The second personal computer I ever owned[1] was an Apple II, with no floppy drive. I bought it, along with a small color TV, from my close friend Robert Trammel while we were both living in Houston sometime around 1980.We had already spent hours together programming on it, then carefully (though not always successfully) saving our programs out to cassette tape. After three months, I sold the computer and TV back to Robert — not because I didn’t like it, but because I was spending far too much time on it.

A few years later — in 1982 — my close friend Wayne Holder hired me into his nascent software company, Oasis Systems, in part to help with his existing and planned word processing utilities (The Word Plus, Punctuation + Style), but mostly to develop computer games. And we did, developing Sundog: Frozen Legacy on the Apple II, a game for which I still get e-mails (and which Wayne is even now working on resurrecting for modern platforms). In January 1984, a few months before Sundog shipped, we were invited by Guy Kawasaki to come up to Apple to see  a preview of the Mac and to talk about what software we could port to the Mac. Through my connections with computer stores in San Diego, I was able to get a personal loan of a Mac for a few days at home prior to the official announcement in Cupertino later that month, which Wayne and I attended as well. That was my first time seeing Steve Jobs in person, and it remains a memorable highlight of my professional life.

When the Mac shipped a few days later, I went down to the one computer store in San Diego that I knew would be getting machines from Apple. I took $3000 in cash with me and managed to convince the store owner — a friend — to let me have one of the three Macs he had to sell. Through a connection with Phil Lemmons — editor-in-chief at BYTE — I ended up writing the official BYTE review of the 128K Macintosh (August 1984 issue). By the end of 1984, I was writing full-time for BYTE, including on-going coverage of the Macintosh, particularly once my BYTE column started in mid-1985. After a few years of writing for BYTE, I switched to writing for Macworld magazine. Steve was now long-gone from Apple, and Apple was having some of its own problems going forward.

But in late 1987, I was contacted by Addison-Wesley. They were interested in having me write a book about Steve Jobs’ new project at NeXT. Folks at NeXT had apparently suggested me to Addison-Wesley, probably due to my writing at BYTE and Macworld. I leapt at the opportunity, particularly since in coincided with our family moving from Utah to just outside Santa Cruz (where I would be doing technical writing for Borland on a consulting basis). Once there, I found myself invited to visit NeXT HQ on Deer Creek Road, sit in on meetings, and attend the 0.3 NeXTstep Dev Camp. And, yes, that meant getting actual face time with Steve Jobs as well — not a lot, but this was a man whose creations had been impacting my personal and professional life for over a decade at this point.

The writing of the book dragged out as I waited to get my hands on an actual NeXT cube, which finally happened (if I recall correctly) at the end of 1988 or early 1989. I wrote the first several drafts of the book on that NeXT cube itself. The book came out in the fall of 1989; it remains the single most successful book I’ve ever written, due to the intense interest in NeXT itself, more than any particular writing skills or technical insight on my part.

The following year, I found myself working with a world-class typographer (Mike Parker) and graphic designer (Vic Spindler) to create a design-oriented desktop publishing system. I was doing all the software prototyping on my NeXT cube, and we made the decision to make the NeXT our first target platform. For five years — 1990 to 1995 — I served as chief architect and CTO at Pages Software Inc, where we developed Pages by Pages and then WebPages, while spending nearly two years just trying to raise venture funding. We closed on funding at the start of 1992 and shipped our first version of Pages in early 1994. We quickly sold all that we were going to in the all-too-small NeXTstep market. My frustrations at seeing larger firm try to leverage off of NeXT’s incredible innovations led to an op-ed piece in the November 1994 issue of BYTE, “Whither NextStep?” The day that issue came out was the last time that Steve Jobs and I spoke — he called me from the back of a car somewhere to ask me what the hell I was doing writing that. I said, telling the truth. Pages would close its door the next year, unable to secure additional funding to move its technology to Windows.

When Steve engineered his brilliant reverse takeover of Apple — getting Apple to buy NeXT for $400 million, then slowly moving himself into the CEO seat — I was not optimistic. I still had unconditional praise for the NextStep technology, but I was dubious about Steve’s ability to sell technology to markets and to compete with Microsoft.

