Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams

This afternoon I went through an aneurysm-stressing experience related to Aetna's management of my employer's flexible spending account.

The details of this particular screw-up don't matter, I'll just pick on Aetna because, well, they have the voice menu system from Hell. Really though, it's the incentives, not the company.

The trick is understanding how Flexible Spending Accounts work in the US. Participating employees predict their spend in qualified programs (dependent care, health care) and set aside a portion of regular earnings to cover the costs. The amount spent is not subject to payroll tax.

The catch is the what happens to any unspent funds.. Employers get to keep 'em. I am willing to bet that, somehow, someway, the FSA administrator also benefits from unspent money.

Now here's where it gets interesting. The plan administrator and employer are clearly incented to make the claims process as problematic as possible -- but they don't have to actually do anything bad to get their money. In fact, they don't have to do anything at all.

They can let "nature" take its course. It's like gardening. Weeds are the easiest things to grow; you just have to let entropy work its magic.

Benefit systems, particularly those involving low bid outsourced companies,have a lot of complex moving parts. It's natural for things to go wrong, for communications to be forgotten, for software bugs to flourish. In fact, it takes a lot of money and effort to make the system work.

Companies with perverse incentives don't have to create scams, they simply have to let entropy build a dysfunctional system. They even don't have to know how it's built or how it works or even that it's in operation, they can still reap the rewards of an emergent scam.

It's a lesson worth remembering. Don't participate in complex systems with perverse incentives; you can't beat Mother Nature.

The case for kicking the can down the road

Paul Krugman, who's got a relatively good record of understanding the American economy, feels the Obama plan is too modest ....

Krugman - Failure to Rise - NYTimes.com

... So far the Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis is all too reminiscent of Japan in the 1990s: a fiscal expansion large enough to avert the worst, but not enough to kick-start recovery; support for the banking system, but a reluctance to force banks to face up to their losses. It’s early days yet, but we’re falling behind the curve.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

There’s still time to turn this around. But Mr. Obama has to be stronger looking forward. Otherwise, the verdict on this crisis might be that no, we can’t.

Politics is the art of the possible. One reason to kick the can down the road is that there's no choice -- the GOP's Marketarian religion and the makeup of the US Senate means this is the best politics can do. If more members of the Party of Limbaugh leave the Senate then we can do more.

Another reason, however, is that we don't know what's going on.

I think both are good reasons to kick the can, but the second, of course, is more interesting. I'm old enough to know my strengths and weaknesses, and to have a pretty good understanding of what humans more talented than I are capable of. From that I'm reasonably confident that even someone with the extreme talents of, say, Richard Feynman, couldn't fully understand the causes and interactions driving the Great Recession.

Heck, people are still trying to fully understand the Great Depression, and that world was very simple compared to ours.

We're boldly going where no "man" has gone before.

I would not be shocked, if, six months from now, the Dow is over 10,000 and home prices are up 10%. On the other paw, I would not be surprised if, ten years from now, we are as shattered as post-WW II England.

I suspect I'm not alone in my thoughts. Maybe Geithner came across as uncertain because, really, nobody should be certain today.

So we've kicked the can. In six months we kick it again. Maybe 70 years from now we'll understand today's collapse -- even as we contemplate the post-human economic crisis of 2079.

How I'd save the New York Times

Henry Blodget has been tracking the collapse of the New York Times for a few months. Among other things he recommends they adopt the pay policy of the WSJ (the WSJ evolved this policy over time) ...

Save The New York Times - Henry Blodget - (NYT)

We are proposing that the New York Times do what the Wall Street Journal does, which is run a hybrid subscription-free business:

• Many news stories are available for free at WSJ.com every day. So much so that the site's direct, non-subscriber traffic is meaningful and impressive.
• ALL of the WSJ's content is indexed by, and available through, Google and other search engines. Most people don't understand this, but it is critically important. The WSJ's paid content is NOT hidden behind a firewall. It is available for free, all over the web, on a story by story basis.
  
