Things that aggravate me in computer games...

Well, it's probably just one, really.

It's the situation in a game where the creators force you to play it *their* way, as opposed to allowing me to go at it *my* way.

Especially bad when you don't even know what you're doing at first. 

Cases in point:

Because I'm leading up to playing Wolfenstein 2...on Xbox:

1) Wolfie: New Order -- I played up to the point where you come back from the moon, and end up facing Mr Stompy. This is an arena fight, your ability to aim and do some other funky controller things that I am not good at, really it's the run+slide+shoot = too many things at once. So that's where I had to stop. My patience for these things is getting lower. I did, however, play through this successfully on the PC a few years ago, although I remember that being tricky then too.

2) Wolfie: Old Blood: You have to fight Jager, in the tavern. It's another arena, and it's tiny. Jager is in power armor. It turns out that you have to shoot the blue power nodes on his shoulders a few times; he powers down for a short bit, you have to go pry a piece of armor off while he's in that state. Then you have to do it again, several times. There's really not enough cover of significance to work with, the power armor seems to have dual-wield miniguns with infinite ammo, and he's in motion all the time. And this is after he smashes down the front door, but it's still blocked so you can't run outside where there's better cover--because you know he's going to come after you: you killed his dog.

3) Wolfie: Old Blood: Just before Jager, you fought the big mechanical dog out at the end of the bridge. This is really contrived, because you have to either be doing run-n-gun as soon as he shows up, or you have to find the one hiding place where he doesn't attack (except for the part where he does, and can hurt you *thru the walls*. I watched a couple youtube videos about this, and it turns out (at least on super-easy) that it takes two measly shots with the kampfpistole (which is essentially the single-shot grenade launcher). But I had to try various weapons a bunch of times to figure that out.

4) DOOM: there is the spot where, even on super-easy, there are two of those great big demons, it's an arena fight...

5) on PC: Wolfie: Return to Castle W: I'm in this cathedral thing, have to climb a ladder up a tower, and there's a grenade-girl at the top who is going to kill me before I get in position to aim at her. It's basically an arena except that it's really a tube, and the cover works against me. If I could actually turn around further...but you can't, your range of motion is explicitly limited.

OK, you get the picture, it's these arena fights. The arena is *always* a "locked room" and it won't unlock until your opponent(s) is dead. Mostly what I'd prefer is to be able to draw the opponent's attention and then run away. 

The problem on my end is of course that (1) *I* am not quite good enough to do this their way, and (2) the xbox controller isn't either, and finally (3) on PC I have to play left-handed for RSI reasons. That's less an issue on xbox, actually, b/c there IS NO left-handed-ness...on Windows, well, that's an imperfect modified key-mapping (but at least you can do that, which wasn't always true in the past).

This results in my preferring the Bethesda RPG vs FPS games, where I can fight and run away. 

The current situation with Wolfie is that I'm done playing those games. And not coming back to them later. Which is too bad, because I was near the end of (1), but not even halfway through (3) and (5).

Wolfenstein 2 is coming up, but I'm not sanguine about my chances there--it seems entirely too likely, in advance, that there will be some of this arena-battle stuff that I can't get through. (Later: yep, there was. The "courtroom" battle is an arena. With A LOT of opponents, and the scenery/furniture is destructible, which means you can't really hide behind it for very long.)

I played all the way through all of these things (exc Doom) on my PC when they came out. Mostly that was a few years ago and now I'm older.

Related to the "have to do it *their* way is the "I want to climb up to *right there*" but I can't. In (2), you're in the tavern, there is clearly a "trap-door" up some stairs to the second floor, but it's locked. (actually, it isn't even a door that *could* be opened, it's a visual decoration).

The visual aspect of "town" in (2) and (3) is fabulous--this is some really good-looking surface texture art.

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Later that night: played Wolfie 2 some. After the point, still on the flying platform, where you get the super-suit, you end up in an arena battle against *something* that is big, clearly tough, has dual-wield *something* that looks like big laser or railgun (well, not railgun, really seemed energy weapon, has a charge time with an associate noise). I've no idea how you take this one out, but it seems fairly stupid, and it certainly isn't fast--easy to outrun, but there's not really a safe spot. (OK, this is the "laser cannon", kinda like the minigun, you can't keep it). You need this weapon to burn a hole in a wall, so there's no way out of this battle. (At least it's not Jager in the tavern again). Ah, apparently there's a second one, a little later, before you get to leave the airship.



There's a play-style dichotomy in this game (as with the predecessors):
"You will see some icons with numbers appear on the screen. They indicate the positions of special enemies - the commanders - who are able to call in reinforcements. You should always prioritize these targets (preferably take them down quietly) first to avoid troubles."

This game is about killing nazis. Why would you want fewer of them? 

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Also: I hate "jumping games" where your jumping has to be perfectly timed/aimed/something in order to get around. You try to do that with wireless kbd/mouse...yeah, not so much.

I'd be more or less ok doing such jumping IRL, if I was, you know, 25 years old still (but I'm nowhere near)

European Economies and Economics

(cutting to the chase:) apparently it DOES take an Advanced Degree (tm).

Stardate: May 2018

A few years back Greece was having a real serious economic problem. Spending was out of control, government revenues were inadequate for debt service, yadda yadda. Heard it before.

All true, but not new. And still there.

The real issue was NOT that spending was out of control, but rather than federal tax revenues were inadequate to pay for services spending and debt was increasing to cover the gap.

Why were tax revenues inadequate? Why was spending so high?

Well, the spending was NOT so high. The revenues were short, for sure.

Why inadequate tax revenues? That is the real problem and question.

Citizens weren't lazy bums (altho others elsewhere certainly said so).

The problem is this: the gray-market economy is as large as the "real economy" (the reported economy). They don't trust the national government to be/do the right thing, to be honest and not corrupt, so the Greeks treat tax-evasion as a national pastime.

First off, what's gray market economy? ("black market" is illegal/stolen goods sold; white market is the regular market we participate openly, and is reported openly.)

Gray market economy is unreported financial transactions. Transactions that are handled as swaps, or all cash, un-reported as taxable income. You hire someone to cut your lawn, pay them in cash, they don't list that as taxable income anywhere, no one knows about it.

There is gray-market activity like this everywhere. You, as person hiring a lawn-cutter, do not know that the employee here is not going to report the income. You pay in cash, it's untraceable.

So of course no one knows the size of the gray market--it's not reported so it can't be measured. The *estimate* I've seen is that Greece's gray market is the same size as its white market. So if the gray market all moved to white, the tax revenues would be sufficient to meet national spending needs.

Everyone was worried about Greece at the time, but Greece is tiny. Problem not solved, apparently, but not in the news. GDP/debt ratio is bad.

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So that same problem exists in Italy now. Same origin, same reasons, same issues. You read about the problems here and there, will Italy remain in the EU? Can it? No one talks about the source issue. They talk about the Euro, as though unified currency is the problem, versus being able to devalue their own currency in the market. (Well, that might help, for a little while, but it's a terrible idea.)

The fundamental problem goes unspoken. Basically: the citizens are crooks. Well, that sounds harsh: they are tax cheats; they all know it. If you confronted one of them, you'd get an earful. Is/was the same in Greece.

The pure-cash/barter economy allows a lot of tax cheating.

I can't do it in my business, I need the proper openness of white market. But I see plenty of gray market around me. Participants drive around with snakes on their plates.

Italy's economy is 10X bigger than Greece. Had Greece folded, there'd have been much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing, but the fallout would have been pretty small. Italy has a problem? That's going to be a bigger splash.

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This is a flaw in the economic models you hear about: why Alan Greenspan's view of economics was inadequate: the black and gray markets are things they can't think about, and are bigger than they imagine. When half the annual economic activity is unreported gray market, well, the white market has problems. The government cannot pay its bills.

And it's not like gov officials there don't know about it. The problem is that EVERYONE participates.

No, I don't know how to fix this. Well, get rid of cash. All transactions are electronic/online, therefore traceable. Otoh, that pushes people towards crypto-currency, which I'm not convinced is safe/secure.

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Later: this gray-market activity is also knows as "underground economy". All off-books, no-taxes-paid.

New Thinking in AI

I found this interesting:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machine-learning-is-stuck-on-asking-why/560675/

(For those not knowing/remembering, he's also the father of Daniel Pearl, journalist who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan)

He invented a really good technique back in the 80s. We used it on the project I worked on 86-90. It's a good statistical basis for probabilistic reasoning, called Bayes Network. It worked.

Now he's talking about the reality of cause and effect. This is a good thing, and working it out probably requires...yes, you guessed it...

An Advanced Degree (tm). Let's start the process.

(I don't disagree with him, per se, and certainly he's been thinking the right thing, but I think there's a logistical failure)

I was working this problem too, mid-80s, for an activity called "Failure Modes and Effects Analysis". or FMEA (often pronounced feema).

