Corwin's Rantings

Living under the sword of damocles

2009-01-04T19:26:00.000-08:00

As I was born after 1950 and before 1986, I lived a significant part of my life with the threat of sudden nuclear war. I suspect this will become a hallmark of my generation. We've lived under the threat of sudden nuclear annihilation, which does affect ones outlook on life.

If you look at science fiction, up until around 1991, all 'near future' fiction had the US/USSR conflict extended into the future. A lot had a limited nuclear exchange as a formative event. I'll even go so far as to say that most of the fiction that was middle distance future had a nuclear exchange of some form take place in the past. After 1991 when the USSR collapsed, the future suddenly had a lot less nukes in it.

In the 1980's I grew up about 2 miles north of the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport and the Fort Snelling Military Reservation. This was also about 6 miles south of Downtown Minneapolis. If I wasn't killed outright in the first flash, I was in the, "dead in 3 hours," band. If we had the fabled 20 minutes warning and the roads were miraculously clear, we'd merely be in the, "dead in 2 weeks," band. If we did get the 20 minutes warning, the highways would be a parking lot and we wouldn't be any further away from the nuclear blasts than if we had stayed at home.

This is how I grew up. We knew that if the nukes started flying, we'd be dead. Period. And there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. At all. That nuclear sword could fall at any time, and we'd know maybe 20 minutes before it actually did. That was enough time to be a good God-fearing American; say our prayers and get our affairs in order. Or in true SF fashion, grumble, "So this is it, we're going to die," then lay on the front lawn in our bathrobes with a towel under our heads.

Humor was about the only way to really deal with that. When Weird Al released, "Christmas at Ground Zero," it was taken by my peers in classic bitterly-ironic fashion and sung to the rafters come each December. However, to this day I still can't listen to the end of the song, where the air-raid sirens sound, without wincing and having to either change the channel or hit next-song. Like many dark things in my life, living under the threat of instant death is not something I like to think about.

To this day I still occasionally think about survival bands and the likelihood of targets near me being hit by a nuke. I no longer live in the instant kill zone. With MSP being a major airport it was a high value target in even a limited exchange, a 'mere' low-yield tactical nuke would be enough to reduce my lifespan to weeks. This is not a reflex that people who were born after about 1986 had a chance to learn.

It is hard to describe how it feels to know that yourself and everyone within 10 miles of your location could die instantly (or worse, almost instantly). Mostly you get through things by not thinking about it. This is not something I'd wish on anyone, and I strongly hope we never go through this again; leaving tales of living under the threat of global nuclear war along side tales of surviving the dust-bowl and the threat of lynch-mobs.

The Chevy Volt

2008-10-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

Ars Technica has posted a review of the upcoming Chevy Volt. My first reaction to it was, "WOW, I SOOO need one." But, calming down a bit, its time to look a bit objectively.

1. 40 miles per charge
40 miles is both not a lot, and quite a bit. This is what it can do on a single charge before it has to fire up the gas motor for more electricity. According to the article, the total range between fill-ups should be north of 300 miles; 40 miles on pure battery and the rest on gas-generator. This means it'll have the same effective range as conventional cars, which is critical for consumer acceptance. So when you move from Chicago to Memphis, you can at least drive the car all the way there without having to pay to have it towed.

In my case the 40 mile range is very reasonable. My round-trip commute is rarely over 35 miles, even with side-trips. Weekend errand-runs are another story, but the large majority of the run would be done on electricity sucked down in my garage. So in our case, the effective miles-per-gallon should be very high.

But for people who commute 40 miles each way, it won't buy a lot. It'll probably mean a MPG rating comparable to some of the smaller hybrids, which won't really justify the cost of the car. However, as the article points out these people are not the primary target market for this car.

2. Cubic footage lost to battery
Even more than hybrids, the Volt has a lot of cubic footage spent on housing the batteries. This is not a car designed for road-tripping to Grandma's house, it is designed for trips under an hour. Looking at it, I see potential problems for those who are over six feet tall, or are well-padded in the hip.

For our average usage, this should be just fine. That trunk can handle our groceries and usual errand-swag. For larger cargoes, longer travel times, or hauling passengers, we have the internal-combustion station-wagon. As neither of us are vertically or horizontally enhanced, we should be able to fit inside it just fine. Considering that our current 'commuter' car is effectively a 2-seater, the Volt should be an easy drop-in replacement.

3.0 Glass cockpit
Continuing the trend brought on by the Hybrids, the Volt doesn't have analog gauges for things like speed, it has LCD screens. The thing I noticed is that the driver's LCD is markedly smaller than most dashboard displays I've seen. Considering the technical challenges of this car and the column inches Ars Technica devoted to describing the software development process for the car's hardware, I strongly suspect that early-adopters are going to have to put up with regular updates to that software.

Seeing as how the target demographic is urban commuters who live relatively close to their place-of-work, it is nearly certain that there will be some kind of 3G network available. OnStar is already usable in most of the US. I suspect that this channel could be used to push out software updates to the cars themselves. We'll see how this is handled once it actually hits the streets.

I like the glass cockpit, but I do like a certain density to my information display. At a glance, without twiddling knobs, I'd like to know at least speed and estimated miles before turning on the gas-powered generator, as well as the typical gauges like fuel-level and engine-temp.

And finally, if cars like these do take off, 220v outlets in garages are going to be all the rage in new construction.

PRT and self-driving cars

2008-10-13T11:20:00.001-07:00

This morning I noticed that CNN had an article about a Personal Rapid Transit deployment in upstate New York. If you've been reading me a while, you know my opinions about PRT. In this case, I do side with the critics in that it is largely an infeasible gimmick. For the same reason that monorail systems like Seattle's monorail never really took off, PRT systems will also fail to thrive. This is because these sorts of systems require a separate right-of-way (RoW) to work, and both prefer elevated trackage.

At the same time, ArsTechnica is running a series of articles on the future of the self-driving car. Part One was posted last week, and is a good run-down of the state-of-the-art of automated driving. Part Two posted today and discusses some of the neat things you can do with a widely deployed 'auto-driver' system. Next week they'll cover some of the social issues that may arise. These sorts of systems take advantage of the pre-existing right-of-way we drive on every day.

The only way PRT will take off is through massive governmental buy-in. We can do it with today's technology, the only sticking point is paying for it and the time required to build it out. Any time you create a brand new RoW it costs massive amounts of money and time. The Interstate Highway System took decades to get into place and cost tens of billions. Even the most robust of Commuter-Rail networks took decades to really get to a good saturation point, at least in the areas where commuter-rail didn't already exist such as the Northeast Corridor, and even they started with pre-existing rail RoW already built.

The cost of a fully deployed PRT system can only be paid for by government. No one else has the finances available for a project of that size. An as with the interstate system, it'll take a long time to get the networks up and running. With massive buy in right now, PRT systems could compete with the kind of self-driving technology we're likely to have at grade in 20 years. The US Government certainly isn't going to fund anything this large, though the more socially minded Scandinavian countries may.

Auto-driver systems are far more likely to be present in US cities in 20 years. In my opinion, wide deployment, where most people don't bother driving themselves, may come in the 30-50 range. Once the personal autonomy issues are worked through, such systems have a wide social benefit as the selfish human driver with the limited point of view (only within sight) introduces certain inefficiencies in the highway system. These are the same benefits that proponents of PRT systems bring forward, and they're right. However, the chances of getting such a separate-RoW system in place are minimal here in the US.

Taxes and tax-credits

2008-10-07T22:07:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently posted a short essay about what a tax-credit would mean for her and her family. In short, not as much as you'd think. But, read it for your self:

http://wiredferret.livejournal.com/1453125.html

VP Debate

2008-10-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

My view of the 'winner' of this debate is the same as the Presidential one: they both won.

One of the things I keep hearing about Palin, especially in the wake of the Couric interview, is that they wanted the firebrand who accepted the nomination back. In light of her closing remarks, I think Palin did that.

However, I must point out that the speech she delivered at the Republican convention was written for "VP To Be Named Later" and personalized once there was a name. And the closing remarks were probably written well before hand and memorized. So, in that sense the Republicans got what they saw the first time; a confidant running-mate willing to fight. A well packaged running-mate.

