DeLong, Mankiw and the Problem of the Weak

DeLong explores the dark side of Mankiw, the probability that this very bright man has confused the Market with the Good:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Dysfunctional Behavior

.... In Michael Barone's view--and could it be in Greg Mankiw's too?--poverty in America is not something to be worried or concerned about because the poor deserve to be poor. The poverty of the poor is a just outcome. Poverty is, Michael Barone says, 'not... any structural failure of society.' Instead, poverty comes 'from dysfunctional behaviors.'...

but DeLong's blade then goes astray

...The point that it is a structural failure of society if (some) dysfunctional behaviors by parents trap their children in poverty seems to whiz by both Barone and Greg without penetrating.

Alas, my reply is swamped in a deluge of likewise misdirected comments (revised version below):

... Brad, you almost had it, but you slipped badly when you wrote "The point that it is a structural failure of society if (some) dysfunctional behaviors by parents trap their children in poverty seems to whiz by both Barone and Greg without penetrating."

Ahh. Would that all outcomes and all poverty could be cured by better parenting. Do you believe schizophrenia is due to bad parenting? Mental retardation? Austism? ODD? ADHD? Cerebral palsy?

Or, for that matter, a 10th percentile IQ? There is limited evidence that IQ can be influenced significantly after a child is born. (Test scores can be increased by practice and motivation/confidence however.)

Alas, "better parenting" is a false answer, and it has trapped you. The truth is that some children are dealt four aces, some a mixed hand, and some nothing at all. Look not for justice in this world.

So then what should a society do for The Weak, The Losers, those who finish last? Shall they fester beyond the gates?

It is the Problem of the Weak that divides the dwindling number of true Christians from evangelical Yahwhites, and that divides people like me from Republicans, Fundamentalists (Weakness and Suffering is a sign of God's displeasure) and Libertarians alike ...

Fear and totalitarianism

On the way home from a lecture I listened to a public radio interview with a past and future Russian dissident. He was speaking in response to the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who'd crossed Putin many times. He described her compulsive courage, her perverse fearlessness. Then he was asked about his time in Gorbachev's prisons in the 1980s. He was tortured, of course. Hung by the neck until he became unconscious, expecting then to die. As he succumbed, he felt the joy of knowing he had defeated the regime. He had not broken. He was victorious.

His torturers resuscitated him and returned to their fun on other occasions, but he remained unbroken. In those days the US opposed torturing people, and the US joined in the international pressure that freed him and others. For a time he thought the old totalitarianism was gone, but now, of course it's back. He's a dissident again.

Fear, he said. Fear is everything in a totalitarian society. The torturers cannot tolerate the fearless.

Incredibly, but undeniably, the fearless exist. I assure you I am not among them, I merely stand in awe.

Will we need the fearless here? American democracy is far more fragile than we once thought it was. Anything could happen. Not yet, but if cowards like me go silent, we'll have moved a step closer.

Google Docs: sort of allows blog posting

Credit to Jacob Reider for noticing that Google Docs (formerly Writely) now supports publishing a document to a web site or to a blog. The blog posting is a curiosity for now, it supports only a single blog, there's limited metadata control, no drafts, no bookmarklet (BlogThis!), etc. The ability to post to a web site is more interesting; I think I might make use of that.

Blogger posting is merely a curiosity for the moment, but it does suggest that Google is reasonably close to integrating Writely with Blogger. Now if they decide to add Safari support ... (This post was published from Google Docs.)

Update 10/12/06: Not only is it a curiosity, it's also buggy (title fails). Don't try this.

Chaos at Microsoft: the story of Windows Live Toolbar, Onfolio and Writer

Microsoft, or at least significant parts of it, must be in panic mode. There’s no other way I can explain all the mess around Windows Live Toolbar, the newly acquired Onfolio RSS client toolbar plug-in, the formerly Microsoft Gadgets that are now supposed to be in Windows Live Gallery (good luck getting that site to load) and Windows Live Writer.

What a mess. Bad links. Missing documentation. Vanishing sites. No update notification. It’s a bleedin’ impenetrable mess.

The odd thing is, I actually like and use these tools extensively. The Windows Live Toolbar brings tabs, pop-up blocking and form completion to IE (I omit the full text search tools, they’re another story). The Onfolio RSS client, which I somehow got before it vanished, is the best RSS client/reader for Windows. Free too. Windows Live Writer, despite some beta issues (beware the windows that fall behind IE!) is an excellent free authoring client. Sure Live Toolbar seemed to kill my Google Toolbar (dueling pop-up blockers for one), but it was easy to set Live Toolbar to use Google for searching. (Microsoft’s Live Search is toast.)

