Rolandt

I discovered something a couple of years ago: Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40. People between 40 and Ω (an indeterminate number defined as “really, just way too old”),  are primarily employed as meaning-makers for the under-40 set. This is because they are mostly good for nothing else, and on average not valuable enough themselves for society to invest meaning in.

The only culture designed for people between 40 and Ω is prescription drug ads and unreadably dense literary novels. Between age Ω and ∅, the age at which you die, there is only funerary culture. That second link is to an app for managing your own death called Cake. Why cake? Your guess is as good as mine.

But there’s a plus side. Forty is when immortality begins.

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A very general life-stage map across civilizations and eras looks like this:

• 0 to α: Achieve launch velocity
• α to 40: Play culture!
• 40 to Ω: Ah crap, I have to make shit up for others now?
• Ω to ∅: Let them eat cake

The new number in the scheme above, α, is the age at which you achieve enough of a restless drive, via either increasing resentment (some sort of red pill) or cluelessness (some sort of blue pill), to play for meaning.

In the scheme above, 40 is the only roughly stable number. It exists as an approximately fixed point because it is an emergent outcome of history. It is reflected in the nature of humanity’s collective cultural archives, religions, sitcoms, ideologies, self-improvement plans, justifiably ageist 40-under-40 award schemes, weight-loss plans, and dating advice.

In case you hadn’t yet noticed, the few older archetypes and characters who do play a role in our collective cultural imagination tend to be unrealistically wise, healthy, evolved, and wondrously well-prepared for retirement. Unlike archetypes of youthful beauty and vigor, these are not meant to set unrealistic standards for older people to actually strive towards. It’s too late for them. They are meant to prevent young people from getting too distracted by their own future concerns to play the present-day meaning games the world needs them to play.

The other numbers can float, which means you can get extraordinarily fucked-up lives if (for instance), your α is higher than 40 or your Ω is under 40.

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If you’re lucky, the following set of inequalities will hold for you, and you will be able to experience that most precious of all things, a life lived forward in time:

0 < α: you have childhood innocence to lose

α < 40: you have enough value that society does culture to you

40 < Ω: there is enough time to take revenge for having had culture done to you

Ω < ∅: if you’re lucky, there will be time to rest and observe in peace

Some well-known fucked-up life scripts include:

Ω < α: Acting dead

α  > 40: Peter Pan

40 > 40: Has-been

40 < 40: Burnout

∅ < α: Died tragically and heroically young

∅ < ∅: Painful and unwanted life extension

Once society stops doing culture to you, and you’re on your own, immortality begins. The morning after your fortieth birthday, you experience the first day of the rest of time.

There is an obvious question that everybody should ask but nobody does: how would you know if you were immortal?

It is not enough to merely go through one or more death experiences, miraculously surviving each one. By virtue of living in 2016, you’ve probably already sailed through many infections and diseases that would have killed you a few hundred years ago. You’ve probably also committed what would have been capital crimes in ages past.

No, you begin to experience immortality the first time you recognize the transience of experiences you thought were permanent, and more subtly, the permanence of experiences you hoped were transient.

This recognition generally ruins culture for you, since culture is built around the game of a meaningful search for eternal truths, timeless values and changeless habits of prowess. And, it goes without saying, transcendence of the unpleasantly transient.

Time, of course, is the merciless slaughterer of all these infinitely qualified anchors of the meaning of life. Wait long enough, and every truth will crumble. Wait long enough, and every value will dissolve into moral ambiguity. Wait long enough, and every habit will decay, first into ritual, then into farce. Wait long enough, and every slain demon will rise again.

And then you will be free. Something almost nobody wants, but almost everyone is forced to endure past 40.

Unless you have kids, in which case you may be eligible for an extension.

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Forty years is not enough to specifically undermine every truth, value, and habit, but it is long enough to generally undermine the idea that there are non-transient truths, values, and habits. You’ve seen too many business cycles, too many political cycles, too many cultural cycles, too many saints and sinners trading places, to believe that this time a source of meaning will endure.

I’ll call any emotionally coherent collection of truths, values and habits meaning. The half-life of a representative basket of meaning is about twenty years, adjusting for purchasing power parity.

Forty is also the age at which point it stops being worth anyone’s while to manufacture and invest meaning in you. It is this drying up of supply — meaning, by virtue of its transience is a consumable — more than any maturation into nihilism, that triggers the shift into an immortal frame of mind.

What really drives home the visceral sense of the transience of all meaning is the realization, around forty, that not only is nobody going to supply you with comforting permanences anymore, but that you have to begin to repay a debt you did not realize you had incurred. You have to create meaning games for others to play. There are not many other jobs for the 40-to-Ω crowd.

Not only is it all meaning transient, it must all be manufactured by somebody.  Meaning doesn’t just happen. Civilization functions by putting the 40-to-Ω crowd to work, creating meaning games for the α-to-40 set to play.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Stock a lake with fish, and he’ll fish till he’s 40, at which point it’s generally not critical to anyone else that he continue to eat.

If you’re lucky, the meaning game you play in your α-to-40 years will have been designed by a tradition of not-entirely-malevolent 40-to-Ω sociopaths.

If you’re even luckier, the meaning games you help create for others in your 40-to-Ω will not be entirely bereft of kindness. This matters more for you than for the people who play your games.

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The transience of the seemingly permanent is well-recognized, even though Buddhists around the world work hard to mystify it. A word or two about the permanence of the seemingly transient.

There are many experiences we hope are transient. Experiences that threaten, and ultimately destroy, meaning. Experiences about which we say, this too shall pass. 

