The Opposite of "Get Rich Quick" isn't "Get poor soon"....

Nick Kristoff has a great story in the NYT about a reverse get-rich-quick-scheme:

Kevin Salwen, a writer and entrepreneur in Atlanta, was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, back from a sleepover in 2006. While waiting at a traffic light, they saw a black Mercedes coupe on one side and a homeless man begging for food on the other.

“Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” Hannah protested. The light changed and they drove on, but Hannah was too young to be reasonable. She pestered her parents about inequity, insisting that she wanted to do something.

“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.

 Yep. These idiots sold their $1.6 million dollar house and donated half the money to charity.

Then they wrote a book about it.

I'm disgusted. Here is why:

1. That little girl has a GREAT topic to write about in her admissions essay for Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, etc. I would kill for a great topic like that. As long as she isn't a complete knuckle dragger, she's virtually guaranteed acceptance. Is it worth $800k to get into a top school? I don't know, it seems like you'd be better off making a donation to the school of your choice - but - I suppose you need access to an alumni network to know who to talk to about a donation and you still risk the girl not getting accepted to the school you made the donation to whereas with this method she's got a all access path she can use to apply to many schools.

2. Whenever Earnest Hemingway wrote a hero the character would often perform selfless acts without the desire for recognition. These bozos didn't have that problem. If you're really such a hero, why don't you donate the money anonymously? But no, not in America, not in the year 2010. Today, you do something "good" (I'll to that in a minute) and then you write a Oprah Book about the event. I'm going to go out on a limb and say between the advance, royalties, maybe an eventual movie deal (Tom Hanks and Sandra Bollock, I say), plus their daughter's acceptance to a Ivy League school I bet they recouped most of that $800 grand.

3. Oh, and the economics of the whole thing is just ridiculous. Why not say to your daughter, "How did the guy in the Mercedes get the Mercedes? What do you think he does for a living? Do you think he's maybe made better choices then the bum?" The answer to all those questions is that the guy in the Mercedes was almost certainly a highly educated professional who invested many years into becoming proficient at something whereas the bum probably wouldn't know what to do with money if you gave it to him. But you won't get into Harvard writing that in your admissions essay.

What this family did was a get-rich-quick-scheme in reverse.

Get rich-quick-schemes are dangerous.    

The money they donated to a charity in Ghana would have done more good if it had been invested in a business in Ghana.

But more important is the implication that there is a "simple" solution to poverty. The implication is that if everyone would just cut their consumption in half poverty could be eliminated and the ECONOMY would be sated by the sacrifice. This theory was recently pilloried in a source far more scholarly and reputable than the NYT's Op-Ed page. 

The only solution to poverty is to grow the economy. You cannot grow the economy easily. Growing the economy requires investment in companies that invest in innovation and new technologies. Growing the economy also requires years of education in science and mathematics.

The Next Ten Years

Curzon, of Coming Anarchy, has an interesting blog post entitled, Ahh, the Futility of Strategic Forecasting…, which details some of the trials and tribulations of trying to guess what sorts of challenges a nation-state may face several decades out. For example, he points out that:

1900 - If you had been a strategic analyst for the world’s leading power, you would have been British, looking warily at Britain’s age old enemy: France.
1910 - You would now be allied with France, and the enemy would now be Germany
1920 - Britain and its allies had won World War I, but now the British found themselves engaged in a naval race with its former allies the United States and Japan.
1930 - For the British, naval limitation treaties were in place, the Great Depression had started and defense planning for the next five years assumed a “ten year” rule—no war in ten years. British planners posited the main threats to the Empire as the Soviet Union and Japan, while Germany and Italy were either friendly or no threat.
1936 - A British planner would now posit three great threats: Italy, Japan, and the worst, a resurgent Germany, while little help could be expected from the United States.
1940 - The collapse of France in June left Britain alone in a seemingly hopeless war with Germany and Italy with a Japanese threat looming in the Pacific. America had only recently begun to scramble to rearm its military forces.
1950 - The United States was now the world’s greatest power, the atomic age had dawned, and a “police action” began in June in Korea that was to kill over 36,500 Americans, 58,000 South Koreans, nearly 3,000 Allied soldiers, 215,000 North Koreans, 400,000 Chinese, and 2,000,000 Korean civilians before a cease-fire brought an end to the fighting in 1953. The main opponent in the conflict would be China, America’s ally in the war against Japan.

