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Indulging in the spotlight effect...

#Facebook v. #Google #Plus #socialnetworks

Unless you're one of the few people who is not on a social network, you're aware that Facebook is rolling out its new interface, Timeline, in the very near future.  I watched the f8 conference in which Mark Zuckerberg announced the new timeline, and what I saw scared me outright.  While I appreciate Timeline from a UI design perspective (it does look quite nice), it's unnerving to me to have the possibility of everything I've ever done available to just about everyone in the world at just a few clicks.

Timeline

If Timeline itself weren't dismaying enough, Facebook has changed the way I can control my data.  Here I'm not even referring to privacy controls; I'm referring to the fact that you can no longer delete data in most places!  When I started to really worry about Facebook's use of my data, I deleted everything on my wall up to the previous week, and then kept only about a week's worth of activity on my wall.  I was able to remove posts, remove the little 'stories' that they put there every time I interacted with someone, and I had control over what could be seen with my profile.  About two weeks ago, this changed - I could only "Hide" activity, not delete it directly.

This is an important distinction - from now on, regardless of your privacy settings, there will still be a record of everything you do on Facebook.  Even if you restrict your profile through potentially improved privacy controls, you are granting Facebook the right to create your permanent record.  Remember how your teachers threatened you with a "permanent record" in primary school?  It exists now, and Mark Zuckerberg is the one who decides what gets done with that.

Mine is currently empty.  I've deleted everything (that I could) associated with my account.  There's nothing on my wall; there are a few email messages still remaining (which I won't delete for a couple of weeks to allow the recipients the chance to read them - thankfully email still works in the way that allows deletion), I have no notes, and I've deleted all the pictures, apps, and videos.  I won't go so far as to close the account, because it's still how I've managed to keep in touch with a lot of people that I otherwise wouldn't.  I may log in every once in a while without interacting with people - which of course defeats the purpose.  However, I'm hoping to convince people to start moving over to Facebook's only competition, Google Plus.

I must say that as of late I'm impressed with Google Plus.  While many of the same privacy concerns exist with Google Plus as do Facebook - we're creating a record with what is essentially a marketing company in each instance - Google Plus seems to be doing things correctly.  First, Circles is a great idea - I can determine who sees what content quickly and easily.  Secondly, I still have the power to delete things.  This is important!  I can control my data in all instances on Google Plus.  Finally, Google Plus is actually a social network.  I realise the irony of an introvert looking to be more social, but with Google Plus it's easy and powerful.  One of my grad school classes has required that we have group meetings in a smaller group of four and in conjunction with a larger group of eight - and we've been having these meetings on Google Plus Hangouts.  It is really easy to use, real-time, and no one has to leave the house!  As you can imagine, scheduling eight people to meet somewhere - when those eight people who are working professionals (some with families) who also attend grad school - is extremely difficult.  With Google Plus Hangouts, all we have to do is agree on a time we'll all be home (this is in the evening, natch) - we can still meet "face to face" and be productive without having to worry about having to drive from MD, VA, or DC to a central point.  
Hangout
I also had the opportunity to look at the Beta version of Hangouts - it has all the features of the existing hangout, but adds the ability to do Wave-esque (as in Google Wave) things such as concurrent document editing in Google docs.  Once that's implemented, I think a lot of people will come to find that they can really get a lot more done with Google Plus and it'll become a serious tool for students, small businesses, and even some large businesses.  

Is any social network perfect?  No.  Will they ever be?  No.  However, at the moment, Google Plus seems to be the way to go - it provides many benefits, allows for productivity, puts the social back in "social" network, and has fewer concerns where privacy is concerned than does Facebook.  Facebook may be the "third largest country" on the planet, but the small nation of Google Plus is growing.

 

Debunking Robert Reich's Debunking of Six Lies

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I've been given the charge (on Facebook no less) to counter the points made by Robert Reich in this video:

The six lies (according to Reich) are:

1) Tax cuts to the rich and corporations trickle down to the rest of us. (No it doesn't and it never has.)
2) If you shrink government you create jobs. (No, you get rid of jobs that way.)
3) High taxes on the rich hurts the economy. (No, the economy grew when the US did this under Eisenhower.)
4) Debt is to be avoided and it is mostly caused by Medicare. (No, if debt is properly used to grow the economy, it becomes a smaller part of the budget because of increased revenue and Medicare has the lowest overhead of any health insurance plan out there.)
5) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme (No, its solid for 26 years. Social Security is solid beyond that if the rich pay the same percentage in social security taxes as the rest of us do.)
6) We need to tax the poor. (This is what Republicans have been proposing when they say any "tax reform" needs to involve all Americans because poor people pay no income tax. The poor have no money and taxing them will not solve our budget problems.)

