On Technology

Top Facebook group: “I’m not yelling…I’m Italian…thats how we talk.”

Top Facebook group that someone ought to start: “Walking around naked makes me feel sexy.”

Some weeks ago, I posted “Coconut” to my Facebook status, and no one noticed. Do you know how much that hurts?

If you have to force viewers not to skip over your video ads, then you’re obviously showing them the wrong ads.

Dear spammer: How do you know that an extra inch would even fit in my pants?

Sunday afternoon is the best time to get on Twitter, because al the e-marketing gurus are off for the weekend. (Also because that’s when #writechat occurs!)

I just added more blogs to my feed reader than there were on the entire Internet a few years ago.

Another worthy domain name that should’ve been considered more carefully for ambiguity: goredforwomen.org.

On Entertainment

Star Trek is no longer a guilty pleasure of mine… Not guilty, because a lot of those stories are pretty good. The Love Boat, however, still is.

In any case, I don’t know how they make it through the galaxy in a ship as fragile as the Enterprise.

Hey! It’s Tomolok the Romulan. He’s dead now, you know. (But he’ll always be G’Kar to me.)

Ugh. Gack! Now I know that Pippi Longstocking wears green underwear. Little girls should learn to keep their knees together.

The new A-Team movie will probably be fun, but they’ll never outdo the original cast.

Happy happy cow cow! Happy happy cow cow! SING IT WITH ME! Happy happy cow cow cow. Moo! (In honor of California cows, to the tune of the “Happy Happy Joy Joy” song.)

Porky Pig just suggested to Daffy Duck that he see a speech therapist for his lisp. (Gail Bishop, of From the Ashes of Courage, would not find that funny.)

On Politics

If a CEO squanders the stockholder’s money, he goes to jail. And if a politician squanders the public’s money, he gets reelected to Congress.

Q: How do you know a politician is lying? A: His lips are moving.

We believe gravity is real only because space aliens are controlling our minds. Fortunately, the FBI and CIA can protect us from the space aliens, thus allowing us to fly. (A commentary on political logic.)

I marveled at the incentives, when I discovered that the penalties when my daughter was late for school were worse than when she was absent.

Did you know that no not even one child has ever been poisoned by Halloween candy?

On Writing

Every time someone implies that I don’t have “a job,” I should thank them for furthering my writing career.

As a writer, I always have to look up the difference between “heroin” and “heroine”: one is a drug; the other is a female protagonist.

On Life, Love, and Relationships

Having a scruffy beard is really cool, and sexy, too, except when you’re trying to lick the last of the spaghetti sauce off the plate.

The Missus has no reason to fear that I will ever cheat on her: between a wife and two daughters, there’s simply no room for any more women in my life. I honestly, seriously, don’t understand how men in polygamous cultures can emotionally support multiple wives.

Ladybugs are so cute! Except when they start swarming near the entrance to your apartment.

After we moved the goldfish bowl next to the turtle tank, the turtle kept trying to swim through the glass.

Do boogers freeze? (As a parent, you sometimes get asked questions like this.)

The plea of a stay-at-home dad: “I want a day off from being a mom.”

Long story short: Paul Keigan started out as a Canadian immigrant 48 years ago, with $96 and the American dream. He got into sales at a car dealership, and immediately he started making friends and repeat customers. Then, 20 years ago, he bought a failing dealership in Franklin, which was to become Keigan Chevrolet.

This year, however, GM, in the midst of its own baptism of fire, has pulled the plug.

“Nobody wants to go out this way,” he explained. “And I’m just one of thousands going through it. Honestly, I’m not bitter for me; where else could a guy like me have gotten a shot like this? I’m bitter about the good people this is hurting, like the people on my staff who performed so well.

“They had nothing to do with GM’s bankruptcy, yet they’re the ones paying for the greed that caused it.

“If we had run our business into the ground, fine. But to have done the job the way we did, only to have someone tell you, ‘Hey, buddy, you’re all done,’ it’s awful.

“Who’d have thought that could have happened in America?”

