The couple that fights like cats and dogs and nobody understands their marriage — AOL introduced them. When you’re running late stressed to your eyeballs and you hear the DING! of an UberPool match in Outer Outer Richmond who will be down as soon as she’s done brining her shrimp — AOL handpicked her. AOL created Batman v. Superman and lobbied hard against macaroni & cheese.

AOL was here when you learned to ride a bike and tripped into your first kiss. AOL was here when you lost your wisdom teeth and got your diploma. And AOL will be here the day you die, laying you to rest in a “joint partnership” casket alongside your high school ex, that phone support agent from Delta, and a fully grown man whispering “please turn on Instagram post notifications…” into your decaying ear for the rest of all eternity.

For a country fighting over security, we seem to know very little about it. I’m reminded of this every time I fly out of LAX, since they’ve got a security hole big enough for Timothy McVeigh to drive a truck through.

LAX has two security lines. The “9/10” line gives you the classic metal detector of days gone by. The “9/12” line gives you the billion-dollar body scans we bought after 9/11. Only passengers in the “precheck” program can go through 9/10 security. At the apex of the lines sits a TSA magician who ensures everyone’s in their proper place.

But here’s what actually happens when I arrive at the seventh largest airport in the world:

1. My TSA magician, whom I call The Great Tagliatelle (I’m usually starving by the time I reach him), meticulously runs through a series of checks.
2. If I pass, he waves me through.
3. The 9/10 line then immediately merges with the 9/12 line, completely negating everything he just did.
4. He begins to weep of existential futility, whereupon his boss promptly fires him for exceeding the 3-ounce teardrop limit.

A few minutes later, the now-blended line reaches the magician’s assistant, Ziti. This is the real gatekeeper. Ziti decides who’s tall enough to ride the metal detector and who must submit to the explosives machine. He has zero information from the prior screening. He’s usually baked. Ziti’s security test is always the same: Can you show me a piece of paper that smells anything like a boarding pass and has the word “PRECHECK” on it?

Unlike his boss, Ziti doesn’t have even the pretense of high technology. At most, he wields blue latex. But unless these gloves are designed to authenticate boarding passes, I can only conclude that airport security — like most security we tolerate — is based on the idea that a terrorist will never get access to one of these:

I’ve been to other airports that don’t want to take this chance. Instead, they’ll have The Great Tagliatelle hand you an Asymmetric Cryptographic Polycarbonate Cipher to pass to Ziti. That’s industry lingo for “laminated clip-art”:

But those are maximum security airports: Their terrorists must have the emotional maturity to walk into Kinko’s.

At LAX, you don’t even need toner. If you can just manage to make the words “PRECHECK” appear on your phone screen, in anything vaguely resembling an electronic boarding pass, you’re in. If you can’t figure this out, ask the 9 year-old in line behind you…once they finish airbrushing the love handles out of their latest Instagram.

How Programmers View Security

To understand the real tradeoff we’re debating in Apple v. FBI, we must think like programmers, not like the TSA.

For starters: If an engineer interviewing at Google proposed LAX-style security for your Gmail, he wouldn’t get hired. “Hopelessly naive; weird pasta-magician fetish,” the feedback would say.

Although we think of technologists as bright-eyed optimists — A computer in every home! Cars that drive themselves! — programmers are actually pessimistic, paranoid lunatics. I say this with love, because I respect the hell out of the mindset.

It starts when we’re 8 and coding our very first program. “What’s your favorite color?” it asks, sweetly, twirling a lock of Visual Basic around its finger. You type in your answer, the screen changes color accordingly, and boom — time to show off to family.

Then Aunt Jody calls.

“Honey, it froze on me. ‘Color.exe has crashed.’ I don’t know what that means.”

You take a look at her entry. She entered: 2.

“I thought it asked how many favorite colors I had?”

But how could you…but what does it even mean to have more than one favori…ok, fine. No big deal. You add a sliver of code to stop people from typing numbers into the box.

Next you post your program to the Internet. Thirty seconds later, you receive another crash report. That user entered: fart.

You can patch this, too, but you’d really like to understand it first. Was this just, somehow, another honest mishap? You send the user an e-mail: “Why? Why would you enter ‘fart’?”

He writes back: “blue.” This is the moment you realize that some people just want to watch the world burn. And nothing is ever the same again.

Seasons change, skills grow. Color war is over; now you’re programming your high school newspaper. But the lessons linger. You can’t guess everything people might do wrong, so you must ensure they only do what’s right. Before anyone can hit Sign Up, for instance, your code verifies that their name contains a real name.

The next day, a signup comes in that technically comports with your rules: It contains the name “John”. But it’s…quite a lot of Johns, with some other weird stuff at the end. Johnjohnjohnjohnjohnjohnjohnjohn… You only programmed the system to expect one. With a whorehouse worth of johns, the text overshoots the space you set aside for the name. The leftover begins spilling into other fields that should’ve been off limits from meddlers. Like the paper’s headline.

And that’s how Monday’s top story comes to be: “BUTTCHEEKS.”

Mercifully, you graduate high school to bigger and better things: quant trading at Renaissance; digital co-chair for Ross Perot ’92. The sharper you get, the more important the work. But the more valuable the work, the craftier — and more determined — your adversaries. Every attack is more novel than the last.

By the time you land an engineering gig at Apple, you are a twitchy, tinfoily mess. When your giggling date pokes you in the side and asks your favorite color, you shout: “WHO WANTS TO KNOW?!”

But at work, you’re in good company. Your peer code reviews look like a meeting of the Flat Earth Society:

What if they steal our data using electromagnetic waves or focused ion beams?

What if they cut power at the exact instant our security kicks in?

What if we think we’re talking to our server, but it’s really someone else’s?

What if the user is tricked into thinking this а is really an a?

What if 1+1 = 3?

What if it’s not actually the user’s finger unlocking the phone, but a fingerprint that has been lifted off a pasta fork and grafted onto warm jelly?

The innocence of color.exe is long gone. Nobody asks why or whether anymore; you take it for granted that someone, somewhere is breaking everything he possibly can. And it is in this spirit that you develop one of the most secure systems the world has ever known.

Please understand:

• It is not “secure” as the Coke recipe is secure. Coca Cola has the key to its vault, but you don’t have the key to yours.
• It is not “secure” as the Pentagon is secure. Those blueprints are closely guarded, but your plans — even much of your security code — are known to all.
• It is not “secure” like the planes or the trains, like your tax returns or your copy of The Sandlot or Hillary Clinton’s emails.

It is secure in that your worst enemy can steal your phone and the engineer who built it and flee to a cabin in the woods, and 50 years hence — if our understanding of physics and mathematics is correct — a hunter will stumble on two skeletons cradling a still-locked iPhone.

