Alaska - stranger than you can imagine

Back when Palin was threatening the future of human civilization in her run for a post-McCain presidency, I recall an Alaskan trying to explain where she came from.

I don't recall the details, but the gist of it was that Alaska is very small, very eccentric, and surprisingly tolerant in an incoherent libertarian-welfare sort of way. It sounded like a place I'd enjoy, though maybe not with kids.

I thought again of that essay when I first read this mornings WSJ resignation coverage claiming Palin had a 92% approval rating in early 2007, and then read ...

Sarah Palin resigning as Alaska governor - Joan Walsh - Salon.com

.... In an angry, rambling press conference that will rival Gov. Mark Sanford's as a stunning example of a bizarre public meltdown, Palin basically blamed her decision on her national critics, who she said were blocking her agenda and costing Alaska taxpayers money.

"You are naïve if you don't see a full court press right now on the national level picking apart a good point guard," Palin said, a reference to her days as Sarah Barracuda, high school basketball star. What does a good point guard do? "She drives through a full court press protecting the ball, keeping her head up…and passing the ball so her team can win. I know when it's time to pass the ball for a win.

"I really don't want to disappoint anyone with this decision," Palin continued. "I cannot stand here as your governor and allow millions of dollars to go to waste. I don't know if my children are going to allow it either…This decision comes after a lot of prayer and deliberation." Palin said all of her children endorsed her decision, and she closed by complaining about people mocking her Down's Syndrome son Trig, with little Piper standing by her side.

"In the words of General MacArthur, we are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction," Palin said, as she turned the podium over to the apparently shocked Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell.

There was rolling hilarity and a total news vacuum on television for about 10 minutes after the news first broke. CNN's Rick Sanchez wondered aloud if Palin could be pregnant again – shocking Candy Crowley – before interviewing Frontiersman reporter Andrew Wellner, who says the press conference came as a total surprise to local reporters.

"She didn't take any questions, she said she could be more effective outside of government," Wellner said, reading his notes to Sanchez. Then CNN got tape of Palin's announcement...

.... CNN is now running the entire speech; earlier, it only ran a clip from her resignation statement onward. It's crazy stuff. For the first 10 minutes or so, Palin rambled weirdly about all the good things she's done for Alaska, on energy and budget issues, sounding kind of like a Furby who memorized a lot of information but has no idea how to repeat it in a human-like way. The tone and inflection were completely off...

There's lots of speculation on her plans, including my favorite -- that she doesn't really have a plan other than to make tons of money, duck a lot of investigations, and see what happens next.

I still think we should be mildly terrified of her. Any country capable of reelecting Bush/Cheney in 2004 is clearly capable of electing Sarah Palin in 2012 or 2016.

Low grade terror aside, this makes Alaska even stranger than I'd thought. This Governor had a 92% approval rating?! Nobody gets those kinds of approval ratings in a democracy. Even recently she was running at something like 60%, which is landslide-level for most politicians.

I really do hope I get to visit Alaska soon.

Visit to a lost world

I have returned from a visit to a lost world. I must tell my story swiftly, for the Guardians of the secret ways know me now. Only a fraction of our expedition notes have survived, little can I show of that mysterious land of Shangri La.

I came upon it by chance, accompanied only by my faithful hound. The way is only paces off a well worn path, but it can be approached only when waters run low and the blood sucking guardians sleep. By chance then came we fell upon the ancient steps.

Long we climbed that broken way, thinking of the men who labored there and the blood sacrifices that sanctified their labors.

We passed by meadows whose peace belied the eldritch history of this place. Then the rustling of the winds

became the roaring of a great cataract.

A monstrous bridge, broken by time, spans the might river above the falls.

Its might beams lay shattered on the rocks below. How many eons had passed since that span stood?

At last, at the very ends of our strength, we emerged atop the vastness to uncover yet another route to the forgotten empire. So many years had I passed that way, never knowing what terrifying mysteries lay just beyond the edge of mere civilization.

We returned to our encampment by a twisted path, and there discovered evidence of the Guardians!

The roped cliff face could only mean others came this way! In shock, we turned to flee, but it was too late. A Guardian nodded to us as she and her slavering beast walked by. We were marked. There are those who know this way!

I write these words hurriedly, for Guardians are jealous of their ancient secrets. I send you my last words now by evening post, keep them well. Beware the Guardians of the hidden falls!!

