Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A reader sent me an article from the Boston Globe concerning a proposal to tweak pensions for government workers in Massachusetts. First, the article notes that taxpayers are currently on the hook for $20 billion in “unfunded costs”. That’s over $12,000 for a family of four and will grow if the pension fund does not obtain the 8 percent annual investment returns forecasted or if medical technology improves and retired workers live longer (an MBTA worker can retire at age 41 with a full pension, fire, police, and prison workers at 45, so our biotech crystal ball has to be accurate out to approximately the year 2070).

The new system preserves the ability of government workers to boost their pension by working overtime towards the end of their career: “pension benefits would be calculated based on their highest earnings over a five-year period, instead of three years.” (i.e., they’ll have to do a lot of overtime during for five years rather than three if they want their pension to be higher than their old base salary)

My personal favorite part of the proposal:

Another, known as “spiking,’’ involves employees nearing retirement who are suddenly given a new job title with a dramatic boost in salary. Under Patrick’s plan, they would have to prove that their promotions were warranted.

As there are no productivity or achievement standards for government workers, how would it ever be established that a promotion was “unwarranted”?

More: press release from the politicians (notably does not contain information on the existing underfunding and how much taxpayers will have to cough up); also check out http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/23/magazine/rockford.html, which has portraits and audio interviews of people in Rockford, Illinois. They are trying to figure out how $10/hour ($20,000/year) private sector workers can support the $52-80,000/year public sector workers (whose total compensation is almost certainly over $100,000/year when the value of pension promises and other benefits are considered).

Reminder: this video of a firefighter talking about his lifestyle and compensation is always worth watching just before paying a tax bill.

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Email from a friend:

“You need to tiger mother Ollie.

One funny aspect of Chaser’s amazing qualities, is that that he’s learned to to distinguish verbs and objects, but he mostly can’t retrieve a ball without a lot of begging and cajoling from his owner..

There’s so much room for Ollie to surpass him!”

“to tiger mother” is apparently the English language’s latest verb. Thank you, Amy Chua.

[Chaser is the border collie in http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827921.900 and in a recent New York Times piece.]

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Various friends have sent me pointers to the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother book and associated controversy. The author, Amy Chua, has a Samoyed and is not impressed with the American education system, ergo, she and I must have been separated at birth. I enjoyed reading about Chua, Coco, and her daughters. Now, however, I’m being peppered with links of reactions to Chua’s book. The latest is a David Brooks op-ed in the New York Times. He says that Chua’s daughters, by piling on the accomplishments, don’t have time to develop their social skills and emotional intelligence. “They’ll grow up skilled and compliant but without the audacity to be great”. How is being an average American teenager harder than becoming a concert pianist?

“Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.”

As the Samoyed Coco has no doubt mastered all of the above “social tests” that Brooks sets forth, I suppose he will be writing a recommendation for the bitch to attend Yale. She has demonstrated superior ability to those Chinese-American kids who have mere “book learning”.

I wonder if Brooks has visited unemployment offices lately. There are plenty of folks collecting checks who have wonderful social skills, who get along well with 14-year-old girls, and who have the audacity to think big. Sadly, however, their lack of measurable or discernible skills is keeping them from getting a job. Consider the person who excels at standardized tests, but lacks social skills. He passes an exam, gets a government job, and cannot be fired until he retires at age 52 with a full pension. Let’s assume that his lack of social skills prevent him from being productive, as Brooks suggest. That’s sad for the taxpayers, but it does not affect his ability to collect a paycheck. Let’s consider a driven test monkey who gets through medical school and becomes a radiologist. Will a hospital refuse to hire him because he can’t prove that 14-year-old girls like him? Given the small number of physicians per capita in the U.S., that seems unlikely. How about a numbers wizard who wants to work at a hedge fund? Is she going to encounter a 14-year-old girl executive who won’t hire her because she played the piano at Carnegie Hall like Sophia Chua rather than hanging out at the mall?