So adversaries be damned: You finally win on the merits. But who said anything about meritocracy? During the champagne toast, Mr. Fart steps from behind the curtain and pulls the pistol of last resort:

“Don’t ship this. Or else.”

To be clear: Contrary to a lot of shoddy reporting, and some rather “generous” language from Apple, this is not the world we’re living in yet. The fact that Apple can break into your phone demonstrates that we’re still firmly in “Coke recipe” territory. But this is not hard to fix, and Apple intends to fix it.

Despite the best efforts of government and non-government hackers around the world, then, there may come a time when the only person who would be able to enter your locked phone — come hell or high water, hearing or warrant or bullet — is you.

That means the debate will ultimately end here: Should a private company be allowed to sell unbreakable security?

— APPLE: This security protects everything from your father’s health records to the President’s communications. We’ve even repurposed the stuff to build decentralized, non-counterfeitable money. This is good news. We’re finally building real security. Based not on our fragile ability to keep secrets and behave well, but on potentially inviolable natural laws. Why do you want to bend those back with the barrel of a gun?

— GOV’T: Our job is to follow every lead to keep the country safe.

— APPLE: Yet you’re building other security systems using the worst technology we’ve ever made: consumer printers.

— GOV’T: Please respect the subpoena.

— TECH: You didn’t issue one.

— GOV’T: Well, there was a paper jam…“PC Load Letter”? What the fuck does that mean?

In short, Apple argues that this isn’t privacy versus security; it’s security versus security. That’s a much harder question than either side is willing to admit. We saw this viscerally a year ago…

What happened on March 24th, 2015?

For as much money and time as we’ve wasted on printer-powered air security, only one innovation has prevented another 9/11: Locked, reinforced cockpit doors. These doors can withstand gunfire and even small grenades.

But sometimes, 6 hours into a Cancun flight, 3 helpings into Delta’s Cargo-Class Seafood, a pilot needs to deposit a few small grenades of his own. So there’s a handshake protocol:

1. When the pooping pilot wants to reenter the cockpit, he calls the flying pilot on the intercom to buzz him in.
2. If there’s no answer, the outside pilot enters an emergency keycode. If the flying pilot doesn’t deny the request within 30 seconds, the door unlocks.
3. The flying pilot can flip a switch to disable the emergency keypad for 5 to 20 minutes (repeatedly).

Like Asimov’s three laws, these checks and balances try to approximate safety while accounting for contingencies. If the flying pilot risked Delta’s gefilte fish and passed out, you want to make sure the other pilot can still re-enter. But add all the delays and overrides and backstops you want; you still have to make a fundamental decision. Who controls entry: the people on the inside, or the people on the outside?

Governments decided that allowing crew members to fully override the flying pilot using a key code would be insecure, since it would be too easy for that code to leak. Thus, there is nothing the outside pilot can do — whether electronically or violently — to open the door if the flying pilot is both conscious and malicious.

This design came back to bite us on March 24th. The very system meant to keep passengers safe enabled a mentally ill Germanwings co-pilot to lock himself in the cockpit and slam into a mountain at the speed of sound. The locked-out captain was armed with full knowledge of the system, a fire axe, and a motivation that dwarfs any hacker’s — and still he could not penetrate the door.

History shows that there is no perfect level of accessibility when it comes to airplanes: sometimes it’s important to keep people out; sometimes it’s important to get inside.

— TIME

What’s striking is that this incident did not prompt any change in cockpit protocol in the United States. The FAA is improving mental health checks, but at 30,000 feet, we still have a security system where the parameters are widely known to criminals; where the method of abuse is clear; where we see no way for people outside the cockpit to stop it; and we’ve still decided the public is best served by keeping the people in the cockpit in charge of the lock.

This is the right choice — there are far more potential suicidal bombers in the cabin than in the cockpit.

Still, I’d hate to be the government official who has to explain this tradeoff to the mother of someone on Germanwings 9525.

Black or white

The security we encounter every day — when it works at all — is usually built out of shades of gray: Lock your door. Need more? Arm your alarm. Even more? Don’t feed Fido for a day. Marginal benefits, marginal costs.

It’s easy to assume that digital security is just another spectrum, and politicians love to reinforce that — gray’s their favorite color. Every presidential candidate is offering the same Michael Scott solution: Let’s preserve everyone’s security at once! Give a little here, take a little there, half-pregnancies for all.

Unfortunately it’s not that complicated, which means it’s not that simple. Unbreakable phones are coming. We’ll have to decide who controls the cockpit: The captain? Or the cabin? Either choice has problems, but — I’m sorry, Aunt Congress — you crash if you pick 2.

Facebook launched two things this month that were received very differently by financial markets and media. If you understand why, you will become a fiercer founder and might even make some money trading stocks.

Headlines called Product A a KILLER. CNBC said it stole over $200 million in value from another company overnight. (I think it’s about as threatening as a tapeworm.)

Product B is a rinky-dink throwaway that hasn’t, as best I can tell, been mentioned anywhere. (I think it’s the monster under your bed.)

We’ll call Product A an ice cube: nice to have, keeps your beer cold, but melts quickly from your memory. We’ll call Product B an iceberg: pivotal, foundational, and hopefully permanent — even if you can’t quite see it all.

This is idiotic terminology, but more people share Medium articles when you write with an MBA stick up your ass.

Product A

Facebook Professional Services (FPS).

Boom.

Yelp stock fell 10% — $220 million off its market cap, its largest decline in more than four months. In a day of broad market gains, let’s pretend at least some of the fall is this news.

Facebook’s ambitions in local are common knowledge, so we must assume it was already baked into Yelp’s outlook. How, then, did Yelp’s long-term prospects change today? Did Facebook launch “The Big One”?

Let’s test this launch against other icebergs I’ve worked on at Facebook:

1. Icebergs form in moats.

The difference between Facebook’s big pile of code and Google+’s big pile of code is…your momma. Facebook bends around your network. Indeed the internal APIs are designed to make it very easy for an engineer to surface Marlene your mother, and very hard to surface Marlene the lobster shucker from Iowa.

But FPS has zero social context whatsoever. There is nothing “Facebooky” about it, even in cases where there could be. For instance, according to its Facebook Page, 126 of my friends have been to The Tipsy Pig in San Francisco, and 22 of them liked it enough to Like it:

One friend even liked the Tipsy Pig enough to review it, which will probably be the topic of my next post:

But according to FPS, the most interesting thing about the joint is that a stranger named Giullian Leiete hated the bartender’s ponytail:

Maybe this is just a stunning oversight. Maybe 12,000 Facebook employees have been secretly dogfooding FPS as a Yelp killer for months, and none of them had the epiphany: “dude — should we build Facebook into this?”

But I don’t think so.

