Credit Card Fraud End Game

Check out this great story in the New York Times magazine about Albert Gonzalez, a big-time credit card fraud operator.

He's sure fallen a long way from his former position as Attorney General of the United States.

But seriously, it's an amazing article. When you've got enough moving parts to your operation, and enough agents tracking you, it's really damn hard to not screw something up eventually. But it's amazing how simple it can be. Like using a known alias as your email address when signing up to AIM, rather than a random combination of letters. The mob is motivated by money - you can be damn sure they wouldn't screw that part of it up. But someone who has a large component of their sense of identity tied up in being a hard core hacker? The esteem of other hackers, and the 1337 h@X0r names that go along with it, are part of the cool.

This line was also fascinating:

Gonzalez relished the intellectual challenges of cybercrime too. He is not a gifted programmer  - according to Watt and Toey, in fact, he can barely write simple code - but by all accounts he can understand systems and fillet them with singular grace.

Exactly. In the end, it's not just about being able to write clevercode. It's about being about to figure out systems, and then execute all the mundane parts involved in not getting caught - hiding identities, laundering money, converting credit card details into dollars without getting busted. Those skills are likely to be just as scarce, if not more, than raw programming smarts.

Guys like him seem only tangentially driven by the money component - it's more about the thrill of the heist, particularly the intellectual achievement. And people hooked on that (like people hooked on lots of drugs) have a hard time letting it go. Same dopamine, different underlying source. They end up like World War 2 bomber pilots - you keep flying missions until you die. It's not that these guys want to get caught. It's just that getting caught is the only way the game ends.

The Half-Life of Dreams

Here's something I've noticed about my recollections of dreams. The amount I seem to remember follows something like an exponential decay process. The amount of decay each time has reasonably big error bars (it could be 30% or 70%, I dunno), but the time intervals seem about right.

Immediately upon waking up instantly I've forgotten about 50% of the dream.

10 seconds after waking up, I've forgotten 50% of what I initially remembered

1 minute after waking up, I've forgotten a further 50%.

5-10 minutes after waking up, I've forgotten a further 50-70%

1 hour after waking up, I've forgotten more (the rate slows down a bit by now, but call it 50%).

By that afternoon, I've lost maybe another half (which by now gets us to about 1.5% of the original memories, which seems about right). The decay continues, so that after a week or so it's practically all gone. The number of dreams I can remember over the space of years (anything about at all from the dream) is probably about 5, and all were weirdly vivid at the time.The process can get delayed somewhat if I repeat my dream to someone soon after waking, but even then they get forgotten for good before long.

It's as if the brain knows not to junk up valuable neurons with recollections of dreams. Evolution has wrought strange mysteries indeed.

Broken

A Google researcher on social networks has a fascinating slide show on how social networks operate in real life. In particular, one of the interesting punch lines is that people don't have a single group of friends, but they have lots of multiple (largely disjoint) groups of friends from different parts of their life, with whom they want to communicate different stuff. More importantly, a lot of social network type software doesn't work well for taking this into account.

The bit that really stuck out to me was his description of how people avoid being online on things like instant messenger and skype:

This is my wife, this is a friend of a friend, and this is someone I'm not sure I know. So people have this list, and they are worried that someone they don't want to talk to might see that they are online and say hello. So they turn themselves invisible. Everyone in their list sees them as offline. This is broken. This is a broken user experience. It's broken because the people they care about, people that they would welcome a chat with, also see that they are 'offline.'

Very well put. This is in the category of 'things I'd never stopped to consider, but when pointed out seemed both brilliant and obvious'. It is broken.What I think is really interesting about this is that tons of people must do this. But I'm sure that most of them a) don't consider whether this problem is likely very widespread, and b) just view it as a bad reflection on them - they feel guilty for wanting to avoid people who they're apparently 'friends' with.

I think it takes a systems perspective to realise that this is first and foremost a problem with an interface that hasn't considered how people want to communicate with each other. Most people I think revert to an explanation that problem must be the fact that they're a shallow person for not wanting to talk to all their skype contacts.

The Power of Marketing

The Last Psychiatrist has an interesting post about the images that marketers use to subtley convey cool:

It's easy to think that the ads are designed to draw in the demo shown in the ads, but that's not the way advertising works, and consequently that's not how America works. If you're watching it, it's for you. These ads play heavy during late and late late night talk shows: the target is boring middle aged white people. Blackberry isn't targeting gays and limber blondes, it's pretending they are already on board so you don't feel like a dork without a touch screen.... They know you better than you know yourself. Strike that: they know the lies you tell yourself better than you.

It reminded me of a conversation with AL years ago during our undergrad days. The question he posed, not dissimilar from Enrico Fermi's 'Where Are They', was this:

If marketers are so brilliant, why are all the people studying marketing at uni complete dumb@$$es?

Which brings me to the question of how much marketers know me better than I know myself. To help answer the question, let me quote from some marketing material that Château Holmes recently received from United Airlines. It was in a separate fold-out book attached to some letter:

"The day miles got set free"

One sunny morning, a man woke up to find his miles anxiously tugging at his toes. "Let's go out and play", they seemed to say. Unable to resist, the man decided to see where his miles could take him. Turns out, they could take him almost anywhere.

This was as far as I got before throwing it across the room in rage.

