DRINKING TIP OF THE DAY: Beer First Aid
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If you happen to cut your hand while opening a beer, be sure to the beer is cold and hold it in your wounded hand. The cold and pressure will stop the bleeding. See a doctor if people freak out when they see your hand. At that point, your friends actually know what they are talking about.

Are machines better than humans?
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Are machines better than humans? This is a question that has been asked since the beginning of the mechanized era. It is also the subject of many excellent Science Fiction stories (like the 1984 classic "The Terminator", which I am watching on TV as I write this). But bringing the question out of the realm of fantasy, the answer can be found by comptemplation the questions like the following: "Will machines ever be able to use their intuition?", "Can a machine rise to the occasion?" and"Will machines ever be able to be "in the zone"?".

One of the greatest talents of human kind, possibly part of our animal ancestry, is the use of intuition. It is the ability to make judgments without having all the data. It is more than just making the best guess (something that machines find hard to do as well), it is making an assessment by feel.

As well, people have the ability to "rise to the occasion". When someone "rises to the occasion", in essence they are going beyond themselves to do something new that they never could have accomplished before. Partially this includes learning a new skill set quickly. But there is so much more involved than just a quick learn. It is being good at that skill set and somehow knowing what to do like they always knew. When someone truly "rises to the occasion" it is a much deeper thing; the person evolves to a higher state of themselves.

Finally, have you ever felt yourself to be in the zone, where everything you do is right? Either at work, or in sports or even in relationships? It's like when us guys don't know what the heck she is talking about, but somehow we come up with the right answer to her question, thus avoiding the one way ticket to the dog house. Being "in the zone" is like being in a place of constantly using your intuition. When we operate at this level, we are operating at a higher level of being, in an unusual place that is a large mixture of skill, confidence and being purely in the moment (as well as many more things).

Machines today are dependent on the data that we provide for them. They are significantly better than humans when it comes to processing many small computational tasks very quickly. But if they have no data, or the set of parameters with which to make a decision is incomplete, the machine is paralyzed and may not be able to proceed. This is not always the case, as some smart programmers build in redundant code that allows the program to recognize this situation and avoid freezing. How can machines act without complete data? Can those famous "smart bombs" we used 1000s of in the most recent Gulf War hit their targets without knowing where the target is? Could they have sensed Saddam's secret location? Or feel out Osama Bin Laden's secret lair in Afghanistan? We know those answers. As fantastic as such weapons are, they need a complete data set to function.

This is where the new math of "Fuzzy Logic" comes in. Perhaps we can program AIs (Artificial Intelligence) or even some lower level programs to think or work with such a logic and then machines will be able to make decisions without all the necessary information. Will this mean that machines will be able to make intuitive decisions? Maybe. And how could a machine "rise to the occasion" and evolve beyond itself? Is downloading a new skill set enough? Will the machines ever be ale to "feel in the zone" and work at a "higer level"? For a machine to feel, it would need to be sentient (meaning capable of feeling). And for something to be sentient, it has to have a certain level of self awareness.

These three questions involve some of the more interesting, unquantifiable aspects of human beings. If you cannot quantify something, how could we possibly program it? A transistor is either on or off, there is no in between to "feel" kind of on or kind of off. Programming these qualities in a machine is a serious challenge. Perhaps humans will not program these abilities into machines. The machines might just do this themselves one day. Until then, human kind will be infinitely better than any clump of silicon.

UMEMPLOYMENT TIP OF THE DAY: Call your working friends while you are at the beach
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Wanna feel good about being unemployed? Take some time out from sitting on the beach, watching the lovely tanned and fit people walking by, soaking up the warm sun, walking in the surf , and pick up the cell phone to call your friends who are stuck at the office (on such a nice day) so you can cheer yourself up.

Ask them how the day is. Listen to their problems with their boss/ co-worker/ computer. Ask them how that tan is coming from the above florescent lights while they sit in their little box of a cube...

