I’m in the middle of writing an analysis of a very strange piece from the Wall Street Journal. I hadn’t realized the WSJ was so shockingly conservative; I would have expected the mouthpiece of global finance to just be unflinchingly, robotically cold. But they’re not. They’re very, very conservative.

And they’re really bad at economics.

Let me be honest: I’ve spent too much time with science, math, logic, ethics, epistemology, and people to ever actually be good at economics. But when I think of the global economy as a complex network of mostly clueless entities, it just starts sounding like the kind of stuff I played with in grad school, and it starts falling into place.

In short, economics is what happens when a group of people get together, decide on a system of commerce, forget that they chose the system, and then start studying it like a naturally occurring and even dominant force of nature.

Really, economics seems like too much cleverness and too little wisdom. Putting everything in terms of trade is intellectually indistinguishable from putting everything in terms of five, and with enough twisting you can fit more or less anything into the bottle of any tiny idea. But in doing so, you declare that tiny bottle a microcosm of reality, and since you “understand” and “control” the idea, that declaration becomes a declaration of godhood: you control everything that fits in the bottle, and you can fit everything into the bottle.

Now sweeping generalizations like the one I just made are guaranteed to be wrong, because they simplify out a lot of stuff. For example, the Discordian “Law of Fives” is a joke and a mental exercise: seeing that you can everywhere find a pattern which is patently absurd demonstrates that looking for patterns found based on presupposed notions are only as valid as the idea that told you to look for them. And what makes an idea valid? Nothing, ever. It is very hard to tell when observations support your theory and when your theory supports your observations, and understanding this is part of why Sherlock Holmes consistently kicked Inspector Lestrade’s ass. This is also why real Zen koans are painfully confusing: they build an expectation or idea and then they subvert it at a level far below the obvious. If the subversion were more obvious, they would be devilishly funny, and one of the most common second reactions to “getting” a koan is hysterical laughter (the first reaction is usually some form of kenshō). Still, this means they contain, subtly, an idea and its negation, and posit them both as true.

Zen and the Discordians are cleverness in service of wisdom, because they’re both attempting to subvert the comforts of ideology. And even Judaism and Christianity agree with this, without knowing it: “idolatry” is the sin of confusing the symbol of something with the much more majestic reality of it. Islam’s ban on representing Muhammad is in the same vein. And in recent history, we have some stunning examples of the cost of idolatry in the “cult of personality” in the USSR and China.

Economics is just our most recent ideological cult. It claims its superiority to other ideas based on the tremendously shaky claim that it’s supposed underpinning, capitalism, “beat” communism and central planning. And so when I ask Economics to go die in a fire, I’m being entirely serious. The cold war was bad enough. Let’s not subject society to an ideological monopoly for much longer.

Finding a decent software job without the benefit of nepotism can be a huge pain in the ass, and there’s this secret code that HR people use that can be difficult to translate meaningfully. This list will help. Most of these are lightly paraphrased from actual Craigslist tech job ads in the Toronto area within the last 36 hours.

• “Must be able to work flexible hours” – At the very least, this means they want you to work 10 hours/day while getting paid for 8. In a small company or startup, it means your boss gets bug reports from clients on his cell phone and will call you in a panic at 11pm on a Friday and expect a resolution before you go to sleep.
• “Must be familiar with (software engineering practice X)” – For all development to this point, they have not been using software engineering practice X well or at all. If software engineering practice X is something fundamental, like a web or UI job mentioning MVC, or any job mentioning revision control or object oriented programming, you’re about to apply to a war zone.
• “Must be able to work on several projects in a fast paced environment” – Management doesn’t know what they want you to develop, but they want it now. See also, “Dynamic Work Environment.”
• “Must have an ability to work under pressure and meet deadlines” – They are understaffed. See also, “Dynamic Work Environment.”
• “We offer a dynamic and challenging work environment” – They have high staff turnover.
• “We are looking for someone with 7 years experience with PHP and the Zend Framework” (Zend was released in 2005) – Either the developers aren’t involved in the hiring process, the developers are really green, or there are no developers.
• “We are looking for someone with experience in PHP, Java, C++, Ruby, Python, HTML, CSS, AJAX, SOAP, XML, ODBC, REST, HTCPCP, and Lisp” – They have no developers or code, and no idea what they need. You’ll probably get to be lead developer, but not CTO. The CTO is the guy who knows all those acronyms.
• “The starting salary is small” – They have no capital.
• “We’ll offer a reasonable ownership stake” – They have no business plan.
• “It’s a small job. We only need someone to…” – …re-implement a product that a team of people worked on for years, but with other stuff added on. You should be able to do it in two weeks with a budget of $200.

And there it is. Armed with this list, you’ll find the software job of your dreams in no time. Good luck!

Damn it, I knew I forgot something. I step back into the elevator and press nine.

Somehow, I never noticed that there are no doors on this elevator. It’s fine, really, because I get to see everything on the way back up.  On one floor there seems to be a seminar; a woman in a red business suit is pointing to slides and addressing an attentive audience. A couple of floors up, the space between the floors has a little garden growing in a neat grid of green wooden boxes.  It’s reassuring how well built this part of the building is, really.

