A fraud victim's false victory and the high tech industry that supports identity theft

SFGate, a San Francisco news site, puts on optimistic spin on the chance capture of a woman who did very well as an identify thief. Alas, the reality is not at all encouraging (emphases mine)...

How victim snared ID thief / She chased down woman who had given her 6 months of hell

... Nelson took off again. In front of West Coast Growers, she dropped a wallet into an abandoned shopping cart. Lodrick, still after her, picked up the wallet -- also Prada -- and found an entire set of identification, including credit cards, a Social Security card and a debit card all in the name of Karen Lodrick. Later, when she returned to the bank that had been her original destination that morning and took possession of the lost driver's license, it was a perfect forgery -- with a hologram and a California seal -- and it had Lodrick's name but Nelson's photo and physical characteristics.

"You can buy the technology (to add marks and holograms) on your computer from companies that have legitimate government contracts and then make a lot of money selling the technology to people they must know are not legitimate," Fairbairn said. "Millions and millions of dollars." The black market, he said, is "a growth industry."

... In November 2006, her postal carrier told Lodrick that master keys to the neighborhood's mailboxes had been stolen. Soon afterward, Wells Fargo informed her that there was suspicious activity in her accounts.

Using the stolen keys, Lodrick believes, Nelson made off with an unsolicited mailing from the bank. Lodrick said it contained two debit/credit cards she had not requested and, worse, a statement for a certificate of deposit that included her Social Security number. Personal identification numbers for the cards were in a separate envelope.

It took only three days for Nelson to raid the accounts for about $9,000 through withdrawals and purchases, bank records show....

Dealing with the consequences of somebody pretending to be her and ringing up purchases of computers, jewelry, clothing, groceries, cigarettes and liquor took a day or two of Lodrick's time every week. There were the credit card companies to hassle with and credit agencies and banks, especially her own bank.

Lodrick calculates that as a self-employed consultant, she lost $30,000 in unearned income between November and Nelson's apprehension in late April. Wells Fargo eventually restored to her accounts all the money Nelson had withdrawn.

... "the bank was horrible. I felt they thought I was comical. I kept dealing with different people. Three different times they told me I'd have to come in and ID the (security camera) photo, that I hadn't done it."

... Lodrick changed bank accounts and identification numbers, only to find that Nelson had again broken into her mail and stolen the new information and was still after her accounts.

...What Lodrick didn't know is that they were neighbors, living only three blocks apart.

In the end, that photo of Nelson in her distinctive coat was her undoing. On June 6, she pleaded guilty to one felony count of using another person's identification fraudulently. She was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn to the 44 days she had already served in county jail and three years' probation...

Lodrick, who made a statement at sentencing, was dissatisfied. "I can't believe it," she said. "I went through six months of hell, and she's going to get probation? She was on probation when she victimized me. Obviously, probation's not helping."

Nor did Nelson, 31, appear to be remorseful. When she entered the courtroom in her orange jail jumpsuit and saw Lodrick, she smirked and waved at her. Judge Kahn chastised her for her attitude...

To summarize the obvious:

• The banks (Wells Fargo in this case) don't care all that much. They'd care a lot more if they were liable for a victim's pain, suffering, and lost income.
• The justice system isn't set up to deal with this kind of crime. Identity thief a pretty good profession for someone who doesn't mind having a criminal record. It's the same story for stealing checks btw, offenders are usually put on probation - again and again. What's new is that income opportunities are now much greater.
• The thief was not particularly bright or inventive, but she was able to plug into a "franchise model"
• Above all, high technology vendors are, at a minimum, closing their eyes to the crooked intermediaries who buy their products. In the case of InfoUSA, they went so far as to develop products that were primarily designed for crooks. Arms dealers in general, and gun manufacturers in particular, of course, have made an art form of this over the centuries.

It's part of this meme.

So what do we do?

1. Make the banks liable for more than the money lost. Maybe ten times more. That would incent them to change their behavior.
2. Go after the legitimate suppliers. That means going after companies like InfoUSA and whoever supplied the id manufacturing equipment that was used in this case. These are companies with deep pockets and a business to protect. This may require changes to laws. The arms dealer industry may provide some good lessons.

Dyer - four new essays

Dyer has four new essays up. Enjoy.

Articles 2007
May 31 The War of Six Days and Forty Years
June 4 Don't Mention the Warming (G8 and Climate Change)
June 8 Calling the BMD Bluff
June 11 India: The Price of Choice

He takes PayPal donations, but needs to adopt Amazon instead. I don't do PayPal.

