Drezner summarizes the arguments that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn't know how to do economics. That's important, because their predictions on global output are an important part of their calculations of global warming to 2100.

Actually, I'm finding Knowledge Problem has a wealth of links and information about oil and the war, including sources from Tech Central Station to Asian Times to Canada's National Post. I like it.

This table from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics is pretty amazing.

TABLE 1
World Reserves and Cumulative Production of Selected Minerals: 1950-1980 (millions of metric tons of metal content)
Mineral	1950 Reserves	Production 1950-1980	1980 Reserves
Aluminum	1,400	1,346	5,200
Copper	100	156	494
Iron	19,000	11,040	93,466
Lead	40	85	127
SOURCE: Repetto, p. 23.

So that's what "known reserves" means, huh? That we have no clue how much aluminum, copper, iron and lead really exists? I wonder about oil?

So which countries' positions on the war are "all about oil"?

It would, of course, be nice to have Germany and France and Russia and China with us. But these nations have their own interests, and we certainly shouldn't give them a veto over U.S. policy. It's telling that anti-warniks who are so ready to infer dark U.S. motives in our clash with Saddam -- oil! -- don't mention the real interests that might explain the German and French stands. Oil and other lucrative contracts -- yes, weapons deals -- as well as their large Islamic populations.

This pieceis from David Reinhard, in The Oregonian. Link via Knowledge Problem.

Steve Mallet posted an interesting piece on the limits of community: <=150 people. I played around with this number, wondering what relationship it might have to the well-known six degrees of separation. If I know 150 people and each of those know another 100 that I don't know, and so on, does that "explain" six degrees of separation?

Of course, these are stupid silly numbers, but I calculated that if about 62% of my contacts' contacts are people not already on my contact list, then within six degrees of separation I've got the whole world covered.

BBC World News last night mentioned briefly that US congress members were calling for various punishments against France and Germany, such as boycotting the Paris air show, in revenge for those countries leadership not supporting the US position.

I'd already noticed a bunch of bloggers and others showing their displeasure by not buying French wine or cheese (1, 2, 3 and 4, for example). That's freedom of choice, or expressing your freedom of speech through consumer decisions. It even seems reasonable to me for one individual boycotter to suggest to others to boycott as well. But it seems childish, peevish and petulant for US lawmakers to call for sanctions on French water or wine. Shouldn't it be OK for your allies to disagree with you? When I invite friends over for dinner and they disagree with my views on religion or politics, I don't withhold dessert.

Today's Friedman NYTimes editorial claims that if the US invades Iraq, US must remain to clean it up.

Let's start with the Bush hawks. The first rule of any Iraq invasion is the pottery store rule: You break it, you own it. We break Iraq, we own Iraq — and we own the primary responsibility for rebuilding a country of 23 million people that has more in common with Yugoslavia than with any other Arab nation. I am among those who believe this is a job worth doing, both for what it could do to liberate Iraqis from a terrible tyranny and to stimulate reform elsewhere in the Arab world. But it is worth doing only if we can do it right. And the only way we can do it right is if we can see it through, which will take years. And the only way we can see it through is if we have the maximum allies and U.N. legitimacy.

Why is this necessarily so? Why not take a large job and split it up according to an efficient and effective division of labor, among volunteers who have different skills and assets? Invading a country, stabilizing it and rebuilding it are very different tasks. The US Marines and Air Force may be best at the first, but not at the second or third. In fact, the best people to rebuild Iraq are more likely to be non-American than American. Iraqis themselves probably distrust the US more than, for example, Canada or Britain. It's a good cop, bad cop routine.

I'm a big fan of full follow-through, if there must be a war in Iraq. However, if this is indeed an international effort, then other countries besides the US must be involved in the follow-through. To be fair, Friedman's article is all about gathering a broad coalition to rebuild Iraq. I only question the assumption that rebuilding must be "owned" by US.

Fox News published an article by Wendy McElroy (link via Rob). The article is also published on ifeminists.com. McElroy implies most other feminist groups are apologists for Saddam Hussein. Three groups are mentioned: the Feminist Majority, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Women's ENews.

It's a little hypocritical to ignore a set of outrages because it isn't convenient for your political position, but that doesn't make Feminist Majority into apologists for Saddam. It seems they have a button for "Help Afghan Women" because they have resources in Afghanistan, several programs in place to rebuild there. That's not wrong. It's true they have 6 articles on Afghanistan in recent global news and one article covering an anti-war mission to Iraq -- nowhere mentioning the rights of women in Iraq. But just because a group decries one crime doesn't mean they condone another. It may be hypocritical, but not evil.

On the other hand, I have a harder time forgiving NOW for this press release:

A U.S. invasion of Iraq will likely entail similar dangers to the safety and rights of Iraqi women—who currently enjoy more rights and freedoms than women in other Gulf nations, such as Saudi Arabia.

But I will point out that's four months old -- the Fox anti-feminist article should have dug up recent material or given up. The more recent press releases from NOW are somewhat more sane, opposing war because of domestic economic costs, for fear it will increase terrorism, and fearing "devastation of cities, towns, villages in Iraq, the loss of lives, the effect on the environment" (this is from their only press release press release since Jan 1 mentioning Iraq). It seems enough information has come out in the last four months about women in Iraq so that groups are no longer claiming they're better where they are

The third group criticized by McElroy was Women's ENews for publishing this article by Yasmine Bahrani. It's much more balanced than McElroy lets on. E.g.

"Thus, while many Iraqi women long for the basic rights that are denied them under Saddam, they have reason to be wary of the future as well... Iraqi women's concerns about the future regime are not theoretical. In fact, they have reason to mistrust Iraq's "opposition" movements, such as the Iraqi National Congress, because they have failed to include women members in key positions."

Really, it seems to me McElroy's article was written last November or December (only one article referenced was written after Oct 31 and none after Dec 31 2002), and held back until now. Perhaps McElroy waited until support for the war had grown enough to make this article seem reasonable?

To be clear, I'm happy to take potshots at both sides here. Both McElroy and the NOW press releases in particular paint the world in exaggerated black and white.

I'm not the only one who thinks Germany and France incompetently managed their opposition to US involvement in Iraq. John Bono (link via Instapundit) points out that they've even alienated Greece. The numbers in Spain suggest that if Germany and France had made Aznar feel loved, he might have gone along with them and with his own people in opposing US intervention. Instead, Germany and France made Spanish leaders feel irrelevant, with predictable results.

Spain's leaders may be on the side of the US in going to war on Iraq, but the Spanish people, or at least 74% of them, are not. I looked this up wondering what general public opinion was like in Europe, given that the EU country leaders differ so greatly. I also tried to look up polls of Italians, but couldn't find numbers.

There's no way Germany should have been surprised that other Euro nations weren't following their anti-American-intervention lead. It's natural for any regime to most fear the country that most threatens their sovereignty:

• Clearly Germany and France (G/F) fear US imperialism as the force that most threatens their influence and power. They don't fear each other greatly today, because of the potential to cooperate and magnify their power (particularly if they can speak for the EU). Furthermore, neither country is so much bigger than the other that one can dominate the other.
• Smaller Euro countries don't fear American intervention in Iraq as much as G/F do. Instead, these smaller Euro countries are more likely to fear G/F because the foreign policy sovereignty of each of these small countries is threatened most by G/F attempting to speak for the European Union.
• China unsurprisingly does fear US intervention in Iraq at least as much as G/F (more so since China can realistically fear that it may one day be invaded to liberate downtrodden subjects). G/F should have looked to China as an anti-American ally, rather than being embarrassed by attempting to speak for other Euros.
• We can even look on Germany's opposition as a "regime", one whose power is most threatened, obviously, by Schröder's party. No wonder Angela Merkel is more annoyed at Schröder's party speaking for all Germans, than by US threat (see linked editorial for quote by Merkel). Again, Germany's ruling party should not have been surprised.

Update: Steve sees even more in this - EU leaders jockeying for position ruling the EU eventually.

