Easy, right?

That's when we learned that paint changes color if you put it on an "imperfect smooth" stucco versus the original home's bumpy stucco. With the bumps, the color becomes subtle and textured and beautiful, albeit different, in every light. On our home it turned canary yellow. When darkened slightly to get the harsh out, it turned green. On the fifth try, we got something that didn't look so much like a practical joke on the neighbors and decided to go with it. Five tries isn't so bad, right?

Tragically, our house also has an interior, and apparently it's a tradition to paint those walls too. I have been informed that many of our room colors need to be different from the others for reasons that my boybrain cannot comprehend. And maybe we need some accent walls. And it all has to match the baseboards, counter tops, cabinets, floors, drapes, area rugs, and furniture. Okay, that seems doable, sort of, until you toss in a few more
variables:

1.    The paint has to be zero VOC (little or no off-gassing). It's my own requirement. That severely limits choices, and faux glazing is impossible.
2.    We don't have furniture picked out. Or drapes. Or rugs.
3.    We have only tiny non-representative samples of counter tops.
4.    The paint color changes dramatically in every type of light.
5.    The paint color changes dramatically depending on what it is near.
6.    Every family member has a different opinion.

Does it sound impossible yet? Wait, there's more.

The city doesn't allow builders to hook up to both gas and electricity prior to government approval to move in. You have to pick one or the other, to keep you from moving in before the home is deemed safe and ready. We needed the gas hooked up first, to test some other systems, so that means we will never see the interior walls in any light approximating our future normal light until after the walls are painted.

It gets better.

When you see a color on a tiny swatch, it might look tan, for example. But when you paint it on a wall it turns yellow or green or red. And not just a little. The wall color will have almost no correlation to the sample you picked. It is pure randomness.

In a few minutes I will call the paint store for my 25th paint sample. (Not an exaggeration.) Some of the choices are colors that are clearly grey on the sample but have names like "Flaming Orange." WTF????

So it's a bit like the game Battleship, where you drop random depth charges on the color chart and see if you can narrow down a zone where the good color is hiding. Except in this case the person you are playing against is both blind and lying.

All I know is that if we find even one color that doesn't look like a jaundiced albino rat when applied to the wall, I'll be lobbying hard to paint all the rooms that color and buy only black furniture, black drapes, and black rugs. I hear black goes with everything. Wish me luck.

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The new Dilbert Store is a good example of both the long tail and mass customization. You can search for any Dilbert comic ever made, find the one that speaks to your own bizarre sensibilities, and in a few days a package arrives at your door with that comic on a coffee cup, or water bottle, whatever. This solved a big problem for us because if you asked a hundred people what was their favorite Dilbert comic, you'd get about hundred different answers. It isn't practical for us to guess which comics would be most popular.

Now a similar thing is happening with price and co-branding. We're starting a test of corporate discounts at The Dilbert store so that you and your co-workers can, if you play your cards right, pay 20% less than the cubeless masses, in return for some exposure within your company.

If the test works out, we'll expand it to include co-branded products and other company focused offers. For example, suppose your company wants to internally promote network security, or disaster recovery, or safety, or some other message. The appropriate department could order Dilbert goods that include your company logo and the on-topic Dilbert comic, all for 20% off. If you play your cards right, that means "free shirt" for you.

If you want to get in on the 20% off test, send an email to dilbert@ordering.com with "corporate discount program" in the subject.  Include the contact info of the person at your company that handles this sort of thing.
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X and Y might represent, for example, the special cheese hiding in the fridge, or the "good pillow" hiding in the bedroom, or the yellow folder hiding in the kitchen. There are a variety of reasons I will not succeed in finding the desired item. About 25% of the time the item is not in the room, or pile, or container where it should be. Another 25% of the time the item is inadequately described, as in "the light brown socks in the drawer with the other brown socks, but not camel colored or reddish brown, and not the old ones."

