Completely random stuff that I am dumping the brain contents of:

If you code compilers, or develop your own computer language, people look at you funny, even in computer science departments.

If you call yourself an Alexa coder, and get into the Amazon Accelerator program, you're part of a thirty-one billion dollar industry with a 200+ million dollar fund throwing money at you.

Two points to ponder: (1) "voice command" approximates to "natural language compiler". Or, "natural language programming", if you're unwilling to stretch to compiler. Yet. So no, this isn't a trivial comparison. and (2) my oh my, how far we have come.

And how far we have to go. I have a great appreciation for the hard work it takes to get Alexa and Google's equivalent to do their things.

And I am yet frustrated when I experiment with trying to get our little gadget to stretch beyond its boundaries. That's ok, that's ultimately why I bought the thing, to play with, just as I play with computers via keyboard.

But I can see where this will go. Oh, so close we are...

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dGaSometer: a universal, hardwired human wetware device, but each implementation having slightly different calibration. dGaS = don't-Give-a-Shit, i.e. don't-Give-a-Shit-ometer. To measure your individual level of don't-Give-a-Shit.

A dynamic device, re-calibrated as needed, just as with any useful laboratory device.

The scale is often set by the most-unfirable person of acquaintance: the one least likely to get fired because no one else in the entire local quadrant could be found to do their job, not for love nor money.

Urinal scrubber (often the owner, depending on the particular location...), PortaToilet cleaner. Plumbers in the get your hands really dirty end of things, especially anyone driving a RotoRooter truck or septic-tank service truck. Chimney sweeps were the classic case, certainly in the Mary Poppins lens. These are the folks whose dGaSometer scales are likely fairly well pegged, compared to the normal folk of their acquaintance.

These are the things you think of one the way home from the day gig. Not because I had a bad day (no, really), but because I thought of a constellation of current and former co-workers, and it just sort of coalesced in my head.

And yes of course this will show up in a story someday. How could it not, I ask you? Once it's there, baby...

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The LightSail 2 mission gallery is here. This is very, very cool, no longer animation we're getting near-realtime views of the actual sail in action. Along with some great looks at the Blue Marble.

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So: Sun, IBM, DEC, VAX, Oracle in its first iteration, etc etc, were just way-too-early adopters?

Just shuddering, still, at the fact that we've come so far, only to reinvent client-server architecture all over again. And the licensing/fee structure that goes along with it. Oy ve.

Writers: this matters in some subtle ways. Don't let the writing you think of as important get caught in some cloud server, where it'll end up belonging to someone else because you didn't catch the clause in the click agreement... Just so you know, there are some cases where you can't use Microsoft Word to write for-profit (student editions, certain types of enterprise editions (universities, schools, libraries typically), and some other special cases are the examples I remember at the moment), so this is already a hidden issue, even though it's not normally enforced.

This will eventually come to a sticking point: the first time someone saves their script or novel to a cloud, one that's got an advance attached, and the big money tangles with each other over who owns what.

Ok, I'm not one to defend Robert Altman. One, he doesn't need it ( MASH for the win, people); two, I'm still aggravated with Altman over Popeye; three, I happen to enjoy the Lucas Howard the Duck movie, so you might take my opinion with a grain of salt.

That said, I'm going to disagree with Dean, and his commenters, on ambiguous endings: see here for a good list. Note what's on the list: The Thing, for example. Blade Runner, for another. 2001: A Space Odyssey (don't leap to Blame Kubrick (TM: Stephen King): remember that Arthur Clarke co-wrote the script, and in this case, the movie preceded the book, or at the least Arthur wrote the book as the movie was being produced.)

Ambiguous endings, in other words, aren't just a gimmick, they're part of the foundation of SciFi and Horror. Flowers for Algernon. Frankenstein (book, not movies). 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dune, if you understand what Frank Herbert has laid out as a trap for his Kwisatz Haderach. The Amber series and Corwyn's path that leads to... where exactly? Alien, and Aliens. The Terminator.

Meaning, calling ambiguous endings a cop-out, or "literary", sort of misses that the best of our work, in this little corner of the imaginative arts, actually lives and dreams with the ambigious ending.

