Books

Over the last weekend, I spent a fantastic weekend with my wife and good friends up at a cabin north of Brainerd in the middle of Minnesota. Between the long drives, waking up earlier than anyone else save Michelle, and a few moments here and there, I got hooked on a fantastic summer read. Geek-readers of the blog will know what a daemon is - a program that runs in the background on a computer that does specific tasks (DAEMON is short for Data & Execution Monitor).

In the mystery-thrilled "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez, a distributed daemon created by a genius geek is unleashed on the world after he dies. The book is gripping and hard to put down, especially for those of us with a strong tech background that can appreciate just how vulnerable we are to such an exploit. I knew Suarez had written a second novel, but I didn't realize that "Freedom" continues (and finishes, I believe) the story. As soon as I got back to the Internetz, I ordered it and hope it arrives by Friday at the latest.

You don't have to be a geek to enjoy it, but it sure is nice to see such a good story filled with accurate claims and realistic tech (for the most part).

Is Timothy Geithner, head of the Treasury Department, leading a charge toward socialism, saving the banks, or setting up the next big crisis (or all three and more?)? I don't know. I feel very comfortable weighing on telecom issues, energy issues, and a variety of other policy matters that I have deeply studied. But all this financial stuff is really friggin complicated ... perhaps because the "Greed is Good" generation sent its best minds to Wall Street to make money rather than producing something of value (which can include banking services - but that wasn't what these folks were doing).

So I find it all very frustrating. I'm trying to read up on it - Michael Lewis' The Big Short is on my short list of books to read. As is Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers. What I did just read is Joshua Green's "Inside Man" and I don't quite know what to think of it. I generally find Joshua Green a pretty astute observer, so I wanted to write about it.

I agree entirely with this quote from Geithner:

“In a crisis, you have to choose,” Geithner told me. “Are you going to solve the problem, or are you going to teach people a lesson? They’re in direct conflict.”

Nothing that I have read suggests the bank bailouts could have been avoided absent a desire to create a much bigger crisis. But I am deeply disappointed in the Obama Administration's unwillingness to pass good policy into law to limit the size of banks and crack down on shady practices that serve to enrich a few bankers but do nothing to improve the overall efficiency of the economy.

[Simon] Johnson contends that Team Obama has ignored the necessary step of breaking up the power of what he calls the “oligarchies”—the big Wall Street banks—as part of the reform process, which is what happened after the emerging-market crises. “If your banks have run themselves into the ground doing crazy things,” he told me, “you need a substantial shift in the power structure. In the ’90s view, the Geithner-Summers view, it is essential that you address that problem as part of the immediate stabilization policies.” To Johnson, as ardent a believer in regulatory capture as George Stigler ever was, it’s plain that Geithner has fallen under Wall Street’s spell, and that through him and his whole apparat, Obama has too.

I do recommend this article as a decent start in understanding why Obama's Administration has done what it has done. But it seems that we really need Congress to push good policy. Obama doesn't seem up to the task.

I just picked up "Free the Market: When Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive" by Gary L Reback. It starts with this quote by George Will (from this column):

It will remind everyone -- some conservatives, painfully -- that a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores...

Bingo.

Just finished Up in the Air by Walter Kirn - the book that the Clooney movie was based on (though substantially different). I had heard the book was hilarious and was disappointed that it definitely wasn't. However, if I didn't have the expectation of laughing like I was reading an Evanovich mystery, I think I would have enjoyed it more... it was a good book. Once I got into it, I really enjoyed the writing.

I found the movie intensely good, but it was definitely more inspired by the book than based on it -- a lot has changed in America since 2001 when this was written.

Kirn makes some great observations - this in particular struck me on many levels:

As a younger man, I made the mistake of talking to a stripper, in depth and at length, about her finances. Her income shocked me. It was double mine. She claimed to be saving for college, but when I presser her, I learned that she didn't even have a bank account and supported not one but two delinquent boyfriends. I didn't feel sorry for her, I felt insulted. There I was, the sort of clean achiever this beautiful girl should consider marrying, but instead she was shaking me down for twenties to lavish on my Darwinian inferiors.

Another one:

His painful, frostbitten feet explained the slippers, but the bubbles he blew were the purest affectation, intended to show that he plays by his own Hoyles. He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.

