I Declare...

Like most Americans, I am considering running for the Republican nomination for President. Usually when you run for President, you want to avoid saying anything that would offend anyone, which means you should avoid saying anything at all. This year, however, the only hope of winning the Republican nomination is to make your opinions crystal clear. So here goes:

• Climate Change. I'm for it. Obama was for change when he ran the first time, so in general I'm against it, except as described below, but he was against climate change so I'm for it.
• The Flag. I'm for it.
• Federal Government. I'm against it. I would repeal the U.S. Constitution, except we should keep the Second Amendment that guarantees the right to shoot guns and also the Supreme Court would be needed to protect the Second Amendment and for other reasons (see below). Because there would be no Congress or President, members of the Supreme Court would need to be appointed by the Evangelical Ministerial Association.
• Coloreds. I'm against them. Obama is one for sure and I'm against Obama. Coloreds are taking over everywhere so we should stop them. With all the intermarriage these days, it can be hard to say for sure who is colored and who is not. Here is where modern computer technology can help. It should be possible to create a high tech device that accurately measures skin color. You will need to be careful about getting too much tan but exposure to sun causes skin cancer so you should be avoiding it anyway. The Supreme Court can administer this program (see above).
• Immigration. See previous item.
• Women. I'm for them.
• Feminists. I'm against them.
• Education. I'm for it, except it should be run by the Supreme Court (see above).
• Corporations. I'm for them.
• Debt. I'm against it.
• Taxes. Don't get me started.

So there it is. With this platform I'm virtually guaranteed to win the Republican nomination. If I got the Republican nomination, I couldn't possibly win the Presidency, though, because there are too many coloreds, but I'm for abolishing the Presidency anyway.

So I guess you're stuck with Hillary for now, but it's only temporary because the End Times are coming.

Hallelujah!

American Mobs

Civil disorder is part of our national character. As Americans we believe that civil disorder can be an appropriate and necessary response to perceived injustice. It was an important aspect of the American Revolution and it's practically part of the Constitution. The right to resort to civil disorder is the motivation for the Second Amendment that guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.

The civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri is neither unusual nor surprising when seen against the long history of hundreds of incidents of civil disorder going back more than two hundred years--more than one a year since the birth of the nation. For the complete list, see this Wikipedia article. Here are a few of the more notorious mob actions:

• Shay's Rebellion (1786)
• Whiskey Rebellion (1791)
• Cincinnati Riots (1829)
• Philadelphia Nativist Riots (1844)
• Bloody Monday (1855)
• New York Draft Riots (1863)
• Haymarket Riot (1886)
• May Day Riots (1894)
• Atlanta Riot (1906)
• Red Summer (1919)
• Battle of the Overpass (1937)
• Zoot Suit Riots (1943)
• Battle of Hayes Pond (1953)
• Watts Riots (1965)
• Wounded Knee (1973)
• Tampa Riots (1987-1992)
• University of Maryland Riot (2002)
• Springfest Riot (2010)
• Bundy Rebellion (2014)

Less than half were race riots and some of the earlier race riots were whites attacking blacks.

I added the Bundy Rebellion from earlier this year though it may not qualify as a riot because no actual violence occurred due to the federal government backing off from armed confrontation. The Wikipedia list doesn't include the Boston Tea Party or the American Revolution itself, perhaps because it includes only incidents that occurred after the United States was formally declared in 1781.

Carmen Segarra is Wrong

Carmen Segarra is a former bank regulator for the New York Federal Reserve who was assigned to oversee Goldman Sachs. She's highly qualified, intelligent, and seriously cares about her work. When her bosses at the Fed started trying to suppress her forthright inquiries into Goldman's activities, she started secretly recording her meetings and recorded 46 hours of conversations over 7 months before she was fired. The recordings show that the Fed has a very timid approach to bank supervision.

In short, Carmen Segarra is the sort of person I admire. Still, I'm sorry to say, she is wrong. Somehow in the course of her considerable education and extensive experience, she has managed to miss the forest for the trees.

The first thing she seems to miss is that the Federal Reserve cannot and does not supervise banks. What it does do is manage perceptions. The continued operation of the banking system depends almost entirely on perceptions. If people believe the banks are safe, they are safe. If people believe they are not safe, then they're not safe. What offended Segarra most, it seems, was when her bosses tried to get her to pay more attention to perceptions and not worry so much about substance. To an even greater degree than other things in life, the banking system depends mostly on what people believe about it rather than what it "is". To some extent, of course, the perception is based on substance, but not very much. The largest banks currently have an equity cushion of around 1%. Even if they had an equity cushion of 10%, it would hardly matter once people decide to run for the exits, which they do from time to time with very little reason. No one understands the banking system, not the Fed, not bank managers, not the shareholders, and certainly not depositors.

