Post Peeves

Golden1 to buy more phishing insurance

Sunday, April 16th, 2006

The Golden1 Credit Union mostly serves (I think) State of California employees. Today these customers were miseducated about how DNS changes propagate and encouraged to trust a bare IP address and “accept the security alert.” See screenshot below (red outline added):

golden1 screenshot

This particular operation should be safe, but they’ve lowered the bar for — why bother setting up go1den1.com or g0lden1.com when Golden1 has told customers to trust a bare IP and ignore warnings?

The least Golden1 could’ve done is to point some previously unused (and thus uncached) subdomain, e.g., new1.golden1.com at the new IP address for golden1.com and tell customers to use the former as a temporary workaround.

Someone ought to be reprimanded for this gaffe.

Posted in Peeves | No Comments »

No Inequality In My Backyard

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

I’ve been meaning to write about the recent larger than expected (very pleasant surprise) anti-anti-immigration rallies and in particular yesterday’s idiotic column from Paul Krugman (which I won’t link to as it is behind NYT’s shortsighted “select” service), but I’ve been very busy and Bryan Caplan has better said what I think in fewer words than I would have used in Half Million Rally Against Anti-Foreign Bias, With Critics of Immigration Like This, Who Needs Advocates? and Are Low-Skilled Americans the Master Race?

The comments on these posts are full of idiots, but the estimable Chris Rasch works in one of my favorite links — the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid.

However, I cannot restrain myself from picking on Krugman’s “Unconfortable facts about immigration” column. Krugman, with emphasis added:

First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small

This from someone who professes to be concerned about inequality. What better way to decrease inequality than to allow very poor people to drastically increase their incomes, merely by living and working across a river or entirely imaginary border? Why shouldn’t someone born in Mexico have the opportunity to earn the same wages as someone born in the United States with identical skills?

If we substitute “born in [jurisdiction]” to “born with [race or gender]” the answer is obvious.

Basic decency requires that we provide immigrants, once they’re here, with essential health care, education for their children, and more.

Here Krugman lets it slip: on one side of an imaginary border, one is human and must be treated with basic decency, whatever one thinks that entails. On the other side of a border, one is subhuman.

Anyone who professes to care about inequality and does not call for complete freedom to move, live and work across jurisdiction borders is deluded by the fog of jurisdicitonism.

As I was writing this Matt McIntosh posted an excellent followup to Caplan, Privileged By Birthright?:

It’s long past time for cosmopolitans everywhere to mount a serious offense against the premise that location of birth is a morally relevant category.

…

I realized a while ago that one way to tell a true liberal (in the broad philosophical sense, not the narrow North American political sense) from a poseur is whether their moral circle extends to include as much moral consideration to those beyond their border as to those within it.

Indeed!

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Peeves, Politics | 5 Comments »

Rong-Solutions

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas in today’s NYT tantalizes and annoys. Although the article never uses the words prediction market or similar (idea futures, decision market) it seems to describe a wildly successful internal prediction market at Rite-Solutions (see below for link), though I have to wonder whether the company isn’t giving more credit to its internal stock market than is warranted (a product line suggested via the market just a year ago now accounts for 30 percent of sales — either their salespeople are expert at pushing vapor or the product was already under development) for the press.

InnoCentive, the other company profiled, seems to be a site for biologists and chemists, much like RentACoder.

The article attempts to segue between the stories:

The next frontier is to tap the quiet genius that exists outside organizations — to attract innovations from people who are prepared to work with a company, even if they don’t work for it.

I agree that’s an interesting frontier, but contracting out solutions, while good and useful, differs wildly from using a market to make or inform decisions. What could’ve been an interesting story on either company turned into another breezy zeitgeist article.

In any case, a company might want to open parts of its internal prediction market to its customers, suppliers, shareholders, or even the public. I don’t think either mentions prediction markets (I’ve only skimmed), but this would very much be in the spirit of and Collaboration Rules.

Here’s a suggestion for Rite-Solution’s stock market — get a real web site (symbol: WWW). The Flash thing at http://ritesolutions.com is from bizarro world — looks a little bit like a web site, but really slow, totally pointless transitions, and utterly unlinkable. A good reminder what the net would be like without open formats and standards.