Generally they do. Unfortunately they also keep coming back. The causes change — today it is Zika, Trump and robots, yesterday it was the Spanish Flu, machine guns and George Wallace.

The transient experiences keep coming back, but the meanings they destroy don’t. Indeed, the permanence of transience is merely the negative space formed by the creative destruction of meaning. Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant.

This is a good thing.

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Culture is the necessary art of perpetuating the disturbing rumor that reality is meaningful. That beneath the pain and the pleasure, the cruelty and the compassion, the estranging and the connecting, the breaking and the making, the ugliness and the beauty, the losing and the winning, the dying and the living, there is Something More.™

Reality of course, is the bit that doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. The meaning of reality, unfortunately, isn’t part of reality. And beyond reality, there is nothing more.

But with a little skill, it is possible to prevent most people from figuring this out until they have paid more in taxes and social security than they will demand back.

This is a good thing. And I am not being snarky. It is good that things are this way.

The way you perpetuate the rumor is by making meaning games. These come in many forms, besides the obvious ones like creating a religion or writing a poem. Like being a good middle manager, running for President, or announcing a daring plan to colonize Mars.

All fall into one of two patterns: redistributing meaning and creating new meaning. There is also a third category, accelerating the destruction of rotting meaning. But since rotting meaning self-destructs naturally anyway, there isn’t much demand for accelerating the process. Still, there’s a living to be made in shorting the meaning markets.

Redistributing meaning requires creating strongly escaped realities by sealing off inconveniently meaningless bits of reality. Things like religion fall into this category. By shifting Significance from Some Things to Some Other Things, redistribution can manufacture a new signal from old noise, and motivate the restlessness and motion the world requires of the α to 40 set.  It may not be very useful motion (indeed the motion is usually circular), but it creates liquidity in the meaning economy.

Creating new meaning means disturbing the universe. By sciencing the shit out of it, as we have discussed several times before. This does not directly create either meaning or meaning games. In fact, given the fundamentally nihilistic character of sciencing shit, the core activity threatens meaning more than it creates meaning.

But for those standing far enough away that they can Fucking Love Science! instead of actually doing science, disturbing the universe creates pleasantly disturbing rumors that J. Alfred Prufrock  actually had an overwhelming question. One to which he could have discovered the answer if only he’d had the courage to disturb the universe. A fucking lovely answer.

The grim truth is not that there is no profoundly satisfying answer. The grim truth is that there is no overwhelming question. Poor Alfred just wasn’t very good at turning 40.

Redistributing meaning or creating meaning. You’re either an art history major, or you can science the shit out of things. There is no middle.

This way of talking about meaning is similar to how we talk about money. You might conclude from this that if you seek meaning, you will also make money. This is exactly wrong. You have to make meaning games, which is exactly the opposite sort of activity.

Being exactly wrong is actually a useful thing to be. It’s the next best thing to being right. You can get to right by flipping exactly wrong. Flipping somewhat wrong merely makes you somewhat wrong in a new way.

To seek meaning is to believe in truth before virtue, virtue before beauty, beauty before creation, creation before victory. This is the honor code of meaning-seeking. If you follow this code perfectly, you will make exactly no money.

I was dumb enough in my twenties to try to follow this code perfectly. Fortunately for my solvency, I am not very good at following instructions, and a succession of mid-life crises and crashes ensured my survival.

But it is important that you don’t stop believing in this code too early. That’s a recipe for a fucked-up life. It is also important that you don’t continue believing in this code too long. That’s also a recipe for a fucked-up life.

You must stop believing in this code exactly when you are ready to begin immortality. When your own appetite for meaning is satiated, and you are ready to start making meaning games for others. When you’re ready to play god for your own amusement.

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Here is how you disturb the universe to make meaning. It isn’t pretty, and there’s a reason most who are able to do it on a grand scale are above forty.

Winning before making. This is survival.

Making before beauty. This is perpetuation.

Beauty before virtue. This is leadership.

Virtue before truth. This is realism.

To win you may need to do destructive, ugly, vicious, and false things.

Then, to create, you may need to do ugly, vicious, and false things.

To make your creations endure, so they don’t go away when you stop  believing in them, you may need to do beautiful, vicious, and false things.

Then, you may need to do beautiful, virtuous, and false things to create happiness.

And finally, you may choose to seek truth. This is an optional, meaningless, and essentially solitary activity. Something the immortal and free may choose to do, to entertain themselves in the amusement park that is the part of eternity that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

Skip this post if you’re not interested in tactical psychology.

This isn’t for you.

This is for the few of you considering emailing your boss to ask if you can attend our workshop.

All of us believe communities are about people. Yet few give themselves even just one day to learn the core techniques they can use to improve any community they ever work on.

From the beginning of the workshop, we’re going help you pinpoint what’s stopping the majority of your members engaging today and help you use psychology (not technology) as your personal blueprint to eliminate the problem for good.  

Imagine how it feels to walk into work with a set of tried and tested techniques (underpinned by proven science) to finally solve your engagement puzzle.

This workshop will take a big, potentially overwhelming, body of scientific studies and filter them into actions you can take when you sit at your desk the next morning. We’re going to teach you the very same techniques we use to help our 250+ clients succeed in all manner of communities.  

I know this change is possible because we’ve seen it at our last two workshops. Every one of us can master these skills.

The workshop includes:

• An entire day of live sessions distilling a century of social science into techniques you can apply to your community. If you’ve never had the time (or willpower) to study psychology and figure out what works for you and your community, this will equip you with everything you need to know. This is the next leap in your career skills.  

