Nemozen

Political bugs: six fixes to the US budget deficit

2011-09-07T21:52:00.005-04:00

A couple of months ago, in the midst of the hype around the US government debt crisis, someone on a mailing list posed the following question: what are some of the "real" things that can be done to solve the problem?

The premise of the question is that the politicians were not proposing rational solutions but rather, were speaking tactically, with ulterior motives, in other words being craven, pandering, demagoguing, etc. Indeed, the US deficit is one of those things where there are a few clear "right things" that the majority of rational informed people would agree with, and yet, wrong things keep happening over and over again. Much like the "design bugs" I like to occasionally rant about, these are political bugs. I don't mean the fundamentally difficult issues where reasonable people can sincerely disagree: a carbon tax, medicare for all, a flat-tax, consumption tax, etc. etc. Those aren't bugs, rather they are unsolved problems, or new "features" to be designed. But for this post, I'm only taking about no-brainers, the bugs.

So coming to the US budget deficit specifically, here was my list of bugs (originally written on July 1, 2011):

Eliminate mortgage interest deductions. Why should renters subsidize owners? No good reason.
Eliminate corporate healthcare deduction i.e. count employer provided benefits as income. Why should employees of larger companies that provide health benefits be subsidized by people who get their health insurance in other ways? Why would society want to encourage linking health insurance to employment, as opposed to say children's education? No good reason.
Abolish payroll taxes and shift that all into income tax. Payroll taxes ostensibly pay for social security and medicare but really are just a regressive extra income tax, why not roll it into the overall progressive income tax?
Reduce social security by making it means tested. Why should anyone above the median income get any additional income from the government? If the purpose of a social safety net is to have the fortunate help the less fortunate, what's the point of helping the rich?
Reduce social security by raising the threshold age. The retirement ages were set a long time ago, when people aged earlier. Sixty five years old in 1930 was like being 75 or 80 today. If the population distribution shifts older, retirement age should rise. The ratio of retired people to working people has to be kept more or less constant otherwise a) it obviously won't work, and b) it will be clearly unfair.
Reduce military spending to a level where it can be called a "defense budget" as opposed to an "offense budget": 50% would still leave it twice as big as the next biggest military budget, and still greater than the next 5 countries combined.

The combination of the above would easily eliminate the structural deficit. Not only that, none of these points fundamentally challenging any principles or stated societal goals, nor are they suggesting qualitative change These are straight quantitative adjustments that, in principle, libertarians, leftists, fiscal conservatives, and most mainstream economists would probably agree with. They should be no-brainers.

And yet, they can't happen. The reality is that regulatory capture makes these things almost impossible. So the debate goes on and on about tiny meaningless slices of spending that are easy to demonize, but have no impact on the real problem. Maybe something will bump the political economic system out of this miserable Pareto optimum. Unfortunately it looks like for now, the main lesson of the last three years of economic crises remains that the first casualty is causality.

Cognomics: what is the market price of your mind?

2011-06-11T18:57:00.003-04:00

Last year, I came across a post about a very interesting study of CAPTCHA economics (in fact, this post is a slightly expanded re-post of an email I sent to a mailing list in Agust 2010). CAPTCHAs are the little boxes you see on login pages across the web. They are meant to prevent software bots, run by spammers, crackers and other Internet bad guys, from pretending to be real users and abusing web services.

The key feature of a CAPTCHA is that it's a puzzle that is very easy for humans to solve but very hard for computers. So to defeat the CAPTCHAs, the bad guys have created online "farms", platforms where people are payed to solve the CAPTCHAs for them.

Leaving aside the nefarious nature of the application, it is fascinating to note that this is one of the first large scale instances of humans renting out their brains for a few seconds at a time. It raises the question: what is the market value of your mind? Or more precisely, of your ability to think? In a sense, of course, billions of people are renting out their brains every day by doing cognitive work in exchange for a salary. But normal employee/employer relationships are complex in ways that are not fully captured by price alone, in other words it's not a commodity. But with the CAPTCHA farm, you get as close as possible to cognition as a commodity.

Note that I said "one of the first" instances... There's another bigger one that's been around much longer: advertising. When advertisers pay for ad placement, they are paying for your attention, so in a sense they are renting your mind. Particularly with Internet advertising, the advertiser literally buys a few seconds of a person's attention, one person at a time. This was a big meme during the dot-com era, the "attention economy".

So, if indeed there's a market for cognition, how do the prices compare across these two sub-markets?

Spammers* pay O($1) per thousand CAPTCHAs solved.
Advertisers pay O($1) per thousand impressions

First observation: In both cases, they are paying to get your mind for O(10seconds). So the mind is really a commodity worth the same whether you are renting it out to store and propagate a commercial message or to do some computation!

Second, if you draw a little diagram of the flow of value, the cognitive supply chain as it were, the two are like mirror images of each other, with the same values circulating in opposite directions. Like electrons and anti-electrons in the same circuit! Here's what we get clockwise for the advertising business:

Advertiser → $1 → Publisher → (payload) → User → (profit from product) → Advertiser

And here's what we get, anti-clockwise for the web-spam business:

Spammer ← (profit from scam) ← Publisher ← (payload) ← User ← ($1) ← Spammer

Funny stuff. Spammers are like the anti-matter to the matter of advertisers, the evil twin from the underworld. Fortunately, they are not quite symmetric in size. It's a lot harder for the bad guys to grow the same size as legal ads/content ecosystem!

Note: of course, the main difference between the minds rented for ads and the minds rented for solving CAPTCHAs is wealth... Rich people's minds are valuable to advertisers, poor people's minds are useful to spammers. But despite this split along wealth lines, the prices are of the same order of magnitude.

Rent splitting mechanism

2011-02-19T09:01:00.005-05:00

I just came across this blog post on "How to split the rent?". Most people split the rent equally between apartment mates. The problem is that not all rooms are equal. How do you value their differences in size, light, accessibility. How do you value the shared areas? Further, different people have different preferences. So it's an interesting problem... so how do you find a fair price and allocation of rooms?

It reminded me of a solution my roommates and I came up with many years ago. It's basically an auction. Say there are 4 apartment mates, 4 bedrooms, and the total rent is $1000. Each roommate writes a bid with prices for each room, with the condition that the total has to be $1000. So the bids might look like
- person 1: ($200, $250, $250, $300)
- person 2: ($100, $250, $300, $350)
- person 3: ($250, $250, $250, $250)
- person 4: ($150, $200, $250, $400)

Then you gather all the bids and you assign each room to the person who has the highest value for it and they pay the average price of that room in all bids. You start with the highest priced room and go down (so that if a person wins two rooms you give them the one with the higher price). If you have a tie for first place on two different rooms with the same two people, you flip a coin. In the above case, no coin flip needed, the solution is:
- room 1 goes to person 3, for a rent of (200+100+250+150)/4 = $175
- room 2 goes to person 1 for $237.50
- room 3 goes to person 2 for a price of $262.50
- room 4 goes to person 4 for a price of $325

The beauty is that the solution guarantees that each room goes to the person who values it the most, and the room prices add up to the correct total rent.

We did it for one year with a 4 bedroom apartment with 4 co-tenants. The biggest room went for about 31% of the total rent, and two rooms of smaller size but with the most light went for 25%, 24% and the dining room converted into a bedroom went for 20%. The second year we were down to three tenants and for a variety of reasons, we did a direct adjustment rather than rerun the auction...

But the moral of the story is that mechanism design works in every day life! Surprisingly not many people do this.

Design bugs in everyday life: hall of fame

2010-10-16T21:13:00.004-04:00

Revisiting the subject of design bugs in everyday life, there really ought to be a "Hall of Fame" for such things, which I hereby inaugurate.

As first inductee, I nominate the typical North American cable TV remote control, like the one from Time Warner shown here. It's design is so atrocious it defies comprehension.

What is it about this object that I find so contemptible? Consider two operations on a TV remote that you really want to be quick and effortless. One is "mute"... When you need it, you need it fast. Another is "previous channel" -- probably the most frequently used button. In any sensible design, these two buttons would be large and as distinct as possible. Here they are the exact opposite, they are the tiny gray dots below the blue and red buttons. They are in fact the least distinct buttons on the whole thing!

This leads to the type of thing we've all experienced: you are watching TV, the phone rings, your focus shifts completely to the phone call and with the little attention that you have left ofter, you fumble with the remote, trying to find the $*@%! mute button, meanwhile the TV volume seems to get louder, the phone call becomes more urgent, stress rises.... You get the picture.

On the other hand, the two largest and most visible buttons on the remote are "list" (to access DVR), bright green one, and "on demand" (to access video on demand), the big white square. But neither of those features, by definition, requires any speed... In fact they are meant to be accessed at a leisurely pace, that's the whole point of them! Perfect candidates for attractive but discreet buttons. But no, they get to jump out the most, screaming at you.

Why does this object have exactly the opposite of what you'd want in a good design? There is not even a lock-in effect, as described in the previous post, to excuse it. Maybe there's a less naive reason. The "on demand" button generates additional revenue for the cable company, so that could be why it gets featured strongly. But really, it can't make that much difference. How many times will someone order movie just because they saw the button? Once? For that tiny bit of incremental revenue they are willing to get in the way of the most essential functionality? It's like giving limousines priority over fire trucks and ambulances on the road!

But let's apply Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. They probably just don't give much importance to design at all. Recall these cable TV folks are the same people who, as I've noted before on the subject of the mythical DVR+P2P, seem completely capable of suicidally stupid fear and paralysis in the face of potential innovation.

The essence of good design is to deliver functionality efficiently, and from that the aesthetic flows naturally. Form following function and all that. For committing the most egregious violation of that principle that I can find, I hereby induct the Time Warner cable remote control to the Design Bugs Hall of Fame.

While we're at it, I might as well give them the second induction as well. Just look at the program menu on your typical TV. Why doesn't it have your most frequently used channels, like bookmarks, easily accessible at all times? Most people watch a handful of channels vast majority of the time. Does it make sense to have them scroll around or enter numbers every single time to find the same few needles in the huge haystack of 500 channels, over and over again? Why not present an automatically generated list of your most frequently visited channels, like the Firefox and Chrome browsers do with web pages? It would be a huge time saver, enormous usability win, a no brainer. They haven't thought of doing that, in the decades that cable TV has existed? Contrast that with innovation in web browsers....

Cable TV subscribers..... which I am not one of by the way, imagine how much more I would complain if I actually used it! But I digress. Fortunately, Cable TV subscribers can now root for the brave new world of software-driven television. Tivo, Boxee, Apple TV, Google TV, Netflix, et al, whatever they end up becoming, let's hope they manage to wrest the user experience from the sclerotic grip of the cable TV monopolies and their business model demons.

South Africa visited

2010-07-06T18:09:00.001-04:00

South Africa imagined

2010-06-26T03:07:00.005-04:00

I am writing this from Johannesburg, where I arrived a few days ago. Before I get to know too much about this country, I wanted to jot down why South Africa has always loomed large in my imagination, especially poltical imagination, going back to really young age. This is a long rambling post that's more personal than usual and is probably of interest to no one but myself. I also haven't checked the facts, this is just a raw memory dump that probably has some innacuracies. Proceed with caution or not at all.

My first consciousness of South Africa was when I saw in my passport, the words: "Valid for all countries except South Africa." I remember thinking, why? First of all, I knew Africa was a continent (I was in it), and I knew the names of several countries... This one I'd never heard of seemed kind of odd.. Second, what was this strange exception, why in the whole world, was there this one place I wasn't allowed to go? Maybe it was dangerous because it was all the way at the bottom and we might fall off the earth if we went there! Naturally I started asking questions. And I learned about apartheid. I'm not quite sure how I reacted to that at first -- I would love to think that I immediately decided it was an injustice... But the truth is, I don't remember. Maybe it became just another fact, like the fact that there were a lot of people in China, and pyramids in Egypt, etc.

Over the years through adolescence and teen-age, it started getting more concrete. Now kids, in those days there was no Wikipedia... And apartheid wasn't in our school curriculum. And I was too young to tackle a serious book. But in Kenya in the 1980s, hardly a day would go by where apartheid was not in the newspaper. So what I got was articles (I was a news junkie from an early age) that would talk about some OAU meeting or something like that, and they would mention in passing old events that the reader was assumed to be familiar with. The African boycott of the 1976 Olympics one day. Another day, Biko. Sharpeville was big, but it was all maddeningly unclear. The information was just trickling in, it took years and years of tidbits before I felt I had a coherent narrative.   The most significant fragment was one day I read an article about the 1976 uprising. It must have been an anniversary because it was a full story just about that... I remember a picture of a dead boy, and it struck me that wow, these kids were my age! It was no longer just an accumulation of historical facts. I started feeling it viscerally.

And of course, there was Mandela.   Just a name and a photo, always the same photo it seemed. I'm not sure why but the newspaper (usually the Daily Nation and sometimes the Standard) always used that one picture as far as I recall. The fact that the photo was ancient, and that they never said anything concrete about him except that he was in jail (of course what could they say, they probably had no information either), made Mandela very remote, he might as well have been Tutankamen, frozen in time, clearly "important" somehow, but not really significant to me.

Music was a large part of my evolving understanding. When I was 13, I had the privilege of meeting Miriam Makeba. We were in Abidjan, and she happened to be walking down a hotel corridor with a woman that my mother knew. So just like that, we stopped and said hi shook hands, and the adults chatted for a few minutes as my sister and I just stood and stared at the famous woman. At that time, to me she was the singer of the song that everyone loved -- "Malaika". Since the song was in Swahili, I had always assumed that she was from Kenya, or Tanzania. But naturally we talked about her a lot the rest of that day, and I found out about her remarkable life. A few years later, I heard her sing in person, at a Paul Simon and Lady Smith Black Mambazo's Graceland tour concert. (Major props to Paul Simon btw, what an awesome dude). Hugh Masakela was there too and sang "Bring back Nelson Mandela" and I was like "yeah, they better!"

By 16, I was completely radically immersed. I followed all the details of which countries imposed sanctions and which ones didn't, which companies divested from South Africa, and which ones didn't (to this day I still boycott Shell oil, for that and for their evilness in the Niger delta, and many other places --- they are really as close as you can find to evil in business).  Anyway, by that point, it's not like I was a pioneer or anyhing, the whole world was demanding the end of apartheid.

Except of course Reagan and Thatcher ("a part bien sur Madame Thatcher" comme dirait Renaud). It really annoys me that they are considered respectable or even great historical leaders, when in fact, they were the last, the absolute last of all world leaders to continue supporting apartheid Even after the entire effin British Commonwealth wanted sanctions, Thatcher tried to help the apartheid government. Of course they didn't put it that way.... They called it "constructive engagement" .Meanwhile they were funneling billions in military aid to South Africa and their allied mass-murdering warlords like Savimbi in Angola, and the other lunatic in Mozambique whose name I don't remember. For this charade, Reagan employed a useless US assistant secretary of state called Chester Crocker who would periodically fly to Pretoria to kiss P. W. Botha's ass. All in the name of fighting communism. (Thatcher, Botha and Reagan are featured together on the cover of Fela's "Beasts of No Nation", an album which struck a deep chord in me at the time.) When I hear the mainstream consensus in the US about Reagan today, it makes my stomach turn. Children, don't ever forget, Reagan was a guy who tought apartheid was ok. He also thought it was a good idea to funnel billions of dollars into trans-national Islamic fundamentalist jihad in Afghanistan, also in the name of anti-communism. How did that strategy work out?

