Critical Independence Theory

When I first noticed that the US was one of the few former British colonies to wage a bloody war of independence, while many other colonies in the empire figured a less violent way forward, I started to suspect something wasn’t adding up. Maybe the US founders were too hot-headed, as partially right as their grievances may have been. Maybe they sucked at negotiating a smarter way. Maybe the US was not the architect of democracy it crowned itself in 1776. But more disturbingly, maybe it wasn’t as interested in unalienable rights as it proclaimed in its declaration of independence.

To be clear about one thing, the monarchy in 1776 was far from perfect. As ways to lead large masses of people go, it was on thin ice and borrowed time.

And yet as monarchies go, the House of Hanover with its four Georges was fairly savvy.

Peeling back the onion:

The Kingdom already had a Parliament in 1776, albeit not exactly 100% democratic. Then again, we’re not even there in 2025 so I digress. A more brutally honest look reveals that America was not exactly God’s gift to democracy, with its revolution heard around the world. Even if to be fair it did move the needle significantly. Great Britain’s parliament dated back to 1706. Timeline check: the US founders had not even been born yet. And that parliament was actually a merger of two parliaments dating back to the 1200s (England and Scotland).

By 1776 there were two houses in the parliament of Great Britain: Lords and Commons. In more diluted incarnations Commons dates back centuries, but it finally took shape and relevance in 1706. By 1776 the monarchy, nobility and the Church controlled the House of Lords, which no doubt was a thorn on the side of the British colonies. And yet the House of Lords knew better than to not work within the boundaries of a fledgling democracy. It remembered all too well the ghost of Oliver Cromwell. A ghost that went BOO! in 1649, abolishing the monarchy altogether. Not to be outdone (unalived, erased, canceled) the Crown made an impressive comeback a mere decade later.

Almost two-hundred years later, in 1832 the Reform Act turned the tables for that fledgling democracy with another seismic shift. Not a single shot fired. The House of Commons roared as the brave new “middle class” was allowed to vote. That was one small step for parliament, one giant step for democracy (with all due to respect to women, labor class, and, oh yes, slaves.)

But wait, it gets better: almost immediately the British Parliament, led by the House of Commons, abolished slavery. Thirty years before the United States. And once again, not one shot fired.

So back to this thing we call “freedom”. Unintentionally I’m sure, the United States Declaration of Independence had set itself up for failure from the start. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Oh the humanity.

Not to let negativity consume us, let’s look at the positives. Not all founders of America were slaveowners. In fact less than you’d expect from the time. Sure, the majority were. Exactly two-thirds. Which makes you wonder about that “two-thirds majority” ratio spelled out in Article V. But nevertheless one-third is a sizable block. A David that eventually overcame Goliath. Just like Commons had over Lords.

The cynic in my brain believes that the mighty American Declaration of Independence was just another oligarchic tantrum in the history of human civilization. “We don’t want to play by anyone else’s rules anymore. Look at all this rich land. We don’t need you anymore, go away. There’s a new sheriff in town. I’m the new king now. Er, president.”

And yet the optimist and dreamer in me refuses to give up. The US has contributed wonders to the world. Even in a parallel universe, without a bloody revolution, it very likely would have still been a beacon to civilization on earth.

No matter how this ends, as the United States of America flirts with fascism and dances with the devil it once knew by another name, history will still remember America’s brief and shining moment kindly.

Progress is scrappy. Civilization is painfully slow. Evolution can only be fathomed as a freeze frame.

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Take heed America: the course of human events is coming around full circle.

The Twilight Boarding Zone

When the Wright brothers first took off on an airplane 121 years ago, their boarding time took 10 seconds. It would have taken 5 but Wilbur stopped Orville and demanded he check his oversized bag. Orville flipped his brother off and they both had a good laugh.

That was the last time the world saw an efficient boarding process. And it has little to do with passengers shortcomings, as much as they obviously exist. That excuse is simply setting travelers up for failure. 

