome energy of human activity.

 

It was around 9 AM, and I was crossing the six-lane Bayside Bridge that connects Safety Harbor with Clearwater, Florida, on my way to work.  I had the top down in my Chrysler Sebring, and untrue to form, I was not playing the radio. I was just listening to the wind and the sounds of the cars around me.

 

All of the lanes on the bridge were full, and it was the height of the morning rush hour. Safety Harbor is mainly a residential area of the county, and the Bayside Bridge connects it with a large industrial patch of Pinellas County. Firmly embedded within a dense pack of vehicles pushing south at 80 miles per hour, I, and all of my fellow bridge-crossers, were driving to work.

 

I had the sudden sensation of being in, and a participant of, a pack of high tech beasts, stampeding towards a goal, a goal of industrial might. Going to work, like a charging army into battle. The wind, the sound of engines, the jockeying for position, the sheer danger was exhilarating. It was very ... American.

 

 

 

Think Tank!

I wanted to show you a special room in my office that I call "Think Tank"

My "Think Tank" is an ordinary office with one extra-ordinary feature. It does not have a computer on the desk. Sure it has a phone, and paper and pens and a desktop calculator, but no computer. The only data processing allowed in this room is mental, and the only communication that happens is verbal, and the only database it has is hand written. Yes, those are Atari cartridges.

This is my cozy office above. This is my cockpit. This is the nerve center from which I command an empire, defeat raging threats, and conquer new territory. I also have a tendancy to Facebook, Tweet with the Twitter, and check my email which invariably sucks me into LinkedIn, The Blaze, Drudge and SodaHead, among other things. The problem is not so much the time wasted on distraction, but the lack of focus it causes. I used to keep looking around my desk, wondering what the heck I was working on. Sometimes I would have a couple of post-it notes stuck to my monitor (actually you can see one on the 2nd to the left) stating simply, what I am doing right now. Not something I need to do, or need to remember, but what I am doing RIGHT NOW. I would keep forgetting what I was doing at that actual moment.

^ Incidentally, this is what my office desk looks like from the inside.

So, across the hall from me is the THINK TANK. There is only a desk, a phone, a pad of paper, and drawing boards. Mainly, NO COMPUTER. There is a spiral bound notebook which contains everything that is happening, or might happen, on any given day. It is littered up with post-it notes containing updates or comments that don't really need to be committed to the pad.

On the back wall of the Think Tank (or TT, as I like to call it) is a dry erase board with a list of all ongoing projects, contact name, status, and notes. I had to add this because we are getting busier (which is great) but because of the Great Recession we are now operating with minimal staff. Prior to the Great Crash of Ought-Niner, I didn't know who most of my clients were! That wasn't my job. I was just the primadonna developer. That's different now. I even answer the phone now, can you believe that?

In this luddite sanctuary, one sits and thinks. Then, orders are written and a file folder containing those orders, along with any supplemental materials, notes, names and numbers is dispatched to the battlefield where they are faithfully carried out. Me, at my desk, with my four monitors, at war.

I write follow up info on those orders, for instance, today I scrawled

"#1 finished!"

"#2 - bad audio, redo" 

"#3 - done!" 

"#4-#8 Sorry didn't do!"

The folder is returned to the Think Tank, and if it is after hours, like it is now, placed on the chair for when the commander (me) returns in the morning to Think Again.

Finally, in this room there are also inspirational decorations here and there, to remind me of past success. Things that say "This Worked!". Brochures from past campaigns or products are taped to the wall, Dr. Evil stands by the lamp (long story), the original hand drawn schematic of something great from a yellow legal pad, and some product diskettes on the dry erase board shelf. There are some incredibly mundane things that may only mean something to one person, like the original install diskette for CompuServe, and one big thing that impacted the lives of millions of people:

These fossils under glass are the only surving pieces of a one mighty 200 seat call center from around 1995. They tell a decade-long story of grand, grand success at the hand of just a few human minds. These pieces were part of the first detonator of a big bang that is still exploding outwards in more ways than I can probably begin to imagine. This was Tony Amico's dialer.

I like to eat, eat, eat, apples and bananas.

When something seems like too much of a challenge, you are supposed to stand in front of this picture, squinting through your hand like a telescope, and slowly land on the carrier during a WWII sea battle. THAT was hard.

This post-it note has been here since 2008. Nobody knows what it means, other than there was some bug that needed to be fixed, and it had something to do with "Conf". Maybe, as the economy recovers, we'll find out.

Inbound/Outbound Interactive Voice: Our Setup Process

For simple applications it is possible for us to offer same-day turn-around.
For more complex applications we can guaranteee 48 hour turn-around if
required. For apps where custom API integration between our systems and
yours is necessary, in most cases, our IT department will beat your IT
department in having it ready :) This is due to our proprietary "2-Sigma"
approach to application development, which is simply defined as: 1. Ask 2.
Get.

EVODIALER.COM and MEDIA1800.COM are two of our client-login websites that
run an IVR application called Protel WebWork. This allows you to control
inbound and outbound calls on our IVR systems.

Both sites are similar in how they function, however EVODIALER.COM is
tailored towards telemarketing (for example, Broken Basket/Abandoned Cart
programs, Cancellation, Caller-ID Callback, or Third Party Verification,
etc), and MEDIA1800.COM is tailored towards DRTV and printed ad campaigns.

EVODIALER.COM has extra tools and reports that telemarketers want, and
MEDIA1800.COM has stats and analytics and other features commonly requested
by the DRTV and direct mail industry (for example, Bestline Engine
Treatment, Snap-It Screw Eyeglass Repair Kit, Christina's Cosmetics, etc)

There are some other sites that have special features for other industries,
depending on what your program is we may choose one of them instead.

MunicipalIVR.com - for municipalities and utilities
866Pay.com - Retail payments
My247Call.com - business PBX
MeTollFree.com - simple toll free services
Dialsmiles.com - Patient/Client appointment reminder services for
Doctors/Dentists/etc.

In most general cases, Media1800.com will probably suit you. The sites are
sort of like scaffolding upon which we produce your IVR application.

The process will go like this, after you have provided us with a written
script containing all of the prompts and general flow (a simple Word doc
will do, but you can draw it on a napkin if you want) we will:

1. Set up an account, and select one master phone number (local or toll
free)
2. Select additional "slave" numbers if needed
3. Upload recorded prompts
4. Build the app
(play prompts, get digits, store data, invoke external APIs, etc.)
5. Select one or more reports for the "Report Gallery"
(for example, there is All Calls, Orders Only, and "Did Not Buy"
reports)
6. AND/OR design a custom report
7. Select one or more files from the "File Gallery"
(for example, Mercury Media, Euro, Moulton Logistics all have unique
file formats)
8. That's it!

The websites have a pre-pay point system (1 point = 1 penny) for Long
Distance, but we usually make other arrangements with major clients (check
on file or net 30, etc) and then just front load the site with a billion
points.

Finally, one of the features of the WebWork application (which runs on all
of our websites) is that it can also use Your IVR system interchangeably
with our own. This way if you want to start using your own telephone
equipment, you can still use the website to control it.

http://www.ProfessionalTeleservices.com is the exclusive technology provider
for http://www.QualityCallsInc.com. Contact either one of us!

An Idea for my Commie Friend Veronica

I have an idea for Veronica and her communist friends. 


Actually, this might actually be a good idea. I don't know. You be the judge. This is an idea tha would use gubmint money to end unemployment, and spark private sector growth. You tell me.


OK Here it is. "Road Corps". 


Anyone of school age, who leave school, will have 5 choices by law. If you really want to use legislation to motivate people towards the light, I think this might be it, and might actually be constitutional. Ready? Here we go.


When you leave high school, you must do one of five things, otherwise you will be placed in jail, or a mental institution:




1. Join the military


You all know number one. Many of us have joined the military. It is a great learning experience and usually results in nice young successful conservative alumni...



