This is the Ryugyong (”Capital of Willows”) Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. In 1987, Great Leader Kim Il-Sung started building this monstrosity. No one’s exactly sure why North Korea started building this eyesore, but in a communist dictatorship, it’s hard to explain why the government does anything. Work on the hotel is believed to have stopped in 1992, during a brutal famine.

Japanese newspapers have estimated that the hotel’s construction cost $750m, which would have been about 2% of NK’s Gross Domestic Product. The hotel stands 330 m tall (about 1070 ft.). The crazy angle of the roof is 75 degrees.

Number of customers since work ceased? 0. The building is structurally unsound and lacks electrical wiring and bathroom fixtures.

According to reports of those who have visited Pyongyang, tour guides act as though the 1070 ft. building doesn’t exist.

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

From Nadezhda Mandelstam’s second volume of her memoir of her life with Osip Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned:

“(Mandelstam) suddenly recieved a visit in the editorial office from the critic Selvianovski who had been asked by RAPP (the so-called “Russian Association Of Proletarian Writers”, commie busybodies who themselves were later to fall victim to Stalin - JS) to seek M. out and tell him how they viewed him at the moment. It appeared their attitude was cautiously optimistic: at last M. had become “a real Soviet man” (i.e. by the mere fact of working on a newspaper), though for some reason he had written not a single new poem,nothing to demonstrate any shift in his outlook…I had never seen M. in such a rage. He turned to stone, pressed his lips very tight and glared at Selvianovski. Then he asked why RAPP did not enquire about his sex life, what technique they and the Central Committee recommended in this sphere, and whether the “class approach” was applicable here, also….Selvianovski, as I saw from his face, was quite terrified. He tried to say something in reply, but M. would not let him speak. For several minutes he had to stand and listen to a torrent of furious words, at the end of which M. turned his back on him.”

As long as we’re poaching content from The Agitator this week, I’d just like to take a moment to point out that John C. Dvorak is provably, permanently deranged.

Not that Linnekin is much above that what with his cheerleading of Dvorak’s malign little effort to make Congress work better. I don’t want to see the bastards do as much as they do now, let alone give ‘em the ability to vote what’s left of my life away on their God-damned Blackberries. I guess Baylen “I’m not an anarchist” Linnekin has different priorities.

Still, Baylen does voice tepid support for my right to sit on my ass every two years and jeer while the electorate votes each others’ stuff away. Not that mandatory voting would change much for me, it’d be the easiest thing in the world to scrawl a few clever obscenities across my government-mandated Freedom Ballot(tm) before folding, spindling, and mutilating the machine-scannable instrument of democracy and jamming the fucker into the ultra-secure cardboard ballot box.

This ought to serve as a lesson to any consequentialist Cato interns that may be lurking out there. You, my friend, could end up about a quarter-notch above John Dvorak with the gap closing every election if you don’t look the fuck out.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Balko gets ahold of another beauty. A bunch of undercover cops tries to bust up some college drinking. One of them flashes his badge and fires a few shots in the air. Another policeman hears the shots, runs over, and shoots and kills the undercover cop (and injured a student).

It gets better.

The president of the university sends out a letter blaming alcohol for the death of the cop. The logic being, I guess, that if no one broke the ridiculous drinking age law, then undercover cops would not be necessary, then undercover cops wouldn’t have to shoot into the air, then off-duty officers wouldn’t shoot to kill the undercover cops.

You’ve got to read the whole thing. It’s so stupid it’ll take your breath away.

Some months ago a number of voting conservatives were making heap big talk about what they were going to do if and when the government “came for their guns”.

The “when they come for our guns” is a recurring bit of wish-fulfillment fantasy among Republican types, a clear crossing of some imaginary Rubicon when they can all gather up their trusty muskets and Make Things All Better, Somewhow (the plans are a little vague on the details, but it involves heroic shooting). It helps the fantasy if there’s a Democrat in the White House, and other distractions (blue-helmeted UN troops, Mexican military invasion, etc) are sometimes clumsily layered atop the mess, but the base dream remains the same.

Well, in New Orleans just recently the government made their fantasies come true.

The resulting utter lack of civil war breaking out has been instructive. It seems that despite all of the brave blog posts vowing to stand together in patriotic solidarity, when there actually came an opportunity to start a civil war over gun confiscation, everyone suddenly had better things to do.

Warren was right:

All this spells no need to brace yourselves for immediate disintegration just yet.

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

- Philip Larkin

Our friend Radley Balko muses:

Something tells me the real Superman would be disappointingly leftist.

I wonder what Balko would think about this:

Basic premise: what if Superman landed in a Ukrainian commune instead and fought for truth, justice, and the communist way? What happens when a man with superpowers and a desire to do good for people (despite their wishes) takes the reigns of the Soviet Union?

From (no surprise) Antiwar.com:

According to the Sept. 1 Manufacturing & Technology News, the Government Accounting Office has reported that over the course of the cakewalk war, the U.S. military’s use of small caliber ammunition has risen to 1.8 billion rounds. Think about that number. If there are 20,000 insurgents, it means U.S. troops have fired 90,000 rounds at each insurgent.

Anyone else see some problems there? First item: “Over the course of the cakewalk war”. Hmm. If I recall correctly, not too many insurgents were around when the Iraqi Army was still in place. Think that maybe just a few rounds of ammunition were fired at, say, the Republican Guard?

Second, strange as it may seem to someone who writes for Antiwar.com, the military actually shoots at targets sometimes. In fact, according to this statement to Congress,

We understand that prior to 9/11 the total DOD small caliber ammunition requirement through the 1990s, up until 9/11 was 350 million rounds per year and that this entire production was provided by the Government Owned, Contractor Operated Lake City Plant in Independence, Missouri.