Botnets, ovarian cancer, MySpace "offenders" and Bayes

What do botnets, "symptom" definition for ovarian cancer, MySpace "sex offenders", homeland security passenger screening have in common?

They all teach us that we need to start teaching Bayesian analysis in 7th grade.

Consider the FBI's guideline for knowing your home PC is a zombie bot:

BBC NEWS | Technology | FBI tries to fight zombie hordes

...The organisation said it was difficult for people to know if their machine was part of a botnet.

However it said telltale signs could be if the machine ran slowly, had an e-mail outbox full of mail a user did not send or they get e-mail saying they are sending spam.

Of these only the last is a useful clue, and it's a stupid bot that leaves such obvious traces. Does any Windows machine not run slowly? It's the very nature of XP that machines slow as they age, a disturbingly familiar trait. The emails "you have sent spam" are either the result of forged headers or they're traps by bot harvesters to recruit victims.

In other words, these tests have weak sensitivity, very weak specificity, and no predictive value. The advice is worse than worthless because, if followed, it would cause vast expense and produce no value. (ISPs can detect bots however, and they should be held liable for failing to detect and notify.)

Ovarian cancer?

...The symptoms to watch out for are bloating, pelvic or abdominal pain, difficulty eating or feeling full quickly and feeling a frequent or urgent need to urinate. A woman who has any of those problems nearly every day for more than two or three weeks is advised to see a gynecologist, especially if the symptoms are new and quite different from her usual state of health...

Gynecologist? Sigh. Family medicine is truly dead. Anyway, this basically translates to a very inefficient but reimbursable screening program. The symptoms are completely nonspecific, so we're basically doing massive amounts of vaginal ultrasound. It would probably be better to simply start a screening program, but focus on persons with known risk factors. Lots of easy money for gynecologists though. Gee, I wonder who wrote up the recommendation?

MySpace? We've covered that one before. A test with low specificity, low sensitivity, lousy predictive value, and it may be used by law enforcement too. 

Passenger screening? See MySpace. Same techniques, same problems. The new regulations that every US traveler to Canada or Mexico have a passport, aka a true national ID card, will make matches less unreliable however. The test will then become more specific.

Bayes, Bayes, Bayes. We need to start teaching it in 7th grade.

The Economist on China's toxic export problem

The Economist, through teeth firmly clenched, admits that China has a product quality problem. Even so, with eyes firmly averted, they fail to note that Europe does not have problems with toxic food imports and they omit mention of cyanuric acid and melamine contamination of farm feed. Lastly, while quietly seizing, they reluctantly point out that (hurrah!) the lawyers are riding to our rescue ...

China's food safety | Economist.com

...For foreign businesses, the lack of quality control in China is not someone else's problem. Several lawyers have argued that, since Chinese regulatory bodies are demonstrably unfit for purpose, any company accepting Chinese exports with official quality or safety certificates could theoretically be held liable for problems that subsequently emerge. Once again, this dilemma highlights the importance for companies of detailed knowledge of their supply chains in China, and of not taking documentary or verbal assurances at face value. To help deal with such challenges, bigger companies should establish their own internal quality-control mechanisms. But for smaller traders, the costs of such systems could undermine their profitability. For many importers then, the best acid test may well be that if a product's price looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Poor Economist. This is hard for them. The last bit, though, is worth all the omissions. Leave it to the law to figure out a way around the offshore legal shelter. In retrospect, I suppose this is like buying stolen goods from a crooked pawnshop. A reasonable buyer should know a genuine Rolex watch costs more than twenty-five dollars, a reasonable US manufacturer or importer should know that China's supply chains are not trustworthy. US manufacturers know juries will be ... sympathetic. Sympathetic, that is, to the heroic and soon to be extremely wealthy lawyers. It's rare to be able to earn so much money in the defense of the good.

A democratic legislative majority means the GOP will not be able to blunt the legal assault. Let loose the dogs of law ...

Cosmic Variance's Sean Carroll on the arrow of time

I've been reading Sean Carroll's posts on Cosmic Variance, not realizing until now that he's a research associate at my alma mater. I guess blogs really are infested by amateurs destroying our culture of knowledge ...

Sean's presentation is pretty readable for the interested layperson ...

Sean Carroll: Why Is the Past Different From the Future?

