Brewster Kahle's Blog

San Francisco is best when it is inventing utopias (executing on it sometimes goes astray, but stay with me).

In our Covid/Pandemic world we are all pushed into virtual classes, virtual work, virtual relations.  Lets face it, we can only stretch virtual so far.

Let’s invent a physical world, and a desirable fabulous sharing wonderful world, in the age of Pandemic.   Together.

Burning Man is cancelled this year.  But it was an inspiration– I went in 1990, the first year in the desert– 80 people. It was called Zone Trip #4 in the paragraph in the Rough Draft physical newsletter– show up, be it, no spectators.  No tickets, no city planning, no directions, no rangers, no sherpas.   Make it happen, we were it.   It was so great that Mary and I invited our friends there to be our wedding in 1992 when there were 400 people and getting married at Burning Man was not a thing, nor would it be for years.

Ephemerisle has same “lets invent the world we want to live in” feel– 400 people on the delta trying to stay afloat, literally.  Inventive, dangerous, and wonderful.

Both early Burning Man, and Ephemerisle are all about adapting to a difficult environment, and with panache.

So…   how about Zone Trip #5: Pandemic?   In this case we start with a large chunk of desert, and then we invent a temporary utopia that works in the age of Pandemic– staying safe and loving it.  

With lots of inventors.   Everyone an inventor.

• Maybe someone brings a traincar of rice, a truckload of beans.   
• Maybe someone figures out what a school is, what a school means, what a school teaches.   
• Maybe there is a glass-cube restaurant.
• Maybe pandemic fashion takes a positive turn– a full-length clear isolation tube-dress 3ft in diameter.
• Romancing while social distancing?
• Virus free camp.
• Recovered camp.

What could you add to the world?

You should try this game.

I just invented and played a game today with my family, and it worked great– it was fun and we learned an important lesson. Similar to the game “Monopoly” which shows that one person ends up monopolizing even though you think the rules are “fair,” the game of Oligarchy shows that the “free market” leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.

The reason this is important is that it disproves one basic tenet of the free-market idea– that it is a game with many winners. Rather the free market, without redistribution, puts everyone (except one) in debt bondage, and quickly. We joked that those that were run out of money had to sell organs. Our game broke up into social classes– it was not worth it to the rich to play with the poor. It was all very real for a simple game.

All of this is based on a paper in Scientific American, Is Inequality Inevitable? Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model suggests, which has been a mind-blower for me: it is so simple and disproves the Libertarian premise.

We played 4 rounds with 6 people in about an hour:

• each gets a pad of paper and pen and writes $100 at the top, that is their pot of money
• each gets a coin to flip

Then each player picks another player agrees to gamble on a flip of a coin, they agree on which wins on heads, and tosses. The stake of the gamble is set at 50% of the lesser of the pots of that pair. So in the beginning, when everyone has $100, the gamble is $50.

Then the players pick another player (or the same player) to do another round. This proceeds.

What is amazing is that even through each toss is “fair” in that it is a 50-50 chance to win a straight amount of money, the results shows one player wins all the money, and really quickly.

Two nephews and their partners, Mary and I played 4 rounds in about an hour and we discovered social classes (we called the broke ones “organ sellers”), feeling of righteous empowerment based on being successful (even though it was completely random), but also that “free market” ended with all-but-one-of-us in a bad situation really quickly.

Try it, it is fun. And read the article, it is startling– free-market without redistribution goes to Oligarchy very very fast. This book on Sumerian and Babylonian economics shows it has always been this way, so people developed peaceful reset mechanisms with debt forgiveness and Julilee: …and Forgive Them Their Debts by Michael Hudson.

[And now you can see it played automatically! http://hackerfactor.com/oligarchy-game.php Go Neal!]

