Dr. Evil's spam

Email spam is ubiquitous these days, and its 'superfluidity' may give it an additional application besides selling stuff to people and hijacking their data and/or machine time.

If you read any detective stories about international assassins, spies and whatnot - and these are the only type of detective stories worth reading - you've definitely noticed how convoluted are the schemes for contacting the guy who spends most of his time in hiding. Every third Saturday of the month come to Piazza del Popolo in Rome, holding 3 red roses and a copy of Sacramento Bee dated exactly 10 days earlier. Now the guy who needs to be contacted has to wander around the square, looking for someone with Sacramento Bee. Thankfully, international assassins have to have sharp eyes, so he will be able to read the issue date, but still... what if Sacramento Bee goes bankrupt?

Or consider the "moles" -- the guys who work quietly in the heart of the enemy's government for years and even decades, only passing the most valuable information or acting in the most critical moments.

How to communicate effectively with these people? Email would be nice, but a permanent email address can be monitored and again, what if you loose the access to it? Thankfully to the cloak-and-dagger people, they don't have to rely on a constant email address. Instead, what they can do is set up an email address -- at any free service, for example -- and just leave it at a few message boards. Then, their handlers call one of those companies who offer "mass mail services" and send the message out to their guy and to the whole world.

Sure, everyone will receive the secret message, but who's going to know if it is a secret message? Do you have a habit of counting spaces at the ends of the lines in Ci41is ads? :p

Fighting hypocrisy at its source.

Have you ever been wondering where hypocrisy comes from? Children are always honest up to a certain age, always speaking what's on their clean minds. Only when they grow up, they start to lie, pretend to care about things they don't, distort information to their benefit -- you know, what adults do.

Clearly, something teaches children that and, since lying is a very basic -- unfortunately -- human behavior, something very basic should be at its source. Something as basic as the language.

Think about it. Every time you ask someone, "How are you?", do you really care about the other person's business? Probably not, in most cases. The phrase has become a single meaningless token, just like "Hi" but, unlike "Hi", still retains a literary meaning. Which is not a problem for an adult acquiring a language, since this type of hypocritical constructions are present in most languages, so the grown up person just makes a mental note that "'How are you' is just how we say [...], literary meaning is not assumed".

Now, when a child learns his native language, he takes everything at its face value since he doesn't know any other languages for comparison. Therefore, when he sees people asking each other how they are, he first thinks to himself, "Wow, what an empathic world I'm living in!" But then he notices that, in most cases, people really don't mean that, thus receiving his first and most important lesson of hypocrisy.

Other aggravated lessons will come soon, but this experience with a very basic thing, a greeting -- the first thing people say to each other and already a lie -- must be the most important of them all. So if we could just get rid of the lies in the basic language constructions the perhaps our children will see that lying isn't a basic behavior, but rather a rare, reproached occurrence. And that should definitely make our world a little better.

Improving gas mileage using the free market.

Senate or House has recently passed an increased mileage standard: in 2020 cars will have to make at least 35 miles using a gallon of fuel -- like a non-hybrid Civic could do 20 years ago. Woo-hoo!

Certainly, automakers aren't happy. I suppose, if left alone they'd still make horse-driven carriages. Proven technology and all, the public would buy anything, as long as it is domestic, reliable, etc.

So it would seem the so called free market needs constant kicking and prodding in order to produce something that is actually good for general public. Or, as a pedantic reader would say, monopolies should be restricted - which is rather tough to do with car makers, telecoms, cell phone makers and pharmaceutical companies. In other words, if an industry that produces something more advanced than shovels or firewood, there would be just a few big companies, monopolies de facto. Interestingly, these are the very industries that affect peoples' lives the most. ;)

Neo-monarchy to the rescue! Instead of wasting time and taxpayers' money for discussing only marginally useful laws, our ideal monarch would instead parallelize the monopolies' with the public interest. Being true to his despotic, non-democratic self, he'd severely limit the freedom of the few individuals. As you might have guessed, he'd prohibit car makers high management to buy gasoline for their transportation. Instead, he'd give them 20 gallons per week, 5 extra for Labor Day weekend. I am fairly certain all the cars they make would soon be able to travel from Detroit to LA and back using half of those 20 gallons.

Free market wins, as usual!

