The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Islamic State’s Goal: “Eliminating the Grayzone” of Coexistence Between Muslims and the West — Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept: The [Charlie Hebdo] attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,” representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said, Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own societies. Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon be forced to “either apostatize … or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come.
• From Pol Pot to ISIS: the blood never dried — John Pilger, On Line Opinion: The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left giant necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors "froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over." A Finnish Government Commission of Inquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed.
• Thrashing Not Swimming — Craig Murray: Indeed one of the many extraordinary features of this fervid political period is that the neo-cons (be they Tory or Blairite) who are so actively beating the drum for war, are the ones who absolutely refuse to acknowledge that the source of the poison is Saudi Arabia. Cameron today told Westminster that the head of the snake is in Raqqa. That is plainly untrue. The head of the snake is in Riyadh. But if your God is Mammon, that is blasphemy.
• My Carpet Liquidation Center Really is Going Out of Business This Time — Patrick McKay at McSweeney's Internet Tendency: I’d always wanted to be a carpet liquidator. Way back when I first opened this place, I said, “Man, this is it. I’ve joined a community. I’m staying here forever.” The calendar pages dropped away as I made my home, waved to my neighbors, and swept the shattered glass below my driver’s side window every Monday morning. Then, it happened. Completely out of the blue, my carpet liquidation center that’d been going out of business for 11 straight years, was suddenly going out of business! And I never saw it coming!
• Accumulate, accumulate! Or not — David F. Ruccio: What are U.S. corporations doing with all the surplus they’re managing to rake in? Well, they’re not investing it. Instead, they’re paying it out to shareholders and upper-management, buying back their stock and expanding their portfolios of financial assets, and hoarding the rest in cash. The net effect is to dampen the rate of economic growth and the creation of new jobs.
• ‘On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me’ … a bunch of econ charts! — Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg. Including my favourites, US GDP hysteresis:
  
  … and the post-oil-shock pay/productivity gap:
  
• First, second, and third order bias corrections — Andrew Gelman re-analyses the death rate data on middle-aged non-hispanic white Americans, which had provoked much scratching of heads (including mine). Apparently, apart from a small shift from 1998-2003, it's in line with what you'd expect as the baby boomers leave this cohort:
  
  Sadly, despite my successful completion of the third-year "Advanced Social Research" unit at SCU (where the definition of "advanced", and for that matter "university", departs from common usage), I still have had no instruction in elementary statistics, so I can't comment on the validity of these corrections.
• The Dangers of the Gates Foundation: Displacing Seeds and Farmers — From a presentation by Mariam Mayet, Other Worlds: Monsanto and Pioneer Hi Bred, both US multinational companies, control most of the hybrid maize market in southern Africa. Through the acquisition of South Africa’s maize company, Panaar Seed, by Pioneer HiBred, hybrid pioneer [seeds] will make a lot of incursions [elsewhere] into Africa. We see and fear a great deal of social dislocation, of collapse of our farming systems – and it’s already happened. In industrialized-agriculture countries like South Africa, farmers have become completely deskilled and divorced from production decisions, which are made in laboratories or in far-away board rooms. The Gates Foundation is a crony capitalist scam, not a charity.
• The problem with self-driving cars: who controls the code? — Cory Doctorow in The Guardian: A car is a high-speed, heavy object with the power to kill its users and the people around it. A compromise in the software that allowed an attacker to take over the brakes, accelerator and steering (such as last summer’s exploit against Chrysler’s Jeeps, which triggered a 1.4m vehicle recall) is a nightmare scenario. The only thing worse would be such an exploit against a car designed to have no user-override – designed, in fact, to treat any attempt from the vehicle’s user to redirect its programming as a selfish attempt to avoid the Trolley Problem’s cold equations. Whatever problems we will have with self-driving cars, they will be worsened by designing them to treat their passengers as adversaries.
• Pirate Bay Founder Builds The Ultimate Piracy Machine — Ernesto Van der Sar at TorrentFreak: One of Peter [Sunde]’s major frustrations is how the entertainment industries handles the idea of copying. When calculating the losses piracy costs, they often put too much value on pirated copies. […] The “Kopimashin” makes 100 copies of the Gnarls Barkely track “Crazy” every second. This translates to more than eight million copies per day and roughly $10 million in ‘losses.’ […] The Kopimashin does make real copies of the track, but they are sent to /dev/null, which means that they are not permanently stored. The most important message, however, is that the millions of dollars in losses the industry claims from him and the other TPB founders are just as fictitious as the number displayed on the Kopimashin.
• Australia – wages growth at record low as redistribution to profits continues — Bill Mitchell: What is clear is that since the September-quarter 1997, real wages have grown by only 11.4 per cent (so just over 0.6 per cent on average per year), whereas hourly labour productivity has grown by 28.9 per cent (or 1.7 per cent on average per year). This is a massive redistribution of national income to profits and away from wage-earners and the gap is widening each quarter.

