Buying a cell phone - another market failure?

Amazon.com: Cell Phones: PCS Phone palmOne Treo 650 (Sprint)

I need a new cell phone. My old one, which I never liked, is falling apart. I figured I'd have a few options. Wrong. Amazon reviews capture what I'm seeing everywhere: poor design, poor reliability, poor customer experiences. It's a combination of a crummy service provider attitude (such as disabling key phone functionality to encourage purchase of high price services), lousy service provider customer support, and phones designed to sell rather than to provide a lasting value to the customer.

In other words, yet another market failure.

I'm going for the simplest possible phone with the fewest features, and using the Apple iSync compatibility list as a quick guide to clueful manufacturers.

Supreme Court bans juvenile executions -- Martian invasion completed

BBC NEWS | Americas | US court bans juvenile executions

The US Supreme Court has abolished the death penalty for those who commit murder when under the age of 18.

This is proof of an alien invasion; how else to explain this outbreak of rationality? The court was, of course, divided. At least they weren't debating the wisdom of executing 12 year olds, the question was for teens aged 16-18.

It's a slippery slope though. As O'Connor writes when arguing for execution:

One of the court's dissenting judges, Sandra Day O'Connor, argued that: 'Chronological age is not an unfailing measure of psychological development, and common experience suggests that many 17-year-olds are more mature than the average young 'adult'.

Indeed. I would not be surprised to learn that most murderers have the psychological maturity of an average 2 year old. Such speculations though lead us down into the depths of relativism, where humans go at peril of their most deeply held beliefs.

And now the Draft

"The Case for the Draft" by Phillip Carter and Paul Glastris: America can remain the world's superpower. Or it can maintain its current all-volunteer military. It can't do both.

With the election out of the way America is beginning to have two long delayed intelligent discussions (sigh). One is about the role of government in our society (social security transformation debate); this discussion might even eventually involve a discussion of "the problem of the weak".

The other discussion is about the Draft. (Capitalized by intent.)

I've posted on this a few times. I never bought the story that the Draft was not a cost-effective approach to building the military; there are many jobs required in a modern military that do not require elite combat skills or even combat capabilities. Some of these jobs could be best filled by drafting adults from ages 25 to 55, and giving them a few months of training in a new "support military" group.

I've also mentioned previously that I thought one of reasons Rumsfeld launched the invasion of Iraq with insufficient forces was that he knew there weren't enough forces to do it "right" (meaning three times as many soldiers). Rumsfeld tried the fudge the difference by carving Iraq up with Turkey, when that fell through he opted to go with what he had.

Now Phil Carter, a blogger, lawyer, journalist and veteran has written an article on the Draft with with Paul Glastris for the Washington Monthly. Here's the bottom line:

America's all-volunteer military simply cannot deploy and sustain enough troops to succeed in places like Iraq while still deterring threats elsewhere in the world. Simply adding more soldiers to the active duty force, as some in Washington are now suggesting, may sound like a good solution. But it's not, for sound operational and pragmatic reasons. America doesn't need a bigger standing army; it needs a deep bench of trained soldiers held in reserve who can be mobilized to handle the unpredictable but inevitable wars and humanitarian interventions of the future. And while there are several ways the all-volunteer force can create some extra surge capacity, all of them are limited.

The only effective solution to the manpower crunch is the one America has turned to again and again in its history: the draft. Not the mass combat mobilizations of World War II, nor the inequitable conscription of Vietnam—for just as threats change and war-fighting advances, so too must the draft. A modernized draft would demand that the privileged participate. It would give all who serve a choice over how they serve. And it would provide the military, on a "just in time" basis, large numbers of deployable ground troops, particularly the peacekeepers we'll need to meet the security challenges of the 21st century.

America has a choice. It can be the world's superpower, or it can maintain the current all-volunteer military, but it probably can't do both.

There's one very good reason that Bush/Rumsfeld don't want a Draft. They know that if we'd had a global Draft in place, involving the elite and their children, we still would have invaded Afghanistan -- but there's no way in hell we'd have invaded Iraq.