• A wide array of case studies in the B2B, B2C, Employee, and non-profit sector. Our previous attendees were hungry for case studies showing how we and many others have applied the very techniques we teach in communities both internally and externally. If you’re looking for proof to take back to your boss, you should come.

• Breakout time. We’re going to set aside time for you to work with people facing similar challenges as you. You can find your own space within the venue and work through a process to resolving your problem.

• Access to an incredible venue. We’ve booked a fantastic venue in the very center of New York. The venue includes plenty of breakout space, multiple screens, high-speed WIFI, and a fully stocked kitchen you can use throughout the day.

• Cooked breakfast and lunch. At this level, we’re focused on serving quality food. No cold sandwiches here, but cooked meals. If you’ve been to our past events, you know what we mean.

• Coffee, snacks, and unlimited beverages throughout the day. We pick up the entire coffee tab on your behalf. You will never be hungry or decaffeinated.

• Our printed workbook. Every attendee will receive our printed workbook with exercises to complete both before and after. We want to laser focus our workshop so you can finally solve your engagement headaches.

• Access to over 40+ videos from our previous events. If you haven’t bought our video package before, we’re going to give you access to 40+ videos from our events from the past 4 years.

• Access to our pre and post-event workshop group. Every attendee will get access to our exclusive workshop group where they can set themselves follow up goals, push and challenge one another to hit their targets, and have an ongoing sounding board to discuss new ideas. We’ll join you in there.

We’ve hosted this workshop both in San Francisco and London. Both workshops sold out and earned a combined 92% approval rating. I’m incredibly proud of this rating (and fully aim to go one step higher in New York).  

We would love to work with you and help you grow your community and increase engagement on June 6.

The fee is $625 per person, but only if you book by tonight.

(we can do group rates too)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tactical-psychology-workshop-tickets-24708631181

Ash Huang:

Product design is all about edge cases. It’s trying to figure out how users will break your system, and doing your best to anticipate that. It’s helping humans be better humans and keeping them from falling through cracks.

If you require a short url to link to this article, please use http://ignco.de/749

The tanim-bala scare that had magnified into an obsessive search for the most secure luggage and body wallet for my sister and me, chewed up a third of our travel budget to Cebu last January. Add to that, one with extra space for safe-food packages and emergency pills for allergies, especially from anything ingested. 

How comforting to find out that we didn’t have monopoly of such irrationality—at YVR, our fellow pilgrims also streamed in, pushing gigantic versions of our ultra-streamlined unbreakable medium-sized luggage. All nodding acquaintances of each other at Holy Rosary Cathedral or in our parishes, we high-fived that early evening, flushed with anticipation to attend the 51st (and second in the Philippines) International Eucharistic Congress; except for a few who had gone to the spiritual event held every four years, most of us would be first-timers.

Asked by my sister what to expect in a congress, I hesitated to share what I recall of the few I had attended—possibly ho-hum stretches of talks and plenary sessions. But from the hefty kit handed to us on our arrival, the schedule had seemed daunting instead, with chanted prayers, Holy Masses, catechesis, and witnessing. We had taken on the identity of “delegates” by then, with an ID bracelet to be worn even in sleep, also a laminated tag with our name and country in bold font.

None of my imaginings humored me from hereon: Not the danger-laced daily trek through hot and dusty streets to get to the proceedings—a cop-escorted luxury coach fetched us from and took us back to the hotel; or the staid picture I had of the John Paul II Pavilion—the open-walled congress site, with cloth panels for a ceiling turned out cheery, even roaring and jubilant. In it, swarmed 15,000 delegates daily, possibly more, as well as hundreds of religious, mostly Filipinos, including the Papal Legate Charles Cardinal Bo, bishops, archbishops and cardinals from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, singing, praising, and applauding.

And soon we relaxed into just being ourselves, focusing cameras, clicking for selfies, crisscrossing aisles to find washrooms, and at lunch on Styrofoam boxes, picnicking, swapping food and life stories, and, yes, texting—all amid impassioned catechesis and homilies, which always extolled the Filipinos’ unabashed “love for the Eucharist.” We had formed a family by Day Two, with our seatmates on both sides, marking in the vastness our space but lost our fellow Vancouverites since.

From Day One, we whirled non-stop with events like visits to the city’s churches, a barrio fiesta, and on to the last three days, which ended physically grueling. Take these: a five-kilometer sunset-to-evening procession of the Eucharist that ballooned to an estimated million, which though, with fat candles, not a strand of hair got singed. Next, a concelebrated Holy Mass on a seething afternoon that sent us up the topmost bleacher seats of the Cebu City Sports Complex, which former Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal officiated for 5,000 first communicants, himself one such at the 1937 congress in Manila.

The concluding rites at Statio Orbis (Stations of the World) way out next door to the humungous SM Seaside, in five of the 25 hectares, where a template of the San Pedro Calungsod Shrine’s altar served the occasion, again got inundated by another estimated 1 million Cebuanos, among whom my sister and I managed to squeeze in, shaded by tall umbrella-bearing women. On only two occasions, two fainted from the heat; all seemed drunk with an inexplicable sense of simply flocking together in response to Christ’s “convocare” for supper, as Luis Cardinal Tagle described it.

The congress would be, for my sister, a burst of self-discovery: herself moaning in grief with every TFC news of disaster, crime, abuse and neglect, causing endless poverty, she finally realized why we, Filipinos, indeed, survive—we do possess an incredible gift, nay, blessing of incorrigible joy, apparently inimitably ours.

