The salary for a junior regional first officer is around $30-$40 a year, working the worst hours the FAA will allow and doing the hardest flying he or she will ever see in their career. The salary for a senior captain pushing buttons on a fully automated 747 is over $200k a year.

Apparently the unions have decided that flying should be done at a level of ability that is proportional to the number of seats. I’m sure that’s a comforting thought if you’re in seat 1A of a 747, but perhaps not so much if you’re in seat 1A of a Saab 340. In truth, the smaller airplanes are the hardest to fly, and spend more of their time in the weather.

What’s funny is that this huge skew is exactly what a free labor market would probably arrive at, too, given its mercenary monetization of human life. The only difference between the unions and the free market is that the unions also make sure the pilot’s competence never comes into play at any level.

No matter the skepticism with which I regard free market capitalism, the results of alternative systems rarely fail to disappoint more.

One phenomenon (of many) about modern culture that really confuses me is the success of budget airlines. Of all the things on which one might want to skimp, I’d assume air travel is not one of them. Hasn’t the thought ever occurred to somebody, as they sit in a lightweight aluminum tube traveling 80% of the speed of sound through the upper atmosphere, “Maybe this should be costing me more than $39 if I know what’s good for me?” Do you really want the people responsible for launching your kids into the stratosphere to be running cash flow negative?

Why isn’t there one airline in the country that charges 50% more to get you there, but which actually does their damn job correctly? They could have decent customer service, and could afford to price their product based on what it takes to fly safely, not decide on price first and then see what they can do with that money.

As a case in point, there have been several regional airline crashes in the past several years that can be traced (at least partly) to poor pilot training and long work schedules. I’d be fine paying extra to fly on a commuter but get a pilot who was as well trained, rested, and paid as one who would normally fly a 747. After all, flying isn’t easier just because there are fewer seats. I can’t imagine I’m alone in this. I also can’t imagine I’m alone in thinking I’d rather get there late than have to have the living shit scared out of me (or worse) by flying through a storm. However, airlines will generally fly right through anything less than a thunderstorm because it saves them the fuel costs of having to divert around (assuming they even have the spare fuel given that they all generally fly with close to the minimum required by FAA regulations). And, of course, sometimes they end up flying through more than they bargained.

So, if an airline started up and came out with ads saying “At Birge Airlines, we put safety above all else, and it shows in our prices. We’ll fly around storms even if it doubles our flight time, we carry more fuel than legally required, and if the weather isn’t good anywhere along your route, there’s a good chance you’ll be staying at a hotel on our dime. We’ll get your there late and lighter in the wallet, but we guarantee we’ll get you there safely.”

Wouldn’t you book your next flight with them?

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Falling energy prices offset another big jump in cigarette prices in April, leaving the U.S. consumer price index flat for the month, the Labor Department reported Friday.

With energy prices down 20% since April 2008, the CPI has fallen 0.7% in the past 12 months, the largest decline since 1955. The decline in the consumer price index has sparked concerns at the Federal Reserve and among economists about deflation taking hold in the United States.

However, core inflation – which excludes volatile food and energy prices – has not declined and in fact has accelerated in the past four months, rising 0.3% in April, the biggest increase since July.

The core CPI was boosted in April by a 9.3% increase in tobacco prices as a new federal excise tax to pay for children’s health care kicked in.

Excluding tobacco, the CPI fell 0.1% in April and the core CPI rose 0.1%.

“Inflation is behaving very nicely,” said Bill Hampel, chief economist for the Credit Union National Association. The report was “further evidence that deflation is not going to happen.”

Maybe I’m too cynical, but when the difference between inflation and deflation is a government tax, you have to wonder about the timing of that tax and if there weren’t ancillary motivations behind it.

Architecture reimagines how humans inhabit the earth — how they organize themselves spatially and shape their everyday lives. If architecture is viewed as the material alteration of the earth’s surface, it has astronomical consequences: it can alter the very shape of a planet. Come see one way designs develop, through a demonstration of laser cutting in our fablab.

That last sentence is a bit of a let down, isn’t it? I had no idea the rest of MIT was underachieving so much with their lasers! We really need to step things up. I know there’s folks at MIT using lasers to do mundane things like creating attosecond bursts of X-rays, quantum entangled photons for cryptography, and 3D high resolution medical imaging, but I don’t think any of us are really coming close to the astronomical-planet-surface-altering bar set by the folks in the architecture department. Maybe we should start using them to cut out parts for things like this:

Some of the planet-altering work of the MIT architecture department.

(For the record, this came from the front page of the MIT architecture department’s online portfolio, a collection of the recent work of which they are apparently most proud.)

Is it me, or has the level of Bullshit in the humanities risen to a point that transcends the usual academic norm? I used to believe that every era has its valid place, and progress was always made, but I’m now starting to think that the intellectual charlatans sitting on faculties of art departments around the world may just be the present day equivalent of the Sophists. The more I listen to humanities academics, I’m increasingly convinced that future civilizations will look back on our times as a dark ages for the arts.

Let’s end this shit, ok? Let’s make next year’s April Fool’s joke be that nobody does anything that day, but secretly plans to really screw somebody in May.