New York, New York - A Survey by the Economist

The town of the talk

The Economist has published a "survey" of New York City. They last did this in 1983. I have fond memories of adventures in the Manhattan of 1981, but it was a rough place then. It's changed. A few interesting tidbits from the series:

...The city's population has reached an all-time high of 8.1m, and a higher proportion of its people—over 36%—are foreign-born than at any time since the 1920s...the Dominican Republic provides the biggest chunk of immigrants, with a share of 13%. China comes next with 9%, then Jamaica with 6%. No other country has more than 5%...immigrants make up 43% of the city's labour force, including over a third of its workers in finance, insurance and property, over 40% in education, health and social services, more than half in restaurants and hotels, 58% in construction and nearly two-thirds in manufacturing.

... The residents of just 20 streets on the east side of Central Park donated more money to the 2004 presidential campaigns than all but five entire American states.

...One big reason why New Yorkers have been able to rescue their neighbourhoods, attract people and smarten up the city is a dramatic fall in crime, which began in the 1990s and continues apace. Once notorious for its threatening streets, graffiti-covered subways, drug-addled hobos and general air of menace, New York today—as its businessman-mayor, Michael Bloomberg, rightly never tires of saying—is the safest big city in America.

... at the end of last year, the median price of an apartment on the island was $670,000, over 15% higher than a year earlier and more than three times what it was in 1995, according to Miller-Samuel, a property consultancy. As Manhattan's established areas climb out of reach, young professionals colonise and upgrade other neighbourhoods. People are getting used to the idea of a $1m house in Harlem...

And about 9/11

... About a quarter of the office space in lower Manhattan—the country's third-largest business district—was destroyed, and 23 buildings damaged.

... About 40,000 people normally worked in the twin towers, and around 150,000 visitors passed through the World Trade Centre complex each day. At the time the first plane struck, at 8.46am, the offices were not even half full. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, between 16,200 and 18,600 people were in the towers, and around 87% of them escaped...

... Leave out the passengers and crew on the aeroplanes that were flown into the World Trade Centre, and about 2,600 people were killed in New York on September 11th 2001. Put that tragic number in perspective, and you can perhaps see how it is possible for New York to be a powerful magnet for talent, youth and energy once more. In 1990 there were 2,290 murders in the city; last year there were 566. Thus even if a September 11th were to occur every other year, the city would by one measure be quite a lot safer than it would be with crime at its 1990 level and no terrorism.

NewsScan passes on

NewsScan Publishing Inc. - NewsScan Daily Archives

NEWSSCAN GOES DARK

We're going to let NewsScan Daily go dark for awhile, and will be turning out the lights tomorrow, March 1st.

While we're gone, maybe we'll reinvent ourselves. Or maybe we won't.

We'll be continuing with our various other activities, including our editorial work for ACM and the publication of Innovation Weekly, to which you can obtain a free trial subscription from our the NewsScan site.

It sounds like their funding ran out. I've gotten Newsscan in one incarnation or another for at about 10 years, it was called Edupage when I started subscribing in 1994. It was a quick way to catch up on novel items, but a myriad of blogs have taken over its primary role.

It was a labor of love and it did it's job well. It's going out in good form. I wish the authors and publisher all the very best.

DeLong: Why Social Security Deals Are Not a Good Idea

Brad DeLong's Website: Social Security Deals: Why They Are Not a Good Idea

DeLong reacts to a seemingly reasonable proposal for social security reform that's been associated with Joe Lieberman. The bottom line is that Bush has shown, time and again, that he can't be trusted. Emphases mine

1.. A Social Security reform bill that uncaps FICA, uses half the new FICA money for sweetening the pot for a well-implemented forced-savings private account program, and that uses the other half of FICA money plus some benefit cuts/retirement age increases to bring Social Security itself into seventy-five year actuarial balance in a well-implemented way--that's a reform bill that is good for the country.

2. However, you cannot get there: whatever deals are struck between Graham and Lieberman will be undone in the conference committee.

