Mike Linksvayer » Politics

54% chance of marijuana legalization, what chance of crime wave?

Mike Linksvayer — Mon, 17 May 2010 07:09:08 +0000

My favorite local weekly, the East Bay Express (I loved their print design and long-form stories in the 1990s; after a couple ownership changes they are still good for other reasons, e.g., prolific reporter Robert Gammon) has a story (actually a blog entry, hopefully something of it makes it to print) that very concisely describes prediction markets and states that “TaxCannabis2010 is currently predicted to win” by traders at Intrade.

I’m happy to see EBX cite Intrade and that the initiative is predicted to win, with two caveats.

The market currently gives the initiative a 54% chance of winning. That means a 46% chance of losing. Not remotely a sure thing. Closing prices chart below.

It’s utterly ridiculous to put marijuana users, farmers, sellers, etc. in jail. But this is not obvious to a number of people, or marijuana would not be illegal. I will be surprised if anti-initiative ads will claim that marijuana legalization will lead to an increase in cocaine use, a crime wave, decrease in test scores, and more. So what would really make me happy with regards to prediction markets and citation of the same would be contracts on cocaine use etc. in California conditioned on whether the initiative wins.

Collaborative Futures 5

Mike Linksvayer — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 03:30:07 +0000

We finished the text of Collaborative Futures on the book sprint’s fifth day and I added yet another chapter intended for the “future” section. This one may be the oddest in the whole book. You have to remember that I have a bit of an appreciation of leftish verbiage in the service of free software and nearby, and seeing the opportunity to also bundle an against international apartheid rant … I ran with it. Copied below.

I’ll post more about the book’s contents, the sprint, and the Booki software later (but I can’t help noting now that I’m sad about not getting to a chapter on WikiNature). For now no new observations other than that Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals put together a really good group of people for the sprint. I enjoyed working with all of them tremendously and hope to do so again in some form. And thanks to Transmediale for hosting. And sad that I couldn’t stay in Berlin longer for Transmediale proper, in particular the Charlemagne Palestine concerts.

Check out Mushon Zer-Aviv’s great sprint finish writeup.

Solidarity

There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a choice we face as a society. The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so.

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Postnationalism

Catherine Frost, in her 2006 paper Internet Galaxy Meets Postnational Constellation: Prospects for Political Solidarity After the Internet evaluates the prospects for the emergence of postnational solidarities abetted by Internet communications leading to a change in the political order in which the responsibilities of the nation state are joined by other entities. Frost does not enumerate the possible entities, but surely they include supernational, transnational, international, and global in scope and many different forms, not limited to the familiar democratic and corporate.

The verdict? Characteristics such as anonymity, agnosticism to human fatalities and questionable potential for democratic engagement make it improbable that postnational solidarities with political salience will emerge from the Internet — anytime soon. However, Frost acknowledges that we could be looking in the wrong places, such as the dominant English-language web. Marginalized groups could find the Internet a more compelling venue for creating new solidarities. And this:

Yet we know that when things change in a digital age, they change fast. The future for political solidarity is not a simple thing to discern, but it will undoubtedly be an outcome of the practices and experiences we are now developing.

Could the collaboration mechanisms discussed in this book aid the formation of politically salient postnational solidarities? Significant usurpation of responsibilities of the nation state seems unlikely soon. Yet this does not bar the formation of communities that contest with the nation state for intensity of loyalty, in particular when their own collaboration is threatened by a nation state. As an example we can see global responses from free software developers and bloggers to software patents and censorship in single jurisdictions.

If political solidarities could arise from the collaborative work and threats to it, then collaboration might alter the power relations of work. Both globally and between worker and employer — at least incrementally.

Free Labor

Trade in goods between jurisdictions has become less restricted over the last half century — tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade have been greatly reduced. Capital flows have greatly increased.

While travel costs have decreased drastically, in theory giving any worker the ability to work wherever pay (or other desirable quality) is highest, in fact workers are not permitted the freedom that has been given traders and capitalists. Workers in jurisdictions with less opportunity are as locked into politically institutionalized underemployment and poverty as were non-whites in Apartheid South Africa, while the populations of wealthy jurisdiction are as much privileged as whites in the same milieu.

