Posted on by mwhybark

The Googley Man

The NYT writes about Wal-Mart, among others, quaking in their boots at the specter of Google looming on the horizon. Annointed media priestess of the future Esther Dyson prophesies “a huge increase in efficiency” as a result of Google, and others’, far-reaching efforts to enable universal ease-of-access to arbitrary data. Efficiency! Ha!

The writer of the article either heard what they wanted to from Ms. Dyson or bought the nonsense whole, as a bit later on the article notes, breathlessly,



Among the many projects being developed and debated inside Google is a real estate service, according to a person who has attended meetings on the proposal. The concept, the person said, would be to improve the capabilities of its satellite imaging, maps and local search and combine them with property listings.

The service, this person said, could make house hunting far more efficient, requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses. If successful, it would be another magnet for the text ads that appear next to search results, the source of most of Google’s revenue.



This service is already available independently, albeit imperfectly, and was widely celebrated as an early and impressive Google Maps hack. The site is housingmaps.com. In addition, non-Google players have been rolling a fully–fledged version of this service out for the past year, as evidenced by our largely Redfin-powered house hunt. Redfin is Seattle-based, and I understand that also-regional real-estate programmers HouseValues just unveiled a similar tool, homepages.com.

I did appreciate the tools. I was, indeed, able to consider a seriously larger number of houses than I would have otherwise. But in the end, we invested an estimated twenty hours a week for about six months into the search. Without Redfin, I would have invested a probable five hours a week into the search. How long it would have gone on is unknown, but given the ten-percent-plus monthly cost increases in the market, my estimation is that we would have been flat priced out by February.

My real beef is with the idea that information transparency will bring greater efficiency. We looked at an estimated 120 houses and bid on five. Requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses my sweet-smelling, taut, and perfectly round ass!

As person who has worked in the graphic arts for some time, this incredible, unproductive ballooning of the work needed to produce a given product, be it brochure or mortgage, is quite familiar. When the new tools make it easy to provide the client with a range of options, options increase to fill – and overfill – the time available, to no actual benefit or economic advantage.

Infinite choice is the end result of perfect information transparency. Infinity is the horizon of inflationary event spirals, while the numeral one is the horizon of efficient decision making.

Posted on by mwhybark

Mwa ha ha ha

For some reason I got sucked into a decent, if ultimately pointless Ask MetaFilter thread on the problem of evil.

I wrote a post but MeFi went down before I could post it and I didn’t want to lose it. So here it is.

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“transworld depravity?” Ill-mannered skateboard magazine readers? I don’t get it.

I think a part of the problem here is attempting to associate culturally-derived values and perceptions with the attempts of cultures to represent an idea which is necessarily beyond culture. If God is eternal and omnipotent and the universe derives from God, our little corner of that universe can’t wholly represent or comprehend the nature of God at all.

Additionally, it’s clear that what is or is not evil changes depending on the cultural perspective of the perceptor. We tend to associate evilness with torture and murder and so forth; other cultures at other times have associated evil with, oh, porn and gay sex. Still other cultures have sanctified sacrificial murder and even genocide.

A common thread in other posters’ attempts to look at the nature of evil in this thread is the acknowledgement of a differentiation between the idea of a world without evil and the world we live in. Evil, then, is apparently seen as a consquence of living in an imperfectible, non-ideal world, which includes suffering and, most crucially, change.

The deistic idea, which posits an extrauniversal reality, eternal, omnipotent, and ideal, must also therefore depict a sort of stasis, where no entropy can effect change. If this gloss is accepted, suffering is a consequence of entropy, of time itself, and therefore will always be with us. Evil may be described as directed suffering, in my view, and as long as humans remain monkeys with complex troop-building and maintenance behavior, some monkey will be suffering at the hands of others.