• Many sites have deals with the WSJ where they can link to WSJ's content and have their readers read it for free. This encourages bloggers and other publications to include the WSJ in the conversation economy.
  
• The only WSJ content that web searchers and readers CANNOT access are the full navigation pages of WSJ.com. Put differently, only subscribers can read The Wall Street Journal. Non-subscribers have to settle for reading the occasional Wall Street Journal story when they happen to encounter it.

I used to pay just to read Krugman, so I know I'd pay as long as the price wasn't insane.

I'm atypical though. They need something more.

The Encyclopedia Britannica online charges about $70 a year for full access. The NYT should buy/partner with the EB and the World Book. For $70 a year customers would get full access to the NYT, full access to the article archives, and full access to the Encyclopedia Britannica and the World Book Encyclopedia. NYT articles would routinely leverage the content of the encyclopedias.

Put this way, it looks like a bargain -- an easy sell for families with school aged children.

No, really, it was easy. Glad to have helped. Ok, if you insist, we'll accept 10 years of free subscriptions ...

The Economist – an update on the Great Recession

I liked this relatively readable yet detailed summary of the State of the Great Recession. Emphases mine.

America's crisis in a historical context | Worse than Japan? | The Economist

… Japan endured a decade of economic stagnation, whereas South Korea returned to growth within two years of its 1997 banking disaster.

Received wisdom holds that policy choices determined the pace of recovery. Sweden rebounded quickly because it acted fast: removing dud assets from banks’ balance-sheets, recapitalising weak banks and nationalising where necessary. Japan stalled for a decade because it took years to recognise the scale of its mess…

… the history of bank failures suggests that Japan’s slump was not only the result of policy errors. Its problems were deeper-rooted than those in countries that recovered more quickly. Today’s mess in America is as big as Japan’s—and in some ways harder to fix.

This crisis, like most others in rich countries, emerged from a property bubble and a credit boom. The scale of the bubble—a doubling of house prices in five years—was about as big in America’s ten largest cities as it was in Japan’s metropolises. But nationwide, house prices rose further in America and Britain than they did in Japan (see first chart). So did commercial-property prices. In absolute terms, the credit boom on top of the housing bubble was unparalleled. In America private-sector debt soared from $22 trillion in 2000 (or the equivalent of 222% of GDP) to $41 trillion (294% of GDP) in 2007 …

Judged by standard measures of banking distress, such as the amount of non-performing loans, America’s troubles are probably worse than those in any developed-country crash bar Japan’s. According to the IMF, non-performing loans in Sweden reached 13% of GDP at the peak of the crisis. In Japan they hit 35% of GDP. A recent estimate by Goldman Sachs suggests that American banks held some $5.7 trillion-worth of loans in “troubled” categories, such as subprime mortgages and commercial property. That is equivalent to almost 40% of GDP…

… Administratively, today’s crisis is far more complex than it was in countries where the clean-ups are presently being praised. In Sweden’s highly concentrated banking system, one firm—Nordbanken—accounted for a quarter of all loans. The government dealt with a big part of the problem by taking over two banks. America’s finance industry is more diffuse. Even after a wave of government-induced consolidation, there are at least a dozen systemically important commercial banks.

More important, Sweden’s much-praised bad banks, into which the government shovelled troubled loans, dealt with straightforward credit backed by clear collateral. Even then the success was unusual. According to the IMF, asset-management companies were set up in 60% of banking crises, but were generally “ineffective”. That seems more likely today when the complexities of securitisation have left “toxic assets” that range from pools of car loans to fiendishly complex collateralised-debt obligations, which are much harder to unravel, value and manage.

What is worse, today’s bust is not just about banking. America faces twin financial crashes (as, to a lesser degree, do other Anglo-Saxon countries): one in the regulated banking sector and a simultaneous collapse of the “shadow banking system”, the universe of hedge funds and investment banks responsible for much of the recent securitisation boom as well as for the sharp rise in financial leverage.