But the biggest reason for my seek-and-find failures can be attributed to Transdimensional Materialization Phenomena (TMP). This involves items not being where they belong when I look for them, but tunneling through a wormhole and materializing right where they belong when my wife looks in the same place two minutes later. Apparently this phenomenon is triggered by just the right coupling of exasperation and sarcasm.

As a stepdad, I often get the find-and-drive request. This one is worse than most because the penalty for getting the wrong item involves driving across town a second time. And this brings me to my story. It began with a request for a specific bathing suit that was allegedly in a particular drawer, and needed to be across town within an hour for a 12-year old girl's birthday party.

Allow me to digress and explain that getting the wrong bathing suit for a 12-year old girl's pool party might be the very worst mistake one can make.
I had a full day planned, and I decided I wasn't going to make the trip twice. This time, damn it, I was going to get it right, no matter what it took.

The task was made harder by not really listening to the description of the bathing suit in the first place. I recalled that it had more than one color, and there was something about brown, pink, and blue. And it was in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Allegedly.

I soon found the only candidate that fit the description, or so I thought.
But my spider sense told me something was wrong. Maybe there was an accessory that I would later learn was something I should "obviously" bring along. Or maybe, as is often the case, what looks brown to me is actually blue or even green, and I have the wrong item entirely.

But this time I was determined. I weighed my options. I decided to take the entire drawer out of the dresser and load it into the back of the minivan.
Later, when it became clear that I had the wrong item, I could push the button to open the back hatch of the minivan and say, "Maybe the item you want is in the drawer." I planned to be all smug about it.

But would one drawer be enough? The other drawers had ancillary and peripheral items that might have been in the "obvious" category for use with a swimming suit. Does a swim suit imply that one also needs a particular t-shirt to wear over it? I was in way over my head.

I figured I could fit the contents of the entire dresser in the minivan. All I had to do was take out one drawer at a time, walk each one down three flights of stairs to the garage, load the minivan, then reverse the process after my triumphant delivery.

The only catch is that I couldn't get the drawers out of the dresser. They have a latch thingy, but apparently it was only designed for people who have both fingers and screwdrivers as parts of their hands. I pushed and pulled and jiggled and cursed. Nothing.

So I called the 12-year old and asked for a complete verification of the item I was about to bring. This wouldn't indemnify me from the inevitable error I was about to make, but at least it would look like a good effort. So I described the item I had selected, and was informed that although it matched all the colors of the target item, flowers are not the same things as stripes, so it was not the right one. I was sent to look harder.

I unloaded the drawer on the bed, spread out all of the items and spoke aloud as I eliminated all the not-the-right-bathing-suit items. As I neared completion of this task, and it was clear I would not be finding the desired item, I was overwhelmed with a sense of dread. History was consistent.
Failure was inevitable.

Then my phone rang. The 12-year old voice said, "Maybe it's in the closet in the purple thing." And.it.was. I verified the target item by bead straps, color, size, pattern, and location. I did it!

Like a champion, I drove across town with my successfully found item tucked in a used Safeway bag. As I pulled up to the house, the 12-year-old's future potential stepmom was outside. I handed her the bag and she asked, "Do you want to wait until I make sure this is the right item?"

I rolled up my window and gunned the minivan toward freedom. I turned off my cell phone and hid for the rest of the day. That's a little thing I like to call success.




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Now you shop on the Internet, and you can buy from anywhere on the planet.
The options for any particular purchase approach infinity, or so it seems.
Google is nearly worthless when shopping for items that don't involve technology. It is as if the Internet has become a dense forest where your desired purchases can easily hide.

Advertising is broken too, because there are too many products battling for too little consumer attention. So ads can't hope to close the can't-find-what-I-want gap.

The standard shopping model needs to be reversed. Instead of the shopper acting as hunter, and the product hiding as prey, you should be able to describe in your own words what sort of thing you are looking for, and the vendors should use those footprints to hunt you down and make their pitch.