From a guy looking for work in IT:

The quick assessment from the agency was: Personality OK, Technical skills, Not. But that’s OK right? I work in IT where the majority of the job involves explaining a missed deadline to a client and to do that you need people skills not technical skills!

Hmm. Perhaps his willingness to miss deadlines as long as he can explain them is part of his joblessness.

I was talking with my Mom about US vs China. In China, naturally, US is seen as having imperialist aspirations to dominate more and more of the world -- to have US-approved regimes worldwide. That led to a discussion of how US is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't, because worldwide criticism of US doesn't seem to depend on what US does. America is either aggressive or isolationist. Isolationism is mostly thought of as a phenomenon from between the two world wars, but not uniquely.

• Remember there was some fear Bush would be isolationist?
  

  Oh, I thought you meant some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Represssive. --GW Bush

  European scholars tsk'ed at the 2000 election and its lack of foreign policy issues (although this particular paper goes on to explain that the American people are not as isolationist as the American Congress and foreign media believe). Stephen Brooks marked "neo-isolationism", which he explained rather as public indifference rather than an active desire to disengage, from the end of the Vietnam War.
  

• Remember right after September 11, 2001? Newspaper articles were published about the fear that this would push US into a new isolationism.
  

• Remember the World Criminal Court? In 1998 European media characterized the US as isolationist, pure and simple -- over the World Criminal Court issue as well as treaties such as land mine restrictions.
  
• Just a few years earlier, in 1995, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were pushing isolationism.

Both "isolationist" and "imperialist" are code for "the US is not consulting our opinion". One is applied to action, one to non-action, but what really stings is to be ignored.

This wide-ranging interview with Christopher Hitchens is pretty interesting. The interviewer says "[Hitchen's] scorn for lowest common denominator thinking, whether from the left or the right, is as entertaining as it is jarring." Hey, that's what I aspire to as well. Some excerpts:

There are several arguments for attacking Iraq. One is the violation of the convention against genocide. If you sign the genocide convention, you have to punish people who commit genocide, and Saddam certainly has done that. I think the strongest case is the responsibility to rescue the Iraqi people from a bastard regime.

A decent respectful hypocrisy and diplomacy means you can’t say we’re doing this to put the Saudis back in that box, teach them a lesson, to change the ways of the Middle East. So they do have to come up with arguments that aren’t as good. I just hope they don’t start believing their own propaganda.

People say, “I think Jesus is my best friend.” No one responds as they should to that, which is to say, “You should be locked up, that’s utter crap.”

Al Gore had allowed himself to become a humble, hollowed-out, humiliated figure. I didn’t want a zombie to be the president of the United States.

And now Gore and wife say that Bush is picking a fight with Iraq? Fuck them. I really mean it. I have nothing but contempt for them. We are risking people’s lives, and all they can be is flippant.

Do unto others? Last night, as I went to bed, after hearing some UN debate on NPR, reading so many blog entries on justifying war, and Virginia Postrel's book discussing what "natural" rights might be, I found myself questioning why I might it justifiable to overturn the leader of another country. I heard Chinese and Russian representatives to the UN defending sovereignty. What business of ours is it to "free" a people from the leadership that grew out of their own culture?

I do find it hard to simply declare things as "wrong" and go out to right those wrongs, even though I'm not a moral relativist. This is trite, but I guess I fall back on the golden rule. Do I want to be left alone by the UN and other countries, no matter what my country of residence does to me? No. If I was jailed for criticizing government policies or for marijuana possession, I would want other countries to pressure my jailors effectively to behave better. If the country I reside in forced me to wear a chador or leave my job, I would want real help from the international community to assert my rights. That doesn't even cover the proven danger Iraq poses to others besides its own citizens. The golden rule doesn't always make it clear what action to take, but in this case doesn't it suggest some effective action beyond proven ineffective UN resolutions?

Yesterday I accidentally stumbled into an anti-war rally in Palo Alto. I didn't wade in but I still noticed how quirky it was. I'm not the only one: the Mercury News reported on it.

• "Palo Alto neighbors Marcia Croft and Margaret Schmidt, both in their late 50s, said they haven't done this since college."
• "An organic espresso bus parked cater-cornered from the plaza sold several hundred cups of organic macchiatos, lattes and cappuccinos made with soy milk."
• "People carried balloon animals twisted into circular peace signs. Children scribbled peace slogans on the pavement with chalk."

The Merc also says "The suburban rally had a diverse turnout, indicating anti-war sentiment is resonating with an audience much broader than activists living in large cities." Maybe so, but there could be another reason: this was as much picnic and street festival as rally. It looked fun to me.

Holy Cow! A British socialist, wrote a Guardian article in favour of war on Iraq! (link via Insta)

It's a good article, by Julie Birchill. She is much harder on the "it's all about oil" argument than I am:

"It's all about oil!" Like hyperactive brats who get hold of one phrase and repeat it endlessly, this naive and prissy mantra is enough to drive to the point of madness any person who actually attempts to think beyond the clichés. Like "Whatever!" it is one of the few ways in which the dull-minded think they can have the last word in any argument. So what if it is about oil, in part? Are you prepared to give up your car and central heating and go back to the Dark Ages? If not, don't be such a hypocrite. The fact is that this war is about freedom, justice - and oil. It's called multitasking. Get used to it!

My other favourite quote is a concise explanation of why a socialist may be in favour of this particular war:

If you really think it's better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you're really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise.

You might think by now I'm in favour of the war. I'm not sure, actually -- it depends on the follow-through. I'm only certain that a lot of the arguments made about it are stupid. I applaud Julie Birchill for combatting that stupidity.

Although Canada is still the US' largest trading partner, Mexico is now the US' biggest international phone call partner. According to email from Brian, for which I can't find the source, Mexico accounted for 5,193.1 million minutes in 2001, and Canada for 5,105.9. That wasn't the case before 2001: "According to the Federal Communications Commission, Mexico is the second most frequently called international destination by consumers, and receives 14.3 percent of all international call traffic from the United States. The most frequently called country is Canada and receives 15.2 percent of total U.S. international call traffic." (ref). Here's a good article on "telegeography".

Canada is not yet supplanted as largest trading partner because in 2000 Canada traded with US to the tune of US$411 billion, while Mexico accounts for US$261.7 billion , the next largest (ref 1, 2). However, if Canada/US trade continues to grow at 7-8%, and Mexico/US trade at 25 - 30%, Mexico will be the largest trading partner in 2004.

I'm back from New York, sorry for the unexplained hiatus.

This month's Scientific American has a new food pyramid (link via Rob), to replace the overly simplistic "Fat is Bad" 1992 official pyramid. Most American fat consumption seems to have been replaced with products that were high in either refined grains or potatos (rice crackers, pastries, pasta, low-fat potato crisps) or high in sugar (soda, fruit-"based" snacks, sweetened yogurt...) I can't be the only one that gained weight on that kind of diet.

The new food pyramid is wacky too. It shows white rice, white bread, potatos, pasta and sweets (high glycemic index) at the top of the pyramid, meaning "use sparingly", and plant oils at the bottom. Surely they don't recommend eating a greater quantity of plant oils than any of the high glycemic index carbs? People would be drinking cups of canola oil to achieve that. I suppose I'm being obtuse, though it *is* difficult to understand whether they recommend getting more calories out of oil than out of high glycemic index carbs, or whether they recommend taking "a serving or two" of plant oil at each meal knowing that servings of plant oil tend to be small.

Anyway, I always knew ants-on-a-log were good for me, no matter what "they" said, because my mom fed me those. You know -- a long piece of celery (eat vegetables in abundance) filled with peanut butter (healthy nuts and legumes, also containing plant oil), and a few raisins (2/3 servings of fruit) dotted along the top for fun.