Please Note: You can only do this so often or they will stop answering your calls. This is why it is important to have many friends and rotate through your list once a week.

UMEMPLOYMENT TIP OF THE DAY: Grand Theft Auto - Vice City
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A great way to keep your self occupied is this fantastic game. I believe they make it for all consoles such as PS2, X-Box and the others. Spend hours upon hours playing an ex-con, recently sent to Vice City (supposedly Miami is the 80's) to set up a new racket. The game is nearly endless. It took me almost two weeks to finish. There are reams of great cars, motorcycles, weapons, missions, thugs to polish off, movie stars to employ, drug deals to wreck....

UMEMPLOYMENT TIP OF THE DAY: Netflix Account
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Nothing helps pass the time like a stack of DVDs waiting to be watched. At $20 a month, you can have 3 discs out at a time and an online movie queue you can build to your lethargic heart’s content. Just think of all the movies you can catch up on. Hell you don’t even have to spring for gas to go out to the Blockbuster to get the movie. They deliver them to your door! Talk about the ultimate in lazy living!!!

So you can forget about wasting your time scouring the Internet for lame job postings that 100,000 people are gonna see as well. No one is gonna look at that resume that you spent your first week of unemployment working on anyway, they are gonna hire their friends anyway….

UMEMPLOYMENT TIP OF THE DAY: HBO's "Band of Brothers" on DVD
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This is a great way to spend your time! If you want to chill out and see more "Saving Private Ryan" style WWII action, this 10 part, 5 disc mini-series put on by HBO is a great watch. I was lucky enough to borrow it from a friend and it took me at least 4 afternoons or so.

I'd also recommend the old Sopranos DVDs for season 1, 2 and 3. Rent'em and watch the day slip away until you're friends are off work so you can call them up and go for a beer. Listen to them complain about their crappy job and enjoy the fact that you don't have anything to complain about!

UMEMPLOYMENT TIP OF THE DAY: Don't keep beer in the house
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If you do, the fridge will be calling your name all day. And when you finally succumb to sweet temptation, all it takes is one of those bad boys, just one of the cold gold beautiful bevvies, and the rest of your morning is shot all to hell... then the afternoon... then the evening...

A CYBERPUNK FUTURE AWAITS US...
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Interested in what the future will be like? One way to look into the future is to look at a sampling of futurist-oriented literature. Many of the current trends in civil society today point away from any vision of the future that involves utopia and more towards a future dystopia envisioned by the sub-genre of science fiction known as CyberPunk.

CYBERPUNK NIGHTMARE
The visions often found in CyberPunk see a civil society that has deteriorated to the point of practically being a left in a Hobbesian “state of nature”. Hobbes postulated in his book Leviathan (1651), that life in the true state of nature where complete anarchy reigns that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Many CyberPunk authors see this old vision anew, seeing their world as an anarchical “state of nature” driven by technology and greed.

Often the power structure points towards an uncaring oligarchy supported by massive corporations that governments struggle to control. These transnational giants exist beyond any legal recourse due to their international mobility. Everything from manufacturing to DNA encoding is left to the brutish realities of the pure open market. Due to lack of regulation, the corporations have conglomerated into power hungry behemoths.

The corporations profit and grow rich at the expense not just of the lower level people who work for them, but at the expense of an increasingly blighted environment. With ineffective government regulations pollution takes on a whole new meaning. Animals are rare and in some stories treasured more than gold. Items we take for granted like clean air and drinkable water are for expensive commodities.

Mobility and power for the corporate entities also obviates any kind of labor organization, thus deteriorating working conditions and lowering wages. Usually there the divide between rich and poor has grown so fantastically wide that the middle class no longer exists. The rich are fantastically rich, while the poor wallow in hi-tech slums, have oppressive low paying jobs (if they are “lucky”), live in the midst of ferocious criminals and rabid gang wars. There is little social mobility for the individual.

