Complexity and air fare pricing: Houston, we have a problem.

Early in my life air travel was almost as expensive as today. At that time, however, we had travel agents and competitive service. It was hassle free.

Later air travel was inexpensive and hassle free. The world felt smaller.

Then it became complicated -- but travel software made up for lost travel agents. We were ahead of the airlines.

Now, it's not so good. It's not just the security hassles. It's not just that the cost of a Minneapolis to Montreal trip has gone up 20% a year for the past four years (now doubled, Hawaii and Europe are cheaper).

It's also that planning a plane trip has become absurdly complex. Complex like choosing a cell phone plan, getting a "free" preventive care exam, managing a flex spending account, getting a mortgage, choosing health insurance, reading mobile bills, fighting payment denials, or making safe product choices. Complex like the complexity collapse that took down the western world.

I blame it all on cheap computing. Cheap computing made complexity attacks affordable and ubiquitous. [1]

In my most recent experience with information asymmetry I found tickets on US Airways for $490 (1 stop) on both Bing and Kayak. When I added a 2nd traveler, however, the price of both tickets increased by $100. (This was harder to spot on the US Airways site as they list deceptive prices, hiding all the "additional fees" airlines carved out to disguise price increases.)

A bit of research (time is how we pay our complexity tax) revealed this happens when the 1st ticket allegedly uses the last "cheap" seat on a flight. The next ticket costs more, and because airlines are loathe to confess this they increase the price of both. That may be so, but it means there's a great incentive to have a few cheap seats that will attract hits from travel sites, but that will turn into high price tickets for the 2nd passenger. This doesn't even have to be planned, natural selection means this kind of emergent "happy accident" of complexity, once discovered, will be leveraged.

This has costs. Maybe high costs. We pay them either by cash lost to legal frauds, or we pay them in time. I think they have more do with the lesser depression than most admit.

It would probably be cheaper for me to just pay my fraud tax to the airlines, but of course I'm not going quietly. I'm studying the (now obsolete) tricks of the trade [2]

• Shop Tuesday at 3pm ET
• Start shopping 3.5 months before departure, buy prior to 14 days
• Tues, Wed and Sat are cheapest days to fly

[1] In the words of James Galbraith (emphases mine): "... 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...
[2] Seems like there's opportunity for outsourcing complexity management to a new age travel agent and their equivalent for managing the complex scams of everyday life. I fear, however, that only a few of us realize we need help.

Update: Twelve hours after posting I was able to buy both tickets for a total of $200 less than the Saturday price. Same times and planes. I learned ...

• Email alerts are worthless. I think they're just a way to harvest email for spam (we live on Planet Chum). Instead I took advantage of a Kayak feature -- they save the last search in a short list on main screen. I refreshed this twice daily. Between Saturday night and Sunday night I was able to get both prices at the listed price.
• I had to keep referencing the search results Kayak provided. The US Airways site kept substituting the flight I didn't want as the "preferred option". I took me 4 runs to get it right. It's hard to explain what they were doing but to succeed I had to carefully track all the flight numbers.
• Kayak passed my reservation to US Airways as 2 adults. The flight was 1 adult and 1 child. I suspected I needed the Kayak reference to get the price I wanted. Kayak passes its request through URL parameters (only sort of works) so I edited the URL parameter to 1 adult and 1 child.
• US Airways makes pointless use of Flash to animate simple result display. This is revealing.

See also:

• Arms race in the market: Dynamic vs. predictive pricing 7/2006
• The best time to buy a plane ticket 7/2007 - Wed

Never thought I'd see - Microsoft and web standards

I did not expect this ...

Echoing Apple, Microsoft bans Flash from Metro IE10 in Windows 8 - Computerworld:

... The Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free," said Hachamovitch. "The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 Web....

Forget no more Flash. This is no more Active X.

Today we salute the fallen web standards warriors of the 1990s.

What is Facebook search good for?

Earlier today my FB stream included a notice from a local "Page" I "like". Something about a ski swap.

