McFreedom

You've probably already seen this Wall Street Journal article about how Starbucks is helping local coffehouses, not putting them out of business as everyone feared. I remember reading some time ago in the Journal an editiorial which claimed that the bookstore situation in You've Got Mail (a large chain bookstore moves in next to a quaint children's bookstore) was based on real life events, but, unlike in the movie, the little bookstore thrived.

I think this is a classic example of how competition results in better service for the consumer. For smart small business people, it also results in better business for them, because they end up serving a core customer base more effectively and accurately. I read a story some years ago about a small-town office-supply store which was terrified of the new Office Max/Depot/Staples moving into town, and as a result began agressive marketing on their comittment to service, their generous return policy, their small-town roots, etc. End result was that they have more business because everyone in town knows they're there and likes them.

It's not small business, but a similar thing has happened with bookstores. I worked in a mall bookstore in 1989, as a clerk, a Waldenbooks. We had the same hours as the mall (10:00AM - 9:00PM, basically). Drinks were verbotten. If we felt you were hanging around too long and trying to read the stuff without buying it, we'd pester you until you bought it or left.

Not far from my house is another chain bookstore - a Barnes and Noble. Not too many years ago, people were predicting that Amazon was going to put them out of business, and I think B & N got scared of that, themselves. They realized that what they could provide that Amazon couldn't was a comfortable space to really browse and enjoy books. That rather than trying to rotate you through, they should try to make you hang out as long as possible.

So, contrast the B&N of today with the Waldenbooks of yesterday: Drinks? B&N has a Starbucks inside it. Reading in the store? B&N has chairs for you to sit in while you read. Hours? Open 'til 10:00 every weeknight and 11:00 on weekends.

Uh, waiter? I'll have some more competition, please.

Sigh...

First quarter of 2003, the TSA is going eliminate "random" gate searches. And you can now take drinks through security. And they've apparently started a "registered traveler" program to speed frequent fliers through the system. I'm very glad to see the idiocy starting to end. Now if they can just get rid of those ridiculous, humiliating and equally "random" shoe checks at security, I might even begin to think that their primary goal is security, not just making me grumpy.

While I often complain about subtle bias in the media, I was surprised to see how balanced this CNN story about the results of the Brady Law is. It draws no conclusions from press releases (on either side) and simply reports what is in the study. I clicked on the link expecting to see at least a paragraph talking about either what a rousing success the Brady Law was - because it's "kept 151,000 criminals from getting guns" (not true) or how we need more legislation because "it only prevents 2% of applicants from getting guns and there are probably more bad people out there." They even have a table breaking down the reasons for rejection. Good job, CNN!

All I wanna know is, did one attorney or the other say, "If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck..."

I've read a lot of things in the past forty-eight hours that say, essentially, "Wow, this whole Iraq agreeing to inspectors thing really blind-sided Bush, I guess there won't be a war now." Others seem to imply that, should a workable inspection system be put in place, that it would still be unacceptable to Bush, and that we'd go to war, anyway.

I don't think so, on either of these two points. This administration has shown itself quite adept at both controlling debate and doing the unexpected. I think the possible outcomes here are pretty simple to map, and that the Bush team has certainly had the forsight to sit down with a pencil and paper and draw the flowchart. Here's my version of it:

There are two games we are playing, right now. One is with the UN, and one is with Iraq. Our goal is to win both. There are two ways to win with the UN: Either by getting everyone to agree that the UN is irellevent (much like the League of Nations) or by getting the UN to actually enforce the Security Council resolutions. The only way we can lose with the UN is if the UN fails to enforce the Security Council resolutions and yet continues to exist as a body anyone takes seriously. Note that the UN game is not zero-sum; it is possible for both the US and the UN to win this game. In the game with Iraq, the primary victory lies in ensuring that Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological). Secondary victory lies in liberating the people of Iraq; this would be desirable, but if Mr. Hussein stays in power without weapons of mass destruction, we will still have achieved our primary goal. This game is zero-sum; we both may not win (although we both could lose if we fail to keep Iraq from using a weapon of mass destruction on us). As in many games, victory comes from the setup phase - we are trying to arrange our pieces now so that it is not possible for our opponents to win.

