It takes a process

My subconscious, the divine lecturer (whoever or whatever that is, God?) was talking to me this morning as I woke up. It was reminding me of an important imposed reality that is common to all functional systems:

It Takes Good Processes to make a functional system.

In the dictionary you get this definition of system:

System:

1. a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole, in particular.

2. a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method. [From Google]

In order to have a functional human system both definitions of a system have to be present. It takes good processes and procedures based on related principles for a human system to work properly. J.D. Rockefeller made his millions by creating Refineries that systematically separated and processed crude oil into "standard" kerosene and other products [oil, gas, road bitumen, plastics, explosives]. The United States has managed to survive because it has functional (more or less) processes like it's justice system, military system, bureaucracies. Processes are necessary and inevitable to good function of any living system; economy, physiology, computing, politics. When those processes go awry it reflects a failure to analyze them and compensate for the idiosyncratic properties of the elements of of their combinations.

A well constituted system will have both centrifugal and centripetal forces. Refineries use both centrifuges and compressors. Compressors usually operate on centripetal principles -- pushing gases towards a center. While Centrifuges spin and separate things. Without designing a process the result is a mess, but with good processes one can separate something into it's composite parts and then recombine them intelligently. Eat crude oil and die. But from crude oil we get fertilizers and energy that helps us eat. Transport crude oil across the landscape and dump it in an aquifer and people die, but oil itself is just a resource. It's how those processes deal with the oil that makes it a poison or turns it into pretty wax candles we can burn while taking a hot bath.

A well designed system processes in stages. It may dry something, then recombine it. It may turn something to gas then cool it. It may use catalysts to break down something from a complex stew into easier to deal with components. It may add heat or extract heat. A refinery is a display of profound chemical knowledge at work creating something useful from ugly, poisonous tar. The issue with our oil business is not with the engineering, but with the focus of the engineers.

Using Systematic processes

Anyway, engineers and people with an engineering, creative spirit, use a variety of systematic processes (definition 2) to devise systems for ensuring that we have living systems instead of messed up ones. This is called "systems engineering" and it has transformed the planet in good ways. A system can be optimized for the few, or optimized for the sake of a functional system. A system that is optimized only for some of it's elements tends to be dysfunctional. Bad process is also tyranny, injustice, maldistribution, oppression and depression. A dysfunctional system dumps junk in the wrong places. Instead of refining things into something useful. So to separate the junk into it's useful components (to a creative mind, everything, including junk and merde, is useful), folks trained in system engineering analyze related things into their component parts and then figure out how to process them into something that accomplishes something good.

Requirements and Laws, inputs and outputs

The requirements of a system are the laws and design goals of that system. Some requirements are built in constraints. No matter how much we'd like to turn lead into Gold there is no chemical process that can do so. Requirements flow from constraints and possibilities. How a set of input materials is processed determines the outcome of that system. And the steps in that process are determined by what the final product is desired to look like. If I want to bake a pie. What ingredients I start with and add to the filler, dough to make the crust, etc... determines the texture, taste and other properties of that pie. A good cook follows a process and understands the requirements for a pie that will taste the way he wants it to taste. A good architect will come up with a repeatable formula for producing a tasty pie everytime.

It takes Process diagrams and Input Output diagram.

Finally, the reason this "lecture dream" woke me is that we need to constitute our government as a systematic structure if we want to solve our governing processes and not rely on trite slogans and self-centered/interested ideologies that ignore systems theory or are dysfunctionally optimizing. Governing processes need to be designed to process information and decision making in a manner similar to processes cooking ingredients or crude oil into useful products. Our politics can either be crude or refined based on how we constitute it. That is why Hamilton put so much care into his part of designing the constitution. That's also why the constitution, while it could be worse, reflected the mess of committee and self interested decision making. We need to apply systems theory to designing our legal processes. But to do that we need to apply what we've learned in psychology and psychiatry and to also remember the principle of engineering;

Just as the same building blocks can build a pyramid or a prison, a swimming pool or a cesspool. So the same elements of legal systems and political process can build a functional republic with democratic attributes or an authoritarian police state. The same blockheads who can destroy our country, can be used to build a really nice system that has the attributes of a functional one.

