1. Create a tarball of your WordPress installation on the old server.
2. Copy over the tarball to the new server, and extract into the directory of your new site.
3. Change wp-config.php on the new server to match your new SQL server settings. This is only a few lines that need to be changed.
4. On your old server create a .sql script file using either mysqldump or myphpadmin. There are plenty of places on the net which will tell you how to do this. Check the documentation on your host for specific help.
5. Now, here’s the trick that makes this a whole hell of a lot easier than other instructions out there: use a text editor or script to automatically find and replace every instance of your old URL in the .sql file with the new URL of your blog. Microsoft Word can do this, for example, but if you’re a real geek, you’ll use something like sed or perl. (For something like this, sed is more than enough.) The reason this needs to be done is that not only is your site referenced in the WordPress configuration, but it’s also probably unfortunately hardwired a lot of places in your posts in links to media. This way, you’ll move over not only your database, but also all the media and references to them.
6. Load the modified database into your new SQL server using, again, either mysql command line tools or myphpadmin.

It actually took me longer to type this than to actually do it, so don’t be put off by the length of these instructions. While they aren’t as complete or hand-holdy as the ones you’ll find elsewhere, if they work they should be MUCH less effort, and give you a new location for your blog with everything moved over correctly. More importantly, it’s actually SAFER the way I suggest above, because unlike the official “codex” way of doing it, you never do any writes to your old blog’s files or database. Nonetheless, as always back up everything before trying this, and I disclaim all responsibility for anything that happens to you as a result of following these instructions. In fact, while I’m at it, let me just disclaim all responsibility for anything, in general.

I hope this helps (the instructions, not the disclaimer). Before I leave you to it, a few troubleshooting tips:

• Make sure your permission are correct. The old server may have a different setup than your new one. In particular, you may need to enable group read and write permissions.
• If things don’t work right away, it may be neccesary to play with the “permalink” settings on the new site so as to write a new .htaccess file.
• If you use a regexp-based script to do the URL find and replace, make sure you correctly escape the “dots” in the URL, and the forward slashes.

At any rate, here’s my advice, which I pray you don’t take, since I don’t want to be on the hook for your kids not eating: Now is a terrible time to invest in the stock market. I know I’ve been negative about the market in general for a while, as I think it has become a den of thieves, and that I think we may be in a long-term secular bear market. But what I’m saying here is different, as I’m talking now about relatively short term market timing.

If you were bold enough to get back in the stock market a year or so ago, congratulations. You’re braver than I. But I think there’s now reason to be concerned that we’re near the top of a cyclical bull market. My reason for this is that inflation is starting to become expected, and the economic recovery is actually starting to pick up steam and become real. Now that everybody knows the economy is doing well, the “wall of worry” is no longer there to climb. Once everybody knows of something, it’s hard to find a greater fool to sell to. (At least not without providing shares at a discount.)

Second, once the economy’s footing becomes secure, the Fed will turn to fighting inflation. Given that we’re starting to see the beginnings of inflation in price data, I think this will happen sooner rather than later. Thus, you’re going to have an expensive stock market, a tightening Fed, and–worst of all–an economy that really hasn’t been truly fixed. Much of our recovery has been purchased by debt, the same stuff that got us in trouble to begin with. We’re like the bankrupt family that averted financial disaster not by tightening their belts, but by finding another credit card they forgot about. So, I think it’s likely the recovery will not be particularly strong, involve atypically low job growth, and might even stall entirely once the true austerity we so sorely need is forced upon us and quantitive easing becomes too ludicrous a proposition, even for Bernanke, once the reality of inflation (which is already happening) becomes more well known.

The bottom line, is that I’m not sure I’d want to be in the stock market when the Fed starts increasing interest rates. Given how low they are, it’s quite possible that interest rates on safe investment could increase by more than a factor of two. That would significantly change the fair price of stocks, even absent a slowdown in growth.

But, seriously, don’t listen to me. I’m just writing this to say “I told you so” if it turns out I’m right.

Fortunately, I lucked in to a great solution, which doesn’t even require transcoding (with the attendant loss in quality that would result). This worked for me in getting a video from portrait to landscape, and I suspect it will only work in that situation. (This should be the only situation in which this problem occurs, as nobody in their right mind should ever shoot video in portrait mode on purpose, and if you do, I’m certainly not going to be complicit in aiding and abetting that crime against humanity.)

The solution requires a copy of the very nice all-purpose video player, VLC.

1. Open the video in VLC
2. It should actually open up in landscape orientation, regardless of the erronious orientation data in the movie file from the iPhone.
3. Select “Streaming/Exporting Wizard” from the File menu.
4. Select “Transcode/Save to file” and click next.
5. Use “Existing Playlist” and select the file you just opened below, click next.
6. Leave everything untouched (i.e. both check boxes blank) on the transcode screen and click next.
7. Choose MPEG4, click next.
8. Click “Choose…” to tell VLC where to put the output file, click next.
9. Click finish.

This should be all it takes. The process will be fairly quick, since there’s no transcoding, but its not instantaneous as it does have to move a lot of bits into a new file.

Rank Title               Artist             Number of Times Played
5.   Many the Miles      Sara Bareilles     66
4.   Fireflies           Owl City           67
3.   The Wider Sun       Jon Hopkins        81
2.   Baby Monkey         Parry Gripp        322
1.   Oatmeal             Parry Gripp        393

One guess as to which two songs are Alex’s favorites?

