Microsoft Office 2007 commentary

OK, this isn't particularly "political" commentary, so forgive me. (Disclaimer: I worked at Microsoft for many years.)

First, a bit of typewriter history. We're all used to the quirky and odd layout of keys on our keyboard, called "QWERTY" after the keys in the top left row. It's a truly bizarre arrangement of keys, something noticed by everyone that learns to type. Legend has it that QWERTY was designed specifically to slow typists down, to prevent typewriters from jamming up. So along came Mr. Dvorak who invented the Dvorak keyboard layout, which was demonstrably more efficient than QWERTY for people that mastered it. Yet somehow, despite being better, it never caught on. People learned QWERTY, and Dvorak just wasn't enough better to justify re-learning how to type.

Which brings me to Office 2007. I've been using it for a little more than a month now, and (metaphorically) it feels like they "upgraded" my keyboard from QWERTY to Dvorak, but without giving me anything new or noticeably better in return.

Microsoft noticed that the most common feature requests they received were for functionality that was already in the product, but which people somehow didn't discover. As a result, the biggest new feature in Office appears to be that they've redone the UI, getting rid of the menu bar in favor of big "ribbons" (basically souped up toolbars) that do a better job of exposing the functionality in the product.

Making the existing functionality more discoverable certainly is a reasonable goal. It's just about 10 years too late. Good or bad, most people have figured out the basic UI model at varying degrees of proficiency. Designing for the "novice" user may have been a wise goal then, but today there are too few "novice" users compared to experienced users. If the old UI was a keyboard layout, it was QWERTY.

This could have been fine, except that they removed the menu bar from most (but not all!) places in the UI. This move is especially puzzling because there is no reason I can see that the menu bar and the ribbon cannot co-exist, and the rest of windows has menu bars.

The net result is that existing users are actually quite a bit less efficient while they hunt through the ribbons for functionality that they know exists, and used to know how to access. Keyboard shortcuts have changed, the whole taxonomy of command layout has changed, with only a very few minor functional enhancements apparent throughout the suite.

But I suppose it's not all bad, I suppose. It may not be an improvement, but they made performance slower than previous versions too!

Timetable on Iraq

I've blogged previously that I believe that a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is a bad idea; it merely tells the bad guys that they can wait you out and you'll be gone. And now the senate and house have passed bills that contain timetables, which Bush has threatened to veto.

Yet I'm about to make a suggestion to President Bush that seemingly contradicts myself:

Mr. President, you should embrace these bills, not veto them. And then take it as a challenge to beat the timetable by knocking some Iraqi leader heads together and finally making some forward progress on achieving the stability that you have not achieved over the past 4 years. In particular, start pursuing a political solution with the same intensity that you have pursued a military solution. (Fareed Zakaria has a great article this week pointing out how important the political side of this is - and how little progress you have made.) Make it your focus.

Think about it: it's the ultimate Judo move. Right now the Democrats have the momentum, largely because of your handling of the war. They've played right into your hands, doing precisely the sort of "timetable to failure" that you've said they would do. Call their bluff. If you can clean up the political mess, you can begin the withdrawal early and you become a hero for actually succeeding there AND bringing home the troops. Everybody wins, you and republicans in particular.

After all, isn't the issue not whether or when to withdraw (I'd hope that everyone - even you - wants to withdraw at some point before eternity), but rather under what conditions? After all, the problem with a timetable isn't the fact that it's a timetable; the problem with a timetable is that it implies that you pull out even if conditions do not warrant doing so. (And if you are willing to extend the timetable due to conditions on the ground, then what is the point of the timetable?)

But by fighting this, you give credence to the idea that you don't really want victory, you just want to stay in Iraq. I may think that a timetable is a bad idea, but I have to say that staying in Iraq with no visible political progress is much worse. Heck, even pulling back to Kuwait and letting the ethnic groups butcher each other until they realize that they have to solve it themselves, and THEN going back in to help them would be better than the path we seem to be on now.

You should take the date not as a micromanaging constraint, but as a challenge, as a dare. The Dems don't think you can do it. Why not give them the ultimate humiliation and show them that they're wrong? Vetoing the bill, though, just plays into their hands.

Gonzalez and Rove

I find the scandal surrounding the firing of the prosecutors to be somewhat fascinating theater. It is an interesting question of how you can serve at the pleasure of the president yet not be beholden to his political priorities. After all, if the president's law enforcement priorities were immigration enforcement (for political reasons or otherwise) and the prosecutor were to focus instead on drug enforcement, nobody would argue that the president would be out of bounds in replacing that prosecutor with one that reflected his priorities.

Yet even if the firings are technically legal that doesn't mean that they are justifiable or ethical. The nation's judicial system rests on perception of fairness and being free from overt political influence. If it's not OK for a congressman to call a prosecutor to ask about whether they are pursuing a case (it isn't OK), then there is clearly something wrong with firing prosecutors who for failing to be "loyal" enough to the president, and congress is thus absolutely justified to investigate.

Which brings me to two observations:

The first is that Alberto Gonzalez has by all accounts been less than credible - his testimony has been incomplete at best, lying at worst. 10 years ago, Clinton was impeached not because he got a blowjob but because he lied about getting a blowjob. Even if the firings turn out to have been OK (a big "if"), it sure seems to me that Gonzalez's shifting testimony falls in the same category as Clinton's.

The second observation is that Bush will let Miers and Rove testify, but only with no oath, no transcript, and no public. He's claiming executive privilege, but I don't see how that can hold up in the face of what amounts to an investigation of wrongdoing. (I have no idea if that's true from a legal perspective, I'm just talking from the perspective of what's right and what engenders trust in the system.) He calls the investigations "political theater" rather than a search for the truth. But given the suspect testimony to date, Congress is quite right to assume that "the truth" will not come from a closed-door no-oath no-transcript session. If Bush really wanted the truth (and truly believed in accountability), wouldn't he demand at least an oath and transcript, even if it's behind closed doors?

Bold thoughts on public education

Over the past 6 months I've been volunteering for Social Venture Partners, focusing on grantmaking for K-12 non-profits. And I've just recently started working at Infilearn.com, which is working in the educational space as well. Therefore, I am an expert in all things education, and above reproach. Well, OK, so no, I'm pretty new to the space and know almost nothing about it. However, hopefully that also means that I have no preconceived notions and a possibility of a fresh perspective. (Or, I could just make all the old mistakes over again.) But since I'm in this space, I will probably blog about it periodically. And one thing I have learned is that our educational system is, if not broken, certainly not nearly as effective as it can or should be.

Recently as a result of my SVP membership, I received a transcript of a talk that Donald Nielsen gave to the Seattle Rotary club back in November. I haven't decided yet whether I agree with his suggestions, but I certainly agree with the questions that motivate them. Since I got permission to host the transcript, I thought I would share it.

