Monthly Archives: November 2017

I would be a bit disappointed in myself if I didn’t make the effort to be fair, so on this thread, here it is:

The Motley Fool wrote a letter to its members that didn’t try to sell a service.

It was just advice, and the best advice it’s been handing out for years. In the face of the robots and High Frequency Traders …

Minute-by-minute stock moves aren’t our game

Our game is played over years. Decades even. Across our Foolish services and across the continents, we’ve demonstrated the power of long-term, patient, business-like investing.

And competing against the billions of dollars supporting HFTs or quantitative shops stacked with PhDs isn’t our idea of winning.

It reminds me of Warren Buffett’s advice about playing a world-class chess champion. “How do you beat Bobby Fischer?” he asked. “You play him at any game but chess. I try to stay in games where I have an edge.”

Like Buffett, your investing edge lies in focusing on your businesses more than your stock prices.

And the letter goes on to extol long-term investing. Much as I said in this post, you can’t beat robots and HFTers at their game – but you can win at your own if it’s long-term investing.

Not that this excuses the blatant manipulation I’ve noted in other discussions, but it’s good to see TMF still remembers their roots.

Former GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has a vision of the future.

And it doesn’t include that monstrous 3 car garage you just built onto the front of your house.

From Automotive News:

It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.

The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.

Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.

The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you’ll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.

On the freeway, it will merge seamlessly into a stream of other modules traveling at 120, 150 mph. The speed doesn’t matter. You have a blending of rail-type with individual transportation.

Then, as you approach your exit, your module will enter deceleration lanes, exit and go to your final destination. You will be billed for the transportation. You will enter your credit card number or your thumbprint or whatever it will be then. The module will take off and go to its collection point, ready for the next person to call.

This might be the culmination of technology, of overpopulation, the consumption of natural resources, the sinking income of the middle-class family, or of the dialogue of how mass transit should occur. Any of these arguments can be at least made well enough to make a rebuttal require some skull-sweat.

This will be interesting – and not necessarily a bad thing. Just a different thing.

And what happens when your train hits a moose?

Mondegreen:

1. a word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of another word or phrase, especially in a song or poem. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in the Feedback column of NewScientist (28 October 2017):

A MONDEGREEN that turned the social media ecosystem into an egosystem for Tony Compton reminds Howie Vernon of a similar misapprehension (30 September). “While walking down the hall, I spotted a poster on a bulletin board for a social media giant. But the poster was slightly blocked by another one, and as such, all I could see was the word FACEBO.”

Howie says this prompted him to wonder what this “facebo effect” might be. Perhaps, he says, “the phenomenon of thinking you’re having real, beneficial personal interactions, when, in fact, you’re not.”

I see that Murphy in New Jersey and Northam in Virginia are the projected winners of their respective governor races, and that the Democrats seem to have done well. While congratulations are in order, this is a small first step in returning the GOP to sanity, and by itself it’s fairly meaningless. The next elections, in a year, will be far more important for the Democrats to win.

And winning takes organization, so I’m a little worried that I was receiving donation requests saying that they had run out of supplies because of an overwhelming response yesterday, Monday. They may be trying to spin this in a positive way, but any clear-headed evaluation is either going to be

1. This is bad, bad organization, which will discourage your voters and prove, once again, that the Democrats are not truly ready to be a national governing party, or
2. This is deception to increase donations.

Either answer is bad. The Democrats need to get their shit together on every level, from operational crap like this all the way to figuring out how to properly message. If you want to see a criticism concerning that, see this column by Andrew Sullivan, where he expected Northam to lose or barely win (I haven’t seen actual numbers just yet, although one article suggests > 5 percentage points; UPDATE – WaPo says 9 points), based on his campaign:

Northam seems to me almost a classic Democratic politician of our time. I have no idea what his core message is (and neither, it seems, does he); on paper, he’s close to perfect; his personality is anodyne; his skills as a campaigner are risible; and he has negative charisma. More to the point, he is running against an amphibian swamp creature, Ed Gillespie, and yet the Washington lobbyist is outflanking him on populism. Northam’s ads are super lame, and have lately been largely on the defensive, especially on crime, culture, and immigration. He hasn’t galvanized minority voters, has alienated many white voters, and has failed to consolidate a broader anti-Trump coalition. In Virginia, Trump’s approval rating is 38/59, but Northam is winning only 81 percent of the disapprovers, while Gillespie is winning 95 percent of the approvers. Northam’s early double-digit lead has now collapsed to within the margin of error.