As for Biden he managed to avoid foot-in-mouth disease, which was one of his marks for 'win', and also managed to not come off as condescending. About the only time he talked about Palin directly it was in complimentary tones on topics they agreed on. When he disagreed, the target was McCain. He laughed in self-deprecating ways, not mocking ways.

I say they both won because they did what they were sent out there to do, solidify support among the leaners. People who were deeply worried about Palin but wanted to believe, because the alternative was democrats, saw a confident woman who could field questions on national TV. People who didn't know Biden, perhaps they skipped the Primary debates, had a very complimentary introduction. Those who feared foot-in-mouth disease were reassured that it didn't happen.

In the grand scheme of things, I think this debate helped repair some of the damage done by the Couric interview, especially among likely McCain voters (among Obama partisans, though, there was plenty of new satire fodder). That said, I personally was very impressed with Biden's performance. Much as the last Presidential debate gave Obama a big boost in perceived competence in foreign policy, I think this debate will give the Obama/Biden campaign a similar bounce. So in the end, I think it'll be Biden who will get the longest post-debate bump.

Newspaper habits

2008-09-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a household that had a regular newspaper habit. As I grew up, I kept it up. In college I also managed to get and read a paper of some kind, reading it over breakfast like I did growing up. After college, one of the first things we did when moving someplace new was start paper service. This continued until we moved to place where the newspaper was not delivered to my doorstep, rather to a box on a pole at the end of my driveway.

This killed my newspaper habit, but it took a while. The box-on-a-pole method of delivery is a result of where I live. I grew up in the inner city of Minneapolis, which like most midwestern cities was platted on a grid system. The same was true of our first post-college apartment, and where our first house was. Our current location is not on a grid, it's on the feeder/arterial system with no sidewalks.

Box-on-a-pole requires special clothing to retrieve the paper more than half of the year. This does not happen before breakfast. The doorstep delivery was simple, even when it was -15 outside. At that temperature, the paper-retrieval method of, "take deep breath, open door, grab paper, close door, let out breath," takes all of 3 seconds if done right, and even a mostly naked person won't risk frostbite. Box-on-a-pole requires a jog of many yards to get the paper, and that means environmental concerns loom large.

However, unlike most of my friends if I still had doorstep delivery I'd still be reading a newspaper. This is largely due to habit, a preference for the layout, and a desire to read my comics all in one page without all those blinking adverts, rather than a preference for the dead-tree version of my news.

Newspapers are dying out at a great rate, and it isn't due to box-on-a-pole in the suburbs (though I suspect it does have something to do with that). This is because the dead-tree version of news is anywhere from 4 to 24 hours of out date as compared to online versions of the same news, assuming an over-breakfast reading. For National and International sources there are much more frequently updated sources. For regional or state issues, there are typically local companies, typically TV newsrooms though ironically the largest newspapers also fall into this category, provide this information online as well. The one domain that the newspaper does have dominance is local coverage.

This is bad news for papers like the St. Cloud Times or the Alexandria Echo Press, as they have to compete for State coverage with papers like the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It has been suggested that these sorts of papers can survive by going "hyper-local," covering local issues to the greatest extent and leave national and international news to the online crowd. At the same time, publishing a dead-tree format newspaper is itself much more expensive than doing some form of ad-supported online presence from a distribution standpoint. Whether or not a news organization can survive on the online ad-stream of an expressly local news provider has yet to be proven, though.

The newspaper shares a problem with the big network newscasts, their consumers are still doing it mostly out of habit. Make a point of catching the CBS Evening News some time, and stick around for the commercials. The last time I did that, the top two products being pushed were luxury cars and medications. This suggests which demographic Nielson shows advertisers as the viewership of these news-shows. I know I stopped watching the big network newscasts when I stopped eating dinner every night with my parents.

I'm probably the last generation to consider these media types to be fully valid information vectors. Since smartphones can pull up cnn.com anywhere they have signal, you don't need to plonk down $.50 for a newspaper that's already very out of date. Or even watch the news.

Recycling

2008-08-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

I've heard from many sources that, "Don't bother recycling. I saw my garbage guy take the recycling stuff and throw it in the same truck as my garbage." One person cites Michael Moore's, "Stupid White Men," as a source of this.

I know for a fact my garbage crews don't do this, because the garbage company has harnessed the power of laziness! I have one of those large garbage pails that everyone has these days, I think it's a 60 gallon bucket. I also have to "bring it to the curb". Right. No problem. I also have to to bring it right up to the curb, because that way the robot arm can pick it up and dump it in the truck. The garbage crew never gets out of the truck unless someone brings it juuuust to the curb but is just out of reach of the arm and they have to shimmy it close enough.

Because of this, putting the recycling in with the garbage would be extra work. Which they don't do, because they are human and therefore lazy. Problem solved!

The down side to using a robot arm is that putting an extra bag of garbage next to my pail will still be there when I get home from work. Before, if it was a reasonable bag they'd just chuck it in the truck no questions asked. All of my garbage has to fit in the pail, period.

Laziness + automation = eco-friendly. Who knew?

Iran time again

2008-07-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

There is much liberal fear right now that we're gearing up for a fight in Iran. This is not without foundation, as we've done some drum pounding about just that. However, I think it is vanishingly unlikely that the outgoing Administration will invade another country as some form of last act.

There is a reason I think this, and it has to do with both military and political calculus. These go hand in hand, of course, so bear with me while I go through it.

John McCain and President Bush are both saying repeatedly that, "the surge is working." The surge is an increase in troop levels coupled with different methods of handling the conflict in Iraq. Both of these men have stated that we're going to be in Iraq for quite some time whether we like it or not.

When you couple the above belief with the Military recruiting problems, you come away with a military that is already fully committed. We've issued stop-loss orders to try and keep people in the service, but even that isn't quite enough to keep our deployment levels where they are right now for much longer. We will have to draw down troops to give them a break, and to try and match our deployment levels with the incoming volunteers.

Iran is going to be a tough nut to crack. The populace already considers America deeply suspect, so we will not be greeted by cheers as we drive down city streets in our tanks. The Iranian regime is the kind that would absolutely prepare its citizens for a long guerrilla war well before we step over the borders. Attempting to commit regime change in Iran will be a bloody, grinding campaign. This is the kind of conflict that would require the undivided attention of the US Military.

Right now we're rather divided militarily. Iraq is occupying a lot of our resources, and most of the rest is in Afghanistan. The best we can hope for are a few 'surgical strikes' on key sites and get the hell out. Unfortunately that would galvanize the Iranian populace against us in ways that'll make our lives very hard in Iraq. But, it is Iran military action we could do with our current force levels.

What's more, with our existing deployment levels in Iraq we simply don't have enough available troops, on even a short-term basis, to pull off a full scale invasion of Iran. And even if we did, both Presidential candidates will come out strongly against the idea. Why's that, you ask?

Because any invasion of Iran will be a long, bloody affair that'll occupy a lot of our military resources. Since we're already in Iraq to the extent we are, additional troops will have to come from somewhere. And that somewhere would have to be a draft. If there is one message a person running for national offices does not want to give, it is, "Vote for me, and I'll abduct your 19 year old sons at gun point and send them to the desert to die." We get this every time draft re-authorization bills come up in the Senate, and some of those Senators don't have to worry about re-election for 4 years.

McCain and Obama are up for re-election right now, and they'll either both have to come out for a draft, or both against it. Considering the anti-war wing of the Democratic party, there is no real way for Obama to support a draft. I also believe McCain is politically savvy enough to see those electoral tea leaves and follow Obama's lead on it.

Militarily, the "best" the war-hawks can hope for is to kick over the Iranian hornets nest and make them really and specifically angry at us. Considering that the US is actually sending a real officially recognized official to Iran, I think even the White House can see the reality on the ground and in the political landscape.

Solar Power Satellites

2008-05-31T08:28:00.000-07:00

CNN had an article up today that was a bit of a blast from the past.

How to harvest solar power? Beam it down from space!

This is something of a blast for me since I did a major report for school (High School I think) on the topic of solar power satellites. As the article says:

NASA and the United States Department of Energy studied the concept throughout the 1970s, concluding that although the technology was feasible, the price of putting it all together and sending it to outer space was not.

That would be during the last energy crisis. As it happens I read some of those reports for that report for school. Since this would have been written around 1992, we were deep in the throws of cheap oil. Desert Storm caused major oil spikes and crashes, but not the sustained high prices we've got going on right now.

