KickIdle.com Blog

A rather long comment I made to a converstation on Facebook. Thought I would share it (and archive it)… (Sorry for the missing context, but I think the comment stands on it’s own well enough and I don’t want to copy the other commenters in the thread without their permission.)

@Lauren: Yes, there’s no difference between abortion and inadequate health care… That’s exactly the type of well reasoned debating that will help us all get through this.

@Rich: Let’s be clear here – no one views the military budget and health care as a zero sum game. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the nation will sacrifice military funding to fund health care. While it makes a great emotional punch, it adds nothing to the rational debate.

While it’s certainly educational to see what other nations have achieved in their health care systems, it’s folly to assume that because they achieve “statistic X for cost Y” that we can do the same. “Health” is a complex subject and for any given facet could be influenced by cultural, diet, lifestyle, genetics, climate, or a dozen other issues. Ultimately the solution is not to transplant a system from somewhere else but to find a system that will work in the US. Given the size of the US and variety of cultures, climate, & demographics within our borders it is even harder to envision a national system that will be “one size fits all”.

Indeed, a big part of what prevents market competition from keeping prices in check is the fact that ever state currently has their own regulations for health care tailored to their situation. This creates huge barriers to entry that prevent easy implementation of a market-based scheme for health care.

Regarding the “fatcats”, it’s educational to see that non-profit insurance companies and HMOs (yes, they exist) have no had significantly better results in cost control than the for-profit “fatcats”.

@Jacob: First, as I stated above, my point was that after you federalize the $2 trillion health care industry, it will definitely be more than defense. Even with the additional numbers from the war funding, that still holds true.

The reason I stated it was “debatable” was specifically what you quoted. Personally, I expect a nation to spend more on the military than on healthcare during a time of war. Arguments over whether this war is right or wrong on whether we should be spending this type of money to fight terrorism are irrelevant in this context. As I said above, no one considers military and health care to be a zero sum game. No one in the government is saying “let’s stop building tanks so we can buy some more MRI machines”. This is a wonderfully effective emotional argument, but a completely irrelevant one.

@Clint: I agree with you on the issues, although I tend to prefer market-based approaches when they’re likely to work.

People seem to assume that if I disagree with them personally I’m defending the status quo. Please understand that I think things need to change too. But I think the best way to do that is to make considered logical changes, not get swept up into an emotional storm and dash off in the first direction that will make us feel better. (And don’t kid yourselves, if you’re bringing up the cost of the military in the context of health care, you’re an emotion-monger. No offense.)

NPR has been playing stories this week about the US Marines attempting to secure some remote regions in Afghanistan in preparation for the upcoming elections in that country. It’s tough going, but the US Marines have always looked tough situations in the face, given a hardy laugh, and gone out to kick ass. What saddens me about the situation is that we’re putting our people out there in harms way to win the battle but not the war.

What I mean by that is simple – democracy doesn’t work without rule of law. It’s as simple as that. In a population that doesn’t accept the authority of law over the authority of jihad or machismo or bushido (or any other similar term and concept), democracy is doomed to failure.

Afghanistan is culturally and geographically disposed towards a localized “village and tribe” organization. I see no value in getting voting stations setup in remote providences there. The populations in those providences aren’t going to be ruled by the capital. If anything, I think such an early focus on democracy instead of a focus on policing and rule of law makes a mockery out of what we should be trying to accomplish in Afghanistan.

That mockery is what makes me sad to hear about our Marines going out and risking life and limb – doing what they do best – for such a meager reward.

Long distance relationships suck, but I have to admit that with cell phones, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, TokBox and IM things are a lot better than the first long distance relationship I ever had. When I went to college and was dating my high school sweet heart, phone conversations cost $0.21 per minute, US Mail was the only way to write and we probably only talked three or four times per week.

Now, Cindy and I talk multiple times a day via text and cell phone. We can keep up with each other’s day via Twitter and Facebook. There’s hardly a time or place that we can’t reach out to each other and stay in touch, even when I’m much farther away than I was in college. As humans, we don’t tend to notice incremental change, but stopping to ponder how much communication has changed in 15 years really makes my mind boggle.

