New feature here at Refugees: Rental Car Reviews.
I seem to travel every week, and drive a different rental car every week. I'm unlike many people that I usually seek out the smallest, simplest, most modest rental car I can find, because usually that means it will be easier to park, easier to maneuver in traffic, and cheaper to rent and refuel. Sometimes I get a larger more luxurious car anyway, despite my requests, and sometimes I get something completely random.
Last week I was rented a Prius, for the first time. I'd never even sat in a Prius, much less driven one, so it was an interesting experience. I thought about looking into buying one when gas was $4 a gallon, probably like everyone else, but felt like you could get most of the same fuel economy with a different, much simpler and cheaper, vehicle.
So... I got in the Prius and it took me a good while to even figure out how to start it up. Actually, you don't start a Prius, you turn it on, kind of like a golf cart. There's a big round button on the dash that you push, but you have to shove the door-opening key-fob thingy into a slot in the dashboard first.
That sort of sets the tone for driving the Prius: everything about it is a little strange, and different.
The dash in front of steering wheel is blank. The normal instruments (speedometer, fuel guage, etc) are in an LED cluster very far forward, underneath the sloped windshield, near the center of the dash. It took me a while to find them after I figured out how to turn the thing on.
There is a large multifunction display in the middle of the dash, where such things are located, but it has a number of unusual functions, including control of the radio and environmental controls, as well as a very distracting display of the Prius' multi-mode drive train. It shows you graphically whether the electric motor is driving the wheels, the gasoline motor is supplying power, or the wheels are recharging the battery through regenerative braking. The display is somewhat helpful in driving the car in an economical way, but probably somewhat dangerous because it can absorb too much of your attention.
Another display available is cumulative fuel economy, which is more helpful. It shows instantaneous and average mileage, and a chart showing mileage over the last 30 minutes. The most helpful part of that display is a bar graph of instantaneous mileage. Driving to keep that bar graph as high as possible proved to be the best way to get the best mileage.
I was disappointed in how "conservative" the programming of the drivetrain turned out to be. I though I could, by really going easy on the gas pedal, drive around in electric mode for a good while until the battery got low. The gasoline motor is programmed to start however, at the first sign of battery depletion, or the slightest acceleration.
The mileage looked pretty good however, as I was able to score up to 48 MPG on the cumulative mileage display by driving very carefully. But I'm a little sceptical of the display, because when I filled up the tank it looked like I got more like 35 MPG than the 47.9 the display indicated when I stopped for fuel. You'd have to drive the thing quite a bit to determine if the mileage indicated was really correct.
The fit and finish of the vehicle was adequate, but not great for a Toyota. The interior was very modern and unconventional, with strange cupholders, weird controls, etc, but not particularly impressive in terms of quality and appearance. Everything looked like a very cheap plastic, and the upholstery was typical economy-car fabric. I don't know if there is a fancier version of the Prius with a more luxurious interior.
Handling and performance were adequate - pretty good for an economy car, expecially a hybrid. There was a little more acceleration than I expected, and the car didn't feel off balance as I sort of expected.
Cargo room in the back was adequate - actually pretty good as a rental car because it was easy to get the suitcases and luggage into the baggage compartment.
Overall I didn't come away thinking I wanted to run out an buy a Prius, but it was very adequate as an economy car. I don't actually know what they cost, but I could see how some people would really like them.
Also I don't know if its possible to reprogram the car to make it less prone to starting the gasoline engine and get better gas mileage - from what I saw it looked like it should be easy.
Boy is this some exciting internet content or what!
Friday, March 27, 2009
Call of the (Socially Inept) Wild
We live next to a State game preserve. Like many in the Northeast we have a deer problem. And a coyote problem. Probably 3 - 4 times a month, the coyote pack takes down a deer within 500 meters of the house, waking us up with the noise of the kill and the fighting over the scraps afterwards.
Once in a while someone gets lost from the pack and spends half the night howling like some sort of mutated wolf with his testicles in a vise.
The other night we had something new. A coyote sat in the woods right behind the house and yipped. Not howled. Yipped. It sounded something like "arrrip, arrrip, arrrip". He'd repeat this about 10 times, shut up for 30 seconds or a minute, and just when you started to drift back to sleep, he'd start up again. Just when I'd had enough, and decided that getting fully awake enough to reach for the shotgun was warranted, he stopped. Did I mention the mangy cur pulled this at 2:30 AM? On a day I had to get up at 4:15 to catch my train?
The next day, my wife, who was having a bad day dealing with stupid people, mentioned that the coyote was just one in a line of mouth breathers she'd been dealing with. "I'm surrounded by idiots. Event he local wildlife is retarded. Come on, he didn't figure out that the pack either couldn't hear him or was so embarrassed by his lame-assed howl that they were lying quiet in the woods pretending to be asleep?"
She's right. He was probably the coyote equivalent of the geek who always shows up at the gathering uninvited, unshowered and smelling of cheese.
She and I have had this conversation before about sharks. The kelp-hugging ecologists love to say: "Sharks like seals. If you don't look like a seal, you won't get bitten. They bite you by mistake."
Yeah, right. Most sharks prefer seals. Most people don't prefer stinky tofu. But it is on the menu in some restaurants.
So one of the rules I live by is to always be on the lookout for the retarded shark*.
*The retarded coyote is not going to live long enough to put his genes into the pool if he pulls that shit again.
Once in a while someone gets lost from the pack and spends half the night howling like some sort of mutated wolf with his testicles in a vise.
The other night we had something new. A coyote sat in the woods right behind the house and yipped. Not howled. Yipped. It sounded something like "arrrip, arrrip, arrrip". He'd repeat this about 10 times, shut up for 30 seconds or a minute, and just when you started to drift back to sleep, he'd start up again. Just when I'd had enough, and decided that getting fully awake enough to reach for the shotgun was warranted, he stopped. Did I mention the mangy cur pulled this at 2:30 AM? On a day I had to get up at 4:15 to catch my train?
The next day, my wife, who was having a bad day dealing with stupid people, mentioned that the coyote was just one in a line of mouth breathers she'd been dealing with. "I'm surrounded by idiots. Event he local wildlife is retarded. Come on, he didn't figure out that the pack either couldn't hear him or was so embarrassed by his lame-assed howl that they were lying quiet in the woods pretending to be asleep?"