Darwin's theory of evolution is wrong

No, I'm not running for the school board in Kansas. But with all the debate in recent months over the teaching of Intelligent Design (within the much longer-running debate about teaching of evolution overall), I thought I'd point out something subtle but important that I think gets missed in all of the debate. Specifically, the debate gets so distracted on the "correctness" of the theory that even people who accept evolutionary theory forget that, well, it's almost certainly mistaken.

Why on earth would we think otherwise? No scientific theory that I can think of to date has withstood the test of time intact - heck, we're even refining evolution on an almost daily basis with new techniques, as this recent Newsweek article shows. But here's the thing: just because evolution is flawed hardly means that it's worthless or that we shouldn't teach it.

My favorite example here is Newtons laws of motion. Some 300 years ago, Newton proposed his theories of motion, gravity, inertia, that sort of stuff. These theories worked great, they made predictions that could be tested, they helped people engineer all sorts of things, and everyone assumed that these theories were how the world worked. Except for one small problem: these theories were, well, wrong. 200 years after Newton, a troublemaker named Albert Einstein showed that Newton was wrong. Not completely off-the-mark wrong, but at-the-edges wrong; specifically, Newton's theories break down when you get into the world of the very small (atomic level), the very large (universes/black holes), and the very fast (near the speed of light).

But here's the thing: for everyday scenarios, the difference between what Newton says and what Einstein says are so small as to be essentially immeasurable. In other words, Newton got it so close that his theories are worth teaching and the most useful ones out there in the day-to-day world, even if they are only a good approximation of reality.

And it took 200 years for Einstein to show that Newton was only an approximation. This is why I bet that within another 200 years, we'll find a better approximation than Einstein offered, and why I am convinced that Darwin will ultimately be shown to be merely a very good approximation. And as a good approximation, it absolutely makes sense to teach it. Good science is all about approximations - every theory has rough edges that are continually refined and occasionally replaced (as Einstein did with Newton's rough edges).

The Intelligent Design folks, of course, latch on to the rough edges of evolution as evidence in favor of their "theory" (which is not actually deserving of that word in any scientific sense of the word). Of course, pointing to the holes in one theory as a means of supporting your own theory is like saying that since drinking water doesn't explain why people get cancer that they must instead get cancer from carrots. It's bad logic, but then the creationist crowd is pursuing an ideological agenda, not a scientific one, so I suppose bad logic is par for the course.

Global warming also suffers this. Lots of global warming doubters make the same logical mistake as the intelligent design crowd by pointing to the rough edges of global warming (of which there are many) as evidence that it's bunk. And many folks that accept global warming as real tend to ignore those rough edges, which is probably just as dangerous. There is certainly more about our climate that we don't know than there is that we do know. This doesn't mean we shouldn't make the most of what we do know, just that we shouldn't pretend that we know more than we do either.

Anyhow, I would caution against too much overconfidence from the scientific community that just because there is little or no scientific debate over a theory that the theory is somehow "done;" we just get better and better approximations. Global warming and Evolution are both pretty darned good approximations, but they are just that. Let's teach them, and teach our kids to extend these theories as well.

Affordable Health Care

A friend who has been reading my posts suggested that I try to tackle affordable health care. More to the point, since I don't think I have a prayer of "tackling" it (especially since it is such a complex space that I know almost nothing about), that I at least do what I think I'm pretty good about doing: distilling it down to the key issues so that at least one can have an honest debate/discussion.

I think the premise of his suggestion is a fair one: health care is broken. I did a quick Google search and found this site which I think sums up the problem: the United States spends more per capita than almost any other nation, yet each incremental dollar we spend does not appear to increase our longevity. I recognize that longevity and overall health are hardly the same thing, but they obviously correlate and it certainly illustrates the point.

I'll make an assertion from this sort of data that we have a highly inefficient system in terms of converting dollars into health care. If that's a controversial point, then I suppose the rest of this post is probably moot, but please indulge me on that. The question then is "how do we get a more efficient system?" My friend posed the question a bit differently, asking how we achieve affordable health care, but I'm deliberately reframing the question because I think that if we can make the system deliver health care more efficiently then I think we can deliver affordable health care. Heck, in the extreme case, look at the citation above. Cuba is just below us in life expectancy, yet spending ~4% what we spend. I'm not proposing that we adopt the Cuban system, but it shows that there is a long way we go, and if we could get even 20% more health benefit per unit of health care delivered, I think the whole notion of "affordable health care" becomes much more realistic.

Broadly speaking, I think there are two sources of inefficiencies: transactional and allocation. Maybe there are others, but these two stick out to me.

The first is the inefficiencies along a single health-care transaction. This includes things like health insurance overhead, malpractice insurance overhead (which is probably a topic all by itself), and in fact a whole slew of crazy policies that result in perverse incentives. My favorite example is that most insurance policies cover Viagra and childbirth but don't cover birth control pills. Whose bright idea was that? There are secondary effects here two, I'm sure. For example, fear of malpractice lawsuits undoubtedly drives some degree of tests and treatments that are not strictly necessary. I can't prove it, but I'd guess that advertising of prescription drugs leads to increased patient consultations, which cost money even if no treatment ultimately ensues.

The second realm of inefficiency is in the allocation of health care. To pick an egregious and provocative example, how many people could have received basic primary care for what it cost to keep Terri Schiavo alive through even one court appeal? If we could allocate dollars more to the needy, we might get more longevity (or other "overall health") points per dollar. More to the point (and to the source of my friend's question), we have a huge imbalance in this country in who has access to health care, and for what. How do we make it so that nobody has to go without?

My friend raised an interesting analogy, which I think is quite good: food security. As a society, we have over the years decided that we don't think people should go hungry. And by and large, we do a pretty good job of ensuring that nobody need be hungry. We have welfare and soup kitchens and a wide variety of programs and charities that try to make sure that people don't starve to death. While hunger certainly has not been eliminated, the number of people that die of malnutrition annually is (thankfully) small. Yet we don't view food as an entitlement from our government or employer, nor as something that we don't have to pay for. And we don't resent the fact that eating at a fancy restaurant costs more than eating at the corner deli.

I'd suspect that this may be part of the key of the issue: how do we make health care security like food security?

A few things come to mind to consider:

• Provide skin in the game. One of the unintended consequences of insurance is that, in shielding the customer from the costs or risk associated with a transaction, the customer has no incentive to limit their use. I believe that this is part of the reason that low-income people (many uninsured) use the emergency room disproportionately - especially if they ultimately do not have to pay the cost of that emergency room usage. Basic marketplace principles: People need to have skin in the game if they are to make rational decisions beyond what is easiest for them. Think about how we would eat if food were provided by insurance. We'd be ordering lobster for dinner as often as we could, especially if the copay for lobster was the same as the copay for tofu.
  
