Microsoft morphs into General Motors: my OneCare account termination story

In the early 1990s I couldn't understand why an acquaintance was delighted by Microsoft's ascendancy over IBM. IBM had been floundering for so long they seemed pathetically charming, whereas Microsoft was Darth Vader and Sauron united -- a blight on the world of personal computing and a ruthless destroyer of every better option.

That was then. Now I still fear Microsoft will resurrect itself, but Gen Y thinks of them as harmless incompetents. My latest experience is pushing me closer to the Gen Y camp. Here's what happened when I tried to kill my Windows Live OneCare account (866-663-2273, but listen for the option number, they permute it ..):

Gordon's Tech: Microsoft OneCare dies: XP hangs by a thread

.... Update 4/21/07: It's one thing to uninstall OneCare, another to kill the OneCare account. The account auto-renews forever. You can't change this online, you have to phone Microsoft to cancel. I tried this tonight. The phone rang a bit, then came a voice .. "Microsoft is closed". Click...

Update 4/22/07: OneCare support has the world's most obnoxious hold music. They alternative up-tempo elevator music with two repetitive sales pitches spoken in a cheerfully grating tone. I got to listen to a lot of that today. After a half-hour I went to lunch, when I returned the line had gone dead. So the wait time was probably 40 minutes. I'll try again tomorrow. ...

Update 4/24/07: Waited 30 minutes on hold. Called back and pushed 9,9,9. Got a support-referral person. They suggested I try option 2 for tech support. Got someone there. They said hours for the account services are 5am-10pm M-F PST and 5am-5pm PST Sat/Sun. They also suggested calling Microsoft's Money-Back-Guarantee line at 888-673-8624. They put through to another tech support number. They said I can't stop the account renewal process without support giving me an "ASIS" number. They transferred me to fee-based technical support where I listened to hold music. Then I gave up...

Update 4/25/07: I ignore the "get an ASIS number first" advice and and call the billing number again at 8:45am PT. Got through immediately -- but that was a false alarm. I'd hit option 3 twice, and errant key presses bring up a human router. She laughs maniacally when I mention OneCare and sends me back to the accounts line. I decide to wait 10 minutes. After seven minutes of the insanely irritating hold music and repetitive marketing patter I decide Microsoft owes me a copy of Macintosh Office 2007 and I contemplate piratical acts. At minute eight the phone picks up. I'm asked why I want to dump OneCare. "Because it has caused far more damage to my system than any virus I'm likely to see". There are no further questions, and to my disgruntled surprise I get a prorated credit of $32. End of story, except, of course, for a post to Gordon's Notes.

Once upon a time General Motors bestrode the American economy, an unassailable behemoth. It took them decades to fall, but by the 1960s they'd been rotted by easy money. Toyota entered.

Microsoft went from nothing to the greatest corporation in world history in about 15 years. If the trend continues they'll collapse even faster, though their massive cash flows will keep them standing no matter how bad they smell.

Gen Y, I gather, fears Google ...

Update 7/8/07: I've since been thinking of Microsoft as a monstrous brain-eating zombie, though both Photosynth and Windows Live Writer suggest the Zombie can still keep some brains on the shelf. It's my wife, however, who pointed out that American under Bush has followed the same progression as Microsoft and General Motors. Very powerful, very dangerous, but no longer meaningful -- simply a big slowly dying Zombie.

Also, I posted an aside about "Microsoft on crack" in August of 2006, I think that was after the Windows Live Cam debacle.

Life in Guantanamo

Backwards City: Guantanamo links to two Guardian articles from a book by a British lawyer about his experiences in the camp. It's ugly and weird. Only Bush's America could produce a cross between a concentration camp and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

The Tralfamadorians and the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics

I tried, and I wasn't able to find a genuine Google hit on the search Tralfamadorians quantum mechanics transactional interpretation [1]. Shame, since Vonnegut seemed to have this theory in mind ...

