I'm fascinated by trends that creep along in an unremarkable fashion until a tipping point is reached. One such trend is that governments will create more laws, codes, and regulations, until almost nothing useful can get done, and societies strangle themselves. We aren't there yet, but with every act of Congress, we get nearer.

Meanwhile, computer simulations are improving daily. An architect can build a 3D rendering of your future home or business and "fly" you through it so you can experience the space as if it were real. It's a cool technology, but on a scale from one to ten, we're probably a two compared to where that technology can go. Those 3D simulators will get better every year.

Another technology that is improving daily is online project management. You can sit at home anywhere in the world with an Internet connection and manage a project with participants anywhere else. But that process is still somewhat primitive compared to what project management is likely to become.

My prediction is that at some point we'll be able to create virtual projects that invite people to live in, and continuously improve from the inside, virtual cities. Let's assume these imaginary cities are floating on the sea, free from traditional governments. Once a project is formed, the participants will be able to design and modify their own virtual homes and businesses, design streets, schools, hospitals, public facilities, and new forms of governments. If we assume lots of similar projects are started all over the world, and they all monitor each other and borrow the best bits, these virtual worlds will evolve to become far better than the real world in terms of efficiency and quality of life. Then we can build the real world version based on the best of these cities, having thoroughly tested everything from the sewer system to the traffic flow in the virtual realm.

There are a number of projects underway to design cities on the sea. Some of them might be terrific. But how much difference might there be between an architect-led design and a crowd-sourced design that has evolved to perfection as a simulation? I'm guessing the difference will be huge.

To be fair, the crossover point will not be clean. The first real city based on its virtual model is likely to be a disaster. But what we learn from those mistakes will feed back into the simulations. In a few decades, I expect all cities on the sea to be projections of virtual cities that have proven themselves in simulators.

Imagine a virtual city in which participants can be simulated crooks just to test the police system. The crooks would ply their trade, and the simulated city would respond with ways to prevent similar crimes in the future. I'll bet a simulated city could reduce crime to nearly zero without giving up too much in privacy. Or to put it another way, I think the virtual residents of the virtual city would learn that privacy is overrated unless they plan to commit crimes. In the real world, I would be terrified to register my DNA and fingerprints with the government while allowing them to install a tracking chip in my arm. But I can imagine a futuristic form of government that has such a small likelihood of abusing that trust that I'm willing to trade my privacy for reduced crime. You can argue with that point, but that's exactly the sort of thing the simulations would help settle.

Banking and insurance would no longer be big abusive business models. Both would be reduced to computer programs managed by the government, which itself would be mostly tech support. Food would come from local fish farms and gardens. There would be few bugs at sea, and the city would locate to wherever the climate was best. All of the farming facilities would be attached to the city, so food would be organic, fresh, healthy, and inexpensive. Schools would follow the best known practices. And the city would train residents to fill jobs as it created them.

I also imagine a city on the sea especially for old people, free from the laws of traditional nations. These oldsters will have access to any mood-altering drugs they want, and doctor-assisted suicide will be a respectable option. But if you design the city right, the old people will have no interest in either mood-altering drugs or suicide. They will have plenty of entertainment in the form of communal pets, audio books, Skype visitors, and water jet wheelchairs to zoom around the city canals until an administrator remotely guides them back for their meds or meals. Someday, being old might mean feeling awesome and having all sorts of freedom.

If you imagine that the future continues to be designed by traditional teams of architects and engineers, you can only imagine incrementally improved lifestyles in the future. But if you imagine that the entire process for designing cities improves too, and the ocean provides us with a blank canvas, the future looks marvelous, at least for the people who can escape to the sea.

Suppose you lived in a country that guaranteed freedom of speech, but 90% of everything spoken or written was deliberately misleading, and you didn't have any reliable way to know which statements were accurate. In an environment in which people are buried in bullshit, would freedom of speech have any practical value?