With this suite of blogging tools Microsof is actually very competitive. In terms of authoring they’re now ahead of what’s available on OS X. (XP has two good low cost authoring tools — BlogJet and LiveWriter. OS X has nothing that works for me on Blogger.)

So why the panic and chaos?

Iraqi death rates 60% of American civil war casualties

Iraq has about 26 million inhabitants. During the US civil war we had about 33 million inhabitants, of whom about 1 million died.

Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says - New York Times:

... A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths...

If we adjusted the Iraqi toll to our population of 300 million, the conflict would claim 6 million Americans lives. Would we call that a civil war? The "conflict" in Iraq is now up to about 60% of the death total of a war that most of would consider "civil".

We usually consider the American civil war to have been a massive bloodbath that still affects us. I don't think future generations of Iraqis will look very kindly upon George Bush or the nation that elected him.

Heroes don't play for fame and fortune

A hero is someone who does the right thing, despite the personal costs.

The Cost of Doing Your Duty - New York Times

... In 2003, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was assigned to represent Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen accused of being a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda — for the sole purpose of getting him to plead guilty before one of the military commissions that President Bush created for Guantanamo Bay. Instead of carrying out this morally repugnant task, Commander Swift concluded that the commissions were unconstitutional. He did his duty and defended his client. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in June that the tribunals violated American law as well as the Geneva Conventions.

The Navy responded by killing his military career. About two weeks after the historic high court victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Commander Swift was told he was being denied a promotion. Under the Navy’s up-or-out system, that spelled the end of his 20-year career, and Commander Swift said last week that he will be retiring in March or April....

We call a man a hero when he falls on a grenade. Charles Swift didn't pay for his convictions with his life, but he paid for them with his career. For some people, that would come close to a major injury. He's a hero.

Note to the naive: when you're a true hero, you routinely pay a high price. If you're a theist you may expect a future reward (or not, depending on the mood of the deity), if you're not a theist then heroism is usually perverse and illogical.

Not all of the irrational behaviors of humans are despicable. Some are admirable. To the perverse, anyway.

Carter on Korea: Eat dirt

Jimmy Carter, a quiet but strong voice of reason, looks at a bad situation and tells us what the only remaining option is. Emphases mine.

Solving the Korean Stalemate, One Step at a Time - New York Times

... One option, the most likely one, is to try to force Pyongyang’s leaders to abandon their nuclear program with military threats and a further tightening of the embargoes, increasing the suffering of its already starving people. Two important facts must be faced: Kim Jong-il and his military leaders have proven themselves almost impervious to outside pressure, and both China and South Korea have shown that they are reluctant to destabilize the regime. This approach is also more likely to stimulate further nuclear weapons activity.

The other option is to make an effort to put into effect the September denuclearization agreement, which the North Koreans still maintain is feasible. The simple framework for a step-by-step agreement exists, with the United States giving a firm and direct statement of no hostile intent, and moving toward normal relations if North Korea forgoes any further nuclear weapons program and remains at peace with its neighbors. Each element would have to be confirmed by mutual actions combined with unimpeded international inspections.

Although a small nuclear test is a far cry from even a crude deliverable bomb, this second option has become even more difficult now, but it is unlikely that the North Koreans will back down unless the United States meets this basic demand. Washington’s pledge of no direct talks could be finessed through secret discussions with a trusted emissary like former Secretary of State Jim Baker, who earlier this week said, “It’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”

What must be avoided is to leave a beleaguered nuclear nation convinced that it is permanently excluded from the international community, its existence threatened, its people suffering horrible deprivation and its hard-liners in total control of military and political policy.

It's a common story, we know it well now. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc looked at a set of bad options and chose the worst of them. Now the remaining options are few and even worse.

We can't cause North Korea to collapse if China won't play along. They won't. So basically we do what North Korea wants -- direct talks. We lose face, Kim feels chipper. Too bad. We elected, then reelected, deeply and incorrigibly incompetent people. We get to eat dirt. If we don't like the taste of it, maybe we should do a better job of being citizens.

Folders, Shortcuts, Aliases, Tags, Taxonomy and Ontology: Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Google spreadsheets has become Google Docs & Spreadsheets, it now includes Writely. Some annoyances remain, some have been fixed. What caught my eye, however is that you can now 'tag' your files -- just as you can 'tag' Gmail messages.

A 'tag' is a string associated with the file. A file can have many tags, there's some UI support for tag reuse, but it's inconsistent. You can filter views by tags. Microsoft Outlook categories are the same sort of thing, though Microsoft's implementation of categories is a baroque and buggy mess. The Google UI for adding single and multiple tags, then removing them, is awkward. They'd do well to study Keyword Assistant, a free tagging plugin written by Ken Ferry. Maybe Ken could sell KA to Google for a million or so.