A Washington Post article talked about getting to interstellar rocketry by slingshotting around the Sun. I understood the idea of slingshotting required a planet or a moon– something that was orbiting something else because you are taking some of that acceleration of the planet for your rocket. Indeed this is called “Gravity Assist,” so what is this slingshotting around the Sun?  Well, this is where you get the Oberth Effect. The idea is you go really fast by getting close to the sun, burning your fuel, and you will go much faster even after you slow down again having left the proximity of the Sun.

But after reading and rereading the wikipedia article, talking with my mates, watching a youtube video I still did not get an intuitive grasp of it– in fact it seems to break the rule of conservation of energy. How could blasting your fuel while going faster make you go faster?  I think I have an approach to see how it makes sense, in general, but does not bring us to equations.

A rocket works by throwing exhaust out the back at high speed, thus pushing the rocket forward. For a given amount of fuel, you throw it out (relatative to the rocket) at a certain speed and certain weight to become the exhaust thus pushing the rocket forward with a certain amount of force.

Let’s say the fuel is thrown out the back at a certain speed, V. If you do this while standing still, the fuel goes one way at speed almost V and the rocket goes the other. If the rocket is moving at speed V, then throws the burnt fuel out the back (say it does it all at once for simplicity), then exhaust will be standing still and the rocket moving faster than it was.

The first case is like in a swimming pool you push against a floaty to go one way– the floaty goes the other way. The second case can be seen as you are in a swimming pool and you push just as hard, but you are pushing against the wall. The wall goes nowhere, and you go faster across the pool.

You would push against a wall if you could. And by speeding up the rocket you are effectively doing that. Same force, but the floaty goes the other way vs the wall which stays still. When you push against the wall you go faster in the direction you want to go.

In the rocket case, we have to get the rocket to go the speed of the exhaust V, and not take any energy to do that. The way the rocket is speed up is by “borrowing speed” by accelerating towards the sun. The sun accelerates both the rocket and the fuel it will burn equally– this is that tricky thing in high school physics where a feather and a bowling ball fall at the same rate (if there is no air resistance). So the sun pulls both in, the rocket and fuel are going really fast, say V, then the rocket blasts out the rocket fuel leaving it behind, and then decelerates as it leaves the sun. If the rocket got up to speed V, then the net effect is that instead of the rocket throwing its exhaust backwards, it would go nowhere, thus being the wall it pushed against.

The rocket decelerates as it leaves because of the gravity of the sun is pulling it back, but it is getting less force because it weighs less because it burned fuel. Again, this is that tricky bit about the feather and bowling ball. So the Sun applied more force to the rocket+fuel on the way in than on just the rocket on the way out. Another way of seeing how this effect works.

At least this makes sense to me. The effect is caused by the sun accelerating the rocket+fuel, then when the rocket blasts out its spent fuel, the exhaust is not going in the opposite direction as much, thereby offering more of a push to the rocket, even after it is decelerated.

Going to the airport this morning, I took a Lyft for $46. It us usually less, but it was rush hour, and still less than a taxi (usually $65) and more reliable than a taxi. The driver was cheerful, been driving for Lyft/Uber for a year and a half, and it was in a Chevy Bolt, so we were driving an electric car. I got there before it predicted, and all was good.

But I looked at the driver’s phone after we got out and it showed she made $23. Yikes. This does not seem fair.

The driver said that after Uber and Lyft went public, the “take” they were taking from the drivers went up.

50% is too high a fee for Lyft. The only higher fees I know are what book publishers take from authors.

In the old days, paying a highway toll meant I paid with cash often a tossing a quarter in a basket or smiling at a toll-taker and handing over a dollar. But now I get to speed through.

To do this, do I really need to have my license plate photographed? Do I need to hide my FasTrak in a conductive bag to keep from getting tracked other places on the highway without my permission? Do I need to have my every bridge crossing be logged into a database somewhere?

As a thought experiment: how do we high toll takers that are automated but not privacy invasive?   If we can figure this out, can we go on to make it happen?

