James Ashley

When GameStop Killed XBox One Kinect

February 2, 2021August 5, 2022 James Ashley2 Comments

If you look up the Xbox One Kinect (informally known as the Kinect 2) on the GameStop website, you’ll read in the product description that “[t]he best Xbox One experience is with Kinect.”

Over the course of the Xbox One’s life, there were approximately 38 games that supported Kinect body tracking. None of them were triple-A games. This is out of 2682 games for the Xbox One. While Microsoft initially planned to require that the Kinect be always on, by the time of the Xbox One’s release on November 2013, this requirement was removed. By the summer of 2014, Microsoft unbundled the Kinect from their game console, allowing people to purchase the Xbox One at a lower price point that was more competitive with PlayStation 4. The final blow came in late 2015, when Microsoft removed their Kinect support for navigating the Xbox dashboard.

Before going into some theories on what happened to the Kinect, I wanted to give my “they’re all dirty” metaphor for the recent rise and fall of the GameStop stock price. The weak GameStop business was being shorted by hedge funds. Small investors gathered on Reddit decided to fight this by pumping money into GameStop stocks in order to inflate the price artificially. They typically used the app Robinhood, which doesn’t charge trading fees, to do this. In the end, the hedge funds appear to have hedged their best, because even as they lost money on their shorts, they made money by fulfilling the trades coming through Robinhood from these reddit investors.

Isn’t this the plot of Mel Brooks’ The Producers? While the purpose of the stock market is supposed to be efficiently moving investor money into the hands of companies in order to create value, short-selling is a speculative financial instrument to allow people to bet that certain companies will fail. Like Leo Bloom, hedge funds like Melvin Capital and Citadel recognized that sometimes you can make more money with a failed venture than with a successful one.

In order to improve the odds of failure, Leo Bloom and Max Bialystock stack the deck by finding the worst script, the worst director and the worst cast for their Broadway show. Similarly, in order to improve the odds of driving down the price of GameStop stock, Citadel let people know that they were shorting the stock. Who would invest in a company that Wall Street big guns were trying to destroy?

The problem for The Producers is that the worst play, Springtime for Hitler, the worst director (who turned it into a Busby Berkeley style musical), and the worst cast (drugged addled hippies), come together to create something that people can enjoy ironically. The play is so bad, it is good.

The worst director and worst cast in the GameStop saga are the Robinhood app and the reddit community /wallstreetbets. Robinhood allows (and encourages) inexperienced investors to bet against Wall Street professionals, which is about as successful as betting against the house in Las Vegas. /wallstreetbets, in turn, allows users to try out betting systems. The latest one depends on treating the stock market ironically, assuming that investment is primarily about manipulating markets rather than finding good companies to invest in. The only difference between /wallstreetbets and the hedge funds, is that one is made up of market outsiders and the other by insiders. Late capitalism. Post-truth investment.

There was a time when GameStop wasn’t just a carcass being fought over by carrion feeders looking for a quick meal. In 2013, GameSpot was a quickly growing company that made its money reselling second-hand console game disks.

In the lead up to the release of the XBox One, it turns out that Microsoft was attempting to kill this aftermarket. Even into the middle of 2013, Microsoft was considering dropping the optical drive from its hardware altogether and making the purchase of games completely cloud-based, like Steam.

It is clear from the confusion around the May, 2013 Xbox One reveal that this idea had lingering ramifications for the strategy around connectivity. Two requirements for a digital only game distribution system are a need for all consoles to be online, at least part of the time, and complex digital licensing verification systems. It turned out that the aftermarket in video games, brokered through third-parties like GameStop, was a much bigger deal than Microsoft realized and their inability to explain how people would be able to exchange and sell used games inspired one of the great marketing trolls of all time, when Sony created a commercial demonstrating how to exchange PlayStation games.

Today any teenager can explain to you the market forces that are destroying GameStop’s business model. There is no need for a company to provide an aftermarket for video games when no one uses disks anymore. Everything is digital in 2021 and everything is online. Almost like an act of revenge for 2013, Microsoft is even strong arming its Microsoft Gold subscribers to upgrade to the Xbox Game Pass by raising prices for the former. Xbox Game Pass allows users to have access to a broad range of games without having to buy those games individually, including the top games from the past two to three years.

Microsoft was ahead of its time in 2013. But what made it want to get rid of disks? One theory is that without a disk drive, Microsoft would have been able to drop the launch price of its console by $50. As it turned out, the Xbox with a disk drive and bundled with an Xbox Kinect, brought the initial price of an Xbox One to $499. The Sony PlayStation 4 launched at a $399 price point.