I'll take them in order (I suggest you watch the video first - it's under ten minutes).

"Lie" 1
To put it very simply, tax cuts "trickle-down" everywhere, all the time.  When taxes are lessened on people or corporations, those people or corporations have more money to spend, save, and/or invest.  (Ignore the "trickle-down" moniker if you must - think of it as immediate benefit, which is what it is when there are less taxes!)  That Jon Stewart was able to recently lambast the Republicans (correctly) for saying the poor had things like refrigerators and TVs is the very essence of what "trickle-down" economics was originally meant to be; as the economy gets richer, the rich get richer, but so do the poor.  (The rising tide lifts all boats - the poor of today have a standard of living that would have made kings of old jealous, and rightly so.  We need to continue making it so that the poor continue to have their standard of living raised.)  Admittedly, there is a growing inequality (which Reich mentions) and that is unfortunate and needs correcting, as he rightly points out.

Again, the moniker of "trickle-down" is often misunderstood and misapplied; that Reich uses it as he does suggests more that he understands what it is but is using it as the convenient scape-goat for his arguments.  Regardless of his knowledgeability, the bottom line is that when government taxes less, more money goes into the economy, and the economy gets wealthier.  This point is largely moot though, since anyone or any corporation that has a lot of money also knows how to shield it from taxes.  (There is also the additional complication which such speeches as Reich's always avoid, and that is that corporations are taxed differently, and they can carry losses and surpluses forward and back in years to assist with their past, current, or future taxes.)

Reich mentions that the corporations are sitting on piles of cash and that profits (and the wage/profit ratio) are the highest they've ever been in decades.  I'm not quite sure why this is a bad thing, but assuming he means it to be negative, it again eludes my grasp as to why he's making a mountain out of a mole hill.  This is the reason corporations exist; they accumulate cash.  They use it to operate and to return value to shareholders.

(There are two additional points he may be trying to make; the first would be that they have too much money; the second may be that somehow since we're in a bad economy that the hoarding of cash has some negative quality to it.  Addressing those two - first, I'm not quite sure how much "too much" is, but if it's $2 TRILLION then that opens the door to such slippery slopes as who determines how much is too much and how it gets "redistributed", and good luck forcing that one on anyone.  The second may be that corporations should be spending the money - but if that's the case, again, it's the job of the corporation to decide what to do with its money.)

Finally, to address one last point about trickle-down economics for tax-cuts to the rich and the corporations - corporations are notoriously skittish.  Having been through quite a bit of business school, I can tell you that there is a good amount of analysis that goes into decisions about how to invest money.  (I was surprised at how much it involves.)  Corporations (with the possible exception of those in the financial services sector) take an agonizing amount of time and effort into making sure that deals they're going to do will be profitable and return value to their investors.  This is significantly more difficult in an uncertain economic climate, and more so when you have a government that seems to be incapable of action, let alone results.  That corporations are sitting on cash should come as no surprise to anyone, let alone a former Secretary of Labor.

"Lie" 2
This is the most disingenuous of the supposed rebuttals Reich makes.  He mentions talking to conservatives and asking how laying off government workers creates jobs.  He talks about "teachers, social workers, fireman" and others such as school builders and road repair crews.  This is either the red herring of his argument, or it proves he really doesn't listen to his opponents.  No one who suggests that a down-sizing of government workers creates jobs would suggest that we lay off these people; for starters, they are invariably state-government workers, and even if that's not the case, his opponents are referring to the people who work for the federal government.  These are people that work for Federal agencies such as the Department of Defense or others; people who may serve functions that are either unnecessary or redundant.  Once hired by the government, a person is more likely to die than be laid off or fired.  (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/federal-workers-die-lose-jobs/story?id=14107075)  Additionally, while government has shrunk since the time of Bush the First, the Federal government has been slowly increasing in size again since then.  (However, as a percentage of the total population, it appears to be shrinking - this is because the population is expanding so fast.  (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/09/how_many_federal_workers_are_t.html))  Regardless of all of that, however, the point is that what dollars the government spends it must first take from somewhere (or print, thereby devaluing the rest of the money), and a growing bureaucracy retards economic growth, thereby reducing private sector hiring.  By reducing the size of the government, more money is available in the private sector for hiring.  In the private sector, the quest for profitability leads to greater efficiencies; no such impetus exists on the Federal level.  Reich has a point that laying off government employees may be seen as reducing jobs, but he misses the larger point in that those jobs may be "artificial" jobs in the first place and/or assumes that those people would not be hired in the private sector.  (For instance, a laid off government worker who is then hired in the private sector does not negatively affect the number of jobs, yet shrinks the size of government.)

