US foreign aid by country (via Wikipedia).

Girlfriend is perhaps not the right word. In Pakistan, as in Egypt, the US relationship is more akin to prostitution or blood money than anything else. The US pays off a military elite while being despised by the body politic in general. Despite giving almost $2 billion in aid to Pakistan, citizens there have a 73% unfavorable opinion of the country. That can only go on for so long.

What it essentially sounds like now is the Pakistan is breaking up with the US, while the US government doesn’t quite get it.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani called “red lines” for a new relationship…

“Nothing is happening on counterterrorism right now,” said a senior Pakistani security official. “It will never go back to the way it was.”

[to which the US responds]

“It is better to have a predictable, more focused relationship than an incredibly ambitious out-of-control relationship,” said one Western official. (NYTimes)

This is pretty predictable break up talk. One party is like ‘I’M BREAKING UP WITH YOU’, and the other is like ‘OK, so we’ll go to your mothers for Christmas’.

“It’s not happening,” said Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, a former interior minister…

“We’ve been very forthright in acknowledging that this is a relationship that needs to work,” a State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said on Friday. (NYTimes)

Pakistan is like NO and the US is still angling for some make-up drone killing.

The Obama administration is desperately trying to preserve the critical pieces of the relationship. General Dempsey asked the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, in a phone call on Wednesday if the relationship could be repaired, a person briefed on the conversation said. General Kayani said that he thought it could, but that Pakistan needed some space. (NYTimes)

I mean, seriously, this just writes itself.

The New York Times office. Photo by eflon

What I find a bit shocking is that this paywall cost $40 million dollars to implement. For that amount they could have presumably improved the product such that I would want to buy it other than putting a leaky fence around a product I’m used to getting for free. This is not to say that I wouldn’t like to pay for the New York Times. I actually wouldn’t mind. It’s not a charity gesture, however, give me something to buy.

There are two reasons to pay for something. Well, one really, but two flow out of it. The one reason is because you have to. The reasons that flow out of that are because you really have to and the other is because you have to and you want to. For example, at McDonald’s if you don’t pay they don’t give you food. At a restaurant you get food and pay after.

Online, people don’t really use the second model. Online I pay for a few things, I pay for extra storage on GMail, I pay for a music subscription at last.fm and I pay for WordPress Themes. These are things I cannot get any other way. If I don’t pay a bit more for GMail I have to delete mail, if I don’t pay for last.fm I can’t get customized radio. If I don’t pay for WordPress themes I have to spend time fixing up free ones. I think this model works, under a few conditions.

First off, they give me something better than I’m used to getting for free. They also save me time, which I’m willing to exchange for money. GMail gives me a shit ton of storage for free, but when I forward work mail and stuff it’s actually not enough. The paid option gives me untold gigabytes so I’m happy to buy. It saves me time in that I don’t have to pile through emails to delete them. Last.fm learns the music I like and plays customized radio. This spares me having to download and curate my iTunes collection, a time saving service that I’m willing to pay for. WordPress Premium Themes are insanely sophisticated by now and save me hours of development time, months in some cases. They also make me look like a genius to clients, and help me make money. Definitely worth a buy.

The NYTimes paywall, however, offers me the same thing as the old free product and actually asks me for time to figure it out and register and keep logging in across various computers and devices. It’s actually crappier than the free product and more of a burden on my time. This would be a possible model if they secured it, ie, forced me to pay. The Times, however, doesn’t. It makes it easier for me to not pay (select/delete) and makes themselves look stupid in the process.

One thought is that they think I’m going to crack it anyway and are letting me in. That the paywall is only for old people who don’t know what a URL is. That’s a bit of a weak business model, however, appealing to ignorance rather than reason. I am willing to pay. Just give me something extra to pay for and save me a bit of time.

For example, spend 40 million dollars integrating with Twitter and Facebook to provide me a social frontpage. Or apply some algorithms to figure out what I’m reading and recommend more stuff that I’d be interested in. Something that saves me time and makes me happy I’ll pay for. Incorporate social networking so anyone that doesn’t pay publicly look like an asshole, like someone who doesn’t tip at a restaurant. Spend 40$ million dollars making your site a bit cooler and then spend 15 minutes putting some decent access control with a fucking .htaccess text file, whatever.Reduce speeds for people that don’t pay, whatever.

You can either delight me into paying or force me to, but the NYTimes is doing neither. The end result is select, delete not because I’m a cheat but because they’re not even trying to make a sale.

Two somewhat anti-social animals

This is partly the proverbial trip to India and what has been for me, someone raised in America, six years in Sri Lanka. There is this modern confrontation with things like the social world and India and China as if they are something new when in fact they are very very old. I think Brooks most interesting insight is that we are information, and that we derive much happiness from our connection to it, in disparate forms.

“I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

It’s a long, thought provoking piece, a bit different from his usual editorials. I don’t understand his preoccupation with gelato and I think his case study is increasingly obscure, but it’s well worth a read.

My Surrender, by Andre Bohrer

In the latest WikiLeaks document dump is the story of two Iraqi men who were killed by a guncraft while appearing to surrender. A military lawyer said “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.” The difference in the American version of war is that they have lawyers and documents to excuse torture and murder, and courts and media to actually pore through it later. On the whole, however, the American misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are a much greater tragedy than even the war in Sri Lanka. By many accounts, over 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq alone, not directly by the military but also by the carnage the US occupation unleashed.

This is not to excuse Sri Lanka’s conduct in the war. I am sure that we have had many incidents like these American ones listed below:

Misunderstandings at checkpoints were often lethal. At one Marine checkpoint, sunlight glinting off a windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband. Hand signals flashed to stop vehicles were often not understood, and soldiers and Marines, who without interpreters were unable to speak to the survivors, were left to wonder why.