Second, Segarra imagined that it was her job to help prevent the next financial crisis, when in fact the Fed has no power to prevent the next financial crisis, no one does. The next financial crisis, when it comes, will happen when it happens. She is described as someone who is like the child who says the emperor has no clothes. Well, so far as the banking system is concerned, the emperor in fact has no clothes, but until some misguided person goes around worrying people about it, everything is fine.

Third, her main push against Goldman seems to be that it lacks a policy regarding conflicts of interest. The Fed requires such a policy, and she says Goldman didn't have one. Goldman is perhaps being more honest in this regard than it needs to be. It's not possible to function as a large bank without engaging in conflicts of interest. Goldman's policy regarding conflicts of interest can possibly be paraphrased as, "we engage in conflicts of interest." Conflicts of interest are not illegal, though they must be disclosed to the parties, and I'm sure they are, and I'm equally sure the parties don't care to read the fine print about that or much of anything else either. Only the most hopelessly naive have any doubts about what Goldman does. Such people should know better than to play in that playground.

Finally, she is a lawyer and she recorded and publicized conversations that are supposed to be confidential. A lawyer should never do that.

Prole Students Act Ungood in Denver

Prole students acted doubleplusungood in Denver on Tuesday, walking out of classes in opposition to a plan to rectify history education. “I don’t think my education should be censored. We should be able to know what happened in our past,” said Tori Leu, a 17-year-old prole student who protested at Ralston Valley High School in Arvada.

The school board proposal that triggered the walkouts in Jefferson County calls for instructional materials to be rectified to present goodthink aspects of the nation and its heritage. It would establish a committee of thinkpol to regularly review texts and course plans, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system and respect for authority” and don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife and crimethink.” For example, the committee would rectify the history of American citizens of Japanese descent who were sent to joycamp during World Peace II by balancing ungood aspects of incarceration with the humane treatment and protection that these citizens received at joycamp.

The proposal is from Julie Williams, part of the board’s conservative majority. “There are things we may not be proud of as Americans,” she said. “but we should be proud of them anyway. We shouldn’t be encouraging proles to think that America is ungood.”

Government regulation really shouldn't be necessary, but...

The title of this post is a quote from an editorial in today's USA Today. Here's another quote for your consideration: Everything before "but" is bullshit.

USA Today's owners don't believe in government regulation, except when they do. So what is the occasion for so much libertarian angst this time? It's California's new law forcing cell phone makers to incorporate a theft deterrent feature, the so-called "kill switch", that allows you to disable your phone remotely if it goes missing. It turns out that cell phone makers, like auto makers, make a lot of money selling replacements for stolen products and have been fighting this feature.

According to libertarian theology, corporations will do the right thing by us because it's good business. But it turns out that there are a few situations where there's more profit in being evil. Let me revise that to say that there are a gagillion ways to make money by being evil, as five thousand years of human history have shown. 

The exceptions consume the rule. Government regulation is always bad except for... Well, just about everything.

My name is Steve, and I'm a Liberal

If you listen to Fox News, it seems that "liberal" is a dirty word these days, something that should have a 12-step program to help you recover from it. So it's nice to see a book that places the word in a more constructive light. The book is Liberalism: The Life of an Idea by Edmund Fawcett, a long-time writer for The Economist. I confess to not having read it, or even bought it. I've only read the reviews. Still, the author's ideas, as described at some length in reviews in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, seem to strike a chord.

Fawcett traces the history of the use of the term "liberalism" in the U.S., U.K., Germany and France from 1830 to the present, and finds four ideas common to those who describe themselves as liberals. I would phrase them in the following terms:

• Tolerance: Acceptance of divergent viewpoints
• Freedom: Limits on power
• Progressivism: Faith in human progress and intellectualism
• Civility: Respect for others

It follows that those who are not liberals tend to believe in:

• Rightness: What is right is clear and unmistakable and everyone should agree on it
• Order: Everyone should be forced to do only what is right
• Tradition: Modern thinking is leading us dangerously away from traditional ways
• Class: "We" (those of our race, nationality, religion, etc.) are worthy but "They" (the others) are not

Representative non-liberals might include: Nazis, communists, most religions, most corporations, and especially Fox News.

