"Uplifting" and Signalling the Stars

Science Fiction author David Brin is guest-blogging at the mind-blowing blog Sentient Developments. Here he suggests that if our technology permits us to radically transform ourselves, we are obligated to "uplift" animals to sapience. And here he argues that we should be having more of a conversation about plans to broadcast our presence to the stars. Fascinating stuff.

Early Afternoon Links

For your reading pleasure:

1. Obama's plan for Afghanistan: once again, the key appears to be figuring out what an administration means by "benchmarks."

2. Pakistan: suicide bomber kills upwards of fifty people in a mosque in Peshawar. Part of Baitullah Mehsud's campaign against the Pakistani government?

3. Iraq: U.S. forces are largely withdrawing from the cities as agreed upon, but may remain behind in areas where sectarian violence is still widespread, like Mosul.

4. Building nanobots...with DNA. Incredible.

5. How health care reform benefits small businesses.

6. Lawyer's should not be judged for who they represent...except when they worked for the tobacco companies, and were balls-deep in the tobacco companies' wrong-doing.

Not That Bad

Matt Yglesias, on the strange American phenomenon of trailing other advanced nations in all sorts of infrastructure, technology and quality of life indicators, yet lead the world mostly in multi-millionaires getting bailed out by the federal government. There comes a point at which we cannot look ourselves in the mirror and honestly say we are one of the world's most advanced nations. Maybe we already there, and we just won't admit it.

Can You Hack It?

Whoever came up with this idea is a genius. YouTube is apparently soliciting auditions via video for a chance to play at Carnegie Hall. The orchestra will apparently consist of people selected from the video auditions, and they'll perform a work by noted Chinese composer Tan Dun under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. From the webpage (via WRR):

Play your part in music history.

Interested in joining the first-ever collaborative online orchestra? Professionals and amateur musicians of all ages, locations and instruments are welcome to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra by submitting a video performance of a new piece written for the occasion by the renowned Chinese composer Tan Dun (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). We have tools to help you learn the music, rehearse with the conductor, and upload your part for the collaborative video.

Surely somewhere someone has tried out for a music gig by video submission, but I've never heard of anything quite so bold as having everyone try out via audition videos they submit online. I think it's a brilliant idea, and were I not years removed from last playing the violin seriously I would consider taking a shot at it myself. But if you have any musical talent at all I say go for it. I have no idea how many submissions they'll receive and I imagine competition will be fierce, but even the smallest chance to play at Carnegie Hall is worth whatever effort you put into the audition. Submissions are due January 28th though so if you're interested drag that old instrument out of your closet, dust it off, and get to work!

Interesting Stuff

Because our focus has primarily been on the elections and all that entails, there are several items I've wanted to blog about but haven't had time to. So here I'll try to hit them all at once.

First, here's an interesting piece from Newsweek on the "flexitarian", which is sort of a hybrid between the vegetarian and the full-on meat eater. Given the unsustainability of factory farming and our meat-eating practices, any effort to reduct the amount of meat we eat is a good thing. And it has the benefit of reducing the suffering of animals consigned to factory farms. This should be the primary purpose in my opinion, but I realize that most Americans either don't care or aren't aware of how much suffering animals endure to produce cheap meat, dairy products and eggs. So despite the claim of a strident PETA official in the article that eating less meat is "beating one pig down the slaughter ramp instead of two" (as if the suffering of one less animal is something to be dismissed) I'm all for people simply doing the best they can to eat less meat. Change takes time.

Also, via Slashdot, Live Science has an article about a novel theory of the universe, that we live in a "cosmic bubble" that is simply one tiny part of an infinitely larger universe, a theory that provides an alternative explanation to dark matter for why our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. In short, our under-density part of the universe would warp space-time differently than the typically dense part of the universe we're observing when we look at things like quasars that are billions of light years distant; that warp then provides the illusion that those objects are rushing away from us at fantastic speeds. Honestly, I don't know if that's any crazier than the universe being comprised mostly of matter we can neither see no detect (or can we?) but there you go.

Speaking of all things dark, Slashdot has another interesting post on Google's efforts to make the "dark web" searchable. The dark web consist of things like PDF files and or scanned documents (like reports and academic papers) that now do not show up in search results. An even greater wealth of information may be at your fingertips soon.

PRI's The World has a good series of radio articles called "How Wars End." Amateur students of history such as myself, as well as the public at large, have acquired various myths about how wars in our history have ended. PRI, in interviews with historians, complicates our myths to some extent. There are several examples, but I found the one on the end of our civil war to be the most interesting. Most people presume that the war ended all at once that fateful day in April 1865 at Appomattox, and amateur historians like myself are aware that Lee turned down the idea of an insurgency that would drag the war on even longer. But the true story is a little more nuanced. It's not that greater facts are uncovered; rather, it's our understanding of the war's end that should be modified. Though there was no unified insurgency during the occupation and reconstruction of the South, southerners certainly did resist occupation with force, committing acts of terror against emancipated blacks and attacking northern forces. Twelve years of political violence eventually sapped the will of northern politicians to continue occupying the south, but even then the violence did not end, as acts of terror were perpetrated against blacks all the way up until and through the civil rights era. Again, this picture doesn't really present any new facts so much as it challenges our understanding of the end of the civil war, as well as the nature of insurgencies themselves. I recommend listening to the program in full.

