On Spoilers in Doctor Who

Doctor Who and River have a relationship that runs in different directions. From River’s point of view she is meeting the Doctor as she gets older and he gets younger. And vice versa.

They have an agreement about no spoilers. Neither tells the other what they know about the future of the other one.

This presumably happens a lot to Timelords and those who associate with them.

Occasionally bits of future knowledge explicitly leak out (character A hands offers character B a drink they don’t drink, yet).  More subtly how people behave when they know something is likely to be different than how they behave when they don’t know that thing.  Therefore information about the Doctor’s future, held by River, could leak out based on how she behaves when they are together or the topics she avoids.

Thinking about Cryptonomicon and Enigma and the suspiciously successful and efficient RAF reconnaissance flights it should be possible for someone to work out something about their future from looking at the behaviour of people travelling in different directions or at different speeds in their timelines. Quite a bit if you put a lot of effort into it and had several different sources to work from.

(no subject)

strange_complex has written a better review of Doctor Who than I’ll manage. I endorse her message and I’m grateful for her sharing her anger about the treatment of LGBT people in this episode.

So this isn’t meant to be a review of Doctor Who but a post about where I am emotionally with the new series.

Kind of Meh. Which is about where I expected to be. I wasn’t disappointed by Asylum of the Daleks. I was expecting a strategic mis-use of the Daleks, a plot more full of holes than an Edinburgh street and to find myself thinking at the end, well that didn’t suck, much.

And that’s sad. I feel sad. Generally, I’m sad about the whole thing.  It’s not great science fiction. It doesn’t feel as brave as it has been in the past. I don’t feel I’m being treated with much respect. 

This episode was pretty much everything I dislike about the current franchise.  It’s full of plot-holes. Big plot holes (if all the Daleks were killed in the Time War where did the retro Daleks come from?). Little plot holes (who posts the key for an insane asylum back through the letter box? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?)  The science fiction is poor to the point of being science fantasy. There are too many Daleks. So many Daleks I feel like an extra in Zulu. The Daleks are Epic. It’s a triumph of cool over substance.

I keep tripping over the plot holes – what is the point of chaining up an insane Dalek in a locked room, if you leave their internet connection switched on?

Dammit another one – if you have nanomachines that can turn your enemies into Dalek stooges why not just send some in the post to every planet you want to destroy?

At some point I’d expect to start watching Doctor Who with the Captain and at some point he’s going to spot a plot hole and I’m going to have to choice to become complicit in Moffat’s lazy plotting or admit that I tolerate it from Doctor Who but not from other programmes because I’m still coming to terms with the emotional fall out of being 10.

I wonder what I’m going to say to him. I don’t want to spend my hard earned fatherly reputation for not fudging when I don’t know by fudging the plot hole on Moffat’s behalf and I’m not sure I’m happy with the alternative response which is – when I was your age this programme meant such a lot to me that I’m prepared to tolerate nonsense like X because I want to love this programme now as much as I loved it when I was a boy and I want you to love it too, so please don’t pay much attention, and, um Look, a Dalek.

I’ve set the series to record on my new PVR.  Partly, because I can do that with a  button now and partly because if I didn’t I might not remember to watch Doctor Who and that would be admitting that I just didn’t care as much as I used to.

On the 8th Pillar of Economic Wisdom - Jobs and Wealth Are Not The Same

My series of blogposts on the Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom has been in hiatus over the summer but I have a quite afternoon and long lunch to devote to the next in the series.

Actually, I’m going to take the next of my Ten Pillars articles out of sequence and go to Pillar Number 8, Creating Jobs and Creating Wealth are not the same thing.

If you lost your job it would be a disaster. If you lost your job but got to keep all the stuff you would consider yourself to a lottery winner, to be really wealthy.

What is Wealth?

You might define it as material things, including the technology embedded in them. Or you might count the amount of labour required to produce the objects. You could include services that are rendered to you. Some where in between goods and services are things like clean air and clean water.

You could include some good things like a reduced fear of crime.