So far, the first part of my prediction has come true, at least in the sense that the bill was struck down, and struck down pretty hard. Of course, we’ll never know what Obama was really thinking, but I maintain that by far the most likely scenario is that he knew full well it would never pass muster. The man is extremely smart, especially for a politician, and he was a law professor. I’m certain he knows that having the Federal Government mandate that private parties enter into a contract is grossly unconstitutional (not to mention the mother of all slippery slopes). I could buy that Pelosi didn’t see this happening (she looks constantly surprised to be wherever she happens to be) but I can’t believe Obama didn’t.

I think if there is one flaw in their plan, it’s that Obama didn’t see the midterm elections going as badly as they did. That’s too bad. As I argued in my original post, single-payer is really the only way to handle health insurance that makes any sense. Forcing private insurance companies to take people they know are sick is insane. Forcing people to buy something from somebody as a condition of their very existence is patently unconstitutional, and always should be. (To head off the people who point out we are required to buy car insurance, that is a condition of driving on public roads, not being alive and American, and no car insurance company is legally forced to provide insurance to somebody with 27 moving violations and two vehicular manslaughter convictions.)

The idea that people should have a million dollar PET scan machine at their disposal health as a fundamental human right is intellectually bankrupt, but that doesn’t change the fact that it may nonetheless be the Right Thing to do if we can afford it. We can, at least for now, and so unless we’re going to let people go without care needlessly, the only way to get everybody health care that makes any sense is single-payer. I challenge anybody to propose an alternative solution that provides all citizens with quality health care but doesn’t open a pandoras box of legislative legerdemain required to enforce access.

The real news here, of course, is not that ESP has been proven real, but that using statistics to try to understand the world is a breeding ground for junk science. If I had to guess, I’d say the author (who is a well-respected academic who has never published any previous work on ESP) has had a case of late-career integrity and has decided to play a wonderful joke on the all-too-deserving field of psychology by doing a few experiments until obtaining statistically meaningful results that defy everything we know about the universe. As I’ve pointed out before, one of the many problems with hypothesis testing is that you don’t have to try all that hard to prove anything, even when done “correctly,” given that nobody really keeps track of negative results.

So, going forward, I’m just going to focus on the second category of posts (though I reserve the right to devolve to the first occasionally). This blog was getting too negative, anyway. In that spirit, here’s a particularly useful trick I just figured out while sitting in a coffee shop working remotely.

I recently gave up my nice window office since I was feeling guilty about taking up a nice spot but only working part time. So, I’ve been doing a lot of work remotely, usually from a coffee shop given that working at home just isn’t very productive when there’s an adorable toddler running around begging to be hugged. So, I splurged and decided to start paying the extra $20 a month to use my phone as an internet connection for my computer. This is becoming a pretty common thing, and Sprint even offers phones that will create a WiFi network on the fly (I use Bluetooth with my iPhone). I expect this will become even more common once the iPhone hits Verizon, as Apple will reportedly allow this version of their phone to create WiFi hotspots, too.

I would typically just leave my phone laying flat on the table next to my laptop. However, giving it a minute of thought, this is actually pretty dumb, for two reasons. First, having the phone so close to the laptop is probably not smart, as computers are notorious spewers of electromagnetic interference at pretty much every frequency imaginable. In theory, they should be shielded, but nothing is perfect and between the memory data rates and the processor clock speeds, a computer pretty much has the cell phone spectrum covered directly, if not with overtones. So, keep the cell phone away form the computer at least a foot or so.

Most importantly, however, leaving the cell phone flat on a table is a bad idea because it puts the antenna horizontal, whereas cell phone signals are polarized vertically. (What this means, if you’re not a fan of electromagnetics, is that the electrons in the cell phone tower antenna are being shaken up and down, not side-to-side. The physics of radio waves is really just a way of doing book-keeping on how distant electrons interact with each other. Without anything interfering, the electrons in your cell phone’s antenna will be wiggled in the same orientation and frequency as those in the cell tower antenna. However, antennas are designed for their electrons to be wiggled in a certain direction (it’s almost always along the long axis of the antenna) and a cell phone’s antenna is oriented with the assumption that the user is holding it upright against their ear.) Once I realized this, I put my phone up against a nearby wall so that it was standing straight up and down (as if somebody were holding it) and my data rates nearly doubled.

So, if you’re using your cell phone as an internet connection, keep it a bit away from the computer and prop it up so it’s vertical. Keeping it vertical in your pocket probably isn’t a great idea, since your body is pretty good at blocking radio. If you find this helps, please let me know in the comments. Right now my experience alone isn’t very statistically significant, to say the least.

Obviously, this is a classic fight between progressives and conservatives. But, which is which? In the example I was reading about above, what was the specific change and who desires it?

(a) the abolishment of the death penalty by progressives
(b) the increase of the debt ceiling by Republicans under Bush
(c) the increase of the debt ceiling by Democrats under Obama
(d) the abolishment of birthright citizenship by conservatives
(e) all of the above

If you answered (e), you are correct.

Let me pour a little rain on this parade. I’m tempted to say nothing (and let’s be honest, writing on this blog is pretty close to doing just that) because I’d love to have everybody run away to Verizon to clog up their network while those of us staying with AT&T enjoy the highest speeds we’ve ever seen. However, I suspect anybody moving from AT&T to Verizon will be sorely disappointed, for a few reasons.

First, it’s now widely acknowledged that the reception problems with the iPhone 3G, and to some extent the iPhone 4, are entirely the fault of Apple. It’s pretty clear from comparisons with AT&T network performance on other brands of phones versus the iPhone that Apple had a lot of learning to do about writing baseband wireless software. Apparently making a good cell phone is more than just sourcing a few million chips from Infineon and then treating the rest of the phone like a small laptop. Apple was way behind on the RF engineering needed to make a reliable cell phone. Even now, this is evident in the poor (albeit improved) performance of the iPhone 4, which can’t seem to figure out how to keep connected to a good signal and requires frequent cycling of the wireless chip to maintain a good connection. So, unless you live in an area just not well-served by AT&T, you will likely find slower speeds on Verizon. While Verizon does cover more physical space with their network, AT&T’s network is provably faster where it actually exists.

