Forewarned is forearmed and this article is both objective and persuasive.  But while the baton, taser, assault rifle or stealth bomber may be used in lieu of conversation words will always retain their power.

As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Socialism on page 460, ‘Only ideas can overcome ideas.’ and in Omnipotent Government on page 210, ‘Both force and money are impotent against ideas.’

Words proffer the instruments to meaning.  Equity, freedom, justice, peace and prosperity.  These are not mere words; they are vantage points.

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

One major trend with the Internet is the open source environment.  Open source software is where the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification.  There are many examples such as Linux, SourceForge or Wordpress.  The speed and adaptability of the open source environment cannot be ignored.

For example, in a memo from deputy CIO David Wennergren to top military officials he wrote,

To effectively achieve its missions, the Department of Defense must develop and update its software-based capabilities faster than ever, to anticipate new threats and respond to continuously changing requirements … The use of open source software can provide advantages in this regard.

The open source environment is the opposite of a classified environment.  The source code may be viewed by all.  Every single revision may be viewed by all.  Transparency is fundamental to the process much to the consternation of some parties.

For example, a researcher built at monitoring tool called Wikipedia Scanner for the online open source encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The BBC reports two examples:

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.

Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency’s computers made edits to the page of Iran’s president. …

“The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as “idiotic,” a “racist”, and a “bigot”. An entry about his audience now reads: “Most of them are legally retarded.”  The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National Headquarters.

Once the taste of such freedom has been experienced it is difficult to extinguish the desire for more.  Additionally, the fundamental thinking process spreads over into other aspects of life.

OPEN SOURCE VOTING

The Wall Street Journal reported 9 September 2009 that Diebold (DBD) Election Services which provides proprietary non-publicly viewable voting software is selling their unit to Election Systems and Software.  Senator Schumer is concerned about the sale because it gives about 75% of the market share to a single company.

But Diebold Election Services, which has since changed their name to Premier Election Services, has been caught tinkering around with Wikipedia.  John Borland at Wired reports,

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company’s machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself.

What could possibly be at issue?  Well, in 2003, Walden O’Dell, CEO and chairman of Diebold, was a top fundraiser for George W. Bush’s Presidential campaign. As Hacking Democracy’s documentary revealed a letter sent by O’Dell to Ohio Republicans stating that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.“

Of course, this situation would be too funny,  if not so sad, for The Onion to leave it alone.

With the available technology and open source software why is voting not completely transparent and accountable?  Why is proprietary software, owned by private companies and not available for public review, used?

GOLD AND FIAT CURRENCIES

Fiat currencies are like the common stock of nations.  All fiat currencies are in long-term bear markets when compared against gold.  This portends civil unrest which has already broken out in Iceland, Greece, China, Iran, the United States and others.

Governments may have had a role and been able to function earlier.  When the economy was not very complex a thug could tell someone how much they could charge for a cow.  But in our current extremely complex society that is riddled with chaotic fingers of instability the distortions that come from government are extremely disrupted to a civil society.  At all times and in all circumstances gold remains money.  Thus, during this age of turbulence you will know that unlike Bear Stears, Fannie Mae or Washington Mutual stock or Zimbabwe Dollars; gold can never become worthless.

Remember, governments only consume wealth.  They are parasitic and produce nothing.  The only way they gain and maintain market share is through the threat or use of violence against innocent individuals.  For matters of morality is a robber’s costume material?  But governments, particularly the large Welfare States, are archaic and barbarous institutions that are no longer needed with our more advanced and civil society.  Statism is an ineffectual excuse for immoral behavior.  Statism is merely a human livestock management practice.

GOVERNMENTS LOSING THEIR WHUFFIE

Whuffie is the ephemeral reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and current application to the Internet is explained in the fascinating The Whuffie Factor.

The primary goods and services that governments sell are theft, corruption, famine, pestilence and war.  Sure, the costumed criminal gangs strut around lying about how they are protecting markets through regulation but who can seriously believe them?  The smart kids in school go off and start business while the dumb kids become the regulators because it is the path of least resistance for the immoral.  Seriously, the dumb kids are going to regulate the smart kids?  After all, the dumb kids think they know how the series of tubes works.

As a result, the smart kids often just purchase the dumb kids through bribes, extortion, etc.  Is this deep capture any more plain than with Goldman Sachs (GS) and JP Morgan (JPM)?  There is a plethora of whistle-blowing that shows up on the open source Wikileaks.