Observations like these really made the book worth reading for me, as they were far more interesting than the story. The end was kinda odd and I didn't really follow it but it doesn't bother me because I was mining the book for insights more than being wrapped up in the characters. I guess I read it like a nonfiction book and I have no regrets, but it sure doesn't seem like praise.

The last time I read a science fiction book, I was climbing up Kilimanjaro and had few opportunities. It was The Wreck of the River of Stars, with a strong focus on slow-moving character development, that I probably would have put down if I were not scaling a mountain with frequent rests at high altitude. I was glad I read it, but it really lacked the excitement that I enjoyed in books by Heinlein, for instance.

Following several recommendations from technology geeks I find insightful (including Jerry Pournelle, one of the authors), I picked up The Mote in God's Eye and then quickly read its sequel, The Gripping Hand, by Larry Niven and Pournelle. Fascinating reading.

These are older sci-fi books, ones that expected the U.S. versus U.S.S.R. standoff would continue long into the future, when man left the Earth. The books are set long in the future, when interstellar travel is practical but humans have not yet discovered alien life. And boom, they do. The twist is that the aliens are much older, and better at just about everything, than humans but had not developed interstellar travel (the human invention of the interstellar drive was an accident - something I have no trouble believing).

I was captivated by the books but hard core science-focused science fiction readers should beware because these are not Stephen Baxter or Greg Bear books. The focus is more on sociology and a good story line. I'm not actually sure that Pournelle has any science credentials, though he clearly has a strong mind for technology. In listening to him speak, his understanding of how science works is quite weak.

I thought both books were well worth reading but I seem to remember daddYman being ho-hum about them, so take it for what it is worth. I had never considered such a plot line and it hooked me from the start (well, after 40-50 pages anyway... I always struggle to follow characters in the beginning of a book).

When I saw the title of this book, I was immediately intrigued - In Praise of Doubt. A recent episode of the Diane Rehm show featured the author and I was impressed with the way he approached issues (although he made a mistake in a claim against Pelosi - she didn't call opponents of health care reform unamerican as some charged; she said those who are disrupting town hall meetings are unamerican). You can download the mp3 of that interview here [50 minutes].

If you haven't read Bill Bryson, you are missing out. I've read a few of his books and own more. I recently picked up "Down Under," a travel book wherein Bryson travels to and all around Australia. Shortly after finishing, I realized it was the same book as In a Sunburned Country - a book I also owned. I guess Sunburned Country is just the American version and the former was the British version.

Though highly entertaining, I found it somewhat bitterseet in that he had far more time and a larger budget than I could ever imagine having. And I'm not sure what I would cut out after reading his descriptions.

'But don't worry,' she continued, 'Most snakes don't want to hurt you. If you're out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes.'

This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I had ever been given.

Bryson strikes a great balance between history, tourist attractions, non-tourist sorta attractions, and making fun of tourists (mostly American). Then he just makes great observations:

I've never quite understood why tourists from the more prosperous end of the market are so drawn to wine-growing areas. They wouldn't, presumably, want to go and see cotton before it became Gap slacks or caviar being gutted from sturgeon, but give them a backdrop of vines and they appear to think they have found heaven.

Having started this book not knowing much about Australia (he actually makes a strong case that no one knows much about Australia), I finished it deciding I'll have to find a way to travel there, if to do nothing more than visit the Tree Top Walk.

I've enjoyed a number of his other books - in particular, Mother Tongue (a history of the english language) and the famous A Walk in the Woods (about the Appalachian Trail), perhaps his most popular.

Organizing is hell. That it is less harsh today than 100 years ago does little to change the fact that organizing workers today remains incredibly difficult. Those who do it sacrifice much to help workers get a fair share of what they produce - to give them more control over their workplace (organizing solely for a raise is seldom a worthwhile endeavor).

Years ago, I worked with organizers, most often from HERE (a union generally representing hotel and restaurant employees) and UFCW (food and commercial workers) and I have a great respect for what they go through just to get some employers to abide by the law, let alone gain advantages for the workers that are fair and yet not required by law. They work long hours at low pay, and rarely get the praise they deserve for improving the status of workers across the country.

