Hungary a tyranny?

Krugman delivers an astonishing opinion, almost as a footnote to a blog post ...

Peripheral Stories - Krugman

... And I spent part of yesterday talking with people in Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs, who wanted to talk about Hungary. It’s hair-raising — and not just because of the economics. What will the EU do when one of its members slides into dictatorship?...

The comments come quickly ...

... Orban has established the rule of arbitrary tyranny in one and a half years. He appointed apparatchiks to key posts with unchecked authority for 9 or 12 years. These positions are:

1. Chief Prosecutor, who was given the right to select even the judges for trials of his choosing.

2. Chief Judge, with the right to appoint/promote/demote/dismiss judges

3. Chief of the Media, with the right to take away the licenses of radio stations and fine opposition outlets out of existence.

4. Head of the Financial Control Office.

He also stuffed the Constitutional court with Party and Personal faithful, enlarging it with from 8 to 15, and forbidding the Court to review cases that have anything to do with money.

It took a mere 3 weeks for Orban to push through a new constitution that restricts people's right to hold referendums, to appeal to the Constitutional court.

Hungary lives in fear now. You can be put in detention without trial for up to 3 years. You can be fired for political reasons and the unemployment rate is 12%.

and in response ...

As a Hungarian, let me correct the picture of my country as one "sliding into dictatorship." This is far from reality. Our government is indeed concentrating and extending its power as far as possible in a democratic system and is definitely doing so beyond good taste. Bearing a 2/3 majority they can even modify the constitution and they use this weapon without hesitation and without seeking consensus. This truly weakens our democracy somewhat, so harsh criticism is well deserved, but Hungary is not turning into a dictatorship, this is simply nonsense.

But where is all that nonsense coming from? Well, Hungarian politics is difficult to see clearly for a foreigner. The reason is the huge advantage of the Hungarian left (which is practically an alliance of liberals and former communists) of having a well-built international network which gives them an access to foreign media that the right just does not have. Hence, no matter who is in power, the foreign opinions about Hungarian matters are dominated by leftists' views. The key players in this game are renowned Hungarian leftist intellectuals residing in Western-Europe. Whenever it is not their team in power they always scream dictatorship - that is what they did with earlier conservative governments as well! Oh, and if the left were telling the truth, we would have a right-wing military dictatorship for 17 years by now, as this is what they "forecasted” before the 1994 elections...

Meanwhile, back home, Newt Gingrich must now be considered a real contender for the presidency.

Humanity dances on the edge of the knife. It's a habit.

The Il crime

The use of a font where these two characters have the same appearance is a data crime and should be punished by audit: lI.

Wikipedia's problem

A marketing firm is caught manipulating Wikipedia. The interesting bit is their response ...

BBC News - Wikipedia investigates PR firm Bell Pottinger's edits

... Lord Bell, chairman of Chime Communications, the owner of Bell Pottinger, said an internal review had been launched.

"I can't see any bad headlines for our clients," he told the BBC. "You won't find anybody, including journalists, who doesn't do exactly the same thing."...

"Everyone does it, so don't look at us."

I hope journalists will dig deeper into the state of Wikipedia and how the "pay-to-edit" problem will be managed going forward. I suspect there are are some reasonable answers, mostly building on Wikipedia's existing frameworks for managing malign edits. Problem is the same as the spam wars and the (new) voice-bot wars -- the costs keep rising.

Ghost story

It's not hard to do the numbers.

There are billions of people in the world and trillions of stories. Every day someone has a one in a million weird event.

Today was my turn.

It happened while I was using Google maps to visit my aunt's new residence in San Francisco. I clicked the zoom button for more detail.

Suddenly I was looking at dark green forest. I wasn't in San Francisco any more.

I zoomed out, and I found I was visiting the wilderness of British Columbia's Mount Garibaldi. It look something like this:

I zoomed in and out and suddenly I was back in San Francisco.

No big deal, just a glitch in the maps.

Except I have a connection to that part of the world. My brother Brian Faughnan vanished not far from there in July of 2002. He left his Whistler youth hostel room to go high alpine exploring - solo, off trail. Yes, that's at the far end of the risk spectrum.

