"Primer" Technologies For Enhancing 21st Century Citizenship

What new technologies could make the most difference?

Across the 20th Century, a growing array of problems were solved through the application of professional skill. We came to rely increasingly upon professions ranging from medical doctors to law enforcement, from teachers to farmers for countless tasks that an average family used to do largely for itself. No other trend so perfectly represents the last century as this one, spanning all boundaries of politics, ideology or geography.

And yet - just as clearly - this trend cannot continue much longer. If only for demographic reasons, the as the rate of professionalization and specialization must start to fall off, exactly as we are about to face a bewildering array of new -- and rapid-onrushing -- problems.

How will we cope?

Elsewhere I speak of the 21st Century as a looming "Age of Amateurs," wherein a highly educated citizenry will be able to adeptly bring to bear countless capabilities and individual pools of knowledge, some of which may not be up to professional standards, but that can find synergy together, perhaps augmenting society's skill set, at a time of need. We saw this very thing happen at the century's dawn, on 9/11. Most important, helpful and successful actions that occurred on an awful day were taken by self-mobilized citizens and amateurs. At a moment when professionalism failed at many levels. 

It is important to note what a strong role technology played in fostering citizen action on 9/11. People equipped with video cameras documented the day and provided our best post-mortem footage. People with cell phones organized the evacuation of the twin towers. Similar phone-stirred gumption stirred and empowered the heroes who fought back and made the Legend of Flight UA 93.  A phenomenon that noted author Rebecca Solnit later documented in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster.

In sharp contrast, the events of Hurricane Katrina (and the 2011 earthquake-tsunami in Japan) showed the dark side of this transition -- a professional protector caste (crossing party and jurisdiction lines: including republicans and democrats, state, local and federal officials) whose sole ambition appeared to be to limit citizen-organized activity. Moreover, the very same technology that empowered New Yorkers and Bostonians betrayed citizens in New Orleans. Thousands who had fully-charged and operational radios in their pockets were unable to use them for communication -- either with each other or the outside world -- thanks to collapse of the cellular phone networks.

This was a travesty. But the aftermath was worse! Because, amid all the finger-pointing and blame-casting that followed Katrina, almost no attention has been paid to improving the reliability and utility of our cell networks, to assist citizen action during times of emergency. To the best of my knowledge. no high level demand has gone out - from FEMA or any other agency - for industry to address problems revealed in the devastation of America's Gulf Coast. A correction that should be both simple/cheap and useful to implement.

What do we need? We must have new ways for citizens to self-organize, both in normal life and (especially) during crises, when normal channels may collapse, or else get taken over by the authorities for their own use. All this might require is a slight change -- or set of additions -- in the programming of the sophisticated little radio communications devices that we all carry in our pockets, nowadays.

How about a simple back-up mode for text messaging? One that could use packet-switching to bypass the cell towers when they are down, and pass messages from phone to phone -- or peer-to-peer -- at least among phones that are of the same type? (GSM, TDMA, CDMA etc.) All of the needed packet-switching algorithms already exist. Moreover, this would allow a drowning city (or other catastrophe zone) to fill with tens of thousands of little spots of light, supplying information to helpers and reassurance to loved ones, anywhere in the world.

See: Designed to let us down in emergencies: Our deliberately frail cell phone system.

Are the cell companies afraid their towers will be bypassed when there's no emergency? What foolishness. This mode could be suppressed when a good tower is in range and become useful automatically when one is not... a notion that also happens to help solve the infamous "last mile connectivity problem." Anyway, there are dozens of ways that p2p calls could be billed. Can we at least talk about it?

(Late note: as of 2012, it seems that at long last some efforts are being made in this area, by Qualcomm and some other companies.  Stay tuned -- so to speak.)

The same dismal intransigence foils progress on the internet, where millions of adults use "asynchronous" communications methods, like web sites, blogs and email, but shun "synchronous" zones like chat and avatar worlds, where the interface (filled with sexy cartoon figures) seem designed to ruin any chance of useful discourse. For example, by limiting self-expression to about a sentence at a time and ignoring several dozen ways that human beings actually organize and allocate scarce attention in real life. To answer your next question: Facebook is quasi synchronous for those folks who haunt it almost incessantly. It thus acquires most of the worst traits of both worlds.

