Gainful Employment, Society is At Fault

draft

Fragment of a larger essay.

I had the misfortune of working at RAND as a college drop out and being part of the early ARPA community, and that set expectations for the workplace which have not been met. Symbolics (an MIT AI Lab spinoff was part of this enlightened conspiracy, so was the MIT Media Lab in its earlier Architecture Machine form). I blame society because I was treated so well to begin with.

Gainful Employment, The Backstory

draft

Several friends have expressed concern about my lack of traditonal employment (or non-traditional employment) and have offered to help.  I appreciate their offer very much.  Its just that the situation is complicated and there are many things, boring things, that they do not or may not know.

But I want to thank everyone for thinking of me.  Yes, its important.  Yes, pretty much all my friends and certainly those who have volunteered to give me advice have probably done better than I in so many ways.

So lets go over some of these issues.

1. I made choices that resulted in taking risks.  Those risks did not pan out, and combined with unexpected health related issues, means that there are non-traditional gaps on my resume. The generic job opening can not accomodate this without special pleading.  Applying over the internet in some anonymous fashion will not work.

2. In fact, applying for a random job over the internet has never worked.

3. I generally have to think about a job before I apply for it.  Its important to me to feel as though, were I to get the job, that I would do well at it. But this approach does not match the "internet clusterfuck apply in quantity and pray" strategy.  That is right, it doesn't.

4. For better or worse, there are health considerations and not every job can accomodate these things.

5. Money has never been important.  What has been important has been the people I work with and the organization I work for.  Think RAND Corporation, Symbolics (MIT AI spinoff), MASS ILLUSION or the American Museum of Natural History. It can be hard to predict these things I admit.  I had a wonderful time consulting to Viacom in various guises, but that had to do with special circumstances and special people.

6. Its hard to be quanititative about this, but quite a few of my work experiences have involved being abused by management or my fellow workers.  But that would never happen in an elite place like RAND.  So it behooves me to work in such a place and avoid places where management does not protect its people.

7. You can learn technology all you want on your own, but being employable in a field means full time dedication and resources to learn and keep up with that specific field.  So you are not just going to be a web developer, you are going to dedicate your life to web development if you want a job in it. I dont want a job in it.

8. Regarding entrepreneurial activity.  I decided I did not want to try that again with out money.  Now that I have learned that getting a job is impossible, I may as well have abused myself through stupid attempts to be entrepreneurial without money.  It would have been more fun.  Live and learn, I guess.

I could go on, but there is no point.  If you want to help, the best way to do so is to introduce me to someone who might have some project or position where there might be a fit.  A few friends have tried this and it has almost worked, or worked for short periods.  But sadly it has not worked in the long run.

I appreciate your time very much.

Personal Power Conservation Notes

I dont write about shit like this so that people who hate me can use it to make fun of me. I already know what you think. I write it so that others who are in distress may, occassionally, read about my experience and get some useful information from it. Who knows what the odds are of this. I think that they are small, but w.t.f. why not try a little idealism now and then?

I have been able to get my gas and power bill down from roughly $150 / month to less than $50/month. I am told that these are very good figures, but its all still baffling to me. Someone who is not working can afford none of this and yet they have to live even if the rich fly their widebody jets around. Supposedly there is a utilities program under the name of 211 that I have yet to try.

But for those of you who are interested in lowering your power bill and / or have no income, here are some notes on what is necessary to get the numbers down by 2/3rds.

1. Enroll in your power company's “CARE” program. This gets you somewhere between a 20 to 30 percent discount on your bill. You need to watch this one, as it tends to reset to off.

2. Unplug your washer and dryer and use the laundromat. Yes that will cost you between $10 to $20 per visit (including detergent), but at least it wont be a surprise at the end of the month.

3. Turn off your heat and air conditioning. I live in Southern California. The heat is oppressive and it gets cold at night. But the pipes wont freeze and its time to realize that you are worthless garbage because you are poor, and you can wear a fucking sweater to keep warm.

4. Replace all the curly lights with LEDs, available at Walmart for roughly $3.00 per light.

5. Unplug all unknown electronics devices, period. Trace all power lines and if you do not need it, dont use it. Remember, if it is plugged in it is probably using power whether there is a light glowing or not.

6. Turn all computers onto maximum power savings. Wait for the fucking disk to spin up.

7. Only run your workstation when you need it, and then turn it off. Never run it overnight.

8. Turn down the temperature on your water heater, assuming you still have gas.

9. Dont use the electric oven and rarely use the electric stove. Use your outdoors propane stove where you can. It may or may not save money in the long run, but in the short run it will save on your electricity bill and let you keep the lights on.

Remember what we are trying to achieve here. We are trying to keep lights on and the ability to charge our smartphones and run some of our computers. Everything else is and should be optional.

Working From My Smartphone: Water and Power

As part of the continuing effort to live within my means, I decided that when SDGE (San Diego Gas and Electric) turned off my power this time, I would just keep it off and spend the money otherwise sent to them to continue to build up my “no power” infrastructure and see how it went. This is going to be much more detail than most of you will be interested in, so feel free to skip to the end.

The power went off the Wednesday morning after Trump was elected. At the end of 9 days, I called SDGE and made a deal. Here is what I learned in these 9 days.

1. No Power Infrastructure

I bought a $20 solar water shower, and spent at least as much money installing it. But it is installed, and the next time that the gas and power goes off (but the water stays on), I will have warm showers at least some of the time. The rest of the time I will have cold water “towel” showers.

I bought a $40 propane camping stove, and I have now built a place for it. It does just what I need. As the reviews say, it pretty much has two settings: full off and full on. I have to stay there and watch it when I cook, as otherwise it will blast whatever is being cooked into charcoal. I have to wear gloves or I will burn the shit out of myself. But it works fine and I can have hot food when the power is off. I plan to continue to use it even when the power is on to see how this affects my lifestyle and energy bills.

I bought a second, larger ice chest for $40 and split my food between the two chests. I try to keep things out of the water, this means an internal strainer for the fruits/vegetables and a container for things like cheese. With two ice chests, I need to spend $4-$8 every 3 days or so to keep things cool. They also require maintenance every few days basically to drain the water.

I bought a $15 external battery for my smartphone. It makes all the difference in terms of smartphone usage especially at night.

I bought a $20 power inverter for my car and used it to charge my laptop. It also depleted my battery and I needed to rejoin AAA to get a charge. This costs $70 these days. No more charging my laptop from my car and no more charging my phone from the car unless the engine is running.

I bought $10 in batteries and would need to do that about every other week. I bought two very cheap “miners” headset LED flashlights and they are my preferred go to lighting solution.

I either go to the Escondido Library if it is open to charge my devices, or on days or times when it is closed, I go to Starbucks and pay $5 for something and use their facilities. In both cases there is unsecured WIFI that I can use. The nearest 24 hour cafe is an hour away in San Diego.

I was able to turn my smartphone into a tethered hotspot. However, I also needed to increase my data plan from $40 a month to $60 and it may go up from there.

2. Productivity

My producitivity went to hell. A lot of my writing and work has to happen when I think about it, not when I have managed to get to the library and to Starbucks. I have severe insomnia and I need to be able to work from home and without a charged laptop I can not do that.

