Ever since I read about Hernando De Soto's work years ago, I've been saying that the a major remedy for third world economic problems would be online land registries. Now, BusinessWeek reoprts that its happenning in India! Photon Courier notes
Why is this a big deal? you may ask. Previously, the deeds were controlled by "powerful village accountants." They typically charged large fees to the poor farmers who needed copies of their deeds--and a farmer might need such copies 2 or 3 times a year when asking for loans (to buy fertilizer, for instance). And sometimes accountants would collude with upper-caste landlords to steal the land by altering the deeds.In the state of Karnataka, 20 million deeds have been digitized over the past 5 years, and 200 kiosks have been deployed across the state. It now costs the equivalent of 30 cents to get a copy of one's records--the previous fees from the local accountants were in the range of $2.00 to $20.00.
Charles Krauthammer details Israel's victory over the Intifada
While no one was looking, something historic happened in the Middle East. The Palestinian intifada is over, and the Palestinians have lost.
[...]
The end of the intifada does not mean the end of terrorism. There was terrorism before the intifada and there will be terrorism to come. What has happened, however, is an end to systematic, regular, debilitating, unstoppable terror -- terror as a reliable weapon. At the height of the intifada, there were nine suicide attacks in Israel killing 85 Israelis in just one month (March 2002). In the past three months there have been none.
[...]
Israel targeted terrorist leaders -- attacks so hypocritically denounced by Westerners who, at the same time, cheer the hunt for, and demand the head of, Osama bin Laden. The top echelon of Hamas and other terrorist groups has been either arrested, killed or driven underground. The others are now so afraid of Israeli precision and intelligence -- the last Hamas operative to be killed by missile was riding a motorcycle -- that they are forced to devote much of their time and energy to self-protection and concealment.
Duing the run up to the war in Iraq, various anti-war and pacifists folks kept quoting Hermann Goering's comment at the Nuremberg trials about going to war:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
But there is an added technique for weakening a nation at its very roots ... The method is simple. It is first, a dissemination of discord. A group - not too large - a group that may be sectional or racial or political - is encouraged to exploit its prejudices through false slogans and emotional appeals. The aim of those who deliberately egg on these groups is to create confusion of counsel, public indecision, political paralysis and, eventually, a state of panic. Sound national policies come to be viewed with a new and unreasoning skepticism ... As a result of these techniques, armament programs may be dangerously delayed. Singleness of national purpose may be undermined. . . . The unity of the state can be so sapped that its strength is destroyed. All this is no idle dream. It has happened time after time, in nation after nation, during the last two years.
In any case, the contrast between the quotations represents well the value and danger of democracy and freedom of the press. Goering assumes the leaders control of the media so all they have to do is tell people things. In contrast, here the leaders are held to a higher standard where leaders must show the people they are in danger in the face of a free press that may be actively hostile to the leadership and its agenda and that does not have the same level of security responsibilities as that leadership. The question FDR opens is whether the questioning of leadership claims by the free press can become pathological enough to cause major damage. I would like to believe that the check on the free press comes from an intelligent and educated citizenry, but my observations of the Ivy League educated readership of the NYTimes, the Washington Post, etc. leaves me dubious.
How do we balance the dangers of overreaching by dictatorship against the dangers of pacifist stupor induced by a free press?
Via Belgravia Dispatch, perhaps the Finanial Times would be the honest liberal alternative to the NYTimes.
Intelligence officers learned between 1999 and 2001 that uranium smugglers planned to sell illicitly mined Nigerien uranium ore, or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq.These claims support the assertion made in the British government dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme in September 2002 that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from an African country, confirmed later as Niger. George W. Bush, US president, referred to the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
Andrew McCarthy and Captain Edi do a good job of dissecting the NYTimes recent effort to mislead its readers into believing that there were no connections between Saddam and Al Queada, when in fact it knew that they had a cooperative relationship.
Robert and others argue that this administration faces a credibility problem. Fault for this credibility problem lies at the feet of the major media like the NYTimes that keep misreporting both what the Administration has said and the facts on the ground that may corroborate Administration conclusions.