"Lie" 3
High taxes hurt everyone, regardless of their income status.  Again, this lie is really hit-or-miss; for starters, he conflates several things in his assessment of the term "economic growth".  He argues that a 91% tax rate (and "really high" effective tax rate) under Eisenhower helped lead to a robust economy.  However, it could easily be argued that the economy's return to a non-war footing had as much or more to do with the economic growth of the 1950s - after all, there was a significant manufacturing base in this country then and instead of making things that would eventually be destroyed in Europe or Japan during war, the output was being deployed to goods and services that people could actually buy and use.  (That they had endured rationing for so long could also have spurred significant consumer demand).  Again, the rich usually shield their money (he does make the distinction between actual and effective tax rates here, and that is important) but even if they don't, taxing the rich is invariably ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst.  The French have recently started taxing their rich at the request of those same rich people; this is expected to raise about $300 million Euros in extra revenue.  (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/23/us-france-wealthy-idUSTRE77M25320110823)  Considering that France has approximately 87% debt-to-GDP ratio (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904007304576496263949498784.html) and their current GDP is about $2.65 TRILLION (http://v.gd/UVdLb0), then we're looking at a debt of about $2.35 TRILLION, of which 300 million Euros is not even a percentage point: 300 million Euros is about $413,550,000, which as a percentage of $2.35 TRILLION is 0.018%.  So the French super-rich are paying an additional tax, but it means that the French government still has to find 99.982% of the money they owe.  Yes, it's better than zero, but not by much.  Finally, when you tax the rich too much, they tend to leave; many states have found that out.  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260067214828295.html)  This makes it at best largely ineffective; at worst, counter-productive.

"Lie" 4
Debt is not necessarily to be avoided; in general, Reich is right on this point.  However, there is good debt and bad debt; good debt is the kind that is not to be avoided.  (Examples of good debts include mortgages on rental properties, or car loans on vehicles that you use for work, etc.)  Government debt is broken down into several pieces; very little of it could be considered good debt.  An exhaustive list of where the government spends money is available for anyone with access to Google or a library; a link to the Wikipedia article is the easiest to read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget.  Suffice it to say that the vast majority of government spending is on defense and health care, along with interest on the debt.  (These three account for about 50% of the government's spending.)  There is no good debt to be had in policing the world, and few would argue that our current wars are tenable, much less affordable.  This is certainly not helping to grow the economy, with the possible exception of some manufacturing jobs and soldiers' pay.  (I suspect that many of our military gear is not made here, but have no proof; either way, they are not utilized in a manner that helps our economy.)  As to health care, Reich claims that Medicare is highly efficient and has less administrative costs than comparable private sector plans without offering any shred of proof.  Even if it does cost less, his point about it as compared to the population is only relevant because the population is currently expanding.  If it stops expanding, then that point is either moot or wrong.  Again, this assumes his point is correct; however, it has long been argued that it is not.  (http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/06/medicare-administrative-costs-are-higher-not-lower-than-for-private-insurance)

Finally, looking at debt as a ratio to GDP, we can see that even 'socialist' countries such as France are only at 87%, while the US is very close to 100%.  Using Reich's own numbers, we could take the $2 TRILLION that US companies are holding, and all the wealth of the rich (approximately $1.3 TRILLION) and apply it to the debt and we would still be at 77%.  His argument that debt is good if it creates jobs may be reasonable, but there is little evidence that government debt creates jobs - one has only to look as far as our current economy for this point to be refuted.  The government has spent tens of TRILLIONS of dollars in the last twenty years; in the last three it has overspent by $3.6 TRILLION, and unemployment is still at 9%.  (Keep in mind that that's the "official" unemployment rate, while the "underemployment" rate is above 15%. (http://www.economytrack.org/underemployment.php) (http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/09/us_unemployment_rate_remains_a.html))  If debt spending leads to job creation, then clearly we should have much lower rates of un-/under-employment.