3. Mental State

I am severely challenged to end this situation (unemployment, living in isolation) and I need to be productive to do so. The despair caused by living in a dark house and not getting work done was and is dangerous. Furthermore, it greatly increased my requirements for medication way beyond the normal and that is not sustainable.

4. SDGE Cooperation

One more time, SDGE was helpful in making a deal to get the power on. I have reduced my monthly nut to under $50/month for gas and electric, the problem has always been the back bill.

Another time I will discuss how I got my bill down as far as I have.

Three Down, Four to Go (DRAFT)

draft

This post is being rewritten, I would wait for this notice to go away before reading.

I applied for seven jobs at a large very successful animation company where I have lots of friends. Each of these jobs was what I call lower-middle-class technical jobs. Two were in production and five were in R&D.  I could probably do any of these jobs with skill and style. So far I have been rejected from three of them and I expect to be rejected from the other four. 

I have assurances from friends inside that I am not lost in the HR maze, but that the real hiring managers have seen my paperwork.

What I find outstanding, and discouraging, is that this company has not contacted me once on any of these jobs to clarify any points, or ask any questions, or schedule some sort of telephone interview.  In other words, I am not really being considered for any of these jobs because if I was, there would have been some sort of contact (even if, ultimately, I did not get the job).

Let us all remember that this animation company is overwhelmed with suitable and qualified candidates and that no doubt they will have no trouble filling all the positions without my contribution.

Nevertheless, I find this disturbing.  All fields are competitive today, from web programming to cyber security. There are no non-competitive fields to the best of my knowledge.  But the only field I really have credibility in, that is that I have a real history with, is related to computer animation (could be VR, AR, games, traditional CG animation, etc).  If I can not get to first base in that area, what makes me think I will be considered in any field?

Globalization and its Discontents Part 2/2

I can't imagine anything more futile and tedious than spending time agonizing over how to present what I have learned about some of the structural economic issues of this country. It goes without saying that i have no credibility in this area and that there is zero opportunity for my opinions to make the slightest difference.

On the other hand, I have read that a so-called democracy depends upon an informed electorate assuming, that is, that we do have a democracy, which I doubt. And some of the most important issues that we as a nation face are at the very least non-trivial and with a long and interesting history so it hasnt been entirely boring for me, but for you, thats not so clear.

If we are going to participate in the political process, then it is up to us to investigate what is going on, what the options are, correlate what we have been told with what actually happened in order to form judgments about future behavior and take what positive steps we can in a world out of our control. Furthermore, certain of the issues described below, although they are part of a very complicated economic system, do seem to have some straightforward partial solutions that would be helpful.

I will call these “naive solutions”. I mean, why not?

So with my undergraduate degree in Economics in hand, I boldly set out to understand what is going on with certain economic policies of our country. Probably no one term describes these structural issues but the one most often used is “globalization” and that will have to do for now. And the goal of my little adventure in civics and participatory democracy is to learn more about what is going on in our economy which seems to have substantially changed in the last 30 years.

Lets ask some fundamental questions.

1. Just how many unemployed people are there in this country?

I grew up at the RAND Corporation, the very home and heart of quantitative research in this country. All economic measures are imperfect but they are often useful. We need some way to judge the effect(s) of policy, and if we are using modeling and simulation, some way to evaluate the results of proposed changes in policy.

I assumed that the “unemployment rate” that we hear so much about was an imperfect measure of the percentage of Americans who are either completely unemployed or mostly unemployed. Imperfect is not the right way to describe this measure, a better way might be “deliberately deceptive”. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “unemployment rate” only measures the percentage of people in this country who had become unemployed in the last 18 months and are still unemployed. If you have been unemployed for more than 18 months, then you are no longer counted. But of the people I know who are unemployed, by far the ones who are most affected are those who have been unemployed for longer than 18 months. How many of those are there? No one seems to know.

Furthermore, there is no measure, as far as I can tell, of the number of people who did find work, but at a rate far lower than the one they had previously. So, if they previously worked as a Marketing professional at $80K/year but are now working slinging burgers at Jack in the Box, this is not measured. There is also no accounting for the people who have given up trying to work, but would be working if they could.

But our government does not measure or attempt to measure this. And when they talk about the unemployment rate they are deliberately lying. Well, I dont find that acceptable. What are they trying to hide. Thats an easy question to answer. They dont want to know how miserable people are in this country due to their policies and they dont want you to know either.

2. But, how much of this unemployment and underemployment is the result of “globalization”?

It would be easy to find out if they wanted to know, all they would have to do is to ask the companies that lay people off, or who no longer outsource to American companies, how many people they laid off or what is the value of the contract now sent overseas.

This would not tell the whole story.  If $500 million dollars worth of salaries is extracted from a community and sent overseas to save $50 million for the corporation, that $500 million is no longer being spent in the local community. How many people does that effect and how to do you measure it?  And then of course that money is itself recycled through the community many times, perhaps to a lesser degree.  Given enough time and a research library, I would probably find that economists have measured or modeled this effect in the economy.  For our purposes it is enough to know that we do not know how much the mere outsourcing of work to save a few dollars for the corporation hurts the rest of us.

But just like the unemployment rate, we would expect that our government would want to know these numbers and would make an effort to estimate them. But they do not. All that is reported, if anything is reported, is that the corporation saved $50 million dollars that year by outsourcing. That must be nice for that corporation, and their shareholders, but how about the rest of us?

3. Surely you do not advocate "Protectionism"? What about "market forces"? 

Yes, there are market forces at work, but there are also many government forces, subsidies, taxes and so forth at work as well.  And believe it or not, "market forces" do not absolve anyone from ethics, planning or thinking.

Protectionism is a naughty word in Washington.  The code word du jour is "free trade". As previously referred to in a test case, should we allow a corporation to save $50 million if it costs our citizens $500 million in salaries?  Our Washington elite says yes. They say that so-called "free trade" will help everyone. Does it? Prove it.  

4. But doesnt Globalization help everyone?

In a word, no.

If 90% of the wealth of this country is owned by 1 percent of the population, then if profits are increased for some major corporations, those profits go to the 1 percent. But its worse than that. Not only does this not take into account the lost income to the now-unemployed workers, it does not take into account how much of that income would go to local taxes and to local businesses as people live their lives. In other words, Globalization deliberately increases the profits of the rich at the expense of the working classes and the local communities.

Furthermore, it is completely obvious to anyone who reviews the history of this process that the people who are most hurt by these policies are the people who are least able to afford it.  The worker with tiny savings can not just simply be unemployed and go get retrained as a lawyer.  First, he has a family to support. Second he has no money for school.  Third he is an older worker and our society is ageist as can be, and furthermore is ageist with specific government support to be so.  (1)

5. Why do you say the government specifically did this to hurt most Americans?  Isnt that paranoid? 

Of course.  Or maybe being called paranoid is just an ad hominem attack by people who do not want to discuss the issues.

It is the responsibility of our law makers, our bureaucracies, and our justice system to create and then implement a body of complex laws, rules, precedent and so forth.  When someone who is an elected representative tries to get support for a law, or a treaty, or a judgment and tells people it will make them more prosperous when he or she knows full well that it will not, then what do you call that?

