Cheney is left to twist in the wind ...

Neither Libby, nor Cheney ...

Bush Commutes 2 Border Agents’ Sentences - NYTimes.com

... There had been speculation that President Bush would grant clemency to some high-profile defendants, but the White House official said the two ex-agents would be the last to benefit.

I. Lewis Libby Jr., former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, could have been granted a pardon for his role in the leaking of a C.I.A. agent’s name and an attempted cover-up. In July 2007, Mr. Libby’s prison sentence was commuted. Nor was there any clemency for former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who in late October was convicted of ethics violations for not reporting gifts and services given by friends. Mr. Stevens would lose his bid for a seventh term....

I don't think the Bush and Cheney families are talking any more.

Why I ignore Amazon's "helpful" ratings ...

I think this sort of thing is pretty common, even when it doesn't involve bribery ...

Slashdot | Belkin's Amazon Rep Paying For Fake Online Reviews

... recently discovered that Belkin's lead online sales rep, Michael Bayard, has been secretly paying internet users to review his company's products favorably on Amazon.com and other websites like Newegg, whether or not they've ever used the devices. Bayard instructed the people he was paying to 'Write as if you own the product and are using it... Mark any other negative reviews as 'not helpful' once you post yours.'..

I always read the negative reviews. I never bother with the "helpful" rankings because they're often obviously gamed.

I kind of figured this out when I realized that my positive Amazon reviews were always "helpful", but my negative reviews were often "not helpful".

Jumping the canyon of Great Depression II

I'm now working my way through lectures by James Shenton, part of a 1996 Teaching Company course on the History of the United States.

It's radically abridged history; stories of a thousand pages become a few sentences or nothing at all. Even then there's too much attention to the idiosyncrasies of various presidents, but Shenton changes gears when he gets the Great Depression. Things get vivid, perhaps because Shenton was born in 1928..

Sheton's lecture took place at the height of Clintonian prosperity, in the midst of the roaring 90s, near the time Greenspan warned of "irrational exuberance" (alas he changed his mind) and four years before the dot com crash of 2000. Shenton might have wondered if he was replaying the 1920s, but that doesn't come across in the lectures.

Listening in 2009 it's eerie hear him walk through the prelude to Great Depression I, and comparing his list to our our time.

• A culture of acquisition? Check.
  
• Stocks couldn't go down? Depends when date the start of our troubles. If we go with 2000 then that's true again, even in 2007 the "home prices never fall" meme was in play. (Of course home prices fell big time in GD I.)
  
• Income inequality? Check.
  
• Great dust bowl? Not here, but how about China?
• Exotic new financial instruments (margin buying)? Check (derivatives)
• Excessive consumer debt (installment buying)? Check (credit cards)
• Technological transformation (auto, electricity, radio)? Check (computer, net)
• Complexity collapse (Keynes)? Check.
• Collapsing banks? Not quite. This time we might have learned something.
• Deflationary spiral? That's the current worry.

So are we going to lose 50% of our GDP, face 25% unemployment and 25% underemployment?

I really don't think so. Yeah, the bridge is out, but the engineer is turbocharging the train engines. Maybe we'll get through the bank crisis and the deflationary crisis before massive unemployment hits -- meaning the train jumps the canyon.

If we make it across the canyon though, we'll have one hell of a clean-up job ahead.

Obama's going to need 8 years, and pray Reason the unreformed GOP doesn't make a comeback.

Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show

We live in numbing times. There's not much outrage left, we have to marshall what we have to deal with the Cheney/Bush torture program.

Still, lunacy like AT&T's recent bonehead move deserves at least a whimper or two (emphases mine) ...

AT and T Sends Customers ‘Idol’ Ads - NYTimes.com

Some AT&T Wireless customers have voted an emphatic no on a promotion for “American Idol” that popped up on their phones this week.

AT&T, a sponsor of the show, said it sent text messages to a “significant number” of its 75 million customers, urging them to tune in to the season premiere on Tuesday night...

... Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless, said the message was meant as a friendly reminder. “We want people to watch the show and participate,” Mr. Siegel said. He added, “It makes perfect sense to use texting to tell people about a show built on texting.”