"Lie" 5
Social Security can easily be shown to be a Ponzi scheme by looking at the first recipient, Ida May Fuller.  "Ida May Fuller worked for three years under the Social Security program.  The accumulated taxes on her salary during those three years was a total of $24.75.  Her initial monthly check was $22.54.  During her lifetime, she collected a total of $22,888.92 in Social Security benefits." (http://www.ssa.gov/history/idapayroll.html)  As the first recipient, she paid $22.54, and received more than one thousand times her initial investment.  Current beneficiaries, by Reich's own admission, are expected to receive $0.  (He states that it is solvent for only 26 more years.)  So anyone paying in now who does not retire in the next 26 years will get nothing.  This is the definition of a Ponzi scheme; money is taken from the people who come after to pay the people who went before.  (My social security taxes, for instance, invariably go to today's retirees; they do not get "stored" for me, or else the system would not be insolvent when I am due to collect.)  Even assuming that the inequality Reich speaks of can be fixed (a huge assumption, as he points out) and that the system can be made solvent for longer than the 26 years it is currently supposedly solvent for, there is no one today who actually plans to retire on only Social Security.  There are plenty of anecdotal stories of retirees collecting Social Security who eat cat food; even assuming these are made up there is no one who assumes that Social Security will provide any reasonable standard of living for them in their retirement, or even a minimal one.  Social Security has three other factors working against it - the first is a continually expanding population; the second is a higher unemployment rate (as the unemployed do not pay Social Security taxes), and the third is that the government continually borrows from the Social Security trust.  While it has so far managed to make all the payments from its borrowing (http://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/fundFAQ.html), there is no guarantee that this will always happen, and as our recent debt ceiling debacle showed, the likelihood of realistic, reasonable, and effective plans for the future are slim.  Furthermore, as these payments currently account for 20% of the government's spending, they would only continue to grow unless the borrowing stops; at some future point they would begin to assume larger and larger portions of the debt, which is a vicious (and inescapable) cycle.  Even assuming we raise the cap rate on Social Security, we have the same issue that taxing anyone generally has - it will be largely ineffective.  It may make the system solvent for an additional period of time, but the other two factors will still be working against it.  Add to that the the government ties Social Security increases to their artificially low inflation numbers, and it certainly does not bode well for the future.

"Lie" 6
We don't need to tax the poor.  In this Reich is correct.  I've addressed taxing the rich already, above.  It can be effective in miniscule amounts (at best), but taxes take money from one area and redistribute them to another area, which may be a better or worse use of the money.  (I'd argue it's usually worse, as the government is not a good arbiter of financial decision making, as its entire budget outlay will show.)  I'd argue that we could forego taxing anyone who makes under a certain level; other than the "equitability" factor there's no good argument for taxing the poor.  The equitability argument holds little water too, in that if we want things to be more equal, helping the poor is a great way to do that.  A progressive taxation system doesn't have to include the lowest earners - it can still be fair by starting at the second or third "rung of the ladder". His arguments for more tax brackets could be useful in this regard.  (I would also mention that the inequality problem is at least partially to blame on the inflationary policies of the government; the poor have their purchasing power lowered by the hidden tax of government inflation.)

Reich continues by suggesting that the crowd not give into cynicism, and that that's what the "other side" (read: Republicans) really wants, as that cynicism deadlocks government and thereby leads to more Republican victories when Democrats lose face.  This argument works well at stirring up the crowd, but is largely nonsensical; both parties are completely inept, and both try to deadlock the other when the other is in power.  Furthermore, the people have reason to be cynical; the federal government is largely too far removed from the people to be an effective tool for positive change in the lives of most of the people it claims to represent.  Here I am not giving into the cynicism that Reich suggests; I am merely examining the possibility of a representative Democracy in which there are 535 representatives for 310 million people - it seems mathematically likely that representation on the order of 1 representative for every 500,000+ people is just not a system that can adequately address that which is important to the electorate.  That doesn't even factor in corporate interests; while those are obviously represented more (due to lobbying) there are still more than 30 million corporations, which means that there'd be a 1:50,000 ratio, which is ten times better but still impractical at best.  (It is further skewed by the influence that larger corporations have compared to the smaller ones.)  Lastly, given the recent shenanigans over the debt ceiling, it would be difficult not to be cynical - our politicians act like children most of the time, and have managed to spend TRILLIONS of dollars to the tune of the entire GDP of the country for a year, with no end in sight.