Kurt Vonnegut | Obituary - Economist.com

... “Slaughterhouse-Five”, published in 1969 against the backdrop of racial unrest and the Vietnam war, propelled him from science-fiction writer (a label he abhorred) to literary icon. The novel caught the brooding, anti-establishment mood of the times and became an instant bestseller. Its signature hook, “So it goes”, which followed every death, was adopted as a mantra by opponents of the war.

The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is kidnapped by small green aliens called Tralfamadorians, who teach him the true nature of time: that all moments in the past, present and future exist always, and that death is just an unpleasant moment, neither an end nor a beginning. When Billy is shot bringing this message to the world, he does not mind. He knew he would die like this; he has seen it all before. “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello” are his last words...

The Tralfamadorian position, I've read, is taken seriously (or at least semi-seriously) by some physicists. Many would say the 'transactional interpretation' of QM is consistent with a severely predestined universe, so that indeed all moments would aways exist, from start to end, and never be changeable in the slightest [2]. I imagine a vast celestial record player that could move back and forth, playing music backwards and forwards ...

Anyway, it's been a long time since I read Slaughterhouse-five, and now that I'm ancient it's probably time to take a break from Quantum Mechanics and reread it ...

[1] One interesting hit, however, led to me subscribe to Backwards City ...
[2] Gribbin 1994: "At first sight, it might seem as if everything is fixed by these communications between the past and the future.... we are back with the image of a frozen universe ... in which neither time nor space has any meaning, and everything that ever was, or ever will be, just is.". Gribbin tries to wriggle out of this interpretation - unconvincingly.

Update: 15 things Vonnegut said well

Update 5/13/07: found a quote to affirm my recollection of the pre-deterministic aspects of the transactional interpretation.

Update 5/21/07: I continue to return to the theme of fate, though I don't want to belabor it with repeated posts. I'll sneak in some updates instead ...

• Newtonian physics implied that if one knew the position and velocity of every particle in existence, then one would know all events. Oddly enough, I think I first read of this in a 1930s era science fiction novel. I assume this was a discussion topic for philosophers during the long span of Newtonian physics.
  
  
• OneThe standard interpretation time slicing inherent in general special relativity is that there exists for each event a perspective from which the event is occurring in the past. Simple induction would then say all events are thus rigidly pre-determined. Of course we know special relativity is incomplete, so perhaps this is of academic interest. [jf 6/11/07: I wrote "general relativity" originally, but the meme comes from special relativity. For all I know general relativity lessens this rigidity. Einstein, at one point in his life, apparently firmly believed that all events, from the beginning to the end of time, were absolutely fixed, which gives a different spin to his famous comments about God and dice. To Einstein not only did God not play dice with the universe, the universe didn't "play" at all -- it simply was. Given the time that Vonnegut was writing, he was probably presenting a version of predestination derived from special relativity.]
  
  
• The predetermination qualities of the transactional interpretation of QM arise from the future-past interactions (rather similar to time slicing in general relativity), but one could interpret non-locality (correlation of non-connected states) as arising not from "action at a distance" but merely as a side-effect of predetermination.

Update 6/11/07: There are now about a dozen hits on the this search string, but all but two (Brad DeLong and this original) appear to be from splogs (spam blogs) echoing Brad. This, of course, brings to mind the facetious "theory of 600". My interpretation of this recent net meme is that that there are really only 600 people in the world, and that the other 6.6 billion alleged individuals are reflections, echoes, and aspects. This bit of self-satire seems have some truth in the world of blogs -- for each true blog there are at least a dozen false echoes. (Sometime in the past six months I read an excellent science fiction short story that may have been the basis for this meme, but I can't recall the author. I need one of those "life record" things we're being promised.)

Of course, if splogs echo Brad rather than, say, David Broder, does that make them not entirely evil?

On the matter of pre-determination, the most obvious objection is how does a story that we perceive as approximately "internally consistent" manage to spontaneously manifest itself all at once? This pushes the anthropic principle to an extreme of extremes (in infinite time an infinite number of chance assemblies produce one that seems to be self-consistent). If one doesn't buy the "universe as a tv show" vision then one also rejects both special relativity and the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. Special relativity is known to be an incomplete approximation, so that's not too hard to reject. Transactional QM seems to be recently falling to the "decoherence" model in which reality is constructed and deconstructed dynamically*, so we may be back to a universe that's not pre-determined, but at the price of being in a universe in which reality itself is emergent, ephemeral and perhaps mutable*.

