Is war becoming too expensive?

Wars used to consume lots of lives. The civil war, WW I -- incomprehensible volumes of lives. Raw human life, however, is not all that expensive. I shan't belabor the point since it's grossly offensive, but in low tech societies like WW I Europe it didn't cost much to raise a man to die in Verdun.

Wars are getting more expensive though - even for the aggressor. Fighers are educated and their economic output is far, far higher than in WW I. Their lifelong post-war care costs more. As we substitute technology for fighters that costs even more. The medium term costs of the "small" war in Iraq to the US are reaching above 200 billion.. The longer term direct costs for the US alone are now speculated to exceed 1 trillion..

Of course expense is relative. As a percentage of an 6-8 trillion dollar economy perhaps a 1 trillion dollar war is still a "small war". Is war really more expensive for 21st century America compared to 19th century Britain? I certainly hope war is becoming more costly in relative as well as absolute terms, but I don't know.

The perils of eBay, and why rough vendors like PayPal

I recently learned a few lessons about eBay and PayPal I'd like to pass on. The bottom line is that while I might use eBay to buy something from a regular person with a clear identity, I'll avoid eBay vendors. I've also reaffirmed and intensified my dislike of PayPal.

I bought a 'refurbished' Samsung i500 PalmOS cellphone from KM Electronics, an eBay vendor. I wasn't really trying to save money; the phone was the best option for my wife and her support staff (me) and it's no longer sold. I needed to go with 'refurb'. I took a gamble and lost, the phone has a defective digitizer. When I emailed KM Electronics I received a form response that made it pretty clear that they weren't going to be much help [1]. They also noted that if I produced a negative response on eBay they'd provide no further support or contact, irregardless of the terms of their warranty. Naturally I immediately submitted a negative response. (I have figured out ways to make the phone useful nonetheless.)

I learned a few interesting things about eBay and PayPal with this experience:

• eBay vendors put credit card icons next to PayPal buttons. It is true PayPal will manage a credit card transaction, but the vendor is paid by PayPal, not the credit card company. So good luck using AMEX to bludgeon a shady vendor -- they got their money from PayPal. The credit card relationship is with PayPal, not the vendor. Clever! A handy bit of indirection that's a win-win for PayPal, eBay and the vendor.
• eBay doesn't like negative reviews. I had to go through a little tutorial to write one. Helps explain why the reviews you see there are so often positive. I suspect the true 'negative experience' rate is several times higher than what's documented.
• This PayPal vendor is fairly typical in not having any contact method save email. (Sure I could try to track 'em down, but it's not worth it.) Email responses are automated.
• As noted above, vendors may go to some lengths to have positive comments; including intimidating anyone who might post a negative comment (voided warranty!). I think eBay ratings are very suspect.
  

I wonder how solid eBay's future really is. I'm kind of hoping Google's eCommerce solution vaporizes PayPal; though Google's product likely have the same beneficial (for vendors) "indirection" "feature".

[1] Selling refurbished phones is kind of a rough business, so it's not surprising they're a bit of a rough company. At least the phone's identifier was valid and Sprint could use it! I'm not their typical customer; I get the sense they specialize in selling things in bad net neighborhoods.

Update 11/24/05: After submitting my negative report, this is the (as expected) email I received from KM Electronics: "All service and warranty for your purchase has been cancelled." This is the type of vendor who sells on eBay -- submit a negative comment, void the support contract. Since this vendor sells a great deal on eBay, one presumes eBay approves. Clearly, the absence of negative ratings for some eBay vendors needs to be judged carefully.

Update 11/24/05b: This gets even more interesting. KM Electronics didn't respond to an email, but they responded very quickly to the negative rating. What an eBay vendor does under these conditions is give the customer a negative rating and some nasty comments, blocks the constumer from further correspondence, and then triggers an eBay mutual withdrawl option -- the simultaneous removeal of both negative comments.

Very interesting! eBay vendors like KM-Electronics (KMElectronics, etc) have more tools than I'd expected to keep their ratings positive. eBay is indeed a rough neighborhood, where advantage goes to the sharpest elbows. I wonder what's next -- goons at my door? If I had time to play the futures market I'd sell eBay short.

I'll post further updates here, I wouldn't be suprised if KM Electronics and eBay had more cards to play.

