Comparative advantage: a one line summary

Recently I gave a talk on outsourcing clinical content creation (hospital care plans, standardized order sets, etc) to a physician audience. I was able to work in a reference to Wikipedia and comparative advantage and to relate Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage to outsourcing. This basic economics works pretty well with a clinical audience; they especially liked my concise summary of Ricardo:

It's not that you can't do the work better than someone else, it's rather that you have better things to do ..

American torture - a study in camels

The right wing is fond of declaiming slippery slopes and the camel's nose. I happen to think this is one of their better strategies -- I agree with social conservatives that humans are very poor at detecting that they've slid onto the smooth road to hell.

So where's the evangelical right wing when it comes to torture? What would our new Supreme Court Chief Justice say?

Emphases mine. Note the stages of torture acceptance.

WHO DID YOU TORTURE DURING THE WAR, DADDY?

By Ted Rall Thu Sep 29,10:40 AM ET
Or, We Are All Torturers Now

... An army captain and two sergeants from the elite 82nd Airborne Division confirm previous reports that Bagram and other concentration camps in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan are a kind of Torture University where American troops are taught how to abuse prisoners who have neither been charged with nor found guilty of any crime...

... The latest sordid revelations concern Tiger Base on the border with
Syria, and Camp Mercury, near Fallujah, the Iraqi city leveled by U.S. bombs in a campaign that officials claimed would finish off the insurgent movement. After the army told him to shut up over the course of 17 months--tacit proof that the top brass condones torture--a frustrated Captain Ian Fishback wrote to two conservative Republican senators to tell them about the "death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment" carried out against Afghans and Iraqis unlucky enough to fall into American hands.

... By 2004 a third of Americans told pollsters that they didn't have a problem with torture.

... By Monday, September 26, the story of torture at Camps Tiger and Mercury to which New York Times editors had granted page one treatment two days earlier had vanished entirely. Only a few papers, such as the Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times, ran follow-ups.

In his 2000 book "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture" John Conroy presciently describes the surprising means by which democracies are actually more susceptible to becoming "torture societies" than dictatorships ... Conroy goes on to describe the "fairly predictable" stages of governmental response:

First, writes Conroy, comes "absolute and complete denial." Rumsfeld told Congress in 2004 that the U.S. had followed Geneva "to the letter" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The second stage," he says, is "to minimize the abuse." Republican mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh compared the murder and mayhem at Abu Ghraib to fraternity hazing rituals.

Next is "to disparage the victims." Bush Administration officials and right-wing pundits call the victims of torture in U.S. custody "terrorists," ...

Dick Cheney called victims of torture at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (who, under U.S. law, are presumed innocent) "the worst of a very bad lot." Rumsfeld called them "the worst of the worst."

Other government tactics include charging "that those who take up the cause of those tortured are aiding the enemies of the state" (Right-wing bloggers have smeared me as a "terrorist sympathizer" because I argue against torture); denying that torture is still occurring (numerous Bush Administration officials claimed that Abu Ghraib marked the end of the practice); placing "the blame on a few bad apples" (the classic Fox News-Bush trope); and pointing out that "someone else does or has done much worse things" (the beheadings of Western hostages by Iraqi jihadi organizations was used to justify torturing Iraqis who didn't belong to those groups).

Citing the case of widespread and proven torture of arrestees by Chicago cops, Conroy noted: "It wasn't a case of five people...doing nothing or acting slowly, it was a case of millions of people knowing of an emergency and doing nothing. People looked about, saw no great crusade forming, saw protests only from the usual agitators, and assumed there was no cause for alarm. Responsibility was diffused. Citizens offended by torture could easily retreat into the notion that they lived in a just world, that the experts would sort things out.

An old story, oft retold. This is how nations fall.

Krugman and others have commented that Bush has transformed the American economy into something that resembles Argentina. Argentina has also had a history of governmental torture, and of social complicity. Maybe we should study Argentina a bit.

As for myself, I'll have to join a march or something. One day I may have to explain to the children what I was doing when America went over a cliff.

Building a personal voice notes internet service

I wrote about this in my text blog: Gordon's Tech: MaxEmail & GMail = a great way to pass voice messages around. Using web based email to view and manage voice messages from oneself to oneself makes the old dictaphone obsolete ....

