TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. This is writing.
The Democrats’ healthcare reform may mean colleges can’t offer affordable health insurance plans to students:
Colleges and universities say that some rules in the new health law could keep them from offering low-cost, limited-benefit student insurance policies, and they’re seeking federal authority to continue offering them.
Their request drew immediate fire from critics, however, who say that student health plans should be held to the same standards that other insurance is.
I guess this is what Nancy Pelosi meant when she said they have to pass the bill so we can see what’s in it.
August 25th, 2010Now they’re in an awkward position. Do they change the law to offer students less generous coverage? That’s not going to sound good. Do they leave it, forcing universities to either end coverage entirely, or make it much more expensive? Cue angry students demonstrating about the cost of their health care policies.
Idiotic decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.
So let’s see if I have this right: the police can walk onto my property, place a GPS tracking device on my car, and track me indefinitely, because I don’t have an expectation of privacy on my driveway? What the hell sense does that make?
Their conclusion not only doesn’t logically follow from their premise, but it has no relevance to it whatever. While I do not expect to have privacy on my driveway—that is, I wouldn’t do anything I don’t want publicly visible—my driveway is my property, and thus I have the right to decide who can and cannot access it. If I don’t consent to the police being on my driveway, and they don’t have a warrant, then they cannot be there. And they sure as hell don’t have a right to place a tracking device on my car.
This ruling is, if allowed to stand, incredibly dangerous. This basically makes it legal for the government to track everyone’s location at any given time, whether they are reasonably suspected of a crime or not. This is one giant leap toward a police state.
August 25th, 2010When it comes to the net, we’re habitually guilty of LUI (Living Under the Influence). We sacrifice real life for realtime. We tweet vacation photos while we’re still on vacation. We share anecdotes about our kids when we’re spending time with them. And yes, we read and publish content from the driver’s seat of our cars.
Apt.
August 24th, 2010There has to be a solution to this problem, but it doesn’t seem to me that enough people who are in a position to find it are doing their best to. We’re all just hoping that some abstract governmental force will step up and guarantee it rather than taking concrete, actionable steps towards ensuring it. I find that disconcerting.
It starts with each of us thinking about how we want to use personal data-based services in our lives—rationally considering how best to use them so they benefit us—and then only using services from companies we trust. At this point, I’m inclined not to trust Google, and I never did have any faith in Facebook.
The only companies that deserve as much personal data as we give out are companies who are truly interested in benefiting their users.
August 24th, 2010Ron Paul chastises that are seeking to stop the New York mosque from being built:
The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.
Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”
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Conservatives are once again, unfortunately, failing to defend private property rights, a policy we claim to cherish. In addition conservatives missed a chance to challenge the hypocrisy of the left which now claims they defend property rights of Muslims, yet rarely if ever, the property rights of American private businesses.
Absolutely right. I do find it amusing, though, that liberals are enthusiastically quoting Ron Paul on this, when many on the left just as giddily portrayed him as a racist in the 2008 primaries.
Paul went on to say:
This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible.
There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?
This is a terrible misunderstanding on Paul’s part of what motivates Islamists. Paul, and others, believe that Islamists are fundamentally only interested in the Muslim world (which is usually conveniently, but inaccurately, defined as the Middle East), and attack the U.S. because of our involvement in the region.
While the U.S.’s involvement in the Muslim world certainly is a motivating factor, it isn’t their primary motivation. For groups like al Qaeda, their goal isn’t to change the Middle East, but to change the world. Their goal is to restart the caliphate and extend Taliban-like rule across the Muslim world—from North Africa to China—and from there, Islamize the world. From this perspective, the U.S.’s involvement in the Muslim world is incidental. The U.S. must be defeated not because it has hurt Muslims, but because it is the world’s superpower and thus the largest threat to their ultimate goal.
Handing Iraq and Afghanistan to Islamists, renouncing Israel and withdrawing all forces from the region may, in the short-term, placate them. But the short-term is, well, short. Would we rather deal with al Qaeda as a group forced into the mountains of the Pakistani-Afghan border, or as a movement in control of Iraq and Afghanistan?
August 24th, 2010Home sales declined precipitously in July:
Economists and forecasters were predicting an awful 13% decline in existing home sales for July, to 4.65 million units. This, we were told solemnly, would be the worst since 2009.
