Fnord.

I raved about Hong Kong previously, but a couple of days ago Thomas Friedman wrote a much better essay on the NYT about returning to the US from Hong Kong:

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

 My quote was much less eloquent:

Yeah, the phone booths have WiFi; the US has become a second-world nation in many ways.

Friedman goes on to inveigle the vast numbers of smart, ambitious people who went to Wall Street and similar where “Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real” instead of actual productive work such as science or engineering. I can personally attest to the brain drain from the national labs, where really really smart PhDs were recruited to do modeling and prediction. Unmatched pay (I refuse to sully perfectly good English by availing myself of euphemisms like “compensation.”) and working conditions, compared to places like FNAL where we had pest-infested doublewide trailers:

You’ve not had fun until you have a raccoon die under your trailer and rot there for a few months. Yum.

Anyway, Friedman nails it in how modern HK is compared to the USA, and how we’d best stop wasting our best minds on financial prestidigitation. Go have a read. 

From the Farber IP list today, frequent poster Lauren Weinstein nails IMHO the zeitgeist:

Term limits have nothing to do with Congress’ action today. LIES do.
The American people have been screaming bloody murder at their
representatives that they don’t want the Wall Street bailout (now
called “rescue” to sound less like the charity it is).

Viewed dispassionately, it’s clear that *some* sort of bailout (not
necessarily the one just voted down) is needed. Quickly.

But we’ve been lied to so much that it’s completely understandable
why people feel the way they do. Lied to about the PATRIOT Act.
Lied to about Iraq. Lied to by their mortgage lenders and banks,
and by untold numbers of economic pundits.

And why don’t people see the urgency? One factor is that the workings
of the credit market have been largely invisible to most of us.
But there’s another factor.

Turn on the TV. Turn on the radio. You’ll see and hear the same
array of commericials for investment plans and cheap home loans as
always. It’s as if nothing whatever has changed, like a parallel
universe to the crisis atmosphere we see on the news in between the
advertising spots.

What’s more, I have yet to see a single spot from any bank or
financial institution that says, “We’re suspending our normal ads to
tell you that we’re in crisis. And we need your help. And we
apologize for our greed and misleading actions up to now.”
Fat chance.

Instead, what we see and hear is business as usual. Invest! Buy!
Dream the dream!

No wonder that most people feel that they’re being fed yet another
lie, and are passing along these feelings to their congressmen.

The financial industry is now reaping the whirlwind of greed.
And the rest of us are being sucked into their nightmare.

Years ago, one of my favorite quotations was from “The Book of Merlin,” by TH White. (Google now has the entire book online here.) I’m lazy, so this is abridged from a large paragraph:

We find that at present the human race is divided poltically into one wise man, nine knaves and ninety fools out of every hundred. . . the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare.

Which brings me to another book. I’m not sure where I found the link, but I’ve been reading a book called ‘The Authoritarians‘ by academic Bob Altemeyer. It’s a free download in PDF format and represents an entire careers’ worth of research on authoritarians. Outlook, motivation, transmission of ideas, and a great deal more. He does a nice job of balancing opinion with solid data and surveys, so no matter your leanings its a fascinating and worthwhile read.

For example, I’ve been puzzled why candidate A keeps repeating statements provably false. Altemayer’s work explains that the target subgroup wants to believe and has no problems accepting conflicting statements from authority. So, basically, the Big Lie works due to mental shortcomings of the target audience.

Read it. Along with, perhaps, Cialdini’s “Persuasion.” Then join me in fearing for the future of our country.

I read a few doom-and-gloom blogs (housing, economics, peak oil) and yeesh, today is all about the imminent failure of Fannie and Freddie. 25 billion or 5 trillion; either way its rather a problem. From Robert Reich: 

Any day now — perhaps any hour — the plug will be pulled on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a massive government bailout will ensue. Together, they’ll become the largest government-owned entities in American history, and, once again, taxpayers will pay the bill, which could come to $25 billion or more.

