How to fix everything.

There's a saying in the software engineering world: "You can make a system so simple that there are obviously no flaws, or so complex that there are no obvious flaws." Right now, our banking and economic systems are solidly, and obviously, in the second category. The financial crisis that we are facing today can be blamed on Wall St. bogeymen, on greed, on deregulation, on the monetary system, or a dozen other causes, but in my view, these boil down to essentially two causes: complexity, and the excessive concentration of power. It is clear that our current means of regulating our financial systems have failed, so now is the time to discuss radical new ideas. Here's mine:

Companies could be limited to having some standard maximum number of employees.

There are a few obvious effects that such a regulatory prescription would have. The first is that it would cause assets to become much less centralized, simply because on the largest scale the management of assets takes a huge amount of manpower. The influence of any given company on the economy would be naturally limited by the amount of work the employees of that company could perform. Forcing corporations to split up into modular units would cause the distribution of both capital and influence to be much broader within society and would encourage competition and efficiency.

In any large system, modularity and information hiding are the keys to limiting complexity. Placing an upper limit on the size of companies would have the effect of making our whole economy significantly more modular; if one company providing a service were to fail, there would be numerous others to take its place. It would require companies to become highly specialized, and there would be a whole industry of coordinator companies that would be born to manage interactions of cooperatives when taking on jobs too large for a single entity. With this specialization would come greater efficiency, as well; the more that any group can dedicate itself entirely to a single goal, the more effective it can be at optimizing its business practices in pursuit of that limited set of objectives.

So, how would such a scheme be implemented? The cap on company size is obviously a value that would need to be fine-tuned over time; in the near term, the caps would be set high enough that only the largest corporations would be required to break up, but over time the cap could be lowered gradually and fine-tuned based on empirical results. This is, of course, not an unprecedented idea; trustbusting goes back to the industrial revolution, but what I am proposing would go far beyond breaking up monopolists; the goal would be gradually, perhaps over a period of decades, to lower the cap to a point where companies might be able to have say five hundred or a thousand employees, or maybe even fewer depending upon the results. It would be possible to issue a waiver for the cap to a given company for a limited period of time so that it could grow sufficiently to healthily split into smaller organizations, which would enable growth by repeated cycles of diversification followed by specialization.

There are still other benefits. Smaller organizations tend to be not only more efficient, but internally more meritocratic and more readily able to adapt rapidly to change. Furthermore, relationships between management and workers in small organizations are often more personal, which can improve working conditions.

The largest problem that this system would have to cope with would of course be how to enable projects that are too large for a single company to handle to go forward. The natural solution is to allow cooperatives to form, with a caveat - that the interaction between members of the cooperative be matters of public record. This would allow regulators to monitor such cooperatives effectively, without requiring intrusive and complex auditing of a given company's internals. If such internal auditing became necessary (say because something appeared amiss among its public transactions), the limited size of the organization would greatly simplify such an effort. Today, effectively regulating a large financial institution is all but impossible given the degree of internal complexity; with a company of 500, such complexity would be all but abolished by necessity.

In software, when a system gets too big and complex, it's time to refactor. The time to refactor our economy has come.

A common view of the future?

Just a quick note to check this out.

Writing

I've come to the conclusion that I despearately need to begin writing again, if for no other reason than to remember what it's like to articulate ideas and set them in an external form. It seems like I've been growing progressively quieter over a period of years, with less to say or perhaps with a growing conviction that little I have to say is worthy enough of note to warrent the permanence of a printed page; so much has been written, and if a thought is not unique, what need for it to persist and be shared? Yet, this conviction must of course be erroneous - the best of humanity is saved and remembered by the written word.

So, I must write, forcing myself if necessary, to exercise and strengthen my rhetorical abilities, and to share and remember the progress of my life and learning, if only ultimately with myself in a later day. In so doing I shall shake this editorial lethargy and once more find the spark of creativity within myself.

That's the hope, anyway.

I now work for Gaiam writing software with the intent of changing the world or making money or perhaps both if possible, attempting to capitalize upon the fundamental principle of the web: that connecting like-minded, interested, active people to one another can have dramatic effects; it's social networking with a purpose and within a niche. Before coming to Gaiam, I'd been interviewing with Google, but fell victim in the final interview to a breakdown of nerve and intellect. In retrospect, I attribute this breakdown to a decline in self-confidence that has taken place over the course of years - why? I suspect it is the evil fruit of a lack of creativity, a lack of persistence, a lack of productivity.

And so, I must write.

Pandora.com

Pandora.com is my new tech darling. Adaptive technology, combined with a great selection of music - this is the future.

Here's me: http://www.pandora.com/people/kris.nuttycombe

Two Stout Monks

A bit of humor: how to deal with complaints.

Bush's Republicans: simply irresponsible

One of the things about the Republican party that has made them so effective against the Democrats in recent years, in spite of all the mistakes that they've made, is their ability to project a unified message. Even though their message is far removed from the truth, they have managed to convince a large number of people of their positions simply by massive repetition.

I believe that the lack of a consistent message from the Democrats is the primary reason that we have failed to get the attention of the average American voter. I belive that we need a central idea, a root cause analysis, if you will, to tie together and explain why the Republican agenda is wrong for America.

Words are powerful, and I think there's a simple, common, and expressive word that we can use to unify our critical voice:

IRRESPONSIBLE.

George Bush, and the members of the Republican Party in general, are fundamentally irresponsible.

They are environmentally irresponsible, attempting to sell off our national forests, and the quality of our air and water, to corporate interests. They take an irresponsibly short term view of environmental problems (like global warming) that can have dramatic and tremendously detrimental effects in the long term.

They are socially irresponsible, neglecting our schools, our poor, our elderly, and our veterans.

They are fiscally irresponsible, and have brought us the highest debt and largest budget deficits in history.

They are diplomatically irresponsible, starting an war that has served no purpose but to create new breeding grounds for terrorists. Afghanistan was justifiable, but Iraq was sold to the American people on premises that were nothing more than cynically calculated lies.

The truth is that the republicans are being irresponsible with America in a multitude of ways, and I think that if the Democratic party can unify behind this message, we can more effectively explain to the American people why the Republican agenda is bad for America.

Hunting the Single-Issue Voter

I received an interesting phone call a couple of days ago. It was a political survey with only two rather unusual questions.

1. Are you opposed to abortion in every case, except to save the life of the mother?
2. Are you opposed to gun control of any kind, including handgun registration?

I didn't have the presence of mind to ask who was conducting the survey, though I doubt that I would have gotten an honest or meaningful answer in any case. I was struck by the strangeness of these questions - I mean, what is the point of such a survey?

Then it struck me.

It's the Hunt for the Single-Issue Voter. The Republicans are trying to assess what percentage of the population they can sucker to vote for them based upon a single emotional issue. This is the group of people that they can count on to go to the polls and vote Republican with no thought whatsoever. Forget about democracy or representing the views of the people - this is a purely cynical and systematic manipulation of a segment of the population for political power. These issues, gun control and abortion, are not things that would even come up in everyday conversation among the electorate were it not for the continual reminders from the conservative media that these are the things that their voters should care about, to the exclusion of everything else. By manipulating the emotions of a group of people ill-equipped to defend themselves with reason, the Republicans work to expand their personal power.