More work to be done.

Notes and Details

System Examples from Google definition [taken 1/30/2015]:

PHYSIOLOGY

a set of organs in the body with a common structure or function.

"the digestive system"

the human or animal body as a whole.

"you need to get the cholesterol out of your system"

COMPUTING

a group of related hardware units or programs or both, especially when dedicated to a single application.

GEOLOGY

(in chronostratigraphy) a major range of strata that corresponds to a period in time, subdivided into series.

ASTRONOMY

a group of celestial objects connected by their mutual attractive forces, especially moving in orbits about a center.

"the system of bright stars known as the Gould Belt"

Mea Culpa

When my adopted people, Jews, start the new year. They do a prayer known a the Vidui. Usually it's sung as part of a ceremony.

This year this was back in September. But for me every day is a new year so I'm thinking "new year" all year and prefer not to wait til the end of the year to think about what I need to change. And the subject weighs on my mind as much due to Christian, new age and Buddhist influences as Jewish ones. The Vidui is important.

And since most people in all religions sleep through sermons and translations, they do it in English as well as hebrew, so it's a collective thing. Where Catholics get in a booth and confess privately to a confessor, Jews do it in public and at least twice a year. It's a list of things we all do. Some of us maybe only once in a life time. Some of us repeatedly. It's a long confessional [Text of Al-Chet] that is rendered differently in different communities. But

We abuse, we betray, we are cruel.

We destroy, we embitter, we falsify.

We gossip, we hate, we insult

We jeer, we kill, we lie.

We mock, we neglect, we oppress.

We pervert, we quarrel, we rebel

We steal, we transgress, we are unkind.

We are violent, we are wicked, we are xenophobic.

We yield to evil, we are zealots for bad causes.

 

Have to Stop it. Not just confess it.

And of course we have to stop it. Not just confess it every year and hope we are forgiven somehow.

Zealots for Bad Causes

But the one that always sticks to my thoughts is the "zealots for bad causes." Bad causes has to meanings. One is we are zealots for causes that are bad, ill conceived, wrong. And of course the other one is that we are zealots for bad causes that bring us bad effects. What goes around comes around. Reincarnation or just and endless cycle of causation and it's effects, we have to do something about this.

Three Fingered Thing or Why I'm thinking about this

Both left and right spend a lot of time criticizing the President. But to me much of that criticism is as much self criticism as it is legitimate criticism. When Carter practiced some conservative Liberalism he was expressing ideas that resonated with me. When the politicians and pundits first started to talk about privatization it seemed reasonable that the government should contract out some of it's work. I've been unable to get a Government job because I've spent most of my life working as one of these contractors. It had it's pluses and minuses and seemed like a reasonable thing until the privateers got their hands on it. Had I been more successful (and more mercenary) at the business of consulting I might have remained a true believer in the idea. Some of what is right wing ideology a lot of us "moderates" thought was true too.

We really did think that public private alliances could be made (and they can) and that the result would be leaner, better government and healthy businesses. We really did buy into trickle down lite theories that we could "reform welfare", use technology to make government and business better, and that somehow it would benefit everybody.

We were wrong. We were zealots for bad causes.

Too many businessmen (and women) are social dominators, grown up bullies. People are numbers for them. An employee is a cost who has no business having any say in the business he works for. Combining, fighting, bullying to make huge numbers in the money and status game are the real business of business and selling a good product, producing a valuable service or goods, or even providing a pension for employees are secondary to winning that game of status and power that is modern business. We bought into the idea that we could take our eyes off of businessmen because we bought their professions that business has to be win/win or it is lose/lose. The idea that executives could play zero sum or even negative sum games where they were willing to cut payrolls by 100's of thousands of people to pay themselves a bonus, even at the actual cost of profitability of their company -- just never seemed rational to us. But we thought their BS.

