Hitchens’ main line of reasoning stems from a few anecdotes that he brings together to create an overly pessimistic picture of sports creating international tension. This kind of journalism is sickening, but typical, as it poses a number of loosely similar stories as facts that reach a hard conclusion without even suggesting alternative sides of the story. It is nothing more than tabloid-esque entertainment, but nevertheless I am compelled to present a different vision of sports in America and the world as a whole.

Since humanity has formed into nations, cultures, religions, and a number of other ways of organizing themselves, there has been a basic problem. In a world in which it is more likely that you do not know somebody than you do know them, how do we interact, probe each others strengths and weaknesses, find common ground, and establish community with people we have no interaction with? Discussing economics, religion, or politics is more likely to breed conflict than mutual understanding. You cannot compete with somebody who is willing to die rather than give ground on a subject. Competitions, as a natural tribal instinct, had to evolve into a different form. I am always going to want to best by sister at any give topic. My family will want to best the neighbors. The town will want to best the next town over. The state will want to best the next state. If we ever find alien life forms, Earth will want to show their superiority. There should be a way to fulfill this natural need to compete without killing everyone. Sports is that way.

This point seems to play right into sports opponents hands. They would say that sports are still a reflection of animal instincts that we can grow out of, that’s it’s somehow base. I strongly disagree. Sports are the civilized competition, the way we teach and learn how to resolve differences without resorting to violence. Sports are islands of peace in a world riddled with genuine conflict. They provide tribal community without pushing us towards its violence.

The key to sports peaceful nature is that they, in and of themselves, don’t matter. They are not a higher cause. When they become representative of a higher cause, trouble ensues, but when they are kept to the level of competition for competition’s sake, then there is no reason for animosity to endure, or to break into violence. This allows for community on both sides of the competition, which allows us to ignore the potentially violent differences individuals have in their everyday lives.

College is a great example. While I probably do not have an causes that I will violently enforce, many people that are thrown together on the same university do. Israelis and Palestinians sit next to each other in lecture. Blacks and whites, Armenians and Turks, and hundreds of other traditionally irreconcilable cultures, religions, and nationalities interact with each other every day. How is it possible to create a cohesive community out of such a widely varied population? Sports. A few chosen athletes are tasked with representing this created community in a way that we can all join together and push past our differences. This community now has a face, something to fight for, but not in a violent way. We can peacefully come together around this one cause.

The same concept applies to localities, states, and nations. If I meet an older, latino, blue-collar worker on a bus or in a bar, I have nothing obviously in common with this man. Throw on an Ohio State sweatshirt, and suddenly we can talk for hours. What’s more, throw a Michigan sweatshirt on the man, and we can still have a civil conversation. We are rivals, but not the kind that you can’t have a beer with. In fact, I am offered an understanding of how the man thinks that I would not normally have. I know he hates me the same way I hate him, and we can bond over that. The same principle applies to a San Francisco shirt in San Francisco, or a Die Mannschaft jersey in Germany.

Sports at their core are about peaceful competition. So how is there so much violence? The violence is caused by the same things that cause violence outside of sports, sports are sometimes just mixed up into the equation. Violence is frequently caused by money, religion, cultural differences, and a whole slew of other things. When the sports teams representing two sides that are already entangled in a conflict meet, one of two things can happen. The competition can remind everybody of their shared interests, or they can serve as a catalyst to a violent conflict. While I believe that the majority of the data suggests the former, I have no proof of this. The important point is, the violence is not caused by the sport itself. It’s caused by the things that always drive us apart. Sports themselves, when played out as they are intended, can only bring peace.

Bringing a conversation to the internet is an idea as old as the thing itself. The internet is designed around sending messages back and forth. Communication and the internet have practically become synonymous. One of the huge advantages of the internet is the ability to communicate asynchronously. However, no internet technology has really been able to capture the elegant simplicity of a casual, social conversation and make it asynchronous.

Twitter has changed that. They have achieved the asynchronous converation where no other technology has been able to. I know that’s a bold statement, but let me explain. Conversation, in the social sense, is not about getting things done. Conversation is about bouncing a thought out there and seeing what bounces back. Conversation is about talking to whoever in the room will listen, just because you want to hear what they have to say. Conversation is about expressing yourself and yielding the floor to others. Twitter captures all of these things, and removes the necessity of being in the same place and time.

The “@” replies are really what gave this capability to twitter. By being able to view the replies of people you know to people you know, your twitter feed becomes a chat room transcript, except you don’t have to stay logged in and you aren’t expected to answer. It becomes your email inbox except there’s no “To: ” list, the messages are just sentences, and you don’t need a reason to post. It becomes your IM except any other friend can throw in his two cents. In fact, it’s welcome.

