Chaos Manor View, Sunday, June 07, 2015

Costco Hearing Aid Center is not open on weekends. I did some experiments: the amplifier on my right hand hearing aid is not broken, but the conducting tube which runs from it to my ear is damaged, so that much of the sound does not get through. That, I know, they can fix on the spot so I am going out there tomorrow to see what they can do. That will relive the time pressure; next I need to contemplate upgrading my hearing aids to Bluetooth with some TV capability; I will see what’s available, and at what cost, although cost is not all that big a factor when it comes to quality of life. I can hardly say I am saving my money for my old age…

Thanks to all of you who sent mail suggesting what’s available out there. I think the alternatives have increased in the something over a year that has gone by since I bought these. I may have to buy a new set.

I found that if I put the left ear hearing aid in the right ear – where it dangles from the ear like a high tech earring – I can hear pretty well, and if I put the right ear hearing aid in my left ear I hear with the left ear as well as I ever do. This means the problem is mechanical not electronic, and mechanical I think they can fix on the spot. So out to Burbank I go tomorrow to see if that’s good enough for the emergency. Alex will drive me, but this ups my determination to get back to driving myself. I have been practicing putting my walker away and getting it out when Roberta takes me places, and I can do that; it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve already determined that I can use a shopping cart as a walker and that works just fine. I suspect I could walk with a cane now, but I don’t have the confidence. I may never have; it’s not my highest priority.

I can’t say my typing improves very fast, but it is improving a little. Not much. I still have to look at the keyboard and it’s one hand (left) sort of touch and two finger (right) and punching two or more keys at once every third or fourth word. Correcting a sentence takes at least as long as writing it. But every now and then when I am not thinking about it I get nearly a paragraph without mistakes. Maybe it’s progress. I remember having only one finger and a thumb, so there’s some progress.

Eric was over and we installed an update to Sigil, and the trial version of Scrivener for Windows. Scrivener is a way of life. I am going to learn it because we are revising and updating The Strategy of Technology by adding a new chapter on asymmetric warfare, incorporating some of the late Dr. Kane’s notes, and adding my own comments about how the principles worked during the Cold War – after all, the Soviet Union did collapse. Faster than we hoped and with a lot less bloodshed. The strategy of technology worked == and would you trust American engineers and technologists, or the State Department experts like April Glaspie (http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/09/wikileaks-april-glaspie-and-saddam-hussein/ and Bremer? You need not answer. Anyway sometime this summer there will be a somewhat revived Strategy of Technology, by Stefan Possony, Jerry Pournelle, and Francis X, Kane. Stefan and Duke Kane are dead; I need to get this out. It’s important. We’ll have an eBook and a PDF quality paper version.

Eric has also been working on Another Step Farther Out, assembled largely from my old Galaxy columns – still, alas, relevant – and some BYTE columns and other sources. And while I am at it I intend to use Scrivener to get control of the huge sprawling backlist of stuff from this page. Ambitious.

And all that in addition to the book with Niven and Barnes, LisaBetta with John DeChancie, and Mamelukes. Ambitious indeed.

Russia, containment, the Cold War, and the new Protracted Struggle

Dear Dr. Pournelle:
I find it hard to credit that you actually believe we could have somehow avoided eventual confrontation with Russia, post-Cold-War. You argue “…Containment was of course explicitly encirclement but we had no choice as the USSR was expansionist, But when the Cold War ended there was a chance of a reset…”
Really? Soviet policies were almost indistinguishable from historical Russian ones, at least in those areas adjacent to the Russian/Soviet Empire: nor has Russia ever not been expansionist–see, e.g. Richard Pipes’ many works on the subject.
The British Empire spent most of the 19th century containing Russia: indeed, the Charge of the Light Brigade was a direct consequence of that effort. In that conflict, the British found themselves allied with their erstwhile adversaries, the French, to prop up a thugocracy, the Ottoman Empire, whose “human rights record” as we would nowadays call it was vile, despicable.
Fast forward another sixty years, and the Brits are now aligned with the Russians against the Germans…and the Ottomans!…over what amounted to…who should be the dominant power in the Balkan Massif!
Russian expansionism is nothing new, and it was inexorable that, once the Cold War ended, we’d suddenly notice that all those old power-politics conflicts were still alive and kicking…they’d just been anesthetized by Soviet hegemony for fifty years.
Should we have avoided confrontation with the “new” Russia? Possibly. Apparently you’ve forgotten that George H.W. Bush gave a speech (infamously referred to as “Chicken Kiev”) in 1991, in which he urged the Ukrainians not to break up the new Confederation of Independent States or whatever it was called. So it’s not like we didn’t try our best.
But the Ukrainians made their break for the exits anyhow (and how could we have stopped them?), and…the Russians blamed us. What to do? Well, we did our best to stabilize things through the quadripartite agreement (along with the UK) under which the Ukes gave up their nukes (has a nice ring, don’t you think <g>?) in return for security guarantees from the West and a recognition of their borders–including Crimea–from Russia.
Well, we can all see how well that worked out. Maybe we’d have been better off if we’d stayed out of it and left the Ukes with their nukes? Hmmm…then again, maybe not?
So then, to this business of how all the problems we face are of our own device. Well, sure they are: we “created” Al Qaeda by using them in the effort to contain the USSR, which even you concede was necessary. And of course, we “created” the need for containment by not going home after WW2 and just letting the Russians “peacefully” take over the rest of post-war Europe–you know, the parts of it we hadn’t already told them they could keep?
If the OSS/CIA hadn’t covertly intervened in the immediate post-war French (1946) and Italian (1948) elections, there’s a good chance those elections would have resulted in Communist Party victories. And while it’s certainly possible those Communist Parties would have been somehow different than those in–say–Poland, or Hungary, or Czechoslovakia…what were the odds?
Now of course we weren’t going to take Poland away from the Russians, nor likely Hungary…but Czechoslovakia wasn’t occupied by the Russians: indeed, when the War ended, the only troops the Allies had on Czech soil were…Americans. But then, in 1948, the coup “happened” and…well, you know the rest.
So, sure…all the problems we have now, and all the problems we’ve had in the past, are in a sense of our own making. That’s Sevareid’s Law: “The chief cause of problems is solutions.” We don’t live in an ideal world: we don’t get to choose between good and bad, or at least not very often: it’s generally between bad and worse.
Nor do we have the benefit of hindsight when we make those choices: the fact that choices blow back on us is not a justification for saying that the choices were bad in the first place. To paraphrase our former Secretary of Defense, you don’t make decisions with the information you wish you had, you make them with the information you actually have. The oft-posed questions that start out “If you had known then what we know now…” are meaningless polemical exercises, more intended to show how clever the question-asker is than to actually shed any light.
Finally, regarding Saddam, Qaddafi, and no doubt Assad and others in the future. Senator Goldwater was once challenged as to how he could claim to oppose Soviet dictatorship in the name of freedom, yet allow and indeed encourage the U.S. to align itself with some of the world’s most repulsive dictators. His answer, which I took very much to heart, was that, in the supreme struggle for the world, any tool to hand was a useful one, and there’d be plenty of time to go around and clean up our smelly little dictators afterwards.
Well, I regard this as “afterwards”: the bill is due, and we must pay it, or be revealed as self-servers who only care about freedom for Americans, or possibly a few Europeans and other American allies too. I for one have zero regrets about taking down Saddam or Qaddafi: I’d do it again, even with the benefit of hindsight. The fact that there is chaos in those countries is lamentable, but it’s not “our fault”, any more than the chaos that we had in this country, post-Revolutionary War, was anyone’s “fault”.
We could have kept stability in Iraq by leaving a larger force in place and reigning in the Shiite-dominated government: we could have established stability in Libya by taking a more proactive role there. If there is anything that is “our fault”, it’s a lack of follow-through. As I’ve observed many times before, to you and others, we still have forces in Germany and Japan, nearly three-quarters of a century after the bullets stopped flying.
You need to come to grips with the new reality, which is that we are in a new Protracted Struggle, with an enemy that is perhaps less obviously powerful than the Soviet Union, but whose relative strength is far greater, if for no other reason that this country’s–and the West’s more generally–elites have lost faith in their own virtues.
So if those like you who at least have some love for Western values–frankly, civilizational values–aren’t willing to step up, then I fear that the next generation is condemned–to quote a great man–“…to taking the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
Very respectfully,
David G.D. Hecht

