Should you control your own computer?

That’s the question that opponents of trusted computing want us to ask. But that’s just as misleading as the suggestions that trusted computing will eliminate piracy thereby bringing about a digital paradise. A better more accurate question to ask is:

Should you be able to offer proof that this result is the output of running that program?

Stated this way the issue of trusted computing becomes much clearer. Obviously, other things being equal, it would be desierable to be able to prove the information you are submitting really did result from the execution of a particular program. For instance this would allow you to purchase processor cycles without the fear of false results or to trust calculations performed by other clients in a distributed virtual world. Moreover, like other technologies it would surely offer benefits that we can’t yet imagine. Below the break I explain why DRM opponents and open source advocates should get behind this useful technology rather than leaving it to falsely identified with DRM and standardized in the worst possible way.

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In the 19th and 20th century courageous women like Susan B. Anthony struggled against vehement opposition to secure women the right to vote. In the 70s and 80s feminists fought against pervasive discrimination and struggled to live up to their notions of gender equity (even when misguided). But now that we have a woman losing the democratic nomination by hair’s breadth Hillary Clinton and some of her supporters are trying to lay claim to this legacy to complain about Hillary’’s loss. Has feminism really descended this low? Gone from a noble struggle for equal treatment to an excuse to complain when a candidate you identified with based on gender losses.

Now the video from the women’s media center certainly succeeds in convincing me that Chris Matthews is a sexist jerk but aside from that it’s fallacious confusion of the media’s constant microanalysis of electability and likability with sexism. Asking whether Hillary will succeed in appealing to men is no more sexist than asking if Barack will succeed in winning white votes. Anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the past 12 years has seen the stupid discussions on cable news channels of whether candidate X has an appealing enough smile, will suffer for being short or has appropriate choice in ties. Sadly, not subjecting Hillary to this ridiculous microanalyses would be sexist response to her candidate.

Of course if you try hard enough you can read sexism into anything but `likability’ isn’t some minor issues that’s only trotted out as an excuse not to vote for a woman, likability is the essence of electoral politics. As we were endlessly reminded by the pundits the voters in ‘04 would have rather had a beer with Bush than Kerry. If it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that Kerry was a man this would be another perfect example of the sexist media. Of course if you just change the channel you can get an equally compelling account of how the racist media has been biased against Obama.

Listening to the recent complaints about sexism that have flooded the media over the last few days one would think that Hillary’s likability problem was a penalty she was paying for behaving too masculine but that’s a load of crap. Hillary played best with the electorate when she highlighted her strength, resolve and experience (3am phone). She alienated voters in the debates not with her confident aggressive stances but with her passive aggressive whining. If anything Hillary was given more leeway than a man would have been given when she ‘observed’ that she seemed to be getting the harder questions instead of angrily lecturing the questioner or keeping a dignified silence. Some people just come across better than others on TV (supposedly Hillary is much more likable in person).

Now this sort of poor sportsmanship from Clinton supporters is bad enough but trying to claim the moral high ground in the fight against sexism is particularly galling and hypocritical. Most of these women complaining about Clinton’s sexist treatment support her (partially) because of they identify with her over gender. These aren’t the rightful inheritors of the struggle for gender equity but rather (for the most part) a group that is happy to impose different expectations on men and women when it suits their purposes and complain about it when it doesn’t. The noble feminist crusaders of earlier generations understood that gender equity would come with a cost. Now, instead, we see casual complainers who seem to think that gender equity means nothing but indulging their feelings of sympathy for other women.

No one could reasonably deny that our society still holds men and women to different standards. I certainly would prefer a culture that treated men and women more similarly but far from working towards gender equity this sort of feminism as sympathy for/indentification with other women is one of the greatest forces holding back equality. When women reward other women with sympathy and support when they are subject to aggressive verbal/intellectual attacks but tells men to toughen up it sends a message about how it’s appropriate for women to act and men to act towards them. If these women were really interested in equality they should be working to eliminate the double standard that says it’s okay to be aggressive and critical of another man but unacceptable and mean to do so to a woman. So long as society sends the message that women are fragile and need to be treated with special delicacy it will also view men as more strong and capable.

