Cobb Rules

The SPAM Rule: There is no SPAM in your email

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Mon, 31 May 2010 01:15:00 +0000

The number of people and companies who abuse the word SPAM continues to amaze me (that's me speaking as someone who started ringing alarm bells about unsolicited bulk email about ten years ago).

I see everyone from well-meaning hi-tech startups to established email companies talking about avoiding email SPAM. The fact is, email SPAM does not exist. It is email spam. The word SPAM is a trademark of Hormel Foods, used for a meat product that comes in a can (and the SPAM on the can in the special font is a registered trademark).

If you want to be taken seriously talking about spam in email you need to follow the rules: There can be spam in my email inbox but never SPAM and seldom Spam. You can say "Remove Spam From Email" but not "Remove SPAM From Email." The only time the stuff in email is SPAM is when it's hanging with a bunch of other capital letters like SPAM IN MY INBOX.

Are we clear now? I hope so.

The "Oilmen Lie" Rule

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the basic facts of modern life: As a rule, oilmen lie. In other words, you should never accept at face value what oilmen tell you about the oil business. And by oilmen I mean the men who run the petroleum business, not the many honest, hard-working folk who risk their lives to bring us the oil and gas products to which our country is sadly addicted. And for the record, historically, the oil business has been run almost entirely by men, not women.

I realize that publicly questioning the moral integrity of the leaders of a large and powerful industry in a blog post is a bit risky. Who knows when someone might be checking out my background—maybe as part of a hiring or employment process—and come across this post. But hey, if you can't get to say what you believe when you're pushing 60, then when?

I'm not just talking about all the lying BP executives have been doing in the last 40 days (and before that when they said they could do deep water drilling without screwing up life as we know it for millions of people). I worked with oilmen for three years back in the 1980s. I was Chief Oil and Gas Tax Auditor for what is now the tenth largest oil-producing state in the Union.

I approached that job as I do most things, with a passion for the past as a path to the future. I read the history of the oil business. And I went on Petroleum Accounting courses. I did a week-long petroleum auditing boot camp out in Texas Hill Country, courtesy of the Texas Comptroller's office. I did a lot of research for the politicians who were pushing an increase in the state petroleum tax that I was charged with collecting.

And I clearly remember the oil industry spokesman telling lawmakers that the oil industry would leave the state if the tax was increased. Well, the tax was doubled and the state steadily rose from 17th to 10th in the production rankings.That oilman was lying. He also lied when he said, in about 1983, that oil would soon be $60 a barrel. At that time, oil was about $30 a barrel. His claim was that the state would soon see a doubling of oil tax revenues without changing the tax rate. Oil did not reach $60 a barrel until about 2006.

A great way to gauge the honesty of oilmen over the years is to read these four books:

The Seven Sisters by Anthony Sampson.
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin.
Texas Rich: The Hunt Dynasty from the Early Oil Days through the Silver Crash by Harry Hurt III.
Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Among the interesting things you will learn from these books is the way oilmen lied to Arabs in order to cheat them out of a fair price for their oil. And the fact that controls on the price of oil in America were put in place at the request of the oil industry. This may come as a shock if you grew up with the huge propaganda campaign oilmen mounted in the 1970s to get domestic oil prices deregulated. Yep, a whole lot of lying went on.

BTW, the last of those four books, Oil! may have the shortest title but it is one of the richest reads in twentieth century American literature. Forget the movie for which this book was butchered (There Will Be Blood). This long-neglected novel reveals a lot about American history that they just don't teach in (American) schools. Like the rule I'm laying down here: Oilmen lie!

The Airport Gate Number Rule

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 22:49:00 +0000

I've been doing quite a bit of flying lately and ran into a somewhat trivial but sometimes vexing rule that I first formulated many years ago when I was traveling extensively for InfoSec Labs and Rainbow Technologies:

Whatever gate number has been assigned to your connecting flight it will be a long way from where you are.