It wasn't just Milton Friedman who was surprised by the behavior of many of our business class. I remember I was surprised when I first started getting intelligence about the Tech Boom frauds back in the late 90's. When Start up Shysters started boasting about how they could sell startups to dumb investors and that the more they lost on the business model the more they could make with the IPO, I knew that the tech revolution was turning into a bubble swindle. Even so it was profoundly disheartening. The 2008 disaster didn't catch me by surprise only because I'd had my shock response and gone through all the period of mourning 10 years earlier. We helped the Cons build a system which they happily picked our pockets with and then proceeded to dump us to the side of their ambition. It may be an enthusiasm for bad causes that will destroy the country, but they got away with it because too many of my generation went along with them. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and a host of "new Democrats" bought into a pack of lies about "triangulation", balanced budgets and reform. Folks who are coming of age now probably see right through it. But you have to be patient with the rest of us. A lot of us won't admit it, but we were suckered too.

More:

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/holidays/Jewish_Holidays/Yom_Kippur/In_the_Community/Prayer_Services/Confession.shtml

Justice and Oligarchs Hightower talks about J.P. Morgan Chase

The Oldest and Most feared Pirate Flag

 

Jim Hightower on J.P. Morgan

When Theodore Roosevelt prosecuted J.P. Morgan, Morgan gave him a tongue Lashing. Oligarchs and elite over-priced people with power have always seen themselves as above the law, or beyond the law, or at least wanted to be. The company he founded is still around and still has the same privateering attitude.

JP Morgan image at Smithsonian (src)

 

Jim Hightower, one of my favorite ex Agricultural Commissioners in Texas writes:

"Well, not a fine against John Pierpont Morgan, the man. This 19th-century robber baron was born to a great banking fortune and, by hook and crook, leveraged it to become the “King of American Finance.” During the Gilded Age, Morgan cornered the U.S. financial markets, gained monopoly ownership of railroads, amassed a vast supply of the nation’s gold and used his investment power to create U.S. Steel and take control of that market.” [http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/01/28/whining-wall-street-banker-pleads-pity/]

No J.P.Morgan and his son J.P.Morgan Junior dominated both centuries through their control of finance. The son helped create the Federal Reserve System after bailing out the early 20th century banking system and not wanting the further risk.

But that sense of entitlement I'm talking about helped him become fabulously rich in the first place:

"From his earliest days in high finance, Morgan was a hustler who often traded on the shady side. In the Civil War, for example, his family bought his way out of military duty, but he saw another way to serve. Himself, that is. Morgan bought defective rifles for $3.50 each and sold them to a Union general for $22 each. The rifles blew off soldiers’ thumbs, but Morgan pleaded ignorance, and government investigators graciously absolved the young, wealthy, well-connected financier of any fault.” [Jim Hightower article]

JP's Dad was an important banker in New England, with connections to London Bankers. J.P. Morgan's Hustling was part of a family tradition. And both JP Morgan Senior and his son were proud of their privateering tradition and built yachts that flew standards that evoked their privateering tradition:

 

The Privateering Tradition Continues:

 

 

Hightower continues:

“Dimon recently bleated to reporters that, “Banks are under assault.” Well, he really doesn’t mean or care about most banks — just his bank. Government regulators, snarls Jamie, are pandering to grassroots populist anger at Wall Street excesses by squeezing the life out of the JP Morgan casino.” [Jim Hightower article]

