I don't know who the guy behind Surveillance blog is. I don't know why he stopped blogging at the end of last month. But I do know that this is a damn fine post on the land mine treaty for which the press has beatified Princess Di.
This article points out that having an OS monoculture is a very big security hole. But don't look so smug, Anti-Microsofties; the Unix kernel is every bit as much of a threat as the Windows one -- perhaps more, because of the nature of the data stored on Unix machines. Can anyone say Sendmail?
Interesting article on the arms race between Senator Hollings' spyware brigade and their nemeses. It's mostly an interview with the owner of an ad-stop company, so there's a self-serving element to the comments; he dismisses concerns about the ways in which his software may cost other companies money with the assertion that they'll just have to find a different revenue model, that's all. But nonetheless interesting.
If you're not reading Treasaigh, you should be. It's written by an American ex-pat in Argentina, and just reading through it provides a devastating portrait of the slow-motion implosion of an economy:
Banking and Foreign Exchange Trading will be suspended Monday as the government seeks the mechanism to halt the leakage of funds from the foundering banking system.
When the run on the banks began in December Cavallo froze all banking accounts... This was supposed to be an emergency measure until the system could be stabilized.
Enter President Number 4 and his economic team... They decided to float the peso and convert all dollar denominated accounts into pesos, creating huge paper losses for many savers. (Paper losses because in theory the peso could reattain parity with the dollar...) To stop people from removing their pesos and buying dollars the banking freeze (or "corralito") was extended. Savers, unwilling to see their life's savings errode even more, went to court. The court has found in favor of the savers and has ordered the banks to release the money to their rightful owners. As a result the cash of the lack of confidence in this administration and in government in general the money, instead of being put to use buying goods and services, is being converted to dollars. The effect of this will be a higher dollar, higher import prices, and higher priced domestic goods. In other words "Inflation", "Erosion of Purchasing Power", "Poverty", "Higher Unemployment", "Social Unrest"... take it to any length you want, the possibility exists - including a civil war.
The government has been looking for the mechanism that will entice savers to leave their money in the system voluntarily, so far unsuccessfully. The latest offering is the Plan Bonex. The details of the plan are not yet available but compulsory conversion of savings to Bonex is possible.
This economic team still has not found the path... and there appears to be conflict between the Economic Minister and the President. Stay tuned for more developments...
There was a lot of talk about how bad the dollar peg was -- well, as it turns out, devaluation is worse. They've destroyed their banking system. Utterly. Eventually the banks have to reopen, and when they do, the money will leave. All of it. And it will be a long, long time before Argentines trust their money to banks, or indeed their own currency, again.
I quote an astoundingly good summary from the Captain's comments:
On Argentina and the IMF. The appropriate precedent for the current Argentine situation is the German hyperinflation of 1920-23. That inflation was also caused by uncontrolled governmental deficits, although on a scale vaster than the Argentine situation. It was ended after the destruction of the German banking system by the expedient creation of a new banking system by Helmut Schlacht, secured theoretically on land and plant assets. Schlacht's principal method of ensuring currency stability was to control carefully the total supply of rentenmarks available. In 1925, the rentenmark was replaced by a new reichsmark backed by gold.
Before an Argentine rentenmark replacement can occur, the IMF is insisting on a government budgetary balance, according to this WaPo article, as without constraint of the government printing presses the supply of currency is unabated, despite the ongoing shrinkage of the money supply occurring with Duhalde's last bonds for cash deal for depositors. As this is essentially a forced loan, also called thievery in time, the implosion of the banking system and a concurrent collapse of the velocity of commerce will continue unabated. When people realise that their savings are gone and the sole determinant of the supply of money is the government printing presses covering the governmental deficit, then hyperinflation will result. This is another good article on German hyperinflationary expectations related to the supply of money during 1921-3. It also has links to the Hungarian hyperinflation of 1945-6 and refers to the French Revolution's hyperinflation. Notably, all of these historical examples occurred during periods of dramatic political upheaval. This makes the long term stability of the Argentine Republic very doubtful.
I'm not sure what can be done. The people simply don't trust the government not to inflate the currency. With good reason. But hyperinflation has an extremely nasty aspect: it creates feedback loops that make the problem worse.
Right now, the government has not yet started running the printing presses. Yet the perception of the people in Argentina is that they will. So prices are already rising:
Today I hit the streets with a full tank of gas and 60 cents (2 pesos) in my pocket. The fact that my tank was full was due to the fact that it is a gasoline car which are not favored where I live because gasoline used to cost 3 time more than diesel. That has changed... diesel prices have doubled (gasoline prices have risen by about 20%) and for the past week it has been impossible to find. My first stop - an automatic teller. After trying the three that were close to my home and finding them all empty I headed for the closest town (about 10 miles away). After 3 more tries I finally found one that let me have 60 dollars (200 pesos) and then informed me that that was my daily quota.
