Leahy on anthrax: the FBI is wrong

Leahy is one of the smartest and most respected senators in the business.

Now I really don't believe the FBI.

Senator, Target of Anthrax Letter, Challenges F.B.I. Finding - NYTimes.com:

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a target of the anthrax letters of 2001, said Wednesday that he did not believe the F.B.I.’s contention that an Army scientist conducted the attacks alone.

At a hearing of his committee, Mr. Leahy told the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, that even if the bureau was right about the involvement of the scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, who killed himself in July before ever being charged, he thought there were accomplices.

“If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people,” said Mr. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont...

The FBI's credibility is almost as bad as Bush/Cheney's.

If Obama wins, the agency needs to be rebuilt.

Apocalypse now: my why

Why are we making history today?

Gordon's Notes: Apocalypse now? Putnam investors

... SEC bans short selling.... 300 trillion is kind of a lot of money ... US Treasury has guaranteed money market funds...

This is what I think is going on.

Yeah, sure, greed, self-deception, information technology enabling levels of complexity humans cannot fathom, Bush trashing US fiscal policy -- they all contribute. They're not new though -- well, maybe the complexity part is.

Here's what I think is new.

Sometime in the 90s we went through a set of major technological and social transformation. Information technology, especially the net, radically changed human productivity in ways we didn't fully measure. Secondly billions of people emerged from years of education in China and India to remake the world economy. Thirdly the end of cold war, and the lost days of Pax Clintonia, unleashed the full power of comparative advantage across the global economy.

Humanity generated vast amounts of wealth -- but it came too fast to be redistributed. It pooled in the hands of a very small number of people, in part because the increasing cognitive demands of workplace were effectively disabling 70% of the population. We began to enter the neo-feudal era.

Trillions of dollars are sloshing around now. Money that the bottom 70% of the population would spend on health care, on cars, on homes, on clothes and on education -- either directly or through taxes. The owners of the money can't possibly consume it, so they try to find ways to grow it. It must grow because that much money is about power, power is relative, and the competition never ends.

The money sloshes into stocks, then real estate, then financial instruments. It never really gets destroyed, just redistributed among the very powerful and very wealthy.

Until we find a way to recycle that money into the hands of people who will use it as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, the cycle won't stop.

That's my why.

Palin email hacked through password reset - educating America

We are truly in the twilight of the password.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Palin e-mail hack details emerge: "It is thought the attackers exploited the password resetting system of Yahoo s e-mail service."

Password reset mechanisms, like Google's brain-dead system, are one sign of the end time. Another is the insane security questions we're asked now. (Vanguard is particularly stupid in their use of a security question, but Fidelity wins the prize for the world's stupidest password policy.)

Geeks have known for at least 8 years that passwords were finished, and security analysts have known this for perhaps forty years. It takes a while for these things to trickle out though; we suffer from the tyranny of the mean in this as in so many other domains.

Palin now joins Paris Hilton in helping educate the American people how truly screwed we are.

The only good news is that two factor identification is starting to get out (though myOpenIDs current implementation is aggravatingly wrong). Biometrics integrated with our cell phone has to be one piece of the puzzle, we can't get it fast enough.

Update 9/24/08: Schneier, under pressure, finally comments. Sort of. What can he say that he hasn't said well for many years? The sheer, unrelenting, stark stupidity of the "security question" makes any commentary pointless. It's persistence is a sign that we're reaching the end of the human run.

Apocalypse now? Putnam investors

I've been betting that Vanguard and Fidelity, for example, will whether the storm.

That's still my bet. The institutional investors mentioned below may have had to pull money to meet obligations, rather than to find a safer haven. Also, 12.3 billion is pretty small money-market fund.

Still, this won't improve Emily's mood ...

Talking Points Memo | Wow [1]

... Putnam Investments has closed a $12.3 billion money-market fund to limit losses to its investors the large mutual fund company said today. The highly unusual announcement is the latest sign that tremendous financial pressures are now threatening even some of the safest kinds of investments. The Prime Money Market Fund was open only to institutional investors. Putnam said in a statement that its board decided to close the fund last night after receiving a large number of redemption requests. The company said it could honor those requests only by selling assets at a loss reducing the value of the remaining shares. Putnam said it decided instead to liquidate the fund and spread any losses evenly among all the investors. 'We wanted to treat all shareholders equally ' said spokeswoman Laura McNamara. She said it was 'premature' to discuss how much of a loss if any shareholders will incur...