2. Icebergs skate where the puck is going.

This is the problem with MBA metaphors: Eventually you end up with ice-skating icebergs.

But if you’re trying to capture a fresh market — especially one as notoriously slow-moving as local — you take time to paint the 2.0, not lipstick the 1.0. That’s why Facebook stopped vying for e-mail and went all-in on messaging.

So, for starters: If this product were an iceberg, it would be surprising for Facebook to launch it on desktop in 2015. Heck, Facebook would probably build a VR version nowadays before it would build for desktop.

Beyond that, there’s nothing unique about FPS, no evidence that anyone ever said “What if…?” No playfulness. No experimentation. Its entire design and featureset is clearly ripped from this little-known Facebook Places website.

3. Icebergs are vertebrae.

If you judge a person’s priorities by how they spend their time, you judge a product’s priorities by how it spends its pixels. When Facebook decided search was important, it moved it from a tiny box in the upper right to a huge bar at the top — literally replacing its own name in the process. Can you get any more symbolic?

The only way to get to this standalone “Services” website is by guessing that some text is actually a link. Maybe that’s because Facebook is putting the finishing touches on the YELP KILLER 9000 before blasting it out to billions.

But I don’t think so.

4. Icebergs are built for people!

In short, if you believe that FPS is a killer response to Yelp, you have to believe that top user experience brains at 1 Hacker Way got together and had this convo:

Q: What’s the best way to find a good restaurant when you’re on the road?

A: Drive back home and type in “http://www.facebook.com/services.’’ We’ll show you a random list of nearby restaurants without any social context. If you can’t find anything in the neighborhood, we’ll send you off to random restaurants in Jakarta and São Paulo.

If this were really Facebook’s best shot at a Yelp killer, Yelp’s stock should’ve gone up.

It’s more likely that FPS isn’t designed for you; it’s designed for you. The dense links to unrelated content. The pretty URLs. The huge signup call-to-action for non-users. The total lack of core product integration. The fact that it’s powered by the same template as another SEO play, the Facebook Places Directory.

To be sure, SEO is an important source of traffic. But it doesn’t represent a new existential threat to Yelp in a world where its other major competitor is already Google itself. It’s like shaving 10% off $GOOG for Facebook People Directory.

Product B

Now let’s take a look at the redheaded stepchild, Product B.

Yeah, that’s it. Just a little announcement when you tap Facebook’s search box that recommends looking for a holiday gift. I can’t find mention of it anywhere on the Web. But here’s why it’s interesting to me:

1. Judge a company’s priorities by its pixels. This is an announcement that sits at the very top of a feature that sits at the very top of Facebook.
2. It follows a year of intense, smart, and creative experimentation in this area. This isn’t a lark. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve been noticing more and more public content/search/trend features popping up all over Facebook this year. A little indicator here, a little bar there. Some helpful suggestions. Not much to look at on their own, but together they add up to a coherent product experience that is deeply integrated into the core.

And most importantly:

3. Facebook is now ranking content above people.

The world’s premiere people mover said: “hold on there sport, have you tried a commercial search? Search for anything.”

Maybe it’s not as sexy as a standalone website. But damnit, that’s news!

How to Get Away with Murder

From the day I started working on product, people have made mountains out of mole hills and mole hills out of mountains. I’d bet that Facebook’s top product leadership has thought a lot about search and trends, but wasn’t even aware that a team was launching a standalone “Yelp Killer” website. In other words, I’d bet the energy that products A & B are getting outside the company is perfectly inverted inside.

I could be wrong. Maybe there’s a 300-person organization over there with their own sushi restaurant and a ten-year roadmap for a standalone services website, and they’re laughing at how widely I’ve missed the mark. But I’m guessing the internal reaction is:

Duh.

Because anyone who builds products at scale already knows the secret: Professional assassins don’t introduce themselves. Whatever the popular myth, Foo doesn’t crush Bar merely by relaunching it to grander fanfare; it tinkers quietly for years, experimenting with novel and native ways to do things that steal from Bar a visit here, a visit there. One day, a data scientist at Bar is grabbing coffee when she notices a trivial — almost imperceptible — dip in a graph that for as long as anyone can remember has gone up and to the right.

Facebook is probably going to kill Yelp. It’s probably not going to do it with a website called Welp. But when W goes from Will to Walmart after a decade, sleep with one eye open. That’s how you get iced.

Unfortunately he posted during lunch, so it went largely unnoticed. In all, Zuck Truck garnered just 19 likes and 2 comments:

But the world was equally divided behind the two commenters, as you can see, and the media loves a cage match. Soon experts began attacking other critical components of Mark’s plan, like whether the rubber bands around the cash might suffocate small African warblers if improperly disposed.

All this sound and fury are overshadowing what I believe to be the real depravity of the couple’s announcement. So let’s dispense with the myths and get to the root evil:

You’re probably reading this and saying, “Hey, you’re just defending Mark because he’s your friend!” And you’re probably reading that and saying, “Hey, you’re only calling yourself Mark’s friend to earn some positive news coverage for yourself!” But that’s not true. If I wanted to earn positive news coverage, the best way for me to do that would be to donate $45 billion. Do you agree? If you do, scroll back up and start reading again from the section labeled “Myth #2.”

The above is known in computer science as an infinite loop. It’s a way to forever trap incompetent people on a treadmill of stupidity, draining their mental resources, and ultimately depleting their blood cells of the vital vitamins and precious nutrients that sustain life here on Earth.

Anywho, you made it to this point, so you’ll be able to grok the real intellectual abomination of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative:

Mark refuses to use his considerable influence to shatter philanthropy’s “glass ceiling.”

We keep hearing about these angelic moguls who pledge to donate “everything.” BILL GATES TO DONATE ENTIRE FORTUNE! WARREN BUFFETT GIVES IT ALL AWAY! Now comes Mark to donate “virtually 100%.”

We’re so distracted arguing over whether or not they’ll really donate everything that we forget to challenge the bedrock assumption: that “everything” is actually the maximum they can give. Mark even reinforces this with classic subliminal messaging:

Here’s the question CNN should be asking: If that’s truly his daughter’s name, why won’t he release “Max’s” birth certificate?

He won’t release it because, if you’re one of the 90 million homeowners living the American Dream, you know in your bones that Mark’s $44,999,999,937.63 contribution is hardly the maximum possible. Think about it: When you purchased your home, you made a downpayment with your money and then borrowed more money. You did this because getting a house with a gazebo was important to you. Well, didn’t Mark say human opportunity etc. was important to him?

If Mark truly wanted to save the world, he would have given away all his money, and then borrowed more money from someone else and given away all their money. This assumes, of course, that Mark’s credit score is above 700 (see CreditKarma.com, the fastest way to check your FICO™ score online).