A note for those of you who don't know your labor history - if you don't know how long it took and how many died in the struggle for a 40 hour day, an end to child labor, and for a minimum wage, you should learn. Some people actually think employers willingly bestowed these prizes on workers - this ignorance insults the memories of some of the most important people in the history of this country.

A decent start to understand the labor history of this country may actually be a work of fiction - John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (which you should buy from IndieBound.org (Amazon is great but independent bookstores are better for the community). Those intimidated because of being forced to read Steinbeck in High School should reconsider - this is a fairly short book and is apparently President Obama's favorite book by Steinbeck.

The book is about organizing the agriculture workers in California way back in the day. Each of these quotes comes from dialogue - starting with an insight into why organizing workers was so important:

"Did you ever work at a job where, when you got enough skill to get a raise in pay, you were fired and a new man put in? Did you ever work in a place where they talked about loyalty to the firm, and loyalty meant spying on the people around you?"

As to those who would argue that humans are too individualistic to work together, one might answer "There is power in a union."

"Men always like to work together. There's a hunger in men to work together. Do you know that ten men can lift nearly twelve times as big a load as one man can? It only takes a little spark to get them going. Most of the time they're suspicious, because every time someone gets 'em working in a group the profit of their work is taken away from them; but wait till they get working for themselves."

The final quote is something that can be applied to almost every power struggle in the history of humankind. London is the name of one of the main characters. The men they are organizing may well starve - their families may be malnourished because the owners of the orchards had all the power in the arrangement. 100 years ago, when people went on strike, some might get killed quickly in a streetfight and others might watch their children go days without food during the ordeal. These were serious struggles.

"They say we play dirty, work underground. Did you ever think, London? We've got no guns. If anything happens to us, we don't get in the newspapers. But if anything happens to the other side, Jesus, they smear it in ink. We've got no money, and no weapons, so we've got to use our heads, London. See that? It's like a man with a club fighting a squad with machine-guns. The only way he can do it is to sneak up and smack the gunners from behind. Maybe that isn't fair, but hell, London, this isn't any athletic contest. There aren't any rules a hungry man has to follow."

According to Wikipedia, when writing about the book, Steinbeck said this - something that I sometimes want to shout at pompous folks who are more horrified by a fucking expletive than the daily outrages faced by the underclass in our cities.

The talk...is what is usually called vulgar. I have worked along with working stiffs and I have rarely heard a sentence that had not some bit of profanity in it. And in books I am sick of the noble working man talking very like a junior college professor. [The novel] is not controversial enough to draw the support of either the labor or the capital side although either may draw controversial conclusions from it, I suppose

The Internet, far from being a mere free-porn distribution engine, allows "mass collaboration." As more and more people come online, each person is better able to find others that share niche skills. In your community, you may be one of 5 or 10 that is interested in, say open source content management system programing (like drupal, the software that runs this site). But on the Internet, you can associate with thousands of people that share that.

Pehaps the defining book describing how this technological innovation impacts culture and business is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

It is a slightly dated book for those of us living the tecnica vida loca, but should still be interesting for those who don't live and breathe on tech sites and philosophical treatises on technology.

As people are better able to associate and work with others who share their specialty, they are able to make unexpected breakthoughs - from esoteric scientific knowledge to the mass sorting of photos of flickr. Oh - and almost all of this is only possible because of itself. Mass collaboration created the infrastructure on which the Internet runs - from the operating systems (linux) to the server software (apache) to the databases (MySQL and Postgres) to the scripting languages (PHP and Perl) all of which are combined into the "LAMP" stack.

The implications are stunning - for instance, Scorecard allows you to learn about pollution in your community. Laws require businesses to report on pollution they emit. Historically, that would go to a government agency that would or would not do anything about it. Now the government agency puts out data feeds that are incomprensible to most people. But groups formed to deal with just this information created software to automatically categorize and update these government feeds, making it more presentable to anyone who wants to easily access the information. And no, on some sites, people can actually upload their own data to contribute to the site, making the data more accurate.

The book is filled with examples like this and will be a good read for those who have not yet grasped how everything is changing in a "The World is Flat" kinda way.

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and a number of other books that I have enjoyed, was the subject of the May 2009 Playboy interview. This may be my favorite Playboy interview. Highlights from Palahniuk's interview is here, along with the opportunity to purchase it.