OnePeople

Cheapskate Overtime Rules

Some of you may have heard the story on NPR this week about how the Bush administration is proposing changes to the overtime rules. They are touting it as a way to give more OT to some million low wage workers. But, what it's really about is not allowing overtime to many more millions. Anybody who makes over $22,000 and supervises two or more people. So, your 7-11 manager? Executive, ineligible for overtime. Your McDonald's boss? Management: ineligible.

NPR pointed out that the last day to comment is Monday. I looked high and low on the Labor Department website and couldn't figure out how. So, I called. They told me it may be too late. Got another number. Was transferred. Finally got the email address. If they want to keep people from commenting this much, I'd say it's worth it so send an email.

HERE'S WHO YOU WRITE:
whd-reg@fenix2.dol-esa.gov

HERE'S WHERE THE INFO IS
http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/

March 27, 2003
U.S. Department of Labor Proposal Will Secure Overtime for 1.3 Million More Low-Wage Worker
Department Seeks to Modernize 50-Year-Old Wage Regulations
The U.S. Department of Labor today published a proposal to modernize its 50-year-old regulations defining exemptions from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for "white-collar" employees, a measure that will help small businesses grow and guarantee overtime pay for 1.3 million more low-wage workers.
"Our proposal will strengthen overtime for the most vulnerable low-wage workers and allow for stronger Department of Labor enforcement of this important worker protection," said U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.

Yeah, I've looked at the new rules and all that. Yes, they do raise the limit. But the point is: is the rule fair? Is $22,000 really a point at which you say, whew! now I've made it! Now I'm making so much and I have so much authority and so much invested in this company, that I don't really deserve overtime! The old rule was absurd, they supposedly went to fix it and they didn't.

Bush Video on September 11th

Everyone remembers the videotape of Andy Card whispering into President Bush's ear on September 11th. It was at a Florida elementary school, and Card tells the President: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack." The President then looks into the distance. Some understood the look as a summoning of strength, others saw bewilderment. In any case, take a look at the next five minutes of the video, courtesy of Memory Hole. They don't end the photo-op. The Secret Service doesn't hustle the President out of the room. Ari Fleischer and Andy Card wait patiently. Remember what were you doing that day? The President sits there and does nothing.

The videotape doesn't provide good context, which is unfortunate. This could be a clever edit job -- for all we know, Card whispers to the President at the end of the video. It hardly matters, though. The image of the President and advisors finishing their self-serving photo-op while the country is being attacked and before the Pentagon was hit is heartbreaking. How does this match with the other accounts from that day? The President left the photo-op and proceeded to fly around the Southeast until the afternoon. There was confusion in the Situation Room as to whether planes could be shot down -- eventually, Dick Cheney made the call. This video tells us that the President wasn't rushed to safety. He wasn't consulting with his aides. He was hanging out. Jokes about Cheney, Rove, et al being the real power behind the Presidency are common -- after watching this, they're not funny. They're terrifying.

Abizaid: WMD Intel "Perplexingly Inaccurate"

Arabic-speaking Lieutenant-General John Abizaid is replacing Tommy Franks. In his confirmation hearing, he admitted to being confused about the missing weapons of mass destruction. "Intelligence was the most accurate that I've ever seen on the tactical level, probably the best I've ever seen on the operational level and perplexingly incomplete on the strategic level with regard to weapons of mass destruction."

Google Dance Esmerelda

Every month, Google takes the results of the previous month's deep crawl, and pushes the results up to the Google servers. This results in some weird and unpredictable search results as each of the thousands of Google servers receive the updates. This is called the "Google Dance." At WebmasterWorld this month, Google Dances were given names, like Hurricanes. As we write this, Esmerelda is hitting the Google servers.