Admittedly these last comments have limited direct applicability to the Hillary campaign but they are an indictment of the modern conception of feminism as sympathy for other women that underlies this supposed feminist cause for Hillary. Not only are their complaints largely unjustified it is people like them, not Chris Matthews who make sure that men and women continue to be treated differently in our society. Maybe as a society we simply don’t want real gender equity but what we would need to do to achieve it is to stop treating women as if they needed special sympathy and protection.

Language is ultimately a means to the end of communication. In most situations we implicitly understand this and either avoid or explicitly qualify our use of words we know are likely to be misunderstood by our audience. For instance even if I spoke some ultra-proper dialect of english that rejected words like ‘hot dog’ and was highly concerned with the overabundance of uncomfortably warm pooches I wouldn’t make speeches demanding “the government act to eliminate hot dogs.” I certainly wouldn’t dismiss a public figure as cruel to dogs because he admitted liking “hot dogs.” Even if I felt very strongly that the term “hot dog” should only be used literally I would recognize the fact that this isn’t what others mean by the term and adjust my remarks to address their intended content. Strangely¹, however, ‘moderate’² religious intellectuals tend to do just the opposite when they talk about god. Rather than attempt to communicate their positions and beliefs in the way that would be maximize understand they instead play confusing word games to avoid saying anything the man on the street would recognize as atheism. This tendency goes so deep that I know pastors who flatly reject any belief in life after death, supernatural beings or events yet get up in church on sunday to read the gospel and give homilies about obedience to god without reminding the audience that they are just using god metaphorically³.

I was forcefully reminded of this tendency while listening to KQED’s interview with Karen Armstrong about religion and the new atheists like Dawkins and Harris. While I couldn’t find the actual interview I heard she says more or less the same thing in this salon.com piece (and if you really want you can watch her give a similar address). Like many religious progressives she makes her dissatisfaction with ’simplistic’ notions of god clear but this doesn’t excuse the miscommunication caused by using ‘god’ to refer to certain kinds of (totally scientific/non-supernatural) experiences and brain states⁴. Ironically though Ms. Armstrong recognizes the fact that most other english speakers mean something totally different by the word god when she complains about monotheist’s talk about god loving people or willing things.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the vast majority of english speakers understand ‘god’ to describe some kind of conscious actor of vast supernatural power. If you don’t want to refer to a supernatural conscious agent pick another word. Sure it’s fair to use god to describe something other than the old man with a beard in the sky most Americans think of when you use the word but only if this is close to the notion you want to communicate. The level of double think required to believe using the term god to refer to some completely natural (non-supernatural) phenomenon isn’t misleading is simply astounding. A significant fraction of the US populace is waiting to be teleported to heaven at Christ’s second coming and 82% of americans believe in life after death. What sort of self-deception is required to think that ‘god’ is a reasonable way to communicate the non-supernatural (or not necessarily) phenomenon you have in mind to a general US audience⁵?

Still this would be just par for the course if she hadn’t gone farther and actually criticized Dawkins and Harris for using god to mean what everyone thinks it means. I’m not a fan of Dawkins’s book (he just stirs up the indignation felt by the average atheist at religious irrationality while making several fallacious arguments) but one thing he does is make it quite clear that he is only rebutting arguments for a supernatural personal deity and I’m sure Harris is even more consciousness. Surely if she has the right to redefine god so throughly as to include non-supernatural experiences they can define the word god to mean what everyone expects it to mean yet she dismisses them as “fundamentalists” for using god to mean a supernatural being. Not only is it absurd to think that the meaning you assign to a particular sound makes you a religious fundamentalist getting the terminology (consistently) wrong doesn’t justify dismissing their argument in the first place. I agree that Dawkins’s rhetoric is not the best way to actually convert religious people to atheism (not necessarily his goal) but recognizing that atheists should try to avoid seeming dismissive of people’s heartfelt experiences doesn’t justify misleading people to believe in god.

Of course no one person alone is responsible for the misguided faith of Americans in god but collectively intellectuals do influence our beliefs. The average american doesn’t have the time or inclination for deep theological pondering and they look to authorities for guidance. When those authorities endorse or just refuse to dismiss claims about god’s existence or the truth of religion the public takes that as confirmation of the fact that their comforting beliefs in a big dude in the sky are reasonable. It doesn’t matter that the person doing the talking might have trickily redefined the word the message that people walk away with is that belief in god is something reasonable people do and then substitute in their own understanding of the word god. If people like Ms. Armstrong actually said what she believed in a language that was straightforward and understandable to the average english speaker that would go a long way to changing people’s religious beliefs.