Posted in Economics, Peeves, Prediction Markets | No Comments »

Holiday

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

I’m ten days late, but finally, a worthwhile holiday: March 15 is Tyrannicide Day!

There are many holidays around the world that have their origins in revolution, e.g., and the Fouth of July, but these are mainly celebrations of the jurisdictions that followed revolution and their supposed national identities.

Tyrannicide Day does not celebrate successful revolution, nor any specific revolution or jurisdiction, so cannot be easily usurped. Charles Johnson, instigator of Tryannicide Day:

What I want to honor today is tyrannicide not as a political strategy but as a moral fact: putting a diadem on your head and wrapping yourself in the blood-dyed robes of the State confers neither the virtue, the knowledge, nor the right to rule over anyone, any more than you had naked and alone. Tyranny is nothing more and nothing less than organized crime executed with a pompous sense of entitlement and a specious justification; the right to self-defense applies every bit as much against the person of some self-proclaimed sovereign as it does against any other two-bit punk who might attack you on the street. Every victory for human liberation in history — whether against the crowned heads of Europe, the cannibal-empires of modern Fascism and Bolshevism, or the self-perpetuating oligarchies of race and sex — has had this insight at its core: the moral right to deal with the princes and potentates of the world as nothing more and nothing less than fellow human beings, to address them as such, to challenge them as such, and — if necessary — to resist them as such. Thus always to tyrants.

Next year I will celebrate on time and in style!

Posted in Peeves, Politics | 1 Comment »

Who’s harmed by (housing) inflation?

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

Jason Ruspini writes about a discussion of upcoming housing futures. One of the open questions about this new market is who will buy (buy long that is — use for hedging against price declines is considered obvious). I often see it implied that the only set of people harmed by housing price increases are non-homeowners. Ruspini:

The natural buyers would be prospective home-buyers, trying to ensure that they aren’t priced-out of the market, but the relative wealth of that group is – naturally – very small.

But most homeowners are prospective home-buyers. Though U.S. residents are moving less often (this was a big surprise to me) 1 in 14 homeowners moves each year and the market for second homes is booming. It seems that anyone potentially moving to better, additional, or housing in a more expensive market than their own would be interested in hedging against price increases. Add in parents who want to ensure their children can buy a home nearby, you have a large and very wealthy group.

is quoted making essentially the same mistake in an otherwise excellent article on his work recently published in the NYT Magazine:

Homeowners, he points out, have a strong incentive to stop new development, both because it can be an inconvenience and also because, like any monopolist, stopping supply drives up the price of their own homes. “Lack of affordable housing isn’t a problem to homeowners,” Glaeser says; that’s exactly what they want. “The thing you want most is to make sure that your home is not affordable if you own it. And for that reason, there’s absolutely no reason to think that little suburban communities with no businesses that are run essentially by their homeowners will make the right decisions for the state as a whole, for the business in the area, for the country as a whole.”

Actually I think it is the anti-housing homeowners who are mistaken (or very short-sighted), not Glaeser, who is probably right at least in part about their motivations.

It seems to me that except to the extent one exits the market (by selling vacation homes, trading down, or moving to a less expensive market) rising prices don’t offer homeowners much benefit apart from bragging rights and the ability to obtain larger secondary loans (which have to be paid back).

Consider car owners, or an even more extreme case, food owners. If car or food production was restricted, the price of their assets would increase. However, in a few years, or a few days in the case of food, they would have to pay in some combination of higher prices, lower quality, and lower quantity.

It is pretty clear that everyone benefits from cheaper transportation and food regardless of whether they presently have a car in the garage and bread in the cupboard and that everyone is harmed by more expensive transportation and food. I’d argue housing is much more like cars and food — consumption goods — than most people are ready to admit.

Posted in Economics, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 2 Comments »

Absurd Sex, Suicide, Migration, and Ugly Apple

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006

Tyler Cowen asks “What is your most absurd view?” and gets an absurd number of comments.

Yes your comment should be crazy but serious too. It should refer to a view which you actually hold, but many other smart people consider untenable and bizarre.

