Morford on wealth and income - the $2 billion dollar home

Morford of the Chronicle, a master of colorful rhetoric, swings at a very fat pitch ...

You and your puny salary / You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs

... the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh Ambani, the fifth wealthiest man in the world....

... is the world's first billion-dollar personal residence. Actually, $2 billion. Imagine the fanciest, most ridiculously overpampered, seriously egomaniacal hotel you can possibly think of, and dip it in solid gold. Then sprinkle it with diamonds and Bugatti Veyrons and the fine, tender pelts of a million baby seals. That's the parking garage...

...It all makes delightful contrast to the recent, awkwardly titillating article in this very newspaper that revealed the annual salaries of various Bay Area workers, from the head of the University of California school system ($591K) to the San Francisco police chief ($250K) to all those surprisingly well-paid firefighters (well over $200K), on down to the guy who runs the city's pothole-filling crew (over $100K and absolutely worth every penny because oh my God, potholes), and on back up to one of the pitchers for the Giants, Barry Zito, who rakes in a cool $14 million per season because, well, he's a pro athlete. They're supposed to be caricatures of real humans...

It's a wonderful read, but there's more than entertainment, awe and envy here. We're at a curious point in the history of wealth -- even an infinite amount of money does not buy an enormously better life than an upper-middle class American has.

Power, yeah, sure, money buys power. I'd like some of that power, which I would of course use only for Good.

Other than power though ...

I don't want a yacht. I don't want a plane. I would like to drop twenty years, but money can't buy that. Yet.

Interesting times.

BBC's In Our Time - still available - for now!

[See a significant update below my post. The shows are still available, for now, on the primary IOT site.]

Increasingly, episodes of the BBC's wonderful series, In Our Time, are unavailable after the initial broadcast. Another candle against the Dark has popped off.

Instead of a (sigh) Real Audio link to the episode, the archives show:

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - In Our Time, The Dissolution of the Monasteries

Sorry, this episode is not available online.

One episode was recently unavailable by podcast as well, due to "copyright reasons". Otherwise the podcast distribution is continuing.

There's been no mention of this policy change in Melvyn Bragg's newsletters, and I can't find any discussion on the BBC website. A Guardian article from last December on the "iPlayer" implementation is the only clue I found to these changes. It may be that the BBC is allowing streaming distribution for UK net traffic, and disallowing it outside the UK. The Guardian article implies that streaming, like podcast distribution, may now be limited to 1 week after initial broadcast.

It seems that what the BBC giveth, the BBC taketh. I think they're making the same sad mistake as the American Academy of Family Practice. The meager revenues they may gain are vastly outweighed by the loss of goodwill, karma, and progress to a better world.

I hope the BBC changes course, at the very least they really ought to have given us more of an explanation. Perhaps they'll start offering episodes through iTunes and like for $1 a pop, DRMd of course. Alas, more likely they'll show up for Microsoft's Zune's alone. Either way, I won't be able to play them back from my car stereo's thumb drive.

I've never had much interest in P2P file sharing, but the pull of the Dark Side grows ever stronger. Damn you, DRM.

Update 4/9/08

Leigh Aspin, the Radio 4 website editor, kindly left a comment ...

I’m the editor of the Radio 4 website and I’m pleased to say that there has been no change of policy – we continue to archive every episode of In Our Time on the Radio 4 website.

The page you’re linking to is on the BBC Programmes BETA site, which doesn’t yet carry programmes beyond 7 days after transmission. In the meantime, please access past In Our Time programmes from http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_current.shtml

A rights issue meant that we couldn’t offer one episode via the podcast feed, as you point out. But we don’t envisage this being a regular occurrence.

Regards, Leigh

I am very happy to hear this news. I am a dedicated IOT fan of course, so the missing shows in the context of the BBC's iPlayer strategy had put me in a bleak mood. I'm particularly pleased to hear that the restricted podcast even is unlikely to be repeated.

Leigh doesn't actually tell us that this 7 day policy will go away once the beta site is live. For now the shows are streaming from the original site, but my recollection is there's much debate within the BBC about monetizing their intellectual property -- especially when it's distributed outside of the UK. The discussion is focusing on video properties, but it's easy for audio works to be caught up in the fight.