This is the 'new age' approach to file organization: tag metadata and full text search. No folders - or at most (as Gmail) a few fixed folders.

There's no direct "ontology" (organization), you don't put a folder called "chairs" (note the plural) inside a folder called "furniture". If you attach the tag "chair" (note the singular) to a file, then a search on "furniture" (search within folder furniture) won't find "chair". Of course you could apply the two tags, "chair" and "furniture", but clearly this gets ridiculous. Of course one could have an external ontology (furniture:chair, etc), and it could even by an acyclic directed graph with multiple inheritance (see SNOMED), but of course that's a bit futuristic. Tags, for now, are not drawn from an external ontology, they're invented.

Tags are good. I like tags. One day we'll have the option of taking tags from external machine-useable ontologies as well as free-texting them (students, compare this to free text vs. coded diagnoses on patient problem lists) -- then they'll be even more useful. There's nothing wrong with tags, and nothing wrong with full-text search [1] -- but it's dumb to ignore folders.

Folders are a handy UI tool for creating and modifying flexible real-world subsumption (containment) relationships. Folders with aliases/shortcuts allow participation in multiple hierarchies (and with cycles too!). Sure Folders have defects, but that's no reason to toss them out. iPhoto manages to do pretty well with the combination of folders and 'tags' (keywords). Google should study that too.

Interesting stuff for the industrial ontologists among us.

[1] In theory. I've used every full text search app written for XP. Even the best of them, Yahoo Desktop Search, is awful. XP, especially XP with antiviral s/w, is hostile to this class of apps. OS X Spotlight, for all of its many flaws, is far more satisfactory. In any case, full-text search works much better on rich metadata than on traditional documents, which is why it works so well in Outlook (Lookout for Outlook) and relatively poorly on the file system.

Yahoo to test kindess of our galactic neighborhood

Yahoo implements an innovative experiment to test the general kindness and attitude of any high tech civilizations in our galactic neighborhood ...

Yahoo To Beam Digital Time Capsule Into Space - News by InformationWeek

...Yahoo and Yahoo Telemundo are creating a digitized time capsule that will beam onto an ancient pyramid in Mexico and into space.

Yahoo began accepting submissions of photos, video, sounds files, video and text Tuesday and announced that it would send the content into space and project it onto the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, near Mexico City.

The company said in a prepared statement that the purpose was to join the 'past and present with the universe's potential future by sharing today's culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away.'...

We usually think our TV emissions are advertisement of our presence, but I've read those are actually pretty tough to sort out more than a few light years away. Not directional enough. A nice directional signal would get a bit further...

Perhaps fortunately, it's unlikely anything will view it.

Welcome to the new, furry, persons

This isn't great journalism. Bonobos are not the same as Chimpanzees. It is noteworthy, however, as a milestone in a journey of many centuries ...

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chimps 'are people, too'

...According to philosopher Julian Baggini, it is possible that non-human animals like chimps could be people.

'You could say that an adult chimp has more of the characteristics of a person than a new born baby,' he says.

After all, though humans and chimps are different species, they share up to 99.4% of their most crucial DNA (the figure is difficult to calculate exactly and depends on the scientist you speak to). And to prove how similar we are to chimps, Danny takes part in a potentially humiliating experiment.

The scent of male sweat is controlled by their genes, in both chimps and men. In a blind test, three women were asked to sniff the sweat of Danny and Cody the chimp, to see which one they fancied most.

When they found out afterwards that one of the odours was from a chimp, there was laughter. When they realised that two out of three had preferred the chimp, there was nervous laughter...

I dimly recall a few biologists gingerly pointing out that we should probably be Pan sapiens rather than Homo sapiens. These things take time. We are slowly separating "person" from "human". In a hundred years there will be many species of "person".

NYT Top 25 on the day Korea tested its bomb

North Korea explodes a nuke. The world ... shrugs?

Most E-Mailed New York Times Articles in the Past 24 Hours - The New York Times:

1. MAGAZINE October 8, 2006
An Elephant Crackup?
By CHARLES SIEBERT
Attacks by elephants on villages, people and other animals are on the rise. Some researchers are pointing to a specieswide trauma and the fraying of the fabric of pachyderm society...

...

11. FASHION & STYLE October 8, 2006
The Farewell Tour
By RALPH GARDNER Jr.

On the college hunt, there’s plenty of time to (gulp) talk.
...
13. INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC October 9, 2006
North Koreans Say They Tested Nuclear Device
By DAVID E. SANGER

North Korea became the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

Number 13 on the list and probably sinking already. Surely North Korea expected a bigger ... bang?