For example, let's say you're looking for new patio furniture. The words you might use to describe your needs would be useless for Google. You might say, for example, "I want something that goes with a Mediterranean home. It will be sitting on stained concrete that is sort of amber colored. It needs to be easy to clean because the birds will be all over it. And I'm on a budget."
Your description would be broadcast to all patio furniture makers, and those who believe they have good solutions could contact you, preferably by leaving comments on the web page where you posted your needs. You could easily ignore any robotic spam responses and consider only the personalized responses that include pictures.

You can imagine this service as a web site. The consumer goes to the section that best fits his needs (furniture, cars, computers, etc.) and describes what he wants, in his own words. Vendors could set key word alerts via e-mail or text for any products in their general category. Once they read the customer's needs online, they have the option of posting their solution, publicly, which gives other vendors and consumers an opportunity to offer counterpoints.

I assume this service already exists in some weaker form.
www.answers.yahoo.com is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't broadcast your needs to vendors. My prediction is that Broadcast Shopping (as I just decided to name it) will become the normal way to shop.

(Note: I am not using this blog post to solicit suggestions for patio furniture and toasters. Those were just examples.)



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Choice two: You get $5 million, but no one else gets anything.

As a bonus, the genie offers to erase your memory of having made the choice, so guilt will never be a factor. You will simply wake up the next day in the new situation.

Which option do you choose to maximize your personal happiness?

This might seem like an easy choice. You take the $10 million and your friends will get $20 million each. Everyone wins. Unfortunately, I don't think humans are wired that way. Happiness is based on the direction your life is heading (better or worse), and what you have compared to what you think you should have.

If you take the genie's $10 million option, over time you will start feeling like the poorest person you know, since everyone else has $20 million apiece. You will wonder what you did in a past life to deserve this shabby treatment from the universe. The ugly truth about humans is that your happiness might be maximized by screwing everyone you know while screwing yourself half as much.

If you buy this premise, it has interesting implications for personal relationships. For example, it means that one way to cheer up an unhappy friend is to put yourself in a bad situation, thus resetting the reference point. The splinter in your finger only makes you unhappy when you're not talking to someone who has a railroad spike through his head.


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Before any war, a lot of people start hating defense companies more than usual. And that's the best time to own defense stocks.

During Microsoft's long run to dominance, the company was widely hated. It also would have been a good stock to own for most of that time. Now it feels as if the white hot hatred of Microsoft has reached some sort of plateau, and so has the stock.

We generally hate companies when we think they have too much power. And that correlates with profits. So suppose you took a survey of people's opinions of various industries today, then did another survey every six months, and tracked the anger levels. If you invested in any industry where the average public hatred was increasing, and sold stock when the average hatred started to level off, would you prosper?

Can you think of any industry where the public's hatred was increasing while the companies' stock prices were stagnate or dropping?

Remember, it's not the absolute amount of hatred that matters, just the direction of the intensity. There is plenty of hatred toward cigarette companies, but thanks to the success of anti-smoking laws, that hatred has leveled off. So according to my hypothesis, this wouldn't be a good time to own cigarette stocks.

What do you think?

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 I saw in the news today that The United States is going to withdraw most of its military forces from Afghanistan. Okay, the news didn't say that in so many words. But they did say, "The cat is on the roof," which means the same thing.

Allow me to explain "The cat is on the roof" to those of you who are unfamiliar with the joke. It goes like this: Bob goes on vacation. He asks his moron brother to take care of his cat. After a few days on vacation, Bob calls to say hi. The moron brother blurts out "Your cat is dead."

Bob is beside himself with grief. And he chastises his moron brother for breaking the news to him in such an abrupt manner. The moron brother asks how he could have done it better.

Bob explains "Well, for example, you could have told me the cat was on the roof. The next time we talked, you could say the Fire Department is trying to get him down. The next time, you could say the cat fell during the rescue and was in the veterinarian hospital. The next time I called, you could say the cat succumbed to his injuries and passed away. That way I would be prepared for the bad news."

The moron brother says he understands. Then he adds, "Oh, by the way. Mom is on the roof."

