From the Mind of Trevor Stone

In April, Burning Man announced that Black Rock City would not be built in 2021. I'd been holding out hope that the COVID recovery would be looking promising enough to make the event possible, and I'd been mentally preparing to spend a couple weeks wearing fashionable dust masks and experimenting with post-pandemic community creation.

My first world problem then turned to "What can I spend my big pile of accumulated vacation hours on now?" Early last year Google extended the unused vacation cap from 240 hours to 300 hours, since encouraging people to take a vacation when everyone was supposed to stay at home would've been irresponsible. I took a couple long weekends last summer, but between an "Avoid interacting with too many people" pandemic and "The western U.S. is blanketed in smoke, so visiting the mountains is no fun" there wasn't much worth spending vacation time on. As winter approached, I realized I was going to hit the cap before the weather was nice enough to run around outside, so I focused on long weekends of "Do stuff around the house." Between holidays and well-placed vacation days, I didn't have a five-day work week between mid-December and late February, which was fairly pleasant.

But now that summer has arrived, I decided it's time to have a big ol' vacation. I'd much rather have a two-week adventure than have ten 3-day weekends in a row. Fortunately, there's an opportunity to scratch my Black Rock City itch as well. There's a long annual tradition of people visiting the Black Rock Desert at the beginning of July, popularly dubbed the 4th of Juplaya. This is the same location as Burning Man, but rather than creating a temporary city of 70,000 people in a few square miles, small groups of friends set up camps around the fast desert space with no central coordination. I've never been to Juplaya before, since the two-day trip each way always seemed like a big challenge to visit a place I was just going to return to seven weeks later. But with Burning Man off the table, 2021 seems like a great opportunity to explore the unique features "outside the trash fence." Plus, I can throw in a road trip to visit friends and family on the west coast.

As I started planning this trip, I quickly realized that I ought to get an amateur radio (ham) license. Radios are key to Burning Man operations, and with nine years rangering I've come to think of radio chatter as part of the playa experience. But while the org runs a commercial radio system in BRC, the rest of the year requires a ham license to spread your message across the desert.

The U.S. amateur radio system provides three levels of license—technician, general, and amateur extra—each with successively larger parts of the electromagnetic spectrum they're allowed to transmit on. Licenses are gained by passing a multi-choice written exam, with the question pool published in advance. From an academic perspective this seems like an unreliable way to assess someone's full understanding of the subject matter, but on the other hand you don't actually need to know things like how to read a circuit diagram in order to use a push-to-talk radio.

With my road trip starting in mid-June and another short vacation I had planned in early June, I had a pretty limited period of time to learn the material. While waiting for my Technician license manual to arrive, I read through the free PDF The No-Nonsense Technician-Class License Study Guide. After two nights I was able to obtain a passing grade on hamstudy.org, but I sure felt like I didn't understand half of the material. There's a significant focus on the physics of electromagnetism and circuits. I've long felt that my grasp of electromagnetism from Physics II was much worse than my understanding of Newtonian mechanics from Physics I, and probably worse than my understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics from Physics III. I have no problem explaining the dual particle/wave nature of photons and could probably work through probabalistic quantum tunneling, but have been kind of confused for over two decades about what exactly an ampere is.

Once I got the ARRL manual I zipped through the 200 or so pages in four evenings and felt like I had a much better understanding of what the heck was going on. After a few more rounds of hamstudy.org practice exams, I drove to southeast Denver (the license test that best met my time concerns) and managed to get a perfect 35/35 score. That felt like a pretty good accomplishment given that my first exposure to any of the material was only a week earlier. Just for kicks I decided to take the general exam, having studied absolutely none of its questions but having all the radio basics bouncing around my head. I managed a 23/35 on that one, which is three questions shy of a passing grade. I guess the test isn't a completely bogus assessment, then.

By the time I got home an hour and change later, the next callsign on the FCC's stack, KF0FTJ had been assigned to yours truly. I am now legally allowed to transmit on the VHF and UHF bands as well as portions of the HF bands. (The names for portions of the radio spectrum are kind of silly. It feels like someone started with "Low Frequency", "Medium Frequency", and "High Frequency" and then people kept saying "But wait, why not turn it up a notch?" so there's now Very, Ultra, Super, and Extreme High Frequency for [VUSE]HF.)