An FMEA for a system (and a simulator to do the actual analysis) would require you to exhaustively describe all the failure modes (i.e., "causes") at the level of detail you want (or more properly "can afford"), and the possible "effects" that would occur.

The problem is that it's really really hard to do this to the detail depth that would be adequate to produce a valuable result. You need a really serious model of parts. So it's really expensive to do, time-consuming, and generally skipped.

And it isn't the most obvious failures that you really want to understand, it's the weird ones, like how leaving a wrench in the wrong place inside a 60s space capsule leads to a fire that kills astronauts.

Pearl is thinking about a larger problem, wants cause/effect descriptions, and complains about what he calls "curve-fitting", which is more or less about finding a limited model that describes a dataset, and allows a little bit of prediction outside that dataset (I suspect, really only accurate for first-order behaviors). He poses a couple of questions as examples: "what if I had finished high school?"

Well, there's no possible way to answer that, except by use of statistics data that we already have, and of course you only get an averaged answer (which continues to be speculative): you probably would have earned more money in your life. If you want more detail than that, like "you would have gotten a scholarship for UMD, graduated and then found a cure for cancer when you were 43 years old", how large a model would it take to do that? How many assumptions about random events would you have to make?

If you're into AI enough to know the historical aspects, recall Doug Lenat's work on Cyc. Remember what that was? They were trying to produce a knowledge base of some sort that was really a massive ontology.

Ontologies are hard. REALLY hard. Mostly you fail, or acknowledge that incompleteness is unavoidable. Generally what I've found is that creators try to do WAY too much, it becomes unwieldy and misses the target. (Pretty sure that was a blog topic a while back, but if not: micro-ontologies are the only thing that can work ok.) Remember SUMO? You can't put enough into it to make it usable without making it unusable.

So how will humans do what Pearl says, when we haven't already done it? I grant you, computers are bigger/better/faster/etc than Lenat had access to 30 years ago, but that probably just makes it possible to get too big sooner.

Back to the FMEA thing: although I was making an attempt at it, I was almost for sure going to fail because the amount of detail necessary to succeed wasn't going to be creatable. Why? Because it's not the obvious failures that you need to find, it's the really weird ones. And I was working in Lisp, where you work with symbols rather than numbers, so you can't run into the computational exhaustion of too many numbers. FMEA is pretty much never done because of the cost, and while a computerized version would be some faster, it'd be hard to create--the real benefit would of course come from being able to reuse component models, but you casually lead yourself astray by eventually thinking those component models are complete.

In any case, I applaud Pearl's thinking, but...problem still untractable.

Why? The simplest way to simulate the universe would be to build it.

Working with Ubiquiti wireless devices

Because of some other activities, been working with Ubiquiti (http://www.ubnt.com/) wireless devices.

Ubiquiti has an interestingly large range of devices. Would not pretend to understand them all just yet. If not an Advanced Degree(tm), you need advanced training and experience.

Had a heck of a time getting some things going. According to their documentation, you mostly just plug-n-play...or not.

Apparently it takes an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out.

The first problem is that the wireless connections are excruciatingly slow to operate. Spent hours wondering what the heck was going on. Finally I decided to attach to the wire--THAT works as you expect, and its properly fast. Problem is, that GUI doesn't quite do everything. There's no control for PoE.

The issues begin with the "airCube". The documentation says you can direct connect a PoE radio device to the PoE output on the Cube and power the radio device. Turns out this is not quite true--not at first--despite the documentation saying you can, incl the pictures.

AirCube appears to have PoE turned off by default, out of the box. You want to use it? Not so easy to do. Out of five units, they were inconsistent about PoE being on. Not sure what that means.

In addition, the AirCube does NOT respond to casual broadcast pings. I.e., if you try "ping X.X.X.255" it doesn't answer. If you try specific IPs (like X.X.X.22) it will if you hit the right one...?

How to do it: You need to use UNMS, or you need to use the your phone. In those GUIs, you can get to the control to turn on PoE. You can get to a management web-page on the device if you connect via the wire, but you CANNOT turn PoE on this way (post-firmware-update: that might have changed).

Or you need to guess the IP. Could get this via "nmap" (unix thing). Even so, changing PoE isn't on the service webpage.

Or maybe you run Wireshark and it tells you. Wireshark will pick up all traffic on the wire it's on, and show you all active IPs. A fully passive IP wouldn't be seen until it does something specific.

On top of all this, I don't think the units are consistent about what they are doing.

Once you have the device detected in UNMS, you can get it to do the firmware upgrade, that puts some new controls in front of you, one of which will be "turn on PoE". I did not, at this point, go look at the direct web-page to find a PoE button.

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The NanoBeams are far simpler to get going, they do the obvious thing with a known-in-advance IP address (.1.20). Wire straight to them, set to DHCP, reboot, they are on your regular network, can then config via webpage (altho you still have to track down the dhcp ip addr).

Will be back to this in a few days, make it more coherent, etc.

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And apparently if you use 'ssh' to get into the device, there are still more settings you can work with. They run a micro-linux. Amazing.

HP Printers, LJ2300 in particular

I've been using Hewlett Packard electronics since 1976.

Never really had any trouble with them (except maybe RPN, way too weird).

Have an LJ6 here at home, still works fine, on USB. Seldom used now.

Replaced that with an LJ 2300 ~10 years ago. That works nicely, have probably printed 20K pages on it. Still in regular use.

Bought a second 2300 to have at work.

I also have a 9055 around, for 11x17 work. Very nice.

The 2300 has parallel (yeah, it's that old), USB, and can take an ethernet plug-in card.

The 2300 is really harsh on those ethernet cards. I haven't figured out why. I've had to replace the ethernet card in the first one about once a year since I got it. Fortunately they are available easily on EBay.

New one: I've had it only a few weeks, it came with a DOA ethernet card, I put one in since I have spares for this reason, that worked ok, but it has since died and I put another one in this morning. This new one is working ok...not sure for how long, tho. (At some point later, that one quit too)

So: word to the wise: if you have a 2300 you already know about this...if you don't, well, be aware.

The 2300 is long-since out of production, you can only buy one used. I guess I don't recommend it necessarily. Probably better if you got a newer one with wifi; printers didn't come with wifi when I got it.

That said, if it's working it does a great job. USB works fine, too. I always have it on ethernet so I can casually network print to it from multiple machines.

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July: bought a four-pack of ethernet cards, and one RAM stick. Ethernet card #1 is working ok. RAM arriving in a few days. I don't remember putting memory into one of these printers before, that should be interesting. Apparently it has two slots for RAM; came with 48, am adding 32.

A Skyrim question for those in the know...or willing to test this

I was talking to another Skyrim player today, who asked if I had ever resurrected/re-animated a dragon.

No, I couldn't even imagine how such might be possible...right? You kill it, you take its soul immediately, no oppo to resurrect.

No, he says, there's a gap between the death and the soul capture where you might resurrect it. If your spell (and I guess your appropriate magic skill) is high enough, you can, he says.

I have not tried this? Any matching experience on this?

You do reach a point where you get to summon a dragon (Durnhevir or something like that). I haven't found it that useful.

Upgrading from XBOX ONE to XBOX ONE X

For unexpected reasons, I got to buy a new Xbox One X this month...i.e., it basically cost me nothing. Otherwise I probably would not have.

So Microsoft wised up re XBOX ONE the past few years, with several things:

1) you can finally attach an external disk and install games onto it, so that you aren't space-limited to the internal drive it came with that cannot be upgraded. So there's also disk-management tools in the XBOX OS now, to format, transfer, and delete games. Yay! I did not know this, but it was a long time coming, given that the One had 3 USB ports.

2) somewhere 2-3 years ago the finally released a 360 emulator, so that you could continue to play your 360 games. Well, some of them, anyway...after saying for some time that there would never even be such an emulator, all of a sudden there was. Yay! Fallout 3/FNV come back. Oblivion does not.

3) with the release of the One X, now there's built-in help for new owners to be able to upgrade from old box to new one. This would be me.

Unfortunately, it's not as smooth as it should be.

It should not take an Advanced Degree to figure this out. But it almost did...

But you have a bunch of things you need to do.

1) Update the entirety of the Xbox One. If you're me, this could be a problem--it requires a real no-data-cap internet service, which is not what I have. So I didn't even BUY the X until I could time it with a visit to mom's house where she DOES have such a thing. It still took several hours. First I updated the OS on the One, then all the games that wanted it. (Mom's internet speed is decent but not extra fast.)

1A) Make sure that while you are online at this point, that you launch every game that has saves, so that all those saves are synchronized to the Xbox cloud. If you don't, those saves are going away.

2) You copy the "personal profile" (aka login & prefs) from the One, onto an external hard drive. This takes maybe a minute or so total, incl power up/down. There's a size minimum on external drives, so you can't do this with a thumb drive (which is stupid, since your profile is tiny).

