I usually look to Megan McArdle for sensible well-informed financial commentary. She’s willing to tell people things that they don’t want to hear–a valuable trait in a financial writer.
Now she has something to say that probably none of us want to hear: There’s Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre. Unfortunately I suspect that she is right.
Everyone seems to be jumping on the story of the Romney campaign’s “Orca” debacle. But it seems to me that this is not really a new story. It’s a story that’s been repeated over and over again thousands of times, in large companies and small, not to mention government agencies.
Tell me that you haven’t heard this one before:
Ars Technica has a great analysis of “Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown.” Regardless of your political views, if you are involved in any large IT project this is worth reading.
“Orca” was the campaign’s massively-hyped centralized computer system for managing the get-out-the-vote drive. It was supposed to track the process in real time and shift resources as necessary from areas where Romney was running far ahead to areas where more help was needed–thus running rings around Obama’s more old-fashioned system.
In fact the system was inadequately tested and users had essentially no training. On Election Day it collapsed, leaving the campaign managers flying blind. Given the margin of victory this probably wasn’t enough to change the results the election. (The “ground game” is supposed to be good for a point or so.) Still, it certainly didn’t help.
“The end result,” Ekdahl wrote, “was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of [get out the vote] efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.”
As Election Day approaches it looks like a pretty tight race. The polls tend to favor President Obama but his lead is usually within the margin of error. A lot will probably depend on which side does a better job of turning out the vote. In addition such a close race offers the chance of some rather ugly outcomes, including the following:
On the other hand it is still barely possible that we will have a clear winner soon after to polls close on the East Coast.
In any case, most states are not competitive so the winner in the Electoral College will be determined in a small number of swing states where the race in considered close. If you keep an eye on the swing states you will know the outcome as soon as anybody does.
Continue reading
A word to the wise: before you download that smartphone app for your favorite candidate you should read
The Register: Don’t download that app: US presidential candidates will STALK you with it.
In his post on net neutrality, Otaku-kun includes an image that is so hilarious (an unfortunately so plausible) that I couldn’t resist copying it:
The new FTC blogging guidelines are supposedly intended to go after the big commercial astroturfing campaigns, where publicity agencies pay large number of bloggers and tweeters to push commercial products. However anyone who blogs or posts to social networks needs to be aware of the rules, since it would be pretty easy to run afoul of them.
This raises significant free-speech concerns. Jack Shafer in Slate has a pretty good run-down of the issues: The FTC’s Mad Power Grab.
Elliotte Rusty Harold has just returned from China and posts this disturbing comment:
Reflecting back on my recent trip to Beijing…one of the most striking things was the contrast between personal, day-to-day freedom in Beijing and the United States (especially NYC/Los Angeles/Orange County). I’m not talking about political representation or freedom to read whatever I felt like, but just the simple ability to go whereever I felt like going without being hassled. To my surprise, by that measure Beijing came off way better than the United States does these days, and that doesn’t speak well for the U.S.
…
Somehow I thought a one-party, authoritarian state would be more oppressive than this. At least in the capital, Beijing compares favorably to major U.S. cities. To be honest, that doesn’t speak well for the U.S. If we can’t be less of a police state than a one-party, nominally Communist nation like China, then something has gone seriously wrong.
Back during the Cold War, right-wing types used to make a big distinction between “totalitarian states” (bad) and “authoritarian states” (not so bad.)
A totalitarian state (Russia, China or Nazi Germany) would try to monitor everything its citizens did and demanded constant declarations of effusive loyalty. An authoritarian state (Franco’s Spain) would generally leave people alone if they kept quiet and stayed out of politics.
By this definition China has clearly become an authoritarian state. But if America is becoming more of a police state than China (in terms of surveillance, etc.) then what does that make us?
Continue reading
Declan McCullagh has a detailed analysis of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s recent Congressional testimony in which he asked for greatly expanded surveillance powers. Currently the FBI has the technical ability to monitor just about everything that goes over the Internet, but they need to get a warrant (or a secret National Security Letter) in order to do so.
Mueller wants to convince the Internet Service Providers to change they Terms of Service to force their customers to “consent” to having the FBI monitor everything they do without a warrant. If the ISPs refuse (as they probably would for fear of lawsuits) then he wants Congress to pass legislation requiring it.
He justifies this by invoking the usual suspects (terrorism and cyberattacks) but of course the surveillance would be quickly extended to cover lesser crimes like copyright violation. It is amusing to imagine the FBI locking up millions of file sharers, but probably they would just prosecute a small number of people to serve as examples.
Like most people I have been following the unfolding problems of New York governer Eliot Spitzer with a mixture of amusement and disdain. However one detail seems particularly striking:
[Spitzer] arranged to meet with “Kristen,” a prostitute who charged $1,000 an hour, on February 13 in a Washington hotel and paid her $4,300, the court document said.
That would seem to imply that high-priced prostitutes, like high-priced lawyers, bill in six-minute increments.