Update 12/20/05: MacSlash has a similar story. I wouldn't want to own stock in eBay.

Life as an outlaw - my experience buying a grayish market phone

How does a mild-mannered gray haired middle-aged guy become an outlaw? Well, in my case fighting with Apple's FairPlay DRM and struggling with my cellular carrier are leading me towards the darkseid.

My most recent experience was with the premature demise of my wife's coddled cellphone. Barely a year old the Samsung flip phone was malfunctioning. A far cry from the Nokia brick that was once stolen, tossed out a car window down an embankment, recovered from the mud days later, and worked flawlessly.

So I needed a replacement phone. I wanted the exact phone I have, the almost-great Samsung PalmOS (Grafitti ONE) SPH i500 so we could share accessories, chargers, etc. The phone would also replace her 1 year old CLIE TJ-27, famed for shoddy quality and the worthless needle stylus from heck. (Hmm, notice a trend here?).

Sprint, alas, had kiled the i500. There's no heir. The next closest thing costs $550 (Sprint rips off customers with the replacement phones). That did it. I wasn't going to spend that much on the infamously unreliable Treo, and we didn't have time to futz figuring our alternatives. Froogle and Pricescan only found eBay phones. I snapped and went to eBay.

There, with great reluctance and some research, I bought a 'refurbished' i500 from the most reliable seeming vendor I could find. I was forced to reactivate PayPal, a vendor I loathe almost as much as Sprint. (Hmm. George Bush. PayPay. Sprint. I think I'm getting seasonal affective disorder ...)

I purchased a phone from KMElectronics:

KM Electronics i500 Samsung Phone: Samsung SPH i500 Palm PDA Color Cell Phone Sprint - New: "YOUR PURCHASE INCLUDES-
1. Samsung i500 Phone & PDA
2. AC Charger
3. New Stylus & New Rechargeable Battery (jf: extended duration, not Samsung battery. The battery is huge; it makes the phone too thick for my use. So you have to budget for a new more useable battery too!)
4. New USB Cradle
5. Software / Manual on CD
6. For use with the Sprint PSC Network

(When new this phone came with two styli, a wrist cord, an ultra-slim and a reasonable sized battery, manuals, etc.)

Turns out the phone is $8 cheaper on their web site, it was $146 on eBay plus $12 to ship.

The good news is Sprint activated the phone without any problem or questions. Stolen phones with invalid ESN numbers is the big fear in this marketplace. In this case the ESN number was very hard to read (oddly poorly printed, I wonder if it was really the original ....) and the first reading I gave was invalid. Sprint didn't mention charging me, there's usually at least a $25 charge for a phone switch.

The bad news is that KM Electronics sent the wrong CD. Since I already have the CD this isn't a big deal for me, but it would be exceedingly annoying if I didn't. Also, a couple of buttons on the front of the phone are missing their labels. Too aggressive polishing?

The phone looks good and so far works well. I'll post an update on my further adventures in the twilight zone ...

Update 11/23/05: Alas, the digitizer is defective. Lost that gamble!

Update 11/23/05: More on this in my next post (on eBay and PayPal), but I did figure a way to work around the 'dead zone' on the i500. I can get most tasks done by using the OK/Cancel buttons on the phone and the option menus in the applications. I did receive a usenet report of a similar problem with a 'new' Samsung i500 bought a few months ago. Since the terms of service of KM Electronics made pursuing this with them a very costly and annoying option I think I'll see how well we can make this phone work.

Update 11/24/05: I do very much like having the same phone for both us, and being able to beam addresses between them, share batteries and retractable charge/sync cables, etc.

How special are we?

Science from Copernicus onwards has been about the 'descent of man'; from the apex of creation to a pointless blob of protoplasm on a meaningless dust speck in a vast cosmos.

But then there's the "cosmological coincidence":

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Supernovae Back Einstein's "Blunder"

... the finding brings to the fore another question: the so-called cosmological coincidence. Observations like this one seem to prove that regular matter and dark energy have similar densities at precisely this moment in time, even though the density of matter has been declining steadily since the big bang. Even Einstein couldn't answer why that would be.

There are a number of these coincidences in modern physics. The reasons why they bother physicists are somewhat subtle, but they fall into the class of non-Copernican phenomena; things that seem to make our 'existential state' atypical.

