The News & TeleGraff

Take Me Out to the Ballgame!

Thanks to the father of a friend, who had seasons tickets, I got to go to the opening of the Washington nationals new stadium last night. It was certainly one of the more enjoyable baseball games I've ever attended -- even though the temperature last night reminded me of the early spring games at Fenway and I used to go to in college.

President Bush was on hand to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, but rather than a celebratory moment, it was sad all around. The president was vigorously booed at every mention; he must've said a land speed record in throwing out the first pitch—a total of 59 seconds on the field. Here's the video:

Overall I thought the stadium was great—the seats were comfortable; the sight lines for good; and there were even cupholders. The only complaint from everyone around us was just how long the lines were for food—something that seems like it will be fixed with time and certainly when there are fewer people at the games. Even the Metro ran rather smoothly in both directions.

Here's the complete set of photos from the ballpark.

Freedom of the Press

I got a sneak preview of the museum this weekend, which opens to the public officially in mid-April. In one corner there's a giant world map demonstrating the degrees of freedom of the press around the world. Green means a mostly free press. Yellow means a restricted press. The color red means a country where the press is in no way free.

I thought that it's sad that the two countries that the U.S. is currently occupying—Iraq and Afghanistan—show up on the map in red. Perhaps more than anything that measurement shows the failure of our efforts to rebuild the countries: Five years and we can't even paint them yellow.

Orange and Black

I'm off in the morning to Princeton, the first time I've ever visited there. I'll speaking at the Center for Information Technology Policy so I'm up late tonight putting the finishing touches on my speech. It's always a little bit harder and a little bit more nerve-racking to be speaking to an audience that knows what you're talking about.

My light reading for the train: "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky. Why can't I ever manage just to bring a good detective mystery when I travel?

Sputnik Moments

One of my favorite concepts from researching "The First Campaign," was this idea from Andy Stern of "Sputnik moments"—that is, teachable moments that made everyone sit up and pay attention. Given the tunnel vision of American society, "Sputnik moments" basically means moments so ripe with symbolism or simply too huge to ignore—September 11 was certainly a Sputnik moment for our interactions with the Muslim world.

While I was working on the book, Britain experienced one in regards to India in October 2006 when the Tata Group, the Indian-founded conglomerate that is becoming an increasing world presence, bought Corus, the company that had once been British Steel in an US$8 billion deal. Prior to the deal, Tata was much smaller than Corus—it was ranked 56th in the world for steel production—but the rising Indian star found no shortage of global financial lenders to back the deal who were ready to gamble that the future of business lay in the east. Between the combined outputs of Corus (then the ninth largest world steel producer) and Tata, the new company produces more steel than once-proud giant US Steel. The British papers were, all at once, proud, troubled, and curious over the deal—the largest foreign takeover ever by a company from Britain’s former colony.

At the time Ed Luce, the former South Asia bureau chief for the Financial Times, told me that it was only a matter of time before the US and India had a Sputnik moment to call their own too.

When Tata announced the bid in October 2006, already that month Tata had bought the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston as well as a 30 percent stake in Joekels, the South African tea company, adding to its expanding drink portfolio, which included Tetley Tea. Earlier in 2006, it had bought two major U.S. brands: Eight O’Clock Coffee and Glaceau’s line of flavored waters. So far Tata’s international expansion and the implications of the supersized growth of Indian firms has stayed mostly off the political radar in the U.S. Don’t expect that to continue, Luce said. "At some point soon, we’re going to see the same thing in the U.S." Luce told me as we were sitting in an Italian restaurant in Dupont. "ICICI Bank will buy Citigroup or Wipro will buy IBM and then there’ll be this rush to understand India. Right now, it’s not urgent—it’s just pressing."

Today may just be a Sputnik moment, a small one granted, but one nonetheless: Tata Motors just this morning bought two luxury brands away from the struggling Ford Motors, Jaguar and Land Rover. Now I'll grant that most Americans probably didn't even know that these two European luxury brands were owned by Ford, but what does it say about the future of the world's economy that already this year Tata seems poised to become a top player in the automobile industry? Earlier this year it announced a $2500 automobile and now it's buying two of the most respected automobile brands in the world.

