Mindless Philosopher

Curious if Obama realizes he has/will use his leverage re: the Keystone Pipeline decision. Roll Call reports, unsurprisingly, that the President will approve the project — no doubt adding thousands of jobs (proponents say 20k, opponents 5k) in this economy is just too tempting for a president facing re-election.

The facts that the oil companies are salivating over this project and that Obama has veto power mean that he can say “yes, if” rather than a straightforward “yes.”

For instance, Obama could condition his approval on Congress mandating that the companies creating/operating the pipeline hire one safety inspector per X miles of pipeline.

Similarly, Obama could condition approval on Congress passing more investment in clean energy tech that will help us recover from our oil addiction.

Would love to see the oil industry lobbyists descend on Capitol Hill pressuring members to pass these types of pro-environment bills.

Republicans have learned how to play this game (see debt ceiling debate), has our President?

Here’s a piece of redundant advice: don’t buy Bitcoins. I heard about them this morning on NPR in a fascinating story. My advice is redundant because at the end of the piece, NPR mentions that Bitcoin’s biggest bank was robbed, so I don’t think anyone is going to buy anyway. However, if that robbery hadn’t occurred, let’s see if I’ve read enough Krugman and Galbraith to explain competently why not to jump in the Bitcoin market.

In the beginning of the story, a Bitcoin proponent mentions how: (1) there’s a fixed supply of Bitcoin, and (2) there’s no Bitcoin “Fed.” The proponent loves Bitcoin because there’s no Fed to “screw it up.” However, the lack of a monetary authority is actually a huge problem, and makes Bitcoin more akin to a pyramid scheme (or, perhaps more accurately, Dutch tulip mania) than a currency.

The Bitcoin early adopters got in when Bitcoins were cheap and started to generate buzz about Bitcoin. The fact that there’s a limited supply no doubt helped raise initial demand. So did the Gawker story about how you could buy drugs with Bitcoin. Demand skyrocketed.

What happens next–a crash–is nearly inevitable and can happen in a few ways. Endogenous catalysts include: early adopters cashing out and reaping the rewards, big retailers not wanting to buy Bitcoins at high prices so they stop accepting them. Exogenous events could be: government raids of accounts used for illicit purposes, bank robberies, runs on a bank, negative (or lack of) publicity.

When enough of the above happen, the price of Bitcoin drops below the price the late-adopters paid for it. These late-comers don’t want to take a loss so they don’t sell/use their Bitcoins. Since no one is using Bitcoins, stores stop taking them (even though they might not mind buying Bitcoins cheaply) because of transaction costs or negative associations with the currency. If no one accepts Bitcoins, there’s no point in buying them. Demand, and the price of a Bitcoin, plummets…just as fast as it skyrocketed initially.

Basically, the Bitcoin economy experiences a recession/depression. When a recession occurs in the real economy, the government or Fed steps in with expansionary fiscal and/or monetary policy. Basically, they give everyone more Bitcoins at a cheap price so people have an incentive to use them and get the economy rolling again. That’s why we need government and a central bank.

And if you don’t believe that hypothetical, think about the recent Bitcoin bank robberies. I bet the Bitcoin customers who lost their shirts would have loved a little help from FDIC.

As usual, government serves a useful role, and libertarian fantasies are nothing more than Ponzi schemes.

Krugman provides the context (use Google for free version) to Perry’s claim that “Over the last two years, 40 percent of the net new jobs created in the United States were created in Texas.”

Wanting to research Krugman’s assertions further, I started Googling for TX’s employment rate (i.e., number of jobs divided by working-aged population). Felix Salmon beat me to the punch:

In sum, though TX hasn’t done too badly, there’s no TX miracle. Furthermore:

1) The graph is very “zoomed in” on they y-axis. There isn’t much difference between the U.S. and Texas, so I’m not trashing TX’s record based on these numbers.

2) Employment ratio might be an unfair metric for TX because of the high proportion of retirees. However, that older population also skews the unemployment ratio in TX’s favor (more demand for goods with fewer working-aged folks competing for jobs). So TX is 1 percentage point better than US on unemployment rate and 1.5 worse on employment ratio … basically a wash.

