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Readers: Thought you might enjoy this article from New Yorker magazine about oil production in Ecuador, its effect on the environment and local people, and the ensuring international litigation in U.S. and Ecuador. The stakes are high, with the lead U.S. lawyer, Steven Donziger, standing to earn $200 million for himself, but the war is long, having started in 1993 and being far from finished. One tip for attorneys: don’t let anyone videotape you saying, about judges, “They’re all corrupt”, or, about an expert witness report “We could jack this thing up to thirty billion dollars in one day”.

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News reports of how badly Japan was doing never quite squared with my experience as a visitor to that country. A recent New York Times editorial attempts to explain the apparent discrepancy.

[The article is interesting to read, but I’m not sure that I buy the entire argument. The Japanese government has indulged in some massively wasteful projects. Still, they probably can’t compare in profligacy to the U.S. federal and state governments (for example, retirement age for public employees, including police officers, in Japan is 60, compared to as young as 41 or 42 here in the U.S.).]

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(Techie) Folks:

We’re expecting a pretty good-sized crowd, perhaps 60 people, for our three-day database programming course at MIT January 30-February 1 (course page). Students can often get un-stuck simply by asking the adjacent person for help, but the more teachers the better the course goes. Especially on the first day people will more likely be stuck due to a mechanical problem such as “Can’t figure out how to get back into text editor” than a conceptual problem.

Via this posting I’m looking for volunteer teachers (all existing course teachers are also volunteers, so don’t feel slighted if you’re not getting a fat paycheck!). It is a great experience to spend three days with bright young people, many of whom come up with creative ideas for queries that would never have occurred to us SQL old-timers. Here are the tasks that people are likely to have trouble with

• getting Virtual Box installed on a laptop (it is supposed to work on Windows, Linux, and Mac, but of course laptops can be quirky; Netbooks and the handful of Macintosh laptops proved the most trouble-prone last year)
• getting our virtual machine installed and running within Virtual Box (we’re going to provide both Virtual Box and the VM on a USB stick for in-class installs and, for those students who preregister, ask them to download and install everything prior; as a last resort, students whose laptop cannot be tamed can partner with others (arguably a better way to do the course, as part of a pair))
• navigating around within Linux, finding files, editing PHP scripts, saving them back, opening a Web browser to see the effect
• actual data modeling and SQL querying
• MySQL quirks
• Eclipse and the Android SDK
• the Java language (for the Android app development segment only)
• border collie biting their ankles

Nobody has a monopoly on the one right answer, so don’t be shy about volunteering if you are stronger in some areas than others. Certainly when students have sysadmin issues I bounce them to one of the other teachers (I’m lucky if my own laptop works!).

To evaluate whether or not you’re qualified to assist, please visit http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/three-day-rdbms/ and pull the “Day 1 problems” document. It has a link to our virtual machine on web.mit.edu and you can see what is entailed.

I hope that you’ll agree that this is the perfect chance to give back to the community. Instead of sweating in a malaria-plagued jungle trying to figure out how to nail a house together, you will be in a comfortable heated recently renovated MIT classroom (link) and you’ll actually be adding substantial value with the skills that you’ve worked for years to build. For folks curious about teaching techniques, it is also fascinating to see just how much can be learned in three days when people work in a lab environment rather than struggling with problems at home.

Thanks,

Philip

p.s. Lunches and dinners throughout the course are on me!

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Back in April, I published a posting comparing the federal budget and deficit numbers to those of a family. It ended up being widely circulated and now the idea has been turned into a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li0no7O9zmE

 

Much funnier than my original post!

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Continuing my tradition of December election predictions (2007), let me note that I am not listening to any news about the 2012 Presidential election. I believe that Barack Obama will win the general election by a slim margin, e.g., 51/49 percent of the popular vote. Here are my reasons:

• people are afraid of change and will favor an incumbent if one is available
• Obama ended the Iraq war
• Americans know in their hearts that Obama is not responsible for the stagnant economy

The last point is the one that may need elaboration. If the economy isn’t growing, wouldn’t voters be enthusiastic about replacing the President? My belief is that Americans are smart enough to recognize that one hard-working high-achieving person such as Obama cannot compensate for 313 million Americans who, on average, don’t work all that hard and haven’t achieved very much. Furthermore, as evidenced by the lack of politicians at all levels who are willing to admit that we can’t pay for all of the stuff that we want, Americans aren’t in the mood to confront reality.

