Afternoon roundup

Closing the tabs so I can find the ones I really do need...

• Using hoards of ancient coins to trace out historic trade networks
• Left-wing populism is also risky
• ACT won't be supporting National's proposed social media age limits
• Meanwhile, Meta and Google battle over who's going to be stuck trying to verify user ages. I really don't like options that require OS-level ID verification.
• NZ needs more investable propositions
• "It will come back to bite you", but if partisans have very high discount rates....
• BBC's More or Less on the relative risks of vaping and smoking
• Happy 50th Birthday to the Layfield Report. I'm still unconvinced of the merits relative to a combination of user/beneficiary charges, uniform general rates, and land-value apportionment of council rates. I'll have to properly go through the thing though. 
• I'll be helping out on the Advisory Group for Te Kura Taka Pini. 

Afternoon roundup

A closing of the browser tabs:

• New Zealand's space industry keeps growing. Here's BusinessDesk on Dawn Aerospace. So neat. 
• America's economists are very sceptical about the latest round of tariffs on imports from China.
• Ancient bugs hiding in NZ amber.
• Statistics New Zealand is shifting out of central Auckland because of increasing levels of 'intimidating behaviour' in the neighbourhood. Police victimisation stats had a surge in crime in Auckland Central West in 2023 that's since abated, but the number of victimisations there remains far higher than in the Lambton area around the SNZ Wellington office. 
• Easy to find claims that public ownership is better than private because private operators are too short-term oriented. Meanwhile, half the board of Christchurch City holdings has resigned. Why? "...the decisions council has subsequently taken over 2024 to maximise short-term dividends at the expense of paying down group debts and investing in the future of its companies has caused us to lose confidence in council's ability to responsibly own core strategic infrastructure."
• Satya Marar at Mercatus on America's populist turn in antitrust policy. 
• Modern desalination is pretty cheap. The energy required for desalinating a household's water is roughly on par with the power needed for its refrigerator.
• Whenever you're depressed by NZ problems like deteriorating council infrastructure, messes in government IT systems, and crises in public media funding, always worth checking over at Canada's seemingly worse problems in the same areas.
• Concrete is neat.
• There is no good version of a central bank digital currency.
• Eli Dourado wants floating cities.
• Worried about the de-banked - people who can't reasonably access normal banking serives? Fix AML.
• If I were still teaching Public Choice, this would be added to the syllabus. If you want the implicit models behind critiques of the left's shift into identity politics from folks like Chris Trotter, it's a good read.
• Cass Sunstein's 'Economic Constitution of the United States' would also hit the syllabus. I've viewed the Public Finance Act and Reserve Bank Act as being part of New Zealand's economic constitution. Sunstein here makes the case around the rules around regulation and regulatory impact assessment.

Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies, as I close the tabs from one of the many open browsers....

• Joel MacManus tracks down the management-book origins of Prime Minister Luxon's favourite terms, from 'chunk it down' and 'big rocks' to 'gates of implementation' - which seems original to the PM. 
• Portuguese rules create black markets in port. Now I'm wondering whether NZ accession to the crazy European naming rules mean our port producers will have to come up with a new name for it.
• Rules that make it hard for landlords to remove problem tenants lead them to discriminate against potential tenants perceived as being more likely to cause problems. Latest iteration: COVID-19 eviction moratorium rules in the US. NBER working paper; Reason piece by Ilya Somin. 
• There've been a lot of stories around on loss of trust in media. Uri Berliner's from NPR is simply superb. I'd say it's must-read. Henry Cooke also good on the NZ angle. 
• The InfraComm report on council debt limits is very good. Just finished recording a podcast with author Graham Campbell on it, along with Peter Nunns and our shop's Nick Clarke; should be up on the Initiative's website in due course. I should have remembered to congratulate them for their advice on Auckland light rail. 
• $250 USD up front, never have cavities again. Checking into options to get it muled into New Zealand...
• I always used to tell my Econ 224 studies to be sceptical about assessments that rely heavily on existence value and option value. NZIER's case for rebuilding the Christchurch Cathedral hinges on existence value and option value of $8.9-$30.6 million per year, and an assumption that tourists will stay longer in New Zealand specifically to see the Christchurch Cathedral, and will spend up to $20.8 million per year during that extended stay. I'm .... sceptical. I used to present the students with a case for a 50-meter gold statue of me in Cathedral Square...
• Firms investing in R&D see employee departures to found start-ups when the new opportunity discovered as part of the research is too far from the company's main line. 