When someone actually pays attention to this "real digital divide" - between the lobotomized/childish synchronous chat/avatar/facebook world and the slow-but-cogent asynchronous web/blog/download world -- we may progress toward useful online communities like rapid "smart mobs." 

For example, crowd-sourcing and citizen engagement are increasingly playing a role in science -- both in terms of funding and direct participation in research.

Only first, we are going to have to learn to look at how human beings allocate attention in real life! (For more on this: see EpoceneChat)

Another tool involves Disputation Arenas, using conflict and competition to help resolve issues and achieve mediation, consensus or synthesis.

Oh, there are dozens of other technologies that will add together, like pieces in a puzzle, synergizing to help empower the magnificent citizen of tomorrow. Facial recognition systems and automatic lookups will turn every pedestrian on any street into someone who you vaguely know... a prospect that cynical pundits will decry, but that was EXACTLY how our ancestors lived, nearly all of them, throughout human history. The thing to be afraid of is asymmetries of power, not universal knowledge. The thing to protect is not your secrecy, but your ability to deter others from doing you harm.

Likewise, I assure you that we are on the verge of getting both lie detectors and reliable personality profiling. And yes, if these new machines frighten you, they should! Because they may wind up being clutched and monopolized by elites, and then used against us. I am glad you're frightened. If that happens, we will surely see an era that makes Big Brother look tame.

And yet, the solution to this danger is not to "ban" such technologies! That is exactly what elites want us to do (so they can monopolize the methods in secret out of our skeptical eye). No, that reflex sees only half the story. Come on, open your mind a little farther.

What if those very same -- inevitable -- technologies wind up being used by all sovereign citizens of an open democracy, say, fiercely applied to politicians and others who now smile and croon and insist that they deserve our trust? In other words, what if we could separate the men and women who have told little lies and admit it (and we forgive them) from those who tell the really dangerous and destructive whoppers? Those who are corrupt and/or blackmailed and/or lying through their teeth?

In that case, won't we have a better chance of making sure that Big Brother doesn't happen... ever?

Oh, it is a brave new world... We will have to be agile. Some things will be lost and others diminished.  We will have to re-define "privacy" much closer to home, or even just within it.

On the other hand, if we don't panic, we may see the beginnings of the era of the sovereign and empowered citizen. An Age of Amateurs in which no talent is suppressed or wasted, and no problem escapes the attention of a myriad talented eyes.

=====     =====     =====

See more on Citizen Involvement in Emergency Preparedness

 as well as Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competitiveness for Society's Benefit

Designed To Let Us Down... our deliberately frail cell phone system

Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi, an expert on communications theory at USC, spoke up recently in support of one of the concepts I have been pushing. Based upon the obscene situation that we saw during the Hurricane Katrina Crisis, when tens of thousands of victims found themselves cut off from the world, even though they had, in their pockets, sophisticated radio communications devices -- cell phones that betrayed folks the very moment they were needed most. Viterbi commented (and apologies for the embedded self-quotation):

Brin goes on to say that the teachable moment provided by Katrina was lost, and that the cellular industry could make a relatively simple, inexpensive change that would allow cell phones to still function to network survivors in a crisis :

".... almost no attention has been paid to improving the reliability and utility of our cell networks, to assist citizen action during times of emergency. To the best of my knowledge. no high level demand has gone out - from FEMA or any other agency -- for industry to address cell-system problems revealed in the devastation of America 's Gulf Coast. A correction that should be both simple/cheap and useful to implement.

"What do we need? We need ways for citizens to self-organize, both in normal life and (especially) during crises, when normal channels may collapse, or else get taken over by the authorities for their own use. All this might require is a slight change -- or set of additions -- in the programming of the sophisticated little radio communications devices that we all carry in our pockets, nowadays.

"How about a simple back-up mode for text messaging? One that could use packet-switching to bypass the cell towers when they are down, and pass messages from phone to phone -- or peer-to-peer -- at least among phones that are of the same type? (GSM, TDMA, CDMA etc.) All of the needed packet-switching algorithms already exist. Moreover, this would allow a drowning city (or other catastrophe zone) to fill with tens of thousands of little spots of light, supplying information to helpers and reassurance to loved ones, anywhere in the world."