A black, stenciled “10″ slides by. I look to the buttons, and nine is still lit, but the elevator is not stopping. Another of these ones, I guess. Outside is a four meter gap between the elevator and the unfinished concrete hallway marked 13. The elevator bumps into something and swings out to the right, continuing its upward journey with a gentle pendulum sway.

It eventually stops, letting me out on a narrow rough wooden floor suspended in space. Steel girders at the four corners mark the edges of the tower. Off to my right hover three finished houses with small yards; an old Japanese man in monk robes is shouting out the window of the nearest one at a construction worker with a jackhammer. Across the wooden path from the houses a crane clings to the frame of the building, and construction crews bustle around it, completely ignoring me.  The nearest solid part of the building is ten stories below.

Suddenly I realize that I’m not standing on wood, but a grey, knit wool.  I drop to my knees and grab it with both hands as the wool walkway starts swaying; I try to keep myself upright but adjusting my weight seems to accelerate the swaying.  I really just want to get back to my apartment.  Enough of this.  Really.  As I wrestle with the knit, three people walk up and join me to wait for the elevator.  ”Hello,” one of them says to me.

“I don’t know how you can live here,”  I say.

“You get used to it,” he replies.

“Yeah, but I have acrophobia.”  I look down, and my stomach turns.

With a friendly laugh, he says, “I suppose that might complicate things a bit.”

The wool path has settled, and I relax a bit.  In fact, relaxing seems to make it more stable.  The elevator appears from a hole in the sky above me, and starts sliding down.  It looks like it will arrive at our level ten meters out from the walkway.

“How are we supposed to get there?” I ask the others.

“We walk, of course,” one says.

“What? How?” I ask.

“Don’t worry, everything’s been built.  You just don’t know it yet.”

The elevator comes to a stop, and the others start towards it as the door opens.  I look down, take a deep breath, and follow.

It was forty minutes after I decided to quit.  I was agitated, twitching.  Three or four times, I reached for it: where I work, it’s always there.  I can’t escape it.  I was irritable.  I didn’t sweat, but I felt uncomfortably warm.  It’s only for a week, I told myself.  Only for a week.

The extent to which it had invaded my habits and my interactions—even my thoughts—was shocking.  Every move without it was different enough to draw conscious awareness of it.  Walking across a large room, sitting in a chair, relaxing at home: all different.

What the fuck was I supposed to do without the internet?

OK, it’s more general than that.  I’m doing this Artist’s Way course, and one of the things that happens in it is a week of reading deprivation: no books, magazines, bus adverts, newspapers, etc.  The obvious modernization was no more internet.  Of course, there are things that don’t involve reading, like youtube, but I decided to follow the spirit of the exercise instead of the letter of it.  The results so far have been kind of shocking.

After half a day, what rose from the pit of time left by dislodging and removing the internet was amazing.  Shoots of ideas: something to write, something to draw, something to organize, something to build out of carefully cut pieces of wood.  And later, what followed?  Action.  I actually went through a huge chunk of laundry, did some preventative maintenance on my room, practised piano, did yoga, meditated, added another 20km or so kilometers to my commute home, pulled out a sketchbook.

It’s now been two solid days where I’m only allowed gmail and its chat thing, as well as blogging and flickr uploading, which are creative outlets.   No wikipedia, no best of craigslist, nothing about software development, security or politics.  No silly animal pictures, no comics, nothing.  I still don’t know what to do with all of the time that’s reappeared without it; the only thing seems to be to act on all of these ideas.  So I’m letting myself blog again, and I suppose uploading to flickr will be ok, and one tweet per blog post until I finish.  Otherwise, I think I’ll make stuff.

For the sake of the search engines, I’ve just started tagging entries.  I went back and retroactively added a tags and installed a plugin to help deal with them.  They’re a pain in the ass.

The idea is that when I write a post, I include a bunch of words or short phrases in the metadata that describe what I’m writing about.  The tags for this one are inevitably going to include “software quality” and “software,” and probably “geek,” maybe “blogging.”  I do this so search engines and blog tracking sites can do a better job of matching what I’m writing about with what people seem to want to read.  It also leads to things like tag clouds, which are great for roughly nothing¹.

The deep problem that we’re up against is that computers are really dumb.  If I talk about software and mention bugs, it will take a long time for a computer to figure out that I don’t mean bugs in general.  Despite the fact that I’m clearly saying the two are unrelated, the fact that I linked both of them in one article means they’ll get slightly closer in the search engines.  And when you add metaphors, satire, similes, etc, computers fall apart entirely.  A surprising number of humans can’t handle it either, but we’re talking about a level of fail never before seen.

This amounts to going over what I write, doing the first level conceptual digestion, and picking the largest lumps of crap that come out of it².  It feels like telling a joke and then explaining it in detail.  But if to get meaningful use out of things like Technorati, then, as they say in the parlance of the streets, those are the breaks.

1) If you’re an idiot and you’d like to know the buzzwords surrounding some new buzzword you’ve heard, they’re very effective.  I don’t endorse technology that helps buzzword-driven idiots fail to function more effectively.  They’re also useful for figuring out how other people are tagging similar articles.

2) And with that, software bugs get a bit closer to dung beetles and tapeworms.