How Wired is Ethan? 2:19 behind the curve

Per sent me an email at 9:35 about Google Talk. I checked Battelle for the gold standard on Google news; he posted at 7:30pm. Since Technorati apparently uses relative pointers on their search URLs (bad, Dave, bad!) by the time you read this post, this search will probably no longer point to the two-hours-ago transition from "preview" to "released" in the blogosphere; but I clock in at 2:19 behind that moment as I write this.

Despite the fact thatTechnorati was built on the premise, "who first and how fast" usually isn't a very interesting a question. But admit it, every once in a while, you want to see how fast your car gets from 0 to 60, don't you?

Outsourcing Services and punctuated equilibrium

Kevin Drum writes about a new trend of "medical tourism" where people fly to India for $8000 heart operations, rather than $25,000 operations in the United States.

I know a young lady who just got accepted into Cambridge (Kings College) for undergraduate. It will cost her a total -- room, board, tuition -- of $6000 per year to go there. Compare that to Harvard.

America has benefitted for decades --arguably, a century -- by being the world's focal point for all sorts of high-value services, from the dedicated "Saudi Sheikh" ward at the Cleveland Clinic for heart bypass operations, to the massive overseas enrollment in US universities, to the massive overseas employment in Silicon Valley technology corporations. All this is an incredibly important driver in our economy.

The day after tomorrow, savvy high-school prospects from California are going to be applying for admission to IIT Bangalore. Not only is it just as good as MIT, it is probably (if they will let you in, and if you can *get* in) one tenth the cost. And since India is a very big, high-growth part of the world's future, the "fringe benefits" for our young California prospect of going there are considerable - learn the local language, learn the local culture... does this sound like America, post-WWII to anyone? It does to me.

The reason half the title of this post is "punctuated equilibrium" is that the evolutionary model of that name posits sudden environmental changes that presage significant effects on organisms, rather than gradual, linear development.

When America runs out of credit, runs out of cash, runs out of international goodwill, and loses its competitive advantage in a whole host of fields, the many invisible benefits of being #1 will *all* simultaneously vanish, and the many invisible costs of someone else being #1 (who says that hot engineering prospect from California will ever come back from Bangalore after he meets a charming dark-eyed beauty from Rajistan?) will suddenly assert themselves -- all at once.

Then we'll spend two generations, or five decades, being desperately poor, as England did from 1945 - 1995. And have plenty of time to contemplate the sheer folly of having elected Pied Piper Bush as president... once.

It's time to derail Social Security privatization

In a nutshell:

1) Social Security was never designed to many any retiree rich. It was designed to prevent every retiree from being destutite. For about 70 years, it has worked just fine.

2) Social Security is not broken. The Social Security administration itself estimates that the trust fund has no problems at all before 2042. As Kevin Drum has pointed out, this is a highly conservative estimate, and that over the past decade, the SSA has consistently predicted the 'zero point' to be about 35 years in the future. In fact, since 1994 it's gone from 35 years to 38 years away. Nice!

3) Every "plan" to "fix" Social Security rests on one of two fallacious assumptions. Some plans rest on both of them. These fallacious assumptions are:
a) Assuming that under the current system, worker contributions will grow at a certain rate (say, 2%) but that under a new system, investments would grow at a larger rate (say, 4.6%). Over time, the growth in the value of investments closely matches the growth of the economy as a whole, and many attempts to justify privatization rely on using different numbers for the two cases.
b) Assuming that borrowing money 35 years in the future (when the 'zero point' is reached) is a Very Bad Thing, but that borrowing money now to pay for 'transition costs' in the trillions of dollars is a Perfectly Fine Thing. Wouldn't you rather defer borrowing trillions to a point at least 35 years in the future, especially when that point might shift ever farther into the future, as it has done for the past decade?

Well, enough. Democrats are going to have to be ballsy if they want to prevent the destruction of another sensible American ideal. We need to fight back, and we need to start now -- for the radical right is certainly starting now. Here is a handy primer from Digby about how the Republicans destroyed Clinton's healthcare reform -- when the Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

We should all read, learn, plan, and act NOW.

Quote from the Digby piece:

"September 19, 1994 - The New York Times reports remarks -- never subsequently denied -- that Bob Packwood made to his Republican senatorial colleagues during closed-door strategy sessions while he was managing the Republican attack during the summer. "We've killed health care reform," Packwood told his fellow Republican senators. "Now we've got to make sure our fingerprints are not on it." For many this is the "smoking gun": proof of a carefully plotted, and secret, Republican strategy."

