I Didn’t Watch

I didn’t watch the presidential debate last night. There is only so much my psyche can take. I have read a few of the after action reports, and it sounds as if I didn’t miss much.

Apparently Mitt Romney “won” on style, which is mostly what these things are about. He wore out his teeth from behind by lying through them continuously. Obama was professorial and languid. Yawn.

One commentator pointed out that the debates are aimed at the undecided, which means the low-information, low motivation voters who haven’t been paying attention in class, ever. I guess this means the people who are more concerned with the latest celebrity breakup than the future of the nation. It sounds as if the proceeding delivered for them. The outcome of the election may hinge on their casual judgment.

The contest of personalities between Romney and Obama interests me not at all. Their political differences are akin to the differences between a medieval surgeon who wants to bleed you before cutting your leg off and a 19^th century surgeon who knows better than to bleed you but wipes his saw on his pants by way of sanitary practice. Obama is a few centuries more advanced than Romney, but neither offering us a sure path to survival. Neither is operating on the basis of state of the art medicine or offering to save the leg.

This makes sense. Both men were chosen through the accumulation of large campaign donations from multi-millionaires. These wealthy donors, in turn, are remoras sucked on to the inhuman corporate sharks that run our society. These corporate sharks have all the foresight and compassion of…sharks. It should not shock us that the candidates have no policies that truly address the realities we face.

In a recent interview, writer and political activist Noam Chomsky was asked how progressives should view the present electoral contest.

Chomsky said “I think they should spend five or ten minutes on it. Seeing if there’s a point in taking part in the carefully orchestrated electoral extravaganza.  And my own judgment, for what it’s worth, is, yes, there’s a point to taking a part.”  The long and short: Vote against Romney/Ryan (for Obama) in a swing state. Vote third party in a non-swing state. Then get on with more important things.

What are those more important things? Primarily, fixing the machine. We don’t like the products, but most people are caught up with hating the present malfunctioning unit. They hope, against all rationality, that the same machine will suddenly produce a perfect model after an endless string of defectives. It’s a factory, not a slot machine. It’s not designed to produce what we need. Quite deliberately the opposite.

The first step in fixing the machine is doing what I am doing right now: Pointing directly at the machine and noting that it is what needs fixing. Education is the starting point. Most of America is caught up in its tribal hatreds.

A suggestion: The next time someone starts talking to you about how much they like candidate A or dislike candidate B, don’t get caught up in that discussion. Talk about the machine. The money filter. The Saving American Democracy Amendment. Anything other than personality driven horse race politics. The first step towards an answer is getting people to start asking the right questions.

Smooth Roads

"Frightful roads. Perpendicular descents. Way not banked; the route is but a passage made through the forest. The trunks of badly cut trees form as it were so many guard-stones against which one is always bumping. Only ten leagues a day.” Gustave de Beaumont, travelling companion of Alexis de Tocqueville in America, 1831

A friend of mine is retiring this week. For the last three decades he has worked for the Vermont Agency of Transportation, most recently as a project manager. It would embarrass him if I named him, but I’d like to acknowledge him.

There is a saying that sex is like air. You only think about it if you aren’t getting enough. Another thing in that category is transportation infrastructure. Most of us only think about roads if they are rough or potholed. We only think about sidewalks if they are cracked and heaved. We only think about bridges if they are closed or restricted. Of course, we also think about all these things when they are being repaired, in which case we are generally annoyed by the delay.

I’d like you to think about these things differently. Please consider:

Roads, sidewalks, bridges, and anything else we walk on or roll across, are all in a constant state of decay. Every foot and wheel brings a surface closer to failure. A road is less of an object than a process, in a constant cycle of destruction and renewal. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but what it really despises is a smooth, impermeable surface. There is a cliché about the Golden Gate Bridge – by the time they finish painting it from one end to the other, the place where they started is ready to be painted again. This applies to road maintenance in any state. It is forever unfinished business.

We demand incredibly high standards of our surfaces. A half inch bump on a highway is jarring. Think of it; Two twelve foot wide lanes going for hundreds of miles, and along all the hills and curves it is supposed to be smooth within one part in a thousand. That doesn’t occur without a great deal of care, skill, and organization. Nor does it remain that way.

