US 2003 and China 2010 – Nations on meth

The NYT is reporting that China is limiting the export of “rare earth” minerals to the US and Europe (and Canada too I’d assume). China did the same thing to Japan a few weeks ago. This is alleged to be a response to threats of tariffs on imported goods made in China.

This is a parenting moment. This is the time when the 16 yo steals the keys, goes for a ride, and puts a nice dent in the front fender. Time to count to ten, and repeat ten times. Then remember what is a stake, and what the long game is.

If you were a reasonably mature and sane nation in 2003, such as Norway, you’d look at 2003 America and draw some conclusions. You’d decide that America was in much worse emotional shape than you’d thought in the Clinton years. You might guess that America had an unsuspected substance problem. The best response would be calm engagement, while also making wise preparations for American derailment.

That’s what we should be thinking about China. China is a critical component of world civilization, and, if this story is accurate, she’s in much worse emotional shape than we thought. We thought she was a smart but rowdy striver, but now we learn she’s snorting meth. This is a problem for China, and for the family of nations. We’re all in this together.

In the meanwhile there are obvious things to do. We have a strategic petroleum reserve. We will tax all rare earth import and production (not just China’s) to build a rare earth strategic reserve. All nations will do the same thing. That will give time for nations like Canada, Australia and throughout Africa to increase production.

More importantly, we need to think differently about China, just as all nations had to think differently about the US after 2003. The world needs a healthy, stable, rational China. We’re going to have to do a lot of counting to 10, even as China works through her own issues, and even as we prepare for the worst.

Maybe the US and China can join a rehab program together.

Tools of the NYT

I liked this NYT reference on favored home tools, especially their product endorsements ...

• STANLEY FATMAX RATCHETING MULTI-BIT SCREWDRIVER $10, (sigh)
• DeWalt 1/2-inch, 18-volt Cordless Compact Hammerdrill kit (hammer, not just drill)
• BOSCH 5-AMP JIGSAW (rather than rotary, sigh)

Oddly silent dogs: The digital TV conversion

Canada still hasn't converted, but the US went to all digital TV on June 12, 2009.

We were supposed to convert in Feb 2009, but the switchover was delayed to allow more consumers to buy D/A converters or digital TVs. My family stayed with rabbit ears; they work better with our subsidized D/A boxes than with old school analog broadcasts. It is true, however, that nobody here watches TV on a TV any more. (The kids see their cartoons streamed to the laptop during their earned computer time, we also stream Netflix to iMac or Wii or we try to watch Netflix's frequently defective DVDs).

Which brings me to something noteworthy. The dog didn't bark. I expected some screaming by on June 13th -- didn't happen. Nothing happened. Cheapskates like us bought subsidized converters, others bought new TVs, cable subscribers weren't affected anyway. As best as I can tell, everyone who wanted a subsidized converter got one.

Most of the analog frequencies were sold off for vast sums (dwarfing the A/D converter subsidies), but a critical component has been made a public good with potentially enormous implications.

This was a huge change in American life, and it was created and executed by government. The six month switchover delay and extra converter subsidies happened under the Obama administration, but this was a long transition that started in Clinton years and went through Bush II.

A longterm, bipartisan, massive technological transition entirely driven and controlled by the Federal government -- that worked.

Nobody talks about it.

Isn't that a bit weird?

iPod interface wrong for instructional video

I’ve been listening to a few instructional videos (lectures) on my iPhone lately. That’s how I came to realize that the iPod/iPhone/iTunes interface for lectures and other instructional video is backwards. We need a Podcast interface with video, but we get a video interface instead.

There are two problems. The first is we get the wrong control set. Instead of the ‘back 30 seconds’ and rewind/fast forward of the podcast UI, we get the very simple controls of the video UI. Even with the variable speed slider it’s tough to replay the last minute of material – particularly while driving. (No, I’m too old to be watching while driving, I’m just listening.)

The other problem is the interrupt behavior. Podcasts and music continue to play if you change to another app (map, GPS), but instructional video pauses. That makes sense for a movie, but it’s wrong for instructional video.

I don’t have any music videos, but I wonder if they get the iPod/iOS instructional video interface we need. If so, is there a way to convert a .mp4 based instructional video into a “music video”?

