denis bider

UPS Delivery Fail

2012-01-30T18:07:00.010-04:00

I live in St. Kitts, in the Caribbean. I usually prefer to send and receive packages using FedEx, because I've never seen them fail.

A month ago, I ordered a package which was sent by UPS. The package's due day arrives. I check its status using online tracking: it says they attempted delivery, but no one was present.

We were, in fact, at home. We live in a condo building with the number clearly marked. The address was correct on the package. No one knocked, at all.

So I jump into my car and head to the local UPS office. I find the delivery guy right there with my package. He says he didn't deliver because the shipper didn't put my phone number on the package, and he found our building complex "too confusing".

Our building complex isn't confusing. FedEx has no problem finding our condo, and always knocks on our door. The guy just didn't feel like putting in the effort to find our condo, at all.

Microsoft Excel: The dumbest possible Undo ever

2011-12-02T14:33:00.010-04:00

I was just reminded, again, how Microsoft Excel has the worst possible Undo implementation ever.

Instead of keeping track of undo actions separately for each file, it tracks them for all open files together. When you undo actions in one spreadsheet, you will be undoing actions in other spreadsheets you have open, too.

This is the stupidest possible design I can think of. It leads to data loss for anyone who relies on a reasonable undo feature when managing their documents. It is positively dangerous to have multiple Excel spreadsheets open simultaneously, since undoing in one document may lead to data loss in others.

Whoever designed this should be fired from software development, and made to flip burgers instead. There's no excuse for this idiocy in a software product like Office.

Dell is inept

2011-11-28T22:35:00.015-04:00

For the last several weeks, I've been trying to unsuccessfully place an order with Dell.

Let me tell you, that company is inept.

The only reason I'm trying to place an order with them is because I want a powerful desktop replacement laptop, and they have the only one I can find with an 18" screen.

But goodness, it's practically impossible to place an order with them.

Because I live in the Caribbean, I cannot have the order shipped to me in the first place. They don't ship anywhere out of the US. So I have to bug a friend, or use a freight forwarding service.

So, I'm now ordering an expensive laptop shipped (against my preference) to the US, but the card I'm paying with is from outside the US. So my order gets canceled by their verification team.

I contact the verification team, they ask me questions, and they finally say okay, you can try ordering now. Can they reinstate my existing order that they canceled? No. I have to get in touch with their reinstatement department. They have a department for reinstating orders!

I get routed to some automated phone central, get handed over from person to person, spend hours on the phone, and I never can get to the fabled reinstatement department. The agents I talk to keep asking all the same questions all over again and are being useless.

Fine. So I place a new order again. Their website offers the ability to pay in multiple transactions, rather than everything at a time. Great. I'll need that, because my bank imposes a daily spending limit that's below the cost of the laptop.

As soon as I place the order, I find a "chat with agent" link, just to confirm what the limit on my card is, and that I want to pay in two installments. They tell me the first one went through. They'll process the next one tomorrow.

A few hours later, a phone call. An agent from Dell is telling me, in a bad English accent, that my second payment could not be processed. Of course it couldn't be, I reply, one payment was already processed today, the second one is supposed to be processed tomorrow. I am unsure what the status of my order is now.

A Dell manager follows up with me by email. I complain about their poor organization, and request information about the status of my order. He sends a courtesy reply to my comments about Dell, but does not inform me of the status of my order.

I foolishly assume that my order is being processed.

A few days later, I check the status of the order online, and...

Canceled.

In terms of pre-sales support, Dell must be the single most useless company I've ever been in touch with. Every single aspect of placing an order is split into separate departments. The people populating these departments are either powerless, or inept, or both. They speak poor English, and if your order needs the attention of another department, they can't even forward you there. The "managers" are just as useless.

Why Dell even has these people on their payroll, is beyond me. The company is simply unfit to handle any order that does not fit their automated process. The humans they employ have all of the autonomy of a cog in a machine, and are as helpful as a nail.

There are government bureaucracies that function much better than this!

LOL Slovenia

2011-11-15T08:44:00.013-04:00

I just found this gem:

Čas je, da gre politika v stečaj!

Apparently, Slovenia has had an issue with high-profile companies going bankrupt in circumstances that may have involved fraud (but probably involved state favoritism and incompetence). The legal system in Slovenia is incapable of punishing people responsible, so the parliament passed a law which imposes the following blanket punishment:

Everyone who had an ownership or leadership role in a bankrupt company is prohibited from co-owning or leading another company, for 10 years after the end of the previous company's bankruptcy proceedings.

Bankruptcies in Slovenia can take decades, so the effective duration of the punishment may be much longer than 10 years.

Not only that, but people who had an ownership or leadership role in a bankrupt company up to two years before the bankruptcy are also subject to the same prohibition.

Is that ridiculous, or what?

Who on Earth is going to want to run a business in Slovenia?

Suppose a company is in trouble and needs new leadership. Who's going to come to its rescue, risking to lose all of their rights to do business in Slovenia, in case they fail?

Given this new law, the most prudent course of action for anyone who wants to establish a new business is to establish it outside of Slovenia. Slovenia is a tiny country, and it's part of the EU. There are several neighboring countries, only an hour's drive away, where you can found your company in a more sensible jurisdiction. There goes Slovenian tax revenue!

What a joke!

This makes me laugh at the ineptitude of Slovenian politicians, as well as feel fortunate for leaving. A country that makes these kinds of choices is on a road to self-defeat.

There are no healthy foods - only healthy diets

2011-11-11T01:33:00.022-04:00

I'm not a nutritionist. However, for the last 5 years or so, I've successfully based my diet on the following suspicions:

Popular nutrition advice is probably misleading and puts exaggerated emphasis on fresh fruit, vegetables, and "natural" ingredients.
While some people are highly sensitive to additives, and others to a lesser extent, most people aren't.
For most people, what matters in diet is, by far, calorie count. It's no use to be eating a vegetable rich diet if you eat so much you're overweight. Conversely, a restricted calorie diet will lose you weight, even if it consists of sugar and fat. As long as your diet gives you enough vitamins and protein, not being overweight is what matters most for health.

There's no such thing as a healthy food. There are only healthy diets. What matters is how the numbers add up, not the individual things you eat.

In this CNN article, a KSU nutrition professor lost 27 pounds over two months on a diet consisting largely of packaged sugary snacks. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake each day, but restricted his total calorie intake. After two months, he lost weight, and his blood pressure and cholesterol levels were better.

As long as it's not poison, and you don't have a specific medical condition, your body can process what you put in your mouth. The trick is not to put too much, and make sure that you're getting vitamins and protein from somewhere, and it won't matter if your diet is based on garden greens or hamburgers.

Our species has been on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, surviving on all types of diets in all sorts of environments. This wouldn't have been possible if our biology required a steady intake of fresh vegetables to live.

Costa Rica vs. St. Kitts for the fitness-minded IT professional

2011-11-10T20:50:00.020-04:00

My wife and I are originally from Europe. We currently live in St. Kitts, and are considering a move to Costa Rica. We're returning from a 5 week trip to Costa Rica, where our intent was to see what daily life would be like for us. Here are our findings.

Health care

St. Kitts: There are foreigners living in St. Kitts, as well as medical and veterinary students from the US. Everyone we talked to has warned us to stay away from the local hospital. A student who visited the hospital reported shoddy hygiene in multiple respects, including a cow walking the corridors. People who need a serious medical procedure, and can afford to, go to Puerto Rico, or the US. If you need to go to the local hospital in an emergency, such as an appendectomy, you can expect worse scarring, and probably a greater chance of complications than in the US.

Costa Rica: Costa Rica is a medical destination for visitors from the US, providing high quality care at lower cost than available in the broken US healthcare system. There is a larger community of expatriates and retirees from the US and Canada, and an international medical center (CIMA) catering to them and to medical tourists.

Score: St. Kitts -10, Costa Rica +10

Language

St. Kitts: The native people speak English, but their accent is so broken that you'll need time to begin to understand. If you ask them to clarify, they'll mostly just say it again, in the same way and the same speed. There are people who speak better English, but after almost 5 years in St. Kitts, it still often takes me 2-3 tries to understand what people are saying.

Costa Rica: The native people speak Spanish. If you don't speak Spanish, it'll be harder to learn than a broken English accent.

Score: St. Kitts -5, Costa Rica -10

Power

St. Kitts: Power is provided by a government monopoly, and the result are frequent power outages. In our 5 years of living there, we experienced:

- A period of several weeks without power for 8 hours every day, because half the power station had burnt down.

- Another period of weeks without power for multiple hours a day, because the power station had been flooded.

- Even in better times, regular power outages lasting 1-2 hours, several times a week. It is fairly frustrating to experience this on a regular basis.

Costa Rica: In our 5 weeks of living there, we experienced one day with a power outage lasting, perhaps, 2 hours.

Score: St. Kitts -10, Costa Rica -3

Internet access

St. Kitts: Believe it or not, St. Kitts might win this one. The problem in St. Kitts is frequent power outages; but if you have a generator, internet access is solid. There are two providers, LIME (phone-based) and The Cable (cable TV based). As of 2011, both currently offer download speeds of up to 6-7 Mbit/s. We have used both, and LIME seems to be more reliable, with fewer interruptions and disconnections. Latency to the US is good.

Costa Rica: Internet access in Costa Rica is through a state monopoly. Our only experience so far has been through a hotel, but the tests I was able to make indicated a 40 ms latency just from the hotel's router to the ISP, and 100 ms more to the US. Ping times to the US were more inconsistent than we experienced in St. Kitts.

Score: St. Kitts +5, Costa Rica -5

Cinemas

St Kitts: A nice, modern multi-screen cinema opened in St. Kitts a few years ago. We welcomed this highly, but unfortunately, the new cinema did not come with a well trained crew. In the first year, we experienced:

- A movie started completely without sound for the first 15 minutes. The sound eventually came on, but we had missed what happened in the first 15 minutes of the movie. No apologies, no refunds.

- One movie had a screaming crying baby in the audience, whose mom refused to take it out. No staff member asked the mom to leave with the baby, either. We left the theater and asked for a refund. We didn't get one.

- Other movies we saw were way too loud. We started going to the cinema with earplugs so we could enjoy a normal volume.

It could be that these issues have been fixed by now; the last movie we saw in St. Kitts had no issues and was enjoyable. However, these early experiences certainly caused us to visit the St. Kitts cinema much less than we would like.

Costa Rica: There are multiple multi-screen cinemas in San Jose. We went to Cinemark in Multiplaza, and to Nova Cinemas not far away. The VIP screens in Nova Cinemas is spectacular! For the same price as a regular movie ticket in the US, you get to see the movie in a luxurious environment with fewer other guests and comfortable, powered recliner seating. Most movies are in English with Spanish subtitles, which aren't a bother, and may help a bit with learning Spanish. The down side is that some movies, animated ones in particular, are available only in dubbed Spanish versions.

Score: St. Kitts +5, Costa Rica +10

Eating out

St. Kitts: There's one excellent restaurant we know of in St. Kitts: Ottley's Plantation. It's pricey, it's out of the way, and they require a credit card to make a reservation. But everything we've had there was amazingly delicious. The service is good, too.

Other than that, though, eating out in St. Kitts is mediocre. The restaurants tend to have great views, but service tends to be atrocious. Waiters shuffle wearily from table to table, and hardly pay attention to your order. Or they are too chummy, and want to talk to you instead of serving you. The food can take forever, and while it tastes decent, the price is high and the experience can be awkward. Therefore, we usually eat at home.

We also love sushi, and St. Kitts has no sushi restaurants. There used to be a kind of sushi on certain nights at the St. Kitts Marriott, but the menu was poor, and it gave us diarrhea.

Costa Rica: Oh my goodness. There are sushi restaurants, and they're so good! White tuna is available, and all the fish are delicious. The Samurai restaurant at Itskazu Plaza has some of the best sushi we've had.

There are tons of other eateries, and most have been highly enjoyable. If we move to Costa Rica, we'll be going out to eat much more.

Score: St. Kitts 0, Costa Rica +10

Groceries

St. Kitts: When we first arrived, the selection of food in St. Kitts groceries was small and variable. If you saw something you liked, you really had to stock up, because when it ran out, it wouldn't be restocked again for a few months. This has improved a lot in recent years. The variety of foods available has grown, and supply has gotten more reliable. The one aspect still suffering is the supply of fresh fruits and vegetables; the availability of these remains poor, and is a lottery when you visit the store. However, St. Kitts has a good supply of foods I like, such as greek yogurts and Lean Cuisine microwave meals.

Costa Rica: Given that Costa Rica has both a Walmart and the largest shopping mall in Central America, we expected more choice. The supply of what's on offer seems reliable - you don't have to stock up on things available at the store. However, I didn't find in Costa Rica's groceries a lot of things that I enjoy in St. Kitts. For example:

- No greek yogurts. I'm talking creamy, high protein, low fat yogurts from brands such as Fage, Oikos, Chobani, Yoplait, or Dannon. Costa Rica has lots of regular yogurts, but those are crap compared to the greek ones. Greek yogurts are readily available in stores in the US, as well as recently in St. Kitts. But not in Costa Rica. Big minus.

- No fat free cheese. Come on. The US has fat free cheese. St. Kitts has fat free cheese. Costa Rica has no fat free cheese. The mind boggles.

- No Lean Cuisines. Or rather: there are some, but in multiple stores, I found no microwave meals that I like, with high protein and low calorie content.

- No Ritter Sport Dark Chocolate with Hazelnuts. Many Costa Rica stores had Ritter Sport, but none had the Dark Chocolate with Hazelnuts. Come on. St. Kitts has that!

That being said, fresh fruits and vegetables in Costa Rica stores are plentiful and readily available.

Score:
- St. Kitts 0 (poor availability of fresh fruits and vegetables)
- Costa Rica -5 (no greek yogurts, fat free cheese, or useful Lean Cuisines)

Protein

St. Kitts: There is no meaningful local supply of protein powder or protein bars. The Marriott has some Nugo bars in the convenience store, and some Steel bars in the spa store, but that's it; and the supply is limited. You will be bringing your protein powder and protein bars from trips to the US. There is a Boost High Protein drink available in Horsfords. I usually buy out the whole supply.

Costa Rica: There are multiple GNC outlets that have protein powders, protein bars, and protein drinks... but.

The protein bars are expensive. A bar that costs $1-$2 in a store like Publix in the US, will cost $3-$9 in GNC in Costa Rica.

The protein drinks are spoiled. I bought a bunch and then returned them, and the people at GNC wouldn't believe me that they're bad. They think it's normal for the solid content in the drink to coagulate, separating out from the water. They think you're just supposed to shake it hard so it mixes again. I did that and tried to drink it, but the taste is atrocious, spoiled, and bitter. I drank a couple ounces and had diarrhea for a day. It wasn't just one drink, either. I tried two from separate GNC outlets, and they were both spoiled in that way. When I returned those I didn't open, the people at GNC put them back on the shelf!

Don't buy protein drinks in GNC in Costa Rica.

Score:
- St. Kitts +3 (there's Boost, but you'll be importing protein powder and protein bars from the US)
- Costa Rica 0 (there's protein powders, but protein drinks are spoiled, and you'll be importing protein bars from the US)

Connections

St. Kitts: Last but not least, travel. If your destination is anything other than Miami, traveling to and from St. Kitts is rather inconvenient. American Airlines has regular direct flights to Miami, but the timing is such that regardless of which way you're going, you won't make most connections the same day. This makes travel to or from most parts of the US rather inconvenient. In addition, ticket price is somewhat high. The airport in St. Kitts doesn't have many stores and facilities, and isn't fully air conditioned.

Costa Rica: Connections with the US seem excellent. There are direct flights to multiple transport hubs, including Dallas and Miami by American Airlines, Los Angeles by United, and others. There are multiple flights every day, so it's much easier to make a connection. The airport is modern and has ample shops and eateries.

Score: St. Kitts -5, Costa Rica +10

Weather, natural disasters, crime

In these respects, St. Kitts and Costa Rica fare similarly.

St. Kitts can be too humid and hot, while Costa Rica can be too rainy.

St. Kitts is prone to hurricanes and may be at risk of earthquake or volcanic eruption. Costa Rica has more earthquakes - we experienced several small ones during our 5 weeks of stay - and also a potential volcano.

St. Kitts has robberies and a high number of murders per capita, while Costa Rica has robberies and an increasing number of murders in San Jose. In both countries, the places where foreigners live are safer and nicer.