That said: you have to do the work. All endings grow from the story that's been told. There can be no half-measures, here. And now we're back to the real question: Did Altman and company do the work in the rest of the picture to make that ending work?

Dunno, I haven't seen Countdown, so I can't say whether it would work for me personally. I think, from Dean's reaction, that we can assume that, for most, Altman and company didn't pull it off, at least not at remove?

Would it have worked in 1968? When none had yet set foot on the moon? But we'd lost Apollo 1, and Grisham, White, and Chaffee along with it. I think maybe, in this case, Altman might have been playing with a loaded deck. The world had set the stage for him, built up the anxieties, and he may have taken advantage of that; in that setup, I think perhaps the idea that we could send someone to the moon and then hear... nothing. Ever again, one way or another...

Yeah, I wonder now if Countdown is a case where art divorced from context has lost something in translation.

And, I don't think ambiguous endings are something to aim for. So I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with Dean, again. Most times, most stories, the well-developed, well defined ending comes out of the story, and should just be allowed to happen.

But then, I've taken my own spin on this kind of thing. I like to think I did the groundwork right, but who knows.

For all I know, my taste-ometer broke on Howard the Duck, and trusting my opinion on matters of art is a dubious business...

Thoughts on the precipice of the next obvious economic experiment...

(Note to scholars: if this is your area, understand that I am yet a visitor here, and likely haven't met your work yet. These are then my naive thoughts ahead of digging further; if I've said the obvious or the laughingly wrong it's simply the nature of my daily reading being in my own little plot of the work. AKA forgive me my sins, as I forgive yours...)

(Note the second: I have a necessity in the daily grind for reading economics literature, but at what the pros would consider a superficial level; I need a certain level of operational and general mapping. The details are usually not part of my practice, except at the micro level. So when I say "I don't see..." I mean the blogs, the Economist, the popular level of discussion, as opposed to the discussion taking place at the journal level. In economics, however, the popular discussion level has an outsized influence, certainly compared to my daily working area.)

Coming up, we're all going to be part of an interesting experiment: a very small, easily identified perturbation at the macroeconomic level.

Here's what I mean. It is a fact of the 401K/IRA construction that, at age 70 and a bit, the IRS and tax law hold that the accounts must begin to be liquidated. Not all at once, the liquidation is scheduled over a certain timeframe, a percent here, a percent there. In my calculations, I find that the aggregate value of a 401K account can continue to grow, for perhaps 15 years or so, to say age 85 or so depending on starting assumptions, even though the account is being sold out of in IRS terms.

This simply reflects the rate schedule in current IRS guidance. The schedule is set such that the overall disruption is mild. At first, the effect is simply to slow the rate of growth, beginning at age 70.5 and going forward to about age 85, and then finally turning over and becoming a net sell-off of the whole 401K account for the years after.

You might get a slightly different result, it depends in detail on how an account is structured, bonds versus stocks versus cash, etc. So please don't take this as a hard result, merely one possible result among an ensemble.

Ok, so what? Every year, some population hits 70.5 and has to sell off their accounts.

Well, the Boomers born in 1950 hit 70.5 next year. Further, the Boomers used the 401K structure more than the age groups before them, relatively. They represent a slightly outsized net population increase in the overall retirement account balance.

So, when the 1950 cohort hit the 70.5 line:

1. One would expect a net, small, broad-based (across stock, bond, cash, etc markets generally) move toward sell across markets, compared to current. Something like, instead of the S&P 500 growing at 10 percent per annum, growing at 9.5 percent, or similar.

2. One would expect a net, small, broad-based increase in tax receipts at the federal level, compared to baseline. Perhaps half a percent or so?

(1) is simply that, in aggregate, there will be more sellers than there otherwise would have been. Taken in aggregate, this should be a very small (hence, perturbation) change, noticeable only in aggregate, measurable only by careful work.

(2) I get to in the following way: a retiree's income drops, currently on age 65 or so, to a first approximation by about half. Social security and so on. And then, at age 70.5, said retiree has to increase their total income by selling off a percentage of their 401K. On net, the effect expected would then be an increase of tax receipts by a percentage of the difference between the Boomers and their immediate predecessors, net of market movements, etc.

