Obama's addiction is a problem

Obama has been unable to break his cigarette addiction.

Obama Noncommittal on Caroline Kennedy, and Smoking

...On another matter, Mr. Brokaw tried to clarify whether Mr. Obama has actually quit smoking, as he suggested.

The president-elect admitted to having “fallen off the wagon.”...

So he's sending money to Satan. This should please Philip Morris, maybe they'll send Obama some freebies.

He's not the first president with a substance problem of course, but at least Bush had put his aside.

I hope he finds a way to do better. It won't be the last of his clay feet of course, anyone insane enough to run for President has more problems than addiction.

This particular addiction, however, does make him a crappy role model for our kids. We'll need to reduce Obama's prominence in our household conversations.

PS. Although I think claims of liberal media bias are overrated, the careful skirting of Obama's cigarette problem does support a bias claim. Of course I didn't mention anything prior to the election, but I don't pretend to be unbiased.

Lower travel costs with VOIP, and is GrandCentral going to go live?

There are many ways to use VOIP, some leveraging Google's pre-beta GrandCentral service. It's taken about 14 years longer than expected, but we're finally moving to non-metered worldwide voice communication.

I've been using Google's GrandCentral with my iPhone's GrandDialer to phone my parents in Montreal. The call quality has improved dramatically in the past months, and the (still) free services is paying for my data plan.

The recent call quality improvements in GrandCentral suggest Google is going to stop using GrandCentral to cow the phone companies, and actually bring it to market. That won't help AT&T's numbers, and it might be the death blow for Sprint.

The unreliability of email - Apple MobileMe and Spamcop.net

Apple's been secretly blocking MobileMe email sent to spamcop.net.

So that desperate email for help your daughter sent you? She doesn't know you didn't get it.

Since Spamcop is a prime generator of anti-spam blacklists, Apple may be doing this for fear a MobileMe account bot will put me.com on a blacklist. If the covert block is policy rather than a bug, it's one more reason to despise Apple and pray for the success of the gPhone.

Other than the reinforcing the folly of trusting Apple, this (again) teaches us that email is an unreliable message stream. Adding silent outgoing mail blocks to false positive spam blocks is a straw tossed atop an already broken camel. Snail mail is significantly more reliable.

For my part, I've had a spamcop.net address for at least six years, but even before this happened I'd decided I needed to deprecate it. In a year or two I'll discontinue the account.

I'm deprecating my spamcop email in an effort to decrease the complexity, and thus increase the reliability of my email stream. The details are too tedious to describe here, but briefly I've decided I need a multi-mode signed sending address from a 900 pound gorilla domain (gmail.com basically), a single personal blacklist to maintain, a strong identity tie to email, and to eliminate redirects of incoming email. It helps that after a very long, hard, development path, Gmail's spam filtering is now very good.

Antidote to The Great Recession: A national small business generation service

Robert Reich's asks "Shall We Call it a Depression Now?" Brad DeLong says ... not yet.

It is looking rather bad though (Glurk! by DeLong):.

Rex Nutting of Marketwatch:

Payrolls plunge by stunning 533,000 in November: U.S. nonfarm payrolls plunged by an astonishing 533,000 in November, the worst job loss in 34 years, the Labor Department reported Friday. It's only the fourth time in the past 58 years that payrolls have fallen by more than 500,000 in a month. Since the recession began 11 months ago, a total of 1.9 million jobs have been lost. The unemployment rate rose from 6.5% in October to 6.7% in November, the highest jobless rate since October 1993...

Everytime I remark to Barry Eichengreen about the disjunction between the intensity of the financial crisis and its limited transmission to the real economy, he says "just wait." I guess we can stop waiting.

So call it the Great Recession for the moment.

In the Great Depression the solution to economic stall was World War II. That's like treating pneumonia with malignant melanoma. Let's not try World War III.

So we can do all the things that have been tried here or elsewhere, depending on how cooperative the rump of the GOP is.

That's good, but maybe we should try a few new things too.