Bottom line

St. Kitts scores -17, while Costa Rica scores +17 on things we care about.

St. Kitts could improve a lot by having good health care and reliable power. These improvements alone would improve its score substantially, and make it bearable for us to live there.

In Costa Rica, my biggest disappointment is the lack of high protein or fat free food, and unimpressive quality of internet access. I would expect more from a country of 4.6 million with a healthy expatriate community. However, its higher scores in other categories make it an attractive choice for us at this time.

Diamonds are a marketing campaign

2011-11-05T07:17:00.005-04:00

This article is fascinating for showing how much larger than the stones themselves the diamond product is. The stones aren't the product at all. The product is public opinion about diamonds. The suppliers create public opinion through product placement and advertising, and control price both by controlling supply, and by marketing diamonds in such a way as to discourage resale, which has the potential of upsetting the price in a big way.

That is the diamond product. The stones themselves are inconsequential.

The article is from 1982. It doesn't seem like a whole lot has changed since then; but it would be fascinating to read of later developments in the story.

Saving democracy through compulsory voting?

2011-09-27T17:35:00.009-04:00

CNN recently published a surprisingly starkly worded opinion piece titled Stupid voters enable broken government. The gist of the article is that we have governments we elect, and therefore governments we deserve.

But do we, really?

A commenter points out the following:

Most eligible voters don't even vote. Only 37% did in the 2010 election. That means it only takes 18.87% of all eligible voters to get elected. And that means a candidate must pander to the bat shit crazies...because the batshit crazies are definitely voting.

It's very likely the other 63% of voters don't show up to the polls because they don't think the candidates represent their views. This works out to a feedback effect since if they did show up, their opinions would carry weight and the candidates would reflect their views.

I've spent a fair amount of time contemplating the faults of democracy, but its salvation might be much more straightforward than I thought.

Edit: Wikipedia has a list of countries with compulsory voting. Out of countries that have it, 12 countries are listed as enforcing it. Prominent among these are: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, France, Peru, Singapore, Uruguay. Most of these countries don't seem to be faring too badly, but they seem to vary widely nevertheless.

US Military Waste

2011-09-15T14:32:00.020-04:00

Reddit recently had an interesting debate with someone who states he was a Contracting Officer in the US Air Force for several years, and was able to shed some inside light on US military waste.

We learn that things like $10,000 hammers are generally miscommunications. An invoice might contain maintenance work worth $10,000 and supplies worth $10, and the line items get swapped around; or the wrong product code is entered.

That being said, there's still substantial waste. It happens as follows:

For many types of purchases, the military is required to look for a handicapped, veteran-owned, female-owned, minority-owned, or small business to buy from, before even considering e.g. Walmart. These types of businesses then buy the items themselves and resell to the military at a markup. This is effectively a subsidy program for business owned by veterans, minorities, and women.
There are programs like NASA SEWP that buy products large-scale from contractors that buy from other contractors that belong to the favored minority groups. Each contractor in the chain passes on the products at a markup, resulting in a final price paid by the government that can be 50% over retail.
The military employs use it or lose it budgeting, where the budget of each unit is decreased the next year if they did not spend the entire budget the previous year. But expenditures of most units are not the same year after year, and units want to have money available for years when there are emergencies, such as in this Washington State Forest Service example. Therefore, units start their annual financial cycle very tightly to conserve in case there will be an emergency. But as the year comes to an end, they end up with a budget surplus, and now they have to spend it, so that next year, they won't receive less. Units that still have money at the end of the financial year have it taken away, and have to fight to get it back, such as in this Blackhawk fuel example. Most units therefore spend their surplus budgets on items ranging from training, to unnecessary flat screen TVs, to expensive office furniture. This mostly doesn't get reported because the orders come in with full documentation claiming they are bona fide needs that just so happen to come up at the end of the budget cycle.
The military employs a large amount of old technology where replacement parts are only still available from a handful of suppliers. These suppliers gouge their prices as high as they can without making it worth for the government to file a lawsuit.

All in all, it looks like there are three major sources of US military waste:

"Use it or lose it" budgeting.
Substantial markups due to having to purchase from favored types of businesses.
Vendor lock-ins for old technology.

If each of these issues were addressed, the US military budget could be cut by possibly as much as 50% without losing effectiveness. The money currently spent on minority business subsidies would likely be much better spent on direct social security. The losses from "use it or lose it" budgeting could be eliminated through a smarter budgeting system that doesn't penalize responsible spending.

Similar lessons could likely also be applied to other government branches, resulting in large overall savings without decreasing the quality and quantity of government services.

Why women shave and wax

2011-08-15T03:01:00.017-04:00

The hirsute women of Reddit, and the men who like them, have been downvoting my attempts to explain that the reason females remove their body hair is not just due to some mere cultural convention, but has deeper causes.

Here's the typical complaint:

We're fucking mammals for fucks sake. Hair is not abnormal. The idea that a woman has to shave and pluck and wax in order to pass muster is abnormal. The solution is for you to stop being so shallow.

I think my following response is my best so far:

The whole reason women shave and pluck and wax is because we're mammals. We have evolved to find people attractive based on their gender traits. We have evolved to associate a certain set of characteristics with manhood, and another set of characteristics with womanhood. Women shave and pluck and wax to differentiate themselves from males. A woman who does this distinguishes herself from women who look more like men. Therefore, females who don't wax are outcompeted on the sex market by those who do.

This entire situation is inevitable. We are brought to this point by evolution and game theory. We don't choose to have these preferences. We are built to prefer women that are more unlike males. Removing hair just helps make you more unlike men.

If you're female, you're burdened by the need to shave and wax. You don't want to have to do it. It's a burden to compete with other females. But you fail to see that the reason you need to play this game is because we are subject to evolutionary pressures. This is the same type of mechanic as what causes deer to have huge antlers.

Be thankful that you can do something as simple as makeup and waxing to vastly improve your attractiveness. I'm a guy, and I'm 5'7". Most women are looking for 6' plus. There's nothing I can do about my height. Now you tell me who is being "shallow".

The Unemployable

2011-08-10T22:00:00.047-04:00

I'm not sure I even need to provide a link to the UK riots. There's already a Wikipedia page about it.

I've recently been considering an idea to which these riots seem to be related. This idea is about the marginally employable - or quite possibly, unemployable.

The society we have right now rewards talent. The more talent you have, the less you need to work to enjoy material comfort. If you have lots of talent, your work can be comfortable and fun, and you might make millions. If you have mediocre talent, you can still prosper if you work hard. If you have no talent, you need to work your bottom off to pay your bills.

With talent distribution being the bell curve that it is, there are bound to be unfortunate people with little to no talent. With talent being somewhat hereditary, a disproportionate number of these are likely to be born to parents who also lack talent. This means that people without talent are more likely to be poor, and the poor are likely to be stuck there.

Not so long ago, if you didn't have a talent to contribute, you could still contribute work. Manual labor was in relative demand. If you could operate a shovel, you could find work.

As time goes by, we are replacing more and more manual labor with machines. This would be wonderful if every manual worker was able to graduate to work that takes more skill, e.g. to operate machines. But it seems to me that this isn't the case. Many people who would have done manual labor in the past, will in the future have fewer and fewer ways to help the economy.

Unskilled people in developed countries are also being squeezed by competition from developing countries. At the moment, there remain many jobs that employ manual labor. But these jobs seem to have been exported to developing countries where labor costs are lower. The people suffering the most from this are unskilled people in developed countries. The jobs that remain in developed countries take more skill. The unskilled workers have to compete for those jobs with skilled people, and are losing.

This situation pretty much requires governments to step in and bridge the gap. They have done so. The cost of cheaper products from abroad is a more expensive social state, which needs to help the unskilled workers as long as unskilled jobs remain exported.

I don't see a way of fixing that, other than allowing companies in developed countries to compete with developing countries on the same terms as permitted there. This means the same low pay, and the same lack of protection laws. This would make unskilled workers even worse off than on social welfare, so it's unlikely to happen unless the social state goes broke.

In several more decades, developing countries will become developed. Their salaries will rise, and unskilled jobs will start to come back to countries they came from.

But will a large enough number of unskilled jobs come back, or will technological progress cause the number of unskilled jobs to still be exceeded by the unskilled workers in the population?

On the one hand, national IQ levels are rising over time. I attribute this to the dominance of genes that lead to intelligence, which proliferate as people mix.

However, I suspect that technological progress will be faster than the rate of natural human improvement. Unless we invent ways of improving ourselves, I suspect that an ever-larger portion of humanity is going to find themselves on the margins of the global economy. They will be in a state where they cannot contribute, because all the work they can do will be done more efficiently through automation. In a state of ultimate technological progress, where all aspects of the production of any good are automated, there will no longer be space for the existence of anyone but the brainiest individuals, and those providing personal services to them. Everyone else will have no way of earning goods, unless they receive them as a gift from those who still play a part in the economy. It might be a direct gift, such as in charity, or a systematic gift, such as in a social state; but it will be a gift nevertheless.

Unless we invent technology to improve human mental abilities, an ever larger share of the population will become dependent on the sheer generosity of an ever smaller pool of people who have skills to contribute. Whether this generosity will be forthcoming, and in what form, is up for anyone to speculate.

We could change our system to reward effort, rather than the good it does. But that's what communism did, and it impedes progress through misuse of resources. It is better for everyone to keep rewarding that which has results, and therefore to reward talent, while giving away part of the proceeds as social welfare.

One could argue that a social welfare state where everything of value is produced by a few people, and everyone else is on welfare, could be similar to heaven. Why, yes, that in fact could be the case. We could live very well in an automated system where most of us are not needed, or even useful, in the production of what we consume.

But for examples of states where the needs of citizens can be provided for without their input, look only at countries like Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia. Their oil exports are 40-50% of GDP, and the rest is, to a smaller or greater extent, foreign workers. Instead of creating heaven on Earth, material security has enabled these nations to indulge in dysfunctions from cultivating religion to oppressing women.

Either way, the outcome is questionable. I think a much better bet is technology to improve how well we think.

Reforming the economy with multiple currencies

2011-07-23T15:19:00.064-04:00

Our national economies appear to be breaking at various points that are hard to fix without substantial reform.

I suggest that many problems within an economy such as the US that have traditionally been addressed by complex, intrusive, and not all that effective legislation, can be addressed more elegantly by redesigning money.

I propose splitting a national currency such as the US Dollar into three or more currencies. These currencies would be:

Consumption Dollars, used for retail purchases. Persons would obtain Consumption Dollars by exchanging Investment Dollars they receive as their income. The exchange rate would start at 1:1 and become progressively more expensive as a person acquired more Consumption Dollars in a certain time frame.
Investment Dollars, received as income. All dividends, salaries and wages would be payable in Investment Dollars. This currency would be used to purchase companies and shares of companies, and could be lent to others who will invest it in this way. This currency could not be used for retail purchases; it would need to be converted into Consumption Dollars first.
Medical Dollars. This currency would be purchased with Consumption Dollars. The exchange rate would start very favorable for an initial quantity of Medical Dollars a person acquires in a certain timeframe. As more Medical Dollars are purchased, the exchange rate would climb to 1:1, and become progressively more expensive as a person acquired more Medical Dollars in the same time frame.

A reform like this would address the following issues:

The variable-rate Investment Dollars to Consumption Dollars conversion would replace highly complex income tax and sales tax legislation with a simple, easily administered mechanism. It would reduce government intrusion in the private sphere, and become the primary means of government funding.
The variable-rate Investment Dollars conversion would progressively tax consumption by the rich without adversely affecting investment crucial for economic growth, and without adversely affecting the poor.
The investment wealth of rich people is difficult for people inexperienced in investment to understand. An average person is used to their income matching their consumption, so they will view the net worth of a rich person as if all of it is there to be consumed. They do not notice a crucial distinction between the income that a wealthy person invests, and the part of their income they consume. Introducing separate currencies for investment and consumption would make this distinction clearer, reducing popular impulse to tax investment, which damages the economy as a whole.
The variable-rate Medical Dollars conversion would allow all persons to have access to basic medical care at a minimal cost, subsidized by persons able and willing to purchase much larger amounts of Medical Dollars at less favorable exchange rates.
The variable-rate Medical Dollars conversion would reduce monopolization of medicine by the rich, which reduces medicine's overall effectiveness. Medicine is highly effective with the first few dollars spent on each person, but becomes progressively less effective as more treatments are applied to the same person. Beyond a certain threshold, the marginal utility of additional medicine approaches zero, as progressively more expensive treatments are employed with lower and lower chances of helping. Under this scheme, the rich would be able to obtain more medical service by paying more, but would be unable to monopolize medicine due to diminishing returns on purchasing Medical Dollars, and would be subsidizing medicine to the poor as they do so.

Clarifications

Q. Who would perform the exchange between these currencies?

A. A government institution similar to current central banks would fill this role.

Q. If a person is paying more Investment Dollars than they get Consumption Dollars in return, where would the extra Investment Dollars go?

A. Into the government budget. That's how this scheme can replace existing income and sales-based taxation as the source of government revenue.

Q. How do you suppress the black market?

A. Same way as you suppress cheating on VAT. Most goods that people obtain are acquired from corporations. Corporations have strong incentives to comply with legislation. Corporations try to change legislation in their favor, but you don't generally see them cheating on sales tax or income tax. They have more to lose than they can gain.

Q. How would you define the exchange rate with an external currency, such as the Euro?

A. You would define another currency, Exchange Dollars, as the freely tradeable currency. Exchange Dollars would be convertible 1:1 into Investment Dollars, and could be purchased 1:1 with Consumption Dollars, but not the other way around.

A foreign tourist visiting the country would undergo this conversion: Euros -> Exchange Dollars -> Investment Dollars -> Consumption Dollars. The conversion into Consumption Dollars would be at an exchange rate specific to this particular tourist, according to the same rules as for everyone else. The tourist's foreign income wouldn't matter; a first time tourist wanting to spend 1,000 Consumption Dollars would be able to obtain them 1:1.

A citizen visiting a foreign country would undergo this conversion: Investment Dollars from income -> Consumption Dollars -> Exchange Dollars -> Euros. This would avoid foreign shopping sprees using untaxed Investment Dollars, and the customs you would have to set up to deal with that.

There may be legitimate circumstances where businesses need to spend Investment Dollars abroad, e.g. to buy a foreign company. Lossless conversion from Investment Dollars into Exchange Dollars could be made available for such cases with a strong paper trail. This is similar to how you currently need a paper trail for business expenses you don't want the government to tax - except you would need such paperwork only for some foreign transactions.

Q. What about a poor person reselling a product to a rich person for Investment Dollars at a markup? The poor person would be able to convert the Investment Dollars to Consumption Dollars at a profit, and the rich person would pay a lower price than they otherwise would.

A. Letting people engage in trade like this is not necessarily bad. The general idea is to throttle consumption by the rich, since its net benefit is lower than consumption by the poor. If a wealthy person and a poor person arrange to trade like this, then the result is a direct social transfer from the wealthy to the poor. That isn't contrary to the purpose of the system.

That being said, trades like this would result in loss of government revenue, and less funding for social services, including services to the poor. If this became the only way anyone buys their Ferrari, then that would be a small lottery win for those who get to do the trade and pocket the profit, and a net loss for others who do not.

It would be possible to simply outlaw this, which would make it too risky for large purchases, and thus restricting the problem in scope.

However, instead of outlawing these trades, it may be worthwhile to formalize them. The central bank could provide an exchange service where poor people could sell their Consumption Dollars for Investment Dollars at a free market rate. This would eliminate illegal trades from the economy, provide income to the poor that everyone can access, and add a control valve preventing rates paid by the rich becoming draconic. It would provide a self-enforcing maximum tax rate, as well as useful feedback helping officials to set gradients for Investment to Consumption exchange rates.

Q. What would prevent everyone from using Consumption Dollars exclusively, e.g. in transactions between individuals?

A. This could be discouraged in the same way as you are currently discouraged from accepting cash for services, and not declaring it for income tax. It is essentially the same problem, and similar solutions can be used.

If the currencies were digital, the system could go further to prevent this kind of tax dodging. For example, for payments from one natural person to another where there's no apparent prior connection, you could simply make a conversion from Consumption Dollars to Investment Dollars automatic.

This simple move would eliminate tax dodging for waiters and others who receive most of their income in tips. Transfers without an automatic conversion would still be possible between people who have prior relationships, e.g. in families.

