I was reading a rant about sci-fi physics (or the lack thereof), and it mentioned how Star Trek had a problem with the transporter being too powerful, requiring a series of increasingly-implausible reasons why it couldn't save the day today. I say "increasingly-implausible" not because it didn't make sense that the transporter would be disrupted by, well, everything, since in some sense that's exactly why they are totally impossible, but because by the end of the run of Star Trek, it is completely implausible that anybody would ever trust their lives to one of these disasters!

I got tired of politically-loaded summaries of what is in HR 1, the stimulus bill as it passed in the House. Everyone knows they "ought" to read it, but few seem willing to actually do it. (The best version unfortunately resists permalinking: Go here, select "House Bills 1-100", then the first house bill.)

Let me help you out. I still have not read the whole thing, and at 800+KB of text I don't feel too bad. But I did spend four hours last night on the bill.

I will stay non-political in this post, until ofter the end. I ask that you bear with me through some political observation, because after spending four hours with legalese I feel I'm entitled to a bit of commentary.

The bill is organized into two Divisions. Division A seems to primarily be about appropriations, and consists of approximately one third of the bill by textual volume, and by my unskilled calculation, about one third of the reported cost. Division B appears to be a massive rewrite of the tax code. Both sections of the bill contain significant modifications to other law, and I have not had the time to follow the (numerous) references through, but it is clear just looking at some of them that they are major changes. Nobody is understating how big this bill is; I daresay everybody is understating it, because a straight description sounds hyperbolic.

I have broken the appropriations into a spreadsheet, which is available as an HTML table in the main body of this post, or as an Open Office Calc file or a Comma Separated Values file. (In both cases you may have to right-click and "Save Link As..." to save it.) The table below is in the same order it appears in the bill; with a spreadsheet you can reorder it, of course.

I haven't even begun to analyze the tax code because I am not competent to analyze tax implications. Also, unlike the appropriations which are mostly either new law, or simply increases in funding for old law (though not entirely), the tax section primarily consists of significant rewrites of older law, making the exact implications difficult to tease apart even if you were intimately familiar with existing tax code and who pays what taxes. I've considered trying to write a summary, but I don't think I can even do that, whereas I might be able to pull it off with reasonable accuracy for Division A.

It's unusual for me to repost something I left as a comment on another site, but I thought this was worth sharing here, even stripped of its context. Tweaked for posting here.

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One of the great dangers of brain research today is that as we find the "explanation" for things, we will conclude they are just illusions and not real.

Well, the thing is, we're pretty sure at this point then that everything is "an illusion" by this standard. Religious experience, love, red, pain, it's all just an illusion brought on by neurons firing in certain patterns, right? Moving into the computer realm, the text box I am typing this into is an illusion brought on by clever programming, as is the browser. It's not an isolated series of claims of illusoriness, you need to consider the whole of them at once, including not just the politically popular ones (religion), but everything that argument makes sense for (red, mathematics, scary).

I submit to you that this view, while popular, is silly.

It's worth remembering, as we enter the culmination of a very loud Internet election season, that out there in the real world, only 8% of voters claim to be voting for one because they "dislike" the other (10% say that while voting for McCain, 6% for Obama). (Check that methodology so you know what that means. It's a free form answer question. If the question were asked as "Which of the following statements do you agree with?

The assumption that industry-funded studies are intrinsically inferior to a non-industry-funded study is an article of faith to many people; in the most extreme cases, the mere fact that a study was funded by industry is sufficient evidence to consider it total garbage. This is challenged by an interesting paper in the International Journal of Obesity, where it is shown that industry studies consistently have a higher quality of reporting than non-industry studies in the field of obesity studies.

Vernor Vinge is well known as one of the originators of the concept of the technological singularity, which is well-known to inform his sci-fi writings.

One of the less well known concepts which informs his sci-fi writings is one possible fate of societies that do not or can not end in a "singularity", which is the eventual unavoidable collapse of the society in a cascading failure state brought on by excessive, uncontrollable complexity in the ever-more-sophisticated systems that drive the society. In this case, take "system" in the broad sense, including not just software, but business practices, government, and societal mores. A failure occurs somewhere, which brings down something else, which brings down two other something elses, and perhaps quite literally in the blink of an eye, you are faced with a growing complex of problems beyond the ability of any one human to understand or contain.

We've seen small-scale examples of this before; Part 1 of The Hacker Crackdown goes into some detail about the 1990 AT&T phone network collapse.

I've always been a bit dubious of this theory. It's not intrinsically bad, but the truth is all software and systems must have some fault tolerance in them, because in reality, faults happen all the time. As I write this, my office has just experienced 6 straight days of faulty internet connection, and yet, our world has failed to end. We've got problems, but every bit of software we use already knows it has to be able to deal with problems like that. Only a few things were confused by the exact nature of the network failure, and even those were non-fatal. Deliveries will be late, networks will be down, contracts will be violated, only the truly foolhardy fail to make plans for those eventualities... unless....

This article on the importance of bringing a topic focus to the news is very important. The thesis is that the article-by-article nature of modern news is incapable of covering issues on any but the most trivial of levels, since every (short) article needs to start from scratch. If you've felt like the news media can't ever seem to get past the first couple of days of Econ 101 (or other equivalent topics), this is why.

More bailout stuff, skip if that makes you unhappy. How did we get here? The economy is fantastically complicated beyond human comprehension, so we are forced to use heuristics to comprehend it. No amount of education can overcome this fact, which is why every economy professor is proposing a different solution; the education doesn't mean you actually understand, it "just" changes the heuristics. My favorite heuristic for understanding the economy (and also a lot of business in general) is that people will do what they believe is best for them, based on their local comprehension of the situation, and that what other people intended for their local situation counts for nothing.

A bailout that does not remove the mandates that banks issue bad loans is worse than no bailout at all. It just guarantees that when this happens again, next time it'll be even bigger. How about repealing the Community Reinvestment Act, at the very least pending an investigation? How about instead of banning corporate parachutes, we ban subprime mortgages entirely? How about phasing in requirements for a 10% down payment, minimum?

Michelle Malkin has the story behind the Palin email hack. (Warning: Link to Michelle Malkin, if you're sensitive about that. But the email quoted by that post is as close to primary source as I can get.)

In summary, Palin's email account was hacked by exploiting the fact that Palin's answers to the security questions that allow a user to reset their password could be even-more-easily-than-usually guessed by accessing public information, which then permitted full access to her account.

I wanted to discuss this situation from a computer security point of view, because there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this example.