We need a game theorist to tell us if this lessons the incentive to cut and run (since you don't come out ahead), or increases the incentive to move fast. I'm hoping the former.

My theory has been that if this thing hits Vanguard and Fidelity then the "safe havens" are remote underground caverns well stocked with things like long-lived antibiotics, high quality seeds, and a good supply of materials for building log shelters.

I don't have time to set up the caverns, so we'll just have to wing it. I'm leaving my dollar-cost-average stock purchase programs in place.

We sure do live in interesting times. It's increasingly hard to remember what life was like in the Clinton era; it seems like a lost golden age.

All we need right now is for Al Qaeda to rise up from its grave. That would really top things off. Hmm. You don't suppose Cheney is playing for a third term? Nahhhhh.

[1] No link because Firefox NoScript warned me of a cross-scripting XSS attempt. Could be a false alarm, or they could have been hacked. I sent 'em an email.

Update: SEC bans short selling. Yep. Apocalypse now. Which reminds me of the kind of bleak sorts of things we realists like to dwell on. When the great depression hit we lived in a physical world. So things got dingy, dusty, and kind of worn, but they didn't vanish. Now we live in a virtual world. If we experienced GD II, where companies like Google go under, a good chunk of our world doesn't get dingy -- it vanishes. Presumably the government would need to nationalize those industries rather than let them vanish.

This meme shows up in modern science fiction btw. As I've mentioned before, people who don't read science fiction must find our world particularly surprising.

I'm still betting against GD II of course. Sure is interesting times though.

Update: $300 trillion is kind of a lot of money, isn't it? That's 0.3 quadrillion dollars. There, I wanted to be the first to start measuring things in quadrillions of dollars. Trillions are so 20th century. BTW, people who are both lucky and insightful, and who can play the game and win, are going to get insanely rich from this.

Update 11:30 CT: US Treasury has guaranteed money market funds. Note that the tag on this post includes the string "history".

Update 2:20pm CT: BBC most read posts in the middle of the biggest financial transformation since the 1930s...


It's not on the radar in Asia at all, but it did make #3 in North America.

I think I live in a parallel reality.

Task management: a feature request

Given the insane way our patent laws work, this is probably patentable. Hopefully publishing it here would prevent that. I sent this feature request to Appigo in the hope they'll add it to their excellent iPhone ToDo.app, but I'd look at a competitor if they got to it first. I really do find the 'assign task to overloaded day' thing to be troublesome.

Appigo Todo | Google Groups

I've been a heavy duty task user for years.

The biggest problem I run into is the task/capacity ratio. On average I have about 1.5 hours a day to work on non-trivial personal tasks...

I need some kind of capacity indicator so that when I move a task I don't move it into an overloaded day.

Obviously it has to be something lightweight, and it may be that very few of your users are going to need this. So it has be something VERY lightweight.

Here's a strawman suggestion. Fancier versions involve looking at calendar, etc.

1. In settings (advanced) users can specify default daily capacity for each day of the week (hours) and default time-to-complete value for new tasks.
2. In task add an optional attribute of time to complete (5, 20, 60, 90, 120 mins for example).
3. In the view we see when scheduling a task, include a capacity icon (vertical bar, green, yellow, red, etc)

If user clicks on the capacity icon they get screen that shows scheduled events (from calendar if possible) and tasks for that day. From here user can override the default capacity value for the day, they can click on tasks for the day to edit them (move them, change time, etc) or they can click to go to the calender app.

Obviously this isn't likely to be the right way to do these things. Customers like me are almost never right in terms of how we think a task should be accomplished. I just put it out as a way to express what I'm hoping to see one day. I know my life isn't going to get any less crowded until the nursing home ...

tags: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, task management, suggestion, proposal, question, lightweight project management, Appigo, time management, productivity

Update 9/19/08: A better design would be to read the calendar, and look for a something called (say): "Appigo task time". If it existed that would be used as the capacity for the day. If not, use the default.

Money market funds don't guarantee a $1 a share

This is perhaps a good time to remind everyone that when you buy a money market fund, you buy a share and earn returns.

The share is priced at $1 a share and that never seems to change. That's an industry convention however, not a law. Even if you have money parked in an ultra-low interest US Treasuries money market fund, there's no law that the share price has to stay at $1. In theory, you can lose money ...

Worse than ever - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

... Here’s the one-month T-bill rate, from the WSJ; when it goes way down, that’s showing a flight to safety. As of this morning, it’s about 0.2% — a panic level. This probably reflects the emergence of trouble in money market funds, which strikes me as very scary — yet another type of postmodern bank run...