In preparation for that day, I made a song with Logic that is composed entirely out of tone generating software synthesizers so that I’d be ready with the first four D’s. (Ok, I think the drum instrument may be sampled.) For example, the initial sound you hear is from an FM synthesizer, sort of what you’d get if you could hack into an old DX-7 and pull the bits directly out of it instead of recording from the analog outputs. This is just about as clean and pure a recording as you’re ever going to experience; the sound you’re hearing has never been anything but abstract information until the moment that information is used to control the most versatile musical instrument of all time: the D/A converter in your computer. (I’m certainly betraying the fact that I’m a much better nerd than musician, but that probably wasn’t ever in doubt.)

The mix still needs a little work, but I’m sick of working on it, so here it is. If anybody wants me to post the original Logic file, let me know. I’ve also included a losslessly compressed file (which is much bigger) for those with iTunes, in case you have really good ears. Please drop a comment if there are any problems with the files. It was mixed on headphones, and will sound much better on the same.

All Electric

All Electric (Lossless)

It’s hard to stay mad at YouTube for too long when you find things like this.

(For the record, I’m pleased that people are looking into objectivism, not that I think anybody actually should literally “go John Galt” in the sense of quitting their jobs. And I also don’t think objectivism is 100% of the answer, but I think it is a way of thinking we could use a little more of right now.)

However, I’m not passing judgment. I’m sure I’d do no better, even with all the training in the world. My reason for writing this is to say something about the system, not the pilot. When I was doing my instrument training, my biggest takeaway from the whole thing was that it was utter bullshit for people’s lives to depend on a pilot doing it correctly when the chips are down. It’s normally easy to fly on instruments, but it gets surprisingly difficult quickly when things go wrong, especially with the disorientation that occurs at night. I really think too much is expected of pilots flying hard IFR in any airplane that’s not fully automated. Yes, it’s manageable, but not with the kind of margin you’d like to see when lives are at stake, and especially with relatively inexperienced pilots. One’s ability to react correctly is shockingly bad when terrified, and I’m guessing the slow speed situation caught the pilots off guard and scared the shit out of them.

However, don’t we live in a world where automation and control technology has advanced to the point where the space shuttle can deorbit and land itself? Where affordable cars have anti-skid brake systems whose computational power rivals a jet fighter’s? Why, then, are we paying to fly in airplanes without something as relatively simple as autothrottles? The big jets have them, but they are not economical to have on most commuter aircraft. Why is this considered remotely acceptable? Why, in this day and age, is “drop out of the sky and kill us all” included in the set of possible control inputs on any commercial aircraft on which our loved ones are flying?

With the exception of the Hudson ditching, every major aviation accident that’s happened in the past ten years in the US could have been avoided with relatively straightforward control software, including 9/11. (Terrorism aside, why the heck should the airplane’s software allow the pilot to fly into something?) If you don’t believe me, cite one and I’ll explain how simple software would’ve avoided it.

Given that this is all utterly doable, why isn’t it done? The answer is that because of regulations and liability, you can’t add a bloody toaster to a commercial aircraft for less than $100,000 per plane. The idea of regulation and liability is that it should keep us safe, but at this point it is doing the exact opposite. The Dash 8 that killed those people would’ve had autothrottles installed had they not been so expensive, and that expense is caused largely by the regulators who make certification so onerous, and the trial lawyers who make liability insurance prohibitively expensive. The Dash 8 is exactly the kind of airplane that needs them, but it won’t get them until we find a way to regulate aviation without completely stifling technological advancement at the same time.

Because of this unintended stifling effect, we could get rid of the FAA and safety would probably increase. I know trusting souls out there gasp at this idea, but the FAA is essentially an extension of the airline industry, anyway, so what we have now is basically self-regulation with all the advantages of government efficiency. They don’t have the guts to do anything drastic, and almost never have the brains to not do harm. They’ll focus on the small stuff (remember the Boeing 727 wiring inspections a while back?) and completely drop the ball on the big problems. When the FAA found out that the Boeing 737 had a major issue whereby the rudder would hard-over on its own, a problem that occurred over 100 times and caused two major fatal crashes, did they ground the fleet? Nope. That would’ve been too financially disruptive. They simply told the airlines to fly the planes a bit faster so that pilots could have a better chance at recovery when it happened.

Sometimes the only difference between anarchy and government regulation is paperwork. Recognizing this is helpful. Once you lose the blind faith, you realize that your safety is in your hands. You can make decisions to limit your risk. One good one is to avoid commuter flights in bad weather.

After long and serious consideration, E*TRADE Securities has made the decision to discontinue our family of proprietary index mutual funds.

As a result, the E*TRADE S&P 500 (ETSPX), Russell 2000 (ETRUX), Technology (ETTIX), and International (ETINX) Index Funds will be liquidated on a date no later than March 27, 2009 (the “Liquidation Date”).

Of course, even though we are discontinuing these funds, as an E*TRADE customer, you have access to over 7,000 funds to help you find the right alternative.

Here are a few important points to keep in mind:

Effective as of the close of business on February 23, 2009, no purchases of the funds may be made and any applicable redemption fees or account fees charged by the funds will be waived.

If you do not redeem your shares yourself, your shares will be automatically converted to cash equal to their net asset value on the Liquidation Date. You will receive proceeds equal to the net asset value of the shares you held on the Liquidation Date after provision for all charges, expenses, and liabilities of the fund.