What does this have to do with collaboration? This system of labor is immobilized by politically determined discrimination. It is not likely this system will change without the formation of new postnational orders. However, it is conceivable that as collaboration becomes more economically important — as an increasing share of wealth is created via distributed collaboration — the inequalities of the current sytem could be mitigated. And that is simply because distributed collaboration does not require physical movement across borders.

Workers in privileged jurisdictions will object — do object — to competition from those born into less privilege. As did white workers to competition from blacks during the consolidation of Apartheid. However, it is also possible that open collaboration could alter relationships between some workers and employers in the workers’ favor both in local and global markets.

Control of the means of production

Open collaboration changes which activities are more efficient inside or outside of a firm. Could the power of workers relative to firms also be altered?

Intellectual property rights prevent mobility of employees in so forth that their knowledge are locked in in a proprietary standard that is owned by the employer. This factor is all the more important since most of the tools that programmers are working with are available as cheap consumer goods (computers, etc.). The company holds no advantage over the worker in providing these facilities (in comparison to the blue-collar operator referred to above whose knowledge is bound to the Fordist machine park). When the source code is closed behind copyrights and patents, however, large sums of money is required to access the software tools. In this way, the owner/firm gains the edge back over the labourer/programmer.

This is were GPL comes in. The free license levels the playing field by ensuring that everyone has equal access to the source code. Or, putting it in Marxist-sounding terms, through free licenses the means of production are handed back to labour. [...] By publishing software under free licences, the individual hacker is not merely improving his own reputation and employment prospects, as has been pointed out by Lerner and Tirole. He also contributes in establishing a labour market where the rules of the game are completely different, for him and for everyone else in his trade. It remains to be seen if this translates into better working conditions,higher salaries and other benefits associated with trade unions. At least theoretically the case is strong that this is the case. I got the idea from reading Glyn Moody’s study of the FOSS development model, where he states: “Because the ‘product’ is open source, and freely available, businesses must necessarily be based around a different kind of scarcity: the skills of the people who write and service that software.” (Moody, 2001, p.248) In other words, when the source code is made available to everyone under the GPL, the only thing that remains scarce is the skills needed to employ the software tools productively. Hence, the programmer gets an edge over the employer when they are bargaining over salary and working conditions.

It bears to be stressed that my reasoning needs to be substantiated with empirical data. Comparative research between employed free software programmers and those who work with proprietary software is required. Such a comparison must not focus exclusively on monetary aspects. As important is the subjective side of programming, for instance that hackers report that they are having more fun when participating in free software projects than they work with proprietary software (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005). Neither do I believe that this is the only explanation to why hackers use GPL. No less important are the concerns about civil liberties and the anti-authoritarian ethos within the hacker subculture. In sum, hackers are a much too heterogeneous bunch for them all to be included under a single explanation. But I dare to say that the labour perspective deserves more attention than it has been given by popular and scholarly critics of intellectual property till now. Both hackers and academic writers tend to formulate their critique against intellectual property law from a consumer rights horison and borrow arguments from a liberal, political tradition. There are, of course, noteworthy exceptions. People like Eben Moglen, Slavoj Zizek and Richard Barbrook have reacted against the liberal ideology implicit in much talk about the Internet by courting the revolutionary rhetoric of the Second International instead. Their ideas are original and eye-catching and often full of insight. Nevertheless, their rhetoric sounds oddly out of place when applied to pragmatic hackers. Perhaps advocates of free sotftware would do better to look for a counter-weight to liberalism in the reformist branch of the labour movement, i.e. in trade unionism. The ideals of free software is congruent with the vision laid down in the “Technology Bill of Rights”, written in 1981 by the International Association of Machinists:

”The new automation technologies and the sciences that underlie them are the product of a world-wide, centuries-long accumulation of knowledge. Accordingly, working people and their communities have a right to share in the decisions about, and the gains from, new technology” (Shaiken, 1986, p.272).