The recent updates have been strange, though. This points to some major changes in the way Google works. In the past, Google has operated two sets of web crawlers: the "fresh" crawl and the "deep" crawl. The deep crawl is exhaustive, and runs once a month. The fresh crawl is superficial, and runs continuously. Recently, webmasters have noticed that the deep crawler has disappeared, and instead the fresh crawler is behaving like the deep crawler. The conclusion is that Google is moving towards a more continuous update process. Some speculate that Google's responding to the prospect of a Microsoft search engine as well as increased competition from the existing search services. Our pet theory is that PigeonRank is finally being implemented.

A more thorough explaination can be found at Kuro5hin.

Sorubeyu

You love wasabi. You love sorbet. Dr. Memory brings you wasabi sorbet. Warning: if you try this at home, wasabi powder is strongly contraindicated.

Reconstructing a Virtual Iraq

David Plotz has a nice piece at Slate on Iraq: The Computer Game. Everyone's heard of the Department of Defense using shoot-'em-ups like Doom to train soldiers, but another game genre is starting to take hold as well: massively multiplayer role-playing games. If you can create a virtual world, like the Sims or EverQuest, that matches real-world conditions, the outcome of the game can provide hints for how the real world will unfold.

This isn't just blue-sky thinking, either. General Wesley Clark commissioned a didactic system called SENSE, in which each player played a stakeholder in postwar Bosnia. He had the new Bosnian government play different roles in the game, to show them the consequences of different policies. The game got so heated that the opposition leader had to go on television after one session and explain why the country fell apart while he was playing the role of President.

These games are also good for observing group behavior. This is where Iraq comes in. Edward Castronova from Cal State was approached by the DoD for suggestions on how to model the politics of post-war Iraq. He suggested that they update the War of the Roses strategy game Kingmaker. If you can accurately model the situation, and let the computer simulate each significant role, a few million simulations should give you a sense of how likely certain situations are: if the new Iraq doesn't join NATO, Iran will invade 25% of the time. The utility of these simulations is not for prediction, but analysis: they can provide a list of outcomes that policymakers could apply to their pet theories.

The most intriguing idea is described by Plotz as NorthKorea.com: create a world that simulates the conditions of North Korea, and let thousands of gamers loose on it. Each player would act in their own interests, and the aggregate effect of their actions would provide an excellent insight on the internal politics of the country. The players would treat it as a game, of course, but observers could glean valuable intelligence from it.

The greater story here is in the use of actual humans to perform a simulation. It's notoriously difficult to effectively model human behavior. The great insight here is that modelling human behavior is unnecessary: with a set of networked players, you can incorporate the genuine article.

Fox Guards Henhouse

Anyone who thinks for a living has been plagued by "business talk." "Synergy", "leverage", "touch base", etc. They're weapons in the hand of consultants, and can be shields for the stupid. More than anything, they're shibboleths, a substitute for real thinking. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu helped create this golem, but now they've seen the error of their ways. To aid in the battle against handwaving, they're released a piece of free software: Bullfighter. It analyzes documents for these bullshit words, and ranks them accordingly. Oh! Those bandy-legged roustabouts! They're in touch with my inner Dilbert! They understand what's it's like here in the trenches! They sympathize with me! They're here to help. Physician, heal thyself.

GPS Dog Collar

Leave it to the gadget fetishists in Japan to give us the GPS collar. If you lose your dog, the collar will be able to locate the dog within 200 feet.

superfuturecity

OnePeople has no plans to visit hipster hangouts, but it's nice to know that superfuturecity can help us find them.

Politics in a Third Dimension

Kuro5hin is running a good piece on political classification systems. The overview of the field is more interesting than the model proposed.

Web Diarists, Collaborative Filtering, and Scale-Free Networks

Even though it disparages Josh Marshall, we have to thank No Data Source for the new Hugh Hewitt piece on the Big Four web logs.

There was a time when web-based journalism was supposed to somehow revolutionize the delivery of news. The combination of low overhead and accessibility that web sites provide was supposed to wrest control of news from corporations and put it in the hands of the people. Now, presumably, anyone can publish their own broadsheet.