Tech Central Station has an article on a subject I've posted before: how oil and economics really intersect. For example, If the US gets 10% of oil from Saudi Arabia, and reduces its oil consumption by 10%, it does not eliminate its consumption of Saudi Arabian oil. It only reduces it by 10%. Oil is a commodity. The only way to not consume Saudi Arabian oil is by embargoing oil from that country. That wouldn't be very effective, because it would mean that only countries without an embargo would benefit from very-slightly-cheaper Saudi Arabian oil. Supply and demand are difficult to trick.

Embarrassingly enough, also in TCS today, Glassman suggests that "If Arianna [Huffington] is really concerned about U.S. use of Saudi oil or even foreign oil in general, she could support exploration in areas of the United States such as barren stretches of Alaska or off all three of our major coasts. Or she might try to encourage her friends to sell their 10,000-square-foot houses in Bel Air and live in apartment buildings. Or get them to stop flying in fuel-guzzling private jets." None of these things would significantly reduce use of Saudi oil (although it's true that changing SUV behaviour matters even less).

When a country allegedly sponsoring terrorism exports livestock, why doesn't anybody suggest reducing our consumption of meat? Because it would be riduculous, that's why.

Last weekend I was busy because my sensei's sensei came to Mountain View for an intensive, three-day, eight-hour total kata seminar. Somebody took a nice picture of Hanshi Miki adjusting my position. Boy was it hard to hold this kind of position (Shito-Ryu style cat stance or "neko-ashi-dachi") while he adjusted the angle and position of everybody's hands, arms, shoulders, spine, legs and feet.

I am fated not to have a digital camera.

In September 2002 I packaged a digital camera (technically, not my digital camera, even worse) to bring to Canada in my checked-in luggage. By the time I looked for it a day after arriving at my parents' house, I couldn't find it. Optimistically, I thought it would be around there or at home somewhere but of course six months later it hasn't shown up at either house. I believe it was stolen from my luggage. My biggest fan however unsupportively suggests I lost it, though I fail to see how.

Well, I had already been thinking of getting a smaller model anyhow. Digital cameras have reached a point where for a price I'm willing to pay, I can get a high quality digital camera that I can carry everywhere. Now that, I would really use. In August I was discussing this with a friend who passed on a news article about new smaller Nikon and Casio models. I thought about this a lot. OK, in fact, I dithered, undecided, comparing features and prices randomly and unproductively.

I went to Good Guys and looked at cameras with the intent to buy. But I couldn't decide by the time my biggest fan unsupportively decided he was ready to leave, so I gave up for the time being.

A month or so later: I decided to stop dithering. I went to my biggest fan for help deciding, but he unsupportively suggested I decide what features were important to me before comparing cameras with those features. Fine! I decided size was crucial - it must fit in my laptop/messenger bag (peewee timbuk2 size) and stay there without me constantly regretting the space it takes up. But quality was also crucial - 2 megapixels with reasonable ability to take close-ups of the things I make. Three models seemed to basically fit my requirements: the Minolta Dimage X, the Canon Powershot Elph, the Casio Exilim EX-S2 or EX-M2. Maybe the Nikon Coolpix 2500 as well, but I never had the covetous craving passion for that one that I did for the Dimage or Exilim, despite its swiveliciousness.

I dithered some more. Would the MP3 player capabilities of the Exilim be useful to me, enough to justify the extra cost? Hmm.

Finally decisive, I ordered a Exilim EX-M2 through a vendor (Tristate Camera) found through Pricewatch. Tristate offered the EX-M2 for about $50 less than Amazon. Great! Only two days later, I got a call from Tristate saying the price was actually $50 higher because of Casio's Christmas packaging deals which included some thingy. On principle, I cancelled the order.

I looked at Amazon's listing for the Exilim, since I trusted Amazon not to bait-and-switch. However they didn't have it in stock at the moment, and I didn't want to buy something that might be in stock at some unspecified future date. I wanted reasonably quick, though not instant, gratification. I was hoping to bring a new digital camera with me to use at Christmas.

Christmas shopping was upon us and we headed to Fry's Electronics for various purchase. They had the Exilim EX-M2. After dithering more about whether I really wanted it, with my biggest fan still unsupportively hoping I'll hurry up and get it over with, I asked the sales guy to get me one. The only one they had left was a pre-opened model. Honestly, I didn't want anybody else to have already touched this camera. Somehow it seemed too personal. Would you buy underwear somebody had bought, then returned? However unreasonably, that's how I felt. I walked away.

Over Christmas, I did some serious rethinking. Maybe I didn't want an Exilim at all, with or without the MP3 capabilities. I wanted closeups to be high-quality, and I found out about the Dimage Xi, which has 3.2 Megapixels, compared to the mere 2.1 Megapixels of the Dimage X, and reputedly very fine opticals. It was somewhat more expensive of course, and the highest price I'd considered paying. But at this point I was willing to pay more to avoid any possible disappointment. I decided to get it. I ordered the Dimage Xi through Amazon. Only after emotionally committing the order, if not actually committing it, did I notice that the order was actually being filled by Office Depot. The date was December 29. The order was going to ship in 1-2 days.

Over the next few weeks, I periodically called home just before returning home from work. You see, I didn't want to sit in the train wondering the whole way if the camera was going to be there, and face disappointment at home. Two packages did arrive, but they were the other two things I had ordered from Amazon the same day as the camera.

Finally, today, I checked Amazon's status: order still there, not yet shipped. It said to call Office Depot for shipping information. I did and discovered that they had cancelled the order, although Amazon didn't know it yet. Apparently they don't stock it any more, and their response to that is simply to cancel the order. I checked a different page at Amazon which claims both that the camera order is ready for shipping 1/1/2003, and that a complete refund has been applied for that order. I don't think I've received the refund yet.

Looking through the Amazon site, they now appear to have taken down the useless offer to order from Office Depot, and instead they have a hopeful "in stock soon" offer for the Dimage Xi. "Order now to get first in line."

I don't know if I can handle the disappointment again. If camera manufacturers did a better job of stocking cameras rather than creating scarcity, and retailers didn't screw around with availability and packaging, somebody would have had my money three months ago. Now they'll just have to wait.

I did enjoy the editorial today by David Brooks about a lack of class consciousness, particularly class envy, in Americans.

Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday...

[Americans] always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich...

Every few years a group of millionaire Democratic presidential aspirants pretends to be the people's warriors against the overclass. They look inauthentic, combative rather than unifying. Worst of all, their basic message is not optimistic. They haven't learned what Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt and even Bill Clinton knew: that you can run against rich people, but only those who have betrayed the ideal of fair competition. You have to be more hopeful and growth-oriented than your opponent, and you cannot imply that we are a nation tragically and permanently divided by income.

However, Income mobility *is not* that much higher in the US. Although it's the classic location for a rags-to-riches story, other developed countries have similar income mobility. In addition, at least one very pessimistic economist has argued that many American adults remain stuck in poverty (see also this course plan which is practically a rebuttal). Anyway, it's all very confusing and there don't exist very many international comparisons of income mobility.

So is the reluctance of Americans to penalize the rich based purely on a hopeful and/or egalitarian outlook, rather than on a real economic difference? David Brooks' point may still be valid, but now I wish some economist/sociologist would link American attutides to income mobility to their actual opportunity for income mobility.

Colby Cosh posted a blog entry I wish I had wrote. It's about how the knee-jerk reaction to enact a measure "if it even saves one life" can so easily go astray. The example is regulations on commercial cigarettes to prevent accidental fires from being started.

Colby and I aren't the only ones frustrated with this (a, b, c). Unfortunately we are probably outnumbered. People who want to save one more life want us to have more signage and helmet laws, have automatic external defibrillators in every plane and firetruck, change every TV and radio so it can be turned on automatically in emergencies, and all get immunized for meningococcus.

My most loyal fan (who complained when I referred to him as "a reader" last week) points out that the oil/war objections typically overlook who is supposed to be benefitting. They also don't specify exactly what oil they're talking about although it's usually assumed Iraq's oil.

