Steam Hammer vs. John Henry 2.0

Google=Algorithm

Apple=Jobs

Steam hammer vs. John Henry 2.0.

What do we need to give Rupert Murdoch to save civilization?

Rupert Murdoch owns News Corp, including Fox news and the Wall Street Journal. Glenn Beck is his tool, the Tea Party is his tool, the WSJ editorial pages are his tool.

By the actions of his properties, we can assume Murdoch has little sympathy for science, democracy, or an enlightenment agenda. On the other hand, he is no fool. He will act to achieve his ego's ends.

His goals to date have been wealth and power. Perhaps he has dreamed they would give him immortality. If so, then science has disappointed him; he will likely die within ten years. Now, perhaps, his focus will shift to crafting a lasting myth, and perhaps a genetic legacy.

If so, he may contemplate the world that lies ahead. He may even reconsider his apparent antipathy to science and reason. Perhaps all he needs is an excuse, some sop to his massive ego.

So let us say to Mr Murdoch - "You win. You are powerful; perhaps powerful enough to injure human civilization. Do you want a statue? We can build you one. Do you want to be worshiped? We will make you a temple. Do you want a title? We can ask the English to give you one. Now, Mr Murdoch, please let civilization live."

How to end the orange alerts

In a response to the Times scare car bomb attempt [1] James Fallows comments on the alerts that have given orange a bad name ...

... for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. That is the real case against the ludicrous 'orange threat level' announcements we hear every three minutes at the airport. It's not just that they're pointless, uninformative, and insulting to our collective intelligence; it's that their larger effect is to make people feel frightened rather than brave...

Are alerts red today, now that there might have been yet another (one of ten since 2001) terroristic action in Manhattan?

No, I didn't think so.

I see the "orange alert" sign every time I drive by the MSP airport. I keep hoping some kids will have vandalized it, but of course that would be a federal crime probably punishable by summary execution. It is an endless reminder of how stupid we are.

The entire "orange alert" class of security theater is politically hard to undo. Fallows puts it well ...

... A politician who supports more open-ended, more thorough, more intrusive, more expensive inspections can never be proven "wrong." The absence of attacks shows that his measures have "worked"; and a new attack shows that inspections must go further still. A politician who wants to limit the inspections can never be proven "right." An absence of attacks means that nothing has gone wrong -- yet. Any future attack would always and forever be that politician's "fault." Given that asymmetry of risks, what public figure will ever be able to talk about paring back the TSA...

If Obama were to do anything obviously rational about these delusions, Cheney/Murdoch would be frothing at the mouth the next morning.

There is hope, however. Obama could use some terrorist act to declare that the nation must consider "orange" to the the new normal. We will never return to whatever the color below orange was. (That is likely true; the forecast is stormy forever). He can also say that cognitive science teaches us that unchanging things become invisible to us. So we will randomly make announcements and activate the orange alert signs to make them more perceptible, with an average frequency of once an hour. Over time the frequency will diminish.

The signs will dim. Some will fail. Repairs will slow. One day we will turn them off.

[1] I wonder if bomb instructions are harder to find now than they were fifteen years ago. I suspect so.

Arizona and immigration - an inarguable response

Diabolic.

Gwynne Dyer, to the bemusement of anyone who has read his past columns, seems to support Arizona's immigration policy ...

Gwynne Dyer: Arizona bucks belief illegal migrants have rights - Gwynne Dyer - NZ Herald News

The President of Mexico was furious. "Criminalising immigration, which is a social and economic phenomena, opens the door to intolerance, hate, and discrimination," Felipe Calderon told a meeting of Mexican immigrant groups.... 

... But suppose I went to Mexico as a tourist and then stayed there illegally, taking work that might otherwise have gone to some deserving Mexican citizen. I would not be treated more gently by the Mexican authorities.

Why does Mexico believe that its own citizens who are illegally in the United States deserve better treatment? ...

.... Some argue that they are doing jobs nobody else wants, but that is only a possible reason for letting them stay. It certainly does not give them the right to stay.

Yet the Mexican government reacts with outraged indignation whenever the US government, or in this case an American state, talks about enforcing the law against illegal immigrants.

It has come to think of the nod-and-a-wink arrangement that allows large numbers of illegal immigrants to cross the border each year as the natural state of things.

Arizona is calling time on that system, and intends to seek out and send home people who are in the state illegally.

In most parts of the world, that would not be regarded as unreasonable. What is different in Arizona's case?...

Hmmm. Sounds reasonable. Surprising to see Dyer on the side of the GOP though.

Except then he skewers Arizona and its supporters in the penultimate paragraph. Do read the essay, it's brilliantly done.

