Dear CRC Press,

I am writ­ing to say that I am forced inter­pret your recent postal offer of “deep dis­counts” on sev­eral dozen poorly-​​written, shoddily-​​manufactured, untimely and obso­lete van­ity press offer­ings in fields for the most part unre­lated to my work or inter­ests, said “deep dis­counts” reduc­ing the price to a mere $99 per use­less vol­ume, as a telling symp­tom of some sort of neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive or psy­chopatho­log­i­cal disorder.

In you, I mean.

I hope you take the time to see a doc­tor, and you may want to set your affairs in order.

My deep­est con­do­lences, in any event, to the authors of the poorly-​​written, shoddily-​​manufactured, untimely van­ity press offer­ings you have been foist­ing for decades. They will inevitably be forced to seek actual edi­tors among their peers and read­ers, and rework their pecu­liarly iso­lated notions in order to appeal to an actual audi­ence, and I am sad­dened to observe that you have given them lit­tle or no cul­tural sup­port in those skills through the years.

That said, if you have any more 1980s-​​vintage Hand­book of Chem­istry and Physics, I am inter­ested in tak­ing them off your hands. Ever since I grad­u­ated (with my first degree in the sci­ences), I have found they are excel­lent for press­ing flow­ers and leaves for art & craft projects.

The lat­ter offered by way of solace, if you were feel­ing com­pletely use­less. Buck up!

Google Maps must have pur­chased a new suite of road infor­ma­tion recently. Or maybe they algo­rith­mi­cally tried to “improve” the dataset they had. Used to be it knew local geog­ra­phy pretty well; now, not so much.

When ask­ing for direc­tions from our farm (on Walsh Road, Web­ster Town­ship) to the Dairy Queen in Ham­burg Town­ship, the dri­ving (not walk­ing!) algo­rithm sug­gests we stay on north­bound Scully. If you saw it from a dis­tance, the satel­lite image would lead you to believe that, yes.

Except that many years’ fierce argu­ment at the county bor­der has left a nasty but potent gate block­ing the road, which will per­sist into the fore­see­able future.

If you were to drive up the rough, mainly untended Scully Road on a snowy day, try­ing to get (say) to a hos­pi­tal in Pinck­ney or some­thing, the least that would hap­pen is you’d waste a half-​​hour try­ing to back out of the last few hun­dred yards with­out end­ing up in a ditch… once you arrived at the impass­able gate at the bor­der, and well after you had tres­passed on a pri­vate road at the end.

The De Lorme Michi­gan Atlas & Gazetteer, a nice old printed book I keep in my car, and which is so obso­lete that it shows lit­tle red lines for roads of all sizes and char­ac­ters, man­ages to catch the gap.

Now every dataset con­tains errors or miss­ing infor­ma­tion. But every time that dataset is used to make a sin­gle, sum­mary state­ment, based on a sin­gle model? Bad­ness can hap­pen in unex­pected ways. In fact, I am obliged to be cur­mud­geonly about it because of my pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence in these mat­ters: it is always wrong to present a sin­gle answer for any multi-​​objective or highly con­strained decision-​​making prob­lem. Big, fat period.

I can’t com­plain, in all hon­esty, about advice given by a black box operations-​​research algo­rithm that on inspec­tion I knew was incor­rect. You get what you pay for. But I can com­plain about a cul­ti­vat­ing a mis­lead­ing user expe­ri­ence in a ubiq­ui­tous data-​​driven deci­sion sup­port sys­tem that presents only one solu­tion at a time to the decision-​​maker. Hell, every iPhone in the world has one of these on it; they’re all wrong, too.

No, I don’t think I am feel­ing lucky, Google. And you didn’t even ask.

I want to see a sheaf of routes. The lit­tle “adjust the route and recal­cu­late a new one using my mile­stones” han­dles Google intro­duced a few years back are a beau­ti­ful thing, a cun­ning arti­fact and a use­ful tool! And of course, the stan­dard “avoid­ing high­way” or “fastest” tog­gles let me reach in and fid­dle with the search method. But only indirectly.

I want the objec­tives right there, not com­bined. I want not just to sur­face the meter (to use a phrase Dan Cooney’s taught me), but sur­face all of them. I want choices cou­pled to clearly dif­fer­en­tiable sup­port­ing arguments.

Like the basic Google Search results them­selves: ten routes at a time, ranked some­how. Or not even ranked, but handed to me as a Pareto-​​equivalent set of alter­na­tives, some faster, some bumpier, some with big­ger roads, some with more gas sta­tions, some more scenic. Heck, maybe I just want to know there are at least ten ways to go back and forth, so I can stage a race, or not get bored on my com­mute, or defend against unwanted SUV inva­sion by a for­eign county or something.

At least some­times. Stop assum­ing I’m feel­ing lucky.

Next time, we can bitch about the mis­lead­ing user expe­ri­ence and illu­sory author­ity cre­ated by the fuckin’ weather fore­cast for­mat. Every­body com­plains about the weather fore­cast, but nobody does any­thing about it.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Bar­bara bought me two inex­pen­sive packs of sim­ple black socks the other day at the local depart­ment chain. Name brand. You’d rec­og­nize them.

Both came in zip-​​lock bags. Six pairs of socks sold in a bag with a slid­ing reclo­sure mechanism.

In both cases the pack­age labels called out the fact of the “RESEALABLE BAG”. So clearly it’s important.

How­ever, in both cases the bags were per­ma­nently sealed by fus­ing, above the line of the resealer. With­out per­fo­ra­tions, there was no way to open the bags the first time with­out dam­ag­ing the resealer mechanism.

So: point?

I’m not the first per­son to have asked the ques­tion. But no clear answer is forthcoming.

What would hap­pen if a gov­ern­ment (not this one, surely, but some US gov­ern­ment) declared all credit default swap con­tracts null and void?

Just killed them all. No more pay­ments, no more indemnification.

What would happen?

I’m still read­ing Woody Holton’s Unruly Amer­i­cans, and I’m struck by the inces­sant sim­i­lar­i­ties between Recent Events and those in the period imme­di­ately after the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War in the US.

More detail to fol­low, but with­out being pes­simistic about it at all, I find myself return­ing to a sequence of ques­tions that has popped into my Highly Paid Futurist’s head in each of the last five socioe­co­nomic shocks:

• What are the chances that a Con­sti­tu­tional Con­ven­tion will be con­vened in the next decade?
• Under what cir­cum­stances will state or regional seces­sion be con­sid­ered by one or more US states?
• How many “nations” (scare-​​quoted on pur­pose, since I’m sus­pi­cious the term may come to mean some­thing new) will there be in North Amer­ica in 12 years?

As I said, I’m not too wor­ried about these things. But the increas­ing scale of these shocks, rang­ing from the Oil Cri­sis, to the Sav­ings & Loan deba­cle, to the LTCM bailout, and now this… the HPF in me keeps want­ing to use the word dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion.

And I don’t mean in the con­text of a busi­ness plan.