Diatribes - Computer, Economic & Political

The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality

2011-01-15T11:07:00.002-05:00

This paper is highly readable - very low on jargon. The models used are also fairly simple to understand. The numbers he comes up with are staggering:

A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes.

Alternatively, replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion.

The paper is primarily about merit pay for teachers. He acknowledges defining quality teachers is difficult (master's degrees & experience don't matter), and advocating for merit pay is politically costly.

His conclusion is that paying teachers far more would be economically justified if salaries reflected effectiveness, but without that link, salaries will lag and schools will underperform.

I'd be curious to see why other countries have such better schools. Do they have merit pay or tenure-less positions? Can the cultural values which benefit students be exported?

Why is a deficit bad?

2011-01-15T10:51:00.008-05:00

In a practical sense, a deficit is bad because it represents overspending. The government has taken on so many future liabilities to pay for present goodies that we're worried about both: the government defaulting (meaning it can't pay the interest on its debt), or the increased taxes required to pay the debt strangling growth. Both are very bad.

Excessive borrowing typically affects exchange rates, which makes it more expensive to import things, and reduces consumption. Excessive borrowing will also typically raise interest rates for borrowing, which is bad should an emergency arise (a real war) or default loom. Borrowing may make spending too easy, and since the politicians aren't spending their own money, the outcry over deficits may be a kind of constraint - though it hasn't been very good.

In an abstract sense, I think too much government spending is bad - it distorts individual decisions in the market, it deprives people of stuff they actually want, and could trigger any of the problems above. But short of excessive borrowing, deficits/debts really don't matter much by themselves - the spending decisions are the real issue.

As a means of explanation, let me give you an example swiped from Steven Landsburg. In the example, you want to buy something. It costs $100 and the interest rate is 10%. You happen to just have $1000 in your bank account. You have three ways to fund your purchase:

   1.     Buy it outright. $1000 - $100, plus $90 in interest = net assets of $990
   2.     Buy it on credit and pay it back a year from now. $1000 + $100 in interest - total costs of $110 (principle + interest), net assets = $990
   3.     Buy it and never pay for it outright. Eternal deficit. At the end of the year you have $1100, you pay the interest of $10 and you never pay the principle. But you don't have $1090 left, there is $100 you can't spend so you can be sure you can afford the interest each year. So you have usable assets of $990.

All three end up exactly the same. The issue we ought to concern ourselves with whether or not to spend the $100 in the first place, NOT how to finance the spending. To make this crystal clear, if the US Government had large opportunities to invest that would bring in more than they cost, would anyone be upset by the deficit used to fund these opportunities? Obviously that isn't the case now, which is why it is so important to scrutinize what we're spending money on rather than just how much.

Now let me address a few criticisms of this general idea. You can argue lending interest rates aren't equal to saving interest rates. But for the government the two rates are really close.* You may argue we don't have the $1000 in the bank to begin with either, but this result doesn't flow from whether or not we have the money in the bank - so long as we have $10 of sure income each year, we can take option 3 and the total cost is just the same as if we chose option 1.

We always say deficits are burdens to the future. But that's only half of the story. Interest payments on past debt are offset by the interest we earn when we defer our tax liability. Government borrowing allows us to defer paying our taxes, but it also allows us to earn extra income from the additional assets we've retained/created. The future inherits our assets as well as our debts, and so far every generation has been richer than the previous one (though of course past results don't guarantee future performance).

Hopefully verbosity hasn't obscured my point. My tl;dr is this: we should be careful about where the government spends money. If we can fix the spending problem, the financing problem falls in line.

* Obviously the government can't stick money into a savings account, or the stock market, or the normal investment vehicles we use. I do think federal or state governments can earn a normal rate of return by investing in assets that add value to the economy or buying bonds from other governments. I think rates on those investments can be comparable to debt rates.

Is economics a science?

2011-01-15T10:51:00.002-05:00

I think function is more important than labels, so the debate over whether econ is labeled as a science or not seems like a waste of time. I think economics is clearly useful, especially micro, so it is here to stay. It is really the only game in town trying to understand the economy. Arguing about whether we call it science or not is stupid.

I understand the word science lends some credibility to its subject. Supporters of phony baloney theories and medicine often paper over bad/missing research with the word science and vapid non-peer-reviewed articles. But I don't think that's comparable to economics broadly speaking, so I'm going to bite anyway.

Of course it depends on how you define science. If science is defined as forward looking, repeatable, and fully controlled experiments, then no, I don't think economics is a science by and in large. But neither is psychology, sociology/anthropology, history, or literally anything dealing with humans or uncontrollable events. And that's fine, we usually call these fields social science.

Fundamentally, I think of the field is misunderstood. People read Krugman or libertarian ramblings or watch CNBC and think that's what economists do. There is more to econ than broad macro stuff - philosophical or otherwise, and a lot more diversity of methods & interests than most people think. Personally, I think economics is more of a descriptive behavioral science than a prescriptive or prognosticating one.

One criticism I see is about controlled experiments. Some economists just use modeling or data mining, but plenty use controlled experiments. For example, Esther Duflo, and most of the MIT anti-poverty lab, has been running real non-contrived experiments on reducing poverty. Vernon Smith & others pioneered an entire branch of experimental economics. Dan Ariely has become somewhat famous for using experimental economics in behavioral econ (for example). Like any other study of human behavior, it is difficult to ethically run experiments and have control, but sometimes you can do it.

I've seen criticism because of the different schools of economics and the disagreements among those schools. There is disagreement only in the broadest contexts. First, not all economists are macro economists. We have lots of micro fundamentals fairly well figured out - all the econ 101 stuff about prices, s&d, elasticities, etc. We're starting understand the way people make specific decisions - both in aggregate and individually. Second, on the macro stuff, economists nearly always agree about what effect results from most changes, they just disagree about which effects predominate. Disagreement in a field doesn't mean no one knows what they're talking about, it characterizes healthy debate and critical thought.

I've read criticism about not having accurate testable predictions. The word accurate is a bit loaded, every field of study learns by making good & bad predictions. Of course you can make predictions which are testable, but in many cases (short of the controlled experiments above) you'll lack a counterfactual. Good economists know the limits of their models, so doing experiments or forecasting, they always have a slew of assumptions and limitations. Economists essentially test hypotheses for a living, those with untestable assertions about the world are more like philosophers or pundits than economists.

The more broadly you try to predict - e.g. for the entire economy - the less accurate you're going to be, all else equal. Economists working in micro areas, say someone from visa predicting HD TV sales for Christmas, can be quite accurate. Even in macro areas economists have had some pretty remarkable successes, like the brazilians taming inflation with conversion to the real, taiwan & singapore becoming major industrialized economies despite having virtually no natural resources.

3rd Party Doctrine Should Go

2010-02-12T09:14:00.001-05:00

I ran across an article about the feds arguing that locational information from cell phones is not private. This is disappointing from Obama, a con law professor, but not everything the executive branch does can fairly be laid at his feet.

Anyway, I think the problem is the "3rd party doctrine." It basically says you lose your privacy interest in anything you give to someone else. It is so grossly out of date and stupid, only a douche like Orrin Kerr could defend it. It comes from a 1976 supreme court case - US v. Miller.

In US v. Miller, the defendant was charged with a bunch of federal crimes. The feds had subpoenaed the defendant's bank for evidence, and got a lot of really damning evidence. The court of appeals suppressed this evidence because the feds hadn't gotten a warrant, and the standard for a subpoena is much lower than a warrant.

The policy, for decades, had been that information was protected only if the defendant "had a reasonable expectation of privacy that is generally recognized by society." This is a circular definition - because I know the feds can get my email, I don't expect it is private; if society feels the same way, then society doesn't recognize expectation of privacy towards email, never mind it is the feds who created that belief.

In a really misguided decision, the Supreme Court reversed the court of appeals. They announced a new doctrine known as the "3rd party doctrine." The opinion held that no one could have a reasonable expectation of privacy toward any information "voluntarily" given to a third party. They skipped the question of confidentiality, though have since held people can have a reasonable expectation to privacy when confiding in doctors, attorneys, and under a few other relationships.

In US v. Miller, the banking relationship wasn't considered protected, and the bank was required to keep the records under the "Banking Secrecy Act," which is like a two-step to getting anything you want: require it be kept by a 3rd party, then use the 3rd party doctrine to get it. Of course NSLs are easier.

When the 4th amendment was written, it focused on privacy within the home because that's where everything private occurred - private conversations, letter writing/reading, bookkeeping, etc. Now that we do these kinds of things outside the home, and the 3rd party doctrine says we don't have an expectation of privacy in these things.

With stuff like remote storage, except where covered by the gutless Stored Communications Act (part of ECPA), the justice department has said 3rd party doctrine applies - e.g. online backups, email archives, stored voicemail, etc. The 3rd party doctrine is the problem.

The other problem, IMO, is that privacy case law is always decided with some guilty criminal on the line. Some evidence shows they're guilty as sin, and they try to get the evidence suppressed for privacy reasons. Courts are loathe to let the obviously guilty go free, so they create privacy precedent that affects us all, only by looking at criminals.

The 3rd party doctrine just doesn't work in today's environment. With NSLs, CALEA, FISA and FISC, federal law enforcment has too much in the way of tools already.

Tea Partiers are Neocons

2010-02-09T23:43:00.001-05:00

Political sophistry doesn't get any more stupid than this: "Tea Parties Go After Ron Paul" (here is a less op-ed article). I can't think of anything more ironic. An organization dedicated to reducing government taxing & spending is going after the biggest anti-tax and anti-spend guy in government.

In case it wasn't clear before, the tea party organizers are neocons. Which means you should expect sheep clothing to be the first thing they shed if they get back in power, and conservative spending promises will be second.

A New Idiocy

2010-02-03T12:23:00.000-05:00

I read an article " A New Capitalism or a New World?" recently. It is head-in-the-sand embarassingly bad. The kind of thing that happens when comparative lit majors try to solve real problems - it ends up a mess. Unsurprisingly the author is a math & philosophy PhD - two studies famous for head-in-the-cloud non-practical thinking, not constrained by the real world. Actually it looks like the whole institution which put out this article is deluded, or at least their readers. On their home page they have a poll - "what will reduce poverty & hunger most" and the highest voted option is "pay small farmers for carbon sequestration." Really!? But that's something like an ad hominem attack, so lets get to substantive discussion.

The author mistates a lot of things - investment was terribly mangled (the bit about private investment was WTF bad), confidence was placed at the root of all economic problems (which is really really wrong), people as legal commodities (anyone with rudimentary legal training would scoff at this), and the author played fast and light with numbers (ok GDP doesn't represent well being - lots of other tests do - so who cares if GDP doesn't?). Plus the author wholly ignores, rather than deals with, real economic principles which conflict with his utopian idea - such as free riding and (anti)commons problems.

Given how often people say the government screws up compared to private industry as a whole, especially when looking at decision making processes - I'm surprised anyone wants to make production more like government. What happens when you can lobby for direct raises? I can't keep track of all the pies our government has its fingers in already, what happens when the government has its fingers in all the pies - who can keep track of it then? If the complexity of financial sector is too much for industry, it is definitely too much for the public sector.

Plus, when government screws you, you're typically out of luck - the government isn't liable for economic harm short of a total deprivation of value, and has soveriegn immunity on top of that. Not so when private industry screws you. Making everything like the government is a really bad idea. Someone said democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, it seems to fit here.

But the article ignores bigger problems. First, cognitively people can only care about so many other people. See Dunbar's Number for estimations of this number. The more say people have over others they don't care about, the more they will act opportunistically - that is try to screw the others. With private industry, each employee has a relatively smaller reach. If we can vote on everything, our reach expands.

Second, yes we need to protect our environment. Yes many businesses have a short run perspective. But the cost of environmentalism isn't measured just in dollars, it is measured in standards of living. Environmentalism reduces standard of living, all else equal. Of course we need to have a balance of sorts, but insisting 3rd world countries adhere to high environmental ideals imposes a terrific human cost.

Abstractly, no one thinks forcing companies to internalize the externalities they create is a bad idea. Of course it is hard to discover and price out effects of various externalities - do we measure costs in total cleanup, or cost effective clean up, or cost savings to the firm, etc. My point is that it is hard, and it isn't clear to me that we have a much better way of doing things right around the corner.

Envisioning an environmentally friendly & sustainable world is easy - we're all subsistence farmers. Envisioning one with a high standard of living is more difficult, especially in underdeveloped countries. To have some semblance of equality would require Americans & Europeans enduring a drastically lower standard of living. You don't hear as much from environmentalists about that.

Only Salesman Think Real Issues are Simple

2010-02-03T11:59:00.001-05:00

I read a spectacularly bad email a while back. Let me excerpt it here:

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature, It is now official you are ALL corrupt morons:
·         The U.S. Post Service was established in 1775 You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.
·         Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.
·         Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.
·         War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.
·         Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.
Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.
·         The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 32 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.
·         You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM??

Right, we're living in a broken state, nothing the federal government has touched ever works, and we'd be better off becoming like other countries which have fewer national services - like africa or south east asia. The federal government offering more services is a bad thing, it would drive us to becoming like the disasters in Canada or Europe.

The author is clearly delusional. I'm not going to take his points apart one by one, but nearly all of them are exaggerated to the point of falsity. Many of these problems listed have been made better by the feds rather than worse. Others are simply new problems which every business is dealing with (I'll note, the post office is actually exceptionally efficient & cheap). There are good reasons to oppose government action, but he hasn't pointed to a single real reason.

The authors argument is this: "X is not working the way I want, therefore whoever is in charge of X now must be incompetent or malicious" (or "corrupt morons"). This is such a simplification of X that it borders on an ad hominem attack.

Certainly track records of success or failure matter, but you can't look at them in isolation. Look at how silly it gets: every person who has ever lived has died within about a hundred years, and humans have been around hundreds of thousands of years, so whoever/whatever made them must be stupid. Or maybe since every computer I've had has failed, the makers must all be "corrupt morons."

I hate it when people pretend complicated issues one-sided and simple. You know why we have lousy health care per dollar? Because it is hard! If it was as simple as throwing it all to the government or private industry, we'd have done it a long time ago. Everyone who believes a real issue is simple must be stupid or selling something.

Bank Bonus Outrage... Again

2010-01-14T11:33:00.000-05:00

I'm not surprised by the continued furor over bank bonuses, but I am surprised that so many people seem to think these bonuses were unexpected.

Here's how banks work. They take money, give it to the most attractive investments, and earn interest on these investments. The interest they earn only needs to be higher than the interest they're paying for the money in the first place (with some cushion for defaults). Easy right?

What happens when several of the largest banks fold, and remaining banks get pumped full of free money? Fewer banks are competing for investments, and these banks can earn very low rates of return (virtually anything over zero) and still clear a profit.

Now of course these banks are raking in money hand over fist. That was the point of giving them free money - to stabilize the big banks taking big losses over bad investments - we made it easier for banks to make money. The loss of competition was just a bonus for surviving banks.

What did we think the banks would do with this money they're now earning? Give it away to the poor? Of course not, they're going to reward the bankers who needed to earn a rate of return just over zero. A job, I might add, which is relatively easy to do, at least compared to the mathematical gymnastics they engaged in to get high rates of returns from CDOs and CDSs and MBSs etc.

This was the point of the entire project - to make banks profitable. Why are we surprised banks are rewarding those who happen to be at the helm during this prosperity?

Same Sex Marriage Again....

2009-11-09T12:10:00.000-05:00

I'm for eliminating state-sponsored marriage. Marriage is two things - a document that giving religious individuals permission to have sex without violating deeply held moral, and a set of legal rights for couples. Both of these portions were given to the state back when the state and church were intertwined. I suspect neither the romans or ruling jews married Joseph and Mary, but instead I suspect they only needed ecclesiastical endorsement. The state does have an important role in the set of legal rights. I don't believe the state should have any role in granting permission to have sin-free sex. Separating the two functions wouldn't eliminate the benefits gays want and would not force the religious to recognize gay relationships as marriages.

The rights conferred by marriage are not insignificant. Beyond the stories about prohibited hospital visits, losing all property when one partner dies, and tax benefits - marriage does come with a hefty bundel of rights. Lots of government benefits (social security, disability, veteran, medicare, some welfare benefits) only accrue to the spouse & children of the beneficiary. Marriage confers employer insurance benefits, maritial communication privileges, visitation rights in jails/hospitals/etc, bereavement leave, estate/gift tax exemptions, and many others.

Now all, or virtually all, of these rights can be contracted around. For example, a will can provide all the estate planning benefits marriage provides. However, this is costly and unnecessary when we have perfectly good default rules for traditional marriages, which could be applied to same-sex coupling. Additionally, it simply strikes me as unfair to force certain same-sex couples to go to this expense and give these benefits away to heterosexual couples free.

The government could create standardized domestic contracts for consenting adults which give the standard rights of marriage with the standard ways out of the contract (a divorce process with existing characteristics, like an obligation to pay child support for any children in common, equal division of assets, etc). These rights would inhere automatically to long-term relationships just like common-law marriages do now. This contract would take care of the rights function of marriage. The other function can be taken care of by churches. Churches can bless any relationship they deem appropriate with the title of "marriage" and thus bestow guilt-free sex for the religious.

Under this system, gay people get the rights they want and religious don't have to recognize same-sex marriage. Gay individuals wouldn't object unless what they really want is for the government to force the religious to recognize their relationships as legitimate (as some people suspect). The religious won't object unless their their real issue isn't religious, but simply they don't want gay people to have the same rights which straight people enjoy (as others suspect).*

Religious individuals can still believe gay relationships are wrong, and can still get someone to give them permission to have sex. Gay individuals can get the rights straight people take for granted, and the title they want. Win/win.

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*I think it is important to note that gay marriage isn't the same as gay relationships. Religious disapproval of gay relationships is traditionally based on the grounds that the act of homosexual sex is prohibited. Offering these government contracts to consenting same-sex couples would not encourage more people to "turn gay," so I can't imagine it would contribute to the number of those engaging in homosexual sex.

Do differences in ability explain the minority wage gap?

2009-10-21T23:42:00.001-04:00

I read a paper the other day about differences in ability and minority wage gaps [pdf]. The author, James Heckman, is a pretty brilliant economist, and he's written a lot on discrimination. Many social leaders don't like his findings - they're controversial - but it is hard to argue with the logic. This paper is pretty light, not even 20 pages of double spaced text, and it has a lot of footnotes. He relies on age−corrected AFQT measures to estimate skill.

In this paper, Heckman finds that adjusting wages to skill explains the wage gap between minorities and whites. The one small caveat is with black males - skill differences can't explain the entire wage differential with black male individuals, so something else is going on here, but skill differences do explain a "substantial fraction of the gap." The conclusion is that affirmative action won't close this gap, we have to close the educational gap earlier in life.

This paper only looks at central tendency statistics. So none of it is relevant for a single individual, but the paper is relevant to populations as a whole. That's a hard thing to hear for a several reasons.

First, it says minorities have less skill, on average, than whites. That isn't a polite thing for anyone to say, but with the differences in educational attainment, it is difficult to dispute.
Second, the resolution essentially gives up on the current generation of minorities, and focuses on helping their children - since "intervention" targeted at adults is far less effective than when targeted at children.
Third, this finding suggests that affirmative action and strengthened anti-discrimination laws won't help (with the possible exception of a minor help for black males).
Fourth, test scores between 3-4 year old children shows a significant disparity between white children and minorities. Which means intervention is needed earlier.
Last, differences persists when controlling for individual, neighborhood (urban or suburban), and family characteristics (e.g. single parent, number of siblings).

This paper has lots of room for criticism. Some have argued that age−corrected AFQT tests don't measure skill, but instead measure race, wages, and schooling [pdf]. The explanation here is that the AFQT weighs math skills heavier than verbal skills, and minorities do relatively better with verbal skills and whites do relatively better with math skills. Additionally, this argument says the measure overstates the role job skills play in generating wages - e.g. the AFQT underpredicts wages for minorities.

PS: Sorry about the flower bullet points, that choice is out of my hands.

‘Microlending’ may not fight poverty

2009-10-17T12:16:00.002-04:00

I saw this news article, it was an easy read and quite interesting. So I wanted to see the actual studies the article referenced. One study was done by Abhijit Banerjee, Rachel Glennerster, Cynthia Kinnan (link to study [pdf]). The other study was done by Dean Karlan (link to study [pdf]), a professor at Yale.

You'll have to read the studies for the limitations and methodologies, but here is a summary of the conclusions.

Conclusions From the Banerjee Study:

While microcredit succeeds in affecting household expenditure and creating and expanding businesses, it appears to have no discernible effect on education, health, or womens' empowerment. Of course, after a longer time . . . these effects may emerge . . . At least in the short-term (within 15-18 months), microcredit does not appear to be a recipe for changing education, health, or womens' decision-making.

Conclusions From the Karlan Study:

Marginally creditworthy microentrepreneurs who randomly receive credit shrink their businesses relative to the control group . . . expanding access to capital (credit in our case) increases profits for male but not for female microentrepreneurs . . . [and] we find no evidence that increased access to credit improves well-being, as many microcredit advocates claim; rather, we find some evidence of a small decline in self-reported well-being.

What is Causing Wealth Gap

2009-10-12T10:11:00.000-04:00

Study shows a stunning gap between U.S. rich and poor: The gap between the top one percent of income earners and the bottom 90 percent is greater than at any time since 1928

Income and the Top 1%

As I said in an earlier post, the middle class hasn't gotten poorer or stagnated. The story about a disappearing middle class, the ultra wealthy few, and an increasing mass of poor is a powerful narrative, but doesn't line up well with careful analysis. The real story is about the top 1% getting much much richer, not about others getting poorer.

Wealth begets wealth

If am born with one dollar more than you, and we earn the same rate of return, I'm going to end up with more than you. And the wealth gap would widen at an increasing rate. That's just the math behind compound interest.

And the gap gets bigger when the difference between the groups is related to income rather than starting assets. If, instead of being born with $1 more than you, I earn $1 more than you each hour, the wealth disparity will be exacerbated.

In some way, specialization is fueling the income gap. Not the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 90%, but perhaps the gap between the top 10% and bottom 40%. The more specialization and education we have in the country, the larger the education gap, which generally leads to a larger wage disparity.

What I'm saying is that even without cronyism, we'd still have a wealth gap, if you assume assuming people are different and some will earn more than others. If that is true, then we'll have a wealth gap and because of compound interest, the gap will widen at an increasing rate.

I don't think this explains all of the gap in the US - the economy is full of privilege granting, government favoritism, and unaccounted externalities. But even if it wasn't, we'd still have a wealth gap and it'd be increasing.

Taxes and the Top 1%

So why did the gap shrink between the 50s and 80s? The best explanation I've read so far is simple: progressive tax schemes and wealth distribution. This begs the question, "but we have the most progressive tax scheme ever, right now, and the gap is increasing, what gives?"

First, I'm not sure we have the most progressive tax scheme ever. For example, the capital gains tax is far less than the income tax, the Bush tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, and state/local governments have incentives not to overtax the wealthy - since the wealthy have the greatest ability to relocate and pay taxes elsewhere (see Tom Golisano for example).

However, the top 1% are paying a larger share of the tax burden than ever before, more than the bottom 95% combined in 2007. This fact doesn't show anything by itself though. The top 1% are earning more than ever before, and they're getting the bulk of new wealth too.

Despite all this, it seems the tax system hasn't kept up with the tremendous growth of the to 1% of earners.

U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

Meanwhile, the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years. The group's share of the tax burden has risen, though not as quickly as its share of income.

Source and more reading. The top 1% is paying more than they ever have before, but they're also making more than ever before - both inflation adjusted and relative to others. The real question is NOT "why hasn't the tax system kept up" but instead "why has the top 1% enjoyed such tremendous growth?"

Theories
Many people have suggested the technological revolution increased gains in the top 1%. This theory doesn't line up very well with what we know:

Most theories of the rising education premium attribute it to skill-biased technological change generated by the high-tech computer industrial revolution. But the high-tech boom's effects on overall productivity became large only in the second half of the 1990s, well after the biggest increases in inequality. The timing doesn't fit either.

Tyler Cowen has another theory:

My intuition is that there has been an increase in the ability of very smart and very wealthy people to buy up undervalued assets and turn them into greater value . . . American entrepreneurs were building up capabilities which exploded in value once the economy stabilized in the early 1980s.

Perhaps this explains much of the growth until the 90s, but then what? The depressed asset prices of the 70s were soaring in the 80s, surely these "very smart and very wealthy" people didn't leave so much on the table during the 80s that this trend could continue through 2007 (which is the latest data I've looked at). Does the educational and technological improvements explain the gains from 1990s through 2007? If so, why did the gains all accrue to the top 1% rather than all those who leveraged increased technology and education?

Increasing Trade
Currently, I think the best theory suggests it is simply the result of globalization. As we know, trade always leaves both trading partners better off. And in all but a few contorted situations, trade leaves both countries as a whole better off. However, trade provides increasing returns to those producing goods at a comparative advantage, and decreases returns to those producing goods at a comparative disadvantage. Again, except in really unusual fringe cases, economic models (Heckscher-Ohlin, Specific Factors, and New Trade Theory) predict the gains to those with the comparative advantage exceed those producing at a comparative disadvantage.

I suspect this explains a lot of the top 1% gains. The U.S. seems to have a comparative advantage in capital intensive goods & services. I'm including human capital in the "capital" category. Those who command these inputs are generally wealthy. International trade benefits these individuals disproportionately. The U.S. seems to have a comparative disadvantage in labor intense goods and services. Labor is owned by each individual, and so individuals without capital or human capital would be harmed by international trade.

If true, I don't think this means we should stop trading. It simply means we need to continue building human capital. Arguably, it would also suggest we should continue our transfer systems, and perhaps ensure trade is pareto optimal for everyone.

Economic Inequality - does it matter?

2009-10-08T17:03:00.004-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about the rising income gap. Is it really rising? Does it matter? We'v heard a lot about the top 1% of earners, but as long as the rest of us aren't worse off, should we care? Now I think we should, though I didn't think so before.

