Over at Webguild I blogged about Google Sky, the new Astronomy mapping tool from Google that has come out before the much anticipated Microsoft World Wide Telescope project which is not available yet.
I’ll be doing most of my technology and business blogging over at Webguild.org from now on, with more personal stuff here at Joe Duck.
Taxpayers, many in Congress, and all three presidential hopefuls are all ranting against the stupidity of earmarking in congress – the process AKA porkbarrelling where congress people insert unnecessary projects into spending bills and/or other legislation such that we taxpayers pay for projects that are usually wasteful and sometimes scandalous. Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” is the current poster child, which was allocating tens of millions to build a bridge that would service a tiny Alaska village of something like a few dozen people.
Yes, of course these projects are stupid, but to focus on them to the exclusion of the _real_ waste in Government spending is nonsense. It’s like complaining that the president makes $400,000 a year when he would work for less. This earmark money is *chump change* in a federal budget of trillions, where the things we should focus on are how to reduce the insanity of spending too much on wasteful social services projects (insert pretty much any one here) and most importantly our military budget, which is incomprehensibly large and incomprehensibly foolhardy:
Military $550,000,000,000. Over half the world’s military spending is ours, and much of it is unnecessary. Note the current Air Force tanker fleet fiasco where on the one hand Democrats argue this staggering contract should go to more expensive Boeing which as a US company would preserve more jobs, while Republicans argue who knows what about this. The right answer is scale this back – significantly – because US security no longer depends on massive capitalized military juggernaut. If there is a *single* lesson we should learn from Iraq it is that the USA cannot use massive military superiority to keep the peace. In fact Iraq may demonstrate the opposite – our massive superiority is one of the factors that insurgents use against us, and is a major reason that the Iraq government has little incentive to get their own military providing better security for the people of Iraq.
But even if our trillions bring security to Iraq it has been a fools bargain. The same spending for infrastructure improvements in USA and around the world would have changed the global landscape in a significant way – certainly more than even the most optimistic scenario for Iraq independence.
Contrary to some of the nonsense spouted by modern “conservatives” and many hawkish Democrats as well, the founders of the USA believed in low military spending, very weak federal control, and in very cautious global dealings. Until we return to those sensibilities we risk everything with the continued reckless military (and social service) spending spree.
A recent report by Compete.com made Fubar.com look like the fastest growing website since the dawn of man. Blogs were breathlessly reporting Fubar’s astounding growth rate of over 3 million percent.
However thanks to some sleuthing over at Webguild, Fubar’s astounding success appears to be in large part due to changing the name of the site such that previous site traffic was not reflected in the Compete.com report. In fact it now appears that Fubar’s astounding growth may be *entirely* due to the name change which sent them down briefly to extremely low levels of traffic last year at this time.
Apparently Fubar has undergone two site name changes and redirections, and thus the Fubar site had almost no traffic last year because it had only existed by that name for a very short time.
* Probably Mozilo was just a high powered opportunistic guy and probably was pretty much within the law with his trades and pay, however he must have known things were poised to melt down to some degree.
* Our congressional system is failing to produce people who are worthy of ruling the amazing American empire. I don’t think there is much corruption but these guys sure are uninspired. The congress-as-corrupt view is a “naivety of the skeptic” idea that is not based on a study of the money flow, personalities, and history of public servants who for the most part are bright, helpful people. However they are mostly lacking in the key skill sets required for innovation and smart reform. In short: American politics selects for the wrong skill sets. To wit:
* Republicans can’t see past Ayn Rand’s ass. They understand the virtues of capitalism, but simply refuse to focus any attention on the key topic of how our brilliant capitalisic experiment has *failed* in many ways to deliver enough products to the neediest folks and how many capitalists are mostly focused on the creation of opportunistic business structures that are exploitable by the clever and the wealthy to the detriment of the greater society. .
* Democratic congresspeople are overwhelmed by math and economics. They concentrate on people, “good vs bad”, “rich vs poor”. * People want to find bad guys rather than find the obvious. In the case of mortgages the system as a whole incentified unwise practicies. Reminds one of the savings and loan debacle although I think government regulations (loan guarantees) were clearly at fault with S&Ls were the mortgage crisis cannot be blamed mostly on the government.
