LinkedIn's home page always shows a few headlines that reference LinkedIn.
This is what I saw this evening ...
Yep, that about says it all. 100 million LinkedIn users private information is now public.
I'm very surprised. Why would LinkedIn opt us all into being used in advertisements? Who thought this was a sane move? How could they forget who their customers are?
They have just made themselves vulnerable.
I can't find the post I was looking for.
It was written by a physicist I read. i'm still looking for it, but there were two interesting assertions. One was that "time was not real", the other was that entanglement is deeper than time.
He was being coy, but this is what I think he meant.
By "real" I think he meant "fundamental". So time is real enough, but if we really understood it we'd see it as emerging from other processes.
It's easy to understand this with "pressure". Humans presumably named the "wind" more than a hundred thousand years ago. Much more recently humans named "pressure" as the expansionary force of a heated balloon. Pressure is certainly real. It's not fundamental though. Much more recently humans figured out that "pressure" was the outcome of atoms in motion. Atomic action is more fundamental.
I gather time is thought to be like that -- an emergent outcome of something more fundamental.
So why should entanglement be the key to understanding time?
Well, physicists think quantum entanglement is very fundamental. It's close to the machinery of reality.
Entanglement is weirder than I can imagine. If I understand it correctly, one could (in theory) separate two entangled particles by a billion light years, measure one a "millisecond" apart (a very squirrely concept in this context), and find the measurements were correlated -- even though a light signal would take a billion years to cross that gap.
In other words, "entanglement" may take place outside of time or space. That's kind of interesting. So if you want to probe time and space, and expose its underlying reality, you might as well start with probing entanglement. If you get it right, you might be able to understand entanglement outside of time (and space), and also understand why we are inside of time.
I really do need to find that post ...
Update 9/1/11: I haven't found that post, but a subsequent Carroll essay suggests I'm not just making this up.
Earlier today I reviewed a decade of Gordon's Notes posts about how information technology has supercharged old frauds.
It's an odd hobby I admit. It started fourteen years ago when I finally noticed charges from Netfill had been showing up on my Visa card. By the time the story was done I was on Japanese TV and I was on a first name basis with FTC investigators. Today this level of fraud wouldn't even make the back pages..
Even then I realized that banks were, perhaps by a happy accident, making money on this fraud. So I figured it would take a few years for consumer and legislative pressure to reform credit card transaction security.
I was a naif. Today Verizon and Comcast make millions from their cut of the $2 billion a year take from US mobile cramming frauds. Instead of reforming, America has elected marketarian zealots who believe Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are agents of the Devil.
Of course this is small stuff compared to the IT enabled complexity frauds that played a role in our latest economic depression. We area very long way from responding to those frauds. That's why I appreciate James Galbraith, an economist well to the Left of Krugman/DeLong (and me), focusing on the role of IT powered fraud and the key role of complexity (emphases mine)...
James Galbraith on How Fraud and Bad Economic Thinking Got Us in This Mess « naked capitalism
... the financial system is both necessary and dangerous, that strict financial regulation is both indispensable and imperfect...
... The Galbraithian line ... accepting the central role of aggregate effective demand, the national income accounts, the credit circuit view of economic life and the financial instability hypothesis. But, it is also embedded in a legal institutionalist framework, rooted in pragmatism, framed by Thorstein Veblen and John Commons, forged in the political economy of the New Deal in the United States. This tradition emphasizes the role played in financial crisis by the breakdown of law and the failure of governance and regulation — and the role played by technology as a tool in the hands of finance for the purpose of breaking down and evading the law....
... When you engage the mainstream on the national income accounts, at least they know what the damn things are. And these days you can even get, though for who knows how much longer, a respectful mention of Minsky...
What you cannot get ... is any serious discussion of contract law and fraud..
... Why not? Why is this one of the great taboo topics of our modern economic history? Well, personal complicity, frankly, plays a role ...
But it’s more than that. Let me try to frame it in somewhat more abstract terms. I would say that the commodity is the foundation stone of conventional economics. That the theory of exchange requires the commodification of tradable artifacts. Without that, there is no supply and demand. A world of contracts, each backed by a separate and distinct set of promises each only as good as the commitments made specifically and the ability of the laws and courts to enforce them, is a different sort of world. Just because you can call a set of such contracts by a name, “collateralized debt obligation” or “credit default swap”, and just because you can create something — you may even be able to create something called an exchange to trade them on — does not make them into commodities with a meaningful market price.
