Macroeconomics and the Great Recession

[Guest post by Don Geddis.  Second in a series.]

Ron,

I enjoyed your original post, but thought it made a number of assumptions that were worth drawing out, and conclusions that were worth questioning.  As the length was getting a bit much for the comment section, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to explore this in a top-level post.

There seem to be three topics: taxes, the financial crisis (which started around 2008 but continues to this day), and exploitation.  I'll address the first two in this post, and the third in a followup.

Taxes.  You are correct to criticize the right/Republicans for their unthinking mantra that lower taxes will necessarily spur growth, and that higher taxes will retard it.  There is some abstract truth to the Laffer Curve, the idea that, at some point, higher tax rates result in lower overall revenue.  (And the converse, that, in certain circumstances, lower rates can actually increase revenue.)  But I think the empirical evidence is clear that the current US marginal income tax rates are nowhere near this level.

I think you go too far to claim that it has been established that higher tax rates cause higher growth, and lower tax rates cause lower growth.  That would be an astonishing result (despite the historical correlations, which you mentioned), and I think it is far from established, in the studies of the economic data.  But perhaps that's a minor point, and we can let it go.

The financial crisis.  The mainstream press layman's narrative of this is something like: in the 2000's, house prices kept rising.  This was basically a Ponzi scheme, and people started buying houses that they knew they couldn't afford, but their plan was to finance the purchase with short-term teaser mortgage rates, and then flip the house at a higher price before their mortgage rate skyrocketed.  This ended in 2007, when the musical chairs stopped, house prices stopped going up, and all the people who couldn't afford their houses suddenly got stuck and defaulted.  And then contagion effects happened, because evil greed Wall Street bankers had collaterialized all these mortgages, and sliced them up, and there were systematic risks in the whole financial system that nobody appreciated.  And suddenly Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and then Bear Stearns, etc.  And then all of a suddenly everything was under attack, the automotive companies were going bankrupt, unemployment doubled from 5% to 10%, and the world economy ground to a halt for the last five years.

A compelling narrative, about how evil, morally-corrupt people, took selfish risks with our valuable society.  And many of them profited personally, as the collateral damage to the economy destroyed tremendous value for the rest of us.  What a story!  What a moral lesson.  Karma has returned to balance.  We angered God by being bad people, and he has now punished us for our misdeeds.

Only ... that story, while it has elements of truth, is basically not true.  Oh, there are plenty of examples and anecdotes where such things happened, but it has almost nothing to do with the economic pain of the last five years of 9-10% unemployment.

And the problem is, since people want the simple, compelling narrative of evil selfish greedy bankers to blame, they focus on the wrong solutions in their attempt to fix this so we don't suffer this pain again in the future.  For example, they focus on regulating bad financial behavior, in the hopes this will stop future greedy people from destroying the economy again.

The problem was not greedy selfish people.  There were greedy selfish people decades ago, and there will be more decades from now.  Capitalism is robust in the face of (and to some extent, relies on!) greedy selfish people.  The problem was that, once the housing crisis started, the US Fed allowed nominal GDP to plummet (Sumner, Wilson, Sumner video, Sumner National Affairs paper).

So now you say that we agree, that maybe the Fed "exacerbated" the situation.  That's an interesting choice of word, for the difference between a few-month downturn in one local industry (US residential housing), vs. a global five-year recession.  The things to compare it to are the 1987 stock market crash (which had almost no impact on US GDP), and the 2000 dot-com crash (which destroyed tech companies for a few years, but again was hardly noticed in the huge overall US economy).  The housing crash of 2007 could have been just another one of those, without the mismanagement by the Fed.  That's a bit more severe than the word "exacerbated" suggests.

So now you want to get into what it means, philosophically, to "cause" something.  I'll agree with you, that the subprime residential housing crash was the original spark.  But it's like living in a dry forest, while somebody at a campfire plays with matches, and the professional firefighters that you've hired for this job are standing watch.  Yeah, one of the matches got dropped in a bush.  But this kind of minor, industry-local crisis happens all the time.  That's why we have a US Fed, so that when a bush starts to spark, the professional firefighters who are standing right there, put it out.

Only, in 2008, they didn't.  And they still haven't, for the last four years.

You're trying to eliminate all flames from the forest.  Not only is that plan unlikely to be successful, but you're also ignoring all the collateral damage from no longer having access to fire.  It's used to cook, to keep warm, to melt metal and make horseshoes and swords.  It's incredible to me that you don't look at this situation, and reach the obvious conclusion of asking the professional firefighters: why didn't you put out that one tiny spark that happened right in front of your eyes?  Why did you allow it to grow into a forest-wide wildfire?

Ron, you persist in your theory of the "obvious" housing bubble, that "obviously" needed to crash:

the resulting bubble in the housing market and rise in mortgage delinquencies was unsustainable (and this was evident in 2005).  Something would have had to end it sooner or later, and it seems unlikely in the extreme that it could have been ended by anything other than a crisis

But again, seen through the eyes of NGDP, even this apparently non-controversial statement is probably false.  A strong rise in asset prices does not always presage a bubble.  "What goes up must come down" is a poor predictor of future prices.  In housing, in particular, residential house prices in Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand followed much the same 2001-2005 path as US housing prices -- but then went flat after 2007, instead of crashing in value with the so-called "bubble" popping in the US.

Ron, you claimed an error of the economics profession (and evidence that economists shouldn't be trusted) was that

The economic consensus in 2005 was that everything was hunky dory.

 Yet you haven't distinguished conditions in the US, from those in Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.  In fact, the recent history of their housing sectors looked fairly similar -- but the performance of the overall economies from 2007-2012 has been very different.

Finally, you say

The Fed may well have exacerbated the situation with its too-tight monetary policy. I don't know, and we can never know for certain. Maybe the current crisis would have been averted. Or maybe we would have ended up with Weimar-Republic-style hyperinflation.

 You know the Fed has tools (e.g. the interest rate) to affect inflation.  They can take steps to raise inflation while (sometimes) lowering unemployment, or other steps to lower inflation while (sometimes) raising unemployment.

Inflation is obviously a spectrum.  For the last four years, it has been far too low, averaging 0-1% instead of 2-4%.

You seem to imagine the only possibilities as either too little inflation (the current state), or too much (hyperinflation).  What makes it so hard to actually hit a target?  You realize, I hope, that this is all the same spectrum.  Even if hyperinflation was the eventual state, in order to get there from here, you'd first have to go through "just right" inflation.  There is no other path.  There is no way to jump from "too little" to "too much", without going through "just right".

So you seem to think that the Fed is not capable of hitting a target.  That if they try to raise inflation a little, they'll just turn on a faucet and accidentally raise it too much.  But of course, surely you know that they have tools to lower inflation also.  So you must think that there's some "oversteering" problem, where the Fed would constantly apply too much of one direction or the other, but not have the fine control to hit a planned target?

I wonder why you think that's the case.  Especially given that inflation has been incredibly stable for thirty years, starting around 1980, despite widely varying economic conditions.  It sure seems like they have the tools to hit their desired target.

What does it mean to "exploit the poor"?

[First (or maybe second depending on how you count) in a (short) series co-authored with guest blogger Don Geddis]

Don,

Before our discussion outgrows the comment thread it started in I'd like to move it out here to the main page. Privately you expressed some reservations about participating in this exchange because you're not a macroeconomist. Well, neither am I, and IMHO neither are most macroeconomists. If you haven't already, you really should watch the movie "Inside Job." It documents (among other things) how the economics profession has been thoroughly corrupted by Wall Street. Apart from the fact that one should never accept arguments from authority to begin with, economists IMHO have no authority.

That said, you wrote "exploiting the poor" isn't really a well-defined concept. Actually, it tuns out to be quite well defined:

exploit (verb): 1) to take unfair advantage of 2) to control or take advantage of by artful, unfair, or insidious means

Do I really need to explain this? If we're engaged in a negotiation and I'm rich and you're poor then I might choose to proceed on the assumption that you need my money more than I need your labor, because if I fail to obtain your labor then maybe my profits will go down by some unmeasurably small increment, but if you fail to obtain my money your children will go hungry. So even though the incremental value of your labor to me might be X I might decide to offer you Y<<X (for you non-geeks, that means Y is much less than X) instead knowing that you have a strong incentive to accept this offer even though I would actually be willing to pay you more if you had any leverage. But you don't, so I'm not. Having come to this realization, I might further decide that it is in my interests to deploy my resources so that you remain poor. Of course, I don't think of this as insuring that you remain poor, I think of it as insuring a ready supply of cheap labor. But it amounts to the same thing.

This is the fundamental problem: labor is unlike other commodities. If we have a surplus of wheat that causes the bottom to fall out of the wheat market and excess wheat to rot in silos, the wheat doesn't care. But labor does care because, to paraphrase Mitt Romney, labor is people, my friend. And labor has children that aren't going to stop needing food just because society has no present need for what their parents have to offer in the way of tradable goods and services.

