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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 188 January 14 - 20, 2002

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.

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Monday  January 14, 2002

All deadlines done, all journalism finished, now to work on fiction. Some interesting mail today. And I haven't heard of a new Microsoft vulnerability in hours!

And I am apparently not the only one with problems doing Updates on Microsoft Updates

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23666.html 

Lee Benjamin, your mail keeps being returned. Have you a new address?

Contact Conference Details

And Harry Reddington recommends:

Click on the element and read the description. It's a HOOT! (of laughter)

Frank G.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/periodictable.html?1007256982530 

Warning: you will have to turn off the PopUp Stopper since this pops up a new window. 

 

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Tuesday, January 15, 2001

I will do fiction before I do this stuff today. I also have to pay the bills. At least I no longer have any non-fiction deadlines.

 

   http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23685.html 

And is this .NET in action? And from Roland

Today's Worms and Viruses:

Outlook:

http://www.antivirus.com/pc-cillin/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=VBS_FUNNY.D 

And Today's MS Trojan:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/trojan.badcon.html 

 

 

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Wednesday, January 16, 2002

Saw Kate and Leopold last night with Roberta. A chic flick, fun, and romantic. I said afterward that the only problem was believing that Meg Ryan, America's sweetheart, couldn't find a boy, and Roberta pointed out that she had plenty of boys. It was men she wasn't meeting.

For the Outlook Worm of the Morning, Roland suggests you see

http://vil.nai.com/vil/virusSummary.asp?virus_k=99312 

As is often this one comes from the virus writer himself and there are no known cases of it in the wild.

Roland also directs our attention to the Microsoft SuperCookie and its privacy implications:

There's no chance of anonymity in a MS-.NET world . . .

http://www.msnbc.com/news/688421.asp?0si 


 

I intended to do an essay on the Microsoft settlement mess, Apple's monkeywrench, and who's behind all this, but the Wall Street Journal has done a fairly good job in an editorial this morning.

As to Enron, my readers will recall that I cautioned against holding stocks with high price to earning ratios, and did so all along. I never believed the DOW would hit 30,000. After the crash in the 80's I said the DOW would recover to about 5500 (when it was way way down). I was told I was an idiot, it would never get about 2500 again. I could see better times were coming because P/E was at an all time low.

Then P/E ratios started going to insane heights. There were books about the new economy, in which the DOW would stabilize at 30,000 to 36,000. I pointed out that was unrealistic because at bottom all this rests on MAKING THINGS, and there wasn't enough energy and raw material to make enough goods to justify that: we weren't investing enough in real resource development. We'd need a lot more cheap energy to get to that level. I was told I was an idiot.

Then the P/E ratios went up and up and up, and I said it was a bubble. I was told I was an idiot.

It's not clear how much of what Enron did was illegal, but all of it was unwise: and so were all those who invested in an energy company that decided it was the world's smartest investment banker and stock trader, and started reporting expected future revenue as if it were earnings. Note that this was not that unusual, nor was it illegal, and investors could see it happening even if they didn't want to believe it. I told you here of an Initial Public Offering valued not at a high multiple of profit because the company had no profits, not as a high multiple of earnings because there weren't any earnings, not even as a high multiple of revenue because it had yet to have any revenue. No, it was valued as a fairly high multiple of "expected revenue", and people bought it, expecting others to keep bidding the price up. This is a legalized Ponzi scheme and everyone including the investors -- certainly their advisors and brokers -- knew it. 

The simple rule is diversify, which means "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." Another is "Don't count your chickens before they hatch," i.e. betting on future revenue should be done with considerable caution. All of  which my generation learned in our first or second grade reader. I understand that what's in the school readers now is more on the order of "See Spot run," said Jane. "Run, Spot, run!" than Aesop's fables and folk wisdom about not counting chickens before they hatch, and crying over spilt milk.

Enron invested in politicians. From Clinton they got seats at negotiating tables and Enron executives accompanied Clinton cabinet officers on trips -- one VP was on the trip when the Secretary of Commerce piled his plane into a mountain, although the Enron exec wasn't aboard that particular flight. Enron got lots of access. Then the Republicans got in, Enron really poured on the money in political donations, but as far as I can see they didn't get the kind of return on investment they had been led to expect by their experiences with Clinton. So they poured in more money, but it all seems to have been a poor investment.

But the bottom line is that people bought Insull stock and City Service because it went up, and one day it didn't and there was a crash, and oops, that was 1929. So comes now Enron, which used to be an energy company, but which got into investment games and people bought the stock because it went up, and put their retirement funds into it cheerfully, and it crashed; fortunately it didn't take the whole economy with it.

We are still the envy of the world, and the Enron case shows that the market works: a fool and his money are soon parted. Gamblers generally lose. A penny saved is a penny earned, provided that you save it, not bet it at the horse races or on derivatives. Everyone is pretty sure they're smarter than the market. Most aren't, and of those, some are crooks.

"See Spot run," said Jane. "Run Spot, run. Run, run run."


 California violent crime ratios for 1997:

>                            Hispanic/white               black/white

> Adults:                          2.0                                 5.6

> Juveniles:                     2.9                                 9.1

I was just sent the above from a reliable source. I have no idea what to make of it, and I put it here largely so I won't lose the numbers.

Doesn't this correspond roughly to the prison population ratios as well?

 

 

 

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Thursday, January 17, 2002

I was noodling around in a conference of no great significance, mostly having fun, and said something about Social Security and investments. In the course of some skittles I mentioned that "The purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers."

