A simple solution to credit card fraud (and why you won't see it any time soon)

This is the first in what will probably be a very long series of articles.  Ultimately, this is the beginning of the story of why I stopped writing nearly a year ago.  TL;DR: I learned some things about how the world works that I couldn't figure out how to write about without coming across like a paranoid loon, and I couldn't get them far enough out of my head to write cogently about anything else.  I'm still not sure I can tell this story without sounding like a paranoid loon, but I've decided to take that chance.

TL;DR2: There are some fairly straightforward technical solution to the problem of credit card fraud.  Some of them are new and innovative, while others are already in widespread use throughout the world, but not in the U.S.  But none of these solutions will be deployed in the U.S. any time soon, not because it's hard, but because the established players in the financial industry won't allow it.

Some of this gets technically complicated, but I'm going to try to keep it as simple as I can.  Part of the solution to the problem has to be to educate people about what is going on, so I hope this post and the ones that follow will reach a broad audience.  If you're one of my technical readers, I apologize if some of what follows sounds condescending.

So let's start with the problem, and the solution.

The fundamental problem with credit cards is that the protocol they use is fundamentally insecure.  To conduct a transaction with a credit card you have to give information to the person you're transacting with.  In particular, you have to give them your card number.  The problem is that this information is not bound to the transaction you are conducting.  It is reusable.  Once someone knows your card number they can use it to conduct any transaction they choose.  There is no security built into the system at all.  It relies entirely on trust.

This was OK back in the 1950s (or the 1930s, or 1887 depending on how you count) when credit cards were first invented.  Back then you had to be physically present to conduct a transaction.  The risk of getting caught if you decided to try to commit credit card fraud was high enough that it was (mostly) an effective deterrent.

In the 1960s merchants began to accept credit cards for orders placed over the telephone.  This decreased the risk of getting caught, and fraud began to be a major problem.  Those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 70s will remember merchants leafing through paper directories of compromised credit card numbers issued on a regular basis by the card companies.

With the advent of the internet and e-comerce in the 1990s, the risk of getting caught committing credit card fraud dropped essentially to zero, especially if you were located in a different country.  The result was the beginning of the epidemic of card fraud and identity theft we see today.

There are technological solutions to this problem.  The most effective (IMHO) is a technology that was first invented in the 1970s and has since become widely used called public-key cryptography.  I don't want to get too deeply into the technological weeds at this point in the story, so for now just take my word for it: using this technology, it is possible to design protocols that allow the information exchanged to conduct a financial transaction to be strongly bound to that one transaction so it can't be reused.  Deploying this technology would essentially solve the problem of credit card fraud, and save the world's economy billions of dollars a year.

So why hasn't it been done?

It's not because no one has tried.  I took a serious whack at it starting in December 2008.  I finally folded up the tent on that effort in March of last year (shortly after I stopped writing, and the two events are not unrelated).  The story of that effort is long and complicated, but the upshot is this: the financial industry has erected barriers to entry that are much more effective than I ever dreamed possible in an ostensibly democratic and capitalistic society.  It is not just me who has failed to deploy public-key encryption technology in the United States, no one has been able to do it.  I don't know how many serious attempts there have been besides my own, but I do know that public-key technology has been successfully deployed in other parts of the world, notably Asia and Europe.  Furthermore, this is no secret.  I wouldn't say that everyone knows it (one of the shocking things I learned is that there are profoundly disturbing levels of ignorance about how the financial system works even among people who work in the industry) but it is widely known.

Why has the credit card industry not deployed this technology?  Surely all this fraud is costing them money, so they have a strong incentive to fix it?  Well, no.  Fraud isn't costing them money, it is costing you money.  All of the costs of processing credit cards, including the cost of fraud, is passed on by the card companies and the banks to the merchants, who in turn pass the cost on to you, the consumer.  Worse, until very recently, merchants were contractually forbidden from letting you know that these costs were being passed on to you.  In a free market, the way this would sort itself out is that merchants would charge extra for paying with a credit card to reflect the extra costs associated with them.  But until last year, this was forbidden, not by law, but by the card companies' terms of service.

Even just this little corner of the problem is far from being resolved.  It's complicated.  The whole situation is horribly, horribly complicated, which is one of the things that makes it so hard to write about, and why I wedged on it for nearly a year.  (Maybe I'm still wedged.  We'll see.)

I'm going to leave it at that for now.  This story is going to be a long haul.  But I'll give you a sneak preview of things to come by pointing out two facts: 1) no one has gone to prison as a result of the sub-prime disaster.  No one has even been brought to trial.  And 2) Hong Kong Savings Bank was recently caught red-handed laundering vast amounts of money for drug cartels over a ten-year period.  The punishment they received was a fine amounting to about a month's worth of profits.

Neither of those things surprises me any more.

A brief program note and market survey

I'm getting to the end of the Antarctica story, and so the Ramblings will soon be turning to more serious matters.  In particular, I'm going to start tackling the long, long story of why I stopped writing for nearly a year.  One of the reasons that it has taken me so long to get to this point is that telling this story entails some risk.  There are certain advantages to staying off the radar.  But I can't seem to resist the urge to tilt at windmills.

As a sneak preview of what's coming, here's a story that appeared today on Bloomberg:

On television, in interviews and in meetings with investors, executives of the biggest U.S. banks -- notably JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon -- make the case that size is a competitive advantage. It helps them lower costs and vie for customers on an international scale. Limiting it, they warn, would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance. 

So what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers? 

Granted, it’s a hard concept to swallow. It’s also crucial to understanding why the big banks present such a threat to the global economy.

That was the program note.  Now the market survey part: suppose I told you that the situation in the banking industry is even worse, perhaps even a good deal worse, than what the Bloomberg story indicates, would you be inclined to believe me, or dismiss me as being paranoid?

