Mass disability - dysfunctional web sites, apps for everything

I last wrote about "mass disability" and the Left Behind in a 2021 post. The concept has sometimes seemed on the edge of going mainstream but it's never quite made it. Maybe we're getting closer; a recent Michael Tsai post (No App, No entry) reminded me of my Mastodon thread from a few weeks ago:

What is the crazy that drives Trumpism and the many global equivalents?

It is that the minimal IQ to function well in the modern world is now about 120 and that eliminates most people.

This is both the most important fact of our time and the least palatable. It is the thing that cannot be said and it will be ruin of us if we don't say it ...

I've been saying this for years. Today I was reminded of it while doing some travel booking.

During the bookings I encountered:

1. A web site that didn't work with my older version of Safari (I knew what was wrong and switched to Chrome. 

2. A Delta web site bug (I recognized it as a bug and knew what to do). 

3. Place that was out of rental cards but I new Expedia would have some contracts that would let me find one. 

4. Travel web sites that all needed new credentials...

... These are all routine parts of modern life including maintaining flaky computer systems (let me tell you ...) and phones ...

It was not like this even 35 y ago. Travel agents handled travel complexity. There were no smartphones. Computers were very limited. There was no internet for most. By necessity everyday life was much simpler. Most people could cope with it.

Now most cannot cope.

This is the most important feature of our time. And nobody can talk about it. 

I remember some good discussions on this thread but I can't find any of them now. Perhaps by design Mastodon has a limited memory. (My home instance has no search, so I had to download my archive and search it to find the date of the post. Then I could slowly navigate to it.)

I expanded on the theme a bit later:

Hotel laundry year 2000

1. Insert quarters to buy detergent, operate washer and dryer.

IQ requirement: 65 (my son could do this after a demonstration)

Hotel laundry year 2023

1. Scan QR code to download app whose profit comes from unspent funds.

2. Install app, create account with Apple ID

3. Figure out cryptic UX so can deposit funds (several odd unintuitive steps)

3. Deposit funds, paying just enough to cover this sesh. Pat the 25 cent low transaction penalty... 

4. Spot the scam behind app and avoid it (eg find at minimum)

5. Diagnose why after paying money and confirming machine it’s still not working

6. Authorize specific transaction

7. Start laundry.

(My son could not do this)

8. When complete delete app. 

IQ requirement: minimum 110, higher to spot the scam. 

This is why America is burning.

People are scared and angry and feeling left behind -- and they can't come out and say they are unable to manage their tech. Because that's the ultimate shame.

See also:

• Biden's essential task is to help the Left Behind 1/2021
• Complexity, cognition, civilization 11/2021
• What is the middle class and why can't most Americans get there? 11/2020
• Broken world: applying for a minimum wage job via a corporate HR web site 3/2017
• Trumpism and transition to mass disability 8/2016
• Is most American poverty actually disability? 10/2013
• The post-AI era is also the era of mass disability 12/2012 (we've been in the AI world for years)
• Unemployment and. the new economy 1/2011 (rather than unemployment we ended up over the next decade with a shrinking middle class and more people on the edge).
• Mass disability and the middle class 9/2011

Civilization, complexity and the limits of human cognition - another attempt at explaining the 21st century

The 70s were pretty weird, but I was too young to notice. (Not coincidentally, the Toffler/Farrell Future Shock book was written then.) By comparison the 80s and 90s more or less made sense. In 1992 Fukuyama wrote "The End of History" and that seemed about right for the times.

Things got weird again in the late 90s. I was in a .com startup and I remember valuations getting crazy about 1997, 3 years before the .com crash. We were still picking ourselves up from the crash when 9/11 hit. (A year later, on a purely personal note, my youngest brother vanished.) In the early 00s came Enron and other frauds almost forgotten now. Then in 2008 the real estate collapse and the Great Recession. We were barely recovering from the Great Recession when Trumpism hit. Followed by COVID (which was expected and not at all weird) and the Great Stupidity of the American Unvaccinated (which we did not expect and is perhaps weirdest of all).

Each time the world went off kilter I have tried to figure out a root cause:

In Feb 2009 I tried to figure out the crash of 2008:

At last count my list of contributing factors to the crash of '09 included ...

1. Complexity collapse: we don't understand our emergent creation, we optimized for performance without adaptive reserve
2. Mass disability and income skew: The modern world has disenfranchised much of humanity
3. The Marketarian religion: The GOP in particular (now the Party of Limbaugh), but also many Democrats and libertarians, ascribed magical and benign powers to a system for finding local minima (aka The Market). The Market, like Nature, isn't bad -- but neither is it wise or kind.
4. The occult inflation of shrinking quality: What happens when buyers can't figure out what's worth buying. Aka, the toaster crisis - yes, really.
5. performance-based executive compensation and novel, unregulated, financial instruments: a lethal combination. See also - You get what you pay for. The tragedy of the incentive plan.
6. Disintermediating Wall Street: Wall Street became a fragile breakpoint 
7. The future of the publicly traded company: A part of our problem is that the publicly traded company needs to evolve
8. The role of the deadbeats: too much debt - but we know that
9. Firewalls and separation of powers: a culture of corruption, approved by the American electorate, facilitated dissolving regulatory firewalls
10. Marked!: Rapid change and the Bush culture made fraud easy and appealing

I put Marked! pretty low on the list, but maybe I should bump it up a bit. The Hall of Shame (Clusterstock) lists a lot more fraud than has made the papers [1]...

• Fairfield Greenwich Group: quietly complicit in the Madoff fraud?
• Angelo Mozilo: white collar mobster
• Sam Israel: a $400 million fraud. In the old days, he'd have been front page news. I never heard of him.
• Many more, each of which would have been in the news once - including: JS Forte, RS Piccoli, JG Ossie, D Palmer, A Nodel, Marc Dreier.
• Those swindlers who have made the news... Allen Stanford, and, of course, Mr. Madoff.

By 2010 I was focusing on RCIIIT: The rise of China and India and the effects of IT.

... The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible ...