A person with good social skills may arguably be happier due to having a more pleasant spouse and having more fun day-to-day, but that wasn’t Brooks’s point. He was arguing that Chua’s daughters, though beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished, are lacking in some sort of productivity-enhancing achievement that Americans with complacent non-Chinese mothers possess. I.e., Brooks argues that Dean Vernon Wormer was wrong when he said that “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son”.

[I haven’t read the book yet, but I doubt that I’ll feel sorry for any kids who have grown up with Samoyeds in the house.]

[Update: I realize that I had this exact debate about five years ago. A friend and I walked past some kids player soccer. She stopped and looked approvingly. “This is so great for them. They’re building all kinds of teamwork and social skills that will help them in business.” I replied “You’re absolutely right. That’s why Nigeria and Argentina are the richest countries in the world.”]

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We have completed our three-day intensive RDBMS/SQL course at MIT. The feedback from students so far is that they thought that it was more effective per hour of their time than struggling through problems at home. This makes a lot of sense to me since anyone learning a new set of tools can get stuck for hours on something trivial, e.g., not knowing the right keyboard commands or not knowing how to find the error log or not knowing how to invoke or quit the debugger. In a shared lab with other students and TAs, there is a much greater chance of a student getting unstuck before wasting a lot of time.

Students liked using Google Docs and they liked having their own VM.

We were concerned that the Android application development portion of the class would be seen as pointless and far too confusing with the mixture of tools required and the three .java files in Eclipse necessary to do even the most trivial thing (grab XML page from server and display values on the Android screen; if programming is like this, no wonder that all of the smart people in the U.S. go to med school and Wall Street). However, the way that we set it up so that we told them exactly which files to touch and how they ended up liking it. Now they can see all of the moving parts in a collaborative server/db-backed Android application. (We could not do the same thing for iPhone because the development environment runs only on Macintosh, which just a handful of students had, and because none of us knows how to use a Mac!) We spent about 1.5 hours on Android development and the overall structure of DBMS, HTTPD, firewall, XML transport, XML parsing, display.

People came to the course with varying levels of experience, which resulted in some people falling behind. By the time that 70 percent of the class had solved the problem, we had to move on to discuss the solution. It is incredibly efficient to be in one room together, but at the same time the only way to train everyone to proficiency would be to have all the learning be self-paced. I don’t have a good solution to this. We probably could have done better with an “extra credit” harder problem following every standard problem. That way the quicker students would have something to do other than catch up on email while the struggling folks were still working on the basics.

The students didn’t do much with PHP, but it proved inoffensive and didn’t waste anyone’s time. Now that MySQL is 16 years old, I was surprised at the things that they’ve yet to accomplish. For example, the C in ACID is “Consistency”, i.e., being able to enforce rules in the SQL data model and using the RDBMS as a last line of defense against programmer mistakes. Yet MySQL silently fails to enforce any CHECK constraint. Similarly, when students would GROUP BY column_a and then SELECT column_b (where column_b had multiple values within each group), instead of raising an error as Oracle, Postgres, or SQL Server would, MySQL happily picks a column_b value at random and includes it. I don’t understand why people use it. Is MySQL/InnoDB faster than PostgreSQL? If so, and if people don’t need such things as CHECK constraints, why not simply use a NoSQL system?

One sober reflection upon MySQL’s capabilities was captured during an instant message exchange among course instructors while developing the problem sets:

• I’m too old to look shit up in the MySQL manual
• fuck these people
• making something that sucks ass compared to Oracle
• and then making us learn all of the differences

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I’ve drafted an article on Using Google Docs for Classroom Instruction and would appreciate feedback.

Thanks.

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We survived the first day of our intensive RDBMS programming course at MIT. About 25 students showed up at 10:00 am and all returned after the lunch break. Though the syllabus is new and untested, the students reported that the class was better than their average MIT course and more effective for learning. I think this goes to show that almost anything works better than the traditional lecture format. We had individual students or pairs working together on laptops and three teachers milling about the room offering assistance for solving problems (plus Andrew in California on IM and Skype). We used Google Docs to distribute the assignments and as a shared workspace for doing code review once problems were wrapped up and ready for discussion.