If you believe Putin’s Russia has the same ambitions as the Soviet Union, I simply do not agree. Putin wants Russians, Russian speaking Slavs, Slavic people, in that order. He has no desire to rule Muslims or Chinese. He wants an assured Russia. Yes, that is much the same as the Imperial goal; why would it not be? But it is territorial disputes in Europe, and not our job. He is not trying to conquer the world; he is afraid the world wants to conquer him, and as a Russian patriot he seeks security in breaking the ring that surrounds him.

As to removing world tyrants, we used to do that; but when Venezuela’s army cast out Chavez, and Haiti got rid of the mad ex-priest, The United States of America restored them; and we chose a side in the Balkan upheaval that was not only anti-Slavic but was soon dominated by ethnic units every bit as committed to ethnic cleansing as any Serb.

We are not much use as world governors. Our success in Germany (our part) and Japan was largely due to the competence of our proconsuls, and MacArthur failed in Korea because we lack commitment and resources. Fortunately South Korea evolved it’s own stable form of government; but then Koreans can be intelligent. The North shows what could have happened. And look at how long Japan has been since the end of the occupation; better than the old Imperial Japan no doubt. How would you improve it and why would you try?

John Quincy Adams remains relevant. The speech is long and seldom read; it ought to be read to every employee at State every year. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/repository/she-goes-not-abroad-in-search-of-monsters-to-destroy/

“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

It cannot be said much better than this. Or do you seriously believe Iraq is better ruled today than under Saddam?

This Time For Sure

Jerry:

The Prophets of Global Warming destroyed their baseline data to prevent it from being seen by skeptics.

SCIENTISTS would have been pushing the data on anyone who would slow down enough to catch up to, to force them to see that what they were saying was true.

However, we’re talking about religion here, so when they knew they couldn’t actually hit the target, they shot their arrows at a blank wall then painted the target around them.

Keith

See The Voodoo Sciences http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/voodoo.html where I discuss the obligations of novelists (be plausible), lawyers (present your own side), and scientists.

Climate trends

Hello Jerry,

In all the hoopla over whether or not the ‘Temperature of the Earth’ (whatever that is—always undefined) has trended slightly upward, slightly downward, or has been trendless over the last couple of decades what seems to get glossed over is the REAL threat of global warming: that any upward trend, for any period, no matter how the ‘data’ was tortured to obtain it or how slight its slope, is ALWAYS presented as proof positive of THREE things:

a. That the rising temperature was caused by Anthropogenic CO2 (ACO2) AND b. That the rising temperature poses an existential threat to the biosphere that can ONLY be mitigated by

c. Governments worldwide taking immediate action to tax and/or regulate EVERY human activity that produces a ‘carbon signature’. The size of the carbon signature, the amount of the tax, and the complexity of the regulations to be determined by those self-same governments. Which will also be creating the bureaucracy necessary to collect the taxes, draft the regulations, monitor compliance, and determine the penalties for any infractions.

You will also note that the demands for action are NEVER accompanied by evidence that the actions being demanded will have ANY measurable effect on the Climate of the Earth (Does the Earth, as a whole, HAVE a quantifiable climate?) OR that the the effects, if any, will be benign.

Climate Change does indeed pose an existential threat to civilization. Not because of any (so far) undetectable consequences-except for a noticeable ‘greening’ of the earth and enhanced plant growth-of producing CO2 as a byproduct of supplying the energy REQUIRED to maintain our civilization, but because of the political actions being taken citing ‘Fighting Climate Change’ as justification.

Bob Ludwick

Mostly they seem determined to prove their models are worth the $billions already spent although they don’t predict much; but Real Soon Now.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Saturday, June 06, 2015

D Day

The single most complex single day operation in the history of mankind; The Apollo Mood Landing was second.

I seem to have broken my right ear hearing aid: I hear nothing in my right ear, but if I stuff the left ear hearing aid into my right ear – it doesn’t stay there of course but I can conduct the experiment – I can hear,

Alas my left ear is much more deaf than my right, so the wrong hearing aid got broke. Monday I will go out to COSTCO where I hope they can fix it; or I will order another. And perhaps it is time to see if there any better than Costco.