The government continues to release statistics indicating that inflation has risen by 3%... 4%... a trip down the grocery store aisles tells a different story. Everything has risen in price. Most items by around 35 percent, others by much more. Of course salaries have remained the same. I was just asked to prepare a proposal for several software projects. The going price... 21 pesos (6.50 US) per hour of programming. (... I wonder if McDonald's needs any burger flippers...)
When the prices rise, the government has to print more money to cover its payments, especially in Argentina, where tax compliance is -- er -- moderate, and government payrolls are large.
Which brings me to another issue. The Wall Street Journal, among others, is proposing dollarization of the economy, formal or informal.
Well, informal won't work. For one thing, there's not enough currency; Argentina was in fact largely dollarized, but those dollars were held in bank accounts, not currency. They've now been forcibly converted to pesos, which is what all the fuss is about.
Besides which, the government would still continue to pay its workers in pesos. In Argentina, government owns many of the large industries, all of whose workers would be paid in pesos instead of dollars. Splitting the economy that way would be disastrous. Just one example: state-owned electric utilities. Paying workers in worthless pesos. Workers won't show up for work. Government losing tax revenues to the underground, dollar, economy can't pay the workers in anything but pesos. Lights go off. Hello, disaster.
Formal won't work either: the government can't keep on a budget. And it will always be to Brazil's interest to devalue and "beggar-thy-neighbor".
Argentina has come to the end of the road of most popular revolutions. Don't get me wrong -- I'm no fan of the oligarchic state that preceded Peron. But the landowners had some idea of how to run a functioning economic system. Peron didn't; he raised expectations that could not be met, and squandered the capital he obtained on useless public-works boondoggles to please the people who kept him in power, even as it assured their further poverty. And all the successive revolutions in Argentina have foundered on the same rock: that the public, and therefore the politicians they elect or the tyrants they tolerate, are unwilling to make hard choices. And inevitably end up with harder ones in consequence.
I look to my city, with its $4 billion deficit, and those who scream about every single program that is touched. Not schools, not sanitation, not arts funding, not eldercare, not parks. . . we can't touch spending. Never, ever, can we touch spending. Raise taxes 'til they bleed, they cry; but don't touch my sacred programs!
Well, Bloomberg won't raise taxes (Thank God!) -- not because he's an Evil Republican, but because it would cripple the city. First of all, the city just took a $75 Billion or so hit to its economy, and it's hard as hell to lure businesses back already. Upping taxes on their firms -- or their executives -- won't help. Second of all, after ten years of painstakingly luring people back to the city, boom! people are afraid to live here. Rental prices have fallen by what looks, to my non-scientific eye, to be about 1/3. Upping taxes will give those people one more reason to stay out. Third of all, New York City already has the highest local tax burden in the country; it's not as if we're undertaxed. And fourth of all, raising taxes would scare the bejeesus out of the bondholders and could precipitate another financial crisis like the 73-74 bankruptcy.
But that understanding is not broad. For every one person I've heard make even one of these points, I've heard many more screaming that the Mayor was going after [insert program here] beause he's mean. When asked what we should cut instead, they evince a blank stare, followed by the statement that they're sure there are other things that could be cut instead of [pet program]. Or we could -- let's all say it together -- raise taxes on the rich. Who will presumably stay quiet in their mansions, rather than, say, moving to Westchester.
Argentina is New York, squared. Can't cut this, this, or this. . . about the only thing you can cut, it turns out, is the flower service in the presidential offices, and even that's tough because it turns out that the woman who provides them is some official's neice. Raising taxes would be a nice gesture but it wouldn't, for example, produce any extra revenue. They can't inflate their way out of the trouble because no one will touch the money they print, and the inflation creates more problems than it solves. And they can't get help from the IMF, because the IMF won't do anything until they balance their budget. Paul Krugman has issued some very convincing arguments against this IMF provision in the case of Asia, where profligate spending wasn't the problem -- but in Argentina's case it is the problem, and it's pretty clear that unless there are some tough provisions, any money sent will be pissed away.
In short, any economically feasible program is political suicide, and vice versa.
I remember a joke a friend from Argentina told me. I'll update the names for today, but the sentiment is still very current:
Putin, Bush, and Duhalde are sitting together in the garden during the breaks at one of those world summits. Suddenly Poof! God pops out of the shrubbery and says, "These are difficult times. And in order to give you some guidance in this difficult era, I will permit each of you to ask one question."
Putin says "Lord, my country has many problems. We are militarily and ecconomically a shadow of our former greatness. How long until Russia regains its footing?"
God says, "Ten years".
Putin starts to cry. "My country is unstable. Who knows if I will live long enough to see Mother Russia restored to glory?"
