Melded Thought: the Articles

Rashōmon

2010-05-16T18:42:00-06:00

A few insightful quotes from Akira Kurosawa’s (黒澤明) masterpiece Rashōmon (羅生門), spoken by the unnamed commoner:

But is there anyone who’s really good? Maybe goodness is just make-believe.

Man just wants to forget the bad stuff, and believe in the made-up good stuff. It’s easier that way.

It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves.

Principled Compromise

2010-05-16T05:10:03-06:00

Frankly, I’ve never been a big fan of the Westminster System of parliamentary government. Having a purely ceremonial figurehead as head of state strikes me as a waste of resources and having a hereditary head of state is undemocratic. Drawing the members of the executive (often referred to as the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in Westminster countries) from the ranks of the legislature leads to a weak separation of powers. Having unpredictable election cycles hampers citizen participation in the election and enables those already in power to time elections for political advantage. Allowing the legislature to dissolve the executive through a simple vote of no confidence often leads to instability, as was famously exemplified by the Weimar Republic.¹ Finally, the strict party discipline that the threat of no confidence votes engenders leads to a loss of independence for individual members of the legislature.

All of these factors, combined with the fact that Britain’s Labour Party had been in power for 13 long years, had made British politics rather uninteresting for me. Until this year, that is, as it became increasingly clear that Labour would almost certainly lose the election even before its date had been announced. Then, after the election was announced, came the UK’s first-ever televised prime ministerial debates, the first of which was widely seen to have been won not by either of the two big parties but by Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Finally, the election itself was a rare nail-biter which resulted in the UK’s first hung parliament since 1974.

The 2010 election left the Conservative Party (often called the Tories) with the most seats in Parliament but just short of commanding a majority. The Labour Party technically came in second but with an overall loss of 91 seats, it clearly had no mandate to govern and only dim prospects² of forming a coalition government. The last of the major British parties, the Liberal Democrats, actually lost 5 seats in spite of leader Nick Clegg’s impressive performance in the debates but held on to enough seats to put the Conservatives over the top if included in a coalition. On May 12, the Liberal Democrats announced that they had agreed to form a coalition with the Conservatives.

Although it makes sense numerically given the results of the election, a Conservative–Lib Dem coalition is unusual to say the least. Often when coalition governments form in parliamentary countries, they are coalitions of parties with similar ideologies such as Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition in Germany. This new British coalition, on the other hand, is a right-left coalition. Obviously, such a coalition could not come into being without some compromises from both sides. Some of those compromises have been published:

Trident: Lib Dems will drop opposition to replacing nuclear missile system but will be able to “make the case for alternatives” and funding will be scrutinised

Heathrow: Plans for a third runway, opposed by both parties, will be scrapped

Nuclear: Lib Dem spokesman will be able to speak in opposition to new power stations—and Lib Dem MPs will abstain from vote

Higher education funding: Lib Dems allowed to abstain on votes—reflecting party’s promise to abolish tuition fees in the long term

Spending cuts: Tory plans for £6 billion cuts this financial year will go ahead

Tax: Tories sign up to Lib Dem plan to raise income tax threshold to £10,000 in the long term, which will “take priority” over Conservative inheritance tax cuts.

There will also be a “substantial increase” in personal tax allowances for lower and middle-income people from April 2011—rather than the Conservative plan to raise employees’ NI thresholds

But a plan to raise NI thresholds for employers will go ahead

Voting system: Bill will be brought forward for referendum on changing to AV but parties will be able to campaign on opposite sides of argument

Marriage/civil partnership tax breaks: Lib Dems will be allowed to abstain from votes

Europe: Both sides agreed there would be no transfer of powers to the EU over the course of the Parliament and Britain would not join the Euro during that period

Immigration cap: Lib Dems accept Tory plan for limit on non-EU economic migrants

House of Lords: Both parties to back plans for wholly/mainly elected chamber elected by proportional representation. MPs will not be able to throw out the government unless 55% vote to do so—a higher threshold than currently

‘Pupil premium’: More funding for poorer children from outside schools budget, as demanded by Lib Dems

There is much to like and much to dislike about the specific policies but what I like most about all of this is the principled, pragmatic compromise that this agreement represents. It reminds me, in many but of course not all respects, of the compromises that lead to the Constitution of the United States. Neither side gets exactly what it wants but agrees to a position somewhere in between in order to promote the national interest. Sadly, while Britain embarks on this brave new voyage, America is trending in much the opposite direction. Recently, a three-term Republican Senator, known for reaching across the aisle, was rejected by his own party for not being ideologically pure enough. This is a shameful episode not because the Senator himself was or was not a great person but for the reason he was ousted.

America has lost its spirit of principled, pragmatic compromise and we need to get it back before it is too late.