Now suppose that the biggest lie in this hypothetical land of free speech is the notion that you, and your fellow citizens, are skilled at sorting lies from truth. You readily believe in your own truth-sniffing abilities, but you're skeptical about the abilities of your fellow citizens. After all, they so often come to the wrong conclusions, according to you. Would freedom of speech have any real value in such a world?

What I'm describing is an absurd situation. In that hypothetical world, 90% of what you heard would be out of context, intentionally misleading, or outright lies. And while you had no special ability to sort the truth from the lies, you'd believe you did. And you'd be darned glad you lived in a country with freedom of speech so you had lots of truth to enjoy.

Thank goodness for confirmation bias. I'm mildly dyslexic, and the New York Times just reported that dyslexia is a sort of perceptual super power. I assume my dyslexia super power allows me to detect truth in ways that regular mortals cannot. Apparently we dyslexics can detect patterns better than people who are tragically normal. I know this is true because I have excellent powers of perception. And I know I have excellent powers of perception because I'm always right. And I know my logic makes sense because it forms a perfect circle. I'm just not so sure about you.

 

 



 

 

I was chatting with a small business owner recently. He provides a service that is a purely discretionary purchase. His business had been slow for the past few years because of the economy. But over this holiday season, he had all the work he could handle, and it was all local. He considers his business an early indicator for the economy as a whole. This made me curious. Was the economy starting to revive? So I started looking for other signs of recovery.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where you'd expect signs of an improved economy to show up first. And sure enough, things around here are looking up all over the place. I thought I'd give you some examples to lift your weekend. If the economy is still weak where you live, or you're struggling personally, perhaps it will help to know that there are bright spots in the country that are likely to spread. It has to start somewhere.

Last night I was standing in line at a local fast food place and ran into a woman I've known for eleven years. She's a server at a white tablecloth restaurant in town. She told me business was slow last year, but picking up nicely so far this year. That's good to hear.

The weirdest bit of good economic news is the number of my friends who are working on startups. Most of them have good jobs already, but they're looking to get something going on the side as well. Weirder yet, I know several people who are working on more than one startup at the same time. If my wife and I threw a party at our house, and invited our usual group of friends, we'd have at least nine startups in the room. I'm probably forgetting a few. I've lived in this area all of my life, and I've never seen this much entrepreneurial energy.

A friend recently interviewed for a good job. The interviewing company offered him a choice of two positions. This happened right around Christmas. When was the last time you saw someone get a job around Christmas? And when was the last time you saw someone do one job interview and get two offers?

Two years ago I rarely saw any new construction in the area. Now I see a lot of it, including homes and roads. Road construction used to annoy me because of delays. Now it makes me happy because it's a sign of an improving economy.

Unemployment is still an issue, but among the people I know locally, far fewer are unemployed now compared to a year or two ago. That seems to be moving in the right direction.

Nationally, stocks are up, and as of this morning, unemployment rates have dropped more than expected. Economies generally don't move sideways. Usually they move up or down. As far as I can tell, things are getting better where I live. The exception is housing prices, which probably have further to fall. But the penalty for walking away from an underwater mortgage seems smallish these days, and I think people have psychologically discounted their home equity losses and are ready to move on.

We have a long way to go, but as far as I can tell, we're heading in the right direction. How about where you live? Leave a comment saying where you live and whether or not your local economy is improving. Tell me what you observe within driving distance.

If you had to pick one priority in your life, could you do it? That's an important question because focusing on the wrong priority would get you a bad result, and having multiple priorities isn't practical. For example, if health is your top priority, you might make choices that are good for your health and bad for your career, such as saying no to having a few drinks after work with your boss.

We humans want lots of things: good health, financial freedom, success in whatever matters to us, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career and more. The problem is that the time you spend maximizing one of those dimensions usually comes at the expense of time you could have spent on another. So how do you organize your time to get the best result?

The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main goal: energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.

Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up.  When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too.

At this point in my post, I must invoke the Dog Whisperer analogy. The Dog Whisperer is a TV show in which dog expert Cesar Millan helps people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar's main trick involves training the humans to control their own emotional states because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from the owners. When the owners learn to control themselves, the dogs calm down too. I think this same method applies to humans interacting with other humans. You've seen for yourself that when a sad person enters a room, the mood in the room drops. And when you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost. I'm suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, you love life, your family life, and your career.