As a result, standard measures of banking distress, such as the level of non-performing loans, understate the contractionary pressure. So far most of the credit collapse in America has come from the demise of securitisation. In 2007, for instance, $668 billion of non-traditional mortgages were securitised. Last year that figure dropped to $40 billion. Rapid deleveraging outside traditional banks also means that cleaning up banks’ balance-sheets may not break the spiral that is driving down asset prices and stalling financial markets. As the lower chart shows, financial-sector debt was the fastest-growing component of private-sector debt in recent years. Many of those excesses are being unwound at warp speed.

A final difference between today’s bust and most other big banking crises is the importance of household debt.

…  Household balance-sheets are more difficult to restructure than corporate ones, which involve far fewer people. Politically, the process raises questions of fairness. How far, for instance, should taxpayers bail out reckless homeowners who bought mortgages they could not afford? On the other hand, the economic dislocation from unwinding a household-debt binge may be less disruptive than restructuring swathes of firms. As Anil Kashyap of the University of Chicago points out, one reason Japan was so loth to acknowledge the depths of its banking problems was the knowledge that a banking clean-up would require a large-scale restructuring of Japanese firms which, in turn, would throw many people out of work. Restructuring household debts may be political dynamite, but it would not require a wholesale remaking of corporate America.

Nonetheless, the rebuilding of American households’ balance-sheets is likely to force a reliance on government demand that is bigger and longer-lasting than many now imagine. In the aftermath of Japan’s bubble, firms spent more than a decade paying down debt and rebuilding their balance-sheets. This sharp rise in corporate saving was countered by a drop in the savings rate of Japanese households and, most importantly, by a huge—and persistent—increase in budget deficits.

A similar dynamic will surely play out in America’s over-indebted households. With their assets worth less and credit tight, people will be forced to save much more than they used to. The household saving rate has risen to 3.6% of disposable income after being negative in 2007. For much of the post-war period it was around 8%, and in the short-term it could easily exceed that. But, whereas dis-saving by Japanese households countered the corporate balance-sheet adjustment, American firms are unlikely to invest more while consumers are in a funk. Propping up demand may therefore require more persistent, and sustained, budget deficits than in Japan.

Add all this together and the ease with which American policymakers dismiss Japan’s experience is probably misplaced. Japan’s outcome—a decade in which growth averaged 1% a year and gross government debt rose by 80 percentage points of GDP—was not one to be proud of. But given the magnitude of today’s mess, it may soon seem not that bad after all.

Health Wars II: The lies of "Betsy" McCaughey

I've already received emails inspired by McCaughey's latest ploys.

Health Wars II have begun.

James Fallows warns us to watch for the name McCaughey (emphases mine) - and for the reemergence of amoral journalism ...

Let's stop this before it goes any further - James Fallows

... The award for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" for the 2000s, so far, goes to Dick "no doubt" Cheney...

My nominee for the winner in the 1990s would be Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. At various stages in her career she has been a banker, a Republican politician, and a staffer at conservative think tanks, but she entered the public stage in the mid-1990s in the guise of a dispassionate, independent researcher who considered it her duty to inform the American public about the dire threats it faced. Come to think of it, that is more or less the guise Cheney took in warning about the threat from Iraq.

In McCaughey's case, the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction was the original Clinton Health Reform plan. In 1994 she wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass.

After the jump, a passage from my 1995 Atlantic article "A Triumph of Misinformation" about McCaughey's article and its effects. More on this topic in my 1996 book Breaking the News -- and especially about why sloppy press coverage did as much to thwart health-care reform under the Clintons as it did to bring on the Iraq war under Cheney and Bush.