Above average: Shangri La on the Mississippi

Best urban cycling.

Best healthcare.

Fittest kids: "Another victory of sorts for Lake Wobegon: Minnesota has the lowest rate of overweight children in the nation, according to a report on obesity in America."

Who knew?

Google: Please fix Gmail's broken threading model

I'm going to keep posting variations of this every 6 weeks until Google surrenders.

Dear Google,

Gmail's threading model was a cute idea. I suppose it would even work if you hadn't hidden subject lines in threads, thereby promoting subject line reuse and thread metastasis.

It doesn't work. Honest. One day you'll agree with me.

As a compromise, let me change the subject lines in the messages people send me (Outlook's killer feature). If you like, you can propagate the new subject line down the thread.

Alternatively, let me easily toggle your thread by subject line feature.

Thank you.

I'll write again.

Yours,

john

An old mystery – why did Saddam block UN inspections?

We now all know that Cheney and Bush were looking for a reason to invade Iraq even as the UN sanctions were crumbling. We also know that Saddam really didn’t have any WMDs to hide.

So why did Saddam prevent UN inspectors from doing their work? He might have held off the US invasion and waited out the rapidly crumbling UN sanctions. Why did he give Bush the excuse he was looking for?

One 2003 theory was that Saddam thought he had weapons of mass destruction – he thought he had something to hide. Maybe his military was lying to him to save their own skins. By 2006 the public theory was that that Saddam himself knew there were no WMDs, but he was  hiding this fact from many of his aides – for fear of revealing weakness to Iran.

Today an FBI report provides more details. I found Saddam’s comments on a “pact with a US enemy” persuasive …

Newly released FBI reports describe Saddam Hussein's reasons for refusing UN inspectors to enter Iraq | World news | guardian.co.uk

Saddam Hussein remained preoccupied with the threat from neighbouring Iran as the US-led invasion loomed and would have sought a security pact with the US if UN sanctions were lifted, he told an FBI interviewer in his jail cell before his execution.

In more than two dozen interviews and casual talks, the deposed Iraqi leader told FBI questioners that he refused to allowed UN inspectors to re-enter the country because he feared they would reveal to his chief adversary Iran the severely degraded state of Iraq's weapons capability.

Saddam, whom the successor Iraqi government hanged in December 2006, also denied having any connection to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida, and said that if he wanted to join forces with a US enemy, he would have sought a pact with North Korea or China…

… The reports were released by the National Security Archive, a Washington group that obtained them from the FBI. The reports contain a few deletions, and one interview, from May 1, 2004, was redacted in its entirety…

.. He said that during the run-up to the US invasion in March 2003, he kept up his bluster about weapons of mass destruction in order to appear strong in front of Iran. Saddam said he believed Iran intended to annex majority Shia areas of southern Iraq, and saw the country as the greatest threat to Iraq. He said he viewed the other Arab countries in the region as weak and unable to defend against an attack from Iran. He said that he refused to allow UN inspectors to re-enter the country not because he still possessed prohibited weapons of mass destruction (he ordered the stock pile destroyed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war) but because he wanted Iran to believe he did.

"Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq," the report of a June 11, 2004 interview states.

Asked how Iraq would have dealt with Iran if the UN inspections and sanctions were ended, he said he would have sought a security agreement with the US. Piro agreed such an arrangement would have benefited Iraq, but said the US would not quickly have made such a pact. He told Piro he wanted a more friendly relationship with the US, an ally during the war with Iran, but that the US "was not listening to anything Iraq had to say"…

Saddam was definitely evil, but he wasn’t crazy.  Instead Saddam’s big mistake was thinking that Cheney/Bush were as calculating as he was, when, in reality, they were … crazy.

Wanted: A consumer-geek friendly triple store database management solution

For the hundredth time I contemplated the challenges of managing personal data with general purpose database management tools (FileMaker Pro for OS X and XP, Microsoft Access for XP) and special purpose database management tools (Address Book and iCal for OS X, Google Contacts and Calendar, Outlook for XP, 1Password for iPhone and OS X).

It’s really an intractable mess. There’s no practical way to move data between these stores (tab delimited files were never enough), much less synchronize data. Everything is in proprietary data stores – fundamentally hostile to data freedom.