Afternoon roundup

The end-of-week closing of the browser tabs

• Seeing like a Bank. Superb explanation of bank IT systems, tradeoffs between customer fees and customer experience, how helpdesks actually work, and problems in cobbled-together systems. It explains a lot more than banks. 
• Interesting piece on price dispersion in generic pharmaceuticals. One snip: "Regulations around pharmacy ownership in Australia and New Zealand make them more difficult to compare." Indeed. 
• If you think the social discount rate should be very low, you should support reductions in transfers to the elderly. Forthcoming in Econometrica. 
• The Rocket Lab launch failure a while back comes down to an electrical arc in a power supply under partial vacuum; they're enclosing and pressurising the power supply system. 
• Wellington Council selling its shares in the airport to have less exposure to quake risk seems sensible. 
• Low attendance at school, Covid is given as one reason. Meanwhile, schools still aren't properly ventilated, nobody uses masks, and the government bans boosters for those under 16. Kinda crazy. Government requires scaffolding for jobs where a ladder would be perfectly safe, with company directors liable for risks. But government bears no liability for unsafe schools and prohibitions on full youth vaccination. 
• "What's so scary about Bryce Wilkinson?" The caption under a smiling picture of Bryce. What indeed! Bryce is lovely. 
• An 88 megawatt solar farm blocked in the Mackenzie Basin. There's uncertainty about how some native plants might change because of shading and sheltering from the panels on a sheep paddock. NZ officials do not want net zero. They want a return to the Pleistocene. 
• Turns out that there's a summer camp for training left-wing activists in NZ. Wonder whether the reporting on a pro-liberty version would be as friendly.

Morning roundup

The morning's worthies! And a couple shockers too. 

• Best news in rather some time. I'd want to see it extended out over a larger sample. But they're not seeing any difference in "long covid" symptoms between vaccinated people who've had breakthrough infections and people who never caught it. 


• The Australian Broadcasting Corporation would know better than to promote antivax cranks. But they'll write this stuff on econ without a second thought. Just to keep in mind next time someone tells you how awesome public broadcasters are. ANU Prof of Econ Rohan Pritchford is on point.


• Looks like Boston is following New Zealand's example - they're getting their own version of the National Policy Statement on Urban Development. 


• Writing pieces on the climate change effects of Covid in New Zealand because of effects on city transport, while ignoring that transport is covered by the Emissions Trading Scheme, is pretty stupid. 


• The coal tit is a careful shopper, but the weka is a crafty little rent-seeker. 


• Amazing. They're using laser pulses on fibre networks under Auckland to find tiny earthquakes that may predict volcanic activity. 


• Businesses still face difficulty in figuring out whether vaccination mandates for workers are legal. 


• BusinessDesk has put together a network map of people in the public sector. So you can see who is who, and who is connected to whom. 


• Pattrick Smellie's predictions for 2022. 

Morning roundup

The morning's browser tabs:

• Newsroom picks up on BusinessDesk's prior reporting on MIQ ghost rooms. Much credit goes to Cameron Conradie's constant reporting on the numbers. BusinessDesk pointed out that the MIQ system is constantly overwriting its own data so that it is impossible to get, from them, the prior track. I wonder what the Archivist would make of this because it sounds like deliberate destruction of Official Information which may have to have been backed up by a Disposal Authority. Anyway we're losing skilled migrants who rightly view there as being no chance that the government will fix the system, because the government starts by hating migrants and viewing allowing any of their families in as actually being a bad thing. While it is still good to live in NZ as a permanent resident, I could not recommend that anyone try moving here, unless their utility enters negatively into my utility function - and I don't have that kind of utility function. 
• The government is going to run into real problems in maintaining nursing staffing. If I've understood the state of play correctly, nursing salaries in NZ are similar to salaries in the UK but Australia has some of the highest pay rates going for nurses. Training nurses here in a common labour market with Australia can result in outflow. NZ has made up the gap by importing nurses - some from the Philippines, some from the UK. But while there's provision for entry through MIQ for nursing staff, it's still a big constraint. Australia is far richer than NZ and can afford to pay more. It's entirely plausible that the government here is behaving as monopsonist in keeping nursing wages down, but even if that weren't the case there would still be a problem. 
• NZ is importing and burning a lot of coal currently. In one sense, this is not a problem at all: the Emissions Trading Scheme sets a binding cap, the current ETS price roughly doubles the cost of using coal, so any coal that's used is very likely in spots where it would be real expensive to substitute away from. But there are still two more substantial problems. First, some of the coal burning is because Megan Woods banned gas exploration in Taranaki, reducing capacity in those fields. So we're being forced to use a worse alternative because the government set very bad policy. Second, optics. While all that coal is accounted in the ETS, nobody understands the ETS, and seeing coal imports makes people think the ETS isn't working. And that builds pressure for even worse interventions. I wish that National would aim for less political point scoring here and instead be looking to underlying causes. 
• The government is going to be having an inquiry into crypto. I kinda knew what was going on in crypto 3 years ago; that tech is moving crazy fast and keeping up with it would be a full time job. I hope Auckland's Alex Sims helps them out a bit, and I also hope they seek some of the expertise over RMIT. Parliament's Select Committee couldn't figure out how the Uber app works a few years ago. This won't end well unless they get some serious help. 
• NovaVax also looks pretty good. Seems futile to hope it will get evaluated and considered for roll-out here, where dose availability is a binding constraint. We are sitting ducks here if Delta gets out. 
• Environment Minister Parker is holding off on nitrate limits on waterways - for now. I still think cap and trade solutions can get that job done. Report on that will be out soon. 
• The government's reluctance to have effective vaccine mandates for border workers - it's just incomprehensible. There can be practical difficulties that need to be overcome; sending nurses out to worksites over a few shifts could make a lot more sense than trying to get all those workers separately to make long commutes out to places where they can be vaccinated. If compulsion is warranted anywhere in public health, it's in vaccination. There are very real and substantial negative externalities from not being vaccinated - and especially among workers who are at risk of contact. We wind up with a health system happy to ban soda in the hospital cafeteria but that can't manage to get workers vaccinated. It's nuts. 
• Another for the "is government actually evil?" file: The Ministry of Ed refuses to fund a teacher's aide for a special needs student (limited budgets; understandable) but also refuses to allow the parents to privately fund the aide. 
• Industrial policy as casino economics. Do you feel lucky?
• Cuba's health policy successes are wildly exaggerated and based on bad data. Here's hoping that the new revolution brings down the communist dictatorship. 
• Remote work won't work for everything. Face-to-face still matters. Planet Money interviews Enrico Moretti. 
• Not crazy to worry about inflation. But if you have strong opinions about it and you think you're right, well, here's the data series on nominal bonds and here's the series for inflation-protected bonds. If you think inflation is going to go through the roof, make the appropriate play. If you think that everyone else is just way too worried about inflation, take the opposite appropriate play. 