3) Attach that external to the One X. Start the One X. It will copy your profile from the external disk. There will be some login monkeying around, some prompting about little things, but you will quickly have a profile on a new, but empty, machine.

4) You need to have the One X update itself. This turned out to only be 800 MegaBytes for me, so reasonably fast.

5) OK, not a step, per se, but it was nearly 10 pm by this point, so time to go home.

6) Next day--power up the One. You have to find where you can tell it "allow game transfer" in Settings. The reason you want to do this is that you want to copy all the games from the One to the X, over ethernet. This should be fastest. You have to be online to do this. You could also pop that external disk back on the One, copy all the games to the external, move that external to the X, and transfer them off the external; I didn't try this. 

7) Power up the X. Also online. Go to Settings/Network something, where it will say "Transfer", and let you see the One. Clock on the One icon, and you will get the list of games that can be transferred. Click all you want, then Go.

8) Wait until done. My two machines ran that at about 300 megabits/second the entire time, but it did still take a while, because we are talking about 275 megabytes. I guess I thought the Xbox ethernet would be gigabit like every other machine I have, but maybe not.

9) Power down the One. Unplug it completely.

10) Restart the X. Somewhere along here it is going to ask you about changing your home machine to the new one. This will log you out of the One, which is fine, because I'm going to wipe it and sell it anyway.

11) Try things out. Every single one you transferred. Because some of this won't go properly. Be online for this, so that it recovers all those game saves you did in step 1A.

12) I lost my game saves for FNV. Granted, that's a 360 game, I've no idea how those work internally. But my FNV saves are gone. The game does start up ok. But there are zero saves. I don't know if the Dishonored 1/2 saves are there or not, but not important: if I touch that again, it will be to start over. Grow Up seemed ok. Just need Skyrim and Fallout 4 to work. Wolfensteins aren't here yet. Diablo 3 looked ok--did I test if far enough?

13) Oh crud. Fallout 4 wants to do ANOTHER UPDATE, 17 GB this time. Ouch. I can't do that. Skyrim wants to do a 7 GB update; small enough that I let that go, but it does mean data will be a little tight the rest of the month. F4 is not getting that update yet.

14) Try out other games. Mostly that worked, I didn't try everything, but you need to, to be sure that all online sync gets done ok.

15) Bad discovery: my Skyrim game saves won't load. Apparently they are not portable, somehow. I can see them, incl the little screen-capture for each one, but if I choose one, it starts to load, then the screen goes black and stays there. If I press the "Home" button, I get a seg-fault crash that is so hard that the machine powers down--and I don't see any of it: screen stays black until the power light goes off. Wow. This equals a loss of, um, how many hours was it? "a lot" comes to mind.

Update: that crash is so hard that the controller won't restart the device. You have to hand-push the power switch on the front of the X.

16) Tried "New Game" in Skyrim. That works fine, but I really didn't want to be throwing away the old character. No idea what is going on.

17) I wonder if the Fallout 4 saves are broken too...I'd be ok with starting over there

18) Try loading Oblivion. The box says "Xbox One and 360" but no, it won't even allow the attempt. Power up the One--same deal. Not going to be doing that...I was willing to keep the One around for Oblivion, but no need.

19) Fire up the One and wipe it clean (well, except for the two Assassin's Creed games that came with it).

20) EBay. 

Whew. Harder than it should have been.

Upgrading a Mac is simpler than this. You do it entirely over the wire--just did it last week. Coupla mouse clicks and that's it.

This is probably the first time MS has actually done this, really. I don't know what Windows 10 does for changes/upgrades...I recall it being nothing for Win 7, when you are changing machines.

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Update: I have just gotten actually high-speed internet at work yesterday morning.

So I did all the updates on X 1 X. All good. Forgot about checking the F4 game saves, will do that tomorrow.

Because it was the HS stuff finally, I went to the Xbox store and bought Oblivion. Was reading about it the day before, apparently it's gotten a fresh re-release with some kind of "Enhanced for X1X" activity. It's not new 4K textures, but it's something in that direction. I tested it on a 4K tv, and by golly it looks better than HD. Very impressive. Just couldn't install from the DVD.

Oblivion is of course still a 360 game, but there it is...4K. Yeah! The key things to remember is to boost sneak before leaving the training area, and do a custom character class so that the major skills are the ones you are going to use the most.

How to get your sounds into High Sierra for custom use

I have had a custom "new mail" sound for years and years.

A new machine arrived recently...well, ok, new to me. I have a 2011 IMac 27 inch. Same screen as I had at old job 5 yrs ago. Very nice. Very inexpensive, $650. Has High Sierra already.

So can I use my custom sound(s)? No, apparently not. Or not anything like the same way. Used to be that you could start Mail, go to Prefs, click the little menu for New Message Sound, there would be the standard list, and also a choice to add something to the list. So I had used that "add something" previously.

High Sierra: No such animal.

Finding the correctly explained solution was harder than it should have been, but the solution itself is pretty easy.

You have to have a sound file. It has to be ".aiff format". A tool like Audacity (free) will do the conversion for you, where ITunes will not. (Did it used to? Could swear that was once a possibility...)

You have to move that file into ~/Library/Sounds.

You can do this via Finder, with "Go To Folder" (aka "command-shift-G"), and enter ~/Library/.

You will then see the list of everything in Library. This folder used to be visible for you all the time, now it is not. This is Apple locking down things so you don't shoot yourself in the foot.

Find the Sounds folder, double click on it. Now drag your .aiff sound file in there.

Quit and restart Mail. Open Prefs. Click on the New Message Sound menu. Viola! Your sound is at the bottom of the list. Hooray!

I think this same approach is true for Sierra, and probably going backwards a while, altho previously you could also use the "add something" choice.

So I now have my new-mail sound back working again. And maybe I'll do some others now too.

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Ringtones are a different beast, but a similar process.

Skyrim interesting discovery...

Small, but interesting. Learned this from a friend.

If you have the Solstheim expansion, there's a location called Kohlbjorn Barrow a short distance SE of the dock you land at. There's guy there who needs help because draugr keep killing his archaeological dig crew.

It takes several rounds of dungeon delving to get this all resolved, but at the end is a "Black Book" in a greenish room on a pedestal in the center. You read the book, you are transported to wherever (Hermaeus Somebody's realm), you have to do a quick run to the far end, where there's another book you want to read. The Black Books have some options for a "power" that you can choose. Here you want to pick "Secrets of Arcana".

Why? The power is that once a day you get a 30-second window in which you can cast a spell and it costs zero Magicka.

Not actually that useful, unless you have a super-expensive spell you want to cast.

OR...

you can cast a spell that is a continuous spell rather than a point spell. i.e., a point spell is like Fireball and a continuous spell is like "Flames" where you hold down the key until the opponents are all dead or  you are.

OK, that's not actually useful here. What IS useful: there are a few, and only a few, spells that do not require actual targets in order for you to get skill point boost. Those spells include Telekinesis, Detect Life, Detect [Un]Dead. You just hold the "hit" key/button down and away they go. So with Secrets of Arcana, you can launch that power, then select Detect Life somewhere there are plenty of people (like Whiterun town square, or maybe Riften), and cast the spell. Keep holding down the cast button/key, and if there are plenty of Live or Dead things, Alteration will race to 100 pretty quick. (Later: I was hoping I could use "Clairvoyance" to boost Illusion, but no go; the spell has to have an actual target to act upon in any category to do any boosting. Detect Life doesn't have a "selected" target, just bodies in detection range.)

I did this by finding a skeleton that wouldn't see and therefore not attack me, telling my companion to go somewhere else and wait, then launching spell as above. I held it down for a bit, then I went and got a fat rubber-band to do that holding for me. Went from level 32 to level 90 on the rubber band.

Remember that I'm on an Xbox One here, so the controller is possible to do this way. Friend came back and said I could get Detect Life from Tolfdir so I did that...then I could go to Whiterun and do it again. I think that from 32-90 took about two hours on Detect Dead with just the one skeleton, but going from 90-100 on Detect Life took about 5 minutes because Whiterun town square has so many folks walking around.

The speed of level-up on these skills is based on how many creatures are in range. Same deal with Sneak--more people walking around nearby, the faster your sneak skill goes up. I suspect you could go from 30 to 100 in Alteration in 15 minutes, with those first ones going by ridiculous fast. Didn't occur to me to measure it, so I don't know.

The only flaw in here is that you will probably gain 4 overall levels at the same time, and you can't pause in the middle to go find someone to buy training from, so you lose that oppo.

You appear to only be able to do this in Alteration (grabbing and holding a something with TK works just as well, and you can do that anywhere), and Illusion, all the other spells/categories require targets of some kind and aren't continuous or they have "ends", like healing.

