One Size Fits...

The titles of the articles, both out of the UK, are designed to appeal to an idea that the world is sexist, that women aren't seen and valued. The BBC lists "Seven ways the world is not designed for women;" The Guardian calls out "The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes." And both articles seek to speak to the difficulty that women have when the "average person," for whom many products from space suits to cellular phones is designed for, is perhaps more accurately described as the average American man.

But The Guardian hints at a deeper problem, noting:

The use of a “standard” US male face shape for dust, hazard and eye masks means they don’t fit most women (as well as a lot of black and minority ethnic men).

And this is a problem that has been around for quite some time:

The high death rate in the Air Force was a mystery for many years, but after blaming the pilots and their training programs, the military finally realized that the cockpit itself was to blame, that it didn’t actually fit most pilots. At first, they assumed it was just too small and that the average man had grown since the 1920s, so in 1950, they asked researchers at Wright Air Force base in Ohio to calculate the new average.

One of these researches was a young Harvard graduate named Gilbert S. Daniels. In his research measuring thousands of airmen on a set of ten critical physical dimensions, Daniels realized that none of the pilots he measured was average on all ten dimensions. Not a single one. When he looked at just three dimensions, less than five percent were average. Daniels realized that by designing something for an average pilot, it was literally designed to fit nobody.

This is, of course, not to say that when the "average" is based on a man, that it won't cause problems for women, who don't typically conform to men's average heights, weights, reach et cetera. But it's a problem for more than just women. It's a problem for literally everyone who doesn't conform to whatever the determined average is (or averages are, depending). Now, this is a problem with a simple solution. But the simple solution is also an expensive one; returning to the pre-Civil War custom of having everything custom-sewn to the specifications of the user. Given modern make-on-demand technologies, this wouldn't be a particularly difficult thing tp put in place, but the loss of economies of scale would be telling very quickly.

And that's the somewhat inglamorous reality of the situation. That most of this is not driven by sexism or racism, but simply finances. Having all crash-test dummies be the same lowers costs. Having clothes sized into predefined dimensions lowers costs. Not send up a spacesuit for every individual astronaut on a space station lowers costs. Sure, women and people of other ethnicities than the one used to calculate the average lose out in this, but that sort of myopia is a hallmark of the human condition. People tend to see the world as a reflection of themselves, rather than something that independent of them.

May We Request a Detour?

The world is a big place. And so on any given day, a lot of things are going on. Enough things that most of us don't have the attention budget to follow up on most, or even a significant fraction of them. One item that it occurred to me had been in the news, but that I hadn't seen anything about recently, was the attempted migration of people from Africa to Europe. So I went online, and started looking for news.

And came across this story of a group of just over one hundred migrants that had been picked up off the cost of Libya by a tanker vessel. When the tanker prepared to return the migrants to Libya, the migrants seized control of the vessel, and redirected it to Malta. En route, the Maltese military intercepted and boarded the ship. Four of the migrants were arrested, and the remainder are now on Malta.

While the number of people attempting to make the Mediterranean crossing from North Africa to Europe has slowed from its peak a few years back, there are still large numbers of people who are desperate to leave war, poverty and violence-racked nations to basically eke out a marginal, subsistence living in wealthier nations. (I've always felt that it really says something about the conditions that people are leaving that an existence that's effectively a step above homelessness, and requires a full-time job {if not more} to sustain is a significant step up. Especially given the fact that many of the people who are fleeing are not poor; the truly destitute often can't afford to make the journey.)

Of course, the migration to the North is not limited to the Mediterranean basin. A large number of people make the trek to the United States every year, for various and sundry reasons. And while active barriers to migration, in the form of walls, laws or other disincentives to moving, are going to have some level of support in the destination countries, the fact of the matter remains that you can't keep significant numbers of people on the outside looking in forever. Sooner or later the draw of the greater resources and better lives that people perceive exist in the "better" parts of the world will simply become too strong to ignore. And when people feel that they have a right to a better life, or simply that they have nothing left to lose, they'll go to extremes. It's possible that the four migrants arrested in Malta won't be deported as criminals, or wind up with long prison terms for piracy. But that's a heck of a risk to take, and it speaks to the perceived stakes.

At some point, things are going to have to even out. Places like sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are going to have to become better places to live. There's simply no other way of putting an end to the constant tragedies that come with the mass migration of people. Destination countries tend to have, presumably unintentionally, a strange push-and-pull scheme in place: a lot of work goes into efforts to push the migrants back to the nations from which they came, yet little attention is paid to the incentives that pull them in. I've started likening it to having a mouse problem. Sure, one can put the time, money and effort into attempting to completely seal the home against mice; or it might be easier to remove the easily-scavenged food that attracts them in the first place.

But this metaphor, which I usually trot out in the service of explaining why I think that a border wall between the United States and Mexico is not the best use of resources, glosses over what may be the best solution. Borrowing a line from justifications of the War on Terror, if wealthy nations help improve the lives of people "over there," they don't have to deal with them attempting to illegally cross borders "over here." To be sure, it's a hard sell, and there are some pretty obvious perverse incentives to such a scheme. So while it may be the best solution, that doesn't mean that it would be an easy one by any stretch of the imagination.

But in the end, it something of a moot point. There is only so much attention to go around, and while this particular story may make a few headlines there and there, the situation will fade from attention again (after all, it is a limited resource) and return to being a forgotten problem, along with a million others. Forgetting about these sorts of things rarely comes back to bite the societies that walk away from them (at least not in the short to medium term), and so for them, the stakes are fairly low. This difference in the perceived stakes is part of what drives the entire conflict. Until the stakes become higher for the destination countries, there will be other priorities that preclude finding lasting solutions. And this is only to be expected. But it's still a tragedy.

