Play us a song

My first instrument was a small Casio keyboard that I got for Christmas when I was maybe three or four. It had a small ROM cartridge that plugged into it with some songs on it that you could play. The keys, there were maybe three or four and half octaves or so, had small lights on them that would light up when you needed to press them, and you could play along with the songs in this manner. It’s been so long that I have forgotten what it had on it, I think one of them might have been Flight of the Bumbleebees or Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Jingle Bells was one of them, for sure. I didn’t get much more serious with it.

When I was in first grade I wound up in the school orchestra, playing violin. I’m not quite sure what happened, but according to my dad I lost the instrument or something, so that was the end of that.

When I was about fifteen, my best friend Thomas showed me his inheritance from his grandfather, a 1950-something model Gibson hollow-body. At some point, Tommy asked me if I wanted to start a band, and I was like ‘hell ya’. I asked my dad if I could get a guitar, and he gave me some lame, dad-like excuse that I was going to my grandmother’s for the summer and needed to save my money. So off I went on a plane with my little brother for the summer, and when we got picked up by my grandmother, she asked what I wanted to do.

“I want to buy a guitar.”

I spent most of that summer watching MTV, trying to pick up as much as I could by watching More Than Words, Nothing Else Matters, and Mama I’m Coming Home on constant rotation. And that began a life-long love affair with the guitar that has had its ups and down and remains somewhat cool to this day. I dare say I’m decent enough at it, having taught myself and learned enough over the years that I can teach myself pretty much any song that I want to. Not that I’m the best technical player, but I can pass a decent solo if I put my mind to it. And I can sing and play, so I’ve had a lot of fun over the years as a front man with a band or as solo performer.

One thing that has always bothered me is that I’ve never been able to read sight music. Guitar players have tablature, which is basically play by numbers, and I’ve always been good at using that to learn whatever I couldn’t pick up by ear. But put a piece of sheet music in front of me and I’m dead. I once tried out for the local art school when I was in high school, but I got too frustrated during the audition and gave up.

A few years ago, after getting more into electronic music production, I bought a 61-key keyboard and started trying to teach myself a few songs. I picked up a couple books and printed out sheet music to some stuff I wanted to play, and started learning how to play by reading the scores. I dare say I was able to teach myself Fur Elise, all of it mind you, not just the theme, but the two breaks with all the technical runs and everything. But the keyboard got stored away to make room for my other hobby du jour, and everything I new drained away.

I still play the guitar, and even bought a small ukulele for the girls, and about all they can do with it is open strum it and sing. I’ve tried teaching them how to fret the strings, but so far, no good. So I figured I’d break the keyboard out of the closet and let them start playing with it. Dare say I was greatly disappointed with how little I had remembered. But the girls took to it like a new toy and all.

The only question was how to drive their learning. As I expected, there’s an app for that, and after a bit or research bought a month of Playground Sessions, and have been letting my oldest play with that. It’s a game, basically, and of course I wanted to use it to. The problem is that the subscription is single-profile only, and I didn’t want to go in there and blow through all the basic lessons and complete her work for her. So yesterday I ran through the demo of Flowkey, which is much different from Playground. A quick review:

Playground Sessions is a much more sophisticated app. It has more of a traditional sheet music view, and there’s a couple options for speed, and whether the notes or finger positions appear above the score. The lessons have accompaniment, and it plays through, marking on the score where you hit the correct note, and it gives you a score based on your accuracy. Eighty percent is passing, and each ‘lesson’ has four or five sections that build on each other before a challenge section. My daughter is obsessed with the accuracy score, wanting one-hundred percent before moving on. I try to get her to move forward, progress by resting before coming back, else she gets to frustrated.

The PS subscription includes a number of free song credits per month. There are multiple versions of songs based on skill level, and they’ve got backing tracks accompianning them. They’ve even got Old Town Road, which was a must-get for my kids. All of the classical music is free, but I was disappointed that the top level of the advanced-hard songs were still simplified compared to the actual scores.

Flowkey, on the other hand, is a bit more pared down app, but is superior in other ways. Now first off, its web based, which is cool, but makes progressing through the lessons a pain. Even the first lesson, which is When the Saints Go Marching In, requires you to load 4 different lessons to learn about four bars at a time, before trying the whole thing. Needless to say, I didn’t spend much time messing that that.

