The debt ceiling test and why index funds are probably evil

We're coming up on one of the great natural experiments of our time. If I and my fellow travelers are right about how the American world works, then either the US debt ceiling will be raised or Goldman Sachs will make a vast (even by their standards) amount of money. If the debt ceiling is not raised, and GS doesn't make another fortune, then I'm wrong about how the supreme court blessed power of emergent corporate entities.

I think I'm right though, so, unless Goldman Sachs has bet big on US debt interest rates rising, the US debt ceiling will be raised.

There's not a lot of comfort in being right though. Being right means that another brief experiment in representative democracy [1] is drawing to a close; voters, even crazy tea party voters, just aren't all that important.

Corporate entities are important though, and not all corporate entities are equal. Exxon has different interests from Apple. Philip Morris and Google are not the same. Privately held corporations can own Senators just like the public, but they can be quite idiosyncratic.

Since all corporations are not equal, all of us are not completely powerless. Those who still have savings can choose which corporations to feed. Some, like Exxon, will oppose a CO2 tax. Others, like Google, will be relatively neutral. Some, like Goldman Sachs, are largely parasitic. Others, like Apple or Subaru, produce useful products. Combining the limited power of voting with the limited power of stock ownership we may be able to keep civilization together long enough for our children to deal with it.

There's a problem though. The problem is that most smart non-uber-wealthy investors [1] put their money in Bogle's proletarian invention - the index fund. That doesn't give us any "vote" on which corporations grow, and which don't.

In the world of corporate rule, index funds neuter our limited influence. We need a new variety of socially conscious investing, a basket of corporations that are mostly compatible with human civilization.

Anyone know of a set to start with?

See also:

• Why you should vote for the Tea Party’s coven in the century of the fruitbat
• Why do corporations (firms) exist?
• Self sustaining entities: corporations and the Spanish Inquisition
• Troubled capitalism: The corporate entity
• Is the GOP truly a pawn of corporations and the wealthy? We'll find out soon.
• Understanding the elections - what's really changed
• The debt ceiling: Can Goldman Sachs win if the US defaults?

[1] The uber-wealthy have access to information we don't have, and they shouldn't have.

The twenty minute HIT bicycle routine

High intensity interval training (HIT) is a popular fix for people with more drive than time ...

What’s the Best Exercise? - Gretchen Reynolds - NYTimes 4/17/11

... High-intensity interval training, or H.I.T. as it’s familiarly known among physiologists, is essentially all-interval exercise. As studied in Gibala’s lab, it involves grunting through a series of short, strenuous intervals on specialized stationary bicycles, known as Wingate ergometers. In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise...

The approach seems promising, since most of us have minimal time to exercise each week. Gibala last month published a new study of H.I.T., requiring only a stationary bicycle and some degree of grit. In this modified version, you sprint for 60 seconds at a pace that feels unpleasant but sustainable, followed by 60 seconds of pedaling easily, then another 60-second sprint and recovery, 10 times in all. ‘There’s no particular reason why’ H.I.T. shouldn’t be adaptable to almost any sport, Gibala said, as long as you adequately push yourself."

The NYT likes Dr Gibala, his prior study was featured in a 'Well' blog post of June 2009. The regime sounds a bit faddish, but I do like the idea of a solid workout over 20 minutes (10 minutes out, 10 minutes back). It is well suited to inline skating, bicycling and nordic skiing.

I can see doing this kind of HIT once a week in addition to my other exercise routines. The 'River road' near our home would be perfect for this - few stop signs, limited traffic. I'll look for find a cheap timer I can tape on my handlebars. It's also pretty easy to convert this to indoor (still have a vintage Nordic Track!) when the weather is bad.

Twin Cities bicycling clubs

I did my first TCBC ride in 12 years tonight. The kids are getting old enough I can take a Dad Night every few weeks; soon they'll be strong enough to join me on these kinds of rides. (I do summer Minnesota Inline Skate Club skates with my middle son, but I often tow him. Harder to do on a bike unless I buy a tandem -- which I'm considering.)