As the article says, there are some major engineering challenges in getting solar power satellites (SPS) working. The first is on-orbit assembly. Our robotics are getting a heck of a lot better these days. Better enough that with a concerted effort we could create the technologies to launch modular sections of a larger SPS and have them lock together on orbit, probably within 10 years if we focus. That's just one of the major issues.

The second major issue is how to get the electrical power from orbit to the ground. A 22,000 mile long transmission cable is not in the cards, so you have to use some for of wireless method. The method identified in those 1970's reports was a form of microwave transmission. Like regular sunlight, it does suffer atmospheric losses as it transits the atmosphere, around 7% on clear day if I remember right. Clouds do affect the microwave transmission, though not nearly to the level of visible light.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this isn't the same microwaves you have in your kitchen. Those have been specifically tuned to a frequency that vibrates water. The frequency used to transmit satellite radio (Sirius and XM) is also a microwave, as are the frequencies used for WiFi networks. When the SPS idea gained some traction in the early 1980's environmentalists got up in arms about the idea of birds getting into the beam path and exploooooooding! This is a misunderstanding of how microwaves work, but the image stuck.

The effects of microwaves of that power-level, not frequency, has been studied. When I was writing that report, some studies done during WWII on military ships experimenting with RADAR inadvertently exposed certain people to very high levels of microwave radiation. These are not studies that can be done any more, scientific standards have increased markedly since then, but it is still data. More work needs to be done to fully quantify the effect of high power-level microwaves on mammals.

The third engineering challenge is the microwave receiver. These rectennas will have to receive a beam originated 22,000 miles away. While newer technology may mean that we can narrow the beam scatter more than was possible in the 70's, it still means a rectenna with a diameter measurable in kilometers. It is possible to construct rectennas that large, some of those early reports suggested farming would still be possible under them, but it does require a commercial aviation no-fly zone above the device.

One of the prime reason cited for putting large solar arrays into space is because light there isn't subjected to the same atmospheric scattering light here on the ground gets. Or at least, that was the reason cited back in the day. Now, better reasons are that solar arrays in space don't have to worry about night, clouds, or finding enough real-estate to plant them. The truly grandiose think on large scales, such as this quote from the article:

And so has a 2007 report released by the Pentagon's National Security Space Office, encouraging the U.S. government to spearhead the development of space power systems.
"A single kilometer-wide band of geosynchronous Earth orbit experiences enough solar flux in one year to nearly equal the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today," the report said.

That "kilometer-wide band" would have to be a bit over 163,000 miles long. This is not feasible within my lifetime. I suspect this quote was used to illustrate the power available out there, and I strongly suspect their assumption was a 100% light to energy conversion ratio which we simply can't do right now.

In short, SPS are feasible if we focus on the technologies to bring them about. There will be environmental push-back due to the microwave beam required to transmit the energy to the ground, which will further limit their applicability. As we develop cheaper heavy lift capacity at our space-ports, it becomes easier to get the hardware up there in the first place. It'll take significant investment of funds by someone to do it, though.

Impeachment returns

2008-05-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

It isn't torture this time, it's this book put out by the former Press Secretary for President Bush.

McClellan's Grave Charge

Impeachment is a fantasy held by the party that doesn't hold the Presidency. The Republicans ran smack into that fantasy in the 90's when they tried to impeach Bill Clinton. Heck, I routinely held fantasies about impeaching Reagan back in the day.

But the simple, brutal fact of the matter is that if the Democrats can't routinely override vetoes in the Senate, they can't impeach. The only way it can be done is by recruiting significant numbers of Republicans to the Yea side, and that will only happen if Bush does something clearly and unambiguously criminal. And by 'clearly and unambiguously,' I mean, 'clearly and unambiguously to someone who will give Bush the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.'

Neither of these conditions exist yet. Nor will they until after the November election, at which point it will be moot.

The UK Panopticon

2008-05-07T12:18:00.000-07:00

Ars Technicha has a nice article about the closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) that pervade the United Kingdom. In short, they haven't done much of anything to either reduce crime, or increase the effectiveness of crime solving and prosecution. But, folks keep demanding it, so they keep building it. At the moment, this is just security theater.

As the article says, "millions are spent on facial software recognition systems that have yet to be shown to have any merit." These are the sorts of systems that are supposed to identify faces, associate them with a specific person, and mark their location. In theory, if the whole system were working the way it is intended, when someone, "is captured on camera roughly every six seconds," it can provide a very detailed way to track where people go. Unfortunately for the security apparatus, the software systems we have now aren't anywhere close to capable of doing this reliably. You need a high quality, full to mostly-full shot of the face to do it. A simple hooded sweat-shirt, with the hood drawn as far over your head as possible can foil a lot of the camera angles required to get a good 'hit'.

The other problem they're facing is a simple data overload one. So much data is being gathered, that effective sifting technologies don't really exist yet. Especially when asking for footage from privately owned CCTV systems.

These are both problems where sufficient application of emerging technology can help. So long as the security apparatus can resist ripping out all this infrastructure they've built, future storage systems can capably handle the information load generated by these cameras. Couple that with advances in software, and you have the beginnings of an actually effective CCTV system. Computer-based tracking of license-plate numbers should come well before then, optical character recognition in noisy environments being a fundamentally easier problem than facial recognition, which will make tracking vehicle movements much easier as well.

Right now, the system is not very useful. On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of ground-work needed for a system that could actually be useful. Once the "back office" details are sufficient, the data flood will become manageable. Once that happens, the utility of all that data becomes much higher.

Financial IQ

2008-04-13T18:11:00.001-07:00

Newsweek had a pair of articles in the last issue that made me think. The first one, "Clues for the Clueless: The mortgage crisis may create momentum for improving our financial literacy. It's about time," is what I'm talking about today. The premise in the article is that the personal financial environment we live in has gotten markedly more complex since 1980 and we're not doing a good job of retraining. The advent of 401(k) plans over defined-benefit pension plans, mortgages other than 30-year fixed, and home equity lines of credit mean what our parents taught us about money isn't always true or accurate, if they even talked to us about it at all.

As it happens, most of what I learned about money came from two sources. The school of hard knocks, and my father in law. I learned about stocks in grade school. Compound interest is a standard math exercise once you get to a certain level (which few do, but I did). Mutual funds? No where to be found. Adjustable-rate-mortgages? Likewise. Debt restructuring? Nada. The prime lesson I got from my parents was a simple one, "Don't go into debt."

Unfortunately, a prime part of the American Experience is managing debt. Car payments for the car you put 10% down on, house payments for the house you put 2% down on, and credit-card payments for the cards you statistically aren't fully paying off every month. The one exception to the 'no debt' rule was a mortgage, since NO ONE pays cash for a house, and I think banks are required to report to the IRS whenever anyone does just that.

A second article, High Finance Laid Low, goes into a bit more depth about how things have changed:

Consider mortgages. In 1980, they came in one flavor: 30-year fixed-rate loans. Because fees and closing costs were so high, it was hard to refinance into a cheaper loan even if interest rates fell. The rule of thumb was that rates had to drop 2 percentage points before refinancing made sense.

When I covered compound interest in school, the 3o-year fixed was one of the examples. When we bought our first house in 1997, there were a few more options, such as the 15-year fixed, and 3 and 5 year adjustable-rate-mortgages. But still, I was told the 2% rule by many people. That mortgage was 7.25% if I'm remembering right.

Now we have a lot more options such as 40-year fixed rates mortgages, interest-only loans (eeeeeviiiiill), and many more types of ARMs. Part of the reason we're in the housing crisis is in part due to a lack of complete understanding, on the part of the consumers, of the risks involved in an adjustable rate mortgage. This is due in part to the fact that these instruments didn't exist even 10 years ago, and it hasn't entered our ancestral memory yet.

More fun figures:

Personal investment choices have mushroomed. In 1980, households had half their financial assets in bank deposits and savings accounts; only 34 percent were in stocks and a meager 2 percent in mutual funds. Since then, Americans have diversified: in 2006, 25 percent of household assets were in mutual funds, 28 percent in stocks and 28 percent in bank deposits and savings accounts (the rest were scattered across bounds and money-market funds).