The above brings me to the second point: if Apple had a bit of a learning curve to figuring out how to write firmware for a GSM phone, it stands to reason they might have a few initial hiccups with a CDMA phone. Verizon’s network operates on a fundamentally different standard than AT&T’s, and Apple will be using wireless chips from a different company (Qualcomm) in their Verizon-compatible phones going forward. Given Apple’s propensity to punish the hell out of early adopters, and having paid my dues in that regard, I have no intention of seeing how they manage to screw up connectivity to Verizon’s network.

Finally, if the problem really is, to some extent, AT&T being overloaded by iPhone users, it would seem to me that the last thing you want to do is be part of the stampede over to Verizon. Just as things are finally speeding up for us sticking with AT&T, the poor existing Verizon folks will be waiting to check their e-mail as millions of iPhone users clog their networks. Verizon’s network may be the biggest, but my guess is that users in major cities will find out that biggest and fastest are two completely different things.

You can send me my check now, AT&T.

But does it strike anyone else as odd that we, as a society, are putting our technological efforts and resources into developing technologies that save us seconds each day when we can’t, as a society, get it together to develop infrastructure and transportation technology that will save us hours from commuting? It seems perverse that most Google engineers probably sit in California traffic for over an hour each day so that they can come into work and make sure nobody has to wait more than 15 seconds for a search result.

My guess is these bid patterns are just acting as clocks. To quote one of the experts in the article, the speed of light actually starts to matter. Given that the timing of trades can mean millions in profits for some of these firms, it stands to reason they would try to keep close tabs on the speed of their connection to the exchanges. By sending in a sequence of false bids (bids so far away from the current price and retracted so quickly they will never result in a buy) they can safely figure out how long it takes an order to go from their computer to the exchange’s computer. They use a sequence (ramp) of increases prices simply to keep track of all the different orders and their timing. (If they used the same price repeatedly, they’d have no way of knowing which order was which.)

My next best theory is that they are probing the HFT algorithms of other firms, trying to either reverse engineer other trading programs (which would give them a decided advantage) or search for some way to induce other programs to act in a way that can be exploited, like a big robot battle played with real money. They are trying to see if they can predict what others’ programs will do in a way that doesn’t require them risking any money. Frankly, I don’t see this as too likely, given that it would be very poor programming for anybody to let their HFT algorithm respond to ludicrous bids.

A final, rather crazy possibility, is that these false bids are a way to communicate between market participants over public, non-traceable channels. If encrypted information were embedded in the timing or changes of the bids, it would be a good way for firms to collude in a way that would be nearly impossible to trace: everybody is allowed to post bids, and every is allowed to read them. Unless you knew how to decode the information encoded, you’d have no way of proving information was being exchanged between parties. And what better avenue of communication between financial firms than the stock market’s public quote system?

One thing that is certain is that this frenetic activity, with hundreds of quotes a second being generated and cancelled, is clearly meant for the “benefit” of other computers, either at the same firm or another. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. I’m not sure what it portends for the markets, however. As people leave the market in droves (as evidenced by 13 straight months of mutual fund outflows) I wonder what will happen when the only people left aren’t people.

Physical Build

This has the nicest feel to any consumer electronics device I’ve ever used, let alone a a phone. Using Corning Gorilla Glass for both the front and back was a beautiful touch. Not only does it look nice, but it resists fingerprints (due to oligophobic coatings which makes grease happier to stay on your finger than stick to the coating) and makes scratches nearly impossible. Early users who report scratches in the glass are likely seeing scratches in the coating, not the glass. While it’s a myth that only diamond can scratch glass, you’ll nonetheless have to try very hard to scratch Corning’s chemically hardened glass.

Another nice touch was going with a squared edge instead of the visually weak rounded edge of the prior generation. It’s like the difference between a ’91 Ford Taurus and ’65 Chevy ’67 Shelby GT. The phone has a solid heft, and the hard edges give it a more secure feel in the hand. (This will be especially important as you try to delicately hold the phone so as not to cause reception to drop, as I’ll describe below.) It has the feel of something substantial, that you might actually use for more than two years before throwing out.

Interface Feel

The A4 chip is impressive. The phone feel orders of magnitude faster than the 3G. No waiting for menus to come up. Everything is fluid and quick. They are going to save a bundle in post production when they do the iPhone 4 ads, as no special effects will be required to keep the ad under two minutes. (I’ve been tempted to make my own ad for the iPhone 3G where I do exactly what Apple does in their ads, except my ad will be shown in real time, with the announcer making awkward comments about the Met’s bullpen while he waits for the screens to come up and the keyboard to unfreeze.)

The iPhone 4 actually works as well in real life as the iPhone 3G does on TV.

Display

Shockingly vivid and sharp. I thought this was just going to be another phone, and I’d simply hoped it would (ironically) fix the reception problems I’ve had with my 3G. I had no idea how blown away I was going to be by the display. If you buy one of these phones, enjoy the feeling you get the first time you see it, because it’s going to be the last time you ever feel that way about a phone: despite the false controversy, these displays really are at the limit of what the human eye can see (unless you’re a 12 year old with 20-15 vision). There’s really no better they could do. Pictures look like slides placed on a light box. It’s quite an effect that you really have to see to appreciate.