If you ask an airline employee / manager, they will point the finger at the FAA, TSA, and the M-O-U-S-E for good measure. Some of that blame is well deserved. But not all of it. 

There are a couple of videos on YouTube that show how an efficient boarding process would / should go, according to science. Of course without traveler shortcomings, profit-maximized operations, elitism & politics. 

Is waiting to board a plane such a big deal? Within reason, not really. But that presupposes a nominal amount of mutual respect. It assumes you’re not telling a passenger that they need to be somewhere when it’s not necessary. “Boarding time” is one of the most disingenuous promises in free enterprise. 

The aircraft I’m in at this time has 38 rows, 1 aisle, 3 seats on each side of the aisle. So 6 seats x 38 = 228 souls on board. “Pre-boarding” (see George Carlin for a definition of what that means) started at 10:09AM. Departure was scheduled for 10:49. It is now 10:48, and we’re pulling back. So far so good, textbook boarding for 228 spinal cords. 

So is 40 minutes really that bad, especially for that number of people? Not really, with one exception: half of that time was spent having the aisle passengers sit down, only to be asked by a middle seat passenger to get up or pay up for a lap dance. Rinse and repeat for window passengers. Also, the example above is the airlines’ best case scenario. And their best case already takes twice as long as science says it should.

There is zero common sense (and as much common decency) in not boarding a plane from the rear to front first. They used to. What they din’t try was perfect logic. What does science say? This: special assistance first, in a section of the plane that their own. The rear of the aircraft actually makes perfect sense for them, for a number of reasons: closest to the bathrooms, and on longer trips closest to flight attendant assistance. Then window seats, then middle seats, then aisles. Every passenger is given a boarding number, so that last row window seaters are passengers #1 & #2. The aircraft can be divided into zones, as it is now but for a logical reason, not for “classism”. Nor for “communism” either. To make it more efficient, period. So in our case that could be 8 zones of 5 rows each, 30 passengers per zone. Color-code each of the zone sections, to make it visually easier for passengers to see their zone up ahead while walking down the aisle.

Remember the feet outlines on floors during the pandemic, meant for social distancing? Airport gate areas can do exactly the same. So based on your boarding number, which is based on your seat location on the plane, you find your number and stand on those happy feet. Then off you go, when the nice person herding cats waves you on. 

The whole elitism of “boarding first” has to be the dumbest thing ever concocted by corporate yahoos. And that’s coming from someone who flew and still flies on first often enough. You want to cater to Mr. and Mrs. busy-wealthy? DON’T MAKE THEM COME TO THE GATE SO EARLY. I would rather be the last to board. Close the door and let’s get this candle lit. 

Thirty passengers that don’t have to play musical chairs with each other can board in about 2.5 minutes. Tried and tested. That’s a 20 minute board for 228 passengers. 

As for the busy and the wealthy? Tell them they have 15 more minutes to sleep or sip on their mimosas at the VIP lounge. So in my flight, pre-boarding (zone 0) would have been asked to be at the gate by 10:20, zones 1-7 would have been asked to be ready to board at 10:30, and the beautiful people could have been asked to not bother showing up till 10:45. Steerage all strapped in, practically no wait for the chosen ones. And not to mention they’re already the first to get off. What better advantage is there? How fragile are their egos that they have to go in AND out first? C’mon. Let’s all grow up a little, shall we?

For those wondering what about those passengers who are delayed through no fault of their own, show up late due to their own poor planning, etc, there’s a simple response: since when do the airlines care about leaving people behind? Except this time at least everyone else would have a much better experience.

This is for the most part a “first world problem”, no doubt. But you know what part is not a first world problem? You guessed it: the elitist part. When elitism gets so dumb that they’ve cornered themselves into sitting down way too early, forced to wait for 200-400 passengers to shuffle past them, with steerage class looking down upon them with that smirk that says, “you know what? I’m going to take my sweet time.” And all the elites can do is just sit there and wait, while they get the Queen Elizabeth royal wave. 