It's unavoidable that readership is going to gravitate towards a small group of news providers -- no one person can read everything. The decision of which news sources to read is influenced in large part by their visiblity and referrals from friends -- it's a textbook
scale-free network, where things that are popular tend to stay popular, and the ignored stay ignored.

The result is Hewitt's Big Four: Instapundit, Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan and the Volokh Conspiracy. Together, these four news outlets exert an enormous amount of influence over the day's agenda, reducing most publishers (like ourselves) to echoes and rehashings of thier posts. This is natural, of course -- reputation and habit are an essential part of the intellectual economy. It's also functionally identical to the "corporate media" problem: the agenda's controlled by a handful.

It's useful to look at how computer scientists deal with this "collaborative filtering" problem. After a time, ranking items by strict popularity becomes less useful. The homogenization of search results are going to prevent valuable but unknown items from being found. The simplest solution is to insert unpopular items, at random. This doesn't interfere too much with the accuracy of the results, but does give a fighting chance to the underdogs.

For you, the news consumer, this means occasionally trying something new. Just visit WebLogs or another blog aggregate service, and see if you can't find a new favorite. Unfortunately, scale-free networks tend to discourage this behavior. You need a large number of people accidentally picking up the same underdog at the same time in order to gather enough momentum to bring it to the top.

Epidemiology studies scale-free networks, too. Viruses get passed around by a core group, and infect populations in clusters. So, it seems, truth is a virus.

Bush Falls Off Segway

Google Broken?

GoogleWatch thinks that Google has hit the 4.2 billion ceiling. Google WebLog disagrees. Google is silent on the matter, hoping it won't taint their IPO plans.

Bottled Water for Dogs

From the Barnum file: the K9 Water Company is selling vitamin-enriched bottled water for dogs. Puddle water, toilet water, gutter water... the end times are nigh.

Blix: "Bastards" Get Him Down

Now that he's retiring after three years as the Chief Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix seems to have found a new voice. He gave an interview with the Guardian in which he called out the "bastards" in the Bush Administration who interfered with the inspection process. They leaned on him for more damning language in the reports, gave him bad intelligence, and were dismissive of the UN in general. "There are people in this [US] administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things," he said. They believe it is "alien power, even if it does hold considerable influence within it. Such [negative] feelings don't exist in Europe where people say that the UN is a lot of talk at dinners and fluffy stuff." He also says that despite of the bad apples, his relationship with the United States was good.

Not So Much with the Looting

This story has been collecting steam for a few weeks, and WaPo finally put it all in one place. The looted Iraqi National Museum of Antiquities isn't missing 170,000 artifacts, which would be their entire collection. It's not missing the 3,000 artifacts estimated by this Saturday's initial report from the State Department and the Customs Service. It's actually missing only 33. Still bad, but not the "rape of civilization" as one archeologist described it. The confusion apparently came from some hyperbole from the museum's respected director, Donny George. He has since apologized for the alarmist remarks.

Brooklyn Eagle

The Brooklyn Eagle archives are now online:

Founded in 1841 by Isaac Van Anden and Henry Cruse Murphy, the Eagle was published as a daily newspaper for 114 consecutive years without missing a single edition. The newspaper, which was originally conceived as a temporary political forum for the 1842 election, ironically lived the longest and absorbed all other Brooklyn daily papers except the Brooklyn Citizen. At one point the Eagle actually became the nation's most widely read afternoon newspaper. Unusual among major metropolitan daily newspapers of that time period, the Eagle chronicled national and international affairs as well as local news and daily life in Brooklyn. As a result the Brooklyn Daily Eagle provides a window into Brooklyn's past, as well as documentation of national and international events that shaped history.

The Eagle played a vital role in the community of Brooklyn's self-identification as separate and even better than Manhattan. Brooklyn existed as an independent city until the consolidation with New York City in 1898. Conceiving and promoting the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eagle took an active role in developing the bridge a symbol of Brooklyn's pride. The paper also coined the phrase describing Brooklyn as "the borough of homes and churches." With offices in Brooklyn, New York, Washington, Paris and London, the Eagle became one of the borough's greatest institutions.