Boy, was I wrong. I was not only wrong about his abilities at Apple, I was wrong in my BYTE article about NextStep being on a downward slope. NextStep, of course, was the foundation of Mac OS X, and Steve transformed Apple into the most-admired, most-imitated, and most-valuable company in the world. And I was tickled that, when Apple brought out its own word processor, it was named “Pages”. Steve had always liked that name when we were developing (and shipping) our own product years before; glad he was able to use it.

To quote John Perry Barlow over on FB, “The world is suddenly a less interesting place.”  ..bruce w..

[1] The first was an HP-67 card-reading programmable calculator.

CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs

The Onion, as usual, nails it. Once you’ve watched it, watch it again in full-screen mode to read the headlines and factoid crawls (starting around 1:45).  ..bruce w..

Back on May 22nd, I ordered an Apple iPad (3GS, 64GB) in the full expectation of being able to use AT&T $30/month unlimited data access plan. It was scheduled to ship on June 9th and arrive here in Colorado around the 15th.

However, today AT&T announced that this plan would go away on June 7th, a little over two months after the iPad started shipping. That changeover would happen before my iPad arrived; therefore, I would never have a chance to sign up for that unlimited plan. As I stated elsewhere, I can’t believe that Apple didn’t know about this either as a possibility or a certainty. It is, perhaps, the most profoundly stupid and self-defeating business move I have seen in years.

On the other hand, if AT&T really did blindside Apple with this, Apple will likely use it to break exclusivity agreements with AT&T and open up both the iPhone and the iPad to other telecom provides. If I were at Sprint or Verizon, I’d be on a plane to Cupertino this morning with an unlimited data plan proposal in hand.

In any case, I went online to Apple today and canceled my iPad order. When I did so, I was given a drop-down list to state the reason for the change. My answer: “I made a mistake.”  ..bruce w..

[Note for nit-pickers: yes, I placed the order on May 22nd and have the e-mail from Apple to prove it. However, they didn't process the order until May 25th, hence the date above.]

Now that American Airlines has in-flight WiFi, it has become de rigueur to write at least one blog post while in flight. Well, here’s mine, at 35000 feet over, well, some state on the route from Denver to Dallas.

That’s it.  ..bruce w..

In the first part of this three-part series, I briefly outlined the parallels between developing software and crafting legislation, while pointing out the great risks and issues in the latter. I also indicated what I felt were some of the general structural flaws  in HR 3200, the House bill on health care reform — not criticizing any actual proposals, but rather highlighting some of the design and implementation problems that make it hard to understand HR 3200 and even harder to predict its consequences.

Here in Part II, I’ll talk about some of the well-established maxims and heuristics of complex systems development, and how they apply to legislation in general and to HR 3200 in particular. (More after the jump.)

Gall

As far as I can tell, John Gall — in his out-of-print book Systemantics (1976)– was the first to observe in print that

A complex system that works is found to have invariably evolved from a simple system that worked. (p. 80, 1978 paperback edition).

Immediately after, he observes that:

A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to started over,  beginning with a working simple system.

My co-blogger (over at ASIP) Bruce Henderson puts this another way:

Start out stupid, and work up from there.

There is large room for differing arguments here as to just where HR 3200 fits in, for several reasons.

First, HR 3200 isn’t “designed from scratch.” As noted in Part I, many sections of HR 3200 are modifying various existing laws and regulations, such as the Internal Revenue Code, the Public Health Service Act, Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the Social Security Act, and the United States Code.

However, leveraging upon and modifying several existing systems is not the same as building a “simple system that works” and evolving it into a complex system that works. I can create a large, complex piece of software that calls upon and even modifies existing systems and libraries — but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m evolving something from a “small, simple system that works”. This is especially true when I’m pulling together from several disjoint or unrelated systems (such as those listed above).

Second, legislation is more robust than software, for exactly the differences outlined in part I, namely that legislation is executed by people rather than machines and operating systems. If I create an ill-formed piece of software, there’s a good chance it won’t even compile (or interpret); if it does, then it may run into linking or integration errors; and if it gets past those, it may crash, lock up, or behave bizarrely upon execution.

If, however, I create an ill-formed piece of legislation, it can be (and often is!) be put into practice, with various human either officially or unofficially working around the defects to make it “work”. Of course, that ‘deployment’ of the legislation may end up drifting or even veering sharply from the stated or actual intent of the legislation. (In a way, this is reminiscent of the early PL/1 compilers that would, upon encountering a syntax error, make a best guess as to what you might have meant to write and compile that instead.)