Economic Destabilization
One argument for why we should care is that income inequality causes economic collapses. The two peaks in income inequality line up nicely with 1928 and 2007.
But does inequality really drive recessions? This graph doesn't line up well with recessions in 1948, 53, 58, 60, 74, 81, 90, or 2001. Why does income disparity affect larger depressions/recessions, but not smaller ones? Would this relationship mean that nations with higher income disparities should have deeper recessions? Could it be, that the graph is only showing that the rich own most of the overpriced assets before the bubbles burst? Is the disparity driving the recession, or is something else driving both? I am skeptical.

Disappearing Middle Class
The story about a disappearing middle class is pretty standard now, but it doesn't seem to line up well with careful analysis. The middle class hasn't gotten poorer or stagnated. Thomas Cooley (NYU economist) explores this in good detail in a series of two consecutive articles. Many other economists agree. The amount of income isn't fixed, and the rich getting richer doesn't necessarily mean everyone else is getting poorer.

Last week, the CBO came out with a paper (PDF warning) on just this issue. In real dollars, no income bracket has seen earnings fall in the last 30 years. However, nearly all the gains have been concentrated in the higher percentiles of earners. So lower percentiles have seen their income shrink as a share of total income, but the purchasing power has stayed about constant and absolute standard of living has been rising. Total amount of income in the world isn't fixed, the the gains to the top 1% haven't come from the losses of others.

There is disagreement over these findings. Other organizations have reported falling earnings. The difference seems to be largely a result of selecting different deflators (the price index used), household income groupings, and whether or not to include fringe benefits (e.g. employer contributions to healthcare plans). The deflator is important because the CPI basket has expanded in the last 30 years to include many things that didn't exist 30 years ago (thus cannot be priced). So we have many different deflators, each with its own weakness.

How you count households matters too, because in the last 30 years we've seen a massive decline in married-couple households and an increase in no-spouse households for both genders. When two people live together, when do you count them as a single household and when are they two households (e.g. roommates) in the same house? So this stuff is tricky, and just citing numbers doesn't really convey any meaningful information.

Other Factors
Others have made the argument that larger income gaps are correlated higher crime rates, homelessness, and other bad things. This may be true, I don't know, but I haven't seen any data suggesting this is true.

I've also seen the argument that a huge gap makes a "fairness" argument. A bank CEO's labor surely isn't a million times more productive/valuable than a minimum wage laborer, right? Well, that's true, but wages aren't reflective of just productivity, they're also a function of scarcity. Very few people can do a bank CEO's job; a lot more can flip burgers. That's not to say CEOs aren't overpaid - the inbred relationship between boards and executives almost ensures they will be - but it is to say this kind of argument isn't reflective of how the world actually is.

Decreased Economic Mobility
One argument does hold some weight for me. Someone pointed me to an academic paper which reinforced previous findings that inequality increases efficiency and capital accumulation to a point, then at some point that when income inequality becomes large, it becomes more difficult to accumulate capital and efficiency suffers. Essentially, it is harder to get out of lower income brackets.

So the inequality problem isn't about rich people benefiting at the expense of the poor, it is about immobility between the groups. That theory makes a lot of sense to me, and it seems consistent with the flat growth of real income in all but the highest brackets. This is bad for a lot of reasons, but I think "fairness" is an appropriate reason to bring up here. Future prospects of higher income gets people to work harder and better. If people don't expect to "move up," so to speak, this can create permanent classes, instability, and general unfairness.

We Should Care

To me, economic immobility is a good reason to care about income inequality. I don't know what is causing the inequality - some have suggested higher levels of education and technology may be driving forces, others suggest corruption and graft - but that perhaps a topic for another post. I also don't know what the remedy is, again perhaps a topic for another post.

The US is too big to fail - and that's why it may

2009-10-02T10:55:00.002-04:00

We've had to bail out companies that have made stupid decisions on the premise that if they went down, they'd take down a large portion of those around them. The problem with bailing them out is that if they know they'll be bailed out, they'll continue to make these stupid decisions.

The US Government—the federal government—is “too big to fail.” When the US has problems, there is serious suffering everywhere, not just here. I think the US has made stupid decisions based on the premise that the US can't fail, the world won't allow it. China will bail us out, or friendly middle eastern countries, or Europe, or someone. Unfortunately, if the US gets near failure, no one is big enough to bail us out.

Profligate Spending

We're in a hole. Other countries are in similar holes too, but we're in it bad and deep. The hole is debt. Now as far as I am concerned, it doesn't matter whether the government decides to fund spending out of debt or cash - I think they're functionally the same. The problem is the government spending. Spending is a problem for somewhat vague economic reasons like crowding out investment (which is a real issue), but also for more immediately visible reasons. At some point in the future, the debt we're incurring will become unmaintainable.

Recessions are great deals for governments, they can spend like crazy because everyone thinks it will prop up the asset prices, keep people in jobs, there is no political backlash, and governments can borrow the money to do this at practically zero interest—at least the US government can. For example, government treasury bonds were paying next to nothing recently.

The issue is the interest on the debt. We've overspent and the way it'll catch up with us is through interest payments. Interest is becoming a more and more significant part of government expenditures. It seems the government never pays back the principle on the debt either, it just rolls over the debt into new treasury bonds or pays it. The debt is growing faster and faster.

Two Ways Out

The first way requires voluntary sacrifice. People need to put up with high taxes and cut back government benefits. We need to accept cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and social security for anyone under 50 and impose income caps on those receiving these benefits. We need to do more triage in Medicare and Medicaid. We need to make massive cut backs in national defense spending. Not $100M here and $100M there, but 50% everywhere. Call it a peace dividend or good sense, but we can't afford our massive military, the overseas bases, etc. We just can't afford it. We need to reduce foreign intervention, stop acting like the world's superpower, and pull ourselves more internally. Trade with all, allies with none. We need to build our productivity: invest more, consume less, do all kinds of politically infeasible things. We'll limp along with fewer benefits, higher taxes, and more humble foreign policy for a few decades and we should be out of the debt we've created. I don't think I have to explain why there isn't the political will to do this.

The second way out is involuntary sacrifice. This can come in one of two ways, the government can inflate the currency, or the government can inflate the currency then become insolvent. Inflation will make the debt much smaller, and payments on interest much easier to make. Of course it will make future debt more expensive (since interest rates include the expected rate of inflation). But for everyone benefiting form having debt wiped out, somewhere there is a debtor who is having their asset wiped out. Any fixed payment, bonds, retirement funds, CDs, bank accounts generally, accounts receivable, etc - will perpetually be worth less than expected and less than planned. Fortunes will be wiped out overnight, stocks and dividends will drop in value, and it'll be a total disaster. It'll wipe out savings and assets; income will have a short half-life—effectively giving further encouragement for Americans to save & spend more recklessly. It will cause massive layoffs, countless bankruptcies, and seriously harm everyone's standard of living. If the federal government becomes insolvent, we'll have anarchy.

When?

When will this happen? As long as other countries perceive the dollar as “safe,” we've got time. Once we see interest rates for federal debt no longer serving as the gold standard, it is close. When interest rates rise and we're forced to borrow at high rates for essential spending, we're hosed.

What can you do to protect yourself? Move yourself or your assets to a more fiscally conservative country. Maybe Canada. Maybe. But if the US undergoes inflation or collapse, you can bet it'll affect countries and people everywhere. The US has gotten too big to fail, it is acting as if a bailout is coming, and although China & others have done their best, no one is big enough to bail out the US government.

Misinformation among anti-globalists

2009-10-01T07:57:00.003-04:00

I had a discussion about the G20 summit the other day with a rabid anti-globalist. This person was vehemently opposed to any international organizations as affronts to US sovereignty. The fear is that some US diplomat (maybe the president) can use international treaties to get results they couldn't get through the political process. In my discussion, it was suggested that Obama could ban guns and curb free speech in the US through an international treaty, although congress would never pass such a law. I have a similar discussion with another individual about this when a non-binding UN resolution came up which this person didn't like (strangely, it was about child trafficking).

I think this feeling is exists among nut jobs on both sides of the traditional political divide. Unfortunately, it is based on a gross misunderstanding of the American legal system. The G20, and globalization generally, provides lots of good reasons for concern, but generic fear of international agreements overriding US sovereignty is not one of them.

For America, there is no such thing as international law

International treaties and laws don't become binding on US citizens automatically, or just because the president signed them. All international agreements must be approved by congress and signed by the president before the agreement becomes binding on Americans.

Congress cannot give up law making power to any other body. For example, Congress couldn't pass a law that says "from now on, the UN can make laws for the US." It would be unconstitutional. Laws cannot be constructed so as to bypass either/both houses because of the bicameralism principle. For example, congress passed a bill which gave power over deportation to the inspector general, but retained a veto over his actions for one house of congress. The issue came up to the Supreme Court, and a one house veto was considered unconstitutional because of bicameralism. Laws cannot be constructed to pass the president either, because of the presentment principle. US diplomats and negotiators have agreed to countless international laws, only to have the proposed laws killed or modified beyond recognition in congress.

All "international laws" must become national law before they are enforceable. I don't know about other countries, but this is how the governmental system in the US works.

Unconstitutional agreements, even if they became law, would not pass SCOTUS

The Supreme Court had the power to review any law or action binding on a US citizen. They've already held the principles of bicameralism, presentment, and non-delegation of lawmaking powers are unconstitutional. A law in violation of one of these principles wouldn't even get to SCOTUS, it would be killed by a district court.

For the specific fears of the person I was talking with, SCOTUS has already held handgun bans unconstitutional. Even if somehow a gun ban got past congress & the president, the Supreme Court would strike it down immediately. Ditto for free speech, the Supreme Court has long pushed free speech jurisprudence beyond what was popular at the time. It was the Supreme Court striking down libel suits, media shutdowns, and restrictive speech laws. The Supreme Court has demonstrated ability and willingness to strike down unconstitutional laws & actions

Conclusion

In sum, the president can't act unilaterally, the Supreme Court can strike down any law or government action abridging constitutional rights, and this broad fear of international agreement or cooperation is irrational and unfounded.

Addendum

The response to my argument was, "well I guess we have nothing to fear, like when the IMF sacked Argentina." I don't know enough to evaluate the truth of that statement, but it doesn't matter. My statement was about US citizens fearing a loss of US sovereignty to international cooperation, not about Argentina being rescued by the IMF.

Again, there are lots of good reasons to worry about the G20.

You may worry the G20 doesn't have the capacity to make good decisions. Perhaps because the increased size (they used to be G8) will make it impossible to get anything substantive done. Or maybe they don't have the right framework for making decisions, or they're not willing to look at big underlying problems, they don't have the right long term focus, they don't have the power to get anything done, or any of a dozen other concerns.

You may worry they don't have your best interests in mind, but rather the interests of big business or environmentalists or the rich or the poor or some other group that doesn't include you. You may worry the G20 decisions will harm others, such as the excluded small developing nations, weaker included nations, or the poor in their own countries, or any other underrepresented group.

Like I said, the intellectually honest have plenty of reasons to worry about G20 decisions and deliberations, but the fear of an international body forcing laws on the US outside the democratic process should not be among them.

Science and Religion are not opposites

2009-09-03T12:06:00.002-04:00

I've spoken with several atheists about religion recently. On a few occasions they were frustrated with my stubborness. I believe the way I do because of experiences I've had in response to prayer. And nothing can change those experiences. So I wrote this, somewhat in defense of religion, but also somewhat in defense of science.

Science Can't Address Religious Questions
First, I think science is fundamentally incapable of addressing questions of faith. I think there are several reasons for this, but one that is really persuasive. Science is observer neutral. When you're performing an experiment, it doesn't matter who is doing it, it matters what is done. If I perform the same experiments Einstein did, and in the same way with the same tools, I'll get the same results. It doesn't matter that I don't have a nobel prize or brain the size of a watermelon. The experiments are observer-neutral.

Religious experiments and experiences are exactly the opposite. If I go to the Red Sea and stretch out my hand, it isn't going to part. I don't expect it to, and I don't believe it should. The same is fundamentally true of all religious experiences - they depend on the observer. If someone else prayed exactly as I have, they would not have the same religious experiences I had. Religious experiences are observer-dependant, and science does not have the tools to deal with these situations.

This also means is that religious tools cannot be applied to scientific questions. If you want to understand the higgs-boson, you're not going to pray about it. Your religious experience cannot detract from my scientific knowledge. Your religious experience is confined to you, and does not apply elsewhere.

Scientific Advancements Do not Disprove Religion
Second, science cannot replace religion for me, nor can religion replace science. Largely this is because I don't think God is a magician. I believe He understands and uses natural laws. The same natural laws we're discovering. God can exist even when His means are understood. God is not relegated to using processes and laws we don't understand. Science has come up with a pretty persuasive explanation as to how human beings came to exist. Great, that doesn't mean God can't exist simply because we understand that process.

I know a lot of evolution-deniers will point to abiogenesis. How did the first life start? Science isn't sure, doesn't know, therefore there is still room for God. WRONG. Science's current inability to solve a particular problem does not render other scientific work meaningless. The lack of a compelling explanation for abiogenesis doesn't mean evolution didn't occur and isn't occuring. If, and perhaps when, science finds a plausible explanation for abiogenesis, it won't change anything for me. Perhaps the researchers have discovered the process God used to create life. A terrific discovery, but not one that disproves God. Again, God can exist where we understand his methods.

Let's say scientists find the gene, chemical cocktail, or whatever which explains the religious experiences I've had. Let's say scientists can conclusively create the same type of experiences which led me to believe the way I do. Again, that won't change anything. God uses natural processes, even for religious experiences. Whether that is dopamine or gene 22q22, I don't care.

What about miracles? For example, what about Lazarus being raised from the tomb. If we found conclusively he was just in a coma until the exact moment Jesus called him forth, does that take away from Jesus' power? I don't think so. But I don't think miracles are magic, they're highly improbable events which can be explained by natural phenomonon. Again, God's power isn't bound to events we don't understand. God's power may be simply the foreknowledge of a particular event, it may be the ability to change the odds of a particular event, or it may be the ability to use natural processes effectively to achieve specific results.

Science is Reliable

This is something I often hear from the religious: "scientists has been wrong so often that how can you trust what they say now?" This is quite possibly the silliest anti-science arguments around. You can trust scientific results because they're repeatable (back to that observer-neutrality) and based on the best evidence and thinking available. If you have a better testable and logical explanation, publish it.

Is science infallible? No. Of course scientists will change their mind as new evidence comes to light, but that's what science is. Our understanding based on the best information available. Considering religion provides zero information into scientific questions, I fail to see why anyone would claim scientists are untrustworthy because they've developed, and sometimes switched, their understanding of the natural world. And don't tell me your religion has never done an about-face on an issue, whatever the justification.

Conclusion
I'm not a science-phobe. Science is fascinating. I love to learn about all the incredible new things we're finding out about ourselves and the natural world. It bothers me that so many people seem to think science and religion are somehow at odds with each other. An advancement in one does not take away from the other. A stumbling or failing in one does not bolster the other. Neither should waste time pointing to the other's failings nor try to derail progress in the other. My belief system does not dictate scientific principles, and science does not dictate my believe system.

What would convince me that I was wrong, and God does not exist? Death. That's it. If I die, and my consciousness ceases to exist; if I never think, act, or do anything again; if death is anniahiliation and the end of everything. Then, I will know I was wrong. Nothing else will suffice.

Tea parties were a waste of time

2009-04-21T13:28:00.002-04:00

The recent tea parties were a testament to the sense of entitlement in both parties. The GOP hijacked the parties from the libertarians and made them about taxes, even though Obama has only increased taxes on tobacco and didn't encourage congress to make temporary bush-era tax cuts permanent. Everyone was protesting bloated government and taxes, but no one was protesting specific government programs. There were no "cut the military" or "eliminate social security" signs. No one was demanding the government cut back homeland security or prescription drug benefits for the elderly. How do you shrink a bloated government if you're not willing to cut the programs that are making the government too big?

Now that the GOP isn't in control, they act like they're outraged about government spending. Neither party can credibly argue they're for smaller government. GOP wants less pork for alternative fuels and environmentally friendly stuff, the Dems want less wealth transfers to corporations. Neither actually wants a smaller government, they just want more regulation and spending on different things.

If we're going to get serious about shrinking the government, we need to cut spending. The "starve the beast" idea where massive deficits will force fiscal responsibility has not worked, will not work. Our politicians, at large, have shown a complete unwillingness to look to the future with fiscal responsibility. If we aren't willing to cut spending, we'll have much bigger things to protest than increased taxes, we'll have to protest the lack of garbage pickup, really dysfunctional transportation, and the loss of the entire social safety net.

The tea parties showed only one thing. We're not willing to protest about real issues. We're only willing to protest the opposing party.

The economic downturn

2009-02-24T08:53:00.003-05:00

Several family members on both sides have asked my opinion on the current depression. I think most of them missed that this is bigger than the housing bubble and even bigger than banking problems. This is a big problem.

First, there was a fundamental malalignment between regulators and industry; rating agencies and the industry; and global capital. There has been a huge increase in the amount of world investment capital in the last 10 years. People needed places to put that money, and a lot of it was soaked up by the US real estate market - because it had historically only gone up in price, and was a safe bet. The market absorbed money both directly, in speculation, but also with mortgage bundles - collateralized debt obligations. The demand for CDOs was such that creation was streamlined and those pushing new mortgages weren't talking to those bundling them, who in turn weren't talking to investment banks, who in turn weren't talking to investors. The amount of risk was just lost in a big telephone game. Rating agencies didn't look very carefully at them either, since they were getting paid by the people trying to sell them, and they called practically anything with bond insurance AAA.

A lot of loans were made to non credit worthy people, but banks weren't afraid of defaults. According to their models, housing prices have always gone up (har), and the bank could just repo the house & sell at a higher price. Even now though, banks don't take a 100k loss when someone walks away from a 100k loan. Banks get the house. Banks are holding a lot of those now, which is limiting the assets they have to lend - since houses are very illiquid. That's the liquidity problem - assets which have value, but can't be sold quickly in the market for cash.

At the same time, banks invented credit default swaps, which on paper are a good idea. They're basically insurance on bonds. You pay ahead of time so that if a firm doesn't pay out on a bond, the bank swaps their assets with your worthless one. But then they were divorced of the bonds and they became insurance against another firm's default. The CDS market wasn't transparent or regulated, and banks backing these things couldn't accurately evaluate their risk. When Lehman went, there was a great fear that these credit default swaps would swamp everyone, and they might have.

So then housing prices leveled off, interest rates rose slightly, and a few other things led to an economic slowdown. Many of these CDOs started going belly up, and taking their investment banks with them. Lending dried up because investors freaked out about the disappearance of their assets. Money flowed into US treasury bonds because investors wanted safety. This buoyed the US dollar and gave the government all kinds of money to spend trying to save these banks. Ok so that's basically where we are.

For the last 30 years, we've used monetary policy to cushion busts and control booms - and fairly successfully. But it broke this time. The fed dropped interest rates below the rate of inflation, essentially to zero. The fed was handing out free money, they couldn't do any more. This is the end of our current economic model. The risk is deflation, and it is really scary. Japan lost a decade of economic growth to deflation, and there isn't really anything the federal government can do to get out of it.

Since our current economic model has no answers for us, Obama has fallen back to Keynesian economics. The only other good model we have - the classical model - says do nothing, and politicians are afraid of doing nothing. When we did nothing and let Lehman Brothers fail, it caused huge losses and problems. The classical model would say this is normal, and the pain is necessary. But since no one wants to put up with a radically decreased standard of living for a few years, it looks like we're going to give Keynes' theory its first real test. Economists basically figured out how much people would be spending if it was a normal year, subtracted how much we're actually spending, and came up with ~$800 billion dollars over 3 years. That's the simulus package.

As you know, Keynes' idea was this. Rather than to look at depressions as natural fluctuations which purged weak firms, bad debt, and reallocated people to more efficient employment (as classical economists had thought), Keynes thought of depressions has harmful negative downward cycles brought on by under consumption and oversavings. His theory was that if the government spent money when individuals weren't, the government spending, if it was an investment, would replace private spending and "kickstart" the economy.

We never really gave the theory a clean chance in the great depression, FDR did a lot of anti-keynsian things like try to balance the budget, and such. Keynes actually didn't like FDR very much, and died before FDR started spending real deficit money - but that was long into the depression, so the classical economists could just explain the upstart as the normal cycle out of the depression. For a while politicians thought of Keynes' theory as a license to spend all they liked - Keynes still believed government spending would crowd out private spending (which he recognized is better than government spending), so he would've been very against running up deficits in good years.

As you know, Keynsian econoics was the dominant theory until the 60s and 70s when some alternates came out - supply side (which was debunked during Reagan, and doubly so under Bush Jr), and the current top theory - the money policy theory. The current theory is that by regulating interest rates through money supply, the Fed can soften recessions if they've built up a cushion during the boom time. Raise interest rates during expansion, and lower them during recessions. Again, we've hit rock bottom there.

Keynes theory does seem logical if you consider depressions as "crises of confidence" where uncertainty causes people to spend less, which causes businesses to be less profitable, which causes layoffs, which causes more uncertainty, & it loops until jerked out by something else. Like a whirlpool. Keynesian economics makes no sense if you look at depressions as "bubbles" bursting, where bad debt, bad assets, weak firms, and unproductive employement is eliminated - and it takes a few years to clean out all the junk so the economy can be more healthy in the future. Like a deep spring cleaning.

Both stories are fairly compelling, I'm not sure which is right. I suspect it is some of both, but less like a whirlpool than most politicians are willing to admit because the cleaning entails enduring real human suffering. I think a lot of efforts to prop up home prices are misguided, housing prices were too high and propping them up will either cause inflation (and wipe out savings, and encourage reckless debt). Ditto with the efforts to prop up the reckless banks, when they go under, they'll be replaced by smaller more conservative banks. But at the same time, if we can spend a bit more now to avoid some of the real impact on actual people, even if that stunts growth later, it may be worth it.

As for how the money will be spent, I haven't looked at it directly, so I don't know. The right-wing sites are screaming about birth control for 3rd world countries (which is more about disease control - not birth control), and the left-wing sites are screaming about the 8-years of useless Bush spending the GOP was fine with but is now holding up over what amounts to a "mote". I doubt disease control in 3rd world countries is a signficant part, and I'm sure the holdouts have some legitimate concerns. Now that it has been finalized I'll probably take a look and decide.

Obama v. McCain - they're not all bad either

2008-10-29T21:31:00.002-04:00

This is once again a response to another email. Yuck, I know.

This discussion has put me in the uncomfortable position of defending Obama. To be clear, I'm not an Obama supporter. I think he's wrong all over on social issues. I think he's wrong all over on family issues. I only mean to defend him from attacks I think are inaccurate or unfair. I'd do the same for McCain if someone brought up the Keating 5 scandal. So far, I think Baldwin is the closest fit for what I actually think. Take a look at his platform, as a strict constitutionalist I think you'll like it too. He's got some nutty issues too, but fewer than McCain or Obama in my opinion.

I'm inclined to agree with you that we've got a semi-socialist/welfare state now. If I were king for a day, I'd yank it in a second, if it weren't for all the people who have grown to expect it. It'd be kind of unfair to yank away social security from those who've paid into it thinking it'd be their retirement money. I don't know what to do about the reliance interest people have developed in our welfare state, it is a tricky question. I don't think more welfare is the way to go, though you're right that democrats are generally in support of this (Obama is no exception). I do think there is enough in the system for everyone to live comfortably if everyone gave to charity as generously as they comfortably could, but mandating it seems unfair.

As for the Obama quote anti-constitution, I understand the suggested interpretation. Personally, I think it requires reading something into what he's saying that isn't there, but reasonable people can disagree. Initially I went through it blow by blow in this response, but I removed it since it didn't add anything. It comes down to what you want to believe, I want to believe Obama was only defending Brown v. Board of Ed, you want to believe Obama was criticizing the constitution and promoting wealth redistribution. As for negative liberties (for the government), the constitution *is* set up that way - to limit government. The name shouldn't connote anything bad though.

I don't know anyone who would say the constitution, great & inspired as it is, is totally flawless. It left out a number of key rights such as a general right to privacy, it supported slavery, it enfranchised only white male landowners, and it is very skeletal. I know there are important reasons for these things - slavery was a compromise and it wouldn't have passed the states without limited support, and federalists were afraid of listing rights for fear that people would think listed rights were the only ones they'd have (which turned out prophetic) - but they're still faults. I don't see Obama pointing to any "fundamental flaws" in the constitution; at most he's suggesting the constitution would be better if it listed government duties to citizens (like national defense). That seems reasonable to me. I might disagree with him on what those duties should be, but I don't know exactly what his list would look like.

As for the statement: "This is the lawyer speaking. This is the problem. No offense but lawyers tend to do this. They take a meaning of something and spin and twist it." I have a few comments. First I'd say it is wholly unfair to paint an entire profession as categorically dishonest. I know people who would say similar things about history teachers. Lawyers may twist words to get them to say what they want, and history teachers may twist history to get it to say what they want. I know it is cool to smear lawyers - we're easy targets given we're often forced to defend losing issues & loser clients - but I absolutely disagree with this statement & the sentiment behind it. I think history teachers try to honestly understand history, and lawyers try to honestly understand words. I also think lawyers are categorically one of the most honest professions, held to one of the highest professional standards, and are by and in large are up to the requirements.

Two points on ACORN. First, I don't see them as universally harmful. Yes I disagree with lots of their positions, but they support some admirable and under served causes. Take a look here. I know you hate wikipedia, but take a look at the citations if you doubt the content. McCain has visited ACORN meetings as recently as 2006, so he isn't free of connection either, though he's certainly less connected than Obama. Also, to say the the democrats are the only ones involved with voter fraud is absurd - just google "voting purges" - the GOP has been responsible for massive purges recently in Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina. No one's hands are clean here (except 3rd parties). And the concerns with voter fraud & ACORN run smack into another issue I brought up earlier - the firing of the US prosecutors. The DOJ found that former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was wrongfully fired by Alberto Gonzales after Iglesias declined to indict over alleged voter fraud at an ACORN affiliate in New Mexico, because of insufficient evidence. So it isn't clear to me why ACORN is unabashedly evil, even if I disagree with a plurality of their tenets.