Why bring this up now? Because McCaughey has sprung up again to "reveal" another hidden danger in another Democratic administration's plans. Buried inside the new stimulus bill, she has discovered, are new big-brother tactics similar to those she warned against years ago. In a recent Bloomberg.com opinion column she wrote:

.. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective....

NCIT is not new, last time I looked it had to do with IT standards. (You can imagine the way it's pronounced, for a while we had several CIT groups, including "ONCIT" and "OhCHIT". Ok, maybe not the latter.)

This time, no free pass for McGaughey. She earned her rep.

Why we should hope CEOs quit - Tom Peters and more

Tom Peters is an establishment management guru. He's not on the scale of the true greats like Machiavelli or Sun Tzu[1], but he's at least in the middle tier.

So his take on executive compensation is noteworthy ...

Op-Ed Columnist - Escaping the Bust Bowl - Kristof - NYTimes.com

... Tom Peters, a management expert, suggests capping the pay of C.E.O.’s receiving bailouts at that of a four-star general. As for the concern that the executives would quit, who cares? Mr. Peters writes that if all the top executives of the Fortune 500 companies were exiled to Elba, “performance of their companies would not on average deteriorate.”...

CEO compensation is the inverse of the zero-bound problem that confounds fiscal policy and produces perverse (high institutional risk) but logical (highest expected return) behaviors in financial managers and bank traders (Paul Wilmot, NYT). CEO compensation has reached the upper-bound limit of what used to be called "f-you money" -- the $30 million plus personal wealth that makes employment optional.

So CEOs don't need their jobs. They work extremely long hours because they adore their work - for reasons that are good and not so good. If you reduce their compensation, so they're now falling down the power curve, many of them will quit.

Then what happens?

I'm betting Peters is right, in part because I don't think CEOs are "selected" on the basis of excellence in leadership or judgment. I suspect that if a large majority of CEOs of publicly traded companies were to take early retirement that corporate performance would be unchanged or improved.

That may be what we have to do to eliminate the upper bound problem.

[1] Update: Ok, confession time. I added Sun Tzu because I was influenced by the opinion of others. My bad. I've since read it; Machiavelli stands alone. In modern times I still like 'Reengineering the Corporation' even though it got quite a bad rep later, and I like 'The Innovator's Dilemma' (but not later, much weaker, "Innovator's Solutions" book). and 'Getting to Yes'.

On books, history and the Kindle

"If humans could learn from history, there wouldn't be so much of it."

me

“Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.”

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com

History is to the past as Moby Dick is to "Fought whale. Lost.". Even if it's true as stated, it's necessarily a radical reduction. Anyone who's read a book of another era, or visited the NYT archives,  feels the wonder of untold stories. Jim Stogdill has written an excellent essay, inspired by the Bezos quote, on history and books ...

The Kindle and the End of the End of History - Jim Stogdill O'Reilly Radar

... I had been doing some research this morning and was reading a book published in 1915. It's long out of print, and may have only had one printing, but I know from contemporary news clippings found tucked in its pages that the author had been well known and somewhat controversial back in his day. Yet, Google had barely a hint that he ever existed. I fared even worse looking for other people referenced in the text. Frustrated, I grabbed a 3x5 card and scribbled:

"Google and the end of history... History is no longer a continuum. The pre-digital past doesn't exist, at least not unless I walk away from this computer, get all old school, and find an actual library."

My house is filled with books, it's ridiculous really. They are piled up everywhere. I buy a lot of old used books because I like to see how people lived and how they thought in other eras, and I guess I figure someday I'll find time to read them all. For me, it's often less about the facts they contain and more about peeking into alternative world views. Which is how I originally came upon the book I mentioned a moment ago.

The problem is that old books reference people and other stuff that a contemporary reader would have known immediately, but that are a mystery to me today - a mystery that needs solving if I want to understand what the author is trying to say, and to get that sense of how they saw the world...

It's not the pre-digital past that seems increasingly blurred and lost, it's the pre-Google past. Much of the early computer era, even the early Internet era, is think on the net.

