"Specially Selected Potatoes"

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Marketers are quite aware that people are reading the ingredients on packaged poison food, and they've long since come up with more palatable euphemisms for things like monosodium glutamate.

But now canny marketers are not just exercising ploys to hide bad ingredients, they're also tarting up perfectly normal foods with nonsensical superlatives. For example, from a bag of Lay's Classic Potato Chips: "Specially selected potatoes". Specially selected for what qualities? Cheapest possible production costs? Minimal nutritional value? Highest possible pesticide concentrations? Most egregious carbon footprint? I'm guessing that maybe they mean they're selecting them for something positive, but the sheer meaninglessness of the phrase compromises the intent of ingredient disclosure: to factually inform the purchaser what is in the bag.

To expect the media to cover this trend would be naïve: they depend on the largess of corporate advertisers. To expect food merchants to properly educate the public is clearly not in their self interest. To expect politicians to do anything would be equally naïve: they won't even allow the prohibition of known poisons from food without extreme pressure, and they have campaign fundraising to worry about. The judiciary and the civil service may try to do the right thing, but they are routinely stymied. If we can't trust the labels, maybe we shouldn't buy their crappy packaged food at all.

Overheard by the pool

This afternoon I got about twenty minutes in the sun down by our pool, which just opened for the season a week ago. Since I haven't really had much sun this year, I am blindingly fish-belly white, so a little bit of sun goes a long way – but even so I was sad when the clouds rolled in (it was a little too cool at ~22c to stay there without the sun).

I parked myself at the upper-right corner of the pool (it doesn't look quite that pristine anymore, three years later) near where the afternoon pool queens gather to dish. I had my iPod implanted and was gamely trying to complete Halting State. When the first song ended, I paused to eavesdrop on our neighbours' conversation.

"I got them in New York. I really liked them, but the only ones they had were scratched, so I ordered them and they said they'd deliver them in a couple of days. But do you know how long it took? It took seven weeks. [italics his] I was calling that woman every single day, eventually she stopped taking my calls."

So I turned my iPod back on and kept reading. The next song ended, so I paused again.

"Yes, they're Armani, but not the new ones. I don't like them very much."

I turned the music back on and stuck my nose back in my book.

A few minutes later I paused to turn over, and saw Adolfo arriving at the pool for his swim. I hit pause, and then gaggle next to me fell silent (yes, they were still talking about sunglasses) and watched as Adolfo took off his shirt and shorts and stepped into the pool. After he was underwater, they resumed.

"I loaned him my Pradas but then after he wore them I didn't like them anymore."

After that I left, so I can't attest that they continued to talk about sunglasses longer than the twenty minutes I was there.

Security and privacy: bait and switch

Holy cow: Rolling Stone has a relevant article! I always think of Rolling Stone as some sort of tired 70s by-blow of Gloria Steinem and Larry Flynt, the place P.J. O'Rourke writes about vomiting in foreign lands. They get major credit for signing Naomi Klein.

(via BoingBoing (via Schneier))

Here's a story: China reinvents its nation, and in the process uses new technology to build "Totalitarianism 2.0" à la Orwell. Klein sketches a scary picture, draws disturbing parallels and connections with the U.S. government, and points out some nasty trends in our not-so-free society.

Although she doesn't spell it out in the article, I'll take it a step further and give a progression:

1. U.S. citizens were highly resistant to living in a police state.
2. A temporary crisis resulted in permanent security measures which cause widespread delay and irritation, but are ridiculous by any reasonable standard and provide no actual improvement in security.
3. The government provides a new method of sailing through security by handing over biometric information and submitting to electronic tracking.
4. Governments threaten to prohibit travel without biometric identification.

A simplistic view, but when you strip away the fear, propaganda and fancy talk, that's what is left.

I've already fallen for it. The border between the U.S. and Canada used to be a lot easier to cross, but since they tightened it so much in the past decade it is now very slow. As a result, the US and Canadian governments introduced the ominously named NEXUS program to facilitate crossing the border. I'm still regularly stopped and searched at customs and asked the usual questions, but now they have a more easily tracked dossier and my retina prints on file (hello General Poindexter!). This is how our privacy and freedom of movement are chipped away: piece by piece, year by year, and one person at a time.

