Mon, 02 Jun 2003
Justification of the War in Iraq
Raph Levien points to a comment by Tim Bray that says, among other things:
Those fables were taken to the UN Security Council and ended doing severe damage to America relationships with pretty well everybody, because pretty well everybody refused to sign up for war on the basis that they were scared of Saddams WMDs, because they weren’t.
Except, they were. No one was arguing that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, merely that continuing sanctions and inspections would produce an acceptable result at less expense (in terms of ammunition, or human lives).
But no one with any sense doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the question was always how to go about disarmament. If there had been a question, the issue would not have been war or sanctions and inspections, it would have been whether any action was necessary at all. It’s easy to lose sight of the distinction in the emotional response to being lied to and led to a war not of your choosing, but self-deception isn’t healthy.
In a prior entry Tim Bray said:
No, the peace movement’s worst nightmare is that the United States extrapolates from Iraq and decides that unilateral aggression is an easy, rewarding and fun way to solve the world’s problems.
And that was everyone’s worst nightmare: that without a reasonable burden of proof, we’d start getting involved in many wars, and plunge into some sort of a cross between Vietnam and World War II, with the added fun of the other guys having nukes. A quagmire, you might say. As it turns out, we don’t look like risking that at all: we’ve moved beyond Vietnam tactically and strategically, and the Iraq war has had a salutary effect on a number of other potential targets and had the mildly perverse effect of making it less likely for there to be more confrontations.
The administration tried meeting the higher stand of proof (that is, a clear and immediate threat to the US itself, by way of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of hypothetical terrorists), and failed. The real question, and the real cause for introspection, is whether we were expecting the right standard of proof in the first place.
There’s an interesting paper on millicents (digital cash worth about a thousandth of a cent) from a guy who seems to be involved in Microsoft’s Penny Black project.
A decade hence, assuming that computers (and their components) continue on the price and performance curves of the last two decades, the minimum transaction grain will be an order of magnitude smaller than it is today. The smallest transactions will be in the sub-penny range. In a decade, we will see pricing by the web page. We can unbundle the newspaper and the magazine, derive revenue from the newspaper morgue, and sell information without restricting consumers to a subscription to a small number of sources.
Interesting thought experiment: imagine an average fee of about .1c/MB ($1/GB) integrated into http. You can probably setup a browser to obey this, so that it just displays “this image too expensive, right click to download anyway” when appropiate. It’s no more expensive than traditional bandwidth charges (10c/MB in Australia), and it sets up an economy so that when you’re slashdotted for writing something way cool you have a chance at making a profit instead of a loss. It potentially gives you a way of rate-limiting users too if you’re overloaded – just raise the prices until you’re not. The numbers might not work out, but in theory should do. Search engines might have problems – they need to scour the web, which would potentially cost a lot of money; but either it already does that, or it’s already subsidised elsewhere, and they already get a bunch of hits. Still, a market should be able to cope with this, possibly by making google.com marginally more expensive to view than other sites.
Note that this doesn’t quite match the email scheme – it presumes downloaders stop paying their ISP per MB, and pay the websites they view instead. Which means the websites pay their ISPs instead, which means fees can be based on outgoing traffic instead of incoming traffic, which in turn puts the burden of paying for the traffic of slammer worms and the like where it belongs. I may be drawing to long a bow at this point.
I’m obsessed with market theory :(
If this theory pans out, then you could make a good argument for allocating the entire social cost of spam to David Chaum’s patent on ecash.
Oh, the double entendres. Anyway, this Infoworld article quotes Ryan Hamlin, the general manager of Microsoft’s antispam technology and strategy:
“It won’t surprise me at all if we spend close to $18 billion a year next year to deal with spam,” he said. This cost includes the price of filtering software and storage hardware and other costs. Loss of productivity is not factored in, Hamlin said.
…
“An occasional spam might show up, but it is kind of noise and you will just delete it. Spam [fighting] will evolve into a measure-countermeasure cycle similar to the antivirus landscape,” he said.
No offense, but the antivirus landscape is abhorrent and a symptom of shoddy security measures in common systems, and $18 billion dollars of market friction isn’t something that should be tolerated. For reference, 35c per year, by the population of America is around $.07 billion USD, or per person, $60 USD versus 22 US cents wasted per year.