Also, by now you've no doubt heard of the numerous instances of wrongly convicted men being freed in Dallas County by virtue of DNA testing. This is the direct result of Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins having launched an ambitious program to review hundreds of convictions to determine if men and women were wrongly convicted. However, not all District Attorneys and law enforcement agencies are as eager to expose or rectify their mistakes. Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that will determine whether convicted criminals have a constitutional right to DNA testing that could prove their innocence. The Ninth Court of Appeals said they do; we'll see what the Supreme Court has to say about that.

Also, the NY Times reported on Monday (feels like two weeks ago) that Afghan officials likely aided the Taliban in an attack on an American outpost in July that was very nearly overrun. This is yet another sign of the increasing nastiness of the war in Afghanistan, though it should hardly come as a surprise that some in the Afghan government (at the local level, or perhaps higher) have loyalties hostile to the Karzai government and our forces.

Privacy

We have strange notions about privacy in this country. The right to "privacy" is central to key Supreme Court decisions pertaining to matters of the family and sexual and reproductive freedom. But in the consumer context, privacy means something different altogether. Corporations can use data mining techniques to compile financial dossiers on American consumers, or preserve records of sensitive financial transactions that are then promptly stolen by identity thieves thanks to lax security standards. Frequently consumers are given the choice only to opt-out of doing business with the corporations that keep records of their transactions (good luck with that, since they all do it.) They must also battle the presumption that everything in their credit record is accurate, thanks to standards that make it difficult for consumers to remove inaccurate information or punish any of the credit reporting agencies for failing to follow even those lax standards. Employers and insurance companies now also seem to think a credit or health record is necessary to either employing you or extending you insurance (of course you can opt out of this as well, by not applying for that job you want or not carrying insurance.) And now, the NY Times reports that banks are compiling financial data and selling it back and forth to each other in a way that permits them to target debtors who are still struggling from the consequences of having too much debt:

Using techniques that grew more sophisticated over the last decade, businesses comb through an array of sources, including bank and court records, to create detailed profiles of the financial lives of more than 100 million Americans.

They then sell that information as marketing leads to banks, credit card issuers and mortgage brokers, who fiercely compete to find untapped customers — even those who would normally have trouble qualifying for the credit they were being pitched.

These tailor-made offers land in mailboxes, or are sold over the phone by telemarketers, just ahead of the next big financial step in consumers’ lives, creating the appearance of almost irresistible serendipity.

These leads, which typically cost a few cents for each household profile, are often called “trigger lists” in the industry. One company, First American, sells a list of consumers to lenders called a “farming kit.”

This marketplace for personal data has been a crucial factor in powering the unrivaled lending machine in the United States. European countries, by contrast, have far stricter laws limiting the sale of personal information. Those countries also have far lower per-capita debt levels.

In other words, farming of financial records is simply a symptom of out of control lending practices. But a comprehensive privacy approach to privacy would have the benefit of reducing such practices. Unfortunately, privacy seems to be one of those issues that comes in a variety of contexts and that no one legislative response seems to exist for, thanks largely to a lack of political leadership. One exception to this rule has been Hillary Clinton, who first proposed legislation that would address this issues in a speech to the American Constitution Society in 2006 (a speech I had the pleasure of hearing.) Unfortunately the PROTECT Act that she proposed languished in Congress, and there are no prospects of revival. I can only speculate, but I imagine that between the powerful financial interests that lobby against such legislation and the scattered reports that American consumers receive through the media about violations of their privacy, the former is considerably more persuasive to members of Congress.

"Storm"

Every one of my hip co-workers and friends is absolutely in love with Apple's iPhone, but I (exercising my knee-jerk contrarianism) would rather get my hands on one of these beauties. Granted, "Storm" is kind of a silly name for a phone, though not quite as silly as putting an "i" in front of everything. 

This machine does read your mind...so you can play games!

I feel it's my job to keep this blog from getting too narrowly focused on politics and especially the Presidential election, thus I'm returning to one of my favorite themes: wild and cutting-edge technology.

Apropos of my recent post about a mind-reading machine, this is a mind-reading headset for computer games!

Imagine controlling a video game by thought alone. Two weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Emotiv Systems showcased a new device, the Epoc, designed to help you do just that.

While Emotiv's futuristic, dueling-octopus looking headset will initially be developed for video games, it could eventually be used in medicine, virtual reality, robotics, education and many other areas.

The technology is based on electroencephalography, more commonly known as EEG. EEG has been around for over 100 years and is currently used to study sleep patterns and epilepsy by analyzing electrical activity in the brain. Until recently, though, EEG readings were regarded as too broad for most applications.

The breakthrough, notes Emotiv Systems' President Tan Le, is in the software algorithm that decodes a person's thoughts by analyzing the electrical impulses in the brain.

This is still very crude, and is not so much mind-reading as turning the non-random signals of the brain into some kind of signal in a computer, thereby manipulating a program. It's a totally different thing from the machine that recognizes what picture you're seeing, as one "understands" the information coming from your brain and the other doesn't. But it's amazing nonetheless. You can see immediate applications of this; for example using it to control wheelchairs and robots (which could be used by disabled people to do their work for them), vehicles, etc. It would open up worlds of mobility for the disabled. Of course being able to manipulate regular pc programs by thought alone is also just too cool. You'd need the other kind of mind-reader to manipulate words any more quickly than machines can do now, but at least with this you could do away with a mouse for the most part. Think of how fast you could respond in first-person shooters!

Anyway, that's your crazy technology for the day. Enjoy.

Mind-reading machines?

Not just yet, but still, this getting scarily close:

Using this model, the program then scanned a new set of 120 brand new pictures to predict what kind of fMRI patterns these would make in the visual cortex.