This one hundred dollar difference turned out to be nearly fatal for the Xbox, which was forced to unbundle the Kinect 2 from its Xbox One by the middle of 2014, finally making their console competitive on price with the PlayStation. It was even able to undercut the price of the PlayStation by selling an unbundled Xbox One for $349 shortly after. This suggests that without an optical drive, the Xbox might have sold for only $50 more than the PlayStation 4, or even for the same price, at launch, while including a key differentiator with the Kinect.

Why did Microsoft insist on bundling the Kinect with the Xbox One in the first place? The problem for Microsoft was that in order to make the Kinect successful, it needed triple-A game companies to create games that used it. But this entails extra design and development costs for game companies. There is no way they would take on this additional cost without a guarantee of a user base that owned Kinect devices. There was a virtuous circle – or perhaps a vicious one – in which game makers need players with Kinects before they will create games for the Kinect, while console buyers need to be shown games that highlight the Kinect before they will buy a console that requires them to buy a Kinect. In the end, neither of these things happened.

There was an underlying reason that Microsoft wanted to get Kinects into consumer living rooms. While the Kinect’s primary feature is its body tracking, which could be used as a controller for playing games and navigating screens, it’s secondary feature is a directional microphone plugged into Microsoft’s cutting edge speech recognition. It could have become an essential interface between consumers and the commercial internet, with Microsoft as the essential broker for these transactions and interactions.

As usual Microsoft was ahead of its time, and even as it quickly killed the Kinect in 2014, Amazon was releasing its own natural language devices built around Alexa, which soon expanded into a tool for not only accessing data on the internet, but also for integrating with services and controlling home devices.

But alas, GameStop created an aftermarket for game disks, that prevented Microsoft from getting rid of its Xbox One optical drive, that caused the Xbox One to lose on price to the PlayStation 4, that caused the XBox to drop the Kinect, that caused Microsoft to cede the living room device market to Amazon.

TL;DR 2/n

January 29, 2021 James Ashley

“So, in the next century there will be no more books. It takes too long to read, when success comes from gaining time. What will be called a book will be a printed object whose “message” (its information content) and name and title will first have been broadcast by the media, a film, a newspaper interview, a television program, and a cassette recording. It will be an object from whose sales the publisher (who will also have produced the film the interview, the program, etc.) will obtain a certain profit margin, because people will think that they must “have” it (and therefore buy it) so as not to be taken for idiots or to break (my goodness) the social bond! The book will be distributed at a premium, yielding a financial profit for the publisher and a symbolic one for the reader.” – Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, 1981

Unmasking, Optics, and Surveillance 1/n

January 27, 2021February 4, 2021 James Ashley

How do you deal with people who refuse to wear masks?

According to fedscoop, tracking down rioters from the January 6th Capitol invasion will be easy due to three reason:

rioters typically didn’t wear masks
rioters photographed, videoed, and streamed their insurrection
surveillance software is extremely good at analyzing photographs and videos for facial matches
(as an aside, facial recognition software is better with white faces than with minority faces. the overwhelming majority of the rioters were white – and men.)

One way to make sense of this is to realize that masking has taken on mythic overtones in America’s culture wars and the Trump supporters who came to attend rallies in the capital, before they became rioters in the Capitol, are anti-mask. Then when they became a mob and invaded the home of the legislative branch of government, they simply didn’t have masks on them.

On the other hand, the rioters seemed anxious to be seen, livestreaming what they perceived as a revolution as it was occurring. If there was no COVID, it seems likely the rioters would have done the same thing and, potentially, there was more masking than there would have otherwise been because of the pandemic.

There are then two plausible reasons rioters didn’t wear masks. First, the rioting was a surprise to most of them and most of them hadn’t known that they would end up breaking the law. Second, they didn’t see themselves as breaking the law, but thought they were on the same side as the police, the president, and other lawful authorities.

At some point, not wearing COVID masks overlaps with not wearing criminal masks, the first from the belief that COVID is not real and the second out of the belief that breaking into the Capitol is not a crime. But surely, deep inside, there is the suspicion for these people that both the disease and the crime are real.

This inherent conflict between wanting to hide our true selves while also wanting to reveal ourselves online is at the heart of the societal changes driven by social media like Twitter and Facebook. We know that these companies make their money by surveilling our online behavior and selling our information. Yet we see this as a fair trade because they give us the ability to be heard and connect with other people who think like us.

The structural artifact created is that unwanted surveillance is inextricable from the opportunity for identitarian expression.

For Capitol rioters, being observed is the natural corollary to being observed.

Due to the bad optics of the rioting of the U.S. Capitol, some Trump supporters are now disavowing the rioters and attempting to unmask them as Antifa agents pretending to be militia/3 percenters/bougaloo bois/ proud bois/ white supremacists.

In this final turn, the ideology critique tradition that runs through Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, critical theory and eventually critical race theory, reaches an apex of sorts – unmasking as a tactic for erasing one’s tracks, even when everything has been caught on film.