But what about the Tea Party? They seem to violate this traditional alignment on the basis that they are strongly anti-establishment, yet decidedly non-liberal with respect to the other three categories. The discrepancy can be explained, though. In the Nineteenth Century and well into the Twentieth, liberals distrusted "order" because those in power tended strongly to believe in "rightness", "tradition" and "class" rather than "tolerance", "progressivism" and "civility". But in the last half of the Twentieth Century, most of those in power (in the western countries at least) switched to the liberal point of view, so it was the right who found themselves in the role of anti-establishment outsiders.

This tells me that "distrust of power" was historically a liberal idea only because the liberals were mostly out of power. Once liberals came to power, they came to believe in "order", and it was those on the right who came to distrust it. So I think it's really only the other three "liberal" ideas that truly represent the liberal point of view. Whether you trust power and believe in "order" depends only on whether those sharing your point of view happen to be in power at the time.

It's worth noting that liberals are slip-sliding on the "tolerance" ideal. On college campuses, which are mostly in the grip of liberal students and educators, an extreme level of intolerance exists for those who do not share the liberal point of view. France is another example, having outlawed the wearing of veils by Muslim women on the grounds that it offends feminist principles. This is a bad trend in my view. Agreeing to disagree is an important pillar of liberalism and should not be allowed to degenerate into intolerance.

The exegesis of liberalism spawned by Fawcett's book is a good thing. It challenges us to self-examine of what we believe and it gives me reason to wear the label proudly.

Marx vs. Ayn Rand: The Coen Brothers

The popular television series "Fargo", heavily derived from the Coen brothers' film of the same name but quite different and in many ways much better, has received critical acclaim. On the surface, it's a story of good, represented by the local Minnesota police, versus evil, in the form of an out-of-town assassin named Malvo portrayed brilliantly by Billy Bob Thornton.

Spoiler alert: good prevails. But there's a possible subtext to the series, another layer of meaning. Malvo, it seems to me, represents a libertarian hero.

The good people of Minnesota are portrayed as being as blah and uncreative as can possibly be imagined. They are television-addicted couch potatoes who live in a rigid social and political structure weighed down with suffocating bureaucracy and rules, especially the police, who enforce the rules and are paid from tax money. They are government itself. From a libertarian point of view, they epitomize the lazy, unproductive parasites sucking the life blood from Ayn Rand's precious "makers".

Malvo, on the other hand, is a libertarian hero. He is creative and energetic and the epitome of free enterprise. His "business" happens to be murder, but he only murders lesser humans who are unproductive and have no creative energy, and so have no right to live, and he does it with spirit and style. Far from being a celebration of good conquers evil, the series can be seen as a libertarian tragedy. It's the triumph of the weak over the strong, the ultimate libertarian nightmare in which the meek inherit the earth.

Of course, modern libertarians mostly stop short of approving assassination for hire as an acceptable enterprise, even if the targets are lazy and useless hangers-on that live off other people's creative energy. So the series can be seen as taking libertarianism to its logical extreme, then asking the question that Malvo asks when confronted in a Las Vegas elevator by his acolyte Lester Nygaard, "Do you want this, Lester? Do you want this?".

If you haven't seen the series, I recommend it. It has a 98% "fresh" rating on rottentomatoes.com. You can find it on Amazon Instant Video and probably other on-demand sites as well. It's extremely well done and great entertainment. Besides that, it seems to have something to say that's worth considering.

Marx vs. Ayn Rand: Lloyd Blankfein

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, famously said in 2009 that Goldman is doing "God's work", which prompted me to quip that God had tasked Goldman Sachs with the job of vacuuming up all the loose money flying around the world so the rest of us can stop obsessing about it and pay attention to what really matters.

Money does matter though. You don't need to be rich to be happy and too much wealth may even interfere with happiness, but as Thomas Piketty has argued persuasively, extreme concentration of wealth has contorted politics and society in the past and likely will in the future.

Give Blankfein credit for understanding the risk of rising concentration of wealth. He has been saying for some time now that unchecked free market forces will lead to destabilizing wealth inequality and dysfunctional government. Of course sabotaging the government is precisely the goal of the lunatic right wing who seek to establish their own government-free zones, be they floating islands as proposed by The Seasteading Institute or Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's vigilante mob.