Dimon is half right. Banks are being criticized by a mass of outraged citizens who have either been directly swindled by them or been affected by their repeated swindles, the Fed Reserve's bailouts of them, and by the resulting costs born by ordinary citizens of this country as the law and banking system protects great wealth while helping that wealth be transferred to the top 1% and on to the top .01%. So Dimon is seeing a threat. But it's not coming from the Government. So far the government has been too tame. Elizabeth Warren is a voice in the wind, but mostly they tolerate her because she's letting off steam for the rest of us while the folks who should regulate the banks look the other way as the banks continue to rig the system for their private, separate gain. Hightower continues:

“But wait — didn’t JPMorgan score a $22 billion profit last year, a 20 percent increase over 2013 and the highest in its history? And didn’t those Big Bad Oppressive Government Regulators provide a $25 billion taxpayer bailout in 2008 to save Jamie’s conglomerate from its own reckless excess? And isn’t his Wall Street Highness raking in some $20 million in personal pay to suffer the indignity of this “assault” on his bank. Yes, yes and yes.” [Jim Hightower article]

On the contrary the banks are benefiting from access to the Fed System. Qualitative Easing, which is supposed to send money to mainstreet is instead going to those personal payrolls, and we are setup for more trainwrecks in the future unless someone does start going after the banks!

So Hightower is being sarcastic when he says:

“Still, Jamie says that regulators and bank industry analysts are piling on JPMorgan Chase: “In the old days,” he whined, “you dealt with one regulator when you had an issue. Now it’s five or six. You should all ask the question about how American that is,” the $20-million-a-year man lectured reporters, “how fair that is.'” [Jim Hightower article]

In the old days either they'd go to jail or they'd be able to buy a judge. Now they have to buy 5 or 6 regulators.

Hightower continues:

“Well, golly, one reason Chase has half a dozen regulators on its case is because it doesn’t have “an issue” of illegality, but beaucoup illegalities, including deceiving its own investors, cheating more than two million of its credit card customers, gaming the rules to overcharge electricity users in California and the Midwest, overcharging active-duty military families on their mortgages, illegally foreclosing on troubled homeowners and … well, so much more.” [Jim Hightower article]

And so far the timid regulators have been unwilling and unable to arrest anybody for these crimes. Some of which are illegal because J.P. Morgan can afford to buy an army of Lawyers and Senators and House members to boot.

Hightower Continues:

“So Jamie, you should ask yourself the question about “how fair” is all of the above. Then you should shut up, count your millions and be grateful you’re not in jail.” [Jim Hightower article]

I'm not grateful they aren't in jail. I've been calling for frog marching since 2007. Some of this mess could have been avoided if there were an army of regulators and cops bothering King Dimon.

Further Reading and Previous articles

Business, Friend or Foe? TR and process improvement Monday, August 6, 2012

Corruption, Racketeering and the Supreme Court RICO Act should have applied, Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Many Forms of Freebooting Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Do we walk in the darkness, or in the light? Sunday, January 19, 2014

An Ideology of Privateering July 26, 2014

JP's illustrious forebear:

Henry Morgan

Discovery of one of his ships

Book

Admiral Sir Henry Morgan

For an example of how Plundering works from Rolling Stone's history of the 2008 bailout:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104?page=2

Baby Teeth Causality versus Sophistry

I just posted an article on "Fukushima Emergency What Can We do". I have some other story lines I've wanted to share there and have been remiss in sharing them. So one of my New Years Resolutions is to be more diligent in reporting things I think others should know about and not only in my twitter or facebook accounts. I always wondered what happened to my baby Teeth. Well it turned out the ones in the St. Louis area were collected for study and some of them ended up locked away in an obscure Bunker. Those teeth were found and used for an epidemiological study. The results showed a correlation between high radiation levels in baby teeth and later morbidity from cancers. Critics raise the cry "correlation is not causality" but given we already know the causality involved in this case correlation supports evidence of causality.

http://fukushimaemergencywhatcanwedo.blogspot.com/2015/01/radioactive-baby-teeth-cancer-link.html

"The Jerk" as prophesy

I don't know about you, but I'm old enough to remember the movie "The Jerk" and to have seen it at the movies. It was kind of lame in the way all such parody comedies are, but what always stays with me is how the main character played by Steve Martin, is so emblematic of modern invention and business practice. He invents an attachment that makes it easier for a person to adjust his glasses. He makes millions off the invention, thinks he's home free. Acts like an idiot and then his invention blows up, people wearing his glasses piece go cross eyed. They sue, he loses everything and as he's being evicted he tries to salvage what he can and winds up with nothing....