The reason I want to know is that this story needs to be told differently depending on whether I writing for a sympathetic or a skeptical audience, and because so many of you seem to be lurking I really don't know.  So please take a moment to do the following: down at the bottom of this post you will find four checkboxes labelled "Reactions:"  Please click on one of them depending on how you reacted to the question I posed above.  And if you don't have a strong feeling about it one way or the other, please click on "Read it" so that I can get some idea of how big my audience is.  (And please feel free to use those buttons on other posts as well.  It really helps me when I try to come up with things to write about.)

Thanks in advance.

[UPDATE] If you're reading this on a newsfeed, the link to the Blogger page with the reaction buttons is here.

[Travelogue] Antarctica, part 8

We spent the next few days slowly cruising south along the west coast of the antarctic peninsula, though never making landfall on the continent itself, only on the surrounding islands.  One of these, Deception Island, is an active volcano.  The caldera has a narrow opening just big enough to squeeze a ship through called Neptune's Bellows.  As we approached we hit a snow squall, and I grabbed this photo of one of the passengers out in it in shorts and slippers.

There are thermal springs that bubble up through the sand and send hot steam into the air, giving the place an otherworldly feel.

Some people actually went swimming here, in a masochistic tourist ritual called the antarctic plunge.  Unfortunately, I decided to give it a miss, so I don't have any good pictures of the crazy people in the water.

I particularly like this photo because it looks like I've run it through a sepia filter or something, but I haven't.  This is what the place really looked like:

The next few days were more of the same: lots of penguins, lots of ice.

To give you some idea of the scale, look at the little black dots in the lower left hand corner of the iceberg in the photo above.  Those are penguins.  Here's a close up:

How big was the Chelyabinsk meteor?

There is a huge discrepancy in reports of the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor.  Some apparently reliable sources put it at 10-30 tons, while others have it at 7,000-10,000 tons.  This is an enormous discrepancy.  Can we figure out which one is correct?

All accounts agree that the speed of the meteor was 30,000-40,000 miles per hour, which is pretty much the going rate for meteors.  That works out to about 15,000 meters per second.  The kinetic energy of a moving object is 1/2 times the mass times the velocity squared.  For this rough calculation we can ignore the 1/2 (we're looking at a two-order-of-magnitude discrepancy here).  So a ten ton (10,000 kg) meteor moving at 15,000 m/s has an energy of about 10^12 Joules.  That's less than one kiloton of TNT, not nearly enough to cause the kind of widespread damage that was reported.

So the 7000-10,000 ton figure is almost certainly the correct one.

It's a doggone mystery

A study has confirmed what dog owners around the world already know: dogs can recognize other dogs:

Dogs pick out faces of other dogs, irrespective of breeds, among human and other domestic and wild animal faces and can group them into a category of their own. They do that using visual cues alone, according to new research by Dr. Dominique Autier-Dérian from the LEEC and National Veterinary School in Lyon in France and colleagues. Their work, the first to test dogs' ability to discriminate between species and form a "dog" category in spite of the huge variability within the dog species, is published online in Springer's journal Animal Cognition.

If you think about it, a modern dog's ability to visually recognize other dogs is a deep mystery.  Most extant dog breeds have only existed for a few hundred years, and many bear very little resemblance to anything in a dog's ancestral environment.  That's not nearly enough time for an innate ability to recognize dogs to have evolved.  So there are only two possibilities:

1. The ability to recognize other breeds was somehow wired into the brains of dogs before those breeds actually existed, or

2.  Dogs somehow learn how to recognize other dogs, including breeds that they may never before have encountered

It would be interesting to design a study to try to suss this out.  Either way, it's pretty cool that dogs (and people too, for that matter) can recognize these:

When the training set in the ancestral environment looked like this:

It's a question of when, not if

Unless you are living in a cave, you will have heard by now of the huge meteor exploding over Russia.  Except that it wasn't particularly huge, and it didn't explode.  The Chelyabinsk meteor weighed about ten tons, [UPDATE: Nature says it was 7000 tons.  That's a big discrepancy, but maybe they meant 7000 kilograms.  I'm trying to find out which source was wrong. and the "explosion" was just the shock wave that it produced as it plowed through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds.  If the meteor was made of iron (which it almost certainly was) it would have been about a meter or two in diameter.  [UPDATE2: Nature was right, it was 7-10 thousand tons.  That would make it about 10 meters in diameter.]

Those are not the scary rocks.

The scary rocks are the ones that are 100 meters or so in diameter, about the size of a football field.  Those are scary because they are too small to be seen with ground-based telescopes, but when -- not if -- one of those hits it will without a doubt ruin your day no matter where on earth you happen to be.  Watch the videos of the Chelyabinsk event and then imagine a rock that weighs a million times more.  Such a rock hits the earth on average once every 10,000 years.  A Chelyabinsk-sized rock hits every 100 years or so.  The last one was in 1908, so this one was right about on schedule.  (Tunguska was almost certainly a comet, not an asteroid, but the energy released was comparable -- Tunguska was probably a little higher.  [UPDATE] I got this wrong.  Tunguska was a LOT bigger, but because it disintegrated in the atmosphere over an unpopulated area it didn't cause much damage other than a lot of toppled trees.).

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was about ten kilometers in diameter.  Those hit every hundred million years or so.  They're pretty rare, and they're big enough to see, so we know that we aren't in any imminent danger.  (Still, it's a little sobering to think that about forty of those have hit the earth since it was formed!)

The little rocks, like the one that hit Chelyabinsk, mostly burn up in the atmosphere or cause minor damage.

But, like I said, the 100-meter-sized rocks are the scary ones.  There are a lot of them, and they're hard to see so we don't know where the vast majority of them are.  An impact by a 100-meter asteroid would not be an extinction-level event, but it could be a civilization-ender.  It would without a doubt be the worst natural disaster in recorded history by a huge margin.  If it hit in water (the most likely scenario) it would cause 1000-meter-high tsunamis. For comparison, the tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear plant was 10 meters high.

There is about a one percent chance that this will happen in your grandchildren's lifetime.

Take a moment to think about that.

Happily, there is actually something we can do about it.  We have the technology to find and even divert 100-meter-sized asteroids.  And it isn't even very expensive in the grand and glorious scheme of things, in the neighborhood of $500 million or so.  That's less than half the cost of a single B-2 bomber.