Getting rid of the money, part 2.

So, after solving the pharmaceuticals problem, the wise monarch has his wrathful eyes on the cell phone makers. By nothing but assuming a weasely conspiracy can he explain the reason why different cell phones have non-matching power/USB cords. Really, all phones do have very similar buttons, with the same numbers and letters on them, and Answer button is green, Hang-Up button is red, so there are some standards which could cover the power and the data cords, too.

This conspiracy extends to other devices, not just cell phones, and even to the devices made by the same company. His Majesty's grand vizier has a camcorder and a still camera from Sony, and these devices have power cords incompatible with each other and neither of them can charge off USB. Clearly, it's more profitable this way: should you get, say, the camcorder charger compromised by a puppy, you won't be able to use neither of the million chargers you already have in your house, nor any of a billion mini-USB cables lying around will be of any help. And once your dear camcorder starts blinking a red LED and beeping pitifully, you'd run into the nearest electronics store to get a new charger, made by guess whom?

But nothing is impossible for the wise king: and again he would strike the offenders right into their board of directors, setting a limit on the percentage of the devices manufactured by their company that they can use, unit-wise (e.g. if a Samsung executive has 4 cell phones and 4 notebooks in his house, 8 devices total, only, say, 20% of them -- 2 -- can be Samsung-made). Plus, these highly-privileged persons would be stripped from one little privilege: they wouldn't be allowed to buy any chargers while holding their office, but would be only able to borrow them from other people -- including the directors of their competitors or even complete strangers on the street.

After being unable to charge their personal gadgets a couple of times, after begging strangers for a charger, they'd call a secret meeting and unify the power sockets across devices, thus entering a collusion that we, the public, can benefit from, for a change.

Again, the wise neo-monarch proves that the free market can benefit the public, no matter what commies say. Only very little regulation is needed, most people won't even notice it :)

Non-monetary motivation

I am having a cold sore these days, so I have a great chance to think about why don't we have a cure for herpes yet. Just as there's no cure for many things, but lots of fairly effective treatments.

Certainly, our understanding of how our bodies work is limited, and probably never will be complete, but it would appear that -- and I'm certainly not the first one to notice -- there's less incentive to search for cures. Because, obviously, if you cure an ailment, you're shrinking your own market (you may end up eliminating the disease altogether!), while a good treatment provides you with a profit forever. Therefore, those who actually can find cures -- pharmaceutical companies -- benefit more from providing treatments, rather than cures, because, just as any corporation, they are in a business of making money.

So it appears that while monetary rewards do work great for us (the humanity) in some areas (see how cooler our cell phones are getting every year!), maximizing the profit may sometimes take you into a direction opposite to the one that the common good might suggest.

Obviously, this is something governments should regulate, and it is equally obvious that modern "donation"-based governments would never do that. Interestingly, this particular case does not actually require much intervention. A wise monarch would solve the issue with a single edict, something like: "No healthy person should be in the board of directors in a pharmaceutical company". And let the market take care of things ;)

Sticking it to show buisiness.

I have recently seen this "Shakira" video on a popular video website. I believe it is a parody, especially since the video title actually says so, but the funny thing is that I have never seen the real Shakira. Or, rather, I have probably seen her on a poster or on a magazine cover, but never knew it was her. So for any practical purpose it can be assumed I have never seen her.

Now, there's an interesting implication of me seeing this video without knowing how the real Shakira looks like: every time I hear her name or hear that song, the image of a fat guy dancing will come up in my mind. When I see a tabloid headline about Shakira's adventures, I'll be thinking: "Wow, the fatso really goes places!". Or, not being able to shield myself from the announcement of, say, Shakira's divorce with a NASCAR racer, I'll be amused that everything is allowed if you're rich and famous. When someone praises the choreography in her videos, I'll be remembering the graceful jumps in the shallow waters. And when (and if) I see the real Shakir, I'll say, "Naw, I don't think it is her!". It is now really hard for the show business to plant the "correct" Shakira image into my head.

This is how the really effective propaganda should work: not just persuading people that black is the new white, but actually replacing white with black in peoples' minds. Of course, this only works well with people who (ideally) have never seen neither black nor white or (at least) have never seen white, and that is why public education is really important ;)

How to save resources -- election vouchers.