Where Flowkey really shines, though, is that they unlock the entire music library after you go Premium. And this is the real deal. Now, like Playground, the popular music follows a modified score that incorporates the vocal melody in it. I would rather have the full score, actually, but that’s a minor quibble. Instead of showing several lines of staff and playing through it like a metronome, Flowkey has one continuous line of staff. The top screen shows a performer playing through it, with graphic aids to show exactly which keys are being pressed. This is both useful and inspiring. Flowkey doesn’t have the fingering numbers like PS, so it’s useful to figure out where to put you hands or how to switch between several chords in succession. And Flowkey has a wait mode, so that it will pause until you find the right note.

And I love just watching the performers on some of the more challenging pieces. It’s hard not to be impressed with Let It Go, forget it. And I was grinning ear-to-ear watching the score and hands whizzing by the keyboard for Bohemian Rhapsody.

Overall, I’m not sure which one I like better. I think Playground Session has a better lesson structure, although it’s very metronomic, whereas Flowkey, well, flows better. It’s more human, rather than just grading you on accuracy. And having unrestricted access to all the songs instead of the limited mode with Playground is nice. (PS has the entire library unlocked for annual subscribers, although not lifetime… ??)

So for now the jury’s still out. I’ll see if my daughter maintains interest in it for now, we’re about a week or two into it, and she still hasn’t gotten through the right-hand lesson. This dad, though, is having fun.

And I might just learn to sight read yet.

Saying ‘no’

Probably one of the most important things I’ve learned recently is the power of saying ‘no’. I’ve usually been gung-ho and enthusiastic when it comes to work, and I guess you could say I’ve been eager to please in a lot of respects. Part of that may be because of self-esteem issues from when I was younger, maybe the need for validation or acceptance, or the need to be liked or loved or whatever. But now, I’m at the point in my life that I don’t feel the need to please everyone, and have started being a lot more discriminating in what I take on.

I’ve mentioned before that as a technical person, I was always the first one people came to when they had problems with their computers. Now, don’t get me wrong, I made a great career out of fixing people’s stuff, but it was mainly because I was always fixing mine and was so good at it. But after twenty years, I’ve gotten tired of the support calls and spending my time working on someone’s 5 year workstation that can’t get Outlook 2016 to work right on Windows 7 or whatever. Or someone wants to spend hours of my time trying to get the straight up cheapest laptop they can find cause they’d rather spend the extra two hundred on lotto tickets. (I’m looking at you, dad.)

As my skills have advanced to deal with larger networks, business problems and software development, I’ve come to recognize where my most unique skills are and where I can have the greatest impact. Everything else has got to go.

I recently picked up David Allen’s Getting Things Done a few weeks back and started rifling through it. He was on Tim Ferris’s podcast more recently and hearing the two of them talk was a great motivation. And then Craig Groeschel had a segment last week on ‘cutting the slack‘ that mentioned the two of them by name, with his tips. I’ve definitely been building my own ‘no’ list, things that I just won’t do anymore. And I’ve been very clear with my boss that we should not do them any more. To quote Groeschel, you “grow with your ‘nos'” .

Now that my political candidate ‘career’ is over (for the foreseeable future,) I’ve been able to focus on a lot of things that I had put on hold for several months during the campaign. I’ve spent more time with my family, caught up on house projects, and I can focus on finishing my degree. But I’ve been asked about filling a leadership position in two of my local parties. The idea appeals to me for several reasons, but I told the first one that I had to consider it, and turned down the second offer outright. My first initial thought was what it would mean to have a democratic socialist as the chair of the local Democratic party. It seems like it aligns with where I want to accomplish, but I’m still on the fence about the effectiveness of traditional electoral politics at this point. I’ll have to save this discussion for another post, but the entire state party will be reorganizing this winter, and it seems like a big opportunity for DSA types to start gaining influence.

I’ve also been working with a blockchain project that I’ve been asked to take over. It’s not really that flattering as the sole-developer and originator of the project quit, and I’m the only other person who’s looked at the code. I was asked to take over formally, and I had to say no, for a variety or reasons related to governance and technical debt — another post coming on that one as well, I’m sure. But even when I was saying no to the person asking, we were exploring the possibility of a new project built on the ashes of the old one. This new one would start fresh, with a proper governance model, and follow a more formal design and test-driven development process than the one that is in a crippled state.