Now, my very old friend tells me, from personal knowledge, that Paul Keigan is the nicest man you’d ever want to meet. And I believe it, because if he’s as good a salesman as they make him out to be, catching the American dream using nothing more than his personality and wits, then he’s gotta be a nice guy. We picture the salesman as a sleazy type, hair slicked back, hand out ready to shake and pickpocket at the same time. But in reality, the best salesmen are personable and downright likable, because they have to be, because in the real world, that’s how you get people to like you enough for them to buy stuff from you.

So if Paul Keigan is the nicest man you’d ever want to meet, that’s going to make me the asshole, because I am definitely not feeling like a salesman right now.

Because if Keigan really cared about his employees, and if he’s really that great a salesman, he’d start a business selling something else. It’s not like there’s nothing to sell. Hell! He could probably even still sell cars. (I understand people are still driving them.) He started Keigan Chevrolet in the middle of a recession 20 years ago, and he could do the same thing again, if he wanted to.

But he doesn’t want to, and I can respect that, too. He’s 68, and he wants to retire. I can understand that… except for one thing… he’s “bitter”—his word, not mine. That sticks in my gut, makes me feel uneasy, like I’ve been emotionally violated.

I have a real hard time working up sympathy for a man who complains instead of doing something to fix what’s bothering him. Now, maybe it was just the reporter who made him seem like a bitter, old man, because playing the victim goes over really big nowadays politically. Or maybe the reporter did not misrepresent him; maybe he needs to be bitter so that he can blame someone else, rather than just admitting that he could do something for his employees, but he just doesn’t want to, because he wants to retire.

However the rhetoric falls out, one fact is clear. We have all had to adjust. I am looking for work again, even though I don’t really want to. Many people are looking for new jobs or starting new businesses. Many businesses need to find new industries or new markets—and not just during a recession, either. Every time Google changes their policy, thousands of online businesses need to adjust or go under. When Amazon some months ago seemed to be discriminating against print-on-demand books, many indie authors freaked out, because they depended on Amazon for almost all their revenue.

And you know something else? I couldn’t work up any sympathy for them, either. Because if you build your business on someone else’s, you accept that you’ll go down with them. You accept their risks. If you depend on Google, you should expect to fail as soon as your business is no longer useful to Google, because that’s the risk you accepted by depending 100% on Google. If you don’t want to accept that risk, you must diversify, only depending a little on Google, and a little each on many other sources of web traffic. That’s the smart thing to do, anyway. And I have a real hard time working up sympathy for these online businesses who don’t do the smart thing and then complain and get bitter when Google changes their policy. See this? It’s the world’s smallest violin…

So their chosen ski rope broke, or maybe their boat ran out of gas, and they sank into the water. So get up and try again already! Because that’s what the American dream is all about! What makes Paul Keigan, his industry, his business, his employees so special that they deserve a pity party instead?

What makes any of us so special that we deserve a pity party?

Remember Will Smith’s character in The Pursuit of Happyness? Even at the lowest of lows, he was still a sympathetic character. With all the mistakes he seemingly had made, we still sympathized with him. Because he never asked us to pity him. Rather, he took his destiny into his own hands and pursued his American dream.

Likewise, the American dream is only dead if we stop pursuing it.

-TimK

Well, here’s an idea they haven’t done yet, but which they ought to do, because it’s tailor-made for this show:

(UPDATE: They did an episode about polygraphs shortly after I wrote this post. Their research team, I’m sure, had already been hammering out the details when this post went live. Interestingly, they never got to most of the points I mention here. I guess lie detecting really is a huge load of bullshit.)

Lie Detectors

The polygraph, voice stress analysis, and now brain scans for lie detection. Unfortunately, these methods are only a step above ancient methods, such as a touching a hot iron to a suspect’s tongue, or having the suspect pull the tail of the Sacred Ass. (There’s gotta be a good Bullshit joke in there somewhere.)

Since you’re asking now, here’s how the Sacred Ass worked. What they told the suspects was that the ass was inside the dark, sacred hut, and it could tell whether or not you were guilty. If you pulled the ass’s tail and it brayed, you were guilty. But if it didn’t bray, you were innocent. What they didn’t tell the suspects was that they had coated the tail with lampblack. An innocent party, they supposed, would go into the hut and pull the ass’s tail. The ass then may or may not have brayed, but the innocent suspect’s hands would be covered with soot. The guilty suspect, however, afraid of being revealed, would not pull the tail in the dark of the hut, and when he came back out, his clean hands would betray him. Of course, what they failed to realize is that an innocent suspect might also refrain from pulling the tail, for fear that the ass would bray out and that he would be wrongly accused.