These pushes of mine have not gone completely ignored or unnoticed. As Viterbi's riffs on the topic show, there have been some fascinating and insightful exchanges, discussing how the nation and public might benefit by adding peer-to-peer supplemental capabilities to the present cell system.

Some object that this development could cost millions. But that is not any real obstacle in an industry making hundreds of billions in the US alone. If either the government or the cell companies saw a clear benefit model, it would be trivial to justify the relatively small expense. Certainly far smaller than incorporating web browsers and MP3 players!

The problem is that top-down hierachy mentalities do not easily grasp the potential of flattened networks.... and this despite the clear example of the Internet itself, as a super-empowering, hierarchy-flattening phenomenon.

(Indeed, I believe that there are underlying PSYCHOLOGICAL REASONS that the twin examples of the Internet - and citizen competence on 9/11 - may have prompted an immune reaction against citizen empowerment, on the part of some members of the Paid Protector Castes. But that's another story.)

One more-cogent objection to the notion of augmenting cell phones with Peer-to-Peer capability: it takes a lot more energy to transmit than to receive. Most cell phones are actually very weak transmitters that function poorly without energetic base towers nearby.

The answer to this objection is simple. In order to use P2P effectively in a crisis, when the towers are down, personal cell phones do not have to carry voice. In an emergency, text messages can make a tremendous difference, e.g. in calling for help, or informing loved-ones that you are okay, or in passing crucial information to authorities. Especially since text messages can be transmitted with multiple repetition-redundancy, simple calculations show that pocket transmitters (cell phones) could pass these along at trivial power expenditure.

Obviously, this same answer deals with objections that P2P (peer to peer) does not carry voice well. So?The algorithms for passing along text messages are very little different from classic packet switching for email, on the Internet. Implementation ought to be trivial.

How to explain why this simple augmentation has not been implemented, even though it is clearly in the national and public interest? One theory is that the cell companies may feel threatened by P2P capabilities. Or that they see no way to make money off them. But this needn't be a problem. For one thing, it should be easy for each hand set to track passed-on messages and inform the network, for billing purposes. Or else the P2P system can be turned off, whenever there is a fully functional cell tower nearby! Thus, automatically reverting to P2P only under circumstances when the capability is actually needed!

Moreover, there is an added allure to this approach, one that could help the cell-cos make real money. By developing P2P capability, companies may open the door to a new method for solving their "last mile problem" - or how to extend coverage into dark zones, just beyond reach of their current network of towers. Think. Why not let customers who happen to be at the edge of the coverage area get a small pay-back fee for every text message that they pass through, from people who are just outside the covered zone? The same way people with solar or wind generators can make their meters run backward, feeding power into the grid.

If such customers had a more sophisticated home-cradle unit, they might even be able to pass through voice calls from a nearby dark zone. Reducing their own bill, helping the company, and making our entire communications system more robust.

Indeed, can anyone doubt that someday, somebody will realize there is a business plan in this? An entirely peer-to-peer network, in which, customers home-cradle units make up the bulk of an alternative cell system? But we'll save that futuristic sci fi scenario for another time. What I am talking about, here, is something that could be implemented in just one year, if anyone (like FEMA) were actually serious about fostering a more resilient and robust society. A pretty big "if" - apparently.

The fact that cell phones served the national defense so well on 9/11, yet failed in Katrina, should have been enough to tell us that serious work is needed, work that has been entirely lacking while we let ourselves be distracted on other adventures. I mean, isn't it a no-brainer for Homeland Security and FEMA to support this kind of capability, in the national interest?

After thinking about it, how do YOU feel about the sophisticated little tranceiver radio in your pocket, now that you know that it was designed almost perfectly to let you down, someday, at the very moment that you might need it most?

==See more of my articles on Emergency Preparedness

The Destruction of BOTH Professionalism and Resilience

As we near a symbolic anniversary, I must say that I have long viewed the events of September 11, 2001 in a unique way - as a moment when the Age of Amateurs briefly came to the fore, showing some of its potential for the 21st Century.

As I have described elsewhere: The Value and Empowerment of Common Citizens in an Age of Danger, The one truly significant and revealing thing that happened that day was not the attack itself, the damage done, or the nation’s official response.

Only the Boston Globe’s Elaine Scarry joined me in pointing out that the attacks triggered a truly staggering display of citizen competence, courage and autonomy, on a day when all of our paid professional protector castes failed.