... In such a universe, everything we think we "remember" ... about the past is ... a mistake.

Dinosaur skeletons arose spontaneously out of dirt.

It's been a busy road to reading material like Sean's. It started when I came across this comment in Wired  last February:

Even the best theories to explain how entanglement gets around this problem seem preposterous. One, for example, speculates that signals are shot back through time. Ultimately, the answer is bound to be unnerving: According to a famous doctrine called Bell’s Inequality, for entanglement to square with relativity, either we have no free will or reality is an illusion. Some choice.
- Lucas Graves, New York City-based writer

As near as I can tell Lucas was simplifying a bit. The complete absence of free will (aka. life in God's movie or the Tralfamadorian perspective) goes back originally to Newton (determination by mechanics) then to Einstein (determination by time slice perspectives) and returned with the transactional interpretation of QM. The good news for the non-Calvinists among us is that the evidence (as I read of it) favors the non-existence of independent reality over the kind of absolute determinism where not only dinosaurs arise from dirt, but all of space and time arise spontaneously and (seemingly) coherently.

So what does all this have to do with Carroll's talk? Well, it seems plausible that the "arrow of time" has something to do with predetermination or non-determination and that it should also have equivalences in both cosmology and quantum mechanics. Here's Carroll's conclusion about where time comes from in the view cosmology - it involves the infinite multiverse ...

...If the universe lasts forever but has no equilibrium
state, we naturally obtain an arrow of time.

It’s crucial that the way in which the multiverse
creates more entropy is to make universes like ours...

Further I cannot go! So where does the arrow of time come from in QM? I'm imagining at the moment that it comes from decoherence...*

* Ok, how did I know that "Decoherence, Quantum Measurement and the Arrow of Time" existed? I didn't, of course. I hypothesized that the arrow of time emerges as a universe of infinite possibilities collapses as the past interacts with it -- an idea that's appeared in at least one science fiction story I've read. I knew decoherence is the technical term used for the interpretation of QM most consistent with this model, so I searched on "decoherence" and "arrow of time". Easy. (The alternate explanation, of course, is that the conference didn't really exist until I thought of it, which led the quantum chaos of the past to collapse.... :-)

Sex offender madness, Minnesota version

A few weeks ago I commented on the lunacy of MySpace's sex offender identification process. I know something about the way these matching algorithms work, and in the MySpace environment the test will have a low sensitivity and a low specificity. A substantial portion of those they identify will be false matches, and they'll miss most offenders.

When I ended my comments I predicted we'd see the authorities treating these lists as real, so that a false match by MySpace may mean a visit from the police. That was an easy one ...

Minnesota asks MySpace for list of sex offenders: 

... On Tuesday, Swanson became one of a number of state attorneys general to ask MySpace for the names of sex offenders from the 7,000 it says it has identified and expelled from its popular social networking website...

The best we can hope for is that MySpace is massively sued.

GOP: party of the stone age candidate

Throughout most of human history, the leader was probably the surviving male with the highest testosterone levels as manifested by jaw, shoulder, and voice. The GOP is electing the candidate best suited to the stone age....

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

Rep. Zack Wamp (R-Tenn.), one of Fred Thompson's boosters on the Hill, recently suggested the actor/senator/lobbyist would make a good president, in part because of his speaking voice.

"He has a commanding voice," Wamp said. "He has a commanding presence. He makes people feel secure. He makes us feel confident."

Sen. George "Macaca" Allen (remember him?) apparently feels the same way. (via Steve M.)

Former Sen. George Allen is bullish about former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, the actor who hasn't even gotten into the 2008 presidential race yet....

...He likened Thompson's voice to that of a "modern-day Rex Allen," drawing a reference to a now-deceased cowboy actor.

... On a related note, interest in Mitt Romney's appearance is apparently still high among conservative political observers, with the Politico's Roger Simon applauding Romney for having "shoulders you could land a 737 on."

This, of course, follows Bill O'Reilly praising Romney's jaw and hair, and NewsMax celebrating the former Massachusetts governor's "sensational good looks."

We are primates, most regrettably. This can work, humans are programmed to follow people who look and sound this way. Alas, it's not the stone age any more. That's the way of the cliff.

Liberating public goods from the NTIS - radical

The National Technical Information Service charges absurd amounts for data that's part of the public domain, including various data sets used in healthcare. A small company has noticed that there's an opportunity here ...