With this challenge in mind, he asks C.A. readers to make predictions about the next ten years. And since nobody likes a wishy-washy visionary, here goes nothing:

U.S.Politics


By 2014, the American political system will face its Waterloo. Four or five weeks ago I would have suggested this involved the disillusion of the GOP, but after last Tuesday's vote in Massachusetts I'll say its a tossup about which party collapses over the next two election cycles. Frankly, if the Democrats can't pass ObamaCare with 60 votes in the senate, a huge majority in the house and control of the White House, they don't deserve to be a party anyway.

But the election of Scott Brown highlights another issue which the U.S. will have to wrestle with over the next 2 elections cycles - the need to have a super majority to do anything at all in the senate. We will face a "Waterloo" when some sort of crisis - be it natural disaster, terrorist attack or financial crisis - will expose the senate as a hollow organization. Should such a crisis happen - particularly if the crisis involves massive inflation or the U.S. defaulting on its debts, American may have no choice but to convene a new constitutional convention and design a parliamentary system.

On the other hand, a new national party, perhaps spurred on by the "Tea Parties" could help create a sustainable centrist coalition. The Tea Parties, as they stand today, lack any sort of coherent policy position beyond "cut spending," etc, but as either the Democrats or GOP collapse its possible talented politicians will move to a viable 3rd party.

By the election of 2020 statehood for at least 1 Caribbean country will be a major campaign issue.

By 2020 marijuana will be sold over the counter in 10 states.

By 2020 gay marriage will be legal in at least half of the U.S.  

U.S. Economics 

On the economic front, 2020 will see a implosion of the "healthcare bubble". By the middle of the next decade,  most Western nations will be in a panic over he increasing cost of providing medical care to their aging populations. But at the same time, genetic engineering, nano machines and improving CPU power will be working from the other directions, making diagnosis, prevention and treatment easier and cheaper. 2020 will be the year that healthcare costs actually level off as increased understanding of the human genome and a program called "Google Doctor" will create "predictive medicine", which will allow for the prevention of most serious and chronic illnesses through gene therapy and other extremely early interventions.

By 2015, more people will be sent into low Earth orbit by private companies than by governments. By 2020 a private company will place a lander on the moon and a major business publication will publish an article entitled "Who Owns the Moon?" as entrepreneurs begin to press for a renegotiation of the mid-20th century outer space treaty, which does not provide for the allocation of property rights in outer space. Ultimately, there will have to be a "Homestead Act" of the 21st century to settle the question of who owns celestial bodies, especially resource rich asteroids.

By 2020 the iLanguage 3.0 App for the IPhone X is going to change the world. iLanguage will be a program which can interpret any known language into any other known language instantly.

By 2020, a online program known as "Google Lawyer" will be able to pass a legal Turing Test, by automatically compiling a legal brief that is indistinguishable from a brief written by top lawyers.

Geo Politics

By 2020, the worlds great powers, including China, Japan, the E.U. and the U.S. will continue to have a generally amicable and constructive relationship as the amount of economic and cultural connectivity continues to increase. The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. will have be economically connected to the point where a citizen of any one "Anglo-Sphere" nation will not need a visa to work or attend college in another.

In Europe and the Middle East, there will be much hand wringing over the large refugee camps that exist to house the several million survivors of the 2nd Russo-Iranian War (Also known as the Caucasus War of 2018 and the 3rd War of Soviet Reunification). The new secretary general of the U.N. will be elected on the promise to "finally de-radiate Moscow and Tehran" but he will privately admit that no one really knows how many years or how much money that project will take. Most serious observers will accept that large sections of both Iran and Russia will remain uninhabitable for maybe 100 years. 

Islamabad will be occupied by U.S., Afghan, E.U. and Chinese Peacekeepers whose job it will be to make sure the Indians keep their promise to leave Pashtunistan by 2025. 

 







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Stumbling Towards Bush 4.0 Territory

Looking back, president Bush went through three distinct iterations during his two terms in the White House.

Bush 1.0 (1998-September 10th, 2001) During this phase Bush was the "compassionate conservative", successful and popular governor of Texas and a man who knew that there were republican solutions to traditionally Democratic issues such as education.

Bush 2.0 (9/11 2001 - April 2004) This is the version that got up on pile of ruble in the days following 9/11 and promised a group of workers at ground zero that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." It was this notion of Bush as the warrior, the protector, that led directly to his reelection in November in 2004. However, by November of '04 the creation of the third version of Bush had already begun.