Four of mine:

Sex and its pursuit is the cause of most personal troubles and most people would be happier with zero sex drive. Watch nearly any movie. If the characters weren’t horny they wouldn’t be in any trouble!

Through most of human history the most rational act for most individuals at any point in time was immediate suicide, given the suffering they should have expected to endure.

With respect to movement, residence and employment all humans should be as free to disregard international jurisdiction borders as they are to disregard intranational (e.g., U.S. state) borders and anything less is morally the same as South African Apartheid.

Nearly every user interface and product from Apple has been aesthetically and functionally ugly, from the orginal MacOS to iTunes. I don’t think I can blame Steve Jobs, as NextStep was wonderful. (Yes, I know OS X is derived from NextStep. They ruined it.)

Note that to the extent readiness to host certain beliefs is under evolutionary pressure my first two beliefs and perhaps the third would be strongly selected against.

Mostly I am an absurd hypocrite: I have a sex drive (but I gather it is less out of control than the average person’s), I have no intention of committing suicide, immediately or otherwise (but I think it is not absurd to expect relatively little suffering in wealthy parts of the 21st century), I live in the national jurisdiction I was born in (do I get any credit for 2000 miles away?), but I have never owned an Apple product.

Posted in Apartheid, Blogs, Economics, Peeves | 5 Comments »

Identity in, Identity out

Sunday, February 26th, 2006

I’ve briefly mentioned digital identity before, but the launch of ClaimID (more below) prompts me to write down my over the top theory concerning digital/ as a great absolute productivity equalizer. The theory in pseudocode:

function work_on_digital_identity(num_workers, avg_worker_skill) { return 0; }

This comes from the observation that hangers-on who can barely string buzzwords together to form a semi-coherent sentence and very smart people and single person projects and huge organizations composed of either all produce the same level of useful results when applied to the “problem” of digital identity: nil.

No, I’m not naming names and yes, this is an extreme caricature. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

So ClaimID is a new site that encourages you to catalog links about yourself and link to your resulting ClaimID page from your blog or home page. Someone ClaimID says does a good job of explaining ClaimID says:

Say you’re a college student with a weblog and you post your foolish thoughts under your real name. Or you’re active in some newgroups or mailing lists.

Time passes, you graduate and decide to look for a job. Of course, the prospective employer will want to do a search on your name, but what will they find? Oops! Too bad you didn’t think of that before!

Enter ClaimID.com. ClaimID will give you a place that you can point people to, to say “Here’s the ‘me’ I’m proud of!”

Salvation! Before ClaimID it was not possible to create a web page with links you are proud of and without links you are not proud of. If you think giving your clean ClaimID page is going to prevent a prospective employer from finding embarrassing links, I have a bridge to sell you.

On the plus side ClaimID is a well designed web application, even if it does nothing useful yet, and useful features are easy to imagine, e.g., a platform that is not a walled garden (imagine!), /tracking, , copyright or other registry, perhaps even the of .

Many of these could be built into popular blogging software (for example) but using future ClaimID or similar would be far easier and more robust for most people.

For what it’s worth I think the killer app for decentralized authentication (yes I’m sloppily mixing overlapping concepts, oh well — but on that note this and this look pretty interesting) is private blogging, or more generally selective information sharing. Currently the only way to do this on the web apart from running your own walled garden is to use someone else’s, e.g., . I never understood the popularity of LJ until a year or so ago someone told me people use it to write entries that only friends may access.

Posted in Blogs, Peeves | 3 Comments »

Admit defeat, not error!

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

William F. Buckley admits that the U.S. military adventure in Iraq is a defeat, but willfully fails to learn anything from it.

It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn’t work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates.

His two postulates amount to an assumption that wherever the U.S. intervenes people will act in accordance with U.S. politicians’ wishes. Nevermind that this doesn’t even work within the U.S. jurisdiction.

Buckley attributes defeat soley to “Iraqi animosities.” Even if that were the sole cause blame can be pinned firmly on U.S. politicians who were very well aware of Shiite/Sunni/Kurd/Christian/etc. “animosities” as leveraging these was a major component of U.S. policy toward Iraq after the 1991 . However, Buckley ignores economic mismanagement, and doubtless many other idiocies endemic to political management, nevermind military-political management. To do so would be to accept blame and teeter on the edge of admitting error.