2. Go to college


College, oh, college, whatever.




3. Get a job



Yeah, get a job, like most of us. Results in normality on a planetary scale.



The last two options are new. You have to pick from one of five. If not, you get arrested, and depending on your mental condition, you are either committed to an institution or placed in jail until you decide to change something ... I don't know, that's kind of a grey area, but anyway, let us move on.



4. THE ROAD CORPS


This is a government funded operation that builds roads, railways, ditches, canals, what-ever-the-heck. You live in a camp, generally enjoy yourself, but work like I did when I was 19. Maybe you pick fruit and clean stuff too. You can also live "off camp" if you have a family and are currently maintaining a home. Camps have day care too, so both parents can work for the Road Corps. All of the administrative staff are Road Corps workers, even professionals. There could be Road Corps doctors and medics. Supposed you are a medic who can't find a job. You report to the Road Corps office. Suppose the Road Corps does not need any more medics. They hand you a shovel until a suitable position opens up. You don't like that, but you can't find a job, so your only option (because you are too good to dig a ditch) is...


5. DECLARE INDEPENDENCE


Also like me at age 19, you are responsible for yourself. The GOV does nothing for you, and you do nothing for it. You are an independent, free soul with no claims on anyone, and a person who takes care of them selves entirely. You do not live for the sake of others, and others do not live for your sake.  Suppose you are the Prima donna medic from our explanation of option 4. Maybe you ARE too good to dig a ditch.  You hit the streets with your lawn mower and start going door to door. Pretty soon, you are the owner of a large, successful landscaping company.


I bet that if "The Five" were to be introduced, there would be a huge number of "Fivers" out there, living free, without the tyranny of this god forsaken nanny state, and fewer and fewer losers opting to be Road Corps voluntarily. But that would be okay, and that is a government tit that I could live with.

Warning: Are Your Clients Getting Thinner?

Thinning Clients can be good if you are a diet doctor, but bad if you sell deep fried butter wrapped in bacon on a stick.

 

But I'm not talking about that kind of client. "Thin Clients" have been around for 50 years, and have always been the most cost effective way of cyber-fusing a stationary workforce with a central computer system, but until now it was not a practical way to give a true, multi-purpose, productivity driven personal computer to a large number of people. For that, we've always needed a network of managed, but self contained personal computers to provide this.

 

In the 1990's I was the IT director of a call center that had 200 people all running the same exact application. During this time the market was flooded with large caches of second hand dumb terminals, and we were bying mint-condition WYSE-50 and VT-100 units for as low as $10 each.

 

Two hundred of these units could be connected to a single 75Mhz 486 with 8 MB RAM running SCO unix, and with a single X-Base (dBMan) program that allowed that many sales reps to access the database, things usually moved along quite nicely (For those of you who can't say when Twitter started, a 75MHz 486 computer with 8 MB RAM has about as much computing power as an iPod).

 

In the early 00's I worked at another 200 seat call center that was a true customer management operation for one of the first internet banks. In this case, the employees of the call center needed more than just a dumb terminal with access to a single application, and when we proposed a Windows 2000 based solution (Servers and Workstations), the executives thought that was a really good idea until they found out what that was going to cost in licensing fees.

 

The asked our department to find an alternative and we quickly latched on to NC's, or Network Computers. These were small, ordinary Intel-based computers with all-in-one motherboards (which was unusual at that time), and only a CD-ROM to boot from; no hard drive. The "Central Application" was accessed by NetScape, and personel who needed additional productivity tools had access to the complete Star Office suite, Telnet-3270 (for access to the banking network), and other things. 

 

We had everything running perfectly when the FDIC shut down the operation for failing some kind of regulatory banking test back at the home office in Boca.

 

Anyway, most of the IT staff got jobs elsewhere, but I managed to find a way to start my own business. It grew, failed, grew, crashed, grew, shrank, grew, blew to pieces, and grew some more. Apparantly thats how it is for most small businesses.  I didn't know that. I was expecting to be rich in 6 months and then spend the rest of my life living like Mark Zuckerberg.

 

Getting back to the point, there was a time when we had 90 people here with Microsoft XP workstations, and we were raking in buckets of money (how do you rake a bucket?) so when we shrank to 30, then 15, and then 3 people we had no shortage of extra parts. Then, in the last couple of years, we feebly swelled to 5, 10, 15, and now actually have over 30 people back in their chairs.  After more than half a decade of feeding from the same storage room filled with battlefield wreckage, hardware supplies are beginning to run thin. Sure, I have five monitors on my desk, and 3 computers under it (linked to the same keyboard and mouse using a very cool utility called "Synergy") but I'm the brains of this operation so I need them.  I'm like the United Nations. I have all the big ideas (as in "Hey, what's the big idea?"), therefore certain rules regarding waste and inefficiency should not apply to me.

 

But when I set up my last functional employee workstation, I had to call Ed to get some prices on some new ones. I also needed his help bringing my old infrastructure back up to speed. In the years of decline, several systems, such as our Name Server, had simply stopped working (You don't really need a name server, not really. Everyone knows you can use Verizon's. Ask any IT guy, what are the IP addresses of Verizon's three name servers, and 9 out of 10 will know them by heart. The 1 who doesn't just hasn't memorized them yet).

 

So, and I promise I'm getting to the point of this story, Ed told me two things. First, he told me that just before everything when to hell in a hand basket, he had "Virtualized" all of my servers. This means that he had taken the images, (like the "souls") out of each one of the noisy machines in the computer room, and brought them to life inside one super-powerful monster computer (which was half the size of one of the old ones), kind of like the Matrix. Actually, more like Tron. Matrix would not really be an accurate metaphor because in Tron, Flynn is actually inside the computer, whereas in the Matrix ...

 

Sorry...

 

So all of the web servers and database servers and ... secret servers .. and other things that had been racked and stacked in the computer room, sucking up energy, shouting "AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH" 24 hours a day, and constantly threatening to fail, were now immortal souls living inside one super jumbo deluxe server that was far less prone to failure because it was really really expensive (and has thus likely paid for itself many times over).

 

I had been wondering why nothing had failed in 3 years. Keeping all of my servers alive used to seem like a crushing responsibility. Every morning it was my ritual to roll out of bed and immediately check to make sure that all of my servers were alive and healthy. It was a stressful experience every once in a while when one of them would fail to open a remote destktop or respond to a ping. Whenever that happened, it was instantly going to be a bad day for everyone.

 

"Something's wrong with one of my servers." I would announce to my wife, in order to let her understand that I was not going to be participating in the wake-ups/breakfast/dressing/lunches/backpacks/boogars and hurry-up-were'-lates. And I might not even be able to do the school drop-offs which means that all of that is going to be entirely on her this fine day, and for that, she would proceed to find ways to make my morning predicament five times more painful than it otherwise would be.

 

But it was true. Nothing had failed in 3 years. I had assumed that it was due to the lowered pressure from having less business, but still, no, it was true. None of my servers had failed in 3 years because they CAN'T fail any more. They are Virtual now.  They are basically Immortal.

 

The second thing Ed told me, or asked me, was "How about using a Thin Client"?

 

I didn't think because I knew. "No." I said.

 

"Why not?"

 

"Because the agents have to be able to run a VB.net app and be able to read and write Excel spreadsheets off of the network drive, and they have to be able to run a specific version Windows Media Player to listen to phone calls in high speed. Plus, I'd have to buy another server to host all of the desktops."

 

Those were all deal breakers for Ed's suggestion, I thought. Ed said that he was coming over to show me something.

 

When he arrived, he was carrying a box which I suspect contained a small PC. It was actually just a standard flat panel monitor and keyboard. We struggled with a desk and a power supply and coughed because of some dust and crawled around on the floor looking for a network jack. I stood up and hacked up a furball. Ed reached up from where he was still crouched in the corner behind the desk and handed me a little gadget about the size of a pack of cigarrettes. It was covered with connectors.