She's right. He was probably the coyote equivalent of the geek who always shows up at the gathering uninvited, unshowered and smelling of cheese.
She and I have had this conversation before about sharks. The kelp-hugging ecologists love to say: "Sharks like seals. If you don't look like a seal, you won't get bitten. They bite you by mistake."
Yeah, right. Most sharks prefer seals. Most people don't prefer stinky tofu. But it is on the menu in some restaurants.
So one of the rules I live by is to always be on the lookout for the retarded shark*.
*The retarded coyote is not going to live long enough to put his genes into the pool if he pulls that shit again.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Your Amusing Cultural Misunderstanding of the Day
My wife was not born in America. She did not arrive on our sunny shores until she was 11. However she did complete High School here. This means that she speaks English without an accent, save for the slight taint of New Yorkese in words such as daughter, and a twinge of Southern she picked up from me.
That lack of an accent can fool you. Stuff that we learned in elementary school, stuff that wasn't repeated in middle or high school, often passes her by. Between worlds, she is, never totally at home in either one.
So, the other day she got ahold of one of those Scholastic magazines they use to teach elementary school kids about stuff - usually there's one for every holiday. St. Paddy's day was no exception. Now, despite the Prussian surname, my background is heavily Scotts (Clan Munro) - Irish (Brady). So the wife calls me the other day and says:
- "wow, the Shamrock is a plant"
- "uh, yes, dear, how did you make it though school in NY not knowing that?" o.O
- "we had Italians and blacks, no Irish"
- "but you went to school in New York City"
- "the Italians weren't big on St. Patrick"
- "but surely, someone hung one up in the hall, sometime as a decoration"
- "if they did, they didn't bother to tell me its name"
- o.O "so, what did you think it was, then?"
- "a rock. possibly, a fake one. 'sham' and 'rock', see? but I thought it was an Irish rock"
- "no, dear, that's the Blarney Stone"
This is from the woman who thought for the longest time that the idiom for "the whole thing" was "the whole kitten and poodle". Well, you have both popular pets, don't you? Made sense to her.
o.O
That lack of an accent can fool you. Stuff that we learned in elementary school, stuff that wasn't repeated in middle or high school, often passes her by. Between worlds, she is, never totally at home in either one.
So, the other day she got ahold of one of those Scholastic magazines they use to teach elementary school kids about stuff - usually there's one for every holiday. St. Paddy's day was no exception. Now, despite the Prussian surname, my background is heavily Scotts (Clan Munro) - Irish (Brady). So the wife calls me the other day and says:
- "wow, the Shamrock is a plant"
- "uh, yes, dear, how did you make it though school in NY not knowing that?" o.O
- "we had Italians and blacks, no Irish"
- "but you went to school in New York City"
- "the Italians weren't big on St. Patrick"
- "but surely, someone hung one up in the hall, sometime as a decoration"
- "if they did, they didn't bother to tell me its name"
- o.O "so, what did you think it was, then?"
- "a rock. possibly, a fake one. 'sham' and 'rock', see? but I thought it was an Irish rock"
- "no, dear, that's the Blarney Stone"
This is from the woman who thought for the longest time that the idiom for "the whole thing" was "the whole kitten and poodle". Well, you have both popular pets, don't you? Made sense to her.
o.O
Friday, March 20, 2009
Sad
I belong to a group of friends who call themselves the UCF, after a long-running joke that started over on John Scalzi's forum. You can see the logo one of our members made for us over on the side bar.
Yesterday, one of our number suffered a terrible personal loss, and we're noting that and nothing more on our blogs today.
Take time to appreciate those around you who make your life worth living, for truly no one knows what will happen tomorrow.
Yesterday, one of our number suffered a terrible personal loss, and we're noting that and nothing more on our blogs today.
Take time to appreciate those around you who make your life worth living, for truly no one knows what will happen tomorrow.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Hendrix and 'Nam
I've seen a number of references to the soundtrack to The Watchmen, usually noting that it failed, with the possible exception being in the "The Ride of the Valkyries" in the Vietnam sequence and "All Along the Watchtower". (Thanks Eric)
I'm not a fan of Moore, naked allegory or comic books in general, so I'll probably give The Watchmen a miss. One thing I did notice is that everyone was referring to the Wagner, and some people were referring to the Hendrix song as an homage to Apocalypse Now. I'm sure both are homages to the movie, as I don't expect Moore to have any original insights into the actual war. But the use of "All Along the Watchtower" in Apocalypse Now was motivated first by the stories of the vets themselves.
When I was a kid, my adult world was filled with Vietnam Vets, and to a man they responded to Hendrix in a special way. I never understood why.
Then, years later, I stumbled across this, by Sgt. Mike McCombs.
It is, hands down, the best Vietnam memoir I've ever seen, especially regarding the Special Forces.
And it has a wonderful tribute to Hendrix that bares the soul of the 'Nam Vet like a prayer to Mars:
According to the SF rumor mill, Sgt. McCombs requested "Purple Haze" be played at his funeral.
When you get time, go immerse yourself in the words of the good sergeant. He died in 1997, but someone ought to remember him by making a movie out of his recollections. I'd watch it.
I'm not a fan of Moore, naked allegory or comic books in general, so I'll probably give The Watchmen a miss. One thing I did notice is that everyone was referring to the Wagner, and some people were referring to the Hendrix song as an homage to Apocalypse Now. I'm sure both are homages to the movie, as I don't expect Moore to have any original insights into the actual war. But the use of "All Along the Watchtower" in Apocalypse Now was motivated first by the stories of the vets themselves.
When I was a kid, my adult world was filled with Vietnam Vets, and to a man they responded to Hendrix in a special way. I never understood why.
Then, years later, I stumbled across this, by Sgt. Mike McCombs.
It is, hands down, the best Vietnam memoir I've ever seen, especially regarding the Special Forces.
And it has a wonderful tribute to Hendrix that bares the soul of the 'Nam Vet like a prayer to Mars:
It's always Jimi I think. His music is pulsing in my head. The headphones vibrate like an arclight and the guitar screams like the Phantoms used to. PurpleHaze, Voodoo Child, The Wind Cries Mary.... They beat on my mind. They twist in corridors long empty of the companionship of the brothers who always knew. The brothers who shared it with me.
