Will the Obamacare Mess Hurt Hillary?

The current and continuing problems with Obamacare have badly hurt his ratings and generated a flow of gleeful commentary by his critics. Obama, however, is in his second term. One possible interpretation of his many times repeated claim that anyone who liked his present coverage could keep it, a claim he knew would be proved false, was that it was an endgame strategy based on his knowledge that he would never have to face the voters again. That is not true for the congressional democrats who supported Obamacare, some of whom may well be defeated next year as a result. But what about the election after that? At the moment it looks as though Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate. If so, how will she be affected?

Three different answers occur to me:

1. She won't be hurt. Her involvement with the administration was only relevant to foreign affairs, so she cannot be blamed for domestic failure.

2. She will be hurt. Obama's prize program was Obamacare. Hillary's, a few administration's back, was Hillarycare. While her supporters will argue that the two programs were very different, they were similar enough that support for the one will be seen as support for the other.

3. She will be helped. By the time she is running, the American health care system will be in a state of catastrophic failure. She will offer an alternative, probably along the single payer lines supported by many on the left.

My feeling is that the third alternative is the least likely, but I wish I could be more confident of that.

My Mac Lied To Me

My daughter, explaining why she was reluctant to upgrade her OS if not necessary, complained that a previous upgrade resulted in the computer reporting a program as damaged when the only thing wrong with it was that it was not from the Apple Store or an identified developer. A web search for the text of the message eventually provided her the explanation—to run the program she had to change her security settings to permit applications downloaded from anywhere to run. Prior to upgrading the system (to OSX 10.8.5) the program had run with no message, so she concluded that the upgrade had either added a new "feature" or altered the security setting without telling her it was doing so.

My initial reaction was skepticism. While I could understand Apple warning a user against a program not from a trusted source, describing such a program as damaged is a lie. The appropriate response would be a warning that the current security setting will not allow the program to run because it is not from a trusted source. That would allow a user to decide whether or not to change the security setting. The result of reporting the program as damaged could well be to cause the user to waste quite a lot of time trying to locate an undamaged copy.

I have now checked her report, and it was correct. My desktop is also running 10.8.5. I set my Security & Privacy settings to "Allow applications downloaded from Mac App Store and identified developers." I went to the site for maptool, the program with which she had encountered the problem, and downloaded maptool-1.3.b89.dmg. When I double clicked on the maptool program on the disk image, I got a message:

"MapTool-1.3.b89" is damaged and can't be opened. You should eject the disk image."

I then reset my security settings to "Allow applications downloaded from: Anywhere" and double clicked on the program. I got a warning that it had been downloaded from the internet, clicked the "open" button, and it opened.

Apple is in fact deliberately lying to its users.

For Cold Weather: A Recipe

A few days ago, my wife and daughter and I had mulligatawny soup at a local Indian restaurant. All three of us liked it. One of my current projects is getting our chest freezer empty enough so that we can defrost it. Included in its contents were several large containers of frozen chicken broth, produced as a side effect of a slow cooked Chinese chicken recipe I am fond of making.

Also, it has been cold out, and the web is a good source of recipes.

This is what I came up with, based mostly on this recipe scaled down to fit in a blender:

Mulligatawny Soup

1/2 cup  lentils                                     

7 cups chicken broth, divided

4-1 inch chunks fresh ginger, peeled                           
1 medium tomato

2 medium carrots,                              

1 celery rib

1 1/2 T butter                                                   
1 T olive oil

1 T garam masala                                       
1/2 T ground cumin

1/2 T ground coriander                                   
1/2 t ground turmeric

1 medium to small onion, coarsely chopped                                  

4 garlic cloves, pressed

3T  flour
1 t tomato paste                                           
~1/2 T salt

~1/2 t pepper

Simmer lentils in 3 cups of chicken broth for about 30 minutes, until soft.

Combine 4 cups of broth, chopped carrots, celery, tomatoes and ginger in a blender or food processor. Blend and set aside.

Melt butter, add olive oil in a sauce pan and sauté spices, onion and garlic, stirring frequently so as not to burn, for about 5 minutes. Stir in flour, cook about 1 minute. Add tomato paste, stir. Add the contents of the blender, bring to a boil, cover and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Put the contents of the saucepan plus most of the cooked lentils back in your blender or food processor and puree until smooth. Return to pot along with the remaining lentils and the broth they were cooked in. Season with salt and pepper to taste, bring back to a simmer, turn off, serve.

