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I’m so proud of my country tonight. Barack Obama has become the next President-Elect in an historic Presidential race that saw the best and the worst emerge from everyday Americans. His acceptance speech was moving; not only did he emphasize the importance of individuals to his campaign, he also brought up the topic of humility and addressing the country’s problems together. We can indeed find common ground to work on the most threatening problems to our country.

I’ve had a lot of difficulty even listening to the Republican point of view over the past eight years. I don’t doubt that the neoconservatives in the Bush Administration used and abused the differences of opinions between people in America to drive a wedge between us all – public, house, senate, and media. However, Obama’s campaign has gone beyond just earning my vote; it has also made me reconsider my emotionally charged reactions towards GOP talking points.

The first was Joe Biden’s anecdote about motives during the Vice Presidential debate:

I have been able to work across the aisle on some of the most controversial issues and change my party’s mind, as well as Republicans’, because I learned a lesson from Mike Mansfield. Mike Mansfield, a former leader of the Senate, said to me one day — he — I made a criticism of Jesse Helms. He said, “What would you do if I told you Jesse Helms and Dot Helms had adopted a child who had braces and was in real need?” I said, “I’d feel like a jerk.” He said, “Joe, understand one thing. Everyone’s sent here for a reason, because there’s something in them that their folks like. Don’t question their motive.”

Joe’s point is that although we may oppose other peoples’ political views, we should not succumb to prejudice about their character. Barack Obama’s campaign has shown that you can address the American public with maturity, dignity, and calm assertiveness, and still win the highest office in the nation. We can’t mistrust an entire segment of Americans simply for identifying with some policy views of the Republican party.

We can and should argue strongly with logic and passion when we disagree, but we cannot forget that our opponents are Americans too. I believe that both Obama’s acceptance speech and McCain’s concession speech strummed on this chord, and I sincerely hope that the political bases of both parties can be mature enough to rise to a more respectful level of discourse, and heal the wounds of divisiveness that have proven so profitable for the special interests in this country. Now let’s see what we can accomplish in the next four years.

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As much as i’ve hated hearing GOP commentators and Sarah Palin herself talk about the “Real America” that supports McCain/Palin, I don’t personally feel that it’s an expression of racism. Rather, this is a sign of denial on the part of party leaders that they have lost the support of the majority of the American people.

This rationalization for losing is actually a pretty common thing to experience growing up in middle America. Lost the grade-school soccer game to a team that fouled yours a few times? Don’t worry, you were the “real winners.” The characterization of losses as non-”real” is a defensive compensatory mechanism. Subscribing to one party in our political system is often shown to limit your ability to think critically about your own stances.

So, although I think it’s despicable to actually believe that anyone who doesn’t support your own political party is un-(or anti-)American, I don’t honestly think that’s what’s going through the minds of the people giving this explanation for the lack of support for McCain/Palin. It’s just a obvious sign that the faithful holdouts are in denial about the unsustainability of the methods and practices of the modern Republican party.

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I stumbled upon this short while researching John C. Reilly, and absolutely loved it.

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I apologize in advance for the following post, because, firstly, I am an apologist by nature, and secondly, it is a bit less well thought out than most posts, but the topic compels me to write about anyway.

I have a theory that what underlies and led up to the current credit crisis is really a crisis in trust. Trust is the fundamental thing that allows us to enter a transaction with another person (or with a corporation), and if we do not trust our counterparties, then there is no way that capitalism may work. What the financial industry has done in the name of innovation over the past couple decades is to bet far more than they should have on the premise that trust is unnecessary; basically, if you don’t trust someone, you just charge more interest, and extract more of a profit from a larger segment of people to make up for those who default. As long as we were in a boom economy, the relative numbers of parties that would be in default were low, and real, honest-to-goodness counterparty integrity and trust (like getting a loan from a banker you knew in high school) was quietly replaced by complex financial modeling.

