Obama – leading us out of the darkness and the torture chamber

I lived 8 years under the rule of Cheney and Bush Jr. The darkness began to lift when the Dems took the Senate, but now I’m blinking into a rising sun.

I’m mostly stunned (emphases mine) …

Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' | World news | The Guardian

Barack Obama embarked on the wholesale deconstruction of George Bush's war on terror, shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition, and calling for a new set of rules for detainees. The repudiation of Bush's thinking on national security yesterday also saw the appointment of a high-powered envoy to the Middle East.

Obama's decision to permanently shut down the CIA's clandestine interrogation centres went far beyond the widely anticipated move to wind down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year.

He cast his scrapping of the legal apparatus set up by Bush as a way for America to reclaim the moral high ground in the fight against al-Qaida.

"We are not, as I said during the inauguration, going to continue with the false choice between our safety and our ideals," Obama said at the signing ceremony. "We intend to win this fight. We are going to win it on our own terms."

In a sign of the sweeping rejection of the legal standards set by Bush, officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday said the new administration would not be guided by any of the opinions on torture and detainees issued by the justice department after 11 September 2001.

Instead, Obama, in three executive orders, renewed the US commitment to the Geneva convention on the treatment of detainees. All detainees will be registered by the International Committee for the Red Cross, in another departure of past practice under the Bush administration.

… Another order directs the CIA to follow the US army field manual on interrogations, which bars such techniques as waterboarding…

… Obama followed up the burst of activity on detention policy by announcing that his administration would put resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the top of his agenda, "actively and aggressively" seeking a comprehensive peace deal. As a sign of that intent, he confirmed that former senator George Mitchell, a veteran US mediator, would be his Middle East envoy…

In contrast to this great post from The Guardian, Minnesota Public Radio spent most of today butchering a confused story about the restoration of US funding for international family planning. Maybe they’re even more stunned than I am.

This is a good day. All of our traditional investments have been devastated, but our investments in Obama’s election have already paid off.

Now that Obama has done his part, our task is to support the creation of an American Truth Commission and international efforts to prosecute Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Bush.

PS. In honor of President Obama, after more than five years of posting, I’ve added the tag called “government” – now that we have one worthy of the name.

The new Whitehouse.gov -- now with a blog

As of this moment Google Reader was unable to parse the feed [1], but via Daring Fireball we now know of the White House blog …

EOP - Blog Post - Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov

Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov.

I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.

… Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:

Communication -- Americans are eager for information about the state of the economy, national security and a host of other issues. This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated…

Transparency – .. The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.

Participation – …we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

We'd also like to hear from you -- what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know…

[1] The blog feed is -  http://www.whitehouse.gov/feed/blog.aspx. I think they’re using their own platform. It doesn’t format as expected in WLW, so I think there are more problems than non-compliant feed announcement.

PC Chaos – the rise of the $150 Netbook

On the one hand, the rise of the Chinese batteries-not-included netbook.

On the other, the Great Recession and the threat of GD II.

The tech industry is being slammed, and Apple is not going to escape.

Emphases mine (note both Lenovo (mainland) and Acer (Taiwan) are Chinese corporations) …

Chaos Reigns in the PC Industry - NYTimes.com

… The major PC component suppliers –- companies like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, Seagate and Western Digital –- are reeling as hardware sales dry up. The credit crunch took its toll on business spending, then American corporations shut down in December in a bid to save money and now companies in China have halted their spending as the Chinese New Year approaches...

… In the fourth quarter of 2007, Acer held 9.5 percent of the PC market, while Lenovo held 7.5 per cent. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Acer boosted its stake of the PC market to 12.3 percent, while Lenovo dropped to 7.1 percent. Acer’s market share is now just 0.9 percentage points behind Dell, according to Gartner.

The rise of netbooks, a type of cheap, ultra-compact laptop, has helped spur Acer’s growth. Acer and its fellow Taiwanese PC manufacturer Asustek Computer have led the netbook market, while slower-to-act rivals waited to figure out if the products would enjoy wide interest.

In its fourth quarter, Intel reported a 50 percent surge in the sales of its [jf. low margin] Atom products, which go into netbooks, hitting $300 million in revenue…

.. The PC makers tried the light, compact laptop idea before with so-called ultra-mobile PCs. But it took better broadband connections, more online services and much cheaper PCs to really make the idea take off. Now the PC market may never be the same.