And the past lives again. MP gyrates to All Along The Watchtower. Willie's foot taps to Gypsy Eyes. Weet sits and downs shum, body moving to Foxy Lady. It's like Jimi invented this kinda friendship, this kinda thing for all of us. It's the key to remembrance. The key to old friendships, somehow not quite dead. Though they all are. 'Cept when Jimi plays.
We were all musical conservatives, really. Well..., mostly. But Jimi picked up a guitar and strummed our souls with sounds like we'd never heard. The heart and the mind throbbed with the bass, the nerves trying to keep up with the rip. The music was not our style, but we lived by it; we loved it. Highway Chile, Long Hot Summer Night. Life blood. You were more likely to hear Bach there than Rock 'n Roll. But Jimi was there - in every hootch, in every meal, in every breath we took, in every waking hour. In many of the sleeping one.
Maybe it was 'cause he was dead, like so many we knew. Maybe it was 'cause he was different, like we thought we were. Or maybe he just found what really counted to all of us. Crazy fookin' music for a crazy fookin' war. Dunno. Just was. Just is. The spokesman of an age, the poet laureate of the Viet Nam War.
According to the SF rumor mill, Sgt. McCombs requested "Purple Haze" be played at his funeral.
When you get time, go immerse yourself in the words of the good sergeant. He died in 1997, but someone ought to remember him by making a movie out of his recollections. I'd watch it.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Brain Rinse
“The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.” – Mark Twain
Jim has made several interesting posts on information warfare.
Of all the words he’s written on the subject, the most important quote is this one:
I have an affinity for that type of inquiry because I am an accredited professional in information warfare – I hold an MBA with a subspecialty in marketing. Some segment of society wages information warfare on the individual practically every day of his or her life. And the individual wages it right back.
I’ve lately been noticing one facet of human thought that is probably closely related to, in fact may be one of (before you nitpick, please remember I said one of) the underlying causes of, true believer syndrome.
Permit me to take a bit of an excursion of ascientific fancy.
When we humans walked the savannahs, death stalked us with pointy teeth and twitching tails. While the human herds relied on each other to look out for danger, each person also double-checked his peers.
Along with that danger came a certain doggedness and trust in one’s own instincts. If a primitive human thought the face of a predator had shown momentarily between the branches of a certain bush, he or she might be inclined to skirt that area even when others in the group see no danger. And, if that human were correct, his or her descendants would be a little more prolific, and a little more cautious, and a little more apt to stick ideas that they knew, or even just suspected, to be true (rather than new ideas that might be more fruitful, but also might be false) than the rest of the herd. Nature is a bit more harsh in punishing false negatives than false positives. We humans are wired to avoid Type II error, because it might eat us.
Mind you, the kind of mind that took the whole scenario apart and figured out that the predator only used those hiding places for certain times of the year when it was migrating and realized that in the other times of the year that tree was a good place to hide to do the human’s own hunting is the kind of mind that would be most useful in a highly technical environment. Unfortunately, that’s also the kind of mind that takes risks and gets eaten more often.
Now, the scenario I just outlined was something I pulled out of…thin air, yeah, that’s it. But I suspect that something very similar actually went into the natural selection of human beings. This is probably also related to our propensity to see patterns where no pattern exists, as my friend Eric said:
Human beings tend to believe things long after they’re disproven. The more the belief is tied to pattern recognition, per Eric’s point, the harder it is to shake. I do believe that this is related to the fact that to ancient humans, the face they thought they saw in the acacia tree might just be a lion, whether or not anyone else in the tribe saw it, too.
Once a piece of stupidity gets internalized, it takes a lot of repetition of fact to shake it out of the heads of the majority of people. As Terry Pratchett said: “A lie can run around the world before the truth gets its boots on”.
I would add as a corollary that an old truth is like a barnacle. You have to scrape it off when it’s no longer true, it doesn’t fall off by itself. Received wisdom that has shown itself to be valid, even if only once, is very, very hard to shake. This is true even when that piece of information is manifestly out of date. There might be a lion under that tree after all.
There is, in marketing, a concept called the “first mover advantage”. If the first product to market is given enough lead time, and fills a need well enough, it is often impossible to dislodge for decades, even generations. Think Frisbee. Think Kleenex. The classic example, the classic practitioner of this, is Procter and Gamble.
When P&G launched the first liquid dish detergent, it was billed as the Dawn of a new era. Thousands of housewives gratefully used what was a revolutionary product. Have you ever tried to wash dishes with homemade soap? I have. My grandparents were poor and frugal, and my grandmother made her own pumice and other soaps used for everything from scrubbing tractor parts to dishes to removing the dirt and top layers of skin from a kid’s hands. Using soap to wash dishes sucks. Dawn was and is a great product.
Dawn is still, years after its launch, the leader in its class. Kids use what their moms used. I did. Mom used Dawn, and that’s the brand I bought when I left for college. There are families whose forebears were richer than my grandmother and they are on the fourth generation of Dawn loyalists.
But Dawn is on the expensive side of the category, as it can afford to be, with that kind of loyalty. P&G is also famous for offering several different products to fit various segments of the market. And so, Joy was born. Now, the next time you go to the Wal-Mart, pick up a bottle of Joy and a bottle of Dawn at the same time. Did you realize that they were both P&G products, or did you think they were competing companies? Even if you realized that they were both P&G entities, did you ever look at the patent numbers on the bottles?
Now, I’m not privy to P&G trade secrets, and maybe Joy has a slightly different blend of the surfactants covered in those identical patents, but the smart money is on a common blend with different colorants and perfumes added at the end of the manufacturing process. Perhaps there’s a dilution factor, but I dilute the stuff before using it anyway. I now use Joy, and have ever since I took my first marketing class that used P&G as a case study.
If you pay more for Dawn than for Joy, I believe that you’ve lost a skirmish in the information war, you haven’t scraped the barnacle off of your hull, directly because of what I was talking about: old wisdom is hard to shake and seldom challenged in what we in marketing call a “low involvement purchase”. If there were two identical cars at two different prices, a lot more people would pick up on that because a consumer’s conscious involvement in a purchase is directly proportional to the amount of money at stake - although the Mercury brand always struck me as a little odd in this respect.
But a lot of people who might read the two paragraphs above will still use Dawn.
Conmen, tricksters, marketers and intelligence agents realize that once an idea gets into someone’s head, even if it is disproven in a way that the rational brain realizes is legitimate there is an emotional residue akin to an aftertaste that colors perceptions. Unless the new idea totally dominates the old one, the old one tends to stick. This is at the core of the marketing adage that “perception is reality.