There was a search but we never found a body. We searched Rainbow Mountain, because he could walk to that and he'd spoken of it. We did make a few inquiries about Garibaldi though. It's a beautiful destination, and he could have hitched a ride there.

So perhaps I was visiting his grave. It is certainly a beautiful and dramatic resting place.

Curious, I googled Garibaldi and Faughnan and tuned up a journalist's story I didn't remember and a post by Matt Gunn who met him in Vancouver before he was lost:

RainbowMountain - Missing Person/Fatality

Brian Faughnan went missing in the whislter backcountry in the summer of 2002. An extensive search failed to turn up any evidence about what happened. I met brian a few days before his disappearance while working at MEC and answered some questions he had about good hiking and scrambling destinations. We discussed rainbow mountain, which is where the search team believes he went missing. This story is a real tragedy and reminds me of the inherent danger of hiking alone.

There is a sequel to the story. I still wear a technical shell we found amongst Brian's gear. It's very faded, but it works. Tonight I thought I'd left it at an ice rink; so the kids and I went to look. We found it in my gear, but, for the first time in a while, we talked about my brother.

My 14 yo was five when Brian was lost, but he remembers more than I thought. He even mentioned Rainbow Mountain. We spoke about my brother for a while.

One of the very hardest things I've ever done was to call my 5 yo son from Vancouver and tell him we hadn't found his Uncle Brian.

These are tales for the dark nights of winter.

Update 12/6/11: I shared this story on Facebook the night I published it. A friend of Brian's, who lives in Vancouver responded that she new Matt Gunn. Then Matt Gunn replied.

Ants, corporations and the great stagnation

Do the great stagnation failures of the research enterprise and the modern publicly traded corporation have the same roots? Are not both ant-colony-like adaptive entities with emergent agendas of "their" own? An agenda to grow and survive regardless of the interests of their individual members or of their economic and human ecosystems?

See also

• Emergent computation -- the thinking world (Nature) 1/2004
• Malice, incompetence, and happy accidents 5/2011
• Why do corporations (firms) exist? 10/2010
• Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis 11/2010
• Why did medical progress slow after 1984? 12/2010
• Unemployment and the great stagnation 1/2011

PS. Extra credit speculation. Could these longterm trends be an independent contributor to the lesser depression? Independent of the macroeconomic disequilibria of disruptive globalization and IT innovation?

The AI Age: Siri and Me

Memory is just a story we believe.

I remember that when I was on a city bus, and so perhaps 8 years old, a friend showed me a "library card". I was amazed, but I knew that libraries were made for me.

When I saw the web ... No, not the web. It was Gopher. I read the minutes of a town meeting in New Zealand. I knew it was made for me. Alta Vista - same thing.

Siri too. It's slow, but I'm good with adjusting my pace and dialect. We've been in the post-AI world for over a decade, but Siri is the mind with a name.

A simple mind, to be sure. Even so, Kurzweil isn't as funny as he used to be; maybe Sir's children will be here before 2100 after all.

In the meantime, we get squeezed...

Artificial intelligence: Difference Engine: Luddite legacy | The Economist

... if the Luddite Fallacy (as it has become known in development economics) were true, we would all be out of work by now—as a result of the compounding effects of productivity. While technological progress may cause workers with out-dated skills to become redundant, the past two centuries have shown that the idea that increasing productivity leads axiomatically to widespread unemployment is nonsense...

[there is]... the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete....

... The argument against the Luddite Fallacy rests on two assumptions: one is that machines are tools used by workers to increase their productivity; the other is that the majority of workers are capable of becoming machine operators. What happens when these assumptions cease to apply—when machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour. At that point, the Luddite Fallacy looks rather less fallacious.

This is what Jeremy Rifkin, a social critic, was driving at in his book, “The End of Work”, published in 1995. Though not the first to do so, Mr Rifkin argued prophetically that society was entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers would be needed to produce all the goods and services consumed. “In the years ahead,” he wrote, “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilisation ever closer to a near-workerless world.”

...In 2009, Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, noted in “The Lights in the Tunnel” that new occupations created by technology—web coders, mobile-phone salesmen, wind-turbine technicians and so on—represent a tiny fraction of employment... In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion.... Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer...

