If you’re tired of hearing about it, good.  If you’re not, you haven’t heard enough about it.  If you’re not yet sick to the heart of the vile, cynical idiocy and greed of it all, you don’t understand it.

This is not about the oppressive, cynical, corrupt nature of SOPA – a bill paid for by an industry that has consistently managed to blame everyone but itself for its failed, obsolete business model.  Nor is it about broken lobbying and media industry interference in government, defective intellectual property laws, disproportionate enforcement, undemocratic and secret trade negotiations, or lack of respect for other nations’ sovereignty when pushing your own broken laws on others.

It’s about the inevitability of pointless and restrictive laws that may have, at some point, had their roots in some well-meaning idiot’s mind, but which serve only to advance the agenda of some fringe.  Blackouts, petitions, and logical arguments won’t stop them, because the forces of greed, fanaticism, and stupidity are an inexorable force that gnaw at liberty, free markets, prosperity and common sense.   And yes, it’s a rant, and a fairly discouraged one at that.  Because I feel like ranting.

A great comment, thieved from here, about “the MPAA’s SOPA backup plan”.  I’ll copy it in its entirety:

It’s not a waiting game, it’s a game of poker. Lamar Smith has a royal flush and few people know it.

SOPA may pass. It may not. He doesn’t care, and it doesn’t matter. The MPAA and RIAA started working on their legislative strategy to pass a new anti-piracy bill in late 2010. SOPA was designed to raise the noise. Everyone is playing right into the entertainment industries hand. The lobbyists are laughing manically at the ignorance of the mob. Even Wikipedia and reddit have played into it.

What people don’t know about is the ace: H.R.1981, the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 which is lying in wait. It’s not complete. You see, PCIP is not contestable because it’s about protecting children. They can, and very well might, copy and paste the full text of SOPA to the end of PCIP. That’s the backup. That’s the deal that was struck with entertainment industry lobbyists. We will try to push this anti-piracy bill. It probably won’t work. Don’t worry, we can pass it under an anti-child pornography bill.

There are two things which no Congressman will risk supporting: terrorism and child pornography. There can be no opposition, no discussion. Any anti-piracy law can ALWAYS be reframed as an anti-child pornography bill and it will pass, without even discussion. It will have the full support of the House (minus Ron Paul), the full support of the Senate, and most importantly the full support of the American people. NO ONE wants to risk being called a pedophile.

The entertainment industry has finally caught up with technology. They understand how it works. It took them 15 years, but they know what DNS is. They are going to exploit a fundamental problem with the way DNS is centralized and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. They have found an error in the very architecture of the Internet. The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.

We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.

Or, put graphically:

The same goes for all laws that seek to limit, ban, violate, and infringe.  PIPA (PROTECT IP), DMCA, CDA (thankfully struck down), Sonny Bony copyright act, Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, ACTA (international treaty), Sinde (ES), HADOPI (FR), LOPPSI (FR), you name it.  Further afield, you’ll find the same things happening in the name of “security – NDAA, the PATRIOT Act, RIPA (UK), PTA (UK) and others.  Phrase something in terms of wanting to “protect the vulnerable” or “prevent evil”, get enough money in the game from those who would benefit materially from your ham-handed assault on individual freedoms and basic intelligence, and you’re good to go.  You don’t even need to demonize your opponents – just disregard them; after all, a large enough part of your electorate can always be convinced that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.”  Right?

Europe and Canada are not immune to this disease.  It’s in the nature of power and greed for established interests to want to foist their crap on others, in the name of democracy and goodness and fluffy bunnies.

What’s to be done, then?

Naively speaking, I’d say to lobby your elected officials, threaten to boycott companies that support such legislation, run for office yourself, speak out in the media, sign petitions, educate your peers, you name it.

It won’t work, because it’s much more work and cost and grief than any normal human being can afford to deal with over a prolonged amount of time – and the people you are fighting are paid for their efforts.  The more they fight, the better off they are.  The more you fight, the worse off they are.  And they have money – if you ever had any doubt that your supposedly democratically elected representatives are bought, corrupt, and useless, this Mother Jones article, which mistakenly postulates that SOPA is dead, has an interesting link to a Maplight list of campaign contributors to American legislators.  Surprise of surprises, the ones for SOPA got more money from the entertainment industry, the ones against it got more money from the tech industry.

What you can do:

- learn about anonymization methods like TOR and Vidalia.

- support efforts to create distributed communications, like mesh wireless networking – all well and good until you get court rulings like this one in Germany that state that it is the responsibility of the owners of wireless networks to encrypt all traffic.  Bye-bye public access networks.

- use encryption.  SSL for web traffic, TrueCrypt for files, anything and everything – all well and good until you get court rulings like this one in the United Kingdom that state it is the responsibility of the owners of encrypted files to provide decryption keys to police upon request.

- don’t buy from companies that support and lobby for restrictions.  Do buy from those who don’t, and from those who create products free of technological encumbrances to doing what you want with content that you own.  Yes, back to the naive stuff, but it can’t hurt.  Not to mention indie software/movie/music producers.  But I guess you really want to watch Transformers V, huh.

- give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Free Software Foundation, and their local / national equivalents.  They’re usually decent and smart people, and good at hiring lawyers to fight this sort of crap.