In all, this is part of a broader process that I am engaging in with my wife, to streamline our lives, reduce our clutter, and focus on what’s really important in our lives. We’ve decided that we are no longer buying into the American dream, and are finding ways to exit our salaried jobs, sell our big house, get rid of the mortgage and debt, and do what we do as we see the world.

Our goal is to be FIRE: financially independent and retire early, and saying ‘no’ is how I’m going to get there.

Keeping on

This blog has become somewhat of a journal for me. I’m still holding to the principle of writing something every day, even if sometimes when I start writing, I have no idea what I want to talk about. Like today. Sometimes I sit down expecting that nothing important will come out, but I keep writing to build the habit and maybe find some truth that I can speak for that day. Sometimes I think it’s just because it keeps the search engine spiders coming back.

I’m still keeping my meditation and intermittent fasting habits, although I’ve been slacking on Naval’s 60 For 60 challenge. I started breaking the sessions up into shorter 20-minute ones because I’ve been sleeping later. As a result I’ve only been getting 40 minutes for the past couple days. I’ve got about 10 days left, so let this serve as a written promise to hold myself accountable if I don’t get back on track. I suppose this means that I need to quit writing and go do that last twenty minutes before the day ends. I’ll save a longer detail on my experience with that after the 25th, when I’ll decide what further adjustments I’m making to the routine.

I still haven’t had anything to drink in about 75 days now. I haven’t found it that hard or difficult at this point. I don’t even find myself thinking about drinking like I thought I might. I remember hearing an old alcoholic tell someone that they hadn’t had a drink in years, but still thought about it ‘every day’. What I have noticed is that I’ve reverted in other ways, and have been eating and drinking a lot of sugar. I’ve been drinking a lot of energy drinks, and am pretty sure I’m addicted to drinking caffeine right now. I’ve been staying up a bit longer than I want to, and have been finding it harder to get out of bed like I had been a few weeks ago.

That may have something to do with the fact that school is back in session, and I’ve had to deal with classes and a few other projects that I’ve picked up in spite of efforts not to do so. And World Of Warcraft rebooted around this same time, which I totally shouldn’t have subscribed to, but somehow have wound up with a level 15 troll priest and several alts already. And on top of that I broke out my old M-Audio 61-key USB keyboard, and have been teaching my oldest how to play through Playground Sessions. Of course I’ve been spending more time on it than her, trying to get my skills back up to where they were years ago.

But, I did manage to get out and go for a run tonight, which I haven’t done in a few weeks. And I did manage to finish the whole route instead of bailing out like I did last time after eating too much, so that’s progress.

The crown of a good name

Today, I attended a memorial service for an acquaintance who passed away a few days ago, unexpectedly . The service was a who’s who of local politicians, party officials, and activists whose lives she had touched. The loss was all the more tragic given her relatively young age. I’ve never been to a Jewish religious ceremony before, let alone a funeral, but there was one thing that the Rabbi said that stuck with me.

” And the day of death than the day of one’s birth.”

Ecclesiastes 7:1

She told a parable from Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson about the above verse.

The point being:

“At the time of death, however, there should be no sadness but a sense of achievement.  If a person has lived a good life, if a person has fulfilled the commandments, completed his mission of doing good in the world, has weathered all of the storms and rough waters that are inevitably part of life and has stayed on course, then there is certainly reason for celebration at the conclusion of such a meaningful, purposeful life. “

The Crown of a Good Name – Congregation Beth Abraham-Jacob

I couldn’t really call this person my friend, we were certainly familiar, and ran in the same circles, but our interactions were usually brief. I did get the chance to spend an hour with her while canvassing the polls this past June. She was there on behalf of one of the non-partisan organizations that she was part of. We chatted during the time, but the two of us didn’t have a close relationship.

Not so of the others that I saw today. I heard several people grieve and acknowledge the contributions that she gave to the causes that she believed in, and how hard it was going to be to fill those shoes. She left with a good name, and one that people around here will remember for some time to come.

Shalom.

The Nation: July 29 – August 5, 2019 Issue

AI’s Persona Problem, by Patricia J. Williams: I don’t usually talk much about the front third of The Nation, as most of the stuff they talk about is more recent event stuff that has gone stale by the time I make my way into the stack. Or, more likely, it’s that I’m already sick of the subject by the time I get to it. This one fits well with the technological issues that I’ve been discussing, and is in line with the Team Human themes that I’ve been interested in lately.