After that, the volunteers themselves looked at the 120 new pictures while being scanned. The computer then matched the measured brain activity against the predicted brain activity, and picked an image that it believed was the closest match.

They notched up a 92 percent success rate with one volunteer, and accuracy was 72 percent in the other. The probability of this happening on the basis of chance -- i.e. the computer picking the right image out of the 120 -- is only 0.8 percent.

In short, if the computer knows what the viewer could be seeing, it can guess what it is almost all the time. The numbers decrease over a longer sequence, but not to an insignificant number:

The ambitious experiment was taken a stage further, expanding the set of novel images from 120 to up to 1,000. The first volunteer took this test, and accuracy declined, but only slightly, from 92 percent to 82 percent.

"Our estimates suggest that even with a set of one billion images -- roughly the number of images indexed by Google on the Internet -- the decoder would correctly identify the image about 20 percent of the time," said Gallant.

That's very, very meaningful. If we extrapolate further, assuming a computer could catalog all the sensations a human could experience, it would be possible to train a computer to recognize the brainwaves associated with them. The better computers get and the better the programming get, the closer this becomes to an actual mind-reading computer. It'll be a while (at least a decade) before this becomes really practical, but in that time I can see this developing into a number of ways of controlling and manipulating computers. Very interesting.

In other internet news...

The Progressive States Network has put together this report about the development of broadband in the United States and how it has not achieved the level of pervasiveness that President Bush has claimed.

Even more interesting are some of the state-level plans that have come about in response to the need to speed up development of broadband networks. I suggest reading this report in full and contacting your representatives to tell them you support similar programs.

Support Representative Edward Markey's Net Neutrality bill

Finally, a bill is being introduced which will legislate Net Neutrality into being. Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey is introducing HR 5353(pdf file). The essence of this bill is that it would prohibit "unreasonable interference from or discrimination by network operators" to "to preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of broadband networks".

Naturally the telecommunications companies are opposed to this bill:

Markey's proposal was greeted with skepticism by some telecommunications companies. An advocacy group that represents some of the companies, called Hands Off the Internet, said it had no objection to studying the issue but opposed any further regulations.

Such regulations "will create uncertainty for investors and Internet service providers that must build the infrastructure to meet consumer demands," said Hands Off the Internet.

(Read the comments on this post for more information about Hands Off the Internet.)

Read some of my older posts for discussions of Net Neutrality.

I have not changed my position: I strongly favor writing Net Neutrality into law and preventing any possible abuses before they occur, although some may have already. TWM officially endorses Mukasey's bill. If you want to offer your support, go here or look up your politicians through Project Vote Smart and make your voice heard. As always, you can make a difference, so don't be afraid to write your call your elected representatives.

A dumb move by Time Warner

Sigh...why aren't we already in a broadband utopia? There are enough services and service providers, the problem is we don't all have all of them. Actually most of us only have one or two options, if there is an option at all! And things are made worse by the fact that instead of moving to fiber-optic (like Verizon Fios), companies like Time-Warner are still relying on copper. Not only does that hamper speed, it makes it harder for them to expand their networks to keep bandwidth up with demand. The way Roadrunner (the Time-Warner broadband internet division) works, you don't even get the maximum capacity you pay for most of the time. If other people are on the network, you may get about half speed. That's one reason why this is an especially boneheaded move by them:

Last week, we learned from a leaked memo that Time Warner Cable is preparing to roll out usage-based broadband service tiers to new customers in Beaumont, TX. The company has since confirmed its plans, with monthly bandwidth caps set at 5GB, 10GB, 20GB, and 40GB. Customers who exceed their cap would be hit with an undetermined per-gigabyte charge, but Bell Canada's overage fees, which range from CAN$1.00 to CAN$7.50 per gigabyte, may give some inkling of where Time Warner's overage fees will end up.

I recommend reading this article in full, but it can be summed up by this passage:

All of that is to say that cable and DSL won't always be the only games in town. If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits, capped cable broadband service like Time Warner has planned is likely to be unattractive, to say the least.

I can guarantee you that if they try to push that on me, I'll be subscribing to a new service.

Solar power update

Well, solar power has been a long time coming and many detractors still don't consider it even a realistic potential source. New technology, however, may make it possible for solar power to replace existing fossil-fuel based energy. Sci-fi authors have been talking about beamed solar power for a long time, but only recently has it become a possibility.

A proposal is being vetted by U.S. military space strategists that 10 percent of the U.S. baseload of energy by 2050, perhaps sooner, could be produced by space based solar power (SBSP). Furthermore, a demonstration of the concept is being eyed to occur within the next five to seven years.

Less sci-fi, but perhaps more practical, are new types of ground-based solar energy collectors, which, with new technologies, are expected to be able to take over enery production for a large part of the US grid.

If those claims stand up, however, solar-thermal plants could provide a significant chunk of the Southwest's—and potentially the nation's—electricity. "The maximum you can get into the grid is about 25 percent from solar," including photovoltaics, Mills says. But "once you have storage, it changes from this niche thing to something that could be the big gorilla on the grid equivalent to coal."

Furthermore,

Assuming that their storage system works, Mills and his colleagues calculated in a paper presented today at the Solar Energy Society World Congress in Beijing that such solar-thermal power plants could match the electricity needs of both California and Texas. And, by combining a system that would meet the needs of California and Texas, solar-thermal plants could supply 96 percent of the national electricity demand. "The entire energy use of 2006, the current technology including storage would use a patch of land 92 miles by 92 miles," O'Donnell says. "Ten percent of the [Bureau of Land Management] land in Nevada is enough."