Citizens, human livestock, are more productive for their farmers, the elite Wall Street bankers, when they believe the illusion that they are free.  Thus statecraft has evolved to be ‘of, by and for the people’.  But now the human livestock is realizing their true relationship to the State; they are good only for milk on April 15th and meat in Iraq, Afghanistan or H1N1.  They realize that if voting made any difference it would be illegal.  They begin to see governments more like an acne infection on the earth’s face that needs to be cleansed.

LIVESTOCK RUMBLINGS

And so the livestock, awaking to the reality of their being owned, are grumbling and mumbling.  Millions have marched on Washington DC.  The ideavirus is spreading from hive to hive.  What ideavirus?

That governments are costumed criminal gangs hired by bankers that are engaged in purely immoral and unethical behavior to lie, steal, cheat, defraud and murder.  That their little paper tickets issued by the unaccountable and close-source Federal Reserve are the primary way they fund these nefarious activities.  That the psychopathic bankers are able to privatize the gains and socialize the losses.  The best possible way to deal with these parastic vampire squids was enacted by the Founding Fathers in Section 19 of the 1792 Coinage Act that provided for ‘any of the officers or persons who shall be employed at the said mint, for the purpose of profit or gain, or otherwise with a fraudulent intent, * * * every such officer or person who shall be guilty of any * * * of the said offenses, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and shall suffer death.’

As Bloomberg reported on 15 September 2009,

James McDonald, chief executive officer of New York investment firm Rockefeller & Co., died Sunday from a single gunshot wound that was probably self- inflicted, officials in Massachusetts said.

CONCLUSION

Technology is rapidly moving forward.  It has enabled ideas to spread at rapid speeds.  The spread of these ideas is undermining the current power structures and revealing things are they really are.  The FRN$ and all other fiat currencies are evaporating before the heat of gold and the rise of digital commodity currency.

But all of the current machinations are nearly insignificant compared to the larger picture that soon a whole new level of species is likely to develop called the Homo Evolutis.  Governments have been a constant retardation for evolution and advancements as life struggles from the swamps to the stars.  Try to escape from being collateral damage as life will be what it was born to be:  FREE AND INDEPENDENT.

DISCLOSURES:  Long physical gold and silver and no position in DBD, JPM, GS or the problematic SLV or GLD ETFs.

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A more gloomy version of the ad was floating around:

Have you ever received an automated sales pitch,
while you were still in your pajamas?

Have you ever had thousands of calls all over
the world charged to your stolen account number?

Have you ever had your paycheck deleted
by faceless intruders from across the globe?

Have you ever had an employer know more about your
whereabouts and activities than your spouse?

Have you ever been snuffed to dust by a
satellite laser while lying on the beach?

YOU WILL

And the company that will bring this to you
is AT&T.

This was a post on rec.humor.funny on 20 April 1994. Everything in this dystopic vision came out true by 2009 too, other than the last one.

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Online trading

Writing in Hindu Business Line, Rajalakshmi Sivam has interesting information about the share of online trading on NSE:

	2006	Today
Number of trades	20%	33%
Rupee turnover	15%	25%

Railway tickets

Writing in Business Standard, Sharmishtha Mukherjee says that 34% of the tickets sold by Indian Railways were sold online.

Ordinarily we might have thought that the rich trade on the stock market, and have better Internet connectivity. So one might have expected a bigger share for Internet commerce with online trading. But it’s quite striking to see the proportion of online trading at NSE (33%) line up almost exactly with the proportion of online ticketing at IR (34%). IR users are likely to not have broadband at home: they’re probably using Internet cafes.

Three other areas are of interest to me in thinking about this:

• Does someone know about the extent to which banking transactions have shifted to the net?
• Does someone know about the extent to which airline tickets are purchased over the net. Speaking for me, perhaps 80% of my air travel gets done through cleartrip.
• Is there traction with craigslist in India? The few times that I have looked, I’ve not been impressed at the liquidity.

Turning to supply side concerns, there are two problems. The first is bandwidth. India does fairly badly on broadband, owing to policy impediments. We’re all waiting for the 3G rollout to get a quantum leap in bandwidth.

The data above, for NSE trading and Indian Railways, is the picture that we’re seeing in pre-broadband India. I think that in the coming five years, a full quarter of the households of India will have a broadband connection (either through a computer or through a smartphone), and that will generate profound change.

