And You're Surprised? Airport Security

A few days ago, I wrote this in a Wall Street Journal online discussion:

I guess by now that everyone has forgotten that the private security that was in place at the time of the 9/11 hijackings was *successful* at enforcing the laws that stood *at that time*. It was legal to bring box cutters, remember? And the hijackers chose that because their preferred weapon (guns) were not legal and they believed that airport security would thwart any attempt to bring those on board. Remember? Then, TSA brought about Utopia by hiring the exact same people to enforce the laws. Okay, well, not quite utopia. At the same time, the laws changed to ban anything remotely resembling a knife, including nail files, Disneyland pocket knives, etc. They also stopped using the same inspectors using obvious fake bombs to test the screening. And to our knowledge, nobody has tried to hijack a plane since then, knowing that passengers probably wouldn't play dead as **they had always been instructed to do before**. Remember? Ceteris parebus, private security is at least as effective as a federal agency, and a lot more accountable after the fact. Hint to the perplexed: what happens to the USDA when beef marked "USDA Inspected" turns out to be tainted?

It looks like Alex Tabarok agrees with me. BTW, the vote was 1269 to 1105 in favor of privatization. I'm not surprised that it was that close, but it shouldn't have been. This is a situation where the Democrats have been cheerleading for expansion of federal powers on the basis that security is "so important that it can't be left in the hands of profit-seeking corporations", while Republicans have been cheerleading for expansion of the security apparatus because 9/11 justifies everything.

When they both agree, we should be afraid, very afraid. After all, look how many of them voted Clinton Administration initiatives into law via the Patriot Act. Besides Ron Paul, did anyone vote against it? Certainly not Kerry and Edwards.

You wanna napkin? - Anarchist NetAdmin

On Indymedia, there is this report about the FBI's attack on an anarchist webserver. They actually use the phrase, "removal of this sever [sic] would be a major blow to anarchist organising worldwide." I wonder if the anarchist network has a NetAdmin with exclusive rights, or does every user have Admin rights? I always wanted to be president of my University's Anarchist Club ... y'know, for laughs 'n' shit.

Seriously, is anyone surprised by this? I mean, they advocate violent demonstrations (yes they do, yes they do, yes they do ... Seattle! 'nuf sed), the Left was completely silent while the Clinton Administration promoted and funded electronic surveillance initiatives (Carnivore, Echelon) while violently suppressing protestors (Waco, Washington), now those chickens have come home to roost, and they undoubtedly blame the Bush Administration. Sure, the BA is the efficient cause, but they and their compadres accepted the final cause long ago (the formal cause of censorship being, "all people with whom I disagree should be prevented from being heard").

If you are for free speech in principle, then you have to be for free speech for everyone. That's why the Right should be ashamed when protesting the ACLU's defense of Nazis, and why the Left should be ashamed for promoting the double-speak-inspired "Fairness Doctrine".

How did they do that - BOINC!

I see that IBM and Sun are renting out supercomputer time (IBM on Blue Gene). $1/hour per processor used at Sun. A few years ago, I read an article about an oil company whose administrative and engineering desktop computers ran linux. At night, they rebooted to become a single beowulf cluster. Cool way to get double usage out of their hardware, no? Now I see there is a cottage industry for supercomputing based on beowulf, and I also see that Microsoft is getting into the act. Applications include analyzing sesimic data for oil deposits, atmosphere models for weather and climate prediction, genome data, and chemical compound data for pharmaceuticals.

But, I have to ask - is building a new supercomputer or renting time on one efficient?

Wouldn't it be cheaper to pay home users, say, $0.10/hour for them to participate in a distributed computing project? The infrastructure is already there: it's called BOINC (for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). There are several projects running on BOINC, of which the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the most famous.