From a business perspective it seems perfectly reasonable for non-taxpayers to have limited access to BBC work. Reliable bandwidth and servers are not cheap, and IOT may have more foreign than UK listeners now. From a foreign policy perspective, of course, it would be a rotten move.

I'm hoping that lovers of civilization and Britain's foreign ministry will conspire to keep IOT available to a world audience indefinitely.

The strange ways corporations die: Sprint's Instinct campaign

Sprint is going to spend $100 million to promote their iPhone killer - the Samsung "Instinct".

Details at the link. Briefly, Sprint is doomed.

Makes me wonder if there's a common pattern to the death throes of a publicly traded corporation. Let's assume that most of the thinkers and ethical leaders bail out before the proverbial plane starts its final dive. What you have left then are a bunch of sharp operators, who've fought by tooth and claw to the pilot's seats with the parachutes

These survivors need to do something to do while they pack parachutes and loot the plane. A $100 million ad campaign is just the right distraction.

Somebody ought do a business school case study ...

World in transition: the unicode milestone

Google has graphed the growth of UTF-8 unicode on the web. This year Unicode use passed the extended ASCII used to cover the English language and some European languages. It's growing on a classic exponential curve, all the alternatives are in steep descent.

There are good reasons to use Unicode even with English, but that's not driving this transition. Unicode's growth reflects the use of Hindi, Chinese and other non-european languages on the net.

This graph is another milestone in the post-euro world.

Guantanamo

The survivors who made it out are writing their books.

A Prison of Shame, and It’s Ours - Nicholas Kristoff - New York Times

...When I started writing about Guantánamo several years ago, I thought the inmates might be lying and the Pentagon telling the truth. No doubt some inmates lie, and some surely are terrorists. But over time — and it’s painful to write this — I’ve found the inmates to be more credible than American officials...

One day people named Bush will consider changing their name.

McCain's hole in Sweden

I like Gail Collins.

Indiana Holiday - New York Times

This all started with John McCain, who proposed suspending the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day in order to give regular hard-working Americans “a little relief.” In terms of rational policy-making, this is a little bit like announcing that you want to reduce tensions in the Middle East by drilling an enormous hole in Sweden...

I'm increasingly thinking of McCain as a duller and more craven version of George Bush.

Update: McCain was born in 1936. He's almost 72 years old now. Between his "gas holiday", his "healthcare plan" (walk 30 minutes a day), his "pay for tax cuts by cutting waste", his Sunni/Shiite/Al Qaeda confusions and his forgetting his opposition to torture he's shown that he needs a full neuropsych evaluation as soon as possible.

Reagan was 69 when first elected, and was showing early signs of his dementia by the time he was 73 (the official Alzheimer's diagnosis was announced when he was 83).

We don't need another president with early dementia. McCain should be evaluated now.

Why did Apple open the iPhone to developers?

Did Apple always intend for the iPhone to be a development platform, or were they forced to change their mind?

A well regarded Piper Jaffray analyst thinks Apple was forced to change its mind ...

AppleInsider | Piper Jaffray addresses 15 more 'unanswered Apple questions' [Page 2]

What was the driver for the App Store on the iPhone for 3rd party applications?
The thriving iPhone hacking community adequately showed that there was significant demand for features the iPhone is capable of, but Apple is not offering. Games, instant messaging, and industry-specific applications are several examples of features that the iPhone does not currently offer in a native application setting. We believe Apple recognized that its user base was dissatisfied with the simplified Web 2.0 apps available on the iPhone's web browser; as a result, the company announced the availability of 3rd party applications in March along with the iPhone operating system 2.0, which is on track to arrive in late June.

I'd have phrased this differently. I'd have said that Apple realized that its initial closed plans were going to severely limit market growth, and expose the iPhone to a losing race with a future Google Android. Maybe Apple figured that even among its hard core base, there were people who weren't going to buy an eternally incomplete solution.

Heck, maybe Jobs read my August 2007 demands and, mistakenly assumed I represented a meaningful demographic.

The good news is that they made the SDK move, even if the application environment is oddly reminiscent of the PalmOS, and even though there's still no word of a synchronization API (an odd omission that few seem to have noticed).

Thanks to everyone who didn't buy the iPhone 1.0, especially those of my fellow geeks who complained bitterly and hacked away at iPhone 1.0.