A tasty spicy soup for cold days.

I should probably add that what I used for pureeing was my new vita-mix, a very high powered blender. My guess is that a food processor would work, but I haven't tried it.

Symbolic Thrift

American law schools, including the one I teach at, currently face serious budget problems due to declining enrollment. The obvious response is to try to cut expenditures. A particularly visible example, at least in our case, is abandoning the practice of serving catered food at faculty meetings and similar events. 

My guess is that the total amount saved is a tiny fraction of the budget, but I think that fraction understates the effectiveness of the change for two different reasons, both in some sense symbolic. The first is that it is hard to persuade other people that they should be careful to hold down expenditures if you are not doing so yourself. Catered meals are a visible extravagance provided mostly for the benefit of the faculty—who, to a considerable extent, run the school. Abandoning them is a way of signalling staff members that they too should be willing to make do on less money, even if it makes life a little harder and less pleasant for them.

The second reason is one that I intuit better than I can explain; it has something to do with the different feel of different human organizations. Consider at one extreme a loving family where every member takes it for granted that he ought to take account of the welfare of the other members in his decisions. Consider at the other extreme a bureaucratic organization, public or private, where the individual concern is not with the consequences of his acts but with the paper trail, his ability to prove to the satisfaction of his superiors that he has done what he should do, whether or not it is true.

Most organizations lie somewhere between those two extremes, depending in part on their size—it is easier to know and care about four other people than four thousand. Most organizations, however large and bureaucratic, make some attempt to take advantage of the family level feelings in order to motivate their members to act in the interest of the organization and the other members, but large formal organizations are less likely to succeed than small informal ones. How successful they are depends in part on how much the organization feels like a family, how much like a bureaucracy.

Which is one reason why, when my school stopped serving lunch at faculty meetings, I started bringing chocolate chip cookies.

Electric Blue Book: An Open Source Proposal

Some thirty years ago, when I was a professor at Tulane Business School, we had a project to develop software for taking exams on computers. It never got completed, but such software now exists, developed later by other people. Our main design objective was to make taking exams easier for students and grading them easier for professors. The main design objective of the current software appears, as best I can tell, to be preventing students from cheating, understandable but depressing.

In a post some years back I discussed the ideas for our software, to be titled "Electric Bluebook," and offered one possible solution to the cheating problem. An alternative  would be to combine our design features with something similar to what the currents software does, mechanisms to lock the user out of both the internet and his own hard drive while taking the exam. How difficult that would be I do not know.

As best I can tell from using the current commercial software, it has none of the features I want, aside from making life easier for students who find typing on a computer easier than writing on paper and solving the problem of reading students' handwriting. A quick look at the producer's web page did not suggest otherwise, but I might be missing something. There are open source programs already in existence for taking exams online, but I have not found any equivalent of Electric Bluebook, software to make taking ordinary exams easier for students and grading them easier for professors. If a reader knows of such software—you can get a picture of what I want from my earlier post—by all means let me know.

The purpose of this post is to see if anyone out there would like to start an open source project to revive Electric Bluebook.

Libertarian Arguments for Income Redistribution

Matt Zwolinski has recently posted some possible arguments in favor of a guaranteed basic income or something similar. While the position is not one popular with libertarians—the only other example that occurs to me is In Our Hands by Charles Murray—it does raise some interesting questions. 

Matt offers three different arguments. The first is that a guaranteed income or something similar would be an improvement on our present system of welfare. That is probably true, especially if you imagine it replacing not only welfare but all policies, such as the farm program, that are defended as helping poor people. The problem, as Matt appears to realize, is that if a guaranteed minimum income is introduced it will almost certainly be an addition to, not a substitute for, current programs.

His third argument is that a guaranteed income is a good thing for reasons that libertarians, among others, should recognize. One version of that is to point out that private charity faces a public good problem, hence that we are on net better off if government taxes us to provide the charity that each of us wants provided but would prefer that other people pay for. This is not a particularly libertarian argument, but it is  essentially the same as one that many libertarians accept in the context of national defense. 

