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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 265 July 7 - 13, 2003

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Monday  July 7, 2003

If you are interested in naming your baby, you might have a look at this resource:

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ 

See also Peggy Orenstein, "Where have all the Lisas gone?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/06BABY.html 

The column is filed, or will be tonight; I am collecting final comments from the associates. And we are off to hospital to have Roberta's stiches removed. There was as usual a lot of action over the weekend.

 

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Tuesday, July 8, 2003

Well, for sure I will never go to Colorado for surgery, or for that matter for much else. When an LA Laker star, Mr. Clean Cut, can be put under $25,000 bond without being charged; the DA says he didn't charge him; and the sheriff says he's only being fair to the complainant but no one tells anyone what the charges are: it's too much for me. California has a goofy legal system, but we got past the Outcasts of Poker Flats and Tennessee's Partner stage some time ago.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/coxnet/iraq/
ap_story.html/Intl/AP.V9529.AP-BKN-Bryant-Arre.html
 

http://games.kjram.com/news/default.asp?nID=19 

 

And then we have this:

http://www.tomflocco.com/florida_rep.htm 

but I find no other references at all. Very odd. You'd think this would be headline news. And you would think that we'd notice a missing Congresswoman, particularly one who had been Secretary of State of Florida at a critical time.  But I find nothing anywhere else. 

AHA: About two minutes after I posted that, I had:

Subject: Harris alive, live on CSPAN 

  Harris alive, live on CSPAN

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/
sfl-78katharineharris,0,307496.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines


Found it using news.google.com

Brian

Subject: The rumors of her death have been greatly exaggerated ( priority one)

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/
southflorida/sfl-78katharineharris,0,307496.
story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
 

----- Roland Dobbins

All very odd. Glad to hear it was all rumor, but where did it come from? Ah well.

Thanks to Mr. St. Onge, the Book of the Month page is now current through May.

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Wednesday, July 9, 2003

We are all recovering. I am back to work on fiction. And of course there is mail.

Stock Options and the Strategy of Progress

It is the end of an era: Microsoft is no longer giving stock options as part of its compensation package, and will now show stock payments as a current expense rather than as a deferred payment. We may expect Microsoft's lobbyists to join the push to make this a universal practice, so that no one will be able to use stock options as a way to finance incentives to grow a startup.

It was predictable. The use of options can be, and thus was, abused, and with big high-flyer companies the incentive for the top executives to make the company look really really good so that the stock options were worth a lot rather quickly was very high, and rather antithetical to the long-term growth strategies such companies need. Note, incidentally, that Microsoft never did things that way, but that's another story we don't need to get into now.

The real reason it was predictable comes from Adam Smith. Whenever two wealthy capitalists get together, the first thing they do is conspire to get the government to limit new competition. This is as old as capitalism and is not going away. Established companies don't fear competition from each other: it's upstarts they fear, and so they seek to have government grant them oligopoly status. Progress depends on freedom and initiative and ease of entry into the market, all antithetical to the interests of the large and established firms, who want to cement their control over their industry. Compete with each other, certainly; but get government to keep the competition from upstarts down and out.

In the modern world oligopolies aren't granted directly. There is no law that says you can't start an automobile company, or any other business you care to start (although try to start a pharmaceutical research laboratory and you'll see what happens to you). But even without criminal law designed to Protect The Public Interest, there are many other regulations, and these can be as expensive to a new company as the initial capitalization. Sometimes more so. The regulations need compliance reports, and those too are expensive. Larger companies can amortize the compliance and compliance report costs over a lot of business, but startups have to burn capital to produce paper that brings them no revenue. The more such paper needed, the higher the cost of entry into the industry, and the less threat to established companies.

This is one reason why big companies don't fight so hard over worker unemployment compensation so long as all their competition has to pay it as well. When it gets as onerous as it is in California -- it can amount to a payment as high as 90% of the salary you pay the employee -- the companies just move out and leave unemployment and a recall election behind; but so long as it's not insane (as it is here now), it's a good way to keep the upstart startups out of the business. They have to raise capital not only for employee payments, but for workman's comp and such.

Note that a low salary plus a stock option requires considerably less capital outlay than a higher salary.

If stock options are not a current expense, there's an incentive to the startup employees to work their tails off to get the company profitable or at least growing. Microsoft's major secret over all these years has been that Bill Gates could get some of the best and brightest people on the planet working their hearts out to make money for him and his stockholders. Of course they could get rich themselves. Do not bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain; a lesson Gates learned early on.