Actually on a related note, this is a quote from one of my favorite books - Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. "Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side." I certainly don't think anyone has suggested they hate anyone else, but I think the comment also relates to disagreeing and condemning without reservation. There is good in every person, and I think Obama has quite a bit of good in him. His record of community service, he's a terrific father & husband, and he genuinely wants to help America. Similar things can be said for McCain - he loves his country, he is willing to serve, and he genuinely wants to help America as well. Unless you're debating the policies of Satan himself, I think there is something you can agree with in every person, party, and organization.

As for the quotes you provided on marxism, they seem to suggest lots of people are marxist. I'm concerned how people have been "priviledged or disabled by their position within the social structure." I see genuine issues that need real solutions (I just don't think raw wealth transfers are the solution). I also think both parties are supportive of a "strong state" - both Obama & McCain have generally taken positions to expand federal influence. I think any economist would agree that a valid purpose of government is to "regulate, to reform . . . the private property market economy of liberalism because of the inequality or alienation it creates." That is what anti trust & regulation is all about.

I just don't think Obama is interested in "replacing" the private property market with "collective or public ownership of the means of production." On the criticism of wikipedia, I think wikipedia is a great source for the mainstream understanding of a term - certainly more so than a specific professor or two. The professors will certainly have better insight into the theory, but as we all know professors specialize to a large degree and their knowledge isn't always representative of the common parlance of a term. I'm not suggesting that wikipedia is reliable enough to use as a source in a research paper, but I think it *is* reliable enough for a quick term look up. Had I been writing a thesis in response, I'd have looked up marx & engels proper, but I'm not being that formal. Attacking wikipedia doesn't invalidate my assertion that Obama isn't marxist - certainly Marx's own writings would a be better source, but I'm afraid I don't have them on hand.

In any event, I think your last statement was bang on - democrats are more "democratic socialists" - which I'd say includes Obama. Marxist just doesn't fit. Thanks for the response, I also enjoy this kind of thing (obviously), and I swear I won't continue this thread any longer.

Obama v. McCain - they still both suck

2008-10-29T11:14:00.006-04:00

I know I'm going to sound like an Obama apologist here, but some of the criticisms leveled against him are just so absurd they hardly dignify response. Hardly.

This is once again adapted from an email I wrote in response to someone. In summary, the email claimed that Obama is a Marxist, that he hates the constitution, and that all government wealth transfers are immoral. Ok that is a bit of an charicature, but not much.

In summary - Obama is only a marxist if you conflate socialism with marxism, there are arguments for socialism (even if I don't buy them), and Obama is not in any way anti-constitution.

I guess my disagreement over Obama's supposed marxist leanings are one of broadness of definition. If all wealth distribution (i.e. socialism) is the same as marxism, then sure, Obama is marxist. So is all of Japan, Australia, and all of Western Europe. But if marxism is restricted to meaning a few traditional things, looking at Obama's positions on economics, I don't think he's anything like a marxist. Just to be clear, I'd suggest marxism is the following (taken & adapted from wikipedia):

* a belief that capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers by the owners of the means of production
* a belief that people's consciousness of the conditions of their lives reflects the dominant ideology which is in turn shaped by material conditions and relations of production
* an understanding of class in terms of differing relations to production, and as a particular position within such relations
* an understanding of material conditions and social relations as historically malleable
* a view of history according to which class struggle, the evolving conflict between classes with opposing interests, structures each historical period and drives historical change
* a belief that this historical process will ultimately result in a replacement of the current class structure of society with a system that manages society for the good of all, resulting in the dissolution of the class structure and its support

Historically, every communist country has had a control & command economy, rather than a market economy - with the exception of China. Every communist country has had an autocratic government too. Obama does not support ditching the market system, or democracy, in favor of an autocratic control & command economy. He supports wealth distribution, which is maybe a step towards control & command, but it isn't C&C itself.

I'd also remark the line between socialism and capitalism isn't so bright. We're well on the socialist side of any bright line you could draw already - we have lots of entitlement programs, welfare programs, & a graduated tax rate. Does that make us socialist? A little bit, yes. If you were wholly against any form of socialism, that'd mean we should do away with social security, medicare, medicaid, WIC, subsidies (through tariffs & tax breaks), and everything like it. Neither candidate is talking about that.

As for justification of socailism generally, there are theoretical and practical reasons to support socialism. I'm not saying I sign on to these, but to avoid addressing them is makes the issue far too one sided. The anti-socialism argument goes like this "it is immoral to take from those who've earned income to give it to those who have not." Socialists, in rebuttal, would say a few things. First, they'd argue those with money haven't necessarily earned it - some people inherit vast fortunes, some people walk into them. Second, they'd argue a graded tax system balances a system that is fixed in the first place. Warren Buffett remarked recently that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary because the capital gains tax is not graded (it is fixed at 15%). Add to that the sophisticated tax evasion (see Caymans), special tax breaks & loopholes the rich use, favoritism in government contracts (not just firms, but entire sectors too), and stuff like the 700 billion dollar bailout, 10% of which is going to exec salaries and a large chunk of the rest is going to mergers & acquisitions (see NYT).

Third, they might argue that the rewards to certain type of labor are disproportionately large/small (which I'd largely disagree with) - why should someone pushing money around stocks make tens of millions while someone actually doing the work at the firms who's stock the rich guy owns, gets much much less. Last, they'd probably argue that in a country with so much wealth, and so much poverty, if the wealthy won't take care of the poor (which is clear doesn't happen completely), the government should. We know most of the homeless have mental disorders, and that many of the poor are so simply because they're uneducated & don't have great opportunities, not because they're lazy.

There are good arguments on both sides and good responses to all these points. I make no comment as to which is right, I only mean to point out that logic isn't going to produce a clear winner, it comes down to preference. And as to academics being anti-capitalist, certainly there are some. But there is no general movement that direction from what I can see - although economists are finding more and more market failures and ways to fix them - that is more about perpetuating the market system than getting rid of it. Of course the market system has produced more wealth than anything ever, more technology, and has so drastically raised standards of living, that it needs no defense. But I can only speak from my experience as an econ/english student at BYU and a law student at IU.

As for Obama on the constitution, if you actually read what he said and listen to the context, at no point did he criticize the constitution. He said the court decision in Brown v. Board of Ed wasn't that radical, that they remained constrained by limitations placed by the constitution. All of that is true. He didn't say the decision *should* have been more radical. He didn't say the court *should* have broken the seperation of powers constraints placed on it by the constitution. He didn't say the court *should* have mandated redistribution - he explicitly says community organizers putting together coalitions of power should. That means the lobbying the legislature.

The tragedy he cites isn't that the court didn't force wealth redistribution, but that the movement focused on the courts to the exclusion of all other types of political pressure. He was merely defending the Brown v. Board of Ed decision against cries of judicial activism, and describing some of the failures of the civil rights movement, as he sees them. Which - for all you "no judicial legislation" people - is one case where I think we can all agree forging new common law by the judiciary was a good thing.

At no point did Obama say the words "fundamental" or "flawed" in that interview - they were added by rightwing pundits. If you listen to what he actually says, he defends the constitution. He defended the constitution when Palin said "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights." He defended the constitution when Bush fired the 8 US attorneys for political reasons. This all seems to revolve around this bizarre and baseless notion that Obama, being black, is going to extract reparations from white people for the abuse & intolerance of centries past. Patently absurd.

I have to say it is crazy to think that Obama would trample the constitution more than McCain. McCain has supported Bush's warrantless wiretap scheme. McCain has supported stripping those in Gitmo of habeaus & due process. McCain has supported stripping federal courts of habeas jurisdiction. McCain has supported the right of the executive to imprison anyone (no citizenship limitation) indefinitely if suspected of being an enemy combatant. McCain supported the kangaroo courts that congress setup to replace federal courts. McCain has opposed the Intelligence Authorization Act on grounds that the prohibition on torture would hamstring the war on terror. Obama, a constitutional law professor at a top 10 law school, has opposed all of these. Unfortunately, both supported the FISA expansion, which no longer requires executive branch to get wiretap authorization from a secret court that has rejected less than a dozen requests since the 1970s.

And again about spending, it isn't clear that Obama will spend more than McCain. He'll just spend differently - on social programs rather than wars. Cutting taxes doesn't cut spending, and government deficit spending is far more damaging than spending from income. So cutting tax revenue without a corresponding cut to spending is even more reckless than simply spending more than you take in. Bush Sr. knew that when he raised taxes despite his "read my lips" promise, and he lost an election because of it.

As for affirmitive action, Obama hasn't come out one way or another yet, and he's actually suggested changing it. From the NYT: In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Obama, a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, said affirmative action programs should ultimately become 'a diminishing tool for us to achieve racial equality in this society'." On the other hand, the last time McCain spoke about affirmative action, he said he supported non-quota affirmative action. "In 1999 McCain pushed legislation which would give companies tax breaks for selling media properties to minorities. In 2003 McCain reintroduced the legislation." Now he's changed opinions on lots of things since then, but has not yet repudiated this position.

The candidates aren't exactly the same. I'm definitely on McCain's side of the abortion debate (even though I'd take a slightly different position). However, I think for too long abortion has pushed all christians into the republican camp, despite good scriptural reasons to support the demcrats, libertarians, or others. It is a very important issue, but it isn't the only issue.

I read the Glen Beck article, but at no point did he actually quote Obama saying marxist things, or define what he thought Marxism was. He seems to be taking the comment Obama made about the civil rights movement not pursuing redistribution through the political process as a confession of marxism. I guess I have a different definition of marxism (see above). I know Mr. Beck makes his living from pushing shock and awe, but at some point he's got to lose factual credibility, even if you like what he says. I also read the "repeal the 16th amendment" petition. I'd like to cut taxes as much as anyone, but again - cutting taxes without corresponding spending cuts is fiscally irresponsible and *more* harmful to our economy. Since neither candidate is serious about cutting spending (see my last post), repealing the 16th amendment is totally reckless. By the way, Ron Paul was the only one who wanted to get rid of the income tax & had a specific (albeit drastic) plan to cut spending. Neither Obama or McCain would countenance tossing income tax & cutting spending that far.

Again, I won't be voting for either McCain or Obama (unless they radically change many of their positions), but there are reasonable arguments on both sides as to which is better (or worse).

If pushing the federal government to enshrine conservative family issues are most important for you, McCain is your man. If pushing the feds to liberalize family issues is most important, Obama is your man. If you care most about the economy, federal spending, and any of a host of other issues - neither candidate is a clear winner in my opinion.

Obama v. McCain - they both suck

2008-10-25T13:34:00.000-04:00

This is a response to an email from someone. It was good in parts, and absurd in others. I wrote out this long diatribe, and thought I'd be remiss not to post it here. As you can see, this response is freakishly long, so I'll summarize. McCain is as bad as Obama on most major issues. There are points where they each outdo each other on bad policy, but most of the real issues aren't talked about by either candidate, and Obama is as good (or as bad) a choice as McCain. Don't feel like you need to read the rest.

About the founders, they certainly were against government dole. But I don't think it was because they thought indolence should result in starvation, or handicapped people without family should go away. I think it had to do with their theory of government. The basic idea is that in order for individuals to be free to vote their conscience, they need to have independence from the government & financial stability. Stability is important because if you don't have food, you'll vote for any plan or candidate that gives you food. Independence is important because if you're getting food from the government, all other concerns are subjugated to continuing the food stream. Hence the idea that only land holders could vote - it was thought they were the only ones stable & independent enough to vote their conscience. I think a lot of things have changed since then, but the principle holds. In any event, I'm not about to go toe to toe with a history teacher about the founding fathers.

I also think the political spectrum is hooey. As you mentioned, both sides want more government intervention. Right wingers want the government to mandate moral issues - ban abortion, restrict pornography & sex, block gay marriage, etc. Left wingers want the government to mandate social issues - anti discrimination, welfare for the poor, gun control, etc. Libertarians on the other hand want the government not to meddle with any of it, and statists want the government to shape all of it. I'm with you on the federalism bit though - more should be left to the states. I'm also for slashing the federal budget 50% - that includes (especially) military funding.

And lets be honest, current republicans aren't fiscally conservative. They may be morally conservative, but by speaking loudly about the deficit, debt, & spending - all the while spending more than any democrat has ever spent, they've proven they can't be trusted with money any more than democrats.

Neither candidate is talking specifics about a widespread government cutback. McCain's 1 year spending freeze (except on the military, surprise surprise) doesn't do anything if in two years budgets increase extra to make up for the loss, not to mention it would disproportionately affect certain areas above others. McCain's aspirations for a balanced budget are particularly insane when you consider the war in Iraq. Joseph Stiglitz, a nobel prize winner, has estimated the cost at $3,000,000,000,000 - and has cited this government spending as the largest retardant of our economy. Obama has promised to go through the budget with a fine toothed comb, but since the budget is transparent already, I think it is clear why he hasn't already done so & shown us what he'll do. Either it would upset too many people or he can't cut as much as he says or both.

As for McCain's promise to veto all pork barrel spending, it is absurd. Earmarks are 3% of the budget, and they're always attached to "bread for orphans" bills. If someone attaches an earmark to a military spending item (the biggest place they're attached to now), is there any chance McCain would veto it? I didn't think so. It is good to expose this stuff to public scrutiny, and it is good to oppose them, but to make them the central budget issue is deceitful or ignorant. Only Obama is talking about cutting military spending, and no one is talking about the impending social security & medicare costs which are about to explode.

As for government intervention, markets *do* need some regulation - they just need the right kind. I won't go into stuff you know, like externalities and other market failures, or technical issues like the game theory behind collusion, but I think the collapsing credit derivative swap market is an excellent example of a market without regulation. Regarding drilling for oil, this is one of those things where anti-drillers will point to externalities. If consumption of oil causes externalities (pollution for one, perhaps global warming), then we'd want to reduce our consumption. Making oil expensive is a good way to do this, although taxation would be a smarter way to achieve this goal. Cheap alternative energy is a good idea too - though I think we can all agree ethanol is an indefensible subsidy to farmers & tax on food. However, both candidates were strongly pro ethanol & alternative energy subsidies in the primaries.

About taxation, I do think we're taxed too much - businesses too. Obama wants to give a cut to everyone making less than 250k/year, and keep revenues about the same. McCain wants to give a cut to everyone, which would slash federal revenue. Never mind it is congress who passes tax law, not the president. Slashing revenue is a good idea, but *only* if accompanied by related spending cuts, which neither candidate is serious about. Cutting revenue when we're already over $10,000,000,000,000 in debt, and we're about to face the most drastic increase in federal payouts (social security, medicare, etc) - is nothing short of reckless. And the "starve the beast" idea can't even be given credence anymore. McCain has a trickle-down approach, and that's fine if he believes it (even if good economists no longer do), and Obama has a targeted approach (which is just wealth redistribution). However, McCain insists on painting Obama's tax plan as a tax increase (when it is revenue neutral), so no one is having the real debate.

Another big problem with taxation is unequal tax rates. When certain companies are given good deals via taxation, it distorts the market supply & consumption. So giving tax cuts to industries we want to thrive will come at the expense of all other industry. If you ever wondered why we've ditched manufacturing & gone to intellectual property - look at the great deal copyright offers, you can profit from something practically forever. Inconsistent trade restraints create similar problems. Sugar tariffs are a backwards subsidy to corn growers (since those making food use less sugar & more corn syrup). Farm subsidies, which make grains cheaper, also make meat cheaper - which has contributed to the obesity issues here. So I'd agree we need less government intervention generally, but I think making the intervention more even handed is just as big an issue. Neither candidate will talk about subsidies, selective tax cuts, or jagged tariff rates.

McCain & Obama have both changed their minds on issues, and I'm ok with that. Whether you call it being "wishy-washy" or just education, is a matter of preference. So long as they're changing their minds based on new/better information & analysis, rather than political pressure, it is a good thing.

The last bit attacking Obama is indefensible. Obama does put his hand on his heart during the national anthem sometimes, here are two pictures. And if not putting your hand over your heart all the time makes him hate America, Bush Sr. & Bush Jr. must hate America too. Reverend Wright is a nutjob, but knowing someone well doesn't mean you agree with their ideas. I've got plenty of friends in law school with whom I disagree with on nearly every issue. McCain was friendly with Harry Haldeman (the infamous Nixon aide) and Charles Keating (and may have helped protect him in the S&L scandal), does that make him unfit to be president? I don't think so.

As for the Che flag, Che was clearly a mass murderer, a despot, and is only famous because he died young & handsome. Che's big complaint was that the endemic poverty in Latin America resulted from an imported class system and monopoly capitalism - and he was largely right - but what does the flag mean? Does it mean Obama wants to overthrow the government & setup a new system driven by moral rather than economic incentives? Doubtful.

As for Bill Ayers, he was part of a terrorist group in the 60s – but Obama knew Ayers in the 90s. I believe people can change. If they can't, then is McCain still a wife-cheating philander? I don't think so, but if you thought no one could drop a terrible past like that, you might think so. Ayers is a professor now at the same university at which Obama taught - it shouldn't be a surprise they know each other. More importantly, what does this mean anyway? That Obama is a sleeper terrorist? No, it means he knows a guy who used to be a revolutionary in the 60s.

As for Fannie & Freddie - both campaigns have close ties and neither saw the financial crisis coming. Actually Ron Paul is the only candidate who did, and he saw it coming as early as 2001. I won't go into the specifics here, as this reply is already horrifically long, but neither candidate has a good idea of what to do. Both supported the bailout - which increased the money supply & federal debt in order to solve problems caused by having too much money in the housing market & too much debt. And as long as we're being honest, neither candidate seems to acknowledge that inflation, driven by federal debt & spending, is a hidden tax on people - no matter whether the spending is for the military or social programs.

The bit about communism is interesting. Communism means several different things - it means the equal distribution system envisioned by Engel & Marx, and it means the autocratic system implemented by Russia & China. Obama has never suggested we get rid of the market system, democracy, money, or anything of the kind - calling him communist is baseless.

I guess my point is that neither candidate is a great choice. Obama's anti trade rhetoric during the primaries was scary, McCain's military leanings are scary. Neither are talking about most of the real issues that matter. Neither seem to have a good handle on the the economy. Both candidates are interested in redistribution of wealth, as is anyone who advocates uneven taxation, subsidies, tariffs, deficit spending, or any social programs. Obama is maybe more overt about it, but neither is against it entirely. Personally, I'll be voting for Baldwin, but McCain's hawkish leanings make me seriously reconsider voting for Obama. If the government is going to spend money it doesn't have, I'd rather it spend those dollars at home than on the military abroad, and I'd rather a brilliant professor from Chicago shaping the spending than a bottom 10% naval cadet.

Sean

The "Credit Crisis"

2008-05-23T02:20:00.002-04:00

Intro

A few people have asked me what this "credit crunch" is, and what the big deal is over subprime mortgages. Let me explain briefly.

Terms

A mortgage is actually just a document that says the bank can take your property if you default on your loan. So I'll be using loan throughout this little essay, not mortgage.

A "subprime" loan is simply a loan with a higher risk of default - e.g. a loan to someone otherwise not qualified for this loan. A loan may be subprime for a number of risk factors - bad past credit history, low/no income relevant to the size of the loan, you get the idea.

The Old Way

When you get a loan for your house, your lender (almost always) immediately sells the loan to a big broker. This is to allocate risk. If a small lender sees 5/10 loans go belly up on a freak thing, the lender might go belly up too. This is unlikely, but it is even less likely for 50% of 1000 loans to go belly up.

This broker bundles lots of similar loans together and sells basically sells parts of the income. They basically sell sections of the revenue stream. This way the big broker doesn't even have to take all the risk himself, and the big broker doesn't need to have all the money it lent out, since the broker can borrow the money to lend, from investors. See this isn’t hard right?

The New Way

Brokers figured out a new way of selling investments. The old way was selling sections of the revenue stream. For instance, they might sell 2% of the loan payments, for a certain bundle of loans, to Jon in exchange for $1,000 now. Got it?

The new way breaks down the payments into "traunches." Lets say we use 3 traunches. The 1st traunch gets the 1st 1/3 of the loan payments from a bundle. Got it? The 2nd traunch gets the 2nd 1/3 of loan payments. The 3rd traunch gets the last 1/3rd of payments.

Naturally the 1st 1/3 of payments is very safe. More than 2/3 of the loans would have to go belly up before the 1st traunch failed to fill completely. So these assets sold at nearly face value. For example, if income is expected to be 1k/month, a 12 month asset would cost just under 12k (due to time value of money, and very very minor risk). These brokerages got these "1st traunch" assets rated as very safe. Safe for stuff like teacher's pensions.

Naturally the last 1/3 of payments is very risky. If anyone defaults, the revenue is coming out of there. So if loan payments were expected to be 1k/month with this traunch, a 12 month asset would cost much less than 12k. These assets were rated very risky, suitable only for hedge funds and other speculators . Still with me?

Complications

Ok with that setup lets do a small amount of history. Remember the early 2000s, and the pseudo recession? Remember what interest rates were? They were low. Like 1%, maybe lower. What do low interest rates encourage? Not saving, but borrowing & spending. That's how we "boost" the economy.

So lots of people got new houses they could only afford at 1% interest rate. Which means lots of people got loans who shouldn't have. And lots of these same people got "variable" interest rates, so the rates change with whatever is current. Lots of "subprime" loans were made. Some predatory lenders were involved, and some greedy stupid home buyers and brokers were involved, but the end result was lots of people got home loans they weren't going to be able to pay back.

Result

Ok now fast forward to today. What are interest rates now? Not high, but higher. And high enough a lot of these subprime loans are going belly up. Which means brokers are losing their shirts and borrowers are losing their homes.

The loss of these loans basically saps money from the economy & causes constriction of money supply since loans create more money than anything else. The reduction of the money supply makes money, and thus –loans, harder to get. And so we have the “credit crunch.”

Concerns

One big fear is that so many of these loans will default that all the derivative assets (remember the traunches & streams?) will be worthless. Since some of these traunches were rated AAA, this means teachers losing retirement pensions, old ladies losing nest eggs, and general instability in the investment market.

The next concern is with deflation. When these loans default, the mortgage permits the lender to seize the house & sell it. This can result in an auction, an empty house, and other things that drives down housing prices. Problems with the investment market & dropping prices may discourage buyers from looking, thus further depress prices.

The reduction in the money supply makes money harder to get. Which would drive up the interest rate, if the fed wasn’t pumping lots of cash into the market. Deflation increases saving rates (which is important since Americans have a net negative savings rate), but decreases investment. Decreased investment weakens job growth, production, and the economy as a whole.

The concern with low house prices is this: if you have a $250,000 on a house worth $200,000 - you may be better off walking away from the house & the loan & letting the bank seize the house. This is very bad for you: you've already invested in the house, and you lose that. This is bad for the bank: they must seize & sell more property, and lose money on the loan. This is bad for other homeowners: prices will fall further. Et cetera.

One last concern is with huge brokerages like Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. These firms were created by the government, and carry with them an implicit federal bailout safety net. If one or both of these go under, it could cost us a huge amount of money to bail them out. Not that we ever pay off what spend anyway. Clear enough?

Non-Issues

Brokers are learning their lesson. Brokers Lost profit is the slap on the wrist the brokers needed. With the massive amount of money being lost, it is actually much more than a slap on the wrist. Maybe more regulation is necessary to prevent this from recurring, maybe less - I don't know.

Bad loans are getting weeded out. When someone defaults, the broker takes a loss, takes the house, and dissolves the loan. If a broker takes too many of these, they may go out of business. When this happens, they sell the remaining good loans to another broker. Purging bad debt is good, carrying it longer with us is bad.

The market will correct itself. Not everyone losing $250,000 homes is going homeless - they're renting or buying a cheaper place. Borrowers are losing their homes, but these homes aren't disappearing, and the depressed prices are permitting new home owners to buy places they couldn't have afforded 2 years ago. So no one is losing anything they should've had in the first place.

Summary

A confluence of factors came together to make too many people get too many loans they couldn't afford. The loans came due and these people started to default & lose their homes. This potentially affects us all. See, easy to understand.

Scary Liberal Facism

2008-02-26T08:42:00.004-05:00

Glenn Beck has an article (written by Jonah Goldberg) making the claim that compared to the facism of FDR & Woodrow Wilson, Bush is nothing. Yikes.

This article is full of more bull plop than a thousand pound hereford. Just because Mussolini liked FDR doesn't mean Mussolini was right in any way. During the 30s FDR instituted the vast social changes with the help of congress (they passed the bills he wanted), and later with the blessing of the supreme court (who upheld them). Laissez-faire should be dead, laissez-fair has some horrific results from faulty assumptions - e.g. equal bargaining power, no market failures, it assumes no strategic decision making, all interested parties are always rational, all parties have perfect (or nearly) information, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. While Glenn Beck is famous for his alarmist neo-con rhetoric, defaming the man who pulled us out of the great depression AND essentially won WWII is beyond the pale. He is, and acted nothing like Hitler, Mussolini, or any autocrat this article tries to cast him as.

The espionage and sedition act were clearly bad acts, but would never stand today as implemented back then, and they became almost totally unused after WWI. Today people have broad speech protections with regard to public figures (see Sullivan v. NYT), E&S acts notwithstanding.

The US Constitution IS living. It DOES change to meet current needs, and it SHOULD change. Otherwise black americans would be worth 3/5 of what whites are, the courts would still lochnerize every economic bill passed by congress, and the federalists worst fear (that people would assume they have only rights enumerated in the bill of rights) would be a reality. No consumer protection agencies would encourage fly-by-night defrauding of customers. And the lack of privacy rights (there are none enumerated per se in the bill of rights) would give the government a big shove towards autocracy.

