Social security - why is GWB ignoring the obvious solution?

Some of my child-free (that opposed to child-less) friends will scream, but it has to be said: why is George Bush ignoring the obvious, pro-life solution to his supposed "social security crisis"? That is, wait for it... more babies. I mean, the Christian Right should be asking him why he is pushing some ill-defined massively expensive financial solution involving money changers, debt, fund pushers and intangible results when all they have to do is get down and procreate?

It's not that I believe rampant procreation is the right solution (basically I think its the last thing we need), I'm firmly behind adjusting taxes, payments, benefits and doing some good old fashioned borrowing to keep the fund on an even keel until demographics sort themselves out. But I am wondering why we're not hearing a chorous of "lets boom like its the sixties" from Bush's supposedly pro-life base that he keeps pandering to at every opportunity.

One other alternative would be massive immigation - say add twenty million extra working age, social security paying immigrants. If I recall correctly the US already has about ten million of them under the radar not paying taxes at the moment, if it would only just legalize them and bring in a few more...

Friends don't let friends...

Friends don't let friends watch "Fox News". Just pop around to their house and tap the Fox News channel blocker into their cable feed while they are not looking. Check the comments on the product site for a laugh - Fox actually want the people who are selling the blocker to appear on the O'Reilly Factor.

Must read reportage

Thanks to Hateful Things for pointing me to "Confessions of a Car Salesman". It is a rolling epic in nine parts that tells the story of one of their writers who went under cover for a month to be a car salesman. You'll laugh, you'll cry and most of all you'll be better armed next time you're at the car dealership waiting to be fleeced.

Halliburton does Babylon

Oy, Halliburton is at it again... landing helicopters on the Ishtar Gate and generally turning Babylon into a military base, that's like building a Wal-Mart in Vatican City.

Voting with your feet: WalMart and WarMart

Today I listened to radio show that was discussing the recent California court decision that basically said, environmental impact reports must consider the economic impact of new development. It also came down against doing two developments simultaneously and having impact reports for each that do not consider the other.

Actually for an public radio show talking about WalMart and big-box development in general it was surprisingly calm and balance, even the attorney who represents big-box stores seemed to have her leash on. In fact I've heard Ms. Shimco represent retail developers in real life in a local situation and she was being very calm and restrained in her comments, as was the economics professor from San Francisco.

One comment that came up time and time again was "well if you don't like WalMart or any other retailer then they should just vote with their feet and not shop there". As they say, no one is forcing people to shop at WalMart. Well that's true up to a point - right up to the point where there are no other stores to shop at and you have to shop at WalMart or move somewhere else. Which brings one to the second objection to saying people should vote with their feet: it assumes a well informed voting population. Basic economics says people make "the economic choice" but they do so with the information they have at hand. What if there are hidden externalities that they don't know about?

On a different aspect of "voting with their feet" it seems American men and women are failing to point their feet in the direction of the local Armed Forces recruiting center. Why not? Well naturally Americans are just making the economic choice again since many, if not most recruits join primarily for financial reasons. Now they are starting to realize there are a few hidden costs to signing up - like maybe actually being put in harms way and dying. That's not going to do much good for your future income potential. Or perhaps realizing that the "seeing the world" promise isn't quite ringing so true any more when all you're likely to see is the inside of a Hummer for the next two years.

I don't blame people for making the economic choice, but just remember when the supply of willing and able has run out there are interventionists in high places with one word on their minds and a big stick behind their backs. Does anyone feel the draft?

Reach for the stars - the American way

I love obscure statistics but I think many people just read or rattle off numbers without any comprehension of what they mean. So when I was perusing the latest figures from the Beureau of Transportation, ostensibly to find out how many people drive cars in the USA (answer: 191 million license holders) one figure stuck in my mind:

In 2003 American drivers drove an estimate total of 2,880,000 million miles.

The first time I read that figure I incorrectly translated the multiplier to mean a total of 2.88 billion miles, but no, its 2.88 trillion miles and that's a very long way, in fact it seemed almost astronomical! A quick trip to Google proved that yes indeed it is astronomical: 2.88 trillion miles is 0.49 light years. That's about a tenth of the way to the nearest star, Alpha Centuri which is 4.4 light years away. Talk about reaching for the stars - Americans are driving themselves to them!