* For the benefit of those who don't read my stuff routinely, I'm not a physicist and I don't even personally know any theoretical physicists. I'm merely channeling the more respectable books written about the philosophical interpretations of modern physics.

Update 7/24/07: Newsweek makes the same connection. Do you suppose they got it from here ...?

Asthma rise and the hygiene hypothesis: evidence from Helicobacter

A bit more support for the hygiene hypothesis...

Resistance: Bacterium Linked to Ulcers May Lower Risk of Asthma - New York Times:

...According to the article, which appears in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, H. pylori acquisition in industrialized countries has been diminishing with each succeeding generation for at least the past 60 years.

“Helicobacter was once ubiquitous,” said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, a co-author of the article and the chairman of the department of medicine at New York University. “We provide evidence that there is a relationship between the decrease in helicobacter prevalence and the increase in childhood asthma.”

The researchers noted that their observations were consistent with the “hygiene hypothesis,” which suggests that childhood infections, particularly infections of the gut, help diminish or prevent allergies and asthma.

Asthma, peanut allergies, atopic eczema ... there's a lot of that around. Getting a dog might help. That reminds me, whatever happened to studies suggesting intestinal worm infections help prevent and even treat ulcerative colitis?

Calvinist theology: from Garrison Keillor

Much has been made of Bush's neo-Calvinism, but this summary of Calvinist doctrine is new to me...

The chosen president | Garrison Keilor

...Calvinism, as all of you Calvinists know, is based on five points of doctrine, which spell out the word 'TULIP' -- total depravity (everybody is sinful), unconditional election (God chooses who'll be saved, it's not up to you), limited atonement (Jesus didn't die for everybody, just for the chosen), irresistible grace (if God chooses you, you're saved, you can't resist) and perseverance of the saints (once saved, always saved, no matter what you do).

I didn't know about the L and the P. What a merciless, cruel faith. That's a God to fear ...

Myelin disorders underlie schizophrenia?

White Matter Matters in Schizophrenia: Scientific American

Scientists have suspected for more than two decades that schizophrenia is linked to defects in the brain's white matter. They could not tell, however, whether changes in the information-transmitting region of the brain detected by brain scans or autopsies were the cause or the symptoms of the illness.

A new study not only clarifies the association but also links it to genes previously tied to the debilitating mental disorder and chemical changes believed to occur in the schizophrenic brain. "[The report] provides evidence that alterations in myelin [the lipid layers that sheath and insulate nerve fibers and are the main constituent of white matter] can cause defects in neurons and the central nervous system in general that are related to neuropsychiatric disease," says the study's senior author Gabriel Corfas, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School's Children's Hospital Boston.

Corfas's team studied mice in which they blocked the erbB4 receptor, in oligodendrocytes, which make up the myelin sheath over a neuron's communication hub. The erbB4 receptors receive a growth factor called neuregulin 1, which is necessary for proper brain development. Genes expressed in oligodendrocytes—such as the one that codes for neuregulin 1—have previously been linked to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder....

...Corfas says that the new findings indicate that screening children with noticeable cognitive and social defects for increased white matter or changes in its organization could lead to earlier diagnosis of schizophrenia. In addition, he says the results indicate that therapies designed to treat other white matter disorders such as multiple sclerosis could be useful in treating schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

Since there are animal models for schizophrenia I'm sure the researchers have already tested drugs developed to enhance myelin production and preservation. Those papers should be out shortly ...

Now aiming SETI dishes at Gliese 581

How do you pronounce Gliese anyway? We need a better name than Gliese 581 for this large rocky planet in a "temperate" orbit around a smaller, colder, Sun:

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | New 'super-Earth' found in space

... The Gliese 581 super-Earth is in what scientists call the 'Goldilocks Zone' where temperatures 'are just right' for life to have a chance to exist.