I have received a request for money recently -- I receive lots of them because apparently some database somewhere thinks I am rich and generous -- but this one was from the Democratic National Committee, no less.

The most interesting part was the return "paid-by-addressee" envelope, which contained a note: "Although this is a prepaid envelope, please attach a stamp anyway, so we'll save our valuable resources". Pretty greedy, huh -- send us not just $100, but $100.37 (39?).

I wonder how many resources were wasted for printing the envelope and the letter, paying for the message writers' labor and moving the letter from the printer to my mailbox. Then some not very valuable, but dear to me my own time was wasted for reading all that stuff and carefully examining the envelope. And to think that all that time and money could have been used for researching the consciousness to machine transfer!

I believe that all political advertisement and discussion should be prohibited -- except for one specially designated federally funded web site. Nothing at all, including the date and place of the next elections should be available anywhere but on that web site. After all, only people who are interested in taking control of their lives politics actually vote, so why waste resources bombarding the non-voting public with political ads?

Steering onto a more realistic road, I doubt the saved money and labor would be used for seeking eternal life in electronic form. Probably it can work as some form of vouchers: after each election everyone is issued a voucher worth, say $5000, which one can immediately exchange for a super-duper wide-screen TV. There is a catch, however: in order to participate in the next elections one needs to surrender this voucher at the polling place.

This way the money that does not have to be wasted on "political process" in its current form gets distributed directly to the people. And by not cashing your voucher you support that one website where the new politics is. No more ugly interruptions of the regular TV programming for debates, no sleazy negative ads -- everyone is happy!

/Or you can use those vouchers to pay for college.

How to choose the best resort.

I think the best places to spend a short vacation are those that are close to home. Say, 1 or 2 hour drive. Certainly, it is way less expensive to get there since there's no flying involved and for the same reason you don't have to have your stuff searched and can take all the toothpaste you want with you.

These are all universally known benefits, but there's at least one more: if you go to a resort that is so close to home, you can easily visit your home if you forgot something (like, say, toothpaste or the cell phone charger). Or you can buy groceries and do the laundry, and then return to the resort. Can't do that with Hawaii!

Parallel Universes are real -- the proof.

A couple of days ago I've overheard some guy in a diner who was telling his friends about someone named Frank -- a very accomplished individual, I must admit. This Frank has built a few buildings, has a happy family and himself is a great guy and all that -- a modern Hercules, this Frank is.

But one thing about him really stood out. The narrator said that back when Frank was 12 (and he is 57 now), he lived in Florida when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened and saw American missiles flying over to Cuba.

So apparently in the Universe Frank is originally from, the Crisis had lead to an actual nuclear war and, I think, the energy released by the nuclear explosions have ripped the time-space fabric and moved Frank into our more lucky Universe. And certainly, if you survive such an ordeal, the rest of the life's problems would seem trivial, nothing would prevent you from becoming a happy, successful person, just like Frank.

Fun with cuisine travellers.

I was watching a travel show the other day, one of those "food" types where someone travels around the world and bravely eats whatever is customary there. A trained bald energetic guy was rushing around the streets of Madrid, checking out restaurants and cafes, enjoying every dish he was offered. There weren't a single item which he didn't like, everything was just perfect, delicious, marvelous -- including the bull's huevos.

I suppose each restaurant did its best to make the best dish possible, so I don't really doubt the guy's enthusiasm. However, I've got an idea for a restaurant owner: invent a "popular, but very expensive and therefore rare and less known dish", with some fancy name. Or, actually, an existing one could be used -- the point is to prepare it badly. So badly that the mere smell would trigger the puke reflex. Then, serve the dish to the guy in front of the cameras, may be take a bit from a specially arranged non-bad spot, and then enjoy how the food traveler pretends to like the food.

Oh, and locking the restroom may be a good addition.

How Tranai instant recall system would affect education level.

I may need to explain how the instant recall system works on Tranai (it is described in this book). Basically, every government official must wear a special collar (which can't be removed while the person holds an office), and there are special booths all around the planet. The collars contain a few grams of explosive and a radio detonator and in the booths there are buttons with officials' names. If a citizen is dissatisfied with the official's work, he can come to a booth and press the corresponding button, and, once a certain threshold is met...