I hold advanced degrees in both marketing and science, so I’ve always been at war with that perception = reality bromide. Perception defines the reaction to reality. The scientific marketer asks “at what point does reality overcome perception in a human’s response to his or her environment”. The “high-involvement” decisions I talked about above give one clue. Even in low involvement decisions, at some level of superiority humans forget the aftertaste and go for a new flavor. Once again, from the P&G archives comes an example that shows that the first mover advantage can be overcome: the story of Tide laundry detergent.
In the 1920s, Americans, even those with washing machines, used soap flakes as detergent. Gray clothes, rings around the collar, and undissolved soap were common, especially in hard water. In 1933, P&G introduced Dreft, the first liquid laundry detergent. It was considerably better than soap flakes in hard water, but only marginally better at heavy soiling. But it was the first mover, and did reasonably well. During WWII, a P&G scientist defying orders from management to drop the problem (which had been classed as insoluble) came up with the formula for Tide. It sat on the shelf until wartime restrictions lifted. The delay was probably fortunate for P&G, because, after the war, sales of washing machines skyrocketed, allowing for a spectacular product launch of Tide. Dreft was left in the dust because Tide’s superiority was so great even loyalists had to agree that Tide was better.*
Moving from the realm of commerce, the more insidious form of this phenomenon I call “mental aftertaste” is that on many topics, there is no way for the layman to perform a test such as directly comparing the washing efficacy of Dreft and Tide that once and for all changes their perceptions. Once the tone has been set by the first mover, it extremely, extremely difficult to shake a perception. You can prove to people that a particular astrologer is a fraud and they will continue to believe in astrology in general. You can show them the studies that have debunked the connection between aspartame and brain tumors, and there is still the fuzzy feeling that aspartame is just not natural, and that there is something wrong with it. Never mind that they can’t articulate exactly what the harmful effect is – it’s just bad. They fall back on the aphorism that artificial things are never good for you (give me azythromycin over mold-derived penicillin any day). And they never acknowledge, probably never realize, that their hostility is tied to the emotional response elicited by those poorly run and poorly reported-upon stories about aspartame and brain cancer. The rational argument has been disproven, but the emotional aftertaste remains.
Conspiracy theories rely on this habit of thought. So do medical myths. How many people still believe that cellphones might cause some form of harm, even if they concede the data show there’s no link to brain cancer? How about high voltage lines?
The sad thing is that people who don’t recognize and modulate (not eliminate, modulate) this tendency of human thought become sheep at best, conspiracy theorists at worst. For the last several years the anti-vaccinationists have been taking a beating on the logical front with several studies giving pretty good evidence that there is no link between the thimerosol preservative formerly used in vaccines and the incidence of autism.
At the beginning of this year, several very shocking revelations about the ethics of the lead author of the original study that should have demolished any credibility that the MMR / Gut / Measles Virus hypothesis ever had. Andrew Wakefield faked the data. He made inappropriate compensation to his subjects for their participation. He was paid by ambulance chasers to find a link between vaccines and autism. His work is totally discredited.
And yet, even when forced to acknowledge that there is no link between either the measles virus or thimerosol (now completely absent from vaccines), parents in the Autism community will still look at vaccines with suspicion. Any minor news item about adverse reactions to vaccines, no matter how rare, no matter how mild, will be freshly jumped upon with cries of “see, we were right!”. It’s sad, really, considering all the people this has harmed. The well has been poisoned, and even after the poison has been neutralized, everyone thinks they taste almonds in the water.
I’m willing to bet something similar will happen with the LHC. Even though Wagner, Plaga, and Rössler have been exposed as cranks and frauds, people are still uneasy about the collider, not because of anything specific, but because the emotional aftertaste of the Wagner lawsuits has primed them to believing that there is something vaguely sinister about the experiment. When scientists, with very good reasons, laugh at their fears, it’s called arrogance. And yet, had Wagner and Rössler not come to the fore, would anyone think twice about the safety of the machine? Other than the very mundane, but very real concern of mechanical failure, that is?
Our human habits of thought make us susceptible to certain weapons in the information warfare arsenal. This is a weakness. But not a totally harmful one. In fact, I think that it is likely that having this weakness also gives us the ability to experience hope. One reason I am such a fan of science, to the point where I actually became a professional in it, is the power of the scientific method to counteract human gullibility while preserving hope.
Scientists have a lot of personality quirks and annoying traits, but the one trait that is much more common in that tribe than in the general population, one the general population would do well to emulate is the forced habit of washing one’s brain of previously held notions when evidence – tested evidence – proves those notions wrong.
*People with small children will probably immediately recognize that P&G made lemons out of lemonade by repositioning Dreft as a more gentle detergent suitable for infant clothes.
Jim has made several interesting posts on information warfare.
Of all the words he’s written on the subject, the most important quote is this one:
When information arrives, how many folks ask themselves: How was this information acquired? Is it complete? Is it accurate? Is it biased. Is it relevant? Is there enough detail? Do I accept it because it reinforces what I think I know, or do I reject it for the same reason? How can I verify it? How can I test it? If I can't test and verify the information, do I accept it anyway? If so, why?
Those who fail to ask themselves such questions place themselves and those who depend on them, at a significant disadvantage - they will always be at the mercy of those who can observe the universe critically, adjust their worldview appropriately, decide and act.
I have an affinity for that type of inquiry because I am an accredited professional in information warfare – I hold an MBA with a subspecialty in marketing. Some segment of society wages information warfare on the individual practically every day of his or her life. And the individual wages it right back.
I’ve lately been noticing one facet of human thought that is probably closely related to, in fact may be one of (before you nitpick, please remember I said one of) the underlying causes of, true believer syndrome.
Permit me to take a bit of an excursion of ascientific fancy.
When we humans walked the savannahs, death stalked us with pointy teeth and twitching tails. While the human herds relied on each other to look out for danger, each person also double-checked his peers.
Along with that danger came a certain doggedness and trust in one’s own instincts. If a primitive human thought the face of a predator had shown momentarily between the branches of a certain bush, he or she might be inclined to skirt that area even when others in the group see no danger. And, if that human were correct, his or her descendants would be a little more prolific, and a little more cautious, and a little more apt to stick ideas that they knew, or even just suspected, to be true (rather than new ideas that might be more fruitful, but also might be false) than the rest of the herd. Nature is a bit more harsh in punishing false negatives than false positives. We humans are wired to avoid Type II error, because it might eat us.
