Saturday, January 24, 2009

Obama's Jan 24 radio address

You can stream Obama's first weekly address from the whitehouse.gov blog. It's also available as an iTunes podcast, though that's through ABC TV rather than the gov site.

Excerpts below, with my emphases. I've asked the site to start providing full feeds rather than excerpts -- please add your voice to that cause ...
The White House - President Obama delivers Your Weekly Address

... Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four...

... I have proposed an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to immediately jumpstart job creation as well as long-term economic growth...

.. It’s a plan that will save or create three to four million jobs over the next few years, and one that recognizes both the paradox and the promise of this moment - the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work even as, all around the country, there’s so much work to be done. That’s why this is not just a short-term program to boost employment..

... To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years. We’ll begin to build a new electricity grid ... weatherizing 2.5 million homes.

To lower health care cost, cut medical errors, and improve care, we’ll computerize the nation’s health record in five years, saving billions of dollars in health care costs and countless lives. And we’ll protect health insurance for more than 8 million Americans who are in danger of losing their coverage during this economic downturn.

To ensure our children can compete and succeed in this new economy, we’ll renovate and modernize 10,000 schools ... We’ll invest more in Pell Grants to make college affordable for seven million more students, provide a $2,500 college tax credit to four million students...

Finally, we will rebuild and retrofit America to meet the demands of the 21st century. That means repairing and modernizing thousands of miles of America’s roadways and providing new mass transit options for millions of Americans. It means protecting America by securing 90 major ports and creating a better communications network for local law enforcement and public safety officials in the event of an emergency. And it means expanding broadband access to millions of Americans, so business can compete on a level-playing field, wherever they’re located.

... Instead of politicians doling out money behind a veil of secrecy, decisions about where we invest will be made public, and informed by independent experts whenever possible. We’ll launch an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov...

I'll subscribe to the iTunes podcast. Recovery.gov isn't up yet, there's just a notice that it will be online after passage of the recovery act.

Since I make my living working on clinical computing software, I will abstain from comment on the economic and clinical merits of investing in the EHR. The rest of it sounds good to me.

The broadband investment is critical. Cheap broadband combined with the the $150 Netbook will be revolutionary.

Google: The Quick, the Sick, and the Dead

In the spirit of the Dapocalypse, and inspired by a recent Google Sites bug, I'm going divide the Google products I pay attention to into three groups: The Quick, The Sick, and the Dead.

This would not be a good time to start relying on items in the Sick list.

The Quick
  • Search and Scholar
  • Android
  • Google Reader
  • Gmail
  • Google Contacts (added 2/9/2009)
  • Google Video Chat
  • Google Mobile Sync (added 2/9/2009)
  • Blogger
  • Chrome
  • Picasa and Picasa Web Albums
  • Calendar
  • Maps
  • Earth
  • News
  • Browser toolbars
  • Translate
The Sick
  • Google Sites
  • Google Apps
  • GrandCentral
  • Gmail Tasks
  • Custom search engines
  • YouTube
  • Shopping
  • Google Groups
  • Google Checkout
  • Google Base
  • Orkut
  • Talk
  • Desktop
  • iGoogle
  • Knol
  • Mobile
  • Documents (Presentation is near death, Docs is sick, Spreadsheet is quick)
  • Google Health (added 6/09)
The Dead
  • Google Notebook*
  • Google Page Creator*
  • Google Browser Sync
  • Google Video
* Zombie, or walking dead

I'll revise the list over time, but I think most migration will be downwards.

How will we know the economy has recovered?

We will know the economy has truly recovered when it is possible to buy a good toaster.

What is the secret of a happy life?

What is the secret of the happy life?

Editing.

All the Bush conspiracy theories - up for re-examination

A terrific summary of Bush era "conspiracy theories" from Tom Tomorrow, one of our most cogent political analysts (emphases mine) ...
This Modern World - (Tom Tomorrow) “Of course…”

Olbermann’s guest, the NSA whistleblower, got me to thinking: what other things that we already pretty much understand to be true will be confirmed as fact in the weeks and months ahead? This is the list that I’ve come up with so far. (Spoiler alert: this feels like something that will probably turn into a cartoon in the next week or two, so if you prefer to be surprised there, you might want to skip this one.)

1. The aforementioned spying on journalists. Of course they were spying on journalists. And there was that oddly specific moment where Andrea Mitchell, in the course of interviewing New York Times reporter James Risen about his reporting on the NSA and government wiretapping, asked if he knew anything about the administration spying on Christiane Amanpour — a question the network promptly scrubbed from the transcription.