Distinguished editors of the Eagle included Walt Whitman, Thomas Kinsella, St. Clair McKelway, Cleveland Rogers, and Frank D. Schroth.

The rise and fall of the Eagle coincided with the economic development in Brooklyn. The paper folded in 1955 because of a prolonged strike called by the New York Newspaper Guild. At the time it closed it employed 681 people and did an annual business in the sum of approximately $6 million.

Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act

S.317 more or less speaks for itself. The five Senate sponsors would like to do away with the 40-hour work week by abolishing the federally mandated time-and-a-half compensation for overtime.

Demzilla

The DNC is currently trying to roll out Demzilla, a piece of software that will collect state and interest group voter lists into a single 150 million-member database that can be used for fundraising efforts. The project, run by QRS New Media and based on software from Plus Three, Alterian and Market Zone, is failing, according to Roll Call, for all of the usual reasons: overengineering, bad or incomplete data, and a lamentable lack of involvement from the intended users during development. The result is that some searches now take weeks to complete. This is, of course, absurd, and Demzilla is basically unusable at this stage -- just when the DNC needs it for the 2004 elections. We could write a book about software development disasters like this, but it would be boring -- these are all rookie mistakes. The real story, though, is not that the DNC can't deploy a by-the-book piece of software. That's only embarrassing.

What should really concern Democrats is that the National Committee could not muster support for the Demzilla project from groups that are ostensibly their closest allies. The DNC claims that 40 state committees will participate, but the reception has been lukewarm to hostile. This could be explained, in part, by the interest groups' and state committees' reluctance to share their voter lists with the national committee. The DNC is asking for their bread and butter, so this is probably the case. Surely they could have been made to see the benefits of a single, unified collection of this information? Couldn't the DNC have used a trusted third party to broker the information? Was their no middle ground? Did the DNC really sink millions of dollars into this project and expect the states to participate under duress? Exactly how well-managed is the DNC?

OnePeople 2004 Federal Budget Wrapup, Part I

The United States' Federal Budget is where politics, theory and rhetoric collide with harsh reality. In its 2,866 pages is encoded an immensely complex set of priorities, commitments and compromises which together will keep the United States operating for an entire year. The 2004 budget is especially interesting (relatively) because it was designed by a strongly ideological White House who has the unusual advantage of controlling Congress. This means that the approved budget is a much less about the compromises and more about the priorities of the Republican party. For that reason, this year's budget is immensely instructive. OnePeople obviously has nothing better to do, so we're going to walk you through this year's budget, highlighting areas of interest that you could easily have skimmed over in your favorite periodicals. Since we're almost as lazy as you are, we haven't actually read the budget -- we're relying on a number of different sources, which we'll refer you to when the opportunity presents itself.

We'll begin the series with some high-level analysis, turning our perceptive gaze towards the summary prose that precedes the tables and line-items of the budget proper. As it does each year, the Administration uses this prose to explain, justify and illustrate its own fiscal policy. It makes for an awfully big target.

The Philosophy

The Bush Administration, without surprising anyone, is an enormous fan of the power of free markets. It believes that private industry is inherently more efficient than the public sector. Since you all diligently followed our recommendation to watch the Controlling Heights series on PBS, you understand that this philosophy has gained a great deal of ground in the last decade or two, as socialist and mixed economies began to fail under their own bureaucratic weight.

The question of how much control a government should have over markets was once framed as a choice between Marx-inspired command economies and free markets. Alongside communism and the command economies' focus on the general welfare, laissez-faire capitalism was forced to make concessions. Rather than let markets run amok, as they did before the Great Depression, capitalist systems had to ensure that markets were stable and predictable. Without these controls, markets can fluctuate wildly, leaving the poorest consumers in shambles. To prevent this, markets were moderated by government intervention. Governments followed the rules laid out by John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics dictate that a government should spend against the economy: when things are going well, the government should leave well enough alone. When economies begin to fail, though, the government should step in and begin spending to stimulate the economy. The Keynesian model worked phenomenally well until the mid-1970s. Starting with the Oil Crisis and then pernicious "stagflation," the Carter Administration proved incapable of spending its way out of an economic death-spiral. Economists began to have serious doubts about the universal effectiveness of Keynesian policy.