The issues associated with so-called "globalization" have been well known in economic circles since the 19 th century. Technology has made things somewhat different, there is more work that can be sent offshore, but this is hardly the first time this phenomenon has been seen. Our politicians and leaders of industry knew to a great extent what the result would be and they did it anyway and lied about how it would be good for us the whole time.  When they knew full well that the people who would benefit would be the rich, and that the people who would be hurt would be the middle classes and the poor.  And they did nothing whatsoever to mitigate that very predictable result.  

Nor have they tried to even measure the result as we have shown.  

6. Arent you oversimplifying this situation?

Yes, the situation is far worse and far more blatantly abusive than I have described.  Lets go a little deeper.

Our government has worked to encourage business to send work to countries where slave labor, indentured labor, and vast numbers of impoverished workers look for anything to do to make a living.  They knew full well that this infinite sink of cheap labor would impoverish a tremendous number of Americans, but they did absolutely nothing to mitigate it.  What could they possibly do, you say?  One, there could be laws against sending work to countries and companies that use slave and indentured labor. Second, these laws would have to include criminal sentences and mandatory jail time for all executives of a company, to the very top, or they would do it anyway, as business in America always breaks the law to make a fast buck.  Third, we can make provision for the displaced American worker to be able to support their family and pay for their graduate school.  Fourth, we can pay for the previous item because the company that displaced them will pay for this retraining out of the profits made from globalization.  Anything else would merely say to the company, make as much money as you want but do not for a second be concerned or responsible for the immense suffering and economic results of the greed of the corporation.

Instead the government and corporations pretend that outsourcing or offshoring does not have negative effects in this country.  But it does, and someone has to pay for it.  Why not have the corporation that benefited from such outsourcing pay for it?

7. Our government has failed to enforce treaties and trade agreements designed to create a level playing field.

The case study of the visual effects and motion picture industries is quite illuminating.  The commonwealth nations (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) have created subsidies for foreign filmmakers to bring their films to these countries.  A producer who brings $10 million worth of production work to Canada will receive a check for $4 million up front.  No producer can resist that. This has affected all the filmmaking arts and crafts, but it has wiped out the American visual effects business (with a few exceptions).  Almost all visual effects has moved offshore and while some Americans have been able to leave the country and find work, or temporary work, many have not been able to do so and have been required to leave the industry and / or are otherwise impoverished.

There are laws about such things. There are treaties. There are remedies.  But in general it requires our State Department to act and they will not act if the elected representatives do not ask them to.  And our representatives will not ask the State Department to act unless the citizens demand it.  But labor is not organized in visual effects so they do not ask, or demand, their elected representatives to help them (or to invoke any of the other remedies that exist to deal with this kind of problem).

Our government had a responsibility to act and it did not do so, and as a result many, many people were impoverished and had to leave the country.  And why?  Because the movie studio wanted the subsidies, it helped them, not the worker.  But who cares about the worker, the non-shareholder? I presume that the field of visual effects is not unique, and that if our government is so completely in the pocket of the large corporation and against the worker in this industry, that the government also acts against the interests of the worker in other industries as well.

Isnt this really the fault of the worker for not organizing? Well, maybe, that is certainly part of the problem here. Maybe our system should require labor to organized to defend their basic rights? After all, the people who are hurt are not just those who did not organize (the craft of Visual Effects) but the local economies as well. But isnt this really just blaming the victim? Its all her fault because she did not scream loud enough when being raped? Maybe.

8. But what could our government do to change the situation?

The following would in no way solve all the problems.  Peoples lives have been destroyed to increase the profits of the rich and we can not turn back the clock.

First, measure unemployment. Second, pay for retraining (calculated at about 250K per person). Third, stop abusive visa programs such as the H2B program. Fourth, compel the corporations to pay their share of the retraining. Fifth, see to it the costs of shipping and communications reflects real costs and does not violate our laws. Sixth, enforce the trade laws regarding subsidies. Seventh, criminalize the corporate violations of the law that result in American unemployment. Eighth, stop oppressing the middle and lower classes with taxes, but increase the taxes on the rich. Backdate this five years. Ninth, use our intelligence community to shut down the transfer of wealth to off shore tax shelters and the work of companies to do the same. Tenth, make it illegal for our corporations to outsource or off shore work to companies that use indentured labor, slave labor, or suppress workers rights. As always with our corporations, these requirements must have criminal penalties attached.  Eleventh, the subsidy issue in the motion picture industry proves that labor must be organized to fight for its rights in our government, so not only must the "right to work" bullshit be eliminated, but unions of one type or another must become mandatory.  Twelfth, force our government to create a strategic economic plan for the economic well being of all our citizens. We have strategic plans for defense and energy, we should have one for our economy. Thirteenth, reduce the influence of big corporations on the political system.  Do this one first.

9. What conclusions should we draw?

I concluded from my little research project into the economic policies of this country the following:

1. That the policies that go under the term of "free trade" were guaranteed to impoverish and/or economically damage the American worker.

2. That the US Government knew this and lied to the American people about the likely economic results of their policies in order to increase the profits of the rich.

3. That the US Government does not measure nor does it want to measure the amount of economic distress that exists in this country.

4. That the US Government does not enforce the laws and treaties that might mitigate the distress their policies have caused.

5. That the US Government has not taken any of the steps or implemented the policies that would assist the American worker in this economy.

6. That in order for us, the 99 percent, to change this situation we will have to change our government, and force them to make the changes.  These changes include measuring the distress, stopping certain visa programs, implementing laws against outsourcing and offshoring to companies and countries using slave or indentured labor, or who deny worker rights, implementing new training and education programs for all Americans that put them on a even footing with the children of the rich, making it illegal to outsource or offshore unless it can be shown that the net benefit to society as a whole (and not just the profits of the corporation) are positive, criminalizing corporate malfeasance, making it illegal to outsource or outshore work to governments and companies known to be involved in immoral and unethical activities, creating real and non-insulting benefits for our unemployed and impoverished, force the State Department to implement the laws regarding subsidies, change the tax structure of this country to put the burden on the rich, and discover and punish off-shore and illegal tax accounts by our rich and our corporations.

Some of these are easier to do than others, but all of them are doable and should be done at once. Ha. Maybe you think that is unrealistic, and you are probably right. Our government has made it very clear what they think about the working classes of this country.

They could not care less.

[To follow: a post on the need to criminalize corporate crime and more specific remedies for the economic inequality our government has so conscientiously brought into being].

____________________________________________

1. You are invited to spend a day reviewing the laws about ageism and ask yourself whether there is any chance for one second that these laws are intended, in any meaningful way, to prevent discrimination based on age.  My conclusion after spending a week on it, is that there is not the slightest chance in hell that these laws are expected to be taken seriously.  One more time our government pays lip service to some nice sounding social policy but does nothing to make it happen.  It would be a joke, if any of it was funny.

2. See the Congressional Research Service Report "The Economic Effects of Trade: Overview and Policy Challenges" at https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44546.pdf

Most Excellent Career Advice from Friends

There was a time, years ago, when one's friends and professional colleagues were an important part of one's career path. There are a variety of trendy-and-sometimes-stupid terms to describe this phenomenon, but back then the world was not seen as a zero-sum game where if you win I lose and vice versa.

