Category: Uncategorized

I’m reading Everitt’s new biography of Augustus on my Kindle. Relations between men and women haven’t changed too much in 2000 years:

“I couldn’t bear the way she nagged at me,” [Octavian] explained [his reasons for divorcing his first wife].

Politics were a bit different.

The voting system was weighted in favor of property owners in the belief that they would act with care because they had the most to lose if any mistakes were made. …

[To finance a war] An unprecendentedly severe income tax was levied (25 percent of an individual’s annual earnings) and riots immediately broke out.

War in the Middle East was more profitable than it has been for the U.S.

Possession of Egypt solved Octavian’s financial problems once and for all. When in due course the kingdom’s bullion reserves were transported to Rom, the standard rate of interest immediately dropped from 12 percent to 4 percent.

[Keep in mind that Egypt had not yet been invaded and conquered by Arabs. It was part of the Hellenistic Empire created by Alexander the Great. Cleopatra and the rest of the upper class in Egypt in the First Century B.C. were of Greek ancestry and spoke Greek (according to Everitt many Egyptian aristocrats did not bother to learn to speak the Egyptian language). The descendants of Cleopatra and her circle would be Coptic Christians today.]

The minimum age in 81 B.C. for a quaestor was 30. The minimum age for a consul was 42. Octavian was considered physically weak and prone to illness. He died after 76 years of delicate health.

Newlywed women were carried over the threshold in Rome, to avoid the bad omen of tripping. The Romans had freedom of speech, even after Octavian became Augustus. They even had Little Caesar, though this was a reference to Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar rather than a pizza delivery restaurant.

Full post, including comments

In reading the Forgotten Man, one is struck by some parallels between our current economic times and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Then: The Great Depression was preceded by the stock market crash of 1929. Prior to the crash people were borrowing money to buy stocks sure that stocks could only go up in value. Margin requirements were relaxed so that a buyer need only put 10% down.

Now: Prior to the housing crash Americans were borrowing money to buy houses sure that houses could only go up in value. Margin requirements were relaxed so that a buyer need not put anything down (the 100% mortage).

Then: “the New Deal had created thirty agencies, nearly all close to the executive, leaving ‘the average citizen bewildered’ … In the period of [one year under FDR], 10,000 pages of law had been created, a figure that one had to compare to 2,735 pages that constituted federal statute law. In twelve months, the NRA had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.” Shlaes points out that a lot of business investment was deferred because nobody knew what the legal or tax environment was going to be.

Now: Federal and state legislatures constantly change and add new laws and regulations.

Then: “[in November 1929] Hoover pushed to expand an existing public buildings program by the healthy sum of $423 million on the theory that the spending would boost the economy”

Now: Government payrolls nationwide are expanding, with an ever greater percentage of Americans employed by federal, state, or local government. This comes on top of a huge expansion after September 11, 2001, when we began devoting a larger fraction of our labor force to security and many of those folks are government employees. Governments at all levels continue with massive building programs.

Then: “Roosevelt himself saw that while [Social Security’s] revenues might cover its costs now, the numbers from the actuaries suggested that there would not be enough money for old-age pensions for future generations.” Social Security was explained thusly: “You and your employer will each pay three cents on each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year. [That amount] is the most you will ever have to pay.”

Now: The impending bankruptcy of Social Security is a feature in newspapers every few months. Taxes are up to 14 percent of wages.

Then: Both Hoover and Roosevelt devoted a lot of attention to keeping food prices high. At a time when Americans were genuinely hungry, and some starving, Roosevelt introduced the new idea of paying farmers not to grow food. This was a boon to owners of farm land. It impoverished tenant farmers and other laborers who could not earn a living unless the land was actually farmed.

Now: Congress recently passed the most expensive agriculture bill in American history. At a time when people worldwide are struggling to pay for food, we pay farmers not to grow food and/or encourage them to turn food into SUV fuel. The government strives to keep food prices high.

Then: “Hoover’s humanitarian policy sent a signal nationwide: do not lower wages. In the end, businesses had to choose between lowering wages and shutting down. Often, they shut down.” Albert Wiggin of the Chase bank said “It is not true that high wages make for prosperity. Instead, prosperity makes high wages.”

Now: Congress has recently passed several minimum wage increases, one of which goes into effect on July 24, 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage notes that “minimum wage laws have been shown to cause large amounts of unemployment, especially among low-income, unskilled, black, and teenaged populations”. Barack Obama promises to “raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing.”