Why Capitalism Isn't To Blame For Unemployment

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Over at AlterNet (now also reprinted at Mother Jones), there is an article which states in the title, that Massive Unemployment is Proof that Global Capitalism doesn't work.  To summarise, the authors paint a picture of a time when people could subsist on their own if they couldn't find employment, principally by going back to what people always did - they farmed, bartered, or did whatever it was they had to to provide a life for themselves and their families.  Only after property started concentrating in the hands of the few did the people have to start doing involuntary work in exchange for a salary that they then had to spend to obtain their livelihood.  The term "involuntary" is thrown around a lot.  Images of scores of people shifting about the country looking for work are also used.

The problems with this article are multiple.  First, while the article is long on identifying the problem, it is short on any of the solutions.  Unless one counts going back to the hard-scrabble life of having to eke each meal out of the earth is a solution, the authors don't present any.  Frankly, I'm not all that keen on milking cows at four in the morning or slaughtering pigs, nor tending vegetable gardens.  (This latter is slightly more appealing, but I wouldn't want to depend on my green thumb for my meals.)  I voluntarily trade some of my time and effort for a salary that allows me to obtain meals in a much easier fashion, and the throw-back to another era isn't really a solution.  I think you'd be hard-pressed to find people willing to trade the conveniences of modern-day global capitalism to work on the farm or in the garden, which isn't anymore "voluntary" than capitalist work when you need those carrots to survive.  Additionally, capitalistic, or near-capitalistic nations are among those with the highest standard of living; while it would be best to ensure that that standard of living is shared by everyone, throwing the baby out with the bathwater is never a good idea either.

Secondly, it conflates global capitalism with a host of other things while ignoring everywhere on the globe except the US.  I'm not an expert on Europe by any stretch of the imagination, but this whole "global capitalism" is a fairly new thing for them, and they've had high unemployment for some time.  (Spain comes to mind, which as I recall has largely leaned socialist, and their unemployment has always been very high, especially among their youth.  France as I recall has had similar problems in the past, though less so now - an argument that maybe global capitalism could be helping there.)  It ignores the realities that in many of the countries which are affected by this "global capitalism" that many of the tenets of that same capitalism aren't practised there or are practised in different fashion.  So to blame capitalism exclusively for "massive unemployment" is disingenuous at best and likely just wrong at worst.  No one has ever claimed that capitalism was perfect, just that it was better than most other systems; communism, for one, might have given people full employment but as they were never paid and had to have spouses stand in line for bread all day, the alternatives could be much worse.

Additionally, the authors don't seem to understand what capitalism even is.  In their haste to paint pictures of the jobless roaming the countryside, they seem to assume that full or near-full employment is even possible.  It's not possible for a number of reasons; for starters, not everyone needs or wants to work.  Even if we exclude those people, there will always be a fraction of people out of work for one reason or another.  Ideally, as they point out, we want this to be as low as possible, and we want to help those who need assistance.  However, to say that the "new norm" is a bad thing is not necessarily the case.  (I'll get into why it is in a second, but stay with this idea for a moment.)  To argue that it's not a bad thing, one has to look at what causes unemployment.  Typically, it's disruptive technology.  When was the last time that you saw a washer-woman?  Well, they were put out of business by that device that you have in your basement into which you throw your clothes every week.  Sometimes, increasing unemployment is a function of technological improvement.  This is no comfort to those affected, but it does happen.  Given that our technological advances from the past fifty years or so have grown exponentially, I suspect that this may be part of the "new norm".  Admittedly, shipping jobs overseas is a fault of global capitalism; something the authors suprisingly neglect to mention.  Of course, their "global" capitalism argument only discusses unemployment in America; it ignores other countries and the fact that jobs shipped overseas provide employment overseas.  The reason there's been an Indian tech-boom is largely because of that.  Though Americans obviously would prefer unemployment be less and that those affected be employed, the flip-side to the coin is that others elsewhere are employed and they have their standard of living raised.  This point is entirely ignored by the authors, who use the term "global" constantly but only refer to Americans in their analysis of unemployment.  A slightly more interesting (and relevant) fact that might have helped their argument would have been if more people globally were unemployed!