A beclowning to come

Remember how Parliament beclowned itself in the Committee hearings about Uber? They fundamentally didn't understand the technology or how it worked.

If this makes it as far as select committee, we can at least console ourselves that the hearings will be entertaining.

New Zealand could follow the United Kingdom in bringing in age restrictions for online pornography and blocking websites which refuse to comply.

Department of Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin, who also holds the children's portfolio, says young people are being "bombarded" by internet pornography and she wants censorship laws to be strengthened.

"This is a really, really big issue to New Zealand and we are going to have a serious conversation about it," she told the Herald.

"And I hope to make sure we have this conversation in this term of Government."

Martin supports the approach of the United Kingdom, which has ambitious - and controversial - plans to introduce mandatory age verification for pornographic websites later this year.

Interesting questions could include:

• How will government develop a list for a Great Filter? Does it know about the problems in the UK's list and age verification setup? 
• How does this mesh with New Zealand's privacy regime? If a foreign website is compelled to collect personally identifiable details on Kiwis that they would never otherwise wish to collect, what obligations do they face under our privacy regime? How can we tell whether those obligations are being met? What recourse might a Kiwi have in case of breach? Could a Kiwi sue the government if information produced under state compulsion were leaked and used inappropriately? 
• Does the government know what the letters V, P, and N might together mean in this context?
• What will be the appeal provisions for sites wrongly listed as being pornographic in nature, and age-blocked? Would they impose undue burden on millions of website owners, and on every Kiwi who wants to find information on topics where bots do a hard time in knowing it when they see it, from sexual health to breast cancer?
• If they follow the Brits in having "porn viewing codes" issued to those over the age of 18, what do they do when somebody leaks the code number and tracked viewing habits of Cabinet Ministers? Like, if Winston Peters is worried somebody leaded his Superannuation details...
• Will our porn-watching habits be included in IDI? 
• Why does the government think there is any market failure here when parents can already make use of parental controls if they wish?

Age of Freaking Wonders

There is no great stagnation.

• Google's new earbuds, paired with their Pixl phone, are the Babelfish: realtime translation on demand for conversation. Alas, no NZ release date yet scheduled. But still.


• The new graphics engine for simulated faces. Just look at what they can do now.
  
     
  It advertises itself as compatible with all game engines and animation packages. Dunno how long it'll take for this kind of rendering to show up in real games and what you'll need to run it but... wow. 

Missed opportunity

Sadly, our tech regulations do not put us in the outside of the Asylum.

I wrote in May 2013:

New Zealand keeps ranking at or near the top of the various indices of economic and social freedoms. We could do well by encouraging greater immigration of American techies fed up with that the American governmentseems to be archiving and storing just about everything for later searches. Just show them Novopay as example of how we couldn't, even if we wanted to.