So I tried my FB page "search" pane with words like "ski" and "Brainerd". Even though I "liked" the "Page" the search failed. I had to resort to my shaky wetware to locate the post.

So what is all the talk about "social search"? How exactly is Facebook a threat to Google?

I've begun adding all the FB "Pages" I follow to Google Reader. These public pages, unlike personal pages, have feeds (it's a secret). GR search works quite well.

The BBC is making In Our Time archives available for download (!)

After years of making past IOT episodes available only for streaming, the BBC is making the archive of their History of Ideas program available for download.

In addition to the regular weekly In Our Time podcast, you can now download all previous editions of the series via the podcast genre pages listed below.

In Philosophy, for example, there are currently 62 programs available dating back to 1998. In early 2010 the BBC made back episodes available to stream, but now they've gone all in. My 2006 tech post on grabbing old episodes is now happily obsolete, my fears of 2008 have been refuted, and I don't need to covertly circulate DVDs of past programs.

These are not great times for the old world (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK), but there are still a few candles in the dark. This is one of them, there's more good news in efforts to freely distribute learning and education. Echoes of the Enlightenment as it were.

In honor of this happy event, I'm adding a "good news" tag to Gordon's Notes. A wee ray of sunshine in my daily gloom.

PS. It's not now documented, but little known, that Blooger has tag (label) feeds. For example, this is my "good news" feed (1 article at the moment, I don't want to overdo it) - http://notes.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/good%20news. The label feeds get the main feed title, so you would want to rename them on subscription.

Waiting for the 25th

We may have something worth saying then.

The humanity experiment has mixed results: Organ trade and enslaving the disabled

Uplifting the naked ape is having mixed results ...

Your money for your life - enslaving the cognitively disabled (China)

Out of more than 20 similar cases that occurred from 2007 to 2011 nationwide, most of the suspects came from Leibo. Mentally disabled people were sold here to criminals and then taken to mines in other provinces including Fujian, Hebei, Shandong and Liaoning.

... According to the Wuhan-based Chutian Metropolis Daily, many villagers in Leibo county exploit mentally disabled people, either forcing them to work under appalling conditions, often unpaid and poorly fed, or by profiting from their deaths.

From July to August last year, the central hospital in Leibo received eight mentally disabled patients, aged between 20 and 50 years old, after they had been rescued by local police in an operation.

They only weighed about 40 kilograms on average, with a dull look and slow reactions, had very little appetite and had lost their instinct for survival. They all died of multi-organ failure within two months.

Liu Xingwei, vice secretary of Leibo county's Politics and Law Committee, told the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald that no legal action was taken against the traffickers, who had snatched the victims under the claim of "sheltering" them, "because there is no related law."

and

Organ-selling firm in NHS talks - mirror.co.uk

... a subsidiary of the General ­Healthcare Group – Netcare – was last year fined nearly £700,000 after pleading guilty to illegally transplanting human organs in South Africa.

... Netcare admitted last November that it had recruited children to donate kidneys which were then transplanted to wealthy clients. More than 100 illegal operations were carried out at a hospital in Durban, South Africa, between 2001 and 2003.

In a statement issued last November, the company said payments were “made to the donors for their kidneys, and that certain of the kidney donors were minors”. The statement added: “Certain employees participated in these illegalities, and (the hospital) wrongly benefited from the proceeds.”

The company said the organ-selling scandal had been dealt with “by the South African legal system and is now closed”.

Heck of a fine. More via Google on the GHG / Netcare scandal, which actually dates to about 2003. Crime paid; the bad guys got away ...

Kidneygate: What the Netcare bosses really knew - Investigations - Mail & Guardian Online

On May 27 four Durban surgeons are due to stand trial for their part in South Africa's kidney trafficking scandal.

But evidence in the Mail & Guardian's possession suggests that top Netcare executives are fortunate not to be standing beside them.

"Kidneygate" is the long-running saga of how -- between about 2000 and 2003 -- about 200 Israeli patients with kidney disease were brought to South Africa to receive organs from living donors who were presented as their relatives.