The times during Wilson and FDR were dark times, but not because of "facist," because of the great depression (caused by republican presidents and congressmen) and WW2 (caused by real facists). They governed over times when unemployment was huge, poverty was standard, and world wars were raging. They made some bad decisions, but are largely regarded as some of the best presidents we've ever had. They enjoyed broad public support, and led the country through huge crises. Not to minimize 9-11 attacks, or the recession following the dot com bust, but compared to the world wars and the great depression, we haven't gone through anything. What have I sacrificed for the war effort, or what have I lost because of the economic down times? Nothing. The same could not be said by most under FDR or WW.

Bush has abused his power beyond any of the listed presidents. He suspended habeas for anyone (including US Citizens) determined by the military to be an "enemy combatant." He has defied supreme court orders (see Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). He has used signing statements as line item veto (also explicitly declared unconstitutional by the supreme court). He's set up military tribunals to try citizens alike with non-citizens. He has presided over the largest illegal snooping ever known. None of the other presidents had others tortured, and we just don't know how prevalent it is now (certainly more than 3 people). None of the others used extaordinary rendition to "export" detainees to places where real torture is practiced - black op sites in libya, egypt, and saudi arabia. Not even during WWI or the New Deal did the US have such a reckless fiscal policy, or spend nearly as much (inflation ajusted) as now - the one exception being WW2.

Wilson and FDR are nothing like Bush. They both did some really stupid things (like comprimise 10 of 14 points for the league of nations, or breaking the 2 term precedent). They both also did some horrific things (E&S act, executive order 9066). They both also did great things - women's sufferage, institute the fed (maybe a mixed blessing), preserve national parks, trust busting, found the march of dimes, and presiding over the biggest crises the US has faced from the Civil war to today. Both were very smart (perhaps Wilson more than FDR), both literally worked themselves to death as presidents, and both are highly esteemed by historians and the public alike. Bush has none of these characteristics, he has presided over no crisis to the scale of either WWI, WW2, or the great depression, he is not an intellectual, he does not work half as hard, his ideals are as shallow as a sweet valley high book, and he's been nothing but divisive and ruinous.

The whole premise of the article is absurd. To seek to justify current presidential misdeeds by pointing to past misdeeds is stupid, but common. It is equally stupid to try to color the water for the democrats by showing past democrats have done stupid things, thus anyone who espouses similar ideas will repeat the past stupidities. I prefer a candidate trying to pick the good things from FDR & WW, than a candidate seeking to continue the bad things from Bush.

2008 Candidates

2007-12-07T09:22:00.001-05:00

As anyone who reads this blog will know, I’m an ardent Ron Paul supporter. I don’t agree with everything he says—going to a gold standard would be disastrous, universal health care seems inevitable as it does desirous with the emergence of available genetic information, realistically some kind of amnesty must be given to illegal immigrants, the Fed plays an integral role in our society (albeit one that could use more sunshine), and although NAFTA-esqe agreements aren’t optimal, they beat the alternatives currently on the table.

I am continuously baffled though, by how others like some of the other candidates. I think there is a lot to like in most of the candidates. Obama and Kucinich particularly seem appealing both to me and on from a broader approach. I’ll say this—each candidate has at least a few things good about them, even if the rest of their proposed policies are nothing short of lunacy. Three experiences to illustrate.

First with regards to Romney. Like Romney, I happen to be an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In school one day, a classmate of mine asked me what I thought about Romney. I said something like this—“he seems like a nice guy, and has some sensible policies, but largely I think he’s a populist idiot, I wouldn’t vote for him with a 10 foot pole.”

This surprised my friend. He thought because Romney is LDS, as am I, I’d support him. I sputtered some poorly worded response about voting for issues not people. What I should have said is this—“how the heck does his religion matter apart from his policies?” Voting for someone based simply on what religion they belong to, apart from their policy positions, is just as bad as voting for someone because they’re white. Religious persuasion can convey positions—religious people generally oppose abortion, but that is really about where it stops. Here’s an example of a policy generally advocated by those most loudly touting moral values (i.e. the republicans): they seem to want to get into any war they can regardless of the human or financial costs to America or others. How’s that for turning the other cheek?

Next an experience I had with a Giuliani supporter. I was talking politics with a friend and he asked me what I thought of Giuliani. I said that I thought he was a one-note politician (security is that note) who would sacrifice anything (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness) for that one note. I may have also said, “he’s the devil’s candidate.”

Another classmate of mine, who I deeply respect as a brilliant person, said “I’m a Giuliani supporter.” This floored me, what could anyone as smart as this woman see in Giuliani that would overcome his being about as shallow as a puddle? Later I asked her. She said he had reduced crime in NYC drastically and seemed to handle the 9-11 emergency well. When I pointed out that crime fell drastically in the 90s everywhere about the same amount as NYC, it was immaterial to her. I asked her what she thought of his record of giving expansive powers to law enforcement, and I wondered what powers he’d give to government agencies if elected. She thought it was good that the criminals are caught, and if the police have to get a little dirty doing it, that was alright with her. I wondered to myself if she’d have supported the Gestapo.

How could someone so brilliant believe such drivel about “protecting America?” I’m not talking about someone who is brilliant in a way not related to politics, I’m in law school. I sincerely hope her support of the destruction of liberties is made in ignorant trust of the government, not from knowing but ignoring history and reason.

Lastly with Hillary Clinton. I’m still technically a resident of New York. More accurately I’m a resident of nowhere, and I probably won’t be for some time, but Hillary is our senator. My wife and I were over at some friends house for dinner and politics came up. Our friends both said they endorsed Hillary. She has a lot to offer, so I asked what it was about her they liked. Their response? Not anything about her experience (which I think she overstates), nothing about sensible policies, nothing about her competently run campaign. They said, “we think its time for a woman to be president.”

What??! When pressed about her policies they mumbled something about universal healthcare and looked eager to change subjects. Because these are great people, whom we really like, I obliged. Had it been a classmate, coworker, single friend, or relative I would have asked the obvious question: is it really wise to choose a candidate to be leader of the free world on the basis of gender alone? Obama would be the first non-white president, why not vote for him? I don’t think I have to repeat how insane it is to choose a candidate on anything other than positions and voting record.

So why do I support Ron Paul when I disagree with many of his policies? First because I agree with him on the most important ones—being fiscally conservative, contracting the government, doing an about face on foreign policy, free trade with all, and giving federal power back to the states. There are many more examples. Second because even when I disagree I see valid logic behind his policies. I support some kind of amnesty for illegal immigrants. He wants to stop illegal immigration, throw the illegals out, then vastly increase the amount of legal immigrants we are willing to take. His point is this: when our system favors allowing people willing to break the law into our country over those willing to wait and hope for a legal means of entry we’re getting the wrong kind of people. His reasoning makes sense. Lastly, I support him because he’s smart on his own. He doesn’t have a cadre of advisors and yes-men approving what he says, dumbing issues down for him, and giving him statements and positions. Many of the other candidates do, and I feel if they don’t have the capacity, or haven’t taken the time, to learn the issues thoroughly for themselves, their positions aren’t their own.

My point is this: very few seem to care enough to really look at the issues. Many explanations could be had for this. The rational voter theory—that people in aggregate vote rationally because the yahoos cancel each other out—can not possibly be true in an election with as much issue-obscuring media hype as a presidential election. As a side note, do we really need the constant self-fulfilling polls all the time? What do I care that 40% of republicans in America want to vote in a lunatic? He’s still a lunatic and I’m not voting for him.
They don’t have enough time or interest, they don’t think the president’s decision impact them enough to care, or if they’re cynical and regard all candidates basically the same so it doesn’t matter. They may be right on the 3rd point, I see Edwards, Clinton, Romney, Giuliani, McCain & others as more of the same. But they don’t have to be right, if everyone looked at positions and records rather than faces, sound bites, and polls I think real change—people like Kucinich, Obama, or Paul—might happen.

PS – **** you Frank! (strong language warning)

Things Which Must Not Be Named

2007-11-03T02:48:00.000-04:00

A brewing controversy at my law school. The other day the following email circulated around the 1st year students.

Fellow Classmates:
As I'm sure many of you have heard, it is very likely that Professor Heidt will not be permitted to teach any "required course" (first-year classes) after this year. This decision, from what I understand, has been primarily based on the withdrawal of several students from his class and his personal beliefs regarding affirmative action in law-school admissions.

If you have no yet read his article discussing IU's admissions procedures, it is available here.

I am quite shocked that the law school is even considering this. We can all debate the substance of Prof. Heidt's article as much as we want; I don't really think that's the issue here, though. Personally, for me, this is not an issue of race or affirmative action; this is about expression. It seems like the law school is trying to penalize Prof. Heidt by engaging in some sort of retroactive censorship. We have all been in Prof. Heidt's class long enough to see that his personal beliefs are irrelevant in class.

I would like to start a petition saying that what the law school is doing here is, well, wrong... but, in more polite, sophisticated language. So, I am going to be in our Torts class early on Monday to get input from others of you. I'm going to aim to be there around 10:15 a.m. I will also start to draft a preliminary petition for Monday. I hope that some of you will come with your thoughts.
- Sender's Name Removed

To begin with, I don't have Professor Heidt, so I don't have a dog in this fight. If you read the linked article, I wonder why students aren't angry about the admissions therein, rather than his discontinuance from teaching a 1L class. If he's right, the IU admissions department is actively harming the schools reputation by accepting lower caliber minority students than comparable schools. I wonder though, if these personal beliefs are irrelevant to the way the course is taught (which I can't say, he's not my professor), why remove him from his class? The only reason can be that 1L classes are considered "good," and losing one is bad, though I can't fathom why that would be.

Also, I'm highly skeptical of this claim. Why would he be punished now for this belief, when this article came out in 2003? And in the article, he references another article he write even earlier than that. If the administration was really trying to blacklist him, they're 4+ years too late, the cat is out of the bag, the Michigan cases were decided in favor of affirmitive action (but against Michigan's implementation of these rules) 4 years ago, and those who brought it up again recently have already settled . But lets say that this is exactly as the student writer is claiming and that Prof. Heidt will not teach 1L classes anymore, even though he wants to, and there is no legitimate reason for this to be the case. If this is some kind of retribution for a criticism of IU acceptance standards, I'd be more interested in finding the decision maker responsible for this move than engaging in some kind of futile discussion about free speech in academics.

Anyhow, on to the substance of this post. It looks as if some students are surprised that talking negatively about affirmitive action is a no-no. This shouldn't surprise anyone who keeps up with the news. Everyone knows there are protected minorities - african-americans, jewish individuals, and muslims are starting to become that way. Asians, caucasians, and to a lesser extent hispanics, are on the opposite end of spectrum. Every protected minority got that status in reaction to gross widespread racism in the past, and many minorities retain that status because of present socio-political concerns.

I can't say I fully support or approve of affirmitive action, but I do approve of its goals - to attempt to remedy the disadvantage statistically inherent to many protected minorities. I won't venture a theory as to why country wide gaps in education, earnings, criminal behavior, and life expectancy, but it is clear such gaps exist with certain protected minorities. Some other protected minorities - such as jewish individuals - don't have the same kind of gaps, and are not typically afforded the benefits of affirmitive action.

Anyhow, through hindsight we can see many monstrously unfair societal norms and attitudes we formerly held. Many people, in a well intentioned attempt to eliminate unfair societal norms from our present society that are, as yet, unnoticed by the "general populace" see gross injustices everywhere. As such our society has many things you can't speak about publicly with impunity. Certain speech about protected minorities is one of those things. Anyone in a public job can find no faster way to ruin their career than to say something negative about a protected minority. Don Imus, a "shock jock" who made a career out of saying offensive things, was only fired when he made another offensive comment about african-americans. Mel Gibson was essentially blacklisted in Hollywood for making an offensive comment about jews while drunk. A similar story played out for Michael Richards, except african-americans were the target of his tirade.

Now, I'm not condoning racism or racist remarks. All three of those comments showed a terrific lack of respect for all people, especially for the minorities directly targetted. If Mel Gibson had said something like that about the Irish, or if Richards had gone on a tirade about hispanics it probably would not have made the news. My point is there are some things we can't say, like when Lawrence Summers suggested that something other than just socialization must exist to explain why more men than women were in high-end science (aside from causing a media outrage he was officially censured). To show how exaggerated this sensitivity is, just think back to when Anthony Howard was forced to resign from his position working for a mayor for merely saying something that sounded like another unrelated offensive word? It seems like you're more likely to be forgiven for cheating on your wife, or even for using cocaine, than for making a racist remark towards a protected minority.

So again I don't see why this is shocking to anyone who keeps up with the news. Affirmitive action became non-controversial in the employment field long ago, and as we've realized the gaps can't be remedied so late in an individuals life, we've pushed affirmitive action earlier. It has largely become uncontroversial in higher education as well. With so many prominent media figures (who probably reflect the public quite well) acting "shocked" and "offended" for a living, is any of this surprising? There are just some things we aren't mature enough to talk about as a society.

My Search for a Calendaring Application

2007-10-11T15:19:00.000-04:00

I’ve been looking for good calendaring on Linux for a while. Long ago I came to the conclusion that they are all either too bulky or too feature poor. So I started using google calendar, and now I’m hooked.

I’d love to give it up, there are many situations where I don’t have internet access (I guess I could print to file the agendas) and need to add something to my calendar. And switching to a purely desktop based app would bork me when I’m not around my school laptop (I use several computers throughout a day).

On my school laptop I use fluxbox and evolution/kazehakase on a very very stripped down xubuntu install - not because the laptop is old (1.6ghz Pent M, 1.5 gig ram) but because I appreciate quick lightweight apps. From boot to a usable system, my laptop takes 45-50 seconds. It wakes up from standby in less than 5, and from hibernation in closer to 15. Heavy kde/gnome stuff is fine on a desktop I don’t frequently power down, but for a laptop you can’t beat that boot speed.

All the desktop calendar apps I’ve looked at are deficient in important ways, for example: korganizer, kontact, and evolution all have high quality calendars, but they are coupled with mail clients and a thousand libraries. Plus, all three of those (as well as sunbird) are full on desktop space consuming apps. Something like gdeskcal would be awesome if it could two-way sync with google calendar, but Xcal and orage are just too feature poor to be handy.

rainlender2 looked like the solution to my problems - it syncs easily with google calendar (via gcaldaemon), and it is lightweight. Unfortunately it isn’t in the deb repos (proprietary reasons I think) and the directions I’ve found on arsgeek & howtogeek give me an error “Unable to load resources from path: /opt/rainlendar2/resources/”. I’ve checked the file permissions and I’ve checked to be certain that path exists - it should work on both counts. So I’m stuck again.

If the kdelibs ever get light enough they don’t slow down my laptop, I’d jump on korganizer in a second (and kmail instead of korganizer if gmail supported imap, but that is another story). But for now I’m stuck taking notes in a tiddlywiki page and using google calendar, neither of which are really all that bad.

My Quest for Note Taking Software

2007-09-07T14:58:00.000-04:00

Note Taking Software

When I first started I thought I had everything planned for taking notes. I employed two tiddlywikis, one (the original) for briefs of all all cases we covered, and one (tiddlywikiSE) for in class notes, and out of class notes. This system has a lot of nice features. Everything is stored in two html files, which makes it easy to backup, to bring anywhere, and cross platform.

I started running into some limitations almost immediately. Some of these I can work around, tagging more copiously, linking properly and whatnot. Some of the limitations I can't work around. For example, I may want to see all "tiddlers" marked with both "torts" and "assault", so as to filter all assault cases that are for criminal law. Now I could just have a different tiddlywiki for each class, and this isn't a bad idea, it is just one I'd like to avoid because it makes searching across classes impossible.

The biggest limitations are with searching. While you can use regular expressions, if you aren't sure how you spelled a word (judgement v. judgment), the search box will only find sequential terms. I'd like to find two words that may not be next to each other, with a simple search. Another issue with searching is speed. With only 3 weeks under my belt, I have nearly 50 cases. Searching is taking longer and longer, and if a term results with more than 10 "tiddlers", Linux thinks my browser has locked up! The tiddlers do eventually come up, but it is so slow.

I've been looking for other systems. Moving 50 cases and 100+ pages of notes sucks, but when I'm creating an outline in October it will really suck to move 200 cases and 400+ pages of notes. So I'd rather sooner than later. I could also just suck it up and stick with this system for this semester and start over with a new system, carte blanche, next semester, but most of my classes are part one of two parts. I'm not going to deal with two systems simultaneously.

So to find the right system, I've begun thinking of my requirements. What I've got so far follows:

Avoiding Lock-in - I expect to keep these notes for sometime. For this reason my content can't be locked in to anything avoidable. 1st - Cross Platform - I won't be locked in to any specific OS, Windows or Linux. I use both, and I refuse to have access to my notes stuck with one or the other. That doesn't mean I need the ability to write notes from either OS (though that is strongly preferred), but it does mean I need the ability to read notes form either OS. 2nd - Exportable - the new system must allow me to export the contents to another system or some intermediary format. This necessitates a specific export function, or that the notes be kept in extractable plain text. 3rd - Duplicatable - I use more than one computer, I have a server, a desktop, and a laptop. The notes must be easy to synchronize across computers.

Avoiding Loss - I can not lose these notes. Not to hard drive failure, not to program discontinuance, not to file format obsolescence. Backups are a must, or some web solution with a trusted company, like google.

Access - This requirement overlaps somewhat with the "avoiding lock-in" requirement, but it goes further. 1st - Portable - these notes must be accessible from my computer regardless of my internet connectivity status. 2nd - Printable - I don't mean some kludge like printing screenshots, or using copy/paste to put the text in a word document, I want to be able to select more than one note at a time, and print them.

Ease of Use - I can't spend all my time fiddling (even if I'd like to). That means the notes cannot require an infrastructure, like a MySQL database or perl, for access. Web servers are right out by the same token, I don't want to worry about apache, or lighttp, or whatever, just to read/write to my notes. I'd rather not have to use a particular syntax, but I don't find wiki syntax particularly limiting or cumbersome. I also don't want to have to learn a complex system, like Vi, just to deal with notes, it should be relatively intuitive.

Findable - stuff I put in this system must be easy to recall. 1st - Searchable - some good searching is critical. I don't need the search to find terms that are synonyms, though that'd be nice, nor do I necessarily need regular expression support, but it must search across notes (not just within), and it'd be really nice if it was smart enough to find two terms in the same note that aren't next to each other. 2nd - Filterable - If a search comes up with 50 items, I'd like some way to exclude the irrelevant ones. Really good searching would eat this requirement, but in its absence some sort of tagging (preferable to folders IMHO) would do as long as you can filter by more than one tag at once. 3rd - Sortable - if a search turns up 50 items, I'd like to be able to sort them by date, or tag, or something relevant.

Lastly two miscellaneous requirements. Scalable - I'll be putting hundreds of notes in here over the course of a semester. This volume can make some solutions unusable if they don't have a good way of categorizing and hiding information. Smart - This is a feature I'd like, but I don't need. I want to do as little organizing as possible. So the less time I spend tagging, creating folders/subfolders, organizing and whatnot, the better (particularly since my professors typically don't categorize their speeches until they've developed them, i.e. at the end, and even then sometimes we're left guessing until much later).

My current tiddlywiki solution isn't bad. It is cross platform, the notes are stored in plain text in the html file, I can rsync the html file for duplication and backup. It is totally portable, and I can print a number of notes at once with no problems. It is dead easy to use, once you know the basic syntax, and it requires no extra pieces of software (other than a web browser). The search box, as I've mentioned, leaves a lot to be desired - it is slow, it can only find sequential words, it can't do any filtering by tag or word, and you cannot sort results (or anything) at all. TiddlyWiki also doesn't seem to scale well at all, nor is it terribly smart.

I've looked at a number of solutions, but I've found them all majorly deficient on a few counts. Simple note taking software, like tomboy, has poor searchability. Web based productivity software, like ijot, notely, or google notebook, is by definition utterly inaccessible without the web. Regular wikis, like DokuWiki or MediaWiki, require a full on LAMP stack--yuck! Mindmapping software, like FreeMind, doesn't seem to scale or be particularly searchable, and Microsoft's OneNote fails utterly on the lock-in front, as well as a few others. Outlining software, like KnowIt or BasKet, takes too much fiddling with organization to be worth the benefits their interface bring. The portable wikis, like Zim and TiddlyWiki, all have some major deficiencies as well--typically lousy searching and poor scalability (tiddlywiki scales poorly from a performance standpoint, Zim from a usability standpoint).

The only other two ideas I can think of are pen and paper, which obviously isn't searchable at all, and doing the whole text document in nested folders (the folders acting as "tags"). The text document idea isn't bad, I can index it with some kind of database (google desktop might work here) to make it searchable, and there always grep for regular expressions, but folders aren't as good as tags and this would require an awful lot of organizing, tagging, and whatnot.

The mythical ideal situation would be something like an offline gmail account. Something where you could create your note, tag it, and archive it, but that would have great search functions (like including/excluding tags). I don't think type of search functionality is really possible without a database, and I'm fine with a database so long as that isn't where my notes are stored. If there was a way to search text files as efficiently as you can search archived gmail, I'd love to know about it.

For now I may use a combination of two methods. I may use a pen and paper to take notes, then clean them up and throw them into tiddlywiki or text documents. The extra step to do this is probably worth it because it will help my notes become more readable and more focused.

If any of you have systems that have worked great for you on most of the fronts I've listed, I'd be interested to hear them!

A Discovery in Bloomington

2007-09-05T10:08:00.000-04:00

My wife and I moved to Bloomington Indiana early this summer. One of the first things we noticed, other than all the hippies, is what seems to be a high rate of birth defects. In our church most of the healthy children were born elsewhere. Of those couples who have had children here, again, we noticed a high rate of birth defects. One baby must eat through a feeding tube, one couple lost their second child very late in their pregnancy (not a normal miscarriage), one couple’s child has had a major issue with his kidney, one couple is pregnant with a baby that has full triploidy syndrome (which is fatal), and the list goes on. Of course the frequency isn’t 100%, but it is really high.

My family has had experience, not with birth defects, but with weird health issues—of my 5 siblings, one had cancer and survived, one has juvenile arthritis, one has ovarian cysts, and we lost another to cancer. All of my siblings are younger than me, and all of these issues developed in teenage years or before. We still wonder if a nearby landfill could be to blame, or something else. We don’t know, and we’ll probably never know, but that is probably the reason I’m naturally suspicious of health problems that develop with high frequency.

The issue of birth defects is of particular concern to us because we are considering having a child soon, and we, like everyone else, want our child to have the best chance possible at happiness and comfort in life. We’ve looked around for evidence of what might cause this, but, though many people had noticed the frequency of birth defects, no one knew of why. The internet seemed likewise silent. All the Bloomington, IN hits revolved around IU, and when checked with “birth defects”, an ambulance chasing law firm came up.

So I was reading digg.com, like I do every morning, and I came across a link to an old “TV Funhouse” from SNL. I’d seen it before, it is about major corporations controlling media for their own benefit. At one point in the video, PCBs are mentioned as a harmful substance dumped by GE and Westinghouse. Since I like to know a little bit about everything, I thought I’d look up PCBs at my favorite source—Wikipedia.

I read about why Polychlorinated biphenyl was used, and what its properties are—all very interesting. As I’m scrolling down I see “Large Scale Contaminations.” The first instance is in the upper Hudson river—which is famous for its high level of pollution. No surprise there. The next instance is, guess what, Bloomington Indiana. Here is the relevant quote:

From the late 1950s through 1977, Westinghouse Electric used PCBs in the manufacture of capacitors in its Bloomington, Indiana plant. Reject capacitors were hauled and dumped in area salvage yards and landfills. Workers also dumped PCB oil down factory drains which contaminated the city sewage treatment plant. The City of Bloomington gave away the sludge to area farmers and gardeners, creating anywhere from 200 to 2000 sites which remain unaddressed. Over 2 million pounds of PCBs were estimated to have been dumped in Monroe and Owen Counties, making it the biggest concentration of PCBs in the world. Although federal and state authorities have been working on the site remediations, many areas remain contaminated. Concerns have been raised regarding the removal of PCBs from the karst limestone topography, and regarding the possible disposal options. To date, the Westinghouse Bloomington PCB Superfund site case does not have a RI/FS (Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study) and ROD (Record of Decision), although Westinghouse signed a US Department of Justice Consent Decree in 1985.

Yikes! So I google Bloomington Indiana superfund, and lo and behold a ton of hits come right up about superfund sites dealing with PCB contamination in Bloomington. Not to be deterred, I read more. It turns out that PCBs get into the air, and generally affect humans that way (and I thought it was our nasty tap water). A document citing the EPA for “callous disregard for human life and health” at one of the Bloomington superfund sites dated 1997 says “the memo does not say how high the PCB levels are in the air but only that they exceed one microgram which is already fifteen times greater that the Superfund target risk level of one per million.”

So then I googled “birth defect” pcb. Guess what, another landslide of information. The NY Times carried an article in 1988 about a PCB spill in Taiwan causing widespread birth defects. The Times writes “Researchers said this was the first well-documented demonstration that PCB's can cause birth defects in humans, and it is one of the few instances of any environmental pollutant causing such defects.” Birthdefects.org (whom we’d expect to be biased towards finding birth defects) writes:

“widespread human toxicity occurred after consumption of PCB contaminated rice oil in Japan and China… follow-up studies of children exposed in utero to PCB have been reported by several researchers. Rogan and colleagues studied over 100 Taiwanese children conceived in the 5 years after their mothers had been poisoned by PCBs and their contaminants, the polychlorinated dibenzofurans. The children had a significant excess of ectodermal defects and developmental delays. In the U.S., studies have reported that at the upper end of exposures in the general population, there is evidence of motor impairment in newborn infants, motor delay in 6 and 12 month olds and impaired visual recognition memory in 7 month olds.”

As it turns out there is an entire active organization dedicated to opposing PCBs in Monroe County, Indiana (where Bloomington is located). COPA – The Coalition Opposed to PCB Ash in Monroe County, Indiana—maintains an active and up-to-date website dealing with this problem. The Monroe County Library also keeps an entire section, online and in the library, dedicated to PCB news and reports.