3) TX has done a poor job recovering from the recession. Unemployment plateaued over 1.5 years ago (Oct 2009!) and there’s no relief in sight (ticked up 0.2 in June). In contrast, the U.S.’s rate is 1 point below it’s max. While high oil prices helped mitigate the initial impact recession, Perry hasn’t been able to drive his state’s economy out of the (slightly shallower) pit.

Paul Krugman says “These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment…There is no light at the end of this tunnel.” And he’s certainly right that the debt deal has no spending that will help the economy. (Interest rates are plenty low already so there’s no relief in that respect.) The Washington Post thinks this deal might be a win for Obama, but I think the depressed economy next November will more than offset any temporary change in his image among centrists.

The deeper question I’m left wondering is: Could progressives have changed this outcome? Crucially, economic stimulus (or “investment” if you want to be on-message) was not even on the table. There was no concerted effort by left-wing groups to put it on the table. While I can’t be sure, I think a big reason that progressives didn’t even try to force a deal that included short-term spending and long-term savings was the President’s stance. Fostering economic growth via this round of dealmaking seems like a lost cause when the chief negotiator on your side says:

Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.

So while I’m not sure what we (progressives) could have done differently in this round, I know our goal for the next round: make sure the President uses his veto-power leverage on the expiring Bush tax cuts to spread out the burden of “living within [our] means” (i.e., revenue increases via the wealthy). Which, unfortunately, still won’t help our flagging economy much. Welcome to America’s lost decade.

A few recent trends–twitter, facebook, credit card coupons–and events–Wikileaks, the hacking of citi, and sony–have led me to wonder whether in 50 years there any secrets at all. Currently, several aspects of society are based on the concept of keeping a piece of information secret. You’re not supposed to give out your credit card or social security numbers. Governments spend billions keeping their secrets hidden from the world.

But could that culture change? What if, instead of keeping my credit card secret, I didn’t worry about who knew my credit card number, and just worried that only I could use my credit card. In other words, perhaps we’ll move from a secrecy society to an authentication society. Engineers will invent ways to securely verify who is authoring information, and that will be good enough. If Williams-Sonoma can verify that I’m the one purchasing the bundt pan with my credit card, then I don’t care who has knowledge of my personal information.

People already post a lot of (used-to-be-private) information on Twitter and Facebook. Could we reach the point where people are forced to own up to all their interactions because there’s really no secrecy? If you buy tickets to the new horror flick, you need to be proud of that decision because maybe everyone will be aware of that decision. (Facebook tried to foist a similar regime upon us with Beacon and it backfired, but maybe one day such a system will become a reality.) Perhaps a newfound sense of ownership of our actions will be a net positive; as in, you won’t do anything that you’d be embarrassed for your social circle to know about. I say “your social circle” because while the world could know about all your actions, your friends (and, alas, enemies) are likely the only people who would care.

And while we might lose secrecy, I think we’ll hang on to privacy. Things you do in your own house, in private, without interacting with companies or other human beings, would still be private. Since no one will know about, for example, your proclivity to sing Beiber songs in the shower, that fact can stay private. But, I’m not sure that “what happens in Vegas” will stay in Vegas anymore — information wants to be free.

This trend will probably affect inter-government relations, and already has to a minor degree thanks to Wikileaks. As more states become fully-accepted members of the international community (i.e., the United Nations), perhaps countries will start treating each other as friends rather than, as so often is the case today, distrusting allies. Certainly in recent years, we’ve narrowed the list of enemy states (e.g., North Korea); perhaps the next decades will see a ballooning of countries’ “friends” lists. Then we’ll have fewer reasons to keep secrets from one another. And hence fewer reasons to be distrustful, fewer worries about security breaches, and hopefully fewer reasons to go to war.

I embrace our emerging secret-less society, and think the positives outweigh the negatives. To get the ball rolling, you all should know that I just purchased Nothing To Envy for my Android Kindle. And, so far, it’s a great read.

Hat-tip to TSK for this amazing Harry Potter fanfic. Here’s a taste, selected for the pleasure of my computer science friends:

And when Harry opened his eyes, he saw just what he’d been hoping to see, a folded piece of paper left on the floor, the gift of his future self.