If a political Ph.D. doesn’t understand a candidate’s message, this suggests the Democrat’s internal training programs (you guys do have them, right?) are in serious need of revamping.

And if the Democrats start taking next year for granted, I fear they’ll get a very big shock. Most voters just want to shake things up; they’re not particularly ideologically driven, they’re more disgusted by political behavior than anything. The Democrats need to bear this in mind.

Charles Lee on 38 North discusses how North Korea gathers intelligence on the United States:

With regard to intelligence collection against the United States, however, North Korea leans heavily on OSINT [open-source intelligence] —a readily available and potentially valuable source of reliable intelligence. Public statements from US officials and powerbrokers, in particular, can have added significance when they provide insights into US military courses of action. Corroboration through other intelligence disciplines can amplify the value of these statements. If, for example, North Korea were able to acquire and leverage long-range ISR platforms like the United States and its allies, it could exploit geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) to better ascertain whether US forces were actually postured for preventive military action. Without such capabilities, North Korea greatly appreciates OSINT exploitation. …

Like their American adversary, North Korea’s intelligence analysts assign measures of analytic confidence to their intelligence sources—namely, the statements of US officials, power-brokers and other influential voices on US Asia policy. High-confidence intelligence can serve as effective guideposts for policy decisions. For example, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s claim that North Korea will never relinquish its nuclear weapons likely sent a strong signal to North Korean intelligence officials that this represents the summary judgment of the American IC at-large based on its vast instruments of collection. North Korea may have read his opinion as “we, the US IC, assess with high confidence that North Korea will never relinquish nuclear weapons.” When viewed alongside the absence of US/South Korean military action, Pyongyang could have been convinced that such an intelligence judgment may have led the US to abandon the goal of denuclearizing North Korea. In other words, the DNI may have unwittingly served as a credible, high-confidence source for North Korean intelligence on US intentions. It is entirely possible that this may have emboldened North Korea to continue its aggressive pursuit of missile and nuclear development.

An interesting problem in communications. Do our officials carefully decide, with each statement with regards to North Korea, whether to lie or not? But there’s more: for those of us who think war is merely trying to blast the other guy to smithereens, think again: communications with the enemy is an important aspect of war, because the cessation of war can only come with the agreement of the other side – or his extinction. The latter is not likely and may not make you popular with your neighbors.

But communications with the North Koreans is a very delicate dance that requires years of experience to intepret – and even then we’re never sure we’re right.

In the category of Not Knowing The Role of Government is Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) who, according to The Hill, said:

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) had been describing the flurry of lobbying from special interests seeking to protect favored tax provisions when a reporter asked if donors are happy with the tax-reform proposal.

“My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’ ” Collins replied.

House GOP leaders are pushing an aggressive timeline for overhauling the tax code for the first time since 1986. They hope to pass the bill, which was only unveiled last week, before Thanksgiving so that it can be enacted into law by the end of the year.

Legislation should be undertaken as we understand the needs of the country, not the desires of a bunch of donors. Indeed, making them happy would be quite un-American, as it’s traditional in our democracy to compromise, which thus leaves no one happy, but everyone in various stages of unhappiness.

Would the responsible district in New York show Rep. Collins the door?

This Forbes article on Commerce Secretary has a delicious tang to it, given Trump’s devotion to money and hiring for his Cabinet those with lots of it:

Fresh off a tour through Thailand, Laos and China, United States Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross Jr. picked up the phone on a Sunday afternoon in October to discuss something deeply personal: how much money he has. A year earlier, Forbes had listed his net worth at $2.9 billion on The Forbes 400, a number Ross claimed was far too low: He maintained he was closer to $3.7 billion. Now, after examining the financial-disclosure forms he filed after his nomination to President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, which showed less than $700 million in assets, Forbes was intent on removing him entirely.

Ross protested, citing trusts for his family that he said he did not have to disclose in federal filings. “You’re apparently not counting those, which are more than $2 billion,” he said. When asked for documentation, the 79-year-old demurred, citing “privacy issues.” Told that Forbes nonetheless planned to remove him from the list for the first time in 13 years, he responded: “As long as you explain that the reason is that assets were put into trust, I’m fine with that.” And when did he make the transfer that allowed him to not disclose over $2 billion? “Between the election and the nomination.”

So began the mystery of Wilbur Ross’ missing $2 billion. And after one month of digging, Forbes is confident it has found the answer: That money never existed. It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004. In addition to just padding his ego, Ross’ machinations helped bolster his standing in a way that translated into business opportunities. And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross’ private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits. Additionally, according to six U.S. senators, Ross failed to initially mention 19 suits in response to a questionnaire during his confirmation process.

