Category: Uncategorized

This posting is addressed to my fellow Massachusetts citizens who vote in the 5th Congressional District. The competition is between Ed Markey, a traditional incumbent Democrat (in office since 1976 and the administration of Gerald Ford) who earns 93 percent of his contributions from outside his district (Wikipedia) and 75 percent from out of state. The challenger is Tom Tierney, an actuary running as a Republican. In this 2011 posting, I suggested that our country needed to be advised by accountants rather than economists. However, it may be the case that actuaries are better suited to analyzing public policy challenges.

Politicians at local, state, and federal levels seemingly cannot get elected without making promises to support people with money or services (such as health care) until those people are dead. This tends to lead us toward bankruptcy because politicians have no expertise in figuring out how long people will live or how much money needs to be set aside today to insure an income stream of, say, $20,000 per year starting 50 years from now. This is precisely what actuaries are good at. (Unfortunately his policy ideas include raising taxes, good evidence for why actuaries have not previously been successful as politicians!)

Regardless of whether or not one agrees with the policy ideas on his web site, an actuary such as Tierney would be a good resource for other Representatives and a constant reminder that making commitments based on life expectancy only makes financial sense for enterprises, such as life insurers, whose other costs are reduced if life spans turn out to be longer than originally calculated.

[Note: Markey was last in the tech world news in 2006 for advocating the arrest of a computer science graduate student who showed the ease with which airline boarding passes could be faked.]

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I’ve been spending more time back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After being in Lincoln, served with Internet by Verizon FiOS, the most painful thing is using Internet from a Comcast cable modem. Maybe it is the slow Comcast name servers, but there is a painful 1-second lag prior to visiting Web sites. Nobody at Comcast seems to have any idea what products they offer here in Cambridge. The Web site says the standard Internet speeds are 20/4 Mbps, 6/1 Mbps, and 50/10 Mbps (in that order and with the 6 Mbps service priced higher than the 20 Mbps service; this is with me signed in so that it knows the location). The customer service agents talk about a totally different range of speeds being available, e.g., 12/2 and 16/3. The discrepancy may be due to some marketing fraud by Comcast where they talk about “PowerBoost” for the first 10 MB of upload (e.g., the first out of 100 digital photos being uploaded). The “chat analysts” have no explanation for why their numbers are different from the advertised numbers.

The technician who showed up to install the service was well informed and efficient. He took one look at my Cisco/Linksys router, a 3-month-old E1200 that has to be rebooted every few days despite firmware upgrades, and said “You should throw out anything from Cisco/Linksys. They never work. Netgear is what you want.”

So let me take this opportunity to thank Verizon for, thus far, four years of high quality service. Another plus for Verizon is that they seem to be able to state what it is that they are selling!

[While Obama and Romney never tire of talking about how the U.S. is the world’s greatest country in every possible way, it seems that 11 other countries have pulled ahead of us in average Internet speed. This article shows that South Korea is the fastest at 16 Mbps, about 2.5X what we’ve got here (6.7 Mbps).]

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For distribution to voters on Election Day: Citizens for a Planned Economy. Based on statements by both Romney and Obama, this should be popular with most American voters.

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Another debate, another party. This one concerned foreign policy, “Which, the network exec explained, is something no one cares about — unless we declare war on Lindsay Lohan.” (Washington Post) What was missing from this debate, to my mind, was an explicit admission that American power is limited. It would have been refreshing to have one of the participants say “Fidel Castro is still in power, 50 years after we first tried to get rid of him, 90 miles off the Florida coast. So we shouldn’t be too confident of our ability to influence events on the other side of the globe.”

Both candidates ducked the hard questions, e.g., are you willing to cut and run in Afghanistan if it is obvious that the puppet government won’t last beyond 2014? Obama seemed more realistic about what we are likely to be able to accomplish. Romney did not persuade me with his “throw money at the military and hostile foreigners will be awed into submission” plan.

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I’m listening to Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way as a book on CD while sitting in often-horrific Boston traffic. What does the book say? Sitting in traffic commuting is the unhappiest time of the average person’s day (cites research by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman ). A person who commutes an hour to work each day would need to get paid 40 percent more than a person who walks to work in order to achieve the same level of happiness. Thus we’ve immiserated ourselves here in the U.S. first with suburban sprawl that makes it tough to socialize the 6-7 minimum hours per day that the Thrive book says is necessary and then by our inability to agree on a mechanism for speeding up traffic.

The phenomenon of Americans not being nearly as happy as our income would predict is well known. I wonder how much of that can be explained by just three factors: (1) we move around a lot due to the lack of a central city, such as Paris or Mexico City, in which people will stay after at most one move, (2) more of us live in suburbs than do people who live in other countries (I can’t find good stats on this but it has to be true if only due to the fact that we have so many more cars), (3) we’ve choked our transportation system almost to death so that suburbanites no longer have reasonable mobility.

A few other tidbits from the book:

• Welfare State handouts make people miserable by keeping them unemployed/dependent; the smart happy country of Singapore does it better by “topping up” wages for their least capable 5-10 percent of workers so that everyone who works has a tolerable standard of living
• Government policies that foster mixed-income housing make people miserable. People are happiest when they are surrounded by folks who earn about the same as they do.
• Government regulations that make it tough to start and run your own business make people miserable. People are happiest when they are in control of their life at work. (The author does not address the apparent contradiction with increased socializing leading to more happiness; many people who run their own businesses are literally sole proprietors and spend more time alone than workers in a cubicle farm.)
• Being religious makes people happy because they are satisfied with what God has provided them. Attending church regularly makes people happy.

