What if TheNew York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

That would seriously suck.

End Times - The Atlantic

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All told, real GDP was expected to fall much more sharply in the first half of 2009 than previously anticipated, before slowly recovering over the remainder of the year...

Real GDP was projected to decline for 2009 as a whole and to rise at a pace slightly above the rate of potential growth in 2010. Amid the weaker outlook for economic activity over the next year, the unemployment rate was likely to rise significantly into 2010, to a level higher than projected at the time of the October 28-29 FOMC meeting.

The disinflationary effects of increased slack... caused the staff to
reduce its forecast for both core and overall PCE inflation. Core inflation was projected to slow considerably in 2009 and then to edge down further in 2010.

The fed doesn't think Ben has created too much liquidity. I wonder if disinflationary is used in order to prevent the word deflation from appearing in print.

fomcminutes20081216.pdf (application/pdf Object)

If you haven't already decided to write off Ayn Rand here is a decent example of why you should. I stumbled upon this passage today being upheld as a maxim of wisdom:

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

That is just about exactly wrong. In my experience, most real political issues are far too complicated to reasonably reduce to two sides, and the extremists, not the moderates, are the ones who are almost always evil. Its easy to invent examples where one side is totally wrong but real life is almost never like that. The passage continues:

The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if, only, by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube..."

This sort of black and white thinking is not offered in the service of truth. It seeks to blank out the truth that moral choices involving real people are complicated, in favor of oversimplified thinking that makes people feel comfortable with their actions. The examples given are transparent straw men, from which the reader is urged to extrapolate to difficult issues. Difficult issues are difficult because they don't fit this simple mold. The truth doesn't care if its on a side.

Why Ayn Rand was a fool...

Population trends point inexorably toward a more dominant U.S. role in a world that will need us more, not less. For the past several years, the U.N. has published a table ranking the world's 12 most populous countries over time. In 1950, six of the top 12 were developed countries. In 2000, only three were. By 2050, only one developed country will remain -- the United States, still in third place. By then, it will be the only country among the top 12 with a historical commitment to democracy, free markets and civil liberties.

The World Won't Be Aging Gracefully. Just the Opposite.

Rational Nation States no longer seek empires, at least in the traditional sense. Conflict in the world today is largely the product of non-state actors. Nearly all of these conflicts involve minority groups who cannot identify with the nation state they are supposedly governed by. Catholics in Northern Ireland and Muslims in Leeds are essentially outsiders in their own land. They fight because they do not fit in.

Israel cannot peacefully exist as a Jewish state anymore than Alabama can peacefully exist as "the place for white people." Furthermore, no "two state" solution is going to work anymore than "separate but equal" worked in Alabama.

You could take the whole territory, including the west bank and gaza, and make it a nation state with the same liberal institutions, and it would work, without terrorism, so long as the place was sold as something that both Arabs and Jews could identify with. That means not having a Star of David on your flag. You have to be a place and not a religion. Your diversity has to be a pillar of your identity and not an asterisk.

They say Presidents are a product of their time. Governance is a bit like IT - Sometimes if you are successful, no one notices, because nothing happened. But if you fail in a massively visible way, people pay attention, and if you can't be held directly responsible for the catastrophe you get to "respond" in full view of everyone. You get to be a hero...

Whats interesting about Canada is that they managed to not have the same sort of violence in the 1970's that they had in Ireland. And it wasn't the heavy hand of martial law that prevented it. It was that they genuinely fought to create a country that wasn't English anymore.

That is what Israel must do. But right now they care more about that Star of David on their flag than they do about not seeing children maimed by explosives. If Canadians had the same attitude about the Union Jack, I think they would be just as fucked right now, and just as entrenched in their attitudes.

Q: These researchers have discussed their desire to maintain secrecy so that the hammer of legal action couldn't be used to prevent publication. Does VeriSign intend to sue these researchers?

A: Security researchers who behave ethically have no reason to fear legal action from VeriSign. Since its inception VeriSign has been one of the world's leading forces for online security, and the company has consistently used its resources and expertise to assist online security's progress. In fact, VeriSign is itself a white-hat security research firm (through our widely respected iDefense Labs), and we understand the concept of "ethical hacking." We're disappointed that these researchers did not share their results with us earlier, but we're happy to report that we have completely mitigated this attack.