Mind you, the kind of mind that took the whole scenario apart and figured out that the predator only used those hiding places for certain times of the year when it was migrating and realized that in the other times of the year that tree was a good place to hide to do the human’s own hunting is the kind of mind that would be most useful in a highly technical environment. Unfortunately, that’s also the kind of mind that takes risks and gets eaten more often.
Now, the scenario I just outlined was something I pulled out of…thin air, yeah, that’s it. But I suspect that something very similar actually went into the natural selection of human beings. This is probably also related to our propensity to see patterns where no pattern exists, as my friend Eric said:
We innately despise the idea the universe is random and uncontrollable and grotesquely unfair. It's contrary to our natures. The same litters of brain cells that help a lemur make it to the next branch or a chimp spot the leopard in the brush just happen, I think, to make it all-to-easy to see order reigning in strings of unrelated and meaningless coincidence.
Human beings tend to believe things long after they’re disproven. The more the belief is tied to pattern recognition, per Eric’s point, the harder it is to shake. I do believe that this is related to the fact that to ancient humans, the face they thought they saw in the acacia tree might just be a lion, whether or not anyone else in the tribe saw it, too.
Once a piece of stupidity gets internalized, it takes a lot of repetition of fact to shake it out of the heads of the majority of people. As Terry Pratchett said: “A lie can run around the world before the truth gets its boots on”.
I would add as a corollary that an old truth is like a barnacle. You have to scrape it off when it’s no longer true, it doesn’t fall off by itself. Received wisdom that has shown itself to be valid, even if only once, is very, very hard to shake. This is true even when that piece of information is manifestly out of date. There might be a lion under that tree after all.
There is, in marketing, a concept called the “first mover advantage”. If the first product to market is given enough lead time, and fills a need well enough, it is often impossible to dislodge for decades, even generations. Think Frisbee. Think Kleenex. The classic example, the classic practitioner of this, is Procter and Gamble.
When P&G launched the first liquid dish detergent, it was billed as the Dawn of a new era. Thousands of housewives gratefully used what was a revolutionary product. Have you ever tried to wash dishes with homemade soap? I have. My grandparents were poor and frugal, and my grandmother made her own pumice and other soaps used for everything from scrubbing tractor parts to dishes to removing the dirt and top layers of skin from a kid’s hands. Using soap to wash dishes sucks. Dawn was and is a great product.
Dawn is still, years after its launch, the leader in its class. Kids use what their moms used. I did. Mom used Dawn, and that’s the brand I bought when I left for college. There are families whose forebears were richer than my grandmother and they are on the fourth generation of Dawn loyalists.
But Dawn is on the expensive side of the category, as it can afford to be, with that kind of loyalty. P&G is also famous for offering several different products to fit various segments of the market. And so, Joy was born. Now, the next time you go to the Wal-Mart, pick up a bottle of Joy and a bottle of Dawn at the same time. Did you realize that they were both P&G products, or did you think they were competing companies? Even if you realized that they were both P&G entities, did you ever look at the patent numbers on the bottles?
Now, I’m not privy to P&G trade secrets, and maybe Joy has a slightly different blend of the surfactants covered in those identical patents, but the smart money is on a common blend with different colorants and perfumes added at the end of the manufacturing process. Perhaps there’s a dilution factor, but I dilute the stuff before using it anyway. I now use Joy, and have ever since I took my first marketing class that used P&G as a case study.
If you pay more for Dawn than for Joy, I believe that you’ve lost a skirmish in the information war, you haven’t scraped the barnacle off of your hull, directly because of what I was talking about: old wisdom is hard to shake and seldom challenged in what we in marketing call a “low involvement purchase”. If there were two identical cars at two different prices, a lot more people would pick up on that because a consumer’s conscious involvement in a purchase is directly proportional to the amount of money at stake - although the Mercury brand always struck me as a little odd in this respect.
But a lot of people who might read the two paragraphs above will still use Dawn.
Conmen, tricksters, marketers and intelligence agents realize that once an idea gets into someone’s head, even if it is disproven in a way that the rational brain realizes is legitimate there is an emotional residue akin to an aftertaste that colors perceptions. Unless the new idea totally dominates the old one, the old one tends to stick. This is at the core of the marketing adage that “perception is reality.
I hold advanced degrees in both marketing and science, so I’ve always been at war with that perception = reality bromide. Perception defines the reaction to reality. The scientific marketer asks “at what point does reality overcome perception in a human’s response to his or her environment”. The “high-involvement” decisions I talked about above give one clue. Even in low involvement decisions, at some level of superiority humans forget the aftertaste and go for a new flavor. Once again, from the P&G archives comes an example that shows that the first mover advantage can be overcome: the story of Tide laundry detergent.
In the 1920s, Americans, even those with washing machines, used soap flakes as detergent. Gray clothes, rings around the collar, and undissolved soap were common, especially in hard water. In 1933, P&G introduced Dreft, the first liquid laundry detergent. It was considerably better than soap flakes in hard water, but only marginally better at heavy soiling. But it was the first mover, and did reasonably well. During WWII, a P&G scientist defying orders from management to drop the problem (which had been classed as insoluble) came up with the formula for Tide. It sat on the shelf until wartime restrictions lifted. The delay was probably fortunate for P&G, because, after the war, sales of washing machines skyrocketed, allowing for a spectacular product launch of Tide. Dreft was left in the dust because Tide’s superiority was so great even loyalists had to agree that Tide was better.*
Moving from the realm of commerce, the more insidious form of this phenomenon I call “mental aftertaste” is that on many topics, there is no way for the layman to perform a test such as directly comparing the washing efficacy of Dreft and Tide that once and for all changes their perceptions. Once the tone has been set by the first mover, it extremely, extremely difficult to shake a perception. You can prove to people that a particular astrologer is a fraud and they will continue to believe in astrology in general. You can show them the studies that have debunked the connection between aspartame and brain tumors, and there is still the fuzzy feeling that aspartame is just not natural, and that there is something wrong with it. Never mind that they can’t articulate exactly what the harmful effect is – it’s just bad. They fall back on the aphorism that artificial things are never good for you (give me azythromycin over mold-derived penicillin any day). And they never acknowledge, probably never realize, that their hostility is tied to the emotional response elicited by those poorly run and poorly reported-upon stories about aspartame and brain cancer. The rational argument has been disproven, but the emotional aftertaste remains.
