Elon Musks' employees might be racist

A Happy New Year to all my occasional readers! May your 2022 be less fucked-up than your 2021, which is probably the best we can hope for.

I was inspired to put pen to... LCD? whatever... reading a breathless Los Angeles Times article on racism and discrimination at Tesla's Fremont, California plant:

4:05 p.m. Feb. 12, 2022: An earlier version of this article said that at least 167 racial and sexual harassment suits were filed against Tesla since 2006. At least 160 worker lawsuits were filed over various grievances, not just harassment.

Oh, sorry, that was an article correction. I'm sure that most of the 160 lawsuits were about racism and sexism. Many, at least. Some, for sure. I wonder why they didn't give a more specific breakdown?

Anyway, let's get on to the meat of the allegations from California's (government) civil rights agency, who are clearly in no influenced by Tesla's move from California to Texas that will take billions of dollars out of their income:

Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred to as “porch monkey stations,” “the dark side,” “the slave ship” and “the plantation,” the lawsuit alleges.
Only Black workers had to scrub floors on their hands and knees, and they were relegated to the Fremont, Calif., factory’s most difficult physical jobs, the suit states.
Graffiti — including “KKK,” “Go back to Africa,” the hangman’s noose, the Confederate Flag and “F-- [N-word]” — were carved into restroom walls, workplace benches and lunch tables and were slow to be erased, the lawsuit says.

Ooohkayyy... Let me show you where this factory is located:

It's squarely in the Bay Area, which is one of the most liberal areas known to man persons. It's just down the road from Oakload, which is heavily Black. If this behavior was really happening at the scale indicated, I would fully expect mobs from Oakland to come and burn down the factory - while mobs from San Jose and San Francisco with artificially colored hair paraded cleverly-worded signs outside.

This claim is almost certainly massively exaggerated bullshit, based on a few events. I mean, the Confederate Flag? If you ever flew it here, your house and car would be burned down in short order. But, and here's the kicker, it might contain a kernel of truth.

Thing is, these "triggering events" aren't coming from the well-established white supremacists in the Bay Area (either of them). They're coming from the near-minimum wage factory worker class - and, to no-one's surprise, this is dominated by recent immigrants: Very few of whom are in any way white.

The dirty secret which the California civil rights agency skirts around is, and this goes back to Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird", practical racism mostly happens around the same strata in society. The Ewells were racist - eventually, fatally so - to Tom Robinson because he was only one rung below them in society - a hard-working black man, not far off from doing better than the wastrel crackers who formed the Ewells. Things have not changed much in 60 years.

The relevant strata of society in the case of Tesla - and any other manufacturing company in the Bay Area - is recent immigrants in manual labour, earning not much above the minimum wage. There is strenuous competition for these jobs, and indeed for the positions just above them that have more security and better prospects. As such, you tend to see the various communities form "views" on the other communities. And, unfortunate as it might be, African-Americans are seen as the least hard workers and least dependable.

From reported experience in major cities, in both USA and Canada, newly immigrated Hispanics and East Asian Americans tend to be reasonably coherent groups, with intra-group solidarity (if you were Manuel Labor on the factory floor, you'd support Javi in his attempt to get a full-time position because he's "one of you", you'd grudgingly agree that Binh from Vietnam could do the job but he's clearly trying to climb to the management ladder, but there's no way you want Marland from Jamaica because he's always complaining and making other people fix his mistakes, but the boss won't fire him because he's black and they can't be doing with the inevitable racial discrimination claim...

This is deliberately a caricature, but it's the practical reality in a wide range of jobs around here. There's strenuous competition for jobs and advancement, so the natural defensive tendency of the human is to join a tribal group for self-protection, and absorb their attitude towards other groups.

Interestingly you don't get so many (proportionate to immigration rates) South Asians in these jobs - they tend to come to the Bay Area on graduate-level visas, or head towards their own small business rather than working for The Man. But still, they have a view on Black Americans, and it's often informed by the relative racial proportion of people robbing their - and their extended family's - retail establishments.

I particularly liked this claim from the article:

One was lodged by a female Black employee who said her female white boss struck her with a hot grinding tool and called her “stupid” and the N-word and insulted her intelligence. The suit says the supervisor was fired but later rehired.

A white woman, in the Bay Area, using physical violence and calling a Black woman the N-word in earshot of anyone else? And the company re-hires her? I would love to hear the details of this case. I suspect the actual facts are quite different to the stated ones.

I understand that the California governing class is mad at Elon for taking his money away from them, and that an accusation of racial discrimination is the easiest tool to exact revenge. But let's not be fooled - these claims are likely 90% bullshit, and the core of real racism arises from the struggle for good jobs and money between non-white ethnic groups.

Why Americans love guns - interpreting for Europeans

Over the past year+ of lockdown, I have attained an unexpected view into the American psyche with respect to legal gun ownership. The summer of 2020 demonstrated to a lot of "regular" American people that

1. city, county and sometimes state governance was not particularly interested in safety for business owners and home dwellers,
2. local police were overstretched at best, and unable to respond in a timely and effective manner to widespread domestic insurgence, and
3. local political interest in protecting the populace was rather racially selective.

As a result, Americans are buying guns and ammunition. A lot of guns, and more ammunition than you can shake a stick at. A best guess^[1] is that 8.4 million Americans became gun owners for the first time in 2020.

If you hail from a gun-phobic country like... most of Europe nowadays, certainly including the UK and Germany, then this might all seem like paranoid insanity. It is anything but. In this blog I'm going to try to explain, to a UK mindset, why the American love of guns is actually very rational - and maybe something to emulate.

The American Gun Situation - Overview

If you want to understand how a very well-informed - albeit highly opinionated - USA gun owner thinks, particularly in regard to mass shootings, you need to read Larry Correia's 2012 blog post "An Opinion on Gun Control". His assertions have repeatedly been proven correct in the past 9 years. Go read that article, then come back here. As an optional exercise, you may like to evaluate the circumstances of this year's San Jose Valley Transport Authority mass shooting with Larry's assertions in mind.

Hopefully, you came away from that article with some understanding of the American gun owner mindset. Let me try to summarize in bullets (hah!):

• Gun ownership in America is much more heavily regulated, at both federal and state level, than you think;
• Mass shootings are highly publicised but a small fraction of overall gun homicides;
• Mass shootings occur almost universally in "gun free zones" because shooters are not stupid, and pick places where people won't shoot back;
• The various federal and state restrictions on firearm ownership ("no assault weapons!") since 1990 have been pointless and ineffective, except in provoking Americans to go out and buy a shedload more guns;
• Defensive gun use saves a lot more lives than offensive gun use takes (this surprised me too, but Larry's source is not exactly known for being a pro-gun camp);
• It is not practically possible to ban guns in America. Really, it isn't.

The Legal Situation

There is the perception in some countries that Americans can wander into their local Walmart, and wander out with a military-grade assault weapon. This is not an accurate statement of the facts. In fact, it's so far off base, it's wandering around the baseball stadium car park.

Suppose you want to buy a gun; that you are of the relevant age (18+ or 21+, depending on state); you are not otherwise disqualified from gun ownership by being a felon, illegal immigrant (yes! you need valid residence and identity documentation) or other locally disqualifying status such as being an accused domestic violence perpetrator.

You rock up to the gun store, browse the various firearms on display - currently, very limited - and pick one that suits your lifestyle and aesthetics. What happens now? You fill in the form for the ATF Form 4473, then - in many states - you leave the establishment and wait for them to contact you. Hopefully within the week, they will inform you that you have passed the checks, and you have 30 days to come in and formally pick up your firearm.

You also may have to, if this is your first firearm purchase, complete a state-defined written multiple-choice test, and there may be a required "waiting period" distinct from the 4473 check until you are allowed to take possession of the firearm.

So next time you hear a politician say "it is easier to buy a firearm than vote!" you know that they are talking complete bollocks.

Now you have a gun, what can you do with it? It varies depending on state. Larger weapons like rifles and shotguns can be taken hunting, can be kept in your house (there are often requirements by states on how they are to be secured) and in some states can be carried around outside ("open carry").

If you want a gun for self-defence in any location other than your home, then practically your only choice is a handgun. Here the states, counties and even cities in the USA have a patchwork of different requirements. Carrying around a (legally owned) handgun with you is referred to generally as "concealed carry", and there is a wide range of what's allowed - from "unrestricted carry" which means you don't even need a permit, to "restricted may-issue" in places like the Bay Area and New York city where they actually don't issue a permit unless you donate generously to the local sherriff's campaign. Allegedly.

Ammunition is generally easy to buy - if you can find it these days - with the exception of gun-hating states like California which restrict who can buy ammunition, where you can buy or import it from, and require background checks for purchaes.