Published in Peregrine Notes by Alegria Imperial, The Market Monitor, Manila, Philippines, April 3, 2016

Daniel Smilkov, Shan Carter, TensorFlow, May 02, 2016

This is a lovely visualization that allows you to play with a neural network by playing with some network parameters and watching the output. Even better, the authors write "We’ ve open sourced it on  GitHub  with the hope that it can make neural networks a little more accessible and easier to learn. You’ re free to use it in any way that follows our  Apache License. And if you have any suggestions for additions or changes, please  let us know."

Mushon Zer-Aviv, Visualising Information for Advocacy, May 02, 2016

Good article that will push your think on networks a bit. The bulk of the discussion is devoted toward convincing people that they ought to look at more than just nodes and edges "to also include  flows  and (as per Galloway and Thacker)  protocols." This makes sense to me, and there are other network properties that should be discussed more as well (connection weights, activation functions, and more). But the author also says "networks need narrative" because "we experience life as a narrative, not as a map and certainly not as networks. A network diagram rarely represents static relations. Narrating a flow through the nodes in the network is a useful way of examining it." To me, that's a lot like saying "we need abstractions". And in a sense it comes down to being able to visualize what's happening. "Visualising algorithms is still a small fringe in the visualisation world. It is mostly academic and so far has mainly served an internal maths and computer science discourse."

Any author will tell you: the money’s in the speeches. A slightly successful author gets occasional gigs and small fees. A moderately successful author gets regular bookings and decent fees. A monster bestselling author is getting rich off royalties — which is very rare — but she’s also getting paid an awful lot to speak. … Continue reading Why do authors get paid to give speeches? →

The post Why do authors get paid to give speeches? appeared first on without bullshit.

Hey everyone,

I am happy to announce that the following Friday, May 6th, we are organizing a new event – Firefox 47 Beta 3 Testday. The main focus will be on Synced Tabs Sidebar and Youtube Embedded Rewrite features. The detailed instructions are available via this etherpad.

No previous testing experience is needed, so feel free to join us on #qa IRC channel where our moderators will offer you guidance and answer your questions.

Join us and help us make Firefox better!

See you all on Friday!

Rogers unveiled its Roam Like Home roaming package in late 2014 and customers have seemed to embrace it. According to the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report, Rogers attributed some of its success to the adoption of this add-on and its Share Everything plans.

Roam Like Home allows customers to tap into their Share Everything call, text and data buckets while traveling. All of these new locations will be charged $10 per day for access, up to a maximum of $100 per month.

Today, Rogers has extended this roaming package to its sub-brand Fido. On Fido, the add-on will be known as “Fido Roam.” The carrier stated that this add-on is coming “mid-May” to Fido Pulse plan customers. Similar to Rogers’ Roam Like Home, Fido Pulse customers will be able to talk, text and use data outside of Canada for $5 per day in the U.S and $10 per day internationally in over 100 travel destinations, including countries in Europe, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Asia, South Africa, Oceania and the Middle East.

Fido Roam customers will only be charged a maximum of $50 in the U.S. and $100 internationally. In addition, Fido is also informing its millennial customers who might be heading out for an “extended soul-searching trip” that it “will only charge them for a max of 10 days per monthly bill,” which means the remaining 21 days of the month Fido Roam will not be charged on your monthly bill.

Nancy Audette, VP of Fido, said, “Fido Roam is another great value add for our Fido Pulse plan customers. It’s affordable and easy to use so that our customers can worry less about finding a Wi-Fi connection and focus more on doing the things they love while travelling. We heard from our customers that they want to roam worry free, and that’s why we’re offering the ultimate roaming solution.”

Related reading: Rogers CEO Guy Laurence says the company has its ‘mojo back’

Michael Anderson of BikePortland picked up on this: 

Six neat charts from Metro’s new report about Portland-area transportation

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Metro is the only elected regional government in the United States. It’s also got one of the most interesting government communications teams in the country. …

For its latest project, a four-part “regional snapshot” about transportation, the agency pulled out all the stops: original tilt-shift photography, narrative video, text drawn from at least a dozen interviews and a whole quiver of custom-made infographics. If you want a single overview on the basics of the region’s transportation situation, I’ve never seen a better one.

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On a per-person basis, the Portland region has been driving less since 1996, even as people take about the same number of trips each day. According to Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report, the region’s residents drove just 5,000 miles per person in 2014 – that’s nearly 25 percent less than other US metro regions of similar size.

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And here’s good news – though a growing population invariably means more commuters, just under half of the workers added since 2000 drive to work alone. The majority are choosing other modes, or working from home.

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Transit ridership is climbing fast, too. In 2014, people in the Portland region took more than 103 million rides on transit. Although ridership has fluctuated over the last 10 years, overall transit ridership has grown faster than the region’s population, faster than the number of miles driven each day and faster than transit service has grown.

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The majority of the region’s freight is still moved by truck. However, as Oregon’s economy has shifted from bulk products like farm exports and timber to lighter products like semiconductors, electronics and specialized machinery, the the region is moving fewer tons of goods around. But these lightweight products are higher-valued – as a result, the overall value of freight exports increased by 55 percent between 2007 and 2012.

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… we spend less time commuting to work than people in most other regions.In 2014 the average commute was 26 minutes – about a minute longer than in 2010. The Portland region is tied for fifth-best metro area in the nation for the share of people with a 30-minute commute or better – nearly two-thirds of commuters in the region have a commute under a half-hour. In part that’s because people here don’t have to travel as far to get to work. The average commute distance in the region is just 7.1 miles.

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Having options is important because different ways of getting around have very different costs.

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More here.