The constructive vote of no confidence used in Germany today is a vast improvement on the traditional, British-style vote of no confidence. ↩
Labour had lost so many seats that even a coalition with the Lib Dems would have been in the minority. ↩

I’m Glad Rudy Giuliani is Not the President

2010-05-09T21:49:05-06:00

This morning, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was a guest on ABC’s This Week, hosted by ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper. During the interview, Mr. Giuliani proved once again why he should not be President of the United States:

TAPPER: I want to ask you a question about, in the trial of Richard Reid in 2003, Judge William Young said to Richard Reid in 2003, “You’re not an enemy combatant. You’re a terrorist. You’re not a soldier in any war. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. We do not negotiate with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.”

That’s a different attitude than the one you’re talking about. Some people say that by making somebody like [accused terrorist Faisal] Shahzad, who is certainly less successful than several of the mobsters you put away, who did far more heinous things than Shahzad actually was able to accomplish, but were tried in a criminal court, they say that what you’re proposing would elevate somebody like Shahzad.

GIULIANI: Well, that’s absurd, of course. I mean, you get more rights as a civilian defendant than you do as an enemy combatant, so that’s a matter of semantics. Maybe you’re giving them more status in terms of semantics, but you’re giving them less rights, which is really important.

I mean, look at this whole thing with Senator Lieberman’s recommendation that citizenship be revoked and look at the reluctance of the attorney general to support that. It shows a sort of sense of, I don’t know, not understanding the magnitude of the problem.

I mean, why shouldn’t we revoke the citizenship of someone who’s been designated the — an agent of a foreign — of a foreign power or an agent of a — of a terrorist group? Of course we should. Of course we should be able to revoke it. And I’d be happy to test the constitutionality of that.

Instead we have an attorney general who’s studying that, also. They’re at war with us, and we’re spending time studying what rights they have. This doesn’t make much sense, Jake. We’re worried more about the rights of the terrorists, it seems — or at least pondering that — more than we are urgency about actually curing some of these things that will keep us safe and not have us rely on luck, which is how we got — got through these last two ones.

The “recommendation” of Senator Lieberman to which Mr. Giuliani referred is the “Terrorist Expatriation Act” that Senator Lieberman co-sponsored last week. That bill would expand a program first enacted in 1940 which allows the State Department to revoke the citizenship of anyone engaged in certain activities in support of a foreign government. The Supreme Court later narrowed the scope of the 1940 law by requiring evidence of a voluntary renouncement of American citizenship before said citizenship could be revoked.

Mr. Giuliani should be ashamed of himself for being so cavalier about fundamental American rights. Allowing the Executive Branch to revoke the rights of citizenship without due process is not only a Very Bad Idea™, it is also clearly unconstitutional¹. Democracies fail when their constitutions are not heeded and the last thing America should ever do is repeat the mistakes of the past. That someone has been accused of a crime, even a heinous crime, is not enough to deprive that person of his or her fundamental rights and those accusations must first be proved in a court of law before any punishment can be meted out.

It is indeed a sad day for the Republican Party when Glenn Beck, of all people, is the lone voice of reason among them on this issue. He recently said, “It’s easy to follow the Constitution when you benefit from it or you’re not affected by it. But what happens when you go against what you want to do, when you want to strap this guy down to the rack and make him talk, but you don’t because it violates the Constitution? That’s what makes this country different.”

The fifth amendment to the Constitution of the United States is as follows (emphasis added): “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” ↩

“13 Things We Want to See in iPhone OS 4.0”

2010-04-03T16:08:55-06:00

Ken Fisher from Ars Technica outlines 13¹ things the Ars Technica folks would like to see in the next version of the iPhone OS:

Splash screen improvements: We think it’s just about crazy to not PIN-protect a smartphone. But when you do this with an iPhone, you put a big barrier between you and your notifications. We’d like to see (at a minimum) message count and SMS count indicators on the home screen. We shouldn’t have to slide to unlock and enter a pin just to see how many new messages there are (or are not). Check out our simple mockup on the right. Surely this is doable. And of course Apple could tone it down and put indicators in the status bar up top rather than cover your precious wallpaper.

I agree about the basics but I would like to see a more flexible architecture. Ideally, I think the splash/unlock screen should support Dashboard-style widgets; some would be notifications, others might be weather, upcoming appointments, etc.

Custom sound notifications: In its infinite wisdom, Apple lets you customize your ring tone, SMS tone, and if you want, (on/off) sound notifications for events like e-mail, voicemail, or calendar alerts. Give us more sounds—and the ability to customize the sounds for every alert type. It’s annoying when nine people are in a meeting, a “ding” rings out, and seven people press their home screen buttons to see if it was their phone.

I would like to chose my email sound but custom sounds are not terribly important to me. In the absence of custom notification sounds, however, I insist on better built-in alternatives than the current “Chime”, “Glass”, “Horn”, “Bell” and “Electronic”. Everyone sticks with “Tri-tone” for SMS notifications because it is the only choice that sounds good.

Notification scheduling: Once a week I hear about someone missing a call or ignoring a text due to their audible alerts being turned off because they silence their phone at night or in morning classes and forget to turn the ringer back on.

