Back in the USA

So, after four months, I have returned to the US. I’m still adjusting to the time zone change, and I have a feeling that the next few weeks will be all about adjustments. Though of course we all know that the world moves on without us, sometimes its hard to remember that, even when we are not around to participate, things change. So, in a number of ways, the life I am returning to is going to be different than the one I left only a few months ago. So it goes. I’ll be interested to play with the new updates and features.

Thankfully though, some things do stay pretty much the same.  Some manner of security and predictability makes you feel a lot more comfortable in your life, and beneath the sweeping changes of the chaotic world, there are routines that can be counted on. I look forward to time spent with friends in the couch circle, playing some CoD4 on live, even just picking up my bass and going over some scales.

I stated a while ago that I didn’t think my life was going to change when I got back from Taiwan, as it had been suggested it would (please read the series on culture shock). Its obviously a little early to make a fair assessment. I have been on the ground less than 48 hours, but as I sit right now, I think I was right. Of course I am different in some ways and in some ways the same, of course Lansing’s familiar streets will not be exactly as they were, of course old friends are gone and new friends are waiting for me in situations I never expected; this is how life is. It always has been this way, some things change, some things stay the same. We don’t get a choice.

The striking thing about going away and coming back is that you really have the opportunity to notice it. Change happens around us, little by little, and most of the time we miss it. We stay wrapped in our comforting stories about the way things are, and don’t recognize the futility of naming the bubbles in a stream. The long jump from then to now lets me see tiny changes as one big change, and it can be a little shocking I suppose, if I weren’t already familiar with the phenomenon. Mostly though, I’m just excited to see what all is coming next, reacquaint myself with the home I know, and just enjoy my time on this planet.

Note: I wrote this at 6 am because I haven’t properly slept in several days. Contrary to my wishes, I am not immune to jet lag… My apologies if this post is slightly tiresome or just total bullshit. I did my best, my brain is pretty taxed right now.

Additional Note: If you are one of those old friends of mine, I’d like to inform you that i’ll probably be arriving in Lansing late this evening. Late tomorrow is a possibility, but one I will be pushing to avoid. Without naming any names, I will be disappointed if I don’t get to see several of you locals when I get into town. You know who you are.

Travel Update

Now in Tokyo, have both fingers crossed that I can make my connection @ O’hare. I have to, get my luggage from the claim, go through customs, cross from terminal 1 to 5, and then go through security again.

All the well wishes I can get from all the friends I have would be greatly appreciated. This will be quite the challenge.

Travel Day again

So it’s about 2 hours before I need to leave for the airport. I’m done packing for the most part. I just need to put my computer away. I’ve cleaned my room, checked to make sure the right planes will still be flying at the right times to the right places. It should all be set to go.

Still, I feel a little apprehensive about the trip. Finally i had myself situated in Taipei. I knew what I was doing, where to go, how to eat, and what I liked best and least about the city. I had some friends. I was even learning to speak the language. Now, of course, once I am comfortable, it is time for another long trip back into uncertain circumstances. This gave me a bit of pause last night, and I had to take a moment for a minor panic attack.

But, closer and closer to leaving, I do feel pretty excited about it. I have so much to do in the states, so many people to see, and places to visit. I am thrilled to get to it.

Soon begins 26+ hours in the international airport system. Wish me luck everybody! I’ll be home soon!

Last Night out in Taipei

I’m coming up on the end of my time here in Taipei. Two more days until I leave, and basically 3 more days until I’m back in the states. With this in mind, I stayed out at the bar pretty late last night, certainly later than I otherwise would have. I also drank quite a bit more than was probably appropriate for an ordinary weekday, but that’s all well and good. As I said, it was no ordinary weekday. I got to see my local friends one last time, buy a few beers, and talk to some pretty girls. Of course we discussed the impact of new media forms on traditional journalism, and the other political social and economic effects of those media. About what else would I talk to girls about?