Commenting on the discovery, Alison Boyle, the curator of astronomy at London's Science Museum, said: 'Of all the planets we've found around other stars, this is the one that looks as though it might have the right ingredients for life.

'It's 20 light-years away and so we won't be going there anytime soon, but with new kinds of propulsion technology that could change in the future. And obviously we'll be training some powerful telescopes on it to see what we can see,' ...

Twenty light years? Might as well be next door. I trust the radio dishes will try to sneak a listen. It's unlikely that we'll pick up any television, but it never hurts to listen :-).

I wonder how old the sun of Gliese 581 is.... I'll pronounce it Gleesee for now ...

Update: Much more information here ... I thought I was being facetious about the SETI dish. Emphases mine. Note the star is Gliese 581, the planet, for now, is Gliese 581c.

... The star at the centre - Gliese 581 - is small and dim, only about a third the size of our Sun and about 50 times cooler.

The two other planets are huge, Neptune-sized worlds called Gliese 581b and d (there is no "a", to avoid confusion with the star itself).

The Earth-like planet orbits its sun at a distance of only six million miles or so (our Sun is 93 million miles away), traveling so fast that its "year" only lasts 13 of our days...

... Just because Gliese 581c is habitable does not mean that it is inhabited, but we do know its sun is an ancient star - in fact, it is one of the oldest stars in the galaxy, and extremely stable. If there is life, it has had many billions of years to evolve.

This makes this planet a prime target in the search for life. According to Seth Shostak, of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California, the Gliese system is now a prime target for a radio search. 'We had actually looked at this system before but only for a few minutes. We heard nothing, but now we must look again.'

By 2020 at least one space telescope should be in orbit, with the capability of detecting signs of life on planets orbiting nearby stars. If oxygen or methane (tell-tale biological gases) are found in Gliese 581c's atmosphere, this would be good circumstantial evidence for life.

... The real importance is not so much the discovery of this planet itself, but the fact that it shows that Earth-like planets are probably extremely common in the Universe.

There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone and many astronomers believe most of these stars have planets.

The fact that almost as soon as we have built a telescope capable of detecting small, earth-like worlds, one turns up right on our cosmic doorstep, shows that statistically, there are probably billions of earths out there.

... Interestingly, Gliese 581c is so close to the Earth that if its putative inhabitants only had our level of technology, they could - just about - pick up some of our radio signals, such as the most powerful military transmitters. Quite what would happen if we for our part did receive a signal is unclear...

This type of discovery further reduces the degrees of freedom in the Drake Equation, pushing the resolution of the Fermi Paradox further towards the "go no more a roaming" answer.

The SETI home page has an article on M Class suns, which I think includes Gliese 581.

...M-Stars, are of interest simply because there are so many of them—they are the most common star in the galaxy. They’re the cool stars that inhabit our neighborhood...

... There’s considerable interest in the question of whether M-Stars could host habitable planets. Would the planets be tidally locked with one face always directed toward the M-Star? Would flares wipe out life on the local planet? If M-Stars could host habitable planets, life may be much more widespread that we’ve previously thought...

...Dr. Peter Backus, Observing Programs Manager for SETI, concluded in a preliminary report on the M-Stars workshop, “One…aspect of M dwarfs makes them intriguing for SETI: they may be ideal hosts for advanced technological civilizations because they live an extraordinarily long time. Stars like the Sun live (i.e., they fuse hydrogen into helium) for only about 10 billion years. No M dwarf that ever formed has yet to die; no M dwarf will die for more than another 100 billion years. With such long lifetimes, there are big possibilities for these small stars.”

Update: Much more here, in a blog dedicated to this topic.

Index funds: whether you're a behaviorist or an efficent marketeer

I used to wonder if index funds would still work if everyone signed up for them. Presumably not, but there seems little risk of that.

But do index funds work if behaviorists are right and the markets are not rational? DeLong summarizes a very readable Justin Fox discussion of the topic. Supposedly index funds still work. Now about those Hedge Funds?