First possibility: Bush could be after the oil in Iraq for the benefit of American oil companies. Well, since France, Russia and China already have potential deals in Iraq, American oil companies may have the least to gain. Although the leader of the exiled Iraqi National Congress has promised oil contracts to US companies if US puts the exiled group in power, the benefits here would be far greater for non-American oil companies. I don't believe for a second that existing oil deals with F/R/C would be scuttled. Anyway, if helping American oil companies were Bush's aim, he could do so vastly more efficiently by giving the money that a war would cost to the American oil companies. Another way of benefitting American oil companies is by affecting the price of oil to keep it unusually high, but this is typically considered unacceptable and politically stupid because consumers (voters) suffer. Rather than see conspiracy in US actions, why don't protesters see at least as much venal conspiring in the F/R/C positions? They're the ones making oil deals with Saddam.

Second possibility: Bush could be after the oil in Iraq for the benefit of the American oil consumers. This one doesn't make a great deal of sense, because US already trades food for Iraq oil. Low prices benefit American oil consumers, but this extended saber-rattling is adding a risk premium of $5-$15 onto the price of a barrel. If Bush just wants to keep the price of oil down, he could ignore Iraq. Finally, note that keeping the price of oil down benefits Europeans at least as much, because in most European countries the price of oil is inflated by taxes. The only way Bush could help American oil consumers without helping global oil consumers would be by subsidizing imported oil.

Third possibility: Bush might wish to protect the oil in and around the Arabian peninsula (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) from future Iraqi agression, in order to benefit American oil companies. Would this really benefit them? It depends on how many deals American oil companies have in the area. If the entire Arabian peninsula were taken offline, the price of oil would definitely go up, and this would presumably benefit American oil companies rather than disadvantage them. Again, this would benefit any oil companies working in the entire region, not just American companies.

Fourth possibility: Bush might wish to protect the oil in and around the Arabian peninsula from future Iraqi agression, in order to benefit American oil consumers. However, Europe depends more on Gulf oil than US does. So really, Bush would be helping oil consumers worldwide if his plan worked.Krugman believes this is what Bush is doing according to a recent NYT editorial.

If you believe in one of the latter two scenarios, then just perhaps, Bush is defending people as well oil from future Iraqi agression -- Kuwaitis, Israelis, Kurds, possible American and European terrorism targets. It's impossible to tell if his motivations are limited to oil. How would one prove this?

Most Canadians (all my relatives) think that the US plans for Iraq are all about securing oil supply (ref: "Outside Exxon and other oil company offices in St. John’s, protesters performed a "die-in" to highlight the connection between war and oil "). I guess the Canadian National Post likes to be contrarian. In this article debunking the "no war for oil" and no blood for oil catchphrases, there's the standard stuff about how the US already trades food for Iraq oil, and wouldn't stand to gain much directly from an Iraq freed from sanctions because Russia, France and China are much more heavily invested in Iraq oil fields. In addition, there's an interesting point about the essential inconsistency of the oil --> war position:

What makes the "no war for oil" school of thought so weird is that many of its adherents are also advancing the theory that war would be too expensive. The White House estimates the direct costs of a conflict in Iraq would be about $80-billion. But according to Yale economics professor William D. Nordhaus, the real price tage would be as much as $2.5-trillion once the cost of nation-building is imputed. Would the United States get a good return on this 13-digit "investment"? Let's assume Iraq's liberation leads to a long-term oil supply expansion on the scale outlined above, and that the price of crude falls by, say, 10%, as a result. Given the value of U.S. oil imports, that would translate to just $22-billion in annual savings. No profit-seeking CEO would accept this miserly rate of return for such a controversial enterprise.

I'm always dubious when I see arguments against a course of action that are inconsistent with each other. If it's the course of action itself, war, that is so objectionable, go ahead, oppose the war. But a bunch of motivation and cost arguments against the war that are inconsistent with each other weaken the basic position to me. I guess most people don't compare arguments to that extent -- they just see a long list of arguments arrayed against something and are overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
Here are some of the cost-based anti-war arguments, together with their top price:

• Washington Post, Michael Dobbs, $200 billion. This article was reprinted in other places like MSNBC
• ABC News, John Cochran, $100 billion
• UK Guardian, $1.9 trillion in the headline, but buried in the article is that the direct military cost would only be $140 million. Cites study by American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Anne McFeatters, $200 billion
• Kansas.com, Siobhan McDonough (AP), $1.9 trillion

Now the articles on how the war is all about securing oil supply:

• Washington Post, Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway
• MSNBC, and again
• ABCNews
• UK Guardian, Zahra Naqiv, Comment
• "Oil is the obvious motive for US interest in Iraq", Straight Goods (Canadian), by Linda Quaig, originally published in Toronto Star

Now that I've reviewed some of these more carefully than before, I'm really struck by how the oil arguments can go either way. For example, one of the MSNBC articles argues that the US should want to avoid war with Iraq, to avoid a spike in oil prices to $40-$60 per barrel. That would hurt already weakened airlines and could even "push the country into recession". Even the Guardian reports that "A prolonged disruption of world oil markets could cost the U.S. economy up to $778 billion, the researchers estimated. On the other hand, Iraq's huge oil resources could satisfy U.S. needs for imported oil at current levels for almost a century and otherwise benefit the economy by $40 billion. "A ZNet article: "Ironically, while the US and western countries would like to see lower oil prices, on the flip side of the coin higher oil prices mean more income for US oil companies and boosted investment returns for oil-related mutual funds.

So, oil is a consideration for many world players (like France and Russia who are on the security council, and have planned deals in Iraq on hold due to sanctions), but there's no doubt that for the US at least, it's not a simplistic cowboy equation of "let's go in there and get that durned oil". Even Krugman, normally bitterly anti-Bush, and my favourite left-coast liberal weekly alternative news mag The Stranger, recognize that it's not that simple.

Now this is what I'm talking about. From the NYT editorials:

Scientists are as much victims of fashion as ordinary mortals are — a fact illustrated by the rich history of junk science and false alarms of the last 30 years. Recall a few instances:

In the mid-1970's, many climatologists warned of an ice age that would severely diminish agricultural productivity by the year 2000.

In 1972, the United States banned DDT, only to find out, years later, that the evidence of the pesticide's harmful effects on human beings is inconclusive. In the meantime, millions of people — 1 in 20 African children, for example — have died of malaria, as Europe and the United States remain reluctant to support controlling mosquitoes with DDT.

And let's not forget the dire warnings about natural resources. In the 1970's, we were told that there would be essentially no oil left by the 1990's.

Science retains its alarmist streak today. The scuttlebutt among the scientists I know is that they have a better chance of getting a government or private grant if they indicate that their research might uncover a serious threat or problem. Media fascination with bad news is partly to blame, along with the principled gloominess and nagging of nongovernmental pressure groups. But government itself has played its natural part.

The point is not to be cynical about science fads but to know enough to choose wisely when it comes to supporting pure science, along with research that can give us beneficial technologies.

— Denis Dutton, Department of Philosophy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

It's so much harder to make money in science or media telling people things have gotten slightly better. It's either "much better" which causes inflated expectations and then disappointments, or "slightly" to "much worse" which of course is dismaying.

I love good news: Optimism, new laws, multiple political parties and a successful money conversion in Afghanistan. Though there's still much to do. At Kabul University, "only two of the university’s five donated laptops can be plugged in at the same time. Still, he says it gives Kabul’s professors a chance to learn how to use the computers and get the basics, like Microsoft Word and Excel. There is no internet access."

I was talking about fear yesterday -- that rational or irrational fears or anxiety govern so many of the activities of people I know, and seem to motivate much activism. I found fear.com, where people can vote on what they fear & add new fears, but it doesn't seem to have the big fears I've seen among acquaintances:

• Fear that we'll destroy Nature
• Fear of food (allergens, additives, GM)
• Fear of medications (pharmacophobia)
• Fear of doctors (one of mine) and dentists
• Fear of traffic
• Fear of joblessness

Since we all fear different things to different extents, obviously some of this is irrational. If it were rational, then the biggest fear of each demographic would correspond to the biggest danger for that demographic, e.g. the 20-40 age group would all fear traffic more than food.