Courts can shift this ‘deployment’ in both directions. They may “find” meaning or functionality in the law never contemplated or even explicitly disavowed by those who crafted and voted for the legislation, or they may prohibit some portion of explicit functionality due to conflicts with the Constitution, prior judicial rulings, or simply their own judgment.  As noted in Part I, judges don’t always agree with one another, either, so whether a given piece of legislation (or a subportion thereof) is upheld, modified, or rejected entirely depends upon which courts or individual judges end up reviewing it.

Third, there are serious and compelling arguments as to how well the current government health care programs (such as Medicare and the VA hospital system) work, not to mention the government systems modified and relied upon by HR 3200 (such as the IRS and Social Security). While you may argue with Gall’s maxims above, I know of no serious systems designer who will state that it is possible to build a large, complex system that works from complex systems that work poorly, if at all. The quality of your original and leveraged systems provides an upper bound on the quality of your final system. To believe otherwise is to succumb to wishful thinking.

Maier and Rechtin

In The Art of Systems Architecting by Mark W. Maier and Eberhardt Rechtin (2002), the authors take a cross-discipline approach to systems architecting, including talking specifically about social systems in Chapter 5. The following passage from that chapter is of particular relevance to the overall purpose of HR 3200 (all emphasis in the original):

The first insight, which might be called the four whos, asks four questions that need to be answered as a self-consistent set if the system is to succeed economically; namely, who benefits? who pays? who provides? and, as appropriate, who loses?

The political arguments raging over HR 3200 are exactly over those four questions. In fact, Maier and Rechtin themselves foresaw those arguments, since they go on to use health care as an example:

Example: serious debates over the nature of their public health services are underway in many countries, triggered in large part by the technological advances of the last few decades. These advances have made it possible for humanity to live longer and in better health, but the investments in those gains are considerable. The answer to the four whos are at the crux of the debate. Who benefits — everyone equally at all levels of health? Who pays — regardless of personal health or based on need and ability to pay? Who provides — and determines cost to the user? Who loses — anyone out of work or above some risk level, and who determines who loses?

The problem with HR 3200 and with the arguments put forth to date on its behalf is that they have not systematically and credibly addressed those four questions. In fact, those arguing in support of HR 3200 and health care reform in general have often given contradictory answers to those four questions, undermining their own credibility, given ammo to their opposition, and (justifiably) undermining public support for HR 3200.

Along those lines, the authors also note that in architecting social systems, you face not just the constraints of normal system design — risk, performance, schedule, and cost — but two more: perception vs. facts. They go on to say:

Social systems have generated a painful design heuristic: it’s not the facts, it’s the perception that counts. Some real-world examples: . . .

• One of the reasons that health insurance is so expensive is that health care is perceived by employees as nearly “free” because almost all its costs are paid for either by the the employee’s company or the government. The facts are that the costs are either passed on to the consumer, subtracted from wages and salary, taken as a business deduction against taxes, or all of the above. There is no free lunch.

Again, with great relevance to the current debate over HR 3200 and the whole approach of the House over health care reform, the authors state:

Like it or not, the architect must understand that perceptions can be just as real as facts, just as important in defining the system architecture, and just as critical in determining success. As one heuristic states: the phrase, ‘I hate it’, is direction. There have even been times when, in retrospect, perceptions were “truer” than facts which changed with observer, circumstance, technology, and better direction. . . . In the end, it is a matter of achieving a balance of perceived values. The architect’s task is to search out that area of common agreement that can result in a desirable, feasible system.

Maier and Rechtin end Chapter 5 with some heuristics they consider specific to social systems. Several are those already cited above, but here are a few additional ones (my comments are in brackets):

Success is the eye of the beholder [i.e., the US public] (not the architect [i.e., Congress]).

Don’t assume that the original statement of the problem [e.g., "45 million uninsured"] is necessarily the best, or even the right one. (Most customers would agree.)

In social systems, how you do something may be more important than what you do. (A sometimes bitter lesson for technologists [and Congress] to learn.)

It’s easier to change the technical elements of a social system than the human ones (enough said).

Maier and Rechtin have an entire appendix at the end of the book on heuristics for system-level architecting. Most of these are intended for software and hardware architecting; however, several have bearing for HR 3200 and the general effort for health care reform.

Plan to throw one away; you will anyway.

This comes from Fred Brooks’ classic work, The Mythical Man-Month, and appears to be highly relevant to what’s going on right now in Congress, where both conservative Democrats and Republicans are suggesting that the best approach right now would be to start over again.