A fairly well known author replied:

As always, Jerry, you appear to take the position there's intelligence behind the beauracracy that's Social Security.

Parkinson's Law.

It's a living organism, that resists change, dislodgement, elimination, modification, or restructuring.

The reason for it's structure towards conservative investing has nothing to do with modern social polemics. It has a lot to do with FDR and Congress creating an instrument that was designed to do two things, offer a bridge between what traditional American local charities provided, or worker's pensions, and poverty and, this is the point everyone seems to be missing, provide a safety net for _people who had absolutely no experience with saving or investing_. The United States in 1932 was a different culture than today. Working people didn't have savings accounts in the main, let alone investment portfollios. There were no mutual funds and corner investment houses.

None of which is untrue, exactly, but it did goad me into writing a reply that became long enough that I thought I would put it here:.

Now this is odd.

I point out that Social Security isn't paying me what I get from a few years of investment in TIAA/CREF. I get sarcastic replies. I reply to those and I get your lecture.

Look: with all due respect, I do have degrees in political science and economics, and if I don't understand the Social Security system I can at least pretend to with credentials. But until the intelligent liberals in this country stop with the knee jerks about Social Security it will remain a political third rail that no one will touch.

As to intelligence, either you believe in rational thought or you don't; either you believe that rational argument in a republic can sometimes result in rational change, or you don't. If you don't then you accept what we have or you become a radical revolutionary devoted to change by means other than rational argument. You hate McVeigh because he gave blowing up government buildings a bad name.

I'm still back in the rational thought stage, having given up radical reform by direct action many long years ago. Possony always said you either believe in rational debate or you don't. If you don't, you have decisions to make. At my age I don't have much choice.

I knew C Northcote Parkinson and I assigned his books in my political theory classes (The Evolution of Political Thought remains one of the best political histories of all time in my judgment, while Parkinson's Laws and The Law and the Profits are amusing but quite valid observations on the way government works.)

And the purpose of government remains "to hire and pay government workers." By 'purpose', which implies intention but doesn't demand it -- machines have purposes too -- I mean largely that there is an institution which seeks that goal -- the Civil Service and its unions -- which is quite well organized and whatever other goals it has, that one over-rides it.

Civil Service is an abomination when combined with Civil Service Unions. The theory was that we would get better government by insulating the civil service from politics: no more patronage. The practice is that we have enduring patronage, and insulated from politics means no control over the people who affect our lives by those we elect. The end result of that is India's Permit Raj in which the Parliament can't affect much of the day to day life of the populace, and getting a civil service job is a life fix.

You can't fire it and it won't work. We used to call the Bomarc the civil service missile and that was 40 years ago.

The military industrial complex is nothing compared to the power of the civil service and teachers unions; and if the military industrial complex produced $600 toilet seats ( I designed one of them, and there was a reason it cost so damned much) at least they worked as toilet seats. 

Much of the bureaucracy today harasses the people with rules whose end purpose was long ago forgotten so that the rules sometimes actually get in the way of the purpose they were intended. Airport security falls in that category: the purpose is to get people flying safely again, not harass them to the point where they drive their cars rather than fly and thus put their lives at greater risk than they would be if there were no airport security whatever.

But the purpose of airport security is to hire and pay airport security workers. All else is secondary to that. It wasn't what Congress said it was doing, and may not have been what most of them thought they were doing, but any could see that was what they WERE doing.

Now we can say "Parkinson's Laws" and give up. Or we can watch the Republic become an Empire and our public servants become our masters, and do nothing about it; or we can actually continue to think that sometimes we can make a difference.

It's a lot harder to change the education system to something rational than it was to bring down the Evil Empire. Thirty five years ago when I set my life goals, bringing down the Evil Empire seemed more important. That's what I set out to do, and I can lay some claim to the notion that without Possony, Graham, Hunter, Niven, and me the Evil Empire would exist to this day. I now understand that was only buying time and the Republic is probably doomed from the barbarians within the gates (barbarians: see John Campbell's essay on tribesmen, barbarians, and citizens; an excellent observation). At my age I am unlikely to play any great role in transforming this incipient empire back into a self governing republic; but at least I can try, and more I can try to recruit some people who will have an impact.

Which is what I do.


Roland reports this morning's Outlook Worm:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.klez.e@mm.html 

This one claims to launch from the PREVIEW WINDOW so it's worth paying attention to it, but it is apparently only in Internet Explorer 5.x, and is fixed automatically in 6.

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Friday, January 18, 2002

Roland reports a WORD virus:

http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_99318.htm 

You get it by opening an infected document.

I'm hard at work on Burning Tower, with some work on Janissaries, and some thoughts directed toward Spartan Hegemony, a new Falkenberg/CoDominium novel. I work on this place when that's done. That probably means I won't be getting many other places for a while. It's time to get some of this work out of the way.

And:

Interesting article on how companies are reacting to

Microsoft's new licensing scheme:

< http://www.cio.com/archive/011502/meter.html >

Pete Flugstad

As to spammers, surely there can't be that big a problem finding the people who spam you about having their live webcams up? I haven't looked but I presume their pictures are displayed somewhere? And surely there is a way to identify at least some of the others? Sigh. I do get weary of sorting spam. Frank Catalano reports that several of his mail addresses have become entirely unusable because of these creatures.

 

 

 

 

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Saturday,

I took the day off. Did some fiction.

 

 

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Sunday, January 20, 2002

Slow day. There's some mail. Nothing much inspires me.

Steve Martin of Albuquerque please send me your email address.

 

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