A professor Rosenau argues that fear has been key to success in preventive medicine and that we suffer less fear today. Rotenburg points out that some anxiety can increase performance. But I guess what most strikes me is how much fear, anxiety and pressure we continue to feel even when our lives are pretty easy. I'm sure those whose lives are truly hard feel more fear and pressure, but it's surprising that the baseline for angst is so high.

A great discussion on Instapundit on surfing in class. I don't really know what the fuss is about, but at least some people understand that it's just like any other potential distraction: playing solitaire, sleeping, doodling, reading a novel, knitting (all of which I've done in class). It's not fundamentally new, not even the ability to instant message your classmates, it's just electronic for a change. And certainly what matters is results. If you don't have the discipline or skill to pass your classes, surfing just isn't going to make that much of a difference once you're used to it. A minor temporary problem is novelty; kids who have already learned not to read books in class haven't yet learned not to read Web sites. I expect one semester to be more than enough for a student to figure out how much attention they need to pay to pass.

Similar discussions are going on here and therewith respect to IM/chat at the workplace and in meetings. I just met a technical journalist with years of experience looking at new technology, yet he had trouble believing that IM can actually help productivity. I don't know, the fact that I conduct almost all communication with my east coast developer via IM and he's a productive member of the team -- well it seems to work for me.

I think I mentioned, but it's worth mentioning again, the IETF had its first experiment with official chat rooms duplicating and augmenting the real meetings, although of course IETF meeting attendees have messaged each other privately during meetings for years. The feedback at the end (much of which took place during the chat room mirroring the huge plenary meeting) was very largely positive. Of course a few people complained that attendees may be distracting themselves. But isn't that their lookout? When attendees actually whisper to each other, the complaint is only that they may disturbing those who want to hear. When there's no worry of disturbing others, why is there now a new complaint?

Of course these new activities can provide a positive function augmenting the in-person event, but even as unredeeming an activity as solitaire may not be entirely worthless. I once thought for a while about how to handle a 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm weekly anthropology course in university. I was interested and wanted to learn, but knew I had a history of falling asleep during class. Rather than change my schedule, take pills or jack up on coffee, I just brought along knitting to every single class. With something to keep my hands busy (I can look away from my knitting 80% of the time or more), I paid more attention, proving this to the professor with relevant questions once or twice. And at the end I had a sweater, too.

I wish I could do this in more meetings, unfortunately I seem to have to educate each new set of colleagues that this helps me pay attention.

Cory Doctorow links to an article about saving the Iberian lynx and Iberian Imperial eagle by preserving cork forests. "It is the economic value of these forests that has ensured their survival," says a member of the conservation group WWF. I am impressed -- they have it right this time. I look forward to seeing more environmentalists look for ways to make natural (or near-natural) reserves be economically successful, rather than just exhort and invent laws to restrict actions.

According to CorkMasters, cork forests are indeed nearly natural: the cork is harvested off trees without permanently harming the trees, and no herbicides, fertilisers or irrigation are needed. Although a cork forest must involve some meddling with nature (keeping access roads to trees clear, perhaps even mowing around trees, perhaps removing other kinds of trees), it seems the WWF have no problems with this kind of agricultural impact.

This relates to Dan Simon's elucidation of the idea of inaction as it applies to the precautionary principle. Is "inaction" continuing to use cork forests as they've been used for centuries? Or is "inaction" completely stopping the "exploitation" of these forests? Ask the question again about fossil fuel use, and it's clear that most quick answers to these questions depend on ill-examined notions of what is natural and what is action, and probably a lot of indoctrination about environmental good and bad.

Is it really so easy to create a hoax that, when seeded onto a couple small online forums, snowballs and gets 2500 people upset enough to write in within a week? I guess so. The resources page is really pretty funny, if you can look at it right. Penny Arcade saved the world by uncovering details about the hoax first.

Volokh posts on water privatization, and a reader sends in a link to this study on water privatization in Argentina. I had heard about the success of that effort, but hadn't seen this particular paper yet.

It may be counter-intuitive, but is it generally true that privatization produces the greatest successes in the poorest regions? "we find that child mortality fell 5 to 7 percent in areas that privatized their water services overall; and that the effect was largest in the poorest areas."

That's not actually too surprising, because in the richer areas there is likely to be surplus (money, water, other resources or services). In California, those whose water is "taken away" from them (we could consider this to be every organization except farms) are still abundantly supplied with water. But in a poorer area, inefficient water distribution may mean that those who most need a jug of water for a feverish child may not have it, and cannot pay any price for it. Making the water distribution more efficient means at least it's reliably there in need.

My personal preference would be for water privatization to be accompanied with a system of "water coupons" to allow poor people to buy a family's weekly/monthly supply of water. Like food coupons in some cities, and similar to the Heifer Project, these could be supported by private donation from richer regions. This allows even small donations to have an immediate, direct and measurable effect, whereas foreign aid to public water suppliers in poor countries is frequently wasted and has a delayed and uncertain effect. A charitable system of water coupons requires privatization in order to work at all.

I'm back from vacation.

Good grief. Matt Smith complains that "Calculated in potential casualties on the field, [it] is the ultimate American doomsday machine." Can you guess what weapon of mass destruction is being unleashed? A nuclear device? Biological or chemical weaponry? Maybe lasers on satellites targetting everybody personally? Nope. It's the segway, a powered two-wheel transportation device. His argument is that it will make people fatter.

I really think Matt intends to be serious about this -- I carefully scrutinized the article for a sense of irony or mockery. But he seriously seems to think that not only is a segway dangerous to the health, but that San Francisco is morally superior for not encouraging these devices and this causes fitter citizens. Pray tell, how is the segway different from our existing powered two-wheel transportation devices, the scooter and the motorcycle?

More info on risk, particularly traffic related.

First, traffic accidents aren't likely to be what kills you (2 to 5% chance), although they are a leading cause of death among the young and among people travelling. (ref1, ref2). But assuming you're interested in reducing that risk anyway, should you decide to live in US or Europe? Should you decide to live in a city or in the countryside? Drive an SUV or a compact? I don't have all the answers today, but I did look up the numbers for US vs Europe. This car safety site has an international statistics page with numbers from WHO reports. I'll grab the following numbers for use later:

• 120,000 total deaths from traffic accidents in Europe in 1995
• 40,676 total traffic fatalities in US in 1994
• 41,907 total traffic fatalities in US in 1996

That's not very interesting in and of itself. I want to know how many deaths there are per capita (assuming that one is driving roughly the average miles per year for the area) or how many deaths there are per mile driven (because that can be affected by behavioral changes). Per capita numbers are easy to get, using the following numbers:

• 512,000,000 Europeans in 1992
• 260,327,021 US population in 1994
• 265,228,572 in 1996

Doing the math that gives:

• Roughly 234.4 deaths per million in Europe in 1995
• 156.2 deaths per million in US in 1994
• 158 deaths per million in US in 1996

Note that although the comparisons may not be exact (the studies may have counted things somewhat differently, my population estimate for Europe was surely a bit low given it was for the wrong year), these differences are large enough to say that Europeans have been more likely to die from traffic than Americans.

Finally, I found death per vehicle-kilometer rate information for all of Europe for 1998, and death-per mile (of course) for US. Some highlights

• At the top, Greece: 57.4 deaths per billion km, or 9.2 per 100 million miles
• France: 16.4 deaths per billion km, or 2.6 per 100 million miles
• Germany: 12.4 deaths per billion km, or 2.0 deaths per 100 million miles
• US: 1.6 deaths per 100 million miles driven (also in 1998 though from a different source)
• UK: 7.5 deaths per billion km, or 1.2 deaths per 100 million miles

I didn't pick the worst offenders -- only three European countries (Netherlands, UK and Sweden) out of fourteen are safer to drive in than US.