Masters of the Virtual World: Billion dollar hedge fund managers and the equity price premium

MR reviews the news on hedge fund manager earnings:

Marginal Revolution: Jordan fact of the day:

..."The combined earnings of the world's top 25 hedge fund managers of more than $14bn ... exceeded the national income of Jordan last year and three individuals took home more than $1bn, according to the biggest annual industry survey...

... What we see are the fearless super-rich having the resources and the liquidity to bid away the equity price premium, plus grab extra profits on the side...

MR has some important links, including to a NYT article Emphases mine:

... The earnings of these masters of the new universe — Mr. Simons took $1.7 billion — dwarfs the $54.3 million that Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd C. Blankfein earned last year, a sum that itself sparked controversy among industry watchers, including DealBook readers.

Some view these handsomely rewarded managers as this generation’s robber barons, using wealth to create wealth, often in secretive ways, and leaving little that is tangible in their wake.

“There is some question as to what the hell they are doing that is worth” that kind of money, J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times. “The answer is damned mysterious.”

Others look upon them as new-economy financiers, evoking the likes of John D. Rockefeller or John Pierpont Morgan as they provide liquidity to the markets and broadly diversify risks in the banking and financial systems.

“You had railroads in the 19th century, which led to the opening up of the steel industry and huge fortunes being made,” Stephen Brown, a professor at the Stern School of Business of New York University, told the Times. “Now we’re seeing changes in financial technology leading to new fortunes being made and new dynasties created.”

... Combined, the top 25 hedge fund managers last year earned $14 billion — enough to pay New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years, the Times said....

... Mr. Simons, for example, has some of the highest fees in the business — 5 percent of assets under management and 44 percent of profits. But the Times notes that he trounces most of his competitors year after year: In 2006, the $6 billion Medallion fund posted gross returns of 84 percent; 44 percent after fees, explaining his $1.7 billion take.

“If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys,” said Jim Dunn, a managing director with Wilshire Associates, an investment advisory firm. “We don’t concern ourselves with fees. If you can provide Alpha, I’m less concerned about what you bring home.” (Alpha is producing returns that are not tied to a market benchmark like the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.)

Lord, words like "we don't concerns ourselves with costs" sound very bubbly to me. My knowledge-free bet, based solely on observing how humans work, is that MR is right that the "equity premium" (the reason that stock markets have historically been a better investment than loaning money directly) is overly large in Economy 3.0, and Simons and his kin are winning the prize for sucking it down. Once it's down, however, it has nowhere to go, and the money will run dry. Also based on how humans work, I bet the "legitimate" efficiency work was finished over a year ago, and the prizes now are financial bubbles flowing into the pockets of the luck-favored prepared mind. Naturally the winners, Masters of the (virtual) Universe, assume they are deities and the prize reflects their superhuman worth. Tears are likely to lie ahead ...

Billions. Sloshing around. Wouldn't you like to be there to catch the spills?

In the meantime, if one assumes the risk premium has been over-deflated, it is likely that investors in today's market are being under-rewarded for the risks they are bearing. Which means, given the recent rise in the market, that the risk is rather substantial.

The virtual fuses with the physical: Google Blueprint

The AIA is the professional organization of American architects:

Official Google Blog: New 3-D layers from AIA on Google Earth

... fly to America’s Favorite Architecture, a layer featuring the American public’s favorite architecture (as selected though a national poll announced earlier this year). View all 150 structures, including many with just created 3-D models of the buildings, ballparks, bridges, and memorials that characterize architecture in the eyes of Americans. And then explore the second layer, Blueprint for America. Blueprint is a community service effort funded by the AIA, in which AIA members donating their time and expertise are collaborating with community leaders and local citizens to enhance the quality of life in their community. You’ll be able to track the progress of these projects on Google Earth as they unfold over the next year and, we hope, become inspired to take action where you live.

As an exercise, contemplate a similar virtual/physical interaction with public health. What other examples of how the physical and the virtual may meet, particularly when organizational entities (themselves virtual and physical) are involved?

And so the world quietly, and invisibly, morphs into something quite different from the world my parents have known.