The donors were in fact poor Brazilians, Israelis and Romanians who were recruited by international organ traffickers and paid a relatively modest sum to give up a precious kidney -- a criminal offence under South African law.

To make matters worse, at least five of the donors are now known to have been legal minors at the time of the operations.

The four doctors -- John Robbs, Ariff Haffejee, Neil Christopher and Mahadev Naidoo -- are bitter at finding themselves at the short end of a chain of ethical dissimulation.

In theory, the buck stops with the doctor doing the cutting, but in reality, the transplant surgeons were little more than skilled mechanics dealing with bodies on an assembly line, maintained, paid for and legally underwritten by the big healthcare factory that is the Netcare Group.

Netcare: not know or not care?Investigations by the M&G suggest that the biggest scandal of the case, which has dragged on since the first arrests in 2003, is the absence from the dock of any decision-maker from Netcare.

The company's Durban subsidiary, Netcare KwaZulu-Natal trading as St Augustine's Hospital, did plead guilty, paid a R4-million fine and agreed to a R3.8-million confiscation order in November 2010.

Twitter

I've resisted Twitter. I auto-tweet what I share in Google Reader, but that's it.

I hate the 128 character limit.

I liked Google Reader Shares -- but it never took off. Worse, Google is neglecting Reader.

I had hopes for G+, but Google's true name policy is bad policy -- and a worrisome sign of what's coming.

Facebook is evil the way Microsoft used to be evil. They just can't help themselves.

I'm going to look at Tumblr again.

And I'm going to look, again, at Twitter. Worries me, however, that like Google and Facebook they're in the packaging business. Packaging us for advertisers. I want to pay for my microblogging.

Too bad I'm a market of one.

The Browser: best of the web and a marketing failure

The Browser is a curated take on the kind of 'this is interesting' content sharing usually associated with Twitter or (to the real cognoscenti) with Google Reader Shares.

It intersects with similar services like Instapaper's content shares, but there's no obvious automation component. It's old-style human curation with links to the original source.

It's good curation - pretty much everything they show today is interesting to me. Unfortunately, I've already read most of the referenced articles. It's hard to see how they can make money; a GigaOm review says they're considering charging subscribers. That's a tough one, though I wish them well. It's hard to compete with free, but perhaps free will go away (it happens) and they'll find a niche.

Whatever their future, it's clear they're a marketing failure. I mean, I'm just reading about them now?! That's insanely bad marketing.

Yes, they have a feed. I'll be following it ... http://thebrowser.com/feeds. So if you follow my Google Reader Shares ...

Klein on why we commie secularists should feel less discouraged

Yes, these are not the very best of times. The Lesser Depression, Rick Perry, Obama the helpless, etc. Commie secular liberals like me are feeling defensive, powerless, discouraged.

But perhaps, Ezra Klein and Stephen Skowronek tells us, we've got this wrong. We're under attack not because we're wimps, but because we're the grown up establishment (emphases mine) ....

The Done Deal - Ezra Klein - WaPo

Much of what I'm hearing at the American Political Science Association's convention is best summed up in table form, and so doesn't make for very good blog posts. But not all of it. Yale's Stephen Skowronek, for instance, made a very provocative argument questioning whether progressives should continue to look back to the New Deal for inspiration. The left, he said, likes to think of itself as an insurgency dedicated to transforming the scope of government. But today, that mantle properly belongs to the right.

... the basic insight seems correct: Liberals tend to underestimate how much they have accomplished, and how much ground conservatives have ceded, over the course of the 20th century, and even into the beginning of the 21st. Liberals tell themselves a narrative in which the last few decades have been dominated by conservatives, but conservatives look around and see a state that has been substantially shaped by liberals. Social Security was joined by Medicare was joined by Medicaid was joined by disability insurance was joined by the Environmental Protection Agency was joined by the Americans with Disabilities Act was joined by the Children's Health Insurance Program was joined by the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit was joined by No Child Left Behind was joined by the Affordable Care Act and so on.