Full post, including comments

One aspect of The Forgotten Man is a discussion of the power phrase “the forgotten man” in American politics. Originally the term meant the average schmoe who is forced to pay taxes because a couple of do-gooders decide to do some good for the poor or other unfortunates. The “forgotten man” is not the tramp, who is right in front of us getting some food or cash, but the laborer or shopkeeper who had to pay for the food or handout. FDR used the term to promote his New Deal but now the unemployed guy was the “forgotten man.”

I thought about this the other day when a friend’s wife was praising Ted Kennedy as a paragon of charity and good will towards America’s young and unfortunate. It occurred to me that voting to spend other folks’ tax dollars is not necessarily an indication of personal virtue. A politician in a liberal state such as Massachusetts might do that merely in order to get votes and not out of any sympathy for the common man. As Ted Kennedy has spent virtually all of his personal wealth on personal consumption of mansions, private jets, women, booze, etc., any help that he has provided to Americans has come at the expense of the “forgotten man” paying taxes. Ted’s own contributions to charity have been minimal (source).

Let’s compare to Warren Buffett. Via his work at Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has created tens of thousands of jobs. He has been responsible for a huge amount of new taxes, certainly in the tens of billions of dollars, paid by successful businesses, investors cashing in capital gains, and employees who took all of the jobs created at his companies. Buffett has spent a negligible portion of his $60+ billion in personal wealth on personal consumption, giving almost all of it away to charity.

Perhaps Buffet is “the forgotten man”. He creates jobs by the thousands. He pays taxes by the $billions. He consumes very modestly considering his means. Yet Buffett is not considered a hero here in Massachusetts, at least.

Full post, including comments

Thanks to the many helpful responses to my posting about VMware, we have concluded that the combination of Linux software mirroring and VMware is never going to work. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get this server to work without wiping and reinstalling. Here is my proposed solution, to be mercilessly critiqued by the experts among the readers.

1. wipe Disk 1 and install ZFS and a fresh operating system (CentOS) on Disk 1, creating one group per development service
2. reboot the machine from Disk 1 and install most things by copying from Disk 2 (maybe a fresh install of Oracle from the tar file
3. wipe Disk 2 and tell ZFS that Disk 2 can now be used as a mirror for Disk 1 (I could be wrong, but I think this is something that ZFS is known to do, i.e., adding a mirrored disk dynamically)

We will not run VMware on the rebuilt machine, but rely on standard Unix user/group permissions. This eliminates a lot of moving parts (the one wizard to whom we have access has no experience with VMware, which by itself is probably a good reason to chuck it). Instead of whatever ad hoc bag-on-the-side mirroring has been kludged into Linux by volunteers we will run ZFS, a system designed from the start to include mirroring as a fundamental part of the file system.

Risks:

a) does Oracle run well over top of ZFS? (understand that the write performance of ZFS can be poor but we are barely doing any updates as this is primarily a development server; the production servers it will run are read-only)

b) can we truly add a mirror after ZFS has been up and running and in use?

What do you guys think of this idea?

Note that there are a few goals on which we cannot compromise: (a) the server must be able to survive the failure of a disk without any human intervention, (b) the server must run Oracle and AOLserver to support some legacy code, and (c) the server must support a couple of simple read-only production services.

Full post, including comments

From Patrick Giagnocavo: http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2008/07/fannie-maes-gol.html

This is a explanation of the Fannie Mae debacle that makes sense. It is very similar to the recent posting here in this blog: what happens when you pick a number for management bonuses and then let management work that number.

The Burnham article does not dwell on the role of management bonuses too much, only says that the managers were trying to increase book profit. Fannie Mae has had well-publicized problems in the past ten years stemming from accounting fraud. These led to substantial restatements of earnings. (reference) The incentive to engage in fraud was higher pay for managers (reference).

Full post, including comments

I’ve started The Forgotten Man, an economic history of the Great Depression. Much in the book was news to me. I’ll kick off my weblog coverage of this work with one quote: “Data from the 1930 census would show black unemployment nationally standing slightly below white unemployment.” (i.e., in 1930, among whose who wanted jobs, a greater percentage of black Americans held jobs than white Americans)

After FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and all of the other Big Government efforts over the past 80 years to fight inner city poverty and discrimination against blacks… the black unemployment rate is roughly double the white unemployment rate. During the same period, the Federal Government share of the economy, as a percentage of GDP, has grown from roughly 2 percent to roughly 20 percent.

[http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20030124ar03p1.htm offers some historical unemployment data. In 1930, the year under discussion, the rate was 8.9 percent. During the Calvin Coolidge years (1920s), the rate was 3.3 percent. Note that these numbers would be much lower given modern measurement techniques that exclude large numbers of potential workers from the labor force. The ballooning of the unemployed during the Great Depression was an anomaly that will be discussed in a future post about the rest of the Forgotten Man.]