Note that 2003 was a vehicle miles record for the USA, 3% up on the 2000 figure, 34% up on the 1990 figure, 89% up on the 1980 figure, 160% up on the 1970 figure and a staggering 300% more than the 1960 figure. Now isn't that what you call progress? These figures tie in nicely with a great graph from the Senate energy bill that shows historical and predicted oil consumption (see below) with transportation demand and future output from the ANWR drilling. When you look at that you'll realize what a teeny tiny impact digging up ANWR will have and what a massive impact our driving habits have. By 2020 if we'd all just drive 5% less, or our cars used 5% less gas ANWR drilling would be rendered completely superfluous.

Perhaps it is time for everyone to check out The End of Suburbia and get a clue as to what all those miles we're driving mean for society.

Sorry!

I confess, I come from a sorry nation. And I'll hasten to add I mean I come from a nation that likes to say "sorry" not a sorry-assed nation (although many Americans might think and say otherwise about Britain when they feel sufficiently peeved at their ancestors old-aged petulance). Anyway, the reason I mention it was last week I was listen to some commentary on a suggestion made in Washington on how to ease the medical lawsuit problem in the USA.

The solution was simple - just encourage doctors to admit and apologize for their mistakes. Yes, doctors do make mistakes, they are after all only human (although Erin over at Chicken or Beef will tell us some believe they can walk on water and perform other miracles). Currently when doctors make mistakes they are trained, perhaps even required, to deny any wrong doing and frequently break off all contact with the patient or the patients relatives. The assumption is that a lawsuit will be forthcoming and you don't want to be opening your mouth and saying anything as stupid as "oopsy, I made a mistake - my bad" because you know, that's just asking for a lawsuit.

However the rationale behind the admit and apologize theory is that it is precisely doctors refusal to admit any blame, and their willingness to run away from an awkward situation that infuriates patients and relatives who are on the receiving end. If the doctor can show some humility and stay involved in the patient treatment process after the fact then perhaps the instinct to sue until you're blue can be appeased.

They question is, will it work?

Well it seems those in the know in Washington seemed to think this was just not going to fly. You see what we need is more legislation, more paper work, more limits, more legal fees. Yes, just solve the problems of legal costs with more legal papering over the cracks...

From my perspective sorry goes a long way. Not in the face of willful negligence of course, but for an honest mistake or accident, one that is learned from and not repeated ad-infinitum (see "The Fog of War") what can you do? However that's just my quaint perspective on the problem because as I mentioned before, I come from a sorry nation. From the day I arrived in the USA the fear of litigation was rammed down my throats - everyone was quick to instruct me on how not to say anything, not anything, if I got in an accident. "Don't apologize!", they would say, "that implies guilt which implies blame and may be used in evidence..." etc. etc.

As an empath who would normally be quick to apologize even for other peoples mistakes that came as a hard lesson but after about 10 years my instinct to apologize has mostly been wrung out of me. Was that a good thing? Hardly I would say. From my memories of that sorry nation I came from I would say life in an apologetic attitude that may suffer the occasional empty sorry is a better than that in a nation of fear of litigation that rarely if ever offers a true and sincere apology.

Buy, sell, up, down... in the end its only round and round

So the Federal Reserve Bank is going to raise interest rates again. Yippi-kai-o. Or not as the case may be. I'm going to be reading the news reports tomorrow to see if any of the mainstream new sources even hint at the real reason interests rates are going up - to prop up the sagging dollar. For the last few months the euro and pound have maintained comfortably high levels against the formerly mighty greenback. Furthermore we've had a few currency exchange scares over rumours, and only rumours mind you, that the big overseas dollar holders might be about to cash in their chips.

It turns out that China has accumulated over $800 billion in dollar reserves. My what a dent in our economy that would make if they started dumping it all. But they wont - or at least not yet since it would hurt considerably too. However that doesn't mean they can't stop investing, and the same appplies all over the world. Who would want to invest in Team USA right now?

When virtually every other currency is doing quite nicely thank you very much against the dollar wouldn't you just want to cut and run? But all the time the USA is buying scads of overseas goods and services with its dollars which means somone must be taking those dollars off our hands in exchange for the foreign currencies we need - like Euros. Not forgetting to mention our biggest problem - deficit spending which means getting people to loan us even more money.