Teachers, doctors and pay for performance

In one paragraph, Gail Collins summarizes an important issue with basing teacher compensation on student performance:

Gail Collins - Teachers Always Show Up - NYTimes.com

... while it’s important to make teachers accountable, telling them their jobs could hinge on their students’ grades on one test is a terrible idea ... The women and men who go into teaching tend, as a group, to be both extremely dedicated and extremely risk-averse. The stability of their profession is a very important part of its draw. You do not want to make this an anything-can-happen occupation, unless you are prepared to compensate them like hedge fund traders...

The same is true of physicians by the way.

The real problems aren't simply incompatible personality traits however. The real problem is that these systems are dominated by Goodhart's law.

As Texas demonstrated many times, the easiest way to improve outcomes is to game the system. With both students and patients this is done by changing the denominator -- either by reclassification (change who takes tests) or by purging the problems (zero tolerance discipline) and filtering the candidates (programs appealing to elite students, wealthier families).

The same things happens in health insurance (risk assumption). Rescission is one way to change the denominator, another one is to promote (inexpensive!) alternative therapies that appeal primarily to health people. Putting the enrollment office on the second floor of an elevator free building is the classic approach to denominator bias.

These effective strategies don't have to be consciously applied. The "invisible hand" will reinvent them time and again.

There are many ways to improve the performance of teachers and physicians that reduce the appeal of system gaming solutions. They don't have the simplistic appeal of "pay for performance" however.

So we'll suffer through a lost decade before, once gain, letting these mistaken policies quietly die.

Anthrax - a cautionary tale

I wasn't blogging when, one week after the 9/11 attack, mailed anthrax killed five people, seriously injured 17 others, and paralyzed much of American commerce.

If I had been blogging back then, I'm pretty sure I would have joined in the general attack on an innocent man. It was a heck of an attack; this month The Atlantic tells the story of how the FBI got the wrong man. He (and his lawyers) ended up with various settlements totaling millions of dollars.

Later the FBI turned on Bruce Ivins, a troubled man. Turns out biological warfare research attracts unusual people. Ivins committed suicide. Since the post 9/11 FBI has well deserved negative credibility, nobody is fully convinced that Ivins was the murderer.

The FBI was never reformed. It staggers on today.

What have some of us learned from the anthrax story? We learned that the FBI is institutionally troubled. We learned that government can break the rules and get away with it. We learned that when crisis hits, we lose our bearings. We learned that defense lawyers are a good idea. We learned that massive security failures can be easily forgotten.

There was never a full evaluation of all the ways the FBI failed, and why. Bush/Cheney had too much dirty laundry of their own to go there, and Obama has way too much Bush/Cheney dirty laundry to clearn.

So the FBI is going to do this again.

Google has an AdSense problem

TIDBits publishes a terrific extended essay on digital photo post-processing.

These are the AdSense AdWords that show up in the full text feed:

Note the spiffy “next” buttons for more of the same.

WTF?

This is the best Google can do? That post had abundant material for analysis, not to mention the TIDBits URL. At least put in ads for Mac related goods.

Something’s broken. I hope for the sake of Google’s shareholders it’s just a transient glitch.

Stross on the post-PC world – mostly right

Charles Stross is in good form with an essay on the post-PC world. It’s the world we’ve been expecting since Netscape Constellation (1996) and Larry Ellison’s proto-netbook (1995). That world became real for me in 2007 (yes, it was that long ago) with the iPhone and in 2008 with the Target netbook [1].

I agree with almost everything he wrote, with one big exception….

… Moreover, the PC revolution has saturated the market at any accessible price point. That is, anyone who needs and can afford a PC has now got one…

Uhhh, no. PCs are not cheap. Not at all. The iPad is cheap [3], but PCs are very expensive.

Yes, you can buy a “PC” for a pittance. It makes a crummy boat anchor though. If you want it to do something useful you need to buy internet service. Where I live that’s about $600 a year – year after year. Unless you bought a Mac, or are geek enough to go without, you need to buy antiviral software. In theory you also need to $150 or so for Microsoft Office. And good luck with backup.

But that’s not the real cost.

The real cost is that you need an IQ-equivalent of 110 or higher, and a love of debugging and troubleshooting. For most of the population, that’s absolutely unaffordable.

PCs are very, very, expensive. The iPad 2.0, or its rivals to come, can be the poor person’s computer [4].

So Charlie got this one point wrong – but it only strengthens his overall argument. My four month old quad core iMac running 10.6 is an anachronism [2]. Its era is passing. Welcome to the third era of the personal computer.