Your elected officials are corrupt shills.  They do not care about reason or logic, they don’t care what they are destroying.  The only thing they care about is re-election and money.

Hope for the best, expect the worst.  Sound vaguely nihilistic / fatalistic?  That’s the idea.  The idiots and cynics are out there, and they’re more motivated and have more money than you.  Remember the golden rule:  he who has the gold makes the rules, and you don’t have the gold.

I don’t mean these:

I’m talking about real hats.  Fedora, porkpie, flat cap, Panama, bowler, trilby, etc., or if you want to get a bit more in the direction of awesome, ushanka, deerstalker, fez, or even the 19th century blue forage cap I saw on a gentleman on Barcelona, combined with a nice navy peacoat.  Looked pretty damn manly.

There’s this thing that, with certain kinds of functional / regional / traditional clothing which one shouldn’t wear unless you perform that function / are of that region / tradition.  So, unless you’re a cowboy or in Texas, don’t wear cowboy hats and boots.  Unless you’re a Scot, don’t wear kilts, Malay fisherman/sarong, baseball player/baseball cap.  To hell with that.  I may personally think you look silly, but wear whatever the hell you want.  That’s the whole point of this.  Pull up your pants anyway.

But we were talking about hats.  Men’s hats.

A fair number of officious self-proclaimed fashion experts seem to think that anyone who dares to wear a fedora in public in 2012 is trying to look like

Well guess what, Sparky?  Don Draper is a fictional character.  Same goes for

How about mocking people for wanting to look like

True, not a fictional character, but a movie star with a whole battery of wardrobe experts surrounding him.

You might as well expect all men these days to look like Brad Pitt, or to dress like

(And to carry a 9mm everywhere they go, of course, because that wouldn’t ruin the line of a nicely tailored suit.)

5 will get you 10 that the reasonably well-dressed average slob in the 1950s and 1960s looked more like this

or this

Notice anything?

Hint:  hats.  And yes, don’t wear hats a table.

There’s nothing wrong with hats, any more than there is anything wrong with trying to dress nicely like Leonardo di Caprio in Inception (great movie, by the way).  Or Don Draper.  Or Cary Grant.  After all, aren’t movies all about giving us something to aspire to?

Well, some of them more than others, I suppose.  But nonetheless, nice hats are great.

They keep the sun out of your eyes, they keep your head warm and your hair dry.  They give you something to wave at people with, to take off when you enter a room (as an obvious overblown show of courtesy) and to fiddle with when playing with your cell phone may not be appropriate.  And they set you apart from the  idiot making stupid comments about “hipsters” or “ha ha Don Draper”.

Sure, every time there’s a rise in some sort of niche fashion, the silly comments come boiling out of the sewer grates.  Sometimes they’re justified.  But while it’s not entirely my bag of tricks, I don’t understand the ridicule leveled at people who try to bring back certain pretty cool vintage styles (the bartender at the Comstock Saloon in San Francisco sported a nifty handlebar mustache and sleeve garters, like someone straight out of an old Western – he carried it off brilliantly).  You might as well bash cuff links, even though they are much more comfortable for typing, keep your wrists cool, look nice, and give you an excuse to wear Mickey Mouse jewelry with a suit.

In particular, though, I don’t get the vitriol aimed at hats.

I own a beautiful tweed deerstalker I found in a shop in Edinburgh.  It’s cold here, and very wet.  I love that hat.  Yes, I know it’s a hunting cap, and you’re technically not supposed to wear it in the city, but my only response to that is “bite me, my head is warm”.  The same response, incidentally, goes out to every single “oh look, it’s Sherlock Holmes” comment I overhear.  In fact, I think “bite me, my head is warm” makes a pretty good mantra – most of the haters look cold and wet.

The same goes for my muskrat ushanka (found with great difficulty in St. Petersburg, on a sweltering July day, in a shop run by an incredulous Russian woman who spoke about as much English as I spoke Russian, although she had much more of an excuse than I did).  In the words of a former English colleague, “you look like an idiot.  You look like a very warm idiot.”  I actually think it’s pretty snazzy.

If you want to conform and be one of the uniform, dull, black-clad hordes every winter (or jeans-and-t-shirt wearing masses in summer), go ahead, nobody’s stopping you.  I once a statement in some generic men’s fashion magazine that “if you wear a tuxedo to the movie theater, you’re not overdressed, everyone else is underdressed”.  The same goes for nice men’s hats.

I like nice suits, but I don’t feel like wearing one most of the time.  But lay the fuck off of my hats.  They’re good hats.  You should try one sometime.  I’ll be wearing my fez.

Over the past 16 years since moving back from the US, I’ve noticed that run-of-the-mill consumer articles (clothes, electronics, auto parts, tools, etc.) – as opposed to luxury (stuff like brand purses) or specialist items, are regularly priced much, much higher in Western Europe than their equivalents in the U.S.

For example, today I tried to buy a small camera replacement battery. A 5-pack of these costs ca. US $5 on amazon.com, plus $3 shipping.