Similar methods are still used by modern cops, by the way, one of the subjects I address at AbesTurn.com. Effective Interviewing and Interrogation Techniques (the link above) tells the story of a 1950’s police force who would have one cop ask questions while another stood behind the suspect with a large telephone book. They told the suspect that if he lied, he would get whacked in the head with the telephone book, and then they watched to see if he ducked. I guess they didn’t consider that even an innocent suspect, giving the “wrong” answer, might not want to get hit in the head with a thick phone book, even if he was telling the truth.

Under the same heading could also go the most hideous and deplorable of supposed truth-telling techniques: torture.

The research on lie detection isn’t much better. Some advocates of polygraphy and other techniques claim a 90% success rate… but not under real-world conditions, and not with suspects trained to use effective countermeasures. Even if that success rate were true, I’m sure it would be a great comfort to the 1 out of 10 people wrongly accused. There’s a reason why polygraph results are inadmissible as evidence in criminal trials: because the polygraph doesn’t actually work.

Frankly, Penn & Teller in their magic act do a better job of reading minds than most lie detectors.

Lie detection is bullshit!

-TimK

P.S. If you’re from the Bullshit research team, here are a few resources to get you started:

A report by the National Academy of Sciences on ineffectiveness of the polygraph:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10420&page=212

A New Yorker article on using brain scans to detect lies:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/07/02/070702fa_fact_talbot

A video by George Maschke of AntiPolygraph.org, with a funny story of how some cops used a colander and photocopy machine as a lie-detector, and how this is no different than the modern polygraph:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJvh0GFNUrE

As we approach this holiday season, it seems we have little to be thankful about.
Still topping the news are stories of death and dire.

• Abraham Biggs, a Florida teenager blogs that he will commit suicide and then webcasts a video of the event, live, while viewers on the Internet wonder if it’s a hoax. His family is despondent and livid, and his father “is now calling for more [government] regulation of chatrooms,” even though his use of the term “chatroom” clearly shows he understands neither the technology or the psychology involved.

• Ashley Dupre reveals on national TV the “details” of her involvement with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, whose political career was destroyed in a scandal of such magnitude that when people talk about the “details,” they still can’t bring themselves to say what really happened.

• Al Qaeda is still in the news, and we’re still apparently terrified by terrorists, meanwhile Palestinian militants fire a rocket at Israel, which lands in an industrial zone in the town of Ashkelon.

• Rights activists are livid that California Proposition 8 passed, and they have stepped up their campaign to have it rejected. Whichever side eventually wins, this will turn out to be a ruthless and bloody fight.

These are just some of the stories I pulled out of the “top stories” at Google News last week.
Meanwhile, the financial markets continue to ride a roller coaster. We aren’t officially in a recession yet, but analysts are predicting one with such certainty that everyone accepts it as a fait accompli. President-elect Obama in a radio address claimed “we are facing an economic crisis of historic proportions,” and he proposed massive, long-term federal hiring, spending, and hand-outs to compensate for the flailing economy.

Some analysts have even predicted another great depression, and they could very well be right. We are experiencing an economic adjustment, in which efforts that we have been expending poorly we must now shift to expend more wisely. Economists know that this kind of adjustment is good for the economy, because we will end up with a better, stronger economy for having gone through it. (What does not kill you makes you stronger.) But such an adjustment also means unemployment, as people in old jobs must transition to new ones. And unemployment tends to freak people out. And that means the government is likely to intervene, and probably poorly. And what would have been a short-lived—though painful—economic readjustment could indeed turn into the next great depression.

It’s scary.

Under these conditions, finding something to be thankful for may feel like an impossible mission.

What’s Important Is Perspective

At this point, you probably think I’m about to launch into a speech about how material things don’t really matter and how family and other loved ones are what makes life important. Well, I’m not.