One problem with the argument here is that we do not have any way of setting up mechanisms for income transfer that can only work in the way we would want them to. Once those mechanisms exist, individuals will try to game or alter them in order to be transferred to rather than from. That will impose real costs—resources spent gaming existing rules and lobbying to change them. And we may end up, as we often have in the past, with transfers that go up the income ladder rather than down or in all directions at once.

The most interesting part of Matt's essay, and the most libertarian part, is the second argument. As he points out, the existing state of the world is in part a result of past rights violations. Land claims in libertarian theory may be based on a series of voluntary transfers beginning with the person who first mixed his labor with the land, but many land claims in the real world run back to an initial seizure by force. Similarly, claims to other forms of wealth must be justified, in libertarian moral theory, by a chain of voluntary transactions back to a first creator. In at least some cases that chain is interrupted by involuntary transactions. Consider a house built by slave labor. Is the legitimate owner the person with the present title to it or the heir of the slaves forced to build it, or is it perhaps partly the legitimate property of one and partly of the other? What about property in other forms inherited through a chain that leads back to a slave holding or slave trading ancestor who owed, but never paid, compensation to his victims?

Most libertarians would recognize this as a legitimate problem, although many might point at the practical difficulty of establishing just ownership in such cases as justifying some sort of statute of limitations with regard to wrongs in the distant past. Matt's alternative, suggested by a passage he quotes from Nozick, is to argue that the descendants of those who gained by past rights violations are on average better off than the descendants of those who lost, hence redistribution from richer to poorer in the form of a guaranteed minimum income represents an approximate rectification for past injustice.

While the argument suggests that transfers from richer to poorer might do a better job of rectification of past injustices than random transfers, it does not imply that such transfers do a better job than doing nothing, that they on net reduce injustice rather than increasing it. Some present wealth may be due to causes that are, from the standpoint of libertarian moral theory, unjust, but not all. If I justly owe you forty cents, taking a dollar from me and giving it to you makes the resulting distribution less just, not more. Unless most inequalities are inherited from past rights violations, a claim I think few libertarians would support, the logic of the argument breaks down.

A brief digression is needed here to distinguish between wealth due to past rights violations and wealth inherited from such violations.  Suppose I am one of two doctors in a town. Someone murders the other. The result is to increase demand for my services, hence my income. I have benefited by the murder but I have not violated any rights, so do not owe the victim's heirs any compensation. The current distribution of income is due to all sorts of events in the past, some of them unjust, but it does not follow that everyone who is better off as a result of past history, even past rights violations, owes a debt to everyone who is worse off as a result.

A further problem with Matt's argument is that, even if you believe that a guaranteed basic income reduces net injustice, it is hard to argue that it is the best rule of thumb for the purpose. Consider the case of Afro-Americans. Almost nobody whose ancestors immigrated to the U.S. after the Civil War is the heir of benefits created by violation of the rights of their ancestors by his ancestors. On the other hand, the ancestors of present-day Afro-Americans were enslaved by Africans to be sold to European slave traders. The present inhabitants of Africa, at least sizable parts of it, are more likely than the present inhabitants of North America to be descendants of  people who owe, and did not pay, reparation to slaves and their descendants. 

It follows that Matt's second argument implies that the (very poor) present inhabitants of Africa owe compensation to the (relatively rich) present American blacks. I do not think Matt would accept that argument, whether or not he could rebut it. If so, he does not really believe in his second argument.

Readers sufficiently interested in these issues my want to look at the draft of one of the new chapters for the third edition of The Machinery of Freedom which discusses some related arguments for redistribution.

Lying for a Good Cause

While waiting for a dentist's appointment this morning I took a look at a Time magazine from last month and was mildly irritated by its attempt to defend Obamacare. The author described a deliberate lie about people being able to keep their insurance if they wanted to as the administration being insufficiently clear—I do not have the magazine with me so can't offer an exact quote. And he echoed the Administration talking point that represented all existing policies that did not cover everything the ACA requires, including contraception, as worthless junk that people only bought because they were desperate for insurance. Which left me wondering about the author of that particular piece of partisan puffery disguised as news commentary. My guess is that, dosed with truth serum or in a sufficiently private conversation with a trusted friend, he would admit that the Administration's claim was a deliberate lie but justify it on the grounds that it was necessary in order to get a good law passed.