I haven’t uncovered some kind of conspiracy. All of this evidence is well documented, and may be well understood by anyone interested. But it worries me nonetheless. What Will my wife and I do? I don’t know, at some point we may decide it is worth the risk. We may look to transfer law schools, or just wait until we live elsewhere. I just wonder how frequent this kind of thing is—and how many people it affects.

Praise and its Effect on Effort

2007-04-21T05:49:00.000-04:00

This article from NYMag is one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time. Very perceptive, and it rings completely true for me. Rather than reading the blatherings of my post here, go read the article instead. It is great.

As a synopsis, the article is about praise, innate ability, and persistence. The article details how smart, highly-praised kids, and I think it applies to adults to a lesser degree, can be afraid to work hard. When they are praised for their abilities, they come to believe abilities are innate, not earned. Because they think brains, athleticism, musical adeptness, and other abilities are is innate, they shy away from challenges. When are praised for their process, the practice, the effort, and the hard work they’ve put in, they are more likely to do more of the same.

I lived this article. To some extent I still do. Often in high school, my friends and I would joke about how lazy we were, and how much wasted potential we had. We knew we had great capabilities, great intelligence, but we weren't willing to work. I always thought we were afraid of failure, but that wasn't it because sometimes, due to our lack of work, we DID fail. And it didn't bother us. What I realized we were afraid of was finding our limits--what we could and could not do. It was preferable to fail at something we hadn't tried at than fail at something we had. There was some dignity in failing, if you hadn't tried, because you still could be "smart." Heck, my senior quote was literally:

Some say, “I may not be the smartest man, but I can work harder than any other.” I say, “I may not be the smartest man, but I sure am close.”

I think there was dignity in failure when we didn’t try largely because we had some suspicions about ability being more innate than "earned" so to speak. And we'd brag, we said we didn't work because "we didn't have to," rather than the truth "because we were scared to." We even looked down on hard workers, made uncomfortable by their efforts to get ahead. They would study and we wouldn’t, studying to us was cheating, tilting the playing field. Because of this we reveled in pop quizzes where no one could study, and dreaded take-home tests where there were no excuses for not doing so.

Then college came and basically slapped me in the face. My first semester I took mostly classes I thought I could do very well at with little effort, but still look like I was working hard. No seriously look at my classes—Computer Science 235 (I'd done well in AP CS), English 115 (I bloody tested out of this, I didn't need to take it), Calc 2 (I’d already taken part of this in AP Calc), Physics (which I'd completely already had in AP physics), and a religion class (though I’d attended 4 years of seminary). So I didn't try in these classes, I'd had this stuff before right? And I got destroyed.

The next semester was little better. I took mostly classes others were taking. I didn't want to blaze my own trail anymore. I don't know when I gained confidence in my academic abilities, it was gradual. Coming back from my two year break, I was still largely careful to take classes I was comfortable in, or thought I would be. I still don't think I have full confidence in my abilities, my last full semester I decided to audit, rather than take, an econ course I knew I'd enjoy but had a reputation for being difficult.

This is not to say I didn't take difficult classes, I did. My first semester I accidentally took some very difficult classes. My last two semesters I took quite a few very challenging courses.

I don't know if my brother is similar in this way with me. Perhaps. Maybe he has something else. Maybe he really didn't have to work in high school. I don't know. I'll bet this could apply to my youngest sister though. And I think this problem is incredibly widespread.

Anyhow, the entire article rings true with me. I don't think anyone is to blame for my own laziness but me; everyone told me I was smart—school teachers, church teachers, my parents, my siblings, my friends, everyone.

I think about the praise I get now. Some of it I value, some I don't. I usually value specific praise—"You do incredible things with excel macros." I usually don't value general praise—"What an asset you are to our company." Both are loose paraphrases of compliments I received this week.

The exceptions to specific and general praise are when the praise comes from someone whose opinion I value greatly. If a non-technical person tells me they're impressed how much I know about computers, big whoop. If my boss (who I always think of as my co-worker, I don't know why) says he is impressed with some part of my technical knowledge, it means something. Even general praise can be valuable this way.

So I guess the challenge is not only to continue to fix the way I look at work, but, more importantly, to fix the way we praise others. To only give meaningful, specific, and motivational praise. And that is hard.

We Hosed Iraq, Let's Face Up To It

2007-04-17T23:45:00.000-04:00

No Military Solution to Occupation
I am a bit of a laggard when it comes to realizing the obvious. I wasn’t thinking about Iraq the other day, when the obvious hit me. We can’t win. Ok that is a little harsh, let me qualify that: we can’t win with force. I absolutely believe that.

What is our current strategy? It is to sit on Iraq until the insurgents go away. No really it is. We try to find them, and get them before they get us. How successful have foreign occupations with limited native support been? Let me think… Afghanistan by the Soviets, Vietnam, Palestine... I could go on.

But I am being dishonest right? There have been many successful military occupations right? Well, not so much. Only two tricks seem to do the job—having a massive size differential (think China and Tibet) or being ruthless (think Japan occupying China).

When I go through and think of the most recent military occupations, I think the occupation of Congo/Zaire by half a dozen African countries. I think of Iraq invading Kuwait. I think of the Falkland Islands by the Argentines. I think of Lebanon by Israel. And which of these invasions remain to this day? None of them.

The lesson of those passed
Let me explain why I think a military solution is impossible. If we had a million troops in Iraq, and a bottomless war chest, we could probably guarantee safety. We could probably restore order. And what would happen to Iraq as soon as we left? All the insurgents that couldn’t step outside would come out. Right now we have a massive force in Iraq. Just massive. And yet we can’t stop insurgents from killing our troops, let alone Iraqi civilians. Why do we think sitting there for longer will stabilize the country, when our presence, so far, has only increased the killings.

Now, many people claim that leaving Iraq would make the sacrifice of all those who died there for nothing. Not so! The deaths which have occurred in Iraq, civilian and military, are terrible. From an analytical perspective they are a sunk cost. Regardless of what we have invested already, do we want to lose more, or cut our losses? Logic dictates we cut our losses.

More importantly, I think, the deaths of the soldiers over in Iraq, if we left, would represent an invaluable lesson to us. A lesson that could save many more future soldiers, children not yet out of diapers, and those yet unborn. If we learn to think before we act, and to defend, not retaliate, the death of all those soldiers will stand for something, a lesson far more value than the lesson we’ll have learned if we stay. That lesson is, if at first force doesn’t work, keep trying.

Popular Support
Many people must support us though, given the huge number of voters that went out for elections right? Well, maybe. Unfortunately this huge number doesn’t seem to be swelling into the Iraqi police or security guard ranks. I think actions are the best indicators of thought and belief. By this standard, Iraqis want democracy, and they want the US out.

The Chaos to Follow
Another common complaint against leaving is that we will plunge the country into further chaos. I think that is right, we will. But it isn’t because we are leaving, it is because we went. Sooner or later we’ll have to leave. Maybe in 5 years, maybe in 10. We can’t outlive the insurgents, we can’t annihilate American resentment by force. Sooner or later we’ll have to leave, and when we do, the very same violence and bloodshed will occur. Who knows, when our best statistical methods determine 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead as a direct result of this war, can it really get much worse?

This Needs to End
I don’t understand why congress has abdicated its responsibility to declare war. Perhaps it is fear of failure, and the inevitable blame that would follow. Perhaps if is something else. But whatever the reason, if history has shown us anything it is that concentrating too much power in any individual, save a very select few, has dangerous consequences. There are many now, not just President Bush, who have a dangerous level of power. This needs to stop. For democracy to work, the people’s wishes must be carried out. The people want out of Iraq. If for no other reason, that ought to be enough.

Amazon's Unbox, or Wait for Apple/Disney

2006-09-08T02:20:00.000-04:00

I tried the Amazon unbox today. Overall the process isn't bad, but this isn't going to unseat DVD sales, Blockbuster, Netflix, or anything else. This is a perfect example of Amazon having lost their focus on their core business.

Initial Thoughts
The first thing I thought was, cool, they'll let me have a version for my video iPod and a version to put on the computer. Wrong, the portable version isn't for iPods, nor for PSPs. The portable version works on the Creative Zen Vision, Toshiba Gigabeat S, Archos AV 500/700, and the iRiver PMC. So their target audience seems to be all 20 people who own one of these devices. Strike one.

Then I also read the restrictions. Windows only. No surprise here, luckily I keep a dual boot, so I have that. US customers only. That is a bummer for our overseas friends, but worrying about copyright laws in every country you sell to? I don’t blame Amazon.

System requirements: 1.5ghz processor, 64 meg video card, and 512 megs of ram. Recommended: 2.5ghz processor, 128mb video card, and 1gb ram. Dang! I could run a DVD on my 733mhz computer back in the day that only had 64mb or RAM! But that is ok; these videos are more compressed (WMV) than standard MPEG2 encoding, so it makes sense. One strange thing—they recommend 5.1 sound, but the video only has two audio channels! Go figure.

And then there is the DRM. You cannot burn the video to a DVD. You cannot play it on your DVD player. You can keep purchased videos on 2 PCs and 2 portable video players at the same time. Rental videos can be stored on your PC for 30 days and once you press play, you have 24 hours to watch the video before it expires. Nice.

So I thought I’d rent something. The rentals are pretty cheap, cheaper than running over to blockbuster anyway. So I rented Office Space. There is some sort of special, where rentals are $1.99 off, Office Space cost me a cool $1.00 flat. Nice.

Installing Unbox Player

First you have to install the Unbox video player. This little program will download the file for you, and play it. Nice. After ordering the rental, you are brought to a webpage with a download icon. I start downloading the video player. As a side note, I am on cable internet. I have seen speeds well in excess of 1 mb/s. This Unbox player came across at a highly varied rate, topping out at 8 kb/s, with an average of 5 kb/s. Nice. So twenty minutes later, when the 3 megabyte file had finished, I went to install it.

The install went largely pretty smoothly. My firewall kept freaking out because the installer repeatedly contacted thawte, but no problem, I just allowed it. I punched in my Amazon login, and I was ready to go.

Well, not yet. The blasted thing wouldn’t connect. The system tray icon had a perpetual question mark over the icon. I opened it up again, and tried to login again. No dice. Since I a computer neat freak, I had already deleted the installer. So I re-downloaded the file (another 20 minutes), re-installed it (actually “repair” according to the installer), and logged in. This time it worked.

Getting Office Space?

Office Space showed up right in my queue. It didn’t look like it had started downloading (the lights on my router weren’t flashing) so I right-clicked on the system tray icon and hit “pause all.” Then I “resumed all.” I re-opened the program, and a little message flashed up—“You’ve used up all your licenses for this video, please visit Unbox.com and repurchase this video.” I hadn’t even downloaded the bloody thing!

So I got screwed out of $1.00. Yep, if it had been any more, I might have been more upset. But not to be deterred, I decided to buy Office Space. It cost a cool $13.45, which is a little insulting since Amazon.com is selling “new and used” Office Space DVDs for $7.79, and I know I can play them in a DVD player.

The order process went smoothly. The movie showed up in my “Unbox player” and started downloading immediately, at 50 k/s. At that rate, between the 1.2 gigabyte full-quality video and the 430 megabyte portable version, it was going to take like… 9 hours!

I’ve Got It!

But I’m a patient man, so I went to bed. Upon awaking, 8 hours later, I found that it had finished. I don’t know how fast it went, but I wouldn’t wait up for movies I bought. So I played the video. It looks good. Really good. As I mentioned, there are only two audio channels. The resolution is good, I don’t know exactly how good (since I had to use the Unbox player, and it doesn’t say), but easily equivalent to DVD quality. All this for 1.2 gigabytes, rather than the 8 or so on a typical DVD.

After watching the movie, I decided that I wanted to play around a bit. I tried to play both video files with VLC, Media Player Classic, VirtualDub, and a few other players I embarrassed to admit I tried. Of course the file didn’t work on any of them.[1]

I had heard reports that FairUse4WM, a program that strips DRM out of Windows Media files, worked for these video files. I thought I’d give it a shot, so I did. Perhaps I wasn’t doing it right, but it didn’t work for me. No matter.

Next, I wanted to see how easy it is to uninstall Unbox player. So I checked the start menu entries—no uninstaller. I went into “c:\program files\amazon\amazon unbox player”—no uninstaller. So I went into my Control Panel, to Add/Remove Programs. The Unbox player shows up there for sure, but there is no remove button. There has got to be a way. I ran the installer again, remembering that among the options (install, repair) was a remove option. So I used that to uninstall the player. Now lets see what the damage is. The program files entry was still there, just missing some files. I deleted that. I poked around the registry. There were only twelve hits under the name “unbox.” I removed all the keys with this name. Clean system right?

I reinstalled the Unbox player, using Altiris’s SVS program that PC Mag gave away. This program is a piece of work, it basically catches everything a program installer tries to vomit all over your system, and keeps it isolated. It worked and I wasn’t surprised to see hundreds or registry entries, and files added/changed everywhere from “common files”, to the Windows directory. Too bad I hadn’t used this last time.

Conclusion

Other than getting screwed out of my rental, the process was fairly smooth. Purchasing was easy enough, and the slow speeds may be because every nerd in geekdom is jumping on this thing to try it out. The files play just fine in the Unbox player, which is kind of ugly, and certainly inferior to MPC or VLC, but it works.

I can almost see the imaginary joe sixpack enjoying this. What happens when his hard drive dies, I don’t know, but it is easy and convenient enough to buy movies. Maybe the rental system will get its quirks worked out. Of course, joe sixpack probably can’t hook his computer to his TV, and isn’t allowed to burn the movie as a DVD, so this has fairly limited appeal. As for portable devices, without iPod support, or at least PSP, the portable file is going nowhere.

If you are looking for a movie, I’d just recommend getting a DVD. They’re cheaper to buy (in the case of Office Space), the copy protection is so badly broken they are more versatile, and you can play them in your DVD player. The DRM is really the deal breaker here for me. I want to watch stuff on my iPod, or DVD player, or in Linux, or on a good media player. None of this is possible with these files. As brave as this is of Amazon to try out, I’ll wait for the Apple/Disney store, and we’ll see what rights their DRM allows.

[1] In retrospect I should have tried Windows Media Player, but I didn’t.

A Disgraceful Presidency

2006-07-07T01:27:00.000-04:00

As a preface, when President Bush was running for election in 2000, I was skeptical, but I supported him over Al Gore. While now I see this as a grievous error, I couldn’t have known this beforehand.

The trouble with President Bush is that he has good intentions. So it is difficult to make a villain out of such a nice man. I believe this is one of the reasons why people still stand behind him. In any event, I think his presidency is an abject disaster full of deceit and secrecy. I will give my reasons for this below.

Failures

The administration has had many failures – their environmental policy, immigration policy (or lack thereof) and the list goes on. But all administrations have failures. Kennedy had several prominent failures, the Bay of Pigs invasion and beginning the Vietnam war, but he is still regarded highly.

It isn’t the fact that the failures have happened, it is more so their reaction to the failures that convince me that this presidency is a disaster.

Iraq

Iraq is a disaster. We went in for the wrong reasons and we are staying for the wrong reasons. Initially we were told about the biological and chemical weapons Saddam had. Then we were warned that he was attempting to procure nuclear weapons from Africa and Iraq had links to Al Qaeda. What the poorest continent on earth was doing with nuclear weapons, I still can’t figure out, but that is beside the point. In the aftermath the September 11^th attacks, Americans were sufficiently persuaded that Iraq was a threat and needed to be overthrown. Heck, we had just hammered Afghanistan; while we are there why not overthrow another dangerous enemy? After all, it will be relatively cheap, we were told.

Except everything was wrong. Saddam did not have, what we call, “weapons of mass destruction”. Nothing credibly proved that he was trying to get anything nuclear, and no links to Al Qaeda were ever established. Saddam was certainly a terrible despot, but as we haven’t made it a habit of overthrowing all despots before, I’m not sure that is a good reason to invade. Iraq was nothing like the success story in Afghanistan, and the projected costs were so far off the gap between reality and projection can only be chalked up to deception. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia, recently estimated the cost of the Iraqi war between one and two trillion dollars (between $10,000 and $20,000 per U.S. household), and that if we had pulled out in early 2006.

Not only get we invade Iraq under false pretenses, but congress never declared war. I understand President Bush was just following a recent precedent set by presidents on failed wars, but I’m not sure that excuse is good enough. So once we were there, President Bush and his advisors consistently ignored every piece of evidence and advice that contradicted their own optimistic predictions.

I can not personally blame President Bush for the abject intelligence failures that allowed 9/11, but I can blame him for not reforming sooner. We had just seen how inadequate our intelligence was during the September 11^th attacks, what more did it take to get some intelligence reform? I suppose it took a war with Iraq. But now we have the opposite problem with intelligence, it isn’t feeble and inaccurate, it is invasive and abusive.

Invasiveness

On December 15^th, 2005 the New York Times ran a story entitled “Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in U.S. After 9/11.” It alluded to domestic phone tapping, but this was largely a warning shot for the deluge of information that was to follow. President Bush, perhaps trying to ensure the intelligence would never be bad again, had launched a major effort to get intelligence by nearly any means necessary.

Then the news broke about a massive database of phone calls. We were assured that these were only suspicious foreign calls, and guaranteed that this was NOT a domestic program. Then a witness came out of AT&T and claimed that AT&T was terribly abusing the privacy of its customers by handing data over to the NSA. The EFF launched a lawsuit against AT&T and it was killed by the “state secrets” privilege, an option the government has to kill any private lawsuit it wants, even if it wasn’t a plaintiff.

Later, news broke that the surveillance was, in fact, a domestic program and that AT&T as well as nearly every other major telephone company, except Qwest, had handed over data to the NSA. This is handing over massive amounts of private data to the NSA, without a warrant or probable cause to be suspicious. Now news is breaking that the Pentagon has been spying on gays, anti-war groups, and other “counter culture” groups. Again, without a warrant, and without suspicion of wrong-doing.

Recently, news broke that the US government had been spying on international fund transfers through SWIFT, a Belgian clearinghouse for financial institutions. While this has raised international ire, still more news has pointed out that the spying began with Bush before 9/11.

The most disturbing thing is the administration’s response: secrecy. The US government designated 81% more documents as one of the fifty classifications used to restrict documents. The state secrets privilege has been used more often in the last six years than any other six years in history. And when you look at the cases it quashed, you find a veritable showcase of hidden injustices.

The Press

Every politician uses the press, as best they can, to their advantage. But not every politician has routinely attacked the press over unflattering, but true, stories. With the revelation of the SWIFT story, the New York Times story was deemed a "disgraceful" compromise of national security by President Bush, and treason by Representative Peter King of New York. Tony Snow, the new white house press secretary, accused The NYT of putting the "public's right to know" over "somebody's right to live."

Negative press of the war in Iraq has met with a similar attitude among Bush and his administration. If you report on anything negative, it is claimed that you are helping the terrorists. While that may be true, the nearly universally negative coverage (except for Fox News for the most part) from the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN and others, suggests something to the visibility of the bad versus the good, if not the frequency.

When accusing the media of bias doesn’t work (or isn’t convenient) the Bush administration has also routinely tried to distract from real issues. The swift revival of the gay marriage amendment, the illegal immigration controversy and the flag burning amendment, have occurred just at a time when President Bush’s approval ratings are lowest. Soon after the SWIFT story broke the Feds caught a group of men in Miami planning on taking down the Sears tower. Unfortunately the seven men were found without weapons, explosives, links to Al Qaeda and the FBI announced there had been “no operational threat.” It seems each time a negative story about the Bush administration hits the major press that points out something new, a flag waving story seems to hit soon after, to drown out criticism.

My biggest concern with the Bush administration’s dealings with the press isn’t about the distractions; it isn’t even the verbal attacks. My concern is that they are wasting time. When you’ve got an entire nation to run, with 250 million citizens, hundreds of billions of dollars of deficit each year, trillions of dollars in debt, and a war going on, it is a wonder that the government’s biggest concern can be, for any length of time, to make burning the flag illegal.

Illegal Actions

The administration has also flaunted binding laws inside the United States, most notably with the “Abu Garib scandal.” I hesitate to call this a scandal – this was wholesale, state-endorsed torture. Real people were hurt, humiliated, tortured, and killed here. This is really the height of inhumanity and it embarrasses me that so few people got charged, found guilty and punished over this. The least we could do is to make sure this doesn’t happen again by sacking those in command who allowed this, and making the message clear – we will not tolerate torture in our prisons.

We, in the Western world, like to consider ourselves civilized. Unlike the Muslim world, we don’t decapitate, whip, flog, cut off hands or stone anyone. But also unlike the Muslim world, we imprison people for years in places where homosexual rape is a daily occurrence, there is disease, frequent beatings, and sometimes murder. We often demur that our governments don’t support, sponsor, or endorse such activities. But the mere frequency of such acts, and the assurance that, if in prison, you will have experience with this, is reason enough in my mind to make us culpable nonetheless.

Another area where the administration has flaunted laws is in Guantanamo bay. I don’t think Bush is responsible for the infrequent kidnappings, tortures and subsequent releases of a number of non-US citizens, but ignoring Habeas corpus in Gitmo and elsewhere says a lot. It is really sad that it takes the suicide of someone like Yasser Talal al-Zahrani to remind us of our little secret. As a bit of history, Yasser went to Gitmo at 17 for supposedly running guns in Afghanistan for Al Qaeda. We don’t know if he was guilty because he was never tried, and never even officially charged with anything, he was just held for four years until he and two others (one of whom was not even ‘officially’ at Gitmo) committed suicide. This guy was younger than I am! And he had spent four years in prison before I even graduated from college.

News of soldiers killing civilians has been around on and off since the Iraq war started. The consensus seems to be, we don’t care enough for it to take a prominent place in our news for more than two days in a row. I don’t think Bush has encouraged this, but just like Vietnam the situation he has placed these soldiers in certainly does encourage this.

The Valerie Plame scandal is another instance where part (or all) of the administration has been caught doing something wrong, and no consequences were felt among those higher up.

Expansion of Power

The Bush administration has taken unprecedented steps to expand executive power. Seeking to get out from under binding legislation, such as the Geneva Convention (with respects to torture), which congress had put into law long ago.

The Bush administration has put undue pressure on many firms and foreign governments to achieve their aims. Aside from the AT&T issue, another representative example is that of “The Pirate Bay.” Somewhere from within the US government, someone of sufficient power put pressure on Sweden to raid and take down a website named “The Pirate Bay” for copyright infringement. Under Swedish law, The Pirate Bay was legal – it hosted no content, it simply ran bittorrent trackers. I don’t endorse piracy, but I also don’t endorse imposing US laws on foreign entities.

States rights have also been consistently disregarded. The whole “no child left behind” is a great example of this attitude. The "No Child Left Behind" education act inserts progress reports and federal testing requirements in an area that had been under state and local control.

Whether you think the "Patriot Act" goes to far in stripping citizens rights in favor of security or not, it certainly gives federal law enforcement greater authority to supersede states where needed in criminal investigations and prosecutions. Another example of expansion of power, republicans in congress are again pushing bills to move class-action lawsuits from state courts to federal courts, and put federal ceilings on what state juries can award in malpractice cases.

Other

There are many other reasons I think this presidency has been a disaster, but for the lost sake of brevity I will only mention some of them here.

The administration has been far too friendly to firms. One of the first official acts of the administration was to ignore the orders of Judge Penfield Jackson to break up Microsoft three ways. Maybe it was better that Microsoft stay together, but the administration didn’t say that, they just ignored the court order.

FEMA blew the Katrina clean-up in a spectacular way. I don’t blame Bush for this, or for the incompetent people he appointed to FEMA. But the awarding of reconstruction contracts was a debacle – going for above average prices to many with ties to government officials. It was so bad, many of the contracts had to be re-bid on.

The recession was not Bush’s fault. Neither was the recovery due to anything Bush did. But a future recession may be due to Bush. His reckless policies of lowering taxes and expanding spending now and in the future have stunned any true conservative. In inflation adjusted dollars, Bush and the GOP congress has outspent any non-war president, including FDR and Ronald Reagan (both of whom, arguably, had much larger recessions to recover from). The rash spending has exploded our deficit from a positive under Clinton to a stunning $600+ billion per year.

End Rant

I understand this may be unpopular, and certainly a highly debated, post. But my hopes for rationality in this administration have been repeatedly dashed as they have done stupid thing after stupid thing. And through all of this they refuse to admit to mistakes and attempt to right the wrong, they attempt to deceive, cover up and intimidate. I’ll close with a quote from Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Building from source sucks

2006-07-03T15:47:00.000-04:00

No really, it sucks. A lot of GNU/Linux purists (and gentoo users) might be upset to hear me say this, but it is true. I know about the advantages – small speed boost, tweakability, and bragging rights from having built your system from source. These are neat things, sometimes critical things. But for an end user, even a sophisticated one, source sucks.

Now that isn’t to say distributing source is a bad idea, it isn’t. The GPL is one of the most revolutionary ideas in the copyright area there has been for a long time. And it is a great idea, if a developer drops a project, if it was GPL anyone can pick it up again. That is brilliant. And it certainly isn’t within anyone’s right to force developers to build binaries for every system – it isn’t feasible and it would impose more of a burden on developers, most of whom are volunteers, than is necessary.

But really, building from source sucks. Let me tell you why I think so:

1. It rarely works out of the box. Sometimes it does, but the larger the program the less likely it is to work. I spent an unconscionable amount of time trying to build a certain program. It was about 50 MB. I never did get it, eventually I found a pre-rolled deb from some unaffiliated site. Now sometimes building from source works beautifully, I built Hamachi in less than five minutes with no problems. But as always YMMV.

2. Dependency hell. Once I read the instructions on how to make the program, often I find that I needed quite a few libraries. One time, I started building the libraries themselves from source, but then I realized they were probably in the debian repositories. So I used apt-get for the rest of the libraries until I found that I already had an older version of one of the libraries that I needed, and I couldn’t upgrade that library without a major overhaul of the system. I tried getting an older version of the program, I tried to build the new library from source, I googled, I shook my fists, screamed and punched the wall – all to no avail.