We'll prevent Alzheimer's before we prevent obesity: lessons of The Pill

There are, I heard on NPR, about 9 promising Alzheimer's prevention therapies in trial [1]. It's likely that, sometime in the next decade, one of them will be a mega-blockbuster -- the biggest change in medical care since the discovery of insulin.

On the other hand, I doubt we'll see a great obesity prevention therapy, despite the billions pharmas are investing into obesity research.

Why is one relatively easy, and the other so hard? Why is it so hard to come up with a safe and effective male contraceptive, but so easy to render women infertile? The Pill (oral contraceptive pill, aka OCP), after all, made its debut over 40 years ago.

The trick is whether one is fighting nature, or not. Women in pre-industrial societies are naturally infertile for most their reproductive years. They're either pregnant, lactating, or cyclically infertile. These are natural states, OCPs need only send "pregnant-lactating" signals and the body does the rest. On the other hand there is no natural state of male infertility. When you try to render a male infertile, you are fighting hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

Obesity is what happens when a biological system engineered to manage scarcity runs into an environment of abundance. The system crashes. Humans did not evolve to have access to so many calories all the time, like all animals we're engineered to use energy as efficiently as possible. Changing that means defeating evolution.

Cancer appears to be a process that natural selection has carefully tuned to balance biological repair mechanisms. It's darned hard to fight cancer.

Alzheimer's though, is a universal lifelong proces that disables the aged post-fertile human. It does not appear to have any significant evolutionary advantage, it is probably the end-result of a garbage collection process that works well within its operational "design" parameters. To delay the Alzheimer's process doesn't require defeating natural selection, so it's a much easier task that defeating obesity.

So I'm betting on an Alzheimer's preventive therapy long before a really good obesity preventive therapy.

[1] Note prevention and cure are different. There's not much prospect yet for curing Alzheimer's, though one might hope a good preventive therapy might allow natural reparative functions to operate better.

American food for people and pets: an industry insider speaks out

The author of this WaPo article was "president of NutraSweet Kelco Co. from 1994 to 1997. He is a management consultant to many large food ingredient companies." In other words, an insider with both biases and credibility. Emphases mine:

Peter Kovacs - It's Not Just Pet Food - washingtonpost.com

Lost amid the anxiety surrounding the tainted U.S. pet food supply is this sobering reality: It's not just pet owners who should be worried. The uncontrolled distribution of low-quality imported food ingredients, mainly from China, poses a grave threat to public health worldwide.

Essential ingredients, such as vitamins used in many packaged foods, arrive at U.S. ports from China and, as recent news reports have underscored, are shipped without inspection to food and beverage distributors and manufacturers. Although they are used in relatively small quantities, these ingredients carry enormous risks for American consumers. One pound of tainted wheat gluten could, if undetected, contaminate as much as a thousand pounds of food.

Unlike imported beef, which is inspected at the point of processing by the U.S. Agriculture Department, few practical safeguards have been established to ensure the quality of food ingredients from China.

Often, U.S. officials don't know where or how such ingredients were produced. We know, however, that alarms have been raised about hygiene and labor standards at many Chinese manufacturing facilities. In China, municipal water used in the manufacturing process is often contaminated with heavy metals, pesticides and other chemicals. Food ingredient production is particularly susceptible to environmental contamination.

Equally worrisome, U.S. officials often lack the capability to trace foreign-produced food ingredients to their source of manufacture. In theory, the Bioterrorism Prevention Act of 2001 provides some measure of traceability. In practice, the act is ineffective and was not designed for this challenge. Its enforcement is also shrouded in secrecy by the Department of Homeland Security.

Even if Food and Drug Administration regulators wanted to crack down on products emanating from the riskiest foreign facilities, they couldn't, because they have no way of knowing which ingredients come from which plant. This is why officials have spent weeks searching for the original Chinese source of the contaminated wheat gluten that triggered the pet food crisis.

That it was pet food that got tainted -- and that relatively few pets were harmed -- is pure happenstance. Earlier this spring, Europe narrowly averted disaster when a batch of vitamin A from China was found to be contaminated with Enterobacter sakazakii, which has been proved to cause infant deaths. Thankfully, the defective vitamin A had not yet been incorporated into infant formula. Next time we may not be so fortunate.