Amazon.fr sells this for €4, with shipping. Amazon.de sells a single battery for €5, with shipping. A specialty camera shop in Germany sells it for €13 (!). A top quality Cree LED torch I recently ordered from China came for $25. I’ve seen the same thing in shops in the Netherlands, France and Germany for 3-4 times that amount, online, and even more than that retail!

The same goes for computer monitors, clothes, cameras, and pretty much anything “routine” I’ve bought recently.

So I spent a few minutes looking at examples – this is totally unscientific and the result of a few bored minutes putzing around Amazon and other online merchants in various countries, as well as my own experience.

Cars: a new base model BMW 335i in Germany (since they’re made there) starts at ca. €36k before tax. The same car in the US starts at $42k – fully €4k less. And let’s not start with iTunes, Steam games, and other digital content that in no way incurs any different manufacturing, handling, or shipping costs for us Europeans than the Americans. Another random one: vitamine C supplements – ca. $15 for 500 capsules in the US, ca, £15 for half that in the UK, around €15 for a fifth of the US amount in France.

In fairness, I’ve noted a drop in online retail computer component prices in the past five years, to the point that some products are priced about the same. But these seem to be exceptions. For every example of “costs as much or more in the US”, I’ll find you five examples to the contrary.

15-25% VAT (as opposed to US state/local sales taxes from 4-10%) does not explain this massive price differential, nor does shipping – most of this stuff is made in Asia. European salaries are not, on the whole, that much higher than American ones (according to wikipedia, the US is actually in second place for median household income worldwide).

I understand that a place like Switzerland would have a high Big Mac Index position – it’s always been expensive, still suffers from stupid customs rules and weird regulations, has high salaries and a culture that historically equates expensive with “good”, and still has fairly limited competition in a lot of areas. But why would this be the same for, for example, a pair of Levi’s in the UK, which are up to 50% cheaper in the US?

It can’t be because of regulation – the Americans are easily on a par with the worst the EU can come up with in things like environmental and product safety restrictions. So that can’t be adding extra cost. And in the EU’s defense, they have agreed on a lot of standardization, like for power plugs, so the cost of adaptation to local markets also can’t explain it (not to mention removal of customs borders and the common currency, while it lasts). Nor rent and such overhead – shops in American city centers face occasionally even higher rent costs than those in any random European city outside of maybe Paris, London, Zurich, Munich, etc. It’s also not market size – while European countries are of course smaller than the US as a whole, you’re not going to gain that much economy of scale from selling to 300 million people as opposed to, say, 80 million Germans or 65 million French.

The only possible theory I can come up with is increased labor costs due to social contributions that employers have to pay, but that by itself can’t be driving up prices so much.

So, what the fuck? Is this just “fuck you because we can” price gouging by merchants, along the lines of what our friends in Australia experience?

tl;dr YOORP PRICES, Y U SO HI?

1. Banning guns works, which is why New York, DC, & Chicago cops need guns.

2. Washington DC’s low murder rate of 69 per 100,000 is due to strict gun control, and Indianapolis’ high murder rate of 9 per 100,000 is due to the lack of gun control.

3. Statistics showing high murder rates justify gun control but statistics showing increasing murder rates after gun control are “just statistics.”

4. The Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban, both of which went into effect in 1994 are responsible for the decrease in violent crime rates, which have been declining since 1991.

5. We must get rid of guns because a deranged lunatic may go on a shooting spree at any time and anyone who would own a gun out of fear of such a lunatic is paranoid.

6. The more helpless you are the safer you are from criminals.

7. An intruder will be incapacitated by tear gas or oven spray, but if shot with a .357 Magnum will get angry and kill you.

8. A woman raped and strangled is morally superior to a woman with a smoking gun and a dead rapist at her feet.

9. When confronted by violent criminals, you should “put up no defense — give them what they want, or run” (Handgun Control Inc. Chairman Pete Shields, Guns Don’t Die – People Do, 1981, p.125).

10. The New England Journal of Medicine is filled with expert advice about guns; just like Guns & Ammo has some excellent treatises on heart surgery.

11. One should consult an automotive engineer for safer seatbelts, a civil engineer for a better bridge, a surgeon for internal medicine, a computer programmer for hard drive problems, and Sarah Brady for firearms expertise.

12. The 2nd Amendment, ratified in 1787, refers to the National Guard, which was created 130 years later, in 1917.

13. The National Guard, federally funded, with bases on federal land, using federally-owned weapons, vehicles, buildings and uniforms, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a “state” militia.

14. These phrases: “right of the people peaceably to assemble,” “right of the people to be secure in their homes,” “enumerations herein of certain rights shall not be construed to disparage others retained by the people,” and “The powers not delegated herein are reserved to the states respectively, and to the people” all refer to individuals, but “the right of the people to keep and bear arm” refers to the state.

15. “The Constitution is strong and will never change.” But we should ban and seize all guns thereby violating the 2nd, 4th, and 5th Amendments to that Constitution.

16. Rifles and handguns aren’t necessary to national defense! Of course, the army has hundreds of thousands of them.

17. Private citizens shouldn’t have handguns, because they aren’t “military weapons”, but private citizens shouldn’t have “assault rifles”, because they are military weapons.