According to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter.

The only thing that makes America redeemable is that they can talk about this in public and hopefully learn from it. In Sri Lanka we simply say that no civilian blood was shed and ‘move on’. I should say borderline redeemable, because the US has still tortured hundreds, killed hundreds of thousands, disrupted the lives of millions and spent billions ‘learning a lesson’ they should have learned in Vietnam. It’s honestly horrifying. I was just reading that for the cost of a single soldier stationed in Afghanistan for a year, they could build 20 schools.

Still, there are tons of international groups within the US who – because they can discuss US atrocities – don’t outright condemn it. Which perhaps they should. But the lesson here globally, I think, is not that the US are hypocrites and therefore to disregard all criticism. That simply leaves us with a status quo of atrocity. I think the more vital lesson is that talking about this openly may actually make punishment less likely than trying to cover it up. Or it could be that the lesson is that having the most guns and the most money means that you can kill and people can talk and you don’t much need to worry, cause no one can punish you anyways. I think the real lesson is the latter, but I’d like it to be the former.

“Everybody must take precautions against epidemics to smash the germ warfare of American imperialism!” (1952)

Some of the resources China exploits, of course, are its own people and the environment. This, however, is also how America began. The American economy was founded on slavery and the genocide of Native Americans and clearing and exploitation of huge amounts of land. They are now in a position to enjoy the benefits of this resource exploitation without having the resources right in front of them. In the course of their growth, American invested in some complex and expensive systems – Social Security, high finance, a huge military, etc. When the resource use was going good this was fine, they had money coming in to pay for it. Over time, however, every society runs into diminishing returns. What was once very profitable becomes merely so, and then only in appearances. To quote Tainter:

The shift to increasing complexity is at first a rational, productive strategy that yields a favorable marginal return. Typically, however, continued stresses, unanticipated challenges and the costliness of sociopolitical integration combine to lower this marginal return. As the marginal return on complexity declines, complexity as a strategy yields comparatively lower benefits at higher and higher costs. With continuation of this trend, collapse becomes a matter of mathematical probability. (Tainter, pg 127)

I think we’ve all experienced this in our own lives, whereby we invest in luxuries (rent, satellite TV, cell phones) which soon become necessities, mounting expenses that make it harder to adapt to shocks like medical bills or lost jobs. On the societal level, humans adapt more and more complex ways to exploit a resource niche until they’re sucking marrow from the bone, and finally its just bone. When the resource is depleted, the complex resource exploiting machine remains, consuming tons of resources itself (salaries, rents, etc). Take, for example, the music industry, financial services industry, etc. In those cases, they now often take out more value than they add.

China, by contrast, is exploiting the shit out of stuff – including cheap labor, their own environment, and other countries. To quote Friedman:

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan. (New York Times)

What’s funny is that for all the ‘blood for oil’, the US is not even getting much oil or anything out of its conquests. A few zealots get to claim a moral high ground as world police while the reality, is torture, loss and waste. In fact, if anyone’s making money, it’s China. To quote Slate, “Look at Afghanistan, for example, where U.S. troops have been fighting for nearly a decade, where billions of dollars of American aid money has been spent—and where a Chinese company has won the rights to exploit one of the world’s largest copper deposits.” China also has bigger stakes in Iraqi oil than America.

At the end of the day, empire is a business, and it involves getting more out than you put in. Like prominent families, empire seems to begin with crime, proceed to genteel exploitation, then gets bigger, less industrious, even decadent, then collapses. The only way out, according to Tainter, is getting a new resource to exploit – be it conquest of land, a new energy resource, or a technological innovation.

Right now China is doing better on these counts, exploiting the shit out of everything. America, however, is bloated with defense and entitlement spending and crippled by colonization without benefits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, some sort of technological revolution – particularly energy – seems to be on the books (it better be, seeing as the 20th Century had splitting the atom, cars, and Internet). This will lift all boats and probably give America another shot in the arm. China, meanwhile, is more prone to collapse than the American empire because everything depends on growth, they are riding on a wave of bad debts, human rights abuses and corruption that is only obscured by growth. Take away the growth and this Chinese empire will collapse, like other Chinese empires before it.

What will happen? Who knows. I just feel that things are shifting this way, especially with Indian growth. I don’t like Chinese TV that much, for me the best part of empire, but Sri Lanka for once seems uniquely positioned to benefit from whatever’s going on.

Soldiers at Elephant Pass memorial

The rules have shifted risks from Afghan civilians to Western combatants. They have earned praise in many circles, hailed as a much needed corrective to looser practices that since 2001 killed or maimed many Afghan civilians and undermined support for the American-led war.

But the new rules have also come with costs, including a perception now frequently heard among troops that the effort to limit risks to civilians has swung too far, and endangers the lives of Afghan and Western soldiers caught in firefights with insurgents who need not observe any rules at all.

And America is not really winning the war in Afghanistan. However, it should be noted that the Soviets killed almost a million Afghans and didn’t work either. There are obviously different tactics for different wars, and I would argue that war itself is generally abhorrent and tends to continue and justify itself. But it seems that UN approved wars may not really end.

I do think that justice tends to play out in the end and ruthless powers tend to collapse under their own bloody weight, but ruthlessness does seem the surest route to winning wars. The American wars are largely wars of choice and one questions why they’re having them at all, but this isn’t the US that would incinerate entire cities as in World War II. That’s a good thing, but it may mean that they’ll never win so decisively again.