Williams talks about the death of privacy, but gets into the ‘code switching’ that people adopt on different areas of the internet. Lord knows I’m guilty of that here. The persona problem that she’s referring to is that that of an individual’s right to self-invention, and the inability of computers to sense the complexity of people’s emotions, or as Rushkoff puts it, the fidelity of human interaction. It’s a short piece, and one that I’d like to see Williams delve deeper into in the future.

The Trump Court, by Elie Mystal: Here is the most terrifying thing about Trump: that besides all of his incompetencies, his madness, and the sheer absurdity, he has been extraordinarily effective at transforming the Federal courts for likely several generations. Mystal is rightly indignant at Democrats for failing to make the Courts more of a campaign issue, and presents a very strong article showing us just how far the Right has succeeded, and what the stakes are for the near future.

Democrats did not make the Supreme Court enough of an issue during the 2016 election, and as a result we now have Justice Kavanaugh. But beyond the relatively high profile of the Supremes, it’s the lower courts that we should really be paying attention to, as the Circuit Courts are the final arbiter of most cases. Mystal picks 7 of the worst ultraconservatives that Trump — or rather the Heritage Foundation — has placed on the courts, and looks at their records on civil rights, gun regulations, immigrants, torture, health care, campaign finance, and so forth.

Mystal is right, Democratics have failed spectacularly when it comes to informing the public about the stakes on this, and we’ll likely be living with the results for generations to come, assuming we can get Trump out of office before the takeover is complete.

Bernie’s Challenge to American Exceptionalism, by Greg Grandin: There is an ongoing theme among the left, a theory about Bernie Sanders, that his brand of democratic socialism is unique, or rather makes Sanders unique among the other contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Ergo, since the other contenders are therefore equivalent, they will ultimately be ineffective at dealing with the problems of capitalism and the issues that gave us Trump.

Grandin make a strong case here that Sander’s platform “is the only thing that can break up the ideological cohesion of the modern right”. He does that by taking us on a historical tour of the war between social rights and individual rights that has been ongoing in America. He writes:

“Individual or political rights are aimed at restraining government power. They presume that virtue is rooted in the individual and that the public good, or general welfare, of a society stems from allowing individuals to pursue their interests—to possess, to assemble, to believe, to speak, and so on—to the greatest degree possible. A legitimate state is a state that restrains itself, that limits its role to protecting the realm in which individuals pursue their rights. Economic or social rights presume that in a complex, industrial society, with its imbalances of power and often extreme concentrations of wealth, the state has a much more active role to play in nurturing virtue through the redistribution of wealth in the form of education, health, child care, pensions, housing, and other common needs.”

Grandin is the author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, which was in Dissent’s Summer 2019 issue. He teaches history at Yale and sits on the editorial board of The Nation as well. I’m starting to find him a very important voice to help understand contemporary America through the lens of history — which is the point of knowing history, of course.

If he is correct that Sander’s is uniquely leading a charge against the individual rights exclusivism that underpins the conservative right, then all progressives and liberals should study that focus and apply it. No matter what ultimately happens with Sander’s presidential campaign. And that’s been my take away from Sander’s 2016 and 2020 runs, that no matter what happens, there are lessons to be gained from it, movements to be built, and people to empower. And I think that has always been Sanders’s goal. Even from those first losses for governor of Vermont, he was showing the way.

The Right Side, by James Oakes: Review of Armies of Deliverance, by Elizabeth R. Varon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone discount the basic premise of an author while effectively building a new thesis on top of the same work. Oakes does this with Varon’s premise that the Civil War was won as various factions, including “enslaved blacks, nonslaveholding Southerners, Northern Democrats and antislavery Republicans, came together to defeat this slaveholder’s rebellion.” To him, this interpretation is incorrect. The battle was not about slavery per se, but against slaveholders, making the Civil War a class conflict.

Oakes is not critical of Varon’s book, in fact his review practically gushes with praise. He considers this and her other volume on Civil War history to be very important chronicles of primary-source materials. Oakes, who is the author of this own volume on the Civil War, makes a compelling case for a reinterpretation of the binding principle of the Union forces against the Slave Power of the Confederacy, one which may be helpful in bringing class struggle to the forefront of modern American consciousness.

