The lessons of 2002 - humility and expertise

The torture memos remind us of the terrible failure of American character in 2002. Krugman learned something then (emphases mine) ...

The defining moment - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

...The Bush administration was obviously — yes, obviously — telling tall tales in order to promote the war it wanted: the constant insinuations of an Iraq-9/11 link, the hyping of discredited claims about a nuclear program, etc.. And the question was, should you stand up against that? Not many did — and those who did were treated as if they were crazy.

For me and many others that was a radicalizing experience; I’ll never trust “sensible” opinion again.

My personal lesson was a little different. I now have far less respect for confident experts and expert consensus. There's an empirical basis for this skepticism - a confident famous expert is less reliable than a random choice. (Technically, this rule applies to Mr. Krugman, who is both confident and famous.)

After 2002 I put my faith in quiet experts who admit ambiguity and uncertainty.

Proof that Google is mortal - Gmail Contacts

When you read about Google's entrance exams, you're left with the impression the place is full of prodigies.

This is wrong.

The proof of Google's banality is the current version of Google Contacts, and particularly Google Contact Groups.

I swear that years ago Google's Gmail had a very simple UI for working with contacts. You could paste in a set of well formed email addresses and POOF you'd added Contacts into a Group.

Now you create the contacts one at time and then, one at a time, add them to a Group. Oh, unless you want to try Google's ultra-finicky CSV formatted import option.

This isn't just average software stupidity, this is Modern-Microsoft level stupidity (excluding, as always, the Windows Live Writer team). Stupidity infesting Google's flagship software product, a strategic product.

Google is made up of flawed mortals, just like Microsoft and everyone else. (Yes, including Apple. Remember MobileMe?)

Obama and Chavez - I like him better now than ever

I like The World's Greatest President (WGP) more now than when I voted for (and, more importantly, donated to) him.

Back then he was merely smart, a political prodigy who could use pigment to obscure his inner geekiness. Above all, he wasn't a member of the Torture Party of Limbaugh.

Now though ...

Cuddlin' With Evil / Obama shakes hands with people we're supposed to hate. Are we all going to die? (Morford)

... Obama was the leader to watch because he did that most rare of things among major world leaders: He listened. More than that, he heard. More than that, he did not insult, demean, degrade, patronize, scold. He shook hands and spoke cordially with everyone in the room, including supposed 'enemies' like Hugo Chavez, a clever pipsqueak of an America-hating media slut who is zero threat to the U.S. but who normally dominates the TV cameras anyway, but who was so disarmed by Obama's effortless, high-road calm that he suddenly had no footing, no audience, no stage from which to bluster and spit. Go figure.

As reported by the Miami Herald:

"[Obama] listened with an extraordinary patience, and he was intellectually elegant in his responses." - Chilean Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez

"I can't recall a U.S. president who has sustained such an open-minded dialogue with the region." - Argentinean Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana

Naturally, all this articulate, respectful diplomacy means one of two things.

One: We are blindly kowtowing to all sorts of scummy, evil forces of the underworld and undermining America's godlike supremacy, and soon will be overrun by drug lords and baby rapists and fat, sweaty, cigar-chomping socialists who love to coddle baby-raping drug lords. This is known as the "Fox News angle." Also known as the "Hysteria Special," and also, simply, "The Limbaugh."

Option two: We are about to make extraordinary progress in the world, as we set a new tone of intelligent cooperation in our foreign policy, restoring much of the respect and international goodwill Bush so grossly destroyed, as we finally step back up to the adult's table, not as the domineering father figure everyone fears for his drunken, violent tirades, but as the kind of elegant intellect and influential peacemaker everyone wants to emulate.

That last thing? About emulation? I think that's the most potentially transformative thing of all.

See, we all know the idea of how Obama's raising everyone's game. It's barely 100 days in and already people speak glowingly of the Age of Obama, how the calm, constructive vibe he exudes like a beacon is actually changing people's everyday behaviors, redirecting our attention from violence and rancor and overconsumption toward something a little bit lighter, smarter, less fear obsessed, more respectful or even just simply nicer. The bastard...

I know that anyone who attains the presidency must, by historical precedent, be at least half-mad.