So in a recent post I pointed out how unreasonable it was to assume that aliens advanced enough to transfer their consciousness into computers would have motives or behaviors anything like what the current human species does. Of course there is an implicit assumption here that a simulation of our brain process on a computer would be just as conscious as we are (the strong AI hypothesis). Here I argue that this isn’t really true. Of course I don’t doubt that artificial conscious beings can be constructed. There is nothing magical about conception, if we manufactured nerve cells in the lab and put them together in a brain it wouldn’t be any less conscious than you or I. However, this doesn’t mean that the particular means by which our brain performs it’s calculation is irrelevant to consciousness. As I shall argue here we actually have pretty good reason to believe that simply simulating what the brain does on a microchip as we know them ¹ is unlikely to give rise to any experiences no matter how faithfully it might reproduce the behavior of that brain². This is a pretty long post so I continue below the break.

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Today on the front page of the dailycal is an article discussing the hardships student parents wil face as a result of UC budget cuts. The people interviewed in the article seem to think we should be moved by the unfairness of reducing the child care subsidy provided to graduate student parents and support the Graduate Assembly’s resolution to exempt child care from the proposed budget cuts. While I can empathize with any graduate student who faces tough choices because of our low wages (particularly at UC Berkeley) the universities subsidy of child care is blatantly discriminatory against people with other lifestyle choices and should be totally abolished not saved. I mean we surely wouldn’t tolerate a program that offered straight couples who wanted to have their own apartment (rather than rooms in a shared house) a subsidized low rent apartment but denied gay couples the same benefit so why do we tolerate a program that discriminates on this lifestyle choice?

My fiance and I will never have children but this hardly means that graduate school imposes no hardships on us. She is a graduate student at Harvard and I am finishing up at UC Berkeley and just as the low salary of graduate students makes it difficult to raise a child it also makes it tough to afford flights across the country. Yet does the university offer me a subsidy to visit my fiance the way it does to graduate student parents? No! Worse, this term UC Berkeley gave me a MWF teaching assignment (instead of the Tuesday one I requested) that made it impossible to visit my fiance over the weekends. But long distance relationships don’t get any consideration by the university while graduate students with children get automatic first dibs on teaching slots that are convenient for their child care arrangements. Moreover, the department is expected to bend over for graduate students with children if they need a particular day free while it’s just tough luck for me if I want to visit my fiance but can’t find anyone to substitute.

In light of this blatant unfairness does the article offer us any particular justification as to why we should subsidize those students who make the choice to have children? No, we are merely given a string of observations about how difficult it is to raise a child as a graduate student.

“If you have an infant, it’s $20,000 a year just in child care fees,” Keeley-Saldana said. “(The cost) really prohibits students from seeking their higher education degrees.”
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With a new baby on the way, Cruz said the heightened costs would be “impossible” for he and his wife to meet.¹
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Senior Dana Parsons, 32, said campus child care services are essential for student parents such as herself.
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“Had it not been for subsidized care on campus, I would not have been able to attend school full-time,” she wrote in an e-mail.
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“There is no good solution,” she said. “I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s fair for Early Childhood to be spared from cuts, but I’m hoping that they really do value the children on campus.”

First of all let’s make this absolutely clear. Failing to subsidize child care doesn’t force anyone to stay at home, leave graduate school or otherwise deny them the benefits of higher education. The lack of subsidized child care merely forces people to choose between the benefits of using their resources to have a family or attend school. This is no different from the fact that without subsidies or special considerations Sharon and I must choose between graduate school and getting to see each other more than rarely during the school year. It’s blatantly unfair to offer monetary subsidies and preferences to one lifestyle choice without the slightest official consideration for the other.

Of course sometimes radically unfair policies can be justified if they offer sufficient benefit for the society at large. However, in order to overcome the presumption against unfair policies such as this one would need compelling evidence that this was really the most cost-effective way to increase the number of US graduates in math/science or the equivalent. Since women make up a majority of graduate students even finding that subsidized child care did more to retain women than men wouldn’t justify the program.² Even restricting such subsidies only to the fields where women were underrepresented and granting the bizarre idea that numerical underrepresentation is ipso facto unfair³ one would need to establish that this kind of subsidy was particularly effective (more so than just giving women extra pay) to justify discriminating against those women who didn’t plan to have children.