I like to monitor this sort of discussion.

We're leaving Iraq -- Why Murtha enraged Bush/Cheney.

Fred Kaplan was among the cautiously semi-pro war rationalists who hoped Bush knew more than we did and didn't expect his people to botch so many things. I was in that club too.

Now Kaplan, a student of military history and strategy, points out that the furor about 'cut and run' is nonensical. Once we gave up on calling on the 'individual ready reserves' we effectively declared that we're done in Iraq. Short of a draft, we can't last a year at current deployment levels.

So everyone who's "in the know" already knows we have to leave soon. (This explains, by the way, why the Iraqi government is now calling for a US departure timetable.) Ready or not.

Problem is, Rove has a story for how to do this, so it looks like we're leaving as planned. Murtha's declaration blew the story up. It makes the inevitable departure look like it's somehow a retreat before popular pressure. So Cheney blows his stack.

The odd thing is, Kaplan points out that Murtha actually has a plan. Chances are, more pain to Bush, it's the plan Rove wants too ...

What Murtha Meant - We're leaving Iraq anyway. At least he's got a plan. By Fred Kaplan

.... The Army recently announced that it will no longer call up the Individual Ready Reserves for duty in Iraq. The IRRs are retired—in many cases, long-retired—soldiers, who, by contract, are obligated to re-enter the force if called back to arms. This announcement is as clear a sign as any that, whatever George W. Bush and Richard Cheney might say about the likes of Murtha, they too know the troops are coming out. For without the IRRs, the Army will be unable to sustain the present levels for much longer.

It almost doesn't matter whether withdrawing or redeploying the troops is a good idea; it's simply going to happen because there is no way for it not to happen (short of a major act of political will, such as reviving the draft or keeping troops on the battlefield beyond reasonable endurance). This is what Murtha meant when he told Russert, "We're going to be out of there, we're going to be out of there very quickly, and it's going to be close to the plan that I'm presenting right now." (There are political reasons for this near-inevitability, as well. When Murtha predicted we'd be mainly out of Iraq by 2006, Russert asked, "By Election Day 2006?" Murtha responded, "You—you have hit it on the head.")

So, the pertinent question becomes: What is the best way for redeploying? In other words, by what timetable (whether one is explicitly announced or not), after what political and military actions? How many U.S. troops should be left behind, and what should they be doing? Where should the others be redeployed, and under what circumstances will they move back into Iraq? Do we have any realistic strategic goals left in this war (one big problem in this whole fiasco is that the Bush administration never had any from the outset), and how do we accomplish them?

There's a very serious debate to be conducted in this country—not only about the future of our involvement with Iraq, but also about the use of force, the response to threats, the war on terror, the shape of the Middle East. John Murtha's proposal leaves open a lot of questions, but—seen for what it really says, not for how it's been portrayed—it's a start.

When the right wing shows pompous rage, they've been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

The lies Bush and Cheney told - from former chair of the senate intelligence committee

Bob Graham had better intelligence access than anyone short of Bush/Cheney. He learned before the war that the Bush administration had willfully chosen to close its eyes, and proceed on a predetermined path -- evidence be damned. Before the world knew, Graham knew Bush could not be trusted. Emphases mine.

Washington Post - What I Knew Before the Invasion
By Bob Graham
Sunday, November 20, 2005; Page B07

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. "[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

... As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda. [jf: around this time the US had its great defeat, when bin Laden and the leadership escaped from their mountain fastness].

.... At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

... We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary. [jf: this includes Iran, now suspected of having tricked Bush/Cheney into the invasion ...]

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version.

... From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor...

Cheney's ferocious attacks of the last few weeks bring the phrase "cornered rat" to mind. He and Bush were duped by Iran, their own massive egos, and their faith-based agenda.

Steve Gibson's password generator

Gibson's passwords are as secure as he can make them. Do you trust Steve Gibson? I do. Definitely not human memorable.

Adventures in shopping continued: Amazon and daily pricing shifts

This is fascinating. I blogged previously on the dramatic fluctuations in Amazon and Amazon partner pricing for the very popular Canon Digital Rebel XT. I discovered then that if I put a variety of this item on my shopping cart, then 'deferred' purchase to "later", I could see the price changes as they occurred. Their were quite a few today -- similar to airline ticket price changes:

Please note that the price of Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 Lens (Silver) has decreased from $899.94 to $879.94 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart.