Same friend suggested that perhaps for Restoration if you could use Greater Ward in conjunction with one of those soul-gem-based lasers you occasionally find, if the laser is less powerful than the Ward that you could do Restoration too. But that requires finding a really weak one of those lasers, and I haven't seen one in quite a while...I tried this, with Steadfast Ward which is not strong enough, and when it has shield failure which is almost instantly you have to recast, which doesn't work with Arcana.

If you know of another spell this works with I'd like to find out.

----------------------------------

Later: OK, there's another way. You can boost Restoration interestingly to the top, and it doesn't involve the Solstheim thing above.

I'm sure there are some variations on this that will work.

Find the "Atronach Stone" and accept the blessing. This blessing is that magical attacks on you convert 50% of damage back into magicka. Then you want to find one of those bird-beak things that shoots fire continuously and stand in front of it. Note that I do NOT mean the soul-gem based things.

Now you are taking damage and gaining Magicka. You probably want to wear some enchanted armor pieces that do magic damage reduction, and maybe boost your magicka regeneration. Then, on top of all that, you want to choose "Healing" as your active spell and run it continuously. Healing takes a target, i.e., *you*, which means it works for skill-leveling. You want your magicka regen to be more or less the same rate as Healing uses it up, 8 pts/sec, and you want the actual fire damage to be about 8/second, so that these things balance. A little more complicated, but you can then run Restoration to 100. You might need to step out of the flame for a bit to heal full up on occasion, so it's not as easy as Alteration was. And you can do it without having to drink potions.

Watched someone do this for a couple minutes. Again here you'd want to stop when your character levels up so that you can go buy 5 training levels.

There's another blessing of Atronach you can get, worth about 20% attack=>recover_magicka that might help.

+++++

So these things are of course a little bit game-destabilizing, when you combine them with the rollover you can do by claiming "Legendary" on, say, Alteration, resetting it back to 15, letting you take those skill points and apply them elsewhere, run the Detect Life routine again, all the way to 100, declare Legendary again, etc. If you have the $, you could train up along the way, etc.

Or at least train things that aren't, all the way to 50. That's reasonably inexpensive; after 50, the price is quadruple, so you probably don't have that much cash.

-------------------------------

A generically similar approach can be taken with Blocking, and Light/Heavy Armor. You want to let a rat bite on you, but not really take health damage. Rat continues to attack, you cast heal. I found that holding a shield in left hand and Healing in the right did well. Block can be run to 100; again, you want to stop for training oppos. But if you did this with the Atronach/Heal-Self combo, you could stand there forever letting the rat work on you until Light and Heavy Armor are at 100, Block is at 100...

--------------------------

Back in Oblivion, you could run Sneak to 100 without even leaving the initial training area, same basic deal. There's that point where you are told to sneak behind that goblin. Turns out there's a location opposite where you enter his room where you can aim yourself at the wall, lean on the move-forward key, and go AFK. If you selected Sneak as a Major skill, you can level your character up to 10 after a while; this will actually take several hours, but does not involve any danger for you, the goblin will NOT look backwards. The only trick is getting yourself aimed properly, and then managing the 25/50/75 perk points.

You couldn't really do the rat-bite routine, because getting attacked damaged your armor, too, which meant you needed repair hammers or spare armor. I can't recall if you could do repairs while in combat...

Also possible: On the Xbox (finally!) that sneak boost above can be done unaided, you can put a rubber band on the the controller and walk away.

Facebook

A separate project has forced me onto Facebook.

What a piece of garbage software.

I'm trying to find the marketplace, in order to buy a small amount of office furniture. I'm kinda wanting to be able to use it like Craigslist, but I can't even find the start page for Marketplace.

Someone sent me a link to a Marketplace item, I was able to look at that. And I can do a search from there. And I get returns that look a lot like Craigslist. But I can't click on any of those returns to look t the item--brand-new search results and I get told "item not available"--every time.

Garbage.

The Health Care business

This is an enormously complex problem, overall.

My experience is not extensive, but I have had to use several "providers" over the last 40 years.

Kaiser Permanente was superior. Also, the most expensive. KP is the most computerized HC provider that I am aware of. This means that their knowledge and planning and efficiency is highest, and that they can be proactive about various things, like telling you when it's time to do this or that (just like the Ford dealer sends you an email when it's approx time for an oil change).

The rest of the industry seems a lot less data-efficient. There's no good reason for that, other than lack of willingness to spend the money to be better, and a fear on the part of some employees that computerization will put them out of a job. That is of course, true, but is like a buggy-whip manufacturer in 1910 saying "automobiles will never replace horses" -- yet here we are.

So today I have read an announcement that Warren Buffet (of Berkshire-Hathaway fame), Jeff Bezos (creator of Amazon), and a guy from J P Morgan Chase (CEO?) will team to create a brand-new Health-Care service to tackle the US HC-provider cost issue.

This is great.

I have no idea who the JPM guy is, and let's not pretend that the banking/financial industry in the US has a good reputation (the seemingly endless parade of scandals based on the industry being greedy goes back as far as you can read).

But we know who Warren Buffet is, perhaps the epitome of good guy who is really wealthy.

Jeff Bezos is the guy who is revolutionizing the retail industry. Amazon is the business to be afraid of if you are in retail sales--aka brick-n-mortar stores. He bought Whole Foods last year, and while we haven't seen "organic food delivered by quad-copter drones" yet, we will.

So this combination is really interesting: you won't go to CVS for prescriptions, NewCO-HC will delivery them via drone. Well, KP sent me pills in the mail, so this isn't too far-fetched at all. The only reason to use CVS is when you get a prescription and need the pills immediately. KP had its own pharmacy in-house, so you could see a doc and then go downstairs for the pills. Refills I always got in the mail.

The initial story on this is that the service will be for their employees, but of course 20 years ago Amazon only sold books.

This will be interesting.

A little political humor

Stable genius:

On the left...

Stable genius?

It ain't this guy:

The Very Model

Advanced Sci Fi and TV

Watched new X Files last night. Hadn't really planned to, but there it is.

Just as crazy as before…hope this time it will move the main plot a little faster. I lost interest last time around, and missed a few things like "CSM" being Mulder's dad. Scully/Mulder shoulda killed him years ago. But no, everyone is back, and in classic form, no one can be trusted.

But one thing that got mentioned, in passing, clearly as an aside to the SciFi fans, was "Dyson Sphere".

Read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

A clever idea, and probably sort of true, but in no way practical. "W" article talks about some of this.

Eventually it says "probably not enough material in the solar system to actually create such a thing" Nor is the material we have actually innately strong enough.

Why not? It'd have to rotate to have "gravity", there'd be coriolis tension and compression and shear, drift around the star…

Imagine a large balloon enclosing a baseball, both perfectly spherical. How thick, how much reinforcement/bracing, and other clever crazy stuff would we have to have so that it didn't disintegrate…

Where would enough atmosphere come from to "fill it" let's say 10 miles thick? Oh, no, you wouldn't do that at all. You'd make a flat layer whose inside surface is glass, and the air is trapped between that and the outer layer, so that you stand inside the outer layer and are looking up through the glass inner layer; maybe it's 20 feet thick. Well, there's plenty of sun, then, and the air is contained. Lots less air needed. Still…a lot of air. I don't think we have enough. We'd have to mine air from…um…we'd have to make it.

A test case, avoiding any thought of the coriolis aspects:

The earth is 8000 miles diameter. Let us imagine it is solid iron. How thick an outer surface do we need? Other aspects will determine that, but let's say it's one inch.

The Dyson radius always used is 1 AU, or 93 million miles. You probably wouldn't actually build it that distance, but for convenience we'll say 100 million.

The surface of the sphere is 1.7E26 square inches. 

Earth = 8000 miles sphere of iron = 268082573106 cubic miles = 7.5 E18 cubic feet = 6.8E25 cubic inches. A little short. 

But only a little. That's interesting, and less damning than I thought. 

We could only build 1/2 inch thick shell. We probably really need more like a foot thick, but we aren't making tall buildings, no point; that, and they'd be unsafe to create. And the sphere would be one billion times more square miles than the entire surface of the earth, of which we currently use very little. We'd still be all bunched together because of the need for fresh water. We'd end up distilling the entirety of the oceans into fresh water. And managing the location...that'd be weird because we couldn't build oceans (the "depth" would create other impossible tension stress forces that would be totally destructive: a half-inch-thick shell couldn't "handle the weight".

Huh. Not so bad as I thought. 

Of course, it'd be vulnerable to things from the outside.  Earth's atmosphere prevents the surface from looking like the Moon, but the outside of a sphere would have no equivalent thing--there would have to be huge team of people and "somethings" whose job was to continually deal with attacks. We'd have to clear the stellar vicinity and the Oort cloud. 

There are a variety of smaller/simpler things also discussed, where we don't actually build a full sphere, but rather a close-in constellation of power collectors. Similar vulnerabilities, of course, but no catastrophic failures likely.