18. In spite of waiting periods, background checks, finger printing, government forms, etc., guns today are too readily available, which is responsible for recent school shootings. In the 1940′s, 1950′s and1960′s, anyone could buy guns at hardware stores, army surplus stores, gas stations, variety stores, Sears mail order, no waiting, no background check, no fingerprints, no government forms and there were no school shootings.

19. The NRA’s attempt to run a “don’t touch” campaign about kids handling guns is propaganda, but the anti-gun lobby’s attempt to run a “don’t touch” campaign is responsible social activity.

20. Guns are so complex that special training is necessary to use them properly, and so simple to use that they make murder easy.

21. A handgun, with up to 4 controls, is far too complex for the typical adult to learn to use, as opposed to an automobile that only has 20.

22. Women are just as intelligent and capable as men but a woman with a gun is “an accident waiting to happen” and gun makers’ advertisements aimed at women are “preying on their fears.”

23. Ordinary people in the presence of guns turn into slaughtering butchers but revert to normal when the weapon is removed.

24. Guns cause violence, which is why there are so many mass killings at gun shows.

25. A majority of the population supports gun control, just like a majority of the population supported owning slaves.

26. Any self-loading small arm can legitimately be considered to be a “weapon of mass destruction” or an “assault weapon.”

27. Most people can’t be trusted, so we should have laws against guns, which most people will abide by because they can be trusted.

28. The right of Internet pornographers to exist cannot be questioned because it is constitutionally protected by the Bill of Rights, but the use of handguns for self defense is not really protected by the Bill of Rights.

29. Free speech entitles one to own newspapers, transmitters, computers, and typewriters, but self-defense only justifies bare hands.

30. The ACLU is good because it uncompromisingly defends certain parts of the Constitution, and the NRA is bad, because it defends other parts of the Constitution.

31. Charlton Heston, a movie actor as president of the NRA is a cheap lunatic who should be ignored, but Michael Douglas, a movie actor as a representative of Handgun Control, Inc. is an ambassador for peace who is entitled to an audience at the UN arms control summit.

32. Police operate with backup within groups, which is why they need larger capacity pistol magazines than do “civilians” who must face criminals alone and therefore need less ammunition.

33. We should ban “Saturday Night Specials” and other inexpensive guns because it’s not fair that poor people have access to guns too.

34. Police officers have some special Jedi-like mastery over hand guns that private citizens can never hope to obtain.

35. Private citizens don’t need a gun for self-protection because the police are there to protect them even though the Supreme Court says the police are not responsible for their protection.

36. Citizens don’t need to carry a gun for personal protection but police chiefs, who are desk-bound administrators who work in a building filled with cops, need a gun.

37. “Assault weapons” have no purpose other than to kill large numbers of people. The police need assault weapons. You do not.

38. When Microsoft pressures its distributors to give Microsoft preferential promotion, that’s bad; but when the Federal government pressures cities to buy guns only from Smith & Wesson, that’s good.

39. Trigger locks do not interfere with the ability to use a gun for defensive purposes, which is why you see police officers with one on their duty weapon.

40. Handgun Control, Inc. says they want to “keep guns out of the wrong hands.” Guess what? You have the wrong hands.

Yes, egregious border controls in supposedly “free” countries are something I feel strongly about.  Not to mention, freedom of information flows, the right to privacy of data from unreasonable search and seizure, and the responsibility of government to provide airtight justification in the case of any intrusion into its citizens’ privacy.

Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher and Wikileaks volunteer, was recently detained at Seattle Tacoma airport by United States Customs and Border Patrol agents.    He had been previously detained last July at Newark International Airport, while returning from a trip abroad.  His laptop and mobile phone were temporarily confiscated and taken out of his sight (thus opening the possibility for the installation of espionage components.)  Security consultant Moxie Marlinspike was similarly detained in November, and his electronic equipment was searched.

In contrast to last July’s stop, Appelbaum did not carry any electronic equipment this time around, except for some USB sticks with the Bill of Rights “encoded into the block device”.

Such stops are beyond “dangerous precedent”.  They are neither random, nor do they serve any security purpose.  From a risk management perspective, they are useless intimidation.

Boingboing has collated Appelbaum’s Twitter feed concerning the event.  Here’s a repost:

• It’s very frustrating that I have to put so much consideration into talking about the kind of harassment that I am subjected to in airports.

• I was detained, searched, and CPB did attempt to question me about the nature of my vacation upon landing in Seattle.

• The CPB specifically wanted laptops and cell phones and were visibly unhappy when they discovered nothing of the sort.

• I did however have a few USB thumb drives with a copy of the Bill of Rights encoded into the block device. They were unable to copy it.

• The forensic specialist (who was friendly) explained that EnCase and FTK, with a write-blocker inline were unable to see the Bill of Rights.

• I requested access my lawyer and was again denied. They stated I was I wasn’t under arrest and so I was not able to contact my lawyer.

• The CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) agent was waiting for me at the exit gate. Remember when it was our family and loved ones?

• When I handed over my customs declaration form, the female agent was initially friendly. After pulling my record, she had a sour face.

• She attempted to trick me by putting words into my mouth. She marked my card with a large box with the number 1 inside, sent me on my way.

• While waiting for my baggage, I noticed the CBP agent watching me and of course after my bag arrived, I was “randomly” selected for search.