In those days, Mandela and the ANC were called terrorists. And Osama bin Laden and his merry band of mujaheddin were called freedom fighters. Kids, never ever ever understimate the power of propaganda. But I digress.

Eventually, both communism and apartheid ended. One thing I am eternally grateful for is that I was there and old enough to understand when those things happened. Every generation should have at least one such supposedly impossible completely unthinkable thing happen in world history. It really helps you understand that most political power is based on illusion, fear and propaganda, which seem inevitable and invicible until suddenly they crumble and you wonder how they could have lasted. Such events teach us that we don't ever need to support or even tolerate the bad guys just because that's the "reasonable" or "realistic" thing to do. (of course if bad guys can actually get you, well it might be ok to keep a low profile if you have to, but my point is, don't buy into their justifications.)

And of course, there was Mandela. He was a fantastic symbol when in jail, but now... this old broken martyr three decades removed from reality, what could he possibly do? I remember staring at the TV, live mesmerized waiting for him to appear on that first day. And suddenly there he was this strange man, very different from that old picture. As he walked, you could almost feel the hundreds of millions of eyeballs on him. And what a sight. Nelson Mandela walking side-by-side with Winnie Mandela. Just like Masakela sang. (Sadly it later turned out that Winnie was a less-than-worthy companion... ). He gave a short speech. he seemed fit, graceful, ... But he spoke very slowly like a primary school teacher, and it was a little weird.

Then things began to unfold. First, I feared a power struggle with the existing leadership of the ANC under Oliver Tambo. But no, Mandela said Tambo is the president of the ANC period. Wow. This guy is really different, not just another power-hungry pol. Then came the famous Ted Koppel interview. At one point, Koppel asked him what he thought about Castro, Arafat and Ghadafi. We were like: Damn! It's a trap! In that split second, I imagined America turning against Mandela, the disaster was imminent. I hoped he'd been watching American politics in his short time since coming out and that he would figure out how to  doublespeak his way out of it like a candidate in an election. Instead, Mandela said something like: those were our friends when no one else supported us, they helped us, and I will not deny them now.   My jaw dropped. Shock. Who talks like that?!! After a couple of seconds, we realized that Koppel also had been silent. No follow-up question, no gotcha, nothing. Just an awkward silence with 100 million people watching. Then Mandela said: "Mr Koppel, have I paralyzed you?" BOOM! Minds exploded. The audience erupted. Like Alexander facing the Gordian knot, Madiba had just taken out his sword, and sliced through decades and decades of bullshit, in one swoop. The simplicity, the honor, the integrity ... he just set it straight. We had just witnessed leadership of a quality that I didn't even know existed.

There is one other thing I remember from that same interview. Some douchebag member of the apartheid parliament from the Conservative party (which was worse than the National party that invented apartheid) was video conferenced in to present the "other side"... I forget what he said but he addressed him as "Nelson, you ...." The tone was familiar to anyone who has lived in Africa. That special mix of familiarity and condescension that the "master" would use to address his servant. The kind of tone people use to call a 70-year old man by his first name and ask him to go fetch something. Anyway MP Douchebag went on for a few minutes, smug in his belief that he could show America that this old kaffir was just a kaffir. I was ready to punch the TV. My blood was boiling. Mandela quietly waited for him to finish, and then responded in a polite tone in Afrikaans. He then turned around and translated what he had just said into English for the audience, and it was the most magnanimous response possible.  Audience erupts again. Game, set and match. Then I knew this is really a Great Man.

But let us not forget, even Ghandi ultimately failed to accomplish what he wanted above all. He died by the hand of his own co-religionist for not being anti- the other religion.  India and Pakistan partitioned, muslim and hindus killed each other by the millions. Six decades later, it's still not over, now they have nuclear weapons aimed at each other. Would that same fate befall Madiba?

What happened over the following couple of years is the true miracle for me. I was disappointed that the recent movie "Invictus" chose to focus on the 1995 rugby world cup story. (Particularly since Clint Eastwood is one of my favorite directors and in "Bird" for example he didn't shy away from the hard parts of the story). Yes it's a great inspirational story... And for anyone else it would be a great hommage. Or if there had already been great films about Mandela then this would be a nice interesting story to add. But for that to be the first major hollywood movie about Mandela is like making the first major movie about George Washington and not mentioning the dark days of the revolutionary war, the famous crossing of the Delaware river, Valley Forge, and things like that.

People forget that South Africa did erupt. People (at least outside of South Africa) seems to think he came out of jail, and it was all hugs and peace and love forever after. No, a while, it was mayhem. Day after day, killings, burnings. Post-apartheid had failed. The western media as they always do, portrayed it as an ethnic conflict between Zulus and Xhosas. Repeatedly hammering stereotypes of "age-old tribal conflict" just like they did in Yugoslavia or Iraq. Of course that's not what it really was, the true story is that there are other motives which sometimes invent ethnic hatred  to serve a concrete purpose e.g. to get someone in power, or to exploit some resources through. And unfortunately is always easy to do even from scratch because people really are baboons. Given two religions or ethnic groups, even if they have lived side by side in peace forever, coming up with a reason to make a few of them hate each other and start a war is the easiest thing in politics.  Oh and no I don't believe that international media are in some giant conspiracy with bad guys around the world. They are just incompetent, often unwitting, tools. See Gell-Mann amnesia.

Anyway, that period is when I finally got to see the Great Man in person. That whole year I was traveling around killing time between undergrad and grad school. He was traveling around for very different reasons than killing time. Several times our paths almost crossed but not quite. I was in Senegal at a Mandela concert where he was supposed to show up but had to cancel because of the shit hitting the fan back in South Africa. Finally, I was at another concert in Rio de Janeiro of all places. It looked like 100,000 people came out to see Mandela. And this time he showed up. He came on, but there were probably 50 other people on stage and you could barely see him.. the sound quality was poor and his speech was not translated into Portuguese so most people didn't even know what he was saying. But I remember being scared, very scared. His speech had zero "feel good" in it, he talked briefly about the problems going on, that he was thankful for all the support and so on but that the situation was very very dire. He said the whole thing was about to fail and mentioned some very specific things about what various parties should do. It was strange most of the folks were still cheering, they didn't get it. And for me, it was a downer: when I finally see my hero, he's all somber and talking about dark practical details that I can't even hear.. His voice seemed weak, his body frail from a distance. I was worried and scared. I started thinking he would die and things would fall apart (to borrow a phrase from Chinuah Achebe).

What was going then is now well documented, people have confessed etc. There was indeed a real effort by elements of the apartheid secret police and Inkatha who were deliberately planning that apparently spontaneous violence. Powerful organized forces were working to create a civil war so post-apartheid would fail. But it didn't. The greatest achievement of Mandela to me is not the fact that he survived three decades in jail, nor that he inspired a rugby team. It is that after he came out of jail, against enormous forces, he snatched peace from the jaws of virtually certain civil war. Many others deserve credit too, but there's no question that without him it would have exploded. I don't know anyone else who has played such a momentous role in recent history ... most of the other "leaders" are people who happen to be at the right time at the right place, and then screw it up, like Yeltsin or Meles. But with Mandela, it's as if Ghandi had managed to avoid the partition of India and Pakistan, entered elective politics, succesfully governed and retired in peace. Can you imagine? Well Madiba did it. And then, at the height of his power, when he could have been king if he wanted, he stepped down and set the example of peaceful transition out of power, for his country and his continent. No other leader even comes close to that level of wisdom, unselfishness and greatness.

Simply the best.

As much as I am enjoying the world cup, that's what's on my mind all the time as I walk around enjoying all of this that is his legacy.

La cigale et la fourmi: CNY/USD revisited

2010-05-22T21:27:00.002-04:00

Time to revisit the "Yin and yang of the greenback" theory. The theory, regarding the relative value of Chinese and US currencies, is basically "La cigale et la fourmi", not as a moral story but as basic economics. China, the ant in our parable, has spent the last 25 years working hard and, thanks to government policies that amount to forced savings, not consuming that much. Meanwhile, the US, the cricket, has spent the last 25 years living off its charm and beauty as the most advanced economy in the world. Its currency's status as world reserve currency gives it a free lunch in terms of being able to borrow.

At some point, the ant will be tempted to start "cashing in", converting all that past hard work into a higher standard of living. How? Well there are several ways the government can convert those savings it has accumulated in USD into benefits for consumers. It could subsidize imported goods like fuel for example. Or more generally, it could let the exchange rate of CNY/USD rise, which would make all foreign goods cheaper in China. So that's the fundamental thesis, which is not at all an original point of view. The question was (and still is) when will this play out?

The financial crisis of 2008 looked to me like it was going to be the perfect opportunity for them. Because it added a couple of other factors (increased US deficit, and the rich world's reduced ability to import from China due to a recession) that added more pressure for the Chinese currency to rise. As it turned out, rather than shift gears into the next phase of development, one with less reliance on exports and increased domestic consumption, they decided to stay in the same gear and press on the accelerator instead: they maintained the exchange rate quasi-frozen and stimulated exports even more. So the big jump in CNY/USD has been postponed.

But will it occur? I still think so. The reserves are still accumulating. Here's the picture I cited last time, Foreign Holdings of U.S. Securities

	Country or category	Total	Equities	Long-term debt		Short-term
				ABS	Other	debt
1	Japan	1,197	220	133	768	76
2	China (Mainland)1	922	29	217	653	23
3	United Kingdom	921	421	160	316	24
4	Cayman Islands	740	279	236	186	38
5	Luxembourg	703	235	104	320	44

And here is what we have two years later, in the latest report just released last month:

	Country or category	Total	Equities	Long-term debt		Short-term
				ABS	Other	debt
1	China (Mainland)¹	1,464	78	360	866	160
2	Japan	1,269	182	136	883	69
3	United Kingdom	788	279	64	422	23
4	Cayman Islands	650	227	140	210	73
5	Luxembourg	578	137	49	312	80

Even more of the same! The pressure keeps building....

Moreover, the rumours are that China might have stimulated itself into a bubble of it's own. How does that affect our theory? You face a bubble, and you had a pile of foreign reserves.... Well that's like being in the kitchen with toast almost burning and a huge reserve of nutella. Pop the toaster and enjoy the sandwich, China!

Update: Note that in the above tables, the amount of Chinese holdings of US securities increased a lot both in absolute and relative terms. Also, I should point out one more argument in the same direction: that western policy makers are increasingly calling on China to strengthen CNY.

Airline fees and the unbelievable worthlessness of CNN

2010-05-09T15:16:00.006-04:00

Earlier this week I stumbled upon a mini-editorial on CNN, wherein the anchor "Campbell" (not sure if it's his first or last name, I think they try to market them like that) went off on the topic of the airline industry charging extra fees. That is, charges that are not part of the ticket price, like the fees for luggage, or food, extra leg room etc. He was all up in arms because new data showed it was EIGHT BILLION dollars last year. He said that airlines are profiting from your discomfort, his face running the gamut of expressions from mocking to outraged. Basically he painted a picture of an industry conspiring to deceptively price gouge.

But here's the thing. In the entire piece, he failed to mention a) whether overall cost of air travel has gone up or down; b) whether the airline industry as a whole was profitable or not. Without those two additional data points, his conclusions are entirely unsupported!

What is definitely happening is a shift to more granular pricing. For example, let's say 50% of travelers have luggage and 50% don't. Say previously everyone paid $400 for a ticket and now it's $350 for the seat + $100 for luggage. Why is that bad? You can argue that it it's annoying to have the cost broken down in pieces, or you can argue that it's great to have more flexibility. I, for one, am very happy to trade a luggage quota I don't use for more leg room! Whatever your opinion, in our example, since the average cost is still $400, you can't say that they are "profiting at your expense". Yet that's exactly what CNN did, without presenting any evidence that the total cost is higher! As a matter of fact, the cost of air travel has been going down for decades and as far as I can tell that trend hasn't reversed recently.

Second, is there price gouging, i.e. excessive profits due to collusion in the industry?Actually, the airline industry "as a whole has made a cumulative loss during its 100-year history". So while it's possible for price gouging to exist in on routes without competition, it's impossible that it is occurring on the industry as a whole. Yet that is what CNN is claiming without any qualifiers.

Wow! You couldn't design a more logically flawed editorial if you tried.

This would be a perfect opportunity for a warning against Gell-Man amnesia, if I didn't already believe that CNN is completely worthless. The only time I see it is accidentally while looking for sports.

+49° 21' 2.65", +154° 42' 28.54"

2010-04-02T23:10:00.001-04:00

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Known unknowns and unknown unknowns

2010-03-31T20:42:00.001-04:00

A lot of people made fun of poor Donald Rumsfeld for his infamous quote..

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

But actually, he had a very good point. There are things that have uncertainty but we know the shape of the uncertainty. For example, I don't know who will the lottery tomorrow, but we do know the probability of any one person winning, or the distribution of winning amounts. And by the way from that we do know that playing the lottery is one of the dumbest activities known to man, though it is a kind of stupidity that we can harness for good perhaps... but I digress. My point is the outcome of the lottery is a known unknown. Which is different type of ignorance than say, not knowing if God exists. There you don't even have a probability space to support a distribution. Once someone asked to me: What's the probability that God exists? Obviously it was a rhetorical question, and it assumed the answer is "very low" (the question came from an atheist). But then I was like: it could be 0.01% or 99.99% or anything. If you have to choose, it might as well be 42.

Zen for my domain

2010-03-20T18:30:00.000-04:00

After procrastinating about it for years I've finally switched this blog to be on my personal domain name (in case you're curious, here's how).. so adios nemozen.blogspot.com and hello nemozen.semret.org!
How long did I procrastinate? Suffice it to say, I've had that domain name since before blogger/blogspot or even the term "blogging" existed... Now maybe in another 3-4 years I will customize the templates! In the meantime, I hope this doesn't break the feedopology.

Design bugs in everyday life

2009-11-08T18:53:00.012-05:00

A long time ago, I think it was in the book "Information Rules", I read a great example of a pure inefficiency, a problem where everyone involved is worse off than they could be under a simple alternative scenario. At a deli or coffee shop, where coffee is served in disposable cups, it's better if the covers are the same size for different size cups (i.e. the circumference of the top of the cups is the same whether the cup is small, medium or large). Otherwise, people will waste time because they picked the wrong size cover and have to pick again, others will also waste time as they wait for them to get out of the way, some lids get wasted, the counter gets messier, etc. Many small problems arise from having different size lids.

It's a striking example because the difference between the right and wrong solution is so trivial. It's a design error, and if you realize it early on, the fix is virtually free but later it's very costly. Nothing new in that, that's exactly the nature of software bugs and it's not surprising that similar "bugs" exist elsewhere. But what really fascinated me in this example is that the bug, doesn't get fixed even in subsequent versions! You still have many coffee places that have different size cup covers, for decades, for no good reason.What a fascinating bug! It should have been crushed years ago and yet it continues to hang around generation after generation.