The "W" article give a brief mention to "Niven Ring" which is of course Ringworld. It's a 1AU strip around a star. Much more doable, not that wide and not subject to coriolis shear forces. It rotated, so it has gravity. There's no "roof" so you could fly up/out. Still vulnerable: remember how Ringworld had a "mountain" in one place where a large asteroid had punched through from the back?

We still aren't doing it, tho. The engineering of such a thing is beyond us. The materials are beyond us. Maybe carbon nanotubes would be the thing.

Why is the Intertubes so slow?

Well, of course it is all those others using it.

The other answer is crappy programming on the server side. And on the client side.

Apparently you need an Advanced Degree(™) to do better.

Here's what I mean:

Yes, I'm a Mac User. No, that's not the cause. Except that it is, slightly.

The above image is "Activity Monitor". You can see that the top two *busiest* users of CPU cycles are Safari and Firefox. Everything else is essentially zero, or idle. When a process is ~100%, that means it is saturating a cpu core, and can't do any more.

But those two are busy doing something, and that something makes them fairly unresponsive to what I want them to be doing. (I acknowledge that some of the problem is that while I'm typing this blog, Blogger is busy trying to help me by doing on-the-fly spelling check, which means there's a background process that is sending/receiving content to/from somewhere far away, and that ties things up a little. That help is nice, but I'd rather throttle it back--remember that I am on satellite internet now…)

What are those two up to?

Bad programming. Well, bad websites, and then bad web-broswer. Those numbers are while the browsers are "idle", too. So what are they doing?

Unfortunately, it's hard to find out because the cpu-usage reporting does not go down to the individual-lightweight-thread level, so I can't know which specific open window (URL) is causing the problem. 

But it's a near-certainty that EBAY and AMAZON are the two likeliest culprits, because they are the pages that have the never-ending-animation content. There are probably other URLs that are worse, but ones I don't visit.

Also, look at the real-mem size. Safari is 15GB?  a pig. This is the same problem that Firefox has, too, about lightweight threads that haven't been terminated and not closing file resources.

Which means that we have web-pages that aren't really 100% closed, even if I closed the window/tab. Files aren't close, and the resources that were loaded (images) are still using memory.

Some of the problem is that on this machine I'm on an old OS, Mountain Lion (10.8). Going to bump it up to Capitan (10.10) in ~3 weeks. I don't expect that is going to fix the issue.

But the problem starts with website creation work that insists on putting animation all over. I personally prefer much simpler pages that have no such thing. These animations that force me to see them are offenses of their own. 

You can dodge some of this via things like FlashBlock (Flash use to be THE WORST about this). But that only solves Flash, what about the animated GIFs? No solution I know of.

I agree that newer OS should have some better-behaving Safari in it. And newer machine would help, except that this machine is already ridiculous fast:

So there are problems in browsers: unclosed resources that are dangling, AND mediocre javascript engine. 

Apple is not guilty of these problems in Firefox, but it IS guilty of them in Safari.

All this animation needs to be halted. At least with FlashBlock I could then choose to play something or not.

What I end up doing now is watching URLs that are these criminals, and adding them to etc hosts.

THIS IS NOT TO HARD TO SOLVE, PROGRAMMERS!

[Next day: "Safari Web Content" seg-faulted and killed Safari completely. Geez this is dumb.]

----

If I quit and restart Safari or Firefox, that cpu number goes down to 10% or something like that, then is slowly creeps up again. At 100% the browser is unresponsive, so I'll be ok until I hit that again. But this is ridiculous.

Garbage on the server side causes this, and bad programming on the client/browser side makes it worse.

It's my understanding that javascript is now compiled on the fly, which didn't used to be the case, so it's at least not running slow by being interpreted still. That was never good, just easy.

---

Another issue about why Blogger is problematic: it wants to do this auto-save for you, and as I am on satellite, that fails a bit too often…and then it is stuck in a different way. It might recover in a few minutes, but it is at the same time trying to do the spelling check, so who knows?

Almost enough to make you want to go back to Lynx.

Economics lesson part 4

Product creation and pricing this time.

X coconuts per year sales - Y cost of raw materials - Z cost of labor - Q other costs = profit.

Let's reset with Herbert, Suzy and Tom.

Each has two coconuts.

We'll stick with Tom this time.

Tom knits hats. The raw material (yarn) costs one coconut for enough to make five hats.

Each hat takes one week to make, and he can sell a hat for one coconut, continuing to mean that his labor is worth one coconut/week.

At the end of five weeks Tom has made and sold five hats, and his materials cost one coconut, for a profit of four coconuts. That's X - Y = profit.

But what of his food needs? If that is one coconut per week, he's losing ground, because his expenses over five weeks were actually six coconuts (one yarn and five foods), and his income was five, meaning he's losing money.

Tom needs to work faster and make six hats, and hope that there's a sixth buyer.

OK, let's say there are LOTS of buyers. Tom can actually sell as many hats as he can make.

So can Tom make six hats in five weeks? Yes, but not because he becomes more efficient, he decides he has to work longer hours, about two more hours, but this gets it done, and now his income equals his needs.

This can continue indefinitely, as long as the cost of raw materials does not go up, and his customer demand does not go down.

In fact, if those two conditions are true, Tom can hire Suzy to make hats too,  but that is only going to work out if she makes hats at the same rate he does, otherwise HER hats aren't worth as much, and then his aren't either.

Wait, how is that true?

Tom makes six hats in five weeks, worth one coconut each.

Suzy makes FOUR hats in five weeks, but they are priced the same. So now two people are making ten hats in five weeks, and selling them to the tune of two coconuts per week. But Tom's previous sales rate was actually 20% higher. The hats are now worth less, because total production rate is down (where production rate is actually quantity divided by workers).

Suzy needs to improve or Tom has to fire her. Or achieve some other kind of efficiency or economy of scale. If he raises his sales price, that will reduce sales volume just slightly, but really not much changes.

Tom needs a knitting machine, but he lacks coconuts to buy one with. OK, let's skip that aspect, too complex. Tom's mother gives him fifty coconuts and he buys the machine. The machine can make one hat per day. Production volume is huge. Tom lets Suzy run the machine, he doesn't even MAKE hats any more. He handles the increased sales by himself. Instead of making 60 hats by himself per year, or 100 with Suzy, they now make 365 hats, and sell for 365 coconuts. This is WAY better.

The material cost of the hat hasn't changed, it's still 1/5 a unit of yarn = one hat, which means 73 coconuts per year material cost. (Actually that probably wouldn't be true, the machine probably wants a slightly different yarn, etc, but we'll skip that.) Suzy's labor cost is still one coconut per week, for a total of 125 coconuts per year operating cost (52+73), leaving 240 coconuts for Tom.  And Tom repays his mother after six months, for a net profit for the year of 190. Next year Suzy gets a raise of one coconut per month, aka 64/year. Sales are again 365, operating cost is 137, for a profit of 228. Tom is happy with this, because his final profit for the year is 176 after his own personal expenses. He was barely getting by before, but the machine ("automation") has made him rich, almost overnight.

After a couple of years the local market starts to saturate, and sales volume goes down. He has to expand his market. This will actually cost money, but it is a good investment to do so, and again his market rises to meet his manufacturing capability.

Then he discovers that he is receiving orders faster than he can fill them. What to do?

Two possibilities: (1) buy another machine. That doubles his production capacity, but could lead to market saturation sooner, again reducing sales. Or, (2), he could raise prices so that the demand drops off enough that sales orders = production capacity.

As always, the situation is more complex, because what happens when Suzy wants to get paid more? After a couple of years, Suzy decides she can buy the same machine and go into business for herself as a competitor.

At this point Suzy has to decide where to locate, else there is a local race-to-the-bottom on pricing, and Suzy is going to lose because Tom has enough coconuts reserve to ride out the price war, and she actually has debt from having to borrow to buy the machine.

So Suzy goes into business far far away, and all is good. Or she doesn't go far away, and figures out how to make a different kind of hat. That changes the competition.

But the pricing strategy is still pretty basic:

X coconuts per year sales - Y cost of raw materials - Z cost of labor - Q other costs = profit.

Pricing on a lot of things you buy is arbitrary--lots of businesses don't have too careful a price-determining method. "Charge what the market will bear" is the phrase. If there are enough customers at 100 coconuts per sales unit and you make an interesting profit, then 100 coconuts doesn't really have to reflect an actual cost.

Economics lesson part 3

How do you measure the size of the economy?

Let's start over with Herbert, Suzy, and Tom.

Each of them make something the others needs. Once a year. Let's also say they all already have two coconuts.

The only need product A/B/C once per year.

Herbert make "A", and needs a "C".

Suzy makes "B", and needs an "A".

Tom makes "C", and needs a "B".

A, B, and C each cost one coconut. Beyond that, Herbert, Suzy and Tom are completely self-sufficient.