I’m not going to even go into how this policy implicitly discriminates against those who have a more difficult time having children (the infertile, gays and lesbians). However, I will note that offering these benefits only to parents and not to those of use with other lifestyle preferences goes directly against the valid feminist justifications for legally required maternity leave and other bars against the implicit discrimination against women smuggled in via career punishment for maternity. However, unlike the lauditory goal of stopping corporations from imposing unfairly excessive penalties for one lifestyle choice (partially because of female stereotypes) we have a situation where the university is unfairly benefiting one lifestyle choice over another.

Of course I realize that few people are likely to be convinced by a logical argument in this situation. Most people want to have children themselves so, as is common with discrimination, it seems right and proper to them that people like themselves should receive a benefit. Moreover, the people who benefit from this program are easy to see while the small cost that all graduate students pay as a result is diffuse. So if you aren’t yet convinced just ask yourself this. How would you feel if things were reversed? Suppose I got subsidized air fare to go visit my fiance and got first pick of teaching assignments so my schedule would allow these visits but graduate student parents received no official consideration at all. If you find that disturbing tell me what’s different about this situation.

Lately several blogs I read commented on the Fermi paradox and the existance of intelligent alien life. First Greg Laden critisizes a historical argument (poor summary) by Professor Watson that the probability of evolving intelligent life must be quite low given the many lucky breaks that seem to have been necessary for our own evolution. A point I think is largely correct. However, perhaps we should hope that the evolution of intelligent life is rare. This this technology review article argues the reason we don’t observe any aliens is that there are very few of them so the discovery that life is common should make us very scared about our future. Robert O’Callahan’s suggests that instead the low probability event might very well be the transition to intelligent life. Thus if we want to find alien life without learning that we are likely to wipe ourselves out in the short future we should hope something like Professor Watson’s argument holds water.

I tend to think most of these arguments (except perhaps Laden’s) and most discussions of the Fermi paradox or the supposed fine-tuning of the universe for life assume far too much about the nature of intelligent life. In particular it seems unjustified to assume that intelligent life must look anything at all like us. Even assuming that intelligent life must be chemically based seems unjustified. Could configurations of plasma inside stars reproduce in some sense and evolve into intelligent life? Could the patterns of elementary particles in a neutron star do the same? I’m uncertain that we even have any reason to be confident that the chemistry and physics of the gases on jupiter can’t support life. Before we get to the stage of predicting that intelligent life must be rare, and certainly before we can assume our universe is fined tuned for life we need to do some deep mathematics to determine what sorts of laws give rise to interactions likely to support self-reproduction and selection.

On the Fermi paradox, the idea that if intelligent life was common in the universe we should have seen it already, I once again think it incorporates a deep anthropocentric bias. Worse it assumes that millions of years of technological sophistication will leave us with the same primitive desire to fuck our way across the universe. It seems totally plausible to me that the reason we don’t observe much intelligent life is that it’s just not worth the bother to them of looking for us or spreading out across the galaxy. After just begining to build computers we already spend massive amounts of time in them, perhaps aliens are too busy living in virtual worlds to come out and play in the real world. Moreover, we already have the very limited ability to control our own reward system. Give us a few million years and I’m sure that a press of a button could bring us more pleasure than any discovery of an alien civilization. The ultimate fate of intelligent life may very well be unimaginable drugged out bliss.

Additionally the very idea that aliens would colonize planets or be out here in the boring galactic nether regions seems to unimaginatively assume that aliens would remain chemical life forms. Sure people contemplate the idea that advanced life might become largely computational with sufficently advanced races learning to replace their brains with computer chips or other computing machines but few seem to really consider the implications of this idea. Beings such as this wouldn’t be constrained by physical space and would have no need to spread out to avoid overcrowding, rather, they would be limited by computational power. Thus the most likely behavior of truly advanced life is to seek out the most computationally rich physical systems and stay there. This suggests that perhaps we should be looking for the truly advanced alien civilizations to be somehow encoded into the most violent, high energy systems around. Visiting planets or sending out signals to the primitive animals who live there might be the last thing on their minds.