Tools and emergent complexity: exonerating Twitter and Rails

Twitter has had substantial downtime over the last several days, and this has prompted no end of commentary and analysis. Ruby on Rails was initially blamed for the problems a year ago, then exonerated, then blamed again (and exonerated again). But blaming the hammer for improperly driving a screw is not very illuminating; blaming a screwdriver for how it drives a nail even less so, and although using a hammer and screwdriver combination to drive a large number of finishing nails probably isn't the best solution, until a better machine is invented you wouldn't necessarily know that.

The reason Twitter is having difficulties is that it truly is a novel application. The rules are deceptively simple on the surface, but the emergent complexity is profound, especially as you start to build a massive database of users (which Twitter certainly is now doing). The sort of many-to-many relationships embodied in the way people follow one another, coupled with the different options on what sorts of tweets you want to see, and the different ways of interfacing – the website, instant messaging, text messaging, a raft of third party applications (Twhirl, gTwitter, FriendFeed, et cetera, etc, &c, ...), the ability to track specific terms...

All of this adds up into an extremely complex system that gets exponentially harder to manage as the user base grows. The telephone systems' switching rules are simple by comparison: they are simple, one-to-one connections that connect, persist a short time, and go away, leaving nothing but possibly a billing record (and definitely an entry in an NSA database). A tweet goes onto a user's own list, their friends lists, possibly the lists of friends-of-friends, the list of anyone who is tracking that term, sends it out via SMS, instant messenger and the API, AND persists the message forever; if the user then decides to delete it or make it private then it is removed from all of those lists. Simple, huh? Oh yeah, and it has to do all of that in realtime.

Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails, which came from a simple project management application. Obviously a simple project management application isn't designed to robustly handle the type of complex operations outlined above. It turns out nothing is, which is why Twitter has no easy solutions at hand. Their difficulties in scaling would have likely happened with any existing platform, as not even airline reservation and telephone switching systems handle such a flood of interrelated and interdependent traffic coming from so many different sources – traffic that doubles in two months.

Evan Williams and company invented something new, and they shouldn't be blamed for not initially understanding the true potential and nature of the beast. Although it isn't profitable, it continues to attract investors; anything with this kind of growth and engagement is interesting to businesspeople. NTT invested for a reason, and it's not just because it is popular (and profitable) in Japan. This is an example of how next-generation communication is working: modern switching rules, attention-based networking – a step beyond instant messaging, a step beyond SMS and a step sideways from the phone system. The right tools for the job probably don't exist yet; maybe Erlang is a step in the right direction.

Lastly, I don't blame the Twitter staff for doing experiments on the site during the day. They live in the United States and there's no reason they should have to stay up all night. Besides, we should face the sobering conclusion that Japan's market and the rest of Asia might be more important to Twitter than the depressed, aging, and troubled North American market. From that standpoint, the US is a cheap, talented labour pool crafting clever mercantile goods to send to Asia in exchange for hard currency. Oh, how the worm turns.

Sustained futurism

(I know I keep going on about Mr. Gibson. Indulge me.)

William Gibson's fiction has aged better than most of its cyberpunk cohorts. Although Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired inhabits a similar milieu, and although it remains an enjoyable read, it hasn't aged as well. Gibson is a strong world builder who has succeeded in creating his own continüum, but more importantly his characters inhabit hard lives and have faint hope.

Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was learning to take in disappointment.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 20

The key to his success is that he focuses on the human elements, and keeps the technical elements as vague as possible, allowing the reader to focus on the human problems that remain embedded in the technological future, through the lens of our present. Gibson's fiction has been progressively moving from the far future into the near future (with a jog into an alternate past); he is most successful where he provides social commentary on real peoples' lives today: from the down-and-out to captains of industry.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 2^nd-to-last

If that's not a truism today, then I don't know what is.

Economics and untested assumptions

Plenty of crow is being eaten over hyperbolic statements made about the real estate market. Unfortunately, that crow is being served up to the taxpayers of the US, and people who own US dollars – the companies who stole the money are keeping it. But that is all water under the bridge, of course, because it was all just a big misunderstanding, right? They didn't mean to commit endless fraud. They were just doing their jobs.

