A Voice in the Dark

I get a very interesting message on my answering machine about twelve times a day.

First, there’s a recording that says “Please do not hang up.” Which, of course, means “hang up now”.

Then the recording continues: “This is not a sales call. This is an important message for…”

After a long pause, Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesiser comes on at a very low volume and says “Collie bin door luck”. Which once again means “hang up now”.

After another long pause, the recording comes back to say “This is in regards to an urgent personal business matter. If you are not the person we are trying to reach, hang up now.” See? I told you.

After an even longer pause, the recording says “By staying on the line, you have confirmed that you are the person we are trying to reach.” Because, you know, it’s an answering machine.

Then another recording of a different person comes on the line, and says to please call him at this number and enter this extension and give the following fifteen-digit case number. Because it’s somehow my job to track the case number.

Now, as I’ve mentioned, I get this message about twelve times a day.

What I’d like is my own automated system, so I could plug in my own recorded message, which would go something like this:

“This is an important message from Caliban Darklock. I am aware that you are a debt collection agent attempting to collect an alleged debt. Unfortunately, your behavior constitutes unreasonable harassment under the fair debt collection practices act. Accordingly, you are not to make or attempt any further contact with Caliban Darklock - directly or indirectly - in relation to this or any other matter. Your most reasonable course of action is to transfer the collection of this debt to a reputable and ethical collection agency which understands and follows fair debt collection practices, with whom I will gladly discuss and resolve the matter. Thank you and have a nice day.”

I hate people who rely on the ignorance of the consumer to do their jobs.

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Brilliant, of course, because it isn’t mine.

A friend observed recently that he is skeptical of global warming for one and only one reason: nobody has changed his stripes over global warming.

I didn’t quite understand this until he explained that what it amounts to is, everyone who believes global warming is happening will somehow benefit from it. The most common benefit is political - people want to outlaw a behavior, or change a tax, or shut down an industry, and if global warming is actually happening… the rest of the world is more likely to agree to it.

For example, the peak oil crowd wants us to use less petroleum fuel. Petroleum fuel is used in internal combustion engines. Internal combustion engines generate greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases supposedly contribute to global warming. So the peak oil crowd leaps into the global warming tent, because it makes a good argument for what they want to do anyway.

Many other people want to halt deforestation and plant more trees. Trees consume carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and therefore help to combat global warming. They leap into the global warming tent, because it makes a good argument for what they want to do anyway.

Still other people want everyone to ride the bus to relieve traffic congestion. A bus generates fewer hydrocarbon emissions than a collection of cars transporting the same number of people, so it helps to combat global warming. So the public transportation crowd leaps into the global warming tent, because - you guessed it! - it makes a good argument for what they want to do anyway.

If global warming were really the case, people would be changing their minds. Instead, global warming is simply leading them to yell a little louder, and it’s the same thing they were always yelling. And while that doesn’t prove anything, it’s awfully damn suspicious.

Filed under: Global Warming, Politics
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Have you ever clicked on those banners that say “click here to get yourself a free [whatever]“? I have. Here’s what happens.

First you have to sign up for three offers from page A. Then two from page B. Then four from page C. And it doesn’t take Einstein to figure out that what you’re doing is earning the webmaster marketing commissions from these advertisers, and back behind the scenes there’s a little counter that will trigger the “congratulations, you get a free [whatever]” page once the commissions are high enough to pay for it.

What a lot of people don’t notice is that the overwhelming majority of people who click on that banner NEVER WIN THE PRIZE. And that’s where the money comes into the owner’s pocket: the people who just plain don’t finish. Every person who gets to page three of that offer and says “wait a minute, this will go on for hours!” before closing the popup in disgust? He’s already signed up for five or six offers. Each and every one of those people has put something like $10 in the site owner’s pocket.