Johan Söderberg, Hackers GNUnited!, CC BY-SA, http://freebeer.fscons.org

Perhaps open collaboration can only be expected to slightly tip the balance of power between workers and employers and change measured wages and working conditions very little. However, it is conceivable, if fanciful, that control of the means of production could lead to a feeling of autonomy that empowers further action outside of the market.

Autonomous individuals and communities

Free Software and related methodologies can give individuals autonomy in their technology environments. It might also give individuals a measure of additional autonomy in the market (or increased ability to stand outside it). This is how Free and Open Source Software is almost always characterized, when it is described in terms of freedom or autonomy — giving individual users freedom, or allowing organizations to not be held ransom to proprietary licenses.

However, communities that exist outside of the market and state obtain a much greater autonomy. These communities have no need for the freedoms discussed above, even if individual community members do. There have always been such communities, but they did not possess the ability to use open collaboration to produce wealth that significantly competes, even supplants, market production. This ability makes these autonomous organizations newly salient.

Furthermore, these autonomous communities (Debian and Wikipedia are the most obvious examples) are pushing new frontiers of governance necessary to scale their collaborative production. Knowledge gained in this process could inform and inspire other communities that could become reinvigorated and more effective through the implementation of open collaboration, including community governance. Such communities could even produce postnational solidarities, especially when attacked.

Do we know how to get from here to there? No. But only through experimentation will we find out. If a more collaborative future is possible, obtaining it depends on the choices we make today.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

Mike Linksvayer — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 23:50:06 +0000

William J. Bernstein‘s A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World as the name implies is an engaging history of long-distance trade from the dawn of history.

The book points out that jurisdictions and other actors throughout history have chosen among trading, raiding, and protection.

By my reading, raiding in the form of piracy and literal trade war was a substantial part of the mix everywhere — and reached its pinnacle among and by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English — until bulk goods with many sources came to dominate shipping in the 1800s. Spices that only grew in southwest Arabia or the flyspeck Spice Islands were the opposite — subject to piracy, monopolization, and taxation along narrow routes and chokepoints. I have temporarily increased my consumption of the now pedestrian seeming cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and black pepper — only available to the very wealthy in well connected cities for most of history. Raiding in the form of conquering and plundering seems even more important and persistent, e.g. the scramble for Africa and WWII and its aftermath.

Speaking of the scramble for Africa, this book points out many times the importance of disease in shaping history. As another book I read recently more forcefully pointed out, the scramble did not occur until the easy availability of anti-malarials — before the late 1800s, European death rates in tropical Africa were too high to sustain more than fortified trading posts. Bernstein even makes the fairly astounding claim that death rates were higher for European crew of slave ships than for the African slaves the ships transported.

The civlilization-destroying blow to the New World dealt by Old World diseases (and resulting relatively unopposed European colonization of the New World) is well known, but Bernstein speculates that disease may have also given Europeans an advantage versus the Islamic world, India, and China as well. The evidence is scantier, but the Black Death may have hit those regions even harder than it hit Europe, rendering them relatively weak at the dawn of European world-wide raiding and trading. 700 years earlier ‘Act I’ of the Black Death sealed the long-term decline of the Byzantine Empire and created an opening for the explosion of Islam.

The last few chapters are somewhat drier reading, perhaps mostly due to familiarity. Overall Bernstein makes the case that increased wealth and decreased transport costs have swamped any political changes in their impact on long-distance trade and that trade’s measurable impact on static well being is swamped by less tangible building of relationships and transfer of knowledge that accompanies trade, and that free traders imperil free trade to the extent they ignore those who lose from trade — paying off losers would be preferable to protecting them, for world-wide trade is net positive, and the alternative risks a spiral of trade wars leading to real wars.

By the way, Bernstein doesn’t mention intellectual property at all, now a staple of trade negotiations, apart from a single passing mention of a trademark applied to Danish hog and dairy products.

Occupation ethics

Mike Linksvayer — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:53:42 +0000

Philippe Legrain:

British troops are dying in Afghanistan because the government deems the Taliban such a terrible threat.