Microsoft has notoriously worked people to burnout for about seven to ten years, then let them pretty well do what they want to after that: the best ones were rich by then, and could either work in less stressful Microsoft jobs including management positions, or just take their money and go somewhere else. Meanwhile, the costs of the stock options didn't show up immediately, allowing the company's value to grow more quickly, and making the options worth more, thus providing more incentive for productivity. 

That works much better for a startup than for an established company, which is why established companies have always hated the practice and wanted government to do something. It was that way with junk bonds, too: junk bonds provided the capital to challenge management of old line established companies which were putting lots of assets into executive compensation like corporate jets and pleasure domes and other non-taxable psychic income for management. Established companies hated junk bonds, and hated those who invented them, and worked very hard to get the full weight of government including criminal law to come down hard on anyone connected with junk bonds.

Microsoft has always run scared, acting more like a startup than a mature company. Today's announcement is a sign of company maturity.

So: it's another era, and a signal that the garage startup that can grow into a multi-billion dollar company is just about a thing of the past in the computer industry. It's possible, but increasingly unlikely, because the capital requirements to meet both the real development costs, and the regulatory costs of doing business, have risen enormously, and there's less capital to burn now.

Many years ago Possony and I pointed out in a work we never finished called The Strategy of Progress that: Human history is the story of a race between freedom and innovation, and regulation and bureaucracy. Over time the natural tendency of all states at all times and places is to divert more and more productive output to structure, regulations, regulation enforcement, inspections, reports, all unrelated to production, and all producing a bureaucracy that can't be laid off when the business it is intended to "serve" takes a downturn or is destroyed. 

Unless things have changed in the past decade, the US Navy still pays a company to make hemp hawser cables in New England; this was set up during the Civil War when those cables couldn't be bought from the South, and at least through the Carter Era the company continued year after year to make cables suitable for sailing ships; the output was instantly sold as surplus, of course. This is merely a dramatic example of what is an easily demonstrated tendency. Das Buros steht immer, as Metternich is said to have observed when finally leaving office.

As Possony and I observed, sometimes things get away from the regulators and bureaucrats, and there is a brief period of freedom, and enormous growth. The Discovery of the New World ushered in one such era (and at the same time the bureaucrats strangled a brilliant period of growth in China.) The First Industrial Revolution was another, and then came the Second Industrial Revolution.

It isn't generally remembered, but in World War II the P-51 Mustang went from drawing board to an operational airplane used in combat in under 90 days. Think about that one for a while, and imagine doing something like that now even though now we have computers.**

The electronics and computer industries broke free of the regulatory chains. There was also financial freedom to allow accumulation of capital for investment. The computer growth era began in about 1970 and continued to the Bush-Clinton era when the regulatory people caught up with the Americans with Disabilities Act, new minimum wage requirements, new employee rights laws, etc., etc.. Moore's Law kept things going beyond that, but apparently the regulators have caught up even with that. 

Depend upon it: just as the Savings and Loan disaster, itself produced by government regulation, ended with an environment less friendly to startup competition to established big financial institutions, the new era of "stockholder protection" will protect lawyers and big established businesses, in that order, and stockholders not at all. So it goes.


** That turns out to be a bit of an exaggeration; see mail.

 


And have a look at:

http://news.com.com/2100-1029-1023735.html?part=dht&tag=ntop 

Which ought to be enough for the day...

Subject: Windows buffer overflow DoS/exploit ( priority one)

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/
default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-024.asp

---------- Roland Dobbins


Hacking Goes Public:

http://www.techweb.com/tech/security/20030709_security 

And we have warned against this for months, but it's well to repeat the warning: don't give information to what appear to be trusted sites. It's probably spam scam:

http://www.informationweek.com/story/
showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10818424
 


Then we have

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/
article/0,1299,DRMN_15_2096156,00.html
 

which is just full of stuff about this horrible celebrity and this 19 year old girl who went on vacation, and isn't identified.  Now if Kobe Bryant actually assaulted her, of course he ought to be accountable; but this all sounds extremely odd. 

I thought I remembered something about  "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense ." 

It's that confronted with the witnesses, oh, and speedy and public, that I don't quite understand here. 