In their recent book, “Race Against the Machine”, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agree with Mr Ford's analysis—namely, that the jobs lost since the Great Recession are unlikely to return. They agree, too, that the brunt of the shake-out will be borne by middle-income knowledge workers, including those in the retail, legal and information industries...

Even in the near term, the US Labor Department predicts that the 17% of US workers in "office and administrative support" will be replaced by automation.

It's not only the winners of the 1st world birth lottery that are threatened.

 China's Foxconn (Taiwan based) employs about 1 million people. Many of them will be replaced by robots.

It's disruptive, but given time we could adjust. Today's AIs aren't tweaking the permeability of free space; there are still a few things we do better than they. We also have complementary cognitive biases; a neurotypical human with an AI in the pocket will do things few unaided humans can do. Perhaps even a 2045 AI will keep human pets for their unexpected insights. Either way, it's a job.

Perhaps more interestingly, a cognitively disabled human with a personal AI may be able to take on work that is now impossible.

Economically, of course, the productivity/consumption circuit has to close. AIs don't (yet) buy info-porn. If .1% of humans get 80% of revenue, then they'll be taxed at 90% marginal rates and the 99.9% will do subsidized labor. That's what we do for special needs adults now, and we're all special needs eventually.

So, given time, we can adjust. Problem is, we won't get time. We will need to adjust even as our world transforms exponentially. It could be tricky.

See also:

• Rambles at starchamber.com - Ned Ludd vs. Watson
• Virtual Assistants Raise New Issues of Phone Etiquette - NYTimes.com
• The Best Siri Hacks So Far - Technology - The Atlantic Wire
• Daniel Kahneman on 'Emergent Weirdness' in Artifical Intelligences - Alexis Madrigal

Silvio

Italy, Europe and the world will pay a high price for the long reign of Silvio Berlusconi.

Government is like parenting. Good parenting is somewhat helpful, but bad parenting is enormously destructive.

Corruption matters. Elections matter.

Are home phones now a sign of vulnerability?

We get a lot of junk calls now at home on our unlisted home wired phone. Many hangup calls, "survey" calls, robocalls -- our home phone number needs a spam filter. It's beginning to resemble my mailbox -- mostly junk.

Of course many homes no longer have fixed phones -- especially in all adult households. We keep ours for everyday use, as a security measure, and because we keep our mobile phone minutes low. As the junk level rises though, a combination of Google Voice and an increase in our mobile voice minutes becomes more appealing. [1]

Some of the calls these days drop as soon as I pick up. I wonder if they're looking for more vulnerable sounding voice. As fixed line phones become less common, they will become a marker for the vulnerable elderly [2]. The sharks will move in ...

[1] Google doesn't support moving a home number to GV, just a mobile number. So we'd have to first move to a mobile, then cancel the mobile...
[2] Not a new trend, Google tells me I wrote about this in 2004! -  Phone Phishing (spam): coming soon to the elderly and the vulnerable

The Gordon vs. AT&T iPhone war - Conclusion

Twenty-seven days ago I declared war on AT&T Mobile.

The war is done - for now. At this time I've slashed the amount of money we send AT&T, gotten a new 4S for me, ported away a sweet local phone number, and AT&T's "Executive Response Team" has been phoning me about a letter from the Minnesota State Attorney General.

I am geek, hear me roar.

Yes, even as you read this AT&T is licking its wounds, cowering in the corner.

It wasn't easy. I had to, for example, spend way too much time figuring out the microeconomics of the US iPhone marketplace and how AT&T's response to the end of SMS is killing SMS. Painful - but revenge usually is.

My revenge is not quite complete, however. I still need to summarize what I did, so you too can take revenge. My response was crafted around our family plan, but elements of it could work for any plan. Here were all the things I did and, briefly, why. There are more details in the links and below.