It's not sci-fi anymore. The sooner we adopt this technology and cut free from fossil-fuels, the better.

Too cool technology

3-D printers may be a far cry from the transporters and the things that made food from raw particles in Star Trek, but it's a first step. William Gibson and others since then (like David Marusek) have included the idea in their writings that people in the future will just use such devices to create, "print" or somehow fabricate everyday objects as needed instead of having stores where all these objects are kept on shelves. Now I've heard of 3-D modelers before, and also 3-D laser cutters that will trim a block of steel down to a desired shape, but I never knew that this was coming around the bend until now:

PASADENA, Calif. — Sometimes a particular piece of plastic is just what you need. You have lost the battery cover to your cellphone, perhaps. Or your daughter needs to have the golden princess doll she saw on television. Now.

In a few years, it will be possible to make these items yourself. You will be able to download three-dimensional plans online, then push Print. Hours later, a solid object will be ready to remove from your printer.

It’s not quite the transporter of “Star Trek,” but it is a step closer.

Three-dimensional printers have been seen in industrial design shops for about a decade. They are used to test part designs for cars, airplanes and other products before they are sent to manufacturing. Once well over $100,000 each, such machines can now be had for $15,000. In the next two years, prices are expected to fall further, putting the printers in reach of small offices and even corner copy stores.

All I can say is, I'm absolutely blown away. Read the article in full and you will be too.

US military deaths in Iraq top 3500

The four-year U.S. military death toll in Iraq passed 3,500 after a soldier was reported killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. A British soldier was also shot to death Thursday in southern Iraq, as Western forces find themselves increasingly vulnerable under a new strategy to take the fight to the enemy.

This blog doesn't keep a running count of how many people have died in Iraq, nor is it a subject we bring up much except when some milestone is reached. The important fact of this number, 3500, is not that so many have died. As I'm sure many a conservative blogger has noted, this isn't a significant number compared to our losses in just about any other war. Certainly not significant compared to Vietnam, Korea, WWII, or WWI. Such a conservative blogger might ask why we belabor the point.

To this I say, the countrymen of those soldiers are rightfully not mollified by pointing out that some 58,000 good soldiers died in Vietnam. One person dying when they don't need to is a tragedy, and Iraq is a tragedy of epic proportions. It isn't important how many have died, it's important that our soldiers keep dying. And they appear to keep dying at an steady rate. According to NPR news:

At least 122 American troops died in Iraq in May, making it the third deadliest month for the United States since the war began.

And as more troops head to Iraq, even higher numbers of U.S. casualties are expected.

...Earlier in the spring, the improvised bombs accounted for about 60 percent of American deaths. Now it's more than 80 percent.

A simply stunning percentage are coming from IEDs. These IEDs are something we simply can't do much about. They experienced the same problem in Vietnam (although the situation was radically different - in almost all cases the soldiers were on foot outside of vehicles) and there was no simple, effective solution. Two things that Vietnam mines and Iraq IEDs have in common is that they can be (and are) concealed in ways that make them almost impossible to spot and the damage they do considered as return on investment is extremely high. According to this Popular Mechanics article from August 2005, "The main IED detector is the American soldier and Marine with sharp eyes: Approximately three IEDs are found for each one that detonates." And yet we're still taking 80% of our casualties from them!

The simple truth is this: no matter what we do or what technology we use, as long as American soldiers are in the country, they're going to die. This is a fact that the majority of Americans (finally) now realize and they find they can't stomach the thought. I can't either. It's horrible.

Update: To see an exact count of how many casualties in May were caused by IEDs, click here.

Net Neutrality III

In case you're not a tech-head, you may not have gotten caught up in the (mostly online) debate about Net Neutrality. You can read my old posts as an explanation of what it is, who's for and against it, and what you can do about it. You might want to educate yourself on it because it's gaining recognition as an important issue. In truth, it's not really a conservative vs. liberal issue so much as it is a individual vs. corporation issue. The only problem is that the conservatives are allied with the big telecoms, which is why they've been making a fuss by blocking any Net Neutrality legislation thus far. This article in the Washington Post provides a good summary thus far. Here's why people are for Net Neutrality:

Net neutrality is a principle that bars Internet providers, primarily phone and cable companies, from charging higher rates to Web-based firms in return for giving their content priority treatment on the pathways to consumers. Without such restrictions, proponents say, a user might find it time-consuming, or even impossible, to call up a favorite site that carriers have relegated to slower lanes for economic or even philosophical reasons.

Here's why people are against it:

Net neutrality restrictions "could prevent broadband providers from offering enhanced levels of service for specialized applications such a telemedicine, or to offer their own branded or co-branded products or services," said Christopher Wolf, co-chairman of Hands Off the Internet, a group sponsored by phone and cable companies . Such arrangements, he said at a recent Federal Trade Commission workshop, "will help pay for the build-out of the next generation of Internet pipes."

And in rebuttal:

Moreover, Wolf said, his industry's critics cannot cite an example in which any U.S. user has been blocked.

But some groups that rely heavily on their Web sites to share information, raise money or promote causes say they fear it's only a matter of time. They cite, for example, a 2005 comment by William L. Smith, then chief technology officer for BellSouth, which has merged with AT&T, that Internet service providers should be able to charge a firm such as Yahoo for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than Google's site.

Now, whatever hifalutin language is used on either side of this debate, it comes down to this: bandwidth providers want to be able to charge data providers for different levels of service and individual bandwidth users don't want that. That's as plain as I can say it with no judgments involved as to who is more right. But proponents of either argument aren't leaving it that simply, so there is definitely a need to clarify. Here's an articulate argument against Net Neutrality (until, at least, it becomes an obvious necessity).