There are two barriers I can identify. One is that the BOINC program needs a billing mechanism, but that should be no problem. The other is that when you are sending out proprietary data to project participants, what keeps your competitor from participating and intercepting your data? That problem seems to be bigger for pharmaceutical companies than for oil explorers, who can after all hide the location of their data. Pharmaceuticals may be able to hide data (I don't know enough about it to know what is or isn't possible) or they may be able to insert misinformation. On the other hand, you can always screen the participants and sign them up to nondisclosure agreements, but that defeats one of the advantages of distributed computing, which is that you have low transaction costs so you can keep the volunteers coming.

What other public goods projects (like climate and SETI) could benefit from the distributed approach? Are there other private goods that could be produced this way? I know that Bill Gates proposed a while back that we consider adopting a system where every e-mail you send commits you to a certain amount of CPU time for such projects (say, a minute). That would be no burden to most of us because it could run in the background, but it would shut a spammer down. In a way, you would essentially be calculating the solution to a public good: the spam-free internet (it wouldn't matter if the calculations were just multiplication tables). If you also happened to produce a cure for Alzheimer's, that would be good, too.

Now that I've posed the question, I have to ask another: is $0.10 enough to induce participants? Or, is it too much because it will encourage people to use more electricity and therefore create more pollution? We may already have too much electricity wasted on electronics, won't this create more?

Farfrompumpin - Oil's effect on the economy

Okay, I admit it, I like blogging about energy. There's a story in the NY Times today that asks the question about why the spike in oil & gas prices haven't negatively effected the economy. I contend that they have - both because I believe that there is a lot of trepidation out there because of it (see recent news on inflation) and because of the related heavy weight elephant in the room which may be partly to blame for the prices, namely the occupation of Iraq. The thing I found most interesting in the NY Times article were the accompanying graphics, which showed that pump prices are still about $0.75 below the 1980 inflation adjusted prices ($3 vs. $2.25), that the amount of energy required to produce a dollar of GDP was still way below what it was then (9000 BTUs vs. 17 ,000 in fairly steady decline since then), and spending on energy is mostly below what it was even a few years ago (6.5% of GDP on energy now as opposed to 8% in 73, exploding to 13.5% in 82, falling to 8% in 85, steadily declining to 7% in 96, then dipping to 6% in 97-99, and back up to the current level), but that the amount of household income spent on fuel, while below what it was in the 80s (8%), is starting to tip up ever so slightly right now (from 4 to about 5%). All of these are rough estimates from the charts.

The increasingly weak link between energy and GDP vs. what it was in the days of Arab Oil Embargos is well known, but the tip-up in household spending is something the Bush Administration should be alarmed about. And possibly take some blame for (though of course they can't be blamed for the fact that the Chinese are also putting demand-side pressure on the price).

Incidentally, the link to Carl Bialik's article in today's Wall Street Journal about aging statistics (statistics that have aged to obsolesence, not stats about the elderly) is funny because it discusses the increasing size of gorillas, i.e. "the million pound gorilla". Carl suggests that you try googling for gorilla and various weights in 100 pound increments. If the WSJ would make this stuff free, I'm sure there would have been hundreds of links to it by now.

Two new cars I would like to drive

The first is, of course, the Smart car. Use the United States selection to see some interesting marketing information, especially regarding safety. Use a European country to see what models are possible (they will only be marketing a limited number of models in the US at first). I'd really like to try the 101 hp Brabus roadster. It weighs only 790 kg, and the engine weighs only 60 kg (that's about 132 pounds). That gives it Toyota MR2-like performance. I would be more interested in the regular Smart car if I lived in a big city where parking was at a premium.

The other is predominantly electric battery powered, and it has very interesting design points. Interesting, but perhaps a little too quirky. And with a top speed of 80 mph, I doubt it's an exhilarating drive. Good way to show off a technology, however. Hat tip to Kathleen for the links.