In 2016 and again in 2018 I tried to explain Trumpism by contributing factors (I was too optimistic about Murdoch's health though):

• 65% the collapse of the white non-college “working class” — as best measured by fentanyl deaths and non-college household income over the past 40 years. Driven by globalization and IT both separately and synergistically including remonopolization (megacorp). This is going to get worse.
• 15% the way peculiarities of the American constitution empower rural states and rural regions that are most impacted by the collapse of the white working class due to demographics and out-migration of the educated. This is why the crisis is worse here than in Canada. This will continue.
• 15% the long fall of patriarchy. This will continue for a time, but eventually it hits the ground. Another 20 years for the US?
• 5% Rupert Murdoch. Seriously. In the US Fox and the WSJ, but also his media in Australia and the UK. When historians make their list of villains of the 21st century he’ll be on there. He’s broken and dying now, but he’s still scary enough that his name is rarely mentioned by anyone of consequence.
• 1% Facebook, social media, Putin and the like. This will get better.

That 1% for Facebook et all is pretty small — but the election of 2016 was on the knife’s edge. That 1% was historically important.

A few months ago I listed 3 causes for the post-COVID supply and labor shock economics of 2021:

1. Wealth became extremely concentrated. 

2. Returns on labor for 40% of Americans fell below modern standard for economic life.

3. Good investments became hard to find.

It's almost 2022 now, so we're into almost 25 years of the world not making sense any more. So now I'm digging even deeper for a root cause.

Today I'm going with Gordon's Law: the complexity of a complex adaptive system will increase until it reaches a limiting factor. Our civilization is a complex adaptive system and its complexity increased until it hit a limiting factor -- the complexity capacity of the average human. These days between 40 and 50% of American's can't handle civilization 2021 (sometimes I call this mass disability (see also). Witness among other things, The Great Stupidity of the FoxCovians.

It's a variant of the "Future Shock" Toffler wrote about 52 years ago. I don't have a fix; I don't think the world will get less complex. Our technologies are moving too fast. Maybe we'll just get used to not understanding the world and civilization will stumble on regardless. After all, for most of human history the world was incomprehensible -- and we did manage. Sort of. Mostly without civilization though ...

Biden's essential task is to help the Left Behind

This is the last in a short series of post that began on Nov 11, 2020, shortly after Biden won the presidency for the first time. Back then it looked like McConnell would hold the Senate. 

In the decades since that post Trump became more insane than usual, a deranged mob of Trump cultists invaded the Capitol building, the Dems took the Senate, and Biden won the presidency for the third or fiftieth time depending how one counts. Truly, I need to finish this series while we still have electricity.

In the first post I wrote about how I think about the Trump voter (and America). I divided the Trump voter up into the religious fundamentalist (sometimes Trump cultist), the despicables (ex: Hawley, Cruz, the WSJ reader), and the Left Behind. The NYT profiled a Left Behind on 11/7/2020 (emphases mine):

... Nick [a] 26-year-old hair stylist ... spent the past few months campaigning for President Trump, taking special satisfaction in offending Biden supporters...

... He did not go to college and prides himself on his independent thinking; he puts himself in the category of street smart, not book smart...

... He had never bothered to register to vote until 2016, when he first heard Mr. Trump debate on television, and saw a political figure who reminded him of himself....

... When Fox News began reporting polls showing Mr. Biden in the lead, Ms. Rocco tried tuning into One America News, the right-wing cable network, which predicted a convincing victory for the president. The Roccos got news from a variety of sources — TikTok, QAnon, the pro-Trump comedian Terrence K. Williams, the YouTube mystic Clif High. “I’m a conspiracy theorist, I guess, if you want to call it that,” Ms. Rocco said...

...  he reminded himself what kept him out there all these months: People had disrespected him. The Facebook group manager who had kicked him off. The neighbor who took his yard sign. Teachers who responded to his daughter’s enthusiasm about Mr. Trump with awkward silence.

“People who don’t like Trump, I honestly think they are very soft people,” he said. “That is why the world is becoming so sensitive today. Back in the day, you could throw a snowball at someone at school and everything was fine. Nowadays, a letter gets sent home: Your child is being mean.”

... His older brother, who he describes as the brainy one, took the other path, winning a scholarship to college. (He is the Biden voter.) But Mr. Rocco’s aspirations were staunchly blue-collar; he chose trade school and went to work at 17...

It's unlikely Nick would have done well at a four year college or succeeded as a knowledge worker. He could marry well, or find an inheritance, or show unusual entrepreneurial talent -- but more likely he's going to be the disrespected Left Behind. In today's America if you aren't a knowledge worker you're probably not going to make over $30/hr, and you're not going to make it into the middle class as an individual [2]. Even in countries with effectively free college this non-knowledge worker cohort is about half the population [2].

America can't survive as a democracy with half its citizens Left Behind. We'll have a January 6 every year -- only the mobs will be larger and have better weapons. Of all the threats we face, this is our greatest near term challenge. Even CO2 driven climate change is a lesser threat.

Biden needs to work out a solution for the Left Behind problem. The good news is that for this problem survival and politics align. The Left Behind are the core of Trump's base and the modern GOP, it's tricky for the GOP to block policies to bring the Left Behind into the middle class. And, after Jan 6, 2021, there's intense awareness of the danger posed by the Left Behind (though that will be quickly forgotten). 

Most importantly the Left Behind are not only white, they are also Black [3], Hispanic, Asian and any slice you like (though more men than women). Helping the Left Behind crosses political boundaries, unlike reducing college debt.

What policies can be put in place so that most non-knowledge workers can earn over $30 an hour? I've written of a few over the years, here's a partial list:

1. A $15/hour minimum wage. Put pressure at the base.
2. Subsidize employment directly, or provide direct cash support (family allowance and the like), or do a mixture of both [4].
3. Learn from Germany and from Quebec's manufacturing sector.
4. Reduce corporate scale, favor smaller companies that employ more blue collar workers [5]
5. Get creative about small business generation - including a national small business generator.
6. Do public works and infrastructure that generate employment. I've been told the pharaohs built pyramids so laborers had work between flooding of the Nile. (The US military is one model for non-college public works employment.)
7. Review all our tax, accounting, finance and labor policies and revise to favor non-college employment.

This is what Biden needs to focus on.

- fn -

[1] One trade worker and one service worker couple can squeak in it as long as they don't have child care expenses and as long as they stay together.

[2] See also my pre-catastrophe 2015 post on why I was a "fan" (heavy irony) of Trump or a recent post/pre catastrophe retrospective. I've been on this topic for a long time though my thoughts have evolved quite a bit over 17 years.

[3] Deep and pervasive structural racism means there's great potential for increasing four year college participation in Black America. I don't think there's anywhere near that potential for White America.

