A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Recommended reading: The Vagrants
The novel is a great display of the writer’s craft, as Li introduces a large cast of three-dimensional characters with remarkably few words. The novel is also timely, dealing as it does with the question of how pragmatic parents are to cope with a child who becomes carried away by words or a philosophy and is ready to sacrifice him or herself to a cause. (See Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his father.)
Full post, including commentsI’m staying at a cousin’s house in Oakland, California. He considers himself to be incapable of administering computers, so he purchased two iMacs and makes periodic trips back to the Apple store whenever data have been lost. Currently one of the two machines is in working order and I tried to use it with my Flip HD camcorder to share a little video of one of his daughters. My previous experience with the Flip has mostly been plugging it into a $399 Windows Vista laptop. On the Mac, I had a lot of trouble plugging the camcorder in mechanically. The design of the Apple keyboard physically obstructs the connector so that it is impossible to plug the camcorder into the keyboard’s USB port. The USB ports on the back are angled downwards, which means that gravity has a much better chance of pulling the camcorder out of the machine (remember that that Flip has a rigid USB connector that ends up supporting the whole camcorder, rather than an accessory cable). By holding the camcorder up to the back of the iMac, I managed to get it plugged in. On a Windows machine, I would be done. I would be prompted to install the Flipshare software off the camcorder onto the PC. After clicking “yes” the software would come up and show the videos on the camcorder, with editing and sharing options. With the Macintosh, I get a confusing dialog box asking if I want to use iPhoto to view “pictures” from my “camera”. After I said “no”, iPhoto came up anyway. After I killed it, no option to install Flipshare was presented.
Do people use the Flip with the iMac? If so, how?
Full post, including commentsIn 1999, I designed a one-year post-baccalaureate computer science program, so that an English major could get a job as a software developer in the then-booming tech industry. One feature that I thought was innovative was that we would teach one course per month, rather than asking students to juggle multiple simultaneous courses. Just today I discovered that this system was adopted in 1978 by Cornell College in Iowa. It is apparently working well for them, since they have not returned to the conventional system.
Full post, including commentsLooking back at Year 2009, I think the biggest question that Americans grappled with was what kind of economic system would be best. Whatever system prevailed through 2008 (see below for my characterization) was obviously flawed. Just as in the Great Depression, this opened the door to considerations of alternatives.
What’s on the table right now?
Option 1: Planned Economy or “Trying to cheat our way out of recession”. If the housing market is soft, the government will guarantee all of the mortgages that are being issued to people who buy houses. If the housing market is still soft, the government will lower interest rates on those mortgages. If the housing market still won’t obey, the government will give outright tax credits to people who buy houses. If companies don’t think that they can afford to hire additional Americans given current wages, regulations, and taxes, we will first have the President cajole them into doing so. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have tax credits for companies that hire Americans. If people don’t want to buy GM and Chrysler cars, we’ll give them a $4,000 credit toward the purchase. When that isn’t sufficient, we’ll have the taxpayers buy GM and Chrysler. Obama and Congress will successively turn their attention to each sagging square of the American economic quilt and sew in $100 bills as reinforcements. When the market gives you an answer that you don’t like (e.g., that a house on the outskirts of Las Vegas isn’t worth much), declare that the market has failed and send in the government.
Option 2: 1970s-style regulation. Prior to the Ford Administration, the U.S. economy was heavily regulated, mostly for the benefit of incumbent companies. You’d need Department of Transportation approval to offer trucking or airline services, for example, and you’d have to do it at prices set by government regulators. Folks believe that they’ve seen the destructive effects of a free market and therefore that the government needs to step in with a heavier foot, starting with Wall Street.
Option 3: Faith in a charismatic leader. “Obama is so smart, I have faith in anything that he does,” is how one of my Cambridge neighbors described her feelings recently.