The demise of the defined-benefit pension plan in favor of defined-contribution 401(k) style plans has forced an entire generation (or two) into the stock market. The boomers had this transition happen mid-career, depending on the sector they work in. Generation X, like me, has had 401(k) plans from the get go or were one of the last to get the defined-benefit plans, but had zero preparation for 401(k)'s in our schooling. Generation Y (also knows as the Millennials) has had 401(k) as the standard option since they entered the workplace, but they at least get the benefit of the collective folk wisdom of the rest of us; I have no idea if these concepts are covered in school these days.

As I mentioned before, I had a class unit in 5th or 6th grade where we were given $10,000 fantasy dollars and were to play the market. The prime lesson here is that stocks go up and stocks go down. If you choose good, you can make money. If you don't choose good, you lose money. It did not teach us about SEC filings, 10-Q reports, or any way to analyze whether or not a company is on sound financial footing.

Because of this lack of formal preparation, we are prone to folk wisdom and herd mentality. We do not teach risk management in school, and instead leave it to intuitive processes. This has some problems, as described in the, "Clues for the Clueless" article:

Finally, when it comes to investing, behavioral economists put part of the blame on "loss aversion." That describes how the average person suffers more pain when losing $10 than pleasure from gaining the same amount; the phenomenon explains people's unwillingness to take risks.

A 24 year old just getting into the market by way of their employer's 403(b) plan (a 401(k) plan for non-profits) may chose a bunch of 'balanced' or bond-funds simply because they want the steady income and don't want to be bothered by losses. Even though they're 40+ years from retirement, and are in the single best position to reap the rewards of 'growth' funds. When the stock market started well and truly tanking this year, I had friends who made a real effort to NOT LOOK at their portfolios; specifically because they knew that if they saw how much they'd lost, they'd be tempted to Do Something about that. Intuitive investors sell low and buy high.

As I alluded to above, part of our problem is that debt has become such a major proportion of our financial lives. As the housing crisis has shown, a vast majority of the average American's net worth is non-liquid real-estate, or non-liquid retirement funds. Therefore, credit becomes a major player. When I buy a car, I do so on the promise of the wages I'll be earning for the next 3/4/5 years. College students routinely come out of college with mortgage-sized debt loads, and it may be decades before their net-worth is positive.

In my specific case, "don't go into debt," has actually worked out. Due to financial planning, a shrewd choice of college, and getting through college on time, I managed to get through without any student debt. The first loan I ever signed up for was my mortgage, which we managed to put 10% down on, and managed to drop PMI 3 years after inception. The first car we bought by way of a loan was a new car, and we still managed to put about 50% down. Having been scared about credit cards by my parents, I didn't get into trouble there; a lesson that was reinforced several times watching friends dig themselves out of exactly that kind of debt-hole. When we get windfalls, we don't immediately blow it all on buying stuff. We have several long term savings goals that we're saving for, and document the contributions.

We are not the average US saver.

Were it not for my father-in-law, chances are good that the financial windfalls we received over the years would be in passbook savings earning a whopping 1.75%. That is very, very safe (thank you FDIC) but not very wise for the bottom line in the long term. My first job was in the public sector, and had a defined-benefit plan (and still do, last I looked), so I didn't have to look at the stock market like my .COM friends were having to do. That plan earned a guaranteed 5% yearly rate, which was kind of nice to know when the memories of the 1991-93 recession were still fresh.

The first time I had to look at the stock market was when I started my new job, in 2003. This job has a defined-contribution plan as the only retirement option. By this point I already knew quite a bit about mutual funds thanks to my father-in-law, so it wasn't the steep learning curve it would have been. Seeing as we were just coming out of the .com bubble-correction in 2003, I probably would have ended up entirely in 'income' stocks rather than where I did.

I know I would have been better served knowing more about how money works. Mutual funds existed in the 1980's, and even 'no load' funds existed. The plethora of mortgage options didn't exist, but more abstract examples of various debt instruments could have been used to illustrate how money works in our economy. "Don't go into debt," served me relatively well until I built up enough financial IQ on my own to be a lot more sophisticated in how my savings works for me.

A word that needs to be left behind

2008-02-20T09:48:00.001-08:00

On the CNN front page today there was an article-teaser I object to:

Coed? What is this, the 1970's? To their credit the actual article is titled, "Underwear left near body, possibly a taunt to police," which is much more acceptable. But, coed?

"Coed" is short for "Co-educational". It came into use to describe students of the opposite gender being educated along side the traditional gender at institutions of higher ed that formerly were single-gender only. As the prevalence of all-male colleges were much higher than the all-female variety, 'coed,' came to be synonymous with "college-aged female".

I object to 'coed' as a synonym of woman. Its use as a descriptor of a place of education is much more acceptable; for instance, the US military academies went co-ed in 1976. When used as a proxy for 'woman' it implies that women in higher education are something to be noted, as if they didn't belong there until recently. It is a form of condescension, and should be scrubbed from common usage. I would be very happy if I never saw it used by a news outlet ever again.

Update: It would seem on first glance that CNN may have caught some flack about it. Right now it shows:

However, the title of the article is now, "Underwear found near co-ed's body possibly left to taunt police."

Sigh

What to do with a tax refund

2008-02-07T14:32:00.001-08:00

According to CNN, the Senate just passed the economic stimulus package passed by the House (plus some changes). Passage is expected to be 'swift'.

We've already discussed what our $1200 is going to be used for. It'll be used to pay for an unfunded federal mandate: a digital TV.

In case you hadn't heard, the FCC is forcing over the air television broadcasts to go all digital real soon now. HD TV is a digital signal, and is the one remaining reason households have TV antennas in this modern era of cable and satellite TV. What the feds are not doing is paying for new TVs, instead they gave the TV stations long enough to get there that 'market forces' would force the change.

And it kind of has. A lot of my friends have HD TV now. The 'early adopters' out there, who plonked down $2000+ for a TV, may need to upgrade though. Those people who still have analog TVs can use a converter box to switch the signals. Those of us with cable or satellite TV already have one, and we won't even notice the change.

We're still using the same 27" CRT we bought in December of 1998. Works great, and fits in the entertainment center. This federal windfall is something we can use to upgrade it, though. It'll pay for the TV and part of a new entertainment center since the current one won't support the now-default widescreen form-factor. See us, stimulating the economy of two countries!

Addendum: It would appear that the Feds ARE subsidizing some of the conversion.

Why pro-choice matters to me

2008-01-22T12:19:00.000-08:00

The simple answer to this is because I was raised that way. That simple thing probably informs most people's base view on the pro-life/pro-choice spectrum, but doesn't show the whole of it. Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe v Wade, which means whole generations have grown up in the post-Roe world. Some of us who were born shortly after Roe have children of choice ourselves. If those children were had early enough, those same children of choice are hitting puberty themselves and the debate now becomes personal for them.

Pro-choice is more than just pro-abortion. Pro-choice means being in favor of having control over reproduction, and abortion is just one more tool. Because the biology of reproduction costs women far more than men, having children is a far bigger event in the lives of women than it is for men. Having choice about reproduction means greatly enhanced life options.

Pro-choice is about being able to chose when to start a family, and even having the option of not starting one at all. Abortion provides the 'last resort' to ensure this choice. Some argue at length that adoption is a much better alternative, but pregnancy itself imposes a major burden on a woman. Adoption is just another tool in the pro-choice toolbox, it isn't a replacement for abortion.

English Law clearly establishes that maternal liability for harm caused in utero does not exist. Some US states are based on Common Law so may also have this protection. The US Federal Law is not based on common law, so instead we have to rely on laws and judicial rulings to define whether or not a mother can be held liable for harm caused in utero. Science is getting better and better at figuring out what actions a mother can take to cause harm, or reduce harm, to a fetus. The US system of law allows a mother to be held liable for harm incurred in utero, as happened to a Wisconsin woman in 1995 who was confined to a hospital by the state in order to prevent her from using illegal drugs and harming her fetus (Angela M. W. v. Kruzicki).

Therefore, if a mother is forced to carry an unwanted child to term and give them up for adoption, rather than abort, it can open her up to liability. Thus, a mother carrying to term HAS to 'do it right', even if she doesn't want the child. This presents a significant burden to the mother. In the US, this means that the unwanted child has to receive adequate pre-natal care which is a health-care expense. Therefore, adoption is a viable alternative to abortion only if the mother is willing to endure the expense of adequate pre-natal care.