In my years of wandering through the wilderness, I have been given some good advice and some very bad advice. Sadly, I have learned the hard lesson more than once that no one can figure out what I should do but myself and that the process of trying to achieve whatever this new goal / plan / whatever is likely to annoy people, friends and colleagues, and be achieved over their dead body or at least without their knowledge and consent.

Like everyone else, I have successful friends and I have very smart friends. Some of the smart friends are successful, and some less so, but nevertheless I know a lot of talented people. These people are pretty much all very busy with their own problems, families, issues and so forth. They are not in any way obligated or should be obligated to help me or advise me or anything else. When they do, it is a gift, they are certainly not getting paid for it. They are just trying to help.

Obviously I am a victim of first-world underemployment and globalization and like so many others I am at a loss for what to do to make a living. Lets be honest here, I have also made some mistakes in the past. For example, I failed to get a trust fund. What was I thinking? Furthermore, it was I who chose to go into computer animation.  Me bad. And so I have reached out to friends to see if they have any ideas about how to best make use of the rest of my life, if you call this living.

For a moment we are going to ignore such fabulous advice as "do good work and dont worry about money". Although this is no doubt a good sentiment, I think it needs a little more elaboration before it can be implemented.

But of those ideas that have been suggested that are specific enough to consider, these are my three favorite: 

1. A NY filmmaker and pioneer of computer animation also had a line of original pornography in the BDSM genre.  He suggested that I might be able to help him market this creative work to various distributors. I have no trouble if consenting adults want to enjoy themselves by tying each other up and whacking each other but I dont really know too much about this subgenre of human behavior and would not be able to contribute much in the way of aesthetics or guidance, so I declined.

2. A good friend who has used computers and done computer animation for the last 30 years knows zero about computers and regularly would self destruct and lose all her work.  I would spend a lot of time helping her and trying to recover her data because I am a "nice guy".  She noticed how helpful I was at this and suggested that I make a career of selling my services as a PC repairman door to door. What a great idea.

3. A very successful friend of mine who has the burden of managing a giant research facility in the field of entertainment related technologies, suggests that trying to get a job in my field was too ambitious.  He recommends that I sell my programming services on the Internet through an anonymous jobbing service. Some sort of lowest-common-denominator programming exchange. He figures I might be able to make $6.00 an hour and that it is "easy money". 

I want to thank all my friends for thinking of me.

They really do mean well.

But what is really, really scary is that these are my friends.

My Dialogue on Facebook About Hillary's Concern for the Unemployed

The following has been edited for formatting purposes and to fix minor grammatical and spelling errors.  I have removed the identity of the person who set me off.  We have been friends for years and if anything are closer after this little exchange.  I will call her "Sandra Smartperson".

Sandra Smartperson.  She would never ever want to care about the unemployed? Really? Michael, you are full of baloney.

Michael Wahrman Dear Sandra, no, I dont think so. Do you just want to insult me, or do you want to know why I think what I do?

Michael Wahrman OK, lets party. 1st the unemployment metric that we are constantly told about is, if you care to spend 5 minutes researching it, guaranteed to not only under report the number of unemployed, but to ignore those who are most in trouble. All it reports is those who are known to have lost their jobs in the last 18 months, anyone who is not employed again in those 18 months is dropped off the metric. Furthermore even those who find a job in that 18 months, there is no way of telling whether they got a job again at their previous salary. Someone who was working at 80 K per year, could now be working for 30K and it would all be reported as great. The first thing anyone who was serious about helping the unemployed would do is to work to create a more honest index or series of indices so we could at least discuss the problem. That is point one.

Michael Wahrman Second, the H1B visa program is well known for being abused by corporations in Silicon Valley (in particular, I presume other industries use it as well in this way) to train people from India and China so that those services can be outsourced to India and China. Pick up pretty much any issue of Computerworld, or read about the (in) famous ongoing Disney IT situation. Hillary not only supports the H1B visa program, she wants to expand it.

Michael Wahrman Third, HRC is on record for not supporting the minimum wage initiative and she gets very little support from the Unions at all. Why is this, Sandra? If Globalization is so good for the economy then it would be just hunky fine to have laws that said that a corporation that off shored labor would be held criminally responsible if that labor was forced labor or abused. I mean the top executives would go to jail. But even though we know that in fact many of these famous off shore companies use indentured labor, nothing is done. Or when high tech companies use raw materials that come from violence torn regions of Africa and the revenues thus generated are used to support the wars that murder tens of thousands of civilians, our government just laughs and pats those corporations on the back for making more profits through globalization. I mean, god forbid our corporations would have to use Americans and pay them benefits! What about the profits to the shareholders?

Michael Wahrman Globalization as we have implemented it in this country is guaranteed to enrich the corporation at the expense of the worker. And it has. And yet no effort has been made by either government or industry (to the best of my knowledge) to either measure the number of Americans put out of work by Globalization nor to make any provision for retraining them for another field. This is not just manufacturing, although I do not understand why manufacturing is held in such low esteem, but is many fields including the glamourous and rewarding fields of visual effects. To the best of my knowledge, HRC has not indicated anything in her platform that would gather these numbers or provide real funding for retraining these disenfranchised workers.

Michael Wahrman Furthermore, if Globalization is so good for the economy, then why should the corporations who have increased profits not be responsible for paying for this retraining? Oh and by the way, it wont be cheap. We are talking about at least 2 years probably 3 to get a Masters degree in a new area, and then find a job, and these are not teenagers but adults with families who need to be supported. If HRC cared about these people, she would have something in her platform somewhere to address it, but to the best of my knowledge she does not. I admit, I have found it hard to figure out what it is HRC does propose, but that may be my fault or how I use the Internet. I might be wrong about this, I hope so.

Michael Wahrman No one knows how many chronically unemployed and impoverished Americans there are today. Although I think the number of 100 M that I have heard is hopefully over the top. The point is, no one knows, and I see nothing in the HRC platform that makes me think that she has anything more in mind than more of the same. You know, 10 percent more of this, 15 percent off of that. By the way, if Obama were running today I might (probably) say the same thing about him.

Michael Wahrman Furthermore, this has been going on for a long time now, this studied neglect while the 1 percent (or 10 percent you tell me), does so well. So do I think that HRC gives a rats ass about the unemployed? No, not really. But all you have to do to prove me wrong (and make me happy, I want to be proven wrong) is to point to a program that she is advocating that is not just more of the same, because more of the same is unlikely to make much of a difference.

Michael Wahrman Now its true, could such a program get through Congress? I guess it depends on what it its, but I am inclined to believe that it would be over Congress's dead body. Nor do I think HRC is in any way to blame for this situation (well maybe a little, but no big deal). But on the other hand, she *is* running for president, pretty much the only serious candidate (I love Bernie but I do not think he is actually running for president exactly, I think he is trying to give a voice to the impoverished and disenfranchised and I love him for it, but its another topic), so it makes sense to me to look at her proposed platform and see what she says. And that gets to the big mystery ....