Reception

Now, the ugly. The reception problems are true, and have already been acknowledged by Apple and Steve Jobs. Apple packed so much stuff into the inside of the phone that they had to put the antenna outside. The outer metal band of the phone is comprised of three distinct stainless steel segments that form the antenna used for (at least) cell and WiFi reception. (I’m not sure if the GPS antenna is internal, someone please let me know.) What this means is that when you hold the phone, you’re holding the antenna directly. Anybody whose ever touched a TV antenna knows that touching an antenna can affect the signal.

In this case, however, there is an even worse effect: if you hold the phone in your left hand (which you will if you’re right handed when using the touch screen with your right hand) your sweaty little palm will likely bridge two of the segments of the antenna. Since sweat conducts (due to dissolved salt) you will partially short the antenna. I can get the phone to drop from five bars to two just by holding it in a natural position. Even when not touching the phone, the reception is significantly worse than my wifes 3G phone, also on AT&T. I guess we’re in for another generation of iPhones that do everything well but make calls. Steve Job’s response to a user who e-mailed him about this was “A non issue. Just don’t hold it that way.” Yes, he actually said that. Even more amazingly, I’m guessing Apple will actually get away with this.

I can also tell you right now exactly what Apple is going to do about this: they will issue a software update in the near future that “fixes” the issue by artificially boosting the number of bars shown. This is what they did on the 3G, and people actually fell for it. Apparently having calls dropped while five bars are showing isn’t enough to raise any suspicion in the average Apple user. I have to sincerely admire a company that can achieve this kind of user loyalty. Steve Jobs is nearly ready to trade in the black mock turtleneck of a Sith apprentice for the hood of a master.

How did Walt Mossberg possibly miss the reception issues in his review? Robots don’t sweat.

Camera

The camera on the phone is so good that it’s probably going to replace my small Canon digital camera. Having a camera always with you that also geotags your photos is really nice, and something I never anticipated as a significant benefit of the iPhone. Nonetheless, I find myself taking a huge number of pictures with my 3G, because it’s just always there when my kid does something worth recording. So, at least for me, one significant justification for the upgrade is that Apple finally got the camera right on this model. While it’s not actually as good as a dedicated camera (even a small one) it’s close enough that it’s certainly worth not having to lug around a second device. Obviously, you’re not going to replace your DSLR with your iPhone, but when was the last time you, your SLR and something worth photographing all found themselves in the same place?

The iPhone 4 can also take 720p HD video. It’s not great quality, and is only at 23 frames per second. It has a slightly blurry quality to it, which I think is due to the detector being used at it’s full native resolution, rather than interpolated from a higher resolution. You can tell this is the case because the scene “zooms in” a bit when switching to video mode, which I believe is a technical limitation; there likely just isn’t enough camera transfer bandwidth available to allow for a full frame capture and then interpolation down to 720p, at least not in a way that wouldn’t require further reduction in the frame rate. I hoping there is a way to do lower resolution video at a higher frame rate, but I haven’t found it yet. HD video of any kind of pretty impressive for a cell phone, so it’s hard to complain about this at all.

Final Thoughts

Aside from the poor RF performance, it’s an amazing piece of engineering. You’ve got a high-end GPS chip, custom low-power processor, human resolution-limited display, broad spectrum LED backlight, a micro-machined gyroscope and accelerometer array, all clothed in chemically hardened glass package the size of a cigarette case. You basically have some of the most impressive modern optics, electronics, microtechnology and radio circuitry available, all in your hand. In fact, the RF problems stem from a design compromise they had to make in order to fit all of this in such a small package.

Having given them this much credit, however, one has to wonder about the wisdom of a design choice that puts size above reception on a cell phone. You know, a pebble is small, but it doesn’t get good reception, either. That’s why I don’t carry pebbles in my pocket even though they are incredibly portable. I’m willing to have a slightly larger phone if it actually works.

Will I keep the phone? I don’t know yet. I’ll have to see how well the phone works in problematic areas for reception, like MIT’s campus. I’ll also look at comparative download speeds between the 3G and the 4, to see how much the reception issue really affects things. However, for now I’m inclined to keep it and just tell myself that it’s really so much more than a phone, how can I expect it to make calls? Steve Jobs really knows what he’s doing…

Update: I recently did a download speed test. Holding the phone normally: 0.2 MB/s. Holding it with the tips of three fingers: over 2 MB/s. This is repeatable.

To begin with, I am skeptical of the very idea of having a management class that swoops in from their MBA school, sans real world experience, to manage companies. It seems to me it would make more sense to pick management from people inside a business who have demonstrated understanding and ability of the unique aspects of that industry.

From my admittedly distant vantage point, business school seems to train people not to truly lead, but to be the quickest in following the herd. Instead of giving us managers who learn a business and find ways to improve its product, it gives us a bunch of jar scrapers who do little of sustance but simply find increasingly clever ways to fool people into paying more for less using the latest management fad. You leverage your customer base into a value-added service relationship, or you outsource non-core competencies, or synergize across divisions, etc. Anything to goose the next quarter earnings growth. You put Snickers bars near the check out at Kinkos, but god forbid do you actually innovate and create something of unique, sustainable value.

Of course, you can’t expect them to do that, because true leadership isn’t something you pick up in a seminar, and acquiring the skills to really innovate in a meaningful way requires a tough slog through an actual technical education. Don’t get me wrong, I have tremendous respect for good managers, having worked under a few. But it can’t be taught in a class. Worse, the concept of business school means that our leadership class is an entirely self-selected group. Leadership should be a position that is earned, not self-anointed by one’s choice of graduate school.