• Only US customs has random number generator worse than a mid-2007 Debian random number generator. Random? Hardly.

• During the search, I made it quite clear that I had no laptop and no cell phone. Only USB drives with the Bill of Rights.

• The CBP agent stated that I had posted on Twitter before my flight and that slip ended the debate about their random selection process.

• The CBP agents in Seattle were nicer than ones in Newark. None of them implied I would be raped in prison for the rest of my life this time.

• The CBP agent asked if the ACLU was really waiting. I confirmed the ACLU was waiting and they again denied me contact with legal help.

• All in all, the detainment was around thirty minutes long. They all seemed quite distressed that I had no computer and no phone.

• They were quite surprised to learn that Iceland had computers and that I didn’t have to bring my own.

• There were of course the same lies and threats that I received last time. They even complemented me on work done regarding China and Iran.

• I think there’s a major disconnect required to do that job and to also complement me on what they consider to be work against police states.

• While it’s true that Communist China has never treated me as badly as CBP, I know this isn’t true for everyone who travels to China.

• All in all, if you’re going to be detained, searched, and harassed at the border in an extra-legal manner, I guess it’s Seattle over Newark.

• It took a great deal of thought before I posted about my experience because it honestly appears to make things worse for me in the future.

• Even if it makes things worse for me, I refuse to be silent about state sponsored systematic detainment, searching, and harassment.

• In case it is not abundantly clear: I have not been arrested, nor charged with any crime, nor indicted in any way. Land of the free? Hardly.

• I’m only counting from the time that we opened my luggage until it was closed. The airport was basically empty when I left.

• It’s funny that the forensics guy uses EnCase. As it, like CBP, apparently couldn’t find a copy of the Bill of Rights I dd’ed into the disk.

• The forensics guy apparently enjoyed the photo with my homeboy Knuth and he was really quite kind. The forensics guy in Newark? Not so much.

• The CBP agent asked me for data – was I bringing data into the country? Where was all my data from the trip? Names, numbers, receipts, etc.

• The mental environment that this creates for traveling is intense. Nothing is assured, nothing is secure, and nothing provides escape.

• I resisted the temptation to give them a disk filled with /dev/random because I knew that reading them the Bill of Rights was enough hassle.

• I’m flying to Toronto, Canada for work on Sunday and back through Seattle again a few days later. Should be a joy to meet these guys again.

• All of this impacts my ability to work and takes a serious emotional toll on me. It’s absolutely unacceptable.

• What happens if I take a device they can’t image? They take it. What about the stuff they give back? Back doored? Who knows?

• Does it void a warranty if your government inserts a backdoor into your computer or phone? It certainly voids the trust I have in all of it.

• I dread US Customs more than I dreaded walking across the border from Turkey to Iraq in 2005. That’s something worth noting.

• I will probably never feel safe about traveling internationally with a computer or phones again.

• None the less, safe or not, I won’t stop working on Tor. Nor will I cease traveling. I will adapt and I will win. A hard road worth taking.

Side note:  I tried to do my little part by “opting out” at San Francisco International Airport on December 26.  Out of two lines for scanners, one with a metal detector and one with a rape scanner, I chose the metal detector line.  I’d previously only encountered an “advanced imaging” full body scanner (backscatter or millimeter wave array) in Amsterdam Schiphol airport earlier in 2010; I pointedly refused to go through it and was wordlessly redirected through the metal detector with no fuss.  By contrast, at SFO I was pulled from the metal detector queue and ordered through the full body scanner.  I refused, and received my complimentary TSA groping.

From The Daily Patdown:

...and Santa, of course

For all the nice folks who believe that there’s actually a point to intrusive scans and molestation, here are a few random points to consider.

• Body scan images are stored and shared, despite claims to the contrary.  Here’s one I found (note toy gun for demonstration purposes):

Let's see what happens when I invert it in Photoshop

Ooh…

No, it's not NSFW, this is National Security we're talking about.

• Travel is a fundamental right, and airport infrastructure / air lanes / resources polluted by aircraft are common goods.  There is no false choice between submitting to invasive security and not flying.
• The former head of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration worked as a consultant for the largest manufacturer of backscatter radiation devices and played a key role in the devices’ sale.
• Backscatter radiation is potentially harmful.  No conclusive studies have been performed.  TSA personnel are not permitted to wear radiation exposure detectors.
• Scanners are easily defeated.  The linked article is one example of many.  Here is another (not so easy, but no less of a threat, one that cannot be addressed by a patdown.)
• The TSA has harassed pilots who have objected to the pointlessness of airport security procedures.  Even with pilots, enforcement of security rules is arbitrary and opaque.  You do realize that pilots can crash the plane, right?  And that airport workers can enter “secure” areas just by using a swipe card or PIN code?
• X-Rays are ineffective, particularly when analyzed by poorly trained / hassled employees.
• The TSA has a track record of hastily deploying expensive devices that do not work.

The examples of abuses of passengers in the name of “security” are too numerous to list, from the woman forced to remove her nipple rings in 2008, over the gentleman unlawfully detained by the TSA after wanting to leave when he refused a grope and threatened with a $10k fine, countless people forced to go through the kafkaesque process of clearing their names off a nebulous “no-fly list” whose existence the TSA only recently admitted, unable to fly because they shared a name with someone placed on it, possibly wrongly in the first place, sexual assault victims traumatized by physical inspections, and many others.