When I talk about high energy, I don't mean the frenetic, caffeine-fueled, bounce-off-the-walls type. I'm talking about a calm, focused energy. To others, it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be.

Before I was a cartoonist, I worked in a number of energy-sucking corporate jobs, in energy-sucking cubicles. But I enjoyed going to work, partly because I exercised most evenings, and usually woke up feeling good, and partly because I always had one or two side projects going on that had the potential to set me free. Cartooning was just one of a dozen entrepreneurial ideas I tried out during my corporate days. For several years, the prospect of becoming a professional cartoonist, and leaving my cubicle behind, gave me an enormous amount of energy.

The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10%, or that it keeps my mind sharp, or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don't need another reason.

As soon as I publish this post, I'll feel a boost of energy from the minor accomplishment of having written something that other people will read. Then I'll get a second cup of coffee and think happy thoughts about my tennis match that is scheduled for after lunch. With my energy cranked up to maximum, I'll wade into my main job of cartooning for the next four hours. And it will seem easy.

Manage your energy first.

One of the many disadvantages of being me is that sometimes I have awful ideas that get stuck in my head and I have to purge them to make room for what I hope is something better. Today is one of those days. I apologize in advance for the post that follows. You should stop reading now. Seriously. Don't say I didn't warn you.

We humans can't tickle ourselves as effectively as strangers can tickle us. Scientists think it has something to do with the element of unpredictability. When you try to tickle yourself, you know what's coming just ahead of the sensation and your mind prepares for it.

Likewise, it feels better when someone else rubs your neck. I suppose part of the reason is that your hand can't get a good angle on your own neck, and you can't simultaneously relax the rest of your body while rubbing with just one hand. Add to that the lack of predictability and a self-neck-rub isn't ideal.

There is at least one other human activity that feels better when someone else does it for you. It's not exactly tickling, and it's not exactly a massage, and I can't exactly describe it in my otherwise PG-13 blog. But if I know my readers, all of you know what I'm talking about and 50% of you are doing it right now. That activity is the topic for the remainder of this post. I'll refer to it as noodling. And let's assume I'm only talking about females doing the noodling just to keep the engineering simpler. That will make sense in a minute.

Suppose we want to invent a system that might be described as a self-noodler, and we want it to have the element of unpredictability. Could we make such a device? Yes, obviously you could write a program that would cause a hypothetical noodling device to vibrate at random intervals. But the problem I anticipate with that design is the lack of humanity. My guess is that a user would perceive machine-made randomness as boring and impersonal. Noodling is at its best when the recipient has the perception that some sort of human intention is behind the action. Can we solve that without the involvement of another human while maintaining a lack of predictability?

Suppose you wrote a program that translated written words into vibrations. Perhaps the specific vibration would depend on the length of words, number of syllables, tone of the sentence, punctuation, and other factors. Presumably, Hemingway's text would create different pattern of vibrations from Shakespeare's sonnets, and so on. My hypothesis is that we humans are so wired for language that the patterns of the vibrations that originate from the written word would register to us as both human-made and - here's the best part - unpredictable. That's the Holy Grail.

If my hypothesis is correct, a user of this marvelous self-noodling system could choose whatever text works best in her particular case. One user might prefer translating the text of an interview with Brad Pitt. Another might find some emails from an old boyfriend and run those through the text-to-vibration system. Some might find a favorite author that does the trick. If the system works, it will give new meaning to the phrase "He wrote me off."

I don't know what the other presidential candidates are doing today, but if they think they can make you happy by fiddling with your taxes, I would respectfully suggest they don't understand your priorities.

Do the rich get more benefits from the government in return for their tax dollars? In a recent post, I casually mentioned that all citizens get roughly the same benefit from the government. Several readers objected. Let's throw some more gasoline on that campfire.