To your second point, that the economic conditions of 2005 were not the cause of the Great Recession. We don't actually disagree about the macroeconomics. The Fed may well have exacerbated the situation with its too-tight monetary policy. I don't know, and we can never know for certain. Maybe the current crisis would have been averted. Or maybe we would have ended up with Weimar-Republic-style hyperinflation. We simply don't know because we didn't do that experiment, and one of the problems with economics is it's very hard to reset the initial conditions so you can try again.

But all this misses the point. Debating whether the housing bubble or the Fed caused the Great Recession is a philosophical argument. What matters is not whether the sub-prime crisis or the Fed's decision was more to blame, what matters is that the sub-prime crisis is what led the Fed to have to make that decision in the first place. It is in this sense that the G.R. can fairly be attributed to the conditions that obtained in 2005, even if subsequent events might have played out differently. (Note that the exact same argument is used to try to blame Obama for the G.R. Interestingly, and tellingly, there are two different explanations for how Obama caused the G.R.: some say it's because the stimulus was too big, and others say it's because it was too small. Both sides can't be right. And, I note in passing, both sides count economists among their ranks.)

I think it is indisputable that the rapid expansion of credit to non-credit-worthy borrowers and the resulting bubble in the housing market and rise in mortgage delinquencies was unsustainable (and this was evident in 2005). Something would have had to end it sooner or later, and it seems unlikely in the extreme that it could have been ended by anything other than a crisis because, as is also painfully evident in retrospect, in the absence of a crisis it was all but impossible to convince anyone that there was a problem that needed solving.

Which might be one reason that poor people sometimes have to resort to dramatic measures to get their point across.

SkyNet has arrived

Skynet has arrived. Or at least one of its peripheraks has:

The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone's ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.

Although humans would program an autonomous drone's flight plan and could override its decisions, the prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.

Yes, you can make money without exploiting the poor, but...

I was (briefly) a guest on a BBC World Service radio program this morning discussing Obama's state of the union speech and income inequality in general. To my mind, this has always been a no-brainer. My argument is: we've done this experiment (of lowering taxes on the rich) twice now, once in the 1920's and again in the 1980's (and doubled-down in 2000). We have also done the control experiment. Between 1945 and 1980 top marginal tax rates in the U.S. ranged from 70 to 90%.

The results are clear: high marginal rates correlate with broad-based economic prosperity and an expanding middle class. Low marginal rates correlate with extreme income inequality, reduced prosperity overall, and ultimately, economic catastrophe.

Now, correlation does not imply causality. Economies are enormously complex systems. And one of the guests on the program dismissed my argument as "not being accepted by economists." To which I say, this would not be the first time economists have been wrong about something. But I freely concede that while the data are suggestive, this is not a slam dunk. In particular, it certainly does not prove (and in fact I do not believe) that raising taxes on the rich by itself will solve all our problems. The data do, however, convincingly falsify the opposite theory, that lowering taxes on rich people results in economic prosperity, and raising them causes unemployment.

The real problem is not really tax rates per se. The real problem is the power asymmetry that is invariably results from lassez-faire capitalism. Capitalism depends on competition in order to function properly, otherwise it devolves into fascism. But the problem is there is more than one way for a company to succeed. One way is to provide a superior product at a lower price, but another is to engage in rent seeking behavior like lobbying legislators to pass laws that favor entrenched interests at the expense of potential competitors or using your economic clout to bias binding arbitration proceedings in your favor.

In short, naked capitalism does not distinguish between success that arises from successful competition and success that arises from gaming the system. Angelo Mozilo made $40 million net of SEC fines (and 34 million net of taxes) for bankrupting Countrywide and helping to precipitate the greatest economic catastrophe in three generations. But his dollars buy just as many yachts, private jets, and politicians as someone who made their money by bringing an actually useful product to market.

After I was kicked off the BBC radio program the question was raised: can you make money without exploiting the poor? The answer I would love to have given is: yes, clearly it is. But it's a lot easier to make money if you do exploit the poor, so in the absence of some countervailing force, those who choose to exploit the poor will win, at least in the short term.

In the long term, of course, they will lose. But so will everybody else.

I am about to be silenced

We got the settlement offer from an organization about which I have written before but which it would be unwise for me to call by name in this post. It includes confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses. So after I sign it I will be legally prohibited from talking about it. The confidentiality clause even prohibits me from disclosing the existence of the settlement. I will also be legally prohibited from saying anything disparaging about the organization-that-shall-not-be-named. So after I sign it I will no longer be able to say that they are a bunch of dirty rotten crooks, no better then common thieves, except vastly better at their craft. But they are. And after I am silenced, they still will be.

Of course, until the settlement is final I am not bound by its terms, and the agreement does not prohibit me from disparaging the State of Nevada, which I intend to do in the fullness of time. But right now I'm tired and I really don't want to push my luck any further. But if one were inclined to inquire further one might find a useful pointer in the comments.

On the brighter side, the American electorate does seem to be waking up to the dangers of SOPA. Google and Wikipedia have gone dark (sort of -- both services are still accessible, but it's a good start) to try to draw attention to the issue. I've not written much about it because I've been distracted by other things, but for the record, SOPA is evil and it must be stopped. It is a bald-faced power-and-money grab by Hollywood, and it would have dire negative consequences for the Internet. Yes, copyright needs to be enforced, but not through third parties coerced by an unfunded government mandate. The collateral damage of that approach is vastly too great.

By the way, from the better-late-than-never-but-nonetheless-still-timely department, in honor of Martin Luther King day, go find a copy of his I-have-a-dream speech. If you obtain one, and you didn't pay for it, then you are a pirate. That speech is copyrighted.

A very peculiar thing just happened on hacker news

I submitted this story to Hacker News about an hour ago. It collected 13 points before it dropped off the bottom of the New page never to be heard from again. But at the same time there was another story on the front page that was an hour older and had fewer points (9 at the time, 12 just now). So my submission should have appeared on the front page. But it didn't. I wonder why.

In case you're wondering, no, I don't really care that much about this particular story. But I'm in the process of trying to promote my movie, which has forced me to pay attention to such things (more on Reddit than HN, but they supposedly use the same algorithm).

The absurdity of online "piracy"

Nothing demonstrates the absurdity of the concept of online "piracy" better than the situation I find myself in: a new episode of The Simpsons aired this evening, one which I really wanted to see. I was out of the house when the episode aired. If I had remembered to set my DVR before I left, I would be able to legally watch that episode now (and skip the commercials). But I didn't, so now if I find a copy of the episode and watch it, I'm a pirate.

To which I say: arrrr, mateys.

[UPDATE:] I tried to see if the episode was available on-line. I first tried YouTube, and discovered a zillion videos that claimed to be the episode in question, all of which were spam (or at least all the ones I tried). I then tried to find the episode on the Fox site. No luck. Finally, I tried iTunes. The episode was there, so I bought it. I somehow ended up buying it twice by accident (for some reason the usual confirmation dialog didn't appear -- iTunes seems to have quietly gone to one-click purchasing.) And then -- AFTER I had bought the episode, paid for it (twice), and downloaded it, iTunes told me that I COULDN'T PLAY IT BECAUSE MY MONITOR WAS NOT HDMI-ENABLED!!!

Nonetheless, despite the fact that I BOUGHT AND PAID for a copy of this episode and didn't get it, if I now obtain a copy by other means I am STILL a pirate in the eyes of the law. But the studio, which stole my money, isn't.

I'm a filmmaker, so I am VERY sympathetic to the desire of content producers to protect their work. But even I am ready to hoist the jolly roger in this case.

What everyone in the SOPA debate is missing

Underlying the debate about the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the unstated assumption that intellectual property rights have the same legal standing as other property rights. They don't, and the tacit concession of this point by opponents of SOPA is significantly weakening their position. The foundation of intellectual property (patents and copyrights) in the United States is this clause in Article 2 of the Constitution:

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This clause clearly establishes intellectual property as a granted right, not a recognized or fundamental right, that is, the "right" to "intellectual property" does not exist unless explicitly granted by Congress at its discretion. Furthermore, Congress is constrained to grant this right only in service of a specific purpose. namely, to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and only "for limited times".

Notwithstanding that the Supreme Court has effectively eviscerated the "limited time" constraint in the case of copyright, "intellectual property" is clearly on a different legal footing from the "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to which people are endowed by their Creator, as recognized in the declaration of Independence. Neither the Declaration nor the Constitution mentions "property" by name [correction: the 5th amendment does mention it. See the comments.], but it is quite clear that the right to physical property was universally considered an inalienable fundamental right by the Founders. To cite but one of many examples, the state of Rhode Island attached a signing statement to its ratification of the Constitution that reads in part:

We, the delegates of the people of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations... do declare and make known,—

I. That there are certain natural rights of which men, when they form a social compact, cannot deprive or divest their posterity,—among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property...

Rhode Island's signing statement is significant because it is quite lengthy. It contains 18 separate clauses explicitly recognizing a long list of fundamental rights. (It's actually worth reading in its entirety). It is reasonable to suppose that if Rhode Island took issue with the clear implication of the Constitution that "intellectual property" is not a fundamental right, they would have said so.

The arguments against SOPA are mainly based on the collateral damage that would accrue by giving content "owners" the power to indiscriminately shut down web sites without due process. But this argument tacitly concedes a much more fundamental point, which is that a grant of copyright is not a right but a privilege granted at the discretion of the People for a particular purpose. It is far from clear that the Constitutional requirement that exclusivity be granted "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is being met.

