When does Amazon censor reviews?

Recently I wrote a negative Amazon review of the Motorola RAZR V3M. It's pretty but dumb.

Amazon didn't release it.

Odd. I've written hundreds of Amazon reviews, I don't recall one being rejected before. I edited my blog review a bit, and tried again.

Nothing.

Peculiar.

I went back and reviewed the other reviews of this phone. There were very few, and they were very weak. Some were negative, but they didn't say anything that might really hurt sales. My review would hurt sales.

It appears that Amazon is now censoring negative reviews of some products. Why this product? One hint might be that Amazon has a shady deal going with cell phones. If you buy on Amazon you get a significant cash discount -- but you sign up for a high margin plan. You have to keep the plan for at least six months, after which the cost of the plan equals the rebate you've received. If you don't cancel then, you pay through forever.

I've been trying out Amazon's "premium" plan (pay up front, get free 2 day shipping). I was toying with continuing it and paying for it. Amazon, after all, has been providing great value through their online reviews. Now Amazon has greatly decreased the value of those reviews for me. I trust them much less. I won't sign up for their premium plan after all.

An Amiga 2000 working for a TV network

The equivalent of using a horse and buggy to deliver cell phones:

Readers fess up to old-skool IT

... “While our local TV network has a high-speed network for editing newsrooms, video servers, resource management with lots of PCs running Windows XP and expensive software, live titling is still done using a 1989-built Commodore Amiga 2000. Bought almost 20 years ago, the beast still runs great using a Maxtor 240MB hard disk drive, with a 25MHz 68030 processor and 68882 math co-processor running Amiga DOS 3.1, and overlaying graphics to live video using a GVP G-Lock device. It has a total of 10MB of RAM. We have to go around in thrift shops hunting down Amiga 500s, Amiga 2000s for spare parts, keyboards and mice. Even a CDTV was victimised to get a Fat Agnus 8372A chip. The computer runs Scala IC500 as a titling program and it still runs great. We transfer data from the Windows boxes using 720KB formatted 3.5- inch diskettes.”..

Many of the other examples in this fun article are OS/2 machines. In addition to sheer cussidness, absolute security from bots and viruses is a winning advantage.

Hardware has improved exponentially over the past decade, though no consumer prooduct will ever again equal the tank-like construction of my original Panasonic [1] manufactured 8086 box. Software hasn't even managed a linear improvement; we had better wordprocessors 10 years ago than we have now.

[1] It's long forgotten now, but in the age when Japan was righteously crushing American car manufacturers Japanese computer manufacturers threatened to do the same to the nascent US PC market. Congress responded with aggressive protectionism, forcing Japan out of the desktop marketplace. Does Dell owe its present power to that action? [Yes, I know all PCs come from the "far east", but Dell is still considered a US company.]

Bandwidth: why the net is slow and getting slower

We don't have anywhere near the bandwidth we need to support video-on-demand (which is why Netflix and the post office still have years to go). Cringely has been delving into various solutions (Googleplex, P2P), but here he delivers a short tutorial on how ISP's work ...

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . WYSIWYB | PBS

... At the heart of this video distribution problem is the lie that ISPs tell about how much bandwidth we are really buying. While you may think your 1.5-megabit-per-second DSL service or your 3-megabit-per-second cable modem service is actually backed by 1.5 megabits or 3 megabits of Internet bandwidth, they really aren't. ISPs provision backbone access based on the expectation that people usually aren't on the Internet, and even when they are on the Internet most of their time is spent reading the screen, not actively sending or receiving packets. As such, ISPs have been able to get away with buying 20-30 KILOBITS per second of Internet backbone capacity for every MEGABIT per second of Internet service they are selling at retail. This 20-to-1 provisioning ratio of what's sold to what is promised (and believe me, 20-to-1 is me being generous to the ISPs since it is probably much higher than that) is what creates the burgeoning Internet video problem.

So if ISPs would simply provision the amount of bandwidth they are selling us there wouldn't be a problem, right?

Alas, that's not the complete story.

What would appear to be an obvious solution to this impending problem is increasing effective backbone bandwidth for every broadband user. There is no LOCAL bandwidth crisis, just an INTERNET bandwidth crisis. As I've explained over the last two weeks, Google is going to solve this for us in exchange for taking the majority of global advertising revenue. Maybe that's the answer, in which case we don't have to do anything. But if Google doesn't step in appropriately or you'd rather not rely on Google for some reason, there is the alternative of going with a different ISP.