The second constraint is development talent. By and large, most websites done in India are just bad. It seems that computer programmers in India do not get the Internet. There’s probably too much of mechanical use of tools and techniques learned on Windows PCs; there’s probably too much Microsoft in the formative years of young people. More study of good quality systems is called for [link]. The best role model that I show all software developers, about a decent e-commerce website, is cleartrip. A bunch of people who get this need to start a hall of shame for badly designed web systems and e-commerce systems in India. My suggestion for the first case study to write up there is: `Bhuvan’ by ISRO.

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Is there a readable book about the neurology of human flourishing? The only book that I am aware of that comes close is “Iconoclast”, by Gregory Berns. This book discusses things that have probably happened at a neurological level when famous people have achieved extraordinary things. The brain functions and processes that Berns writes about, however, seem to me to be relevant to the character development and flourishing of all humans.

What are the factors most likely to prevent individuals from achieving according to their potential? Anyone writing a list from the top of their head would be likely to include such things as: getting one’s thinking stuck in a rut; being constrained by fear of the unknown or fear of ridicule; social environments that reward conformity rather than individuality; and lack of skills in social networking. Gregory Berns discusses these factors.

Points made by Berns include the following:

• In order to think creatively and imagine new possibilities it is necessary to break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization. We need novel experiences in order to see things differently.
• Constraints associated with conditioned fear responses can be inhibited through cognitive reappraisal (re-interpretation of information). For example, fear of uncertainty or ambiguity can be inhibited if the situation is viewed as an opportunity to gain additional knowledge by experimenting.
• People have a strong tendency to follow the herd in order to avoid activating their fear systems. But one dissenter is typically enough to break the herd effect.
• Important social networking skills include promoting familiarity with the goods you are selling (because familiarity defines what people like) and establishing a reputation for being trustworthy.

Do we need a neurologist to tell us such things? Probably not, but it is good to know that there is neurological evidence supporting at least some of the claims made by personal development practitioners.

There is a fair amount of discussion in the book relating to wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity and justice, but I don’t think there is much discussion of temperance or transcendence. One could hardly have expected all the human virtues to be discussed in the book, however, because Greg Burns did not actually set out to write a book about the neurology of human flourishing.

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In India, Thomas K. Thomas has an article on price cuts by Airtel. My sense is that we’re in for a big crash in prices of bandwidth through a combination of improvements in prices of wired services and the rollout of 3G which is now a credible alternative to land lines.

The exciting new development on mobile bandwidth is the CDMA EVDO devices being sold by Reliance and Tata Indicom. Last night I did a bulky upload and it worked at 350 kb/s without interruptions. Naman Pugalia and Alok Parekh are measuring the performance of Reliance and Tata Indicom at locations all over India. The picture so far is that EVDO is a lot better than dialup (or CDMA 1.x) but it ain’t really fast.

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The happy planet index constructed by the New Economics Foundation (nef) doesn’t actually attempt to compare the happiness of different planets. What it attempts to do is to assess how happy our planet is with what is happening in different countries. I hope that makes you smile because if you take the happy planet index too seriously I think you are at risk of becoming unhappy – and that might make the planet unhappy!

The countries that are given the highest ratings in nef’s index are Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guatemala and Vietnam. These places don’t seem to me to offer the ideal of a good life for the people who live in them, even though many of these people say they are satisfied with their lives.

The authors claim that the results show that a good life is possible without “costing the earth”. Andrew Norton has pointed out that the results do not support this conclusion. Average happiness levels are relatively low in several countries that are ranked among the top 50 in the happy planet index.

As defined by the nef the happy planet index is a productivity measure. The numerator (or output measure) is happy life years, measured by multiplying average life satisfaction levels by average life expectancy. The denominator (or input measure) is a linear function of the average “ecological footprint”, which is a measure of the total amount of land required to provide all resource requirements plus the amount of vegetated land required to absorb CO2 emissions.

The basic idea seems to be that “the planet” becomes happier when people in a particular country become happier without using more “land” or when people maintain their current happiness level while using less “land”.

How do we know that this is what makes the planet happier? How do we know that the planet cares whether or not humans are happy?

My point is that the happiness of the planet only exists in the mind of the human who thought up the idea of the happy planet index. There is nothing wrong with trying to imagine what it would be like to be a planet that has feelings, but this is a game that anyone can play. Some people could imagine, for example, that the happiness of the planet will rise if more CO2 is produced. After all, CO2 is food for plants and planets like plants. Don’t they?