This would require formalizing financial relationships in cases where there's a need for payments in Consumption Dollars between people who aren't family, such as between new partners and roommates. I think such formalization would be welcome, as it would provide an additional formal step between "strangers" and "married".

However, even without that, it would still be possible to use the same types of discouragement that are in place for income tax today.

Don't stop using soap just yet

2011-07-22T21:22:00.010-04:00

So I did an experiment for you. For science.

This guy posted on Reddit about how he hasn't used soap and shampoo for a year. I've heard similar ideas before, so I decided to give it a try.

For over a month, I showered only with water. I never stopped feeling unclean. My hair had lots of dandruff. My scalp itched. Scratching it felt tacky due to the oil on my hair. I cut my hair to 1/3 inch, and it wasn't much better. A month went by. No improvement.

I used soap & shampoo again today. I finally feel clean. My hair smells good. My scalp isn't itchy.

Maybe not using soap and shampoo works for people who shower 3 times a day and swim in chlorine regularly, but it didn't work for me.

So scratch that theory.

The top 1% vs. the top 0.1%

2011-07-21T16:11:00.002-04:00

Excellent article by an investment manager about the makeup of the top 1%:

Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%

The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well.

...

Since the majority of those in this group actually earned their money from professions and smaller businesses, they generally don't participate in the benefits big money enjoys. Those in the 99th to 99.5th percentile lack access to power. [...] I speak daily with these relative winners in the economic hierarchy and many express frustration.

Unlike those in the lower half of the top 1%, those in the top half and, particularly, top 0.1%, can often borrow for almost nothing, keep profits and production overseas, hold personal assets in tax havens, ride out down markets and economies, and influence legislation in the U.S. They have access to the very best in accounting firms, tax and other attorneys, numerous consultants, private wealth managers, a network of other wealthy and powerful friends, lucrative business opportunities, and many other benefits.

...

[T]he bottom line is this: A highly complex and largely discrete set of laws and exemptions from laws has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.

The best, not the worst, must be teachers

2011-07-20T23:55:00.005-04:00

Build a better educational system by taking a leaf out of Finland's book.

Interview with Tony Wagner:

[Finland] began in the 1970s by completely transforming the preparation and selection of future teachers. That was a very important fundamental reform because it enabled them to have a much higher level of professionalism among teachers. Every teacher got a masters degree, and every teacher got the very same high quality level of preparation.

So what has happened since is that teaching has become the most highly esteemed profession. Not the highest paid, but the most highly esteemed. Only one out of every 10 people who apply to become teachers will ultimately make it to the classroom. The consequence has been that Finland's performance on international assessments, called PISA, have consistently outranked every other western country

You can't have good educational outcomes unless you have good teachers. I find it shocking how many countries are letting the teaching profession fall into disregard. It is the way to an incompetent future work force, and uneducated voters.

Heightism in online dating

2011-06-18T22:18:00.005-04:00

I came across a heightism thread on Reddit today, and I found the following report stunning:

I made two accounts in different metropolises in the country using the exact same profile picture and descriptions but in one the height was listed as five foot seven and the other it was six foot three. And this was a "good looking" "handsome" "fit" guy.

The five foot seven guy? ZERO messages received first; ever. Not one. A reply rate back of less than 5% as well and most of those were from girls you'd describe as homely. And mind you this guy was attractive and fit.

The six foot three guy? He would get anywhere from 1-3 messages a DAY initiated from girls. And not just homely girls, but some very cute ones. I'd always ask why they messaged and they'd say it was due to a high match % or something listed in the profile interests. This guy would also get like an 75% return on his messages, and we're talking about from good looking girls here.

Funny enough, the fake hot girl profile I created got a ton of messages, and one of the most common leading lines was "do you like tall guys?" That's it. Naturally I thought this one liner would come off arrogant and off putting, but when I tried it using the tall guy profile, the success rate was even better than before.

I thought it's bad to be a guy on online dating sites, but no! There's just a complete lack of interest in short guys, regardless of their other features.

If you're tall, finding interested women is apparently cake!

Leaders against war on drugs

2011-06-02T01:47:00.017-04:00

A panel of former and current politicians and world leaders have published a report stating the obvious: the "war on drugs" is a huge failure.

Their report argues that anti-drug policy has failed by fuelling organised crime, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths.

[...]

Instead of punishing users who the report says "do no harm to others," the commission argues that governments should end criminalisation of drug use, experiment with legal models that would undermine organised crime syndicates and offer health and treatment services for drug-users.

So a group of people - from Kofi Annan, to Paul Volcker, Javier Solana, Richard Branson, and 15 others - go out of their way to speak out against this positively harmful, brutal, intrusive, puritanical "war on drugs", which criminalizes innocents, overcrowds American jails, wastes tens of billions, and fosters organized crime in countries south of the US, and achieves nothing.

How does the White House react?

It dismisses the report as "misguided".

What's misguided here are politicians who worry about appearing soft on drugs rather than solving the problem.

Anonymity: The refuge of the frustrated immature

2011-05-26T21:47:00.011-04:00

There are people who would have you believe that anonymity is somehow crucial to a functioning and civilized society, and that it's somehow essential on the internet.

It is not.

In the vast majority of my experience in real life and on the internet, anonymity is only ever abused.

In real life, people are much more likely to behave in ways that are harmful to others if they feel they aren't being watched.

It's the same way on the Internet. When people feel they are anonymous, they will do and say things they would otherwise never consider if they had to sign their names to it.

The vast majority of those things are harmful. Check any forum that allows anonymous posting. Under the veil of anonymity, people post things as if they have no capacity for self-restraint. Anonymous posts aren't thought out, they're overly aggressive, and are frequently meant to intentionally hurt others.

There's this movement, called "Anonymous", whose greatest achievement is that they've vandalized a few sites on the internet.

For the past several years, I allowed comments from anyone on this blog because any comment is at least better than no comment, right?

Well, perhaps not. Overwhelmingly, the comments that were posted on this blog anonymously were poorly thought out, overly aggressive, and most of all, dumb. Most anonymous comments would never be posted if the writer wasn't sure that they won't have to answer for it.

And for tolerating all this crap, what do we have to show for it? I gained insights into human nature. I learned that if you give people the opportunity to show their unrestrained selves, many will turn out to be meaner, dumber and less worthy of respect, than you'd expect.

That's an interesting insight in and of itself. But since anonymous commenting is about as unrestrained, as unpleasant, and as intelligent as farting, we really shouldn't be offering an audience to it.

The fate of anonymous digital currencies

2011-05-18T20:39:00.014-04:00

I just recently found out about Bitcoin, a digital currency that strives to be anonymous and have no central authority.

Instead of there being a single, trusted, centralized issuer of the currency, the entire network of peer-to-peer nodes, formed by people who use the currency, acts as the issuer of currency, and verifier of transactions.

The technical overview sounds convincing, and while there could be glitches I'm not aware of, I have no reason to believe right now that the system is technically deficient. It is already used in practice and accepted as a currency by a few.

But here's the bottom-line issue.

In order for a currency to be useful, you have to be able to use it to buy bread and pay electricity. Virtually all local government prohibits such transactions from using anything but the locally mandated currency.

In order for Bitcoin or a similar currency to become more than a curiosity, it has to be perceived as reliably exchangeable to a local currency.

In order to be perceived as reliably exchangeable, at least one country would have to credibly protect an exchange point between the digital currency and some other exchangeable currency.

That country, or group of countries, would then have to defend this courtesy, as the digital currency is used increasingly by folks worldwide to dodge taxes, and by mob lords to launder money from illegal activities.

As long as governments around the world maintain their irrational obsessions with making the drug problem bigger through prohibition, and making the tax problem bigger by trying to tax people's income, they will not tolerate an anonymous digital currency becoming more than a curiosity.

If any one digital currency threatens to become more than that, the US government will shut it down by outlawing exchange points within the US, and by outlawing transactions with exchange points outside the US.

They did the same to online poker.

Happiness gene identified

2011-05-06T01:13:00.001-04:00

A gene has been identified which causes people who have it to report a higher degree of happiness than others. (The gene causes the brain to recycle serotonin more efficiently.)

I contend that it is now irresponsible and immoral to let a child be born without first ensuring that he or she has this gene.

Allowing children to be born without this gene is to create people who will be less happy than they could be.

Planes are harder to hijack these days

2011-04-25T01:42:00.003-04:00

This story represents why planes are harder to hijack these days.

Never mind the (questionable?) security at airports. This guy was still able to bring a knife on board. But he could not hijack the plane. The passengers and crew didn't let him.

I predict there's no dark matter or Higgs boson

2011-04-15T20:20:00.004-04:00

Face it, physicists.

There likely is no Higgs boson, and there likely is no dark matter either.

Our current theories are decent as far as they go, but we will likely need to discover a new theory, and undergo a paradigm shift, to understand what we now call "dark matter" and gravity.

The education bubble

2011-04-15T19:58:00.005-04:00

I really like what Peter Thiel has to say about education:

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it.
...
Like housing was, college is advertised as an investment for the future. But in most cases it’s really just consumption, where college is just a four-year party, in the same way that buying a large house with a really big swimming pool, etc., is probably not an investment decision but a consumption decision.
...
[W]e’ve looked at the math on this, and I estimate that 70 to 80 percent of the colleges in the U.S. are not generating a positive return on investment.

His fellowship plans to "select 20 college students under the age of 20 and pay them $100,000 each to drop out of college and embark on entrepreneurial careers."

US vetoes UNSC resolution on Israeli settlements

2011-02-19T17:45:00.002-04:00

See, this right there is the reason for 9/11. The whole world condemns Israel, but the US turns a blind eye:

The US has vetoed an Arab resolution at the UN Security Council condemning Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories as an obstacle to peace.

All 14 other members of the Security Council backed the resolution, which had been endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

It was the first veto exercised by the Obama administration which had promised better relations with the Muslim world.

"Better relations with the Muslim world." ... Right.

Security "features" that hurt good guys more than bad

2011-02-11T13:25:00.003-04:00

So, you're using Windows, and you want to enroll for a public key certificate.

You open up your Internet Explorer (because other browsers don't work), apply for the certificate, pay for it, receive it, and you think all is dandy.

Then, you want to export the certificate so that you can use it on another machine.

No go.

In their infinite wisdom, developers of Windows Vista made it so that private keys for certificates requested through the browser are automatically marked unexportable.

This is to "protect" the private key. You can't back it up or use it on another machine, but the bad guys also can't export it from your computer behind your back. Right?

Except the bad guys can. The private key is, obviously, stored on the machine. The operating system has to access the private key in order to ever use it. So the private key is there. All you need is a third party utility, such as Jailbreak, to work around the "protection", and there you go, you can export the key.

The only people actually hurt by this stupid design decision are people who want to be careful and responsible, and do not want to risk running an untrusted third party hack with administrative permissions.

Those people have to revoke their certificate, install Windows XP in a virtual machine, and request a new certificate from there, because Windows XP did actually allow the key to be exported.

Gah!

You have two cows...

2011-02-08T18:34:00.001-04:00

Reposted from an internet forum.

1. FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

2. PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.

3. BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and as many eggs as the regulations say you should need.

4. FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.

5. PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You help to take care of them, and you all share the milk.

6. RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

7. DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

8. SINGAPOREAN DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. The government fines you for keeping two unlicensed farm animals in an apartment.

9. MILITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

10. PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbours decide who gets the milk.

11. REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbours pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.

12. AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for it. After the election, the president is impeached for speculating in cow futures. The press dubs the affair "Cowgate".

13. BRITISH DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. You feed them sheep's brains and they go mad. The government doesn't do anything.

14. BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. After that it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

15. ANARCHY: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to kill you and take the cows.

16. CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

17. HONG KONG CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly-listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows' milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because the fung shui is bad.

18. ENVIRONMENTALISM: You have two cows. The government bans you from milking or killing them.

19. FEMINISM: You have two cows. They get married and adopt a veal calf.

20. TOTALITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.

21. POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: You are associated with (the concept of "ownership" is a symbol of the phallo-centric, war-mongering, intolerant past) two differently-aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.

22. COUNTER CULTURE: Wow, dude, there's like... these two cows, man. You got to have some of this milk.

23. SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

IQs and opinions

2011-02-08T10:14:00.004-04:00

Many people seem to assume that those who disagree with them on something basic must be stupid.

I understand the frustration of fundamental disagreement. I used to fall into this trap, too.

Then, I got a fair amount of exposure to a group of very diverse high IQ people. My most striking experience was that they are as likely to agree with you, as to have a completely opposite mindset, arguing things you would never consider reasonable.

It is appealing to equate a person's disagreement with one's basic values with stupidity, but this is usually not the case.

I like to compare IQ to the horse power of a car engine. A stronger engine means you can reach your destination faster, but it doesn't dictate where you're going to go.

You're more likely to find yourself in the same destination - having similar opinions - with a bunch of people with large IQ variations. It is appealing to characterize a person as smart because they agree with you, but again, this is not necessarily the case.

The baby-sitting parable for the economy

2011-02-06T11:18:00.004-04:00

In 1998, Paul Krugman wrote this insightful article illustrating the Japanese recession, and the stagnation that followed, with an approachable and interesting parable.

Rich envy

2011-02-05T18:15:00.005-04:00

Robin Hanson posts this insightful observation based on Scott Adams's suggestions on what minor vanity perks could be given to the rich as a reward, and motivation, for paying more taxes:

Why do we tax the rich? If it is just because the rich have lots of money, and we need more money, then we should be pretty eager to take up something like Scott’s suggestions. Such policies could help us get lots more money at a relatively low cost to ourselves. But if we tax the rich more to lower the status of the rich, so they don’t loom as high above us, we are more likely to dislike Scott’s suggestions. Yes such policies lower the income status of the rich, but they might more than compensate via other very visible status markers.

Societies don't tax the rich because of fairness, or because of the economy. By far the main reason so many people are in favor of "progressive" taxation appears to be envy.

Not money envy, but status envy.

We are the aliens to some

2011-02-05T08:09:00.002-04:00

While we contemplate with doubt the possibility that aliens might be observing us, eluding us, and not contacting us, we are doing much the same thing to tribes in South America's rainforests.

Look at these guys peering at the airplane, wondering "what the hell is that?"

The researcher in the video says we should leave them the decision about whether or not to contact us. Consider the ridiculousness of that statement. How can they ever make an educated decision about whether or not to contact us?

Don't buy HTC

2011-02-03T01:55:00.003-04:00

I like Android phones, but as far as specific manufacturers go, I wouldn't recommend HTC.

My HTC Desire, which cost about $700, worked fine for about 6 months, but then apparently overheated at one point from watching a video over Wi-Fi.

It then started having increasingly severe startup problems, rebooting constantly after turning it on, and now it won't start up and stay up at all.

Internet message boards are full of people reporting overheating and rebooting problems with this phone. In many cases, this is apparently fixed by sending the phone in and replacing its motherboard under warranty.

Unfortunately, my phone didn't come with warranty, so I'm out of luck. I'm back to my age-old Motorola which still works fine, without fancy technology.

Save yourself some trouble, and don't buy HTC.

Why culling "alien" species?

2011-02-01T05:19:00.004-04:00

Scottish conservationists are expending time and effort to hunt down American mink and shoot them.

Their intent is to protect local species such as water voles and moorhen, who apparently cannot compete with minks.

Why the favoritism? Why should we care whether one species is predominant, or another?

It's one thing if a species, foreign or domestic, is causing direct damage to humans. But if it's just displacing one set of species in the ecosystem with another, what's the problem?

The ecosystem will adapt.

Why Slovenian media are... shit

2011-01-26T13:55:00.032-04:00

I like to use accurate words. I prefer that words do not exaggerate, but convey that which is true.

In the title of this post, the words are, unfortunately, appropriate. Saying that Slovenian media are "poor quality", or something otherwise reserved, would be an understatement. "Poor quality" would indicate that they aren't as good as they could be, but they may still have uses.

Consuming Slovenian media is about as harmful as consuming that which should go in the toilet:

Slovenian media will try to intentionally warp your worldview with manipulative, and frequently untrue, allegations about the moral, social and economic perils of Western society. This is mainly to support local politicians who distance themselves from the Western concept of justice and meritocracy, and instead put emphasis on privileges that "ought" to be available to all, and "national interests" that benefit a few. This harms the long-term development of the country, but pacifies the masses while some people profit.
Possibly in support of the above, or possibly because they are inept, Slovenian media will regularly take all sorts of internet hoaxes, easily verifiable as such, and publish them as serious articles. This seems to be more likely if such "articles" discredit the US. Slovenian readers will believe these articles in consternation about the state of the world beyond Slovenian borders.