Marginal Revolution: The private provision of public goods

...Public.Resource.Org takes non-copyrighted documents that the federal government charges the public for and puts them into the public domain. Not much is available now but the service wants to make available for free all of the millions of documents, videos and other material from National Technical Information Service. To build their library Public.Resource.Org are asking people who want a government document to buy it through their service. They will then make the document available to everyone else for free....

Currently the web site lists dozens of $100 healthcare videos that nobody with free will would be interested in. They don't list code sets yet, it may be the ones I'm thinking of are not truly owned by the feds ...

Polonium - an update

Slate features excerpts from a book on the "Sasha" Litvinenko murder:

Who killed Alexander Litvinenko? - By Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko - Slate Magazine

.... Whoever chose polonium to kill Sasha did so because the chances of its ever being discovered were close to zero. It could not be easily identified chemically: the toxicology lab found only low levels of thallium, a minor contaminant of polonium production. Polonium was unlikely to be detected by its radioactivity, since common Geiger counters were not designed to detect alpha rays. Polonium is perhaps the most toxic substance on earth: a tiny speck is a highly lethal dose, and one gram is enough to kill half a million people. But it is absolutely harmless to a handler unless it is inhaled or swallowed. Most important, polonium had never been used to murder anyone before, so practically no one in the expert community—toxicologists, police, or terrorism experts—would have been looking for it or expecting it. It was sheer luck, plus Sasha's phenomenal endurance, that it was found. He had received a huge dose. Had he died in Barnet Hospital within the first two weeks, his death would have been attributed to thallium, meaning that anyone could have given it to him.

The irony is that once it was detected, polonium became a smoking gun. No amateur killer—even one awash with money—could have used it...

....Within hours of Sasha's death, HPA radioactivity hunters identified and closed off several contaminated sites in London, including Itsu, the sushi restaurant on Piccadilly where Sasha met Mario Scaramella, and the bar in the Millennium Hotel where he had tea with the Russians. As the investigation progressed, they added dozens of other places to the polonium map; the eventual list included offices, restaurants, hotel rooms, homes, cars, and airplanes in several countries. Hundreds of people all over Europe showed varying degrees of polonium contamination, spreading from the epicenter of the "tiny nuclear bomb" exploded in London. When the dust settled, the investigators had a pretty complete understanding of how to read the map. As the Scotland Yard liaison officer told Marina, "We know exactly who did it, where, and how."

Here's the quick summary:

1. Putin ordered Litivenko killed.

2. Lugovy was part of the hit, but there were two poisoning attempts. The second one might have involved someone else.

3. Polonium is actually quite a reasonable murder weapon.

4. Litvinenko knew nothing.

5. Russia adores Putin.

Hmpph. Polonium still seems to be a ridiculous murder weapon. Surely there must be equally undetectable poisons that wouldn't point so clearly to Putin. The motive still makes no sense to me, unless one assumes Putin is batty.

Perhaps the most credible explanation is that Putin ordered Litvinenko killed by Polonium because Putin's even battier than Bush. Bush has proven that you can be a leader loon; we have to be ready to assume Putin's no better.

Lesson for healthcare IT

What the history of the electric dynamo teaches about the future of the computer. - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

... More recent research from MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson has shown that the history of the dynamo is repeating itself: Companies do not do well if they spend a lot of money on IT projects unless they also radically reorganize to take advantage of the technology. The rewards of success are huge, but the chance of failure is high. That may explain why big IT projects so often fail, and why companies nevertheless keep trying to introduce them.

Brynjolfsson recently commented that the technology currently available is enough to fuel a couple of decades of organizational improvements. Even if technology stands still—it will not—there are already big changes stored up for us.

Optimal value from healthcare IT investments may require very different ways of delivering services, with quite different professional roles.

DeLong's plan for healthcare reform

A few months ago I wrote about how I think health care reform will one day turn out:

Grodon's Notes: Health care financing: the 80/20 questions are the only questions

....

1. Everyone residing in American will have the second option. Always. I call this the "HMO from Heck Solution".
   
   
2. The first (class) option will be available in a number of ways. Some will get it via risk sharing plans. Some will pay cash. Some will buy it on the gray market ... or the black market. I call this the "Libertarian Solution".
   
   
3. Five years after this choice is available, after development costs have been recovered and competition has arisen, the specifics of the choices will change. The "first class" choice will now become the guaranteed "second class" choice and it will be "cheap". There will, however, be a new, better, very expensive, "first class" choice.
   