Never mind Congress. If Trump discovers someone lied about how much money he had in order to make it into Trump’s Cabinet, well, will Trump admire him for his gall or chuck him out on his ear for not having enough money?

Autochthonous:

1. (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists.
   1. Geology (of a deposit or formation) formed in its present position.
      Often contrasted with allochthonous

[Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in the Feedback column of NewScientist (28 October 2017):

[A reader] informs us that King Leopold III of Belgium was a fervent naturalist and traveller. “He led several expeditions in Africa, Asia and South America among others,” says Anne, and, unlike his infamous grandfather, “was acclaimed for his defence of nature and of autochthonous populations.”

Martian on right, painfully earnest frat brother on left. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Mars Needs Women (1967) proves only that its script needed a rewrite. This patched together piece of shit has really nothing at all to say, except maybe that the director had the sort of ego which could be soothed with shallow drek.

Blech.

This thread has been quiet, but here’s Michael C. Horowitz and Julia M. Macdonald on Lawfare comparing the campaign to stop autonomous weapons from being used (one of them is known as The Campaign To Stop Killer Robots) to the successful anti-landmine campaign. They worry that we haven’t piled up enough bodies yet:

Second, while there was clear evidence of the human costs of the use of landmines around the world, the lack of casualties from the use of lethal autonomous weapon systems muddies the ability of the movement to build public support. The pictures of ordinary people injured and maimed by mines, combined with the casualty statistics, played a key role in shocking and shaming governments to take action. It also bolstered the legal argument that mines violated the proportionality and distinction principles of international humanitarian law. Persuading the international community to ban a technology preemptively without observing these human costs will be difficult. Moreover, autonomous weapon systems are a much broader category than blinding lasers, the only previous technology to be subject to a preemptive ban.

Not only is the international community less emotionally affected, but there remains uncertainty as to whether these weapons would, in fact, inherently transgress international law. It is also possible that autonomous weapon systems might reduce civilian casualties in some cases if they have high levels of accuracy, lack human emotions (e.g. revenge), and do not suffer from the same physical limitations as humans, such as fatigue.

They may have a point. However, if enough bodies are piled up, it may also suggest the lethality of the system – a desirable trait, no?

Their conclusion:

Therefore, while the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots appears to be following a similar playbook as the ICBL, we should be cautious in drawing too many conclusions about the likelihood of a ban on LAWS [Lethal Autonomous Weapon System]. The differences between the two issue areas—in particular, the lack of consensus around the definition of lethal autonomous weapons, uncertainty as to their military effectiveness, and the current lack of human casualties from the use of these weapons—will make attaining a preemptive prohibition on their use harder to achieve. That being said, continued dialogue and discussion about what LAWS are is essential to determining something very important: agreement on the proper role of humans in decisions about the use of force, and how to best achieve that aim.

I cannot help but notice that there is no address of the issue of using a potentially sentient artificial entity as a military recruit may induce ethical objections as well.

It’s hard to come up with anything insightful to say about yesterday’s tragic mass murder in Texas. There’ll be the cries for this not to happen and here’s how, the drummed up outrage at the idea of politicizing the murder by actually proposing legal changes to prevent it from happening, some conspiracy-theorists will try to lump it in with the Sandy Elementary Shooting as never having happened, etc. It’s all becoming depressingly predictable.

It’s a rut we’re in, and I don’t know how to get out of it. One side thinks the other side is taking advantage of this for political gain, while the other sees an incomprehensibly lax regulation of the means for killing our fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, all us normal folks are just pigeons being shot out of the air.

From my libertarian readings from years ago, I know the gun rights advocates believe that arming the populace is supposed to stop these things from happening. My personal observations so far culminate in the conclusion that this theory is a primitive application of shallow reasoning to a scenario full of potential nuances. It’s becoming apparent that he who gets off the first shot wins – he may still end up dead, but it’s damn well clear that mankind is not a rational species, as anthropologist will tell you. The shooters are not rational people, they’re madmen looking for a personal escort to Hell.

Since I woke up with this on my mind, I suppose I’ll dispense the same political script as everyone else concerned with the NRA’s control of the issue. This is for my benefit, to blow off steam and anger.

For each and every GOP Congressperson up for re-election in 2018 who did nothing in Congress to respond to tragedies of this sort, the same rough script should be employed.

Since the last election there have been N mass shootings. (Populate with appropriate sad images of people mourning.)

Has our Congressman XYZ proposed legislation to prevent madmen from gaining access to guns?