This is just one speculation thrown out about an area we know so impossibly little that it’s hard to conclude anything except that we shouldn’t trust any of our intuitions about what life must be like too much. Ohh and I can’t write a post about this subject without throwing a shout out to Greg Egan for being one of the most imaginative and thoughtful science fiction writers about these issues.

Today KQED (NPR affiliate) ran a program entitled Secret Asian Woman about the perceived racial inequities that Dmae Roberts undergos as a half-asian woman who can pass as white. For the most part I stay quiet on the particulars of these sorts of seemingly oversensitive claims of racial injustice since I lack enough personal experience with the situation to productively comment. However, while I’m not half-asian myself my fiance is and after dating for five years or so (and explicitly asked her opinion for this post) I’m quite confident that I’m not merely being naive about how people treat half-asian women. Given the social pressure not to dispute these sorts of claims and the potential for even false perceptions of racial injustice to cause suffering and undermine our resolve to combat genuine racism I feel it’s important for people to speak up against unjustified hypersensitive claims of racism¹.

I don’t doubt that Dmae Roberts has experienced genuine (and horrific) racism in her life². It’s certainly no overreaction to call her grandmother’s expressions of disappointment that Dmae’s mother couldn’t have been white racist. The rejection and poor treatment of her and her brother by other young children on account of her race was also literally racist. However, as Dmae admits herself at the time she never thought it was a huge deal when she would be made fun of by other kids on account of her race. It is only in retrospect that she interprets it as being hugely significant. Obviously it’s awful how cruel children are are to anyone who doesn’t fit in but nothing she describes about their behavior is any worse than the way children treat those who are different on account of being nerds, having a skin condition or whatever other weakness they seize upon. As the victim of this kind of behavior myself I certainly don’t want to trivialize the harm of this behavior but we should avoid the fallacy of treating children’s cruelty as dramatically worse because it falls into a historically recognized category of adult cruelty. It’s not something we’d like to believe but children are incredibly cruel and we shouldn’t implicitly send the message that it’s okay because their cruelty is based on a child’s lisp than on their racial background.

It’s understandable that someone like Dmae would come to see the world through the lens of race, just as kids who grow up poor often come to see the world in terms of social class and smart academic kids can come to see things in terms of popularity and jocks vs. nerds. However, this fact doesn’t make it the case that talking about a “Chinese fire drill” is a racist remark. The etymology of the term is irrelevant since the users of the term don’t reflect on it and unlike terms like “negro” use of the term doesn’t suggest affiliation with any anti-Chinese prejudice. Racial theorists might want this term to be racist but the fact that in actual practice Asian-Americans aren’t offended when their white friends use the term makes it a non-racist term. Similar points can be made about other things Dmae brings up like people imitating the martial arts master from Karate Kid. It isn’t racist now because it doesn’t suggest any prejudice or dislike and the last thing we would ever want to do is widen the class of comments that we decide express prejudice. We want to reduce the potential for accidental offense not increase it.

This brings us to the central hypocripsy of Dmae’s piece, an attitude that puts decades of progress against racism at jeopardy. Most of the complaints Dmae makes about modern events (not her grandmother or being raised in the midwest) ultimately reduce to the fact that people recognize race and view it as a genuine matter of commonality or difference. She complains that people ask what ethnicity she is or inquire about how her parents got together. Dmae gets very upset when a friend of hers comments, in response to Dmae’s claim that she can tell that some other girl is also half-asian not white, that you can tell but we can’t. In other words her complaint is essentially that people identify themselves with their racial group yet the other half of the piece is all about Dmae having pride in being half-asian and making a big deal out of racial identity. Dmae comments several times that she feels particular kinship with other half-asians even expressing how grateful she is that there are now more people like her out there. But if your ethnic background dictates certain common experiences that are justifiable grounds to feel kinship with others surely then being white in America involves certain commonalities (if nothing else the failure to have these experiences) that justify talking about what ‘we’ experience.