Then a little bulb went off. Lately I’ve been slogging through Allemang and Handler’s “Semantic web for the working ontologist”. It’s heavy going, not least because the further you get from the early chapters the greater the underlying uncertainty. Will we really use OWL and SPARQL ten years from now?

On the other hand, the early stuff is persuasive, especially the descriptions of the RDF Triple Store and the RDFS data definition and transformation language. The above wikipedia link, as of today, doesn’t do justice to the real value of this work. To me the fundamental appeal is that there’s a solid and increasingly accepted specification for a universal data representation store that not only encodes data, but also metadata – the equivalent of column names, data types (strings, numbers, etc), table names, relationships and so on.

This stuff was created over the past 20+ years to integrate “say anything, anywhere” data sources across the Net [1]. The movement has been popularized by Tim (web ground zero) Berner-Lee in lots of semantic web presentations.

So we now have a standard way to represent data and data relationships, to manipulate both things across all platforms, the RDF Triple Store + RDFS combination. Heck, it can even manage graphs!

Bingo.

That’s how I want my data to live, whether it’s my Contacts or my Calendar or my Passwords everything else that’s not a document. Finally I’ll have the tools I need to, you know, manage my contacts and passwords and so on.

Sure, performance is an issue – but I’m not dealing with a trillion records. I’m dealing with a few thousand records. Stick the damned structure in RAM and build indices galore – I don’t care. The key thing is having a standard way to store and manipulate my data.

So all you niche vendors out there, all you guys that want to take the market away from FileMaker and especially Microsoft – give me a consumer-grade (think Bento – but less stupid) Triple Store based solution that will let me work with data across platforms and applications.

I’d appreciate it.

[1] Anyone remember Apple’s “HotSauce” Project X MCF work from the early 1990s? MCF moved to XML format then to Netscape and later joined the RDF development stream.

What gene studies reveal about the diversity and resilience of mind, and the limitations of psychiatric disease classification

This research further confirms results first published in Science three months ago. The continued blurring of the diagnostic boundaries between manic-depression and schizophrenia is significant, as is the relationship to control of the immune system. It has always been interesting to contemplate similarities between the immune and nervous systems …

BBC NEWS | Health | Gene clues to schizophrenia risk

Scientists have identified thousands of tiny genetic variations which together could account for more than a third of the inherited risk of schizophrenia…

… The findings came from work by three separate teams, who analysed DNA from thousands of people.

The studies - the biggest ever into the genetics of schizophrenia - appear in the journal Nature.

The findings suggest that schizophrenia is much more complex than previously thought, and can arise not only from rare genetic variants, but common ones as well…

… The researchers say that individually many of the genetic variations they have identified play only a tiny role in raising the risk of passing schizophrenia down the generations … "Cumulatively, they play a major role, accounting for at least one-third - and probably much more - of disease risk."

All three studies highlight genes found on Chromosome 6 in area known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex, which plays a role in the immune system, and in controlling when other genes are switched on and off.

The researchers believe this might help explain why environmental factors also seem to affect risk for schizophrenia…. For example, there is evidence that children whose mothers contract flu while pregnant have a higher risk.

In total the researchers identified 30,000 tiny genetic variants more common in people with schizophrenia.

A similar pattern was found in people with bipolar disorder…

… Dr Thomas Insel, of the US National Institute of Mental Health, said: "These new results recommend a fresh look at our diagnostic categories.

… "If some of the same genetic risks underlie schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, perhaps these disorders originate from some common vulnerability in brain development." …

It feels like we’re making a genuine leap forward in our understanding of the what some call the “connectopathies”. One of the more immediate implications is that we’re driving another nail into the increasingly problematic classificationd (nosologies, as in DSM IV) (see – psychiatric diagnoses, 200 years behind) of disturbances of the mind.

The BBC article claims that this is a new discovery of similarities between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but I posted on that in 2003 …

BBC NEWS | Health | Mental illnesses share gene flaw (September 2003)

… Sabine Bahn, who led the research, published in The Lancet, said: "We believe that our results provide strong evidence for oligodendrocyte and myelin dysfunction in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

"The high degree of correlation between the expression changes in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder provide compelling evidence for common pathophysiological pathways that may govern the disease phenotypes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder." …

In particular childhood onset “bipolar disorder” seems to have a great deal in common with early onset schizophrenia.