I consider reproductive choice a fairness issue. This is one area where nature clearly dictates distinct differences between the sexes, which is why I believe that modern technology can be correctly used to equalize this. Until science can perfect a uterine replicator, and therefore free women from the duty of bearing the children of choice, there will always be a disparity; but at least it can be a disparity of choice. We are tool users by nature, so this seems quite fair to me.

Women deserve as much of a chance to live their lives as they see fit as men do. Reproductive choice is a major part of that goal. This is why pro-choice matters to me.

Presidential Races, part 2

2008-01-22T12:18:00.001-08:00

Bill Richardson has dropped out and McCain has won South Carolina. Since South Carolina has historically always picked the eventual Republican Nominee, it could very well be a Senator/Senator race for the general!

Interesting.

Presidential races

2007-12-26T10:26:00.001-08:00

I admit to half ignoring the race for the nomination. I live in a state where I have an under 50% chance of caucusing in time to have a say in the nomination, and that provides a bit of a disincentive to pay attention. Sure, I can participate in the money-primary, but historically I haven't done so and probably won't start any time soon.

That said, I do have a candidate in mind, Bill Richardson. My reason for supporting him is decidedly unscientific nor is it based on things like issues. Or even that I like his hair or something. No. Of the top four democratic candidates, he is the only governor. And Governors win presidencies when running against Senators. I want a democrat in the White House in 2009, and that means I should support a Governor. QED.

I think this has something to do with Senators being on the national stage and Governors merely having executive experience. Hillary has spend years explaining away her 'yea' vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq. This sort of thing is a common experience with Senators running for President. The Senate, and to a lesser extent the House, requires an understanding of nuance to really know a candidate. Unfortunately for Senators running for President, nuance is devilishly hard to convey convincingly to Joe Average Voter; and gets even harder when the Opposition starts pounding out ads emphasizing what the vote looked like rather than what it was supposed to do.

In modern Presidential politics, Senators suffer a disadvantage to Governors when it comes time for the general election. The race for the nomination is a different critter, since likely voters (or caucus attendees) are those who are more likely to understand nuance and thus a Senator will do a bit better than during the real race. Kennedy was the last Senator to be elected President while still in the Senate, and American politics have changed markedly since his time.

Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are all Senators. Edwards has the advantage of not being currently a Senator, though he was as recently as 2005 which may be too recent to save him. Obama has the advantage of not being a Senator for very long. Clinton has the advantage of being a Clinton, and that's about it.

Of the big three, Clinton is by far the most vulnerable to Senator-itis. Edwards served longer, but a lot of his skeletons came out in the 2004 campaign, and he is no longer a seated Senator. Obama hasn't been a Senator for very long, and just maybe, maybe, hasn't been in the Chamber long enough to build up enough potentially embarrassing votes.

Over on the Republican side, they seem to have figured this trick out. Of the top three polling candidates, there are two Governors, and a Mayor of a city larger than some states. Running in 4th place is the Senator.

With the Republicans almost guaranteed to nominate a non-Senator, it is paramount in my mind that the Democrats nominate a non-Senator. Unfortunately, I don't think that'll happen unless some form of "Iowa Surprise" hits and Richardson suddenly starts gaining in the polls. Which tells me that the next President will most likely be a Republican, which causes me to grind my teeth.

A paradox of parenting

2007-11-22T08:38:00.000-08:00

In this week's Newsweek is an article titled, "In Trouble For Show And Tell." In it, it described a significant up-tick in kindergarteners being suspended for inappropriate sexual activity. That's right, sexual activity in a group of kids who are still supposed to believe in the stork.

What, pray, is leading to this purported increase in pulchritude in those aged 5-6? Nothing! It's always been there, it's part of the development process. But schools are much more worried about lawsuits alleging lack of due diligence in policing inappropriate sexual behavior, so they're getting proactive about it in order to avoid massive legal costs.

The paradox here is that kids of that age have to know WHAT behavior is unacceptable, while at the same time preserving their innocence by not knowing WHY it is unacceptable.

I know a couple who is home-schooling their kids. Unlike most such couples, one parent is a trained educator. Neither kid has reached age 5, yet they've already had several in depth discussions about puberty and sex. Kids that age can handle some of this stuff without having their heads explode in a puff of sin. My own parents introduced me to at least the anatomy and physiology of pregnancy and mature genitals at a pretty young age, definitely well before I got the same stuff (a bit watered down) in class.

As a caveat, I didn't get the true meaning of puberty and, shall we say, human courtship rituals, until 6th grade. I have a memory of visiting a doctor's office where sexual development was being discussed. I knew the parts involved pretty good, but this 'puberty' word was a new one on me. I may very well have been sexually harassing my female classmates in Kindergarten and none of us may have known it but the teachers!

The fact is that, 'sexual touch is something you just don't do,' is a social taboo that is a learned thing. Like all learned behaviors, it takes time for the lessons to sink in. Children aged 5 have immature ethical and moral systems, so it comes as no surprise at all to me that these children are still violating this taboo.

The first encounter children generally have with this taboo is the, "bad touch," talk. The "bad touch" talk is very clearly aimed at adults, as the aim of the talk is to get the child to report when an adult is molesting them. What this talk does not do is sensitize the child to other things, such as bad touch from age peers, teaching that inappropriate exposure is inappropriate all the time ("I've got new underwear! Look!"), and nudity is never done outside the home. This is a topic that has long been on the list of, "things we don't talk about and hope we never have to." If schools are going to continue to be paranoid about lawsuits on this frontier, this will have to change.

In a perfect world, so the thinking goes, children wouldn't even consider doing anything sexual until they're 18. Children shouldn't have ANY sexual experiences until they're in their teens at least, and, as the thinking goes, anything that happens before then is somehow damaging. The developing mind just isn't ready for ...that... stuff.

Unfortunately for the thinking, reality differs somewhat. I've heard many anecdotal reports from parents and even some journal articles (that I don't have the energy to chase down right now) about masturbatory behavior in children who are in pre-school, or earlier. That behavior is self-rewarding even at that age, so can be hard to stamp out. This sort of behavior is rather common.

The practice of suspending kindergarteners for inappropriate sexual behavior unfortunately makes sense. The schools don't touch sex until 6th grade or there about, if they touch on it at all, so sending the child home for some home-schooling about what they did wrong makes sense. The problem here is that 1, 3, or 5 days isn't enough to really inculcate the social taboo into a child. "You just don't do that," will work on some children, but others need more subtle methods to really learn that lesson.

It is sad that schools have to punish children for the paranoias of the parents. Especially if the behavior being punished is one that is fairly common to the age group. To me this just underlines that we need to start teaching our children about this stuff at a younger age. That is not likely to happen, seeing as how bad a job we're doing with children who ARE old enough to learn about it. But it would help.

GPS and cars

2007-10-10T21:56:00.001-07:00

Recently headlines were made by an announcement from OnStar that they will be shipping an ability to stop a car once it is reported stolen. This has certain people up in arms about the implications of this technology, and their points are very valid. If OnStar can do it to render a stolen car useless, what if the Department of Homeland Security could 'borrow' the system to enforce a 'do not drive' list? OnStar uses GPS technology already, so locating the stolen car is pretty easy once it is reported as lost.

There are a whole host of things that detailed GPS data enables in cars. Not the least of which is the possibility of a truly automatic car. That sort of thing is still a long ways away, but we're getting ever closer to two other possibilities.

The two possibilities I consider very likely unless legislation is proposed to prohibit it involve in essence a black box for the car. As the road system of the United States gets ever more detailed in digital spaces it makes GPS navigational units even more useful. This is already happening. The next step is when the nav units start phoning home.

The first area I predict to really come into play will be from insurance companies. Actuaries would LOVE the detailed information provided by a GPS location log and road data. Cross reference the two and you have all sorts of goodies:

What percentage of the time does the driver exceed the posted speed-limits?
How often is the car parked in high vehicular crime areas?
How many miles per day/week/month/year does the car get driven?
When the car gets driven outside of 'normal', such as driving to Grandma's.

The pitch will be like this: Put a tracker on your car (or sign a data-sharing agreement with OnStar), drive well, save big bucks on your car insurance. Privacy advocates are already unhappy at the use of credit reports to provide discounts, this will only take the same course. This is very attractive to insurers, because it makes their job of judging risk a lot easier.

Once the above is on the market, you can guarantee that nanny-boxes will also be on the market. Have a new driver under the age of 18 in the house? Give them their own car, and a nanny box to keep them honest about their driving. This technology is already in use in the commercial trucking industry.