I don't proselytize much here on the Ramblings, but in this case I'll make an exception: if you care about the future of civilization, I urge you to go to the web site of the B612 Foundation (the name comes from the home of the Little Prince) and, at a minimum, sign up for their mailing list.  B612 was founded by a pair of NASA astronauts, Ed Lu and Rusty Schweickart.  They know what they are doing, and they have a plan that will work -- if it can get funded.  The more people they have on their mailing list, the more likely they are to be able to attract the attention of a person or institution capable of providing that funding.

So do your bit to save the planet: sign up for B612's mailing list.  Do it now.  And if you're really feeling motivated, make a donation.  Every little bit helps.

[Travelogue] Antarctica part 7

On our second day at sea heading for the Antarctic peninsula I had a follow up meeting with Richard Dawkins to talk about the proposal I had written up for him a few days earlier.  TL;DR version: he was not interested in participating or even endorsing the idea, but he would be willing to provide some introductions, most notably to The Clergy Project, where he thought I might find a more sympathetic audience.

Since neither of us had anyplace to go I decided to try an audacious experiment.  About three years ago, while on another cruise, I wrote an imaginary dialog between myself and a prominent YouTube atheist who goes by the handle QualiaSoup.  It advances an argument for the proposition that the idea of God has many (but of course not all) of the same properties that God would have if he existed.  Thus one can plausibly claim that God exists if one defines God as an idea, an axiom that many theists would subscribe to.  It's a bit of a stretch, but I think the argument actually holds up pretty well, even after all this time.

I decided to try this argument out on Richard to see how far I got.  (NB: I told him up front what I wanted to do and asked him if he was OK with it.)  TL;DR: I got a lot further than I was expecting to.  I got a little hung up on the circularity of redefining God as the-idea-of-God and had to on-the-fly coin the terms God1 (a supernatural being, which does not exist) and God2 (the idea of God1, which does exist, and which can have real effects, some of them beneficial).  But in the end I ran out of steam and could not convince him that there was a point, that there was a useful distinction to be drawn between fiction and falsehood.  (I think his exact words were, "But what's the point if it isn't true?")  So in the end I took my best shot at reforming Richard Dawkins and I failed.  But I'm grateful that fate afforded me the opportunity.  And the some of the leads he gave me are still active and may result in something some day.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, the ship had to divert its course to the north because there was much more sea ice coming up from the Weddell Sea than had been expected (almost certainly a consequence of global warming).  Our captain (the coolest captain ever) had an open bridge policy, so I spent some time there watching the crew dodge icebergs. There's a whole terminology associated with ice.  Little pieces of ice are called growlers (I guess because of the sound they make as they scrape against the hull).  Slightly larger chunks of ice are called bergy bits (no, I am not making this up) but I was never entirely clear on where the dividing line was.  There are also lots of different kinds of icebergs, but I won't bore you with the details.

As a result of the unexpected ice our scheduled stop at Elephant Island had to be cancelled and instead we ended up at another one of the South Shetland Islands (I can't remember which one now, but I think it was Nelson Island).  We didn't land there, but we did get a zodiac tour.  I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

(BTW, in case you haven't already realized it, you can click on these images and get larger versions.)

Funny you should mention that...

Tony Mach, in a recent comment, wrote:

I find it nice to read your perspective about all things related to economy, and how it is one big capitalistic cluster-fark.

First, thanks for the feedback, Tony.  Because this blog doesn't really have a theme its sometimes hard to decide what to write about.

But the economy is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, and also related in a very intimate way to the very, very long story of why I stopped writing nearly a year ago.  The TL;DR version is that at the end of a multi-year process I came to realize some things about how the world actually works under the hood that left me in a full-blown existential crisis.

I'm still struggling with how (or even whether) to tell the whole story.  But in the meantime, here's a data point.

[Travelogue] Antarctica, part 6

One of the  more annoying aspects of the cruise was the schedule.  There were 200 passengers on the ship, but because of environmental regulations only 100 could go ashore at once, so we had to go in shifts, and they would try to get in two landings a day.  So the early shift was pretty frickin' early, at least by my night-owl standards.

Trick is, they would broadcast a wakeup call over the loudspeaker into our cabins in the mornings, but they had no way of selecting which cabins got the announcement.  Everyone was awakened bright and early whether or not we were on the first shift.  So after we left South Georgia heading out across the Southern Ocean I was really looking forward to sleeping in.  We had two days at sea before reaching Elephant Island.

So I was pretty frickin' annoyed when at 6AM on the first day the captain came on to loudspeaker and said, "Ladies and gentlemen I apologize for waking you up but we are approaching a very special iceberg.  You really should get up and have a look at it."

Are you fucking kidding me?  We're heading to Antarctica.  Icebergs are going to be a dime a dozen.  This had better be the best damned iceberg the world has ever seen.  Grumble grumble.

I dragged myself out of bed and over to the window.

Holy shit.

It was a mile wide, and as you can see, it had spectacular arches around the entire perimeter.

I said to Nancy, "You really should have a look at this.  It's worth getting up for."

Nancy said, "Mmmrmrmmmrrmm...."

But the captain didn't leave her a choice.  A few minutes later he came on the PA again and said, "You need to get up to see this iceberg.  This is the most spectacular iceberg I have ever seen.  You can sleep when we get back to Ushuaia.  I can hardly contain myself!"

Yes, he really said that.  I wanted to nominate him for Coolest Captain Ever.

What is it about the CSS thing?

Good grief!  Since I started blogging again two months ago I've averaged about 1 comment per post.  (That's pretty disheartening by the way.  Sometimes I stare at all the "No comments" at the bottom of my posts and wonder if anyone is reading this.)  But this post that I wrote four years ago is still getting comments!  253 of them and counting!  I got two new comments on that post just today.  (I decided not to publish one because it was too rude.)