From a risk management model, the whole idea is deeply, darkly flawed.  Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theater“to describe how pointless it is.  After all, don’t forget that the last two major attempts to bring down an airliner bound for the United States (the “shoe bomber” and “underwear bomber”) were foiled by alert passengers — as was the 2007 would-be Glasgow airport bomber.  Even had one of the first two amateurish attempts succeeded, it is doubtful whether either would have brought down the plane at all.  As for sharp objects, what about buying a bottle of champagne at duty free and breaking it in the aircraft bathroom?

As far as targets go, the 2004 Madrid train bombing and 2005 London bus bombings proved that, when you harden one target, a determined attacker simply diverts to another, softer one.  Do you want to live in a society where control is so pervasive that all potential targets are safeguarded beyond the point of risk?  Or would you like to see the risk intelligently minimized by addressing the causes of terrorism, good police work, and security measures that do not cause massive economic losses, personal inconvenience, and loss of fundamental liberties?

Here’s a flier with your rights (pdf) when dealing with the TSA.

Cracked.com, comedy site or not, has a list of TSA “greatest hits”.

How to fix this?  I don’t have an answer.  Israel has not suffered a single bombing of an airline taking off from its territory throughout its history — despite being the most loathed target for most attackers that “security” measures are supposed to guard against.  Techniques include relentless profiling, behavioral analysis, and well-trained staff.  Thankfully, various American legislators have taken note of the issue and are introducing legislation to curtail abuse.  Meanwhile, the TSA helpfully informs us that thermos bottles may be used as bombs.  Thanks, guys, I feel safer already.

Why does it matter to the rest of the world if the Americans want to have clownshit-insane paranoid security nonsense ruling the country?  I first came across a backscatter scanner in Amsterdam Schiphol airport earlier this year, and told the woman manning it in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t going near it.  She wordlessly directed me through the regular x-ray machine, which I didn’t set off.  However, the mere presence of such an egregious device in an otherwise civilized country is representative of the general influence the United States government exerts on how security in other countries is handled.

When American officials decide to ban nail clippers or water from planes, other countries follow suit.  The same goes for removing shoes at security checkpoints, and other stupidity.  The United Kingdom has made advanced imaging scanners mandatory for travelers from several airports, and is progressively deploying them — no pat-downs as an alternative (not that they are one anyway).  Other countries will eventually take the same path.

Unfortunately, the number of people who are willing to defend such abuses in the uninformed understanding that they will thus be kept safe from a largely imaginary threat is huge.  Here’s hoping that at least one of them reads this and has second thoughts.

I realize it’s been all the vogue since at some point in the mid-1990s to send all your technological requirements overseas, as you will get cheaper service in India, China, Romania, Vietnam, you name it.  I’ve been approached numerous times by business school classmates and fellow alumni whose business plan included some element like “oh, we’ll just hire a coder from overseas, he’ll do the site for cheap”.  Yeah.  Excuse me while I giggle into my drink, but I do not want to be part of your impending train wreck.

No, this is not a rant against Indian programmers.  There are a lot of good ones, who are regrettably made to look bad by bad ones.  This is a rant about wanting to get something for nothing, the kind of dishonesty and mediocrity it encourages, and the negative effect on the technology industry as a whole.

Indubitably, buried somewhere in the hordes of eager, ambitious young developers being cranked out by thousands of schools, there are a few who are genuinely intelligent, experienced, and of high quality.  But you should ask yourself, (a) is it your responsibility to wade through all the trash to get to these diamonds, and (b) if they’re that great, why haven’t they already left for a place where they’ll earn a salary commensurate with their caliber?

To be fair, stereotypes do a disservice to the good people who do stay where they are, either due to visa issues, personal choice, or other factors.  That said, the smart ones are not likely to be the con artists infesting sites like rentacoder or elance.com with semi-literate, incoherent, unrealistic, generic nonsense replies, e.g.

We are team of developer/designer working on php/.NET technology providing quality website and software to the clients

I’m sure “you are team”.  Rule 1 of applying for any job: make sure your application letter uses proper spelling and grammar — English as a second, third, or fourth language is no excuse.

Lest I sound selectively vitriolic, this is little different from stereotypes of sunny-demeanored, perfect-management-hair-wearing MBA graduates in the US (the reasons why Office Space and Dilbert are still funny), or my experience-borne generalization of managers from “certain” countries as perfidious backstabbers (I know I’m doing a disservice to a lot of people, but again, that’s my experience.)

Nor is “just hire EDS/IBM/KPMG/Cap Gemini” an answer.  ”Reputable” large companies want to make a buck as much as anyone, and at the same time as charging for a huge amount of overhead, they’re as likely to pawn off a junior developer on your, or outsource your tasks to their overseas provider

This genius exploits the laws of supply and demand to offer “thesis-writing” services, coding up third world students’ programming homework for a price.  Note the comments.

A great horror story.

Another one grabbed  start with the comments on the last page.