 The sheriff says "I'm sure he is a fine, upstanding guy. Obviously he is well-liked, and he is a role model," the sheriff said. "But I think sometimes when people look at their heroes, they forget they are human beings. One of the unique traits of humans is they make mistakes." He also talks about the stresses in a rape accusation. And

The newly elected sheriff expressed dismay with what he called "mindboggling" media coverage, saying the focus has been more on the athlete than the woman who says she was victimized.

Given that no one seems to know who the victim is, or what she claims happened, I suppose it's astonishing that all the attention is focused on the Laker's cleancut star. At least it would be to an Eagle County, Colorado Sheriff.

Doubtless it will all come out, but it sure seems odd that Kobe Bryant would go to Colorado and assault a hotel employee as the first criminal action of his life. And that the District Attorney has yet to file any charges, and the complainant is unidentified and "on vacation" while this goes on and on and on. 

Full disclosure: this house is full of Lakers fans. And we've been admirers of Kobe Bryant who has been, so far as we can tell, one of the outstanding role models in the sports world.

 

 

 

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Thursday, July 10, 2003

Once More Unto the Breach
John Quincy Adams on the Role of the United States:

"She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. 

"She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. 

"She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. "

[Aceldama: literally the Field of Blood, namely the Potter's Field which the scribes bought with the 30 pieces of silver Judas threw at their feet.]

Once more unto the breach -- we're going in to Liberia. Meanwhile we feed a trooper a day into the Iraq meatgrinder, the situation in Afghanistan is about what anyone could have predicted (warlords but no Taliban and no al Queda, thus unchanged from when we won but decided to stick around and "help"), and former Yugoslavia is safer and safer for international bureaucrats and less and less livable for the actual inhabitants who aren't privileged to be part of the new aristocracy. 

Former Yugoslavia may be the model to look at though, the final product of US desire to help, to protect the weak and make humble the proud: a country governed by a New Class which looks a lot like the old New Class Djilas described except this nomenklatura is brought in from outside, doesn't live there, and doesn't really give a rip about those who do.

Armies break things and kill people. They don't build nations, and the better they are at nation building the worse they are at being an army. 

 It's possible to recruit and train and deploy "nation builders" but it's a different kind of armed force. It won't win many battles, and it is not likely to have the respect of the real armed forces -- and that can be a real problem. It can be a problem because by its nature an occupation force has privileges. They're tax farmers, and with all that money flowing around the Sergeant Bilko types gain a lot of power and get rich; and the combat troops tend to resent that after a while. Why shouldn't they get the goodies?

It's one reason why celibate military orders have been so successful over the millennia. A combat force that looks beyond mere wealth and comfort and family life and has no profession other than breaking heathen heads is a very useful thing to an empire. Of course  Janissaries and Mamelukes will discover their power at some point. Real soldiers always do.

Still, armies designed and trained for occupation are still preferable to using real combat troops. Occupation duty in hostile territory is very hard on an army. Not only is there the constant stress and danger, but there's a moral effect: when you use military tactics on a civilian neighborhood there will be women and children killed, and you may be certain that both the enemy and our own journalists will rub the faces of the soldiers in the coffins of dead children. The effect of that on a soldier cannot be good.

But once more we go forth in search of monsters to destroy. While at home the unemployment rate is high, and we can't afford a tax cut. We aren't developing energy independence, but we are building a new army of regulators. Our airports have fewer users, but they're secure. And our military adventures overseas will, of course, make them more secure. Won't they?

Make no mistake. We will Do Good. We're Doing Good in Iraq. Of course we are finding it more difficult than we thought:

"It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external in- jury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, per- haps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one."

J. S. Mill On Liberty Emphasis added by editor

We are, I am sure, capable and high minded despots. I would rather be ruled by an American occupation force than any other despot. I am not sure I care for the effect that has on our troops, or that I want to teach our officer corps the niceties of despotic rule, but there it is.

But all this is lamentation; we are well down that road now, and I doubt there is any turning back.

So: if we are to be an empire, how shall the costs of empire be born? Why should the American people bear those costs alone?

We will need occupation forces -- tax farmers -- to do the work of governing and stabilizing and nation building. An armed Peace Corps, so to speak. Where will we get those, and how ought they to be trained? I ask seriously, because it is becoming clear that we will need them.