In 1983 David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear on live television. It was similar to many other disappearing tricks he had performed over the years, but the scale and the fact that it was being filmed made it seem all the more inexplicable. According to some debunkers, however, the fact that it was filmed, and that we all have a bias toward believing what we see with our own eyes, made it actually easier for Copperfield to create his illusion.

As a software developer working with virtual reality, computer vision and artificial intelligence, and also as a former philosophy student, the intersection of these three themes, unmasking, optics and surveillance, are a rich mine for me. In the next few days I want to take each of these concepts apart philosophically and historically, in isolation and in relation to each other, and destrukt them to see what falls out. I want to address Kant’s distinction between the private and public spheres in What Is Enlightenment? while also covering the role of the unmasking motif in Scooby-Doo, naturlich. I want to dig into why magicians never reveal their tricks and why politicians never admit they are wrong. Along the way, if I am feeling particularly self-destructive, I want to touch on Critical Race Theory, cancel culture, right wing safe spaces, the politics of personal destruction, nuclear options and redemption through art vs salvation through politics.

Patrick Leahy Cannot Preside Over a Presidential Impeachment

January 26, 2021January 26, 2021 James Ashley2 Comments

I’m not a lawyer, much less a Constitutional scholar, so I really have little weight to throw toward resolving the question of who should preside over the second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. This is the second time of late that I’ve opined on matters for which I am fairly unqualified to opine. I’m even starting to worry that I’m becoming a bit of a habitual self-investigator rather than merely an easily distracted autodidact.

At the same time, I have been trained as a post-grad philosophy student to deal with some fairly difficult texts, many of which contradict each other, all dealing with extremely abstruse ideas and involving dense argumentation. Which is to say, I really find it difficult to resist.

It was recently reported that Senator Patrick Leahy will be presiding over the upcoming impeachment trial of Donald Trump rather than Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts. The reasons for this are twofold.

First, Justice Roberts appears to have demurred when approached by Senator Chuck Schumer concerning the matter.

Second, Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 states that “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” In other cases, such as impeachment of a Vice President or other civil officers, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate presides over impeachments. This case seems to fall somewhere in-between as Trump is no longer a sitting President of the United States.

The complication here is that how we read Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 on this matter is tied to our interpretation of Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution says this about the President of the United States: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

A minority of Constitutional experts who have weighed in on the matter interpret this section to mean that an ex-President of the United States cannot be impeached and tried, since the plain text of the Constitution says only Presidents, i.e. sitting Presidents, can be impeached and tried.

Against this argument opposing late impeachment, Brian C. Kalt, the foremost expert on late impeachments, makes it clear in a 2002 law journal article, The Constitutional Case for the Impeachability of Former Federal Officials, that this is not a correct interpretation of the Constitution’s plain text, which is much more ambiguous.

The plain text arguments tend to take the form that if non-sitting Presidents are impeachable, then the Constitution should have said “The President, Vice President or other civil officers [or former Presidents, former Vice Presidents or other former civil officers]…” Because it doesn’t then they are not.

An even less tenable argument being thrown around is that Donald Trump is now a private citizen and if the Constitution wanted to allow impeachment and trial of private citizens like you or me, then it would have said so. This is a fairly weak argument, though, since a private citizen being impeached for high crimes while in civil office is clearly different from trying a private citizen who has never held federal office (or even trying a former official for offenses committed out of office, for that matter).

The right way to look at Article II, Section 4 is that it serves to limit Congressional power regarding who can be impeached and tried, but sets no rules regarding the timing of the impeachment and trial. This interpretation brings it in line with precedent, both in English Common Law and the contemporary understanding of impeachment as articulated in the state constitutions, as well as structural arguments for late impeachment (Presidents should be discouraged from doing impeachable things late in their presidencies).

But if the timing of the impeachment trial is not constrained when the Constitution says “President of the United States” in the context of impeachment, then this would seem to apply to Article I, Section 3, Clause 6, also. If presidential impeachment trials in the Senate must be presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, then this would be true whether an incumbent President or a former President is being tried.

Moreover, the Chief Justice does not appear to have a say in the matter. The power to try an impeached President is vested in the Senate and not the Supreme Court. The Senate makes its own rules about how it interprets the Constitution with regard to impeachment powers.

But I’m not a Constitutional expert and I’m not a lawyer. At the very least, though, it strikes this layman as odd that the Senate should choose to interpret “President” as including ex-Presidents in one part of the Constitution while deciding that it excludes ex-Presidents in another.

And if I’m noticing that, as a layman, it is not only probable but certain that the Republican defenders of President Trump in the Senate and dependable if flexible conservatives at the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and other publications will do so as well, arguing that while it may be the case that Donald Trump committed convictable acts, the process is so flawed that he must be exonerated.