Michael Wahrman The big mystery is how it is possible for this to be going on so long without Washington realizing that there is a problem here. It is not fair nor am I laying all this at Hillary's door, by which I mean she has only had a small part to play in creating this problem. But I am absolutely blaming our Government, that is the federal government: Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme and other Courts, etc. How it is that Washington was able to believe that this could just go on without blowback (I love that word) is what amazes me. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe people are doing just great. If that is so, where does all the anger come from? Why are so many people saying, hey, its all very well to give the better part of a trillion dollars to help your friends on Wall Street (and give speeches to them but not tell us what you said) but maybe you might have some of this vast wealth left over for us. You remember us, right? Remember? You want us to vote for you every four years or so, right? So when I say that Hillary does not care less, that is only because that is what I seem to see when I look at her positions. Now maybe she has in mind some very interesting and dramatic solutions (and has some idea about how to get them through Congress) but if so I am unaware of them. Maybe you are more aware of them than I am and can help me understand. Is it fair to put all this at Hillary's feet and say fix it? Well, no, not really. Doesn't seem fair to me. But we do give the President a lot of power and it is a good place to start.

Michael Wahrman Finally, Sandra, I may very well be full of shit, but probably not baloney. Aside from a degree in Economics and my time at the RAND Corporation (for what that is worth, probably not much, but it is true so why not) I have been a vegetarian since 1978 and so I am unlikely to be full of baloney. I hope you are doing very well, and that you are recovering from surgery, and that I am all wrong about either Hillary's plans or the state of the nation, because if there is one thing I am quite sure of, I am not in a position to do much of anything at all except to complain. Feel better ! Nice to hear from you!

Michael Wahrman By the way, I write a blog and here is a post I wrote about how the homeless are helped down here in N San Diego county.... I wish that everyone who has read this far would read it, because I believe I have done a good job at expressing my outrage and disgust.  See Law Enforcement Provides Moral Instruction To The Poor

Michael Wahrman Ok, I lied one more thing. If the three founders of Google can share 7 widebody jets and rent Moffet field as a place to store them, then I can see a program in a leading candidate's platform about how we are going to help that homeless person I wrote about above, and help her right now. I am tired of waiting. I have waited long enough. I can stare in disbelief at what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says how they measure unemployment only so often. I can be disgusted at how the former chief of police of Los Angeles will spend 4 months in jail after abusing the civil rights of tens of thousands of prisoners in Los Angeles over two decades and see no outrage anywhere only so long. So does Hillary care about the unemployed? Really? Hey, I am hungry, anybody have some baloney?

Farewell Facebook For Now

In the last few weeks I have blocked three people on Facebook, unfriended a few, and probably have been unfriended myself without my knowing it.

Its all about one or more of the following issues and I doubt you will be surprised by any of it. I am a little surprised by the intensity and insanity of it all though.

My friends are very happy because their candidate, Hillary Clinton, has probably clinched the nomination for President from the Democratic Party. Between you and me, I never really had much doubt that Hillary would do this. She has always been the frontrunner and seemed likely to me to win the nomination without the use of Superdelegates. And of course if it came to the position of the Superdelegates, I did not think there was much doubt about which way that would go either.

I am happy for my friends. It is a good thing when your candidate wins, generally speaking. I presume my friends are ethical Americans who are voting their beliefs and so forth and so on.

But for a variety of reasons, most of which have very little to do with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton is not my candidate. Again dont get me wrong, I love Bernie Sanders. I never thought he had much of a chance of winning the nomination, but I am stunned and delighted that he did as well as he did. Its just that I think I also know something about Hillary Clinton and the kind of president she will be.

But now that Hillary has won the nomination (or all but won it, its not really much in doubt) my friends are angry that I do not fall into line and support Hillary.

And boy are they angry. I have received two death threats and lots and lots of insults. Its OK, its helpful to know who actually respects you enough to let you have your beliefs without throwing insults at you. And clearly I do not have many such friends on Facebook, or for that matter anywhere, probably.

I hope that when Hillary Clinton wins the Presidency that she becomes as good a President as my friends believe that she will be. For my part, however, I doubt it. I think she is a competent, process oriented, mainstream Democrat.  I doubt she will be any better nor any worse than any other power mad, middle of the road, Washington insider Democrat.

If you do not understand by now that the status quo is not working for millions and millions of Americans, then I am very happy for you. It means that the system is working for you, and that is great, and I am very jealous. You have my congratulations.

If you want to understand why it is not working for others you are going to have to look beyond the surface. You are going to have to ask why there are so many Bernie and Donald supporters, each in their own way. You are going to have to try and figure out how many people are actually unemployed, underemployed, and / or impoverished.

As for me, I find that Facebook is not worth the aggravation.  So instead of blocking and unfriending even more people, and the aggravation that involves, I am going to absent myself from Facebook for a few months, possibly until after the election.  I am not really sure.  If you want to know how I am doing, you will just have to email me or read this blog.

Good luck to all of you and I hope you will keep in touch.

Three Interview Issues Worthy of Discussion

Three recent “interview worthy” issues were recently brought up by a friend who has the misfortune of managing several hundred researchers of various types at a well-known entertainment company.

The three issues are (a) working with other people, (b) deadlines, (c) recent programming experience.

As always, I take these things personally.  But probably these questions have nothing to do with me. I suspect that it has to do with having to deal with self-entitled, prima donna researchers at his international facility combined with possibly a misunderstanding about my recent work.

First, I am probably easier to work with than anyone else I know assuming you actually want to get the job done which is a big assumption. I did time at UCLA in the 1970s, I know what teamwork means and I dont just pay lip service to it. I let people know what they need to know to get a job done, I help them when they get stuck. I explain potential problems and suggest possible solutions to them when appropriate. If anything I have the character flaw of “oversharing”.

There can be a problem when people are insecure and defensive, as they often think I am talking down to them, as I tend to explain things using the English language which has words of more than two syllables. This can be especially problematic with self-identified “producers”.  There can also be a problem when people say that they want to go to the moon, but really want to go to the corner. There are other issues as well, but in general working with people is not a problem when we are all people of good faith trying to get the job done.  

Second, deadlines were problematical in my youth due to my genuine contempt for arbitrary ones. Over the years, I have learned that organizations rely on arbitrary deadlines in order to manage large projects and get anything done. Thus the problem becomes not whether or not a deadline makes sense but about everything else involved with the process of making a deadline, which is to say such things as scope of work, schedule, approval processes, client management, project strategy, resources allocated, the talents and personalities of the people on the project, technologies in development, training, and most of all whether a system has been put into place, engineered if you will, to be able to make deadlines of this nature without too much blood and mangled bodies.

With no false modesty, I will tell you that I am one of the best persons I know to help conceptualize and engineer such a deadline-making system as well as being excellent at managing a process to completion. I can also tell you that, particularly in the entertainment industry, there are people who do anything in their power to prevent and sabotage such a system from being put in place or working. At that point, it is up to senior management to step in and discipline the producer who is damaging the organization or discipline the prima donna who uses chaos and insubordination for their own purposes of self-aggrandizement.

I have often been involved with projects whose goals were so lofty, and the resources and time allowed so limited, that compromises are required to make anything happen at all.  This kind of situation, which often feels like the story of my life, requires everyone to work together.  Decisions have to be made, directions have to be set, people have to be honest.  This is why we get paid.  