A friend challenged me this week on where my newsletter was going. Admittedly, I have no idea. It was meant to be an experiment, though — an umbrella for experiments, if you will…

The post An umbrella of experiments appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

Have you ever heard anyone say “I’m no good at maths” ? Do you ever stop to wonder where they picked that up from? An exam? Or an adult’s opinion off the back of an test? We talk about maths as if it’s some sort of binary – either you’re good at it or you’re not. But that’s not the way the world works. Not with maths, art, basketball, or playing the ukulele. Practice, interest, seeing it, tiny advantages on top of advantages…

I’m supporting this campaign to boycott SATs tests in primary schools.

The post Kids don’t need SATs appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

Wouldn’t it be great to get a cheque every month just for being you? This is the sweet, fuzzy vision the Ontario and federal Liberals, are counting on to sell their latest idea, a basic income. Just this year, the Ontario government laid the groundwork for a pilot project to test the idea. Any actual large-scale program is far off into the future, however, and that’s a good thing. We need to take a hard look at the idea, especially in Liberal clothing.

Pie-in-the-sky or slap-in-the-face?

A basic income is exactly what it sounds like: a monthly cheque provided to every person by the government with no strings attached. A recent Ontario poll suggests the idea has broad support: 41% of Ontarians support it compared with 33% who oppose. Yet when people are asked whether they think a basic income is a good idea, they are never asked what they would be prepared to lose to get it. The point isn’t that basic income is pie-in-the-sky. It’s just that it could be implemented as a slap-in-the-face.

Basic income is an obvious draw at first. A basic level of guaranteed subsistence for everyone sounds egalitarian and just. It could reduce poverty. It could even give workers something we lack today: bargaining power. Getting a monthly cheque could mean not having to take the first crappy job that appears if you get fired or the economy tanks.

Does basic income = bargaining power?

The question we should ask first is whether we have the bargaining power to get a worker-friendly version of basic income. Be aware: conservatives of all stripes also like the basic income. In fact, one of the idea’s biggest proponents in Canada is former Conservative senator Hugh Segal. Milton Friedman loved the idea too. It plays to the right’s utopian libertarian fantasies of “coupon capitalism.” The idea is that the government’s role is reduced to simply giving everyone a cheque or coupon to purchase goods and services plus securing property rights.

Corporations already profit off everything from toothpaste to cargo planes, why not the healthcare and education we receive as basic rights today? Those crappy jobs might be easier to resist for a while but they might also get a bit crappier if employers know the state is effectively giving them a subsidy that keeps workers out of the most desperate poverty.

Neoliberal Trojan Horse

What kind of basic income program would the Liberals create? Would it be one that adds to the standard of living we already enjoy, strengthening worker confidence? Would the party of Bay St. demand that the rich pay more so that everyone can live well? Or would they be happy to lop off some more public programs to their friends in the private sector while introducing ever more means-testing? The labour movement and the left could expend a lot of energy on a neoliberal Trojan Horse, one that entrenches the idea that social policy is there to support individuals navigating markets rather than building collective goods.

Looking at the numbers should give anyone seduced by the Liberals overtures pause. This fiscal year, Ontario will spend $15.8 billion on social programs in total and roughly $8.4 billion on income transfers for those on low incomes (welfare and similar programs). Giving every Ontarian even $15,000 annually would cost $207 billion, just over 25% of provincial GDP. Even limiting basic income to everyone over 15 years old would still come out to $172.5 billion. Increase the basic income amount and the cost rises in tandem. Even a $10,000 per person annual basic income would cost a bit more than what Ontario currently spends on everything else put together.

To implement a $15,000 basic income, while getting rid of welfare, but keeping things like education, healthcare and higher education, would still mean raising an additional $200 billion in revenues. That’s more than double the $91 billion Ontario is able to raise in taxes today (Ontario has total revenues of $130 billion).

Even an optimistic scenario would need a very strong social movement to demand higher taxes. Assume, as basic income advocates rightly point out, that a basic income would improve health and lower crime. Say we could reduce expenses on those by a third or roughly $20 billion. Assume also that the federal government gives Ontario the roughly $40 billion it would save on transfers like child benefits and low-income pensions. This still leaves an extra $140 billion, 18% of GDP, unaccounted for.

Basic income, austerity, and privatization

There is nothing wrong with increasing taxes if they pay for the things we need. In fact, we need more taxes if we don’t want to continue down the path of austerity started in Ontario by Mike Harris and continued by Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne. This path has seen tax cuts followed inevitably by hospitals closing, work inspectors being fired and urban transit crumbling. But first we need the social force that could extract this kind of progressive tax increase—one that ensures the rich pay their fair share.

The very real risk is that instead of a progressive basic income Bay St. as well as the multinational charter school and healthcare corporations would finally get their privatized schools and day surgeries in Canada. We deserve a basic income, but we also deserve quality education, healthcare, childcare for anyone who needs it. We deserve programs that can provide more support to those who need it more, not an abstract equality. A Liberal basic income implemented today will present us with the false choice of getting rid of these universal rights for some more cash—we may well end up spending more and getting less. An extra $5,000 to pay for your child’s education or your broken leg doesn’t matter much when you’re wealthy, but it does when you’re working class.

Power from the bottom up, or gifts from the top down?

The math and the political landscape should be enough to at least get a bucket of cold water ready in case we need it. Basic income in the abstract is not up for debate today; if it was, we would be feasting. Instead, we need to be taking a hard look at what something concrete enacted by today’s Liberal Party would look like. And it looks like table scraps. The NDP, who recently passed a resolution at their convention seeking to explore a federal Guaranteed Annual Income, with next to no debate, would be wise to be very cautious about the illusory promises of basic income.