Who exactly is this drivel appealing to? 5 year olds with a frequent flyer account? Senile old people with too many miles on their hands? I honestly have no idea. But someone signed off on spending thousands of dollars, printing up this junk and sending it across the country. In entirely unrelated news, United Airlines posted a Net Loss of  $651m in 2009, and a Net Loss of $5.348b in 2008.

Some marketers have deep understandings of human nature, and manage to cleverly work this in to the messages they convey. On the other hand, most of the clowns you knew in uni doing marketing? Yeah, they're still clowns.

The Market for Roombas

I got a Roomba a few months ago. They're a brand of robotic vacuum cleaners. I refer to it affectionately as 'The Cleaning Lady'.

I found it to be awesome. For the record, I also bought earlier an expensive Dyson vacuum, which sits (somewhat ironically) gathering dust, because I'm too lazy to use it. The Roomba has its down sides - it keeps knocking things over (surfboards, guitar stands, that kind of thing), and has a tendency to get caught on cords lying around.

But all that is dwarfed by the satisfaction of emptying all the dust that used to be on my floor, but now is cleared away thanks to my robotic slave. Ha ha ha! Work tirelessly, my electronic minion! Soon, we will take over the world!

I think that the Roomba is designed to appeal brilliantly to:

a) People too lazy to vacuum themselves (i.e. all straight men)

b) People who enjoy gadgets (i.e. techy people, engineers - a subset of a) )

c) People rich enough to afford an actual cleaning lady, but too socially awkward to want to deal with them every week (i.e. the whole set of b) ).

I anticipate it will break within six months, at which point I can perhaps convert it to a mobile drinks tray that drives your beverages to random locations around the house, periodically spilling them when it bumps into things. I will still, however, consider it money well spent.

Gold

From the excellent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

What's funnier is that I know people who'd actually do this:

He's Strong, Yet Vulnerable!

I think I've figured out part of the secret of Robbie William's success.

It's his carefully crafted persona that broadcasts "I'm an alpha male bad boy" but lyrics that frequently suggest "But I'm somewhat vulnerable and introspective too".

Chicks love it, because bad boys are always appealing, and the sensitive part builds rapport. Average schlub guys like it, because they think 'Hey, I'm somewhat vulnerable and introspective too! Maybe women will like me now!' (They won't).

Add in some catchy pop/rock instrumentation, and it's a winning formula. Clearly Robbie Williams understands vulnerability game. Which sounds about right, given he seems to have pretty good game in general.

Take the song 'Feel'. The chorus is standard wuss rock:

'I just wanna feel real love,

Feel the home that I live in.

'Cause I got too much life,

Running through my veins, going to waste'

But look how he contrasts this in the next verse with his implied status of a) having lots of women and b) treating them as he pleases :

'I don't wanna die,

But I ain't keen on living either.

Before I fall in love,

I'm preparing to leave her.'

Demonstration of High Value, with a hint of Romantic Vulnerability.

'Come Undone' features another motif of his - I'm alpha enough to engage in reckless behaviour, but this recklessness leaves me exposed emotionally to you:

'I'm contemplating thinking about thinking

It's overrated Just get another drink and

watch me come undone...

If I ever hurt you your revenge will be so sweet

Because I'm scum, and I'm your son,

I come undone.'

Perhaps the epitome of this is in 'Strong'.

Here he threads the needle entirely - his sensitivity and introspection is about his own bad boy lifestyle! The Mobius links back on itself!:

'Early morning when I wake up

I look like Kiss but without the make-up

And that's a good line to take me to the bridge.'

Yes,that is a great line actually - easily the best in the song.

The chorus is inane, but hammers home the same tried and true formula to a catchy tune:

'You think that I'm strong.

You're wrong. You're wrong.

I'll sing my song.

My song. My song'

etc. It's all the same shtick. Whoever he's paying to write this stuff has got it figured out.

Ah, Robbie Williams! He's so cool and tough, and yet sensitive too! How dreamy...

Public Masters, not Public Servants

If you ever needed proof that the government views us as its subjects, rather than its masters, consider the way the TSA has rolled out its latest security screening procedures:

"While I was in the room for “private screening,” Kathy and other travelers watched in embarrassment and horror as a sweet-faced, white-haired, old woman with an artificial hip and a long skirt (she had the calm and grace of a nun) was subjected to the same treatment from a female TSA agent, who warned her loudly in advance that she was going to touch “breasts” and “genitals.” When offered the “private screening” room, the lady hesitated. Everybody knows that when the government wants to take you into a private room at the airport, it’s not going to be good. So of course the woman chose to be violated and humiliated in public, with witnesses."

In the tradeoff between civil liberties and national security, I tend to generally side with the national security concerns. Reasonable people disagree on these points, and libertarians often make very persuasive cases for protecting civil rights, even if they're less open on what exactly the tradeoff is in terms of security.

But whatever my views are, they are secondary to a more basic principle - the tradeoff between civil liberties and security is one for the people to decide. It is not for bureaucrats to decide on our behalf.

Witness the bald-faced contempt with which the TSA holds you and I. Why would they just announce regulations that force surly, rude TSA rent-a-cops to touch people's genitals in public?

Simple. To force people to instead choose the alternative of having their genitals visible via x-ray to other surly, rude TSA rent-a-cops in another room.