What has occurred in the lending market (probably best described by This American Life recently) may the effect of the sudden failure of decades of financial modeling to compensate for the gradual deterioration of real trust between individuals on Wall St. Trust was just a limitation on the levels of profit that could be gained through financial innovation; the real geniuses found out that you could give a loan to basically anyone as long as you could include their probability of default as a number in your financial calculation. The lack of information or faith about the balance sheets of counterparties seemed to become a problem so suddenly because the innovations obfuscated the real cost of the debts that were being incurred (think option ARMs or balloon payments), until finally it all came due and nobody could be counted on to fulfill the terms of the mortgages (or, for that matter, credit default swaps) that they had agreed to. The boom market can not be described as the result of complete trust in all counterparties; it was the hubris of believing that trust could be outsourced to third parties (the ratings agencies), and as such, not being particularly important, instead of being an absolutely essential component of deciding to do business with someone else.

It seems like I’m being a bit hysterical about the importance of integrity and trust in a free market system where capitalists are incentivized only to maximize short term profit, long term implications be damned. To trust recent corporate philosophy, preserving your real trustworthiness is a matter best left to those in branding or P.R., and that your actual actions can be painted over or hidden by name changes or evasive legal maneuvering. However, the culture of a company or even the reputation of a business leader with integrity can visibly affect the way that all people interact with your company. To make my point, i’ll invoke the image of Warren Buffett, whose every word the American public seems to look to as if messages from a mystic oracle.

It may be true the reason the credit market seized up is solely because of the sudden extreme value of cash on hand to protect against strategic competitive moves, such as that alleged by some against J.P. Morgan. It also may be true that trust has no place in a free market; that all decisions should be based upon rational evaluation of the creditor’s ability to pay. However, in this type of an economic storm, I am going to make a prediction that the value of integrity and ability to honor promises, regardless of the cost, is going to be a determining factor in which businesses are able to survive and make it through the recession/depression. Those who are able to cultivate a supernatural track record and reputation for trustworthiness and integrity will survive where the sharp business of the past will fail without trusting counterparties. In fact, I believe it will likely be a successful tactic for small businesses to overtake their failing large competitors caught up in this mess over the next decade. Although I sincerely hope that the country recovers from this crisis quickly, it could very well prove to be a good time to be in business and change the way that business is done in America.

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It seems like we’re hearing about failed banks and institutions on a daily basis now. Hitting that point of no return, insolvency, seems to do the trick. At the same time, bank-to-bank lending rates (Libor rates) have been spiking, and that means that banks are relucant to give out cash. This is despite the massive injections of liquidity that the Treasury has been making.

To this casual observer, it would seem that the game is to hoard as much cash as you can, to try and survive longer than your competitors, and also buy out as many competitors as you can on the way down. Also, try to predict the end of the game so you can time your acquisitions well, and also know how much cash to hoard. If that’s the case, then injecting liquidity is just giving the players more time on the clock, it’s not restoring confidence or any such rubbish.

And if the game doesn’t end, and all banks are ultimately insolvent regardless of however much time they get on the clock? I think that’s what the bailout plan is trying to avoid; by providing an end to the game, they hope to stop the cash hoarding and return to normalcy. However, I haven’t heard any indications that the $700 billion is any more than a guess. It’s scary to think that the network of complex financial securities (“innovations”, as they like to call them) may ultimately be more in the value of trillions than billions. There may be no way to bail out these banks at all.

If so, is it worth it to even try? My guess is that it’s worth it to try, but if so, it’s important to either go the Buffett strategy of getting a real market price (instead of a make-believe hold-to-maturity price), or to go the Swedish route that involves buying the companies directly. Even a solution that attempts to stem the tide of foreclosures is woefully inadequate to deal with the majority of Americans in financial distress for whom a mortgage is only one aspect of their difficulties. There’s also massive amounts of credit card debt, car loans, etc. that won’t disappear through renegotiations of monthly house payments.

Sorry for the doom & gloom, but I’m hoping someone can step in and tell me why i’m wrong, because this is the best understanding I can come up with so far.

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I found out something really interesting (to me, anyway) today. It’s something that I took for granted – public records at city hall. I knew intellectually that I could go there and ask for information, but had never done so.

