Victim Blaming

 I was glad to see someone take up the issues wrt sexuality in the Atlanta shooting last week.  But sadly the author seems to merely be shifting the blame once again.

I made this comment:

Author says that Asian Women are distinctly hypersexualized.  This borders on blaming the victims for their choice of occupation, and blaming their career for even existing.

The author properly heaps blame on those who blame men's sexuality and violence on women.  But what about characterizing the false and wrongful diagnosis of sex addiction as a form of hate and sexism?   Visiting massage parlors is normal sexual activity involving an ancient profession, not a soul destroying addiction that needs to be cured.

"Emergency" electricity and gas bills

This 3/18 article caught the PUC chair, who subsequently resigned on pressure from the governor, privately boasting to "investors" that CPS Energy has really big gas bills, a "fairly large" emergency electric bill here said to be $300 million, but lots of money to pay.  It also mentions how ERCOT claims they kept the electricity price at the maximum rate about 300 times the normal rate for 2 days after most power had been restored on Wednesday 2/17 because they wanted to prevent "loss of life."  Still no discussion of the even higher CPS natural gas bill which other articles say could be $850 million.  CPS had to buy natural gas at emergency rates to keep electrical generators running when instruments at the coal and nuclear plants froze up.

I got my CPS energy bill for the period starting 2/16 and it is very low...no additional charges--and I used less electricity than usual.  CPS has borrowed extra money ($500 million) to prevent passing on large bills to ratepayers in the short term.  However, because CPS owned by the City--aka "us"--unless the bills are reduced by the State or Courts, we will eventually pay them off over many years.  $1 billion in storm charges for CPS as a whole would mean about $1000 liability per ratepayer, not as bad as some in Texas face (elsewhere bills have been up to $16,000 for a small home) but still not good.

The best solution to prevent these kinds of problems in future--emergency gouging by Texas Electricity generators--would be to give up the insane and corrupt idea of a Texas State Electricity Grid and connect Texas to the Eastern and Western US Grids (like El Paso, which did not lose power).  Texas generators would then also have to meet federal standards.  This idea is almost never talked about, but one poll says 57% of Texans would go for it.  Governor Abbot has said Texans would rather freeze to death and pay super high rates than accept federal regulation.  I beg to differ.

https://www.tpr.org/news/2021-03-12/cps-energy-in-san-antonio-sues-ercot-for-illegal-prices-during-winter-storm

Bayesian Inference

For twenty years, as a scientific computer programmer, I've written programs based on ideas related to Bayesian Inference.  But I've never had an intuitive understand of it until now.  I never had an intuitive exemplar which illustrated the components and how they work together.

Now I have one.  It related to how a friend is so vocal every year right around the beginning of Daylight Saving Time (DST).  He posts editorial after editorial, cartoon after cartoon, and shoots down any alternative other than totally abolishing DST. 

With only a moment's reflection, I realized abolishing DST would have substantial negative impact on a wide variety of human social, recreational, educational, entertainment, and religious activities...all the things that people may choose to do among other-than-immediate-family, in short, social activities.

Restaurants, bars, gyms, concerts, lectures, museums, zoos, resorts, professional athletics, golf courses, after-school-activies, church activities would suffer, and the downstream affected industries such as wedding services, childbirth and care services, and marriage counselors, among many others.  Both the people who enjoy these things and the people who provide the services.

This is probably why, though it seems counterintuitive (and/or evil) to many people, the general direction of proposed changes at the Federal and State levels seems to be toward Permanent DST.   The vast majority of proposed bills have been to that effect.  At the Federal level, all the bills I know of would give states the ability to choose either permanent Standard OR Daylight Saving time, and make exceptions.  Here's a updated source:

https://www.sco.tt/time/

My friend always shoots that down, complaining that the cold winter mornings would be deadly, especially among northern states.  Well that's exactly why per-state control makes sense, they could decide based on such factors.  Southern states might...depending on how extreme climate evolves...prefer the longer evenings year round anyway.  Florida has been most consistently pushing for year round DST.