   
4. There will be a huge amount of spending on luxury experiences associated with health care and on "alternative" therapies -- none of which will have any impact on outcome.
   
   
5. Innovation, invention, chaos and harm will be far greater in the Libertarian world than in the HMO from Heck world. It is the Libertarian world that will crush costs and convert the "First Class" option into the cheap and universal "Second Class" option.
   
   
6. NIH research funding will shift to favor development of solutions that provide 80% of value for 20% of the cost -- rather than the current disposition to the "best possible" solution.
   
   
7. Once people wrap their heads around this, and that will take a while, they'll decide having the "HMO from Heck" isn't the worst thing in the world....

Today I'm reading Brad DeLong's proposal. I think the mixture of single payor with huge MSAs and backup catastrophic coverage is fascinating, and consistent with the evolution to the above ...

1. 20% Deductible/Out of Pocket Cap: The IRS snarfs 20% of your family economic income. 5% of it is an increase in taxes (but that replaces your and your employer's current health insurance premiums). 15% of it goes straight into your Health Savings Account. That HSA is then used to pay all your family health bills. If your expenses in a year are less than what's in your HSA, the balance is rolled into your IRA (or, if you prefer, returned to you with your tax refund check).
   
   
2. Single-Payer for the Rest: If your HSA is emptied and you still have more health bills that year, the federal government pays them. The main point, after all, is insurance: if you fall seriously sick, you want right then and there to be treated whether or not your wallet biopsy is positive.
   
   
3. Sin Taxes: on Tobacco, Gorgonzola, Three-Liter Bottles of Liquid High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Tanning Clinics (Melanoma), et cetera: Sin taxes (and, perhaps, someday general revenues) pay for an army of barefoot doctors and nurses and mobile treatment vans roaming the country, knocking on doors, and providing preventive and other long-run lifestyle services for free: Let me examine your prostate. Mind if I check your refrigerator and tell you how to eat healthier? Have you exercised today? I'm a Pilates instructor, and we could do a session now? Are you up on your immunizations? Anybody here have a fever and need antibiotics? Come on out to the van and I'll clean your teeth." The idea is to make the preventive care cheaper-than-free, to insure that nothing with a high long-run benefit/cost ratio gets left undone because people would rather get a bigger check the next April to use to buy an HDTV.
   
   
4. A Lot of Serious Research on Best Public-Health, Chronic-Disease, and Hospital Practices: Made easier, of course, by linking the payment records from the health branch of the IRS to hospital records to the wirelessly-transfered logs from the barefoot doctor vans.
   
   
5. That's it. No deduction for employer-paid health expenses. No insurance companies.

In my real job I sometimes get to listen in on how the giants of capitalism think health care reform will play out. They are all very fond of libertarian solutions with minimal roles for governent and giant MSAs, but they have more than the MSAs in common with DeLong. They also think the insurance companies are going to go.

Personally, I think the insurance companies will take a long time dying, but it's intriguing that so many different players have them in the crosshairs ...

Sorenson, Kennedy and the third Sachs' Reith lecture.

This is another post in a continuing series on the BBC 4 Reith Lectures 2007: Sachs and the modern world. The MP3s are no longer legally available but the BBC has put the transcripts online.

The first lecture was rather good, though several of the comments were pompously silly. Is immortality worthwhile if it means being mocked forever?

The second lecture, in China, spent too much time managing the tender sensibilities of the host nation. This was probably politically wise, but it made for a dull speech. I was starting to get tired of the Kennedy references, but I was about to change my opinion.

The third took place in Sachs' home base - Columbia University's Earth Institute. There was no need to worry about the sensibilities of the insensate American government of course, so the material was quite a bit sharper. I was particularly impressed by Sachs discussion of fear and human nature:

... Two deep aspects of human psychology are crucial here. The first is that human beings hover between cooperation and conflict. We are actually primed psychologically, and probably genetically, to cooperate, but only conditionally so. In a situation of low fear, each of us is prone to cooperate and to share -- even with a stranger. Yet when that trust evaporates, each of us is primed to revert to conflict, lest we are bettered by the other. Game theorists call this strategy "Tit for Tat," according to which we cooperate at the outset, but retaliate when cooperation breaks down. The risk, obviously, is an accident, in which cooperation collapses, and both sides get caught in a trap in which conflict becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that all-too-real nightmare, we end up fighting because we fear that the other will fight. This fear is confirmed by fear itself. Wars occur despite the absence of any deeper causes...