Call that piece of paper “Paper-2″.

Harry tore a piece of paper off his pad.

Call that “Paper-1″. It was, of course, the same piece of paper. You could even see, if you looked closely, that the ragged edges matched.

Harry reviewed in his mind the algorithm that he would follow.

If Harry opened up Paper-2 and it was blank, then he would write “101 x 101″ down on Paper-1, fold it up, study for an hour, go back in time, drop off Paper-1 (which would thereby become Paper-2), and head on up out of the cavern level to join his dorm mates for breakfast.

If Harry opened up Paper-2 and it had two numbers written on it, Harry would multiply those numbers together.

If their product equaled 181,429, Harry would write down those two numbers on Paper-1 and send Paper-1 back in time.

Otherwise Harry would add 2 to the number on the right and write down the new pair of numbers on Paper-1. Unless that made the number on the right greater than 997, in which case Harry would add 2 to the number on the left and write down 101 on the right.

And if Paper-2 said 997 x 997, Harry would leave Paper-1 blank.

Which meant that the only possible stable time loop was the one in which Paper-2 contained the two prime factors of 181,429.

If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn’t have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin’s Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry’s standards of cheating.

Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it.

I’ve been the victim of a massive spam bot attack for about a month now. Basically, a vast network of “zombie” computers (i.e., computers that have been taken over by viruses, worms, or other bad software) have been hitting my blog trying to posts comments. I tried several courses of action: moving over to WordPress, installing plug-ins for WordPress that supposedly stop spammers, and messing with my htaccess file. Unfortunately, though each of those step helped a bit, the spam bots still got through and I was exceeding my daily CPU limit set by my web hosting company.

More Googling has finally led me to a solution that works. I put the following text in my htaccess file in my www directory. (htacess files apply automatically to subfolders.) I hope this entry can help others who are in my situation overcome their spam bots as well.

#from http://multifinanceit.com/htaccess.txt
#These lines block agents commonly used to harvest URLs and email addresses.
#One of the uses of such agents is to gather URLs for subseqent referral spamming
#by a large number of hosts. Thus, preventing their access may, by itself, decrease
#the amount of referral spam you receive.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Microsoft\ URL\ Control.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/4\.0\ .*Win\ 9x\ 4\.90.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Indy\ Library.*$ [NC,OR]

#These lines block bots that use your bandwidth for their own commercial reasons.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^abot.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^aipbot.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Linkwalker$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*nameprotect.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*TurnitinBot.*$ [NC,OR]


Of note is that the comments that spam bots tried to leave never made it through the content filtering system (either under Movable Type or WordPress). So hitting my blog was really useless for them, yet they still continued to try anyway…

Purim at Adat Shalom was just spectacular. I participated in this year’s Purim Shpiel, mainly as King Ahasuerus. This role isn’t as large as it sounds — we had an ensemble cast of about 50. Everyone contributed their part and the result was amazing, mainly thanks to our amazing director, Karen.

Since the audience seemed to enjoy the show, I thought all my blog readers (all…3 of them?) might enjoy the Shpiel as well. This year’s theme was National Purim Radio. Click below for excellent parodies of Diane Rehm, Car Talk, This American Life, etc.

Part 1:





Part 2

I’ve been disappointed with MovableType recently, but the DOS attack by spammers on my blog this past week was the last straw. I added CAPTCHA, but that didn’t keep them away. (I should note that MT was smart enough to quarantine the spam comments so they never showed up.) My hosting company added a blocking mechanism (via my htaccess file), but by that point I had already decided to follow enjanerd‘s lead and move to WordPress. The blog needs some personalizing, but all the tech stuff is done: your rss feed should update seamlessly (right?) and permalinks still point to the right place.

And maybe a nicer blog will entice me to post more. (A guy can dream, right?)

Really, WaPo, if your mission is to inform, please stop writing ledes like:

Interest payments on the national debt will quadruple in the next decade and every man, woman and child in the United States will be paying more than $2,500 a year to cover for the nation’s past profligacy, according to figures in President Obama’s new budget plan.

Everyone pays the same $2,500? — huh, I didn’t realize we had a regressive tax system in this country!