Friendly fire - how Dem spam killed my donations

I'm a good commie. Each cycle we  give some money to help Dems.

Not this election though. Partly, that's because my team's spam has gone astronomical. The spam flow is legal though, because "political speech" isn't covered by the CAN-SPAM act of 2003.

Campaign spam comes with 'unsubscribe' links, but they don't seem to be connected to anything. Even if they were, however, I'd probably be re-enrolled with the next list update. I doubt the campaigns spend much on mailing list hygiene.

At least the email headers aren't faked, so I have about thirty Gmail filters that send all email from all identified campaign-related domains to the trash. I'm probably not the only one doing this though, because lately the domain names are proliferating. The speech spammers are trying to get around my filters.

This is a job for the DFL. Yes, it's a bit of a reach for them -- but we're talking money. Money talk gets politician's attention. Here's what the DFL can do:

1. Get serious about a state wide unsubscribe service. Tell campaigns that if they don't follow the rules, they don't get funding or DFL support.
2. Forget about reaching me by email. There's nothing a politician can put in a mass email that will interest me (the vast majority of political speech is aimed at the undecideds). Instead set up narrowcast feeds aimed at literate geeks whose vote is not in doubt.
3. Enjoy the money Emily and I will send after the spam stops.

And now, back to our regular programming

Yikes! This morning I saw a post that was supposed to go our family blog, not Gordon’s Notes.

Sorry. I doubt there is much global reader interest in our Canadian Thanksgiving pictures.

It’s gone now.

The state of WiFi is mixed

Due to circumstances beyond my control I had to pay $50 for a D-Link DIR-615 Wireless N Router today.

I won't bother with a technical review. This thing has a 3 star Amazon rating; there are presumably better alternatives at the same price point. Most middle income users would do better to buy the $180 Apple AirPort Extreme. Cheap junk has a high cost of ownership.

The purchase gives me the excuse, however, so pass on a few observations on the state of WiFi today ...

• 802.11G is a sweet spot technology. It's good enough and reliable enough if you can find decent equipment.
• 802.11N 2.4GHz is good but overhyped, and 802.11N 5GHz is junk.
• WiFi equipment breaks. I assume it's something to do with the physics of radio. These things fail like hard drives. I'd love to know why they're so fragile.
• Apple tech doesn't handle microwave interference well. Devices lose their signal and fail to reacquire - including iPads [1]. I don't know if Windows devices do any better. Disappointing.
• Modern microwave ovens are insanely leaky. Doesn't the FCC regulate this industry at all? We need way better regulation of microwave emissions.
• The "wizard" setup on the D-link DIR-615 assigns an insane wireless device password, and the manual setup is crazy-geeky. There's stuff in there even I don't recognize. It didn't used to be this bad; why can't anyone but Apple do device software any more?
• WiFi is not reliable enough.

I'll expand on the last bit. Over the past six months I've gone completely cable free at home and at my parent's home, using only Apple equipment. Even with the best available residential gear, it's nowhere near as reliable as cabled setups.

At my home I have to power cycle our gear every two to four months. At my mother's home, however, with a 3 yo AirPort Express (pre-N), they ran into problems every two weeks or so. I've switched her main machine back to a wired connection.

I suspect a hardware problem at my mother's home, but I think my own home record is reasonably typical for healthy hardware. Between the limited reliability of healthy hardware, high hardware failure rates, and (except Apple) remarkably bad setup software, the state of the wireless market is not happy.

We need more studies of why markets fail. What's wrong with capitalism? Were market failures always this common?

[1] I bought my mother an iPad. I've used it a fair bit. I knew it would be big, but I thought the need for a classic computer (iTunes sync) would limit iPad 1 adoption. I thought iPad 2 with MobileMe sync would be the big one. So I'm surprised iPad 1 is so big. It's not for me though.

Cricket’s $149 Android and the future $4000 Dell desktop

We are way past the tipping point if the no contract $149 Android phone is real [1]. The replacement for the $150 ChromeOS Netbook has come before the netbook, and Google’s $80 ultra-portable (with FM radio a cell phone too!) is a year ahead of schedule – though Microsoft’s lawsuits will slow things down.