Blankfein agrees that some form of wealth redistribution is necessary. He has said that the country is good at creating wealth but not good at distributing it. He gets mealy-mouthed, though, when it comes to how to achieve this goal. Blankfein suggests that a growing economy, like a rising tide, will raise all boats, but if Thomas Piketty's "r > g" theory is correct, growth only makes wealth inequality worse over time. Piketty's theory suggests that taxes of 1% of net worth per year are needed for the growth in wealth to not exceed the growth of the economy.

Perhaps in his heart of hearts Blankfein knows that taxes are the only way to redistribute wealth but doesn't dare say it. The hatred that the wealthy harbor against paying taxes is so extreme that it approaches something like religious fervor. He might not last for five minutes as CEO of Goldman Sachs if he so much as breathed support for taxes. The company would risk becoming a leper in the eyes of their customers and he himself might not be invited to any more parties, ever.

Blankfein is right to be worried about what will happen as the concentration of wealth continues unabated. It augurs ill for the country, for his children, and for pretty much everything he cares about and believes in. But he needs to take the next step and lend his support to a sensible tax policy. He should at least get behind the "Buffet Rule", Warren Buffet's proposal for a 30% tax on income over $1 million. There's no doubt though that it would take a bit of courage. The blow-back would be fierce.

Marx vs. Ayn Rand: The French Wealth Tax

In a previous post, I suggested that any country, for example Kiribati, could impose a wealth tax on individuals even if they don't live in that country. France already has a wealth tax which it imposes on its citizens, but why couldn't it be extended to non-citizens? I've tried to do a little on-line research and I can't find anything that prevents it from being applied to persons in other countries even in its current form. I'm certainly not an expert in this field of law, though, and it would take a lot more research than I'm willing or able to do to determine if any changes in law would be needed, or if it's simply a question of the government of France mustering the will to try to apply it to non-residents.

Nothing could be more "un-American" than a country applying its tax to foreigners. The American Revolution was fought in large part over the issue of "taxation without representation" because the British Parliament had imposed taxes on the American colonies but colonists were not allowed to vote for Parliament. So one possible objection to imposing the wealth tax on foreigners could be that they do not have a voice in the government that is imposing the tax. But despite the prominence of "taxation without representation" as a pretext for the American Revolution, the United States doesn't exactly follow the principle that people who are taxed should have a voice in government. Persons with permanent resident status in the U.S. are not citizens and cannot vote but are taxed the same as citizens.

This objection to application of the French wealth tax to foreigners is easily overcome, however, if France were willing to grant citizenship to anyone who pays the tax. France has its share of xenophobes, of course, but it's difficult for me to see any good reason why a country should withhold citizenship from anyone subject to the wealth tax. It kicks in at about US$1 million of net worth so it's not like the country is in danger of being overrun by immigrants who will be a burden to society.

France is the country that produced Thomas Piketty, the economist who has become something of a superstar to those who believe that allowing unchecked wealth accumulation is dangerous and unwise. By seeking to apply its wealth tax to persons outside its borders, that country could take a bold step to ensure that there is no "Galt's Gulch" anywhere on the planet where the uber-wealthy can escape appropriate taxation.

Marx vs. Ayn Rand: A Floating Galt's Gulch?

In Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged", Galt's Gulch is the place in the Colorado mountains where America's innovators, disgusted with government regulation, retreat from the world, resulting in apocalyptic economic collapse. But as this article reveals, it's not to the mountains that they're planning to escape, but to the sea.  It's called "seasteading", the creation of manufactured sovereign island nations in international waters to be populated by silicon valley libertarians. An organization called "The Seasteading Institute" promotes the concept.

The idea is to escape stifling government regulation. But wait, what do people like these silicon valley innovators actually do when they have the chance to create their own micro-environment, in condo developments and gated communities for example? Do they welcome non-conformists with open arms? Not exactly. What they actually do in such cases is impose increased regulation far beyond what government imposes. If you don't believe me, try starting a garage-based business in a gated community and see what happens. You'll be fined, restraining-ordered, and pretty much driven out of Dodge. It's highly ironic that some of the most famous silicon valley mega-stars started in garages in middle class neighborhoods, but once they struck gold, these same people moved to highly regulated communities that prohibit the very thing that enabled them to get started.