[1] I thought things would blow up in 2009. Didn’t happen! Microsoft dropped the price of XP to about nothing and crawled back enough control of the netbook to stun the market (same thing they did with Palm in the 90s by the way). It’s still going to happen, but that’s not the first time I’ve been wrong on transition times. I’ve since learned to take my time estimates for technology transitions and triple them.

[2] Charlie also omits the role Digital Rights Management (DRM) plays in driving this transition. DRM is one of the reason there’s so much good software being produced for the iPhone. Your CDs may be worth money some day.

[3] Not least because of the pay-as-you-go capped data plan. That’s as big a deal as the device. Yes, I know iPad’s require a PC-as-peripheral, but that will change within the year.

[4] Of course that’s what the original Mac was – the “computer for the rest of us”. Closed architecture. All applications were to be vetted by Apple. Strict UI standards. Heavy investments in usability and design. Single button mouse. It worked too – it really was easy to use. Much easier to use than OS X. Almost as easy to use as the iPad. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it spirals.

The Cheonan sinking: insanity or accident?

When Sarah Palin bloviates, the media goes mad. When a South Korean military vessel blows up, perhaps from a North Korean missile, things get very quiet.

This is a good thing. Evidently the prospect of WW III does concentrate minds. It’s a sign that our legislators aren’t as stupid as they look.

A recent BBC summary outlines the current public analysis…

BBC News - Seoul's dilemma over sunken warship

The 26 March sinking of the Cheonan, with 40 lives lost and six men still missing, is certainly a South Korean military disaster…

… The shattered wreck of the 1,200-tonne gunboat has now been winched to the surface, in two pieces, and is being examined at a naval dockyard.

The investigation team includes American, Australian, Swedish and British experts, in part, to ensure that its conclusions are seen as free from South Korean political influence.

… suspicion is mounting, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-young concluding that a torpedo attack is among the "most likely" causes.

… "If it's a torpedo firing then that's about as big a thing as you can do short of rolling across the border," he told me. "Unless you have a desire to start World War III then you don't do it…

… If it is shown to be a torpedo that hit the Cheonan, then perhaps it can be seen as retaliation for the fact that North Korea is reported to have come off worse in the most recent naval skirmish.

Or maybe it was an attempt to rally the military around the leadership of the ailing Kim Jong-il, reportedly trying to manage a difficult transition of power to his youngest son.

But others have suggested that it might be the military acting alone, a sign of a dangerous shift in the balance of power inside North Korea, and a far more worrying prospect.

So the options are …

• North Korea’s leadership is insane
• North Korea’s military is insane
• It’s a freak accident with an impossibly ancient mine

The last is unlikely, the first two are discouraging. I wonder, just based on watching humans for a while, if there isn’t a fourth explanation.

An accident. A blunder. A screw-up.

Remember when the US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 civilians? No, that wasn’t US military policy. It was a screw-up.

We now know how crummy the Soviet military infrastructure was before the collapse of the USSR. It’s likely that North Korea’s is in much worse shape. It’s likely their submariners are desperate and ill-trained. it’s a setup for an accident, or for a crazed officer to do something very stupid.

Would the submarine officers confess to having screwed up? In North Korea that would probably be a death sentence – or worse.

My money is on blunder.

Now it’s all about China, which has huge investments in North Korea. It’s all about whether China will decide that North Korea has to end, and, if so, on what terms and timeline.

Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III.

To the right of us – Greece, Portugal, Spain and perhaps Italy and Ireland (GPSII):

How Reversible Is The Euro- - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

For a long time my view on the euro has been that it may well have been a mistake, but that bygones were bygones — it could not be undone…

…but what if the bank runs and financial crisis happen anyway? In that case the marginal cost of leaving falls dramatically, and in fact the decision may effectively be taken out of policymakers’ hands…

…if Greece is in effect forced out of the euro, what happens to other shaky members?

I think I’ll go hide under the table now.

and to the left of us – China:

Andy Xie - I’ll Tell You When Chinese Bubble Is About to Burst - Credit Writedowns

“My maid just asked for leave,” a friend in Beijing told me recently. “She’s rushing home to buy property. I suggested she borrow 70 percent, so she could cap the loss.”

Sigh. It’s not over. Act I was the NASDAQ (remember the NASDAQ?) tech bubble. Act II was the property/asset bubble. Act III takes place in Europe and China.

It really does feel like a world of hurt down here, and we haven’t even hit Peak Oil (but it’s on the way.)

We all wonder why. Why now? A year ago I made up my personal list of 10 contributing causes (Feb 09) and, recently, I wrote up one way out of America’s particular set of challenges.