Oh, and "assault weapons"? Go re-read Correia above - but in short, politicians are deliberately conflating a fully automatic ('selective-fire') rifle, exclusive to the military, with a semi-automatic (one bullet per pull of the trigger) rifle which happens to be the most popular kind of rifle in the USA. It turns out that you can't own a "machine gun" in the USA in practice - unless you buy a smuggled one illegally, which criminals do because they don't actually "obey the law".

That's how you get a gun, and what the major types of gun are - now, who's actually getting them?

Gun Ownership in the USA (it's everywhere)

People often make the mistake of underestimating gun ownership in America. They say blasé things like "you know, literally everyone has a gun!"

If you took that as an estimate, you'd be low by at least 20%. In 2018 the USA had more guns than people - 393 million guns compared to 325 million population. There have been a lot more guns bought since then, and guns don't really 'wear out', although they can rust and become unreliable. Note also that these numbers are only estimated, because of the general lack of registration of guns. My personal opinion is that it's a lot higher now; about 40 million guns were purchased in 2020, and we're probably on target to beat that this year if the supply can keep up.

About half of the civilian weapons in the entire world are held in the USA. And civilian weapons are 90% of the total, because there are many more civilians than military.

Obviously, many people have many guns, and many others have none, so it makes more sense to look at per-household gun ownership. This ownership is not distributed evenly. Republican states have a higher rate of household gun ownership in general; Alaska, Montana and Wyoming all have rates above 60%, whereas the populous northeast states are under 20%. But it's mixed - liberal Washington state has a similar ownership rate to redneck Texas (42% to 45%). Even hippie California has a 28% ownership rate, though my guess is that it's higher in the rural parts and lower in the heavily liberal Bay Area.

A joke goes that China's People's Liberation Army is the largest standing armed force in the world - but Texas has a much larger, better trained, and more heavily armed force which deploys in pickup trucks. I would estimate that there is somewhere in the range of 35-40 million firearms in Texas, handily beating the PLA's 28 million firearms. If Beta O'Rourke^[2] really does intend to take away guns in Texas, it's going to take him quite a while. I hope he has a big truck to carry them.

Even in the Bay Area, if you assume that ownership rate is half that of the rest of California, 1 in 7 houses have a firearm. And, since it's so expensive and bloody awkward to buy and supply it, they are probably not just owning the firearm because they like the look of it above their fireplace. (Why do so many homes in sunny California have fireplaces? Why? Why?)

Let's talk about sex, baby; and eth-ni-ci-ty

Sorry, Salt-N-Pepa, I couldn't resist.

Over many visits to shooting ranges, you get an idea of what kind of people - phenotypes - are interested in firearms ownership. Now, I'm only going by what I see locally (Bay Area in California), but it's told me a lot:

• The majority are white men, and generally older (40+). So far, unsurprising.
• There are more women than you might think. Most shoot handguns, but I've seen several shooting rifles including one who's shooting a heavy calibre (7.62mm or .308) with very tight groups at long distance. (Side note: intermediate calibre rifles like the infamous AR-15 are in fact the easiest firearm for smaller people to shoot: they have remarkably little recoil, so are easier to keep on target than a handgun or shotgun)
• Strongly represented ethnic groups: Hispanic, Korean and Chinese
• Under-represented ethnic groups: Black, Indian
• A number of men bring along their children (teens) - and in my experience, this happens disproportionately with Hispanic men. They're clearly interested in teaching their daughters to shoot.

Those people familiar with Bay Area Asian demographics might be thinking: Why Koreans? Well, let's talk about the Rooftop Koreans cultural meme. Back in 1992, the Los Angeles riots resulted (for complex cultural reasons) in Los Angelino criminals - primarily black - looting Korean stores. The Koreans had generally settled in the area in the 1970s-1980s and made a successful living with small retail businesses, but in '92 found rampaging mobs trying to loot and burn their livelihoods.

Korean men - at least, those born in Korea - all serve in the military. When you have a succession of unhinged dictators in North Korea, controlling a huge standing army and artillery, South Korea is going to make damned sure that its populace is trained in military skills and able to react quickly to an attempted invasion. This is not like the previous West German conscription where you had options for conscious objection, or the ability to volunteer in Civil Protection Services - in South Korea, you're going to serve in the active duty military for at least 18 months, and you're going to like it. And if you don't like it, they really don't care. Even famous actors have to do their part. It took until 2018 for South Korea to recognize conscientious objection as even a thing.

As a result, in Los Angeles the Korean male population had a) ready access to firearms and ammunition, because they were in America, and b) the training, discipline, and community coordination to mount an effective defence to looters. It's notable that in 2020 the LA rioters generally stayed well away from Korean businesses - because they knew that the Koreans would shoot them with no compunction, and the local police would not give a crap. Even USA-born Koreans get the indoctrination from their appa (father) about the potential threats to their family's prosperity, and their need to be able to defend the family from them.

Let's not forget Hispanics. The USA Democratic Party likes to think that, because Hispanics are generally lower on the income ladder, that they're sympathetic to Democratic social justice aims. In my experience, this is rather an optimistic reading. If you're struggling to make your way in the USA, as many of them are, the last thing you want is a criminal scumbag coming into your small business and robbing it because it's an easy way for him to make money - and so, you take protective measures into your own hands. And if it's a scumbag criminal Hispanic, you're going to be very relaxed about taking him out, even if he thinks you're his compadre.

Finally, and even The Guardian admits this, middle-class blacks are buying a whole lot of guns. When you see sustained riots in your community, and respected community members gunned down for having the temerity to resist violence, what are you going to think? Are you going to rely on the police? The hell you are. You're going to tool up to defend your family - whether you're a man or a woman.

How it Plays in Practice - Deaths

There are many guns in America, so there are a whole lotta shootings. The connection is undeniable.

There are lies, damned lies, and gun death statistics, but a good place to start is the number of homicides by firearm. You can see that it has kicked up in recent years, but it's about 10,000 deaths per year. Don't confuse this with the number of deaths by gun which is far higher (about 34,000 deaths a year) - because there's a lot of gun-induced suicide, and note that the higher the gun ownership rate in an area, the easier a suicidal person finds it to use a gun instead of hanging / tablets / car exhaust, etc.

Now, remembering our table of household firearm ownership, check out Figure 2 (state-by-state ranking of gun homicide rates) at the americanprogress.org site. Heavily armed Texas is #22. Liberal and lightly armed California is at #25. Those are two very big, populous states with a number of large cities. Liberal and disarmed Illinois (home of Chicago) is #9. Top ranking Montana and Wyoming are #37 and #38 respectively. Now, the overall picture is complex, and it's hard to compare state-to-state completely, but you should at least be convinced that just having a large number of guns doesn't inherently make a state more dangerous.

So Why Do Americans Own Guns?

Based on the ownership numbers, and noting the firearms death numbers, Europeans could be forgiven for assuming that Americans have to be insanely and irrationally paranoid to own all those guns. But as the saying goes, "you're not paranoid if 'they' really are out to get you."

Home defence

Americans do not like people breaking into their homes. Not at all. Over the years many US states - including highly liberal California - have passed laws stating in essence that if someone uses force to break into your house, you don't have to hide or retreat, or wait for an imminent threat of violence to you or someone else. You are presumptively allowed to shoot the invader, and when the police rock up, the worst they will do is temporarily confiscate your firearm (after giving you a receipt), and comment on your shot groupings.

Shooting home invaders who are actively fleeing the property is a little dicier legally (sorry, Tony Martin) but I suspect rural police forces are more tolerant in this regard. In rural Alabama I wouldn't be surprised if they helpfully drag the bullet-ridden body back over the property line into your yard before taking the crime scene photo. And then throw the corpse in jail for 20 years for felony robbery, just to make the point.

Bear in mind just how big the USA is. Even in crowded regions like the Bay Area, the population density is far below the UK's average. It can easily take 10-20 minutes for the police to reach you, even if they're available. Out in rural parts, that number could be half an hour, or much longer. If you have a crime problem, that's a very long time to wait. Americans are not inclined to wait.

Note that, although Antifa are happily rampaging in the center of major cities, there are very few suburbs where they'd try that on. Because the homeowners would shoot them - in many cases, with actual glee - and, again, the police really would not care.

Self defence

If you want one reason why Americans own handguns, self defence (the aforementioned concealed carry) is it. As Larry Correia noted:

Handguns are tools for self-defense, and the only reason we use them over the more capable, and easier to hit with rifles or shotguns is because handguns are portable. Rifles are just plain better, but the only reason I don’t carry an AR-15 around is because it would be hard to hide under my shirt.