2. Of course Cheney was running everything, at least for the first term.

3. Of course they made backroom deals with their pals at Halliburton, Enron, etc.

4. Of course they were lying about Iraq from the start.

5. Of course torture was sanctioned at the highest levels.

6. Of course Valerie Plame was deliberately outed in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s op-ed debunking the yellowcake uranium story.

7. Of course male prostitute turned fake journalist Jeff Gannon was having an affair with someone in the White House.

8. Of course we came close to war with Iran.

9. Of course someone was feeding Bush answers during that presidential debate where you could clearly see a square shape under the back of his jacket — a camera angle that the administration had specifically demanded the network not use. And there’s the point where he interrupts his own answer to chastise someone no one else can see — of course he was wearing a wire.

10. I’m not sure if this one counts as an “of course,” but I’ve long suspected that Bush has some sort of neurological disorder which worsened over the course of the past eight years. If you go back and look at clips from his days as governor, it’s almost shocking how articulate and quick he seems. I mean, yes, we can all chuckle, ha ha those wacky malapropisms, in the way that you might have had a good natured chuckle about Ronald Reagan’s absent mindedness, until years later when you realize with dawning horror that the man with his finger on the button probably had early stage Alzheimers. Bush was inarticulate eight years ago but these days he can barely string a sentence together.

11. And maybe an overall generic entry: of course the truth will turn out to be much, much worse than we ever suspected...

… of course I go out and run a few errands, and am swamped with reader suggestions when I get back. Most of these came in repeatedly, including many suggestions that my “neurological disorder” theory might more easily be formulated as “of course George Bush was drinking again.”

– Of course Alberto Gonzales fired those attorneys for political reasons.

– Of course the White House emails were deliberately deleted.

– Of course more than two hundred thousand Iraqis were killed and more than a million displaced.

– Of course there were plans to suspend elections in the event of another terrorist attack.

– Of course Bush decided to invade Iraq in October, 2002.

– Of course the administration leaked important details of ongoing investigations by federal agencies before the completion of the investigation for purely politically expedient reasons, thus compromising the security of the cases, alerting accessories, and endangering Americans.

– Of course Whittington’s shooting involved a criminal coverup.

One of Cheney/Bush's more remarkable achievements was to revise the tinfoil hat standards. What was once absurd and silly became, for eight years, well worth consideration.

It will be quite interesting, 10 years from now, to review this list. I suspect about 80% it will be found to be correct, and none will be considered absurd. Given the surprising accuracy of the loony gas station tabloids over the past few years, I have wondered about their persistent claims that Bush was drinking again.

I've also wondered about the neurologic disorder.

As bad as we now think the Bush regime was, it's possible it was even worse.

Friday, January 23, 2009

What the iPhone needs is Gorilla Haven’s DateBk6

DateBk6 is ugly, eccentric, and complex.

I miss it terribly. The iPhone’s Calendar is pretty and swooshy, but, as a tool, it’s pretty pathetic. It’s one of the reasons I don’t sing the praises of the iPhone. (My lack of praise is probably fully responsible for weakening iPhone sales.)

Give me an ugly jackhammer like the PalmOS DateBk6 any day …

Pimlico Software - DateBk6

When was the last time that you missed buying a birthday present because there was no ADVANCE warning of an event? Or missed a task because your tasks were not integrated with your calendar? Or spent more than two taps inserting a commonly used event for which DateBk6 has a built-in template? Or needed to look at a week-at-a-glance with the TEXT listed of your appointments? Or wanted to use color on your Palm handheld to emphasize important events? Or wanted to keep your spouse's or co-worker's calendar on your palm - but visibly separate from your own? Or have DateBk6 time-zone aware so that alarms and events are properly keyed to the correct timezone? Or wanted to recover an event that you accidentally just deleted? Or link an event or ToDo to an address book entry and automatically log to it? Or put an alarm on a ToDo? Or handle events that span midnight? Or.....? DateBk6 handles all of these tasks and more. No wonder it is one of the most popular Palm programs ever written…

…Best of all, the proceeds from this product go towards wildlife conservation and the Dewar's Gorilla Haven project in the North Georgia Mountains

Of course nobody would seriously consider porting DateBk6 to the iPhone.

What a developer might do is to make a deal with Pimlico. Work with the engineer (singular I think) to reverse engineer DateBk6. Understand what it does and why it does it. Then build a true iPhone app with a similar set of ideas, but have it sync to Google Calendar and Contacts (maybe sync notes/tasks to Evernote).