In hindsight, those making the predictions seem to have been the sort of wild-eyed optimists whose sunny belief in the strength of the housing market got us into this mess in the first place. The actual figure for home sales, according to the National Association of Realtors, was 3.83 million–a 27% decline.
The home buyers tax credit ended in April and this is the result. The credit didn’t create new demand—it took existing demand and artificially compressed it into a smaller period of time. In this way, it inflated demand while it was in effect and inflated housing prices as well, and thus put off (but didn’t avoid) a necessary contraction after the 1997-2006 housing bubble. We will now live through that contraction.
We could have suffered through it earlier, but we decided to delay the pain.
August 24th, 2010Trader Joes has a very different strategy than most grocery stores:
Trader Joe’s organic creamy unsalted peanut butter will be more satisfying if there are only nine other peanut butters a shopper might have purchased instead of 39. Having a wide selection may help get customers in the store, but it won’t increase the chances they’ll buy. (It also explains why so often people are on their cellphones at the supermarket asking their significant other which detergent to get.) “It takes them out of the purchasing process and puts them into a decision-making process,” explains Stew Leonard Jr., CEO of grocer Stew Leonard’s, which also subscribes to the “less is more” mantra.
Customers accept that Trader Joe’s has only two kinds of pudding or one kind of polenta because they trust that those few items will be very good. “If they’re going to get behind only one jar of Greek olives, then they’re sure as heck going to make sure it’s the most fabulous jar of Greek olives they can find for the price,” explains one former employee.
That’s a powerful strategy in any business: compete on your selections, not your selection.
August 23rd, 2010Keith Hennessey breaks down a favorite rhetorical trick used by welfare state supporters:
In this view of the world, revenues belong to the government and are allocated by policymakers as gifts to those who need or deserve them. When you hear that “we cannot afford to cut taxes” and “we should not give tax cuts to ______,” you are hearing this philosophy.
Money doesn’t just magically appear in the government coffers. A private citizen or firm earns income and the government takes a portion of that income. The money initially belongs to he or she who earned it. Using “we” to refer to the government suggests the funds being spent by the government belong to the government. This matters because if the money belongs to the government, then elected officials should apply their moral principles to figure out who needs or deserves it most. If the money belongs first to he or she who earned it, then elected officials should apply their moral principles to figure out whether they should take it from the earner and spend it on something else or give it to someone else. Those are fundamentally different decisions.
In this case, Keith is responding to Paul Krugman’s use of this convenient lie, but it’s widespread. When welfare state supporters discuss reducing taxes, they refer to it as “giving” money to some group. Krugman et al love using it, because it makes tax cuts sound like a plot to make the wealthy wealthier. In reality, of course, this is absolutely false—a tax cut merely reduces how much the government forcibly takes from someone.
August 23rd, 2010Targeted Algorithms and Complete Openness
August 20th, 2010Eric Schmidt comments on where Google is going:
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.
Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. “The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,” Mr. Schmidt says.
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Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he’s a believer in targeted everything: “The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”
Targeted, location-based technology could prove incredibly useful to us, or it could end up a terrible change in how we live our lives. I have a few fears about this kind of technology.
None of my fears happen to be a concern for privacy as it is typically considered. I am less afraid of personal information leaking out, or being abused by a company, than I am of a society where complete openness is not only accepted, but expected. There’s a balance between the public and the private that, I think, keeps us level as individuals. A private sphere, where the individual is free to act, say and think without regard or even thought for what others might think, allows us to consider things free from outside influence. By thinking and doing free from public interference, we can look at the outside world from an outside perspective—that is, from our own individual perspective—and judge it based on those standards. A private sphere is necessary for individuals to exist at all.
Once we are expected to share everything with the world—things as meaningful as our goals, hopes, fears and our health, the banal, such as what clothes we’re wearing or what we’re doing at any given moment—who we are as individuals would become a part of the public. They would no longer be factors of our own personal selves, our own to consider, but rather characteristics—data—to be judged by the public. Once those factors become a part of the public, the individual will look at themselves from the public’s perspective, to be judged not by their own standards, but by the public’s, since they now consider themselves the public. Their love for science fiction won’t be a unique characteristic, but an oddity, an abnormality, wrong, because no one else has it.