TCBC has the most rides in the metro area, especially the B/C rides I like. (It will be a while before I'm a B rider again; their B rides get pretty fast.) It's not the only recreational club [2] though. Aside from the outre Black Label Bike Club (no local site, that would be inappropriate) there is the Hiawatha Bicycling Club [1], the "Easy Riders" (I've seen them, but can't find a web site), the fitness/performance oriented Ride and Glide [3], The Twin Cities Bicycling Meetup and Twin Cities Social Cycling (meetup).

TCBC is by far the largest and oldest of the recreational road cycling clubs, the other may come and go.

[1] Lower key, often lower pace - but possibly in retirement. Their Javascript heavy web site doesn't appear to work in modern browsers; I wonder if was done using an old version of FrontPage.
[2] There are at least a half-dozen racing clubs, probably twice that.
[3] They do pacelines. I think TCBC only does pacelines on A and some B rides.

Care of special needs adults in post-employment America

The Dow is doing very well, though some expect that to change shortly. For most Americans, however, the Great Recession grinds on. The percent of employed adult Americans (employment-population ratio) is now back to where it was in 1976, when most women weren't in the workforce. The annual incomes of the bottom 90% of US families has been flat since 1973.

Against this, we see about 50 million Americans with a disability and 24 million with a severe disability. Looking forward, barring US adoption of Canada's brilliant solution, intractable American demographics means fewer workers supporting more disabled persons -- even as those workers are faced with decreasing employment options and stagnant or falling wages.

So it's not surprising that societal care for the weak is being withdrawn ...

When Children With Autism Become Adults - Goehner 4/13/11 - NYTimes

... As the explosion of children who were found to have autism in the 1990s begins to transition from the school to the adult system, experts caution about the coming wave.

“We estimate there are going to be half a million children with autism in the next 10 years who will become adults,” said Peter Bell, executive vice president for programs and services of the advocacy group Autism Speaks.

Services for adults with autism exist, but unlike school services, they are not mandated, and there are fewer of them. Combined with shrinking government budgets, the challenges are daunting.

“We are facing a crisis of money and work force,” said Nancy Thaler, executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services. “The cohort of people who will need services — including aging baby boomers — is growing much faster than the cohort of working-age adults that provide care.”

To help parents navigate this difficult journey, in January Autism Speaks introduced a free Transition Tool Kit for parents and their adolescent children with autism. The kit includes information about such critical issues as community life, housing, employment and developing self-advocacy skills...

... Many young adults with autism have transitioned into large residential systems, whether group homes or institutions, offering round-the-clock services. But waiting lists can be long. And increasingly, in an effort to stem costs, states are moving away from the group home model into family-based care, a trend that started about 10 years ago.

... Nationwide, 59 percent of people who receive autism services are living with their families, according to Mr. Lakin.

Living with one’s family may not always be best for a person with autism. Nor is it what many families, who assume their grown child will move into a group home, for example, envision for their future. But options are limited, and given the high demand for out-of-home residential services, Mr. Lakin said, “families really need to think about a longer and more central involvement in their adult child’s life than they have in the past.”

The good news is that many states are providing more support for people with autism who live with their families. They are also giving families greater flexibility and control over budgets with so-called consumer-controlled services, which reimburse families that hire friends or relatives, rather than outside caregivers, for regular care.

Connecticut and Arizona, for example, pay for care provided by family members, a growing trend. Other states, like Pennsylvania, have programs in which contracts are issued for people with autism to live with other families. And Vermont and New Hampshire pioneered a model of providing funding directly to families.

Some families have pooled their own money and entered into cooperatives with other families, a challenge that can take years...

.. Among the most powerful advocates are siblings of those with developmental disabilities. “Sibs have always played a really important role; we just haven’t identified them as sibs,” Mr. Lakin said. “We’ve identified them as agency leaders and social workers occupationally. But the real impulse of their work is that they were a sibling.”