After the lawsuits settle down the contract free low end iPhone will go for $250 in 2012 and Android will hit a billion users by 2013 (including China’s forked Android phone). By then RIM, Windows Mobile and so on will be history. Nokia and Motorola will make Android phones. Microsoft will be an IP parasite, a shadow of its former self.

So what about Dell?

Here’s where it gets funny. I’m used to thinking Dell will go away. After all, even today’s phones can have external monitors and keyboards. Who needs a Dell after 2012?

Well, verticals will. Software development. Servers.

Thing is, vertical gear doesn’t sell for $800 a pop. Remember what Sun workstations cost when Sun was profitable? Desktop prices are going to start going up, and up. By 2013 I expect Dell will sell far fewer machines – but they’ll be much more expensive. One day we will see the $4000 desktop, even as much of Africa carries a supercompter in their pocket.

[1] But what will it cost after the patent suits?

Why you should vote for the Tea Party’s coven in the century of the fruitbat

Christine O’Donnell. Linda McMahon. Sharron Angle.

Names to conjure with! The Tea Party’s fruitbat coven strikes fear into the hearts of rationalists. Together with Minnesota’s Michelle Bachman and President Sarah Palin they …

Oh, excuse me. I’ve got to shut the window. Susan’s grave spinning can be kind of distracting.

Ok, where was I? Got it. Looks grim. Doomed we are. True, Minnesota survived Ventura [1], and this group can’t be as bad as Cheney/Bush, but America is in a grim place. Shouldn’t rationalists be buying gardens in the countryside?

Well, yes, we probably should. But I will make a case for why rationalists should vote fruitbat, even though I lack the convictional courage to do it myself.

Let’s consider just five of the wee challenges that face America in the next thirty years, and think about how Vulcans (my people – Team Obama) would do compared to fruitbats.

First, there’s the relative decline of America as a world power and the growth of American poverty. Obviously the fruitbats will speed this along. But relative decline is going to happen anyway. There’s nothing magical about America. Our post-WW II preeminence was largely a matter of circumstance. Since then we’ve done some things right, and, especially in the Cheney/Bush era, many, many things wrong. We Vulcans managed to avert, for now, Great Depression II, but we couldn’t finish the game. Advantage Vulcan, but only by degree.

Secondly, global climate change. Two words – Nixon. China. We tried, we failed. The fruitbats can’t do worse, and only they can talk to the denialists. Advantage fruitbat.

Thirdly, the end of participatory democracy – China and America converge. Enlightenment thinkers couldn’t anticipate the positive feeback loops that make American law and regulation ever more favorable to large corporate entities (and billionaires, though they are less predictable). We Vulcans have failed on this front. Advantage fruitbat.

Fourth – the reason-resistant bomb. Iran is only the best current example. Mutual Assured Destruction worked [2] because the enemies feared death. Russia, China and the EU are all secular states, and American leadership religion is mostly skin deep (until Bush II [4]). If true believers have control of nuclear delivery systems, and if they believe their deity will either protect them or give them paradise, then we’re in a new world of hurt. It’s hard to see how Vulcans can help here. Maybe fruitbats can talk to them. Maybe religious logicians [3] will stop worrying about a fruitbat led declining America. Advantage fruitbat, albeit a small one.

Lastly, there’s the Big One. AI, better described as AS (artificial sentience). Skynet – the smarter than you think [3] machines. We don’t survive this one. Vulcan leadership, by sustaining American science, will move this day forward. Fruitbats, by accelerating the decline of America, may slow it down by five to ten years. That might move the end time out of my lifespan, though, alas, probably not out of my children’s lifespan. Advantage fruitbat.

If we add it all up, Vulcans only clearly win on one of the five big challenges. Yes, the fruitbats do accelerate the decline of America – but that might also slow AS work.

I can’t force myself to vote fruitbat. I’m not that rational; I’ll continue to campaign for Vulcan rule. In the near term it is clearly the better choice. If the fruitbats win, however, there is some (slightly) longer term consolation.

- footnotes

[1] Yes, Minnesota is whackier than California. We don’t get the credit we deserve.

[2] To my amazement. The long post-fusion survival of civilization is a strong argument for divine (or other) intervention.

[3] I’m impressed and disturbed that the NYT put this series together, even though it’s annoying that the last article managed to miss the historic Cyc and active Wolfram Alpha AI projects.