Right now, the liberal dream, as embodied by ideas like the public option and universal early childhood education, is to push a bit further in the direction we're already going. The big conservative dream, as embodied by Rick Perry, is to somehow turn back the clock and undo almost a century of social-policy legislation. Where it was once the liberals who had radical ideas for what we should do with the state, it's now conservatives who are waging war on behalf of transformative policy change...

I emphasized the ADA because it still blows my mind. George H Bush signed that bill in 1990. Twenty years later it's relatively uncontroversial, but it was a major progressive victory. It's much more progressive, for example, than anything Canadians have.

Opposition to redistribution - two causes

Three weeks ago a typically anonymous article in The Economist reviewed two of the less obvious obstacles to reducing inequality and poverty in America ...

Economics focus: Don’t look down | The Economist August 13th, 2011

... America is far less inclined than many of its rich-world peers to use taxation and redistribution to reduce inequality. The OECD, a think-tank, reckons that taxation eats up a little less than 30% of the average American’s total compensation, compared with nearly 50% in Germany and France...

... Broadly speaking, countries that are more ethnically or racially homogeneous are more comfortable with the state seeking to mitigate inequality by transferring some resources from richer to poorer people through the fiscal system...

... A new NBER paper finds evidence for an even more intriguing and provocative hypothesis [about why the poor may not support poverty reduction]. Its authors note that those near but not at the bottom of the income distribution are often deeply ambivalent about greater redistribution....

... Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions...

The claimed relationship between tribal homogeneity and support for progressive taxation is hard to prove, but it feels consistent with the humanity I know. The second claim, that poor Americans may fear assistance that may make them "better but last", has some college-student experimental evidence (for what that's worth) -- but it also feels familiar. Pratchett called this "Crab Bucket" in his novel Unseen Academicals.

These obstacles don't make progressive taxation and poverty reduction impossible, but they do make it harder. It's worth understanding where resistance comes from.

Google Quick, Sick and Dead - 6th edition.

It's been only four months since the 5th edition of Google Quick, Sick and Dead - 5th edition. It's been a busy time though, with the launch of G+ and Google recently announcing another set of official closures. The terminations were of products I thought had already been discontinued, so I don't have them listed below.

As with prior editions this is a review of the Google Services I use personally - so Android is not on the list. Items that have moved up or are new are green, items that have moved down or officially discontinued are red, in parens is the prior state.

For me personally the news is not good -- both Google Reader and Google Custom Search are now on the Dead list (though Google has finally fixed the broken icon that was displaying with custom search). These are two of my favorite Google services, but neither of them deliver significant ad revenue to Google. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with relying on Google's cloud. G+ is mildly interesting, but so far it's not doing anything useful for me.

The Quick (Q)

• Google Scholar (Q)
• Gmail (Q)
• Chrome browser (Q)
• Picasa Web Albums (Q)
• Calendar (Q)
• Maps and Earth (Q)
• News (Q)
• Google Docs (Q)
• Google Voice (Q)
• Google Search (Q)
• Google (Gmail) Tasks (Q)
• YouTube (Q)
• Google Apps (Q)
• Google Profile (Q)
• Google Contacts (Q)
• GooglePlus - G+ (new)
  
• Blogger (S)

The Sick (S)

• Google’s Data Liberation Front (S)
• Google Translate (S)
• Books (S)
• Google Mobile Sync (S)
• Google Checkout (S)
• iGoogle (S)

The Walking Dead (D)

• Buzz (D)
• Google Groups (D)
• Google Sites (D)
• Knol (D)
• Firefox/IE toolbars (D)
• Google Talk (D)
• Google Parental Controls (D)
• Google Reader (S)
• Orkut (S)
• Custom search engines (S)
• Google Video Chat (S) - replaced by G+ Hangout

See also:

• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #1 (1/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #2 (11/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #3 (6/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #4 (10/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #5 (5/11)

Netflix 2011 - now we miss Blockbuster

Our family's been having trouble with defective cracked Netflix DVDs for years. Now we find 1/3 of all the DVDs we receive, and 1/2 of the PG movies, are defective. This is a major bummer because we don't do TV, much less Cable. Three DVDs a week is it.