If a money market fund invests in US treasuries, and the fund is earning an insignificant interest rate, then the fund's expenses will mean that, if the share price doesn't fall, the fund is operating at a loss.

If you're losing 0.3% a month on a hundred billion dollars those losses can hurt.

At least one small company money market fund lost value recently. I think we're a good way from Vanguard or Fidelity money market funds dropping share prices below $1/share, that's pretty far down on my personal worry list.

It would be wrong, however, to say that a money market fund is as safe against loss as an FDIC bank account.

Money managers, the myth of the free market and fluid identity

I've been calm so far, but this is straining my gasket.

Op-Ed Contributor - Why the Fed Can’t Let A.I.G. Go Under - Lewitt - NYTimes.com:

... The Fed cannot afford to stand on principle. The myth of free markets ended with the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Actually, it ended with their creation....

Michael Lewitt is the president of a money management firm.

Ok, maybe Michael Lewitt said the same thing when he was on top of the world. Ok, maybe Lewitt never supported the GOP and their religion of the "free" market as pseudo-darwinian deity and definter of good and evil.

But what about those Lehman Bros bankers overheard on NPR bemoaning the lack of a federal bailout?

This is tweaking one of my persistent personality oddities, though it's a shadow of its former self. I still get annoyed by the astounding ability of many (successful) humans to change their fundamental principles at the drop of a hat.

It wouldn't bother me so much if they were simply Machiavellian manipulators, slyly saying whatever it takes to advance their personal agenda. That, at least, I can understand. I dislike these people, but I appreciate their artistic evil. Non-smoking tobacco company executives fall into this group.

No, what bugs me more are people who effortlessly adapt their "core" principles to server their current interests. There adaptability threatens my mental model of what a person is.

That bugs me.

PS. I'm not saying the Feds shouldn't try to salvage the world economy, but I recognize shareholders like me ought to take it in the gut. Of course I'd also like the CEOs to walk the plank, but I'm not delusional. That won't happen. I do think Bush's bankrupting the US will eventually be recognized as a part of the problem, but I also think we're going to discover there are significant issues with the basic shareholder mechanism of funding companies.

The SIPC is not the FDIC, but ...

Emily, who makes me look like a raving optimist, has been lately contemplating mattresses, hordes of critical surgical supplies buried in waterproof caskets at remote locations, and Swiss bank accounts.

So it's good to learn today that there exits something called the SIPC (also that the small investor part of Lehman Bros is still in business):

SIPC - The SIPC Mission

... When a brokerage firm is closed due to bankruptcy or other financial difficulties and customer assets are missing, SIPC steps in as quickly as possible and, within certain limits, works to return customers' cash, stock and other securities. Without SIPC, investors at financially troubled brokerage firms might lose their securities or money forever or wait for years while their assets are tied up in court.

Although not every investor is protected by SIPC, no fewer than 99 percent of persons who are eligible get their investments back from SIPC. From its creation by Congress in 1970 through December 2007, SIPC advanced $508 million in order to make possible the recovery of $15.7 billion in assets for an estimated 625,000 investors...

It's not exactly the FDIC, but, on the other hand, the coverage limits are significantly higher. They don't cover investment fraud.

So you think you can ride a bike?

I've done some bike tours. Not like this ...

Ian Hibell | Economist.com

.... IN A man’s life there comes a time when he must get out of Brixham. He must leave the boats bobbing in the harbour, the Devon cream teas, the holiday camp and the steam railway; he must bid farewell to the nine-to-five job at Standard Telephones and Cables, up the A379 in Paignton, and hit the more open road.

Some might get no farther than Bristol. But Ian Hibell went so far in one direction that his eyebrows crusted with frost and his hands froze; and so far in another that he lay down in the hot sand to die of dehydration (as he expected) under a thorn tree; and so far in another that the safest place to be, out of range of the mosquitoes, was to burrow like an alligator into black, viscous mud.

In the course of his 40-year travelling life he went the equivalent of ten times round the equator, covering 6,000 miles or so a year. He became the first man to cycle the Darien Gap in Panama, and the first to cycle from the top to the bottom of the American continent. He went from Norway to the Cape of Good Hope and from Bangkok to Vladivostok, wheeling or walking every inch of the way...

... His favourite had a Freddie Grubb frame of Reynolds 531 tubing on a 42-inch wheelbase, reinforced to take the extra weight of goatskins holding water; Campagnolo Nuevo Record gears front and rear; Robregal double-butted 14-16-gauge spokes; and Christophe pedal-straps. It was so lightweight, as touring bikes go, that a group of boys in Newfoundland mocked that it would soon break on their roads....