Imagine a national small business generator. A web site built around a knowledge-base of tens of thousands of business plans. Plans for franchise businesses, plans for manufacturing, plans for service businesses. Plans for businesses that need a lot of startup money. Plans for businesses that need a credit card and a mega-Kiva (it's the US, not Uganda) microloan. Plans for all the things people need in bad times, and plans for the good times to come. Plans for business that write the business plans that go into the knowledge-base.

The plans are organized by pre-requisites. Some are tagged for special skills, others for grinding hard work. They come with packaged loans, like the ones the Small Business Administration already offers - and maybe with grants as well. They come with packaged legal infrastructure, and an expedited incorporation package that greatly simplifies current law - a kind of augmented LLC with simplified tax filing. IP protection, the whole nine yards.

Add an option to invest. So would-be investors can browse these small business startups, and choose which to invest in. Optional online skills based training, or sign up with the people who've just launched, you know, teaching businesses.

Most importantly, the plans are tied to a federal health insurance program, modeled after the Minnesota small-business plans available to any two people starting a business.

It's a web site of course.

So one day you're out of work.

Take a day off. Then go to the knowledge-base.

Login. Browse. Search. Compare some plans. Get some advice. Pick on, click, click, sign.

You're in business now. A grant to start. Health insurance. A loan.

It's not new. Similar programs have been very successful in developing nations. It's just a bit bigger.

It could be done.

The Guardian's bad advertising moment

I've been reading the Guardian ever since they went to full content on many of their feeds. Terrific paper, great innovation.

Unfortunately, the ads associated with feed adwords can be problematic.

For example, the feed for today's article on the illness of Thailand's King Bhumidol's illness in the midst of a grave national crisis was accompanied by this ad, just beneath the paragraph about the very popular Crown Princess ...



Big ouch.

Did I ever mention I once lived in the Bangkok's old Pradu Nam (water market)?

I wonder if there's a way to specify that some adword topics should be advertising free. So no ads for posts on Thailand, for example.

1 billion more IQ points

This is why I donate to CARE every year.

Op-Ed Columnist - Raising the World’s I.Q. - Kristof:

...When a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough iodine in her body, her child may suffer irreversible brain damage and could have an I.Q. that is 10 to 15 points lower than it would otherwise be. An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a needless loss of more than 1 billion I.Q. points around the world...

Occasionally in my travels I’ve been unnerved by coming across entire villages, in western China and elsewhere, eerily full of people with mental and physical handicaps, staggering about, unable to speak coherently.

I now realize that the cause in some cases was probably iodine deficiency...

CARE works on things like this.

I sometimes have to remind them once a year not to spam me or contact me, but some years they don't need a reminder. They have my email and contact information on a special "do not call" list.

No junk mail, no spam, no hassles. We send them a check every December.

Recommended.

How much wealth did the housing bust eliminate?

Did you guess $6 trillion?

Real balance effects (wonkish) - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

... Since I’m rushing off to class, let me do this from memory. Before the world went crazy, the US monetary base was about $800 billion. Suppose that the price level fell 20 percent. This would raise the real value of that base by $160 billion. Right there you can see the problem — the housing bust has wiped out something like $6 trillion of wealth; compare that with the effects of even a drastic fall in the aggregate price level....

Sure, it was never real. But .06 quadrillion dollars ain't nothing, even though it's a fraction of the .4-.5 quadrillion dollars now being deleveraged.

Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street. My God.

I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad.

Michael Lewis, who made his name writing about the once "wild" (now quaint) 1980 rogue market years, updates his story...

The End of Wall Street's Boom - Michael Lewis - Portfolio.com

... In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility...

...Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash...

...here’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1...

...In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he’d spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. “What most people don’t realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world,” he says. “The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market.”...

...But Lippman, along with traders at other Wall Street investment banks, had created a way to short the subprime bond market with precision...

... The big Wall Street firms had just made it possible to short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond by creating, in effect, a market of side bets. Instead of shorting the actual BBB bond, you could now enter into an agreement for a credit-default swap with Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs. It cost money to make this side bet, but nothing like what it cost to short the stocks, and the upside was far greater...

... Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody’s but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody’s were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. “But we’re sitting there,” Daniel recalls, “and he says to us, like he actually means it, ‘I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.’ And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, ‘What did you just say?’ as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him...