Alas, we're not immune to the shenanigans going on elsewhere. Our NSA, the GCSB, is getting a legislative redraft. Thomas Beagle of TechLiberty summarises; NoRightTurn has a few additional comments. I'm not a lawyer - maybe things aren't as bad as they seem. David Farrar is considerably less concerned....When the US seems to be doing everything it can to convince its tech guys that the government really does want to be spying on everybody, and that the IRS wants to know everything you talk about at political meetings if you have small-government leanings, the last thing we need are headlines suggesting we're heading down similar paths if the legislation doesn't actually do that. And if it does, it does need changing.

At the time, a whole pile of people offered me big assurances that the TICSA legislation was far more innocuous than the press made out and that it wouldn't just work to kill innovative startups who couldn't handle the regulations and that it was all just a beat-up by people who didn't understand the regulations and hadn't had all the super-secret briefings.

The NZ Herald now tells me that we've scared off a pile of tech investment. I guess that they didn't understand the regulations or profit from the super-secret briefings either.

Jim Henson meets Ayn Rand [Important update]

Jim Henson argued with Ayn Rand in an ARPANET discussion forum in 1976. Along with Yoko Ono. I had no clue that this existed. Massive thanks to Luis for the pointer.

*** Update, erratum, and apology. Twitter commenters said fake; I searched around. And I found this on the ARPANET Discussion Forum webpage. There is no link to this page within the main site, but it comes up on Google. Here it is:

Disclaimer
The parties responsible for presenting the textual information on this website, and in other formats that appear as part of this project, disclose that their intention is to create the thoughts and emotions of the various characters presented through The Arpanet Dialogues in an effort to stimulate debate about the current state of world affairs from the perspective of hindsight.

I apologise for not having searched this out more thoroughly earlier.

Update 2: Here's a discussion of the project. Clever. But it would have been nice if they'd have linked to the disclaimer from the front page.
And here's io9 on it, via Russel Brown.

In hindsight, Ronald Reagan's voice sounded the most out of synch with the Reagan that plays in my head - a bit more cardboard than I'd expected. But the fake Rand sadly didn't seem that far out. For other fake Rands, do read Mozart Was A Red, by Murray Rothbard.

Original post follows below.
***
Artist Sidney Nolan, also in the discussion, asked Henson which was his favourite puppet.

JIM HENSON
Each character is special for me they represent different aspects of myself. Kermit the frog is perhaps closest to me. An altar ego of sorts.

AYN RAND
What does that say about you.

SIDNEY NOLAN
Big laughs. He is exceptional.

JIM HENSON
I dont know. I don’t think too much about it.

YOKO ONO
My favourite is Big Bird. He is so tall and gentle.

AYN RAND
To be honest I find it to be senseless entertainment. I prefer the celebration of men and what they can achieve.

JIM HENSON
Do you have children Ms Rand.

AYN RAND
What do children have to do with what I prefer.

Later:

JIM HENSON
Ms. Ono you are too idealistic I think.

AYN RAND
I agree.

SIDNEY NOLAN
I think Ms. Rand is even more idealistic at heart.

JIM HENSON
And sad.

And Ayn later misses the point:

JIM HENSON
I think Ms. Rand and my character Oscar the Grouch would have a lot to talk about actually. I am laughing out loud at this idea.

AYN RAND
Why would I want to talk to him. What has he achieved or trying to achieve.

JIM HENSON
He has achieved what I think is the ultimate goal of your way of thinking.
...
Isolation. Contempt for others. A hard heart. Yet even he can muster a bit of empathy every now and then.
...

AYN RAND
I am not isolated. I have no contempt for others. Millions of people read my books and find my thoughts inspirational. I hardly spend my time on the sidelines in a trash can grumping.

JIM HENSON
Not yet anyway.

Read through the whole transcript and tell me it wouldn't be hard to programme a bot whose output would be indistinguishable from Rand's for 80% of her contributions. I've a soft spot for Rand. And I disagree  with Henson about the "ultimate goal" of Rand's project. But Henson takes this one.

Other ARPANET Dialogues:

• Marcel Broodthalers, Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Edward Said, 1975. Lots of fun "What's this whole chat thing for" discussion at the start between Reagan, Said and Broodthalers. A sample:

  EDWARD SAID
  What are the implications [of online chats]. This will revolutionize they way people do business. Culture perhaps. Someone from Japan can have a conversation with someone from California. What about China.
  
  RONALD REAGAN
  Wouldnt you rather pick up the phone and call.
  
  RONALD REAGAN
  All this damned typing.

  Said has the best imagination and foresight about what ARPANET could lead to. The novelty of corresponding by instantaneous text with people you've never met before, whose voices you don't know and whose faces you can't place - it's commonplace for us, but not so much 40 years ago.

• Samir Amin, Steve Biko, Francis Fukuyama, Minoru Yamasaki, June 1976. A short highlight:

  STEVE BIKO
  What if the people dont want democracy. What if they want a monarchy.
  
  FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
  That so archaic.