Option 4: Parliamentarianism. Give one party control of both legislature and executive and let them make major changes. This is how things work in most other Western countries, but the American system has been to keep power fragmented. Oftentimes we vote different parties into executive and legislative branches. Even when one party controls both Congress and the White House, parochial concerns have typically kept anything significant from being changed. We have elected a Representative or Senator not to push forward a grand Party agenda, but rather to bring a pork barrel project home to our town. The big push to pass a 2000-page $1 trillion health care bill that nobody had read or understood was an example of parliamentarianism at work and it was a shocking and surprising process to many.
As in the Great Depression, one thing that very few Americans seem to have faith in is market economics. The system that prevailed prior to 2009 was supposedly “free market capitalism” and we now know that it doesn’t work. Limiting ourselves to just those things that directly relate to the Crash of 2008-?, let’s consider what we actually had:
People close to or favored by the government were able to make enormous amounts of money without taking any personal risk. That’s not a classical free market (in which investors can expect no more than a normal return on investment, after adjusting for risk). That is crony capitalism.
Where can we see a free market operating in order to evaluate whether it was a workable economic system? Due to the enormous size and power of governments worldwide, it seems almost impossible to find a truly free economy. In almost any country one could make a better return on investment by cozying up to a government official or collecting subsidies than by taking risks. The free market, however, does operate internationally. If you are sailing around in a freighter and want to buy sugar, you’ll buy it wherever it is cheapest without any incentives from or intervention by the U.N. If you’re sailing around in a freighter full of cash and want to invest it, there is no international tax system encouraging you to put the money in a particular place or industry. Does the free market work? Commodities by and large seem to be pretty cheap and efficiently produced. Capital flows to support rapid growth in China, Brazil, India, and other countries whose mix of education, costs, stability, and regulation are attractive. Why wouldn’t this free market system work domestically for the U.S.?
Perhaps when government grows beyond a certain percentage of the economy it is no longer possible to have a market economy. Federal spending in the U.S. right now is more than $3 trillion annually. A handful of senators on a single committee can direct a healthy slice of that $3 trillion wherever they choose. It shouldn’t therefore be a surprise that economists found political lobbying to yield the highest return on investment of anything that American companies did. (Lobbying need not result in direct government payments to be profitable; consider the Detroit automakers getting one line inserted into federal regulations, a 25 percent tariff on light trucks starting back in 1963.)
When federal, state, and local government constitute 40 percent of GDP, and the political system is open to lobbying, perhaps pretending that we can have anything resembling a free market is a mistake. Those of us who took Econ 101 are prejudiced against planned economies, but perhaps a Soviet-style planned economy is more efficient than a crony capitalist system.
In my opinion, this is the big question that we’re going to be working out as a society during the coming decade.
Full post, including commentsHere’s a bit of inspiration: http://canonfieldreviews.com/7d-1-weather-sealing/ (guy subjected Canon 7D and 5D Mk II bodies to a lot of water/snow abuse and they survived (Canon doesn’t guarantee rainproofing except for its professional 1D bodies, which are the same price and weight as a Hyundai sedan)).
So don’t let the cold weather, snow, slush, and freezing rain keep you from getting out. I will be cheering you on from my friend’s house here in Napa, California!
Full post, including commentsDriving from Sonoma to Napa, California this evening, I asked my passenger if she would like to listen to OPR on the car radio. “What’s OPR?” she responded. “Obama Praise Radio,” was my explanation. She disputed this characterization of National Public Radio but agreed that we could turn on All Things Considered. Daniel Schorr was talking about Paul Krugman‘s description of the decade 2000 through 2009 as “the big zero” in which nothing good happened. Schorr contradicted Krugman by citing a stellar achievement: “This was the decade that gave us our first African-American president, Barack Obama.”
Full post, including commentsI won first prize in a United Airlines contest: a Christmas week in Sacramento (second prize was two weeks in Sacramento). The succession of televised basketball and football games on the television here has been interrupted with news of Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of a Northwest Airlines Airbus bound from Amsterdam to Detroit. The incident has brought the U.S. government’s “no-fly” list into the news. When Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father dropped a dime on his son and told the Feds that young Umar was preparing to wage jihad, this was not sufficient to add his name to the list (due to fears that many frequent flyers with the same name would be inconvenienced?).