Since then, I've noticed other examples of design bugs in every day life that are surprisingly resilient. Some, like the one above, probably survive because the inefficiency occurs in such tiny increments, we don't appreciate the cumulative cost. Others survive because all they need is one chance to get into the system and then they are locked in forever. Here are a few random ones that I can think of right now:

Typographical Fonts where l (lower case L) and I (capital i) are hard to distinguish.... It seems like if you are designing a font, making letters distinct would be one of your first requirements, so how do these fonts survive, and even thrive? Imagine all the damage that has been done throughout history because someone misread a "l" as an "I"... it's hard to estimate but it must be huge. Maybe it caused a shipwreck at some point!
Alphanumeric key mapping on phones: a neat old idea which allows you to make memorable words out of phone numbers, like 1-800-FLOWERS. But let's look at that mapping on our phones We have 2: ABC, 3: DEF, 4: GHI, 5:JKL, 6: MNO, 7 : PQRS, 8:TUV, 9 : WXYZ , and 1 and 0 have no letters. This leaves a small doubt in a some cases: when you see O is it really an O which makes it a 6 or is it a zero? Similarly if I see a I, I'm not sure if I should dial a 4 or a 1. That's a bug in the design. The fix would obviously have been to assign I to 1 and O to 0, and then assign all the others alphabetically 4: GHJ, 5: KLM, 6: NPQ, .... with a nice side effect that now all the keys would have three letters on them (instead of two of them having 4 letters, or omitting Q and Z like they did in some old phones). Again a trivial fix but the design bug got locked-in, became the standard, and now it will never be fixed. Imagine.... maybe some lives were lost because someone wasted precious seconds by dialing a 4 instead of a 1!
Bank ATMs that give the cash before returning the card; it seems obvious that will cause a lot of people to leave their card behind which in turn is a huge cost for the bank and the customer! The fix is to design the machines to always return the card first and then proceed with the withdrawal or deposit. Fortunately this last bug seems more prevalent among older machines than newer ones, which hopefully means it's on it's way to extinction...

On Optics (channeling Safire)

2009-10-29T19:09:00.017-04:00

William Safire recently died. Even though I disagreed with most of his political opinions, I loved and will miss his columns, especially "On Language". So I want to note his passing here, with my own little post on language. Now of course I don't aspire to be as entertaining or educational as him... so I'll just rant about something I find annoying.

Politicians and journalists in the US have started using the word "optics" when they mean "perception" or "appearance" . E.g. instead of "this looks bad" they say "the optics of this are not good"..... urgh! Extremely annoying fad! Here are two quick examples I just found using my favorite search engine. The first one is from a politician in 2008:

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa [...] said that terrorists would dance in the streets if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, is elected president [...] because Obama's middle name is "Hussein," his father's Muslim roots, and his appearance -- or "optics," as King put it. "I'll just say this that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States -- and I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam? "

Well Mr. Congressman, the optics of this are that you are a pretentious buffoon who thinks that borrowing scientific sounding words makes you look smart. (Oh and it seems you are also a bigot... but that's off-topic here.) The second one is a more recent example from an actual writer this time:

"In response to the leak, the White House kicks into high damage-control mode [...], but even here shows some clumsiness, at least regarding civil-military optics: the 25 hours for the Olympics vs. 25 minutes for McChrystal optic..."

The "McChrystal optic"? To me those two words invoke a beam of light going through a solid material whose constituent atoms are arranged an orderly repeating pattern. Which of course has nothing to do with what (I think) the writer meant to communicate -- something about Gen. McChrystal and perceptions. The faddish metaphor failed, the sentence is ugly and borderline incomprehensible. Way to go, Mr. Professional Writer.

I think this usage of "optics" right now, in 2009, is just at the point where it's perfect indicator of a certain kind of pomposity. Normal people haven't started using it (and hopefully never will), but it seems to be trendy with hacks who either can't come up with better metaphors or fear that simple words would expose their paucity of meaning. Am I being to harsh ? OK, let's give that last writer the benefit of the doubt, and see what else he's written... in an even more recent post, the following:

"President Obama and his advisors seem to be wrestling with this fundamental issue in Afghanistan and the optics and the body language...."

Bingo! Optics and body language.... just horrible isn't it?

It's not that I am just a cranky conservative when it comes to language -- far from it, I love its constant evolution -- slang, jargon, lingo.. it's all great! But that doesn't mean that all neologisms are good. It doesn't mean that "any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes", to quote George Orwell. For a new word, usage, phrase, or expression to work, for it to be cool, in any language "what is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around."

R.I.P. William Safire.

Do you feel lucky... punk?

2009-08-16T18:03:00.012-04:00

Here are two reasons why humanity might soon go extinct, and why it wouldn't be such a big loss. As you can see, I am in a cheerful mood today.

Big rock from outer space

Last year, using the example of the asteroid Apophis that might destroy the world in 27 years, I made the point that human beings are sometimes astonishingly stupid when it comes to making decisions that involve low probability events.

If we were rational mathematical creatures, humanity as a whole should be willing to spend billions of dollars to insure against that 0.0023% chance that we will all be wiped out. If you don't like my argument based on the present value of future GDP, here's another way of arriving at the same point. If you are willing to spend a trillion dollars say on nuclear weapons to defend against other humans, and say there's a 1 in 50 chance that you actually need them, logically, you should be willing to spend a billion dollars on threats that have a 1/50,000 chance of happening. (I am using conservative orders of magnitude here, obviously a nuclear war has less than 1/50 chance of happening, so that makes my point even stronger).

Today, in this article from Ars Technica, I found out just how stupid we are.

Congress awarded NASA a $1.6 million grant in 1999 to put towards the NEO discovery program. Unfortunately, this was the only funding Congress gave to NASA to pursue this goal.

Yup, the US government allocated $1.6 million dollars to save all of human life from extinction... Total! And just in case you are inclined to blame "the Americans" for being so short sighted, consider that all the other countries in the world are allocating.. ZERO! (Ok maybe they have a couple of telescopes pointing at the sky but we need giant laser beams or something...)

At this point, I am almost rooting for the asteroid to kick human ass. We deserve it.

Small germs from inner space

And of course, a big stone falling from the sky is not the only threat we face. Tiny germs are threatening us too. Let's take the H1N1 virus -- the swine flu of recent fame. You'd think that at least when it comes to human health, humanity can be rational, right? Not so quick. Let's see how are favorite mammal is dealing with this problem. Consider the following article from the Guardian (great newspaper btw): "Experts warned dispersal of Tamiflu would do more harm than good" about the debate on anti-virus treatments for H1N1. Here's the scientific view, summarized by one expert quoted in the article:

"Some people wanted to take a long-term view of the risk of resistance developing and to seek to preserve the effectiveness of antivirals for the next pandemic, which may be more severe."

"If you get a resistant strain that becomes dominant in the autumn, Tamiflu will then be useless."

And here's another scientist:

"I am concerned about the vast amount of Tamiflu that is going out almost unregulated," he told the Guardian. "We are increasing the possibility that the flu will become resistant sooner or later. At the moment there is no desperate need for Tamiflu. We should be reconsidering its issue, rather than encouraging its use.

"I think we should stop the national pandemic flu service. It was put there for an outbreak of far higher mortality than we have. If you get a resistant strain that becomes dominant in the autumn, Tamiflu will then be useless."

Ok, thank God for all these smart scientists who have thought it through! The politicians should logically follow their advice right? Well actually

"It was felt ... it would simply be unacceptable to the UK population to tell them we had a huge stockpile of drugs but they were not going to be made available"

So they just decided to go ahead and do the wrong thing! It's like a parent saying: "If I told my 5 year old not to play with this loaded gun, he would have been upset, so I decided to let him play with it." Mind you we're not talking about some distant threat here. The next mutation of the virus could be this autumn. Granted there's a low probability that it will mutate into a real killer, but that's my whole point. It's a low probability but high impact threat. And faced with that, the British government is willingly increasing the probability of a pandemic that could kill hundreds of millions of people, because they are afraid of being unpopular for the next two months!

Seriously! If this was a movie, whose side would you be on? I would be like: Humans suck! Go H1, Go N1, it's your birthday!

No rare events in the savannah

None of this is original of course. Evolutionary biologists will say it's because our brain evolved in an environment where we just never had to consider small probabilities. We have no problem dealing with quantities like "if I go left, I get 1 potato, if I turn right I get 12 eggs"... Our brain can compute those things even as a toddler. But things like "1 in 50,000 chance" just don't compute in ye olde wetware. It's only after years of formal schooling, e.g. by the high-school level, that we start to get intuition on really small numbers. Because until the modern age, we didn't need to! Sure there were rare things like being hit by lightning, or having an earthquake, but since there wasn't anything we could do about them, there was no evolutionary advantage to actually being able to reason logically about really small probabilities. Good old superstition would work just as well. You could say "I got hit by lightning because Zeus is angry at me because I didn't offer animal sacrifice". If you are a hunter gatherer living in the bush, that explanation is practically speaking, just as good as the scientific one.

But now, by our own hands, we have a world where we do need to reason about small probabilities... Problem is, the brain hasn't caught up! Global warming is another example. Twenty years ago, it was a low probability but high impact threat, just like our two examples above. Scientists were running around screaming "There's a 1 in 100 chance that the polar ice caps will melt! That's huge!" But humanity just couldn't deal with it. People were like: "One in a hundred chance of extincttion? Pffft. I'm feeling lucky. Let me go buy a lottery ticket."

Well now global warming is in the same range of probability as 1 potato and 12 eggs, so people are dealing with it, but it may be too late.

Is this the end-game of evolution? Is this what the epitaph will say:

Here lies humanity.
They became really good at reproduction -- 6 billion individuals!
But not quite good enough at probability.

Maybe it's all part of a master plan. A conspiracy! Apophis contains some organic molecules which are distant relatives of the H1N1 virus. Together the asteroid and the swine flu are collaborating to take us out, and recolonize the planet with a new dominant species that they like better. After all, that could be how we got here too!

Gell-Mann Amnesia

2009-08-13T00:35:00.000-04:00

Last November, I came across this piece by Michael Crichton. I found the following bit brilliant:Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Brilliant! It reminds me of my rants about the NY Times. Yet I still buy it most days.... Amnesia.

Note: when I wrote that post, in November 2007, the Times' newsstand price had just increased from $1 to $1.25. Now it's $2. 100% increase in less than two years!

Mark Cuban's advice to Myspace

2009-08-11T21:40:00.006-04:00

I made what turned out to be a rather lengthy comment on the latest post at blogmaverick.com wherein Mark Cuban gives advice to Rupert Murdoch. A quick survey of my readers (hey me!) indicated that close to 100% would like to have that insightful comment right here on their favorite blog. Hence this post.

The first part of Cuban's advice is kind of crazy. He wants news sites to block incoming links from aggregators. Block links! That's a surprising level of cluelessness from our good friend, who is getting all the flack he deserves for that idea from other people so I won't add to it.

The more interesting part of the post is on Myspace's potential future business model... I really think he's on to something. Here's what I had to say about it (Since Wave is not integrated with Blogger yet, I can only cut & paste):

Excellent advice for Myspace, Mark! I think being a music platform is the best business plan for them. They have the audience with the right demographics, and the artists. For now… But they can’t pull it off with the website they have today. So the big question is, do they have the technical capability to support that business plan?

It would take a significant breakthrough, a next generation web application. It would have streaming, download and playback, syncing with devices, all better or at least as good as todays iTunes client/server combo. It would also have to be a great authoring/publication tool for artists to easily create a good looking online presence, perhaps even some actual post-production music features to create special samples and mixes…

In short, they need a site that is as different from today’s Myspace pages as, let’s say, Gmail in 2009 is different from Hotmail of 1999. The ingredients are available and ripe: after years of stagnation, browsers and web languages are in a period of intense innovation. But can Myspace pull them together to create a cool and, as Steve Jobs would say, “insanely great” technology for the new web-based music universe? I doubt it. I just don’t see any evidence whatsoever, at Myspace or anywhere else at News corp, of the level of technical depth required to lead the world into this new — dare I say it? — “web 3.0″ music world. Still, you are right IMHO, it’s their best bet and they should at least try rather than wither away.

Chronicle of a death foretold

2009-07-29T00:35:00.002-04:00

Sometimes little things are very telling. In the case of Facebook, one of those things is "Reply-to:"... or rather three of those things. To wit:

When you receive a message on Facebook, it sends you a notification by email. Great. But then you can't reply! Why? Why don't they just set the reply-to in the email header to an address that will send it back to the person's inbox in Facebook? That way you and your friend are still communicating through Facebook but with the added convenience of email e.g. on your mobile. But no, they force you to login to the Facebook website to reply.
Similarly, suppose you are logged in to Facebook, and you want to email your friend. You go to you friends profile, and guess what, you can't click on the email address to send them email! Why? Why can't they just make it a mailto link?
So ok, you decide to just copy and paste the address, of course. But you can't -- it's an image! Why? Whyyyyy? Why can't they just leave it in plain text, why do they want to go through the extra expense of converting everyone's email into an image?

In short, they are really really going out of their way to discourage you from using your friend's email address. Why? Fear of spam is not the reason, we're talking about authenticated contacts. Obviously the reason is that their business model is such that when you visit their website, they make (or at least hope to make) money from advertising.

The technical ideal here is obviously flexibility: let users exchange emails, SMSes, IMs, everything they want with their friends, with Facebook being the hub of their online universe. Instead of re-inventing separate and more primitive versions of email and IM inside their closed world, they could inter-connect and inter-operate. They could also for example enable you to chat with your Facebook contacts directly even if only one of you is logged in to Facebook and the other is on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN messenger, or Google Talk... If Gaim and Trillian could do that years ago, surely Facebook can. They could effectively unify all the existing message systems into a grand Facebook Open Overlay IM ("FOO IM"). It would be a great service to their users, and a manifestation of the core raison d'être of a social network. And of course, they already have plenty of employees there who are very smart and experienced with this kind of stuff, so they definitely could. But, instead of doing the right thing, their business model is forcing them to instead handicap their users' communications!

Every company must have a way to make money of course. Through some combination of good ideas, timing, environment, luck etc. companies end up with very different business models. Here it looks like Facebook is trending toward one which requires an "adversarial" relationship with the user. We're seeing hints that their need to reach profitability is starting to go against the best interest of their users. Sure you can still make money that way. But that road is ugly. Down that road you end up with health insurance companies whose profits rely on denying coverage to people who tought they had paid for it. Shady calling cards where they put obstacles in your way so you can't fully use the advertised number of minutes. Sleezy subscription schemes that generate profits by making it difficult to cancel even when you are entitled to. Everyone knows that world, those businesses you just hate, the ones you complain about. Those are simply businesses where the company's incentives are not aligned with the users'.