This already exists in a related form, and to some extent, always has. Women that think they are overweight even if they aren’t have fallen into this trap—they have internalized the media’s (e.g., the “public”) definition of beauty, and have now judged themselves by someone else’s standards. Women in this case are internalizing other standards—that is, taking someone else’s standards and replacing their own. They are allowing them in to their private sphere. But complete openness is something different. When an individual shares everything about themselves, they are not just internalizing. They are accepting the majority’s standard as the standard. They have become the public.
That’s one of my fears—that complete openness will erode not just our privacy, but our conception of the individual, and so also erode our ability to think critically about the world. Once we identify with the public, and do not see it from an outside perspective, we will be less able to find its faults.
My second fear is that Schmidt is right about targeted recommendations, and they will become the main means of “discovering” new things. Perhaps these algorithms will be exceptionally good at identifying things that we like; that’s fine. But what worries me is a society where people do not seek new things out on their own, through their own effort.
When you are trying to find something—a new book, movie, band—you are positively engaged. You have a defined idea of what you are looking for, and you are actively thinking of how you can find it. This requires that you, on your own, discover what it is that you like and want more of. You are defining your ideals and tastes for yourself. You are thinking.
If we rely on algorithms to do this for us, we are also ceding the right to think and do for ourselves, to make personal judgments. If we would rather an algorithm decide who we are, we are letting others define us and what we believe. Why not have an algorithm that decides what our political beliefs are, and votes for us accordingly?
That sounds hyperbolic, but I don’t find it much different than allowing an algorithm to find what music we should listen to, movies we should watch, food we should eat, or people we should date. Rather than just accept all new technology, we must be skeptical. We should calmly and rationally think through how it will impact us and whether it is positive.
“There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” she said.
What a ridiculous issue all around. There’s no reason the mosque shouldn’t be built, and many people who oppose it—like Newt Gingrich and Harry Reid—are absolutely doing so for political advantage.
Yet now we have Pelosi criticizing them for making this a political issue, and then trying to politicize it herself by calling for an investigation.
This is an excellent example of just how broken our political system is. We have conniving fools like Newt Gingrich using people’s prejudices for their own gain, gutless idiots like Harry Reid trying to gain a little support by opposing it, and Nancy Pelosi doing the only thing she apparently knows how to do: threatening to use government power.
Oh, and I forgot the President. Can’t forget him! For his part, he decided to opine on a local issue (I’m rather sure Obama wants to add “Opiner-in-Chief” to his official title) and support building the mosque, then when he realized that might invite some criticism (God forbid!), he “clarified” that he only supported the general right to freedom of religion, but not necessarily this mosque. That sure clears that up.
August 18th, 2010Alexis Madrigal comments on the nature of the web:
Streams — on AM radio, CNN, Ustream, or some future platform — are products of seconds; they reflect the passions and occupations of a moment. Perhaps valuable in their own way, necessary for some things, but deeply attached to an instant. Streams say, “This is.” They rarely have time to ask, “Why is this?” And they never seem to have time to answer that question.
Books are objects defined by how much time it takes to craft them — and to consume them. They cannot be taken in at a glance. They are the distillation of many moments and states of consciousness for writer and reader alike. They slow us down and hold us steady.
Yes, yes, yes. I made a similar point last November.
August 17th, 2010August 17th, 2010If an idea isn’t exciting you shouldn’t do it. I usually get an idea around 8 o’clock in the morning, when I’m getting up, and by noon it’s finished. And if it isn’t done quickly you’re going to begin to lie. So as quickly as you can, you emotionally react to an idea. That’s how I write short stories. They’ve all been done in a single morning when I felt passionately about them.
August 16th, 2010If publishers are to continue to be relevant, they need to repair both of these errors: first, by publishing lists, not books—meaning, collections of books where each book fits into the list and contributes to a larger story—and second, by cultivating a relationship with their readers. In either case, it helps to be small.
Former Broncos tight end Nate Jackson on training camp:
August 12th, 2010Your body says No, but your brain says Yes.
The Economist has a excellent, in-depth look at David Cameron’s reforms in Britain:
August 12th, 2010Where does this radicalism come from? Ruddy-faced and shire-bred, Mr Cameron looks and sounds like the stolid, middle-of-the-road High Tory he is often thought to be. Part of the answer lies in the company he keeps. Among the most evangelical of the Tocquevillian Tories is Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron’s strategist. A former advertising man who grew intrigued by the potential of businesses and other non-state organisations to bring about social change, he joined his old friend’s campaign to remake the Conservative Party.
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