...The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities...

...when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”...

...No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.’s. I doubt any partnership would have sought to game the rating agencies or leap into bed with loan sharks or even allow mezzanine C.D.O.’s to be sold to its customers. The hoped-for short-term gain would not have justified the long-term hit...

I have only a few thoughts percolating in the general horror.

1. We need to close the rating agencies down. Now.
2. When you give 99% of the human race money and power, they cannot imagine that they don't deserve it. They are convinced they are brilliant. I know I would.
   
3. The part where shorting the bad loans with credit-default swaps enabled the generation of 'virtual' bad loans involving real money is mind-boggling.
4. I don't think this was caused by poor black people getting too many loans. Do you?
5. Compared to these people Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are bleedin' saints.
   
6. This really is a complexity collapse.

Update - see also:

1. Complexity collapse
2. Disintermediating Wall Street
3. The future of the publicly traded company
   

Update 1/3/08: Mr. Lewis writes a f/u essay for the NYT.

Kiss your Google Notebook good-bye

I sure hope you don't been, you know, using your Google Notebook ...

Google Cost Cuts Take The Company Away From Its Engineers (GOOG)

... Search sandbox SearchMash, virtual world Lively and Google Page Creator will soon be gone. Google Audio Indexing and Google Notebook could follow...

Axing Notebook will educate many about the limits of the Cloud.

I wonder how much Google makes from Picasa Web Albums. Now you don't suppose ...

The Dacopalypse continues.

New frontiers in the evolution of life

To me geologists are the greatest of detectives. They work from the tiniest bits of evidence, and painstakingly build their case.

I'd never have the patience.

The NYT profiles advances in geologistt's understanding of the early earth, along with implications for the evolution of life ...

A New View of the Early Earth, Thanks to Australian Rocks - NYTimes.com

... Genetic studies of current life support that notion, pointing to an organism that lived in a high-temperature environment as the last common ancestor. That does not mean that life started there, but that is almost certainly where survivors of the giant impacts would have huddled...

The evolution of earthly life has been problematic. We thought the earth dropped below the boiling point and, bang!, life happened.

Too fast. That's why scientists have tried to imagine how prebiotic chemistry could occur outside of the early earth, in the relatively benign environment of outer space.

If the new theories are right, earth cooled a lot sooner than thought, and the massive asteroid impacts of the time might have spared a few extremophiles. Life wouldn't have to reboot every time the oceans boiled.

The GM bail out: fund it with a carbon tax, a break-up, and new fuel efficiency standards

Robert Reich is on fire. He's got one great Keynes mini-bio post, and another on why it's absurd to make fuel-efficient car manfacture a GM bailout condition.

Happily, my tyrannic rule is no longer needed in the blessed reign of Obama. If I were tyrant, however, these would be my bail-out conditions:

1. Bail and break: Too big to fail means too big to live. Make breaking up GM a condition of the bail-out
2. Per Reich: industry must sign-on to new fuel efficiency standards.
3. Account for the bail-out monies through a carbon tax (not a gas tax directly).
   
4. Offset the carbon tax (the Great Recession is the wrong time to increase next taxes) with a large investment in public transit development and universal wireless internet access to diversify commuting-free employment.

The same terms would, of course, need to be offered to every automotive manufacturer, not just GM.

The power of blogs: Fords GM to drive to handout

I can't remember which of the blogs I read said that the US auto CEOs should have driven a hybrid instead of taking a private jet when begging for a bailout.

Now we learn ...

Ford Will Speed Green-Car Launches - WSJ.com

.... Mr. Mulally plans to drive a Ford Escape hybrid to Washington, where he and his GM and Chrysler counterparts are set to appear later this week...

Now that's power.

Too big to fail means too big to live

Another voice saying we need to fund a failing industry because GM is too big to fail ...

Toyota to cut bonuses 10% | Business | guardian.co.uk

... Earlier this week Carlos Ghosn, who brought Nissan back from the brink of bankruptcy when he became chief executive officer almost a decade ago, warned that car-makers faced massive job losses and urged governments in the US, Japan and Europe to come to their rescue.