Maybe I should just stick to writing about CSS and jerking people's chains. :-(

BTW, I have not been keeping up with the latest developments in CSS, but I just did a little Googling and found this post from 2011, two years after I wrote my "CSS should not be used for layout" post.  It makes me feel completely vindicated.

This is what leadership looks like

For those of you who may have forgotten since we see so little of it nowadays:

There's also a transcript of the English translation for those of you who don't want to take the time to watch the video, but I think it's worthwhile even if you don't understand Hebrew. This is an extremely rare example of politician telling an unsympathetic audience something they don't want to hear, and doing it brilliantly. Well worth the time.

[Travelogue] Antarctica, part 5, or My Date with Richard

On Christmas day the weather turned 'round on us again and it was so windy we couldn't make any landings at all. We ended up doing a scenic tour of Drygalski fjord, and even that turned out to be a little dicey because of how hard the wind was blowing.  We learned later that the boat doing the same tour a few days behind us wasn't able to make any landings on South Georgia at all.  Such is the way of the Antarctic.

So we headed to sea, towards the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula.  We wouldn't see land again for three days, which gave me plenty of opportunities to chat with my fellow passenger, Richard Dawkins.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I am at once a big fan of his (I think "The Selfish Gene" is one of the greatest books ever written) and a harsh critic, not just of Richard, but of the strident rhetoric employed by all of the so-called "new atheists."  I believe that religion thrives because it fulfills a legitimate human need, and that secular movements would prosper more if they recognized that fact rather than try to sweep all religion under the rug as worthless nonsense at best, and the source of all evil at worst.  Yes, religion is fiction, but it is not merely fiction.  We are story-telling animals, and fiction can be powerful JuJu, a fact that we ignore at our peril.

I was salivating at the prospect of having the opportunity to make that argument to The Man himself.

The four of us (me, Richard, Nancy, and Richard's wife Lalla) had dinner together that night, and to make a long story short, Richard was much more receptive to my argument than I ever imagined he would be.  He basically just said yes to everything I said, and a conversation that I expected to last an hour or two was over in five minutes.  Suddenly I was at a loss for what to say next, but it's not every day that one gets to have a private conversation with someone of Richard's stature, so I decided to press my luck.  Shooting from the hip I said, "Why don't you start a church?"  He responded, "That sounds like an interesting idea, tell me more."

So I did.  Of course, I was making it up on the spot, but I must have done a reasonable job because at the end of the pitch he said, "Sounds good, why don't you write up a proposal?"

I was flabbergasted.  In my wildest dreams I have never imagined that he would be so receptive to the idea, and at that point I was truly speechless.

So the conversation turned to ties.  Yes, I know, it sounds deadly dull, but Lalla is an artist and one of the things she does is make hand-painted ties.  She paints animals, and Richard was wearing one of her ties (penguins, of course).  Beautiful work.  Lalla, if you're reading this, I still want one :-)

One of the stories Richard was fond of telling was wearing a warthog tie when he was invited to lunch with Queen Elizabeth.  The queen, evidently not a big fan of warthogs, asked him, "Why do you have such an ugly animal on your tie?"  He replied, "If it is an ugly animal how much greater the artistry to fashion it into such a beautiful tie."  What a great line.

I stayed up late writing up a draft proposal for what I ended up dubbing the Church of Natural Cosmology.

(To be continued...)

[Travelogue] Antarctica, part 4

After a day of communing with penguins and Santa Claus, we raised anchor and headed over to the old whaling station at Grytviken.  Today this is the only human habitation on South Georgia, and it's just a few dozen people who man the museum, research station, and government offices which maintain the British claim to the place.

A hundred years ago Grytviken was an active whaling station.  Today its main claim to fame is that this is where Ernest Shackleton found rescue for his stranded crew after a failed attempt to reach the south pole.  If you aren't familiar with Shackleton's story you really should go read it.  It is one of the most amazing tales of courage and heroism (and, frankly, stupidity) in human history.

There is, needless to say, not a whole lot to do in Grytviken nowadays.  We visited Shackleton's grave and drank the traditional Irish whiskey toast, then climbed up the hill for the panoramic view:

The sun was setting, and a deck of clouds was starting to roll in, and since it was Christmas eve of course we all had to go to church:

That's Nancy in the middle, flanked by Richard Dawkins and his wife Lalla Ward, and yes, we are all on our way to that church in the background for Christmas eve services delivered by one of our fellow passengers, a retired minister named Arthur Hammons.  He did an absolutely terrific job considering he had one of the toughest possible audiences, including everything from devout Mormons to even more devout atheists and everything in between.  Ironically, we non-theists were the only ones who stood up to sing the hymns.

(Richard told us the next day that some British newspaper had published a short piece on the fact that he had been spotted in a church, but now I can't find it.)

But by far the best part of Grytviken was the wildlife.  Now that the humans have (mostly) gone, the seals have moved back in, and they are everywhere.  The fur seal pups are the very definition of ridiculously cute, and they are more than eager to pose for the camera:

You wouldn't guess it from this photo, but they are also vicious.  Seals are a patriarchal species, and only the alpha males get to mate.  This results in strong evolutionary pressures towards aggression and territoriality, and if you get too close to them even the pups will attack and bite you.  The adults can run faster than humans, and they weigh several hundred pounds so if they catch you they can inflict serious damage.  Happily, they won't attack unless provoked, so you are safe as long as you keep your distance.  But on one occasion I inadvertently got a little too close to one and got a first-hand demonstration of just how fast they can move.

Oh well, I figure if you haven't been blown off a beach in hurricane-force winds and attacked by a fur seal, you haven't really been to Antarctica.

[Travelogue] Antarctica, part 3

After getting nearly blown off the beach on Salisbury Plain I was feeling a little leery about the weather, but I needn't have worried.  The weather in Antarctica turns on a dime in both directions, and the next day was as different from the first as it could possibly be.

Clear blue skies.  No wind.  Spectacular.