However, it's more likely that the "new norm" is a bad thing, and has other reasons.  However, I suspect that capitalism, while providing the framework for employment/unemployment, is not the root cause.  The problem is more likely government interference.  With interest rates being altered and a climate of uncertainty that pervades the business market (see the VIX if you're not convinced that people are skittish about investing), people simply have no cause to hire, and certainly have no cause to cut costs.  A perfect example is Bank of America.  This bank, too big to fail, has been bailed out by the government and yet the growing supposition is that they will lay off about 40,000 people in the next three years.  (They have not announced this as of yet officially.)  Is that a fault of capitalism?  Or is it the fault of a government that interferes by taking money from where it should have gone and misallocated it to banks that then had no incentives to properly align their acquisitions?  In this case, it could be argued that the acquisitions themselves are to blame, and partially defend the original article's thesis; however, in a properly functioning market, the acquisitions would have been done properly at the time of inititiation and any layoffs would have been spread out over a much longer period of time.  So, instead of laying off 40,000 over the course of ten to fifteen years, the length of time Bank of America has been growing, in a way in which the market might be able to more readily absorb the affected, it now happens in a much more concentrated timeframe - three years.  In this case, while the net results are that 40,000 people lose their jobs, the shock to the system is much more pronounced in a market in which the government regularly interferes and obscures both investment signals and incentives.  Remember, the only way that the government can provide money to anyone or any corporation is if it first takes it from someone else or prints it - both of which will distort the picture for those who would otherwise want to put that money to better use than some hack in DC.

This brings us to the final point - the "99ers".  These are people who have been out of work so long that they have exhausted their unemployment benefits.  The authors of the article use this to point out that unemployment is serious, new and different this time, and demoralising.  However, the article mentions at least one time (1873-1874) in which the unemployed were organising for two years, so while it may still be objectionable, it is not new.  However, again, we have issues with interference from DC; unemployment benefits probably do not discourage job seeking, so I am not going to rehash that tired saw.  (Any rational person understands that a person would rather collect a full-check than much smaller benefits.)  However, the issue again becomes a misallocation of capital; instead of encouraging employers by getting out of the way, the government continues to rob Peter to pay Paul and print what it can't steal from Peter.  I am certainly not going to argue that we shouldn't have some form of assistance for the unemployed, but oftentimes in the goodness of their hearts and/or in an attempt to be seen to be doing something, the government will actually exacerbate the situation.  (President Obama's recent jobs bill will not help matters much; it will encourage employers to hire people unemployed for less than six months and essentially leaves people unemployed for longer out in the cold.  By offering credits for hiring and not retention, it also encourages turnover.)

Is global capitalism a perfect system?  Not by any means - there is no such thing in a world that's define by scarcity.  (Ideally, global capitalism will lead us to the post-scarcity era, and we'll have new, less pressing issues.)  However, while it may be a framework in which undesirable things happen , it is certainly not the fault of that framework - but the actors within it who distort its normal function.

Ten Years Ago Today

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Today differs from my day ten years ago in that I slept through a lot of today.  Ten years ago on September 11, 2001, I was actually up really early and went into work early.  My office was on 35th and 7th in Manhattan, and I still don't remember why I was up early, but I sat down at my desk at around 0830.  Just a few minutes later, my colleague Brian, who sat next to me told me that his friend had just IM'ed him that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers.  My first words were "That must have been one hell of a mechanical error..."

We gathered around a television someone had brought from one of the media rooms, and we saw one of the Towers on fire.  Of course, at this point, there hadn't yet been a second crash, but that happened, and the cameraperson couldn't believe their eyes.  Nor could we!  Of course, at that moment, we knew it wasn't just a mistake - we were under attack.

I immediately called my parents to let them know I was okay, and my brothers as well.  At the time, I managed to get through, but I think that's only because I was so quick about it.  Most people didn't get through on cell phones until later that day or the next.

Of course, we found out about the plane at the Pentagon and the one in Pennsylvania shortly after, and watched the Towers fall.  (That was terribly shocking.)  There were a number of other rumours - bombs in schools and a threat against the Empire State Building.  (As our office at the time was very close to the Empire State Building, that one got the most attention.)  Finally, our IT Director Bradley (my boss) kindly suggested to the management that they might want to let us go home.

So they did.  It was about 1200 by then, and the entire Island was shut down.  I lived in Westchester, so I couldn't really go anywhere; I resolved to walk up to my Aunt's apartment and see if she could put me up for the night.  Along the way, I stopped at a hospital to give blood.  The person on the line in front of me was very familiar to me - I couldn't quite place her at first - but it was Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order: SVU fame.  Of course, given the gravitas of the day, she was just another New Yorker trying to help, and other than an "I love your work" from the lady at the table signing people up, no one who recognised her said anything or bothered her.