I frequently talk to people about risk assessment -- particularly when I hear people telling me how "dangerous" it is to fly. Humans are very bad at risk assessment. Knowing this can make you only slightly better at it (unless you actually do the studies and the math each time you evaluate risk), but it might make life easier to live, knowing that the things you worry about may not actually be worth worrying about.

The reason I mention this now is only because I looked up some links for more info. Here they are.

• Kahneman and Tversky have done some of the best research into overall risk assesment. Here's a brief summary of what they call Prospect Theory.
• The Culture of Fear, Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, gets good reviews on Amazon.
• The Polar Bear Strategy, Reflections on Risk in Modern Life, gets even better reviews. There's lots more, too.
• I've read Why Flip A Coin and Technological Risk

So here are some examples of evaluating risk. Do you think Finland is a particularly safe country to live in overall if you're my age (30)? Why (Answer here). Were the reasons you thought Finland was safe or dangerous the same reasons? Can simple reasoning, without statistics or math, give you a useful answer?

Joel Spolsky, aka "Joel on Software", has a fun rant from last week about how complicated software is. Sometimes I think things aren't as bad as he says, the rest of the time I know they're worse.

Joel notes that you can't intelligently criticize a software ecosystem (the Windows ecosystem, the Linux one) until you really know it. You don't really know it until you've spent years learning the tiny details that rarely but importantly affect your job. And I'll add to Joel's point that by the time you really know it, you can no longer criticize at all: you're too deeply bought in (see Influence for commitment and consistency) and too habituated to one way of doing things for any other way to seem at all reasonable.

In the NYT editorial pages today, Nicholas D. Kristof first says "Mr. Chávez is an autocratic leftist demagogue who is running the economy into the ground, manipulating the Constitution and fostering hatred between rich and poor". So far so good - too often the media (such as NPR), particularly on the left, refuses to even make judgements about dangerous international leaders.

But then Kristof goes on to say that the global community has no right to interfere. He criticizes "César Gaviria, the secretary general of the Organization of American States, who is representing the international community as a negotiator between the two sides, has publicly laid much of the blame for the crisis on President Chávez in an apparent shove to get him to resign or call early elections".

What's wrong with that? When it was the US and Clinton, rather than Venezuela and Chavez, plenty of Euros and Canadians said that Clinton should resign. That was not seen by anybody as "a signal" to "take to the streets and call for a coup". At worst, the response of Americans was that foreigners should mind their own business, but it was in no way taken as interfering with the American democratic process.

I think that's because the American democratic process is strong. Nobody sees any harm in calling for Clinton's resignation (or for Jorg Haider to step down) because they find it rather unlikely that public action will result in chaos in US or Austria. But Venezuela is seen as a tinderbox, with greater risks of violence and chaos -- whether or not Chavez stays.

So, what should a person like Gaviria do? Staying silent seems irresponsible if he truly believes Chavez is harmful. Foreigners can after all have some effect on a country's politics, perhaps influencing voters. On the other hand, it also seems irresponsible to advocate violence or a coup. So was Gaviria irresponsible? It's hard to tell from Kristof's editorial, where there is no Gaviria quote. But it seems most likely Kristof was responding to this news from Wednesday, where the most damning thing Gaviria said about Chavez was "that President Hugo Chavez's refusal to acknowledge the depth of the crisis complicated negotiations aimed at resolving it."

There's a completely different side to the story, people that feel that Gaviria is on Chavez' side, that Chavez may have greased Gaviria's hands (ref 1, ref 2. E.g.

Meanwhile, the ostensible "mediator" of the conflict has cynically called for government repression against the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators assembled outside the TV stations. With that action, Cesar Gaviria has lost any illusory credibility in his aspiration to "mediate" the Venezuelan conflict. He should return to Washington immediately.

Note that quote is from a Venezuelan news source.

It may be that Gaviria spoke up unwisely -- but it's his support (not criticism) of the Venezuelan government that may be destroying his credibility as a negotiator. Kristof should get a more nuanced view of the situation before criticizing the negotiator, and he should definitely give us the ability to fact-check his ass by being more specific about what exactly Gaviria said that he objects to.

In addition to several rankings of countries' economic freedom (Canada's Fraser Institute, US' Freedom House and Heritage Foundation, compared to each other by Cato), there is now a major study of American states that shows the same correlation. The new study is by the National Center for Policy Analysis and the Fraser Institute.

These indexes reflect some new thinking among major economists. In the 1980's and 1990's prescriptions for national economic success included mostly privatization and inflation control. Now there are also concerns about property rights, rule of law, labour market flexibility, and ease of compliance with regulations. Milton Friedman says:

I used to be asked a lot: “What do these ex-communist states have to do in order to become market economies?” And I used to say: “You can describe that in three words: privatize, privatize, privatize.” But, I was wrong. That wasn’t enough. The example of Russia shows that. Russia privatized but in a way that created private monopolies—private centralized economic controls that replace government’s centralized controls. It turns out that the rule of law is probably more basic than privatization. Privatization is meaningless if you don’t have the rule of law.

Hernando De Soto emphasizes the cost of retrograde regulations and undocumented land ownership in any of several interviews:

One main reason why the informal sector has not become formal is that from Indonesia to Brazil, 90 percent of the informal lands are not titled and registered. This is a generalized phenomenon in the so-called Third World. And it has many consequences. One is that the price of land drops because it is not legally registered as private property. In Peru, when we title these lands, the market value doubles the same day. After 10 years, it goes up nine times. The principal reason is that it is easier to trade the land once the property rights are clear and established.

This NYT editorial by Harvard History professor Lizabeth Cohen contained some material which made me uncomfortable by its slant or implications. It seems the editorial is intended to highlight the inequalities of modern commerce, particularly malls, and to generate outrage -- but I don't like being made to feel outrage at things that are only made to seem outrageous.

As retailers chose to bring "the market to the people instead of people to the market" ... they inevitably favored some people over others. Shopping centers aimed at what Macy's Annual Report for 1955 called "middle-income groups" explicitly distanced themselves from consumers deemed undesirable because they were too poor, black, or young and unruly.

In 1955, shopping centers were pretty new. It's pretty obvious that new developments typically are available to the rich first. Of course a store like Macy's is going to target a particular income group that they believe will return profits. Would Cohen complain if Tiffany's put out an annual report saying it was targetting rich people with its diamond and gold jewelry, or if a yacht company admitted to putting ads in Wall Street Journal rather than on lamp-posts in the slums? It's not immoral to sell expensive goods to rich people.

Next, a historian ought to realize that after the rich people had places to shop, then the middle income groups, the remaining niches were for lower-income groups. In the 80's, from what I can tell, stores like Target and Wal-Mart filled that niche astoundingly successfully.

At a time when many low-income Americans didn't own cars, the few bus routes to shopping centers were carefully planned to transport nondriving customers, particularly women, from nearby suburbs, not low-income consumers from inner cities.

Wasn't the whole point of shopping centers in the suburbs being new -- that there were already stores in the inner cities? So, of course the suburban malls are going to encourage transporting people who have nowhere else to shop rather than people who already have someplace to shop. That doesn't make the people who already have someplace to shop (the inner-city residents) disadvantaged. In fact, one could argue that inner-city residents were themselves advantaged, before suburban shopping malls popped up.

It's true that in some cities (Cohen's example is Newark) the inner cities became dead zones where poor people lived and shops were abandoned. That's a reaction to risk, and it seems in many cities today we're reducing the risk to shopkeepers in those areas and commerce is returning.

If customers looking conspicuously different from typical suburbanites actually made it to the mall, they were often met by unwelcoming security guards who had been hired by management and were not accountable to any public authority.

Isn't that the same in many institutions? Stores don't uniquely have this problem, so do universities and churches and even government buildings. Being accountable to government isn't a panacea. In fact, stores have a unique incentive to be welcoming to a wide variety of people because you can't tell who might spend money.

Malls have done little to encourage public transportation to accommodate the low-paid, urban workers who now dominate shopping center sales forces.