3. Reading man pages, readmes, usenet posts, and other forms of research suck. Not to say they aren’t useful, they can be. But all the reading is often more work than the program is worth. I’ve spent hours deciphering readmes and config files and the make file itself. After all of this, I’ve gotten snubbed by the developers on usenet channels, which isn’t that uncommon though there are a lot of helpful people out there. I started checking everywhere for people with the same problem, others had the problem but no solutions had been posted (just vague advice).

4. Uninstalling. Once I get an app built from source, sometimes I don’t want it anymore. Not for disk space reasons alone, sometimes for compatibility reasons. Guess what – when you build from source, the make file vomits files all over your system. They’re in /usr/bin they’re in /home/user/.program, they’re all over the bloody place. You can hunt them down, or ignore them. Usually I ignore them. Contrast that with a deb or rpm you’ve installed. Go to kpackage, aptitude, synaptic, or any other good package manager, and it is just a few clicks to get that binary blob off of your system.

What is the solution to this? Obviously developers or contributors can create binaries. That works, but as I said before, it is a bit burdensome to require that of all developers. I understand the technical difficulties with getting source to compile everytime, on every system, easily. Instead, what I think would fix this, is is an easier way to convert source into a deb/rpm file.

To a great extent this involves getting the source to compile correctly on every machine. But what about the unification process in Oregon. Or the LSB (linux standard base). No one can (or should) force developers to submit to these processes, they may be too stringent or not supported widely enough, but we need something like this.

Imagine if source could easily be turned into a binary. As easily as say, converting an RPM to a DEB with Alien. Source would be easy enough everyone could just use source. Developers wouldn't have to offer two types of download - source and binary. This could save open source developers (nevermind sourceforge) a terrific amount of resources - bandwidth, storage space - and time - no more compiling each iteration of the program on each platform. If nothing else I think this could really make open source development easier, quicker and more attractive.

Net Neutrality

2006-06-17T17:01:00.000-04:00

You hear a lot in the news today about net neutrality. Net neutrality is basically this – currently telecommunication companies (hereafter called telcos) give you whatever bits you request on the internet without deciding which ones you deserve. Now telcos are fighting to be allowed to prioritize certain bits over others. This may seem trivial, it isn’t.

The telcos claim that this will allow them to offer better service to firms. Google.com can pay and get faster access to your connection than joeblow.com. This seems like a good idea per se. I don’t think it is.

Arguments for Net Neutrality

Many people think that neutrality would end the usable internet. Sites like youtube would drown out more legitimate traffic, like vonage [1] and IPTV.[2] They claim junk would crowd out non-junk.

First – why would youtube crowd out IPTV? If the network really is neutral, IPTV is just as likely choke off youtube. And if anything is getting choked off that suggests that users are demanding more bandwidth than exists. If this is the case, the telcos should either lay more cable or charge more until demand = supply.

Second – what these people are afraid of has never happened. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, just that it is unlikely. Even if it was likely, this is a QoS [3] issue NOT an aggregate bandwidth issue.

Third – it is awfully pretentious to tell an internet user which parts of his/her browsing is less important than others. Obviously things like emergency services should receive priority, but they are the exception. Why is youtube less important than IPTV?

Another common thing to hear is that companies like Google and eBay are getting a free ride on the telcos. The telcos are just making them pay for the access they already enjoy. This is junk – Google already pays for the bandwidth it uses. So do you. If you are both already paying, who is getting the free ride? No one.

If you controlled a near monopoly (oligopoly) on an important technology, would you want more or less government intervention? I know I would want less intervention. As a monopoly (or oligopoly), the telcos can charge artificially high prices. The huge costs to entry (fixed costs from laying the cable) deter entry and the monopolist can make scads of money.

So guess what position the telcos are taking towards net neutrality? Slogans like “hands off!” and “don’t regulate!” [4] It is clearly in their best interest to lobby against regulation, so our politicians really need to take their lobbying less seriously (or more precisely, evaluate the arguments not the arguers or their contributions).

What is this really?

This is nothing new. Firms have been trying (and sometimes succeeding) to do this for a long time. It is essentially holding another firm hostage, extortion. Let me give an example. Let’s say that Moneybags Inc. owns all the highways. Currently they charge tolls for access. Truckers r’ Us uses those highways to do business, and they pay the toll for access like everyone else. Moneybags Inc. sees how much money the truckers are making, so they institute a policy – if you want to drive over 30 MPH, you have to pay double in tolls. It makes sense right? If you are driving 60 you should have to pay 30 right? Bullocks.

This scenario isn’t actually completely accurate. First we’d have to add that Moneybags Inc, which used to let anyone on the highway, now has a competing trucking firm that doesn’t have to pay the tolls (or gets them rebated). To add further accuracy, Moneybags can also exclude completely, for any reason, any vehicle they want. Not only that, but since it is so expensive to set up a highway system, Moneybags Inc. actually got the government (meaning you and me) to fund the vast majority of the road building. And in fact, Moneybags Inc. pocketed a whole bunch of the cash and didn’t build all the roads they promised.

That is pretty close to the scenario with net neutrality. As the scenario shows, this is purely a money grab. The worst thing is that it might actually work. With all the money, slogans and rhetoric these companies are (and have been) throwing at congress, they might just win.

For more information about what telcos have been doing with our money, read here about the scandal.

[1] Vonage is basically telephone over the internet. In the past the sound quality for such technology was so poor that it was virtually unusable. Firms like Vonage and Skype figured out ways to improve the sound quality without requiring really really fast internet connections.

[2] IPTV is simply television delivered over the internet. Individuals, groups of people or firms create TV shows and distribute them for free over the internet. In the future, many people expect all TV to be delivered through the internet because the internet allows for greater variety of shows, less use of the electromagnetic spectrum and lower distribution costs.

[3] QoS – Quality of Service refers to the probability of your connection meeting a specific throughput. Telecommunication firms oversell capacity, but if you always get the capacity you were guaranteed when you signed up, there should be no problems with crowding out.

[4] It is pretty well known that these two websites were created by the telcos as a sort of fake grassroots campaign.

Don't Kill Welfare

2006-05-22T17:54:00.000-04:00

This stems from a discussion I had with someone who thought that welfare should be eliminated. Her basic theories were this:
- it takes away freedom (you MUST pay it in taxes)
- the government cannot take away freedom (it'd be good if a few more people though this)
- it discourages self-reliance (thus there is little incentive to get off)
- it promotes laziness
- free rides are immoral

The following is a rebuttal of sorts.

I find in general those who oppose welfare have never received it, don't know anyone who has and have no direct experience with it. Most are just upset they have to give up money to those less fortunate. I hope this isn’t the case with everyone, but some people's positions are disturbingly inaccurate and illogical nonetheless.

Agency –
Welfare does not infringe on the donor’s agency any more than other laws. We have to pay taxes but few complain about a lack of agency there. Welfare doesn’t infringe on recipient’s agency either – they are free to reject it.

Welfare does not replace our obligation to give to the poor. But welfare isn’t about personal righteousness, it is about human compassion. We know that we ought to give personally to the poor, but we also know that not enough people do. Thus many poor people, often suffering from psychological disorders, go hungry in a land of plenty for no reason. People SHOULD be more giving, but they AREN’T, and these people still need help regardless of how many people feel like giving. The point of welfare is not to replace voluntary donations/help, but to augment the dearth of help available to the poor.

Self-Reliance –
Welfare need not destroy self reliance. Usually it doesn’t. Your view of welfare is quite antiquated; it isn’t the government just writing checks to poor people every month forever. First, few people subsist wholly off of welfare for very long. Few people can. Second, welfare almost always includes work incentives. To keep it you have to get a job. Third, welfare now has time limits attached – you get three years or so in ten (it varies state to state) to be on welfare, surpass that limit and you are kicked off.

Welfare isn’t about supporting lazy people. Welfare recipients are almost exclusively single women with children. There are good reasons single mothers have a hard time finding jobs – lack of education, lack of opportunities, plus they have kids to take care of and daycare is expensive. These are mostly people who legitimately can’t help themselves, without welfare they often fall into worse things – prostitution, drugs or starvation.

No Work Required –
I think I addressed this already, but welfare has work incentives. The LDS Church welfare often carries with it the requirement to work, but anyone who served as a missionary in a poor area in the United States can assure you – even in the church not everyone works for welfare. That doesn’t mean we should shut down church welfare for slackers, it means we should do our best and expect the same from others.

Authority –
The government has authority to send young men and women to kill people in war, authority to imprison and inflict capital punishment on citizens, and the authority to tap citizens without warrant, permission or notice. I’m not arguing they shouldn’t have this authority I saying it is amazing that some people believe that these are OK, but this same government cannot possibly have the authority to transfer money from the rich to poor among its own citizens. At the very least, if the government has authority to collect taxes and social security – it certainly can collect money for welfare.

Morality –
If all freeloading is a problem, we better repeal child labor laws. Before 18, kids are all getting free rides, put them to work! Many of us afterwards receive free rides (or cheap rides) – through gifts from our parents, pell grants, the earned income tax credit, scholarships, grants and on and on.

I am a student at BYU - what about the massive subsidy the LDS church gives all BYU students? No tithe payers can opt-out of subsidizing our education, they don’t have that choice (no agency! we cry). And no BYU student can opt-out of receiving this money. I suppose we are all immoral people in an immoral institution for accepting handouts. But really, what is the problem with an income transfer? We'll be paying someone else's social security all our life, what is wrong with some start up capital?

Conclusion –
My point isn’t that we should transition to a welfare state. I am libertarian and I see welfare as terribly ineffective and I think there are many better solutions. But I also see some sort of welfare as important to a moral society. Welfare does not release me from my responsibility to help the poor, but it makes me feel better about their situation. Why? Because I can’t help everyone and I’m glad that there is help available.

How to Save Movie Theaters

2006-04-30T12:33:00.000-04:00

The movie theater is dying. To anyone who has been in a long time, this isn't surprising. Why pay $18 for two tickets when you could buy the DVD in 6 months for the same price? While theaters and enthusiasts cry "the experience!" it doesn't seem to matter to most people.

So what are theaters to do to survive? With hardcore movie enthusiasts staying home for their nice home theater, and the people in the middle staying home because the movies that are coming out stink - theaters are drying up.

Lets consider their options. They could take the anti-customer route (it seems to be working for the MPAA/RIAA). First, they could raise prices - there is a segment who will see movies no matter the cost. Second, they could have more advertising - more crappy trailers & ads they force you to sit through. Maybe even advertise on the movie itself - see the hero reach for a Coke in "King Kong, brought to you by Microsoft". For obvious reasons these are terrible ideas - the segment that will see movies no matter what is far too small. People resent being advertised to - our time is precious, if you waste it we won't come back. Surprisingly, until now this is largely what theaters have done - more ads and higher prices (for tickets and snacks).

The other option is the pro-customer route. They could improve the experience. Offer nicer amenities - softer seats, more leg room, reserved seating, larger screens, lower volumes (anyone else's ears ring after a movie?), no more ads, cheaper snacks, or better snacks (a theater near me lets you take any food you bought from a nearby restaurant into the movie). Certainly this will eat at profit margins, but it seems losing customers is doing the same. Optionally they could lower prices and offer the same amenities. That is the idea for the $1 theaters you can still occasionally find.

Theaters could price discriminate - $15 for King Kong but only $5 for Benchwarmers (and only $2 for Silent Hill). The film industries long standing resistance against this has been that it signals to customers what movie is garbage and what movie is good. So what? Don't critics, rottentomatos and a dozen other sources already do that? If that is really a problem, just scale prices to cost of production - films that cost $100 million to make, cost $15 to get in, those that cost $10 million, cost $5.

There is a more clever type of price discrimination they could also use - charge based on where you sit in the theater. The best seats cost $12, the worst cost $5. I think this would be rather clever if it was enforceable, who would take a date to the $5 seats? You could easily see who is a cheapskate by where they sit, and that might be enough incentive to buy the more expensive seats. Of course they could bill this as - "Now - get whatever seat you want, no lines!" so people don't think they are just getting bilked.

Another type of price discrimination could be declining prices. When a movie premiers, that first weekend charge $12, two weeks later charge $10, and so on until the movie gets pulled.

None of these ideas are revolutionary. None are totally infeasible. But other than lousy movies and home theaters, what is driving this shift away from public theaters? Here is my opinion -

When the printing press came out, the churches freaked out - why go to church when you can have the bible at home?
When the player piano came out, musicians freaked out - why go to a real concert when you can have a concert in any bar?
When the radio came out, musicians freaked out - why buy music when you have it sent to you for free?
When the internet became popular, retail stores freaked out - why go to a store to buy something when you can shop from home?
When p2p came out, the RIAA freaked out - why buy music when you can get it for free?

Essentially this is the same thing.
Now that home theaters are becoming more and more common, movie theaters are freaking out - why go to the theater for $10 when you can stay home for $5 (plus a large initial investment).
But, people still go to church, concerts, they still go to stores and buy music and they'll still go to theaters. Theaters are only losing a bit of their movie goers, not everyone wants to wait 6 months to see a movie and fewer still have nice home theaters to watch them in.

I think this is just a push towards the long tail. The long tail just means that the mainstream super-hit is becoming less of a money maker and the movie/book/song way down on the distribution is becoming more valuable. Movie megahits do seem to be in bad shape - nothing has come out worth watching since Christmas with the possible exception of V for Vendetta (which I've not seen). Last year there wasn't much either, the children in Narnia were infuriating, Cinderella Man was campy, Batman Begins was hokey - there were some good ones, but not many.

To survive, I think movie theaters are going to start offering good independent movies. Some of independent movies have already done well when put in theaters - Blair Witch, Big Fat Greek Wedding, Life is Beautiful. If there was more financial incentive to make independent movies, we might get more high quality ones. There are already great independent movies being made, recently I saw and liked - "Paradise Now" and "Everything is Illuminated." I've heard great things about "Good Night and Good Luck." "Eternal Sunshine and the Spotless Mind" was another great pseudo-independent movie. Good independent movies are out there, and if more theaters started billing them, there would only be more created.

I think this is one of the few ways to stop the movie industry from its oncoming death spiral. Currently, the movie industry makes more than 70% of their revenues in DVD sales and other after-theater releases. But movies are getting costlier and costlier to make, and they are marketing to an increasingly fragmented audience. One who has to chose between alternatives that are getting better and better (which the exception of TV) - while movies seem to be getting worse. Cheaper to make movies with directors who are more visionary and have more control, sounds like a winning combination to me.

There was a great independent theater near where I used to live, if I'm right about the push to the long tail, it won't be suffering as badly as the mainstream theaters. I don't know how they are doing, but they're still around, and that is encouraging.

Mini Entry - Plug for my brother

2006-04-21T22:18:00.000-04:00

If you are at all interested in controversial politics, check out my brother's blog. He has pretty good sense most of the time (in that I agree with him fairly often). Potentially more interestingly, he has great sense for what will be volatile, potentially offensive and highly debated. Some of our comment threads illustrate this readily enough.

I'm only surprised he hasn't blogged about immigration yet.

Ideas for Cell Phones

2006-04-14T14:33:00.000-04:00

As my previous posts will show, I am not a luddite. But I don't own a cell phone, nor will I in the foreseeable future. I have a lot of reasons why not (mostly because I am cranky and antisocial).

Why I don't like cell phones (in no particular order)

- I don't like being accessible all the time. I want people to think a little bit before bothering me.

- I don't want people to expect me to be accessible all the time (those who keep cell phones off are often asked "why was your phone off")

- I think cell phones are largely a waste of time ("dude, where you at? What is going on..." more conversations on cell phones than regular phones seem to trail off like a pointless IM session)

- I think cell phones lead to bad planning and critical thinking skills (instead of thinking ahead we just do the "I'll call you" type of planning)

- I think cell phones cause more accidents than most other types of distractions. (Its bad when others are distracted because that MAY affect me, but worse when I am distracted because that WILL affect me).

There are others too, but these are the major ones. I know cell phones have terrific benefits. I won't waste my time writing them here, they are apparent. But I would like more out of cell phones than they currently give.

These are some must have features:

- Internet anywhere. I want to have an adapter that will plug my phone into my computer and have my phone provide internet. I know a lot of phone plans (sprint) offer this, but it isn't ubiquitous or inexpensive. A cellphone is already $20/month, can they really charge another $20/month for internet? I'm already paying for the time! An extra $20/month is fine for DSL at home, but not fine for a slow cell connection.

- Transparency. In my opinion it is unacceptable that I can't upload a 2-second mp3/wav (or at least a midi) to my cell phone for a ring-tone. $1 for a 2 second ring tone?!?! We're talking $30 per minute of ring tone at that price! Instead, for $1, I can buy an entire song on iTunes or an album on allofmp3.

- More transparency. My wife is staying with her same service, but moving to a new phone. That means that she has to go to a verizon store and THEY have to move her address/phone book. This is unacceptable. I want my address book on my computer to sync with my phone, compatibility both ways.

- Better coverage. I'm not talking in rural wyoming, I'm talking in suburbia. Cellcompanies have done great work (esp Verizon) but they still have a long way to go.

- Better power management. Not just a better battery. Better batteries are great, but I want lower consumption. When the battery on my wifes phone dies, if she tries to plug in to the wall and call again, the recharger can't keep up with the consumption so the phone will die again.

Less important than the preceding, I'd like some of these features:

- Note taking abilities. If you could call a certain number you'd get an answering machine (basically) that would record what you say, then email you what you said as an mp3. A 96kbps mono mp3 wouldn't take that much space or bandwidth (and that bitrate seems about right for cell phone quality audio).

- Free streaming audio. I don't mean enabling mass copyright infringement, I mean I want to be able to connect to my mp3s at home (via FTP, apache or whatever) and listen to them if I want. It is nice to be able to buy a song from my phone, but getting it onto a computer is a nightmare, the quality is lousy and the storage offered on phones is ghastly.

- Free streaming video. Same as above.

- Fewer buttons. Yeah this sounds impossible, but other than the 0-9, # and *, there is no reason cell phone should have 8 other buttons. Or 20 different menus to navigate through to get to any particular function.

- Better cross-platform compatibility. Camera phones are neat, but they don't play nice with Linux. I'd really like a standard of some sort for how these things connect to computers so that I could use it with Linux.

Many of these features are in particular phones, but I don't know of any phone/service that has all of them. Cell phones can do neat stuff, take pictures, watch video, play mp3s, et cetera. But if cell phones were to have these features, I'd snap one up right away.

The Problem With Patents

2006-03-17T03:03:00.000-05:00

I've written about copyrights and argued that the copyright system is broken. By that I mean that it is not serving the purpose for which it was designed, it is more harmful than helpful.

For contrast, I don't think the patent system is broken. It is just seriously messed up, and needs some massive overhauling. Not as bad as a copyright system that allows enforcement of over 100 years - do we really need to protect stuff for that long to get people to invent???

I don't know how to fix copyrights, other than drastically decrease the length of a copyright, perhaps require a fee of $1 every 5 years to get rid of the 'orphaned works' problem. I do have better ideas on how to fix the patent system. They'll be at the end, after I try to convince you that it needs fixing of course.

What is a patent supposed to be?

A patent is supposed to be a well defined property right that gives an owner (not necessarily inventor) a monopoly, or significant competitive advantage, on a device. It should be clear what the patent covers, enforceable, innovative and temporary.

Why give monopoly power?

Innovation has positive externalities. Meaning it benefits more than just the creator. A negative externality means that it is under-produced. To get around this problem, we give away temporary monopolies so that creators capture more (not all) of the benefits they produce for others. The temporary monopoly with the new invention makes people better off than not having the invention would.

The trade off is that the workings of the invention must be public. Any expert in the field should be able to use your patent application to recreate your invention. That way, when the invention falls into the public domain, everyone may benefit. This is why the government offers patents.

What are patents currently?

Patents today are the right to TRY to exclude others from using a property right granted exclusively to you. They are not often innovative (prior art issues)¹, often held invalid and most of the time not very well defined.

Why do we care?

This is actually a great question to always ask. So patents aren't doing what they were designed to do. So what? I argue there are many problems. Patents are designed to incent innovation. They may in fact discourage it (as we'll see later). Legitimate patents may be invalidated and the uncertainty with not knowing the validity of a patent has negative externalities (so it causes harm to many, so we have too much of it). Patents may deter entry into markets, so monopolies can be extended. Patents may harm consumer welfare. All these things are bad.

Why are we so far off?

In brief, because of a poor incentive system. It was designed just fine, but some problems crept up, weren't fixed and it has gotten worse. Don't believe me? Here are some statistics. In the United States there are 350,000 patents filed each year, and 200,000 accepted. That isn't to say that 150,000 are rejected, there is a backlog of about 750,000 patents as of 2004. Does anyone think there is that much innovation going on in the United States?

Over-Patenting

One of the biggest problems is over patenting. As the previous statistics should show, we are filing and receiving way too many patents. I don't know what the right number is, but we'll see that 350,000 a year must be too high.

Over patenting is bad for a lot of reasons. Worthless patents swamp valuable ones in the examination process. Which patents are worth carefully examining? Patents on non-innovative ideas are terribly harmful to competition. The value of a patent (and enforceability) is diluted with frivolous patents.

Problems with Filing a Patent

Because patents are first come first receive, there is the incentive to file early to beat out competitors. Many patents are filed just in case a discovery turns out to matter in the future. If the inventor (usually a firm) doesn't know the value of a patent, there really is no way the PTO can know.

The PTO bears the burden of proof. Meaning your application is considered valid until proven invalid. Patents are relatively inexpensive to file for (the fees differ on a number of factors) but since the PTO spends an average of 18 hours on each patent, they are relatively expensive to handle for the PTO. So when the PTO cuts costs, they examine patents less thoroughly. In addition, rejections are easily appealed and may be appealed indefinitely.

So many ridiculous patents have been accepted,² that many patents are not filed with a serious expectation of being accepted, but more so “on the chance.”

Problems with Acceptance

Patents are accepted too often. The problem with over acceptance is that invalid and non-innovative patents are granted. These can be very dangerous to existing/potential businesses. They harm competition and thus consumers unnecessarily.³

Many things are causing this problem. First, there is a high examiner turnover first of all. If you are a good patent lawyer, would you rather work for the government or a private firm for triple the pay? Government patent lawyers are overworked and underpaid. Is there any wonder the experienced lawyers go to private firms? This is bad because it leaves the bad patent lawyers determining the validity of patents written by good patent lawyers.

Even if the PTO can keep it's good patent lawyers in existing areas, they will always have a lack of specialty in new areas. The PTO sorts and distributes the patents according to specialty, but if an invention is really innovative, it is new by definition. Thus it is hard for the PTO to maintain experts in each rapidly developing field.

Perverse incentives push PTO attorneys to accept patents too readily. Since the burden is on the PTO to find prior art, determine inventiveness, and determine validity, it is easier to accept a patent than challenge it. The vast backlog of patents puts pressure on PTO attorneys to work quickly, not carefully, as well.

Uncertainty Causes Overpatenting

Because no one is exactly sure what will hold up under litigation, many firms take the 'shotgun' approach, of filing for everything on a device. So if I build a new machine, and I'm not sure what I can really get a patent on, I may try try to patent all it's parts. If 10 of my 20 applications are turned down, I still have 10 covering my invention. And if 9 of my 10 patents are declared invalid, I can still hold a monopoly on my invention. But if I only file a single patent for my invention, and it is declared invalid or my application is turned down, I'm up a creek without a paddle!

Strategic patents are problematic - defensive patents and offensive patents. This is what a defensive patent is: if I am afraid someone will patent a practice I am already using (a reasonable fear), even if the idea is non-innovative, I may file a patent to protect myself from a potential lawsuit. An offensive patent is just the opposite: if I know a firm is using an unpatented process (no matter how obvious and trivial it is) I may try to patent it and earn royalties from licensing it. Both lead to overpatenting, legal complexity and greater uncertainty.

The scope of a patent is problematic as well. The “doctrine of equivalents” states that patents also cover 'equivalent' inventions. This adds to legal uncertainty, is a workaround and equivalent? Is a competing platform/standard/invention equivalent? Just as bad, an applicant can add to the scope of his patent after they have filed. So if a related technology develops, anyone could amend a current patent application to cover the new technology. This way their patent would be ahead of the true inventor in the patent queue.

Since mankind continues to push into new frontiers of knowledge, the PTO has been right behind offering patents. So if a certain technology (ie software) isn't patentable now, it might be by the time the PTO gets to your application.

95% of patents are never licensed, litigated or produced. That means that 95% of patents are completely worthless. Since inventors can't always tell if an invention is valuable it is better to file than not to file.

One issue that has been resolved is what was called “submarine patents.” This was the practice that allowed for 'secret' patents to be filed. This was previously allowed so that a larger competitor couldn't develop a competing idea and obsolete your idea before the patent could be granted. The real effect was that anyone could file a secret patent so no one would know what it covered. After a firm had implemented a certain technology using the secret patent, the patent holder could pull out the secret patent and hold the firm ransom for royalties., even though there was no way the firm could have known about the patent. Even more deviously, a patent holder could file a secret patent, and amend it (or add to the scope) secretly to cover a new idea the inventor hadn't thought of. This policy was done away with in the late 90s.

Firm Incentives causing overpatenting

Firms have the incentive to hold a lot of patents. Valuable or not, IBM holding 3 trillion patents is pretty daunting. With these patents, IBM can keep out entrants, signal value to investors, boost company value and gain bargaining leverage. None of these goals have anything to do with the purpose of patents.

Litigation causing over patenting

I know this is blasphemous, but I claim there isn't enough litigation over patents. How about this – only 1.5% of all patents are litigated, and only .1% are litigated to trial. This is far too little.

We know it is too little because of positive externalities associated with litigation. Invalidating a patent benefits everyone, not just the firm that sues for the invalidation. Clarity in validity also benefits others. So there is a free riding problem with litigation (especially since it is so costly).