Anyway, I have some time before I go back to the food show, and in that time I need to fill out a lot of paperwork in order to be reimbursed for my travel to Kaohsiung recently, and for all my taxi travel over the last few days. I also need to try and fill out an evaluation of the program here, and complete a report on an event I attended months ago. I have plenty to do.

Interestingly, for all thats going on here in Taipei, I feel like i’ve already gone home. I feel all wrapped up here, and there are people and places I miss very much. I’m excited to see them. I’m getting the idea that going back home won’t be exactly what I thought, but no matter. Can’t wait to get there.

Food Show Today / Movie Tonight

Today was day one of the Taipei International Food Show, the event I which technically provided the reason for my being in Taiwan. That it falls on my last week away from the states gives me the opportunity to go out with a bang, but it also makes for a very busy week. I’m going to try to keep up with posting as I can, but I have lots of work to do during the day, and a number of people to see each night.

My apologies in advance if it’s a slow week here on outwardly foolish.

Wikipedia:Replies to common objections – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia:Replies to common objections is a great page for two reasons. The first reason, obviously, is that it successfuly deflates pretty much every bogus criticism of wikipedia by every hater to have hated on what is now the go-to page for encyclopedic summaries of unfamiliar topics.

The second, is found when you search for “communism” on the page. You see, one of the criticisms levelled at wikipedia by some internet hack, was that it is too communist, and it should promote the values of capitalism and the free market, such as competition, individual property, and intellectual property. This, I love. Wikipedia does a great job explaining why this statement is rediculous, so I don’t have to; please read the page yourself.

However, it brings to my attention an important point that i’ve been thinking about with regards to modern IT and economics for some time. Let me start with some disclosure. I am a huge fan of markets. As the son of an economist, and a lifetime student of the interactions between markets, governments, and societies, I will say that (truly) free markets are easily the most effective, adaptable, creative, and ultimately successful way to distribute scarce resources that humans have devised (up to this point). I will also say, in the same aforementioned roles, that markets regularly fail to distribute those resources in a way that satisfies human concerns for ethical, just, and humane outcomes.

Though they often undervalue inputs or fail to recognize an input as an input, distribute resources based on efficiencies resulting from innequalities that existed before the market itself, and regularly generate chaotic upheavals which can ruin the lives and livlihoods of millions (if not billions), they must be forgiven these flaws (though the flaws should ideally be mitigated by government redistribution [not regulation]) because they successfuly solve the mother of all problems for a resource management system (economy), the problem of information.

Now for some explanatory background. Though non-market systems operate under laudable ideals, and I would be the first to support a feasible system that operated more ethically and justly than a market can, the fact is, such a system can never be scalable. In order to maintain the human population, the quantity and variety of goods and services which must be produced, even to support the most modest existence, is massive. In order to provide the quality of life that most collegiate anti-capitalists enjoy,  those factors are multiplied by orders of magnitude. Though communal arrangements can (and do!) work for small communities, they are simply not scalable. This is the information problem.

Consider that in a scenario where demand for a good outstrips the supply of that good, one must weigh the strength, not just the presence, of demand. In small communities, this can be determined by asking each party why they need the resources, and then, as a community, deciding who needs it the most. This works pretty well with groups of 5 people. Groups of 50 have a much harder time. How could we reasonably expect to do this in a group of upwards of 6,000,000,000?It is also important to keep in mind that we aren’t even dealing with fixed quanties of supply and demand. These figures are in fact in variation by the second, and subject to entirely unpredictable external shocks. The reality is, there is simply too much information to be processed by a central authority in time for the decision to remain relevant to the situation. This is the reason even the most benign of communist governments could never have been successful.

Markets solve this problem by abstracting all the complex supply and demand information, in real time, into a simple index, the price. Price is the point at which demand meets supply. If the good is worth more to you than all values less than the price, the market will give you the good. If the good is not worth the price, you don’t get it. In this way, no central authority need make the decision. You make it for yourself. This distributed processing effect of markets is what makes them such a dynamic, adaptive resource allocation system. It is also why the linked article above is so interesting to me.