Salon summarizes the DeLay / Abramoff story

Salon.com News | The Hammer falls

Concise and interesting. Very pre-Teddy (Roosevelt).

At its height, the first great political machine of the 21st century worked like this: In Congress, Texas Rep. Tom DeLay controlled the votes like a modern-day Boss Tweed. He called himself 'the Hammer.' His domain included a vast network of former aides and foot soldiers he installed in key positions at law firms and trade groups, a network that came to be called the 'K Street Project.' He gathered tithes in the form of campaign cash, hard and soft, and spread it out among the loyal. He legislated for favored donors. He punished those who disobeyed, and bought off those who could be paid.

Conservative activists, who had grown up in the heady days of Reagan's America, patrolled the badlands of American politics for new opportunities. None did it better than Jack Abramoff, a former president of the College Republicans, who had a taste for expensive suits. Abramoff opened a restaurant, Signatures, where the powerful came to be seen and, in many cases, treated to free meals from a menu that included $74 steaks. He pulled in tens of millions of dollars from Indian tribes and the Northern Marianas Islands to help fund other operations -- skyboxes at the MCI Center where DeLay could hold his fundraisers and all-expense trips to Scotland where DeLay and friends could play golf.

Others were drawn into the web as well. Abramoff kicked down money to his old college buddy Grover Norquist, an anti-tax crusader whose role was to keep the right-wing ideologues in line. He hired Ralph Reed, a former advisor to the Christian Coalition, who helped keep the religious right on good terms with the Republican leadership. He hired Michael Scanlon, a former aide to DeLay, as his assistant. He leaned on former lobbying colleagues, like David Safavian, who was working in the Bush administration and could do favors for his clients. Susan Ralston, Abramoff's former gatekeeper and executive assistant, went to work for Karl Rove in the White House.

Online gambling - 1905

Online gambling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There's a history section to be written for this Wikipedia article. If I could validate family lore I might add a section on an example of 'prior art' in online gaming.

Prior to WW I my paternal grandfather worked running telegrams in Liverpool. Punters would submit their bets via Telegram (electric telegraph) prior to race-time. My grandfather, then a child, ran them to the track. I don't know if punters received their winnings via Telegraph, but it's quite possible.

Indeed there is little truly new under the sun. Practically speaking, I wonder if this 'prior art' might invalidate some pesky process patents.

PS. Thanks Mum!

On grief - New York Times Magazine

We all know, or will know, a bit of the feeling. The call about the parent who's died. The brother missing. This story is well told and worth reading.

NYT Magazine: After Life - New York Times (Joan Didion)

Nine months and five days ago, at approximately 9 o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, then 37, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive-care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center's Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004), more commonly known as 'Beth Israel North' or 'the old Doctors' Hospital,' where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself....

...Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves." Erich Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940's and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: "sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.

The essay does not discuss what happened to Quintana. Unfortunately, Google tells us. Per Wikipedia: "[Quintana] Michaels died of complications from acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, in New York City at age 39." About 20 months after her sepsis admission. I wonder if she ever went home.

There's an old expression that goes something like "count no man fortunate before his death". It is a truism in psychology that pessimists make more accurate judgments about life and control. Perhaps there are no optimists and pessimists -- but rather the more and the less delusional ...

For what it's worth, I have for some years paused at various times, and thought "this is the blessed moment, it will be forever as it is now, safe in the past".

Iraqi strategy: the Bush view versus the military view

Ignatius (WaPo) claims that the US military has a strategy for Iraq, and that it's very different from what Bush says. It would be nice to know if it's merely different from what Bush says publicly, or whether it's quite different from what Bush says privately (and probably believes).

The military is concerned about eroding public support. Maybe they'd get somesupport if their strategy was presented directly and honestly. It at least seems plausible -- if hardly idealistic. The Bush rhetoric is insane, and even the American public has trouble with an insane strategy.

I think the military strategy boils down Afghanistan II. It's letting the Iraqis fight it out, while moving US forces off the scene. The US would provide air support, but would otherwise strive for invisibility. No more 'hearts and minds'. Whatever government emerged is Iraq's problem, and human rights and democracy are nowhere on the radar. The goal is 'stable' Iraq and a base for future US military operations in the region, but no "permanent bases".

Note the prediction of a very sharp force reduction. That fits with the story that Blair told the Japanese that the Brits would leave in May of 2006.