[4] I think subsidized work has significant political, cultural, economic, psychological, and social advantages over direct cash subsidies -- but I'm not adverse to experimenting. 

[5] "Blue collar" is a historic synonym for Left Behind.

My 2015 post on why Trump was a sign of a healthy democracy

I'm on the way to writing about what I think should be Biden's #2 priority (#1 is undoing Trump's executive orders). Three previous in this series include: 

1. How I think about the Trump voter (and America)
2. What is middle class and why can't half of American voters get there?
3. Biden's lost agenda

This fourth post is about something I wrote in 2015. Back then I thought Trump was a bad joke. I thought that American politics was a compromise between corporations, powerful (wealthy) individuals, and the voting masses. Clearly corporations and the wealthy would prefer many GOP candidates over Trump, and the masses alone would not be enough.

Yay masses.

Now, amidst the smoldering wreckage, I'm going to quote from that old misguided post (emphases added): 

Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really.

... I’m a fan because Trump appears to be channeling the most important cohort in the modern world — people who are not going to complete the advanced academic track we call college. Canada has the world’s highest “college” graduation rate at 55.8%, but that number is heavily biased by programs that can resemble the senior year of American High School (in Quebec, CEGEP, like mine). If we adjust for that bias, and recognizing that nobody does better than Canada, it’s plausible, even likely, that no more than half of the population of the industrialized world is going to complete the minimum requirements for the “knowledge work” and “creative work” that dominates the modern economy.

... This [never-college] cohort, about 40% of the human race, has experienced at least 40 years of declining income and shrinking employment opportunities. We no longer employ millions of clerks to file papers, or harvest crops, or dig ditches, or fill gas tanks or even assemble cars. That work has gone, some to other countries but most to automation. Those jobs aren’t coming back.

The future for about half of all Americans, and all humans, looks grim. When Trump talks to his white audience about immigrants taking jobs and betrayal by the elite he is starting a conversation we need to have. 

It doesn’t matter that Trump is a buffoon, or that restricting immigration won’t make any difference. It matters that the conversation is starting. After all, how far do you think anyone would get telling 40% of America that there is no place for them in current order because they’re not “smart” enough?

Yeah, not very far at all.

This is how democracy deals with hard conversations. It begins with yelling and ranting and blowhards. Eventually the conversation mutates. Painful thoughts become less painful. Facts are slowly accepted. Solutions begin to emerge.

Donald Trump is good for democracy, good for America, and good for the world.

"Good for democracy" except, of course, the white non-college masses spoke clearly back in 2016. An actual "President Trump" was unthinkable, but it happened. I do not underestimate him now.

So that part of the post did not hold up so well. But I stand by the part about making the never-college 40-50% of Americans a political focus. More on that when I write the fifth post in this series.

See also

• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes (Jan 2011)
• Rubio, Sanders and the President Gordon agenda (Mar 2016)

Broken world: applying for a minimum wage job via a corporate HR web site

My #1 son is a special needs adult. He’s excited to start at $10/hour job running food around a sports stadium. It’s work he can do — he’s got a great sense of direction and he is reasonably fit.

The job engagement process is run by an archaic corporate web site that looks like it was built for IE 3. The site claims to support Safari but warns against Chrome. It is not useable on a smartphone.

The HR process requires managing user credentials, navigating a complex 1990s style user interface, and working around errors made by the HR staff — who probably also struggle with the software. He would not have the proverbial snowball’s chance without my ability to assume his digital identity.

Sure, #1 is below the 5th percentile on standard cognition tests — but this would have been a challenge to the 15th percentile back in the 90s. In the modern era, where most non-college young people are primarily familiar with smartphones, this is a challenge to the 30th percentile.

Which means the people might want to do this job are being shut out by the HR software created to support the job. Which probably has something to do with this.

The world is broken.

#massdisability

Crisis-T: blame it on the iPhone (too)

It’s a human thing. Something insane happens and we try to figure out “why now?”. We did a lot of that in the fall of 2001. Today I looked back at some of what I wrote then. It’s somewhat unhinged — most of us were a bit nuts then. Most of what I wrote is best forgotten, but I still have a soft spot for this Nov 2001 diagram …

I think some of it works for Nov 2016 too, particularly the belief/fact breakdown, the relative poverty, the cultural dislocation, the response to modernity and changing roles of women, and the role of communication technology. Demographic pressure and environmental degradation aren’t factors in Crisis-T though.

More than those common factors I’ve blamed Crisis-T on automation and globalization reducing the demand for non-elite labor (aka “mass disability”). That doesn’t account for the Russian infowar and fake news factors though (“Meme belief=facts” and “communications tech” in my old diagram). Why were they so apparently influential? 

Maybe we should blame the iPhone …

Why Trolls Won in 2016 Bryan Mengus, Gizmodo

… Edgar Welch, armed with multiple weapons, entered a DC pizzeria and fired, seeking to “investigate” the pizza gate conspiracy—the debunked theory that John Podesta and Hillary Clinton are the architects of a child sex-trafficking ring covertly headquartered in the nonexistent basement of the restaurant Comet Ping Pong. Egged on by conspiracy videos hosted on YouTube, and disinformation posted broadly across internet communities and social networks, Welch made the 350-mile drive filled with righteous purpose. A brief interview with the New York Times revealed that the shooter had only recently had internet installed in his home….

…. the earliest public incarnation of the internet—USENET—was populated mostly by academia. It also had little to no moderation. Each September, new college students would get easy access to the network, leading to an uptick in low-value posts which would taper off as the newbies got a sense for the culture of USENET’s various newsgroups. 1993 is immortalized as the Eternal September when AOL began to offer USENET to a flood of brand-new internet users, and overwhelmed by those who could finally afford access, that original USENET culture never bounced back.

Similarly, when Facebook was first founded in 2004, it was only available to Harvard students … The trend has remained fairly consistent: the wealthy, urban, and highly-educated are the first to benefit from and use new technologies while the poor, rural, and less educated lag behind. That margin has shrunk drastically since 2004, as cheaper computers and broadband access became attainable for most Americans.

…  the vast majority of internet users today do not come from the elite set. According to Pew Research, 63 percent of adults in the US used the internet in 2004. By 2015 that number had skyrocketed to 84 percent. Among the study’s conclusions were that, “the most pronounced growth has come among those in lower-income households and those with lower levels of educational attainment” …

… What we’re experiencing now is a huge influx of relatively new internet users—USENET’s Eternal September on an enormous scale—wrapped in political unrest.

