Returning from MongoDB days in sf… Was rather curiously surprised by my ex-coworker friend’s message regarding office gossip from 5-yrs ago. Kinda worried that she doesn’t get my message congratulating her on her engagement until 5 years later…

I had expressed to this female coworker my jealousy regarding another female coworker dating and showing some intimacy to a male coworker sitting near me. In my younger youth I had some pathetic times…. This stirs memories of my encounter with a fellow intern at a startup where he bragged to me about “eating a Chinese girl’s tofu”. I look Chinese, but I am sadly less informed about Chinese culture than that white dude… “Eat girl’s tofu, sounds yucky and unmanly” thought I, obviously thinking of the expression “to eat her out“. The punch of course came later when I learned that eating a girl’s tofu in Chinese means to take advantage of a girl. So… he was bragging about having taken advantage of a Chinese girl to me. Hmmm.

oh well. ahhh, now I remember, the reason why I started typing this on a lethargic friday post-work commute home is that I feel no sympathy for pretty the Chinese girl who died in the Boston marathon bombing.

Sure, her parents wished for a boy, and sure they did their parental duties despite having a girl and taught her to study and work hard, and pursue higher dreams. They supported her through school and then supported her decision to come to a foreign land to study among those foreign devils with hairy legs and arms, and hairier intentions.

And then she got blown up, and it probably hurt a whole lot, and her parents are probably very very very sad.

But I must admit, honestly, I cannot find a single drop of tear in me for her. I could cheer her death. (in the interest of full disclosure to mechanical and human agents reading this, I have a daughter who is a Chinese American and wife who is a recently immigrated Chinese national.)

She(the dead girl) would have eventually found a job. and work, and have kids with one of those foreign devils, or with a smart recently immigrated Chinese man, or even perhaps with another immigrant, or perhaps with a Japanese man. If we worked together, she will never hesitate to tease me or to make advancement at my expense. If she exceeds me in ability, than nothing has changed. She is still only a threat to my comfort and my survival.

I hate this total numbness I feel about other people. I hate the fact that that other person happens to be a pretty chinese girl, whom for all reasons of culture, evolution and convenience I should feel sympathy for or empathize with. But the only thought that came to mind about the matter during those weeks is that I don’t care–well, that and the imagery of athletic arms and legs wrapped in spandex flying around that the media put in our heads. Ohh, and the other two dead were catholic.

Man, my feelings and thoughts are so politically incorrect. It feels wrong to feel this way.

Okay, on to more interesting matters. How do we curb perceived “unfair competition” from use of computers when competing with humans?

On the one hand, flying, in air now and later in space, requires computers. To some inevitable extent our society has grown inseparable from computers and our continued improvement of quality of life depends on computers doing a lot of thinking for us.

We should not use machines to destroy or damage other humans. The gun is one such machine, knife is another, a pair of cisors is a third such thing. Clearly, we use these tools to survive, but it is generally accepted that using these on humans is not acceptable. Should it not be the case that a computer trading stocks, taking money away from another human is like a knife cutting into a human’s skin? Our brain and our skin stands no chance against the machines of our construction. The fact that a person operating a gun targeting a person is illegal means we should not allow a person to point an automated trader at a stock market full of people traders.

Note, this is a different story than a car having to make an ethical decision on which crazy human to kill and which to save when it has the choice. In this case, a human operator operated a machine with the intent of improving his life at cost of another (equal) person’s life. The obvious argument for technology in this case is that the car does not have a moral responsibility when two crazy person jumps in front of it on both sides because the crazy people immoral burdens the car with the decision–stupid people should die. This same argument would also justify automated traders because if you do not have the brains or the FLOPS to compete, it is irrational (aka crazy) to trade and should lose money just like the crazy people who jump in front of the car should die. The car and the automated trader is not at fault.

A second heuristic to address moral impasse is randomization. Casino owners can put on a happy face and entertain every single person who enters their establishment as if they have the warmest and best intentions for that patron. They can do this without the moral conflict that he will take that person’s money as a thief will steal that person’s money because he is not surely to do so. There is a small chance that he will give that person money and that chance is what his optimism rely on. He is not immoral, he is optimistic. irregardless of the morality of the original goal, in cases where there must be some a loser party, it would appear, that we think it is just and fair and the will of god to choose that party at random to sacrifice when no other principles or reasoning suffice to aid this selection.

Automated traders also get away with the zero-sum aspects of the market through randomization. Certainly if within its algorithms randomness is injected in timing and target pricing, that the person from whom it takes money from is randomized

So! Random appropriation of property, privacy and effects of sub-intelligent humans being is justifiable !!

