Public Goods

 

Return To Sender

Return to sender, address unknown
No such number, no such zone
We had a quarrel, a lover's spat
I write I'm sorry, but my letter keeps coming back

Th US Postal Service will return to sender, but an email site?

I have an email address that my family ghosted. It was so inundated with spam, etc., that it became easier to just move to another company and another email address. But that original email address is still active all of these years later. And it is the email address that is on file with my college. I only found this out when I had to go back to that email site (I had to be verified by the company offering that email that I was who I said I was). In doing so I found hundreds of old emails from my college.

The college knows my post office address. When I move or change that address, mail gets forwarded for a time and then eventually it is retuned to sender. I am well aware of this because when my late father moved to a nursing home, he received forwarded letters for a time, but the sender eventually received a return to sender note.

And that is the difference between a public service, as provided by the US Postal Service, and a private company providing an email address. A public service can attempt to notify both parties when it is unable to complete a transaction, even when it makes no profit on that notice. A private company can not be expected to notify either party unless it is getting a profit for providing that service. Email addresses provided by a private company may look and feel like a public good, but they are still private goods, and unless those private goods make money they will not be offered. So no incentive to return to sender,

Tolerance III

 

The Rules of the Road

But that's how it goes,
You live and you learn,
The rules of the road.

So what are the rules?

Playing a game means following the rules of that game. There is a branch of study about playing games, Game Theory. It studies, subject to the rules, the best strategy for playing a game. Game Theory has demonstrated that there are different strategies for playing a game with only two‑players, than there is for a game with three-or-more players, (and that does NOT mean that there are not three‑players in most games. There is often an umpire to call balls and strikes, even if that umpire is merely the two players being honorable, and there is probably a league of potential opponents, making all of those games more than two-players). But the rules should only ensure that bad behavior is not rewarded if it is caught, not that there is no bad behavior.

There is a board game called Lie, Cheat and Steal. It is a variation of the Prisoner's Dilemma. The object is to win even if that means lying, cheating, or stealing. The payout matrix for Player One on each move, the rules, where the payout matrix for Player Two is the oposite of this, effectively is:

Player One (rows)/Player Two	Not Lie, Cheat, or Steal	Lie, Cheat or Steal
Not Lie, Cheat or Steal	1	-2
Lie, Cheat or Steal	2	0

But there is a problem for society if this behavior is rewarded. If players Lie or Cheat, then transactions may not take place. If Stealing is allowed, then there is no incentive to ever produce anything because it may be stolen from you. To allow transactions to continue and to encourage production, society would prefer it if the payout matrix for Player One was:

Player One (rows)/Player Two	Not Lie, Cheat, or steal	Lie, Cheat or Steal
Not Lie, Cheat or Steal	1	0
Lie, Cheat or Steal	0	0

The payout matrix would be the same if the a constant were subtracted from every cell, for example, 

	Not Lie, Cheat, or steal	Lie, Cheat or Steal
Not Lie, Cheat or Steal	0	-1
Lie, Cheat or Steal	-1	-1

And that is why society has laws and trials. Those laws are not intended to PREVENT lying, cheating, or stealing. They are intended to NOT REWARD lying, cheating, stealing or other bad behavior, if and when it is caught. The penalties should be large enough such that being caught has to be considered when each player makes their choice.

IOW, dominance, winning at all costs, might be good for one player, but that win is not necessarily good for society. What is good for society, is tolerance, allowing, but not encouraging, any choice, i.e. making each game at least a three-player game. Any law which restricts choice even if that choice is to lie, cheat or steal, is bad, even if it is well intentioned.  But laws can be enacted to prevent rewarding bad choices.

Affirmative Action II

 

Working Class Hero

There's room at the top they are telling you still|
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

Should the working class be opposed to Affirmative Action?

I have degrees from two of the Ivy Leagues. But, since I come from a working-class background, I could not afford tuition at either of these Ivy League Universities. I was only able to attend because of merit based scholarships.  I was a National Merit Scholar in high school and properly nerdy enough at my undergraduate college that I earned merit-based scholarships to graduate school.  This must mean that I am FOR a merit-based system and OPPOSED to affirmative action,  correct?  Nothing could be further from the truth.   https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/08/affirmative-action.html

Man is a group animal.  In the words of John Donne, “No Man is an Island”. It is the group that matters, not each individual in that group, whether that group is a club, a college, or a nation.   A merit based system is good for the individual and should be supported, but Affirmative Action is for the group, including every individual in that group, including the working class.

Left versus Right

 

It’s Alright With Me

It's the wrong time and the wrong place
Though your face is charming, it's the wrong face
It's not her face, but such a charming face
That it's all right with me

Is the left then wrong?

Left and Right to describe one’s politics only dates back to just prior to the French Revolution. At that time in the French National Assembly, the supporters of the King sat on the right and the supporters of the Revolution sat on the left. Left and right, a binary, is not how normal politics should be described. A normal distribution does indeed have a left and right side, but most of the views are in the center.

Unfortunately right in other contexts means correct. And right-handed is "normal", while left-handed is not. And left is known as sinister in Latin. Thus the perception that the left is not normal and is sinister.