I think my idea of Daylight Saving Seconds is the best idea of all...and it eliminates the cold winter morning issue without causing any more than a few seconds shift every day.

But anyway, I find it interesting (and not surprising actually) that my friend's campaign to abolish DST seems to have never grasped the negative effect such a change would have on social activities.  If I were to launch the kind of ad hominem attack I all too often have towards this worthy fellow, I might wrongly shout out.

"Well, this just shows how anti-social you are."

But clearly, that would not be a valid inference from just this one strongly felt concern.  Many people oppose DST--reportedly a plurality, including some who would consider themselves very concerned about the extra human lives lost because of Spring Forward day.  That's a social issue, right?  This issue isn't completely resolved by the reduction in human lives lost on Fall Back day compared to baseline, because of having the added hour.  The effects on these two days almost but not completely cancel each other out.  (I would point out that the process also affects many other days, for good or ill, and that life is about more than just avoiding death.)  And possibly any number of concerns, which might not necessarily be described as anti-social.

But suppose for a moment we could assume that nearly all people who ARE anti-social, oppose DST because they don't like to see other people enjoying social activities, and they don't care about its benefits.  Then, what would know about my friend's being anti-social or not based on his also being opposed to DST?

Ahah, this is just the arrangement to deploy Bayesian Inference!  Otherwise, you can't get that answer easily from logic or math.  It's not a proper syllogism, as I would alway know in my conscience if shouting out a flame like the above.

We start from the Prior Probability, P(H), which is the probability of someone being anti-social.  There are a lot of estimates of anti-social disorder, from 0.3% to 3.3%.  I've frequently referred to this group of people, from hardened violent felons to bankers and CEO's and US Presidents, as "2%."  But sadly I believe it may be larger than that, so I'll go with 3%.  This is called the prior probability because it's the best we can guess without knowing the ultimate fact here (that my friend opposes DST), and knowing nothing else about him either in this example.  I won't talk about whether I have other priors or not.  I can't think of any offhand at this moment, and I'm not trying either.  The wonderful thing about Bayesian Inference is that you can follow the same process over and over to add all your priors together, which once again is not possible in elementary logic or math because of faulty syllogism or disjoint sets.

We multiply that by the Posterior Probability, P(E | H), which in this problem is the probability of someone being opposed to DST given the fact (or theory) that they are anti-social?  I've just postulated that this probability is effectively 1, at least for the sake of this argument, all anti-social people oppose DST, they have no reason to support and every reason to oppose, to want other people suffer lack of their precious social activities.  That might not be true, actually, but at least it's a coherent theory.  If we had actual evidence, from surveys or whatever, we could plug it in here.  You could even plug in less than 0.5, Bayesian Inference still does it's best whatever the number (or function) is.

Finally, we divide by Model Evidence, P(H).  This is the probability of being opposed to DST.  That's been measured in polls as 45% in favor of ending the clock switching, and 37% keeping the current system.  The popularity of other alternatives like Permanent DST is hard to tell because most people haven't thought about them much, which might actually be a problem with this claimed model evidence as well.  If you told people they might lose church and school activities, they might change their minds, etc.  Finally, the remaining number are not reported and we can assume they don't fit well into this analysis.  So we'll have to go with 45/(45+37) as the current model evidence, though I personally think if people understood ALL the ramifications, they wouldn't be so easily persuaded to end the current system, and there are better options IMO.

So now the fill out the Bayesian Inference equation:

P(H | E) = P(E | H) * P(E) / P(H)

In this case:

Probability of a person being anti-social, given that we only know they oppose DST is equal to

Probability of being opposed to DST given that one is anti-social, times the probability of being anti-social, and divided by the probability of opposing DST.

It still blows my mind that works.

Here the proposed numbers are:  1*.03/(45/(45+37))

Answer: 0.055%

So this one bit of information, that person opposes DST, tells us that they're about twice as likely to be anti-social as the general population, but it's still not a large number.

