The Euro
I’m a bit concerned about the Euro. One of the big news stories of last year was the collapse of Argentina’s economy, followed by the collapse of Argentina’s government. One of the main reasons their economy went down the tubes is that they decided to peg the value of the peso to the value of the dollar, rather than letting its value float on the open market. I’m not enough of an economist to understand the fine nuances of the implications of such a policy, but I do know that closing off one valve in a system (the ability for the value of a country’s currency to fluctuate) simply applies more pressure to other parts. Thus, Argentina’s difficulties.

Anyway, now a bunch of European countries all have a common currency. Despite all of the semi-disastrous austerity programs followed leading up to the introduction of the Euro, the economies of say Portugal and Germany just don’t have a whole lot in common. However, they are bound by a common currency now. Will some of the poorer countries in Europe run into problems like Argentina’s if their economies can’t keep pace with the larger industrial economies? Just qualifying for the Euro forced those countries to make lots of sacrifices and compromises, what sort of pressure will actually using the Euro put on them?

Mark Hershberger was one of the people who hacked the Department of the Interior’s computers. He’s lucky they didn’t panic and try to throw him in jail.

This NYRB article on Occidentalism describes the historical lineage of anti-Western movements like Islamism. It’s a great article, and probably ought not be summarized. Read the whole thing.

1988: “Read my lips, no new taxes.”
2002: “Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes.”

Wonder how this one’s going to work out.

Risks Digest recently had a couple of items about buffer overflows. I can remember when Windows people used to point out that Unix programs were fraught with buffer overflows, back when the buffer overflows in every suid root program were getting explointed left and right. The fact is that people hadn’t even begun delving into buffer overflows in Windows applications yet. Because pretty much everything that runs under Windows is privileged, we’re going to see literally hundreds of buffer overflow exploits for Windows apps before it’s all said and done.

Why is there no bipartisanship in Congress? Paul Krugman argues (based on actual data) that it’s because the Republicans have moved to the right and the Democrats have pretty much stayed where they were. This rightward shift coincides with the rising income gap between the richest Americans and everybody else.

USAMA BIN LADEN THE MURDERER AND COWARD HAS ABANDONED YOU!

Well, they finally let Vanessa Leggett out of jail. Hopefully she’ll get a million dollar advance for her book.

A judge has ruled that the keyboard sniffer used by the federal government to snatch the password for a PGP private key was not used unconstitutionally. I’m pretty sure I’m OK with this. The FBI obtained a court order to install the device. The defense argued that they didn’t obtain a wiretap order, and use of the device constituted wiretapping. It seems to me that the fact that the judge’s order was not a wiretap order is a technicality, unless there’s some higher standard required to obtain a wiretap order than the order that was granted by the judge.

Warlords in Afghanistan continue to steal food aid as it enters the country. I have a serious question: why don’t we just ship so much food aid into Afghanistan that there’s no incentive to steal it? Rice and wheat are cheap. There are some logistical issues involved with getting bunches of it into Afghanistan, but somehow we managed to move a large amount of military assets into the area in a month or two. I would think that getting a bunch of food in there would be even easier.