These so-called seasteads would inevitably suffer the same fate. Messy home-based start-ups would not be tolerated, nor any sort of real nonconformity. In fact, many creative types these days are gravitating to places that are anathema to libertarians: Boston and New York City. Supposedly suffering from stifling taxation and over-regulation, these cities are actually highly tolerant of disruptive innovators, especially immigrants. Compared to them, floating islands founded by silicon valley billionaires would be as dull and insipid as Palm Beach, hardly the sort of places to attract the brilliant nonconformists they themselves used to be. What everyone forgets is just this: the billionaire innovators, when they started, were poor. They didn't start out rich.

Floating enclaves created "of the rich, by the rich and for the rich" are unlikely to lead to anything even remotely interesting.

Marx vs. Ayn Rand: A Hyperloopy Tax Idea

In my previous post, I talked about Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and the heated debate it has incited over the rapidly increasing disparity in wealth between the wealthiest 1%, who own one-third of everything, and the rest of us, and how that may end up "killing the goose that lays the golden egg" for everyone, the wealthy included. This article in today's "Bloomberg Businessweek" contains a good review of the debate and concludes with the very valid point that, in the modern world, it's a practical impossibility to tax the rich to any significant degree due to the mobility of their wealth and the political power they wield.

So I have a tax idea that is truly worthy of the title of this blog--a truly "hyperloopy" idea. You may not be aware that the United States is among the small number of countries that impose income tax on their citizens and residents even though they may no longer live or work in the U.S. Well, you can take that a step further. The United States, or any country for that matter, can impose any tax it wants on any person who resides anywhere in the world on any basis and for any reason, even though that person has never been a citizen of the taxing country, and even if that person has never resided in that country nor in fact ever had anything whatever to do with that country. The Independent and Sovereign Republic of Kiribati, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, for example, may perfectly well pass a law imposing a tax of 1% per year on assets exceeding, say, 100 million dollars, owned by any person anywhere in the world, whether or not they have ever heard of Kiribati let alone so much as made a phone call to anyone there. There is no international law that prevents it.

Of course Kiribati wouldn't get very far trying to collect such a tax unless a wealthy person had the misfortune to land in that country unawares. If more important countries started adopting such taxes, though, things could start to happen. Tit-for-tat taxes by one country on another country's citizens would be resolved by agreeing to tax treaties, which is exactly the endgame that's needed in order to tax the uber-wealthy. In fairness, a credit should be allowed against such a tax for all other taxes paid by the individual to any jurisdiction, but it would guarantee that the wealthy would pay at least 1% per year of their assets in taxes, which, if I understand Piketty correctly, is just the amount of taxation needed to prevent catastrophic accumulations of wealth.

Marx vs. Ayn Rand

A new book by French economist Thomas Piketty, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", has created a sensation and incited renewed debate over Ayn Rand's philosophy of radical capitalism, which is the prevailing economic philosophy in the U.S. Radical capitalism rejects any sort of social or economic engineering by government, preferring to leave such matters entirely in the hands of private corporations. In Ayn Rand's most famous work, the novel "Atlas Shrugged", the wealthy, the "job creators", are depicted as so overburdened by government that they "drop out", resulting in economic collapse.  Piketty's view, on the other hand, is essentially Marxist, which holds that unregulated capitalism leads inevitably to extreme wealth inequality, social instability and war.

Both Marxism and radical capitalism seem to be gross oversimplifications. In "The Communist Manifesto", Marx and Engels argue convincingly that unrestrained capitalism cannot but lead to universal misery, then conclude that communism is the only solution. Communism of course is not the only solution, and was in fact very nearly the worst possible solution, as the utter failure of that grand experiment in state ownership of industry has proven very convincingly. But radical capitalism seems to suffer from the inverse error--the assumption that the uber-wealthy are so important to the world economy and so over-sensitive that the only solution is to coddle and pander to them to prevent them from running away and leaving the rest of us to suffer the consequences of our supposed laziness and stupidity.