In other words, you can't really believe not just opinion pieces, but even "factual" articles in what's considered to be "serious" Slovenian media.

Fundamentally, the major reason this can happen is that the Slovenian language, spoken by only 2 million, is a ghetto for the Slovenian soul.

Humane executions?

2011-01-25T18:53:00.008-04:00

There's an interesting article on New Scientist about the drugs used in "humane" executions by lethal injection.

For the purpose of this article, let's set aside the contentious debate about whether execution is acceptable in the first place. Given that executions do take place, what would be the most humane method?

I think the very fact that prisoners can't choose their own method of execution is inhumane. There ought to be a selection of several approved alternatives, and the prisoner should be able to choose a method he, or she, is comfortable with.

I also find it fascinating that no state practices execution by substituting air with nitrogen. This seems to me more humane than the lethal injection method, which may very well involve suffering if the anesthetic fails.

When pure nitrogen enters the lungs, it absorbs oxygen from blood cells. Within a few heartbeats, the new blood entering the brain is devoid of oxygen, and the brain shuts down. There is no pain. The person simply goes unconscious. Keep them breathing nitrogen, and the brain is dead.

Still, if I had to make this awful and macabre choice, I would not choose either the lethal injection, or the nitrogen. They are too sissy. As for hanging, or the guillotine, or stoning - I find them disgusting, and awful.

If I had to, and were able to, choose for myself, I'd go for firing squad. There's something about standing up to the guns, facing them, that says to me - I stood for something, I lived with principles, and I die with self respect.

Don't give the shooters any blanks either. That's a disgrace. An executioner should know the reason he's firing at a guy for, not seek sissy comfort in that he's just following orders, and that his gun maybe contained a blank.

Suppose you had to make this choice. What method would you choose for yourself?

Parking law abuse in Miami

2011-01-15T00:21:00.017-04:00

If you ever park a car in Miami, you may want to know that the Miami-Dade County cares a lot - in fact, it cares $23 - whether your car is parked this way:

... or this way:

Unfortunately, I was unaware of this factoid.

So, this past night, as my wife and I were contributing to the local economy by having dinner out in South Miami, eating sushi in the belief that our car is correctly and legally parked, officer "Y Isidor" took a look at our car, and after glancing briefly, decided that our mutual evening would be greatly improved if he issued this lovely request for us to help top up the Miami-Dade County budget:

And this is after I put all my coins in the parking meter, to make sure it would not run out - because, unlike many people I know, I actually care about correct parking.

So I logged on to the net tonight to find out more about how stationary vehicles can be deemed to be "parked against traffic", and I found the following opinions, gracefully provided by the internet:

You are parking the wrong way and when you leave the parking spot you will have to drive the wrong way, for a short time, against traffic.

Everybody I issue a ticket to thinks they should have gotten a warning... Give me a break, if I read your post right; you drove on the wrong side of the road, parked against the direction of traffic and now you think you should have gotten a warning.

These are obviously incredibly intelligent individuals whose mental powers must surpass mine. These gentlemen are able to see the recklessness and danger in my briefly positioning my vehicle to occupy the opposite lane before parking, as well as the incredible daftness of crossing that lane again when I exit the parking space.

We have only the stars to thank for such ~~useless bozos~~ insightful individuals who make the world a better place by issuing citations to people who've paid their parking.

Genetics controls gender, not upbringing

2010-11-23T09:27:00.002-04:00

Very interesting article. Due to accidental loss of penis, parents and doctor attempted to raise son as daughter. Despite having been castrated and believing he was a girl, his behavior became increasingly masculine:

"The girl had many tomboy traits, such as abundant physical energy, a high level of activity, stubbornness, and being often the dominant one in a girl's group."

[...]

Yet by the time Brenda reached puberty at 13, she was feeling suicidal.

"I could see that Brenda wasn't happy as a girl," Janet recalled.

"She was very rebellious. She was very masculine, and I could not persuade her to do anything feminine. Brenda had almost no friends growing up. Everybody ridiculed her, called her cavewoman.

Chocolate flavored powdered meat

2010-11-12T09:23:00.016-04:00

Hello to another day in a world where the vast majority of the protein we need for our sustenance - as well as lots of superfluous protein that we don't really need, but it looks nice on our bodies - is derived from daily torture and slaughter of thousands, millions, literally billions of dairy and meat animals.

I probably don't have to go into details of what a lifetime of a dairy cow or farm chicken looks like. You know their life spans are short, nasty, and brutal.

Some time ago, I walked into a nutrition store, looking for protein powder. Among the most prevalent powders, which tend to be derived from milk, I noticed a conspicuous product called Carnivor. It's protein powder... made of beef.

If there was ever an abomination, this is it. This is pure, powdered evil.

You see, we can get far more protein per life-of-animal-suffering from dairy, than we get from slaughtered meat.

Over an average life span of 3 lactations, a dairy cow will produce 20,000 lbs of milk per lactation, for a total of 60,000 lbs of milk per cow. At 3.2g of protein per 100g of milk, this gives us 860 kg of protein, per cow lifetime.

Meanwhile, a slaughtered steer - male cow - yields an approximately 714 lb carcass, producing about 570 lbs of retail beef cuts. This gives us about 20 kg of protein per steer lifetime.

If you simply compare these figures, it's apparent that grinding a steer carcass into a mere 20 kg of protein powder - functionally equivalent to protein you could get from dairy, just 40 times less - is abhorrent, and a waste.

And in the end, this abominable product is fed to people who feel they're more manly if they drink chocolate-flavored powdered meat.

People who don't help themselves...

2010-10-27T23:57:00.011-04:00

In Indonesia, a country of 230 million people, they apparently "do not have expertise" to maintain a tsunami detection system which was put in place after the 2004 catastrophe:

Locals were given no indication of the coming wave because an early-warning system put in place after the devastating 2004 tsunami has stopped working.

Fauzi, the head of Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysic Agency, told the Associated Press that the system began to malfunction last year, and was completely inoperative by last month.

"We do not have the expertise to monitor the buoys to function as intended," he said.

There's just no excuse for this incompetence.

Over the course of 6 years, a country with a population of 230 million has been unable to acquire equipment and train people to run a crucial early warning system? After they received the help to put it in place from countries like Germany, China, France, and the US?

What a waste of help.

Every cent misplaced by helping people who don't help themselves could have been used towards a goal where it would actually have an effect.

Edit 2010-10-29: Unlike bloggers, BBC News does not possess the integrity to annotate articles when they change them after they're published, but instead they regularly change articles, after having published them, in complete stealth.

The article has now changed to quote that the buoys have been "vandalized". How that's compatible with the statement they quoted previously, and why they deleted that statement, is beyond me.

Here's a screenshot of the article the way it still appears at the moment through Google Cache.

The value of seven billion dollars

2010-10-05T16:55:00.007-04:00

According to the French legal system, the value of $7 billion is 3 years in jail. That's what Jerome Kerviel got for fraudulent trading which saddled Societe Generale with a $7 billion loss.

EPA's economic analysis estimates the value of a US human life at about $7 million.

The reason a life can be assigned a value is because it takes a certain amount of money in order to save a US life. If you have $14 million, you could use that in the US to save, most efficiently, about 2 human lives total. Or that's what EPA suggests.

The money wasted by Jerome Kerviel could, therefore, have been used to save 1,000 human lives.

So basically he wasted 1,000 human lives worth of money, and what he gets is 3 years in jail.

Of course the damage cannot be undone, regardless of whether the jail time is 3 years, or a lifetime, or if he is simply executed, like the Chinese would have done.

But money is about human lives. Economic damage is about human lives. A system which handles this sort of wrongdoing by, basically, giving the guy a slap on the wrist, does not have its priorities straight.

Lady GaGa's meat dress

2010-09-14T18:41:00.017-04:00

I think people who are put off by Lady GaGa must either really dislike her music, or must be numb in the head. I don't remember a person this original since... ever.

Here's her latest outrage: the meat dress.

You and I might joke around and come up with a crazy idea to wear a dress entirely made of meat to a celebrity show, chuckling and feeling smug about our original and iconoclastic thinking. Then we would go wearing a nice evening suit because we don't have the balls to actually pull that off.

Lady GaGa goes and wears the meat dress.

It's visually disturbing, and at the same time seems to be a waste of meat that could have been served on a dinner plate. But consider our meat industry, which slaughters more animals in a year than there are all humans living. Consider the inefficiency of our food industry in general, combined with our eating habits, which wastes 50% of our food.

What is actually more disturbing: these few pounds of flesh made into a dress, or 10 billion animals raised in horrible conditions and slaughtered for meat every year? And to add insult to injury, a large part of that flesh going wasted?

We, humans, treat animals with utter, complete disrespect. We don't like to own up to it, we like to pretend we're all civilized, cultured, and nice, while eating our dinner steaks and barbecue chicken. Whether GaGa intended it or not, this dress starkly calls attention to our hypocrisy, and for that, I appreciate it.

Being deaf vs. speaking an unpopular language

2010-09-11T09:04:00.020-04:00

Katja Grace makes an interesting argument comparing:

intentionally making your kid deaf - like some deaf people want to do, arguing it will help the child experience deaf culture;
raising a child in an unpopular language - like most parents speaking unpopular languages do, arguing it will help the child experience that language's culture.

There is a difference between the two, primarily that a child raised in an unpopular culture can still learn a foreign language, whereas a deaf child cannot learn to hear. However, most won't learn a foreign language, and those who do, will be severely handicapped. Katja's arguments are illuminating and compelling.

I've expressed this sentiment in the past: languages with small numbers of speakers, like Slovenian, are poison for the people brought up speaking them. It should be a basic human right that one should be not just taught, but raised in a major world language, one that's e.g. in at least top 10 by total number of speakers. Of those, it should possibly not be a language spoken by a monoculture, but an international language that enables conversation with people from a wide number of countries.

If you raise your kid in a small language, and only make a token effort of teaching an international one, it's as if you are intellectually disabling your kid, preventing or impeding him or her from accessing the vast majority of knowledge and ideas that would otherwise be easily accessible.

The only acceptable way to speak a small language should be to be fully bilingual, maintaining equal fluency in an international language. When a child cannot be raised fluently in two languages, an international language should take precedence over a small one.

Fidel Castro, peace activist

2010-09-08T15:01:00.003-04:00

Wow:

Over the course of a five-hour discussion, Mr Castro "repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism", and criticised Mr Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust.

"The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust," the former president said.

Mr Castro said that Iran could further the cause of peace by "acknowledging the 'unique' history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence", Mr Goldberg wrote.

Mr Castro told Mr Goldberg that he understood Iranian fears of Israeli-American aggression and that he did not believe that sanctions and threat would dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.

"The Iranian capacity to inflict damage is not appreciated," Mr Castro said. "Men think they can control themselves but [US President Barack] Obama could overreact and a gradual escalation could become a nuclear war."

Mr Castro has recently made a number of warnings of the danger of a nuclear war between the West and Iran.

Mr Goldberg then questioned Mr Castro about his stance during the Missile Crisis of 1962, asking if he stood by his recommendation that the Soviets bomb the US.

"After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it at all," he said.

That just might redeem the guy. A bit.

James Jay Lee's demands

2010-09-01T16:56:00.004-04:00

James Jay Lee has been solo protesting outside the Discovery Channel's offices for years, demanding a complete overhaul of their programming. He believes that the human race is so bad for the planet that our population should be radically lowered through mass sterilization. He also wants an end to civilization and armed conflict. Because the Discovery Channel's network reaches many people, he believes they can, and should, make this happen.

It seems that no one has been taking him seriously, so now he invaded the Discovery Channel's headquarters waving a gun and with metallic canisters strapped to his chest. It appears that he is currently taking a couple of hostages, awaiting his demands to be met.

Read about his crazy demands before his web site is shut down, which seems likely. :)

1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. ...

The doghouse: India goes after encryption

2010-08-31T08:48:00.004-04:00

India is going after all sorts of encrypted communications that are making it inconvenient for its security services to keep tabs on everyone.

They've already gone after RIM (Blackberry), and telecoms firms are next.

If their smarts are sufficient to at least be consistently dumb, a countrywide ban on secure web browsing ought to follow.

This is a ridiculously bad idea because it only prevents law-abiding citizens from using encryption to protect their sensitive communications.

All the smart criminals and terrorists can continue to use encryption, whether or not it is legal, as they please.

Something to show your kids

2010-08-28T17:52:00.002-04:00

Food additives

2010-08-25T07:52:00.006-04:00

A very nice article making an attempt to dispel the irrational fears of food additives. An imbalanced diet is much more of a danger than the additives in the food:

So, had I overdosed? Yes, but not on E numbers.

Dr Heaversedge wasn't worried about my E consumption, not even sodium nitrite (remember that 100-fold safety margin). What he was horrified by was the fact I'd eaten 418% of my recommended daily allowance of fat, 500% of my salt RDA and 218% of my sugar RDA. So the biggest nutritional culprits in my binge came in purely organic form and had no E numbers.

Don't miss the column that enumerates a few additives used by our ancestors in recent centuries. Strychnine and sulphuric acid in beer, anyone?

"Zakaj bi verniki sami seb lagal?"

2010-08-17T17:55:00.009-04:00

[Most of my posts are in English. This one isn't. :) ]

Vprašanje v naslovu mi je pred kratkim postavila neka anonimna korespondentka, ko sem objavil, da je laganje samemu sebi popularno. Da 90% ljudi - vsi, ki so verni - sami sebi lažejo.

"Zakaj bi verniki sami seb lagal?"

Odgovoril sem ji:

Vera temelji na tem. Zato se ji reče "vera", ne pa "resnica". Jedro vere je verska laž, v katero se verjame, ker je udobno, ne zato, ker je res. Okoli laži je antiracionalni ščit, ki varuje laž pred razumom. Ščit poskuša nevtralizirati razumske misli, ki bi versko laž ogrozile. Če kakšna misel pride skoz in predre ščit, pa je vernik zadolžen, da zapolni luknjo s pasto iz laži.

Conversations with a Christian

2010-08-16T20:28:00.013-04:00

The following is my summary of a long and frequently frustrating debate on Facebook between myself, another atheist, and a Christian. I changed the names for some degree of privacy.

"The evolution of morality is a pretty well researched question with solid evolutionary answers. A better argument for the existence of something along the lines of God is awareness itself. To the best of my knowledge, science has so far been unable to offer an explanation of why anyone's aware of anything. Nor does it offer a satisfactory explanation of why I happen to be aware of only me - and not any of the other billions of creatures in existence.

In my mind, questions about the origin of awareness beg an answer that must point somewhere outside of what we currently know as nature, or at the very least requires augmentation of our knowledge of nature.

However, jumping briskly from these questions to "God exists as depicted in the Bible, and he sent Jesus to atone for our sins" is a gross violation of rationality, and it is only possible if you first assume that the Bible contains truth, and THEN proceed from that point onward, rather than considering the truth of the Bible on its own. It must be clear to any imaginative mind that IF a spiritual world exist, it might take any number of forms, and that a book originated by an organization that is obviously in the business of power and influence is NOT a source to be trusted at all.

Now, as far as Evelyn's faith goes, I think it is fairly clear at this point, and has been shown numerous times, that:

(1) Evelyn's faith is irrational, and she's proud of that. She has exclaimed several times that her world is not limited to probabilities between 0 and 1, and that it isn't limited by cold logic. She might as well have said directly that her world involves fairy tales. These were clear admissions that rationality is not important to her. And not just when it comes to religion: she actually went further and stated that even knowledge about the world is not important to her, preferring the bliss of ignorance to scientific pursuit of knowledge. (This, while at another point referring to her credentials as a scientist.)

(2) The purpose of Evelyn's faith is to give her comfort. She has stated several times that the reason she believes is because it makes her feel good, and she would like others to believe because it would make others feel good. At no time nor at any point did she use any argument that would assert that her faith is "true". When asked to evaluate the probability that her faith is true, she flatly declined. This indicates she might not even actually believe her faith is true, she just enjoys a thought process that assumes it is true, and she wishes to preserve that thought process for the comfort it provides.

(3) Evelyn believes that atheists live in mental anguish where they suffer from not having a comfortable answer about the nature of the universe. Evelyn fails to understand that it isn't necessary to believe in a detailed story of a God in order to be comfortably at ease with the Universe.