Lovely essay. I wish both Amazon and Google, with similar missions to bring knowledge the world, great success.

Google's ActiveSync license - interesting

Google, I am your servant. Google has saved my iPhone from a heel grinding. As of today I have Push connection to five of our family calendars (Contacts are up next), and I didn't even need Microsoft to pervert the platform.

Pound sand, MobileMe.

Cough. Ok, so I did need a bit of Microsoft. Specifically, their ActiveSync monopoly (PalmPre). I figured this cost Google a fortune ...

Google licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft for this. I assumed they'd cloned it. I wonder what a ten million user license of ActiveSync costs? I don't imagine Microsoft gave Google much of a discount. It's an amazing testimony to the power of Microsoft's Exchange monopoly, and a marker for how serious Google is about making this work.

Ahh, but not so fast. Betanews has a different angle (emphases mine) ...

Google Sync made possible through patent license with Microsoft | Betanews

...[Google] licensed Exchange Server patents from Microsoft, in a deal that company is describing today as an "open" license.

This morning, Google launched its initial beta for a contacts synchronization service that enables individuals to share information for up to five mobile calendars and three e-mail addresses between devices, including iPhone, S60, BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson, and Windows Mobile phones. If that list sounded familiar, it's because their manufacturers are all on the patent licensing agreement list announced by Microsoft last December 18

Today, Google officially joined that list, though obviously because its beta has already been launched, its agreement with Microsoft must already have extended back at least several months.

Whether due to the evolving state of the market, the increasing demands by consumers for interoperability, the increasing threats from the European Commission, or a combination of these factors, Microsoft has steadily been increasing the availability of its technology, including to competitors. One of the most crucial of the protocols being opened up is Exchange ActiveSync, which Microsoft's own Exchange Server 2007 uses to maintain contact information, e-mail distribution, and point-of-presence between networked PCs and mobile devices.

It's easily the most effective synchronization protocol going, and has become the de facto standard. So Microsoft is under increased pressure to avoid being characterized as non-competitive or unfair with regard to one more standard upon which the world's businesses rely, which is also under its complete control.

Under Microsoft's current policy, the use of APIs to communicate with a system using one of its protocols, does not require a patent license. But serving up the protocol for yourself under your own brand name does require one, and that's what Google Sync does...

I wonder what's in the patent. I suspect it might include things like the definition of a "Contact" -- such as the data model.

It's also clear that Google isn't running a humungous version of Exchange Server -- they licensed the patents, they didn't buy Microsoft's software. Maybe this didn't cost them as much as I'd imagined.

I think we all owe the European Union a big "thank you" for forcing Microsoft to relinquish effective control of Exchange Server. This also suggests that BlackBerry is not as vulnerable to Microsoft's direct action as I'd imagined.

Now, on to sorting out my Contacts so I can, for the first time ever, have a unified contact set. More on that later ...

Update 3/4/09: In comments Leaskovski refers to the interesting example of "Z-Push", an open source project:

... Z-push is an implementation of the ActiveSync protocol which is used 'over-the-air' for multi platform ActiveSync devices, including Windows Mobile, iPhone, Sony Ericsson and Nokia mobile devices. With Z-push any groupware can be connected and synced with these devices...

... Open source Z-Push enables any PHP-based groupware package to become fully syncable with any ActiveSync-compliant device.

Being an opensource project under the GPL, it allows developers to add their own backend so that Z-Push can communicate with their groupware solution.

Currently, Z-Push is available with four backends: the IMAP and the maildir backend for e-mail synchronisation, the vCard backend for contact synchronisation and one for the Zarafa package which allows full synchronization of E-mail, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. We expect that other backends arise in the near future as the opensource community gets the grips with the new possibilities....

Great project. I sure hope they succeed and I'll keep my eye open for z-Push news. Unfortunately Source Forge hasn't heard about feeds :-). Maybe one day.