Since then, these castes have united around a single goal - to distract the people from what really happened on 9/11. Have you noticed that pundits and high muckities of both left and right constantly speak in terms of public “fear and panic” when - in fact - there was very little of either trait in evidence that day... or, indeed, the months that followed? Instead of going with what worked on 9/11 by investing in ground level citizen responsiveness, both the administration and its critics have tended to parse the problem relentlessly in terms that bicker over which branch of the protective caste should be given more power over our lives.

An example: Debates over the PATRIOT Act swirl around a devil's dichotomy, choosing *between* security and freedom. In this debate, the civil libertarians have my loyalty... but ONLY to the extent that I am forced to accept this dismal, narrow, zero-sum game. Being asked to choose between my childrens’ safety and their freedom. (Bah!) While I send them checks I am also resentful that they want to "protect" me... instead of helping me protect myself.

Now we have Katrina, another example of the Protector Caste failing utterly to prepare or prevent or palliate harm... only on a vastly worse scale than 9/11.

After all, on 9/11, their failure came about as an unfortunate confluence of many factors, some of which weren’t anybody’s fault, all uniting to create a sudden and very brief Perfect Storm. Isolated acts of incompetence combined with sheer bad luck - plus enemy innovativeness - to make Professional Anticipation fail at all levels.

This did not mean that our paid protectors were systematically incompetent... they had doubtless been saving us from many other threats all along, quietly and professionally, and have continued doing so, even hampered recently by the Neocons' all out war on neutral professionalism.

What 9/11 did prove was an age-old adage, that even the best anticipators only succeed some of the time. Inevitably, no matter how skilled, anticipation will fail. And when that happens - when surprise comes at us like a ton of bricks - we must fall back on the other thing. Anticipation’s partner, in helping human beings to deal with the shocks of an onrushing future.

Resiliency. The thing our fellow citizens - (mostly Bostonians and New Yorkers) - demonstrated prodigiously on that day. And the one thing that the Protector Caste has been downplaying - (instinctively and surely NOT consciously) - ever since.

Define irony. The Protector caste has been doing this - by reflex - defending their turf from amateurs, at the very same time that skilled professionalism has been under relentless attack by our political leadership. By the appointment of political hacks into management positions for which they were totally unqualified. By stacking the upper echelons of agencies like the CIA with partisan attack dogs. By dismantling independent advisory panels and waging ideological war on science. And - above all - by commencing an unprecedented purge of the United States Officer Corps.

Somehow, we must make it clear to these skilled and dedicated men and women, ranging from FEMA and the CIA to generals and admirals, all the way to local fire marshals, that the uppity citizens who are lifting their heads, increasingly empowered by education and new technologies, are not the enemy. That our rising competence and ability to self-organize in a split second does not threaten their jobs.

We will still need their depth of knowledge and skill for decades to come.

What citizen empowerment will do is provide the backup that enables them to do their jobs at all, in a world that grows increasingly complex with each passing day. Indeed, if they turn to us, we will be their help, their reserves, their bulwark against political meddling and destructive interference.

Oh I could go on... only now there is Katrina.

Here, unlike 9/11, there was plenty of warning. Years in the case of the levees (see my 1990 novel EARTH) and many days in the case of the storm. Failure of anticipation now becomes culpable. Failure to enhance citizen autonomous resiliency can only be seen as criminal.

Online, the mystical-libertarians are going ape, claiming that this all shows the INHERENT incompetence of government. An insipid response that is wholly insupportable. Other emergencies have been handled well, within recent memory. Especially when skilled and vigorous officials swiftly cut red tape and engaged all resources, including private, corporate and individual effort.

Government's failure in this case arose from the War Against Professionalism waged by this administration. (Was this in order to spread a failure of confidence in government? No, too early to get quite so paranoid.)

What is less clear has been the parallel war against citizen empowerment. PEOPLE could have stepped in, taking the place of the missing National Guard, for example. And countless other ways. Instead, every barrier was put in place to prevent individual effort.

Since 9/11, the professionals have been undermined and the people hampered. BOTH anticipation and resiliency have fallen into dark times, exactly when we need both traits to become super-enhanced, to face of a world transforming before our eyes.

And this despite a hundred billion dollars spent on readiness?