Regardless, the result of this is that, as I am paid by the hour, I am not paid more for any work I do over the contracted amount.  Not just this, but there really wouldn’t be much practical point in working more, as most of my work takes place between countries that generally observe fairly relaxed working hours.

In all this, I have regular contact with former colleagues, as well as fellow INSEAD alumni, where the subject of working hours comes up.  My eight-hour days are the subject of a lot of laughs, particularly among entrepreneurs, financial types, consultants, and managers accustomed to putting in much more time at the office.

It is against this background that I would like to offer a reasonable criticism of systematic long work hours, and a defense of the eight-hour day.

It’s no more than a rule of thumb

First of all, the 8-hour work day may not be for you.   If you are building your own business (or trying to save a broken one), you will probably work a lot more.  Likewise, every now and then, much longer days are just part of the job (my longest day was about 96 hours straight, and I’m never doing that again.)  If you work saving lives, if an important deadline is coming up, if you’re being shot at, or if you just plain love your job and want to spend more time there — that’s fine.

Likewise, nothing against working less than eight hours.  Or working odd hours.  Or not working.  I’m the last person to ever argue for any sort of face-time requirement (unless you’re running a store or public service with advertised hours of presence.)  There’s no reason a programmer, a writer, a mechanic, or anyone else should have to be at their workplace for any more time than it takes to (a) do the parts of their job that they need to be on-site for, and (b) talk to people they might otherwise not see (stakeholders, people who give you information, customers, etc.)  By extension, if you have a bunch of employees who are regularly working 3 hours a day, it’s your responsibility to decide whether or not it’s worth paying them full wages, or whether you could either cut their pay or give them more tasks, and still get the same quality of work.  Welcome to management, if you don’t want to lead you shouldn’t have taken the job, nobody said it was easy.

Rather, I object to the acceptance of more than 8 hours a day as some sort of expected standard,  and to the judging of others by that “standard”, whether in consulting, investment banking, corporate law, IT, or any other profession.  You are welcome to work however long you feel is appropriate — but leave others out of it.

It’s an accepted convention

Granted, “that’s the way it is” is not an acceptable reason for anything.  It’s also a fairly arbitrary number.  That said, the eight hour day is something that has evolved in the past 100 years or so, and a lot of the current world has adapted to it.   Even developed countries that have attempted to legislate around this phenomenon (e.g. France and its 35 hour work week) see that people generally work something approaching 40 hours a week.  In France’s case, most companies have some sort of “exempt” employees who receive RTTs (more holidays) in return for….still working around 8 hours a day.

Huge swaths of the world’s economy are currently in shambles, and over the past 20 years, accepted means of working have changed.  But that does not mean that it is legitimate to impose a new expectation on the working world. That is un-capitalist, insofar as it engenders the expectation of receiving something for nothing (e.g. more work without more compensation.)

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it

8 hours makes a reasonable amount of sense.  It allows you to spend roughly a third of your day sleeping, a third of the day working, and a third taking care of personal business and having a life.  Yes, I believe that this is important.  It allows employees a reasonable lunch break in the middle of the day — whether this is natural or not is up for discussion, but it seems to work out.  Again, it’s up to the individual to decide whether he wants to work more than 8 hours (or whether he wants to / has to keep the job that requires him to do so.)

Longer hours shouldn’t make up for bad planning

As stated previously, management is hard — and it is cowardly and unreasonable to carry out a manager’s failure on the backs of his employees.   If there is consistently too much work for any given employee to complete in a reasonable day, the project was undersold, there are not enough employees, or the business model may simply be uneconomical.

Not paying people for their work runs contrary to free enterprise

Forget any sort of socialist collectivist power-to-employees nonsense.  This is the free market, baby.

Are you benefiting directly financially or materially from your overtime?  Will you share proportionally in the payout from that big negotiation you’ve worked on, or will the company you love benefit noticeably from your extra effort?  Great.

Likewise, were you fully informed upon embarking on your career (hi, banker guys) that you would be working long hours?  You signed a work contract, which may or may not be legal in your country.  That contract provided for a given amount of work.  You may also have been fully informed orally of “unofficial” work requirements that cannot, for legal reasons, be specified on a contract — with the assurance that you would receive perks and a high salary in return — it’s up to you to realize that you should get everything in writing, and to judge whether or not your employer’s HR is any more trustworthy than a used car salesman.

It is also up to employees to negotiate with an firm what happens if you finish they work ahead of schedule, and I venture that it’s reasonable to expect employees to be willing to be prepared to take on more work if they finish their job in less time. That’s only fair to shareholders and management.  Motivation to do more is why bonuses were invented.

At the same time, if someone is working hard to help  a company gain competitive advantage, but is not being reimbursed for his fair share (let’s face it, there are managers who “earn” bonuses by making employees work like slaves, while their teams’ bonus pools are laughably small) that person is being screwed.  He should re-negotiate, or leave.  But his situation most likely won’t improve.

Are you benefiting materially from your overwork?  Fantastic (as long as you, as an employee, do not start projecting your choice of working times on those around you, and as long as your employer does not get the idea that this is typical.)

However if, as a salaried employee, you are consistently faced with the need to pick up your management’s slack, there is something seriously, seriously wrong.