The redemption is treated as a taxable transaction, and you will have to pay taxes on the proceeds of the liquidation, even if your shares are automatically redeemed on the Liquidation Date.

Please be assured that this decision has nothing at all to do with the financial health of E*TRADE FINANCIAL, which has been, and continues to be, very well capitalized by every applicable regulatory standard.

I especially like the last sentence. Only a financial industry CEO could lie so effortlessly. If they are so well capitalized, why are they applying for TARP funds? Why are they liquidating their mutual funds out from under their customers, instead of just selling the business? I suspect they need the cash to cover withdrawals. There may be a run on E*TRADE going on.

Fortunately, E*TRADE’s funds don’t have a lot of money under management. Only about half a billion dollars worth of stocks will be unloaded on the market this week, by my quick estimate. However, this might be a harbinger of ill things to come, if other financial institutions start to see liquidating their proprietary mutual funds as a way to raise capital.

On the bright side, at least nobody will be forced to take a short term capital gain…

It turns out that in certain situations, tremendous speed-ups of several factors can be obtained with this facility. In fact, I’m amazed that I haven’t read more about this. In particular, when memory is being loaded “out of sequence” in a memory bandwidth-constrained loop, you can often benefit a great deal from explicit prefetch instructions. For example, I am currently working on a program which has has two inners loops in sequence. First, an array is traversed one way, and then it is traversed in reverse. The details of why this is done aren’t important (it’s an optical transfer matrix computation, if you’re interested) but the salient aspect of the code is that the computation at each iteration is not that great, and so memory bandwidth is the main issue. Here is the relevent section of code where the arrays are accessed in reverse:

/*
* Step backward through structure, calculating reverse matrices.
*/
for (dx = n-1; dx > 0; dx--)
{
Trev1[dx] = Trev1[dx+1]*Tlay1[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay2[dx]);
Trev2[dx] = Trev1[dx+1]*Tlay2[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay1[dx]);
dTrev1[dx] = dTrev1[dx+1]*Tlay1[dx] + dTrev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay2[dx]) +
Trev1[dx+1]*dTlay1[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(dTlay2[dx]);
dTrev2[dx] = dTrev1[dx+1]*Tlay2[dx] + dTrev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay1[dx]) +
Trev1[dx+1]*dTlay2[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(dTlay1[dx]);
}


Despite having exactly same number of operations in the forward and reverse loops, it turns out that the vast majority of time was being spend in this second (reverse) loop!

Why? Well, I can’t be entirely certain, but I assume that when memory is accessed, the chip loads not just the single floating point double being requested, but an entire cache line starting at that address. Thus, the data for the next couple of iterations is always loaded into L1 cache ahead of time when you’re iterating forward in address space. However, in the reverse loop, the chip isn’t smart enough to notice that I’m going backwards (nor should it be) and so it has to wait for the data to come from either L2 or main memory every single iteration. By adding a few simple prefetch statements to the second loop, however, the time spent in this section of code went way down. Here is the new code for the second loop:

/*
* Step backward through structure, calculating reverse matrices.
*/
for (dx = n-1; dx > 0; dx--)
{
Trev1[dx] = Trev1[dx+1]*Tlay1[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay2[dx]);
Trev2[dx] = Trev1[dx+1]*Tlay2[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay1[dx]);
__builtin_prefetch(Trev1+dx-1,1);
__builtin_prefetch(Trev2+dx-1,1);
__builtin_prefetch(Tlay1+dx-1);
__builtin_prefetch(Tlay2+dx-1);
dTrev1[dx] = dTrev1[dx+1]*Tlay1[dx] + dTrev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay2[dx]) +
Trev1[dx+1]*dTlay1[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(dTlay2[dx]);
dTrev2[dx] = dTrev1[dx+1]*Tlay2[dx] + dTrev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay1[dx]) +
Trev1[dx+1]*dTlay2[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(dTlay1[dx]);
}


The prefetch instructions tell the processor to request the next loop’s data, so that the data is making its way through the memory bus while the current computation is being done in parallel. In this case, this section of code ran over three times as fast with the prefetch instructions! About the easiest optimization you’ll ever make. (The second argument given to the prefetch instruction indicates that the memory in question will be written to.)

When playing around with prefetch, you just have to experiment with how much to fetch and how far in advance you need to issue the fetch. Too far in advance and you increase overhead and run the risk of having the data drop out of cache before you need it (L1 cache is very small). Too late and the data won’t have arrived on the bus by the time you need it.

Why did I not prefetch the dTrev1 and dTrev2 memory locations? Well, I tried and it didn’t help. I really have no idea why. Maybe I exceeded the memory bandwidth, and so there was no point in loading it in. I then tried loading it in even earlier (two loops ahead) and that didn’t help. Perhaps in that case the cache got overloaded. Who knows? Cache optimization is a black art. But when it works, the payoff can be significant. It’s a technique that is worth exploring whenever you are accessing memory out of order.

Tax receipts projections.

So, we have this situation where there is a huge economic entity that is about to see its income drop precipitously, as tax revenues fall off a cliff. Whether by spending cuts or inflationary printing, future real government contributions to the economy are going to have to decline. It’s easy to forget, but the government doesn’t actually make anything. Whatever money they spend either comes from the present or the future or from inflating the currency, but either way it is a hole that has to be filled sometime. Due to the large delay between the effects of a downturn and government spending, this will take a while to play out, and it’s a huge overhanging issue that has yet to completely hit the proverbial fan.