I think Sri Lanka can change and will change, but it will come from us. Instead of respecting and working with the Sri Lankan people, Chris Patten comes out with the usual moralizing tirade which has not much to back it up. He’s all about pity and threats of ‘cutting us off’. This may make a point in the circles he walks in, but it just hurts moderates on the ground here. Basically, he sounds like a colonial dick and strengthens the extremists. In the end it makes less and less space for us to push actual democratic values in the middle.

How to deal with shit like this:

Now, put yourself in a Tamil’s shoes, and decide whom to vote for in the presidential election: Choose either the head of the government that ordered the attacks against you and your family, or the head of the army that carried it all out.

Mr. Patten is saying that the Sri Lankan government ordered attacks specifically against Tamil civilians. I think the orders callously put people in the crossfire, but I don’t think for a moment that civilian families were targeted. No one is saying that the government was purposefully attacking civilians rather than attacking the LTTE and not much caring who was in the way. The latter is bad enough, but I think Mr. Patten’s allegation here is false. Worse, it makes the actual trauma look false by exaggeration.

Then there’s

By the end of 2009, most of the displaced had been moved, and the nearly 100,000 remaining in military-run camps were enjoying some freedom of movement — important steps brought about mostly as a result of international pressure and the authorities’ desire to win Tamil votes.

Can’t you just say, ‘we commend the government, but’? Even with tongue in cheek, just for diplomacy’s sake? The international community was not the reason, otherwise they would have also stopped the war. And the government decided to call the election. Plus they actually released the IDPs on the schedule they set. This is again Mr. Patten placing all the agency with the West and us just non-entities. He doesn’t give the government credit for anything, which even I do. It’s just a fatalistic view where Sri Lankans can’t do anything and the West needs to step in.

It is hard to imagine either candidate making the necessary constitutional reforms to end the marginalization of Tamils and other minorities — the roots of the decades-long conflict. Left unaddressed, Tamil humiliation and frustration could well lead to militancy again.

While Sri Lankan voters face a difficult decision, for the international community, the choice is clear. Whoever wins, the outside world should use all its tools to convince the government to deal properly with those underlying issues to avoid a resurgence of mass violence.

You know what, I can imagine it. I can imagine a better future, and I think most Sri Lankans can. So I’d really rather you not poop on that dream. It is something of a tautology here that the darkies will kill each other if they don’t follow western government just so. What they don’t realize is that a police state can also contain militancy, and there’s nothing a police state loves more than an international bogeyman making sweeping declarations, like…

In short, this means not giving Colombo any money for reconstruction and development until we know how it will be spent. And if we see funds not being used as promised, it means not being afraid to cut them off until.

Wow, I feel like I’m getting lectured by my dad, except Chris Patten isn’t my dad and the west itself is floating on Chinese loans. And the West is propping up governments in Saudi and Egypt and Israel and Pakistan that pretty much ignore what they say, but they seem to think it’s cool to make an example of Sri Lanka. I don’t mind if they act firmly, but they’re not really going to do it, certainly not based on some NGO Op-Ed. Talking loudly and carrying a little stick just emboldens extremists here.

They like the international bogeyman, and they especially like patronizing, empty threats. The JVP and people like Gotabaya Rajapakse are trying to spread this idea of an international conspiracy against Sri Lanka and Patten plays right into their hands. But again with the doom and gloom,

While there may not be much to choose between the candidates, the rift between General Fonseka and Mr. Rajapaksa — and the consequent divisions among Sinhalese nationalist parties and the renewed vigor of opposition parties — has at least put the possibility of reforms on the agenda. International leverage, correctly applied, could help expand this small window for change.

Well, there is a huge choice. Sarath doesn’t have a huge extended family for one, he’s in a coalition with all the minority parties, etc. They have drastically different proposals, one calling for more government reforms, the other same government and more projects. And what are these Sinhalese nationalist parties? The SLFP and UNP are not Sinhala nationalist parties, both work with Muslim and Tamil parties as expediency demands. And who split? Is he referring to the JVP, which is actually an opposition party? The only real Sinhala nationalist party is the JHU, and they’re not very prominent in this election at all.

I’m in the middle and even I am put off by both the tone and content of Mr. Patten’s piece. I don’t like it because it’s all about the West and how they know what’s right, giving no thought or respect to the Sri Lanka people that actually have to implement change. Threatening us with money or holding back money only pushes us back from the values that I think we have in common. In the face of what feels like an international threat, the country will pull away.

My overall point is that if the west needs to behave diplomatically. Speak softly and carry a big stick. You have money, cool, hold it over the ministers, don’t use it in a public forum that humiliates Sri Lankan people. You’re aware that many Sri Lankans think this war was worth it, why not put in a few paras to placate them that you’re not with the terras and rabid diaspora. Above all, don’t pity the Sri Lankan voter. We’re doing OK.

Vikas Bajaj is the business chappy from the Times and he was down here a month ago. He’s got a story about tea, Dilmah tea specifically. I used to bring Dilmah back for my friends in Canada and they loved it. That’s a cool thing about Sri Lanka, and it’s nice to talk about it. I like tea, you like tea, hey. I think the story kinda glosses over how desperately poor and exploited the tea workers are, though it does close with how people don’t actually want this job for their children. I’m not sure that ‘small, rundown houses’ really describes the squalor of line houses. However, better business is, I suppose, a way out.

What I like about the article is that it looks at a Sri Lankan business making good.

His company’s story symbolizes the path that other Sri Lankan businesses and industries have had to follow to compete with the likes of China and India, which have lower costs of production and the advantage of size. To attract business, Sri Lankan companies have become specialists and producers of affordable yet exclusive products. In apparel, for instance, producers here have established themselves as a go-to source for lingerie and sportswear so they do not have to compete on cheaper clothes directly with low-cost mass producers like Bangladesh and China.