Software tools in volunteer organizations

America is nearing a generational shift, as more and more of the Boomer generation reaches retirement age, and more and more Gen X and Millennial start taking more of a leadership role in organizations. I’ve made a bit of a personal brand identity as one who straddles between this digital and analog world, and I’ve made a living by helping organizations move between the two. As more and more of my focus shifts away from established businesses and toward startups, non-profits, campaigns and community organizations, I’ve been spending a lot more time thinking about the tools and apps available within these spaces, how to select them, and how to get traction within them.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, and this post will likely have more questions than answers. All I can do is present a few use cases and share some thoughts.

The first political campaign that I became involved with was the 2016 Sanders campaign. I got involved with the state grassroots, we didn’t have any official support from the campaign at all, in fact, the first direct involvement that we had was during the petition-gathering process. A campaign representative came in and met with all of the various organizers that could make it to the state capitol, and we went over the process and requirements. Up into that point, all of us were operating over several dozen Facebook groups. There was one at the state level, and regional and city groups as well. Communications required crossposting events and news to about a dozen of these groups at a time.

I think a few of us recommended some distribution groups. I found a service and volunteered to setup the various lists to hand over to individual admins; another person put up the $35 to get it started. We also rolled out a Slack instance for the state, and used that extensively throughout the campaign.

Now one of the problems that I’ve seen over and over again with rolling out new tech is that there’s always a certain number of individuals that are tech-averse. More accurately, they’re risk averse. They may be more comfortable with email or text messages, or Facebook, than using Slack, Signal, or Twitter. That’s just the nature of the beast. There also seems to be a sweet spot for the size of the organization and the number of people that participate with these apps. Generally speaking, if you can’t get more than two thirds of a group membership to use a tool, then it will most likely not be useful as a public tool. This is more true the smaller the group is.

Now, there are exceptions to things that are more useful from an individual standpoint. Things like Google Drive or Trello are helpful even if you’re just using them for yourself. Other things may be impossible to roll out organically. I once tried recommending our local Democratic party executive board start using Signal instead of group text messaging, and while most everyone agreed in spirit to using it, the initiative never moved forward.

Ultimately, anything that is going to require people to install another app or create a new account is going to be met with pushback in any volunteer or service organization. Hell, that holds true for any organization. But for startups or existing orgs that are still living in the analog world, technology deployments can have a great effect on productivity.

Choosing from all of the options out there is another challenge. When I was in the enterprise space, the process usually involved gathering business requirements, doing an initial selection of vendors, and then putting together a request for proposals from vendors, compiling reports and making recommendations to an executive board. This process is no doubt familiar to people in any large organization. In smaller orgs, the decision making responsibility might fall to one technology ‘expert’, who has to make these recommendations, implement them, and ultimately provide support. The latter of those tasks is ultimately the longest and most expensive of them, and is where most of the frustration ultimately lies.

My daughter just joined the Girl Scouts, and I got an email several days ago that they were moving to Slack and Google Calendar instead of text messages and emails. I went to a leadership meeting earlier tonight and was talking with a couple of the parents while we waited for the building to open up. One of them said “I downloaded so-and-so’s Slack app like he asked, but no one was in it.”

We’ll see if this time is any different.

Antifa recruiting captain

Tonight there is another of the 2020 Democratic primary debates on television. I’m ignoring it, as I have all the debates so far this cycle, and as I intend to continue to do so. Douglas Rushkoff has a great monologue at the beginning of this episode of Team Human that I was listening to today, which probably has a lot to do with it. We’re in the midst of state legislative races this year where I live, followed by municipal races the following spring in time for our primary voting. I haven’t decided what my involvement is going to be yet. I’ve been contacted by at least one city council candidate, but they’re not pounding down my door, or anything. I may pick up with the Sanders campaign and help out there, but for now I’m keeping to my current regimen of family, work, school, meditation, crypto, this blog, and the other two or three projects which I’ve already committed to.