The Outside Of The Box Fallacy

There’s a classic story about a truck that had become wedged at the entrance of a tunnel, and it goes something like this:

One day, traffic had come to a stop in a metropolitan tunnel. A huge 18-wheel truck exceeded the clearance of the tunnel and got stuck. It couldn’t move forward or backward. The emergency crew were at a loss, scratching their heads as tempers began to fray. Finally a little boy on the sidelines spoke up: “Why don’t you just let air out of the tires?” They promptly did exactly that, allowing the truck to be free.

The moral of the parable is intuitive enough: fresh and simple thinking can dramatically win over entrenched and complex thought processes. I first heard the story back in the late 80’s, which is just about when the business management establishment started using the expression “think outside the box”. While the expression served its purpose for a few years, like all overused jargon it finally lost its meaning. Yet the real problem with this particular jargon lies not in its overuse, but in the logic contained within the jargon itself. 

The box represents a process that has already been designed, tested, and under execution for some time. Clear thinking, or a good strategy, actually created the process and therefore the box. Managers and employees are hired to mind the box – until bugs in the process begin to appear. These bugs can be internal (design) issues, or external (competitive) threats. Corrective pressures ensue, and suddenly everyone in the box is asked to think outside of it. This might be akin to building a house for your family, then when things start to go wrong with the house you ask your family to step outside and pretend the house does not exist. Sounds more like a Chinese fire drill than strategic thinking.

Take one example of “boxed” strategic thinking: Iridium was a $5 billion satellite-telephone venture investment by Motorola that filed for Chapter 11 less than a year after the wireless phone system went live. Pundits have been all over the Iridium case study, for the most part agreeing that it was a case of falling in love with a technology idea at the expense of a market reality: Motorola was betting on a wireless technology that had been proven for more than 30 years, with a guarantee to cover the entire globe, regardless of what the market need was for businessmen in the middle of the Sahara desert desperately needing to make a call.

If there is something that Motorola was good at – and still is to be fair – it is boxes. Radio boxes, more precisely: from the first automobile radios, to RF (Radio Frequency) communication devices for the military and for commercial use. But it didn’t just master the production of communication boxes; it also pioneered the Six Sigma process, the mother of all operational quality control processes. So given this track record in strategic as well as process excellence, what went wrong with Iridium? Had Motorola fallen blindly in love with the promise of satellite communications technology, or with its own capability to build the perfect box?

My bet is that neither of those two indictments is as relevant as the fact that Motorola had lost sight of how to think -- never mind where to think. Motorola’s founder Paul Galvin came from the Michelangelo Buonarotti school of visionary thinking: when guys like Michelangelo stand in front of a huge block of marble, they don't see a chunk of rock like the average mortal, they see the David inside of it; Galvin looked at a car radio and didn't just see an RF receiver box, he thought about the driving experience inside the car. Almost seventy years later, Galvin’s successors looked up to the skies and dreamed of sixty-six satellites covering wireless communications for the entire surface of our planet. Apparently they forgot to look back down at earth and find their David, or at least, the ultimate communication experience. 

If only there had been a little boy standing in the sidelines to remind Iridium guys that not much more than 10% of the surface of our planet is actually inhabited -- 1% if you consider only urban areas.

The Shortest Yard

"The NFL and its fans have no right to profess concern. It's hypocrisy. Yes, I understand that the sport may not have caused Hamlin's condition. That's not my point. My point is that the sport destroys bodies and lives, and we love it.

Stop telling me you're concerned, or stop watching. Am I pissing you off? I hope so."

- Scott Wilson, attorney for NFL concussion case

“The sport”. 

I mean, you’re not really pissing me off Mr. Wilson, but you have poked my morbid curiosity. As a numbers guy I had to conduct my own due diligence. And sure, I was just called a hypocrite. By a lawyer, but l’ll let that one slide for now. 

I’m sure I’ve been a hypocrite from time to time, like most mortals. But like anything else it’s not about falling for hypocrisy, from time to time. It’s what you do about it. 