Complexity here is what is going to defeat the market with, in principle, infinite variability, and in practice, more distinct features than one can keep up with. In great volume, contracts of these kinds are per se hyper-vulnerable to fraud. Examples range from the New Jersey phone company that simply printed made-up fees on its bills hoping that no one would notice and for a long time nobody did, to the fact that almost no one at the insurance giant AIG realized that the CDS contracts they were selling contained a cash collateral clause, something that would cost them billions at a time when they didn’t have access to the cash. They range from unnoticed provisions permitting CDO managers to substitute worse for better mortgages in previously sold packages without notifying the investors, to the Mortgage Electronic Registration System and the pervasive incentive to document fraud in the foreclosure process.
I highly recommend... that you read the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report just published in the United States, or the even more recent report of the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, the many reports of the Congressional Oversight Panel and the report of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, SIGTARP. These are, by the way, very, very good documents prepared by serious public servants and it’s plain as day. Fraud was not a bug in the system, it was a feature. The word itself, along with abusive, egregious, reckless and even criminogenic suffuses these accounts of what went on.
Godleyans teach that stocks can not be separated from flows. Minskyans teach that finance can not be separated from reality. And my father’s tradition is that the legal and the technological can not be separated. The financial world, as it exists, has nothing to do with the commodity world of real exchange economics with its delicate balance of interacting forces. It is the world of technology at play in the form of quasi mass produced legal instruments of uncontrolled complexity. It is the world of, in other words, of evolutionary specialization in the never ending dance of predator and prey. In nature, when predators achieve an overwhelming advantage, the prey suffer a population crash, from which the predators in turn suffer later on. In economics it’s a financial crash, but process and dynamics are essentially similar.
Corporate fraud is not new; financial fraud is not new...
... In the computer age, on the other hand, we entered the world of private labeled securitization, of negative amortization payment optional Adjustable Rate Mortgage with a piggyback to cover the down payment. Oh, and documentation optional...
... Rendering such complex and numberless debt instruments comparable requires a statistical approach based on indicators. And that launches into a world which was not imaginable in, say, 1927. The world of credit scores, ratings and algorithms, a world of derivative and super derivative instruments of sliced and diced residential mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, synthetic CDOs, synthetic CDOs squared, credit default swaps — all designed to secure that triple-A rating and to place the instruments which had been counterfeited to begin with — they looked like mortgages but were not really mortgages. Laundered, that is to say, transformed from the trash that they were into a triple-A security and fenced, which is to say, sold to the legitimate investment market by an intermediary called a commercial or an investment bank. To place these counterfeit, laundered and fenced instruments into the hands of of the mark. The mark. And who was the mark? Michael Lewis, in the The Big Short tells us who the mark was. The mark had a name in the industry, they would say, “who are we selling this stuff to?” And the answer would come back, “Düsseldorf.”
The Texas institutionalist, Clarence Ayres, to bring you a voice from my home territory in Austin, Texas, stressed most strongly the role of technology and the irreversible contribution of new tools to the production process. In finance, it’s the algorithm that is this tool, it seems to me...
... The corruption and collapse of the rule of law, in the financial sphere, is basically irreparable. It’s not just that restoring trust takes a long time. It’s that under the new technological order in this field, it can not be done. The technologies are designed to sow and foster distrust and that is the consequence of using them. The recent experience proves this, it seems to me. And therefore there can be no return to the way things were before. In other words, we are at the end of the illusion of a market place in the financial sphere....
... t practically speaking what we’re dealing with here and what we need to recognize is not an interruption to a long process of economic growth, a recession or some shock to aggregate demand. It is an incurable disease at the heart of the system.
... it’s our task, it seems to me, against the odds, to build a new line of resistance. And I’ll wind up by saying that I think that line must have at least the following elements in it:
... Third, a full analysis of the criminal activity that destroyed the banking sector, including its technological foundation, so as to quell the illusion that these markets can effectively be restored to anything like their form of 4 or 5 years ago...