From this morning's article from AFP:

"We would have much preferred Ford to keep the companies in the family, so to speak, especially with Land Rover being so profitable," said British labor leader Tony Woodley, whose union had supported India's top vehicle maker in its bid. "But with the commitments Tata have given to the future of Jaguar-Land Rover and the long-term supply agreements for components, especially engines from Bridgend and Dagenham [Ford sites in Britain], we're obviously pleased."

Let's see how much coverage this sale ends up getting in the States over the coming days—in the long run, GM, the longtime leading automaker which finished last year as the world's largest by what amounted to a rounding error, may have more to fear from Tata than from Toyota.

Bush's War

I stumbled last night into watching Frontline's documentary, "Bush's War," which was as captivating and fascinating to watch as New York magazine promised it would be: "If you’ll watch only one television program on the catastrophe in Iraq, make it this one."

More:

Like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Freud’s return of the repressed, the war in Iraq keeps on coming back to bite us in the pineal gland. We do our best to distract ourselves with the collapse of the American economy or the rehab of pop tarts, but then another suicide bomb explodes in Baghdad and we are made to wonder once again—$3 trillion for exactly what? Bush’s War can’t tell us exactly “what,” except for a fiasco, but this two-night, four-and-a-half-hour Frontline special is the best audiovisual history of who, why, when, and how available to date.

The second half airs tonight. Watch it.

Spam and laws

When I asked Larry Lessig why geeks don't think of the law as a possible solution to their challenges, he told an interesting story:

He says he first realized the depth of the tech/politics disconnect after attending some of the first anti-spam conferences. At the conferences, geek after geek rose to discuss how to get another 5% improvement in filtering here, 3% incremental improvement in blocking there, or 5% by doing X or 10% by doing Y—but universally they were interested in software solutions, either new code or new protocols or new firewalls or the like. No one suggested getting government involved. Lessig suggested that new government regulation or enforcement could make a significant difference—maybe as much as 20% or 30% with game-changing legislation—and the reaction he was met with, he recalled, was that "it was so irrational to think about the law as a solution."

Technologists, he explains, lives in an idyllic environment: they get to spend their days developing and solving problems in logical, straightforward ways that are governed by strict rules and protocols. Code makes sense. Coding makes sense. The whole series of interlocking protocols online, from CSS to TCP/IP to FTP and HTPP, all ensure smooth operation in exchange for strict adherence to the rules.

By contrast, "Washington politics is torture," Lessig said. The process doesn't make sense; it can be changed at any time by rules that someone else makes up; "super users" (lobbyists, senior staff, bureaucrats, and committee chairmen) can hijack anything at any time; and, to top it all off, it's incredibly slow—most legislation or regulation takes five years or longer to work its way through Congress or a goverment agency—or the equivalent of more than three flips of Moore's Law. Well, yea, when you phrase it that way it doesn't sound very fun either.

I wonder whether we have made law too complicated? I'm reminded of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with Charles Overby, the head of the new Newseum. We were discussing the First Amendment, which reaches five protections into 45 words, and is carved in marble 74 feet high on the front of the Newseum. He laughed and said Congress today couldn't get even a single one of those five rights into 45 words. I couldn't agree more—I can envision a law passed today guaranteeing freedom of speech running to several hundred pages at least. And don't even try to guess how long the the 27-word Second Amendment would be if written today....

Lessig and i9/11

I spent some time on Friday with Larry Lessig, who is one of the internet's great thinkers. He's probably best known for his work on intellectual property and for his backing of movements like Creative Commons. I was most interested in talking with him about the disconnect between Silicon Valley and Washington, but that subject morphed into a larger discussion about what will happen when our nation sees its first widescale digital attack.

The question, of course, is not if but when. As Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain pointed out during their speech at Google here in Washington on Thursday, there's no particularly good reason why the U.S. has not yet a major terrorist attack online already and so the question is really more: "Why not?" Luck appears to be the answer so far.