The next level is legal. I don't know if OnStar is already being given search warrants for the GPS logs of cars, but it is only a matter of time before they are. Once GPS devices with phone-home capabilities are embedded in more cars, the ability of law enforcement to see everywhere a car went increases markedly. Given enough time, laws may evolve to the point where such logs are mandated in all road vehicles, and can be queried by a nearby police cruiser or from the big database it reports to. Some science fiction already covers this issue.

Obviously there are some privacy concerns here. Does my right to privacy extend to keeping my vehicular location private from law enforcement without a search warrant? It could be argued that the trackers just track the vehicle not the driver, and thus no implied guarantee of privacy exists. Or it could be argued that operating a vehicle in the state of [$state$] is contingent on certain terms of use, stipulated when you applied for a drivers license and signed, thus giving statutory consent to have your location tracked on demand. This has yet to be clarified.

The big threat to privacy here isn't the government, though that threat is increasing, it's still the private sector. There is no guarantee to privacy in the private sector. If you can save big money by having your location tracked everywhere, you can bet that there will be hoards of people signing up to save big money. This leads to circumstances where the US Government purchases information on the open market that they couldn't legally collect directly, such as domestic satellite surveillance. The private sector doesn't have near the restrictions on it that the government has, but the government has deep enough pockets that it can pay the private sector to do what it couldn't.

So expect to see GPS-related laws start popping up.

Counter-feminism

2007-09-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently mentioned a common rant her father goes on about. It is a theme I've heard several times from many quarters, and even thought myself in the privacy of my own head.

Where are the jobs for white men? If 75% of doctors and 70% of pastors are women, what are the men going to do? All these women are taking jobs that men used to have, so what jobs are men going to have? I never worried about you girls finding good jobs, but now that [son] has graduated from college (with a classics degree), I'm worried about him getting hired, because he is not diverse enough. Reverse discrimination! Why, even though [crazy mormon guy] is qualified, they won't hire him as a preschool teacher in Mormon country!

I've heard this before.

I work in an industry that is decidedly male. As in, 85% or so. It is hard for women to break into it as it is such a strong field. I'm not proud of it, but that's how it goes.

When I was job hunting right out of college I had thoughts like the above. I wasn't diverse enough. Being a white male meant I got zero bonuses for diversity. Not even veteran bonuses as I never served. I had to gain access based 100% on my merits, not based on which disadvantaged class I was in. It felt no fair, as people with less innate spiffy as me were getting in.

That was the male privilege talking. Just by walking in the door I got a default +5% on the selection because I fit the pre-conceived notions of what someone who does what they wanted looked like. At the time I did not understand that all but the most generic civil-service classes involve the subjective opinion of one or more people in the selection process, and that subjective opinion is biased towards white males in my field. The built in bonuses for being female or not white were there to level the playing field.

So yes, there is push-back for this. You get that any time an entitled class (men in this specific case) gets deprivileged in some way. But, this is for the better in the long run.

How it should work, and unions have been trying to push for this for years, is that each worker is evaluated objectively on their ability to add to the organization. As anyone who has attempted to hire anyone more than the most menial of disposable workers knows, objectivity on such relative worth is very hard to come by, and reliable objectivity even more so. So we're stuck with a subjective system.

So yes, Men are somewhat deprivileged from where they were 30 years ago. It isn't all gone yet, and that wage gap is still devilishly hard to get rid of. The Son who has a degree in classics will most likely not get a job in his field. His innate male-ness still counts for some, but he'll have a hard time busting into the 'personal assistant' field, better try for something more tech oriented. The daughters are both earning more money than I am, a position they simply couldn't have been in 30 years ago. It is entirely possible that the daughters will continue to earn more than the son, even at the same relative life-stages. This is something else that would have been very hard to accomplish 30 years ago.

So no, rolling the clock back 30 years to when male privilege ruled would not make everyone happy. Being deprivileged does feel like things are now unfair, but that's because they've been unfair for so long that the unfair has come to seem normal. In this case, get used to the change. It is better for all of us.

The changing nature of search

2007-07-31T21:59:00.001-07:00

Since the dawn of the web-driven internet, search engines have been largely key-word based. By that I mean the web pages of the world were indexed based on what the words are on that page. How the results are sorted after you hit the Go button is the product of quite a bit of intellectual property, but the big boys in the industry rank results based on popularity as a proxy for relevance.

This is an approach that works well for items that are popular, but not as well for items that are decidedly niche or were JUST published and therefore don't have much popularity yet. Also, really good searches are best thought of logically, and logic is not something most users are trained in. Drilling down into a popular topic into the sub-realm you're interested in almost always requires excluding search terms, or selecting between two. And most people don't get that sort of thinking.

The search engine I used before Google came on the scene in a big way was Alta Vista. That one used actual logical operators for its searches, which pleased the computer scientist in me. When looking up weird stuff sometimes I ended up with searches that looked like this:

((term OR term) AND (term OR term)) NEAR term

I know what that means, and how the parens work in there. But, um, normal people don't, even though it used words instead of & (and), | (or), or ! (not). What 'normal people' expect, is to type the phrase, "How do I tie a half-windsor" into the search engine, and get a handy how-to in the first few links. Most search engines these days will attempt to search the whole phrase, or failing that drop the common words (everything but 'tie' and 'half-windsor') and return what THAT comes up with.

Work has been going on for years now on what's called 'semantic search', which analyzes the query for the concept it is driving at, and returns results that match the concept. This is a much harder way to index, but arguably a more valuable one when it comes to returning valid results. As an example of why this is a good thing, take the term 'bondage'. It has two very different concepts associated with it. One is the Christian concept of the term ("deliver me from bondage", or, "I am in bondage to.."), the other is a bedroom activity that gets filtered by family filters. A semantic search engine should be able to tell the difference between queries using that word, and decide which large sub-set of pages it should return for the search.

This is decidedly tricky, as there is no easy way to automate the process of determining the concepts on a page. It takes MUCH beefier computer power to index a page for sematics and concepts than it does for key-words. Google and other search engines are now taking variations on the search terms and searching on that as a way to deliver more relevant results, but this only goes so far.

The other day I was searching on a non-Google site for a query that had the word "replicate" in it. Results returned by that query had the following words highlighted as keyword matches: replication, reproduction, reproduce. As it happens, I was searching for a term that has rather specific technical meaning and is commonly used in that exact form. Reproduction, while next to replication in the Thesaurus, had absolutely nothing to do with what I was interested in. Happily, this particular search engine allowed me to put in "+replicate" as a way to tell it to not try searching on variants, and that returned me a much better list.

Once Semantic Search is here and works well, it'll out-perform traditional key-word based search for most searches. This will take some getting used to for those of us who understand the Boolean logic behind current search engines. Key-word search won't go away, though it may require special search syntax to invoke it. However, I predict that I'll just plain get used to it and start using sentences in search terms instead of key-words.

Bills of Attainder

2007-07-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

A Bill of Attainder is a law that labels a person or group to be criminals, and provides punishment for same without involving the judicial system. The British Crown was fond enough of them to piss off the framers of the United States Constitution, which leads to this paragraph in Section 9, Article 1.

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

Which is in the main body of the text, between the "Habeas Corpus" section, and, "no direct tax" (since amended) section. An "ex post facto" law is a law that makes existing penalties for a crime to be greater, and applies it retroactively, or changes the rules so it is easier to convict a crime and applying those new rules of evidence to people already in custody or were already cleared of charges on the crime.

The key thing here is the Bill of Attainder. It is flatly unconstitutional in the US to pass them, a point that the US Courts have pointed out a couple of times (most recently in 2003). So why bring this up?

Because President Bush has put out an Executive Order of Attainder.

It isn't a 'bill' of attainder, because:

It isn't an Act of Congress.
It doesn't create a new crime, it just penalizes a behavior.

Why it is an Executive Order of Attainder:

It singles out a specific group for penalty without involving the courts.

What is especially troubling is the broad wording of the executive order.

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:
(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or
(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or
(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

To summarize, anyone who works against our goal of creating democracy in Iraq can have their US assets seized by the Treasury Department. The determination of "working against" is not done by a court of law, rather by Executive agencies. This is a writ of attainder pure and simple.