• Joseph Beuys, Juan Downey, Rosalind Krauss, Henry Moore, March 1976.

Treasurenvy

Tomorrow is budget day here in New Zealand. What's going to be in the budget? Ask iPredict. But if you want the data at 2 PM tomorrow when the budget is released, download the Budget app this afternoon! I'm pasting the Treasury site below. If your Treasury hasn't got an app for your budget, why not?

NZ Budget App

Page updated 22 May 2012

The Treasury is launching the NZ Budget app for Android, iPhone and iPad to coincide with Budget 2012.

The app provides Budget-related video, Ministers' media statements, the Minister of Finance's Budget speech, the Executive Summary and Key Facts for Taxpayers.

Tablet versions of the app also provide the Fiscal Strategy Report and Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU).

Read the related media statement by Hon Bill English, Minister of Finance, on the Beehive website: Budget 2012 goes high tech with new app (22 May 2012).

How to Get the App

The app will be available late on Wednesday afternoon. On your device you will be able to go to the App Store or Google Play and search for NZ Budget.

There is no charge for the NZ Budget app.

How the App Works

The app is not loaded with Budget 2012 data but receives it from a Wellington-based server after the embargo ends at 2pm on Budget day, 24 May 2012.

Until the embargo is lifted the app will not show any information. When Budget 2012 is released on 24 May, the app will automatically update and start to display Budget 2012 information.

The app will not contain all of the Budget 2012 information released on Budget day. For example, the largest Budget documents - the Estimates of Appropriations 2012/13, the ten sector volumes of the Information Supporting the Estimates 2012/13, and the Supplementary Estimates and Supporting Information 2011/12 - are not available on the app.

These Estimates documents and other Budget 2012-related material will be available on the Treasury website's Budget 2012 home page at: http://www.treasury.govt.nz/budget/2012.

The illustration on this page is a sample screenshot of the NZ Budget app on an iPhone using a chart from the Key Facts for Taxpayers from Budget 2011.

Feedback

The Treasury welcomes feedback on the NZ Budget app.

Meanwhile, in Canada

The same government that considered the mandatory long form census so strong an invasion of privacy that it was worth destroying the continuity of the census data series is requiring ISPs to maintain extensive logs on users and to hand them over to police without warrants; ISPs are banned from telling customers of any government snooping unless given explicit permission by the police.

Tony Clement, back in 2010:

“It is not appropriate to compel citizens to divulge how many bedrooms they have in their houses, or what time they leave for work in the morning,” Clement said. “The government’s approach is about finding a better balance between collecting necessary data and protecting the privacy rights of Canadians.”

Vic Toews, Public Safety Minister, last week:

Critics of a bill that would give law enforcement new powers to access Canadians' electronic communications are aligning themselves with child pornographers, Canada's public safety minister says.

"He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers," Vic Toews said of Liberal public safety critic Francis Scarpaleggia during question period on Monday, after Scarpaleggia asked about a bill expected to be tabled Tuesday.

Odd that it's more of an intrusion to have to tell the government how many bedrooms you have than to #TellVicEverything about what sites you might be visiting while in the bedroom. Australia is no better.

Meanwhile, some Canadian universities will start letting IP folks trawl through faculty emails to see if anybody's sharing gated journal articles. I expect most folks at Toronto and Western to flip quickly over to Gmail. This while the #AAASmtg has been exploring the notion that research has been biased towards materials faculty can access; this adds a hurdle to research efforts for folks at smaller schools with less extensive online journal holdings. It would be interesting to see what bias was induced into paper citations by JSTOR's moving wall.

New Zealand is getting worse too. But it's getting worse slower than other places. Shame that the National government hasn't figured out that one of our comparative advantages is in freedom, and in particular tech freedom; we ought not have bent over so quickly when the FBI came calling for Kim DotCom. American tech folks looking for exit options have noticed...

Why retire?

I've never quite understood why academics retire. Jeremy Bentham wanted his auto-icon propped up in the University long after his death; he's apparently still brought out for the occasional meeting of Council where he's listed as "present but not voting". That doesn't seem all that bad.

Nick Rowe wonders why people bundle so much leisure into retirement. It's difficult to conceive of models in which doing so is optimal. Sure, work gets harder as we get older, but so too does leisure.

The obvious answer is that our productivity falls as we age. So it makes sense to consume more leisure when the opportunity cost is least. But there's also an obvious problem with that explanation. If our productivity at work falls as we age, maybe our productivity at leisure falls as we age too. Which will get worse more quickly: my ability to give an economics lecture; or my ability to portage a canoe?