• We dropped child #2 from our family plan. He wasn't interested in phoning or texting - he wanted email, games and videos. We were paying $10 (plus taxes and fees) monthly for his plan and we'd have stuck with that, but AT&T's mandatory data plan for out-of-contract smartphones was going to make his cost $25/month. Too much.
• I liked child #2's easy to remember mobile number -- any my corporate Google Voice number was non-local (they no longer have MSP numbers). So I ported #2's number to Google Voice. Cheap at $20; I suspect AT&T puts more value on its numbers than that.
• I got a new 4S (more below), so phones moved around and child #2 ended up with iMessage and Facebook Messenger for texting with WiFI.
• Child #1 was stuck with the data plan, but thinking through iPhone Microeconomics it was clear I should use his off-contract $15/month data plan [2] to get a highly subsidized iPhone [1] that would facilitate iMessage use. He was eligible through our family plan and his voice rate did not increase. I could have been short-term cheap and gotten a 3GS, but a 4S has a longer lifespan and the camera and other features were worth the cost to me. I got the 4S, he got an old 3GS.
• I dropped our family plan from 1400 to 700 minutes. With Child #2 off the plan, and using GV at work to decrease my use of the iPhone for business, this was not hard to do.
• I dropped our $30/month family texting and any-mobile plan. This was the big cut, but looking at usage patterns it was clear that with iMessage and Facebook Messenger we'd pay less than $10 a month even at 20 cents/message.
• We were paying for SmartLimits for Wireless. I studied it and realized it was useless for an iPhone.
• We were paying for a Canada Calling service -- but I almost always use Google Voice to call Canada (saves me $1300 a year). Canceled that. [3]
• Emily and I had $30/month unlimited data plans - but we never come close to even 2GB. Emily is often under 200, and I'm always under 1GB. That's $10/month we don't need to spend - $240 over tow years. We dropped to 2GB plans. Emily may go to 200MB in time.

We've saved several hundred dollars and picked up a new 4S. You can do something similar. Start by dropping that expensive texting plan.

Now to figure out what to do with our increasingly junky home phone ...

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: iMessage use on an AT&T iPhone without a SIM card (iPod Touch mode) 11/30/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Giving your old iPhone to your kid: working around AT&T's mandatory data plan 11/3/2011
• Gordon's Notes: AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay 11/3/2011
• Gordon's Tech: AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless is almost worthless 11/4/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Turning an iPhone into an iPod touch - keep the original SIM! 11/28/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Porting a mobile number to Google Voice 11/21/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Testing Facebook Messenger as a texting alternative (4 and 3G) 11/5/2011
• Gordon's Tech: iPhone alternatives to AT&T's texting fees 11/11/2011
• Gordon's Notes: AT&T’s secret Nov 2009 mobile contract change – Elegant Evil 6/2010
• Gordon's Notes: The fear that's driving AT&T's smartphone data plan policies 11/7/2011
• Gordon's Notes: iPhone micro: How SMS pricing is accelerating the smartphone transition 11/24/2011

[1] The 3GS costs $1 with a contract. AT&T gets a portion of a data plan to cover the rest of what it owes Apple. A $15 data plan doesn't leave much margin for AT&T to pay Apple, so this is a highly subsidized phone.
[2] He uses about 100MB at most, usually less. We monitor with Dataman Pro, Safari and YouTube are parental control disabled. iTunes video samples is his main data drain, if that increases I'll disable iTunes - but he does well.
[3] To AT&T's credit, it's now easy to add and remove services from their web site and the accounting seems fair.

Update 3/4/2012: H2O wireless turns out to be a cheap way to add voice/SMS service for light use: Gordon's Tech: Pay-as-you-go voice and SMS service for a contract-free AT&T iPhone with H2O Wireless

Update 3/18/2012: Months after I make this change, I realize I have no SMS service at all! I didn't notice because most of my texting is via iMessage. Turns out I've been missing friend's texts, and my own infrequent texts have gone missing. No error messages of course, everything just goes into the ether. It appears when AT&T removed our unlimited messaging plan, they forgot to add in a transactional plan. I wonder if that was once automatic, and has only recently become an opt-in plan. I added it in, and now MyAT&T.app lists text use; I'd wondered why that wasn't included earlier.

Moral of the story: Even AT&T is overwhelmed by the complexity of its mobile plans -- so test everything!

What Steve Jobs teaches about psyche and adaptive advantage

Steve Jobs bachelor party consisted of him, a reluctant Avie Tevanian, and one other guy. At that point in his life, he had no true friends. It's not clear how many he ever had, though he had many acolytes and several congenial colleagues.

He was a nasty person, though, like most of us, he improved somewhat with age. He never made it within two sigmas of decent however.