In that sense, Facebook today is eerily reminiscent of AOL in the late 1990s. Facebook is the king of social networks with something like 300 million users. AOL was the king of Internet access providers, with 30 million users paying $20/month! (Here's an interesting side question: I wonder how Facebook users as a percentage of total Internet users today, compares to AOL subscribers as a percentage of total Internet population in 1999? I wouldn't be surprised if it's roughly the same.) And at the very peak of its dominance, AOL was showing the same signs. Instead of letting their users just go to any website directly, they had this limited proprietary system with "rooms", "keywords", "channels", their own content, their own applications, etc. The reason was because they were stuck in a business model of a closed online service from the 1980s. So even though they knew the open network was infinitely better, they were devoted to a doomed goal of keeping the users inside their own closed world. Inevitably their users realized they could get more for less: pay $10/month to a no-name ISP, use a free browser and just surf the web... ("surf the web" sounds so quaint doesn't it?) And they started leaving AOL in droves. Even after merging with Time Warner, AOL couldn't capitalize on the shift to broadband. They remained desperately focused on trying to keep subscribers from leaving the old "America On Line", they became a monster that took adversarial customer relations to a whole new level, before finally giving up in 2006. (By the way all this has little to do with what AOL is today in 2009).

To be sure.... Wow for a long time, I've wanted to start a paragraph with "To be sure ...", and this is the first! But I digress.

To be sure, despite the dramatic title of this post, and despite the fact that I've picked on them once before, it's far from over for Facebook. They may yet decide to give the users the obvious flexibility, and make enough money with higher quality ad targetting when the users naturally come to the site anyway. Maybe they will find new ways to advertise as messages flow openly in and out of their network, or maybe they will figure out brand new business models. Whatever the case is, they do have one great thing going for them. Execution. They know how to get things done. You don't get to 300 million users by being stupid or lazy. They just need to make sure they are not smartly and expertly marching off a cliff.

The title of this post by the way is from a novel by one my favorite authors. Not his best novel, but a great title. And a pretty good movie too.

$135B: pros and cons

2009-06-17T00:25:00.009-04:00

Last week, a friend pointed me to the following story:

"Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals ...."

My first thought .... well not my first, the first was of course: "WTF?!!", but the second or third thought was "this could be terrorism!" A deliberate attack on the ability of the US govt to finance itself, by shaking confidence in the debt instruments.

And of course I expected it to be huge news. The biggest case of counterfeiting in history and a new kind of terrorism etc, etc. Yet, I searched and searched, and there was barely any mention of it anywhere else that day and the next day! No follow-ups, no debunking, nothing. In fact even the initial story is completely absent from mainstream news. Why the silence, what's going on? Where are all the experts and the pros? Then when you think about it... it makes sense. If it really is an attack, an attack on the very essence of money -- confidence, that's exactly how you would want to respond isn't it? Is it possible that say all the reporters who called the US Federal Reserve for comment got a quiet very high level response saying: "please bury this story", and did so? After all it is well known that major US news organizations have in the recent past complied when the US government asked them not to reveal national security secrets that they knew.

Today a week later, there are still very few stories about it on the web, and zero from the major US news organizations, nothing from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN et al.

Here's a good blog post theorizing that the bonds must be counterfeit, and likely designed to be caught.

100% wireless

2009-05-06T00:45:00.005-04:00

Continuing with the persotechnomobilephoto upload theme:

This past weekend, I finally completed the last step of a very gradual evolution... to H. s. sapiens radionsis i.e. the all-wireless man. It started with giving up the telephone landline years ago and just using the cell phone. Then, after a recent move, I could get many high-def digital TV channels completely free... via good old fashioned broadcast.

So I decided to take the leap with Internet too. I had a Sprint broadband wireless modem I'd been using on a laptop, and one day plugged it into my 4-year old Mac mini. That worked no problem (after I realized I had to put in the "phone number" #777). So now, after procrastinating for weeks, I was finally going to look into how to enable IP forwarding in OS X and what do you know, it's right there in System Preferences under Network, there's an icon for sharing, et voila! Now I needed a DHCP server and I was just getting ready to download and install one when, lo and behold, I see there's already one in OS X. Oh cool, home network done. Right now I am sitting writing this post from my laptop, which is connected to the Internet wirelessly via the Mac, which is connected to the Sprint cellular network. It all just works! Sometimes you just have to say: cool! This is another one of those times.

The same little mac is also the host of my music collection and old-fashioned CD player too. It's also plugged into the TV to serve as DVD player. And of course it's a computer connected to the internet, so with bluetooth mouse and keyboard, I can kick back and surf the net on big screen. That goes very well with boxee.tv, which makes it really hard to miss cable TV (I never really cared much for it and barely ever had it anyway).

Two cool things. First is that the little mac mini has totally replaced the roles normally played by a DSL/cable modem, a WiFi router, a home computer, a set top cable/satellite box, and a DVD/CD player. Not only has it replaced them all, but for the home environment, it actually does a better job in many of those cases! All in one very compact, well designed little box (HDMI for example, pretty far-sighted) where all the details just worked so easily I probably spent more time writing this post than setting it all up. What can I say but: I love OS X and the mac mini.

The second cool thing is that I now enjoy home Internet, TV, and phone service all wirelessly, untethered! I could just as well be living on a boat... with a big battery.

Always remember batteries. In this wonderfully convenient wirelessness, the weak link is the battery. Was it Napoleon who said something about how a whole battle could turn on a simple horseshoe? Today the same can be said about batteries.

Meta social network

2009-04-29T01:58:00.006-04:00

I'm forced to recognize that despite making fun of the social networking hype, I do use a number of web things which feed other things and involve people I know. So, jokes aside, here's an attempt at making sense of the feed topology, my personal feedological graphic if you will:

This is also my first attempt at a blog post from a mobile photo... I took the above a few days ago and synced it to picasa over the air. But you can't rotate!

Trouble in (AAPL) paradise?

2009-03-14T22:47:00.020-04:00

Last year my beloved blackberry was stolen... at gunpoint! That was the single most lopsided cost and benefit equation (for all involved) I have ever been a part of in my life... but that's not today's story. The story is, I decided to replace it with a second generation iPhone (with 3G and GPS), which had just come out. I'm not about to write a product review, God knows enough has been written about the iPhone. I'll just sya it's a really cool device.

But there's one aspect that doesn't seem to be talked about at all. A few weeks later I went to Ethiopia, and coincidentally again, I got one of the very first 3G SIM cards in the country. Amazing, the coolest phone and the fastest wireless network, woohoo. Except... there was no crack to unlock the 3G iPhone! So I had to carry two phones, one to make calls, and the iPhone for my address book etc. Second, my MacBook pro doesn't have a modem! And of course, who remembers to take an extra modem with them? Thankfully I had an old IBM Thinkpad, which has a built-in modem, so I could get on the Internet. The point is that the two Apple products I had were unusable in the third world. Whereas their competitors products (IBM and Blackberry in this case) are perfectly usable in those same conditions.

When I came back, a few weeks later, I was given an HTC G1 Android. Again many people have written comparing the two, but the thing that immediately struck me as the most important in comparing the two is a very basic point. The Android doesn't assume you have a computer. Everything is over the air, your contacts, applications, OS updates etc. are all updated/synced wirelessly. Whereas the iPhone requires that you have a computer, and a pretty powerful one at that (it has to be able to run iTunes on Windows or Mac OS X). To use an iPhone, you have to not only buy the phone, you must also already have a $1,000-$2,000 computer at home. If you live in the first world, that's a perfectly valid assumption, no problem. But it means that Apple's total market is a few hundred million people in the first world. This is true of Apple products in general, but is even more true of the iPhone which is a hugely important piece of that company's future. For comparison, Android's market is those people, plus the other 3 billion people in the world who can afford a $200 phone but not a $2,000 computer.

Then few months ago I read a great blog post (unfortunately I can't find the url to link) which argued that because Apple's marketing has been based on "coolness" and "exclusivity", once a device reaches a critical mass of users, the marketing starts defeating itself. Same psychology which limits the lifespan new fashion or of "hip" nightclubs: exclusivity is key to success, and eventually when the B & T crowd can get in, it's no longer cool.

Add to that the phenomenal success of iPhone sales so far, and you can only conclude that pretty soon, it might, just might saturate its potential market, much sooner than you would expect. There's some evidence this is already happening with the iPod. And the iPhone has more formidable competitors and more complicated market dynamics than the iPod.

Recall what happened with personal computers, Apple invented the category and dominated it with a unique approach until the mid 80s. But as the overall market grew from millions to billions of users, they peaked and ended up stuck at well under 5% market share, as cheaper and uglier IBM PC clones took the other 95+%. On the other hand, in the last 10 years, Apple has pulled off several bet-the-farm miracles. Not just the invention of the iPhone, and the iPod, but also two earlier huge gambles: switching from PowerPC to Intel CPUs in the Mac, and switching from the old Mac OS to Unix-based OS-X, both were incredible successes of business and engineering that defied the conventional wisdom completely.

So this is a tricky one. It could go either way. But I'm going to go out and a limb and predict that 2008 was the year of Apple's peak. Short AAPL.

Florida 2000

2009-03-11T23:55:00.014-04:00

I was reading Super Crunchers a little while ago. I got to this passage which is one of those things that are deceptively low-key but then make you go WTF? A big WTF?!! Such a big one in fact that I am quoting it here. At the end of a section about data mashing the author adds the following cautionary tale (pp. 138-139):

Yet the art of indirect matching can also be prone to error. Database Technologies (DBT), a company that was ultimately purchased by ChoicePoint, got in a lot of trouble for indirectly identifying felons before the 2000 Florida elections. The state of Florida hired DBT to create a list of potential people to remove from the list of registered voters. DBT matched the database of registered voters to lists of convicted felons not just from Florida but from every state in the union. The most direct and conservative means to match would have been to use the voter's name and date of birth as necessary identifiers. But DBT, possibly under direction from Florida's Division of Elections, cast a much broader net [...] Its matching algorithm required only a 90 percent match between the name of the registered voter and the name of the convict. In practice this meant that there were lots of false positives [....] For example the Rev. Willie D. Whiting, Jr., a registered voter was initially told that he could not vote because someone named Willie J. Whiting, born two days later, had a felony conviction. The Division of Elections also required DBT to perform "nickname matches" for first names and to match on first and last names regardless of their order -- so that the name Deborah Ann would also match the name Ann Deborah, for example.

The combination of these low matching requirements together with the broad universe of all state felonies produced a staggeringly large list of 57,746 registered Floridians who were identified as convicted felons. The concern was not just with the likely large number of false positives, but also with the likelihood that a disproportionate number of the so-called purged registrations would be for African-American voters. This is especially true because the algorithm was not relaxed when it came to race. Only registered voters who exactly matched the race of the convict were subject to exclusion from the voting rolls.

[...] What makes the DBT story so troubling is that the convict/voter data seemed so poorly matched relative to the standards of modern-day merging and mashing.

Note that this book is all about number crunching, not politics, and overall very optimistic, gung-ho even. But this brief passage, specifically the things that I have highlighted in bold above, gave me pause... It's been bothering me for a couple of weeks.

Clearly, technically, DBT made a blatant mistake as the author concludes. But how come? Why did the government of Florida give directions that led directly and predictably to the "mistakes"?First of all, why allow any false positives at all? It's perfectly possible to get to almost zero false positives if you tolerate more false negatives, i.e. err on the safe side. In fact, in legal terms, that's the rule: "innocent until proven guilty" -- not 90 percent, but beyond a reasonable doubt. How could they accidentally forget this principle when it came to denying basic rights like voting? Second, in addition to the bias mentioned in the passage, it seems obvious to me that African Americans have a higher frequency of occurence of the same names. So not only did they err on the unsafe side, but the way in which the error expanded happened to be doubly targeted at a particular demographic group -- how come? Oh and who ran the state government of Florida at the time, and who benefited from those errors? Those are rhetorical questions by the way. But it's still surprising. Anyway it's history now...

Speaking of history, the title of this post comes from the name of a disco in Nairobi way back in the day. The first time I ever heard about the concept of a nightclub was when we drove by Florida 2000 one day, and I asked what's that place? I was too young to even think about going in but it was a fascinating thing -- it actually looked like a flying saucer.

And speaking of flying saucers, I wonder what it must be like for kids to not have the "Year 2000" in the future... Which reminds of a song by Fela and Roy Ayers.

What happened to Kavo, Tizaa?

2009-02-14T19:50:00.012-05:00

I want my
I want my
I want my DVRP2P

From the first time I heard about Tivo, I expected the obvious next step, which would be gargantuan, the biggest thing since the web browser. It was obvious; Tivo + Napster! But Napster was already dead so I started saying: Tivo + Kazaa! Kazaa just happened to be the hot P2P file sharing network at the time (circa 2002). It's not necessarily Tivo anymore either, now it's DVR a whole category. So to update the idea let's call it DVR+P2P.

It's obvious. The DVR is basically a computer with a big hard drive, and a fancy video decoder/tuner card. Tivo is essentially an application that runs on Linux, I believe. Moreover DVRs connect to the Internet. So if they just added a P2P software client on it, boom! Suddenly not only can you record your own TV programs, you can also search every other user's recorded programs. This means almost anything that has ever been on TV on any channel is accessible for viewing on demand by everyone! The benefit to users would be ... I can't find a strong enough superlative. It'd obviously be HUGE. And incredibly easy to do.

So why hasn't it happened yet?

Copyright infringement? This is running on a closed device so they could easily restrict the software to only search "legal" videos from the same cable or satellite provider only.
Advertising? They already allow fast-forwarding through commercials, it doesn't seem to have killed the ad revenue. In any case they could disable ffwd if they wanted to.
Revenue? DVR+P2P would be so great they could charge any price for the service everyone would still sign-up for it.

Are they just extremely paranoid?

Here's what AFAIK is the conventional theory about this: Traditional laws relied on the physical form of books, records etc. to control the amount of copying, and now with digital media + data networks making copying exponentially easier the laws just don't fit anymore, and so there will be some major adjustments in the coming decades. In the meantime content owners are paranoid and are just blocking every new distribution method even if it's beneficial to them, like they tried to do when VCRs first came about. Scrounging through some links on my old homepage, I found a link to the first article I first read on this: "Who will own your next good idea?".

Today, I stumbled across a brilliant presentation by Laurence Lessig from 2002 entitled "Free Culture". In fact this post was supposed to be a quick link to that preso but it has released years of pent-up frustration on this subject in me. Anyway, "Free Culture" augurs a much darker cloud over the same field. He makes the point that digitization is expanding the scope of regulated use dramatically to the point of suffocating unregulated use. Which seems upside down because we are so conditioned to think of digitization as threatening regulated use. But when you think about it, it's absolutely true! Brilliant!

<irony>
That link on the word Brilliant which I've used before was to the hilarious Guinness commercial where they keep saying "Brilliant!" Now it says "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." What a perfect example of legal protection of creativity!
</irony>

The more I think about it, the more amazed I am by the truth, simplicity, and importance of that fact: digitization is expanding the scope of regulated use. Unregulated use which used to be 90% of the activity, like simply reading a book or lending it to a friend, is being replaced by regulated use: reading a web page is technically a regulated activity, there are restrictions on what you can or can't do with those bits of content whether they are in your computer's RAM or HD, or pixels. "Fair use" is just a minor sideshow. Unregulated use is the 800lb gorilla. I don't think most people realize that and they really should. Lessig is a giant.