And that’s a good thing, because decreasing the cost of communication has all kinds of good effects. But the best effect for me is that I get the chance to find and love a girl like Cindy.

If you’ve never left your “comfort zone”, you’ve probably never experienced culture shock. Culture shock is quite simply when you find yourself in an environment where people act differently than you’re used to acting. It can be as big as going from America to Japan, or as simple as going from Boston to Virginia. The geographic version of culture shock is the easiest to understand and the most commonly experienced. But when you work in an insular community, espescially one with rigid social rules, you can experience culture shock too.

In my case, I spend time on military bases as part of my job. Most of the time, the bases seem just like working at any other big organization. But sometimes there’s the unexpected culture shock that hits you from left field.

Yesterday, I left work and jumped in the car. It was about 95 degrees out, so I had the AC turned all the way up. There was a red pickup ahead of me as we left the parking lot, and when he got up to the road he just stopped. After a few seconds, I was resisting the urge to honk at him “Boston style”. But as it dragged on, I finally decided to drive around him. I had no idea what he was doing, and didn’t really care.

As I pulled alongside him, I noticed he had his window down and was waving at me. Thinking he needed directions or something, I rolled down my window. I couldn’t hear what he said at first – I had to turn down the AC too. As soon as I did, I realized what he was saying. “The music’s playing…”

On military bases, the base PA system will play music at the end of the day, normally 5:00pm. When that music plays, everybody on base stops what they’re doing and listens until the music finishes – if you’re driving, you stop in place on the road and listen. It’s definitely surreal the first time you get caugh up in it. I had been caught in it before, but because of my AC I didn’t hear the music while I was sitting in the car. Fortunately, I only made an ass out of myself to that one guy instead of the whole base! But having to conform to unexpected social norms is eerily similar whether it’s in a foreign land like Japan, or just around the block at a military base…

Apparently Senators Schumer and Graham are upset enough about Iran’s efforts to monitor it’s citizens’ Internet activities that they want to ban Seimens and Nokia from future contracts with the federal government. According to Graham…

“The Internet has proven to be one of the strongest weapons in the hands of the Iranian people seeking freedom and trying to chart a new destiny for their country. Companies that provide technology to the Iranian regime to control the Internet must be forced to pay a heavy price.”

Why aren’t the Senators going after NSA’s activities in the Pinwale program with the same fervor? Or is it only wrong to meddle with the Internet when you’re not the US government?

So, one of the big attack modes in computer security these days is “phishing”. Phishing is when someone induces a victim to disclose a username & password (or other important identity information) using something that appears to be a valid website. For example, someone might setup a fake Bank of America website, then email that link to thousands of people asking them to login and confirm their account. Even if only 1% of the recipients falls for the trick, the attacker gets access to hundreds or thousands of bank accounts.

One of the most important countermeasures to this attack is user education. Organizations have spent lots of money trying to educate users that they should never disclose their password to another site. Things as simple as never opening links from an email and verifying the “SSL Lock” icon on your browser are cornerstones to this process. But more importantly, users should never give their password to a site with the wrong URL. In our example above, if the link in the email goes to http://bankofamerica.com@geocities.com/~spammer/fake_login.html, the goal of user education is to get the user to stop and say “Hey, that doesn’t look right….” In fact, social media pioneer MySpace spent a lot of time and effort combating these exact types of attacks through user education efforts on their login screens and banners.

That brings us to Twitter. There appears to be a whole universe of Twitter related tools and websites that ask you to use your Twitter username and password to access their services. This is a bad idea! First, in the specific instance, we are building up a huge body of websites with access to our Twitter accounts – a break in at any of them could result in massive compromise of Twitter accounts, regardless of Twitter’s policies and security controls.

But more importantly, Twitter’s importance to the “youngins” means that we’re now raising a whole new generation of Internet users that are 1) vulnerable to exploitation because of their age and now 2) trained by prior experience that sharing their username/password with other sites is a good idea. Now, I’m not one of those people that will do anything “for the children”, but this is still a scary prospect.

