I need to ask my sci-fi reading friends if this plot twist has been used yet. It's obvious once you think of it. In the corporate police state of the future when the police will round up suspects and interogate them they will call it market research. Welcome to Florida.

And should that fail to be sufficently bizzare for you: guess who's building the detention camp in that place outside of all international law - Guantanamo Bay? Go on guess first, then take a look.

It would be bad to become paranoid.

Manichaeism: A dualistic philosophy dividing the world between good and evil principles or regarding matter as intrinsically evil and mind as intrinsically good.

Simple models are a big help in reasoning about stuff. They help you visualization. They generate analogies. They are easy to teach. They give course work an outline. Often they can be tested. They provide a coloring book that the scholar or student can then fill in.

The simplest models are the Boolean ones, the dialectics: good and evil, black and white, rich and poor, north and south, left and right. These are great for debating clubs. They are much easier to project into each other: good, black, poor, south? Of course projection can be dangerously simplistic. While models are good for graduate seminars dialectics are good for PR messaging.

That said this is a thought provoking essay by Robert Kagan on the growing culture gap between the United States and Europe. There is little doubt which overly simplistic dialect he's projecting this into.

The title is "Power and Weakness". I'd rather that he'd called the essay "Muscle or Speech".

Kagan is a conservative who edited the book "Present Dangers". A very crude caricature of which is that America must not fail to take up the white man's burden for should we fall to who will create the foundation upon which liberal democracies may thrive? Carry a big stick, and use it.

The dialectic Kagan's essay chews on is that the Americans are more drawn to the use of their superpowers. In the military sphere the our power seems mind boggling disproportionate to the rest of the planet. Europeans are drawn to using multinational negotiation to tackle hard problems. They have had a lot of practice including two world wars where they choose to try muscle rather than speech. This dialectic arises from fundamental differences about which tools the two camps have at hand. We have a powerful military; they have deep talents at multinational negotiation.

The dialectic also arises out of an even more fundamental aspect of how power operates. If the power is distributed disproportionately to a very few those few have little trouble coordinating it's application. If, on the otherhand, power is spread out a little more uniformly amoung the players then then to get stuff done the players need to coordinate actions to achieve goals that benefit them. Concentrated power has the luxury of authoritarianism, a diverse middle class must use the tedious tools of a liberal democracy.

Those with the power to act can and usually do. By necessity those in the second tier must be more skilled at coordinating their actions if they wish to have 'similar power'. But then, usually in these kinds of power struggles the second teir find a new form of power, something that goes around the "The Maginot Line" of the old power.

What I think Kagan misses is that the Europeans are only just beginning to figure out how to use the power that their unification brings them. That when they do that power will be different in character than American power. That difference will make it hard for American's understand.

It is a classic story amoung your business school crowd. Upstart with alternate model of how to go about a business displaces existing player that has become muscle bound. Don't fight the last war. We live in interesting times.

The term ground cover has a surprising range of usages. This noun phrase is used for the class of things that cover your real estate in a cheap convenient way. A good ground cover is reasonably inoffensive, self-maintaining, and with luck attractive. The term is used in different ways in gardening, farming, but it's most amusing usage is in real estate.

In horticulture the term is used to describe a range of plants that once established require little work and can be used in places where you don't want the bother with the labor of a garden or lawn but your not willing to return to the wild. Pachysandra is very popular in residential settings and shrub roses and daylillys are popular in traffic islands.

In more industrial settings the mulch is very popular. Below the mulch is usually a layer of plastic tarp. Such plastic tarps are widely used in green houses, garden centers, vegetable gardens, and farms. Where they are called alternately a ground cover or a weed control barrier.

You can even find the term used for the asphalt like materials used to seal dumps, industrial wastelands and abandoned property.

The term ground cover is also used in the real estate industry to refer to ways of employing your real estate holdings while you wait for a more lucrative opportunity to arise. The developer looks for certain features in a good ground cover. It must pay the taxes, and not be too tiresome to manage. U-Storage facilities are a good example of this usage.

It must not be too attractive lest the neighbors are tempted to object latter when you want to build your office park. The real estate speculator would be making a big mistake to leave the land idle while he waits for the chance to build his office park or apartment complex. Imagine his disappointment when he finally decides to build and the neighbors decide to complain about the loss of open space. Better to put in something a little unattractive. A used car lot is a good choice.