My day job involves supporting numerous small businesses technology needs, I’m sure I’ll get more into the details of that another time, but we’ve got a wide swath of clients across the political spectrum. As I deal with the owners and managers most often, I’ve gotten to know them best, and for the most part they lean conservative. There’s a few that would make great character studies. There’s the lesbian couple who live and work together and are politically active Republicans. Another is an effeminate man who I would be willing to bet is so deeply closeted that he doesn’t even realize it, and pumps Christian rock playlists in the office and through the phone system — the stories to tell there…

I’ve got a couple people at various offices who are the lefty side of the political spectrum (dental and environmental cleanup firms, now that I think about it,) and know who I am and provide encouragement, but given that my boss is retired military, and Irish Catholic, I don’t broadcast or advertise things too much. So when I got called into deal with some customer service issues at a small evangelical mission outreach office, I wasn’t planning on making any friends.

Now, as most people I’ve a long and complicated story with religion that will take more than one blog post to get out, but the word atheist would have probably been most appropriate for the last decade or two in my life. I’ve mellowed a bit over the years, and I think the term has some baggage to people in the African American church community, and as someone in politics I’ve had to adjust how I talk about my beliefs publicly. Which is why I was suprised to be proclaiming myself as a ‘militant atheist’ in this ministry office earlier this week.

This is actually the third faith-based organization I’ve had to deal with in the past few weeks, and in all cases I’ve had little, if any, face to face interaction with staff. Most of that had been handled remotely or by other people under my supervision. We don’t deal with any mega churches, so budgets are tight and so my interactions are quite limited.

So I’m at the office, which is basically made up of two young women in their twenties. Their bosses are a husband and wife team, he being the theologian and speaker. There were several pictures of him on the walls of the office, somewhere in sub-saharan Africa, one would presume, with him surrounded or addressing adoring throngs of the darkest, black-skinned natives you can imagine. But it’s just the two young women and I , and as I spend the next few hours taking care of business, I can’t help but eavesdrop.

After a couple disparaging, ironic remarks paraphrasing Trump or conservatism, she mentions something about ‘Leftbook’. At this point my curiosity got the better of my professionalism, so I asked her if she just referred to Facebook as ‘Leftbook’. Yes, she says, as it was almost entirely radical leftist content, save for one conservative friend or colleague that she was still following. I regurgitated some of the Team Human theories Rushkoff has humans as the fuel for Facebook’s prediction algorithms, and let my guard down entirely. I told them who I was, my political activity, DSA membership, and when I showed them a picture of me standing behind Bernie Sanders they both lost their shit.

After a while they admonished me not to tell their boss. They weren’t paid to have opinions, they said, and their boss, the Great White Savior, had recently worn Trump 2020 socks to the office. They were literally giddy that they had “made a friend”, since they both are transplants to the area, and I’m pretty sure promises were made to induct them into Antifa at some point.

Jokes aside, the power dynamics within that office could probably warrant a sociological study. That said, it was good to connect with someone on the job, especially when it means building solidarity with these two young millennial members of the working class.

Solidarity indeed.

How I became a (failed) blockchain engineer

Impostor syndrome is bit of a popular topic in certain professional circles, people being haunted by the nagging feeling that they don’t really know what they’re doing in their chosen field, and that soon someone will expose them as a fraud. It seems to be prevalent among software engineers and other fields where specialization inevitably informs one that the sum of what they know is but a fraction of the sum of knowledge. It’s not something that I content with, for the most part, but I bring it up because I’ve been thinking about when I get to call myself a software engineer.

Not that I’ve ever been lacking for confidence, rather as fair number of people of my gender and complexion, I suffer from an excess of it. I’ve always operated from a place where coming up to an answer to a question, or hypothesizing an answer as a means to discovering one is usually the correct course of action. This is different than having an opinion about something about which I know nothing, of course, but this invariably leads me to question or challenge assumptions to answers from others, some of who may have more expertise in a subject. As one who realizes that many advancements in various fields have been made by outsiders, I don’t see any problem with this. My wife on the other hand, calls it ‘male answer syndrome’ when I inevitably make a statement that runs counter to something that she knows as true, or has been led to believe by someone else with more expertise.

On Twitter, this has become known by the number of reply guys that plague women’s timelines. I don’t know if this is specific to the professional classes or not, but I assume it happens wherever a woman forms an opinion about anything at all. Around here though, I’ve started correcting my wife’s accusations of male answer syndrome with wrong answer syndrome, as our eldest daughter has picked up the annoying habit of declaring demonstrably false statements about things in the middle of an argument about some parenting slight against her.

I digress.