This question matters because if the rich get more benefits from the federal government, some would say it is "common sense" that they should pay a higher tax rate. But, as regular readers of this blog know, common sense isn't a real thing. And its ugly cousin, fairness, is a concept invented so dumb people could participate in arguments. Fairness isn't a natural part of the universe. It's purely subjective. So let's agree that fairness can be ignored in this discussion. We'll stick with what can be quantified, sort of. (If it were easy, it wouldn't be fun.)

We'll also limit our discussion to federal income taxes because that's the main topic of national debate during this election year.

On the payment side, we all agree that the rich pay far more per person in taxes than the poor. And the vast majority of the rich pay a higher tax rate as well. The exceptions are some subset of the superrich, who are perhaps 1% of the top 1%. Let's ignore the superrich for now because any discussion of that special group drags us into the unrelated topic of capital gains taxes.

We can also exclude from this discussion the 49% of American adults who pay no federal income taxes. They pay plenty of other taxes, but for now that is a separate discussion. To keep things clean and simple, the question boils down to this: Does the average millionaire get more benefits from the federal government than the average member of the middle class who pays federal income taxes?

Consider national defense. The rich pay far more per person to fund our military. Some would argue that is "fair" because the military is protecting far greater assets for the rich. For me, that doesn't pass the sniff test. If our military disbanded tomorrow, the rich would move their money and their families to a safer country and leave the middle class to become slaves to the conquering Elbonians.  The argument that our military gives greater protection to the rich, because the rich have more assets, assumes our national enemies are nothing but burglars looking for loot.  It also assumes money can't escape across borders with its owners. Granted, the rich might lose their mansions and businesses if they escaped with the rest of their wealth, but the middle class who can't afford to escape would end up working in the Elbonian salt mines. According to my calculations, the middle class get more benefits from the military because national security prevents them from becoming Elbonian slaves. The rich are only at risk of losing a portion of their stranded wealth when they head to Switzerland. And depending on the ambition of our hypothetical enemies, we all benefit equally by not being killed. A rich dead guy is not happier than a middle class dead guy.

How about education? The rich benefit from an educated workforce because it allows them to staff their companies and grow their wealth. The middle class benefit by having job opportunities and a non-zero chance of someday becoming wealthy. In my case, a government-subsidized education system allowed me to go from lower-middle class to rich. And that makes me...oh, say 50% happier than I would have been otherwise. Meanwhile, the rich got richer, but I doubt they increased their overall happiness by more than 10%. If the goal of life is happiness, including health and physical security, I benefited the most from the government during my journey through the middle class, during which time I paid far less than I do now in taxes. Now that I'm in the top 1%, and paying at the top tax rate, even if I doubled my income tomorrow, it wouldn't have much impact on my happiness. So while a functioning government allows the rich to stay happy, it allows the middle class an opportunity to substantially increase their happiness.  I'd call that roughly a tie.

How about safety nets? Compared to the rich, the middle class have a far greater risk of someday becoming poor. That risk is magnified if they have relatives who might need assistance too. But arguably, safety nets also prevent the poor from forming marauding gangs of cannibals preying on the rich. If I didn't pay taxes to provide safety nets for the poor, I'd spend a fortune on a private militia to defend my house. Benefit-wise, I'd call safety nets an equal benefit for all.

In discussions such as these, I like to call upon my automobile analogy. You can argue all day long whether a car's engine is more important than its wheels, but unless you have both, the car is useless. It might be true in some technical sense that one class of citizen benefits more from taxes than another. But from 30,000 feet, it looks to me as if you're arguing whether the engine or the wheels are more important to the car.

So far, we've acted as though we can compare one average rich person to one average middle class person. That makes sense when discussing the present. But the future is infinitely larger than the present, and therefore should be weighted more heavily in this discussion. That brings us to the question of birthrates. If the middle class person has two kids, and the rich person has one, the benefits of a stable government flow disproportionately to the family with the most offspring. Keeping two people alive is better than keeping one person alive. So if it's true that birth rates decline with income, it must be true that the middle class get more FUTURE benefits than the rich from their tax dollars today. But the bottom line is that whoever has the most kids, regardless of income, benefits the most from the government. If fairness were a real thing, taxes would be based on your number of offspring, not your income.