• Perhaps I should reformulate the "skin in the game" argument as "return insurance to being insurance." The point of insurance, after all, is to spread risk, to limit downside exposure. Health insurance does that, but it's also become its own entitlement program, providing a "health benefit" rather than a safety net. (Again, we have food insurance in this country in a variety of forms, yet nobody feels weird paying for food out of pocket.) In the way that a portion of our telephone bill goes to ensure universal telephone coverage, we should consider funding the insurance side of the equation not just through individual premiums, but through a portion of what gets paid for pay-for-service.
• Increase choice and competition in the system. Easy to say but hard to do, but I can enumerate some of the places where increased competition could lead to greater efficiency:
  
• Choice of health plans. Most people are ensured by their employer, and they are stuck with a one-size-fits-all plan (or perhaps a menu of 2 or 3 options).
• Drug patent reform. I struggle with this because I really do believe in the value of patents and I recognize how much it costs to bring a new drug to market. But we also have companies that tweak a product slightly in order to extend a patent's lifetime, and who do not license cheap generics or competitors. I think we should try to find ways to compensate the companies for the investment and risk they bear to develop drugs, while making it as easy to crank up the volumes (and down the prices) on those drugs as we can.
• Malpractice reform, as a way to make it easier for more doctors to get into the field (increased competition), and to reduce the incentive for them to practice defensive medicine.
  

There's a tension in most debates about healthcare between the single-payer model and the pure free-market model. I think this is a false debate because neither model works. The single-payer model is inefficient because it lacks competition, choice, skin in the game, and often has rationing of service or long delays for service. The free-market model works much better, but only for those who can afford it. The trick is to take the best of both models: provide a safety net so that nobody goes without essential health care, but wring enough efficiency from the system so that most people can afford to pay for the health care that they need.

We're a Christian Country

That's the rationale I heard tonight explaining why we should be bothered by Keith Ellison's decision to take the oath of office on a Koran rather than a bible. We were founded by Christians, after all, so we're a Christian nation, and we should be using the Bible. (Some excellent commentary on this, IMO, is here.)

Well, yes and no. It is an undeniable fact that the founding fathers were pretty uniformly Christian. But I think this point is pretty irrelevant, and an exceptionally weak argument for justifying almost anything that it is used to justify. Actually, it's worse than that, because the logic of using this fact to justify fairly innocuous things like "in God we trust" on our currency (something I don't , by the way, have a problem with, but for other reasons), is equally valid for justifying quite noxious things as well.

I get why people are on edge about Muslims these days; saying that the western world is suffering from challenges in the Islamic world would be an understatement. Many Muslims have sworn to defeat the west and not enough Muslims have stood up to disavow that ideology. But letting that lead to intolerance and prejudice - and distorting our history to justify that - is hugely problematic.

And yes, the Bible and other Christian derived traditions have some pretty prominent places in our society. For example, people swear in court on a Bible to tell the truth. But the thing about this that many people seem to miss is that it isn't the Bible that's the relevant part of that particular process; it's the fact that people are swearing on something that means something to them. I frankly am quite comfortable with an oath to tell the truth made by an atheist if they simply raise their hand, but if they have to do it on a religious text which I know they do not accept, then I do not trust their oath either. (And my understanding is that the courts take the same view - raising one's hand is sufficient; certainly, that's all that was done in the court cases where I've been a juror).

There are at least two reasons why the "we were founded as a Christian nation" rationale is so bothersome to me. The first is the fact that it omits the minor detail of the constitution and the government that these Christians forefathers created. It is no accident that the government is explicitly a secular institution. The first amendment prohibits establishment of religion (or free exercise thereof - keeping government quite explicitly neutral!). And even more significantly, it requires no religious test to hold office. So Ellison's decision to use a Koran is constitutionally strictly a personal decision; it holds absolutely no legal or official significance. (And, of course, Jews and even other Christians have declined in the past to use a Christian Bible for their oath, somehow these decisions never generated controversy.) Our forefathers had the foresight to deliberately create a government that was secular and that stayed out of religious matters; this much is pretty clear, so I don't understand why they would do this if their intent was in fact to achieve the opposite (a Christian nation).

But the more disturbing reason that the "founding fathers were Christian" argument bothers me is that that same logic leads to some rather frightening conclusions. After all, our founding fathers were all white, so if the fact that they were Christian confers special benefits to the Christian Bible, then you have to also presume that being white also had special implications - perhaps that there is a problem with non-Europeans holding office. Oh, wait, they were all male, maybe that means that we shouldn't afford women equal rights. And of course, many of them owned slaves; I don't need to draw conclusions about what that must mean.

Our founding fathers were great men - visionaries who created the greatest nation on earth. But they were not without flaws, and it is dangerous and IMO frankly ignorant to assume that because they created a great nation that everything about them was a template for all to follow, and to then extrapolate from that. There is nothing wrong whatsoever with being white, Christian, male, or (gasp) all three, but there is quite a bit wrong with assuming that there is something wrong if you fail to meet all three criteria.

The Democrats latest tactic - be an ostrich

OK, so it's a myth that ostrich's bury their heads in the sand, but it makes for a good analogy.

The Democrats this week are looking to cut off funding for the war if Bush doesn't pull the troops out of Iraq by 2008. This seems to me to be an ostrich strategy, and comes from the following faulty reasoning: the war was a mistake, therefore we must undo it by pulling our troops out. Uh-huh. And if you close your eyes and click your heels 3 times, the situation will magically resolve itself.

(Before I get too harsh on the Democrats here, it bears pointing out that Bush's approach in Iraq is not exactly realistic either. Plan B in Iraq seems to be to try to make Plan A work, long after Plan A has shown itself to be a complete failure. Of course, picking on Bush is easy, so back to picking on Democrats, which, oh what the heck, it's just as easy...)

One can have reasonable debates about whether the war was a mistake. And regardless of where you fall on the question of whether starting this war was or was not a mistake, pretty much all reasonable person (i.e., anyone NOT in this White House) agrees that the execution of the war after the first few weeks has been pretty disastrous.

But nevertheless, here we are. And here's the problem: you can't put humpty dumpty back together again. I'll give Bush credit on one thing here: a timetable is a mistake. The mess we're in means that we can't leave a bigger mess behind. We need to leave behind something that won't be a breeding ground for terrorists, and that won't further erode what little credibility we have left in foreign policy. (And I frankly wish that Bush would spend his energy recognizing that this problem, not a military problem, is what we face.) We need to be establishing security yes, but we need to establish confidence building measures and not wait for the Iraqis to stand up but force them to stand up. As this happens, yes, we should withdraw, but absolute anarchy would result if we do so in the wrong way.

To the degree that our presence in Iraq is part of the problem, it may actually make sense to pull troops back early; I say "hooray" if this is the case. But it still makes my point above that the key metric is increasing stability, not numbers of soldiers coming home.

So I come back to the Democrat's tactic to try to force Bush's hand. It's stupid because it ignores reality, and it's stupid because it's about politics, not about doing the right thing.