You see, also amongst the top news stories at Google were stories about people lining up to buy the new Blackberry, and about all the fans queued up to see the movie Twilight, which turned out to be a blockbuster. Statistics show that airplanes are still the safest way to travel, despite the TSA, and the risk of an American being killed by a terrorist still ranks up there with the risk of being hit by lightning. (Seriously.) Despite the freak suicides and the politicians hiring hookers, we are still safer from violent crime than at any time since the War on Drugs started. Meanwhile, I’m booked up with work for at least the next two months, and I’m turning away potential clients, giving them the option of letting me pencil them in after a couple months. Some recession, eh? I thought I would have a little time off, a slow time, time I could spend writing my next book full-time. No such luck.

Okay, so maybe we’re not in a full-blown depression yet, and maybe the recession hasn’t hit me yet, but some people have indeed lost their jobs. My father works in the financial-services industry. He recently reported from his company, where dozens of employees were laid off, including some of his friends. That hits close to home.

But in a recent poll, Americans were asked what they would do if they had to tighten their financial belts. They said, they might not go out to eat as often, but they absolutely would not give up their Internet connections!

OK. Let’s get some perspective, here. During the Great Depression, nobody had an Internet connection. Even the roaring ’20’s happened decades before Al Gore invented the Internet.

How good do we have it? How bad would things really have to get before we see–in real terms–another “Great Depression”?

This past Sunday, the family and I stopped off at the grocery store, on the way home from church, just to pick up something quick for lunch. More than $75 later, we came out with fixin’s for a humongous salad, chips and pretzels, 2 different kinds of soup, 2 different lunch meats, 4 different cheeses, 4 giant chocolate bars (because they were on sale), 2 boxes of cereal (but that wasn’t for lunch). Meanwhile, there was still a little leftover chicken in the fridge, which I had roasted last Friday (and served with mashed potatoes, stuffing, veggies, and a bottle of shiraz rosé).

This is cutting back?

Frankly, our biggest problem is that we’re spoiled and fat. If we really had to cut back, it would mean not getting to snack between meals, surviving on Ramen noodles instead of choosing what kind of soup we wanted, eating all of the leftovers before opening a new can of anything, and praying that we never make it “down to the last jar of peanut butter,” as my dad puts it. But even when he and Mom were first married, were starting a new family, and were struggling to make ends meet, they never got down to the last jar of peanut butter. Literally, they had a jar of peanut butter they held in reserve. They never had to open it, because income always came in, or food was always available, or a friend would always come through with a little kindness.

Discounting the Positive, Over-dramatizing the Negative

Bryan Caplan opened my eyes. I’ve long been a fan of his, as much as any layman can ever be a fan of a research economist. But he actually produced evidence that people “pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse.” This is actually only one of the 4 biases he laid it out in his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

Even leading optimists grant that pessimistic bias has grown worse in the modern era… How can high levels of pessimism coexist with constantly rising standards of living? Though pessimism has abated since World War I, the gap between objective conditions and subjective perceptions is arguably greater than ever. (pp. 46-47)

We tend to look back at the past with nostalgia. We tend to downplay our own good fortune, because it feels normal. We tend to over-dramatize fear and pessimism.

The reality is that things would have to get so much worse than they are now before we even approach the average quality of living during the Great Depression. The gap is so great, I doubt we could get there, no matter how bad the economy gets.

Be Thankful

So this Thanksgiving, I’m not going to whitewash over the truth. I’m not going to be thankful just for family and friends, because that’s not all we have to be thankful for. I’m also going to be thankful that we live in the most wealthy and prosperous age in human history. And because of that, we have the transportation to visit loved ones. And even if we can’t visit them, we can send them our Thanksgiving wishes on Facebook. And we have more good food and more choices today than ever before, and available more cheaply than ever before. You wanna talk about a feast? The pilgrims ain’t got nothin’ on us! We are truly blessed.

-TimK

Imagine this happening to you…

One Sunday morning service, a 2,000 member congregation was surprised to see two men enter, both covered from head to toe in black and carrying submachine guns.

One of the men proclaimed, “Anyone willing to take a bullet for Christ, remain where you are!”