Are Americans paranoid about being attacked while out in public? Maybe. But it certainly seems to happen a lot. See my Asian Lives Matter series for what happens in cities like NYC, DC, and San Francisco where handgun carrying is effectively banned. I assure you, these attacks will happen less in concealed-carry-permitting cities, because a bystander will pull out their weapon and shoot the attacker in short order. You will rapidly run out of motivated scumbags.

Take a look at what happened in the West Freeway Church of Christ in 2019. A scumbag pulled out an (illegal) handgun and started firing, killing two church members. A church member pulled out his concealed pistol and shot the scumbag dead, with a single shot to the head, doubtless preventing many more deaths. Interestingly, weapons had not been allowed in places of worship until shortly before then.

Incidentally, if you want to understand some of the issues around effectively using a handgun for self defence, read Correia's article on CCW training. Suffice to say, it's not something to be undertaken lightly.

The Gummint

And now we get to the real point of owning a firearm, and why so many have been bought in recent times.

The essential difference between the American and the British psyches, from my observation, is in their obedience to government. British people often don't like their government, and hold it in polite contempt, but with few exceptions they will still nearly all follow "the rules" even if the rules don't make sense, because - well, they are the rules, and they don't want to make trouble. As a demonstration, see the past year and the COVID restrictions.

Tell a rural American to follow a pointless and obnoxious government diktat, by contrast, and his or her response is very likely to be along the lines of "f*cking come and make me, you bastards." And if you do try to make him or her do it, there is not an insubstantial chance that you will get shot. Ask the Internal Revenue Service about their previous experience trying to collect taxes in places like the Ozarks, for instance.

I don't think most Europeans fully understand how serious many Americans are about having firearms to resist government tyranny. Part of the reason, of course, is the recurring incompetence and actual malice of US governmental institutions. Anyone dealing with the Social Security Administration, immigration authorities or - my favorite - the public school system quickly starts to understand some of this mentality. The government is not generally seen as benevolent, and it doesn't really matter which party the titular President belongs to.

Americans know what malevolent, unaccountable government looks like. They run into it with uncomfortable regularity at a small scale, and they don't like it, at all. It's not a stretch for them to think that the malevolence could scale up with a suitably "we know what's best for you" government. That's what the firearms are a brake on. If you doubt this, ask yourself why approximately eighty million firearms will have been purchased between March 1st 2020 and December 31st 2021. Government saying "we're going to tax, regulate and take your guns" a) is an overtly aggressive act, and b) shows that the government actually thinks that the current firearms are a barrier to them governing "effectively". And the last thing that most Americans want is "effective" government.

What the UK Could Learn

First, it was a mistake to peacefully give up nearly all guns. Probably an unavoidable one, given the media climate at the time, but there is now no practical way for the British population to resist government oppression. Maybe you don't think that's a problem for now, but sooner or later it will be. An unarmed population is remarkably tempting as a takeover target for self-favouring politicians. That's not true in places where they will overthrow you, shoot you, and stick your head on a fence post as a warning to others.

Second, stop respecting all the laws. Politicians make stupid laws, regulations and "emergency powers" impositions all the time. Tell them to get stuffed. Make the politicians and low-level clipboard-carriers fear the people, not the other way around. You think that a fluorescent-vested busybody going around the Alamo in San Antonio telling people to wear a mask outdoors is going to get any traction? He'd be lucky not to be thrown in the nearest pond.

Third, you're going to have to defend yourself and your family eventually. It seems clear that the police are more interested in prosecuting people for silly speech on Twitter than going after actual hard-core criminals, people smugglers etc. - well, you can do the former from an air-conditioned office, but the latter actually requires hard work and personal risk. So if you can't rely on the police to defend you, how are you going to defend yourself?

Fourth... oh, sod it. Just emigrate to the USA. Pick a suitable gun-favouring state, go to the local gun store and ask for help. It'll be the most liberating thing you ever do. Not to mention, it'll annoy Polly Toynbee.

[1] There is no national register of who-owns-which-guns in the USA, and that's very deliberate. A gun ownership register tells you where to go to confiscate guns should you be inclined towards a dictatorial rule.
[2] Actually "Robert Francis O'Rourke", known as "Beto". But I like "Beta" better.

Scottish independence referendum - a compromise

The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum resulted in a fairly clear "No" vote - 55% No to 44% Yes - but with the recent hilarity of the 2019 UK election result and a very strong Scottish Nationalist showing, there are increasingly strident calls from the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) for a re-run.

Inconveniently, the SNP wrote a manifesto for the 2014 referendum in which they promised:

If we vote No, Scotland stands still. A once in a generation opportunity to follow a different path, and choose a new and better direction for our nation, is lost.
[...]
The debate we are engaged in as a nation is about the future of all of us lucky enough to live in this diverse and vibrant country. It is a rare and precious moment in the history of Scotland – a once in a generation opportunity to chart a better way.
[...]
It is the view of the current Scottish Government that a referendum is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. This means that only a majority vote for Yes in 2014 would give certainty that Scotland will be independent.

A "generation" is somewhere between 18 and 30 years (age of adulthood vs average age for first time birth in the UK) so it seems a bit problematic to hold a second referendum before 2032 at the very earliest.

Fear not, First Minister Sturgeon! Hemiposterical has a solution.

The eligibility to vote for the 2014 referendum was:

• British citizens who were resident in Scotland;
• Citizens of other Commonwealth countries who were resident in Scotland;
• Citizens of other European Union countries who were resident in Scotland;
• Members of the House of Lords who were resident in Scotland;
• Service/Crown personnel serving in the UK or overseas in the British Armed Forces or with Her Majesty's Government who were registered to vote in Scotland.

Let's flip that around by replacing "Scotland" with "England". Hold a binding referendum on Scottish independence, based on these eligibility criteria in 2023 (9 years after the first referendum, 9 years before the earliest date of the next one) and, if the population of England votes "Yes", wave a cheery farewell to Scotland.

This doesn't disenfranchise the Scots - they retain the right to hold their own referendum in the future and see it pass. It just additionally enfranchises the population in the part of the Union who have to fund Scotland to the tune of an additional £12bn per year, or so, in Barnett Formula payments. Since we had a referendum on EU membership with a similar net payment, this seems proportionate.

I'm not including Northern Ireland and Wales in the referendum in fairness to the Scots - they already receive significant Barnett payment, and so would be highly motivated to vote "Yes", evict Scotland and benefit from a potentially larger pool of funding.

So Boris, Nicola - how about it?

BBC shilling for illegal immigration

I shouldn't be surprised at the BBC any more, but their article My life trapped in an American city was so egregious that I feel it deserves a thorough fisking.

My family and I migrated to Phoenix, Arizona, when I was eight years old. I'm now 22 and a student of engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso.
I'm not a criminal yet in a way I'm treated like one.

Well, your parents arranged to violate the immigration laws of the country in which you find yourself, so it's not surprising that the way you could be treated is analogous to the way that others who have broken the laws are treated. And I can't help but notice that you're not blaming your parents for this situation despite the fact that they explicitly arranged for it to happen.

El Paso has checkpoints around it where immigration officers ask for your documents, documents I obviously don't have. I can't leave the city or I risk deportation. Fortunately, my parents became US residents two years ago but, unfortunately, this isn't the case for my sisters, aged 25 and 18, and me.
When they got their papers they moved back to Phoenix in search of more job opportunities after four years of living here. But I risked putting my college education in jeopardy and getting deported if I crossed the checkpoint and was asked for my documents.

I also wonder whether your parents' immigration status would be jeopardized if USCIS found out that they were actively working to conceal other illegal immigrants - you and your sisters, specifically.

My parents visit me once every three or four months - because of work and other things they can't be here more often. But since they all moved I haven't seen my youngest sister. Her high school graduation was last month and I was unable to go even though everyone in the family was there. And I know neither one of my sisters will be able to attend mine.

On the other hand, you get a gratis US taxpayer funded high school education, and I can't help but notice a complete lack of gratitude for this.

I try not to complain since I'm the first of my parents' children to go to college. I feel very lucky. On the other hand, there are days when I'm just tired of it.
I feel like I don't have rights.

Well, you have all the regular rights of anyone within the United States, citizen or otherwise, as enumerated in the Constitution - in fact, a heck of a lot more than in Mexico. What you mean is, you don't have the right to be treated like a legal resident of the country - because you aren't. That's like me visiting Paris and complaining that I don't have the right to be treated like a French citizen. I'm not a French citizen, there's no prospect of me becoming one, and just because I'm touring the Eiffel Tower doesn't give me any rights to that status.

When they ask me "Why aren't you working? or "Why don't you drive?" I have to make them believe that I'm lazy. So they just stop asking. The truth is I'm unable to work or get a driving licence.
As soon as we crossed the border I had to assimilate myself. I learned English and as I was learning it as a child, our teachers would straight out say "Stop speaking Spanish. You're in America now". A few months later I would win spelling bees - compete against white people who only spoke English - and still win.