Yes, you read that right. People were objecting to these new devices. The bureaucrat's response? Not modify the devices. Not eliminate them, or hold public hearings to evaluate alternatives and the prospective national security benefits. No, just make the alternatives even worse.

Can you imagine a more open contempt for citizens? It's as if Microsoft were to greet the widespread complaints about Windows Vista by announcing 'Hmm, people don't seem to like Vista, huh? Well, let's forcibly remove all versions of XP and Windows 2000 so their only choices are Windows 3.1 or Vista!'

At some point, enough is enough. I am not interested in granting $10-an-hour cro-magnons powers of genital groping, cavity searches, or electronic strip searches in a dubious furtherance of national security issues, especially when the need for such powers has not even been demonstrated.

Somebody needs to be fired for this. Preferably the whole TSA. Contract it out to people who actually lose money when their customers are outraged, rather than viewing it as an excuse to make things even worse.

Fake But Real

For those of you who think that mental accounting isn't real or significant, I ask you this:

Is not the end of daylight saving the best day of the year?

(I exclude of course for those schlubs who turned up to appointments an hour early)

Few things are as sweet as the apparent ex-gratis gift of an hour of your life, on a weekend no less, to do with as you see fit.

Now, it's all just time-accounting jiggery pokery - the earth both spins on its axis and revolves around the sun just as before. And you know this - it's the same hour you lost in the spring.

But even after all that, boy it just feels great to sleep in for an hour more! Even when you know it's mental accounting nonsense, it doesn't stop you enjoying it.

Science is Awesome

There's something really satisfying about seeing science applied rigourously to areas normally ruled only by rumour and superstition. It's what makes Mythbusters such a great show.

The Guys at Serious Eats do this as well, tackling recently the question of whether McDonalds hamburgers ever go moldy. Apparently they don't. Crazy stuff!

So we're on the 'Mythbusters - Confirmed!' level. But here's where the real science starts.

Is this happening (as is usually assumed by snooty health food losers) because of strange preservatives McDonalds is putting in? If so, are they in the patty or the bun, or both? Is it because of the salt level in the patty? Is it because of the size of the patty? Does it happen with other hamburgers as well?

Read on for yourselves and find out!

I came across them a while back when they had a similar experiment to figure out what made McDonald's fries so tasty.

I confer upon the folks at Serious Eats the Richard P. Feynman Award for scientific excellence in pursuit of cool and interesting everyday stuff.

Science - it's what makes your french fries awesome.

Untranslatable Words

Everybody tells me that I should learn a language. It's the trendy thing to do. Wouldn't it be amazing to go to some remote village in Bolivia and speak to the locals, and find out about their lives?

Well no, frankly. At the moment, if you put me in a truck stop in the middle of Nevada, I am completely capable of speaking to the locals and finding out about their lives, which are surely quite different from mine.

And yet I don't want to. I feel like a slightly lesser person for not wanting this, but that alone doesn't get me over the hill. And somehow, I can't imagine this feeling changing when the locals are in some godforsaken part of a foreign country.

Still, there is one legitimately cool thing about learning foreign languages - finding out about awesome words that English doesn't have an equivalent for.

But thanks to Jonah Goldberg's G-File, I don't actually have to go to the hassle of learning to get this cool! Here's a fascinating list of 20 'untranslatable' words, which they really mean 'words which require a whole sentence to describe, as the single word version of the concept doesn't exist'. A really untranslatable word would be, well, untranslatable.

My favourite:

Toska (Russian) – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

Huh. That does warrant a separate word.For all its faults, Russia sure has some interesting cultural ideas.

Second Person Obituaries

For various reasons, my family tends to take a very matter-of-fact approach to death. As I grew up, it became apparent that this wasn't in fact the norm. Most people seem to avoid contemplating it altogether, and find any significant focus on it to be morbid. I find it more surprising that one could go through long periods of one's life and not reflect on one's own impermanence, but that's human nature for you.

But in the Holmes household, I remember my uncle would frequently read the obituaries each day in the paper, sometimes out loud. I think he was just interested. One of the things he used to point out, which I still find interesting, is the number of  condolence notices written in the second person - 'Bob, you were a great father to us all.'  I guess it takes people a while to come to terms with the fact that their loved one is really gone.

My uncle was of course no man to scorn another man's mourning. But his sadness towards death was devoid of a desire to hide what it was, which allowed him to appreciate the ironies that death entails, and indeed help to make it more bearable (an attitude he maintained when my grandparents died, so he walked the walk here).

And those who tend to view death as a fairly ordinary occurrence are more apt to notice that it's strange to write to the dead through the medium of the public notices of The Sydney Morning Herald. If one's messages are in fact being delivered to heaven, wouldn't they be just as likely to get there if you just wrote it on a piece of paper in your room? And if it's just a public expression to celebrate and mourn the person's life, why address it to the deceased?

I told him that when he dies, I'm writing him a notice in the paper addressed to him personally, done in his honour.

Suspend That Disbelief!

I consider myself fortunate to have had to endure only minimal exposure to women's magazines, usually when a girl I know is reading them. But one thing that always struck me as hilarious and absurd was the stories submitted by readers. For instance, let's look at Cosmo's 'Sex Tips from Guys'. Here's a couple chosen at random:

Jamie, 23, informs us that "I can't be the only one who loves when a woman licks that soft patch of skin in front of my ears."