Broadband providers around the globe are expected to start giving away netbooks in exchange for commitments to wireless network services, Mr. Richard said…

PC makers sowed the winds with 27 years of prices suspended in mid-air. Now comes the hurricane. Microsoft is going to be hurt very badly, and Google’s chromestellation strategy could be a big winner.

Alas, there’s not much money in this for any PC hardware vendor – not even Acer. Only for those that sell components to Google.

I think this is why Apple showed nothing at MacWorld. Apple had a netbook years ago, they’ve got a netbook-in-waiting now. It’s time to see if they intend to play.

Update 1/22/09: As expected. Microsoft is not stupid, though Gates would have been more brutal. His great strength was an eagerness to shoot the lamed horse - past love be damned.

Nonbelievers. Now that's change.

Obama included "nonbelievers" in his list of "good peoples".

That's change.

He didn't pull a lot of punches. His audience didn't entirely love the bit about embracing science and technology effectively. He outlined what he's going to do pretty darned clearly.

I believe. Change is here.

Update: DeLong makes a plausible claim that we may now have the most capable reason-based government since ... well, at least 100 years. Maybe longer. I need to add the "enlightenment 2.0" tag to this post.

iMacs are expensive

We'd like to reorg our home office. That means I need at least the same computing capability in half the space.

The best way to do that is to ditch my 5 yo big-old XP box and monitor, and replace it with a 24" iMac that will run Fusion/XP and OS X, using the monitor as a 2nd display. (The 20" model has a joke-quality LCD that Apple should be flogged for selling.)

Problem is, that will cost me about $2,400 with appropriate RAM.

Or I could get a Mac Mini and forgo the 2nd display. There the price is quite good, but the memory capacity and processor speed are currently on the low side -- and rumor is that the next generation will sacrifice CPU to make the Mini smaller and cooler. Of course Apple will also drop the firewire connection, so performance will take another big hit.

I'd buy a more powerful Mac Mini that would sell for, say $800 base and $1000 or so with 4GB. I'd attach an external firewire hard drive and/or a NAS.

It's not that the iMac is all that more expensive than a similar Vista box, it's that Apple doesn't offer the package I want. This isn't the time to be buying a $2,400 computer that we don't desperately need ...

Update 1/27/09: I originally titled this "Macs are expensive". On reflection though, it's more true that the iMacs are expensive. The newly renovated plastic "low end" MacBook is suddenly quite a bargain.

True, it's very hard to find on Apple's site, but there is a page. An adequate CPU, firewire, big drive, NVIDIA graphics, external monitor, 4GB RAM capacity, did I mention firewire ... The general MacBook tech spec page claims it outputs up to 2560x1600 external video -- sufficient to drive some 30" monitors ...

Update 3/3/09: Not any more! Evidently Apple agreed with me. A price drop from $2,400 to $1,500 is damned aggressive.

Performance-based compensation and novel financial instruments: an explosive combination

Econbrowser draws a connection between known problems with performance-based compensation, given to CEOs to “align” their interests with those of shareholders, lack of regulatory oversight, and financial innovation (emphases mine) …

Econbrowser: Executive compensation

… That the incentives for CEOs need not necessarily coincide with those of the shareholders is a well understood phenomenon that is a special case of what economists call the principal-agent problem. This arises in situations when an agent (in this case, the CEO) has better information about what is going on than the principals (in this case, the shareholders) who rely on the agent to perform a certain task. One way to try to cope with these problems of asymmetric information is to tie the agent's compensation directly to performance.

What caused that principle to go so badly awry in the present instance? I believe there was an unfortunate interaction between financial innovations and lack of regulatory oversight, which allowed the construction of new financial instruments with essentially any risk-reward profile desired and the ability to leverage one's way into an arbitrarily large position in such an instrument. The underlying instrument of choice was a security with a high probability of doing slightly better than the market and a small probability of a big loss. For example, a subprime loan extended in 2005 would earn the lender a higher yield in the event that house prices continued to rise, but perform quite badly when the housing market turned down. By taking a leveraged position in such assets, the slightly higher yield became an enormously higher yield, and while the game was on, the short-term performance looked wonderful. If the agent is compensated on the basis of current performance alone, and the principal lacks good information on the exact nature of the risks, the result is a tragically toxic incentive structure…

