Microsoft is now out to prove that Bastiat’s 1850 broken window fallacy (Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas) is actually a great way to make money! (In other words, profit from waging expensively self-destructive cyber wars.)

What do I mean by profit from broken windows?

In a real-life example, scientist and environmental activist David Suzuki has often claimed that a corporation polluting a river adds to a country’s GDP. If the river has become polluted, an expensive program will be required to clean it up. Residents may choose to buy more expensive bottled water rather than cheaper tap water.

Suzuki points to this new economic activity, which will raise GDP, and claim that the GDP has risen overall in the community, although the quality of life has decreased.

Suzuki, however, forgot to take into account all the decreases in GDP that will be caused by the water pollution precisely because the economic losers are more difficult to identify than the economic winners. We don’t know what the government or the taxpayers would have done with the money had they not needed to clean up the river. We know from the Broken Window Fallacy that there will be an overall decline in GDP, not a rise.

That’s right. An 1850 economic theory predicted attempts by Microsoft to fraudulently make money with broken WINDOWS.

In the early 1990s Bill Gates infamously told his lead engineers and architects he would leave security out of the first release of Windows NT 3.5 (and I remember it well!) because safety slowed down their release schedules.

In the late 1990s Bill Gates also infamously told the SCO (Santa Cruz Operations) security teams (and I again remember well, hearing it directly from them!) that he had no interest in adding security to Windows after the fact because it wouldn’t make him a billion dollars.

Microsoft was willfully pumping out known defective windows expected to break.

This was confessed in 2001 with incredibly tone deaf articles like “Gates pushed change in security culture at Microsoft“.

Yeah he pushed NO SECURITY long and hard because he demanded broken Windows would bring him higher margins.

Speaking of long and hard, when I was in college my economics professor described to his students the Gates family way of thinking in terms of Soviet corruption (and this is allegedly a true story, as he was an expert in Soviet apocryphal economics):

When window production success was measured on tonnage generated, the windows came out so hard/thick none would fit in any buildings. So when window production success was shifted to measure square meters generated, the windows came out so long/thin none ever made to to the buildings without breaking.

Since the inputs didn’t change, and corruption allowed the factory operators to be lauded based on simplistic metrics, they gamed the system for selfish profit and screwed everyone else.

What was Microsoft Windows really measured on? It wasn’t security (preventing breaches), that’s for sure, and so decades of broken Windows have flowed and flowed and flowed into buildings around the world (especially America) being breached over and over and over again.

The SolarWinds disaster is like a ridiculously obvious return to Soviet-era economic lessons (if not 1850s early industrialization) for very basic supply-chain safety.

Microsoft (MSFT) is officially a cybersecurity giant. For the first time on Tuesday, Microsoft disclosed revenue from its various security offerings as part of its quarterly earnings — $10 billion over the last 12 months.

That amounts to a 40% year-over-year jump in the growing security business, making up roughly 7% of the company’s total revenue for the previous year.

“We waited in some sense [until] this milestone to show the depth, the breadth, the span of what we are doing,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Yahoo Finance… [following] Microsoft’s involvement in uncovering the breadth of the massive SolarWinds cyber attack in December, which hit private companies like cybersecurity firm FireEye (FEYE) and government agencies including the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments, as well as the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s very sad and so very unfortunate how Microsoft pushed out Windows that break and now is so shamelessly pleased to announce it’s making all its money repairing them. Why aren’t the Window repairs paid directly out of Gates’ fortunes?

In reality the cost of repairing Windows is dragging the economy down, while Gates gets richer.

Deploying broken Windows in the first place is a shameless tax on companies, which all would be far better off buying safe systems and then spending “fix tax” money elsewhere because it’s not needed (broken window fallacy as Bastiat warned us so long ago).

Related: a Harvard thesis in the mid-1990s (same time Gates was pushing out broken windows) argued apartheid can be very profitable (for fascists who stand to profit from those forced to live in fear with broken windows)

Kobach wrote about a white police state as good for business. He seemed to think beating down non-white populations (those seeking equal rights with white police) was how to push wealth into white hands just as a matter of “peace keeping”.

Now go back to the start of this post and tell me if you can see the “where do you want to go today” slogan (perhaps a longer version of “get out”) in that image from 1907 rioting white supremacists in Canada, breaking all the windows…

An interesting new set of evidence shows an old controversial theory is turning out to be true: Ronald Reagan worked covertly to block American attempts to free their hostages in Iran, as a means to win the Presidency.

A Jacobin magazine article writes up the core issue:

[We don’t have a smoking gun for] Reagan striking a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election, but simply working behind the scenes to thwart negotiations to free them.

Jacobin pulled that analysis from the following paragraphs in a hugely important NYT disclosure, generated from fresh “records of Project Eagle donated to Yale” that were unsealed upon Rockefeller’s recent death.

Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.

The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.

“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.

That all should have been the introductory context setting for another new article in The Drive that gives an incredibly detailed look at Operation Eagle Claw.

Any judgment of Eagle Claw must be rendered within this context. Political partisanship aside, any fair, objective appraisal of the mission must also acknowledge that not only did President Carter’s strategy deliver the desired results in the end, that strategy was, in the words of Pollack, “the only one that could have worked [emphasis original].” Unfortunately, it took 444 grueling, stressful days to reach the desired conclusion.

The Drive fails to consider at all (in its “non-partisan” effort) whether Reagan’s “smooth, smooth, smooth” elite team of high-powered officials were effective at extending the grueling, stressful days. That seems essential to the story.

More importantly the Drive gushes with positive portrayals of Carter as a great leader, highly respected in the military, yet no harsh assessment of Reagan’s efforts to intentionally harm America and increase suffering of America’s high-profile hostages… harms done just to drive a great leader like Carter out and push himself and GOP into the White House.

People arguing that Facebook has a point (in suing Apple) are just more evidence of the problem in America. It’s like someone at Facebook packaged logical fallacies into bright colored candy and we all know how Americans do love their sugar.

Stop saying slippery slope. it’s a fallacy
Stop using tu quoque. it’s a fallacy
Stop the no true Scotsman. it’s a fallacy

A genocidal anti-democratic digital slavery plantation of Facebook that regularly peddles lies to escape regulation, is NOT directly comparable to any company that wants your business a little too much.

These are two very very very different companies. I have bashed on Apple flaws and crimes for over a decade now (don’t own a single product) but there is no way in hell I would distract attention to them from Facebook. It’s like saying General Lee might be the worst man on the planet (terrible general, terrible human who enslaves people) but have you looked at whether a company selling guns to the Union army is too dominant?

Come on. Americans need to get a clue here.

(And if in any logical debate you bring up “pigs love mud” I’m going to have to point you to classes on selective hearing flaws and why that phrase means the opposite of what you think).