It is rather disturbing to be this deaf. Among other things it makes using the telephone impossible. Perhaps I can find earbuds that work with my iPhone. It would mean taking out the hearing aids to use the earbuds. I wonder if there is a better way. It’s no fun being deaf.

More on this tomorrow.

NOAA Research Presents Evidence Against a Global Warming ‘Hiatus’    (journal)

By JUSTIN GILLISJUNE 4, 2015

For years, scientists have been laboring to explain an apparent slowdown in global warming since the start of this century, which occurred at the same time that heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxide were soaring. The slowdown, sometimes inaccurately described as a halt or hiatus, became a major talking point for people critical of climate science.

Now, new research suggests the whole thing may have been based on incorrect data.

When adjustments are made to correct for recently discovered problems in the way global temperatures were measured, the slowdown largely disappears, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared in a scientific paper published Thursday. And when the particularly warm temperatures of 2013 and 2014 are averaged in, the slowdown goes away entirely, the agency said.

“The notion that there was a slowdown in global warming, or a hiatus, was based on the best information we had available at the time,” said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information, a NOAA unit in Asheville, N.C. “Science is always working to improve.”

The change prompted accusations on Thursday from some climate-change denialists that the agency was trying to wave a magic wand and make inconvenient data go away. Mainstream climate scientists not involved in the NOAA research rejected that charge, saying it was essential that agencies like NOAA try to deal with known problems in their data records.

At the same time, senior climate scientists at other agencies were in no hurry to embrace NOAA’s specific adjustments. Several of them said it would take months of discussion in the scientific community to understand the data corrections and come to a consensus about whether they were reasonable.

Some experts also pointed out that, depending on exactly how the calculation is done, a slowdown in global warming still appears in the temperature record over the past 15 years, though it may be smaller than before. These scientists have never accepted the notion that the slowdown represents any major problem in climate theory, but they said they believe it was real and demands an explanation.

A leading hypothesis to explain the slowdown is that natural fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean may have temporarily pulled some heat out of the atmosphere, producing a brief flattening in the long-term increase of surface temperatures.

NOAA is one of four agencies around the world that attempts to produce a complete record of global temperatures dating to 1880. They all get similar results, showing a long-term warming of the planet that scientists have linked primarily to the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests. A huge body of physical evidence – notably, that practically every large piece of land ice on the planet has started to melt – suggests the temperature finding is correct.

Yet the temperature record is plagued by many problems: thermometers and recording practices changed through time, weather stations were moved, cities grew up around once-rural stations, and on and on. Entire scientific careers are devoted to studying these issues and making corrections.

In their paper published online Thursday by the journal Science, and in interviews, scientists at NOAA said that in coming months they would roll out new versions of their temperature record that incorporate numerous improvements.

The previous record showed that temperatures from 2000 to 2014 had warmed at about two-thirds the rate of temperatures from 1950 to 1999. In the new analysis, the rate of warming in those two time periods is basically identical.

NOAA said the improvements in its data set included the addition of a huge number of land measurements from around the world, as a result of improving international cooperation in sharing weather records. But the disappearance of the slowdown comes largely from adjustments in ocean temperatures.

The ocean covers 70 percent of the earth, and thus the temperature at its surface has a huge influence on the overall record. Yet ocean measurements in particular are plagued by difficulties.

For many decades, into the mid-20^th century, the main measurements came from sailors hauling up buckets of seawater and plopping thermometers into them. The buckets varied, the thermometers varied, and some of the sailors were more diligent than others about following instructions. On average, scientists believe, the water tended to cool off a bit before the temperature was recorded.

NOAA had long believed the data glitches from the buckets had largely disappeared after World War II, but new information suggests that bucket measurements continued on some commercial vessels for decades after the war. The new NOAA data set attempts to correct for this and other problems in the ocean records.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington long critical of climate science, issued a statement condemning the changes and questioning the agency’s methodology.

“While this will be heralded as an important finding, the main claim that it uncovers a significant recent warming trend is certainly dubious,” said the statement, attributed to three contrarian climate scientists: Richard S. Lindzen, Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. Knappenberger.

However, Russell S. Vose, chief of the climate science division at the Asheville center, pointed out in an interview that while the corrections do eliminate the recent warming slowdown, the overall effect of the agency’s adjustments is to raise the reported global temperatures in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries by a substantial margin. That makes the modern global warming appear somewhat less severe than it otherwise would.

“If you just wanted to release to the American public our uncorrected data set, it would say that the world has warmed up about 2.071 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880,” Dr. Vose said. “Our corrected data set says things have warmed up about 1.65 degrees Fahrenheit. Our corrections lower the rate of warming on a global scale.”

Even if the warming slowdown in the early 21^st century was real, there seems to be little question that it is ending. By a small margin, the global temperature hit a record in 2014, and developing weather patterns suggest that record will be broken by a larger margin in 2015.

Maybe by two hundredths of a degree! Fantastic! And all that from data adjustments.

On torturing data until it confesses

Hello Jerry,

Dr. Curry wrote about the ‘debunking’ paper on her blog ( http://judithcurry.com/2015/06/04/has-noaa-busted-the-pause-in-global-warming/ ) .  At the time I copied and pasted the above link, it had garnered 491 comments.

The ‘pause’ disappeared when, after comparing the data from the precision thermometers on the buoys , deployed for the express purpose of obtaining high quality ocean temperature data, was compared with sea surface data collected by random sailors measuring the temperature of a bucket of water by immersing a hand held glass thermometer in the bucket and writing the observed temperature in a notebook OR by having another random sailor read the temperature of the engine cooling water inlet, when they thought of it,  and log it a different notebook.  None of the ‘sailor collected data’ had an intrinsic precision better than approximately 1 degree (actually, +/- 1.7 degrees according to one of Dr. Curry’s posters), even if the sailors, all of them, actually read the thermometers correctly.  As for the engine inlet temperature, I’m positive that the ship designers went to great lengths to put precision, calibrated thermometers in the inlet pipes to make sure that they knew the temperature of the water being used to cool their engines to a small fraction of a degree.

