Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I mentioned to a friend my wish that, as long as the government is spending money in hopes of boosting the economy, it would spend it on something that has proven to yield very high returns, i.e., open-source software. He asked “How would you decide which projects to fund? Most of the funding for software so far has come from the Department of Defense.”

My proposal would be copied from the way that universities implement their race-based hiring programs for faculty. Each department in a university is given a fixed number of slots that they can fill by hiring whomever they believe is best qualified to be an assistant professor. If, however, a department should hire someone whose skin is dark enough to qualify them as a desirable minority, that hire does not count towards their allocation. In other words, a department with one slot that has found a white or Asian candidate can still hire that person and a favored minority in addition. This way the university enlists its entire staff in helping with race-based hiring, rather than having one administrator at the top whose job is to find potential professors with the appropriate skin tone.

How can we apply this to open-source software and government agencies? It might seem as though each government agency were spending as much money as humanly possible at all times. Yet in fact each agency has an annual budget and is constrained by that budget. If we were to set aside a few billion dollars we could say “Any agency that wants enhancements to existing open-source projects or wants to fund new open-source software can do so with all of the money coming from the central open-source software fund.” That way agencies would be encouraged to spend money on open source because any funds spent wouldn’t come out of their usual budget.

How would it work? Suppose that a 30-person group within the National Park Service wanted a Web-based tool for collaboration amongst themselves and a volunteer organization. They find that a Drupal module does 85 percent of what they want. They would hire the developer of that module to add the features. Those features could be rolled into the public distribution or made available separately to other programmers worldwide. The money would come from the open-source software fund, no questions asked, rather than the Parks Service budget.

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A rich friend forwarded me an advertisement that he got…

“Ferrari of New England is pleased to announce that we have 7 brand new Ferrari’s [sic] in Stock [sic] and ready to go, including 6 F430’s [sic] (Spider’s [sic] and Coupes) and a 612 Scaglietti. This is indeed a rare opportunity to become the first original owner of a new Ferrari. Most times it takes years and a purchase of a pre-owned Ferrari to attain this status.”

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Automobile sales in the U.S. are down 35 percent for December 2008 compared to December 2007. My conclusion is that the economy is in surprisingly good shape. Why? There is hardly a single person in the U.S. who actually needs a new car. Cars have become so durable that the easiest purchase to defer is a new car. A neighbor of mine is selling a 1997 Chrysler minivan. It has 125,000 miles on it, works perfectly, and looks almost new because it lives in a garage. He doesn’t trust it for long highway trips anymore. The Blue Book value of this car is $3000 for a private party transaction, $1625 for a trade-in. It would surely be nicer to have a brand new version of this same van (about $23,000 invoice, which presumably is the maximum you’d ever have to pay), but there would be no shame or inconvenience in driving this 12-year-old minivan.

The population growth rate of the U.S. is about 0.9 percent, so we might expect about 2.5 million cars to be sold as a consequence of newly licensed drivers (there are 250 million registered cars on our roads). There are roughly 6 million car accidents every year in the U.S. If we assume that the car is destroyed in 3 million of those, we would expect another 3 million sales due to accidents. That’s an annual sales rate of 5.5 million. In fact, sales are running at a rate of closer to 10 million, which means that 4.5 million cars are being sold as luxury splurges. That doesn’t sound like a depression yet.

[January 6 Update: The New York Times has an article today on the fact that cars have gone from an average of 6 years old to an average of 9 years old.]

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The news today describes the withdrawal of Bill Richardson from the job of Secretary of Commerce. None of the articles point out that the guy has never had a job outside of government (wikipedia). Does it make sense to have someone running Commerce who has never had any experience of trying to do any sort of business? As private industry continues to shed jobs and government continues to grow, one might argue that in the long run all U.S. jobs will be government or government contracting, but we’re not there yet. As a taxpayer, I get a bit nervous when I see the entire government run by people who’ve never been net payers of taxes (of course government workers do pay income tax, but their tax-funded salaries are larger than their tax payments, so on balance they are net recipients of tax dollars).

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Title pretty much says it all… “Obese Patients Necessitate Bigger Plane For Aussie Flying Doctor Service”

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The newspapers are filled with stories about the latest battle in the Arab-Israeli war, which started in 1948 but somehow is presented in our media as a fresh conflict. Hamas is described as a terrorist organization that has somehow occupied various buildings and rocket-launching sites throughout Gaza. In fact, Hamas is the legitimately elected government of all of the Palestinians, having won 76 out of 132 seats in a 2006 election (the Fatah party won only 43), as its Wikipedia article explains. Despite a military conflict with Fatah in 2007 (wikipedia), which resulted in the loss of power in the West Bank, Hamas supposedly remains the popular choice of the average Palestinian and overwhelming the choice of Gazans when it comes to political representation.

We don’t have to like what Hamas advocates or Hamas’s army does, but we should have the courage to accept their authority to speak and act for the Palestinians.

[Hamas is actually delivering on its campaign promises, which is more than most of us Americans can say for our politicians. Hamas promises in its charter to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” and to fight against Jews (they can’t be fighting against the state of Israel because they don’t recognize the existence of the state of Israel and certainly they aren’t fighting against the 20 percent of Israelis who are Arab).]

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The New Yorker magazine ran an interesting article in January 2007 about Michael F. Bennet and the Denver Public Schools. Bennet was recently named the new U.S. senator from Colorado, so the article is timely again.

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… you get to keep selling mortgages that are guaranteed by the federal government (and that probably won’t ever get repaid). This from a November 19, 2008 Business Week story: “FHA-Backed Loans: The New Subprime.”

As the government gets ever bigger, there will be more and more situations in which gains are privatized and losses are socialized (paid by us taxpayers). The real question is why anyone starts a business that does not tap into federal guarantees of one sort or another. What kind of fool would take the risk of failure?

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At a New Year’s party today, I sat between a Harvard administrator and one of Harvard’s brightest faculty stars. They were discussing a recent faculty meeting at which the president and dean failed to inspire them with a bright vision of the future. I said that they shouldn’t expect inspiration from bureaucrats at Ivy League schools. By dint of their limitless wealth, these schools will always be at the top of the heap regardless of what the bureaucrats do. The innovations will come from scrappy new schools such as University of Phoenix, which figured out new ways to deliver face-to-face and online education such that hundreds of thousands of people were able to earn degrees that would otherwise have entailed huge sacrifices of schedule, calendar time, and money. There was no reason for a school like Harvard to deliver education any differently than it was delivered 350 years ago, i.e., a lecture hall, a blackboard, a bunch of physically-present students, and a library with physical books.

The Harvard professor objected “But there is a lot of great innovation in education going on at Harvard right now.” My ears perked up. Were they going to do something with Internet-supported cooperative work? With using teleconferencing to collaborate with universities in China and India? Maybe the minimal step of capturing lectures on video so that students could review them later? None of the above, as it turned out. “We’re putting more art projects into the curriculum and we’re going to curate some existing campus spaces as contemporary art galleries.”

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The death of our economy and other news seems to have eclipsed the Darfur story in the daily papers. The latest New Yorker magazine has a very interesting article on the day-to-day life of U.N. employees working with refugees in Chad. Definitely easier to read the article than to head over there and see what it is like first-hand…

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