Of Course I'm Right!
America’s National Anthem is, well, a symbol of America. And so it is no small matter when someone steals it. According to NPR’s Morning Edition the Chinese have done just that, and they did so by playing a version that was arranged by a private individual named Peter Breiner. He found out about it from friends who heard them play it in that tiny itty bitty venue – an Olympics medal presentation.
File this one under the department of “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up”.
How the United States deals with the world around us has been the principal province of the president, for as long as there has been a U.S. It is an area in which most presidents learn it on the job, as was the case for Presidents Reagan & Clinton. In other circumstances, presidents bring a strong policy background to the job, such as was the case with President George H. W. Bush. (His son, President Bush, doesn’t seem to have learned anything, not really having understood anything prior to having taken office.)
Senator Barack Obama is only a little older than me. Neither of us can seriously have understood at the time all of the implications of the Vietnam War, but both of us became well enough aware of the world around us to understand what was happening during the Carter administration (he might have even gotten it during the Ford administration). He has spent some of his life outside of the United States, and he has spent some of his life in the time of the Cold War.
Senator John McCain is of a different era. His views are informed by his having served in the Vietnam War and been captured and held by the Vietcong. There are few people on earth who can relate to his nearly unique experiences. McCain spent most of his life with the Cold War, and he was born outside of the United States.
Both of these men have interesting perspectives on foreign policy, but to be sure John McCain has been there a whole lot longer. Which positions should we judge? My own areas of interest revolve around the reconstituted Soviet Union, how we handle the Middle East, and how we engage the developing world. I am also interested in continued development of international relationships to reduce cybercrime and cyber-terrorism. As an expatriate foreign policy probably impacts me more than domestic policy, which is why it’s up front next to education. But these days that should be the case with more Americans. Our new found isolation in the world has empowered bad actors, like Hugo Chavez.
Senator McCain has been a strong proponent of America following international law and norms. As a former prisoner he saw what happened personally when those norms weren’t followed. The senator has always expressed strong concern about the way the Bush Administration treated detainees in Guantanamo Bay, and advanced legislation against such reckless behavior.
Senator McCain supported former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush on both their decision to go to war and initial tactics. This to me represents a remarkable failure on his part, because Mr. Rumsfeld failed to ask the very question that most foreign policy experts would ask: what happens after you invade? We take over and then what? The departure from the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to “shock and awe” only worked until the shock and awe wore off, if it worked at all. The actual justification for the war is now thoroughly debunked, and the next president will have to clean up this president’s mess.
Senator McCain has been very vocal about Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Here I am entire agreement with him, and I would perhaps have gone farther. Russia has for years lost its luster to me, and the current president has lied – repeatedly – about Russia’s intent. It’s all about reasserting Russia’s position as a super-power, taking control of her oil, and using economics as a policy weapon against the west. As I wrote previously, we brought this on ourselves. McCain has been there early on, as it is in his nature to address such threats.
Senator Obama has made statements to the same effect as of late, but has otherwise taken a less prominent stance. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing. If the current president plays “bad cop” in some way in the near future, Senator McCain will be left with fewer options than Senator Obama in January. The reverse is also true. President Bush can use the McCain’s stridency to say, “This is who you get later if you don’t solve the problem to my satisfaction.” It’s right out of a West Wing Episode, and arguably out of the Iran Hostages playbook, where Iran resolved the matter the moment Ronald Reagan took office.
John McCain has also stated his preference for ending sugar, oil, and ethanol subsidies as part of his education plan. Were those subsidies tied to quality standards I might have more sympathy for them, as I did with the Swiss. Absent those, the American way of life is not on the line, and it would seem that commodity prices are doing just fine on their own at the moment, and so it’s free money to remove those subsidies.
Senator Obama is not without his own touch on foregin policy. In 2006 he sponsored a bill that eventually became law to stablize the Congo. He has stated that he is willing to meet with leaders of countries that we don’t especially love, like Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. He has been extremely cagy about the terms of such meetings and he has parsed his words carefully since. Normally such parsing drives me CRAZY, reminding me to look up what the definition of is is. The art of foreign policy, however, is talking out of both sides of one’s mouth. Senator McCain and our current president don’t do this, so far as I can tell.
While I find John McCain’s views on Iraq far from my own, his views on Russia seem to be more aligned than those of Barack Obama, and there can be no doubt as to who has more experience. Obama has nowhere near the amount of experience of his opponent, but he did get Iraq right, and he probably has a good handle on Africa. Still I do not agree with his willingness to meet with just any ole dictator.
Today both candidates get passing grades on foreign policy, with McCain getting about a 80/100 and perhaps Obama getting 75. So let’s give this round to McCain.
Many people have asked me what it’s like living in Switzerland, and how life differs from that of outside the United States. Some of the big differences are how one interacts with the U.S. government itself, and with the States. Let’s discuss two examples over the next few days and whether or not they are fair, the first one being everyone’s favorite subject, taxes.