In a more abstract direction this research provides some tantalizing hints about the diversity of mind/brain, and the emergent resilience of the brain/mind. Thousands of gene variants all affecting minds in unpredictable ways.

By comparison we can see the diversity of our bodies, but they’re really all somewhat familiar. From a distance a parade of human forms is not that interesting. Four feet to seven feet tall, a bit of pigment variation, some muscular variability – but really, not so different. Dogs are much more diverse.

I suspect though, that a parade of minds would be far more interesting. Minds twenty feet tall and 6 inches tall, minds wide and minds narrow …

The resilience of the mind is also reinforced by this study and the earlier Science article. One in twenty people have big, ugly, mutations that ought to mess their minds completely – and yet they function very well (at least in mid-life, who knows about senescence). Somehow our minds are able to construct themselves from a very diverse and often severely flawed substrate.

That last point is what I find most interesting …

For further reading, see also the links associated with this 2008 post of mine.

Another marker of the GOP's long fall - no more Jews

The GOP has reached another milestone in its quest for irrelevance ...

GOP loses last Jewish senator with Coleman loss

WASHINGTON - The defeat of incumbent Norm Coleman in the drawn-out Minnesota Senate race leaves Republicans without a Jewish senator for the first time in half a century.

Coleman's departure comes two months after the GOP's other Jewish member, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, switched parties to become a Democrat...

In the House, Eric Cantor of Virginia ... is the only Jewish Republican in the 435-member body. That's down from eight Jewish GOP members who served in the House during the 1990s.

The National Jewish Democratic Council lists 30 Jewish Democrats now serving in the House. The Senate will have 13 Jewish members as of next week when Franken, Coleman's rival in Minnesota, is sworn in. That's 11 Democrats and two independents who normally vote with the Democrats.

Ira Forman, CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said the sharp drop in the number of Jewish Republicans in Congress paralleled the party's shift to the right. "It's a reflection of where the Republican Party has gone," he said. "It's left the Jewish community pretty cold."...

So how many Catholics are left in the GOP? There must be a few or else the GOP would be an almost 100% WASP shop now.

I think Minnesota has the only Muslim Representative (definitely Democrat), and I'm pretty sure the Democrats have all the de facto (dare we speak it?) atheists.

For Jewish representatives the House and Senate ratios are now 30:1 and 13:0. Pretty severe ratios, especially the latter.

So is anyone in the GOP paying attention at all?

No, I didn't think so.

Consumer Reports blogs

Epochs ago we subscribed to Consumer Reports. We eventually gave up on them. Their reviews didn't match my own experience, and I found I was getting more out the negative reviews on Amazon. Their technology reviews, in particular, were very different from my own assessments.

I was also very disappointed in how little use they made of their subscriber base. That must have driven more forward looking employees berserk. They had a loyal and informed customer base they could have tapped to do the sorts of things Amazon did.

They're still around though, still nonprofit and still rejecting advertising. They've joined the 20th century however -- they have a series of Consumer Reports blogs on Electronics, Cars, Home, Safety, Shopping and more. I'm going to try a few of them, especially those that don't involve software or electronics.

U.S. Bank's ID Shield makes me scream

U.S. Bank, alas, is my bank.

Recently they instituted new mandatory "security" feature they . I had to provide them with answers to a wide range of security questions.

Yes, the "security" questions that provide a yawning back door into your online data, because it's easier for a crook to get answers to the security questions than it is to get at a strong password. Security question attacks are how most celebrity email accounts are hacked.

Today I tried to sync my Quicken data and I was asked where my maternal grandparents live.

I don't know where the #$!%$ my maternal grandparents live. They died before I was born, back in the early part of the last century.

American Express does not do this to me. I respect American Express's security model; ever since I learned the hard way about the Visa/MC systems.

I can't tolerate the pain of switching checking accounts, but US Bank has earned my enmity. I'm going to make them send me paper statements until the last post person falls.

Update: It gets better. I looked up the answer to the security question in my password database. I'd used a longish passphrase, so I gave that back to US Bank. The web site croaked with an error (probably string overflow) and locked my account (yes, like this). They gave me a #$@% phone number to call. US Bank is dead to me.