Don Meyer, the founder and director of the Sibling Support Project and the creator of Sibshops, a network of programs for young siblings of children with special needs, said: “Parents need to share their plans for their special-needs child with their typically developing kids. After Mom and Dad are no longer there, it is likely it will be the brothers and sisters who will ensure their sibling leads a dignified life, living and working in the community.”...

It doesn't require a lot of imagination to predict how this will turn out. Among other things, we should expect a return to orphanages (esp. for special needs children) and the return of longterm institutions for the destitute disabled.

This might be a good time to consider the Canadian Solution for immigration. Maybe we should even take a look at where America's trillions are going. Just saying.

The Golden Age: November 9, 1989 to September 1, 2001

In our home it's a short hop from planning a bathroom remodeling to the history of uncertainty in medieval and modern eras to the shadow of The Last American Golden Age, an era when the world felt predictable and the future was bright.

When was that golden age? It wasn't, Emily and I decided, exactly the 1990s. It began with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989. It ended, of course, on September 11, 2001. So the Golden Age for modern America lasted almost 12 years.

Future historians won't agree. They'll say it's all too neat. Falling walls and towers bookmarking a millennial decade -- it's a cliche.

The cliche doesn't stop there. The seeds of the whitewater world, the Net and the rise of the China and India, world were planted then. Seeds of doom planted even at the peak of power?! Come on. Nobody would write that story.

But that's what happened. Reality doesn't worry about cliche.

Update 4/18/11: I had a typo in the title. Fixed.

Thoughts after two days of a primary care conference

I haven't seen a patient in 10 years, but I like to keep in some contact with my first career. So I've spent the last two days at the MAFP Spring Refresher. It's inexpensive and local and the lectures are comparable to most such conferences.

Mostly I enjoyed the presentations, but I'm not going to write about those. Instead of commenting on the "new" discoveries, I'll comment on the static and the transitory.

What's static is the manner of presentation. In the past 30 years we've gone from transparencies to (yech) PowerPoint, but the basic format of medical lecturing is unchanged. The most interesting material is only spoken, not written. We get lists of symptoms (near pointless) instead of typical and atypical presentations. We don't hear enough about common mistakes. We rarely get frequency or prevalence data or diagnostic sensitivity, specificity or positive predictive value. Even experienced clinicians don't describe natural history of the conditions they know. We see lists of moldy textbook treatments that the speaker would never actually lose herself. Specialists don't tell us what makes a good referral. We get nearly worthless PDFs (that we can't copy/paste), only one speaker (the best) provided a handout of key points.

Thirty years -- and we've made no real progress in something as fundamental as person-present education.  Since improvements are so obvious (see above) this is a curious form of market failure.

What's transitory is medical practice. Medical progress is almost as static as medical education, but I was struck today by the effervescence of medical fashion. Perhaps it's a side-effect of a field that now changes slowly, but several speakers spoke of national care guidelines that seem to reverse direction every two years. I think of daily and monthly changes to medical practice as being like the weather in Minnesota - frequent storms that rage and thunder -- then pass slowly away. Against that is the climate of slow change and true progress, but that now takes a decade to see ...

Text Spam: Phone company text messaging must die

I don't like paying $20/month for our AT&T unlimited texting family plan. After all, it costs AT&T next to nothing to provide SMS services.

I pay because the current IM alternatives don't work. That leaves texting as the polite alternative to the unscheduled phone call. I pay because what I get is worth more than the money I pay.

Or, rather, it was worth more. It's worth less all the time, because I'm getting more text spam like these 595-959 Welcome to Sears/Kmart Shop Your Way Rewards Text Alrts (yeah, "Alrts") ...

Unlike "full number" text spam, AT&T won't accept reports for these...

Instead, AT&T markets "short code" text message services. They charge spammers to spam us, and, I assume, they charge us to receive the spam. Talk about a win-win!

You could try completing the FTC's spam report form for wireless phones, but as of today it's not designed for text message reporting. It's as though the FTC got caught in a time warp @ 2002.

This is only going to get worse. There are now two phone companies in America, and they hate us almost as much as we hate them. They hate us so much they'll drive us to abandon their most profitable service.