Subsequent to 9/11, the former Army Chief of Staff issued guidance to change the training requirements for the Army and thus the total DOD training requirement increased to 1.1 billion rounds per year.

Now of course the math works out such that something’s missing somewhere - maybe some other data would clarify matters, or maybe the military’s running a tad short on projectiles. Whatever the case, the point is that it serves to demonstrate that the US military burns up a whole bunch of ammo every year even when they aren’t fighting a war in Iraq. Thus the claim that 90,000 rounds are fired at each insurgent is a gross oversimplification (if you’re charitable) or a flat-out lie (if you’re not).

The Antiwar.com piece goes on:

The combination of U.S. government-owned ammo plants and those of U.S. commercial producers together cannot make bullets as fast as US troops are firing them. The Bush administration has had to turn to foreign producers such as Israel Military Industries. Think about that. Hollowed-out U.S. industry cannot produce enough ammunition to defeat a 20,000-man insurgency.

Obviously 1.8 billion rounds (to use the author’s figure) would have been more than enough for Stalin to defeat such an insurgency. He’d have started at one side of the country and had his troops shoot everyone they came across. Sooner or later (likely sooner), the insurgency would have stopped, and far short of a billion rounds of rifle ammo.

So it isn’t “hollowed-out US industry” that’s allowing the Iraqi rebels to run around and shoot back, obviously there are more subtle things going on here, such as the facts that the US government isn’t Stalin’s Russia and that George W. Bush (again, shocking as this might be to an Antiwar.com columnist) isn’t Stalin.

And this isn’t cherry-picking, that column should have been edited with an axe. I mean it’s fine to be anti-war and all, but look: you need to get your bloody facts straight, even the ones that get in the way of making an overwrought point about how terrible (yet incompetent) the bad ol’ US government is. The way this stands, the editorial page of AWC looks about as trustworthy as a CentCom press release.

The River Behind The Eyes. Note the URL.

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David Friedman has a draft of a book online, Future Imperfect, which has the interesting feature of allowing reader comments (moderated). I posted a brief note, and received a dissenting reply from another reader.

What we are talking about is technological protection of intellectual property. I gave the example of a hardware license, but this topic seems to need further explanation.

In brief, a hardware license is a piece of external hardware that is required to be seen by the software in order for the software (the sort of intellectual property in question here) to operate. License present, software works. License absent, software doesn’t work. Since the license can’t get copied right along with the software, this ought to be a foolproof method of IP protection, right?

Well, not quite.

Let’s think about a hardware license that’s conceptually very simple: it’s a little plastic enclosure that plugs into the printer port of your PC. Inside this box is a wire that goes from an input pin to an output pin on the printer port. The software that this license is for is coded such that when it starts (or at random intervals, or whenever) it checks for the presence of the license by toggling the state of the output pin and trying to see what’s happening via the input pin. If the license (wire) is there, the input should match the output. If it isn’t, nothing should be “seen” from the input pin.

Now such a license would work very well for most non-technical people: if the little box is there, the program works. If it’s missing, the program doesn’t work. The problem is that anyone who cracks the thing open can see what’s inside (not much of anything), fabricate a replacement license (with a paper clip, say), and tell everyone in the world that all you have to do is stick a paper clip between pins X and Y on your printer port and the software works for free.

Stepping up the complexity of the license we could stick a serial EEPROM (that’s been loaded with a licence code) into our little box and read it from the printer port with our software. This is harder to duplicate, since a) it requires a modest amount of skill to fabricate and b) EEPROMs come blank, so it also requires some skill to program the thing. Of course a license like this could be made in bulk in a third world country for a few bucks each, and again everyone in the world could download a license-programming program that one bright boy wrote.

But it’s still more expensive than a paper clip.

More complex yet is some sort of intelligent license that has to interact with the licensed software. In this case copying the license may be non-trivial, since cheap microcontrollers are avaliable that are essentially single-chip computers. Also moving the license from the slow and easy-to-understand printer port to something like a USB port further raises the bar to would-be IP violators.

What about attacks on the host software? Is that the end of hardware licensing? Not yet. Consider that a very intelligent license could itself contain a part or all of the program that it licenses. Coprocessor cards are fairly common for specialized systems, so if the threat was great enough, a coprocessor card could become a software license. Think about a very generic computer program: it takes some data “D”, performs some operations “O”, and returns the result “R”. Does it matter where O takes place? You need to see the result, and perhaps provide the data, but the manipulation of the data (which is the whole point of the software in the first place) doesn’t have to take place on your computer.

So now who cares about the host software? All of the important parts of the program happen on the license, which is basically a black box: data goes in, result comes out. And now the license is hellishly complex by necessity, it needs to be a whole computer in and of itself. The costs of duplicating the licence have skyrocketed: not only do you have multiple components that are more complex than the microcontroller referenced above, but you have extremely complex, unknown software operating them.

And we can go on from here, there’s no reason in principle that the license can’t be much more complex than your computer. The real limitation to this approach is cost: if the licence adds $10,000 to the cost of the software, the software has to be worth a good deal to start with. But that also means that duplicating the license will cost $10,000 per copy for the hardware alone, never mind the time and effort involved.

Certainly hardware licensing isn’t a perfect solution, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. For hardware licensing to work, it just needs to make intellectual property violation cost more than it’s worth.

Wars seem important at the time, but they usually aren’t. Five years later, they are history. About sixty thousand GIs died in Vietnam. We lost. Nothing happened. It was a stupid war for nothing. Today the guys who lost faces and legs and internal organs back then are just freaks. Nobody gives a damn about them, and nobody will give a damn about you. A war is a politician’s toy, but your wheelchair is forever. If you want adventure, try the fishing fleet in Alaska.

Think about it.

— Fred Reed