Star spangled revolutionary ferment

I am not big on holiday directed posts, I have tried them and found varying success.  But this one seems topical both toward current events, and to the holiday at hand.

The American Revolution
Gordon S. Wood, Random House, New York 2002

The atmosphere in the colonies could not have been less receptive to these initial efforts by the British government to reorganize the empire. In the early 1760s, with the curtailing wartime spending, the earlier commercial boom collapsed. Between 1769 and 1764, American markets were glutted with unsold goods.  At the same time, bumper tobacco crops (in part the result of new independent producers) drove tobacco prices down by 75%.  This economic slump threatened the entire Atlantic credit structure, from London and Scottish merchant houses to small farmers and shop keepers in the colonies.  As a result, business failures and bankruptcies multiplied everywhere. 

What the British were trying to do, raise taxes, cut spending, reorganize the Empire's political structure has something form almost everyone to love and hate.   Today's Democrats can not that austerity measures in the middle of a recession are likely to bring out the pitchforks, while Republicans can point out that raising taxes will do very much the same thing.  Not too surprisingly, the British did an excellent job, making everyone mad at them.

My point has generally been that once you drive a bus off a cliff, you can maybe take measures to soften the pain of the landing, but there is no real hope of avoiding the crash.  In this case, our bus is lying at the bottom, with at least two other buses (Europe, and China) possibly getting set to land on top of us.

"We don't make anything here"

There is one city that is doing very well in this deep and long recession that we have been going through.  It is one of the few places that young people can get a job.

That of course would be Washington, D.C.

Bubble on the Potomac

Andrew Ferguson, Time Magazine, 22 May 2012 (hat tip: MR)

The riches reflect a regional economy as resilient—and as strange—as any in the world. "We don’t make anything here," Fuller says simply. Washington is one of the few metropolitan areas in the country that have no significant manufacturing sector, placing it alongside Atlantic City, N.J.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Ocean City, N.J. "There isn’t any single major industry," says Jim Dinegar, president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade. "We’re just very diverse."...

Aside from its wealth, the single defining feature of über-Washington is its youth. Most of the people who have moved to Washington since 2006 have been under 35; the region has the highest percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds in the U.S. "We’re a mecca for young people," Fuller says. One recent arrival says word has gotten out to new graduates that Washington is where the work is. "It’s a place where a liberal-arts major can still get a job," she says, "because you don’t need a particular skill."

Note that it is not all easy.  The employment track for the young includes a lot of working for free and than maybe getting an entry level position at very low wages.  These are not options for most middle class students coming out of college with a huge amount of debt, or low income students who received a lot in the way of scholorships, but have no family funding to support them while they work for free.  These are positions for at the very least the upper middle class: the 20 or 10% if not necessarily the 1%.

I don't have a problem with liberal arts majors.  They are often the most creative students coming out of a degreed program.  That our economy cannot find a place for our most creative thoughtful students is highly problematic.  That they would use their creativity within the confines of an enormous self-feeding political-beaurocratid establishment is particularly alarming.

Cloud computing collapse

Blogger, which I am using to write and display this post to the web, and its rival Wordpress are forms of cloud computing.  Cloud computing is when a group of people, have some sort of hardware in hand that they use to access via the internet software, memory, and data.  The key is that the software and data are not located on, only accessed from, the device they have in hand.  It allows people to access their software from a variety of locations, eases centralized monitoring of data, makes data sharing easier, and reduces the platform requirements at the end users location. 

Of course, if you have ever had the Internet go down at your office, or tried to log in from a remote location to some sort of application and found that you have no service, there are some obvious downsides to cloud computing.  Carrying your software and data around with you has some advantages.

As it turns out, there are some systematic risks to putting all you computing eggs into the internet-basket.  From a recent conference report, written by Brian Ford, came a warning:

Researcher: Interdependencies could lead to cloud 'meltdowns'
Chris Kanaracus (reporting), IDG News Service, 7 June 2012 (hat tip: NC )

A rise in complex, composite cloud services could create dangerous 'bubbles,' according to a Yale researcher.

As the use of cloud computing becomes more and more mainstream, serious operational "meltdowns" could arise as end-users and vendors mix, match and bundle services for various means, a researcher argues in a new paper set for discussion next week at the USENIX HotCloud '12 conference in Boston.

I did not see the conference-specific report noted above.  But I am presuming that this very recent paper by the noted researcher, Bryan Ford, covers much of the same ground.  From the abstract (paragraph breaks added):

Icebergs in the Clouds, the other risks of cloud computing
Bryan Ford, Yale University, 17 May 2012 ( pdf )

Cloud computing is appealing from management and efficiency perspectives, but brings risks both known and unknown. Well-known and hotly-debated information security risks, due to software vulnerabilities, insider attacks, and side-channels for example, may be only the “tip of the iceberg.” As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or “meltdowns".

Non-transparent layering structures, where alternative cloud services may appear independent but share deep, hidden resource dependencies, may create unexpected and potentially catastrophic failure correlations, reminiscent of financial industry crashes.  

Finally, cloud computing exacerbates already difficult digital preservation challenges, because only the provider of a cloud-based application or service can archive a “live,” functional copy of a cloud artifact and its data for long-term cultural preservation. This paper explores these largely unrecognized risks, making the case that we should study them before our socioeconomic fabric becomes inextricably dependent on a convenient but potentially unstable computing model.

Always nice to have a new technology collapse model to kick around.  The  warnings about cascading collapse of the electrical grid were getting tiresome.

Computer collapse - brought to you by FEMA of all people.

The Forever War: Civ II version

Joe Haleman's The Forever War is a classic of science fiction.  But Joe Haldeman needed the vagaries of traveling over interstellar distances to make it last forever.    There was a board game based on the novel, but it was a squad combat game, and didn't deal with the length between battles.

Which brings us to the computer game Civilization II.  A turned based game that is, in this case, fought against computer generated foes.  There is a certain amount of diplomacy, and the internal structure of your government puts limitations on your actions. It can run a little long.  And sometimes, it can run really really long.

In what may be the longest continuously played game of Civilization II, the world is just too closely balanced for the fighting to ever stop.

I have been playing the same game of Civilization II for 10 years. This is the result
Lycerius, Reddit Gaming, 13 June 2012 (hat tip: MR)

I've been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I'm not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows.

• The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

• There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

• The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.

• As a result, big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90% of the worlds population (at it's peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers (late game worker units) are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn't any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout.

• Only 3 super massive nations are left. The Celts (me), The Vikings, And the Americans. Between the three of us, we have conquered all the other nations that have ever existed and assimilated them into our respective empires.

•You've heard of the 100 year war? Try the 1700 year war. The three remaining nations have been locked in an eternal death struggle for almost 2000 years. Peace seems to be impossible. Every time a cease fire is signed, the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. Even when the U.N forces a peace treaty. So I can only assume that peace will come only when they're wiped out. It is this that perpetuates the war ad infinitum.

Hmmm....  Doesn't sound all that unrealistic.

From some of the comments at the link, I suspect ineptitude has has partially allowed for the battle to continue for so long.  Also, not particularly unrealistic.