Thug Rule II: Feral Cities

The New York Times Magazine has an article in its annual 'ideas' issue about so-called "Feral Cities".

Quote from the Times:

"The police in Brazil have fallen back on a containment policy against gangs ruling the favelas, while the rich try to stay above the fray, fueling the busiest civilian helicopter traffic in the world (there are 240 helipads in S-o Paulo; there are 10 in New York City). In Johannesburg, much of downtown, including the stock exchange, has been abandoned to squatters and drug gangs. In Mexico City, crime is soaring despite the presence of 91,000 policemen. Karachi, Pakistan, where 40 percent of the population lives in slums, plays host to gangland violence and to Al Qaeda cells."

Building on the ideas posted in my previous "Thug Rule" post, I will note that the breakdown of social order in the face of thugs armed with the real weapons of mass destruction -- cheap guns, ammunition, and explosive -- is one of the most pressing technological issues of our era. It's worth noting that the balance between order and chaos has historically tipped one way or the other based on available technologies and the political will to apply them. Rome, in the fading days of its glory, was ruled by the mob, because no military technology existed at the time which could be usefully applied in an urban context where preservation of property value was important. Millenia later, Louis XIV demolished entire neighborhoods of Paris (I believe Colbert was the architect both of the policy and the new boulevards) to creat long, wide, straight streets converging to plazas, which could be policed in extreme cases with cannon and musket fire. These new lines of sight/fire replaced the easily mobbable warren that had been the Paris streetscape before, and the application of technologies of urban design, scientific policing, and the general rise in prosperity brought on by the industrial era caused thug power to decline dramatically. Now we appear to be on the verge of the post-industrial era, and the emergence of thug rule at both the national level and the urban level will be one of the greatest problems of the 21st century. One answer is totalitarian methods of control. Louis XIV pioneered these as well. As one wanders the Louvre, it's worth remembering that its gigantic (literally palatial) halls were created to house the bureaucracy of governmental control pioneered by the "L'etat, c'est moi" state of the Sun King. Today, with electronic surveillance and database technologies, combined with highly precision weapons of policing/combat, highly centralized government can fight back -- but the middle-class middle ground of civil society is lost, for the social and technological factors which made this middle layer so powerful over the past two centuries are fading away.

Fallujah: Haystack demolished, 4000 needles found

The U.S. Marine Corps has posted a slideshow report to the web about the now-mostly-complete operation in Fallujah. I was pointed to this report by Juan Cole, who characterizes the thinking behind it as a mindset of "classic conservatism" which ignores the realities of insurgencies and their popular support. I can't speak to mindsets, but the facts in the report worry the hell out of me. The triumphal table in one of the later slides lists about 4000 individual munitions -- tank shells, mortar shells, rockets -- as being captured. If we assume very generously an average weight of 200 lbs. for each individual munition (many are 60mm mortar shells that might weigh 20 lbs), that means that the Marines fought a pitched battle lasting weeks, lost 50 dead, and captured a grand total of 400 tons of explosive badness. Now remember that Fallujah was supposed to be the epicenter of the Sunni revolt.

That is, pardon my bluntness, a pimple on the ass of an elephant.

The ability of the insurgents in Iraq to create chaos is almost directly proportional to the access to explosives. Guns (AK-47s, etc.) are a secondary chaos factor, but explosives are the real thing that distinguishes today's mess in Iraq from the relative peace that reigned in India under British occupation a hundred years ago. A minority of upset people without high explosives are a rabble; a minority with high explosives are a headache of the first magnitude and a complete block to peace and progress. If you doubt that, look at the dystopian examples of Palestine/Israel and Northern Ireland before 1999. For a city which was supposedly the belly button of badness in the whole Sunni uprising, we found diddly squat in terms of the real core dangerous stuff that makes effective insurgency possible.

How do we know this? The Defense Department told us themselves.

Remember that tempest in a teapot about the ultra-high-explosive RDX and HDX that went missing from Al-Qaqaa, a story which broke right before the election? The total amount of just the most dangerous explosives missing there was 380 tons, which seemed like an enormous amount -- just as the 400 tons captured from Fallujah now seems like a lot. However, as part of its Al-Qaqaa damage control efforts, the Defense Department released numbers stating just how much high-explosive badness was floating about Iraq -- and the numbers simply boggle the mind. Estimates of 250,000 tons missing are moderate out of a total of perhaps a million tons present before the war -- and these bombs, shells, and rockets were stored in hundreds of munitions depots which stood unguarded for months after the invasion, prey to all sorts of extremist bomb-snatchers who are now staggering under the weight of their accumulated badness and have their sights on complete chaos in Iraq.