Now, if surveys are wrong about the popularity of DST, in the direction more people preferring DST if they actually understand all the implications, then that above estimation goes up!  As it should, because the remaining pool of people is more and more relatively populated by the anti-social.  Or, if more people would be opposed to DST, then the number goes down.  (Thinking about the pools of people involved is how Bayesian Analysis actually works.)

Likewise, and obviously, if the number of anti-social in the general population goes up or down, then the result does so in exactly the same proportion.

Finally, if the estimation of the preference of the anti-social towards eliminating DST goes down, then so does the result in exactly the same proportion.

These all make perfect sense, still the derivation of the equation seems unintuitive to me.  I'm hoping it will come to me soon.  The "proof" of Bayes Theorem that's easiest to follow is algebraic, but seeing that hasn't helped my intuition.

Aha, here is the intuitive Venn Diagram explanation I've been looking for!

It is easy to see that P(A|B) is P(AB)/P(B)...the intersection of A and B viewed from the universe of B.

Also note that P(AB) = P(A|B)P(B), deriving the universal view from the B view.

Also that P(B|A) is P(AB)/P(A), the intersection of A and B viewed from the universe of A.

And now we also have P(AB) = P(B|A)P(A).

Now the two ways of looking at the intersection yield the same actual result.

P(AB) = P(A|B)P(B) = P(B|A)P(A)

Bayes just rearranged the two term equalities to

P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B)

Daylight Saving Seconds

 Some people complain endlessly about DST.  Others relish the extra summer evening daylight generally for social activities.  (So it's easy to guess what is preferred by the anti-social.)

I have the best idea.  Rather than switching on DST in one big thump, which does create issues, what we need is Daylight Seconds.

With Daylight Seconds, clocks adjust forward a few seconds a day, starting once average sunrise time achieves no later than 7AM, and keeping it no earlier than 7AM, until June 21, when about 2 hours of daylight savings have been achieved by pushing it all to the end of the day, then switching in reverse to cancel out until the sunrise time has again reached 7AM, then letting it rise from there.

I presume of course that all clocks are computerized and set themselves automatically via RF or internet.  All mine are, at least the ones I bother with.  They may all be that in 100 years, if not 50 years.  I think dumb clocks, that don't set themselves automatically via a trusted source (on RF or Internet) are stupid, and most people are just way behind on this now.

What I'm proposing would never force sunrise to be any later than 7am, but never allow it to be any earlier.  For most of the year, 7am would sunrise.  Isn't it far more natural to get up every day based on Sunrise rather than midnight?  Certainly that's the way human life would have been before clocks and time keeping. 

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism

Tony Greenstein has a great new essay related to the use of the faulty IHRA definition of antisemitism in UK. 

Debunking the Calculation Problem

 That State Socialist countries are inevitably doomed to failure by the Calculation Problem was proposed by FA Hayek.  It is utter nonsense.

1) There are very few problems for which a suitable mathematics cannot be found, and this is not one of them.  There are many suitable approaches, starting from systems of differential equations, gaussian optimzation, bayesian inference, and so on, which are actually used in Corporate and (non-Communist) government planning.  If nothing else, markets themselves can be modeled...the perfect kind we'd like to see, instead of the actual often failing (or non-existent) kind we have in Real Capitalist Economies.

As I often joke, Capitalist Economies are centrally planned by computers also, most infamously by trading algorithms whose very intent is social destruction through advancement of inequality.  And they are succeeding in that mission.

2) In it's own terms, and in the fullest context, the economic history of the Soviet Union was in fact remarkably successful for many decades.  It's failures had little or nothing to do with the Calculation Problem.