“White Low-Income Non-College” (WLINC) and “non-elite” are politically correct [1] ways of speaking about the 40% of white Americans who have IQ scores below 100. It’s a population that was protected from net exposure until Apple introduced the first mass market computing device in June of 2007 — and Google and Facebook made mass market computing inexpensive and irresistible.

And so it has come to pass that in 2016 a population vulnerable to manipulation and yearning for the comfort of the mass movement has been dispossessed by technological change and empowered by the Facebook ad-funded manipulation engine.

So we can blame the iPhone too.

- fn -

[1] I think, for once, the term actually applies.

Piketty's latest work on inequality is wrong about education.

The NYT has a readable summary of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s US income research. Much of it is familiar, but I was struck by this paragraph:

[since 1979] … Younger adults between 20 and 45 years old have seen their after-tax incomes flatline.

But over the same period, seniors in the bottom half have seen their after-tax incomes grow by over 70 percent. The bulk of that gain represents increased health care spending through Medicare.

Growth rates of a few percent a year do add up; health care is eating everything. Maybe it’s time to reread my old health care post.

Their findings are very important, but one of their recommendations falls flat (emphases mine) …

… improving education and job training, equalizing distribution of human and financial capital, and increasing labor bargaining power, combined with a return to steeply progressive taxation

No, education and job training aren’t the answer. Roughly 40-50% of the US population has an IQ of less than 100. People with an IQ of under 100 have many skills, but they are not going to succeed in an academic program. Canada has the world’s highest “college” (includes 2 year vocational programs) graduation rate, and even they top out at around 56% of the population. I’m not sure why economists struggle with this basic arithmetic, my guess is they spend too much time with the cognitive elite.

What is the answer? We need to flip our thinking. We can’t change people to fit the work available in the natural post-industrial economy. We need to change the work to fit the humans. We need to incentivize work that is meaningful and rewarding across the cognitive spectrum. Germany did some of that by biasing their economy towards manufacturing. We can do some of that too (sorry Germany, that’s going to hurt you!), but we’re going to have to think more broadly. We’ll need to provide direct or indirect subsidies for work that’s productive even if it can’t compete with automation. We’ll have to apply work support lessons from the US military (long history of productive work across cognitive spectrum) and from traditional disability work support programs.

 

Trumpism: a transition function to the world of mass disability.

We know the shape of the socioeconomic future for the bottom 40% in the post globalization post AI  mass disability world.

But how do we get there? How does a culture transition from memes of independence and southern Christian-capitalist marketarianism to a world where government deeply biases the economy towards low-education employment?

There needs to be a transition function. A transform that is applied to a culture. With the anthropology perspective I’ve long sought Arlie Hochschild makes the case that Trump is, among other things, a transition function that erases Tea Party Marketarianism and embraces the heresy of government support (albeit for the “deserving”).

In a complex adaptive system we get the transition function we need rather than the one we want. No guarantee we survive it though.

See also:

• Trumps is a Politics of Loss and Revenge 8/2016: Marshall demolishes false dichotomy between economic distress and white racism.
• Gordon's Notes: Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really. 8/2015. Well, today I’d write “a desperate democracy”, but my tough love take on why we have this pathologic human being contending to more or less destroy civilization.
• Trump explained: Non-college white Americans now have higher middle-aged death rates than black Americans 11/2015. Marshall does a better job in his 2016 post.

What socioeconomic support will look like in 20 years

This is what I think socioeconomic support will look like in 2040 based on cognitive [2] quintiles.

The bottom quintile (0-20%, non-voters) will have supported work environments and direct income subsidies; an improved version of what most [1] wealthy nations do for the 0-5% of adults currently considered cognitively “disabled” [1].

The second quintile (20-40%, Trump base if white) will have subsidized employment (direct or indirect).

The fifth quintile (80-100%) will live much as they do now.

I don’t know what happens to the 3rd and 4th quintile.

- fn -

[1] The US is currently “mainstreaming” the cognitively disabled into relatively unsupported work, a well intentioned and evidence-free project by (my) Team Liberal that is going to end in tears.

[2]  In US male euros (avoid racism/sexism effects) maps to academic achievement which tests learning, social skills, temperament and the like.

Learning from an Amazon "Newer Galaxy" fraud: I too am prey.

I’ve been digging into thunderbolt 2 lately. It’s an orphan technology — sure looks like Apple has given up on it. In retrospect either Apple or Intel needed to make their own hubs — in a low-trust world leaving this to dying 3rd party manufacturers was a mistake.

For now I’ve settled on the OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock. It’s not perfect, I still have suspicions about how it performs under load. I wouldn’t be surprised if I need to power cycle it every few days. Yeah, like I said, Apple needed to make this. I tested it next to an Elgato hub with similar USB 3 performance, the deciding feature was support for legacy firewire 800.

During the testing period I used a (too) short thunderbolt cable bundled with the Elgato, but that’s going back with the return. Due to a misunderstanding about Apple cable prices I decided to get a OWC 2m cable, but in a moment of weakness I ordered it from Amazon (Prime shipping, speed, etc).

That is, I ordered from an Amazon page that said OWC cable on it, via “Newer Galaxy Distribution Company”. The page looked like this:

Yeah, look closely, It says made by OWC and the image has OWC on it, but the page title doesn’t actually say OWC. On the other hand, the text says:

Utilizes the latest Thunderbolt chipset for high-speed 10Gb/s Thunderbolt and 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 devices
Enhance video workflows with support for faster 4K video transfers + 4K display capabilities via DisplayPort 1.2
1 Year OWC Limited Warranty

So I was stupid, yes, but I wasn’t completely misguided. I even inspected “Newer Galaxy”’s sales count and ratings — though I know ratings systems of this sort are almost completely fake.

Damn. I know better than this. Yes, it was Amazon Prime, but that only means the returns are easier. It doesn’t mean it’s legitimate.

This is what’s being shipped:

A “2M” cable. It’s not actually a counterfeit cable at this point, it’s just not what I ordered.

There’s an upside to this experience. I can share it here for one, and every story like this is a small push for Amazon reform. Amazon returns are very easy, and for frauds like this there’s no return postage fee. (I’ll reference this blog post in the return comments.)