No.

Is this failure irresponsible?

Yes.

When you elect me, ABC, the first thing I will do is begin work on gun-control legislation that will make it difficult for madmen to get their hands on guns. I will submit it for consideration within a month of taking office. And then I will push for it to passed.

Why? Because if one day I hear on the radio that some of my own family have been killed by a madman with a gun, how can I possibly hope to look my family in the eye?

How can I hope to look my constituents in the eye?

This is how responsible governance takes place, and Congressman XYZ doesn’t understand this.

I do. Vote ABC.

And if the GOP screams that this is a coordinated campaign, everyone answers You’re damn well right, you murderous morons. This is a national problem and you’re not addressing it.

I don’t really feel better, but at least I tried.

Ya know, lady, later someone talks about a “vibrator”. Would that be your vibrator, or the gentleman’s?

Proving multi-tasking has never been a skill of mankind, Michael Shayne spends so much time trying to finance his impending wedding and subsequent marriage that he loses the girl in Dressed To Kill (1941), the third installment of the Michael Shayne, Private Detective, series. The strength of this installment may also be seen as the bandages that cover its weakness: some fairly clever dialog obscures the fact that we never really get to know these characters, not even Shayne, a private detective who, from what his beau has to say, has never really cracked a murder case before, despite multiple tries.

But he has empty pockets and a bride-to-be when, responding to screams in the Hotel du Nord, he discovers a maid shrieking at the sight of a body of a woman, sporting a neat hole between the eyes, and a man, the head of a dog on his head, also shot in the head, sitting at an elegantly laid dinner table. These are a former theatrical producer and one of his leading ladies, and Shayne employs sharp patter, a certain jocular attitude towards the dead, evidence he purloins from the murder scene, and some street smarts as he wades through misdirection, lies, more bodies, a fairly clever murder device, and some clumsy cops.

But no real backstory, no insight. This is a straight B-class movie, I think, and it’s purely about the entertainment value. And it does deliver. Shayne is a pleasant and clever character, and yet in the end even he says “Well, color me pink….”

It’s fun. But if you never see it, you won’t have missed any profound insights.

Ossicone:

Ossicones are horn-like (or antler-like) protuberances on the heads of giraffes, male okapis, and their extinct relatives, such as Sivatherium, and the climacoceratids, such as Climacoceras.^[1] The base that a deer’s antlers grow from is very similar to an ossicone.

Ossicones are similar to the horns of antelopes and cattle, save that they are derived from ossified cartilage rather than living bone,^[2] and that the ossicones remain covered in skin and fur, rather than horny keratin. Antlers (such as on deer) are derived from bone tissue: when mature, the skin and fur covering of the antlers, termed “velvet,” is sloughed and scraped off to expose the bone of the antlers. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Giraffe ancestor didn’t have a long neck, but two sets of horns,” Science:

Kevin Williamson meditates on the functions of political parties in the context of the Donna Brazile revelation concerning the Clinton campaign and the DNC on National Review:

There is a contradiction within American progressivism, which seeks to make the political process more democratic while pushing the policymaking process in a less democratic direction. For a century, progressives have championed more open primary elections and open primaries, popular ballot measures, referendum and recall processes, and wider voter participation. At the same time, progressives, particularly those of a Wilsonian bent, have sought to remove the substance of policymaking from democratically accountable elected representatives and entrust it to unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies in the belief that panels of experts immune from ordinary democratic oversight could make hard decisions based on reason and evidence rather than on short-term political necessity and popular passions. They regarded the political parties and their infamous smoke-filled rooms as embodiments of corruption and old-fashioned wheeler-dealer politics at odds with the brave new centrally planned world they imagined themselves to be building.

As it turns out, political parties are — like churches, civic groups, unions, trade groups, lobbyists, pressure groups, and business associations — part of the secret sauce of civil society. In much the same way as our senators — in their original, unelected role — were expected to provide a sober brake on the passions of the members of the more democratic House of Representatives, political parties exercised a soft veto that helped to keep extremism and demagoguery in check. Anybody can run for president — but not just anybody can run as the candidate of the Republican party or the Democratic party. Third parties face an uphill battle, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot prevail: The Republican party was a very successful third party, displacing the moribund Whigs. The difference between a republic and a democracy is that republics put up more roadblocks between fools and their desires.

The denuded political parties provide an important fund-raising and administrative apparatus — along with a tribal identity that is arguably more important — but they do not offer much more than that. Instead, we have relatively little in the way of mediating institutions between candidates and the public at large.