The Other Side of Slavery

When I used to read newsgroups on a regular basis, there was a recurring theme for posts about the morality of selling yourself as a slave. Basically, the argument ran like this: You own yourself, therefore you own your labor, therefore you own the fruits of your labor. Rights normally entail the ability to dispose of something as well as to have or use it. I have a right to live, and that implies a right to commit suicide, I have a right to my own labor, therefore I have a right to withhold my own labor, I have a right to property, therefore I have a right to sell property. If I so choose, I may sell myself as a slave to someone else. Let's stipulate also to the idea that I do not have a right to kidnap and/or sell other people against their will as slaves, or to commit my progeny to slavery.

In all of those discussions, however, I don't believe that I ever once saw any discussion of whether or not it was moral to own slaves. That would be a strange state of affairs if everyone agreed that people have the right to sell themselves, but they don't have a right to buy said product. Let's explore that.

Under what circumstances would we agree that the slaveowner is a humane, i.e. "moral", slaveowner?

I would say that he must (1) honor the requirements of the contract (implied or otherwise) that brought the slave into his possession, and (2) provide adequate food, clothing, and shelter in exchange for total ownership of the slave's labor. What else? Would it be okay to have the slave work constantly and in dangerous situations? I believe that most people would agree that he needs rest, but that the risk of the work would be negotiable (since risk-free work is not an option). Would it be okay to send him into a solitary confinement holding cell at the end of the workday, and feed him through a slot? I think most people would agree that the slave should be allowed some human interaction and therefore entertainment. However, I do think that the owner should be allowed to control the slave's interaction especially with respect to the opposite sex. After all, the original agreement was that the owner provide the basics of life support, and a wife or husband and especially children would burden the slave and therefore by extension the owner. But what about surgical or chemical sterilization?

Granted, that is all intuitive, stream-of-consciousness reasoning on the issue, but how realistic is it? What parallels can we draw? I can think of two similar relationships: parent/children and warden/convict. Parents are required to provide the basics for their children and usually do try to control their reproductive rights. Wardens, similarly (especially if you mean Joe Arpaio). What differences can we identify? Neither children nor inmates enter into the relationship voluntarily (an argument can be made that the inmates do by virtue of committing crimes), but surprisingly the parents and the wardens do enter voluntarily. Both are also considered to be moral, especially to the degree that they succeed. Most people I think would draw the line at forced sterilization on the basis that the slave (like the child and the inmate) may one day negotiate their termination of the relationship, and should be returned "whole" to society.

So if we have a slaveowner who buys a slave's freedom from the slave him/herself, is this a moral transaction? Would you do it, if you could?

I think that I would not, unless I could be convinced that the slave was somehow made better off by my ownership. There was a Heinlein short story in which this was the case. I suppose that I am a rule-utilitarian on that issue on the basis that slavery is repugnant.

So, you don't think such actual, voluntary slavery exists? What about the traditional husband/authority and wife/homemaker relationship? What about the dom/sub relationship?

UPDATE: What about Oskar Schindler? He was a slave owner, especially in the sense that I have defined it (he profited from the Jews' labor, he provided basic necessities). I think you could make an argument that he was moral.

The Sheila Test

Have I already blogged this? Ah, well, it makes no difference because it deserves constant repetition.

I subject technical things, especially software, to the Sheila Test, named for my mother. Basically, if Mom can install, run, and use it without help then it is more likely to be a successful product than if she can't. Not that Mom is particularly dense; quite the contrary. It's just that she's more likely to give up on something if she has to learn a lot of new techie stuff. I understand that: life is too short to have to spend time learning PERL script if you have no other need to know PERL.

This first occurred to me when I was reading about linux in the "early" days. According to the experts looking at the server conversion rates and projecting them into the future, Linux was going to take over the world in a matter of months. What was the advantage? "You can fix bugs and recompile the kernel yourself." Wh-wh-what? That's a benefit?! To whom? No, no, no, my dear sir, my mother is not going to feel comfortable recompiling kernels. It's just a little too much excitement just to get a new printer to print vacation pics. What she wants is an operating system that installs and updates itself. That is why Windows holds the market share it does, and why linux is very popular among the 1% of the population who think that recompiling kernels is fun as well as exciting.