Fourth, an understanding of the way in which financial markets interact with the changing geophysics of energy, especially oil, with the commodity markets to choke off economic recovery unless the energy problem is addressed squarely. I think that’s something that we’re seeing happening now.
Fifth, a new strategic direction to redesign and rebuild our societies for the challenges of aging, infrastructure, energy, climate change and shared development which we all face. And to create the institutions required to make this happen. That requires, I think, from an intellectual point of view, a merger of the Keynesian, Post-Keynesian and the Institutionalists traditions which is, in fact, something that is already underway.
Sixth, to achieve these goals by mobilizing human brains and muscles to overcome unemployment and to assure a widely-shared, decent, and reasonably egalitarian society according to the most successful and enduring social models, by which I mean a commitment to the deepest policy principles that Keynes himself held and also an understanding that we should use history as a guide to what has worked and what does not.
And seventh, the reconstruction of the instruments of public power — the power to spend, the power to tax, the money power and the power to regulate — so as to effectively pursue these goals with democratic checks and balances to prevent the capture of new state institutions by predatory forces.
Galbraith sometimes reads like an egotistical crank, but if he is a crank, he is a crank with a point. He's the first economist I've read who has focused on the intersection of old frauds and new technologies, and the role of complexity, in the birth of our latest depression. I even appreciate the Peak Oil reference smuggled into his closing paragraphs.
His remedies are familiar, they are calls to an 'enlightenment 2.0' movement. The seventh sounds grandiose, but Ed Dolan's summary of Sweden's fiscal rules gives us a pragmatic guide to action.
Thanks James.
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For the past fifteen years I've been fascinated by how the information technologies of the late 20th century supercharged old frauds. I suspect that our current depression, and the Depression of the 1930s, have enabling technologies as one common cause.
It takes time for law and custom to adapt to new technologies and complexities, and until they do frauds as old as the human mind take on new forms and power.
For almost ten of those fifteen years I've been publishing notes here. In honor of a post I'm working on now I've assembled an annotated biography. There's a sort of grouping order to the list, it's not chronological ...
I wrote this almost three years ago. It sank without a trace ...
Antidote to The Great Recession: A national small business generation service
Robert Reich asks "Shall We Call it a Depression Now?" ... Brad DeLong says ... not yet.
... In the Great Depression the solution to economic stall was World War II. That's like treating pneumonia with malignant melanoma. Let's not try World War III.
So we can do all the things that have been tried here or elsewhere, depending on how cooperative the rump of the GOP is.
That's good, but maybe we should try a few new things too.
Imagine a national small business generator. A web site built around a knowledge-base of tens of thousands of business plans. Plans for franchise businesses, plans for manufacturing, plans for service businesses. Plans for businesses that need a lot of startup money. Plans for businesses that need a credit card and a mega-Kiva (it's the US, not Uganda) microloan. Plans for all the things people need in bad times, and plans for the good times to come. Plans for business that write the business plans that go into the knowledge-base.
The plans are organized by pre-requisites. Some are tagged for special skills, others for grinding hard work. They come with packaged loans, like the ones the Small Business Administration already offers - and maybe with grants as well. They come with packaged legal infrastructure, and an expedited incorporation package that greatly simplifies current law - a kind of augmented LLC with simplified tax filing. IP protection, the whole nine yards.
Add an option to invest. So would-be investors can browse these small business startups, and choose which to invest in. Optional online skills based training, or sign up with the people who've just launched, you know, teaching businesses.
Most importantly, the plans are tied to a federal health insurance program, modeled after the Minnesota small-business plans available to any two people starting a business.
It's a web site of course.
So one day you're out of work.
Take a day off. Then go to the knowledge-base.
Login. Browse. Search. Compare some plans. Get some advice. Pick on, click, click, sign.
You're in business now. A grant to start. Health insurance. A loan.
It's not new. Similar programs have been very successful in developing nations. It's just a bit bigger.
It could be done.
It's still a good idea, except now I'd add an indemnity program [1] against IP lawsuits combined with reform of the patent process. A reform that might take down the modern plague of Nathan Myhrvold. I know that anything I invent is going to violate somebody's patent. This is poison to high value startups.
