g m g D e s i g n . c o m

Japanese students of English are using Obama speeches to hone their English. Very interesting.

I’ve felt for a while that mandatory liberal arts (or humanities) courses at universities are not the best idea. Never mind that humanities courses often break down into indoctrination courses into illiberal, left-wing thinking. They’re also of limited use in the real world–outside of academia, that is. The NY Times reports on this phenomenon.

No offense to devotees of the liberal arts. Some of the courses are interesting and useful. The NY Times suggests the following justification for humanities courses:

But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown. In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”

Of course, the idea that humanities courses at universities encourage morality seems silly to me. Religious beliefs, not left-wing philosophical beliefs, account for personal virtue more than studying the works of Chomsky, Nietzsche, or Marx.

Economically, does it make sense to mandate humanities over business and technology courses? My answer: only if your career ambition is “life-long college student” or liberal arts professor.

Home foreclosures are not so much a national problem as they are a problem in five US states. Hence, bailout money will disproportionately benefit people in just a few states who made risky bets (note that most of the foreclosed homes are refinances, not purchases).

Now why didn’t the rest of us get in on this government-assisted scam?!

HT to tdaxp’s blog.

The token conservative at the NY Times, David Brooks, has an editorial on the bailout fever sweeping the country. The first few paras are ones that any conservative (or libertarian) would love.

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.

Over the last few months, we’ve made a hash of all that. The Bush and Obama administrations have compensated foolishness and irresponsibility. The financial bailouts reward bankers who took insane risks. The auto bailouts subsidize companies and unions that made self-indulgent decisions a few decades ago that drove their industry into the ground.

The stimulus package handed tens of billions of dollars to states that spent profligately during the prosperity years. The Obama housing plan will force people who bought sensible homes to subsidize the mortgages of people who bought houses they could not afford. It will almost certainly force people who were honest on their loan forms to subsidize people who were dishonest on theirs.

But then Brooks turns from ideologue to pragmatist.

Well, in some cases we probably do [want to subsidize failure and bad decisions]. That’s because government isn’t fundamentally in the Last Judgment business, making sure everybody serves penance for their sins. In times like these, government is fundamentally in the business of stabilizing the economic system as a whole.

I agree. Free-market economic thinking, which I support, becomes irrelevant if the “system” as a whole goes under, since the “system” is the context by which free-market economics operates. Absent that context (which includes politics, economic rule-sets, intellectual property protection, protection from anti-competitive behavior, etc), laissez-faire is little more than a meaningless  buzzword.

So Brooks has successfully moved beyond the ideological debate to an operational debate. Instead of, “should we have a bailout?”–which is now moot anyway–the question is “how should bailout funds be managed in a way that supports the system but doesn’t unduly reward failure?”

Personally, I think the bailout has gone beyond its charter. Political opportunism has led to a bailout that doesn’t just include banking or mortage-related problems but a sort of “Keynesian revolution” or a “New New Deal” mind-set. Keynes is now the smartest guy in the room, having thoroughly pushed Milton Friedman out of the way. Well, not really, but that’s the mind-set at least.

The reality is that all this government spending–right or wrong–is and should be both temporary and exceptional. It is the emerging markets that benefit primarily from state-directed capitalism, not economically advanced nations like the US, which benefit primarily with free and open markets. Government spending taints market forces, shifting monetary allocation decisions to bureaucrats rather than investors, and shifting private sector mindshare and talent to government offices rather than toward entrepreneurial endeavors. This “Keynesian” era should come to an end sooner, rather than later.

The restructuring plans that General Motors and Chrysler submitted this week to the U.S. Treasury Department as a condition of getting loans under the Troubled Asset Relief Program are supposed to demonstrate how the companies will restore their profitability. But presumably auto manufacturers have been trying to restore profitability for several years, so it is unclear why plans drawn up under extreme pressure and intended to please government minders will be any more effective than the strategies that brought them to the verge of bankruptcy in the first place.

Hmm, that’s a good point.