I’m a little stumped by the contradiction of data available on the subject. Credible sources like the Mayo Clinic and similar agree that ”most” TBIs (Traumatic Brain Injury) are caused by falling. Especially elderly and children. One law firm sets falling at 47%, consistent with the label of “most”. The other categories include traffic accidents - 16%, “struck by something - 15%” (which could be sports), assault - 9%, other - 13%. 

But then it gets sloppy after that. The TOTAL incidents in the US are listed at around 2.8 million (between 1.5 million and 3 million). So far so good, except some credible sites say ALL of those are sports related, while others say that 47% of the 2.8 million are from falls. So which is it??

Regardless of the sloppiness from credible sources on OVERALL numbers, there is some consistency on how SPORTS break down.

American football accounts for just under 11% of either sports TBIs or all TBIs. Either way it’s not the highest incidence within sports: rugby has a higher rate at just under 13%. American football is 2nd, followed by women’s ice hockey and then men’s ice hockey. 5th place is women’s soccer, 6th is men’s soccer. 

So as far as I can tell, the leading causes ranking of TBI looks like this (USA):

1. Falling

2. Traffic Accidents

4. Assault

5. Rugby (men)

6. American Football (men)

7. Hockey (women)

8. Hockey (men)

9. Soccer (women)

10. Soccer (men)

“The sport”. Which one are we talking about, Mr. Wilson? 

The reasons athletes are drawn to sports vary from fun to passion, but money takes center stage among the top performers. Which also means there’s huge profit to be made by the owners of sports franchises, leagues, events, broadcasters and related (merchandise, etc). And that’s where it gets “stupid”. For every greed dollar that turns a blind eye to the risks carried by the athletes, there’s a greed dollar for those that would sue by distorting the same risks. 

There’s no excuse for turning a blind eye to the risks of sport injuries. But that also means the nature of sports may one day end up looking like a chess game. Don’t touch me, don’t even look at me. And we better sit down before one of us gets hurt.  

For their part, distorters and hyperbole artists live by the “ends justifies the means” rule of war. So technically in the name of a good cause (defeating an evil enemy or defending an injured athlete) the truth can be sacrificed. To the point of fighting symptoms without understanding the cause.

The shortest yard is the first one. The last yard is the longest. Go deep or go home.

The Pareto Principle

Some of you know it as the 80/20 Rule. The principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from roughly 20% of causes. In other words, a minority percentage of causes have a substantial majority effect.

Politicians and their patron saint Niccolò Machiavelli have known this simple crowd control algorithm for centuries. But to be fair to them it’s not just governments and their politicians who live and die by the Pareto Principle. Capitalism thrives on it, artists are tormented by it.

The internet and its virtual communities of social platforms adopted the principle from day one. It was a prime directive practically ripped from Machiavelli’s “The Prince”: capture no more than 20% of traffic, then tell the world that you are the world. How small can you go in the 20% club and still assume the “I’m king of the world!” position? Well, we now know what share of the social media market $44 billion will buy: 9%. As our Titanic hero Elon Musk would say, “let that sink in.” 

Comedian Bill Burr has quipped an interesting number on more than one occasion, when poked about the blowback from audiences over his sarcasm about women. “What, like 20 of them?” he scoffs, mocking the relatively small number of booers or hecklers. But regardless of how he truly feels about women, you may want to pay close attention to his defiance of the Pareto Principle. Some internet neighborhoods have condemned the likes of him and Dave Chappelle as public enemies. Yet reality is the eighty percent undertow behind the shallow shores of the twenty percent. As Chappelle and Burr enter the deep end of accountability, they manage to outsmart the Pareto effect. They are the Schrödinger cats of the comedy circuit.

If comedy’s not your thing, maybe the dark side of the 80/20 ratio will grab your attention.  The two political parties in the US have never enjoyed much more than 20% of actual population support, never mind 51% of voters over the past few decades. And yet, every time a new politician is sworn in they can’t help but parrot the same tired dogma: “The American people have spoken.” They sure have. Somewhere between half and eighty percent either disapprove of you or at best are apathetic. 