[3] They’re not whackos. Given his stated beliefs and values Ahmadinejad is more rational (for a certain definition of rational), and thus more scary but less annoying, than the fruitbats.

[4] Carter was very religious, but in a peculiarly rational way. He’s a true anomaly.

Krugman takes on Rupert Murdoch

Took longer than I’d hoped, but at last Krugman has Rupert Murdoch in the crosshairs.

This won’t be his last Murdoch editorial. We all need to stop saying “Fox” when we mean Murdoch (emphases mine) …

Paul Krugman - Fear and Favor - NYTimes.com

… As Politicorecently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that when billionaires put their might behind “grass roots” right-wing action, it’s not just about ideology: it’s also about business. What the Koch brothers have bought with their huge political outlays is, above all, freedom to pollute. What Mr. Murdoch is acquiring with his expanded political role is the kind of influence that lets his media empire make its own rules…

We need to name Murdoch, we need to name the billionaires who wish to rule America. They are succeeding.

We need to remember what Berlusconi did to Italy.

We need to subscribe to the NYT.

Verizon scam: Emergent fraud earns a fine

This is an old and universal cell phone scam, but somehow Verizon got caught ...

Verizon Wireless to Pay Refunds for Data Charges - NYTimes.com

... Verizon Wireless will pay up to $90 million to 15 million cellphone customers who were wrongly charged, one of the largest-ever refunds by a telecommunications company...

I wonder if David Pogue's Nov 2009 NYT column played  a role in the settlement. Maybe AT&T will refund me the $5/month I pay to block my son from inadvertent data access.

I'm sure Verizon will still money on the deal, especially after they write off the cost of the refund. (There's no wrongdoing, it's all an accident, so they can write it off).  I'm reasonably sure they never explicitly planned this fraud, it was simply a happy accident.

See also:

• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams
• Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams (Pogue, 11/2009). This post has a nice collection of similar scams if any DA is interested.
• Gordon's Notes: Emergent fraud: Anthem and automatic payment denials
• Gordon's Notes: 21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind

Transparent society: automated monitoring of employees

I own Minority Report. I need to watch it before it's entirely passe.

For example, Social Intelligence is marketing employee behavior data mining to corporations. Forget spotting terrorists with Total Information Awareness (oh, you've already forgotten?), it's much more profitable to spot employees with a substance problem. Plus, it doesn't freak out the Tea Party if corporations do it.

If corporations don't buy, SI argues, they'll be sued the next time an employee goes postal. They should have known, lawyers will argue (and they will).

SI is also opening a subsidiary that will use bots to generate optimal online identities; burying the signal in noise. This service will be sold to employees. (I'm pretty sure Stross covered this in Accelerando, but there's lots of prior art here.)

I was joking about the employee service. SI might as well do it though. If they don't, someone else will.

There are several business opportunities here. I'm particularly looking forward to the related hire-a-hacker fund. Ten thousand people will anonymously donate a dollar for an SI related initiative.

(via Schneier).

PS. The Schneier comment thread includes some examples of name collisions and identity errors. I have one of those. My true name is somewhat unusual, and one time I flew in to give a talk only to be met by two police officers. They were looking for me as a material witness in an arson investigation. I was dressed for the presentation, so their expressions were funny to watch. Evidently I didn't look like the guy they expected ...

Google's ad platform is a gaping hole in iOS parental controls

I know Apple's OS X parental controls are broken. I thought things were better with iOS. Then I discovered a wide range of apps, from PublicRadio to WolframAlpha, provided WebKit based embedded browsers that bypass parental Safari lockouts.

Today our residential parental controls tester discovered that Google's AdMob ads give him full access to YouTube from Pandora.app.

iOS parental controls are just as broken as OS X parental controls. Since YouTube and Safari are essentially NC17 ("explict") apps, every AdMob or iPhone.app that provides access is arguably NC17 too.

What a mess.

Culturally, I'm surprised how little interest this gets. The iPad platform in particular is going to be big in all schools. Have parents given up, are they in denial, or do they just not know?

See also:

• OS X Parental Controls: Never more broken than with Apple's MobileMe
• iPhone for kids: The Achilles Heel

The key to happiness

This is disturbingly close to what I think ...

I would say "editing" rather than "self-delusion", but, really, that's quibbling.