 

"Cool," I said, not very interested in Ed's latest geek toy. "Is this some kind of universal adapter?"

 

"No. That's the Thin Client." Ed said, matter-of-factly.

 

There was this Matrixxy warping of the universe around me as I took another look at the weightless little lump of plastic and metal in my hand. All of the "connectors" were the things that what you would normally see on the front and back of a big PC: USB ports, VGA, the new wierd VGA, ethernet, and microphone and speaker Jacks. Microphone and Speaker Jacks.

 

I said something naughty. "What about the host?" I asked.

 

"You already have one. The ESX server that is hosting all of your virtual servers has more than enough power to run a room full of these."

 

The Thin Client he had selected for me was one of several different types that he had been working with. This particular one fired up with light blue screen that gave way to a normal looking Windows desktop, but it couldn't do very much on it's own.  At that point, Ed clicked an Icon on the desktop and the screen shifted to a more familar Windows XP login. This was coming from the big server downstairs. From that point on, everything you might see or do with this workstation would actually be happening inside a virtual desktop, within a virtual server. It was almost exactly the same has having a conventional network PC.

 

Even Windows Media Player worked, and fed the audio to the little Thin Client's analog speakers.

 

It started to dawn on me that this might actually be more than just a less-expensive workstation (one which, I might add, doesn't even need to be plugged in if you have a near by USB port to power it), it is a completely solid state appliance, almost break-down proof, and certainly tamper-proof. Our aging Windows XP workstations on the floor are doomed to start failing one by one over the next couple of years. As the last IT guy on site, that is a prospect that I'm dreading a little bit, but now, if I replace each failed PC with one of these little darlings, over time that will be all we have in here. A Maintenence Free work center, all Windows XP or Windows 7 desktops, plugged into virtually immortal servers.

 

That means as we grow, I won't have to hire a technician to fix anything. I'll be able to hand it entirely by myself, no matter how big we get. When God gave us the Optical Mouse, you can't imagine how easier my job as a Call Center Computer Guy got. I would estimate that 20% of my time was spent cleaning Mouse Balls. This is that times a thousand. No more PC crashes, no more viruses, no more getting yelled at by my wife because she has to be a single mom for a day.

 

I started dreaming about all of the writing and coding that I would be getting done. Twenty minutes later I found that I had been sucked into SodaHead and was leaving an incendiary comment to someone about Christmas Trees ... D'OH.

 

 

How I compete: I treat my clients like GODS.

At the height of the most recent economic boom, I barely knew who my customers were. They came clamoring to me for services and I distributed myself among them aloofly, and sparingly dained to ration my greatness to only those who were deserving.

 

Well, maybe I wasn't that bad, but we were a bigger organization back then, and it was generally understood by my co-workers that clients were not allowed to talk directly to me. There was a structure and an order, and it worked like this: A receptionist answered the phone. She directed the call to tech support or sales, or to some other department. If there was a new order or technical issue, this information would filter up to me only after all of the paperwork was done, media was prepped, and anything of a higher priority was completed.  And simpler projects and issues were often times handled by technically skilled employees below my who would occasionally only need some hints or advice from me to get the job done themselves.

 

I never really knew from one day to the next what I would be doing, or even why some things would come back around or get cancelled.

 

A few times I would be poking around someone else's desk looking for post-it notes or something and their phone would ring. I'd pick it up, "Sheri's Desk" I would say, for instance, if it happened to be Sheri's desk. The caller would ask for Sheri, and I would tell them that she was not at her desk but that she might be back shortly, and then I asked if perhaps I could help them? They would ask me who I was, and I would say "I'm just one of the programmers around here".

 

Interestingly, that kind of anonymity occasionally revealed interesting insights into people's opinions of our service. And, it is for that reason that if you look at all of our employees on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter, one of them is not a real person. Heh.

 

But I digress. Enter the recession. Our business is flying along, full speed ahead, when WHAM, it is slammed by a heat-seeking missile. One of the engines explodes. Trailing thick black smoke and twinkling little bits of shattered debris, we start to roll over and dive. The sales department pulls back on the stick while engineering works feverishly to give it more power. Accounting deftly begins damage control, while management starts tossing out dead weight and dead bodies.

 

But it isn't enough. We're flying upright, but we can see by the numbers on the board that it is not sustainable. We're going down, and there's nothing we can do about it.  And even if we found a way to maintain altitude, the troublesome economic landscape is inflating upwards, towards us, looming larger and larger with each passing moment.

 

And, to top it all off, our ship is old, out-dated, and the enemy who took a shot at us is still back there, etc. etc. etc.

 

OK enough with the stupid metaphor. You get the picture.

 

So what did we do to solve our seemingly impossible problem?  I'll tell you more about it next time, and of course, it's no real cliffhanger. Aside from personally doubling down in a dark corner for 11 months reinventing my "aircraft", the answer is in the title of this story.

What Us Boomers Need to Take Away from "Occupy"

I'm a Baby Boomer, barely. The United States Census Bureau considers a baby
boomer to be someone born during the demographic birth boom between 1946 and
1964 but a Canadian boomer as someone born from 1947 to 1966, and in
Australia they place the baby boom between 1943 and 1960. I was born in the
US in 1965, so technically I would be in Generation-X, but for the purposes
of this article lets just dub my sorry self as a honorary Boomer.

There are not very many of us participating in the "Occupy" movement, or the
riots, or whatever is scheduled to come next by Progressives and George
Soros, in their decades-long plot to bring about American Socialism by
destabilizing the US economy.

But do not count us Boomers among the ranks of the Useful Idiots.

Oh, for sure, there are some retarded boomers out there talking about how
North Koreans get "a regular paycheck". Not all of us had childhoods free
from head injuries. We never wore helmets.

What are we to think about the spoiled babies pooping and masterbating on
Wall Street? On the surface, it is laughable. We look at them and laugh.
They are stupid, lazy, lost and spoiled little babies who's lack of
maturity, experience, and virtue is being exploited by the radical left to
make some kind of dopey point. It is funny. It is foolish, and it is
pointless.

There is a hidden agenda, however. Nothing any of the whiney little brats
living in tents think is actually true, and nothing that they want is going
to happen. None of them have any clue why they are really there because, to
the people who put them there, this is just one tactical move in a long long
chess game. I am not going to expound further on this, because you probably
know all about this, and if you don't let this be a warning to you, start
paying attention to this.

My point right now us, what do us boomers need to take away from all of
this? Aside from a few chuckles, that is.

You need to understand this, when you look at those kids: That is America's
future. You and me, we are the attic, the upstairs, the offices and game
rooms of this house that is America. Those maggots on wall street, those
stinky little parasites, those termites, are the basement, the foundation,
the beams and pillars upon which the future of America rests.

Get it?

What do we do? I suggest something that has never been done before. I
suggest that we re-start our generation. I suggest that we go back down to
the ground level and take this nation away from those losers. And I suggest,
that it will be very, very easy. We are the hard workers, we are the tough
nails and the pressure treated planks. We are the grown ups with all of the
money and we own everything. Fuck those little bastards. Don't hire them.
When you see them begging by the side of the road, throw a beer bottle at
their head. Give them the finger and tell them to suck it.

Don't just ignore them, starve them. This is our country, we own it, and
they aren't going to fuck it up.

Protel announces a permanent "test number" for worldwide call centers

Professional Teleservices, Inc. ("Protel") announces a permanent "test number" for worldwide call centers in order to test communication with North American telephone lines. As the number of calls centers located in India, Philippines, and the Middle East increase, US and Canadian IVR interaction with these rooms is often times frustrated by audio quality and consistency issues which prevent touch tones and voice interaction from behaving properly.

A single test call to the IVR does not always reproduce the problem.  Problems usually occur when call volume begins to peak above the threshold that starts to create problems, and the issues are often times tied to the process of call conferences and transfers within the call center's equipment and cannot be reproduced with a stand-alone mobile or land line.