In architecting a new [software] program all the serious mistakes are made in the first day.

As someone who has been dealing since 1995 with failed or troubled IT projects, I find that this is the maxim I keep coming back to. I think that the Obama Administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress badly miscalculated public support for rushing sweeping (and unexamined) health care reform into law given the profound economic problems facing the country (not to mention the massive Federal deficits).

Given a successful organization or system with valid criteria for success, there are some things it cannot do — or at least not do well. Don’t force it!

As noted in Part I, HR 3200 is “kitchen sink” legislation, trying to accomplish a variety of changes that are not necessarily related or dependent. I suspect that Obama and Congress would have been far more successful with a series of small, focused bills that had clear goals and clear limits. The problem with HR 3200 is that by trying to cover so much ground, it merely increases the overall size of the opposition — people with objections to a specific portion of HR 3200 find themselves uniting (directly or indirectly) with those objecting to other portions of HR 3200. By recasting HR 3200 into smaller, well-defined chunks, the opposition to any given chunk becomes smaller as well, increasing that bill’s chances of passage.

Group elements that are strongly related to each other, separate elements that are unrelated.

The shorthard version of this in software design is “high cohesion within a module, loose coupling between modules”. This is another argument for breaking up health care reform into smaller, well-defined and clearly-focused chunks.

If you don’t understand the existing system, you can’t be sure you’re re-architecting a better one.

And, I might add, if you don’t understand the proposed system, you can’t be sure it’s a better one. It is unclear that most of the members of Congress who are pushing HR 3200 understand either the current US health care system or HR 3200 itself (and all its implications).

I could include many more maxims here, but you are better off getting Maier and Rechtin’s book and reading it for yourself.

Part III will suggest a different approach to health care legislation using good practices from systems development and software engineering.

ITEM: My co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, has a post over at the New Ledger about the proposed legislation to give the President “emergency control of the Internet”:

S773 makes no attempt to outline and describe what form of emergency would trigger the use of these broad new powers to limit communication, nor any means by which it could be reviewed by anyone outside the executive branch. The bill also proscribes that the executive branch will perform periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies “shall share” requested information with the federal government.

Translation: the US government bureaucracy will be spending your tax dollars to figure out private networks, find choke points and places where they can control the flow of communication. Furthermore, companies (such as your ISP) are going to be required, by law, to supply the federal bureaucrats with whatever network, account, usage and history information they deem appropriate. All in the name of cyber safety, you see.

Read the whole thing. I propose that we label S773 “the stupid Rockefeller bill“, just as an earlier idiotic piece of legislation by (now former) Senator Fritz Hollings to require all computers to have controls to block digital copying became known on the Hill as “the stupid Hollings bill”. The stupid Hollings bill eventually died; let’s work to ensure that the stupid Rockefeller bill dies as well.

ITEM: It’s passe now, but guess what? Van Jones did not fill out the infamous 63-question form that the White House was requiring for background checks. No word on whether the FBI ran the usual mandatory background check on Jones and, if so, just what they reported to the White House. Meanwhile, the mainstream media is saying, “Who? What happened? Was it important?”

ITEM: Maybe it’s just as well that Van Jones, the White House’s “Green Jobs czar” is gone. Doesn’t look as though those “green jobs” are materializing all that well.

ITEM: Speaking of clueless journalists, Sandra and I fly out tomorrow (Wednesday) to DC for the 9/12 March on the Capitol. Estimates of the expected protest crowd for Saturday have doubled, from 25,000 to 50,000. Anyone want to lay bets on how much actual coverage this gets in the mainstream media? ..bruce w..

The Onion is doing some of the best video satire around. Hat tip to Randy Barnett over at the Volokh Conspiracy. ..bruce w..

In interesting and complex story is unfolding, centered on Goldman Sachs, the large and highly profitable company that we all worked so hard to fund with bail out dollars. The story started as a small, throw-away technical story about a former Goldman employee named Sergey Aleynikov, who left the firm and was accused of taking source code with him. From a Reuters story on the subject from earlier this month:

That wealth is generated on computer systems that can handle greater trading volumes at ever increasing speeds. These platforms often rely on algorithms — a sequence of instructions used for calculation and data processing — that can spot unseen opportunities in the market and give their users a huge advantage measured in milliseconds.