Honestly, there's a very short list of things that would have me retire from lecturing:

1. Being forced to retire;
   • But this does require either legislation mandating a retirement age, or constraints on recontracting for reduced duties and wages commensurate with depreciated human capital. I'm pretty sure Canada has the former. [David Giles, in comments, says Canada no longer forces retirement.]
2. Health problems that affect labour in more embarrassing fashion than leisure coupled with a stronger sense of shame than I currently have;
3. Strong technological innovation in leisure-complementary activities;
4. Technological changes in academia that make lecturers obsolete [read read read]

The fourth I most worry about because it could hit rather sooner than I'd like. Society invests too much in higher education. The bottom tier of students would do better in taking a trade qualification than a Bachelor's; rather too many undergraduates are learning absolutely nothing^* [HT: Isegoria]. Things like MITx (InsideHigherEd) will let top institutions provide more credentialling services for those who ought to have university training. Government R&D funding has been being crowded out, so when the sector eventually loses the funding coming from students who never really should have been there, academia will contract (and especially severely if MITx takes off). The good times can't last forever.

On the plus side, much of what universities provide isn't really instruction. Instead, it's a bundle of instruction, signalling, consumption, and complex relational and social capital not easily provided elsewhere. The instruction can be handled by MITx, but I'm not sure the rest of it can be. Teleconferencing hasn't eliminated either face-to-face business interactions or academic conferences. That gives me hope I can still be in the classroom in my 80s. But if teleconferencing ever advances sufficiently for virtual conferences to supplant traditional ones,^** I'm going to get just a little bit nervous.

* The book cited finds no improvement in complex reasoning, writing, or reading skills among a substantial proportion of undergrads. I haven't read the just-released book, but I expect the problem's largely one of fit. A bottom tier of students just cannot be taught by the methods that are appropriate to the middle and upper tiers of their classmates and would have better outcomes in community college or technical training environments. Starting g matters.

** I think it'll require holodeck-style virtual hospitality suites.

Bits of heating

I love this idea, but wonder about its practicability.

Two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper presented this year at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”

They acknowledge that it is more likely that data furnaces, if adopted, would be placed first in basements of office and apartment buildings, not in individual homes. But as a “thought-provoking exercise,” the authors give homes the bulk of their attention.

If a home has a broadband Internet connection, it can serve as a micro data center. One, two or three cabinets filled with servers could be installed where the furnace sits and connected with the existing circulation fan and ductwork. Each cabinet could have slots for, say, 40 motherboards — each one counting as a server. In the coldest climate, about 110 motherboards could keep a home as toasty as a conventional furnace does.

I had thought that data centres required pretty strict climate control; achieving that over massively distributed systems would require more than a few techies who could be dispatched from the NOC in case of temperature fluctuation or other circuit faults. It would be a bit surprising if those costs didn't outweigh the cooling plant cost reduction; on the other hand, they have started moving data centres to the Arctic circle.

Crypto-optimism

Eli Dourado's excellent discussion of technologies of control and technologies of evasion reminds me of the anarcho-optimism of Cryptonomicon. Eli builds a business cycle story:

Here’s my model. First we need to differentiate between two kinds of innovation and think about their effects. The first kind of innovation is geared toward brute maximization of production. It is typically centralized and makes use of economies of scale. Examples might include an assembly line factory or a big, coal-fired power plant. Because these innovations tend to be centralized, they introduce points of control. The capital is typically fixed and therefore easy to tax and regulate. It’s well known in the development literature that it’s really hard for governments to control rural peasants who live off the grid. Once they move to the cities and plug into centralized services, it is easier to require them to send their children to school, for instance. Because these innovations introduce points of control, I will call them technologies of control.

On the other hand, not all innovations are about brute maximization of production. Some are about producing things that we already know how to produce in ways that have ancillary benefits. An important ancillary benefit is evading control. Examples of these innovations include 3D printers and solar power. The evasion of control that is possible with 3D printers is the subject of Cory Doctorow’s short story Printcrime. And portable solar power cells can make people harder to control by supplying electricity without the need to register an address, have a bank account, stay put, and so on. These are obvious examples, but control can be evaded through more subtle innovations as well. I will call innovations that circumvent points of control that can be used by governments or monopolies to exploit, tax, or regulate technologies of resistance.

Now, postulate some background rate of innovation. How many resources will be devoted to technologies of control and how many to technologies or resistance? The answer is that it depends on how invasive the state (or other monopolies) are. When the state is invasive, at the margin the incentive is to find ways to circumvent the points of control; a greater proportion of resources will go into technologies of resistance. When the state is non-invasive, at the margin the incentive is a purer maximization of production; a greater proportion of resources will go into technologies of control, which results higher growth.

Add in time-to-build or other frictions in shifting capital from technologies of control to technologies of resistance, and we get cycles.