Even so ... even so. We are far, far more fortunate than we deserve.

Nimbophobia: Why you should fear the cloud - Google's performance problems

Another reason to fear the cloud.

Google Calendar is getting slower ... and slower ... and slowweeerrrr.

It's barely useable on the web. Fortunately the slowdown doesn't affect my iPhone Calendar. It syncs via Google's exchange services, so any delays occur in the background.

Now I have a lot more events and calendars than most people, so hardly anyone will share my experience. Even so, this is important. The air is getting bad and the canary is going down. You may be next.

Why is Google's Calendar performance tanking?

I'm guessing they've cut back on their infrastructure spend. A reasonable choice in current economic conditions. Problem is, when a cloud company does this everyone is affected. There's no way to opt out.

So if I were a profitable company, for example, I'd be sharing the same pain as Google and other less profitable companies.

The Cloud makes everyone equal. Too equal.

Fear the Cloud.

Update 9/24/09: Blogger has an undocumented 5000 post limit. Prior posts cannot be searched or edited. Google has no fix four months after copping to the bug. Fear the Cloud.

Monsters

We need a truth commission.

183 - Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com

... now no way to view the people who ruled us these past 8 years as anything but monsters. We had all these rationalizations of torture over the “ticking clock” and all that — then we learn, for example, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month...

Monsters.

WGP Obama

It's true. He's moving so fast the spinning heads are airborne...

Sluts & Salvation / Also: Mysterious chicken, drooling Facebook, maniac presidents. Can you help? (Morford)

Obama Resolves Riemann Hypothesis

... In which the World's Greatest President (WGP) continues to infuriate and confound his GOP critics by taking on -- and checking off -- so many impossibly ambitious projects and issues so quickly, so calmly, so impressively, that not only can't they keep track, but they can't write snarling, simpleminded, wrong-headed on-air commentaries and blog posts fast enough to string together a cohesive narrative of fear and outrage before Obama's already moved on and announced he's going to colonize the moon and cure oak blight and teach the world to communicate with dolphins.

Upshot: Total frothing extremist gibberish. Secession! Guns! Teabagging! Tears! Fascism! Limbaugh! The right-wing punditry frying itself to a panicky crisp like a giant KFC Family Bucket of frustration! Absolute genius, Mr. President....

It's like those X-Men comics where they blow up the bad guy power sponge by overloading him with way too much of the good stuff.

WGP. Like it.

The best about Twitter essay

Farhad Manjoo has written the best "what is twitter good for?" essay to date.

I say that because I agree with him. For example ...

The reluctant Twitterer's dilemma. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

... But if you're not into that, Twitter doesn't seem to offer much that you can't already get elsewhere—for instance, at Facebook. A few months ago, I urged readers to join the social network because you could no longer mistake it for a passing craze; Facebook, I argued, is now a permanent part of the culture, as critical to modern society as e-mail and the cell phone. Since then, to much annoyance, Facebook has redesigned its site to be more Twitter-like. These changes diminish Twitter's attractiveness: Are you just looking for a way to occasionally send a mass message to your friends? Facebook, where you've already established a circle of followers, can be a much faster way of doing so—especially now that it looks so much like Twitter...

I like the comment on how FB's redesign wounds Twitter. Personally, I've found Twitter most useful as a convenient way to post status updates to FB (using the FB Twitter app) -- and to one friend (that's you M.) who prefers Twitter to FB.

Oh, what's FB good for? Well, past about forty or so, it's pleasant to just know one's friends are up and about. FB is a severe "data lock" play -- I don't put anything there I'm attached to.

Farhad's essay a Twitter cheat sheet that explains, among other things, the # convention for tweet tagging.

Time to sign petition for a public insurer option

Ground zero in the health care wars is whether there will be the option of a quasi-governmental insurer with national rates and a large risk pool.

I believe this entity could provide good-enough care that most people would bitterly resent.

Therefore I'm strongly in favor of exploring this option.

If you agree, join me in signing Howard Dean's petition ...

Howard Dean Pushes Public Health-Insurance Option - Health Blog - WSJ

... Through StandWithDrDean.com, the group is collecting signatures for a petition that pushes the idea of patients having the choice of “either a universally available public health-care option like Medicare” — an idea that Obama supported during his presidential campaign but that industry is resisting — “or for-profit private insurance.”...