3. The boomer bulge is approximately 15 years in timeframe past 2020; the effect will be, in fiscal terms, short-lived.

4. The effect will likely be small enough so that Brad Delong, Paul Krugman, Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, and their colleagues will have years, nay decades of fun arguing over "Who did what to Whom?"

5. We haven't seen the end of the data-driven macroeconomist (i.e. Emi Nakamura) winning the major awards, relative to the model-driven macroeconomist. In fact, we're just beginning...

musing on the subject of this John Scalzi article.

Ok, class is a weird thing. From observation, my English friends giggle whenever North Americans discuss class. We in the U.S. think money = class; the English have a completely different view of the matter.

An example: Kate Middleton, and her family, in the U.S. would have been considered upper class, due to their wealth.

In England, Kate's family are firmly middle class, due to not having titles, land, etc. They're shopkeepers, not matter their money.

Similarly: Paul McCartney may have a sir attached to his name now, and billions to go along with it. The title dies with him, however, and money will not buy his children membership in the upper classes. Unless, like Kate, they marry into it. Or hold onto their property and money long enough to drift in on indifference.

So, U.S. considerations of class are different. Using middle, working, upper, poor, may be necessary in some sense, but the uses are colloquial, and vanish on looking too close, as fog in our fingers.

That said, there are serious upper classes in the U.S. and Canada. (Mexico is a different category; the Hispanic countries of the Western Hemisphere have a class legacy that lives in a much different category. Similar but different enough so as to be dangerous if you get it wrong. 'El Jefe', as one example, has many different connotations. Using what might be a familiar jibe between friends with someone you don't know very well can be troublesome.)

The Roosevelts were one example. The Hearsts, briefly. The Fords. In South Texas, the King Ranch, in south Louisiana the various families that established what used to be Hibernia Bank and the Calcasieu Marine Bank.

I know of one family in Louisiana that owns a stretch of land that is difficult to describe, in terms of extent. When they work cattle, they move their herds from close to a beach on the Gulf almost all the way to I-10.

Without once crossing out of their own land. Or, for that matter, opening a gate in a fence on their own property.

And the King Ranch makes them look like dilletantes. And there's the Parker Ranch on Hawaii. We're talking true wealth here, self-perpetuating, and on a scale that's almost unimaginable, except by the very peak of the dot-com crowd.

If, for example, Microsoft or Amazon were to crater tomorrow, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos would still be personally wealthy, by any measure. But their ability to pass a self-perpetuating cycle of wealth to their children would be significantly decreased. Simply because it takes a fairly impressive amount of heavy lifting to turn the stock wealth in a single company into a broad-based, bullet-proof wealth system across all types of markets. I would imagine those two have, simply because they've had plenty of time to do so.

But is that the same thing as owning 100,000 acres of working ranch? And banks and construction firms and... Time will have to tell.

And this type of upper class has, contrary to common belief, existed in North America since the beginning. Consider the Brahmin class, in Boston. I've seen only the briefest glimpses of this group, via friends and acquaintances, and they too are, for the most part, a self-perpetuating class of wealth and privilege. Not necessarily the kind of wealth you'd associate with Ferraris and trips to Monaco, mind.

But their kids don't have to worry about college; they've been "Down for Harvard" since birth and don't have to worry about how to pay for it. When they get out, even if they don't go into the family business, which may or may not exist in a concrete sense, wherever they move, they won't have to worry about a down payment on a house, or a car note.

These aren't bad things. Think about it this way: given the opportunity, wouldn't you want to make sure your children and grandchildren don't have to worry about how to pay for college? Whether they'll be able to afford a house note? A car, health care, the basics?

Not kept in style, but the basics taken care of. That's what, at the heart of it, many of us, I observe, consider the American Dream to be. Not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but rather being settled. Able to back up our kids when they screw up, give them that little bit that lets them get started.

In current terms then: Working class means that, if you had the grades to get into college, then you had to either earn a half scholarship, or pay for it yourself. Maybe you took community college first, saved up a little money stocking groceries at night, and went to A&M or UT when you hit your junior year.

Maybe you got lucky and hit an apprenticeship as a plumber, took your master chit and started your own business with a line of credit from the credit union, held against your retirement fund from the union.