He was also a great gift to me and my family. We got the products of his company, without the displeasure of his companionship. It would, however, have been fascinating to observe his mind. It was extraordinary.

It was also completely unsuited to most of human existence. Even his powers of manipulation could not outweigh the enmity he created throughout most of his life. Were he born at another time, he would have likely died young. Throughout most of human existence his mind would have been a disability, not a gift.

There was a place and time where his mind was perfectly suited, and he had the fortune to be born to that time and to that place.

It's a good lesson on the distinction between adaptive advantage and dysfunctional trait. The distinction is not the trait alone, but its suitability to the environment.

It's also a lesson on the evolution of mind. Human minds are astonishing diverse; in physical terms it's as though a single species could have children with fins and children with wings. A winged mind flies in some times, drowns in others.

Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT

I've been chattering for a few years about the rise of mass disability and the role of RCIIT (India, China, computers, networks) in the Lesser Depression. This has taken me a bit out of the Krugman camp, which means I'm probably wrong.

Yes, I accept Krugman's thesis that the proximal cause of depression is a collapse in demand combined with the zero-bound problem. Hard to argue with arithmetic.

I think there's more going on though. Some secular trends that will be with us even if followed Krugman's wise advice. In fact, under the surface, I suspect Krugman and DeLong believe this as well. I've read Krugman for years, and he was once more worried about the impact of globalization and IT than he's now willing to admit. Sometimes he has to simplify.

For example, fraud has always been with us -- but something happened to make traditional fraud for more effective over the past thirteen years. I think that "something" was the rise of information technology and associated complexity; a technology that allowed financiers to appear to be contributing value even though their primary role was parasitic.

Similarly, the rise of China and India is, in the long run, good for the entire world. In the near future, however, it's very hard for world economies to adjust. Income shifts to a tiny fraction of Americans, many jobs are disrupted, people have to move, to change careers, etc. It takes time for new tax structures to be accepted, for new work to emerge. IT has the same disruptive effect. AI and communication networks will further limit the jobs we can take where our economic returns are equal or greater than the minimum wage.

I think these ideas are starting to get traction. Today Herman Gans is writing in the NYT about the age of the superfluous worker. A few days ago The Economist reviewed a book about disequlibria and IT

Economics Focus: Marathon machine | The Economist

... Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist, and Andrew McAfee, a technology expert, argue in their new e-book, “Race Against the Machine”, that too much innovation is the bane of struggling workers. Progress in information and communication technology (ICT) may be occurring too fast for labour markets to keep up. Such a revolution ought to be obvious enough to dissuade others from writing about stagnation. But Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that because the growth is exponential, it is deceptive in its pace...

... Progress in many areas of ICT follows Moore’s law, they write, which suggests that circuit performance should double every 1-2 years. In the early years of the ICT revolution, during the flat part of the exponential curve, progress seemed interesting but limited in its applications. As doublings accumulate, however, and technology moves into the steep part of the exponential curve, great leaps become possible. Technological feats such as self-driving cars and voice-recognition and translation programmes, not long ago a distant hope, are now realities. Further progress may generate profound economic change, they say. ICT is a “general purpose technology”, like steam-power or electrification, able to affect businesses in all industries...

... There will also be growing pains. Technology allows firms to offshore back-office tasks, for instance, or replace cashiers with automated kiosks. Powerful new systems may threaten the jobs of those who felt safe from technology. Pattern-recognition software is used to do work previously accomplished by teams of lawyers. Programmes can do a passable job writing up baseball games, and may soon fill parts of newspaper sections (those not sunk by free online competition). Workers are displaced, but businesses are proving slow to find new uses for the labour made available. Those left unemployed or underemployed are struggling to retrain and catch up with the new economy’s needs.

As a result, the labour force is polarising. Many of those once employed as semi-skilled workers are now fighting for low-wage jobs. Change has been good for those at the very top. Whereas real wages have been falling or flat for most workers, they have increased for those who have advanced degrees. Owners of capital have also benefited. They have enjoyed big gains from the increased returns on investments in equipment. Technology is allowing the best performers in many fields, such as superstar entertainers, to dominate global markets, crowding out those even slightly less skilled. And technology has yet to cut costs for health care, or education. Much of the rich world’s workforce has been squeezed on two sides, by stagnant wages and rising costs.