Political arguments are often lost before they even start because one side allows the other to frame the debate. The clearest example of this is the tacit acceptance of the terms "pro abortion" and "anti abortion" in the debate on reproductive rights. In this case, the tacit acceptance of the term "intellectual property rights" concedes the fight before it starts. If there are intellectual property rights, then the debate can only be about the extent to which the state should go in order to defend those rights. But, as I have shown above, there is no legal basis for intellectual property "rights", only intellectual property "grants" (for limited times and for a specific purpose). I hope it's clear how this reframing would change the tenor of the debate.

[UPDATE:] OK, so not everyone has missed this :-)

[UPDATE2]: Wow, things are changing fast: "In an incredible turn of events, six Republican Senators have asked Majority Leader Harry Reid not to hold a vote on PIPA, the Senate version of SOPA...."

[UPDATE3]: Someone who goes by the handle Nirvana over on Hacker News makes a really excellent point in the context of conceding too much by adopting the wrong terminology:

...the Bill of Rights was enacted "in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers". This is referring to the limited powers granted to the government in the constitution. Notice, the preamble doesn't say "in order to grant rights...". The bill of rights contains "further declaratory and restrictive clauses".

Thus, these clauses are not designed to create or grant rights, but are of a "declaratory and restrictive" nature.

The constitution does not create any rights. There is no such thing, in the american form of government, as "constitutional rights". [Emphasis added.] People often use this phrase when referring to the Bill of Rights, but it is imprecise, because the Bill of Rights doesn't grant rights. IT doesn't say "the people shall have the right of free speech", instead it says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"

The right of free speech, as recognized by the First Amendment, precedes and predates the constitution.

How nations shoot themselves in the foot

Raspberry Pi is a very small (credit-card sized) very inexpensive (<$50) computer capable of running Linux. The organization that is building it is located in the U.K. They write:

[T]he Raspberry Pi Foundation had intended to get all its manufacture done in the UK; after all, we’re a UK charity, we want to help bootstrap the UK electronics industry, and doing our manufacturing in the UK seemed another way to help reach our goals.

We investigated a number of possible UK manufacturers, but encountered a few problems...

[O]ne cost in particular ... really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all.

Res ipsa loquitur.

It's alive!

My movie is now available on iTunes! Please tell your friends, like me on Facebook, upvote me on Reddit, subscribe to the movie blog, watch the trailer. And if you really want to send some love my way, rent the movie and write a review! Thanks!

What is your quality metric?

Imagine you're a political leader faced with the the decision of whether or not to institute a particular economic policy. You are told by your advisors, who are honorable, trustworthy, and 100% accurate economists, that instituting this policy will increase the real average income in your country by 25%. Would you do it? Of course you would. It's a no-brainer, isn't it?

Well, no, not necessarily. There are a lot of different ways to raise the average 25%. One is to raise everyone's income by 25%. But another way is to double the income of half the population while halving that of the rest. A third (to take this to an extreme) is to make the income of a single individual be the former GDP plus 25% while utterly impoverishing everyone else.

I hope I don't have to convince you that the third outcome is not a very good one. Even if you happen to be the one lucky person who becomes the trillionaire your quality of life is not likely to be very high, since you will now be living in a country where everyone but you is starving and living on the street. So maybe you'll decide to spread the wealth by hiring a few people to help out with the gardening. Or maybe you'll just hop in your private jet and go somewhere else (maybe somewhere they have gated communities).

But what about the second outcome, the one where half the people get their incomes doubled while the rest are halved? That again is not so clear, and whether you consider this a good outcome or not probably depends on how and why the income redistribution happens. For example, if it happens as the result of a shift from a controlled economy to a market economy, and the people whose incomes are doubled are the ones who are motivated by profit to become more productive while the ones whose incomes are halved are the ones who resist market forces and spend their days protesting the demise of the welfare state then you might be inclined to think it's a good thing. But if it's the result of half the people banding together and somehow coercing the other half into working harder for less pay then one might be a little less enthusiastic.

The point here is not that one economic policy is better than another, but that merely deciding whether one outcome is better than another is already a non-trivial exercise. But it is nonetheless a crucial exercise, because the chances that you will get what you want without first deciding what it is are very low. Even on an individual level figuring out what you want is not so easy. Do you want the big house with room for all your toys, or the little house that's easier to maintain? Or would you rather be unburdened by such choices so you can take the time it would require to make such decisions to sit under a tree and read a book?

Adherents of free-market economics like to think that they can solve this problem by letting everyone make their own decisions. And empirically, the outcomes of free market economics do seem to dominate all competitors, at least if you care at all about material well being. But there are two problems. One, as I have just noted, is that people often do not actually know what they want. And the second is that there is no such thing as a free market. Every market is regulated by something, even if that something is only the social norms and conventions of the merchants and their customers.

Of course, in the real world, markets are usually regulated by governments which make rules about, for example, what is and is not property. Once upon a time in the United States, humans could be legal property. Nowadays we have this concept of intellectual property, which is often misunderstood to be some kind of consequence of natural law, but is in fact a wholly artificial construct designed to reward people for creating (and hence encourage them to create more) artistic and inventive works. Intellectual property exists because we as a society decided that it should exist, not because it's a consequence of the laws of physics.

So here is a not-entirely-implausible scenario of something that could actually happen in today's world: somehow a highly contagious and deadly pathogen is released into the world. If you get it, you're probably dead. Someone invents a cure, but unlike Jonas Salk this person takes out a patent, and decides to price the medicine at what the market will bear: 99% of your net worth, and a lien on all your future earnings. After all, the alternative is death. What's your life worth? What is your child's life worth?

Or take this scenario: suppose someone invents and patents a genetically engineered food crop while at the same time releasing chemicals into the environment that kill all non-genetically-engineered alternatives. The inventor of such a plant could become fabulously wealthy. But is this a good outcome?

By the way, that last scenario is not a hypothetical. It is actually happening.

So much to do, so little time...

I was really hoping to get some writing done this week but circumstances have intervened. Between the movie, the company I'm trying to get off the ground, a hacking project that has me obsessed (elliptic curve cryptography if you really want to know), and a ton of miscellanea (end of year donations, family health issues, a piece of registered mail that the post office seems to have misplaced, yada yada yada) my time has been too fragmented to formulate coherent thoughts.

I am making progress on clearing out the backlog and I hope to be able to get back in the zone later today. In the meantime, go read this article on Ron Paul by Glenn Greenwald and the follow up. He's a much better writer than I am anyway.

Happy holidays!

Happy Christmas/Solstice/Festivus/Saturnalia/Hannuka/Kwanzaa/New Year!

Image snarfed from http://reallycutestuff.com/

The Cosmo and Me, Part 3 - How Wall Street screwed me

I last wrote about our experience with the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas last January and before that almost exactly one year ago to the day. To recap briefly, in 2005, back when buying real estate still seemed like a good idea, we bought a condo at the Cosmo. Then the recession hit, the developer went bankrupt, and the project was acquired by Deutsche Bank. Astonishingly, despite an almost perfect storm of bad economic conditions, the Cosmo actually got built.

But we didn't get our condo. The Cosmo took it from us, along with half of our down payment. The short version of the story is this: they finally finished building our condo, two and a half years after the promised delivery date and six months after the Cosmo opened, but they didn't tell us. The sent a closing notice to our old address in Los Angeles, but not to our new address in northern California, and so we never got it. When we called them on this their response was: you never notified us of your new address.

Now, that is manifestly untrue, and we can prove it. The Cosmo had been sending us correspondence at our new address for nearly a year, and of course we've kept it all. We can also prove that we sent them correspondence with our new address on it via certified mail as required under the contract.

What we cannot prove is that we sent via certified mail a letter saying, "Please note: our address has changed." The contract specifies that change of address notices have to be sent via certified mail.

Now, there is a legal principle called "implied waiver" that should apply in this case. Because the Cosmo sent us correspondence at our new address, that constitutes an implied waiver of the requirement that we notify them of our new address via certified mail. If we could count on getting justice, we would patiently wait until we got our day in court. Unfortunately for us, the contract also includes a binding arbitration clause, so we can't sue them. A number of people in situations similar to ours have already gone to arbitration. And one by one they have, with a very few exceptions, lost their cases.

I've read some of the decisions in those cases, and they are brazenly biased in favor of the Cosmo. In one case, it was so brazen that even the judge overseeing the case couldn't take it and ordered the arbiter to go back and redo part of it. I know of only one person who has prevailed in arbitration. In every other case I am aware of, the Cosmo has won, and the buyers are left with nothing. No condo, and no refund of their deposit. It is theft on a vast scale. And it's all legal.

Back in January I speculated about why the Cosmo seemed so confident in its position despite the fact that we have what should be a slam-dunk case against them. Now I know the answer: the fix was in from the beginning, and they knew it. The Cosmo employs 5000 people in a city that has been one of the hardest hit by the recession. The arbiters live in that city, and apparently they know what side their bread is buttered on.