The first question that comes to mind is this: run away to where? The wealthy depend for their happiness as much as the rest of us on the efficient functioning of the world as a whole. There is simply no castle on a mountaintop anywhere on the planet that a wealthy person can escape to and live in blissful isolation from the consequences of economic apocalypse. But consider the other question: what would happen if the wealthy did stop managing their assets? In the U.S., the wealthiest 1% (some 3 million people) own about one-third of all U.S. assets. Mostly they are passive investors, leaving others to make the day-to-day management decisions. Let's say that they all got fed up, sold those assets and went to live on mountaintops. Would the economy really collapse? Of course not. It's giving the wealthy much too much credit to say that global disaster would be the inevitable consequence of losing their supposed business acumen. They don't make many business decisions themselves. They have professionals who decide what to invest in. So to accept Ayn Rand's view of radical capitalism, you have to believe that the global economy depends on the top 1% making good decisions about which investment advisers to trust. The idea that these people are in some sense "running a business" is a romantic myth. Almost none of them run businesses in the sense that most of us understand it--deciding what to do and how to do it. Who does run the business of America? The answer: most of the rest of us.

The real crime of rising wealth inequality, though, is that it's inefficient, which means that there is less total wealth than there should be. This is a double whammy for the rest of us. Not only are the wealthy taking more and more, but the pie is actually getting smaller, leaving ever smaller crumbs for everyone else. A rising tide would indeed lift all boats, but as a result of rising inequality, the tide is going out.

Wealth inequality leads to inefficient allocation of capital because the wealthy are irrationally conservative when deciding how to invest. If you have a billion dollars, rationally speaking you ought to be willing to invest some of that in risky ventures, because if things go badly and you end up with just 500 million left, you can probably still get by OK on that. In fact, the wealthy are very much more afraid of losing their money than most of us and so are extremely conservative about investing it. (The one exception I can think of is Elon Musk, but he's very much the exception.) The riskiest investments, which are also the ones that produce the greatest growth and employment, are mostly made by people with quite ordinary levels of wealth, people who are not yet wealthy but want to be. Because growing income inequality squeezes out these upper-middle-class investors, that powerful engine of growth gets stalled. Add to that the fact that, relatively speaking, the wealthy save more and spend less of their wealth than the rest of us, and the result is low rates of growth.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid. Whether you are in the top 1%, the bottom 1%, or anywhere in between, extreme wealth inequality is hazardous to your health.

Open Letter to Elon Musk

This is an open letter to Elon Musk, whose "hyperloop" idea is the inspiration for this blog.

Hire me!

I've applied to work as "Front End Architect" with SpaceX, the private space launch company founded by Musk that has successfully designed, built and launched their own rocket system, the Falcon 9, "from the ground up".

We happened to be at Kennedy Space Center for a launch last March, a stopover on our cruise to the Bahamas. (The Apollo/Saturn V Center is awesome by the way and worth the trip.) It's the only launch I've ever seen, despite suffering from bouts of space fanaticism, off and on, since watching Disney's "Man in Space" series in the 1950s. (It's on YouTube; search "disneyland man in space". It's still the best educational film on space travel despite being 100% white male and possibly even racist, but that can be a teachable moment too.)

"Tomorrowland" has become "Todayland", but the romanticism of space still infects me. When I got laid off from my job maintaining investment portfolio accounting software, I couldn't help but think of SpaceX.

The space program has always been controversial. From the beginning, serious people questioned whether it's what we ought to be doing with our time and money and focus, and, in general, whether technology is a good thing at all. The Amish may be the happiest people on the planet, but in my heart of hearts, I don't want to be Amish. I want to soar. And it's relative. Most of what we do for a living is not more worthy than space exploration. That's certainly been true in my case.

Is space exploration ethical? Technology can help connect us. Something like a third of U.S. marriages now get started on the Internet. It can also be a kind of escapism that distracts us from what's important. In the end, it's like everything else. It's what we make of it. It's not the answer to everything and it's not the apocalypse. It's just part of the work of humanity. Probably we can't not do it and it's better to focus on how we do it.

SpaceX, from all I can tell, does it well. Their flights are amazingly cheap. Cheaper is almost always better for the environment. If you spend less you're causing less damage to the planet, with some exceptions of course. Money saved going into space can go to other important needs.

But there's another, possibly more important reason that I'm attracted to SpaceX. It seems to me that in the 40s, 50s and 60s we discovered how to manage complex systems, then forgot how to do it, and SpaceX seems to have re-discovered it. It's important that we know how to do that. Probably the happiness of our children and their children and their children's children depends on it. I would like to contribute to that with whatever I have left go give.

FreedomPop - Hide from the Govm'nt, or Not

In the news--a phone called FreedomPop for $189 that's supposedly secure against government spying.

Two things I have to say about that:

1.  It's illegal in the U.S. to maintain a communications system that government agencies cannot tap into. All communications providers are required by law to maintain a technical means for the government to know who is communicating with whom and to record or listen in on communications.