With that in mind, I saw in the news that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is warning Karzai to clean up the corruption in the Afghan government or else Great Britain will withdraw its forces.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gEBlJJibsvBmFQK5iQvBXDIIJRQAD9BQ3BQG0

That's the "cat is on the roof," as clear as I have ever seen it. Obviously Afghanistan isn't going to get rid of corruption. That gives Great Britain an honorable reason for withdrawing, which I assume they have already decided to do. Once that happens, Obama will be forced by public opinion to do the same, leaving behind some terrorist-hunting forces only.

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Suppose a genie appeared and offered to give you regular access to all the things you desire. Let's say that in your case it includes golfing, exotic traveling, eating ice cream, and having a great career. The genie's only catch is that he gets to control your schedule.

Your first reaction might be to take the deal, since all of the activities on the menu are better than the things you do now. And maybe having a genie do all of your scheduling would be convenient.

But if you're smart, you'll decline the offer. No matter how fun or fulfilling are the activities on your list, you can only enjoy them if you have control over WHEN and HOW LONG you do each one. On day one of the genie's deal, you might find that he has allocated nine hours for eating ice cream, and twelve minutes for golf. And your tee time is midnight, after you work twelve hours.

I'm exaggerating the genie's cruelty, but in general it's true that doing the thing you want at the time when you are most in the mood for it makes a gigantic difference in your overall happiness. If you eat when you're hungry, nap when you're sleepy, and work when you're feeling productive, life can be pretty great.

So let's test this concept. Tell me in the comments how much flexibility you have over your own schedule then rate your own happiness. Use a scale of 1-10, as in:

Schedule Flexibility: 8

Happiness: 7

 

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Yesterday I blogged that beauty is nothing more than our recognition of functions that are related to current or past survival. Many of you chimed in with counterexamples and arguments. I will address them here.

Q. Music is beautiful. Where's the survival benefit there? 

 A. Even the most famous musicians are generally only enjoyed by 10% of the population. Someone mentioned Miles Davis. I can't stand listening to him. But every person reading this blog would agree that a lush forest is beautiful. So while music in general is universally enjoyed, any given song does not register as beautiful to the public at large. 

Q. What about art?

A. We speak of "appreciating" art, and I think that's a good word. Most art wouldn't be described as beautiful. The Mona Lisa, for example, is skillfully done, but the subject is homely. If other people hadn't told you it was worth a fortune, you wouldn't hang it in your living room. And like music, there is no universal standard for beauty in art.

But there's still a correlation between art and survival impulses. It's probably no coincidence that so much art includes food, babies, and well-fed women during childbearing years.

Q. You can concoct an argument that ANYTHING has a survival benefit.

A. What's the survival benefit of a spider or a human turd? If you break down either of them for their color and form, you'd find the elements that would be considered beauty in some other context. But since spiders and turds have no survival benefit, they don't appear beautiful to the public at large.

Q. What about an ocean? Or a sunset?

A. The ocean is full of food. That one is easy. And if you are an early human living outdoors, sunset and sunrise are probably the best times for hunting and gathering. Midday is too hot. After dark, you're more prey than predator.

Q. Why does a Corvette or a Porsche look more beautiful than an Edsel?

A. Fast cars have more function than slow ones. Most of the beautiful ones are fast. You need speed to catch prey and avoid predators.

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If you're a guy, you know the joy of walking through a hardware store and seeing all of the well-made tools. To me, a good power drill looks like art. It's literally beautiful. And of course tools have survival utility. So far, my hypothesis holds.

Little kids are drawn to playing with toy trucks and toy bulldozers. Kids wouldn't describe those toys as beautiful, but those items must be visually attractive in their own way. Obviously construction equipment represents tools that are highly useful, and help humans survive. Even toddlers realize it.

Speaking of toddlers, adults find babies to be attractive almost automatically, without regard to what the little creatures look like. Clearly the adult response to babies has survival utility.

There are plenty of areas open for interpretation under this hypothesis. For example, a parking lot is arguably more useful than a forest, depending on the context, but the forest registers as being more beautiful. Perhaps that is because we're not that far evolved from hunters and gatherers, for whom a forest means survival and a parking lot means no food.