Conspiracy theories rely on this habit of thought. So do medical myths. How many people still believe that cellphones might cause some form of harm, even if they concede the data show there’s no link to brain cancer? How about high voltage lines?
The sad thing is that people who don’t recognize and modulate (not eliminate, modulate) this tendency of human thought become sheep at best, conspiracy theorists at worst. For the last several years the anti-vaccinationists have been taking a beating on the logical front with several studies giving pretty good evidence that there is no link between the thimerosol preservative formerly used in vaccines and the incidence of autism.
At the beginning of this year, several very shocking revelations about the ethics of the lead author of the original study that should have demolished any credibility that the MMR / Gut / Measles Virus hypothesis ever had. Andrew Wakefield faked the data. He made inappropriate compensation to his subjects for their participation. He was paid by ambulance chasers to find a link between vaccines and autism. His work is totally discredited.
And yet, even when forced to acknowledge that there is no link between either the measles virus or thimerosol (now completely absent from vaccines), parents in the Autism community will still look at vaccines with suspicion. Any minor news item about adverse reactions to vaccines, no matter how rare, no matter how mild, will be freshly jumped upon with cries of “see, we were right!”. It’s sad, really, considering all the people this has harmed. The well has been poisoned, and even after the poison has been neutralized, everyone thinks they taste almonds in the water.
I’m willing to bet something similar will happen with the LHC. Even though Wagner, Plaga, and Rössler have been exposed as cranks and frauds, people are still uneasy about the collider, not because of anything specific, but because the emotional aftertaste of the Wagner lawsuits has primed them to believing that there is something vaguely sinister about the experiment. When scientists, with very good reasons, laugh at their fears, it’s called arrogance. And yet, had Wagner and Rössler not come to the fore, would anyone think twice about the safety of the machine? Other than the very mundane, but very real concern of mechanical failure, that is?
Our human habits of thought make us susceptible to certain weapons in the information warfare arsenal. This is a weakness. But not a totally harmful one. In fact, I think that it is likely that having this weakness also gives us the ability to experience hope. One reason I am such a fan of science, to the point where I actually became a professional in it, is the power of the scientific method to counteract human gullibility while preserving hope.
Scientists have a lot of personality quirks and annoying traits, but the one trait that is much more common in that tribe than in the general population, one the general population would do well to emulate is the forced habit of washing one’s brain of previously held notions when evidence – tested evidence – proves those notions wrong.
*People with small children will probably immediately recognize that P&G made lemons out of lemonade by repositioning Dreft as a more gentle detergent suitable for infant clothes.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Not exactly John's meme: Socialism Literature
Not "socialist literature", because that would be something different...
Lately, apropos of our situation and the government's response to it, I've been studying up on the Great Depression; what caused it, what the government did about it, and why it ended. I get the impression people (especially people in government) don't understand it very well, or bother to read any of the history or economics about it.
But the Depression inspired several classical works of political economics that effectively explored what makes economies work. The common theme is surprisingly simple (although it seems to elude most politicians): Incentivize the individual.
The first good book on my bookshelf inspired by the depression is one I've talked about in this space before: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, by Joseph Schumpeter. Written in 1942, it starts out with an apparently sympathetic analysis of Marxism, which Schumpeter purposely put there to encourage socialists to read his book. Schumpeter went on, however, to say that "creative destruction" in the business sector, fueled by entrepreneurialism and "disruptive technologies", is essential to the long term survival of capitalism and continued economic growth and wealth creation. He then gloomily predicted that capitalism would eventually evolve into corporatism, hostile to the essential processes of entrepreneurialism and creative destruction. Schumpeter himself clear that he was not advocating the end of capitalism, writing "If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently, it does not mean that he desires it."
It is hard to look at our current situation and not be a Schumpeterian. When I first studied Schumpeter in college, I remember thinking he was probably right, and hoping his predictions did not come true before I died, or at least before I retired. I didn't make it.
The next book talks about how the government will react to the economic trends predicted by Schumpeter. Written in 1944, The Road to Serfdom, by Frederich Hayek (what is it about these Austrian economists?) is one of the most influential and most published works in economics ever written. In it, Hayek makes the case that centrally planned economies will inevitably lead to tyranny. Tyranny is inevitable, he believed, because no government could adequately process and analyze all the variables needed to successfully implement a planned economy. Because of the inability of the organs of planning to do their jobs, disagreement and conflict was sure to arise over how to manage the economy, and the government would be forced to resort to coercion to impose its (flawed) plans. The eventual result would be a authoritarian state populated by poor and miserable serfs.
When I read them in the 1980s and the Soviet Union was still around, Hayek and Schumpeter made for highly effective critiques of Soviet Communism. But Communism was already dead at that point and just didn't know it yet (although many Communists did, right John?) and had been forcibly imposed by Marxist revolution anyway.
I'm starting to think Communism was good for our capitalist system because it kept reminding us what we didn't want to be. Now we seem to have forgotten it all and appear to be caught in the throes of some kind of demented hysteria - which if you read the history of the Depression, you may notice has happened before.
The third book talks about the role of the individual in a deteriorating economic situation. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, was not published until 1957, although in many ways it appears to be set in the 1930s. Rand's themes are pretty well known, although they certainly seem to have been forgotten lately: namely that rational ("Objectivist") individual liberty is essential to the survival and prosperity of human civilization. Take away that simple motivation: that every person has the right to the fruits of their own labors - and it's only a matter of time until civilization collapses. Rand was particularly harsh towards collectivism, in particular collectivized labor - a particularly prescient theme in view of the current problems being suffered by the American auto industry.
As I write this I'm listening to a TV news story saying the big 3 car makers have reached an "agreement" with the United Auto Workers in which the UAW gives up essentially nothing, and guarantees at least another $25 billion will be needed to "prop up" these non-viable companies in the next quarter alone. Of course the government will not allow the car companies to enter bankruptcy, because that would give them the legal leverage to break the death-grip of the unions.
The theme of these classically liberal authors is simple: in economics, it is the power of the individual that counts, and it is the nature of human society to take away that power, with bad result.
On the other side of the fence are the "modernist" Liberals, who are currently in favor, represented most famously by John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith.