Since then I’ve been chipping at the list, looking for the cause of the cause of the cause (etc – go too deep and it’s all entropy). Sure we’ve got above average corruption and economic financialization, but those tendencies have always been with us. This feels like something novel, something that, in modern times, has come along every century or so. (In deep history every 2,000 years or so.)

I’m nominating two independent but self-reinforcing causes – information technology (IT) and the Rise of China and India (RCI, aka globalization).

The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible.

The IT transformation is not stopping. If anything, it’s accelerating. There are more than 350 million mobile phone subscriptions in Africa.

Think about that for a minute.

In five years Africa will have at least 500 million 2010 iPhone/Droid interconnected equivalent devices, and Google’s sentence-salad English/China translation will probably work. I’m still thinking we miss Kurzweil’s 2045 catastrophe, but the prelude will be rough enough.

RCI and IT (RCIIT?) Alone each would have thrown the world for a loop. Together they’ve put us into an entirely new level of future shock.

We might as well get used to it.

Winner take all - lessons from writing

Charlie Stross has been writing a series of enlightening posts about the fiction industry. Today, after a volcano extended killer road trip, he unloads on the joys of being a professional writer ...

... I'd like to point you at this 2005 paper by the Author's License and Collecting Society, titled "What are Words Worth?, describing the findings of a study organized by the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM)I, Bournemouth University. ..

...  restricting the survey to focus on main-income authors (those who earned over 50% of their income from writing) gave median earnings of £23,000 and mean earnings of £41,186.

... the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors' incomes — a measure of income inequality, where 0.0 means everyone takes an identical slice of the combined cake, and 1.0 indicates that a single individual takes all the cake and everyone else starves. Let me provide a yardstick: the UK had a Gini coefficient of 0.36 in 2009, the widest ever gap between rich and poor— while the USA, at 0.408, had the most unequal income distribution in the entire developed world. The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74...

... In addition to being a wildly unstable, lonely occupation with an insane income spread, there are other drawbacks to being a writer. Many American writers are forced to rely on a day job, or a spouse with a day job, for health insurance: health insurance for the self-employed is prohibitively expensive, especially for the self-employed poor. Those who don't have a job that provides healthcare, or a partner with family benefits, are never more than one accident away from bankruptcy. As the median age for publishing a first novel is around 34 because it takes a lot of life experience before you know enough to write something worth publishing, most authors are in the age range 34-70 — old enough that they're likely to develop chronic health conditions or need expensive treatments. (To be fair, it's not just authors who get the short end of this particular shitty stick: I suspect the US health insurance industry is actively suppressive of entrepreneurial start-up ventures by older folks in general.)...

...So here's the truth about the writing lifestyle: it sucks. It is an unstable occupation for self-employed middle-aged entrepreneurs. Average age on entry is around 34, but you can't get health insurance (if you're American).... As a business, it's a dead-end: you can't generally expand by taking on employees, and the number of author start-ups where the founders have IPOd and cashed out can be counted on the fingers of a double-amputee's hands...

I've read Stross for years - in the small science fiction/fantasy world he's a modern giant. He is an extremely smart man and I believe that he works very hard. Although he's a relatively successful science fiction writer, if he wanted money he'd be working for Goldman Sachs.

Clearly Charles Stross has been cursed with the writer's obsession and he deserves our sympathies as well as our thanks. Maybe it was something he did in a past life.  I've put "The Revolution Business" on my Amazon cart today. It's the least I can do.

Beyond the dismal reality of the 21st century wordsmith, there are other noteworthy insights in the essay (read the entire work of course). I agree with Charlie that "US health insurance industry is actively suppressive of entrepreneurial start-up ventures by older folks"; I think that's going to change thanks to MY President.

Most significantly for the rest of us, we know fiction writing, like acting and sports, is a "winner take all" form of work. A small fraction of writers take home a vast majority of the earnings. In an interconnected world, where work can flow easily, it's conceivable this will become widespread among all knowledge workers. Really, you do want your babies to grow up to be cowboys.

Palm/HP is still dead

A few weeks ago I said Farewell Palm. Now HP has paid $1.2 billion in cash to acquire Palm ($5.70 a share).

It's good news for those who bought Palm stock in the past few weeks, but it's no reason to consider buying a PalmOS device. Whatever Palm was yesterday, it's now being digested by a very average large publicly traded company. Palm is now HP.

An average PTC like HP can compete effectively against other clumsy but powerful PTCs like IBM, Dell, RIM, and Microsoft. HP is capable of turning out devices that are every bit as good as Windows Mobile phones of 2008.