... Mr. Siegel said the message went to subscribers who had voted for “Idol” singers in the past, and other “heavy texters.” He said the message could not be classified as spam because it was free and because it allowed people to decline future missives.

“It’s clearly marked in the message what you need to do if you don’t want to participate,” he said. “It couldn’t be more open and transparent.”

Richard Cox, the chief information officer for Spamhaus, a nonprofit antispam organization based in Britain, countered: “It’s absolutely spam. It’s an unsolicited text message. People who received it didn’t ask for it. That’s the universal definition of spam.”..

...Mr. Siegel of AT&T defended the use of the medium given that voting by text message had played a big role in “American Idol.”

“Text messaging is the perfect way for us to tell people about this wildly successful show and to watch it,” he said...

Mr. Siegel's soul has had a rather bad day. I hope he sends it out for some rehab. Being a spokesbot for AT&T can't be pleasant.

AT&T's cell phone spam attack is not as bad as SONY injecting malware into their customer's computers, but it still deserves a spark of outrage.

Ok, a feeble squib of outrage.

Still. Something.

Update 2/7/09: Gizmodo's comments.

American torture - what's next

Obama (praised be his name) is likely to define waterboarding as torture and pledge to follow the spirit of the Geneva convention.

So what do we do next about American torture?

Well, to get caught up with the matter, a few helpful references:

• The Torture Report NYT Editorial Dec 2008
• What do the Bushies and the Khmer Rouge share? - Nicholas D. Kristof
• Madness and Shame – Bob Herbert
• Why aren't Americans outraged? Friedman, Guardian

As to the last, we're not outraged because, frankly, our outrage engines have burnt out. At this point nobody would be shocked to discover that Cheney has a private dungeon full of missing people.

So we'll have to proceed without outrage. Panetta says it reasonably well (emphases mine) ...

Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation: Leon Panetta on Torture

... According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified in some circumstances. How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear.

Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock?

The simple answer is the rule of law. Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. It was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that. This new nation would recognize that every individual has an inherent right to personal dignity, to justice, to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment...

Admittedly, Panetta has rather naive view of American history, but I'll take it. Creation myths have their uses. At least he doesn't resort to the asinine tactic of including "torture doesn't work" as a reason to avoid it. That stupidity implies that if we came up with an effective way to torture then things would be simply peachy.

Next steps?

We need to support an American Truth Commission. We need to support international efforts to prosecute Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice. At the least they can be denied the comforts of Florence. We need to get the story out, and we need to write about it even when nobody wants to read about it.

Even with all the outrage worn out, we keep plodding along.

Eight years - among the worst

We've had some really bad presidents. I mean really bad.

Warren Harding was perhaps the very worst. He was completely unsuited to the job, but his friends made him look good by comparison. They stole and ruined a vast amount. It was a record of pillage, looting and waste that has stood for almost a century. But then came eight years of George Bush Jr (Frank Rich - NYTimes.com).

Wow. Rich has done a great job of summarizing an astounding record of greed, theft, and incompetence. It's easy to imagine that Bush was a Soviet "Manchurian candidate", programmed forty years ago to destroy America.

Except, of course, he couldn't have done it alone. He needed Cheney and GOP control of the House and especially the Senate.

The almost worst thing is, America reelected Bush. We stuck it to ourselves. The really worst thing is that we stuck it to the rest of humanity too.

Interview from the dark side of software

From Slashdot, a pointer the very best interview I've read in the past year.

It's the story of an extremely bright programmer who, step by step, walked beyond the limits of morality but just to the margins of the law. [Update: Or maybe well beyond the limits of the law. Via Schneier]

He's reformed now, but his look back at the software he wrote is amazing. There are clear indications of current wisdom ...

philosecurity - Interview with an Adware Author

.... Most things don’t have to be perfect. In particular, things involving human interactions don’t have to be perfect, because groups of humans have all these self-regulations built in. If you and I have an agreement and you screwed me over badly, you’ve always got in the back of your mind the nagging worry that I’m going to show up on your doorstep with a club and kill you. Because of that, people don’t tend to screw each other too much, right? At least, they try not to. One danger, perhaps, of moving towards an algorithmically driven society is that the algorithms aren’t scared of us showing up and beating them up. The algorithms will do whatever it is that they are designed to do. But mostly I’m not too worried about that....