In general, scenery that has a lot of variety in color and shapes looks more beautiful than something with less variety. That makes sense from a survival standpoint too, since eating a variety of foods is healthier than eating just one type. And it would be easier to hide in an environment with more variety. Variety seems highly correlated with basic survival.

I thought a lot about beauty as function during the design of our new house. At every step, it seemed as if we had to choose between function and some "standard" sense of beauty. In time, I came to see this as a false choice. The most functional choices register as beauty when you put them all together.

The best example of that idea, which I have mentioned before, is the formal living room. In a traditional home, the formal living room is somewhere near the front door, and it has no function but to look beautiful. To me this sort of room always looks hideous no matter how well the drapes match the furniture, because the space has no utility. In my view, beauty is a garage with some extra space on one end for a ping pong table. I might be stretching the "survival" concept to include recreation, but there's no point in surviving if you're going to be unhappy.

Another example of beauty as function is the layout of our ground floor. It has a circular flow, so you can head down the hallway, turn right twice, and end up where you started. You can never be cornered. The feeling you get in the space is one of beauty, but it probably stems from some sort of survival instinct. And you get that feeling  before the paint, baseboards, furniture, floors, or drapes are in place. The beauty seems to come directly from some primal sense of how the space flows. At least that's how it feels to me.

When you coordinate colors, for your outfit or your living space, you try to avoid introducing a color that doesn't match at least one other color that is already there. To do otherwise makes the outcome less beautiful. Here again, I think the survival instinct is informing our sense of beauty. As an early humanoid, I would think that any time a color appeared in your view that was inconsistent with the surroundings, that meant something was wrong, and perhaps dangerous.

That's my hypothesis: Beauty is nothing more than our recognition of functions that are related to current or past survival.

Okay, I'm sure other people have the same theory. But I'm the first one to write about it in The Dilbert Blog.
]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 It's hard to be a teenager and get away with anything these days. Parents can determine from the phone bill who the teens have texted and when. Parents can even read the teen's text messages if the phone is left unattended. Parents can see e-mail messages, check what web sites have been visited, and stalk their kids via Facebook.

In some cases the parents can already track their kids via GPS devices in cars and phones. You know that trend will increase.

Yes, teens have countermeasures and workarounds. But that's a lot of effort, and it's hard to hide all the electronic clues of, for example, an unapproved association. Even if you hide all of your own electronic footprints, you could still pop up on someone else's Facebook page.

This got me thinking about privacy issues in general. Most people reflexively believe privacy is a good thing, and a lack of privacy is a bad thing. But what if privacy creates more problems than it solves?

Let's say you have a secret carnal desire for broccoli. In our current world, where privacy is still somewhat attainable, you hide your dirty little broccoli secret. If anyone were to find out, you'd be ostracized and mocked. So you carry your little secret around like a bag of shame, sneaking trips to the grocery store to get a fix.

Now imagine a world where no one has any privacy and your inappropriate desire for broccoli becomes common knowledge. Suddenly all the other broccoli lovers know you are one of them. You start hanging out together, sharing your broccoli stories. You make new friends. You are understood. It's a relief in many ways.

In a world with no privacy, no one will seem like a freak because so many people will appear to be one type of deviant or another. In that world, the biggest losers would be the people who have totally uninteresting flaws and passions. They would seem boring.

Like it or not, that world is probably coming.]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Recently I was thinking about the typical pathway to democracy. It seems to me the usual pattern goes something like this:

1. A dictator rules a bunch of uneducated idiots.
2. The dictator realizes he needs smarter citizens to compete with other countries.
3. The dictator educates his citizens.
4. The educated citizens get rid of the dictator.
5. Democracy flourishes.

In Afghanistan, the literacy rate is about 26% in cities, and 9% in outlying areas. Not surprisingly, the recent Afghan presidential election didn't work out so well. I have a feeling that version 2.0 won't be a spectacular success either.