Last week the Cosmo made a settlement offer to the few stragglers who are still under contract with them: we get 50% of our deposits back. They keep the rest. And despite the fact that it is a manifestly unjust outcome, we're going to accept it because the alternative is to continue to have this hanging over our heads for got only knows how long with the virtual certainty of losing 100% of our deposit to the decision of a biased or corrupt arbiter in an unappealable decision.

Lesson learned: never sign a contract with a large corporation that includes a binding arbitration clause. You will lose, and they know it, so you have no leverage at all. If they decide to screw you, you will be screwed.

My dismay over this extends far beyond the financial loss, which is considerable, but won't really have a major impact on me in the long run. What bothers me most is that I really believed that justice would prevail in the end, that at the end of the day (or the decade as the case may be) we would get our day in court, or at least in front of an arbiter, and we could present our case and be able to count on getting a fair decision. That faith has been shattered. If justice still exists at all in the United States of America (if it ever existed?) it seems to have become the rare exception rather than the rule.

Happy holidays.

ANNONCEMENT: "But for the Grace of God?" available on iTunes Jan 9

I'm thrilled to announce that my movie But for the Grace of God? is going to be released at long last! It will be available on iTunes on January 9, and should be on Netflix shortly after that.

I've started a new blog for the film where I am going to be posting announcements, deleted scenes, and anecdotes in the runup to the release. Posting over here at the Ramblings will probably be light for the next month or two, so if you want to stay in the loop please go subscribe to the Grace of God blog.

The ants shall inherit the earth

Humans are not the dominant species on this planet. Neither is the domestic house cat, though one might be forgiven for drawing that conclusion. No, that honor belongs to the Argentine ants. We were invaded by the very ironically named Linepithema humile last night, and the ensuing battle lasted well over an hour as we vacuumed, sprayed, swept and wiped the little critters from nooks, crannies, cat food dishes and trash cans. (Thank God they had not yet discovered the pantry.)

If ever you need proof that cooperation and altruism can evolve through Darwinian evolution you need look no further. The Argentine ant is one of the most successful species on the planet. But why? They have neither brains nor brawn, no armor, no sting, no bite. They are in fact, if you look at an individual ant, one of the most innocuous creatures you could ever hope to encounter. They're disarmingly unthreatening, almost cute. And if you want to dispatch one you can just squish it like, well, a bug.

But considering an ant as an individual entity is a serious mistake, every bit as wrong as considering one of your white blood cells to be an individual. Notwithstanding that they are not mechanically connected to each other the way the parts of your body are, ants are in fact just components of a fundamentally different, much larger, and far more intimidating whole, the ant colony. Kill an individual ant, or even slaughter them wholesale, and the colony goes on.

So what makes the Argentine ant so singularly threatening among all the species of colony-forming insects in the world? It is that Argentine ant colonies are structured in a fundamentally different way than all of the others. Nearly all other insect colonies are organized around a single individual insect who lays all the eggs. We normally call this insect the "queen" but a more accurate description would be an ovary. This individual or organ, depending on how you choose to look at it, is the colony's soft spot, its Achilles heel. Kill the queen and you kill the colony.

In addition, most insect colonies have a sense of identity based on their genetic identity (since all the individuals in the colony have the same mother). So while the individual ants in a colony will cooperate like the cells in your body, individual colonies will compete with each other for food and territory.

Argentine ants aren't like that. A single colony can have multiple queens, and when Argentine ant colonies encounter each other, they don't fight. It's as if all of the Argentine ant colonies on the entire planet have drawn up a mutual cooperation treaty. An individual ant is a member not just of a colony, but of a planet-wide super colony. This makes Argentine ants virtually impossible to eradicate without sterilizing the entire planet.

To battle an Argentine ant invasion it is not enough therefore to simply kill the ants that you see, because there's almost certainly an effectively infinite supply of them hidden away at the other end of their trail. The only effective defense against them is to infiltrate the colony with poison-laced food, which takes several days to be effective. Happily, but ominously, in our case we were able to track the infestation back to its source, which turned out to be a potted fern in our dining room. It was happy because we were able to just take the fern outside and dispense with the multi-day poisoning operation. But it was ominous because we have no freakin' clue how that colony came to become established there in the first place. That fern has been sitting in our dining room on a three-leged metal stand for months and months. We water it regularly. Until last night we never saw even a single ant there.

Kinda creepy.

Newt Gingrich wants to fix poverty by making poor kids scrub toilets

I gotta give Newt Gingrich credit for one thing. He's certainly not afraid to stand up for a controversial position:

"Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and nobody around them who works," Gingrich replied. "So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash,' unless it's illegal."

...

"I believe the kids could mop the floor and clean up the bathroom and get paid for it, and it would be OK," he said to applause.

Newt is actually right about this, but here's the thing: rich kids don't have habits of working either. I never worked when I was a kid. I've never been paid for mopping a floor or cleaning a bathroom. But I turned out OK. Why? Because I was fortunate enough to grow up where there were some really good public schools where I got a really good education. And then I went to a public college on a scholarship. And then I went to grad school on a fellowship grant from the Office of Naval Research. And then I went to work for NASA. Until I went to work for Google at age 37 every dollar that paid for my education and my salary came from the government.

So Newt, how about instead of making them scrub toilets we give the inner city kids the same high-quality publicly funded educational opportunities that I had as a white middle-class child of the 'burbs? I turned out OK. Maybe they will too.

It gets better (geek version)

I recently learned of the tragic passing of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the cofounders of Diaspora, apparently by his own hand. The news really hit me hard for three reasons. First, I was really rooting for Diaspora to succeed. Facebook is evil (there, I said it) and something needs to come along and replace it. Second, it's just generally tragic when someone dies in their prime, and when it's someone as talented as Ilya was that makes it doubly tragic. He might have made the world a better place. Now we'll never know.

But the third and main reason the news really rocked me was my sense that this should and could have been prevented. I think one of the reasons that Ilya Zhitomirskiy is dead is that we have a culture that discourages seeking help for depression and other mental illness because of the stigma attached. If it becomes known that you've succumbed to feeling blue then in the cutthroat world of entrepreneurialism you are damaged goods. You can't hack it. And so young kids keep it bottled up inside. And sometimes they die.

That has to stop.

But, alas, it's a very thorny problem. Because people's reluctance to seek help is deeply rooted in cultural norms it's not just a matter of setting up a hotline, or putting up a blog post saying, "If you're feeling depressed, call." For one thing, depression can be a sign of an underlying mental illness that an untrained person might not be equipped to deal with. Suicidal depression is serious shit, and if you meddle without knowing what you're doing you can easily make things worse, to say nothing of creating serious problems for yourself. (As an obvious example, even just holding yourself out as someone to talk to is a Really Bad Idea. If someone calls and you're not available that could easily push them over the edge. Crisis hotlines have to be manned 24 by 7.)

One possibility is to follow the lead of the LGBT community and start an It Gets Better campaign for geeks. But that's problematic too because the stigma attached to depression is nowadays much more serious than that attached to homosexuality. On the other hand, the fact that depression, unlike homosexuality, actually is a mental disorder means that (again, unlike homosexuality) you can, if not cure it, at least ameliorate it, and that this is uncontroversially a good thing.

What if those of us who have faced suicidal depression and lived to tell the tale spoke up? Maybe if enough time has passed we can admit to it without having to risk ostracism. And maybe if we did it could save a life. That sounds to me like a risk worth taking. So here goes.

If you are a geek contemplating suicide, I say to you from personal experience that no matter how bleak things look right now, they will get better. I know this because I've been where you are. When I was in graduate school I was suicidally depressed. But I got past it, not because I'm any better at dealing with depression than the next person, but because I got help. In my case, help consisted of professional counseling.

I know what you're thinking: no therapist can possibly help you. You're so much smarter than any therapist. You've thought this through, and you haven't been able to figure out the answer, so a therapist won't be able to either.

You're wrong. Here's why. You're a geek, so you're used to thinking about every challenge as a problem with (at least potentially) a solution. Depression isn't like that. It's not a problem with a solution, it's something that happens to you that you need to learn how to manage. You can't fix depression any more than you can fix getting sleepy or having to go to the bathroom. What you can do is learn how to deal with it. And a good therapist can help you with that. It's not an easy process, but it's well worth the effort. You'll still get depressed, but it will hurt less.

Even if you're not willing to bear the pain for yourself, do it for others. Again, I know you feel alone and worthless and like nobody cares. You're wrong about that too. That's the depression talking. (One of the techniques for dealing with depression is to think of it as an external entity that causes you pain. If you had a knife stuck in your arm it would hurt. Depression is like having a knife stuck in your brain, except the knife isn't a physical thing so you can't just reach in and pull it out.) No matter what your circumstance, unless you're a psychopathic serial killer, somewhere out there is another human being whose life will be better if you're around. You may not have even met this person yet, but I promise you they are there. If you're not willing to stick around for yourself, do it for them.

Do it for Ilya.