From Jim Kunstler:

At the moment, two of the biggest elephants in the room, so to speak, are going tits-up with X’s where their eyes used to be. These would be the “affordable housing” enablers Fannie and Freddie, who managed during the past decade to make housing virtually unaffordable for any normal, responsible person unwilling to game the system — with the additional consequence that not only the housing market but the general credit-and-lending apparatus of the US has entered a state of morbid failure. These two corporations are now dead, incurring a legacy of obligation that will add five trillion dollars to the national debt at one stroke. Nobody knows what the exact results of this debacle may be — and the current silence about it is deafening — but odds are the effect will range somewhere between destroying the currency and bankrupting the United States altogether.

How did this happen? Well, check this out:

(That’s from a Krugman post.)

Yep, that’s the Bush (HW)-appointed head of OTS, which along with OCC regulates much of the banking industry. Taking a chainsaw to a stack of regulations that were ’strangling the industry.’ Whew, good thing that was averted, eh?

This last Kunstler quote seems to capture it pretty well:

I’m rather convinced that the carnage on the money scene will be so extreme this fall that the nation will seem to have been transformed from a superpower to a basketcase before November 4th, and that the blame for this state of affairs will be blindingly obvious: the people in charge for the past eight years looted the treasury, destroyed the currency, and left the machinery of capital a smoking wreckage.

Heck, even Obama sees it coming:

“Here’s the problem: If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed, then probably the financial system would receive such a body blow that it could be disastrous”

- Barack Obama, August 25, 2008

Lovely weather we’re having, innit?

This is really a post about two things, so bear with me. Cast your mind back a few years to Bush’s heyday and Medicare Part D, the infamous drug benefit. Due to pharma handouts and dishonest accounting now coming to light, they couldn’t afford real coverage and came up with the infamous ‘doughnut’ gap in coverage. From Wikipedia:

The plan requires Medicare beneficiaries whose total drug costs reach $2400 to pay 100% of prescription costs until $3850 is spent out of pocket. (The actual threshold amounts will change year-to-year and plan-by-plan.) 

I have to assume that the soulless bastards who came up with this consciously refused to consider the human stories of suffering and tragedy it would inevitably cause. I consider this a prime example of ‘getting captured by a large system and the rationalizations that ensue.’

Stories like… but I’m getting ahead of myself. The other thing this post is about is ‘Weblogs that I enjoy’. Allow me to introduce you to the self-proclaimed ‘Drugmonkey‘, an anonymous, foul-mouthed, cynical, liberal pill peddler at some large pharmacy chain. He has most excellent stories and I highly recommend him. As with some of my favorite blogs, he gives you a glimpse into another world. The title of his blog is ‘Your Pharmacist May Hate You’, which gives you some idea of the content…

Today, I was clicked through to his site and reading some old stories when I found this one. He used to call himself ‘drugnazi’, and it explains why he changed. Go read it; it’ll simultaneously move you to tears and also to find the asshats of Part D for a serious beatdown.

‘Compassionate conservatism,’ my ass.

Via Science in the News (good newsletter, by the way) a depressing article in the Times Online entitled ‘Sexist Culture Drives Women Out of Science.’

(The picture is Marie Curie, who knew all about science and sexism. Picture from Wikipedia.)

Here’s a long quote:

The majority choose their children and alternative careers instead of struggling with the hurdles of a macho “lab coat culture” with long hours, old boys’ networks and the risk of sexual harassment.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist at the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York and the lead author of the study, said the research had revealed a world with values seemingly stuck in the 1970s.

She said: “It has been a bit like a time warp. This predatory or condescending culture [towards women] was more common across the workplace 20 to 30 years ago but has somehow survived in an engineering, science and technology context.

“It is the hidden brain drain. We have this amazing, talented pool of women who have left the industry. It is highly destructive to our society and economy.”

I can testify to its existence, having seen the toll on friends and family alike. How’s this for pathetic?

The study, to be published in the Harvard Business Review on Thursday, found that while women made up 41% of newly qualified technical staff, more than half dropped out by the time they reached their late thirties.

Nearly two-thirds of all women surveyed said they had been victims of sexual harassment in the workplace. A similar number objected to the “lab coat culture”, in which researchers laboured over experiments, “tethered to the microscope”, for up to 12 hours a day.

More than half dropped out? Damn but we suck.

