Indecent Comment on an Indecent Subject

Steve Russell, retired after 16 years as a trial judge in Texas, is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

In cyberspace, there is no place. The "community standards" are those of the whole world. An upload from Amsterdam can become a download in Idaho. By trying to regulate obscenity and indecency on the Internet, you have reduced the level of expression allowed consenting adults to that of the most anal retentive blueballed fuckhead U.S. attorney in the country. The Internet is everywhere you can plug in a modem. Call Senator Exon an "ignorant motherfucker" in Lincoln, Nebraska and find yourself prosecuted in Bibleburg, Mississippi.

This is bullshit -- unconstitutional bullshit and also bad policy bullshit. To violate your ban on indecency, I have been forced to use and overuse so-called indecent language. But if I called you a bunch of goddam motherfucking cocksucking cunt-eating blue-balled bastards with the morals of muggers and the intelligence of pond scum, that would be nothing compared to this indictment, to wit: you have sold the First Amendment, your birthright and that of your children. The Founders turn in their graves. You have spit on the grave of every warrior who fought under the Stars and Stripes.

And what mess of pottage have you acquired in exchange for the rights of a free people? Have you cleansed the Internet of even the rawest pornography? No, because it is a worldwide system. You have, however, handed the government a powerful new tool to harass its critics: a prosecution for indecent commentary in any district in the country.

inappropriate and unacceptable

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. Who can gainsay the Lord Chamberlain when he pronounces it “inappropriate” to wear jeans to the Queen’s garden party? This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.

The point can be generalised. As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it. But intolerance has not been eliminated, merely thrust underground. “Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are the catchwords of a moralism that dare not speak its name. They hide all measure of righteous fury behind the mask of bureaucratic neutrality. For the sake of our own humanity, we should strike them from our vocabulary.

How China Won and Russia Lost

On a dark November night in 1978, 18 Chinese peasants from Xiaogang village in Anhui province secretly divided communal land to be farmed by individual families, who would keep what was left over after meeting state quotas. Such a division was illegal and highly dangerous, but the peasants felt the risks were worth it. The timing is significant for our story. The peasants took action one month before the “reform” congress of the party was announced. Thus, without fanfare, began economic reform, as spontaneous land division spread to other villages. One farmer said, “When one family’s chicken catches the pest, the whole village catches it. When one village has it, the whole county will be infected.”

Ten years later, in August of 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev lifted his nation’s 50-year-old prohibition against private farming, offering 50-year leases to farm families who would subsequently work off of contracts with the state. Few accepted the offer; Russian farmers were too accustomed to the dreary but steady life on the state or collective farm. Thus began reform of agriculture in Soviet Russia.

The results in each country could not have been more different. Chronically depressed Chinese agriculture began to blossom, not only for grain but for all crops. As farmers brought their crops to the city by bicycle or bus, long food lines began to dwindle and then disappear. The state grocery monopoly ended in less than one year. Soviet Russian agriculture continued to stagnate despite massive state subsidies. Citizens of a superpower again had to bear the indignity of sugar rations.

Throughout the reform process, the Chinese Communist Party simply reacted to (and wisely did not oppose) bottom-up reform initiatives that emanated largely from the rural population. Deng Xiaoping’s famous description of Chinese reform as “fording the river by feeling for the stones” is not incorrect, but it was the Chinese people who placed the stones under his feet.

Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of his party in March of 1985. By that time, he knew that the Chinese reforms were successful. His reforms, contrary to the popular narrative, closely mimicked China’s. He proposed to lease land to peasants, establish free trade zones, promote small cooperative businesses, and set up joint ventures. The difference was that Gorbachev imposed these changes from above, on an urban economy in which virtually all citizens worked for the state. Gorbachev’s reforms either were ignored or they were enacted with perverse consequences. Bottom-up reforms worked in China; top-down reforms failed in Russia.

Winston on Market Failure and Government Failure

Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution talks about the ideas in his book, Market Failure vs. Government Failure, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Winston summarizes a large literature on antitrust, safety regulation and environmental regulation. He finds that government regulation often fails to meet its objectives. While markets are imperfect, so is government. Winston argues that idealized theories of government intervention based on textbook theories of market failure are not the way regulation turns out in practice. He argues that special interest politics explains much of the disappointing outcomes of government regulation.