In fact, give some thought to what kind of person even thinks it possible to become a valuable leader with two years of night school, and you begin to understand why corporate America is the fix it’s in. It’s no surprise so many of them cut corners ethically and focus on short term results at the expense of true sustainable value. When I was applying to grad school, I looked at the statistics of the GRE scores by major. Business majors scored lower than everybody; lower on Math than English majors, and lower on Verbal than Engineers. It seems the only qualification one has to have for leading people in corporate America is an inability to do much else.

This kind of pseudo leadership is epitomized by the well-documented decline of Hewlett-Packard under the erstwhile tenure of Carly Fiorina. This once great innovator that gave us the first handheld calculator was morphed into a company that sells cheap plastic printers at cost so that they can gouge consumers with ink at 1000% profit margins. Short term, that works as a way to make money. Long term, HP is never going to invent anything again, because after all the short-sighted cost cutting, their research labs are essentially defunct. Of course, a marketing consulting firm was probably paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with their “invent” slogan. The management class has no sense of their own self-created irony.

Like HP, many once great American businesses are essentially management consulting companies that happen to have inherited some intellectual property. Far out product development funding is decimated, and what remains is for management to scrape the bottom of the jar with marketing tactics, outsourcing, and whatever trivial refinements are allowed by their skeleton R&D departments. Looking naively at corporate profit growth in the US, the MBAs seem to be vindicated, but this growth has been illusory. They call it transforming America to a knowledge-based economy. I call it burning the furniture to heat the house. How much longer can we grow by shrinking?

Given the ubiquity of MBAs, it’s easy to forget that the very concept of business school didn’t come about until the early 20th century, and it didn’t take off until after the war. We managed, as a country, to produce some of the world’s greatest industrial achievements without the aid of MBAs. We built a transcontinental railroad, gave the world aviation, invented the automobile industry and modern assembly line manufacturing, all without a single business school graduate around to synergize or value-add anything.

I believe history will show that the concept of management school, and the notion of a management class that is self-selected by career choice and not demonstrated ability in a field, is a major failure. Maybe it’s time to rethink our pipeline for corporate management.

Obviously, any time one is talking about an entire group consisting of hundreds of thousands of people, you’re talking in approximations and on the average. Some of the great leaders I’ve met that I alluded to above actually had MBAs. My point is that they are great leaders not because they have MBAs, but because of their experiences and inclinations. In fact, the people I know who I respect the most with MBAs have very little respect themselves for the degree, which is where much of my skepticism about the degree originates.

I’m not saying this is one of the intents behind the Volker rule, but it does work out quite well. I’ll also point out that the Volker rule imposes even more restrictions on bank trading than Glass-Steagall ever had. All in all, a very nice way to keep the stock market form overheating without having to raise interest rates, a perfect bit of finesse whereby borrowing costs stay down for the government without having to tighten credit and potentially derail whatever recovery we’ve got going here. While I’m obviously joking about a conspiracy theory, I do believe it’s true that a stock market drop may be necessary to containing borrowing costs for the government. Thus, they may not be so quick to try to take efforts to prop it up.

There is absolutely no flaw in this strategy, and I’m probably the millionth person to write about it. Therefore, the average consumer is likely to hear about it from somewhere, by the time the bill takes effect, and Americans aren’t a bunch that tend to miss a chance at free buffet. I’m pretty sure people will adopt this approach in significant enough numbers to cause a problem for the insurance companies. So, how the heck did such seemingly poorly designed legislation come to pass?

There are three plausible hypotheses out there, as far as I can tell: (a) The Democrats are fools, too enamored with their own savior complexes to bother to understand even the most simple manifestation of unintended consequences, (b) The Democrats are stupid like foxes, and know this will bankrupt our health insurance industry, and when that happens we will be forced to have the government step in with single-payer insurance, (c) The Democrats know the bill will be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional (you can’t force private parties into contracts) well before the provisions set in, thereby paving the way for a single-payer system.

I think the first is, by far, the least likely of the three scenarios, and yet it is the assumption that seems to be made by the Republicans and everybody I know who is conservative or libertarian. I think it’s very dangerous to assume your opponents are fools, and while Pelosi may make that very tempting at times, I think the way she got the bill passed shows that she’s a lot more shrewd than most people give her credit for. I think the Democrats know exactly what they are doing, and I’m not entirely convinced they aren’t right for doing it.

The free market, for all the worship thrown at its feet, simply finds equilibrium points, nothing more, and sometimes less. Whether or not those points are places any of us really want to be is entirely a function of the constraints we put on the market in question. And in the case of health care our current system has some really unintelligent constraints that lead to us being forced to pay for a health care system where the market is too regulated to limit the introduction of new and expensive technology, and yet too free to cover everybody. I’m fairly libertarian, but I have to admit that if you’re going to operate with the notion that unlimited access to a million dollar PET scan machine is a basic human right (and while I think it’s ridiculous to honestly consider it a right, it is certainly a worthy goal to have) then you really need to have a single-payer insurance system and rationed care, or else we’re going to bankrupt ourselves. Will quality of care suffer? Inevitably. But the system we have now may very well destroy the republic, so that’s wouldn’t be so good for quality of care, either.