The place was called St. Andrew's Bay.  Because we had gone second the day before we got to land first this time. The water was glassy, making the zodiac ride downright pleasant.  We landed on the beach and got the second of what would become a familiar ritual: Larry, our expedition leader, would give us a briefing (go here, don't go there) and then off we'd go.  In this case, Larry said there was a king penguin colony down the beach on the other side of a small rise that we didn't want to miss.  But the landing spot was already chock-full-o-critters, and we spent quite a while just hanging out right there checking out penguins...

And fur seals (closely related to sea lions, but not the same species)...

And elephant seals...

After twenty minutes or so we finally said, well, this is cool, but I guess we really ought to go check out this penguin colony.  So we trudged along the beach and over the rise, and this was the sight that greeted us:

Penguins as far as the eye could see.  A wall-to-wall carpet of penguins.

Those are all king penguins.  The brown ones are chicks.  At this stage in their development they are bigger than their parents, and they are absolutely fearless.  On more than one occasion we couldn't proceed because we were surrounded by them, and wildlife has the right of way.

Oh, and did I mention it was Christmas eve?  So of course when we got back to the boat, Santa was there:

And that was just the first half of the day :-)

[Travelogue] Antarctica, part 2

I've been slow in posting Antarctica travelogues because I've been busy editing a highlight reel from the two-hour-long DVD they made for us on the ship.  I don't want to post it publicly because it's a little sketchy in terms of copyright, but if you're interested in seeing it drop me a line and we'll work something out.

Anyway, when last we visited our intrepid travelers (which is to say me and Nancy) we were dodging land mines in the Falkland Islands.  We left Port Stanley in the evening and headed out for two days at sea en route to South Georgia island.  There's not much to do on a small boat at sea, so we dealt with the tedium in the traditional manner: we went drinking.

Happily, the observation lounge was just outside our cabin and it was equipped with a bar, so we went to watch the world go by and drown our sorrows (such as they were) in Pisco sours.  There was a woman at the bar we had met earlier, a charming British artist named Lalla Ward, and next to her was a man who bore a striking resemblance to... Richard Dawkins!

Holy shit!  I was stuck on a boat for two weeks with Richard Dawkins!

To jump ahead a bit, we got acquainted and over the course of the trip spent quite a bit of time together.  But that's a whole 'nuther story.  This post is supposed to be about Antarctica, and South Georgia Island in particular.

After a day and a half at sea we got our first glimpse of... well, it's a bit of a misnomer to call it "land".  Shag Rock is aptly named.  It's a rock (actually four of them) sticking up out of the water in the middle of nowhere.

They are covered by shags, (a kind of sea bird for those of you who, like me, think "carpet" more than "ornithology" when they hear the word "shag") hence the name.  Quite possibly the most inhospitable place I've ever seen, but after two days at sea we were ready to take what we could get.

The next morning, after what was ultimately an uneventful crossing, we arrived at South Georgia and anchored at a place called Salisbury Plain, home to one of the largest king penguin colonies in the world.  The wind was blowing pretty hard but that is not at all unusual for that part of the world.

Antarctica is one of the last unspoiled wildernesses left on earth, and the operators that run cruises to this part of the world adhere to a pretty strict set of regulations designed to protect the wildlife.  Our boat had 200 passengers, which made it one of the larger ones to do this kind of trip, and it meant we had to go ashore in two shifts.  When we boarded we had colored stickers attached to our key cards that separated us into the red dot group and the green dot group.  Each day we would alternate, with one color getting the early morning wake up call at 6 AM and the other group getting to sleep in until around 8:30 or so.  We were in the second group to go ashore, and by the time we got there, the wind had whipped up into a pretty serious gale.  It was genuinely difficult to stand upright, and nearly impossible to take pictures.  Even the penguins were getting blown over on occasion.

Now, I have to digress and tell you a little bit about penguins.  Penguins are incredibly cool critters.  They are technically birds, but they are well along on the evolutionary path towards becoming fish.  Their forelimbs look more like flippers than wings, and the feathers on the leading edges have evolved to look almost indistinguishable from scales.  (Take that, creationists!)  They have virtually no fear of humans, as you can see from the photo.

They also have no sense of propriety when it comes to defecating.  When it's time to poop, they just let loose wherever they happen to be.  The result, over the course of a breeding season, is a whole lot of fertilizer, and it smells every bit as bad as you might imagine.

So there we are, struggling to walk, trying to take pictures of penguins, trying to take it all in, trying not to get sick from the smell, and I'm thinking to myself: hm, I wonder how bad this has to get before it starts to actually be a problem.

You see, there is no dock here.  The ship is anchored out in the bay, and we get to shore in little rubber zodiacs, which of course means that the only way back to the boat is in those same little rubber zodiacs.  The water is right around freezing, and there are no medical facilities.  I learned later that one person actually fell into the water during the landing and had to be evacuated back to the boat.

We soon found out.  We had only been on shore for about 10 or 15 minutes when we got the word that the landing had been cut short and we were evacuating.  We made it back to the ship without incident, where we learned that the winds had topped out at 70 MPH, very nearly a category 1 hurricane.

We also learned that they have extensive contingency plans, including the option to camp overnight on shore if necessary.  The weather can turn on a dime, and it is entirely possible to get stranded ashore.  And there ain't no four seasons to retreat to.  Antarctica is serious shit in more ways than one.

To be continued...

Boy Scouts may end ban on gays

The dam seems like it's ready to break.  NBC News is reporting that the Boy Scouts are close to ending ban on gays.

Not that any delay was ever acceptable, but I have to say that things are moving forward with breathtaking speed.  It has been ten years since I first started writing about gay rights, and back then I never imagined that I would see things actually change so much.  It gives me hope for the world.

It is interesting in retrospect how the debate has evolved.  Here's an excerpt from that first essay:

A related argument is that homosexual couples should not be given societal support because they do not produce children. This argument is also so untenable I'm amazed that anyone can advance it with a straight face. First off, it simply isn't true. Homosexuals are perfectly capable of reproducing, and many do. But even if it were true, if one were to take reproduction as the gold standard of what does and does not deserve societal sanction then infertile people, or people who do not wish to have children, should be prohibited from marrying on those grounds. The argument is just so ridiculous it feels like a waste of time to even bring it up. 