For example, you fly into Atlanta, Terminal B, connecting to O'Hare from gate C1. That is C1 out of 36 gates numbered C1 to C36. Great, a low gate number! Then you find that C1 is actually at the far end of C terminal. What you really wanted was C20 or C30. You get into O'Hare and find your connecting gate is G30. Could it be? A handy gate? No, G30 is as far from your arrival gate as you can get and still be in G terminal. And even when you make it all the way to the end of a foreign terminal, and all the signs are mercifully in English, things can still be pretty confusing. I took this photo at Seoul's Incheon airport, an otherwise wonderful airport (the cleanest, quietest, least crowded I have been to).

Not Talking Only Makes Things Worse

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 04:03:00 +0000

Looks like George W. Bush is hell bent on not talking to Iran. Not talking has a history of making things worse. A lot of Americans don't like to talk about some things, like birth control, race relations, or the policies of the government of Israel. In my experience, not talking is not good. It is not good for one's personal relationships, the welfare of one's society, or the security of one's country.

For example, parents who don't talk to their kids about birth control do them a great disservice (as does a president who appoints an opponent of birth control to the federal post responsible for birth control). Those parents sometimes end up having much harder conversations forced upon them.

Sometimes, not talking may seem easier than facing up to a tough subject. Some people would rather not talk about racial inequality. Some white folks don't feel comfortable talking to black folks, even when they really do want to talk to them, and vice-versa.

Over time, a lack of communication creates a communication gap, literally. I have to concentrate sometimes to understand what some of my black friends are saying, but I am happy to make the effort. The more we talk, the better we understand each other. The better we understand each other, the smaller the gap between us. The smaller that gap, the greater the hope we will reach the point where we can live in harmony and not hegemony.

The folks who pushed for the invasion of Iraq talk hot and heavy about exporting democracy as though democracy were the bedrock of our society. It is not. Democracy is a structure built on the bedrock of any society: trust. And you can't have trust without conversation.

You can't solve conflicts without conversation. For example, the British government never defeated the IRA. It talked to the IRA as both sides de-militarized the conflict. America should talk to Iran. And terrorists. And anyone who wants to engage in dialogue.

Refusing to talk now only makes it harder to communicate when we talk later. And sooner or later we will talk.

New Versions of Windows Will Always Be Late

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 18:45:00 +0000

...and seldom worth waiting for. What you want to wait for is the second update to the new version, the 3.11 to the 3.0, the SP2 to the XP, and so on.

I am quite familiar with the problems of inductive reasoning so I won't say it is impossible that a future version of Windows will ship on time. But I would never bet money on the folks at Microsoft giving me what they promised when they first promised it. Indeed, I would humbly suggest that IT managers who take Microsoft timetables at their face value are gambling with their company's profitability.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Remember that Windows 1.0 was announced in late 1983, promised for April 1984, only to be delivered in November, 1985. As someone who tried to use Windows 1.0, I can say in all honesty, it was not worth the wait. Arguably, we did not get a really worthwhile version until Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in November of 1993, a decade after the initial brouhaha. The rest, as they say, is history.

Hacking Democracy: Some Things Were Not Meant to be Computerized

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 01:13:00 +0000

As a crucial election draws near in America, the debate over computer voting systems is again getting attention, notably from tonight's airing of Hacking Democracy on HBO. However, from some of the reviews of this program (like this one in the Boston Globe) it is clear that even well-educated and otherwise intelligent people don't "get" the problem.

The most vital ingredient in a fair election is trust. The current generation of electronic voting machines are already untrusted (and you can trust security expert Bruce Schneier to provide authoritative analysis of why this is).

Critics of current systems have advanced numerous approaches to making future electronic systems trustworthy. While this is laudable, I contend that the goal is not achievable. No hardware programmed by people will ever deliver the same level as trust as a system of voting based on hand marked paper ballots. To imply, as the Globe's critic seems to do, that electronic systems are no more problematic than their predecessors, is to miss the point. There is a known history of addressing and resolving past problems to the point where the electorate accepted the outcome as fair.