This bike sounds a bit like my 1976 Raleigh International. Mr Hibell died on is bicycle, struck by a car driven badly.

Another slap for we hysterical democrats

via Cosmic Variance, I go to a great rant (censoring mine) ...

Whatever - A Previous Message Repeated, Slightly More Forcefully

... Please accept that this contest is going to be close. Please accept that you will have to fight for it tooth and nail. Please accept that the GOP will feast on every single ****** instance in which you show even the slightest hint of entitlement to the presidency. Please accept that the GOP SOP is to win by any means necessary, and that they’ve cultivated an entire generation of political strategists and media lackeys who can’t think in any other way, and whose allegiance to the party is reflexive and far stronger than their interest in things like facts. Please accept that the entire thrust of the GOP strategy between now and November is to keep knocking actual issues out of the political news cycle. Please stop acting surprised and resentful about any of this. The GOP will crush you — again — if you keep doing it. For ****’s sake, they’ve played you exactly the same way since the 2000 election. Will you please exhibit a learning curve. You’ve been here before....

Thanks, I needed that.

The Party is stronger than the Fact. 

Where have we seen that before. Can't quite recall. Seems strangely familiar though ... Guess I should have paid more attention in history class ...

I've added Scalzi (Whatever) to my blogroll. Let's see what else s/he can do.

Chinese recall of melamine contaminated infant formula

The formula is not approved for distribution in the US, but the FDA suspects ethnic markets may sell it here. Infant formula contaminated with melamine has been recalled in China:

FDA: Melamine found in baby formula made in China - USATODAY.com

... The Food and Drug Administration is alerting Asian and ethnic markets across the USA that infant formula made in China may be contaminated.

The FDA is working with state health agencies across the country to make members of Chinese-American communities aware of the danger.

Chinese newspapers report that some infant formula has been linked to kidney problems and kidney stones in babies in China because the formula contains melamine — the same industrial contaminant from China that poisoned and killed thousands of U.S. dogs and cats last year.

Sanlu Group, the major Chinese dairy that produced the formula, has recalled 700 tons of the product, state Xinhua News Agency reported today.

No baby formula approved for use in the USA is manufactured in China, the FDA says. 'We want to reassure the public that there's no contamination in the domestic supply of infant formula,' says Janice Oliver, deputy of operations at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition."

It's very likely that Chinese infants get quite a bit of melamine in their formula. It's used to make formula appear more nutritious than it is, allowing use of cheap ingredients. Melamine has no nutritional value, so the infants are being both poisoned and starved of nutrients.

Humans are supposed to be fairly resistant to its effect, and the toxicity in cats and dogs was supposed to require simultaneous contamination with cyanuric acid -- still these are baby kidneys. Many must have been harmed.

I wonder if the recall is a sign that China is getting more serious about caring for its people?

A good reminder that the food fraud saga continues.

Update 9/14/08: Turns out a New Zealand company forced the recall, it wasn't a sign of increased attention by Chinese authorities. Infants died, we may never know how many. It sounds like the nutritional content of the "formula" may have been very low, probably lower than the dog food shipments.

McCain's effective lies and the post-fact society

The McCain campaign campaign is lying low and high, left and right, and they're not even bothering to cover their tracks.

Is Farhad Manjoo right that we live in a post-fact society?

Why doesn't Barack Obama lie more often? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

... In my book True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call "media fragmentation"—the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio—lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don't, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it's clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.

In particular, McCain is feeding off long-held conservative antipathy to the mainstream news media, the same force that propelled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth four years ago. The Swift Boat message was conceived on talk radio; in the months before they caught the attention of TV producers, the vets appeared on hundreds of local radio stations across the country to push the story that the media wasn't telling the whole truth about Kerry. By the time they'd raised enough money to run TV ads, the Swift Vets had built up a huge network of people ready to defend their claims. These networks managed to render fact-checking not just ineffective, but countereffective—when newspapers pointed out flaws in the Swift Vets' claims, the Vets' defenders would pounce, arguing that the very act of fact-checking proved that the media was in the tank for Kerry.