Bush says, "Lord, we are facing a time of unprecedented trouble. How long until America has overcome her domestic problems and defeated terrorism?"
God says, "20 years."
Bush starts to cry. "In 20 years, I'll be out of office. By the time America is at peace, I'll have been forgotten."
Duhalde says, "Lord, my country has many, many problems. How long, oh Lord, until Argentina has political stability and economic prosperity?"
The ever-brilliant Jonathan Rauch, meanwhile, pens the simplest explanation for why the Palestinians continue terror: it works. Meanwhile, Brink Lindsay explores proposed long-term strategies for Israel. The Jane Galt conclusion: It's a big goddamn mess, folks.
Eugene Volokh has this post on the root causes of school shootings. It's (of course) well thought out, but there are a couple of things that might bear further examination:
It's true that if teenagers couldn't get their hands on guns, it would be harder for them (though not impossible) to do such massive damage. I don't think that it's possible to stop someone who is bent on planning mass murder and suicide from getting guns, especially in a nation where there are 200-250 million guns. But it's true that if somehow this miracle could be worked, the problem of mass school shootings would diminish (though other problems might increase). Still, the availability of guns doesn't tell us why we've had mass school shootings in recent years, but not in the years before.
An acquaintance who should know informs me that the backup plan for the Columbine shooters was to blow up the school during assembly -- and that the evidence is that there's a high probability that they would have pulled it off. Killing everyone, instead of the tragic few who died. But I can't vouch for this.
I know of only one conjecture that is even slightly plausibly, and I stress that it is only a conjecture: What changed since the time of the first school shooting is that there's been a lot of media coverage of school shootings. Teenagers keenly resent their own insignificance; when they see someone being in the news -- even for committing an atrocity -- some of them begin to envy this person's fame. And some tiny fraction of those may even decide, against all reason, self-preservation, and decency to take the same path. The first mass school shooting was an essentially random event, but the media coverage that it triggered dramatically increased the probability of subsequent events of the same variety.
I am certainly not arguing that the media should be barred from covering school shootings. I am not even sure that as an ethical matter, the media should moderate their coverage.
But I think that if we're looking for a causal explanation for the advent of mass school shootings, the one that so far best fits the evidence -- the only one that shows a correlation, which is surely not sufficient for showing causation but is largely necessary to show it -- is this one.
I think that this is a huge factor. And while I too do not think that we should try to legislate coverage, I think that there is one thing that usefully could be done, without degrading the quality of coverage (IMHO) in the least: a voluntary media ban on reporting their names. Would it stop the killings? I have no idea. But I don't see how it could hurt -- and it ought to stop cold any little pipsqueak who thinks he'll go down in history in a blaze of glory.
I love the big construction machines. They put me in mind of dinosaurs.
In the early days it was the grapples, crawling over the pile to pick up fistfuls of steel in their enormous claws and deposit it on the trucks, like a prehistoric monster uprooting a tree and waving it around for effect.
Then there were the cranes, just towering over everything, graceful, elegant, enormous.
Now there are the cherry pickers, which are funny because the driver steers from the basket, suspended in the air behind the machine as it lumbers forward. And the excavators, clawing out enormous piles of dirt from the ground as they prepare it for new construction. The front loaders, carrying loads hither and thither. And any number of smaller machines, forklifts and bobcats and such. Like little baby dinosaurs, they manage to be cute even though they're a LOT bigger than I am. (And even though their operators would kill me if they heard me refer to them as "cute").
This site has to be one of the largest assemblages of working construction machines ever in this country -- like a mechanical Jurassic Park. And though now that it is hollowed out it looks, in scale, much as the pyramids must have done, down to the little city we've built for the workers (though ours is made of tents and trailers rather than mud huts, and we have (mostly) indoor plumbing). But the difference is that Pharoah had to use overseers with whips to grind his monument out of the muscles of the workers, killing many of them in the process. So far this job hasn't had a single fatality that I know of, an the men are paid upwards of $25 an hour, plus benefits, to do labor that's a lot easier, and less dangerous, than their peasant forbears. The raw muscle power that took all those lives has been replaced with machines that turn a day's labor into a minute's work, by one man comfortably ensconced in the cab of his mighty machine.
Which brings me to another question: I get a hell of a lot of email from anti-war, anti-"warblogger" folks who don't like my ideas. The ones that are respectful, I answer privately. The ones that aren't, I junk or make fun of. But there's a common thread on which I wish to comment, which is that almost none of them can write.