2.  If I were at the NSA, I would secretly sponsor a web site called nsa.cant.hack.this.site.com which would presumably attract a crowd of terrorists, tax cheats, spies, fraudsters, drug dealers, bitcoinsters, child pornographers, investment bankers, cheating husbands, socialists, and anyone else the government ought to be keeping track of. It would make things so much easier because they wouldn't have to go looking for these people and wouldn't have to waste all that time and energy trying to hack into systems. To make it convincing, NSA would orchestrate a big fuss about how awful it is that they can't hack the site and just wait for the baddies to come to them. It's impossible to know whether such a site is being sponsored by the NSA or not. Impossible. In fact, the more it's hyped, the more news there is about how bad it is for the government, the more likely it is to be a front for one or another spy agency.

So what does it take to really hide from the NSA? Here are a few things to keep in mind.

- Don't use Microsoft Windows for anything. It can't be made secure no matter what you do, period.

- Use the smallest, simplest hardware possible, Raspberry Pi for example. Make it tamper-evident, for example by giving it a custom paint job.

- Use only the Linux kernel and the absolute minimum Linux add-ons. Get the software from multiple sources and make sure they're identical and of course verify checksums from multiple sources via multiple connections from different computers and different internet providers.

- Write the rest of the software yourself. You really can't trust software you get from anyone else. One of the Snowden revelations is that NSA has been planting programmers to introduce security holes into open source software.

- Use XOR encryption. It's simple and you can easily program it yourself. If the key is truly random and is at least as long as the message, the result is a one-time pad, which is unbreakable even in theory. Use 3 or more different makes and models of USB hardware random generators in combination to generate the key and test the generated keys for randomness. This is really hard to do properly. You'll need to study it and become expert at this.

- Use low-tech key exchange, physical rather than telecommunications delivery. If not in person, then use tamper-evident packaging and you'll need one-time-use code words to verify authenticity.

- Don't buy via mail order if you can possibly avoid it. If the government is already on to you, everything you get in the mail will be pre-hacked. Buy as much as possible from stores you don't normally visit.

- You need to hide who you are communicating with and the fact that you are communicating at all. This is called steganography. This means that you can't use any centralized servers but need to communicate one-to-one only, and you need to use library or internet cafe or hacking into poorly secured internet connections, rather than doing it from home or work. It's terribly difficult to do and tedious and awkward but absolutely necessary if you want to be truly invisible.

It's pretty unlikely you're bad enough to justify doing all this. There are some things you can do though to make it at least a little bit more difficult for the NSA.

- Minimize unnecessary communication of whatever it is you feel you need to keep secret. It's really difficult to make sense of communications without context and 99% of what we say is redundant and unnecessary.

- Maximize unimportant communication with both important people and unimportant people. It makes it a little more difficult for the NSA to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

- To foil automated computer scans of your communications, communicate via Skype and hold up written messages to the camera while you're talking, preferably in handwritten script rather than printed. Better yet, learn sign language and sign while Skyping. (Your deaf friends will appreciate it too.) I'd be surprised if NSA have got this covered yet, though maybe they will after reading this blog. Probably they're the only ones who read my blog.

But do you really care? Does privacy have any real value to you? To paraphrase Dr. Strangelove: Stop worrying and learn to love the NSA!

The American Flag: Stars a' Poppin'!

Finally, a topic worthy of the title of this blog.

It's called "Six Californias". It's an initiative sponsored by Silicon Valley billionaire Tim Draper, and recently approved by the California Secretary of State, to split California into six separate states. Call it "government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich". (Don't try to find Tim Draper in Wikipedia. His page is blocked because a claim of copyright violation has been filed against it.)

Well, OK.  It's a free country, for billionaires. And anyway "class warfare" is a losing strategy. Just ask Mitt Romney what happened after his 47% speech. There are plenty of other reasons to question the sanity of this initiative, though.

If successful, California will have twelve U.S. Senators rather than just two, greatly increasing the political influence of Californians at the expense of the other states.

The initiative assumes that other states will take this lying down.

They won't.

New York will up the ante, splitting itself into at least twelve states with twenty-four U.S. Senators. Rhode Island will split itself into at least 3, if not more. Bottom line: at least 500 states rather than the current 50, maybe more.  Not only does each state get 2 U.S. Senators, but every state has at least one U.S. Representative, regardless of population. So the Senate would have 1,000 members or more and the House would have at least 3,000.