Sergey created highly reactive real time trading code that likely was looking for “pockets of predictability” in the somewhat noisy sea of trades that happen every day. These are transient opportunities to make a small amount of money on trades that last for only a few moments to less than a day. On their own they are very small, but when orchestrated by high speed computer and constantly running, they can represent a substantial and steady stream of income for the firm or trader that is running them.

Where this starts to get strange is what Goldman did next, and how federal law enforcement became involved. This except from Zero Hedge:

Sergey Aleynikov was arrested at Newark airport by FBI agents, as he was coming back from a trip to Chicago, on what are basically industrial espionage charges. Sergey, or Serge as his Linked-In account identifies him, was VP of equity strategy.

In the 5 days immediately preceeding his departure from “Financial Institution” (potentially GS), Sergey allegedly downloaded 32 megs of ultra top-secret quant trading proprietary code, that, according to Special Agent McSwain’s affidavit, he then proceeded to encrypt and upload to a website in Germany, with a UK owner.

From the affidavit: “certain features of the [code], such as speed and efficiency by which it obtains and processes market data, gives the Financial Institution a competitive advantage among other firms that also engage in high-volume automated trading.The Financial Institution further believes that, if competing firms were to obtain the [code] and use its features, the Financial Institution's ability to profit from the [code]'s speed and efficiency would be significantly diminished."

Let me clarify - in the matter of a few days, Goldman Sachs was able to get federal law enforcement to arrest a programmer that had left its employ to work for one of its competitors. Those familiar with the workings of our justice system might be surprised at the speed at which this went from "we think he is up to no good" to "enjoy your jail cell, Serge". Since when does the FBI take marching orders from Goldman Sachs?

This becomes important because in the present day program trading (under the control of machines running programs like this) account for as much as 49% of all trades on the NYSE, with Goldman's programs taking up at least 60% of that volume according to Zero Hedge.

A few days later Bloomberg weighs in wanting to know just exactly what Goldman's code was doing that could so manipulate the markets? The video says, “It is amazing within one day of Goldman calling they had FBI agents at his driveway doing surveillance. The next day they arrested him…”

Last but not least, in the tin foil hat area of this evoloving puzzle is a set of wild speculation that was posted first on the daily KOS and later re-cycled via Denninger's market ticker, including such charges as:

...GS, through access to the system as a result of their special gov't perks, was/is able to read the data on trades before it's committed, and place their own buys or sells accordingly in that brief moment, thus allowing them to essentially steal buttloads of money every day from the rest of the punters world.

It would mean that Goldman was able to "see" transaction order flow - bid, offer, and execute messages - before they were committed in the transaction stream. Such a "SNIFF" would be COMPLETELY UNDETECTABLE by the sender or recipient of the message.

The implication of this would be that they would be able to front-run any transaction where the data was visible to them, thereby effectively "stealing pennies" from each transaction they were able to front-run.

Which are very heavy charges indeed. There is something strange wrapped inside this story, and if we are all lucky it will emerge over time. With this now a legal matter, this may end up unfolding in a direction that powerful forces such as Goldman and the NYSE would rather not have it go. Within the court system, much of what Sergey knows in relationship to this matter is now discoverable and available to be cross examined. All it would take would be for some enterprising legal mind to start pulling this thread and a great many interesting facts may come to light.

We may find that our hard earned tax money that did not go to send us back to the moon instead went to help firms like Goldman Sachs further loot and launder what is left of our shattered economy, all the while keeping their government cronies on warm standby to beat down anyone who might spill the beans.

Gee, Maw, tell me again: how does this stimulate the economy?

[For those of you coming in from Ace of Spades HQ, here's the Atlas Shrugged review.]

AFTERNOON LINKS

ITEM: Visualization is always a good thing. The Heritage Foundation graphically illustrates the minuscule nature of Obama’s proposed  — and far from realized — cuts (hat tip to Instapundit):

MORNING LINKS — things are heating up a bit.

ITEM: The stimulus ain’t stimulating fast enough. Actually, I have serious concerns as to whether the stimulus can truly “stimulate” the economy (as opposed to distorting it, followed by a crash — kind of like drinking three Red Bulls on an empty stomach). And here’s the key reveal: ” The reports do not say how many jobs have been created.” I wonder why.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert — “U.S. to put conditions on TARP repayment“:

Strong banks will be allowed to repay federal bailout funds, but only if such a move passes a test to determine whether it is in the national economic interest, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing a senior U.S. administration official.