If you’re liberal, you’re probably already in agreement with me. You can go back to reading The New Yorker now. If you’re libertarian or conservative, you’re probably saying “Well, isn’t the solution to having a health care market perverted by government regulation to just completely deregulate the market?” The problem is, the free market mechanisms that we normally happily exploit to give us things like cheap computers can yield some pretty unsavory things in the case of health care. For one, the free market would let poor people die on the side of the road. Same with old people, and anybody else who’s future economic output is less than the statistically expected cost of keeping them alive. That’s just the economically rational thing to do. That is only the case, however, because we’re very good at putting a positive price on things involving an exchange of goods, but we haven’t developed a way to price intangible things, like the cost most of us would implicitly ascribe to the outcome of having our fellow Americans dying in ditches. Were there a way to accurately impute a real monetary cost to the intangible (psychological?) cost of that happening, perhaps going with the free market would be a good idea. I’m not sure that’s advisable or even possible, but at any rate, we don’t currently do it. It is thus a simplistic and short-sighted adherance to half-baked economic theory that compels somebody to say we should let our health care be handled by the free market. We may find the market’s equilibrium point is optimizing a cost function we’re not proud of.

Economic theory, as it currently stands, is  the last discipline we should entrust our lives to. In the future, we will look back on our current economic theories and realize that they were just the first steps in a thousand mile journey towards understanding how the world operates. Right now, microeconomics says a few vague things about equilibrium prices provided humans are rational and a million variables are rendered constant. It is more notable for what it doesn’t tell you than what it does. For example, it talks vaguely about the restoritive forces which tend to push down the price of a a good produced with surpluses. But does it say anything about how long that process will take? Does it take into account the “friction” of people avoiding the risk of switching production? The effects of human irrationality? People are just beginning the work of answering these questions with new disciplines like behavioral economics. But we’re a long, long way off from having economic theories on which one can auto-pilot policies affecting matters of life and death.

As things stand, we’ll just have to use the same method engineers use when they don’t have a complete theory of the underlying problem: intuition and trial-and-error. And what’s wrong with that? Our country started out as a big experiment? Since when did we stop seeing the US as a laboratory for good government? Why are people so freaked out by a single-payer system? Give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, we can go back to our current fantastic system, tweak it, or try another idea. And we probably won’t have wasted any more money than we do right now rebuilding Iraq for a month. Personally, I would try a single-payer system where people pay co-pays for each procedure determined as a fraction of their gross income. This would form a progressive tax to fund the system (the equanimity the Left wants and the Right wants but just not if the government does it), as well as motivation to not abuse the system (the efficiency the Right wants but the Left seems to think will happen automatically because bureaucrats always do such a good job). Hospitals should be given bonuses for good performance relative to expenditures. Adoption of medical advances should be subject to a hard limit on medical expenditures as a function of GDP, and decided by ranking effectiveness per unit of cost. Is there a perfect way to quantify results when ranking hospitals and technologies? Of course not, but the beauty of our current system is that it’s so bloody godawful that having a monkey spin a casino-style Health Care Policy Fruit Wheel could not possibly fail to improve things. Let not the perfect be the enemy of the slightly less shitty.

Whether or not you agree with my solution, I think it’s fair to say that trusting our health care industry to the precepts of current free market economic thinking is like building an airplane based on a 19th century understanding of aerodynamics and expecting it to fly. I think there’s archival footage of how well that worked out. Economic principles may be elegant, but that doesn’t mean they work in the real world. And here’s some bad news: if we ever do get economic theory to the point where we can let it dictate health care policy, that theory is probably going to be as ugly as the subject of that theory (i.e. us). In the meanwhile, there’s nothing libertarian about letting people croak so that we can adhere to some imagined Platonic form of government.

Let me get this straight… We’re trying to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it but exempts themselves from it, to be signed by a president that also hasn’t read it and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke. What the hell could possibly go wrong?!?

The second e-mail:

28th Amendment proposal

For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress.  Many citizens had no idea that Congress members could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they didn’t pay into Social Security, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws.  The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform that is being considered…in all of its forms.  Somehow, that doesn’t seem logical.  We do not have an elite that is above the law.  I truly don’t care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever.  The self-serving must stop. This is a good way to do that. It is an idea whose time has come.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution:

“Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies  to the Senators and Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.”

Kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

Fantastic. Awesome. Terrible. Sync is one of those killer applications that usually ends up killing the user, like a hand gun being passed around at a frat party. The result is often a solution worse than the problem, with data corruption and inconsistent data between locations a common failure mode. People have gotten it right recently, however. Apple has done a very good job with MobileMe, at least in terms of sync reliability. I have my complaints about them, but they’ve never messed up my data, even after more than a year and probably over 1000 synchronizations.

I was, therefore, perhaps a bit too unwary in trusting my data to Dropbox. I also figured that if they are already charging people they must have the bugs worked out, right? This is people’s data we’re talking about. No company is going to take control of your data with a product that is still buggy, right? Right?

Wrongo. It took me only two weeks of using Dropbox to find out I was grossly mistaken. Yesterday I moved a few large folders around on my linux machine, and the result was hopeless corruption of my Dropbox file system, with the server basically throwing its hands up and locking itself in the bathroom (folder “rejected by server”). Note that my problem wasn’t caused by conflicting edits made simultaneously to the same data on different devices (the typical difficulty with synchronization). Dropbox failed spectacularly just because I made multiple changes to ONE of my local copies and it got hopelessly confused. (Fortunately, I was able to restore everything from a backup on another computer, so you can stop sending cards and letters. I appreciate the sympathy, however.)

Talking with tech support, and looking at the forums, this is clearly a known issue that many users are having. A known issue that results in database corruption if you have the audacity to do something insane like move folders around! And they don’t mention this in the FAQ, let alone bright red flashing letters on their web page. Did I mention they are accepting legal tender for this product?