If you want a beautiful Internet video experience, one answer might be to buy service from a broadband ISP that will allocate more backbone bandwidth per account. If you are a DSL user, you have a choice of ISPs in most markets. They all go through the local phone company, of course, but that phone company has no problem allocating the rated value of the DSL line because to the telco that last mile bandwidth is free. My DSL ISP is MegaPath and they buy a 1.5-megabit-per-second circuit from BellSouth (now AT&T I guess, but the trucks don't say that yet) and it can really carry 1.5 megabits per second 24/7, no problem. The problem is that MegaPath then makes me share a DS3 (45-megabit-per-second) connection to the Internet with every other customer of theirs in my LATA or service area, so in practice I get a LOT less than my 1.5 megabits.

One would think a national DSL ISP would have a huge business advantage if they could sell me a 1.5 megabit service and actually PROVISION a 1.5 megabit service. The wholesale cost of Internet bandwidth is right now around $15 per megabit per month. So delivering a REAL 1.5 megabits vs. the 30 kilobits I am probably getting right now will cost my ISP 75 times as much, but that's still only $22.50 vs. $0.45. So the question is whether I would pay $22.05 more than I am paying right now to be able to effortlessly watch video over the net?...

Along the way Cringely admits that ISP's do have a legitimate grievance with "net neutrality". Their business model depends on that 20:1 provisioning ratio, but some kinds of net use are truly incompatible with that sparse provisioning. For things like video they have to buy much more backbone capacity -- so they bear a lot of extra cost. Of course they ought to be able to pass that on to customers, but imagine the screams from customers who aren't getting value from the streaming video ...

Reducing poverty by leveraging globalization: SciAm

Another post rescued from my archives. This SciAm article on Globalization was published in April of 2006. I hope to add the key points to my old web page on reducing poverty.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Does Globalization Help or Hurt the World's Poor?

.... Capital controls. The flow of international investment consists both of long-term capital (such as equipment) and of speculative short-term capital (such as shares, bonds and currency). The latter, shifted at the click of a mouse, can stampede around the globe in herdlike movements, causing massive damage to fragile economies. Many economists (including those who otherwise support free trade) now see a need for some form of control over short-term capital flows, particularly if domestic financial institutions and banking standards are weak. It is widely believed that China, India and Malaysia escaped the brunt of the Asian financial crisis because of their stringent controls on capital flight. Economists still disagree, though, on what form such control should take and what effect it has on the cost of capital.

Reduced protectionism. The major hurdle many poor countries face is not too much globalization but too little. It is hard for the poor of the world to climb out of poverty when rich countries (as well as the poor ones themselves) restrict imports and subsidize their own farmers and manufacturers. The annual loss to developing countries as a group from agricultural tariffs and subsidies in rich countries is estimated to be $45 billion; their annual loss from trade barriers on textile and clothing is estimated to be $24 billion...

Trust-busting. Small exporters in poor nations often lack the marketing networks and brand names to make inroads into rich-country markets. Although transnational retail companies can help them, the margins and fees they charge are often very high. Restrictive business practices by these international middlemen are difficult to prove, but a great deal of circumstantial evidence exists. The international coffee market, for example, is dominated by four companies. In the early 1990s the coffee earnings of exporting countries were about $12 billion, and retail sales were $30 billion....

Social programs. Many economists argue that for trade to make a country better off, the government of that country may have to redistribute wealth and income to some extent, so that the winners from the policy of opening the economy share their gains with the losers. Of course, the phrase "to some extent" still leaves room for plenty of disagreement. Nevertheless, certain programs stir fairly little controversy, such as assistance programs to help workers cope with job losses and get retrained and redeployed. Scholarships allowing poor parents to send their children to school have proved to be more effective at reducing child labor than banning imports of products.