Fighting for $15 an hour may not sound as glamorous as fighting for $15,000 a year, but it is only by building our power form the ground up rather than appealing to the nice feelings of elites that we’ll truly win. The fight for a world that is less insecure, where we work less and have a greater say over what we do doesn’t start with illusory quick fixes like basic income handed down by the representatives of the elite. It starts with the hard work of organizing. Every time workers have demanded something and won, they’ve had to make credible threats. This starts with collective power built from the bottom-up and it will get us much further than a basic income handed from the top down.

Originally published at Rankandfile.ca last week.

Michael Fogus, in the latest issue of Read-Eval-Print-λove, writes:

The book in question was Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie (Brodie 1987) and upon reading it I immediately put it into my own "personal pantheon" of influential programming books (along with SICP, AMOP, Object-Oriented Software Construction, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and Programmers Guide to the 1802).

Mr. Fogus has good taste. Programmers Guide to the 1802 is new to me. I guess I need to read it.

The other five books, though, are in my own pantheon influential programming books. Some readers may be unfamiliar with these books or the acronyms, or aware that so many of them are available free online. Here are a few links and details:

• Thinking Forth teaches us how to program in Forth, a concatenative language in which programs run against a global stack. As Fogus writes, though, Brodie teaches us so much more. He teaches a way to think about programs.


• SICP is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, hailed by many as the greatest book on computer programming ever written. I am sympathetic to this claim.


• AMOP is The Art of the Metaobject Protocol, a gem of a book that far too few programmers know about. It presents a very different and more general kind of OOP than most people learn, the kind possible in a language like Common Lisp. I don't know of an authorized online version of this book, but there is an HTML copy available.


• Object-Oriented Software Construction is Bertrand Meyer's opus on OOP. It did not affect me as deeply as the other books on this list, but it presents the most complete, internally consistent software engineering philosophy of OOP that I know of. Again, there seems to be an unauthorized version online.


• I love Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns and have mentioned it a couple of times over the years [ 1 | 2 ]. Ounce for ounce, it contains more practical wisdom for programming in the trenches than any book I've read. Don't let "Smalltalk" in the title fool you; this book will help you become a better programmer in almost any language and any style. I have a PDF of a pre-production draft of SBPP, and Stephane Ducasse has posted a free online copy, with Kent's blessing.

There is one book on my own list that Fogus did not mention: Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Peter Norvig. It holds perhaps the top position in my personal pantheon. Subtitled "Case Studies in Common Lisp", this book teaches Common Lisp, AI programming, software engineering, and a host of other topics in a classical case studies fashion. When you finish working through this book, you are not only a better programmer; you also have working versions of a dozen classic AI programs and a couple of language interpreters.

Reading Fogus's paragraph of λove for Thinking Forth brought to mind how I felt when I discovered PAIP as a young assistant professor. I once wrote a short blog entry praising it. May these paragraphs stand as a greater testimony of my affection.

I've learned a lot from other books over the years, both books that would fit well on this list (in particular, A Programming Language by Kenneth Iverson) and others that belong on a different list (say, Gödel, Escher, Bach -- an almost incomparable book). But I treasure certain programming books in a very personal way.

Snapchat has made it to my iPhone front page. I did not expect that when I tried it a week ago. First I wanted to understand how this thing works. That's far from obvious. But once you understand the navigation, it's efficient. Very efficient actually.

Once I understood how it works, I wanted to know what to do with it. And this is where it differs from the kids. For kids, especially young teens, it's a way to find an identity. You style yourself, you style your snaps. It's very important to appear in the most flattering way. You are your story.

For me, it's the exact opposite. Completely casual. What I do here on my website lives for years if not decades. Same thing for everything that I publish professionally. But Snapchat? Pffffrt. Just do it. For more serious conversations I use WhatsApp or if it has to live longer plain old email. In Snapchat I just tell things as they happen. It's only a few seconds per snap. I don't even worry, if you understand me. If you only heard me speak English, you can hear my speak German now. Probably sounds like Klingon to you.

I have only a few dozen contacts on Snapchat. But I already came to know some really nice people a lot better. Snapchat is here to stay. I am putting my card in the right margin for now. Don't be shy. But you do need to tell me your name, if you want to be invited.

At Vancouver City Council on May 4, two reports will come forward for debate and approval: South False Creek, and Point Grey Road.

Seaside Greenway – South False Creek – Burrard Bridge to Cambie Bridge

Project Goal:  To upgrade and improve safety of the All-Ages-and-Abilities (AAA)
recreational facility on the South False Creek Seawall.

This report presents a plan to upgrade the Seaside Greenway (i.e. Seawall) on the south shore of False Creek between the Burrard Bridge and Cambie Bridge to improve safety, comfort and capacity for all users. This will be achieved primarily by widening the path where it is currently narrower than 6.0m and by separating people cycling from people walking. The design has been developed to minimize impacts on green space and trees, to respect existing character, and to improve walking and cycling connections to the Seaside Bypass and the future Arbutus Greenway.

False Creek Seawall — Area Under Discussion

 Seaside Greenway Completion — Phase 2 – Public Realm and Sidewalks, Point Grey Road, Alma Street to Tatlow Park

This report provides recommendations for the creation of an improved walking
environment and enhanced public realm on the Seaside Greenway between Alma
Street and Tatlow Park (Macdonald Street). The key components are:

• Wider, more accessible sidewalks and new or wider front boulevards with
street trees on the north side of Point Grey Road
• Expanded green space and street closure at Point Grey Road Park

These public realm changes were approved in principle by Council in July 2013.

Phase 2 of the Seaside Greenway Completion will improve the walking environment
and public realm between Alma and Macdonald Streets, including lighting and
pedestrian amenities, and be the final step in the creation of a continuous 28km route
for walking and cycling.