Yeah, in theory Apple could produce a good solution and take this niche away but, really, there’s no sign they’ll ever do this. Waiting for Apple to open up their Calendar APIs is waiting for Godot.

So screw Apple.

I’d pay $100 if it worked.

Update 12/23/2010: It's not on the iPhone, but Pimlical for Android has been released.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

We now have Krugman’s human sacrifices

Actually, it was Paul’s wife who called for a “human” sacrifice of bankers, and my wife who seconded the motion.

In any case, we now have the winning candidates …

TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo |

The Financial Times reports … today that in early December, Merrill, which months earlier had agreed to be bought -- rescued, really -- by Bank of America, decided to pay out $3-4 billions in bonuses.

The bonuses were handed out on an accelerated schedule -- at least a month earlier than in previous years. And they ere agreed to just days before Bank of America, realizing how much in toxic assets Merrill had on its books, went to the federal government asking for more taxpayer money to help it digest Merrill -- money that was eventually forthcoming…

Let the ceremony begin …

Colin Powell – the path to reform?

Powell squandered his honor serving Bush and Cheney. He may have been betrayed.

We knew he’d become an Obama supporter, but reading his quotes it’s clear he’s not just a voter, he’s a fan (emphasis mine) …

Colin Powell: The America We Remember Is Back Again - Political Hotsheet

.. "I am surprised," Powell said. "I am deeply pleased it happened in my lifetime…

.. As an African-American who was once touted as a presidential candidate, Powell offered his perspective on the Mr. Obama's historic election.

"We have a man who happens to be an African-American, but beyond that, he is a qualified, capable, transformational figure – that's why we elected him," Powell said. "The fact he is African-American says so much about who we are as a people, as a country. It has energized the country and energized the world. Parades the night of the election, not only in Chicago and New York, but in Rio, in Berlin, in Obama, Japan -- there is such a place. They're building a statue in it for him already. The world wondered, can America really do this? Aren't they too divided? Can they really pull something like this off? And we said to the world, yes, we can, and we did."

Regarding the ongoing wars that President Obama will inherit, Powell offered his view on how to proceed, "...in terms of Iraq, we can continue the draw-down a pretty steady pace, and the Iraqis get our help, but Afghanistan, a still more difficult task. Still a tribal society, still a very poor country. The government is not functioning as well as we want it to, and you have the drug problem, which I think can destroy any country if it is not brought under control. So additional troops will help, but we need more than just additional troops. We need to do something about the Pakistan side and the government needs to start functioning. It is a political and economic challenge."

It's not unlikely that President Obama will call upon Colin Powell for service in the new era of responsibility.

Powell may yet undo some of the harm he contributed to. If he’s really willing to help, I’d forgive.

Obama – leading us out of the darkness and the torture chamber

I lived 8 years under the rule of Cheney and Bush Jr. The darkness began to lift when the Dems took the Senate, but now I’m blinking into a rising sun.

I’m mostly stunned (emphases mine) …

Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' | World news | The Guardian

Barack Obama embarked on the wholesale deconstruction of George Bush's war on terror, shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition, and calling for a new set of rules for detainees. The repudiation of Bush's thinking on national security yesterday also saw the appointment of a high-powered envoy to the Middle East.

Obama's decision to permanently shut down the CIA's clandestine interrogation centres went far beyond the widely anticipated move to wind down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year.

He cast his scrapping of the legal apparatus set up by Bush as a way for America to reclaim the moral high ground in the fight against al-Qaida.

"We are not, as I said during the inauguration, going to continue with the false choice between our safety and our ideals," Obama said at the signing ceremony. "We intend to win this fight. We are going to win it on our own terms."

In a sign of the sweeping rejection of the legal standards set by Bush, officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday said the new administration would not be guided by any of the opinions on torture and detainees issued by the justice department after 11 September 2001.

Instead, Obama, in three executive orders, renewed the US commitment to the Geneva convention on the treatment of detainees. All detainees will be registered by the International Committee for the Red Cross, in another departure of past practice under the Bush administration.

… Another order directs the CIA to follow the US army field manual on interrogations, which bars such techniques as waterboarding…

… Obama followed up the burst of activity on detention policy by announcing that his administration would put resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the top of his agenda, "actively and aggressively" seeking a comprehensive peace deal. As a sign of that intent, he confirmed that former senator George Mitchell, a veteran US mediator, would be his Middle East envoy…

In contrast to this great post from The Guardian, Minnesota Public Radio spent most of today butchering a confused story about the restoration of US funding for international family planning. Maybe they’re even more stunned than I am.