It seems to me their fundamental sync architecture is flawed (it apparently doesn’t record file operations in a way that is guaranteed to preserve the transformation of the file system from one state to another). I wonder if they don’t warn against this in their FAQ because they don’t want their VC funders (who are surprisingly big names) to know they are in over their heads, or if they are so far in over their heads they don’t know they have a problem. To do file sync, as far as I can tell, you basically have to be able to hook into all possible I/O operations on the disk and make sure you record every single change, in order, so that those operations can be “replayed” on the remote copy. I can’t think of another way to guarantee consistency. Maybe the folks at Dropbox found a way to avoid this complication. Maybe they were wrong. I’m not saying I’d be able to do better, and I know it’s a notoriously hard problem, but I’d hope that if I couldn’t solve it I’d at least know that I hadn’t. And I certainly hope I wouldn’t look for funding and customers before I’d solved it.

Looking at the Dropbox staff list, I should’ve been more careful. Its CEO and CTO seem like great guys, but they also look like they just started shaving last week. Their CTO, and well over half their staff, are very young, very recent MIT dropouts. With all the new humanities course requirements, I guess you can’t trust MIT undergrads with your data until they’ve gotten at least an MS. Either that, or MIT must cover some pretty important material senior year in Course 6. The fact that the first several iterations of their Mac OS X client didn’t even synchronize all possible parts of a file (despite not informing the user of this) should’ve been a red flag that Dropbox was not being run with a whole lot of discipline or adult supervision.

Am I just writing this to complain? Of course not. I would never do that! I’m writing this with the hope that my experience may prevent at least one other person from wasting their time with Dropbox, or losing their data. I’m also writing about this because my experience with Dropbox, as well as Mendeley, bring up interesting questions about VC technical vetting, a topic which I will discuss in my next post.

And that’s how we got this. The worst elements of the success of this trend is the fact that (a) about half the male population of the country is falling for this “designer t-shirt” scam and (b) they are legally allowed to vote in federal elections. I know some people will fault me for not understanding fashion, and in general I don’t, but I think it’s a self-evident truth that if somebody gets you to pay $70 for something that costs $4 to produce, you need to rethink your priorities. Especially if that thing can be had for $10 with equivalent function elsewhere. But god bless the fashion victims, because lord knows where our economy would be without them loading up their credit cards with four-color printed underwear at a 1200% markup.

In Terminal, from an account with administrator priviledges, type the following:

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.audible.data.plist

It will ask you for an administrator password. Type it.

Now, after restarting iTunes, you should only have to reenter your Audible password one last time. Note that you have to be running from an administrator-level account for this to work. (Go to Users in System Preferences to enable your account as an Administrator, if need be. You can always switch it back to Standard once you’re done with the fix.)

Given that most local and state government budgets are complete disasters, the only possible result of such union intransigence is massive layoffs. It’s already happening, in fact, as municipalities all over cut back on police and fire budgets. Some towns have even shuttered their police departments, relying on county sheriffs for protection.

Plot illustrating the steady decline in union membership over the past several decades.

It’s pretty clear that unions, far from providing job security to their members, more often price their members out of a job. One need only look at the massive decline in American union membership (see the included figure) to see proof of this. Union bosses get rich at the expense of the junior members, whose jobs are cut. But how is this possible? How can union presidents continue to get elected despite the fact that they are clearly pricing their members out of existence?

The answer, I think, is that unions are inherently self-destructing because of a survivorship bias in their member voting, exacerbated by union domination of the labor prices in certain fields. When union jobs are lost, those who are fired are likely to seek employment in other fields, as unions do everything they can to ensure that when a job is priced out of existence at one firm, it is priced out of existence at all firms. That’s why there are three (for now) US auto companies but only one union. If companies do it, it’s called price fixing. If labor does it, it’s called the United Autoworkers Union.

Intuitively, one would expect that any union boss so arrogant as to insist on pay raises unaffordable by the employer would get voted out by union members. However, if you lose your job you’re probably not going to sit around paying union dues, you’ll probably going to start looking into a lateral move into another trade. Or you might just give up looking for work or retire early. The point is this: the people who continue voting for the status quo union leadership are, by definition, those who have benefitted from union membership, not the millions of workers who have had to leave their chosen profession due to the union destroying their jobs.

Imagine a hospital which has such poor medical care that anybody who has more than a cold dies, but whose cafeteria serves fillet for every meal. Customer surveys of this hospital would be nearly unanimously positive; all the people who leave the hospital will have had a great time, but the corpses can’t complain. This pretty much describes what is happening at unions.

Another major point in favor of the Vista is that it allows for the baby to be rear-facing, even in the seat. This way you can talk to the little guy or girl while walking with them, and apparently research has shown this interaction to be important. I’m not sure it will ever make a difference in their development, in all honesty, but it’s just really nice to be able to see and interact your kid while you’re walking with them.

Unfortunately, there are a few major design flaws in this stroller. First, the front “suspension” is terribly designed. The spring is far too heavy, and it takes me putting my (considerable) weight on the stroller to even begin to compress the front springs. Given that the wheels are made of very hard foam, the result is that the ride is extremely harsh when the stroller is in rear-facing mode such that the baby’s weight (not to mention head) is over the front wheels. This isn’t a big deal on smooth surfaces, but my poor kid gets bounced around quite a bit on the brick sidewalks where we live. So much so that he was grabbing the sides of the stroller. It’s so bad that I have to avoid certain streets where we live. I certainly expected better engineering from such an expensive stroller.

Another design desision which I question is the fact that even at the most upright setting, the baby is declined at a 45 degree angle, making it hard for him/her to see out.

Finally, the construction is a rather low-quality in areas. For example, both our wheels wobble. In fact, the fit and finish on most of the stroller is a lacking, with rivets and attachments loose and a lot of play in everything. For example, the seat frame is in two halves, with the two aluminum parts attached to a plastic center bracket with cheap rivets. Those have come loose, and now the seat is starting to “recline” a bit on its own. All in all, a very disappointing experience to have with a stroller that cost this much. My personal guess is that when you buy this stroller, most of your money is going into paying Massachusetts taxes, as this company made the poor decision to base themselves in one of the most expensive states in the country in which to do business. (I know, I live here, too, unfortunately.)