Research. The Green Revolution played a major role in reducing poverty in Asia. New international private-public partnerships could help develop other products suitable for the poor (such as medicines, vaccines and crops). Under the current international patent regime, global pharmaceutical companies do not have much incentive to do costly research on diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis that kill millions of people in poor countries every year. But research collaborations are emerging among donor agencies, the World Health Organization, groups such as Doctors Without Borders and private foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Immigration reform in rich countries. A program to permit larger numbers of unskilled workers into rich countries as "guest workers" would do more to reduce world poverty than other forms of international integration, such as trade liberalization, can. The current climate, however, is not very hospitable to this idea...

I spent a year in the development world after college, hiding out in the UN building in Bangkok (security was pretty light back then) and USAID offices in Bangladesh, so I have a tenuous connection to the world of international development. We've been more-or-less trying to move millions of people out of poverty for decades, and the results are increasingly good. We know far more than we did in 1981, and we're learning more all the time ...

Lost - all search is not equal

All search is not equal. A lost child will almost always have a significant search, but an attractive child of a wealthy, famous, and attractive family will get a better publicly funded search than a poor child. A woman will generally get a better search than a man, and a childless middle-aged man taking risks should not expect the most massive of searches.

Dr. Gray, a wealthy researcher lost at sea, is receiving a grade A publicly funded search, as well as the extraordinary private resources of an extremely wealthy community. I'm a bit jealous, but only a bit. Whatever it takes, I'll root for the miracle.

How to rescue a failed state

I came across this Economist article almost two years ago, but it was lost in my unpublished drafts. It deserves a bit of attention, so I'll resurrect it today. Emphases mine. Note the role of the UN and the Bangladeshi soldiers.

Rebuilding failed states
Mar 3rd 2005 | FREETOWN AND MONROVIA

ONE and a half years ago, Liberia was a failed state. Two separate groups of drug-emboldened teenage rebels controlled most of the country. A gangsterish president, Charles Taylor, was losing control even over Monrovia, the capital, where all sides were firing heavy artillery into office blocks and looting strategic spots such as the brewery. In August 2003 (see article), The Economist reported from that unhappy city that “famished townsfolk have already eaten their neighbours' dogs and are reduced to scrounging for snails.”

Today, thanks to the world's largest UN peacekeeping force, Liberia is calm. Some 15,000 blue helmets are keeping the streets more or less safe. There are still road blocks, but not the old sort, where militiamen stretched human intestines across the road as a signal to motorists to stop and be robbed. The UN road blocks are typically manned by disciplined Bangladeshis, of whom the locals vocally approve.

.... This article is concerned with the toughest cases: states that have lost control over most of their territory and stopped providing even the most basic services to their people. Only Somalia unambiguously fits this definition. A larger group of countries, mostly in Africa, are close to failure (see chart). Some, such as Zimbabwe, are cantering towards a cliff-edge. Others, having recently failed, appear to be recovering, if fitfully: Afghanistan, Haiti, Sierra Leone and Liberia all fall into this category.

States can fail because of external shocks, or they can decay from within, or both. Afghanistan and Angola collapsed when their colonial overlords suddenly withdrew. In Sierra Leone and Congo, the state was looted into putrescence, thus inviting rebellion and ultimately, collapse.

It is tough to mend a failed state, but the fact that some formerly failed states are now doing quite well—eg, Mozambique and East Timor—shows that it is not impossible. And although treatment is costly—the UN mission in Liberia costs $800m a year—the cost of doing nothing is often higher. When governments collapse, it is not only bad for citizens who thereby lose the law's protection. It can also cause regional or even global repercussions.

Lawlessness, it is often argued, creates space for terrorists to operate. This is sometimes true: there are almost certainly al-Qaeda operatives lurking in Somalia and the wilder parts of Pakistan. But the most-cited example, Afghanistan, does not really support this argument. Osama bin Laden used Afghanistan as a base not because it was a failed state, but because its government invited him to.

... The chief reason why the world should worry about state failure is that it is contagious. Liberia's civil war, for example, infected all three of its neighbours, thus destabilising a broad slice of West Africa. Congo's did the same for Central Africa.

... Looking only at war-torn states, Mr Collier and Anke Hoeffler, also of Oxford, found that three types of intervention were highly cost-effective, even before one considers the value of saving lives.

One good idea is to try to restrict the sales of commodities that fuel war. Extractable minerals often provide both the means to fight and an incentive to do so: rebels in Sierra Leone, for example, dug diamonds to pay for arms, and fought to seize power so they could grab all the mines...