We'd switch to Netflix streaming, but it's been a bust for us. Netflix's streaming market is not PG-13 and under.

So we've had no love for Netflix, even before they raised prices. The future is not brighter - today Netflix lost a contract with Starz, a major content provider.

Now we miss Blockbuster. Too bad Netflix did 'em in.

I don't think things will get better in the near term; there's a big fight brewing between cable, content producers, copyright holders and the rest -- Amazon and Netflix, with Apple lurking in the wings. Not to mention the bit torrent gang (go Pirates!).

I think we'll drop down to a single Netflix DVD a week, timing it so we can return a defective one before the kids weekend movie slots come along. We'll try dabbling in Amazon streaming to the Mac (Flash, yech). Too bad Apple isn't really in this game.

Carroll on Time: emergent or fundamental?

My favorite part of Sean Carroll's posts on the nature of Time was about emergence vs. fundamental time ...

Time exists...The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.

Carroll, my favorite physics blogger, confirmed that I was on the right track when I wrote entanglement and the realness of time. I wasn't just making it up! I'm willing to bet a beer that within fifteen years the consensus will be that time is emergent rather than fundamental. That's easy for me to say, I really have no idea what I'm talking about.

Reading the essay I'm reminded that in classic General Relativity Fate rules; a life history is fixed from death to birth, like the track of an ancient LP. Calvin would approve.

I wonder if Carroll holds that opinion as well, updated for an era of Quantum Gravity perhaps with a twist of the many worlds interpretation of QM.

Modern physics is so weird.

Google's identity failure: recreating the joy of Buzz

Google + requires us to use our "true name". In may case John F, not "John Gordon" or any of my other aliases.

Charlie Stross has a good rant on why this is a bad idea. He finishes with a set of solid recommendations (emphases mine) ...

Google is wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It's nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it's to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they're pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it's not a real identity to them: it's a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them. Forcing people to use their real name online won't magically induce civility: the trolls don't care. Identity, to them, is something that exists in the room with the big blue ceiling, away from the keyboard. Stuff in the glowing screen is imaginary and of no consequence.

If Google want to do it right, they're going to have to ditch their naming policy completely and redo from scratch.

To get it right, they need to acknowledge that not everyone has a name of the form John Smith or Jane Doe; that not everyone uses the same character set or same number of names. They might be able to get away with insisting on a name that appears on a piece of government-issued ID; but then they need to acknowledge that people have legitimate reasons for using one or more pseudonyms, allow users to register pseudonyms associated with that name, attach pseudonyms to different (or even overlapping) circles of friends, and give the user a "keep my real name secret" check-button. Then and only then they'll begin to develop a system that has some hope of working.

I can't improve on Charlie's rant. He's one of many, but he says it well.

Unfortunately, this isn't the first time Google got it wrong. They made the exact same mistake with the Buzz Profile. I wrote about that over a year ago ...

Gordon's Notes: The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion (feb 2010)

I am father, brother, in-law, son, and spouse. I am coach. I am volunteer. I am citizen and activist. I am a physician. I am an (adjunct) professor. I am an oddity in a large, conservative, publicly traded corporation. In the corporation I am a team member, known to some customers, occasionally publicly facing, known in various ways and various places. I have other roles and have had many more over time.

I am Legion. So are most middle-aged persons.

Only one person knows all the roles and all of the stories that are not excruciatingly boring (hi Emily).

That’s the problem with Google Buzz, and why my Google Profile doesn’t include my pseudonymous (John Gordon) blog postings or my Google Shared items.

Buzz is tightly linked to my Google Profile, and my Profile is trivially discoverable. I don’t want corporate HR or a customer or business partner to instantly know that I’m a commie pinko Obamafanboy with a dysfunctional Steve Jobs relationship.