Meanwhile, we ought to all feel safer now:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A11045-2003Jul5.html
 


"in World War II the P-51 Mustang went from drawing board to an operational airplane used in combat in under 90 days."

I don't think so. It did go from drawing board to a flying prototype in somewhere near that time span.

David Meader

This is one of several, and I'm sure that's correct, and I was repeating a legend I'd heard and never bothered to look into. It is still the case that we were able to do such things once. Now...

Mail on Kobe Bryant

Bryant supplied DNA Samples submitted to CBI for analysis http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local
/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_2099296,00.html
 

Kobe gets no fair trial from broadcast media http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?
id=47239&section=SPORTS&subsection=SPORTS_
COLUMNS&year=2003&month=7&day=10z
 

Subject: Emails to Colorado

Some of these are funny. Below is my fav.

http://www.vaildaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?
AID=/20030709/NEWS/307090103
 

- "I hope you have all your ducks lined up before you start trying to ruin a good kid's reputation and life. Because if you mess up this one, they just might ship you out to Denver to spend the rest of your useful days looking for Jon Benet's murderer.

"And if, as I believe, you are dead wrong on this one, I will get a lot of enjoyment when Johnnie Cochran tap dances on your forehead.

You folks in Colorado have an off way of trying to make names for yourselves. Glad I never visited. And never will."

- Larry Ross

From Rich Pournelle

As I said, we're Laker fans here...

And

Tuesday, July 8, 2003

Well, for sure I will never go to Colorado for surgery, or for that matter for much else. When an LA Laker star, Mr. Clean Cut, can be put under $25,000 bond without being charged; the DA says he didn't charge him; and the sheriff says he's only being fair to the complainant but no one tells anyone what the charges are: it's too much for me. California has a goofy legal system, but we got past the Outcasts of Poker Flats and Tennessee's Partner stage some time ago.

I'm afraid that it isn't just Colorado. In the whole country over the last decade or so, legislatures have passed increasingly harsh and restrictive laws when it comes to allegations of sexual crimes. The plain fact of the situation these days is that you are guilty until proven innocent if you're accused of a sex crime. It's almost as bad as an accusation of domestic violence. The political pressure is such that a DA will not dismiss even an obviously bogus case, for fear of the political repercussions (of course, DAs these days only worry about their conviction rate, not actual justice).

So, whether there's any truth in the (still secret) allegations or not, Kobe Bryant WILL be dragged through the legal system as if he were already guilty. It doesn't help him, of course, that he's a celebrity, which will make this so public that the DA will be even MORE conscious of possible electoral disaster later on.

You often write, correctly, I think, about how the United States is no longer a republic and trending towards Empire. That reflects internally as well as in foreign policy. For example, when we have the Supreme Court essentially bowing to political pressure and taking heed of rulings in European courts (recent sodomy case), we shouldn't be surprised at how the lower courts are influenced by public opinion. We no longer have a system of criminal justice in our nascent Empire. We have a system of de facto trial by public opinion and political influence, with all the dangers inherent in that kind of process.

Tim Pleasant Attorney Colorado Springs, CO

I do hope Squire Pleasant is overstating the case, but as I watch this mess I wonder.

Understand: I am hardly defending arrogant and uncivilized behavior by sports superstars. Far from it. But given Kobe Bryant's unblemished reputation to this point, one wonders, where does he go to get his reputation back if the charges -- assuming there are any charges -- aren't true?

I keep remembering phrases like "confronted with accusers" and "informed of the charges" but I probably am reading obsolescent books.

 

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Friday, July 11, 2003

It was a long and not much fun night last night, and another long and not too pleasant morning today, so there won't be much until the weekend.

My Windows 2000 Backup Server died making awful noises, and I'll have to do another, and yes, I know, Windows 2000 Server doesn't have "backup" servers. Anyway the primary one is running, but it will need replacing, and first I need to get a secondary on line. So first it's to the cable room to pull the old machine out and see why it makes grinding noises and puts out no video...

 

VIRUS WARNING see mail.

 

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Saturday, July 12, 2003

It would be amusing if it were not a life: a man was sentenced to life imprisonment for toe sucking.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/
articles/0711coach-sexsentence-ON.html
 

He was by all accounts a model coach. Everyone liked him. But apparently his wiring was odd, and he liked to suck the toes of ten year old boys. He did nothing else: they tried to get the kids to say he did other things but he didn't. But he did suck toes.