Meh.

Diverse vibrate options: When your phone is in vibrate mode, aside from receiving a voice call, most of the other notifications which trigger vibration all trigger the exact same kind of vibration. Let us assign custom vibrations for different kinds of alerts. Three short bursts repeated twice for SMS, or two long buzzes for e-mail.

If we can get notification widgets on the splash/unlock screen, I wouldn’t really care about this. At most, I think all I would want is a vibrate scheme that matches my notification sound.

SMS alerts: Let me set the number of times I will be alerted to missed SMS messages.

Again, notifications widgets on the splash/unlock screen would help here. In any case, the current double notification works for me so this is not a priority for me.

Special alerts: Let me set a special alert for when a high priority e-mail is received, and let me set alerts for e-mails from specific people or specific headlines, e.g., “The boss is e-mailing you,” or “Brett Favre has retired for the 14th time.”

I would rather see an expanded “Favorites” feature that enables custom SMS and email sounds for certain individuals in addition to the ringtone. Setting it up to scan messages for specific text is not a feature I would use often, if at all.

Power scheduling: A great feature found on many smartphones and implemented best on the BlackBerry lets me set a schedule when the phone and/or its antenna is active. Hey, we’re all supposed to be conserving energy, right? Well, on weekdays I don’t need my phone on from midnight to 6am. Let me automate that.

Meh.

Advanced e-mail scheduling for accounts, push: Push is one of the things that makes the Blackberry experience so delicious. Apple, let us specify what hours our e-mail accounts are in Push versus Fetch mode. Second, let us schedule when accounts check e-mail at all. Some of my friends say they wish they could tell their phone not to check work e-mail at night or on weekends.

Meh.

Unified inbox support and/or better inbox switching: If you have more than one mail account, you know what a pain it is to switch between accounts. Currently it takes a minimum of four taps to switch from one inbox to another. Allow unification, or make it easy to switch between accounts. Or how about both?

I’m not convinced a unified, full-fledged inbox is really such a great idea (see more below). Easier account switching would be very beneficial, however.

Full e-mail storage and synchronization: Unlike the BlackBerry and other smartphones, the iPhone does not synchronize folders until you go into them (if you have Exchange, you do have the option of pushing all of your folders). If you have a sizable sent folder, for instance, if you pop into it looking for a message you sent today, the phone will proceed to download in chronological order everything in your sent inbox. This makes using any folder but the inbox a general pain. But it also greatly limits the effectiveness of the search.

Meh. There’s a reason Apple doesn’t do this: most people (including myself) have email accounts so large that even just storing the headers and first few kilobytes of each message would consume an inordinate amount of the iPhone’s limited resources. A better solution would be a standardized protocol for submitting searches to the email server and sending the results back to the iPhone but Apple is not likely to be able to pull that off. In the mean time, I use GMail’s web interface to search my email on my iPhone.

Allow actions from within search: It’s great to be able to search e-mail on the iPhone, but it’s lame that you can’t do much with the search results. Once you have your results, you cannot delete or move those items into other folders. And expand it! Currently you can only search in the folder you are in, which isn’t much help if you’re not sure which folder something is in.

Um, you do realize that this is just a mobile device, right? Some of these features might be handy once in a great while but if you are trying to do heavy-duty email organization, you’re much better off going to your laptop/desktop.

Running apps in the background: When I’m on the road, I find I am opening and closing Mail constantly because I can’t run other apps in the background. Need to check my calendar? Need to see something on the Web? Open, close, open, close, open. Both Palm and Google have managed to pull this off, and we know it can be done on jailbroken iPhones.

Meh. When apps open and close as quickly as most iPhone apps do, return you to the last screen used and consume the entire screen when running, there’s little functional difference between serially running apps and switching between simultaneously running apps except for the resources consumed.

Standard data conduit protocol: Palm mastered this, and there’s no reason Apple can’t (we just suspect they don’t want to). We need a standardized conduit protocol for third-party apps to synchronize data between the phone and a desktop. Lots of people have come up with clever solutions, typically using Bonjour autodiscovery, but there are all sorts of problems on the desktop side, such as a proliferation of background processes, open ports, and firewall hassles.

On this point, I couldn’t agree more. In addition to the Bonjour technique mentioned above, I’ve seen apps use online WebDav files for synchronization. Not only does that add complexity and (usually) expense to what should be dead simple, it is painfully slow without Wi-Fi.

There is only one thing (at the moment) that I would add to the list: a universal notification inbox. I would like to be able to open a single view which lists all the new things my iPhone knows about (text messages, emails, calendar alerts, etc.) so that I can quickly scan them, mark them as not new and, if I so desire, launch into the appropriate app for further options. Notifications should also be less obtrusive; I should never have to dismiss a notification in order to continue doing what I was doing. In other words, I want something very similar to Palm’s notification system. (This would be my preferred alternative to a unified inbox.)