In time the economy will adjust  -- unless exponential IT transformation actually continues [1]. Alas, the AI revolution well is underway and technology cycles are still brutally short.  I don't see adjustment happening within the next six years. The whitewater isn't calming.

[1] That is, of course, the Singularity premise, as previously reviewed in The Economist.

Update 12/3/2011: And how does the great stagnation play into this - Gordon's Notes: Ants, corporations and the great stagnation?

iPhone micro: How SMS pricing is accelerating the smartphone transition

I've been playing with a simplified model of the carrier-locked AT&T American 2011 iPhone marketplace. I think it makes some interesting predictions.

For the purpose of this discussion we'll assume that a minimal phone must include both:

• phone system compliant voice services
• text messaging: either SMS or non-SMS (example: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc)

We further assume that voice services cost the same for all phones, that iPhones are assigned AT&T's minimal $15/month [1] data plan and that SMS and non-SMS text messaging are equally valuable [2]

In this model there are only 3 phones:

• A: iPhone optimal - today that's the 32GB 4S.
• B: iPhone minimal - today the 3GS 8GB. This is similar to the 'A' phone of 2 years ago.
• C: pPhone: Plain Phone. Includes SMS and Voice but does not trigger AT&T's

So how do prices and lifespans break down, assuming phones are purchases with a 2 year contract, we get a new contract q 2 years, and the iPhones use non-SMS messaging ($15/month [3]) but the Plain Phone (pPhone) uses SMS ($20/month)?

• A: $300 + ($15 * 24) = $660.
• B: $0 + ($15*24) = $360.
• C: $0 + ($20*24) = $480.

Based on this simple model what can we say will happen to pPhones? Assuming a healthy iPhone can run for four years [4], then at the end of the 2 year contract, what is the rational selling price of a used phone?

Clearly, the pPhone should disappear immediately. It costs 30% more than the minimal iPhone, and it doesn't have apps, wifi browsing, video, calendar, pen light, quality camera, etc, etc. It has no resale value. (A bizarre conclusion, but it follows from the extraordinary high price of SMS services.)

Less obviously, the resale value of 2 year old iPhone is also quite low [6]. A formerly class B phone iPhone is probably no longer supported by Apple at that point and the formerly Class A devices set a low ceiling (below).

The formerly Class A iPhone at age 2 is a 'Class B' phone, but for a new-contract customer it has NO price advantage over a current generation Class B device. Both will cost $360 over two years. The only market for an out of contract 2 year old carrier-locked 'Class A' iPhone is to replace a lost or broken contracted phone.

That's worth something -- but there are a LOT of those 2 year old former Class A iPhones on the market. After all, in this model there's no rational reason to not have a data plan, and since a data plan pays most of the cost of a phone, everyone in this model gets a new phone every two years [5]. That means there's a glut of post-prime iPhones on the market.

If I new Class A iPhone has an initial purchase price of $300, I expect its value after two years to fall to about $70. Indeed, the primary market may be persons wanting a very cheap iPod Touch. Effectively the price difference between the Class B and Class A iPhones over two years is $660-$360-$70 or $230 -- which is what we pay for the storage capacity and features of the Class A device (well worthwhile for most of us).

In this simple model then, it's deeply irrational to buy a pPhone, one should not fear loss or breakage of an iPhone as there will be a glut of affordable used phones on the market, the value of an out of contract iPhone is going to fall, and there are good reasons to buy either a Class B iPhone (save $230) or a Class A iPhone (features, performance).

The real world is a bit more complex - but not much more complex. Data network based texting is not yet a full replacement for SMS texting for example. However, the future of SMS is very limited. An unintended consequence of carrier's addiction to SMS margins is that they're ferociously accelerating the transition to smartphones that will destroy those margins.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Remembering when the iPhone cost less (in 2008 texting was bundled)
• Gordon's Notes: The fear that's driving AT&T's smartphone data plan policies
• Gordon's Tech: Testing Facebook Messenger as a texting alternative (4 and 3G)