When the American Republican Party splintered in recent years from mainstream conservatism to neo-fascist movements, it mastered the Pareto Principle as an alternative fact maker. Ripped from the cover of survival coffee-table books, it convinced itself that when standing up to a bear you should make yourself look bigger. “Never mind those votes, they’re not real anyway. Look over here, deep into my huuuge eyes... then close your little mind and let me take you back, to a magical place from the past that never existed.”

So the next time you cruise the internet’s underworld, watching the rage Geiger counter shoot up by the thousands and the thirst traps by the millions, you may want to remind yourself about the Pareto Principle. Eighty percent of reality is beyond the interest of media and social platforms. They weren’t developed to enlighten you in the first place, their prime directive is to sell. What you’re seeing is blinding you from what you’re not. Which is how selling works. 

One of society’s greatest oxymorons is street wisdom. Survival is powered by instinct, not by wisdom. Street instinct is the king of urban myths, and as such it roars as the ruling monarch of the internet. 

Political Parties And The Death of Nations

Twelve score and five years ago the United States of America declared independence from the oppression of a single, arbitrary monarchy. Imperfect as that declaration was it was a big step in the right direction. More people gained liberty from oppression, though sadly not exactly for all. 

So that challenge from day one, the one on page one of the constitution, was much more of a mission than we've ever bothered to understand: go forth and form a more perfect union. It was the founders way of telling us that they knew they weren’t perfect. Because a threat to liberty anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And as God was their witness they knew damn well that they never quite honored that “all men are created equal” bit.

Seven score and nineteen years ago the northern side of an almost one-hundred year old union set out to correct that “liberty and justice for all” brain fart. It was the bloodiest conflict the Union had, and still has ever seen. No foreign enemy has ever incurred more deaths on Americans than Americans themselves. I mean, don’t get me wrong: had Hitler or the Soviet Politburo not been stopped that self-owned wound would have been tragically dwarfed. 

One score ago some cave-dwellers hijacked four commercial aircrafts and weaponized them against our imperfect union. A union they accused of all the evils in the world - as if the evils that they incur on their own people are magically exempt from their messed up sense of cave-justice. 

The US today is not so much at a crossroads as it is at the edge of a cliff. It has managed to successfully fight oppression from monarchy, slave mongers, fascism, and even Stone Age cave dwellers. It’s been at the edge of this cliff before. Cornered here by itself actually - seven score and nineteen years ago. But something ominous has happened: the same two internal forces that drove us to that Civil War cliff never quite went away. Sadly, one of those forces went into “sleeper cell” mode. The kind we often accuse foreign threats of spawning, like the alien mother in hibernation.  

One score ago America’s domestic sleeper cell was awoken, on the day the two towers were fallen. The no-longer-sleeping alien mother took one look at the two ruling parties of America and picked one to assimilate by eating its insides. Temporarily disguised as a legitimate political party it swiftly pushed the US back to the edge of the cliff. 

The enemy within always has and always will be our own worst enemy. We are now way overdue to declare independence from an archaic party system. A party system that has incurred more damage on our own people than monarchy, fascism, communism, and stone-age cave dwellers combined. I’ve crunched the numbers already, like a hundred times since I thought to myself: this can’t be right. I’m not going to rehash those numbers now, please do your own math. But no matter how you shuffle the numbers, these two American parties, whether you think one is benevolent and the other one is an Alien bitch, are not going to walk away from their gravy train. Even if they know it might save our country, they will sooner conduct it off the cliff. 

From Wuhan to New York: The Road To Pandemia

I’ve been bad-mouthing big cities for quite some time now, most of it from a love-hate optic. I was born and grew up in three big cities, though by Manila standards my three country capitals might as well have been adorable little towns. 

I also eventually lived in 10+ million metropolitan sprawls, which is possibly where the dysfunctional relationship began for me. For those familiar with the term “gerrymandering”, the practice was not born merely out of voting suppression tactics. Migration, economics and ethnic control have fueled the driving force behind gerrymandering over the years. 