Patrick Leahy cannot be allowed to preside over President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. Chief Justice Roberts needs to do his job.

Mitch McConnell’s Impeachment Canard

January 11, 2021January 13, 2021 James Ashley1 Comment

While prominent voices like those of David Frum of The Atlantic , Jim Geraghty of National Review and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal have all called for a swift second impeachment of President Trump for instigating the mob that sacked the U. S. Capitol building in their attempt to stop the Constitutionally mandated counting of the electoral vote, this process appears to have been slowed down by Mitch McConnell’s January 8 memo stating that the Senate cannot begin to act on any impeachment articles from the House until January 19th at the soonest, one day before Joe Biden’s inauguration.

McConnell is misleading and pulling a combination of what he did to Merrick Garland by using parliamentary procedure to not act with Bill Barr’s traducing of his friend Robert Mueller by misrepresenting the actual case before him.

McConnell has a reputation as a master of Senate parliamentary procedure, and has used this reputation to hoodwink the public and his fellow Senators. There are in fact multiple ways to begin Senate impeachment hearings before January 19th.

The Senate is currently adjourned for three day increments and holding pro forma sessions in between. According to Mitch McConnell’s memo,

“It would require the consent of all 100 senators to conduct any business of any kind during the scheduled pro forma sessions prior to January 19, and therefore the consent of all 100 senators to begin acting on any articles of impeachment during those sessions.”

According to a report Mitch McConnell had drawn up by the Congressional Research Service in 2012 about pro forma sessions, however, the correct language is not the consent of all 100 senators but rather unanimous consent, which is a very different thing that pretends to be the same thing. In fact the House just tried to pass a resolution by unanimous consent earlier today to request that Vice President Mike Pence invoke the 25th Amendment, and it basically means that unless anyone voices an objection we’ll all just pretend that all members agreed. (Someone did object, by the way, and the vote will be tabled for tomorrow.)

The CRS also, in this report, identifies two pro forma sessions of the Senate in which legislative business occurred through unanimous consent, on December 23, 2011 and August 5, 2011.

The report also states that there two ways to conduct business during a pro forma session and not just the one that McConnell claims in his recent memo:

“While, as noted above, the Senate has customarily agreed not to conduct business during pro forma sessions, no rule or constitutional provision imposes this restriction. Should the Senate choose to conduct legislative or executive business at a pro forma session, it could, providing it could assemble the necessary quorum or gain the consent of all Senators to act.”

So what are pro forma sessions and why is a) unanimous consent different from the b) consent of 100 senators. Also, why does McConnell think he can get away with conflating these two things?

Pro forma sessions are effectively sessions that last under five minutes in the Senate during which nothing is accomplished but which must be held in order to be in compliance with Article 1, Section 5, Clause 4 of the Constitution.

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

By holding a pro forma only meeting every three or so Congressional business days, either chamber can take an extended adjournment, allowing members the time to visit constituents, raise money, and so on, without technically violating the Constitution or requiring the consent of the other chamber.

In 2012, President Obama challenged the status of the pro forma session when it was being used by Mitch McConnell to block the President’s recess appointments. His administration claimed that these were not real sessions and that therefore the Congress was effectively in recess.

The Supreme Court disagreed in their decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, stating that pro forma sessions are not just for show because 1) the Senate says they aren’t and also because 2) legislative action can occur by unanimous consent because a quorum, required for unanimous consent, is presumed, even if it doesn’t exist actually.

Confusing, isn’t it? I’ll quote extensively from this analysis from the Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog, which elucidates the matter further:

The interesting point is that (b) is rests on a fiction: there actually is no Senate quorum during a pro forma session. As Mitch McConnell’s brief in the Supreme Court explains, “The Senate, in other words, has provided that a quorum is presumed until proven otherwise.” And it is a fiction the Court definitively accepts: “[W]hen the Journal of the Senate indicates that a quorum was present, under a valid Senate rule, . . . we will not consider an argument that a quorum was not, in fact, present.”

Yet that critical presumption that a quorum exists is easily burst: any member of the Senate can suggest the absence of a quorum. “During any pro forma session, the Senate could have conducted business simply by passing a unanimous consent agreement. . . . Senate rules presume that quorum is present unless a present Senator questions it.” As Noel Canning’s brief in the Supreme Court explains, “whenever the Senate lacks quorum . . . , a single Senator can prevent the Senate from conducting business by making a quorum call.”

It’s turtles all the way down. To recapitulate:

A pro forma session counts as a real session, for Constitutional purposes, if legislative action can occur during this session.
Legislative action can occur during a pro forma session through unanimous consent.
Unanimous consent requires a quorum comprised of a simple majority of all senators (51).
Even if a quorum is not actually present, the rules of the Senate maintain the fiction that one is unless a senator calls for a quorum count.