It’s often handy to be able to surf from a monitored network. Perhaps you want to job-search Monster from work, view (cough) inappropriate comment on your lunch break, check your bank balance in a open-wifi coffeeshop, whatever. For it to really be secure, all parts of the channel must be encrypted, including the DNS lookups. Here’s a free way to do it. (If you have the money, you can also run a VPN; this is a simpler way of building a private HTTP-only VPN.)

You need an SSH account on a server that you trust, and a copy of Firefox. That’s it! An SSH agent such as SSHKeychain is nice for not having to re-enter passwords every time, but not required.

For this example, I’m going to use my server, usul.phfactor.net, so change accordingly for your setup.

There are two parts of this: The first part is to setup an encrypted connection, which has what’s called a SOCKS proxy. This forwards your HTTP requests over the SSH connection to the remote server, which does the DNS query, HTTP fetch and returns the results to you via SSH. It turns out that SSH itself has a SOCKS proxy in it, you just have to enable it.

The second part is to tell your web browser to use the proxy, and how to find it.

Here’s the first part:

 ssh -C -D 8119 pfh@usul.phfactor.net

That connects me to my account (pfh@phfactor.net). The -C asks for gzip compression, which speeds things up a bit over slow connections. The -D 8119 sets up the SOCKS proxy, and establishes port 8119 on the local machine as the proxy connection. You’ll see a prompt after this, as the SOCKS part is invisible:

Next, you have to tell your browser about it. I’ll use Firefox, as its common and easy to use. Open up preferences, and go to Advanced/Network:

Then go to Settings:

Put in localhost/8119 for the SOCKS proxy, and use SOCKS4 and not the SOCKS5.

That’s it! Now, every web page you surf travels over SSH to the remote host and is encrypted from you to there. (In my case, until it hits usul.phfactor.net) You still have to trust the server and sysadmin who runs it, but that’s easier sometimes.

Enjoy!

Sources: This page had the key bits, before I found it I had tried twice and failed. Thanks, interweb!

As a renter in one of the nation’s most overpriced markets, I’ve been reading about real estate since before we moved here. Piggington, Calculated Risk and many others. It doesn’t take too many graphs like this one to make one wary:

Anyway, a couple of days ago a thought-provoking essay “The Next Slum?” was posted on The Atlantic positing that the detached-house suburbs would become the new ghettos:

…A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

It’s an interesting essay, and I recommend it to you. I debated posting it, but it kept running around my head as I tried out his arguments, so perhaps that’s a good sign. His data seem solid, but the argument he makes about desire to return to urban life is more sketchy. Personally, I couldn’t agree more and often have the same debate with exurb co-workers, but that’s beside the point. Question is, do large masses of people really want to desert the burbs and go urban?

Even if they don’t, will economics force the issue? The article quotes Arthur Nelson of Virginia Tech as projecting a surplus of 22 million suburban homes by 2025; 40% of the volume in existence today. That sort of surplus would crush pricing, and the article also explains the progression from vacant to crime statistics; it rapidly becomes a self-reinforcing rout.

If you read pessimists like JH Kunstler or The Oil Drum, this sort of scenario is old hat. I was quite surprised to see it in the mainstream media, well backed up with statistics and experts. Chaotic times ahead, I fear.

What do the mayor of Salt Lake City and Nobel-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz have in common? They both despise Mr Bush.

Let’s start with the mayor, shall we?

“You have acted in direct contravention of values that we, as Americans who love our country, hold dear. You have deceived us in the most cynical, outrageous ways. You have undermined, or allowed the undermining of, our constitutional system of checks and balances among the three presumed co-equal branches of government. You have helped lead our nation to the brink of fascism, of a dictatorship contemptuous of our nation’s treaty obligations, federal statutory law, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

“Because of you, and because of your jingoistic false ‘patriotism,’ our world is far more dangerous, our nation is far more despised, and the threat of terrorism is far greater than ever before.
…
As United States agents kidnap, disappear, and torture human beings around the world, you justify, you deceive, and you cover up. We find what you have done to men, women and children, and to the good name and reputation of the United States, so appalling, so unconscionable, and so outrageous as to compel us to call upon you to step aside and allow other men and women who are competent, true to our nation’s values, and with high moral principles to stand in your places – for the good of our nation, for the good of our children, and for the good of our world.”