In order to allow call centers all over the world to live test and simulate call volume, Protel, which maintains excess PSTN capacity for long term growth, has set up a Florida telephone number 727-450-7600 which offers a series of three tests to the caller; The first test records and plays back, the second test collects and speaks single touch tone digits until you press the star key, and the final test collects and speaks back long, #-terminated strings of digits until you press the star key.

These tests can be simulated on up to 100 concurrent channels. The termination point for these tests is a Windstream DS-3 installed at the Qwest Tampa Cyber Center, so engineers performing diagnostics can be 99.999 percent confident that any issues showing up during the call tests are not a product of the testing equipment.

For more information about this service or about Protel please visit http://www.ProfessionalTeleservices.com.

 

Be Less Excellent: Email

E-mail is probably a very big part of your day if you are the average business person these days, and chances are your email messages in some way interact with one or more below-average looters. In order to prop up their dignity and make them feel better about themselves, we recommend that you actively practice "less excellence" when crafting your correspondence.

 

Here are some tips that you can consider when typing up an email to make it more below average and thus less intimidating to the looters that might see it:

 

+ Never change the subject line, even if the subject of the thread has changed completely.

 

Sometimes a chain of back and forth emails might begin with a reply, and not an original message.  For instance, someone might email you an announcement like "Keep the back door locked" to which you reply, "By the way, is the new server ready?".  This opens up a can of worms because the server was DOA, it had to be shipped back to the manufacturer, nobody knew what the status of the replacement was, someone else wants the shipper to be responsible for the handling charges, etc, etc, etc. This goes on for weeks, but in order to maintain your less-threatening, sub-standard alumenousity, you (on purpose) and everyone else (because they are mostly losers) continue to forward and reply with the subject line "Keep the back door locked".

 

+ Begin every other sentence with a lower case letter.

 

+ Frequently end a phrase with a space, and then a comma ,and then more words.

 

+ Use the abbreviation "Ect".

 

+ Occasionally make no sense whatsoever.

 

+ For extra emphasis on something, add fifty exclamation points.

 

+ Frequently forward emails without any explanation at all, or with the first name of the person you are forwarding it to, without capitalization, as the totality of your explanation. Like this:

 

To: Erik Olson

Fr: Julie Patron

Sb: Keep the back door locked

 

erik

 

----- Original Message ----

> To: Julie Patron

> Fr: Fed Ex

> Sb: Keep the back door locked

 

> jule

 

>----- Original Message ----

>> To: Julie Patron

>> Fr: Fed Ex

>> Sb: Keep the back door locked

 

>> please forward this requestion to the appropriate answerer ,for replying

 

ect.

 

 

Why Are Stabilizations Delayed 2.0

Apparently, the fight over raising the debt ceiling, the debt, taxes and spending cuts is not just nothing new, it's actually a thing they call an "Economic Stabilization War of Attrition" which even has mathematical principles behind it where you can predict how long it will go on, which side will win, and what the outcome will be based on the number of people involved, the current will of the people, the current state of the economy, and the overall stakes.

 

I don't understand the math, but even without that understanding, I found this paper (or rather, a wiki about the paper) is very interesting.  It is about the mathematics behind the politics of economic stabilization:
 
<a href=http://www.edegan.com/wiki/index.php/Alesina_Drazen_(1991)_-_Why_Are_Stabilizations_Delayed>Why Are Stabilizations Delayed</a>

 

I showed it to my Romanian friend Mircea during a discussion where he was suggesting that the United States reprint and re-issue new currency, and all of the various reasons why he felt that it would be a good idea.

 

Mircea then commented, "I read that page, interesting in formulas, some might be good indeed, But here we do not have so much time for theory man, we did it here, it was on other places too, even in US during Abraham Lincoln happened as well. So what is the problem then? too much political biased there, too much inner greediness, come on.
 They should combine forces for such procedure man, monetary stabilization of US dollar is not a matter of republican / democrates position, it is a NATIONAL INTEREST priority there, can't you see it?"

 

He pointed out, as an example of such an achievement, the Hoover dam, which he had recently visited.

 

Yes, the Hoover Dam, the Apollo project, the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, The Internet... they are all great achievements of mankind working harmoniously to make the world better.

 

However, doing anything radical to stabilize the American economy is another matter, because this time it is not about achievement, rather, it's a war.
 
I have no doubt that the type of stabilization he was talking about would be very effective, but something as radical as changing the currency would require a complete collapse of the economy on a very personal level here.
 
The problem is, thus far, the economic problems are not painful enough to outweigh doing something that Revolutionary (with a capital-R). 
 
Also, there are really two separate things happening simultanously:
 
1. A global recession of almost unprecedented scale
 
2. A debt crisis
 
These two things seem to be feeding each other.  Most of the people I listen to say that the recession was caused mostly by bad banking and lending practicies, and to a lesser extent, the wars, and finally by accelerated growth in the emerging economies like India and China, driving up the prices of oil and steel.
 
The solution to the recession should have been (they say) to let it work itself out.  But what happened was the democrats (and to a lesser extent president Bush) chose to spend trillions of dollars bailing out the banks, the automobile industry, and even the american people by sending everyone checks.
 
Then, maybe a little drunk with power, the democrats also "nationalized" our health care economy (to go into effect in 2014) which added another trillion dollars to the debt.
 
So now, a Stabilization is required because the growing debt cannot be paid for by the current tax levels.  Taxes must be increased to stop the debt from growing, and to start bringing it back down, however long that takes, but as long as it is on a negative trajectory, due to an annual revenue surplus, whether by higher taxes or budget cuts or both, everything will be fine as is, and it will just take a generation to reign in that debt. It is what it is.
 
However, the republicans are angry because this particular stabilization fight is over a problem that they feel never should have been created in the first place, beginning with blaming the democrats over the mortgage banking crisis, to contributing to the debt with the stimulus and health care reform.

 

Democrats, on the other hand are anry because they think they were dealt a bad hand in 2006 / 2008 and are being thwarted at every turn by the republicans who only want them to fail.
 
Add to that, the fact that we are still in a deep recession which can only be cured by a private sector economy that already thinks it's (T)axed (E)nough (A)lready, and the Stabilization War over miniscule changes in policy is raging on and on with no attrition or concession on either side.
 
(So imagine trying to even broach the subject in the halls of congress of a currency swap. We would rip each other to pieces over here.)
 
I agree that the math (from the linked page) can only be proven in retrospect (as if I know anything about that). Also, this time, (as they always say) "It's different". This is not just the same tired old political cat-fight over taxes vs. spending. This is an attempted revolution unfolding slowly before our eyes, based on a plan which started in the mid-1900's by the CPUSA, the Soviet Union, and the labor unions.

 

Rrrrrrt - What?
 
I have some logic to back that up:
 
3 Points:
 
Point 1. Barack Obama campaigned on a promise that he would "Fundamentally Transform America" which can only be literally interpreted as a polar shift in government. Americans mostly do not want to be transformed, and if they do, they don't want "The Government" to be the motor of transformation. Americans do not want "change" once this word has been actually defined to them. They will resist, successfully.
 
Fundamental Transformation actually means redistribution of wealth, something long and constantly sought after by democrats, liberals, Black Liberation Theology (Obama's church), and of course, socialists and communists and most of the young, innocently ignorant do-gooders, plus the politicians who take advantage of them.
 
Point 2. Americans are scared to death of communism. Most Americans consider socialism to be the gateway to communism, merely a stepping stone. American communists point that out, by the way. Therefore, all acts of communism and socialism must be performed with great stealth, or they will be shut down by the American people.
 