You've done a great job of learning the language: fantastic! Just curious: what did you learn about the laws of the country you're living in, and the need to respect them? Because that's also kinda important.

After the 2008 recession my dad, a civil engineer, couldn't find a job in Phoenix and we lost the house we had. So we had to go back to Mexico.
I had such a terrible time, it was probably the worst of my life. I was so Americanised that I didn't fit in. That's what they ask you to do to be accepted in the American culture. I had lost my Mexican identity. We were there for a year and a half before we came back.

Looking at your age (22 now) this looks like: left Mexico at age 8, returned to Mexico at age 12, came back to USA at age 13/14. Pardon me for scenting a certain amount of license with the truth here. At age 8 you'd be speaking fluent Mexican Spanish. After 4 years in the USA you'll certainly have an American accent, but you'll be immersed in an immigrant community and frequently hearing and speaking Spanish. The problem is, you didn't like being back in Mexico because it wasn't as nice as being in the USA - even with all the illegal immigration limitations you document so heavily.

I know so much history about this country, more than average US nationals, and I have so much respect for it seeing as I get myself involved in politics to help improve this country's current state. I involve myself more than citizens, people who should worry more about this nation given that it really is theirs.

I see. So you don't think that, for instance, politics in the USA should be reserved for those who are actually citizens and bear voting rights and responsibilities? In fact, by the sound of it, you consider yourself better informed and more responsible than they are? I can't imagine that generating any resentment at all.

It's difficult to dream in a country that, regardless of everything I've done, which is what most immigrants do, doesn't welcome you even if you've seen it as home for most of your life.

I've found the USA very welcoming to immigrants. But then, I came here by following the rules that the USA had laid down for immigrants. Almost as if Americans don't appreciate those trying to end-run around the rules that others are following. Go figure.

I understand that they have the right to choose to whom they grant citizenship. I just wish they would give me some sort of help. I've given up part of my culture, my roots, to be accepted here. I've already given some of me.
Why can't this country give something back?

What, like a free high school education? A community which is so attractive that you'd rather live there illegally than in your home country legally? Legal status for your older sister and parents? Yes, you've really been hard done over by the USA.

Three semesters from now, when I graduate, I may still be deported. And I may never see my sisters again until they can get papers, which by the looks of it will probably be in 12 more years.

You should go and talk to Indian or Chinese H1-B visa holders and ask them about their timelime to permanent resident (Green Card) status. They'd love to only have to wait 12 years. If you want to see your sisters again, you can always go to Mexico after you graduate. What you're actually saying is that you prefer the economic and educational benefits of living in the USA to seeing your sisters. That's a perfectly rational choice, but it's your choice, and it's a bit much to blame the USA for the situation that you can't have your cake and eat it.

You can't deny that this has affected me. This shouldn't be happening.

Right. Your parents shouldn't have repeatedly violated US immigration law in the first place to put you in this invidious position. And yet that doesn't seem to be your point, for some reason...

Pull your head out of your ass, girl. If you really want to stay in the USA, find an American citizen and marry them. I assume that's how your older sister got her residence status. It may be a sacrifice - you might already be in love with someone who's not a USA citizen - but you have to decide what's most important to you.

Referendum predictions

I have no idea on the actual result. I don't think I could place a bet if I was offered 50:50 odds on each choice. That said, the breakdown by region is going to be very interesting, and I wonder if the rain/floods will hit turnout in the SE, and whether that will make a material difference.

If "Remain" wins: The Guardian (and, less obviously, BBC) will be insufferable. Juncker et al will keep true to their promise not to give any concessions to the UK, even if the result is knife-edge. UKIP effectively dissolves in a frenzied pit of backbiting. Who knows what the UKIP voters will do at the next election?

If "Leave" wins: Immediate witch-hunt from Guardian, BBC. Cameron resigns. Panic in Europe. Stock markets burning. Sweden and maybe Denmark start feeling popular pressure to exit or form referendum. Juncker et al refuse any trade deals with the UK. Boris's hair a fixture on the international news.

I've observed my Facebook stream becoming increasingly stridently pro-Remain over the past 2 weeks. The Leavers are keeping very quiet, presumably because they're swamped by insufferable Remainers if they post anything. Remain posts seem to be relatively free of Leaver comments. So is this due to Remain having an insurmountable majority, due to me having a supermajority of Remain friends, or because the Leavers don't care what the Remainers think or do?

Going by their selection of stories and interviewees, the BBC have steadily abandoned impartiality over the past couple of weeks. The only really studiously neutral Beebite I've seen has been the indefatigueable Kuenssberg.

The implications of the "Out" threats

With the UK In/Out referendum less than three weeks away, and the BetFair odds on "Leave" starting to come down - albeit still very far from 50-50 - it has been instructive to listen to the veiled, and not so veiled, threats about what will happen if the populace vote for "Leave".

A good example was the comment in late May from Jean-Claude "Piss Artist" Juncker, European Commission President:

"The United Kingdom will have to accept being regarded as a third country, which won't be handled with kid gloves.
"If the British leave Europe, people will have to face the consequences -- we will have to, just as they will. It's not a threat but our relations will no longer be what they are today."

Apparently EU officials don't want to have lengthy negotiations[1] with a Brexited UK, which makes sense. But of course, the easiest course for both sides would be to retain status quo ante: continue trade under the same conditions and tariff schedule as before. Why wouldn't this be the starting point? In general, trade tariffs hurt the populace of the country / countries that impose them: they make imported goods more expensive for their populace. The main function of trade tariffs is to protect local industry from "abuse" from "dumping" by foreign manufacturers: selling goods below the cost of local produce. This may not be good for local industry, but it's certainly good for anyone who wants to buy those goods, at least in the short term.

It seems fairly clear that, whatever the merits of the "Remain" and "Leave" positions, the EU establishment is happy to cut off its population's noses to spite the UK's faces. One has to ask: if national membership of the EU is supposed to be of benefit to the population, why would the EU take action to screw over all their population in order to punish a member nation that wanted to leave?

[1] Note that the EU can apparently spare the manpower to negotiate a mostly free trade agreeement with Canada, which has half the population and a bit more than half the GDP of the UK.

ISIS and the matriarchy

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has stuck his oar into a conjunction of the current fiery discussions around a) the treatment of women in the workplace and b) how to handle ISIS with a blog article titled, discretely, Global Gender War:

Now compare our matriarchy (that we pretend is a patriarchy) with the situation in DAESH[ISIS]-held territory. That’s what a male-dominated society looks like. It isn’t pretty. The top-ranked men have multiple wives and the low-ranked men either have no access to women, or they have sex with captured slaves.

There's no way this could possibly be controversial, amirite?

Adams has started a new blog series today on the question "Is the United States a Patriarchy or a Matriarchy?" where his evidence for "Matriarchy" is moderately compelling so far: "Women have the most political power in the United States because more women than men vote". True, we haven't had a female President yet, but it's not obvious that this is because they're being discriminated against. Personally, I'm astonished that Hillary Clinton has got as far as she has given all the shenanigans she has been involved in, which would have torpedoed any other candidate's aspirations before starting, and how astonishingly un-gregarious and un-likeable she is.

Anybody remember Democrat hopeful Gary Hart in the 1988 campaign? Sunk without trace by an accusation of marital infidelity. Michael Dukakis who eventually became the nominee? Lost mostly because of an insufficiently warm personality. Hillary should have sunk without trace by now, and the fact that she's still the Democrat front-runner by far is a sign of how much leeway the population - and the media - is giving her. One can only surmise that it's because she is a woman.

Returning to Adams' original article, he points out that the gender pay gap in the USA doesn't really exist - as the estimable Tim Worstall has pointed out time and time again with respect to the UK, which (if anything) is more traditional than the USA. He addresses the assertion that women are interrupted more in meetings by pointing out that people who talk more are more likely to be interrupted, and while this is not a slam-dunk answer it's at least a point that suggests a need for more analysis. He also points out the strong societal push to give sanctuary to women and children from Syria, as opposed to young single men.

It's quite possible that Adams is completely wrong and that women are systematically discriminated against in the USA, but it's not obviously false.

Anyway, the point of the article is to contrast the USA against the vast majority of Middle East states which are indisputable patriarchies - really, would anyone like to argue the opposite? - and to hypothesize that one way that the Daesh/ISIS leadership are controlling their low-level followers is to restrict their access to good nookie on Earth with the promise of wonderful nookie in Heaven if they blow themselves up in the right place, with appropriate Koranic citations to back this up. Again, Adams' thesis is not obviously wrong. These men seem to have significant "issues" with women and something is motivating them to suicide, while the harems for their leadership are a matter of record.