There are no tenable grounds for denying equal rights to homosexuals, just as there are no (and never were any) tenable grounds for denying equal rights to blacks. This one is a complete no-brainer. Why does it have to take so long for society to figure these things out?

Hm, I wonder how much the Internet was a causal factor in speeding up the pace of change.  Certainly seems like a plausible theory.

Gay marriage opponents get desperate

You can't make this stuff up.  Opponents of gay marriage are now arguing that marriage should be limited to unions of a man and a woman because they alone can "produce unplanned and unintended offspring."

This sounds like good news to me because it makes it clear that gay marriage opponents have completely run out of even remotely plausible sounding arguments and are starting to get desperate.

Here are a few more choice quotes from the article:

Conservative attorneys did not argue that gays or lesbians engaged in "immoral" behavior or lifestyles. Instead they emphasized what they called the "very real threat" to society posed by opposite-sex couples when they are not bound by the strictures of marriage.

The traditional marriage laws "reflect a unique social difficulty with opposite-sex couples that is not present with same-sex couples — namely, the undeniable and distinct tendency of opposite-sex relationships to produce unplanned and unintended pregnancies," wrote [Paul D.] Clement, a solicitor general under President George W. Bush. "Unintended children produced by opposite-sex relationships and raised out-of-wedlock would pose a burden on society."

"It is plainly reasonable for California to maintain a unique institution [referring to marriage] to address the unique challenges posed by the unique procreative potential of sexual relationships between men and women," argued Washington attorney Charles J. Cooper, representing the defenders of Proposition 8. Same-sex couples need not be included in the definition of marriage, he said, because they "don't present a threat of irresponsible procreation." 

Like I said, you can't make this shit up.

I feel as if I'd be insulting your intelligence by pointing out what is wrong with this argument, but just in case it's not obvious, this argument runs afoul of the same logical flaw that affect all arguments against gay marriage based on procreation, namely, that any such argument necessarily applies equally well to sterile heterosexual couples.  If I've had a vasectomy then I too, even as a heterosexual male, cannot produce an unplanned pregnancy.  Does that mean that I should not be allowed to get married?

If marriage has anything to do with procreation at all, it is not about making children, it's about raising them.  That's the part that requires a long-term commitment (duh!), and gay couples are every bit as capable of raising a child as straight ones (and based on my personal experience, maybe more so).

I just hope that the Justices see this argument for the farce that it is.  I am not optimistic.

The ultimate argument for gay marriage

Travelogue: Antarctica part 1

Three weeks ago Nancy and I visited Antarctica.  It's not easy to get there.  It is completely inaccessible in winter, and even in summer it is quite a shlep.  We had tried once before, years ago, to fly there, but bad weather kept us on the ground in Punta Arenas, Chile.  This time we took a boat from Ushuaia, Argentina, which is more reliable, but takes a lot longer.

Just getting to Ushuaia was quite an odyssey.  Our road to Argentina went by way of Los Angeles, Lima, and Santiago, where we spent a day before continuing to Ushuaia.  Santiago is a nice city (vastly nicer than Lima), but having to disembark in Chile was annoying because the country has a admission charge of $160 for U.S. citizens.  It's called a "reciprocity fee" but to me it seemed indistinguishable from institutionalized bribery.  Worse, to pay the bribe, er, fee, you had to wait in an interminably long line.  Then, after paying, you then had to go wait in another interminably long line to actually clear immigration.  All this while dealing with five time zones and twelve flight hours worth of jet lag.  I kept having to remind myself that this was a nice problem to have.

We finally got out of the airport and were met by a representative of our tour company, ushered on to a bus to our hotel and got checked in amidst the usual chaos that ensues when a busload of people all show up at the front desk at the same time.  In the confusion, the local rep neglected to give us the little package of mostly useless "Welcome to Chile" documents.  How do I know that the documents that we didn't get were mostly useless?  It's because somehow at 4:30 AM local time the following morning -- after we had spent the day on a pleasant but uneventful tour of the city --  the hotel concierge suddenly realized that we had not received our package, and took it on themselves to call us right then and there to tell us that there was some "important information" waiting for us at the front desk, and that we should come down right away.  So I groggily put on some clothes and went down to the lobby where I was handed this very elegantly produced bundle of ads for local merchants, together with the schedule for the previous day.  I was not amused.

I'll spare you the gory details of the next 24 hours.  Suffice it to say we made it to Ushuaia unscathed, and at 4 PM boarded our new home for the next 18 days, MV Le Boreal:

We headed out the Beagle Channel towards the Falkland Islands en route to South Georgia island and thence to the Antarctic peninsula.  The waters we were crossing are notoriously rough.  Down in that part of the world there is very little land to stop the wind, and so it can whip up something fierce.  Particularly to be feared were the last two days of the cruise, where we had to cross the dreaded Drake passage to get back to Ushuaia.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Happily for us, the one-day crossing to the Falklands was uneventful, and we landed in Port Stanley on what passes for a fine summer day down there.

We had a nice walk, took in the sights, which included several groups of Magellanic penguins.  And this beautiful scene with an incomparably incongruous sign:

In case you can't read it, the sign says, "WARNING - Although this area is believed to be clear of mines, it is possible that a mine may be washed ashore from a nearby minefield.  Please be careful.  Do not touch any suspicious object, but place a marker nearby and report it to the JSEODOC, Stanley."  Those mines, of course, are left over from the 1982 war with Argentina.  Now those old tensions are flaring up again.  Argentina seems to be rattling its sabers once again, and we were told that we were the last ship out of Ushuaia that was going to be allowed to dock at Port Stanley for the rest of the season.

It was sobering.  We dodged a bullet figuratively.  But the Falkland Islanders may be doing it literally before long.

Happy new year!