In fact, in response to Al-Qaqaa, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita stated that the 380 tons represented just “one 1,000th of the material that we are aware of”. 1/1000th is .1%. Congratulations to the U.S. Marine Corps. They've cleared Fallujah, taken 50 KIA, and eliminated .1% of the problem facing Iraq. That is very depressing math.

Two facts are critical to recall here if we are to have accountability:

1) All those explosive were stolen because Donald Rumsfeld convinced George W. Bush that we'd win this war fast and on the cheap with few troops. So when we invaded, we didn't have enough men to police the most important weapons sites.

2) Whatever munitions might have been in Fallujah were probably moved out weeks in advance, along with most of the insurgent fighters in the town, after George W. Bush pre-announced the impending military action by several weeks, apparently for personal political gain.

If we are ever to extract ourselves from Iraq with something resembling a victory, or at least a stalemate, these incompetent yahoos are going to need to learn from their past major mistakes and stop making so many in the future. Let's hope, but don't hold your breath. Though turning Blue might be a good thing for some people in this country to consider.

Never Forget: With Bush, Politics Trumps Security

From the NYTimes: "Throughout the 19-month war, the insurgents have demonstrated an uncanny adaptability in the face of vastly superior American firepower. That has not changed with the storming of Falluja. American commanders acknowledge that insurgent leaders fled Falluja in the run-up to the invasion and have likely been organizing the deadly counteroffensive unfolding in cities across the north and around the capital."

The reason that there was a "runup" to the invasion of Fallujah was that the Bush Administration didn't want to invade before the election and risk that mess becoming a campaign issue -- but also felt compelled to state publicly that they *would* invade Fallujah after the election, so that their inaction wouldn't become a campaign issue. These guys always put politics first, and America is much the worse for it.

Sound familiar? It should.

Via Spencer Ackerman, check out what Marine Lt. Gen. James Conway (recently appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff) has to say about the laughable attack-and-pull-back, then create-'Fallujah-Brigade' strategy of this past spring:

After taking control of Al Anbar province from the 82nd Airborne, Conway wanted to apply a dual strategy to defeat the insurgents of mixing discrete military operations with an infusion of visible, and lucrative, reconstruction. When four Blackwater contractors were lynched in Falluja at the end of March, Conway wanted to "let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge." Instead, he was ordered to attack the city. During the siege laid by Conway's forces, Falluja quickly became a symbol of resistance to the occupation. Yet while the Marines were preparing to finish the job--planning a full attack on the city that all sides recognized would produce serious civilian casualties--he was suddenly told to pull back. Then he was told to create the Falluja Brigade, a force to control the city led by Saddam-era officers--which, before its ultimate collapse, incorporated the insurgents or had non-sympathetic elements within the brigade purged by them.

"I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, that you really need to understand what the consequences are, and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that. ... Once you commit, you've got to stay committed."

[Gen Conway] would not say where the order to attack originated, only that he received an order from his superior at the time, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Some senior U.S. officials in Iraq have said the command originated in the White House.

Bush: Politics. Always. Trumps. Security.

Mea Culpa

So, I got that wrong. Well, we live and learn. Here's some dead space as a memoriam for the election... and to give my next post a little distance:


















Sigh.

Why Bush Lost

Yes, I am writing this at 2pm PST on Tuesday. So what, it's over.

Bush lost for a very simple reason: First pissing off, and then motivating, nearly every part of the electorate outside your very core support is a bad, bad, idea.

He pissed off my Mom -- what Molly Ivins calls "the Episcopalian vote" (though Mom is Lutheran) with his non-reality-based rhetoric, his right-wing evangelical agenda.

He pissed off my brother -- a young swing state male -- by lying about his $300 tax cut (remember that in 2002, he gave a $300 refund and a $300 "advance" which had to be paid back in 2003? that hurt some people who didn't budget for it...)

He pissed of my friend Jim by actually being crap in the war on terror and crap on fiscal sanity - Jim is a Buchanan Republican who knows a sheep from a goat. or a Pet Goat.