Sales each year are one each of A, B, and C, for one coconut each, per the above list, effectively in a circle.

Three sales transactions at one coconut each, per year, means the economy is three coconuts large.

Each of the A/B/C are consumed during the year, so each person needs one again the next year. So next year's economy will also be three coconuts.

After three years Herbert decides he also needs a "B", and he has one extra coconut. Suzy makes another "B" and Herbert buys it. Now the economy has FOUR sales transactions, and the size for the year is four coconuts, a 33.3% growth. Hooray! Next year Suzy has an extra coconut, and decides she wants a "C", so she buys that from Tom. Tom now has an extra coconut, so HE buys an "A". Sales for the year are now six coconuts.

But the same number of coconuts exist, no new coconuts were created, and yet the economy has doubled in two years. Each person has the same amount of coconuts at the end of the year: two. But they each bought two things during the year, so yes, the economy doubled.

This too is a weak example, because you could then increase it so that each of the three people buy 100 million A/B/C if they could actually execute the transactions that fast, and the economy would be 100 million coconuts. And you can do this without actually even CREATING the A/B/C, just rotate around what is being sold.

Creating and then selling A/B/C is what is called "real wealth", whereas just reselling the same things over and over is just "paper wealth". (Remember that regardless of how many transactions occur, at the end of the year there are still only six coconuts…even if the economy was 100 million.)

Turning raw materials into finished goods creates real wealth.

Continuing in a given product-creation business means that you need to have enough customers to buy all you can/wish to produce per year. This includes handling the wearout/return-rate. If the potential customer population is large enough, you can grow continuously. All of which contributes to the size of the economy.

But remember that "the size of the economy" does not equal the money supply, nor the "real wealth".

Economics lesson part 2

The US economy, the world economy…really complex. No one really understands it well, except in small pieces. Anyone who says they do is lying to you, and probably has a hidden agenda.

Does it take an Advanced Degree(™) to get your head around it? Well, yeah, probably. And a bunch of separate lessons. Here's #2.

This is a tiny-scale lesson. It's going to involve analogies. They're not going to work very well, because it's hard to invent an example that works and is small enough to understand.

Let us think back to an imaginary social situation 10 thousand years ago (why? because there's essentially zero technology).

There are three actors in this scenario. We'll call them Tom, Suzy, and Herbert. Each actor has a thing they can do to participate in the economy. They are completely different things.

Tom makes furniture.

Suzy makes clothing.

Herbert cooks meals.

Remember that this is 10 thousand years ago. Tom doesn't even have a knife, maybe a bit of stone he can scrape tree branches with. But he is able to make a table, of sorts, chairs of sorts, and bed frames that are above ground to avoid there being too many bugs. Furniture consists of tree branches that are tied together using vines. It's all very Tarzan.

Suzy makes clothing from animal skins. They're not high fashion, but provide some insulation.

Herbert grills meat over a fire. No knives, no skillet or pots. Primitive.

How much furniture do they need? Well, three beds, three chairs, one table. Let's say it takes Tom one week to make a chair, two weeks to make a bed, and three weeks to make a table. Once made, the items last one year before falling apart (because the vines don't last).

Suzy's clothing takes one week per person.

Herbert cooks every day.

Where do the raw materials come from? Tom's come from the forest. Suzy's come from the animals the Herbert uses for food. Herbert has to go hunting once a week to acquire a week's worth of food.

This started out sounding trivial, but as we try to make it more accurate, it gets more complex.

So the economy goes like this: Herbert cooks, Suzy makes clothing, Tom makes furniture. For All. There's no "money", there's no "barter". It's too small.

On day one, there's no food, no clothing, no furniture. Tom goes to the forest for sticks, Herbert goes hunting. At the end of the day, Tom has enough sticks to make everything, and Herbert has a week's worth of food. Tomorrow Suzy will have animal skin for one person's clothing.

After three weeks, Suzy has made clothing for everyone. Tom has made three chairs. Herbert is still doing the cooking.

How things are working so far. Well, they sleep on the ground still, but they do have chairs. They have clothes, and food.

But now, animal skins will start to pile up because they have enough clothing for the first year. We'll ignore this for now.

Herbert's work is a just-in-time process. He hunts for deer, he cooks them. 

But Suzy runs out of work after three weeks. Tom keeps chugging and after 12 weeks there are three beds, three chairs, and one table. That's probably not enough tables, so Tom makes another table just for Herbert's cooking usage, and a table for Suzy to use while making clothing. But after three weeks Suzy already has nothing to do. She is not longer contributing to the economy. What does she do? After several months, Tom is in the same situation. 

After six months, Herbert gets tired of being the only worker. Plus, deer are getting scarce, because they run away when Herbert appears. 

So they capture some deer, Tom makes a "pen" and the deer go in there and can't get out. (Ok, analogy is breaking down now, deer can jump decently, and aren't docile enough to have gotten caught in the first place.) Deer take management, but they are a self-renewing resource. As long as they only need to eat 52 deer per year, and they have at least that many in captivity, food is a self-sustaining activity, and now Herbert doesn't have to go hunting for meat. He can go pick fruit instead. Tom and Suzy have to manage the deer, which means making sure they have enough food, water, etc. AND, captive prey animals means predators discover them. Tom has to provide security.

This is a collectivist operation. Now everyone is busy enough.

Until Maria shows up. What can Maria do to join in? Maria needs a chair, a bed, and a table. What is Maria going to create in the economy? Maria is going to make grass huts. No one had shelter before.

It takes 3 months to make a grass hut, so it will take her a year to make one hut each for four people. Beds go in the huts. Each hut needs another chair, and another table. Tom is busy with furniture again, but he's also providing security for the deer, so it takes him a lot longer to get more chairs made.

All these primitive creations have a short lifetime, because the materials and craftsmanship are crude. So let's say that one hut out of four is destroyed every six months. Maria will be busy half the time make huts. During the winter they discover that the animal-skin "clothing" they've worn isn't sufficient, so Suzy makes new heavier stuff. OK, now everyone has twice as much clothing. 

There's no money here yet, because the economy isn't complex enough, but it's headed there. There aren't any "managers" yet either.

And everyone in the economy needs everyone else's services, albeit not all the time. And they are dependent on the wear-out rate.

OK, this example is already getting complex.

Let's change one aspect. Suppose it takes Maria four months to build a hut. Now there's trouble, because she can't build four in a year, but one out of four collapses every year. So at the end of her first year there's a good chance that instead of 3 huts there are two. In year two she has to build two huts to fill original demand plus first-year wearout, in addition to the next one that is going to collapse. She's losing ground.

So next Roger shows up. He makes jewelry, at one week per item. Well, he wants all the same things everyone else has, which mostly works, except that Maria is only just barely keeping up. And Roger doesn't want to wait a year for his hut.

The wearout problem is getting difficult. In addition, Herbert is starting to have trouble feeding everyone enough.

Yeah, the economy, and the society are going to start to break down at this point.

Roger wants his hut NOW. We'll ignore the possibility of violence in here, and argue that Roger offers Maria something extra to build his hut first. OK, now the money question approaches. How do we value peoples' work properly, in order for demand to cause a change in construction priority because Roger is "willing to pay more"?

What happens when Maria figures out to how to make a fancier hut, but it takes longer? What if Maria runs out of customers (i.e., no population growth one year) and makes no new ones? Or does she just keep on making them anyway, figuring that "if she builds it they will come"? If she makes more, that means that Roger can just arrive and walk into a hut. OK, Tom was bored and made extra furniture too, the hut already has a bed, table, and chair. What is Roger going to contribute to the economy?

Problems arise. Alternatively, Tom doesn't furnish the hut in advance, but he has some extra inventory. Roger can have a table, but Tom doesn't want jewelry, so he can't barter with Tom for it. But Maria wants a jewelry but can't barter with Roger for a jewelry because he only needs a little bit to get a bed, and her sales quantum is four months work of work whereas his is one week.

So let's say that the get together and conclude they need a bartering abstraction, using coconuts. One coconut equals one week of work. To initialize, they gather one coconut each. (We'll assume for the moment that no one cheats and goes out in the dark to collet more coconuts down by the beach.)

One coconut won't buy a bed, but Roger can, after two weeks, trade two jewelrys for two coconuts, and can then trade three coconuts for a bed. He makes one more jewelry, and trades with Suzy for clothing. At this point, Roger has no more customers wanting another jewelry.

But everyone needs to eat, and Herbert now has to get paid for the food he makes. One coconut per week is good, he says, and he can cook for six. So at the end of week one, they all pay a coconut, and that means Herbert earns five coconuts. But he has a hut, and furniture, and clothing, what does he need to spend coconuts on? At the end of the second week people are starving, and have to figure out how to prepare their own food, because they have no coconuts to pay Herbert with. Maybe at this point Herbert has to drop his price, or the others have to raise theirs. 