Here’s the thing that scares me about all of this: one of the tenets of control theory is that having a strong feedback loop with a large delay in any system is a good recipe for instability, and yet that’s exactly what we have when the government becomes such a large factor in the economy. Of course, an economy is not a model system, and it could never experience runaway instability like a linear circuit could. But if there are forces pushing it towards instability, I’d argue the result may not be exponentially growing oscillations, but it won’t be good. Humans don’t like unstable systems, especially when their money is involved, and rather than suffer oscillations, I suspect the economy would just fall and stay down.

Why hasn’t this happened before? Well, one likely possibility is that I’m completely out of my mind to be applying principles of control theory to the national economy. But another is that we’ve simply never tied this big of a feedback loop around our economy before. The last time we had a credit dislocation, perhaps government was small enough that these oscillations were damped. But the gain is way up, now, and I’m a little nervous to see what happens now that the system has been given a big kick.

You can be sure the special interests know what’s in it. You can be sure each Senator knows the pork coming his district’s way. But each member of our esteemed congress didn’t know 90% of what they were voting for.

Apparently, we don’t even have two days to spare? Utter bullshit. Congress is still taking breaks. They are still going home on the weekends, aren’t they? But when it comes to spending close to a trillion dollars, they just can’t wait two days?

I’m going to have to buy a lot of liquor this April to get through having to pay taxes to this government…

The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called “Hollywood Personalities,” which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. And it continued its efforts to encourage news coverage of celebrities displaying diamond rings as symbols of romantic involvement. In 1947, the agency commissioned a series of portraits of “engaged socialites.” The idea was to create prestigious “role models” for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, “We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer’s wife and the mechanic’s sweetheart say ‘I wish I had what she has.’”

The piece also explains the great lengths to which De Beers went to ensure that diamonds, actually a relatively common rock, are kept in artificially short supply to create the illusion of rarity. Furthermore, they control the entire supply chain, keeping wholesale prices much lower than retail (the markup on diamonds is ridiculous, at least 100%) so that it’s impossible for the public to unload their diamonds on the market.

The most interesting part of this piece is the notion that people in 1946 were capable of this kind of cynical manipulation, because it removes one of the most bitter aspects of our current moral degeneracy: that idea that we’ve somehow fallen from a great height. It’s always a relief to find out the fall wasn’t that far.

My theory is that it is certainly possible for every conceivable investment to lose value, where no matter if you’re short or long you lose money. Just consider the absurd case where everybody becomes clinically depressed agoraphobics, sitting at home wasting away. Clearly, financial markets will freeze, and you’ll find out that your assumptions on value were predicated on the Wall Street showing up to work, the computers which record your trades running, and people holding out enough hope in the future to bother trading anything but cigarettes. Every asset, no matter what, has some finite counterparty risk. You may be right about everything, but the universe doesn’t owe you a bid. There probably weren’t a lot of good places to put your retirement funds during the declining Roman Empire, for example.

Granted, total collapse of financial market functioning is a rather extreme, and seemingly academic, case to consider. But as I thought about it a bit more after the discussion, I realized that this isn’t academic at all. Between fully liquid bull markets, where everybody makes money (on paper) and the macabre situation I posited above, is a continuum of completely plausible scenarios where it gets harder and harder to make money in any asset. In fact, this is already happening right now.

Bid-ask spreads on options have been widening in the past few months, which makes it harder to hedge either direction as liquidity dries up. While derivative markets are zero sum if you average out to expiration, in the short term both parties can have losses on paper due to wide spreads, and if you can’t close your short option position, you are forced to tie up cash as collateral, which could cause you to lose money. Thus, in a way both parties to an option contract can lose out if liquidity dries up.

Certain stocks are becoming impossible to short (nobody is willing to loan out any more shares). Others (such as Sears) are starting to require short holders to pay interest. It’s quite likely for somebody to go long Sears, somebody else to go short at the same time, and for both people to lose money.

Is this discussion of any practical value? I think so: if the market continues to deteriorate, even those that correctly predict it will have trouble making money from it. For example, it will become increasingly difficult to make money in inverse ETFs, no matter how brilliantly you predict the underlying stock market trends. The counterparties to the derivatives owned by the ETF will become so adverse to risk that they will insist upon prices which are less and less favorable for the ETF. This will manifest as extreme slippage in the ETF relative to the index it inversely tracks. Again, this is already happening. Consider the following plot of SKF versus the Dow Financials Index, which it is supposed to track the inverse of times two:

SKF (green) versus Dow Financials (black): How to lose money both long and short.

The underlying index went down about 25%, but so did the ETF (there were no distributions from SKF in this time frame). Everybody lost money, long or short! Some slippage is inevitable as a “cost” of leverage and shorting, but my point is that the slippage is getting worse. Six months ago SKF was tracking much closer to its target. It might be useful to consider an index of inverse ETF slippage as an indicator of the health of the financial markets, or at the very least a index of how crazy you’d have to be to remain in the market. So, the ETF slippage, the option spreads, tight short supply: they might all be subtle hints from the market that the market is no place to be right now, long or short.