I take it Cohen wants malls to have a social conscience and responsibility. Surely the malls don't have a problem actually hiring these people and having them show up on time. Is it really the mall's responsibility to encourage public transportation for their workers?

The death in 1995 of a black retail clerk from Buffalo, killed trying to cross the seven-lane highway that separated her bus stop from her job inside a suburban mall, was only the most brutal example of this form of discrimination.

This sentence bothered me the most. Sorry, was the mall discriminating in hiring the black person? Was the public bus system discriminating in putting the bus stop on the opposite side of the freeway from the suburban mall? Or was the driver who hit her discriminating in choosing a black person to run over? This is a brutal example of a this form of damning allegation.

As developers sought sites close to the affluent populations to which they catered, their presence augmented the prosperity of host communities, exacerbating an already unequal distribution of economic resources in metropolitan areas.

This is a generic problem; why is Cohen blaming the mall developers? Why not the house-builders who don't build shacks, or the schools for not bussing in slum children? Or the employers putting good work opportunities out in the burbs? A complex social problem like this can't be fixed by assigning blame to just one link in the chain.

Cohen's last prescription is that Christmas shoppers should spread their money around -- not just to malls, or online sites, but also presumably to local/city stores. Prescriptions like that do no good over the long run -- it just wastes Cohen's breath, perhaps makes a couple socially-conscious people either feel guilty or go out of their way to do a less convenient (less efficient!) shopping trip. The whole premise of a market-based society is that the sellers go where people want to buy. If that's the suburbs, the inner cities, or online, they'll go there. From what I've seen, it's all three.

Here's my prescription for Cohen, and all those who -- like me -- want to better the lot of disadvantaged people. Help them directly. If you think that inner city kids don't get enough education, give money to their schools (or give them voucher/money to give them the power to influence schools). If you think that mall workers don't have adequate transportation, work on that directly. Complaining that malls cause these problems is an ineffective way to address these problems because it's only one piece of a very complex social puzzle.

If I can paraphrase Innocents Abroad: he writes that Western Canada is disenfranchised, fundamentally different and cut off from the Canadian power-base. That certainly has some truth to it -- BC and Alberta are such resource-rich provinces that they have different interests, naturally, from other provinces. However that doesn't necessarily mean a disunited country -- Washington State is resource-rich and Mississippi is poor, yet clearly they're united in a country with a strong self-image.

My parents moved from Alberta to Ontario and back to BC -- I'll have to ask them at Christmas what they think of this.

If your breasts are larger than DD, read Cat's site. Cat only told me about this tonight. There's also reasonable advice for smaller sizes. Even medium-sized chests suffer from badly fitting sports bras in particular.

Volokh says that Fumento says (in Reason Online) that the Atkins Diet doesn't work. Maybe it's because some people don't actually lose weight when they stick to it; maybe it's because some people can't stick with it and therefore don't lose weight. It doesn't matter; saying a weight-loss diet works or doesn't work is too sweeping a generalization. It makes more sense to figure out when it works, why, and for whom.

Volokh also seems to be missing, despite a couple reader comments, that although calorie intake is the main weight-loss causative, what form those calories take can be a major factor in whether or not people can find the right food, feel cravings, feel energetic, and in general are able to keep to the diet.

I never heard about this recently deceased police lab chemist who allegedly repeatedly lied on the stand. I now wonder why we don't hear about this kind of thing more often. Is it:

• Very rare
• Happens but hushed up
• Happens but nobody knows when, where

First and second generation immigrants are quite different. Mel says that at her school where almost everybody is Latino, there aren't interracial tensions. The biggest tensions are between first-gen and second-gen.

First generation: Forget the white kids with the studs in the tongue," Riz says. "Indians are gonna work for you. At the beginning, they work for minimum wage. Then little raise, little raise, slowly, slowly. Everyone live together; they are saving money, six people in household working, they bank 80 percent of their money and use 20 percent for expenses. They don't drink, no clubs, no fancy clothes. Suddenly, they have $60,000 in the bank. Then they will buy the Subway or the Blimpie.

Second generation: Riz worries about the second generation... his cousin, Ali Momin, 22... unlike Riz when Riz started out, Ali won't wear $3 shirts from K-Mart. His cologne is Dreamer by Versace. His savings account is zero. "Riz tells me a whole buncha times, 'Don't be wasting money,' " Ali says. "I keep that in my head for a couple of days, then it goes away."

From a Washington Post article on labour in the Old South (link via Mars or Bust).

Maybe this is why I don't like UDDI -- as Sean McGrath points out, it's a top-down, librarian-style, managed classification system for XML services. A lot of work for everybody to do something that any Yahoo could do.

You can now examine wine with a magnetic resonance spectroscope to see if it's gotten acidic. Of course, the gizmo will cost you a couple tens of thousands of dollars. But since the highest price paid for a case of wine at auction is reputedly $112,500, I expect there will be a couple early adopters anyway.

I just found a slightly dated paper on AOL interoperability and standard adoption, particularly with respect to Jabber. Wishful thinking? I'm betting AOL will wait for two things: (1) for an IM standard to have an RFC number, and (2) to no longer be clearly #1 in the market, as it is now.

A year ago, AOL was clearly the market leader, but MSN and Yahoo were reportedly growing faster (together MSN and Yahoo have more users than AOL). Now, Yahoo claims the most "workday IM users" (also see here, and Jupiter Media Metrics shows that MSN is still gaining.

Presence standards for buddy lists (seeing who's online, where, doing what, and how they could be contacted) have pretty obvious applications in online gaming. The video gaming industry has long been a serious early adopter for graphics, sound, processor and now network technology with the explosion of online games. In fact, sites like XBox Live already let you create buddy lists and see who's online, playing what game, and how good they are. They just don't yet connect with other presence applications -- you have to go to XBox Live to see what your buddies are playing. I think that will change, and these kinds of sites will "push" that presence information into your main IM/presence client, so that you might be tempted to get the service or go online when you otherwise would not have. Classic viral marketing.

For that matter, how about porn, another high-tech early adopter industry? Surely hard-core online porn fans want to know when one of their favourite "D-Cup Blondes" members "comes" online!

A bunch of bloggers I read occasionally (often linked from Instapundit) share the feeling that Europeans, particularly on the left, don't understand the new world order since 9/11. This blog entry in particular says that Europe will only understand that there is already a war, when an attack targets their soil.

But what if that educational moment doesn't come in the next, say, 10 years? I may be optimistic, but I believe there's a significant possibility, verging on probability, that moment will not come in the next 10 years. Minor attacks probably, but not an attack with the level of surprise and emotional intensity as 9/11, from the same or similar sources, targetting European soil. There may not be one targetting US soil either. So are we at war? Are the Europeans? It depends on your definition of war, and Europeans define it differently.

Google ZeitGeist is still there, though it's getting harder to find the link. This month, top five sports queries from Canada! I'll give you one guess what the #1 is.

Chris asked me about mercury levels, how dangerous they are, and how mercury can be abated (not because I knew anything a priori, but because he knows I sometimes like to look into these things).

On the one hand, 41 states have issued fish advisories for mercury (ref). But only 13 states have issued statewide advisories (including fish from all bodies of water), and it's unclear how serious an advisory is. The EPA says most consumers don't need to worry. Generally only pregnant women eating unusual amounts of fish daily or from particularly contaminated sources would need to worry. The FDA is currently reviewing its advice so this may change.

Note that mercury abatement processes exist -- there are small companies (like Acute Services or Enviro-Vac) that can be paid to clean up mercury spills. There's even been a small amount of backlash against proposals to even more severely lower the recommended maximum mercury intake. Even at current levels, the US recommendations are already several times stricter than the Australian recommendations (four servings of high-mercury fish per week upper limit for pregnant women only).

Overall, it doesn't seem like a serious thing Americans need to worry about. Even if you travelled to some highly mercury-polluted place and ate nothing but fish for a month, it would still be balanced by a normal American diet over the period of a couple years.