In describing Michael Moore's newest movie, Jeff Jarvis observes:
He's no longer just ridiculing the powerful; he's no longer turning them into punchlines; he's now trying to convince us that these particular powerful people -- Bush et al -- are evil, venal, corrupt, incompetent co-conspirators out to ruin our world. If you're going to try to convince us of that, then you have a different obligation of fact and argument than if you're just trying to make fun of somebody. You should give us legitimate facts and arm us with arguments by showing both sides of an issue and beating down the other side. If you don't do that, you're only shrieking. You're weakening your own argument by ignoring the other side. You're insulting the intelligence of your audience by not giving them both sides. You're just seething. That's what Moore is like now. He wants to convince us he's telling the truth but he's afraid to tell the whole truth.
Update: See also lying by the Kerry campaign.
Transhumanists argue that technology can make accidental death obsolete. They further argue that:
If some people would still choose death, that’s a choice that is of course to be regretted, but nevertheless this choice must be respected. The transhumanist position on the ethics of death is crystal clear: death should be voluntary. This means that everybody should be free to extend their lives and to arrange for cryonic suspension of their deanimated bodies. It also means that voluntary euthanasia, under conditions of informed consent, is a basic human right.
Just a random thought this morning. I mean at this point we know that Saddam was involved with Al Queada and perhaps other terrorist groups. Saddam had WMD and was developing more, Saddam was an evil man that should be eliminated, that Iraqis prefer their new government to Saddam, that Iraq llooks to become a democracy soon, Iraq is even getting a working stock exchange.
Does anyone at this point seriously believe it would have been better to leave Saddam in power?
Scott Sampson talks about dinasour evolution and notes that:
Ecologically speaking, once two closely related species differing only in reproductive structures (e.g., horns, frills, crests, etc.) come back into contact, it’s unlikely that both will persist for very long, since they will be doing the same thing to make a living.
He also makes an argument for protectionist industrial policy:
When all of the continents were united as Pangaea, and even during the initial phases of fragmentation, virtually every terrestrial ecosystem for which we have good data indicates the presence of multiple, perhaps two to four, kinds of large carnivorous dinosaurs, in the range of 750-2000 kg. Given the extensive continental connections, this was a time when terrestrial animals were able to move around much of the planet. It is also why we find remains of dinosaurs on every continent. They didn’t need to fly or swim across major marine barriers—they simply walked from landmass to landmass. With all of this faunal mixing, it is not surprising that we find multiple species of large carnivores in most ecosystems.Unlike living carnivorous mammals, which often have highly specialized teeth and jaws for particular diets (meat, bone marrow, etc.), large carnivorous dinosaurs apparently lacked such ecological diversity. So, given that they were all doing pretty much the same thing to make a living, it seems reasonable to postulate that inter-species competition would have limited the maximal body size for any one species. It’s highly unlikely that a given lineage could have evolved to be a giant of five or six tonnes when several other species were in direct competition in the same ecosystem. As the continents split apart, dinosaurs and all other parts of the terrestrial biota went along for the ride on these giant rafts of continental crust, setting sail on independent different evolutionary courses. We postulate that it was only after all the continents broke apart that opportunities arose for a single species to dominate an ecosystem and grow to T. rex proportions.
About 75 million years ago, when North America was divided into two landmasses by a seaway, several smaller-bodied tyrannosaurs such as Daspletosaurus and Gorgosaurus lived alongside one another. These animals were large, about 1,000 to 2,000 kg, and no doubt menacing, yet a fraction the size of their subsequent relative, Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived about 67-65 million years ago. In contrast to its predecessors, T. rex lacked the direct competition with other large carnivores. For whatever reason, all other tyrannosaur lineages died out. Almost simultaneously, the seaway receded for good, reconnecting east and west America for the first time in 25 million years and effectively doubling the geographic area for North American dinosaurs. The additional area allowed Tyrannosaurus to increase in body size while maintaining population densities high enough to avoid extinction, at least for awhile.
Great article on polemics. Heres the rules:
This one is incredibly disapointing as it seems like I should be able to find agreement with my close friends and with people with whom I share a common culture. I would reframe this as try to reframe the dispute so you are not adversaries. No, I don't know how to do this one easily.
On the very rare occasions when it does happen, it will be because the person converted has already and independently come to harbor serious doubts and is teetering on the edge of ideological defection. This is due, more
often than not, to some outrageous action by his own side or some shocking revelation: witness the effects on members of Communist parties in the West of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and the Khrushchev speech
of 1956.