NIH funding generally falls into two categories: on the one hand you have very long term research on grand problems, such as understanding cognition or the ability to regenerate nerves via stem cells, and on the other, short term research which is essentially medical in nature. The former has essentially zero short term benefits, other than “ah, that’s nice” articles in Nature, in which we find out something vague about the way the human memory works (”something to do with this here chemical, plus a few thousand others we don’t know yet!”). These large scale efforts will eventually, we hope, yield true revolutions in the way we perform medicine, and might be have huge economic returns. But they are decades away. The latter category, on the other hand, provide immediate health benefits, but generally in the form of linear improvements in care which come at exponential increases in cost. For example, new cancer drugs may extend the lives of a fraction of patients, but they cost $60,000 or more.

Given that any advances born of NIH funding turn into private profits funded by health care consumers, I’d argue NIH funding generally has a negative short term return on investment; instead of adding to our productivity as a country, it results in products which we are forced to buy (via givernment regulated insurance) no matter how marginal their improvement. If a pill works 5% better than the previous one, but costs 10 times more, no politician has the guts to say it’s not worth it. In this environment of completely uncontrolled cost management, for every dollar we spend on the NIH, the “return” is that we have to spend far more on the marginally effective technologies produced. This is completely different from most engineering and science research, where the products are, at worst, pointless amusements (e.g. most Media Lab research), and at best make society more efficient (e.g. networking, industrial robotics, digital imaging).

I don’t know what the Senate is thinking, but if their idea of stimulus spending is throwing money at healthcare research, we’re in trouble. You don’t grow a productive nation by spending a quarter of your GDP on visits to the doctor, but that’s where we’re headed in the next decade. I’m not a blind cheerleader for the NSF, either, but at least the research it funds has a net positive return on investment, even if it’s close to zero. Things like better computers, artificially intelligent robots, telepresence, etc. would all be much more beneficial to our economy than another $1000 a month pill we’ll be forced to buy for people who will die anyway. And if you’re apalled at my mercenary separation of morality from economics, ask yourself this: Is it in our long term moral interests to bankrupt the country? Healthcare quality tends to go down in collapsing economies…

~/.mozilla/plugins
/usr/lib/firefox/plugins

and make sure you delete any file with the name nprhapengine.so. Then, in Synaptic (or whatever package manager you like) make sure you’re running the actual official Adobe version of Flash 10. Ubuntu, being produced by ideologues (didn’t think I’d be able to write about linux without taking a shot, did you?), makes it hard to install software built by evil monolithic companies. So, if you have Flash installed, it’s probably a buggy “free-as-in-doesn’t-work” version. Do a search for “adobe flash” in Synaptic and uninstall any currently installed free versions. Then, install the flashplugin-nonfree package. (If you don’t find that package, leave a comment and I’ll help you make it available to Synaptic.)

After that, restart Firefox. Rhapsody should now work using their excellent Flash-based client.

(By the way, I was able to get the full Rhapsody client running in WINE, and was even able to play 30 second clips. However, it wouldn’t let me login, saying that cookies were being blocked. If anybody has been able to overcome that, I’d love to hear about it.)

It’s also a bit scary. The California government is apparently so bankrupt that it has to resort to stealing money from its citizens to push back paying the bills for 30 days. What then? In a few months to a year, the Federal government may have to bail them out. Either that, or California will have to raise taxes on the wealthy to astronomical levels. It will be interesting to see how high taxes will have to get before Alec Baldwin becomes a Republican.

Pretty big bug, huh? You’d think it would be rather embarrassing when your latest operating system release breaks the internet for a large proportion of your users. You’d assume this would be high priority, right? Nope. Until recently, the bug was considered only Medium priority since there were workarounds, even though they were completely nonintuitive and nothing a basic user could ever figure out by themselves. Worse, Ubuntu 8.10 has been out for months now, and this still hasn’t been fixed, and probably won’t be for a long time. (In fact, it will end up being fixed in the next version of Ubuntu before they backport the solution to 8.10.)

This bug exposes a fundamental flaw in the Linux distribution development model, wherein the people releasing the operating system don’t actually write, or even understand, the various components they are packaging. If this bug came up in Vista, Microsoft could have it fixed in less than a week, because the guy that wrote their network manager actually works there. Of course, Microsoft tests their products before sending them out the door, so it wouldn’t have happened to begin with.

A lot of the people using Ubuntu 8.10 are going to turn tail and run back to Daddy Gates when they encounter this bug. They aren’t going to check bug tracking sites to figure out what’s going wrong, or look into work-arounds. So, you can ratchet the Linux market share down just a little bit more. At this point, the idea that Linux will take over the computing world is actually becoming downright laughable from the perspective of anybody who hasn’t been drinking a lot of kool-aid.

I’ve asked this question before, but why spend so much time developing Linux only to not bother to actually put out a quality product? If these folks are so inclined to spend time programming a mediocre operating system for free, why not just volunteer at Microsoft? At least that might actually help people.

(In case you found this page looking for a solution to the problem, instead of a pointless rant about it, I offer the following two solutions, in order of decreasing utility. The most obvious solution, assuming you value your time at something north of minimum wage, is to simply install a usable OS built by professionals who actually have something to lose were they to release an operating system with such an astoundingly egregious bug. If you’re too cheap for that, or suffer from Linux Masochistic Personality Disorder and absolutely must get this working, you can always edit your network settings by hand.)

