Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Was chatting with a gal today about Hurricane Gustav. She said “One of my relatives is still living in a FEMA trailer.” Three years after Katrina? “He’s a drunk. He’s milking the system.”

Here’s the terminal forecast for New Orleans

KMSY 312036Z 312118 06010G17KT P6SM VCTS SCT025 BKN050CB OVC200
TEMPO 2124 VRB15G25KT 2SM TSRA BKN035CB
FM0500 05020G30KT P6SM VCSH OVC015
FM1000 05040G60KT 1SM +RA OVC015
FM1400 07055G70KT 1SM +RA OVC015

Note that it gets ugly around 6 am Eastern time, with winds from 050 at 40 knots, gusting 60, 1 mile of visibility in heavy rain, overcast clouds at 1500′. The peak winds are forecast starting at 10 am, gusting up to 70 knots.

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I’ve seen some newspaper articles and editorials that confidently express the thought that America is full of people who would not vote for Barack Obama because he identifies himself as black. During the primary season both American Democrats and Republicans were supposedly racist. Now that Obama has triumphed among the Democrats, the “silent majority” of racists are supposedly exclusively Republican.

I’ve traveled extensively around the U.S. recently and talked to people about the election. Here are some of the states that I’ved visited: Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Maine, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Many of the folks with whom I’ved talked are union members and gun owners, exactly the kind of angry white men whom journalist accuse of being secretly racist.

The only thing negative about Obama related to his race that I have heard anyone say is that he has benefitted from race-based admissions policies at universities and from various other race-based preferences. Some folks weren’t intending to vote for Obama, but it was because of his perceived mediocrity and proposed policies, not his race. The same people spoke highly of Condoleezza Rice, if she happened to come up in conversation, and admired her accomplishments and intelligence.

I don’t think that these folks were being guarded in their conversation, as I heard some people express negative stereotypes about Jews (controlling the economy, being cheap (somewhat contradictory; if Jews have all of the nation’s money, why would they need to conserve it?)) and some very harsh opinions about other groups, depending on their political slant.

Has anyone reading this blog actually heard an American voter say “I will not vote for Obama because he is black” or “I do not think that a black person should be elected to high political office in the U.S.”?

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Check out the reader review by Amanda Richards in this otherwise boring Amazon.com page.

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The federal government does computing a bit differently than other folks. The FAA has a computer system for keeping track of a few thousands of flight plans every day and distributing those flight plans out to air traffic control centers. The current system went into service in 1988, according to the story linked below.

What did the FAA choose back in the 1980s? Keep in mind that 1988 was 10 years into the ascendancy of the DEC VAX line of minicomputers. It was 9 years after the release of the first version of the Oracle relational database management systems. It was 6 years after Sun Microsystems began shipping its popular Unix workstations.

According to this story, the system launched in 1988 on a pair of Philips DS714 mainframe computers (photos). Philips quit the computer business shortly after these machines were installed. This article from 2005 talks about the FAA’s plan to replace the Philips mainframes and to “go online early next year [2006]”, but apparently they haven’t completed the porting project. The volume of traffic is larger than you’d expect, with 1.5 million messages per day (about 20 per second; roughly what a pizza-box Web server might be expected to handle), apparently because the network handles weather and NOTAM data as well as flight plan data.

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A friend invited me for dinner and asked if I had any food allergies. I explained that I was too old to be allergic, having grown up in the 1960s rooting around in a filthy suburban environment. We were so poor and dirty that we didn’t have antibacterial soap. He said that his previous guests had emailed him an HTML document describing their food challenges. I’ve reproduced it at http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/allergies (names changed).

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Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, is the Republican VP candidate. She is attracting criticism for her lack of experience with national office. Much of the criticism comes from fans of Bill Clinton, someone who went from being governor of an obscure state to being president. If Bill Clinton can do it, why not Sarah Palin?

[Owing to John McCain being 90% dead, I am sticking with my December 12, 2007 prediction that Barack Obama wins the general election popular vote by 5 percent.]

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I was out riding my bike today. In order to continue toward my goal of becoming morbidly obese, I stopped at Formaggio in West Cambridge for a sandwich (price has gone up from $4.50 to $6.00 in last few months; thank God the government tells us that we don’t have any inflation). A guy came up to me and asked if I would help him “lift a sofa into a U-Haul”. I figured that it would be a quick hoist from the sidewalk into the truck and readily agreed. When I got to his apartment, I discovered that the sofa was on the second floor, was enormous and puffy, was fairly heavy, and had to come down a narrow winding staircase. My host said “I don’t know how they got it in here.”

With a lot of tilting and twisting we eventually managed to get the thing onto the street and into the pickup truck bed. I asked him why he was moving. “I’m a schoolteacher in the suburbs and moving to Newton will cut my commuting time.” Having been thinking about school quality recently, I asked him why graduates of the Cambridge public schools did so badly on tests. “It’s the unions. Nobody cares if the students learn or not.” Were the suburban school districts better? “Not really. I could stay until 5 pm and work with every student who needs help and I would get paid exactly the same as someone who mails it in.”

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Ever since the dawn of the Age of Machines people have been worried that smart machines would displace humans from a lot of jobs. We’ve been reassured that this has never come to pass, i.e., that automation has created more jobs than it has destroyed. In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark points out that “there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. … the arrival of the internal combustion engine … rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.”