Reviewing Michael Moore's recent work of propganda:
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
Last night, my dinner companiion said that she was getting increasingly upset and angry at the Bush administration. She is otherwise very smart and analytic, but here she seems to have blown a gasket. Rather than engaging in a sane/rational assesment of the facts, she was simply parroting all the party-line Democrat/liberal mud slinging! It was shocking and a bit weird to hear her talk like this. Every time I tried to respond to an issue she brought up, she would instantly switch to another rather than try to understand what was said. With each answer and transition she was getting more visibly upset. I told her that if she just enjoys the feeling of moral outrage associated with throwing around lots of accusations, that is fine. But if she wants to be a rational person and take a look at the evidence, she would have to calm down. The primary subject of the conversation was, of course, the 9/11 commission and the question of whether there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Queada and whether the Administration claimed Iraq was involved with 9/11.
She is, of course, an avid reader of the NYTimes and of course her emotions were stoked by headlines like "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie" and editorials saying :
Mr. Bush said the 9/11 panel had actually confirmed his contention that there were "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said his administration had never connected Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Both statements are wrong.
A commission staff report, released last week, said there were contacts between Osama bin Laden's terror network and the Iraqi government, but they did not appear to have produced a collaborative relationship. Commission chairman Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said ``we don't see any serious conflicts'' between the panel's and the White House's positions.
"The sharp differences that the press has drawn [between the White House and the Commission] are not that apparent to me," Hamilton told the Associated Press, a day after insisting that his probe uncovered "all kinds" of connections between Osama bin Laden's terror network and Iraq.
. . .
But the Indiana Democrat said the press accounts were flat-out wrong."There are all kinds of ties," he told PBS's "The News Hour" late Wednesday, in comments that establishment journalists have refused to report.
"There are all kinds of connections. And it may very well have been that Osama bin Laden or some of his lieutenants met at some time with Saddam Hussein's lieutenants."
Hamilton said that while his probe had failed to uncover any direct operational link between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's terror network in attacks on the U.S., there's no question that "they had contacts."
The Clinton administration portrayed the relationship between al- Qaeda and Saddam's intelligence services as one of cooperating in weapons development. There's abundant evidence of that. In fact, as you'll soon hear from Joe Klein, President Clinton justified his strike on the Sudan "pharmaceutical" site because it was thought to be manufacturing VX gas with the help of the Iraqi intelligence service. Since then, that's been validated.
Critics of the Bush administration argue that it falsely created a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks to help justify the war. Last week, the administration countered that it had never made such an assertion — only that there were ties, however murky, between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A survey of past public comments seems to bear that out — although whether there was a deliberate campaign to create guilt by association is difficult to say.
Mr. Bush has also used a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush used to refer to Mr. Zarqawi as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner" who was in Baghdad working with the Iraqi government. But the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime, nor under the direction of Al Qaeda.
That the report itself has lots of factual mistakes is beyond the scope of this post. But what I would observe is that we are seeing the same misreporting of the administration's claims here that we say earlier with respect to imminent threat.
We have an opposition in this country that is too emotionally overwrought to engage in rational discussion and debate. Instead they have a deep need to make up arguments of the other side that they know they can win. When they are caught doing it, they say instead that the Administration implied it and that they were too stupid to notice the difference. But they are clearly NOT stupid. If the administration really was making the claims they accuse it of making, (1) the NYTimes would have reported/analyzed the difference between what was said and what was implied and (2) if it didn't, they would have been making arguments against what they interpreted the Administration to have been saying. The shocking lack of contemporaneous opposition material claiming, contra the Administration, that Iraq was NOT an imminent threat or that Iraq did NOT have ties to Al Queada is the biggest evidence of all that the left is losing touch with reality.
(Major hat tip: Jim Miller)
According to Carlos Perez eBay serves ~400M page views per day on a database of 60 million auctions with 30k lines of code changes per week with 99.92% uptime. According to eBay's 10-k, it has 41.2M active users and is growing at 50% per year! The 10-k is ambiguous but it looks like eBay depreciated at least $21M of equipment last year. I think eBay is paying WAYYY too much for server ops.
