Choice VII

 

I’m a Man

If I had my choice of matter,
I'd would rather be with cats
All engrossed in mental chatter
Showing where your mind is at

If you believe in one God, then you believe in Choice.

Zoroastrianism believes in two competing absolutes, Good and Evil, that are constantly at war. It sounds an awful like today’s Hellfire and Brimstone evangelists.

The First of the Ten Commandment is that God is an absolute and is there is only one absolute. This means that Evil is NEVER equal to Good if God is Good. This is not only theological it is also mathematical. If there is an absolute, ∞, AND a complete opposite of that absolute, -∞, its zero is a relative zero between these two absolutes, (∞+-∞)/2=0. But if there is one absolute, then the multiplicative inverse of that absolute, 1/∞, is an absolute zero. That there is a difference between an absolute zero and a relative zero can be seen by setting these two zeros equal to each other. You end up with the absurdity that ∞²-∞²=2.

If there is only one God, then Evil can never be an equal to that absolute/God. To accept a relative zero, is to accept that there are at least two absolutes. If there is only one absolute, the choice is between that absolute and no absolute, not between Good and Evil, i.e., competing absolutes. If someone is telling you that the choice is between Good and Evil, then they are also telling you that they believe that there are at least two absolutes. And if there is only one absolute there must be one choice, that absolute or not that absolute. If someone is denying you that choice, then they are denying the existence of that absolute.

Certainty III

 

The Hello Song (the theme song to Animaniacs) 

There's a word in every language
A word that you should know
A word that means you're friendly
A word used high and low.
Though the way to say it varies
Most everywhere you go
Its meaning never changes
And that word is Hello 

Variance is just saying Hello 

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose 

By any other name would smell as sweet; 

Smart guy that William Shakespeare. He saw the problem that humans infer things because of a name. Take the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for instance. It could just as easily be called the Heisenberg Variance Principle, that for a particle at a location, x, the speed, δx, associated with that particle at that location is defined by the location and the standard deviation at that location. But because it is called the Uncertainty Principle, and God is Certain, it is assumed that God has No Variance, is Unvariant. 

Mathematically this is Determinism, 0 ± 0, versus Randomness, x ± σ. In trying to be God-like, humans assign a location of 0 and a Standard Deviation, σ, where variance is σ², of 0 to all things. However humans are not God, x<>0, and the correct equations should be 0 ± σ for God versus x<>0, x ± σ for everything else. In other words, we should try to  discover God’s variance and make that our own variance for all of our locations, if we want to be God-like.

The Middle

 

Stuck in the Middle

Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you.

But the middle is where you want to be.

The eternal debate always seems to be between the right vs left, whether that is monarchists vs. lower case r republicans; capitalists vs. communists; conservatives vs. liberals; libertarians vs. progressives; red vs. blue; etc. One side are User Optimalistsm, UO. The other side are System Optimalists, SO. But humans are individual users (UO) that form a society (SO). No side should win, or we have no society, and not thus no society to protect individuals from each other.

Mathematics/game theory provides the guidance that when individuals form a system they seek a Nash Equilibrium. Some users will achieve less than their own User Optimal, but all members of the System will be at Equilibrium,  will achieve the same value.

While this may sound like an unfamiliar concept, you probably have experienced it if ever you have driven in a lane drop in traffic, due to construction, work zones, accidents, etc. The System Optimal solution is for the lane which continues to move at capacity and for traffic to continue to operate in the lane that is being dropped for as long as possible until there is a safe gap to merge into the continuing lane. This is called a rolling merge. In fact few travelers have ever experienced a rolling merge. This is because an individual vehicle can always continue in the lane which is being dropped and then force its way to the head of the still moving lanes, because “don’t you know who they are.”  To prevent last-second lane jumpers, most other vehicles  move into the continuing lane at first notice. Also some vehicles will block the lane being dropped to block any attempts at lane jumping. This is neither a User Optimal free-for-all nor a System Optimal rolling merge, but somewhere in-between where individual Users function as if they were a System.

It is neither winner takes it all, nor everyone wins, but the team wins because some team members are willing to take one for the team. Neither extreme wins, but the middle wins.

Batman

 

I Am the Walrus

I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob

I am the Batman, goo goo g’job.

I got excited when the National Renewable Energy Lab featured a story about the Gotham Knight. https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2024/unleashing-the-power-batman-project-revolutionizes-battery-manufacturing.html. I should have realized that the project named Batman was short for Battery Manufacturing, and not the Gotham  Knight . Before that realization, my question was which Gotham Knight, the one before the Reagan presidency when Batman merely captured crooks for the Gotham  City Police Department OR the Batman after that time where his opponents were insane (at least according to his  morality) and were confined to Arham Asylum. It is the former Batman that was nearly cancelled, not current popular one. But there is another humbler meaning for batman that I would like to suggest is also more in keeping with the pre-1980s Batman.

That is an orderly to an officer in the British Army. It is derived not from the creature of the night, but from the term bat, the French word for a pack carried into battle. A batman managed an officer’s bat. In which case Alfred the butler is the batman to the current Batman.

