A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
An awesome new biology journal paper showing how just how wrong a distinguished professor sitting at a desk at Harvard University can be. It is also a good example of the hubris of those modern scientists who believe themselves to be vastly smarter than their 19th century forebears.
Full post, including commentsI’ve started to read Wealth, War and Wisdom
Skimming ahead, I’m not sure how practical the book will prove to be as an investment guide. In Japan stocks and urban land proved to be good investments for investors who bought prior to the destruction of World War II. Farm land, on the other hand, did not do well. In France, by contrast, land and gold came through the war much better than stocks. In nearly every country afflicted by war, stocks outperformed bonds for the periods 1900-1949 and 1940-1949. One caveat that Biggs offers is that you can’t buy and hold individual stocks, since once-promising companies inevitably decay (computer nerds get branded as dullards by Biggs: “IBM and Intel were once great innovating companies, but now they are corporate research laboratories. Bill Gates was the innovator, not Microsoft”). How does Biggs, a professional money manager collecting fat fees, recommend to his readers that they maintain a diversified equities portfolio? Through low-cost index funds: “It pains me to write it, but professional investors don’t do much better [than individual investors picking stocks and underperforming the S&P] on a statistically significant, risk-adjusted basis.”
Biggs’s strongest recommendation is to avoid being Jewish, especially in Europe: “German Jews, brilliant cultured, and cosmopolitan as they were, were too complacent. They had been in Germany so long and were so well established, they simply couldn’t believe that there was going to be a program that would endanger them. … As a result the German Jews had relatively little wealth outside of Germany, and reacted sluggishly to the rise of Hitler…”. Other regions of the world get some coverage as well: “In Iraq the wealthy Iraqi Jews who had lived there for centuries misjudged how fast and ruthlessly Saddam Hussein … would move to expropriate their wealth. … The same calamity befell the Indonesian Chinese who failed to anticipate the rapidity of the fall of Sukarno. … No matter how safe and secure your home country appears, even if it’s the United States, every truly wealthy person should have some assets elsewhere. History suggests that nothing is forever. … New Zealand recently has become the Shangri-la of choice for paranoid American hedge-fund grand masters. Currently wealthy Russians are paying up for residential properties in London, New York, and the south of France.”
Given the fact that the U.S. has not experienced a war on its soil since 1865 and that he is writing mostly for an American audience, Biggs seems a little obsessed with war. On the other hand, being invaded and conquered has been the most dramatic cause of wealth destruction throughout human history. And the U.S. has been at war for much of the past 70 years (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States for the full list). Who is to say that if we keep starting wars we won’t eventually lose one badly enough to find the enemy here in Boston?
[One thing that we can’t fault Biggs for is timing the market for readers of books about surviving financial crises. According to the Amazon reader reviews, the hardcover hit the streets in January 2008, just one month after the U.S. economy entered the Great Recession, and came out in paperback in October 2009, just a few months after the recession officially ended (July 2009).]
More: Read Wealth, War and Wisdom
Folks:
I’d like to spec out the required front-end server hardware for a database application with the following characteristics:
During a peak period we could conceivably get as many as 45,000 users logging in during a 30 minute period so that’s 270,000 pages to be served within 30 minutes or roughly 150 pages per second (corresponding roughly, perhaps, to the peak load on a server handling 4.5 million pages per day with a slightly uneven demand).
Let’s assume that Oracle is sufficiently well tuned and supported by hardware that it responds to all of these queries and transactions very quickly and does not become a bottleneck. (I recognize that this is a big assumption, but I would like to treat any Oracle issues in a separate posting.)
Here are my questions:
Thanks in advance to the Windows/IIS/ASP.NET heroes who answer!
[Note: This was edited down from a posting that had some distracting stuff about tuning Java, which resulted in a very unfocused discussion. I have had the moderator remove the non-IIS/ASP comments and will save them for a later posting regarding Oracle/Java.]
Full post, including commentsFolks:
I’ve drafted a book review of Academically Adrift and would appreciate comments/corrections.
Thanks.
Full post, including commentsI just finished The Book of CSS3: A Developer’s Guide to the Future of Web Design
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Cancer. Rachel Carson predicted a big increase in cancer due to due to DDT, which would cause “practically 100 per cent of the human population to be wiped out from a cancer epidemic in one generation.” Paul Ehrlich, a MacArthur genius, also predicted doom from DDT: “The U.S. life expectancy will drop to forty-two years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics.”