The original list has only 12 numbered items but item 12 is clearly two items that have been inadvertently combined. Also, the URL indicates only 5 items so the list has evidently expanded over time. ↩

Haiti and the Problem of Evil

2010-01-26T05:59:57-07:00

The problem is at least as old as monotheism and may even be older. Many pagan religions side-stepped the problem altogether by positing capricious rather than just gods. The so-called Abrahamic faiths cannot escape the problem, however, as their god is purportedly righteous and perfectly so. I speak, of course, of the Problem of Evil. The first formal expression of the problem is traditionally (though perhaps incorrectly) ascribed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus and goes something like this:

If a perfectly good god exists, then evil does not.
There is evil in the world.
Therefore, a perfectly good god does not exist.

Or, put a little more thoroughly:

God exists.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.
A perfectly good being would want to prevent all evils.
An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence.
An omnipotent being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence and has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.
A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.
If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, then no evil exists.
Evil exists (logical contradiction).

Natural disasters, such as the recent earthquake in Haiti, often do, and should, bring this problem to the fore for anyone with even the slightest of philosophical leanings. Natural disasters aren’t just evil, after all, they represent random evil on a truly massive scale; evil that affects the virtuous as well as the vicious and everyone in between.

Obviously, theologians the world over have been wrestling with this problem since long before the cataclysm in Haiti. (Conversely, Haitians have been wrestling with crushing poverty since long before the earthquake.) Some theologians, such as the fundamentalist Christian cleric Pat Robertson, embrace an angry version of god who visits “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” (Exodus 20:5) While such a god is scriptural, it lacks justice and so most theologians look to other solutions. The quest to resolve the contradiction of evil in a god-governed universe is often called theodicy¹.

In reflecting on this matter in a recent Newsweek column, Lisa Miller wrote:

Theodicy remains the most powerful tool in the atheist’s kit, however, and many a believer has turned away from God over the suffering of innocents. [Bart] Ehrman [a Bible scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] did. After a lifetime as a Christian, “I just got to a point where I couldn’t explain how something like this could happen, if there’s a powerful and loving God in charge of the world. It’s a very old problem, and there are a lot of answers, but I don’t think any of them work.”

The challenge, then, to all believers is to examine the problem and the answers and to ask, “Do any of them work?”

The term theodicy comes from the Greek θεός (theós, “god”) and δίκη (díkē, “justice”), meaning literally “the justice of God,” although a more appropriate phrase may be “to justify God” or “the justification of God”. The term was coined in 1710 by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in a work entitled Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal (“Theodicic Essays on the Benevolence of God, the Free will of man, and the Origin of Evil”). (Wikipedia) ↩

the Rules of the United States Senate

2010-01-24T20:08:06-07:00

[…] the Presiding Officer shall, without debate, submit to the Senate by a yea-and-nay vote the question:

“Is it the sense of the Senate that the debate shall be brought to a close?” And if that question shall be decided in the affirmative by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn — except on a measure or motion to amend the Senate rules, in which case the necessary affirmative vote shall be two-thirds of the Senators present and voting — then said measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, shall be the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other business until disposed of.

[…]

After no more than thirty hours of consideration of the measure, motion, or other matter on which cloture has been invoked, the Senate shall proceed, without any further debate on any question, to vote on the final disposition thereof[.]

—from Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the United States Senate

A Brief History of the Filibuster¹

The filibuster first became a possibility in the United States Senate in 1806, when the Senate, after having been so advised by Vice President Aaron Burr, abolished the “previous question” procedure from the Standing Rules of the Senate. “Previous question” is a common parliamentary procedure for ending debate early and bringing the matter currently being considered to an immediate vote. When this rule was eliminated, it became impossible for the Senate to close debate of a particular topic so long as at least one Senator still had something to say.

The use of this procedural vacuum to stall or kill legislation first began in the 1830s but took on new significance during the contentious debates about chartering the Second Bank of the United States in 1841². Despite periodic attempts at revival, the Senate would remain without a previous question procedure for 111 years. Finally, in 1917, after the Senate’s session expired without having voted on a popular war bill, the Senate’s rules were amended to permit cloture³ (another term for previous question, often used in the context of legislative bodies). Typically⁴ for a motion to end debate early, this cloture motion required the consent of two-thirds of all senators present and voting. The current practice of requiring a smaller three-fifths majority of all senators duly chosen and sworn (i.e. present or not) was established in 1975.

In spite of repeated frustration with protracted debates in the Senate, for most of the Senate’s history—including those years when no cloture procedure existed—filibusters remained a rarity until the late 20^th century. The 1960s saw a dramatic proliferation in the number of filibusters as southern Democrat Senators attempted to block civil rights legislation. In spite of the failure of those attempts, the proliferation of filibusters has continued unabated ever since with every Senate term from 2000 to 2009 having no fewer than 49 filibusters. In 2005, Republicans, then in the majority, began talking about reducing the majority needed to pass cloture to a simple majority but ultimately dropped the proposal as it became clearer that the Republicans were likely to lose their majority status in the 2006 elections. With the Democrats now in power and with Republicans using filibusters to block virtually every aspect of the Democrat agenda, the Democrats are now the ones to talk about easing cloture votes.