If you're in any doubt about the position of Western women in the Middle East, read the travel guidance for women in Saudi Arabia:

- Women traveling alone are not allowed to enter the country unless they will be met at the airport by a husband, a sponsor or male relative.
- Women relocating to Saudi Arabia to marry, study or stay with a Saudi family need to be aware that leaving the country requires the permission of the Saudi male head of their household.

So if the hormone-crazed late-teen ISIS recruits can't get access to women because of the restrictions that their leadership imposes, Adams' assertion that he as a teenager in the same position would gladly strap on explosives to get access to the forbidden fruit is not obviously insane. Deliberately provocative, yes. But can those piling on Adams provide a more plausible explanation of the current suicide bombers' motivation?

The logistics of de-immigration

Eminent social justice activist Shaun King raises a pertinent point on the current topic (in the sphere of the US presidential candidate selection process) of what to do with the "immigrants of dubious legality" in the USA:

What do you think it would look like, practically speaking, for Trump to "round up" 450,000 immigrants per month and "ship them off".

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) October 15, 2015

This is, as several people has observed, quite a hard problem.

The first problem you have is finding the immigrants, and this is probably the killer. You've got 360M people in the USA, illegal immigrants are 10M-20M in number by various estimates, so for every 1000 illegals found you have to trawl (naively) about 20,000 legal citizens - and at 450K illegals/month constant rate you're looking at 2 years to remove nearly everyone. So every month you need to annoy 9M legal residents at some level in order to meet your quota. As immigrant numbers fall, that number of recently annoyed legal residents will rise. You'll start with unobtrusive measures, but as time goes on you'll need to get more and more intrusive - and most of the annoyed legal residents are citizens, and can vote against representatives who are supporting this measure.

Then you need to make them leave the country. Detention is expensive, ask anybody in the Federal Bureau of Prisons - average is about $100/day and that assumes amortizing entry and exit costs over many months. The sooner you can export them, the better. You need to fund daily 1-way flights from a wide range of cities to the dominant countries of residence of illegal immigrants: Mexico (obviously), major nations in Central/South America, and Pakistan/India/Bangladesh. The immigrants won't be paying for this - they'd rather pass their US$ to legal resident friends and rely on that largesse being transmitted to their home country for later pick-up, at a generous margin. So the US government will be implicitly boosting illegal financial transactions as a result. Occupancy rate on those planes is going to be highly variable. Assuming average occupancy of an evacuation plane at 50% - realistically, you can't fill them with paying passengers, ask anyone in the UK - that $700 is a reasonable round trip fare to Latin America, and noting that the return journey will need to be empty (don't even think about eating the profit margins of existing airlines, there's no way this turns out well) you're spending about $700M/month just on the export. This assumes zero cost on detention and transport to the airport, which is "optimistic".

What's the end run around this? Make the illegals deport themselves. Illegal immigrants come to the USA to work and earn money for their family, with the (faint) hope that they can eventually stay. This might occur by having a baby in the USA who will be a US citizen, and applying for residency on compassionate grounds; alternatively they might eventually find an employer willing to sponsor them. So remove that attraction. There are definite areas of employment for illegal immigrants; it depends on the region, but generally agriculture (crop picking), daily manual labour and domestic service are the top areas. Focus tax audits on those areas, reduce the marginal cost of legal labor (e.g. by increasing the deductability of costs associated with a provably legal labourer) and watch the illegal employment rate plummet.

This isn't a free ride - the government will still need to fund the free no-questions-asked one-way flights home, but if they really want to make this happen then it's probably the cheapest way to achieve the goal. With no income, and easy access to return journeys to one's home country, the labour problem will mostly fix itself.

Of course, this reduces the government benefit of illegal employment - is an incumbent administration willing to forego all the income from illegal activity?

Some illegals more equal than others - California edition

In a conversation at work today, a colleague mentioned that her Iceland-born spouse needed someone to go with him to the local branch of the California Department of Motor Vehicles (aka the First Circle of Hell) because he had to take a test. There was widespread surprise at this - didn't he have a valid licence from another country, and wasn't this OK? Yes he did, and no it wasn't; as of 15th May, the California DMV will no longer issue temporary driving licences when you pass their written test.

For context on why this matters: for foreign citizens, when you move to California and become resident (paying rent / utility bills locally) you're required to get a driving licence within 10 days of this event if you want to continue driving in California. Up until May, this was straight forward: you went to the DMV, took their written tests - tedious but not too hard - then booked a practical test and in return got a temporary driving licence that you could renew if the test got postponed. The practical test took 1-3 weeks to reserve a reasonable slot until recently, but this year's announcement that certain immigrants didn't have to prove any legal residence status has caused a huge rush of applications and backlog of tests.

Now that foreign citizens don't get the temporary licence, they can't drive unaccompanied from day 11 of their residency until the date that they pass the (admittedly easy) driving test. Sounds like a bit of a regression, so what's going on?

Let's look at the requirements for California DMV form AB60 guidelines on proving identity if you're not already a Californian:

Foreign Document that is valid, approved by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and electronically verified by DMV with the country of origin:

• Mexican Federal Electoral Card (Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE) Credencial para Votar – 2013 version)
• Mexican Passport (issued in 2008 or later and includes digital photo and digital signature)
• Mexican Consular Card (Matricula Consular – 2006 and 2014 versions)
• Foreign Passport that is valid and approved by DMV (see page 4 & 5 for list of DMV approved passports). The customer must also provide his/her social security number (SSN) that is electronically verifiable with the Social Security Administration.

Well, that's tough luck if you're an illegal immigrant (i.e. not able to get a legit Social Security number because you're not a legal resident) and not Mexican, right? Luckily there's an alternative if you have a foreign passport but not an SSN: if you have one of the following then you're OK:

• Argentinian Identification Card (Documento Nacional de Identidad (DNI) – 2009 or 2012 version)
• Brazilian Consular Card (Carteira de Matricula Consular – 2010 version)
• Chilean Identification Card (Cedula de Identidad – 2013 version)
• Colombian Consular Card (Consular Registration – 2015 version)
• Ecuadorian National Identification Card (Cedula de Ciudadania – 2006 or 2009 version)
• Ecuadorian Consular Card (Tarjeta De Identification Consular – 2015 version)
• El Salvadorian Identification Card (Documento Unico de Identidad (DUI) – 2010 version)
• Guatemalan National Identification Card (Documento Personal de Identificacion (DPI) – 2012 version)
• Guatemalan Consular Card (Tarjeta de Identificacion Consular – 2002 version)
• Peruvian Identification Card (Documento Nacional de Identidad (DNI) – 2005 version)

Or you can show another foreign passport: so if you're a dual national then by my reading, you're sorted. Other than that, if you're not from Central/South America and don't have legal residence then you're pretty much sunk. Yay for the major South American nations, except Venezuela or Uruguay, but boo for anyone else.

To recap: if you're an illegal immigrant then you don't really care about driving illegally in the short term. But long term it could be a problem, which is why California has the above AB60 guidance about handing out driving licenses. If you're from Central/South America then they have you covered, otherwise they really don't seem to care. It's perfectly fine for a country to be antagonistic to illegal aliens (that's me struck off Shahid Haque-Hausrath's Christmas card list) but to be arbitrarily receptive to citizens of some countries and not others smacks of, oh I don't know, naked political favouritism?

And now legal immigrants will find it substantially harder to comply with the laws of the state that they're living in - and paying taxes to. Nice one, California.

Take the upside and you own the downside

I was annoyed by this inane Reuters article on the fate of the UK's gold stash:

An independent Scotland could lay claim to a part of the United Kingdom's 310-tonne gold reserves if votes go in favour of the "Yes" campaign this month, with ownership of Britain's bullion hoard up for negotiation along with other assets.

If I were Scotland, I'd run as far as possible from the £7.8bn pile of gold bricks. The reason I'd do this is because if I take on a fraction of the assets of the UK, I have no argument against also taking on its liabilities:

As of Q1 2013 UK government debt amounted to £1,377 billion, or 88.1% of total GDP, at which time the annual cost of servicing the public debt amounted to around £43bn, or roughly 3% of GDP.

Why would you take (say) 10% of £7.8bn when you'd also have to assume 10% of a £1400bn liability? You'd have to be stark staring bonkers. Alex Salmond isn't a rocket scientist, but even he would realise how dumb this would be.

Surrender monkeys don't eat balut

A fascinating shit-storm is brewing between the Philippine Army and the UN Disengagement Observer Force as a result of recent events in the Golan Heights:

The Philippine military said Monday that a U.N. peacekeeping commander in the Golan Heights should be investigated for allegedly asking Filipino troops to surrender to Syrian rebels who had attacked and surrounded their camp.
[...]
When the besieged Filipino troops sought his [Gen. Catapang's] advice after they were ordered to lay down their arms as part of an arrangement with the rebels to secure the Fijians' release, Catapang said he asked them to defy the order.