We know that a country of people who earn a median wage of $16.27 per hour (source) cannot afford to pay $100,000-200,000/year pensions to policemen and firefighters who retire at 42 or 50. We know that we can’t afford our massive military or unlimited payments to Medicare providers. We know that we can’t afford to pay working-age people to sit at home and collect 99 weeks of unemployment benefits. We know that China is growing 10 percent per year because businesses find employees there who have a better education and work ethic. We know that countries like Singapore now enjoy a higher per capita income than the U.S. does partly because they’ve figured out how to deliver basic government services as a tiny fraction of the cost (as a percentage of GDP). We know that our public schools are set up to benefit employees rather than students and therefore the outlook for competitiveness is not improving.

We don’t want to do anything about these issues, however, which is why reelecting our current crop of politicians, including Obama, is the most sensible thing to do.

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My end-of-year email from Vanguard noted that the S&P 500 index had a total return (dividends plus price changes) of about 2 percent. This money market-like return confirms my friend Tom’s hypothesis that investors should expect roughly the same return from any asset class. Bonds, stocks, cash, whatever. There will be volatility but you won’t get any risk premium. The consumer price index was up about 3.4 percent Nov 2010-November 2011 (source), so in real terms an investor in U.S. stocks lost about 1.4 percent.

[Foreign stocks did even worse, according to this article. Developed markets lost 12 percent; emerging markets were down 18.6 percent (these numbers may be only for price changes, so with dividends the picture would be slightly brighter).]

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A friend sent this this screed from Forbes about the folly of modern management practices, e.g., trying to maximize shareholder value and paying managers for pumping up the stock price rather than getting customers and profits. The article includes some interesting statistics, e.g.,

Meanwhile [despite higher CEO compensation per dollar of net earnings] real performance was declining. From 1933 to 1976, real compound annual return on the S&P 500 was 7.5 percent. Since 1976, Martin writes, the total real return on the S&P 500 was 6.5 percent (compound annual). The situation is even starker if we look at the rate of return on assets, or the rate of return on invested capital, which according to a comprehensive study by Deloitte’s Center For The Edge are today only one quarter of what they were in 1965.

The article concludes by relating an argument against stock-based compensation for managers: “For the last 35 years, stock-based compensation has been tried. It had the opposite effect of what was intended. We should learn from experience and discontinue it.”

Managers do seem to be doing great while shareholders continue to take a beating. I wonder if it is completely fair, though, to blame the managers for helping themselves to unearned stock options and grants. Capital is cheap now, thanks to the rapidly growing wealth and high savings rates in China, India, and other rising economies. Even if managers weren’t looting from the shareholders it isn’t clear why the returns on investment should be high. Money isn’t as scarce as it once was.

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At a dinner party last night (officially a “Hanukkah party” but suspiciously held on Christmas Eve), a 26-year-old guy was talking about how effective online dating has become and, in his opinion, is dramatically more acceptable to people than it was just 3-4 years ago. I pointed out that Internet access is nearly universal in the U.S. (at the very least, a person can use the Web at the local library), online dating goes back at least to 1995, and yet there are plenty of single people who say that they want to be married. Ergo, online dating is a failure.

Obviously there are a lot of people who have met future spouses online, but perhaps those folks would have managed somehow prior to Internet dating. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm shows that the rate of marriage has been falling since 2000 and, according to http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/mvsr/supp/mv43_12s.pdf , has fallen even more dramatically compared to 1990.

[One obvious flaw in online dating/personal ads is that people should not be allowed to describe themselves. What difference does it make what a person thinks of himself if others don’t share that view? That’s why I wrote a personal ad for a friend (see http://philip.greenspun.com/romance/clarissa/ ) a few years ago. The ad worked and she celebrated her first wedding anniversary last summer.]

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From a Facebook friend (i.e., someone I barely know!): “Spending the day migrating sites off of a very sick server. Do I have no life because I am a sysadmin, or am I a sysadmin because I have no life?”

Separately, I was at the airport this morning and watched two charter pilots get into an airplane headed to Florida. They’ll be calling their kids from mobile phones tonight and returning home some time tomorrow.

Perhaps we should should all take a moment to thank those who work on holidays so that the rest of us can enjoy. (That said, of course I am working, at least until 5 pm when I shut down from a Christmas lights helicopter tour.)

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Here’s a story about a guy who was paid more than $30,000 per day by Massachusetts and federal taxpayers ($360,000/year salary plus sick and vacation pay divided by 15 days of actual work; his pension obligation may yet add significantly to a total compensation that is already higher than the President of the U.S.). His time sheets and other records were shredded by a friendly coworker, but his lack of attendance in the office was revealed by checking mobile phone records. An interesting unforeseen implication of technology.

http://www.chelseaha.org/About_Us.html still shows the guy as executive director of this agency that manages 910 apartments for the worthy poor. His compensation was approximately $600 per unit per year. Given that the minimum rent for a public housing unit in the U.S. is anywhere between $25 and $50 per month, this one guy potentially earned between 100% and 200% of the total rents received.

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