So more healthy increases in the dollar interest rate will be needed to keep people interested in taking the dollar off our hands. And recent small decline in Euro and Pound values is nicely explained by anticipation of the rise in dollar rates. In a week or two when the excitment of a Fed rate hike has worked its way out of the system those currencies will both be off to the races again and guess what... we'll be looking at another rate hike, and another, and another. The question is will all the rate hikes eventually cause inflation? At my economics class they told us about cost-push and demand-pull inflation, but they never talked about deficit driven inflation. It seems to me if the economy isn't grown and the idiots in charge are spending like crazy but not kick starting the economy then all the high interest rates will just stiffle the economy even more. If costs rise due to higher borrowing costs then I think that was what was known as stagflation, something that haunted the US economy back in the good old 1970's.

Why does radio need advertising anyway?

When a movie contains a product placement the movie company gets paid by that company, when a TV channel plays a commercial for a product they get paid by that company. So someone explain this to me - when a radio station plays music by a band its essentially providing free publicity for that band and free advertising for the bands record label. So why don't radio stations get paid by record companies every time they play music?

Instead we have this bizarre state of affairs where they have to pay the record companies to pay music. WTF?

Maybe once apon a time people didn't actually have much music at home, most of their music consumption was from the radio so radio was providing the primary performance medium for music. But that's hardly true these days, increasingly most people are buying their music in CDs or online and listen to it at their leisure. Radio has just become a way to hear the latest and greatest output (usually over and over again), and occasionally catch some golden oldies from your youth - that perhaps now you're middle aged and bored you'll go and buy on CD or iTunes since you no longer have a tape player to play all those tapes you used to haul around in the car (and in any case they are most likely beyond replay anyway).

If radio isn't such a stimulus for music sales why are record companies always so enthusiastic to get airplay for their latest and greatest progeny? And why are all those services that tell you what's playing on the radio so you can go buy it so popular too? In England you can even hold your phone up to the radio and it'll tell you what the band is and give you the opportunity to buy it then and there!

I don't think any musician now would seriously suggest that radio play of tracks is dramatically harming its revenue. Its like RIAA saying that someone who downloads an album to sample it before buying (because until the new Napster came along you couldn't do that anywhere else) is robbing them of one CDs worth of revenue. Get over it guys, that person would never have bought the CD in the first place.

So, seriously, I think radio stations should all stop playing any music for a week and let RIAA get an idea of the true positive impact radio play is having on their sales. Then they can put out their hands and get paid for playing music the radio and providing all that music advertising. Then they could just ditch all the regular product commercials, not have to suck up to all those product companies and play even more money making music slots. Oh, I forgot, doesn't ClearChannel own all the radio stations now anyway and I expect ClearChannel and RIAA are pretty much in each others pockets so that would never happen

Just another brick in the Wal*Mart

In case you hadn't heard, the Canadian Wal-Mart store that I previously reported as being on the verge of unionizing actually did, only to be told Wal-Mart is going to shut the store down. Wal-Mart claims its because the store is not profitable although its not clear if this was before or after hiring the extra 30 or more employees the union thinks is necessary.

Either way Wal-Mart's action has not been good for its already tarnished image and prompted them to run full page ads in several Canadian papers claiming that employees are the cornerstone of the company. If that is so why is it then that many States are finding they are footing a very heavy bill to provide healthcare for Wal-Mart's employees? Wal-Mart does provide medical benefits but only pays for 52% of the premium - something that isn't going to fly for you average mother with a family working at their stores making close to minimum wage.

In the meantime Wal-Mart just squared away $19 billion in profit last year (including the $10 billion they ploughed back into building new stores). Even with 1,500,000 employees worldwide they could easily fork over several thousand each to pay for the best healthcare plan possible and have billions and billions left in the bank. Indeed $19 billion represents a profit of over $12,000 per employee - heck they could even give all their employees a raise and an extra week of vacation per year...

If you'd like some more information on the antics of the worlds biggest, baddest retailer click on the bumper sticker below.

Thom Hartmann on "History repeats"

I just read an interesting article called When Democracy Failed - 2005 by Thom Hartmann. In it Hartmann re-tells how Hitler rose to power on the back of fear of terrorism, corporate welfare, propaganda and media control, pre-emptive strikes against other nations, and painting all dissenters as unpatriotic and un-German.

The process was kicked off by an act of terrorism on February 27th 1933 - the firebombing of the German parliament building (Reichstag) by Marinus van der Lubbe. Van der Lubbe confessed to the crime under torture, and was tried with four communists who were acquitted. Van der Lubbe was executed by beheading January 10th 1934.