"Free societies enable the future by limiting the past" -- Laurence Lessig.

Will the circle be unbroken

2009-01-30T23:54:00.007-05:00

For the first time ever, the IMF is borrowing.

When the lender
of last resort
Becomes a borrower,
Will the circle be unbroken?

(Couldn't find the John Lee Hooker version...)

Nemo, Zen and the art of 20%

2009-01-22T19:36:00.010-05:00

One of the cool things about my employer is the concept of 20% time. Basically it's a license to spend a chunk of your time working on things that you think are good, useful interesting, etc., but otherwise might not get done. Recently I finished a small 20% project, and it was officially announced today. Read all about it, and then go and try it!

Note: If you can't see Ethiopic fonts on your computer, here are some links to Ethiopic fonts to download and install.

L'albatros

2009-01-15T00:06:00.003-05:00

Today, I ain't about economics, or politics. Not technology, nor internet. Not even epistemology. Not even wow! It could be "De gainsbarre a biggie". But no. Today, it's "Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!".... beau de l'air comme disait Charles:

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

A peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées....

Microsoft files pay-per-use PC patent

2008-12-30T12:45:00.003-05:00

Note to self: Microsoft files pay-per-use PC patent... What about Amazon's EC2 and S3 services? I assume they were able to patent some of it before launching. Is the only difference here that the MS patent applies to "personal computers" whereas Amazon's is for "servers"? Eeeeeenteresting. This may be relevant to me....

eBay: fall of an icon

2008-12-24T17:50:00.006-05:00

I have always been huge fan of eBay. Actually not always. At first I was a fan of Onsale, the first auction site on the net! In fact I bought my first laptop in an auction on onsale.com, in late 1997. Later I bought their stock. Then they merged with egghead.com and then went out of business ages ago... While writing this post, I noticed there's a current website at onsale.com which seems to have nothing to do with the original. So anyway when I heard of eBay, I dismissed them as a copycat. But having a more than casual interest in auctions, inevitably I realized the main difference between onsale and ebay was huge.

Ebay had sellers! It's hard to appreciate today just how revolutionary that was kids. Let's just say, in addition to the use of auctions, it presaged long-tails, user-generated content and many other things that we consider fundamental to the Internet today. Even amidst all the dot-com hype, eBay was definitely one of the truly revolutionary things about the Internet. And it was profitable! During the dot-com bust, and for years afterward, eBay shone ever brighter.

But for the last couple of years, I've become convinced that eBay has entered it's John Sculley era. Like Apple in the late 1980s, faced with a new wave of challenges, they have responded with a misguided strategy. I think they are neglecting their strengths and fighting from weakness, which as we've known since Sun Tsu, is a path to likely defeat.

Thus, in accordance with my rights and obligations as a blogger that no one reads, I hereby charge eBay Inc. with failure to fulfill it's destiny as an Internet icon, in ways that include but are not limited to:

Website suckage: Every time I've tried to buy or sell stuff on ebay in the last couple of years, I've been shocked by how cluttered, messy and unusable the site is. Three years after Ajax became the norm, ebay.com pages look like they are from cgi shell scripts written in 1996.
Concentration on the fat head instead of the long tail: they changed the fee structure in a way that was widely interpreted as anti-small seller, anti-auction, pro-fixed-price. They even shockingly removed the ability for sellers to leave feedback on buyers!
New management whose arrival coincides with moves betraying a profound misunderstanding of their core value as a two-way marketplace.

To make a long story short, short EBAY, long AMZN.

NOTE: This post was first drafted in July 2008 but not posted until December. Things have changed in the financial markets since but all of the above still applies IMHO.

Stealth bailout

2008-11-14T22:00:00.002-05:00

A few days ago, I was shocked to find out that there's another bailout of a trillion dollars in loans by the Fed:

"The Fed's lending is significant because the central bank has stepped into a rescue role that was also the purpose of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, bailout plan -- without safeguards put into the TARP legislation by Congress.

Total Fed lending topped $2 trillion for the first time last week and has risen by 140 percent, or $1.172 trillion, in the seven weeks since Fed governors relaxed the collateral standards on Sept. 14. The difference includes a $788 billion increase in loans to banks through the Fed and $474 billion in other lending, mostly through the central bank's purchase of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds."

While we were debating the $700B bailout, there was a stealth bailout that was three times bigger!

Yin and yang of the greenback

2008-11-14T20:47:00.011-05:00

China has a huge trade surplus with the US which has been growing since 1985. Normally, or in theory, exporters repatriate the money earned abroad, which makes their own currency rise and the importer's currency fall.

But in this case, for over 20 years, China has been keeping that money in dollars. Compare "Foreign Portfolio Holdings of U.S. Securities". Two countries stand out. Japan and China both hold huge amounts of US securities. (Actually the ones that really stand out are Cayman Islands and Luxembourg but that's another story!). Further down on the same page, see "U.S. Portfolio Holdings of Foreign Securities" which shows the US has a similar amount of Japanese securities. But that's not the case with China. There it's completely one-sided with China holding huge amounts of US debt. At some point they will need to sell those dollars right? That's the 1.4 Trillion dollar question. Basically China has been delaying its currency's rise in order to continue growing exports.

The current economic crisis changes things.

As US and Europe imports slow down, China might shift away from exports and more towards infrastructure and internal consumption. This means their reserve strategy might change to bringing money back home.
A loss of confidence in the US financial system.
A huge increase in US public debt from the bailout and the stealth bailout.

All three things imply China will want to sell dollars and dollar assets.

What else can we imagine? Weakening dollar will help American exports. Which may be critical for new energy technology products (in solar, wind, hydrogen and who knows what else) to develop and succeed.

So here 4 bold predictions for this different world:

USD vs CNY will go down,
the US dollar will no longer be the world's primary reserve currency, but
America will do what it has historically done best -- create a new industry for the world, meanwhile
China's billion people will get an accelerated rise in standard of living.

Manipulation of prediction markets

2008-10-18T21:28:00.002-04:00

Nice post on manipulation of prediction markets: ...manipulation can improve (!) prediction markets - the reason is that manipulation offers informed investors a free lunch.

Nice also to see our old friend Hanson.

... the first casualty is causality

2008-10-04T00:08:00.011-04:00

This week, like everyone, I had some thoughts about the $700B financial industry bailout. I put them in an email to some friends a few ago... Here they are (with some edits):

This bailout is looking more and more like a scam. The fear-mongering about jobs sounds a lot like when the same folks were saying Saddam was about to nuke the USA in alliance with Al Qaeda. Just because it's scary, it's not automatically true, and it's not automatically the case that the proposed solution will avoid it.

$25B for Detroit automakers slipped into the bailout? WTF? They would surely have been turned out if they had asked for it alone, but piggy-backed into the $700B... Recall how after Sept 11 all the airlines were begging for bailouts, and many of them got turned down. Imagine how many companies will try to jump onto this bailout like hungry vultures on fresh kill.

Also, note that the relationship between Paulson and Goldman Sachs is eerily similar to the relationship between Cheney and Halliburton. Nothing against Paulson per se, I'm just pointing out the parallel. In any case, even if he's a saint, is any government capable of disbursing a freestanding $700B fund without massive corruption? Visions of scams with this bailout that'd make Halliburton's no-bid contracts for Iraq look like chump change.... In fact, this whole mass psychological phenomenon looks more than a bit like an accelerated rerun recent history... With Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac-Lehman-AIG, in the role of Sept 11, and the Big Bad $700B as the Iraq Invasion of 2003, the US congress as itself, and special appearance by the Great Depression II as Saddam's WMD. I don't mean to compare the events of course, fundamentally different crises. But the the political and business dimensions sides are similar.

I'm also reminded of Russia in the early 1990s. The experts kept screaming that if this or that privatization didn't happen right away, the consequences would be severe, Russia would be come communist again, the 3rd world war would start immediately, etc etc. Guess what? Behind all the deadlines, and crises, rescues, etc., there were some dudes rigging privatization auctions. By the time people woke up to the game, seven gazillionaire oligarchs had ownership of more than 50% of the GDP of the ex Soviet Union, and the standard of living had dropped, life expectancy had dropped, the economy was in ruins... Basically the entire country got jacked by a few dozen people.

Back to USA 2008. The crisis exists of course, and ok let's agree something must be done [NOTE: this was written on Wednesday Oct 1, before the Trouble Asset Recovery Program (TARP) bailout was approved by congress today]. But I'm skeptical about TARP.

So let's go to the root causes - not because I presume to know something more than the experts have been saying, but just to help me understand by summarizing. The crisis exists because:
1) we don't know how many more homes will foreclose, and what they will be worth when they do; which leads to
2) uncertainty in value of mortgage backed securities (MBS) which leads to
3) uncertainty about balance sheet of banks with lots of MBS, which leads to
4) unwillingness to lend i.e. credit crisis, which leads to loss of savings, loss of jobs, homelessness etc.

Now instead of injecting money at #3 which is what TARP (the current proposed bailout) does, why not inject it at #1? I think the government should just say it will buy the houses that are being foreclosed on rather than the securities derived from them. This seems better to me than TARP because:
a) the taxpayer is buying something whose valuation is better understood, and therefore taking less of a risk;
b) by having a buyer of last-resort for the houses and a known worst-case price, you're putting a floor under the value of these MBSes... this clears up the bank balance sheets, everyone will know which banks are solvent and not, and those that are can resume lending and that stops the credit crunch
c) the socio-political side-effects are better -- i.e. any bailout would not be for insolvent banks and poorly managed companies but for defaulting homeowners, by making them tenants instead of homeless, and the opportunities for corruption are greatly reduced
d) worst case in the long term, the government gets stuck with $700B of new public housing that's hard to sell (but has tenants), whereas the current bailout's worst case is just burning $700B on paper that ends up being worth $0.

I'm no expert but the more I read about this, the more I believe that it's better to solve the problem at the source, i.e. #1 and not #3.

I learned later that this is similar to something done in the 1930s called the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), and has been advocated in the current context by Roubini. Some politicians have also called for it, but in addition to TARP! The Washington Post too has a column proposing something along those lines.

In any case, TARP was approved today, so we'll see. If it gets implemented, I predict scandals and a blue ribbon inquiry comission circa 2010. Hopefully it will work in spite of that, because alternatives are probably eliminated.

Universal health care & AIG

2008-09-22T03:12:00.006-04:00

The big problem with providing Canadian-style universal health care in the US is that it would basically nationalize a large part of the insurance industry (while also expanding it). Undeniably a huge disruption to a huge industry that employs many people. But now, the US government has, in effect, nationalised AIG", the biggest insurance company in the world. If the government ends up actually owning 80% of AIG, then why not use AIG to provide health insurance for the uninsured? Bang! Too good to be true, surely...

Letter to the editor

2008-07-16T02:03:00.005-04:00

After reading this opinion piece from the Irish Independent News...

Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:22:44 -0400
From: "Nemo Semret" 
To: kmyers@independent.ie, letters@independent.ie
Subject: Re: Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS

Dear Kevin Myers,

I agree wholeheartedly with your article.

Indeed, it is a melancholy object to those who walk through that
continent of Africa, when they see the streets, and "vast savanahs"
crowded with "sexualy hyperactive indigents" (as you so aptly put it),
importuning Europeans for aid every few years, generation after
generation. I agree with you that the prodigious number of children
they produce is, given the growing uncertainty of the global economy,
an unacceptable economic, environmental and aesthetic burden on the
lifestyles of the deserving people of the First World.

Ethiopia, as you point out is a particularly galling example. At 80M
population today, with a birth rate of  3-4% and a net population
growth of over 2%, the country is producing 1.6M new mouths to feed
per year. Of those, perhaps 100,000 have any chance of having a
lifestyle that you would consider decent. That leaves 1.5M useless
mouths to feed, 750,000 AIDS conveying organs of each gender, 3M
Kalashnikov wielding arms, etc.

At the same time, China and India are earning their place at the table
of the global economy, but in the process putting pressure on the
world's resources. In particular,  as has been well publicized, their
growing appetite for meat is driving up prices of meat, of soybeans
and corn further down the food chain, and even of oil and gas.

Having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject,
and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors, I have
always found them grossly mistaken in the computation.  The Gates
Foundation as you point out  is misguidedly deploying considerable
resources to make the problems worse by preventing malaria from doing
it's natural job. I would add that the US government, the United
Nations, the Global fund, and various and sundry funds dedicated to
enabling Africans with AIDS to continue spreading the disease are
tremendously counterproductive.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope
will not be liable to the least objection. I have been assured by very
knowing people of my acquaintance that a young healthy child well
nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome
food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or fried; and I make no doubt
that it will equally serve in a lo mein or a curry with rice.

I do therefore humbly offer it to your consideration that of the
previously computed 1.5M excess Ethiopians produced annually, 150,000
be kept for breeding, and the remaining 1.35M,  at a year old, be
offered in the sale to reputable global agribusiness corporations;
always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last
month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. This
supply of about 15,000 metric tonnes per year of additional
high-protein food will, if appropriately marketed to the growing
markets of Asia, relieve global prices of a wide range of connected
commodities by up to 10%. Your average countryman stands to save at
least 100 Euros per year in gasoline alone!

I think the advantages by the proposal which I have made are obvious
and many, as well as of the highest importance. The risk of AIDS
bearing immigrants will be reduced, the reduction in civil wars in
Africa will free up more television time for entertainment in the
First World,  increasing not only viewing pleasure but also
advertising revenues and thus commerce and overall economic
well-being, and of course, the long-suffering consciences of the West,
rather than needing to be relieved by constant doses of aid-giving,
will be fully cured of  that most senseless and nagging feeling of
guilt. Many other advantages might be enumerated.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least
personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work,
having no other motive than the public good of the deserving First
World, by advancing its trade, providing food for its growing
partners, and relieving its citizens. Though I am Ethiopian myself, I
have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny.

Sincerely,

Yonatan Fetanu

Electoral markets

2008-07-13T14:56:00.003-04:00

In my last entry about prediction markets vs polls, I quoted and linked to some aggregate numbers from Intrade for the US presidential election. Now there's Electoral markets, a website called that displays the prediction markets at the state level. Cool stuff! I came across it in a blog entry that sums it up quite well.

Capital del mundo

2008-07-04T15:29:00.002-04:00

A ride-by demographic study, one subway car:

Apophis & carpe diem & how to save the world with a billion keychains

2008-06-22T22:00:00.016-04:00

There's a 0.0023% chance that asteroid Apophis will impact earth in 28 years. Who cares about a 1 in 45,000 chance? Believe it or not, it is useful information.

For example, you could use this information when negotiating a 30-year loan -- structure it so payments are more heavily weighted to the last two years! At what cost? Of course the world won't end, but if there's a chance... you can precisely calibrate your degree of carpe diem. You should be willing to pay up to $1 for every extra $45,000 (plus additional interest) that is deferred to the last two years. Many people spend $1 on a lottery ticket where you have a 1 in 689,065 chance of winning $10,000. And of course a big loan with a small chance you won't have to pay it back is the same as a lottery ticket -- in fact even better since a) this one pays upfront and b) the normal lottery ticket is overpriced by an order of magnitude.