In responding to a comment Sachs discussed the nightmarish indirect impact of 9/11 ...

... September 11 was an extraordinary event, clearly without being banal about it. It opened up the possibilities for much worse than we could have imagined, much worse about us. It led to an end of introspection for several years, to bellicosity, to faith in the military approach, to the idea that we could bludgeon them all - after all we are the world's sole superpower.

Future historians, I suspect, will treat 9/11 as in some ways analogous to an assassination that has a certain (in this case considerable) direct impact, but a potentially much larger indirect impact. Will America's post-9/11 psychotic break be one day seen as the beginning of the end? It is miraculously mysterious to me that we have not had another significant attack -- for that, I think, would have been a fatal blow to America's fragile psyche.

The most remarkable part of the lecture, however, was the presence of Theodore (Ted) Sorenson in the audience. Mr. Sorenson is 79 years old, but he evidently has one of those lucky minds that by virtue of brilliance and biology resist entropy. Of course he must have prepared in advance, but even so ...

... SUE LAWLEY: We have, as you mentioned, during the course of your lecture, Jeff, we have Theodore Sorensen - Ted Sorensen - sitting on the front row there, lawyer and writer who was Special Advisor and speechwriter to President Kennedy. I wonder, having heard everything you've heard this evening, sir, whether you'd care to say something?

THEODORE SORENSEN: That's very nice, thank you. It's been an extraordinary experience for me to sit here tonight and listen to such a wise and wonderful lecture, with so many references to a speech given forty-three years ago, and I'm sure if President Kennedy were alive and here tonight he would be moved and touched as I am to think that that speech of his, that basic message of his forty-three years ago is now going out through these BBC lectures all over the world. Since I know a little bit about the speech that you frequently cited, I wonder why…

SUE LAWLEY: Can I just say, did you write it?

THEODORE SORENSEN: Oh I never acknowledge that. President Kennedy was the author of all of his speeches. (LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE) Or I, or what I should say in answer to that question is, 'Ask not'. (LAUGHTER) So my recommendation to you, Jeff, when you make this lecture again, is to cite two other parts of that speech. One is a passage where President Kennedy said, 'The world knows America will not start a war. This generation of Americans has seen enough of war.' Haven't heard that recently! The second was where he not only asked for a re-examination of our relations with the Soviet Union, but praised the Soviet people for the enormous contribution and sacrifice they made in World War Two, which no-one had ever done before, and the Soviets rather resented it, and it was one of the ways that he reached Khrushchev. Seems to me we live in a world where the people of Islam have been rejected and humiliated for generations, and if someone took the time to praise their contributions to civilisation over the centuries, that might help.

(APPLAUSE) [jf - this applause went on for a decently long time]

JEFFREY SACHS: Don't you think we have the makings of another speech coming? (LAUGHTER) I think it is so astounding that President Kennedy's and your speech was not only so brilliant that it gives shivers when you read it or listen to it, but it literally worked within weeks. It did exactly what it was meant to do: it changed history. This is an astounding, astounding truth, and it's an astounding accomplishment of, of this man before us tonight. It's just amazing.

And thus I came to change my opinion of Kennedy/Sorenson's 1963 speech, an oration that Sachs feels saved modern civilization. His case is persuasive, and so I now understand Sachs weaving the speech throughout the 2007 Reith lectures.

Whatever Kennedy's many (many) flaws, he assembled an astounding group of people, and he drew upon the best parts of America in a way we cannot imagine today. We seem, by comparison, a shriveled and brittle people. We have no choice, however, but to imagine that there is a road back for this country and for the world.

There are two lectures still to go.

Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud

This morning our last modern pencil sharpener broke. We have only one that works now. It's twelve years old, I remember coming across it in the campus bookstore. Even then reliable sharpeners were hard to find, so I bought several. Only one survives. It was made in Germany. We're going to mention it in our will, it may be worth a fortune thirty years from now. By then billionaires will employ artisans to craft beautiful objets d'art that sharpen pencils, and the rest of us will be using our teeth.

We tossed the broken one in the garbage. Alas, the can was broken. Well, that's almost reasonable. One year in a house with our 3 kids would even have weakened a German garbage can. No surprise this one broke.