It would be possible for everyone on earth to have their own happy planet index that takes account of the things that they imagine that the planet might value. It would probably be preferable, however, to come down to earth and acknowledge that there is potential for everyone on the planet to vary in the extent to which they value various things that are important to them.

If nef’s happy planet index serves a useful purpose I think it is to remind us that surveys that measure our subjective well-being do not necessarily take into account all the things that are important to us. When we report how satisfied we are with life we take account of the things that are most salient to us at the time. We don’t necessarily take into account our own future well-being and the well-being of future generations of family members, let alone the well-being of other relatives and friends, the well-being of other humans, the well-being of animal pets, the well-being of other living things, or other matters that might be important to us.

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1. Cell Phone Features: I want to be able to do three things with my phone; talk, text and store numbers. Beyond that I value battery life over every other damn thing that can be put on my phone. I don’t need to check email, take photos, look up restaurant reviews or play scrabble 24 hours a day. The best phone I have ever had was the first one I got for free with service in high school .

2. Kindle: I like reading books. Removed from electronic connections it allows the reader to spend hours immersed in the authors world experiencing the content as the author envisioned it. When reading from electronic content people want to customize the view, follow links, look up unfamiliar concepts etc. I just feel no desire to fold books into the broader spectrum of electronic media.

3. Twitter: Seriously, I don’t get it. Has anything so useless ever been so hyped. Have any of the throngs of reporters breathlessly declaring twitter the second coming of language ever actually read a twitter. We all have a stream of random thoughts running through our heads, but until now no one expected everyone they have ever met to care.

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Adopt feed-in tariffs to create demand. It’s not enough for people to want alternative energy; it must be economically viable, as well. No matter an individual’s level of belief in clean energy, global warming, or carbon footprint reduction, as long as entry costs remain prohibitive, most small investors such as homeowners will stay out of the market. Only by offering financial incentives to surmount those entry costs will governments, local or federal, entice homeowners into investing in their own solar panels or rooftop wind turbines, which will create long-term demand, increase production over time, and lower the entry costs naturally.

Accomplishing this goal in Europe, particularly Germany and Spain, has been the feed-in tariff, which mandates payments for homeowners who generate sufficient electricity from their RES-e systems to sell it back to the power companies. Using this system, in Germany between 2000 and 2007, the installed capacity of RES-e more than doubled, including within residential areas, meeting the 2010 goal (12.5% of electricity derived from alternative sources) three years ahead of schedule. At the same time, the entry cost of such systems fell 20% and 10,000 manufacturing and maintenance jobs were created, giving the RES-e industry viability and sustainability.

Aesthetics must be recognized as a luxury item. With homeowners associations (HOAs) wielding the power to refuse urban and suburban residents the ability to utilize solar panels, solar water heaters, or light-colored roofing materials for aesthetic reasons, RES-e production won’t extend into the most heavily populated parts of the nation, which is where the energy is most needed. The same holds true for local governments, which often block adoption of RES-e by refusing to issue building permits for such projects or by charging such high fees to issue permits that again the entry cost is raised beyond the small investor’s reach.

If RES-e production is going to survive and thrive, this trend must be reversed, and state laws and subsequently state courts are increasingly becoming battlegrounds between aesthetics and science. Currently eight states have enacted laws giving homeowners teeth against HOAs and local governments, while four more are considering them. Perhaps most well known is California’s “solar rights” law, which bars restrictions against solar panels and water-heating systems by HOAs and other public entities on the basis of appearances.

Additionally, similar bills have been introduced in both houses of Congress to move homeowners’ RES-e rights to the federal level. Although these bills received little support to date, the new administration’s drive toward green power could change that rapidly.

Not a luxury is the electrical transmission grid. Already aging, subject to brownouts and blackouts in some regions, and in desperate need of upgrades, the grid that stretches across the U.S. and Canada will control the rate of advance for RES-e systems.

Many transmission nodes within the grid require additional depth to handle the increased workload from the exponentially rising numbers of electrical devices—computers, entertainment systems, kitchen appliances, heating and cooling systems, even plug-in cars—in high population areas. In addition, the electrical inputs into the grid must be balanced against the demand load, with additional power needed during peak hours. Under the current system of generating electricity via a few hydrocarbon-based generation plants, grid managers can balance their loads relatively easily; but when a cityful of solar panels or rooftop turbines kick in, this task becomes much more difficult.