Round One: Compliance

The first round includes inspections, but that's not all. Remember, the Iraqis have been ignoring a whole litany of UN Security Council resolutions, including weapons inspections; giving the Iraqi people the money from the oil they sell; and not oppressing the Iraqi people. Even if they allow inspectors unfettered access anywhere (which I doubt), Mr. Hussein clearly will not give his people the money from the oil he sells, nor stop oppressing them, generally.

So, in this first round, I can see three basic outcomes. The first (and least likely) is that he complies with all UN Security Council resolutions. No more weapons of mass destruction, no more oppression of Iraqi people. In all likelyhood, that also means no more Saddam, because without his boot on their necks, the Iraqi people will probably overthrow him. In this outcome, the game is over at round one, no need to continue the decision tree. Go to "Iraq Outcome One" and "UN Outcome One."

The second (and most likely) is that he complies with some UN Security Council resolutions, or tries to appear to comply, in the hopes that some or all of the UN will be fooled into thinking he is in compliance and that no further action is needed, which will force the US to act unilaterily (or, he hopes, not at all). Go to "Round Two."

The final possible outcome to round one (which I believe is only slightly more likely than the first possible outcome - i.e., not very likely at all) is that he clearly fails to comply with UN Security Council resolutions (especially the inspection ones). In this case, I expect that the UN Security Council will authorize force. If Force Is Authorized, Go To "UN Outcome One" and "Round Three." Else, Go To "Round Two."

Round Two: Convinving the UN to Act

The Round is only played if Mr. Hussein puts the UN in a position where the US feels it should act. This round is avoided if Mr. Hussein capitulates completely in Round One, or Mr. Hussein is so abrasive to the UN that there is no question of it acting. I think it highly likely Round Two will be played, and I further think the Bush team has anticipated it and has plans for it. This round is played entirely between the US and the UN (comprised of its members). This is the final round with the UN; after this round, the UN game will be complete.

Without getting into how this round is to be played, there are two possible outcomes from it. Either the UN authorizes the use of force, in which case Go To "UN Outcome One" and "Round Three", or they do not authorize the use of force. If the US remains bound by this decision (highly unlikely given the President's stated intent not to be bound by it, combined with his 70% approval rating), Go To "UN Outcome Two" and "Iraq Outcome Three" If the US ignores this decision (very likely) Go To "UN Outcome Two" and "Round Three".

Round Three: Use of Force in Iraq

This is the final possible round of the Iraq game. On its own or with the UN, in this round, the US (and perhaps friends) will invade Iraq, eliminate weapons of mass destruction, and overthrow Mr. Hussein. While highly unlikely, it is possible that we will fail in this effort, in which case, Go To "Iraq Outcome Three". Much more likely is "Iraq Outcome One".

Iraq Outcome One: Iraq In Compliance; Hussein Ousted

In this outcome, Mr. Hussein is eliminated, as well as the weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq is in compliance with all UN Security Council resolutions. This is an unconditional victory for the US. If the UN ended up in "UN Outcome One," it is an unconditional victory for the UN, as well.

Iraq Outcome Two: Iraq In Compliance; Hussein Remains

In this outcome, Mr. Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction are destroyed, and he complies with UN Security Council resolutions on giving oil money to civilians and not persecuting his own people. Until he is overthrown (which I do not believe will be very long if he is not starving and persecuting his people), this is a partial victory for the US. The only way to get to the end point is if Mr. Hussein complies with the UN, so the UN must be in "UN Outcome One" at this time and also has an unconditional victory.

Iraq Outcome Three: Weapons of Mass Destruction Remain; Hussein Remains

This is the least likely of the possible Iraq outcomes; it would require Mr. Hussein to both dupe the UN and for the US to allow the UN to be duped without doing something on its own. This is an unconditional victory for Iraq and an unconditional defeat for the US and the UN; the UN mst be in "UN Outcome Two" at this time.