And nary a caveat in sight! There’s no ‘but, this war has been going on for thirty years and how sad and it will never end but look at this moment of poignant humanity’. It’s about a country which is pretty cool and has got problems but is overall moving forward. Which Sri Lanka is.

Another great Times article is 31 places to go in 2010. Sri Lanka is number one. I really think Sri Lanka deserves this. Travelling around Sri Lanka is so much fun, so easy, so cheap, and so beautiful. You can get so many places in one day and there are still so many untouched places to discover. People are super nice, you can get a smattering of English anywhere and it’s pretty safe. The food is good, the water is nice, the sunset and sunrise are amazing. What else could you want. MIA was freaking out on Twitter and posting pictures of dead babies and stuff, but I think this kinda attention is good for Sri Lanka. At least the people that actually live in Sri Lanka.

I came back here years ago cause I thought the country was too inherently awesome not to boom, and I thought the war stuff was under control. It ended up being five years of tsunami and death and war and heartbreak and hustle, but I can see that future again. I mean, I guess I always did. Sri Lanka’s a great place to visit and a great place to be. Here’s hoping for more good news.

Tangalle

Now – South Coast

The swimmability of the ocean changes seasonally. Luckily, this is an island so it’s always season somewhere. Right now is great for the south-western coast. Tangalle is quite a bit deeper in my experience, but still OK. There are shallow, clear rock pools which are good for families. Mirissa is supposed to lovely, I sadly haven’t been. I think it’s season for whales and dolphins there too. As you go around the coast you then get to Unawatuna. Una is well developed commercially, there are tons of guest house and food and stuff. The beach is also great right now, and it’s a bay, so you can wade out a long ways safely. I recommend Kingfisher for food.

Galle is cool whenever, but it would be the most fun for tourists this 28th Jan through 1st Feb, for the Galle Literary Festival. There’ll be a bunch of international authors down and cosmopolitan people around, plus the place is a short hop from Una and even Hikkaduwa (basically Colombo’s beach suburb now, on the west coast).

Inland, Yala National Park is awesome. You can stay at the Yala Village and literally be on your balcony looking at wild boar and elephants. But do be careful.

Also, on January 15th there is a solar eclipse visible from very few places on earth. Jaffna is one of them. I’m heading up there on the 13th. It should be sweet.

Arugam Bay

Late Summer

Around July, August I always try to make it out to Arugam Bay. This is a surf spot which has evolved a bit of a tourism industry around. Personally, I try to stay away from the main stretch and swim around Pottuvil Point. This is a bit annoying to find, you basically turn left in Pottuvil town and wind in past the school and lagoon and stuff. Once there, however, it is unbelievable. There are these giant rocks stacked next to the beach. We slept on them and went swimming as the sun warmed the sea in the morning. The waves are strong but safe, so it’s just fun. Surfers get good 100 meter runs, but you can also do quite happily with a bodyboard. Get out and have avocado and mayonnaise sandwiches, french fries.

August is also the season for the Perahera in Kandy. This is a parade with elephants dressed up and lots of fire. It is basically the coolest thing ever. I think this is also the Nallur Festival in Jaffna, which should be more accessible this year.

Anytime

Then I think hill country, like Ella or Haputale, is awesome anytime. The beach is great, but the sublime views from way up in the hills are some of my favorite moments in Sri Lanka.

People, however, never paid for content. Homer wrote the Odyssey for meals and a place to crash. Shakespeare became a prosperous land owner, but he never saw any bank from the Leonardo DiCaprio flick. The money is in the medium. Someone technical always comes into exploit the artist, and what they really sell is some medium. It’s a product, and the geeks selling the widgets make the real money.

The issue isn’t that the content is bad. It’s just that the old media product isn’t as good as, say, Apple or Google. Those are both ‘content’ businesses, but Apple’s sexy iWants and Google’s supercomputers are both much better products. A magazine or newspaper is a rich experience, but it’s not the best content delivery system. Which, if you want to be a content business, is the point.

This is not to say that newspapers or magazines are deprecated, like records. Or maybe they will be. Vinyl sales are growing and it’s quite a comfortable niche. It doesn’t really matter. The New York Times has 17.4 million readers per month online compared to 1.1 million subscribers (huge, basically opposite caveat). If they just released an innovative product around their content I’d buy it. Perhaps a pill that gives informative seizures every 3 hours, something new. If they have all those eyeballs they could push their classifieds section harder and sell ad space more aggressively, all through investments in technology.

Print still makes real money, but they should be smart about it. They need to move into India and China where there is growing demand for print. And not the vanilla International Herald Tribune, but real regional reporting. South America, Africa, those markets are still wide open and can be very profitable. Hell, a Mexican telecom tycoon is the one bailing the NYT out. The success of Al Jazeera shows that there’s still huge demand for news, but people don’t need to get it live from New York anymore.

Google and Apple are making investments and trying new markets and the media boys aren’t. I think that’s basically the difference. Content isn’t a tax and blaming the ungrateful consumer doesn’t make money. You have to improve the product. These guys are all in the content business. Google and Apple just package it better. All I’m saying is you wouldn’t wrap your fish in an iPhone. That’s basically where the business is right now.

To quote Google Co-founder Sergey Brin’s editorial

In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will “impress the necessity of something being done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.