Full post, including comments

The $650 13″ screen Toshiba laptop that I purchased a year ago was running slowly with multiple browser windows open. I poked around using the (excellent) performance tools included with Windows Vista and found that the machine was page-faulting like crazy. Windows Vista by itself took up 650 MB of RAM and browser windows running gmail, Acrobat, Flash, etc. were chewing up the rest of its 1 GB. I spent $45 at Amazon on two new DIMMs to bring the machine up to its maximum of 2 GB. and thought it would be a good time to reflect on one year of experience with Windows Vista.

The worst part of the machine is the keyboard, which works if you type with just the right touch but otherwise will drop characters. The second worst part is some software that Toshiba larded onto it. When you roll the mouse up to the top of the screen a bunch of pull-down menus appear that seem to be related to function keys. These are hard to get rid of and conflict with the Windows user interface. I think that the solution is to click right on the desktop and disable anything that says “hot keys”. An annoyance is that the fan kicks itself on and off loudly, making it seem that the computer is laboring mightily.

Hardware failures: none, despite cheap plastic lightweight construction.

Networking: Windows often puts up a dialog box saying “Windows needs your permission to continue”, e.g., when accepting a wireless connection at a hotel. This on a machine that has only one user account, which is configured with no password. On the other hand, the machine is often able to get a connection, e.g., from an 802.11N base station with WPA security, when expert Linux and Macintosh laptop owners are unable to connect.

I have installed the following software on the machine:

• an open-source ssh client
• Firefox
• Rhapsody streaming music
• Netflix streaming video
• AOL Instant Messenger
• Google Earth
• Java
• iTunes (I admit to owning an iPod)
• Real Player
• OpenVPN (virtual private network to get into a cluster)
• Picasa (free Google tool for converting camera RAW photos to JPEG)
• various Adobe products, including Acrobat and Photoshop

There have been no conflicts or incompatibilities with the operating system and no calls to tech support for the OS or any of the apps. I have not done any manual updates or system administration until today’s 5-minute RAM upgrade. I disabled all virus protection and firewalls when the machine was new and yet there have been no viruses of which I am aware.

Things that would add a lot of value to this product: better keyboard, fan-free cooling design.

Changing the operating system to something other than Vista would have saved no time and enabled no additional capabilities.

Vista hasn’t proved too scary or complex for someone like me who had a bit of Windows XP experience (though I’ve never programmed or administered XP), but for the average person a mobile phone that can be used as a home computer would make a lot more sense.

[If anyone wants the old RAM, two sticks of 512 MB DDR2, please send email to philg@mit.edu with your mailing address. This is a $20 value but can be yours absolutely free… ** UPDATE: these were claimed very quickly by a starving graduate student in Pittsburgh **]

Full post, including comments

In the primitive old days we would get a new server with a 400 MHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, install Unix, Oracle, and AOLserver, and be up and running after one long miserable day of system administration. Fortunately we live in the modern age. Two months ago, I bought a server with 4 GB of RAM, a processor with multiple gerbils running at the speed of light, and handed it over to a couple of young whiz kids. They laughed at my idea of simply installing Linux, Oracle, and AOLserver. “You’re going to use this box for multiple development servers,” they said. I replied that Unix was all set up for this with users, groups, and file/directory permissions. We would just create one group per development server and add people to the group. This response resulted in peals of laughter. Didn’t I know about VMware? They would create a virtual machine for each development server and entirely separate user account bases for each virtual machine. The poor little pizza box would now be burdened with running four copies of Linux, one for the underlying machine and one for each of the three development servers. This seemed like a waste of the gift that the brilliant hardware engineers had given us of 4 GB of RAM, but isn’t it the job of programmers to render worthless the accomplishments of hardware engineers?

I let them do it their way. Two months later, the box still isn’t up and running. What are the issues? We have one minor issue with time keeping. VMware supposedly lets you have the underlying box look up the time from NTP servers and set the system clock and then the virtual machines are supposed to get their time from there. That isn’t working for some reason and the virtual machines always have the wrong time. (We can laugh at Windows Vista, but I have never seen a Vista machine that was off by more than a second or two.)