A Shift on Iraq(emphases mine)

The Generals Plan a Slow Exit
By David Ignatius
Monday, September 26, 2005; Washinton Post

... The commanders who are running the war don't talk about transforming Iraq into an American-style democracy or of imposing U.S. values. They understand that Iraqis dislike American occupation, and for that reason they want fewer American troops in Iraq, not more.

...I had a rare opportunity to hear a detailed explanation of U.S. military strategy this weekend when the Centcom chief, Gen. John Abizaid, gathered his top generals here for what he called a "commanders' huddle." They described a military approach that's different, at least in tone, from what the public perceives. For the commanders, Iraq isn't an endless tunnel. They are planning to reduce U.S. troop levels over the next year to a force that will focus on training and advising the Iraqi military. They don't want permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. Indeed, they believe such a high-visibility American presence will only make it harder to stabilize the country.

The commanders' thinking is conveyed by a set of "Principles for a Long War" for combating the main enemy, al Qaeda and affiliated movements. Among the precepts they discussed here: "use the indirect approach" by working with Iraqi and other partner forces; "avoid the dependency syndrome" by making the Iraqis take responsibility for their own security and governance; and "remove the perception of occupation" by reducing the size and visibility of American forces. The goal over the next decade is a smaller, leaner, more flexible U.S. force in the Middle East -- one that can help regional allies rather than trying to fight an open-ended American war that would be a recruiting banner for al Qaeda.

... There were 412 suicide bombings in Iraq from January through August, killing about 8,000 Iraqis, according to U.S. statistics. The number of suicide attacks in August was eight times higher than a year before.

To combat this insurgency, Casey has moved to joint U.S.-Iraqi operations, such as the recent offensive in Tall Afar in northwestern Iraq. As part of this Iraqification approach, Casey has embedded 10-man U.S. adviser teams with every Iraqi brigade. The advisers can mentor Iraqi troops but, perhaps more important, they can call in U.S. air support...

President Bush and other administration officials continue to speak about Iraqi democracy in glowing terms, but you don't hear similar language from the military. ... "I think we'd be foolish to try to build this into an American democracy," says one general. "It's going to take a very different form and character." The military commanders have concluded that because Iraqis have such strong cultural antibodies to the American presence, the World War II model of occupation isn't relevant. They've sharply lowered expectations for what America can accomplish.

...The generals devoutly want the American people to stay the course -- but the course they describe is more limited, and more realistic, than recent political debate might suggest.

We need to get Bush off the stage and have Abizaid address the nation. This is an alternative Iraqis might support, and it may be better than US directed partition or an unrestrained civil war. It is, of course, a disaster by the standards Bush set on his invasion.

Once there were real Republicans

Once the Republican party was a respectable group. Bruce Bartlet was one of them. You didn't have to agree with them, but you had to respect them.

Here he cries for his lost party:

MaxSpeak, You Listen!: THE TRUTH HURTS

... The chilling conclusion, therefore, is that virtually 100 percent of all federal taxes, on a present value basis, do nothing but pay for Social Security and Medicare. Unless there are plans to abolish the rest of the federal government, large tax increases are inevitable.

Let me be clear that I am no advocate of higher taxes. I’m the one who drafted the Kemp-Roth bill back in the 1970’s and I have spent most of my career looking for ways to cut tax levels and tax rates. But that was predicated on an assumption those supporting tax cuts also wanted to downsize government. I never saw tax cuts as a substitute for spending cuts, but more as sugar to make the medicine go down. My ultimate goal was to reduce both taxes and spending.

Unfortunately, few in my party seem to share this philosophy any longer. For many, tax cuts have become a substitute for spending cuts. It truly amazes me how often I hear people on my side talk about cutting taxes as if this is the only thing necessary to downsize government. They seem genuinely oblivious to the fact that the burden of government is largely determined by the level of spending, not taxes. Nor do they understand that in the long-run, all spending must be paid for one way or another. Increasing spending today, therefore, absolutely guarantees that taxes will have to be raised in the future...

Emphases mine. The Republican Party has become insane.

Bartlet wants a Value-added tax (consumption taxation). What we ought to be debating is how to raise taxes, but the Republican Party is far from that state.

HIV Denial: the tragic price of a delusion

Red State Moron: A simply tragic story.