Anything that has ever happened in history is magnified and rebroadcast, like a bull-horn in the face of the consumers of American media. Anything that even hints of a historical connection, or parallel with communism, fascism, totalitarianism, etc, EVEN IF IT'S NOT ACCURATE, drive people into the streets (and eventually the polls). Examples of this include the "1938 Germany", the Weimar Republic, "having a September 10 mindset", communist revolutions, books like Animal Farm, Atlas Shrugged, etc.
 
The population of the United States is now officially in a perpetual state of freaking out, and the media is shoveling data like coal into a furnace to fuel this stasis. This is the environment within which serious politicians are struggling to make progress.
 
Point 3. The American Dollar is the defacto exchange currency of the world. This means we can get away with murder and do whatever we want.
 
Therefore, in order to fundamentally transform the United States, the only thing that will ever allow this to happen is to collapse, or at least marginalize the dollar. That process  devalues the currency.
 
Part of the strategy in making this happen is to run up a huge national debt, using any excuse they can think of (which has been done, now).
 
The next thing that will happen will be the devaluation of the currency (btw, that will be the sign to leave the planet if you can).
 
This crashes the American economy through hyper-inflation and debt default. The only imaginable solution at that point would be a socialist revolution, and the people will allow it because they don't have any other foreseeable solution, and because there will be soldiers pointing guns at them.
 
Part of this strategy includes selecting the wrong solution to a big problem on purpose. An example of this is the Affordable Healthcare Act, which will break the healthcare system in this country. The only way to clean up after that, is to nationalize it completely.
 
Education of the masses is the only panacea. People can't be fooled and manipulated if they know what is going on.  Our culture and popular media is now beginning to elevate "Carnival Barkers" to the stature of News Press, and the main-stream news media is being actively discredited into oblivion for it's openly biased, anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-conservative, anti-republican taint.
 
And this is happening by the free market, which means the "Carnival Barkers" are striking a powerful chord within the consciousness of the people. Hopefully this will make some kind of difference.
 

 

It was the Damnedest Thing

Telephone ringing


AFB: Public Affairs, Sergeant Reed.




Joe: Hi, my name is Joe Jones, I’m with the Globe.




AFB: What can I do for you Mr. Jones?




Joe: I’m following up on a story and I was just wondering if I could get some information on some events that occurred last night?




AFB: OK.




Joe: We had several people call the paper and I’ve talk to some others who say they saw some kind of UFO in the sky around 6 o’clock last night. I’m trying to coordinate the stories and decipher whether or not they mistook some kind of military or commercial aircraft… you know…




AFB: OK. What can I tell you?




Joe: Well? I talked to the airport up in the city and they said they didn’t have any flights over the town last night, they all go north, you know…




AFB: I know, they can’t fly over the base.




Joe: Exactly, so it must have been some kind of military aircraft. Can you tell me if you have any activity in the area last night that could have been mistook for a UFO?




AFB: I don’t know, we’ve got a lot of things. Can you be more specific?




Joe: Well folks in town say they saw something, some of them described it as a lot of lights. This one guy, he’s a pilot, he said it wasn’t a plane. Said it was a mile long and moved like nothing he’d ever seen. Couple of fellas said they thought they saw some jets chasing it.




AFB: Yeah.




Joe: Then it just took off. Said it went straight up.




AFB: Yeah.




Joe. Yeah, what?




AFB: Yeah. That happened.




Joe: What happened?




AFB: It was the damnedest thing. They said we got this thing on radar coming straight at us, and it wasn’t a mile long but it was pretty big.




Joe: What… I…




AFB: Then they scrambled a couple of fighters we had, we always have two on alert. They chased the damn thing like fifty miles but then…. Pffft.




Joe:




AFB: Couldn’t catch it, I guess. It was pretty weird.




Joe: You’re joking with me, aren’t you?




AFB: No, not at all. That actually happened. I can’t explain it. Nobody can. That shit happens all the time, we’re just not supposed to lie about it anymore because, what’s the point of that? This thing came down, clipped a few treetops at about two thousand miles per hour and then…. Flew away.




Joe: You’re serious?




AFB: Yes, godammit. I don’t know what else to fucking tell you. It’s not like we can do anything about it. This shit happens all the time and I don’t know what else to fucking tell you, alright? Now is there anything else I can do for you today, Mr. Jones?




Joe: No, I guess not. But…




AFB: What?




Joe: Nothing. Thanks. Goodbye.




AFB: Have a nice day.




Click.

Objectivism 2.0 - Mind vs Matter

This is the theory: The mind is a heirarchy of conscious threads. Each thread is a continuous stream of thought. Some threads are very sophisticated and have access to a lot of resources. Other threads are less, and the smallest type of thread is a simple, closed loop containing a memory. This type of thread is a meme.

At the top of this stack is, well, you. You are in charge, so we call this the Master Thread. Just below the surface, are many Commander Threads. These threads perform a lot of tasks that you don't need to be aware of. These threads do many different things, but we call them Commanders because they have the power to direct you, physically, when necessary.

Here are some examples of commander threads:

Focus - When you are focusing on something that you are doing, such as driving a car or shopping at a store, many of the commander threads team up to simply repeat a mantra, "I'm Driving I'm Driving I'm Driving" or "I'm Shopping I'm Shopping I'm Shopping". (Incidentally, this, like all forms of communication between threads is, surprisingly, carried out in the form of your native language, i.e. English).

Reading - While reading, depending on your level of focus, one or more threads will actually recite, in spoken language, what is being read by the eyes.

All Commander Threads speak the native language of your mind. This is how they hear each other, and how they get attention. The more threads there are reciting the same thing, the more it is brought to the attention of the rest.

At the center of the conscious mind there is an Aperture of Consciousness where the Master and Command threads reside. Within this Aperture, there is a Cacophony of spoken streams of thought coming from all of the threads. The loudest things heard in the Cacophony are the things which are brought to the attention of the Master and Commander threads.

For instance, they might all simultanously scream "Red Light!" or "Duck!" causing the entire being to instantly turn it's focus, and conditioned responses, to a single idea.

Another thing that the threads are constantly doing, is simply speaking what they perceive, stating the names of the objects, feelings, perceptions, even humorous connections as they experience them through the senses or through their relations with other threads.

Memes also do this, only to a much lesser extent, and it requires more memes to operate in concert to rise to the level of attention with the cacophony. An example of this is several threads crying out simultanously, "Where's my keys? Where's my keys? Where's my keys?" to which a great many memes might begin screaming the answer.

These threads are all talk, however. There is not much feeling going on with them. In fact, Threads don't have Feelings as you an I might immediately think of by definition.

Feelings come from lower down on the stack. Feelings come from an area downstairs, maybe just a level above physical sensation. In fact, many kinds of feelings are just that, a physical sensation that we very often mistake to be thought.

Here is where we get to the crux of Obj20. The part of your mind that is YOU, is the complex web of threads and memes. The rest of it is living meat, and animal that you inhabit. This animal has a separate mind based on instinct and feeling, and we've become so horribly entangled with this beast that we don't know what part of our mind is "I", and what part of our mind is "It". We do to very bad things with the "It" within which the "I" resides.

1. We include "It" in our decision making process: The things that enrage or excite the creature are incorporated into our mental processes as though they were valid thoughts, and they are not. They are like a dog barking next to you. Yes, the barking might have significance, but it can easily not, and either way it is a separate entity, driven only by instinct and feeling.

2. We torture "It" by making it responsible for our actions, by including it's perceptions in our decision making, and then by blaming it for the results. We consult it for a reaction by imagining horrible things, allowing it to perceive these things, and then having a reaction. Often times this process results in both unnecessary torture for the creature, and bad decisions as a result for the mind.

Yes, "It" will feel, be happy, hurt, hungry, and sad. You cannot stop that, but we make things so much worse by letting "It" run the show, and by torturing "It" by trying to solicit it's opinion about everything.