Upper class means that you went to a good college. But you didn't have to work, the parents had it covered, including the apartment off campus and the car, except you worked a little just to have a little extra cash on hand.

Middle class? Scholarship kids, the full-ride type, on campus all through because that's what the scholarship would pay for. Medical school or law school, maybe architecture, a grad school that got you paid right away, the day you walked out with the ticket in your hand. If engineering, you took the right internships and walked into a job waiting for you the day you graduated.

The upper classes maybe didn't even need the job, but there's always one available when they need it.

The working classes don't know anyone, have to fight through the two-hundred to one ratio of applications to job openings. Scrape by, put it together, go from job to job and never quite know when the axe is going to fall.

Middle class, there's always a rumor of a good step up, maybe as a negotiating tactic, maybe just as a way to make sure you land well when this current one gets cut.

Upper class don't get cut from jobs. By this point, they're working for their family company. Or, teaching somewhere, working for an NGO, at a non-profit, somewhere the vicissitudes can't touch, and the little bit of family support means they can handle the poor salary by other means. Again, not massive wealth, just the kind of backup that makes things easier. Or maybe massive wealth, that can be there too, but it's the security that matters here. (Consider: 200k invested, roughly a thousand a month in interest: if your grandparents had put that in a trust for you, would a thousand a month matter to you? Would it have mattered when you were, like I and my wife were, struggling? I know for sure as hell how much a thousand a month would have meant. Would still mean, for that matter, because we've got a kid getting to the point where college bills are on the horizon. And let's face it, when you think of wealth, does 200k sound like 'wealth'? Another example, could you scrape up time and 80k against a 400k loan, to start a business that, if things went right, in 2 to 4 years would pay off the loan and generate something like 200k per year? I couldn't begin to afford this, and I doubt any of the people in that article could swing it. But that's the kind of thing that the upper class can afford to do: invest time and effort to perpetuate wealth, in what look like small ways; if you've conditioned yourself to think of a million dollars as what it takes to get into the upper class you'll miss the real thing when you see it.)

And notice: it's only the upper class that's self-perpetuating. The middle class is an accident of being in the right place at the right time. The working class is the default: always the poor schmuck getting pissed on and being told it's raining.

This is description, I could generalize to other connotations. The retail grind, farming, fishing, construction, each has variations that you can see. Who owns what, who signs the time cards, who shows up drunk on Thursday and gets shitcanned.

Wherefore the unnerving, then? Why would the upper-middle class then feel a little anxiety? Worry? Maybe the sand shifting beneath their feet, a little?

The verities, no longer solid?

It happens to every generation, I observe. Collectively, that moment when "Who, where, what, how?" percolates through the subconsciousness. The Boomers: 60s rebels, 70s disco, 80s yuppies and worries about interest rates and tax brackets, nineties gas prices and holy shit you mean our kids could get caught up in another war?

The greatest generation: the war, and the aftermath. The cold war and all its collective anxieties, turned up to 11 and yanking the knob off...

GenX, us: we will never see a dime of social security. The universal realization, I thought, when we were getting started. I never met a member of my rough age group who didn't know this, down deep in their bones.

Ah. Now I wonder: did some of us begin to believe again, just a little?

The GenX middle class, in my little categorization, above. The ones who'd skipped along, put all the anxieties aside. Maybe discounted them, since those who couldn't keep up were the ones voicing them (and forgetting how they'd once shared these concerns, if only academically).

And the clouds are on the horizon. The first hints that the leading edge will be at 80 percent of current social security benefit, when we retire, and from there it's all downhill.

Medicare's finances even worse. Most states barely scraping Medicaid now, Obamacare/ACA something something oh God how are we going to get to retirement? What happens if the stock market crashes again?

In other words, we seem to be about where the Boomers were in 1990, 1991, 1992, when the recession that kicked Bush the Elder out of office took hold. The Boomers had been through Black Friday, the recession and the war in combination, plus gas kicking up from 95 cents per gallon to a dollar and 25 cents or more, and staying there (25 percent jump essentially in one summer) and their anxieties kicked into high gear.

This settled. But how many dot-com revolutions, or similar, come along in a lifetime? My generation and that of those immediately following look to be starting to question the next phase of life, and where we go from here.