In What City Did You Honeymoon?And other monstrously stupid bank security questions tells us these passphrases are the fault of RSA Mobile, who provides them to banks. I want a bank that's smart enough to pay for a smarter version of two factor authentication. For example:

... Instead of coming up with ever-more-ornate questions about teachers and toys, banks and security companies should push solutions that are safe and customer-friendly. While everyone hates calling customer service, confirming your identity on the phone (an out-of-band device) is way more secure than using an online form. RSA's Gaffan told me about a phone-based authentication system used by more than a dozen of the company's clients. At sign-up time, you enter your work, home, and cell numbers. If you lose your password, simply indicate whether you're at home, at work, or on your cell. To authenticate yourself, just answer your phone and type in a number that appears on your computer screen. There's nobody asking about your honeymoon and no stuffed animal names to remember. Sounds perfect to me. What's my favorite bank? The one that doesn't ask me stupid frigging questions...

Passwords are dying, and they may take the world's less intelligent banks down with them.

Update 7/1/09: Michael A. points out that parents and children know each other's secret questions (children may need to do a bit of social engineering). On the other hand, spouses don't. My wife and I share a US Bank account, and she doesn't know my "High School mascot". There's got to be a lawsuit in here somewhere. Children hacking parental bank accounts, spouses denied access, users denied access ... I fear we don't have enough hungry lawyers these days.

There's a simple solution for US Bank that would be a win-win. Provide an option for customers to choose an alternative authentication option. Customers using option B would be required to have a strong password (but not to change it routinely, that's been shown to harm security) and, if they need to reset it, to physically travel to a bank branch, present legal ID, and pay $20 cash to cover the extra costs.

Update 7/3/09: One common workaround for stupidity of this extraordinary magnitude is to come up with a single robust "backdoor" password and use it to answer every secret question. US Bank does not allow this, each "secret question" response must be unique. I need a smarter bank! I can't trust any entity this incompetent with our money and our identity.

I've asked Bruce Schneier if he could write an essay identifying banks who actually demonstrate a basic understanding of security principles. I've also written a note to REI, who's VISA card I like. Unfortunately REI use's US Bank ...

... I love my REI Visa card, and I use it all the time.

Unfortunately, US Bank has introduced new online banking security measures that are proof of security team incompetence...

... I can't use an online bank with an incompetent security team!

I'm sorry I'll have to give up my REI Visa card. I hope you'll consider this email when you evaluate your relationship with US Bank.

Dog food: now it's the fluoride

We don't know the safe levels for dogs. Apparently the fluoride comes from a high bone meal content in pet food ...

Fluoride in dog food - Pets' health at risk? | Environmental Working Group:

.... An independent laboratory test of popular dog food brands, commissioned by Environmental Working Group, revealed that the food we buy for our pets contains high levels of fluoride, a contaminant that may put dogs' health at risk.

Eight major national brands marketed for both puppies and adults contained fluoride in amounts between 1.6 and 2.5 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's maximum legal dose in drinking water... All 8 brands contain bone meal and animal byproducts, the likely source of the fluoride contamination.

Scientists have not studied the safety of high doses of fluoride for dogs....

It's hard to know what to make of this, except to reiterate that, in practice, libertarianism sucks.

Coleman is gone. At last.

It's a bit anti-climactic, but it's still good ...

The Associated Press: GOP's Coleman concedes, sending Franken to Senate

... Republican Norm Coleman has conceded to Democrat Al Franken in Minnesota's contested Senate race, ending a nearly eight-month recount and court fight.

Coleman conceded at a news conference in St. Paul, a few hours after a unanimous Minnesota Supreme Court ruled Tuesday the former 'Saturday Night Live' comedian and liberal commentator should be certified the winner...

...A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the earliest Franken would be seated is next week, because the Senate is out of session for the July 4 holiday."

Coleman steered to the wind. When Bush was powerful he was a conservative, when Bush weakened he was a "moderate". He was never a GOP rebel like the Senators from Maine.

Health Care reform and Climate change response (aka the survival of civilization) both got a big boost today. Of course there really aren't 60 certain votes for anything, but we're closer.

Now if we could just get rid of Pawlenty ...

States nobody should live in: add Georgia

One less state that a moral person would choose to live in ...

Editorial - Two Meals and Not Always Square - NYTimes.com

... Three days a week, Georgia now serves inmates only two meals...

Texas is another such.