For another, I’ve also learned that I’m not as good at spotting fraud as I should be — I blame that on age. The data is clear that most of us become prey after age 55 or so. Prey have to learn fear, and I’m learning.

Best of all I learned that Apple has dropped its price on 2m thunderbolt cables from $60 to $40 (that price drop is probably why trustworthy alternatives have disappeared). So I’ll do that instead.

It would be good to have a trustworthy alternative to Amazon… 

Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really.

I’m a liberal of Humean descent, and I’m a fan of Donald Trump.

No, not because Trump is humiliating the GOP, though he is. Of course I enjoy seeing the GOP suffer for its (many) sins, and it would be very good for the world if the GOP loses the 2016 presidential election, but Trump won’t cause any lasting political damage. Unless he runs as a third party candidate he’ll have no real impact on the elections.

I’m a fan because Trump appears to be channeling the most important cohort in the modern world — people who are not going to complete the advanced academic track we call college. Canada has the world’s highest “college” graduation rate at 55.8%, but that number is heavily biased by programs that can resemble the senior year of American High School (in Quebec, CEGEP, like mine). If we adjust for that bias, and recognizing that nobody does better than Canada, it’s plausible, even likely, that no more than half of the population of the industrialized world is going to complete the minimum requirements for the “knowledge work” and “creative work” that dominates the modern economy.

Perhaps not coincidentally about 40-50% population of Canadians have an IQ under 100. Most of this group will struggle to complete an academic program even given the strongest work ethic, personal discipline, and external support. This number is not going to change short of widespread genetic engineering...

This cohort, about 40% of the human race, has experienced at least 40 years of declining income and shrinking employment opportunities. We no longer employ millions of clerks to file papers, or harvest crops, or dig ditches, or fill gas tanks or even assemble cars. That work has gone, some to other countries but most to automation. Those jobs aren’t coming back.

The future for about half of all Americans, and all humans, looks grim. When Trump talks to his white audience about immigrants taking jobs and betrayal by the elite he is starting a conversation we need to have. 

It doesn’t matter that Trump is a buffoon, or that restricting immigration won’t make any difference. It matters that the conversation is starting. After all, how far do you think anyone would get telling 40% of America that there is no place for them in current order because they’re not “smart” enough?

Yeah, not very far at all.

This is how democracy deals with hard conversations. It begins with yelling and ranting and blowhards. Eventually the conversation mutates. Painful thoughts become less painful. Facts are slowly accepted. Solutions begin to emerge.

Donald Trump is good for democracy, good for America, and good for the world.

See also

• For American adults are poverty and disability the same thing? 10/2013
• The Post-AI era is also the era of mass disability 12/2012
• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/2011
• Deficits, climate, BP and immigration: Saving America is suspiciously easy 7/2010
• Dynamic stability: struggle and balance in minds, brains, genomes, pregnancy, politics, ecosystems and economies 1/2015
• Mass disability and Great Depression 2.0 3/2008
• Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011
• Salmon, Picketty, Corporate Persons, Eco-Econ, and why we shouldn't worry 4/2014
• Civilization is stronger than we think: Structural deficits and complex adaptive systems 5/2010

The Post-AI era is also the era of mass disability

Is Stephen Hawking disabled?

Obviously this is a rhetorical question. Hawking is 70 and retired from the Lucasian chair, but he remains a tenured professor. He is a bestselling author of multiple popular books, has been married twice, and has three children.

He is clearly not disabled.

Is a physically strong male with an IQ of 65 disabled in Saint Paul, MN? Yes, of course. Forty years ago, however, there were many jobs that would pay above minimum wage for a strong back and a willingness to do tedious work. Heck, in those days men earned money literally pumping gas.

Would Stephen Hawking have been disabled in 1860? Yeah, for the short duration of his 19th century life.

Disability is relative to the technological environment. Once a missing leg meant disability, now it rules out only a small number of jobs. Once a strong back meant a job, now it means little.

Technology changes the work environment; it makes some disabled, and others able. It's an old trend, automated looms put textile artisans out of work 200 years ago.

Those artisans had a rough time, but workers with similar skill sets have done well since. Economic theory and history teaches us that disruptive technological transformation can produce transient chaos, but over time resulting economic growth will benefit almost everyone. More or less.

But history only repeats until it doesn't. Economic benefits don't have to be evenly distributed. If fewer jobs require strong backs, then people whose primary talent is the strength of their spine may earn relatively less. If supply exceeds demand, the price of labor will fall below the "zero bound" of the minimum wage. Some backs won't find work; those workers are disabled.

Most people can play in more than one game, but the competition is getting tougher and the space for human advantage is shrinking in the post-AI era. The percentage of the population who are effectively disabled has been rising along with national income and the Gini coefficient. It's not just the pioneers now, Respectable economists are wondering about tipping points.

So enter The Wolverine...

 

Krugman acts as though he's just started thinking about the post-AI economy, but he isn't fooling anyone. We know he grew up on Asimov and the Three Laws. Now that the election is done, and he doesn't have to be a strict non-structuralist any more [1], he's started writing about what the post-AI era means for income inequality using the phrase "Capital-biased technology". He has recently promised us a "future" column on policy implications.

Future - because he's trying to break it to us gently. I, of course, have no such qualms. A year ago I wrote about the policy implications of the Post-AI era (emphases added) ...

The AI Age: Siri and Me

... Economically, of course, the productivity/consumption circuit has to close... If .1% of humans get 80% of revenue, then they'll be taxed at 90% marginal rates and the 99.9% will do subsidized labor. That's what we do for special needs adults now, and we're all special needs eventually...

Or, in other words, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". In the post-AI era we will need to create employment for the mass disabled.

See also:

• Baumol's cost disease: medicine, education and post-AI disruption 10/2012
• Life in the post-AI world. What's next? 9/2011
• Google's A.I. recognizes cats. Laugh while you can. 6/2012
• The AI Age: Siri and Me 12/2/2011
• Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III. 4/2010
• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/2011

 and from the K (NYT):

• Rise of the Robots
• Capital-biased Technological Progress: An Example (Wonkish)
• Policy Implications of Capital-Biased Technology: Opening Remarks
• Is Growth Over? (K responds to Bob Gordon's essay that deprecates the impact of IT. FWIW, I think Gordon has no idea how much IT has already disrupted, and what is yet to come.)
• Robots and Robber Barons

elsewhere

• Artificial intelligence: Difference Engine: Luddite legacy | The Economist 11/2011

- fn -

[1] Clark Goble made me read a critique of my team's champion. I found hurt feelings (K has claws), but no substantive critiques. That's a shame, I've long wanted to see somebody like Mankiw (who was once readable) engage K on his denial of structural factors in 2009-2012 unemployment. I suspect K has always known of ways to argue the structural case despite the persuasive low global-demand data. I wonder if he was disappointed that nobody dared challenge him. 

