Month: December 2011

Today I finally figured out the main problem with the idea that a tax on the rich would solve all of America’s fiscal problems. The best way for a politician to stay in power is to hand out money to cronies, e.g., $150,000 per year pensions to unionized government workers or $400 million per aircraft to a defense contractor. The only limit to government spending, therefore, would be some sort of a limit on a politician’s desire to obtain and retain power. Our government needs to raise taxes right now because it has greatly outspent its revenue at current tax rates. Raising tax rates, especially on the rich, therefore seems like a very attractive idea, at least to some of the 99 percent.

Why would any of the 99 percent oppose a big tax on the 1 percent? Perhaps they think that the government will eventually outspend this new revenue source and then start coming after the non-rich.

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What’s the best way to share video captured with the iPhone? The camera on the iPhone 4S seems to be much higher quality than the one on my old Droid 2. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I can’t figure out how to share video semi-privately. On Android, it is easy to share video via YouTube without re-entering one’s Gmail account and password (the iPhone can do this, I think, but at the cost of keying in one’s Google ID once again (I’ve done it about 15 times so far)). The Android phone also has useful options for sharing via Facebook and Google+ that the iPhone seems to lack. One thing that I came to like on Android was a default option to push everything up to a private folder on Google+. I can’t find an equivalent on the iPhone. I tried iCloud, but it doesn’t show any content from the phone except for contacts and calendar items.

If you don’t want to email someone a monster file, what is the most convenient process for getting a video to just one other person, or possibly a handful as in a Google+ circle?

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Ask your boss for three days off and a trip to Boston at the end of January. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to lose all feeling in your toes, you’ll appreciate that a few friends and I are teaching a free three-day intensive course on SQL programming for database management systems, with a bit of Web and Android application development. It went well last year so we’re looking forward to an even better class this year. I think that people come away from this class with about as good a knowledge of SQL as folks who take a semester-long course. The intensive TA’d format is much more efficient than a traditional lecture-and-homework system.

Course web page: http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2012

Note that the class is free and open to the public.

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One of the peculiarities of American life is that young people tend to see serious movies intended for old people while old people (like me) tend to see frivolous movies intended for young people. Everyone seems to love and be inspired by the Martin Scorsese movie Hugo. (Spoiler alert) The story concerns an old man who was a pioneer in the early movie industry and who, after World War I, found that his popularity had faded to the point where he could no longer make commercial films. No longer famous, he becomes a “loser” who does nothing more than support a wife and god-daughter by working in a toy shop inside a train station. A boy connects the old forgotten guy with a film historian in an attempt to “fix” the old man. I assumed that the “fixed” old guy would be able to resume his creative projects, but in fact the inspiring ending is not that the creative genius is able to work again in a creative field. The old guy emerges from obscurity to wear a tuxedo, attend awards ceremonies, etc.

The message to children in the audience seems to be “Achievement is irrelevant if you’re not famous; if you are famous, no additional achievement is required.” Certainly having an ordinary job and supporting a wife and child is not an outcome to be desired.

I’m not shocked that someone in Hollywood would have made this movie, but I am shocked that people would pay to watch it and more shocked that they would pay to have their children watch it. What if your kid ends up selling tires and coming home ever night to feed the family? Should he feel like a failure? What if your kid writes a bestselling novel and, 20 years later, is forgotten? Do you want him to feel like a failure?

[Separately, what do folks think of the 3D in this movie? I didn’t find that it added much to the story or experience. Mostly it just made me wonder what parts were animated and what parts were real(-ish).]

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A friend was recently debating the question of whether or not the U.S. is generous with foreign aid. One of his colleagues pointed to data that show the U.S. giving less “official development assistance”, as a percentage of GDP, compared to other countries (various charts, most of which make the U.S. look stingy compared to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, et al). My friend commented that the U.S. is actually the most generous country because our enormous military efforts benefit many other nations. For example, we discourage wars and keep shipping lanes open (except off the coast of Somalia!). Our military also shows up in other nations when disaster strikes. This costs a huge percentage of our GDP but isn’t counted as foreign aid per se.

Some of the most valuable assistance that we provide to other nations is not accounted for either in military or foreign aid spending. For example, we have spent a high percentage of GDP on funding scientific research that is published and available to anyone worldwide who can afford the price of a journal subscription. We have spent our tax dollars on standards such as TCP/IP that can be used at no charge by people worldwide. A lot of free Web services, such as Wikipedia, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Gmail, were built and are run by Americans. A foreigner who learns from Wikipedia and uses Gmail has received very useful aid.

Why not come up with an accounting measure for how our military, scientific research, and Internet offerings benefit people in other nations? Then we can feel good about ourselves without spending (i.e., borrowing) more money.

[I guess we’d have to make sure that we didn’t ask unhappy Iraqis or Afghanis contribute to this project because they would be likely to put in a negative column for a lot of the stuff that our military does!]

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