(if I were the) King of the Forest

If this only mattered for screening on airliners it would probably amount to no more than an inconvenience and a small incremental danger to a few passengers. But it seems to represent a more general trend: increased control and centralized security measures superseding distributed security measures; more trust in authorities to keep everyone safe and less trust in individuals to shoulder some responsibility (and to be allowed the tools to implement that responsibility) for their own security – security in the broadest sense, including not only personal safety but financial, social, and interpersonal security as well. It is consistent with much of modern political and social practice: we will cede our responsibility along with our freedom to some authority, which will promise in return to keep us safe and happy.

If we want to make drugs affordable in the third world, we must find a way to rein in the health care advocates who would use that as a moral platform to transform the American and European markets. Protected from such a threat, the drug companies would, I’m guessing, cooperate. But as long as Americans agitate to be treated – at least for purposes of pricing – the same as their peers in the marginal markets, the drug companies will do all they can to protect their domestic profits – which ultimately protects the R&D pipeline that benefits both the first and third worlds.

I fear that in the modern cultural/social/political climate, Mr. Schneier’s plea for more distributed solutions to security problems will, except in the narrowest technical realms where logic and experience generally prevail, fall on deaf ears. Social and political biases of the public aside, our political and cultural leaders benefit from the increased power with which centralized systems endow them, and such systems will continue to be the preferred solutions to most problems which fall, however unproductively, into the political realm.

As both an option-holder and a shareholder in various companies I agree that options should be reported in some manner other than a footnote, but I vehemently disagree that calling them an “expense” – on a par with cash outlays like salaries – is the correct accounting form.

This sounds to me like a success of ethical government. It sounds to me like a refutation of the clamor we’ve heard for the last six months from the news media and the Democrats that the Bush administration is “in Enron’s pocket”.

Oh the delicious irony of modern politics. In 2001, after deciding that it’s previous attempt to comply with an EPA dictate for cleaning the air by oxygenating gasoline had resulted mainly in dirtier water, the state of California banned the oxygenating compound MBTE and requested a waiver from the EPA regulation to avoid a mandated switch to ethanol. The state’s argument that there were other ways to achieve the objective may or may not have merit – it’s not clear how much of the dispute over that is science and how much is politics. But when, in the past, has that argument even mattered to Democrats – and the California government is pretty much entirely composed of Democrats – when an environmental regulation was at stake?

In a world of boundless resources, where no worthwhile project went undone for lack of funding or attention, we could eliminate arsenic and a host of other environmental poisons to arbitrarily small tolerances with impunity. In the world outside of utopian fiction, however, limited resources must be allocated, and what is used for one thing is unavailable for another….It may be that as a society we conclude that reducing arsenic levels is the best use for those resources, but that conclusion is neither obvious nor unanimous and has nothing to do with science.

I tend to be cynical about government so government ineptitude rarely shocks me. The electricity crisis in California provided an exception. It wasn’t just the up front stupidity that amazed but the refusal to acknowledge it even after the fact. It was bad enough that the original “deregulation” program included such regulatory aspects as freezing retail prices, forcing distributors to pay the highest bid price on the wholesale market, and mandating utility divestiture of power plants; the legislature later added a prohibition on entering into long-term contracts, thus guaranteeing all purchases had to be made in the spot market. What is amazing is not that there was a crisis, but that it took so long to happen.

Every day print and television news organizations bombard us with the results of studies purporting to prove something profound about the effects of public policy, most contradicting some other studies reported last week. The election we just endured brought us a blizzard of conflicting statistics and analyses presented by the candidates and repeated by the media. Almost every advocacy organization now solicits and publishes studies showing – surprise surprise – that their particular policy agenda would be the best thing ever if only we would allow them to implement it. How are we to sort out the good from the bad in this barrage if your reporters will not present us with enough of the underlying information to make an informed evaluation?

I am bemused by the recent spate of articles in both the Mercury News and the Chronicle bemoaning the fact that gasoline prices vary across California, and are generally higher in the Bay Area than in other parts of the state. The raw facts – which should be neither surprising nor of particular concern to anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of free-market economics — have been veiled in mystery and innuendo, implying some vast oil company conspiracy and the specter of evil oil companies (gasp!) actually profiting from our addiction to automobility