Another worthwhile tactic is to offer generous aid to war-flattened countries, once they have stabilised a bit, so that they can rebuild their buildings and institutions. Mr Collier and Ms Hoeffler estimated that increasing aid to post-conflict countries by the equivalent of 2% of GDP per year for five years, starting half a decade after the war ended, would cost $13 billion but yield $31.5 billion in benefits.

By far the most cost-effective way of stabilising a failed state, however, is to send peacekeepers. Mr Collier and Ms Hoeffler calculated that $4.8 billion of peacekeeping yields nearly $400 billion in benefits. This figure should be treated with caution, since it is extrapolated from one successful example. In 2000, a small contingent of British troops smashed a vicious rebel army in Sierra Leone, secured the capital and rescued a UN peacekeeping mission from disaster.

Not all interventions go so well. But a study by the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, suggests that the UN, despite its well-publicised blunders, is quite good at peacekeeping. Of the eight UN-led missions it examined, seven brought sustained peace (Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mozambique, Eastern Slavonia, Sierra Leone and East Timor), while one (in Congo) did not. An earlier RAND study had looked at eight American-led missions and found that only four of the nations involved (Germany, Japan, Bosnia and Kosovo), were now at peace, while the other four (Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq) were not, or at any rate, not yet.

The comparison is not entirely fair. The Americans took on tougher targets: Iraq has more suicide-bombers than East Timor. On the other hand, the UN had punier forces and budgets at its disposal. The annual cost of all 11 UN peacekeeping operations today is less than America spends in a month in Iraq.

... The UN secretary-general's “special representative” in Liberia, a forceful American called Jacques Klein, is the most powerful man in the country. He may lack an “executive mandate”, including the power to arrest people, such as the UN had in East Timor, but his budget is roughly ten times larger than the Liberian government's. A UN embargo on Liberia's main exports (timber and diamonds) remains in force, pending proof that the money is not falling into the wrong pockets.

Mr Klein put 48 Liberian “generals” (with noms de guerre such as “General Peanut Butter” and “General Fuck-Me-Quick”) on the UN payroll, so that they would help him disarm their men (and boys and girls). The ex-fighters were offered incentives to surrender their guns: $300 and help with school fees or vocational training. About 100,000 handed in weapons or ammunition, which is encouraging...

.... But pacification is only the first step. To ensure that a recovering failed state does not fail again, it needs a government that is legitimate and competent enough not to invite another rebellion. And nation-building is the hardest task of all.

... Practically nothing works in Liberia. There is no piped water, no functioning justice system and the closest approximation to a middle class is 60,000 civil servants who have hardly been paid in 14 years. There are 450,000 prosperous and well-educated Liberians, but they live in America and show no sign of returning. Liberia is not even ranked on the UNDP's annual “human development index”, for lack of data. “We're fighting to get to the bottom of the list,” says the UN's Mr Klein.

The only large organisation that functions adequately in Liberia is the UN. Besides keeping the peace, it helps refugees return home, inoculates babies, feeds a fifth of the population and trains local teachers, policemen, judges, army officers and so forth. This is helpful, but it is hard to support such a weak government without supplanting it. Because the UN offers the best salaries in town, and actually pays them, it often ends up poaching the most able public servants...

... If the UN were suddenly to pull out, Liberia would collapse again. But it won't pull out suddenly or soon. Sierra Leone, Liberia's neighbour, which collapsed just as bloodily in the late 1990s, offers a heartening example. Three years ago, it was in roughly the same situation as Liberia is today, held together only by 17,000 blue helmets. The peacekeepers have pulled out gradually, as the Sierra Leonean army has grown stronger with British training. After the last peacekeepers leave, Sierra Leone's elected government will still be shielded by a British promise to send back its troops if rebels attack it. The country is still poor and ill-governed, but it is no longer a charnel house, so it has a chance...

I wonder these days if Iraq was truly lost when the UN's Baghdad office was destroyed, taking with it some extraordinary people ...