When do coincidences add up to deliberate harm?

==See more articles on Disaster Preparedness: Citizen Involvement in Emergency Planning

==MISC Matters==

A preview of a posting I’ll make next week on http://www.davidbrin.com/

"Will the first decade of the 21st Century be known as the time when our Scientific Age came to a whimpering end? The one trait shared by anti-modernists of both left and right appears to be disdain for our ability to learn and do bold new things. My published review of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, explores how partisanship can explain much of this collapse of confidence... and why partisan interpretations don't cover everything. http://www.davidbrin.com/gopwar

Two recommended books that tout assertive problem solving are The Past and Future of America's Economy: Long Waves of Innovation that Power Cycles of Growth By Robert D. Atkinson and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.

 The first explores assertive measures that would allow us to play our roles better in the world economy. The latter pursue’s Kurzweil’s argument that our scientific competence and technologically empowered creativity will soon skyrocket, propelling humanity into an entirely new age. I don’t entirely agree. But boy, what a ride.

How “Horizon” theory ties into present tragedies...

HORIZONS OF INCLUSION- Part II: 

Does the betrayal of New Orleans mean that government is incapable of coping?

An interlocutor on another list has contended that the market place would have done a vastly better job of preparing and handling an emergency like this. His reasoning:  We would have all these stockpiles and emergency teams in place through private endeavors -- if the emergency entrepreneurs could be assured that when needed they could sell their services/goods at whatever price they could get for them….Without worrying about being prosecuted for “price gouging”.

With all due respect, this is just plain wrong. Yes, I agree that government policies can affect the "horizon" behavior of private companies etc. An example that is galling to us authors is the Thor Power Tools case, in which publishers wound up taxed for books kept in warehouses, hence they put books out of print much earlier than they would otherwise. (And notice how - by citing “horizons” - I have tied this in to our present topic!)

And yet, it is downright silly to credit most types of business with longer horizons than government, when it does its job. Companies have a responsibility to justify spending vs likely return on investment (ROI) that seldom extends beyond 3-5 years. Indeed, in recent decades, ROI horizons have shrunk considerably, as CEOs have found their personal self interest coinciding with one year or at best 2-year ROI.

Exceptions do exist. Tree farms and toll roads, for example, where farsighted investors plan to recoup generous rewards across a span of one or two decades.. Tuning public incentives, taxes and other policies to encourage longer range ROI across more industries should be a high priority. Exactly the kind of tuning that Julian Simon and the other cornucopians and market mystics dismiss as unnecessary, as they point to surging economic indicators that (alas) rely upon exploitation of fast-depleting resources and do not reflect un-sustainable practices.

Governments are inherently capable of longer horizons, in part because that is one of their essential functions.(When they are managed by sincere and smart people.) They can stockpile, create vast infrastructure. Buy during recessions, when commodities and other things are cheap and everyone else has stopped spending. Example, the US govt owns some of the best real estate in Paris, especially magnificent apartments which it picked up for diplomats at a song, in 1945, paying no taxes on them, forever.

One of the many sins of the insipid left-right axis (other than the fact that it is French), is its implicit refusal to take a calm look at which tasks government is good at and which it does badly. We all have lots of OPINIONS about this, but very little calm research.

And yet, we HAVE learned a lot. For example, besides providing basic security, justice and enforcement of contracts, govt also does pretty well at tackling certain types of infrastructure, emergency preparedness (when public officials do their jobs) and handling ACUTE EMERGENCIES. (Kill Hitler, feed THESE children right now, go to the moon.) Acute needs are often driven by consensus desires that are simply not measurable in terms of ROI.

Govt tends to do much worse when taking on CHRONIC PROBLEMS. (e.g. constantly improving our refrigerators or entertainments in response to public taste, providing longlasting and productive jobs, making poverty vanish, creating an ongoing profitable human presence in space.) These are far better handled by a market... perhaps with fine-tuning to ensure that it really is profitably attractive for private capital to step in and address long term needs.

Indeed, such incentives are needed to help make it natural and profitable for the private sector to do more of the heavy lifting in emergency preparedness. Especially insurance companies. My interlocutor protests that we have done the opposite:

But we know the politicians would immediately cry "gouging", and "profiteering" and proceed to criminal indictments and confiscations. We would not even need the Strategic Petroleum Reserve if property rights could be protected -- as thousands of entrepreneurs around the nation would build their own little fuel reserves.  I might add that insurance markets are highly regulated making innovation  difficult.