Currently, most of the world's vitamins are manufactured in China. Unable to compete, the last U.S. plant making vitamin C closed a year ago. One of Europe's largest citric acid plants shut last winter, and only one vitamin C manufacturer operates in the West. Given China's cheap labor, artificially low prices and the unfair competitive climate it has foisted on the industry, few Western producers of food ingredients can survive much longer.

Western companies have had to invest heavily in Chinese facilities. These Western-owned plants follow strict standards and are generally better managed than their locally owned counterparts. Nevertheless, 80 percent of the world's vitamin C is now manufactured in China -- much of it unregulated and some of it of questionable quality.

Europe is ahead of the United States in seeking greater accountability and traceability in food safety and importation. But even the European Union's "rapid alert system" is imperfect. Additional action is required if the continent is to avoid catastrophes.

To protect consumers here, we must revise our regulatory approaches. The first option is to institute regulations, based on the European model, to ensure that all food ingredients are thoroughly traceable. We should impose strict liability on manufacturers that fail to enforce traceability standards.

A draconian alternative is to mount a program modeled on USDA beef inspection for all food ingredients coming into the country. This regimen would require a significant commitment of resources and intensive training for hundreds of inspectors.

Food safety is a bipartisan issue: Congress and the administration must work together and move aggressively to devise stricter standards. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, has deplored dangerous levels of lead in vitamin products originating in China. We must get to the bottom of this pressing public health issue, without self-defeating finger-pointing.

The United States is sitting on powder keg with uncontrolled importation and the distribution of low-quality food ingredients. Before it explodes -- putting more animals and people at risk -- corrective steps must be taken.

Regulatory standards are a very tempting way to create de facto "protection" for selected industries. The protectionist impulse can do great economic damage, and the profits associated with such de facto tariffs are a rich source of political corruption in America. Alas, there may be no alternative. We don't have a proven market solution to this kind of risk, and our present failure makes action unavoidable. We will need new regulations for human food.

As for pet food - as I wrote earlier - there's a simple quasi-Libertarian solution. Pet food manufacturers should formulate a product for human consumption derived from the same sources as the animal product. This premium product would therefore fall under FDA regulation. The CEO and board would eat at their regular meetings, and major suppliers would be also be sent snacks. Selected pet owners who are also ambitious lawyers would add it a few snacks to their diet every few months. If a problem were then discovered, the legal onslaught would be brutal, effective, and highly profitable for the lawyers involved. Food that carried the "We eat our own dog food" slogan would sell for a premium price of course. A major US accounting firm would be engaged to manage the certification process, and to ensure that the CEO was dining properly.

Nasty, brutal, short - the life of most humans

I recently wrote of 19th century American aspirations for a 50 year lifespan. John Hawks describes other settings when life expectancy was about 35 ...

John Hawks Anthropology Weblog : 2007 03

Kim Hill and colleagues (2007) report in the current Journal of Human Evolution on the mortality profile of recent Hiwi hunter-gatherers. Here is their abstract:

"To our knowledge, interview-based life tables for recent hunter-gatherers are published for only four societies (Ache, Agta, Hadza, and Ju/'hoansi). Here, we present mortality data for a fifth group, the Hiwi hunter-gatherers of Venezuela. The results show comparatively high death rates among the Hiwi and highlight differences in mortality rates among hunter-gatherer societies. The high levels of conspecific violence and adult mortality in the Hiwi may better represent Paleolithic human demographics than do the lower, disease-based death rates reported in the most frequently cited forager studies."

...Among pre-1960 Hiwi males, 57 percent could expect to survive to age 15, and 43 percent to age 30, with an average young adult mortality rate of around 2 percent annually. So it is not anything like as high as has been suggested for Neandertals and earlier humans (with annual mortality rates as high as 6 percent).