Large packets of information, folded neatly, going back to the decade of construction hold some sort of voyeuristic appeal. You can easily look through the history of a building, finding out that it’s been a toy store, a department store, and so forth. Knowing what’s been in the floors and corners lends an air of reality, an air of tangible history, instead of the anonymous and soulless relationship that i’ve had with most buildings.

I know that it puts me in the minority, but I had a lot of fun looking through old public records. I wonder what sort of emotional impact it might have to have these old records scanned and put online for public use. I know that I wasn’t asked for an ID, my name, or even my purpose when I went there, so I imagine that these are freely available for people to see. I can imagine the difficulty, but what if there were a time slider in Google street view?

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First off, the $85 million (ed: billion) AIG bailout scares me, not because of future bailouts that it most definitely encourages, but instead because it still seems like it’s not enough to cover the sheer volume of credit default swaps that it has outstanding. I don’t get the feeling that $85 million billion is enough to cover the trillions of dollars outstanding in the whole international ponzi scheme that AIG has foolishly insured.

The second thing is that the whole “Change” message being put out by the McCain GOP campaign reminds me of the unintentionally funny Match.com “6 Months Free” campaign that’s all over TV commercials right now. The gist of the promotion is that if you use Match.com for 6 months and totally strike out… they’ll give you another 6 months for free. Hey, if you pay for our service and it doesn’t work for you for half a year, waste another half a year of your precious time, on us! It reminds me of the GOP message of “Change” on the economy. If the last 8 years haven’t worked for you, we’ll be happy to serve you with the same administration for the next 8 years!

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In the handful of news articles I read today, I nearly passed over a link to one of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters from 2002, the one where his predictions for the derivatives market seem eerily close to the unfolding of current events on Wall Street. Reading his conversational, informational letter is like finding an oasis in the desert. I’ve read other shareholder letters, and most of them feel as if they were written by drones who have no interest in providing anything but cheery opacity.

I was very pleased to find that Berkshire Hathaway publishes all of Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders on their website. Please dig in and enjoy.

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Grant McCracken linked to Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency by Dr. David Kilcullen, Lieutenant Colonel, Australian Army, discussing it in the context of applied ethnography. If you are able to abstract away the most obvious differences between insurgencies and online communities, there is a lot of wisdom in this document directly applicable to the role of community managers.

In a modern online community, while no sane P.R. person would acknowledge that their employees view some segments of a user base as enemies, that attitude does exist, despite the measured tone of external communication. There are direct competitors kept at arm’s length, griefers, trolls, spammers, and many other types of people who (whether consciously or not) act to undermine the stability or quality of an online population. It is a significant portion of the job of a community manager to deal with their everyday activities without causing harm to the community through their own actions. And in many cases, the goal of certain harmful subgroups is to provoke the community’s operators into harsh action which they can then convert into media coverage for their own viewpoints.

If you’re involved creating online communities, i’d highly recommend you go read this article, ignoring temporarily the real differences between our work and the operation of a counterinsurgency. If you can work with the analogy, much of this hard-earned knowledge can be applied in similar ways. For example:

12. Prepare for handover from Day One.
Believe it or not, you will not resolve the insurgency on your watch. Your tour will end, and your successors will need your corporate knowledge. Start handover folders, in every platoon and specialist squad, from day one— ideally, you would have inherited these from your predecessors, but if not you must start them. The folders should include lessons learned, details about the population, village and patrol reports, updated maps, photographs—anything that will help newcomers master the environment. [...] This is boring, tedious and essential.

Staff at online communities come and go, but rarely do I see the operational knowledge of community managers codified into forms that can be quickly picked up by new hires. Often, new community managers are thrust into a situation beyond their comprehension by an engineering staff who has become too busy to deal with user base issues. It’s a great concept to develop handover folders for future community managers, or even engineers switching over to deal with a problem while the main community folks might be away. In some websites set up for community success, there exist mountains of contextual information connected to users, data, and media, visible only to the employees, which perform this function of informing people about the context behind a situation while they consider solutions. An emphasis on problematic user groups, topics, and geographical regions would be a useful component of such documentation.