Facebook's share price: based on my ads, it's going to stay in the 20s

Facebook opened at 38 and it's down to 24 (7/28/2012). Facebook has earned less money than expected.

I don't know where Facebook's money was supposed to come from, but Facebook claims advertising pays the bills:

Advertising on Facebook

Ads help keep Facebook free
From the beginning, the people who built Facebook wanted it to be free for everyone. It now costs over a billion dollars a year to run Facebook, and delivering ads is how Facebook pays for this.

You see personalized ads
Facebook tries to show you the ads you’ll be most interested in. These ads are chosen based on the things you do with Facebook such as liking a page, and info Facebook receives from you and other sources. Dig into the details.

You can impact the ads you see
Unlike ads on television, you can influence which ads you see on Facebook. Spot something that doesn’t interest you? Click the X and it’s gone.

Except ads are obviously not paying as expected. There are two reasons for this, one obvious and fixable, the other simply weird.

The obvious problem is that when i use Facebook.app I don't see ads. I assume that's why Facebook is working with Apple on a unified iOS/OS X integration strategy that will bring ads to mobile. (It's funny how many geeks claim it's app performance that's driving the rewrite.)

The weird problem shows up in my web browser. I see ads in my browser, but they are uninteresting or annoying. 

It's not I'm immune to advertising. I pay for a Silent Sports subscription so I can read their ads. So why can't Facebook give me interesting ads?

It's not that I don't try to help. I visited their 'interests' page -- but they didn't list any of my interests (I ran into the same problem with Google's ad-interests page years ago.) I "x out" the fb ads that are annoying or uninteresting, but I still don't get anything interesting. Facebook's two year old ad voting isn't working.

I'd love to read an article on why Facebook's ads are so poor, and why Google's are only somewhat better. The best minds of today's young are spent trying to get me to click on ads, I'm trying to help them, and it's not working. I get better ads on the rare occasion that I watch broadcast TV, and much better ads in magazines.

That's weird.

I can think of three possible causes. One is that the products and services I buy from don't need Facebook ads. They get more mileage from Facebook's free Pages. Another is that Facebook's leadership is mediocre and delusional. (I think the era of mega-wealth is making that age-old problem worse.) Lastly the real profit in facebook ads may come from exploiting the same population that watches daytime tv; I'm not worth bothering about.

I suspect all three answers are correct. Unless Facebook can do a great deal with Apple, or figure out how to make Pages pay without killing them[2], or come up with a new business model, their share price is going to be stuck in the 20s for years to come.

I really do need to learn how to make bets on relative spreads. [1]

See also:

• Why are Google and Facebook ads so crappy? 4/2012
• Facebook changing: it's not about friends or games any more ... 7/2012
• Facebook has the eBay disease - the Farmville story 11/2009
• Facebook's ad voting - fascinating 7/2009
• 21st century TV - preying upon the weak 3/2011
• Facebook's Ads Are Terrible, It's Amazing The Company Will Do $4 Billion In Ad Sales: Apparently an analyst named Rich Greenfield wrote on this pre-IPO, but it looks like his share price estimates were optimistic. 

[1] John A, I still have the notes you gave me! The linked article is about making bets on single trends, I'm more interested in bets on relative trends. (Ex: Divergence between Facebook/Google share prices over an 8 month period.)
[2]  About Sponsored Stories - Facebook Help Center

A shot in the dark - Am I my brother's keeper?

Roger Ebert wrote a column on gun control and received 650 comments.

He read them all.

Then he responded, with one of his best columns ever. Some of the lines are so well said I've excerpted them below. I've written about this many times, but, of course, not with his eloquence.

A shot in the dark - Roger Ebert's Journal

Catie and Caleb Medley went to the doomed midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises." It was a movie they'd been looking forward to for a year, her father said. Gunfire rang out. The bullets missed Catie, who was pregnant. Caleb was shot in the eye. On Tuesday, their son Hugo was born. Caleb is listed in critical condition, and the cost of emergency treatment for his head wound has already reached $2 million. The Medleys were uninsured.

... Many of the comments were about health care, and one of the arguments frequently heard was: "I don't want the federal government taxing me to pay for the medical costs of people who don't care enough to provide for their own costs."...

... In our imagination it's always other people who get sick. I have a reader who tells me he's never been sick a day in his life. I tell him that's interesting from an autobiographical point of view, but otherwise not relevant. I can assure him that unless he's killed in an accident, sooner or later he will most surely get sick, and sooner or later he will most surely die.

Are we our brothers' keepers? Many people who resort to scripture are under the impression that we are not. They forget that it was Cain who said he was not his brother's keeper, after murdering Abel. In a similar sense, if our fellow citizens die because they have no access to competent medical care, they argue that we are not their keepers...

... I quote from the Bible for a particular reason. Many of the opponents of Universal Health Care identify themselves as Christians, yet when you get to the bottom of their arguments, you'll find them based not on Christianity but on Ayn Rand capitalism...

Ebert is talking about prosperity theology (wikipedia, see also Prosperity Theology | Christian Bible Studies [1]), a belief that wealth is a sign of god's approval, and poverty of god's disapproval. Since sin earns god's disapproval, the poor are sinners.

Although American Christians have brought prosperity theology to new heights, it's not unique to Christianity or to Mormonism. Hinduism's justification of caste maps well to the idea that poverty goes with sin, and wealth with grace.

In 2012 the fundamental difference between the right and the liberal is how we answer the question: "Am I my brother's keeper". Ironically, avowed Christians often give the answer of Cain and Ayn, while secular humanists often give the answer of Abel.

Cain and Abel. Romney and Obama. Some things never change ...

[1] Probably the only time I've ever linked to Christian Bible site.

Is labor lumpish in whitewater times?

Krugman is famously dismissive about claims of structural aspects to underemployment (though years ago he wasn't as sure). DeLong, I think, is less sure.

Krugman points to the uniformity of underemployment. If there were structural causes, wouldn't we see areas of relative strength? It seems a bit much to claim that multiple broad-coverage structural shocks would produce such a homogeneous picture.