(another) Nuclear War. It once seem inevitable that we would have a species-ending nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Famine. Environmentalist Lester Brown predicted imminent famine in 1974, 1981, 1984, 1989, 1994, and 2007, in a 1967 book titled Famine, 1975!, and by MacArthur genius Paul Ehrlich in a 1968 book The Population Bomb (repeated, but without a predicted date, in a 2008 book, The Dominant Animal).
Exhaustion of minerals, oil, etc. We did indeed use up all of the known reserves of zinc, gold, tin, copper, oil and natural gas by 1992, just as predicted in the Club of Rome’s 1970s bestseller Limits to Growth. But then we found some more.
Air Pollution. Flying a small plane into the Lower 48 from Alaska or the Caribbean, I’m often amazed at how brown the air looks hanging over Washington State or Florida. On the other hand, it was supposed to be much worse. “In 1970, Life magazine promised its readers that scientists had ‘solid, experimental and theoretical evidence’ that ‘within a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air polluion… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.'”
Plague (AIDS). “The number of deaths from [AIDS] has been falling since 2005.”
Plague (Flu). Ridley claims that the 1918 flu epidemic was unique due to the environment of soldiers in trenches. A successful modern flu needs its victims to be well enough to walk around, go to work, and spread the disease further.
Global cooling. If not for all of the dinosaur blood that we’ve pumped out of the ground and set on fire, we would in fact be going (slowly) into another ice age. This frightened journalists and their readers in the 1970s and a lot of ink was spent on dire warnings about climate change similar to today’s articles, except that the promised temperature trend was opposite.
Ridley suggests that we count our blessings. The last few years have seemed to offer a lot of lessons about human hubris. Here are some of the things that we’ve learned we can’t do safely: (a) drill for oil in mile-deep water (Deepwater Horizon), (b) build nuclear power plants on tsunami-prone coastlines (Fukushima), (c) build the world’s biggest airliner and engines (Qantas Flight 32), (d) protect cities that are below sea level from flooding (Katrina in New Orleans). On the other hand, none of this seems to stop the human population from expanding and, overall, from enjoying a better standard of living than previous generations.
[June 8 update: NYT carries a Thomas Friedman column “The Earth is Full” saying more or less the exact opposite of what Ridley wrote. They both have great credentials (Ridley has a doctorate in science; Friedman was smart enough to marry a billionaire heiress) so it is tough to know whom to believe.]
Full post, including commentsSteve Jobs unveiled the iCloud file syncing system only a few hours ago, yet already there are imitators who have managed to run with Apple’s ideas. The two copycats that come most readily to mind are Dropbox.com and Google Docs (like iCloud, a cloud-based service that stores files, but the Google programmers, apparently within just a few hours, also managed to develop a browser-based editing interface to some of those files).
Has anyone figured out what the original innovative Apple service does that these imitators haven’t yet managed to copy? I.e., what can I do with iCloud that I can’t do with Dropbox.com?
Full post, including commentsIn reading opinions regarding the U.S. and state economies from professional economists and in talking to these folks face-to-face I’ve never heard any of them say anything clear enough for a voter to act upon. For example, suppose that the U.S. owed 800 percent of GDP, like Greece (see this NY Times article (the U.S. figure is around 500 percent, though we’re not as centralized as European countries and there is almost surely a lot of state-to-state variation)). An accountant would say “You’re spending more than you earn. You have to stop or you will run out of money.” After hearing that, voters and politicians might be able to get together and agree on some spending cuts (not the trivial ones that they’ve managed so far). Perhaps even Californians would be able to agree that their cities could be run into bankruptcy just as competently by managers who earned no more than the President of the United States earns, that a qualified fire chief could be hired for only the same salary as the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and that a police lieutenant need not receive 3X as much as a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant in combat in Afghanistan.
Instead of accountants in public discourse, however, we have economists. So our problems are not recognized as arithmetic challenges, e.g., “How can a society with a median wage of about $16 per hour afford to pay local and state government workers $100-200 per hour (and then pay them for another 50 years after they retire)?” or “How can teenagers who score lower than their Chinese counterparts on every measure of educational attainment be relied upon to pay for 130 million poor and older Americans to receive unlimited medical services in the world’s most expensive health care system?” (see this chart for how Medicare will have 80 million beneficiaries in 2030 (I added in another 50 million for Medicaid (chart)).