Kookery about planetary alignment aside, might the environment of the child’s first experiences shape their thinking? I can’t imagine any baby whose first impressions of the world consist of pool parties and people in hot pants turning out to be a person of substance. But maybe my observations were just due to the fact that people simply have less babies in the Summer for some wierd social reason?

As a control I then did birthday checks of the worst human beings I could think of: Pamela Anderson, Jessica Simpson, Tom Cruise, Kanye West, Courtney Love, George Bush, and the worst person to walk the planet since Hitler: Linsday Lohan. Their birth months? June, June, July, June, June, July and July. Incidentally, George Bush is the only world leader I could find who was born in either June or July.

This isn’t scientific, but nor did I have to cherry pick. This shit is real. Gestate faster, Michele!

Update: I’m relieved to find out that a few good friends were born in June. So, astrology is rebunked. But July is still highly suspect…

Thanks to Dikipedia.org for help with the research for this article.

Unsold cars pile up in a British lot.

If the manager gives you any trouble, just quietly pull out this photo, and maybe a few others from the Guardian’s piece, and leave them on his desk. Stand up, point to them and say “Maybe somebody will make me a good deal on one of these.” Then slowly walk away. If he doesn’t stop you, fine. Just leave the picture with him and come back next week. After he’s stared at that picture for a week, he’ll soften up.

In all seriousness, if you are in the market for a car, wait until the 2010 models come out. You will probably be able to buy a 2009 model for an unbelievable price if you hold out for it. The automotive industry is so screwed, it’s hardly believable. They just keep churning out cars, and nobody is buying. I’m thinking of picking up a new Hummer at the end of the year and using it as an apartment.

A few nights ago I dreamt we were allowed, by some new medical advance, to have our baby taken out early so that we could have a little meet and greet, and then he’d have to be put back in to be born normally a few weeks later. When we got to hold him, he looked like a regular baby, with his eyes tightly closed and his face scrunched up.

Then, he started to relax, and opened one eye, then he cautiousy opened the other and looked around. My wife was holding him so that he faced me, and we both got excited that he was already looking around, way ahead of schedule. He then locked eyes with me and said ”Hi, Jonathan!”

“You know my name?!?” I exclaimed.

“Yes, you told it to me earlier, you’re my dad,” he replied, as if it was obvious. He then
started to try to move around and crawl, but was too weak.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “your brain has been getting good exercise with us talking to you in your mom’s belly, but your muscles haven’t been able to, what with you all squeezed in there. Speaking of that, how do you like being stuck in there all curled up in a ball?”

The baby shrugged stoicly, as if to say, “What can you do?”

“How do you feel about the fact that you gotta go back in there in a little bit?” I then asked. He shot me a wide-eyed “Say what, now?” look. The dream ended.

Additional detail: the baby had red hair and a receding hairline with a widow’s peak. He looked sort of like a miniature David Caruso. What the hell does that mean?

I’ve written before on the failure of Linux on the desktop, and my feeling being that it is a hopeless to shoehorn an ancient server OS into something your average person might want to use to check e-mail (at least not without the resources of somebody like Apple). Market data has been showing desktop linux adoption slowing, and now recent testing has shown Ubuntu itself is actually getting slower. We will have to mark down 2008 as yet another Year of Desktop Linux that turned out not to be. Will 2009 be the year? Not by my experience trying to upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10.

As I sat watching the upgrade work its way through the packages, at some point the computer became unresonsive to mouse clicks. I ended up having to do a hot shutdown in the middle. As you might imagine, this completely,and utterly, hosed my Linux partition.

You might wonder why I keep banging my head against the wall of Linux, despite my rantings about it. So did I. As I sat starting at the kernel panic message, I realized something:

As much as I complained, part of me enjoyed putting up with this stupid operating system, even though it long ago exausted its utility by causing me to spend so much of my time that it was no longer worth any amount of free software. As an engineer, I like to tinker and fix things, and Linux gave me the opportunity (rather, forced me) to delve into the workings of the OS in order to manage it. Thus, it provided me with the illusion of feeling useful and productive on a regular basis as it required me to put my knowledge to work fixing the never ending litany of problems.

But as I sat looking at a hosed partition, I had the embarassed, hollow feeling that I’d really wasted an extraordinary amount of time focused on my computer as an object of inherent interest, as opposed to an expedient for actual useful work. My linux machine had become a reflexive endevour, largely existing for its own purpose, like a little bonsai garden that I tended to with wearing patience.

And now what do I have for it? I have some profoundly uninteresting knowledge of the particulars of one operating system, and a munged disk that’s about as practically useful as a bonsai tree. (Yes, my actuall work is backed up, but it’s never trivial getting everything exactly the way you had it with a new system install, no matter how much you backed up.)

This was all good, though, because it ripped from my hands something I didn’t have the good sense to throw away. Rather than huddle down with an install CD and try to fix my little Linux partition, I just let it go and started to get back to work, actual work in the outside world, using Windows.*

It felt good. I’m done with operating systems as a hobby, tired of indulging technology for its own sake. One must not get too attached to things.