Fortunately, I fly under the radar (esp. under Paul's), so I am free to wonder about labor in the post-AI era complicated by the the rise of China and India and the enabling effect of IT on financial fraud. Stories like this catch my attention ...

Fix Law Schools - Atlantic Vincent Rougeau  Mobile

... the jobs and high pay that used to greet new attorneys at large firms are gone, wiped away by innovations such as software that takes seconds to do the document discovery that once occupied junior attorneys for scores of (billable) hours while they learned their profession..

Enhanced search and discovery is only one small piece of the post-AI world, but there's a case to be made that it wiped out large portions of a profession. Brynjolfsson and McAfee expand that case in Race Against the Machine [1], though almost all of their fixes [1] increase economic output rather than addressing the core issue of mass disability. The exception, perhaps deliberately numbered 13 of 19, is easy to miss ...

13. Make it comparatively more attractive to hire a person than to buy more technology through incentives, rather than regulation. This can be done by, among other things, decreasing employer payroll taxes and providing subsidies or tax breaks for employing people who have been out of work for a long time. Taxes on congestion and pollution can more than make up for the reduced labor taxes.

Of course by "pollution ... tax" they mean "Carbon Tax" [1]. The fix here is the same fix that has been applied to provide employment for persons with cognitive disabilities such as low IQ and/or autism. In the modern world disability is a relative term that applies to a larger population.

If our whitewater times continue, we will either go there or go nowhere.

[1] They're popular at the "Singularity University" and their fixes are published in "World Future Society". Outcasts they are. Their fan base probably explains why the can't use the "Carbon" word, WFS/SU people have a weird problem with letter C. 

See also:

• Slavery, technology, and the future of the weak 2/2012. What do you do with a labor surplus?
• DeLong, Mankiw and the Problem of the Weak 10/2006. When Mankiw was almost readable.
• Mass disability and the middle class 9/2011

Why did productivity gains go to the elite after 1973?

After 1973, and especially after the early 1980s, productivity gains went towards the 1%. Media male compensation in particular went flatline... (emphases mine)

Where The Productivity Went - Krugman

Larry Mishel has a systematic breakdown of the reasons for worker income stagnation since 1973. He starts with the familiar divergence: productivity up 80 percent, the compensation (including benefits) of the median worker up only 11 percent. Where did the productivity go?

The answer is, it’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid. One third of the difference is due to a technical issue involving price indexes. The rest, however, reflects a shift of income from labor to capital and, within that, a shift of labor income to the top and away from the middle.

... Income stagnation does not reflect overall economic stagnation; the incomes of typical workers would be 30 or 40 percent higher than they are if inequality hadn’t soared.

Happily, Krugman doesn't say whether this is "fair" or "just". Those are meaningless words. Obviously one man's fair is another's unfair. No laws need be broken, though many may be bent. Purchasing politicians may speed the inequality process, but even that is probably not essential.

The interesting questions are

1. Why did this happen in the late 1970s? What changed? How much of this is a result of computerization, automation, and globalization?
2. Is this good?
3. Is this wise?
4. Should we do anything about it? If so, what should we do?

My answers are

1. It is technology and globalization, and large corporations changing the ecology of accounting and regulation to perpetuate themselves.
2. It is not good.
3. It is not wise. This is a recipe for social collapse.
4. We should do something. We should tax carbon. We should tax financial transactions. We should institute industrial policies that provide employment to the bottom 60%. We should expect to subsidize employment for the mass disabled of the information age. We should prepare for the AI age.

Your answers may vary.

See also:

• Slavery, technology, and the future of the weak 2/2012
• Life in the post-AI world. What's next? 9/2011
• The AI Age: Siri and Me 11/2011 (Shortly after I wrote this Siri stopped being useful. Coincidence :-)?)
• Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011
• Attacking Inequality: Redistributing wealth 9/2006
• Opposition to redistribution - two causes 9/2011 - why income subsidies must be invisible
• Occupy Wall Street (OWS): the mass mind masticates 10/2011
• Where has the money gone? To the very American oligarchy. 2/2006
• The Quiet Coup - Atlantic Mobile 5/2009 - Simon Johnson. How America's de facto oligarchs came to emulate Russia's. I missed this one three years ago; it's a classic that deserves a post of its own.
• My Favorite Paul Krugman Essay: Brad DeLong (DeLong on Krugman 1998)

Liberals and conservatives - it's in our programming

It helps if you think of humans as biological robots with varying programming ...

Politics, Odors and Soap - Kristof - NYTimes.com

... “The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity...

It has some face validity; it certainly fits my own values (hint - 'respect for authority' is not one of them, which is a bit of a disadvantage in corporate and military settings). I don't think it captures the full difference however; conservatives [1] and liberals have very different attitudes towards the (non-genetically related) weak. Perhaps in conservatives of all colors, cultures, times, and places loyalty is tied to notions of tribe (race) and family. The unrelated weak are a distant abstraction.

It also doesn't fully explain the historical paranoia of the American right (peaking again) in a whitewater world. For that we need to look at responses to novelty as well as to threats to power, tribe, and authority.

The model isn't complete then, but it's useful. It's easier to live with America's conservatives if we understand it's not their fault. Liberals and conservatives just have different operating systems; politics is our essential interface.

[1] So are libertarians a form of conservative or a third branch? They are less interested in caring for the weak than many conservatives.

Slavery, technology, and the future of the weak

Reading 9th grade world history as an adult I read over the names of the wicked and the great. I round years to centuries, and nations to regions.

Other things catch my eye. Reading of slavery in ancient Rome and Greece, I think of India's untouchables. The theme of surplus built upon slavery runs constantly through human history, until it blends into an industrial model of market utilization of the "The Weak".

Yeah, progress happens. I'd choose a minimum wage job in Norway, or even in Minnesota, over slavery.

So what's next? In a globalized post-industrial world, does the labor of the "Weak" have sufficient value to support a life of health and balance? If it does not, if within the framework of the post-AI world 20% of the population is effectively disabled, then what do we do?

Slavery was one answer to the problem of the weak. Industrial and agricultural employment was another. If we are fortunate, we will provide a third answer.