Google's mobile app search recognition is working ...

Five months ago this was a toy...

Official Google Mobile Blog: Google Mobile App for iPhone now with Voice Search and My Location

... The new Google Mobile App for iPhone makes it possible for you to do a Google web search using only your voice. Just hold the phone to your ear, wait for the beep, and say what you're looking for. That's it. Just talk. Once the App is on, you don't have to push any buttons to search....

Now, it works -- at least in a quiet room.

I have the Google app configured so kb entry is the default. That gives me more control over the voice app initiation. I hold the phone about 8 inches in front of me -- not against my face.

With this approach, in a quiet room, the results are quite good. Good enough that the speech driven search UI is now an improvement over typing in the query.

Submit your Google Data Liberation requests

Google Data Liberation Suggestions - Google Moderator is open for requests.

Let the noble liberation front know what Google data and metadata you'd like to be able to import and export.

My choice - Picasa album transfer.

Leading indicators - Harvard's finance grads

Wow.

Frank Rich - Awake and Sing! - NYTimes.com

...The Harvard Crimson reported that in the class of 2007, 58 percent of the men and 43 percent of the women entering the work force took jobs in the finance and consulting industries...

Maybe we should be tracking where Harvard grads go. Whenever something exceeds 40% of the graduates we go to yellow alert, and when it hits 50% of the men we go to red alert ...

Google's confusing social graph strategy: Google reader friends via Google Chat

I can easily share my Google Reader shared items by publishing the Reader generated web page or Reader generated feed, but it's been very unclear to me how Google decides that someone is a "Friend" who's shared items I can see.

I think that's partly because Google has been flailing about trying to figure out what they mean by this (versus, for example, the "follower" feature in Blogger). Google's social graph strategy is a ruddy mess, but of course we knew that when they dumped their original Google profile shared items.

Looks like the latest incarnation is leveraging Google's new core products: Gmail, Google video chat, and Google Voice/SMS services:

Managing Friends via Gmail Chat or Google Talk - Google Reader Help

... To add a friend to Reader, you must invite them to chat with you in Gmail or Google Talk. Once your friend accepts the chat invitation, you will become friends in Reader. If you invite a friend who doesn't use Gmail or Google Talk, an invitation will be sent to your friend to sign up. Here's how to invite someone to chat with you...

I don't think it's going to work. The set of people I chat with is not the same set as those I want to follow via Google Reader shared items, nor the set I want to have on my "Friend Shared" list.

There will be more iterations and confusion to come ...

Update: There's also something buggy going on. Jacob R is seeing my shares, we have a chat relationship, but I'm not seeing his shares. I added his share stream as a distinct feed for now. (See below, turns out when Google switched to their even more befuddled social strategy I wasn't in Jacob's "Friends" group, so his sharing feed went away. He added me in and it reappeared.)

Update: Wow, this is really screwy. Google has things set up so you do the feed stream share thingie with ONE of (not both of)

• Your chat contacts
• "Friends" as defined by Gmail - "Friends, Family, and Coworkers are groups to help you organize your contacts. You can move contacts in and out of these groups at any time. Various Google products let you share information with people in these groups.
  In addition, you can create a Google profile to help people in these groups keep in touch with you. They will be able to easily find your profile from various Google products."

In both cases of course the Chat contact or Gmail Friend must have as an email address the Gmail address associated with their Google Reader shares. (BTW, just imagine what happens when you try to synchronize the Graph of persons who are members of one or more of Friends, Famiily and Coworkers with, say, your iPhone Contacts.)

If you understood all of that you need to drink more.

Train wreck.

Confessions of a real estate agent | Salon Life

Great story: Pinched: Confessions of a real estate agent | Salon Life.

It was one hell of a ride in a hot real estate market.

Cutting your communication costs

Our monthly communications bill, including landline, mobile and net, is a good percentage of our food or mortgage bills.