In the spirit of not merely criticizing, I think there is a far more constructive way that the Democrats could exert pressure on Bush to do the right thing and (hopefully) still get the troops home sooner (and probably score political points as well). They should let Bush have all the funding he thinks he needs for Iraq. Yep, every last penny. But here's the catch: they should allocate zero new dollars out of the budget to pay for it. So for every dollar that he wants to spend on Iraq, he should have to cut it from somewhere else, or raise taxes (or cut his tax cuts) to pay for it. Bush currently faces no pressure on this front because everyone wants to support the troops. But if he has to actually make sacrifices/tradeoffs with his other priorities, I think his focus on the need to solve Iraq may increase a bit. At the very least, it would make explicit the sorts of tradeoffs that we are making implicitly today.
Here's my idea: give bush all the $ he wants, but make him pay for it out of his tax cuts or spending cuts elsewhere. I.e., if you think the strategy sucks, make it hurt to continue it.

Steve Jobs and DRM

Apple has been getting some flack lately for the closed nature of its iTunes/iPod system, specifically the fact that the music that it sells on iTunes is protected by digital rights management (DRM) schemes which greatly restrict the ways in which the songs can be played.

Steve Jobs recently posted a rather surprising response to complaints about these restrictions in which he suggests that all DRM be dropped. Hooray! DRM is fundamentally flawed; I could go on about the reasons I believe this, but I think that Corey Doctorow does a pretty terrific job (in a talk to researchers at Microsoft, no less!) here.

That Steve Jobs, who arguably has benefited the most from DRM music (being the pioneer of legally sold music on the Internet) should take this position is notable and refreshing.

Unfortunately, it is also insufficient - his position is self serving and mistaken in two key ways:

• He claims that opening up the FairPlay system is impossible to do, and is thus calling on the music industry to remove DRM. While this is a nice call-the-bluff statement, it is hard to accept this assertion. From a technical point of view, there are a variety of ways in which FairPlay could be licensed to other manufacturers, opening up the ecosystem to competition and compatibility. It's obvious why Apple would not want to do this, however.
• He also claims that only a small percentage of music on peoples' systems is DRM protected, that the vast majority of the music is legally converted to MP3 with no copy protection whatsoever. This is likely true (it certainly is for me - I have about 25 songs purchased from iTunes out of about 5500 songs that I've ripped from CDs). However, from this fact he draws the ludicrous conclusion that consumers are locked in as a result. If you have even a few songs from a single store, and you can only play those songs on one device, why would you buy songs from another store that you can only play on a second device? That's simply a crazy demand to make of consumers.
  

Of course, I think Jobs is absolutely correct in pointing out that the music companies themselves sell the bulk of unprotected music and as such are not in a great position to decry unprotected music.

Which brings me to what I think is the larger problem with DRM in general (and the DMCA in particular): it tries to achieve the legitimate goal of copyright protection with draconian impositions on consumers. (See my earlier post asking why the music industry hates their customers; DRM is just another example of treating your customers like criminals.)

I'm no lawyer, but here how it seems to me. When I buy a DVD or a CD, I am buying the right to watch the movie or listen to the music whenever and whereever I want to. I obviously don't own the music itself (I cannot play it for profit, I cannot resell it, I cannot license it), but there have never been any restrictions on any personal use to which I choose to put it. The physical disk merely provides "proof of purchase" - it provides evidence of that right.

But as long as I have the disk, there is no intellectual property distinction between playing the movie/music directly from the disk or ripping it to a computer and playing it there (and thus avoiding the inconveniences of lost or scratched disks, or of having to put disks into trays, move them around, find them in a pile of disks, etc.) With CDs, which were invented before DRM and hence (for compatibility reasons) have no DRM, I can in fact rip the music to my hard drive and then toss the CD into a drawer and never pull it out again. This is also perfectly legal, as long as I do not share the music with others (since I purchased the right to listen to it for myself, I don't have the right to share it). I cannot, however, do this with DVDs because the act of doing so violates the DMCA, even though there is no copyright violation involved. And I cannot do this with DRM'd music that I purchase off of the Internet.

This is why I only have about 25 downloaded songs (I buy the CDs for everything else). I would be very surprised if I were alone, which suggests that there is huge financial opportunity that DRM is damping.

I assume that the music industry imposed draconian DRM on Apple largely because of the widespread theft they saw with Napster. What the industry doesn't understand, though, is that that Napster arose from its own failure to address a significant market demand. Now, even though they have (grudgingly) agreed to address that market demand, they continue to treat their customers as presumed criminals.

Here's some simple math that the music industry should consider: given the choice between selling $100 worth of music and suffering, say, 5% piracy, or selling $200 worth of music and suffering 20% piracy, most rational businesses would choose the latter in a heartbeat. After all, making $160 sure beats making $95. I admit that my numbers here are pulled out of thin air, but I would bet that whichever music company is first to take the risk and remove the DRM requirement will find that indeed piracy goes up a little, but overall sales will go up even more.

Too bad none of the major publishers have the vision or the guts to even give it a try. Too bad for them, because they're leaving money on the table, and too bad for consumers.

The hypocrisy of civil disobedience

We were watching Boston Legal last night. (Extremely silly show, obvious liberal political bias, but still a lot of fun. And boy, justice moves quickly in Boston. But I digress.) There was a case that involved a character who sprayed a woman with blue paint because her company did testing of cosmetics on animals. The character's defense was basically that he shouldn't be convicted because the animal testing is so morally wrong that it needed to be stopped. This got me thinking.

I have a tough time with this line of reasoning, though. Civil disobedience of course has a long history of being a non-violent and morally superior method for exposing evils in society, and I think that's great. But there are three ways to go about it; the distinction is subtle, I think, but important:

1. Commit your act of civil disobedience, and then claim that you shouldn't be prosecuted because what you were doing was morally right.
2. Commit your act of civil disobedience and defend yourself on the basis that the law under which you're being prosecuted needs to be tossed out, not just for you but for everyone (for example, because it is unconstitutional).
3. Commit your act of civil disobedience and demand to be prosecuted for it and plead guilty (i.e., invite the conviction) and let your conviction highlight the wrongness of the law or of the thing for which you were convicted.

I think the first method exposes the hypocrisy of the protester while the other two achieves the goal of highlighting the hypocrisy of the law or of the thing being protested.

The problem I have with the first method is that it sets a precedent that anybody who thinks that they are following a higher moral calling can ignore any law that they want and get away with it. This leads to anarchy, frankly. And besides, the whole point of civil disobedience is to suffer so that your suffering shows the wrongness of a status quo; if you go the first route, you are basically saying that you're not willing to pay the price. That's not civil disobedience, that's just flouting the law.

The second approach is pretty straightforward, but unfortunately often doesn't present itself as a viable course. It also gets into the tricky area of "judicial activism," (a notion that many conservatives view as an existing out-of-control problem but which I view as merely something to be careful of). Nevertheless, I think civil disobedience as a way to force judicial review of a law that needs to be struck down is a fine thing. (Frankly, I'd like to see more people violating the DMCA to force review of this overreaching restrictions on our freedom, but that's a topic for another posting.)

The third approach is, I think, the gold standard for civil disobedience. This is for those tricky cases where, like it or not, the law has passed legal muster but is simply morally repugnant.