The problems are instead categorized as amenable to complex solutions that only someone with a Ph.D. in economics can understand. Or perhaps they are cast as political problems, e.g., “If not for the presence of a handful of heretics amongst voters and in the legislature, we could pass new laws that would magically double our wealth” (I have some extra faith in Massachusetts because one party has controlled our legislature for decades and when we run out of cash there is less chance that they will waste time trying to pin the blame on the handful of Republicans who show up to the State House every now and then to collect a paycheck (but do nothing else)). But oftentimes economists are politically oriented and contribute to the relabeling of “not enough cash” to “too many people in Party X”.
So instead of the sober accountant showing up on TV or in a news article saying “You aren’t rich enough to do stuff like this” or “All of your wealth was siphoned off by the following cronies of the current rulers” we have Economist A saying “Really the U.S. is in great shape if only we printed more money here, had one government agency issue some bonds there, had another government agency buy those bonds, and changed some assumptions in making projections about the costs of Programs X, Y, and Z”. That would be confusing enough except that Economist B then comes on and says “No, the government shouldn’t be printing money and we need these other assumptions in our projections.” The contradictory and complex opinions result in paralysis and inaction where the accountant’s simple warning would have been heeded. Perhaps worse, people hear what they want to hear, in which case a complex macroeconomic argument will register as “We can all be wealthier even if we’re studying less in school and then working fewer hours and fewer years.”
So could we increase our society’s wealth if we sent all of our economists off on a three-year holiday?
Full post, including commentsIf you’re an expert Web developer with Python experience and want to move to the Imperial City, this database-backed Web developer opening in Washington, D.C. should be appealing. You’ll get paid reasonably good money and have a chance to work with Nathan Cobb, the physician who founded QuitNet, which has helped literally hundreds of thousands of people quit smoking. QuitNet is a good reference for when folks ask “Has anyone ever done anything useful with social media?”
Cobb is notable for learning about Facebook and Web 2.0 in 2004 then developing a time machine in which to travel back to 1995 and start his online community with many Facebook-like features.
The job should be secure since the money is ultimately coming from the $206 billion Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement between the cigarette companies and the states. [Most of those states will probably soon need to start sending every retired public employee a free carton of cigarettes every week in hopes of reducing their pension liabilities.] Not that you’ll really need the cash since all of your entertainment will be free (museums, lectures, concerts, recreation, etc., all paid for by collecting taxes from people in Ohio, Michigan, and other struggling states). You’ll be getting good experience building applications that plug into all of the popular social networking sites. You’ll be living in a city where there are literally 10 jobs for everyone with a modicum of skill, so if you don’t like it you will have your choice of places to work next.
[In case you’re a single male Python nerd tempted to move to Silicon Valley, keep in mind that there is a huge surplus of single men in the San Francisco Bay area whereas the opposite situation applies in Washington, D.C. (see Boston Globe (written by a journalist and therefore not adjusted for overall population size). Would you rather be by yourself fighting California traffic or with a lovely young female government employee riding the Metro? Remember that your government worker companion will be well-paid and she won’t have to work long hours so she’ll have plenty of time for recreation.]
Full post, including commentsI’m halfway through The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Have you chuckled at the apparent inconsistency of a neighbor who drives a 7,000 lb. pavement-melting SUV to Whole Foods and then buys organic produce? It turns out that there is no inconsistency. She is destroying the planet with her SUV and with her purchases of hard-to-grow organic food.
Ridley notes that with genetically engineered crops, synthetic fertilizers, and Roundup to control weeds, the trend of feeding ever more people with less land could be continued. The biggest obstacle to returning land to its wild state is organic farming. Currently we are using 38 percent of the Earth’s land for growing food or grazing animals; at 1961 levels of productivity we would need to be using 82 percent of the land.
Organic farmers won’t use genetically engineered crops, so they spend a lot more time and energy fighting pests. Organic farmers won’t use Roundup and other herbicides, so they plow the weeds under, which kills a lot of small animals and loosens the soil enough that it erodes (or sometimes they resort to flame-throwers). Organic farmers won’t use standard fertilizer, but only manure from cows, which means we’ll need a lot more cows running around.
Organic cotton is an especially hard-on-the-Earth product, according to Ridley. Standard industrial cotton has Bacillus thuringiensis (“bt”) genes mixed in and these kill pests, cutting the need for sprayed pesticides in half.
Who knew that “sustainable” would mean a polyester shirt and a bag of Fritos?
[Update: Just a few days after this posting, a German E. coli outbreak that killed 22 people has been blamed on organic bean sprouts (story).]
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