Donnie, 34, wants to share with us his insight that "when I lean in to kiss you, hold the back of my head gently in your hand. It's tender, yet sexy."

Now, dear reader, let's leave aside for the moment the implausibility of some of this advice. Let's also ignore the tenor of the writing, and whether the expression 'It's tender, yet sexy' seems more likely to have originated in a male or a female speaker.

No, what I find amazing is this. Cosmo never seems to invite its readers to actually send in anything! Apparently they're just inundated with readers just sending in unsolicited stories about sex tips, their hair, exercise secrets and all sorts of other junk. This is doubly curious for all the tips coming in from men, given they're not actually reading the magazine. Pity the poor mailmen who, week in, week out, must deliver endless sacks of missives from readers who (curiously), never include their surname, but are extraordinarily punctilious in always including their age. Apparently this is how people sign off all their correspondence.

My question is this: sure at some point, readers would at least wonder about whether all this junk is actually just made up by some intern earning eight bucks an hour, not actually readers? Apparently not.

I know that I am clearly preaching to the choir on this one, as illustrious readers of this periodical are more likely to be perusing National Review, National Geographic, The New Yorker, The Economist or Monocle. But still, it's amazing how much the inclusion of a first name and an age is sufficient to get people to not question what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly obvious fraud.

Surely You're Joking, Mr Gates

http://www.sellsbrothers.com/Posts/Details/12395

The premise is Richard Feynman applying for a job at Microsoft:

Interviewer: Here's the question: Why are manhole covers round?

Feynman: They're not. Some manhole covers are square. It's true that there are SOME round ones, but I've seen square ones, and rectangular ones.

Interviewer: But just considering the round ones, why are they round?

Feynman: If we are just considering the round ones, then they are round by definition. That statement is a tautology.

Very nice. Read the whole thing.

Risk Shifting, Government Patronage, and Too Big To Fail - Chess Club Edition

This guy is brilliant - he figured out the same thing that Bear Stearns, Citigroup and Goldman figured out, except he was in High School :

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-time-i-hacked-my-high-school.html

Clubs made money by reselling burritos or pizza from nearby restaurants during lunch. Each of these lunch sales typically made about $100 in profit. 

...

Unfortunately, the rules around lunch sales were restrictive. Only one club could sell per week, and other clubs like the Science Club had a much stronger precedent for needing lunch sales. Without a precedent for needing money, I was unable to acquire enough lunch sale dates.

...

I studied the rules for operating clubs on campus and found the loophole I needed: clubs were allowed to go into debt to the student government for $200. I figured that if I were in debt to the student government, I'd have more leverage in getting lunch sale dates.

I immediately spent $200 on chess boards, chess clocks, and books. I bought more than we needed because I wanted to maximize our debt. Then I went to the student government treasurer, gave him the receipt, and was reimbursed for the expense.

The student government wasn't too happy about the situation. They wanted me to pay them back as they were on a tight budget. I told them I couldn't raise money because they wouldn't give me lunch sale dates.

Checkmate.

They relented and started giving me lunch sale dates so that I could pay them back. Even though we made $100 per lunch sale, I only paid them back $50 at a time to maximize the time we were in debt. Soon afterwards, the student government relaxed the rules to let clubs have lunch sales more days per week.

Sounds a lot like TARP, doesn't it? When the government is effectively on the hook for your debt (either literally in the Chess Club case, or via a potential collapse of the banking system and currency in the Financial Crisis), it's amazing what kind of patronage you can secure from them.

Headlines From The Election

Pot Smokers Too Stoned To Get Their Act Together And Show Up At Voting Booths! Shocking New Findings! News At 11!

The best result of the night was Marco Rubio's victory in Florida. I rate that guy. The fact that Charlie Crist is sleazier than the Pakistani used car salesman who sold me a Honda Civic with wheels of different sizes (true story) makes it even sweeter. You can Rubio's victory speech here, it's pretty damn good. It also reminds me that the Republican Party hasn't actually had a presidential candidate who was a good public speaker since Reagan.

The worst result of the night was that Barney Frank, the nincompoop most responsible for monstrosity that is federal housing policy, hung on to his seat. Bah. In a better world, he'd be being chased out of town by citizens with pitchforks.

Analogies

The Scottish Enlightenment was to the Ancient Greeks what Black and Scholes were to Bachelier.

From a discussion over lunch with The Greek over whether Ancient Greece was (in his words) 'the founding of all civilisation' (he disagrees with the analogy, you may be unsurprised to find).

Predicting The Climate Where You Grew Up Based On Your Descriptions of Heat

Here's something I've noticed. Typically without realizing it, people use different adjectives to describe when they're feeling hot based on the humidity.

Where I grew up, it was a quite dry Mediterranean climate. On really hot days, everyone described it as 'like an oven' or 'like a furnace'. They themselves were always 'burning' or 'roasting' or 'baking' or 'scorching'. I just assumed that this was how everyone described it.

I found it interesting when I was in Chicago (which has very humid heat in the summer) that on hot days there, people always described themselves as 'melting', but never 'burning'. (Melting was the overwhelming description, and there were fewer variants - sometimes you got 'frying', which can go either way as it connotes a kind of oily heat). The air was 'like a sauna'.

And that's how it actually felt. It didn't feel like you were roasting.