So what would happen if a senator entered the senate chamber and requested a quorum count? Presumably something like this:

It would be discovered that there is not a quorum.
Without a quorum, no business can be done.
If no business can be done, the the Senate is in violation of the Constitution Article 1, Section 5, Clause 4.
The Senate must call on the Sergeant-at-arms to wrangle up 51 senators, so there is a quorum, so legislative action can occur in compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning.

Supposing there are 48 Democratic senators and at least 3 Republican senators willing to be in the Capitol Building to receive and act on Impeachment Articles from the House, this can happen as early as tomorrow. The next opportunity will be on January 15th at the next pro forma session of the United States Senate.

And thus Mitch McConnell’s attempt to obstruct congress can be toppled, by the numbers. Turtles all the way down.

Philosophical Classics for Nerds

January 4, 2021March 22, 2021 James Ashley

It is 60 days after the day I thought the U.S. presidential election would have been settled … and yet. Intellectually, I recognize the outrageousness of the situation, based on the Constitution, based on my high school civics lessons, and based on my memories of the 2000 presidential election between Bush and Gore when everyone felt that any wrong move or overreach back then would have threatened the stability of the republic and the rule of law.

At the same time I have become inured to the cray-cray and as I listen today to recordings of President Trump’s corrupt, self-serving call to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger, I find that my intellectual recognition that norms are being broken (the norm that we trust the democratic system, the norm that we should all abide by the rules as they are written , the norm that we should assiduously avoid tampering with ‘the process’ in any way) is not accompanied by the familiar gut uneasiness that signals to humans that norms have been disturbed. That thing that makes up “common sense”, a unanimity between thought and feeling, is missing for me due to four and more years of gaslighting.

When common sense breaks down in this way, there are generally two possible causes. Either you have gone crazy or everyone else has. Like Ingrid Bergman in that George Cukor film, our first instinct is to look for a Joseph Cotton to reassure us that we are right and Charles Boyer is wrong. What always causes me dread about that movie, though, is the notion that things wouldn’t have gone so well had Ingrid Bergman not been gorgeous and drawn Cotton’s gaze and concern.

In another film from a parallel universe, Cotton might have ignored Bergman, and she would have withdrawn from the world, into herself, and pursued a hobby she had full control over, like crochet, or woodworking, or cosplaying. Many do.

Over the past two decades, nerdiness has shifted from being a character flaw into a virtue, from something tacitly acknowledged into a lifestyle to be pursued. The key characteristic of “nerdiness” is the willingness to allow a passion to bloom into an obsession to the point of wanting to know every trivial and quadrivial aspect of a subject. True nerdiness is achieved when we take a matter just that bit too far, when friendships are broken over opinions concerning the Star Wars prequels, or when marriages are split over the classification of a print font.

The loss of the sensus communis can also mark the point where mere thought becomes philosophical. The hallmark of philosophical reflection is that moment when the familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar and then demands our gaze with new fascination, like Ingrid Bergman suddenly drawing Joseph Cotton’s attention. For Heidegger this was the uncanniness of the world. For Husserl it was the epoche in which we bring into question the givenness of the world. And for Plato it is the desire for one’s lover, which one transfers to beauty in general, and finally to Truth itself.

Philosophers as a rule take things too far. They say forbidden things. They draw unexpected conclusions. They examine all the nooks and crannies of thought, exhaustively, to reach the conclusions they reach, often to the boredom of their audience. They were nerds before we knew what nerds were.

Even in the world of philosophy, however, there are books and ideas that used to be considered too important to overlook but too nerdy to be made central to the discipline. Instead, they have existed on the margins of philosophy waiting for a moment when the Zeitgeist was ready to receive them.

Here are five works of speculative philosophy whose time, I believe has come.

Simulacra and Simulations by Jean Baudrillard – This book describes virtual reality, a bit like William Gibson did with Neuromancer, before it was really a thing. The Wachowskis cite it as an inspiration for The Matrix and even put phrases from this work in one of Morpheus’s monologues. It is blessedly a short work that captures the essence of our virtual world today from a distance of almost half a century (it was written in 1983). No one should be working in tech today without understanding what Baudrillard meant by “the desert of the real.”

Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit – Parfit took apart the notion of identity using thought experiments drawn from science fiction. One of his most striking arguments, introduced in Part Three of his work, in a section called Simple Teletransportation and the Branch-Line Case, Parfit posits a machine that allows speed-of-light travel by scanning a person into data, sending that data to another planet, and then reconstituting that data as matter to recreate the original person. Of course, we have to destroy the original copy during this process of teletransportation. Parfit toys with our intuitions of what it means to be a person in order to arrive at philosophical gold. If the reader is troubled by this scenario of murder and cloning cum teleportation, Parfit is able to point out that this is what we go through in our lives. How much of the matter we were born with is still a part of our physical bodies? Little to none?