And, if this is an accurate view of the Republicans and the Democrats, it means we’re moving from the Age of Policy to the Age of Personality. That never ends well.

But while I find his remark that a fully functioning party should provide a veto against bad politicians appealing, I do not see how this connects to his previous remarks concerning Wilsonians who want to employ experts in making policy. The idea that a bunch of politicians, sans expertise in most facets of modern life, can hope to cope with the complexities of the modern world makes me shake my head in disbelief. Given my own numerous remarks on the defective efforts of amateurs, I could not dare to make any other statement – nor would I wish to.

The solution cannot be to elect a bunch of amateurs – especially the second-raters put forth by the GOP, who respond to the modern world by rejecting it and all of its necessary complexities – but instead learn how to integrate the elected world of republics and democracies with the meritocracy which is scientific knowledge. We used to know how to do this, but we’ve partially forgotten, I think, through the willful rejection of the distilled opinions of the experts because they clash with the ideology of the elected. I state it this way because no traditional political party with which I’m familiar is immune to such rejections.

But Kevin smoothly and slickly uses the phrase … unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies … as if it were a historical and unassailable truth, and it’s not. Bureaucracies can be held accountable, and they can be replaced. Neither operation is easy, of course, but then effective and fair governing is a non-trivial business.

Ummm, remember, she has a head, too.

The British Stormy Monday (1988) suffers from a common affliction of the British cinema of that era, a quality I’ve referenced before, somewhat mystifyingly, as brittleness. This story follows the tale of Brendan, a down on his luck Brit who decides to take a cleaning job with Finney, a club owner in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he first demonstrates his cleaning skills and is then given an emergency assignment to pick up a group of jazz musicians who’ve arrived early from Poland and without documentation at the airport (or perhaps it was a naval port).

In a separate thread, Mr. Cosmo of New York City contacts Kate, a pleasant young red-head, and requests her to show up and render professional assistance (of what sort is never clarified, which I found very irritating) in his quest to do … something. He’s apparently some sort of businessman who is being brought in by the City government to help resuscitate a moribund neighborhood. Or perhaps the entire city. It may be this lack of attention to detail which imparts a sense of brittleness to the entire movie.

But back to Kate, as she makes her way to assist Mr. Cosmo, she runs into Brendan, quite literally, but no one is hurt. A little later, we discover she has a second job waitressing at a bar, in fact just around the corner from Finney’s club – where Brendan is slaking the pains of the day away and meets her again. On impulse, he asks to meet her for drinks once her shift is over, and she agrees. Later, during the drinks, she disappears for a moment, and Brendan overhears a couple of toughs discussing a contract they’ve received to work over Finney.

Brendan and Kate finish their date, and Brendan notifies his employer of the impending violence to be inflicted on his person. The tables are turned and the toughs turned away, in a very nice scene. We soon discover the toughs were hired by Mr. Cosmo, who apparently wants Finney’s club. Why?

We don’t know, really. It’s merely a knob on the plot, it exists to bring out some conflict without any real motivation.

A little more to-ing and fro-ing, Kate and Brendan get a very tough reputation, a jazz musician goes out in a burst of fame flame, and that more or less wraps things up. We were neither upset nor shocked by the plot, even if we couldn’t spell it out from afar.

This is because we didn’t really care, and that’s a shame. The acting seemed competent enough to me, certain scenes are enacted with a fine eye to detail and psychology, and the moviemakers seemed fairly bold. But there were disconnects, such as the aforementioned mysteries of Kate’s profession and Mr. Cosmo’s desire for Finney’s club – and how he goes about it. It’s as if the story-tellers didn’t really much care about the story they were telling, and that indifference carried throughout what I suspect could have been an interesting, even compelling movie.

But it’s not.

Too bad.

I’ve written about Rep. Lamar Smith’s (R-TX) bad advice about Americans getting all their information from President Trump here. I’m mildly happy to see Science reporting Rep. Smith is retiring:

The controversial chairperson of the science committee in the U.S. House of Representatives announced today that he will not seek re-election to Congress next fall. The pending departure of Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) could give the U.S. scientific community a chance to recalibrate a rocky 5-year relationship with a key congressional committee.

The 69-year-old Smith, who was first elected to Congress in 1986, is in the middle of his third 2-year stint as chairman of the science committee. House rules require members to step down as chairperson after 6 years, so Smith was already a lame duck.