He apparently has pissed off Hispanics (according to this post) by being crap on immigration.

He pissed off the national security voters by invading Iraq, being wrong about WMD, and not getting bin Laden.

I could go on... but the point is, huge chunks of the "big tent" Republican majority defected this year, because Bush pissed them off.

Memo to President Kerry: You have created a historic coalition of groups with some disparate agendas and a burning desire for retribution after four painful years. Do NOT give in to their demands for redress, but rather consider how to both maintain, and expand, your coalition of governance over the next four years -- or we will be seeing the pendulum swing back in 48 months.

And finally.... Hurrah!!

The New Democracy

Right now I am working on a big strategy project for a non-U.S. telco. Our central thesis is that the convergence of new communications technologies means that they must focus on user participation and user-created-content in order to be successful. The democratization has begun, driven by massive user particpation.

The list of examples is endless. Measurements of data flows on the world's networks show that the vast majority is user-created communications traffic. Email remains the killer app of the Internet. Multi-player online games, with the content created almost entirely by users, are growing at an extraordinary rate. eBay, with all of its content created by users, is one of the most successful and profitable companies of the new generation.

Here in America, I am seeing incredible changes in our electorate. Via email, via bundled cell phone minutes, via blogs and online papers, via a multiplicity of cable channels, we are seeing an incredible groundswell of involvement, of participation, of awareness, of democracy. This is a new new thing, and reminds me of nothing so much as two old things; the Philadelphia described in Ben Franklin's Autobiography, and the explosion of published tracts during the Protestant Reformation in Europe, kicked off by Martin Luther and rocket-propelled by the new technology of the printing press. I've just returned from a trip to explore the Reformation, and I assure you that the visceral impact of walking from a hand-lettered bible to a room absolutely full of printed cheap paper flyers is incredible. That previous revolution changed society to its core, and this one is doing the same.

In the past 18 hours, I have talked to swing voters in two different swing states; sent emails to a Yahoo group which have travelled around the globe; read first-hand reports from hundreds of voters in the comment sections of sites like the Daily Kos and Washington Monthly's Political Animal; and posted my thoughts here more than once.

And then... I open my browser to Google in a vain attempt to do some work, and there, right on their famously terse home page, is a link to the Google Election Page, telling everyone to get out and vote!

This stuff is pervasive, it is unescapable, it is changing our world for the better. Welcome to the future of democratic content, collective action, and widespread conversation. Props to Larry Lessig; we've just remixed.

Turnout looks to be massive in Ohio

Just talked to Ben, my brother in Ohio, who spent an hour and 15 minutes in line to vote. He's one of those younger "won't bother" voters who are all bothered about Bush. It sounds like a wild carnival atmosphere there... his roomate appears to have ended up with a date with a gal he met at the polls, and local radio and TV stations were reporting lines as long as 400 voters by 7AM.

Franklin County (where Ben is) is traditionally Republican -- just how many of those hundreds of early birds are Democratic, I can't say. But my gut tells me, way more than Karl Rove can stomach.

Kerry in a landslide.

More predictions and turnout

Oregon has 62% turnout through Sunday - on track for some big numbers!! (Note: PDF link)

Kerry takes Florida and Ohio, and at least one wildly unexpected state like Tennessee or Virginia
National turnout at least 65%, and yes I really do know that is outrageous by historic standards

Interesting note: In the "oh my god the world is ending" 1980 election between ineffectual malaise and a new morning in America, just 48.5% voted, and Reagan rolled. See, the CW is right - low turnouts do support Republicans. Too bad, guys.

Kerry in a landslide

Kerry to win by at least 5%, at least 50 electoral college votes (i.e. >295:244)

From TPM:

According to Gallup's mega-ultra-final poll out Sunday evening, 30% of registered voters in Florida have already voted, either through early voting or by absentee. Of those who have already voted, Kerry leads President Bush 51% to 43%.
According to the Des Moines Register poll out late Saturday evening, 27% of Iowa adults have already voted. And among those Kerry leads 52% to 41%.

(Edited Monday afternoon)

More data: Among actual voters -- and close to 20 percent of voters surveyed by FOX nationwide said they had already voted -- Kerry bested Bush by 5 percent, 48 to 43. With actual voters in Florida and Iowa also giving the lead to Kerry in surveys, this is starting to look like a trend.

Yes, Fox News! Kiss it goodbye, George W!