For the coup de gras, one can apply the lessons of teletransportation to address our pointless fear of death. What is death, after all, but a journey through the teleporter without a known terminus?

The Conscious Mind by David J Chalmers – Just as the 4th century BCE saw a flourishing of philosophy and science in Greece, or the 16th century saw an explosion of literary invention in England, in the 1990’s Australia become the home of the most innovative works on the Philosophy of Mind in the world. Out of that period of wild genius David J Chalmers came out against the general trend driven by Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland that denied the reality of consciousness. Chalmers, on the other hand, made the case through exacting arguments that consciousness is not only real, but is a fundamental property of the universe, alongside spatiality and temporality.

Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity by Brady Bowman – Since Dale Carnegie’s important work reforming the habits of white collar labor, positive thinking has been the ethos of professional life. The Marxian threat of alienated labor is eliminated by refusing to acknowledge the possibility of alienation in the corporate managerial class. Just as movie Galadriel tells us that “history became legend, legend became myth”, the power of positive thinking became a tenet of faith, then a method of prosperous Biblical exegesis, and finally a secret.

Do you ever get tired of mindless positivism? What if the underlying engine of the universe turns out not to be positive thinking but absolute negativity? And what if this can be proven through Hegel’s advanced dialectical logic? How much would you pay for a secret like that?

The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose – Penrose was a brilliant mathematical physicist who unleashed his learned background to the problem of human consciousness. Do physics and quantum physics in particular confirm or reject our theories about the human soul? I’ve always loved this book because Penrose comes up with a solution to human consciousness in a somewhat unphilosophical way – which made many philosophers nervous. The crux of his argument for the place of mind in a quantum universe is the size horizon of some features of the human brain. Ultimately, I think, Penrose provides a way to reconcile Kantian metaphysics with modern cutting edge physics and biology in a way that works – or that at least is consistent and the ground for the possibility of Kantianism.

Honorable mention: Darkside by Tom Stoppard – if you have been watching The Good Place then you should be familiar with The Trolley Problem, a thought experiment used to tease our ethical intuitions and commitments. What could make The Trolley Problem even better? What if it is incorporated into a radio play by one of our greatest living English dramatists, performed to the tracks of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and acted out by Bill Nighy (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Rufus Sewell (Dark City) and Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones).

One Day Till Election Day

November 2, 2020March 22, 2021 James Ashley

The most important thing about making a Moscow Mule is getting the cup right. It needs to be copper, which does good things with the lime juice. Don’t use a silver cup, which is used a a container for the Mint Julep. To make a Moscow Mule my way, pour ice into a copper cup. Over the ice add:

2 oz not too expensive vodka
4 oz Moscow Mule mix
enough sparkling water to fill your copper cup to the rim

Garnish with a lime slice and mint sprig.

A few years ago I found myself with Dennis Vroegop at a LinkedIn Learning party in Redmond, Washington. It was there that we began negotiations on what eventually became our App Development for HoloLens video course. It was November 3rd, 2016 during the week of the Microsoft MVP summit and the free bar had an excellent mixologist who was able to make me a Rusty Nail as well as a Moscow Mule. I was thrilled.

As the night wore on, we went from party to party with a great sense of freedom and the feeling that we were on top of the world and that we were on the cusp of great things. Another friend, Tamas Deme, ended up at a dour affair for the local Republican Party where depressed representatives waited patiently for bad news.

But that isn’t how things turned out. As we moved from party to party, people started getting panicked phone calls from spouses at home and their faces turned from bemusement to chagrin. At one point we ran into Tim Huckaby, a legend in the Microsoft RD world, who told us Trump was winning the election. We thought he was joking.

Finally my wife called me in tears barely able to contain herself. The country had elected (another) rapist and she couldn’t understand how. I couldn’t get my head around it and ended up walking around Redmond for the next few hours.

Instead of the best year, 2016 became the start of a set of strange, difficult to understand events. Everything feels like it has slowly been dissipating ever since. Friendships have become strained. Relationships have frayed. The extended, non-nuclear family is maintained by avoiding each other. I constantly have to tell my children that this isn’t how things used to be and politicians as well as people in general traditionally are afraid of being caught in lies. But I can tell from their tone that they doubt me. After all, isn’t my generation partly responsible for what has happened?