If any progress is to be made in helping Evelyn understand where Isaac and others like him are coming from, it would be in clearing up the misconception in paragraph (3) above. The reason Evelyn chooses her faith is emotional. The emotions involved are a sense of bliss if the faith is retained, and fear of uncertainty and emptiness if it isn't. Because her reasons are emotional, she will actively evade any attempts to apply reason that could threaten her faith.

I do not think that reason and logic alone can put even a chink in her armor. The armor is auto-deflecting and self-repairing, and she has been practicing those self-repairs her entire life.

If you want her to understand where you are coming from, the first order of business would be to explain, in EMOTIONAL terms, what helps you, as an atheist, to sleep peacefully at night. What makes you not perceive the world as cold and empty. What gives you the same emotional assurance as the bliss she gets from "knowing" that God is there to love her and guide her.

For atheists, who are used to thinking logically, this is a pretty tall order. Not every atheist might even have these emotional issues resolved. This is because atheists are ascetic thinkers, driven by principle, not comfort. We are willing to endure mental discomfort in order to pursue Truth.

Most people who are religious, however, are not ascetic thinkers. They don't find refuge in religion because they're driven by a noble principle. Instead, such people put more stock in mental comfort. They may in fact have given up on understanding the world in the first place, and so could not care less if their world view is further distorted. They may not even be able to tell the difference between a distortion and truth. And they don't care - as long as what they believe makes them comfortable."

Iran considers prisoner rape noble

2010-08-15T18:00:00.006-04:00

Words of an influential imam, with whom Ahmadinejad "regularly consults":

"If the judgment for the [female] prisoner is execution, then rape before execution brings the interrogator a spiritual reward equivalent to making the mandated Haj pilgrimage [to Mecca], but if there is no execution decreed, then the reward would be equivalent to making a pilgrimage to [the Shi'ite holy city of] Karbala."

Cultural relativism, anyone?

How socialism caused World War II

2010-08-12T20:49:00.012-04:00

I was just recently informed, via Tomaž Štih, of Götz Aly's book Hitler's Beneficiaries. The original German title of this book was Hitler's People's State, and it analyzes in detail Hitler's economy before, as well as during World War II. There's a Spiegel review here.

Apparently, this book makes a compelling case that the entirety of the German war effort existed to finance German socialism. The Nazi party was, of course, a socialist party - its full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party. But it turns out that apparently, the wars and the socialism weren't related just coincidentally. Hitler was a great social redistributor; the ultimate Robin Hood, in fact - in terms of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. His social state was financed first by confiscating the property of Jews in Germany. But eventually, this source of funding ran out, and the social system required funding. Hitler's choices at that point, then, were either to let the socialist regime collapse, or... obtain funding from neighbors. The subsequent invasions were not only self-funded from what was taken from the occupied regimes - they actually helped the Reich avoid bankruptcy it would otherwise had faced.

Tomaž makes the interesting observation that, time and again, history unfolds as follows:

To gain popular support, leaders distribute treats to the deluded masses by tapping an unsustainable source.
The masses get used to those treats.
When treats can no longer continue, two problems arise:
1. The masses do not wish to accept that they were deluded, or that it's no longer possible for them to get treats.
2. The leaders who caused the problem blame a third person, who becomes the victim.

I find it amazing that I never managed to see this pattern with World War II. Yet now that I do, it is striking how time and time again, the world revolves around this same old pattern: enjoying too much in the present, and paying for it later on. Not just on the macro scale, even people's individual lives revolve around the same unthinking paradigm: spend, broke, spend, broke; eat, diet, eat, diet.

If at least people were conscious of this process as it goes on. But it is the denial that makes it possible in the first place. And the denial is what, for me, makes observing it the most painful.

Apartheid was bad, but South Africa today is worse?

2010-06-02T19:53:00.005-04:00

Interesting comments by a few South Africans:

"We didn't like apartheid, but some things were better under apartheid than they are now."
"Life here under apartheid was bad, but now it is more bad."

Chicago Justice

2010-06-02T00:39:00.014-04:00

Inevitably, in a country of 300 million people, even if most things go right, there will be stories every day that make you sick.

Inevitably, in a country that large, many of these stories will involve the police.

This is a story like this.

Dad, wife and daughter are out for breakfast when they notice what appears to be a woman in distress. It is in fact an undercover police officer looking to trap people with "soliciting" a prostitute. She leans on the passenger side window and offers sex or blowjob. No sooner are they able to respond when the police swarm the car, arrest the dad, impound the car, and leave the wife and daughter stranded.

The dad spends 8 hours in custody. They do not return the car. The city wants $4,700 in "towing and storage fees" in order to give it back.

Related: read this insightful comment about the Chicago Department of Revenue and their car impounding racket. Snippet:

And as for the poor guy in this story, odds are that he will not get his car back, as there are many reports that they take very expensive cars that they get and re-auction them off very quickly, to avoid having to give them back. Once the car is gone, they can stall forever regarding the money, if they are ordered to return the vehicle.

The doghouse: Residence Inn "High Speed" Internet

2010-05-30T17:26:00.022-04:00

My wife and I are currently on an extended trip. We spent some time in Vegas and are now visiting Chicago. Hotel prices in Vegas currently seem to be about as low as they're going to be, so we took this as an opportunity to stay in some nicer hotels that we might not have otherwise considered. We stayed in the lower-end suites at Trump, Vdara and our favorite from last year, South Point, and we must say that the Trump is now our favorite experience. We will for sure stay there again, if we can get a similarly reasonable rate.

What we liked most about the Trump was the lack of any major inconveniences or drawbacks. The suite was nice and had a great view overlooking the strip. The bathroom was the most marvelous of a comparable size suite or room that we ever stayed at. There was a lot of storage space; there was a nice little kitchenette; none of the space was wasted on a mini-bar with insulting prices; 24 hour room service with excellent food; a 24 hour gym; and quite importantly...

... fast and reliable internet access.

Thankfully, all of the hotels we stayed at in Vegas this time - Trump, Vdara, and South Point - offered great internet access.

Now fast forward to our stay in Chicago. The most reasonable accommodation we could find was at a Residence Inn, where for a decent price, the little suite has nearly everything you might wish for - even a full fledged kitchen with a large fridge and a freezer - except...

... fast and reliable internet access.

About a week ago at South Point, I clocked the download speed at 2.3 megabytes per second. Here at Residence Inn, the "High Speed Internet" connection manages a paltry 60 kB/s, or about 2.5% of that.

At Vdara, the ping time to Google was consistently around 60-70 ms. Here, the ping time ranges anywhere from 300 to over 1000, with an average of over 500 ms. Even just pages with a lot of images take long to load, let alone more network intensive types of access.

I called the hotel's internet help desk, provided by Guest-Tek, to ask about these issues, and was shocked at their response. I thought perhaps there is a technical problem that makes the network temporarily that slow. But no. This is their service operating as intended. They consider the service to be primarily for business purposes such as email and basic web browsing. The following, they explicitly stated, are not what they consider acceptable uses:

Watching streaming video (e.g. YouTube).
Downloading music (e.g. from Amazon or iTunes).
Skype.

I am perplexed that, with such limitations, they dare call their service "high speed" internet. What, exactly, is "high speed" about emails and basic web pages, in the year 2010? I could do that with a modem, fifteen years ago.

If anyone knows of a place to stay in or around Chicago that offers (1) a fridge, (2) actual high speed internet access, and (3) a reasonable price...

... please leave a comment.

Edit: We made the mistake of giving a chance to another Marriott-operated Residence Inn in a different area near Chicago. They again advertised "free high-speed internet", and again, the problems were identical. The average ping time is 500-1000 ms, and the average transfer speed is 30-60 kB/s. A simple text page can take some 10 seconds to load. A page with photos takes minutes.

I am reporting these guys to the Federal Trade Commission - if I can get the page to load. :)

Braindead MP3 buying restrictions

2010-05-10T22:46:00.013-04:00

As you may know, I live in St. Kitts. St. Kitts is a nice island in the Caribbean, part of the two-island Federation of St. Kitts & Nevis. The two islands have a population of about 40,000 and have their own government, their own seat in the UN, and so forth.

St. Kitts & Nevis also happens to have no really enforced copyright law.

There's a store downtown which sells pretty much any movie you can think of for about USD 7. All bootlegged, poor quality, pirated copies. If they don't have a copy pre-manufactured in the store, they'll burn it on a CD for you if you return in 20 minutes.

I don't buy movies this way. I prefer high-quality copies, and I don't mind shelling out what's basically the price of two movie tickets to have it on a proper DVD. I also like to know that I'm contributing towards production of future movies, not just some guy who purchased a device that can copy a CD.

For similar reasons, I prefer to buy my MP3 music from legitimate copyright holders. I'm not sure there's any law in St. Kitts that would make it illegal for me to go online and download pirated music for free. Even if there is such a law, almost certainly no one enforces it.

But I hate stealing intellectual property. I believe in contributing for stuff that I enjoy. So until recently, I liked to buy my MP3s on Amazon, for the (for me) reasonable price of $1 per track.

It seems this era is now coming to an end.

First, Amazon was verifying my shipping address. It had to be in the US for me to be able to purchase and download an MP3. Okay, so I use a shipping address in the US.

Then, they introduced IP address checking. Okay, so instead of connecting directly, I connect through a proxy in the US.

Now, apparently, they introduced credit card checking. My credit card, unfortunately - or fortunately, for other reasons - is not in the US. And there's not much I can do about this.

Even though I'm right now sitting in a hotel in Las Vegas, I am therefore unable to buy an MP3 on Amazon. They won't sell it to a customer with a credit card outside the United States.

It is braindead - though I understand the reasoning for it. Copyright for the same song might not be held by the same person in every country. The revenue may need to go to different people, depending on the country it's used in. And there may be other legal restrictions.

But still, that doesn't change the fact that it's braindead. As a resident of St. Kitts, I now have no other choice than to download bootlegged copies of my music - even though I want to pay for it.

Life in prison for "lewdness with a minor"

2010-05-10T02:39:00.011-04:00

A 34-year old Nevada woman was drunk and made some seriously inappropriate proposals to a 13-year old son of her friend:

Taylor kissed a friend’s child, forced him to touch her breast [through a bra] and asked him to have sex with her.

Prosecution charged her for "lewdness with a minor". A jury found her guilty, and the judge had no choice but to impose the penalty required by Nevada law: life in prison.

In the words of her public defender:

“She is getting a greater penalty for having a boy touch her breast than if she killed him.”

Check out some of the insane comments here. For example:

Lori Bishop: About time!!! Maybe if a state takes a stand against predators other states will follow.

Bekah: FINALLY! I AGREE because these sick people might really think next time they want to mess up another childs life! GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i wish it was like this in EVERY STATE!

Idiot Greeks

2010-05-05T16:28:00.014-04:00

I've never had too much respect for modern Greece - like I don't have much respect for any country that dwells on the overinflated achievements of its ancestors, but not achieving anything today.

What's happening in Greece these days, however, is outrageous. Over the last decade, Greeks have enjoyed a government spending splurge that was financed by borrowed money. Now they are deeply in debt. In order to stop accumulating that debt, let alone to repay it - if at all - they need to tighten their belts. Work a little bit more, for a little less money, for a little bit longer. There is no other way, because the borrowed money isn't coming any more. The Greek government's spending cannot continue at its former levels. Without the borrowed money, the numbers simply don't work out.

So what do the idiots do? They don't just stick their heads into sand. They cement buckets full of sand onto their heads and run around while setting things on fire:

At least three people have been killed in the Greek capital as protesters set fire to a bank during a general strike over planned austerity measures. [...] Riot police forced them back, but right next to parliament, other groups set buildings on fire - including a department of the finance ministry in charge of the the austerity programme as well as an office of the Athens prefecture.

What could we possibly do to make people understand economic realities? To not lash out like this when their debt-funded benefits must end? Better education in schools? What else is possible?

No Flash on the iPhone

2010-04-23T15:35:00.002-04:00

I've written before of Apple's crappy attitude towards developers. Here's the latest example with Adobe:

Mr Chambers also commented on Apple's revision of its terms and conditions. He wrote: "...as developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at any time."

And what a bunch of hypocrisy from Apple:

Apple responded in a statement to technology news site CNet in which it described Flash as "closed and proprietary". Apple preferred to support more open standards which replicate everything Flash can do, added the statement.

This coming from the vendor of the most proprietary and tightly controlled of popular computing platforms.

Miscarriage blamed on non-fussy uterus

2010-04-21T23:18:00.002-04:00

Very interesting:

FAR from being a passive container, the human uterus seems to be highly selective about which embryos it accepts. Women with less "fussy" uteruses may be at higher risk of miscarriage.

Miscarriage is the most common complication of pregnancy, with around 1 in 3 embryos lost before 6 weeks of pregnancy and a further 10 per cent before 12 weeks. For years, faulty embryos or problems such as abnormal clotting or immune responses have been blamed.

Jan Brosens at Imperial College London wondered if another process was at work. He had noted that many women who had repeated miscarriages claimed to have conceived incredibly quickly. "Each one of their pregnancies was conceived within one or two months of trying," he says. What's more, some studies have hinted that embryos implanting outside the normal window of uterine receptivity were more likely to miscarry.

[... article ...]

The doghouse: US Postal Service

2010-04-20T18:41:00.006-04:00

A month ago, I ordered a shipment from the US. Unfortunately, the only shipping method available was US Postal Service. The shipment was supposed to be delivered from a sender in Colorado to me in St. Kitts, and the quoted time was 10-14 days.

Now look at these admirable tracking details:

Electronic Shipping Info Received, March 25, 2010
Arrival
International Dispatch, April 05, 2010, 8:14 pm, ISC MIAMI FL (USPS)
Arrived Abroad, April 09, 2010, 12:38 pm, BAHAMAS
Origin Post is Preparing Shipment
Inbound International Arrival, April 13, 2010, 3:25 pm, ISC MIAMI FL (USPS)

It is now April 20, and the shipment spent this time going from Miami to Bahamas and back to Miami, and is now apparently still in the States.

A courier service would have delivered this in 2 days.

Omni-fix for Windows?

2010-04-19T17:27:00.002-04:00

Nice!

Microsoft has launched "Fix It" software that keeps an eye on a PC and automatically repairs common faults.

The software basically adds the automatic diagnostics system in Windows 7 to older versions of Microsoft's operating system.

[...]

Once installed, the software gets updates about known issues with Windows or any connected devices, and regularly checks to see if a host machine has fallen victim. Once fixes become available it will tell users they are ready or attempt to apply them.

Let's hope this takes off and becomes more effective over time. There's really no reason why Microsoft shouldn't proactively fix common problems on people's machines, including malicious software removal. It is a major opportunity for Microsoft to make Windows friendlier to users who don't know much about software, and invariably end up with machines bogged down by malware and other problems.

Abortion should be legal after birth

2010-04-15T04:00:00.019-04:00

Kids like these are why abortion should remain legal for quite a long time after birth:

At first all seems well, but as time goes on the boy begins to display disturbing behaviour, spitting, hissing and kicking his new mother, threatening to kill family members, reacting violently when denied a new toy, attempting to beat a relative with a statue when asked to correct his math homework.

Finally, when the child not only threatens to burn down his house but draws pictures of the conflagration, the adoptive mother hatches a desperate plan. She puts the boy on a plane back to Russia with a note saying that he has severe psychological problems, she was lied to by the orphanage, [...]

Looking at some of the comments under this article, I am bewildered by the attitudes some of these commentators take:

This is a new variation on child abuse. The disposable child abandoned by airplane.

narcissistic single woman who should never have been permitted to adopt a child and now rightly deserves to be facing criminal charges of abuse and/or abandonment.

This selfish woman was unprepared to deal with a difficult child.

It is telling how far we have fallen that these attitudes are taken as self-evident and normal, rather than the insanity they are.

The following points lead me to believe such attitudes are insane.

The sum of a society's unamortized investment in a human being is not nearly maximum at age 7. It is when the said being has stopped studying and is about to start working. Depending on the country and the child's education, this could be anywhere from age 18-28.
When a person dies, the true cost to the world is (1) emotional, as in the sum of unpleasant emotions felt by others over the loss; (2) loss of investment, as in when the child has already undergone significant medical attention and schooling (especially when paid by taxes and others' contributions, rather than by family).
A severely damaged child is not going to improve and is only going to become a damaged, and quite possibly dangerous, adult.
We, humans, are animals. Our experience differs from the experience of animals in details, but not in its essence. We all experience life, thoughts, emotions. Only the degree of complexity differs.
We kill animals for joy and profit all the time. Our civilization is a lean, mean killing machine that you help propagate each time you bite into a sandwich.
Learning about the cruel nature of our civilization shocks many people, me included. But even knowing that meat in our sandwiches comes from slaughter, 95% of humans will not stop eating meat. Almost every one of us, most likely including you who are reading, silently endorse the slaughter we do on a daily basis.