Why the Senate?

Inevitably, all deliberative bodies with formal rules will be subject to those rules being used to delay or block the work of that body. And delay isn’t necessarily a bad thing; laws affect the lives of everyone living under their jurisdiction and time should be taken to consider them carefully. So why is it that the United States Senate, in particular, has so much trouble with delaying tactics like the filibuster while others, such as the United States House of Representatives, do not?

Not all of this difficultly can be attributed to the cloture rule and its requirement of a three-fifths majority. As I alluded to earlier, requiring supermajority votes to end debate early is typical for deliberative bodies, with most actually requiring a larger, two-thirds majority. Indeed, for 111 years the Senate operated without a cloture rule of any kind and yet was still able to bring legislation to a final, up or down vote.

Remember that a vote for cloture is not a vote to end debate per se; it is a vote to end debate early. Early means different things to different people but in this context it means ending the debate sometime before what the rules would otherwise have allowed. And herein lies the Senate’s particular vulnerability to delay by means of debate: the Senate’s Rule XIX, which governs debates, imposes no limits on how long a Senator may speak once he has been recognized by the presiding officer. Nor is a speaking Senator required to speak about the topic at hand (“germane” debate in legislative parlance). Unlimited speech is often seen as a special privilege of the Senate; debates in the House of Representatives are always subject to strict time limits. Thus, under the traditional rules of the Senate, debate continues so long as any Senator has something that he or she wishes to say⁵.

This rule is the source of the classic filibuster depicted in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington where one Senator simply talks for as long as he or she can possibly manage. Senator Strom Thurmond set a rather dubious record in this regard in 1957 by speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes in a failed attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of that year. The aforementioned filibuster by southern Democrat Senators of the 1964 Civil Rights Act lasted 75 hours. Ultimately, however, the debate in each of these cases did end without invoking cloture.

Why Now?

Today, the “classic” filibuster almost never actually happens. Even the “classic” filibuster’s much more staid cousin—where the minority ensures a quorum is not present and thus prevents a vote without having to actually speak endlessly—rarely happens any more. Instead, the mere threat of a filibuster is enough to stop the majority party in its tracks. Why is that today’s filibusters are almost never played out?

For most of the Senate’s history, only one bill could be considered at a time. Filibusters would therefore not only prevent progress on the current bill but indeed on all bills pending before the Senate. The only alternative was to table the bill, which, thanks to the Senate’s rules on tabled motions, effectively kills the bill. Halting all progress in the Senate is a politically costly move and most Senators are reluctant to go quite that far. During the civil rights filibusters of the 1960s, however, the Senate began to allow more than one bill to be “on the floor” at a time. Thus, the debate in the Senate could switch from a filibustered bill to a non-filibustered bill without having to officially table the filibustered bill. In so doing, the political costs of filibusters were greatly reduced as filibusters no longer halted all progress in the Senate.

With the political costs of filibuster all but gone, they have become much more common. The majority party, eager to move forward with its agenda and unwilling to waste valuable floor time, rarely limits debate to only filibustered bills. This, in turn, has reduced the barriers to filibusters even more as mere threats are enough to persuade the majority party to move on to other matters. This has created a kind of positive feedback mechanism where the easier each filibuster becomes, the more likely a filibuster is to happen and the more filibusters happen, the easier they become. We have now reached a point where filibusters are essentially costless and completely effective unless the majority party can muster the necessary 60 votes for cloture.

Is That Legal?

There is a school of thought, recently espoused by Thomas Geoghehan in a New York Times op-ed piece, that the requirement of a supermajority to pass a motion of cloture is unconstitutional. The thinking goes something like this: the Constitution specifies certain votes which require a supermajority to pass—ratifying treaties, amending the Constitution, overriding the President’s veto, etc.—and in all other cases a simple majority vote is sufficient to pass any measure. By requiring a supermajority of 60 votes to end debate, Rule XXII creates an unconstitutional supermajority requirement for all bills. Therefore, the Constitution essentially requires Rule XXII to be changed to require only a simple majority to invoke cloture.

Unfortunately for proponents of simple majority cloture in the Senate, that line of thinking does not stand up to scrutiny. In the first place, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what cloture is: it is a procedure to end debate early. Debate in the Senate can, and often does, end without invoking cloture when the Senators run out of things to say; such bills can pass the Senate without ever having commanded a 60-vote supermajority. Generally, only controversial bills are subject to filibuster.

Secondly, the Constitution clearly allows the Senate to set its own rules: “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings[.]” (Article I, Section 5) Implicit in the determination of “the rules of its proceedings” is the power to determine by what fraction procedural motions, such as cloture, must pass. Indeed, there are other rules which require something other than a simple majority: Rule X on special orders, for example, requires a two-thirds majority. No one questions their constitutionality and no one should for the Senate has the power to set its own rules.