One way we do this, is by using a mechanism that we have called the Future Stage. On this stage, we act out future (and sometimes past) scenarios, confrontations, and other events that induce an emotional response from "It". We do this in order to try and make a decision, based on the emotional response It has. This both tortures the creature and results in faulty decisions, based on feeling and not rational thought.

Another way we torture It is by allowing a particularly effective specialist thread (or threads, I don't know) that we refer to as "The Conscience" to torture the creature, rather than simply tell the rest of the threads what it is thinking. I believe that this is because The Conscience has trouble getting attention by shouting into the cacophony, so he just stabs the creature over and over again with a pointed stick until you listen to him.

So, the first steps to creating a rational, pure Objectivist Soul is to train yourself to do a number of things. This is not easy to do, and it requires conditioning your mental responses, and spending time thinking about what is really going on inside your head.

1. Get off the Future Stage: Stop demonstrating hypothetical scenarios to the animal mind, looking for a reaction. You hurt it, and it gives you illogical responses. Don't use the Future Stage for tactical thinking. Instead, narrate your thoughts to yourself and your threads in English (or your native language). The animal cannot perceive this, and will not react with any emotion.

2. Ask your conscience for it's opinions, in English (or your native language). Pretend that you are your own personal Jiminy Cricket and tell yourself what your conscience wants to say about things.

(Playing the role of various commander threads, as though they were actual people in your head, helps you to shift your center of gravity to focus on the function of that thread. Of course, it's still just you who is speaking, but when you take off the hat of the Master Thread and put on the had of a specialist thread, you can actually assume the role of that thread for a time being. This technique can be most dramatically demonstrated by sleeping on demand, and dreaming while awake.. not daydreaming, but actual dream-dreaming. I'll write about that later)

3. Feed, Entertain, and Comfort the physical side of your body, and it will not bother you about anything.

4. Know that when the body feels, it is not you. It is a separate thing from you. Emotions are like the guages on the dashboard of a car, they are not the driver behind the wheel.

The Objectivist Soul

At the core of the objectivist mind is the objectivist soul. Stripping away every external force (fear of pain), corrupt motivation (pity, pride), mistaken assumption (altruism, selflessness), and physical compulsion (hunger, pain) there exists the Objectivist Soul.

This soul is something that I've been developing a theory on for about 7 years, as of the time of this writing. It represents the current state of a single conscious thought process unfolding slowly over those 7 years and continuing to unfold. Although this theory is not complete, it has advanced far enough that I am able to manifest physical benefits from the understanding it gives me, and I feel that now is the time to begin sharing it.

The simplest way to describe something complex and new, is to give names to it's elements. To simplify these concepts, the names will seem frivolous, but I have given these names to these things for unimportant, yet actual reasons. For instance, my name for the human body, the human animal, everything that is not the soul, is "Pablo". When I refer to "Pablo", imagine that I am talking about a gorilla. The original Pablo was a person that I shared a hospital room with one time. He'd had a stroke.

Observing Pablo helped me to advance my theory of the objectivist soul one more baby step.

Rather than waste any more of your time, I am going to come right out and declare the conclusions of my theory in it's current state, and you can then choose to remain interested or not.

Critical to this theory are several important structures within the mind. The most influential of which, for better and worse, is the "Future Stage".

The Future Stage is a capacity that your mind has, like being able to throw a ball or form sentences. The Future Stage is where you act-out scenarios, conversations, and situations that may or not (and usually don't) take place in the future. It is also used to a lesser extent to replay the past.

The Future Stage is an amazing tool, unfortunately it is more often than not, used to torture Pablo.

(Other structures, which I will not describe in detail here but will in separate posts, include the "Master Thread", "Commander Threads", "Threads", "Memes", ("Threads" and "Memes" produce the "Cacophony"), the "Aperture of Consciousness", and a dream-making entity called "Hector".)

The most important take-aways from this theory are

1. You and the Animal that contains you are two different things.

2. You must stop torturing this animal, and stop taking it seriously too.

3. You cannot really feel pain, only joy

You are riding around inside an animal, thinking that his instincts are your feelings. The only true feeling is accomplishment, or joy. Everything else is an instinctual reaction spewing from the animal in which you are contained.

Pablo is an animal, like a gorilla or a baboon, that has instinctual reactions to all situations, desires, boredom, hunger, and pleasures and pains of its own. You are driving this animal around like a go-cart, unaware that there is any separation between the being that is yourself and the being that is this animal. You have intertwined the purity of spirit, soul, and intellect with the mindlessness of a wild animal.

You have to unlink from that, and stop frightening and provoking the animal by acting out situations on the future-stage before it. Stop including the feelings and reactions of this animal in your thought processes. The future is none of it's business, so stop asking it's opinion about things. Think to yourself in language, not acting-out scenes on the Future Stage. The animal, believe it or not, does not understand language and cannot react to anything that you think strictly in language and don't act-out on the future-stage.

If you are experiencing a confrontation, there are stages of escalation within your mind, but they may start with a sensation of threat to Pablo. Even if they don't, you immediately begin translating the situation to Pablo by reproducing what is happening onto the Stage in a way that Pablo can understand, and Pablo gets angry, and starts to burn inside, and wants to growl.

Later, when you replay that event for Pablo, he can't tell the difference between reality and what kind of presentation you are torturing him with on the Stage. So he gets angry all over again. And, in anticipation of a showdown, you postulate scenarios by acting out the showdown, over and over again, in many different ways on the Future Stage in front of the animal mind's eye of Pablo, who starts freaking out because he doesn't understand that it's just your imagination.

First of all, stop torturing Pablo by including him (or her) in your inner monologue.

Second, things will hurt Pablo, and there is nothing you can do about that, but realize that it is not you who is being hurt, but the animal in which you reside.

Comfort it, but don't accept it's pain as your own, because you are incapable of experiencing pain.

Also, it is your responsibility to feed it and entertain it. You don't need to do anything else to keep it happy. Stop hurting it from the inside, and stop being effected by the things that hurt it.

You can't stop things from hurting the animal but stop making them worse by including yourself in it's pain. That makes it hurt more.

Just let the animal have it's own reactions and don't let it kill anyone.

You know, steer it around, act normal. Feed and entertain it. It will be happy.

As for you, what are you doing? You're riding this animal around like a carnival ride. Stop that. Stop shirking your responsibilities to use the animal as a vehicle of accomplishment. What is the matter with you? When it gets bored, do you just get it drunk?. You are supposed to be watching it, feeding and entertaining it, but you act like an irresponsible baby sitter and instead of working you just get it drunk, which, by the way, makes you artificially feel the one true emotion, accomplishment. You get it drunk so you don't have to watch it, and at the same time you revel in a spirit of accomplishment that you got via the drug.

Don't include Pablo in the decision-making process.

You may think that your wife, husband, or boss is the single biggest cause of stress in your life but worse than that, your mental threads are the single biggest cause of torture to Pablo. You can impart all kinds of pain to Pablo. You can torture by forcing him to watch the Future Stage, by making him responsible for decisions that you should be making, and by making him take responsibility for your mistakes.

Meanwhile, Pablo has no clue what's happening. Pablo is just an animal being driven around by a force he does not understand (you) and being presented with situations, both real and imagined, that he can't deal with emotionally, which he translates into physical pain, anxiety, and all of the other emotions that are of the animal, but not the Objectivist Soul.

You cannot feel pain. Joy is the only emotion you are capable of. Anything else is Pablo, being hurt by the outside world and by you.

These are the conclusions resulting from a train of thought, a line of reasoning, that has been going on for about 7 years, that I can specifically point to, however, like all mental activity, it probably has roots going all the way back to the beginning. But it was 7 years ago that I starting wondering how people in your dreams could act so independently, how visual images could unfold so vividly without any apparent attempt on the part of the conscious mind to create or direct them.

This was when I discovered the independent concurrent threads of consciousness that are constantly crowding into the aperture of the mind.