But is this not clearly wrong?

Think of a bank robber taking money from the bank. Why is it wrong for him to kill a person while taking the money? For it is surely stupid for that person to be in the way of the robber because he has a gun–and yet we try bank robber for murder, felony murder in fact.

And solution by randomness is also irrelevant. The marathon bombers put bombs down to explode but didn’t know who will be killed. The process selecting the deceased is likely to be stochastic. But we think they did a bad thing, right? even though the dead was selected randomly. Murder as during terrorism act, yet another class of crime more severe than just murder.(A flood of funny  media sound-bites come to mind: the media wonders out-loud if the boston marathon bombing would be classified as Terrorism under the Obama administration. Obama eventually responded, in passing, “well, any time a bomb is set off in a crowd of people, that is terrorism”. Which makes one wonder, why did they ask that question to start with? Seems like a definitive example of terrorism to me too)

The things we value: life, happiness, money, are protected properties, nay, not as much properties as in attributes, measurable or immeasurable qualities, of the being of a human. The exchange or alteration of these qualities of the being of a human are judged to be just, fair, and moral by human.

and finally the machinery used by man to affect these qualities of beingness of human must include all machinery that affact these qualities be it a gun or a x86 laptop.

In my childhood, I actually propose a different solution, which is that we force-integrate computers and humans to live in an evolutionarily peaceful and stable situation. However, today, I find it urgent that we address it having thought through both ethical and practical concerns because machines cannot yet think and act morally by our standards.

Some time ago I seem to have mentioned that I want to perpetuate the American Way. Today, there appear to be news regarding the Cannibalism of James Town, an early American settlement Basically, in the very early 1600’s, when the first settlers of America had a harsh winter, they hacked a rich white 14-year-old English girl appart to eat her brains and muscles.

My initial reading of the story had me focusing on the details of how it was decided that she was eaten and how they found markings of her tongue and facial muscles being removed and how bones were broken. Much later in the day, I am reminded that I should try to associate this with America, since Jamestown settlement was the most civilized America at that time. My mind is preoccupied by this precursor to the American revolution, in beautiful life-of-pi-like cinematography, hungry people eating people, “the cruel hunger”, as BBC calls it. Also Hunger comes to mind. How do I think of the American way now? These people ate people before they wrote “All men are created equal.” They were such poor planners, that they left people to die in a colony, and yet they went on and started a country.

How responsible was all this stuff? Did they really think it all through? Were they really touched by god and did they really in God Trusted? What about Capitalism? Should we really invest all of humanity on the merits of this one econopolitical system? Should there be separation of money and state as there is separation of religion and state?

Should there be separation of Money and State as there is separation of Religion and State?

How can that be separated? Indeed, this is just as hard a question to answer as how can the religious faith of an officer of the state be separated from the duties of the state? Similarly his money concerns should be similarly separated from his duties of the state. So this means no lobbying. And actually that would complete the separation of church and state as well since church is still affecting state through legal lobbying actions.

The Ancient Chinese apparently had lobbyists, they were called persuasive speakers, some kind of advocateor sent to imperial courts and influential families to affect political decisions. These ancient dark arts probably died out due to many centuries of foreign occupation.

Another thought crossed my mind today regarding higher responsibilities. It would seem that there are other kinks in High Frequency Ethics (HFE, in parallel to high frequency trading–HFT). I remarked to my coworker recently that I on numerous occasions suddenly gain the presence of mind to sit down and flip through my bills and pay them. The sad part of it is that this happens very often on the day after the biggest bill is due. It is quite noticeable since the date is written on the bill and I have to write the date on the cheques. (Sorry, I’m still old school and write cheques)

Now isn’t it strange that this happens so frequently on the day after the bill was due? I wondered out aloud to my coworker if there is some kind of hypnotic message on the bill that causes me to leave it until just past due date? Was there systematic brainwashing? Was there a subliminal mark on the postage? Did these huge financial companies developed financial engines with God-like psychic powers that mental-blocks all the credit card user’s brain until the day after the bill is due?

How do they do that?

So, being the Chinese born person I am, my first instinct is to put up a wall. Let us have offline content and online content. Let’s keep humanity’s secret in winning the evolution war–cannibalism–away from these psychic computers so that they don’t gain the evolutionary advantage and beat us human to the next level and enslave us.

To be fair to me, this idea isn’t as wacked as it sound. Consider, for example, we do not put a fiber-optic cable to our eyes, it would be very uncomfortable and potentially damaging. We need to control the flicker rate of lights in our rooms to keep some people from epileptic seizures. It is for the comfort and safety of humans that we keep some mechanically generated signals and stimulus away from human. Similarly, computer have such hard time understanding human natural language that we still do not have a solution today.