Zittrain (who is the only web-lebrity famous enough to be known by a single letter: "Z") and Lessig rightly pointed out that the 9/11 Patriot Act, which passed in such haste after the terrorist attacks, had been long sitting in a drawer at the Justice Department waiting for just such an occasion. There's no way such a major piece of legislation could have been written so quickly. Richard Clarke, a former national counterterrorism official best known for writing "Against All Enemies," has said that there is a similar document waiting in a drawer for the first digital attack. Lessig calls it the "i9/11 Patriot Act." After that attack—whether it shuts down the power grid, crashes Wall Street, or undermines the nation's air traffic control system—the government will argue that the attack demonstrates that privacy online comes at too great a cost and so the government must be able to access ALL information that passes online in whatever form—you know, to save us from ourselves.

The challenge inherent in that debate, though, is that the government so poorly understands technology and all of the various internets that such a law would be really the blind leading the blind. As Lessig told me Friday morning at Starbucks, "The i9/11 will be handled by people who have no idea."

I can't even imagine what a terrible piece of legislation it would be. One of the key reasons that technologists really do need to get involved in politics is so that there's some understanding of the process and the players before that while comes to the fore. In order to have any hope of stopping legislation that as Zittrain argues in his new book, "The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It," there need to be smart people involved very early on in the process of drafting it. Of course, there's the huge challenge: How to harness the nimble, entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley for the slow, tedious, and confusing corridors of power in Washington? As Lessig asked me, "How do you get people to understand the salience of process?"

One thing is clear: We can't allow this generative force that will have so much to do with the growth of the US and global economy over the next half-century to be arrested in the name of ill-conceived security measures.

Borat but Swedish

So one of my Swedish friends sent me YouTube videos today of a new television show in Sweden that seems like a real-life Borat. In "Top 100 from U.S.," these two Swedish guys travel around the United States finding things to make fun of. This clip shows them in Fort Lauderdale:

Here are two others. As my friend said, it "might not help the US reputation in Sweden." That certainly seems true.

I could actually see the show being a hit here too. There's something about all the jabbering in Swedish that's hilarious. And of course there's so much rich material here in the States—I imagine the Top 100 would just be a start!

Just Saying

I'm just back from the "Take Back America" gala, part of the annual Take Back America conference put on by two great groups: The Campaign for America's Future and the related Institute for America's Future. I gave a lot of ink in "The First Campaign" to the Campaign's Apollo Alliance project to build a new green-focused economy.

Anyway I digress.

At my table tonight, we were discussing how the conference is poorly named (I was, in the interest of full disclosure, a guest of the Sunlight Foundation tonight). "Take Back America" might have been a great name in 2003-2004 when the conference started and Democrats were angry and unfocused. However today progressives are in the middle of a historic election where their party will choose either a woman or a black to be the party's nominee for president. Democrats today hold both houses of Congress and the electoral map for November looks promising for further gains. It seems like the conference should really be about taking America forward, especially given the campaign for America's future's projects like the Apollo Alliance.

In 2003, Howard Dean frequently used on the campaign trail as her frame "I want my country back." There's a subtle but important difference between "take back America" and "I want my country back." The campaign made a point never to say "take America back."

I hope this is the last year where the progressives focus on taking back the country. We've got enough challenges just looking ahead to the future.

Joining the Superclass

I've just started reading David Rothkopf's "Superclass," about the global elite and how they live. His definition is rather narrow, these 6,000 or so CEOs, government leaders, financiers, and military officials who project incredible international power. Now I know I'm still far removed from that particular class, but I've been thinking a lot in the last two weeks, especially with my trip to Helsinki in the middle of it, about how in the last two years I've joined the unique global educated elite.