Yeah, I know, I'm a little late.  The reason I'm late, and the reason I haven't been blogging in the last three weeks is that I've been on a boat in Antarctica.  There was an internet connection, but it was unbelievably slow, like 2400 baud kind of slow.  Just loading the Blogger editing page took about ten minutes, when it was working at all.  Once we got below about 60 degrees south we couldn't see the satellite, and then we were completely cut off from the rest of the world for about five days.

I'm still a little jet lagged so I'm not going to try to catch up right now, but for the time being here's a picture of a Gentoo penguin who posed for me.  We saw gobs of Gentoos, and we were told that they were doing relatively well compared to other penguin species under climate change because of their more diverse diet.  But Wikipedia says their numbers are declining along with pretty much all the rest of the wildlife down there, so I have no idea what the real story is.  All I know is that they are damn cute.

Ecological shocker of the day

White tigers are not actually an endangered species:

[W]hite tigers are not a subspecies at all but rather the result of a mutant gene that has been artificially selected through massive inbreeding to produce oddball animals for human entertainment.

Something peculiar about the reporting of North Korea's missile launch

The major news outlets are reporting that:

Experts say the launch shows North Korea's rocket has the range to hit Hawaii and parts of the West Coast of the United States.  [Emphasis added]

This is odd because the rocket actually got its payload into orbit.  If you can get a payload into orbit, then you can get it anywhere in the U.S. (indeed anywhere on the planet) [1], not just the West Coast.  Why would a news outlet report such an obvious error?  More precisely, who are the "experts" that fed them the erroneous story, and what could possibly have been their motive?

Usually when mainstream news outlets report things that are false or misleading it is not hard to find some plausible political or economic motive behind it, but this is a mystery.  There's either something very peculiar about this orbit (in which case that should have been part of the story) or someone along the line just made up the bit about Hawaii and the West Coast out of whole cloth.  Why would anyone do that?

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[1] It is not quite true that getting into orbit lets you get anywhere.  In general, an orbit constrains you to a certain range of latitudes.  The two extremes of this situation are an equatorial orbit, which constrains you to zero degrees latitude, and a polar orbit, which covers all latitudes.  Both of these orbits are harder to achieve than an orbit that is inclined at some angle between 0 and 90 degrees.

The only kind of orbit that constrains you in longitude (which is what is being claimed here) is a geosynchronous orbit, and that is very hard to achieve.  You have to get to an altitude of 35,000 km or so.  The North Korean satellite is in low-earth orbit at about 500km.  Not even close.

The actual trajectory of the North Korean satellite seems to be a polar sun-synchronous orbit, which means it could potentially deposit a payload anywhere on earth, including Santa's house.

Scalia jumps the shark

At an appearance at Princeton University, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was asked by a gay student about his support for bans on sodomy.  He answered:

It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd'.  If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?  I’m surprised you aren’t persuaded.  [Emphasis added]

It was that last bit that left me slack-jawed despite the fact that I've gotten accustomed to the ridiculous drivel that passes for logic in Scalia's twisted worldview.  No, I am not persuaded, Justice Scalia, because your "argument" (if one can even call it that) is a straw man (something which, if you'll forgive me, I thought you would have known).  Of course you can have moral feelings about homosexuality.  But what is it that justifies reifying your moral feelings into law besides the fact that you happen to be a Supreme Court Justice?  Do you have any basis for outlawing sodomy other than "because I feel like it" (and "because I can")?  No, you don't, because there isn't any (which is probably why you have nothing to resort to but indignation when someone calls you out).

Amanda Marcotte puts it better than I could ever hope to:

We can probably come up with a better system than randomly picking a bunch of acts—same-sex relations, murder, giving coffee drinks funny names—and declaring these things immoral on the grounds that something has to be immoral.  There's got to be a more rigorous way of wading through legal questions than just throwing darts against a wall, and when the darts hit the words "murder" and "sodomy," figuring hey, let's ban both.

For instance, we have this crazy theory in the modern era that people have rights that shouldn't be infringed on without good reason. So, because you rogering your boyfriend in peace in your home doesn't actually hurt anyone, we should leave you alone to go ahead and do that. However, shooting someone in the head for cutting you off in traffic does infringe on others without good reason: In addition to the ensuing traffic jam and the taxpayer money necessary to clean your victim's guts off the road, someone unwillingly dies.

Seriously, how does someone so oblivious to his own biases ever get to be a judge?

Ladybug porn

Gotta do something to drum up traffic around here.  :-)

This photo was taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5 on a boat in Neva Bay outside St. Petersburg, Russia.

It's the capital gains rate, stupid!

In last week's WSJ Peter Schiff has a piece debunking... well, it's actually a little hard to tell what he's trying to debunk.  The title of the piece is The Fantasy of a 91% Top Income Tax Rate, but of course it is undeniable that there once was a rate this high (actually, tax rates topped out at 94% in 1944).  But Schiff argues that this rate wasn't "real" because of the myriad tax shelters and loopholes that were available at the time.  So were the effective tax rates, net of loopholes, higher then than now?

That is a tricky question to answer (as evidenced by the labyrinth of figures in Shiff's piece, some of which he originally got wrong).  But it's also the wrong question to ask because it ignores the real elephant in the taxation living room: long term capital gains.  (Actually, the real elephant is a wealth tax [1], but that is so far off the radar in today's political climate that one risks being taken for a left-wing nutjob merely by uttering the phrase.  So I won't.)

Let's take stock of the last 100 or so years of economic history.  In 1926 the capital gains rate was 12.5% and the top marginal income tax rate dropped from 44% to 25%.  Three years later, the Great Depression began.

In 1944, the capital gains rate was back up to 25%, and the top marginal income tax rate was a staggering 94%.  That was quickly reduced to 91%, but over the next thirty years it was never lower than 70%.  Over this same thirty-year period, unemployment was 5.5% or lower for all but one year (1958, when it spiked to 6.8%).  The capital gains rate rose as high as 38% in 1979.

In 1981 the capital gains rate was reduced to 20% and the top marginal income tax rate was reduced to 50%, then to 28% in 1988.  In response to increasing deficits, the income tax rate was raised in 1992 and again in 1994 (by a Republican Congress working with a Democratic President, it is worth noting).  The deficit shrank to zero.  Unemployment shrank to 4% in 2001.