The report said banks that had plenty of capital and demonstrated an ability to raise fresh capital from the market should, in principle, be able to repay government funds.

But the judgment would be made in the context of the wider economic interest, the report said.

Stop and think about that for a moment: strong banks that have received bailout funds will be allowed to repay those funds — our tax money, present and future — only if the government decides it’s “in the national interest.”

ITEM: In the meantime — and completely unrelated to the half-million people who gathered in tea parties nationwide last week — Obama orders $100 million in budget cuts! Big whoop;  we face a $1.7 trillion deficit this year alone. Imagine being overdrawn by $17,000, and then trying to find ways to reduce the amount by $1. This clip immediately came to mind:

ITEM: Sun, having botched its acquisition by IBM, has agreed to be acquired by Oracle. Frankly, I think that IBM would have been a better fit for Sun technology and culture, and I think IBM was foolish to let Oracle (its arch competitor in the database market) get its hands on Sun. On the other hand, it’s a big win for Oracle; kudos to them.

ITEM: Only 13% of CIA personnel speak another language. What makes this item funny is that last Friday, I was driving home (here in the Denver area) and flipping through radio channels. I settled on a Spanish-language music station to practice my listening comprehension. In the middle of a commercial break came a recruiting ad for the CIA. The really funny part: the ad was in English. That makes sense, actually — you want your recruits to be bilingual — but it was certainly weird.

ITEM: Obama will hold his first cabinet meeting today with “the most diverse Cabinet in history.” I’m more concerned about their ethics, their competency, and their ideology.

ITEM: Jackson Diehl cites the key challenge in Obama’s foreign policy efforts:

Now comes the interesting part: when it starts to become evident that Bush did not create rogue states, terrorist movements, Middle Eastern blood feuds or Russian belligerence — and that shake-ups in U.S. diplomacy, however enlightened, might not have much impact on them. . . .

Obama is not the first president to discover that facile changes in U.S. policy don’t crack long-standing problems. Some of his new strategies may produce results with time. Yet the real test of an administration is what it does once it realizes that the quick fixes aren’t working — that, say, North Korea and Iran have no intention of giving up their nuclear programs, with or without dialogue, while Russia remains determined to restore its dominion over Georgia. In other words, what happens when it’s no longer George W. Bush’s fault? That’s what the next 100 days will tell us.

ITEM: Meanwhile, Robert Samuelson — always worth reading — questions our obsession with the Great Depression, but in the end hedges his own bets:

Some indicators now imply that the present decline is ebbing (“glimmers of hope,” says President Obama). China shows similar signs of improvement. All this diminishes the dreary comparisons with the Depression. But if these omens prove false, a more somber conclusion could emerge.

The mistakes of the Depression were rooted in prevailing economic orthodoxies, which had been overtaken by new realities. The present policies likewise reflect today’s orthodoxies. But what if they, too, turn out to be misguided because the world has moved on in ways that become obvious mostly in retrospect?

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: Yeah, I know it’s been a few days, but between attending the Denver Tea Party and reading Atlas Shrugged (as well as Alas, Babylon — what a fun week!), I’ve been busy. So shoot me.

ITEM: Speaking of Atlas Shrugged, the New York Times says that Obama is looking forward to a redefinition of capitalism. Which brings to mind this quote from Atlas Shrugged:

“My purpose,” said Orren Boyle, “is the preservation of a free economy. It’s generally conceded that free economy is now on trial. Unless it proves its social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won’t stand for it. If it doesn’t develop a public spirit, it’s done for, make no mistake about that.”   . . .  “The only justification of private property,” said Orren Boyle, “is public service.”

Hint: Orren Boyle isn’t one of the good guys.

ITEM: Yet more Atlas-Shrugged-in-real-life, this time up in Canada:

Indirect bureaucratic control proved to be a failure, filled with problems that rendered it unworkable and prone to disaster: wasteful investment decisions, pork barrel projects, clumsy redistribution programs and general failure to achieve objectives. “The planners,” says Prof. Ellman, “are often no more able by indirect levers, than they had previously been able by direct levers, to guide the enterprises to socially rational decisions.”

This is all very old news in economics, I know. But it seems not yet to have reached Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, the federal government’s official advisor on how to bring the United Nation’s “sustainable development” model to Canada via major government economic intervention and control.