Last para:

Ford has wisely chosen not to seek federal loan money and the attached strings. This establishes a useful control group for this latest experiment in big government intrusion into the marketplace. Will GM and Chrysler benefit from government help managing their businesses, or will Ford surge ahead as Washington starts to bring all the benefits of central planning to their competitors? It will be like watching East versus West Germany, or North versus South Korea. But it is pathetic to see the automakers who have so decisively failed the American consumer and their stockholders go hat in hand to the government. Things worked differently in FDR’s time. When GM founder William Durant’s later venture, Durant Motors, went bankrupt during the Great Depression, he career-shifted to managing a bowling alley in Flint, Mich. Maybe that is the kind of incentivization the auto executives need to do their jobs better.

Some advice for Tim Geithner (aside from paying back taxes):

The unanimous opinion among The Thugz was that you must base your work around a time-tested law of ghetto capitalism: losers must die in full view. What? This doesn’t make sense. O.K., well, let me explain. Your first mistake (more accurately, your predecessor’s error) was to mix the bad apples (banks) with the good (banks). By doing so, you forgot what makes capitalism so much fun: winners win at the losers’ expense, and everyone gets to watch and laugh. Sort of like public hangings, except reported on the financial pages. Otherwise, why read The Wall Street Journal?

The moral is: don’t ever take the joy of death away from the public. Because if you don’t see losers in pain, you begin to think the game is rigged. And we all know the game is fair, open, and transparent … yes?

Humorous, yet insightful.

NOTE: I will add that I don’t agree with the assertion (in the article but not quoted above) that Milton Friedman’s ideas have expired. That comment was way off, in my view.

If he does, it will solidify his legacy as an anti-free-trade president, which would obviously be bad for the country. Or maybe he was winking at protectionists/union bosses, without any real intent to re-negotiate. In this case, I hope he doesn’t stand by his convictions… assuming he’s even honest about his convictions, which is not very apparent to me.

Pretty good read on the subject, for paranoid types.

EDITED (2/18):

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

The increasing mobility of computing devices combined with frequent stories of privacy breaches and identity theft has thrust data encryption into the public eye. This heightened awareness of, and deman for, encryption has resulted in the development of a number of strong encryption solutions that emphasize usability. While encryption can help mitigate the threat of unintentional data exposure, it is equally capable of hiding evidence of criminal malfeasance. The increasing accessibility and usability of strong encryption solutions present new challenges for digital forensic investigators, whose traditional response methodologies leave them largely unprepared to deal with pervasive strong encryption.

In this paper we address the shortcomings of the traditional forensic response methodology with respect to encryption. We develop and discuss a variety of practical techniques for dealing with the use of encryption to conceal evidence. Our research highlights the virtues of volatile memory analysis by demonstrating how key material and passphrases can be extracted from memory to facilitate the analysis of encrypted media in a forensically sound manner. We also present a proof of concept tool capable of automatically extracting key material from a volatile memory dump and using it to decrypt an encrypted disk image.

The technical community has largely rejected Windows Vista. Later this year, Microsoft will release Windows 7, their next version of their flagship desktop OS. Unlike previous releases, this one will almost certainly be on time. The reason lies largely in the slow adoption of Vista by businesses. Consumers who purchase new PCs get Vista b/c that’s what OEMs offer, and most don’t question it. It’s geekdom that, for the most part, has rejected Vista.

Vista offers major enhancements over Windows XP (its predecessor). Ironically, most of these enhancements appeal directly to technical people, esp security-conscious people. So, what about Vista inspires irrational hate from bespeckled nerds? The following:

1. “annoying popups” prompting confirmation for system-level changes
2. higher hardware/resource requirements

That’s it, really. Those popups refer to UAC: user account control. It’s touted as a security feature to protect applications from making system-level changes without authorization. In reality, the goal is to push ISVs (independent software vendors, read: software companies other than Microsoft) to produce software that writes to user folders rather than “system” folders like the “program files” directory, the “c:\windows” directory, etc.

The higher resource requirements–even after disabling Aero, Vista’s cool new interface–is a valid complaint. The constant complaining about UAC (the “annoying popups”) is nonsense. Most users won’t face more than a handful of UAC prompts at all. They’ll occasionally upgrade their OEM software or sporadically install new applications. That’s it.