Please note that the price of Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only - Silver) has increased from $838.94 to $854.99 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart.

Please note that the price of Canon 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens has increased from $74.94 to $75.99 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart.

Please note that the price of Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only - Black) has decreased from $829.94 to $799.94 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart.

I'm sure someone has s written software that will check the deferred cart list items every 10 minutes, and execute a purchase based on the price fluctuations. Buying from Amazon.com these days seems to resemble buying shares on the NASDAQ. Inevitably the same sofware used to execute trading strategies will be used throughout the retail chain.

It's not just electronics by the way. The price of the Calvin and Hobbes compendium, a book, just jumped $10 on my shopping cart. I assume Amazon is adjusting costs in real-time based on sales, competitor pricing, customer profiles, the cost of gasoline, the futures market, and some randomness factor to measure the impact of different price points.

More complexity. More obscure costs. Where does it end?

PS. My "buy signal" for the next five days is something around $840 for the camera with the default lens.

Emily's new cell phone and the cost of complexity

Emily needs a new cell phone. Here 2-3 year old coddled Samsung flip phone is now unreliable (it turns off unpredictably when closed).

Unreliable technology. That's a cost of complexity.

Ok, I'll just buy her the phone I have, the Samsung i500. It's a flawed device, but I know it well and I've more or less got it working with Emily's iMac. It will run ePocrates and she'll finally be able to dump her crummy SONY CLIE TJ-27.

Except the Samsung i500 is history. The PalmOS being 90% dead, Samsung has switched the physical descendant of this phone to whatever it is Microsoft now calls their PDA OS. There's no equivalent at Sprint. This launched Emily into an eloquent rant on the cost of complexity -- summarized here.

This is progress, yes. But it has a cost. A 10 minute exercise will now consume hours of research -- starting with figuring out if I can buy the phone on eBay and get Sprint to switch it over. There's a huge hassle cost here.

It's a hassle and complexity cost we pay almost every day. Call it "the progress tax". It consumes a lot of our life.

We are starting to adapt. The price tag of a new item is now almost irrelevant to us -- the cost we look at is the complete cost of ownership. This is dramatically changing what we buy and how we buy. Even so, we can't avoid the progress tax completely, and sometimes the churn cost far exceeds the value of the "progress". Indeed, in many cases, there is change with regression, such as the loss of capabilities that we value (reliability in particular).

I would like to see more scholarly investigation of complexity cost and its impact on our lives. We know that the average middle class person watches much less TV than they used to. I wonder if that really represents a switch to other entertainment forms, or whether it's how middle class Americans are paying their complexity taxes ....

Who has the bigger middle class - China or the US?

By one measure, China:

The Big Picture: China by the Numbers

• Shanghai boasts 4,000 skyscrapers -- double the number in New York City. Still, 17% of the entire Chinese population lives on $1 a day. Only about 300 million people in China, or 23% of the population, are considered middle-class.

Since the population of America is less than 300 million, and at least 25% is in poverty or tenuous circumstances, China has now a much larger "middle class" than America. I suspect in absolute terms the average member of the American middle class has much more money than the Chinese equivalent, but this transition is remarkable. America is very far from ready for China.

By the way, the word "only" in the above quote is kind of weird. What's "only" about 23% of China?

Fundamentalist history and biology - a bias issue for Universities?

Fundamentalists schools teach different versions of history, geology, biology, etc. In Saudi Arabia the Holocaust is probably not a big topic in modern history. In Christian fundamentalist America Darwin was inspired by Satan. (My public high school history class, by the way, taught that the Children's Crusade was a noble spiritual cause worthy of emulation. That was in the days that the Catholic Church wrote Quebec's history books.)

This can be a problem, of course, if one applies to university. What does an A grade in history mean if the history is fraudulent? What good is biology class without natural selection? Naturally, this conundrum has lead to a lawsuit:

University Is Accused of Bias Against Christian Schools - New York Times:

... The suit, scheduled for a hearing on Dec. 12 in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, says many of Calvary's best students are at a disadvantage when they apply to the university because admissions officials have refused to certify several of the school's courses on literature, history, social studies and science that use curriculums and textbooks with a Christian viewpoint.