Two Days Till The Election

November 1, 2020 James Ashley

The Sidecar is a somewhat neglected concoction, being a brandy-based cocktail that doesn’t fit into the common categories of brown, clear and beach drinks. The most important thing is to wet the tip of your martini glass with water before dipping it in sugar and chilling it in the freezer. To make a sidecar, shake:

2 oz brandy
2 oz triple sec or other orange liqueur
1 1/2 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice

The base of a cocktail (brandy, whiskey, gin, vodka, rum or tequila) is a bit like a Kuhnian paradigm that casts an interpretive shadow over whatever else you add to it. If you add lime juice and simple syrup to rum you get a Daiquiri. When you add lime juice and simple syrup to gin, you end up with a Gimlet. Garnishes also provide a gravitational pull of their own. Dry vermouth, gin and olives gives you a martini. Dry vermouth, gin and cocktail onions makes a Gibson. Replace gin with vodka and you end up with either a vodka Martini or a vodka Gibson (emphasizing that vodka, being a clear alcohol like gin, is a mere variation rather than a species change). Gin, sweet vermouth and bitters gives you a Martinez, a drink that the Martini is apparently descended from. Bourbon, sweet vermouth and bitters is a Manhattan. Replace the Manhattan’s vermouth with simple syrup and you get an Old-Fashioned. Add mint leaves to this and you have a Mint Julep.

Herodotus tells us that the Persians always deliberated over important issues once drunk and once sober, to ensure they captured all the aspects of the matter with clarity but also with an open mind so that, matatis mutandis, good outcomes were achieved. The surprise is always in how different moods can affect our judgment which we otherwise assume is firm and built on unmoving principles. It is why decisions should never be made in haste or in a moment of high passion. And if we do this anyways, there is much to be said for a process that allows review, so that mistakes made in the moment can be fixed.

But due process, like brandy cocktails, is not currently in vogue, and it is difficult to tell if this is a result of changing perspectives on what justice entails – or if this is merely a momentary passion.

Three Days Out From Election Day

October 30, 2020October 30, 2020 James Ashley

The White Russian is famously the drink of The Dude. It is a three ingredient cocktail composed of equal parts vodka, Kahlua and heavy cream. No garnish. I prefer it in an Oculus Rift novelty glass, but any old-fashioned glass will do.

My wife’s grand-parents and great-grandparents were White Russians. In the 1918 revolution her family retreated and retreated with the Tsarist forces through the Ukraine. Her great-great-grandfather and a cousin iconically died when their regiment was surrounded by the Reds in the snow. The Reds did not take prisoners. To be fair, the Whites didn’t either. And both took advantage of the war to act out pogroms on Jews, whom neither side trusted.

One of her great grand-fathers was sent to the Gulag for a 5 year term for blowing up a bridge. If the bridge actually existed, family opinion holds that his sentence would have been much more severe. Later, after walking home following the end of his 5 years in Siberia, he took advantage of the war to gather his family and escape from the Ukraine to Germany. German fliers had promised them a great life if they migrated west. Instead, the Germans placed them in a labor camp, where they stayed through the extent of the war. Once the guards had left the camp, they made their way to allied forces and eventually were granted passage to New York City, where they lived for several years before settling in the suburbs around Washington, D.C.

Their take-away from all this was that the Nazis were bad but the Soviets were worse.

I recently discovered that my mother is voting for Trump. I was a bit surprised, but not completely. My mother is Vietnamese and there are complicated factors involved which come down to: 1) a specific distrust of the Chinese, who in the past and currently are attempting to create a sphere of influence in that part of the world, especially as the Trump administration has withdrawn from foreign engagement; 2) anti-communism that grows out of a long history of communist atrocities in Vietnam as well as the trauma of being expelled from one’s own country and being forced to leave both family and ancestral graves behind; 3) Trump has been successful in portraying himself as being tough on China, despite general indifference to the plight of the Uyghurs or of the independence movement in Hong Kong.

The horror of communism is the basic belief in the plasticity of human nature and the belief that with proper education, reinforced with force if necessary, anybody can be made to believe anything. Combine this with an absolute belief in the righteousness of one’s cause as well as a cadre of cynical operators willing to carry out this political agenda, and you end up with the sort of destruction of norms and truth illustrated in the writings of George Orwell and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, films like The Death of Stalin, and the growing testimony about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

But as strongly as I abhor the anti-humanism and anti-enlightenment baggage of communist movements (or maybe because of it) it is clear that a general sympathy for the working person, a desire to help those in need and an recognition of the need to address the consequences of global warming are not the essence of communism. The essence of communism is a disregard for truth and a belief that anyone can be made to believe anything and that norms are a weakness. These are not the traits of a Biden presidential candidacy.

Drinking down my White Russian, I coo privately over the prospect of Biden presidential victory and begin to confuse the two.

Sam Elliott tells us in The Big Lebowski that The Dude was the right man at the right time (which is also a perfect description of Joe Biden). The Dude has many faults. Among his virtues, though, is a degree of appreciation for what he expects from the world and a respect for norms. He is surrounded by somewhat extreme friends, but he also gives them space and grants them their personal dignity and recognizes their humanity. For all his 60’s radical rhetoric, he is ultimately a man of bourgeois tastes pursuing enlightenment ideals about interior decoration with a clear sense of human dignity and of what crosses the line of human dignity.