Features I want, and maybe all of us want:

1. Speed through toll booths and paying the right toll
2. Able to deal with cars that have a device and ones don’t
3. Easy to refill the device with money as needed
4. Not be tracked any more than dropping a quarter in a basket (not creepy)

Goal 2 means that if the toll does not detect the car’s device, then we need to track it somehow and bill the owner. Currently this is done by photographing the license plate and sending a bill.  I do not have a way around this, do you

But if the car has a transponder then the car can put out a signal to pay the toll. I think with crypto-currencies, especially zcash, we have all the technology we need.

Basically the device would hold a key to the money I had transferred to it. Then the device would recieve and transmit a bunch of numbers to the toll as it was passing through, just as the current FasTrak does, but instead of saying the account number in the FasTrak, it would offer to pay the required toll by transferring the money into the government’s account. This could be done quickly, inexpensively, securely, and privately– all with technology that is currently here and open source.

Does this do the trick?

We need a low transaction cost billing system because tolls are low so the fee should be a small percentage of the toll. Currently it is 3% to 5% cost because of the visa card transaction to refill my FasTrack account. Bitcoin is often 7 cents per transaction, and zcash is much less than a penny. So current Bitcoin would work, but other systems are a better fit for this. But this works: check.

If the toll booth could detect if the payment was good and valid quickly enough then it would not need to take a picture in those cases. If the transaction is too slow for this (like current bitcoin), then the picture might have to be taken, but can be deleted when the transaction is complete, say in 30 minutes.

In terms of putting money into the account, this can be done from dollars, or credit cards, or crypto in any of a large number of proven wallets and websites. So that seems easy.

So cryptocurrency, bitcoin, etherium, or zcash can make a highway toll-takers more efficient than they are now.

Wouldn’t it be great if an early widespread use of crypto was to make our highways more efficient and less creepy?

Same product, same vendor, to same address, same day, same shipping, same billing address, but different customer, different price $8.63 vs $12.37. 43% higher price for me than for the Internet Archive. In fact I checked the price for me an hour before and the day after the Internet Archive bought it, so I do not think it is the vendor changing the price by this much.

Below are the receipt for the Internet Archive, offer to me, and offer to my home business account (same price as the Internet Archive). Turns out I stumbled upon “Business Pricing.” It’s a “feature.” Business Prime costs $179/year, as opposed to consumer Prime for $99/year.

Yikes. Shakes my confidence, and seems like we could be on our way to “redlining.”

What price to do you see for https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0089PBTV2 ?

I am wondering if the Internet Archive, and tech orgs more generally, could effectively hire teams in addition to hiring individuals.  I am thinking of 4 or 5 people that could work effectively with each other, be remote from HQ, but be really “hired” in the sense that they assimilate and integrate with the rest of the organization.  I have not tried this, so this is just random thoughts at this point.

Acquisitions usually fail, they say, and I have seen failure– culture mismatch, too much redundancy, so lots of loss.  The new term “acquihire” is interesting, so people are trying to hire functional groups, but so much is loss

What if a group defines themselves as a team and goes out to be hired.  They interview as if they were an individual– talking to managers in an organization to find out if there is skill, temperament, salary match etc.  If the team is hired, then it is trained by the org, and such, and then operates as a “super individual” for the first year or so. Built into the team can be different skills, maybe: communicator/manager, tech lead, prodmgr/testing, senior and junior dev.

What problem am I trying to solve?  Well there are several:

How to grow a tech company to meet a sudden opportunity: so you get funding, a grant, increased revenue– how do you grow?   Some big companies acquire other companies, but those teams often do not integrate well, take a long time to deal with and are expensive.  Most organizations hire individuals, maybe this would be effective step up from this system.

How to be effective remote workers:  San Francisco is a tough place to move to, but what if a team operating in another area or another country but then went to job hunt in San Francisco, and did some training there, but then mostly lived and worked in their home location. They could learn from each other to bring up younger workers and can recruit to replace people in their team. To integrate with other people and teams in the organization they should switch people’s projects otherwise silos could solidify.  This team would then really work for the organization, not just for the team.