Lets say I hold a patent on tennis shoes and I make a million dollars a day on that patent. If a new upstart shoe maker named Nike sues me over the patent, how much would I be willing to spend to defend the patent? $999,999 a day. How much would Nike be willing to spend to invalidate the patent? Invalidating the patent doesn't give Nike a monopoly, so assuming in a competitive model there are no (or lower than monopoly) profits, Nike would be willing to spend less than me. Thus it is probably in their best interests to just license a completely ludicrous patent.

Not only is this litigation costly, but anyone found infringing on a patent in court pays TRIPLE the claimed damages! That is high stakes in deed. To add to this problem, the alleged infringer bears the burden of proof, that the patent is invalid or that they didn't violate the patent. The wording is “clear and convincing evidence.” that is strong wording. So it shouldn't be surprising to find that 95% of all defendants settle without going to court.

Current Workarounds

Currently, the only common practice that alleviates some of the problems is a system of patent exchanges. Microsoft, IBM, Sun and a few other firms swap patent immunity. IBM won't sue Microsoft, Sun won't sue IBM. This helps large firms quite a bit, but it favors large incumbents and makes it difficult for startups to compete with these firms. If I develop the perfect operating system, odds are it treads on some existing patents, lets say IBM holds them. If I wanted to license them, I'd have to get IBM to agree. How much should IBM license them for? $1 less than the profits I will make by having the patents. What if I need a patent from Microsoft and IBM and they both demand $1 less than my potential profits? This is called the double marginalization problem.

Potential Reforms

Have I convinced you the patent system is messed up? I hope so.

Reforms may be grouped into two main ideas: weaken existing patents, or strengthen them. Weakening patents would make invalidation easier, that way the PTO could continue to accept and approve as many patents as they currently do. Only the truly inventive and valuable patents will stand court scrutiny. Exactly opposite, strengthening patents would make it harder to recieve a patent, but any patent granted this way would stand better to court scrutiny.

Weakening Patents

Weakening patents is best done through legislative reforms. Lowering the burden of proof for invalidating patents. Shifting the burden to the patent holder is probably too strong a move, but rewording "clear and convincing evidence" to "a preponderance of clear evidence" might be a good start. Sounds legal too!

The goal is to provide clarity about the validity of patents, by invalidating stupid patents. One way to encourage litigation More importantly, litigation costs must be lowered. The 3x payout for "willful infingement" must go. We can't legslate lawyer fees, but we can speed up the litigation process. The "doctrine of equivalents" must go, it provides only uncertainty.

A good way to produce more clarifying litigation is to create incentives to litigate. One idea (which I think is a bad one) is to allow the government to challenge patents. A better idea is to offer a bounty on invalidated patents. One problem with the bounty idea is that mostly worthless patents would be invalidated this way, but if you limited the bounty to licensed patents, you could eliminate a lot of this problem. The bounty could be granting the patent to the challenger for a few years, or a flat rate payment. Lastly, there are public interest groups already doing great work towards this end (such as the EFF and Public Patent Foundation), by funding them with incentives or grants we could improve the situation.

Another way to provide clarity is to force firms to litigation. By capping the dollar value of "settling," firms my opt for a court remedy rather than an out of court secret agreement. Limiting settling and other forms of collusion makes more information public, which can benefit more people.

Strengthening Patents

If we were to strengthen patents, we would have to make the acceptance process far more rigorous. Improving the review process is easy, but costly. Ideas include hiring more examiners (and paying them better) and opening patent applications up to third party opposition. The third party opposition would allow those who would be potentially hurt by a bad patent to challenge it before it is granted. This would reduce the USPTO's costs, but since it benefits more than just the challenger, there will be a freerider problem. Regardless of this problem, third party challenges can only make things better.

Another idea is to focus PTO attorneys on more the valuable patents. There are a number of ways to do this. First is by raising application costs. Increased fees are one way, but a more clever way is to require the inventor to find all instances of prior art, and condition the validity of thier patent on the thoroughness of thier search. Even more drastically, we could shift the burden of proof from the PTO attorney to the inventor. Which makes sense, forcing the inventor to prove why thier invention deserves a patent.

Focus can also be attained through statistical methods. Valuable patents have certain characteristics more frequently than non-valuable patents. Certain fields for example are more lucrative than others. The length of the list of prior art and the number of claims made are also postively statistically related to the value of the patent.

A Mixture?

As in most things, a mixture of both is probably best. One additional idea encompasses a bit of both ideas. That is the superpatent.

A superpatent would be a stronger patent. Meaning it would hold up better legally (increased presumption of validity). It would also go through a more stringent acceptance process. A superpatent would be a new type of patent, and inventors could choose if they wanted a normal patent or a superpatent. Normal patents would be relatively weaker, while a stronger option would be available to those who are certain they have created something truly innovative.

This would sort commercially viable (and inventive) patents from frivolous ones. True inventors would get better legal protection, silly patents would be weaker, and no one is forced to do anything they don't want to. This seems like the best option to me.

1Prior art is an instance of someone creating/using your 'invention' before you 'invented' it.

2Examples of such are: Crustless PB&J, Double Clicking, Online Histories, Perpetual Motion Machines, and Hierarchical Displays.

3By definition, all patents harm competition. Sometimes they kill it. We want to prevent this when there is no offsetting benefit.

How Microsoft got IE to be the de facto standard

2006-03-08T21:04:00.000-05:00

I sent this email to my brother:

You may have seen this on Digg, but it is pretty hilarious. I put together the sequence. Pretty funny stuff.

First watch this video. Then check this video out. Pretty funny. Lastly this one (its chronological order). Boy that second one must have been a bitter pill to take.

He responded wondering why Microsoft had bailed out their only competitor, who is now looking to eat their lunch. It is a good question really. Well here is my answer.

That was when the internet was just hitting the masses. The standards were out there (for the most part) but still very flexible because there wasn't a large installed base. Microsoft wanted IE to be the defacto standard really bad.

Why did Microsoft care what browser people used?

Operating systems can be replaced by higher level operating systems. BIOS stood for (used to, they changed it in the 90s) basic integrated operating system. BIOS was a full on (but limited) OS. Microsoft figured out how to use BIOS to boot DOS, a higher level OS. Later they figured out how to get DOS to boot Windows. Thus they knew operating systems could be replaced, they'd done it: BIOS > DOS > Windows.

They were afraid the internet was going to do this again. And Netscape would be basically an OS on top of Windows. The problem was this: if everyone develops for Netscape, not for Windows, then Windows doesn't matter (just like a BIOS doesn't matter much now).

Microsoft was terrified that Windows would get built over. Then they couldn't charge much for Windows (because it wouldn't be that important). So they did their darndest to kill Netscape and force IE on everyone else.

Getting rid of the Apple Problem

Macintosh threatened to throw a wrench in their plans. Even if Apple went out of business, someone would buy it up and still offer Macs. Because there was another viable platform, many early developers felt they should work for compatibility with both Mac and Windows. There was no IE for Macintosh and even if there had been, Microsoft needed a way to get Mac users to use it. If IE wasn't default for all major platforms, IE wouldn't be the standard, it would be a standard.¹

Luck was on Microsft's side. They had been killing Apple's revenue for sometime and Apple was willing to partner with anyone to survive. For Microsoft it was worth $150 million to make IE the de facto standard that it remains to this day. For Apple is was worth accepting IE to survive to try and fight again.

So what about Netscape?

Tying means using one product to sell another. Tying is like selling a copier and forcing (contractually or with technology) the consumer to get the copier serviced by you as well. This example is an actual case – Kodak did this. Not bundling, that is selling Office rather than Excel or Powerpoint alone. Bundling is fine. Tying is per se illegal (meaning if you are found to be tying, you are wrong, no debate).

I don't think there was any doubt in Microsoft's mind that bolting IE to the OS was "tying." The problem for Microsoft was that permanently bolting IE to Windows (and making it default) was the only way to unseat the current king of the internet, Netscape. It worked. And then they got slapped with an anti-trust suit for guess what... tying.

During the trial a Princeton computer scientist got the Windows code via a court order and found that by removing two lines of code (from the source of Win98) you could get rid of IE. So Netscape presented this in court. Microsoft's rebuttal was a video, showing that by removing these two lines of code Windows crashed. When the prosecutors looked into this they found this was two different videos spliced together. Guess what?

They were found guilty. Judge Penfield Jackson was furious. He'd been annoyed by Bill Gates' deposition. Gates had been ornery and not very helpful, but this put Jackson over the top. So Jackson wrote a scathing decision and Microsoft was supposed to be split into three companies. Because this decision was so harsh when the change of administration came, they pardoned Microsoft.

So Microsoft had won. They got IE to be the standard everyone uses when developing for the web and no penalties for it (if you don't think IE is the de facto standard, make your site incompatible with IE and, unless it is slashdot, don't expect to get much return traffic). Microsoft now has new pressure again – from alternate web browsers and from alternate operating systems. But there is a new savior on the horizon for them – trusted computing. If they succeed with the vendor lock-in trusted computing allows they'll never go out of business.

1 Note: Popularity doesn't make real standards, but it does nicely for de facto standards.

Hard Drive Setup & Maintenance

2006-03-01T23:19:00.000-05:00

So when I am (re)installing an operating system there are some partitioning tricks that make it (relatively) painless next time. Plus you'll get some performance bonuses from these techniques. I will describe my preferred partitioning setup on each system.

Windows Partitioning

If it is a Windows only box, I like to have four partitions. The first one is 3 gb or so it is for the operating system only. The next one is usually 7 gb or so, just for programs. This is nice because if for many programs, those that don't need registry entries, you don't have to reinstall them when you replace your OS.

The third is for 'documents and settings' meaning all my music/movies/documents/preferences/desktop et cetera; it takes most of the available space. This is probably the most important parition to keep seperate from the OS. This way if Windows dies (as it has a tendency to do) you can resintall without losing your stuff. Lastly I like to have a 5 gb or so "slush" partition. I use bittorrent and it is messy. Meaning if you use it you'll have to defrag a lot more than otherwise; this way I only have to defrag a 5 gb partition rather than a huge monolithic one.

I realize four partitions is a lot for some people. This can be condense very easily to two. One for the OS & programs, the other for every thing else. Some programs you have to reinstall if you reinstall windows anyhow (any program with a CD key), so the programs partition may not be that big of a time saver for some (I only use free software when I have to use Windows so this works for 90% of the apps I use). The slush partition is only if you do a lot of downloading.

If you already have windows installed, don't despair. There are ways you can change the partition your 'docs & settings' folder is to. If you haven't installed yet, you can make an install disk do this and much more for you in an hour flat.

Windows Maintenance

The other thing I do to keep my hard drive clean is I have a Windows VMWare image. So if I want to try out a new (unstable or potentially useless) program I install it on my Windows image. If the program hoses your system or if the program is worthless, just replace the image with a backup (presuming you back up VMWare images you use a lot). That way you don't have to fix anything if it was bad, and you haven't cluttered your registry - which seems to cause many of the problems Windows has.

VMWare is a company which specializes in virtualization, meaning their software makes your computer tell an install CD that you aren't running an operating system right now and to go ahead and install (even though it is installing to a file, not an entire partition). All this without leaving Windows or Linux. So you can have an operating system running in an operating system. This way if the one inside gets hosed, no problems, you haven't touched the outside one. VMWare released a free player as well as a free server. You are going to want the player in this case, and you can create a Windows image just fine with the free player.

To keep everything up, I schedule a virus scan of my slush partition every night. If your AV supports active scanning (meaning it automatically scans anything you download), you may not need to do this. I think active scanning is a waste of CPU cycles, so I disable it, but still run a limited scan fairly often. That way if I downloaded anything bad I catch it before it gets anywhere. The rest of my system gets scanned every week (or every other). I don't run spyware scans, they've never found anything but some cookies that get cleared out when I exit firefox. If you must use Internet Explorer, schedule some spyware scans.

I also run a disk check once a month. Just in case you know. You really don't have to defrag hardly at all with NTFS. I mean it won't give you a big performance boost really. If you are running bittorrent or something messy, I'd keep it confined to every other week at most (which is where the slush partition comes

GNU/Linux Partitioning

I love Linux (in case you haven't noticed). I've used FreeBSD briefly, but this advice is aimed at Linux users, though it could probably be modified to fit a BSD. With a Linux-only box I use four partitions as well, though for different reasons.

There are a lot of good filesystems you can run linux on. There are some bad ones too (fat anyone?), but I'll only mention my preference. ReiserFS is a great filesystem. I used it when I was on Mandrake (oh about 9.0). Now though I am on EXT3. EXT3 may not preform as well as Reiser, but I've found a lot more tools for it. Most importantly the EXT3 windows driver is far more stable and functional than the Reiser one, in my experience.

The first partition holds the actual OS. Messing around with Linux I hose my system regularly, so it is nice to make a fix so easy. The second partition holds the /home directory, this is analagous to 'documents and settings.' The third holds the '/etc' partition, which is full of configurations I've made to different programs. The last is for the swap partition (kind of like a dedicated area for virtual memory). I don't have as much RAM as I'd like, so I use a swap of 512mb. It is rarely, very rarely, half full, but better to have it than not.

I run bittorrent too, so I could have a slush partition, I just never have. Four partitions is a lot so you can fairly easily use a single partition to hold /home and /etc, and one for the OS. Having a swap partition really is a good idea if you don't have more than 512 mb or ram, but you could always ditch that too.

GNU/Linux Maintenance

This is a lot easier. I just schedule FSCK to run on each partition every month. Thats it!

Dual Boot Setup

I currently have a dual boot machine. I don't want 8 partitions on a single disk for it, I combine a number of them down to four total. First I have a partition for Windows. The whole thing, docs and settings, program files and the OS. If Windows dies I can always transfer stuff to my Linux partion (from Linux of course) easily. Then replace it when I reinstall Windows.

Next I have a small swap partition, 256 mb or so. My laptop only has 384mb of RAM, so I really need the swap. Third I have a 'slush' partition. I know it seems wasteful, but it is FAT32 so both Windows and Linux use it for BT traffic and other messy stuff. I have friends who used their slush partition for both the '/home' and 'documents and settings' sections of both Windows and Linux before too, which is neat, but large FAT partitions make me nervous. If you don't do that, since the slush partition is FAT32 you can read and write from both Windows and Linux. Which is nice, but that part is unecessary, there are EXT2/3 and ReiserFS filesystem drivers for Windows, so Windows can at least read what is on the linux partion. Every modern Linux distro has NTFS read support too.

Lastly I have my Linux partition. Everything under "/" together (unless you mescalate /home and docs and settings in the slush partition). That way if I hose Linux, I can boot into windows, using Windows EXT2/3 drivers I can save my /home and /etc partitions, reinstall Linux, then just when back in Linux I copy /home and /etc back where they belong.

Conclusion

This is just my advice, take it for what it is worth. But next time you are setting up a new operating system (like Vista, if you swing that way) remember - 'many partitions make light work' or 'partitions are your friend' or some other platitude exonerating the virtues of breaking up your hard drive.

UAE & Ports, Bush & Iraq

2006-03-01T21:31:00.000-05:00

I've been on a political streak recently, don't worry I have a neato one on partitioning coming down the tube. The whole UAE port scandal incensed me. Why does it matter if they own equipment at ports??!? They've never been connected to terrorism, they are very modern, western and pro captitalism, they have a per capita GDP comparable to the United States. If we would allow a free trade agreement with them, why wouldn't we let them own stuff here?

The way I see it, the more interconnectivity we have the better. Would Osama Bin Laden gotten attackers to hit the World Trade Towers if he had friends/family there? How about if he owned stock in United Airlines? Yeah, probably not. FDR and his advisors had a great idea after WWII. Nations that trade don't fight. Since then, AFAIK no nation that trades freely with another has gone to war with it.

It just seems racist to object to the UAE whereas the port equipment used to be owned by the Brits. If it was Iran, fine we should be worried, but the UAE is not like Iran in any way other than race and religion. It reminds me of people who think we should penalize sucessful countries/companies with trade barriers. It sounds just like racism to care about one group of people you've never met more than another (like Detroit auto workers vs. Japanese ones). I'm not saying it is racist, it just sounds like it.

As long as I am on a rant, why the heck are we still in Iraq? I've asked myself and others a number of times. I get different answers but none of them seem to hold water.

Is it for democracy's sake? It seems very imperialistic to force an unwanted form of government on a country. If the Iraqis do want democracy, shouldn't enough of them support the fledgling government for us to leave? If leaving would allow the terrorists to win because they have more resources, we can give the Iraqis the money and weapons they need. If the terrorists would win because not enough people care to fight them, it seems they have the mandate of the people.

Saddam was not linked to Al Qaeda and he had no WMD. We didn't know that before, so it was fine that we invaded. But now we know. So it isn't about protecting ourselves anymore. Many people claim we should stay because we've invested so much money and lives already it'd all be for naught if we left. This is the exact definition of a sunk cost, one that should be ignored in future analysis.

Why are the terrorists blowing up our soldiers in Iraq? We like to say it is the bland hatred of freedom, but could it be our long standing anti-muslim policy in Israel? Or how about our occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq? Maybe it is our undue influence we use to selectively pressure and protect third world nations? It seems simplistic that they hate us for our way of life. If it is simply that, why didn't Muslim attacks come sooner than the mid 90s.

The only honest reason I can figure, is that President Bush wants or needs wartime powers for whatever reason. He can only get them by keeping us perpetually in war (kind of reminds me of Orwell's masterpiece 1984). The wartime powers would be cover his wiretapping (and other semi-legal) decisions. Wartime power may be a good enough reason to many, I'm not so sure. But at least let's call this what it is.

Politicians Should Stay Away From Economics

2006-03-01T20:32:00.000-05:00

I have wondered, for a long time, about public views on economics. I wonder that they are so backwards, and I wonder why there are so backwards. It seems to me that, for the most part, people stay with what they know. I don't argue physics with the physicists, linguistics with the linguists, or philosophy with the philosophers. I expect that they know their respective subjects better than I, and if I want to disagree with them I had better educate myself first.

I studied economics in college. That doesn't make me an expert, but I have a reasonably good idea of what I am talking about. Economics unfortunately brands me with the business people, but much to the surprise of many, economics is predominantly a descriptive behavioral science. We make fun of the vocational Bsuiness students as much or more than most because we are so different, yet seen as the same. Finance is about money, economics is about human behavior. Since the study of how we spend money seems to be the most lucrative and demanded work of economists, it is what others see the most.

Back to my original point. Why does everyone seem to have an opinion on economics? One answer is: because it affects us all, we all ought to be involved. My counter argument is as follows. Everything that we study matters, if it didn't matter no one would study it. Anyone who thinks that literary theory doesn't matter wouldn't care if deconstruction is taught as the primary means of interpreting literature in elementary school. Anyone who thinks high level physics doesn't affect us needs some serious brain food. If all study affects everyone (or at least affects all those purporting some economic knowledge), why don't they have as vociferous opinions on everything else?

I really don't know a good answer to this. Perhaps people perceive economics as a 'soft' science (which it may be), and as such my opinion is as good as the opinion of anyone else. That is baloney, take any econ class and suggest a poorly-thought-out theory. The professor will tell you exactly why your theory isn't the case. If you insist it is a matter of preference, he/she may take the time to construct a graph, a mathematical model, or do some econometrics to show that your theory is demonstrably untrue. However demonstrably false opinions are rampant in the public view of econ, and though they can be (and often are) refuted this doesn't seem to slow their propagation.

Adam Smith never said that profit was the end all motivation. He said that the drive for profit drives efficiency. Efficiency increases welfare, we will have more disposable income to give to the United Way, or buy an XBox. He was a dedicated moralist who saw economics as a way to increase welfare, not "strangle some small developing nation." He was a descriptivist not a prescriptivist.

The same kind of misinformation goes on with all the emphasis on sweatshops. Are the conditions horrid? Certainly. Should we encourage better conditions? Without a doubt. [2] But as Themla Young said "foreign factories… shouldn't be [shutdown]. When companies shut down… many workers are forced into even less desirable situations." Boycotting Thai goods hurts the Thai people, not Nike. No one addressed the issue of preference. Developing nations seem to prefer to work in sweatshops to other work. [3] Americans, though we would like to dictate to them our morals, certainly prefer cheap sweatshop goods to expensive ones. [4]

Perhaps you are wondering when I'll get to my point. I was going to call for changes in linguistics; I would try to get more than one linguist. Linguistics is something I know next to nothing about (short of taking a single 200 level class), so I haven't formed ill-advised (or otherwise) opinions, I would need to seek out experts. Were I to develop incorrect linguistic opinions they would probably be as caustic and misinformed to linguists as what most politicians say about economics is to me.

[2] Perhaps we should look into the good things globalization is doing as well. Microcredit, for example, for one is raising thousands from poverty.

[3] Many tree-huggers say 3^rd world workers are 'forced' into sweatshops because there is no other choice. What did these people do to survive before globalization? If they had a sustainable way of living before, why did they abandon it to work in a sweatshop? Because they prefer it (or prefer the benefits it pays).

Trusted Computing Cuts Users Out

2006-02-19T21:43:00.000-05:00

Computers are all about the users. They were invented to help users simplify tasks (whether it is a scientist on a cray or your grandmother on her eMachine). That said, users have always been the problem with computers. We say we want stability, well why don't we run Solaris or FreeBSD? These are among the most stable complex systems out there; they'll do most everything we want and never crash (as opposed to DOS which won't crash but it won't do what we want). The answer is users, we are the weak link, not Solaris, us.

If you need to get something done, tools help. But the best tools won't get anything done if you don't know how to use them. I have a friend who uses a pen and pad of paper to do his budgeting. He has excel, he just doesn't know how to use it.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just cut the user out of the equation? This is the whole idea behind mechanization, users make mistakes, we'll get a machine to do it. This has provided spectacular leaps in production. This mentality has long been in the computing world. Windows and OSX do this very well and it is a great boon to usability.

Computer security is starting to improve significantly by cutting the user out. All these computer security measures do this:

automatic updates

firewalls without user interaction

anti-virus programs automatically cleaning/deleting files

This makes user security better, it saves time, & does a better job than many users could do on their own.

But cutting the user out (like anything else) when taken too far has scary results. What if someone decided you couldn't be trusted to decide what to put on your computer, and that someone else should decide? This is essentially what "trusted computing" is all about.

There is a great discussion on Slashdot about trusted/treacherous computing. A particularly insightful poster wrote "Trust the computer but don't trust me? That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen." That is the issue at heart here. Firms will decide what you can and can't do on your computer, because you cannot be trusted.

Trusted computing has benefits. By only allowing tested code to run there are a lot of potential benefits:

stability could increase

viruses could be prevented from running

malware could be stomped out

piracy on trusted platforms would end

users would know when their system changed

phishing could be stomped out – no more passwords

These benefits are nothing to snub your nose at. A version of this model is what we have for online security. You can get a "trusted" SSL certificate for your business, signaling that it is OK to put in your SSN or credit card number. This has been a boon to online retailers, it provides a fast way to gain trust with a user. No more lock-ins to companies you have experience with.

There are potentially harmful effects to 'trusted computing' too. What if you were a virus writer and found out how to get your code to be 'trusted.' I don't pretend to understand how this could be done, but if it was it would be far more devastating than current viruses (and the incentive seems high enough for someone to figure this out). By cutting the user out of the equation, you may actually make systems LESS secure. Other potentially harmful effects:

vendor lock-in. Perpetually enforced monopoly power. Do you trust Microsoft to decide for you what applications you can use? Will Firefox be trusted? FF extensions? What about programs that cut into their revenue – OpenOffice? Not to pick on Microsoft, there are hundreds of tech/content firms that would love to eliminate competitors.

control. For censorship, DRM, whatever. This would end piracy. And privacy. And user control of data, documents, and everything else. This provides a spectacular platform for hard drive extortion.

identification. If amazon could uniquely identify you, no need for onerous identification processes. But if someone used your computer without your supervision, or figured out how to fake an identification, you may have just bought a thousand britney spears cds.

no more privacy. Is the opposite of anonymity, nonymity? How would this affect free speech, in say China, or the US?

We are just on the cusp of 'trusted computing.' Windows Vista supports it. Many computer manufacturers shipped hardware that supports 'trusted computing' already.

The GPLv3 specifically deals with 'trusted computing' and DRM. I'll leave you to figured out what the FSF and Stallman think about them, but it isn't positive.

So is 'trusted computing' good? I'll leave that to you to decide, but it is certainly something to be aware of. As for me, I'll stick with Linux, make sure my hardware doesn't support 'trusted computing', and operate my computer however I please.

By the way, the SSL certificates we use for online purchases... yeah phishers are using them now too.

Mini-Entry - Frivilous pursuits

2006-02-15T01:01:00.000-05:00

So as far as religion goes, mine is one of the most strict. Everyone knows the people who follow each law to the letter. I admire such people, I'm just not one of them. So when you think about a lot of stuff we do, it isn't exactly useful, doesn't have a religious/eternal purpose. I'm talking about stuff like most entertainment. TV is like spiritual junkfood, we know it is bad for us, but we like it.

I don't know how to justify such things. I'm not sure I need to. Seinfeld, Kung-Pow, RATM or Kurt Vonnegut, none of these have any good spiritual implications, and may have bad ones (the overused word 'desensitization' comes to mind). They may not have any good implications in the long run, but they help with the issue of keeping one's sanity.

Maybe no one else knows what the heck I"m talking about. I'm not a fundamentalist really, though I admire those who can be. My point is that not all frivolous things are bad (or that more stuff is frivolous than we think, take your pick). I spend inordinate amounts of time figuring out how to hack computers, a word which here refers to getting computers to do something they weren't designed to do. Some people think it is a waste, then they go watch a movie (I often counter with "I have time to waste, I don't own a TV", which is true).

Just because I select my frivolous pursuits differently than others doesn't make them better or worse. Sometimes I am surprised that people can pay as much attention to their appearance as I do to computers, my brother does to politics, my mother to books, my father to work and my friends to movies, video games & tv shows. We all just choose our frivolous pursuits differently.

Sony Copy Protection? Get compensated!