I happen to know of another massive distributed processor, one that handles vast qauntities of information, decentralizes authority, and responds globally and immediately to any local input. Of course I mean the internet.  The internet, interestingly enough, seems to provide the possibility that the information problem could be solved without the use of markets, allowing us to overcome the information problem, without having to accept the failures at the ethics, justice, and humanity that are systemic in markets.

This post is not intended to describe how that is possible, but only to express that I believe it may be possible. I am excited to recieve some responses, and to post on this topic in the future.

Tired

I wanted to provide a little more explanation of what I was talking about yesterday, but the more I think about it, the less I care to do so. I’m doing my best on this blog to describe the world I see, in the hope than anyone else who sees it that way, or anyone else interested, can come and discuss. I realize I often don’t accomplish this, posting unclear or poorly defined ideas, or ideas that may just be altogether wrong.

In my view though, that’s the point of the medium. It doesn’t have the finality or formality of print and I can make statements with a lot of risk of being wildly wrong. Thats what the comment thread is for. Thats what edit is for. I just want to get these ideas out into the public space and play around with them a bit. Still, a lot of these topics really wear me out.

I still feel pretty bad about making that girl cry yesterday, even though I’m pretty sure there was no way for me to have known what I was doing. Certainly if I had not mentioned English it wouldn’t have happened, but again, how could I have known that was a necessary omission? I guess that’s what’s making me tired. People get hurt to easily, and I take it very personally when they do.

Maybe that’s what I mean now. I hope I’m not offending anyone, but not enough to be more careful and lose out on a good idea. What does that say about me? Really I want comments on this.

More on Culture

I just returned from the International House in Taipei. This is where I lived initially when I arrived, and where most of my friends in Taiwan still live. As this is my last weekend in Taiwan, it was appropriate for me to head up there and do a little drinking with the residents. Unfortunately I seem to have stepped on a few toes while I was there. I haven’t yet internalized the do’s and don’ts apparently.

Firstly, there was a local Taiwanese girl, who, at some point, I was led to believe had a pronounced interest in practicing English with me. I can’t remember if it was she or a mutual friend that said so, but I do remember being told that we were to speak english together at some point, so she could get better at it. Such being the case, every time I see her, I ask her when we are going to practice our English, and tonight being my last night at I-house, I said that it had probably better be soon. Somehow my lighthearted prodding to practice a foreign language was not interpreted in the same spirit, and I soon found myself face to face with a girl in tears, and a crowd of Asians scowling at me for my insensitivity. Before my American readers assume I was being drunk and belligerent, let me assure you I had not been drinking too much yet, and the transition from laughter to tears took only seconds. I guess she didn’t like to be “forced to speak english.” My bad. Interestingly, this was only the beginning of my trespasses for the evening.

To add to the list, there is the matter of a journal, being filled by everyone in the house who knew a recent resident, to be used in the creation of some kind of video for her, now that she has returned to Japan. As she was one of few residents to actually keep my phone number and continually invite me to group events, I really should have contributed to this book. Yet, as my family, and perhaps some of my friends know, I just don’t do well with these kinds of sentiments. What do you say to someone when it can only be one thing, and it has such weight to it. For the same reason I hate writing thank you notes and letters in general, I put this off, saying I would get to it before I left, and ultimately left without ever getting to it. This is sure to cause some disturbance. I’ve disappointed people. So while it didn’t actually offend anyone last night, it is like a little offensive time bomb, waiting to let somebody down.