This prompted our host to note that he himself was on the “no-fly” list for four years. Whenever the 65-year-old U.S. Army colonel, with a Top Secret security clearance, showed up at the airport, the Tray Stacking Agency (TSA) would detain him for about an hour to call Washington and make sure that he was not the guy on the list. What were the clues available to TSA? Our colonel is black. The guy in the database was listed as white. Our colonel was 65 years old; the guy in the database was 40. Eventually the young white guy was dropped from the database and our colonel was able to fly commercial with only the usual amount of hassle.
Full post, including commentsThis Christmas season has prompted some reflection on the phenomenon of cars simultaneously bearing Christian fish symbols and bumper stickers proclaiming that a child has been elevated to honor student status at a particular school. Is such a bumper sticker truly consistent with Jesus’s teachings on humility? I couldn’t find good statistics on what percentage of public school students are on the honor roll, but this article reports 15 percent in one school district. Let’s say the average honor student is roughly at the 93rd percentile. As the Chinese population is 1.34 billion, if we assume that the distribution of intelligence and diligence is the same in the U.S. and in China, perhaps a more humble bumper sticker would read “My child is almost as smart and hard-working as 94 million people in China”.
Anyone else have a good idea for a humble bumper sticker?
Full post, including commentsThe Collapse of 2008-? has resulted in many employers having a lot of extra office space. What to do with the cubicles of the fallen? Why not turn the aggregate vacant space, at least 15 percent in most cities, into nurseries for babies?
Currently a majority of U.S. college students are women. A significant and growing proportion of people in the U.S. with advanced degrees are women. Let’s look at the investment in a typical woman with a master’s or professional degree. Figure 12 years of public school at $15,000 per year and 7 years of university education at $80,000 per year (tuition plus the foregone income). That’s $740,000 of capital paid in from a combination of public and private sources.
Now let us suppose that our example woman gives birth to a child. At a minimum, she will want to be with her child every two or three hours to breastfeed. What are her options? She can choose career and leave the baby with a nanny or daycare center for a solid 9-hour block every day. She can choose the baby and quit her job. She can try to split the difference by working part time. In any case where the mother gives some priority to the baby, society loses some of its return on that $740,000 investment. This reduces GDP and, more critically right now, the government’s tax base.
Why should the mother have to choose? We have literally skyscrapers worth of empty office space in every major American city. Why can’t part of the average white collar workplace be set aside for an infant nursery? The mother shows up with her nanny and spends 10-11 hours at work (still being paid for a standard 8). The nanny stays with the kid in the nursery; the mother walks over when the nanny notifies her that the baby is ready to nurse or whenever the mother feels that she wants to see the baby. Thus the mother will have spent 2 or 3 hours during the course of a working day over in the nursery with her baby. She has still worked a full 8 hours but not in one stretch.
Thanks to the efforts of politicians and activists, working women have all kinds of rights that they didn’t have formerly. In many cases they have the right to be hired preferentially over a better qualified male (“affirmative action”). They have the right to sue an employer for not paying them equal wages to what men doing similar jobs are paid. They have the right to sue an employer for permitting loutish men to run around the office making lewd remarks. Seemingly every right has been secured except for the one that would matter the most to working women: the right to continue one’s career without separating from one’s cherished infant.
Full post, including commentsThe December 21/28, 2009 New Yorker carries an article (sadly not available online) on Greg Carr‘s efforts at ecosystem preservation in Mozambique. The article relates a story about a politician visiting a small village:
Politician: “I’m here to save you, and we will bring hospitals, schools, …”
A villager stood up and said “We are very happy, very touched, because you came from so far away to save us, and that reminds me of the story of the monkey and the fish.”
The city folks didn’t know the story, so the villager told it.
A monkey was walking along a river, and saw a fish in it. The monkey said, Look that animal is under water, he’ll drown, I’ll save him. He snatched up the fish, and in his hand the fish started to struggle. And the monkey said, Look how happy he is. Of course, the fish died, and the monkey said, Oh what a pity, if I had only come sooner I would have saved this guy.
Speaking of Africa, I’m enjoying listening to A Bend in the River