- fn -

[1] Note we're talking contract, so this is fair -- unlike AT&T's mandatory smartphone data plan for non-contract phones.
[2] Clearly SMS is superior at the moment, but this is going to change quickly. 
[3] I'm assigning the FULL cost of the data plan to non-SMS messaging. 
[4] Based on our experience, assuming even minimal care.
[5] That's probably too simplistic. A two year old former-Class A device may be superior to a new Class B device -- though not by much.
[6] Today businesses that buy used 3GSs are offering only $100 - for a device with an unsubsidized purchase cost of perhaps $300.  That's a very low price for a device that may be only two years old and can run iOS 5. It's so low because the primary market is small -- people who need to replace a lost contract phone or who want a 2nd rate iPod Touch (troublesome to activate, flaky iMessage performance, not truly supported by Apple). The market would be much larger if not for AT&T's carrier lock and mandatory data plan policies, and the price would be higher.

Update 11/26/11: A Felix Salmon Reuters post is a good complement to this article. It's a sign that the marketplace is beginning to think through the weird consequences of AT&T's contracts, all-smartphone-data-plan-mandate,  and SMS pricing.

Update 11/30/2011: added footnote [6] to clarify.

I deleted my Google G+ Profile

I visited my Google Profile today. It includes G+ posts, and more was public than I'd expected.

There's no longer a way to disable the Posts tab in Google Profile. I recall that was once optional.

I can, however, delete my Profile:

Downgrade from Google+

... Delete Google+ content or your entire Google profile If you delete Google+, Google attempts to restore your experience of other Google products to the way it was before you joined Google+ and to permanently delete your Google+ circles, posts, and comments. If you delete your Google profile, you delete Google+ as well as other services and their data that depend on a Google profile...

I'm going to give this a few days, but I expect I'll delete my TrueName Google Profile. I'll take the opportunity to take another step away from Google 2.0.

It's interesting to reread my first post on my Google Profile in 2007.

Today I have been re-christened 113810027503326386174. It is the ID Google assigned to the persona associated with Gordon's Notes and other blogs. I assume it will be the foundation for Google's future identity management services...

...I will need to add this new number to the page where I park all my public and related personas.

I really didn't expect Google to choose its current path.

In its place, at least for the moment, I have created a John Gordon profile, a companion to my blogs.

Update 12/6/2011: I've deleted my G+ Profile and G+ Content. The dialog I received said ...

Over the next few days, Google will attempt to delete all Google+ features and your Google+ data from your Google Account:

Your circles will be deleted, but people in your circles will remain in your Contacts.

Your +1's will be deleted.

Your posts and comments will be deleted and won't be available to anyone you shared them with.

Any profile information that you did not make public will be deleted.

Many Google+ social and sharing features will be disabled for you on other Google sites.

Content from other services, such as videos, will no longer be visible to people in those circles.

However:

No photos will be deleted: you can still access them in Picasa. To delete them, go to Picasa Web Albums.

Your connections to third-party services will not be affected. To manage them go to Connected accounts settings.

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The Iran-Mexico assassination plot -- so what about the traffickers?

Everyone I read had the same reaction ...

... Plausible Culpability - By Daniel Byman | Foreign Policy

Incredulity has been the most common response to reports that Iran plotted with Mexican drug traffickers to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, at a Washington, D.C. restaurant...

Now, six weeks later, the emerging consensus among my sources is that ...

• Iranian intelligence really is this stupid ...
• Mossad does dumb things too, so why not Iran ...
• Come to think of it, we're not that smart either ...

So it's being treated as "real". Lots of CIA operations going on against Iran, Saudi Arabia presumably friendlier now, etc, etc.

That's ok, but what about those Mexican drug traffickers? Didn't they just engage in a proverbial "act of war" against the US government? Does this mean they need to be watching for little dots moving in the night sky?

This really wasn't the smartest move for them.

Too much history

One of the reasons I blog is to engage with a fascinating world, and to track the streams of history.

I'm finding that harder to do. It's not that I don't see the streams, or see ways to connect them -- it's that there's too much. I feel as though history just kicked up a gear.

Partly this is the loss of Google Reader's share/tracking functions. They were a key component of how I engaged with my fragments of the world's knowledge flow. Even if nothing else had changed, losing those functions and my share repository would be disorienting.

I don't think it's just the loss of Reader though. It's more that Reader's capabilities masked the rate of change. Without them, it's easier to see how the world is changing.

These are truly whitewater times.