* Is there a simple legal remedy for all the CEO pay and stock manipulation issues? I propose a “Captains go down with the ship” law. If a company you founded fails you lose everything you made from that company except some modest monthly stipend. This would incentify stability over pump and dump strategies. I don’t think it would inhibit founding quality companies. What unintended consequences would this law bring to the business landscape?
TechCrunch is reporting that Digg is likely to get sold soon – probably to Google and probably for about $200,000,000. Good for Kevin Rose and the VC folks, but I’d like to know from the key Diggers if they’ll feel any loyalty to the new owners or to the project. Also, do they think they are owed more than … zero… on this deal?
Social sites do offer their participants something of value = participation and platform – but are there “losers” in these equations?
How do the high level participants who have put in thousands of hours and made the site what it is feel about these cash outs?
I’m wondering how often distribution of equity during the *liquidity* event properly reflects the building of equity. Entrepreneurial capitalism correctly asssumes you need to highly reward risk to get folks to take business risks and innovate. But as Mike Arrington has noted entrepreneurs have a value system that appears to actually assign a high value the thrills and chills of the experience. Thus to get optimal production and innovation it appears to me we need to pay “deeper” on these big internet deals. In the case of a YouTube, DIGG, or Facebook I’d find a way to reward those down the food chain in some proportion to their contribution to the enterprise. It’s possible that these rewards would be small enough that I’m wrong to think this matters much in the overall equation of optimizing the capitalist experience, but even a modest reward would brand the mega deals as “fairer” than simply a situation where fat cats effectively exploit self-motivated worker bees who have generated the user content and social networking that the market values so highly right now.
SEED magazine reports on the Blue Brain, which IMHO is the most likely project to attain machine-based self consciousness. This in turn will change everything completely and usher in a new era that will bring more change to humanity than any previous event in history.
“The column has been built and it runs,” Markram says. “Now we just have to scale it up.” Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. “If we build this brain right, it will do everything,” Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? “When I say everything, I mean everything,” he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.
As I’ve noted many times before I believe that machine consciousness will bring profound changes to humanity which will be hugely positive. Now, we allocate resources very ineffectively. Conscious computers will be able to do vastly superior resource allocations and staggering design improvements. These alone will likely resolve all global resource issues such as energy, food, and water. It’s not as clear if the AI age will bring a resolution to problems that have as a a core cause our human defects. Health, Education should benefit enormously but some of the human thinking that creates war, intolerance, crime and suicide will persist and it will resist the improvements.
However the abundance that the AI age will bring to the world should allow us to manage many of these human problems much more effectively.
Markram: “What is holding us back now are the computers.”
Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data – about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers.
Energy consumption is another huge problem …. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion …. But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.
This 10 year estimate is even more optimistic than Ray Kurzweil’s but in the same league. Although most of the computer programmers I know strongly reject this view, I think it’s also possible that AI could emerge with very limited human intervention from the massive parallel processing environments such as Google’s search server farm of hundreds of thousands of connected machines. Consciousness and human intelligence, if it is as overrated as I believe, is best seen as something of a byproduct of simpler, evolutionarily derived mental processes and other mental activities. As the number of interconnections in machines approaches the number we have in our brains (again we bump into a 10-20 year time frame), and machines are programmed with current routines to do the same mental tasks we do, I’ll be very surprised if machine consciousness will require more than a modest level of additional tweaking of the type they have already started at Blue Brain.
So, I’m not buying my laptop a birthday cake quite yet, but remain cautiously optimistic about the end of the world as we know it.
TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington is on my favorite show tonight talking about the future of technology along with Chris Anderson of Wired. (not to be confused with TED conference coordinator Chris Anderson).
Ha – just got a Tweet from Mike that he hasn’t even seen himself yet since it’s not on in CA yet.
Chris Anderson:
On sharing his next book before it is even out: “Open Source” the idea, leading to a flood of more ideas, which in turn enrich everybody. “Google doesn’t show up on your credit card bill”.
Anderson’s provocative points are about how “free” is becoming a key concept in the digital economy, and may trump
Where does the some $360,000,000 that Craigslist saves the economy go? Back to us, says Chris. Hey thanks for the fish Craig Newmark!
Commodity information “needs to be free” vs unique information which may need to be expensive.
Radiohead as using digital economics for what it’s good at, and stimulate demand for the scarce thing – seeing the band in person, endorsements, and T shirts.