It's interesting to watch the emergence of de facto standard data models driven by the need to support synchronization (a very demanding master). There are lessons aplenty for health care standards (HL-7 RIM, etc).

The case that Obama has been naive (via Krugman)

I'd assumed that Obama, a Chicago pol, was cynical smart, and all this "bipartisan" stuff was just chaff to distract the enemy.

Krugman says otherwise, and he claims evidence (emphases mine) ...

Paul Krugman - The Destructive Center - NYTimes.com

... how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan...

Wow. The administration really expected support from the Party of Limbaugh?! They weren't just putting up a smokescreen?!

How the heck did such a naive group win the election?!

I assume they're better informed now.

Update: Emily doesn't buy it. She thinks the "80 seat" leak was another layer of deception, intended to make the GOP think that Obama's team were a bunch of naive rubes. She's convinced they're deeply steeped in darkest devilish evil. I certainly hope so!

Google is the net

When Google is having technical problems (as in this morning) the net feels slow.

That's because, for me, Google is a lot of the net I use - search, Reader, Gmail, Apps, etc.

I'm not the only one (emphases mine):

Coding Horror: The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

... Now that Stack Overflow has been chugging right along for almost six months, allow me to share the last month of our own data. Currently, 83% of our total traffic is from search engines, or rather, one particular search engine:

Search Engine
Visits

Google
3,417,919

Yahoo
9,779

Live
5,638

...

AltaVista
202

...

Those 6x and 8x numbers that Rich quoted two years ago seem awfully quaint now. Google delivers 350x the traffic to Stack Overflow that the next best so-called "search engine" does. Three hundred and fifty times!..

The shocking thing is that AltaVista still exists! They were the first truly useful search engine, and their fate should forever crush talk of "first mover advantage". I was an early adopter of AV, and I remember the day I gave them up for Google.

Consider this. For the the elite Geeks that visit CH ...

• Google/Live = 600
• Live/AltaVista = 30

I like Google. In terms of doing things that help me, the rank of software companies in my life is basically Google >>> Apple/Microsoft (tied, and Windows 7 might push Microsoft ahead). Still, a wee bit of competition would be good for everyone.

Why we may buy Kindle 2

Not for us, for my mother who has macular degeneration and limited vision ...

Amazon.com: Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation): Kindle Store...

... Kindle's high-resolution screen now boasts 16 shades of gray...

... Kindle has six adjustable font sizes to suit your reading preference. Now every book in your library can be large print.

... Kindle can read to you. With the new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you. You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free. You can choose from both male and female voices which can be sped up or slowed down to suit your preference...

They only have six adjustable font sizes, so I don't think that's different from Kindle 1. I was hoping they'd go to seven or eight sizes, but really I need to test with my mother.

Imagine: How and why Microsoft should pervert the iPhone

Imagine we lived in an alternate reality where Apple didn't forbid applications that competed with its iPhone suite. Yes, I know it's hard. History was very different in that universe. Maybe Jobs achieved true spiritual enlightenment a few years back, and the alternative-Apple's board wasn't able to fire him.

In that reality, like here, former Palm geeks were fed up with Apple's PIM/PDA services and current BlackBerry users snorted their coffee when contemplating the iPhone ...

Gordon's Notes: The straw that broke my iPhone love

... What makes this straw a back breaker is not simply that iPhone calendaring is pathetic, it's that Apple forbids alternatives. Even on OS X there are a few alternatives to Apple products, but on the iPhone only Apple can use the USB cable, and vendors are explicitly forbidden to distribute alternatives to Apple's core applications. On the iPhone it's Apple's Calendar.app, or it's nothing.

It's a bad story, and, short of a revolution in Apple's attitude, it's not going to get better. Astonishingly, the Apple iPhone and MobileMe have made me miss the old Microsoft.