I finally found out from a policeman that they were letting people off the Island - trains going out were running again.  I went to GCT and boarded a Metro North train.  That train was the most crowded train I've ever been on, and of course people were crying and screaming and trying to call people and it was general bedlam.  It was a somber ride, and of those not crying or screaming, no one spoke except to comfort those who were.

I arrived home safely, and obviously, no one went to work the next day.  I don't think we went back to work until the following Monday, though my memory of the rest of the week is a bit fuzzier than on that actual day.

**********

I found out later in the day that one of my classmates from Regis, Greg Trost, had been in one of the Towers during the attack, and had died.  I was never very close to Greg, but he was easily the funniest kid in our class, and had a great outgoing spirit, and it was very difficult to hear that he'd been killed.  My class have started a scholarship to Regis in his name, and hold a series of events every year in remembrance of him.

**********

I found out later still that one of my coworkers/friends from PricewaterhouseCoopers had also been in the Towers during the attack, and she had been killed.  Dominique Pandolfo was a girl I worked with at PwC who moved to Marsh and McLennan to be a trainer.  As I'm told, she normally worked in the midtown office, but was doing a training session at WTC that week.  She was an attractive girl with a great bubbly personality, and I had considered asking her to lunch one day.

**********

I lived in California from January 2002 - March 2003.  It was a difficult thing to leave, and especially after the attacks, but I had planned on moving in October and things had been put off for a while.  When I came back, my parents sold the house we lived in shortly thereafter for their retirement to Florida, and one of the things we found in the attic is the pamphlet whose frontpage is scanned above.  It's an original from the 1970s, and one that I plan to keep.  I'd been to the Towers myself on only one occasion, for a LInux User's Group meeting, and this was after the first bombing attempt.  I don't have any of the material from that day (which would have been just my badge anyway), but as I have the pamphlet now I have something to keep as a small reminder.

**********

Obviously, in the time since, things have changed quite a bit, and not necessarily for the best.  I think George W. Bush handled the initial crisis well, but wasted huge opportunities to steer the country in a positive direction, and our politicians have been flailing ever since.  I'm not going to get into the politics of it, but my feelings are that we should do what we can on the intelligence side to find and thwart potential attacks, but our current security theatre (and the naked scanning and molestations from the TSA) are not making people safer and come at great cost to our liberty.  I'm hoping that in the spirit of Patriot Day, as today is now called, that we can reverse some of the gains the terrorists made that day and remember what makes America great - freedom, liberty, and justice for all.  We owe it to the people we lost to remember their sacrifice and ensure that it was not in vain.

Book Review: Crash Proof 2.0 by Peter Schiff @peterschiff

Cp2

I'm always a little leery of reading too many things that will tend to agree with viewpoints that I already hold.  While I'm fairly set in my ways, I love to learn, and I like to hear viewpoints that may be opposing (or not related, even) to mine for the experience of learning something new and checking the information against what I already believe.  Books like Crash Proof 2.0 tend to fall into the category of mirroring my own beliefs, and as such I wasn't as quick to read it as I might have otherwise been.

It's a shame that I didn't read it in 2006.  Peter Schiff correctly, and I mean correctly, predicted most of what happened in 2008, a full two years prior to its occurrence.  When I started reading the book, I was reading the original Crash Proof (not 2.0) as I had found excerpts online, and noticed that it was written before the financial crisis.  Interested in what little I had read, I searched to see if there were updates, and found that Crash Proof 2.0 had been written in 2009, with the original book intact, but with updates from 2009 written at the end of each chapter.

I plunked down the $12 for the Kindle version, and read it on my HTC Flyer.  It's one of the best purchases I've made this year!  It's very interesting to see how the predictions made in the original book came so true, and of course with the 2009 updates, Peter expands on his thinking from then, and provides further insights as to what to expect for the future.

The book is filled with expert advice, particularly if you think there is an upcoming dollar collapse and that the government printing trillions of dollars is just not the way to go about ensuring prosperity.  He starts with an analysis of the problem - that America is no longer a producing nation, and that our government is literally trading away our prosperity to foreign investors.  The Federal Reserve continues to print money like it's going out of style, and so people's wealth is slowly being robbed of them without their knowledge - as things get more expensive and they make the same amount of money.  Analysing the stock market and the real estate market, he shows from the 2006 standpoint how the two are inter-related and predicts a collapse (which happened, of course), and we get the wisdom of both foresight and hindsight in the analysis of the economic crisis with updates from 2009.  From that point, the book devotes the rest of its chapters to what individuals can do to protect themselves from the coming dollar devaluation by investing in foreign markets, precious metals, and maintaing certain levels of liquidity.