Now, you can point at that site owner and call him dishonest all you want, but he’s not dishonest at all. If you sign up for enough offers on that website, you will indeed get your free [whatever]. You will put a lot more than the cost of that [whatever] into his pocket, but it’s not real money. You can’t convert your address and phone number into money; the site owner can. He’s trading something of value to you for something of value to him, and extracting value from it. His advertisement told you exactly what you were going to get, his first page told you exactly what you had to do, and not a single lie was in the whole batch.

The person to blame for your experience on that website is you. Nobody else is responsible. Nobody made you click the banner and fill out the forms and then get impatient and quit. It was all you.

And that’s how computer security works today. The intruder doesn’t break into your computer. He invites you to let him come in, offers you a really cool prize, and simply instructs you how to do what he needs done. If you would fall for this free [whatever] scheme, you would fall for any number of other schemes designed to install spambots and spyware on your computer, and there is nobody to blame for it except yourself.

So if you want to understand modern computer security, you might think you need to read Chris McNab and Thomas Peltier, but you’ll probably get more mileage out of studying Zig Ziglar and Ron Popeil. It is simply more critical than ever that we instruct and coach our children (and adults) in the fine art of skepticism: due care, due diligence, reasonable and prudent behavior. Understanding risk and how to manage it. These are critical life lessons, and they’re a great deal more important than some of the crap we teach in school.

Filed under: Business, Philosophy, Security
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Today, in the furtherance of a job qualification process, I took an automated skill assessment. I inherently distrust these. Here’s an example of the kind of question I was given.

Which SQL statement will produce blah blah result?

a) SELECT blah blah FROM Table1 JOIN Table2 blah blah

b) SELECT blah blah FROM Table1 LEFT JOIN Table2 blah blah

c) SELECT blah blah FROM Table1 RIGHT JOIN Table2 blah blah

d) SELECT blah blah FROM Table1 CROSS JOIN Table2 blah blah

Now, given the actual parameters that I’ve obfuscated with “blah blah” above, the correct answer was (b). A left join produced the desired results. But here’s the issue.

Given specific perfectly reasonable conditions of the data, any of the available options could have produced the desired result. No answer was universally wrong, but only (b) was universally right. The key factor was what one assumed about the data and its referential integrity. If you made a slightly different assumption, you could select any of the answers. And what worries me is that I don’t know what the test author’s assumptions were.

I would like to think that the author of the test knew SQL better than I do, since I don’t consider myself sufficiently qualified to write such a test, but the reality is that test authors are frequently interns or other barely-skilled people. Indeed, what if there’s just a typo in the answer key? It worries me.

That’s about it. Nothing profound here. I’m just sitting here worrying about something I can’t control, which is irrational and unproductive, but somehow I can’t stop doing it.

Filed under: Business, Software
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So back to the question of Solutions and Investments that I started covering this morning…

The fundamental error in most libertarian arguments I hear is the failure to clearly recognise that removing a problem is not the same as providing a solution. This isn’t in any way a criticism that libertarians don’t understand the situation; it’s simply a criticism of the way they explain the situation as they see it. Without that elucidating plan for what goes in the place of (say) our public school system, and the explicit recognition of how that system hooks into the rest of our political and economic systems, there is this vast gulf of uncertainty.

Now, I do have faith that something could go there, and that it would be a Good Idea, and that it would indeed make things better. But I am not smart enough to know what it is, and I do not trust you to be smart enough to know what it is either. I believe that if you were smart enough to know what it was, and patriotic enough to want the problem fixed for the sake of America, and humble enough not to care if you get the credit - you would tell everyone who would listen.

I don’t know which of those things are missing. I don’t know if the argument leaves this gap in the plan because the speaker doesn’t know what the solution is, or intends to somehow profit from it, or just plain demands that he get all the credit. And it doesn’t really matter, because if any of those things are the case, I don’t want him (or her) solving our nation’s problems. So what I need to hear is some assurance that the person planning to gut the system has some idea how the hell things are going to keep operating.