Unskilled labor has done remarkably well since the Industrial Revolution, partly because the fastest growing economies experienced sharply curtailed birthrates and limited immigration. If an economy were to slow or population growth were to accelerate or higher minimum wage laws were to be put into effect, Clark suggests that millions of the least skilled workers might find themselves out of a job.

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I’m about to reread A Farewell to Alms, by Gregory Clark. The book challenges the conventional wisdom of economists about how and why economies grow. Ask a typical economist for an economic growth recipe and he or she will say “low taxes, property rights, security and stability.” Clark has assembled amazing quantities of data on wages, prices, and rents going back to the year 1200 in England. He demonstrates that England circa 1300 had all of the things that a modern economist says are sufficient to guarantee economic growth and yet its economy stagnated for centuries.

Clark starts with a defense of Malthus. In most societies at most times in human history, Malthus was right. The population expanded until everyone was living at a subsistence level. Given an improvement in technology or health care the long-term result was not that people on average had an improved standard of living, but rather a population of increased size living at an even lower material standard. You had to be robust in filthy Europe to survive infections, but even an underfed weakling was relatively safe from disease in hygienic Japan and China. The consequence was that China and Japan were more densely populated and strikingly poor by European standards right up to the Industrial Revolution.

If Malthus and Clark are right, foreign aid is the ultimate career path for a young person. Western donors are motivated by images of people living in poverty. Money flows in. Even after subtracting for the overhead of running all of the NGOs, a certain amount of food and health care aid reaches the unfortunates. You might expect the NGOs to suffer a reduction in demand and a reduction in donations as the unfortunates begin to look less unfortunate. Malthus would predict that the former unfortunates will have a lot of children and eventually the larger population will be worse off than before, which will result in more dramatic TV images of starving people, more donations, and more job opportunities for our young NGO careerist.

Population growth combined with personal income growth is an anomaly, according to Malthus and Clark. The U.S. population has been growing steadily in recent years and our average inhabitant is no better educated than before. Politicians stand up and angrily ask why average personal income hasn’t grown. The real question is why average personal income hasn’t shrunk.

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A few insights from Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan…

Virtually everything that we Americans eat is a form of corn. Cows, chicken, farmed fish, and pigs are fed from corn, resulting in meat, eggs, and milk from corn. Most of the ingredients in processed food come from corn, including the lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the coloring, the citric acid, and the “natural raspberry flavor” (need not come from a raspberry, only from something “natural”… such as corn).

Cows are designed to eat grass, not corn. If you feed a cow corn she will tend to get sick and require massive doses of antibiotics. Most of America’s cows are in fact sick and pumped full of antibiotics. In some cases the antibiotics are necessary to prevent bacteria from turning the corn in their stomachs into a gas that would literally explode the cow. Humans were adapted to eat meat from grass-fed animals. Steak from a corn-fed animal is probably not as healthful and the heart disease that we get from eating steak might well be caused by eating corn-fed cows.

Whole Foods is a scam. “Organic beef” is corn-fed beef from cows that are crammed together in filthy feedlots. They might get lighter doses of antibiotics or skip out on eating protein derived from dead animals, but the steaks at Whole Foods don’t come from what you would recognize as a traditional farm. [I went into a local Whole Foods and asked if they had any grass-fed beef; the clerk looked in one little corner of a case where such beef sometimes was stocked and came back to report that they were out.] “Free range” chickens are produced in vast chicken houses where the chickens are locked in for all but the last two weeks of their life. During those last two weeks a couple of doors are opened onto small side yards. The chickens could in theory go out these doors and walk around a bit, but they don’t because they’ve no experience with leaving the big chicken house.

Farmed salmon is a scam. People fall in love with salmon because it has a lot of nutrients and omega-3 fatty acids. Most of those properties are side-effects of the natural life of a salmon. A farmed salmon that is fed on corn is literally “chicken of the sea” and there is no reason to believe it is more healthful than a corn-fed chicken.

Pollan visits a farm that runs more or less naturally, Polyface. The cows munch the grass, the chickens run through the pastures and eat insects that would become pests, the surrounding forest cools and waters the pastures, the manure from all of the animals fertilizes. This is more or less how things work in Nature and it is nothing like the “organic” farms that supply supermarkets. Industrial farming is always a monoculture, which means that you need to bring chemical fertilizers in to replace nitrogen and pesticides to control insects. When the animals are fattened in feedlots their manure becomes a waste product to be treated rather than a fertilizer for the fields where they eat grass.

Organic produce sold at supermarkets is 99% as bad for the environment as standard produce because it is grown on massive monoculture farms and all of the inputs, such as fertilizer, must be trucked in from far away. Pest control is a serious problem with any monoculture and it becomes even more of a challenge with an “organic” monoculture because the farmers aren’t permitted to use modern weed- and insect-killers.

Food, especially meat, is a lot cheaper than it was in the 1960s. Pollan shows that it might look the same but it really isn’t the same food.

[Penguin published the book at $20 originally. That apparently wasn’t enough for them to pay an editor to notice that Pollan consistently misuses the term “begs the question” to mean “raises the question”.]

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