Here’s one way things don’t change: no matter where you live in the world, if you are a U.S. citizen who receives any sort of income above a very minimal amount, you have to file a tax return. U.S. stands alone in this nearly unique way among other governments. In most other cases you only file taxes (if required at all) in the country in which you reside. However, just because one has to fill out paperwork doesn’t mean one ends up paying the same taxes one would pay as a resident.
The U.S. philosophy is basically this: if you’re paying taxes somewhere else, and you’re not actually working in America, then you can reduce your tax burden by the amount paid. That means that if you never travel to America and the tax rate is higher than what you would pay as a U.S. resident, you pay nothing. On the other hand, if you do visit and work during that visit, then that money is subject to tax. And if the American tax rate is higher than the country in which you reside, you end up paying the difference. It’s more complicated than that (there are housing credits, limits on those credits, an income exclusion, etc), but that’s the jist.
Is any of this easy? No. The amount of paperwork expatriates often have to complete for taxes can measure into the kilograms, just for simple returns. In addition, different tax systems may cause substantial amounts of confusion due to when obligations occur, and when tax bills are finalized, requiring substantial revision over time. And don’t even get me started if you have a more complex situation, like say stock options, whose value has to be accounted for between the time they were granted and the amount of time you’ve spent in the states.
Is this fair? It says that as a U.S. citizen you still have a societal obligation no matter where you live. If you are a citizen and have never lived in the U.S., it may seem unfair. But the government is supposed to be there to protect you if you get into trouble; and you also get to vote for your senator, congressman, and in the presidential race. Certainly to me this seems fair. Citizenship has its responsibilities. In Switzerland, for instance, male citizens must serve in the armed service. It would be unfair if expatriates had to pay a higher rate than other citizens. Depending on your point of view, that has in part taken place, but not to the point that it has impacted me personally.
The IRS has attempted to simplify things somewhat, and you can see their attempt here.
World trade talks collapsed this week in Doha over food subsidies. I had previously discussed the potential impact on Switzerland. However, the collapse of these talks, the inability to reduce barriers, particularly subsidies in the U.S., has harmed countries where agriculture is still the dominant export, or would be if such tarrifs didn’t exist. The question remains: what protections are appropriate, even absent tarrifs? What sort of quality standards must be observed? If they are observed, then does the cost of living and production overcome the cost of transportation? And is the impact of transport on health and environment understood and accounted for? Many millions of lives and lifestyles depend on the answers. Food has to be affordable to all and safe to produce and eat.
We are running out of addresses for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4. That protocol allows us to have 2^32 devices (about 4 billion systems minus the overhead used to aggregate devices into networks) connected to the network simultaneously, plus whatever other systems are connected via network address translators (NATs). In practical terms it means that the United States, Europe, and certain other countries have been able to all but saturate their markets with the Internet while developing countries have been left out in the cold.
Long ago we recognized that we would eventually run out of IP addresses. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began discussing this problem as far back as 1990. The results of those discussions was a standardization that brought us IP version 6. IPv6 quadrupled the address size so that there is for all practical purposes an infinite amount of space. The problem is IPv6’s acceptance remains very low.
While IPv6 is deployed in Japan, Korea, and China, its acceptance in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere has been very poor. It is not the perfect standard. ALL it does is create a larger address space. It does not fix routing scalability problems and it does not make our networks more secure. No packet format would fix either of those problems.
One of the reasons that IPv6 is not well accepted is that it requires an upgrade to the infrastructure. Anything that uses an IPv4 address must be taught to use an IPv6 address. That is an expensive proposition. IP addresses exist not only in the computer you’re using right now, but in the router that connects your computer, perhaps in your iPhone (if you are a Believer), in power distribution systems, medical systems, your DMV, and in military systems, just to name a few. Changing all of that is a pain.
Back around 1990, I had posited a different approach. Within IPv4 there is an address block 240.0.0.0/4 (16 /8 blocks). What if one could continue to use normal IPv4 address space, but when needed, if the first four bytes of the IPv4 address space contained addresses from that reserved block, one would read the next four bytes as address as well? View that block, if you will, as an area code, and everyone would have one. That would mean that you would only need it if you were contacting someone not in your area code. It would also mean that eventually we would have increased the address space by the size of a factor of 2^28. That’s a big number, and it probably would have sufficed.
Even after these addresses became prevelant, since devices would only need to use them if they were communicating outside their area code, it would mean they could be upgraded at a much slower pace.
The problem that people had with the idea the time was that the cost to implement this version of variable length addressing would have been high from a performance factor. Today, routers used fixed length addresses and can parse them very quickly because of that. But today that is only because they have been optomized for today’s world. It might have been possible to optomized for this alternate reality, had it come to pass.