The same dynamic is at work in the Palin rollout: "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent," Republican strategist John Feehery told the Washington Post. "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

Obama has inherent, obvious disadvantages in pushing a message in which "little facts don't really matter." For one thing, he's boxed in by his oft-repeated search for a different kind of politics. But given the tenor of the campaign, Obama's audience might be happy to see him take the low road. In the past, Democratic voters have been willing to accept lies. Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2004, the Kerry campaign managed to convince Americans that 3 million jobs had been lost during George W. Bush's first term (at the time of the election, it was less than 2 million) and that Bush "favored sending American jobs overseas." (He didn't.) Kerry and others on the left repeated these claims often, and in time they took root.

The misstatements of 2004 suggest a category of lies that Obama could get away with—ones that the public is already primed to believe about McCain. McCain's signature policy goal is cutting out earmarks. But as the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen points out, in promising to veto all earmarks, McCain has inadvertently called for cutting some popular programs—including all U.S. assistance to Israel, which is technically provided through a kind of earmark. Of course McCain doesn't really want to stop giving aid to Israel; an ad that suggested McCain's cost-cutting zeal would lead to abandoning Israel would be as dishonest as McCain's sex-ed ad. But it might also be effective, reinforcing the idea that McCain wants to cut too much.

Or what about that 100-years war? Picture an Obama ad showing McCain saying that the war in Iraq will last 100—or even 1,000!—years. The ad patches in footage of McCain singing "bomb Iran" and describing all the devastating effects of war. Actually, that ad exists—a comedy group posted it on YouTube in February. Nearly 2 million people have watched it. It's hilarious, effective, and a complete lie. Obama's advisers should be pushing him to approve that message.

It's another version of the Strauss Gap. The GOP knows that the American people aren't all that concerned about what's true any more. Post-fact society? I'll buy that.

If the American people don't rediscover an interest in mere reality pretty damned soon, Obama will have to join the McCain lie train.

Post-fact society? Not enlightenment 2.0. Not good.

Dark times indeed.

Update 11/6/2008: Was I wrong? Damn, but I was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. See also. Yee-hah. I was wrong. Obama, you were right. I'm so glad you're going to be President and I'm not.

Worse than Bush

I never believed the 'we couldn't get anyone worse than Bush' story. Bush was only as bad as he was because the GOP also held the House and the Senate. If the Dems had held the Senate (Paul Wellstone, your plane crash changed history horribly) he would have been simply another bad leader - instead of one of the worst to ever occupy the White House.

Krugman now says McCain/Palin could be worse than Bush/Cheney (emphases mine)...

Krugman - Blizzard of Lies - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

... I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again....

...how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Only if the Dems lost the Senate and were crushed in the House. So worse in potential, but in practice -- probably not.

I emphasized "at least in America", by which Krugman really means the past 100 years in America, because America is starting to resemble Argentina. Yes, it could happen here.

Incidentally, FactCheck.org backs up Krugman on the blizzard of lies. It's not just we Dems saying that.

FactCheck.org: all the lies exposed -- even ours

FactCheck.org is an establishment web site -- not a campaign site. We need them desperately ...

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics....

The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg in 1994 ...

The APPC accepts NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

True, they've had to expose an awful lot of Palin/McCain lies recently, but they whacked one Obama commercial too.

Brad DeLong pointed me to them, and he's always right.

There's a feed, I'll be sharing interesting posts on my Google Reader shared items feed (you can subscribe like any feed). We need Annenberg more than ever.

Information we shouldn't fear: the McCain/Palin science curricula

Unsurprisingly, Palin is a fan of creationism. She uses the old "nyah, nyah, you're a scaredy cat" line of argument:

Palin brings creationism debate back into the headlines: Scientific American Blog

...The addition of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to the GOP presidential ticket has brought the creationism-evolution fight back into the news cycle as voters learn more about her agnostic take on the subject 'Teach both ' Palin has said. 'You know don’t be afraid of information.'"

Ahh, don't be afraid. Good thought.

So which creation stories shall we teach?

Since we live in north america, we could choose an Inuit or Amerindian story. Or, since we live in a post-industrial world, we could teach the theory that we live in a simulation, and that our "universe" is immaterial. Or there's the theory that our dark energy infested universe is a beta design that fell off a post-singular assembly line.

Hmm, what do the Satanists say about Creation? They must have a story too. It would be unfair to leave them out.

While we're at it, let's introduce astrology into the science curriculum too. No reason not to, lots of people like astrology. Not science of course, but neither is creationism. Reagan was a big fan, so Palin must approve.

During human history many people have believed that human sacrifices can appease the gods. Let's add some human sacrifice to our science curricula.

India and China, the future of humanity may now be upon your shoulders.