Yes, the conventional wisdom of 2005 sounds screwy when we look at it in retrospect. But what other whoppers are we swallowing for no good reason? Compare and contrast these two statements:

“An invaluable book . . . Today’s real estate markets are booming and Lereah makes a convincing case for why the real estate expansion will continue into the next decade. This book should prove to be a truly practical guide for any household looking to create wealth in real estate.” —DEWEY DAANE, FORMER GOVERNOR OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD OF GOVERNORS

Review for Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust - And How You Can Profit from It: How to Build Wealth in Today's Expanding Real Estate Market, by David Lereah (Chief Economist for the National Association of Realtors), published 2006-02-21

"Suddenly those US government treasury bonds, still near the historic lows of one and two percent, are beautifully attractive because they are safe: they will never blow up like sub-prime CDOs did."

This American Life #355: The Giant Pool of Money, 2008-05-09 (mp3)

Just as nobody could conceive of the US housing market imploding like a cheap lightbulb, nobody can conceive of the US treasury doing the same. After all, it has never crashed, the US has never become insolvent, and therefore it cannot happen.

Except it can.

Foreign investors had simply not appeared, the demand for Uncle Sam's offering--so often a sure-fire thing--had fallen flat. Unlike anytime previously, the world's treasury buyers had suddenly decided to keep their hands in their pockets, invest their oil dollars elsewhere; some in the new-kid-on-the-block euro treasuries, others in their own local currencies.

The great US treasury bond sale: but nobody showed up The Middle East December 2004, by Milan Vesely

All it takes is a crisis of confidence. It doesn't even really require that the US screw up its fiscal situation so badly that the current accounts deficit gets permanently out of whack and stays that way for a generation (oh, never mind, it already has). All it takes is for the Chinese treasury to decide that it no longer wants to finance hip replacements or another US military adventure, and the whole thing could come apart like a piñata.

So, when somebody says with great certitude that an investment is completely safe, hold on to your wallet. That goes double for any government, and twice over again for corporate or state-sponsored media.

America: join the crowd

I've been spending some time thinking about the decline of the American Empire, and putting it in the context of recent world events. Bear with me for a brief economic history of the past forty years, a little more in-depth review of the past seven, and a sobering prognosis.

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Peak oil in the United States happened before 1970, and it has been a long ride downhill. The United States' domination of the world in the 20^th century was based on oil, and when it started depending on oil imports, things started to go wrong.

The 1973 Arab oil embargo underlined this problem. Our prescient president Jimmy Carter put on a sweater and set sheep to graze on the White House lawn, but he was ineffective in his quest to convince the American people that energy independence was critical: they were in denial as global oil production per capita reached its peak in 1979, and they elected Ronald Reagan.

Reagan made people feel better, and they soon forgot about the whole energy mess – for a generation. Cars got huge, and then even huger, and oil remained relatively cheap. But the demographic shift worldwide set up massive structural problems that couldn't be ignored, at least not by the ruling class. They understood that trouble was coming quickly, and groups such as the Project for the New American Century set up plans to counter these shifts.

After the media and the Supremes pushed their man into power in 2001, the neocons were in their springtime. Dick Cheney's energy task force made tactical plans, as the Bush administration had already decided to invade Iraq.

I'm not going to get into the entire September 11th thing. If you choose to open that door and reconsider what you saw that day and try to match it up with what you've been told since, I guarantee you won't like it. Whatever its cause, that convenient crisis was used as the launching point for a campaign fulfill a clear agenda: the United States sought to seize control of middle eastern oil.

Afghanistan was just the preamble. The Plan, as outlined by Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.): seven more countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. You will note that those countries bracket the largest proven oil reserves in the world. The notable oil producing country that isn't mentioned in the list (Saudi Arabia, a nominal US ally whose shaky kleptocracy has close ties to the US élite) would end up pretty much surrounded. If your goal is to establish military domination over a region, this looks like a very good plan.

The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has had many conflicting justifications and pretexts, among them Osama Bin Laden (who is in Pakistan, and who isn't important anymore); the status of women (which was only a priority for a hot second) and finally, the scary Taliban (unless and until the US can make a deal with them – then all is forgiven. Again.) But really, Afghanistan is now simply a convenient location for military bases (strategically placed around a certain strategic asset) next to two problematic countries.

Discussing the justifications floated for the invasion of Iraq would take more time than I want to devote to it, but between the weapons of mass destruction, Al-Qaeda links, spreading freedom, massacres, rape rooms, spreading democracy, and other altruistic and high-sounding bullshit, none of them tend to last more than six months. The longest lasting reason so far has been obstinate tenacity. That is unrealistic as a basis for foreign policy. At the very least Iraq continues to present plenty of convenient opportunities to rattle the sabre at Iran.