It is not an absurd position. "The end justifies the means" is usually stated as if it were obviously false, but it is not clear that it is. Most of us would be, I think should be, willing to do things we would usually disapprove of in order to achieve a sufficiently good result. To what degree ends do or do not justify means is, as it happens, one of the subthemes of my second novel, where an antagonist who is not a villain behaves very badly to my protagonists for good, from his standpoint sufficiently good, reasons.

It occurred to me to wonder if the author of the Time piece or others with similar views would accept the same argument applied to a previous instance and a different President, if they would agree that, while the facts it was based on might be mistaken, the moral reasoning was correct.

Imagine that you are President Bush and that you believe the following:

1. Saddam Hussein is a murderous tyrant whose people would be far better off without him.

2. If he is overthrown by the U.S., his government can be replaced by a reasonably free and democratic one which will serve as a model to convert other dictatorships in the region into free and democratic societies.

3. Points 1 and 2 will not be sufficient to persuade the American people to support an invasion of Iraq. They would, however, support such an invasion if they believed that Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction.

4. While it is possible that Hussein is producing weapons of mass destruction, the evidence is very strong that he is not.

Would you be justified in pretending to have good evidence of WMD's in order to get sufficient public support to make possible a U.S. invasion of Iraq?

The logic is the same as in the case of Obamacare—lying to the public in order to make possible policies you consider highly desirable.

In both cases, the argument hinges on factual beliefs. Point 2 above turned out to be strikingly false. Obamacare will, I think, turn out to have been a very serious mistake. But the question I am asking is not whether the beliefs were correct but whether the moral argument is. If Bush believed points 1 to 4, was he justified, in terms of those beliefs, in lying to the American people? If Obama believed that the ACA would greatly improve American health care, was he? 

And, perhaps most interesting, would people who answered "yes" to the second question be willing to give the same answer to the first?

Legal Insurance as a Commitment Strategy: A Solution to the Patent Troll Problem

One intellectual property issue that has gotten a lot of attention lately is the problem of non-practicing entities, referred to by their critics as patent trolls—firms that buy up an inventory of patents not in order to practice them but in order to sue other firms for infringing them. Patents protect ideas and ideas have fuzzy boundaries. That makes possible a strategy of suing on weak cases not because you expect to win but in order to be paid to drop the suit. It may make sense for the targeted firm to settle for an amount less than the cost of litigating the case  if it wins and considerably less than the cost if it loses. A large firm that knows it could be targeted multiple times might go to court in order to deter future suits, but that makes less sense for a small firm, especially one that will be bankrupted if it loses and badly hurt even if it wins.

The purpose of this post is to suggest a way in which small firms could protect themselves against such suits and ask why it is not in common use. The solution I am proposing is litigation insurance to cover most or all of the cost of defending against such a suit. While most insurance costs more than it is worth from an actuarial point of view, this kind of insurance might well be worth more than it costs.

Ordinary insurance costs its customers more than it pays them for two reasons. The obvious one is that, in addition to paying out claims, an insurance company has to rent offices, hire claims adjustors and salesmen, bear a variety of additional expenses. The less obvious reason is that insurance reduces the incentive of the insured to take costly precautions against whatever the insurance covers. If my house has no fire insurance, it is worth it to me to take any precaution—installing  a sprinkler system, say—whose expected payoff in reducing the chance that the house will burn down is greater than its cost. If I am insured for 90% of the loss, it only pays to take those precautions whose benefit is at least ten times their cost. The inefficiency of worthwhile precautions not taken reflects what economists refer to as moral hazard. The benefit that balances those costs is the fact that the money the insurance company pays comes when something has happened, such as my house burning down, that makes money especially valuable to me.

Litigation insurance has those costs as well but, for a firm likely to be targeted by a patent troll, it also has a large potential benefit: Deterrence. Insurance which covers litigation cost but not out of court settlement makes settling less of a temptation, increasing the chance that the suit will go to court. The more likely it is that the plaintiff will have to litigate, the less profitable it is to bring the suit in the first place. Insofar as the effect of the insurance is to keep you from being sued, it provides a benefit that costs the insurer nothing. 