*I’m not trying to insult OS X, which I think is probably better than Windows. I just don’t have a Mac at work. (I can only fight one holy war at a time.)

Gay people are rightly upset that they are being treated differently under the law, and they have an absolutely valid point that they can not be considered equal in the eyes of the law until the language is exactly the same for everybody. They thus have every right to reject the compromise that offers them “civil unions” while straight couples get “marriage.”

However, the crux of the problem is that marriage is originally a religious institution. (See comment discussion below.) So, religious folks are upset, and perhaps even a bit rightly, because they see gay marriage as the state sticking its nose in a religious matter. Granted, it rings a bit hollow, as they certainly never objected when the government got into the marriage regulating business to begin with, but their past errors don’t mitigate their present grievance. Despite the one-dimensional caricature of religion from the left, polls show that Americans overwhelmingly support equal rights for gay people, despite 84% of them identifying as religious.

What’s missing from the debate is that for all the finger pointing at religious extremists, a lot of mainstream Americans voted against gay marriage. After all, half of California is not fundamentalist. I think the disconnect is that many mainstream moderately religious people simply don’t appreciate having elements of their culture usurped through legislation, and that’s what they perceive as happening when laws are passed to expand the definition of marriage. Ironically, the idea that one’s cultural institutions shouldn’t be subject to popular vote is an idea that I’d think most gay folks would actually empathize with.

This may all seem like petty semantics on both sides. What should matter are the rights, not the language used. It would be nice if religious folks just got over it, and realized that the redefinition of marriage by the state isn’t really imposing on their religion. I think both sides could stand to give a little, but it’s an impasse over language that’s not likely to ever go away. Apparently, everybody really really wants this “marriage” thing, except half the people who are married. (Best line about the whole topic I’ve heard: “I want gay people to have marriage so that they can be as miserable as straight people.”)

So, in a way both sides are right, and the basis of that paradox is the fact that a government supposedly separated from the church wrote legislation that mentioned marriage to begin with. It’s understandable to recognize legal rights for couples in the law, but it was flat out wrong (and probably even unconstitutional) to base the definition of those unions on anything having to do with religion.

The simple solution to this whole mess, then, is for the government to simply get the hell out of the marriage business! The word “marriage” should be expunged from the laws, and everywhere it should be replaced with “civil union.” I don’t care who is allowed to create a civil union, but there should be no mention given to clergy. Personally, I think judges, ship’s captains, and people with PhDs in the hard sciences are the only people that should be considered qualified to officiate a legal civil union, but it’s not a deal breaker for me.

The bottom line should be this: If you want to get married, you go to the church of your choice, where they are free to discriminate or not all they want; if you want legal rights for your spouse, you go the town hall to get a civil union. This should apply to everybody.

Furthermore, change should be done by amendment at the Federal level. Gay people shouldn’t have to worry that their rights will be revoked every time the Democrats lose control of congress. (Reckless entitlement spending shouldn’t be the price of love!) Thus, the prohibition against government legislation of marriage must be constitutional.

Since this blog is anything but critical to anybody, I’ve also decided to just run the latest code in the current branch from now on. Every night, a cron script will run that will update the blog with fresh code from the SVN repository. (SVN is the version control software used by the developers of WordPress.) You can see the current version at the bottom of the page.

So, this blog will serve as a live, working test of the current branch of the WordPress code base. Will this be useful to anybody? I don’t know. But it will amuse me.

Only half the country pays any federal taxes. So, that leaves 150 million people to pay for it. To avoid the further complexity of how the taxes are distributed among those folks, lets just assume that we’re all equally responsible for it. That’s over $56,000 for each American who pays taxes, and that’s just in about three months. Angry yet?

Maybe not enough people care about the debt burden on our nation’s children because the only people who are having kids these days are the bottom half of the income ladder, who pay no federal taxes. The upper half is too busy working dual incomes (about half of which goes to the government) to have kids (I don’t remember the stats, but the birthrate is well below replacement).

So, the people who pay for the government have no interest in the next generation, and people with an interest in the next generation have no stake in the government. Exactly a recipe for bad government and massive public debt.

Country Doctored

Disclaimer: I quantized some of the MIDI, partly because there is a ridiculously large latency in my USB MIDI interface, but also because I play piano like a palsied badger. Other than the quantization help, however, it’s all me playing. I didn’t speed anything up. The beauty of multitracking is that it averages out the mistakes, and often turns them in to “happy accidents,” to quote Bob Ross. It’s amateurish, but what you probably can’t appreciate is how much less it sucks than it really should, given my ability.

If you can’t listen to the file, right click and download it and listen to it in separate software. For some reason the latest version of the QuickTime plugin is choking on this, at least on Windows.

If you really wanted to screw with the country, what would be the worst thing you could do? Halt foreclosures and/or slow down the repayment of debt. And yet that’s exactly what Arnold “I am here from the future to destroy your economy” Schwarzenegger has just proposed. He has asked that state lawmakers impose a 90 day moratorium on foreclosures. That sounds really good, but another way of saying it is that it’s a three month state imposed time window wherein banks will not be able to repair their balance sheets. Given that California is ground zero for the housing bubble, this is pretty significant, and in my amateur opinion is tantamount to extending the recession by at least three months. It’s also a slippery slope, and given that it’s highly unlikely a farm hand living in a $750k house (yes, true anecdote) will be able to suddenly improve his cash flow in 90 days in the middle of a recession, I can’t imagine the moratorium will do anything besides delay the day of reckoning.