Now, I want to say that I don't think that this is because far-leftists can't write -- God knows, the creative writing programs are stuffed with enough of them to disprove that theory. But the ones who can don't, at least to me. The ones who write to me display literary skills ranging from average to breathtakingly bad. Letters display the kind of orthographical and punctuational errors that one is supposed to have left behind by the tenth grade. I am not talking about people who use awkward phrasings, or make the occasional typo; Lord knows I'm on no high moral ground there (and don't think I don't know that I am about to get a stream of emails about every typographical error I make in this piece). I'm talking about paragraphs that have no logical beginning and no ending, but start and stop abruptly and at random, like third world trains. Continuous misspellings of common words that make me go back over and over again to re-read, until I figure out that they have substituted "to" for "too", "its" for "it's", "there" for "their", etc, and thereby inadvertently rendered the sentence almost, but not quite, totally incomprehensible. People who string together sentences with commas for pages at a time, until one begins to fear that their word processor is out of periods and the letter may never stop. People who apparently believe that a semi-colon is to the colon as semi-formal is to formal clothing. People who were apparently not familiarized with the subject-object convention of sentence construction in their formative years and pepper me with a stream of jolting sentence fragments. People who use the wrong word because it sounds something like the right one: tenative for tenacious, palpitate for vascillate, etc. And then there are the people whose essays are technically correct but so dull in their construction that they read like a third-grade essay on "What I did over summer vacation": Adjective-noun-verb. Noun-adjective-adverb. Adjective-noun-verb. It's enough to make one pound the keyboard screaming "don't they have any clauses where you come from?"
I won't even start on the people who think that the sarcastic "Did so! You're a big fat idiot!" verbal play of the high-school debate team is every bit as compelling in a political letter from a 52-year old computer programmer as it was when they triumphantly refuted "Resolved: The Cafeteria Will Serve Lima Beans and Lamb Patties Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays". Because most of my letter writers aren't like that. They're nice people. Serious people. Well-intentioned. But functionally semi-literate.
I don't mean to suggest that the right has some sort of God-given literary talent; there are any number of atrocious conservative, libertarian, and "warblogger" writers. But the anti-war left doesn't seem to have any answer to the near-omniscient topical mastery of a Steven Den Beste, the witty imagery of a James Lileks, the sharp financial insight of Mindles H. Dreck, or the individual talents any of another dozen bloggers I could name. These people can write. And the letters I get from conservatives, even when they're excoriating me (believe it or not, I get more than my share) are invariably well-spelled and rely on logic, not name-calling or "dead babies trump reason" type arguments.
So why can't the kids on the anti-war side, by and large, write?
Well, a compelling possibility is that I'm just not seeing them. Maybe I'm stuck in my little libertarian-right ghetto and I'm not getting the good stuff, just the trolling nutbags. So come on, talented heirs of Marx and Gandhi! Send me your stuff! I want to know where I'm going wrong.
I think that's part of it. But I think another part of it is that we've abandonned educating our children in favor of nurturing their delicate little psyches. Because I've had this argument a couple of times, and the semi-literate conservatives are always sheepish, a little ashamed, of their lack of writing talent. The left-wingers, on the other hand, are proud of it. "It's just a bunch of stupid rules! The important thing is the ideas, and people understand what I say just fine."
Wrong on both counts.
For one thing, rules are not stupid just because they are arbitrary. It does not matter, in some metaphysical sense, whether we drive on the right or the left side of the road; but it matters very much that we all do one or the other, because frankly, I can't afford any more car insurance than I already have. The rules of grammar are of course, somewhat arbitrary, but they are not therefore stupid; they are required for us to communicate with each other. If I say "Therefore house to the up pick go I keys" it matters not that this arrangement may be perfectly intelligible in Yoruba (I have no idea whether it is or not; it's an example); it violates the word-order rules upon which we have agreed in speaking English, and which allow us to sacrifice other complicated grammatical rules necessary to mark words in languages where word order is less rigid than in English. Surprise! The rules of English grammar, by and large, are there because they avoid ambiguity or redundancy. We gloss over these in spoken English because context and body language allow us to convey much of what poor sentence construction does not; moreover, it's real time, so if we build a sentence poorly the first time, and are not understood, we can correct the error. Writing is one shot; if your sentence isn't clear, the reader won't understand what you are saying. You must therefore take much more care to write clear, non-redundant, but unambiguous English -- and that means good grammar. You may think, for example, that the prohibition against splitting infinitives is an example of the power of petty tyrants, but in fact it exists for the very good reason that "to" is not only the infinitive marker in English, but also a preposition, and therefore improper placement can be very confusing.
Poorly constructed sentences, like poor spelling, take away the focus from the ideas and put it on the poor writing. Flawless prose is indeed "all about the ideas"; bad prose is all about the paragraph I had to read four times before I figured out what the writer was trying to say -- and the eight paragraphs I didn't read because I didn't want to bother wading through any more mistakes.
Anti-war people are certainly not the only people prone to this type of thinking. But politically, they are the most likely to embrace it. Witness "whole language" reading.