Personally, I’ve been reading this excellent, funny book by Tamim Ansary called Destiny Disrupted: A History Of The World Through Islamic Eyes. Oddly, the parts that make me react emotionally were not the episodes from the Crusades, like

They went on a frightening rampage that including boiling adult Muslims up for soup and skewering Muslim children on spits… and eating them. I know this sounds like horrible propaganda that the defeated Muslims might have concocted to slander the Crusades, but reports of Crusader cannibalism in this instance come from Frankish as well as Arab sources.

oddly it was

[Genghis Khan] razed the legendary old city of Balkh, know to the ancients as “the Mother of Cities,” dumping its library into the Oxus River, hundreds of thousands of handwritten volumes swept away.

Perhaps it’s because I know Mr. Khan’s relatives, but it’s the destruction of knowledge that got me emotionally. Not that I’m not horrified by eating Muslim children, I’m just saying. Personally, the burning of the Jaffna Library is one of the things I regret most about Sri Lanka’s long war. But I digress.

Google is trying to digitize old books, especially orphan books where the copyright holder can be found. They’re also setting up a system to pay authors while making the information available to billions of people. Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon are suing to make them stop (for business reasons basically). That sucks.  I recommend reading Dr. Brin’s full editorial.

My goal, personally, is being able to capture what I see at night. I think a camera should be able to do this. However, with a long shutter cameras are actually capable of capturing what I cannot see, including otherworldly light. I suppose ISO could do the same things. However, I digress. For low light and general photography I’m interested in the new FujiFilm FinePix F200EXR ($320) and Sony WX1 ($500). The latter seems to have better image quality and does cool panoramas automatically.

However, I still think the FujiFilm F30 is the best low light camera ever made. I have owned two and thrashed them till they fell apart, but they’re magical. The LX3 I have now takes ‘better’ more printable photos but the controls suck and it makes a significant and awkward bulge in my pants. The long exposure trick is cool, but it takes me a minute to get the thing out and set it up for a normal party shot, which stresses me out. It does shoot really good HD video though. For something comparable (not an SLR, but not a compact) I’d recommend the Canon G11. It has great, intuitive controls, and now an improved low light sensor. No HD video, but takes great photos a bit easier than the LX3.

Not Megapixels

What’s interesting about the G11 and the other low light cameras is that they actually have less megapixels than competitors. That’s because it’s about quality, not quantity.  What you need for low light (and better pictures, generally) is a better sensor, not necessarily more megapixels. In fact, putting more megapixels on the same sensor produces granier shots. So the G11 actually dropped to 10 MP from 14 MP for the G10, which I think is great. Hopefully consumers will understand.

Tigers In The Midst

Any person with any sort of capability was in the LTTE economy. I personally know of pharmicists, teachers, translators and government servants who were ‘affiliated’ with the LTTE. Many people have told me they came north to ‘visit relatives’ just as the war starts, which I’m beginning to think is not entirely true. Many people did choose to move with the LTTE.

I don’t think a LTTE pharmacist needs to be too thoroughly screened. However, there are other levels of people who would have been fighting, and many were doing labor, forced or otherwise. For the country that won and then lost Afghanistan, they might want to consider the security issues. You can say that the cost (human rights, rule of law) is too high, but at least consider the issue as a rational one.

Empty Is The Fist

Furthermore, the real players in this game are diplomatic. India shapes things up on the low and then pledges money to resettle IDPs. The Times makes a bunch of public demands and allegations, but their ‘side’ doesn’t have the hard or soft power to back it up. Instead, it just inflames resistance here and makes it harder for local moderates to operate. It’s a pada show.

I think the Times/IHT need to take a page from Barack Obama and begin approaching the rest of the world as partners, not as vassals. As he said:

“America will not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation – the essential truth of democracy is that each nation determines its own destiny. What we will do is increase assistance for responsible individuals and institutions, with a focus on supporting good governance”

The Times is obviously not a government, but instead of lecturing it might be more productive if they supported the parts of Sri Lankan government that are working (security forces, medical teams, military engineers) and then offered constructive criticism. Based on respect.

Me personally, I think the government should let people with receiving families ‘post bail’ and go. I think everyone else should be given a choice, though the roads to most of the Wanni should remain closed till demining is done. I still think these Sri Lankans should have the choice. However, I don’t demand stuff because a) I’m not sure and b) it’s not constructive. But I do ask, diplomatically. I do try to support the institutions that work. Basically, I’m not a dick about it.

My message to the Times is, more generally, ‘What are you talking?’ In Sri Lanka that’s a phrase that comes up in many arguments. It refers not to the content but the tone, as in ‘why are you so rude?’ If the Times wants to actually help Sri Lanka beyond the casual rant then they may need to learn how to talk.

photo by Noodle Pie

A just war, via Al Jazeera’s Flickr

I think Gini Appu is right in that Sri Lanka risks missing our own reflection barking at the moon. But it’s so dumb sometimes. There are literally 3 million displaced in the AfPak war and the Pakistani government sucks more than ours. I mean the latter with all due respect, I think the Pakistani people showed great character and respect after the attack on our cricketers in Lahore. But your government does suck more than ours.

I don’t ask for consistency or moral equivalency or whatever. I don’t even consider hypocrisy an intellectual sin. But it is very difficult to take their coverage seriously sometimes. The New York Times still doesn’t refer to American torture as ‘torture’, it’s enhanced interrogations. The exact same techniques are still called torture when North Korea does it.

Meanwhile Sri Lankan military action against the LTTE must be halted and negotiated and Sri Lankans flying flags in menacing. However, Pakistan villagers rioting and killing their neighbors is “a grass-roots rebellion that underscores the shift in the public mood against the militants and a growing confidence to confront them.”

Well, OK. I guess the Al Qaeda lobby in New York and London isn’t as powerful as the LTTE. And I suppose terrorism is only terrifying when it hits you. Just forgive me if I check out the blogs and take the omniscient narrator in the Times a bit less seriously.