18. Remember the global audience.
One of the biggest differences between the counterinsurgencies our fathers fought and those we face today is the omnipresence of globalized media. [...] When the insurgents ambush your patrols or set off a car bomb, they do so not to destroy one more track, but because they want graphic images of a burning vehicle and dead bodies for the evening news. Beware the “scripted enemy”, who plays to a global audience and seeks to defeat you in the court of global public opinion.

This is a fantastic insight into the operations of hostile parties on large, established communities. In some cases, direct competitors provoke a company into hostile action, which they use to get attention for their own startups by claiming injustice. In other cases, it’s an attention- or pageview-seeking bloggers causing problems then writing digg-bait about being banned from your service. With the speed of global blogging, it’s essential to remember that all correspondence and actions taken during a ban may be posted online, resulting in your trial in the “court of global public opinion.” Bans in this case, are commonly not finished when the moderator clicks a button.

I could go on, but i’ll let the article speak for itself. Some of my favorite pieces are the discussions of understanding a population locally and deeply, and gaining its respect, if not its love. I love finding cross-disciplinary overlaps, and this is one of the best examples i’ve seen in a while.

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Every few years, a malicious email nearly gets past my years of automatic defenses and skepticism about stuff I get in my inbox. Today, I was one click away from getting owned. I’ll write about it to make sure my readers don’t also fall for the scam.

I got an email in my inbox with the subject line “CNN.com Daily Top 10″. I’m a CNN reader, and I imagine so are a large proportion of Internet users. In the email, there are a bunch of broken images and links that look pretty normal as far as HTML email newsletters go, especially considering the couple of years behind the curve that CNN has typically been.

Email as it appeared in my inbox

The payload wasn’t in the email itself – the email contained links to “Top 10 stories” and “Top 10 videos”, and of course, your eyes skip past all the other stuff to the content, and if you just glance, these look mostly plausible, or at least resemble the schlock that makes up news entertainment these days. The kicker is that the top video is really disturbing – “US Beef Unsafe for Consumption”. If you’ve fallen for everything else so far (again, not a big stretch, there aren’t attachments or weird spam-like bits of language, and the style is on par for the subject), then you’ll click on the link.

This is what you see when you get there. The js pops up after load.

The link takes you to a CNN Video lookalike page with a flash widget which pops up a Flash upgrade request. Again, this is something your average Internet user is used to seeing and consenting to without thinking. If you hit Cancel (which I did, as I often find this annoying enough to give up and not bother watching the video content), then it puts you in a loop with another error message until you hit OK. Internet users are used to poorly written javascript doing this kind of thing, so they might consent as well just to break the loop.

Behaves kinda like an idiotic website bug, so you might ignore this too.

Once you hit OK, if you’re using FF it’ll prompt you to download a file called getflashupdate.exe, which looks pretty normal as well.

If you’re like me, you just got here because you’re annoyed and want to jump out of the seemingly benign javascript alert box loop. However, I finally noticed one (of many, to be sure) small clues that revealed the nature of the scam. The URL of the download surely wasn’t CNN’s. Once I hit cancel, the flash widget told me that I was using Flash Player 0.

Flash installers tend to screw up pretty often, so once again the scam tries to imitate known behavior.

Altogether, there were numerous cues that I could have observed at any time to figure out what was happening. For one, the From: email address was fake looking. The URL’s in the javascript alert boxes were also fake. The URL’s for every story in the mail were identical. I know that I’ve viewed Flash media before without trouble.

However, for all the cues that were available, the writer of this exploit put in an amount of effort into crafting an authentic-feeling damnit-I-have-to-upgrade-Flash-again experience for an average Internet user that nearly fooled me. If it hadn’t been for my tendency to give up on content rather than install yet another Flash upgrade, I might have been caught hook, line, and sinker.

The owner of the website appears to be Brazilian, and the content looks fairly authentic, so I suspect this is an owned webserver in Brazil being repurposed to distribute a rootkit.

The last time I got nabbed was by the “I Love You” virus, which just happened to come from the name of my favorite Aunt, so it was pretty unlucky for me. Sure, I should have known better, but i’m a human, and we’re all susceptible to these kinds of attacks. I guess every time the attackers advance in their approach, we become better in our defense. It’s just too bad that they’re the ones in the natural position to change where the battlefront lies.

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