Yet in a 2,000-word screed to his daughter — whose real name, I’m told, is Diego — the word “leverage” doesn’t appear a single time. Mark Zuckerberg is doing less to cure AIDS than the average American is doing to procure a gazebo.

And therein lies the ugly truth:

By declining to donate even a mere 105% or 110% of his net worth on margin, Mark reinforces the narrative that the billionaire class owes no debt to society once they donate every cent of their money.

This is not an easy thing to say; Mark was once my personal hero. Sure, I’ve overlooked moral failings before, like when he activated Facebook Safety Check during the drunk driving arrest of Michael Phelps — but refused to activate it for any other country’s Olympic criminals:

But all the open letters in the world can’t wash away the fundamental human truth: A hero is someone who leaves everything he has on the field, plus the stuff you loaned him. We must always look past soaring rhetoric to uncover hidden financial motives, and that is why I have decided to pen this essay today.

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post for CreditKarma.com.

A reporter interviews three people in line to learn more:

The first man is a felon who was previously convicted on six counts of apple juice fraud. He introduces himself as Satoshi. He’s wearing a name tag that says “HELLO, MY NAME IS PAUL CEGLIA.” He’s holding a Do It Yourself Disguise Kit with a fake mustache and glasses. It’s his most prized possession, but you can have it for $2.99 (*plus shipping & handling).

“I’ll publish everything you say about Satoshi’s Lemons,” says the reporter, “since you’re probably Satoshi.”

The second man says he’s certainly not Satoshi, no siree, and to please leave him out of the spotlight. Although, come to think of it, he did stumble on a pile of documents under a park bench in which a hundred other people say he is Satoshi. But he’s not, but here check out the docs, but please please leave him alone, but boy a hundred different people!

“I’ll publish everything you say about Satoshi’s Lemons,” says the reporter, “since you’re probably Satoshi.”

The third man gladly acknowledges he’s Satoshi but would rather talk about more important things. He begrudgingly agrees to a blood test. He aces a lie detector test. During the interview, he passes a kidney stone. It turns out to be a lemon seed. The lemon seed aces a lie detector test. Finally, the reporter gets up to leave.

“Wait!” says the man. “We didn’t even talk about my mission yet!”

“How can I trust a word you say about Satoshi’s Lemons?” asks the reporter. “You’re definitely Satoshi, you have every reason to lie!”

Today this healthy skepticism led me to start pulling on a thread…

Question: Who Made Reload?

We’ve all followed the sad news about Lamar Odom. While the cause hasn’t been identified, police have said he paired cocaine and alcohol with an excessive amount of a Viagra-like “herbal supplement” called Reload. The FDA previously issued a warning bluntly instructing consumers to “stop using this product immediately and throw it away,” which is helpful if you’re in the habit of checking the FDA’s website whenever you’re about to have sex.

The news has prompted lots of journalists to ask a natural question: Who made Reload?

This answer would be straightforward if Reload were a regular drug, but what many people don’t realize is that the government barely regulates supplements before they reach your cupboard. Following an intense lobbying effort in the ’90s, the industry now effectively polices itself. Regulators often step in only once problems emerge… or when an Attorney General wants a headline.

Earlier this year, the New York AG investigated supplements at major retailers and found that four out of five didn’t contain any of the labelled herbs. They contained “cheap fillers like powdered rice, asparagus and houseplants, and in some cases substances that could be dangerous to those with allergies.” We’re not talking fly-by-night Internet products; these are glossy bottles of so-called Gingko Biloba and Echinacea and Garlic, sold in stores like GNC and Target and Walgreens, with relaxing names like “Herbal Plus” and “Spring Valley”:

When you buy a supplement, then, you’re effectively on your own — not just in determining whether the supplement is safe and effective, but even in deciding whether you’re eating what you think you’re eating. Reload’s packaging suggests it’s an “herbal blend” full of plants like Gingko Biloba and Saw Palmetto, but tests show that it actually contains sildenafil, the strong prescription chemical found in Viagra itself.

This is a much freer market than people are accustomed to when they purchase anything from a reputable retailer, let alone something they plan to swallow. Absent stricter regulation, busy citizens count on the media to inform.

Answer: Japanese Dating Moguls?

The media does great work when the newsgathering process is well-defined. We usually know within days of a mass shooting, for example, where the gun was purchased and which other crimes the gun shop is linked to. But even as journalists breathlessly ask where these mystical Reload pills came from, I’ve yet to see one proffer anything more than a skin-deep answer:

The Washington Post

An Internet address listed on the packaging directs users not to information about Reload, but rather to a Japanese-language Web site about Internet dating. An e-mail address listed on the Web page did not work.

USA Today

Despite the product’s label claiming it was made in the USA, the website listed on it appears to be a Japanese dating site that provides little clue as to who is the maker of the product…USA TODAY’s “Supplement Shell Game” investigation in 2013 found it difficult or impossible to determine who the people or companies are behind many of the drug-spiked supplements.

GQ

Who makes it? Good question. According to their packaging, Reload is manufactured in the United States. However, distribution information for the product directs you to this Web site, which seems totally legit. It’s possible that the pills are created and packaged in some dude’s kitchen in Utah.

How to Hold the Press Accountable

Here are the simple steps I took to begin answering the question: Where did Reload come from?

Because there is no benefit (and is in fact real harm) to Internet mobs, I’m replacing names in this post with the aliases “Sam” and “Jo”. Authorities have the real information and can handle it as they see fit. My goal is to help you become a better consumer of the press, so that when you read paper-thin accounts like the above, you stop and say: “Hey! That’s not real journalism.” Only with that kind of pressure will the media improve.

Step 0: Be Skeptical

This whole episode began because something nagged at me: Why would an English-language sexual performance product link to a Japanese-language dating website on its packaging?

Outlets like the Washington Post and USA Today seemed to take this at face value, but website owners can and do change. It is not uncommon for squatters and content farmers to snap up expiring domain names and host other content on them, just so they can exploit the reputation, inbound links and other “Google juice” a domain has accumulated over the years. I figured that after the Reload pill hit the FDA’s radar, its creator went underground and let the domain lapse, thus freeing an unrelated party to nab it. A quick whois lookup of reloadpill.com confirmed that the domain changed hands in August of this year, long after the FDA’s 2013 warning.

Step 1: Find the Real Site

The first order of business, then, was to see what the Reload pill website looked like when it was actually the Reload pill website. You can do this by going to the Internet Archive and browsing past snapshots of the domain. No media outlet took even this initial step as best I can tell from public reports. Please understand, this isn’t advanced computer wizardry. It’s something that anyone with the slightest technical background would try, and it’s something you should demand of your fourth estate.