Apparently the researchers disclosed to MS and Mozilla but refused to talk to Verisign for fear of preemptive legal action. I have to say that I can't blame them for being skittish. There is plenty of evidence in general that large companies will use their resources to go after security researchers making claims they want to silence. Microsoft and Mozilla are the exceptions. They are among the few companies who really do get security and deal with it very responsibly and professionally. I'm not sure Verisign's association with iDefense puts them in the same category.

The Sitefinder debacle was an absolutely outrageous abuse of power that sort of overshadows any good they might have done in the past. They made it absolutely clear in the midst of that incident that they don't care what technical professionals think about their company. I believe their CEO Stratton Sclavos used the word "zealots" in a news media interview to refer to people who disagreed with their actions. I'm pretty sure a frivolous lawsuit against a handful of "hackers" that has no basis in law would cause a less widespread outcry. If you are willing to do the one there is no reason why you wouldn't do the other.

Sclavos may be gone, but its going to take a hell of a lot more than complaining about not being in the loop before the sort of people he called "zealots" will be willing to trust the company he used to operate.

Tim Callan's SSL Blog - Online Security

The press was the filter. And the press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness.

But the press, of all parties, should have seen that this didn’t give them authority, for the press was supposed to be in the business of going out to find the real authorities and reporting back to what they said.

This blog post is a good example of an ongoing dialog among the twitteratti that echos many of the questions we wrestled with when creating MemeStreams.

I've been thinking that Twitter is in fact solving the problem that MemeStreams sought to solve, moreso than Digg or the blogosphere have... Its the closest thing that has come along.

1. Smart people are using it.

2. Its people focused. You can see who the people you are following follow. Like our Audience and Sources.

3. Its uniform. There is a good chance that a link someone posted to twitter came from one of the twitter feeds they follow. Because you know what they are following and how to parse it, you can find out where things came from. This is different than the blogosphere, where you don't know what people are reading and chances are they are reading sources that post with different formats and software than they use.

4. Like MemeStreams, its a social network based on interest rather than relationship - you can follow anyone and they don't have to follow you back, or even know who the hell you are.

There are some things that you want that it doesn't have, such as automatic source attribution, but what it does have is a lot of people on it, the value of which cannot be overstated. It is also highly apied and programmable.

Twitter may be the most powerful tool that has come along for actual memetic analysis of Internet discussion.

Something interesting is about to happen here. There may be opportunities to create very powerful tools out of this.

Attention + Influence do not equal Authority

Congrats to Rattle and his lovely new bride!!:) Many Best wishes!!

CONGRATS NICK AND YUN!!!!!

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

The associated Slashdot thread includes an alarming post:

Take botulism toxin: the DNA encoding it is well known, and short enough that one could order it directly from a DNA synthesis company.... That entire process could be done with someone with basic college level biology and about $5k... I could produce enough to kill my entire university, starting from scratch, in about 2 weeks, give or take, maybe faster.

If this is correct, significant steps may need to be taken to accelerate the process of developing regulations in this area. Unlike Bill Joy, my preference is a regulatory regime that is focused on controlling access to raw materials and tools, rather than one that focuses on controlling access to information. It remains to be seen whether the former is workable, but Joy's perspective seems to be that this isn't a question worth asking.

The article juxtaposes these experimenters with a voice that seems rather shrill:

Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization, warned that synthetic organisms in the hands of amateurs could escape and cause outbreaks of incurable diseases or unpredictable environmental damage.

ETC Group has the following to say about biotechnology:

ETC group is not fundamentally opposed to genetic engineering, but we have profound concerns about the way it is being foisted upon the world. In the current social, economic and political context, genetic engineering is not safe, and involves unacceptable levels of risk to people and the environment. For ETC group, the fundamental issue is control.

Am I being unreasonable in retranslating that as follows: "We're not opposed to genetic engineering outright, we're just opposed to capitalism and modern liberal democracy, and so we're opposed to any and all genetic engineering while we live under a capitalist/democratic system."

Such perspectives are self-discrediting. Genuine concerns about the risks posed by amateur biology labs aren't going to turn into practical regulations unless they are voiced in a serious way by serious people who are not also interested in destroying the entire social order of the modern world.

There seems to be a vaccum here that is begging to be filled by a voice that is less arrogant that Joy, less partisan than ETC Group, and more urgent that the slowly moving idustry process in the biological materials supply business.

Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home - Yahoo! News