See the disparity here?

On the one hand, we kill on a massive scale without blinking. On the other hand, the life of a psychotic child, one who's probably going to grow up to cause massive damage to life and property, that's sacred.

It's not sacred. It's an investment gone wrong. Investments like these should be terminated, before more resources are sunk, or possibly some innocent bystanders who are actually contributing get hurt in the process.

Fruit and veggies don't make you healthy

2010-04-07T11:55:00.009-04:00

I've suspected this for quite a while, and evidently, it's true. The claim that fruit and vegetables are inherently healthy is baseless:

In the best case scenario, an extra two portions of fruit and vegetables each day could prevent 2.6% of cancers in men and 2.3% of cases in women, the study concluded. [...] Fruit and vegetables could [...] be beneficial just by virtue of taking the place of more calorific fare, health experts say.

The following is the best article I've read so far on what we actually know about nutrition:

Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice

I stick to the following rules myself:

Calorie budget. I write down the number of calories in everything I eat. I do not allow myself to exceed my daily calorie budget. I pace myself throughout the day, eating 100-300 kCal every 1-3 hours, so that I can have a final meal of protein before I go to bed, without exceeding the budget.
Protein. I try to get at least 20g of protein every 3 hours. I get it from a variety of sources, including meat, yogurt, cottage cheese, fat free cheese, fat free milk, and protein powder.
Exercise. I go to the gym several times a week. Primarily weights, with cardio on some days.
Vitamins and minerals. I take one multivitamin pill each morning in an attempt to make sure that I get the vitamins and minerals I need. I choose a pill that has a 100% recommended daily dose for all the vitamins, and a variety of minerals as well.

I have found that exercise is definitely what makes the major difference, but keeping to a calorie budget and getting enough protein lets me keep my weight down and muscle mass up even when I get lazy about exercise for a while.

Dubai stinks

2010-04-04T17:45:00.005-04:00

Dubai, the Arab world's most "cosmopolitan" and "secular" destination, sentences a British couple to 1 month in prison, based on a 2-year-old child's allegation that she noticed them kissing in the restaurant they were at.

Also for enjoying alcohol illegally with their meal.

"Your user profile was not loaded correctly"

2010-03-29T10:39:00.005-04:00

Is anyone experiencing the following issue?

About 25-50% of cases after booting, logging into Windows produces the message "Preparing your desktop". This takes several minutes, and then you get logged into a temporary profile instead of your own, and Windows shows a notification stating "Your user profile was not loaded correctly!"
When you check the Application section of the Windows Event Viewer under Administrative Tools, you see messages from User Profile Service with Event IDs 1502 and 1508, and contents that include: "DETAIL - The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process." One of the events mentions specifically that the file is ntuser.dat, belonging to the profile being logged in.

I've had this happen on two laptops consecutively, so the problem must be in some software I've installed, but I don't know what software.

I've read reports on the net that this problem can be caused by Google Updater, a program that's installed with applications such as Google Earth and Google Toolbar. Apparently, Google Updater can lock the file that contains a profile's registry, and that prevents the profile from loading correctly.

However, I have uninstalled Google Updater, and the problem has occurred again, in the exact same way, since then.

Germany tells Greece to sell islands

2010-03-04T18:30:00.011-04:00

If there's something I particularly like about Germans, it is their hard-nosed character trait of not only accepting responsibility, but expecting others to accept it, too.

More so than other European nations, they seem to have the ability to tell themselves and others to suck it up, tough it out, and face the consequences of foolish decisions in the past.

So I cheer when I hear German politicians proposing that Greece should start solving its national debt problem by selling islands. That's principled.

I'll add to that: sell sovereignty along with the islands. An island that goes for €2 million would easily sell for €2 billion (or more) if the buyer gets to make his own laws.

Apple is evil

2010-03-03T12:59:00.002-04:00

Not only does Apple make arbitrary decisions that affect the livelihoods of anyone developing for the platform; they are also now abusing the hopelessly wrecked US patent system to thwart competition.

Apple stinks.

Why we don't do Apple

2010-02-23T13:37:00.009-04:00

This is one reason why our small software company has not invested anything into producing software for the Apple platforms, nor do I plan us to:

ChilliFresh is an Australian company that creates apps for the iPhone, including the recently banned Wobble, which provides pictures of women's breasts.

"I'm now worried the eco-system is run by puritans and is not fair to all players," developer Jon Atherton said on its website.

"And worst of all it is not a secure source of income. It can drop to close to zero if they decide to change the rules," he added.

The firm was making £320 a day out of its apps, a figure which has dropped to £5 since the ban, he said.

"On Friday evening we got an e-mail out of the blue which basically said, thanks very much but we don't want you any more. Apple said it was removing all overtly sexual apps," he told the BBC.

It just doesn't seem to make sense to develop for a platform where you can't even count on being able to sell your software once you've invested years of effort into its development.

Apple picks sides, too:

When asked why some apps with adult content [such as Playboy's] had remained intact he said that Apple took into consideration how "well-known" companies were as well as whether they had "previously published material".

In other words: shaft the small guys, but try to avoid the big guys suing.

Man crashes plane into IRS offices

2010-02-19T01:10:00.007-04:00

The US Internal Revenue Service is frequently described as the most aggressive, least forgiving, most bullying tax agency in the western world.

The IRS is charged with enforcing a tax code which is incredibly unwieldy and full of traps. The way IRS enforces this tax code is said to frequently result in honest individuals ending up bankrupt or in jail for "transgressions" that they did not even know about.

I do not know this man's background, but quite apparently, the IRS was ruining his life, and he saw no better recourse than to crash his plane into their office building.

Quite possibly, they did, in fact, leave him with no other recourse.

The US tax system must be reformed, and the IRS must get out of the business of destroying people and businesses.

Charity considered harmful

2010-02-11T12:16:00.005-04:00

I was struck by this comment by Toby Ord under a LessWrong.com article:

It's not actually that hard to make a commitment to give away a large fraction of your income. I've done it, my wife has done it, several of my friends have done it etc. Even for yourself, the benefits of peace of mind and lack of cognitive dissonance will be worth the price, and by my calculations you can make the benefits for others at least 10,000 times as big as the costs for yourself. The trick is to do some big thinking and decision making about how to live very rarely (say once a year) then limit your salary through regular giving. That way you don't have to agonise at the hairdresser's etc, you just live within your reduced means. Check out my site on this, http://www.givingwhatwecan.org -- if you haven't already.

Charity is the process of taking purchasing power away from functional, creative individuals and communities, and giving it to dysfunctional, destructive individuals and communities.

Charity doesn't change the nature of the dysfunctional and destructive. It only restructures the reward system so that the dysfunctional and the destructive is rewarded, and the functional and constructive is penalized.

A person who does this willingly is, I am sad to say, stupid. You are only supposed to do this if people force you at gunpoint (taxes), and even then it's more patriotic to flee.

You should reward people for doing the right thing - providing a quality product or service - not for when they fail miserably.

The reason we evolved empathy is for cohesion with our immediate social group, where our empathy is balanced with everyone keeping track of everyone else, and an effective sense of group fairness.

But this only works within our immediate social group. Charity towards complete strangers is harmful because it is not balanced with fairness.

To balance our economic interactions outside the immediate social group that we can monitor, we already have a functioning system that's fair and encourages constructive behavior.

That system is money. Use it for what it's for.

Happy times in North Korea

2010-02-05T13:29:00.002-04:00

In The Economist:

First, women under 40, the main cohort of traders, were banned from markets, which have since been closed. Travel restrictions, especially near the Chinese border, were reimposed. “Antisocialist Conscience Investigation” teams fanned out. With market activity criminalised, punishments got harsher. In low-level “labour training-centres”, where most economic “criminals” are housed, 60% of inmates have seen executions and 90% witnessed forced starvation, refugees tell surveys by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland for the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Copyright troll hijacks hit song Down Under

2010-02-05T11:01:00.010-04:00

Copyright troll Larrikin wins lawsuit against Men at Work for their inclusion of two bars of an old Australian popular melody in Men at Work's recording of Down Under. The copyright troll now wants 40-60% of the song's earnings.

Larrikin purchased the copyright to "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree" specifically to extort people who make any use, even tangential, of this old, well-known Australian melody:

"It's earned a hell of a lot of money for us since we've bought it,'' Mr Lurie told The Age.

Another case of people who would leave the world better off if they were run over by a bus.

Previously:

Australia bans depictions of small breasts and female ejaculation

2010-01-31T19:18:00.007-04:00

Incredible.

If the world is indeed overpopulated, then censors like these should be the first to go.

Protecting you from yourself, and from your obviously immoral curiosity about female ejaculation.

"You... slut!"

2010-01-30T20:10:00.007-04:00

In various shapes and forms, the following has been making the rounds:

This has a ring of truth to it, which is why people think it's funny. But it's false - unless the woman in question is failing to protect her fertility by getting tested and using condoms, or is failing to use birth control.

I think that the label "slut" for women who like sex is spread primarily by women who have a lower sex drive to begin with, and use sex as a means of manipulating their partners. If such women did not shun and discredit other women who genuinely like sex, then their undesirability would become apparent and their manipulativeness would lose power.

St. Kitts election

2010-01-26T21:16:00.008-04:00

The Labour party has been in power in St. Kitts & Nevis for 3 consecutive terms over the past 15 years. During Labour's reign, the islands first subsidized an ailing sugar industry, then retired it, improved as a tourist destination, and have seen much development in recent years. This would have been great, if it wasn't for an ominous and enormous dark side: the foreign debt has ballooned from several million USD when Labour began their first term, to now over US $1 billion. With a population of perhaps 50,000, this works out to $20,000 US per every adult or child - exceeding the islands' annual GDP.

Talk of corruption is endemic, and the amounts that have reportedly been spent on public projects, such as houses for laid off sugar workers, seem to be more than these projects should cost. Since St. Kitts has no external supervision and no Freedom of Information Act, it is hard to estimate how much of the more than $1 billion has been siphoned off to private accounts, but the word in the newspapers and on the street is that the people in power are living beyond their salaries, and own surprising amounts of expensive real estate, locally and abroad.

This year began with an election for the next 5-year governing term. The competition is for 11 seats of the National Assembly. 3 of those seats go to representatives from Nevis, while 8 seats go to representatives from St. Kitts.

The two islands are a federation, and the parties in St. Kitts are separate from those in Nevis. Since St. Kitts controls 8 seats, the main competition is in St. Kitts. The contenders here belong virtually exclusively to either Labour, led by PM Denzil Douglas, or to its antagonist PAM, led by Lindsay Grant. The election, which was held this Sunday, again gave Labour a decisive victory: it won 6 seats to PAM's 2.

But there's a twist.

The local democracy here has a peculiar rule that a candidate can only fail to run for office twice. Once you have been a candidate twice, and failed both times, you may no longer run for office. It so happens that the leader of PAM, Lindsay Grant, lost the previous time around. If he lost again, he would no longer be able to run for office; PAM would be decapitated.

So Labour set out to make this happen. They expected correctly that voters in Denzil Douglas's district would vote overwhelmingly for him. They therefore encouraged a large number of those voters to register in Mr. Grant's district instead, to turn the balance against him. These extra voters did not necessarily live in Mr. Grant's district, but it so happens that voter registration doesn't require anyone to prove where they live. So apparently, hundreds of people from Mr. Douglas's district went to the other district to vote against Mr. Grant. As a result, Mr. Grant lost the election by a total of 29 votes out of 2,661 in his district. If this is left to stand, he is no longer eligible for office.

The peculiar thing is that this is not considered blatantly illegal. My understanding is that Labour freely admits to having done this, and contends that this is quite alright according to the law.

You can imagine that the PAM supporters disagree, and that there is major tension about the issue. Mr. Grant will need to challenge this outcome in court, but the swearing in of the new representatives is this week.

The further unfolding of this story should be exciting. Not too exciting, hopefully.

Obama is the man

2010-01-22T09:15:00.005-04:00

It's been a year and I have to say that, so far, I am fairly pleased with the Obama presidency.

It is certainly much better than the dumb white guy that was in charge before.

I am particularly happy to hear about his plans for some serious bank reform that ought to prevent banks from getting too big to fail.

This is good news, and is something I've been advocating since a year ago.

Violent genes

2010-01-21T09:59:00.008-04:00

In the UK, two brothers, aged 10 and 11 at the time, beat two other boys almost to death, apparently unprovoked:

During police interview, the court heard the older brother said he attacked the boys because he had been bored and "there were nowt to do".

[...]

A BBC investigation has already revealed the two attackers were well-known troublemakers and that social services were heavily involved in their lives.

Compassion is a genetic trait.

Some people have more of it, some have less of it, and some people don't have it.

We aren't all the same.

Most people who lack traits that we take for granted don't make themselves visible like this. They live among us and have relatively normal lives, except for little or no compassion, and they show this in small ways rather than large.

I say this because some people have a fiction that there is such a thing as a "brotherhood of humankind", united in values that "virtually all" respect (or should respect) by default.

This is not true. Not only do we not appreciate the same ideals, we don't even share the ability to. Perhaps up to half the human population is evil. We are not united in our sensibilities and ideals. We come together as individuals who agree on a common set of laws to solve our various private concerns.

Societies that understand this, and build on the basis of everyone's self-interest, prosper. Societies that try to build on some non-existent, pre-supposed common idealism, fail.

G-spots and squirting

2010-01-09T16:03:00.005-04:00

There has recently been a lot of ruckus about a "study" having "proved" that there is "no such thing" as a G-spot.

The "study" basically involved asking a bunch of women who were twins whether they have a G-spot or not.

Since women in genetically identical pairs would differ on whether they have a G-spot, the study concluded that there must not be any such thing.

The study seems to have pretty much completely ignored relevant information such as the variety and sexual competence of these women's sexual partners.

I shudder to think that this sort of complete bullshit passes any sort of review and gets published worldwide as if it's meaningful.

If you want to know the truth about sexual topics, you need to go to people who have had a lot of sex and a variety of sexual partners.

You need to go to people who enjoy swinging, partner swapping, group sex, open relationships.

If you enter a community like that, you will quickly learn that:

Yes, there most definitely is a G-spot. Even if you think you don't have one, if you find the right partner, you may be surprised.
Yes, women most definitely have the capability to squirt (female ejaculation). Not all women are physically capable of it, but a very large proportion is. Even if you think you're not, if you find the right partner, you may be surprised.

You just can't get very reliable information about people's sexual potential by studying people who deliberately try to not have sex.

Addendum: Some readers have interpreted the above as boasting that I am "the right partner". This was not the intended at all.

I do believe that it may very well be possible to have a semi-objective ranking of people's sexual prowess; some ways of doing it are just universally lame, while others will receive a good response from most potential partners. However, it seems highly unlikely that we would ever have consensus on who is the best sex partner - or even who is "very good". This seems highly dependent on each person's biology, preferences, and past experience.

PEBKAC

2010-01-08T22:27:00.014-04:00

PEBKAC. Acronym for: Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.

I have cofounded, and I run, a small software company that specializes in SSH client and server software for Windows.

SSH is a standardized protocol which specifies how a desktop program, called an SSH client, can connect to a back-end program running on another machine. The other program is called an SSH server, and the SSH standard specifies how the two programs can transmit files and information in a securely authenticated and encrypted manner.

If you have any experience with computers, I hope it's not too far fetched to expect that you have a vague understanding of what "client" and "server" means. A program that runs in a client role is proactive: it decides what server to connect to and what actions to request that server to perform. A program that runs in a server role is reactive: it waits expectantly to receive connections from clients, and responds to them as they arrive, in turn.

So, as I mentioned earlier, our company makes an SSH server, called WinSSHD, and an SSH client, which we call Tunnelier.

About a year ago, we introduced a built-in feedback feature into WinSSHD, which I hoped would make it easier for users to report any problems that they might experience, so that we can fix them.

And report they do.

Unfortunately, however, my expectations turned out to be... off the mark... about the quality of the feedback we would receive.

The very first thing that it became apparent we have to do was to introduce a minimal length requirement for the content of the feedback.