Of course, the real system doesn't have to so brutal. Instead of the explosive decapitation, just recalling the official should be enough. There is, however, an obvious problem with such a system: it doesn't allow unpopular decisions to be made. Really, it isn't possible to satisfy absolutely everyone, so every political decision is necessarily a compromise of sorts -- and that is probably the major reason people hate politicians: every decision that is beneficial to one group is not so beneficial to another, and virtually everyone ends up in one of latter groups. Politician just have to try to satisfy everyone, which gives them an appearance of lying hypocrites (or you have to be a hypocrite to become a politician, doesn't really matter what is the cause and what is the effect here.)

This necessity of "balance" makes uneducated populace more attractive to governments: people who don't think critically can be cheated easily, so governments may want to decrease the quality of public education. Which creates a vicious positive feedback: the generation raised with worse education produces even worse rulers (of all levels, from city district officials to presidents/prime ministers), who, in turn, worsen the public education system even further.

Now, the instant recall system could start the cycle in the opposite direction: more educated people will more likely accept unpopular, but necessary decisions, so the government would be more interested in increasing the education level of the population. And more educated people will produce smarter rulers, who will improve the education even further.

Of course, this will work best if people live and occupy an office long enough so that their efforts in the area of educating new citizens could be statistically evident while they're still in office.

Politicians' promises database

One can often hear, especially near the election time, how someone who wants to get (re)elected speaks about his or her promises, that were either fulfilled by the hard work of the speaker, or failed, due to the obstruction of the evil opponents. Either way, says the the election-hopeful, you should elect me to the office, so I could continue actually doing the good deeds or fighting those who oppose them.

And certainly, the pre-election promises are often exaggerated, either by the candidate s themselves, if the promises were at least partially fulfilled, or by their opponents, if the said promises never materialized. In the latter case the mere existence of such promises is denied fiery.

Well, it used to be rather hard to prove or disprove whether the particular public words were said or not, and even if someone could do that, their claims could be easily refuted. Really, whom are you going to believe, the smiling successful pillar of the community and the farther of three adorable daughters, or some unwashed girl in broken glasses who spent the whole week in the library, "digging up all this nonsense"? The sad fact that most people would side with the former brings us to the necessity of the easily accessible promises database, that anyone could query.

And the necessary technology actually does exist today, a wiki-like engine is perfect for this kind of thing, the only thing that is needed is some sort of an operational protocol. Here's how it could work:

- Together with announcing the candidacy, a record in the web-accessible database is created and each candidate fills in his or her ideas on what should the targeted office do about "issues".
- During the campaign these ideas/promises can be updated but not too often, and each update should have a comment explaining the reason for the change.
- Once the elections are done, the database is frozen (the office-elect may only attach progress reports) and it becomes easy for anyone to see, what was and what wasn't done.

From the technical perspective, a couple of simple but effective tampering-prevention measures should be taken: copies of the database should be regularly mailed (on a CD) to anyone interested, and there should be several mirrors of the website. But, more importantly, the database should be universally accepted socially, so anyone with too many unexplained discrepancies in the database becomes a political corpse instantly.

The system could later be upgraded to something similar to what they had on the planet Tranai.

Phones on a plane.

FCC may drop plan allowing cell calls in-flight, which is good, because on a plane there's no walking away from someone who just has to describe her most recent visit to JCPenney™. I like the fact that we don't have to bear any white noise in addition to the engines' humming.

But do we owe this blissful silence to the cell phone usage ban? May be, but only indirectly. I think there is a more powerful social factor.

See, the persons who like to talk over the cell phone a lot, they usually tell something, i.e. they produce a monologue. And you don't really need a phone for a monologue, right? The only time the telephone function is used is at the opening stage: "OMG I gotta tell you about..." and in the end: "Oops, these rude people are staring at me, talk to you later". Between these phrases there is virtually uninterrupted stream of words, so one doesn't actually need a working phone for this kind of "conversation".

So, we don't hear these entertaining monologues on the plane only because describing a JCPenney sale into a switched-off phone (or just into the open air, for that matter) is considered silly, ridiculous and otherwise socially unacceptable. We're spared -- but not because of the cell phone ban per se, but because the chatters don't want to look stupid, as if... oh, never mind.