The libertarian rhetoric is simply too revolutionary. It’s like the Boston tea party. It may feel like a great blow for democracy when you market it properly, but it’s still theft and destruction blamed on an innocent third party. It offends me to propose we steal someone else’s property, destroy it so nobody can benefit, and then point the finger at a group we don’t like. The government belongs to the people. All of its systems belong to the people. When you propose that those who dislike a “bad” system steal it from those who do like it, then destroy it to prevent anyone from using it, and finally point the finger at the people who developed the system as though the creation itself were an invitation to steal it… there is something fundamentally immoral and unjust about that.

It’s a case of two wrongs don’t make a right. Yes, Britain charges too much tax on tea; yes, the public school system is fundamentally ineffective and counterproductive. But it will not make things right if we throw the tea into the harbor and shut down the schools. It will just make people angry who weren’t angry already, and it seems like that’s what the people who are already angry really want. They want everyone else to be angry, because once someone gets angry, you can point him at a target you want destroyed and he’ll just blindly direct his rage toward it.

Most libertarians aren’t angry, of course. They honestly believe in the inherent goodness of their fellow human beings, and the inherent superiority of the market, and in the long term they’re completely right to believe in those things. But some few libertarians ARE angry, and those few draw little distinction between liberty and anarchy, and in the near term it is just monumentally stupid to ignore them. There is simply too much potential for abuse in the libertarian platform. There is a great potential for good in the platform, too, and it would be irrational to ignore that - but I, for one, need assurances that there will be more of the good than of the abuse.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Politics, Software
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Okay, now that I’m done jumping up and down saying “Russ Nelson read my blog! Russ Nelson read my blog! And he admitted it“… hey, cut me some slack, I don’t have that many visitors… I feel like we’re close to an understanding, but not quite there.

I agree that it’s a good idea to stop bad policies and recognise bad investments. But the system is interdependent - you can’t stop one policy without having a ripple effect on a bunch of other policies, which turns non-bad investments into bad investments. The order of operations is important: you cannot take away the bucket while the faucet is still running. It makes a mess. First you turn off the faucet, and then you take away the bucket.

It seems very much like the libertarian goal is “take away the bucket, it’s a bad policy”. The conservative goal should be (though the big-C Conservative rarely understands this) “let us find a better policy to replace this bucket”. When the libertarian observes that it is reasonably simple to install a drain where the bucket sits, the conservative points to the rope on which the bucket hangs.

“The bucket pulls this rope as it fills with water,” he explains. “The rope goes over a pulley and is attached to a large dumbbell. On the way up, the dumbbell will hit these scissors which will cut this line which releases that hammer which strikes a volleyball that knocks down those dominoes.”

And the libertarian says “OMG, you crazy bugger, WTF does all of this do?” - and he follows the chain and discovers that in the end, it opens the curtains. And he quite rightly observes that this is immensely stupid and there are much better ways to open the curtains.

“That’s true,” says the conservative, “but this works.” And regardless of the amount of work necessary to maintain it, and the amount of hassle involved in climbing over the delicate machinery that does it, he’s absolutely right: this system does, indeed, open the curtains.

And that’s really the crux of my disagreement with libertarians. Their platform is largely “this does not work well enough; let us eliminate it, and someone will design something that works better”. And they’re completely correct. But between the elimination and design, there is an indeterminate period of time during which it doesn’t work at all. Who will design this new plan? We don’t know. When will it be ready? We don’t know. And the pressure of not having anything that works is a massive incentive to take the first solution that comes along, regardless of how it compares to the old one. It’s actually worse than having a system designed by the lowest bidder - it’s a system designed by the fastest snake oil salesman.

I’ll add to this later, but I have a job interview… which is a perfect example of this in action. I have no job. I cannot afford to have no job. The first job I am offered, I will take, because a bird in the hand and all that. This will almost certainly not get me the best job possible, and in the long run it is a losing strategy - but I do not have a better one. I’ll elaborate this afternoon.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Notices, Politics
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Russ Nelson has a post today about misperceptions of libertarianism and some rebuttals.