The Modern Senate

With the question of the cloture rule’s constitutionality safely put aside, there remains nevertheless an obviously growing paralysis in today’s Senate. Whereas cloture was once considered unnecessary in the Senate and indeed was not possible for 111 years, 139 motions for cloture were filed in the Senate during the 110^th Congress (January 4, 2007 through January 2, 2009). The 111^th Congress has been similarly stymied, unable to pass legislation about health care reform, financial reform or carbon emissions reductions. Many who observe this ineffectiveness correctly blame the now-overused filibuster. Many of those same individuals, then, call for simple majority cloture.

Normally, simple majority cloture would be a terrible idea. Remember that cloture is a motion to end debate early; if only a simple majority is needed to end debate then the majority party could end debate within 5 minutes of it having started. Should the rest of the rules regarding cloture in the U.S. Senate remain, however, simple majority cloture in that house would not have such an undesirable effect. The Senate’s version of cloture, after all, merely limits debate to a further 30 hours rather than ending debate immediately. Simple majority cloture might, therefore, be a reasonable solution.

There are, however, other solutions which I find preferable. The most obvious solution, to me, is to introduce time limits on debates in the Senate. This is, after all, what the House of Representatives did to great effect. Granted, the time limits in the House are a little severe, often 5 minutes or less. Since the Senate is a smaller body it could use limits that are far less draconian; say one hour per senator per debate. While unlimited debate is an honored tradition of the Senate, it is clear to me that today’s Senators simply aren’t worthy of that tradition.

Much of this information comes courtesy of Wikipedia and Senate Procedure and Practice by Martin Gold. ↩
During this debate, after talk of reviving previous question had arisen, Senator William King of Alabama famously said to Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, “I tell the Senator, then, that he may make his arrangements at his boarding house for the winter.” ↩
It is worth noting that unlike cloture in other bodies, a successful vote for cloture in the United States Senate does not end debate immediately. Instead, debate is limited to a further 30 hours and certain other procedural delays are prohibited. ↩
Robert’s Rules of Order, the de facto standard for parliamentary procedure, requires two-thirds majorities for such motions to pass as does its competitor, The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure. ↩
Rule XIX does prohibit any one Senator from speaking twice in the same day on the same topic. This, however, is easily circumvented by speaking as long as possible during one of those two opportunities or by offering an amendment which would then be considered a separate topic of debate. ↩

Healthcare’s Paralyzing Effect on Economic Growth

2009-11-22T19:50:29-07:00

Even when passing into law multi-billion-dollar bailout programs for big businesses, politicians in the United States love to point out that small businesses are the engine of economic growth in America. Statistics from the U.S. Small Business Administration appear to bare this supposition out (emphasis added):

Small firms:

Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.

Employ just over half of all private sector employees.

Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.

Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.

Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).

Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).

Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.

Those statistics are quite remarkable and represent the economic impact small businesses have even in an environment where many cannot afford quality health insurance for their employees. To my mind, that then begs the question of what small businesses could do in America if health insurance was not dependent on one’s employer. What could America’s small businesses do if workers didn’t have to choose between working at a small business and having quality health care? How many more small businesses would there be if no one had to choose between pursuing entrepreneurial dreams and quality health care? I believe that these choices have a paralyzing effect on economic growth at a fundamental level.

I think one of the more interesting statistics above is that 40% of high tech workers are employed by small businesses. I suspect this number is unsustainable with our current healthcare “system”. Many of today’s high tech workers are young, healthy twenty- and thirtysomethings who probably don’t pay very much attention to healthcare issues. As they “mature”, that will change.

Unfortunately, the healthcare bills currently being debated in Congress do not sever health insurance from employment and may have little impact on the affordability of health insurance for small businesses. As such, they are unlikely to address the questions I posed above. Given the likelihood that one of these bills will eventually pass, I take some comfort from the salient point of Ezra Klein’s recent essay on healthcare: success breeds success. In other words, perhaps the passage of any healthcare bill will make future efforts at reform easier. I can only hope that future reforms will focus on the ties between employment and health insurance, which I consider to be an inherently bad idea.

China

2009-11-22T18:35:20-07:00

Let’s be very clear on one point: although it is still run by the Chinese Communist Party, China is no longer a communist country. Instead, it is an authoritarian capitalist country. When Nixon first went to China in 1972, the move was premised on the idea that engagement with China would eventually lead to both economic and political reforms. When China began experimenting with capitalism in the 1980s, America began buying Chinese goods based on the assumption that economic prosperity would lead to democracy and human rights. The experience of the past few decades should relieve us of such misapprehensions, or at least of the misapprehension that Chinese political and human rights reforms will happen any time soon. To date, there is no evidence that China cannot continue to be an authoritarian capitalist regime for the foreseeable future and America must base its China policies on that presumption.