Certainly the replacement of hanging chads with software bugs is not a step forward, but reverting to pencil and paper is not necessarily a step backward. And objections to analog voting methods based on the need to get quick results simply don't cut it as far as I'm concerned. For myself, and quite possibly a majority of voters, a reliable result at 5PM the next day beats a dubious results about 2AM.

So, for the record, and after very careful consideration, my position is that the use of programmable electronic devices to cast votes is not now, nor ever will be, as trustworthy or as verifiable as it needs to be for elections thus conducted to be considered fair.

Ignorance in Power is a Nightmare Scenario

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:03:00 +0000

Forget "ignorance is bliss" when it comes to those in power. Ignorance among the powerful is deadly. How deadly? Try 655,000 lives. That is the number of Iraqis who died since 2003 who might still be alive but for the US-led invasion, according to a survey by a US university.

Could ignorance kill more than half a million people in three years? Yes, if you invade a sovereign nation based on bad intelligence, guided by a flawed understanding of history and military strategy.

Could the number of people killed by this ignorance be wrong? Well, consider the follow-up story describing reactions and the rationale. The instigator of the invasion, President Bush, says "Six-hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at is just...it's not credible."

But the report was prepared by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health which is hardly a group of dummies. It was peer reviewed by The Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals in the world. The survey uses techniques relied upon in many fields, specifically adjusted for the given task, based on past efforts and critiques thereof.

The ignorance lies in simply rejecting such a study as not credible. You can disagree with it for sure, but to reject it outright shows a lack of understanding of scientific methodology. The next thing you know the President will be rejecting evolution as "just a theory." Hmm, like that other theory called gravity. Or is our President ignorant of that one as well?

The First Victim of Fundamentalism is Irony

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:18:00 +0000

"An Iraqi militant group led by al-Qaeda has threatened to massacre Christians in response to remarks about Islam by Pope Benedict XVI that have caused offence across the Muslim world. The Pope quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor who criticised the teachings of Mohammad for endorsing the use of violence."

The Times of London.

Weasel Words Will Come Back to Bite You

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 16:42:00 +0000

When you avoid telling the whole truth, using "weasel words" to shape the facts to your own agenda, your credibility may perish as a result, never to be resuscitated. It is now pretty clear to all but the most rabid George W. Bush supporters that our President shaped the truth like an explosive charge to launch his war on Iraq.

One of the many blowbacks from GW's atrociously misguided attempt to manipulate reality to his own ends is that a lot of people now believe he is attempting to rig the November 2006 elections by manipulating gas prices. Gallup found 42 percent of survey respondents agreed that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this Fall's elections."

At times like this a president needs a good front man, which White House spokesman Tony Snow clearly is not. He said the survey raises the question, "if we're dropping gas prices now, why on earth did we raise them to $3.50 before?" Duh! Anyone who is in that 42% is likely to fire back "To deliver windfall profits to the oil companies so they can fund Republican candidates in the election." Snow seems about as fit for his job as Brownie was for FEMA. And Bush now has zero credibility with at least 42% of the country. Admittedly, two thirds of that 42% are registered Democrats. But a third are not. These are people for whom the joy of paying a lot less to fill up the car is not enough to overpower the sense that they have been duped.

Further proof that if you keep twisting the truth, people won't even believe you when you give them a straight answer.

People Will Mess Up Every New Technology for Profit

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 19:36:00 +0000

Classic examples are the mess that spam has made of email, and before that, the mess that viruses made of popular computing. The latest is the mess that splogs are making of blogging. Check out the wired articles I blogged here.

p.s. Glad to see the Treo post worked, and yes, we made it home safely, but there must be a better way for mobile posting than all the screens I went through--some added by Google as it takes over Blogger for profit.

4 of 5 Minivans

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:59:00 +0000

...don't move out of the fast lane, even when the driver in the vehicle behind them makes it very clear he or she would like to get past.

(Okay, not a profound rule, but I wanted to test blogging from my Treo 650 while in the car--no, I am not driving while I type this.)