2006-02-10T23:07:00.000-05:00

Remember the Sony rootkit debacle? Sure who doesnt. As you probably know the EFF filed a class action lawsuit against SonyBMG for the the XCP copy protection and for the MediaMax copy protection. Well it's been all over the news that Sony is settling. I bought one of these discs; if hadn't been running Debian I'd have been hit by it too.

Today I just got a notice in the mail informing me that I can claim damages from this lawsuit. I wasn't infected but as long as I return the disk I can get awarded damages. Lets make this as expensive for Sony as we can (to deter behavior like this in the future). If you purchased either of these two copy protection schemes, the details below tell what you need to do to recieve compensation. Please get compensated. It isn't much, but if enough people get compensated it may just stop/slow this from happening again!

Here is a list of the infected cds: with XCP and Mediamax.

Great job to the EFF, one of the few organizations looking out for Joe Sixpack (and everyone else).

***IMPORTANT LEGAL NOTICE/SOFTWARE UPDATE NOTICE***PLEASE READ*** (Please do not respond to this email. Responses will not be read.)

If You Bought, Received or Used a SONY BMG Music Entertainment CD Containing Either XCP or Media Max Content Protection Software, Your Rights May Be Affected By a Class Action Settlement, And You Should Download Updates For That Software.

What is this about?

A settlement has been proposed in a lawsuit brought against SONY BMG Music Entertainment, Inc., SunnComm International Inc., and First 4 Internet, Ltd. ("Defendants"). The lawsuit, In re SONY BMG CD Technologies Litigation, Case No. 1:05-cv-09575-NRB, is pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and relates to XCP and MediaMax content protection software installed on certain SONY BMG music CDs.

The Settlement resolves claims that the Defendants manufactured and sold CDs containing XCP and MediaMax software without adequately disclosing the limitations the software imposes on the use of the CDs and the security vulnerabilities it creates. The Defendants have denied that they did anything wrong.

Who Is Included, And What Does The Settlement Provide?

The settlement provides relief for persons who bought, received or used SONY BMG CDs with either XCP or MediaMax software. Under the settlement, any person in possession of an XCP CD can exchange it for a replacement CD, an MP3 download of the same album, and either (a) cash payment of $7.50 and one (1) free album download from a list of 200 albums, or (b) three (3) free album downloads from that list.
Purchasers of CDs containing MediaMax 5.0 software will receive a free
MP3 download of the same album and one (1) additional free album download. Purchasers of CDs containing MediaMax 3.0 software will receive a free MP3 download of the same album.

The settlement also requires the Defendants to stop manufacturing SONY BMG CDs with XCP or MediaMax 3.0 and 5.0 software and, until 2008: (1) make available updates to fix all known security vulnerabilities caused by XCP and MediaMax software; (2) provide software programs to uninstall XCP and MediaMax software safely; (3) fix any future security vulnerabilities discovered in MediaMax and any other content protection software placed on SONY BMG CDs; (4) provide independent verification that personal information about users of SONY BMG CDs has not and will not be collected through XCP or MediaMax; (5) waive certain provisions of the end user license agreements for XCP and MediaMax software; and
(6) ensure that any other content protection software will be clearly disclosed, independently tested and readily uninstalled.

At 9:15a.m. on May 22, 2006, the Court will hold a hearing at the United States District Court, Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse, 500 Pearl Street, Courtroom 21A, New York, New York 10007-1312, to decide whether to approve the settlement and the class attorneys' fees and costs.

How Do I Participate In The Settlement?
If you bought or received a SONY BMG Music CD containing XCP or MediaMax software and want to receive the relief you may be eligible for under the settlement, you must submit an online claim form at www.sonybmgcdtechsettlement.com, or mail a claim form to:

SONY BMG CD Technologies Settlement
P.O. Box 1804, Faribault, MN 55021-1804

All claim forms must be submitted by December 31, 2006.

What Are My Other Options?

If you bought, received or used a SONY BMG Music CD containing XCP or MediaMax software, and you do not want to be legally bound by the settlement or receive a replacement CD, cash, free downloads or other relief, you must exclude yourself by May 1, 2006. If you do not exclude yourself, certain of your claims against the Defendants that were or could have been asserted in the lawsuit will be released, meaning you may not be able to sue the Defendants for those claims.
To view the detailed legal Notice of Proposed Class Action Settlement, Motion for Attorneys' Fees and Settlement Fairness Hearing and to download the software updates, visit www.sonybmgcdtechsettlement.com.
You may obtain further information by contacting the claims administrator at the address above or by calling toll free 1-800-242-7610.

Why The Copyright System is Broken

2006-01-23T23:01:00.000-05:00

Note: A commenter has alerted me that some of the material with regards to Disney is not my own but belong to Doctor Lawrence Lessig. I am a big fan of his so I am embarrased I didn't know. A friend on IRC suggested the idea to me, and I thought it was great (not knowing he lifted it from Lessig). I am going to keep the content up, and provide a link to Dr. Lessig's presentation. He is much smarter than I am, give it a read.

I am worried about the future. We have increasingly devastating natural disasters, immorality and violence, but people are working on these problems. They do not bother me much. I am worried about where our culture is going.

By culture I mean traditional media: literature, music and movies, as well as nontraditional creativity: computer code, hardware, and science. It isn't the content itself that is troubling, though we have problems with that, but the freedom this content no longer enjoys. Legislative copyright trends allow less and less freedom, and this will damage our future.

Copyright laws have existed for some time. In 1710, English copyright laws had a 14- year statute of limitations. In 1769 London publishers, seeking to protect their monopoly on classics, succeeded in extending copyrights forever. Five years later this ruling was overturned. Can you imagine a world in which only London publishers could print Shakespeare, Milton and others?

This sort of battle has been waged as long as control and reproduction of creative works has been possible. The founders of the constitution understood the conflict between copyright holders and everyone else. To address this conflict, the purpose of copyrights was included in the constitution.

“[Congress shall have power] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

To encourage creativity, copyrights grant temporary monopolies to inventors to recoup losses incurred during research or development. This is as it should be; science is expensive, art is valuable.1 After a “limited time” these works fell into the public domain.2 There, anyone can use them, publish them, copy them, and make derivative works, all without permission.

Why should we care? Progress has always built on the past. Literary theory supports what seems common sense; what we create has roots in what we know. The past has always tried to control the future use of its works. This includes computer code, literature, media, science, et cetera. Culture is free so long as the past is prevented this control. If control by the past is always allowed, permanent monopolies would ensue. An oligopoly of incumbents could control culture by allowing or disallowing use of their works.

An example to illustrate. In 1928 Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse with “Steamboat Willie.” It was a parody of a full-length live-action feature film named “Steamboat Bill” released the same year. Walt didn't wait 14 years, he just used it. Disney continued the tradition of using works in, the public domain to create the Disney classics we now cherish. Many of these were lifted from the Brothers Grimm. If there was no public domain or copyrights had been enforced as vigorously as they are now; there would be no Disney movies. Ironically, with media corporations pushing for extended copyright legislation, Disney (and others) is ensuring that no one will do to them what they did to the Brothers Grimm.

Now a brief overview of current copyright laws in America. Initially, we adopted British common law. This included copyright laws with the 14 year statute of limitations. In 1831 the length was extended to 42 years, 56 in 1909, and starting in 1962 a barrage of extensions ensued. Legislators prolonged the copyright duration eleven times in the last 40 years- not just for new works, but existing works too. The length now stands at the creator's life plus 50 years or 75 years. Do music artists really need life + 50 years to “recoup their losses?” Do we really want all our artists motivated strictly by financial gains, rather than a love of music?

Despite how onerous the length of current copyrights is, far more insidious forces are at work in the United States. Expansion of copyright holder rights has accelerated at a ridiculous rate. Formerly, there were three divisions of rights: unregulated, fair use and regulated. Unregulated uses included reading the media, selling it, giving it away, anything not explicitly in the other two categories; these were rights copyright holders couldn't touch. 'Fair use' covered rights that would have been protected by copyright but were explicitly allowed: derivative works, personal copies, citations, and other non-commercial uses. Copyright covered a small area of rights: publishing and copying for profit. Copyright did not cover distribution, personal copies, or a slew of rights that have been recently abdicated to copyright holders. These lost rights now make it impossible to legally make a copy of a DVD for personal use or resell a software license.3 The next generation of DVDs will further defenestrate our rights, for example Blu-Ray players “call home to Sony” for permission before playing the movie. All these rights, once ours, have been lost to the copyright holders.

The increasing statute of limitations and decreasing user rights are destroying the public domain. Without this, “new Disneys” are kept out by the old Disneys. Losing out on the potential gains which a new Disney could bring is clearly a net loss to society. The only offsetting gain is the increased profits the old Disneys receive from enjoying a continued monopoly; profits which are arguably less than the potential gains from a “new Disney”.

With the computer industry forced to take orders from media conglomerates under threat of 'enabling infringement' litigation, our direction is clear. People don't realize that right now culture is more controlled than any before has ever has been. Before the erosion of personal rights, if you wanted to understand how an invention worked, you could look at it (or the patent). With patents and copyrights now locked under the guise of being 'proprietary', inventors can no longer build off of others. With technology advancing only where copyright holders approve, culture is controlled at an increasing rate.4

Even now, companies gobble up patents and copyrights of dubious creativity. Microsoft has patented the double click, Amazon.com patented keeping an online history, Rio has patented hierarchal displays (which is being used to sue Apple), and on and on. Although companies claim these are 'defensive' patents to protect themselves from frivolous litigation, they are often used 'offensively.'5 Prior art is ignored, alternative compatible solutions are outlawed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and monopolies that never should have been, are now enforced by the government. The costs alone of navigating this legal minefield, never mind licensing costs for trivial inventions, are enough to prohibit new firms or individuals from entering and innovating.

Another issue is “probabilistic patents.” Lobbyists claimed that research now takes so long that innovators need patent protection on inventions that they 'intend' to create. So that big bad Microsoft doesn't swoop down and make it first. The problem with this is that, no one knows if the innovator will ever be able to produce the invention they intend to create. This bars all others from actually making such a device.

A perfect example of this is RIM and the Blackberry. They made a terrific device that got email, and all sorts of things wirelessly, like a cell phone. Well guess what, someone owned a patent on fairly specious grounds (they had never and still have never made the device they patented), vaguely resembling the Blackberry. So who loses? RIM who made the blackberry. Any user who bought a Blackberry. What was preserved? The rights to sue others over patents you never developed.

I hope this seems as insane to you as it does to me. Does it make sense that rightnow, you can more jail time for videotaping a movie in a theater than for rape? Does it make sense that recording industries can sue for over $1500 per song shared on peer-to-peer networks?6 Does it make sense that the content industry (those creating movies, music, et cetera) can hold hostage the entire technology industry over these copyrights?

No one is fighting this because of asymmetric returns. Licensing basic technology (such as the double click) may cost each user only a dollar, but benefits copyright holders quite a bit. It is simply not worth fighting to those who are injured by the copyright, but it is worth enforcing for the holders. Hence copyright holders are winning all the battles.7

Why does this scare me? I worry about the next generation of computers, further locking down distribution. The Intel VIIV push is all about this and DRM8 (digital rights/restrictions management). I worry about the future. When firms, through technology and litigation, will govern creativity. When royalties must be paid on copies of works by Da Vinci, Dickens, and Stallman. When future artists and innovators, cannot create because of ridiculous and expired patents on everyday ideas. When faceless firms control all current and future uses of science, computers, music, movies and literature.

1 It is interesting to note, copyrights do not exist to benefit the inventors; but to encourage more creation.

2 This is less and less true, as I will explain later.

3 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) makes it illegal to circumvent copyright protection regardless of the reason. To copy (or play) a DVD you have to break Content Scrambling System (CSS), remove Macrovision, and sometimes region encoding, all three of which are protected by the DMCA. Thus copies and unlicensed players are illegal. So playing a DVD on Linux is illegal since there is no licensed software. Similar restrictions (EULAs) keep you from reselling your software, so if you just bought a new version of MS Office, you can't legally sell your old one.

4 This only applies in industrialized nations. With 3rd world countries refusing to grant these old world monopolies, innovation is moving overseas at a frightening rate.

5 A study of 354 technology firms in 2005 found that they currently face an average of 42 lawsuits each, the greatest contributor being copyright infringement.

6 A new law mandates $1500 for each work infringed on. Piracy figures in general have been thus inflated.

7 Copyright holders are clearly winning legislatively, but claim to be losing billions to piracy. Economists dispute these losses. Pirates are, on average, poorer than non-pirates (most are the young and people in 3rd world countries). They argue that not every person who pirates a movie, CD, piece of software, et cetera, (especially in 3rd world countries where piracy is rampant) would be able and willing to pay full price for what they pirated. So if pirates, on average, can not afford the intellectual property they pirate, have the industries really 'lost' any money? There are quite a few academic papers which explain that industries have not lost much to piracy (despite the inflated values they give) and in many cases have seen increased revenue from piracy.

8 DRM is more and more the way things are going. For an excellent discussion on the goals of DRM see this rant.

Flash and the Future

2006-01-13T02:11:00.000-05:00

Samsung announced they'll start building 16 gigabyte flash chips (in the article they aren't consistent with gigabit and gigabyte, but since we already have 2 gigabyte flash drives, I suspect they mean 16 gigabyte not 16 gigabits). Now they have 32 gigabyte drives. That is big. Really big.

These sorts of flash drives would be beautiful in portable devices yes. Pocket PCs that can actually hold the bloat in windows XP (I kid I kid), iPod nanos that hold 32 gb, and any of a dozen other applications.

But more importantly I can see a terrific value using them in laptops. Imagine putting 5 x 16gb flash drives in a laptop in a RAID 5 array, giving 64GB usable space (more than enough for most laptops). You'd have a few huge advantages.

1. You'd save a terrific amount of power (spinning CDs and HDs kills batteries faster than about anything).
2. In a RAID 5 array (so long as only 1 drive fails at a time), if you have a drive failure, you could have a little program popup and say "look part of your HD has died. You haven't lost any data, so don't worry, but get this serviced immediately."
3. With the RAID 5 controlled by the computer, the read/write times would be unreal. Fastest loading ever. 10 second boots and instant program loading!
4. With solid state memory, no more hard drive heads scratching the hard drive platters if you drop your laptop.
5. Flash memory is small. Even 5 chips would be much smaller than a 2.5 inch hard drive. More importantly, it is flat. So you could get laptops half inch thick (assuming a slot loading CD drive).
6. No problems with fragmentation. Because read on flash speeds aren't tied to sectors being consecutive, it doesn't matter if files are spread all over.

I'm sure there are other advantages too, but this is what came off the top of my head.

When you unplug your computer, the reason you lose unsaved stuff is because RAM, without power, cannot hold data. Not so with flash though. If we could get a faster version of flash with read/write speeds closer to DDR RAM speeds, you could have a computer that, when unplugged unexpectedly, doesn't lose anything it wasn't writing at that very millisecond. Boy wouldn't that be a leap ahead?

Many people are worried about flash hard drives. They worry that flash memory has a limit to the number of writes. This shouldn't be a big problem because - the number of writes is really large - with load balancing no particular sector will wear out faster than any other - the worst a drive can become is read-only.

Traditional hard drives have some advantages over flash. Traditionaly hard drives have faster consistent write speeds, flash is faster for smaller files but slower for large ones. This is assuming the regular hard drive isn't fragmented, but it is a concern nonetheless. To beat this hardware manufacturers have developed hybrid drives.

Windows Vista have plans to use flash much more than previous operating systems. Vista will have the option to use a flash drive you plug in as memory. While it isn't as fast as real RAM but it is leaps faster than traditional virtual memory. Vista also has planned support for the hybrid drives I mentioned. This is a traditional hard drive coupled with a large flash drive. The flash drive would be used as a buffer (rather than the 2, 8 and 16 meg buffers on current HDs). This buffer would also be used for primary data storage, and the hard drive wouldn't have to spin all the time. These hybrid drives have many of the same benefits a pure flash solution would have, though not to the same extent.

Unsurpisingly Samsung (the makers of these massive chips) have made a flash laptop of their own. And for those doubting the feasibility, Intel seems to agree .

I hope Apple is working on this. Currently I can only see Apple implementing something like this, but eventually it'd hit the PC market. HP seems to still innovate even if Dell doesn't. Wouldn't that give them a boost, the fastest laptop (so they claim) now is even faster, more stable, fault tolerant, and smaller.

Notes:
Flash drives have faster burst read times than traditional hard drives, but not long consecutive reads. That problem would be eliminated by having a striped array.
I know about the limit to reads/writes, however this can be mitigated by proper allocation.
Flash drives are rated at 1,400,000 hours of MTBF. That is a long time. Most Hard Drives are rated at 1,000,000 hours of MTBF.

Some OS Developments I'd Like To See Become More Ubiquitous

2006-01-09T00:02:00.000-05:00

Here are some ideas for operating systems that I'd like to see developed. I was on a plane the other day, and I fired up my laptop to watch a movie. I had just got the movie, so I didn't have time to rip it, which I usually do; to save on batteries. Spinning a hard drive consumes enough power, spinning a DVD drive consumes even more.

So I loaded into my Debian system. The power management in KDE is pretty good. Admittedly KDE's standby and hibernate stink, but the CPU throttling is a godsend. So I start watching my DVD and about 40 minutes later, as my battery is forcing out its last gasps, I think to myself, "why do I need a fully featured OS running to watch a DVD?"

I've been thinking about this question and it is more puzzling than it seems. Why can't my computer act as a DVD player as well as a computer without having to do both? My idea was that a computer that set to boot from the CD drive first (as most are) would check to see what the disk is. If it was a bootable disk (a la knoppix) it would boot. If it was an audio CD, it would play the audio. If it was a DVD, it would start the DVD; both using some minimal multimedia player that doesn't even touch the hard drive.

Then I started thinking, why couldn't the music player that played the CD, also play mp3s from the hard drive? Ditto for playing avis or movs. Unfortunately that leads to the slippery slope; loading filesystem drivers, media codecs, spinning hard drives, and some sort of OS environment. Sounds strangely like a very light linux distro. (Like geexbox I suppose, though it would have to install rather than just be a live CD).

Macs already have something like this. They have a number of neato boot modes. The neatest is 'disk mode.' By holding "T" when the computer is turned on, the computer acts like an external drive. Connect it to other computers and they'll see an external drive (I think it'd be neat if you could do this without rebooting your mac, while in OSX, but for technical reasons, especially problesm with more than one machine mounting a single hard drive, that may not be possible). That kind of idea is what should go into this new boot mode.

A mini OS is an option, but the general public wants something that comes with their computer. Currently I have a triple boot, DSL (my media player that fits what I want closest), Debian and Windows XP. But why couldn't a bootup multimedia player be implemented in the BIOS? I started looking around and it seems my idea (as usual) is a little late.

This article came out today. It is a nice writeup on what both Toshiba and HP are doing with a few (as much as 80% in Toshibas case) of their laptops. You can get it now in the Toshiba Qosmio series, or the HP dv1000. These laptops will have a multimedia player that will start on boot without loading an entire desktop environment. The Toshiba Qosmio series is expensive (it has a lot of multimedia stuff packed in there) but the dv1000 is less than $1000.

Why is this a good idea? Other than the obvious power management reasons I see two major advantages to this setup. First load times will be negligable. Second the media player will be more stable. Have you ever had, in the middle of a DVD, a virus scan or something fire up? Something blue screen? Plus, if you killed your OS, at least you still have a functional DVD player!

All in all I was glad to see other people, far smarter than I am, implementing this. As long as this feature continues to expand, I know my next laptop will have it.

My Toolkit

2006-01-04T23:00:00.000-05:00

I visited my family for the holidays, which means I spent an entire day on planes and in airports. However unpleasant, I can deal with this. But upon reaching my destination I found I had left my little black case of CDs on the plane.

What was in my case? Not music or movies (actually I did have serenity in there), but instead something far more valuable, my admin toolkit. This was devastating (ok not so bad, I stored the ISO files).

Currently I do low level computer support. People come to us all the time with computers that are completely hosed with spyware and other malware. We often get computers are running legacy software, OS9, WinME, Win 98, I've seen Win 95 (though not 3.1 or earlier thank goodness). It is hard to stay on top of all of this software.

The other part of my job is helping people with 'multimedia' projects. This includes Final Cut, Premier, DVD Studio, Encore, Shake, Motion, the Adobe Creative Suite, the Macromedia Suite, Garage Band, Audition, Soundtrax, and a dozen other programs we have sitting on our computers. Occasionally one of these computers gets hosed too. Guess who gets to fix them?

I don't mind fixing computers, I enjoy it. I usually plug OSX or Linux for people while they are waiting, I enjoy that too. Most people are pretty accepting that we can't fix everything, and sometimes it is better to give up the ghost and reformat a computer than muck around for hours.

So why is my toolkit so important? I'll tell you. It makes my job much easier. Here is a list of CDs I have in my kit, and why they are useful.

Windows Live CDs: These aren't all Windows based, but they can all write to NTFS.

Winternals ERD Commander: A live windows based CD (so it can r/w NTFS), ERD will sort through Windows blue-screen memory dumps.¹ Then it will suggest the most likely causes of the problem. It is rarely wrong. It does have a ton of other uses, but this is the most useful to me.

MiniPE: This is the ultimate Windows liveCD. It includes everything: backup utilities, 4 different virus scanners, 3 antispyware scanners, ISO software, file recovery software, and anything else you might need. There were a few things I wanted extra, so using WinISO I added a few other goodies, but it is fairly complete by itself.

Ultimate Boot CD: This is a nice collection of freeware utilities. It is a little bit dated, but still quite good for free. Antivirus, antispyware, hard drive tools, and a whole lot more.

Windows Installer: The install disk and necessary apps to go with it.

Windows XP Professional Install Disk: It is my own personal copy I got when I bought my computer. XP Home works just as well. When people don't have their disk, as long as they have the product key, I'll install off of my disk. Reformatting is so often the answer to problems, XP installer is necessary.

Custom Autopatcher Disk: Since my WinXP installer is SP1, there is no way I'd connect a computer to the internet off a fresh install. Not even to get Windows Updates. Enter Autopatcher. This is about 250 mb right now, and it includes all WinXP updates. Plus it offers a lot of ways to customize Windows. Since it is only 250 mb, I put a ton of other freeware on the rest of the disk: Firefox, Opera, Sygate Firewall, ZoneAlarm Firewall, Microsoft Antispyware, AVGFree, Clamwin, and others. This way I can update the fresh windows install and put antivirus, a firewall, all at the same time. Then I feel comfortable connecting to the internet.

I have two versions of each freeware program, one I can run from disk and an installer. That way I can run AV without going through all the rebooting and installing, then install it to keep the user safe.

Gnu/Linux Live CDs: Each of these has a specific purpose, testing hardware, security, rescue and others. Note, not all of these are Linux, one is BSD based.

ZoneCD: ZoneCD is neato. It makes any computer, with a wifi card (it suports an amazing array of chipsets), and internet access into a hotspot. Reportedly this was used during Hurricane Katrina so that people could file FEMA applications and whatnot over the internet when there were only a limited number of ethernet ports.

Knoppix: The original LiveCD, or nearly so. Knoppix comes with a ton of software, secure deleters, network traffic analyzers, apache, and others. Knoppix is so complete, it could easily be called a desktop replacement OS.

M0n0wall: A liveCD firewall. This isn't as easy to use as most of the other disks I've listed, but don't let that deter you. This is a grade A firewall. Based on FreeBSD, it is small enough to run on most anything, I had a friend running it on an old 386 with 20mb hard drive just fine. This is useful for creating protection for a temporary DMZ, while you are getting things setup.

Auditor and Whax: Either of these will do, I've use Auditor more frequently but not because it is better, these are both great. They are security testing disks. Someone running insecurely and refuse to change? Do some penetration tests with these and they'll change their mind. In the future Auditor and Whax are merging to become Backtrack. Keep your eyes out for that!

Helix: Helix is for incident response. Other liveCDs use virtual memory or 'swap' space. This makes them much quicker, but they may overwrite some temporary data (or more likely unrecovered deleted data). Helix won't. If a computer is compromised you'll want Helix.

Gnu/Linux Install CDs: These are almost all really easy to use, which is why I carry them. Some users are sick of Windows but don't have the $ to buy a Mac, so I offer them a Gnu/Linux disk. I do carry a lot of them, but isn't that what Linux is all about, choice? Note, not all of these are Linux, one is BSD.

Mepis: This is my preferred newbie distribution. It automatically detects nearly everything, plus you can learn a lot about Linux systems if you want (as opposed to Ubuntu). But if you don't want to, you don't need to. Debian is my favorite distribution and Mepis is a comfortabl derivative.

OpenSuSE: This is another easy OS to install and use. Very professional, and functional, most users can handle SuSE just fine. The best RPM distro out there.

Linspire: This is probably the easiest distribution out there for an ex-Windows user. I've offered it to people who don't know a firewall from a port. Linspire had a temporary free offer, which is when I grabbed it, expect to pay about $60 for it now. As a warning you always run as root on Linspire, so you can hose your computer if you aren't careful. But thats not any different from Windows.

Kubuntu: If you don't want your user to mess anything up, Ubuntu is for them. I prefer KDE to Gnome, so I offer Kubuntu to those sick of Windows. I'd never use it because... well there is no root!

FreeBSD: Occasionally we have someone with a real working knowledge of computers seek help. BSD is real Unix, rather than a clone, and is really a grade A operating system especially (but not only) for servers. I've only ever given FreeBSD away twice, but the users were both quite happy.

So between the rescue disks I can clean up any computer pretty quickly. With the install disks I can help them get a fresh install if that is what they need.If I had to pick 3 disks that are the most useful, I'd definitely go with MiniPE, my custom Autopatcher disk, and Mepis. Save the system if possible, replace it if not!

As always, if I missed anything, relayed any incorrect information or you have questions, feel free to comment, I'll get back to you.

1When WinXP blue screens, it does a partial memory dump. You can set it up to do a full memory dump if you'd like, but this is valuable for diagnosing the problem.