So, after comparing the precision buoy data, which shows no warming,  to the sailor logged data, the paper writers took the obvious step of adjusting the BUOY data to match the sailor data and voila:  warming, with a significance value of 0.1.  For normal science, the significance value has to be 0.05 or less, but this is Climate Data.   Data from the ARGO system, the most precise and widest coverage ocean temperature data ever collected and which also shows no trend, was not used at all by the authors of the paper which debunked the ‘pause’.

When we have shenanigans like this, routine in Climate Science,  being performed by leading ‘Climate Scientists’ and we have sitting US Senators demanding that anyone who questions them be prosecuted under the RICO statutes, and mainstream media and academia fully on board with BOTH the bogus science AND the prosecution of doubters, it makes anyone with a passing interest in constitutional government and personal freedom pretty antsy.  Or should.

Bob Ludwick

There certainly seems to be precious little rational debate on the quality of climate data and the importance of the location on input data to the accuracy of prediction. It may be that the reliable buoy data is from too few areas – I would assume so since I doubt they have many in the middle of the ocean – do they need ship data; but their own study shows that the ship data were less reliable than the buoy data. Perhaps I misunderstand? But the ship data certainly seems inherently less reliable, and therefor predictions mad from that data must have a greater error margin. Yet the cold snap of the fifty to 75 era seemed real enough; they had plenty of alarms about the coming of the new Ice Age during the 70’s and early 80’s, so they must have taken that seriously. And there were no thermistors in existence prior to World War II, so any comparison to temperatures of that time were going to be based on prewar temperatures taken with buckets and mercury thermometers by sailors who were not likely to read closer than a degree and probably more like the nearest 5.

I am persuaded that proper science treats the data as primary, not as something to be adjusted to fit the theory.

And we do not have all the data. We know little of the heat effects of undersea volcanism. We know a fair amount about the effects of spectacular volcanoes like Tambora and Krakatoa and the Iceland volcanoes that Benjamin Franklin observed on his voyages to Europe. We are discovering that there are yet effects from Tambora that we are just now finding. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/200-years-after-tambora-volcano-eruption-unusual-effects-linger-180954918/?no-ist Why do we allow people to pose as scientists when they do not follow scientific method, and who seek to label all their opponents as corrupt?

We trade the benefits of science for social justice. We sow the wind.

Fred on Scientism

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Scientism.shtml

“Because we live in luminously foolish times. Mr. Khan cites, not approvingly, a scientist who wanted to have another dismissed from his position for being an evangelical Christian. Why? Well, you see, the manner of thinking of religious people renders them incapable of science.”

Charles Brumbelow

Fred is as usual very much worth reading.

White Collar Automation in USAF

I recall Herman Kahn writing, though I do not recall where, that the 473L system had basically exterminated much of the middle management of the United States Air Force.

This was back in the 1960s.

http://scienceservice.si.edu/pages/052125.htm

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Middle management generally grows back.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326780&

Batteries Charge for Energy Role (EE Times)

Drivers: Smart cities’ rise, solar cost declines

Jessica Lipsky

6/4/2015 07:17 PM EDT

SAN FRANCISCO – The rise of smart cities and the decreasing cost of renewable energy systems is rapidly changing the power management market. The resulting decentralization of electricity sources requires new power management solutions and business models, which will drive a multi-billion dollar market in the next 10 years, market watchers said.

Using battery storage can decrease the cost of load shifting, stabilize the frequency of a power grid over the course of a day, and add power to existing systems, Yole analysts wrote in a paper titled “Energy Management for Smart Grid, Cities and Buildings: Opportunities for Battery Electricity Storage Solutions.” Access to clean energy, CO² emission reduction, and energy independence are among the many benefits of shirking traditional modes of consuming power, the paper said.

As traditional business models based on centralized energy sources become obsolete, the market for energy storage systems will surpass $13.5 billion by 2023, analysts said.

“The growing market share of intermittent renewable energies (wind, photovoltaics) in electricity generation reveals a strong interest in stationary battery energy storage systems,” Yole Senior Analyst Milan Rosina said in a release. “Recent cases in China, Japan, and some European countries have shown that the further deployment of renewable energy sources in many areas of the world will require electricity grid upgrades, larger deployment of suitable energy storage systems, and development of suitable energy management solutions.”

Yole’s paper pointed to batteries as particularly attractive energy storage systems in buildings that have both solar and traditional electricity sources. Excess photovoltaic electricity can be stored in batteries and cheap energy can be drawn from the sun or the battery during the day when electricity rates are high; grid power can be used at night when overnight rates are lower. Excess locally-generated electricity can also be sold to the utility.

Yole analysts also envisioned a “community storage” model where several neighboring houses with solar roofs will be connected to one large battery system. A Yole spokeswoman said the main focus on energy storage is in the residential sector.

“The residential storage market entry barrier is rather low with strong synergies to other products/applications,” Yole Analyst Coralie Le Bret said. “The value chain for residential electricity storage market is still greatly dispersed and composed of many small players — more than 50 players offer commercial solutions and others will release their products soon.”

Low cost non-disruptive power storage would change much; the sun don’t always shine when you need power, and you don’t always need as much power as you could get when it does shine. And of course low weight power storage is needed for electric cars.

Medical Data, Cybercriminals’ Holy Grail, Now Espionage Target      nyt

By REUTERSJUNE 5, 2015, 9:47 A.M. E.D.T.

SINGAPORE — Whoever was behind the latest theft of personal data from U.S. government computers, they appear to be following a new trend set by cybercriminals: targeting increasingly valuable medical records and personnel files.

This data, experts say, is worth a lot more to cybercriminals than, say, credit card information. And the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breach revealed on Thursday suggests cyberspies may now also be finding value in it.

Cyber investigators from iSight Partners said they had linked the OPM hack to earlier thefts of healthcare records from Anthem Inc, a health insurance company, and Premera Blue Cross, a healthcare services provider. Tens of millions of records may have been lost in those attacks.

All three breaches have one thing in common, said John Hultquist of Dallas-based iSight. While cyberespionage usually focuses on stealing commercial or government secrets, these attacks targeted personally identifiable information.

The stolen data “doesn’t appear to have been monetized and the actors seem to have connections to cyberespionage activity”, said Hultquist, adding that none of the data taken in the earlier attacks had turned up for sale on underground forums.

A source close the matter said U.S. authorities were looking into a possible China connection to the breach at OPM, which compromised the personal data of 4 million current and former federal employees.