Which gives me a wonderful commercial idea: someone could make a "talkbox", that looks like a phone, with a microphone and all. But, it isn't connected to any network, so there's no interference with the in-flight systems (and no bills to pay, so it can be used on the ground, too!). Instead, there's a voice-synthesizing system which once in a while says, "Uh-huh", or "Really?!", or "Tell me more!" and so on. Deluxe models could also have speech-recognition system, so when the user says, "Know what I'm sayin'?", the talkbox would answer, "Yeah, totally", or something like that.

It could be marketed as "Confidebot" or "Supportive Jenny" -- this needs more thinking. Just check your regular cell phone with a flight attendant, show her that you're going to use the Supportive Jenny and talk on the phone like you normally do, all flight long!

Of course, I feel a little guilty suggesting this, but if it works, I'd be flying first class my private jet, so why do I care!

/off to USPTO.gov

The new taste of travel.

It's interesting how one forgets his home a little after spending a few days away, getting somewhat used to how things are at the place where you stay. And once you get back, you "rediscover" -- or, rather, reload into the cache memory -- the particular smell of your home, the exact position of the light switches, the size and shape of your cups, etc. It is fun and it wards off Alzheimer's.

And now, with the (relatively) new Transport Security regulations prohibiting more than a few ounces of any non-solid substance to be taken aboard, there's a new feeling in homecoming. The taste of your own tooth-paste.

0% APR for life credit cards.

You know how banks offer credit cards with 0% APR for 6-12-18 months, so you get used to not paying off the whole balance during the grace period and get slammed with 15-18-24% rate once the promotional period expires.

It is interesting to note, however, that potentially banks could keep 0% rate forever, and still make profit, as long as you pay off your balance on time (and I guess they are making profit even if you always repay your debt within the grace period).

Suppose you get a credit card with $1000 limit, then buy some stuff for the whole $1000, then send a $1000 check to the bank a couple of weeks later and then restrain yourself from shopping sprees, admiring how you're living by your means. In effect, the bank gave you $1000, received it back from you and keeps it. So if you don't go buy another $1000 worth of stuff on the very day the bank got your $1000 back, the bank gets to use your money as it sees fit. For example, it can give someone a mortgage or a business loan and get a few pennies of interest on that $1000. And if they have 100,000 customers, each giving them a $1000 for a few days, these pennies add up to millions of dollars.

But that of course works only if you pay regularly and, more importantly, don't go waste all of the credit limit at once, but instead spend a $100 here and a $20 there, then the bank gets to use your money longer.

Therefore paying off the balance does not mean the bank gets no profit, I wonder if it gets even more profit then off those poor folks who just pay a minimum payment every month, thus being able to admire the wrath of 24% APR spreading its black wings across the Universe. See, if you don't pay off the whole balance, and may be get to pay an occasional overlimit fee, your credit limit probably isn't very high. And as the wise science of mathematics teaches us, even the humongous (24% APR) of multipliers can be brought to near-zero if multiplied by a near-zero number ($250 credit limit). On the other hand, if you are a fat cat with $50K credit limit and buy a G35 for the Junior to drive to school and pay off the whole ~$40K balance the very same month, the bank gets to use those $40K almost indefinitely.

So whether you're "financially responsible" or not, pay off credit cards or not, banks get profit anyway. Which is obvious, of course, but it was interesting to analyze the mechanism.

Daylight saving time holiday: 2-hour tax cut.

I support the free market as much as the next guy, but I just have to say that today, omnivorous capitalist sharks had stolen one whole hour of our hard-earned day-off.

Really, why this time shift has to happen on Sunday, of all days? Why not on Monday, around 4pm? Suppose you're at the office, and it's 3.59pm and then suddenly -- ta-da! -- it's 5 already, time to go home. Hallelujah!

But no, instead we're losing one Sunday hour. In the beginning of the 20th century people had died fighting for these precious day-off hours, and now we're just giving one away.

What about the fall time shift, some may ask. Aren't we getting that hour back on one glorious Sunday in October? We do, but that extra hour is well earned: productivity has also grown dramatically in the 20th century, so don't you think we could work one hour less -- per year?

And it's not like the government can't just order this change, it has no problem telling people what to do in other areas. But being a free market advocate and all, I propose an economic solution: 2-hour tax cut.