A modern CPU can handle ~10k HTTP requests per second (see these benchmarks. I don't know how much memory eBay's database consumes, but we can make some estimates. Lets assume each auction and each user requires 1k of memory. 60M auctions plus 40M users implies 100GB of memory. Now lets double that for indexing and other overhead and we are at 200GB.
Today you can buy a Sun E25K for $3.6M with 72 processors and up to 500GB of memory. That seems like enough to handle eBay's load. Potential problems
The report says:
Bin Ladin had been pressuring KSM for months to advance the attack date. According to KSM, Bin Ladin had even asked that the attacks occur as early as mid-2000, after Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon caused an outcry in the Middle East by visiting a sensitive and contested holy site in Jerusalem that is sacred to both Muslims and Jews.
Perhaps the answer to the question about what it really means to be intelligence is to judge a book by its cover. It turns out that Beauty and Brains Often Come Together. So, except perhaps at the limit, when you meet someone who appears smart, but is unattractive, you should have second thoughts about their judgement. If they are academics or their politics are left-win, even more so!
Since people who have post-graduate degrees are politically more left-wing than people who have only bachelors degrees and since the more education one has the less likely one is to have kids (see the previous link) then are the genetic variations that code for a predisposition to left-liberalism being selected against? My guess is that high IQ people who do not go on to grad school are politically to the right of high IQ people who do. Well, the latter are probably having fewer kids than the smarties who do not go to grad school. So are the future generations of high IQ people going to be more right-wing than they are now?
What is an ''intelligent'' person? As defined by the media, it seems to mean someone who takes the media seriously. Someone wonkish on the nuts and bolts of particular topics of interest to media types, and able to sit around yakking about them till 3 in the morning. Ronald Reagan had a much rarer intelligence -- a strategic intelligence. In 1977, he told Richard Allen, ''My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose.''
[...]
Those who disparage him say it would have happened anyway. It was obvious to all that the Soviet Union was on the verge of total collapse. After all, as big-time Ivy League history prof Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1982, ''Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse'' are ''wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.''
No, hang on, I must be thinking of Professor J.K. Galbraith, who in 1984 was marveling at ''the great material progress'' of the USSR. In fairness to Galbraith, as the Associated Press would say, he has almost no schooling in economics, aside from being a Harvard economics professor for several decades.
I argued that we need more basement nanotech/biotech here. Now it looks like progress is happenning! Yay and watch out!
But he hasn’t given up. After all, what home-brew STM [scanning tunnelling microscope] obsessives lack in numbers, they make up for in ingenuity and dedication. For example, John D. Alexander – a senior systems engineer at Molecular Imaging – devised in his spare time a “simple STM that can resolve atoms, with a cost of materials less than $100, excluding oscilloscope.”Of course, it was an STM, albeit a more “professional” model, that Don Eigler used in 1989 to spell out “IBM” in xenon atoms.
I wonder if the next-next-generation home-brew nanotools could enable a dedicated amateur to fashion a nano Etch A Sketch. Forget about my name on a grain of rice. “Pescovitz” written in quantum dots – now that would make a great addition to my cabinet of curiosities.
Glenn Reynolds argues that people are wrong to believe that
dramatic lengthening of lifespans would yield stagnation and resentment. Older people would entrench themselves in their positions, while juniors would fester with no real hope of getting ahead. Progress would dry up as creative minds wasted their best years in uncreative apprenticeships, under the sour scrutiny of their elders. The result: a dull, uncreative gerontocracy.
at the same time that lives have been lengthening, the past hundred years have also been the most creative and dynamic period in human history. And it certainly doesn't appear that our institutions are controlled by a rigid gerontocracy. (In fact, one finds rigid gerontocracies mostly in communist countries -- the former Soviet Union, the current People's Republic of China -- and not in capitalist democracies. So if fear of gerontocracy is behind opposition to longer lives, it would be better expressed in terms of opposition to communism than opposition to aging research.)
| Country | Life Expectancy |
|---|---|
| South Korea | 75.4 |
| Chile | 76.3 |
| US | 77 |
| UK | 78.2 |
| Germany | 78.4 |
| France | 79.3 |
| Japan | 80.9 |
| Australia | 80.1 |
PS Anyone know how to get rid of the big space above the table?