But enough of political carping -- let's all come together on the bipartisan goal of building a better, more grammatical future for our children. Turn off your spellchecker! Break out the OED! Strunk and White for everyone! Together, we can brave new future into the boldy go!
A correspondant, angered by my treatment of Krugman (which has since disappeared -- conspiracy or Blogger woes? You decide) has sent me the following missives, which I combined into one, angry rant.
A further stroll through your site (which I only discovered yesterday) reveals that:
(1) Your attack on his Enron payment -- like all of Andrew Sullivan's endless hysterics on the subject -- ignores the ludicrously obvious central point: Krugman has been slashing away at Enron since January 2000 -- far earlier than any other writer I know of -- so, if it was an attempted bribe, it didn't work very well (to say nothing of the fact that he revealed it immediately).
He's channeling another blog. I've never said that Krugman was ethically suspect for taking Enron money; I've said that he's hypocritical for saying that he can take money and remain untainted, but Republican politicians (and only, apparently Republican politicians) can't.
(2) Like every other conservative/libertarian blogger I've seen, you never do lay a finger (or even try to do so) on his central objection to Bush: that his tax cut is outrageously imbalanced toward the rich.
That would be because I don't care.
Any tax cut of any sort will favor the "rich" (if you define the rich as the top quintile or quartile of income) because 83% of the taxes in this country are paid by the top 25% of earners.
How can this be, I hear you cry. I pay a hell of a lot of taxes!
Well, first of all, there's the matter of leverage -- 10% off Warren Buffet's earnings is a hell of a lot more than 10% off mine. But that definitely isn't the whole story, because that top 20% doesn't bring home anything close to 83% of the income. (I don't have a very good web connection right now, or I'd look up the exact stats).
Second of all, if you're not in the top 20%, most of your taxes aren't taxes -- they're FICA. Which is not a tax, technically. It's a "contribution", even though if you don't make your contribution they come with guns and take you to jail, which makes it feel less like what I do in church when my grandmother's watching and more like, oh, a tax.
Nonetheless, we maintain the fiction that it is a contribution, and not a tax, and thus is not structured the same way as the income tax. In particular, it's highly regressive, which is to say that the poor pay more than the rich, because everyone pays 12% of their income up to $65,000 or so, and then no one pays anything on income over that. Which is obviously a better deal if you make $100K than if you make $20K.
This progressivity is not, as some might have you believe, the work of demon Republicans intent on giving working stiffs the short end of the stick. In fact, it's the tool of progressives, like Krugman, who are determined to keep the social security system largely structured as it is: a state obligation to take care of the old. In order to sell it, they maintain the fiction that it is not a pay-as-you-go system in which those currently retired soak those who currently aren't for as much as possible, but rather a pension, to which they have paid in and are therefore entitled. It is this feeling that they paid and are now owed that makes it so near-impossible to reform the system. So the reason that the social security tax is regressive is that benefits are regressive, capping out at a much lower percentage of salary for top earners than those at the bottom; making the "contribution" progressive while leaving the benefits stacked in favor of low-wage earners would destroy the fiction that it is a pension, and not a Ponzi, scheme.
The point being that while we all think we pay taxes, social security and medicare contributions can't be touched. Nor can the administration cut your state income tax. Leaving very little for them to hand back to you unless you're one of those "rich" people.
While I am in favor of a progressive income tax, I am not in favor of an income tax as progressive as ours is. Leaving aside Social Security, almost no one in America pays any federal taxes. Yet they vote for benefits. While I have no problem with the idea that Warren Buffett should pay a larger percentage of his income to the public treasury than someone flipping burgers at Happy Burger, I think the burger flipper should pay something. Otherwise the temptation to go shopping at someone else's expense is too great. And I think that we can all agree, whatever our political persuasion, that politicians like to hand out goodies to their constituents whether or not those are in the broader public interest. If you make it so that the constituents don't experience the direct pain of paying for those goodies, the system spins out of control.
So there, I've addressed it: I think it's stupid and irrelevant. And I definitely don't think it was Krugman's core point; his core point in the column you cite is that Bush is causing the social security crisis by handing out unreasonable tax cuts; this is demonstrably untrue. As I showed. The rich part is thrown in for emotional effect.
Regarding your Feb. 2 attack on him: refresh my memory. Exactly how ARE more 70-ton artillery pieces and three new kinds of fighter plane useful against a terrorist organization that consists of tiny individual cells scattered worldwide, since we already have the capability to obliterate any Third World government that actively shelters al-Qaida (or declares war on us in any other way)? Do we bomb Hamburg or Islamabad? And as for your crack about Krugman's "friends the Democratic senators futher larding up [the defense budget] with pork for their homestate constituencies": is it really necessary to point out to an adult that Republican senators are even fonder of homestate military pork than the Democrats?