Welcome new subscribers

My recent post on the Zynga Google chef kerfuffle got a lot of attention, and attracted a lot of new subscribers. Welcome! You'll find this blog is a little messy and disorganized. I've been writing Rondam Ramblings for over eight years now. I try very hard to post things that my readers will find worthwhile. And therein lies a problem, because I have no idea who most of you are, and unlike most other blogs that attract a following beyond the author's personal acquaintances, Rondam Ramblings has never really had a theme. In the past I've covered politics, religion, quantum mechanics, computer science, entrepreneurship, travel, homelessness, the meaning of life, and now I've even added cooking to the list.

As time goes by and my readership gets more diverse it becomes harder and harder to figure out what to write about. My latest attempt over the past weekend was such a dismal flop that I actually deleted it (only the second time in eight years that I've done that). So please help me keep the quality of the content here high: if you see something you like (or something you don't) leave a comment or click on a reaction button. (If you click on the "bogus" button it would be really helpful if you could also leave a comment telling me why you thought it was bogus.) The satisfaction of having written something that someone finds worth reading is more than enough to keep me going, but it's also the only reward I get for the not-inconsiderable effort of writing. I don't charge and I don't serve ads. So I really appreciate feedback. Thanks.

BTW, I have a guest blogger, Don Geddis, who make occasional contributions here. If you see a post from him that you like please send some love his way as well.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Among other things, I am thankful for all of you who subscribe to or otherwise follow this blog. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: there is no greater reward for a writer than to be read. I hope I can continue to make it worth your while. To all of you, I say thanks, and happy Thanksgiving!

Coming apart at the seams

Here are two excerpts from today's news:

A police action intended to roust a few hundred protesters ... instead drew thousands of people into the streets on Saturday, where they battled riot police officers for hours...

...

Police used batons to try to push [the protestors] apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-​sprayed directly in the face, holding [the protestors] as they did so. When [the protestors] covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-​sprayed down their throats. Several of [the protestors] were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-​five minutes after being pepper-​sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

The remarkable and dismaying thing about these two excerpts is how seamlessly they flow together. You'd think they were both from the same news story, but they aren't. The first is news from Tahrir Square in Egypt (where I was walking around by myself just this past Tuesday) and the second is from U.C. Davis.

It is really starting to feel like the whole of human civilization is in danger of coming unraveled.

Here's more from the U.C. Davis story:

The man who pepper-sprayed the protesters in the video above is Lt. John Pike, of the UC Davis Police Department. If you'd like to let him know what you think of his actions, you can email him at japikeiii@ucdavis.edu; for what it's worth, his boss, UCD Police Chief Annette Spicuzza, told the Davis Enterprise that she's "very proud" of her officers. "I don't believe any of our officers were hurt," she says, "and I hope none of the students were injured."

Follow the link above to see the video. It's shocking.

Travelogue: Free Egypt

If you've ever wanted to visit Egypt but don't like to deal with throngs of tourists, now is your moment. The political uncertainty here scared most of the tourists away back in February, and they still have not returned. We've spent the last three days on a whirlwind tour of Luxor and Cairo with a few hundred of our closest friends, and as far as I could tell our group constituted 90% of the tourists in all of Egypt. We saw all of the major sights -- Luxor, Karnak, Valley of the Kings, the Pyramids, the Egyptian museum -- and didn't have to wait in a single line.

Other than the almost eerie emptiness at tourist destinations, the situation on the ground seems mostly normal despite the fact that the country has been under military rule for eight months. There are no soldiers on the streets, no tanks, no military checkpoints. (There are, however, occasional roadblocks set up by the locals, which narrow the road down to one lane and force cars traveling in opposite directions to alternate, which is annoying but not intimidating.)

Traffic in Cairo is completely insane, which I am given to understand is par for the course. It's a city of 20 million people without, as far as I can tell, a single functioning traffic light. It is the craziest, most chaotic traffic I have ever seen in my life. Cars, busses, scooters, and pedestrians intermingle freely with no apparent pattern. If there are rules of the road here beyond "biggest vehicle with the most aggressive driver wins" I have not been able to discern what they are. And yet it kinda sorta works. At one point it took our bus half an hour to go 300 yards around Tahrir Square to get to the Egyptian museum, but we did get there eventually, and without a single casualty. (The photo at the top of this post was taken out the bus window on that trip.)

Sadly, underlying the relatively quiet and orderly (by the standards of revolutions) political changes is an economic desperation of a sort I have never before experienced, and I've been to some pretty poor places. The flip side of all the excess capacity in the tourist sector is an army of street vendors, taxi drivers, boatmen, hoteliers and restaurateurs who have been abruptly cut off from their livelihoods. In a culture that even in the best of times does not shy away from, let us say, high-pressure sales tactics and haggling, the result is an army of underemployed service providers competing fiercely for the few customers that are left. So while you don't have to deal with lines, you do have to deal with a constant barrage of hello's and excuse-me's and please-look-at-my-shop's.

But it doesn't end there. The instant you display even the tiniest bit of interest, they will latch on to you and not let go until they have extracted as much money from you as they possibly can. Americans by nature don't like to be rude. The Egyptians have figured this out, and have developed a vast array of finely honed techniques to make it impossible to extricate yourself from them in any other way. I've travelled to a lot of places and seen a lot of high-pressure sales tactics, but the Egyptians have truly become the masters of the game.

But the most amazing thing about Egypt is not the history or the quiet revolution or the chaos on the roads or the street hustlers. It is something I suspect many visitors don't notice, and which Egyptians don't draw attention to: this is probably one of the poorest countries we've been to, one in the midst of political and economic turmoil of the highest order, and yet we have not seen a single beggar. Not one.

If by some bizarre chance anyone from Egypt is reading this, I have a message for you on behalf of my fellow tourists: we get it. You are facing some really tough challenges, and we understand that whether your children eat tonight depends on whether you manage to sell us a trinket for a dollar. We respect that your response to these challenges is entrepreneurial. We respect that you are trying to free yourselves from a dictatorship and establish democracy against some pretty tough odds. And we want to help. We really do.

At the same time, you have to understand that while we want to help, that is, at least for most of us, not our primary purpose for coming to your country. We're here to see the sights, to learn, and to have fun. Being overrun by street vendors at every turn is not fun. Being hustled is no fun. And having to say no is also no fun. In fact, it's painful, because we really want to help. But we can't be your saviors. At the end of the day, you're going to have to put your country back together yourselves. And after seeing what your ancestors accomplished 4000 years ago there is no doubt in my mind that you can do it.

If you are Egyptian and you are a street vendor or you know a street vendor I have a suggestion: set up your table and put up a sign that reads: "Hello, my name is Ibrahim. I am selling this merchandise so that I don't have to beg to feed my family. Please take a look, and if you like something, buy it. I promise to charge you a fair price, and not to hassle you if you decide to pass." Then follow through on that promise. I predict that you will do a better business than your competitors with that approach. Surely it's worth a try? Who knows, you might even start a revolution.

My fellow travelers and I will be rooting for you.

In defense of the Google chef

I'm on the road with very limited internet connectivity so I can't do the homework I normally would before posting this, so it's possible that what I'm about to say is based on unreliable reporting. There is a lot of grumbling in the blogosphere in the last day or two about reports that Zynga is using strong-arm tactics to claw back employee stock options. Zynga's argument is that they don't want people who joined the company early to get disproportionately large rewards compared to someone who joined the company later but contributed more. CNET reports, citing the WSJ:

Zynga executives were especially concerned with not creating a "Google chef" scenario.

That reference relates to Google's 2004 IPO when one of the company's chefs, who was hired in the firm's early days, walked away with $20 million worth of stock after the shares went public.

This really bothers me. It presumes that a chef cannot be a significant contributor to the success of a company. As someone who was there in Google's early days I can tell you from firsthand experience that this is not true. If someone at Zynga actually did say this on the record, they owe Charlie Ayers an apology.

Working at a startup is hard. The hours are long, the stress can be brutal, and there is no guarantee of success. In fact, the odds for a raw startup (which is what Google was when Charlie joined) are very much against you. I have no idea what Google's deal with Charlie was, but typically you take a pay cut for a shot at the brass ring. Charlie didn't make $20M for cooking, he made $20M for taking the risk that the company he was joining would fail and that he could end up five years older, unemployed, and with nothing to show for his trouble.

But it is not Zynga's failure to grasp this basic fact of startup economics that bothers me, it is their singling out of Charlie in particular because he's a chef. As someone who was there in the early days I can tell you that Charlie Ayers contributed more to Google's success that I did, and I was a senior software engineer.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that people get hungry, and when they do their productivity drops. As a company you have three options: make your employees deal with it themselves (bring sack lunches or go out), provide some basic but uninspiring food (stock the break room with snacks, have the odd pizza delivered), or you can, as Google did, provide them with really good food.

The latter option costs more, but it pays dividends. When the best restaurant in town is the company cafeteria it liberates your employees from having to worry about where their next meal is coming from (literally) and lets them focus on their work. For software engineering in particular, where getting into an uninterrupted mental "flow" is crucial to productivity, free quality food is a huge lever.

Providing quality food to an ever-growing roster of hungry engineers is not an easy task. Charlie and his staff worked harder on a light day than I ever did (or probably ever will). If you doubt me, take a job in a restaurant kitchen some time. Not only that, but the stakes are higher than most people realize. Feeding a few hundred people in a professional setting is not just taking the process of preparing a home-cooked meal and multiplying. If a software engineer screws up, the site goes down. But if a chef screws up, people get sick. In extreme cases, they die.