The more serious issue is that the machine simply hangs up and won’t respond to keystrokes for several seconds out of every minute or two. At first I figured that the problem was virtual machines being paged out to disk so I asked the whiz kids to disable swap for each and every one of the four Linux installations. They did that and the machine is still halting temporarily. Here’s a description of the problem from one of the whiz kids (they will remain nameless so that they don’t need to be more ashamed than they already should be)…

We're running VMware Server on Linux and have noticed that the virtual machines will hang for several seconds at a time. This is creating serious performance problems and making even the most basic console interactions painful. The disk access light in the status bar of the management console is lit for the duration of the freeze. When the light goes out the VM resumes running smoothly. At first we thought this was a paging problem but upon adjusting memory allocation neither the VMware host nor any of the virtual machines report any swap use whatsoever. The problem continues to occur even with swapping disabled. Checking the vmware.log file reveals hundreds of disk timeouts. Here's a five minute span from the log file:


Jul 07 14:57:30: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 13.156 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 14:58:00: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 7.435 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 14:58:35: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 9.563 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 14:59:13: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 9.763 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 14:59:45: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 5.775 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 15:00:21: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 8.015 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 15:00:57: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 9.939 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 15:01:31: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 10.320 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 15:02:00: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 3.345 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)
Jul 07 15:02:37: vmx| DISK: DISK/CDROM timeout of 6.182 seconds on ide0:0 (ok)

Any advice from a VMware hero? When is it time to wipe the machine and run it like we would have in 1978?

Full post, including comments

Boston has some of the highest per-mile taxi rates in the U.S., higher than far wealthier cities such as New York. At the same time, our streets aren’t all that congested at most times of day, unlike, say, New York. The result is that people do a lot of extra driving in private cars in order to avoid using taxis.

Consider a guy who lives in the suburbs who needs to go to Logan Airport for a five-day trip. He could drive his gas-guzzling SUV and pay $100 to park at the airport. He could pay $120 for a round-trip cab ride in a gas-guzzling seven-year-old full-size American sedan, the mainstay of our taxi fleet. What is he likely to do? Have his wife drive the gas-guzzling SUV to and from Logan twice.

How could we have lower fares and brand-new hybrid vehicles at the same time? Current taxi fares go primarily to pay rent on the medallions. The City of Boston artificially restricts the number of taxis to roughly the same number that existed in the 1930s, when the city was much smaller and poorer. The consequence is that it costs roughly $400,000 to buy a medallion, 20 times the cost of a brand-new 2008 Toyota Prius (a medallion for New York City is closer to $600,000). How come your driver barely speaks English, doesn’t know how to navigate anywhere, doesn’t have a $200 dashboard-mounted GPS, looks poor, and is driving a wreck? As an economist would predict, with the supply of medallions limited, all profits from a taxi operation go to the medallion owners. The drivers earn a subsistence income regardless of the rates set by the city. They cannot be paid less because they would quit and take another job requiring no skills. They cannot be paid more because any higher salary for drivers would attract unskilled workers willing to work for less. When someone hands $40 to a taxi driver here in Boston, most of the money ends up in the hands of a millionaire or billionaire who owns the medallion.

In the old days nobody seemed to mind a system left over from the 1930s that made life in Boston more expensive and clogged our parking spaces with private cars that people used so that they wouldn’t have to pay for artificially inflated taxi fares. When gas is over $4 per gallon, though, and we’re choking ourselves and our planet, perhaps we can summon the political will to expand our taxi fleet with hybrids.

One advantage of hybrid taxis is that a taxi is operated more miles than a private vehicle, so replacing an old Ford Crown Victoria with a new Prius has a lot more impact on gas consumption if done for a cab than for a family car. Another advantage is that taxis tend to be operated mostly in stop-and-go city traffic, where hybrids perform best. Finally we have the opportunity to reduce air pollution to make Boston more attractive to people and employers who have been fleeing south and west.

Right now the politicians and bureaucrats are debating whether to approve a requested 50 percent fare increase, on the stated theory that it will help drivers pay for gas. In reality any fare increase must end up in medallion owners’ pockets. Perhaps it is time to allow anyone who is willing to meet safety and technical standards to operate a taxi here in Boston at rates that are 30 percent lower than current rates. To qualify, a driver would need to be in a vehicle that burns no fuel when stopped in traffic and that consumes, overall, no more fuel than a 2008 Toyota Prius. That should ensure a plentiful supply of efficient taxis on the road and at rates low enough to get people out of their SUVs.

Background: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/fare_game/ (a 2004 article with some useful information)

Full post, including comments

I’ve drafted a new article on preventing runway incursions: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/runway-incursions/. Please comment by clicking the “add a comment” link at the bottom. If you have a typo or correction or short-term comment, feel free to make that here.

Full post, including comments