UN Outcome One: UN Is Involved In Making Iraq Comply With All Security Council Resolutions

This is a "win/win" outcome for the US and the UN: Iraq complies. The US gets what it wants and the UN maintains its relevancy. I believe this to be the most likely UN game outcome. To be in this condition, Iraq must either be in "Outcome One or Outcome Two." This is an unconditional win for the UN and at least a partial victory for the US.

UN Outcome Two: UN Is Not Involved In Making Iraq Comply With All Security Council Resolutions

Whether or not the US decides to act unilaterally (but even more so if it does), this is an unconditional defeat for the UN. At the very least the US, and perhaps much of the rest of the world, will see the UN as being toothless; a League of Nations for a new century. It is a valid question whether the UN would even continue as a going concern if this outcome is reached, or if it does, if the US will still be a member.

Summary

The most likely outcome is "Iraq Outcome One" and "UN Outcome One": An unconditional victory for the US and the UN; an unconditional defeat for Iraq (well, for Mr. Hussein - this would be an unconditional victory for the Iraqi people). We have set up the pieces so that the most rational moves for all players result in our complete victory, and even irrational moves should result in at least a partial victory for us.

Are there cases I've missed? Perhaps. There's obviously a lot of handwaving about how these round will be played; that's not the point. The point is, in most cases you can ask a "yes or no" question ("Will Saddam comply with all UN Security Council Resolutions, or not?"), decide which outcome is more likely, and decide which way the ball will bounce for either one. If the US can set up the deicision tree such that every possible node results in victory, than it's just a matter of execution (no pun intended). I believe we're at that point, now.

My son Blake and I were under my desk, today, looking at the "sudwoofer," and listening to the low parts of various songs, and feeling the vibration with our hands. He looked at it, and announced, "Made in China." I explained that China was very far away, and that they made a lot of things there.

"We'd have to drive a long time to get there," he decided. I agreed.

"Do you want to go to China?" I asked.

"Ye-NO! Stay home."

"Yeah, I think you're right. Let's not go to China, today."

Antother topic my brother and I were discussing is the attitude of the "Egyptian Street." It was his opinion that surveys had shown that the average Egryptian hated the West, but it was my impression that they weren't that virulent, although I agreed that they don't like Israel all that much. Professor Volokh has a post debunking a recent study of Egyptian attitudes about the West.

For what it's worth, my opinions were informed by the even more unscientific and anectdotal report from P. J. O'Rourke in the October, 2002 issue of the The Atlantic, "Anything Goes," about a recent trip to Egypt. [Note: As of this writing, Mr. O'Rourke's article is not available online].

The bottom line seems to be that nobody knows what the average Egyptian thinks with any certainty.

The reason my brother Evan noticed that my email didn't work was because he took issue with my statement in Morality of Suicide Bombing that "Palestinians have killed a lot more Israeli civilians than vice versa."

He was trying to email me a link to a story which rebuts this claim, which he described as being from a "conservative" web page and trying to accurately count noncombatants (not classifying the suicide bombers themselves as "civilian casualties," for example).

I believe I've found it, and it's interesting reading. The bottom line is that there were 579 Palestinian "noncombatants" killed by Israel and 433 Israeli "noncombatants" killed by Palestinians through June, 2002.

Of course, the "bottom line" really hinges on who is a noncombatant. The study does correct a lot of past work on this issue by deciding that, "[N]on-uniformed Palestinians who fire at Israeli soldiers or civilians are classified as combatants."

I think the more general issue to consider is one of moral responsibility for one's own death. If a soldier kills an enemy in war, that soldier is not considered to be morally responsible for the death he caused, as he would be if he murdered the same individual in a different context. Enemy combatants - even ineffectual ones - are fair and valid targets on the battlefield.

Thus, I think the study doesn't go far enough on this issue: "Children throwing stones at tanks are not considered combatants[.]" They further discuss the overall uncertainty about casualties on the Palestinian side, in general: "[Palestinian] sources generally disagree on many significant details, including the name, age, and circumstances of death of victims," and claim to have erred on the Palestinian side when they weren't sure. Without looking at the study, of course, I can't verify this, but it's worth noting that they agree that they probably still have a lot of people in the "noncombatant" category that would be classified as "combatants" by their own measures if they had more data.