You cannot erase yourself from the web. Shifting from privacy to self-promotion.
Anderson: Yes, MS will get Yahoo.
Google as algorithms, Yahoo as a people business. Google and the “machines first” culture are winning. Microsoft, a pre-web culture, believes in software. Their success kept them from being hungry, but now they are.
Tech Bubble of 2000 was different. Softer landing this time?
Facebook: We’ll see narrowing of social networks (a GREAT point!). NING model may prevail. e.g. Chris’ own www.DIYdrones.com What is the right level of granularity?
Chris: “Everything I believe is written on the back of an iPhone”:
Designed in California, Made in China
Mike Arrington
Big issues:
* Net neutrality.
* China. Sites are filtered and slowed rather than outright deleted from the network. Companies are not happy with the policies, but reluctant to leave 187,000,000 internet users to the competition.
* Mobile space. Fundamentals are changing such that USA can compete now with other countries in the mobile space.
* Identity theft. US has done too little to fight this. Even Sen John McCain had his ID stolen a few years back.
* Education, computers, and internet access for schools. Government weak in this area, but also true that computers are often an educational distraction rather than enhancement.
* Economic implications: TV ads suck (great point Mike!), so internet ad share will increase. However also we’ll see TV and internet increasingly converge.
Mike’s online “about 100% of the time I’m awake”. TechCrunch startup database is one key focus. “We’re not worth 100MM”. (for more on TC valuation issues see the excellent Yahoo Tech TV interview with Mike).
Microsoft won’t back down and be embarrassed by the Yahoo deal. MS failed in search and fell off the online map. All the major search engines are roughly equivalent (great point Mike!). But Google has lots of publishers and lots of action at their own pages.
Amazon – transitioning to a services model. Renting services in the cloud is eliminating yet another high cost business barrier by providing high level infrastructure at low cost.
Startups and entrepreneurs: Modern day pirates. Gamblers. They value risk cf risk averse folks. YouTube’s 1.65 Billion sale as a surprise.
Can Facebook have their “Google Moment”, which for Google was figuring out pay per click advertising. Facebook as more innovative than Myspace. Can they invent something to generate a LOT of revenue? If yes, another Google is born.
Facebook’s friend based advertising model may be illegal because it’s implying an endorsement without the consent of the person.
BBC as a great site to review the condition of the world. Blogs as taking page views from the ‘big guys’. Comments as important. Blogs following Silicon Valley as a “trainwreck”, but blogs in general on the rise.
Is privacy an illusion? Harder to get email address than SSN (hmmm – I don’t think so…).
Obama fan. Tech potentially will make our lives much better. 3rd world education as exciting. Worrying about Virtual Reality. What happens when people want to spend all their time in VR?
Update: Apparently, no …. !
Jason Calacanis is a clever guy, but I like to call people out when they make wild predictions that they themselves probably don’t believe.
Here, Jason predicts Google will have 90% search share in a year. I’m happy to see if he really believes his prediction and offered up this wager over at his blog:
If Google’s search market share is at or above 90% on March 6, 2009 I’ll buy you a bottle of MACALLAN 25. If below 90% you buy me a bottle.
Now, a bottle of scotch may not sound like much of a wager, but this Macallan 25 runs about $500 per bottle.
In fact I boldly started out posting him that I’d bet a whole case, but luckily checked the price and the post got stuck in his spam controls so I could revise it. I’m confident I’m right, but I guess I’m not quite 12 bottles confident! Of course if that’s the only bet Jason will take then bring on the Macallan Calacanian wager!
CNET really seems to have misread what Jeff Clavier – one of my favorite VC blogging guys – said to them recently about startups and income. Rafe at CNET implied that Jeff was suggesting that even for a startup making a respectable 300k monthly income was noise and was distracting them from the big money which they could only obtain through big financing. When I read that I was really surprised, because 1) it was clearly wrong to suggest a company pulling in 3.6 million annually should necessarily be worrying a lot about VC money and 2) it did not sound at all like Jeff Clavier, who has a great reputation for good reason – he’s happy to share a lot of helpful information and he recognizes that in some circumstances there is no reason for VC funding or VC guidance.
So, Jeff’s reply to the story made more sense. He said he was talking about *one* particular company in what he seemed to think was an off the record conversation. That made a lot more sense, and it sounds like CNET owes him an apology?
Joe Duck 