What Afghanistan needs is a dictator who values education for his own benefit, thus setting the stage for his own demise and the emergence of democracy. The Taliban aren't the right kind of dictators because they eschew education.

But I wonder if education is the one area in which the Taliban might be willing to negotiate, assuming there are moderates among them, in return for power. Suppose we agree to withdraw our military, leaving some hardly-noticed bases that we use for hunting terrorists, in return for the Taliban allowing the U.N. to set up non-religious schools, funded by foreign assistance, with mandatory attendance, including girls. We could agree to keep any political or controversial stuff out of the curriculum.

The Taliban could still teach religious absurdities to their kids on their own time, the same way we do it in our own country. We wouldn't like what the Taliban teach their kids, especially the parts about killing infidels. But in the long run, the Afghan education system would produce a citizenry that demands democratic reform. It might take 200 years, but that's not bad for a country that is in the Stone Age.

The risk, of course, is that once we leave, the Taliban beheads everyone who thinks education is a good idea, and spends all of their drug profits to set up Bed and Breakfast places for Al-Qaeda. I will stipulate that the beheading scenario is likely. My only point is that Afghanistan needs a pro-education dictator more than it needs a president who steals elections. Maybe we shouldn't be trying to skip steps.

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Yesterday I made dozens of decisions, on topics as varied as Dilbert licensing, landscape design, marketing, and investing. In all cases I was operating with incomplete information, which is typical. As a practical matter, most decisions happen without the benefit of all the data you would like.

It made me reflect on all of the little rules one develops over the years for handling decisions without the benefit of sufficient data. You always start with the easy questions, such as...

1. What do the experts say you should do?
2. How much experience do the experts have with this question?
3. Does the expert have a conflict of interest?
4. What's the worst thing that could happen?
5. How easy is it to switch course if you choose wrong?
6. What information can you find on the Internet?
7. Who has made this choice before? Were they satisfied?
8. If I delay, will I learn something more that is useful?
9. Is there a way to do a limited test?
10. Does the decision make logical and mathematical sense?
11. Do the experts make this choice with their own money?
12. What do the well-informed people in my situation usually do?
13. What does the competing vendor say about this vendor?
14. Have I seen all of the alternatives?

Those are the questions with relatively clear or quantitative answers. It's the next category of questions that intrigue me, because they involve pattern recognition, and I can't always tell whether I am being influenced by fear and bias, or keen intuition informed by my experience. The questions in this category look like this...

1. Does this situation follow a pattern I've seen in scams?
2. Is someone giving answers that seem intentionally vague?
3. Is information conspicuously missing?
4. Is someone trying to rush me?
5. Could someone unscrupulous easily take advantage of me?
6. Have I regretted this sort of decision before?
7. How do I imagine other people will react to this decision?
8. If the expert is so smart, why isn't he rich?

 
What questions would you add to the list?

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Several years ago I wrote a non-Dilbert book called God's Debris. I called it a "thought experiment" because I used hypnosis techniques in the writing to give readers a euphoric mental sensation, as if they were learning some deeper truth about reality. Evidently it worked. Many people tell me they have reread God's Debris four or five times just for the buzz.

For others, God's Debris is like eating an onion. People who are on the outer fringes of either dogmatism or skepticism find it hard to relax and simple feel ideas that don't seem right to them. And if you have a doctorate in philosophy, or the like, you might not get the full impact of the book, in the same way that a guy taking an LSD trip doesn't need a bong hit. But if you don't fall into one of those categories, God's Debris can be an interesting experience.

Until now, there was always one thing holding back the full impact of God's Debris: The physical process of reading makes it difficult to fully relax at the same time. That's why I'm excited that God's Debris is finally available as an audio book, both on iTunes and Audible.com. Now you can slip in your ear buds, sit back, close your eyes, and take a 2-hour and 44 minute mental flight.

After an extensive search of voice talent, I chose DC Goode to narrate. In case you wondered, hypnosis requires no special type of voice. I chose DC because he made the material come alive. It's a rare talent.

If you recommend the audiobook to anyone, let me know how they experienced it. You can e-mail me at dilbertcartoonist@gmail.com.