While the “@” replies make Twitter a channel on which you can have a conversation, it’s the 140 character limit that forces the conversational feel. Whenever you are not limited in time or length, people tend to go on too long. In a real conversation, somebody will usually interrupt somebody else who is taking up too much time to make his point. The asynchronous nature of much of the internet does not offer these interruptions, so there’s no impetus for conversation sized-snippets of thought. Twitter’s brilliant move to limit statements to 140 characters forces single thoughts to be expressed, which is exactly what happens in a good conversation.

These two simple design decisions have created a phenomenon that I used to mock mercilessly but now embrace. The web-wide conversation is a great way to casually keep in touch with people you rarely get to have a real conversation with, and a great way to have a little fun during work without distracting you for hours on end, like facebook can do. Twitter is probably not the end of network news, real time search is probably not the end of Google, and it’s probably not without some element of narcissm. However, I’ve grown to enjoy this simple technology immensely just because it lets me talk a bit more to a few more people. More conversations are never a bad thing.

Who Can Help

The recently passed stimulus bill (not the currently debated spending bill) focused on a few main areas. The first was “shovel ready” government projects. These projects are mere stopgaps. They employ people for a short time and then they are finished. Building a bridge or a road, while nice, creates a minimum amount of additional value. Coming up with a single idea that transforms our energy industry, on the other hand, potentially creates huge amounts of additional value. It is these types of innovations that need to be funded, and that was what a part of the stimulus bill was aimed at. Funding “green” technology and IT companies that would transform healthcare by making it efficient.

The problem with these investments is that the markets are artificial, or at least unproven. The market for energy efficient vehicles and other appliances will be created, in large part, by another part of the stimulus bill. Raw incentives and tax cuts are being handed out to those who will purchase the products the stimulus funded the development of. It’s a market, perhaps, but the value is all what the government put into it. If there is actual demand for these energy solutions, they will succeed wihout subsidies (and be extraordinarily lucrative with the government subsidies).

Determining what energy solutions will actually create new markets with obscene profits and goodness for all mankind is not an easy task. Luckily, we have professionals that do this on a day to day basis. These people are called “investors”. There are many types of investors, but they all have one goal: to invest in securities that will increase in value. Since they share this common goal, they have come up with numerous ways of determining whether something will make money or not. They are not always right, but they are way better at it than anybody else.

Fixing Societies Woes

The ideal situation, then, is to somehow get these investors the capital and time necessary to find the corners of the market that will flourish given enough time and capital and allow the investors to give these markets time and capital. As you can see, this all requires time and capital. There is an institution in this country that has plenty of both, and that is the Social Security Administration.

The Social Security Administrations currently looks over a fund of nearly 2.5 trillion dollars. That is enough money to fund just about everything. What’s more, people don’t need it until they are at least 62. This gives approximately 40 years from the time people start investing until the fund needs to reach maturity. There has never, ever been a 20 year period, let alone a 40 year period, in which the stock market on average has not returned a better return on investment than any other security.

It is my feeling that privatizing social security provides us with the capital necessary to bust out of any economic crunch, this one included. However, capital alone is not sufficient.

Privatizing Social Security, Responsibly

When the housing bubble burst a year ago, people were stunned to learn that their retirement savings had been slashed by huge percentages. I can’t even imagine the emotional impact of helplessly watching your grand retirement being washed away in a matter of weeks. This cannot be allowed to happen to Social Security, and it’s my belief that it needn’t happen to either Social Security or 401k’s.

As Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler argue in Nudge, people are very unlikely to change from default choices. By following some of the recommendations there, we can make privatizing Social Security safer than the 401k’s people use today.

An ideal system would offer a very good default with a limited number of good alternatives, while also allowing the reckless individual to invest however he pleases. The default option for a person’s Social Security should be a private fund that invests heavily in index funds with a small percentage set aside for risky venture and low risk bond investments. It should also be age aware. By the time the individual reaches age 55 (or whatever is deemed appropriate), they should be exposed to the minimum amount of risk. A stock market crash on your 62nd birthday should ruin your day, not your retirement.

Investing in the Game Changers

The final piece of the puzzle that is necessary for true economic stimulus is investing in the potentially explosive markets. Getting in on the next Google or Microsoft: the next big thing. These are the companies that will employ vast numbers of people in short periods of time, provided they have the capital to grow. Currently, this niche is filled almost exclusively by Venture Capitalists. I feel that while these players certainly have a role to fill, current legislation practically prohibits the American public from taking advantage of these opportunities.