Messiah Cruise and the glass houses

Mofford reacts to "The Messiah Cruise" with his characteristic salaciousness:

Is Tom Cruise The Messiah? / The Church of Scientology certainly thinks so. What if they're oh-so-horrifically right?:

... What if the astonishing proclamation made by top gooberhead Scientologist (and official Friend of Tom) David Miscavige is urgent and accurate and Tom Cruise really is that happy cult's personal Jesus, a true deity who may not be recognized in this lifetime for his divine contributions but who, in the future, will be 'worshipped like Jesus' for what he has done for humankind and therefore we have all been looking at 'Jerry McGuire' and 'Days of Thunder' and 'MI:III' exactly wrong?

Can you imagine? No? Me neither. Here, try this bottle of Ambien and this forced ingestion of 3,000 powdered copies of Us Weekly and this enthusiastic partial lobotomy. There. Can you imagine now? Excellent...

It's easy to mock scientology, the peculiar mind of its founder, and its alien engrammatic infestations, but is it really much more odd than ultra-high-tech warfare in the ancient americas? Are the Nephites all that more peculiar than deities mating with human females (virgin or not)? Is supernatural parenthood all that more unusual than the idea that humans have some universal right to power over, say, slugs?

Really, it's glass houses all the way down.

Maybe in a thousand years Tom Cruise will look pretty good. Personally, I doubt it, but I am reasonably sure stranger things have happened.

Google adds machine learning into your search results - if you authenticate

Just another small step on the path to skynet …

Official Google Blog: Personally speaking

... Today, we're taking another step toward making personalization more available to you by combining these two into a single signed-in experience. Now, when you're signed in, you'll have access to a personalized Google—one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage.

Keep in mind that personalization is subtle—at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you'll see it. For example, I (Sep) am an avid Miami Dolphins fan (no joke). Searching for [dolphins] gives me info about my favorite football team, while a marine biologist colleague gets more information about her salt-water friends. ...

Search that learns what I like, a part of Google’s reputation management strategy. The more value that’s attached to my Google identity, the more likely I am to use it, the more Google knows about me, the better the ads get.

BTW, I have some curious things show up in my searches nowadays. For example, a ‘Note this’ link that lets me add any result to my Firefox/Google Notebook.

Is Bill Gates delusional?

I think Gates believed what he said in this Newsweek article.

Daring Fireball: Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates

... Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise ...

The best guess of Daring Fireball and others is that Gates was referring to the ‘month of apple bugs’. He was widly inaccurate, and it wasn’t the only whopper in his Newsweek interview.

Gates was brilliant once. If, as I suspect, he believed what he said, he’s either deluded or demented. It’s an unsettling state for a very powerful individual.

Now I believe Gates’ days at Microsoft are really over. I don’t think Balmer has far to go either. The future of the world’s computing monopoly will belong to someone else …

Dyer has seven new articles - and an improved web page

Dyer has seven new articles online:

January 4	Struggle Against 'War on Drugs'
January 9	Scotland's Unhappy 300th
January 10	Iraq: No Change of Strategy
January 15	Russia, Europe and Energy
January 18	Frangleterre
January 22	China's Satellite Killer
January 26	The Martyrdom of Hrant Dink

The good news is he's now using true html on his amateur site. The bad news is there's still no syndication feed.

Update 2/1/07: Alas, the articles are still ancient html hacks. At least one doesn't render on Firefox, probably due to a tag error. Can someone please buy Dyer a (free) blog?

DeLong on inequality

Brad DeLong, a Berkeley economist, has summarized his thinking on inequality. He distinguishes between international and national inequality, and sets his personal views aside...

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: What Kinds of Inequality Should We Worry About?

... on the level of individual societies, on the level of nations, I believe that inequality does loom as a serious political-economic problem...

... Odds are that a greater effort to raise the average level of education in America would have both made the country richer and produced a much more even distribution of income and wealth by making educated workers more abundant and less-skilled workers harder to find and thus worth more on the market.
.
.. corporate CEOs and their peers and near-peers make ten times as much today relative to the patterns of a generation ago. They do not do this because a CEO's work effort level and negotiation and management skills are in relative terms ten times as valuable to a corporation today as they were to a corporation of a generation ago. They have risen because of a reduction in the ability of other corporate stakeholders to constrain the freedom of top managers and high financiers to direct the value added in their direction.

Similar patterns are found in other countries across the globe... For the most part, it looks like these changes in economy and society have not resulted in more wealth but in an upward redistribution of wealth: a successful right-wing class war. The easiest counterfactuals to imagine are those in which greater public investments in education and greater moral, legal, and cultural constraints on the freedom of action of those at the top produce an equal or greater amount of total wealth and income with a lower degree of inequality.