 

 

The Jerk and Unsafe Products

 

...I think of that every time I see a new ad for a product. It's even a cycle. First come the ads, promising salvation from some sort of dis-ease and/or an improvement on some existing product. Usually I know that the new product is almost a copy of the first product and is in the same class of medicines as the original, just has a bromine atom where the other has a chlorine atom, a methyl chain where the other had something else, but is virtually the same. Those ads come heavy on the airwaves with some catch phrase like "ask your Doctor about...." and images of happy people doing happy things. Usually there is also a long list of side effects that would scare the bejeezies out of anyone if they weren't said so softly the targeted audience can't hear it. This has been going on for years and goes all the way back to when medicine was literally huckstered on the street with medicine shows. We've seen it with Opium, heroin, morphine, followed by an even longer sequence of artificial and semi-artificial opiates like methadone, oxycodone, etc. All with the same unintended, and sometimes intended side effects. This usually leads to the next phase in invention:

...ads for lawyers. "Call this number if you used ACME Drug AlphaDumwit".

The Jerk is a funny movie. And it is semi serious. But we have a lot of Jerks. And most of them are far more clever than the jerk because they are usually grifters who know when to bolt town, lawyer up & hide their money, before the law-suits come down. The Jerk had good intentions. The grifters don't. Anyway the movie was funny. It's still funny. There are a lot of real Jerks out there. Ultimately, Steve Martin's Character isn't one of *them*, he realizes he is a jerk and changes.

The Jerk on IMDB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcwz8-EfFYE

Are you a Social Dominator?

Social Dominator Test

Just for fun, I want to call out the section on Social Dominators for my Social Dominator Friends. You can test yourself and see if you too are high in "SDO" traits. Take the test!

Are You A Social Dominator? Take the Test and Find Out;...

What is a Social Dominator?

People who score high on the "Social Dominator scales" aren't necessarily Right Wing in all their views. What they are are people who engage in "Exploitive Manipulative Amoral Dishonesty (EMAD)" behavior. To have a higher you have to have your alpha males. And Socially dominant people see themselves as those males. They are attracted to notions that justify their dominance of other and they use ideology to dominate others. Some of them don't personally believe what they say. So when tested for "Authoritarian" characteristics they won't often get a high score. But their belief in social darwinism is there even when they preach Creationism and attack Darwins theory of evolution. It might be justified through biblical stories, or it might be disguised, but social dominators are the ones who want to, or do, stand at the top of the social pecking order!

Of course if you don't score high on this test you might be a "Social Dominance enabler" or a "Right Wing Authoritarian" and have the combinations of submissiveness, aggression and conventionality that let the socially dominant get away with murder.

The studies I've been referring to describe hierarchy formation, pecking order behavior, discrimination, oppression and bullying in society. They origin in studies that date to the 40's when behavioral scientists were trying to understand the madness of Totalitarianism, especially the Nazis and the holocaust. In addition to studying the appearance of the phenomena the studies also try to describe how that behavior is produced.