After six months of use, the stroller continues to fall apart. The wheels have developed flat spots (so much for foam being more robust), and are getting more wobbly. The frame is becoming somewhat loose. Our rain cover cracked in the cold. Nothing that affects safety, I don’t believe, but it’s very frustrating to pay this much for a product so cheaply made and badly tested. This is a lot of expensive aluminum held together with very cheap plastic. Our baby seems to be mostly content with the stroller, but often strains to try to see out given the recline of the seat.

It can backfire if not done correctly, however, and Mendeley is providing a good object lesson in that. In theory, Mendeley is a killer app for people in academics. It is a cross-platform (including web), cloud-synced database for papers that handles citations and automatic import from all manner of online journals.

Unfortunately, the beta releases have been so bad that most of the word-of-mouth on Mendeley has been poor. Do a quick Google search on them and you’ll see a lot of complaining. In my experience, the software has tremendous potential but is so poorly implemented that it is currently unusable. Import of any paper with an accented letter in an author name, for example, fails. In my field, it seems half the people have umlauts in their name. Page numbers aren’t imported correctly, either, requiring the user to manually enter them. If you import a PDF for a paper already imported through other avenues, the software is happy to create duplicate entries. And so on…

After the frustration of importing their citation database from other software, only to find Mendeley too buggy to be usable, it’s likely many of the early users will not bother return for more punishment. So, what Mendeley is actually accomplishing with their beta program is the alienation of exactly the kind of people they are supposed to be winning over: technologically-minded members of their target audience. These are the people their collegues will to turn to when they are looking for citation software. Mendeley won’t be their answer.

Unfortunately for Mendeley, they may eventually have a great product, but when that final bug is fixed and they drop “beta” from the name, it may be a tree falling in a forest with nobody to hear.

So, what’s the truth? I ran a few quick benchmarks to find out. To isolate the effects of the kernel from the benchmark software itself, I used a 32 bit benchmark program, XBench, so that the only thing that would be changing between the two runs was the kernel. (My understanding of Mac internals is not great, so I hope I wasn’t making a poor assumption here.) The results were interesting. As one might expect, neither side is entirely right or wrong.

The biggest difference was in memory allocation, where the difference was almost a factor of two. The next biggest difference was in the thread benchmarks, where the 64-bit kernel had a roughly 30% improvement in time. Finally, the 64-bit kernel had over a 10% improvement in large block disk transfer speed. These results seem plausible, as all involve tasks where the kernel plays a relatively large role. The rest of the benchmarks, mainly graphics and computation, had little or no improvement, as one would also expect.

So, it seems that while it’s true Apple isn’t doing a terrible thing by defaulting to the 32-bit kernel, it’s certainly also the case that you’re leaving some speed on the table. This is especially true for the disk transfer benchmarks, which can have a real effect on the perceived responsiveness of the computer.

The complete results for my are below. The test computer was a 2.53 GHz Mid-2009 MacBook Pro.

64-bit Kernel

Results	127.31
CPU Test	180.05
  GCD Loop	285.50	15.05 Mops/sec
  Floating Point Basic	145.63	3.46 Gflop/sec
  vecLib FFT	120.72	3.98 Gflop/sec
  Floating Point Library	280.68	48.88 Mops/sec
Thread Test	331.22
  Computation	500.00	10.13 Mops/sec, 4 threads
  Lock Contention	247.63	10.65 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test	200.62
 System	255.76
  Allocate	618.01	2.27 Malloc/sec
  Fill	185.89	9038.61 MB/sec
Copy	211.31	4364.56 MB/sec
 Stream	165.04
  Copy	157.53	3253.68 MB/sec
  Scale	155.20	3206.42 MB/sec
  Add	175.03	3728.48 MB/sec
  Triad	174.48	3732.49 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test	190.82
OpenGL Graphics Test	86.25
User Interface Test	245.26
Disk Test	48.75
 Sequential	101.56
  Uncached Write	120.97	74.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write	119.43	67.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read	64.63	18.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	137.50	69.11 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 Random	32.07
  Uncached Write	11.66	1.23 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write	77.18	24.71 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read	59.85	0.42 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	107.70	19.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]

32-bit Kernel

Results	122.67
CPU Test	179.50
  GCD Loop	295.89	15.60 Mops/sec
  Floating Point Basic	141.66	3.37 Gflop/sec
  vecLib FFT	120.19	3.97 Gflop/sec
  Floating Point Library	283.69	49.40 Mops/sec
Thread Test	260.69
  Computation	396.28	8.03 Mops/sec, 4 threads
  Lock Contention	194.23	8.36 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test	190.01
 System	234.38
  Allocate	369.54	1.36 Malloc/sec
  Fill	186.29	9057.73 MB/sec
  Copy	211.60	4370.52 MB/sec
 Stream	159.77
  Copy	153.34	3167.08 MB/sec
  Scale	150.01	3099.22 MB/sec
  Add	169.51	3610.92 MB/sec
  Triad	168.11	3596.34 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test	187.39
OpenGL Graphics Test	87.04
User Interface Test	237.42
Disk Test	46.82
Sequential	90.51
Uncached Write	118.31	72.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	79.22	44.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	60.05	17.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	154.69	77.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random	31.58
Uncached Write	11.29	1.20 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	76.69	24.55 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	60.83	0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	116.08	21.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]