The Depression is not going away. I think historians will say it started with the dot com crash, and it feels like we're in the middle of it. It's past time to try something like a national small business generation service combined with patent reform.
[1] For example, the small business generation program would include loans to support payment into a national patent defense program. When a patent attack is launched, government funded lawyers do the fighting. Loans would be repaid from future revenues. It's a form of IP insurance program.
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Governmental failure, which is an outcome of a failure of citizenship, is not merely an American phenomenon. Even nations that are not falling empires are feeling the pain.
Israel is our latest example. Like the Wisconsin protests, this is best understood, I think, as a collective protest against a failure of citizenship. It's the middle class beginning to realize that the top 0.5% owns the game.
I hope this movement visits America soon.
My worst predictions have been about the price of personal computing.
I blame it on age.
No, not on age-related dementia. I've been wrong about the price of personal computing since my brain was new. Age related experience rather.
I'm old enough that my first calculator cost the equivalent of a modern laptop, was much bigger and heavier than my MacBook Air, had no batteries, and could add, subtract, multiply and divide. My next calculator cost 1/3 the price and had many more "functions". After that the price of four function calculators went to about zero; they showed up in cereal boxes [1].
It was by far the greatest price collapse in my life. Curiously, a scholar.google.com search didn't find any articles on the collapse of calculator pricing. Scholarship is weird.
That first monster calculator has warped my thinking ever since. The 64KB (not 64MB, not 64GB) Commodore PC I first used was cheaper than my first calculator. I expected the price to collapse. Instead the entry level price of personal computing rose quickly as Commodore and Atari left the market.
When I bought a Palm III, solid state, rugged and elegant, I expected the price to fall. After all, it was made of sand and oil; no complex moving parts. Competition would drive the market downwards I thought.
Instead the price for a PDA rose until they merged into phones (I loved my Samsung Palm flip phone) and then vanished.
Netbooks were next. I saw cheap Linux Netbooks at Target and I knew, at long last, I'd be right. They cost about as much as that first Commodore, and they had no moving parts. Price had to fall. ChromeOS was proof. By 2011 we'd be buying our kids $125 battery-free Chromebook.
Right. This month I bought my "netbook". I forked over $1100 to that fruit place.
So you'd think I'd give up.
That would underestimate my cognitive dysfunction. Surely, having lost the last five tosses, the wheel will come up black this time!
Two years ago, inspired by a Gasee post, I decided calculator style price collapse was coming in the form the $80 Android phone. Today Asymco is tracing smartphone growth. Look at the Samsung Bada phone and Android.
Even a stuck (analog) clock is right twice a day.
[1] Then the low end vanished into software, and standalone calculator became a relatively costly specialty item. Like the desktop PC.
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Every review I read uses OS X iCal and Address Book as examples of the worst aspects of Lion. This one is from Macintouch... (emphases mine)
Macintouch: Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review (Part IV)
... Others, including iCal and Address Book, are downright horrid to use, no matter how pretty they may look. It's as though everyone at Apple was given the directive "make it like iPad", but nobody coordinated the ensuing work...
iCal was awful in Snow Leopard. I didn't think it could get worse, but it is. Address Book was never a great app, but now it's moved into the "horrid" range.
In my use of Lion I get the same feeling of uncoordinated work. Some features seemed aimed at power users, others at people who'd never used a computer before. There's good work, but there's also the kind of incoherence I expect from a Google or even a Microsoft product.
This is, most assume, the first version of OS X where Steve Jobs wasn't available to enforce a narrative. It's a sign of what Apple is likely to be post-Jobs -- less like the Apple we know, more like Google.
This morning I heard the bell toll for my iPhone 4. It sounded like "This accessory is not optimized for this iPhone”.
This, of course, is how an iPhone tells you it is water damaged. The warning message will appear intermittently even though there's no attached accessory.
My son's SIMless iPhone has done this for two years. That's not a surprise, it was a gift from a friend after a white bowl swim.
My iPhone 4 though, it's never been swimming. It has, however, spent a summer in Bangkok CO2-enhanced Minneapolis. It's had to live with sweaty pockets and big swings in temperature and humidity. It's acting like a wet phone, even if that is from ambient moisture.