Here’s what reloadpill.com looked like back in 2012, probably without its original styling:

It’s in English and it’s advertising the pill—that’s encouraging. And at the bottom, it includes all sorts of contact info for “American Labs” (the same company named on the packaging), including a California mailing address, an e-mail address with a hint of a name (Sam), a phone number, and even a fax number. Quick Googling revealed the address was a private mailbox at one of those rent-a-box locations often used for scams, so I figured the rest of the info was obfuscated as well. And the previous owner of reloadpill.com used private domain registration, which means his contact info is only accessible via subpoena.

But it was a start.

Step 2: Link the Site to Other Sites

Next I began googling each piece of contact info from the original Reload site to try to connect it to a bonafide person or enterprise. When I searched the fax number, it turned out to be the contact info for three other domains: JoJohnson.com and JoJohnsonMusic.com, where it was listed on the domain records, and MaverickDVD.com, a pornographic video company, where it was listed on the customer service page.

Like the Reload site, the MaverickDVD.com domain was registered privately. It was also taken down in the last month. But the Internet Archive has a snapshot of it from September 10th, and along with the same fax number, the contact page lists a different e-mail address containing Sam’s first name.

The other two domains were not registered privately. Public domain records indicate they were visibly registered to a Sam Johnson, along with a Gmail address and a California street address.

(The remaining contact info provided corroboration of this newly discovered last name. Googling the address and phone number lead to an entry for a booth at the 2012 Las Vegas ASD, a consumer goods trade show. The exhibitor was Sam Johnson of herbal supplements company American Labs, and his address and fax number matched that found on the old Reload website.)

Step 3: Link the Other Sites to People

I had now gathered three e-mail addresses:

• sam@reloadpill.com from the original Reload site.
• samjohnson1@gmail.com, from the domain records for JoJohnson.com and JoJohnsonMusic.com, which contained the same fax number found on the original Reload site.
• sam@maverickdvd.com, from MaverickDVD.com, which contained the same fax number found on the original Reload site.

Facebook allows you to look up a profile by an e-mail address you already know, because people often want to find their friends quickly via their addressbooks. So I pasted each address into Facebook’s search bar.

The Reload e-mail address was not tied to a profile. But the Gmail and Maverick addresses were both tied to the actively maintained Facebook profile of a business marketing major from California named Sam Johnson. Sam is friends with a fair amount of adult film stars, as well as one Jo Johnson, who is pictured holding a guitar.

What now?

The 3-step process above should’ve been table stakes in 2015 for any journalist who felt it was relevant to ask “Who’s behind Reload?” in the first place. In just 10 minutes, using 4 freely available websites, anyone can find more promising potential contact information than a defunct e-mail address on a Japanese dating site.

It is, of course, only a beginning: nobody has been asked for comment; leads have not been rigorously pursued; a dozen other reasonable explanations have yet to be ruled out. The FDA has the information and can employ these important investigatory tools as they see fit. Because I’m neither lawyer nor doctor nor reporter, you should study the facts for yourself.

That is, in fact, the entire point of this post: Don’t outsource your thinking. Not to the government, not to the media, not to me. Confront the world skeptically, particularly in realms like supplements, where organizations we lean on for oversight may sometimes abdicate their responsibility. Educate yourself until alarm bells ring in your mind when you read observation masquerading as journalism. We are lucky to live in a time when we are all so empowered.

For the last 60 hours, he’s been A/B testing one word against another (“Get” or “Buy!” or “Install”?), one screenshot against the next. Delirious, he starts to A/B test reality — is that penguin really making paninis? — but all will be worth it in the end if he can manage to realize the impossible American dream: Convince you to pay one dollar, one time to install his life’s work on your iPhone.

Should he beat the odds, he’ll then take your 70 cents and plow them into another app on his phone. This app will not only charge him every day for the rest of his life, but it also increased his fee last year by over a dollar a month.

What the hell is going on here?

What Wealthfront Really Costs

That’s long been the promise on Wealthfront’s homepage: A $100,000 account for less than $20 a month.

Wealthfront loves to paint itself as the anti-Wall Street, but it exploits the same achilles heel as its Manhattan cousins: Many people don’t have an intuitive grasp of the magic of compound interest, and so they certainly haven’t internalized the tyranny of compound fees.

Then let us be clear: A 30-year old who invests $100,000 in his retirement with Wealthfront “for less than a night at the movies” will likely pay the company over $100,000 in fees by his 75th birthday.

If he sets aside additional money from his salary over that time period — say, $15,000 per year — the fees could come to half a million or more. Still less than a night at the movies, assuming you also had to produce the movie.

This is all a great deal for Wealthfront. If they hook enough young professionals early, the company gets to invest their money for the rest of their lives, skimming a larger and larger portion off the top as it compounds. Heck, I like this model enough that I consider investing in Wealthfront, Inc. at least twice a year.

But it’s not such a good deal for you. There are other options available that would enable you to stop working years earlier, and that fact gets buried in the self-righteous rhetoric that continues to flow from the company. As with Wall Street firms, this rhetoric must keep flowing to paper over the same infallible truth that has bedeviled meatspace financial advisors for decades.

The Dirty Little Secret

Here it is: If you open a retirement account, and you invest some of your paycheck each month into a Vanguard Target Retirement Fund, and you just…leave it…you just leave it right there until retirement…

…you don’t do anything when the folks on CNBC announce that the sky is falling; you don’t do anything when Cousin Eddy calls from a secure underground bunker in the badlands and says that the fed is printing money and it’s time to liquidate and ammo up; you don’t think it’s a sign that your parrot said “fuhgeddaboutit” but you thought she said “get a nugget” and surely that must mean a gold nugget? and you looked online and noticed that the price of shiny yellow metal was crashing and wait your parrot is also yellow and I’ll be damned if that isn’t a sign to buy…

… no, if you just leave it there to compound over decades…

…then you will probably make more money than if you hired the guy from Edward Jones, and even that Senior Executive Double-Stuf Vice Managing Director from Goldman Sachs. You will probably make more money than if you outsourced your investments to the kindly rabbi who performed your bris because my gosh how nice is he for offering to do my finances and I’m really starting to see him as a sort of father figure. And you will probably make more money than if you used Wealthfront.

The financial industry has spent decades and billions persuading people of the opposite — that investing is difficult, that it requires sophisticated certifications and products, that you better not go it alone, that it takes a lot of time. It’s not true.

Don’t take my word for it; take Warren Buffett’s.

Buffett recommends Vanguard because once you tune out the rhetoric from both coasts, one unassailable fact remains: As a non-profit that is owned by you and other shareholders, Vanguard is the only company in the financial industry that is not trying to make a huge profit off of you. Everyone else is talking their book. EVERYONE.

The Fine Print

That’s a pretty harsh reality for competitors, but it’s nothing a little creative marketing can’t mollify. Wealthfront’s CEO took pleasure in mocking Betterment’s spin today, but let’s take a look at what Wealthfront itself is putting out there.