If I were to point out that no one ever got sick from eating Charlie's food most people would consider than to be damning with faint praise, but that is just a testament to how well Charlie did his job. Not only did he keep us well feed and free from salmonella, he inspired us. When I said that the best restaurant in town was Google's cafeteria that was no exaggeration. Charlies food was outstanding, day in and day out. (It still is. If you're in the Bay Area, do yourself a favor and have a meal at his restaurant.)

But Charlie's contribution to Google's early success went even well beyond that. Charlie was a friend and a cheerleader. Everyone at Google got to know him because everyone went through the lunch line, and Charlie was always there making sure everything was ship-shape. And Charlie got to know us, got to know our individual tastes and preferences, and bent over backwards to accommodate them, but never at the cost of compromising on his principles of making his offerings healthy and sustainable, principles he still adheres to. Being fed by Charlie was a privilege. It was inspiring. It was cool. It kept us going.

Don't tell me Charlie deserved his payday any less than the rest of us.

[UPDATE:] Found a link to the WSJ article that isn't behind a paywall. Just to be clear, I am not taking a position on Zynga's policy. I think renegotiating the compensation of underperforming employees could be a defensible practice (albeit fraught with all manner of peril). What I take issue with is citing Charlie in defense of such a policy. Here's the relevant passage:

Built into that arrangement [stock options] is the chance that ... some very early employees will end up with bigger windfalls than latecomers who contribute more to the company. Many in Silicon Valley cite an early-hired Google Inc. cook whose stock was worth $20 million after the firm's 2004 IPO.

Zynga attempted to avoid such pitfalls. In meetings last year, Zynga executives said they didn't want a "Google chef" situation, said a person with knowledge of the discussions.

So apparently it's not just Zynga casting Charlie as the poster child for the early employee who got more than he deserved. I do not doubt that some early employees end up not pulling their weight. But Charlie Ayers was not one of them.

Google ate my email address

Just now I did a routine Google search whose top result ended up being a thread on Google Groups. To my shock, when I tried to click on this link, Groups would not let me view the thread. Instead, I saw this message:

Update Email Address

You've changed the email addresses associated with your Google Account since the last time you visited Google Groups.
You need you to decide what to do with your subscriptions on your old email address.

Removed Addresses: ron [at] flownet [dot] com
Edit your Google Account Addresses
You can choose to re-add these addresses to this Google Account from the Google Account page.

Trick is, I hadn't made any changes to my account. Worrying that I'd been hacked, I started checking out all my settings but nothing seemed amiss. OK, no problem, I thought, I'll just add the flownet email back into my account. But when I tried that, I got this message:

There's already a Google Account associated with this email address. Please sign in; or, if you forgot your password, reset it now

Well, that's strange. Yes, there is an account associated with that address, but it's *my* account! Well, maybe this is just some kind of transient weirdness that will go away if I log out and log back in again. I tried that, and got this:

Your account has changed

This account has an alternate email address, ron@flownet.com. This address is no longer available because an organization has reserved this flownet.comemail address.

You are now signed in with your primary address. Except for the removal of the alternate email address, nothing has changed.

WTF?!? This address is not longer available? Because some (unnamed) organization has reserved it? How is that possible? I've owned the flownet.com domain since 1993. How can someone reserve a flownet.com address without my knowledge or approval?

This is a serious problem, because I am signed up to a ton of Groups under my flownet email. Until this gets sorted out I am completely cut off from all of these lists (including, ironically, a list of ex-Googlers who might be able to help me solve this problem).

I have been digging around trying to figure out what happened and how I can fix it for the better part of an hour now with no success. As best I can determine, it has something to do with Google plus (one of the help pages I landed on says, "If you signed up for Google+, your Accounts settings page might have been updated.") and the fact that I use Postini (now owned by Google) for spam filtering on flownet.com. (Since flownet.com is one of the older domains on the Internet it gets boatloads of spam.)

If anyone reading this can get the word to Google that they've screwed this up I'm sure many people would be very grateful. I can't be the only one having this problem.

Travelogue: The Grand Canyon of Jerusalem

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there are some pictures that can't be fully appreciated without a few words of explanation. This is one of them:



What you are looking at is an aqueduct carved into granite bedrock by Herod the Great around 20 BC. But that is not the impressive part. The Mediterranean is lousy with aqueducts. To understand the significance of this one we have to start with the Temple Mount.

The Temple Mount is an enormous plaza, about 37 acres in all. Normally when you build a plaza you find a more-or-less flat space and pave it. But Jerusalem is built on rolling hills. It has no flat spaces to speak of, so Herod made one by leveling the top of one of the hills. This in itself was no mean feat because the hills are made of granite. But the mount extends well beyond the boundaries of the flattened hill top. To create the extra area, Herod built enormous stone walls and filled in the voids between the inner part of the walls and the hill. (The Mount is so vast, in fact, that it actually covers two hills, not one. The second one is Mount Moriah where tradition has it that Abraham offered his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God, and Mohammed ascended into heaven to receive the Holy Q'uran. The tippy top of Mount Moriah just barely juts out of the top of the Temple Mount where it is covered by the Dome of the Rock. Alas the Dome is nowadays closed to non-Muslims, but if you convert to Islam you can go inside and see it.)

The Temple Mount would be an audacious feat of engineering even by modern standards. In its day it was bordering on the miraculous. Alas, its glory was short-lived. In 70 AD the Romans squished a Jewish rebellion and in retaliation destroyed the Temple. They tried to destroy the Temple Mount as well, but it proved to be quite literally rock-solid. Since then, 2000 years of weathering, earthquakes, and neglect (in the Byzantine era the Mount was used as the city dump) have left it largely intact.

But not untouched. In the intervening 2000 years the city of Jerusalem literally grew up around it. New buildings were built on top of the ruins of old ones, and the street level rose to the point where today it is nearly level with the top of the Mount. The southern and eastern walls are still visible today, but the western wall is almost entirely buried underneath 2000 years of construction and brick-a-brack. (There is no northern wall because that part of the Mount sits on the bedrock left behind after the hill was leveled.)

After Israel gained control of the Temple Mount in 1967 it opened the area to archaeological research. One of the excavations is called the Kotel Tunnel ("kotel" is the Hebrew word for "wall") and it is pretty much what the name says: a tunnel that runs the entire length of the western wall, a few dozen to a few hundred feet below the current street level.

As you walk north along the tunnel, the bedrock beneath gradually rises up to meet you. Herod, being somewhat anal-retentive about architecture and not content to leave well enough alone, had the bedrock chiseled away so that it looked like a continuation of the wall. This boundary between the actual wall and the faux wall carved into the bedrock is one of the many archaeological wonders that have been unearthed in this excavation.

So you're walking along north along this tunnel. The Wall is to your right. At some point it transitions almost imperceptibly from stone wall to carved bedrock. And then you get to the base of the northern end of the Temple Mount, what started out as the interior of a granite hilltop, a sight that until a few years ago, human eyes had not beheld for some 2000 years, give or take. You are standing on what 2000 years ago was street level (and indeed, you are standing on the original paving stones), but is now a few hundred feet underground.

And in front of you is the aqueduct, carved by human hands out of solid granite over 2000 years ago, now completely covered by the city several hundred feet above your head. It's a serious Indiana-Jones moment.

To say that my mind was blown would be quite the understatement. If you are ever in Jerusalem, the Kotel Tunnel is a sight not to be missed (unless you suffer from claustrophobia). Tours are by appointment only. There isn't much room in there, and some parts of the tunnel are so narrow that traffic can only flow one way at a time so they have to limit the number of people. But it's mostly surprisingly roomy in there. In many places, you are walking through the interiors of old buildings that were later converted to basement water cisterns as the city grew above them. So if you don't mind the odd tight squeeze and low ceiling I cannot recommend it too highly.

Travelogue: The Roma in Rhodes

Met this kid on the island of Rhodes:



He is a Roma, commonly known as gypsies. He posed for me for a euro.

The picture I didn't get (and I'm still kicking myself) was of his younger sister, who I'm guessing was about three. We found her in a similar circumstance: on the street, cradling a tiny accordion in her lap, playing with the coins in the bowl in front of her as if they were toys (which to her they probably were). It was such a heartbreaking sight that it didn't even occur to me to take her picture until we'd gone well past her. When I finally came to my senses and returned to the spot, her older brother had taken over on accordion detail.

A conversation with God

I have long advocated the creation of an atheistic theology. Yes, I know it sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it's not. It is simply an expression of rational scientific thought using the language of myth. The reason for doing it is that, like it or not, myths are a very effective marketing tool, and it's high time that we rationalists availed ourselves of it. Our failure to create effective myths amounts to unilateral disarmament in the war of ideas.

There have been a few half-hearted efforts in this direction, including the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Raymond Smullyan's famous essay Is God a Taoist?. But these are self-identified as fiction and parody, and are therefore self-undermining. Even my own suggestion of adopting Loki as the foundation of an atheistic myth suffers somewhat from this problem.