The tech side is fascinating too. Nobody knows Windows like a black hat. I wonder how much this sort of story has informed the design of OS X 10.6 ...

Unexpected social good - a post on roaring fans

My tech blog posts are partly for my own use, and partly I'm trying to give back.

Sometimes it seems to work; some posts get very kind comments.

There's one, however, that really stands out.

An otherwise unremarkable May 2008 post on how badly written OS X print drivers cause howling, roaring, fans has earned me more “thank yous” than almost anything else I’ve done in the past few years.

Funny how that works.

China 2009 is about to become Japan 1986

So you’ve probably been thinking that after the last ten years we’re due for a respite. A bit of calm amidst the floating refuse of our crated life raft. It was a big waterfall for sure, but now we get to float for a while.

Then you hear the roar of the next cataract.

Very few people now remember than by 1986 Japan had just about finished off the American car industry and was about to conquer the American computing industry.

What'? You don’t remember the congressman taking a sledgehammer to a Japanese made IBM-clone?

I remember because my very first PC was an 8086 clone made by Panasonic. It was the most over-engineered device I’ve ever owned. It was built to last thirty years, and it cost less than the other clones on the market.

IBM, Compaq, and the like were terrified. Congress was appalled – America had lost the automobile*, now we were going to lose the computer too.

De facto “voluntary” quotas were enforced. Panasonic and other Japanese PC vendors left the desktop market. Dell became dominant.

Flash forward 23 years …

Chinese Electric Automaker Challenges Big Three

…Chinese car maker BYD Co. BYD developed an electric automobile that only costs consumers $22,000…

Gee, this feels familiar.

Wait until Chinese/Google “Chromestellation” netbooks start selling at Walmart for $124.99 (batteries not included).

Eeeeeeeyyyyyaaaaaaa …..

* The same set of “voluntary” quotas forced Japan to manufacture in the US, and also allowed GM, Chrysler and Ford time to more or less compete with Japan.

Guru-level air travel tips

I am a lowly travel worm, unworthy to learn the techniques of the travel Ninja (emphases mine) …

Being John Glaser 1/6/09

… Preventing the person in front of you from reclining their seat (Spilling soda on their head is minus 5 points. Pointing the air vent so that it blows on their head is plus 5 points.)…

… Stopping the person next to you from reading over your shoulder. (Saying “Read my stuff again and I’ll kill you” is minus 5 points. Turning the book/newspaper upside down and continue reading earns the contestant 5 points.)…

Captured via Jacob Reider’s Google Reader shared item list.

Google responds to CO2 emission criticisms

I don’t know the back story here, but clearly Google is sensitive to accusations of environmentally incorrectness. Their response is fascinating …

Official Google Blog: Powering a Google search

… Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don't reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

I think it would be interesting to compare Google search CO2 prediction to CO2 production from a 1 km walk.

2009 will be the year of machine translation

Speaking of the singularity, I've subscribed to my first foreign language blog, thanks to Google Reader's integrated machine translation services.

I've read a few predictions for 2009.

Here's mine.

This will be seen as the year that machine translation went mainstream.

The world's IQ is about to go up 10 points.

The press makes much of Apple and Palm's recent twitches, but those companies are dull as dust compared to Google. I don't think we grasp what's happening there.

Singularity watch: Google maps is now smarter than me

Mercifully, the Singularity seems to be receeding.

On the other hand, the days when I was smarter than Google Maps are now only a fond memory.

It's now clearly better than I am at finding routes through the Twin Cities. I've taken to checking Google Maps' recommendations on routes I routinely travel just to see where I shave a few minutes.

Barring a true global dacopalypse Google Maps is only going to get smarter, and barring a scary miracle I'm only going to get dumber. Our ships have crossed in the night.

I'm getting that old John Henry feelin'.

Health care reform. Be humble. Be afraid of the accounting rules.

We're going to change American health care again.

It would be good to learn from past mistakes. In particular it would be good to remember that accounting is terribly dull and terribly powerful, which means it's terribly dangerous.

Consider the way we account for ambulatory care today.

In the 1980s, when I was doing my family medicine training, the Feds wanted to encourage primary care physicians. They looked for a "fair" way to divert money from procedural specialties to primary care and came up with the "RBRVS" (emphases mine) ...

