The Wall Street IRS

I just read a fantastic piece in this week's Rolling Stone. The article, "The Great American Bubble Machine" by Matt Taibbi, isn't posted online yet, but some blogger has posted a copy. The article is mainly about how Goldman Sachs is an evil company for doing what it is that every company on Wall Street does. I suppose that the point is that Goldman Sachs does it better than anyone else, and that's why they are still around.

The real takeaway from the article, for me, is where Taibbi compares the proposed cap and trade legislation in congress with the gasoline bubble of last year. In essence, that the cap and trade market will quickly become a place where speculative investment will drive prices past the level of sanity. Since the cap for carbon emissions decreases every year, and the technology to reduce emissions will take many more years to develop and implement, we can pretty much guarantee that the price of carbon emission allowances is going to increase. Supply will decrease, whereas demand will remain largely unchanged in the short term. We are gift wrapping a market for Wall Street that they don't even need to game, it's already rigged.

The real problem here is that all of the financial market regulators are themselves in the financial industry. Name after name in the article is a Goldman Sachs alum in a regulatory position. The head of the New York Federal, the Treasury Secretary, CEOs of most of the major players in these bubbles, and the list goes on. Goldman Sachs isn't the problem, because every other person with some position of authority is probably an alum of some other large investment bank.

I'm not saying that we don't need energy reform, we absolutely do. There is a lot of investment opportunity in upgrading the power transmission infrastructure to a "smart grid," switching over to new more ecologically friendly methods of getting energy, etc. I just don't think this is the way to do it. If the Obama administration wants a carbon tax, then pass a carbon tax. Do not burden us with this commodity market that will make the prices of energy skyrocket. We saw firsthand what market manipulation did to gasoline prices, and we cannot afford a bubble like that for the energy we use to heat our homes, especially not in this economy. If there must be a tax, let the government collect it and use it for research and development in new energy technology. Don't let it go to a banker's new summer home. I think Taibbi sums it up quite well.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going. [Rolling Stone, via Zero Hedge]

P.S. Pick up the issue and read the whole article. It is fantastic.

Incredible Bowling Shot

Holy Lord.

The Thornton Epiphany

I was once again watching Real Time with Bill Maher as I was cleaning up around here. He was interviewing Billy Bob Thornton, so I wasn't paying that much attention and went to load the dishwasher. When I got back and sat down near the end of the interview, Billy Bob was telling a story about smoking in a bar in New York. As in Lafayette, smoking in restaurants is illegal, but it goes even farther there in that you can't even smoke in a restaurant's patio area. Of course, there are also alcohol consumption laws, so you can't drink beer on the sidewalk. The story concludes with the ridiculous circumstance of him not be able to drink or smoke without taking a step over a gate. Bill Maher then remarks, "I feel like that's why a lot of people vote Republican."

I laughed, but the more I think about it, the more right it seems. The negative stereotype of most progressives is the annoying hippie. People worry that liberals in power will mean that no one can have guns, non-hybrid cars, or any food not vegan soy based. The Democrats have allowed the Republicans to paint them in that light for years, and as if to confirm their lack of testicles never said anything about it. All the right had to say was, "They will force us to become hippies," and everyone with an SUV, a grill, or a rifle said fuck that. Of course there are progressives who like to hunt, race gas guzzlers, and eat meat but that isn't what conservatives want people to hear.

Progressives are losing people that way, being to easily labeled as a hippie or an environmentalist. We have these laws that tell people you can't let customers smoke in your business, even outside, and you will have a lot of people eventually decide they just want the government out of their face. In all, I agree with that sentiment, but that isn't what the Republicans stand for anymore. Republicans want to make government smaller by decreasing the protections and services offered to citizens, not increasing freedom. In fact, one could argue that conservatives are the leading candidates for decreasing personal freedom, but that is a different post. As long as the government is wrongfully intruding into the lives of people, there will be a large swath of people that will never vote on the side they perceive as increasing the size of the government. The Democrats need to fight to change that perception, and it will be difficult to do so with the healthcare debate going on.

The simple answer is, get rid of some of these intrusive laws. There are many countries where it is perfectly legal to drink in public, and the sun still rises there. We don't even have to get rid of laws, just get rid of some of this crazy (and costly) bureaucracy. Make it a Democratic cause to streamline the government, the same way it already is a progressive cause. There are already Democratic movements to simplify the tax code, so make that a highlight of the legislative agenda after healthcare. [CBS] Progressives need to make some headway against this freedom curtailing perception before they begin to work on energy policy. If the Democrats don't make people feel more free, the Republicans will be able to yell about socialism even louder than they are now. Eventually, someone is going to start believing it and the conservative renaissance will be on us again. I don't know if the world can handle that right now.