And here we are at the supply and demand balance. Herbert's product has a constant demand ("inelastic" if you prefer). Furniture is an occasional demand. Clothing likewise. Food, though…you need it every day.

Edward comes along and he can do the food thing too. And he's willing to charge less than Herbert. Herbert's price has to come down, at least to the point that there's balance, because once Edward is maximum busy, Herbert takes the overflow. But Edward has customers getting angry he can't do more, and he raises his price a little, because this will drive off enough marginal business that there's balance. Herbert still takes the slack.

And one day Herbert discovers black pepper. Suddenly everyone wants it, and wants to buy from Herbert again. HE can't keep up with demand, and raises HIS prices to drive off marginal business, and those customers are back to Edward.

But at this point Edward and Herbert are not competing on price. Not completely. Herbert has a better product, and it costs more. Herbert has all the business he wants. In fact, more than he wants, so he decides to raise his price further, and then only work six days. He still cooks for himself on Sunday. Some folks have to save a little bit out of each meal and eat leftovers on Sunday, because altho Edward can pick up some slack, he can't feed everyone even one day during the week.

This is all about balance. Supply, demand, pricing. All about balance.

Until Walter shows up, and he can cook more food than Herbert AND Edward, because he's got a Dutch Oven, and his cost is therefore less. Herbert and Edward are out of business, caused by automation. Well, OK, maybe Herbert is not, because he has black pepper. But the folks who bought from Edward now buy from Walter. So Edward is guaranteed out of business. Herbert probably loses some, maybe he has to lower his price, or go back to working all seven days…

Complex, no? And we don't even have babies in the mix yet. That's automated low-speed creation of new customers.

The economy is always in flux, because there are new people created, and old ones die out (the wearout factor applies to humans as well). Technological changes = automation improvements, and that causes job loss. Edward is going to have to figure out something else to do. Or maybe he goes to work for Walter.

Edward invents doors for huts. He can make one door per week, one coconut's worth of work. But he thinks a door is worth TWO coconuts. A door means that your hut can be closed off to critters wandering in, so it's really useful, and now Edward is earning twice as much as other folks. But there's a limit to demand--huts only need one door. Maria is still building huts, and she contracts with Edward to make a door for her every time she makes a hut.

Then Edward invents the window. Whoa! Whole new product. Same customers, but a window is priced at one coconut. Everyone wants a window, so some other prices start to go up, in order that people make enough profit to buy a window.

Everyone's needs can be meet by earning the equivalent of 52 coconuts/year for food, and about ten more coconuts/year for the other stuff. Herbert is earning around 100 coconuts, so they start to pile up, because he has nothing he can spend them on. With a fixed money supply, very rapidly Herbert has all the coconuts, and the economy collapses. So Herbert has to spend them, else his customers either come and steal all his coconuts, or worse. Herbert has to find something else to buy. A fixed money supply is not good (this is part of why the "gold standard" is a disaster at some point dependent on the overall size of the economy--economy big enough and the gold supply is constant means the gold price-equivalent goes up, and the inevitable "bubble-burst" will cause a bank run and collapse).

(A lousy alternative: people can go down to the beach and collect more coconuts, and thus enrich themselves, but if it's too easy, that is going to devalue the coconuts--if they're too easy to get then prices will go up, causing an inflation spiral and economic collapse. ("I went down tot he beach this morning and gathered five coconuts; I'll pay TWO for that clothing now" -- Suzy likes this, but now there's a bidding war for her product, thus the inflationary spiral.)

Aaaauuuggghhh! It's complex. I guess you DO need an Advanced Degree(™). 

TV/Electronics tech advances

15 years ago or thereabouts I had simple cell phone, then I had a phone and a Palm Pilot, then a phone, a pilot and an iPod.

I remember saying to someone at work that what I *really* wanted was the unification of all three, so that I was only carrying one gadget. Three was too many.

That did eventually happen, with the IPhone. For reasons, I didn't get into that level of smart phone right away, not until 2010, and I started with an Android, because I thought I was going to do a programming project for it (that never happened, and eventually I hated the device--Android at that time was stinky). But I did love the success of only having one device.

The problem with this is that the Pilot was better at one particular thing I needed to do, and adequate at the remainder, and I STILL cannot do that one thing equally well since having to give it up. This really bites, and I could damn sure solve it if I could program the iPhone in my preferred language (Java, which Apple doesn't allow). I'm not going back to android.

-----

Where is this going?

Why hasn't the television world unified all those devices along with the obvious expansions that should happen?

What is it I want? I want a single unit, so I don't have cables all over. I want that unit to do the cable/satellite interface (i.e., channel tuning, DVR, channel guide, etc), I want it to play a DVD/blu-ray, I'd like it to do all the online things that Apple TV does.

And I want to use voice control.

I don't want to spend a pile of time flipping through a hard-to-read channel guide. I'd like the screen to be touch-sensitive. I want to be able to say "play channel 24", "what's on TCM now?", "record this movie", "open the dvd tray"

Why isn't this the default of new TVs already? There's nothing new there that involves R&D, just a coordinated integration spec. You can imagine it being just slightly configurable, inasmuch as I need to be able to replace the "cable" interface sub-unit with a satellite equivalent. And I need to upgrade from DVD to blu-ray at some point. (OK, I can play a blu-ray through the xbox, but that's outside the voice-control, and many people don't have xboxes. And no reason the xbox couldn't have an external-peripheral interface that let me still have voice-control (which wouldn't have to be extra-complex), although as I think on it, that might only really have to be "power on xbox", "power off", and a couple other things. I wouldn't really want to use the voice to replace the xbox controller handheld.

What do you think? Have I missed something else that should be included?

You'd think this was already done, but it's not. ChromeCast uses your phone as the primary device, but I sure don't want that. I'm ok with it as the "remote", but not as the streaming source. The TV still has to do the heavy lifting, regardless of whether your phone is the remote or not. (and if it is, I should be able to talk to Siri, which accomplishes the voice control?)

Why couldn't my XBox be the unit with all the smarts? Well, it'd need a 2T hard disk, or allow an external one somehow, or a local-network storage (

What about Alexa? and FireTV? OK, apparently you can now get an Alexa TV. That sounds good, but it doesn't work with my satellite box.

Years ago you could get a PCI card that was a tv tuner, and then software that would use it. I had one, that was really nice, until the channels I wanted most to record (TCM) went digital and encrypted.

At the moment, it looks like the Alexa-TV/Echo-Dot combo is the closest. And available as a 65-inch 4K. But no cable/satellite. These devices are also, of course, intended to be used by folks with real broadband internet, not folks with satellite.

It shouldn't take an Advanced Degree(™) to figure this out.

Economics lessons, part 1

It shouldn't take an Advanced Degree(™) in Economics to figure out how the economy works, but it sure seems like it does.

"We're going to bring back coal" -- what a ludicrous thing to say. Does anyone think this is going to happen ? Why? It's not. Coal is nearly dead. And you don't want it to come back. Those are nasty dangerous jobs, with illness and reduced life expectancy for everyone involved or nearby. Mine collapse, black lung disease, polluted drinking water. Where coal is burned, polluted air. No good.

Why is coal going away?

Basic lesson: old business models are replaced by new ones that are more efficient in some way. Old tools are replaced by new ones. You could call this economic Darwinism if you're aren't afraid of evolution. If you are, well, you're going to get rolled under by those who aren't, and no amount of stupid from the current federal government/administration will stop it.


Cases in point:

1) Horses. up to 1900, personal transportation was either on foot or on horse. Neither goes very far or very fast, so your travel is very limited. Well, okay, since 1840 there WERE places you could go on a train. But not to the grocery store.

A horse is more efficient that walking, if for no other reason than something besides YOU is doing the work, and the cargo load is greater.

But what's worse is the pollution aspect of horses. Imagine that you are in 1890 New York City. Four million people live there. There are a LOT of horses. Horses poop everywhere. It's probably less bad in the winter than the summer, but it's still bad. And you can't turn it off. (Imagine if the car you drove in the 1950s, 5mpg and high-pollution, could never have the engine turned off…not then an improvement over a horse.) Horses drop dead in the streets; then they rot: flies and disease. You can't hook a horse on the back of a tow-truck and take it to the dealer for repair.

So the revolution here is when an automobile becomes possible, and priced right, it eliminates horses as transportation almost overnight.

(Remember a good Henry Ford quote here: "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said 'better horses'" because most people's vision extends only just beyond their front door. Well, he gave us a better horse, and a better business model along the way. (Yes, I know Ford didn't really say that.))


2) Shopping. about the time I was born, your standard shopping experience was to go to a department store, let's call it "Sears", and you could talk to someone who actually had expertise/knowledge about how to do something and what tools to use, and they could sell you those tools.