I have one major problem with libertarianism. As a conservative Republican, I believe our institutions have value simply because they are institutions, and while I agree that in the long run we would be better off as a society without such institutions - I am primarily concerned about how we dismantle them.

Take public schooling, for example. Public schooling is funded by taxes. A great many taxes have been instituted to pay for it, many of them on unrelated items. It is common, for example, that a tax is levied on gambling activities which helps pay for public schools - a recent initiative here in Washington state would have legalised privately-owned slot machines if 15% of the proceeds were paid into the state’s public education coffers. (I voted no on that one. 15% is not enough. Slot machines are very nearly a license to print money on the backs of the poor. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that produces nothing of value. Get that figure closer to 50% and I might consider it.) Most state lotteries are only legal because they fund public education.

Now do away with public schooling. What happens to all these taxes? If the slot machine initiative had passed, the owners of slot machines would be sending money to the state for public schooling. What happens when public schooling is discontinued? Do they just keep sending the money to the government? Now that there’s no public education for the lottery to fund, don’t the state lotteries now become illegal? What happens to them?

Let’s look at the state lottery. How many people does it employ? How many printers does it contract to print scratch tickets? What happens to the tickets already at store counters? Imagine we send them back. How do we dispose of them? Take all the pick-six printing machines in all the convenience stores, and send them back. Where do they go? What happens to them? Clearly, so many people go to the local convenience store just to buy Lotto tickets, removing that machine will materially impact the store’s business. After all, while we’re here to buy Lotto tickets, we may as well get some coffee or a Slurpee or a giant soda, and - ooh, donuts!

That’s a significant impact. You shut down the public school, and you create a void in the market. You create a cascade effect where multiple other systems need to shut down with it, and the shutdown of those systems has a negative effect on supposedly unrelated systems. The private schools can’t handle the sudden glut of students; the parents, in most cases, cannot afford private school tuition. When you remove mandatory schooling, many parents will choose not to school their children at all. What do the parents do with these children all day? How does a two-income household adjust?

The problem, for me, is not theoretical. It’s logistical. Would we be better off as a society if there were no public education? Theoretically, yes. But there is. And there’s a transition process from a society that has public education to a society that doesn’t. Libertarians never really talk about the plan to make that transition. They simply say “this is better, we will do it this way” and they completely neglect the fundamental truth of human nature: people hate change. You have to make large changes slowly. And there is simply no plan from the libertarian camp to deal with even the larger aspects of the changes they propose. I can understand if they don’t address the issue of bad schools popping up and educating children badly; the situation will, after all, take care of itself in the marketplace. But what about the infrastructure that supports our public schools? Where does that infrastructure go? When, exactly, do the American people get their tax investment back so they can spend it on private education?

And that’s my problem with it. Every libertarian platform talks excessively about where we need to go and why we need to go there, but pays zero attention to how we make the trip. And when you come down to it, a Republican is more libertarian than a Democrat.

Filed under: Economics, Philosophy, Politics
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So here’s the latest on that job offer I got.

After I accepted the offer and told all the relevant recruiters and agencies I was off the market, cancelling two pending interviews and withdrawing from consideration on an excellent opportunity at a local startup, they started putting off my start date. I’ve been trying to get a straight answer on why, and yesterday afternoon I had a long conversation with the lead recruiter at my contract agency.

Apparently, after I received the offer but before I accepted it, the project where my position was attached got cancelled. All the principals on that project were laid off. So while my position still exists, it’s no longer attached to a project, and all the signatures and commitments are from people who no longer work there. This means that the project management team need to find another project which can productively adopt the position, so it’s properly attached to a project budget. It also means that new contracts need to be signed with the contract agency by people who actually still work there.

It’s a mess. I’ve already informed the contract agency that I’ve resumed my job search. I can’t just sit around waiting until the client cleans up the problem. I’m less than pleased now that several of the positions I was considering elsewhere are filled.

Filed under: Business
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