Third, the issue of recent programming experience has more to do with structural economic issues and confusion about what the talent for technical work is. Back when there were far fewer technical people available, I was recognized as one of the best on the West Coast. Now that there are so many good technical people in the various fields, I feel, modestly, that I am one of the best technical people on the West Coast. But this can be difficult to communicate to many people today because they are confused about what they want.

Do they want someone who knows the technology inside and out, and can be creative with that technology or do they want someone who knows what -1 means in a stupid software package that they are using on a project because someone thought it was trendy and they might more often get laid? Do they want someone who can design software and has taste, or do they want a moron who is easy to control and knows how to type. Decide what you want.

And then, if you are still concerned, talk to my references, who are near the top of their fields, and see what they say.  

I hope this has helped.

"America and the Global Economy" in Foreign Affairs

[needs to be rewritten with examples from article]

If you go to the following link, you will be able to read an article in Foreign Affairs by Jacob J Lew entitled “America and the Global Economy”. Mr. Lew was director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

If you register with Foreign Affairs, you will be permitted to read one article a month. Isnt that nice of them? I think that is mighty white of them, myself.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-04-11/america-and-global-economy

When you read this essay you may notice some entertaining little details. Pretty much every paragraph is either a lie or a threat except in the cases where it is both. What Mr. Lew is saying is that you had better do it our way or you will be sorry.  And literally the subtext is that putting Americans out of work is always good. And paying for insanity at the UN is just the price we have to pay if we want the UN to be around to do things we want now and again. Its our way or the highway.

We can count on Jack Lew to make the point that putting Americans out of work and supporting the worst kind of racism and anti-semitism at the UN is all in a days work for a Washington bureaucrat.  I have no doubt that he is a big supporter of Hillary Clinton and vice versa.

Wikipedia page for Jack Lew

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lew

Depression, Unemployment, Health, Memory, Stress and so Forth

If you are unemployed then you probably already knew how fucked you are. But those of you interested in the details may wish to review the following links.

1. Long term stress erodes memory. I keep forgetting to post this one, ha ha.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-03/osu-lse022916.php

2. Accepting a job below one's skill level can adversely affect future employment prospects.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-03/uota-aaj030316.php

3. Depression is more than a mental disorder, it affects the entire organism. Well, who said it was a mental disorder anyway, and what does that mean. Nevertheless, you may read this study here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160301075102.htm

On Getting A Security Clearance

A colleague of mine from the old days who, to my amazement, occasionally reads my blog, wanted to make very sure that I knew that there was no way I could ever get a security clearance, not even SECRET.

This disturbed me for reasons that I will explain below, and so I researched the topic to the extent that one can on the Internet, and I am happy to say that he is probably wrong, at least for the reasons that he thought. He might however be right for other reasons and this I will describe below.

You may not consider it interesting to wonder who can and can not get a clearance but I do, even though I have no particular expectation or desire to handle or know classified information. I am, you see, a *fan* of the world of intelligence, I have very little desire to be *in* it. It is a difficult world to be in for reasons we will only touch on here. I much prefer to *speculate* about national security matters than to actually *know* for sure what is going on. Speculation is fun, but actual knowledge implies a very serious responsibility. And the more you are involved the more it will affect your life. 

But if I am to ever work in place like the RAND Corporation again, which is doubtful, one needs to get at least a SECRET clearance, even though you are unlikely to handle SECRET material, and that is how the issue came up. The reasons for this are several, but it is not because one will necessarily be handling SECRET material. In fact, when I worked at RAND in my youth I only once handled SECRET material and that occasion could have been easily avoided. Trust me, it was no big deal. The primary reason for needing a clearance is because you are required to be around people and facility that does or may handle such material, and you need to be able to be in those areas without having an escort by your side at all times. 

So lets get our cards on the table. Some people at RAND thought I did a lot of drugs when I went into computer animation and visual effects. I did not. But I certainly was around quite a few people who did drugs, and I suffered from an undiagnosed disorder which made me appear to the uninitiated as though I was on drugs, i.e. I had severe ADHD which was not being treated. I am not going to go over this in great detail, frankly it bores me, most people already have their minds made up, and most people are not capable of understanding the issues anyway.

But what drugs I did do were minor, and stopped as soon as I got decent medical care, which did not happen in LA, only in NY. IMHO, there is no decent medical care in S. California.

The point is, none of this keeps one from getting a security clearance today. You have to not be doing illegal drugs today, and for several years. And there may be a judgment call here on the part of the investigators about certain aspects of your use at the time. However, there is nothing there that makes me particularly concerned. I used drugs to medicate a medical condition, when it was properly diagnosed and treated, all illegal drugs went away.

But there are other judgment calls that could interfere and I want to mention them to you today.

What they are really looking for with the basic security clearance is a somewhat boring individual who fits in with the system and feels that the system is pretty darn good. If you do not file taxes because you are impoverished, that may not be you. If you think your doctors are only concerned about themselves and money and that the medical system is fundamentally screwed up, that may not be you. If you think that the poor are treated badly in this country and that the legal system and government is designed to exalt the rich and disenfranchise the poor, and that there is gross state-enforced inequality of opportunity, that may not be you.

But the law and regulations on security clearances are not explicit on these points. And theoretically one should not be denied a security clearance for holding a belief that is outside some conservative belief system.

So, am I eligible for a security clearance? Without doubt, I *think* I am. But it is certainly *possible* I could be denied one. It is possible *anyone* could be denied one. And then one would have to appeal.

What would happen if I was suddenly exposed to a classified program that obviously violated the rights of Americans, or violated the law, or was outside the system designed to approve such projects? The answer is that I would work within the system to get such a project changed or terminated. I would not do an unauthorized disclosure under any circumstances. If it were not possible to correct the situation, then I would resign from the project and find something else to do. I think that it is very unlikely that I would ever have to deal with such an issue, however.

To the extent that one can figure out such things by what is published online, I believe that I am eligible for a security clearance.

Besides with the disaster that is or was Ed Snowden, I would think that the whole security clearance system would be up for reconsideration and that they would be much better off with people like me. Just my opinion.

For what that is worth.

My Platform Should I Run for the Executive Committee of SIGGRAPH

draft

For many years I have attended the national conference of SIGGRAPH and been amazed that as far as I can tell the conference is totally unaware that there is vast unemployment in this field and that those who have managed to continue working have had to move overseas to do so. Yet SIGGRAPH keeps on pushing the field as a sensible one to go into without knowing or caring whether or not these new people will be able support themselves or their families by doing so.

I happen to also believe that computer animation is unusually blessed or cursed with the intangible glamour of the various entertainment industries which acts as a lure to the unwary. (1)  I can tell you that when I made the choices to go into this field I had no idea, no one told me and I did not understand, that I was going into a niche industry and very likely would experience long periods of unemployment.  Had I realized that, I would not have gone into this field. Such a choice would have been completely irresponsible on my part.

And yet we keep on encouraging young people to go into this field without a hint of caution even though we do not even know the size of the disaster that has already occurred.  I believe that this is both irresponsible and morally wrong.