Now, well, Sears is slowly going out of business. With the increased competition that Sears faced, and the willingness of stores to compete on price, the American consumer reached a point where purchase price was the critical aspect. That resulted in a need to cut costs at Sears (and everywhere else), and one of the costs that got cut was labor. Reduced pay because of cheaper workers means reduced purchase prices which means customers don't go elsewhere. It also means that workers are less knowledgeable. Turning those workers into part-timers to avoid paying benefits also keeps costs low, but you still only get the lesser workers. And those workers are the ones that interact with customers. Retail customers don't like trying to deal with dumb employees, but it's not like that's not true everywhere else too. And because aggregately we have decide that cost beats all, this was inevitable.

When you are forced to compete on price, rather than product or service quality, you get a race to the bottom. That always results in a shakeout where some close, some are bought, and a couple limp along getting slowly worse and worse.

As Sears has gone downhill, so have others, putting people out of work.

What's the business model that accelerates this? Well, Sears itself started it back in the 1800s. Remember the "wish book" ? Yeah, that was it, combined with Wells Fargo wagons (remember the song from The Music Man?). The model: send a catalog to a customer, let the customer place a written order with a paper check, box items and put them onto a Wells Fargo Wagon, wagon delivers to customer. Customer doesn't have to visit a store, in fact CAN'T because it's too far away. The process isn't fast, but it means you have access to thousands, millions of customers who don't live in town, or live on the other SIDE of town. Remember that transportation back then was horseback.

Back in the day, you could even buy a house, as a kit, from Sears.

So what was that? It was a new and more efficient business model. Enabled because of reasonably efficient postal service, banking service, and transportation service. Those things were, of course, still fairly limited, but still a giant leap over 100 years before.


3) Amazon. Now the equivalent model is Amazon.com + Paypal + FedEx/UPS. Instead of a turnaround time of weeks, it's now days, and perhaps only hours if you live near an Amazon distribution center. So those Sears jobs are turning into Amazon jobs. At least you don't have to interact with dumb employees or customers.


A theoretically perfect market is like this: you as customer have access to the advertising service, which has access to the payment service, and the delivery service, and all of that can turn around with minutes to hours. That sounds like today, with one exception: in a perfect market ALL possible goods and services are available for purchase at all times. I want to buy an "X" and the advertising service shows me who has that for sale. Our current market is imperfect in that some things are not for sale when you want to buy and go looking, but it's awfully damn close.

The old business model of "brick-and-mortar" stores is just about dead. Yes, there are still a lot of stores around. But that's going away. an old business model that is no longer efficient enough. One of the other reasons why the newer model is more efficient is that if you buy pants that don't fit you can just send them back and order a different size. Soon as you know you wear 34x32 pants, that's the only size you order. No need to try them on at at store.


4) 3D printing. This is going to replace a bunch of manufacturing flavors, over time. You will do it yourself at home. It will be more efficient to own a printer, and order a design, which it then makes for you. There is ZERO shipping cost, beyond raw-material refills. Eventually this is the Star Trek synthesizer. Make-on-demand. No need for a store, because there's no need for inventory.


5) Delivery via drones. Amazon is working this. It will have limited range, but be more efficient for small things, and nearly fully automated: this will reduce vehicle traffic at ground level. Just wait until the air is full of these things, tho.


Back to why coal can't come back…it's an old business model. It worked at the time because it was very low-tech, and because of that there weren't any competitors. You could dig it out of the ground with a pickaxe and haul it home with a horse-cart. But it was still nasty. At large scale, it was also dangerous. Oil is high-tech, but there aren't any mine collapses or explosions. (well, you get oil spills, those are nasty too.)

The coal competitors involve a bit more advanced technology, in varying amounts. Oil/etc require special transportation, special processing, special handling at your house. Natural gas is similar. Electricity puts the most dangerous parts far from your house, and you can do a lot more with it. Solar can bring power generation right back to your house again, and the fuel source is free, but the tech to create solar panels isn't trivial.

Here, too, tho, coal itself displaced a predecessor: trees. Much higher energy density, same transportation methods. Problem: non-renewable. You can grow trees in your yard.

Coal is nasty from the get-go. Oils is too. NatGas not so much. Solar is nasty only at manufacturing time (I imagine that disposal time will be too, but I haven't heard about much of that going on, the wear out age of solar panels is still probably well into the future).

But very little of that involves human work any more. And that is why coal is going away.

Automation.

All of these advances are the result of automation. Improved tech is a kind of automation. Both are better business models.

Which all result in job losers. Job winners, too, but the jobs are different, and the people are too. 50 years ago cars were still largely hand-made. Assembly lines, yes, but human workers. Now they are almost fully automated. Competition and therefore cost pressures forced this to be true. You want to buy a human-made car? Who still does that? Rolls Royce. Bentley. Morgan. Ferrari. Lamborghini. What's the sales price? Yeah: quarter-mil+

(look here: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Automobile.html for a fascinating explanation)

Coal production, such as it still is here in the US, is not guys in mines with pickaxes. It's giant earth-moving trucks scraping a mountain flat out west. The mining jobs are gone. Automation has killed them. Not coming back. Waiting for them to come back because some knucklehead presidential candidate says they will is foolish in the extreme.

Automation has already killed a lot of jobs here in the US. Cost pressures moved a lot of jobs outside the US, and automation will kill them too.

Winners and losers. Economic Darwinism. Survival of the adaptable.

Inevitable. And scary.

----

An afterthought or two:

1) the coming "AI" revolution is already changing things, and that will accelerate. I don't know how or where. I used to work in that area, when it was still primitive. It was great fun, but inevitably came the pullback of "this is still too hard".

2) electric cars. If I live another 30 years I will see the end of the internal-combustion-engine-driven car. Gasoline will go away. What is currently a gas station hasn't been solely a gas station for years. It's a convenience store where one product is gasoline. Don't plan on keeping your current car forever. Or your antique.

3) self-driving cars and the Uber/Lyft equivalents will eliminate private ownership of vehicles for the most part. Self-driving trucks are in the near future (test vehicles are already in use). This will be one disruptive use of AI. Taxis are doomed; well, the ones driven by humans are. Uber service with self-driving cars will be the new thing--you won't even own a car.

4) There are plenty of historical occasions where the upheaval of new tech replacing old tech causes social unrest and rioting/vandalism.

Solar Power at the home

Hyde University campus has two buildings. One of them was designed and built by me, aka "the barn", and the other is the house.

Where HU is located it's readily possible to have a 30 inch snowfall. I think two years ago we have one that was ~24. Fortunately, it's rare, and doesn't last long (the 24 was only a few days long before melting). The barn has a poured concrete floor on cinderblock supports (because the ground is sloped there). While the foundation isn't precisely flat, it's close. There's about a half-inch variation from the corners to the side-centers. (I didn't know that at pour time, only discovered it as I was installing wall framing sections and not getting the precise alignment I wanted.)

So when I designed the barn, I requested roof trusses capable of handling that 30 inches of snow. The roof is corrugated sheet metal sections on one-inch purlins every 24 inches.

Part of the reason for that was to handle the snow, but another part is that I would like to put about 5KW of solar on the roof. Solar has some weight, but not like the snow. But it's permanent weight, so the trusses are "storage trusses", which means I can also shove boards up there on the inside, and I have done that; mostly it's 2x4 and 2x6, altho my 50/60-year-old cherry one-by is up there too.

So this is all fine. I have a price quote on installing solar, but it's higher than I want, so I haven't done it yet. The quote has, in my opinion, too much battery and not enough panel. I want to be able to start my table saw (Delta Unisaw, 1HP motor, this looks about the same vintage as mine)

while a sawdust collector runs. There's a power-drain-surge while an electric motor starts up, so I want to only start them one at a time, but that's easy enough, and you want to do the collector first. (That said, my "collector" might just be a squirrel-cage blower to vent sawdust out the side wall; I have one, but it's sitting on the floor right now.)

This is a typical two-bag collector.

If you look at Google Images for "sawdust collector" you can see a lot of home-brew variations involving a shop-vac. Shop-vac is usually fairly low-power.

A Squirrel-cage is like this (except that mine is WAY bigger):

I'd just bolt that square opening to a hole I'd cut in the exterior wall, mount a water-blocking cover/shield over it and blow dust out. That'd work fine. It's not like I'm going to be cutting so much sawdust that there'd be a mound of it, it'd just be a dusting, and there's often enough breeze to dissipate that anyway.


So where is this all leading?

The HU house doesn't have the same kind of roof trusses. They are simple triangles with a center-post, no diagonal struts. That makes it easy to climb in around them, but I now have the feeling that I can't do solar on the house, which I *especially* wanted to do, with the barn as a test-drive.

This is a bummer. The house has A LOT of roof, because it's a single-floor ranch, and solar would be great.

I don't know if this has a solution. The trusses over the garage are 2x6, so they are stronger than 2x4 trusses, where the barn has 2x4 trusses with mid-supports.

It might be going to take an Advanced Degree I don't have to figure this one out.