If you don't score high on the Social dominance test, try this one:

http://helloquizzy.okcupid.com/tests/the-altemeyer-authoritarian-test

Further Reading on Social Dominance Theory:

A Proposed Measure of Social Dominance Orientation in Children: https://www.academia.edu/954487/A_Proposed_Measure_of_Social_Dominance_Orientation_in_Children

Social Dominance Theory, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/politics/research/researchareasofstaff/isppsummeracademy/instructors/Sidanius%20&%20Pratto,%20in%20press.pdf

Related Articles and Issues:

Broken Windows Theory

Broken Windows Theory: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-neighborhood-and-city-village-and.html

Why Broken Windows Theory was corrupted http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/why-broken-windows-theory-was-corrupted.html

Bullying:

Bullying and What to do about it: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/08/bullying-and-what-to-do-about-it.html

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/01/understanding-social-dominance-theory.html

Inequality and Power; the Curse of Financialization

My Friend Richard Torgerson introduced me to the "GINI" coefficient years ago. The Tax Justice Network put out a post that uses a measure based on the GINI and HDI measures. GINI-HDI graphed. And they tie this to something they call the "financial curse." Not being a professional economist, I'm more interested in this subject for what it says about what we should do as a society to do something about "financial curses" and inequality. [see http://www.taxjustice.net/2015/01/16/financial-sector-like-oil-industry-graph/?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=twitterfeed]

Defining Terms

http://www.taxjustice.net/2015/01/16/financial-sector-like-oil-industry-graph/?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=twitterfeed

GINI index is named after Corrado Gini, an Italian statistician

The World Bank defines the GINI coefficient or index this way:

"Gini index measures the extent to which the distribution of income or consumption expenditure among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Lorenz curve plots the cumulative percentages of total income received against the cumulative number of recipients, starting with the poorest individual or household. The Gini index measures the area between the Lorenz curve and a hypothetical line of absolute equality, expressed as a percentage of the maximum area under the line." [SI.POV.GINI]

They sum it up: "Thus a Gini index of 0 represents perfect equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality." [SI.POV.GINI]

Human Development Index (HDI)

The Human Development Index is a measure of the capabilities and education of a population.

"A tool developed by the United Nations to measure and rank countries' levels of social and economic development based on four criteria: Life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling, expected years of schooling and gross national income per capita. The HDI makes it possible to track changes in development levels over time and to compare development levels in different countries." [http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/human-development-index-hdi.asp]

Subtracting the Gini - HDI gives an index that shows what the authors call "The Financial Curse Index" or how relying on financial industries blows up an economy. I believe the curse is actually "financialization" -- which is essentially the economic transfers that go on when folks have power over money and can use that to transfer wealth to themselves.

Details

GINI

Princeton gives more definition to the GINI coefficient with their WIKI page [Gini Coefficient]:

The Gini coefficient is usually defined mathematically based on the Lorenz curve, which plots the proportion of the total income of the population (y axis) that is cumulatively earned by the bottom x% of the population (see diagram). The line at 45 degrees thus represents perfect equality of incomes. The Gini coefficient can then be thought of as the ratio of the area that lies between the line of equality and the Lorenz curve (marked 'A' in the diagram) over the total area under the line of equality (marked 'A' and 'B' in the diagram); i.e., G=A/(A+B). [Gini Coefficient]

"The most equal society will be one in which every person receives the same income (G = 0); the most unequal society will be one in which a single person receives 100% of the total income and the remaining people receive none (G = 1−1/N)."

"While the income distribution of any particular country need not follow simple functions, these functions give a qualitative understanding of the income distribution in a nation given the Gini coefficient. The effects of minimum income policy due to redistribution can be seen in the linear relationships."

"An informative simplified case just distinguishes two levels of income, low and high. If the high income group is u % of the population and earns a fraction f % of all income, then the Gini coefficient is f − u. An actual more graded distribution with these same values u and f will always have a higher Gini coefficient than f − u."

"The proverbial case where the richest 20% have 80% of all income would lead to an income Gini coefficient of at least 60%."

Src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Calculation

"An often cited case that 1% of all the world's population owns 50% of all wealth, means a wealth Gini coefficient of at least 49%."

Gini Coefficients pretty much represent a refinement and follow on to Vilfredo Pareto's power curves. by Gini