Network neutrality is supposed to promote continuing Internet innovation by restricting the ability of network owners to give certain traffic priority based on the content or application being carried or on the sender's willingness to pay. The problem is that these restrictions would prohibit practices that could increase the value of the Internet for customers.

Traffic management is a prime example. When traffic surges beyond the ability of the network to carry it, something is going to be delayed. When choosing what gets delayed, it makes sense to allow a network to favor traffic from, say, a patient's heart monitor over traffic delivering a music download. It also makes sense to allow network operators to restrict traffic that is downright harmful, such as viruses, worms and spam.

Kind of a red herring though. Legislation can make what whatever provisions it needs to ensure that medical or emergency traffic is assured of speedy delivery. This includes things like remote surgery or VOIP calls to 911. Not only that, but as far as the technical side of things, data "surges" can be accomodated by laying more fiber down. That's what you pay your ISP for. That's what they're supposed to be spending some of that revenue on. Furthermore, that's not what people at AT&T are talking about. Don't believe in corporate goodwill; they want to charge web content providers for the privilege of faster access to their websites. And there's nothing stopping them from regulating the flow of viruses, worms, and spam now...so why aren't they doing it?

Pricing raises similar issues. To date, Internet pricing has been relatively simple. Based on experience in similar markets, we expect that, if left alone, pricing and service models will probably evolve. For example, new services with guaranteed delivery quality might emerge to support applications such as medical monitoring that require higher levels of reliability than the current Internet can guarantee. Suppliers could be expected to charge higher prices for these premium services.

Blocking premium pricing in the name of neutrality might have the unintended effect of blocking the premium services from which customers would benefit. No one would propose that the U.S. Postal Service be prohibited from offering Express Mail because a "fast lane" mail service is "undemocratic." Yet some current proposals would do exactly this for Internet services.

Let's say you're an at-home patient who needs 24 hour medical monitoring. You pay the hospital or whoever it is to do the monitoring and you pay the ISP for access to the internet. Now the argument is that your monitoring service should be able to pay the ISP for guaranteed data transmission without fail. That would be a premium service, and in such cases reliability is absolutely paramount. But that doesn't mean it should be adopted as a model for the entire internet. As a matter of fact, I think it would be safer to adopt Net Neutrality with the provision that such medical services must receive first priority. Before you argue that it's impossible to distinguish what kind of information is being trasmitted (that is, the ISP couldn't tell the difference between a heartrate monitor and hardcore porn), remember that it is possible to differentiate between where the data goes. Any domain registered with the ISP with legitimate credentials would get a free pass. So even if the user laying in bed used the same connection to look at porn at the same time as his heart was being monitored, the ISP could give priority to one or the other.

This also brings up an important issue: most data bottlenecks happen in the vicinity of the end-point; that is, the receiver. When you're using your computer at home and notice a slow-down at about 5 or 6PM, that's because everybody in your neighborhood with your ISP got home and logged on. Your connection to Amazon or Yahoo or whoever is irrelevant because their webservers aren't being overloaded. That's whether you pay for 56K dialup or whether you pay for 15Mbps Verizon Fios. Net Neutrality won't affect that one way or the other, and whether Yahoo pays to load faster than Google or not, both will still be slower for you (unless you're rich of course and pay for a T1 of your own or something, which is what you can already do).

As far as the concerns the individual user, you'll never experience a change for the better. They can't give more bandwidth to those who pay, they can only slow down those who don't. As more and more users get online and more and more traffic is shuffled around the existing internet, you might see service degrade overall. That's why if bandwidth is an issue, the ISPs need to get in gear and roll out more fiber instead of increasing prices for a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. The answer to that is not to let the ISPs slow non-premium paying sites down, it's to increase the bandwidth overall. And finally, if so many users are visiting a website that it's slowing down, the ISP can't do anything about that anyway. That's an issue with the website, in that they need to buy more servers and buy more bandwidth (not faster). But you rarely find websites to be like that. Some instances are when tickets go on sale (at ticketmaster.com, for example), or over the holidays when Amazon was having special offers and you had to log on at a certain time. Otherwise, it happens during a Denial of Service attack. All of this has nothing to do with your ISP, and that's why the idea of them offering "Premium Service" has no meaning to you or me and seems like merely a way of extorting more money from web content providers and giving us trouble by slowing down sites that can't pay for it.

The analogy of the Postal Service does not stand. The Post office moves all mail at the same speed, except for the stuff you pay extra for. They move that faster. The ISPs can't offer to move any data faster, as it all moves at the same speed (relative to your websites, ISP servers, and you). You can't pay for any data to get to you any faster. It's not even possible because of the technical limitations (like how your email gets turned into a bunch of different data packets and takes innumerable paths through a bunch of different servers along the route; who are you going to pay?). The Post office doesn't slow all mail down so that you can buy a premium service which gets to you at the same speed all mail used to; it actually does speed it up. It's not the same thing at all.

We're not saying that all discrimination is good or that the market always gets it right. Some forms of discrimination can be harmful, especially when service providers have market power. For example, if a local telephone company that is a monopoly provider of both broadband access and plain old telephone service for a community blocks its broadband subscribers from using an Internet phone service offered by a rival company, this discrimination can harm both competition and consumers.

Does this mean we believe that we should place all our trust in the market and the current providers? No. But it does mean we should wait until there is a problem before rushing to enact solutions.