See also:

• Slavery and religion - Wikipedia
• A taxonomy of American politics 2/2011
• Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011
• The AI Age: Siri and Me 12/2011
• Gordon's Notes: Life in the post-AI world. What's next? 9/2011
• The subprime mortgage story: a problem of the weak 11/2007
• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/2011
• Median male earnings - declining since 1969? 3/2011
• Political theory and the original position (Rawls) 6/2006
• DeLong, Mankiw and the Problem of the Weak 10/2006
• Noblesse Oblige and the Problem of the Weak: Buffett and Gates 6/2006
• French universities and the revenge of the weak 5/2006
• The market answer to dementia: Soylent Green 9/2007
• Attacking Inequality: Redistributing wealth 9/2006
• The WSJ, the American Right, and the Protestant view of sinful poverty 6/2006
• Seeking Dickens: mental illness and prisons 1/2007
• What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? 2/3005

In fifty years, what will our sins be?

In my early years white male heterosexual superiority was pretty much hardwired into my culture. I grew up in Quebec, so in my earliest pre-engagement years add the local theocracy of the Catholic church.

Mental illness, including schizophrenia, was a shameful sin. Hitting children was normal and even encouraged. There were few laws protecting domestic animals. There were almost no environmental protections. Children and adults with cognitive disorders were scorned and neglected. Physical disabilities were shameful; there were few accommodations for disability.

Our life then had a lot in common with China today.

Not all of these cultural attitudes are fully condemned, but that time is coming.

So what are the candidates for condemnation in 50 years? Gus Mueller, commenting on a WaPo article, suggests massive meat consumption and cannabis prohibition.

I am sure Gus is wrong about cannabis prohibition. Even now we don't condemn the ideal of alcohol prohibition; many aboriginal communities around the world still enforce alcohol restrictions and we don't condemn them. We consider American Prohibition quixotic, but not evil.

My list is not far from the WaPo article. Here's my set:

• Our definition and punishment of crime, particularly in the context of diminished capacity.
• Our tolerance of poverty, both local and global.
• Our wastefulness.
• Our tolerance of political corruption.
• Our failure to create a carbon tax.
• The use of semi-sentient animals as meat. (WaPo just mentions industrial food production. I think the condemnation will be deeper.)
• Our failure to confront the responsibilities and risks associated with the creation of artificial sentience. (Depending on how things turn out, this might be celebrated by our heirs.)

The WaPo article mentions our isolation of the elderly. I don't think so; I think that will be seen more as a tragedy than a sin. This is really about the modern mismatch between physical and cognitive lifespan.

The article is accompanied by a poll with this ranking as of 5800 votes:

• Environment
• Food production
• Prison system
• Isolation of the elderly.

Fraud on Cyber: An annotated sample of Gordon's Notes

For the past fifteen years I've been fascinated by how the information technologies of the late 20th century supercharged old frauds. I suspect that our current depression, and the Depression of the 1930s, have enabling technologies as one common cause.

It takes time for law and custom to adapt to new technologies and complexities, and until they do frauds as old as the human mind take on new forms and power.

For almost ten of those fifteen years I've been publishing notes here. In honor of a post I'm working on now I've assembled an annotated biography. There's a sort of grouping order to the list, it's not chronological ...

• Causes of the crash of '08 - how much fraud? (Feb 2009).
• Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III (April 2008) - The rising wealth of China and India is the best news of the past century. Information technologies, like agriculture, writing, and the printing press, enable both the good and the bad in humanity - including new innovations in fraud. Together they have turned our world upside down.
• Lewis and Einhorn - repairing the financial world (Jan 2009). We didn't do the repairs.
• Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street. My God (Dec 2008). When we could still be shocked.
• Global finance and parasites (Sept 2009)
• The subprime mortgage story: a problem of the weak (Nov 2007) We are all marks, but some suffer more than others.
• Memphis mortgages, complexity attacks and long term consequences (May 2010) - Information asymmetry is at the heart of IT enabled complexity attacks.
• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams (Nov 2009) IT enables complexity, complexity, entropy and emergence yield happy accidents.
• Malice, incompetence, and happy accidents (May 2011) I love this Dilbert cartoon on emergent fraud through IT enabled complexity attacks
• Complexity attack – the illustrated version (Dec 2009) Dilbert again. Scott Adams at his best.
• Emergent fraud: Anthem and automatic payment denials (Oct 2010) - a handy example of a complexity attack
• The Health Savings Account preventive visit scam (Nov 2010) - Complexity attacks are ubiquitous
• When the market is your deity, there is no such thing as corruption (July 2009) Marketarianism defined
• Brad DeLong: Principles for enlightenment 2.0 (March 2008) - One of my earliest Marketarian posts, before I started using that term.
• Scylla and Charybdis: Corruption, health care reform and climate change. (Dec 2009) - Alas, we lost.
• Campaign Finance Reform - The Publicly Owned Politician (Oct 2008) - Treat politicians as publicly traded corporations
• The Empire Strikes Back: complexity, mobile phone plans, and Apple defeated (June 2008) - few remember that Apple lost its war on the phone companies. I think if Jobs health had been better he'd have made another go at this.
• Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams (Nov 2009) - The list of mobile phone related scams is amazing. Perhaps everything we need to know about the past twenty years could be understood from this list.
• InfoUSA and Wachovia Bank sell out the vulnerable elderly (May 2007)
• Marked! Where did all our investments go? (Nov 2008) - we'd already had a lost decade
• Melamine sickened infants: 53,000 and counting (Sept 2008) - Not just an American problem, but the GOP removed much of our ability to respond
• Toxic heparin: fraud is looking likely (Mar 2008). I'm still amazed so little came of this.
• Pet food poison and pithed America (Mar 2008). When I realized Americans were overwhelmed.
• Fraud and Globalization: Toy Story III (June 2007) Do you think this has stopped?
• Poisoned Toothpaste from China: this would be a good time to start freaking out (May 2007). We never did.
• 21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind (June 2007). Deception and response made the human mind. So what will our time make?
• Credit card scammers: the story continues (Jan 2007). Yawn.
• Stop net fraud - make the banks pay for the externalities (Oct 2005). Easy to fix.
• Security costs money, it's cheaper for banks to pay the crooks. (May 2005)
• We've come a long way -- fraud 2008 (May 2008) - Yep, we knew.
• The Land of Rand (April 2005) Before the crash.
• Mob scams 200 million in small charges, shades of Netfill (Feb 2004) Yawn.
• Credit Card Fraud explodes -- Yawn. (Sept 2003). We had lots of warning of what was coming.