flwyd | Tirism (Reply)

Don't argue amongst yourselves
Because of the loss of me
I'm sitting amongst yourselves
Don't think you can't see me
Don't argue amongst yourselves
Because of the loss of me
I haven't gone anywhere
but out of my body

Reach out and you'll touch me
Make effort to speak to me
Call out and you'll hear me
Be happy for me

[Ullean pipe solo]

Don't argue amongst yourselves
Because of the loss of me
I haven't gone anywhere
but out of my body

Reach out and you'll touch me
Make effort to speak to me
Call out and you'll hear me
Be happy for me

Reach out and you'll touch me
Make effort to speak to me
Call out and you'll hear me
Be happy for me

-- Afro Celt Sound System, "Release"

Quickies

Your daily irony: From Experian's "Request a copy of your credit report" page:
American Express, VISA, MasterCard or Discover is accepted for purchase of your online credit report.
That's sort of like paying by check in preparation to open a checking account.

The New Age movement should start a Chakra and Aura campaign.

At the Afro Celts concert at Chautauqua, they ended by telling the audience "God bless yourselves." This is a profoundly wonderful statement, because it acknowledges the divinity of each person and their opportunity for self-empowerment, all within the envelope of a "God is great, I am very small" standard phrase.

The concert itself was great. I went to the Chautauqua concert because my other plan for the evening fell through. I danced in the grass behind the concert hall and had much more room to move than the people sitting inside. Since I already had a ticket to the Tuesday show, I bussed down to the Gothic (a cool theatre, by the way) and had just as much fun dancing on the crowded dance floor. They were a really entertaining band to watch, with a lot of back and forth between drummers (they have four) and some instruments you don't see every day. A thrown broken drumstick landed at my feet so I got a souvenir in addition to a signed copy of their new CD (which is good too). At times they had all 10 musicians on stage at once, and several of them played two or three instruments in the same song. The bagpiper/fiddler/flutist/tin whistler was a really cute Black Irish girl, too.

Bring 'Em On

Other than President Bush admitting he lied (in his 6th press conference in two and a half years -- 1/5th of Clinton and 1/10th of his father in similar time spans), DARPA dropped their program for gambling on terrorism. Press at Quicken, Bloomberg, and Slashdot (which has some informative and insightful comments). The project's website has been reduced to <html><body></body></html>, but you can see the archived version at cryptome.

In short, investors would buy and sell "futures" for terrorist acts. It's a well established financial activity in areas like energy and agriculture. Participants would buy and sell contracts keyed to possible events, such as Saddam Hussein being killed in the next three months. People with inside information (or just a hunch) would promise to conduct future transactions at a fixed price that will be advantageous, given what they think will happen to the price. Analysts would then examine the market to determine what experts thought would happen, and then (presumably) make special preparations for those events.

What this boils down to is organized and analyzed betting on assassinations, terrorist attacks, political overthrow, and so forth. Laypeople are unsurprisingly shocked to hear about the project, which sounds mindbogglingly outrageous to the uninitiated. However, it's important to understand what this program was about, because it highlights some important trends.

Futures markets can often prove to be powerful predictors of future events because the collect and filter expert opinion. They're effective, in part, because people stand to make or lose money based on their predictions, so it's in their interest to act according to their best guess from all available data. However, there are several reasons why terrorism is a bad arena for a futures market.

One common reaction is along the lines of "So you're inviting al-Qaeda to attack and make money on it?" This isn't necessarily the case. Terrorists and their financial backers wouldn't participate if they thought they'd get in trouble or if they thought their participation would foil their own plot. The idea works if non-insider experts participate. For instance, CIA, FBI, and NSA agents, news analysts, and regional experts might all get different information suggesting a high attack probability and, through their market participation, indicate this. However, shady connections and laundered money tied to terrorist organizations could easily become a part of the system.
Another frequent reaction is "You're betting on people being killed?!?! Have you no compassion?" This expresses a gut reaction that this is a distasteful activity. The U.S. would certainly raise hell if the French were betting on Dubya's chances of assassination, a suicide bomb in the Pentagon, LSD in the drinking water, and so forth. This program could do some serious damage to diplomacy efforts.
More subtly, it could influence the events it predicts. If the market reveals a high probability of an attack in Egypt in the next month, the planners of that event could call it off, shifting to another time or place. Law Enforcement efforts are typically more successful when the criminals don't know the cops know what they're up to. Conversely, and much more dangerously, market participants with a vested interest in an attack who could prevent it might choose not to, since they'd lose money. Just before 9/11/01, there was a huge increase in futures sales (in which the seller predicted the price to go down) on United Airlines and American Airlines stock, which did in fact fall (no pun intended). Much of this money wasn't collected, and 9/11 conspiracy theorists have speculated wildly about it. But it's possible that someone had information that would have helped prevent the attacks, but didn't share it because they hoped to get rich on it.
Finally, the system could be abused in fatal ways. Consider the following scenario: The CEO of Haliburton, Bechtel, or General Electric has a vested interest in the U.S.A. going to war with Iran. They indicate, via the futures market, that they think an Iranian nuclear strike is likely. The administration uses this information to justify an attack and Persian regime change. The company (and, therefore, the CEO) makes bank not just on the futures market, but also on weapon sales and rebuilding contracts.