As I've been traveling around the country in recent months for my book, I've been meeting up with friends in every city that I visit -- friends accumulated from college, work, or any number of the conferences that I've attended. I know in just about any city in the country and in most major cities around the globe there'll be someone that I know. Today I even complained to a friend overseas that she was writing her Facebook status updates in a language I didn't understand. This weekend I'll be seeing some of the people who I met in Helsinki last week, who are we visiting Washington this weekend for work. Many of the people at last week's conference had lived or worked overseas, and a few of them had even moved back and forth from the Nordic countries to the United States and back again. The increasingly porous borders of the European Union make moving around ever easier. My friends will debate things like the merits of dual citizenship that allows them to move and travel more easily. These are all opportunities, problems, and benefits of a very narrow global population.

On Tuesday I had drinks with a friend and we were comparing the shopping scene in Shanghai and Buenos Aires when I stopped and noted how rare this conversation would have been either for the 3 billion or so people in the world who will rarely if ever leave their home villages or for any number of our parents' or grandparents' generation. All told, according to the map on my Facebook page, I've visited some 10% of the world's countries -- and I feel like I am one of the less well-traveled of my friends.

Living in Washington and working at the Washingtonian, I also at least have access to the "superclass." We eat at the same restaurants, go to the same places, and once or twice a month at least I find myself talking to one of them. Much of the opening of the "Superclass" focuses on Davos and the World Economic Forum, which while I've never attended does at least impact my life as sources head overseas and schedules get rearranged. I even had one college class start with the professor giving his first lecture via satellite link from Switzerland.

One of the stories in "Superclass" that I found most familiar was an anecdote of a billionaire in first-class realizing that the woman next to him had attended kindergarten with him; when he said, "Small world," she replied, "At the top." That's certainly how it feels to me often enough.

MSM vs. Wikipedia

For Wednesday night's Georgetown class, I focused on Wikipedia, as well as a quick overview of internet law (libel, etc.), so this week I've been thinking a lot about the questions of who records history and journalism, that "first rough draft of history." There's always been incredible inherent power in being the person who writes an encyclopedia or a textbook—just ask the Indians, blacks, or any other persecuted minority.

Wikipedia gets a lot of criticism for being unreliable and certainly one of its great challenges is that quality varies a great deal between entries. But Dave Weinberger had a Tweet this morning that made me think:

For lots of info, Wikipedia is as reliable as MSM, except you don't get blamed for citing MSM if the MSM is wrong.

One noteworthy fact: Wikipedia has never been successfully for libel.

Al Jazeera and Me

Al Jazeera English asked me a couple of weeks ago to do a webcam interview for a piece on voter-generated content:

All-in-all it's a good piece and pretty thoughtfully done, which is not something I generally say about TV news. I'm a big fan of what Al Jazeera English is trying to do and I think it's a travesty that no major U.S. cable outlet will carry their channel—a statement so blanket that one can only believe that the blackout is politically oriented. What's so wrong with giving Americans access to the Mideast point of view?

Bill Gates: 'Washington, We Have a Problem'

This morning I attended the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s "Titans of Technology" breakfast to hear none other than keynote speaker Bill Gates himself. It was quite the event—more than 1,100 people packed into the Capitol Hilton ballroom at 7:30 in the morning to hear Gates talk, from tech entrepreneurs to venture capitalists, recruiters, lawyers, businessmen, and even a handful of politicians. It was certainly in aggressive networking crowd for that early of the morning. Business cards were flying everywhere.

Gates, who during his brief stint at Harvard actually lived in the same freshman dorm room as I did, was in town to talk on Capitol Hill about a number of policy issues near and dear to his heart—not the least of which was America’s competitive standing in the globalized tech world. Now I argued in "The First Campaign" that one of the biggest problems facing the United States is the increasing disconnect between the government and the technology sectors. Luckily, despite the theme of Gates' remarks, this morning at least there was little of that disconnect on display—Congressman Jim Moran and Frank Wolf, who both represent the Northern Virginia tech corridor, were in attendance at the breakfast, as were a number of other local and state government officials. As far as Gates was concerned, though, that's about as far as it goes. He at several points made mention of the fact that the government isn't doing what it needs to be doing to keep the tech sector competitive.