If Buckley hopes to fence off his “postulates” (and thus U.S. policy) from criticism by admitting defeat in this one instance I hope he fails miserably, but I fully expect he and other advocates of interventionism will succeed in this subversion of truth. The long history of poor outcomes of U.S. intervention in the Middle East, elsewhere, and within the U.S. jurisdiction (domestically) is forgotten completely and is never learned from.

I have probably suggested too many times that prediction markets could help remind voters that the most likely outcomes are not those predicted by politicians.

On a related note: So what if Iraq splits? A jurisdiction is not a sacred entity.

Via Mike Godwin. You must check out Godwin’s awesome site design. (Don’t worry, I still hate Macs.)

Posted in Economics, Iraq, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 1 Comment »

Free as in free pollution parking

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

Tyler Cowen cites Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, which claims that “On average [in the U.S.] a new parking space has cost 17 percent more than a new car.” If I were lured by the temptation of urban policy I would certainly read this book.

I gather Shoup’s argument is that if zoning did not require minimum numbers of spaces and if market rates were charged for parking there would not be wasteful spaces built in uncongested areas and it would be possible to find parking in congested areas.

Shoup probably covers this, but one of the baneful effects of free or underpriced (e.g, cheap area parking permits in San Francisco) is opposition to dense development. Additional residents mean more competition for spaces, giving residents all the reason they need to go into mode, leaving a stunted cross between (vile place) and the wonderful Sanhattan it could be. (Of course there’s much more to story. I’d point to some Matt Smith columns and a feature published on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in San Francsico in the if its archive search weren’t so broken.)

Certain control freaks now want to swing from requiring a certain number of parking spaces to prohibiting more than a certain number of spaces. How about letting people build or not build however many spaces as they see fit? The problem is not under- or over-provision of private spaces, it is the underpricing of public spaces.

How about auctioning area parking permits — what politician doesn’t love a windfall? Existing permit holders could share in the windfall as power dictates. New residents would pay market prices. I’m sure Shoup has many more and better thought out proposals.

A related urban transport micro-rant: is an atrocity. No faster than buses and far more expensive, dangerous, space-wasting and inflexible, light rail serves only monument-building fantasies. If a real is infeasible just add or upgrade buses.

Addenda:

  • A complement or partial alternative to market prices for parking is to charge for road use as in central .
  • Anti-light rail articles.
  • Politically-controlled underpricing of water (especially for agricultural use, e.g., in California) and energy (primarily in oil exporting jurisdictions) doubtless cause far greater problems worldwide than underpriced parking.

Posted in Books, Economics, Peeves, Politics | 6 Comments »

Supply-side anti-censorship

Friday, February 17th, 2006

Brad Tempelton explains why a censor should want an imperfect filter — it should be good enough to keep verboten information from most users, but easy enough to circumvent to tempt dissidents, so they can be tracked and when desired, put away.

In the second half of the post, Tempelton suggests some anti-censor techniques: ubiquitous and . Fortunately he says these are “far off” and “does not scale”, respectively. To say the least, I’d add.

Cyber-activists have long dreamed that strong encryption would thwart censorship. is an example of a project that uses this as its raison d’être. While I’m a huge fan of ubiquitous encryption and decentralization (please install , now!), these seem like terribly roundabout, means of fighting censorship — the price of obtaining information, which includes the chance of being caught, is lowered. But someone has to seek out or have the information pushed to them in the first place. If information is only available via hidden channels, how many people will encounter it regardless of lower risk?

An alternative, perhaps less sexy because it involves no technology adoption, is supply-side anti-censorship: make verboten information ubiquitous. Anyone upset about google.cn should publish information the Communist Party wants censored (my example is pathetic, need to work on that). This is of course not mutually exclusive with continuing to carp and dream of techno-liberation.

I guess I’m calling for projects. Or one of those chain letters (e.g, “four things”) that plagues the blogosphere.

Posted in Blogs, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, P2P, Peeves, Politics | 2 Comments »

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