Except it's not 2008, and the competition is not RIM or Microsoft or Dell. The competition is Google and Apple.

Google and Apple are also publicly traded companies. They are not typical however. They are very deviant. Google has an underestimated two tier ownership structure that gives great power to its founders. Apple has Steve Jobs, who in addition to being an insane genius with mind-control powers is also Apple's founder and has cult like authority over the company and its shareholders. Both Google and Apple behave like privately held companies with public money.

Palm is still dead. I don't know why HP did this deal. Maybe it was all IP, but they paid a lot for IP. I think they hope to stay in the only game in town. It won't work; there's no room for them at the table.

This is about Google and Apple. Microsoft will take 3rd place. RIM will fall by the wayside within three years. HP won't last a year. They can't compete.

Apple next: MobileMe becomes the iPad host peripheral

I've noted that the iPad will be a computer for people who are poor. I've predicted that Apple will turn on Facebook (their friend today, but so was Google, once). I've noted that MobileMe more closely resembles OS X server than it does Google Apps.

Now, for my next prediction [1] - related to all of the above.

Within a year Apple will make MobileMe an iPhone back-end peripheral. When they do that iPhone users will not need a local copy of iTunes (PC or Mac), and they won't need an ISP. After that Apple will make MobileMe into a Facebook competitor.

Next year's iPad will come with a starter MobileMe subscription.

[1] I'm a dreadful prognosticator, but it doesn't stop me. I'm often right in the long run, but usually premature.

The Obama difference - Israel and Bicycles

Act One: Obama and the the Middle East

Cohen - Beating the Mideast’s Black Hole - NYTimes.com

.... That meeting concluded with Mitchell saying: “You asked if I think Netanyahu is serious. They ask the same question. You are an expert on Palestinian and Israeli politics. They are the same. But no one in the world knows American politics better than me, and this I will say. There has never been in the White House a president that is so committed on this issue, including Clinton who is a personal friend, and there will never be, at least not in the lifetime of anyone in this room." ...

Act Two: Obama: Transportation and transparency

In the Obama administration, there's an official blog from the Department of Transportation with with a post about bike and pedestrian infrastructure highlighting a March 15 policy statement on bicycle and pedestrian accommodation:

... The establishment of well-connected walking and bicycling networks is an important component for livable communities, and their design should be a part of Federal-aid project developments. ... transportation agencies should plan, fund, and implement improvements to their walking and bicycling networks, including linkages to transit...

... transportation agencies should give the same priority to walking and bicycling as is given to other transportation modes. Walking and bicycling should not be an afterthought in roadway design

... children should have safe and convenient options for walking or bicycling to school and parks..

... DOT encourages bicycle and pedestrian accommodation on bridge projects including facilities on limited-access bridges with connections to streets or paths... 

..Current maintenance provisions require pedestrian facilities built with Federal funds to be maintained in the same manner as other roadway assets. State Agencies have generally established levels of service on various routes especially as related to snow and ice events...

... The Secretary shall not approve any project or take any regulatory action under this title that will result in the severance of an existing major route or have significant adverse impact on the safety for nonmotorized transportation traffic and light motorcycles, unless such project or regulatory action provides for a reasonable alternate route or such a route exists." 23 U.S.C. 109(m)....

There is a difference between Obama and the GOP alternative. A vast, huge, multifaceted, every day in every way difference.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is a willing servant of Rupert Murdoch, owner operator of the Wall Street Journal and Fox news.

History is fractal - IOT the Zulu nation

Melvyn and Shula do not have the best chemistry in during the In Our Time program The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. I can see why Melvyn was peevish, but it's a bit of a shame. I'm sympathetic to Marks' notion that the emergence of Shaka Zulu was more chance than destiny; a contingent result of swirling change and disruption driven, fundamentally, by the technologies of innovative agriculture and consequent rapid population growth and Malthusian collapse.

That, however, was too much subtlety for 15 minutes of Shaka, for there was a lot of ground to cover in one 48 minute program. Even in this quick overview it's clear the history of the consequent fallings and risings of the Boer, Zulu, and British is immensely complex, full of chance and personality and mostly unknown.

So it is with history. Endless stories, of which we know only a tiny number. There must be many more, perhaps more grand and sad than any we know, lost in deep time.

Lost, but, in a sense, not unknown. History is fractal. The stories we know in detail are similar to those we know in outline are similar to those we know in myth, and are very likely similar to those we don't know at all. If we are wise enough to realize that history is fractal, we can study closely the history we know and learn universal truths. If we are foolish enough to believe our stories are unique, we walk the path of willful ignorance.