How to teach younger workers in a remote workforce: I learned by watching and working closely with others– I think we all do. Doing that over a network can only go so far. Teams can have junior and senior people in it, people that know how to work together well and have the bonds to bring each other up.

The communications issues can ease management issues with remote workers: some people are better coders than communicators, but good communications is essential in remote work, and in modern tech work in general.  What if the team had a mix of different skill sets?

Robustness, resilience:  each team can handle their recruiting, training, and rejuvenation– each job function could be shared between people, so if any one leaves, there are those that can fill in. Key is that the team would not pick up and leave all together otherwise the organization is super stuck.  If longevity with the organization can be counted on, and the company resists the temptation to fire a full team at once, then this can be a big advantage.

Team formation can be a local phenomenon— maybe a team forms in hacker spaces, around schools, or in companies that are downsizing and then they market themselves as a unit. Maybe teams are created in outsourcing company somewhere.  It is possible that a team in a remote country could cost the same as an engineer in San Francisco.

—-
The Internet Archive has successful teams working as scanning centers around the world, so it works for this task.  Can it work for tech groups? Don’t know but maybe we should try.

Have you tried anything like this?

Short story by brewster kahle, 2019 [pdf, googledoc]

Now running, he had never seen the campus cops get aggressive before. Something clicked– he could now see how it could happen, how it was happening to him– he was questioning, even doubting, those he had looked up to, learned from. Now he was told to just obey and he didn’t like it.

What had actually happened was pretty tame from what he was reading in the papers of what was going on other places, but it was something about coming to his campus.

In the morning, his friends in the dorm had convinced him to help prepare for the anti-war protest in the afternoon. This meant that he would have to skip work at the campus hotel, call in sick or something, which was a transgression he was not comfortable with. He was happy with his studies, learning a lot and at high speed, but letting his boss down at the hotel, and having to lie was outside a Mainer’s comfort zone.

But he let his friends win out, making signs, listening to the new music, was more exciting than setting up people’s rooms in the hotel. Hendrix was his favorite—there was something raw and burning that brought it all home to him even though he was in a nice green isolated campus in Vermont on a spring day.

He had read the New York Times in the morning, but he was finding the mimeographed underground fliers more riveting, but more importantly, more true. But “true” might be overstating it–they reported events going on at other campuses in very different ways. What was true was starting to be a bit hard to figure out. The debates on perspectives and underrepresented voices were always understandable but, frankly, a bit abstract compared to sitting down and having to reconcile these different newspapers when he did not have a god’s eye of history to say, “oh, yes, I knew it all along, it really happened this way.” He was just confused. He knew they were not winning the war, but what about the kids at the University of Wisconsin– did the cops really let loose on them for doing, well nothing much? Or was it actually as insignificant as the small piece implied in the New York Times saying some activists were stirring trouble? It was these small issues that helped him the most in understanding from the confusion, by being confused, about what is right or wrong; what is true or exaggerated; how this generation could come to question the fabric that had coddled them.

So he brought his copy of Electric Ladyland that could now legitimately be taken out of the library since last week. He loved his turntable in the dorm living room, where he could turn it up, maybe a bit too loud.

He was the self-appointed music aficionado in his dorm and got to know the music librarian pretty well. The collection was pretty good too, he tried to keep himself to the new-releases display and took to reading Rolling Stone and getting into waiting for things to be put out, usually on Thursdays. It was then that he could take them home and listen there. It was much more satisfying to crank it on the hi-fi than sitting in a little carrel with headphones on. He liked the suspense of waiting for the new releases. 1968 was a good year for music, he thought, and it was bringing together his love of music with the politics and issues that he was waking up to. His program on the campus radio station had gathered more listeners throughout the year, and he was given the best slot, after dinner, because he would play music but also talk about happenings at other campuses that most did not know about. A little bit of context never hurt anyone and if he kept it short, got back to the music, people seemed to even like his historical banter.