I turned it off for a while, and a cooler drier time of day it seems well again. It's out of warranty, so I'll wait and see how it goes. (I did use a sturdy wooden toothpick to remove some rock-like lint from around the base connector. [1])
This is annoying. Multiply this annoyance across a family of five and annoyance becomes a serious problem. The iPhone is just too damned "precious".
I doubt iPhone 5 will be any better. If there's hope, it's for iPhone 6. If Apple wanted to, they could make that phone a much less tender flower.
Why should they want to though? After all, the more tender the iPhone, the more are sold. Until, of course, the brand gets such a reputation for fragility competitors begin to run ads showing "this accessory is not optimized for this iPhone". (Hint, hint).
There's reason for hope. Apple is very good at taking just enough blood -- but not too much. After years of fragile laptops they did move to the more robust uniblock aluminum body.
iPhone 6, please be less precious. In the meantime iPhone competitors, stop talking about apps and start talking about moisture resistance.
[1] Anyone know of an non-builky iPhone case that seals the dock connector? I am consider the OtterBox Commuter.
Update 8/4/11: I wrote a tech post.on wet iphone prevention and treatment.
Give us your feedback on the new Google Calendar Look is a thread created by a Google Employee to get "feedback" on the new Google Calendar look.
You know, the "look" that uses about half of an 11" screen to show a search bar.
My theory is she hates the wasted screen real estate and needs ammunition. So, please help. Post your comments. Don't hold back.
Unless, of course, you don't want to see your calendar items. Maybe they make you feel stressed. In that case, just relax. Don't bother posting.
If you do post, please mention that the "old" look had far too much wasted white space to begin with.
I used to read the Scientific American science news feed, but periodically I'd tap on an article title only to find it was a subscriber-only link.
So I switched to Nature science news. Only to find they're doing the same thing - mixing public with subscriber-only posts.
So I'm back to reading other science bloggers.
Does this strategy actually work for publishers, or are they paying good money to bad consultants?
The good news is that Kateva's creatinine is back where it should be and her stomach is holding out. The bad news is that, even if all goes well, her feast on a friend's Rimadyl will end up costing over $1,500 for a straightforward 3 day hospital stay.
Please remember this. Rimadyl, an ibuprofen-like drug sold in the US veterinary market, is beef flavored. It's dog candy, just like the yummy children's aspirin that poisoned my childhood peers. We're used to our evil canine cur stealing food, but we misclassified the drugs as ... not food. She had a different classification. (Unfortunately, she's learned to hide food wrappers, so it took us a day to figure out where the Rimadyl went.)
Poisoned medicinal candy precautions are one lesson from Kateva's folly. It's not the only lesson though.
Once upon a time $1,500 would have covered the costs of a similarly routine human hospitalization. Around that time a time a similarly troublesome dog would have received much less care for much less money.
Health care inflation in the US applies to humans, dogs and cats alike.
Which suggests a natural experiment. We know a lot about rising human health care costs in the US. Why not compare those costs to rising costs of companion animal (aka "pet") care? American dogs and men, for example, have similar health care habits and obesity rates. American dogs and men get the same medications for roughly the same costs.
On the other hand, veterinarians are paid substantially less than physicians. Veterinary care has much less regulatory overhead, and is much more efficient. There is minimal marketing, very simple billing, and a largely market based payment system.
Most of all, the care of the aged is very different. A demented incontinent dog gets a brief and painless house call. A demented incontinent human meets a far crueler and more costly fate.
It would be interesting to plot the trajectory of American veterinary and human health care cost inflation. I think the curves would look quite different, largely due to lower end of life costs. I don't know though; there may be surprises. Curiously, I don't think this study has been done.
Quicken is dead.
Yes, you can still buy something called "Quicken" for Windows -- though not in the UK where the produce was terminated four years ago. No matter, Quicken is dead. The failure to produce a reasonable product for OS X is just another nail in the coffin.
Intuit itself may well continue. Their share price has done well over the past two years, and the company has moved well beyond their original product line. They may even be earning money (one way or another) from Intuit's Mint.com, a read-only Cloud product with a few *cough* privacy and security issues
It's not just Quicken. Back in the 80s and 90s personal financial software was a hot product niche. At one point Microsoft Money was a serious player, until antitrust concerns and a failed acquisition left it mortally wounded.