Here's a prediction I can make with perhaps 70% accuracy. People are slow to update these adjectives, and generally go with what they were used to. Anyone who instinctively says 'melting' grew up in a humid climate. If they say they're 'melting' when it's a dry heat, I'd raise the estimate to 95%. 

I remember hearing about a linguistics professor who could identify where in the US you were from based on how you referred to the interstate highways - '94', 'I-94', 'Highway 94', 'Route 94' etc. I know in Australia, there's a variation between the east coast and west coast based on whether highways have a definite article or not - on the east coast, everything is 'The Pacific Highway', whereas on the west it's just 'Stirling Highway'. I've known of east coast people who instinctively added the definite article to west coast highways.

The inferences I'm happiest with are those that use the minimum of data to draw reliable conclusions about broad and apparently unrelated phenomena.

Mini Cannon

Not to be confused with a Mini Canon or a Mini Canon.

It looks like you could do some serious damage if you fired one of these into a person. Which is all the more outrageous, given how small and playful it looks.

Via Kottke

Doing What You Love

If you looked at all the advice that's dispensed, and compare the numbers for 'Frequency That Advice X is Given' and 'Actual Value of Advice X', some of the most frequent and useless seems to be the admonition to 'Do What You Love.'

To my mind, the best job to aim for is the one that maximises (roughly speaking):

P(Getting & Keeping Employment in Job X) * [(Wage in Job X) + (Personal Non-wage enjoyment of Job X, expressed as an equivalent dollar value)].

For simplicity, call this P*(W+N)

'Do What You Love' says to focus on N, and ignore the rest.

Viewed from this perspective, it's obviously stupid to ignore P and W.

But it's even worse than that. Maximising N will generally cause you to aim for jobs that you can't get, and that pay nothing. The problem is that if your tastes are the same as everybody else, N is likely to be negatively correlated with P and W (holding constant the demand for the end product being produced)

Suppose Bob loves playing X-Box and sleeping with hot women. Should Bob aim to become a video game tester or a porn star?

Seen from this perspective, it's obvious. Lots of guys enjoy these things, so the competition for these jobs is huge (P is low for male porn stars and video game testers). Because lots of people are competing for the jobs, the market clearing wage will be low (W is low for male porn stars and video game testers).

Same for being a political staffer, a journalist for the New York Times, an intern at a trendy nonprofit, or a sitcom writer.

On the other hand, it's possible to modify this advice to something more useful:

"Do things you love more than the average person."

Things that you love more than the average person will be roughly loading up positively on N. So you'll still be more likely to end up in jobs you'll somewhat enjoy. But more importantly, they will also be loading up positively on P and W. Jobs that fewer other people enjoy will have less competition and higher wages. This is doubly true if you think that lots of other people are foolishly following the 'Do What You Love' advice.

In other words, you don't have to love reaching into clogged toilets to be a plumber. You just have to dislike it less than the average person. Because plumbers make some pretty serious coin. You know why? Most people can't stand the prospect of reaching into clogged toilets.

Combine this with the secondary part of :

"Do things you are better able to do than the average person."

(which will also lead towards higher P and W) and you're a long way to a good rule of thumb.

Finish it off with:

"Do things that there's a high and reliable demand for the end product being produced"

(which focuses on some of the demand determinants of P and W), and you've got a pretty damn good way of evaluating employment.

I remember Coyote making a similar point a while ago.

Now THIS is how campaigns should be

Via Ace of Spades, this hilarious video from Reason about the way that the founding fathers insulted each other.

This stuff is pure gold. For better or worse, American politics is fairly mellow. I prefer adversarial governments - the more everyone in government gets along, the more (typically value-destroying) legislation they're going to pass. Personally I like question time in the Westminster system, where both sides try to mock and embarrass each other every single day. If nothing else, it makes for far more entertaining watching than the typical C-Span snoozefest. Not only that, but it forces politicians to be creative in their mockery, because there's limits on what kinds of insults you can use without being thrown out by the Speaker. Paul Keating was a master of these kind of barbs. Check out some of these pearlers:

What we have got is a dead carcass, swinging in the breeze, but nobody will cut it down to replace him.
- On John Howard

The principle saboteur, the man with the cheap fistful of dollars.

- On John Howard

He is the greatest job and investment destroyer since the bubonic plague.

- On John Howard

Like being flogged with a warm lettuce.

- On John Hewson

We’re not interested in the views of painted, perfumed gigolos.
- On Andrew Peacock

What we have as a leader of the National Party is a political carcass with a coat and tie on.

- On Ian Sinclair

..the brain-damaged Honorable Member for Bruce made his first parliamentary contribution since being elected, by calling a quorum to silence me for three minutes.”

- On Ken Aldred

"Disneyland with the Death Penalty"

So begins William Gibson's description of Singapore in Wired. From my limited experience of a few trips there (and Singaporean friends), he paints a reasonably fair picture of the place. It's a great article.

You may be able to sell me on a lot of law and order policies, but something seems deeply wrong to me (as to Gibson) with the death penalty for trafficking cannabis.

Blogging [ Q(demand) ~= 0 when P = 0 edition ]

Building up a blog seems to face similar challenges to building up any other kind of business (I assume - I've never done the latter).

The fact that the price of the product is zero affects this analysis  not at all.

Zero is, after all, the competitive market clearing price for writing on the internet.