The scope is particularly troubling. One could argue, and I'm sure many have, that passing a law mandating the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would violate this EO, and thus subject practically every democrat in Congress to having their assets siezed. Hilary Clinton has already received an official nasty-gram from the DOD, saying (without pointing to the EO) that she qualifies for the EO.

As grounds for Impeachment go, this Executive Order is way better than Abu Ghraib ever was. This is action taken by President Bush himself that directly contravenes (the intent of) the Constitution. It is a violation of his oath of office ("I promise to uphold the constitution").

Will an Impeachment motion stick, though? The arguments I raised for Abu Ghraib still stand, even though control of congress has shifted. The Democrats have been having a whee good time in the house passing bill after bill of Bush-Smackdown only to have it ram against the 60-vote wall in the Senate. An Impeachment motion would pass the House, only to follow Bill Clinton by dieing in the Senate. Anything there will HAVE to involve significant numbers of GOP Senators defecting to the 'Anti-Bush' camp, and that will require a MAJOR blunder on Bush's part; a blunder like trying to apply this new EO to a leading Democratic Senator like Ted Kennedy. I believe that Bush is politically savvy enough to avoid the actions that'll lose him the votes in the Senate he needs to keep on his side.

That said, the wording will still be there when the next President is elected. Who knows how the next President will take things, and they won't be held to the same account as Bush, who wrote the EO, would. It is a bad precedent, and needs to be struck down as soon as possible.

Survey Says: Kids come 8th

2007-07-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

From the AP.

It seems that in the last 17 years attitudes towards marriage have shifted markedly. Once upon a time, 1990, children were perceived as one of the top attributes of a successful marriage. They're now 8th of 9 identified by the Pew Research Center. Things closer to the top of the list include such items as, equitable distribution of chores, good housing, and a healthy sex-life.

The survey also found that, by a margin of nearly 3-to-1, Americans say the main purpose of marriage is the "mutual happiness and fulfillment" of adults rather than the "bearing and raising of children."

Which is interesting in and of itself. This really shows how attitudes towards marriage have shifted since I was a wee one. It is no wonder that the current crop of people reaching marrying age is called, "the me generation."

Two weekends ago I was at a family vacation that we'd been doing for 25 years, and many people I grew up with were there as well. Of the three families with kids my age up there, we had seven of us. Ages ranged from 32 down to 23. Of the seven of us, four were married (none younger than 29) and none had any kids. At age 32 all of our parents had at least one child already. Of all the families that had even been somewhat regular to this annual vacation, the vast majority had started families by age 32. This is a demographic that can be described as 'white, well educated, middle class', which is one of the population segments with the LOWEST birthrates right now.

Marriage is focusing more and more on the relationship between the adults instead of the adults suitability to raise the next generation. An interesting quote:

The survey's findings buttress concerns expressed by numerous scholars and family-policy experts, among them Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University's National Marriage Project.

"The popular culture is increasingly oriented to fulfilling the X-rated fantasies and desires of adults," she wrote in a recent report. "Child-rearing values -- sacrifice, stability, dependability, maturity -- seem stale and musty by comparison."

As if having a healthy sex-live inside wedlock was a bad thing. When are we supposed to have it? Or are we not supposed to have it at all? Darned puritans.

Anyway, if your idea of good family values includes lots of children and raising them up healthy and intact, this report is bad news. At least if you're just looking at white middle-class america. Things get different when you delve into minority groups (who aren't going to be minority for long at this rate):

But the patterns in regard to race and ethnicity were more complex.

For example, census statistics show that blacks and Hispanic are more likely than whites to bear children out of wedlock. Yet according to the survey, these minority groups are more inclined than whites to place a high value on the importance of children to a successful marriage.

Placing cultural value on having children in marriage would seem to commute to having children at all, even out of wedlock. Minority groups are more likely to have this value than white america. I've also seen separate reports that immigrant groups tend to have much higher birthrates than people who were born here. At some point, and I think I'll live to see it, White America will merely be the largest group in a plurality and concepts of 'minority' will fade.

Another thing that I suspect is contributing to the diminution of child-raising as a golden goal of marriage is the realization of people my age and younger that raising kids is a LOT of work! And liability. Couple that with a growing cultural permissiveness of childless couples and you have a lot of couples taking the easy road and just not bothering to have kids. Awareness of just how much children cost is also taking hold. I covered some of this two years ago (Fertility and Parenthood), but in short the 'window' for having kids has moved from the early 20's to the early 30's and the resultant fertility problems that entails. College costing what it will doesn't help either, and college educations are now seen as 'standard' for a good life. And you want a good life for your children, right?

Lets try an example. I want to have kids. I want to have enough kids to:
1) Try and make up for those my married friends AREN'T having.
2) Have enough that at least one of 'em will give me grand-kids.

So lets call it 5 kids to be safe. That means probably 28 years of raising kids, and 33 years of paying for college in some form or another. The simple fact is that in that time 5 college educations are going to cost well over a million dollars (closer to $2M thanks to inflation in the overall market and the much higher college tuition inflation rate), a megabuck doesn't go nearly as far as it did 20 years ago, so my poor children are GOING to be saddled with .edu-debt. And that assumes an education at a public university. All this doesn't cover health insurance before they even get to college, I had better hope I get that covered through my employer.

That is a lot of work. We've done a good job of showing our children just how much responsibility having children is so they'll put it off to when they can afford it. Is it any surprise that we're having a big fall-off in families with children?

Back to the article:

Virginia Rutter, a sociology professor at Framingham (Mass.) State College and board member of the Council on Contemporary Families, said the shifting views may be linked in part to America's relative lack of family-friendly workplace policies such as paid leave and subsidized child care.

"If we value families ... we need to change the circumstances they live in," she said, citing the challenges faced by young, two-earner couples as they ponder having children.

In my opinion we're a bit too late for that for the current generation. The baby bust is firmly in place right now, and revising workplace attitudes (and laws) to be much more family friendly will take a decade or two to do any good for reversing that. This needs doing. America is currently maintaining its workforce through immigration rather than 'growing our own', so we're not in the same straits as our European brethren.

Increasingly, children are seen as optional. Something to be explicitly chosen, rather than opted out of. This is something that my feminist upbringing sees as a true and wonderful thing, though it does have some negative impacts to senior care when I get to be that age.

In the mean time, a happy marriage seems to be one in which both members perceive themselves to be equal partners, in both chores, bedroom activities, and providing for the household. That's a good thing right there.

Looking to the future

2007-05-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

Charles Stross recently posted a transcript of a talk he gave to an engineering consulting group. You can find the rather long transcript here. It is a very good read, and he brought up a number of points.

One of the points was that 'driverless cars' are a near inevitability. This is a view I also hold, and I also think I may live to see it. My first talk about this topic was the second post ever on this blog, "PRT Will Save The World", which was a critique of advocates of the same idea trying to bring it off right now. Stross makes this point:

Once autonomous vehicle technology becomes sufficiently reliable, it's fairly likely that human drivers will be forbidden, except under very limited conditions. After all, human drivers are the cause of about 90% of traffic accidents: recent research shows that in about 80% of vehicle collisions the driver was distracted in the 3 seconds leading up to the incident. There's an inescapable logic to taking the most common point of failure out of the control loop — my freedom to drive should not come at the risk of life and limb to other road users, after all.

I agree with this point. Humans are the most unreliable factor in automobiles, so once automation has reached the level that it provides human-equivalent safety the drive to yield all control to automation will be strong. There is a fairly long road before we get there, though, as the first iterations of an auto-driver has to contend with not only road conditions but human drivers in the environment. It is much easier to plan a system based on the assumption that all vehicles are the same and all vehicle controllers are the same and probably networked; this is what Personal Rapid Transit advocates have been pushing for.

PRT can only be done right now if a separate system of roads is created along side what we already have. The build out for that will quite reasonably take 20 to 50 years before a reasonably complete system can be built in a metro area (never mind interstate traffic). In that time automation will continue. By the time the separate PRT road network is built out, it is highly likely that automation has gotten to the point that the existing road network can be used. In other words, we're about 20 years too late for PRT to pay off in any meaningful way.

The problem represented by "I get in my car and go to point B" has its own factors. Right now each driver is a selfish driver operating under a set of rules, meaning that they do not actively cooperate with other drivers yet still maintain (reasonable) compliance with driving laws. Once in a while they may deign to yield to a turn signal for a lane change, but that's about as egalitarian as it gets on the roads. Also the observation window for that driver is limited to what they can directly perceive as a driver, plus whatever news comes over the radio about traffic problems. More modern in-car nav devices have wireless connections to local traffic centers to provide near-term access to congestion data. This supplemental data stream is by necessity rather coarse grained.