It would also be the height of selfishness for Californians to use the power of their state government to clog up the nation’s financial system in order to avoid having to deal with the consequences of their feckless consumerism. Where California goes, so goes the country, and that includes really bad ideas. I expect other states, such as Nevada, to follow suit with similar populist legislation. Hopefully the Feds will clamp down before this gets out of hand, because otherwise I can see economically illiterate do-gooder state legislators launching the mother of all depressions by bringing down our entire financial system through a morass of legislation designed to prevent banks from clearing bad credit.

Why is foreclosure considered such an anathema, anyway, at least compared to the prospect of having our entire financial system collapse? People will be released of their debt burden, with the only consequence for their foolishness being that for the next seven years they’ll have to rent an apartment at a much cheaper monthly payment than they had before. I can’t imagine that’s such a bad thing, especially when the alternative is for the credit crunch to deepen, an outcome that would have potentially dire consequences for everybody. Given that the Fed has been only marginally successful in freeing credit markets, the last thing we need is for states to push the other way by obstructing the neccesary process of clearing out bad debt through default.

Mr. T understands that massive deleveraging will lead to an extended depression.

I envision Bernanke in a headlock in one arm, screaming “Ok, ok, we over inflated!” with Paulson in the other, choking “Let go, can’t breathe! Ack. Fine! We lied about TARP! Ok?”

However, straightforward logic will tell you that gold should not neccesarily go up in price during deflation. Yes, it’s money, but so are dollars! And since gold is always priced in units of somebody’s money, why should it always go up? Sure, it will increase in value, relative to other assets, during deflation, but without other factors to consider there is no reason to expect it will increase in price. After all, the Yen is money, so shouldn’t it go up during deflation? Obviously, every currency cannot go up relative to every other currency, and so, too, the price of gold will not automatically go up during deflation.

So the real question is this: is gold an attractive currency relative to the dollar? I’d argue it depends on the stuation. If you expect the deflation to be caused by lower demand for goods despite an increase in the money supply, you might consider gold a more stable value. But there are inherent disadvantages to gold, such that all things being equal, cash wins: You can’t pay debts with gold, and none of your future expenses are priced in units of ounces of the stuff. There’s no way to make gold disappear, but in our fractional reserve system, fiat currency can vanish during a period of debt destruction. If I were confident of such a monetary deflation persisting I’d personally want to keep my wealth in the ever scarcer fiat currency, not a form of money that’s dug out of the ground and hoarded by metric tons in central bank vaults around the world.

I certainly agree that it’s possible for gold to go up during deflation, and that if ever there were a situation where it should, it’s perhaps now. All I’m saying is that the idea that gold will always go up during deflation is as nonsensical and meaningless as saying the Euro will always go up during deflation. It depends on the situation. I think the best argument for holding gold during a period of deflation is simply the expectation that the government will soon do everything in its considerable power to reinflate the currency.

(Disclaimer: Lest anyone think I’m the typical antigold zealot sniping at the bugs, I’m actually long a significant portion of my meager grad student portfolio in GG and DGP.)

…This decision was made easier by the fact that the Big Three’s balance sheets have made even sympathetic Washington spenders worry about throwing money at a bankruptcy. Democrats decided it would be better to direct the funds in a way that allowed them to later deny fault.

The plan? Make it the Bush administration’s responsibility to give Detroit cash — namely by claiming after the event that the $700 billion rescue package for financial institutions was in fact a rescue package for auto makers. This was attempted with several hilarious “colloquys” — pre-scripted dialogues between members that were quietly inserted into the Congressional Record after the vote, all aimed at rewriting the “intent” of the law. Say, this one, from Oct. 1:

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin: “As Treasury implements this new program, it is clear to me from reading the definition of financial institution that auto financing companies would be among the many financial institutions that would be eligible sellers to the government. Do you agree?”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd: “Yes, for purposes of this act, I agree that financial institution may encompass auto financing companies.”

Fun. Meanwhile, Democrats passed $25 billion in aid for Detroit, though under the careful guise of “green” funds to help it meet new fuel-efficiency standards.

Damn. I’m becoming fairly convinced that in the long run history will look upon the likes of Dodd and Pelosi and Barney Frank and Bush in pretty much all the same light: fools and crooks, all. These are the guys that sat by term after term letting the federal defecit grow and grow while they bought votes with the money. They let the government enable our massive dependency on debt through the Federal Reserve; we talk about the finance “industry” as a private enterprise that got out of hand, but fractional reserve banking doesn’t happen without the government as a neccesary and willing partner. The buck stops (literally) at our government.

These corrupt traitors did much to help get us into this mess, and now we are trusting them with trillions (when all is said and done) to get us out? Having Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in charge of congressional finance committes during a crisis is like opening the cockpit door of a plummeting 747 to find, well, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Those two lawyers have about as much training in finance as they do in flying heavy transport aircraft. And their incompetence would be tolerable were it not for their corruption and allegience to the finance industry. It’s like the fox guarding the hen house, if the fox were a dull weasel.