Search for God's Debris on iTunes, or Audible.com at:

http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/enSearch/searchResults.jsp?D=Gods Debris&Ntt=DC Goode&Dx=mode matchallpartial&Ntk=S_Narrator_Search&Ntx=mode matchallpartial&y=9&N=0&x=2&BV_UseBVCookie=Yes

  (Warning: I don't recommend listening to it while driving.)]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 I'm trying to come up with a good Halloween costume. I prefer something topical and funny. I don't want to be the guy who shows up at the party wearing sweat pants and says he's a baseball player. Maybe you can help.

One idea is to wear a Barack Obama name tag with my regular clothes. Then I'll wait for someone to say, "Barack Obama? How's that Barack Obama? I had such high expectations for your costume and all you did was...oh, wait. I get it."

Do you have a better idea? (Dressing as a Dilbert character is too obvious.)

 
]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The other day I was reading some first-hand accounts of the war in Afghanistan, in Newsweek, as told by several Taliban fighters. Throughout their stories they would refer to various Taliban leaders, and Newsweek would parenthetically point out that said leaders had been killed by Predator missiles. And today I read somewhere that 14 out of 20 Al Quaeda leaders in that neck of the woods have been taken out by Predators.

This made me wonder about the future of the war. Let's assume the conflict drags on forever, technology keeps improving, and the American public loses all interest in funding the hunt for terrorists. What then?

My prediction is that millionaires will start buying time piloting Predator-like drones (drone clones) from home, the same way big game hunters buy licenses. You'll be able to literally fly the drone from your laptop, supported by mercenaries on the ground in the ungoverned region of Pakistan. For a substantial fee, the mercenaries will help you launch and refuel the drone, and act as spotters to help you find terrorists. The wealthy hunter at home will stalk the terrorists via remote control and wait for a clean shot, then BAM!

Your first reaction to this plan is that it would be highly illegal and often unethical, especially when the wrong targets are attacked. But that doesn't mean my prediction is wrong. The customer would be involved in this activity via the Internet, the same way you might access a gambling website if you lived in a town where gambling was illegal. If some country passes a law against remote terrorist hunting via Internet, the wealthy hunter can simply go somewhere that the law doesn't exist, such as Las Vegas. And the mercenaries would be operating in a part of the world with no functioning government. So I don't see the law being an obstacle.

At the moment, I assume this sort of business model would be uneconomical, even for the very wealthy. Drones and mercenaries don't come cheap. But drone technology will continue to drop in price while improving in performance. And mercenaries won't be that expensive once the Pakistani locals start filling those jobs.

Any country with a military capable of stopping the mercenaries will have no incentive to do so, since killing terrorists serves the interest of all existing governments.

I'm guessing that a private citizen can't legally buy a Predator, but as other countries start producing drones, which seems inevitable, it won't be that hard for mercenaries to get them.

What part of my prediction is unreasonable?

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 I was delighted to learn that The Economist ranked the business school where I got my MBA (University of California at Berkeley - Haas School of Business) as number one in the United States.

http://www.economist.com/business-education/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14632300

This makes me proud, even though there are a few minor differences in the program compared to when I attended. For example, the classes are now held in different buildings. The coursework is different. The textbooks are different. The entry requirements are different. I attended the evening program. And all of the professors are different. But the name of the school is totally the same! I'M NUMBER ONE! WOO-HOO! GO BEARS! I think this moves me one step closer to that Nobel for economics.

The rankings of business schools are highly reliable because they are derived by asking the opinions of students who have attended upwards of one business school each! You might think someone would crosscheck this sort of survey result with the psychology departments at those same universities. But on the face of it, I don't see any problem with asking students if they made (cough, cognitive dissonance, cough) wise decisions.