OK out there, engage those partisan issues lists and contrarian “comment cut n’ paste” files. Who will be the first to leap to their keyboard and howl: “gated community”, when describing a Greenway that has no gates, and that anyone can travel any time using two feet, two wheels, three wheels or four wheels. Or perhaps the first to engage in yet another satisfying round of “bash the rich”, since it can be imagined that property values on PGR are rising faster than elsewhere, and that a large house with ocean and mountain views is expensive only because it’s on a Greenway, and before the Greenway, these homes were all cheap like borscht.  Or perhaps the first to bash PGR as a “bike lane”, since this is easier to vilify than a Greenway, and the cut n’ paste thing works better too. Have fun!!

Personally, I’ll be cheering loudly for more green space, safer and more attractive places for people to walk or ride a bike, and for upgrades to two big chunks of our 28-km Greenway.  Bring on the Arbutus Greenway and connection.

By participating in history instead of standing by to watch we shall at least be able to enjoy the present. ... You should read your Homer. Gods who manipulate the course of destiny are no more likely to achieve their private ambitions than are men who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; but gods have much more fun!

If we are to be thwarted in our ambitions, let us at least enjoy the striving. Writing code is one way to strive bigger.

~~~~~

From We Are As Gods, the iconic piece in the The Whole Earth Catalog that gave us the line, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" -- misremembered, but improved in the misremembering.

Bob Mackin in the Courier has obtained (apparently) exclusive audio recordings of Chief Campbell of the Squamish FN on March 23 discussing a vision for the lands.

I’ve been following the two Jericho land sales.  They are such magnitude and location that their eventual fate will have a major impact on Vancouver’s look, feel and density. Really, their future is a fork in the road to what the West Side of the City can become.

It is unfortunate that the audio, or Mr. Mackin’s interpretation of it, seems to highlight the confrontational aspects of this situation.  However, the vision seems very sensibly to focus on density way above the classic Point Grey / West Side single family home. The area already has townhomes and towers, and all indications are that more of this is a preferred (if not inevitable) future. And yes, there will be pearl-clutching galore.

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked audio says towers part of First Nations’ Jericho Lands vision

Campbell explained that achieving higher density would increase the land value and make it easier to gain financing to payoff the provincial loan. He mentioned the potential to build single-detached houses on the top of the property, townhouses down the slope and midrises and highrises along West Fourth Avenue. He told attendees to expect opposition.

“If you can get a 2.0 [floor space ratio] or more, you can get a lot of highrises, but that means that the discussions with local residents, they’re going to give us feedback, they’re going to give us pushback,” he warned. “They’re going to argue that we’re blocking their views, that they have a say. The local politicians over there are already beaking-off and chirping. You’ll see in the media that [David] Eby, the NDP critic for the province is already talking, as well as Joyce Murray, the federal MP.”

There is no mention in Mr. Mackin’s description of the audio clips’ content of transit, transit-oriented development or the connection to Jericho Beach Park. But there is a long road ahead as this development unfolds:  2-3 year-long zoning discussions with the City, community amenities, density — all the usual stuff.

From The Economist:

.

On the edge of Sunrise, next to the Florida Everglades, eight modernist blocks of flats (the first of them 28 stories high) are to rise, along with offices, car parks and a shopping street including restaurants and a cinema. Erick Collazo of Metropica Holdings, the developer, says the idea is to build a downtown in suburbia. Metropica, as the 26-hectare complex is called, will not really be a downtown. Because of what it suggests about the future of cities and suburbs, it will be more interesting than that. …

As it has done before, Florida is pioneering a new kind of city. Robert Bruegmann, an authority on urban sprawl at the University of Illinois, reckons that American city centres and suburbs are coming to resemble one another. Suburbs are growing denser and more diverse; urban cores are greener, cleaner and often less densely populated than they were (even go-go Manhattan has two-thirds as many people as it did a century ago). Ersatz city centres, which can be built in low-rise suburbs like Sunrise or in built-up areas, bulldoze the distinction further. South Florida is becoming a landscape of scattered centres—sprawl with bumps.

But creating the appearance of urbanity is not the same as making a city. Cities are supposed to be cosmopolitan and surprising; they ought to change in unpredictable ways. Mixed-use developments, by contrast, are fully-formed when they are built—and are too costly for the poor. They are not supposed to be diverse. John Hitchcox of Yoo, a design firm that has worked on Metropica and many other projects, says that mixed-use developments aim to create communities of like-minded people. Though they look like cities, they are supposed to feel like villages.

In fact, the low-rise 1960s suburb where Metropica is being built is already full of cosmopolitan surprise. Behind those monotonous lawns lives a diverse population: one-third of the 88,000 people who live in Sunrise are black and one-quarter are Hispanic. The strip malls are filled with esoteric businesses—a South Indian vegetarian restaurant run by Palestinians, a Vietnamese café, a Dominican hairdresser, even a British shop selling Boddingtons beer and scones. Walkable they are not. But by providing places for immigrants to get ahead, the cheap, ugly, car-oriented strip malls of suburban Florida are already doing what cities are supposed to do.

Earlier this week, the brand new Raspberry Pi Camera Module v2 was revealed to the world, its headline feature being an 8-megapixel sensor. It’s been a few years since the original came out and the new camera is an excellent little upgrade to the existing model; you can find out all the details in our complete breakdown in Issue 45 of The MagPi magazine, which is out today.

Picture perfect, the new Pi Camera Module v2