We’re Cheaper than a Non-Profit!

Of all the tall tales in Wealthfront’s marketing, I imagine this is the one that spawned the most email threads marked “A/C priv.” It’s part of the company’s new effort to convince you that its service is cheaper than a product that is already run at cost:

The cost of our Direct Indexing service is actually lower than the Vanguard ETF it replaces. Vanguard currently charges an annual 0.05% management fee for VTI. For $500,000 accounts, our equivalent fee for Direct Indexing is only 0.02%. And for accounts above $1 million, our fee is even lower at 0.014%.

That’s because we do not charge a management fee for the roughly 80% of our Direct Indexing position that’s comprised of individual stocks. The cost of that service (including all commissions) is included in our annual 0.25% advisory fee.

Here’s even more good news: When it became illegal to sell foie gras in California, many generous restauranteurs decided to just give it away*!

(* But the cracker it was served on cost $20.)

Seriously, if someone at Wealthfront can justify the Hollywood accounting here with a straight face, I will breed them a panini penguin.

Because they do charge a management fee on your entire Direct Index balance. It says it right there: 0.25%. It appears that Wealthfront would prefer to call it an “advisory fee” here even though it relents with “management fee” on its homepage. Personally I like to call it a Safe Rides Fee. Whatever you call it, if you want to own the entirety of the public U.S. market, Wealthfront alone is going to take $2,500 out of your $1 million Direct Index to Vanguard VTI’s $500 on year 1. Sixty years later, this “next evolution of index investing” ends up considerably more expensive than the last one.

On and on it goes:

By allowing a Wealthfront investor to hold the individual securities that comprise an index in her own account on a commission-free basis, Direct Indexing effectively eliminates any Index fund or ETF management fees on the associated position, which reduces overall portfolio cost.

and:

Owning an index fund or ETF comes with a fee. Although the fee may be small, it still acts as barrier to fully replicating the performance of a passive index investment.

and worst of all:

We believe our Direct Indexing service meaningfully addresses the two remaining shortcomings with modern index investing — the cost of the Index Fund and ETF management fees and the missed tax-savings from the inability to pass on tax losses. For this reason, we view Direct Indexing as the next evolution of index investing.

The divide between an “index fund fee,” which you pay to Vanguard to manage a collection of securities that track an index, and Wealthfront’s fee, which you pay to Wealthfront to manage a collection of securities that track an index, is a distinction without a difference. And it’s the oldest Wall Street trick in the book — the financial advisor who treats his esteemed clients to FREE! luxury box seats at the big game (*** when you pay him $10,000 a year).

Bottom line: Existing index funds trounce Wealthfront when it comes to the annual expense of owning the U.S. equity market. Please don’t pee on our leg and tell us it’s raining.

We’re Commission-Free!

It’s a wonder that with so many brilliant folks in Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, there is so much confusion over the definition of “free.”

Schwab, for instance, thinks its new Wealthfront competitor is “free” even though you pay for the service by keeping a mandatory portion of your portfolio in a Schwab Haha-Interest-That’s-A-Good-One Checking account.

Wealthfront also likes to take Schwab to task for commission-free ETFs that aren’t, while touting its own “commission-free” service instead.

A quick recap:

Free (/frē/): The miniature spoonful of frozen yogurt you asked for at the checkout counter so you could “test” that crazy new flavor, Vanilla.

Not Free (/nät frē/): The bacon-wrapped date samples that are “given” to you once you show your $55-a-year membership card at the entrance to Costco.

Wealthfront trades are certifiably the latter. If they’re going to play this game, I wish they would at least do it the Silicon Valley way — with creepily overtargeted ads.

Our Tax-Loss Harvesting Makes Up for Our Fee!

To the extent the SEC allows, Wealthfront argues that the benefits of its automated tax loss harvesting service can outweigh its fees. In short, they argue that there’s free money on the table.

This kind of claim crops up often in the investing world, so here’s a flowchart I use whenever I’m presented with a golden opportunity:

First, let’s get a few pesky facts out of the way:

• If your nest egg exists entirely in a retirement account, as it does for many Americans, then tax loss harvesting won’t help you at all.
• If you aren’t realizing capital gains on a regular basis, then the potential maximum value of tax loss harvesting is capped by the government as your net worth grows, while the amount you pay to Wealthfront each year is uncapped. And that’s a shame, because…
• If you practice the kind of investing that Wealthfront itself evangelizes — buy-and-hold, passive, rational, long-term indexing that is rebalanced with new money or in retirement accounts — then you should not be realizing capital gains regularly anyway.

Having said this, let me be clear: Wealthfront and I strongly agree that tax loss harvesting can improve aftertax returns. But as with so many Wall Street firms, and contrary to its own holier-than-thou marketing, Wealthfront wildly overstates the benefits. There is simply no evidence, nor any theoretical reason, to believe that a portfolio managed with Wealthfront will outperform a simple Vanguard portfolio bought and held for retirement, once you account for Wealthfront’s fees.

The key gimmick that undermines Wealthfront’s marketing paper is that it tallies (and later even compounds) the entirety of every potential harvestable tax loss as if it’s all money in your pocket:

Tax Alpha is used to directly measure the tax benefit generated by proactively selling stocks with capital losses within a certain short period of time (say a single tax year)…We view Tax Alpha as an easy to compute and understandable metric to compute the performance of Direct Indexing.

Wealthfront claims that it “could” generate an “incremental annual after-tax return of 2.46% over just owning the S&P 500.” This is an astonishing number. If software could reliably generate 2.5% of investing alpha at one-tenth the cost, I would move my entire portfolio to Wealthfront tomorrow. Heck, Harvard would probably move its endowment.

But again and again, Wealthfront tries without blinking to draw a straight line between tax alpha and cold hard cash. For example, they offer a chart titled “After-tax Price Return of VTI vs. Direct Indexing” that appears to show that if you had merely flipped on Direct Indexing in 2000, you would have earned ~2% compared to losing 9% with Vanguard’s ancient index fund technology! They appear to reach these numbers simply by adding the maximum possible tax alpha to VTI’s return.

All these cases neglect to mention that you will probably only see the maximal gain if you are maximally messing up already, by needlessly churning your account to generate capital gains. As Vanguard’s founder advises: Don’t just do something; stand there.

So where else might you find these gains that Wealthfront will magically offset? Well, if you look at the fine, fine print on that paper (yes, even finer than Betterment’s): “The net tax benefit over the period includes the liquidation of positions transferred in and sold to invest the client account in the Wealthfront portfolio.”

In other words, Wealthfront will now partially offset the gains that you were only ever forced to realize by switching to the service in the first place. Hooray!

There are plenty of other holes in Wealthfront’s claims, which are well covered here (and still not substantively addressed by the company to date).