Some of his friends really got into the movies, putting on nightly shows once they got the hang of the projectors. It was a bit hit-or-miss since they often had not even seen the movie before they put it on for other students. But it all worked out.

They rarely got to see TV, but they had gathered in the library around the small set last week to see the reporting of Democratic National Convention in Chicago. A police riot is what the underground sheets were saying, but the Chicago Tribute was saying it was provocateurs, and maybe foreign ones, that were disturbing the peace and not respecting the democratic process.

“Glad you decided to come, Bryce” said Ava with a mischievous smile, “or should I call you ‘Moon Child’?” He smiled back, a bit awkwardly, somewhat because he was not comfortable with the monikers, or nom-de-guerre that some of the others are adopting, but mostly because he is feeling guilty about the hotel. “Thanks, Ava, I think this will be fun.”

“What did you bring for us today?” she asked looking at the colorful cardboard square under his arm. Bryce brightened up. “Hendrix came out with a double album that is perfect… perfect for the day, but also perfect for me right around now.” Ava nodded, the deviousness gone, and said, “yes, for me too, I am starting to get it, it has taken me a long time.” Bryce shot back, “Oh, you have always been more accepting of the moment, more in the moment than I have been. I think that is because you are from the city where the media has always been important to you in shaping your world. But up north, we take time in the woods and on the sea, and everything seems to be a bit more, you know, rooted.” “Oh, stop philosophizing and put on the record, we have signs to make.”

“Uh, where did you get the paints and cardboard, Ava?” and now her smart aleck smile returned. “Oh, the Art teacher is an artist herself so she understands if some of the supplies disappear, and besides I think she might be coming to the protest– she is into it.” Bryce looked a bit puzzled, and asked, “are the teachers allowed to come to a protest and one that we have not cleared with the administration?” “Allowed?” Ava pondered, “hadn’t thought of it, yes, I guess she could get in trouble.” Bryce’s expression of “well, yeah” and a bit of fear communicated better to Ava what was at stake. They were breaking rules, skipping work, stealing supplies. In some measure being caught up in the moment, in another measure it was wrestling with the issues inside– they had nothing against the college and certainly didn’t want to get their Art teacher in trouble. “Are you doubting this, Moon Child?” Bryce looked down and tried to think of what he wanted on his sign.

Grateful Dead music poured out of the Kronos College 60 Quad as Ava and Bryce entered. Colorful dresses, flowy skirts and handmade signs all seemed like a party. The Bronze statue of the Founder of Kronos had been given an afro wig and colorful shirt. The large letters of the motto on the statue that said “Grow” had had a painted addition so it now said, “Grow Free.”

But looking over towards the administration building there was a row of men in blue in formation and looking… dangerous, with billy clubs across their backs. Bryce and Ava wondered if there were that many cops on campus and they looked closely at the faces. Bryce said: “That is my boss, Mr. Stills, from the Hotel, what is he doing here?” Bryce walked towards him, but there was no eye engagement at all. Bryce could not figure out the look in his face– was Mr. Stills happy about being there, or a bit afraid of being there?

The student president started off his speech with a ponderous argument against the war, but was drowned out pretty fast with chants of “hell no, we won’t go” and people rushing the stage. He could not even finish his speech and was taken over by a disorganized sequence of Buddhist chants, tirades about mistreatment of American Indians, and even a Dylan lookalike trying to get everyone to sing together.

A change in tone came abruptly when a tall older man, not a student and not from around there, started talking about the school and the role it plays in supporting the power structure. He launched into it: “How could a college that is focused on history, on looking back, when there are big problems to solve. THEY said THEY would make a better world, but THEY didn’t. Why re-learn their mistakes when we need new ideas and action to address the future.“

The speaker then pointed at the administration building shouted “There, that is where the puppet masters work, that is where the real power lies, and lie it does! If we are really going to make a change it is not going to be complaining about a distant Washington, it will be remaking our school to be relevant.” The students were starting to get riled and pumping up and down their signs. “Now, who is with me? Who will take on the administration and take over this campus?”