If a 12-year-old boy is throwing rocks at a tank and gets caught in the crossfire, I don't think he's a noncombatant. There has to be some presumption in warfare that targets on the battlefield who are engaging you are valid targets. Even if the Israeli soldiers are trying to shoot around these kids, occasionally one of them is going to get hit, and I don't think the Israeli soldiers have much of a moral responsibility to take risks themselves to prevent those types of casualties.

All that said, without seeming to weasel too much, I'm willing to accept that perhaps more Palestinian civilians have been killed than Israeli. I think the more important point was the next sentence, however, "[T]he vast majority of the Israeli civilians killed were directly targeted, while the vast majority of Palestinian civilians killed were accidentally targeted." I still stand by that. Furthermore, it's instructive to look at the percentages - 67% of the Palestinians killed were "combatants" by the definitions of the study. 26% of the Israelis were.

Email to quark@mcfreedom.com has been broken. Fixed, now. Thanks to my brother Evan for pointing this out...

Anyone who uses Mozilla to post to Blogger may know that, with any version of Mozilla greater than 1.0, posting tools don't work (ah, HTML). Adam Rice has figured out a workaround. His fix is in a couple of messages, but I'll summarize it, here:

First, find your "user prefs" directory. Under Linux, that's ~/.mozilla/<user>/<weird-sid-thing>.slt. Under Windows (2000; may be slightly different elsewhere) it's "\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\<weird-sid-thing>.slt". Inside either of those directories, there should be a directory called chrome. Create a file called userContent.css. Put this line in it:

  form[name="stuffform"] { height: 100%; }

Reset Mozilla. You should now be able to write blog entries. "Blog This" even works again!

I was reading Wired this morning, when I came across an interesting statistic. In the "Start" section, this month's "Inforporn" story is called "The Walls Have Ears," by Rebecca Harper. In it, she states, "The US spent about $68 billion on taps last year, arresting 3,683 people." Note: The link for that story doesn't go anywhere; it goes to where I think the story should be, but I've been unable to find it; perhaps they'll update it when they publish full content on 9/20/02; if not, it's on page 60 of the 10.10 (October, 2002) print magazine.

Being a suspicious reader of any news story about any study (well, any news story about anything but especially about studies), my first thought was, how much is that per arrest?.

$18.5 million per arrest. And she alludes that most of them were drug related. I know the government does some stupid things, but it was hard for me to imagine that they'd spend $18.5 million dollars just to catch a drug dealer. The original study appears to be this, from the Administrative Office of US Courts. A White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Study (which has serious flaws of its own, but those flaws aren't important for this discussion) stated that non-law-enforcement costs of drug use cost the US $98.5 billion in 1998. There were 1,579,566 drug-related arrests in 2000. That's an average economic cost per arrest of $623,589 per drug user. Even if we assume the average wiretap arrestee was the worst possible drug offender, and responsible for ten times the econmic loss of the average offender, we're still left with paying $18.5 million to avert $6 million in societal damage.

Of course, the answer is, Not even the government is that stupid. But apparently Wired is. The numbers given in the report state that, for the cases where cost was known (1,327 of 1,491), the cost was $48,198 per case, or a total of $71,863,218. Which is still a lot of money (basically $20,000 per arrest). But it's not a ludicrously insane amount of money.

I can't figure out where the error came from, either. It's not a simple order of magnitude anywhere. She didn't multiply twice or anything obvious like that.

I always like to put mistakes like this in context, because it shows how obviously the reporter and her editors were not thinking critically about the numbers they were seeing. The FBI's total budget for FY 2001 was $3.44 billion. Total Federal Spending on law enforcement was $34 billion in 2001. All levels of government combined - Federal, State and local - spent $146 billion on all law enforcement in 2000.