'It is important for governments to finance industries that employ a lot of workers,' he told a symposium in Tokyo. 'The credit crunch has made it difficult to finance day-to-day operations.

'Job destruction will be massive in those countries that do not rapidly help the auto sector to finance itself. It will not be seen immediately, but in a few years.'...

Just like Citigroup was too big to fail.

It has occurred to many, many, people that "too big to fail" should also mean "too big to live".

Maybe the price of bailing out these industries should be to break them up into smaller pieces that aren't too big to fail.

Human pathogens attack their mosquito hosts

In medical school, about 250 years ago, I was very interested in comparative and evolutionary immunology.

How, I thought, could we hope to understand the human immune system without knowing how it evolved, and without comparing our strategies to those of very different animals?

Happily, at the time I was asking those questions, other people were studying them. Now, 24 years later, we're learning some amazing things.

This is new science. Until today I would have said mosquitoes mostly tolerated the human pathogens they carry ...

Bug vs. bug: How do mosquitoes survive deadly viruses unscathed?: Scientific American Blog

Why can mosquitoes carry deadly viruses without succumbing to them and live on to give humans West Nile, dengue fever, and a host of other fatal illnesses. According to new research, the insects' primitive immune systems recognize that the viruses are dangerous and slice the microbes' genetic material into harmless pieces....

... The prevailing theory had been that these viruses and mosquitoes lived in harmony. But entomologists found quite the opposite to be true. "We were shocked," lead author Kevin Myles told ScientificAmerican.com, "This had long been viewed as a very benign relationship."...

I take exception to the word "primitive" in the first paragraph. Why would there be anything "primitive" about the immune system of the modern mosquito. They've been evolving for a long time ...

Mumbai attacks - maybe not so expert

As expected, Schneier's analysis of the Mumbai attacks, is much better than anything from the mainstream media, including the WSJ, NYT or The Economist.

Blogs rule. Again.

Schneier makes several important points (read the post), but this one I'll call out (note the current count of attackers is 10) ...

... The attacks were surprisingly ineffective. I can't find exact numbers, but it seems there were about 18 terrorists. The latest toll is 195 dead, 235 wounded. That's 11 dead, 13 wounded, per terrorist. As horrible as the reality is, that's much less than you might have thought if you imagined the movie in your head...

Ineffective in quotes, perhaps. Mumbai is both unfathomably large and quite small. A family I personally know has lost several friends and colleagues.

The key point, which is not reassuring, is these young men accomplished the kind of devastation one might expect from healthy, ruthless, men with some military training and no particular desire to live. I suspect a suicidal team of SAS soldiers would have done far worse.

The thesis that these were not spy movie super-warriors is reinforced by the cooperation of the single barely adult captive (it pays to take these people alive):

Mumbai terror attacks: Rice calls for 'total transparency' from Pakistan | World news | guardian.co.uk

... Azam Amir Kasav, a 21-year-old Pakistani national who speaks fluent English, told interrogators his team took orders from 'their command in Pakistan', the investigators, speaking anonymously, told Reuters. The training was organised by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group and involved former members of the Pakistani army, they added...

If the US, EU and India can use this attack to force Pakistan to move against its internal terror network then this nightmare might be used to reduce future harm.

If Pakistan cannot act, then we will all have a better idea of what we're up against.

Update: Two incidents in Montreal, Canada, the 1989 Ecole polytechnique shootings (14 dead, 14 wounded) and the 2006 Dawson college shooting (19 wounded, 1 dead) are illustrative. In both cases the killers were mentally ill, had no particular military expertise, and used non-military weapons. Both killers committed suicide fairly early in their assault.

The city is not large or hard to navigate, and even in 1989 the police were experienced and well trained. Even so, the toll was considerable.

The fact that 18 survived the Dawson shooting, even two who had terrible injuries, is astounding and is credited to luck (of a dubious sort - it would be better luck not to be shot), superb emergency responses, the youthful vigor of the victims, the courage of bystanders, police strategies developed after the 1989 shootings, and a very well placed shot by one officer.

So there are things that can be done, but there are some vulnerabilities every modern city shares - from Mumbai to Montreal.