The idea is to reward companies that let the workers go home one hour earlier once a year. By doing that, they are going to loose 1 hour of their output, right? So, the new cool tax cut would allow them to write off profits of 2 hours. That is, divide the whole year's profits by the number of hours operated and deduct 2 such pieces.

This way daylight is going to be saved and people will be happy. It is a win-win for everyone!

/Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

2YHRR

Actually, there are some programs in place that intend to shuffle people a little. In the US, for example, there is a special visa class (J2, I think) that allows foreign students to study for a while, but then they are forced to spend at least 2 years in their home country ("2 Years Home Residency Requirement"). The idea is that after 2 years they'll have enough things going and won't try to return back to the US, instead staying in their homeland, thus spreading American culture. Some say that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili is the program's greatest success.

For the opposite direction, there are organizations like Peace Corps and, I believe, some churches send young missionaries around the world.

Problem is, these programs are in no way mandatory, they are based solely on younger peoples' curiosity. And actually those curious and open-minded people would learn a lot about the world by themselves, it is other, less curious and open-minded people who need to be sent traveling but alas, they don't volunteer. Catch22 at it's best.

How to stop wars

Do you think a war is possible between the USA and, say, the UK? Or Australia? Probably not, right? Not completely impossible, but much less likely than a, for example, USA:Venezuela showdown. Or UK:Brazil, or Australia:Pakistan.

And it's not just the common language that counts, as there is also one more unlikely foe for the USA: Israel. The reason is, I guess, is that there are so many Israelis (i.e. citizens of Israel) and Jews (i.e. those who may have never been in Israel, but still associate themselves with it) live in the USA, that an attempt to start a war would be blocked by them on every level of the society, including the highest ones.

Same goes for the UK: there are so many people who have relatives there, that the mere idea of a war would be stopped with a simple thought: "Are we going to bomb the uncle Patrick's house, too?".

NATO-Schmato, WTO-Schmeeteeo, they don't mean much in this respect, really. Family\friendship ties are way more important in war preventing than all international treaties combines.

Which leads to a simple solution: people should be forced to move to other countries. For example, once you reach 18, you go to a college that is, say, at least 50 degrees away from your birthplace, longitude-wise. Even if you return back to your homeland, after 4-5-6 years in college you'll have enough friends there that you wouldn't want to kill. And they wouldn't want to kill you.

There may be a few countries who wouldn't join this marvelous program. Well, the rest of the world would just bomb those and voilà -- the world peace!

Speaking in tongues shuts down brain.

I've been rearranging stuff on my desk and dug up an issue of the Discover magazine, which I haven't read yet. Otherwise I would've known that "speaking in tongues shuts down brain areas responsible for executive function and thought control". But that wouldn't do me any good since, being a poorly educated person I didn't know what "speaking in tongues" meant. I thought it meant speaking aloud, like when talking on the cell phone, which would explain why trolls some people drive erratically.

Turns out, though, it is just a fancy way to call glossolalia, but, listening to some people who talk a lot -- like politicians ;) -- I think my original idea has some merit.

The greatest treachery, or where do assholes come from.

There is an old ballad about a mountain troll who wants to marry a man, Mr. Mannelig, and if she does that, she'll presumably become human. One has to wonder, though, if a troll becomes a human, won't he or she still be a troll inside? The kind of person that leaves garbage around wherever he goes?

Now, if you remember what your grandparents told you -- that "people were better in old times", you'll have to agree that somewhere down the line there was someone who actually got seduced by the promises of 12 mills and a mighty sword (a real, head-cutting sharp sword, not a MMORPG sequence of bytes) and gave to the requests, marrying the troll.

I don't know if she had offered something else in addition to what is listed in the ballad, but it doesn't really matter. The fact is, there was someone who hadn't quite think through what he was getting into and, as a result, has betrayed as all. Because apparently this happened a rather long time ago, when the science of contraception wasn't as developed as it is now. Besides, at that time it wasn't socially acceptable for a married couple to use even whatever sorry means were available.

So they had children and, sure enough, their children were half-trolls. Since the mitochondrial DNA is passed along the mother's line only, their descendants still have those distinct trollish genes. And that is why we see the number of assholes increasing, it isn't just the generation gap, it really is happening, objectively.


P.S. YouTube carries a nice version of the ballad by InExtremo.