Chicago Boyz

Ralph Nader announced his latest run for the presidency, amid press hoopla. I doubt that he’ll have a decisive effect this time. The reason? Everybody knows, in retrospect, that Nader’s participation in 2000 killed Gore’s chances. Given the intensity of anti-Bush feeling among the Democratic Left, Democratic voters are unlikely to chance a repeat of the 2000 experience (just as many Republicans and independents who had voted for Perot in 1992 were unreceptive to conservative and libertarian third-party candidates in 2000).

Not everyone learns from his mistakes, but most people do if the consequences are important enough. There’s no reason to expect Democratic voters to ignore history and plunge off the same cliff twice.

UPDATE: Jim Miller makes a different and more sophisticated argument that reaches the same conclusion about Nader as I did. However, Miller goes further and argues that Nader may not even have been decisive in 2000.

This morning he’s got a headline about the death of the president’s dog but nothing about a Jerusalem terror bombing that killed and wounded many people. Is Drudge taking the day off or are terror attacks in Israel so common as no longer to be news?

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

— William Faulkner

I got an email a few days ago from my friend Dave. He’s a Lefty who lives in England, but he supported the war, as he supported the Bosnian intervention, since he thinks it is the liberal thing to do to depose horrible dictators. An old-fashioned view on the Left these days, but one which provides some common ground for us. He is nonetheless, pretty anti-Bush. He sent me this anti-Bush screed, which makes fairly tired arguments and incorrect statements, including this one: “This doctrine originally declared that the United States has the right to attack a hostile power that possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

My response was about as follows:

No. Wrong. “We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.” See National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

Note: “before”. How much before? As much as we deem necessary for our security. Other than this inexcusable and easily checked error, I thought the article was trivial. Bottom line, Saddam had way less shit than we thought. This is big news. This is actually a good thing, and we could only find it out by conquering him. He was so stupid he lied about it and fucked around until we conquered him. If he’d have fessed up he’d be at his desk now, and his sons would be raping somebody. He apparently either didn’t know better himself or figured his power rested on people thinking he had the stuff. Maybe he’ll write his memoirs and we’ll find out. Does it mean Bush lied? I don’t think so. Does this mean going into Iraq was wrong? I don’t think so. Does this all mean Kerry gets elected? Maybe. This issue will help him with some moderate voters. We’ll see what Jane Voter thinks in November. If Iraq is more or less quiet and the economy has not tanked, Bush will almost certainly win, on historical trends. But, anything can happen. A Kerry/Clinton ticket is likely. This would lead to lots of excitement and a large turnout of women voters who might put the Donk ticket over the top. This is an interesting year. Carl Rove has said from day one the next election will be very close, as close as the last one, and I think he is right. I did not watch the Bush interview. I read the transcript. It was weak. If he keeps on like that, he can lose. We’ll see how he does. His biggest danger may be alienated righties who are mad about the spending binge and his attempted immigration reform. There is real anger out there. But, Nixon irritated the same type of people in 1972 with his pre-election spending tsunami, and he won in a landslide. And running against your core, assuming there is no third party challenge, to reach into the center, is usually effective.

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As programming jobs get progressively simplified, and more people learn how to do them, will all of our skilled high-tech labor end up working at Wal-Mart?

Well, no. First of all, our skilled high-tech labor won’t really be through with programming until Wal-Mart’s run themselves – checkout would be done by detecting RF tags as they leave the store, and charging it to a credit card you swipe on your shopping cart, which has a bag dispenser so you put your items into the bags as you take them down from the shelves, while the shelves get stocked by automated wheeled gizmos that read that same tag and know where everything goes. The Indian programmers will be helping with that, too, of course; us programmers aren’t the only ones their programmers will be competing against.

And don’t think plumbers and other tradesmen are safe either, nor anyone that thinks they add value by being on-site. Given enough bandwidth and the right software, you can remote-control a humanoid robot to do everything from the other side of the planet from fixing someone’s toilet to waving your hands and drawing on a whiteboard at a meeting.

Second, there’s plenty more work to be done by people that can use their brains and solve problems. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the sky. Air traffic is depressingly thin; most of our traffic crawls along the ground on little narrow strips and keeps getting caught in innumerable bottlenecks. The Solar System is completely deserted, as is everything beyond. The aging process is still just as lethal as it’s ever been. Portable computers are still kind of clunky, since you have to either have a big, bulky keyboard or input letters one at a time through an awkward phonepad-style interface; gizmos to read brainwaves are still in the prototype stages. While we’re on the subject of brainwaves, a reliable lie detector would be most helpful.

Oh, and those monster particle accelerators? How about little tiny ones instead? I’m sure we could find all sorts of profitable uses for those.

And that’s just the beginning. Down the road, we’ll be looking into things like breaking Einstein’s speed limit and seeing if there’s something interesting we can do with dark matter. We’ll work on gravity generators; couple those with brainwave interfaces, and everyone will be able to move things and build things just by thinking about it.

The point is, there’s thousands of years worth of work for all of us to do at the very least. Maybe millions of years. Maybe there isn’t a limit at all. If there is, we can’t even see it from here. It’s extremely short-sighted to say that we’re all going to be working at Wal-Mart because foreigners have learned how to program – if programming is the ultimate in human achievement, then the human race isn’t what I thought it was.

Whether foreigners learn to program or not, there’s so much other work to do that the most important questions we should be asking ourselves is:

1. What barriers can we remove to make it easier to turn a profit chipping away at that multi-millenia backlog of advancement that stands between our pathetic Earthbound civilization and our future as a truly advanced species? The computer industry offers a clue; it’s the closest to pure laissez-faire that we’ve seen in quite some time, and it’s had unparalleled success in pushing performance and quality up and prices down in its offerings.

2. How do we best streamline the process of retraining for the new tasks as the old ones become commoditized? Universities are not especially efficient at this task; we need something better, for everyone from the high-end talent on down.

3. How do we ensure that we continue enticing the world’s best talent to our shores? Lots of economic and personal liberty would be my suggestion.