These are hard times and we need more Dude’s in the world. We also need more White Russians over here, bartender!

Four Days From Election Day

October 29, 2020October 29, 2020 James Ashley

This is the Aviation cocktail. It is one of the earliest recorded cocktails of the 20th century. Just sourcing the ingredients can be a feat in itself.

2 oz gin
1/2 oz lemon juice
1/4 oz maraschino liqueur
1/4 oz creme de violette

Shake with ice and pour into a martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist or a maraschino cherry. There is some controversy about the creme de violette. Some people leave it out altogether, on the theory that modern versions of the liqueur are inferior to that used in the original drink. Some throw it in with the rest of the ingredients in the shaker, which creates a very purple drink. I like to add it over a spoon after pouring the glass so it is in a separate layer, creating a morning dawn with clouds effect, which is how the drink originally got its name.

The disputes over the right way to make an Aviation follow a long term (or long form) mode of thought. This is unusual and increasingly rare. Typically we make short term decisions, and this has been blamed many of the follies we face today.

Stock market investment is meant to be a long term matter but many of the disasters that occur in the market seem to occur when people treat it as a short form (i.e. gambling) metier. There was a time, as with the characters in a Jane Austen novel, when a person’s worth was calculated based on a 5% return on investments. Mr. Darcy was worth 10,000 pounds a year, which meant he had an endowment of 200,000 pounds. 10,000 pounds a year put Mr. Darcy in the top 1% of British incomes at the time. His 10,000 pounds is equivalent to around £450,000 today, according to a quick unverified Google search I just did. His modern equivalent, I imagine, would consequently be Jared Kushner, not Colin Firth, which makes Ivanka Trump our Elizabeth Bennett!

Okay. Enough of that. Short term thinking vs. long term thinking. That is the current topic.

I once had a manager to whom I expressed my concerns that the path we were on in building a software product simply wouldn’t work. There was no audience for it. I was concerned that my manager was hiding information from the CEO of the company and that this would lead to disaster down the road, including but not limited to everyone losing their jobs. My manager calmly told me with a smile that this was something I shouldn’t worry about and that if his strategy didn’t work, it was his job that would be forfeit, not mine.

I think he was sincere in saying this, to the extent any manager is capable of sincerity (I’ve known a few), but the problem was that this was short term thinking. In the short term, he was confident that what he was saying was true. Later, however, adverse circumstances led to a shortfall in income and I moved on to other employment while he continued doing internal pitches in order to get more money for his project. He of course forgot about any claims he had made previously.

There are several lessons that can be drawn from this. The first is never to trust management. They are not on your side. Their job is to figure out how to get you to further their own goals.

The second is that something said can be true in the short term but not true in the long term. In the short term, people will say whatever gets them through to the end of the meeting they are in. This is what we also call a pragmatic attitude.

Statements concerning actions that are true over the long term are actually called “ethics”. When someone claims they will do something, and perhaps believe it, but after a few days or a few weeks, abandons that promise, then they are being unethical. If the keep to their word over the long term, they are being ethical. A characteristic of people who keep their word over the long term is that they are thoughtful about what they say and what they promise.

Even the beliefs we hold can be ethical or unethical in this way. I was once serving jury duty in a case that was pretty fun – about which I can’t really say anything. Most of the jury was inclined one way while two were inclined another. At the end of the deliberations, one of the hold outs was eventually ready to change his vote because he had a party he wanted to go to that night. So it was down to the fore-person. She made multiple arguments about how it was possible that the person on trial may not have done what he was accused of. And honestly her intentions were good. She was concerned about the three-strikes mandate that at the time would have given the defendant an excessive punishment, and many juries at the time were struggling with the notion of jury nullification in cases where they felt the criminal justice system itself was unfair. It occurred to me to ask her, out of curiosity, whether she believed what she was saying.

After which there was a long pause of at least a minute and maybe more. She then announced that she was changing her vote and we returned to the courtroom to announce our verdict.

“Is that true” is a powerful question, I discovered that day.

In life, we all say things that sound good at the moment. When I supported pitches to the client while working at a digital agency, this was what we did every day. We said things that sounded good. Strangely, we always believed what we were saying when we said it. Following the George Costanza rule, it isn’t a lie if you believe it.

But what we believe in the moment isn’t the same thing as an ‘ethical belief’. It can be blamed on social media, the lowering of public discourse, the long term effects of Trumpism, but it feels like people no longer believe or speak ethically anymore. There is no sense that the things we say should be true or that the promises we made should be kept. It’s all just words …

And words can destroy lives, markets, norms, social bonds and potentially great nations. My hope for the Biden presidency is that we will finally have ethical beliefs, again.