I fully expect to buy iPhone 2.0 (after the official SDK release) -- even if I Apple withholds a synchronization solution. I wouldn't ever buy an iPhone had there not been an SDK, but I now believe that Apple's geek customers will eventually, with great effort and much gnashing of teeth, force a reluctant Apple to publish a synchronization API for the iPhone.

Why Joel Spolsky hates Microsoft Mesh -- and what this says about the peculiar course of software outsourcing

Spolasky thinks the Microsoft Live Mesh idea is dumb, that Microsoft is again trying to solve an insanely hard problem nobody cares about - synchronization. Ray Ozzie rewriting Notes/Agenda/Groove yet again and again. Spolsky makes a great analogy between Mesh and the nigh-incomprehensible Hailstorm.

Personally, I care a lot about synchronization and I believe it's a deeply hard problem. In addition to my personal PIM sync obsessions, synchronization technologies have a huge potential impact on healthcare interoperability. So I think Spolsky has a some good (albeit cruel) points about Architecture astronauts, but he's possibly undervaluing the synchronization problem.

On the other hand, his comments about Google and Microsoft's brain drain is really interesting ...

Architecture astronauts take over - Joel on Software

... Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

Whoa. Only a few years ago American software engineers were a doomed breed; all software design and invention would be outsourced. Now we read that starting salaries for novice, albeit very smart, CS grads are putting a crimp in Spolsky's business plans.

This fits with what I see in my corner of the industry. There's a new appreciation for the value of really smart people, and personnel costs are about to take an unexpected turn in the midst of a recession.

Outsourcing is taking a strange and unpredicted course.

Update 5/20/08: Microsoft Mesh sounds a lot like Microsoft FeedSync. Turns out FeedSync is an element of Mesh, which makes Mesh seem like a Microsoft marketing concept rather than a product concept. That's never happened before ... (joke)

Detecting weapons grade uranium: give up

Twice in the past 7 years, ABC news has smuggled depleted uranium, with a radioactivity signature comparable to highly enriched uranium (HEU), into the US. Despite packaging and address data designed to ensure maximal screening, the mild radioactivity was not detected.

HEU, like depleted uranium, is just not all that radioactive.

ABC received technical support from two scientists, one of whom was transiently assigned to a Homeland Security watch list as punishment for embarrassing the Bush administration. Last month the two published an article on the detection of smuggled HEU ...

Detecting Nuclear Smuggling: Scientific American

• Existing radiation portal monitors, as well as new advanced spectroscopic portal machines, cannot reliably detect weapons-grade uranium hidden inside shipping containers. They also set off far too many false alarms.
• So-called active detectors might perform better, but they are several years off and are very expensive.
• The U.S. should spend more resources rounding up nuclear smugglers, securing highly enriched uranium that is now scattered overseas, and blending down this material to low-enriched uranium, which cannot be fashioned into a bomb.

In addition to the above synopsis, the author's point out that it's fairly trivial with modern HEU to create a nuclear weapon. (The online version of the article includes a plaintive editor's note claiming all the information in the article is available from public sources.)

The NYT wrote about the detector program last March. The detectors are great at producing false alarms, it turns out that we live in fairly radioactive world*. Problem is, the best research tells us they're really lousy at finding minimally shielded weapons grade uranium.

It's reasonable to invest in better detectors, but the current generation are security theater with a high cost in false alarms. We should be focusing our efforts on restricting leakage of HEU from Russia and other sources. We won't get that kind of intelligent response from Bush or McCain, so all we can hope is that someone else wins the presidency.

On the other hand, I remain puzzled that five years after many experts agreed it was inevitable, we haven't seen nuclear terrorism in the US. It's not the detectors, and most reports indicate we're not doing enough to slow the HEU trade, so what's up?
--
* Good thing that current medical research suggests we're more radiation resistant than we thought we were. Our DNA repair systems do relatively well with radiation.

Sometimes a 2nd chance works - convicts in the army

People with a criminal record have a hard time finding work, but recently recruiting problems have created military opportunities.

The good news is a study of ex-felons finds many of them can succeed as soldiers ...