I'm finding the same is true of blogging software, at present. Blogger doesn't support lots of neat features, so move to Moveable Type, right? Oh, by the way, you need to make sure your server supports SQL, PERL, PHP, Unix ... okay, we're failing the Sheila test. I suspect that lots of bloggers with sophisticated blogs but no actual discussion of "hacks" or other techie issues are supported by the bloggers' grad students (or friends, or employees, etc.). Mom doesn't have a research assistant, and is not likely to get one this year or any other. This spells opportunity: when someone produces software that installs easily, integrates onto the desktop, provides all the features you want, and can be upgraded/updated to take advantage of new features, then everyone will migrate to that.

Uh, Mr. Gates? Mr. Jobs? Mr. Torvalds?

Index of topics

As soon as I decide that I give a $#it, I think I'll start dividing my posts by topic. Here's the list so far:

• How did they do that? Interesting ideas coming from interesting muses
• Keeping up with the Joneskis - news from Scandinavia, Cuba, China, and the Hermit Kingdom, and socialized health care
• Lodge Practice Evil - private solutions to poverty
• Farfrompumpin - news of energy, oil, etc.
• And you're surprised? - stupid things the government is doing to you
• Sell the forests (and roads) - free market environmentalism
• The problem with capitalism - stupid things capitalists are doing (not necessarily to you)
• You want a napkin? Examples of sloppy thinking (where I will probably be Exhibit A)
• Can you tell the difference? What happens when the left acts like the right and vice versa
  

Some things cross will categories. I will need new categories. And so on.

Modern protectionism

Two recent statements about protectionism/subsidization got me to thinking about some big trends. The first was an article from Doug Bandow on how other countries - especially Europeans - free ride on American development of new chemical entities and pharmaceuticals. For support, see here and here. The second was an article by Peter Drucker (by way of MR) discussing how the Bush steel tariffs have distorted the steel-using industries' use of materials. In both cases, we had an unanticipated consequence. My question is: what other similar forms of protectionism and subsidization may be leading to long-term and major changes in the world that other nations can free ride?

A1) Transportation. European countries have artificially induced oil scarcity in their countries through taxation, and Japan has an actual scarcity. This forces their consumers to seek more fuel efficient automobiles (turbo diesel in Europe, hybrids in Japan). Will America be able to free ride off of their policies? Or will they be off of oil before we are, while our Big 3 are relegated to a niche market (light trucks)?

A2) Transport again. Will we be able to free ride off of the development of light rail in other countries? I think this is a tougher problem because the population density in America outside the NE Corridor is so much lower than that of Europe and Japan that it simply isn't feasible outside that area. Berlin's population density is 11,400 inhabitants per sq. km in the inner city, Paris has a density of 20,000 inh./sq. km in the inner city, New York has an inner city density of 10,194.2/km² (26,402.9/mi²), Tokyo is 13,333 / sq. km, London has about 5100 /km², but a place like Los Angeles or San Francisco only have about 2400/km^2. As you can see, between Dallas and California, except for large urban centers like Denver, the density is too small to support any kind of mass transit.

A3) Energy. Will the US be able to free ride off of Japan's development of methane hydrates? Off of Portugal's and Holland's investment in wind generators?

Long lasting light bulbs and other addiction myths

In my lifetime, I have known a few otherwise sane and intelligent people who believed that "they" could make an incandescent light bulb that would last thousands of times longer than the normal bulbs, but "they" don't because we wouldn't have to buy any more bulbs and "they" would go out of business. Let's say regular bulbs cost $1 and last a year: how much would you pay for a bulb that lasts 10 years? 100 years? Wouldn't you pay something on the order of $10 for the 10 year bulb and $100 for the 100 year bulb? Accounting for inflation and risk, of course.