Selling China Long-Term Innovation Assets

On my way back from Beijing in December, I sat in front of a corporate guy who was returning to the US after pitching a deal to sell tens of thousands of electric car charging stations in China. He was talking to a California software guy, also returning after pitching after pitching a deal. Their exchange was all about the polite fiction that US companies are selling products to China when they are really selling their best technologies—for the lower price and profits of products. It’s short-term real gains over long-term potential profits.

Here is the essence of what I heard:

1-China is demanding technology transfer for the deal for electric car charging stations pretty much for the price of entry and for the price of the product alone. US, European, Korean and Japanese companies have known this and done this for the past 20 years. Most countries pay extra for the technology and most companies refuse to sell their best. China is getting cutting edge technology at almost no cost.

2- China can do this not only because of its enormous market but because it is the ONLY market for many products and services. China is building large numbers of high speed trains. The US is not. China is building hundreds of thousands of urban electric car charging stations. The US is not. China is spending $800 billion to make its electric transmission lines “smart.” The US is spending $8 billion. Corporations go to expanding markets. They have no choice today.

3- China is running a national, mercantilist economy policy that both state-owned and privately owned companies follow. Technology transfer is focussed on building Chinese global companies that can compete with US, Japanese and European corporations. Investment and trade are not just about raising living standards (if they were, then Beijing would let the yuan rise, increase the buying power of China’s consumers, and boost their living standards). They are about building national and global economic and political strength.

4—US companies know they are building their own competitors in China but feel they have no choice. They need that choice or the future long-term growth prospects for the US will grow dimmer and dimmer. China is playing a serious national innovation game. Good for China. The US is not. Bad for America.

emotional issue?

Secret History of Credit Card

NARRATOR: But what really attracted Citibank to South Dakota was an obscure Supreme Court decision that said a bank could now export its interest rate to other states. It was called the Marquette decision.

BILL JANKLOW: The Marquette Bank decision was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that said, forget where the bank is chartered. Wherever the credit decision is made, in whatever state, that's the place where you can apply interest, wherever you make the loan. In other words, if South Dakota had a 25 percent ceiling, then you could charge 25 percent, even to a loan in Florida.

BEN STEIN: The credit card companies hate people like me, who pay off our bills every month. And I know that because I ran into a fellow I went to high school with on the street, and he told me he worked for a credit card company. And I told him about how much I use credit cards and how I pay them off every month, and he said, "Oh, we hate you. We hate you guys. We call you deadbeats."

NARRATOR: "Deadbeats," in the upside-down world of the credit card business, are the people like Ben Stein, who pay off their bills on time. The industry's best customers are the 90 million Americans who don't pay off their credit card debt. They're called the "revolvers."

PAT WALLACE: Providian, for example, was accepting payments from consumers on their accounts, depositing the checks but not crediting the account for sometimes up to several weeks. What was the net result of that? Invariably, the consumer got a late charge.

LOWELL BERGMAN: They were holding payments so that they could charge late fees and they could charge overdraft fees and—

Deschooling Society

If a team wants a good field goal kicker it will indeed seek a kicker who demonstrates to them he can kick. That someone comes to the team with a certificate that he went to kicking school and got all good grades in kicking would be laughed out of court. The issue would be: can the person kick field goals with accuracy and distance under pressure of game situations.

Similarly, with much in entertainment worlds. Webster University has a highly regarded theater department. Students work hard here and hopefully learn a great deal. But when they go out looking for an acting job, that they have a degree from Webster University with a major in theater is of extremely little interest. The issue is performance and demonstrated ability, not a credential.

China High-Speed Rail project

Someone in my family works for Siemens as a senior member of the China High-Speed Rail project (not to be confused with the China Maglev project, for which Siemens is also a partner). We've talked about it quite often - and fairly extensively yesterday. Here are a few details:

The technologies of all four major high-speed rail system in the world - Germany's ICE, Japan's Sinkansen, France's TGV and Canada's Bombardier (in order of overall technological advancement) - have come together in China, though rather reluctantly. When the Chinese started the project years ago, they did something very clever: Instead of picking one of the four systems (which is what people normally do), they gave all four a pilot contract each. The one showing the best result in its pilot would then be chosen as the main partner, they said, making all four competing like crazy - routinely investing more resources than they've originally planed. The Chinese are not concerned about significant waste due to incompatibility between the pilot products, since all four are building to the specs written by the Chinese.

