Focusing Illision

From "Thinking Fast and Slow" :
"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it."

I lost my mind in San Francisco

Everything we love and hate about the city, profiled in an article about the housing crisis in SF .

Risky Business

The difference between how scientists and the population perceive descriptions of risk - a matter of life and death. A cautionary tale from Italy.

Reflections on minimum wage.

Every couple of years, this drama plays out. There is a call for a hike to the minimum wage, the democrat talking heads posture it as helping the poor, the republicans paint it as a burden on the business. Lost among all the shouting is a serious analysis on what it does. I was on the fence on this, as something that did not make sense, but did not have significantly destructive effects.

Now a report from the CBO makes me reconsider. The current hike is expected to cost the economy half a million jobs through 2016. If the analysis is correct (and it seems to be), then we are at a stage where we should no longer support this nonsensical drama.

From a pure demand/supply point of view, the minimal wage did not made sense and would never be implemented in pure market economies . The government is setting the price for labor, and what that does is push a certain class of jobs out of the economy. If there is a retiree who is willing to work as a librarian for $5/hour, or an out of work individual willing to work in a new field where he would not be productive for $7/hour - these folks would not be allowed to work even if there was an opportunity and they were willing. So those kinds of jobs are lost.

On the benefit side, those that have jobs that pay the minimum wage - everyone across the board gets a raise, regardless of whether they are adding value or not. And if they are not, presumably the business owners would cut those positions as well. Those that get to keep their jobs get a higher salary - and they are net better off, but it is not without a cost to those that are lower on the ladder. The report mentions that a third of the benefits would go to families that earn three time the poverty levels, and only 19% goes to the families that are below the threshold.

This is a perfect example of a blunt instrument - something that is implemented across the board, with uneven benefits and costs,  and leaves the system worse than before. The reason it gets repeated every couple years, is that (1) politicians can point to it and claim that they are helping the poor and (2) it is easy to implement. Another victim of the news cycle that is based on talking points rather than nuanced analysis. 

The fences are for sheep, not for snakes ...

Make no mistake - any competent terrorist will not be using hotmail and skype to broadcast their plans. The surveillance infrastructure is best used for spying on law abiding citizens.

And if you think you are a law abiding citizen who has nothing to fear from surveillance, understand that with the proliferation of legislation that gets enacted without anyone even reading bills, the average US citizen commits three felonies a day. The day you run afoul of the rulers, the all seeing eye will surely focus its gaze on everything stored about you in the massive government data warehouse of warehouses.

Maybe the government is going about doing this the right way, and they have our best interests in mind. But the key issue is that they are not transparent about what they are doing.

Bruce Schneider: "Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal -- or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law -- but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we're living in a police state."

The internet is built on American platforms and the country has done extraordinarily well in capitalizing on this - but if the rest of the countries of the world, many of whom have a higher standards for privacy, do not trust the US it will create opportunities for others to provide secure options for communications, and the american economy will pay a price for it (not unlike the $10 we pay for each air ticket to sponsor the security theater that goes on).

As prof Lessig argues in Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace - the internet is not an unregulatable place of freedom, but can be architected to become a place of oppressive control. Unsophisticated governments may resort to such crude tactics as shutting it down, the moderately intelligent but ultimately ignorant ones have more sly tactics work to shape the architecture of cyberspace so that monitoring and control become fully ingrained features, with no option for users to opt out of the constant surveillance.

Lets hold our politicians accountable, if they cannot provide oversight over the executive branch and merely serve as rubber stamps, they do not deserve our trust or our votes. Lets support entities like EFF and ACLU, that fight for our civil liberties and transparency in government. And if nothing else, lets not have this conversation die out when CNN and Foxnews get distracted by the next photogenic american tourist that disappears in a third world country. This is a time to ask questions, and make decisions on how we need to structure our society and technology to protect our civil liberties. 

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."  - Benjamin Franklin.

If you ever wonder what a poker face looks like ...

... observe Chris Moneymaker when he bluffs Sam Farha on the final heads up round.



And for the background story, read the Oral History of the 2003 WSOP - the year that broke open the floodgates for the amateurs behind the guy who had a name so outrageous that folks asked him for ID before believing him. 

How does one profile an enigma? ESPN takes a shot at profiling Lionel Messi

What do you do when your subject is reticent, inarticulate, and inaccessible? You go to places where he spent his formative years, talk to others who are more willing, and come up with some wild conjectures on what it is that drives someone who may lay claim to be the greatest football player of all time. The result is a portrait that feels somewhat incomplete and hollow - but the effort is laudable.

If nothing else, its finally great seeing content on the web break away from the jaded magazine layout and become more dynamic. Not quite as sophisticated as Snowfall by NYTimes, yet a notable step forward. This is how to fight off the Safari reader feature that threatens to strip away anything that is not purely textual content.

A compelling vignette of what is good and bad about America -

- neatly packaged in a story about a kid who wanted to bike to school.

Behind the hits - The NFL players insane injury mentality

There is something so macho, but also delusional, and ultimately tragic in how these modern day gladiators have been conditioned to think about their jobs, their bodies, and their professional colleagues.  Riveting.