Abortion is probably the poster-child issue for this today: legally, it's a settled matter, but morally it obviously is not, so I'll pick on this issue to highlight what I mean. I do not intend to take a side on the abortion debate here, just highlight two potential methods of civil disobedience protest; I could just as easily pick on radical animal rights groups, for example.

I respect abortion protesters who get arrested (for non-violent acts!) and fill the jails to highlight their cause; this actually demonstrates that they are willing to sacrifice for what they believe.

On the other hand, I have no respect whatsoever for the abortion protestors who break the law and then try to claim that they should not be punished for having done so (especially if violence is involved). This is a weasel approach. In my opinion, people who take this approach - regardless of cause - are not willing to sacrifice for their beliefs. Yet it is the sacrifice, not the original act of civil disobedience, that ultimately changes minds. Isn't that the point of civil disobedience?

The urge for the surge

Lots of people have been criticizing President Bush's proposed "surge" of troops into Iraq. Frankly, I don't know whether or not it's a good idea or a bad idea because, frankly, I don't know what his goal is. (And to be clear, "success at our mission," as Bush describes it, is not a goal. It's a description of whether or not you've met your goal. I still don't know what his goals for Iraq are, frankly, although I have some of my own.)

Anyhow, there's sort of a predictable and reflexive response from many - mostly, but not exclusively, from the left - opposing the surge. I think that's as absentminded as the surge proposal itself.

As I see it, the surge could be exactly what we need, or just putting more troops into harms way, but it depends on how they're used. In other words, the surge is neither a good idea or a bad idea - mostly, it's a tactical move rather than a strategic move, and I have no idea whether or not it actually supports our strategy. (Hmmmm....actually, I think the problem is that I don't have a good idea what our strategy itself is). As an essentially tactical decision, I also have a quibble with the fact that Bush spent months agonizing about what to do in Iraq only to come up with a tactical move that he could have ordered one morning over coffee. But I digress...

Here's the thing. It's been said so often that it's cliché at this point, but I'll say it anyhow: the problem in Iraq is fundamentally a political problem, not a military one. This is something that the left has repeated and that the White House still doesn't seem to understand. But equally true is something that the White House points out that the left seems to ignore: you can't solve anything politically until there is stability on the ground. If the surge can provide the stability that is the substrate for any conceivable political solution, then hooray - it's a critical and necessary move.

Of course, that then begs the following question: "Mr. President, now that the surge has been successful and the streets of Baghdad are quiet, how do you ensure that they will stay quiet and won't need a massive military force (ours or Iraqi) for centuries to come?" If the President has an answer to this, then the surge is the right medicine at the right time (no, scratch that - a year or 3 too late), and I'd love to hear the political strategy.

Absent any clear coherent political strategy - or even a strategy for a strategy - the surge is just going to put more gasoline on the fire.

I'm not an advocate of a withdrawal from Iraq. Right or wrong, we made this mess, we need to fix it. (And full disclosure: I felt that invading Iraq was the right decision, albeit for different reasons than Bush provided. It's the subsequent management of Iraq that I think has been so disastrous.) The surge is a tactical move that could provide the opportunity - through stability on the ground - to actually address core issues and actually achieve a stable, democratic Iraq (something that I feel would indeed be an unambiguously Good Thing), or it could just result in more body bags. My fear is that Mr. Bush hasn't thought it through in this way.

There's nothing wrong with taking life

I suppose that's a pretty provocative title, but I think it's true. I don't think that the taking of life per se has any moral issue about it. It's the wasting of life that I think is morally problematic. Why do I draw this distinction, and why do I think it frees me to make the provocative assertion that the taking of a life is amoral? I think it actually provides a better basis for figuring out a host of other issues than starting from the premise that taking life is wrong.

I should point out that despite the claim that killing is not evil in and of itself, the corollary that wasting of life is wrong prevents me from coming to wacky conclusions on the basic moral scenarios.

For example, killing someone for their wallet is pretty clearly a waste; certainly that fails the morality test. And one can generalize this pretty quickly based (perhaps on a technicality) on the inability of one person to judge whether or not another person's life would be "wasted" if they were killed. More to the point: since it's so hard to determine when killing someone would be a waste (who gets to decide, after all?), one must default to the position that it will be wasteful and thus refrain. Of course, we have a number of well defined exceptions where killing is perfectly acceptible (self-defense, for example), but I think my "wasting life" litmus test applies here as well. After all, if someone is lunging at you with a knife, then failure to kill them likely means wasting your own life.

And I don't think that this argument has any actual bearing on the abortion debate. Pick whatever point that you believe that human life begins (see my earlier post on abortion where I argue that this is the real crux of the issue). Prior to that point there is no life to waste (by definition of how we picked the point) so this argument doesn't apply, and after that point then it's pretty clear that the life is being wasted, so it's not OK.

Rather, I think that the distinction about wasting life vs. taking life helps more at the fringe cases - cases where you are balancing interests, or weighing quality of life issues.

Some examples:

• Hunting and eating meat. Hunting for trophies has always bothered me. But someone who hunts a deer and eats the venison and uses the leather is not wasting the deer - and I have no problem with it. In both cases, the life of the deer is obviously taken, but I think the former case is immoral while the latter is not. This is actually the scenario that got me thinking about the distinction between taking and wasting life - after all, it's the same act as far as the killing goes, so I asked myself why the two scenarios felt so different. Even apart from hunting, eating meat necessarily involves taking a life - but if it's to nourish another, then I don't think it is wasted. Butchering the cow and leaving the meat to rot, on the other hand, doesn't feel morally acceptible to me.
• Euthanasia. I think the Terri Schiavo case was the perfect example here: the fight was clearly a quantity-of-life vs. a quality-of-life fight, and my "wasting life" argument suggests that quantity of life is not what's important, it's quality. Prolonging suffering in hopeless scenarios strikes me as very much a waste.
• Death penalty. While I have lots of problems with the death penalty in practice (specifically around my confidence that the system does what it is supposed to do and never executes an innocent person), I don't really have any problem with it from a moral point of view. Assuming that the person truly is guilty and that the crime is serious enough that the death penalty is not unreasonable, then I don't think this is one of the cases where "who decides if it would be a waste" has actually been answered: a jury and several layers of judges.

I think there are many people who have a knee-jerk "life-at-all-costs" philosophy, but I think that this often leads to moral contradictions; I think it makes more sense to focus on why life is important, and that leads to a more insightful understanding of why taking life is sometimes morally acceptible and sometimes not.

The problem with affirmative action

I suppose this is a relevant post for today, being MLK day and all.

Affirmative action has been in the news a bit lately, with the new affirmative action ban in Michigan. Frankly, though, nobody should be surprised that affirmative action remains in the news. It will always remain an issue as long as it is done the way it is done because - as it has been implemented - it is fundamentally self-contradictory.

I should be very clear up front that I think that the goal of affirmative action is both noble and necessary. The legacy of institutional racism from slavery through Jim Crow is clearly still being felt even several generations after the most notorious institutional repression has been erased.