Most people will dismiss the book, even though it's filled with accurate predictions and sound advice.  Most people don't see a coming dollar collapse (though Schiff is in the same company as many Austrian economists, and even other financial pundits like Robert Kiyosaki, who all agree that it will happen) and so aren't particularly worried.  As the last part of the book details, this is an unfortunate occurrence, but it's one that readers can take steps to alleviate.  Whether protecting themselves, or helping others by sharing the knowledge, the way to do just that is contained in the book!  I highly recommend it for that reason.

Peter Schiff's website is www.europac.net.

A Better IP Address GREP For EnCase

Hex

I was recently teaching a colleague about the use of keywords in EnCase, and in highlighting grep usage, we came across the default Guidance IP address grep string:

0|([3-9]#?)|(1#{0,2})|(2([0-4]#?)|(5[0-5]?)|[6-9])\.0|([3-9]#?)|(1#{0,2})|(2([0-4]#?)|(5[0-5]?)|[6-9])\.0|([3-9]#?)|(1#{0,2})|(2([0-4]#?)|(5[0-5]?)|[6-9])\.0|([3-9]#?)|(1#{0,2})|(2([0-4]#?)|(5[0-5]?)|[6-9])

The issue with a grep string like this is that you want to find IP addresses whose octets are always less than 256, but there is no "less than" operator in grep, so all one can do is attempt to construct each octet with digits (using OR), and/or accept some false positives.  (This means that you will get results that may not be IP addresses; instead you will get dotted decimal numbers that contain 'octets' greater than 255.)

The Guidance default grep string basically tries to construct all possible digits for the octets of an IP address.  While this is a reasonable way to do it, it has three problems.  The first is that it misses IP addresses!  It does not find "64.7.11.2", for instance.  Secondly, it leads to a large number of false positives.  Thirdly, that expression is rather convoluted to understand, and certainly maintaining it seems difficult.

My colleague and I came up with a better (but not perfect) IP address grep string:

(0|1|2)*[0-9]?[0-9]?\.(0|1|2)?[0-9]?[0-9]?\.(0|1|2)*[0-9]?[0-9]?\.(0|1|2)*[0-9]?[0-9]?

This IP address string is a lot less complicated that the one that ships with EnCase, thereby potentially mitigating some of the third problem with their default.  The first problem is also alleviated, in that it finds all IP addresses that we tested!  While it still suffers from the second problem, the number of false positives is significantly reduced.

Thoughts On Mayorship @foursquare

Super-mayor-foursquare

I recently got kicked out as the mayor of my apartment complex on Foursquare.  I took a two and a half week trip, so I wasn't able to check in as often as I normally do.  Consequently, "Nic B." has become the mayor.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn't the worst thing in the world.  I understand that Foursquare creates mayorships based on the number of times any one person checks in at a particular place in the last sixty days.  However, what this means is that I'm unlikely to ever get back the mayorship of my apartment complex.

The first part to this is that we don't even have to assume that "Nic B." will never go on vacation.  All that has to happen is that his vacations are shorter than mine.  Consequently, he'd be able to check in more often in any given time period over sixty days, assuming he doesn't forget to check in for a considerable amount of time.  (Given his usage patterns, this seems unlikely.)  As I don't often take vacations, but take at least two weeks when I do, this is very likely.

The second part to this is that my long-term check-ins don't count.  I have more check-ins at my apartment complex than "Nic B." has total check-ins!  They even list this feature in the FAQ:

"We calculate mayorships based on the number of days that you've checked into a place over the past 60 days to keep mayorships current (It’s possible for you to have more check-ins over all time than the current Mayor, but just not as many recent check-ins)."

They do this to keep the mayorship "current".  Well, that may be well and good for the ADD-Gen-Y types who have absolutely no attention span, but for people who think and act more long-term, that part of the game is quickly losing its appeal.  I've lost a considerable number of mayorships that way, and have gone from 25 to 8.  (The remaining 8 are ones where there seem to be no competitors.)  Checking in is not fun for the sake of checking in; the goal has to be that occasionally it's rewarding!

I can understand wanting to keep mayorships current.  However, I think Foursquare could add some weight to long-term check-ins, and recalculate how they give out mayorships.  Otherwise, they may find that longer term players simply stop playing.