Kidding aside, I do credit Berkeley's MBA program for my success with Dilbert. It trained me to think more like a business person than an artist. For example, an artist listens to his inner calling and hopes the public agrees. A business person listens to the audience and gives them what they want; that's the approach I took. In 1993 I opened a direct line to Dilbert readers through e-mail, and adjusted the content according to their feedback. That was one of maybe a dozen key business decisions that helped Dilbert break through a crowded field. I joke about getting an MBA so I could become a cartoonist, but business school was literally the competitive advantage that made Dilbert a success.

You are what you learn.

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 From an Article in the New York Times, here is one of the coolest theories I've ever heard that isn't already an episode for Star Trek. This quote sums it up:

"A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the (Large Hadron) collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=3&hpw#articleBodyLink

Obviously the phrase "abhorrent to nature" has no precise meaning in science. So I figure if we're tossing out sensational interpretations I should add one of my own. As regular readers of this blog know, I believe our reality is a holographic simulation, and you and I are just software running within it. Our creator, or creators, who presumably had bodies like ours, made this simulated universe so they could live forever, in a fashion, because their own reality was about to be annihilated in some sort of cosmic catastrophe. Or maybe we're someone's seventh grade science project. The point is that we only think we are real because that's how we were programmed.

Or if you prefer a less "Superman's exploding planet" version of that idea, from someone with more credibility than me, check out Boltzmann's Brain theory:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html

If we are a software program, we might be constrained, perhaps by rules of the program, to stay within certain parameters of enlightenment. For example, we might be restricted from discovering that our reality is a simulation. And the Large Hadron Collider might be testing the limits of our allowed enlightenment. So you might expect some paradoxical, illogical, frightening thing to happen when knowledge starts to approach the programmed forbidden zone of knowing.

But apparently speculation about our software simulation reality is still allowed by the program as long as you mock me in your comments to prevent the idea from spreading.

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 During the peak ratings years of The Jerry Springer Show -- an alleged reality show -- a fight would break out among the guests during almost every episode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jerry_Springer_Show

It seemed obvious to me that these fights were orchestrated by the producers. What are the odds that a fight would break out during every episode and yet no one would ever get hurt or arrested?

The surprising thing is that everyone I talked to about the show during its glory years believed the fighting was genuine and spontaneous. I found that level of gullibility to be mind boggling.

Likewise, when big name TV magicians perform spectacular tricks on TV, such as making a jet disappear, and the witnesses on the scene act amazed, it's obvious to me that those people are in on the trick, and/or their comments of amazement are taken out of context. The magician's only obligation is to entertain the gullible viewers at home. Paying actors to claim they don't know how the jet disappeared, and filming reactions out of context, is the easiest way to do it.

All of this gets me to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Both of them have been in the news a lot for their outspoken and controversial views. And once again, people don't seem to understand that their jobs are entertainment, nothing more.

I enjoy sampling the content from the far left as well as the far right. When I listen to Limbaugh, I generally have two reactions:

1. I don't agree with the viewpoint expressed.
2. This man is an entertainment genius.

Talk show hosts have no legal or ethical obligation to do anything but entertain. And judging by their successes, Limbaugh and Beck are brilliant at their jobs. I find it mind boggling that anyone believes a TV talk host is expressing his own true views.

You could make a case that the things Limbaugh and Beck say influences the gullible masses in ways that are not helpful to society. But that's probably true of every pundit, left or right. It's a price of free speech.

Do you think that Limbaugh and Beck have the same views in private as they spray into the entertainmentsphere?

]]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 I just saw this article on the Internet about an economic prediction I made ten years before the recent financial meltdown.

http://www.ethics.org.au/ethics_forum/printer_friendly_posts.asp?FID=3&TID=3566

This got me wondering, in jest, if I am eligible to someday win the Nobel Prize for Economics. (Okay, technically it's called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.) The surprising answer is yes. One only needs to come up with an original and useful contribution in the field of economics. You don't need to do any math.

http://nobelprize.virtual.museum/prize_announcements/economics/eco_questions_08.html

With that in mind, do you think the confusopoly theory is the simplest explanation of how the recent financial meltdown came to be? Obviously greed and stupidity were also factors, but those influences are well understood and common to all of economics.

 

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