Keynes' most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, says that most of what we think we know about economics, supply, demand, etc., is wrong, and instead there are complex and cointerintuitive forces governing consumer spending, prices, and interest rates. Written during the Depression, General Theory says that, under such conditions, governments must engage in radical deficit spending to "jumpstart" the economy. Sound familiar?
Later, Keynes was one of the founding directors of the World Bank and the architect of the Bretton Woods agreements, and advocated creation of a centrally planned world economy with a single world currency.
John Kenneth Galbraith was perhaps most famous for being FDR's chief of the Office of Price Administration during World War II, responsible for the government's setting of prices for everything from table salt to ocean liners at the point of a gun. His most famous postwar work, The Affluent Society (1957), drew on both his wartime experiences and the theories of Keynes to say that only the government is smart enough to decide how to manage modern complex economies, and governments should use consumption taxes to shape public behavior. Galbraith, perhaps even more than Keynes, was very paternalistic, repeatedly making the point that intellectual elites (usually in government but also in big business) must make decisions for the ignorant masses on how to manage their affairs. He was consistently dismissive of the power of the free market, and even of the classical entrepreneur, writing that it was big business that was the main engine of technological progress.
So the intellectual debate that we haven't had in this current crisis boils down to this: Who can better decide how you spend your money: you, or the government?
I've spent a (mostly wasted, I'm afraid) lifetime in and around big government, and my overwhelming experience is that government is usually about the worst way to do anything. The bureaucratic system promotes mediocrity and corruption and the more I learn the more government seems functionally almost identical to organized crime - and I know a lot about organized crime as well.
The Congress just passed and the President just signed the largest spending bill in the history of the world, and not a single one of them even read it. They read only "their part", namely the sections where their patrons (in organized crime, or banking, or the car industry, or whatever) get their money. And this is not surprising or even noteworthy in Washington because that's how it always works.
I have my own non-scientific theory that a big part of the world's economy comes from crime or some kind of illicit activity. Every economic system is a continuum between legitimate, legal activity (you make or buy something honestly and sell it honestly) and purely criminal activity (you steal something and sell it or sell something you don't own, or which doesn't exist). In between is a wide spectrum of "grey area", from not paying taxes on cash transactions, to artificially but legally inflating prices, to deceiving people about what they are paying for, to charging people outrageous but secret interest rates (That means you, Chase Bank), to smuggling legal commodities from one place to another to avoid taxes, to a zillion other complicated and shady but profitable activities.
My theory is based on my own observations of money being spent that has no apparent legitimate origin, from the local scale (your neighbor has no job, but a new $400,000 yacht) to the macro scale (Russia). Non-scientific extrapolation suggests to me that as much as 40% of even healthy economies is dirty. In non-healthy economies the 'crime fraction' may be much higher, nearing 100% in places like North Korea.
The other thing I notice is that the more authoritarian the regime, the higher the crime fraction, because when you take away the incentive for legal entrepreneurialism the void tends to be filled by the criminal variety. Do your own analysis and form your own conclusions.
Criminal activity, in almost all of its forms, is very corrosive to a healthy economy. The current economic crisis was precipitated by an epidemic of corrupt "gray area" activity: a big chunk of the financial industry made loans they knew were bad then packaged and resold those loans without disclosing the risk associated with them, in order to keep inflating the real estate bubble, encouraged by politicians who not only took money from but openly conducted homosexual affairs with the financial executives making the bad loans. (Want to see an eerie coincidence: study the biography of John Maynard Keynes.)
Governments rest on legitimacy in the eyes of the governed, even authoritarian ones. As authoritarianism increases, individual liberty decreases, and the crime fraction grows, loss of legitimacy accelerates the process, leading to a "failed state". A failed state may lash out against its neighbors or become a humanitarian and economic sinkhole, draining resources from neighbors.
We are now at the decisive moment for the United States, and are betting our whole future that Keynes and Galbraith are right and Schumpeter, Hayek, and Rand are wrong - that government really does know better than you and me.
The stimulus bill signed yesterday contains a provision to allegedly spend $81 billion "protecting the vulnerable" (plus another $61 billion of vulnerable-protecting deceptively lumped under "tax relief"). No information, so far, about what that means, but it probably means welfare or straight-up wealth redistribution - maybe that plan to give tax refunds to people who paid no taxes.
However, the government promises:
If it works, we'll be fat, dumb, and happy serfs. If it doesn't work, what will happen?
Lately, apropos of our situation and the government's response to it, I've been studying up on the Great Depression; what caused it, what the government did about it, and why it ended. I get the impression people (especially people in government) don't understand it very well, or bother to read any of the history or economics about it.
But the Depression inspired several classical works of political economics that effectively explored what makes economies work. The common theme is surprisingly simple (although it seems to elude most politicians): Incentivize the individual.
The first good book on my bookshelf inspired by the depression is one I've talked about in this space before: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, by Joseph Schumpeter. Written in 1942, it starts out with an apparently sympathetic analysis of Marxism, which Schumpeter purposely put there to encourage socialists to read his book. Schumpeter went on, however, to say that "creative destruction" in the business sector, fueled by entrepreneurialism and "disruptive technologies", is essential to the long term survival of capitalism and continued economic growth and wealth creation. He then gloomily predicted that capitalism would eventually evolve into corporatism, hostile to the essential processes of entrepreneurialism and creative destruction. Schumpeter himself clear that he was not advocating the end of capitalism, writing "If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently, it does not mean that he desires it."
It is hard to look at our current situation and not be a Schumpeterian. When I first studied Schumpeter in college, I remember thinking he was probably right, and hoping his predictions did not come true before I died, or at least before I retired. I didn't make it.
The next book talks about how the government will react to the economic trends predicted by Schumpeter. Written in 1944, The Road to Serfdom, by Frederich Hayek (what is it about these Austrian economists?) is one of the most influential and most published works in economics ever written. In it, Hayek makes the case that centrally planned economies will inevitably lead to tyranny. Tyranny is inevitable, he believed, because no government could adequately process and analyze all the variables needed to successfully implement a planned economy. Because of the inability of the organs of planning to do their jobs, disagreement and conflict was sure to arise over how to manage the economy, and the government would be forced to resort to coercion to impose its (flawed) plans. The eventual result would be a authoritarian state populated by poor and miserable serfs.