Why do corporations (firms) exist?

Economists used to wonder, from a theoretical perspective, why "firms" including companies, and especially large corporations, exist (aka theory of the firm). In 1937 Coase thought that while corporations didn't allocate labor and capitol as well as the market, this was offset by lower transaction costs.

Of course transactions costs in the net era are far less than in Coase's time, so this doesn't explain why corporations remain so entrenched.

This still seems like a valid question. Does knowledge work, in particular, scale all that well? Movies seem to be put together by loose coalitions of small to medium sized companies, why aren't more things done like that?

I suspect most people familiar with large corporations would agree that often the company seems much less than the sum of its parts. In particular, the absence of internal markets can make intra-company collaboration less efficient than market based collaboration. Corporations, on the inside, operate like the command economies of the Soviet Empire (or, for that matter, like today's China -- which is doing well for the moment).

I'm trying to put together a list of things that large corporations can do uniquely well. I wasn't at all impressed with the conventional "theory of the firm" list. Here's mine ...

1. Act without the restraints of antitrust law. A large corporation can do many things that would require collusion to be done by smaller entities.
2. Change laws, particularly accounting standards and tax laws, to favor large corporations and lower their cost of capitol. This creates a positive feedback loop where tax laws and accounting rules favor large corporations, which in turn influence laws and rules that favor large corporations and so on.
3. Corporations can buy senators and lesser politicians, again without collusion.
4. Corporations can engage in financial warfare, cutting off suppliers to smaller competitors, blocking access to capitol, and so on.
5. Corporations can capture regulators.
6. Corporations may be able to create and institute processes that allow them to do knowledge work with "average" knowledge workers instead of temperamental and expensive "stars". (I don't think this actually works, but a lot of effort is spent on this.)
7. Corporations can buy A and above ratings from (corrupt) rating agencies.
8. Once a corporation exists, it has an unusual ability to sustain itself even when its mission ends (like the inquisition)

Taking these items as a whole, it's apparent that once corporations are established, they are large and powerful enough to change their ecosystem to suit them. Rather like some primates.

I'll update my list as I get more ideas. Any suggestions?

See also:

My stuff

• The Corporation - what next? (8/2010)
• How big should financial firms be? (3/2009)
• Troubled capitalism: The corporate entity (Iain Banks, 8/2010)
• Self sustaining entities: corporations and the Spanish Inquisition (6/28/2006)
• The corporation as psychopath (Economist book review, 2004 - I've updated the post with a copy of the since lost review)
• Beyond the first cause: Deepwater Horizon and the publicly traded company (6/20/21010)
• Understanding the elections - what's really changed (11/4/2010)
• The morality of markets - and a response to hunger (9/28/2010)

Other people's

• The Nature of the Firm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Anti-Dismal: Williamson and the theory of firm (10/16/2009)
• Llamas and my stegosaurus: Artificial Persons (1/22/2010)
• The Corporation Film and The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power Joel Bakan (2004)

Update 2/25/11: In a Krugman article I learn that Williamson won the Nobel in 2009 for work in the 70s on the theory of the firm. So Williamson extended Coase ...

Williamson argues that the firm is best regarded as a "governance structure," a means of organizing a set of contractual relations among individual agents. The firm, then, consists of an entrepreneur-owner, the tangible assets he owns, and a set of employment relationships ...

Personally I wasn't that impressed with the descriptions I read of Williamson's work, but Krugman likes it (emphases mine)...

Oliver Williamson shared the 2009 Nobel mainly because of his work on a question that may seem obvious, but is much less so once you think about it: why are there so many big companies? Why not just rely on markets to coordinate activity among individuals or small firms? Why, in effect, do we have a lot of fairly large command-and-control economies embedded in our market system?

Williamson answered this in terms of the difficulties of writing complete contracts; when the tasks that need to be done are complex, so that you can’t fully specify what people should do in advance, there can be a lot of slippage and strategic behavior if you rely on market incentives; in such cases it can be better to do these things in-house, so that you can simply tell people to do something a particular way or to change their behavior.

... there are times when it’s better to rely on central planning than to leave things up to the market...

Krugman's "Central planning" comment sent the usual suspects frothing mad. They've obviously never lived in a large corporation. I have. Krugman is spot on.