In general, the lower the frequency the further it can travel, but also the less information can be packed into the signal. Also, the lower the frequency the longer a good antenna needs to be. My main amateur radio interest is in emergency communications and disaster response, for which battery-powered and easily-mobile radios are ideal, so VHF seems to be the primary band. The HF bands allow amateur operators to talk with people hundreds or thousands of miles away, and hams like to geek out on things like bouncing radio waves off the moon and the solar cycle's effect on long-distance communications thanks to the ionosphere. I find that mildly interesting, but I still don't entirely see the attraction in having a complicated radio setup to talk to people on the other side of the continent now that the Internet has made it cheap and easy to talk to any of two or three billion people around the world. I imagine the ham experience was pretty amazing in the '50s through the '80s. Amateur radio experimentation led to many of the Internet protocols that have come to supplant the service.

I think "I have a license, now who will I actually talk to?" is a common issue for hams. Fortunately, the ham community seems to be pretty friendly (they're people who's hobby involves elaborate setups to talk to people, after all). I've been participating in a weekly Boulder Amateur Radio Club discussion net, and yesterday I received a "radiogram" originating in Pasadena congratulating me on getting a new license that was relayed through "Traffic Nets" until someone on the Colorado traffic net picked it up and gave me a phone call to make the delivery. This is way less efficient than email, but I'm glad that folks are keeping in practice with a communication system that can serve as a backup in the face of a widespread Internet outage. Because if there's one thing I've learned working at a major Internet company for a decade it's that having a well-tested plan for component failure is crucial.

Programs are a major problem for attempts at unity. As soon as a policy is made specific, the differences must be addressed. Progressives tend to talk about policies and programs. But policy details are not what most Americans want to know about. Most Americans want to know what you stand for, whether your values are their values, what your principles are, what direction you want to take the country in. In public discourse, values trump policies, principles trump policies, policy directions trump specific programs. I believe that values, principles, and policy directions are exactly the things that can unite progressives, if they are crafted properly. The reason that they can unite us is that they stand conceptually above all the things that divide us.
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Having those shared values, largely unconscious and unspoken, is not good enough. They have to be out in the open, named, said, discussed, publicized, and made part of everyday public discourse. If they go unspoken, while conservative values dominate public discourse, then those values can be lost–swept out of our brains by the conservative communication juggernaut.
Don't just read about these values here and nod. Get out and say them out loud. Discuss them wherever you can. Volunteer for campaigns that give you a chance to discuss these values loud and clear and out in public.

– George Lakoff, The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!, “What Unites Progressives”

Put another way, values, principles, and policy directions are how you build a movement. Policies are how you implement the vision once the movement has critical mass. When building a movement you don't worry too much about folks with a drastically different world view; you're just trying to find all of your friends. But when it comes to policy, it's important to work with folks from “the other side.” A policy which is supported by many members of some movements has a better chance of surviving than a policy which is supported by all and only one team.

I'm Right and You're an Idiot: The toxic state of public discourse and how to clean it up by James Hoggan with Grania Litwin, 2016

I went book shopping last weekend so that I would be better prepared to have conversations with conservatives about issues like climate change. This book sounded like exactly what I was looking for. James Hoggan is a professional in the public relations field. He runs DeSmogBlog, a site devoted to "Clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science" and has published a book on the topic. He set out to write another book devoted to climate advocacy and highlighting climate facts, but he realized that there was a bigger problem: the public space in which our society discusses issues and comes to agree on policy is polluted, sickening democracy and making progress on any tough issue almost impossible. So he decided instead to explore what was clogging the public square and how we can engender more productive communication and enable action on important problems.

Hoggan structured the book's chapters around people he interviewed, most experts in some mode of communication. The result is a book where each part is clear and interesting, but it can be difficult to find an overall narrative. I came away with several important insights but without a full practical framework for making things better. The epilogue does help tie things together, and I'd recommend reading that first, then deciding if you want to read the rest of the book.

Hoggan's background concern of climate change and environmental concerns shows up throughout the book; most chapters share the interviewee's thoughts on how people relate to environmental facts or arguments. And while I bought the book hoping to improve my ability to have conversations around climate change, I think the book would have been stronger if he'd dug into specifics on several distinct issues. He mentions migration, gun violence, and other "big challenge" problems in passing but never talks about how someone might approach those particular problems using the ideas in the book.

Some of my key takeaways:

Experts on a topic (e.g. scientists) make decisions based on facts, rational debate, and deep investigation. Most non-experts make decisions based on emotion and narrative.

In a modern democracy, the support of non-experts is needed for any major policy. Facts are important in deciding what to do, a story (particularly one with values or a moral) is crucial in getting people to do it.

People have a self-conception in which they generally do the right thing and believe in the truth. When something challenges this view, people experience cognitive dissonance, which is uncomfortable.