The Few, the Proud, the Bad - Intel Dump -

...The study looks at the performance of soldiers who entered the Army with waivers for prior criminal convictions, no high school diploma or other reasons. In a nutshell, these soldiers get into slightly more trouble, but assuming they make it through basic training and avoid major trouble, they're more likely to be better soldiers...

This is the proverbial silver lining in a pretty dark cloud.

The end of television - now it's official

I never caught the TV habit. When I was a child we were too poor to have a working television (really -- people gave us TVs but they kept breaking), and after that I was too busy. My wife and I watched Star Trek - Next Generation in its heyday and I think it was great stuff, so I'm not opposed to television -- it's just that I rarely have time for it.

If our children were calmed by TV I'd use it as a pacifier, but the commercials agitate them. So they watch Netflix videos, including TV episode DVDs, three times a week.

We're a weird family, so I assumed television was still popular among the normals. It came as a shock seven months ago when I realized how little television my children's classmates seemed to watch. Since then I've begun to pay attention to the slow and quiet collapse of broadcast TV in America. It reminds me of the disappearance of public smoking -- an unquestioned bit of boomer life suddenly impermanent.

Now the decline has become official, marked by a Clay Shirky book and essay that's receiving deserved attention:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

... And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto...

... So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years...

I think we missed how much of the boom years of the 80s and 90s came from freeing up cognitive resources consumed by the Cold War, and what it has meant to return to a military economy over the past decade. Shifts in cognitive resources, such as 1970s entry of women into the workforce, have big impacts.

I don't think ending television is going to have as big an effect on cognitive resource deployment as feminism or the end of the Cold War, but as a social phenomena it's well worth a notice.

Broadcast television is finally dying. That's news.

Update 5/15/08: A well written contrarian response to Shirky's cognitive surplus thesis.

How to save the New York Times - TimesCash voting

Murdoch, as expected, is remaking the Wall Street Journal in his own image. The old leadership has been evicted.

The New York Times is doing very badly in the market. The share price predicts a quick decline, the only thing saving the paper is a two tiered stock structure that splits control from equity. The NYT is next for the chopper.

Can it be saved?

If I had control, I'd introduce "TimesCash".

Here's how it would work.

Anyone can buy any amount of TimesCash at any time using their credit card, starting with a minimum block of $10. It's sold through Google Checkout, Amazon, or the NYT could process its own transactions.

Readers spend any amount of TimesCash they have on any story they like, but clicking on a button next to the story. Each day, the NYT would rank stories by TimesCash earnings, just as they do for "most emailed", "most blogged" and "most searched". Readers could decide if they want their names to be displayed alongside the stories they've voted for.

When a reader's TimesCash account is depleted, they can buy more whenever they want.

Once a year the names of the biggest TimesCash purchasers would be published -- for those who chose the publicity.

This would save the New York Times. I'll take $10 of TimesCash as my reward.

How are TV generals like tobacco industry executives?

Morford notices how much our once-respected military leaders came, under the Bush administration, to resemble tobacco industry executives ...

All the president's liars / Fun new game! Which TV news "military expert" is really a whore for the Bush administration? (Hint: all of them)

... Did you watch any CNN or Fox News or MSNBC, lo, these past five or six years, listen to the pundits and ponder the wise, informed comments of all the military experts the networks brought on to discuss Iraq policy,...

... a highly specialized group known to gullible Americans as stoic, stern-faced retired generals, colonels, majors, military advisers, former Pentagon officials, the ones you've heard and seen on TV news for years, but who are known to the Bush administration as a delightfully dishonest gaggle of preferred liars, lackeys, shills, puppets and mouthpieces for Dick Cheney and Donny Rumsfeld and Dubya himself...

...  Why would they do such a thing? ...

... That's easy: Access. Access to the White House, to the corridors of power and influence; access to the perks and the pals and snifters of brandy, the backroom handshakes, the business deals, the hugely lucrative military contracts, the sweet, sweet piles of cash and privilege and power awaiting them if they just toe the line and keep their real opinions to themselves...

...Reminds me, in a depressing sort of way, of that gaggle of Big Tobacco CEOs who banded together not long ago in a hilarious attempt to convince the nation — and the courts — that cigarettes aren't all that bad and there's little evidence smoking causes cancer or impotence or death, and in fact small children really love secondhand smoke and so do puppies and flowers and Jesus, and if you want to have fun sometime, walk into a hospital nursery and fire up a fresh Marlboro and blow that yummy smoke straight into the faces of the newborns. Watch them squirm with delight!...

