Roger Ebert, on education:
Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained.
Roger Ebert, on education:
Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained.
Both Matthew Yglesias and Karl Smith (guest blogging for Ezra Klein) posted today on deficit spending by the federal government. They both dismiss the idea of opposing budget deficits for reasons of morality or responsibility and instead discuss them in terms of their impact on economic growth, which is the only thing you should really care about. Debt is a tool that can be used to make you (or America) better or worse off depending on the terms of the loan and what you do with the money you borrow.
Here’s Karl Smith:
So, deficits do matter. When the economy is strong, they lead the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, strengthen the dollar and increase imports. When the economy is weak they lead to falling unemployment and rising capacity utilization.
Matthew Yglesias points out the negative effects of deficits, which under certain conditions:
In the real world, though, deficits matter for a specific reason. If the government tries to borrow a huge amount of money, investors will start demanding generous interest rates in exchange for lending. And if investors can get high rates lending to the government, which is safe, they’ll start demanding even higher rates of non-government borrowers. That becomes a problem for the private sector. Investments that are profitable at a low rate of interest are unprofitable at a high rate of interest, so the overall pace of investment and growth declines. Bad. The Federal Reserve can, however, act to keep interest rates low. The problem with this is that Fed action to lower interest rates might produce too much inflation. Inflation, when it gets high, is not just annoying but starts to really erode the workings of the price system and thus the whole economy. Again: Bad.
He then goes on to point out that the conditions under which it is bad for the federal government to engage in deficit spending are not currently in effect.
This is why just about every credible economist I read says that what the government needs to do is borrow money to stimulate the economy now and make a credible promise that it will cut the deficit later. For example, here’s Nouriel Roubini a couple of weeks ago:
The Obama administration did the right thing early, and avoided another depression. He is still doing the right thing now in pointing out the risks of early austerity. And he is limited by an unco-operative Republican party trapped in a belief in voodoo economics, the economic equivalent of creationism. Even so, he and his party have been unwilling to tackle long-term entitlement spending. Two years in, and this means the US remains on an unsustainable fiscal course.
The result will soon be the worst of all worlds: neither short-term stimulus nor medium-term fiscal sustainability.
Marco Arment has a great post on why “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply to new hardware platforms. It lacks pithy quotes, so I urge you to go read it. It’s not very long.
People have noticed that Capital One advertises different interest rates on auto loans depending on which browser you’re using. Plenty of people are speculating as to the reasons why. I’m with the group of people who think that this is a manifestation of A/B testing rather than discrimination based on the browser you choose to use. Even if it is based on your browser (rather than random numbers or something in your cookies), I’d still guess that it’s just an arbitrary way of segregating the market for testing different interest rates to see what kind of response they draw. Wonder if Capital One will wind up having to explain what’s behind it?
Dave Pell talks about social impact of the Walkman:
The Walkman and its offspring, such as the iPod, completely changed the way we experience music. And even more compelling, these devices also had a huge impact on the way we interact (or don’t interact) with each other. Before the Walkman, listening to music was quite often something we did together. Headphones and portability changed that. The very same sounds that had been a cornerstone of our social experience suddenly transformed millions of us into isolated walking zombies.
I imagine this is a paragraph many people can identify with:
I’ve known my wife since we were in high school. We’ve been married for more than a decade. And we’ve never once looked at each other and said, “They’re playing our song.” And after talking to a few other couples, I don’t think we’re all that unique. She has her songs. I have my songs. Our only modern equivalent to having a shared song is when one of us retweets the other.
Ed Felten, known to most as the brilliant mind behind the Freedom to Tinker blog, has been appointed as Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. This is one of those moves that makes too much sense for me to have ever believed that something like it would ever actually happen. Next thing you know Bruce Schneier will take a job with the Department of Homeland Security.
I’ve read a lot of pre and post-election analysis, and I agree most closely with John Judis on what comes next for America:
Like the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, this slowdown was also precipitated by the exhaustion of opportunities for economic growth. America’s challenge over the next decade will be to develop new industries that can produce goods and services that can be sold on the world market. The United States has a head start in biotechnology and computer technology, but as the Obama administration recognized, much of the new demand will focus on the development of renewable energy and green technology. As the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans understand, these kinds of industries require government coordination and subsidies. But the new generation of Republicans rejects this kind of industrial policy. They even oppose Obama’s obviously successful auto bailout.
Instead, when the U.S. finally recovers, it is likely to re-create the older economic structure that got the country in trouble in the first place: dependence on foreign oil to run cars; a bloated and unstable financial sector that primarily feeds upon itself and upon a credit-hungry public; boarded up factories; and huge and growing trade deficits with Asia. These continuing trade deficits, combined with budget deficits, will finally reduce confidence in the dollar to the point where it ceases to be a viable international currency.