This week, I have been mostly miserable and sleeping my way out through it, but also reading:

• You may soon need a licence to take photos of that classic designer chair you bought — Glyn Moody at Ars Technica UK: Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects even if you own them. That's the result of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which extends the copyright of artistic objects like designer chairs from 25 years after they were first marketed to 70 years after the creator's death. In most cases, that will be well over a hundred years after the object was designed. During that period, taking a photo of the item will often require a licence from the copyright owner regardless of who owns the particular object in question.
• Lightbulb DRM: Philips Locks Purchasers Out Of Third-Party Bulbs With Firmware Update — Tim Cushing at Techdirt: The world of connected devices is upon us and things have never been better. Criminals can access your email account by breaking into your fridge. Your child's toys and your television record your conversations and send them to manufacturers' servers, where criminals are (again) able to access them. Your home thermostat goes HAL 9000 and attempts to set your house on fire. And, now, your lightbulbs won't do the one thing you expect them to do: produce light.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  
• Young people who question Government or media may be extremists, officials tell parents — Jon Stone, The Independent: A leaflet drawn up by an inner-city child safeguarding board warns that “appearing angry about government policies, especially foreign policies” is a sign “specific to radicalisation”. Parents and carers have also been advised by the safeguarding children board in the London Borough of Camden that “showing a mistrust of mainstream media reports and a belief in conspiracy theories” could be a sign that children are being groomed by extremists. Scarfolk is alive and well in Camden.
• Caring doesn't scale — Brian Sletten in the service of O'Reilly's ego: If the cost of integration falls to almost nothing it becomes easier to support casual interactions. They may turn into more formal, long-lived integrations down the road, but for now we can exchange information with anyone at any time about any subject for way less effort than you probably can imagine given the pains you have seen elsewhere. Our ability to do anything with this information isn't immediately guaranteed, but freeing it from silos is the first step.

I've long felt that what the field of quantum physics has been waiting for is a new slant from a business perspective. I'm sure that the folk at CERN will be grateful for these insights; they'll probably be able to sell the particle accelerators and replace them with a few life coaches.

I can also attest to the power of leadership. At the last gluten-free Coffs business networking meeting I attended, it occurred to me that the assortment of complete and utter "vibrating energies" in the room was many orders of magnitude more powerful than was justified by any expertise or intelligence.

These leaders are indeed not afraid to challenge established belief systems, whether it be the perceived need to pay wages, or the wisdom of the fluoridation of toothpaste. We are truly blessed in this region to have such an abundance of leaders who refuse to be hamstrung by reality.

I have to disagree with Ted Rall here:

The Paris attacks are an attempt to sap political support — a better word might be tolerance, because the anti-ISIS war was never ratified by the people of France — for the French government’s participation in the air war against ISIS.

The attacks also serve secondary purposes as propaganda for recruitment — look, emasculated Muslims everywhere, we are fighting back against the infidel crusaders who have tortured and massacred and humiliated us, in their center of power! — as well as to make Westerners ask this very question: why us? ISIS wants France to draw the conclusion that what they are doing in Syria and Iraq is immoral and/or too costly to continue.

The attacks are all about propaganda, but not in either of the ways Ted suggests. Al Quaeda, and now ISIS, have never given two hoots about the West. New York, London, Madrid, Bali, Paris, are all just means to an end. They may well see these mass killings as just restribution, but that is an incidental matter. ISIS certainly do not want to be seen as victorious, nor do they want the Western atrocities to stop. They want to provoke ever-greater barbarity from the West upon defenseless populations, because it is that which is the ultimate recruitment tool in the part of the world they do care about.

Another question often asked is "where did they come from?" Not, as supposed by racists, from a weak-willed people unusually succeptible to "radicalisation". ISIS came from the same place as the Khmer Rouge; out of the rubble and into the power vaccuum created by Western bombs.