In 2003, the capital gains rate was reduced to it current 15% and top marginal income tax rates to 33%.  Five years later the Great Recession began.

Now, of course none of this proves a causal relationship between high taxes and general prosperity or low taxes and economic disaster, but the correlation really is quite remarkable.  The last hundred years have been bookended by two periods of dramatically low taxation, which just happen to correspond (with a 3-5-year delay) with economic catastrophe.  In between we had three decades of high taxation and uninterrupted prosperity.  If there isn't a causal relationship, it sure is one helluva coincidence.  But no matter how you slice it, there is only one theory that the data could conceivably debunk, and that is the one that says that rich people are job creators, and that taxing them exacerbates unemployment.

There is, of course, a very plausible model of why higher taxes can help promote prosperity: jobs are not created by wealth (it's actually the other way around: wealth is created by jobs).  Jobs are created by demand.  Enmployers don't hire people because they have money, they hire when -- and only when -- there is more demand for their product than they can meet with their existing work force.  So it is no coincidence that prosperity coincides with high marginal tax rates (and, I might add, strong labor unions).  The best way to generate demand is to, as conservatives like to say, "broaden the base" and operate under rules that benefit the middle class and poor even if this comes at the expense of the very rich.  This is because the less money you have, the more of it you spend as a percentage of your income.  A single person can only consume so much, so a million dollars in the hands of one person produces less demand (and hence fewer jobs) than the same million in the hands of, say, ten people.

Now, please don't mistake this as an endorsement of communism.  I am a proud born-again capitalist.  I do not believe in equality of outcome.  There has to be some incentive to work harder and take more risks.  But there also has to be some countervailing force to balance out the disproportionate political and economic power that comes with extreme wealth.  From 1945 to 1975 that countervailing force was high marginal tax rates and strong labor unions (and Glass-Steagal, but that is yet another story).  Today we have... Barack Obama.

God help us.

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[1] Actually, the real real elephant is corporate taxes.  But that's a whole 'nuther can o' worms.

Rebooting the Ramblings

OK, I'm coming out of the closet.

Last February I announced that I was shutting down this blog.  Ten months later it's still here, and a lot has happened.  In particular, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear two gay marriage cases, an issue which has been near and dear to my heart for many years now (despite -- or perhaps because of? -- the fact that I'm straight).  This would be good news except for the very real possibility that this could easily be another Dred Scott decision.  We narrowly dodged a bullet on Obamacare, an outcome I predicted two years earlier (to much derision, I might add).

So maybe I'm Cassandra instead of Elijah, but either way I feel driven to prophecise: The Supreme Court will affirm Proposition 8 and DOMA.  Never in my life have I wished so much to be wrong.

Here's why I'm worried: there are three hard-core ideologues on the court: Thomas, Alito, and the ideologue-in-chief, Scalia, will surely vote to affirm DOMA and Prop 8.  Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan are not as reliable votes to overturn as the Three Ideologues are to affirm, but the odds are pretty good.  That leaves Kennedy and Roberts as the usual wild cards.  But there is a deeper concern than just the numbers, and that is that we cannot rely on the Supreme Court to act rationally, or even within the confines of the law.

That DOMA violates the Equal Protection Clause is absolutely clear.  There is no principled argument to be made against gay marriage.  None.  Zero.  The closest the right has been able to come is to mumble vague platitudes about children.  But "doing it for the children" requires that you bury your head in the sand about the reality that producing a baby and raising one are largely separable activities, that many heterosexual couples are childless by choice (myself and my wife among them), and that there are probably millions of gay couples raising healthy well-adjusted children throughout the globe, particularly in ten countries and nine states where gay marriage is currently legal.

But the ideologues don't care because, well, they're ideologues.  Ideologues don't reason forward from the evidence, they reason backwards from the conclusion that homosexuality is sinful, though normally they omit the bit about it warranting the death penalty (except in Uganda where they are doing their best to follow God's Word).  Scalia in particular is not at all shy about putting his ideology on display: in 2003 he dissented against Lawrence v Texas not on merits but because it would lead to gay marriage!  In other words, Scalia reasoned: if you can't regulate what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, then there is no principled argument to prevent them from getting married.  He's right about that.  But his conclusion is perverse: therefore is must be Constitutionally permissible to regulate what people do in their bedrooms, and the Ninth Amendment be damned.

Well, it feels good to get that off my chest.  When the history of this civil rights struggle (because that's what this is) is written I don't want anyone to be able to say that I stood idly by and did nothing.

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On an administrative note, Rondam Ramblings is going to be sticking around for a while.  I was always planning to start blogging again, but I was hoping to extricate myself from the Blogger platform because it is becoming more and more important to me to maintain control of the content that I produce (I actually have a lot to say about that, but that will have to wait).  But then I discovered that Blogger allows you to change the canonical URL under which your blog appears.  You may notice that the URL you are seeing is no longer "rondam.blogspot.com".  Since links matter more than the actual hosting (though hosting matters too) and bringing up a blogging platform turns out to be a lot more work than I had hoped, I've decided to stick with Blogger for now.

There's another reason to start writing again now, and that is that there is more to the story of why I stopped back in February than I told at the time.  Back then I wrote, "it is unwise to leave unedited thoughts publicly available on the internet."  There's a long and complicated story behind that remark, one that will take more than one entry to tell.  So that will have to wait.

Talk about burying the lede

[Yes, I know I said I wouldn't be posting any more, but I couldn't let yesterday's news go unheralded.]

I had to actually do a Google search to find this story in today's news:

Voters in Maine and Maryland approved same-sex marriage on a day of election results that jubilant gay rights advocates called a historic turning point, the first time that marriage for gay men and lesbians has been approved at the ballot box.

In Minnesota, in another first, voters rejected a proposal to amend the State Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman...

Still, it's probably a good thing that a trifecta for gay marriage at the ballot box no longer makes the front page.  The tide has turned.