Pretty impressive, unfortunately. I'm constantly looking for ways to drop the cost. The main things we've done and not done are:

• We don't do SMS. That saves us about $35 a month, even after we pay the fees for the messages we do get.
• I signed up for an AT&T Canadian calling plan to reduce the costs of the frequent mobile phone calls I make to aged parents. That saved some money, but then ...
• I started using Google GrandCentral (now Google Voice) to call Canada. That has saved about $1,000 a year (!)
• We do Netflix rather than cable TV. That saves us about $25/month and is a much better experience (save that Netflix has too many broken DVDs for children).
• Rather than pay $10/month to add a phone to the family plan, we signed up for a T-Mobile pay-go plan. Estimated savings of $80 a year, so it may not have been worth the hassle.
• We do pay for a higher quality/performance ISDN service, but that's been worth it in terms of reliability.
• When iPhone 3.0 comes out with Push support for instant messaging, we'll use that and see if our phone minutes drop enough to justify switching to AT&T's smallest iPhone family plan.
• We dropped long distance services from our landline -- it's local only. We haven't dropped our landline yet and, with 3 kids without mobile phones, we probably won't. However when Google Voice comes out for everyone each child and my wife will get GV numbers.
• We get a 15% discount on our AT&T mobile services through John's employer
• Rather than pay for fax line we use maxemail, a pay-as-you go fax send and receive service. They're bare bones primitive, but excellent service, low cost, and much more reliable than even high end office fax machines. We scan documents to the server from our ancient brother printer and then upload. (It's a safe market niche btw, Google is never going to get into something as messy as fax receipt and fax seems eternal.)

All in all we've hacked off about $2,000 a year. Today's NYT suggests some other options, though many don't apply to us. Some of the best tips come when you're dissatisfied enough about your current pricing to consider switching services (or willing to bluff). I'm going to take a look at the cable alternatives to my current ISP and decide if I want to threaten a switch. 

Basics - How to Cut the Beastly Cost of Digital Services - NYTimes.com

... Cable, satellite and telephone companies can only be overjoyed that millions of their customers take no action to lower their bills, and instead routinely pay much too much for overpriced plans they purchased a decade ago.

Faced with increased competition, they will gladly tell you about better package prices if you ask, but they won’t be calling you up to tell you how you can save money.

Pull out your bills and then call all your providers. Tell them you’re paying too much and you want to lower your bill. They can only say no.

IF THEY SAY NO, THREATEN TO SWITCH ...

... The regular customer service representative won’t be as empowered as someone in the cancellation department to cut you a better deal.

“We will work with our customers to find a package that suits them,” said Bill Kula, a Verizon spokesman.

At their discretion, Verizon sales reps can cut the price of DSL service, offer free months of Internet access, increase the discount on voice service or give a $50 American Express gift card to customers returning to Verizon’s television service.

AT&T gives its employees similar powers to make deals. Reps are known to offer enhanced services for a basic price, and to lower the cost of one service to its bundled price even if you’re not buying the bundle. “If it’s a matter of keeping the customer, we’ll do the best we can,” said Fletcher Cook, an AT&T spokesman.

... AT&T, for example, offers local and unlimited long distance for $40.

That price drops to $35 if you also get wireless (but you must tell the company to combine your bills). A $99 package includes unlimited landline service, a DSL connection and wireless service for $10 less than those services would cost if priced separately. The company will also pay new customers $100 to sign up.

ASK FOR CORPORATE DISCOUNTS Many corporations have discounts with the major wireless phone carriers. Bring your corporate business card to a wireless carrier’s store or check your company’s intranet site for particulars. Depending on the company, you can typically knock $10 off the monthly cost for a smartphone’s voice and data plans.

Identity theft on social networks - nobody is who they say they are

Just the start - Schneier on Security: Social Networking Identity Theft Scams. It's well worth reading, not so much because of the details of the attack but because it's a marker for a new front in 21st century fraud.

I know it seems like a private obsession, but please trust me on this one. In forty years this will be seen as the golden age of fraud - enabled by new escalations in complexity powered by computation and communication technology.

I'm sure there are analogies in the history of clay tablets, papyrus, paper, printing, the telegraph and so on.

Fraud and deception are as old as biology -- in fact they may define what it means to be alive. Almost certainly deception detection and response have powered the evolution of the nervous system over the last billion years or so, and the evolution of sentience over the last few thousand years.

Interesting times.