I'm not qualified to say whether the money we did spend on wiretapping was well spent; whether the criminals could have been caught more cost-effectively (or, given the cost of catching them, whether their largely drug-related offenses might be cheaper for society to ignore than to prosecute). But even I can see that it didn't take half of all the money we spent on law enforcement to wiretap 1,491 people.

Everyone seems to be talking about their memories of September 11, today. I was asleep when the planes hit the towers (I live on the west coast, so they crashed at about 6 am).

I'm not sure exactly when, but my youngest brother called and asked for me. My wife told him I was asleep. "Well, get him up!" he said. Figuring he needed help on some technical problem, she asked him what was up. He replied something about how New York was on fire. She came and got me, and as I got dressed to go upstairs, I turned on the TV.

Both towers had already collapsed, and southern Manhattan was on the TV, obscured by smoke and dust, some shot from New Jersey. My first thought was that someone had set off a tactical nuclear weapon, it looked that bad.

By the time I got upstairs, my wife had turned on the big TV to CNN. As I reached for the phone, I saw the first movie of the second plane going into the tower. My first thought was that it was terrible that they'd already put together a simulation of what had happened - it looked too Hollywood to be the real thing.

My brother was in a conference in Atlanta, which had pretty much spontaneously ended, and he was trying to figure out how to get back to his home in Raleigh with no airplanes flying. We talked for a bit, and I remember on the phone being overcome for the first time thinking about all the people in the towers.

We hung up, and I watched the TV for while. The doorbell rang; it was my new neighbor, whom I hadn't met, yet. He didn't have a TV set up, yet, and had been at SFO about to get on a flight to meet his fiance in Europe and they'd just sent everybody home. He wasn't sure what happened, so I invited him in, and we watched it together.

About noon I figured I should head to work, so I did so. I discovered the blood bank was already turning people away. People criticized the Red Cross in the aftermath, but I think they forget the sense we had at the time that this was only the leading edge of something much bigger. I donated money and blood (eventually) and I was not at all unhappy about them holding the money in reserve and eventually destroying the blood - I gave both those things in part to prepare them for the next attack. That it didn't come is much more important to me than that my bodily fluids were burned because they weren't needed.

After a few hours, it became clear that I wasn't getting any work done. I was just watching TV or listening to the radio, and I figured I could do that just as well at home, so I headed there.

Our house is on a hill on the Penninsula, overlooking San Francisco Bay. We're right above the San Carlos Airport (SQL), a little regional airport. We're right on SFO approach, and you can see Oakland approach across the bay. At night you can easily see 15 planes around the bay area; often it's more like 25. Commercial jets fly south just to the west of us, turn east and fly back north over the bay, constantly.

I invited my friend Jeff over, and he and I sat on the deck and drank. I drank scotch (Macallen 18, I think); I don't remember what Jeff drank. We watched the two fighters doing CAP over the Bay - one to the north of us and one to the south. They both turned due east of my house. I've never felt so glad to see our military; I really understood the love for the military our grandparents had in a way I never did, before.

The next few days to me were most highlighted by the quiet - I could step out on the deck and not hear an airplane, except the ocassional fighter.

Three days later, when the flights started again, I remember my wife and I went out on the deck and cheered the first flight into to SFO.

Found on Fark this Reuters picture showing Ground Zero back in March. The picture isn't anything new, but check out the caption:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as "ground zero" in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. "war on terror" since September 11. REUTERS/Peter Morgan

Uh, yeah. When I see that hole in the ground, "Human rights around the world" is the first thing that pops into my head, too! Certainly not thousands of Americans whose "human rights" were casualties on that day.

While the annoying thing about this is the fact that Reuters, which is so high on its "objective" horse it's getting a collective nosebleed, is putting editorial in its picture captions, I also have to take issue with the substance of the editorial. The "U.S. 'war on terror'" has not been opressing "[h]uman rights around the world." We've liberated Afghanistan, and while things still stink there, it's certainly not because of our war - our war have significantly improved things. It may be true that, in some parts of the world, governments are quashing dissent (or oppressing people) in the name of anti-terrorism efforts. But that's hardly our fault.