After years of complaining and trying to figure out how to change things I came to the conclusion that the only way to be heard was to become a member of the Executive Commitee of ACM SIGGRAPH (the EC).  Although the EC is nominally elected by the membership of SIGGRAPH, in reality to be allowed to run for the EC one must be approved by the Nominating Committee and the Committee lost no time making it clear to me that they had no interest in my contribution.

There is however in the By Laws of ACM SIGGRAPH a provision for write-in candidates to be nominated and were I to wish to persevere it would be through this mechanism. Unfortunately, the details of this mechanism are undocumented as far as I can tell, but a friend has done a lot of work and seems to be able to extract the needed information from the relevant people.

Were I to run a write-in campaign for nomination, I would need approximately 70 signatures of people who were both current members of ACM and of SIGGRAPH. Those signatures would have to be on a form that is of yet undefined and whose original is provided on paper, as I currently understand it.

The number of signatures would not have been a problem "back in the day", but now most of the people I know who work or have worked in computer animation are not, to the best of my knowledge, members of SIGGRAPH as SIGGRAPH has worked very hard to make itself completely irrelevant to the production community. It may be one of the ironies of this campaign that I am able to get a dozen or two "new" members for SIGGRAPH as most of the people I know who would support me in this foolish endeavor would have to become members to do so.

Why should you bother to go through this trouble merely to make me eligible to run for a “position at large” on the Executive Committee?  In other words, even if the write-in campaign is successful, I would still have to run for election.  The best answer I can give is to itemize what my platform would be should I run for office and let you decide for yourself.

Let me preface these platform notes by saying that many people I have talked to who are more knowledgeable than I am about how SIGGRAPH at the national level actually works believe that there is either (a) nothing SIGGRAPH can do in any of these areas and/or (b) SIGGRAPH should not even try.

Let me also note that apparently the EC of SIGGRAPH thinks that it is not important that several thousand people (the number is unknown) who were undoubtedly encouraged by SIGGRAPH to make the questionable choice to go into this field. I would be a minority of one on the EC and likely have very little or no influence.

I would however be a voice for the disenfranchised and be certain that their plight was at least discussed at least to some small extent.

So were I to run, I would run on the following platform (certain to be revised).

1. To the extent possible, see to it that the program and events of SIGGRAPH do not encourage people to go into this field without a good understanding of what the possibility of employment in this field is.

2. To the extent possible, attempt to understand what the real employment in the fields associated with SIGGRAPH actually are and what the current unemployment is.

3. To the extent possible, make it possible for those who have dedicated a substantial portion of their career to this field are enabled to attend the national conference. The current rules and procedures do not in any way go far enough to permit this.

4. To the extent possible, make allowances for those who are unemployed or economically challenged have access to the full body of SIGGRAPH publications without fee or at a reduced rate.

5. To the extent possible, address the issues of ageism in computer animation, at least by having reminders at relevant conference events of the illegality of ageism as it applies to employment.

6. To the extent possible, attempt to assess the amount of hardship caused by the off-shoring of computer animation production to other countries and what remedies there may exist for this.

7. In the likely event that no suitable remedies exist for the problem of 6, to the extent possible see what can be done to train members of SIGGRAPH for other fields where employment is possible.

8. To the extent possible, encourage and try to organize outreach programs to try and encourage industry to create jobs that need the skills that computer graphics and animation provides.

A few more points and then we will wrap this up. It is not clear to me that I can afford to be a member of the Executive Committee should I be elected since I am so chronically un- and under-employed. However, we can probably cross that bridge when and if we get there, and something can probably be worked out.

It is equally unclear to me whether my efforts would result in any tangible benefit to anyone and whether or not it would be a good use of my time.

______________________________________


1. One year SIGGRAPH has a panel celebrating 25 years of Rhythm and Hues.  The next year R&H is out of business, 1000 people are dumped on the street, and SIGGRAPH says nothing. Dreamworks lays off all of their Nothern California studio, but SIGGRAPH does not notice or mention it. Last year, SIGGRAPH had a presentation about 30 years of ILM. Not a word about all the people ILM has laid off as they downsized. A young person attending SIGGRAPH might draw the conclusion that this was a glamourous and rewarding field to be in and that unemployment was not an issue. Pixar is huge, right? It never lays off people, right?

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished in Computer Animation

In the following discussion, the primary Antagonist is someone many of you know, but not all of you. He will not be named in this post. He is a well-known computer graphics pioneer who lives in California. The Company is not well known except to a few, but is a well-regarded “special services” technical design company who is known for its Dept of Defense clientele. Its two founders are each of them charismatic, brilliant, and successful. They are also located in California. The person is someone I would have called a good friend. The company, a desirable company to work for.

About 10 years ago, my friend calls me up to help him out on a project that is about 6 weeks from delivery. But they do not have anything working yet. What he wants me to do is to use GPU programming to take two stereo images and deduce a depth map from them. I have just started learning the GPU which my friend well knows, and I have never tried to do depth correlation from stereo before, although I am aware that it has been done and that it is well known to have problems.

It also turns out that my friend, who is working for the above mentioned company, does not have much money, so it will not be a real consulting rate. So I tell him that I will look at the problem and get back to him. In the mean time they send me a contract which I put aside because I am not going to commit to this project if I can not do it well, nor am I going to charge him.

I wish to emphasize that at no time did I commit to this project and that from the very beginning I doubted it was possible. The only thing that might have made it possible, given that any program written would then have to be integrated into their larger system, would be a program that was already written, and just needed a little refinement. Otherwise, there is no way the larger deadline could be made. (See Note 1).

Now I of course am very disappointed. I would love to work with my friend, this is the first time he has asked me, and I would love to work with this company. But for that to work, obviously, our first project would have to be successful, and I see very little odds of success here.

So I look at the problem and discover that programming the GPU back in the pre-CUDA days is much worse than I thought, I could spend weeks just figuring out how to get floating point data in and out of the GPU. So, I call my friend and tell him I can not do it. Maybe two weeks has passed since he first called me, if that. Not only that, but I have been talking to him every day or maybe every other day during this period so he knew how things were going, which is to day, not well. They do not pay me anything, nor should they, no obligations were made on either side and no contracts signed.

But as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished.  The question is only when and in what form the universal cosmic "reward" for trying to help my friend gets paid back.

Fast forward to today.

My friend, who works thereafter at every blue chip company in silicon valley you can think of, never once offers to help me get an interview or find a job for me, even though he knows I am looking. So, finally I ask him why and he explains that it was because I failed so badly on the above project, the project that I did not commit to do and which had very little chance of success. And furthermore, to add insult to injury, he says that company thought I was crazy. Why? Because I did not sign a contract committing to a project I did not think I could do and for which they had very little money?

And so, it appears that my friend has held a grudge all these years, God only knows who he told, and how many jobs or projects I have lost because of it. In fact, I wonder if the whole thing was just a play to blame the problem on the consultant. Both my friend and the company could say that they relied on a contractor but he failed to deliver what he promised even though I did not promise anything.

So what is the truth here? What is the lesson? The first is that no good deed goes unpunished, I should have just said no, up front, not I will look at it. And second, that I wonder whether I actually do have any friends in this industry.   And the third is to wonder whether I am really a victim or not?  How much of this is my fault, how much is no fault of my own? To offer to look into a problem, is that a bad idea?  Perhaps.