I should also be clear that I think it is not the idea of affirmative action that is flawed, but rather how it has historically been implemented that is broken, and in fact would suggest that alternative approaches are feasible.

The goal of the civil rights movement was to achieve a colorblind society - something that it has, fortunately, been largely successful at. (Not entirely of course, but overt racism is certainly no longer socially acceptable and not only have institutional barriers been removed, but protections have been enshrined in the law. But I digress...) The goal of affirmative action was to make up for the effects of past repression. But herein lies the internal contradiction: in order to make up for past wrongs, many affirmative action programs end up being quite color-sensitive - the opposite of the very colorblind ideal that gave root to the cause of affirmative action!

Furthermore, because affirmative action has largely been implemented in zero-sum games such as college admission, helping a minority because they are a minority comes at the expense of someone else who is not a minority. This, of course, is the issue that most conservative opponents of affirmative action decry - both because it is a form of reverse-discrimination (how can that possibly be morally acceptable if discrimination based on color is unacceptable?) and because it effectively punishes this generation for the sins of prior generations - something that western society has for a very long time looked down upon. The fact that affirmative action has patently noble goals blinds many of its advocates to the very real fact that - as implemented - most affirmative action has a necessary side effect of embracing the very evils to which it aspires to provide redress!

I mentioned "zero-sum" above, and I think that is the crux of the problem: giving preference to one person comes at the expense of another. Remove that and I think the controversy around affirmative action goes away. After all, there are many sports scholarships and nobody decries the fact that non-athletic students do not have access to these scholarships. Nor should they: failure to win a sports scholarship doesn't bar you from attending a school (though of course, economically, it may make it more difficult), and there are other scholarships or student loans available.

There is yet a third argument raised by opponents of affirmative action: that it provides opportunities to people who are not qualified to take advantage of those opportunities. Sadly, there is some merit to this objection, even if it is not actually happening in practice, it could. In my opinion, affirmative action done correctly focuses on the supply-side of the equation - expanding the pool of qualified minority applicants for jobs, school admissions, and such - rather than the output side of the equation (how many minorities get hired or accepted). In these pools, consumption from the pool can (and should!) be strictly merit-based. Of course, to fill the pool, you have to feed the pipeline at the other end. You can have a merit-based job applicant pool, but to ensure that minorities have the same opportunities, you have to get more of them through school. And getting more of them into school means reserving more spots for them ("quotas", or at the very least displacing other qualified candidates since school size makes this a zero-sum situation), or lowering standards so that you can accept students that you would not have otherwise accepted.

Neither of these are attractive approaches, but I think there is a third option: that feeding the pipe means consuming from a secondary pool of applicants, and that if you can push the problem down a level. The job applicant pool is fed by the output of our universities. Affirmative action today tries to directly fix the output of our universities by force-fitting more minorities into them, with the problems above. But viewed as a supply chain problem, one realizes that the output of the universities is a result of the applicant pool from which the university itself consumes. Get more qualified minorities into that applicant pool, and you'll see more qualified minorities coming out. And how do you get more minorities into that applicant pool? Get more of them successfully through high school. And so on.

In other words, remove the zero-sum nature of the problem. Smart affirmative action programs would start in grade school to ensure that minority kids are getting a great education and any additional help that they need to succeed. This doesn't come at the expense of the education of a middle-class white kid - it's analogous to the sports scholarship. Then you get a lot more minority kids coming out of grade school ready for high school. Do the same thing in high school, and you see a lot more qualified applicants for college. If you have more qualified applicants from all races, there is no need to use race as a deciding factor where the zero-sum bottlenecks apply: you can do admissions based on merit and still find yourself having proportional representation in your student body.

While there are fortunately many programs that seek to help minority kids early in their educational career, this is sadly not where most affirmative action advocates focus. But it's really the crux of the problem - otherwise, you're treating the symptom rather than the cause, and doing it in a morally problematic manner at that.

"Fair Trade Oil?"

I just finished reading The Prize by Daniel Yergin. Fascinating (but long!) history of the past 150 years or so, as told through the lens of the oil industry. It starts out talking just about the industry itself, which occasionally starts bumping up against events of the day, but shortly into the 20th century an interesting inversion takes place whereby the significant events (such as the world wars) can be described in terms of oil itself as oil takes on strategic national significance for many nations of the world. He's not trying to claim that the wars or economic policy were specifically about oil (as many people claim about the current Iraq war) or anything radical like that; rather, he describes how the need for reliable oil supplies shaped strategies and policies and international relations.

Anyhow, I didn't intend this post as a book report; however, it did get me thinking.

Many nations have been "blessed" with rich deposits of oil. But this is a decidedly mixed blessing. Most nations with oil reserves have used that oil to help provide income for the country (in most oil-exporting nations, oil is nationalized) - and for most of these nations that income is (or was) badly needed. However with startlingly few exceptions, most of these nations have also not progressed very far at all, because the wealth stays captured within the government and the well-connected; on the whole, many of these governments are quite repressive, and even the ones that aren't rarely reinvest this money wisely in a way that diversifies the economy, creates a vibrant middle class, increases education, decreases poverty, or otherwise makes life better and more secure for everyone in the country.

My personal opinion is that this results from the fact that the income is "free" - once the well is in the ground, you don't have to do incremental work to gain incremental income. And if the government is getting a stream of income that is reliable, there isn't much incentive to improve its efficiency or reduce corruption. And worse, if that stream of income is coming from oil importing countries rather than from its citizens, then it doesn't need to be terribly responsive to its own citizens, and in fact has a strong incentive to ignore them in their effort to satisfy the foreign customer. A classic economic game of getting what you reward - frankly, nobody should be surprised.

I look at the coffee industry. Economic realities have incentives aligned for some pretty nasty environmental and labor practices in the industry. As a result, over the past few years we've seen a pretty strong rise in "fair trade" coffee, whereby producers and retailers commit to sustainable agricultural processes and fair wages to farmers, and label the resulting product as such, and consumers "agree" to pay a little bit more for the resulting coffee. Heck, even Starbucks, the Wal-Mart of the coffee world (yeah, I'm just saying that; I like Starbucks just fine) has embraced the concept, which says to me that the concept must be economically viable.

So I ask myself this: if its possible to alter the basic economic equation in coffee to account and correct for the intangible social consequences, is it idealistic/naive to suggest that perhaps we find a way to do the same with oil? We could add a "fair trade" certification for oil that comes from countries who:

• Have certifiably open/transparent government processes that are free of any meaningful degree of corruption
• Respect human rights - for example, if they want to drill a well in your yard, they actually pay you for your property
  
• Respect their environment
  
• Plow petroleum profits back into proper investment in their citizenry
• Work to diversify their economies in order that people outside of the oil industry can have opportunities, and so that the country is not so wholly dependent on oil.