Geeks like to make system-level changes all the time. They’ll run into as many UAC prompts in a day as the average person does in a year. Good reason to hate UAC? No, because it can be trivially disabled and later re-enabled. And software geeks have no problem negotiating the enabling and disabling of security features.

The real reason geeks hate Vista

Because they’re supposed to. Because other Slashdot users loathe it. Because it’s Microsoft, and Microsoft is eeevil.

It’s hard to stress this enough. Don’t use an administrative account unless you really need to. Regardless of the operating system you use–Windows, Mac, Linux, or whatever–you can create a standard/restricted user account and use that for most tasks. And you should definitely use a limited account for web surfing.

According to ZDNet, 92% of critical Microsoft vulnerabilities mitigated by Least Privilege accounts. In other words, malware that somehow manages to execute on a user’s machine either won’t work or will effectively be contained by using a limited account. Malware that attempts to terminate or evade anti-virus scanners will likely fail if the user is logged in as a limited user.

Great editorial by Tom Friedman, chastising Congress for restricting H1-Bs by companies that are getting bailout funds.

Bad signal [referring to anti-immigration protectionism]. In an age when attracting the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world is the most important competitive advantage a knowledge economy can have, why would we add barriers against such brainpower — anywhere? That’s called “Old Europe.” That’s spelled: S-T-U-P-I-D.

Friedman cites interesting statistics, including that half (half!) of Silicon Valley startups are founded by immigrants (you know, those guys who are taking our jobs by starting companies and… creating jobs).

Newsweek had an essay this week that began: “Could Silicon Valley become another Detroit?” Well, yes, it could. When the best brains in the world are on sale, you don’t shut them out. You open your doors wider. We need to attack this financial crisis with green cards not just greenbacks, and with start-ups not just bailouts. One Detroit is enough.

Actually, one Detroit is more than enough, but you get the point.

Brilliant move, politically:

President Obama on Friday quietly signed an executive order pushing federal construction projects to favor union workers, undoing yet another Bush administration labor rule and generating criticism of political “payback.”

Great move, if the goal is to reduce US competitiveness, delay economic recovery, and blow through the economic recovery money more quickly and with fewer results.

Economist Tyler Cowen laments a possible tax break for home buyers.

Like Arnold Kling, I wish to shift the economy out of housing, not into it again. I also believe that the supply of homes is relatively elastic right now.

He further elaborates, if you’re interested.

The point is that politicians–Republicans, in this case–continue to screw with the market, due to their own greed (desire to get re-elected for “doing stuff,” even if it wasn’t helpful) or their own ignorance.

I saw my first real-life wolf-dog hybrid today. The story is as follows. As a German Shepherd owner, I have a soft spot for GSDs. I saw a lady walking her GSD and struck up a conversation. I asked her if her dog was friendly and if she’d mind if I pet him (note: it’s always a good idea to check w/ the owner before petting or approaching a dog you don’t know). She said yes, so I pet the dog.

Then I found out that the dog was a 2nd generation wolf-dog hybrid. It was the grand-son of the product of mating a German Shepherd with a wolf. It looked almost identical to a (text book) German Shepherd, but had more sable and longer legs. I asked the owner if her dog had longer teeth than average and she said yes (wolves have longer teeth than dogs).

The dog was friendly, though. I never would have guessed it was a hybrid, much less a 2nd gen hybrid. That’s as close to wolf as I’m willing to pet given the relative unpredictability of hybrids. Interesting experience.

The father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl speaks out against the culture of apathy toward evil.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of “resistance,” has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words “war on terror” cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

[...]

At my own university, UCLA, a symposium last week on human rights turned into a Hamas recruitment rally by a clever academic gimmick. The director of the Center for Near East Studies carefully selected only Israel bashers for the panel, each of whom concluded that the Jewish state is the greatest criminal in human history.

The war on terror is lost when we lose our capacity to understand evil when confronted with it, or our willingness to fight it.