You might say that wealth was about mental well being. That people don’t buy products they buy solutions to problems they have.  You might think about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need and see wealth as a continuum from meeting basic material needs up to meeting our desire for self-actualisation. You could include in this issues of choice and control. You could equate wealth with good mental and physical health.

I’ve always liked the idea of wealth as a set of solutions to problems. And the less labour that is needed to solve my problems the better.

In a kind of self-referential implosion I’ve seen wealth defined as things of value, as defined by their ability to be exchanged for other things of value. Wealth is what you think it is.

It’s your money, pick your own defination.

What’s clear to me is that wealth is not the same as a job.  A job is something that allows you gain access to wealth. Other things that enable you to gain access to wealth are owning capital, social transfer payments and crime.

For me a job is labour that is exchanged for wealth through it’s ability to contribute to wealth for other people. Wealth and job are not the same. A job is just one way that we gain access to a share of the wealth that we collectively create and own. And in some ways they are a waste of time. I’m going to talk briefly about driverless cars (1). Specifically taxis and I’m going to assume that you, like me, find chat from taxi drivers to be of limited value. If I wish to get in a metal box and be taken from Waverley Station to where I live I could have a taxi, with a driver or I could soon have a taxi, without a driver. I will arrive at my home in the same time. I’m indifferent between the driven or the driverless cab. But one technology involves a human being having a job.

I’m no better of for them having a job. In fact, if I weren’t paying for a human driver my cab ride home would have been signifcantly cheaper. (2) I could have spent the saving on a nice coffee from Starbucks. I’d have been better off.

There is a familiar pattern in the Developed world over the last few hundred years of mechanisation, of work that was done by human beings being done instead by machines. Often the machines are better at it. A mechanical pump can pump more water from a coal mine than all the humans you can fit in the coal mine ever could.  Often the inventor can take the skills needed to do the job, embed them in a  machine and then run that machine faster than humans can work. In any event, work that once was part of someone’s job is now done by a machine.

That process of jobs disappearing as new technologies build machines that can do them better has been going on for centuries. Many of the jobs, most of them, are of no loss to the job holder, so long as they can find another job – in order exchange their labour for a share or wealth.  Who misses going to the well to draw water and would tear down the aquaduct? Who misses spending a month’s wages on a hand knitted jumper shirt when a machine can knit it in minutes?  Not me.

More stuff is available for less overall human effort. What happens to the person who used to do the job? What happens to my taxi driver once I tell him that I no longer care enough for his chat to pay for him time? Unless he can find another job he loses access to wealth, and some measure of dignity.

This is the crux of the discussion about creating jobs.  Without a job most people have no way of accessing the wealth that is being created. The agenda behind talk of job creation is a desire to avoid having a conversation about reallocating capital or continuing to widen and deepen social transfer payments. We’d rather pay someone to dig holes in the road and then pay someone to fill them in again than create a fairer society or admit that we’ve got plenty of stuff and share it around a bit more equally.

Jobs naturally follow opportunities to create wealth in ways that can’t currently be done by a machine. I don’t think there is any reason to think that the only worthwhile jobs are created in the private sector but we do have to be careful about taxing some citizens and using that wealth to create jobs for other citizen. That’s just a transfer payment in disguise. (3)  The money taken in taxes would have been spent on wealth for someone. Whenever I hear politicians talking about the state investing in Green-Collar jobs (4) for example I wonder if they can tell the difference between us subsidising a new technology so that we can all enjoy the wealth that might come from cleaner, cheaper, more politically secure energy and subtly taking money out of our pocket using electricity bills instead of taxes so that no-one notices that we’ve given a bunch of wealth to people but not created any additional stuff.

Our aim as humans should be to elimate the need for jobs. To move to a state where everyone one alive could not distinguish between their work and their play and where the reason for doing the work is not because we need a job to buy some stuff but because we need the work to lift our souls.

(1) Who would have guessed.

(2) I estimate between 1/10^th and 1/20^th the price.

(3) Are you Rangers in Disguise?

(4) A neologism which is in the dictionary due in part  to my efforts

http://zenpencils.com/comic/75-l-p-jacks-work-and-play/