It seems that in order to facilitate negotiations for the release of 45 Fijian soldiers captured by the (al-Qaeda affiliated) Nusra Front rebels - such capture perhaps due to less-than-stellar planning by UNDOF - the UNDOF commander decided that yielding to the rebels' demands for the Filipino troops to give up their weapons would be just dandy. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Gen. Catapang is Chief of Staff of the Philippine Armed Forces, so can't really rise any higher in the command structure, and isn't well-known enough to run for high government office, so he's got no real motive to puff up his role in this dispute. I'm inclined to believe the main thrust of his account. Since the army has been in near-continuous counter-insurgency campaigns, with the communist NPA in the central Philippines and the Islamic groups in the south and south west, they've accumulated quite a lot of experience with fanatic groups and have presumably absorbed the lesson that doing what your opponent tells you to seldom works out well.

It'll be interesting to see if the resolution of the dispute is made public:

Catapang said an investigation would allow the UNDOF commander to explain his side and the Philippine military to explain why it advised the Filipino peacekeepers to defy his order.

I doubt the second part will take very long. I'd start with "Because it was bloody stupid" and work up from there. Catapang, as a 4-star general, comfortably out-ranks UNDOF's 2-star leader and so there's no insubordination problem I can see. The first part would be educational though: just what did the UNDOF commander think would happen if the Filipino troops had laid down their arms as ordered? And what involvement did the UNDOF commander have in the Fijians being captured in the first place? The Philippine Army is withdrawing from the UNDOF mission in the Golan, presumably because they have no appetite for being put in the same position again when UNDOF decides that covering its backside is more important than the safety of the troops in its command.

It seems that si vis pacem, para bellum is still true: if you want to keep the peace, you have to be prepared to kick the ass.

Update: Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club is well worth reading on this topic:

In the past the UN apparatchiks have relied on the faithfulness of their subordinate commanders to take a bullet for the team. "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." But Tennyson had never been to the Philippines where the word for blindly following orders is tanga – or sap.

Piling on Piers Morgan

I was initially surprised that the news of Piers Morgan's fall from grace resulting in the cancellation of his CNN prime time talk show had been news in the UK, but I guess the prospect of Morgan returning to Blightly was sufficiently generally appalling that the Brits were quite concerned about the prospect.

Yesterday Piers had comedienne Chelsea Handler on his show. Noted for brutal honesty, such as discussing personal abortion and DUI stories, Chelsea didn't disappoint but possibly not in the way Piers expected. The discussion following the show's commercial break was quite enlightening:

Chelsea: I mean, in the middle of the commercial break – I want your viewers to know; they must know, because they're probably following you on Twitter. I mean you can't even pay attention for 60 seconds. You're a terrible interviewer.
Piers: Well, you just weren't keeping my attention. It's more of an issue with you than me.
Chelsea: That's not my problem. This is your show, you have to pay attention to the guest that you invited on your show.
Piers: If they're interesting enough ...[cut off]
Chelsea: Listen, it doesn't matter how interesting I am. You signed up for this job. [..] Well, maybe that's why your job is coming to an end.

Piers has - or had - the 9pm-10pm slot on CNN, which is prime time. (West Coast viewers, 3 hours behind the East Coast times quoted, can usually see the show live at 6pm Pacific or repeated 3 hours later). There's a constant battle for viewers between CNN and Fox in the evening, and Fox announced in August that newscaster Megyn [yes, really] Kelly would be taking over the Fox 9pm slot from previous incumbent Sean Hannity. Piers seemed keen on the challenge, tweeting "Bring it on, Megyn Kelly". Kelly duly brought it on, starting in early October and two months later was beating Piers 5 to 1 in viewers, up 10%-20% from Hannity.

Why did CNN viewers turn away from Piers in droves? Kelly is clearly easier on the eyes than Piers, but that can't be the whole story. I think Tim Stanley in the Telegraph gets closest to it:

But he acted as though no one had ever thought to discuss the subject[gun control] before. Like, ever. He tried to make gun control his own personal crusade, to "school" the Americans on law and order. And he displayed a crass insensitivity towards issues such as the importance of the Constitution or the American tradition of self-reliance. The scale of his ego was extraordinary. No US liberal has ever managed to challenge their country's fundamental respect for gun ownership. Why did he imagine that a guy with an English accent – the accent of George III no less – would succeed where Bill Clinton, Teddy Kennedy or Barack Obama had failed?
[...]
The embarrassing thing about the whole Piers Morgan affair is that it has turned the tables on us Brits. We always insisted that we were the courteous ones and the Americans were the boobs. In this case, it's been the other way around.

Americans really don't like being told, imperiously, what to do. Piers did this all the time, and worse wouldn't admit when he'd been beaten. He invited young Republican Ben Shapiro to debate guns with him after the Sandy Hook shooting, and had his clock unexpectedly cleaned - Shapiro tried to load the game by going for a "town hall" format which would have stuffed the audience with shooting victims and Shapiro wisely refused, telling him 1-on-1 or nothing. So, nothing.

Looking at interview styles, probably the best comparison on Fox with Piers is Bill O'Reilly who hosts the 8pm-9pm slot. O'Reilly has a similar format, inviting guests to discuss contentious issues 1-on-1, or sometimes 2-on-1, with him. One key difference, I think, is that O'Reilly doesn't try to lay traps - he relies on his (formidable) preparation and debating skills. Unlike Piers he has regular guests from a range of political views - liberal Juan Williams is one of the favourites - and the debate can get quite shouty at times but the guests generally know O'Reilly, know the position he'll take, and have wrestled with him often enough to give a good showing. More important, O'Reilly doesn't belittle them. He tries to reason, and even if you don't agree with his (often reactionary) position you can see that he's playing the man rather than the ball. Piers by contrast is a classic bully, trying to belittle opponents.

CNN's Anderson Cooper is a marked contrast to Piers; I've seen Anderson do interviews, and he can be tough - Greg Smith who resigned publicly from Goldman Sachs did an Anderson Cooper interview, and Cooper didn't go easy on him at all - but he's fair. You feel as if he's trying to make the interviewee explain what he's hiding from the audience, rather than browbeating the interviewee from a position of power just to establish a pecking order like a bully does. It would be hard to overstate how much most Americans look down on bullies. The War of Independence was essentially a reaction against perceived bullying (imposition by means of might) of the American colony by King George III. Piers is a classic bully, and Americans simply don't like that kind of person.

Interestingly it seems that even his own staff weren't keen on him:

"The makeup girls suffered the worst — he was rude and belligerent," says our source. "The general feeling is Morgan didn't show any respect to anyone working under him — the people who were trying to make him look good."

It would be uncharitable to note how hard a job that is. But this is Piers Morgan, so screw charity.

Don't give the guests power over the residents

Top legal blog "The Volokh Conspiracy", now at the Washington Post, analyses the recent California 9th Circuit decision that wearing American flag shirts at high school can legally be prohibited. Eugene Volokh notes that the actions of the principal (Mr. Rodriguez) in banning wearing of American flag clothing in fear of it causing violent disruption may be constitutional but not at all a good idea:

This is a classic "heckler's veto" — thugs threatening to attack the speaker, and government officials suppressing the speech to prevent such violence. "Heckler's vetoes" are generally not allowed under First Amendment law; the government should generally protect the speaker and threaten to arrest the thugs, not suppress the speaker’s speech. But under Tinker's "forecast substantial disruption" test, such a heckler's veto is indeed allowed.

I have to confess sympathy for Mr. Rodriguez in his predicament - his job is to ensure order and prevent disruption at his school, and students who wear the American flag did seem very prone to be correlated with disruption:

At least one party to this appeal, student M.D., wore American flag clothing to school on Cinco de Mayo 2009. M.D. was approached by a male student who, in the words of the district court, "shoved a Mexican flag at him and said something in Spanish expressing anger at [M.D.;s] clothing."

Now there are plenty of legal Mexican immigrants in the USA, so we shouldn't assume anything about the angry student's immigration status, but if (for instance) a student of Scottish heritage took offense to a Live Oak student wearing an American flag on St. Andrew's Day and threatened him "I'll cae the pins o' ye!" I can't imagine Mr. Rodriguez reacting the same way. The principal does seem to be bowing to the opinions of a category of "guest" students in preference to those who are citizens of the country. (Irish students aren't likely to cause problems on St Patrick's Day because it's celebrated in the USA as much if not more than in Ireland).

If you want to know more about what Live Oak High School is like, take a look at the California department of education stats for the school. It's about 50-50 demographic split between white and Hispanic/Latino students. The standardised scoring indicates that white, Asian and black students improved significantly in the past academic year but the Hispanic/Latino students went backwards. It seems that pandering to them isn't doing them any favours academically. Incidentally, I'm dubious about the "Two or more races" stats - only 1 student of mixed heritage out of 858? My arse.