Each state would have a Governor, and other state offices, and a state legislature. Think of it: I could probably have a shot at being elected Governor of a state! Getting a seat in the state legislature would be easier than getting on the city council. With such an explosion of state government officials, the unemployment rate would fall to zero. Everyone would at least be guaranteed a job in state government.

Actually, I'm starting to warm to this idea.

The newly created states will need to apply for admission to the Union. Some might not even apply, in which case they would become U.S. territories, like Guam. Some might be rejected if admitting them would upset the balance of power or otherwise offend someone important.

This is chaos and it wouldn't last. Finally, everyone would be exhausted and would sit down and work out a Grand Bargain. We would go back to having fewer states, but this time, both houses of Congress would be elected strictly on the basis of population.

It's called "the law of unintended consequences".

Now I'm really liking this idea.

Go, Tim!

The Climate Emergency

I've lived for 65 years.  I've seen that:

Conservatives said that civil rights laws would be a disaster for America. They turned out to be wrong.

Conservatives said that pollution laws would be a disaster for America. They turned out to be wrong.

Conservatives said that fuel efficiency laws would be a disaster for America. They turned out to be wrong.

Conservatives said that auto safety laws would be a disaster for America. They turned out to be wrong.

Now, conservatives say that climate laws will be a disaster for America--"cutting off our arms and legs" is how Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Vice Chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, put it on Meet the Press this morning.

They are are wrong again.

Climate change is a global emergency.  It brings to mind two prior global emergencies: World War II and the Y2K computer bug.

During World War II, America, belatedly, recognized the emergency and entered the war against fascism. In many ways the Allies' conduct of the war was riddled with waste and blunders. There was broad consensus, though, (there was a lot of propaganda, of course) that it was an emergency. The democracies (together with Russia) prevailed. No one today doubts that it was an emergency, but before Pearl Harbor, the country was very divided about the necessity of entering the war.

What will be our climate change Pearl Harbor, that will galvanize our attention and our resolve to deal with the emergency? Are we capable of acting before a sufficiently large catastrophe turns our daydream of limitless consumption into a nightmare for some large population of unlucky victims?

Yes we are. The history of the Y2K bug shows the way.

In case you've forgotten, the Y2K bug was an emergency created by the fact that almost none of the computer hardware and software created in the 20th Century would work correctly for dates in the 21st Century. Most of the problems would be small, but engineers who studied the problem recognized that the impact of a vast number of small problems occurring all at once all over the world might well overwhelm our ability to deal with them and create economic and financial chaos. We would be "pecked to death by ducks" as the saying goes.

A massive international effort was undertaken.  Virtually all governments and major businesses mobilized to confront the emergency.  An estimated $300 billion was spent fixing the problem.  Was a lot of that wasted? Yes, of course. It's really difficult, maybe impossible, to confront an emergency without a really shocking amount of waste.

We did a good job though. The 21st Century arrived and there was virtually no disruption from the Y2K bug. In fact, we did such a good job that a lot of people started to doubt whether the problem was ever "real" in the first place or just some fantastic conspiracy dreamed up by computer programmers to make work for themselves. I was involved in it, and I can tell you, it was real. The thing is, we saw a crisis, we mobilized, we solved it. Veni, vidi, vici. It may be the first time in human history that the whole human race mobilized to successfully avert what would probably have amounted to a global disaster.

The first step is to recognize and accept that it's an emergency, as we did in the case of Y2K. What if there had been Y2K deniers? There weren't, or they were marginalized at least. What if they had stopped or impeded the global effort to confront the crisis? You don't know, is the thing. You're on a car trip, and you decide to take a longer route to avoid a dangerous, winding mountain road. You'll never know if you saved yourself from driving off a cliff. That doesn't mean you were wrong. "Uneventful" is the goal in that case.

Thoughtful persons have a solemn responsibility to confront the deniers and take every opportunity to get the word out that the climate emergency is real, and that we need to take the longer, safer route to the future rather than risk finding out if the shortcut is going to work out for us or not.

You wear seatbelts. You use child safety seats. You buy cars with airbags. You don't drive on bald tires. You don't drink the Kool-Aid if the safety seal is broken. So let it be known in every way you can that you don't want to play demolition derby with the future of our planet. Most of our children and grandchildren will not get a chance to inhabit another.