A little over a year ago, I became involved with a small blockchain project. I’ll keep it unnamed so as to prevent this from showing up in search engine results for now, but it was a fork of privacy coin framework that was being managed by a single developer. The dev was new to software design and had a lot of time on his hands due to disability, and had done a decent job of establishing a community around this project. I came in a few weeks after it had been launched, and became a part of the community. I set up mining pools, block explorers, and started doing a lot of commits to various side projects associated with this new cryptoasset.

Eventually though, I began to see warning signs. our dev didn’t understand git versioning very well, and had a bad habit of just starting new repos when he got stuck or a feature didn’t work out. The commit and branch graphs had a lot of dead ends and unconnected starts. I was never really sure what he was doing, what he was working on. I tried to help, fixing a couple things in C++ where I could and trying to help him get his workflow under some sort of change management, but there wasn’t a test suite, and several of the changes that he had introduced in the code base seemed to have killed backward compatibility of the existing blockchain.

In all, I think things became too overwhelming for our friend. I had to step out of the picture after a few months to deal with real life issues, and I don’t think anyone else ever stepped in that understood blockchain functionality the way that I had after spending hours looking into the code. In addition to maintaining the code base, trying to introduce new features, our friend had to deal with hash attacks which stalled out the blockchain completely not once, but twice, and had to deal with the constant support issues of pool operators, trading exchanges, and users with wallet or transaction issues.

It all became too overwhelming. In addition to dealing with all of this, our friend was also dealing with both physical and mental health issues, as well as money issues that apparently threatened his housing situation. One day, he published an apology to everyone for failing and went dark.

I hadn’t been active in the community as I had been, but still kept an eye or ear on things. The stalled chain had been restarted and a new version of the wallets released, and things seemed like they were getting back on the right track. There were a couple people that seemed to be having some issues with funds, but nothing serious. Most of the trouble seemed to be with burnout.

There was a panic, of course, among some of the miners and people who had been sticking with the project over the last few weeks of troubles. There were strong words about fraud and exit scams from people who had gotten involved with the project more recently. A few community leaders tried to calm nerves.

But ultimately, there was no one else that had any technical experience with the code itself. None that were willing to speak up, at least, and I don’t know of anyone else that had been interacting at the level that I had. And I still had a bit of financial and emotional stake in this project, which is why I volunteered to take the reins on a technical assessment, to figure out the state of the network and whether there was any chance of getting things back on track.

And that’s how I became responsible for a broken blockchain project. I’m still trying to figure out just how broken things are, whether it can be fixed, or whether a project that was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars is now dead.

Ending cash bail

Of the projects that we considered pitching for our ‘social benefit’ programming project was in the cash bail space. There are are many arguments for abolishing cash bail, and there are organizations that are focused on making bail for non-violent offenders. We wondered how we might increase participation in these types of programs using novel software solutions.

The arguments against the bail system are many. A 2013 study of pretrial detention in Kentucky showed a “direct link between how long low- and moderate-risk defendants are in pretrial detention and the chances that they will commit new crimes.” The hypothesis behind this is that “jail destabilizes lives that are often, and almost by definition, already unstable“, and disrupts employment, housing and family support.

Then there are stories like that of Kalief Browder, a 17 year-old who was accused of stealing a backpack. After refusing to plead guilty, he was was given a thousand dollars bail, and sent to Rikers Island after his family was unable to pay. He was held there for three years without trial, and was beaten and held in solitary confinement for two years. Two years later he hung himself.

The current system punishes the poor. Unable to post bail, and faced with the possibility of weeks or even months of pre-trial detention before their case, many people choose to plead guilty just in order to get out. These perverse incentives can lead to disastrous consequences later in life for these people who are legally innocent. And there’s also the problem of America’s $2 billion bail bonds industry, which makes money off the poor. (The U.S. and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world that allow bail bonds.)

Thankfully, the tide is turning.

The Bail Project is a national revolving bail fund, launched following the non-profit Bronx Freedom Fund. The goal of the fund is to pay bail for thousands of low-income Americans. Since bail is refunded when a person shows up for court, the money gets recycled and is made available to more individuals. According to their website, they’ve paid bail for over 6300 people.

The efforts of the Bail Project and likeminded others seems be having an effect. California completely abolished cash bail last summer. Google and Facebook have banned bail bond service ads. And nine of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates support ending it, including Biden, Sanders and Warren.