We need an alternative to phone company controlled text messages. We need a messaging service that includes spam filtering -- and that doesn't make us sitting ducks for low grade spam. Blackberry did this years ago; maybe when RIM dies in 2013 either Apple or Google will buy their texting service -- and give us something worth paying for. Maybe California will ban text spam and end our spam as a side-effect. Maybe all of the above.

There's an opening here. Help me out Apple, Google, and California!

The debt ceiling: Can Goldman Sachs win if the US defaults?

The GOP is expected to blackmail the Democratic party by holding the American economy hostage. This isn't news; Bruce Bartlett has been talking about the debt ceiling and debt default since last June, and has been expecting this crisis since January.

Even so, I haven't worried. It's not that I think the GOP is reasonable or even rational. The GOP is certainly crazy enough to blow up the village in order to save it. I haven't worried about this because I have assumed that the GOP will obey its masters on the big things  ...

Gordon's Notes: Is the GOP truly a pawn of corporations and the wealthy? We'll find out soon. (Jan 2011)

... Charlie Stross says emergent corporate entities control America. Krugman says wealth alone is sufficient explanation, emergent entities are an unnecessary complication.

John Gordon says control (the bouncing yellow ball) of America is a dynamic balance between the emergent corporate entity (ECE) powerful (wealthy) individuals, and the voting masses [1]:

Of course I'm right, but it would be nice to have evidence.

Fortunately, there's a natural experiment coming up. The GOP is threatening to destroy the American, and world, economy. This is in the interests of neither powerful individuals nor ECEs. So if it happens, then Stross, Krugman and I are all wrong. The Voters have power after all, and it's just too bad so many Americans are detached from reality...

Recently, however, I realized there was a flaw in my logic.

I assumed destroying America was not in the interest of American "Corporate Entities". That's not necessarily so. I expect there's a way to make vast amounts of money off a US debt default, particularly for a company that has "insider" information. If Goldman Sachs were to bet on default, then they could combine with GOP whackiness to finish us all off.

Now I'm worried.

Epsilon breach: the iStealer and CyberGate mystery

A marketing (legal spam) firm was hacked and a bunch of our "private" (hah!) information was stolen. We can now expect more personalized phishing attacks (yawn). We might see more identity theft, but I've read that the identity reseller market has collapsed -- perhaps because there was too much cheating going on. (This is why civilization can win -- crooks can't trust each other).

Yawn. Another day, another semi-legal enterprise hacked. it's a boring story [1], not nearly as interesting as the far more sensitive, and far less discussed, RSA hack.

The story is boring, but there's a curious angle. The attack was prosaic ...

Epsilon breach used four-month-old attack - Security - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au

...The link in the body of the email took the user to a page that downloaded three malware programs – one that disables anti-virus software, another (iStealer) that is a Trojan keylogger to steal passwords, and a third (CyberGate) which offers hackers remote administration of the infected machine....

But the curious angle is how the attack trio are described: iStealer, CyberGate and an anonymous tool for disabling system defenses. I can't find out anything about them!

A google search on iStealer turns up lots of hits -- but they're obviously from shady sites I wouldn't visit without a VM constrained self-destructing browser. The only Wikipedia hits are on Russian language pages. In fact, as of today, this blog post is probably going to be the only legit result in many searches! (Sorry, I don't know anything.)

Why this curious silence?

[1] The firm is called Epsilon -- a silly name right out of a Bond flick. I think that's why this got so much attention.

Read the NYT on iPhone, iPad or desktop - for free with a Google Reader bundle

I was a happy Times Select subscriber. I liked paying for what I read, and I was disappointed that the NYT took down that paywall. The price was reasonable and access was convenient. True, I didn't get much value for my money (other than Krugman), but it was a way to contribute.

That's not how I feel about the NYT's $40 million paywall from Hell - $455 a year to view the NYT on 3 online devices. Unless, of course, I choose to mulch the newspaper, waste natural resources, and boost the earth's CO2. Then I pay less.