While Gates's speech focused mostly on where he sees technology going in the coming decade, what he calls the second digital decade—mainly increased convergence of broadcast television, cable, speech recognition, velocity, and desktop computing—what I found most interesting given my interest in the subject was Moran’s question to Gates at the end about his assessment of the political landscape in regards to tech. Needless to say, the world's second-richest man didn’t paint an optimistic portrait.

As Gates said, “Historically the United States has done a great job with making the right investments.” However, today he has doubts as to whether the U.S. is equipped to make the same type of investments. The U.S. political system appears to be increasingly geared toward short-term stimuli even at the expense of long-term payoffs. One example he cited was the current plan to provide tax rebate checks to boost to the economy while ignoring any longer term fixes that would help the U.S. over the next decade. Today other countries are doing the best they can to compete with the United States, wire their nations, and build the infrastructure that the U.S. has successfully created in the past. As one questioner noted, the U.S. definition of "broadband" is increasingly outdated as other countries surpass us not just in connectivity but speed as well. Worldwide all of those investments are leading to an increasingly fast pace of innovation.

The United States is struggling to maintain its traditional lead and isn't making some of the smart decisions that it should be making—Gates cited as one example the 60% of computer science students in the U.S. who are not U.S. citizens and how given the vagaries of the current immigration system not a single one of them will be allowed to get a job in the United States upon graduation, a mind-numbingly stupid decision that will have a long-term impact not just on the US economy (negatively) but the economies of developing worlds around the globe (positively). We need to be looking, Gates said, at the long-term multiplier effects of some of the investments that we could be making today—even if there is no sure short-term gain.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s CTO, said that the US is generally geared towards making introspective decisions and has a lack of understanding about how the rest of the world is coming online. Too often, he explained, he runs into politicians who say in answer to his prods and questions, “The polls won’t let us do that.” What we need here is some real leadership from the government, he said, to explain why some of these investments are so critical to our nation’s future. Mundie has very strong concerns that we skew too much to the short-term today in the decision-making on Capitol Hill and in the government. There is much more energy outside the United States for infrastructure investments then there is inside the United States, he said.

Gates also had some choice words for the U.S. education system, which he has been helping to reform and revolutionize through the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He said that too often school today in the U.S. is “like stepping back in time.” Kids today, as he explained, have cell phones, Xboxes, and all sorts of electronic gadgets at home, but when they step into the schools they are likely to face computer shortages, limited access to the internet, and even outdated software. “It’s a real problem,” Gates said.

Unfortunately the challenge of the morning for Gates and the Microsoft team was that they were preaching to the choir: the people in the audience from Congressman Moran to Northern Ireland's Minister of Trade, Enterprise, and Investment are the ones who already understand just how important technology will be to the future of the world economy. Given the early hour, the people Gates really needed to reach were probably still sleeping.

Security and Professionalism

One of my friends, Matthew, has a great blog about tech issues and his own experiences with geekdom—I learn a lot about hosting and servers and the like from him. His post today about the professionalism of sysadmins echoed something that I heard from a guy here in Washington a few weeks back who does dark-art computer security, the really high-level stuff when someone hacks into Mastercard and steals a million accounts or the Pentagon finds itself under attack from the Chinese.

Here's Matthew's observations today:

I frequent WebHostingTalk.com, a really good forum for people in the web hosting industry. There are lots of really knowledgeable people on there….but some are just distressing. One guy posted, maybe a year ago, that he was getting a “private room” and didn’t know what he’d need for equipment. Did he need a router? Switches? A “private room” in a data center, by the way, is to host your many racks of servers, walled off from others for maximum security. You’ve got to be a very big place, with a very big budget, to be doing that. This is kind of like asking, “I’m buying a 500,000 square foot warehouse. What do I need? Do I need a forklift? Lights?” (A lot of answers were basically, “What do you need? You need an IT department, and someone who doesn’t have to ask this question.” Although my favorite answer was, “Padded walls.” Normally it annoys me when people give rude answers online, but I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.)

...