But his departure could be more than simply a changing of the Republican guard. Smith, trained as a lawyer, has fought acrimonious battles with scientists over peer review, climate change, and the role of the federal government in supporting basic research since becoming chairperson in January 2013. He has clashed repeatedly with senior officials at the National Science Foundation, which he has accused of wasting tax dollars on frivolous research, and at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which he believes has hampered economic development through overregulation.

“Chairman Smith’s climate denial and investigations have created consternation in the scientific community and relations have deteriorated while he’s been chair,” one longtime observer says. “But he has not been fundamentally hostile to the scientific or academic enterprise. In an increasingly ideological and polarized Congress, it’s not clear whether his successor will be less controversial.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, which has been one of Smith’s leading critics over the years, says his departure “offers Congress and the science community a chance for a fresh start.” The science committee “became a venue for partisan conflict and political interference in science” during his tenure, says Andrew Rosenberg, who heads the union’s center for science and democracy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In light of his terrible advice concerning President Trump as the fount of all knowledge, this is a bit of an appalling revelation:

Smith’s letter announcing his decision notes that he has “been able to shape policy involving ethics, immigration, crime, intellectual property, space, energy, the environment, the budget, and high tech” as chairperson of the ethics, judiciary, and science committees.” But the 16-term legislator is vague about exactly why he’s retiring, saying only that “for several reasons, this seems like a good time.”

Given his flawed idea of government’s role in society, the idea that he chaired a committee on ethics leaves me feeling mildly ill.

Back in May I mentioned the open House seat in the South Carolina 5th district, vacated by Mick Mulvaney upon his confirmation as Director of OMB, was actually being contested by the Democrats in the form of a guy named Archie Parnell. Archie lost, as I noted here. But he didn’t do badly, as this chart indicates:

Data from Ballotpedia.

Now he’s back and running again. He’s even released an amusing election video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_zj8r_NhpA&feature=youtu.be

Yeah, that’s all. I just liked the video.

On Lawfare, professor Alan Rozenshtein weighs in on the problems of new services offered over the Internet and how they interact with our legal system:

Unfortunately, when it comes to policymaking, the platform-or-publisher question is a prime example of what the early-twentieth-century legal realist Felix Cohen called “transcendental nonsense”: the counterproductive attempt to answer practical questions through conceptual analysis. One of Cohen’s famous examples was the debate over whether a labor union was a “person” and thus could be sued. Instead of torturing ourselves about the essence of labor unions or personhood, Cohen argued, we should instead ask whether we’d rather live in a world in which labor unions could be sued; if yes, then we’ll say that labor union are persons, and if not then we’ll say that they’re not. In this view, the label “person” isn’t driving the analysis but is rather just a shorthand way of describing those entities that the law allows to be sued. And since all definitions are just arbitrary conventions, there’s no purely logical reason to prefer one categorization over another. The real work has to be done by a combination of facts—what is the state of the world and what are the various options for changing it—and values—what sort of world do we want to live in.

In the case of technology companies and their obligations to moderate content—whether of foreign interference in elections, terrorist and extremist speech, or just everyday bullying and harassment—debating over whether companies are platforms or publishers is as backwards a strategy as is arguing over whether labor union are people. Instead of having a theoretical discussion over what kind of entity a technology company is, and then, using that categorization to determine its obligations, we should ask what obligations we want the company to have, and then use whatever label is most convenient to remind ourselves of what we decided. And to answer this latter question, we need to focus on facts—how many users, what kind of content, what sort of algorithms—and values—what tradeoffs are we willing to make between policing bad content and the inevitable infringements on user privacy and free expression that such policing entails. These are hard questions, and definitional debates over whether a technology giant is more like a newspaper or a telephone network won’t help.

In other words, let’s retire the tired debate over whether Facebook or Google or Twitter is a platform or a publisher (or some third, hybrid category). It’s just distracting us from the real issue: not what these companies are, but what they can do.

It’s a little fascinating watching someone dance around the fact that the law is currently inadequate by disputing certain processes whereby we make law, or damn near anything else comprehensible. I think it all keys on this:

And since all definitions are just arbitrary conventions, there’s no purely logical reason to prefer one categorization over another.

Well, no. As any software engineer of the object-oriented variety (and, to a lesser extent, perhaps, the functional-paradigm programmer) knows, we categorize in order to simplify attaining our goals; within the law, categorization means we can avoid enumerating every entity we wish to address within the framework of the law, and, more importantly, extend it to future entities. The definitions are not arbitrary, but are driven by goal-oriented logical processes – and thus we invalidate Cohen’s (Rozenshtein’s citation) remarks.