The most interesting aspects of the paper are the comparisons between the Hiwi and other ethnographically-known hunter-gatherers. Many of the differences in mortality profiles are attributable to strong cultural differences:

"Cause of death among the groups differs considerably. Disease is an important cause of death in all groups, but represents only 20% of deaths in the precontact Ache, 45% among the precontact Hiwi, and about 75-85% of all Hadza, !Kung, and Agta deaths. Respiratory disease is the main killer of the Ache, whereas gastrointestinal pathogens are most important among the Hiwi and probably Hadza. Among the !Kung, respiratory and gut infections are about equally important. Violence is the major cause of death among the precontact Ache (55% of all deaths) and very important among the Hiwi (30% of all deaths), but notably less important in the two African societies and the Agta (3-7% of all deaths). Indeed, the crude homicide/warfare death rates per year lived are more than ten times higher among the Hiwi and Ache than among the Hadza or !Kung (1/100 and 1/200 per year for precontact Hiwi and Ache, respectively, vs. 1/2500 and 1/3000 for the Hadza and !Kung, respectively)..."

"If high mortality, warfare, homicide, and accidental trauma are typical of our Paleolithic ancestors, the Hiwi mortality patterns may be more representative of the past than those derived from other modern hunter-gatherers. If so, several observations about the Hiwi are important. First, conspecific violence was a prominent part of the demographic profile, accounting for many deaths in all age and sex categories. Most of the adult killings were due to either competition over women, reprisals by jealous husbands (on both their wives and their wives' lovers), or reprisals for past killings. The criollo-caused killings were motivated by territorial conquest. Moreover, infanticide (especially on females) constituted the highest mortality rate component of all Hiwi conspecific violence. Second, no predation deaths were reported despite attacks by anacondas, Orinoco caimans, and piranhas, and the presence of jaguars in the area. Accidents associated with the active-forager lifestyle were common, but disease was a more important killer, accounting for nearly half of all deaths. This suggests an adaptive landscape in which success in social relations, competitive violence, and disease resistance are paramount. This may partially explain why many of the genes that appear to have been under strong selection in the past 50,000 years affect either disease resistance or cognitive function (Wang et al., 2006), presumably related to success in an atmosphere of frequent violent social competition (Hill et al. 2007:451)."

These communities vary greatly in their level of violence. The most violent of them sound comparable to chimpanzees. The big surprise is how dominant these pre-technological human predators are. They died of disease or from conspecific violence or from accidents, not from other predators.

Nutro products: how NOT to do a pet food recall

Our dog's primary foods were not involved in the melanine recall (so far), but the company that makes some snacks we use had recalled gluten products. So one might think Nutro Products would be very careful about their statements on the rice recall.

Alas, their rice recall page simply says their rice containing products aren't derived from the known contaminated sources. As always, the unsaid words are important. They don't tell us that the products do not contain Chinese manufactured rice protein.

So we should assume they Nutro Food snacks do contain Chinese manufactured rice protein, we should assume that source is unreliable until proven reliable, and we should assume Nutro Products is being a bit dishonest about the risks of their foods. I've tossed this company's products, and we'll avoid them in the future.

I wonder if anyone will keep a global list ranking the quality of vendor responses to the melanine affair. It would be a handy reference to guide future buying decisions. If you know of such a list, send a note to jfaughnan@spamcop.net and I'll link to it.

Calendar curses: remembering Palm

I'm working on our family's week schedule, and again I weakly curse the state of 21st century calendaring. I have a work calendar on Outlook, a personal calendar on my Palm, and a variety of paper based family calendars. It's a mess and there's no solution on the market.

Which brings back a memory of a product that was briefly on the market, but which I can't locate on Google.

Back in the 90s, before they decapitated themselves and were simultaneously disemboweled by Microsoft, Palm was very focused on solving this type of problem. They introduced, or almost introduced, a home device that basically a "Palm server". It would hold the family calendar, and every family member would sync to it. I think it was supposed to be a "thin client" for email and kitchen web browsing as well.

Am I imagining this product, or did it ever come to market? It was near the end-time for Palm as a meaningful platform.

For now, I merely await the iPhone. I'm not overly optimistic, Apple's .Mac screw-up strongly suggests they've decided this problem is too hard to tackle.