Without strengthening this necessary infrastructure, and without finding a means of balancing these inputs against demand loads, RES-e could cause more problems than it solves. The cost of grid upgrades, meanwhile, could eat a significant share of the new administration’s recently proposed economic stimulus plan.

There’s no easy solution to driving such a fundamental change within the world’s largest economy, particularly through established political fiefdoms and vested interests. Nobody should expect the process to be smooth or error-free; but then, neither is economics.

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Throughout history, major steps in the progress of nations have come about through landmark court cases. Whether we take the Dreyfus’s case in France, or the slew of court decisions in the United States in the 60s to end racial prejudice, we see that when public opinion reaches a boiling point, then the law itself changes in a rational way to accommodate the new sense of right and wrong.

The courts have always been at the forefront of detecting new ideas, concepts, and understandings of fundamental freedoms. With the advent of the Internet, a flood of new problems relating to data protection, communication, and privacy have come up, and one by one, the courts are having to decide the status of each one. For example, the recent decision on whether or not linking to a defamatory website is itself defamation decisively defends the freedom of a person to give their own views and cite another’s opinion.

Image Credit: sandrino

One such landmark case is on the horizon, and the end is predictable. The legality of p2p file sharing will soon be decided. And I’m willing to stick out my scrawny neck and say that p2p file sharing will have the stamp of legality. And with no restrictions. No patrolling, and no traffic shaping.

Why am I so sure? Because it makes sense. Even if the courts do not immediately agree to it, they will sooner or later. Because that is what history has shown us. The EU has already struck down France’s Three Strikes Proposal.

The RIAA is right to be worried. People often feel that CD’s are overpriced and that the Recording lables charge too much for each song. This is true. However, they are forced to do so. Recording Labels take huge risks when they support any new artist by publicizing them and promoting their albums. Most of these artists will be failures. To compensate for this, the labels simply have to charge high rates for songs that do succeed. Of course, this means that successful artists can holdup the lables and demand higher rates. To mitigate this, the labels bind their artists to them with contracts that prevent them from running off.

The RIAA does have some valid reason to feel that the p2p file sharing of mp3s is hurting them. No doubt there is some loss there, but not to the extent that it publicly cries out. We’ve already discussed earlier on how software piracy is not really theft.

The point however, is that the RIAA needs to recoup their losses that arise from supporting poorly performing artists by charging exorbitant prices from the public for the songs of the successful ones. This is the main reason for file sharing. Apple has shown using itunes that people can and do pay for songs and software if it is reasonably priced. Perhaps a day is coming when artists can bypass the recording labels and sell their songs directly to the public at a much lower price. This is obviously something that the labels are scared of since it undercuts their entire raison d’être.

The reason that file sharing will be legalized is simple. At the end of the day, you simply cannot place a restriction on what people do in the privacy of their homes without causing damage to anyone. Opportunity Costs don’t count as damage, unfortunately for the RIAA. If legislation dictating what people can and cannot do in the privacy of their homes is ever enforced, it will result in the creation of a police like atmosphere that will give people the feeling that they are being watched. And that is something that cannot be tolerated for long.

It’s obvious that the RIAA doesn’t understand this. That is why they are claiming that even ripping legally puchased CD’s is illegal! (See the first paragraph in the second heading). They are frustrated and clutching at straws, desperately trying to retain some authority when the very rules of the game have changed. It’s only a matter of time before they lost big time in court, and will have to accept the new environment as it is. Wait for that day. The US would have progressed once more.

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However, digital security uses economic principles which are very similar to those used by physical security. In both cases, the foundation of the security is to provide two disincentives to potential thieves: first, make it difficult to take your stuff by locking it up; second, reduce the perceived payoff for successfully breaking your lock. How well your security measures work depends on how well it performs each of these tasks.

For example, having a single, simple password shared among all of the computers and computer users in a household provides a weak level of security. A simple password, such as a short word out of the dictionary, is relatively easy to “break” using brute force – trying each word in the dictionary, for example. The payoff in this situation is also larger than it could be, since that single password is all that is needed to provide access to several systems and several users’ data on them. Overall, this is very much like using a single cheap bike lock to lock up the whole family’s bikes; a little brute force with a bolt cutter later, and all the bikes are gone.

This is why security professionals advocate difficult passwords that combine letters, numbers, and symbols; it’s why they say passwords should be changed often and should never be shared. If your lock is sufficiently difficult and time-consuming to break and it protects a small enough set of information, the payoff won’t be worth the time and the risk – and your potential thief will look elsewhere.

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