Without having followed this discussion in any form, I suspect the real solution is going to start with something Rozenshtein should like to discard – the … third, hybrid category. But how to extend the categorization? Elsewhere in his post, he states that

But the companies, led by Google, are increasingly defending their algorithms as First Amendment–protected speech, which suggests a closer affinity to publishers like the New York Times or CNN than to pure communications platforms like AT&T or Verizon.

My understanding is that these algorithms are part of the content delivery system, rather than the content generation system (which, for you categorization buffs, means the users). For Rozenshtein, he uses their existence to suggest a likeness to previous category members, but based on content generation, I think. I could be wrong.

But let’s reconsider, then, the previous generation of publishers and platforms. How did they deliver content?

First, there were the old corkboards in stores and other buildings of both private and public nature, of which you still see a few. People could leave messages of general or specialized interest, which might be answered through public or private means by other interested folks. This might be an example of a platform.

There was, and still is, the public sale of the content. An example is the iconic sale of newspapers by newsboys. While this might function purely to move buyer-generated content to other buyers, it was more usually used by the company providing the content to sell that content, thus making the company a publisher.

The postal service is the last one I shall mention, and I mention it last for a reason. Much like the previous category, public sales, it could be used either way, although more by publishers. LOC (letters of comment) columns provided a minor way for readers (who were not always buyers, although again they overwhelmingly fell into this category) to generate content, but again this was, and is, a publisher-dominated content delivery system. Importantly, this mode of content delivery permitted a limited form of customization, because now the user of the delivery system knew who was receiving the content. In theory, each item could be modified based on knowledge of the reader at the given address. Insofar as I know, there was no regulation of such activity.

This slight diversion down memory lane should serve to awaken a question in the reader: how do the algorithms of Google, et al, fit into this picture of content delivery? The closest categorization is the last one listed, the postal service delivery system, because each recipient can be, and in technical fact has to be, distinguished from the others. Once collection of data extraneous to the technical requirements of delivery commences, the items delivered can be modified based on the extraneous data – and possibly the non-extraneous data as well, to be entirely anal about it. Keeping in mind my long term theme that computers are multipliers, the ability to modify items based on the extraneous data is boosted to the n^th degree, compared to the prior generation postal delivery system. This ability to customize is then applied to items both actively collected by the company, as well as those independent content generation entities who are using the company’s delivery system to send content to readers.

And this, I contend in my legal ignorance, is what will end up generating an entirely new categorization for the noted companies, much to their dismay. This massive ability to customize, and the lack of control of the providing company over that content, will make them unique – and subject to regulation.

I hope the questions used while formulating such regulations will include questions regarding the appropriateness of customizing political content to separate users – if one political message generated by, or for, candidate A contradicts another from the same content generator, but is only viewable by non-intersecting subsets of the receivers of the messages, is this an appropriate and desirable use of the medium? If not, then what do you do about it? Ban the entire service a priori, or attempt to detect and punish a posteriori, after the damage is done?

In the end, categorization is the marvelous tool of the human intellect, but one must always remember that they are often imperfectly defined; new categorizations should always be kept in mind, but will always be driven by the goals of those doing the categorization.

Sedulous:

1. working hard and steadily; diligent
2. constant; persistent: sedulous attention to the task

[YourDictionary.com]

Noted in “The Senate Just Confirmed an Anti-Gay Blogger to the Federal Judiciary,” Mark Joseph Stern, Slate:

Thursday’s confirmation vote provides a reminder of the Trump administration’s vigorously anti-LGBTQ stance. Trump himself may or may not hold animus toward sexual and gender minorities, but his Cabinet, advisers, and allies in Congress are working sedulously to reverse progress on LGBTQ rights. Once Trump stacks the federal courts with reactionary activists, his judges can chip away at landmark rulings protecting marriage equality and the broader rightsof same-sex couples. Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court justice, has already signaled his eagerness to reconsider gay rights. Judges like Bush can help to weaken gay-friendly precedent in the lower courts, making them more vulnerable to reversal.

I must say, my reaction to the sound of this word is quite different from its meaning.

Continuing this story about course disruption by Reedies Against Racism (RAR) at Reed College, The Atlantic’s Chris Bodenner reports on a counter-reaction:

This school year, students are ditching anonymity and standing up to RAR in public—and almost all of them are freshmen of color. The turning point was the derailment of the Hum lecture on August 28, the first day of classes. As the Humanities 110 program chair, Elizabeth Drumm, introduced a panel presentation, three RAR leaders took to the stage and ignored her objections. Drumm canceled the lecture—a first since the boycott. Using a panelist’s microphone, a leader told the freshmen, “[Our] work is just as important as the work of the faculty, so we were going to introduce ourselves as well.”