What does the market ever get right except making money for those who own resources? How many times do I have to point out the example of the Robber Barons for what an unregulated market does? Why wait for problems to arise and then solve them after they've already caused trouble? Look, the Ford Pinto had problems that Ford knew about when they designed it. But because there weren't any laws that would harm Ford or keep them from building it, they went ahead and did it. When the public and the government know that a problem probably will arise because of some action a corporation is taking, it's better to stop it before it begins, not after!

Here are my own thoughts on this issue. Let's say you want to go online and look at Amazon.com to shop for books. First, Amazon establishes itself online. It buys its servers and pays an ISP for access. The default speed is the speed of electrons through copper wire or the speed of light through fiber optic lines. This speed is, of course, impeded by the hosts en route between the provider and end user. The ISP lays out the copper wire or fiber and charges for people to use it by the amount of data they move. You pay an ISP to get online for basically the same thing, except more data comes into your computer than leaves it. At the level of the individual, you basically pay for the speed level instead of the data amount because you actually use so little data. That means that no matter how fast data flows out onto the Internet, you can only get it as fast as you can get it and you're paying for the privilege. So there's Amazon, ISP1 (the ISP Amazon uses), ISP2 (the ISP you use), and you. Now Amazon is paying umpteen-million a month for using somebody's lines. Let's say you're paying about $50 a month for broadband.

Now what ISP1 is proposing is that for an extra fee, they'll let Amazon keep the same speed as before and they won't let them be slowed down, whereas for Blogger.com that doesn't pay for the premium, it will be serviced at a slower rate. Now if both rates are above your 15Mbps connection (if you have such), it doesn't matter to you. But it's not likely that both will be above that speed, and if the ISP feels it necessary, it may actually service that website at a slower speed, like 3Mbps. So no matter what bandwidth you pay for, you'll only be getting what the other ISP feels like giving. Or maybe they won't limit it overall, but at peak times, your connection to Blogger.com will be slowed down whereas your connection to Amazon.com will remain nice and perky. You may not care, but what if you do? Envision this also; whatever surcharge they add on for premium service to Amazon will be rolled into your purchases from Amazon.com because they're not going to eat the costs. Part of the price of an item is already their operating costs, because they're not shy about charging you for them. Let's say there's another site you shop from, Bookstore.com, which is pretty much exactly like Amazon.com but it doesn't pay for premium speed. When you buy from Amazon, items may be a little more expensive, but you can browse faster. When you buy from Bookstore, items are the same old price but it's hella slow. And in both cases you're paying for their costs, but in the case of Amazon you're paying extra so that you can get the same old site speed and service. What good is that to you? It sounds like crap to me.

Ok, if ISPs want to charge more for laying more cable or fiber for a guaranteed service which is separate from their services in general, that's fine with me. But it's not fine with me if the speed I pay for is irrelevant when it comes to internet services. It's not fair, but what am I going to do, quit using the internet? Is that like how we're supposed to control market prices of food by not eating when food prices are high? You may think that's a hyperbolic comparison, but is it so much when you're the one on the heart monitor?

California leads by example with flourescent lighting

California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine is proposing a bill that would ban the use of incandescent light bulbs (the type just about everyone has in their home). These would be replaced with compact fluorescent lights. You can read what he has to say about it here. Before you get all bent out of shape, right wingers, know that the incandescent is on its way out anyway. Phillips will stop producing incandescents by 2012. I'm sure most of the industry has similar plans. The ban will only make things happen a little earlier. But there's no reason to gripe about it anyway; fluorescent lights are an improvement in every way over incandescents:

While it will not give opinion on the possible California law, the EPA recommends CFLs.

"They save money and energy," EPA spokeswoman Enesta Jones said. "They are more convenient than other alternatives and come in different sizes and shapes to fit almost any fixture."

Also, CFLs generate 70 percent less heat than incandescent lights, Jones said.

About a fifth of the average U.S. home's electricity costs pays for lighting, which means even if CFLs initially cost more than conventional lightbulbs, consumers will save, Jones said.

A 20-watt CFL gives as much light as a 75-watt conventional bulb, and lasts 13 times longer, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit group studying energy issues.

Southern California Edison, an Edison International subsidiary and one of the state's biggest utilities, runs a program that cuts the cost of a CFL by $1 to $2.50. In the past year, SCE has helped consumers buy 6 million CFLs, it said.

California Energy Commission member Arthur Rosenfeld said an average home in California will save $40 to $50 per year if CFLs replace all incandescent bulbs.

People may be put off by the fact that they cost a couple of dollars more, but you have to remember to factor in the savings over the life of the bulb. CFLs last longer and take less energy to power. As for environmental impact, while there is mercury in fluorescent lights, more mercury is emitted from coal-burning plants over the life of an incandescent than there is in a CFL plus the coal it takes to power it.

All in all, it's a win-win situation. I doubt Texas has anywhere near the foresight to put this on the agenda, especially since Rick Perry seems to want us to burn more coal, but as individuals we can start on it anyway and wait for the government to catch up. Besides, it'll save us all some money.

Rights for Robots?

A report by the British government has concluded that robots could someday advance far enough to demand the same legal rights as humans (unless of course they're terrorists, in which case they have no rights.)

More e-waste; this time, it's Africa!

If you recall my previous posts (here and here) on the subject, you know that "recycling" computers by such primitive methods as ripping them apart and prying the precious metals out is extremely hazardous to one's health. And yet, this is the method employed by poor people overseas. The first article I posted specifically talked about China. This new article talks about the same phenomena happening in Africa. It's really a horrible situation.