And so he gets life imprisonment as a child molester. It wasn't many years ago that murder got you about 8 years. But of course that isn't as severe as toe sucking.

One would like to suppose there is more to the story than that, but I don't know any more, and it was reasonably local. We followed it as best we can with a city newspaper that thinks Los Angeles unimportant compared to riots in Umtata and otherwise wants to imitate the New York Times. Our other local newspaper is too local. It started as the Valley News and has never got over that. 

So we can't be sure. But every article we have seen shows that Trenton Michael Veches, 32, did nothing else, and in fact was, up to the moment of his arrest for toe sucking, a model coach.

I wonder where in the statute book it makes toe sucking a crime comparable to murder?

But he's a danger, it says. That, I suppose, comes from experts. Senior Deputy District Attorney Sheila Hanson says it's clear. although there is nothing in the news here or elsewhere to show what the danger is, or that he ever did anything but touch toes. 

Still, she says, some of the boys are scarred for life. Which says something about America. The worst thing that could ever happen would be to meet a man who touched your toes, and it was so jarring that you never bothered to tell anyone until the police came around to solicit the testimony.

If that was life scarring, what must it be like to have your sister shot in the head as you walk across the street? But that, one presumes, is not so seriously damaging as having your toes sucked. And we can, of course, assume that nothing so nasty and demeaning ever happens in locker rooms when there are only boys around. After all, it was in Newport Beach where all the children are far above average, and the Mayor is Queen of Rumania...

The serious part is the the predictive nature of the sentence. If the legislature ever got around to making toe sucking a crime -- and would that apply to mothers with their infants? -- what sentence would be prescribed? One suspects it would be less than life. But perhaps this man would do something worse in future?

I can show you many people walking the streets or even occupying political office who, I suspect and with good reason, will commit crimes. Perhaps "only" financial crimes that will rob people of their life savings, hardly as horrid and life scarring as toe sucking, but still, real crimes. I can show you lawyers plotting to extract billions from the fast food industry and whose interest in the public welfare extends no further than the fees they will get. I can show you lawyers who prey upon Vietnamese nail clinics filing lawsuits that they will let you out of for a few thousand dollars; and in some cases causing people who fled by boat to go out of business and start life over. I can show you -- but perhaps the point is clear.

If you jail people for what you think they may do, you are on a slippery slope. The three strikes rules are predictive rather than retributive. They've been around a while, and perhaps are justified, but one applies them with a certain fear; but in those cases there are at least three convictions of crimes specified in the law as crimes. Toe sucking as a crime requires a theory, because surely the law never specified the action as criminal.

Perhaps we need a board of psychiatrists to go through the country and consider each citizen to determine the likelihood that at some future time this person will commit a serious crime. Then we can act as if the crime had been committed, and sentence the criminal, at the same time saving the victim. 

And see mail.


 I can't do research on toe sucking just now. Adelphia Cable Modem is out again. One presumes it will be back shortly.


WE HAD A MAILING yesterday. If you subscribe and got a "welcome aboard" message today the mailing didn't go to you. Otherwise, if you subscribe and didn't get the mailing, look on BADMAIL and see if your name is there, and take appropriate action.

A couple were returned as rejected by spam filters. I can't do anything about those since it never says whose mail was returned.


A spokesman for the HM Inspectorate of Education took umbrage with Professor Umbridge: "It would be sad indeed if readers equated the character with today’s inspectors, who are all warm-hearted individuals dedicated to ensuring that all children experience a little magic in their school lives."

I love it. I love it.

 

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Sunday, July 13, 2003

Well I have Creon working again, and about 1,000 words for the column on heat, Intel and AMD, and other matters.

I will say this: Intel ought to find and beat senseless the man who designed the clip system for holding the heat sink and fan onto the Pentium III flip chip. I sure wouldn't want that chap working on anything else.

But old Creon is working again perfectly.

Adelphia cable modem went out for a while yesterday, died intermittently last night, and was gone this morning. It seems to be fixed again this afternoon.

he City Council gave this part of Los Angeles to Adelphia. I have no idea why they were favored over Cox. People with Cox cable modem don't seem to have the problems I have.

I will say that Adelphia cable modem mostly works. Of course it decides to quit about the time I am in a player vs. player group in a massive online dungeon. I find I am dumped off and have to log back on again, at which point my character is either dead or thoroughly lost.

 

 

 

 

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