Minnesota is a better choice.

Human progress and global climate change – are we good enough?

We are not what we were 20,000 years ago. We are not the people of 2,000 years past.

Hell, we’re not even the people I was born to.

We’re better than we were.

We’re better at damned near everything. I don’t know the how or why, but we’re still around 50 years post-fusion weapons. We got rid of Freon. We don’t routinely torture children in public schools. We have the ADA. We don’t smoke on airplanes. We have Obama. Gay unions, by whatever name, are inevitable. Religious fundamentalism in American is on the wane. We got rid of the torturers. Maybe this year, maybe ten years from now, America will guarantee good-enough health care to every American.

Progress happens. Lots of progress. Yeah, we go backwards, just like real estate, the Dow, and average July temperatures. Backwards – in the short term. Long term it’s one hell of a trend.

So I think that if the climate change riff on our smoldering Malthusian crisis had come along in 2060 that we’d be ok. Fifty more years of Singularity-free progress and we’d be ready to handle our CO2 problem.

Except it isn’t 2060, and we’re struggling big time. The US Congress has passed a bill that gets us about 5% of the distance, and the Senate is expected to suffocate it. To add injury to injury, those who argued against the bill were babbling gibberish.

I think we’ll still work something out. It’s the Obama effect; the boundaries of the impossible have moved. It’s going to take a lot of effort from the Rationalists however.

So I’ll start with an exercise. I’m going to try to invent a plausible argument against a Carbon Tax-equivalent like Cap and Trade.

For my first Denialist argument I’ll admit that the earth has been been growing warmer, on average, over the past 150 years. There’s no sense fighting on this point.

Then I’ll grant that CO2 might warm the earth, but I’ll say that particulates also cool the earth. Moreover, I’ll claim, we can’t trust simulation data so we  really don’t have good evidence that CO2 emissions are warming the globe. The effect may be solar in nature, and the historic relationship of global warming to CO2 rise is merely coincidence [1]. Therefore, I’ll argue, we need to do more research before acting on CO2 emissions.

That’s one. For my second argument I’ll grant that the earth is getting warmer and CO2 is the cause, but over the next 100 years it’s cheaper to adapt (build submerged homes) than it is to reduce CO2 output. Most likely, assuming we don’t vent the methane, we’ll only have a 3-4 degree Celsius warming by 2100 and that will only reduce GDP by 5%. By the time we get to 2060 we’ll be sucking yottawatts from parallel universes and we can dump the CO2 back into whatever cosmos we’ve depleted.

For my third argument I’ll grant the earth is getting warming, and that CO2 is the cause, and that we can’t “adapt” without risking human civilization and the lives of billions of people. In this case we should invest in terra-forming and climate engineering, such as CO2 sequestration or high altitude aerosol deposition, and forget about Carbon taxes.

So far I’ve come up with three semi-rational contrarian arguments all opposing a Carbon Tax (equivalent). I’ll call them “Solarian”, “Adaptionist”, and “GeoEngineering”. The three cover a spectrum from very weak (Solarian) to worthy of discussion (GeoEngineering).

The latter two are reasonable enough that most Rationalists would include aspects of them in a full-spectrum response. Personally I believe the “Adaptionist” argument makes unrealistic assumptions about the willingness of millions of humans to go gently in the night, and I think the GeoEngineering is astoundingly unlikely to work. Still, I think we’ll have to have some Adaptation (Leaving New Orleans…) and the GeoEngineering approaches do deserve study and testing.

Are there any quasi-Rational arguments against a Carbon Tax (or equivalent) that I’ve missed?

[1] An odd coincidence of course.

Finance transactions aren't so standard after all

In my job I'm familiar with the hellish stew of healthcare IT transactions.

Honestly, I'm a bit of an expert about that.

We always assume things are better in the simpler world of bank transactions.

That's probably true, but apparently they weren't so great 10 years ago ...

Charlie's Diary: How I got here in the end, part nine: the little start-up that could:

.... 1998 was a painful learning experience. It turns out that while the British banks all adhered to the APACS protocols for exchanging financial transactions, the protocols in question were prone to, ah, flexible interpretation — and each and every one of the banks interpreted them differently, seemingly in order to lock out their competitor's suppliers' EPOS terminals....

Standards are hard work, particularly when one's income depends on the standards not quite working.