As well as covering the camera and giving you some projects to start you off with it, we also have a look at the ten best Pi-powered arcade machines, which should give you some ideas for a retro games system of your own. There are also tutorials on creating lighting effects for costumes with a Pi and some NeoPixels, making an Asteroids clone in Basic, and building an IoT thermometer. We also have Astro Pi news, excellent projects, reviews, and everything else you’d expect from your monthly MagPi.

A model railway, powered in-part by Pi Zero

Highlights from issue 45:

• Replicate an Astro Pi experiment
  Create a humidity sensor, similar to the Sweaty Astronaut code
• Hacking with dinosaurs
  The MagPi heads to the Isle of Wight to see how some animatronic dinos are being hacked with Pi
• Original games on the Pi
  Play three brand-new games on your Pi thanks to YoYo and GameMaker Studio
• Moon pictures
  Find out how to use the camera board to take amazing photos of the moon
• And much, much more!

How to buy
As usual, you can get The MagPi in store from WH Smith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Asda as well as buying copies online from our store. It’s also available digitally via our app on Android and iOS. If you fancy subscribing to the magazine to make sure you never miss an issue, you can do that to on our subscription site.

Free Creative Commons download
As always, you can download your copy of The MagPi completely free. Grab it straight from the issue page for The MagPi 45.

Don’t forget, though, that like sales of the Raspberry Pi itself, all proceeds from the print and digital editions of the magazine go to help the Foundation achieve its charitable goals. Help us democratise computing!

We hope you enjoy this month’s issue! Before anyone asks, no, the magazine unfortunately does not come with a free camera. Sorry!

The post Learn all about the new Raspberry Pi Camera Module v2 in The MagPi 45 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Annika Salzberg is currently a biology undergraduate at Haverford College majoring in biology. While in high-school here in Baltimore she developed and taught an R class to her classmates at the Park School. Her interest in R grew out of a project where she and her fellow students and teachers went to the Canadian sub-Arctic to collect data on permafrost depth and polar bears. When analyzing the data she learned R (with the help of a teacher) to be able to do the analyses, some of which she did on her laptop while out in the field.

Later she worked on developing a course that she felt was friendly and approachable enough for her fellow high-schoolers to benefit. With the help of Steven Salzberg and the folks here at the JHU DSL, she built a class she calls R for the intimidated which just launched on DataCamp and you can take for free!

The class is a great introduction for people who are just getting started with R. It walks through R/Rstudio, package installation, data visualization, data manipulation, and a final project. We are super excited about the content that Annika created working here at Hopkins and think you should go check it out!

Hello, SUMO Nation!

Did you know that in Japanese mythology, foxes with nine tails are over a 100 years old and have the power of omniscience? I think we could get the same result if we put a handful of SUMO contributors in one room – maybe except for the tails ;-)

Here are the news from the world of SUMO!

Welcome, new contributors!

• George
• lunalopus
• Just Sew Cris
• Jorker22
• veronique

Most recent SUMO Community meeting

• You can read the notes here and see the video on our YouTube channel and at AirMozilla.
  

The next SUMO Community meeting…

• …is happening on WEDNESDAY the 4th of May – join us!
• Reminder: if you want to add a discussion topic to the upcoming meeting agenda:
  • Start a thread in the Community Forums, so that everyone in the community can see what will be discussed and voice their opinion here before Wednesday (this will make it easier to have an efficient meeting).
  • Please do so as soon as you can before the meeting, so that people have time to read, think, and reply (and also add it to the agenda).
  • If you can, please attend the meeting in person (or via IRC), so we can follow up on your discussion topic during the meeting with your feedback.

Community

• THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR FEEDBACK. Keep following that thread for all the news.
  
• Want to know what’s going on with the Admins? Check this thread in the forum.
• Ongoing reminder #1: if you think you can benefit from getting a second-hand device to help you with contributing to SUMO, you know where to find us.
• Ongoing reminder #2: we are looking for more contributors to our blog. Do you write on the web about open source, communities, SUMO, Mozilla… and more? Do let us know!

Social

• Hooray for Jhonas and Magno – our newly appointed approvers!
• Ongoing reminder: We have a training out there for all those interested in Social Support – talk to Madalina or Costenslayer on #AoA (IRC) for more information.

Support Forum

Lori Kaufman, How-to-Geek, May 01, 2016

For various reasons I've been looking at how to create and open sidebars, modals, and other embedded content windows. Now maybe it's true that the whole world uses mobile phones these days, but I still see desktops and laptops (not to mention tablets) as more important in the realm of online learning. And these, I think, will need to support content mixing a lot better than they do. (It reminds me of the days back in the 1980s working on my  Atari computer  where the main thing for me was to be able to have a split editing window so I could move content back and forth.) I keep hearing about how impossible it is but I see stuff like this drag-and-drop sidebar  and I know it's not.

Lightroom for iOS 2.3 is now available, bringing with it a few important improvements and bug fixes. Most notably, we’ve taken steps to reduce the amount of steps that it takes to edit a photo from your camera roll. We heard from a number of users that editing and sharing a single photo was really important, so we made it possible to start editing immediately with a single photo. Importing multiple photos was also made easier by being able to swipe across a series of photos directly. By making it possible to start editing directly, you no longer have to find a photo, import it, find it again, and then start editing, so common workflows should be improved considerably.

We’re of course constantly working on ways to improve the many different workflows in Lightroom for iOS, and have a number of improvements in the pipeline. Let us know in the comments here what you think about this update as we all as what improvements you’d like to see in future builds of Lightroom for iOS.

Lightroom mobile 2.3 is available immediately for iPhones and iPads from the App Store.

We’d love to know what you think, and don’t forget to rate it if you like it

-Josh and the Lightroom mobile team