I have a (currently unpublished) article that uses what I have learned by looking at feud societies such as saga period Iceland to explain why non-practicing entities present a special problem for patent litigation and borrows an idea from the legal system of Periclean Athens to suggest a legal solution. The private solution I am suggesting here is in part inspired by yet another legal system I have written on, privately enforced criminal law in 18th century England. Part of what made that system work was the existence of associations for the prosecution of felons, the members of which paid in advance into a fund used to pay the cost of prosecuting anyone who committed a felony against one of them. The real function of such associations, I believe, was not insurance but deterrence: The membership list of the association was published in the local newspaper for the felons to read, in order that they would know who not to target.

Which leaves me with a puzzle: Why isn't the equivalent approach used against patent trolls—or if it is, why doesn't it work?

The Third Edition of the Machinery of Freedom

I have just finished drafts of the  chapters for the new edition and webbed them for comment.

The Rush to Judgement

A friend or acquaintance comes to you with a story of how badly he has been mistreated by someone—his employer, his girlfriend, a store, an airline. He expects you to agree with his complaint, take his side, despite the fact that you have not heard the other side of the argument and so, unless you happen to have some other source of information, have no way of knowing whether his side is correct. Your honest response would be to point that out—at which point he will get mad at you too.

Seen from a sufficiently cynical point of view the pattern makes sense. Agreeing with him makes him your ally, allies are useful, and the target of his attack is far away and, with any luck, will never know you have sided against him, her or it. Agreeing is also stupid if it does not occur to you that you have heard only one side of the story or if you have not yet learned how dangerous it is to reach conclusions on that basis,  dishonest if you have.

I was reminded of this particular recurrent irritation by recent news stories about a waitress who claimed to have been stiffed by a couple she served, given a note criticizing her (lesbian) life style in lieu of a tip. Her original account did not identify the couple, but it provided sufficient information for them to identify themselves—at which point they provided what looks like convincing evidence that she was lying, including the visa charge for their dinner, tip included. The most recent story I have seen includes comments by friends and former colleagues of the waitress reporting a history of minor lies designed to provoke sympathy on the basis of invented stories.

What struck me was not the behavior of the waitress but the behavior of the large number of people who took her side, including reporters who took the waitress's initial story as gospel, reporting it as something that happened, not as something someone claimed happened, despite no evidence beyond a digital image of what purported to be the check with note and without tip. Judging at least by reports, thousands of people on Facebook condemned the supposed behavior of the couple—with no evidence beyond the news stories—and many sent donations to the purported victim. 

Their behavior was stupid and unjust. The behavior of the reporters was also professional incompetence. 

One question about the story that nobody else seems to have commented on occurred to me. All of the reports describe the waitress as an ex-marine. She is also described as 22 years old, and the most recent story mentions "a day care center where she once worked." The minimum age of enlistment for the marines is 17. The usual terms of enlistment are for three to five years of active service. Marine corps training requires an additional three months. It is not impossible that someone could have enlisted at 17 on the shortest terms, left the corps at 20 and by 22 have worked first at a day care center and then at a restaurant, but the timing is sufficiently tight to be at least mildly suspicious, especially when combined with evidence that the person in question is a habitual liar. 

It would be nice to know if any of the reporters checked with the marine corps to make sure that "ex-marine" was not another fabrication.

Obama, Silicon Valley, and Learning by Testing

There were PhDs working as low paid data managers during Obama’s ’08 campaign and top product managers developing interactive during ’12 campaign. There are many talented developers/product managers/data modelers who would take a pay cut to work on something they believe in. Especially for those with enough life experience to know how important the Affordable Care Act is, even if it’s not an ideal solution.

The quote is from a comment on a very interesting essay about the failure of the Healthcare.gov website.  Part of the essay's point is the danger, in IT projects and elsewhere, of a particular approach to doing large projects:

The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.

Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. 

It occurred to me that the comment, combined with that point, raised an issue that had probably not occurred to the commenter. The Silicon Valley people who worked to reelect Obama were acting on their view of Obama and his policies. The arguments of the essay imply that they ought to be willing to revise that view and alter their political activities accordingly as further evidence comes in.

If, as many sources seem to suggest, Obama did not realize that healthcare.gov was not going to work, and if the reason he did not realize it was that he had created a culture around him in which people did not feel free to pass on bad news to their boss, then he is not, and was not, competent to be President. If, as Obama himself implied in contrasting the failure of healthcare.gov to the success of the IT efforts of his reelection campaign, government is very bad at doing this sort of thing, that is at least some evidence that the ACA was a mistake, likely to make health care worse rather than better.