This brings me to my friend and neighbor. For all these years, in the heat and the rain and the cold, and in the hair tearing frustration of offices and administrators, he has been managing this unfinished business. He is one of those everyday unsung heroes who bring us what we expect. If he and his colleagues do their jobs, we don’t notice a thing. We walk, we drive, we ride our bicycles, and we think about something else.

I’d like you to do something for my friend as a little tribute. The next time you are driving or biking on a newly paved road, or walking on a clean new sidewalk, just notice it. Appreciate it. Think about Beaumont’s words. Marvel a little.

Have a good retirement, neighbor.

A Software Problem

The Librarian is a fan of British TV. Not all of it, of course, but series such as Sherlock (with Martin Freeman as the definitive Dr. Watson and that nerd-throb Benedict Cumberbatch) and Downton Abbey. A source of frustration for her is that these programs are released by the BBC months before they show up on this side of the Atlantic. The BBC actually blocks people with U.S. IP (Internet Provider) addresses from streaming the programs. American viewers don't get to see them until PBS broadcasts them stateside, months later.

Enter IP spoofing. There is software available that fools the BBC servers (or any servers, for that matter) with a false UK address. Now we can watch television with actual plot and character development at the same time as Londoners.

There’s a similar problem with UK musical artists. The UK release of these performers generally predates the U.S. release by a month. The answer for a faithful U.S. fan is paradoxical: Download the music from a pirate site for free when the music is released, and then buy it a month or so later when it is legally available here.

The recording companies don’t seem to get the fact that once a piece of music or video is in digital format it is inevitably going to be released into the electronic wild. It’s not a plastic disc in a box anymore.

Some artists have realized this. Radiohead was first in line among major bands, self-releasing their 2007 album In Rainbows online, allowing people to pay whatever price they wanted. After a few months they released an actual boxed set CD, which sold well enough to hit #1 on the U.S. and UK charts. Estimates for their take from the online offer vary between $2.4 million and $10 million, none of which went towards the salaries of recording company executives.

Other artists have followed suit. Amanda Palmer used the online project funding site Kickstarter to raise money for her new album Theatre Is Evil. She broke Kickstarter’s fundraising record with a $1.2 million take. Donors get various perks, including special preview releases. Palmer gets to do the album she really wants, and delivers her art to her fans without the recording company producers as intermediaries.

In the U.S., mobile phones are connected to particular carriers. If Verizon coverage is the best in your area you might buy a Verizon-compatible iPhone or one of the Verizon-compatible Android-based phones, or a simple feature phone, again, compatible with Verizon. Same goes for AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile. Some of these carriers use a system called CDMA and some use a system called GSM, but even within those systems you can’t switch a phone to a different carrier.

This is not the case in Europe. A mobile phone is just a mobile phone. If you want to sign up with a carrier you buy their SIM card (a little plastic chip that sticks into your phone) and start paying them. If you want to switch to a different carrier you buy a different SIM card and sign up with some other company. This lack of a phone lock in results in more competition and, therefore, lower prices.

An example from the Verizon website: 900 minutes, 2 GB of data and unlimited text messaging costs $110 per month. Checking in on the Vodafone UK website, the exact same plan costs 46 Pounds, or $73 per month. A similar plan on T-Mobile UK (900 min., 5000 texts, 1.5 GB) is 35 Pounds or $56 per month. The best price I could find was with a carrier called O2: Unlimited calling, unlimited texts, 1 GB of data, and a free 16GB iPhone for 30 Pounds or $48 per month. A customer can fold in the price of a new phone into the plan or buy a cheaper SIM-only plan for an existing phone.

(I just did the math. 5000 texts per month is one every six minutes for 16 hours per day. Does anyone actually do that? What else could they possibly accomplish?)

Mobile phone companies in the UK also have a wider variety of plans with more combinations of features than their U.S. counterparts. Such are the benefits of unlocked phones. You’d think that a Federal Communications Commission or a Congress concerned with the financial well-being of the citizenry would outlaw the locking of mobile phones. Oh, right, “concerned with the financial well-being of the citizenry.” Never mind.