Do you have any numbers to back that up, or are you relying on the word association between "Republican" and "Defense"? I think if you check the budget you'll find that the boondoggles in this one mostly go to Democratic Senators. Not because Democrats are evil, but because they're in charge. Senators of all stripes like handing out pet projects to their constituencies; that is, to some extent, what they are elected for. If the Republicans were in control, they'd be doing the same thing. That's why I'm a libertarian.
As for the artillery, etc, you're fighting the last war. If all we're going to do is make sure you can't crash a plane into the World Trade Center again -- well, I'm here. Osama already took care of that. We might as well build wooden forts to keep out the Injuns -- at least they'd be pretty.
The artillery, etc. is for the next war, which is striking some fear into the hearts of states who sponsor terrorism. Who are a lot more vulnerable to artillery than airport security.
As for your April 24 comments: if you doubt that DeLay revealed himself in that speech to be a theocratic nut, take a look at the Houston Chronicle's editorial. And anyone who doubts that John Ashcroft is an ultraright extremist has the problem of explaining his famous interview with Southern Partisan Magazine.
In which he lauded the Confederacy. Not slavery, not racism. The fact that you associate the Confederacy with those things doesn't mean he does. And using his name as a sort of shorthand for "fascist" is the sort of intellectually sloppy thinking that comes from being insufficiently exposed to both sides of the political landscape.
As for DeLay, the article you quote cites what seems to be a pretty standard "decline of Western morals" speech. The writer certainly hates him, but he doesn't offer any juicy quotes, so I can't tell what he said. Which makes me suspect the answer is, "not much".
On one point we do agree, though: I too dislike intellectually dishonest smartasses.
That's not a very nice thing to say about Kruggie.
Now, I could say that having graduated from high school, I try not to end my missives with thinly disguised name-calling that convinces no one of anything except the belief that whoever offered it is an unimaginative lackwit incapable of adult conversation.
The recent Tahoe-Sierra decision states, in the sentence starting on the bottom of the second page continuing on the third.
"A permandent deprivation of all use is a taking of the parcel as a whole, but a temporary restriction causing a diminuition in value is not, for the property will recover value when the prohibition is lifted."
We're talking about a "temporary" restriction that lasted either 32 months (accoring to the majority) or 6 years (according to at least one of the dissents).
The shooting coincided with a debate in the German parliament Friday on tightening gun control legislation.
Germany already has strict laws governing the right to a gun, but experts say the country is awash with illegal weapons smuggled into the country from eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Those wishing to get hold of a hunting rifle must undergo checks which can last a year, while those wanting a gun for sport must be a member of a club and obtain a license from the police.
I'm willing to be we'll be seeing editorials on how this calls for stricter gun control -- if I can find a sucker to take the other side of that bet, that is.
I'm afraid posts are a little bit thin on the ground; as you can see, I'm having a bit of trouble with my computer. But the post you're looking for is here. And if you like what you see, please do come back.
Patrick Ruffini asks how come I'm not giving stock tips.
Well, first of all, that's not quite my area of expertise. (If I can be said to have an area of expertise.)
Secod of all, I'm Chicago-trained, so I subscribe to the notion that you can't beat the market in the long run.
Empirically, this is true. The stock market is so well traded that arbitrage opportunities vanish almost as soon as they appear; professional money managers who spend all their time researching companies, according to studies, earn back just about what it cost them, in economic terms, to find the information that allowed them to invest better. I'm not going to spend all my time researching the market, and I don't think I'm smarter than the people running the mutual funds that underperform the market. So I buy low-fee index funds (there are more sophisticated products that do the same thing with a superior return, but they take more money than I have to buy in). Of course there are problems with this approach; for one thing, when a stock joins an index like the S&P it's price jumps about 5-10%, so the assets are overpriced. But I would find this argument more compelling if all the active stock-pickers who pointed this out to me hadn't underperformed their indexes in both the boom and the bust.
And third of all, financial advice is serious and personal. I could say broad, true things: don't put all your money in equity; don't expect more than 3-5% annual real returns; don't invest more than 10% in the sector you work in, much less your company, even though it's "What you know" (you're not Peter Lynch, and he diversifies like hell); don't hold high-interest debt in order to buy securities of any sort unless their real yield is higher than your debt (it's not, in almost any case); don't base your investment decisions on what everyone else is doing; don't think you're a genius because you correctly picked on stock that did well. Monkeys throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal could hit one high-flyer.
In other words, act sensible and don't expect to get rich on the stock market. Allocate your assets between different securities and different industries. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
But this isn't helpful, because you already know this, and you're ignoring it. You're plunging your net worth into things, hoping they'll go up and you can get rich and retire. You're holding credit card debt while you put money into a Roth IRA. You're not putting a sensible 40% into equity, even though retirement's only 20 years away, because bond returns are too low; you're putting it all into equity, and planning to switch into Munis when you're seventy. At least, if you're anything like the rest of America, that's what you're doing. So I'd be talking to myself.