I love the story, but I'm not sure how well parts of it match the stylized time path. Here's Eli:

So far, I’ve been pretty general about technologies of resistance, but I want to tie it back into McJolfsson’s story about rapid skill-biased technical change. The key point is that labor is extremely regulated; firms that use labor are subject to intense government control. In part this is because policies that give labor a “bigger piece of the pie” are popular with voters, and in part it is because labor can complain and enforce its rights in a way that machines cannot. If you own a business and you are subject to intense government control, you are going to invest resources in circumventing the points of control. In our economy, that means getting rid of lots of labor as cheaply as possible, which means skill-biased technical change. As Arnold Kling has said, “if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.” But it’s because there is so much control exercised in the labor market that the incentive to automate and outsource is so high.

Agreed. But surely American labour market regulation has been in decline since the late 1970s. I have a hard time seeing a big labour regulation shock anywhere in the 2000s that would have precipitated a dumping of labour. I suppose the shock has to come from technology reducing the costs of substitution more quickly than labour market deregulation reducing the need for such substitution. Do read Eli's full argument, which brings together Brynjolfsson's techno-optimist story with Cowen's Great Stagnation.

I'm a long term optimist on technologies of evasion. Eventually, something like BitCoin will be successful. Meanwhile, Patri is sparking more real-world hacks around control. The latest one: floating platforms 12 miles off San Francisco where foreign tech entrepreneurs could route around idiotic American immigration laws.

This immigration issue deeply affected the Blueseed team, of which two are immigrants (from Serbia and Romania), and the other is the son of Cuban immigrants. Rather than accepting the current reality, Dan tells us, "If U.S. policy hasn’t kept pace with the changing economic realities of the era, someone needs to find a solution that will help entrepreneurs come to Silicon Valley if they so desire. And that someone might as well be us. In other words, it’s time to stop complaining and start solving the problem."

On their website they state they plan to start accommodation prices off at around $1500 a month, and transportation will be provided to the mainland by a daily ferry. Internet connectivity will be provided via a point-to-point 40Gbps laser link with satellite link backup. They are also looking at additional backup solutions using submarine cable and potentially a series of WiMAX relay buoys. A visa is not required to earn a paycheck on Blueseed, and most residents will be able to travel back and forth to the mainland with a business/pleasure B1 Visa.

I worry that it will be really easy for the government to change a line of regulatory code to make it tough for Blueseed residents to commute back and forth; but, I'm also not sure that they'll face big pressure to do so and regulatory inertia would then work in Blueseed's favour. Until some California Congressman reckons the extra votes he gets from making a stink about platform-dwellers stealing jobs swamps the costs he'd impose on the tech industry.

The afternoon's weeping

Item the first: the Tobacco Inquisition at the University of Otago's Wellington School of Medicine now want to censor the internet to get rid of YouTube videos friendly to tobacco companies.

Lead researcher Lucy Elkin said that while tobacco companies denied advertising on the internet, the significant brand presence on YouTube was consistent with indirect marketing activity by tobacco companies or their proxies.

"The internet is ideal for tobacco marketing, being largely unregulated and viewed by millions of people world-wide every day," she said.

The study also found that while YouTube provides for the removal of material it defines as offensive, it does not currently consider pro-tobacco content as grounds for removal of specific video clips.

However, public and health organisations could request that YouTube removes pro-tobacco videos containing material considered offensive under present rules, Elkin said.

Governments could also implement the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control requirements on controlling tobacco marketing on the internet.

But Thomson said in New Zealand, the government had shown it was not willing to put the legal resources to deal with examples of indirect tobacco marketing.

I need to start smoking cigars again.

Go to YouTube. Put "Smoking" into the search bar. You get:

1. Smoking lettuce
2. quit smoking
3. a 1951 Goofy No Smoking cartoon
4. a Sonic the Hedgehog no-smoking video
5. Short video of smoking celebrities
6. Smoking tire (cars)
7. A Star Wars anti-smoking PSA
8. Another anti-smoking video
9. ...

It goes on and on, probably 10:1 anti versus pro smoking. Clearly YouTube is a propagandist for Big Tobacco and is in desperate need of censorship.

Who is funding Otago to do this stuff? Ah. The Health Research Council of New Zealand. Nice. I'll have to remember to try paying somebody cash under the table to take back the part I paid for that study.

Item the second: a Belgian paying about $NZ 110/month for the third fastest broadband package, capped at a maximum of 30 MBps, downloaded 2.6 TB of data over a month and his ISP is cool with that. I'm paying $110 NZ per month for broadband plus phone for their fastest package, currently delivering 7 MBps to the exchange but less than 2MBps for overseas connections, that caps out at 20 GB/month of traffic. Nothing to be done about it, and no particular policy moves can fix it. It's a small remote market problem. But I still weep.

Social hacks and Fire Drills: I told you so edition

Last year, I suggested that it would be an awfully good idea for the University, and other folks, to run phishing drills. Send out an email to staff typical of a social hack phishing expedition looking for user name and password details, see who replies, commence the beatings, then repeat until nobody needs beatings anymore.