The feedback dialog, which is displayed automatically when a user uninstalls WinSSHD, has four components. There is text which explains that the user can provide feedback, but only if they want to. There is a text area for the feedback, and there are two buttons. One says "Send", the other says "Close". The instructions say that if you don't want to send feedback, just click "Close".

In the beginning, the only requirement to send feedback was that it's non-empty. This was insufficient. We got a barrage of feedbacks that said simply "blah" or "[expletive]" or "doesn't work". Such feedback, of course, is useless - and often just plain mean and insulting. So we now require that the feedback must have 40 or more characters.

The volume of useless feedback is now less, but even so, between 1/2 and 2/3 of all the feedback we receive is "abdfhkjghdfkjghfj..." - garbage characters repeated enough times to satisfy the 40 character minimum. Some feedback even seems angry because we "make" them type it in. Most of these people use an English version of Windows; and yet, they do not seem to realize that they could simply click Close.

Which brings me to the next most common type of frustrating feedback. These are people who have downloaded the SSH server instead of the SSH client, and do not realize their mistake. Here's one such case:

what is wrong with simple ftp transfers? This has a large learning curve, and I don't have a lot of time.

I uninstalled this before I even ran it.

Make it simple:
1. where do you want to connect
2. what is your login name
3. what is your password

That's about it.

terrible interface.

This is feedback from an apparently literate English speaker who has succeeded in downloading, installing, uninstalling, and forming a terrible opinion of WinSSHD, without even noticing the plentiful occurences of the word "server".

The sad thing, the tragedy, is that this is not exceptional. We get feedback like this every day. In combination with the people who send "abcdkjhkjshg" because they don't realize they can simply click Close, this constitutes the majority of our feedback.

Yes, we have also received feedback that was beneficial, and has helped us improve WinSSHD. The feature does help, despite the frustration. And even if all it did was let us know how many people were totally befuddled beyond our expectations - that would be helpful as well.

But still... there is so much of this.

I have already tried changing our download page to clearly identify which program is the server and which program is the client. The only thing that remains to be done is to physically separate the download pages, and attempt to lead the user to the right one.

Yet, I still have some doubts that it'll fix the problem completely.

Why Kenzo died

2010-01-04T19:57:00.032-04:00

Edit 2009-01-27: We learned Kenzo's pathology results today. It turns out Kenzo he had a tiny tumor that obstructed his bile. This resulted in the damage to the pancreas and liver that eventually led to his death. We are told that the tumor was very small and hard to identify even during the autopsy. It wasn't until they put the tissue into formalin that they were able to see it. Identifying it in the first place would have probably required a CT or an MRI, and removing it would have required a very involved procedure that would have been very high risk even in an otherwise still healthy cat. There is apparently no way he could have been saved on St. Kitts, and his chances would still have been poor even with state of the art skills and equipment.

When our cat Kenzo fell ill, and we were browsing the web for information and other people's experiences, we mostly found reports by people whose cats survived. It may however also be useful to hear failed accounts, so as to know what to look out for.

Kenzo was a big, gentle, adorable, 5-year old male cat who weighed 7.5 kg (16.5 lbs) before his illness. He was happy, playful and loving, and had a marvelous character. He had been overweight, but not obese; his stature was simply majestic for a cat. Genetically, he came from a prohibited liaison between a Turkish breed female and a Persian breed male.

In early December 2009, we left for a 10-day holiday and left Kenzo and Chanel (his female cat companion) in the care of a roommate. When we came back, we noticed that Kenzo had lost considerable weight. He went from 7.5 kg to 6.5, which the roommate had failed to notice. She merely observed the total food eaten by both cats, which remained normal, but did not notice Kenzo's loss of weight.

Mistake #1: Failure to spot the problem when it starts.

At this time, Kenzo showed no other signs of problems. He was cheerful and playful, and showed passion for chicken breast when we fed it to him. We therefore assumed that he might have simply not liked the food he was being given, or stopped eating due to stress of our absence. We thought this despite the fact that we had left for longer several times before, and the cats never had any problems.

Mistake #2: Failure to call a veterinarian as soon as noticing the problem.

Since Kenzo only lost weight but was still happy and playful, we thought perhaps a parasite might be involved. It was also time for the cats' monthly shot of Revolution, a parasite preventative, so we administered that just in case. A veterinarian later told us that this probably overburdened his liver.

Mistake #3: Failing to consult a veterinarian before administering medicine after noticing a problem.

Since Kenzo seemed relatively fine, and his toenails had grown long during our absence, I clipped them. He resisted, and my persistence added to his stress.

Mistake #4: Adding stress to a cat that already has a problem.

The next day, day 2, Kenzo didn't eat at all. On day 3, I noticed yellow color around his mouth. I raised this with my wife, but she thought it was from the food he was recently given. I was suspicious, since I had never before seen such discoloration after he ate, but did not pursue the matter further.

Mistake #5: Failure to recognize the onset of jaundice.

On day 4, I noticed that the yellow color around his mouth persisted. This time I suspected jaundice, and I checked the inside of his ears. They too were yellow. I conferred with my wife. We immediately called the emergency veterinarian and promptly brought Kenzo to them. He stayed with the veterinarian overnight.

On day 5, we came back to the vet to talk about results and see Kenzo. He was none too happy about the clinic environment and had not eaten much at all. They had done bloodwork and an ultrasound, but not a biopsy. His liver enzymes were all out of whack, his bilirubin was 9 where the normal is up to 0.9, but the rest of the bloodwork was fine, so they suspected that he has hepatic lipidosis. This is a dangerous liver condition in a cat that hasn't been eating. It is caused by the general inability of cats to process their stored fat. The treatment is to force the cat to eat enough for the liver to recover.

In the vast majority of cases, hepatic lipidosis is a consequence of another condition, but the underlying condition wasn't diagnosed. We all assumed Kenzo stopped eating due to stress of our absence, and/or due to the new person taking care of the cats.

This wasn't, in fact, the case. We didn't learn until the autopsy that Kenzo had pancreatitis.

Mistake #6: Failure to diagnose the underlying cause of hepatic lipidosis.

When we returned home, Kenzo showed some interest in food and ate a significant amount, but not enough given what the vet said he was supposed to. Jana took it upon herself to force-feed him over the next two weeks, which she did heroically. We did this in hope of avoiding him having to get a feeding tube, which would involve surgery to place it into his stomach through a hole in his throat.

The force feeding should have worked to help his liver. But what he really had was pancreatitis, and he needed an IV of fluids and electrolytes to keep him hydrated, as well as not that much feeding, to give rest to his pancreas. With oral feeding, he just wasn't getting (and keeping) enough fluids.

Mistake #7: Failure to hydrate the cat.

Mistake #8: Prolonged treatment based on an incorrect/incomplete diagnosis.

Kenzo didn't seem to be doing much better, so we called the vets, but were reassured that the treatment we were giving him was fine. We continued force feeding, even though we were worried because his energy level rose right up when he wasn't eating, and bottomed out when he was fed.

Mistake #9: Failure to reconsider diagnosis when treatment is not working.

Kenzo seemed to be getting worse, and the force feeding was very wearisome, so we finally insisted on bringing him in to get more tests and a feeding tube.

When we brought him in the second time, tests showed that his bilirubin was 19 - twice what it was the first time. He had lost more weight, and was down to 5.9 kg. They performed bloodwork and ultrasound again, but it was right before New Year's, so the people needed for a more detailed checkup were all off-island - celebrating in the US with their families, not having their cat die on them.

Tests showed that his gall bladder was enlarged and his bile flow was obstructed. He underwent surgery to receive a feeding tube. We were told to continue administering food, and now also antibiotics which they hoped would reduce internal swelling and remove the obstruction. What he would have really needed is more thorough tests and/or surgery, but the necessary people weren't on island.

We took him home December 31 and were told to bring him back on January 5.

He seemed to be improving slightly on antibiotics, and the feeding was much simpler with the feeding tube. (If your cat needs force feeding, definitely get a feeding tube.)

However, on the evening of January 3, he just seemed to fall of a cliff. He lost all energy - couldn't even climb out of the litter box after peeing - and looked like he was about to die. We brought him in first thing next morning.

We hoped they could still operate and do something, but it was apparent to the vet immediately that he was dying, that he wouldn't survive anaesthesia, and that euthanasia was the only remaining option. Reluctantly, this is what we did.

Autopsy showed that his bowel had ruptured, which was probably what caused the drastic decline the previous evening. The rupture itself was fatal and irreparable. The main problem, however, appeared to be severe pancreatitis, which had destroyed his liver in turn.

Autopsy also showed scarring of the intestines, which would point to Inflammatory Bowel Disease, but he didn't recently show any such symptoms. We suspect the scarring may have been from when he was younger, and was unrelated to the recent situation.

After the autopsy, the veterinarians reassured us that there was nothing we could have done. That given the state he was in, he would have died no matter what we did, even at the point when we first brought him.

We're not so sure that is the case. If none of the above mistakes had happened - and perhaps if this wasn't a godforsaken island which all the skilled people leave over New Year - then, maybe, Kenzo might have lived.

As it is, we are left with a tuft of his hair... his favorite toy... and the next 10 years without our beloved, special, irreplaceable companion.

In memoriam Kenzo, Sep 2004 - Jan 2010

2010-01-04T10:21:00.003-04:00

Our cat, Kenzo, died today after 3 weeks of intensive home care. He was the sweetest, most graceful and majestic cat we've ever known.

Goodbye, Kenzo.

The doghouse: GSM Association

2009-12-29T17:13:00.010-04:00

It turns my stomach to see how antiquatedly defensive and counter-productive is the GSM Association's response to the recent cracking of GSM encryption:

Using the codebook, a "beefy gaming computer and $3,000 worth of radio equipment" would allow anyone to decrypt signals from the billions of GSM users around the world, he said.

Signals could be decrypted in "real time" with $30,000 worth of equipment, Mr Nohl added.

It looks like GSMA has a mindset stuck in 1995, completely failing to notice the evolution of security attitudes that happened in the software industry. They employ the classic approach of (1) shoot the messenger, (2) downplay the problem, (3) claim they're "working" on a solution:

The GSM Association (GSMA), which devised the algorithm and oversees development of the standard, said Mr Nohl's work would be "highly illegal" in the UK and many other countries.

[...]

[T]he GSMA dismissed the worries, saying that "reports of an imminent GSM eavesdropping capability" were "common".

It said that there had been "a number" of academic papers outlining how A5/1 could be compromised but "none to date have led to a practical attack".

The association said that it had already outlined a proposal to upgrade A5/1 to a new standard known as A5/3 which was currently being "phased in".

"All in all, we consider this research, which appears to be motivated in part by commercial considerations, to be a long way from being a practical attack on GSM," the spokeswoman said.

Security research should not be illegal anywhere, and the proper response to a vulnerability is to fix it. Immediately; not at some convenient time, far in the future.

Gravity wells

2009-12-29T16:39:00.003-04:00

From xkcd, a very nice, easily graspable illustration of gravity wells. Click for the large version:

The failed jet attack

2009-12-26T19:38:00.013-04:00

Details here and here.

Note how all the security theater implemented after 9/11 failed to stop this attack.

Security processes were followed correctly, but did not detect the explosives in this man's underpants.
The man's name was checked against the "no fly" list; he wasn't on it.
In fact, the man was traveling on a valid US visa.

The real reason this attack failed?

The explosive device apparently malfunctioned. Instead of simply blowing up the plane, it merely caused a local fire.
When passengers smelled the fumes and saw the flames, they acted aggressively, perhaps preventing a worse turnout.

The response of the Obama administration: more security theater.

US President Barack Obama, on holiday in Hawaii, has ordered increased security for air travel.

The US Department of Homeland Security said "additional screening measures" had been put into effect since the incident.

"These measures are designed to be unpredictable, so passengers should not expect to see the same thing everywhere," Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

Prepare to be harrassed and inconvenienced again for a false impression of safety.

Then again - perhaps the existing security measures did help prevent a disaster, in that they forced the perpetrators to try a poorly tested design (PETN in underpants) rather than a more conventional device (which might have worked, and blown up the airliner). I just hope that the new "surprise" security measures won't again raise the frustration in air travel to a whole another level.

See also this hilarious South Park episode where Mr. Garrison invents an alternative to air travel.

Please, put the patent system out of its misery

2009-12-23T11:00:00.005-04:00

i4i. How suitable a name for a patent troll company. Another set of people who would leave the world no worse off if they were run over tomorrow by a train.

This is how it works. Register an overreaching, abstract patent that the small brains at the patent office have no chance of understanding the ramifications of. They will even let you patent the wheel, for smurf's sake.

Then hire an ethically challenged lawyer (or is that a tautology?), and possibly find a cooperative judge (it's not a bribe if they can't prove it!).

Then sue the bejezus out of a big corp, like Microsoft or Research in Motion.

The people who do this should all be dead. If they stole amounts like these in a bank robbery, they would be chased by every cop and would appear on every front page. But instead, they're doing it by abusing the legal system, and hardly anyone gives a damn.

Please put this broken patent system out of its misery.

The doghouse: Predator drone does not encrypt video feed

2009-12-17T17:21:00.003-04:00

Of all the billions that are spent on developing aircraft like the unmanned Predator drones, you would think that the designers would employ some decent encryption to protect the command channel and the video feed.

Nope.

Unions destroy businesses

2009-12-14T20:01:00.003-04:00

A fantastic example of how destructive a force workers' unions are for a business.

British Airways just recently lost 292 million GBP over a 6 month period, and its two pension schemes have a combined deficit of 3.7 billion GBP. Management is handling this by freezing pay and downsizing: 1000 employees have already left on voluntary redundancy, while 1200 more need to leave.

The union's response? An 11-day strike over the whole Christmas and New Year period, ruining the holidays of a million customers who now can't get tickets on any other airline because everything is booked out.

Edit 2009-12-17: A judge declared the strike illegal based on a technicality. Thank smurf.

Obese people on-board: discrimination?

2009-11-26T00:52:00.007-04:00

The Canadian Supreme Court wisely ruled that people like this should not have to pay for more than one plane ticket, because that would be discrimination:

I am pro-discrimination.

By that token, maybe the Canadian Supreme Court should extend its anti-discrimination activism to roller coaster rides? Surely, the minimum height standards discriminate against midgets.

Belle de Jour: Freakonomics interview

2009-11-22T22:13:00.018-04:00

"Belle de Jour" is the pseudonym of a woman scientist, blogger and author, known for writing about her experiences as a call girl.

Now that her identity has been revealed, an interview with her appears on Freakonomics:

In 2003, a young American woman in London studying for her PhD. ran into money trouble. To support herself while writing her thesis, she joined an escort service. Under the assumed name Belle de Jour, she started to blog her experiences. That blog led to a series of successful, jaunty memoirs beginning with 2005’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. The books were adapted for television in the U.K. (where she is portrayed by Billie Piper) and later in the U.S. All the while, as Belle de Jour garnered more attention — and criticism, for portraying prostitution as a glamorous career choice — the woman behind Belle de Jour struggled to keep her anonymity. This month, as an ex-boyfriend threatened to blow her cover, Belle approached one of her critics, the London journalist India Knight of the Sunday Times, to reveal her identity. That resulted in an article, published Nov. 15, outing her as Dr. Brooke Magnanti, 34, a neurotoxicologist at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. This week, she agreed to answer a few questions for the Freakonomics blog, about her work as a call girl and as a scientist.

I think a lot more women should be entering this sort of career, it should be a lot more commonplace, the expected quality of service should become higher, prices of high quality service should be driven somewhat lower, and a lot of prejudice should be shed by the public.

We owe a lot of gratitude to women like Dr. Magnanti for helping especially with the latter.

Also, I just love the language she uses on her blog. A couple of quotations:

Reminded me of something we used to say, that inside most porn actresses is a failed real actress*. Inside every tabloid hackette is a not-very-bright girl who dreamed of being Kate Adie but didn't have the work ethic or talent to make it happen. Journalists my sweet Tallahassee ass. You are to historical record what my books are to fine literature.

Go on, open a Sunday supplement today. How many pages in before you encounter some polly filler by a female columnist implying men in general (or her man in particular) doesn't pull his weight at home, while she majestically juggles family, work, and the burden of having a vagina which has the audacity to bleed once a month? How many pages before you encounter some self-flagellating male columnist admitting to same?

Let me state for the record that if being a man was easy, hookers wouldn't exist. Fact.

And this:

He asked me to undress to the level of underwear (requested: bra, stockings with suspenders, knickers over the suspenders - so the stockings could stay on during sex). I did this.