Several U.S. states were already investigating a Chinese link to the Anthem attack in February, a person familiar with the matter has said.

China routinely denies involvement in hacking, and on Friday a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said suggestions it was involved in the OPM breach were “irresponsible and unscientific”.

Hultquist said iSight could not confirm that China was behind the attacks, but similar methods, servers and habits of the hackers pointed to a single state-sponsored group.

BLACK MARKET FLOODED

Security researchers say that medical data and personnel records have become more valuable to cybercriminals than credit card data.

The price of stolen credit cards has fallen in online black markets, in part because massive breaches have spiked supply.

“The market has been flooded,” said Ben Ransford, co-founder of security start-up Virta Laboratories.

The result: medical information can be worth 10 times as much as a credit card number.

And as electronic clinical records become more standardized…

Epicycles are still more plausible than ‘string theory’.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/a-crisis-at-the-edge-of-physics.html>

The elephant in the room is ‘climatology’, of course.

—————————————

Roland Dobbins <roland.dobbins@mac.com>

Infidel!

New Breed of Wireless Sensor Developers Inspires New Tools (EE Times)

Jerry

I’m actually using one in a new product. The TI CC3300 is a complete WiFi enabled microcontroller. Draws about 130ma at 3 volts when sending data full bore over WiFi. The development board costs 60 bucks and has two 32 bit CPU’s. One runs the radio and protocols the other is for your application. The FCC certified module is about 20 bucks in quantities of a 1000.

On Jun 6, 2015 11:06 AM, “Jerry Pournelle” <jerryp@jerrypournelle.com> wrote:

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326771

New Breed of Wireless Sensor Developers Inspires New Tools (EE Times)

Bernard Cole

6/5/2015 00:01 AM EDT

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Semiconductor companies that supply the hardware/software building blocks for embedded wireless M2M and IoT apps are running into a new breed of developer. Totally different than the experienced designers of past years, many of them have no background in MCU development or in any of the many wireless protocols. The only things they have in common with veteran developers are the desire to participate in a new wave of Internet of Things designs and get their ideas to market as fast as possible. Among these companies are Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs, and Freescale Semiconductor, each with its own view of what tools a developer needs and how best to provide them.

Inexperienced developers have always been there, demanding tools that are easier to use, Texas Instruments System Applications Manager Jarle Boe told EE Times. But recently, as the excitement about IoT and wireless sensors has grown, they have increased in number. “At TI-sponsored events on such topics in the past we would get 50 to 100 or so developers on average. Now, depending on the venue, we are seeing very many more than that. And many of the newcomers are inexperienced with hardware development on MCUs and want simpler and quicker ways to develop code.”

Video link here. Developing sensor tags with a downloadable app

(Source: Texas Instruments)

To meet that need and to accelerate adoption of its recently introduced SimpleLink family of ARM-based CC2650 wireless microcontrollers, TI this week introduced its new SimpleLink Multi-Standard SensorTag IoT kit for such newbies. The kit is a complement to the company’s Launchpad platform for experienced MCU developers.

Initially the kit includes wireless connectivity tools for Bluetooth low energy, 6LoWPAN, and ZigBee apps on the CC2650 MCU. Planned for later addition to the kit is a Wi-Fi SensorTag for the SimpleLink CC3200 wireless MCU.

DARPA’s Robotics Challenge has a gender problem (WP)

By Matt McFarland June 5 at 8:29 AM

The tech world deservedly catches some flack for its lack of gender diversity.

For example, only 30 percent of Google’s employees are women. At Facebook 31 percent are women. The number are more skewed in technical roles.

As lopsided as those numbers are, they pale in comparison to the gender breakdown at the finals of this year’s DARPA Robotics Challenge, which takes place Friday and Saturday in Pomona, Calif. Eleven of the 24 teams competing are made up completely of men. Of the 444 individuals on the teams, only 23 are women. An alarming 94.8 percent of the participants are men.

The robots are designed for humanitarian purposes, but officials admit that they could be used one day as soldiers. You can learn more about the robots competing here, and watch a live stream of the event too. Just don’t count on seeing much gender diversity.

And robot nurses in the MASH

Positive Effects of Climate Change Underreported

Climate change has been going on since the beginning of time, but has been the source of intense debate in recent years. In the case of the Sahel area of Africa, climate change means 4 more inches of desperately-needed rainfall per year than in the past, according to a new study by climatologists in the Journal Nature Climate Change. The main cause of the increase is rising greenhouse gas emissions, it finds.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/06/05/climate-change-brings-needed-rain-to-africa/?intcmp=latestnews
Lee

All True. We grow more food per acre than at any time in history. Good for the jungles too.

I’m a criminal, you’re a criminal, we’re all criminals now…

https://bananas.liberty.me/youre-a-criminal-in-a-mass-surveillance-world-how-to-not-get-caught/

“There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration.” This warning is from John Baker, a retired law professor who tried in vain to count new federal crimes created in just the past few years. The same message comes from attorney Harvey Silverglatein his book Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”

Charles Brumbelow

The phrase I grew up with, “It’s a free country,” takes on a slightly hollow ring. We have sown the wind.

• http://www.fredoneverything.net/Ballmer2.shtml

Turn Out the Lights and Lock the Door

I Hear the Fat Lady Singing

May 28, 2015

Breitbart: A white man in Baltimore was sitting in his car when two female er, teens got into a fight. To continue this enterprise they climbed atop his car, perhaps mistaking it for a tree. He got out and asked them to take their dispute somewhere else, whereupon fifty er, teens beat him nearly to death, leaving him with $200,000-$400,000 in medical bills. The daily grind. Life as usual. If fifty whites similarly beat an er, teen, cities would burn and the media would go crazy. In this case, silence will prevail. American-Africans can do no wrong. But something is wrong in America..

http://www.armytimes.com/story/military/2015/04/23/sex-assault-prevention-cadets-army/26235135/

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Friday, June 05, 2015

Today I need to work on LisaBetta, a near future (bureaucratic Earth, some asteroid mining colonies, no faster than light travel) novel John DeChancie and I are writing. It should be a pretty good yarn.

Global warming ‘hiatus’ puts climate change scientists on the spot

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-sn-global-warming-hiatus-20150603-story.html#page=1

September 20, 2013

By Monte Morin

It’s a climate puzzle that has vexed scientists for more than a decade and added fuel to the arguments of those who insist man-made global warming is a myth.