I can do no better than quote Volokh's takeaway:

The school taught its students a simple lesson: If you dislike speech and want it suppressed, then you can get what you want by threatening violence against the speakers. The school will cave in, the speakers will be shut up, and you and your ideology will win. When thuggery pays, the result is more thuggery. Is that the education we want our students to be getting?

If Live Oak High School really wants to help its Hispanic/Latino students, it should insist that they meet the standards expected of all other students.

Ukraine and Clancy's prescience

At Christmas I read the newest (and final, given the author's passing) Tom Clancy novel Command Authority where hero and president Jack Ryan is battling to keep Russia from taking over Ukraine with military force, using agents provocateur in conjunction with the substantial number of Russian passport holders in east Ukraine as a pretext for involvement and invasion.

All is passing as Clancy has forseen:

Russia's large landing ship Nikolai Filchenkov has arrived near the Russia Black Sea Fleet's base at Sevastopol, which Russia has leased from Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The ship is reported to be carrying as many as 200 soldiers and has joined four additional ship carrying an unknown amount of Special Forces troops. Flot.com also reported over the weekend that personnel from the 45th Airborne Special Forces unit and additional divisions had been airlifted into Anapa, a city on Russia's Black Sea coastline. In addition, it is believed that Russia's Sevastopol base contains as many as 26,000 troops already, according to the German Institute for International And Security Affairs.

Clancy will never be remembered as a giant of literature, but you have to give the man his due in anticipating world events. Russia is no doubt terrified of Ukraine pivoting westwards, especially given the billions of dollars invested there:

Moody’s cited Putin as saying Ukrainian borrowers owed Russia about $28 billion, according to a report this month, before the $15 billion of bond purchases. Ratings agencies will "eventually" have to look at this exposure, Grafe said.

With fracking and Canadian oil exerting downwards pressure on fuel prices, one wonders where the Russian siloviki are going to find the money to maintain their lifestyles. For sure V. V. Putin can turn off the taps of Ukraine's gas supply, but that's only likely to make the citizens more angry at Russia.

I'd hope that rolling tanks across the border would be a step too cheeky even for Putin, but who knows what internal pressures are being exerted?

The efficiency of central planning

Now we're seeing just how well a centrally planned Winter Olympics can be run in a socialist country, for the bargain price of $50 billion so far shouldn't the Guardian be shipping Polly Toynbee over to Sochi to report on the benefits of central government planning and purchasing in this event? After all, she's so vocally in favour of it in the UK...

I'm watching @SochiProblems on Twitter with something between amusement and growing horror...

On the way to the media center. The street is not quite ready yet. #SochiProblems pic.twitter.com/5lA4tmGoNz

— Simon Rosner (@SimonRosner) February 6, 2014

Luckily the Russian sense of humour is coming to the fore:

Favorite line of the week from the young Sochi volunteer on the bus, "we don't have problems in Russia, we have adventures".#SochiProblems

— Alan Springer (@alanspringer) February 5, 2014

The Brazilians organising Rio 2016 must be down on their knees thanking Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for this farce - no matter how badly they mess up, they'll still look like a well-oiled machine compared to Sochi 2014.

States vs territories and the unintended effects of Obamacare

For all those arguing that smart people in government can solve healthcare problems, a case for you to consider. As well as the 50 states that make up the USA, there are various territories which are overseen directly by the Federal Government but which are not themselves states; Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands ("organized" territories with a degree of self-rule) and American Samoa, Midway Islands and a bunch of small atolls and islands ("unorganized" territories). Federal government rulings apply to these territories in the same way that they do the states.

It turns out that the implications of recent Affordable Care Act were not entirely thought through with respect to these territories:

While the Affordable Care Act requires health insurers in the territories to accept all shoppers no matter how sick, it does not mandate that all territorial residents buy plans nor does it provide subsidies to make coverage more affordable--as it does in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The big win for poor people in the ACA was that they would receive subsidies to purchase the (rather expensive) health coverage that the ACA mandated they buy, and the big win for sick people was that they could not be refused insurance or be priced out of the market due to pre-existing conditions. The way the finances balanced was a mandate to purchase insurance under penalty of fines. But those subsidies aren't provided to residents of these territories, so ACA plans are extremely expensive; and the mandate does not apply in the territories. Result: most people aren't buying ACA plans because a) they are expensive and b) they don't have to. The only people buying ACA plans are the really sick people for whom even unsubsidized ACA plans are far better than their alternatives.

So the insurance companies in those territories are stuck having to accept really sick people without any ability to dilute the effect on their returns by including a large pool of healthy people:

The administration has offered technical assistance to alleviate the problem alongside potential policy work-arounds. One solution Health and Human Services has suggested is having the territories pass their own individual mandates, just as Massachusetts did back in 2006. But the regulators say that won't work either, because they don't have enough money to subsidize the purchase of insurance coverage for their citizens.

In other words: if Guam mandates purchase of insurance by Guam citizens, they'll have to pay full price for the ACA-compliant plans and they'll march on 155 Hesler Place with torches, pitchforks and lengths of rope.

It appears that no-one drafting the Affordable Care Act asked "hey, how does this affect the non-state territories?" As a result, they've made a horrific mess of healthcare in those areas. Oopsie. Next time someone proposes that the government step in to fix something, remember how badly they got this wrong.

Terrorist mis-management

Pity poor Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Not only is the USA reading his communications, and the Egyptians arresting his brother, he's forced to deal with problems such as those profligate bastards in Al-Qaeda Yemen splurging his hard-earned cash on a new fax machine:

When he took over al Qaeda in 2011, senior U.S. intelligence officials were already pointing out his penchant for micro-management. (In one instance in the 1990s, he reached out to operatives in Yemen to castigate them for buying a new fax machine when their old one was working just fine.)

We never see this aspect of terrorist life portrayed on "24", but I feel they missed a trick here. Think of the missed potential for a gripping scene where Habib Marwan escapes from his hideout with CTU in hot pursuit, but is weighed down by several safeboxes full of receipts and outstanding invoices from his minions which he can't leave behind in case he leaves an expense claim unpaid - or, worse, lets through a claim from Navi Araz for carpet cleaning without a receipt.

Jacob N. Shapiro's analysis makes amusing reading. He points out how terrorism "in the large" increasingly resembles a medium-size business. Perhaps at the top level the leaders aren't worried about filing accounts with the Inland Revenue - unless they have some country's intelligence service providing funding, in which case the audits might be just as bad - but they have to struggle to manage very limited funds to give the best bang per buckriyal, demanding accountability from staff who have practically been selected to be unstable and rejecting authority and order.

Perhaps al-Zawahiri should take inspiration from Hank Scorpio; providing good healthcare and an attractive pension plan for your minions does seem to go a long way towards smooth running of your terrorist organisation, and showing personal concern for their domestic problems does a lot for loyalty. al-Zawahiri doesn't really seem to be a people person; he should rope in someone more personable to supplant him in the day-to-day people management. Alan Sugar, maybe. "Hamas al-Masri: you're fired!" <boom>

I do wonder about this assertion though:

Terrorist managers are also obliged to place a premium on bureaucratic control, because they lack other channels to discipline the ranks. When Walmart managers want to deal with an unruly employee or a supplier who is defaulting on a contract, they can turn to formal legal procedures. Terrorists have no such option.

Were I to run an international terrorist organisation, I'd put a premium on remote management of problems. Specifically, I'd be selecting my heads-of-region based on their ability to deal effectively with problems. Since they are (by definition) not bound by legal considerations, I'd expect the "unruly employee" problem to raise its head only once, and that very briefly. After that they can rely on word of mouth to propagate the result of giving grief to the organisation's management layer. If Mr. al-Zawahiri is reading this, I'd be willing to consult on people management re-engineering for a very reasonable fee; just email me your address, with the email titled "al-Zawahiri's permanent address" so it won't get trapped in my spam filters.

Facebook through a PRISM

There's a tremendous amount of hot air being talked about the alleged US Government access to personal data from the major internet companies via the supposed PRISM system. I'm not entirely sure who to believe, though I'm defaulting to "no-one"; there's no reason to trust any Government denials, nor any better reason to put faith in the technical understanding of journalists. So let's look at how PRISM might actually work from the limited point of view of snooping on Facebook.

The size of the problem

Facebook has somewhere around 1bn users, but they're not all active - indeed, they vary greatly in levels of activity. So let's say there are 250M distinct FB users per day, and they spend an average of 10 minutes per day on it with 2 activities (read a post or instant message, view a photo, update status, make or delete a friend) per minute. That's 5bn activities per day, or 60,000 per second, that you want to record. How do you find out what they are? Bear in mind that your key requirement is to be able to know who is talking to and associating with whom, and what they are saying.