You Can't Defeat Terrorists

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 14:45:00 +0000

Losing the War on Terror: Why Militants Are Beating Technology Five Years After Sept. 11, by Ahmed Rashid, Washington Post, Monday, September 11, 2006.

All that money, all those lives. All that rhetoric, all that false hope. Why oh why won't world leaders come out and admit that you can't beat terrorists, then move on?!!

Well there are some obvious reasons why world leaders won't admit that you can't beat terrorists. A lot of 'leaders' are are more politican than leader and for them terrorism is a crutch, a raison d'être. Where would the ratings for George W. Bush be if were not for terrorists? They would be a lot lower than they are now. Heck, if it were not for 9/11 he probably wouldn't even be president. Or he would be facing impeachment for his utter failure in the face of hurricane Katrina.

Just watch the brilliant Brazil and you will see how it is done. The under-pinnings of that movie are the symbiotic relationship between Maggie Thatcher and the IRA. That's right my fellow citizens, the British did not defeat the IRA, they talked to the IRA, legitimized through the political wing, Sinn Féin. Ironically, it was the bombing of New York on 9/11 that put the final mail in the coffin of the IRA's bombing campaign. American support for such action evaporated in the firestorm that consumed the Twin Towers.

I can only hope enough people will take Mr. Rashid's article to heart and be brave enough, courageous enough, to realize that you can't defeat terrorists, but you can win the war on terror IF you are prepared to:

a. Negotiate with the political arm of terrorist groups (e.g. Hamas, which has shown willingness to form part of a legitimate government).
b. Negate the motivation of the terrorist base (e.g. enable Palestinians to transition from refugees to citizens of a viable country with a sustainable economy).
c. Take religion out of the equation (e.g. accept that nobody has a god given right to any piece of land--the alternative is eternal warfare).

And please, please, may we have some leadership on this planet instead of politicians!

Stephen

Money can't always buy votes

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:55:00 +0000

A Republican primary race for St. Johns County Commission seats in Florida may seem an unlikely place for me to find a great big ray of hope, but the defeat of two well-funded incumbents in this race is one of the most promising signs I have seen that citizens can be trusted to call the shots. Check these stories for full details:

http://staugustine.com/stories/090606/news_4063738.shtml
http://staugustine.com/stories/090906/news_4070779.shtml

Basically, well-funded incumbent Stern had raised $197,470 but narrowly lost to Sanchez, who only raised $7,720. Incumbent Maguire raised $140,000 yet was solidly defeated by Manuel, who had only raised $8,860. In others words, and contrary to received wisdom in cynical political circles, you cannot count on reelection just because you have a lot more money than your opponent (bear in mind the total voting age population of the county is less than 125,000).

What lost the election for these two commissioners was a rising tide of discontent about the way they had mishandled growth. For years they both tended to vote the way big developers wanted, and they both took big chunks of money from big developers. At the same time they seriously neglected the growing need for affordable homes and well paid jobs.

Then they showed hubris in the face of criticism. During the race, Commissioner Stern declared that "Over the past five to six years, the Board of County Commissioners has done a commendable job in negotiating with the developers to provide infrastructure improvements." Clearly this is not what most voters think. Those in her own party disagreed enough to express themselves in the voting booths.

I only hope that this trend can be generalized and in November people across the country will vote the way they feel about the following statement:

"Over the past five to six years, the Senate/House/President has done a commendable job of __________ to provide __________."

Stephen

A place to post things I have learned

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Cobb) — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:31:00 +0000

The posts on this blog concern ideas, observations, realizations, even principles, that have helped me and might help others. I really hate to see the lessons of history forgotten, it is so darned inefficient. So maybe I can help someone save some time by passing on lessons I have learned. For example:

Technology is neutral.
Without trust prosperity is not possible.
Complacency is the curse of comfort.
You should plan to succeed even as you are failing.
Whatever gate number your flight is assigned it will be a long walk.

I am going to try and blog news and views that illustrate these and other "rules" that will emerge over time.