Immediately, the choir fled.

The deacons fled.

And most of the congregation fled.

Out of the 2,000, there only remained 20.

The man who had spoken took off his hood. He then looked at the preacher and said, “Okay, Pastor. I got rid of all the hypocrites. Now you may begin your service. Have a nice day!” And the two men turned and walked out.

So, would I have run?

Hell, yeah!

Look, just because some guy in riot gear carrying a gun tells you to stay put so he can shoot you for your faith, that doesn’t mean you have to listen to him! If you have the chance to escape, then you escape, with you friends and family if possible, and you never look back.

Do you think all the Jews who escaped from the Nazis were traitors to their faith? What about all the Christians who helped them escape, at great personal risk? (The penalty for harboring a Jew was summary execution.)

There is no triumph in dying for Christ, if you could choose to live for Him instead.

-TimK

Why? Because she was involved in setting up a fake MySpace account, posing as a teenage boy, in order to mess with the emotions of a psychologically fragile teenage girl who had been nasty to her daughter. The teenage girl ended up committing suicide, and now people want to blame someone. And technically, Lori might have run afoul of federal computer fraud laws, even though those laws were supposedly never intended to address this situation.

The bad part about this case is that it only reinforces that federal prosecutors can convict almost anybody they want to, because we almost everybody has done something that is technically against federal criminal law. And most of us have also done at least one stupid thing online that might have pissed off someone else.

You see, the federal code is full of over-harsh laws. (Years in the federal pen for violating MySpace’s terms of service?! Get some perspective.) And this law wasn’t even applied correctly, because federal computer crime laws were intended (supposedly) to protect peoples’ credit card numbers and other sensitive information stored on computer. And rooting for a misapplication of an unfair law just to get even hurts us all, because it makes it more likely that the next victim who wants to get even will want to get even with you or me.

OK. Rant over. (For now.)

-TimK

There are actually four separate questions to global warming: 1. Are world temperatures rising? 2. Are humans causing it? 3. Can we do anything to stop it? 4. Should we do anything to stop it?

First, you have to get past #1, which you can, because we have indeed measured a gradual increase in temperature over the past 100 years or so. This is not a steady rise, year after year. It is a long-term trend, like the stock market, 2 steps forward, 1 step back.

But even if one gets past #1, that doesn’t imply #2, which is where many advocates go awry, because science simply can’t tell us the answer. And #2 doesn’t imply #3. And #3 doesn’t imply #4. On this last, if we could do something to stop it, that doesn’t mean we ought to. So what if the waters rise? A Cato Institute paper, for example, pointed out that it would be cheaper to move all ocean-front houses 100 miles in-land than to try to reduce CO2 emissions enough to make a difference.

The “global climate crisis,” as I understand it, comes from the fact that some people fear that global warming will bring upon a new ice age. (Plus, it has the word “crisis” in it, which tends to make ordinary voters act stupid, so that’s always a plus.) It may or may not be a crazy theory. What I do know is that it is pure speculation. Now, if you want to run around shouting about the world coming to an end, that would be one thing. But I choose to do something more constructive.

Anyhow, some evidence suggests that global temperature is largely out of our control, because humans only have a small (if any) effect on it. Most global temperature change is caused by natural causes such as the sun shining. So unless you have a grand plan to block out the sun in order to reduce global temperature, we should probably redirect our efforts toward adapting, rather than panicking.

-TimK

P.S. A more level-headed (less sexy) article on Scientific American gives a more circumspect view of the so-called data blunder.

Some of these signs revolve around how the scientist himself approaches the claim, such as whether he submits it to rigorous study and peer review or whether he issues press releases and runs paid advertisements. Obviously, just because a claim is mentioned in a press release doesn’t mean it’s bogus, but valid claims will usually be subjected to peer review, because most scientists want the badge of honor that comes after their discovery has been proven by their peers.

Other signs deal with the kind of evidence presented, the quality of the evidence, or whether the claim is consistent with already-understood science.