Back to Apophis. Here's another, less selfish, example of how this information can be useful. We want to know how much money it makes sense for us (earth, one world united!) to spend defending against Apophis. The answer is 0.0023% times the present value of world GDP, cumulated from 2036 forward. Oops that's infinity... Wait not necessarily. If we assume GDP stops growing at some point (e.g. the point where all material needs of humanity would be easily met), and we assume a a discount rate strictly greater than zero, the present value of all future GDP is a finite number. So we should multiply that number by 0.0023% and invest it in a laser beam.

Laser beam schematic:

Take that, make it a billion times more powerful, with a nuclear battery, put it in a satellite with some stuff for aiming and we should be ok! Seriously though, we do have 28 years to work on the technology, so no biggie. But how do we create the political will to spend money on it now?

Societies seem to have a hard time making really long-term investments, whether they are democracies or whatever. But they all love lotteries! Let's revisit the deferment of debt idea. The borrower will be willing to pay a premium to take some debt and push it back past the 28th year. The lender is neutral since they get extra fees to compensate for the risk. Thus we have an efficient transaction between a rational borrower and a rational lender. OK and what has that got to do with asteroids? Recall this is essentially a lottery, one that's better than the usual ones, and we know people are willing to pay 10 times the rational price for lottery tickets. Therefore it should be possible to satisfy the lender with just 1/10th of the fee collected from the buyer! And the remaining 9/10th can be used to build a giant laser beam!!! Everyone's happy. In fact, since the beam also works to eliminate or reduce that very risk, the rational lender might even be willing to contribute part of their one tenth. And then everyone's even more happy. Let's call this the GAALBMF: global anti-asteroid laser beam mortgage fund.

Karma Tycoon

2008-06-06T21:36:00.016-04:00

Due to a recent ahem... incident, I stumbled across some old press coverage for Karma Tycoon. Cool! Not just because it's a fun and educational game which anyone can play free (check out the the rave reviews), but because yours truly wrote the game server.

It was a one-off contract for Do Something. 9mmedia, developed the client-side and outsourced the server-side to me at IHN, back in 2006 when IHN needed some cash. It ended up being a pretty cool project... 9mmedia guys are great to work with. I highly recommend them.

The game was fun and interesting to design and implement (but not the schedule -- that was rough especially since I was also busy with some other stuff). We used red5 to interface between the java server and flash client. I was also able to use some components of Merkato too, which was nice.

Mars Landing

2008-05-24T23:34:00.008-04:00

'Phoenix Mars Mission scheduled to land May 25, 2008, is the first in NASA's "Scout Program." Scouts are designed to be highly innovative and relatively low-cost complements to major missions being planned as part of the agency's Mars Exploration Program.'

Canary in a coal mine

2008-05-11T19:50:00.008-04:00

pulse, naymz, doostang, fastpitch, ...

That is the list of new social networks I've received invitations to join just recently. Some are new, some are old websites recylcing themselves as social networks. Before that, there was ning, facebook, linkedin, geni.com, myspace, friendster, hi5... This is crazy. Have we reached the boo.com stage of facial neworking? (Oops. I just realized I wrote facial instead of social. That's hilarious).

Meanwhile, Blog Friends -- the one thing that I found most promising on Facebook (at least as an example of a feature that I could make use of, not necessarily a general killer app that would change the world) -- died an ominous death. Ominous for Facebook that is. But in it's last gasp, it inspired a useful cliche. The day it died, my status message: wondering if Blog Friends was like a canary in a coal mine.

Why that analogy? See what Blog Friends themselves said: "... we have been at the mercy of Facebook's frequent modifications of their Platform specifications, and that has also been another disabling factor for us." So I remain firmly in the camp of Facebook skeptics -- at best, it's the next AOL (which is still huge).

I remain however a huge fan of Geni.com. That one that should be good for generations.. literally.

Overall, I hope social networking becomes something that's not quite a separate app, and not just a feature, but a service/capability as ubiquitous, useful and unobtrusive as ... email! (Hey check that out: 3 "U"s! Now I sound like a cheesy business book). Somebody should create standard api and ... yeah! Something called Open Social... That would be pretty promising!

Of course, I've been wrong before on this kind of stuff.

Predictions, elections, polls, fractals, reflixivity & the kitchen sink

2008-05-11T18:27:00.018-04:00

People argue about whether prediction markets do a better job of forecasting elections than polls, or it's an illusion due to timing.

Initially, I am inclined to believe this is one area where the market works better. This follows from their most basic properties. Let's assume both are mostly mediocre. That is many polls and prediction markets available, but just no good in general.

Now consider polls. If there was fewer of them, and they were well communicated, we could count on the fact that expert from all sides would scrutinize them and that they would thus be held to the highest standards. Or of course if you average a lot of polls, you should get a more accurate poll of polls, as errors cancel out. In both cases, centralization increases accuracy of polls. Conversely, when looking at any one poll alone chances are, the one you're looking at is a bad/biased one.

For markets on the other hand, even if you are looking at one market alone, if it was biased, all it would take is one person who has seen the other markets to arbitrage the bias away, in effect linking the two markets and making them two views of one more accurate underlying market. Two polls cannot get organically linked and become more accurate than each by itself. You have to add them up yourself. But two markets can! Thus any one market you stumble upon is more likely to be accurate than a poll you stumble across.

This argument seems particularly apt for the US presidential elections, since there's so much slicing and dicing... The polls are all complicated what-if scenarios. So anyway, according to Intrade, which I've written about before, here are the current probabilities for the next US President (taking bid prices, to get lower bounds):

And the Iowa Electronic Markets seem to agree. Thus, the above, in my humble opinion, is as close as you're gonna get to a prediction out there today.

But is it any good?

Getting back to the philosophical argument again... polls are trying to measure current feelings, i.e. they assume there's an underlying "true" preference of the public, and that they are an objective mechanism to reveal it, within a certain Gaussian error. But it could of course be that the error is much larger than we think possible, because the models are completely wrong. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Black Swan, that I mentioned here a couple of posts ago, has argued, a lot of mistakes are due to imposing Gaussian models on a reality that has fractal or power-law or heavy-tailed scaling. For polls, if you think there is a true current preference, then I guess the error should be Gaussian (in other words, using Taleb's lingo, the preference is "in mediocristan"). But looking at it over time, as you must for a prediction, maybe a single poll of a few thousand people, even if it's not representing a wider reality, can have a fractal effect, replicating it's belief patterns at larger scales, through media. If that' s the case, most polls will be meaningless, some will be virally important. And prediction markets won't work well either. True the participants size can scale so maybe they can make fractal bets, but no matter how many expert bets the market brings in, it won't improve the information about a black swan type event which is what a fractally scaling popularity would be.

Some people, like George Soros in his recent book (that I just picked up this weekend) argue that, when it comes to human/social phenomena, the underlying reality doesn't exist separately, it is entangled with human attempts to understand it, and manipulate it (he calls it reflexivity). So taking his ideas to polls, are they measuring something that fundamentally may not actually exist? Probably, there's no objective public opinion that exists independently, waiting to be measured. But it exists reflexively (this is my interpretation/application of Soros idea here so sorry if it's wrong). The polls, even if totally arbitrary to start with, by being communicated, may induce the reality they purport to measure. People listen to the news, and the polls, and their future actions are affected in some way, may then come to act in the way that is suggested to them by the polls for people like them. It may or may not be controlled in concentrated way, but if we apply this theory, then polls are as much instruments of action as measurements, in robotic terms, as much actuators as sensors.

Drexler redux: nanotech

2008-04-25T20:52:00.009-04:00

Blog: noun, abbrev. Etymology: Web log.

A year ago, I logged a note to revisit Hanson & Drexler. One day, I was at The Strand, actually remembered and ended up picking up K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation (I now see there's a new edition that's even available as an e-book, but I didn't know that at the time, and just got the original edition). Incidentally, that event proves this blog is serving it's purpose! If it wasn't for this blog, my faint connection to that book might have gradually faded into the past. I also picked up Black Swan, which I ended up really enjoying but I digress...

Engines of Creation is pretty cool. First surprise: It is perhaps the seminal work in Nanotechnology. In fact, Drexler coined the term. I didn't know that. I found Drexler interesting because of a paper he wrote with Bernardo Huberman on agent/market-based computing systems. But it turns out he is the Godfather of nanotechnology. Wow indeed. Second observation: considering it's a book about future technology published in 1986, just the fact that I was able to read most of it says a lot. Usually non-fiction books about future technology don't age well: either they were right and so what they contain is now obvious, or they were wrong and are now useless, except for a few predictions that live on as comedy. But not this one. It is still absolutely readable. It does waste a bit too many words on appeasing fears of doomsday scenarios, and has a bit too much juvenile moralization. Just a bit. But the 2/3rds or so that I did read closely was fascinating stuff which hasn't aged a bit. It's great, the first time I got some clue about how nanotechnology might work.

Indeed, I had always had a hard time bridging the gap between the fictional nanotech that I found so brilliant in Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, and anything I knew about science or technology. Not surprising since it's sci-fi, you might say, but my point is that "nanotech" exists in real science yet I don't see no microscopic helicopters and infinite-dimensional interactive books being talked about in the newspaper. What you hear about is relatively mundane "nanotech" ideas. Relatively of course, because by normal standards, even "boring" nanotech's promises are huge ... Microscopic "hard disks", or carbon nanotubes that conduct electricity much better than wires, or can support structures that are impossible with steel like space elevators!

But the Drexler vision is much bigger than better construction materials. He imagines actual nano-machines that build stuff, actual mechanical assembly of atoms and molecules. If you accept that premise, it leads to gigantic consequences, essentially limitless food, energy, all our material needs becoming ... immaterial, so to speak. This is a big idea. And it turns out Mr Drexler has made it the work of his life.

Which brings us to the question... So how come his book is not obsolete? After twenty years f being the breakthrough birth of a new field, why are those ideas still not well known to the general public, when the buzzword they created seems to now mean something much less. Well it turns out Wired magazine has answered this question in a 2004 article on K. Eric Drexler entitled "The Incredible Shrinking Man". You can read the details in the article, but in short there's a great ideological divide in nanotech, and it looks like the "incrementalists" who focus on new nano-materials and so on won the research politics battles over Drexler who wants to build nano-machines.

Now I feel for Drexler in a different way. Not just as a fascinating guy who I should follow-up on but as a human story too. Could he be like Edwin Armstrong, who invented FM radio and many other great things, but lost all the crucial battles in his life? Or is it going to be a classic story of early brilliance, fall from grace, long struggle, and ultimate righteous triumph... Hmm I think that's classic but I can't think of any examples right now. Anyway here's a possible triumphant ending: nanobots win the prize for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Imagine a little machine made of a few atoms of X that uses solar power to move around and grab CO2 from the air, and then attaches the C to some part of itself, releases the O2, and then falls to earth as XC dust. It could even be called something cool, like photosynthesis.. haha. Who knows, if X is right, that XC might even be a source of fuel! So in the end, our hero stops global warming and saves the world! Good night kids.

Golgool -- Custom Ethiopian Search Engine

2008-03-30T20:11:00.004-04:00

Golgool is my quick little exercise in creating a Google custom search engine. Check it out at www.semret.org/golgool.

For example, a search for [seeds export] on golgool yields more interesting results than a search for [ethiopian seeds export] on google.com.

Volunteers welcome! Send email to the address at the bottom of the Golgool pages and I'll send you an invitation to contribute (so you can add sites, search refinements, etc.)

How can carbon-offsets work?

2008-03-23T18:49:00.007-04:00

What do Norway and the New Jersey Nets have in common? They are among the myriad entities declaring that they are or will be carbon neutral. That's is great but it reminds of one thing that has been bothering me for a while now. In a lot of these cases, they rely on "carbon offsets". And to me, well I have an issue with carbon-offsets -- they can't work. Here's a rant expanded from an email exchange I had back in November 2007.

First of it's not that I'm not green -- far from it, I even joined Greenpeace way back! Second, it's not that I don't believe in markets -- far from it! So now let's back up for a second and consider the common "green market mechanisms". As far as I know (which is not much but hey, who else is around?), there are four types of incentive-based mechanisms being suggested in the world with the goal of reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere due to human activity. Do they work? And what's wrong with carbon-offsets in particular?

My favorite is the carbon removal X-prize. A prize is a very efficient way of funding R&D. Basically you put up a $25M prize, and it might lead to 10 teams spending $24,999,999 each in parallel, and then one or more of them would actually solve it, while creating many useful partial solutions and spin-offs along the way! So from society's point of view, you get up to $249,999,999 worth of R&D using just $25M to stimulate it. But it's a long shot approach, excellent return, but high risk. Clearly, the world needs incremental approaches as well to balance our species-survival portfolio.

The popular incremental approach is cap & trade. That seems to work.. Sounds like the incentives are right on. Those who can figure out ways to reduce emissions get rewarded, and those who can't, pay for it. Both sides work incrementally thus, without any huge disruptions to society, we get gradual improvements. The only problem is that the cap levels are kind of arbitrary and could be changed by fickle and/or corrupt politics which might distort the incentives. Still given some consistency across time and space, the incentives should work as expected because both the reward and the penalty happen at more or less the same time.

If you really think about it, carbon tax is a simpler better version. It has the advantages of cap and trade with fewer costs, and it can work more widely since it wouldn't only apply to specific industries. The only downside is that its' tough to get people to support anything with the word "tax" in it. (So the difference in cost between "carbon tax" and "cap & trade" is simply the cost of weak leadership in democracy.

But really maybe there's a magic solution? One with no new taxes! Yay! No caps or limits! Yay! A win-win solution! Maybe... carbon offsets. Are they too good to be true? Yes. Here's the problem as I see it: If I want to build a carbon-belching factory or travel on a carbon-spewing jet plane, and then offset it by paying someone to plant a forest of trees, what will prevent the trees from being cut down in the future? When that tree will be cut down or die -- after 5 years or 20 years or 500 -- really changes the value of the offset and whether it truly cancels out my plane trip or my factory.

And here securing the tree is not just another implementation detail. It's a central, fundamental flaw of the market. Because the incentives are not there. If I'm the polluter and you're the off-setter, once I pay for the right to pollute, I will happily pollute and I don't care anymore about whether you truly keep the tree alive, I've already gotten the credit for it. You the seller can take my money and still cut the tree. This is not like normal uncertainty/risk about the value of a product or service. In a normal market, the buyer wants to get the stuff they bought, which is what keeps the seller from cheating. But in the carbon offset, the buyer has no incentive to care once they got the credit, and the seller, once they are paid for planting, has a huge incentive to just chop the tree and use the wood.

Of course people cheat in all markets. But enforcement, regulations etc. can only work if the vast majority of buyers and sellers have the basic incentives to make it work, and the law only has to deal with a small minority of cheaters. For example in stock markets or commodity markets, the buyers and sellers police each other because if one cheats the other loses. In the carbon-offset market, they can both cheat and not tell anyone. SO enforcement is going to be prohibitively expensive. Basically you have to set up a well-meaning intermediary like a fund that receives the money from the offset buyers and pays out the planters over the lifetime of the tree... That's a huge problem.