So what happened to personal financial software? Why did it become a niche market for vendors like iBank for OS X?
I suspect it was more than one thing. This would be my guess ...
The last of these is, of course, the most interesting.
Quicken is not an interesting product for people with millions of dollars to manage. They will largely use professional money managers. Quicken is not an interesting product for people with very limited savings and investments, particularly if the investments are largely concentrated in 401K accounts. The natural market for Quicken was individuals and families with significant financial complexity but not wealth.
Over the past fifteen years that market went away. The saving grace for niche Mac vendors is that, insofar as some remnant of that market still lives, it's now largely using Apple products.
In the end, I think the collapse of the American middle class killed Quicken.
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I've written recently about the role of religion in the reasoning of the GOP base. This is an elephant in the room; pundits will discuss the role of American's exceptional fundamentalism in the context of abortion politics, but not in the context of debt politics. The mainstream media is missing an important ingredient in our political paralysis.
There's another elephant out there, and it will grow over the next ten years. The average American voter will become increasingly demented. Demented people rarely vote of course, but most dementia is the end stage of a very long process. Before a voter is disabled, they will lose the ability to process information, recall all but the most recent events, and adjust their beliefs based on evidence. They will, in other words, become less rational.
How big a factor is this?
We can make some estimates by starting with the end-stage state of clinical demential ...
Prevalence of Dementia in the United States: The Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study
... The prevalence of dementia among individuals aged 71 and older was 13.9%, comprising about 3.4 million individuals in the USA in 2002. The corresponding values for AD were 9.7% and 2.4 million individuals. Dementia prevalence increased with age, from 5.0% of those aged 71–79 years to 37.4% of those aged 90 and older...
... The elderly population (those aged 65 years or older) in the USA is expected to double from approximately 35 million today to more than 70 million by 2030...
Of course these numbers are only a start. What we really want are numbers expressed in percentages of voters, and we want the average disease duration from judgment impairment to disability. Personally I suspect that's about 20 years, but the best data I could find was on a relatively rare and aggressive form of early dementia ...
Pre-dementia clinical stages in presenilin 1 E280A... [Lancet Neurol. 2011] - PubMed result
... Pre-dementia cognitive impairment was defined by a score 2 SD away from normal values in objective cognitive tests, and was subdivided as follows: asymptomatic pre-MCI was defined by an absence of memory complaints and no effect on activities of daily living; symptomatic pre-MCI was defined by a score on the subjective memory complaints checklist higher than the mean and no effect on activities of daily living; and MCI was defined by a score on the subjective memory complaints checklist higher than the mean, with no effect on basic activities of daily living and little or no effect on complex daily activities. De
... Median age at onset was 35 years (95% CI 30-36) for asymptomatic pre-MCI, 38 years (37-40) for symptomatic pre-MCI, 44 years (43-45) for MCI, and 49 years (49-50) for dementia. The median age at death was 59 years (95% CI 58-61). The median time of progression from asymptomatic to symptomatic pre-MCI was 4 years (95% CI 2-8), from symptomatic pre-MCI to MCI was 6 years (4-7), from MCI to dementia was 5 years (4-6), and from dementia to death was 10 years (9-12). The cognitive profile was predominantly amnestic and was associated with multiple domains. Affected domains showed variability in initial stages, with some transient recovery in symptomatic pre-MCI followed by continuous decline.
In this disorder asymptomatic pre-MCI started at age 35, and disability (dementia) at age 50. So the aggressive form has a 15 year course. I would expect less aggressive forms have a longer course, so I'll go with 20 years.
So by these very rough guesstimates about 15% of 50 year old voters will be impacted by "asymptomatic pre-MCI", an early form of cognitive disorder that will impact their judgment. That prevalence will go up with age. Since GOP voters are much older than Dem voters, this, like religious fundamentalism, will be concentrated in the GOP base and it will strongly impact GOP politics.
If you don't understand the two factors of religious fundamentalism and pre-dementia cognitive impairment you will have a hard time understanding the future of the GOP.