What I find so objectionable about this piece is that it threatens to undo much of the progress we have made towards racial equality. Sharon (my fiance) just assumes that she isn’t being the subject of racial discrimination (except the benefit of having more guys who want to date her) and as a result doesn’t suffer racial resentment or anger. However, it’s very easy to make yourself see racial bias around every corner and that perception can cause almost as much pain as true racism. It’s this pain that is why it’s important to eliminate racism in the first place so it’s similarly important to prevent this false perception of racism, not to mention the harm this does to the cause of eliminating true racism. Equating your experience as a half-asian having to hear people comment about “Chinese fire drills” or asking about how your parents met with the sort of things that happened at Jena not only trivializes real racism but creates faux feelings of racial victimization where they don’t need to exist.

Dmae’s family may be racist and growing up in the midwest when she did may have exposed her to some racial prejudices but give me a break. A half-asian woman in the US in this day and age is hardly oppressed. Somehow having more guys who think you are hot doesn’t make me very sympathetic.

Update:

Just to be clear I think my fiance’s experience is particular to the treatment of half-asian women (it may not even extend to guys) by whites. I’ve certainly had other half-japanese friends complain about the way other japanese people treated them (primarily when they lived in japan). It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if half-asians generally had trouble being accepted by the asian communities but my fiance has never really seen a reason to go out of her way to socialize with people because they share her ethnicity (and knows less about Taiwan than I do…and I just watch CNN). In short I think this is a peculiarity of the way our culture regards Asians and Asian girls in particular (if anything the stereotyped as hot and smart which is hardly an oppressive burden). I think there is still real racial discrimination that goes on and if you are half-black you probably run into real problems as a result but that’s one of the reasons it’s important to distinguish being oversensitive and offended by the term “Chinese fire drill” and real racism that we need to work hard to eliminate.

In any case part of what I wanted to point out here was the harmfulness of an attitude that always takes individual accounts of racial difficulty at face value while discouraging others from speaking up to say, “Hey, I don’t have those kinds of problems.” In short it bothers me that I’ve yet to meet a half-asian girl who had any significant problems with discrimination by whites but yet this one woman’s story is broadcast on the radio as if it was totally typical.

If I hadn’t seen this on the AP website with my own eyes I would have assumed it came from the onion but apparently Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) really is protesting drunk driving in Grand Theft Auto IV. Yes, that’s right they feel that this game deserves to have it’s rating bumped up from mature to adults only because in addition to the ability to murder, rob banks, perform hits, pimp girls out and engage in wanton violence you can also drive drunk. This is so fucking stupid I’m actually at a loss for words. MADD seems to actually believe that we need to portray our murderously violent felons as believing in designated drivers “out of respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving.”

This is just one more example of the idiotic tunnel vision of groups like MADD and our general irrationality in calculating costs and benefits. Ultimately drunk driving does differ in kind from any other kind of careless driving. If you drive after having just a little bit to drink and double the chance you will kill someone it’s no more harmful than driving while slightly sleepy, upset about your breakup or anything else that also doubles your chance of committing vehicular homicide. One might try to argue that drunk driving is in general far more dangerous than say driving while drowsy but this isn’t so clear.

According to the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA) there are about 1,550 deaths annually where drowsiness is cited by the police as a factor. Admittedly this is a much lower number than the 15,829 alcohol related deaths reported in 2006. However, as the NHTSA says it is quite likely that drowsiness is radically under reported. After all the crash is quite likely to wake you up (or put you to sleep) and who is going to volunteer to the officer that they were too tired to be driving? Moreover, we should expect these figures to underrate the danger of drowsiness compared to drunk driving since drowsiness is not testable post-mortem while BAC is.

Of course it’s reasonable to think that strong moral condemnation of drunk driving is more likely to reduce deaths than similar moral condemnation of drowsy driving. I’m not sure¹. However, even if this justifies more severe treatment of drunk drivers and a greater degree of cultural condemnation it doesn’t justify importing your prejudices and unexamined emotional reactions into the debate. We should step back and take a look at which measures/responses are most likely to save lives and balance this against the costs. What I have a problem with is people judging drunk driving more harshly because drinking is considered `sinful’ while working late at the office is considered virtuous. The whole tone of moral outrage against drunk driving is a classic example of demonizing people who aren’t like you. Sure most of us may drink but even most drunk drivers likely don’t think of themselves as such (I’m a big man and only had…) while it’s much easier for everyone to identify with someone who had to drive while sleepy. Maybe we should try and change that but anytime we single out one activity like this I worry that we won’t make the correct trade offs.