What struck me is that these signs also apply to political discourse. Briefly, you should suspect a political argument if:

1. The media says (or implies) it’s a cut-and-dry issue, without debate among scholars. There is always debate among scholars. We see this, for example, in the non-debate over global warming. (Do scientists basically agree, supporting government policy? No, they don’t. Not even close.)

2. The advocate says that powerful, government forces have conspired to hide the truth from the public. Okay… Sometimes this happens, but only in the short term. And when it does happen, the evidence is clear that the government is keeping secrets, because it refuses to hand over documents in court cases, for example, citing “national security” or some such. But when someone yells “conspiracy,” generally they’re paranoid.

3. The benefits of a proposed policy are not compared to the costs, or the costs are hidden while the benefits are trumped up. This is frequently accompanied by an appeal to fear, focusing on a reputed evil and how a proposed policy will supposedly wipe it out, without seriously examining the costs. There are always costs, and the costs–not only economic costs, but also social costs–are often stratospheric. TANSTAAFL!

4. No open system of information is available to judge whether a program is working or not. Rather, support for a program or policy is anecdotal. Unfortunately, this characterizes most government programs, even programs such as law enforcement. For example, new police are deployed to high-crime areas, and when crime decreases, the new policy is given credit, without considering whether crime was bound to rise anyhow, regardless of the policy. Or if crime instead continues to get worse, an appeal is made for tax hikes to hire even more police, in order to combat the worsening crime situation, without examining scientifically whether the policy itself is sound.

5. The advocate defends a policy on the basis that it has been the norm for a long, long time. The argument was recently made to me, against gay marriage, that the traditional marriage has been the standard for 5,000 years. Well, first of all, it hasn’t. The so-called traditional marriage has been the minority world-wide for most of recorded history. But even if it had been the standard for 5,000 years, that doesn’t make it right. Acupuncture has also been around 5,000 years, that doesn’t make it superior to MRI machines and modern surgical procedures.

6. The theory was developed without engaging with historic and current political debate, and without accepting the realities of current government. For example, those who say that there we have no constitutional obligation to pay federal income taxes, and therefore that you shouldn’t. Well, frankly, the real question is power. Does the IRS have the power to force you to pay? Don’t know about you, bucko, but I don’t feel like arguing with them.

7. The advocate downplays widely accepted principles of government and justice. Again, unfortunately, many government programs do this, and many of those are not brought into the public debate. We lucked out, for example, in that the ACLU has been carefully following the Bush administration’s misadministration of justice at Guantánamo and elsewhere, because the government would not have brought these to our attention of its own accord. Yet many bad laws are passed by appealing to fear or emotion (e.g., antitrust, government welfare, the War on Drugs) without a detailed examination of “the bad guys” in the light of accepted principles of justice. This results in inequities in society and criminal penalties that are out of whack with the damage they purport to protect against.

-TimK

What caught my eye about Long’s article was his claim that in a genuinely free market, businesses would be significantly smaller than they are today. He points out that large, hierarchical businesses are subject to many of the same inefficiencies that plague government bureaucracies. The executives of the largest corporations cannot possibly have enough knowledge to make good decisions about the thousands of different projects various parts of their companies are undertaking, and so it’s inevitable that large companies will suffer from inefficiencies greater than those that afflict smaller firms.

For example… the Internet’s success depends on the fact that it isn’t owned or managed by any single entity. Back in the 1990s, when the Internet was competing with proprietary online services like AOL and Compuserve, the Internet’s lack of centralized control turned out to be its most important strength. The hierarchical decision-making processes of the AOL and Compuserve companies simply couldn’t keep up with the spontaneous order of millions of Internet users acting without central direction.

Lee goes on to partly agree and partly disagree. On the one hand, you have Microsoft, who started as a small, entrepreneurial, innovatively disruptive company and has grown up into a struggling, bumbling behemoth. (My words, not his.) On the other hand, you have Google: “The reason Google is so profitable, in a nutshell, is network effects. Google sits at the center of a vast network of users, website operators, and advertisers who are locked in a virtuous circle.”

Fascinating topic, and one that I haven’t yet thought much about in those terms.

-TimK

-TimK

P.S. Ellen is also a member of the “Impeach George W. Bush” group. And she created the “Impeach John McCain” group, just in case he were to have won the presidency.