Since just before the start of the 21st century, the Earth’s average global surface temperature has failed to rise despite soaring levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and years of dire warnings from environmental advocates.

Now, as scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gather in Sweden this week to approve portions of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, they are finding themselves pressured to explain this glaring discrepancy.

The panel, a United Nations creation that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, hopes to brief world leaders on the current state of climate science in a clear, unified voice.

That was the headline in Sept. 2013. We wondered how NOAA and the climate scientists would react. Today we find out.

New look at data finds no break in warming trend

June 5, 2015

By Monte Morin

(Front Page, LA Times)

http://www.latimes.com/includes/sectionfronts/A1.pdf

Upon closer look, a global warming hiatus is ruled out, U.S. scientists say

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-no-global-warming-hiatus-noaa-20150603-story.html

Federal scientists studied temperature readings from ocean buoys and weather stations around the world and determined that global temperatures did not plateau at the turn of the century, as had been previously concluded.

(Linda Stratton / NOAA)

By Monte Morin

Contrary to prior reports, global temperatures did not stop rising around the turn of the century, study says

Detailed measurements of surface temperatures around the world show no break in decades-long warming trend

A fresh look at the way sea temperatures are measured has led government scientists to make a surprising claim: The puzzling apparent hiatus in global surface warming never really happened.

In a study published Thursday in the prestigious journal Science, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote that Earth’s global average surface temperature had climbed 0.2 of a degree Fahrenheit each decade since 1950, without interruption, due to the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases.

That conclusion seemingly negated an awkward piece of evidence in the debate over whether human activity is indeed warming the planet.

There are other interpretations.

Brazen, outright scientific fraud.

<http://dailycaller.com/2015/06/04/noaa-fiddles-with-climate-data-to-erase-the-15-year-global-warming-hiatus/>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

And when it is all done, the adjustment amounted to 0.03 degrees. Three hundredths of a degree. But they found what they were looking for, a way to adjust the data that had the science establishment in great fear of a returning Ice Age in the 1970’s.

“I don’t find this analysis at all convincing,” said Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech who argues that natural variability in climate cycles dominates the impact of industrial emissions and other human actions. “While I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.”

Global warming ‘hiatus’ puts climate change scientists on the spot

Researchers representing the scientific mainstream also rejected the idea that global surface temperatures never stopped rising.

“It’s always good to go back and look at the data as carefully as possible and make sure it’s calibrated correctly,” said William Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. “But the hiatus is history and it was real.”

“I don’t find this analysis at all convincing,” said Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech who argues that natural variability in climate cycles dominates the impact of industrial emissions and other human actions. “While I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.”

 

This, combined with the fact that ships now sample a smaller area of the world’s oceans, have skewed the data toward cooler temperatures, they say.

Also, though it had long been assumed that ships measured seawater temperature with engine intake thermometers — an innovation that began after World War II — that is not the case, Karl said. Instead, some ships still scoop up seawater in canvas or metal buckets.

“The buckets, when you pull them up, tend to evaporate their water, and if they’re canvas there’s even more evaporation,” Karl said. “By the time people stick a thermistor in the bucket to measure temperature, it’s already slightly cool.”

To correct for the discrepancy between bucket and engine measurements, Karl and his colleagues used nighttime air temperature readings taken from the deck of the ship to calibrate the readings.

This is worth reflecting on. Bring up a bucket and stick in a thermistor – assuming you have one. Instruments which even read to hundredths of a degree cost hundreds to thousands of dollars ant require calibration. I doubt that many commercial ships employ them now, and I am certain they did not in 1970, when they would have cost even more. I am fairly certain Naval warships don’t have them, either in intake valves or portable for sticking in buckets.

We used Yellow Springs Instrument Company (of Yellow Springs, Ohio) thermistor probes to take the internal temperature – anal probe – of the astronauts as we tested equipment – and astronaut – heat tolerance of up to 400 degrees F. The probes were accurate to .0.05 degrees C, and were the best we could obtain at the time. They were also expensive and I doubt any were used for sea temperatures; they were expensive. I see they make thermistors accurate to 0.05 degrees C to this day. Accuracies to several thousandths of a degree are now available but at a considerable price, and I am sure few if any are carried on commercial or navy ships; and I am damned sure they were not aboard any ships including NOAA research vessels prior to 1990.

We calibrated our instruments by measuring the temperature of melting ice – ice made with distilled water. I don’t know how to use night air on the deck to calibrate to any tenth of a degree or for that matter to nearest degree.

http://www.advindsys.com/Manuals/YSIManuals/YSICatalog-1998.pdf

The point being that we don’t know to any three tenths of a degree what the Earth’s temperature was in 1950, and we don’t know it now; but if you draw a straight line between what we think the temperature was in 1890 to what we think it is today – using their data – you get a rising trend line as everyone knows you will, but there was a period when it went down a lot following World War II, then began slowly climbing again; and the only explanation the experts have is to manipulate the data until the trends change.

And they want to bet $billions on this “science”?

of course there’s this

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/06/05/global_warming_hiatus_new_research_shows_it_doesn_t_exist.html

It’s been a rough week for climate change deniers.

First, a paper came out basically destroying claims by a group of deniers that climate models “ran hot”, that is, always overestimated the amount the world is warming. It turns out the claim was fundamentally flawed in numerous ways, which isn’t terribly surprising. You can read all about it at that link.

But the bigger news is that a new paper has been published showing that the global warming “hiatus” or “pause” or whatever you want to call it doesn’t exist.

and this

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/06/04/new-research-on-global-warming-hiatus/

 Subject: No warming pause

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/06/05/science.aaa5632.abstract
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/06/05/global_warming_hiatus_new_research_shows_it_doesn_t_exist.html
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/06/04/new-research-on-global-warming-hiatus/
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2015/06/noaa-no-pause-in-global-surface.html
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/scientists-drop-science-bomb-on-climate-skeptics.html

paradoctor

Which demonstrate you can prove anything if you can manipulate your data. But then we have always known that. When it was shown that many of the land temperature stations were almost certainly giving incorrect data – they were originally in open areas, and are now in highly urban areas – it was decided that adjustments were not necessary.  But of course that can’t be as important as the possibility – not demonstrated, but possible – of canvas buckets. But it’s all right, those deniers had their minds made up already, unlike the Believers. This is science, after all, and all those AAAS sessions about the coming Ice Age and the Genesis Strategy didn’t really happen.