Resource-Based Relative Value Scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... RBRVS was created at Harvard University in their national RBRVS study from December 1985 and published on September 29, 1988. William Hsiao was the principal investigator who organized a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, which included statisticians, physicians, economists and measurement specialists, to develop the RBRVS.

In 1988 the results were submitted to the Health Care Financing Administration (today CMS) to be used in the American Medicare system. In December of the following year, President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989, switching Medicare to an RBRVS payment schedule. This took effect in January 1, 1992. Starting in 1991, the AMA has updated RBRVS continually. As of May 2003, over 3500 corrections have been submitted to CMS.

Physicians bill their services using procedure codes developed by a seventeen member committee known as the CPT Editorial Panel...

To implement the RBRVS rules an accounting system had to be developed. That accounting system is expressed as the rules for "Evaluation and Management" codes.

Who developed that accounting system?

The AMA.

Who funds and controls the AMA?

Surgeons and procedural specialists.

So the RBRVS, aimed at improving reimbursement for non-procedural work, was transformed into accounting rules by an organization dominated by proceduralists.

It worked about as well as one might expect. From the mid 1990s through 1999 the "E&M" rules went through 3 revisions amidst a bitter struggle between physician specialties. The controversy was so great that the 1999 rules were never implemented, and today variations of the 1995 and 1997 rules are both accepted.

The rules are, and I say this carefully, insane. I've designed expert system solutions that worked with the rules, and no human should ever have to think about them. The saving grace is that despite all the complexity and branches and calculations and summations and variations, there are only 3 likely code choices for the care of a particular patient. Physicians pick what feels right, knowing that they must be breaking the rules some of the time and so, on average, tending to bill a bit on the low side.

The worst effect, however, is how the accounting rules perverted primary care. The penalties for error are theoretically severe -- for a while the FBI devoted a special team to looking for cheaters. Physicians are required to document all that's done, and thus care was radically changed to focus on documentation of material of virtually no clinical value. The modern medical note is almost unreadable.

Lastly, since the accounting rules involve points for bits of the body examined, physicians are incented to spend too much time on rote and pointless examination and documentation, at the cost of thinking about a patient's needs and problems.

Primary care is in bad shape today. I wonder if William Hsiao has any idea what came of his original work. It's a beautiful example of the unintended consequences arising from accounting rules.

Let's try to remember the lessons of the RBRVS and the E&M coding story.

Accounting is dull, Accounting is terrible.

Be afraid of accounting.

Election turnout numbers: Highest in MN, GOP voters stayed home

My home state of Minnesota is just so darned fabulous ...

FactCheck.org: Is it true that 36 percent to 37 percent of eligible voters failed to vote in the recent presidential election?

... Minnesota ... had the highest voter turnout, at 77.8 percent. Hawaii and West Virginia are tied for the lowest turnout, with 50.6 percent each...

... Before Americans went to the polls on November 4, much was made in media reports about record levels of voter registration and high enthusiasm levels among the electorate. And while the 61.6 percent turnout number doesn't seem that impressive – in 2004, after all, 60.1 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot for the highest office – it is the highest turnout in the U.S. in decades. As the CSAE report says, "If the rate of voting exceeds 61.0 percent of eligibles, turnout will have been the highest since 1964."

But why was it not even higher? Republican turnout, according to CSAE, dropped, while Democrats voted in higher numbers. The percentage of those voting for the Republican presidential ticket dropped by 1.3 percentage points and those voting for the Democratic ticket went up by 2.6 percentage points from 2004. Curtis Gans, the center's director, said he, too, thought even more Americans would vote in 2008. "... we failed to realize that the registration increase was driven by Democratic and independent registration and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats...

The GOP voters stayed home, the Democrats came out, and we had a historic win with a small increase in overall turnout which was, still, high by historic standards.

Incidentally, I'm fine with a 60% turnout. As best I can tell about 40% of Americans have no idea what's going on, and far too many of them vote for people like Cheney/Bush. I'd rather they stayed home ...

Update 1/11/09: As noted in comments, MN has a special advantage -- we're not on the west coast. After PA was called west coast voting really fell off. So my comparison is a bit unfair ...