Finally, we were all talking, rather casually, about seeing a movie together sometime before I left, and I expressed my excitement that, since our newest ATO intern wanted to see the same movie, I would be able to introduce her to the I-house kids. I really wanted to get that done before I left, because their community has been so important to me during my time here. I wanted to make sure she has some friends. When they learned that she had several Taiwanese relatives, they all acted like it was unimportant for her to meet them, as she certainly already had plenty of friends. I responded quickly “Yeah but all old fucking people, she needs some friends too.” Even though I have been here for nearly 4 months now, I was totally unprepared for the response.

Shock, disgust, anger… all are appropriate words to describe their reactions. Apparently this level of casual disrespect for elderly relatives crossed an important line. The thing was, I hadn’t even meant to insult anyone, it just never occurred to me to think of my relatives as a substitute for friends my own age. It may be an individual peculiarity, or more indicative of American culture in general, I’m not sure, but I just haven’t been as close to anyone in the older generations as I have to my peer group for more than a decade. I quickly tried to explain that I hadn’t been speaking of the relatives directly in such course language, and kicked myself for using it in the first place, but the damage was done. I had revealed an important difference between myself and my fellows. Apparently I just don’t care much for anyone much older than me.

In recognition of the composition of my readership, I think it’s important to say a few things right now. Of course I love my parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and all the older people who have taught me what it means to be alive in this world. Yet, at the same time, it is very difficult for me to feel close to them in the same way I feel close to my contemporaries. Of course we are all human, and many things never change, but I think some things have changed so much, that the differences in our perspectives on the world way heavy on our relationships.

This weekend, we four interns realized we could save $125 dollars if we all shared a room. We had three beds in one room, two singles and a double, which meant that our married pair, myself, and our newest and youngest could all sleep comfortably in one room together. However, when we suggested this to our boss, he seemed scandalized, trying to quickly piece together alternative arrangements that would yield the same savings without *gasp* boys and girls sleeping in the same room. When he couldn’t think of one he went so far as to say “You are all adults, you can make your own decisions.” I was left wondering what he imagined would happen.

The reality has been sinking in the longer I have been in Taiwan, though I suspect the realization dawned on me long before. Increasingly, the year that you were born seems to really impact your general outlook on life, and what you think about the rules of the game. Of course we are all human, we have human needs and wants and dreams, but the worlds in which we have been raised are so drastically different. As we grow and come to understand more about our world, we form models to help us understand the society in which we must live, but that society is a moving target, and it’s moving faster now. One of the common themes of this blog has been that we are now in the process of a revolution. In it’s effect on society, economics, politics, and day to day existence, this information revolution, I believe, will be on par with the industrial or even agricultural revolutions. That is, we will be living on the same world, but the one we live in will be totally different.

In my eyes, my grandparents model of the world simply can not help me be successful in my world. Even my parents are rendered useless in strategic decisions, helpful mostly when I need tactical advice. Even my model is in danger of sliding into obsolescence without my constant vigilance and willingness to immediately abandon a rule that no longer makes sense. It has certainly happened to some of my peers. The only constant I can count on is that constants will be subverted. Change is imminent, incomprehensible, and omnipresent.

Really, I suppose it’s unfair to place this divide right on generational lines, but those born before the ascension of the digital phone, who were not raised on the internet, who haven’t interfaced with machines and maintained friendships with electricity, are at a disadvantage. If the world seems solid to you, you’re at a disadvantage. For me personally, this has led to some division between myself and those friends and relatives who are underestimating the changes, and who look at my life and worry I may be failing to reach my potential. But these high points of existence they would see me reach are on ranges that have since been eroded, and i’m looking for new peaks that they have never seen, and maybe can’t see. The landscape is changing quickly.

From my iPod

So one of the reasons I was so excited to get this touch is that I hoped to be able to post on the run from a pocket device. Obviously this is limited to situations where I can find wireless, but that’s a lot better than nothing.

So, that’s what I’m doing now, posting from a capitalist temple in Kaohsiung on over a wireless signal I was able to find. Anyway, I gotta go take some poctures of this press releae, but I’m pleased with this first run.