It was in these dangerous years in which the current Administration's economic principles were forged. Once Reagan and Thatcher were elected to office, privatization and the miracle of laissez-faire capitalism seemed the only answer. The current Bush Administration, led by the first President with a Master's degree in Business Administration, are stalwart adherents to this radical pro-market philosophy.

Spending What You Don't Have

This philosophy, which is marked by a deep mistrust of government spending, has had a direct effect on this year's federal budget. On the assumption that money in the budget is as good as wasted, and that the money is more wisely spent by the taxpayers directly, the Administration was able to secure $350 billion in tax cuts, on top of previous round of cuts two years ago. This is less than the $750 billion initially requested, but still significant. These cuts have not found their way into the budget, though, which means that the government will have to borrow money to make up the difference. This means more of the dreaded deficit spending that plagued the country in the years following the Reagan Administration. When asked about the ill-effects of the resulting debt load, the Bush Administration responds that the cut will create an economic stimulus from the newly tax-free consumers, which will result in more tax revenue, which will recover some of this shortfall. This argument has created miles of commentary, and we won't engage it here.

[This is where we start unabashedly cribbing from Thomas Frank's outstanding piece in the June 2003 issue of Harper's. -- ed.]

Suffice to say, this isn't addressed in the budget's prose. Instead, the deficit is blamed on the speculative bubble of the 1990s, the previous Administration's watch. There's no mention of the two massive tax cut packages. Instead, we're told that the budget would be in deficit because of the recession anyway. We're not told that the deficit is worse because of the tax cuts, though that's demonstrably true.

Social Security and Medicare

Instead, under the heading "The Real Fiscal Danger", we're told that the nation will be bankrupted by Social Security and Medicare real soon now. This is not a new issue, but now the Administration has a solution in keeping with its radical economic liberalism: privatization. Instead of leaving the trust money with the government, taxpayers should be able to invest the money directly in the stock market. On its face, the idea sounds moderately dangerous: government-mandating savings are being left to the vagaries of an increasingly deregulated market... one that just suffered a massive wave of scandals, to boot. The technical question of how to insert trillions of dollars into the stock market without giving the exchanges an embolism is still unresolved. Nevertheless, the Administration wants you to know how near the danger looms: "the combined shortfall in Social Security and Medicare of nearly $18 trillion was about five times as a large as today's publicly held national debt." This is wildly misleading, though -- the same document claims that Social Security will actually have a surplus for the next 14 years. Medicare is certainly in trouble, but more on that soon. Suffice to say: the $18 trillion number actually comes from a 75-year projection, which is absurd on its face. Earlier in the budget, we're told that projections past five years are impractically speculative, and should be ignored. This works nicely when you're trying to obscure the effects of a massive tax cut in recession, but makes the immediacy of the Social Security problem very difficult to illustrate, so perhaps we can cut the authors some slack.

As for Medicare, the system is certainly in trouble, but this has nothing to do with government inefficiency. Instead, this has to do with the skyrocketing cost of medical care. The silence from the Administration on this issue is deafening.

The Government That Hates Itself

We also find a anti-government vitriol. In "Governing With Accountability", we're told that federal agencies are not beholden to the laws of the market and are therefore inefficient and/or incompetent. they have "not managed themselves well enough to know whether they had the right people with the right skills to do the work." "Pay and performance are generally unrelated." This "Washington mentality" has "wasted billions of dollars."

This analysis seems so silly that it's hard to believe the Administration isn't a laughingstock. The irony is that the policy's flaws are invoked by the Administration itself when it explains the Defense Department budget. The thinking is that the Defense Department cannot be held to free-market standards, since it is not meant to make money. It is, by design, inefficient and redundant. That's what makes the military so effective at what it does. To apply free-market principles to military spending is comparing apples to oranges. The military is the only government activity that is given this exception, though.