Finally, with the cumulative effects of the impoverished lower classes, the untouchable super rich and elusive transnational corporations, there is little tax base left for any government to deliver social services let alone maintain order. There is no social safety net as the disenfranchised and marginalized struggle to survive in a Dickensian world. Order is left once again to the market bringing us to a very ugly “state of nature”.

CURRENT ISSUES OF TODAY
It is indeed a dark vision that one would hazard to guess would actually come about, yet in many ways we live in a world that has the seeds of the CyberPunk nightmare. We have an international economy with massive transnational corporations. Yet there still is a robust middle class and a fairly strong civil government. But keep in mind the trends in American civil society today.

Since the New Deal that mercifully drove the United States out of the depression of the 1930s, the trend in North America has been towards developing a welfare state where everyone was taken care of and the central civil government maintained order. But things slowly evolved away from the notion of a big government. By the 1980s, the Reaganites argued that this welfare state itself was responsible for slow economic growth and began the process to dismantle the welfare state. Beneficial social programs were beginning to be seen no longer be something that aided America but rather was holding it back. Finally, the North American Free Trade Association was signed in 1992. NAFTA essentially freed large business from US and Canadian labor and environmental laws, thus precipitating the movement out of country of skilled labor jobs of the middle class.

This trend continued with the Clinton administration. Even as the Democrats followed a policy of astute fiscal restraint that the Reaganites preached and even with a massive surplus, they still managed to obliterate the concept of the ever-present social safety net. Clintonites allowed for relaxation of the ownership rules for media outlets, which greatly reduces the independent sources for news and weakens the amount of objective information that the public consumes which effectively undermines democracy. They also weakened corporate oversight in loosening the accounting laws for big business, as well as allowing for extensions on trademark and copyright terms.

Today the current Bush Administration is pushing the most radical tax cut in US history in effort to spur economic growth. But in the process they are making tax cuts so radical as to severely hamper the social services. Some postulate that this is the end game for a group of the elite that really want the government to collapse under it’s own weight of deficit spending, lack of delivery of essential services and lack of public interest, leaving the country in a horrible state (of nature…).

CONCLUSION
Corporate mobility due to free trade and erosion of corporate oversight will make big business larger than ever imagined. In accordance with the growth of business in the power structure is media conglomeration, which further consolidates power by restricting the flow of information. Add the elements of the eroded middle-class, a lost of a tax base for governmental programs, lack of environmental regulations and a torn social safety net. We have a recipe for a very ugly world ahead of us. With everything being left up to the wilds of market it sounds like we are left in a very Hobbesian “state of affairs”.

Now does the CyberPunk nightmare look so off base? In the eighties, many CyberPunk authors assumed we would reach this horrid state through the post-apocalyptic nightmare of world war three or through technology running out of control. But with the above trends in mind, it is looking more like we will end up there more through greed and apathy. If the current anti-government, anti-social services trends continue, we might just end up in that hell, and we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

Thanks to Chip Young for a thorough proof reading, Tom Cronin for hjis excellent article "Moving into the Matrix" and W.R. Clement for his prescient book Quantum Jump.

We Need a New Kind of Liberalism
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We need a new kind of liberalism that works. Today liberalism, in its current form in the United States, is unpopular, demonized and quickly on the retreat. Why has the right-wing gained such an ascendancy in the last 20 years? The average guy on the street has little interest in the liberal agenda, when ironically enough, it is to little guy that liberalism seeks to protect. Why is this? What went so badly wrong that liberalism is unpopular in this new millennium?

In many ways, liberal ideas are painted as counter intuitive these days. And in a lot of ways, the federalism that started in the 30s and advanced so much later in the fifties and sixties is on the wane. With massive government institutions, bloated budgets and ridiculous red tape many federal programs seem to not be credible anymore. Welfare was discredited during the Clinton Administration and effectively destroyed. Even the enshrinement of the most progressive program ever installed by the federal government ahs been dismantled: affirmative action. By and large, these have been relatively popular things in most states.