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All war is economic, both in motive and in execution. The US imperial machine is out of gas: the US dollar is tremendously depressed, and by many accounts teetering on the verge of collapse. The US economy is sputtering. The political élite which started this adventure is discredited and unable to convince anyone to carry it further. A resurgent Russia now stands prepared to defend its interests in its neighboring sphere, buoyed by the rocketing price of petroleum. It turns out that the USSR didn't collapse because of Reagan's force of personality: it collapsed because Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil. That no longer holds true: we are now in or around worldwide peak oil. Refineries are at capacity, but no new refineries are planned – ever again.

This is really, really bad news for the United States. The Terror War for Oil was conceived as the last chance to sustain American hegemony, supplying the energy to hold the country over until new technologies become available (or at least until the Baby Boomers die). But it failed, and now the US is broke, mired in an anthill, and beset by competition from countries with younger, larger, and better educated populations, with larger supplies of oil, more effective governments, and more dynamic economies.

Which is not to say that the United States is a bad place, or that it will be worse than other places. On the contrary, it will probably do reasonably well once it extricates itself from some current difficulties. But it will never rule the roost again, and Americans are going to have to learn to shed the myth of American exceptionalism. The tank is empty, and the US will have to learn to wait in line at the gas station just like everybody else.

Steer clear of Jamaica

Jamaica has been described as "The Most Homophobic Place on Earth". It is a deadly dangerous place for the gay people who live there, people who face assault and murder on a regular basis. Many gay Jamaicans come to Canada as refugees, including a gay activist who hadn't yet been murdered, and even a police officer.

Many are calling for a boycott. I support the idea, as nothing forces societal change but brute economics: education only can happen at a teachable moment. The people of Jamaica are as uninterested in ending violence against gays today as white people in the American south were uninterested in ending the lynching of black people fifty years ago. Only an ongoing campaign of economic, legal, and social pressure ended the wholesale torture and murder in the United States; it will take nothing less to change the situation in Jamaica (and on surrounding islands).

Some claim that a boycott will hurt more than it helps, causing Jamaicans to further persecute gays for "being the reason" for the boycott, and unjustly punish the innocent people of the society. Well, the society as a whole is responsible for how it treats its most vulnerable members, and for enforcing the law: the fact that they choose not to protect people from violence and murder means they should be ready to bear the economic consequences. Even if they choose to punish their gay neighbors for the boycott, it could hardly be worse than what they're already doing, so allowing Jamaicans to hold their gay people hostage under threat of worse treatment makes little sense. The "boycotts hurt those they purport to help" argument is worn out.

Teach kids to question authority

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother: a very dangerous book to pick up in the late evening. It is a young adult book about teenage hackers who bring down police-state security regime enforced by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security following a terrorist attack and restore the Bill of Rights.

Fiction, unfortunately. This is fine reading for young people: exciting, subversive, relevant, and extremely motivating with real-world ideas about things they can do to change the world they live in.

I'm one of Cory Doctorow's 1,000 true fans. The man shames me; he's written the most patriotic book I've read in years – a veritable pæan to the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. constitution – and he's Canadian. It wasn't easy for me to leave my country of birth, and it is all too tempting to turn my back on it; this book reminds me that the United States once stood for principles worth fighting for, and with work, it could someday again.

The book is available for sale as a dead tree and as a DRM-free audiobook, as well as a freely downloadable CC-licensed text|html|PDF file – and if you downloaded it, liked it, and want him to get paid for it, donate a copy to a library or school.

Yahoo! Microsoft is dead.

It is with a six-pack of schadenfreude that I consider the collapse of Microsoft's attempt to eat Yahoo. Particularly hilarious is this zinger from Steve Ballmer:

At the heart of our strategy is a commitment to bring the benefits of competition, choice, and innovation to everyone who uses the Internet.

Competition? from a convicted monopolist? Hollow laugh. Choice? Only until they use cross-subsidy to wipe out their competitors. Innovation? Microsoft has never had an original idea other than Microsoft Bob.

The yellow press is full of speculation that Ballmer's job is on the line. As a replacement, let me be the first to recommend former SCO head Daryl McBride. He has lots of experience that will help in Microsoft's probable new line of business: threatening people with lawsuits. The RIAA route is the last avenue of the irrelevant.