During his appearance today on ABC’s This Week program, Robert Reich gave this insight:

I think the big issue over the next 10 years and the big contest is going to be between authoritarian capitalism, à la China, and democratic capitalism, à la the United States, and its not clear to me that authoritarian capitalism is not going to win…

I am betting on democratic capitalism but I think that the authoritarian capitalism, we cannot [over]state the threat to the way we go about our business, the way we think about the world.

on the Principle of Least Suprise as It Pertains to Double-clicking Files

2009-10-26T04:11:43-06:00

The latest edition of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard (or 10.6 for those in the know), has changed something that hasn’t changed on Macs since their introduction in 1984: a file’s “creator” code no longer has any role to play in deciding what application will open when that file is double-clicked. This is particular anathema to those few hearty souls who stuck with Apple during the lean years of the ’90s. Back then, those hearty souls often crowed about the Macintosh’s intrinsic superiority over the PCs of the era and the creator/type code regime was often at the top of their list of reasons why Macs were so obviously better.

Creator and Type Codes

For those not steeped in the history of file system metadata, allow me to explain a little. When Apple’s engineers created the Mac’s original file system, they decided to track a certain about of metadata about each file, or in other words to track certain kinds of information about each file in addition to the file itself. Among these metadata were the creator and type codes. The type code identified the contents of the file—i.e. plain text, JPEG image, Word document, etc. The creator code identified the program that had created the file¹. If set, the creator code was used to determine which program would open the file when double-clicked. If the creator code was absent, the type code was matched, if possible, with a system-wide default program for that code.

In many ways, this was an elegant solution to the problem of deciding what should happen when a user double-clicked a file. And certainly from a 1984 perspective, it followed the principle of least surprise: users expected that the program that wrote the file would open the file and that is precisely what happened. It was an obvious choice at that time particularly as nearly every program then in existence saved files in a proprietary format. Microsoft Word, for example, saved files in a format that only Microsoft Word understood. MacWrite saved files in a format that only MacWrite understood. Indeed, in these early days the two codes were almost always redundant: the default program for a given file’s type code was almost always the same program indicated by that file’s creator code.

Modern Needs

Over time, however, standardized file types developed that could be read and written by more than one program. Today, a JPEG image, for example, can be read by Apple Preview, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Apple Pages as well as any Internet browser you can think of. Not only are there fundamental differences among these programs as to what they are and what they do, crucially for the user experience there are also vast differences in the load times for each of these programs. Apple Preview is a relatively svelte program that typically loads in a second or two. Adobe Photoshop, by contrast, is a behemoth that can take a minute or more to load. If a user expected Photoshop but got Preview, it is a mistake that is quickly corrected because Preview loads so quickly. If a user expected Preview but got Photoshop, it is a mistake that takes much too long to correct because Photoshop is so slow to load. In addition to surprised, the user is often frustrated.

Ah, but if the creator/type code regime is even half so superior as the Mac fanboys of the ’90s loved to claim, how then is it possible for a user to expect one outcome when double-clicking yet encounter another? The answer lies in the always-present but rarely acknowledged Achilles heel of the creator and type codes: they are now and always have been hidden.² And with good reason. In the first place, since they were invented for the resource-starved original 1984 Macintosh,³ these codes were limited to 4 bytes and were consequently quite cryptic.⁴ Secondly (and more importantly, I think), there is the simple fact that there are two codes. Most users would likely not remember which code did what or what would happen if one of the codes wasn’t set. How, then, was a user to know what would happen when he or she double-clicked on a file? Again, the answer from 1984’s perspective was simple: the file’s icon. Each program that overwrote the creator code would also add an icon for that file which visually tied the document to the program. Double-clicking on that icon produced no surprises as to which program would subsequently launch.

The trouble with the icon approach, however, is that while it does succeed at identifying the associated program for each file, it does nothing to visually indicate the contents of the file. All the Word documents, for example, end up looking the same. Worse, all of the image files look the same as well. Scanning a folder’s icons in the Finder becomes useless if it has a number of files made by the same program. Thus, as icons became more detailed and especially once color became available, icons became previews of the file’s content rather than visual references to the associated program. This trend started with images but Leopard brought pervasive preview icons, even to more humble formats like word processing and plain text documents. In the process, however, the visual tie to the associated program was lost.

So now we are left with a conundrum: how do we let the user know what is going to happen when he or she double-clicks on a file and provide a preview of the file’s contents in said file’s icon? The answer is painful to those loyal fanboys of the past yet perfectly simple: the file’s extension. Long eschewed by the older Mac community as a hideous artifact of “PCness”, file extensions have nevertheless been part of the file-opening-decision-making process since the debut edition of Mac OS X, Cheetah (aka 10.0). File extensions have the advantage of being both visible⁵ and simple. When I see a file ending in “.doc”, I know it will open in Word. When I see a file ending in “.pages”, I know it will open in Pages. No guessing, no surprises. If I prefer that JPEGs open in the quickly launching Preview rather than the slowly launching Photoshop, I merely set the global default for the “.jpeg” extension to Preview. If I need to edit the image in Photoshop, I can always open it in that program manually, in a number of different ways. If there is a particular JPEG image that I want to always open in Photoshop, Snow Leopard retains a per-file override that can be used to persistently associate a given file with a given application. Thankfully, this override data is not programmatically accessible via any of Apple’s public APIs so it is more difficult for Photoshop to hijack my JPEG associations as it always did when the creator code was honored.