Obviously, you can't very well go in and make Iran or Saudi Arabia or Nigeria adhere to guidelines such as these - particularly when their ruling classes are making so much money from oil sales. However, unlike coffee where the fair-trade rules increase the cost of the resulting product, in this case I don't believe that adhering to these guidelines needs to increase the cost of the oil at all. As such, you can turn the economics around: raise taxes on all oil by some amount, and then eliminate taxes for "fair trade" oil. You could even do this in a revenue-neutral way, making by making the total tax rise fluctuate based on the amount that gets reduced for the fair-trade exemption. That way, you're not hurting the economy or paying more in total for oil, but you are introducing price discrimination into the equation to favor behavior we approve of over that which we do not. Classic economics: if you want a different outcome, change the incentives equation.

Doing so would sure be a whole lot cheaper and easier than going to war over the point.

And people complain about political correctness run amock?

You may have heard about a massive wind storm that hit Seattle last week. It knocked our power and Internet access out for 6 days, and my in-laws still don't have power more than a week later.

While a few people died from flooding and trees falling onto their homes - quite tragic under any circumstances - the largest single cause of deaths appears to have been from carbon monoxide poisoning, from people moving generators or grills indoors. This is particularly tragic because it is so obviously preventable. After all, when the wind is blowing, you can't necessarily stop a tree from falling on you, but you sure as heck don't have to bring a generator or grill inside.

Anyhow, responding to this, our major daily, the Seattle Times, published big bold front-page headlines a few days ago in about 6 different languages warning about what a bad idea it was to bring these fuel-burning devices indoors. Great public service announcement.

Would you believe that the Times actually got letters from people protesting the fact that they published this in a bunch of languages other than English? I understand the goal of having people that move here learn to speak English; heck, I've blogged on this very topic. But let's get some perspective, folks. Which is more important: (a) keeping people alive by giving them some very basic information in a form that they can understand, or (b) advancing your ideology about "English Only?"

Whether or not English is or should be our official language, the facts on the ground are that many people don't speak it or read it, and suggesting that they should not be presented with potentially life-saving information is simply a disgusting elevation of ideology over humanity. Let's save the English-only debate for non-life-threatening issues, OK?

Hard for me to build on this

So I won't even try. I think Fareed is one of the most clearheaded analysts out there, and this is a great summation of the Iraq war.

Transfats and Foie Gras

Motherhood and apple pie may epitomize "America," but governments lately are taking this literally as they try to act like parents and police what we eat. Chicago, of course, gained notoriety this summer for banning the sale of foie gras (though, in a humorous loophole, I understand that they can still give it away - leading to $100 pizzas with free foie gras on top!) And now New York has banned the sale of foods with trans-fats in them, and is considering following Chicago's lead with foie gras.

The trans-fat issue is one where I think the government might actually have a legitimate role, but is going about it all wrong. Trans-fats raise legitimate health issues, but an outright ban makes no sense - it's heavy handed, and restricts many legitimate uses along with the problem scenarios. Bans like this for decisions that a rational adult should be perfectly capable of making should be anathema to anybody that loves freedom.

Most trans-fats in cooking are a relatively recent (last century or so) invention, and are not naturally occurring (though some small amounts are natural). More to the point, switching away from trans-fats to other fats can generally done transparently, with no obvious effects on taste or outcome. I say "generally" because there are places where these fats fill a unique role - a little bit of Crisco in a pie crust can make it somewhat flakier more effectively than butter.

So going without trans-fats is, with a few minor exceptions, a fine and doable option, and a good thing for people to do. If this is the case, and if a ban is a bad idea, what is a reasonable approach to addressing the health issues associated with trans-fats? The best idea I've heard is one where the government doesn't ban trans-fats explicitly, but requires (a) clear labeling of any foods that contain them, and , (b) taxes levied to recover the associated health costs. This is similar to the approach with cigarettes, of course, and smoking has been declining steadily over the last several years.

The two best ingredients to people making smart personal decisions are good information, which the labeling provides, and an economic proposition that reflects more or less the realities and tradeoffs of the decision at hand, which a tax would provide. Then let people make their own choice. If they decide to get fat and have a heart attack, why shouldn't that be their prerogative, as long as the rest of society doesn't have to pick up the tab for that decision?

The ban on foie gras is not quite the same, in that the issue here is not so much a personal decision as it is one based on an argument of animal cruelty. I would have a hard time trying to justify animal cruelty, but the issue is not whether or not you support animal cruelty, but whether what happens meets the definition of animal cruelty. (I think this argument is analogous to the one I recently made about abortion being a debate about where the line is for infanticide).

"If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?"
-- Homer Simpson

If foie gras truly is animal cruelty, then tasty as it is, it is reasonable for governments to ban it. I argue above that the decision to eat trans-fats is a personal one and a "victimless crime," but abusing animals is hardly victimless; it is certainly within the reasonable jurisdiction of governments to ban such activities or their outcomes.

I personally love seared foie gras, and would hate to see it banned. (And frankly, I think Chicago and NY should focus on more pressing problems facing their populations.) Given that geese do not have a natural gagging relfex, it is also not clear to me that this crosses the line to animal cruelty.

Absent a clear distinction between foie gras and other "cruel" foods (veal, factory-farm poultry, etc.), then I worry that banning foie gras is just the first step down a slippery slope towards banning a host of other food products.

Profiling - what's wrong with it?

Profiling seems to be getting a bad rap these days, whether it's racial profiling (getting pulled over for "driving while black", for example) or other forms of profiling, such as suspicions of anyone doing anything overtly Islamic, such as the recent detention of several Muslim clerics from a US Airways flight. (Note that I am deliberately using simply "profiling" rather than the more commonly used "racial profiling" because profiling can go beyond simple race, as the example above illustrates.)

Is profiling inherently problematic? The answer, surprisingly, I think is "no." From a civil-rights perspective, I think there is nothing wrong with profiling per se, provided that it meets one critical test: is it effective. Most of the time, it isn't, and this is where profiling inevitably crosses the line from inconvenience to personal infringement for the person being profiled.

Consider two examples to prove my point about effectiveness. In the first, there is a report of a shooting in a predominantly black neighborhood. If the police are out looking for suspects and focus exclusively on blacks, that IMO is "bad" profiling - you're casting unfair and undue suspicion upon someone because of skin color (seems like an infringement on their rights to me), and you're also ineffective because you are needlessly cutting off leads that could be fruitful.

On the other hand, suppose in the same situation there are eyewitness reports that the shooter was black. In this case, I don't think anybody would think it controversial to focus on black suspects; frankly, I doubt anyone would actually call this "profiling" in this situation.

Over the past few years, I think we've seen a lot of hysteria over profiling with regard to terrorism. The imams mentioned above are not the first example of Muslims being removed from airplanes because of middle-eastern looks or because they were overtly Muslim. I hope I'm not saying anything scandalous in saying that this is pretty bad profiling. After all, I'm not aware that we've ever actually caught a terrorist this way. On the other hand, the sort of profiling that has actually stopped terrorists has been looking for people who, say, try to light their shoes on fire on an airplane.