The New York Times is basically calling for economic sanctions on Sri Lanka in order to force a cease-fire. This includes the $1.9 billion emergency IMF loan which is basically to prevent the economy from cratering. I know that the Times doesn’t advocate terrorism, it’s my favorite paper. However, I can’t think of a greater weapon than if Prabhakaran wrote it himself. The LTTE wants the ‘international community’ to bail them out. The New York Times wants to do it.

The proper thing to call for is the LTTE to lay down their arms and let go of their human shields. The proper thing is to choke their international funding and support.

Instead the Times wants to point an economic gun at Sri Lanka in order to preserve the LTTE for ‘negotiations’. The LTTE doesn’t want a ceasefire to negotiate, they just want a ceasefire to not lose. I don’t even understand where the Times gets off.

Sanctions generally don’t work in any of these situations. All they do is entrench local despotic tendencies and drive countries into the arms of China, Russia, Iran, etc. How are the sanctions going in Burma, for example? Cuba?

The Times says there are no ‘good guys’ in this fight, but there actually are. I’m no big supporter of the government, but in the fight against the LTTE they are the good guys. My government is running the camps and hospitals that feed and clothe these people while the LTTE is keeping them as human shields. My government has elections while the LTTE has boycotts and murders moderate Tamils. We can fix our government. We cannot fix the LTTE.

God knows this war has a terrible cost, I have seen it. But for the New York Times to step in now and ask for the West to basically attack Sri Lanka economically is unconscionable. The IMF loan isn’t for war, it’s to keep our financial markets from tanking. I’m not one to defend handouts normally, but this is a messed up time internationally and there is huge instability across the system.

How would impoverishing Sri Lanka help? How do we care for the refugees then? How do we rebuild the land that the LTTE occupied and left fallow? How do we rehabilitate their child soldiers? How do we repair their human shields?

Seriously, you want to step in and punish Sri Lanka and save the LTTE now? What the fuck are you thinking? Thankfully the UN Security Council has blocked any moves so far. Now is the time to help Sri Lanka. Not bail out the LTTE.

And yes, I understand the hyperbole involved in that statement. I know the Times doesn’t support the LTTE. The consequence of their ideas, however, would be to bail out the LTTE.

Photo from the New York Times. For the record, Somini Sengupta’s reporting kinda sucks and whitewashes the LTTE

What I hear from the Red Cross and UN people is that the situation is dire. About 250,000 civilians and LTTE are being herded into a ‘safety zone’ and sorted out with the bombs. The real asshole in this drama, however, is certainly the LTTE. They are preventing people going out and using human shields as policy. Don’t get me wrong, they are a terrible stain on this nation and the world and the greatest threat to the Tamil people. If only because the language now becomes about fighting terrorism, and that justifies any amount of collateral damage. The LTTE must be eliminated, but the sad effect is that this is being done by killing and oppressing the shit out of the Tamil people. Collateral damage.

What’s really sick is that the LTTE held up a convoy of critically wounded people for about 3 days. If you don’t know the LTTE, this is what they do. They do not give a fuck, and they suck. What also sucks is that the government isn’t that cooperative either, if only because it can’t sort out the LTTE cadres from the civilians. This government also does not give a fuck and is ruthlessly trying to win this war on all fronts, including violently controlling the media perception of it.

And perhaps, so be it. The LTTE got to a negotiating position but then proved that their only agenda was destruction. The great shame is that is average Tamil people being destroyed. By who matters little as it’s happening. The government is prosecuting this war and Tamil people are collateral damage. Given the existential threat of the LTTE, however, I think most Sri Lankans would say this is justified.

I think there is a better way, but I can’t articulate it and neither can the opposition. So be it. My thoughts and metta go out to everyone suffering in this conflict, from the innocent civilians to our soldiers and even to the LTTE cadres. May all beings be peaceful and happy. If not in this life.

From my print days.

I’ve thought about this before, but the logistics seem daunting. You can print and distribute blog posts as a newspaper. Print is dying in the West, but it is still pretty powerful in the developing world. Internet is still non-competitive in the Third World because not enough people have access. Print media can still travel to more poor, rural people and reach more eyeballs. This article discusses an interesting bridge between the two – republishing blog posts in print media and distributing on the ground.

The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities.

“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” he said. “There were so many techniques that I’ve seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry.”

The Printed Blog will publish blog posts alongside other Weblike content, like user-submitted photographs and readers’ comments. The paper will be printed on three or four 11-by-17-inch sheets of white paper and laid out like a blog instead of in columns.

Advertising remains print’s one great advantage over Web publications: advertisers will pay much more for print ads than for online ones. Mr. Karp aims to sell 200 ads an issue. The Printed Blog will charge $5 to $10 for classifieds and $15 to $25 for business ads that reach 1,000 readers.

Mr. Karp expects that each issue, to be distributed twice a day to 1,000 people, will eventually have enough ads to earn a profit of $750 to $1,500 a week. (In comparison, Mr. Cohen said that a typical weekly edition of one of the free Silicon Valley papers that reached about 20,000 people would cost about $10,000 to produce, with an operating profit margin of 11 percent to 15 percent.)

Of course, JPG Magazine was based on a similar user-generated model and it recently failed.

In my experience it’s distribution and not cost that makes or breaks any magazine. So, time will tell. In Sri Lanka I think the best upscale distribution is what Harpo’s has been doing, distributing mags with pizzas. Outstation the best distribution is for Kit and other prepaid cards, but people make real money on those. I’ve also heard that Lion Beer has an impressive network.