Multiply that by four family members, since there's no family plan. There's also no option to only get web access.

Happily, there's a practical alternative we can use until the NYT gets sane and offers web-only family access for @$150 a year. [3]

The practical, free, alternative to the NYT is ... the NYT. The NYT, you see, allows 'free' access from blogs. Since the NYT provides section feeds (Arts, Science, US, World) it is, in essence, its own blog [2]. If you add these feeds to Google's superb Reader, you can read the NYT from your web browser, iPhone or iPad for free. On the iPhone or iPad (or desktop) you can also use Reeder.app (my favorite iPhone app [1]).

It's a bit tedious to add these feeds, so you may want to start with using a Google Reader Bundle I prepared:  Gordon's Google Reader Bundle - New York Times. If you're a Google Reader user you'll get a button that lets you add all the feeds at once.

[1] Try the embedded readability function is excellent. Tap the little R in the top right of any page. The major limitation is that it only shows the 1st page of a multipage article, so sometimes I have to open the web view.
[2] If you browse the NYT web site with Safari you see either the RSS or "Reader" symbol by many articles. Since these are feed based, I wonder if they also dodge the paywall.
[3] We hate to encourage them, but to be fair Emily will pay the lowest cost subscription plan for the next few months.

Skimmer: The HTML 5 version of the NYT

The NYT is experimenting with HTML 5 at www.nytimes.com/skimmer/. I tested with Safari, the site stores 10MB locally to begin services.

I didn't like the way the fonts rendered on OS X Safari, but Windows users will probably do better (sadly, Windows' font technology is better than Apple's). The site is very responsive; it caches many page ingredients locally.

This is hardly revolutionary. In the days of 2,400 bps modems AOL was responsive because all the graphics elements ran off a 3.5" 720K diskette. It's taken a long time, but HTML 5 has brought us back the late 80s.

I had no trouble highlighting text and creating a blog post from the text. I suspected that might be blocked, but for now copy paste works.

The site is not glitch free. If a page doesn't render, don't wait. Hit refresh.

Worth a look.

Naked Emperors: where are all the connected people?

A NYT headline says half of all American adults have Facebook accounts [4]. Twitter-like valuations are leading to tech bubble denials. Social networks, we are told, led to the Egyptian revolution [1].

Except, I don't see it here among school parents, sports team families, tech company colleagues, and upper-middle-class neighbors.

True, I live in the midwest, but by all metrics Minneapolis is a snowier version of Seattle-Portland. If not here, then where?

I don't see feed readers in use outside our home [3]. Almost nobody subscribes to calendar feeds. Very few of my sample [5] use Twitter. Most of my friends who once used Facebook have stopped posting or even reading. Even texting isn't universal. Everyone has 1-2 email addresses and can use Google, but that's as far as it goes. Forget Foursquare.

I see more iPhones every day, but they're not used for location services, pub/sub (feeds) or even Facebook's user-friendly pub/sub. Around here iPhone communication change has been limited to faster email responses.

There is change of course, but it lags about 5-10 years behind the media memes. Dial-up connections are mostly gone, though I still see AOL addresses [2]. Texting is becoming common. Old school email is now universal, though many (unwisely) still use office email for personal messaging.

It's frustrating for me; all of the school, sport, community organization and even corporate collaboration projects I work with would go better with pub/sub in particular. I've learned the hard way to dial back my expectations, and to focus on 1990s tech.

So is Minneapolis - St. Paul strangely stuck in the dark ages? Or is there a gulf between the media portrayal of American tech use and reality --  a gulf that will lead to a big fleecing when Facebook goes public?

My money is on the fleecing - and a faint echo of the 90s .com bubble.

[1] The same nearly-free-to-all worldwide communication network that Al Qaeda used effectively in 1999-2000 is now celebrated by us for its benefits in Egypt. Technology has no values, only value.
[2] I assume about half those are dial-up. 
[3] Google Reader is astounding. Just astounding. Nobody mentions this, everyone talks about Twitter (not useless, but weak). Weird.
[4] Not actually using FB mind you, just have accounts.
[5] Ages 8-80.