My guess is the offset market is of purely psychological value... It's very much like Catholic "indulgences" that you could buy from the church to cancel out your sins in exchange for some money. Clearly a very profitable scheme. If you're the church, it's just free money. It's better than free money: they give you money and they thank you and you increase your power over them! Which begs the question... Who is the church of carbon-offsets?

4-legged terminator

2008-03-18T13:13:00.000-04:00

Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV

2008-03-01T21:34:00.002-05:00

Isn't this kind of a big deal?

Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV.
Stephen Barr, a molecular virologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, says his team has identified a gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection in a cell culture by preventing the assembly of the virus.
[...]
"We are currently trying to figure out why this gene does not work in people infected with HIV and if there is a way to turn this gene on in those individuals," he added. "We hope that our research will lead to the design of new drugs, or vaccines that can halt the person-to-person transmission of HIV and the spread of the virus in the body, thereby blocking the onset of AIDS."

I remember around ten years ago, researchers had found a way to prevent the HIV from attaching itself to and attacking white blood cells by making another organism that would go and attach itself to the same geometric spot (or something like that). That sounded really promising. I wonder whatever happened to that....

Wiimote -- Go Johnny go!

2008-02-20T14:11:00.003-05:00

This is truly amazing. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
I always had high hopes for the sony playstation running linux to do some fun unexpected revolutionary thing.. But this one takes the cake. Wiimote!

Obameme

2008-02-14T17:26:00.003-05:00

I nominate for Meme of the year to date: barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com.
Barack Obama is your new icon.

Ethiopian Commodities Exchange

2008-01-26T13:03:00.000-05:00

Ethiopundit has a very lame critique of the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange. It's basically that the government is so corrupt and the rule of law so non-existent that the exchange is like a Potemkin village and therefore can't possibly work. The prototypical player in the market that Ethiopundit wishes were possible: "one bright young fellow outsmarts some TPLF conglomerate by cornering part of the coffee market on his own or with a few daring foreign investors. " That is a hollywood-inspired vision of markets, and even what it tries to represent, the succesful high-risk speculator is not what makes markets work.

Indeed the critique ignores the necessity of bottom-up success. I have no inside information at all (even though I happen to know the person spearheading it from childhood), but I imagine that the exchange will tap into existing markets. The exchange should initially represent traders of the actual goods. These people already engage in buying and selling the stuff wholesale, but they do it by negotiating one-on-one or in a fragmented market. Everyone knows there's berberé tera, for example, the more or less centralized place where people buy and sell that particular commodity wholesale in Addis Abeba. An exchange can give those buyers and sellers a place where they are always guaranteed to find each other easily, i.e. create liquidity, and market prices. Second, the exchange generates reliable, centralized price information. That information is available down the chain all the way to the producer. Farmers, transporters, storage providers, all would benefit from improved liquidity and access to price information.

Only after the market succeeds by serving the primary players does it create a environment fertile enough for secondary players like arbitragers, speculators, and the hot-shot that our pundit friend envisions, to try their luck. These purely financial players add value too of course, they make prices more accurate by eliminating temporary gaps, and bring more flexibility to the primary players by allowing them to trade-off risk and reward. But if they come, it's not as a pre-requisite for success, on the contrary it means it's already a success.

Of course there are many reasons why the exchange could fail. For example there's what I would call the "user interface". Not necessarily with computers but in general the means by which traders interact with this market. Do they go in person and stand in a pit, do they talk to a professional in a booth who then goes on a floor to bid/ask, or do they sit at desks and punch in or speak their orders. Those are tough design issues and the answers cannot simply be copied from other exchanges elsewhere.

But to say, as Ethiopundit does, that it will fail because government interference will prevent secondary activity is putting the butter before the slice of bread (to coin a phrase!). Even if you accept the premise of interference and kleptocracy, which I don't know enough about to accept or reject, it's still not a reason why the primary layer, people who already trade these goods, cannot benefit from an exchange platform. It may be many years before (or if ever) we see commodities trading fortunes built on this exchange, and kleptocratic government going after them, but long before that Hollywood scenario, the exchange could very well make a lot of people who are currently dealing in commodities somewhat better off. And that deserves to be looked at on its own merits, not lumped with everything in the country as part of a general critique of the government.

Wisdom of crowds revisited: intrade

2008-01-25T17:23:00.000-05:00

Aha! Search engine futures by Intrade. One year after Google and wisdom of crowds, the idea is catching on.

Collected rants about a certain Mr. Jeffrey Gettleman

2007-11-21T20:24:00.001-05:00

Over the last few months, I have had quite a bit to say to
Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times. But like Don Quichotte at the windmills I waive and waive my sword, and he refuses to fight back! What a coward. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It all started out nicely about 4 months ago... with a front page article about Ethiopia on the NY Times. Here's what I had to say on 21 Jun 2007:

The journalist was clearly sympathetic to the ONLF .. but still I was glad that article appeared on the cover of the Times. Somalia was a big mistake by Meles. A Times article wont make things worse... Instead of worrying about the Times, the outside force they should be concerned about is the mullahs in the madrassas preaching about christian Ethiopians raping and killing muslims on behalf of Bush.

At least this article will make things better because the sooner they feel pressure from outside and the stronger it is, the better chance there is that ET can get the out of Somalia, bring in the AU and de-escalate the situation in Ogaden.

On a month later, our destinies crossed paths again when he wrote a more aggressive piece about the Ogaden region. Here's what I wrote in response on July 24, 2007:

True the fact is that ONLF is resurgent, there's a huge crisis in
Ogaden and that is a big story that deserves to be on the cover.

But this guy is either biased or irresponsible. He repeats the
allegation that three guys who spoke up at a meeting were tortured and killed
by the govt. He simply echoes Ogaden Online, adding that they have "a
network of reporters and contributors, some equipped with satellite
phones." Isn't that a pathetic way to validate their legitimacy? For all we
know it could be the ONLF office in Toronto that runs that website.

Moreover, he knows who the alleged victims are (the guys spoke on a NY
Times video!!!). And he can't verify it? He can't even get an official
response or statement from the govt about this? He has quotes from the
govt spokesman for other things but not this. WTF?! He didn"t have
time to call back before the deadline? The dog ate the response? We're
talking about 3 specifc guys who were tortured and killed allegedly
because of the Times material. It's a disgraceful level of investigation.

Hopefully we'll soon know whether the truth is that it's ONLF
propaganda or a government atrocity but it won't be thanks to Jeffrey Gettleman
-- the new Judith Miller... Pffff! Shame on the Times. Plus they just
raised the daily price to $1.25! I swear I'm this close to dumping the
old grey lady

Finally, the epic showdown on Oct 2, 2007. As you can see the temperature rose

Check this out: "A calm voice from embattled Eritrea" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/world/africa/02eritrea.html
by.... you guessed it! Our hero Jeffrey Gettleman, aka Judith Miller the Second. Yes the same Jeffrey "excuse me while I regurgitate ONLF press releases" Gettleman who we last saw a couple of months ago in the thread below.

This time Isaias is the subject of Gettleman's fantasy. Acoording to the article, Isaias is simply a righteous guy, leader of a mighty little country in a fight against superpowers, who don't like it simply because it's "one small voice"! Besides the noble and righteous struggle against superpowers, Eritrea has a few mundane little economic challenges. But the only thing holding back the flourishing of democracy and growth of the economy is... you guessed it, the evil big neighbor to the south. To cap it off, Gellman says "... Mr. Isaias’s mustached face, which has been likened to an African version of Tom Selleck." Seriously. They actually printed that. I swear I expected the article to continue: "After the blowjob, Isu asked me if it was as good for me as it was for him". Seriously.
In fact if you read it carefully, there are no meaningful facts at all, no sign that any pointed questions were asked, nothing but a glowing portrait of Issayas, exactly as he would want himself portrayed, a calm nice guy, with hobbies, no pretensions, but idealist, fighting for justice.

Last time I was angry at the Times, now shock, disbelief.... What comes next again? Weyne weyne... New York Times... Anyway forget them, others are doing quality reporting and analysis, I just came across the example pasted below.

From http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/08/05/ethiop16594.htm

[...]

"Ethiopia has often justified military action in Somalia on grounds of cooperation between what it calls "terrorist" groups in Somalia and the rebellion in Ogaden. The ONLF certainly has strong ethnic and political links to Somali insurgents now fighting against the Ethiopian military presence in Somalia. It may have decided to escalate its rebellion in Ogaden in response to Ethiopia's full-scale military intervention in Somalia in December last year.

Now there are reliable reports that, as a result of Ethiopian military pressure inside Somalia, Somali insurgents including members the militant Islamist al-Shabaab have sought refuge in Ogaden where they could be regrouping. Thus instead of containing and calming the situation in Somalia, the actions of Ethiopia's forces there may well be exacerbating the conflict and regionalising it.

The emerging crisis in the Ogaden is indicative of an increasingly volatile political and military situation in the Horn of Africa. Predictably civilians are bearing the brunt of the crisis both in the Ogaden and in Somalia where hundreds of thousands have been displaced by fighting since the Ethiopian intervention. Predictably human rights abuses and violations of the laws of war are being perpetrated by all sides. It could all get a lot worse, especially if it leads to a resumption of the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

So why isn't the international community doing more to address this crisis. Hasn't the UN being saying for years that crisis prevention is better than cure?

The EU and the United States have significant leverage over Ethiopia in the form of foreign aid and political influence. They should use it instead of turning a blind eye to abuses carried out by the Ethiopian security forces in the name of counter terrorism.

Western support for Ethiopia's counter insurgency efforts in the Horn of Africa is not only morally wrong and riddled with double standards, it is also ineffective and counterproductive. It will lead to the escalation and regionalisation of the conflicts of the region and may well help to radicalise its large and young Muslim population. "

Killer app? Spam and HIV epidemics

2007-09-26T18:52:00.001-04:00

Talk about tackling evil: Using Spam Blockers To Target HIV...

A Microsoft researcher and his team make a surprising new assault on the AIDS epidemic ...

ice

2007-09-25T14:07:00.000-04:00

udc/ice http://udcnigeria.com/blog1/about-udc-ice/

Skypeout(age)

2007-08-20T23:13:00.001-04:00

You said it's the age of skypeout
Well you know
It's more like the out-age of skype

OK I won't talk about Chairman Mao, anyhow...
Don't you know it's gonna be
Alright!

By now about the mega skypeout-age is old news. What's interesting is the explanations... Here's an explanation filtered by a sceptic:

"Has Skype gotten so big that when part of its circulatory system comes under stress its entire body starts shutting down? Did Skype have a stroke?"
Some guy with an opinion, I'm too lazy to revisit the link and get his name

He's not totally convincing but I see his point... A congestion collapse could happen in theory if the p2p clients don't back off but instead try to reconnect more aggressively to other peers when they get a "busy" from some peers. But I think a simple recent bug that went undetected is as likely an explanation.

Oh yeah and it is pretty lame to blame Microsoft. What next? Are they going to blame their bugs on Sept 11th? Please don't use real tragic disasters to excuse your own recent failings!

Geni.com

2007-07-21T17:43:00.001-04:00

Geni.com is a genealogy social-network... Brilliant! My tree is already at 67 people less than 24 hours after being created!

Lifeboat planning

2007-07-05T14:17:00.001-04:00

"Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks" -- Warren Buffet.

Etymology of Nemo

2007-06-19T14:29:00.001-04:00

Another trip down ego lane.. A long time I ago, I threw up a page called the Etymology of Nemo... I am glad to report the first update since October 29, 1998, thanks to a very erudite Mr. Arthur Klein, who contacted me by email:

If I remember correctly, the Greek word used by Homer was 'medeis' where the first e is an eta and the word is pronounced may-dace. It is declined like the famous heis, mia, hen, meaning one (masculine), one (feminine), one (neuter). But it has been fifty years since I studied Greek and tried to read Homer. But you should be able to find it in a decent classical Greek dictionary under: mu, eta, delta, epsilon, iota, sigma. My little modern Greek traveler's dictionary has only 'meden' - mu, eta, delta, epsilon, nu - meaning nothing.

Arthur (Exalted one in Celtic)
Klein (Little in German)
How about that for an oxymoronic name.

While we're on the topic, I should also note my Chinese name
(self-selected with a little help from the web)

柠檬

Pronounced ne-mo. It has a meaning I like a lot, but which shall be left as an exercise for the reader (and I've already done it -- haha).

Hanson & Drexler

2007-06-13T11:34:00.000-04:00

I'd like to make a note on Robin Hanson who is really great. So is K. Eric Drexler. Or at least they have some really interesting ideas and ways of thinking.. I should look into what they've been up to since I last read their stuff way back in 90s.

As of May 7, 2007,

2007-05-07T01:56:00.000-04:00

for the record, I am no longer writing about certain topics and a certain company in particular. Regular readers (hey me) have noted it already!

Podzinger

2007-05-02T12:07:00.000-04:00

Podzinger is a text-search engine for audio content. Pretty cool. Another one of those things that took ten years longer than the hype...

Search for bandwidth

Google, Youtube, Mark Cuban

2007-04-12T16:25:00.000-04:00

Mark Cuban makes a great point: that "Gootube" (as he calls Youtube now that it is owned by Google) is forced to be a free bandwidth video hosting/delivery service, rather than a media company, because due to DMCA they can't monetize the content by putting ads around it. How come nobody else is talking about that fact? That's much more fundamental than whatever content deals or lawsuits they are involved in this week.

Still, I think Cuban is too pessimistic about Gootube. It's not like there's no hope for them, quite the contrary. Consider this: instead of monetizing the content, they can enable the monetization, with two features for the content uploader

1) pay-per-view powered by Google Checkout payment services,

2) ads powered by Google Adsense or whatever video ad solution they have, and again the content owner gets the revenue directly

In both cases, the content owner gets the revenue directly and Gootube makes money on fees, like Ebay. These fees can be just as high as the profits from licensing content and monetizing it themselves like a media company (higher if you believe the "long tail" content has more value than big media properties).

Plus they can truly claim to be just the service provider and therefore not liable for copyright violations.

Now throw in a third feature

3) "Gootube Pro" service with no 10-minute limit, where they charge the content owner for bandwidth, a for-pay mass market video content hosting/delivery service, and they can have all the "big" content too.

Why would they try to beat the media companies at their own game when they they have the infrastructure and technology to play a unique and extremely lucrative role as an enabling platform for mass Internet video, for both user-generated content and mainstream media properties?

When everyone thought search technology was just a commodity piece of a portal, Google succeeded by technological strengths in search. Now with everyone thinking about social media and big media monetization of content, maybe they will go with their strengths as a distributed platform for hosting and delivery of content, payment and advertising services.

Blackberry modem!

2007-03-02T01:32:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you just have to say: cool! This is one of those times. I am posting this from my laptop using my blackberry as the modem... Yup, it just works, as described here. In fact, mine a 8700 with T-Mobile is not even listed among the ones that work but it still does! Currently, I'm getting 49.9Kbps. How come they don't advertise this?