I bet there's more here than great metaphor. I bet the same marketing companies that worked for the tobacco industry, and that had great relationships with their GOP allies, also advised the Pentagon on their propaganda plans.

The story was exposed by the New York Times. What the heck are we going to do when Murdoch et al acquire the New York Times?

The NYT needs to put Amazon and Google (not PayPal!) donation buttons on every article. We need that rag to keep running.

Edwards and Fallows agree - the press is bad. Why?

Fallows agrees with Elizabeth Edwards - the press is the problem.

James Fallows (April 28, 2008) - Most important item in Sunday's NYT

This Sunday's New York Times -- fat, varied, making me wonder how I got anything done on the weekends in America when I routinely had all this to read -- had lots of interesting stuff in it. But the most important item was the op-ed by Elizabeth Edwards called "Bowling 1, Health Care 0."..

...The more heartfelt and bitter complaint is about the way press coverage seems biased not against any particular candidate but against the entire process of politics, in the sense that politics includes the public effort to resolve difficult issues. (Medical care, climate change, banking crises, military priorities, etc.) For twenty years I have heard this from frustrated politicians -- Gary Hart, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, they may not share a lot of views but they are as one in this frustration. What galls all of them is the way that the incentives created by most coverage bring out the very worst in most politicians, and discourage them from even bothering to try the harder, more "responsible" path. No one says that press incentives turn potential Abraham Lincolns into real-world Tom DeLays. But the incentives push in that direction rather than the reverse.

Active politicians rarely dare say this in public, since they know the same reporters and commentators will be there to talk about them tomorrow and the next day and from then on. For reasons personal (health) and political (husband out of the race), Elizabeth Edwards no longer has to hold anything back...

Alas, neither Edwards nor Fallows asked the interesting questions.

Why is the print press* bad? Is it really getting worse?

My suspicion is that the Craisglist-Google driven decline in ad revenues is forcing newspapers to be ever more customer focused -- which means struggling to hold onto the eyeballs their advertisers want.

That means they give their readers what they want.

What does the portion of the public who's willing to read a newspaper want?

The bulk of the readership doesn't want to read about policy, they want to be distracted and entertained. So the newspapers provide them entertaining news about politicians, such as their hair styles, bowling scores, partners, pastors, etc.

Pogo said it long ago - We have met the enemy and he is us. The media is not the problem, the voters are the problem.

It's easy for Elizabeth Edwards and James Fallows to beat up on the press. Heck, they richly deserve a beating. It's a lot harder for them to admit the real problem is the American citizen.

Now that's a hard problem.

* I don't know anything about TV and radio news except NPR, so I'll omit them.

The surprising cost of fly intelligence ...

Science is most fun when it throws up completely bizarre surprises. Like these study results ...

Learning and longevity | Critical thinking | Economist.com

...After repeating the experiment for 30 generations, the offspring of the learned flies were compared with normal flies. The researchers report in a forthcoming edition of Evolution that although learning ability could be bred into a population of fruit flies, it shortened their lives by 15%. When the researchers compared their learned flies to colonies selectively bred to live long lives, they found even greater differences. Whereas learned flies had reduced life spans, the long-lived flies learned less well than even average flies.

The authors suggest that evolving an improved learning ability may require a greater investment in the nervous system which diverts resources away from processes that stave off ageing. However, Dr Kawecki thinks the effect could also be a by-product of greater brain activity increasing the production of reactive oxygen particles, which can increase oxidation in the body and damage health.

No one knows whether the phenomenon holds true for other animals. So biologists, at least, still have a lot to learn...

As far as we can tell, humans are the only technological species that ever lived on planet earth. (See, however, Stephen Baxter's Evolution for a wonderful imaging of a pre-technological sentience.)

We've come along fairly late in the planet's history.

Why did it take so long to produce an extinction-event class species [1]? What was there about intelligence that was so hard?

The flies might be giving us some clues ...

[1] Anyone studying the fossil records will see evidence of worldwide mass extinction beginning early in our evolutionary career. Species that can cause that kind of mass extinction are in a class of their own, albeit a short-lived class.