Bush 3.0 (April of 2004-1/09) In April of 2004 Rumsfeld offered Bush his resignation because of gross abuses of Iraqi POWs. Bush refused to accept the resignation. This is the president Bush that is most remembered today; the man who let events get the better of him. The high - or low - point of Bush 3.0 was his "heckuva job Brownie" moment in the days following Hurricane Katrina.

And so it came to pass in November of 2008 then senator Barack Obama was elected to bring change. Throughout his campaign, Obama promised repair the damage done by the Bush administration and restore transparency and accountability to government.

But that was Obama .07, the public beta released for testing before all the bugs had been ironed out.

The first official release of Obama 1.0 has thus far proved buggy and has often been corrupted by errant files left over from the previous software (Bush 3.0). And on Christmas day, 2009, the Obama OS suffered its first full-scale kernel panic requiring a complete reboot. So far, the administration has decided to release a patch, which is designed to correct the security flaw in Obama 1.0 and update the system to Obama 1.01. Unfortunately, this may not be enough to really correct the security flaws:

Everyone who read the name "Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab" prior to December 25, 2009 should be reprimanded and fired.

The White House findings state that, "Mr. Abdulmutallab possessed a U.S. visa, but this fact was not correlated with the concerns of Mr. Abdulmutallab's father about Mr. Abdulmutallab's potential radicalization." It's an embarrassing sentence of bureaucratese in its own right, but more so when considered in context. The State Department didn't revoke Abdulmutallab's visa because an office clerk misspelled his name in a database.

Has no one in the intelligence community ever used Google? When "Abdulmutalab" was typed in, did the computer not ask, "Did you mean 'Abdulmutallab'?"

Another admission that crosses the threshold of bewildering into the realm of criminally negligent: the National Counterterrorism Center has a database of all known and suspected international terrorists. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was added to that database.

But that database does not feed directly into the TSA No-Fly List.

Who more than known terrorists belong on the No-Fly List? There should be no human involvement required here. One line of SQL database code could have averted disaster.

According to the White House, when the CIA and NCTC got the name of a radicalized militant from the militant's own father, and a warning that he was planning an attack, they did not search "all available databases to uncover additional derogatory information." How many databases are there? And how many terrorist databases must one appear in before he or she is considered a threat to U.S. national security?

This wasn't a ticking time bomb situation involving a lone wolf under the radar. Such a terrorist will succeed, and there's nothing we can do about it, aside from remaining vigilant. But the United States already knew about Abdulmutallab, and learned of his intentions on November 18th -- a month before he struck.

Most grating in the White House report is the repeated notion that Abdulmutallab's plot failed. It didn't. Nine years after 9/11, and after billions of spent dollars in needless security, confiscated fingernail clippers, and dumped breast milk, he succeeded in smuggling explosives onto an airliner destined for American soil. He succeeded in igniting the explosive. If not for dumb luck involving bad chemistry and a brave Dutch film director, there might today be a smoldering crater in Detroit.

Worse, there are a number of indications that the Bush 3.0 software, which was supposedly deleted, may be coming back:

After the attack, President Obama remained in Hawaii and enjoyed a Christmas vacation on the golf course. After the attack, National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter took a six-day skiing holiday. After the attack, CIA director Leon Panetta remained in beautiful Monterey, California. The nation, the administration claims, can be governed from afar, and that's probably true. But when terrorists attempt a major strike on U.S. soil, isn't it a good idea to have someone in the White House situation room above the rank of janitor?

This tells me that Obama 1.0 - now 1.01 - is treading dangerously close to becoming Bush 4.0. And all it takes in one successful attack inside the U.S. and I have no doubt that the house and senate will pursue there own method of deleting the corrupt software, which will be very divisive and dramatic for the whole country. 

A Step in the Right Direction

I applaud the president for taking responsibility for the Christmas Day Attack -aka The Boxer Rebellion (he he) - but I fear his proposed changes, absent the ending of a career or two, will simply create more paper shuffling and CYA mentality:

The government will strengthen criteria for putting people on no-fly lists barring them from U.S. aircraft. Authorities will comb databases of people suspected of ties to terrorist organizations and determine whether any of them have U.S. visas. The man accused in the Christmas airliner attack, Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had a visa, even though he had recently been added to a government watchlist.

What was the point of the terror watch list? I heard recently that there might be 500,000 names on the government's terror watch list. 500k isn't a "watch list", its like 50 divisions. If Al Qadea had 500k people they would attempt a conventional combined arms invasion of Egypt, not send some goon to blow up his pants on an airplane.