This doesn't mean that futures markets are a bad idea. Just that matters of life and death are perhaps not the right arena. From DARPA's page on the project:

The DARPA FutureMAP program will identify the types of market-based mechanisms that are most suitable to aggregate information in the defense context, will develop information systems to manage the markets, and will measure the effectiveness of markets for several tasks. Open issues that will drive the types of market include information security and participant incentives. A market that addresses defense-related events may potentially aggregate information from both classified and unclassified sources. This poses the problem of extracting useful data from markets without compromising national security. Markets must also offer compensation that is ethically and legally satisfactory to all sectors involved, while remaining attractive enough to ensure full and continuous participation of individual parties. The markets must also be sufficiently robust to withstand manipulation. FutureMAP will bring together commercial, academic, and government performers to meet these challenges.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (I might be wrong on the final 'A') has a long history of funding far-seeing research projects with applications much wider than military uses. Today's Internet, for instance, is a direct descendant of a DARPA funded project. They are also one of the primary funders of speech recognition technology, to mention just one area. The above paragraph sounds to me like a description intended to pique the interests of university economists who will solicit funding and produce research on the feasibility of markets as a tool in predicting future defense-related events that are only indirectly related to murder and terror.

One reason I'm registered as a Green, rather than a Libertarian, is my belief in free markets as a tool to be considered, rather than a holy solution to all problems.

Tiring Activity

I didn't get out of my hot bicycling adventure from a few weekends ago without any problems. My tire picked up a couple thorns, and by Thursday morning my tire was flat. I pulled it out, found the hole, patched it, removed the thorn, pumped it up, and went to work. It was a little low on air the next morning, but I took my pump to work. When I got out, the tire was completely flat. I pumped it up to go the couple miles to the Ragtime concert and made it there without a problem. On Saturday, I took the tube out again and found a second hole (and corresponding smaller thorn). I patched this one and put the bike back in the shed. On Sunday, it was flat again. I removed the faulty second patch and replaced it. It held air fairly well on Monday, but I bough a couple new tubes, since I was losing trust in it. A clerk at UBikes alerted me to the fact that I'd grabbed extra thin tubes, intended for racing, which are more expensive and less durable. I told him I wanted regular tubes, so he said he'd go grab some for me.

On Tuesday the tire was a little low on air, but made it to work okay. At 12:30 it was still holding, but at 2 it had lost all air. I'd planned to go straight from work to the bus for the Afro Celts concert, so I didn't have room to stick my pump. Fortunately, a kind cyclist offered me his as I was walking my bike a block from work, so I managed to make it home. I quickly tore out the doomed tire and installed the new one, grabbed a bite, and biked to the bus station.

On Wednesday, as I turned onto the sidewalk next to work, I went over a small cement enclosure that I've hit every day all summer. Only this time, my new tire blew out. *grumble* After work, I demonstrated my tube-removing expertise to discover two lateral holes. Turns out I'd ended up with a thin tube after all. I only had one large patch on me, so I cut it in half, but despite lots of glue, couldn't suppress all of the leaking air. I pumped it up and rode on a prayer that Performance was open until 8. I was in luck. I bought three new tubes, two tube liners, a plastic tire iron (figuring screwdriver scrapes weren't helping things), and a Presta/Schrader converter. You know what they say about grocery shopping when you're hungry? I was buying tire accessories with a flat.

I installed a new tube and the guard in my rear tire and haven't had a problem yet. Which is quite alright. I don't feel the need for any more practice removing my wheels. Anyone want to start a futures market on flat tires?