If new information is presented in a way that's too shocking to that belief, people are more likely to assume that the information is wrong than that they've been wrong. It's therefore very important not to structure an argument as "You're wrong" or, especially, "You're a bad person." Instead, find shared values and express a policy proposal as a way of expressing those values.

Tell your own story; otherwise people who oppose your idea will tell your story in a way that undercuts you.

Once you've told your story, avoid responding to attacks. It's easier for folks to see an attacker as offensive if you aren't playing defense.

Anger is important in motivation, and appealing to anger "on your side" can be a good way to get folks involved in an issue.

But it's super important to drop the anger as you start talking to folks who don't get angry by the same things you do. If someone feels that you're speaking to them out of anger or that you perceive them as an enemy, they aren't likely to take your words to heart.

Self-righteousness and purity can hurt your position.

If the public sees two sides loudly asserting their own position, they aren't in a good position to evaluate the arguments and they may conclude that the issue is just a matter of personal preference or align with the side that has better hair or a slicker marketing delivery.

Change is scary.

People resist imposed change more than when they feel they have agency.

Inevitability is a terrible motivator.

To take action, people need to feel that there's hope and that what they do will have an effect.

Compassion is key to communication.

You can't make progress working with an enemy. But you can make great progress working with a fellow human being that you understand, respect, and disagree with.

One of the best paragraphs in the book comes in the epilogue:

People don't start out mired in hostility. The situation evolves. When someone publicly disagrees with something we feel strongly about, we perceive them as aggressors and we begin to question their motives and intentions. When people criticize or condemn our cause or our reasoning, our defense mechanisms kick in. Anger simmers and escalates. When people on both sides of an argument draw their positions from the perceived bad behavior of the other, they eventually start treating each other as enemies, and this provokes a perpetual shoving match and eventual gridlock.

Today's Conference on World Affairs Howard Higman Memorial Plenary was by former South Carolina congressman Robert Inglis, who is now the executive director of republicEn.org, a site and nonprofit organization run by conservatives concerned about climate change focused on swaying other conservatives about the issue. The talk was entitled "How Free Enterprise Can Solve Climate Change" (video here) but it wasn't so much an economics presentation as a discussion about what it would take to convince conservatives (and particularly conservative U.S. politicians) to implement a carbon tax. In particular, he argued that for the right wing to buy in, it needs to be a revenue-neutral, border-adjusted carbon tax.

Revenue-neutral means the money earned by the tax needs to be offset by cutting taxes somewhere else. The plan needs to be revenue-neutral because you can't get the Republican party to agree to a carbon tax which will also increase the size of government.

Border-adjusted means that an import tax on carbon would be imposed if the goods came from a country which didn't tax carbon at the source of production. The border adjustment is important because it would let individual countries set up taxes on their own (without requiring worldwide coordinated government action), but would make American-made goods which paid the carbon tax (or were developed with cleaner technology) competitive with foreign-made goods from countries which use cheap but dirty production methods.

The focus wasn't so much on the mechanics of how such a scheme might be implemented, but rather on how climate change believers might effect action on the issue through a congress whose position over the last two decades has ranged from skeptical to hostile. Speaking to a Boulder audience dominated by folks on the left, Inglis talked about how to frame the conversation in terms that a conservative (like your uncle Charlie at the holidays) can support. Inglis's own history went from opposing climate change legislation based on no knowledge except that Al Gore supported it (mid-90s) to introducing a bill which would tax carbon and cut payroll tax (2009). The bill died, and he was thanked for his efforts by being defeated by the Tea Party in the 2010 primaries.

Inglis's biggest topic of framing was on tax. A plan that sets out to make things like manufacturing and driving more expensive is on shaky ground with Republicans already; if it sends more money to Washington, they'll stop listening. He wasn't especially particular about the way in which taxes were reduced, though he called out a corporate income tax reduction as a particularly attractive option for swaying Republican lawmakers. He said that many liberals seemed unwilling to reduce corporate income tax in exchange for a carbon tax and he questioned how much those liberals were truly convinced that climate change was the most important issue of the generation. (One could play the same trick on any number of issues: offer to cut income tax but make it revenue-neutral by imposing a tax on firearms and ammunition and see how committed conservatives are to income tax reduction.)

Of the revenue-neutral schemes Inglis mentioned: payroll tax, income tax, or a dividend, I think the latter is best-suited to balance a carbon tax. If the dividend were distributed equally to all American citizens, it would be a much more progressive tax benefit than cutting the corporate rate. Furthermore, an annual cash payment to everyone, even if they are currently unemployed and thus not paying much payroll tax, would help people cover the costs of increased energy bills, buy a more energy-efficient car, move away from rising sea levels, or otherwise cope with the new world of climate change.