What I really want is a system to stop somebody from getting on a plane - not a scanner - not a series of questions, but a system whereby a CIA station chief receives a tip - say the name of a foreign national who is reasonably suspected of receiving training in martyrdom operations - and he can quickly - within maybe 1 or two minutes, tops, put out an APB to every entry point to not let someone with the following name, nationality, etc, cross. The technology required to do this is a very sophisticated and expensive piece of technology known as Gmail.

But the level of cooperation between the CIA, DOS and DHS is probably not possible, and the  devolution of authority into the hands of lowly CIA station chiefs (not really a lowly position, but in the mind of some deputy COS in D.C. they are) would cause fits back at both Langley and Foggy Bottom but I believe it is an aspirational goal.

Also, why is a person who is banned from England allowed to enter the U.S.? Anyone barred from entering either the U.K. or E.U. should undergo a extra layer of scrutiny before being allowed entry into the U.S.

Obamacare, creating a nation of Californias, pt. 2

It seems that Ben Nelson is now opposed to the special bribe deal he received in exchange for voting for the health care bill.

The Democrat wouldn't say who he has spoken to regarding the so-called "Cornhusker Kickback" but that he would see to it that Nebraska doesn't get a special deal.

"At the end of the day, whatever Nebraska gets will be available to all states," Nelson said during a conference call with reporters.

Nelson provided the crucial 60th vote that brought the reform bill to the full Senate after winning concessions to limit the availability of abortions in insurance sold in newly created exchanges. Among other things, he was promised federal funding to cover Nebraska's entire cost of a Medicaid expansion included in the bill. Other states will have to begin picking up a portion of the added expanse beginning in 2017.

Nelson has said he didn't ask for special treatment for his state.

Nebraska wasn't alone in getting Medicaid breaks. Vermont, Louisiana and Massachusetts also got help with their programs.

Nelson said Thursday that if he can't secure a similar deal for every state, he wants states to be freed from paying the cost of Medicaid expansion. That could mean eliminating the provision, finding another way to pay for it or allowing states to opt out.

Allowing states an opt out seems an odd way of expanding coverage, and sense that is ostensibly one of the primary goals of Obamacare it seems counter productive to allow it. More sensible - if the goal is to cover everyone - is to pay for as much of the expansion as possible at the federal - as opposed to the state - level.

Of course, that still doesn't address how the new federal spending will be paid for, but at least this change would mitigate some of the damage Obamacare could do to cash-strapped state governments.

Let's see if house and senate leaders call Nelson's bluff take him up on his offer.

Madame Secretary, resign pt. 2

Perhaps I was a bit hasty when I called for the resignation of the secretary of DHS.

Thinking back, I now wish I had called for the resignation of the director and all deputy directors of the CIA as well whomever is directly in charge of the foreign service.

And the secretary of DHS.

Here is why:

ABC ferreted out the truth behind news reports that Umar Abdulmutallab's father alerted the U.S. Embassy about his concern that his son had gotten involved with radicals. The way such reports were worded conveyed the idea that the CIA didn't have a smoking gun to work with. Actually, the CIA had a smoking cannon handed to them.

ABC learned that what really happened is that Umar phoned his father to say he was calling for the last time because the people he was with in Yemen were going to destroy his SIM card. That would make his phone unusable. And that was as much telling his father he was entering the final phase of training for a terrorist suicide mission.

His father immediately alerted Nigerian intelligence officials that he was afraid his son was preparing for a terrorist mission in Yemen. The officials then brought him directly into the presence of the CIA station chief in Abuja on November 19.

So it's not as if some worried father wandered in off the street to unburden himself to a clerk at a U.S. embassy. And note that the Nigerian intelligence officials didn't run the risk of getting trapped in voice mail hell or hearing, 'I'm sorry your email got lost in the shuffle.' They made Double Dutch sure the station chief heard the father's statement and understood its import and urgency.

What happened after the station chief took in the father's account? Report, file, and forget:

The next day the embassy sent out a thin report to U.S. embassies around the world warning Adbulmutallab may be associating with extremists in Yemen. The CIA official compiled two more robust reports following the meeting with the suspect's father. One was sent back to CIA's Langley, VA [headquarters]; the other remained in draft form in Nigeria and was not circulated until after the attempted attack on Christmas Day, according to a U.S. official.[...]

The White House better be on notice, because if something goes bump in the night in the near future a quick impeachment is sure to follow. I realize there will be a political cost - short term, in my opinion - for a major house cleaning in a mid-term election year, but the Dems are toast in November anyway, and I think the American people would give the president a lot of credit for - shock! - holding the people responsible for our safety responsible for this lapse.