Art or Terrorism

I read an article today about a comic book artist who was searched by the TSA because he was carrying a work in progress about terrorists attacking the United States. [SFScope] This story hit me pretty close to home, because my roommate is an aspiring comic book artist. I also have my own concerns about that. Who gets to decide what materials are questionable? If I travel with my combustion textbooks, is that questionable? What about math books? They could be about cryptography, I might be planning a cyber crime.

Terrorism is one of the biggest issues of our time. It is only natural, as human beings, that we make art about our feelings and opinions about it. Why does expressing those opinions mean that someone is a terrorist? Imagining extremists blowing up buildings is not reason to believe that the person doing the imagining is an extremist. We all have these thoughts and feelings, and this author took his thoughts and made them into these books. Why does that make him suspicious?

Ironically, the very people who say they are defending us from terrorists who hate our freedom are the ones taking it away. They claim to be the ones responsible for our ability to have our opinions, to draw our comic books, but please don't try to take them on an airplane. Don't put your ideas on paper anywhere they can be seen, we wouldn't want to think you are a traitor. Enjoy your freedom, but not the freedom to ask questions.

This is what Orwell was worried about in 1984. First, we can't think of terrorism. Terrorists use bombs, so one day we can't think about bombs. Bombs are made by chemists, and soon it is dangerous to know too much. It might even be at that point, I've never tried to fly with my chemistry books. Here is the most horrifying part about all of that; if you read about a student being searched at an airport for having chemistry books (or virology, cryptography, any of the "dangerous" sciences) would you even be surprised? That doesn't mean we are losing freedom, that means it is gone. When you can't even carry "too much" money onto a plane, freedom is dead. [ACLU] I still have hope that Obama or anyone can turn things around, but until someone does, this is the country we have to live in. This is the privacy that we are given by the authorities, where your unreleased intellectual property can be violated at the whim of a guard at a checkpoint. This time it was a comic book, what if next time it is a trade secret, or medical records, or something where privacy is of the utmost importance? Is that a country that you would call free?

R. I. P. Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson died today at age 50. [CNN] Deepest condolences to his family, friends, and fans. The King of Pop left a tragically short period of brilliance and his unfortunate fall from grace.

Dangerous Assumption

In my sophomore design class, we did a section about liability law. Of course, as a product engineer, if I design something inherently unsafe I am liable for any injuries it causes. Unfortunately, a lot of great lawyers have a funny definition of "inherently unsafe." Not that there aren't poor designs in the world, because there are plenty of horror stories about defective cribs, but the main takeaway of the lecture was that people are fucking stupid. We were told story after story of people using things in unforgivably dumb ways and getting a ton of money in court rulings. For me, the real takeaway from this lecture was that believing people possess even basic intelligence was a dangerous engineering assumption.

I watched Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday, and Bill Maher made a joke where he implied that most Americans were so stupid they thought Iran was a treadmill made by Apple. At the time I didn't fully appreciate the joke. Then, last night while watching the Daily Show, they did a piece interviewing people on the street both in America and Iran. Frighteningly, it's pretty clear that some people in this country can't name the president. The people in Iran seemed to know pretty well, and he isn't even the most powerful person in that country. All of this got me thinking.

As a product designer, it is wise for me to assume that people are dumb. Should this assumption be applied to progressive causes as well? I think about the big policy debates of some recent years, and they all seem to boil down to a nuanced viewpoint against a hardline slogan talking point. Here are some examples off the top of my head;

• Marijuana Legalization:
  Pro; Marijuana is relatively harmless substance and prohibition is very expensive compared to regulation and taxation of the substance.
  Con; DRUGS ARE BAD!
• Withdrawal from Iraq:
  Pro; After an unjustifiable and expensive conflict which weakened our position geopolitically, it is time to reduce our prescence in the region and take our soldiers out of harm's way.
  Con; DON'T CUT AND RUN! SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
• Ending Torture:
  Pro; Torture is an illegal, ineffective, and disgraceful practice.
  Con; JACK BAUER!
• Kerry vs. Bush:
  Kerry; End Bush's policies of irresponsible deficit spending, restore civil liberties, aggressive foreign policy, etc.
  Bush; I'M A WAR PRESIDENT!
  