I wonder how willing his supporters in Silicon Valley will be to apply the "test and revise accordingly" approach to their own political views.

The Second Amendment in the 21st Century

A recent facebook post pointed me at an entertaining video in favor of gun control. The point of the video, surely correct, is that mass shootings were a lot less practical with 18th century firearms than with modern firearms. Its conclusion: "Guns have changed. Shouldn't our gun laws?"

There are two problems with the argument. The first is that gun laws have changed quite a lot over the past two hundred plus years. The second is that, while mass shootings get a lot of publicity, they represent only a tiny fraction of all killings.

There is, I think, a better argument to be made for the effect of technological change on the argument for the right to bear arms. As I interpret the Second Amendment, it was intended as a solution to a problem that worried eighteenth century political thinkers, the problem of the professional army. As had been demonstrated in the previous century, a professional army could beat an army of amateurs. As was also demonstrated, a professional army could seize power. Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army won the first English Civil War for parliament and then won the second English Civil War for itself, with the result that Cromwell spent the rest of his life as the military dictator of England.

The Second Amendment, as I interpret it, was intended to solve that problem by combining a small professional army with an enormous amateur militia. In time of war, the size of the militia would make up for its limited competence. In time of peace, if the military tried to seize power or if the government supported by the military became too oppressive, the professionals would be outnumbered a thousand to one by the amateurs. It was an ingenious kludge.

It depended, however, on a world where the weapons possessed by ordinary people for their own purposes, mostly hunting, were as effective as the weapons possessed by the military. We are no longer in such a world. The gap between military weapons and civilian weapons is very much larger now than then. One result is that the disorganized militia, the population in general, no longer plays any role in military defense. Another is that, if there ever was a military coup in the U.S., ordinary civilians would be much less able to oppose it with force than they would have been two hundred years ago.

Civil conflict in a modern developed society is much more likely to be carried on with information than with guns—a government that wants to oppress its population does it by controlling what people say and know. It follows, in my view, that the modern equivalent of the Second Amendment, the legal rule needed to make it possible for the population to resist the government, has nothing to do with firearms. The 21st century version would be a rule forbidding government regulation of encryption. A government that has no way of knowing what who is saying to whom lacks the most powerful weapons for winning an information war.

There remains a strong argument for the right to bear arms, different from but related to its original function. People who are unable to protect themselves are dependent for protection on the police. The more dependent people are on the police, the more willing they are to tolerate, even support, increased police power. Hence disarming the population makes possible increased levels of government power and the misuse thereof, although for a somewhat different reason than in the 18th century.

Which is an argument against restrictions on the private ownership of firearms.

The Killer App for Google Glass

I can remember large amounts of poetry, but people's names, faces and the  information associated with them are a different matter. For the most part, I successfully conceal my handicap by a policy of never using names if I can help it, but once in a while the tactic fails. I still remember, as perhaps my most embarrassing moment, recommending Larry White's work on free banking to someone who looked vaguely familiar—and turned out to be Larry White. 

Help, however, is on the way. I first encountered the solution to my problem in Double Star, a very good novel by Robert Heinlein. It will be made possible, in a higher tech version, by Google glass. The solution is the Farley File, named after FDR's campaign manager. 

A politician such as Roosevelt meets lots of people over the course of his career. For each of them the meeting is an event to be remembered and retold. It is much less memorable to the politician, who cannot possibly remember the details of ten thousand meetings. He can, however, create the illusion of doing so by maintaining a card file with information on everyone he has ever met: The name of the man's wife, how many children he has, his dog, the joke he told, all the things the politician would have remembered if the meeting had been equally important to him. It is the job of one of the politician's assistants to make sure that, any time anyone comes to see him, he gets thirty seconds to look over the card.

My  version will use more advanced technology, courtesy of Google glass or one of its future competitors. When I subvocalize the key word "Farley," the software identifies the person I am looking at, shows me his name (that alone would be worth the price) and, next to it, whatever facts about him I have in my personal database. A second trigger, if invoked, runs a quick search of the web for additional information.

I am told that Google itself has a rule against building face recognition into glassware, so my Farley file software may not appear in the immediate future. But it is the killer app, and someone will build it.