The Equality of Being Unremarkable

The true measure of when gays will have achieved equality is when being gay is viewed as entirely unremarkable. And when that's the case, the fact that a person is gay will be seen less and less to be the dominant (or only) salient characteristic of their personality.

So by this metric I am thoroughly heartened by stories like this one, from Melbourne. (For American readers, the Liberal Party is actually the name of the Conservatives in Australia) :

WHEN Tom McFeely first announced he wanted to stand as a Liberal Party candidate at this year's state election, there were some people in the gay community who unkindly branded him a traitor.

Oh, I bet there were. Nobody gets scorned like identity group minorities who depart from the mainstream thinking within their group. Just ask Clarence Thomas.

After all, they argued, Mr McFeely is an openly gay man from a working class family in Scotland and also happens to run one of the best-known gay venues in town - the Peel Hotel in Collingwood. Why on earth would he want to represent the conservative side of politics?

In other words, their criticisms amounted to, "But... but... you're gay? How dare you?"

For Mr McFeely, it's a no-brainer. First and foremost, he points out, he is a businessman who believes in Liberal values like free enterprise. His upbringing and sexuality are irrelevant.

 Amen to that! Anybody who believes in free enterprise, gay or straight, is welcome in my Liberal Party. 

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''I'm not standing as a gay candidate, the same way people wouldn't stand as a heterosexual candidate,'' says the well-known local publican, who has been preselected to stand for the Liberals in the state seat of Richmond.

 Very well put! I love it - they keep wanting to make him the "Gay Liberal Candidate", but instead he just keeps responding "No, I'm just the Liberal Candidate. Gay has nothing to do with it."


So what issues does he want to run on?

Mr McFeely says that while he might not be your typical Liberal candidate, the issues he is campaigning on are much the same: community safety, business rights, less red tape, better public transport, less road congestion. 

Sounds pretty good to me (personally I'd replace 'better public transport' with 'abolish public transport', but then again I'm not running for election in Melbourne). What about more sensitive issues like gay marriage (you knew they'd never let him  get away without answering that one, even though this is a State election, and marriage is set by Federal law in Australia through the Marriage Act of 1961) 

On the issue of same-sex marriage, though, he is less convinced. Despite being in a civil union with his partner of 18 years, he does not accept the term ''marriage'' because of its religious overtones.

''But what I do support is government recognition of all relationships,'' he says. ''It's easy to say: I'm all for gay marriage. But in practical terms, what does that mean?''

A focus on practical aspects of partnerships, along with a desire for some legal recognition, but not interested in the more controversial label of 'marriage'? He just keeps getting better and better. By contrast, the seat of Richmond stands a reasonable chance of electing a member of the Greens Party, the lunatic leftist fringe of Australian politics (sadly becoming less and less fringe every day).   


But here's the headline that really made me smile, discussing the same story in the Melbourne Leader:


"Liberal Candidate Wants Roads Fixed"


Spot on. In fact, nowhere in the article is his sexuality even mentioned.  He's not being elected to Parliament  to have gay sex on your behalf. He's being elected to implement policy, so let's talk about that. 


While I doubt I have many (/any) Victorian readers, if any of you should be casting a ballot in the State election for the seat of Richmond, I would you to vote for Mr Tom McFeely.

Rhyme Schemes for the 21st century

It's difficult to say anything original on the subject of love.

Still, the Gorillaz have one very nice line in the song 'To Binge'.

"My heart is in economy,

Due to this autonomy."

What a great way to express a feeling of unpleasant dejection, linking it to cheap air travel. Now that's an angle I'm sure nobody else has tackled before - it's only recognisable to a listener from about 1970 onwards.

I also like the second line though. I suspect (perhaps unfairly) that 'autonomy' was chosen mainly to rhyme with economy. Still, whether intended or not, it's a very good choice.Most love affairs don't break up because of impersonal circumstances. They break up for much more mundane and less romantic reasons - Tom got bored of being with Sue and cheated with Sue's friend, Sally felt that Tim had gotten clingy and pathetic, etc. But autonomy is exactly what it is - things fall apart mainly because at least one party wanted it.

You'd never get this sense listening to love songs. The theme of 'The Lovers vs. A Harsh Society Trying to Prevent Their Love' is one of the most overused (and lame) ideas in pop culture. Apparently 'Your Love Will Be Thwarted By External Circumstance' is much more likely in song-lyric land than 'Your Love Will Be Abandoned By Your Own Choice Because You Became Bored With It'.

Compare, for instance, 'Not Gonna Get Us' by tATu:

'They're not gonna get us,

Not now I love ya.'

Yeah, that's the problem - before you didn't love each other, and now you do, everything's fixed!

Dumbasses.

Memo to Criminals - Grab a Clue, Not an Ipad

It amazes me that there are still criminals who think that it's a positive expected value proposition to steal anything containing a GPS device. 


My mum recently had her handbag and iPad stolen. Because she the iPad linked to her MobileMe account, my brother was able to track it online as it passed through about four houses, and eventually settled at one place. They'd called the police, and the GPS evidence was sufficient for the cops to get a warrant, whereupon they searched the house, found the iPad (after the woman had earlier denied having it), and one more dumb@$$ is now spending time in the slammer for possession of stolen property. 