Further, let's say there are a billion light fixtures in existence, that they were populated evenly (1 billion divided by the average lifetime of the bulbs) to level the demand for replacements, and there were a million new fixtures built every year. The companies making these miracle bulbs could expect fairly constant business for new bulbs, and constant replacement business once the first long-lasting bulbs reached their lifetime limits. So why wouldn't "they" do it?

Actually, if you are willing to accept some tradeoffs, "they" have. The number one cause of light failure is the sudden increase in heat when it is turned on, so warming the element, using heavier elements, and other such changes can increase the lifetime. All of these increase the cost, and the heavier element results in less light (4 W or so for the Livermore Centennial bulb - barely a glow). Similar arguments can be made for the miracle refrigerator, the miracle carburetor, and so on.

As it turns out, we no longer have to conjecture about this: with the advent of the Compact Flourescent Lamp (CFL), we essentially have a competing product that should drive the miracle lamps out of the cupboards of GE, Sylvania, Philips, etc. Where are they? A standard soft white 100W bulb costs about $0.65 while the equivalent CFL costs about $7-8, puportedly lasts 10 times as long*, and costs about 1/3 as much to operate.

* I tried an experiment with the earliest models: I installed a CFL and an incandescent in the same overhead fixture at the same time. When I changed out the third incandescent, I replaced it with a CFL and never looked back. Therefore, in my mind, CFLs have always lasted 3x as long, but that's obvously an underestimate. And that was with a Gen I CFL.

Now, most people accepted the fact that this is a myth even before the advent of the CFL. Why, then, do the rumors persist? And why do otherwise clear-thinking people believe them when you change the industry? For example, why do people believe that Big Pharma will attempt to hook diabetics on insulin when they could be developing a permanent cure? Obviously, Big Opta is hooking people on glasses when they could be ... trying to ... um, nevermind.

My guess: such people undervalue competition. They could be stuck in a sort of Innovator's Trap Stockholm Syndrome. That is, they look at the state of the market for, say, incandescent light bulbs from the point of view of the incandescent light bulb manufacturer and forget to consider it from the point of view of a heretofore unknown novel competitor who comes outta left field and creatively destroys the old paradigm.

Question: Are there any real industries or institutions which are addicted to the income or other compensation they get by holding back innovation from us and/or getting us addicted to half-measure solutions? What are the most significant, and what is the solution for each?

Good Old Socialized Medicine?

Daniel nearly sprained his own arm patting socialized medicine on the back for inventing islet cell therapy. Ho-hum, been there done that. Still, since they are being heavily subsidized by capit ... um, non-soc ... er, how about less-socialized medicine?, then we shouldn't expect them not to hit a single every now and then. Especially when most of the experimentation and discovery of what doesn't work has been done for them (i.e., more subsidization). Finding out what doesn't work may actually be the more important part of innovation, if you can accept Thomas Edison's authority on the subject.

According to the UMM article, "Islet cell transplantation has been performed since the late 1970s, but a group of Canadian doctors improved the method several years ago." I wonder where it was first developed? Ugh, I see that the federal NIH is a Johnny-come-lately to the party, just as the other socialized medical researchers are.

More history here, here ("The vast majority of islet transplants have taken place in the United States, while 60 were performed in Germany and 30 in Italy"), and here (the actual publication of the Edomonton Protocol used in the UK). The immunosuppression drugs daclizumab, sirolimus, and tacrolimus were supplied to the Edmonton researchers by Roche (US)), Ayeth-Wyerst (US), and Fujisawa (Japan). Well, batting .333 in the majors is considered quite good (I'm assuming that Japan also has mostly- or all-socialized medicine, but I could be wrong).

Questions - are the UK experiments another disappointment in the making, given that that seems to be the history of islet transplants (though apparently not with the Edmonton Protocol)? What about the shortage of donors?