The only thing that did not work well was distributing the 2.7 GB .zip file containing the virtual machine for the course. It took at least 30 minutes to download even though it was parked on web.mit.edu. We had a couple of DVD-ROMs, but should have brought a bunch of USB sticks. The MIT wireless network and/or the Web server is not ready for intensive use. We used virtualbox.org and had sysadmin problems on all underlying platforms (the mix was approximately 80 percent Windows, 10 percent Macintosh, 10 percent Linux; one guy had a $150 Android tablet for viewing documentation). It would have been ideal to get everyone set up well before the class started, though many of the attendees did not pre-register so it is unclear how we would have reached them.

Overall it was a very rewarding experience. A lot of very smart people showed up and we were able to save them a lot of time while teaching them some useful skills. I need to offer a public thank-you to Andrew Grumet,  John Morgan, and Shimon Rura. Given the range of systems that we had to deal with as well as the problems students encountered that were peculiar to their laptops or “just plain peculiar”, there was no way that I could have been effective alone. So thanks, guys!

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Folks:

We’ve drafted an RDBMS versus NoSQL article for the three-day RDBMS course that we’re teaching this weekend at MIT (you’re welcome to take the class, even if you’re not an MIT student; just email me). The article is intended to support a 20-minute discussion and give students pointers should they be interested in learning more. As neither Andrew nor I are NoSQL experts, comments would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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As I was apparently the only Jew handy during a blizzard that dumped 14-18″ of snow in the Boston area, I was asked to comment on whether Sarah Palin’s video (youtube) regarding the Tucson shootings was offensive. Here’s my analysis

• 30 seconds: “our exceptional country, so vibrant with ideas” … “a light to the rest of the world”; The rest of the world doesn’t seem to be in a rush to copy our political system. Most democracies are parliamentary. Do we have better or more ideas per capita than other countries? Certainly we’ve had more per-capita wealth for implementing those ideas, but where is the evidence that we’re more creative than everyone else on the planet?
• 60 seconds: “inexcusable … evil man took lives”; is there any evidence that the killer himself wants to be excused? Certainly nobody else has come forward to say “I think what Jared Loughner did was reasonable under the circumstances”
• 1:24: “spent the last few days… praying for guidance”; if God helped out with this video, I would have hoped that He could have varied the camera angle a little (yes, I know that I’ve done some equally lame work for my helicopter stuff, but my production budget is lower than Ms. Palin’s)
• 2:40: “Obama would join me in affirming the health of our democratic process” [based on there being some turnover of seats in every election]; contrary to Ms. Palin’s statement, it is extremely difficult for an incumbent Representative to be voted out of office. Congressmen and women choose their voters by rearranging districts; voters do not choose Congressmen in most cases. If the vulnerability of incumbents is a measure of political health, as Ms. Palin suggests, we’re not in the best condition.
• 3:31: “journalists should not manufacture a blood libel”; analyzed separately below
• 6:20: “it is in the hour when our values are challenged that we must remain resolved to protect those values”; this has been a very common sentiment expressed in Supreme Court opinions, e.g., when FDR was advocating throwing out the Constitution in order to deal with perceived emergencies during the Depression and World War II. The government would say “we need to regulate all of this stuff that has nothing to do with interstate commerce because of the crisis” or “we need to intern more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans without a trial because they might be a risk”. The sentiment is almost always in the dissenting opinion, with the majority agreeing with the government that the crisis trumps whatever freedoms people had formerly thought the Constitution gave them.
• 6:30 “we had to fight the tendency to trade our freedoms for perceived security [after 9/11]”; Did we win this fight while I was waiting in the security line at Logan for my new X-ray scan?
• 6:55: “we need God’s guidance”; this seems like a bad way to deal with criminal justice or politics since people of different religions will get different guidance from God, at least to judge by what is written down in the world’s various sacred texts. A Jain, for example, would surely not hear divine voices telling him to invade another country, execute a convicted criminal, or do a lot of the other stuff that our government does.
• end of video impression: Palin’s face looks remarkably square (maybe it always looks like this? I haven’t seen any of her other videos and did not watch any TV coverage of the 2008 campaign (since I predicted Obama’s victory back on December 12, 2007))

Was Palin’s use of “blood libel” offensive to me or other Jews? Was it a reasonable analogy? Wikipedia notes that an unexplained murder in Norwich was blamed on the Jews. Palin was discussing an unexplained group of murders (probably nobody other than Jared Loughner will ever know the real reason) and how some journalists were blaming it on people who’ve made statements opposing Democratic Party initiatives.