If you don't know how to allocate assets, do a discounted cash flow, or estimate pre- and post- tax costs for a variety of time periods, get yourself a good financial planner. A good financial planner is one that doesn't sell you anything. He takes a fixed fee and tells you what to do with your money, spanks you gently for not saving enough, and helps you plan realistically for retirement. He helps you decide what sorts of investments, in what kinds of accounts, will maximize your post-tax income. And you pay for this advice, up front and through the nose.
A bad financial planner is cheap. He works for a firm that sells financial products, and therefore tries to foist on you whatever insurance/mutual fund/equity/debt product they have too much of. You will regret saving money this way when you are eating cat food because the Muni of the Month Fund tanked on you.
A good financial planner is recommended by someone you know well, someone prudent. Someone who is probably a little sheepish about how boring their retirement plan is.
But I won't give specific advice because first, it's not me, and second, the law of averages says that even if I'm brilliant, I'll be wrong a lot of the time and someone will lose money. So I'll stick to the tired-but-true platitudes that put everyone to sleep. You'll follow this advice -- or not. But at least you won't sue me for telling you to buy Yahoo at 200.
I have been witness to many a fine theological debate about the existance of hell, and I have always wondered why they were wasting their time on such a pointless question. Obviously, there is a hell, only those who staff it have added an "p desk" on the end to make it sound more professional.
So my computer at work hasn't functioned for two weeks. More specifically, we have had a series of problems with the internet connection. First, the internet software refused to acknowlege the modem that came with my computer.
I uninstalled and reinstalled the software
I uninstalled and reinstalled the modem drivers.
I tested the phone line.
I changed the phone cord.
I uninstalled the internet software, uninstalled the drivers, removed the card, cycled the CPU, reinstalled the card, and reinstalled the software.
I bought a new, external modem, and connected it to the serial port.
Nothing worked.
This process is called troubleshooting, wherein you test the easiest and most obvious solutions, and therefrom proceed, using the information gleaned from earlier steps, to the more complicated and unobvious ones.
I called the makers of the new modem, on the off chance I'd bought a dud. Nope -- the modem worked.
I called the people at AT&T, who lead me through an exhaustive series of tests, at the end of which we'd determined:
1) I could use dial-up networking to connect to the access point 2) I could not get any IP service from this point. No pinging, etc. 3) I could not then disconnect from the service. 4) Once I had made this non-functional dial-up networking connection, dial-up networking would not, in the future, recognize the modem as functional until I had gone into the modem setup, removed it, and added it back.
[At this point, I want to head off any pre-emptive strikes from the friends and strangers who are, even now, tabbing over to their email software to compose a missive the primary message of which is "Get a real operating system". I am sitting in a trailer, not at home, not in a nice corporate environment where I have ample time and resources to fix things. Where, pray tell, am I going to download the drivers to fix my Linux internet connection, given that I have the only internet connection on the site? More importantly, I'm not in charge of purchasing. While I am second to none in my loathing for Windows ME, this is what the Fates have handed me, and like all tragic heroes, I am powerless to move against them.]
Having determined all this, we reached a consensus that most probably my Windows ME installation was FUBAR, and needed to be redone. A consensus with which the chirpy chick at the computer maker's tech support wholeheartedly agreed; she arranged to send me three CD's that would format my hard drive, reinstall all the OEM software, and leave it as pristinely functional as the day it was purchased. This re-tooling is what I spent my day doing.
And the #@%! thing still doesn't work.
Now I can get an internet connection for five minutes or so (time varies). After which, I lose my connection. Can't ping, nothing. Disconnecting and reconnecting produces -- you guessed it -- the same hardware error I got before. But this time, if I reboot, I can re-establish a connection (this was not true before). Every single time, the same thing: connect, lose connection, reboot, connect, etc.
So I apply my troubleshooting skills.
Is it the internet software? Almost certainly not -- the software's been replaced. The modem is a USR Sportster, the most common kind, and though it's one of them newfangled V.92 thangs, it's common enough that AT&T would have logged a known error by now, or at least an alert. If it is some strange interaction (most unlikely -- there's the dial-up netowrking layer in between, which USR has certainly tested as it will be the primary use of their product) then AT&T is going to have to do some coding. It's complicated and non-obvious; leave it for now.
Could it be the modem? Even more unlikely. Resetting the modem and trying to reconnect doesn't work. If the modem were the problem, either resetting would work -- or rebooting wouldn't. There is no variance in the success and failure of the various stages of the abovementioned cycle, now repeated about 30 times for effect. While it's vaguely conceivable that Windows ME has a bug that causes it to irreparably crash Dial-Up Networking whenever it loses contact with a non-functioning modem, this would almost certainly be a widely known error.