Those of you who are technically savvy have been waving your hands and bouncing up and down in your chairs like that smart kid in math class. Of course, the million code monkeys out there pounding away on a million keyboards have come up with an answer. There are software packages out there that you can use to unlock your phone. There are businesses where you can send your phone to be professionally unlocked. Even the CDMA/GSM divide is being bridged by new quad-band phones that can run on all the U.S. and European systems. It’s cheaper for the phone manufacturers to make, distribute, and support one model with all the capabilities built into the chip instead of a different model for each system.

Right now the process is kind of an edgy thing and the buyer must beware. A phone can end up “bricked” instead of unlocked, and the warranty is voided by such shenanigans. Things keep developing, however. With the advent of the quad band phone it became a software problem, and software only requires brains and time. My prediction is that unlocking will become more mainstream and reliable. Just as the record companies got caught flat footed by online digital music distribution, I foresee the mobile phone monopsony being flummoxed by the unlocking issue. I can imagine them throwing huge resources into security software in a hopeless attempt to stop the million code monkeys.

The common thread between music and mobile phones is that once information is reduced to electronic bits the ability of authorities to control that information becomes compromised.

This brings me to electronic voting machines. Most of those machines are manufactured by one of three companies: Sequoia, ES&S, and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold). There are two basic types. Card readers do exactly that – the voter fills out a specially formatted ballot and feeds it into a machine that reads it and records the vote. DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) machines have a touch screen with a virtual ballot on it. Votes are recorded electronically and sometimes a paper record of the vote is produced. About 25% of voters in this election will be using DRE machines with no paper record of their vote. Without a paper trail the integrity of those votes relies entirely on the security of the voting system computers. The software that runs these systems is considered proprietary by the manufacturers, so the voting machines essentially become impenetrable black boxes. Except, of course, to hackers.

Electronic voting systems have been plagued by failures. Voters have watched as their vote selection flipped form one party to another. In some districts thousands of electronic ballots have disappeared. In other districts vote counts have exceeded the actual population. In New Mexico the number of spoiled ballots in majority Hispanic (read: Democratic) districts rose dramatically when touch screen machines were introduced and then dropped again when paper ballots returned. In both 2004 and 2008 there were statistically significant discrepancies between exit polling and the official results. And those are just the problems we know about.

 I guess that is the real problem with electronic voting – it is almost impossible to know if we’ve been cheated. Two-thirds of Americans are now voting with paper ballots, or at least paper records. However, in the tight races we have been witnessing even a couple of percentage points in a swing state can make the difference. One doesn’t have to steal the entire vote, just the important bits.

The problem with hand counted paper ballots is that they are time consuming and bulky. The beauty of hand counted paper ballots is the same as their faults. Yes, they are time consuming and bulky. If some group wants to steal an election they literally have to steal physical objects. Stuffing the ballot boxes requires that physical copies of ballots have to be produced, filled out, transported, and placed into many breached physical boxes. Faking a vote count requires suborning a number of people, all of whom have to keep their mouths shut. It has been done many times in American history, but it takes real effort and is generally detected.

A number of European countries have experimented with electronic voting. Both Ireland and the Netherlands tried it and went back to paper. Other countries, such as Germany, simply banned electronic voting.

There are many reforms needed in U.S. politics. One vital reform is keeping our ballots physical and our ballot counters human.

Then, perhaps, we could get a consumer friendly FCC and cheap mobile phone service.

Sibling Punditry

"Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice."

This one is about credit being delivered where credit is due. There is a teaspoonful for myself and a great chocolate-drizzled scoop of credit for my beloved sister.

I was looking for an old essay of mine and came across one from 2006 titled “The Next Saddam.” In it I point out that such disasters as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait don’t just pop up out of nowhere. There is a long string of circumstance leading up to the first shot being fired. In that case it included U.S. intervention on behalf of a dictator. I traversed from Saddam Hussein to the Shah of Iran and mused that there were probably other dictators in the Middle East and Central Asia desperately trying to hide the cracks in the foundation.

My pick for Most Likely to Abscond was Islam Karimov, the butcher of Uzbeckistan. My sister, under the nom de heresy Not a Jedi Yet, pointed a prescient finger at Hosni Mubarak, now former president of Egypt. This was not a random pin-the-tail-on-the-dictator guess. She backed her pick with reason and evidence. She was five years ahead of the pack, and it all fell pat as she predicted.