I have LinkedIn as my bland corporate face, and, despite Facebook’s innate evilness, a FB profile for friends and family. Inside the corporation I’ve a blog that serves as a limited persona.

We all have many roles, identities, avatars, personae, limited liability personae, characters, facets and so on. The problem with Buzz today is that it’s tied to the Google Profile, and that profile is the closest thing to my unified public face. It crosses boundaries. So it can only hold the limited information channels that are available to all.

Google hasn't learned enough from the disastrous failure of Buzz. They're repeating old mistakes, and seeing old results. Already G+ activity seems to be falling, and losing people like Stross isn't helping.

This can be fixed. Like Charlie says - give us a hard identity that the police can track if need be. Tie it to credit cards. Heck, for a fee "validate it" so we can better protect ourselves against identity theft. Then give us as many pseudonyms as we want, and give us tools to manage them while keeping our TrueName to ourselves.

AT&T: In case you forget why you hate the company (but not the customer reps)

I had another set of AT&T interactions when I added son #2 to our AT&T famlly plan ($10 a month). They reminded me why I fear and despise AT&T.

Surprisingly, they also reminded me that AT&T has exceptionally pleasant and agreeable service representatives. They are even more agreeable than the average Apple store staffer. How can such an evil company have such pleasant customer service [1]? It's a mystery. My best guess is a mixture of brain implants and illegal substances.

The first upset came about when I tried to add son #2 through the AT&T web site. I didn't want a contract or subsidized phone, and the site assumes that. I cancelled out. That is, I thought I cancelled out. I found out the next day that I'd unwittingly switched from my text messaging plan to a new plan. This turned out to have  silver lining, as the new plan is the same price and adds unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling - an unannounced upgrade to match the competition. Despite the upside, this was an occult contract change. I hate occult contract changes.

The next (minor) aggravation came when I realized I had to go in and turn off AT&T marketing for my son's phone. Yes, AT&T spam text is an opt in feature. If you don't want AT&T spam text you have to opt out -- for every phone.

The big aggravation came when I was warned that AT&T will enroll him in a data plan if I switch his SIM card to a "smartphone", even if the "smartphone" never uses data and even though he doesn't have an AT&T phone and isn't on an AT&T contract.

This is so wrong. I think AT&T tries to justify this is as a "feature" to prevent high fees for out-of-contract data use, but really it's pure evil. It makes old iPhones much less useful and drives new phone purchase and data contracts. (If you have to pay a data fee without a phone, might as well get a subsidized iPhone so part of the fee goes to Apple.)

There's a twist, however. I've written about this before: Does anyone know what AT&T's smartphone data plan rules really are?. It's not at all clear, despite what AT&T reps are told, that this automatic enrollment applies when a user doesn't have a contract. Son #1's iPhone has been on our family plan for over a year and he's never been enrolled. (Maybe the trick is his iPhone has never used AT&T data services, so it hasn't triggered their enrollment.)

Al Franken is our Senator, and he's going to be interrogating AT&T about their T-mobile acquisition. I'll remind him to ask about their obligatory data plan.

- fn -

[1] For example, today's rep convinced me to drop from 1400 min to 700 min on our family plan. This means we lose the Google Voice friendly (but meaningless otherwise) "A List" feature, but that's offset by their mobile-to-mobile/unlimited texting plan.

See also:

• Does anyone know what AT&T's smartphone data plan rules really are? (8/2010)
• AT&T Contracts, Terms of Service and Plan Terms – observations of interest (6/2010)
• Gordon's Tech: AT&T will data block a phone - but this disables MMS messaging
• AT&T’s secret Nov 2009 mobile contract change – Elegant Evil
• John's head explodes: AT&T rebate paid with an AT&T debit card (1/2008)
• Head still exploding: The AT&T mobile phone rebate card scam (3/2008)
• Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams (11/2009)
• AT&T is a partner to phone scams that target the vulnerable elderly (4/2009)
• AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear (2/2009)
• Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show (1/2009)