Who are these people? I wouldn’t post a blog making fun of people who didn’t know otherwise obscure things, except that these should be basic little tasks for people in these positions. It’d be like a certified (not certifiable, but certified) sysadmin for Windows systems posting and saying, “I need to change my desktop background? How can I do this?” Or a car mechanic, who’s gone on and opened his third garage, posting and saying, “The oil in my car is old and dirty. Is it possible to somehow drain the old oil and put new oil in?” Or, for the more absurd requests we see, someone posting on a financial forum about how they’re starting a lemonade stand and think they need $750 billion in startup capital, wondering what bank will give them a better interest rate. It just shocks me that these people are successful and yet so clueless.

According to my source, one of the biggest challenges in network security right now is how IT is often an afterthought in the initial stages of a company. You start a law firm and you first hire your couple of lawyer partners then one of them has a nephew who knows something about computers and you get him to set up your email servers and network. Then as the firm grows, he gets hired on full-time since he built the original system. Before you know it you're running a massive firm with the same nephew overseeing the IT and your systems aren't nearly as robust or secure as you need them to be. My source says he's seen a couple of law firms who have had entire casefiles hacked and lost because of bad IT.

If you're thinking about setting up a company these days, make sure you get your IT right from the start—it's going to be much less expensive and easier in the long run, even though it'll be more difficult and more expensive as you get started.

The web is much too scary of a place these days to try to do it easy on the cheap.

The Rising Bear

As someone pointed out last night, it was exactly 200 years ago that Russian Cossacks occupied Helsinki, then a thriving metropolis of some 4,500 Swedes (since Finland was still part of Sweden). The cathedral I posted about earlier today was built for the Russians soon thereafter. Russia, as one might imagine, is never far from the minds of the Finns today. The lengthy border between the nations is one of the world's starkest dividing lines, in terms of measures income and life expectancy. A Finnish male today is expected to live roughly two decades longer than a counterpart across the border. While the Soviet Union was still in existence, roughly 27 percent of Finnish trade was with Russia, but after the end of the Cold War that number dropped to just three percent—a pretty good indication of the economic meltdown the country has seen in the last twenty years. Of course today, it seems to be on the rise again.

On the military front, it didn't escape notice that Russia buzzed a U.S. aircraft carrier two weeks ago. According to that same article, there have been eight incidents between Russian bombers and U.S. fighters off the coast of Alaska since September.

Politically, though, Russia is in a really interesting place. As one diplomat pointed out last night at dinner, what does it say about modern Russia that the Russian election this week was never in doubt but that in America, tomorrow's Texas and Ohio primaries has everyone on the edge of their seats? We knew just as well that Putin's hand-picked successor would win as we did that Saddam Hussein would win reelection in Iraq. Is there any doubt that Russia is no longer an open democracy? What does that mean for the next decade in terms of Russia, Europe, and the U.S.? I can tell from conversations here that the Nordic countries are thinking very very hard about this question.

Fun Löyly (Sauna) Facts

We watched a hilarious and enjoyable 50-minute documentary on the Finnish national Löyly (sauna) culture. It’s pretty far north up here—we’re only a degree of latitude farther south than Anchorage—so there's a natural interest in spending lots of time in a (very) warm environment, but the Finns take it to an intense level.

Here are some fun facts from the documentary:

• There are two million saunas in Finland for about five million people.
  
• Finns are so dedicated to saunas that they're aboard everything from icebreakers to deployed overseas with Finnish troops. In Kosovo, there are 20 saunas for 300 troops. The largest sauna is at the Naval Academy.
  
• Today more than 90 percent of new apartments are built with in-apartment saunas.
  
• There's a Finnish saying regarding medical ailments: "If sauna, booze, and tar don't help, it's fatal."
  
• The longtime Finnish leader Urho Kekkonen was famous for his "sauna diplomacy," where he would bring world leaders into his presidential sauna for extended negotiating sessions.

Anyway, if the movie ever makes it onto YouTube, it’ll be a huge viral success.