Snooping at the ISP

The easiest place to start surveillance is at the user's domestic Internet Service Provider (ISP). This is where most USA-based people will connect to the Net. The user will have a public IP (internet address) which is the point where their traffic enters and exists the Net proper, and the ISP will - or should - normally know which of their users, physical locations and bank account ties to that IP. This knowledge will be looser for entities like public wi-fi networks, but they should still have physical location info e.g. the Starbucks on the corner of 5th and Maple.

Regular (HTTP) internet traffic consists of packets - consider them as postcards - with "from" and "to" Internet addresses, plus some text content. The packets are very small, so you have to be able to aggregate a lot of them in order to build up e.g. the entire contents of an email; however they have index numbers so you know what order they are supposed to be in. The "from" address will be the user's public IP, and for our purposes we know what "to" addresses belong to Facebook, so we can require the ISP to just capture those packets for our use. Assuming that we monitor all 250M people in this way, and that each "activity" is about 4KB in size (ignoring photos and voice chat) that's an average stream of 240MB/sec, nearly 2Gbits/sec that the Government has to collect from the various ISPs and process in real time. In practice you need to double that bandwidth because usage isn't flat throughout the day - there will be a definite diurnal cycle and you need to have capacity for the daily peak.

This is a substantial processing challenge but it's not impossible - the Government just has to write its own mini-Facebook back-end that records user activity, without the need to handle photos and videos, and allows them to associate Facebook IDs with real people IDs. Then they can run their own queries over that data store. They'll be writing nearly 20TB/day to that store, so they'll need quite a few hard drives (more when you consider redundancy) but hey, it's the government, they've got the spare $ somewhere.

Of course, someone has to actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth to filter, store and forward the traffic from the ISPs - more government cash - and someone's going to have to monitor and maintain it. This has to happen in nearly all USA ISPs, without any word of it getting out. I'm sure this is completely realistic.

Problem! We're primarily interested in "bloody foreigners", and not just the ones based in the USA. If two people outside the USA are communicating, even if it's via a USA-based Facebook data center, we won't even know it's happening. How can we improve this situation?

Snooping at Facebook's edge

Here we take advantage of the fact that even foreign users end up talking to a FB data center, and many of them are in the USA. (Presumably whatever we work out here could also be done by friendly governments like Eire or the UK for data centers abroad.) Instead of monitoring at the USA users' ingress points, you look at where they egress into Facebook's network. This gives you many fewer places to monitor, though obviously much more traffic per spot so you need fewer instances of hardware but at a much higher grade. You also have fewer places for news of the additional hardware installation and operation to leak from.

The IP packets still have source addresses so you know where they came into the Internet (more or less). You'll need additional collection of data from US ISPs tying IPs to locations and people, where feasible, and you won't have this quality of source information, but you can probably manage.

So far we've seen that just for Facebook you're looking at quite a substantial volume of traffic, and we've ignored all photos and videos, but you can probably infer quite a lot from this data and it doesn't seem to be an insurmountable volume. So far PRISM seems to be not technically infeasible. But there's a wrinkle...

Encryption

So far we've been blithely assuming that we can read the plain text of what the user is sending to and receiving from Facebook - the URLs, the posted text - without any problems. Indeed, HTTP - the system by which web browsers communicate with web browsers - makes it easy to read this information. An HTTP conversation happens in plain text and looks something like this:

From the browser: asking for the page "index.html" on host "www.example.com":

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com

From the server:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 30 Feb 2012 20:31:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.3.4.5 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux)
Last-Modified: Sun, 29 Feb 2012 01:10:25 GMT
Etag: "2e70e-7d6-5f1c883b"
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 100
Connection: close

<html>
<head>
  <title>An Example Page</title>
</head>
<body>
  Hello World
</body>
</html>

The first block is the information about the server and what it's returning, the second block is the HTML page itself.

If you've got access to the stream of data between a user and a website, you can very easily work out what they're doing. You could even change the data, e.g. modifying every instance of the word "Guardian" to "Grauniad" in the stream back to the user, so that the user browsing the eponymous website gets very confused.

Luckily, some clever chaps were aware of this vulnerability of HTTP and came up with a modification: HTTP Secure (HTTPS). This is widely used, and is the default for new Facebook users. The difference it makes for our purposes is that all an external observer can see in plain text is a conversation between the browser and the Facebook server negotiating a "shared secret" - a string that both of them know but that no other observer can know. Once this is agreed, they encrypt the rest of their conversation using that shared secret. The observer can't see what URLs are being requested, or what data is returned. All they know is that IP 192.168.100.2 is communicating with Facebook, and that (judging by the encryption negotiation) they're using Internet Explorer 9. That's not a lot of use to an eavesdropper.

There are a number of approaches to compromising HTTPS sessions, but they're generally rather CPU intensive, target specific web applications, and are progressively being prevented by upgrades to the secure protocols. Here's a little light reading of some examples for the curious. Generally, the only approach that really scales is a man-in-the-middle attack. This is where an eavesdropper intercepts the user's packets to Facebook and pretends to be Facebook itself; in turn, the eavesdropper connects to Facebook pretending to be the user and relay's the user's requests and Facebook's responses.

The way that HTTPS/SSL defeats this is via Certificate Authorities, a small number of trusted firms across the world who provide the data that can verify that when you connect to a server believed to be from Facebook that the electronic signature you receive back from that server really does belong to Facebook. The ins and outs of how this works are complex, but the net effect is that it's really rather hard for even a Government to pretend to be Facebook, and requires a substantial compromise of either Facebook's secret SSL keys (so it can sign the connection just like Facebook does) or a certificate authority (so it can claim that its fake signature really is Facebook's). Even these approaches are not foolproof, and have to be cracked for each company and updated whenever each company changes its signature. Unfortunately this can be detected by browsers; for instance, modern browsers know what the real certificates should be for major websites and can warn you if someone is trying to impersonate Facebook even if a compromised certificate authority claims that they're kosher.

There's also the not insignificant issue that such an interception approach has to be at least as reliable as the servers the user connects to, and must not introduce any detectable latency into the connection despite having to relay all the traffic both ways and filter out the text it's interested in.

The killer, though is that you have to inspect all traffic to Facebook. Unlike plain text traffic, where you can easily see that packets pertain to photos or videos and ignore them, you can't tell this for HTTPS until you've intercepted the conversation and started to man-in-the-middle the connection. You've got to continue relaying the photos or video data, even though you're not interested in it, because if you drop the connection the browser will notice and so will the user. This massively magnifies the problem - you need as much processing capacity as Facebook itself has at its front ends.

Insider access

Google, Facebook et al have strenuously and specifically denied giving PRISM-like access to user data. Let's take them at their word. Assuming they're not co-operating, how would you get the access you'd like to user data without them knowing?

The most effective approach, as noted above, is to have an insider compromise their SSL secret keys. That lets you man-in-the-middle all HTTPS traffic. Unfortunately you have a very small set of insiders who have that access - and, by definition, those insiders will be as trustworthy and hard-to-compromise as possible.

The talk swanning around about "free access to data on Facebook's servers" is rubbish. There is no way any substantial routine access to user data is going unnoticed. Facebook will be monitoring read traffic, bandwidth usage, CPU and memory load for all its critical servers. If there's unexplained traffic in any volume, it's going to show up in dozens of monitoring consoles scattered all over the firm. So many people would have to be in on the snooping that word of it would inevitably leak.

Conclusion

It's just about feasible for a government to snoop on the plain-text non-photo non-video traffic for Facebook, and the best place to do it is probably where traffic exits the Internet going to Facebook's network. You're looking at a very serious amount of hardware to snoop and store the information, but it's tractable with the budget available from a major government. When it comes to routine snooping on encrypted (HTTPS) traffic though, forget it. It would require a major systematic compromise of closely-held secret keys, a very high performance software infrastructure operating at very high reliability, and - the killer - would have to be able to deal with as much traffic as the Facebook front ends themselves do. By extension, the same is true for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. The Government is going to require inconveniently large amounts of hardware placed inconveniently close to the major Facebook, Google and Microsoft data centers.

I should add that the alleged $20M/year cost of PRISM would cover the capital costs of about 15,000 servers written off over 3 years (say, $4000 per server since you have to cover associated network, power and cooling infrastructure). That's really not a lot. If you have 5 TB of storage per server, that's 75,0000 TB over 3 years; the above requirements just for Facebook basics would be about 21,000 TB over that time, and you'd have to at least double that for redundancy. This doesn't even approach all the other personnel and software development costs.

Conclusion: the scope of PRISM has almost certainly been massively exaggerated. Journalists have been taken for a ride.