In point form then the contributing factors were:

1. the well known principal-agent problem
2. poorly designed performance based compensation (an attempt to mitigate the principal-agent problem, but the time scales are not aligned)
3. leverage without regulatory oversight
4. novel financial instruments with a no more than average* (probably below average when expenses are incorporated) expected value but a skewed probability distribution – so there was a high probability of slightly above average returns and a low probability of catastrophic failure

It’s a persuasive argument, consistent with Lewis and Einhorn on repairing the financial world, Lewis (again) reporting on the “end of Wall Street” and Henry Blodget writing for the Atlantic – Why Wall Street Always Blows It.

My take away lessons are:

1. We need to be very careful with performance based compensation. The problem isn’t that it’s not an effective incentive, the problem is that it’s too effective an incentive. The physician “pay for performance” crowd should pay attention to this, but they won’t.
2. We need regulatory oversight. Yeah, we knew that.
3. Novel financial instruments, whether they provide new ways to skew probability (2008), or new forms of leverage (1929), need to set off red flashing lights and screaming alarms in the Treasury, Congress, the White House and the Federal Reserve. Our government and regulatory agencies need to be doing continuous “war gaming” about how new technologies will transform finance, and constantly about how to avert future catastrophic scenarios.

See also:

1. Jumping the canyon of Great Depression II
2. Stimulus and the scale of under-utilized global productive output
3. Lewis and Einhorn: repairing the financial world
4. The role of the deadbeats
5. Complexity collapse
6. Disintermediating Wall Street
7. The future of the publicly traded company
8. Marked!
9. Mass disability and income skew
10. The occult inflation of shrinking quality
11. You get what you pay for. The tragedy of the incentive plan.

* In this sense “average” refers not to the averaging over the lifespan of the instrument, but rather all the probable outcomes – an expected value calculation really.

Obama falls for the Jena meme

Not Obama's best speech line ...

Obama Addresses Homophobia, Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia Among Black Americans | The New York Observer

... We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others...

Except the Jena story wasn't that simple. Wikipedia provides excruciating detail.

The speech would have been better without that line ...

Obama knows what he’s doing – calming the right …

I didn’t like the Warren choice, but I’ve been worried about culture shock on the right. Maybe Obama, who is perhaps a bit better at politics than I am, has been worried too. Maybe he’s been trying to calm their anxieties.

Maybe it’s working …

In McCain Country, Acceptance of Obama Grows

… In interviews in the week leading up to Mr. Obama’s inauguration, many people here said a tolerant spirit toward his presidency has been hastened, paradoxically, by some of the same groups that voted mostly Republican in the election. Those include active or former military personnel, and people who identify themselves as evangelical Christians, two groups with traditions of respecting hierarchical order and strong leadership…

… Leonard Nelson, 63, a 23-year veteran of both the Army and the Navy, said he had voted for Mr. McCain mainly through military fealty, believing that Mr. McCain’s own military record would make him a better commander in chief.

“But I’ve come to think the better man won,” said Mr. Nelson, owner of the Humidor Cigar Shop, an aromatic haven of pipes, blended tobaccos and customers on a first-name basis. Mr. Nelson said that Mr. Obama, through his cabinet selections, sent a signal of centrist government intention that feels all right to him.,,

… At one of the city’s biggest evangelical megachurches, Victory Christian Center, with 17,000 members, there were also mixed messages of enthusiasm.

The church’s pastor and founder, Billy Joe Daugherty, said that the selection of the Rev. Rick Warren, a prominent evangelical minister from California, to give the inaugural invocation went a long way to easing fears in Mr. Daugherty’s mostly conservative congregation about a liberal social agenda…

“What I’m sensing from Obama in making the choice he did — he’s saying to all groups, ‘Why don’t we come together?’ ” Mr. Daugherty said in an interview…

When Bush “won” in 2000, he acted as though he’d won by Obama’s 2008 margin. Obama, who really did win big, behaves like he just squeaked by and needs every vote.

What’s next, a visit to Limbaugh?

We don’t deserve this President, but I’ve never been in favor of getting what we deserve.

I find this all very hard to believe …

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 ...