And before you pooh-pooh me, how many of you out there are using the same username and password for a lot of your social media sites, email accounts, Amazon, Etsy, etc.? I’d be shocked if most kids have strong passwords let alone separate passwords for all the different sites they use on a daily basis. So these phishing vulnerabilities are only going to be more important as time goes on. And the really scary thing – even if you and your kids are smart enough to avoid these pitfalls, the vulnerability has what we call a “network effect”. Even if YOU aren’t vulnerable, someone you’re connected to probably is. And that can be just as bad. Think your 13 year old would never talk to strangers online? What about when his friend’s account is compromised and some stranger is using that friend’s Facebook or Twitter to talk to your 13 year old? Still feel safe? Think you would know better even if your 13 year old wouldn’t? What if your best friend sent you a Facebook message to let you know that the party tomorrow is cancelled? How paranoid are you willing to be….?

What can be done? Well, for starters, Twitter should implement an API Key approach to programmatic sharing like the one used by Flickr (or some other well engineered security mechanism for sharing access). Then they need to lead the charge in educating users not to share their passwords with a site that doesn’t end in “twitter.com”. And parents, don’t forget to spend some time with your kids – and not just explaining this stuff!

The Boston Globe has reached a deal with their labor unions to hopefully keep the paper running. Turns out one of the most contentious parts of the negotiations had nothing to do with compensation – it had to do with guaranteed lifetime employment. This is one of the things that makes my mind spin at the labor unions.
I’ve never worked in a unionized job, so maybe I just lack some critical angle on the whole deal here. But it seems pretty clear that the unions are no longer a bastion of hope against the unfair practices of evil management. It’s one thing to organize against sweatshop wages and unsafe work environments. But it’s a joke to organize so you blackmail management into a suicide pact – and that’s what lifetime employment guarantees are. When business is growing, there’s no real impact to an enterprise from that agreement. But it’s no wonder that management at any enterprise needs to get those provisions struck when business is weak.
As the economic downturn picked up over this last year, I’ve consistently heard stories about how unions have threatened the economic viability of businesses. The obvious examples from the Detroit car companies are just the tip of the iceberg. Unionized labor may have been a good thing in the past, but I have to wonder if there will be a point in time when government labor regulations will reduce unions to nothing but a poison pill that threatens both management AND labor with their demands.

Bet you think this is about Iraq, right?
Wrong. This is about San Bernardino County in California, USA. That’s right, US Marines assisted the California Highway Patrol with a DUI checkpoint on a public highway. Now, this isn’t like tanks rolling into Tianamen Square, I admit. But if you’ve heard of Posse Comitatus you know that the military isn’t supposed to be used for police actions inside our own borders.
This is definitely a bad trend….
via Clint.

One of my chief peeves with the auto bailout has been the persistent assertion that the “Big 3″ are the last hope for American manufacturing. But Newsweek has an article about the other automotive sector in this country – the non-union southern-based “foreign” cars made in America.

MSNBC has posted another article talking about how prisoners were tortured as part of the war on terror. Honestly, it makes me sick to my stomach to read things like this:

Ruhal Ahmed, a Briton who was captured in Afghanistan, describes excruciating sessions at Guantanamo Bay. He said his hands were shackled to his feet, which were shackled to the floor, forcing him into a painful squat for periods of up to two days.
“You’re in agony,” Ahmed, who was released without charge in 2004, told Reprieve. He said the agony was compounded when music was introduced, because “before you could actually concentrate on something else, try to make yourself focus on some other things in your life that you did before and take that pain away.
“It makes you feel like you are going mad,” he said.

and….

[Donald Vance of Chicago, held at a detention center in Iraq: ] “I had no blanket or sheet. If I had, I would probably have tried suicide,” he said. “I got to a few points toward the end where I thought, ‘How can I do this?’ Actively plotting, ‘How can I get away with it so they don’t stop it?”‘
Asked to describe the experience, Vance said: “It sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate your own thoughts when you’re in an environment like that.”
He was released after 97 days.

Those are the stories of the people that the US couldn’t earn a conviction against. Welcome to the treatment you can expect at the hands of the “greatest country on earth” as some “patriots” like to claim. Here’s a news flash for you – Donald Vance was a US citizen, held by the US, with no recourse to the courts. What does that mean? It means each and every one of us better realize that it could happen to us.
If you believe America should be a beacon of freedom to the world, then it’s time to start getting our government to believe in the freedom and dignity of individuals.