Now, years later, the Canadians and the French are practically washed out, even though some of their technologies have contributed to the new Chinese system. The Germans and the Japanese remain - as initially expected - the main competitors - or, reluctant partners for the Chinese. The vast majority of heavy lifting on the technological front is done by the Germans (which was also expected, since even the Japanese system was originally based on German designs), but the Japanese have the advantage that their pilot has started earlier (the Chinese intentionally delayed the German pilot in order to ransom a below-value price).

The record speed, for example, was achieved using two joined trains - of four sections each - built by Siemens in Germany and put together in China. Those are the only two German trains current available for this route. All the other trains are Japanese, and they're what people see on most new footages. But the top speed the Japanese trains (on the same route) can reach are significantly lower - about 350 km/h, or >10% less than the German record. Plus, while the German rains got to 395 km/h in standard configuration - with two tracking (active) and two tracked (passive) sections in each train - the Japanese had to cheat - using three tracking and only one tracked section in each train - in order to reach their 350 km/h.

As someone has mentioned above, there exist a TGV speed record that's much higher still, but that's a record nobody in the industry takes seriously, because it was achieved with a totally crazy, not nearly practical configuration of train sections. It's a fake number, period.

The bottom line is, for the original cost of one project, China has managed to get more than twice the amount worth of know-how (all legally via proper technology transfer contracts), and is now itself among the leading players of the industry. For the upcoming US high-speed rail system, the Chinese has offered a bid with a price tag 1/3 lower than anybody else...

Sumerians Look On In Confusion As Christian God Creates World

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

"I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."

...

Moreover, the Sumerians were taken aback by the creation of the same animals and herb-yielding seeds that they had been domesticating and cultivating for hundreds of generations.

"The Sumerian people must have found God's making of heaven and earth in the middle of their well-established society to be more of an annoyance than anything else," said Paul Helund, ancient history professor at Cornell University. "If what the pictographs indicate are true, His loud voice interrupted their ancient prayer rituals for an entire week."

According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God's most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings.

"These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant," one Sumerian philosopher wrote. "They must be the creation of a complete idiot."

Why girls dress up?

scientific proof

Perhaps it's time to once again point out that "scientific proof" is a red herring. As any number of science's theoreticians have carefully explained over the years, scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Rather, science works mostly with a double-negative approach: An accepted theory is one that we have failed to disprove. Scientific testing and data collection is mostly aimed at showing that a hypothesis is wrong. Results that agree with a hypothesis are generally called "support", not "proof", because usually the tests can't provide proof. But a single (correctly done;-) test or observation is often sufficient to disprove a theory.

This is why scientific theories are often called "tentative". Scientists are always trying to think of new ways to test a theory, and sometimes they succeed in finding situations where a theory fails. The poster child for this was the failure of Newton's mechanics to explain a number of anomalous observations about a century ago, which led to Einstein's theories explaining how the universe actually works. Of course, his theories have never been "proved", either. They have merely withstood hundreds of new experimental tests. Tomorrow some physicist (or high-school student) may produce a new test that demos an exception to Einstein's equations. But until then, they are accepted not because we've proved them, but rather because we have repeatedly failed to disprove them.

Of course, fundamental physics is "easier" that climate in an obvious way. Weather is much more complex than things like particle physics or orbital mechanics, which can be reduced to some fairly simple equations (though not quite as simple as we thought back in Newton's day). Anything dealing with weather has to be treated statistically, since the complexity is far beyond the capacity of our most powerful super-computers. (Our computers can't even model a butterfly's wings in detail, much less the effect the butterfly has on weather halfway around the world.;-) Since the public is generally totally ignorant of statistics, it's not surprising that people would fail to understand what the AGW theorists are telling us. It's fairly obvious that even most of the posters here in this "nerd" community don't understand the difference between weather and climate. You don't have much of a chance of understanding the issue without a good grounding in statistical methods, in addition to all the kinds of chemistry that you have to understand.