So we thought about ways to help expedite this movement using technology. Perhaps more people would be interested in donating to a bail fund if there was more transparency. Could a blockchain system be used to allow people to see the individuals whose lives they were helping? Aside from the privacy concerns, of course. Some people might object to having their information made public in that way, but arrest and court records are already public… There are a host of ethical concerns that such a system might bring up.

There is research that shows that people are more likely to donation to a cause if the ask is made as specific as possible, and that likelihood decreases as the benefit group is increased in size. Simply put, people are more likely to donate to help feed a single child if they are shown their name and picture, but if you are told about an entire nation of people experiencing famine, people will do nothing. I can’t find the source currently, but have heard it from Sam Harris. If true, we may be able to increase participation in a bail fund if people are shown exactly who their money is going to help.

I can imagine some of the pushback already. There’s some racial and class dynamics that are bound to be brought up against it, and it could turn into some sort of reality show gamification if not dealt with delicately. There could also be negative consequences if someone is deemed “not worthy”, a Willie Horton moment if you will.

So would there be a use case for donation tracking system, even if the individual data was anonymized? For example, if you donate $5 to a bail fund, that money might go to help one person, but once the funds are recycled, half of the money could go to two different people. If people could be reminded that their donation had helped three unique individuals, would that cause them to contribute more? This effect could be even greater if released individuals were encouraged to add back into the fund, either as an alternative to the standard bailbond fee, or as a way of paying it forward. Even a small donation could have a non-linear effect.

We also mused at ways to automate the operation of such a fund using a smart contract, but ultimately, the onramps and offramps needed to execute such a system over a number of jails seems like too much of a risk.

In all, most of what I came up with seems like a solution in search of a problem. I’m ultimately trying to improve on something that I have no experience with, and that could ultimately be completely unwanted by those affected. As interesting of a thought experiment this may be, I decided to pass this project by for now and see if something where the need was more readily apparent would present itself.

I did not have to wait long before one would show up on my doorstep. More on that in a week.

Solving society’s problems: business for good

So yesterday we documented a bit of the research that we’ve been doing to nail down a proposal for our senior project proposal at school, and today we wanted to talk about the “business for good” space, an alternative to the shareholder capitalism that seems to be the norm in the world today. Socialists and capitalists can both agree that these type of businesses, with a primary responsibility to provide shareholder value, is responsible for both wrecking the environment and causing the type of economic inequality that we see in the world today. One of the things that I’ve been greatly interested in is figuring out ways to create or promote alternative forms of arrangements, both in the way that both capital and worker power is distributed in organizations. Most of my explorations have been around ways to form worker cooperatives or worker owned businesses, or how to implement these types of organizations using decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), which we talked about yesterday.

Enter the social enterprise. The Social Enterprise Alliance (SEA), founded in 1998, defines this field as a mix of business, government and non-profits, or, as “organizations that address a basic unmet need or solve a social or environmental problem through a market-driven approach.” SEA is a membership organization, and has several chapters throughout the United States.

Things start to get a bit confusing when you add in B Corp and public benefit corporations. While SEA defines social enterprise as a business model, B Corp refers to a paid certification, and public benefit corporation is a “legal incorporation type”. SEA gets into some of the distinctions between the three.

B Corp is a certification from the non-profit B Labs, which is only given to for-profit entities. Confused yet? Social enterprises can apply for B Corp Certification, but not all B Corps are social enterprises. The certification fees are not cheap for someone hoping to start a new organization. B Labs requires one year of prior work for thier $1000 annual certification, although startups can get a provisional certification for half that.

SEA defines a public benefit corporation as one that falls under a specific set of incorporation laws that are available in a limited number of states, 25 plus DC, based on the details over at BenfitCorp.net. Identifying as a public benefit corporation allows business and startups to signal that they have a purpose beyond maximizing shareholder value. I have a feeling that this type of distinction may become very popular in the future.

SEA does a good job of distinguishing between the three of these concepts. Organizations can be all three, although SEA is the only one that allows non-profits and individuals to join. I’ll be taking a further look at their membership offerings and figuring out what else needs to be done to drive these alternatives to exploitive capitalism.

In the meantime, I would encourage you to hop over to B Corp’s directory of certified businesses. I was quite surprised to see the number available in my state, and there were several that I felt the need to reach out to about further information.