Of course none address the fact that there is no new data, merely manipulation of the older observations, and none of them are accurate to tenths of a degree – which is what they adjusted the data to find.

We know that in 1776 cannon were dragged across the Hudson River on the ide.  We know that the Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland and called Nova Scotia Vineland where they grew grapes.  Greenland has never been as warm, and the Hudson doesn’t freeze hard enough to hold up cannon.  I can guess temperatures from those facts, but I wouldn’t expect them to be accurate to a degree, much less tenths of a degree.

There’s obviously a lot of work involved in working out who’s right, and there are other measurement sets (land, satellite, ARGO) which are still definitely showing a pronounced slowing of temperature rise, but – the idea of what NOAA did is not unreasonable. They compared ship measurements with buoy measurements when they had both in the same place and time. They found that the ship measurements were 0.12C higher on average than the buoy measurements. Something needs to give: either lower the ship measurements, or raise the buoy measurements – or accept that you have switched in the middle with a noticeable bias. Now in the past, ship measurements were frequent; now, buoy measurements are frequent, and the imbalance is growing. It is natural that trying to correct such a bias is going to create a temperature trend that you didn’t see before.

mkr

Certainly; but they had a conclusion and adjusted the data; that is not in the rules.  They discovered more reasons for uncertainty, not better data; they can change the conclusions because of the increased uncertainty, but they could only change to less certainty; instead they seem now to have MORE certainty.

But they knew the conclusion regardless of the data. they can’t do that. They discovered uncertainties in the data; that makes the conclusion less certain.

Isis and Iraq 

Dear Dr. Pournelle, 
There are a couple of articles on the subject I believe you will find of interest. 
The first is an article on the role of western intelligence — especially, Turkey — in fostering ISIS
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-west-saw-isis-as-strategic-asset-b99ad7a29092
The second is a discussion of the failures of the Iraqi army
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/31/key-rebels-ready-to-quit-u-s-fight-vs-isis.html
So, from these things I draw a few conclusions:
1) No one in Iraq is willing to fight for the central government; that is how 150 fighters can route 5000 men armed and supplied by the US. The Peshmerga will fight for Kurdistan, the Shiites will fight for their neighborhoods, the Sunnis will fight for themselves. They’re all fighting each other, but no one’s interested in the central government. 
2) Our own ability to pick and choose winners in these struggles is extremely limited; many of the “moderates” we pick turn out to be extremists, and the real moderates are badly handicapped by US policies.  
Unfortunately, we can’t simply leave this mess alone; leaving them alone won’t stop them from, say, hijacking airplanes and flying in the buildings. That’s the problem with peace — the other side has to be willing to let you surrender and leave the field. That can’t happen. Like it or not, Saudi Arabia et al are part of the world economy, all that oil makes that part of the world important, and Israel is still there just waiting to eat a hydrogen bomb from the first non-Jewish people able to develop one and crazy enough to use it. 
So we can’t simply walk away from this.  
Nor do we, as a country, have the will to send in the troops and occupy Iraq and Syria long-term.  It’s what the Romans would have done, but we won’t.
So what’s left? The only thing I can think of is hope from some Bonapartish military dictator who wants to rule the whole mess , and allow him to conquer the territory, imposing his rule on the restive minorities by brute force.  Saddam II, in other words.  And then HE will be a security threat as well. 
Another alternative: Instead of trying to construct a healthy Iraq, deliberately destabilize the situation further, so that the entire region tears itself apart. If they’re busy killing each other they won’t have time to plot terrorist actions against Israel or the US.   The downside of that is , eventually, all civil wars end, often with the most extreme and virulent group triumphant.  
I’m leaning towards a Saddam II, if we can find one.  Seems a pity we killed the last one.
Creating a western democracy in Iraq, a la West Germany or Japan, would have been ideal. However, for roughly the same time we occupied Japan and Germany, we failed utterly to recreate those conditions. Why?  Do we have the will to try again?
Somehow I doubt it.
So in the absence of full-scale invasion and occupation, we are reduced to a hunt for proxies who won’t do what we want but will be marginally less bad than the alternatives.
What do you think?
Respectfully,

Brian P.

A reasonable summary.  But if we do nothing for a while, we won’t have anything to do…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Thursday, June 04, 2015

I have received numerous emails describing how to use a Mac mushpad with pulldown menus, for which many thanks; I expect I knew the technique at one time and forgot it, but it also takes dexterity I no longer have. Knowing how to do something and doing it have diverged in the past year,

Not to complain. When I was young I thought of people my age as far older than I think of myself now, and I am often reminded of the proverb about lamenting that I had no shoes until I met a man who had not feet…

As to Skype, if you assume that with a Mac everything you need to do is either simple or impossible, then something seems difficult it is probably the fault of the app; apply logic. In a widely used app like Skype, there must be a simple trick to get past the problem. It probably assumes the user is non compos mentis. Solve the puzzle. If you add that my eyesight isn’t what it was, and I often do not notice things I should notice, the solution generally suggests itself. So it was in this case, and we had a very productive Skype conference with Dr. Jack Cohen in England. Jack worked with Anne McCaffrey and Terry Pratchett among others; he’s a PhD in biology with a strong interest in ecology, and when he’s worked with authors the result is generally spectacular. I said this yesterday, but after many of you had read it, so I’ll say it again:

“We had a very productive conference, arriving at a number of new plotlines on our new “Beowulf Series” novel about the first interstellar colonies. (Legacy of Heorot http://www.amazon.com/The-Legacy-Heorot-Book/dp/1470835541 , Beowulf’s Children http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765320886/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_3?pf_rd_p=1944687442&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=1470835541&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0JAPV8WFM2QJRSH73F1R) and the novella that fits between them, The Secret of Blackship Island http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Island-novella-Avalon-Series-ebook/dp/B007MSK4HM . The events taking place in the Blackship Island novella turn out to be extremely important and have a greater effect on the plot than the characters know. Jack Cohen had many suggestions to make the biology richer. I think this will be a big best-seller when we finish next week.”