But the constant use of forms of the words "prove" and "proof" in regard to scientific theories should be treated with humor, since such words are an open statement that the author doesn't know much at all about scientific methods. Those are media and propaganda terms; they have very little use in scientific discussions. Proofs are what mathematicians do. Scientists do disproofs. (And it is interesting how well the radically different approaches of math and science complement each other. So far I haven't read much enlightening from either camp on this topic, just the observation that they play well together. But we all know that.)

Telangana - why so much opposition

... Telangana lost out because it had to carry the burden of keeping the marriage working and pretending everything was alright while suffering and enduring discrimination all the while. Telangana lost out because the Indira Gandhi’s Congress was not ready to create more states. Telangana lost out because they had to unnecessarily live with the tag of united Telugu when they were only concerned with their self-rule, self-expression and self-development.

We don’t want continue with charade any longer. We don’t want to be cowed down by the majority of Andhra-Rayalaseema. We just want to be on our own so that our politicians, however vile they are, are at least accountable to us. So that they spend the money they get in our region, even if they eat half of it, at least we get the other half. Self-rule, self-development and self-expression are more important to us than the unity under a tag called Telugu. This tag does not even make sense when many Telangana people actually feel that their language is treated inferiorly by their Andhra brothers.

Harrison Bergeron - social equality

.... social equality has been achieved by handicapping the more intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society. For example, strength is handicapped by the requirement to carry weight, beauty by the requirement to wear a mask, etc. This is due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the United States Constitution. This process is central to the society, designed so that no one will feel inferior to anyone else. Handicapping is overseen by the United States Handicapper General, Diana Moon-Glampers.

Harrison Bergeron, the protagonist of the story, has exceptional intelligence, strength, and beauty, and thus has to bear enormous handicaps. These include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, forty pounds of birdshot around his neck, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, a rubber ball on his nose, black caps on his teeth, and shaven eyebrows. Despite these societal handicaps, he is able to invade a TV station, declare himself Emperor, strip himself of his handicaps, then dance with a ballerina whose handicaps he has also discarded. Both are shot dead by the brutal and relentless Handicapper General. The story is framed by an additional perspective from Bergeron's parents, who are watching the incident on TV, but because of his father's handicapping due to his superior intelligence, and his mother's less than average intelligence, they cannot concentrate enough to appreciate what occurs nor remember it.

A similar (though less developed) version of this idea appeared in Vonnegut's earlier novel, The Sirens of Titan.

A Library to Last Forever

.. the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

Op-Ed Contributor - A Library to Last Forever - NYTimes.com

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The Uber Nutrient Worth “Hundreds of Billions”

D is not just another nutrient. Putting it simplistically, it is the über-nutrient that affects the way all other nutrients, not just calcium, are utilized. Virtually every cell in the body has a D receptor, even those in the brain. Until recently, however, few asked why. This is a particularly interesting question because there is very little vitamin D actually available in food. Most of our nutritional D, in fact, is added. Historically, the primary source of D, not only for humans, but for many other animals, has been sunshine. We convert the energy found in ultraviolet B in our skin to vitamin D. Obviously, there is something critically important about D if our prehistoric ancestors could manufacture it even during times of famine.

Now we see a compendium of solid peer-reviewed research indicating that many of our most troublesome and expensive diseases are symptoms of vitamin D deficiency. Rickets, apparently, was only the tip of the iceberg. Other diseases on the list of conditions caused or exacerbated by D deficiency include cancers, diabetes, susceptibility to bacterial and viral infections, autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, heart disease, stroke, osteomalacia or age-related bone mass thinning, osteoporosis, depression and even food allergies. Obesity, in fact, is highly correlated with vitamin D deficiency. In many of these conditions, risk factors drop within months, and by as much as 80%.

The Uber Nutrient Worth “Hundreds of Billions”

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The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold

So in early 1996, Jackson began programming a back-end system for a new electronic currency, practicing medicine by day, and coding by night.

He hired a software engineer to create the user interface, and four months later launched E-Gold.

As Jackson envisioned it, E-Gold was a private, international currency that would circulate independent of government controls, and stand impervious to the market’s highs and lows. Brimming with evangelical enthusiasm, Jackson proclaimed it a cure for the modern monetary system’s ills and described it at one point as “an epochal change in human destiny” and “probably the greatest benefit to humanity that’s ever been thought of.”