The election results will also put an end to the Obama administration’s attempt to reach an international climate accord. It will cripple its ability to adopt domestic limits on carbon emissions. The election could also doom Obama’s one substantial foreign policy achievement—the arms treaty it signed with Russia that still awaits Senate confirmation. In other areas, the Obama administration will be able to act without having to seek Congressional approval. But there is little reason to believe that the class of Republicans will be helpful in formulating a tough policy toward an increasingly arrogant China, extricating America from Afghanistan, and using American leverage to seek a peaceful settlement of Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Why is this going to be happen? Because America is a country that cannot be effectively led. I’m not just referring to the Tea Party here, either. I look at this country and see a majority who are unwilling to grapple with the scope of our problems, much less realistically evaluate potential solutions. I see one political party that is perfectly happy to indulge fantasies about the need for lower taxes and talk vaguely about cutting spending without proposing any spending cuts, and another that worried more over the past two years about positioning itself to minimize its losses rather than going all out to solve our problems when they were in a position to do so.
I’m out of patience for blaming politicians, though. We live in a country with deep problems that portend very bad things for the next generation, and yet voters under 30 didn’t even bother to show up. Old people showed up to vote for cuts to all government spending except the defense budget and the entitlements that benefit them personally, even though that’s the very spending that makes up the bulk of the budget.
We live in times that demand that we rise to the occasion, and yet as a country we are mired in apathy, delusion, and impotent anger. I really wish I could just stand at a distance and laugh.
Seth Godin on political ads:
Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent’s supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they’re all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded.
There are positive ads as well that are intended to encourage turnout from supporters, but there’s no doubt that he’s right about negative ads.
Here’s my strategy for choosing who to vote for: I never vote for crooks. If a politician seems to be a crook, I won’t vote for them regardless of party. Then I vote for the party whose goals align most closely with my own, regardless of the individual candidate (as long as they’re not a crook).
I’m always interested in the ways people learn to browse the web more effectively. This learning seems to center around getting better at filtering out noise and getting straight at the stuff they care about. We have a constant battle between the human capacity to adapt and the desire for publishers and designers to get people to pay attention to ads and appreciate their design skills.
Jakob Nielsen has a new study that shows that people have gotten good at ignoring images that don’t add value what’s on the page. People have figured out how to identify and ignore images that are not “real.” It seems that the leading practitioners of Web design have already figured this out. Most advice these days seems to be to cut the fluff, and this study confirms that instinct is correct. People are getting better and better at filtering out non-meaningful things on Web pages anyway, so it’s better not to put them there in the first place.
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Blizzard continues to innovate on the security front
It would probably surprise people to learn that Blizzard, a game company, provides better security options for players of its games (World of Warcraft and now Starcraft) than nearly all banks and financial services companies do for their customers. The problem Blizzard faces is that people steal World of Warcraft accounts all the time, either to use the characters to farm gold, or to just strip all of the cash and things that can be sold from the account and pocket the cash.
A number of methods are used to steal passwords, including phishing, catching the passwords using key loggers, and just brute forcing them. Blizzard’s first big attempt to solve the problem was to give users the option of protecting their account using two factor authentication — their password and an authenticator that is tied to the account. The authenticator is a key fob (or an phone app) that generates a number every few seconds that must be entered in order to log in. Once an authenticator is tied to your account, getting your password stolen is no longer a problem.
Despite the fact that the authenticator app is free and the physical authenticator only costs $6, many players do not use them, and accounts still get stolen all the time. Indeed, account thieves almost always attach their own authenticator to compromised accounts as soon as they’ve been compromised, making it that much more difficult for players to get them back. (I shudder to think about how much money Blizzard spends dealing with account theft.)
To enable players who haven’t gotten an authenticator to secure their accounts, Blizzard has introduced a dial-in authenticator. With it, you can assign a phone number to your account. If there’s something unusual about an authentication attempt, you will be required to dial in to a toll free number from that phone and enter a PIN in order to log in successfully.
There’s bound to be an interesting article written about the economics of account security that explains why Blizzard finds it more worthwhile to implement robust authentication solutions when so many businesses that are susceptible to financial fraud do not. Are people that much more likely to steal your World of Warcraft characters than they are to steal your Amazon.com account and use the credit cards you’ve saved there? Or is it that people are more willing to go to extra trouble to secure their game accounts?
Update: There are lots of smart comments about this at Hacker News as well.