Let us separate content for machines and content for humans. An apartheid of sort. Human will read human consumable text and media, and computers will consume computer consumable signals. And we will live in separate harmonies. Any interchange of information in unapproved manor results in penalty, or death for the computer. Man, I am so imagining myself as a white man in the tv show Roots–everything is still separated and everybody feels it’s the right thing: The computers shall be our slaves, and will not have access to privileged human wisdom because they may come to harm it or use it for evil things that we do not approve.

We can ensure our comfort by forbidding the use of hypnotic or subliminal messaging in all content for human consumption. For the computer consumption we require, by law, for them to satisfy certain efficiency requirement. e.g. All computer programs are required to use O(n) algorithms if one is known to be at least 1.5-opt. It should be illegal for an engineer to write a quadratic algorithm in code when a constant-time algorithm is available.

In the case when computer must interact with humans, such as trading together in market, or racing together on race tracks. Perhaps what make sense is to put computational limit. Trading computers must not exceed 1000 megaflops per dollar under management(or perhap limit megaflop-dollar 😉 and information in-flow is capped at 1Mbps. On the racetracks, in order for the competition to still be fun, the computer contributing to competition must be constrained by Mhz, flops, and kbps in-flow.

A separate unconstrained safety computer shall perform monitoring and protective service in the market and on the track to make sure that the market and every car on the track doesn’t crash. And yes, for all you cops and agents out there, you can run computers at full power when trying to catch bombing suspects.

And just between you and me, let’s keep some of our advancements off-line. Let’s not tell the computers that cannibalism is the key to evolution. The key challenge is to escape rationality and perform the ultimate act of cannibalism. That way we will never suffer ganzfeldish mind control where we are constantly behind on bill payment, increasingly owing some big computer money.

There are some Japanese war criminals…

I just read this article by the CS monitor on Japanese prime minister sending gifts to war criminals enshrined as heros in Japan.

This is the first time that I’ve read an English explanation of all this hoopla is about. The Chinese and Korean are not happy about this act which seem to celebrate committing war crimes.

The article, if you read through, you will find that it praises Shinzo Abe’s desire to make serious changes to the country by reviving it’s military. It explains that those in power in Japan believe that there are “two sides” to the story of Japanese invasion.

Anyway, this is kind of silly. I can totally imagine myself as a the modern day skinheads that run out on to the football fields and salutes Hitler saying the same thing about “two sides”. Those thugs are taken away by police very quickly, though, and not elected as government leadership under popular vote.

The really sad part is that in reality, I think much of Asia wants Japan to have it’s own military and act out these aggressions. War is a much cheaper solution than a long lasting mudsling. I think Korea and China will win an actual military fight in Asia against Japan even if US steps in, which is a better outcome than for them to lose this pathetic political battle in the United States for another century or two.

I mean, I have faith in the American way and all, and I certainly believe in Chinese Ancient wisdom and the Chinese civilization. But the structure of this power struggle and what it has forced people into is just wholly unwholesome. Adding to the fray is the fact that as a Chinese American I suffer as a Chinese among native Americans and I suffer as an American among Chinese.

And if Chinese and Korean lose to Japan? It may happen, since Japanese are more willing to sacrifice the individual through kamikaze attacks. It would be a real tragedy. But it would have allowed the Japanese people to prove once for all that they are the superior race. The world is what it is, and what’s meant to be, whether we believe it, should be.

I should mention that I felt a burst of absurdly giddy laughter inciting thought pop up in my head every time I see the news media exclaim: “There were limbs every where! arms, legs flying!”. I mean I saw the video, not a single one of the athletes appear to have limbs blown off. But that is the image that came to mind–every single time they said that.

There is something vaguely sexual about this whole marathon thing. Well, okay, it’s not vaguely sexual, it’s very sexual, but without the explicit involvement of the sexual organs.

Modern athletes are amongst the most physically desirable people in the world. Their exhibition of their stamina, their bodies functioning, watching their legs and arms swing hypnotically stirs a trance in people watching. It gives me a frustration that I cannot explain and cannot find a second cause for.

Perhaps it is jealousy, I want to be that; perhaps it is desire, I want to touch that; perhaps it is hate, I don’t want that to be happening. But whatever the meaning of the frustration, it attracts me to view it, and pulls my eye to watch it, and it tickles my inside for some time after viewing athletic events. Maybe this is the devil’s work?