Interestingly there is a "2/27 Hitler knew" conspiracy theory (cf. the "9/11 Bush Knew" theory) about the events claiming the Reichstag fire was actually set by agents working for Hermann Göring and that Lubbe and the rest were set up. Whether or not they were, the rest, as they say, is history. As Hartmann points out, at the moment it is we the people who now have the choice of letting history repeat or not.

Privacy schmivacy!

To follow up my post about the recent security breaches at T-Mobile and ChoicePoint there is an article from Wired that dishes the dirt on the T-Mobile breach. Apparently the security breach at T-Mobile affected at least 400 people who's information was extracted using a WebLogic server security flaw. The flaw that was announced by BEA (who make the WebLogic server) as a high severity problem along with a patch to fix it March 2003. The hacker was able to exploit the flaw for a year before being arrested in October 2004, a full 18 months after WebLogic had posted the patch for the problem. By which time he'd already extracted all kinds of private information including social security numbers and passwords from the T-Mobile databases, this information was made available for sale online by the hacker. Just what where they doing storing unencrypted passwords in their database? Duh!

At this point it is not clear if the hack on Paris halting T-Mobile account exploited the same flaw, but regardless it seems clear that all those "privacy" policies that companies send their customers aren't worth the paper they are written on. A company can say all the warm and fuzzy things it wants to about how carefully it will guard your private information, but if they don't follow even the most basic procedures for keeping websites secure then its going to be open season on your "private" information. For a company like T-Mobile to leave a publicised high risk security flaw unpatched for 18 months, or even for one month, well its is just plain negligence - heads should roll and fines should be imposed on them.

That's the problem with all these privacy rules, none of them really have much bite. Even with the ChoicePoint situation where the law forced them to publicize their breach there is no serious consequence for them. Sure they get egg on their face and have to field some bad PR and a few civil suits. But ultimately there are no punitive measures taken, no license to store private data is revoked, and no audit to ensure the source of the problem has been corrected.

What I suggest is that any organization storing personal information on a website should be licensed, regularly audited and held fully responsible for the privacy of that information. Like the captain of a ship, "responsible" means there will be consequences if privacy compromised. So if it can be shown that company was negligent in guarding the privacy of its customer information then their license should be revoked and all data they hold should be made completely inaccessible from any website, by any means. That means the likes of T-Mobile would be forced to shut down their websites and loose a hugely popular and convenient feature of their service. T-Mobile could probably muddle by with only phone and snail-mail based customer service, but for a company like Amazon it would basically mean the end of their company.

Notice I said the company would have to be shown to be negligent, that's usually a pretty high bar to prove. Being responsible for a problem is one thing and usually quite easy to prove beyond reasonable doubt, but for example, even Union Carbide has not yet been proved negligent in the Bhopal incident. So if T-Mobile area are hacked because of a flaw in someone else's technology that they didn't know about that's probably not negligent. If they are hacked the day after a security flaw is published, that's also probably not negligent. If they systematically or consistently fail to implement security policies to guard information then that's quite likely a long way towards provable negligence.

But the severe consequences of being proved negligent (in a court of law) would mean a company would do everything they could do to avoid falling foul of. And to avoid the problem of corporations with how shall I put it - "slippery shoulders" (aka. high paid lawyers and "connections") - perhaps some kind of three strikes rule could be used. If a company experiences three breaches where privacy is compromised and is demonstrated to be responsible but not necessarily negligent, then they will loose their license just the same. This is rather like the points system for driving licenses, once the points add up to high away goes your license, no questions asked - just to be safe.

Allen Holub stole my job!

Yeah, yeah, and dingoes ate my baby...

I'm sure you've heard it all before but apparently today I was usurped on my first opportunity to do contract software engineering by one Allen Holub. My fatal mistake was, apparently, to say "Can I let you know tomorrow?". In between then and tomorrow the software rockstar Allen Holub was drafted and apparently took the job. I guess that I, a veritable software jack-of-all-trades shouldn't feel bad that Holub was selected preferentially over me, after all I had all along said I wanted the client to get the right person for the job.

Never mind, I've heard there are still jobs available fixing wind generators over at Altamont pass...

I, Bush - Episode 2 Take 3

Nicely following my topic of people getting screwed by ChoicePoint and probably with no effective recourse comes Just a cost of doing business, an article by Jeff Kaplan. In it Jeff Kaplan points out that Bush's recent bill to restrict class action suits by private citizens has further swung the pendulum of unequal protection in further in the direction of corporations. Bush told us that this bill was necessary to prevent frivilous lawsuits hurting businesses and damaging our economy.