I’m not sure that I can recommend the book. It is somewhat rambling and anecdotal and, at least as an audiobook, it is tough to know the reliability of the studies referenced. Furthermore, the insights offered are very similar to what positive psychologists have been saying for years: (1) have a lot of friends, (2) make sure those friends are happy (i.e., the folks with PhDs in psychology recommend immediately dumping any friend who becomes depressed!), (3) live in a compact house or apartment within walking distance of those friends (I wrote about this in my non-profit ideas article under “Latin American-style Towns for the U.S.), (4) don’t work more than 40 hours/week (part-time workers are happier than full-time workers), and (5) take a lot of vacation. On the other hand, the author managed to get an interview with Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, on the subject of why Singaporeans surveyed at the top of the Asian happiness charts.

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Since folks seem to have so many good ideas for how to make an Android or iOS tablet come up with the Sonos controller when unlocked, how about an idea for making the device serve as a digital photo frame when locked?

Is there an easy way to have the tablet be dark when idle/locked/unplugged and show rotating photos (digital picture frame) when idle/locked/plugged in?

And if the slide show application is workable, what’s the best stand for the tablet? Amazon and Walmart seem to have a few.

And my last tablet question for the night… since we’re talking about devices that never leave the house, why aren’t there a lot of 13, 14, 15, and 17″ tablets available now? These are all standard sizes for LCD screens in laptops. How hard is it to glue a battery to the back and install Android on a little CPU?

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Folks:

My favorite whole-house music system is Sonos. They used to make a handy controller that cost $400, but discontinued it because the same functions can theoretically be accomplished from a standard Android or iOS device running the Sonos app. Consumers did not want to pay $400 when an Android tablet can be had for as little as $50. Unfortunately, the standard Android or iOS tablet turns out not to be nearly as convenient as the Sonos dedicated controller.

The Sonos controller would wake up if it sensed motion, i.e., if a human picked it up. Is there any tablet on the market that will do this? Or is there an app for iOS or Android that will make it happen?

The Sonos controller always woke up in “Sonos control” mode because that’s all that it could do. An iOS or Android tablet will typically wake up or boot up on its home screen, presenting a bewildering array of options and necessitating extra steps to get to the Sonos app.

Is there an easy way to have an Android or iOS device automatically start the Sonos app when the operating system boots? And then present that app on wake-up?

[Separately, I will note that it is amazing how easy it is to become lazy. I used to take LP records out of their jackets, clean them, and put them on a turntable, then flip the LP over after 20 minutes. Now it bothers me that I have to press an extra button or two!]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/nyregion/large-poor-families-are-left-out-of-new-yorks-housing-plans-officials-say.html is one of my favorite New York Times articles in a long time. The best minds of government and non-profit organizations (and journalism, since the NYT saw fit to run the story on the front page) have discovered that it is challenge to support and house a family of eight (two parents plus six children) in New York City on an income of $1700/month (roughly my stipend as a single graduate student at MIT in the early 1990s!).

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For the early part of my career as a computer nerd, “legacy software” was something to be deprecated and rewritten by me and my heroic colleagues. Increasingly, however, I am encountering people for whom software that I wrote back in 1995 is the “legacy system”. On a summer beach picnic with Greta, I randomly talked to an online course developer at the Berklee School of Music, for example, who said that the school had used the .LRN system for about 10 years and it had “served us well” but had recently migrated to something new. As I was the reviewer of the SQL data model and page flow for this module of the ArsDigita Community System (described in this book chapter), I felt a surge of pride at the fact that it had worked so well for so long. I felt even better hearing that Zipcar was still relying on the ArsDigita Community System, despite having hired programmers and attempting to write something newer and fancier. It probably is a character flaw that it makes me feel good to hear that a group of new programmers with much better tools and much more money and time have thus far utterly failed to get to where Eve, Jin, Tracy, Aure, and I got back in 1995-1999… (we had four years, of course, which is a long time, but we and the folks who joined us built about 200 different applications during those four years)

Perhaps the way to make a COBOL programmer feel good on her deathbed is to find some customers who have never been able to migrate off the mainframe…

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I’ve always liked all-in-one PCs, having bought my first back in 2000 from Gateway. I’m considering getting a Dell XPS 27 with the touch screen so that I can try out Windows 8 (don’t worry, I am prepared for Windows 8 to suck! Frankly I haven’t found any new Microsoft features since Windows XP that I thought were useful). Dell seems to make a pretty good product for around $2000 (includes 8 GB of RAM and a 2 TB hard drive for video editing/storage). What I can’t figure out is why there is no SSD cache or accelerator available from Dell or indeed why this isn’t standard. I bought a $1000 17″ laptop from HP last summer and, due to its 32 GB SSD accelerator, it boots just about as fast as a fully SSD-based machine yet has a huge capacity for storing video and the accelerator was only about a $50 option (based on SSD accelerators on amazon.comthe price seems to be about the same today).

If everyone hates computers that are slow to boot, why hasn’t the SSD accelerator idea caught on as a standard feature?

[Anticipating that the Apple fan club would chime in with some derision… I priced a similar configuration over at Apple and found that $2549 is the price for a 27″ all-in-one with similar CPU, memory, and hard drive capacity. But the Apple product does not have a touch screen so really there is no direct comparison. Anyway, it would be good if people could confine comments to the question of why this $50 item is not in every personal computer rather than the question of how anyone could be stupid enough to buy a non-Apple product.]

Update 10/20/2012: Dell just added a $2500 “monster” config for the XPS 27. It has a 32 GB SSD accelerator (in front of a 2 TB conventional hard drive), 16 GB of RAM, and a Blu-ray drive. That still does leave the question of why don’t they offer this as an option on their $1000+ PCs. Almost every magazine review seems to indicate that the SSD accelerator improves system performance more than anything comparably priced.

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