This seems to be happening with the healthcare debate as well. Our healthcare system is a joke compared to those of other industrialized nations, yet an attempt to even offer a public insurance option to buy into is being met with cries of "COMMUNISM!" Which brings me back to the point, do progressive activists need to start talking in catchphrases? Obviously, we can't even assume that people possess any awareness of their political reality, but in a democracy progressives need them on their side. Should arguments that explain every nuance of a policy decision be abandoned? I would guess that, "We need to fix healthcare because... Here is how...," is much less effective than grossly oversimplifying and saying, "FREE HEALTHCARE!" Progressives don't even need to feel bad about it, conservatives do it all the time. This is how conservatives had so much power for so long. I'm not saying this is what I want, quite the contrary, but maybe if someone yelled "FREE HEALTHCARE!" as loud as the right is yelling, "COMMUNISM!" it would cause someone to pick up a fucking newspaper and find out who the goddamned president is. We need that more than anything else.

This Giraffe is Having a Bad Day

I thought this was hilarious.

Office Supply Porn

In high school, I had a friend named JoAnna who was a self proclaimed office supply nerd. She once instant messaged me that she had gone to buy some office supplies and excitedly proclaimed to me that her, "folders were nesting like dolls." I was reminded of her enthusiasm for this stuff by a post on the Make:Blog today. They highlighted some different planning and writing tools for brainstorming projects and ideas. This is something I have been interested in recently, since I have been trying to adopt the Getting Things Done method of time management. I chose this method because it seems to be pretty common with the hacker and maker communities that I tend to identify with. As such, I have been looking at the ways that other people keep themselves on top of stuff.

I haven't yet implemented GTD, and my system right now is pretty piss poor. It isn't that I am having trouble staying on top of my workflow, but my system is far from perfect. I get ideas for songs, blog entries, drawings, or things I want to look into all the time. Unfortunately, I never have anything to record this informations so the ideas get lost. I'm getting a little better using the note taking app on my iPod, but the real problem is my methods for tackling larger projects. I'm good at staying on top of smaller stuff like homework assignments and my day to day workflow, but I have trouble breaking up big stuff into smaller chunks to do. For example, if I have a paper to write, I'll do it all in one weekend. I do the same things for exams, where rather than starting my studying far in advance for a bit of time every evening, I'll sit down and have a couple several hour long study sessions. I see people around me stressing over these things a lot less and getting similar results to me. To me, this indicates that there is a more efficient way to approach big projects and I am hoping that GTD will be my way of doing it. In the meantime, any suggestions about the way people keep themselves organized is appreciated.

Statistics and Iran

I will confess that I don't know much about the politics of the Iranian election. Frankly, I voted for Obama in the hope that I would be afforded the luxury of not having to worry about the stability of hostile Middle Eastern nations. In the long run, I'm not really sure that any of the Iranian candidates in this election will make a huge difference for the United States, due not only to the prevailing politics of the region but also the role that unelected clergy play in Iranian government. Regardless of the individual politics, the point of an election is to assert the will of the people onto the government. In any functioning democracy or republic, elections are the most critical function of the government. The fairness and accuracy of an election cannot be in question. This is, unfortunately, the case in Iran. President Ahmadinejad has been accused of rigging the election so as to steal it from opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi. [New York Times]

While there has been an admitted discrepancy of 3 million votes, I suspect there will be more. Nate Silver, the genius statistician, used Benford's Law to analyze the election. His conclusion is that there is a suspiciously unlikely distribution of votes for at least one of the candidates. [FiveThirtyEight] I have heard of Benford's Law used before in an application like this, but today I read another article about another analysis. Benford's Law is concerned with the first number of the count for each candidate. This article instead looks at the last two number of the provincial counts. Since these are the least significant digits of the count, their distrubtion should be roughly uniform across the counts (as these numbers represent random noise for all practical purposes). They are not. In fact, they deviate from the expected distribution in such a way that the probability of a distribution matching the one in Iran is 200 to 1. [Washington Post]

As I have said before, I don't know much about the specifics of the politics in this election, but clearly the results do not match the will of the people. That needs to be fixed, regardless of the winner. The three million vote irregularity found by the Iranian officials is only the tip of the iceberg. When the statistics say smoke, there is almost always fire.

Kicking Around Some Ideas

Thought I would write a little update on what I've been working on lately. The last project I mentioned on this site was an intersection with a stoplight modeled using a microcontroller. Unfortunately, that project did not function after the circuits were developed, as such I had no useful material to post. Here is a run down of the things I have going on right now.