A famous batman is Mervyn Bunter in Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Bunter was Lord Peter’s batman during World War I and remained with him after the war to manage his affairs. Despite being only his valet, Bunter is Lord Peter’s friend. Lord Peter admires Bunter’s efficiency and competence in virtually every sphere, and trusts him with his life. We all need a batman like that. I hope that the National Renewable Lab’s project has that batman in mind, and not the current Batman who is all about imposing his point of view by dominance.

Consistency

 

The Life I Lead

I run my home precisely on schedule
At 6:01, I march through my door
My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02
Consistent is the life I lead! 

Be consistent. 

When faced with a road with too many cars for the capacity of that road, the expectation is thar the government which operates the road will excpnd the capacity of that road.  The expectation is not to eliminate some of the cars around me. Why they when faced with an immigration system where there are too many immigrants for the processing system is the response that government should eliminate immigrants, not increase its ability to process immigrants? To be consistent why is the correct response increasing supply in one case and decreasing demand in the other case. Shouldn’t it be the same response in both cases?

But understand when there is an attempt at a joke. I remember a public meeting when I was asked a question about how to deal with traffic congestion. I factiously tried to emulate Swift’s Immodest Proposal by saying that people should shoot the tires of vehicles that they did not recognize. I remember then being asked without any sense of irony where would one get ammunition for one's gun and could one get exemptions from our state’s gun laws. I learned to be consistent in my humor too!

Distribution of Wealth III

 

Adventures of Robin Hood Theme

Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Riding through the glen,
Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
With his band of men,
Feared by the bad, loved by the good,
Robin Hood! Robin Hood! Robin Hood!

Where is Robin Hood when you need him?

According to the Global Wealth Databook published by USB, the world has become wealthier but more inequitable in the distribution of that wealth. In 2000, that databook reported that the adult population of the 164 markets, mostly countries, was 3.8 billion and the wealth of those markets was 118 Trillion of US Dollars. In 2022, the most recent year reported, the adult population increased to 5.1 billion. a growth of 42 percent, but the wealth had increased to 450 trillion of US Dollars. Even adjusting for inflation, this is equivalent to $256 trillion in 2000 US Dollars, a growth of 117 percent.

The distribution of that wealth also became less equitable. The ratio of the mean to median wealth per adult is a good indication of the equitable distribution in each market. That index has been weighted by the size of the population of each market. On that basis the weighted Equity Index (the ratio of the mean to the median, weighted by the population for each market in 2000 is as shown below.

It changed to that shown below in 2022.

While the extremes in the smaller markets of Bahrain, Bahamas and Brunei dropped in the intervening years,  the total inequity increased, and the variance in in the distribution of wealth also has increased. The Equity Index in the United States changed from 4.7 in 2000 to 5.1 in 2022. This ratio of the mean to the median is NOT changed by restating in inflation adjusted dollars. It appears that as total wealth increased, this has been accompanied primarily by an increase in the variance of the distribution of that wealth.

Distribution of Wealth II

God Bless the Child

Money, you've got lots of friends
They're crowding around the door
When you're gone and spending ends
They don't come no more
Rich relations give crusts of bread and such
You can help yourself, but don't take too much

Mama may have, papa may have 
But God bless the child that's got his own, that's got his own
God bless the child, the child that's got his own 

How much wealth is enough to be your own? 

God bless the Swiss. I had the feared that the Global Wealth Databook published annually by Credit Suisse would be discontinued after Credit Suisse was taken over by UBS. In fact UBS has published the 2023 book. And this Databook has wealth information by country by year from 2000 to 2022. Thus it is possible to not only see how wealth is distributed among the population of a market, but it is also possible to see how this distribution has changed over time. For 2022, the book reports mean, median and total wealth and adult populations for 164 markets which are primarily countries ( Hong Kong SAR,  and Taiwan are reported as separate markets from Mainland China, despite China’s’ territorial claims; some markets are not reported because there is no data, e.g., Sudan, South Sudan, etc.). This means that at least for this year it is still possible to examine how wealth is distributed in most markets.

“Sadly” the United States, based on the ratio of the mean to the median wealth, has lost ground as the market/country with the most inequitable distribution of wealth in the world. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/04/distribution-of-wealth.html   

While Bahrain and the Bahamas are still the most inequitable counties, again they are very small markets. But the United States has lost ground to other small markets such Lesotho, Brunei, Suriname and even to the large market of Brazil. If the mean to median is weighted by the share of population, the United States has only the third most inequitable distribution of wealth after India and China. But this ranking is almost entirely because of the size of India and China’s populations. The Top 10 Most Inequitable Markets ranked by weighted inequality of wealth (mean divided by median) are

Market	Share of Adults	Share of Wealth	Weighted Mean /Median Wealth
India	18.1%	3.4%	0.80
Mainland China	21.7%	18.8%	0.60
United States	4.9%	31.1%	0.25
Brazil	3.1%	1.0%	0.16
Indonesia	3.6%	0.7%	0.13
Russia	2.2%	1.0%	0.10
Nigeria	2.0%	0.2%	0.09
Pakistan	2.5%	0.2%	0.06
Philippines	1.4%	0.2%	0.06
Bangladesh	2.1%	0.2%	0.05

where the mean wealth per adult that is closest to the median wealth per population remains Iceland. But this is not surprising in a country with arguably the oldest democratic body (the Althing)  and where almost everyone is related to everyone else on the island.