This kind of inequality should be a source of concern. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, and the other hundred-millionaires of Microsoft are brilliant, hard-working, entrepreneurial, and justly wealthy. But only the first 5% of their wealth can have any justification as part of an economic reward system to enourage entrepreneurship and enterprise. And the last 95% of their wealth? It would create much more happiness and opportunity if divided evenly among the citizens of the United States or the world than if they were to consume any portion of it.

Moreover, an unequal society cannot help but be an unjust society. The very first thing that any society's wealthy try to buy with their wealth is a head start for their children. And the wealthier they are, the bigger the head start. Any society that justifies itself on a hope of equality of opportunity cannot help but be undermined by too great a degree of inequality of result.

In the United States, the problem of inequality has two dimensions: insufficient effort to educate, and insufficient control by other stakeholders' of the ability of the top 50,000 or so earners' discretion. In other countries the problem of inequality has these two but also other dimensions as well. In all it is something we should worry about, because we can see in our minds' eyes alternatives that would make for better, healthier, happier, and equally well-off societies.

I can't prove it, but I suspect that the C-suite value-redirection has a significant negative effect on corporate morale and thus productivity. Humans are hard-wired to punish cheaters, and employees see these wins as unfair.

So the CEO cut is probably contrary to the interest of shareholders as well as stakeholders ...

Thirty years from frozen to comfy -- the end of the last "ice age"

I was enjoying an excellent IOT podcast of the history of Hell (Melvyn Bragg is Anglican, so he forgot purgatory) on my morning commute when I was startled by the claim that the 'very rapid end' of the last “ice age” is a part of European folk memory. A hot Hell is a mostly medeival innovation claimed the don — older cultures write about cold Hells and warm Heavens.

Hmm. I didn’t know much about that. My ice age knowledge was more dated than I'd realized. Wikipedia brought me up to speed, (one must make allowances for some obviously polemical edits) and a bit of quick research found this 1999 article …

Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary -- Adams et al. 23 (1): 1 -- Progress in Physical Geography

... The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11 500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. ...

Wow. Decades is more on the scale of "weather" than our traditional view of "climate". I have generally tracked the mainstream scientific view of global climate change (big, possibly scary, worth trying to slow), but I think I just moved a few degrees towards the anxious end of things.

A human lifetime transition from near-ice-age (the Younger Dryas was a stutter along the path from the last major ice age to our current interglacial) to wet-and-warm would make a lasting impression. Maybe a 10,000 year impression through the stories of 200 elders. Noah’s ark takes on a new meaning now …

Molly Ivins was a Minnesotan (briefly)

Molly Ivins has died. She’s been a feature on our family news page for many years, and I’ve quoted her many a time in my blogs. Her obits talk as though she was a satirist or humorist first, but I recall her as a editorialist first and foremost. She told us what she believed and why. Her once high opinion of the wisdom of the common American had been in decline for some time, but I suspect she wanted to live to see the Dems take the senate. A great polemicist, she was also a serious journalist who exposed some of the snakepits of her home state to a national audience.

What I didn’t know was that she was briefly a Minnesotan ..

Syndicated Columnist Molly Ivins Dies | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited

... Born Mary Tyler Ivins in California, she grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University's School of Journalism. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She worked her way up at the Chronicle, then went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, becoming the city's first woman police reporter.

Ivins later became co-editor of The Texas Observer. She was the featured attraction in October at a huge Texas Observer fundraising ``barbecue,'' at which politicians, journalists and entertainers honored her.

She joined The New York Times in 1976, where she worked first as a political reporter in New York and later as the Rocky Mountain bureau chief, covering nine mountain states.

But Ivins' use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.

Ivins returned to Texas as a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald in 1982, and after it closed she spent nine years with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2001, she went independent and wrote her column for Creators Syndicate. ...

The NYT stopped regularly carrying Molly in the 1990s, but by then the web had come. I was able to read her at the Star-Telegram and Working for Change, though her national voice had clearly waned. I imagined she made too many enemies along the way, no matter what compliments they may pay her in the obits.