And this is when the shouting started. The microphone went dead. The students were now a mob with different people calling out directions. “On to the administration building!” and the row of campus cops, in unison, came to attention. Bryce did not like where this was going, but was feeling the crush of students goading themselves on towards the cops.

Bryce, now 20 feet off from the line, made eye contact with Mr Stills who looked stern and frightened. Breaking role, Mr. Stills shook his head, looked straight at Bryce, and called: “Leave. Leave Now. Run.”

And Bryce and Ava ran. They ran out of the Quad and the day snapped back into a beautiful spring day, but they were shaken. They did not know what to do or where to go, so they went to the library, where Bryce always felt safe.

Collapsed into the chairs in the music section, Bryce and Ava did not speak. Carol the librarian came over and smiled in as calming of a way as she could. Bryce implored, “Is it always this way, does this always happen?”. “No, no it is never the same. 1968 was a cataclysm and it unfolds differently for different classes– never the same, but always deeply affecting.”

In the library, they were allowed to come out of period, see the bigger picture, read from the future, and it gave Carol, and all librarians, a special role in the student’s lives. She continued, “Each Kronos College class’s 1960s reflects the students’ real-life backgrounds and their group dynamics– always the 60’s but a different slice. Some classes, when they get to 1968, they are much more into the hippy thing, the drugs, the awakening. There is something about your class that has always been attuned to the politics. Even last September, your 1960 month, your class was completely engaged in the election and the buildup of atomic weapons. The Cuban Missile crisis of 1961 hit you guys very hard, if you remember.”

Bryce and Ava had now caught their breaths, helped by someone to pull them out of the intensity in the Quad to put it in some perspective. Carol went on, “Your class is asking the right questions, though, and really staying in the moment– this is not easy for everyone to do. 1968 was very intense even on small college campuses. Compressing 1968 down to one month is a headspin that is difficult to take. Assassinations, the draft, Saigon… Sometimes I wish we could spend a full year in 1968– there is so much and so many perspectives. Think about villagers in Vietnam, student riots in Paris, and later, as the song says ‘4 dead in O-hi-o’”.

“I just hope no one gets hurt out there,” Carol mumbled under her breath.

The next morning Bryce went early to the Hotel to apologize, but Mr. Stills put him right at ease. He said he understood the torment, excitement, and rebellion. “I was a Kronos 60 student once, you know, I know 1968, I know it well.” Mr. Stills went on, “For me, I got caught up and got hurt, not from a billy club, but by acting in ways I am not proud of, not proud of to this day. But I think I learned a great deal about the times and myself. If I could be swept into these things, I can just imagine what it was like to be a confused college kid in the real 1968– graduating meant getting drafted. All pretty real.”

Bryce was relieved and thankful, but then looked quizzical– “but you were a cop yesterday…” “Yes,” Mr. Stills answered slowly, “it is not an easy job, but the school needs us to take different ones at different times. It is tough, most of us want to be on your side.” He paused, “and it is not clear exactly where things will go, each year is different. It used to be much more student-run, but over the years, or should I say decades, we have learned that things can get pretty out of hand.”

“Now please set up your rooms for the incoming visitors, we have 20 coming for this week, and they bring in a lot of the real-life money we need to keep Kronos debt free. We have new sets of clothes because we are at the end of 1968 and the fashions were widely varying and changing quickly. Most of the guests like the hippy garb, and we try to make them look as good as we can even though they usually weigh too much. But give them the other outfits in their closets, maybe they want to be a farmer or plumber instead. Oh, and make sure you change out the newspapers, magazines, and records. The joints get hidden in the teapot, the visitors are expecting that.”

Bryce and Ava had another month in the 1960s to go. Bryce was looking forward to Led Zeppelin’s first album. Ava was thinking of applying for a job as an assistant Art teacher so she could stay– she liked art nouveau– so maybe in Kronos 20, but was not sure.

Right now, 1968 was causing their heads to spin.

Causing them to Grow. Grow Free.