When I read them in the 1980s and the Soviet Union was still around, Hayek and Schumpeter made for highly effective critiques of Soviet Communism. But Communism was already dead at that point and just didn't know it yet (although many Communists did, right John?) and had been forcibly imposed by Marxist revolution anyway.
I'm starting to think Communism was good for our capitalist system because it kept reminding us what we didn't want to be. Now we seem to have forgotten it all and appear to be caught in the throes of some kind of demented hysteria - which if you read the history of the Depression, you may notice has happened before.
The third book talks about the role of the individual in a deteriorating economic situation. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, was not published until 1957, although in many ways it appears to be set in the 1930s. Rand's themes are pretty well known, although they certainly seem to have been forgotten lately: namely that rational ("Objectivist") individual liberty is essential to the survival and prosperity of human civilization. Take away that simple motivation: that every person has the right to the fruits of their own labors - and it's only a matter of time until civilization collapses. Rand was particularly harsh towards collectivism, in particular collectivized labor - a particularly prescient theme in view of the current problems being suffered by the American auto industry.
As I write this I'm listening to a TV news story saying the big 3 car makers have reached an "agreement" with the United Auto Workers in which the UAW gives up essentially nothing, and guarantees at least another $25 billion will be needed to "prop up" these non-viable companies in the next quarter alone. Of course the government will not allow the car companies to enter bankruptcy, because that would give them the legal leverage to break the death-grip of the unions.
The theme of these classically liberal authors is simple: in economics, it is the power of the individual that counts, and it is the nature of human society to take away that power, with bad result.
On the other side of the fence are the "modernist" Liberals, who are currently in favor, represented most famously by John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith.
Keynes' most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, says that most of what we think we know about economics, supply, demand, etc., is wrong, and instead there are complex and cointerintuitive forces governing consumer spending, prices, and interest rates. Written during the Depression, General Theory says that, under such conditions, governments must engage in radical deficit spending to "jumpstart" the economy. Sound familiar?
Later, Keynes was one of the founding directors of the World Bank and the architect of the Bretton Woods agreements, and advocated creation of a centrally planned world economy with a single world currency.
John Kenneth Galbraith was perhaps most famous for being FDR's chief of the Office of Price Administration during World War II, responsible for the government's setting of prices for everything from table salt to ocean liners at the point of a gun. His most famous postwar work, The Affluent Society (1957), drew on both his wartime experiences and the theories of Keynes to say that only the government is smart enough to decide how to manage modern complex economies, and governments should use consumption taxes to shape public behavior. Galbraith, perhaps even more than Keynes, was very paternalistic, repeatedly making the point that intellectual elites (usually in government but also in big business) must make decisions for the ignorant masses on how to manage their affairs. He was consistently dismissive of the power of the free market, and even of the classical entrepreneur, writing that it was big business that was the main engine of technological progress.
So the intellectual debate that we haven't had in this current crisis boils down to this: Who can better decide how you spend your money: you, or the government?
I've spent a (mostly wasted, I'm afraid) lifetime in and around big government, and my overwhelming experience is that government is usually about the worst way to do anything. The bureaucratic system promotes mediocrity and corruption and the more I learn the more government seems functionally almost identical to organized crime - and I know a lot about organized crime as well.
The Congress just passed and the President just signed the largest spending bill in the history of the world, and not a single one of them even read it. They read only "their part", namely the sections where their patrons (in organized crime, or banking, or the car industry, or whatever) get their money. And this is not surprising or even noteworthy in Washington because that's how it always works.
I have my own non-scientific theory that a big part of the world's economy comes from crime or some kind of illicit activity. Every economic system is a continuum between legitimate, legal activity (you make or buy something honestly and sell it honestly) and purely criminal activity (you steal something and sell it or sell something you don't own, or which doesn't exist). In between is a wide spectrum of "grey area", from not paying taxes on cash transactions, to artificially but legally inflating prices, to deceiving people about what they are paying for, to charging people outrageous but secret interest rates (That means you, Chase Bank), to smuggling legal commodities from one place to another to avoid taxes, to a zillion other complicated and shady but profitable activities.
My theory is based on my own observations of money being spent that has no apparent legitimate origin, from the local scale (your neighbor has no job, but a new $400,000 yacht) to the macro scale (Russia). Non-scientific extrapolation suggests to me that as much as 40% of even healthy economies is dirty. In non-healthy economies the 'crime fraction' may be much higher, nearing 100% in places like North Korea.
The other thing I notice is that the more authoritarian the regime, the higher the crime fraction, because when you take away the incentive for legal entrepreneurialism the void tends to be filled by the criminal variety. Do your own analysis and form your own conclusions.
Criminal activity, in almost all of its forms, is very corrosive to a healthy economy. The current economic crisis was precipitated by an epidemic of corrupt "gray area" activity: a big chunk of the financial industry made loans they knew were bad then packaged and resold those loans without disclosing the risk associated with them, in order to keep inflating the real estate bubble, encouraged by politicians who not only took money from but openly conducted homosexual affairs with the financial executives making the bad loans. (Want to see an eerie coincidence: study the biography of John Maynard Keynes.)
Governments rest on legitimacy in the eyes of the governed, even authoritarian ones. As authoritarianism increases, individual liberty decreases, and the crime fraction grows, loss of legitimacy accelerates the process, leading to a "failed state". A failed state may lash out against its neighbors or become a humanitarian and economic sinkhole, draining resources from neighbors.
We are now at the decisive moment for the United States, and are betting our whole future that Keynes and Galbraith are right and Schumpeter, Hayek, and Rand are wrong - that government really does know better than you and me.
The stimulus bill signed yesterday contains a provision to allegedly spend $81 billion "protecting the vulnerable" (plus another $61 billion of vulnerable-protecting deceptively lumped under "tax relief"). No information, so far, about what that means, but it probably means welfare or straight-up wealth redistribution - maybe that plan to give tax refunds to people who paid no taxes.
However, the government promises:
This is your money. You have a right to know where it's going and how it's being spent. Learn what steps we're taking to ensure you can track our progress every step of the way.That is, without telling us what $142 billion worth of "protecting the vulnerable" means. I downloaded the bill, and studied it for a while (It's 407 pages, I haven't read the whole thing yet, either, but then again I didn't vote for it.) and can find no reference or explanation about protecting the vulnerable.
If it works, we'll be fat, dumb, and happy serfs. If it doesn't work, what will happen?
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