Climate Change

Here's a view of the Baltic Sea from Hanasaari Sunday morning. Normally this bay would be solidly ice at this time of year but the Finns are having their warmest winter in a century and the two inches of snow that fell Saturday night was the first on the ground in a while. When we arrived at the airport, the country was all brown ground.

The trio of massive icebreakers in Helsinki harbor that we passed Sunday on our tour of the city have been unused virtually all winter.

It's easy to see why climate change is such a huge issue in the Nordic countries—they're seeing it every day.

Here's the link to my full set of only so-so photos from Helsinki. As I said, we didn't really get of the bus for most of the tour so much of the photography was done through the dirty bus windows. Not exactly ideal. The fresh snow, though, did make everything look prettier and wonderful. And I loved exploring the Hanasaari peninsula early yesterday morning and finding fresh bunny tracks.

Helsinki Orthodox Cathedral

Here's a photo I took yesterday of the Russian Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral as part of our whirlwind tour of Helsinki. I joked that it was a very American tour of the city—the bus we were only barely slowed down and we almost never got off it. It's how I think many Americans see national parks: "Off to the right kids, that's the Grand Canyon. Now on to McDonald's."

One amazing culture shock has been the Nordic emphasis on being on time: Everything here starts and ends on time to the minute. If a panel is supposed to start at 2 p.m., you better be in your seats at 1:58 and if it's over at 4 p.m. you can count on the moderator will be doing closing remarks as the clock touches 4 p.m. Yesterday's tour began a half-an-hour (!) late due to bus difficulties and the tour guide seemed to think it was a national scandal, apologizing profusely and explaining "Murphy's Law" and the "Snowball Effect." The two-hour driving tour of Helsinki, which was extended an extra half-hour, had us pulling into the Hanasaari driveway exactly one minute after the intended end time. The Finns among us get very agitated at anything that is more than a minute or two off schedule. The eight-minute late start to the afternoon panel—mostly caused by us Americans—was enough to provoke a chiding.

For us Americans, used to things starting ten minutes late and ending whenever they come to a conclusion, it's an impressive (and quite appreciated) feature—although so far every one of us has a story of wandering into something two or three minutes late only to find it well underway. Thursday night, just before I left the States, I attended the National Press Foundation dinner, which I noted was impressive for only wrapping up seven minutes late—an unheard of feat for a Washington gala—but I can imagine that if it had been in Helsinki it would have been over seven minutes earlier than it was.

Helsinki: Walls or Windmills?

I just arrived this morning in Helsinki for a week-long globalization conference sponsored by Hanasaari, the Swedish-Finnish Cultural Center. The conference brings together a dozen Americans with a group of Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Swedes, and even a person or two from Iceland. I'll be speaking Wednesday on the government and the internets.

I'm always fascinated traveling overseas and seeing how other governments operate and how America is viewed from other perspective. One speaker today rounded up the Finnish view of Americans as "Three S's": Stetsons, shotguns, and SUVs.

The sessions are off-the-record so I can't say exactly who said what, but I will say that the panel was mostly ambassadors and diplomats to Finland. The challenge today, the speakers concluded, was that Europe and the Nordic countries often see more differences with the U.S. than similarities. Throughout the Cold War, a common enemy united Europe and the U.S. and so the differences weren't as visible but today without that common enemy we appear to have very different belief systems and worldviews. One major difference is that Europe has an ethos that says that government is part of the solution to any major societal problem, whereas the U.S. has an ethos that the government is more likely than not only not part of the solution but just as likely to be the problem itself. Now I firmly believe this isn't the case—"The First Campaign" argues strongly that government has a huge role in protecting the American economy from the challenges wrought by globalization's free markets, but I can certainly identify from the sentiment.

A speaker today had an interesting point—he tried to translate a saying roughly as "There are two kinds of people react when the wind blows, those who build walls and those who build windmills." The context actually came up today in the sense of the Danish commitment to renewable energy and conservation—the country has managed to have a 25 percent growth in its GDP without any gain in its energy use—but it made me think of the U.S.'s whole approach to the world today. I can't help but think that since 9/11 we've been building too many walls and not enough windmills at home and around the world.