The pushback from freshmen first came over Facebook. “To interrupt a lecture in a classroom setting is in serious violation of academic freedom and is just unthoughtful and wrong,” wrote a student from China named Sicheng, who distributed a letter of dissent against RAR. Another student, Isabel, ridiculed the group for its “unsolicited emotional theater.”

Two days later, a video circulated showing freshmen in the lecture hall admonishing protesters. When a few professors get into a heated exchange with RAR leaders, an African American freshman in the front row stands up and raises his arms: “This is a classroom! This is not the place! Right now we are trying to learn! We’re the freshman students!” The room erupts with applause.

I caught up with that student, whose name is Pax. “This is a weird year to be a freshman,” he sighed. Pax is very mild-mannered, so I asked what made him snap into action that morning. “It felt like both sides [RAR and faculty] weren’t paying attention to the freshman class, as it being our class,” he replied. “They started yelling over the freshmen. It was very much like we weren’t people to them—that we were just a body to use.”

The result?

Support for RAR seems to be collapsing; only about 100 students were involved in this year’s boycott, a quarter of last year’s crowd. There haven’t been any Hum protests since the upperclassmen who participated in the noise parade were barred from lectures. RAR’s list of demands keeps growing, but its energy is now focused on Wells Fargo [for its financial ties to private prisons]. That could change when reforms to the Hum syllabus are announced this fall, but for now, the lecture hall is free of protesters.

Reed is just one college—and a small one at that. But the freshman revolt against RAR could be a blueprint for other campuses. If the “most liberal student body” in the country can reject divisive racial rhetoric and come together to debate a diversity of views, others could follow.

These are the candidates to be future leaders, and they appear to be reacting properly.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope, currently damaged and inoperative due to Hurricane Maria (NPR).

I don’t know how many folks participate in the public computing projects, but I’ve been doing so for so long that I don’t recall when I started. Today I received an email from the SETI@Home folks, who are analyzing data from various telescopes for any signs of extra-terrestrial civilizations, that they’re overwhelmed with data to analyze and need more participants. If you’re interested in joining the effort, here’s the link.

Hey, I remembered my password to SETI@Home – I probably haven’t logged in to the account in 3+ years! It says I’ve been contributing computing time since 27 Apr 1999. I wonder if I was running the Yggdrasil version of Linux at the time …

Given the tangible and substantial damage President Trump continues to do to the United States, the latest Gallup Presidential Approval poll made me start wondering.

As you can see on the right, the Disapproval line set a new high of 62% and the Approval line set a new low of 33% a few days ago, a plunge I (and I’m sure everyone else) attributes to the indictments of Manafort and Gates, as well as the guilty plea of Papadopolous. The fact that Trump hired and worked closely with those accused of high crimes, and another who actively plead guilty, brings to mind a certain concern that he hasn’t the judgment of character necessary to run an effective Administration.

And then we’ve seen a helluva recovery in his numbers, which I believe to be the result of the terror incident in New York City. It’s a well-known phenomenon that at times of public danger, there’s a rallying effect around the President.

So I’m left wondering if the United States is being deliberately prodded to keep President Trump in power. Every day he does more and more damage to the most powerful country in the world, whether it’s nominating another judge so extreme that even the GOP Senators are disgusted by them, or blundering about in the Mideast, or frantically trying to disassemble the ACA (a blow to the health of the citizens of the nation is a blow to the nation), or attacking the laws and norms which have made this Nation strong, or all of a number of foolish stunts he’s pulled.

I have no doubt that our adversaries and our enemies keep a very close eye on us, and the election of President Trump came as a golden opportunity for them. He’s been quite the productive gold mine for them, and if they have any sanity about them, they’ll try to keep them there. The 30% approval rating is probably the point at which Trump is considered to be in imminent danger of impeachment, and the plunge looked worrisome. So what does it cost them to sacrifice a single soldier in their cause? Pick one out, have him take a shot at causing terror, and, hey, look, Trump is back up to 39%. That’s a safe level, they no doubt muttered among themselves.

Sadly, we’ll probably never actually discover whether this is true, and I doubt it’d have much of a counter-effect. But as terror attacks continue, keep it in mind. We really need to dig out the tick before we all catch Lyme Disease – or something worse.

I fear we were not meticulous in our leaf cleanup, and the survivors are looking awfully darn cold, don’t you think?

Just to make you feel better, here’s a random shot from this past summer.