Sarbanes-Oxley was a bill passed shortly after the Enron scandal. It imposes very strict accounting requirements on public companies which end up costing these companies millions of dollars a year. Before these regulations existed, having an IPO (Initial Public Offering) was a good way to raise a round of capital to expand. After Sarbanes-Oxley, only companies that have enough money to offset the prohibitive costs of entry have an IPO. This means no regular Americans get to invest in the little guys that are steadily hiring and trying to grow with as little money as possible. The irony is that Enron was successfully prosecuted on laws that were already on the books, not Sarbanes-Oxley. These laws had just been poorly enforced until the scandal broke.

Now I do not mean to suggest that we should throw our Social Security into the venture capital arena. What I do mean to suggest is that a well balanced fund should invest a small percentage in risky investments, and that small companies should be able to benefit from these investments. Two percent of 2.5 trillion is still 50 billion dollars, and that is enough to fund whatever the next big thing may be. If we are careful, it could pay back in spades.

Stimulus Through Prudent Investment

With the index funds at ten year lows, this is a buyers market. The only way to bring the markets up, along with the economy, is to invest in those companies that are poised for expansion. Nothing is more about investing in the future than Social Security, and it seems obvious that these two identical goals should be combined. By removing the obstacles to investment, providing the capital for investment, and putting it in the hands of professionals, we can get America’s economy back on track.

This bothers me. It does not bother me that my blog is not that popular; I keep it mostly for me. It does not bother me that posts that are deeply technical are not the most popular articles. I might not be a very good writer, and I might not be saying anything that interesting. What does bother me is that the most helpful posts I have written are probably going to be the least read. The only true value on this blog is posts that go into the internals of how something works. These are the posts that, hopefully, people will read and get something out of. I do a lot of work gathering the knowledge that I do have, and if I can pass it on efficiently, then I am accomplishing my goal. However, Google is the reality of how the internet works. If Google doesn’t see a lot of links coming into your page, then you won’t get any visitors. That’s fine, except that you also won’t get that one guy who really wants to understand the internals of JavaScript inheritance; that one guy who really just wants a library to allow some consistency in JavaScript class declarations without getting in the way.

Now I’m not saying I’m the one guy who can answer these questions. JavaScript inheritance is fairly well covered by the likes of JavaScript gurus Douglas Crockford and John Resig. However, the concept extends well beyond this specific topic. When a person develops a deeply technical knowledge on a new topic, his knowledge will be lost to the internet until enough people have developed the same knowledge to recognize the first guy’s contributions. Once there is a big enough base, all these people can cross reference each other and gain critical mass on google. Then, finally, the topic can hit the mainstream. The problem is, the necessary knowledge for a less technical person to get into a topic was there months, or even years ago. It was just impossible to find.

Solving this problem is really, really hard. Ideally, a search engine could capture the meaning of an article and register that it is something original, something that explains something generally not known. It would then have to infer that a person searching wants something more technical than what he has found so far. I would go as far as to say that today, that’s impossible. Instead, the “semantic web” is probably the evolution that has to happen to make this work. With quality tagging, I should be able to indicate that an article is about JavaScript, inheritance, and that it is not for beginners. I should be able to indicate that links to other articles about JavaScript inheritance are not just random links to things I’m discussing, but are references to articles that deal with the exact same issue. I should be able to indicate which references explain things at a higher level and which give a more general overview. I should be able to qualify how the rest of the body of knowledge relates to my small contribution.

This, in my mind, is the promise of the semantic web. The problem is, of course, that it requires a lot more work. As an author, I have to describe how my contribution fits into the rest of the web. As a search engine, results are less a linear ranking, and more a web of how topics interrelate. Designing an interface that pulls in all the relevant information and is still easy to use will be difficult.

Someday somebody will figure out how to achieve similar results without the up front effort. Otherwise, my dreams will probably never be achieved. Until then, however, I’ll continue to watch as baseless opinions win the day and potentially new knowledge is lost in the sludge somewhere near the end of Google’s long tail.

So what do I think is going to happen? I think Obama is going to win. Naive, perhaps, but for the past four years, I’ve been surrounded by university liberals in Illinois, no less. How does he do it? Well, it’s ridiculously close. I think Indiana and Florida are going to go McCain. In that case, Obama needs to grab both New Mexico and Colorado. Assuming he can do that, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan are going to be big battlegrounds. If Obama can win two of those, he’ll win the election. I think he’s going to do it.