Google “Chicago population” and it spits back “2.7 million”. Yeah, right. That’s just the number of cars on the Kennedy Expressway at any given hour of the day, give or take an orange barrel. The true MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) population of Chicago is closer to 10 million. NYC says it’s 8.3 million peeps. I counted that many alone at the Simon & Garfunkel concert in Central Park. The greater New York MSA is closer to 20 mill.

I believe the Great Pandemic of 2020 will be the last nail in the coffin of the Big City. About time I might add, not a minute too soon. Oh it’s not going to happen overnight. Megacities probably have a few more supernova years left in them. But don’t bet the farm on their comeback. Especially now.

I’m not alone in my prophecy of urban doom of course. We are a visible number of big city skeptics. Some of them are pint-sized fresh new faces like Greta Thunberg. Others are old dogs like David Attenborough. Climate Change drives their skepticism. Mine as well, though with an evolutionary twist.

My love-hate dysfunction with the big apples began while living in the third largest city in the US. A country that happens to host the third largest population in the world (can someone get me a bronze medal, thank you very much). I was in architecture school, with a heavy dose of urban planning and engineering in the curriculum. It was the City and Regional Planning batch of courses (carelessly abbreviated as “CRP”) that first caught my attention. As it turns out, there is an optimal density number for human populations... who knew. Whether you like it or not. Whether you believe in it or not. And whether you believe it to be relevant or not. That number tops out at 100 people per square kilometer. That’s 260 people per square mile. Just over two US acres per person. One-fifth of an hectare per person, or five people per hectare.

For perspective, here’s where some US and world cities fall when compared to the optimum density of 100 people per square kilometer:

Chicago: 4,582 people per square kilometer.

New York City: 10,431 people per square kilometer.

Paris: 20,535 people per square kilometer.

Bnei Brak (Israel): 27,338 people per square kilometer.

Manila: 41,515 people per square kilometer.

In case you’re wondering, Manila is where we cap off as a human race, the highest population density on the planet. No point in casting stones there when New York City, one of the world’s most admired cities, is one thousand times over the limit for a sustainable and healthy population density. Are there gerrymandering factors at play? You betcha. Wuhan China clocks in at a density just over Chicago’s, though given China’s lack of transparency it is anyone’s guess as to where Wuhan’s true density lies. But this being 2020, we actually know one thing: cities like Wuhan are prime incubators of the worst kinds of diseases and pollutants. When it comes to megacities, I think there is nothing to debate anymore: their time has come and gone. They contributed great things, but their wonder years are dangerously close to a zero-sum game. I would hate for that day to come. We weren’t meant to live on top of each other like bats. The skyscraper technology mesmerized us for a century, but it’s time for us to grow up. There is nothing cool about human waste raining down a dense forest of PVC tubes, within just a few square kilometers. 

As for the planet itself: remove water and uninhabitable land and at 7.5 billion we are approximating 300 humans per square kilometer. As a planet, the needle is twitching into the red.

So who are these so-called experts that set the optimal population density bar that low? And why should we believe them? After all, people lead productive and relatively long lives in New York, Paris, and Manila. Well, those experts are highly qualified researchists from leading academic institutions. They are no different than the scientists who have been telling us for decades that we need to mind our levels of DDT and carbon emissions, or our intake of sugar and fat. Yet in spite of their warnings, life goes on. Overblown? Not exactly: false equivalence, pure and simple. My individual survival, or even my thrive, means squat to the gods of evolution. We either thrive as a species or we're useless to the life farmers of the universe.

There are fair warnings, there’s fear mongering, and there’s bias confirmation. Your choice. Mine? For whatever it’s worth, I was born in a city that today is denser than New York City. It’s been a long and winding road for me, through unsustainably-dense cities that I will always love. But not to live in them, ever again. In 2020 I moved to a density of just over 100 people per square kilometer. When I look outside my window I see a wonderful world. One where our neighbors are friendly but we all know how to keep our respectful distance.