Outstanding Infographic: Fatalities vs Miles Driven

NYTimes has a gorgeous graphical display that plots auto fatalities per 100K people against vehicle miles driven per capita - and annotations that tell a story behind the curve shape. Wow - way to move away from the standard time trended line graphs on two axes. 

The Inception of Adaptation

Susan Orlean's piece from the New Yorker that was the basis of the book The Orchid Thief which was the basis of the movie Adaptation which is one of my favorite movies. The site has a number of her other pieces too - stellar writing.

Meeker Report '12

The always informing and entertaining Mary Meeker strikes again - and in her target this time around: Mobile.

Mobile - yet another mountain to climb for publishers.

A ongoing saga of disruptions - first the web, then smartphones, and now tablets. A very typical (and accurate) case.

The Portrait of a Doctor as a Conflicted Immigrant

Under the uber-sensationalist title of "America is Stealing the World's Doctors", a prototypical immigrant story - frustration, opportunity, guilt, rationalization.

Cue ... Action ... Reward! How marketers use purchase data and psychology to "Target" advertisements.

Turns out while Walmart is out there optimizing logistics and cutting costs to the bone, Target has been busy building predictive analytics to figure out when to send you coupons - and hide what they know about you.

This is the new marketing - there are mountains of data and statistical tools out there that allow companies to figure out what you are up to. The new challenge is to how to use that data to drive your purchase decisions without violating your sense of privacy and fairness.

How to get interests of the 99% (or 99.95%) represented in congress ...

Lawrence Lessig explains that 0.05% of the population is pretty much funding the congress campaigns, and it is not surprising why congress does not represent the 99.95%. A possible modest solution - base campaign finance solely on vouchers from citizens, and the incentives will align properly. 0.05% is also the probability of this change happening anytime soon. Prof Lessig, can you raise some money to get this reform passed?

Video with Jon Stewart.

If you need $1K, the rate is 25% per annum - $1M? 4%. $1Trillion? 0.01%.

Update(12/6): Ben Bernanke's response to the article. Appears there were some inaccuracies in how it was reported. However, the point about material reform not happening still stands.

Now the details of the bailout way beyond the TARP are finally out [Bloomberg Report]. Its not pretty, trillions of dollars loaned out practically free - protecting the bonuses of the banking execs who brought on the crisis with their leveraged risk taking. So thats what the "free" part of the "free markets" meme is referring to. And the banks are bigger and more concentrated than ever, and there have been no substantial reforms. This will end well, no doubt.

Money - where is it?

xkcd has the answer.

The Valley - How It All Started ...

I'd never heard of this Tom Wolfe piece on the valley pioneers - Noyce, Moore, Grove, and some others less well known today. Absolutely riveting bit of history - for anyone who wonders where and how the silicon valley ethos germinated and blossomed. The parallels to today are ridiculously apparent. History doesn't repeat, but it indeed does rhyme.

California Bleeding

What happens to local governments when the economy goes south and taxpayers refuse to pay more. Cities go broke, services get cut, and we go quickly from a fiesta to a fiasco.


The succession of financial bubbles, and the amassing of personal and public debt, Whybrow views as simply an expression of the lizard-brained way of life. A color-coded map of American personal indebtedness could be laid on top of the Centers for Disease Control’s color-coded map that illustrates the fantastic rise in rates of obesity across the United States since 1985 without disturbing the general pattern. The boom in trading activity in individual stock portfolios; the spread of legalized gambling; the rise of drug and alcohol addiction—it is all of a piece. Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for short-term rewards.

What happens when a society loses its ability to self-regulate, and insists on sacrificing its long-term interest for short-term rewards? How does the story end? “We could regulate ourselves if we chose to think about it,” Whybrow says. “But it does not appear that is what we are going to do.” Apart from that remote possibility, Whybrow imagines two outcomes. The first he illustrates with a true story, which might be called the parable of the pheasant. Last spring, on sabbatical from the University of Oxford, he was surprised to discover that he was able to rent an apartment inside Blenheim Palace, the Churchill family home. The previous winter at Blenheim had been harsh, and the pheasant hunters had been efficient; as a result, just a single pheasant had survived in the palace gardens. This bird had gained total control of a newly seeded field. Its intake of food, normally regulated by its environment, was now entirely unregulated: it could eat all it wanted, and it did. The pheasant grew so large that, when other birds challenged it for seed, it would simply frighten them away. The fat pheasant became a tourist attraction and even acquired a name: Henry. “Henry was the biggest pheasant anyone had ever seen,” says Whybrow. “Even after he got fat, he just ate and ate.” It didn’t take long before Henry was obese. He could still eat as much as he wanted, but he could no longer fly. Then one day he was gone: a fox ate him.

The other possible outcome was only slightly more hopeful: to hit bottom. To realize what has happened to us—because we have no other choice. “If we refuse to regulate ourselves, the only regulators are our environment,” says Whybrow, “and the way that environment deprives us.” For meaningful change to occur, in other words, we need the environment to administer the necessary level of pain.