It gets better though. Apparently, these clowns are not readers of Popehat. If they were, they might have remembered Ken's advice to Shut The #$%@ Up. This Mensa Chapter President decided to call up my mum's house and asked for her by name, claiming to have found her frequent flier card on his table outside his house. My brother asked whether there was anything else there. No, he said, there wasn't, just the frequent flier card. Obviously it didn't occur to this future string theorist that a frequent flier card doesn't contain a person's phone number, and that he was both a) indicating himself as a liar, and b) providing evidence that he had other items from the handbag. Not only that, but he then told my brother that he could pick the card up from his address. My brother noticed that the address he gave was the same as the second house that the iPad had been at. Last I heard, the police were going round to pay him a visit too. 


What a complete tard. If he'd just shut up, it would have been very difficult to prove that he'd done anything wrong - the defense 'I don't know anything about it, maybe the thieves just parked outside my house for a while' would have been likely to create reasonable doubt. Add in the extra evidence he himself provided, and it seems like the Great State of Western Australia will soon be paying his rent too (to paraphrase the Kingston Trio).

The New Class War

Mark Steyn is back, and on fire. He's doing a series of postings on the issues of the US election.


From Tuesday's column:

The new class war in the western world is between “public servants” and the rest of us. In Washington, the marching bureaucrats are telling us government doesn’t suck. But in Greece, the bloated public service has sucked so much out of the economy there’s nothing left. 

Exactly right. This is not a trend that can persist indefinitely:





It's not sustainable, because the blue line has to fund the red line. When enough people decide that private employment is a mug's game and join the government, there eventually won't be enough productive people left to fund the rest.I take the lesson of the Greek crisis to be that public servants will continue to vote (and strike) for continued employment and higher wages, even when it threatens the entire functioning existence of the State.


The game where government wages keep growing and private sector wages stay stagnant seems likely to end in one of a couple of ways:
a) everyone joins the government side (e.g. communism, dictatorship ), thereby eliminating any advantage to being in the government 
b) the private sector simply stops working and/or paying taxes (i.e revolt), at which point either the apparatus of the state collapses, or the state resorts to ever greater coercion to keep the private sector working (e.g. Zimbabwe).


And from today:

When the law says that it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. What the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? George III didn’t care what complimentary liquid refreshments a village blacksmith shared with his clientele. Say what you like about the Boston Tea Party, but nobody attempted to prosecute them for unlicensed handling of beverage items in a public place.

True dat.


Update: Linked by Instapundit - thanks!

A Lovely Song, But...

The song is 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' by Israel "Iz" Kamakawiwo`ole.


As a starting point, I find it hilarious that when your surname is "Kamakawiwo`ole", the part that gets a shortened to a nickname is his first name, Israel (shortened to 'Iz'). Yeah, that's the part people will have difficulty with!





It's a lovely cover version - the ukulele makes a great accompaniment, and his voice is ideally suited to the song - soft, and yet able to reach high notes while still sounding deep. Perhaps most strikingly, the segue into 'What a Wonderful World' (and back again) works perfectly, and makes a whole that is larger than the sum of the parts. I listened to this a lot, and really loved it. 


That is, until I started noticing one aspect that, once discovered, I couldn't help but be bothered by.
(below the jump, in case you don't want the song ruined for you)

Very Sad

It's strange how seemingly innocuous details can make a story poignant.

A 19-year-old surfer who died after getting bitten by a shark today off the Santa Barbara coast likely was attacked by the feared great white shark, an expert told AOL News.

Lucas Ransom, a junior at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was attacked shortly before 9 a.m. PDT. Three beaches in Santa Barbara County were closed immediately after the attack. KEYT-TV reported that the shark bit off the surfer's leg and he bled to death. 

As reported in The Australian, what I presume were his last words were said to his friend, who was with him: 

“It was very stealth,” Ransom's friend Matthew Garcia, who was on a surfboard several metres away, told the Los Angeles Times. “You would have never known there was a shark in the water. It was all really quick.”

He said Mr Ransom looked over and said “Help me dude,” before being dragged under.

I don't know why I found that last detail particularly moving, but I did. 

Vegan Reality Check

True story. 


I've had a similar argument with vegetarians and vegans several times before, except looking at the indirect effects of farming. Every lettuce you eat is probably sprayed with pesticides that kill snails, farmed with tractors that chew up worms, and driven around in trucks that splatter bugs on their windscreen. No matter how you cut it, animals are going to die for your food. That, my friends, is the world we live in.


Thanks to SH for the pointer.

The Psychological Effect of Colour in Photographs

I'm not sure if this is a common reaction, but I certainly notice it in myself. I don't know why, but I find it surprisingly hard to relate to people in historical black and white photographs. 


There's no good reason for this - human nature hasn't changed much in the past hundred years (if ever), and it's a fair bet that if you'd been born then, you'd have ended up just like everyone else at that time. But for some reason, when you take away the colour, it stops being a world I can relate to and becomes instead some point in the vast prehistory of places far removed from the present. For colour photos, however grainy, the world is recognisable. It's a place that you conceivably could be in.


Don't believe me? Compare these two photographs.


Below is a photo of some World War I prisoners of war. The people in it could be your grandfather. Change the clothes slightly, and they could be you:

Now compare the same photo in greyscale:

Such a trivial difference. And yet, it may as well be another planet.

I think this is part of the reason that World War I always seemed like a faraway country of which we know nothing, so to speak.