Long hours can make people unproductive

I accept your anecdotal evidence that you are a superman who is regularly able to plug away at your PC for 18 hours straight.  I am not.  Don’t impose your mutant work/life balance on me.

Hard work alone never meant success…

It’s bitter, but true — if it weren’t, I know many more truck drivers who would be millionaires.   Long hours may be a prerequisite for building a business, under many circumstances.  But most successful entrepreneurs did not arrive at their goals through brute force, but with a mixture of skill, intelligence, luck, timing, and effort.

…in fact, it may say bad things about you

Likewise, not working as much as you does not mean I’m not as good a worker as you.  In fact, I think I’m pretty good at what I do.  It may, on the contrary, just indicate that you are not very good or efficient at your job.  How about that?

Anyway, long hours are not the same as hard work.

The job market is bad, but nobody is irreplaceable

Remember this.   Your best bet is to make sure that you’re smart, you’re well-connected, you’re constantly building your experience, and you’re not subject to the whims of a manager / company that thinks sufficiently little of high performing employees that they would be at risk of firing for putting in less than an excessive amount of work time.

Always remember — a company that is willing to fire you for not going above and beyond the agreed-upon commercial exchange that is a work contract, is most likely to be prepared to get rid of you for something else that is equally silly.  There is a reason why Office Space and Dilbert are still funny true.

In short, we work, we’re paid, it’s a fair exchange.  The balance will always be between your choice as an employee / contractor to put in a certain amount of effort in return for an agreed-upon payout, your willingness to be flexible, and an employer’s desire to extract the maximum “bang for their buck”.

You are no hero

But many of us disagree with the need and desirability of spending 25 hours a day at the office, and yet, are able to do a great job.  Your acceptance of hard working conditions does not mark you as a martyr or a superman; remember that is the man who works insane hours on a regular basis, whether through choice or obligation, who is abnormal. Questioning others’ comparatively normal working hours will just make people not want to talk to you at parties.

Nobody ever lay on their death bed wishing they’d spent more time at the office.

You add all the eggs you can. Like, a whole pack for all I care.

Don’t do any pussy hairdresser shit like separate out the egg yolks. Cholesterol and fat are good for you. They keep your mind sharp and help defeat communism.

Add as much butter as you dare. Bonus points for salted butter. Margarine will cause large, evil men tospontaneously exit a hidden door next to your refrigerator and beat the living crap out of you before being mean to your puppy.

Add a boatload of pepper. Pepper protects you from herpes, plague, and Republicans. It also helps mask the taste of rancid meat, which is why it was so popular in the Middle Ages. That said, these are not the Middle Ages (had they had scrambled eggs this awesome, they would have gone straight to 88mph and done galactic grit laps around the invading alien armada scheduled to wipe out New Jersey in the year 2590 AD.)

Add salt. Just lots of it. Salt is to Michael Bloomberg what crosses are to vampires. It is thus a Good Thing ™. Bonus points if you can find some super-expensive fleur de sel or something that will similarly cause your girlfriend to kick your ass when she comes home for dumping what’s basically massively overpriced salt skimmings, you know, the crusty layer that pelicans crap on at the salt flats near the beach, into your scrambled eggs.

You should forgive her, though – she’s a woman and she either cannot understand the manly awesomeness of your scrambled eggs, or her panties will spontaneously dissipate at the first taste of your scrambled eggs. If you’re a woman, disregard the above, use whatever the hell salt you want, you have boobies and are thus okay in my book. It’ll be almost as epic as the time I used a whole can of my girlfriend’s frou-frou lemon-infused olive oil to make spaghetti. It was great spaghetti, except that she bitched me out for using a $25 can of olive oil for noodles. I mean, give me a fucking break, who charges $25 for a can of olive oil unless it’s lovingly hand-crafted by blind Tibetank child monks from slabs of plutonium and whoopass? Anyway, it was in a can, and only cheap oil comes in a can.

Add a bunch of milk. Milk comes from cows, and cows are hilarious. Did you know that in Cambodia, you can blow up cows with an RPG for $100? I like animals, and I would never do that, but you have to admit, in an abstract way, it’s pretty damn funny, exploding cows.

Then, take a fork and beat the shit out of it. Beat it like a boss.  Beat it as if it were your boss. Beat it like a red-headed stepchild. Touch my monkey, TOUCH IT, THEN BEAT IT SOME MORE.

Now, and here’s the key, put some more butter in the pan. Make it hot. Hotter, bitch. Hotter than the hinges of hell. And brown that fucker. Break it up, and this requires practice, into large chunks, each of which is nice and manly brown, like the sizzling skin of a topless Saint Tropez beach bunny.

Consume. But wear an old pair of underpants, because you will soil them from the sheer orgasmic goodness that you have just created.

Damn, I should write recipe books. Julia Child ain’t had nothing on me.

I present to you a list of minor Star Wars characters with completely unnecessary backstories, Zombo.com, and the ca. 135 google results for “earthworm costume” (with quotes).

What do all of these have in common?

That would be John’s Law of the Internet.

It states, simply:

No matter what you are trying to accomplish, no matter how trivial, irrelevant, exotic, or pointless, the likelihood is very high that someone out there has already done it.

The corollary to John’s Law says,

…and they probably had vastly more free time than you ever will.

Enjoy.