If a fundamentalist math class teaches that imaginary numbers are satanic and cannot exist, should that math class be meaningful in college applications? If the college uses ACT tests, and the students fail biology, is that bias? If the student is admitted, and fails all of their college biology tests, is that bias? If I'm a Satanist, can I be denied admission to a Fundamentalist college because my theology doesn't match their standards?

Eugenics, take II

It's been a while since the heyday of European eugenics, but these days that ancient spirit is rising almost everwhere. Among the community of persons with genetic disorders, tests that allow quicker and faster abortions raise the specter of extinction ...

The Problem With an Almost-Perfect Genetic World - New York Times

.... One study of 53,000 women's choices, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2002, found that the termination rate ranged from about 1 percent for conditions that were classified as having no impact on the quality of life, to 50 percent for those considered to have a serious impact.

Women were far more likely to choose abortions for disabilities that have a high probability of affecting cognitive functioning. For conditions that have little or no impact on the quality of life but might require medical or surgical therapy, the abortion rate was 16 percent, but doubled for those likely to cause mental dysfunction.

As for Down syndrome, doctors estimate that about 80 percent of women who get positive test results choose abortion...

I would expect China to pioneer in this area, I think a magazine article on eugenics in China would be absolutely fascinating.

Americans may think that the evangelical movement will stop abortion in America. Wrong. The fear of a 'defective' child will keep abortion alive and well among all Americans who can afford it. Medical abortion rates do not differ significantly between evangelical fundamentalists and secular Americans of a similar socio-economic class. That datum predicts that abortion will remain available in America (though it may not be covered by medicaid) and that the new eugenics movement will stay with us. We shall all be ubermensch one (very sad) day ...

The American infatuation with performance: optimizing genius

The New York Times Magazine has a long review of various past and present programs to identify children with extraordinary intellectual gifts and guide them to careers of power, prestige, fame and prominence. Some of the projects have a strong eugenics influence, others are reminescent of Nietzshe, still others seem to feel the children will be "wasted" unless their gifts are harnessed.

The enterprise appears to have a history of disappointment. This matches my own limited experience with living among geniuses, my undergraduate experience at Caltech (note: I am not a genius). The geniuses I knew were exceptionally good at almost everything. They usually didn't study very hard, since they could excel with relatively little effort. They, were, however, not necessarily terribly ambitious. Indeed, I'm tempted to recall that the more balanced and well adjusted they were, the less driven and ambitious they appeared (even there, however, the numbers were small and memory is misleading).

Perhaps a truly brilliant deep thinker would conclude that many driven persons suffer from a lack of deep insight, and that they would be better to spend their limited days caring for loved ones and quietly contemplating the uncaring universe.

Update 11/20: One way to think about this is to consider Lance Armstrong. What made Armstrong one of the greatest atheletes of the past 100 years? Was it genetics? Sure. Was it luck? Definitely. Was it being emotionally well balanced and raised to be wise and mature? Uh, no. Armstrong was (he's mellowed a bit), by all reports, a bit of a nut case. He wanted to win in a "rip arms off", "sell soul", "pay any price", "crush the enemy" sort of way. He is even now not a nice man. A well rounded, well balanced, optimally raised person with Armstrong's genetics would more likely be a sunday school teacher than a world champion bicyclist.

Or consider Isaac Newton. Was Newton a nice well rounded man? No. Isaac Newton, perhaps one of the greatest human minds of all time, was a miserable, nasty, bitter, cruel, vengeful creep.

Genius is genius. It doesn't say anything about how the person will be, it doesn't even seem to correlate with insight. You may produce more Newtons by cruelty and spite than by wise instruction and compassion. Which is not to say we should torture our young geniuses, but we shouldn't imagine we'll produce great leaps in knowledge by making their lives more agreeable.

Autism-like findings in relatives of autistic children and the evolutionary biology of autism

The first degree relatives of autistic children share behavioral and neurologic traits with autistic persons: Be the Best You can Be: Autism-like findings in relatives of autistic children and the evolutionary biology of autism. What does that tell us about the natural history and evolutionary biology of autism?

Conason flays Woodward

Joe Conason works over Robert Woodward: Salon.com | Woodward's disgrace. When he's done, there's not much left of that ex-journalist. Worth reading, as a lesson in the seduction of power.