Then, he asked if I would undress him.

And that was when I noticed. The odd angle of his uneven shoulders, his narrow chest, the gouge-like scars. I didn't ask, he offered nothing, and I ran my hands over his body with no hesitation. He asked me to swing his legs onto the bed, and when I did, I saw the walking sticks next to it for the first time.

That client did not reach orgasm but enjoyed the sex. We talked afterwards, he about his upbringing in Africa. His hair was thick and dark and when he said his age I could not believe it. He was much older than he looked, far older than my father! I could see in the moustache and cheekbones a man who, had his health outcome been different, might have been a dashing RAF pilot in some other world. I continued to stroke the unusual topography of his body, lightly over the lumps and odd moles, harder when I reached his (still semi-erect) penis. He, correctly, identified where I was from based on the pronunciation of a single word that came up in conversation. I can't remember if this encounter is in any the books... on the blog, he was mentioned only in passing, and not because of disability. We talked about holidays, about sunshine and the sea.

This is what comes to mind when I read people like Harriet Harman describing selling sex as "truly medieval" and "just so wrong". For her, presumably, her sex drive is constrained neither by opportunity nor the form of her body. She can and, I assume, does have sex as and when (and if) she wants it.

Other people are not in the same position. And surely denying them access the human touch is short-sighted and "truly medieval". I do not believe for a single moment, however, that these campaigners against sex work have a single ounce of compassion for the trafficked women they claim to want to help, so perhaps asking them to have compassion for people who, simply by fate, happen not to have the freedom or opportunity for a fulfilling sex life so many of us take for granted is far too large a request.

Evil in Russia prospers

2009-11-22T21:45:00.004-04:00

CEO and co-founder of former leading foreign investor in Russia says that Russia is now a criminal state:

"When Putin first showed up and said he was going to tame the oligarchs I was the biggest fan of that particular concept. Then I realised that what he meant by taming the oligarchs was by sticking law enforcement people in their place," he says.

"Now you have a bunch of law enforcement people who are essentially organised criminals with unlimited power to ruin lives take property and do whatever they like and that's far worse than I have ever seen in Russia before. Russia is essentially a criminal state now."

Values across the world

2009-11-21T15:40:00.007-04:00

Fascinating - a map based on research of how people's values differ across the globe:

Israel should move to West Australia

2009-11-20T19:55:00.016-04:00

I've said it before: Israel is a historic mistake, and their religious zealotry is no better than the zealotry of the Muslims.

Israel should get a taste of their own medicine, and be moved to West Australia. They've built a country out of the desert once before; they can do it once again. Except this time, the land should be properly purchased; the borders should be well defined; and there will be no "holy" land to fight about, and no angry, disenfranchised neighbors.

Then everyone, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, can get on with their lives, let this mess be over with, and continue to live in peace.

But that would be no "fun" then, would it?

Venn's diagram of 4 famous characters

2009-11-14T22:40:00.006-04:00

The subconscious: The tail that wags the dog

2009-11-12T13:23:00.035-04:00

I had an interesting dream today. Not long before my alarm went off, I dreamt being in a house that I know, and for some reason, Vladimir Putin was there. We exchanged a few sentences, I'm not sure about what exactly. Then he went into another room to meet some other people, and then he was about to leave. I felt that an important concern of mine wasn't addressed, so I caught up with him at the front door. "Hey Mr. Putin," I said, and he looked at me expectantly. I said, "Don't start a world war." The look on his face was one of confusion and bewilderment. I repeated, "Please don't start a world war. I mean... don't start another world war." He understood now. For a few moments there, he was at a loss for words, with an open mouth, more than apparently dismayed - as if to say, that's what you think about me? That I would do something like that? Quickly though, he found his wits, and his expression changed completely. "Ha!" he said, in a tone that suggested, you won't trick me like that! "Not everyone gets a look up my leg named Gari Barov." I didn't understand. "What?" He repeated: "Not everyone gets a look up my leg named Gari Barov." I was obviously confused. I didn't mean to trick anyone in the first place, and now I had no idea who this Gari Barov person is, and what he's doing looking up anyone's leg. I still don't think I even caught the name correctly. Putin picked up on my confusion, and explained: "Gari Barov? The short guy." He gestured a height a few feet above the floor. "Not everyone gets a look up my leg named Gari Barov." He felt that his explanation was done, and promptly left, while I was still contemplating his response, bewildered.

More than a few seconds thereafter, it dawned on me. In this encounter, Putin was wearing shorts. A really short person could look up his pant leg and see what kind of underwear Putin was wearing, if any. Gari Barov, who is apparently a short person, could do it. But most other people, even if they're also named Gari Barov, aren't short. They can't tell whether Putin is wearing underwear.

What he said was, then: Russia must be able to make a believable threat. If I tell you I'm not going to blow up the world, that would be tantamount to admitting I'm bluffing.

I have no psychic link to anyone, let alone Vladimir Putin, obviously. But I find this dream fascinating because of the apparent ability of the subconscious to communicate meaningful messages which it takes a while for the conscious mind to understand.

It is sometimes said that, if a person is like an iceberg, then the conscious mind is the tip that's visible, and the subconscious is the 90% that lies hidden underneath. I've tended to think that the subconscious is like a tanker - a largely passive, reactive object with huge inertia that the conscious mind must make a great and persistent effort to steer. Experiences like this, though, suggest that the subconscious could be more; that its role could be more active. How much more active?

Catholic water fonts

2009-11-11T22:51:00.033-04:00

I was raised as a Catholic - or at least, my mom attempted to do so. I attended church at the time, and I had suspicions about some of the traditions there that seemed a wee bit gross.

Two habits, in particular, seem to give excellent opportunity for the spreading of microbes. The communion is one. It is conducted during every Catholic mass, and it involves the priest handing out small, very thin, blandly tasting slices of bread to everyone in the audience who queues to receive one. While some people take the communion into their hands, many open their mouths and accept it on their tongue. The priest might try to avoid touching people's mouths and tongues, but this is hard to achieve, so he most likely spreads microbes onto bread which ends up with other people.

The other questionable practice I recall is the font with the holy water. Whenever a believer enters or exits a Catholic church, they are expected to dip their fingers into an open bowl of water that might be changed now and then, but looks and smells fairly stale. The believer then ought to make the sign of the cross with their wet fingers, which - depending on how the person chooses to do it - involves touching the holy water on their forehead as well as possibly the lips.

The Catholic church used to have more questionable rituals yet. Nowadays, there is a part of the mass where members of the audience shake hands and extend peaceful wishes to the other random attendees around them. Centuries ago, this ritual used to involve kissing on the lips. (Genders were separated, so you would kiss people of the same sex.)

The reason I'm writing about this today, though, is not about the unhygienic rituals themselves. It's about what people's participation in, or avoidance of, these rituals, suggests about the depth of their beliefs. See this:

Catholic churches in Italy are installing automatic holy water dispensers to help reduce the risk of spreading swine flu.

The outbreak of the H1N1 virus has led many churches to suspend the tradition of having holy water in open fonts into which people dip their hands.

The new machine works like an automatic soap dispenser, squirting water when a hand is passed under the tap.

[...]

Churchgoer Marta Caimmi agreed.

"It's great," she said. "Thanks to this we are not worried about catching swine flu. It is the right thing for the times."

[...]

"Some people had stopped dipping their hand into the holy water font as they were afraid of infections," he told Reuters.

"Some people even pretended to touch the water but they just touched the marble edge of the font. I think that it is a pity to lose our traditions."

I'm pointing this out because I think it demonstrates the underlying rationality of people whose ostensible faith ought to be irrational.

The holy water in church is supposed to be part of a purification ritual. It is supposed to be holy. Blessed. Pure. Believers are supposed to spread it on their skin (or lips) to purify themselves with it.

And yet: the believers' very behavior, their very comments above, demonstrate that they are aware of how microbes can spread in stale holy water. They very much suspect that the holy water doesn't have the purification powers needed to cleanse it of microbes. They want to create the appearance of following tradition, however. It is nice to have a ritual to signal their faith, to show that they fit in.

With traditional holy water fonts, they face a dilemma. They either have to pretend to touch the water, but not touch it, and risk that people will see this. Or, they have to actually dip their fingers in, and swallow a small risk to their health in order to convincingly signal faith. This makes the situation awkward, and the arrival of hygienic dispensers makes everyone relieved. Now everyone can signal their faith without worrying.

The very presence of this new invention in a church is evidence that hardly anyone there has misconceptions about the true extent of the holy water's powers of purification.

Combine this with the casual attitude to Catholic dogma that believers in Europe tend to have, and it seems that people either go to church for main reasons other than faith - perhaps they go to see others and to be seen; or else, they compartmentalize effectively in such a way that they have strong faith where it can't obviously hurt, but they switch to evidence and reason where it matters.

Since priests are the ones buying and installing the new holy water dispensers, it seems that they are at least as pragmatic as anyone else. If they truly believed, they could just bless the holy water and say that this makes all the microbes go away. Unless they doubt their powers of blessing.

And this is all a good thing. Religion can coexist with the rational world as long as it doesn't conflict it. Religion as practiced in Europe has already adapted to a large extent. Various fundamentalisms and religiously oppressive states, however, show how things become where this hasn't happened.

Rejection massively reduces IQ

2009-11-10T19:41:00.002-04:00

Wow (link):

Baumeister's team used two separate procedures to investigate the effects of rejection. In the first, a group of strangers met, got to know each other, and then separated. Each individual was asked to list which two other people they would like to work with on a task. They were then told they had been chosen by none or all of the others.

In the second, people taking a personality test were given false feedback, telling them they would end up alone in life or surrounded by friends and family.

Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.

"These are very big effects - the biggest I've got in 25 years of research," says Baumeister. "This tells us a lot about human nature. People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you're excluded, this has significant effects."

Baumeister thinks rejection interferes with a person's self-control. "To live in society, people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behaviour. Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and self-destructive. You have to use self-control to analyse a problem in an IQ test, for example - and instead, you behave impulsively."

The consequences of early life stress

2009-11-08T18:10:00.001-04:00

Wow (link):

"We separated the pups from their mothers for three hours each day for ten days," Dr Murgatroyd explained.

"It was a very mild stress and the animals were not affected at a nutritional level, but they would [have felt] abandoned."

The team found that mice that had been "abandoned" during their early lives were then less able to cope with stressful situations throughout their lives.

The stressed mice also had poorer memories.

Dr Murgatroyd explained that these effects were caused by "epigenetic changes", where the early stressful experience actually changed the DNA of some of the animals' genes.

"This is a two-step mechanism," Dr Murgatroyd explained.

When the baby mice were stressed, they produced high levels of stress hormones.

These hormones "tweak" the DNA of a gene that codes for a specific stress hormone - vasopressin.

"This leaves a permanent mark at the vasopressin gene," said Dr Murgatroyd. "It is then programmed to produce high levels [of the hormone] later on in life."

The researchers were able to show that vasopressin was behind the behavioural and memory problems. When the adult mice were given a drug that blocked the effects of the hormone, their behaviour returned to normal.

Give organ donors free health care!

2009-11-06T02:32:00.005-04:00

Robin Hanson quotes research which finds that blood donors aren't really put off by the prospect of being paid for their donation, they just don't want cash. Vouchers would work just fine, though.

Commenter Michael Keennan then comes up with this ingenious idea: instead of refusing to compensate organ donors at all due to ethical concerns, why not pay them back in kind? How about, for example, giving kidney donors free health insurance for the remainder of their lives? That would surely cause more people to consider donating their kidneys, which may save plenty lives; and I don't see how it raises any ethical dilemmas. Doesn't it seem fair and just for people who have donated an organ to receive free health care in return? Doesn't it seem more unjust if they do not?

Education as demonstration of willingness to suffer

2009-11-04T02:26:00.003-04:00

This exchange summarizes my opinion of much - though not all - university-level education:

Doug S: Remember: the job of a university professor is to do research and bring in grant money for said research, not to teach! Teaching is incidental.

redired urologist: So why do the parents pay $40,000+ annually for this type of service?

Doug S: In most cases, it’s not the education that’s worth $40,000+. It’s the diploma. Earning a diploma demonstrates that you are willing to suffer in exchange for vague promises of future reward, which is a trait that employers value.

So Dilbertesque... but - like Dilbert - generally true.

The countability of real numbers

2009-10-24T18:32:00.020-04:00

Natural numbers (symbol N) are positive whole integers starting with either 0 or 1. It is obvious that there are an infinite number of natural numbers, and that they are countable. By starting with the lowest natural number and counting long enough, you will eventually reach any other chosen natural number.

Integers (symbol Z) are countable as well. The set of integers contains zero and all natural numbers as well as their negatives. To count them all, just start with 0, then 1 and -1, then 2 and -2, etc.

Rational numbers (symbol Q) are those numbers that are expressible as fractions, e.g. 1/2. Rational numbers are also countable. For an idea of how to count them, imagine a two-dimensional grid that has integers on each axis, and contains infinitely many horizontal and vertical lines, one for each integer on the respective axis. To count all rational numbers, start at (0,0). Then, count all intersections on the border of the square between (-1,-1) and (1,1). Then, count all intersections on the border of the larger square between (-2,-2) and (2,2). And so on.

Algebraic numbers are those numbers that are roots of a polynomial. Algebraic numbers include e.g. the square root of 2, which is the root if (x^2 - 2 = 0). Algebraic numbers aren't necessarily rational, but they are also countable. They are countable because their quantity is limited by the quantity of polynomials, and polynomials are countable. (A polynomial is determined by its coefficients, and the coefficients can be written down as a number.)

Finally, we arrive at real numbers. Real numbers (symbol R) are an expansion of rational (and algebraic) numbers that is intended to address a certain deficiency. The deficiency is that there exist convergent series of rational/algebraic numbers which appear to converge to something, but that something is not a rational (or algebraic) number. A classic example of such a convergence is Pi.

The idea behind real numbers is to have a set which, in addition to rational numbers, also contains the converging points of all converging series that can be constructed within the set. This makes the set "complete".

The traditional idea is to envision a real number as an infinitely long series of zeroes and ones (i.e. the number itself expressed in binary, with a decimal point some place).

If one imagines a real number like that, then it intuitively follows that a set of all-real-numbers is the set of all such infinite-series-of-0-and-1.

Cantor's diagonal argument can then be used to show that a set defined that way is uncountable. If you have an infinite set of unique infinite-series-of-0-and-1, such that each series in the set is marked with an index; then you can construct another infinite-series-of-0-and-1 which differs from all the other series that have an index. So therefore, the indexing is not complete. The set contains more series than can be counted.

Well yes, but: if we are constructing the set of real numbers as the set of rational numbers + the converging points of all converging series, then aren't the converging series countable? Every converging series must be the result of some algorithm. But algorithms are expressible as code, and code is expressible as numbers. So the number of possible algorithms is countable. So the number of all converging series must also be countable. If we construct the set of real numbers this way, then, it is a union of two countable sets - so it must itself be countable.

Does it not follow, then, that the standard envisioning of real numbers as infinite-series-of-0-and-1 must include an infinite number of them that are neither rational, nor the result of any limit? If so, what is the use of all these extra, unidentifiable "real numbers"?

It sure seems that, all those real numbers that we can actually express, or use in any way - are countable.

Or is the number of converging series uncountable? If so - how?

Somali pirates, Italian mafia, and radioactive waste

2009-10-19T03:56:00.005-04:00

Looks like the story about Somali pirates has some twists and turns. Johann Hari:

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply.

In other news, the Italian mafia is reported to have sunk as many as 30 ships of toxic waste off the coast of Italy.

Johann Hari makes perverse conclusions - his perspective is classically ridden with misplaced Western guilt. But this makes for an interesting twist in the story. It's not just that a failed state breeds criminality; it breeds a muddled state of affairs where criminality is intertwined with vigilantism. A failed state is not one where well-minded people are absent; it is a state where well-minded people are disorganized, unable to enforce laws and counter criminals. It is a state where it is hard to maintain your principles because, in the absence of law, there are no clear guidelines on what's acceptable. One day, you use violence to chase off waste-dumping mobsters and invading fishermen. Not that long thereafter, your friends are engaging in outright piracy.

Obviously, toxic waste requires better controls. You can't just outsource its disposal to any mob-run company. They're gonna dump it either in your backyard, or someone else's backyard, or in the middle of the Atlantic. It's not that hard to manufacture papers which "prove" that the ship and its cargo were "sold" to someone in Nigeria...