Ever wish there were another way to describe political positions than left and right?  Would it be better to describe it as User Optimal, UO, and System Optimal, SO. That is Individuals versus the Team? And wouldn’t it be even better to describe it in three dimensions: UO vs SO; Nature vs Nurture; Truth vs Fiction. ( and that last dimension is not mean to be disparaging, to be a slam. I prefer Fictional stories over Non-Fiction, but I also know that WWE wrestling is NOT Truth). Maybe Truth, Justice, and the American Way, otherwise known as  Certainty, Mercy and Pluralism?

Dimensions

 

The Twilight Zone

You are about to enter another dimension.
A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.
A journey into a wondrous land of imagination.
Next stop, the Twilight Zone!

A dimension of the imagination?

Herman Minkowski realized that the special theory of relativity, introduced by his former student Albert Einstein,  could best be understood in a four-dimensional space, which has come to be known as "Minkowski spacetime", in which time and space are not separated, but combined in a four-dimensional space–time. Then special relativity can be effectively represented using an invariant constant which is equal to  x²+y²+z²-c²t^{2 .} or (x²+y²+z²)-c²t². Pythagoras’s Theorem is only the special case when eccentricity is equal to one and is only true for a flat surface. In case anyone needs a hint,
x²-y²= 1 is the formula for a hyperbola. Only if time OR space is equal to zero should this be solved using Pythagoras’s Theorem. Unfortunately, the Lorentz Transform solved it using Pythagoras’s Theorem.

Graphically, Minkowski space typically has been presented as a two dimensional graph where the three spatial dimensions: x, y and z; were combined into one dimension of space versus another dimension of time. But because the invariant constant involves squares, this should really be not solved for a flat, Euclidean, surface. It should be solved for a hyperbolic surface, and a third dimension should be added which is indeed one of imagination, based on the imaginary number, √-1. This cone of events should be plotted with dimensions of space, time, AND imagination. Hyperbolic functions of space and time only repeat in imaginary planes and would be a single function on a hyperbolic surface. E.g. Cosh(x) has a period of 2πi which repeats only in the imaginary plane. These other planes of the imagination can  be thought of as the multiverse, which is distinguished from the “real” plane on which we live. Using the three dimensions,  the event space would be two cones which intersect at the origin, the Big Bang, which is the opposite of Twilight Zone, where all imaginations are zero.  

Variance

 

Room to Move

May seem peculiar
How I think o' you
If you want me darlin'
Here's what you must do.
You gotta free me
'Cause I can't give the best
Unless I got room to move.

Does the universe give us room to move?

The universe is infinite and expanding. But because it allows us to be free, there is choice, it has a known variance, which should NOT be confused with its size. That variance allows for all of these choices to occur. If each choice is binary, e.g. heads/tails, true/false, the odds of each choice is 0.5 and statistics tells us that the variance of the universe must be s²π²/3. Because the odds of choice, s, are 50%, its variance is 0.91. If there was no choice then s would be 0, reflecting that there is only one outcome, i.e. only true, and the odds of deviating from that outcome is 0% and the variance would thus be zero. 

The universe in which we live has choice, and thus has to include all of those choices. At the point where the universe incudes all of those choices, there is a transition to a universe where the choice has already been made ( e.g. there is effectively no further choice). This point is the absolute as given by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. In the Theory of Relativity, the absolute is the speed of light. That is you can only approach an absolute, but you can not be an absolute. This describes exponential behavior. In Traffic Engineering, the approach is to the absolute which is capacity of a road. In Fluid Mechanics, it is the capacity of a channel. In Traffic Engineering, you are in a uncongested domain before reaching that capacity. In Fluid Mechanics you are in a laminar flow domain before you approach that capacity. It is suggested that the universe  in which we live is only the turbulent, chaotic, part of the domain where there is choice. There must be a transition to the orderly domain, which has a zero variance. But in both domains,  the universe is infinite so not only are we free in our domain, but in both domains we have room to move.

Good Intentions

 

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

Baby, do you understand me now?
Sometimes I feel a little mad
But don't you know that no one alive can always be an angel
When things go wrong I feel real bad.
I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood

But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were more than contemporaries and acquaintances.  They both belonged to a group they called the Inklings and thus supposedly read and commented on each others works while in progress.  J.R.R. Tolkien is the author who created The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and whose estate has authorized the Amazon series The Rings of Power.  C.S. Lewis is perhaps best known today for his Narnia series which contained  The Lion, the  Witch, and the Wardrobe.  But he is also the author of That Hideous Strength, the last volume of his Perelandra trilogy.

Both men lived through, and were deeply affected by, the hellish evils of WWI and WWII and the rise of fascism. Their works reflect this.  J.R.R. Tolkien also appears to be a strong believer in the monarchy, if not a Jacobite, who also believed in the battle of ultimate good and ultimate evil. He set his tale in a completely imaginary world.  C.S. Lewis appeared to be less of a monarchist, who appeared to believe that people were neither inherently good nor evil, but could be deceived to unknowingly support what later tuned out to be fascism. He also set his story as much as possible in the “real” world.  The “science” in the Perelandra trilogies is woefully out of date, and the theology is, being positive, at least imaginative.  But the lessons about having good intentions, but unknowingly supporting the evils of fascism, are unfortunately all too pertinent today.