In short: When evaluating the benefits of tax loss harvesting, presumptively calculating and compounding anything beyond the government’s capped annual income deduction is like saying that you just made $400 million because you decided not to buy a 747 — okay, sure, but good luck trading that in for beer.

Why is Wealthfront so expensive?

Calm down, capitalists: Wealthfront should absolutely charge as much as people are willing to fork over. In fact, I hope they convince some folks to pay a million dollars a year, so that more informed clients like you can get it for free. (That’s how Wall Street works. It’s why you’re receiving 2% cash back on your credit card while your neighbor pays 12% on his. But it’s also why your advisor has a yacht and you don’t.)

I’m not asking why Wealthfront helps itself to such margins, which is obvious and perfectly normal, but rather why the market bears it. After all, it’s hard to think of many other service industries that work like this. You would probably find it unreasonable if your piano teacher charged you more and more each week just because you have more money than you did when you first started rounding the Circle of Fifths.

Or, to use an example closer to home: TurboTax doesn’t get to take a cut of every dollar you make until they put you in the ground, even though, like Wealthfront, they have a direct hand in growing your money. Navigating the Pease deduction cap, the Minimum Tax Foreign Tax Credit on Exclusion Items (“MTFTCE” for “short”), and the year-to-year tango in the rest of the U.S. tax code, is arguably far more intricate than passive index investing. But Intuit has to make do with fifty bucks a year — and even that is a miracle in this day and age. TurboTax doesn’t even get a bonus for maximizing your refund, but they owe you if they don’t!

When it comes time to market to those who work at Google and at Facebook and at Twitter, Wealthfront all but demands that we evaluate it as a technology company than a stuffy banking firm. Yet when we judge Wealthfront on its own terms, it looks virtually unprecedented.

It’s not just that Wealthfront charges users for its software, which is rare. It’s not just that Wealthfront charges users a recurring subscription fee, which is even rarer. It’s also that, on average, Wealthfront increases its subscription fee every day.

And Wealthfront enjoys other invaluable perks over most consumer tech companies: It does all this automatically, without having to notify users or seek proactive permission (jealous, Amazon?). It does so without having to give Apple or Visa a large cut. The train rolls on even when the customer changes credit cards, or addresses. It doesn’t have to send you a bill, or add a line item to your Amex statement, or otherwise ask you if it’s cool to charge you $9 for a service that cost you $8 this time last year.

Wealthfront also boasts high switching costs. Sure, there’s no account transfer fee — you can take your balls and go home at any time. But with Direct Indexing, you’ll be walking away with thousands of individual stocks. Do you plan to manage all those by hand? Or liquidate and take the tax hit? Once you go robo, you never go back.

The market tolerates this pricing because Wealthfront has pulled the oldest trick on Wall Street: Cherry-picking the benchmark. They’ve anchored us all to something irrelevant, then blown it away before our eyes. How could anyone complain about a 0.25% fee when the Wall Street average is 1%?

But for all its bleating about Valley-style tech disruption, Wealthfront is still just milking the pricing precedent that the Street established decades ago:

The more money you earn, the more money we earn.

It’s Time to Kill the Proportional Fee

By the time we all knew Uber was better than taking cabs, it was already showing us why it’s better than owning cars. But Wealthfront is still just telling us that they suck less than Bank of America. If you insist on wrapping yourself in the cuddly blanket of Silicon Valley, then you must also take the swing.

Here’s what that means to me: The standout technology companies here take repetitive, mundane, ridiculous chores that no human should ever have to do — rebalancing retirement funds across 9,000 companies, or calculating the generation-skipping gift tax — and write code once to do them for us a million times over.

This technology helps wring out real, quantifiable savings; the code doesn’t care if that net worth integer is 1,000 or 1,000,000. These cost benefits are so obvious and undeniable that the sales team doesn’t even need tricks to close the deal; they just need to write down the truth.

Those savings are then passed on to the consumer, even as the founder walks off — yes, just like Wall Street — with a huge barrel of money. So much is created in the nuclear transition from unscalable human effort to unrelenting CPU that both the house and the gambler can win big.

This might surprise you, then: I’m certain that Wealthfront, or something like it, is the future. There is tremendous alpha to be realized through automation — if you’ve ever paid a bill one day earlier than you had to, or left a penny uninvested one day longer than required, then you know this must be true. It is inevitable that computers will optimize our cashflow, our investments, and our taxes to a degree that will make the status quo look downright laughable to our grandkids. The right solution in this space will mean people can retire earlier and spend more of their time doing what they love. I desperately want to see it exist so I can recommend it to my mother, and my brother — and use it myself.

But for now, Wealthfront is just another pretender to the throne, tilting at Schwab windmills and Fidelity bogeymen even as it tacitly joins them in guarding Wall Street’s greatest secret: It doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to work harder and harder into your gray years, paying more and more of your paycheck to an advisor who is doing the same amount of work as the day you two shook hands.

So, to borrow a page from Wealthfront’s chief:

We can do better than this. We have to be better than this. Stop charging proportional fees for advice.

The world doesn’t need another Wall Street.

(If you like tech snark, you can also check out my post on Uber.)

Flying to Vegas? Look to your left. Now look to your right. Statistically speaking, one of you is about to get ripped off by a cabbie. And it’ll probably be you, the imbecile who chose the middle seat and paid $15 for wifi.

Taxi scams are nothing new, but here’s something novel: The Nevada state government is out-innovating Uber in attacking these scofflaws.

How The “Sin City Shuffle” Works

There are two main routes to get from the Vegas airport to the Strip. One of them is illegal. To figure out which one you’re on, apply this test: Look outside. If you can’t find outside, you’re in a tunnel—which means you’re being ripped off.

The I-215 tunnel adds about $10 to your fare, but one in three cabbies “longhauled” undercover cops through it anyway. The country hasn’t seen this kind of brazenness since Bankerty Robberson opened a Skimask Hut outside Wells Fargo in 1979.

What can possibly be done about such a confounding crime? I had plenty of time to research this on a recent trip to Vegas, while my own cabbie, Mickey, drove me to the Bellagio by way of Montpelier, Vermont.

Uber’s Naive Solution

Uber’s absurd answer to longhauling is straight from your childhood: When a driver behaves badly, he only gets one star. Within hours, Uber adjusts your fare. Their systems can do this automatically because they have everything they need to calculate an “ideal” fare—start point, end point, traffic conditions, and past fares. If the driver keeps scamming others, he automatically gets fired.

But Nevada officials found fault in Uber’s stars. In fact, they kicked the company out of town for not protecting tourists.

I stand with Nevada and say—leave this to the pros.