This week the NRTEE produced the latest report in its current mission, which is to turn Canada’s market-driven energy economy into a what Prof. Ellman would call a centrally planned indirectly bureaucratically controlled low-carbon economy.

Titled “Achieving 2050: A Carbon Pricing Policy for Canada,” the report adds hundreds more pages to the NRTEE’s existing volumes on carbon and climate issues. It also adds a fresh batch of horrifying economic ideas to a planning agenda that is already on the brink of parody.

Read the whole thing.

ITEM: Speaking of apocalypse, J. G. Ballard has died. His end-of-the-world SF novels — The Drowned World,  The Burning World– were staples of my high school reading years. But his greatest work (IMHO) was Empire of the Sun, based on his own experiences as a child caught up in the Japanese occupation of Singapore and sent to a Japanese POW camp.

ITEM: Memo to Microsoft: you know you really screwed up when a news article about the impeding release of Windows 7 is headlined, “Meet Microsoft’s antidote to Vista.”

ITEM: Speaking of not having a clue, DHS Sec’y Janet Napolitano is blaming “politicization” over the outrage about the “rightwing extremist” report. The real “politicization”, of course, is the report itself.

ITEM: More cluelessness: Obama says that the Republicans are “the party of no”, as if that’s a bad thing. “Just say no!” was one of the more popular chants at the Denver Tea Party last Wednesday, and with trillions of dollars in deficits projected for the next decade, we need to hear “No!” more often. Meanwhile, White House advisor David Axelrod thinks that dissent and demonstrations are “unhealthy”, at least when directed against his boss.

ITEM: And rounding up the Clueless Trifecta for the weekend: “White House: Releasing memos didn’t hurt national security.”And, of course, that’s immediately apparent and provable, isn’ t it? And not everyone agrees.

ITEM: Here’s this bonus assertion: “Obama: Cuban, Venezuelan outreach was ‘positive’.” For whom, Mr. President, for whom? There’s a reason all these statements were released on the weekend. Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson wonders what really goes on in Obama’s thoughts about the world at large. And when you have the Associated Press comparing you to Gorbachev (and not in a good way), it may be time to rethink your approach.

ITEM: Speaking of the former Soviet Union, here’s a news alert: Russia is not a democracy! It’s also not much of a world power any more. And for all my mocking tone, this is truly tragic. I had high hopes for Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union — it has tremendous natural resources and a brilliant, friendly, well-educated population. Sandra and I visited there in 1998, and our daughter Heather spent 18 months there doing missionary work (and went on to graduate with a BA in Russian from BYU); her husband, Michael, did two years of missionary work there as well.  They love Russia and its people, but are quite frank about just how disfunctional both the government and the society are.

ITEM: As much as I snipe at the New York Times, I give them major props for running what could be, in retrospect, their own obituary: “Newspaper Ad Revenue Could Fall as Much as 30%“:

Publishers will start to report first-quarter results this week, but people who follow the industry and have had a glimpse of the 2009 numbers say it is clear that once again, even the most pessimistic predictions were not dark enough. They are expecting declines sharp enough to wipe out profit margins at many papers that, despite two years of battering, had stayed comfortably in the black, and to push already-weak publishers closer to bankruptcy, perhaps even closure. “I think over all we’re going to see a decline somewhere in the mid-20s” compared to the first quarter of last year, said Edward Atorino, a media analyst at the Benchmark Company, a research firm. “There have been a lot of signals that things have gotten much worse in the last couple of months — the furloughs, the pay cuts, the layoffs.”

I am a great fan of newspapers and have no particular desire to see them die. During the 6 years (1999-2005) I lived in Washington DC, I faithfully read both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal every morning starting around 6 am. But when we moved here in Parker, Colorado, I found that the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News just weren’t the Washington Post, and I could only get the Wall Street Journal via afternoon mail (and it didn’t always show up then). I cancelled my WSJ subscription and cut back my Rocky Mountain News subscription to weekends only. When I realized that I was primarily using the News to help light fires in our woodburning stove, I cancelled it altogether.

ITEM: “After you!” “No, after you!” “No, I insist — you first.” In the greenhouse gas follies, the great dispute is over which countries should go first at limiting greenhouse gasses. Since everyone realizes that such an effort spells economic disaster, nobody is eager to actually do something.

Maybe some more links this afternoon.  ..bruce w..