I so deeply regret getting involved in Computer Animation, and I wish I had never left RAND. It was a mistake for me to do so and I pay the price of that mistake every day.

_______________________________________

1. Furthermore, in the following years as GPU work has become more and more practical and desirable, I still advise people to not think that they can tack on the GPU part at the last minute. A GPU is not a panacea, it has its own strengths and weaknesses, all of which are much better understood today than then, but even so, exist. I am a big fan of using the GPU but not in all cases, and it has to be used with sophistication and insight, and most of all, you have to have time to make it all work together with the main program, at least in many cases.

Entertaining Report on Cybercrime in Brasil

Have you noticed how boring and unreadable most official reports on cyber crime seem to be? They come in various styles of boring from a Russian style that is at least readable to the US Govt style which is in extreme bureaucratic gibberish. Or you have the weird semi-anarchic cyber community with their quasi-rebellious bullshit and psycho-pathological narcissism.

But now at last we have a report that brings some of the excitement and romance of cyber crime in a readable style that is not laden with pseudo-philosophy. It seems to be one of several reports on regional cyber crime by a company called www.trendmicro.com.

In this particular report we have a discussion of cybercrime in Brasil which I encourage you to read on your own at this location.

But here are a few tidbits I picked up that I thought were interesting.

1. Cyber criminals in Brasil make very little use of the "dark web", such as Tor for example,  but operate in the open on the "surface web".  This is expected to change in the future as the criminals get more sophisticated and in response to greater law enforcement.

2. Cyber criminals come in two varieties: Developers and Operators. Developers develop the tools and sell or lease them to Operators.  Operators use these tools to attack their targets.

3. There are numerous tutorials and online classes for those who wish to become a cyber criminal in Brasil.  These classes sound very reasonable and one could imagine that they might be helpful even for those who are learning to thwart cyber crime.

4. There also seems to be a robust and healthy infrastructure for the provision of apparatus to help in crime. These include such things as "credit card" skimmers for companies which extracts the information on the card when processing an apparently legitimate credit card transaction.

5. Although there are numerous classes of targets in Brasil, this report does give the impression that the banking industry of Brasil has become very vulnerable.  

6. Many of the Developers are or were computer science students.  Some of them are literally Computer Science students and take time off to study for exams and so forth.  We know this because they post letters of apologies in the forums apologizing to their clients for being unavailable for a certain period. 

7. Both Developers and Operators hold Brasilian law enforcement in contempt.  Apparently the penalties for cyber crime are considered to be very weak and the law enforcement particularly inept.  Presumably this will change in the near future as both are corrected as crime increases.

8. The disastrous Brasilian economy is the prime motivator here.  There is extraordinary poverty and an economy that has stagnated with no obvious way to improve one's standing.  In this, Brasil seems to be very similar to the USA of the last decade.  Thus, the real problem here is not crime but poverty and, apparently, corruption.   Again, very similar to the USA.

9. Finally the report gives the impression that part of the cause of the substantial increase in crime is the result of the failure of the mythology that the rich are people who have earned and deserve to keep their wealth. The impression seems to be that the rich are merely more successful criminals, corrupt politicians or the children or relatives of the former. Again there is a striking similarity to beliefs in the USA.

I would recommend anyone who is unemployed and interested in a new career to read this report.

The following image is not from the report on Brasil, but is an illustration I found on the web of how a credit card skimmer scammer works:

The Search for Nazi Gold and Computer Animation

On the occasion of a very disappointing Siggraph for those of us struggling to make a living with computer animation and failing, as so many do, several colleagues have suggested the idea that searching for Nazi gold could be a viable career alternative.

Of course, they are responding to the recent events in Europe where two different stories about Nazi gold have been in the press. In one case, a young woman found a mysterious ingot of gold at the bottom of a shallow lake in the German alps with its identifying marks scratched off. And in the other, two people in Poland claim to know the location of a train that was allegedly hidden by the Nazis in a labyrinth of railroad tunnels at the end of World War 2.

At first glance, this activity might seem a promising way to make a living, at least in comparison with the disaster of computer animation, but I think when we review all the facts it will become clear that there are other potential career paths, like art fraud or laundering money, which have a better chance of being successful.

Its hard for Americans to relate to the European concept of treasure hoards littered around the countryside, left behind by invading hordes as it were, hoards from the hordes, whether  Roman hordes, Anglo Saxon hordes, Crusaders acting like hordes, Moors, Normans, Danish, Vikings and what-have-you raping and pillaging and stealing everything they can get their hands on, only to melt it all down and bury it for safe keeping, there to be found by a nerdy but sincere metal detection wielding citizen who has been searching relentlessly every weekend for the last 30 years.  The facts are that some people do this in Europe (search every weekend) and every once in a while they really do find something. (1) 

Aside from these more official discoveries, there are also signs that other, less formal, activities are taking place behind the scenes with good results. An annoying number of previously unknown fine art objects regularly show up on the antiquities market having been plundered from an ancient grave by some scumbag who has been tempted by an evil antiquities broker. Some of these dastardly folks only pretend to plunder graves, they dishonestly forge ancient art items and shamelessly sucker some corrupt collector or curator into buying them in a variation of the famous adage “you can not cheat an honest curator”.

But as romantic as these more ancient hoards are, the real action is in caches of art and gold left behind by everyone's favorite, the National Socialists in the period roughly 1944-1945. As thieves and murderers, the National Socialists of the last world war were in a class all to themselves. First they would roll the Wehrmacht in, then they would roll the gold out of national treasurys, the art out of the museums, and the Jews into the camps stealing everything they ever had along the way. When you melt down a million gold dentures, it just looks like gold bars to those helpful Swiss bankers who are always happy to launder money for the criminal du jour. Some things never change.

But do we really think that there is a lot more to find out there? The problem is that it is very hard to tell. Officially, we know of lots of things that are still missing. But who is to say that some of this missing gold was found but no formal press release issued? Who is to say which famous trainloads of decadent art were hidden in an abandoned mine instead of being destroyed by aerial bombardment on its way there? What 100 tons of gold were processed by the Swiss, what disappeared into the Tsar's vault in Moscow, what treasure from Troy now lies in the basement beneath the Hermitage waiting a year, a century, a millinnia before it sees the light of day?

Keep in mind also, that while the average computer animator knows hardship and rough working conditions, he or she has rarely dealt with abandoned mines, networks of crumbling railroad tunnels filled with unexploded munitions, or deposits at the bottom of very deep, very cold lakes. Yes a computer animator knows how to endure hardship only to be disappointed. But for every hoard found by a metal detection practitioner, how many others work for decades for a handful of copper?

The odds are as likely that you will write a screenplay that gets made into a successful movie. Or that you will be recognized for your talent and invited to direct a film. One seems about as likely as the other, being successful in the motion picture industry or finding a cache of Nazi gold. If you have to go through the trouble of changing your career, I recommend finding something with more likelihood of success.

________________________________________

1. The most famous recent example of this is the fabulous story of Maj (ret) Tony Clunn of the British Army, MBE, who discovered the location of the famous battle of Teutoberger Wald in Germany.  See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Clunn