Now this would be a truly useful genetic modification. I'd love to have a cat but we're afraid we wouldn't be able to keep one if our allergies were bad. And that would be nasty to the kitty to get rid of it after a couple months of having a family.

Why the end of feminism is bad news for men (link via Instapundit). Halley even links to Powerpuff Girls stuff which I love for its feminine/feminist combination attitude. Salon did an article on those "demonic offspring of Shirley Temple and Japansese anime" back this summer. They didn't put such a fine point on why this is dangerous for men as Halley does, but they had some good lines: "Is Lara Croft powerful because she can take you down, or because you'd like her to go down on you?"

Why do we have such bad security? In tonight's keynote, Bruce Schneier started by assuming that large companies have bad security (products or systems) because it makes business sense. It doesn't make sense to spend money on security until it becomes more expensive not to. There are few consequences for bad security. He suggests increasing liability, which has interesting implications for open source. If open source projects were immune to liability, that would be a killer advantage for open source code in some areas.

On the other hand, if everybody who wrote, shipped or administered insecure systems were liable including open source, you would think large institutions would have an advantage. It's surprising Microsoft doesn't support broad liability for security holes (or maybe this is the next phase after Palladium). Microsoft could just buy insurance against this liability anyway. And this gets to Bruce's real solution: that with insurance and liability for security holes, there will be a free market for security. Companies could sell secure products and agree to accept some liability (currently every software package you buy disclaims liability for anything, even problems they know about). This is a very free market approach. Akin to the carbon market which puts an actual price on pollution of a certain kind, liability and insurance put a price on insecurity.

More security notes from the IETF. A couple responsible people watched all the traffic from people's laptops onto the Internet, and had a couple algorithms looking for password leaks. They found 2223 unique passwords. Some details:

• 1546 sniffed passwords were from HTTP


• 183 were from telnet


• One of the telnet sessions then opened a ssh (secure shell) connection, then used a root password which also got revealed


• 496 passwords were from email (mostly POP)


• 75 were from AOL IM

I'm sure many more would be found if a human were looking for passwords - the algorithms probably haven't had much work put into them to really find a lot of passwords.

Security is complicated. Systems are complicated. If IETF people can't get it right, how do we expect others to?

Den Beste lambastes a researcher for publishing a weakness in the American agriculture system. Poonwalla disagrees (and Instapundit reports on the debate). The debate is very familiar to me from experience in the computer industry.

When a security hole exists in a system, and a random person discovers this exploit, they have a few choices.

Publish the finding, even though some might use it to exploit the system before the hole is fixed

Keep quiet or even suppress the finding, hoping nobody else will discover it

Use it to hack into or damage the system.

For most people, the third option is ruled out pretty quickly, but there's a lot of attractiveness to number 2 (particularly in the military). Most of the security people I talk to believe that number 2 gives only a weak feeling of security. The usual damning phrase is to call it (with a sneer) "security through obscurity". Many people insist on number 1, publishing the exploit widely and loudly to make sure it gets fixed fast or else.

Poonawalla mostly explains it well, except he misses a subtle point. Many of the most responsible security experts, the guys who routinely discover holes in protocols or cryptographic algorithms, feel that the most responsible path is to give the information about the hole first to the people who can fix it. It *may* be possible to fix the hole even before a potential hacker discovers it. However, in order to pressure companies to actually fix the holes, the security expert will also publish the information on the exploit to the Internet in a week or a month or two.

This stuff gets discussed frequently here at the IETF, obviously in the security area. I've seen representatives of large software companies plead with the independent security experts to help keep security holes secret at least for a short while. My opinion is that it takes somebody with a certain amount of resentment against these large companies, and a certain amount of willingness to make trouble and cause chaos, not to agree to keep secrets for a short while.

Coincidentally, Bruce Schneier just discussed this tonight at the IESG plenary at the IETF. (It's the last day of the 55th IETF conference here in Atlanta, and I've been extremely busy, but it's been good.)

Here's a graph from the Fraser Institute on how bad queues have gotten since 1993.

"Canada has the best healthcare system on earth – so long as you don’t get sick!" That quote is from David Frum (link thanks to Rob again), who is so right-wing as to have been a speech writer for Bush. Not surprising this article is as much about belittling Gore as about health care. But I did follow his links to the Fraser Institute's study on queues in the Canadian Health Care system.

Queuing is one of only a few ways of rationing a scarce resource. Assuming the supply of angioplastys is not infinite, then a public health care system can ration angioplastys in only a few ways:

• Queuing
• Favoritism
• Bribery
• Market pricing
• Central planning

It seems that Canada uses queuing and favoritism (as Frum alleges), and central planning of course was the original idea of a single-payer health care system. But bribery and market pricing are illegal. Of course if queuing becomes bad enough, it becomes impossible to prevent bribery, as shown in any centrally-planned country after enough years. That leaves market pricing as the only tool not used -- which seems vastly unfair.

But as Frum says, as long as I was healthy I was perfectly happy living in the Canadian system.

Dave Barry published a mildly funny rant on Modern Art a month and a half ago (but I just got the link last night from my karate instructor). Basically, it's "the emporer has no clothes" -- this art that professional art appreciators pay so much money for, Barry claims, is shit, is nothing, is empty and sterile (or not).What is the public value of a work that can only be appreciated by somebody immersed in the social and historical context of the art world?

Appreciating minimalist art seems to me to be a very intellectualized endeavor -- if you know how one artist influenced another, you can compare a canvas painted all over in a single colour to a canvas painted in two colours and see the sheer extravagance of the second.

Terence Spies is the guy who started to introduce me to this extremely intellectualized appreciation of art, and sometimes I can grok it. In his not-recently-updated blog, you can see this tendency in a different realm -- a greater appreciation of certain food from an intellectual understanding of the processes and ingredients that go into it.

Emotionally I prefer national health care, but intellectually I have problems with it. Here's one problem: when the government runs out of money as prices go up, they pull the rug out from underneath. Grandmothers wondering if they can buy Christmas presents!

It's not often I see or hear something that makes me wish I had television channels. But now I wish I could see the Daily Show, which this article is mostly about (link found via Volokh). I love the quote from Jon Stewart:

"CNN has bought the show, I really don't know why. I'm not sure they realize that we're actually making fun of them.".

I'm now co-chair of a new IETF working group called XMPP: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. To my surprise, there's already news coverage of this working group.

XMPP grew out of the Jabber work but many people are now trying to bring it to more formal status as an IETF standard.

This morning on the jitney in San Francisco, two obvious tourists got on. I offered directions & public transportation advice to the couple, who turned out to be from BC. I said I was also Canadian, but had been living in the US for seven years. The woman replied sympathetically "Oh, that must be hard."

I blinked. I hadn't put any negative emotional spin on my statement. What did she mean? Did this random Canadian believe that, living in the US, I must be a victom of vast amounts of crime? Subjected to poor and expensive health care? Suffering from racism? Or simply subjugated by the heavy yoke of capitalism?

I've never thought of living in the US as "hard". Amusing, yes, especially when elections come around. It's a little extra effort deciding to pronounce Z as 'zee' or 'zed', or choosing to write "colour" or "color". But the office jokes about Canadians are so mild they make me feel like one of the team rather than an outsider. The health care system is mysterious used to at times, but I managed to schedule my regular physical with my regular doctor less than one month away from when I called (that's much easier than scheduling an electrician). I have never been a victim of a crime in this country.

The benefits of living in the US are nothing to sneeze at either. I get lower taxes and higher wages (which together offset the higher living cost), and most of all I get to work at an exciting small high-tech company that has a chance of success because of the business laws here.

This isn't intended to try to convince Canadians (or Americans) that living in the US is superior to living in Canada. Canada is cool too, and I'd live there if it worked out that way with my job and my boyfriend. All I want to point out is that it's not so different. If that Canadian tourist has swallowed the demonization of the US and Americans that I've been hearing from north of the border recently, it's from a lack of critical thinking, not because its true.