I also discovered how to listen to them while unasleep, how to allow dreams to start in my mind at will, while awake and alert. I learned how to fall asleep on demand, which wasn't my goal but it was an interesting and useful side effect. And I also learned that sleep is not nearly as important as dreaming, and that dreaming could replace sleep any time, no matter how briefly experienced.

But all of this was fun and games until I discovered something I called Tangles. This was when I learned that I was not Pablo, and that Pablo was just this poor creature being tortured by the world and by my own mental behavior. By thinking that there was no difference between myself and Pablo I included Pablo in all of my thought processes, and my thought processes were in turn directly effected by stupid Pablo. This was because of the Tangles.

Most of the time, a new discovery of the mind (like the Future Stage or the Threads) takes weeks, even years to fully explore and understand, but much to my astonishment the discovery of the Tangles was like suddenly achieving sight after a life of blindness. I was shocked, actually.

I untangled Pablo and let myself accept that I was me, and Pablo was Pablo, that my thoughts and joy were my own and that Pablo's world sucked, but poor Pablo, he's an animal; but at least I could now stop torturing it and stop accepting his torture as a property of me.

I didn't think it was true, I thought. It had to be fake. There had to be proof. It was like thinking I could fly, and there was only one way to prove that this was real.

IF the totality of the theory was real, then I should never feel pain, suffering, anger, contempt, bitterness, jealousy, dread, fear, or anything but gladness and joy from that point on. That's impossible, there's no way, I thought, but it's true.

Now, I see Pablo getting hurt, I feel slings and arrows driving into him, but knowing that it's not me feeling the pain, only the physical body of Pablo, and knowing that sadness or rage welling up from the gut and into a flushing face of Pablo is just his instinct, his animal reaction, I am powerful and free to mitigate and navigate Pablo, to hold his reigns and drive him around the trouble, and to comfort him like a dog. That kind of trouble is not my trouble, it's two animals barking at each other.

There is no fear of future events because it is Pablo who reacts with fear to the Future Stage. The only purpose of the Future Stage is to present hypotheticals to Pablo and see how he reacts. You don't need to do that. His opinion is not important. It is when you are all tangled up with him, but untangled, you don't need that.

(Incidentally, it is very hard to train yourself to stop using the Future Stage, but it's possible, and even easier when you realize fully that you do not need it, and that it only hurts Pablo. This requires practice, self training, and conditioning some "Guardian Threads" to detect when it's happening and shut it down.)

But what about other people? What about another person who shows up and starts to torture Pablo?

You put a stop to it. You take Pablo out of that situation as fast as you can. You are not capable of malice, anger, or even sadness, so this becomes very easy to do, but will be probably very confusing to the other person. Suddenly you're Jesus? Granted, inside that other animal is a soul, but I can also now see that the other animal/soul is in a horrible tangle, and my vision and my process is crystal clear.

Until I can figure out how to present this theory in a not-crazy form, and find kindred souls to untangle, I'm an objectivist soul living alone in a world of howling mad beasts.

And now there's an App for that!

 

 

Update: Conscience

After the smoke and confusion had begin to clear I noticed that there was still a commander thread deliberately hurting Pablo. It took me a few minutes of meditation to figure out what he was, and to my surprise it was something I should have already discovered just from having watched Disney Movies alone: My Conscience!

It seems that this little thread has only one way to get the attention of the other threads, and that is to take random stabs at Pablo, causing him physical pain.

Using the same techniques I employed to keep random threads from jumping onto the Future Stage (including this one, which I had not recognized as any one more special than the others), that being a combination of training and active guardian threads to watch him, I was able to get him to join the rest of us in the Aperture like decent beings who can discuss things without resorting to violence. He was actually extremely relieved, because he had never been able to get our attention any other way before.

I think I'll name him "Jim".

President Obama and Greece.

(Stent wrote:)

Thirty years ago this fall, on October 18, 1981, a charismatic academic with rather limited government experience and with a one-word slogan, "Change," was elected prime minister of Greece. His name was Andreas Papandreou. Greeks may now wish that 30 years ago they had had a Tea Party movement. Things could have turned out differently.

Thirty years ago, Greece was in an enviable position on the matter of national debt, with its debt just 28.6 percent of GDP. Few advanced countries can manage that kind of debt-to-GDP ratio. By the end of Papandreou's first term in office, that ratio had nearly doubled, with debt at 54.7 percent of GDP. By the end of his second term, the figure was in the mid 80s.

The 1980s in Greece were a time of dramatic expansion of government. Papandreou and his Socialist party created a new government-run health-care system, dramatically expanded employment in the public sector, nationalized failing companies, and increased government handouts of every shape and form.

It was a government expansion so large and many-sided that in the end it generated a revolution of expectations and attitudes about the role of government in society. No government since then has been able to reverse that revolution, no matter how willing it was or how pressing the circumstances.

It is in this detrimental position that the current prime minister, George Papandreou, son of Andreas, finds himself. A sorry state of affairs created by one generation to be dealt with by another, the sins of the father to be paid for by the son — this is the material that Greek tragedies are made of.

The statism of the Eighties got another boost when subsidies from the European Union started to pour in, and yet another boost in 2001 when Greece adopted the euro and discovered that she could borrow at very cheap rates. The euro and the subsidies played the same role in Greece that oil has played in the Middle East: the lifeline of an unsustainable economic system, the enabler of a demagogic political class.

Now the Greek government finds itself with a debt-to-GDP ratio somewhere north of 140 percent and quickly rising. Since May of 2010, that problem has also become the European Union's problem. Because Greece is a member of the EU and the eurozone, it is feared that her instability will lead to the destabilization of other weak members of the EU. Greece cannot go out to the markets to service her debt and finance her new deficits; that has become the care now of other nations' taxpayers across the continent.

The agreement between the EU and Greece stipulated that Greece would drastically reduce her deficits in return for European aid. That was to be achieved by budget cuts and tax increases. The Greek government since then has mostly intended budget cuts and vigorously pursued tax increases.

Such an approach is not surprising considering the political clout that government employees enjoy in Greece. One of every four working adults is a government employee. The government at the beginning made some across-the-board cuts in salaries and pensions, but since then it has basically tried to address the issue of public finance with tax increases.

The absolutely dismal results of those tax increases have not persuaded the younger Papandreou and his colleagues to reduce the size of government and its tax, regulatory, and corruption burden on the economy. The Greek government employs lots of people, even by European standards; the increase in unemployment since the crisis started has come exclusively from the private sector. Finland may have the best educational system in Europe, but its ratio of students to teachers is double that of Greece, which has one of the worst educational systems. In area after area of governmental activity, Greece has the most people employed per population but also the worst results: a way-above-average number of tax collectors but very poor tax collection; an above-average number of policemen but dismal public order; a record number of local courts but perhaps the slowest justice system on the continent; a record number of hospitals but one of the worst systems of health care.

There are hundreds of governmental organizations that employ thousands of people and no one knows what they do, how they do it, or indeed if they do anything at all. Recently it was found that there was a government agency for the preservation of a lake that was drained decades ago.

Then there are the companies owned or controlled by the government. One of them is the Railroad Organization, which has annual revenues of €100 million, pays annual salaries of €400 million, and each year has a loss of about €1 billion. Now the government pretends that it is cleaning up the Railroad Organization's finances by transferring the employees from the company to the central bureaucracy of the government. That kind of cleaning up would embarrass even an Enron executive.

On the other hand, the Greek government has no problem increasing taxes. Taxes on income and property, on sodas and swimming pools, on cars and natural gas, on corporate profits of years past, on everyone's electricity bill. The Valued Added Tax (VAT) for many goods is now at 23 percent.

The Greek government finds itself in a very difficult place. It cannot continue to squeeze the private sector for more euros. The Greek private sector, which has become a kind of new serf class, is very weak and rapidly shrinking. On the other hand, the public sector — with salaries two and three times that of the private sector, plum benefits, egregious pensions, and early retirements — is just too politically powerful to be messed with. There is a solution to the Greek crisis; the only problem is that solutions in Greece tend not be to politically viable things.