Today I learned to my great delight that a fellow named Harry Stottle is in fact an atheist who has actually talked to God and written an account of his experience. Highly recommended reading. It is a rare privilege to have (from a cosmological perspective) a front-row seat to divine revelation.

RIP John McCarthy

John McCarthy, one of the most influential pioneers of computer science, has died. His main claim to fame was the invention (some would say discovery) of the Lisp programming language. It is hard to overstate the impact that Lisp has had on the programming world and on me personally. I discovered Lisp while I was still in high school (via P-Lisp running on an Apple ][ ) and it is one of the things that made me decide to pursue a career in artificial intelligence (a term that McCarthy coined). Even today it is with no small amount of regret that I note the ironic juxtaposition of two facts: 1) Lisp is one of the most influential inventions/discoveries in the history of mankind's intellectual progress, and 2) it is hardly ever used by anyone any more. Lisp is the Latin of computer science. Parts of its essence lives on in Python and Ruby and Javascript and Haskell and pretty much every other programming language in widespread use today (except C and C++). But Lisp itself is a mostly dead language [See update below]. I wish it were otherwise. The world would be a better place.

But McCarthy's legacy also has a little-noted dark side which also influenced my career, but in a much less positive way. McCarthy was not only one of the pioneers of the study of AI, but also an avid proponent of a particular school of thought about how human intelligence works. McCarthy believed that human intelligence could be modeled as a formal logic. That hypothesis turns out to be (almost certainly) wrong, and the evidence that it is wrong was overwhelming even in McCarthy's heyday. And yet McCarthy steadfastly refused to abandon this hypothesis. Well into his nominal retirement, and quite possibly to his dying day, he was still working on trying to formulate formal logics to model human thought processes.

The way human mental processes actually work, it turns out, is (again, almost certainly) according to statistical processes, not formal logics. The reason I keep hedging with "almost certainly" is that the jury is still out. We have not yet cracked the AI puzzle, but vastly more progress has been made in recent years using statistical approaches that has ever been made using logic. Very few (if indeed any) logic-based systems have ever been successfully deployed on non-toy problems. Statistics-based applications are being deployed on a regular basis nowadays, with Siri being the most recent example.

It took decades to make this switch, arguably due in no small measure to McCarthy's influence. One of the many consequences of this delay was the infamous AI-winter, which lead more or less directly to the commercial demise of Lisp. That the same person was responsible both for the invention of such a powerful idea and for its demise has to be one of the greatest ironies in human intellectual history.

It is important to remember that even great men can be wrong at times, sometimes spectacularly so. There is no shame in this. The human has yet to be born whose rightful epitaph is "He was right about everything." But John McCarthy's legacy in particular calls all of us mere mortals to a greater degree of humility. The world would be a better place if more people could acknowledge the possibility that even their most cherished beliefs might be wrong.

[UPDATE:] After posting this I felt the need to hedge my assessment of Lisp as "mostly dead." Lisp is not dead. In fact, it is probably more vibrant now than at any time in the last 20 years. But by comparison to other languages Lisp has a vanishingly small mindshare. To cite but one concrete example, of 300 or so Y Combinator companies there is (AFAIK) only one whose code is written in Lisp.

Notwithstanding all that, if you're interested in programming I really encourage you to learn Lisp. It is still the best programming language out there.

Travelogue: What's up with the splatty toys?

We've been seeing street vendors selling these things everywhere:



It's a toy that consists of a sphere of jello-like material. You throw it against a flat surface where it lands with a splat! and spreads out into a thin film. Then over the course of the next 10-20 seconds it slowly creeps back to its original spheroid shape. Some of them have little appendages like eyes and a nose so that they look kinda sorta like a face.

That's it. That's all these things do. Splat! Creeeeeeeeeee....eeep. There's not a single place we've been to that hasn't had at least one guy -- more often several -- standing there throwing these things at a board laying on the ground over and over and over again. I can't imagine what the appeal is. I have never seen anyone actually buy one. And yet we've seen dozens of people apparently trying to make a living by selling them, so the actual number of splatty-toy resellers is certainly much higher -- probably hundreds, perhaps thousands. How big could the market for these things possibly be?

It's baffling.

Woman arrested for reading the Constitution in an airport

Daily Kos has the first-person account in gory detail. The part that struck me most is near the end:

[My husband] has for years tried to cure me of my delusion that there is some democracy left in the United States.

I am beginning to be cured of that delusion myself. :-(

KC Fed President: Big banks are a threat to capitalism

Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, says that big banks are a threat to capitalism.

The U.S. economy is the most successful in the history of the world. It achieved this success because it is based on the rules of capitalism, in which private ownership dominates markets and individuals reap the rewards of their success. However, for capitalism to work, businesses, including financial firms, must be allowed, or compelled, to compete freely and openly and must be held accountable for their failures. Only under these conditions do markets objectively allocate credit to those businesses that provide the highest value. For most of our history, the United States held fast to these rules of capitalism. It maintained a relatively open banking and financial system with thousands of banks from small community banks to large global players that allocated credit under this system. As late as 1980, the U.S. banking industry was relatively unconcentrated, with 14,000 commercial banks and the assets of the five largest amounting to 29 percent of total banking organization assets and 14 percent of GDP.

Today, we have a far more concentrated and less competitive banking system. There are fewer banks operating across the country, and the five largest institutions control more than half of the industry’s assets, which is equal to almost 60 percent of GDP. The largest 20 institutions control 80 percent of the industry’s assets, which amounts to about 86 percent of GDP.

...the problem with [Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs)] is they are fundamentally inconsistent with capitalism. They are inherently destabilizing to global markets and detrimental to world growth. So long as the concept of a SIFI exists, and there are institutions so powerful and considered so important that they require special support and different rules, the future of capitalism is at risk and our market economy is in peril.

Amen, brother Hoenig.

Politics: catching up on Glenn Greenwald

I'm using a rare bit of down-time to catch up on the news. I cannot recommend Glenn Greenwald highly enough. It sometimes seems that he is the only voice of sanity left in the whole of the news media. Time is tight, and internet connectivity is flaky, so I can't write much well-considered commentary. Instead, I'll just point to two particularly noteworthy recent items and encourage you to read them in their entirety:

A remaining realm of American excellence

When President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden on the evening of May 1, he said something which I found so striking at the time and still do: “tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history.” That sentiment of national pride had in the past been triggered by putting a man on the moon, or discovering cures for diseases, or creating technology that improved the lives of millions, or transforming the Great Depression into a thriving middle class, or correcting America’s own entrenched injustices. Yet here was President Obama proclaiming that what should now cause us to be “reminded” of our national greatness was our ability to hunt someone down, pump bullets into his skull, and then dump his corpse into the ocean.

What are those OWS people so angry about?

... growing wealth and income inequality, by itself, would not spark massive protests if there were a perception that the top 1% (more accurately thought of as the top .1%) had acquired their gains honestly and legitimately. Americans in particular have been inculcated for decades with the belief that even substantial outcome inequality is acceptable (even desirable) provided that it is the by-product of fairly applied rules. What makes this inequality so infuriating (aside from the human suffering it is generating) is precisely that it is illegitimate: it is caused and bolstered by decisively unfair application of laws and rules, by undemocratic control of the political process by the nation’s oligarchs, and by a full-scale shield of immunity that allows them — and only them — to engage in the most egregious corruption and even criminality without any consequence (other than a further entrenching of their prerogatives and ill-gotten gains).

Travelogue: I'm surrounded by Cretans!

Not to be confused with cretins :-) Yes, we're in Crete. Heraklion to be precise. Not much to say about this place. It's perfectly pleasant, but unremarkable compared to other places we've been. Its main claim to fame is the proximity of the ruins of a 3500 year old palace, which is, I must confess, amazingly old, but we're starting to get a little burned out on archaeology. Europe is lousy with antiquities. Really, the only reason I'm writing about Heraklion at all is that I couldn't resist the opportunity to write the headline :-)

Travelogue: More from the hidden-gems department

Today's hidden gem is Monemvasia, Greece, a tiny Byzantine fortress on the Mediterranean that is being lovingly restored to maintain its original look-and-feel. It's like stepping into a time machine. Motorized vehicles are not allowed. In fact, they are not physically possible. All the building materials (except the local stone) are carried in on horseback or by hand, as are all other supplies.

Monemvasia is situated on a giant rock that is connected to the mainland by a causeway. At the top are the ruins of another town that once housed 20,000 people. The view is nothing short of breathtaking.



I don't normally do commercial plugs here, but I'm going to make an exception for the Likinia hotel, a hidden gem within a hidden gem. The exterior looks like a medieval stone building (and it is) but the interior has been recently remodeled and looks like a top-flight modern boutique hotel. The proprietor is a very friendly old Greek woman who I have no doubt takes very good care of her guests. Her English was not the best, but it was a damn sight better than my Greek.

If you do decide to stay here, pack light. You'll have to carry all your luggage several hundred yards over uneven cobblestone alleys and staircases to get here. But I promise you it will be worth it.