Here’s the alternate five-point plan that Nevada’s Taxicab Authority devised after 45 years of experience regulating 26 million Vegas taxi rides. We begin in earnest with

Plan A: People with Guns

In June 2012, Nevada launched its first major broadside against longhauling in the form of a roadside checkpoint. Uniformed cops stopped occupied cabs at random and offered to prosecute drivers who were taking inefficient routes.

In other words: Welcome to Vegas! We are slowing you down to make sure your driver isn’t slowing you down.

Unfortunately, through no fault of the state, it didn’t work. It turns out that uber lazy tourists were too apathetic to show up in Clark County District Court during their Vegas vacation:

The authority’s chief investigator, Ruben Aquino, said only about three passengers chose to press complaints out of the 80 cabs that were stopped on Thursday.

“People were not willing to prosecute over a couple of dollars,” he said. “They just wanted to get to their hotels.”

So, while Mickey gave me a tour of Mount Rushmore, I researched Nevada’s

Plan B: The Big-Ass Physical Sign (BAPS)

The Nevada Taxicab Authority constructed BAPS throughout McCarran International Airport. Each sign lays out state law and enumerates the proper taxi fares for every conceivable trip a tourist might take, using approximately twice as many words as it took Ronald Reagan to tear down the Berlin Wall.

I knew that Uber was coded largely in Python and Objective-C, so I was curious to see which technologies the Authority selected for the BAPS program.

After extensive research, I can report that the signs are big sheets of paper glued to foam.

The kind of setup you used to
use to present the effects of
food coloring on celery.

Now: How much time would it take you to hang foam boards? Five years? Ten? Well, that’s why you’re a middle-seat guy. The Nevada Taxicab Authority implemented the BAPS program airport-wide in just two years.

And they would have done it even quicker, except that, as Nevada Taxicab Authority Administrator Charles Harvey explained,

“We had to haggle with the taxi industry on what the signs should say.”

Understandable. It’s like when Erin Brockovich discovered PG&E dumping cancer into a lake and then asked them, ferociously, what font they preferred to be sued in.

Plus, “all things take time in government,” says Administrator Harvey, who recently resigned, apparently to pursue a career as a fortune cookie. But no matter. The signs are done now, and I doubt they’ll ever need to be updated: Vegas is a sleepy town, and the dollar is a stable currency.

Unfortunately, the commission’s years of effort proved as pointless as blue celery. Only 7% of people read the BAPS, and cabbies proved unintimidated by Elmer’s Glue. And so, as my cabbie and I explored the Alamo, I dug into

Plan C: The Big-Ass Spreadsheet

Three-dimensional solutions clearly weren’t cutting it. As the kids would say: Nevada had to “go cyber.”

I need to warn you—I’m a Stanford-educated computer scientist, but you probably won’t be able to follow this.

Here is what Nevada did: Nevada created a real big Excel spreadsheet of real bad cab drivers. Then Nevada uploaded the spreadsheet to its website.

“This database is provided as a resource to assist taxi companies when evaluating potential new hires to support their goals of employing a workforce in an industry truly dedicated to the public through honesty and integrity,” says the Taxicab Authority.

The Taxicab Authority also has a loose tooth that it has placed under its pillow to cover next year’s operating budget.

But unbelievably, the spreadsheet didn’t do the trick either; longhauling was worse than ever! While Mickey drove us through Three Mile Island toward my hotel, I read about Nevada’s nuclear

Plan D-Day: The PDF.

Government has never met a problem that it could not solve with PDF.

“Appear weak when you are strong,
and strong when you are weak,
and upgrade Adobe Acrobat.”

—Sun Tzu. The Art of War.

Nevada used this formidable, end-of-days technology to fashion its own version of Uber’s rating system. As you might recall, giving feedback on Uber is a veritable labyrinth of steps:

1. Activate your mobile device screen.
2. Dry the finger or fingers to be used during the feedback operation.
3. Position your finger over the pertinent screen coordinates.
4. Apply pressure using the predesignated digit.
5. Lift your finger.

But Nevada’s system is as easy as 1–2–3, with no conditions on limb wetness:

1. Print out the Long Route Voluntary Witness Statement.
2. Complete the sworn affidavit in view of a public notary.
3. Mail or fax the form to the Department of Business and Industry.

Given that, here are a few insider “tips and tricks” to keep in mind when cabbing in Vegas:

• Wear a fanny pack containing a desktop computer, a printer, envelopes, stamps, a fax machine, a notary, and food pellets for your notary.
• While in the cab, note the driver’s full name, permit number, cab company name, cab number, license plate number, and physical appearance. If you don’t have this information memorized for some reason, just ask the driver while you’re locked in the car with him. If he wants to know why you need it, explain that you’re trying to have him fired and ask for a selfie to fulfill the physical description requirement.
• Remember to bring $10 to pay the notary to witness you sign your complaint that you were overcharged by $10.
• If you need transportation to a notary, consider taking a taxi cab.

I tried out the government’s system when I was in Vegas, but I never heard back from anyone. This is no doubt due to the shameful unreliability of the U.S. Postal System.

Whatever the cause, Nevada’s Long Route Voluntary Witness Statement affidavit has failed to curb longhauls. And so, whizzing through the iridescent cornfields of sunny Nebraska, I unpacked the final

Plan E: The Custom-Built Hardware That Does One Very Niche Thing That Your Phone Already Does On Its Lunch Break

Some challenges cannot be met by man or software alone. A long taxi route is one of those problems. Suborbital flight is another. Bytes and sweats can take us far, but for the world’s hardest problems, new circuitry must be laid, new metals fused.

The Nevada Taxicab Authority voted on Tuesday to convene a committee among industry members to draw up guidelines on how to conduct a pilot test of RideIntegrity, a software and hardware package designed to let the authority track cab movements and trip details online.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single commission voting to convene a committee to draw up guidelines.

Nevada estimates that it will cost approximately $6 million per year to install, operate and oversee these new “RideIntegrity” machines inside every cab in the city. You’ll pay for all this through an increase in your taxi fares (which are already double the price of an UberX ride, but, in fairness, less than half of the cost of owning a Gulfstream).

Bracing for the Long Haul

I am blown away by the admirable tenacity of the Nevadan government. The complaint Word doc; the bad driver Excel spreadsheet; the Powerpoint airport sign—when it comes to Microsoft Office 2003, Nevada has tried it all. Now all the chips are riding on RideIntegrity™. Will this be the one?

Vegas aficionados should band together and deliver an ultimatum to their government: $100 million and 100 years. But no more! If the Taxicab Authority can’t cure longhauling by then, residents should hand the reins to the TSA to implement sensible reforms like a Federal Cab Marshal Service.

Nevadans deserve light at the end of this tunnel, and it’s certainly not going to come from Uber’s dance with the ★★★★★’s.

(Thank you to Mickey for capturing this beautiful shot during our ride.)