Not a Jedi Yet? The Force is strong in her punditry. Will she make more accurate predictions? Is she destined for a slot on cable news? Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future…

Further Evidence of the Decline of Western Civilization - Carnivore Carnival

As if we needed more evidence.

The Kitchener Cordless Super Jerky Blaster is on sale for $29.00. That’s 71% off.

And what, you may ask, is a jerky blaster? The Q&A section of the listing has the answer:

“The jerky blaster is for making meat sticks without a casing, and flat meat (jerky) You add your seasoned meat mixture into the meat barrel, then squeeze the mixture through a tube (flat or round style) onto a baking sheet.”

The device in question looks like the offspring of a cordless drill and a caulking gun. A simple pull of the trigger and you can produce oozing meat mixture in flat or round. The very existence of this tool raises questions.

Ok, so you want to make your own special recipe venison Slim Jims. I get that. You’re making a bunch, and your arms get tired rolling the stuff out by hand.

But cordless? You’re going to be preparing beef jerky on the roof? In the woods?  On the back of a moving flatbed truck? There are electric sausage stuffers on the market. They sit on your kitchen counter and plug into the wall socket. In your kitchen, where you prepare food. The existence of a cordless jerky blaster infers the existence of a place with no electricity, but access to cookie sheets and an oven. And yet, and yet, the jerky blaster comes with only one battery, so after some limited period of meat extrusion one must find a working outlet to recharge the device.

Someone in product development somewhere thought this was a great idea, and it passed muster in the executive offices. What America needs is a hyper-specialized cordless meat processing device. Nobody stopped for a moment and said “This is idiocy. Nobody needs to make jerky more than fifteen feet from an outlet.” I guess it’s a new rule for the age of lithium ion batteries: If it can be made it can be made electric, and if it can be made electric, it can (and will) be made cordless, whether that makes the remotest sense or not. For that matter, does any private individual in this world make enough jerky to need a dedicated tool like this? (“Hey Frank, check it out. Fresh batch of jer- Hey Frank, come back here!”)

I am imagining some factory worker in China asking the purpose of this new product. The look on this person’s face on receiving the answer would be priceless. And we used to call them inscrutable. We, who have created the most completely unnecessary thing.

On another front, the 666 food wagon, located in Manhattan, has come out with the world’s most luxurious hamburger. Costing $666, it contains a patty of Kobe beef wrapped in gold leaf, lobster, foie gras, truffles, and caviar. It is wrapped in three one-hundred dollar bills. They call it the “Douche Burger.” Disgusted with expensive and pretentious gourmet burgers presented at trendy restaurants, they came out with their own capper, describing it as “a f—ing burger filled and topped with rich people shit... It may not taste good, but it will make you feel rich as f–k. Douche."

As it turns out, it was a joke and an advertising gimmick. What the article I read reveals, however, is that there are unintentionally shame-filled burgers out there. There is a $295 burger available at a New York restaurant called Serendipity that contains a "mix of Japanese Wagyu beef infused with 10-herb white truffle butter, seasoned with Salish Alderwood smoked Pacific sea salt, topped with cheddar cheese." A similar Wagyu based atrocity with foie gras and champagne retails for the speechless-rendering price of $5,000 at a restaurant called Fleur.

It’s hard enough comprehending people paying the price of a used car for some semi-durable bauble such as a designer handbag. But a burger?

Final kicker, double barreled: Wagyu beef, and its partner on fancy menus, Kobe beef, sound as if they are raised on some meticulously run farm in a picturesque part of Japan. The meat is from some heritage breed of Japanese cattle bred over centuries for the refined palates of the shoguns and pampered by their anal-retentive attendants, right?

First barrel - You cannot purchase actual Japanese Kobe beef in the U.S. As Larry Olmstead reports in Forbes, it is illegal to import it. Second barrel – Wagyu means beef from cows raised in Japan in general, but you can’t get that over here either. What you are eating when you peel off those Benjamins for a Kobe/Wagyu steak (or burger) is U.S.  raised cattle that have a Japanese cow somewhere back in their family tree. It is simple culinary fraud. Boom, boom.

You’d be better off eating an honest stick of American made beef jerky. You could make it yourself.