3. And even if you could get there in the sense of having a deal on the major outlines of the reform bill, the devil is in the details--and everything we know about the Bush administration tells us that it is incapable of implementing anything well: something always goes wrong (due either to incompetence or malevolence or both) to make Bush-implemented policy initiative a bad idea.

4. So the only way to fix Social Security is to do so in a way that keeps the Bush administration's mitts off of the implementation, and the final form of the legislation out of the hands of a Republican-dominated conference committee.

5. Therefore, if Lieberman is going to bargain, he needs to bargain first for a special rule to govern the legislative process, second for the removal of drafting details from Republican-controlled staffs, and third for a separate--and non-Bush controlled--bureaucracy to implement the program.

What Josh is saying is that all that is simply not going to happen, so that (1) is irrelevant. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that (1) is true.

Bottom line -- there's no real way to a bargain given the track records of the Bush administration and the GOP.

Journalism yet lives: The NYT exposes negligent care of prisoners

The New York Times > New York Region > Private Health Care in Jails Can Be a Death Sentence

This is old-style journalism, by Paul von Zielbauer and the NYT. There's still something left in our newspapers. It's a LONG article, an expose on the consequences of outsourcing the care of very vulnerable and often despised people to a for-profit corporation:

...In these two harrowing deaths, state investigators concluded, the culprit was a for-profit corporation, Prison Health Services, that had moved aggressively into New York State in the last decade, winning jail contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with an enticing sales pitch: Take the messy and expensive job of providing medical care from overmatched government officials, and give it to an experienced nationwide outfit that could recruit doctors, battle lawsuits and keep costs down.

A yearlong examination of Prison Health by The New York Times reveals repeated instances of medical care that has been flawed and sometimes lethal. The company's performance around the nation has provoked criticism from judges and sheriffs, lawsuits from inmates' families and whistle-blowers, and condemnations by federal, state and local authorities. The company has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements...

It's a long article, too long for most of us to read in these harried times. View it in full page and scan the middle.

Even if you don't care about prisoners (who does these days?), the lessons apply whenever a vulnerable population (nursing home, indigent, cognitively impaired, psychiatric, the poor, prisoners) has their care managed by a for-profit consolidated entity. In the absence of the human safeguards of intimacy, in the absence of powerful regulation and observation, driven by the ferocious natural selection of the marketplace, these entities will inevitably morph into a machine for disposing of the inconvenient. It is a progression as certain as the arc of a thrown rock.

An inside view of Google

men.style.com: GQ

Yes, this was written in GQ. I can't explain that!

Gmail - Inbox (47) - of which 2/3 are spam

We're losing the war on spam. Google's filters had been doing well, but now they're failing dismally. Today about 2/3 of the messages that passed Google's initial spam filter are in fact "obvious" (to a human) spam. I've not seen such a rotten screening rate in years.

Spam from SONY: thank you congress

Sony Media Software – Home for Vegas, Sound Forge and ACID

Congress gave us CAN SPAM. CAN SPAM gave us this:

The monthly newsletter for Sony Media Software product information, news, and tips...

Sony Media Software
1617 Sherman Ave.
Madison, Wisconsin 53704
http://www.sony.com/mediasoftware
Customer Service and Sales: 1.800.577.6642
THIS IS NOT SPAM
You received this message because you requested to stay informed of products and promotions when you registered a product.

The Direct Mail Association paid off our corrupt congressperps (yeah, most of the CAN SPAM supporters were GOP) so they'd make this kind of spam legal. Sure I can tell SONY to remove me from the mailing list -- but I know from years of trying to get myself off paper junk mail lists that my name will just get added back on. There's an entire industry that develops in these situations; the "frontmen" like SONY insulate themselves from the guys doing the dirty work of adding addresses any way they can.

The one good news is that SONY is probably using a legitimate mailheader (CAN SPAM did require this). So when I submit them to various spam filtering services there's a better chance they'll get blocked.