Yet those who flee the Taliban and the war are denied asylum in this country.

This is an outrage.

The outrage applies to the U.S. with some multiplier (also in Iraq). The least an occupier could do is to offer speedy asylum. However, I don’t think asylum is enough — invader/occupier jurisdiction citizenship, granted on demand, should be the baseline.

Free Software: Foundation for a Libre Planet

Mike Linksvayer — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 03:11:55 +0000

Support the Free Software Foundation. It’s good for a free planet and you can attend the just announced Libre Planet Conference, March 21-22 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an outgrowth of the FSF’s annual member meeting.

I’m really excited that the conference will have software freedom and network services as a major focus. This will be the first public conference on the topic, following last year’s meeting from which followed the Franklin Street Declaration and Autonomo.us.

If you enjoyed my rambling call to support Creative Commons a couple months ago, you might enjoy reading Benjamin Mako Hill’s somewhat less rambling call to support the FSF.

I’ve donated to the FSF off and on since at least 1998. You should get started now, if you haven’t already. My only regret (apart from not giving every year) is still not having relevant prediction markets enabling me to be a futarchist donor. I mention that here both because it is a necessary disclaimer for me to make (my philanthropy suggestions are not based on handwaving, not consensus projected impact) and because perhaps my most highly desired free network service is a prediction market exchange. I’ll explain more another day.

CC6+

Mike Linksvayer — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:50:20 +0000

December 16 marked six years since the release of the first Creative Commons licenses. Most of the celebrations around the world have already taken place or are going on right now, though San Francisco’s is on December 18. (For CC history before 2002-12-16, see video of a panel recorded a few days ago featuring two of CC’s founding board members and first executive director or read the book Viral Spiral, available early next year, though my favorite is this email.)

I’ve worked for CC since April, 2003, though as I say in the header of this blog, I don’t represent any organization here. However, I will use this space to ask for your support of my and others’ work at CC. We’re nearing the end of our fourth annual fall public fundraising campaign and about halfway to our goal of raising US$500,000. We really need your support — past campaigns have closed out with large corporate contributions, though one has to be less optimistic about those given the financial meltdown and widespread cutbacks. Over the longer term we need to steadily decrease reliance on large grants from visionary foundations, which still contribute the majority of our funding.

Sadly I have nothing to satisfy a futarchist donor, but take my sticking around as a small indicator that investing in Creative Commons is a highly leveraged way to create a good future. A few concrete examples follow.

RDFa became a W3C Recommendation on October 14, the culmination of a 4+ year effort to integrate the Semantic Web and the Web that everyone uses. There were several important contributors, but I’m certain that it would have taken much longer (possibly never) or produced a much less useful result without CC’s leadership (our motivation was first to describe CC-licensed works on the web, but we’re also now using RDFa as infrastructure for building decoupled web applications and as part of a strategy to make all scientific research available and queryable as a giant database). For a pop version (barely mentioning any specific technology) of why making the web semantic is significant, watch Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web.

Wikipedia seems to be on a path to migrating to using the CC BY-SA license, clearing up a major legal interoperability problem resulting from Wikipedia starting before CC launched, when there was no really appropriate license for the project. The GNU FDL, which is now Wikipedia’s (and most other Wikimedia Foundation Projects’) primary license, and CC BY-SA are both copyleft licenses (altered works must be published under the same copyleft license, except when not restricted by copyright), and incompatible widely used copyleft licenses are kryptonite to the efficacy of copyleft. If this migration happens, it will increase the impact of Wikipedia, Creative Commons, free culture, and the larger movement for free-as-in-freedom on the world and on each other, all for the good. While this has basically been a six year effort on the part of CC, FSF, and the Wikimedia Foundation, there’s a good chance that without CC, a worse (fragmented, at least) copyleft landscape for creative works would result. Perhaps not so coincidentally, I like to point out that since CC launched, there has been negative license proliferation in the creative works space, the opposite of the case in the software world.