In fact, it's failures had almost everything to do with an intense and unremitting full spectrum War of Annihilation which was launched against it by all non-Communist countries from the very outset.  And the ultimate so-called Collapse was in fact the result of a successful Color Revolution, which was only the last and successful attempt in a long line.  Wall Street Banker and Spy Allen Dulles had worked on that project for a lifetime, including during WWII, when USSR was fighting on the Allied side (while being attacked by all the money Wall Street could swing at the nazi regime).

Imperialists are probably aware that (likely too long after they are gone) they will be rightfully blamed for everything.

3) The Soviet Union did suffer from something many might confuse with a Calculation Problem.  And that was the Collaboration Problem.  Hierarchies of human control (including data acquisition) rarely function as one might hope, even with some degree of Democracy (whose very existence was never even hinted at by the truthfully told mostly non- and anti-democratic West).  Collaborative decision making is still a barely emerging technology, especially in established really existing republics and institutions where it barely exists.

It is precisely in this area that systems of control based on Property, Accumulation of More Wealth by the Wealthy, and Private Tyrannies based on ownership of the Means of Production have an unassailable advantage.

When everyone is born with a collar, they are more easily chained.  Those born with lesser or no Property are born into Wage Slavery.  Which unlike Serfdom or Slavery has little or no guarantees, leading to lifetimes of pointless fear and alienation under the feet of giants--the not so invisible feet.

We should not consider this acceptable, even if it worked, which it hasn't very well or for very long, and it looks like the end of everything is soon following, mostly from Capitalism's many failures and the growth of ever more reactionary anti-social philosophies it has engendered.  Even if it could persist forever, it will continue to consistently fail to advance the most important outcome: fully developed human lives within a matrix of biological sustainability.

A good society cannot emerge from a system that requires, engenders, and fuels anti-social aspirations.  Adam Smith never said it could either, but he failed in his attempts to revise that, as have all of his successors.  Sadly, the Visible Foot will always defeat the Invisible Hand in developing human society and wealth.

Debunking Myths about Communism

Bourgeois economist Brad DeLong is often interesting to read and presents well nuanced opinions atop a mountain of well selected reads I often pass on to appropriate friends.  But, especially in his older writings, he has very little nuance when denouncing Communism!  Sometimes calling himself a Rosa Luxemburg socialist, he often pulls up the most slanted and distorted "facts" and interpretations originating from the most infamously slanted and inaccurate Cold Warring sources to denounce socialist history in Russia following Kerensky, aka the USSR, and also Cuba, and China.  In one passage I remember, he denounced economic progress in Cuba since the Cuban revolution on the basis of TV's per Capita.  A more nuanced observer might relate quality of life to the relative absence of TV's I was thinking at the time.

So I've often and still have a deeply felt need to write a suitable defense of Central Planning and other alleged economical errors of really existing (or existed) Communist Regimes.  I've read and thought a lot about things like the alleged Calculation Problem and consider it mostly one of the highest piles of bunk I've ever seen.  I'm very very tired of the practice of some friends of mine of continually tossing bits of Hayekian agitprop at me, as if I hadn't already heard it ten million times before and am still trying to find enough time to find the outermost thread on which to start pulling a ball of yarn which is mostly hot air.

But meanwhile, just as I was once again thinking of doing this, I discovered a treasure trove of Communist Myth Debunking right here.

And here's a video from the Gravel Institute, showing how and why USA, the richest country in the history of the world, has worse outcomes on every social metric than many other countries.  Including shorter lifespans than in Cuba.  It's incomplete, however, in not mentioning the high cost of maintaining our full-spectrum-dominance empire, aka Defense, which does no good for most US citizens.

Close Guantanamo

We must do everything possible to close Guantanamo Prison.  The whole concept...of putting the ultimate war prisoners beyond the Constitution is un-Constitutional.  The 40 remaining prisoners Guantanamo can easily released or moved to domestic facilities.  They should have their cases heard and their universal rights respected.  Most held at Guantanamo were never charged with a crime, and were held because bounty hunters.  Meanwhile, it's still costing nearly half a billion to run a singular advertisement against human decency and rule of law, and for foreign jihadi recruitment.