Much of this hysteria I think arises from a mistaken understanding of statistics and probability. For example, it is a fact that the most deadly of terrorist attacks (9/11) and the vast majority of terrorist attacks around the world over the past several years have been committed by Muslims. Sad fact, but pretty obviously true. So the odds that a given terrorist is Muslim are much higher than the odds that the terrorist is, say, Catholic. However, we aren't looking at random terrorists, we're looking at random people. And even if the odds that a random Muslim is a terrorist are twice that of a random non-Muslim, you're still looking at minuscule odds in either case. Stated another way, with over a billion Muslims in the world, if there are even 1 million terrorists among them (which I'm sure there are not), that's still only a 0.1% chance that any given Muslim is a terrorist.

So suspecting a given Muslim of being a terrorist simply because of his religion is a lot like trying to solve a rape case by detaining all of the men in the city. You haven't really narrowed the problem in any meaningful way, and you're violating the rights of a lot of people in the process.

This isn't just an academic point - efficiency in security is actually critical. Trying to achieve good security without efficiency has two very dangerous side effects: (a) it overwhelms the process that you are trying to keep secure, and (b) all the effort expended on pointless security procedures distracts resources from genuinely useful security work, thus creating security holes or lapses that can be exploited by people who don't simply look like the stereotype of the bad guys but who actually are the bad guys.

Removal of shoes and bans on liquids at the airport both offer examples of the latter, and as far as I can tell neither of these time-consuming, arduous, and expensive procedures has stopped a terrorist. Alert passengers on a plane stopped the shoe bomber, and good intelligence stopped the liquids-bombers.

Frankly, I've yet to hear of examples of profiling that are actually effective in practice. And that is what makes the inconvenience and infringement that results so unacceptable.

A bit of support for my hypothesis

A few weeks ago I posted about the unintended consequences of increased energy efficiency - namely, that increased efficiency (or low cost cheap power or fuels), while it would decrease consumption for a given task, would actually lead to greatly increased energy consumption overall.

I made a not-so-rigorous argument in a not-too-coherent manner, but I've just read a book (The Bottomless Well - The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy by Huber and Mills) that spends much of its pages making precisely the same point with much more data and rational than my mere conjecture contained.

I don't quite agree with all of its assertions. For example, it correctly points out that waste is necessary, that you cannot have perfect efficiency in, well, anything. According to the laws of thermodynamics, this is absolutely correct (and is also why only 2-15%, depending on how you measure, of the raw energy available in a gallon of gasoline actually gets converted into forward motion for a car). But because this inefficiency is unavoidable and a key side effect of extracting work from energy, they claim that waste is therefore "virtuous." That's a stretch to me - just because it is vital doesn't mean you want any more of it than you absolutely have to have.

But most of these disputes are quibbles; I thought that overall the book was quite enlightening in describing the history of human energy consumption, the importance of energy to our economy, and the importance of using energy to extract and refine energy itself, all using compelling data to make some rather counterintuitive points.

Happy non-denominational winter solstice event

Last week there was a funny segment on The Daily Show where Jon Stewart pokes fun at the whole "war on Christmas" thing. I think his satire here is spot-on; the whole "war on Christmas" (obviously a sub-battle of the whole "war on religion") is a farce by people who confuse defensive pushback with offensive attacks.

Let me start small with the Christmas angle. There was a big debate last year certainly (and in other years) about various stores trying to "banish" Christmas by having their employees say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Many people felt that this was political correctness run amock, or else saw larger anti-religion overtones in this, and thus felt not only offended by the use of the term "happy holidays" but also that the minority was again ("again" is a funny word to use here, since it presupposes prior legitimate examples) running roughshod over a majority.

But I think this point of view is erroneous for several reasons:

• I have yet to hear a tale of someone taking offense or filing a lawsuit or a formal complaint or whatever because somebody else wished them Merry Christmas. (Heck, I'm Jewish and I have no problem with it, and I wish people Merry Christmas myself at this time of year.). Yet many people were proposing boycotts of stores for using Happy Holidays. This makes the notion of the minority oppressing the majority tenuous at best.
• The stores that said Happy Holidays inevitably were filled with red and green inside; there was absolutely no evidence of Christmas being ignored or banished. (And I might argue that that such materialism alone, not the greeting used by the employee, is a far bigger and truer "banishment" of Christmas.) Best Buy this year provides a recent example of this.
• If you are a shopkeeper know that many of your customers are Jewish or Muslim or whatever, why wouldn't you want to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible?
• It's a free country, last I looked. Nobody is forcing anybody to say Happy Holidays, so why can't they choose to say what they want?

And at the same time, lots of folks say Merry Christmas. That's fine too. (Other than the fact that Christmas is a holiday that seems to last for a month and a half of the year. But I digress.) While we're on the subject: it's a Christmas tree, not a holiday bush or any other euphamism. The tradition of decorating a tree this time of year is essentially exclusive to Christmas, no harm in calling it that.

So how or why the Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas debate ever became an issue escapes me; it seems to me that it's only an issue, frankly, if you're a religious Christian who can't bear the acknowledgment that there are quite a few non-Christians in the country. Fortunately, most Christians know and behave better.

But there's the larger issue of the "war on religion" that I hear about a lot from my conservative friends who decry the lack of school prayer, or the display of religious symbols in public, or attempts to remove "under God" from the pledge of allegience.

This is an issue where perspective is everything, I think. Take organized prayer in school, as the most glaring example. From the perspective of a religious person, banning organized prayer may seem like outright hostility (rather than neutrality) towards religion. But to a non-religious person - or someone from other religions - such prayer clearly crosses the line to imposition of religion, or at the least a demand that government somehow endorse a religion in particular or religion in general. Yet the defensive pushback to that imposition is viewed as an offensive attack on religion.

School prayer may be the most effective tool in highlighting this, but I think all of the other "hostility to religion" issues fall into the same basic model.

As a side note, the whole notion of not displaying religion in public I think also reflects a subtle but critical distinction in meanings of the word public. "Public" displays by private individuals or groups has always been and (fortunately) continues to be perfectly acceptible. But "Public" can also mean "owned or operated by the public", i.e., government, and this is where neutrality towards religion must be enforced.

I believe in the first amendment. And I have no problem acknowledging that the founding fathers were all Christians, some of strong faith. But that doesn't change the fact that the country that they founded was quite deliberately set up to be a secular government in which religious people could thrive; the first amendment makes that abundently clear to me. And it's worked quite well to keep government out of anything religious.

Religion belongs in the home and in the heart, not in the government. For a perfect example of why, just look at almost any country in the Muslim world that has embraced Islam as a basis for its government. I say that not to slam Islam, but most off the governments that explicitly embrace religion are Islamic and collectively these governments and societies provide ample evidence that government and religion are not a compelling mix.

I have absolutely no problem with PDR (Public Displays of Religion). I have absolutely no problem with religious people of any faith practicing, embracing their religion, or letting it guide them. I have no problem with politicians being guided by their faith - quite the contrary, I think that's quite healthy. But there is a huge difference between being guided by faith and demanding that your government get out of the way of your practice of it, and demanding that government embrace your religion.