PS. This one is from Emily.

How can we kill faxing?

How can we kill faxing?

We need to kill it. The fax is a horrid thing. It's much less reliable than it was years ago, and it was never reliable.

Faxing into my Maxemail fax service is unreliable. Faxing from my home machine to Audio-Digest CME is unreliable. Junk faxes abound and are harder to filter than junk email. Fax numbers are busy. Error reporting is lousy. Faxing is just bad. The cost to the world of fax technolology must be horrendous.

It's seemingly easy to come up with a technical solution that would unify email, fax and scanning with security and authentication. Adobe was selling a lot of this technology years ago. The adoption (chicken/egg) problem is a bit tougher. The big problem, however, is patents and intellectual property. For faxing to be replaced we need an Internet Engineering Task Force specification that's unemcumbered by licensing fees and guaranteed to be safe from legal challenge forever.

That's the hard part. Adobe is not known for IP wisdom, though their DNG (digital negative) specification might be a counterexample. It would take a government, Google, or Microsoft to come up with an open specification that vendors can adopt, ideally with Adobe's cooperation. If the muscle is sufficient, Adobe would cooperate, no matter how grudgingly.

If Microsoft would kill fax this way, I'd forgive them for killing OS/2.

Maybe I can get Cringely to write about this ...

Four new Dyer essays

Dyer's spartan article page has four new entries:

2006

22 September 06 Thai Democracy
23 September 06 'Normal' Japan
29 September 06 Climate: A Stitch in Time
2 October 2006 No Genocide in Darfur

Time to catch up.

The twenty-five cent solution: How Google News can save journalism

Google News is often criticized for harvesting the fruits of journalism without compensation. I suspect this is a bit of misdirection; journalism's problem is the collapse of the print advertising and classifieds business model - not news aggregation or even bloggers. On the other hand, there might be a way for Google News to save journalism.

Google has the Google Checkout and Adwords micropayment infrastructure. They could put a button next to each Google News article. Click the button, and 25 cents, the cost of a crummy newspaper, is deducted from one's Google Checkout account. Every few months, Google issues checks to the news organizations. Maybe Google also offers some nice bennies to people who donate, like extra Gmail storage or more Picasa images -- benefits that would cost Google very little.

It's a win-win-win for readers, journalism and Google.

Why 25 cents? Why not just any amount? Because larger amounts mean that wealthy persons and wingnuts can "buy" news. A twenty-five cent donation means that the vast majority of the western world with online access can potentially donate.

Would it raise enough money to make a difference? There's only one way to find out.

Update 10/5: Emily asked for more details on how this helps Google. Here's a few ways:

1. They're being sued by a number of publishers. This might help with that.
2. It promotes Google Checkout, which is probably a very big deal for them.
3. If journalism is healthier, Google News is healthier, and so is the search business.
4. It's not evil.
   

The No-Fly List: reason enough to dispense with the GOP

This is not a new problem. I've written about it before. The FBI's No-Fly List is a "test" for security threats. It's a test with a positive predictive value of, approximately, zero. That is, the overwhelming number of alarms are false alarms. Another story:

Marginal Revolution: Another reason to give your kid a weird name:

... Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson are some of those names. Kroft talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom are detained almost every time they fly. The detentions can include strip searches and long delays in their travels.

'Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list,' says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003. She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. 'They're going to be inconvenienced every time ... because they do have the name of a person who's a known or suspected terrorist,' says Bucella...

Beyond the inconvenience and cost to the innocent, this inanity results in increased security costs and increased security risk. A burglar alarm that rings every 10 minutes means that resources are misdirected from effective to ineffective measures.

This is achingly stupid. So how does it connect with the GOP? The new GOP has a strong anti-rational, anti-intellectual, anti-science streak (See: The Republican War on Science). This is fundamental, and it means stupidities like the No-Fly List are never fixed. The No-Fly List is reason alone to remove the GOP from office.

Incidentally, the current FBI is a disaster. I'd love to see the WSJ news team do an investigative review of the FBI.

Update 10/6: Incidentally, the comments on the 60 Minutes article (follow the MR link) are well worth reading. If you're on the List, your best bet is to inform security beforehand and give them all of the material they'll need (passport, etc). I loved the comment about 'terrorists with digital cameras', I can't figure out if that's satirical or genuine. Lastly, an obvious workaround, other than replacing the GOP and FBI, is for persons on the list to be offered the option to enroll in the Fed's Traveler ID program.

Almost forgot. Look for the wingnuts to accuse 60 Minutes of treason. Sigh. The 60 Minutes article is genuine journalism; and that's a profession in crisis. I'd like to see a 'donate' button on every news page so I could contribute to journalists doing great work.