I Like This Alot

This comic is awesome - it's about what the author imagines people mean when they use poor grammar and spelling, featuring the mythical create, 'alot'.

Ridiculous Application of Premises in Movies

In general, I'm a complete sucker for suspending my disbelief during movies. I'll go along with the vast majority of absurd premises, and don't frequently think ahead to what might happen next of what exactly that guy with the dossier was really doing, or whatever. I remember watching a Wile E. Coyote cartoon with a friend of my brother's, and being surprised that he would predict how every joke would end. It's not that I couldn't figure it out if I stopped to think - I just never did. So I generally just go along with whatever ridiculous premise is being stated..

But for some reason, one thing that always causes me to reinstate my disbelief is when movies take a particular technological premise, and apply it to absurdly limited ends.

A great example of this is in the new Star Trek movie. The U.S.S. Enterprise is in a tangle with the Romulans, and the Enterprise captain has been taken hostage after stupidly going aboard the Romulan ship. (Apparently, the prospect he would be detained didn't occur to him). The Romulans are firing on the Enterprise. They might be in trouble.

BUT

Thankfully the Enterprise has a weapon that can transport stuff inside the enemy ship! What a stroke of luck! 

Now, gentle reader, what weapon would you choose to send inside the ship?

a) Several nuclear bombs on 3 second detonation delays to multiple parts of the enemy ship

b) Two guys with guns

c) A fruit basket

As you probably guessed, they go with option b), but realistically you may as well have picked c). Moreover, it's not as if they decided that the chance of saving the captain is worth risking everyone else on the ship by attempting a rescue - apparently option b) doesn't appear to occur to anybody the ship.

And all these people are meant to be graduates from a military academy? That, alas, I cannot believe.

Anyway, I was thinking about this after watching The Prestige yesterday, as part of the project of going through all Christopher Nolan movies (Inception, Memento and The Dark Knight together put him in the category of 'presume I'll watch the movie even if I don't hear anything else about it other than his involvement', a post currently only occupied by the Coen Brothers).

The movie is great, but they also have a real lack of imagination on one particular premise (some plot spoilers below the jump)

Dude, Where's My Launch Code?

If this is true, it's astonishing:

Bill Clinton lost the card containing launch codes for a nuclear strike for "months" during his presidency, according to a top military leader's memoir. 

Gen. Hugh Shelton, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Clinton, makes the claim in his new book "Without Hesitation," ABC News first reported Thursday. 

"At one point during the Clinton administration, the codes were actually missing. That's a big deal, a gargantuan deal," Shelton writes in the book.

Stories like this sure make me sleep easy at night! 


Thanks to The Greek for the pointer.

Three Cheers for Politicians!

President Obama was in California today. He gave a speech in Los Angeles to a crowd estimated at 40,000. Even though the majority of the US is rapidly becoming disillusioned with Obama, the mentality of the faithful hasn't shifted much. 

In an earlier speech, Brown quoted both Spiro Agnew and Mahatma Ghandi. As he left the stage the crowd erupted with cheers of "Jer-ry, Jer-ry, Jer-ry" that sounded eerily similar to the studio chants that greet Jerry Springer.

No kidding, eh?

I've tried (and largely failed) to explain to several people today exactly what it is that I find distasteful about all this. But in a nutshell, it comes down to this: it seems unbecoming of free-born citizens of a republic to cheer too loudly for their elected leaders.

To this antipodean, it's staggering that such a number of people would turn up. In Australia the whole notion wouldn't pass the laugh test. The concept of lining up for several hours to hear the Prime Minister speak would be considered ludicrous by nearly everyone. It's not just that they'd have better things to do - they actively would rather not be there. This would apply even amongst people who voted for her. My guess is that in the whole of Sydney, there might be perhaps 100 people willing to line up for hours on end, and they're mostly employees of the Labor Party already. Politicians as a whole are viewed with suspicion and dislike, even politicians from the party you vote for.

And to my mind, I'm quite happy about that.

Perhaps the most insightful observation about this came from my (Australian) friend Jerome Cardinal. During the Obama victory rally in Chicago, he was walking past a TV which flashed to a close-up shot of a woman crying. His response was 'It looks like a @#$%ing Michael Jackson concert.'

He was right. Nobody lines up at 5:30am to hear a policy speech scheduled for 2pm. People line up at 5:30am to see rock stars. And I'm deeply uncomfortable with a citizenry that views their leaders this way. I think it's an attitude that tends to feed the worst tendencies towards narcissism and megalomania that most politicians already have.

I remember Mark Steyn making a similar point during the 2008 election:

There are generally two reactions to this kind of policy proposal [Obama's promise to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet]. The first was exemplified by The Atlantic Monthly’s Marc Ambinder:

What a different emotional register from John McCain’s; Obama seems on the verge of tears; the enormous crowd in the Xcel center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain’s speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers.

The second reaction boils down to: “‘Heal the planet’? Is this guy nuts?” To be honest I prefer a republic whose citizenry can muster no greater enthusiasm for their candidate than “stilted cheers” to one in which the crowd wants to hoist the nominee onto their shoulders for promising to lower ocean levels within his first term.

Three stilted cheers for the stilted cheerers. There, surely, is the republican ideal: a land whose citizenry declines to offer anything more generous than stilted cheers for whichever of their fellows presumes to lead them.