Real estate ground cover can be seen everywhere. The long strips of little one story shops along main streets in old suburbs were built as ground cover by speculators. They used to be called "rent stores". The speculators expected to build apartment buildings later when the density could support them.

Real estate ground cover is common around the margins of cities. It creates a band of ugly low sprawl occupied by marginal businesses like used car lots, exercise gyms, and storage facilities.

I don't see any reason to believe you wouldn't get a similar ground cover in any and all property rights systems.

Today's times has an article that at first blush is about the top 25 internet retailers and how some of them might surprise you - e.g. Dell is #1 and TicketMaster is #2. The majority of the article is about Amway's success with thier Quixtar subsidiary. Apparently the article's author was unable to type Quixtar into their search engine since with a little effort they would have quickly found the sites in the web that point out that Amway/Quixtar is right on the razor edge of being a commerical cult.

These MLM (Multi-Level-Marketing) organizations are great frameworks for abusive organizations. The root of the tree can delegate liablity, offensive labor management practices to the leaves of the tree, while collecting fees via upfront fees for sales materials.

Web traffic per site was the first place I noted a power law distribution in the web. Back then (1997?) Alexia used to have a chart showing this. This chart illustrates that. It's taken from this data source, it's the table in that press release labeled "U.S. Top 50 Internet Properties").

The vertical axis is visitors per month, and horizontal is the rank. The top three, who are neck and neck, are AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. The top of the chart would be 100 million visitors per month!

18 inch eyes, 60 feet long, eats whales? Washed up on the shore in Tasmania.

Meanwhile, don't miss these amazing videos and photos of a new species of squid discovered in 2001!

Are you doing disaster planning for earthquakes, or a telecom industry meltdown? Can you treat them the same? The article mentioned in the prior posting implies the folks at eBay do.

Do they have similar distributions?

Indeed they are quite similar. This graph shows how the distribution of earthquakes vs. scale is another power law curve. Most of the energy(wealth) is reserved for the very rare very huge earthquakes.

Humm... what about tornados.

I'm now finally reading Barabasi’s book Links and it is turning out to be quite delightful.

Networks where the nodes – ranked by their incoming links – have power law or Zipf's Law distribution (like the distribution of wealth or the distribution of productivity) are said to be scale free.

Scale free networks are quite reliable in the face of random failures since so much of their wealth is concentrated into the hubs and the random chance of hitting one of those is small; but they are also extremely easy to attack since the hubs stand out.

As a fine example of the risks of concentration of wealth consider the contingency plans that companies are attempt to make should WorldCom have to shut down portions of it’s networks. The situation with the Internet in Europe is particularly messy at this point.

"Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week that the industry was in a state of "utter crisis" and that he was bracing for more bad news. ... The prospect of a telecommunications collapse now ranks as the most likely disaster to assail Corporate America" from the contengency planning article in CNET News

AT&T Broadband’s privacy policy? They can release unlimited info about your browsing to third parties!

The privacy policy is an eight page legal document. The copy delivered to my house had each page reduced to one-quarter size. There is a paragraph in the middle of the document that is over a page long. The last two sentences in that paragraph have 96 words

Here is the relevant fragment of those two sentences:

“…when you use … cable Internet services, certain information maybe disclosed to third parties providing content or services on the … platform. Such disclosure may include without limitation … other information about your “electronic browsing”.”

It explicitly states that there is no limit on what information maybe released. While they have a limit on who’s included amoung third parties: they must be providing content or services on the "intereactive TV platform". Who provides content? Do the networks, the media companies, advertisers, news outlets, and the government provide content?

The Republican Party in New Mexico tried to bribe the Green Party there to run cantidates. No need for the Republican party chairman to resign - he was just acting as a messenger for an unidentified source in Washington, D.C.

I don't have much sympathy for third parties. We have a two party system here and third parties are very disruptive. If you want change then you have to change one of the parties.

The Republicans were buying a far left cantidate with two purposes in mind. First: the Democrat would lose votes on his left. Second: if he moved toward the left in an attempting recapture those votes he would lose votes on his right.