Nigerian importers are able to make a quick buck because of high local demand for electronic goods—Pentium III computers sell for about $130 and a 27-inch television will set you back around $50. The remainder, equivalent to approximately 100,000 computers per month, ends up in dumps and landfills. That electronic waste (e-waste) is chock-full of pollutants like lead, cadmium and mercury that then seep into the ground and water supply. When the mounds of waste get too high, they are burned, releasing toxins from the plastic casings into the air. (For more about how we're destroying Africa with waste, check out Travis's post, The Global Village's Septic Tank.)

Not only should African countries not allow this to happen, we shouldn't either. US manufacturers certainly have the resources to handle recycling domestically, where it would be much safer and healthier (provided they're not using prisoners!).

Income Inequality

To no one's surpise, it's getting worse:

Lately economists have been using new data to look more closely within the top decile of American incomes. What they’ve found is startling. Here are some results from Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University. Between 1966 and 2001, median wage and salary income increased by just 11 percent, after inflation. Income at the 90th percentile (six minutes from the end of the hour-long parade) increased nearly six times as much—by 58 percent. At the 99th percentile (the last thirty-six seconds), the rise was 121 percent. At the 99.9th percentile (3.6 seconds before the end), it was 236 percent. And at the 99.99th percentile (0.36 seconds, representing the 13,000 highest-paid workers in the American economy), the rise was 617 percent. That is worth repeating: Over thirty-five years, the rise in wages and salaries in the wide middle of the income distribution was 11 percent. The rise in wages and salaries at the top of the income distribution was 617 percent.Such extreme skewness is new. It suggests that a huge proportion of the economy’s productivity gains are neither being passed on to consumers through lower prices—which would have the effect of raising real incomes very broadly—nor being distributed to investors as profit, nor even being used to raise the wages of most employees in industries seeing rapid productivity growth. Rather, they’re being diverted to a comparative handful of employees.

The author if this article contends that this is not a result of labor's declining share of national income, but not everyone agrees on that:

In another recent report on the boom in profits, economists at Goldman Sachs wrote, “The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income.” ...For most of the last century, wages and productivity — the key measure of the economy’s efficiency — have risen together, increasing rapidly through the 1950’s and 60’s and far more slowly in the 1970’s and 80’s.But in recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Benefits accounted for most of the increase.

Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post laments this trend:

The young may be understandably incredulous, but the Great Compression, as economists call it, was the single most important social fact in our country in the decades after World War II. From 1947 through 1973, American productivity rose by a whopping 104 percent, and median family income rose by the very same 104 percent. More Americans bought homes and new cars and sent their kids to college than ever before. In ways more difficult to quantify, the mass prosperity fostered a generosity of spirit: The civil rights revolution and the Marshall Plan both emanated from an America in which most people were imbued with a sense of economic security.That America is as dead as the dodo. Ours is the age of the Great Upward Redistribution.

So what's causing all this income redistribution? Here's Meyerson again, on globalization:

Clearly, globalization has weakened the power of workers and begun to erode the egalitarian policies of the New Deal and social democracy that characterized the advanced industrial world in the second half of the 20th century.For those who profit from this redistribution, there's something comforting in being able to attribute this shift to the vast, impersonal forces of globalization. The stagnant incomes of most Americans can be depicted as the inevitable outcome of events over which we have no control, like the shifting of tectonic plates.Problem is, the declining power of the American workforce antedates the integration of China and India into the global labor pool by several decades. Since 1973 productivity gains have outpaced median family income by 3 to 1. Clearly, the war of American employers on unions, which began around that time, is also substantially responsible for the decoupling of increased corporate revenue from employees' paychecks.

So globalization has helped to depress wages, but it's not the sole explanation. Here's a more general explanation, from a researcher at the afore-mention Economic Policy Institute:

“If I had to sum it up,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the institute, “it comes down to bargaining power and the lack of ability of many in the work force to claim their fair share of growth.”

But why the lack? Unions are clearly no longer as powerful as they once were. Could that be part of the reason?

Researchers argue union weakness is due to the spread of skill-based technology jobs. Unions have the greatest appeal when workers are equally skilled; technology skills destroy that equality. Consequently, it becomes less profitable to join a union. Also, increased political and managerial opposition to unions has played a role.Due to the declining power of unions, the increasing productivity of skilled workers has not raised the incomes of their less skilled counterparts, as it once did through labor contracts.

What about technological change?

Computers and the internet have reduced the demand for routine jobs that demand only moderate skills, such as the work of bank clerks, while increasing the productivity of the highest-skilled. Studies in Britain and Germany as well as America show that the pace of job growth since the early 1990s has been slower in occupations that are easy to computerise. But the scale of America's income concentration at the top, and the fact that no other country has seen such extreme shifts, has sent people searching for other causes. The typical American chief executive now earns 300 times the average wage, up tenfold from the 1970s. Continental Europe's bosses have seen nothing similar. This discrepancy has fostered the “fat cat” theory of inequality: greedy businessmen sanction huge salaries for each other at the expense of shareholders.

So technology is part of it, but can hardly explain all of it. What if add immigration in the mix? From a study of income inequality in California by the Public Policy Institute of California (pdf):

Immigration contributed to rising income inequality in the state because the proportion of immigrants in the state's male workforce has grown substantially and has grown most at the bottom and lower-middle of the income distribution.