• Math research - This summer I am working on undergraduate research in Mathematics rather than Mechanical Engineering. I mostly wanted to do this because I'm considering going into mathematics for grad school rather than mechanical engineering and I wanted to get an idea about what math research is. I don't feel like I'm really qualified for the research I am doing. This is research involving heavy abstract algebra, and I have never had any formal coursework in the subject. For the first time in my life, I am having to encounter material at this level of difficulty without the benefit of a class to learn it. It is at the same time intellectually satisfying and endlessly frustrating. Anyone have some good links to some interesting abstract algebra stuff?
• Podcast - My roommate and I have been kicking around the idea of doing a podcast. It would be in a similar format to Kevin Smith's brilliant SModcast, in that it would probably just be an unscripted conversation. This might be happening after the end of this month when we all get paid and can invest in the equipment we need to record.
• Art - I recently got a digital camera, and I'm going to make an effort to get back into producing some visual artwork. Part of this will be photography, but I want to work on my drawing skills as well. Engineers have to be able to communicate graphically, and I couldn't draw my way out of a wet paper bag. I'd like to one day improve to the point that I can not only easily communicate with technical drawings but also use drawing as a creative outlet. I'll be posting some of that work here. If I get a decent amount of material I might even start up a DeviantArt account.
• Music - Again, I have a few things I am working on. More details to come, possible performances or recordings to follow.

I think that's it for now.

E-Readers for College Students

I hear a lot about Amazon's new Kindle DX, and how the people at Amazon are working with some colleges as a replacement for textbooks. You can read the Wall Street Journal story about it to see what I mean. I have thought a lot about it, since I love new gadget toys, but I just don't see it working out. Here are the reasons that I would love to have an e-reader, and then the big problems where I don't see it working.

Why E-Readers would be great;

1. My shoulders would hurt less - Like most college students, my textbooks are gigantic tomes. Carrying them to class or to the library is a huge pain, especially when you throw in the laptop (along with its necessary accessories) that I need for nearly every assignment. My large Timbuk2 bag is almost always filled to the brim, and usually weighs at least 40 pounds if I am going somewhere to work. If I could replace 25 pounds of dead tree with 9 ounces of plastic, I'll make that trade every day.
2. Use my free time more effectively - There are plenty of times during the days I have classes where I get little snippets of 20 or 30 minutes of dead time on campus. I don't carry around books that I don't absolutely need because they are so cumbersome, so I end up wasting that time when I could be doing useful work. Having all of my course material in one tiny device would alleviate that problem, because I always have full access to my books.
3. All the neat features - Excuse the nerdery for a second, but e-readers are fucking cool. You can save and export annotations (crucial for a textbook), get newspapers, magazines, and blogs delivered to them wirelessly, read PDFs (big for my research, as most articles you download are PDFs), and even make it read to you. That is pretty fucking neat compared to paper with ink stains. [Amazon]
   

Why E-readers won't work;

1. Cost - For just the $490 cost of the reader itself, I could get most of my textbooks used from the bookstore. Of course, once you buy the reader, the books aren't free. If this Statistics book is any indication, the Kindle price isn't much lower than the print price. According to those same links, the Kindle price is above the Amazon used price and therefore probably the bookstore's used price as well. I also can't sell back a Kindle book to the bookstore. The use of that e-reader pretty much effectively doubles the cost of textbooks in the first semester, and keeps the costs higher for each semester after that. I'm already living on Ramen noodles, so no thanks on that proposition.
   
2. Color - I know this is a minor gripe, but I really like color in my textbooks. I'm in a very technical field, and color really helps the clarity of diagrams and charts. I deal with technical drawings and printouts all the time, so I like to see color. According to Wired, color screens are a way off, so this is probably just a matter of technology getting there. For now though, I'll stick with the paper for clarity.
3. DRM - I had a friend with a lot of music they bought from iTunes. The tracks had Apple's FairPlay DRM scheme on them, which prohibits the files from being played on "unauthorized devices." I remember these tracks were a huge problem, because when you buy a new iPod or a new computer or even re-installed Windows, you had to jump through all these hoops to get your music back to playable. Amazon encumbers their e-books with their own DRM. Well, the trouble with textbooks is that I can't fuck around and just lose access to them for an indeterminate amount of time. I need access to them whether or not I replace the reader, re-install Windows on my laptop, or whatever else I need to do. I would much rather give my money to a company that doesn't assume I am a criminal and try to lock down the content I have paid for. [Defective by Design]
   

My second two gripes are pretty minor. If Amazon wants to really get my dollars, they should make a student edition of the Kindle. It should be cheaper, and to make it that way they can get rid of some of the superfluous features. The Kindle can pull down content from a wireless Internet connection. I carry with me, every day, approximately 4,000 things that connect to the Internet. I have no problems using my computer to sync an e-reader. It works for my iPod, subscriptions and all. Speaking of my iPod, I will always use that to listen to audiobooks and mp3s, so no need to have that on the Kindle. Those are just some components that can be discarded. I don't need another device to check my e-mail and ESPN, I have plenty of those. Don't sell me a computer, I already have one. I just want a book with more features, and the Kindle comes close, but it doesn't quite make sense for a college student just yet.

Is Science As Important As Football?

I just read this article, which makes the case for a return to better science education. Check it out.