So I've stopped recommending the iPhone to others anyone who needs at least PalmPilot 1994 functionality, and I won't be replacing my wife's (miserable) BlackBerry Pearl with an iPhone...

In this alternate reality, Dr Doom Microsoft can be a dark hero.

Microsoft Outlook is an ugly mongrel of ancient code, but it spanks iCal and Address Book. So imagine if Microsoft were to create an iPhone calendaring, task, contact and memo suite tied to Outlook, Entourage, Exchange Server and their newest incarnation of Windows Live.

Consider the advantages for Microsoft

• They'd have a great weapon against RIM (BlackBerry)
• They could charge $50 an iPhone app and make a bit of change
• They'd bind more customers to Windows Live, which they could leverage to provide streaming music and video services (remember, in this alternate reality the iPhone is open to Apple's competitors). Maybe they start charging for a bundled streaming media and data store service and generate revenue there.
  
• Microsoft's iPhone address book could be used to tie customers to their messaging solutions, from email to instant messaging
• They'd make it very easy for customers to switch to Microsoft's phones since they'd have a simple data migration solution
• They'd have several tools to pry people from Google's calendaring, email, contacts, identity, pending telephony/video (GrandCentral) and, eventually, search solutions
• An iPhone/iTouch platform could be a part of Microsoft's Netbook response strategy.
  

In that bizarre reality, I'd be singing the praises of Lex Luthor Steve Ballmer.

Wow. Rescued by Microsoft. That's weird. I'm almost grateful it can't happen here.

American corruption and Obama's challenge

I usually discount predictions of American outrage. As near as I can tell, America has been seriously stoned for at least 8 years.

On the other hand, I feared Obama was another lost cause and that he would need to adopt the GOP's deceits to contend.

So maybe Rich has something here. He gets credit for smacking the media meme that Daschle's problem was taxes (emphases mine) ...

Frank Rich - Slumdogs Unite! - NYTimes.com

... In reality, Daschle’s tax shortfall, an apparently honest mistake, was only a red flag for the larger syndrome that much of Washington still doesn’t get. It was the source, not the amount, of his unreported income that did him in. The car and driver advertised his post-Senate immersion in the greedy bipartisan culture of entitlement and crony capitalism that both helped create our economic meltdown (on Wall Street) and failed to police it (in Washington). Daschle might well have been the best choice to lead health-care reform. But his honorable public record was instantly vaporized by tales of his cozy, lucrative relationships with the very companies he’d have to adjudicate as health czar.

Few articulate this ethical morass better than Obama, who has repeatedly vowed to “close the revolving door” between business and government and end our “two sets of standards, one for powerful people and one for ordinary folks.” But his tough new restrictions on lobbyists (already compromised by inexplicable exceptions) and porous plan for salary caps on bailed-out bankers are only a down payment on this promise, even if they are strictly enforced.

The new president who vowed to change Washington’s culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead. There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe...

Rich's reminds us that Geithner and Rubin are deeply embedded in the history of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; and that the banking connections run deep in Obama's organization. On the other hand, American history has many examples of insiders turning against tribe - with the the advantage of knowing where the skeletons are.

I hope Reich is write about a populist anger at America's high tide corruption though. We can't eliminate corruption in human government, but we can push it back to the lower range of history. To do that we'll need Senators like Al Franken rather than Norm Coleman, and we'll need an angry public to stay loud.

Krugman on the GOP's latest blow

The deal with the GOP "centrists", per Krugman:

What the centrists have wrought - Paul Krugman

...The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad...

The Party of Limbaugh strikes.

Oh, and the GOP's DeMint (South Carolina) wants to block any stimulus money going to walking and bicycle paths.

The POL is just bad to the bone.

Dyer - 5 new articles

Five more from Dyer (apologies for formatting):

The Cuban Revolution at Fifty

Thieves' Quarrel

Israeli Tail, American Dog (2)

SWISH, Obama and the Terrorists

Multi-racial Britain