An old photo by me

I spend a fair amount of time in meetings. If I have more than two I consider the day a wash. Not that meetings are unimportant, some are vital turning points in a project, some actual create consensus and new ideas etc. However, more than anything, the lack of any meetings often ensures that a project will fail. However, I feel like little thought is given to getting value for time and things often amount to just a discussion of obvious facts and promises of future action. A few rules of thumb I apply are that if there are more than 5 people or no actual decision makers then the meeting is useless. These facts are obvious to anyone who’s ever worked a job, but the New York Times has an interesting article on actually codifying the lesson.

Money quote:

Whoever calls a meeting should be explicit about its objectives. This means specifying tangible goals and assigning responsibility for creating, summarizing and reporting on them. Ask yourself this question: Specifically, what do we want accomplished when we walk out of the room?

Everyone should think carefully about the opportunity costs of a meeting: How many participants are really needed? (Almost all business teams and committees are too big.) How long should the meeting last? Set a definite ending time. Anyone who doubts that the meeting is necessary, or thinks it’s too long, should speak up.

After productive or unproductive meetings, assign credit or blame to the person in charge. Then, if people have track records of leading ineffective meetings, don’t let them lead future sessions. When their expertise is essential, make them subordinate to an effective meeting leader.

updated

He is, hopefully, shaken. But unharmed. Whereas the journalist who threw the shoe was beaten till “he was crying like a woman” (Times). The shoe thing is deeply disrespectful in Arab culture, as is calling him a dog (unclean). I guess I don’t disapprove of what the journo did, well, actually, I think it’s OK. I wish more problems were aired symbolically rather than bombically. I mean, I wish people could see that there are other more creative ways to garner media coverage than dead bodies. And what he said was, well, coherent. “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” He then threw a shoe at Mr. Bush, who ducked and narrowly avoided it. As stunned security agents and guards, officials and journalists watched, Mr. Zaidi then threw his other shoe, shouting in Arabic, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” (ibid).

From the New York Times photo essay. Everything looks abandoned

The Times has an article on our charming little war. Sri Lankan Army Is Pushing for End to 25-Year War Against the Tamil Rebels. Headline makes me chagrin. I’m 26 years old. This fucking sucks. I do hope the war will end and the Tigers get defeated, even by these johnnies. However, there are caveats placed like mines throughout the article. For example, they note that we actually have no idea what’s really going on in the North and East. That cause independent reporters and monitors are not allowed. The government also has no plan for a political solution or how to effectively hold the land that we’re occupying. I dunno. I hope the thing ends but I really don’t trust the people in charge. I aspire to something more for this country than ‘no terrorism’. Perhaps something positive.

The article has a few points to quibble with,

It is clear that Mr. Rajapaksa’s drive to eliminate the Tamil Tigers has been no cakewalk for the military, either. In October, a suicide bombing killed more than two dozen people, including a retired army major general in Anuradhapura, an ancient Buddhist pilgrimage site in the heart of the island.

Er… the former general was a rising opposition leader, ostensibly opposed to the current prosecution of the war. His death was actually in the government’s political interest.

The same month, crudely made Tamil Tiger fighter planes bombed a power station, plunging the capital into darkness.

The power station sustained minor damage, and Colombo shut of its own power as a ‘defensive’ move. The Tigers have never blacked out Colombo, the government has blacked out Colombo in reaction to them flying around.

Besides the main thing is how we’re supposed to perceive this thing in an effective media blackout. Perhaps the ‘fuck it’ approach to our humanity will work as per the JVP. However, a lot of people are living in camps and the Army isn’t even letting tents or tarps in to shelter people through the rain and floods. There is a scale of human suffering that we simply do not hear about.

Sometimes, a small slice of life slips out. In the ground floor women’s ward of the main hospital in government-held Vavuniya town the other day sat a 65-year-old woman, with a mane of gray hair, wide stunned eyes and a tube through her side.

She had been hiding in a bunker in a rebel-held village, holding her baby grandson tightly to her chest, she said, when the bunker was shelled. A piece of shrapnel punctured her left side, perforating the left lung.

Her grandson lay in the pediatric ward next door. His mother had been killed in a previous bout of fighting, the old woman said.

Is this any life for our people? I dunno, maybe it’s worth it. I would really like this to end. But not like this.

Pioneer 10 image public domain, via Gunthert

Friedman has a nice piece on ‘How‘. As in, how did we get so fucked, and why how you do things matters. I’m just riffing off one line, but I’ve always written that ‘how’ matters. As in, how you fight a war, how you run a government, these things matter. Character and integrity matter. To quote: “In a connected world,” Seidman said to me, “countries, governments and companies also have character, and their character — how they do what they do, how they keep promises, how they make decisions, how things really happen inside, how they connect and collaborate, how they engender trust, how they relate to their customers, to the environment and to the communities in which they operate — is now their fate.” Our government has so neglected the ‘how’ that I’m not that impressed with the ‘what’.

So our troops are near Kilinochchi. How did we get there? How many innocents have died and been jailed? How do our government institution function? How much money did we spend? How do we treat our own people?

These questions matter, perhaps not in the short-term, but in the long term you get totally fucked. And that’s why character and integrity matter. And that’s why it’s a shame that our national character is so stained by Mahinda’s suspension of our Constitution to fight Eelam War IV. That’s why human rights and rule of law aren’t luxuries, their the bulwark of generations.

Choi Jin-Sil, her suicide blamed on the Internet

Was reading this thing bout Korea which is like, uhhh. “The government’s Communications Commission last year ordered Web portals with more than 300,000 visitors a day to require its users to submit their names and matching Social Security numbers before posting comments.” And this is South Korea btw. In North Korea you have to register to get more than 300 calories per day. I think this is an incredibly toxic and disturbing precedent to set, suicide of a South Korean actress aside. Humans have systematic psychological attribution errors, which it’s weird to see on a national level. And, needless to say, bad.