Greeks like me cringe when we hear people like Paul Krugman lecturing Americans on how a government takeover in a certain sector of the economy will facilitate in the future reforms that are necessary now.

There stands Greece today, a year after it was bailed out by the taxpayers of other countries, facing the choice of reforming itself or going to utter ruin, and it cannot make up its mind.

The thirty years of hardcore statism have destroyed not only the economy of the nation, but also its ability to do politics, to articulate choices and ideas for the crisis at hand. Everything seems already decided, pre-determined, and set in stone, like the annual government budgets with their immovable expenditures tied to vote-rich constituencies.

Back in the mid-Eighties I was a primary-school student. I didn't understand the politics, but I could feel the pathos of a country that had just "discovered" that there is a thing called a free lunch. Oftentimes, one is asked what one most missed having in one's childhood. I couldn't have told you at the time, but I can with certainty answer today: a Tea Party.

There are Americans who wonder what American exceptionalism is. I know.

Greek Citizen…

The Decline of Programming with Language and it's Impact on Civilization

The holy grail of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) programming seems to have been, at least since the mid 1990's, a graphical user interface (GUI) for programming what is the furthest thing from graphical technology: Voice.

This is because IVR vendors are increasingly going after the end user as their direct customer, and either ignoring  developers completely or trying to create cottage industries out of marginally competent IT consultants.

Furthermore, IVR developers are all in competition with each other. The logic seems to be, at some point, the tools created by IVR developers become good enough that their users will be able to compete with them in their own market. The dust has settled on their being two kinds of IVR software products: Expensive, complicated development tools for sophisticated IVR programmers which target specific operating systems and equipment, and cheap, easy to use, drag-and-drop tools for users of a specific IVR.

(FYI, although technically Asterisk is not "Expensive", I still tend to categorize it in the former, because even though the software is free, I consider it to be an extremely "Expensive Mistake" unless you know exactly what you are getting yourself into.)

The trajectory of IVR development tools also seems to have symmetry with software in general. It used to be accepted, or at least acceptable, that in order to use a computer you were expected to have to learn a few things.  This is no longer the case, and that certainly is not a bad thing. My 5-year-old is very proficient with the computer at home and I don't mean that in a cute way: She actually knows what she is doing. She knows how to search YouTube and Google. She sees ads for websites on TV and goes to the computer to visit them. She pauses the TV and writes down the domain names in big, sometimes reversed, block letters, then fires up a browser and types the domain name into the address bar.

Look at the iPad. It has become so easy to use that you don't even need a keyboard. But, now we're starting to walk down a different path. Frankly, as a cranky old man, there isn't anything you can do with an iPad that I'm particularly interested in.

Go back to 1999 or thereabouts: An IT consultant charged with setting up a simple database had two choices: GUI or Code. While Microsoft Access did have a robust programming language built into it, most users simply use the graphical User Interface, and only advanced users took advantage of the Visual Basic interpreter that ran behind it.

On the other hand, SQL (such as MSSQL or Oracle) and xBase apps (such as dBase and FoxPro) also had some kind of GUI that could work with files and process data, but most users of these systems worked with primarily the languages and only secondarily with the GUI to make things easier for their operators and end-users (such as a cashier or data entry clerk).

And it was not dedicated, brainy programmers who used these languages. dBASE was originally created so "Anyone" could make a database application.  The "B" in BASIC stands for "Beginner".  People used to talk about what language should be the best one for children to start with.

There used to be plenty of choices, but now, not really.

The growing chasm between GUI and Language has made programming with language almost impossible to learn. Yes, there are millions or competent, knowledgeable programmers in the world (including about half a million in the US, according to the Department of Labor, 2008) but compared to 76% of the population of the US in 2005 who actually owned a computer (about 200 million, according to research done by Seagate). When personal computers first came on the market, every one who owned one knew at least part of a programming language.

From my experience as a technical support engineer for a software company in the early 1990's, I would volunteer a guess that probably half of computer owners at that time knew how to write and run at least a BASIC program or batch file.

Now, using the best information I could find in 15 seconds on Google, the statistics would seem to indicate that less than one quarter of one percent of computer owners in the united states know how to write a program, or possibly even know what that means.

In 1990, being "computer literate" minimally meant knowing how to create a shell script (like a DOS batch file), knowing your way around the command shell, and knowing how to do useful things with a programming language like QuickBASIC.

In 2011, according to the salesman across the hall from me today, being "computer literate" means knowing the difference between a PC and a Mac.  He's used to the Mac. He can't use a PC, therefore he considers himself to be not computer literate.

The implication is that being a programmer is now considered a form of engineering, perpetually moving away from the grasp of small hands and average young minds, and turning into a specialty that has little opportunity to jazz the imagination of the average American, and is consistently reinforcing itself as the defacto profession of the third world.

Anyone, anywhere in the world can sit down in front of a computer and, with little or no human intervention, learn to become an adequate programmer, compete in a global marketplace and earn a living. It only depends on how hard they are willing to work at it.

Much in the same way, anyone in the United States can pick up a shovel, dig a ditch that needs digging, and earn a living at it. It only depends on how hard they are willing to work.

(Incidentally, how many American computer programmers do you know? How many American ditch diggers to you know?)

My point is that Programming with Language has become such a specialty due to its increasing complexity, that fewer and fewer young westerners are being exposed to it, while on the other hand, more and more young people in developing nations are studying it hard because it is still a profession that can be self taught, and it is a geographically independent skill that can be marketed globally.

Most people refuse to consider programming anything with language simply because the language developers have made it too complicated for most people to learn, unless they have a vastly compelling reason to do so, like hunger.

But one of the results of this, is a proliferation of substandard software tools serving a market of vaguely skilled consultants who don't want to learn more than they have to, and who are largely unable to deliver services to end users that they really want.

I once heard a consultant tell an office worker, "Yeah, if you want to get out of that program you have to turn the computer off and back on again". God bless that man for printing up business cards and finding people to pay him, but knowing just enough to function is not going to compete with guys named Samir amd Rajiv.

My IVR systems have always given me a competitive advantage when using them for a variety of different businesses because I program them with language. It's not a complex, netty or perly language, just a simple IF THIS THEN DO THAT unstructured implementation of a BASIC-like interpreter.

When I originally developed the language, I imagined end users of evodialer.com and roboverifier.com using it to program their own IVRs. My clients were call centers, marketing companies, government entities, even Fortune 500's that all had IT departments of some type.

My experience with that shows me that people want few, simple choices, and if they really need something not accessible in two clicks, Samir needs to do it.

It seems like nobody realizes that they can still learn how to do things. That there's not just "An App for That", chances are, there's a language too, and the language is far more useful and powerful than the "App", and that learning it is not impossible, and probably not even hard, if you at least have a general understanding of what a programming language is and have had the opportunity to use one.

This refusal to program with language is parallel to a reluctance to repair one's own appliances or automobile. As long as it not a necessity to do so, why bother?  I had to learn to fix a problem with the engine of my truck when I could not afford a mechanic. It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. I mean, it was difficult, but I had first assumed it would be impossible.

Children need to have BASIC returned to them, so that they can grow up knowing what it means to use a programming language. Even Visual Basic has become way to complex for children to do anything useful, simply because there is too much you need to fully understand before you can do anything useful, and that commitment needs to be developed. I can learn any programming language in just a few minutes, partly because I've had decades to familiarize myself with most of them, and partly because I know that it is learnable if I just move in that direction and don't stop until it's learned.

Programming languages are designed to be learnable, and as learnable as possible, within the confines of its purpose, just like cars. I am not lamenting the loss of our ability as a nation to write a program or fix a car; if anything I might only lament the loss of yours and mine, and all of the little children.

Erik Olson, COO
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