What programs are next on the chopping block? Medicare cannot keep up with the demand. And the soon to be retiring Boomers are projected to drain the federal coffers dry when Social Security will fail in 20 years. The EPA is under sustained attack by the current administration.
COST

The government is clearly not capable of delivering the services that the people want, ask for and need. Nor do we see the politicians willing to allow the bureaucracy do their jobs effectively. Consider the fact that the beloved US Military has not been allowed by our civilian administration to conduct their main job, defending America. Now that their job is defined more as a good offense rather than a good defense, we see that even this government institution, so beloved by the right, is not allowed to conduct their business as they see fit in the most recent war in Iraq. Less troops than were asked for were provided, less time to prepare was allowed and less input from the Joint Chiefs of Staff was listened to. What was the major driving factor to ensure this? Cost and subsequently speed. Donald Rumsfeld clearly did a fantastic job of keeping expenses down. A $20 billion war to oust a dictator and remake the political landscape of an entire region is a heck of a deal.

Now think about this. If even the most essential arm of the government is not allowed to spend money while at war, what can we say for the social services? Even the new Department of Homeland Defense is under funded. States and Municipalities are not getting the funds they need to maintain security. How are they going to be allowed to spend money. I would say the picture is mighty bleak for any liberal agenda. With this current Administration pushing through a massive tax cut, how will there be any cash left for a government that is no in a state of deficit spending, especially when we are at a time of war?

LOST FAITH

Many of the liberal ideas that were enshrined in law and government programs are now on the chopping block, not just because they are expensive and now deliver dubious results, but because people no longer believe in these programs. Many of the ideas of forcing openness, forcing people to share and forcing people to participate are wildly unpopular. Is there not a way for us to find a new kind of liberalism that will be popular?

We need to find a way to explain to people why certain things are important in a way that they can understand. Or perhaps come up with an alternative that suits their needs. An excellent example was affirmative action. Past a certain point, it became reverse discrimination. The best people were not being picked for the job or the school, but the person who fit the profile. Here was a liberal idea that at the time made good sense to get the institutions of the land to be representative of the people of the surrounding area. It was a legal solution to a social problem that was eventually discredited as being unfair.

THE CHALLENGE

The current Democratic Party is lost in the woods. The Green Party is far too radical to be elected. It is clear that the liberal agenda has waned in this current climate. The challenge to the liberal leaders is to come up with a new program that makes sense to the man on the street, to main street America. Liberals need to learn to speak the language that the center can accept again. Liberalism needs to find a way to be seen as patriotic again. We need to keep this country on a course that maintains a civil society of equality and compass.

Unemployment
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Ahh, there's nothing like being unemployed again in San Francisco. All those late nights, those late mornings, calling my working friends and harassing them mercilessly, it all makes it worthwhile. The last time those evil money grubbing swine laid me off, I had the time of my life. Summer 2001 was fun for everyone. But I was unemployed with a decent severance package and everything was going on.

Now days, things are different. Lost more people are unemployed (which means I have more friends to play with during the week) and there are significantly less jobs out there. But, lucky for me, I have been contracting for a while on the side, and sometimes that cash comes in. It sure helps a lot. Keeps the wolf form the door.

I used to wish unemployment for all my friends. It's a great time. Not everyone thinks so, especially those with kids or other financial responsibilities. But then again, my brother has two kids and he's having a pretty good time of it. He's spending more time with the kids, which they love, riding his motorcycle a lot more and generally making the best of it.

Being unemployed is a great time of self-discovery. You really get a lot of time to think about what you want to have in your life, what defines you as a person and what it is you want to actualize. I content that it is not just a time jumping from one job to another. Rather it is a great opportunity to throw off the shackles of everyday routine, responsibility and hustle to look in the world in a new way, to define yourself by what you like to do instead of what you do for a living.

So I plan to relax, enjoy and find out what’s not just out there, but in here (err, my head).