In psych an attribution error is basically being irrational in a systematic manner. One classic experiment on the fundamental attribution error was

Subjects were asked to rate the pro-Castro attitudes of the writers. When the subjects believed that the writers freely chose the positions they took (for or against Castro), they naturally rated the people who spoke in favor of Castro as having a more positive attitude toward Castro. However, contradicting Jones and Harris’ initial hypothesis, when the subjects were told that the writer’s positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated writers who spoke in favor of Castro as having, on average, a more positive attitude towards Castro than those who spoke against him. In other words, the subjects were unable to see the influence of the situational constraints placed upon the writers; they could not refrain from attributing sincere belief to the writers.

I mean, it’s no big thing that humans are irrational. We’re essentially working with a monkey toolkit in a world only recently populated with data and logic. However, nations at least should make some effort to see clearly and do the rational thing.

This whole thing in South Korea is triggered (or catalyzed) by the suicide of their movie star sweetheart Choi Jin-Sil. However, suicide is a complex thing rarely attributed to one thing and picking the most obvious (salient) feature and cracking down on that is just running headlong down a psychological rabbit-hole. It’s an error. Choi was a single mother and a divorcee and God knows what else. But South Korea blames it on the Internet. With crap like this:

In a monthlong crackdown on online defamation, 900 agents from the government’s Cyber Terror Response Center are scouring blogs and online discussion boards to identify and arrest those who “habitually post slander and instigate cyber bullying.”

And then there saying that this is a chance for the government to pivot off the massive beef protests of the last year. Science fiction is starting to look more and more real. Comforting even. This world is just dem stupid at the moment.

I read something in Slate once, which generally makes it true. The writer was once charged with securities fraud, but that’s kinda par for the financial industry. He did some math and it seemed to make sense. Henry Blodget’s general argument in the Wall Street Self Defense Manual was that investors would make more money just buying index funds rather than gambling on the stock market. The worst option of all was paying other people to gamble for you (as in stock brokers, investment bankers, etc). You get a decent return on the nikang stock market, you probably lose if you try to beat the system, and you pay someone to lose if you go through a broker. Which is why I always suspected that the financial industry wasn’t wearing pants. And today I read about the history of Wall Street in the New York Times, confirming the lack of pants, making it doubly true.

Also read another, article called Wall Street RIP. Money quote:

“The swashbuckling days of Wall Street firms’ trading, essentially turning themselves into giant hedge funds, are over. Turns out they weren’t that good,” said Andrew Kessler, a former hedge fund manager. “You’re no longer going to see middle-level folks pulling in seven- and multiple-seven-dollar figures that no one can figure out exactly what they did for that.”

but to quote Ron Chernow for the history Op-Ed,

Beneath the razzle-dazzle of trading desks and the wizardry of esoteric finance lay the inescapable fact that these firms had shed their original reason for being: providing capital to American business.

In the sunless maze of Lower Manhattan, the old Wall Street houses were miniature temples of finance. Elite, all-male and lily-white, rife with snobbery and bigotry, they didn’t bother to hang a shingle outside, and the tacit message to pedestrians was clear: keep on walking. This reflected the banks’ patented formula of serving only the most creditworthy clients: industrialized nations, blue-chip corporations and wealthy individuals.

My basic understanding is that in order to get or sell shitloads of money you had to go through a trusted connect, like Sotheby’s for art auctions or stuff. Over time, however, multinationals and competition made anointment in the temples of finance less necessary.

Then came the 80s and cocaine and these vestigal houses went totally apeshit with junk bonds, internet stocks and – now – mortgages from people who should never have be given mortgages. I’ve inquired about mortgages before, from banks. You have to have a guaranteed income of X, and then they calculate the percentage of X you can feasibly pay, and then they tell you how much mortgage you can get. Subprime mortgages mean giving money to people who fail this basic test. T o quote the Wiki:

In the United States, mortgage lending specifically, the term “subprime” refers to loans that do not meet Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac guidelines. This is generally due to one of a combination of factors, including credit status of the borrower, income and job history, and income to mortgage payment ratio…

A subprime loan may have less room for financial difficulties of the borrower, which can lead to late payments and defaults.

And ‘can’ in this case means ‘does’. People that fail that income/payment ratio test (among other things) tend to be unable to pay. That’s what the test is for. To avoid bad loans. Instead, these financial companies wrapped these turd sandwiches in newspaper and resold them as derivatives. And them Joe Oklahoma couldn’t pay and now the entire international credit market is fucked. That is important because legitimate business/people who want credit can’t get it.

Anyways, I read a bit of the bailout memo, and it’s hilarious. You get this section:

6. Maximum Amount of Authorized Purchases.

The Secretary’s authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time.

Followed by this one:

8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Luckily that’s been redrafted, but I still wonder how this magical money will plug the dyke, seeing as it – prima facie – just involves buying mortgage bundles that people still can’t pay. Why doesn’t the government just buy the house?

And then what’s extra fucked is that its the former head of Goldman Sachs (Henry Paulson) who’s asking the government for $700 billion to bail out the institutions. If you’re keeping track at home, that much money will buy 3.5 million mortgages at $200,000 apiece. Via Bloomberg I got a number of about 2.2 million US homes at risk of foreclosure. So you could theoretically buy back most of those mortgages (or a hybrid). Not that those people made great decisions either. But fuck.

In 8 years George W. Bush has managed to fritter away every military, economic and moral advantage America had. Hopefully people will vote for a new party to put Humpty Dumpty back together.