That only makes sense. If you add enough lower-paid workers to the mix, you'll reduce average income. So economic and social trends are clearly at work. But what about political trends? Paul Krugman thinks it has a lot do with who's in charge in Washington:

Finally, since 1980 the U.S. political scene has been dominated by a conservative movement firmly committed to the view that what's good for the rich is good for America. Sure enough, the rich have seen their incomes soar, while working Americans have seen few if any gains....it seems likely that government policies have played a big role in America's growing economic polarization -- not just easily measured policies like tax rates for the rich and the level of the minimum wage, but things like the shift in Labor Department policy from protection of worker rights to tacit support for union-busting.

I think Krugman is trying to avoid being too partisan, because it's clear that government policy can have a profound effect on income inequality. Let's start with those Bush tax cuts:

As it happens, Citizens for Tax Justice, a national think tank, just completed a study of the latest federal tax cuts. The study analyzed the benefits generated by these tax cuts vs. the national debt incurred to finance them, as well as the ultimate distribution of the final net benefits and costs across, horror of horrors, different income classes. The findings are thought-provoking. According to the study, 99 percent of Illinois families are net losers under these debt-financed tax cuts. Only the wealthiest 1 percent of Illinoisans -- folks with an average annual income of $1.44 million -- come out ahead.

It helps to have numbers to back it up, but it's common-sense that if you give more money back to the wealthy, thus increasing their share of income, then you're going to widen the gap between them and the poor and the middle-class, who get far less or nothing at all back from the tax cuts. "Starving the beast" also result in less public services to those with lower incomes (no, the tax cuts don't pay for themselves) furthering income inequality. Then there's the minimum wage, which as a result of the failure of Congress to increase it for ten years now, has declined in real purchasing power:

One way the United States addresses inequality is through the federal minimum wage. In 2005, minimum wage workers earned only 32% of the average hourly wage. Barring a minimum wage increase, we are poised to break a record in 2006 for the greatest inequality between minimum wage and average wage workers since the end of World War II.

So which party has been in charge for those ten years, and has deliberately stifled any effort to increase the minimum wage? (That's a rhetorical question.) This goes hand in hand with efforts to alter regulatory requirements for overtime pay that would reduce the take-home pay of millions of workers. And while the power of unions have weakened for reasons that have little to do with whose in office, without question Republicans continue to push changes that would weaken them still further.Lax governmental regulation of corporations as a result of Republican policies has also contributed to rising income inequality:

A clear example of such manipulation are the banking scandals of the 1980's. Under this scheme, the government implemented a deregulation plan which permitted banking institutions to offer unreasonably high interest rates to investors. These investors were overwhelmingly wealthy interests who purchased "brokered accounts" under the $100,000 federal insurance limit. The agency responsible for monitoring the investments of these institutions, the Federal Deposit Regulatory Commission, was understaffed and there was political interference with their activities. When numerous institutions failed, the government "bailed out" the many wealthy depositors. The total cost of the bailout according to a recent Federal Reserve report was $153 billion. The net result is a shift of this money from ordinary taxpayers to wealthy investors.

That's not even the most recent corporate scandal. Let's not forget the shenanigans of the likes of Ken Lay...or how some other corporate CEO's have managed to amass such hefty paychecks as a result of lax governmental regulation. Then there are the little ways that the current administration wants to make things a little easier on "the have-mores", such as making it a lot harder to collect taxes from wealthy tax cheats:

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others. The administration plans to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, in less than 70 days. Kevin Brown, an IRS deputy commissioner, confirmed the cuts after The New York Times was given internal documents by people inside the IRS who oppose them.

You can pass all the laws in the world, but if you don't have enough police to enforce them, who's going to obey them, right? Which in this situation, is exactly the point.

This is at the same time that the administration is going to send debt collectors after poorer tax cheats, at greater expense than what it would cost to have the IRS' own agents do the job (a shining example of both Republican tax policy and the failure of privatization.)So...what have we learned? Income inequality can be the result of entirely natural economic and social trends. But at the root of income inequality lies human nature, and the simple fact that people who acquire wealth want to use their wealth to acquire still more wealth. If left to their own devices, they'll acquire as much as they can given the particular political circumstances; at the same time though, the wealthy will also use (or corrupt) the political process to make it easier to acquire more wealth (pdf). So why is this a problem? Back to The Economist:

Privately, some policymakers admit that the recent trends have them worried, and not just because of the congressional elections in November. The statistics suggest that the economic boom may fade. Americans still head to the shops with gusto, but it is falling savings rates and rising debts (made possible by high house prices), not real income growth, that keep their wallets open. A bust of some kind could lead to widespread political disaffection. Eventually, the country's social fabric could stretch. “If things carry on like this for long enough,” muses one insider, “we are going to end up like Brazil”—a country notorious for the concentration of its income and wealth.

The authors of this particular study say that generally, democracy has a negative effect on income inequality...but that reverse is true as well (pdf):

A skewed income distribution, in turn, could lead to a skewed distribution of political power, which negates democracy and therefore its effect on inequality.

In other words, income inequality tends to perpetuate itself, and it could potentially be a threat to our democratic system. Income inequality in some fashion is inevitible, and not necessarily undesirable. But severe income inequality that produces a permanent underclass of poor and reduces upwardly mobile opportunity is not only unjust, but a danger to American democracy. The consequences of current economic trends and political policy may be hard to visualize, as they may be some decades distant, but were things to continue unchanged it's not that hard to imagine a country where the wealthy enjoy a sytem of privileges entirely different from what the rest of us enjoy, aided and abetted by those in power who are like them or who serve them. What will that country look like and what will remain of the way of life that we've come to value as uniquely American? I for one would rather not find out.

Update: It's a little worse than we thought (via Kevin Drum.)