I’m very pleased that the work we did on the Blackship Island novella will lead to some great scenes in the new book.

Rand Paul has said that American Adventurism in the Far East created ISIS. Of course I think he’s right, since I predicted it would happen. After all, we created al quada with our earlier intervention, and the hostility we get from Russia and all the people of the lower Danube come from our feckless meddling in the Balkans, where we chose to support the Bosnians by bombing the Slavs. The result was to confirm Slavic and Russian suspicions that the West was trying to encircle Russia. Containment was of course explicitly encirclement but we had no choice as the USSR was expansionist, But when the Cold War ended there was a chance of a reset.

Albright/Clinton ended that.

Then we intervened in Iraq and hanged Saddam; now we miss him. We were there because al Qaeda attacked the US. Al Qaeda did that because the USA had soldiers in Arabia as a result of the first Gulf War; that made the US an enemy. Iraq had nothing to do with 911 but we acted as if Iraq had been in on it.

We defeated Iraq and al Qaeda; that left a lot of Muslim young men eager to get the US out of the Middle East. ISIS resulted, and its message is, get the West out of Muslim homelands.

The fact that in a real sense we created al Quada and ISIS does not mean we can ignore them. ISIS has declared war to the knife against US. We have some friends—well as much friends as we can have—in area: they don’t want us there, but they want the Caliphate even less. We created the monster. It is up to us to destroy it. We should do so, giving Sunni Iraq to the Kurds, and get the hell out. We may have to do something similar in Libya. We wish to the very bones of our being that we had saved Kaddafi, and most wish Saddam were back in Iraq. So much for our becoming involved in the territorial disputes of Europe and the Middle East.

It’s getting late and I am going to LASFS tonight.

From Jerry Pournelle:

White collar automation will bring new industrial revolution, says CEO (ZD)

For years I said that robots would relieve us of mind struggle repetitive work.  I never wondered what the effect on people who could only do that kind of work would be.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

= = = =

White collar automation will bring new industrial revolution, says CEO (ZD)

Robotic Process Automation automates complex tasks usually performed by white collar workers. Mihir Shukla is CEO of Automation Anywhere, one of the largest RPA players in the world, and he says it will make us more human and could bring about the next industrial revolution.

= = = =

FDR sort of had the right idea during the Depression – putting people to work digging ditches and building things. About now is the time when we hire everyone to work – 4 days a week. Give them the fifth day off to look for work in in the private sector. People are looking to get on Disability to get an assured income. OK. Let’s assure all citizens and legal residents four benefits – shelter, food, medical care and a small cash allowance. In return for those they work four days a week. They dig ditches, work in day care centers, sit with people who must lie in bed, supervise sheltered workshops for cognitively disabled, etc. — even the “Disabled” can do something. Able-bodied people can dig up curbs and place ramps for bicycles and baby buggies. All low-tech stuff. Only buy shovels and small steamrollers from American companies. Let’s do all the stuff we can’t afford to do while we’re paying people to sit on the duffs.

We have stuff that needs to get done. We have people collecting benefits who need something to do. Let’s call it Workfare. It was done during the 1990’s with some success. Let’s expand the program. Everybody becomes an employee, so their health insurance gets paid for. And all work – no Disabled except the unconscious and the demented. When your Unemployment benefits run out after 6-8 weeks, back to work you go. Otherwise, we all work until we are old enough to retire.

Ed

I agree. You want the dole, earn it. If you can’t use a shovel, answer the phone. If that’s medically impossible, sit on street corners as company for crossing guards, or pour water for shovel workers. You will work for the largesse of your neighbors. And there is work to be done.

Alas that will result in a unionized army of managers on civil service as well as the hate mail I will now get.

From Holly Lisle

I’m not sure how much I agree with this, but I found it a good read.

>

>

> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/06/03/he-was-certain-technology-would-save-the-world-heres-what-changed-his-mind/

> He was certain technology would save the world. Here’s what changed his mind. (WP)

>

> By Matt McFarland June 3 at 9:07 AM

>

> For a long time Kentaro Toyama was a believer in technological utopianism. He studied physics at Harvard and earned a PhD in computer science at Yale. Toyama went on to do research at Microsoft. The work was demanding, but something was missing.

> “At the end of the day, I was helping to make better gadgets for wealthy people who could afford to play video games,” Toyama told me.

> In 2004, when his boss asked if he was interested in opening a research center in India, Toyama accepted on the spot. He’d never even been to India. But he was hungry to make more of a direct contribution to society.

> Here was the chance to sprinkle tech fairy dust on a developing nation and watch success after success.

> Except it didn’t play out like that.

> Toyama spent five years in India with a team of about 10 and hatched about 50 projects. He found the projects that had a real social impact were ones in which he worked with capable organizations that were committed to their mission.

In the year and a half I spent in Central America—1974-1976—(Costa Rica, Guatemala), I saw huge swaths of the population who lived in huts made of stick and leaves whose children ran naked through the streets because they had no clothes. And I saw the folks who had houses that put the abodes of America’s super-rich to shame. In one of these houses lived a friend of mine whose high-caste Castilian parents bought her a pedigreed champion Andalusian stallion for her 15th birthday. (Even then, this would have been like buying her the world’s most expensive car.)

Everyone was on the take, the countries were at war with themselves (Guatemala literally, Costa Rica with a major Communist influx from Cuba going on).

Business was done by pull, influence and bribes, not by quality, effort, and integrity. The Guatemalan government operated by force against its own people. Those with money were those with power.

The fallout of this was horrific—and this is the way most of the world works.

My older son saw this in Afghanistan while he was stationed there trying to train the local forces to protect themselves from the religious terrorists when US forces moved out.

Nothing can save people who live under corrupt governments except to get them out—and even then, if they bring their culture with them, and that culture includes the core belief pull, influence, and bribes are the way business must be done, and that the use of force against innocents and citizens is appropriate, they just bring hell with them.

If this sounds like I’m describing the way things have increasingly turning here for the last couple of decades, that’s not by accident.

So Toyama is right in that technology won’t fix anything. He’s wrong in thinking that anything short of a change of philosophy will.

From whole governments down to single individuals, if people expect to get something for nothing, demand fairness rather than justice, and think that governments rather than their own work and creativity create money, they cannot be saved.

Holly

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.