The pain of CAN SPAM is that it did nothing to stop all the porn/phishing spam, but it legitimized the equivalent of paper junk mail -- without creating a "postal fee" to attach a cost to the marketing. This SONY junk is only the beginning, in the absence of a "postal fee" our mailboxes will finally collapse under a deluge of "legal SPAM". I'd place a hex on the GOP Congress, but it's clear my hexes are working.

The only bright spot is the certainty that marketers will overreach, and that eventually they'll have to pay a postal fee (tax) and join a certification program paid for by the tax. The certification program will require a "V-Chip" like tag identifying the type of email as determined by an independent group. My ISP will filter all those messages out at my request.

Or so I can dream. I just hope GOP voters get this stuff too.

Hey, all you black hat bad guy pirate hackers out there ... could you please plunder a SONY movie for me?

NYT discovers Africa and is intensely confused

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: Thousands Died in Africa Yesterday

The NYT has a long and vacuous editorial today on poverty and death in Africa. In failing to express a plausible approach to the disaster of much of Africa, the NYT effectively came out in support of complacency.

Others have done better. Dismantling trade tariffs is a part of most solutions. Putting pressure on South Africa to stop supporting Zimbabwe's tyrant is another. Helping less vicious tyrants to replace more vicious tyrants is probably worth trying. Vaccination programs (thanks Bill and Melinda, at least there's an upside to the pain Microsoft has given me) and early infant nutrition programs will help; on this point the NYT's support of the Blair initiative is correct.

That which remains: Ken Kifer's bike pages

Years ago, before kids, I did quite a bit of bike commuting. I put up a web page on the topic. Back then Ken Kifer's site was a great resource. I came across his name again through a bio he wrote on Major Taylor; it was there I discovered that Ken was killed by an intoxicated driver at the end of 2003.

A friend now preserves and tends Ken Kifer's site including his bike pages. and his utopian visions.

This is the last entry on his "what's new" page:

August 30, 2003: I have returned from a 6,500 mile bicycle camping trip to the Pacific Ocean in Washington and back. I am preparing my trip report, and I have already revised my page on Touring with a Solar Laptop to reflect changes.

Here's to you Ken.

Hope -- the american talent for subversion

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Hollywood Bets on Chris Rock's 'Indecency'

I found this oddly encouraging:

Once the feds vowed to smite future 'wardrobe malfunctions,' the customers started bolting the annual TV franchises where those malfunctions and their verbal counterparts are apt to occur. An award show sanitized of vulgarity and encased in the prophylactic of tape delay is an oxymoron. And so the Golden Globes lost 40 percent of its audience in January on NBC, the Grammys lost 28 percent of its audience this month on CBS. The viewers turned up instead at the competing 'Desperate Housewives' on ABC, where S-and-M is the latest item on the carnal menu.

America has an odd genius at corruption, diversion and subversion. Perhaps more of our national anxiety attacks will be subverted.

I must confess though, that our family doesn't have a bone in this fight. We don't watch TV. I thought the V-Chip was a great idea, but Al Gore and I were the only two people who thought so. Label the content and let the family decide what to do with it ...

Monbiot summarizes the 'Left Behind' series

George Monbiot � Apocalypse Please

I got to this one via the Moyers speech. The 'Left Behind' delusions are fairly typical of the kinds of delusions that have circulated in American subcultures since the founding of the nation. Monbiot has a pretty good summary of the overall belief system. I don't think Bush himself actually believes he's fighting the Antichrist, but many of his acolytes very much believe he is.

...In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to earth when certain preconditions have been met.(4) The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel’s occupation of the rest of its “Biblical lands” (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the Antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to earth...

In this article Monbiot says the Rapture Index is 144, "just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists". Today I see it's hit 153. It's risky for prophets to be so specific; wise prophets never make numeric statements.

Bill Moyers all but despairs of our leadership, and our citizens

Drunk and Disorderly � Blog Archive � There Is No Tomorrow

Moyers gave a speech in the last few months. A version of the speech was published on AlterNet, then copied to this blog. So much for copyright!

Moyer all but despairs of our government and our citizenship -- but he still has hope.