Personal conclusion: Not offensive and perhaps the most accurate and sensible part of the video.

[Separately, I’m trying not to look at any news about this incident because it would be too sad to think about a 9-year-old girl dying, even if she were the only victim. According to some historians, Stephen Foster wrote Gentle Annie (lyrics; Marilyn Horne singing) after the death of a young girl in a carriage accident. For those of us who lack such talent, what purpose can be served by reflecting on the sad events of last weekend?]

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Folks: This weekend I’m teaching a class at MIT on RDBMS programming. Sadly I forgot to learn the material myself before offering to teach it. In giving students guidance as to when a standard RDBMS is likely to fall over and require investigation of parallel, clustered, distributed, or NoSQL approaches, I’d like to know roughly how many updates per second a standard RDBMS can process. Here are the criteria:

• mixture of inserts, updates, and selects, with the server doing 10 queries for every update and the typical update or insert involving two rows
• a 4U server with 8 CPU cores and enough RAM to hold the entire database
• eight hard drives so that transaction logs, indices, and tables can all reside on separate spindles (or magic RAID approaches can be used)
• perhaps a little bit of magic in the form of a solid-state drive being used for the transaction logs
• any RDBMS, including MySQL/InnoDB, Oracle, Sql Server, DB2, etc.

I’m looking for a number that is good to within one order of magnitude.

Thanks.

[http://www.tpc.org/tpce/results/tpce_perf_results.asp makes it look as though the answer is “about 2000” though I’m not sure if the TPC-E benchmark simultaneously requires some queries. It is tough to say because the tpc.org Web site is unusably slow…. I finally got the Word doc. It looks like they count some queries as “transactions”, e.g., “The [Customer-Position] transaction is a real-only transaction”. So maybe the answer is closer to 1000? The TPS-E benchmarks use some ridiculously expensive systems, but they also require a huge amount of data to be kept, e.g., 8 TB for a low-end system doing 2000 queries and updates/second.]

(The venerable TPC-C standard never struck me as matching up that well to typical Internet applications.)]

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One of my big mistakes as an investor was not seeing that a U.S. house price bubble deflation could affect the price of industrial equities (my main investment; I had faith in GE’s ability to sell jet engines in China and India even though I thought houses in Cincinnati were overvalued). Clearing off my desk from 2010, here’s a story from the Wall Street Journal (“Shareholders hit the roof over relocation subsidies”, October 25, 2010) about how whenever top managers at public companies change job, they’re compensated for any loss they might incur from selling their house. The Microsoft shareholders had to pay Stephen Elop $5.5 million in relocation costs, including $3.7 million to make up for the loss on his Los Altos mansion (separately, I would have loved to have gotten the $1.8 million furniture moving contract!).

How much will this take out of shareholders’ pockets? Let’s assume 5000 substantial public companies (e.g., the Wilshire 5000). Let’s assume that each company has 10 top executives, that turnover occurs every five years (2 execs per year), and that each one gets an average of $1 million if he or she sells a house in a down market. Peter Schiff in the WSJ on December 30, 2010 said they’d have to decline another 20 percent to get to the historical trend line (and Philip says the trend line itself is too high because it factors in continued robust growth for the U.S. economy, whereas in fact there has been little growth since 2007); the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank economists say another 23 percent drop is due. So let’s assume the down market in real estate lasts at least another 5 years. The Case-Shiller index peaked in 2006, so that means a total of 10 years of decline. That’s $2 million per public company per year and a total of $100 billion that will go to employees rather than shareholders.

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