Of course when Bush says "businesses" he is always quick to frame that as "small businesses" of the mom and pop kind. Approximates 80% of all businesses are sole proprietorships or partnerships, the rest are corporations, however 95% of all revenue comes from the big corporations. So while appealing to the "small business sector" Bush manages to appeal the the maximum number of people with the minimum of economic effect. We can all associate with those small guys, well all know a small business and a great number of people own one of some kind.

But the problem is, according to Kaplan recent studies have shown its the corporations, not people and small businesses, who are 160 times more likely to sue, and even worse they are 69% more likely than a regular person to be chastized for launching a frivilous suit.

So, did the Bush bill address frivilous lawsuits by corporations too? Hell no! The truth is by restricting suits by people but not corporations (who actually claim to be people when it suits them) Bush was able to create a lot of noise and smoke without the actual fire that might damage the huge profits made by legal companies that prop up our so called democracy.

And so it came to pass that the people got screwed, and the corporatiosn ruled - again.

A two tiered response to privacy violations?

Does anyone else see not just a slight, but a massive inequity between what happened when Paris Hilton's personal phone information got stolen, and what happened when ChoicePoint managed to give away personal details of not just one, but potentially hundreds of thousands of people?

In one situation we have a bunch of celebrity phone numbers and some happy photo snaps posted on the web. A few celebs get their phones jammed with crank calls and no doubt quickly got a new phone number, big deal. I'm sure that T-Mobile has probably dished out new phones and free T-Mobile service credits to everyone concerned even if, as it is likely to be the case, they weren't to blame for the "hack". So, one emabarassed celebrity who probably wont get anyones phone number given to her again, and a huge amount of press, and bad PR for T-Mobile even though its quite possible she just had a dumb password that someone guessed.

In the other case we have a bogus application to ChoicePoint resulting in the release of names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers and every else the budding identity fraudster needs to steal the identity of thousands of people. And even after the fact, even those who didn't yet get their identity stolen (several hundred already did), the rest and sit back and wait, fingers crossed, that their information isn't out on the web somewhere waiting to suck their bank accounts dry at any moment. No one really nows and quite possibly these people will have to run scared for years before they can think of taking their eye off their credit reports.

So what is the inequity? Well in one case we have the Secret Service involved, looking out for Hilton's back, working with T-Mobile to investigate and shutting down all sites that continue to propogate the information from her mobile. In the other well, the news of the fraud appears to have been buried for almost a year at the request of "federal authorities" in defiance of the California law that required ChoicePoint to notify everyone of the release of their personal information. Now ChoicePoint are just offering a free year of subscription to credit history monitoring services to those 145,000 is has, so far, identified as victims of the fraud. Apart from that little, if anything seems to be done about it and ChoicePoint appears to be washing its hands of the problem.

At least one person has already decided to hit ChoicePoint with a law suit and I can easily expect a class action suit to follow quite prompty, although being a multi-state case it is likely that it would fall fowl of Bush's recent anti-class action bill that forces it to be fought in class-action unfriendly federal courts. Wired News is now indicating they think such suits will fall on deaf ears, as courts have previously dismissed attempts to sue banks that have been duped by identity thieves on the grounds that the victim wasn't a customer of the company they were suing. Maybe that was just a badly presented suit that failed, but it certainly sounds like there should be a case to sue someone when a company that you didn't even ask to be holding your data screws up and hands it over to criminals.

Or is it, that just because we the people are many and not of celebrity status we dont get a personal investigation by the Secret Service, and in general we just get screwed because on average we don't have the time or resources to seek restitution in a court of law.

Repost: Hunter S. Thompson

In honour of the late Hunter S. Thompson who died today I'm reposting this LDTT entry from July 2003. Yesterday I came across the following quote from Hunter S. Thompson. After some investigation I discovered it is from an essay in his latest book "Kingdom of Fear : Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century".

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world--a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us....No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers speak for America today--and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American Character. They are the racists and hate mongers amon us--they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. -Hunter S. Thompson, 2002

The essay in full is here.

Mmmmm mergers

As the news breaks that SBC really is going to buy AT&T its a good time to remember that the break up of AT&T into the baby bells was the last significant use of the Sherman anti-trust act. Since then its been a ever growning tide of merger mania. Throughout the 80's and 90's and now into this century corporations have been going at it like crazy. Many of these acquisitions are dismal flops, unless you happen to be an executive that gets a huge bonus or pay-off or an investment banker or lawyer that gets a fat commission check for making it all happen. After the merger its bad news for the employees and customers, and quite often shareholders. Like a cascade of dominoes merger mania either wrecks a path of destruction and waste, or eventually assimilates enough power to collapse internally from its own size.