Travelogue: All quiet on the eastern front

The country of Greece has been more or less shut down by a general strike as the country's economy teeters on a precipice that could plunge the Eurozone, and potentially the whole world, into a major economic depression. But you'd never know if from reading American news sources. The NYT front page, which includes a story about how Mitt Romney cared for his lawn (and no, I'm not kidding), makes no mention of it. I can find no mention of it on any other American news outlet. (CNN doesn't even mention it under World News!) The only coverage I can find at all is on Reuters and Al Jazeera. Reuters reports that there are 400 dock workers demonstrating outside the port, but I can neither see nor hear any sign of them. In fact, here in Piraeus everything is remarkably quiet. No ships are coming or going. (We had to leave our previous port two hours early so that we would make it in at 3AM before the strike began. It's unclear if we're going to be able to get out again.) There are no airplanes in the sky. There are a few cars on the road, but traffic is light. It is eerily reminiscent of the days following 9/11.

[UPDATE:] The story finally made the front page of the NYT.

In case you're wondering, we saw no hint of any violence. We did go into Athens on one of the hop-on-hop-off tour busses (which are apparently staffed by non-union workers). There we were able to visit a refreshingly crowd-free Acropolis, though we had to admire it from a distance because the site itself was closed. But the Acropolis is surrounded by a lovely park, which we had pretty much to ourselves.

Travelogue: the fine line between irony and serendipity

We had been having a stupendous run of luck with the weather. For two weeks we had nothing but clear blue skies. In fact, one day I got a sunburn. In Europe. In October.

Then two days ago our luck ran out. We arrived in Amalfi to some ominous looking clouds and a pretty good-sized swell. Some time later the captain announced that it was too rough to be able to operate the tenders to shore, that he was canceling the stop, and we would have a day at sea en route to our next destination, Taormina.

To describe my reaction to this news I have to rewind just a bit: we had actually been to Amalfi earlier on this same trip. We're on multiple legs of a cruise whose itinerary was really designed to be done one leg at a time, so we have a number of repeat destinations. The idea was to use our first stop to get an overview of the place, and then the second to do a deep-dive into whatever we had found most interesting the first time around.

On our first stop in Amalfi I found a secret route out of town. Yes, I know how weird that must sound, but only if you've never been to Amalfi. The town, you see, is quite literally built on a cliff. Actually, it's built into a little canyon carved into a cliff, but let's not quibble too much over semantics. The point is, there is absolutely no level ground around Amalfi. Nada. Zilch. Zip.

So at first glance it appears that there is exactly one way in and out of town. It's a road that was laboriously carved into the limestone in the 1800's, and is today occupied by vehicles that the road's designers could not possibly have imagined in their wildest dreams, everything from scooters to tour busses. Lots and lots of tour busses. So many, in fact, that they are constrained by law to only go one direction. There are many, many places along the Amalfi road where it would be physically impossible for two busses to pass one another.

All that diesel exhaust makes the Amalfi road a not-very-pleasant route to walk. But it has some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, and I really wanted to get some pictures without having to shoot through the window of a bus. So I decided to take my life in my hands and walk out of town.

A quarter mile or so out I noticed a footpath that crossed the road and decided on a whim to find out where it went. To make a long story short, it turned out to go back into town, and connect with a whole network of footpaths that criss-cross the slopes all along the Amalfi coast. The access to this path from the center of Amalfi is so well hidden that while I'm pretty sure I could find it again, I could not describe how to get there to anyone else.

So on the one hand, I was really looking forward to showing my discovery to Nancy and some other friends we have made on the boat. On the other hand, we had been touring non-stop for two weeks, and the pace was starting to get a little grueling. So part of me was disappointed, and part of me was relieved that we would get a much-needed vacation from our vacation.

So we headed South.

Those of you of a certain age will remember the theme song of a television series called "Gilligan's Island" with the line, "The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed." Except for the ship not being so tiny, that's pretty much what happened. The weather deteriorated rapidly, and long before we got to Taormina it was announced that that stop was being cancelled as well, and we would be heading instead for the safety of the deepwater port at Messina, where we finally arrived around 8PM after passing through one of the most spectacular lightning storms I have ever seen in my life.

Now, there is a reason that Messina was not on the original itinerary. It was once a charming Sicilian town, but then it was destroyed in an earthquake and rebuilt as a depressing modern monstrosity. There is graffiti everywhere. A few pre-earthquake buildings stand forlornly amidst a sea of utterly bland cinder-block apartments. It is hard to say which did more damage: the earthquake, or the urban planners who oversaw the reconstruction.

Oh well, at least it's not raining, I thought to myself as I stepped out onto the balcony to assess the weather. And then I heard a sort of "chuff" sound from down below. I looked over the railing, and there were two pilot whales right below me, almost close enough to touch.



Yeah, I know, the photo doesn't look like much. But you have to remember that this photo was taken well after their initial appearance, after I'd had a chance to get over the shock of seeing whales in an industrial harbor at all, let alone practically under my feet, and run inside and grab my camera.

It was by far the best look I've ever had at a whale. And but for some bad weather, I never would have seen them.

Postscript: we left Messina and promptly sailed into the gnarliest storm I have ever experienced. Chaise lounges were flying across the pool deck. We found out later that the wind had been a sustained 70 knots true. That put the storm solidly in the range of a category 1 hurricane. Not an experience I ever care to repeat.

Today the wind is down to a mere 40-50 knots, but the weather at our next port (Santorini) is looking dicey as well. And to top it all off, this leg ends in Athens, where a general strike is scheduled to begin the day we arrive.

I overheard a truly heartbreaking lament from one passenger who, along with his family, is only on board for this one leg. This was supposed to have been their trip of a lifetime. They scrimped and saved for years to be able to afford it. And now they will likely be spending more than half of their time stuck aboard the ship in the rain.

Sometimes Loki has a truly perverse sense of irony.

Travelogue: A 500 year old practical joke?

We did the whirlwind tour of Rome today, which included a tour of the Vatican museum and the famous Sistine Chapel. As I was looking at the famous Michelangelo frescos on the ceiling it suddenly occurred to me: that dude is mooning God!



I did a little research afterwards and it turns out that's not quite right. That dude is God, and He's mooning us. (You can tell because he's wearing (or not) the same pink robes and has the same grey hair that He has in all the other panels.) The best part: the title of the panel is -- and I am not making this up -- The Creation of the Sun and the Moon.

Michelangelo must have had a sense of humor.

What would you have done instead?

Christopher Hitchens, who is normally a rational and reasoned man, somehow manages to consistently lose his rudder when it comes to the war on terror. Not exactly his words, but the headline of his most recent piece in Slate is: Those who protest the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki have to say what they would have done instead.

Very well, I will tell you Mr. Hitchens.

I would have filed formal charges against Mr. al-Awlaki. I would have sought an indictment from a grand jury. I wold have given Mr. al-Alawki the opportunity to return home to answer the charges against him. If he failed to take advantage of the opportunity to defend himself (which he almost certainly would have) I would have tried him in absentia. I would have waited until a jury returned a guilty verdict. Then -- and only then -- I would have ordered him blown to kingdom come.

I would have done these things to show to the world that we are a nation of laws, not of the whims of men. I would have done these things to plant our flag firmly on the moral high ground. I would have done these things because they are the right thing to do.

Glen Greenwald said it best as he usually does:

[A]s the Bush years proved, the American population is well-trained to screech Kill Him!! the minute the Government points to someone and utters the word “Terrorist“ (especially when that someone is brown with a Muslim-ish name, Muslim-ish clothes, and located in one of those Bad Muslim countries). If Our Government Leaders say that someone named “Anwar al-Awlaki” — who looks like this, went to a Bad Muslim-ish place like Yemen, and speaks ill of America — is a Bad Terrorist, then that settles that. It’s time to kill him. Given those “facts,” only a “civil libertarian absolutist” would think that things like “evidence” and “trials” are needed before accepting his guilt and justifying his state-sanctioned murder.

...

The most ignorant claim justifying the Awlaki killing is that he committed “treason” and thus gave up citizenship; there’s this document called the “Constitution” that lays out the steps the Government is required to take before punishing a citizen for “treason” (“No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court“); suffice to say, it’s not met by the President secretly declaring someone guilty backed up by leaked, anonymous accusations to the press.

Worth reading the whole thing.

A final -- and telling -- quote from Hitchens:

Is a synagogue in town the next development you truly welcome in the spirit of “inclusiveness” and “diversity”?

Except he didn't use the word "synagogue" of course, he used the word "mosque." I suppose Mr. Hitchens thinks it's OK to make this invidious query about a mosque because terrorists are muslims or some such thing. Hitchens of all people should recognize this logical fallacy. Even if all terrorists are muslims (which they aren't but let's suspend disbelief for the sake of argument), it does not follow that all, or even most, muslims are terrorists, despite the fact that vast numbers of Americans are more than willing to draw that inference. Most of Hitchens's writings are dedicated to debunking such logical errors, which makes it all the more tragic that he of all people is promulgating it in this case.

Travelogue: more from the hidden gems department

Today's well kept Adriatic secret is the Croatian island of Korčula (pronounced KOR-chew-la).



If you want to get away from the touristic hordes, this is a good place to do it.