It's a tragic story well worth reading.

Christine Maggiore, a wealthy and fairly healthy HIV positive woman, writes a book denying the reality of AIDS/HIV. She breast feeds her two children and declines their immunizations. Her co-conspirators include a set of quack physicians -- among them Dr. (Heidi-father) Fleiss and Los Angeles child protective services. (Case law, established in the care of Christian Scientist and Jehovah's Witness children is reasonably clear that the state has an obligation to intervene on behalf of a child in these circumstances.)

Recently, following a brief illness, her young daughter dies of AIDS associated pneumonia. She is devastated but remains convinced her daughter's death is unrelated to HIV infection. (The children's father is not mentioned in the story.)

This lies in the perplexing intersection between cultural beliefs, faith, and mental illness. Ms. Maggiore's beliefs have a delusional quality, but they are not so different from those of Christian Scientists and many alternative medicine practitioners. It is not a simple matter (witness a very well done book on a Hmong child's illness and her care in Minnesota), but here the state failed this child. We have very effective therapies for HIV disease in children. This child should never have been infected, but once infected she should not have died [1]. The state should protect Ms. Maggiore's remaining child from the actions of her loving but misguided mother. Ms. Maggiore, unfortunately, has the legal resources to ensure that will be very difficult.

Her physicians, with the exception of one who noted his own failings, should be removed from their specialty societies and their licenses revoked.

Great reporting in the original story by the way.

[1] Update 9/26/05: On reflection, I'm getting this opinion via the newspaper article. I suspect our treatments are in fact not universally successful.

On human memory

I've been thinking again about human memory -- that hacked and refactored offspring of scent storage.

I've only a lay knowledge of the neurosciences, but from what I read I suspect the picture that's emerging is both fascinating and disturbing. I think the emerging consensus is:

1. We don't really remember very much at all. We have 'hints' and 'fragments' and 'aspects' in our memory, but most of what we think we "remember" is in fact recreation and synthesis from often very sparse hints. This is why it's trivially easy to create false memories, and why witness testimony is so unreliable.

2. All of our cognitive structures are crude and defective, but memory structures are particularly archaic and limited and evolve very slowly -- if at all.

3. The 'creative and synthetic capacities', imagination, the ability to invent based upon pieces of information, began as a hack to extend the limited capacities of our memory subsystems. By implication creative and synthetic people may have memories that are in one sense "better", in another "untrue".

4. If memory evolution is the rate limiting step in our cognitive capabilities, then we can think of language and socialization as a way to create a distributed memory service (each person could specialize in one social narrative, and key myths and technologies could be transmitted from one specialized parental store to a child).

5. The ability to read and write was a transcendental leap around the limitations of memory. When we fully understand how reading occurs we will be stunned by what a fantastic "hack" reading is. It will be seen as a collection of frail mutations and perverted subsystems.

6. Some people have exceptional memories ("photographic"). Is this a new mutation or does it have a downside? I tend to suspect the latter or I think it would be far more common. It is very worthy of study.

All of which places things like 'brain memory chips' [1] and continuous capture of one's lifetime audiovideo stream in a different historical context -- just another step around an archaic subsystem that can't keep up with the evolving brain. In our home we've taken one step along that path by constantly cycling family images on the computer displays -- creating not-utterly-authentic memories of a life of uninterrupted joy.

Balance the budget? It was trivial, thanks.

National Budget Simulation

Old budget was $3748.1268 billion
($2673 billion in spending, $1075.1268 billion in tax expenditures and cuts).

New budget is $3122.95 billion
($2542.55 billion in spending, $580.4 billion in tax expenditures and cuts).

You have cut the deficit by $625.18 billion.
Your new deficit is $-224.17 billion.

A piece of cake. Mostly I got rid of foolish programs and nonsensical deductions and reversed the Bush idiocy. It's not that hard to balance the budget!

The lost war: Wellstone was right

Time reviews the war: TIME.com: Saddam's Revenge -- Sep. 26, 2005. Essentially they say we've lost.

I suppose it depends on how one defines losing. I still think Rumsfeld (the idiot) intended from the start to partition Iraq, and that may still come to pass. In terms of our stated goals, however, I agree that we've lost. Time to bail and try to prepare the good guys to survive the civil war.