Retroactive copyright extension cripples the public domain, but there are relatively unexplored options for increasing the effective size of the public domain — instruments to increase certainty and findability of works in the public domain, to enable works not in the public domain to be effectively as close as possible, and to keep facts in the public domain. CC is pursuing all three projects, worldwide. I don’t think any other organization is placed to tackle all of these thorny problems comprehensively. The public domain is not only tremendously important for culture and science, but the only aesthetically pleasing concept in the realm of intellectual protectionism (because it isn’t) — sorry, copyleft and other public licensing concepts are just necessary hacks. (I already said I’m giving my opinion here, right?)

CC is doing much more, but the above are a few examples where it is fairly easy to see its delta. CC’s Science Commons and ccLearn divisions provide several more.

I would see CC as a wild success if all it ever accomplished was to provide a counterexample to be used by those who fight against efforts to cripple digital technologies in the interest of protecting ice delivery jobs, because such crippling harms science and education (against these massive drivers of human improvement, it’s hard to care about marginal cultural production at all), but I think we’re on the way to accomplishing much more, which is rather amazing.

More abstractly, I think the role of creating “commons” (what CC does and free/open source software are examples) in nudging the future in a good direction (both discouraging bad outcomes and encouraging good ones) is horribly underappreciated. There are a bunch of angles to explore this from, a few of which I’ve sketched.

While CC has some pretty compelling and visible accomplishments, my guess is that most of the direct benefits of its projects (legal, technical, and otherwise) may be thought of in terms of lowering transaction costs. My guess is those benefits are huge, but almost never perceived. So it would be smart and good to engage in a visible transaction — contribute to CC’s annual fundraising campaign.

Vote No

Mike Linksvayer — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:29:00 +0000

Anyone placing great hope in Obama is deluded. He is just another abominable person. However, given a lifetime of cavalier behavior, putting the temporary dictatorship in the hands of McCain would be insane. It is only slightly comforting that Obama (and Biden) say some of the right things regarding executive power … we’ll see what they do when they hold that power. Somewhat more comforting is the consensus that Obama will pile on debt slower and extract the US military from Iraq faster than McCain.

So please, vote for ~~change~~constraining executive power just a tiny bit, vote for Obama.

Regarding California and San Francisco propositions (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this rule applies elsewhere), you could do far worse than to vote no on all of them, and it would be hard to do much better.

However, I recommend voting yes on one of each — California Proposition 5 for a slight attenuation of the drug war and San Francisco Proposition K to hamstring police enforcement of anti-prostitution laws.

Futarchist Voter Guide

Mike Linksvayer — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:34:17 +0000

Four years ago I used play money contracts traded at the Foresight Exchange to provide a Futarchist Voter Guide (though I didn’t call it that). This U.S. election cycle relevant real money contracts are traded on Intrade.

The first set was instigated and subsidized by Peter McCluskey. Two have attracted a fair amount of interest and seem to be informative. They have consistently indicated that a Democrat will result in a smaller (but still approaching US$1 trillion!) increase in the US federal government debt over one year and a smaller number of US troops in Iraq. (The others, regarding the movement of oil and interest rate futures on election day, have shown no difference between expected election outcomes.)

Above: Expected increase in US Government debt between 30 Sep 2010 and 30 Sep 2011 if party wins US presidency.

Above: Number of US troops in Iraq on 30 June 2010 if party wins US presidency.

Note that briefly in early September the contracts indicate lower debt and fewer troops in Iraq with a Republican candidate. I suspect this is due to McCain’s brief surge following the GOP convention — the implied outcomes above depend on election winner contracts, and with a much lower volume, presumably take awhile to fully respond to rapid shifts in election outcome expectations.

A second set of relevant contracts instigated by Polimetrics have unfortunately attracted almost no trading and probably tell us nothing. Note however they also reflect the brief McCain surge, at which point they implied a greater than 100% chance of growth, low unemployment, and lower crime with a McCain win. They have since reverted to showing essentially no difference between Obama and McCain. Note that each series only starts when there have been trades.

Above: Percent chance that economic growth averages 2.5% or more for 2009-2011 if individual wins US presidency.