Poor Practice

Since getting people to think of the children has become passé, the new mantra seems to be "Won't somebody please think of the impoverished?" While there's nothing wrong with considering the needs of the poor, there does seem to be a tendency as of late to use them as proxies, when perhaps a more direct criticism of a circumstance may be warranted. The article "‘Privacy Is Becoming a Luxury’: What Data Leaks Are Like for the Poor" seems to be an example of this. The article attempts to make the case that "Late Capitalism" is providing yet more opportunity for bad economics to injure poor Americans, but it comes across as relying on the reader's pity for the women it holds up as victims, rather than any factual support for its premise.

To make a long story short, the Seattle Housing Authority accidentally released names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and tenant code numbers of people enrolled in the Scattered Sites housing program to a group of Scattered Sites members, when they should have received an e-mail newsletter instead. The SHA says that it was a case of human error; the person sending out the newsletter attached the wrong file. To be sure, the SHA does seem to be downplaying the situation. If Personally Identifiable Information is understood as pieces of information, either alone or in combination, that may be used to positively identify a specific individual, then the mistake resulted in a release of PII.

But it's worth keeping in mind that PII isn't always a closely guarded secret. Information such as names and addresses can be a matter of public record. Any one of those dubious personal records sites can likely turn up the address that goes with a particular name. Therefore, if a name and an address is all that's needed for identity fraud, as one of the advocates quoted in the piece notes, an awful lot of people, poor or not, are exposed.

This, however, doesn't mean that the SHA wasn't being sloppy with people's data. Accidentally sending out PII when one means to send a newsletter is the sort of basic error that they should have been prepared for. While Data Loss Protection technology would have flagged the error, had it been set up to look for the specific fields in question, a better model would have been an automated system that pulled down the PDF file, attached it to a prepared e-mail and sent the finished combination to the recipients, possibly after having sent it to an SHA staffer for a final once-over. The article quotes a security advisor who hints that organizations slack off on security when dealing with poor people, because they understand that since the poor have bigger fish to fry, it won't be a problem. While this strikes me as taking cynicism to an illogical extreme, it also fails the sniff test. Given an obvious release like this, it seems that some enterprising lawyer would have gone after the city for damages already, had they done something that constituted real harm. Banking on the clientele not having the free time to participate in a legal case seems like a remarkably dangerous strategy for organizations to undertake.

The article being grouped in with the topic of Late Capitalism is telling. While it's intended to be yet another critique of a modern American economy/society that cheerfully ignores the travails of of the lower classes, the only real consequences it speaks to are one woman's feelings that a) her identity didn't matter to the Seattle Housing Authority and b) that the SHA might retaliate against her if they knew she was speaking to the media (even though, ironically, there may be enough information in the piece to allow the SHA to identify her). Everything else is in the form of hints or suggestions, rather than concrete information. The author doesn't even bother to find out if the specific release in question needed to be disclosed, even though it's established that "specific disclosure laws vary by state." If one is interested in knowing Washington State's rules, they are summarized here: https://www.atg.wa.gov/data-breach-notifications, along with a list of notifications (the SHA release is not on it as of now).

There is certainly something to be said about the fact that public agencies tend to be given the funds to demand and collect quite a bit of personal information from people requesting public benefits, yet not enough to adequately secure the information once they have it. Protecting "makers" from fraudulent claims is clearly more important that safeguarding "takers" from those who would either prey on them for what little they have or attempt to use them as cover for their own bad acts. But that's not a facet of capitalism. Socialists can be stingy and suspicious, too.

Equinox Moon

It has been unseasonably warm and sunny in the Seattle area recently. But clouds are moving in, so today wasn't great for lunar photography.

Fortunately, I took some shots yesterday...

I normally shrink these down so that the long edge is 1500 pixels, just out of habit. But I didn't cut this one down quite so far, to preserve some of the details. It's somewhat softer than I'd like; I don't think that I've learned the correct technique for lunar photography.

It's Okay If It's Him

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella recently said: "Hate and violence have no place in our society." His post on LinkedIn garnered tens of thousands of Likes and hundreds of comments. It stuck me, however, that if you were to observe people's day-to-day actions, one could easily come away from that with the understanding that those words are something that people say, and that others support, because this is what is expected of them, and not because they actually believe it enough to work for it.

On Last Week Tonight recently, John Oliver did a segment on Public Shaming. And kudos to him for not simply coming out against the practice, but owning up to his own support of the tactic: "When it's well-directed," Mr. Oliver notes, "A lot of good can come out of it." (That good, apparently, being the opportunity to take pot shots at Tucker Carlson.)

But this strikes me as the way people tend to understand hate and violence; they're okay, so long as they are "well-directed." And few people see themselves as misdirecting their anger. An article in Slate magazine effectively holds up one Will Connelly, now known as "Eggboy" for smashing a raw egg into the back of an Australian lawmaker's head, as a hero. The reason for this is that his target, Queensland Senator Fraser Anning, is anti-Moslem.

“The real cause of the bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place,” Anning said in a statement. Anning also tweeted:  “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”

Of course, a mass shooting, and a random egging are not the same thing. And the point here isn't to imply that they are. But here in Washington state, coming up to someone and hitting them on the back of the head is considered a form of assault, even if not a very serious one. (Other jurisdictions may consider it battery, instead.) "Hate and violence" aren't limited just to actions that are directed at people with sympathize with and reach some arbitrary threshold. And that's what tends to make denunciations ring hollow; a general willingness to be selective about what's bad and what isn't.