Timberlake, the economics professor, is convinced that Jackson’s radical dream, his goal of upsetting the economic status quo and overturning the government’s monopoly on money, is what really got E-Gold targeted.

Should Yale support biotech lobbyists? yalepatents.org

I understand the hopes, shared alike by local universities and municipalities, that biotech will reenergize Connecticut’s sagging industry and employment landscape. The actual realization of a wealthy, well-educated workforce and lucrative industry may someday redeem the subsidies and other favors made to incentivize the growth of local biotech shops and drug manufacturers in CT.

Reasonable people disagree about the benefits society will reap from lengthy monopolies on biological drugs–for periods of a decade or more.  For instance, is it true that a certain, dozen-year period of drug exclusivity is required for firms to recoup their research?  After all, manufacturers of generic biological drugs will, in all likelihood, confront the same bevy of expensive safety and efficacy testing as the original producer.  In some cases, the sheer cost of reproducing the process for making a biologic treatment may make these inventions immune to the kind of generic versions that can be made of simpler, small-molecule based drugs (mainstream antibiotics and antidepressants, for instance).

In addition, the monopoly provided by government-guaranteed data exclusivity has nothing to do with the already decades-long patent protections that cover the inventions packaged into drugs.

Considering the enormous price that our society will likely pay for high-tech drugs in the coming decades, we should at least understand what kind of deal we’re getting with drug manufacturers as we negotiate the monopolies they’ll receive on the next generation of life-saving treatments.  It is in the interest of the university community, not to mention the Connecticut taxpayer, to keep industry lobbyists like CURE at arms length, at the very least, so that meaningful, two-sided debate can occur on the enormous issues of drug cost and healthcare reform.

Should Yale support biotech lobbyists? | yalepatents.org

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SAT and GRE testing

The workaround for this problem is to tailor the test to the examinee, real-time, with computer-adaptive testing. So let's say you get an item with a difficulty estimate of 1 correct; now the computer will hit you with one at 1.2, for example, and keep ramping up until you kind of level off at getting 50/50 right, which is where it decides you belong. Once it has you figured out, it either just throws easy ones at you so you feel good about yourself, or starts serving up items still undergoing pilot testing. Either way, what you do after that point will not affect your score.

This sounds great, and it would be great, if it worked reliably. The problem is that the thing has to kick in somewhere at the beginning of the test, and define a broad range that you belong in, and then a narrower range, and then a narrower range, etc. What this basically does is unfairly "weight" the first few items of the test, because they are the ones that will determine what large band of scores you will be eligible for. Once the machine has pegged you at the lower half, say, there is no way for you to break out of that, because it's never going to give you those harder questions. If that's not where you belong, you won't be able to demonstrate that, and you'll just get the top score of that band. So if you start the thing out and you're nervous and you just make a dumb mistake, that mistake can really cost you--much more than it would later in the test. All these models are probabilistic, so guessing and just making dumb mistakes are accounted for. But the moment you go adaptive, the beauty of the model is trashed at the beginning and doesn't come into effect until later.

Many of the tests which moved to computer-adaptive methods have gone back to just serving a range of items, but one, the GRE, is still adaptive, even though ETS (the company that makes it and the SAT and the TOEFL) knows it doesn't work reliably (people taking the test over and over can get very different scores). Evidently there are financial/political reasons they can't get rid of it (rumor).

Slashdot Comments | MIT Axes the 500-Word Application Essay

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I can pay you back with penny stamps

Dear Daddy

This is just a very secret letter between you and I. I really do not like asking you, but do you think you could afford to send me some money, what ever you can afford. I want to buy Mummy something for Xmas, but as we only get (?) a week pocket money I'm afraid I spend mine. I try hard to keep some, but somehow it goes. If you can Daddy, I will keep sending you penny stamps to pay you back young man, then you can use them can't you. We are very disappointing you will not be home for Xmas but we will still hang a stockingup for you. Father Xmas might leave you something if you are good.

Please do not tell Mummie I have written, else she will be annoyed at me asking you for money, she is in town at this moment.So I will post this straight away. If you can't send it don't worry.

Lots of Love + Kisses old-pop xxxxYour Ann.

Letters of Note: I can pay you back with penny stamps

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