Could it be the motherboard? The most likely solution (or the serial port, which is attached to the motherboard, so what's the difference?). I know -- why would it crash two separate modems? No idea. But given the prevalance of the problem across two modems, a reformatted hard drive, and numerous software reinstallations, the only place left to look is a central failure.
But don't try to explain that to the folks who made my computer.
I spoke with a charming young boy from Canada, who, like most such people, has no idea what the hell he's doing. He has been given a book full of procedures to try, based on teh general nature of the problem. The minute he gets a vague clue about what happens inside that box he spends his time talking about, he will either be promoted, or leave. Until then, he venerates the Book with the same textual rigidity as the most devout Orthodox Jew. He spent five minutes trying to get me to walk through the modem testing procedures with me before I managed to knock it into his head that:
1) The modem had been tested 2) The software was not only new, but the ISP connection was pre-installed and thus unlikely to be the source of the problem 3) The phone line was working fine.
He put me on hold to talk to his "colleague".
For those uninitiated in the Way of the Help Desk, that "colleague" isn't a colleague, it's his boss. Or a former help-desk "engineer" who can tell a NIC from a knick-nack and has thus been put somewhere safe, where the users can't get to him. After five minutes or so, my Canadian returned to tell me that he was pretty sure it was the modem.
I pointed out that if it were the modem, it wouldn't fix itself every time I rebooted -- or it would fix itself when I turned it off and on.
He put me on hold to talk to his "colleague".
I rebooted the machine for the 31st time to see if it would perform the same trick. It did.
He returned with the opinion that it was the phone line.
Now, given the intermittent nature of the problem, this was perhaps a natural guess, if you hadn't talked directly to the person who knew what was going on, rather than the nineteen-year old who didn't. I told him, as gently as possible, that it wasn't the phone line.
He argued.
I layed out, with impeccable logic, all the reasons it wasn't the phone line:
1) I just moved trailers. The problem occurred in both trailers. Also, the people who isntalled the phone line tested it.
2) The problem isn't intermittent; it's calibrated exactly to the boot cycle. Which does not affect the phone lines.
3) The phone line works.
4) The problem does not vary with the phone line -- there are two modems in our trailer, and neither works.
Did they test it for Data he asked, after another trip to the "colleague". I'm in Manhattan, not Saskatchewan. Asking someone two feet from the trunk if they tested the line for data is like asking if they tested it for French
He was puzzled. We had a brief seminar on the causes of line failure: interference, pinching or clipping, physical degradation, or cables sub-standard for data transmission. None of which is an issue when you are using a brand new phone line sitting smack on top of the entire, newly refurbished fiber-optic infrastructure for the World Trade Center/World Financial Center area, and you're the only damn person using the line.
I told him I wanted a technician.
He -- I know, I'm repeating myself -- put me on hold for another "colleague" session.
He came back and said "I know you don't want to hear this, but I really think it's the line."
Now, the geeks who have been following this will know how overwhelming was my urge to say, "I know you don't want to hear this, but I really think you're an idiot. Let me talk to the $%@# escalation engineer."
But I am a lady. All I said was, "Could I please speak with your colleague? Maybe we can straighten this out."
ANother hold session.
"No."
"But we're not getting anywhere. I think that if we can just talk. . . "
"Callers can't talk with the Level 3 people".
Sounds like a cult, doesn't it? And believe me, I spent my next two hold sessions awash with pleasure at the idea of the spaceship coming to pick up the faceless moron who insisted that my problems were in the phone line. Certainly, the structure was cultish. Ordinary people cannot talk with the God of the Computer. Only through the priest, Help Desk Tech Level One, can you communicate with His Holiness. Ordinary mortals would be blinded by His radiance and struck dumb by the mellifluous harmonies of His voice. On this Rockhead I build My church.
What gets me is that I know exactly what the little rat bastard was doing. He didn't want to talk to me because he'd have to stop cruising for naked pictures of Anna Kournikova and pay attention. So he tells this kid, who has absorbed nothing so far except blind obedience to the sacred precept that We Must Not Deviate From The Book, some stupid thing to get me off the line in the hopes that by the time I call back, he'll be off his shift. In order to do this, he has to make it someone else's problem. Having had the modem, the AT&T software, and the cables convincingly refuted, he fell back on the one thing I couldn't test myself: the goddamn phone line. I argued. I begged. Dammit, I almost wept. But no dice. I am not allowed to call back until I get Verizon to check the line they checked three days ago when they installed it. At which point, presumably, some other rat bastard will have some other reason why I'm not his problem. And the kid will go on thinking that the best way to deal with technology problems is not to figure out what's wrong, but to pass it off to someone else. So that when he has Ascended to Level 3, he too will be able to deliver cryptic non-solutions to his ignorant acolytes.