In the case of the President and Vice President, this means impeachment and removal from office, without any further delay from a complacent, complicit Congress, the Democratic majority of which cares more about political gain in 2008 than it does about the vindication of our Constitution, the rule of law, and democratic accountability.

It means the election of people as President and Vice President who, unlike most of the presidential candidates from both major parties, have not aided and abetted in the perpetration of the illegal, tragic, devastating invasion and occupation of Iraq. And it means the election of people as President and Vice President who will commit to return our nation to the moral and strategic imperative of refraining from torturing human beings.

Now, I’ve not been to SLC in a couple of years, but I don’t remember it as a hotbed of left-wing liberalism.

Now from an astounding article in Vanity Fair by Stiglitz. Remember, this is an economist:

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.
…
All of this spending made the economy look better for a while; the president could (and did) boast about the economic statistics. But the consequences for many families would become apparent within a few years, when interest rates rose and mortgages proved impossible to repay. The president undoubtedly hoped the reckoning would come sometime after 2008. It arrived 18 months early. As many as 1.7 million Americans are expected to lose their homes in the months ahead. For many, this will mean the beginning of a downward spiral into poverty.

Between March 2006 and March 2007 personal-bankruptcy rates soared more than 60 percent. As families went into bankruptcy, more and more of them came to understand who had won and who had lost as a result of the president’s 2005 bankruptcy bill, which made it harder for individuals to discharge their debts in a reasonable way. The lenders that had pressed for “reform” had been the clear winners, gaining added leverage and protections for themselves; people facing financial distress got the shaft.
…
Some portion of the damage done by the Bush administration could be rectified quickly. A large portion will take decades to fix—and that’s assuming the political will to do so exists both in the White House and in Congress. Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden—even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated. And think of the widening divide between rich and poor in America, a phenomenon that goes beyond economics and speaks to the very future of the American Dream.

In short, there’s a momentum here that will require a generation to reverse. Decades hence we should take stock, and revisit the conventional wisdom. Will Herbert Hoover still deserve his dubious mantle? I’m guessing that George W. Bush will have earned one more grim superlative.

Both are well worth a read.

On the topic of bottled water:

…but the current campaign against paying good money for bottled water when tap water is perfectly good (and very likely purer) is so sensible on the face of it that I am now done with you. Fini. Kaput. Ausgeschlossen. No more designer water. Water is water. If you want lemon flavoring, add a slice of lemon. You want bubbles, stick a straw in it and blow.
…
No, San Pellegrino and Perrier got rich off the pretensions of liberal wastrels like moi who thought it set us apart from the unlettered masses. We ordered it in restaurants for the same reason we read books we don’t like and go to operas we don’t understand — we say to the waiter, “Perrier,” to give a continental touch to our macaroni and cheese.

and more:

So now I wonder, “What else am I doing that is too dumb for words?” A woman leaned over to me the other night and said, “You’d look so much better with your eyebrows trimmed.” This is just the sort of advice a man yearns for — you don’t want to be walking around with eyebrows the size of sparrows for the rest of your life.
…
I gave up watching television 25 years ago because I liked it so much even though I couldn’t remember what I had watched the day before and could see that if I went on as a viewer my life would become a blank. And now I refuse the iPod because it is an audio bubble that shuts you off from the world, which is where good ideas come from.

Reform feels good, take it from me. To correct course and avoid the reef and find clear sailing is the great tonic of life. A man grows a beard for the pleasure of cutting it off. And now I have the pleasure of boycotting bottled water for tap.

and he then proceeds to tie it all together into a stick-the-landing conclusion:

And now, if liberals can cut consumption of foreign water, then maybe conservatives can start to face up to the disaster they visited on this country with the election of the Current Occupant. None of the current Republican hopefuls can quite bring himself to do this. Face it. When you push an incompetent frat boy on the country, what you get is what has happened. Republicans prize loyalty above all things, so the Republican Congress carried the White House water for years, not bothering with any sort of oversight, but loyalty to the Occupant now is like marriage to a drunk, a very iffy proposition. If they can’t get a grasp on this, the Republicans can’t win in 2008.

I do love him sometimes. The full essay is well worth enduring the Salon ads. Or just pay the thirty bucks per year; I find it worthwhile.