When all is said and done there should be room for the little guys to sneak through cracks in the pavement and take reguvenate, just like those pesky mammals did after the dinosaurs all went tits up. But what price must we pay for such a chance at renewal and just how long will it take for corporate America to implode all over again? Maybe it's a good time to refresh our memories with tales of robber barons, railroad tycons, and the implosion of the business world of the thirties. If so then you could do worse than read the interview with Thom Hartmann over at BuzzFlash.

A forking liar

It was good to hear the senate committee put Rice through the wringer these past two days. Well, at least half the committee did so and Senators Boxer, Kerry, and Biden certainly turned on the screws extra tight. If Boxer didn't actually call Rice a forking liar, then she certainly implied it yesterday and again this morning. The best quote of the hearings surely came from Biden when he said "Don't listen to Rumsfeld, he doesn't know what the hell he's doing". Its too bad Boxer couldn't have been so candid.

The rest of the committee were mostly wearing their sycophant hats, patting Rice firmly on the back for having made it through another glass ceiling and congratulating her on her "performance" at the hearing. Never mind her past performance, which had been resoundingly dragged through the mud from whence it came these past two days, lets just rubber stamp her for showing up, knowing her party lines, and putting on a good act.

One thing that occurred to me, while the proceedings were just a rubber stamping affair (since Senators rarely break partisan ranks, and the Dems apparently have lost all their balls - except ironically, Sen. Barbara Boxer) it would have been nice to see such debate surround the appointment of a President. The quality, quantity and depth of questioning exceeded anything we ever saw in the Presidential debates by so much it makes me wonder how we can pay so much attention to questioning the puppets, while ignoring the puppet master in chief? Can anyone imagine George Walker Bush surviving even one day of such questioning without completely melting down and then seizing up in terminally goofy paralysis?

As they say, God bless America, 'coz now one else is going to!

Google echoes real life

Thanks to SEC filings it seems that Google employees are getting a glimpse of who is worth what in their company. Previously limited to the executive level, such disclosures are reaching down to the rank and file Google employees. So now hundreds of the employee planned stock sales are appearing in public and hence lots of Google employees now know at least how much their cubicle buddies are worth. Those recent hires who didn't have years to accumulate generous stock handouts are apparently feeling a little tension from the wealth inequity.

I think someone should go to Google and study this effect in detail, it might provide a fascinating glimpse of how the world at large would be if we all knew the wealth, or lack thereof, of our neighbors. I once had occasion to find out the salary and stock grants of every employee in a company I previously worked for (no I wasn't hacking into the finance computers, it was by legitimate means) and I can tell you it was an "enlightening" experience. Think how society would be if everyone knew the wealth and income of everyone else. I think the stark inequity of wealth and income distribution in this country would be thrown into sharp relief and could wreck some havoc. Yes the statistics are there for all to read should they bother, but if you were confronted with this information day in and day out it might rub it in.

There is an argument frequently made by some people about privacy and disclosure of personal information - that what is the harm in it because if you haven't got anything to hide then you shouldn't have anything to worry about. I wonder then why they isn't applied to information about wealth in this country. Those with most to hide seem most interested in hiding that information, something we are frequently reminded of when the wealthy manage to find their way into top positions that require the most disclosure of financial information. What is driving that desire to disclose as little as possible, do they have something to be ashamed of? Gentlemen, why don't you just revel in your wealth and show the world what good you have put it to??? Yeah, as if... :-)

Broadband == democracy?

I just read an article that claims the US isn't so far behind the rest of the world on broadband roll out. I beg to differ with McCullagh's argument about geographic size, just check where Canada is on the list, however the interesting part is his map of broadband access by Zip code in the USA.

Boy that looks awfully familar to me, wasn't it only a couple of months ago we were all staring dumbfounded at this map of Presidential Election 2004 voting by county?

Okay the maps aren't identical, but it does show a high correlation between broadband access and blue voting... One explanation is obvious - cities have the best broadband access and those danged metropolitan and diverse cities are most likely to vote blue. However another explanation might be that those with broadband get the most diverse news about the country and the world (and of course get the most porn on their screens) and generally appreciate freedom of information and freedom speech the most. So much so that they are willing to vote blue to protect it.

Thank the lord for broadband!