This is what George Wallace did on the right during the civil rights era and what Nader did on the left in the last election.

I am in Vancouver this week. The plane from Boston to Montreal smelled of forests burning. Vancouver is an amazingly beautiful city. There is extremely good food. My first night I ate at a highly rated French resturant. The appitiser - a lite broth of wild mushrooms and fava beans - is wonderful.

The resturant was in a very elegant hotel. They put me back in a corner of the room. The young man who seated me offered me a paper. Forty minutes later he reappeared. He’d forgotten there was a newspaper strike. So he'd gone out to get a paper, he apologized for the delay.

Two young Hispanic men sat along the back wall near me. They were having a quiet conversation in Spanish. It's tone seemed a little sober.

After the soup a tall muscular very young black man dressed in ill fitting jeans, basket ball shoes, gold chains, and a huge basket ball jersey was shown to a seat along the same back wall two tables from the other two. All three immediately launched into a more animated conversation still in Spanish.

Ten minutes later a handsome Japanese looking man in his late 20s is shown to a table on the other side of the Hispanic men. He is dressed in a very nice suit. He has a camera, with a large lens, hanging from his neck. He nods at the two gentlemen. Everything is quiet for a while.

Then the conversation continues with all four now chatting. The conversation is slow, quiet. After a period they switch to English. I assume the Japanese gentlemen's Spanish is poor.

The elder of the two Hispanic gentlemen enquires of the Japanese man "what do you do?" "I am a butler" he replies. This confounds the other three. He explains that he works on "that floor" in the hotel where every guest gets his own butler.

They are all guest workers, all from different countries Central America, the Philippines, etc. They discuss what they are paid. Less than the American minimum wage. They disucss various jobs they have had. Cruise ships off the coast of South America; 50$ a week plus tips - very hard for women. Europe, the Middle East.

The elder Hispanic man is going home, vacation. Others are jelous. They discuss of where to buy gifts, and how short 2 weeks is. How hard it is to be away from one's family.

I eat a peice of salmon. It rests on small pastries filled with a very spicy curry of some kind, the plate is decorated with excellent relishes and mustards. The wine, from Chile, is nice. The meal is $40 dollars. I am on expense account

Don't take too much out of the fridge or you may not fit back into the fridge.

This chart shows the incomes of various segments of the American population for the eighteen years from 1979 thru 1997. The top 1% is the top line. They saw a increase of 220% in their incomes. The bottom line is the income of households in the bottom 20%. They saw a 4% decline during this period. The bottom five lines display income trends for each 20% of the population; only the top 20% saw their income increase.

This data is taken from a report of the congressional budget office Effective Federal Tax Rates, 1979-1997 see page page 147. Of course these are all adjusted for inflation, and are reported in 1997 dollars.

There are about 100 million households in the US, so there are about 1 Million households in the top 1%. I suspect the comparative advantage of the top tenth of a percent is better yet again, etc. etc.

Scientists finally go to work on something really important. Want to lose 10% of your weight instantly? Move the scale. (click here)

Today's chart is not a log-log graph. The horizontal axis is years. This wonderful graph is taken from William Nordhaus's marvalous essay on the progress of computing (click here (pdf)).

Since the switch to (massless) electronics for computation this progress curve has been remarkable smooth - in the long term. I wonder if there are other progress curves with similar long term growth rates. For example is there one for the age of machines - steam, transportation, machinery, etc. - or the for measurement say. Graphs like this are generated by processes that grow a certain percent every year - 50% a year since 1940 in this case. Growth like this - in fundimental inputs to the economy - are what drive economic growth.

This sharply falling cost curve has marched thru all the industries where information handling is significant element of the biz. Each has sooner or later had to be completely disrupted and remade anew. For example along the supply chain. Huge displacments: not a lot of office supply salemen any more. Huge generators of wealth: Wal-Mart's market cap is 243 Billion dollars.

My thanks to Brian DeLong for the pointer (click here).

This chart has one dot for each nation on the planet. One axis shows how many people live in that nation. That's why China and India are on the far right. The vertical axis shows how productive that nation is, per person, so that nations like the US, and Japan are near the top. This is a log-log graph, so there are huge variations across its span.

Nothing about this graph tells you how evenly the is wealth distributed within those nations.