Just What is So Surprising

The degree of “surprise” generated by a policy decision—such as no longer honoring the creator code—is, of course, entirely subjective. Long-time Mac users will tend to be surprised by this new behavior and therefore disappointed by it. Switchers from Windows will be more likely to embrace it. Personally, I was infuriated every time I had to wait for Photoshop to launch after double-clicking an image that I realized too late had been edited in Photoshop. I always found association hijacking to be a “surprise” and I gleefully welcome its demise. Moreover, relying on file extensions makes the Mac a better citizen of our connected world as file extensions undeniably represent a de facto industry standard for application association.

Now if only Apple would accept the de facto industry standard behaviors for the Home, End, Page Up and Page Down keys…

Ultimately, the “creator” in “creator code” became a complete misnomer as it really came to mean “modifier”. In other words, whenever a program saved a file it invariably and often quite inappropriately overwrote the creator code with its own code. Thus the “creator code” actually referred to the program that most recently wrote to the file rather than the file’s original creator. ↩
In the pre-OS-X “classic” era, creator and type codes could be seen and/or edited only with a developer tool called ResEdit. Modern Mac users can see them with some command-line utilities like xattr and hfsdebug. These are considered “expert” or “power user” utilities. ↩
The first Mac OS X, tragically named Cheetah (aka 10.0), introduced a mildly more resource-intensive but much clearer potential replacement for the creator code: bundle identifiers. Every app on Mac OS X has a reverse-DNS-style identifier (such as com.apple.iTunes) which uniquely identifies each application in a human-readable way. Furthermore, Mac OS X Tiger (aka 10.4) introduced a file system feature that could supplant the original type codes: Uniform Type Identifiers (UTIs) which uniquely identify each kind of file in a human-readable way. Alas for those who hoped these would replace creator and type codes in situ, no version of Mac OS X, including Snow Leopard, has used them when deciding with what application a particular file should open. ↩
Not quite so cryptic, of course, as the still-lingering convention that file extensions should consist of only three characters, even though all modern file systems support longer extensions. Fortunately, this convention is waning and more modern programs (especially those on the Mac) have embraced longer, more descriptive extensions. ↩
In Windows, the visibility of file extensions is a system-wide setting that is stupidly turned off by default. Every “power user” I know turns it on almost immediately. On a Mac, the visibility of file extensions is set on a per-file basis. Extensions are generally visible by default, though individual programs may stupidly default to hidden extensions when saving new files. Leopard’s preview icons smartly display either the extension or an equivalent file type at the bottom of the icon, even if the extension is not visible. ↩

IEEE Finally Ratifies 802.11n

2009-10-25T03:58:32-06:00

From the press release:

11 September 2009 —The IEEE today announced that its Standards Board has ratified the IEEE 802.11n™-2009 amendment, defining mechanisms that provide significantly improved data rates and ranges for wireless local area networks (WLANs). This new amendment to the IEEE 802.11 base standard is designed to help the data communications industry address the escalating demands placed on enterprise, home and public WLANs with the rise of higher-bandwidth file transfers and next-generation multimedia applications. WLANs based on IEEE 802.11 are widely deployed, with more than 1 million units shipping per day.

The tortuous process that finally resulted in this approval took ridiculously long. The first feasibility studies began in 2002, with a formal Task Group formed in 2003. Indeed, this approval is so mind-bogglingly overdue that it is unlikely to make any difference whatsoever; wireless hardware vendors started producing devices based on various drafts of 802.11n in 2004—5 years ago. In 2006, the Wi-Fi Alliance finally gave up on the plodding IEEE and started certifying devices for 802.11n before the standard was ratified.

Coincidentally, my personal 802.11g router/access point recently died and I placed an order for an 802.11n replacement before I heard the news. I’ll expect a firmware update if the final version made any incompatible changes with whatever draft my device was certified against.

Melded Thought: the Articles

Rashōmon

Principled Compromise

I’m Glad Rudy Giuliani is Not the President

“13 Things We Want to See in iPhone OS 4.0”

Haiti and the Problem of Evil

the Rules of the United States Senate

A Brief History of the Filibuster1

Why the Senate?

Why Now?

Is That Legal?

The Modern Senate

Healthcare’s Paralyzing Effect on Economic Growth

China

on the Principle of Least Suprise as It Pertains to Double-clicking Files

Creator and Type Codes

Modern Needs

Just What is So Surprising

IEEE Finally Ratifies 802.11n

A Brief History of the Filibuster¹