Josh thinks that Chalabi was an Iranian spy. Bruce Schneier notes that it looks more like Chalabi was set up to take the fall because of an encryption issue. He is missing the larger issue. Chalabi had a large batch of files implicating UN officials and foreign leaders in the UN OIl For Food Scandal. The US wanted UN approval for its power transfer arrangement. The US raided Chalabi's office and took away his computer files (probably including his UN Oil For Food files/evidence). The UN Security Council then voted 15-0 to support the US. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Vice Squad is a great blog on the various attempts by the government to tell you how to live your life. My favorite recent post is about a homeless shelter that gives its residents wine!
Most shelters would not allow someone to enter if he had a bottle of alcohol on him. As a result, the homeless men would chug the bottle dry just before coming in -- a solution that was good neither for the drinker nor the shelter.
[...] "People thought it would be crazy to let them drink in here — the staff wouldn't be safe," Manuel says. "But just the opposite happened. They took great ownership of having a place to go. When you let them drink here, the drinking goes way down."And the risk of poisonings via the consumption of rubbing alcohol is greatly reduced.
I was talking to a friend a few days ago who is trying to organize a comunity living space. He was talking about all the detail he had to manage. Some general thoughts on leading a business/organization:
See the end of this comment section for an example. It is now quite clear that Bush et al never claimed a threat from Iraq was imminent; that people who hold up or endorse signs that say "Bush lied. People died" are deluded, that there appears to be an active campaign by Bush opponents to mislead the public about Bush's case for war, and that this campaign has been doing damage not only to the Bush but also to the US as a whole.
Last night I was talking with a friend of mine about what the US had done in Iraq. He thought that invading Iraq was the right way to go, but blamed the neo-cons for messing up the execution. I responded that, if we were observing the outcome of poor execution, then the decision to go to war was truly a no-brainer and that, at very least, you had to give the neo-cons credit for the decision to go to war in the first place. (Note to Dan: the conservatives base is isolationist and was opposed to the war -- Dick Cheney notwithstanding)
In any sufficiently large scale operation, LOTS of mistakes will be made. It is easy to find them, point to them, and say that this shows that the people running the operation are incompetent. Moreover claims of bad execution can be a source of common ground when one wants to get along with people who are viscerally opposed to the people doing the execution.
If we say that part of good execution is *STARTING*, there is no one executing better than the neo-cons. Kerry and Gore would not have prosecuted the war AT ALL and that would have been a much bigger failure of execution than any this administration has done. And for what its worth, many of the purported "mistakes" are actually the best of bad options. e.g. getting access from Turkey would have meant paying too much cash AND selling out the Kurds and actually using more troops on the ground would have meant either much higher US casualties or flatenning Fallujah and Najaf, neither of which strike me as good ideas.
Clay Christiansen has talked extensively about the way incumbents fail to recognize disruptive innovation because, at any given time, they view it as a lower quality version of what they are already selling to their already satisfied customers. The incumbents don't realize that, by lowering price substantially, the challenger is accessing entirely new markets for the "lower quality" product. Russell Beattie is describing the same phenomenon in the mobile space.
there are going to be *billions* of mobile devices on the web very soon now and that's going to change things fundamentally. The Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by XHTML-MP
[...]
But again, the session is called "Wireless War: What Technologies Will Win?" and I'm sure instead of focusing on the incredible changes that mobile data services are going to bring into the lives of the 2 billion people who will own cellphones around the world in the next few years, it's going to be about how WiFi and WiMax are actually threat to 3G technologies. No really. No, no really. No really. Ugh.Does Silicon Valley have blinders on? Did they get a technology-lobotomy? These entire conferences could be filled with *nothing* but analysis of mobile tech - their impact, their influence, the opportunities and more. What are these organizers doing? Do they not read? Do they not travel outside of the country ever?
[...]
Mobility is about mobile phones. Period. Forget "wireless" - why is that so hard for Americans to understand? Wireless has nothing to do with the real revolution. Mobility is about what happens when a couple billion people around the world are interconnected 24/7 with relatviely cheap, powerful, converged multimedia devices called cellphones. It's changing the face of society as we know it. Elections have been won because of SMS. Whole societies have customs now around a service that Americans have no idea exists. That's just *today*. Tomorrow will bring higher speeds, location services, presence, international push-to-talk groups, streaming media, and more. This is incredible.