Update: An hour after I posted this I thought of one remarkable exception: LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn has a non-predatory business model. They have been relatively careful not to infuriate their users. LinkedIn continues to grow, and I don't see any true attrition. It will be interesting to compare their valuation to Facebook's.

21st century TV - preying upon the weak

Our kids love family road trips. They love that they can watch motel TV - cartoons and "reality" shows on logging and mining.

Their TV fest is my window to an alien world. As best I can tell, morning cartoons are funded by fleecing the weak. They don't sell to kids, they market adult good and services that are at best a waste of money. Their target market is the weak and uneducated; like lotteries they take money from those who need it most.

This is so 21st century America. We live in a nation where GE doesn't pay taxes (the best investments are Senatorial), Goldman Sachs uses the mafia's operations manual, the GOP has lost touch with Reason, and it's open season on the weak.

How did we end up here? Is it all the fault of aging boomers with rampant pre-dementia? I don't get it...

Update 3/26/11: The morning after I wrote this the NYT found that someone was imprisoned for his role in vast mortgage fraud enterprise of the past decade. A penniless guy who lied on his "liar loan". Is there a rehab program for a nation?

Update 3/27/11: After today's farewell NYT OpEd by Bob Herbert I'm tagging this post as "meme watch". Zeitgeist in action.

Quantized scent detection isn't quantum computing

Towards the end of my comments on a  BBC news article titled "quantum physics explanation for smell", I started to have second thoughts about how "quantum" these results were ...

Gordon's Notes: Quantum computing in the nose

... If these results are replicated, then Turin gets a Nobel.

If noses use these 'quantum' effects, then it's pretty much certain that neurons do as well.

Does that mean our brains are 'quantum computers'? I need help from Aaronson. This 'quantization' sites on the micro-macro boundary. Not all quantized vibrations are quantum physics....

I asked Scott Aaronson, MIT prof of computational physics [1] and famed blogger if he'd consider a comment on the original article. Instead he replied by email, and gave me permission to quote ...

These look like *really* interesting experiments!  And it's a priori plausible that smell would involve some quantum effect -- we already know that ... photosynthesis and bird navigation do.

If true, this doesn't IN ANY WAY imply that the brain is a "quantum computer" in the sense of using quantum coherence to speed up computation.  That's a separate question, and any such suggestion would still need to overcome the problem of how entanglement could survive in the brain for any appreciable length of time.

So while we do have evidence that natural selection has made use of some aspects of quantum physics, we have no evidence (yet), that it has made use of entanglement, the spooky action that motivates research into quantum computation. So the nose may be doing quantum physics, but we have no evidence that it's doing quantum computing. [2]

[1] Born in 1981, when I left college. Sob.
[2] Incidentally, if I read Aaronson correctly, he suspects quantum computing is possible, but it won't solve radically new problems (and thus won't destroy the world economy if it works).

Quantum computing in the nose

Smell, aka the application of algorithms for molecule classification, uses "quantum" effects ...

BBC News - Quantum physics explanation for smell gains traction

... in 1996, Luca Turin, now of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, suggested that the "vibrational modes" of an odorant were its signature.

Molecules can be viewed as a collection of atoms on springs, and energy of just the right frequency - a quantum - can cause the spring to vibrate.

Since different assemblages of molecules have different characteristic frequencies, Turin proposed, these vibrations could act as a molecular signature.

The idea has been debated in the scientific literature, but presentations at the American Physical Society meeting put the theory on firmer footing.

Most recently, Dr Turin published a paper showing that flies can distinguish between molecules that are chemically similar but in which a heavier version of hydrogen had been substituted...

If these results are replicated, then Turin gets a Nobel.

If noses use these "quantum" effects, then it's pretty much certain that neurons do as well.

Does that mean our brains are "quantum computers"? I need help from Aaronson. This "quantization' sites on the micro-macro boundary. Not all quantized vibrations are quantum physics.

Update 3/25/11: I forgot to change my title when doubts crept in. My mistake!