In a future where human drivers are very few and far between with automation handling the details of getting from point A to point B, the problem changes markedly. The driver in this case is the in car automation. Because we're talking about 20-50 years in the future, I'm going to presume a wireless network between the cars themselves and to a central traffic authority. With GPS, which most new cars already have thanks to OnStar and similar services, the central traffic authority can gain very highly detailed view of what traffic is moving across the roads. The peer to peer network in the driver's environment can communicate with other vehicles on the road much more richly than can be done now through signals.

All of this means is that the driver in this case is cooperative not selfish. The peer to peer network can be used to notify cars behind the vehicle of sudden traffic hazards, lane change intent, emergency vehicle presence, traction hazards on the roadway, and other such data. The central traffic authority can route traffic around blocking points in a way that greatly enhances the total throughput of the roads. The network possibilities make the driver much more aware of the total environment it is driving through, which better enables correct decisions.

Then you have the fact that an automation system can have more precise sensors than a human driver, such as truly accurate range finders, and reaction time. If traffic suddenly needs to slow down to handle a deer on the road, the signal to "break" can back propagate from the deer MUCH faster than can be done with mere breaklights and right foot moves. If the car ahead of the driver sends the break signal, the driver can start breaking itself in less than a seconds, which is much faster than a human could do it.

The presence of a selfish driver, such as an actual human behind the wheel, can throw a smooth flowing cooperative system out the window. This is why after a certain point humans will be discouraged from driving, probably by insurance companies at first and then by law. As Stross says, "They're going to redefine our whole concept of personal autonomy". The social impact of this is going to be great, especially for those people earning their first driver's license this year, people who are most likely to see this system come about.

It is possible, though not too likely except in the 50-70 year range by my guess, that the concept of the neighborhood vehicle pool may exist and private vehicle ownership may fall off. We've got too much invested culturally to give up private ownership of a stable of vehicles, so if this happens it'll be a ways down the road. And if it happens, socialist Europe will probably be where it takes off rather than capitalist America.

On the other hand, such a system will better enable rental companies to rent things like pickups for weekend projects. $50 for a one day rental certainly beats out the $350/month loan payment to have that vehicle on semi-permanent standby. An auto-drive system would allow the rental companies to dispatch vehicles to residences without having to send a driver along, like Enterprise does now in certain areas. Once the system is more fully deployed, private ownership of vehicles may well decline.

This level of tracking of movement may well run smack into certain knee jerk privacy concerns, which is something else Stross addressed. In fact, that very topic is the main point he is trying to make about the world in 20/30/50 years hence. Within 50 years it will be possible for people to record every waking moment of their lives, and it is entirely possible that such activity be mandated for certain classes of citizens such as sex offenders and those under probation. The 'lifelogs' as he calls them will be searchable the way internet information is searchable, leading to levels of exposure that I find mind-boggling, but kids those days will be all too used to. So having everywhere you drive tracked will be nothing because every step you take is tracked in some way already.

It is an oft quoted statistic that there are more closed-circuit TV cameras in England than there are people, or will be within 10 years. This is probably exaggeration, but the point is that there are a lot of CCTV cameras in England. Couple those with sophisticated image processing, we're not quite there yet but we're real close, and you can get a tracking system of fair quality. This is something that can be in place within 10 years.

How we as a society will cope with this level of tracking is something we can't predict from here. That level of tracking will prove beyond all possible doubt that each and every one of us is a criminal in some minor way. Do you cross the street only with the light and at corners? Do you follow the speed limit ALL the time? Do you trespass by cutting across a lawn on your walk to the bus? Do you always move your car for snow emergencies? Do you always respect 20 minute loading zones? These questions will force some changes in society, hopefully the reduction of some of these laws. Won't know until we get there.

In defense of Gifted & Talented

2007-05-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

I was a Gifted & Talented student for a number of years. I think I started in the program in 3rd grade, and continued through at least part of Jr. High. Because of that I have a first and view of what G&T programs provide.

Gifted & Talented is in essence special ed for smart kids. That might seem a wee bit dichotomous, but it is pretty close to the truth. Gifted and Talented programs are designed to keep said 'smart kids' engaged in education. Engagement is a particular hazard of Gifted and Talented youth.

I knew many kids while I was in school who were very smart, but rarely tested above the 70% mark. At the same time I was worried if I had a test come back with less than 90%. I was engaged in the process, they were not. To the gifted or talented youth, school can very easily seem intolerably boring so they detach from it. Native smarts are not enough to pass tests, you have to care enough to at least look at the material once to have a chance of doing well.

Engagement is the prime challenge for gifted and talented youth. These are kids who are smart enough that they can be told once, maybe twice, before they fully grasp a concept (assuming engagement, of course), where their classmates may be struggling with the 'tell me three times' method and still coming out with only partial comprehension. The continual back and retread required to bring the slowest students up to speed acts as a disincentive to keep paying attention to the class.

The method employed by my Gifted and Talented program was to have a special class once a day or a week where the G&T kids got together and did activities just for us. The hope was that by providing something to look forward to by going to school, that enthusiasm would rub off on the REST of school. That worked for me. It didn't work for some other kids I knew, but you can't help EVERYONE.

Another thing that helped me was attending an Open school. By having grades 4-6 in the same educational environment, 4th graders reading at a 6th grade level have a full class where in traditional education it'd be the three people in the class of 25 who read at that level. The traditional education model, three kids out of 25 reading at grade+2, isolates the 'smart kids'; and one thing that anyone who lived through largish classes at that age can tell you, standing out is a BAD thing socially. The Open school model also allowed students who are reading at grade+2 to also have classes with students with math skills at the same grade level.

Which brings up another point, in traditional educational settings gifted and talented students all too often end up with the "teacher's pet" nickname. This also provides a disincentive to doing well, as it is yet another way kids isolate 'outsiders'. I've seen three ways of coping with this problem:

Hole up. Don't answer questions, and try to keep people from find out your test scores. Sometimes, this means purposely blowing parts of tests to keep from 'acing' them. If you don't stand out, they can't taunt you.
Armor up. Assume a facade of uncaring, or downright smugness at how well you're doing. You're doing better than everyone else, and that's THEIR problem, not YOURS.
Clique up. If there are other smart kids around, pack with them. It's a lot easier to defend against the forces of stupidity if you are in a group of your fellow smart kids.

Gifted and Talented classes provide a way to meet other kids who are as smart as you are. This helps reduce the isolation experienced by these students. In my case this was a big help.

I said earlier that Gifted and Talented is special ed for smart kids. This is quite distinct from Special Ed, note the capitals, which is designed to try and get greatly under performing kids to at least grade-level. G&T programs also are not funded by Special Ed levies, which puts them right next to languages, band, and theater on the budgetary chopping block come time to 'trim the fat'. The G&T program came before the School Board several times while I was in the program, and each time was saved from outright extinction. The school district I grew up in is now even more cash-strapped than it was when I went through, so I'm fairly certain that the G&T program is all but scrapped.

Gifted and Talented helped me a lot. In 3rd grade I was reading at grade level. By first term 4th grade I was still reading at 3rd grade level. By the end of 4th grade I was reading at a 5th grade level. I was reading (and writing, by what I've been told) at a 12th grade level by the time I hit High School in 9th grade.

In 2nd grade I had exactly one other kid in my class that I knew was about my level for smarts, and that wasn't enough incentive to try and keep up. In 3rd grade he transferred to another area and I was The Smart Kid and all that entailed. That was the year I was entered into the Gifted and Talented program. In 4th grade I moved to another area, a 4-6 once, and met the same kid I had in 2nd grade. He found a social group there that I was introduced to, many of whom were also G&T students or otherwise working ahead of grade-level. This, plus the G&T classes helped catapult me from the rut I was in.

Gifted and Talented programs are a valuable service. In this era of focusing so strongly on keeping students from falling off the bottom, we have forgotten that kids at the top fall off too. A sparkingly smart student who is a D- student because they are disengaged will get absolutely nothing from a 'remedial' class that helps those with learning disabilities. In fact, it may hurt them even more. This is a tragedy.