Cogentco ergo sum

2007-02-27T17:29:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I wrote paper entitled Cogent: Disruptive pricing or disruptive marketing? which showed that Cogent Communication's claim of revolutionizing the economics of Internet bandwidth was a clever marketing ploy, not a revolution in terms of "real" prices, costs or technology. It was just a lower quality network, and their prices were cheaper than the others, but not anywhere near as cheap Cogent made it sound. Nothing wrong with that... unless you don't like the "tragedy of the commons" effect.

Indeed, since then, instead of attracting their ideal customers (following what I called in the paper the "focus on retail" strategy -- get customers that pay $1000 for a 100Mbps and only use 1-2% of it), Cogent got much much more of the opposite -- "wholesale" customers that can really fill up the pipe, while still paying a flat $3,000 for a 100Mbps or $10,000 for 1Gbps pipe. And of course it's a self re-enforcing cycle, because the more that happens, the less attractive it becomes to any other kind of traffic. Now recall that 2-d table showing their profit margin as a function of utilization of the pipes, and transit/peer ratio of the traffic... Thus, basically from 2001 onward, they were going toward the bottom of that table (higher utilization), where it's mostly red. Which can't possibly go on forever right?

In principle it can't, unless they last long enough to move to the left of the table as well, i.e. reducing their transit/peering ratio. In other words, the other solution mentioned in the paper, the "buy their way into Tier-1 status" approach. Well they tried. Naturally the incumbent Tier-1s had no desire to admit them into the club, anymore than Rome would've opened the gates for barbarians. But would it be possible for Cogent to force it's way in? The only way is if you have a large enough customer base that you can go to Level 3, AT&T, Sprint & co and argue: "Hey you need to get to my customers as much as I need to get to yours, so let's be peers." Once you've done that with each one of them, then you are a Tier 1. In recent years only ATDN, the transit backbone of AOL has succesfully completed that series of moves.

Unfortunately for Cogent's hopes of muscling into the Tier-1 club, most of their customers were wholesale buyers that were multi-homed, i.e. had at least one other transit provider. Which is just common sense from the buyer's point of view, you want to shovel as much traffic as possible into the cheap Cogent pipe that has a flat rate, but for sensitive or "premium" customer traffic, you want the option to route through another better quality transit provider where you pay by usage. Given that situation, theoretically if Big Transit Provider X decides to "dis-peer" its network from Cogent's, the main thing that will happen is that Cogent customers will be pissed at Cogent for making them use their expensive other transit to get to those destinations (and to Cogent customers it appears like X is still "up" but Cogent is not giving them full Internet transit).

So guess what ATDN did when they were safely in the Tier-1 club? In Dec 2002, they dis-peered Cogent! (Its one of those clubs where you have to close the door behind you). Meanwhile those red numbers were piling up for our protagonist. By 2003 it was on the verge of going bankrupt and eventually it essentially did go bankrupt (I'm no accountant but I think what happened was they couldn't pay for their vendor-financed routers from Cisco so they gave Cisco a whole bunch of equity instead -- if you have any friends who owned pre-2003 Cogent equity, ask them... Then again, maybe you shouldn't remind them). But even as the company ha done foot in the grave, they kept selling those GigE pipes at $10,000/month, and it was still the cheapest bandwidth around, so their traffic volume continued to grow by leaps and bounds, making them one of the largest backbones in terms of traffic carried. By 2005, Cogent had grown up and was really pushing to the left, on that table. But Level 3 was threatening to de-peer (as was revealed later, negotiations had started in July) and they were big enough that that would push Cogent far over to the right. In an attempt to get more leverage against Level 3, in August 2005, Cogent reps started contacting Level 3 customers and offering them insanely low prices, even lower than their traditional "disruptive pricing", but only for Level 3 customers. Finally, in October, Level 3 called their bluff and before you knew it, Cogent was down, and there was no doubt as to who was Tier-1 and who wasn't. For more on the tactical details of this particular incident here's my opinion on the Level 3/Cogent peering disput of 2005.

So what now? Cogent is still losing money. But, there's one important variable working in their favor. Bandwidth prices have been declining more or less steadily at 30% decline per year for the last 3 decades. So now, typical transit prices went from $150-$200/Mbps/month in 2001 are now in the $15-30 range. So the good news for Cogent is that they may finally start making a profit on bandwidth! But the bad news is the marketing advantage of their "disruptive pricing" has shrunk dramatically. Today Cogent is just another transit provider, a bit cheaper and with a lingering reputation for lower quality among large backbones..

All the money they lost in the past by being cheaper does not seem buy them any competitive advantage today. It simply was a giant exercise in transforming the savings of little old ladies (the shareholders) into sports cars for porn webmasters (the heavy users who managed to get wholesale bandwidth below the true cost for a few years). Oh and Cisco ended up owning one of the major competitors of all their other main customers... Oops!

I think the moral of the story is that IP transit is a commodity, you can compete based on price and quality (or you can bundle it with other services and make it a non-wholesale product, like a CDN, hosting, managed services etc. but that's a whole other story). But there's no point in trying to build market share by selling below market (unlike the case with say software). When it's a commodity, sophisticated buyers (multi-homed, with their own ASN and IP address allocation, and connecting in carrier neutral facilities) will just arbitrage -- enjoy your early losses and leave you if you ever try reap the higher profits.

Nemo propheta in patria sua?

2007-02-19T16:15:00.001-05:00

The bible says: No one is a prophet in his homeland (Luke 4:24 , John 4:44). This is one of my favorite proverbs. I first heard it in the Bob Marley song Survival, towards the end he says: A good man is never honored in his own country. In the Latin version (the title of this entry), it says literally: Nemo is a prophet in his own country, hehe... but I digress.

Today that proverb is about to be tested -- for a good man is now seeking honor (in the form of elective office) from the people of his own country. In Bangladesh Muhammad Yunus has entered politics. If I had to draw up a list of people on earth who should be in politics for the benefit of mankind, then this guy would definitely be near the top. Good luck sir!

Rift Valley Fiber Optic Network

2007-02-11T23:53:00.000-05:00

Super STAR

2007-02-04T15:48:00.000-05:00

Once again, the mainstream media have miserably failed the world. We've patiently waited, but more than 4 months after September 19, 2006, acres of newsprint and billions of bytes have been devoted to Bush's speech at the UN, to the coup in Thailand, even to "the hearty souls around the globe who joined in the fun on Talk Like A Pirate Day 2006" for God's sake... but there has been almost no mention of perhaps the most significant event of that fateful day of September 19, 2006: the awarding of United States patent 7110977.

One exception should be noted, the mighty NYSTAR News. Defying the editorial decisions of such giants as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, who during that autumn went with the aforementioned stories and more meaningless verbiage about the upcoming 2006 US federal elections, the fearless newsletter of the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research, uncovered the historic gem of a story: "Nemo Semret and Aurel Lazar were awarded a patent for systems and methods for allocating resources using spot market and derivative market techniques. The patent was assigned to The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York", wrote that paragon of prescient journalism. Three cheers for the NYSTAR News: hip hip... hooray! Etc.

1 billion, 100, infinity

2007-01-02T10:04:00.000-05:00

Save 1 billion lives, live to be 100 years old, and then die... what a life! Henry Beachell

Google and wisdom of crowds

2006-12-19T09:40:00.000-05:00

Google is Putting crowd wisdom to work. Seems like all the great ideas take about 10 years longer than expected. Of course there was Admiral Ponidexter's terrorism prediction market which was suggested after Sept 11... I first heard if as "Idea Futures", way back in the mid-90s, which someone was goingn to commercialize, but somehow it never worked out. Oh wait ... Foresight Exchange

Google is taking all these good ideas lying around. I guess that's the real secret. Innovation is not like a gold rush, the ideas are there in plain sight. You just have to pick them up one by one, when you are ready, and polish them up. Of course it helps if you are very smart, and have an unbelievable cash flow because you were disciplined about your first idea.

So the question now is, why can't Google use the "wisdom of crowds" inherent in the search engine? Of course selling search ads is a form of that. But I mean in the predictive sense. To take a very crude example, if you know the key words searched by people from a particular company, then that could tell you something about what that company is doing. Not in any direct way of course like: the CEO searched for "bankrupcy law". But in a massive way with tiny correlations being detected in mountains of data.... Oh wait how do we know they are not already doing it?

Chaos theory: from A-nuak to Z-end

2006-12-17T22:28:00.001-05:00

I just came across this item in Google news: "Anuak Minorities Facing Insecurity and Terror in Ethiopia", an editorial in Al Jazeerah by Keith Harmon Snow. As I read this editorial, I went from genuine dismay at what is going to skepticism. The timing of this editorial is a bit suspect. He wrote this report for UNICEF more than a year ago, why didn't UNICEF publicize it? Probably because it was not objective. The author definitely seems to have an axe to grind. The guy clearly has been researching this issue -- see e.g. http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jun2004/snow0604.html, and he raises huge issues, and I intend to read up a lot more on this.

But what's really alarming now is that the Anuak story is blending, or actively being blended into the Ethio-Somalia story. So the virus, that started out as just the Islamic Courts Union versus warlords of Mogadishu, morphed into ICU versus the transitional government of Somalia, then became the coming war between Ethiopia and Somalia, now all of a sudden has mutated into a much more ominous disease:

"The Pentagon and Ethiopian military are prosecuting an entirely invisible war in Somalia, and while persistently threatening, arresting and shooting Anuak men, the Ethiopian military has actually tried to conscript some Anuak men to fight for them in Somalia. This is not a war on terror it is a war of terror. Ethiopia's clandestine involvement in Eritrea is equally invisible, and Human Rights Watch has also documented the ongoing repression against the Oromo people in Ethiopia's Oromo State. Other minorities are being forcibly displaced to serve conservation or petroleum interests."

This is the story that is being told on Al Jazeera. SomaliNet.

I believe we may have already entered the chaotic phase. Not necessarily on the ground yet, in terms of full-scale war. But in the chaos theory sense: small actions will be reflected, and propagated in unpredictable manners, and along every ethnic and religious fault line in Ethiopia, amplified, multiplied, echoed, reverberated by the dynamics of the global crusade/jihad. Every time someone dies, their ethnicity or their religion will be tallied up, sliced and diced. How long before this leads to home grown religious death-squads, and ethnic militias?

wikipedia

2006-07-28T23:28:00.001-04:00

I just read an article about wikipedia (New Yorker magazine, July 31, 2006. Alongside the usual praise, it captures some pretty good criticisms:

"Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rules."

"...infested with moonbats."

"...the open-source model is simply inapplicatible to an encyclopedia. For Software, there is an objective standar: either it works or it doesn't. There is no such test for truth."

Hmmmmm. Aren't we forgetting that other pillar of epistomiological virtue? Popper would say there's natural selection, the market, and ... voting.

So why not add voting to Wikipedia? Like Digg, each article would be voted on by users, and therefore have a score. Each reader would get a binary vote, thumbs up (+1) or thumbs down (-1). Uniqueness of votes can be easily enforced by IP address for each article. The article's score is then simply the sum of all the votes (+1 and -1). This score would of course help the reader adopt the appropriate degree of scepticism.

But the score could also be used in a derivative way. One of the problems on Wikipedia is situations where two contributors get into a big battle if repeteadly deleting the other's changes because say the article is on a controversial topic, or simply because whoever is wrong is stubborn or fanatical... Well each contributor could have a an editor rank based on the value they have added to articles they haved edited in the past (which would be something like the average change in score of the articles before and after their edits), and presto, in a dispute, the person with the higher rank, which should the one proven more reliable over time, wins! Truth wins, and Wikipedia lives happily ever after....

Seems simple enough... Why not? Imagime Ebay without the seller rankings... Yaiks.

ETC to outsource all services

2006-06-21T11:58:00.000-04:00

Just came across this: ETC to outsource all services

Hmmm, very interesting... I'm not sure I understand.

Does it mean "privatize" as in selling shares of ETC to private owners, or "outsource" as in contracting an external entity to perform some of the work for ETC. Those are two very different things... maybe they are doing both with one entity, i.e. an equity for services swap?

Also, it's unclear what the news is. Is it that there's a deal being negotiated to implement the existing policy of trying to sell 30% of ETC to a foreign telco? Or is it reporting that a new revised policy is coming up?

If anyone has more info, please pass it on! I really hope the latter. Privatization is not the cure. Competition is. Privatizing a monopoly is merely handing over the profits to an outsider, and not necessarily a recipe for innovation and growth.

Black Gold

2006-06-09T10:07:00.001-04:00

I can't wait to see Black Gold, a movie about fair trade and coffee. But, in an effort to keep myself honest, let me state my opinion before seeing it, since it will surely change. So here we go..

Fair trade? Fair schmair! In trade, the only thing that's fair is the price you can get. Guilt about grower's poverty is only going to work on a minority of global buyers and therefore have a limited effect on the overall price. What is needed is an appeal to consumers desires, not their guilt. Desire is a very powerful thing that influences price dramatically. Just look at Starbucks. Here's something I wrote about this a while ago Digital Coffee (I don't feel bad about being too self-referential -- this is a blog isn't it? All about me).

What coffee growers need is brand marketing or something like that. Decommoditize the commodity. Then instead of the retailer getting 90% of the value, the source would get 90% of the value. The day rich consumers insist on House of Jimma Ethiopian Coffee, just like they do Godiva Belgian chocolate, or Emmentaler Swiss cheese, that will be the day of the rich coffee farmer.

Technosophy

2006-06-02T18:34:00.000-04:00

Test driving the blog... Can't yet trust it with anything new,
so let's try recycling some old musings.
Here's one from 1998.

Licensing, Microsoft and Salvation

98/11/06

Many have compared Microsoft in the 1990s to Standard Oil in the 1890s, and Gates to Rockefeller. But I think there's a better (even if slightly exaggerated :) historical analogy to be made.

Almost everyone who buys a PC pays about $90 for the Windows95/98 license, about 10% of the cost of the computer (about the same percentage if you look at NT machines too). For centuries, peasants in Europe (and other Christian feudal societies) paid about 10% of their harvest to the church automatically ("la dime"). It was the licensing fee for the Bible. I'm sure that at the beginning, it appeared to make sense. What's 10% in exchange for eternal salvation? But they didn't tell you about the bugs in the Bible. They didn't tell you all the things that you wouldn't be allowed to do under future releases. They didn't tell you you wouldn't be able to boot Buddha, and that the Islam API was not compatible. Instead, you are told to wait for the upcoming release which will solve all your problems... provided you stay faithful.

Why is this important?

Afterall, most of the suffering in the world today has nothing to do with what's good or bad in the computer industry. But! when the work patterns, the relationships between capital and labor were being put in place, in the mid 19th century, only a small fraction of the world was involved in the industrial economy. By the time it became "important", it was already too late to change it rationally, only extreme violence could challenge the established order.

So, what happens today in operating systems and the software industry in general, could well shape the basic structure of human society for the next century. Do we want to wake up in the year 2050 and see 3 billion enraged slaves of "intellectual property" led by Vladimir Info Lenin, or Mao Techno Tung?

hello world

2006-04-21T16:04:00.000-04:00

One timid foot into the blogosphere for me, one giant irrelevance for mankind.