Yes, but whose fault is that! I am so tired of hearing people holler at "government" in general, while paying no attention to the fact that "government" is a set of tools. The real question is "whose hands are operating those tools, and to what end?"

The notion that "labor unions" control the US Government is getting so tired, so absurd, so absolutely loony, that even most conservatives are starting to shuffle their feet and look embarrassed when guys like Limbaugh shriek this old chestnut. Today, when more Pork is flowing to the frat boys' pals in any one year than any FOUR under Clinton, maybe it's time to accept a basic fact...

... that government is tweaked by those in power to favor their friends. And for a long time those with the power to tweak the rules have been... the CEO class. Using government to create regulatory regimes within which innovation and inventiveness and hard work and competitiveness are not the winning traits... but rather, the greatest flows go to those with best connections and passive collection of capital rents. Above all, we see relentless insertion of regulations that ask taxpayers to absorb costs (e.g. R&D and pollution abatement and infrastructure and resource depletion) while profits are privatized.

(Have you any idea how far we would be in space, if NASA had been allowed to collect royalties from communications and weather satellites?)

Let's take insurance, since my friend raised it.

If insurance companies actually competed, they would make their living by working hard to ensure that their clients live longer! Your insurer would take active steps to make sure your faucet and work station weren't killing or crippling you. Want lower premiums? Then let Allstate look in your medicine cabinet and give you advice. Don’t like their advice? Choose another company.

Logically, it is the right-handed alternative to so many acronymed agencies, like the FDA and OSHA. So why has this approach to consumer protection never taken hold?

The brilliant and lamented Barry Goldwater (whose spinning body now provides half of the power used by the State of Arizona) asked this question once. He soon realized that laws had been carefully erected, largely by his own party, to foster conditions under which insurance companies can rake profits simply on the basis of actuarial betting -- with plenty of mutual back-scratching, collusion and government tax credit support -- without lifting more than a finger to actually earn those profits. Only a few remnants of the old activist approach to insurance - like Underwriters' Labs -- still exist, wherein companies invest time and effort to win by making their clients live longer.

One major exception? Industrial fire prevention. Insurance companies still vigorously inspect and supervise every client who wants to insure a major commercial building. They demand all sorts of precautions from fire extinguishers to safety procedures that exceed local code. It’s competitive. It works. And guess what? OSHA and the feds regulate this particular area LESS because insurance is doing what it should. The state has withered back in direct proportion to the degree that private enterprise has tried. (Another major example: FedEx/UPS have virtually taken over parcel post, a withering away that no cynic ever expected and that proves incrementalism can work.)

When he realized what had happened to the insurance industry, Goldwater suggested removing the corporate-welfare props, thus forcing insurance companies into a truly competitive market where their profits would arise mainly from active efforts to increase their customers' well-being... leading hopefully to an eventual withering away of FDA, OSHA, FTC, the CPSC and a whole alphabet soup of paternalistic agencies that were set up to protect us, and that serve as bogeymen of the right. Goldwater’s plan looked good in theory. Instead of simply bitching endlessly about government - (a smugly satisfying but pathetically impotent pastime) - why not offer real “right-handed” alternatives to solve what the people see as real problems.

"Nothing doing!" said the rest of the GOP, at the behest of their lords in corporate boardrooms. Goldwater’s idea never even made it to committee.

Again, let me remind you all of a weird historical quirk... of all the industries that have been DE-regulated in the last few decades, it has been democrats who did the most, and the most successfully. Trucking, banking telecommunications, airlines, parcel post, and so on....

The GOP has been the main backer of a few major deregulatory actions. Savings and Loans, the accounting industry, and energy. Ah, contemplate those wondrous stimulations of industry and market-generated wealth for all. Well, for a few.

No, my friends. Bringing this all back to “horizons” and who does better at solving problems, do not expect “business” to behave any better than "government" so long as CEOs can make more money by manipulating government than by providing competitive goods and services.

If you want the state to wither away, try competing with its services FIRST. Instead of demanding that it dismatle and trusting some mythical market to step in later.

==Continue to Part III  or return to Part I