We feel some hyperbole coming on, so we'll leave the analysis for the moment. Keep an eye out for out next piece, which will be significantly lighter on the plagiarism of Mr. Frank, and instead turn our eye to the spending on the Department of Agriculture.

SimSyndicate

The Sims Online is a multiplayer online world where participants shepherd their virtual "Sims" through life. They need to get jobs, fall in love, go to the bathroom, and get along with the Sims around them. It's just like your real life, but you can do it from your chair.

One of the operating principles of the virtual world is that there is no established government or police force -- the Sims have to keep themselves honest. Inevitably, some players decided to rob and steal. This makes the game more interesting, but the law-abiding Sims had to form a response. The most popular Sim, Mia Wallace, organized the Sim Shadow Government. With about 160 other players, they made sure that the other Sims operated under the rule of law.

Students of political science know what happened next. The Shadow Government devolved into corrupt syndicate, extorting other players and running protection rackets. Competing syndicates have been formed. The full story is at the Mercury News. The assassination euphemisms are particularly fun to read about. Some SimRICO statutes should appear soon.

Globalization for Dummies

It's likely that you missed the excellent PBS series on the history of 20th Century economics, Commanding Heights. Fortunately, the series is also available online, in one of the best uses of broadband we've seen in a while. The series takes an impossibly complex set of problems, and lays them out in an accessible and valuable way. Spend some time with this series before you get comfortable with your ideas about globalization and its consequences. As an added bonus, it's narrated by David Ogden Stiers whose dulcet tones graced Rick Burns' New York series.

Wolfowitz: Iraq War Was About Oil

Well, so much for those of us who thought there was more to it an that. The Guardian quotes Paul "Bombers" Wolfowitz as:

"Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,970334,00.html

Update Thu Jun 5 10:53:51 EDT 2003:
From the gulfwar-2 list:

...Guardian appears to have yanked the story - and for good reason. What Wolfowitz actually said, available via the transcript at DefenseLink, is substantively different:

"Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different."

What makes The Guardian's actions even worse is that they ran the AP
version days earlier:

"The primary difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options in Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil,'' he said."

"The Run" Trailer Available

The Official Dog Run of OnePeople has its very own documentary film. The trailer's now available.

3 JUNE 2003 WEB SITE LAUNCH www.the-run.com

Dear All,

Siren Documentaries has been working on a feature length film that looks at East Village community through the window of the Tompkins Square Park dog run. The film will be completed by fall 2003. In the meantime, we've built a web site (www.the-run.com) to get everyone interested. The site includes goodies like our trailer, links to press and a brief overview of the film. Check it out, spread the word and please, let us know what you think. Thanks to all of you who have participated and supported us along the way.

THE SIRENS
Erica Isaac
Joanne Denyeau
Heather Malin
Cristina Moracho
Eric Miranda
Jake Cohen
Meg Viola
Kristen Schultz
Terry Dollard

NYT Needs More Helprin

In this Sunday's City section of the New York Times, the editors are asking readers which books are the new New York classics.

We here at OnePeople encourage each and every one of our loyal readers to nominate Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. Once you have read it, the book will inform everything you do as a New Yorker. But don't take our word for it, Benjamin De Mott said as much on the front page of the New York Times Book Review:

"Is it not astonishing that a work so rooted in fantasy, filled with narrative high jinks and comic flights, stands forth centraally as a moral discourse? It is indeed....I find myself nervous, to a degree I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance."

We here at OnePeople can't think of higher praise, or a book more suited to being one of the "new New York Classics." So how can we make sure Winter's Tale gets the attention it deserves? You can start by commenting on this story, or mailing OnePeople directly, and we'll make sure that it ends up on the City editor's desk. Pass this message along to all your bookish friends, too -- we need all the help we can get.