I look forward to your disagreement.

Last night, CNN was getting audience reactions to President Obama's speech, and asked a man his opinion on the idea of ending subsidies to oil companies. My fellow citizen responded that during times of government subsidies, gas prices rose, so maybe if the government removed subsidies to oil companies, gas prices would fall.

Huh?

How hard would it be to run for President and try to satisfy both the smart people in the country and the voters who don't understand . . . well, anything? The classic solution is to lie to the dumb while winking to the smart. If you do it right, the dumb people are pleased with what you say and the smart people understand you're only saying it to keep the slow learners happy.

But apparently President Obama isn't a fan of the obvious lie. Perhaps because of his lawyer training he prefers using a bit of hypnosis to bamboozle the dumb with lies that aren't technically lies yet operate the same way. Want an example?

If you did a poll today, and asked the average citizen whether or not the following statement is true, how many would say yes?

Statement: Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than his secretary.

The truth is that Buffett pays a lower tax rate, but he pays millions more in actual dollars. And Buffett and his secretary receive roughly the same benefits from the government.  (Everyone reading this blog knows that.) The President was careful to specify "tax rate" when he started talking about the Buffett rule, but he capped it off with a hypnosis-like summary by saying Americans know it is just "common sense" that a billionaire should pay more than a secretary. By the closing summary, the clarifying word "rate" was gone. What started as a discussion of tax rates transmogrified into a discussion of who should pay more. Then the President slapping the label "common sense" to his near-lie and imbued it with an undeserved logic. That's a classic technique of manipulation.

Smart observers understand the Buffett tax question to be about rates. But I'm guessing that many of the dumb viewers came away with the impression that Buffett paid less in in real dollars than his secretary. And I'm sure President Obama and his advisors intentionally chose language that furthered that misunderstanding while winking at the smart observers.

When I'm president, I will end this deceptive practice and treat every voter the same way I treat the smartest voter. Wink, wink.

It's starting to look as if Newt Gingrich will be the Republican nominee. If so, this might be the first time two non-believers ran against each other for President of the United States.

What?

Oh, that's right: You still think Gingrich and Obama believe what's written in the Christian Bible. I understand why you think that. After all, both men say they believe in god, and they do churchy things. The trouble is that Gingrich and Obama both set off my non-believerdar. (That's like gaydar for non-believers.)

I'll bet if you did a test in which you showed volunteers pictures of believers and non-believers, the volunteers could do better than chance in picking out the non-believers.  That hypothesis isn't too wild. There have been studies  in which volunteers tried to identify political conservatives by photographs, and the volunteers beat chance.  And at least one study says women can identify gay men just by looking at them.

You could also walk into a room and pick out the person who is most likely to be good at math. You wouldn't be right every time, but if you saw a guy who looked like Dilbert, and a guy who looked like David Beckham, which one do you think could help you with your computer problem?

There's a hypothesis that the ability to believe in God has a genetic basis. That hypothesis is far from proven, but the smart money says there is some truth to it because most mental capacities have a genetic component. There's probably even a genetic basis for why my favorite color is green.

The skeptic in me takes with a grain of salt any study that purports to demonstrate the existence of gaydar or conservativedar or any other form of human radar. It's hard to design a test involving humans that doesn't have some leakage. And the people designing the tests might have agendas. So the strongest claim I can make about my non-believerdar is that it feels to me as if I can identify non-believers with an accuracy that is better than chance. But it's just a feeling.

Based on what feels like the power of non-believerdar, my assumption is that both Gingrich and Obama believe in the utility of belief while remaining skeptical of the details, up to and including the existence of a supreme being. In other words, I see them as pragmatists. If you plan to be a politician in America, you need to pretend you believe. Everything about Gingrich and Obama tells me they look for solutions that make sense within the context of what is proven and practical.

What does your non-believerdar tell you about Gingrich and Obama? Do you think they believe in the supernatural, or do they pretend they believe for practical reasons?