We can't replace it. There are no more square, tough cans that use standard cheap trash bags. There are only round cheap things that use exotic bags that will only be sold for the next six months.

Our two DVD/VCR combos limp along. One has a broken DVD player, the other a broken tape player. There's no point in replacing them -- the replacement would only last three to six months then it would break. We won't replace our crummy old toaster, because the modern modern alternatives won't last more than a few weeks.

How to explain this emergent conspiracy of globalized incompetence and occult inflation? Clearly the answer is related to Krugman and Hilton [1] and the reelection of George Bush. The American consumer is simply overwhelmed, unable to process and cope with the complexity of the new age. Consumers are repetitive and consistently making very poor choices, and the market is responding to the frailty of the consumer.

I'm hopeful that a correction is coming. It's too late for we boomers to get our heads around the new world -- we're too old and slow. We can, however, retreat into "grumpy old person" buy nothing, replace nothing stasis -- and that will give the young more leverage. It's up to their minds to absorb the new rules, and reboot the marketplace.

Go for it kiddies, we gomers are depending on you!

[1] BTW, I'm seriously starting to feel sorry for Ms. Hilton.

Scientific American demonstrates how to eliminate web traffic

I wanted to link to a SciAm article I have at home. I had some things to say that seemed interesting (to me). A win-win for SciAm and me, especially since they charge for archival access.

Problem is, every time I went to the page Camino/Firefox pegged my CPU at 100%. Scientific American was featuring a BASF (German pharmaceutical company) animated ad that kills Gecko clients (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Netscape, etc) - at least on OS X.

I've now disabled all web advertising display using Camino 1.5's quite excellent built-in blockers. So Scientific American's blunder will disable entire classes of advertising. Perhaps the responsible ad agency should take notice too.

I wonder how many thousands of people have been locked out today (especially if this impacts Firefox/Win as well) how many have responded by enabling full ad blocking, how many won't return to the SciAm web site, how many are reconsidering the value of their SciAm subscriptions...

It takes only one blunder of this magnitude to cost a web site months of work.

I'd try sending them feedback, but of course I'm not going to bother accessing their web site now. In any event, any corporation capable of this type of mistake probably omits the feedback link. Eliminating feedback helps reduce annoying customer interactions.

This is pretty much a universal rule by the way -- any entity, whether human or corporate, that does really dumb stuff is very unlikely to allow feedback. It's pretty much two sides of the same coin.

What a waste.

Paris Hilton and Paul Krugman - together?

I have only a very vague idea of who Paris Hilton is or what she does, but even I know she's famous, rich, likes drugs and seems able to absorb punishment almost as well as Mick Jagger. So I was able to enjoy a witty, funny and vastly entertaining essay in Salon  ...

We'll always hate Paris - Clintra Wilson -Salon Life

If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, Paris Hilton, for all her frailness and vulnerability, is a huge, flaming meteor that can penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, bypass all weather completely and destroy millions of lives wherever she happens to feel like plummeting...

...Paris Hilton charges $200,000 to show up at a party for 20 minutes...

... (Just to give this price tag some sense of proportion, in 2004 the average per capita annual income in Iraq was $422. So it would take the average Iraqi over 20 years to earn one minute with Paris Hilton, or around 24 Iraqis one year to divide and share that one minute with Paris between them -- which would just be a complete waste of money unless they could use that one minute to swallow all her jewelry and handbag and shoes.)

Paris has come to embody the angst of our increasing sense of powerlessness -- she's the blonde whom we punish, because we understand her crimes. We don't really understand all the crimes of the administration -- congressional bribes, organized mass deceit via domestic propaganda, policy fixing, violations of privacy and human rights.

Those are too legally complicated. While we were busy ogling Lindsay's drug binges, Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" and Britney's shaved head, our leaders larded us with misinformation, illegally invaded another country, murdered we-don't-even-have-any-idea-how-many innocent civilians (not to mention independent journalists), stole a nation's oil, tortured enemy prisoners, quietly bankrupted our economy and our international moral standing in service to the short con of military Keynesianism, effectively built Dick Cheney his own private Praetorian Guard, and ushered in the most serious threat to American freedom in our history: the very real threat of despotism.

God, that is depressing. Hooker! Where's the hooker?

Which leads to the Krugman connection:

... Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit...

...Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”...

So you see, Krugman and Hilton are together. Ok, sort of connected - by their inverse relationships to a dysfunctional media serving a disinterested populace.

Ok, so my morals are declining ...