There are a few lessons we can draw. One is that, as my wife notes, in a fight between Saddam and Bush the Yalie would be minced meat. The other is that Paul Wellstone was right and I was wrong.

I felt the invasion was likely to be badly executed (especially after we lost Turkey!), and that Bush had gone to great lengths to ensure we'd have no allies but Blair -- but that it was plausible that we had no choice. (On reflection, it was actually Blair who persuaded me. Even then I thought Bush was a dolt and Rumsfeld was worse, but I trusted Blair.)

Paul Wellstone, our senator, didn't buy it. He'd supported (along with all other Americans) the Afghan invasion, but on Iraq he voted No. He died shortly thereafter in a plane crash (no, it really was an accident). We traded Wellstone for Norm Coleman. Kind of like trading your Lexus for a Ford Pinto.

I should have listened to Paul. I'm sorry Paul, you were right.

Palm stops flogging its ex-horse

This was a mercy killing.

Technology News Article | Reuters.com: SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and its longtime rival in the mobile software market, Palm Inc. (PALM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) are set to unveil on Monday a cell phone that will run Microsoft's software, sources said on Friday.

The Palm Platform had great promise once. My Palm III astounded and delighted me; more so even than my iPod. There was genius made real.

The genius passed. Maybe it was the loss of a few unrecognized key contributors. Maybe it was greed. Maybe it was Microsoft. Whatever the cause, after the Vx the Palm Platform careened downhill. SONY introduced PalmOS devices that lost data when the battery died. Palm stopped working on sync problems, and never developed a robust way to sync and home and work. Netscape, Novell and Lotus died, leaving the corporate PIM to Exchange/Outlook. Sync didn't work, and Palm was years late in responding. Executives stopped carrying Palms. Palm never revised their software to fit XP's (or OS X's) multi-user environment. Palm licensees began to fork the desktop application, confounding multi-device households.

The final straw was abandoning Grafitti (Grafitti Two is Jot, it's technically unrelated).

Today's Palm Platform is a shadow of its former self, a shuffling zombie. Farewell Palm, you now join the Newton in the halls of 'hardware that deserved better'.

Apple, the ball is now in your court. Again.

As expected - routine torture of Iraqi prisoners for fun and amusement

This is in keeping with the historic record of what humans do with those in their power -- in the absence of rigorous oversight and the presences of extreme stress:3 in 82nd Airborne Say Abuse in Iraqi Prisons Was Routine - New York Times

... We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them," one sergeant told Human Rights Watch researchers during one of four interviews in July and August. "This happened every day."

The sergeant continued: "Some days we would just get bored, so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did it for amusement."

At least one soldier said he had been acting under orders from military intelligence personnel to soften up detainees, whom the unit called persons under control, or P.U.C.'s, to make them more cooperative during formal interviews.

"They wanted intel," said one sergeant, an infantry fire-team leader who served as a guard when no military police soldiers were available. "As long as no P.U.C.'s came up dead, it happened." He added, "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

The soldiers told Human Rights Watch that while they were serving in Afghanistan, they learned the stress techniques from watching Central Intelligence Agency operatives interrogating prisoners.

The Army captain who made the allegations gave Human Rights Watch and Senate aides his long account only after his efforts to report the abuses to his superiors were rebuffed or ignored over 17 months, according to Senate aides and John Sifton, one of the Human Rights Watch researchers who conducted the interviews.

American 'exceptionalism' is rank nonsense. We are no more or less virtuous than other humans -- and that's not a high standard. In the absence of rigorous oversight and discipline bored men torture for fun.

This is a part of the consequences of Rumsfeld's decisions to under-resource the occupation, and it is consistent with the culture he promulgated. Rumsfeld should have been fired long ago. Bush should be impeached for not firing Rumsfeld.

Wikipedia - becoming astounding

Years ago I tried to find a clear and useful reference on 'comparative advantage', a foundational theory in economics. I was frustrated by a great deal of noise, and at that time the Encyclopedia Britannica didn't help.

Today I tried again, and Wikipedia had a good summary. I knew Wikipedia was good, but it's becoming astounding.

Update 9/25: See the comments. Brittanica actually has a reasonable article. Hard to believe that's new, so either I misremembered using them or I bobbled my old search. So I'll still say Wikipedia is amazing, but I should have been nicer to EB.