I asked Inglis about the details of border-adjustment and whether it would account for non-tax incentives which lower the price of carbon production like foreign aid to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela or governmental policies by a country like China which provide polluting industries with benefits like unrestricted access to land or other perks. Inglis wasn't concerned with internalizing all externalities, and he also said the import duty would be based on the carbon content of an American-equivalent product, meaning that as American production becomes less-polluting, carbon-derived imports will get cheaper. I'll let the economists hammer out the details on this front, though.

I think Inglis's most important focus isn't on the policy specifics, but on reaching out to Republicans and conservatives as one of their own. He (and the folks republicEn can gather to their rallying call) can speak the free enterprise orthodoxy lingo that progressives aren't as fluent in and he can appeal to them from heart-felt religious conviction grounds upon which even religious liberals, let alone secular scientists, don't stand. (This isn't to say that religious liberals don't have religious conviction, but that their dogma has evolved so significantly from conservative religious dogma that attempts at convergence mostly end in a lot of barking.)

Unfortunately, the opportunities for reasonable and rational engagement across ideological lines seems to be shrinking faster than polar ice caps. In the past, the stereotypical conservative uncle Charlie and liberal niece Linda listened to similar news sources and spent time with overlapping sets of people and so could converse with a shared view of consensus reality. Today's media (broadcast and social) is so specialized that it seems difficult for folks on either side of the spectrum to agree on terminology and facts, let alone discuss a policy approach with a cool head. And it seems like at a holiday gathering that Linda's mostly on defense in response to Charlie's rants about gays or immigrants or guns tough to even start a conversation about sea level rise and crop failure. If instead of a holiday, Linda tries to start the conversation on Facebook, it's easy for Charlie to glance at the subject and skip right over it, avoiding discomfort and hitting the Like button on an inspirational message in a colorful font. Meanwhile, broadcasters and publishers can get more advertising eyeballs if they present the "opposing" side as other or untouchable, which puts politicians interested in collaboration in danger of being scorned by their in-group.

Climate change is a global problem and it needs pan-ideological work to address it. Unfortunately, building a coalition ain't what it used to be.

Obama's speech about surveillance last week featured the following paragraph which gets modern cybersecurity totally backwards:

We cannot prevent terrorist attacks or cyberthreats without some capability to penetrate digital communications, whether it's to unravel a terrorist plot, to intercept malware that targets a stock exchange, to make sure air traffic control systems are not compromised or to ensure that hackers do not empty your bank accounts. We are expected to protect the American people; that requires us to have capabilities in this field.

This train of thought made sense during the cold war. Communication systems built by and used in the Soviet Union were different than those built in the U.S. So if the NSA could simultaneously find and keep secret flaws in a Russian phone system while ensuring security flaws in American phone systems got fixed.

On the Internet, that game doesn't work anymore. Tech companies, open source groups, and standards bodies sell and distribute hardware, software, and protocols globally. Countries and companies throughout the world use the same routers, the same operating systems, and the same secure communications protocols. Every undisclosed security hole and every undetected backdoor that the NSA has at its disposal to "penetrate digital communications" is a tool that attackers have to harm the targets Obama claims the NSA is trying to protect. The stock exchanges and air traffic control systems and banks are using the same networking gear, the same database software, the same VPNs, and the same web browsers as the plotting terrorists, hacking criminals, and enemy governments.

Even if the NSA only uses their powers for good, the more "capabilities in [the digital spying] field" they have the less safe American interests are from foreign spies, criminals, and terrorists. The nation will be more secure if our communications technologies are robustly secure than if we can listen in on all the world's chatter. And by making American communications more secure, the world's communications will be more secure.

Key takeaways from Intuition, Technology, and Communication at The 2010 Conference on World Affairs.

Intuition is a human skill for coming to a conclusion given all the varied data we've gathered. Technology provides us with a lot more data so hopefully humans can have better intuitions. For instance, a human with a laptop and a chess program can beat a chess supercomputer that a human alone cannot beat.

Intuitions are often culturally conditioned. American intuition when the phone rings is to answer it. Russian (Soviet?) intuition when the phone rings is not to, because it's probably someone who wants you to fix something.

The most useful recordings for building Roger Ebert's new TTS voice were commentary tracks from DVDs. Future movie commentaries will literally be recycled from his old movie commentaries.

There are TTS systems that let you add markup for inflection, but it makes typing even slower, you'll far further behind in the conversation. What if there were Unicode characters that indicated sense and emotion? ;-) is okay at indicating irony and ALL CAPS can do emphasis, but there's a lot more nuance that could be added.

Some of the best writers are lousy face-to-face conversationalists.