Above: Percent chance the US unemployment rate is less than 5.0% at the end of 2011 if individual wins US presidency.

Above: Percent chance the number of violent crimes committed in 2010 is lower than the number of violent crimes committed in 2007 if individual wins US presidency.

Peter McCluskey has automatically updated pages showing implied outcomes for each set of contracts given their latest trades.

(I intended to make a page with frequently updating graphs, but got lazy when Peter published the aforementioned pages, and only collected the data until now, which is available in a spreadsheet.)

Addendum 20081103: See a slightly expanded version of this post at Midas Oracle.

October and beyond

Mike Linksvayer — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:32:43 +0000

Friday (tomorrow) I’m attending the first Seasteading conference in Burlingame. I blogged about seasteading four years ago. Although the originators of the seastead idea are politically motivated, I’d assign a very low probability to them becoming significantly more politically impactful than some of their inspirations (e.g., micronations and offshore pirate radio, i.e., very marginal). To begin with, the seasteading concept has huge engineering and business hurdles to clear before it could make any impact whatsoever. If the efforts of would be seasteaders lead to the creation of lots more wealth (or even just a new weird culture), any marginal political impact is just gravy. In other words, seasteading is another example of political desires sublimated into useful creation. That’s a very good thing, and I expect the conference to be interesting and fun.

Saturday I’ll be at the Students for Free Culture Conference in Berkeley. You don’t have to be a student to attend. Free culture is a somewhat amorphous concept, but I think an important one. I suspect debates about what free culture means and how to develop and exploit it will be evident at the conference. Some of those are in part about the extent to which political desires should be sublimated into useful creation (I should expand on that in a future post).

October 20-26 I’ll participate in three free culture related conferences back to back.

First in Amsterdam for 3rd COMMUNIA Workshop (Marking the public domain: relinquishment & certification), where I’ll be helping talk about some of Creative Commons’ (I work for, do not represent here, etc.) public domain and related initiatives.

Second in Stockholm for the Nordic Cultural Commons Conference, where I’ll give a talk free culture and the future of cultural production.

Finally in Gothenburg for FSCONS, where I’ll give an updated version of a talk on where free culture stands relative to free software.

In December at MIT, Creative Commons will hold its second technology summit. Nathan Yergler and colleagues have been making the semantic rubber hit the web road pretty hard lately, and will have lots to show. If you’re doing interesting [S|s]emantic Web or open content related development (even better, both), take a look at the CFP.

More than likely I’ll identicate rather than blog all of these.

Another trillion dollar fraud

Mike Linksvayer — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:09:25 +0000

Glenn Greenwald’s September 20 piece on the decision processes leading to the Iraq invasion and the current bailout is right on:

I don’t pretend to know anywhere near enough — in terms of either raw information or expertise — in order to opine on the necessity or lack thereof of The Latest Plan in terms of whether the alternatives are worse. But what I do know is that an injustice so grave and extreme that it defies words is taking place; that the greatest beneficiaries are those who are most culpable; and that the same hopelessly broken and deeply rotted institutions and elite class that gave rise to all of this (and so much more) are the very ones that are — yet again — being blindly entrusted to solve this.

Of course the non-financial toll of the Terror War makes it a far greater tragedy, but the financial tab of each will be of the same order of magnitude — US$trillions.

Although the US$0.7 trillion number being cited is apparently made up, Barry Ritholtz’s guess that it could end up costing US$1.5 trillion is entirely plausible, given the systematic underestimation by politicians of wars and public works. Ritholtz’s upcoming book on bailouts will presumably have data on the misunderestimated (really) cost of bailouts. Watch his brief WSJ video interview or on his own blog.

Stop the bailout, which will only prolong the pain and ensure future bubbles. Instead take this “crisis” as an opportunity to eliminate all of the various politically imposed causes of expensive housing.

If the rent seeking dinosaurs of finance die I look forward to new mortgage products designed to hedge risk rather than play chicken with politicians (see beginning of post for how well that turns out). Incidentally, see a recent post on what current housing futures say.