Molly never “got” the net. She never had a “feed”, she never had a public email address, she never leveraged the net to spread her influence. She was a person of another time. Her closest heir is probably Paul Krugman, and the legions who inhabit the electronic world where she was, ironically, best known at the end.

Trailer parks and the new suburbs: how is my world changing?

I live in the urban residential core of the “twin cities”, a relatively wealthy mid-sized north american metropolitan region. We’re colder than average, I suspect the relatively harsh climate accounts for why we’re also healthier and wealthier than average (selection pressure). The climate has probably also slowed our population growth, but we still have massive urban sprawl — among the worst in the north.

It’s an interesting spot to watch America evolve. Which brings me to trailer parks and the new suburbs.

We have a lot of trailer parks (?modular homes?) in the metro area. The more I look for them, the more I see. They’re surprisingly invisible; it’s only on a second look that an apparent wooded area resolves into a trailer park.

In the urban core they’re old, but there are many new ones on the urban perimeter. I assume they’re subsidized by speculators who want to buy large amounts of land for future use while minimizing taxes and generating a revenue stream. I’d like to know how many people live in these parks, and if they’re becoming more common. It would be interesting if urban sprawl and tax laws were shifting people from urban appartments and low income housing to peripheral trailer parks, and whether that’s a good think or a bad thing for the families involved.

On the other hand, when my children’s hockey team visited the northern home of the fierce Polars, we killed a few minutes driving around a massive suburban development just north of the National Sports Center in Blaine MN. The current sat map is misleading — that open space is all homes now. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of homes. A small town with a handful of non-gated entrances from the surrounding ring roads. Town homes, separated homes, bigger homes, fancy homes, large homes on a golf course — homes for the middle class and the upper middle class about a one hour commute north of the metro center. It looks like a factory town from the outside, but it’s not quite so bad in the middle of it.

Of course it’s not built for my family — to me it feels claustrophobic and eerily robotic, something straight out of the Truman Show with its planned migration from the middle to the upper class. There’s no poverty and no retail; a few modest parks, but no grand parks. It’s almost, but not quite, treeless. There are sidewalks on at least one side of each street, but no interesting lanes or bicycle paths or walking paths — the space is used efficiently. In a hundred years it will either be gone, quaint, or a slum. I don’t know which.

There’s a large trailer park about a mile from this massive suburban development.

Trailer parks and Disney World inspired urban suburban settlements. The world moves on in novel and unpredictable ways.

Update 1/12/09: Flash forward.

Credit card scammers: the story continues

In late 1998 I was one of thousands defrauded in the $40 million Netfill credit card scam. I wrote up a web page, helped track down the baddies, was even on Japanese TV. My fame was very minimal and very fleeting, but the problem didn't go away. A system that was designed for person-present brick-and-mortar transactions has deep flaws on the web, but, absent legislation, banks have very good business reasons not to fix things.

Reading this Wired News story brings back old memories ...

Wired News: I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI

.... The full scope of the problem is hard to judge, but nonetheless staggering. U.S. banks lost $546 million to debit card fraud in 2004, according to banking research firm Dove Consulting, and credit card fraud losses were estimated to be about $3.8 billion globally in 2003 according to The Nilson Report. The Federal Trade Commission estimates that 10 million Americans are victims of identity theft each year. The financial impact of identity theft remains untold."

That's a lot of losses, and I bet less than half of the losses are ever detected, so total unrecovered losses to consumers are probably about equal to this number. In addition, outside of North America, banks are notoriously bad at covering losses, so any number based on bank losses is really an underestimate. Speaking of unresponsive financial services ...

The Schwab [brokerage] case illustrates a running theme in Thomas' dealings with the FBI. Although Thomas says he provided his handlers at the Seattle FBI with logs depicting desertmack's scheme, the bureau apparently never acted on that information -- the Oregon FBI only learned of the theft because Campbell, the victim, reported it himself after it occurred. "If we had left it up to Schwab, they might never have gotten the FBI involved at all," Campbell says...

Schwab, too, was less than responsive. Campbell got his money back from the company only after several calls to the firm pointing out the obvious security flaws in a system that failed to flag a wire request made on an account a day after contact information on the account was changed. "Schwab was pretty bad with customer service," Campbell says. "For a long time they wouldn't tell me they were going to take responsibility for it and return (the money)." (Schwab had no comment).