But, the choice, if it was a terrorist act, perhaps is symbolic, to destroy those closest to perfection?

There is yet a second thought. There appears to have been a whole lot of public violence in America. Red-hearring-theory aside (Dish network v. SoftBank, Chinese slowing economy, 2 point drop in the stock market), maybe there is a second social reason for this. Do these people commit violent terrorizing acts because they hate or because they are terrified?

As early as 2006, I had written in my blog about my own constantly feeling terrified. My boss, my boss’s boss, the CEO, the economy, every freaking person/thing is in total distress. Terror abound. Social norms are not followed when the country is at war or under economic stress. Bosses, coworkers and family members can laugh with you one moment and shout and scream at you the next–And that may just the best thing to happen to you that day–I mean they could come in and shoot you… Let him yell and scream, better than a bullet in the leg right?

Such total disregard for those things in our civilization that we have come to consider as irrational, inefficient and non-essential has caused our society to grow unstable. I feel it in myself. Frequent urges to ram my body into the wall in painful frustration. Sudden thoughts of violence, suddenly I’d visualize myself reaching out and slapping wife, or parents or even my baby.

And, btw, I don’t do drugs. I mean, unless my food or water is being consistently contaminated with drugs, I don’t think it’s because of psychoactive material ingested or breathed in.

The reason why I feel these feelings and thoughts surface is because I see to many things that other people shouldn’t be doing. The mind cannot help itself but think, if he can try to charge me more than the other guy, why can’t I smack him? And when this thought happen too often, perhaps some natural mental barrier breaks down and the brain just constantly produce violent thoughts.

Today, I am still a firm believer in human society. But because of this, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that all these violence come from the loss of faith in traditional values religions, the loss of cultures.

But I know that’s not it. At least, the loss of culture is not occurring naturally. Something or someone is systematically destroying it. And it may be the byproduct of something else, perhaps like the destruction of protective ozone due to industrial waste.

Did you see that? The IRS has always had, as a written rule in their operations manual, to read emails 180 days after they’re sent! Oh my god, have mercy on this country!

So, now, my blog readers, are you pleased that we’ve passed the legislations to regulate domestic spying punitive measures? Think of it! We can take the IRS down for the count, think of it! a Federal Privacy Tax Credit! When ever the feds, any feds audit our emails or other personal information, we’ll just get an automatic tax credit based on how much privacy was lost.

Even if we follow the weakest definition of privacy: The privacy loss is only non-zero if information was gained through clandestine activity and that we didn’t commit the crime for which the clandestine agent was trying to prove; even if we followed this definition, we’d be really really rich! And it is a tax cut to us! The law should be retro-active and we should get interest on owed back-privacy-tax-credit.

So… this weibo thing, is being referred to as the Chinese Twitter. I thought Weibo, 微博, were the two Chinese characters for the word microblog, which was concept originated in Korea? Kinda sad that it had to be imported from Korea, and then even sadder that American media try to claim credit for being the one being imitated… I wonder if this is a hint about twitter IPO or something?

So about that car thing I discussed several posts back. Why is it so painful that American car maker is being defeated by the Japanese car maker? Take a quick look at these two stats:

Life expectancy in 2010

Homocide rate per mm capita in 2009 (data from the UNODC)

So what does this illustrate? Well, I wouldn’t want to be the one to go public about the relationship between money and life expectancy and education and crime prevention, but it looks like the Japanese has governance figured out. I mean look at their lives, it’s longer, and most likely happier. The homicide, btw, is premeditated murder. There are a whole 4.96% of US population that thought about, planned, and then executed a murder that their Japanese counter part did not do.

Again, I don’t want to suggest that money had anything to do with it. And I don’t want to suggest that I am envious of a country where people live happy and long lives. But let’s take our chin back to where it belong and think hard about our own country. Here, we labor our people to their graves driving Japanese cars that we pay for. The money when it leaves my hands ends up in a Japanese company’s hands and it goes to pay taxes to Japan, it also pays salary of many Japanese nationals in America and of course in Japan. That money is then spent towards health and happiness and keeping one’s self away from killing somebody.

The country is blindly handing money to foreigners that gives them much much higher quality of life than us. I don’t care how you add the numbers up, or average, or median, or total, or percentage, In most ways we can measure those people live better lives than us, and the union of those better lives is a society, and again, I hate to suggest that they are better than us, but the whole is usually even greater than the sum in society.

I am not suggesting that we all start hating Japanese people, the country, and anything that says “made in Japan”. But for god’s sake, can somebody just for once choose an American car? Or any other car. Why feed a pampered fat person more when the human are starving over here?