It's no surprise this would come in the NY Times, or that they'd interview the upper-middle class for the article. That's their audience, it's who they're speaking to.

I don't speculate in political terms here; these anxieties are far broader, deeper, quieter than the playing at politics can handle. How will it play out?

Now there's the question for the writer...

A minor ritual, with small but well-meant power, and well known among those who know: turning the audio setting from bluetooth to terrestrial FM on the way home from work, that last day before your weekend, because you don't have to listen to the traffic from whichever mapping system you use, as well as your streaming tunes.

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Barry looks like a suckerpunch, a switchblade in a bar fight kind of storm. And it will be. Not our storm, but I'll be keeping an eye out for the aftermath, where we can help. Because I've family there, sure, but also because it's always our storm, in one way or another. This particular one, I'll be looking for senior living spaces, community centers, dialysis centers, homes for the disabled, those sorts of places. The places where poverty, medical need, and age can all meet.

Those are the places where people can't get out, no matter how much they might otherwise want to. They're stuck there, until the waters come. And the water always comes. We'll see it, at least a few of them, with stretchers and helicopters or boats and the desperate.

They'll need help on the other side. After Harvey, for example, one of the local retirement homes took more than a year to get its permit back, because of the unexpected flooding. In the meantime, the folks that lived there were at sea in a world even more unknown than they'd been.

Food banks, of course. Medical supplies, water, the basics, they'll all be needed. We'll be doing what we can, and hoping it's just a wet hot mess this weekend, and not something worse.

It can always get worse.

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I like this article, by Soraya Roberts, a writer I just found today, but with a voice I enjoy. I agree with her, of course, as do a lot of people, that Hollywood is currently in a boa constrictor's nightmare: swallowed the pig and now stuck digesting the thing. They've hit the big time with the worldwide blockbuster, and they're not sure how to do some types of movies they've done before.

That said, Netflix and Amazon and BBC America have their own opinion on this matter...

Um. And I kind of think writers have an opportunity here; there's space for those with a voice and an idea and a little work ahead of them...

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I wonder what Charles Hill thinks of the Russell Westbrook trade? My suspicion, when the Rockets originally brought Chris Paul on board, was that this was the end state; but then, I went through it with the Rockets and Moses Malone, Ralph Sampson, the Hakeem era where the more they added, the farther from getting back to the championship they got, Yao Ming and the never quite made for prime time players... yeah, I didn't think Chris and James were going to fit together.

Not for long enough to matter. That they've made it the past couple of years seemed as far as they could go.

My question is, have Russell and James learned enough to live together again? There's history there, too. It speaks well of James Harden, I think, that he'd sign off on trying again. And, I'm assuming, Russell the same thing. They're pros, granted, but us on the outside looking in never quite know where the frictions can't be overcome.

I'd have asked for a center, though.

The yearly garden is always an experiment. Quite literally, if you think about it, given that you're never quite sure what the dirt is composed of. Where you got the compost, who made it, where did they get all the sand, anyway, how much clay, how much rain...

We're past tomato time, the vines went from producing to yellow and dying. The cucumbers continue to bear, and they've hit their stride in terms of flavor, too. Green beans, there it looks like I've another couple of quarts to take up, and lord help us the sage has gone ape this year. Peppers, too, it looks like we'll have a fair few quarts of those. I haven't tasted those yet, it'll be interesting to see whether we're "Hmm..." or "Holy shit" with jalapenos this time.

And something there is that loves bok choi this year. We got a few young greens in March, and I've just let them have it ever since. Same thing with the tomatoes, I'd estimate we might have had one in three or four that weren't buggered by some little bug before we ever got it.

But we've had rain consistently since February, in a rhythm and a rhyme we've not had since we moved in. A sign perhaps of the decadal oscillation patterns in the Pacific, I'll take it gladly and say thank you.

My story garden has grown, as well; I looked through my list of works awaiting in the queue this morning for the first time in a bit. It tickles me, that list. And it reminds me of the work ahead, but for today at least I look at what I've done and am proud.

And I finished a story this morning. So I think I'll go and let my smile stretch a mile, and get ready for an evening on the patio, with hot dogs and charcoal and the sounds of the neighborhood. May you, dear reader, enjoy your own evening in such a way.