Shame nobody listens. In today's inbox:

Dear All,

Last night an external agency used a staff member’s username and password to set up a large spam broadcast using our Exchange email servers which has resulted in a backlog of messages on our email gateway.

The spamming process has now been disabled but it will take some time before our queues return to a normal state (by 3.00pm). Meanwhile, you may experience delays in delivery and receipt of external emails; this includes messages sent to and from UC student accounts. Moreover, it is possible that some of our emails will be rejected as our email exchange has been blacklisted.

Please note that this incident occurred because a staff member responded to an email asking for their username and password. The email looked as though it came from an official or trustworthy source such as ICT Services. Be assured that ICT Services would never request a username and password by email; nor do any other trustworthy source such as banks.

Although no emails have been lost; I would wish to apologise for any inconvenience that this spam attack has caused.

We run fire drills every semester. Why oh why aren't we running phishing drills?

AoLDaily ... (or not).

Original post first as drafted, followed by correction.

I got my first internet access in 1994 via the University of Manitoba. Well, if you want to be really technical about it, we had BBS access back on the farm to VideoTEX and Telidon on the Commodore 64 back around 1985 (300 baud, if I recall correctly), but I'm not sure that really counted.

But lots of folks in 1994 hit the internet via America Online: AoL. Rather than being a just an ISP, they wanted to be a walled garden, with exclusive content for subscribers (like New York Times) and little reason for users to browse outside of the garden. The walled content garden is what's currently interesting.

Why? A daily read for me (and ought to be for you) is Arts & Letters Daily, edited by Denis Dutton - who's about 4 minutes away over in the Philosophy Department here at Canterbury.

A couple of days ago, Denis highlighted a book review by Kerry Howley:

Third-wave feminism combined combat boots and baby-doll dresses. Barbie was a mannequin on whom you practice giving abortions... more»

If you hit the link in my post, you'll get to a teaser for the review with a subscription pitch.

If you hit the link from Arts & Letters Daily, you'll get the full article.

BookForum has to be doing this at its server side via referring site recognition as there's nothing special in the URL.

Will Arts & Letters Daily become the new walled garden entry portal? Doubtful, despite Denis's refusal to post his Nota Bene pieces in an RSS feed. But it's certainly an interesting mechanism for BookForum to give a certain set of readers trial access without opening the whole thing up. They couldn't exist without subscription payments; they must reckon that ALD readers build buzz and are more likely to subscribe after a full text preview rather than a snippet, where folks arriving there just after a Google search for some content would be as or less likely to subscribe if they had full content rather than just the snippet.

Update and Correction. Arts & Letters Daily isn't that special, or at least not special for this particular reason. The link I've posted above works! So BookForum is allowing links in from the main blogging platforms then as well as ALD. I like this. The last thing a publisher ought to want to do is kill off social buzz about their content if that buzz helps build subscriptions. Further testing shows that other links I put up to BookForum from here delivers the full text article when hitting the link from their main site gives only the snippet. Neat!

So the perforated subscription wall stops the random Google content search - the kid looking for stuff for his term paper - and stops folks who come to the front page specifically looking for BookForum's content, but still allows ample social media linkage. Good stuff.

Results I don't believe [updated]

Kiwis almost never look for pornography on the web, a survey partly conducted by AUT University has found.

The survey of 1250 people in 30 countries showed that fewer than 5 per cent of Kiwis admit using the internet for pornography daily. More than 80 per cent said they never looked for sexual content on the web.

1250 people in 30 countries? 42 respondents per country if it's not population weighted; maybe a dozen Kiwis answered the survey if it was? Or do they mean 1250 people in each of 30 countries. [DPF, comments, confirms 1250 per country, phew!]

Alexa is a bit more forthcoming: 6 of the top 100 sites visited by New Zealanders are porn. #s 46, 64, 65, 66, 73, and 81, at least judging by titles or tags that are obvious in the Alexa headings. If folks are more likely to block tracking toolbars like Alexa when surfing that kind of content, then these results understate things. The one ranked #46 here is ranked #54 globally.

Or maybe the 5% in the survey really downloads a whole lot of content. But I doubt it.

Who runs surveys of 1250 people across 30 countries? The margins of error have to be huge!

Our strange new world

Adam Bertocci pens a Shakespearean rendition of The Big Lebowski and posts it to the internet on a Wednesday. By the Saturday, a New York theatre company has arranged for a March opening; by Thursday, a book deal.

Last year, some guy started posting a Twitter feed of crazy stuff his dad says. Now it's going to be a TV series starring William Shatner.

Why aren't you famous too?

I'm still waiting for a Bigfoot animated TV series based on Bigfoot's twitter feed. Come on, internet, make it happen.