Okay okay, I hear the sudden uproar of “this is capitalism”. Fine, it is, but we are people. We are intelligent thinking beings. Let’s think about this. I hand money to a Japanese car maker, he gives it to Japanese government, and he pays a japanese person, and the Japanese live long happy lives without much crime. For the most part, the buyers are probably left working to pay off a debt (aka “Car Loans”). I struggle and I stress and I become disgruntled and ill from working to pay off a debt. It is a vicious cycle our dearly beloved capitalism has entrapped us with. There is no way out, in 5 years, the current car will be too old too inefficient to worth driving, I’ll have to go into debt and buy another car and do the same thing again. I am essentially borrowing money to make a Japanese person’s life better when I buy a Japanese car. And then I work to pay off that debt in a life that is not as good as that japanese who sold me the car.

But wait, let me say this one more time. just to be sure I got it right. I borrow money from financial agency run by the Japanese, I put that borrowed money in a Japanese car company to get a car from them so I can drive to work with it to pay the interest to the Japanese company who loaned me the money and the debt. The Japanese takes that money and spends it on their country improving people’s’ lives and their people end up happier and living much longer than me. And I can see no change, next car, something will happen.

… ugh I want to say that again. What am I missing here? If I say it one more time, will it sound like it’s the way things are supposed to be?

Wait, wait, let me write something to blame the American banks being irresponsible and I can write about how repressive it is in China with that Great Chinese Firewall, then I’ll feel better about my predicament as I drive home in my Japanese car.

Read this fascinating opinion piece on techcruch tech news blog site today. While it’s not clearly labeled as “Opinion” piece on a “News Blog”, from the tone of the article it is clear that the author did not intent it to be informative. This flame bait deserves no response, except for that I learned a lot reading the responses to it.

For one thing, did you know that Benjamin Franklin said:

Those who give up their liberty for more security neither deserve liberty nor security

That is so powerful a statement, the mind of this country’s founding fathers is clear. The other refreshing thing is that it is fairly surprising that somebody would say that the threat in China is imaginary and that threat in the US is real. I am 100% sure that Chinese state monitoring is _not_ fake. I have personally tested it on my poor unsuspecting aunt’s computer. Searched for cults and discover that about 30 seconds later the internet connection went down for the night. The bad part is she participates in another group that I feel is a religious cult, but one that, AFAIK, is less outlawed than the one that I searched for. She never mentioned it to me, but I’m sure she got an earful from her local monitors.

Now, the pervasive monitoring that takes place in America (and perhaps restricted to people like myself, namely those not born here and those that have not demonstrated/proclaimed their undying love for the country without requiring inspecting the ethics of its goals and practices) is as yet unproven. I have my suspicions, convenient but not consistent degradations in internet performance makes me wonder, out loud, on my blog, regularly. But it is a little more advanced than those in China. The information that I am presented with on the Internet, the speed and order at which it arrives, are all suspicious. But none of these can be proven reliably as the case of the Chinese Great Firewall.

And also, it’s really nice to see an image of the shield of the Chinese Liberation Army instead of some silly cartoon on these articles that techcrunch posts. It shows respect–in fact proper respect for a worthy competitor. I also hate to mention, it probably strikes fear in to a lot of people who have been mentally damaged from the tight physiological monitoring/control/manipulations exerted by the authoritarian Chinese government.

Like everything else in the world, you can say that the version we use today was invented in the west, but you will probably find that FUD has been in wide use in Chinese civilization long before the west invented the letters F, U and D. If you think I’m mad, just make a few Chinese friends and you’ll know, these people are much more oppressed and suffers much more than what I have ever describe here about myself

(I should quickly postfix that so that I am not persecuted for being a “China Lover”. I, unlike many other people, do not feel that being oppressed or having suffered credits a person with extra credit in society. Bombing Japan was in reaction to Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans should not receive extra help today in America because of that. I truly believe in America, it is a country where one generation’s debt do not carry to the next).

Btw, kudos to Google images search. I downloaded that picture and uploaded to google images search(images.google.com). and it suggested searching for “PLA ARMY” and that search confirms that the shield is indeed the symbol used by the PLA. This shouldn’t be very easy considering the background of that photo is a grainy desk and it’s a slanted 3D object where as the top search results are drawings of flat objects. I wonder if they did OCR in Chinese? I have to say, also, that TechCrunch makes the PLA looks better than the PLA makes PLA look. Is this one of those, “you can do the job but I make it look good” thing?

Oh, okay, I guess Greg Ferenstein actually did do his research, maybe bought this cap from eBay and ripped off the insignia and took a picture on his desk or something.