This is a good day. All of our traditional investments have been devastated, but our investments in Obama’s election have already paid off.

Now that Obama has done his part, our task is to support the creation of an American Truth Commission and international efforts to prosecute Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Bush.

PS. In honor of President Obama, after more than five years of posting, I’ve added the tag called “government” – now that we have one worthy of the name.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

The new Whitehouse.gov -- now with a blog

As of this moment Google Reader was unable to parse the feed [1], but via Daring Fireball we now know of the White House blog …

EOP - Blog Post - Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov

Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov.

I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.

… Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:

Communication --
Americans are eager for information about the state of the economy, national security and a host of other issues. This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated…

Transparency – .. The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.

Participation –
…we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

We'd also like to hear from you -- what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know

[1] The blog feed is -  http://www.whitehouse.gov/feed/blog.aspx. I think they’re using their own platform. It doesn’t format as expected in WLW, so I think there are more problems than non-compliant feed announcement.

PC Chaos – the rise of the $150 Netbook

On the one hand, the rise of the Chinese batteries-not-included netbook.

On the other, the Great Recession and the threat of GD II.

The tech industry is being slammed, and Apple is not going to escape.

Emphases mine (note both Lenovo (mainland) and Acer (Taiwan) are Chinese corporations) …

Chaos Reigns in the PC Industry - NYTimes.com

… The major PC component suppliers –- companies like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, Seagate and Western Digital –- are reeling as hardware sales dry up. The credit crunch took its toll on business spending, then American corporations shut down in December in a bid to save money and now companies in China have halted their spending as the Chinese New Year approaches...

… In the fourth quarter of 2007, Acer held 9.5 percent of the PC market, while Lenovo held 7.5 per cent. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Acer boosted its stake of the PC market to 12.3 percent, while Lenovo dropped to 7.1 percent. Acer’s market share is now just 0.9 percentage points behind Dell, according to Gartner.

The rise of netbooks, a type of cheap, ultra-compact laptop, has helped spur Acer’s growth. Acer and its fellow Taiwanese PC manufacturer Asustek Computer have led the netbook market, while slower-to-act rivals waited to figure out if the products would enjoy wide interest.

In its fourth quarter, Intel reported a 50 percent surge in the sales of its [jf. low margin] Atom products, which go into netbooks, hitting $300 million in revenue…

.. The PC makers tried the light, compact laptop idea before with so-called ultra-mobile PCs. But it took better broadband connections, more online services and much cheaper PCs to really make the idea take off. Now the PC market may never be the same.

Broadband providers around the globe are expected to start giving away netbooks in exchange for commitments to wireless network services, Mr. Richard said…

PC makers sowed the winds with 27 years of prices suspended in mid-air. Now comes the hurricane. Microsoft is going to be hurt very badly, and Google’s chromestellation strategy could be a big winner.

Alas, there’s not much money in this for any PC hardware vendor – not even Acer. Only for those that sell components to Google.

I think this is why Apple showed nothing at MacWorld. Apple had a netbook years ago, they’ve got a netbook-in-waiting now. It’s time to see if they intend to play.

Update 1/22/09: As expected. Microsoft is not stupid, though Gates would have been more brutal. His great strength was an eagerness to shoot the lamed horse - past love be damned.

Nonbelievers. Now that's change.

Obama included "nonbelievers" in his list of "good peoples".

That's change.

He didn't pull a lot of punches. His audience didn't entirely love the bit about embracing science and technology effectively. He outlined what he's going to do pretty darned clearly.

I believe. Change is here.

Update: DeLong makes a plausible claim that we may now have the most capable reason-based government since ... well, at least 100 years. Maybe longer. I need to add the "enlightenment 2.0" tag to this post.

iMacs are expensive

We'd like to reorg our home office. That means I need at least the same computing capability in half the space.

The best way to do that is to ditch my 5 yo big-old XP box and monitor, and replace it with a 24" iMac that will run Fusion/XP and OS X, using the monitor as a 2nd display. (The 20" model has a joke-quality LCD that Apple should be flogged for selling.)

Problem is, that will cost me about $2,400 with appropriate RAM.

Or I could get a Mac Mini and forgo the 2nd display. There the price is quite good, but the memory capacity and processor speed are currently on the low side -- and rumor is that the next generation will sacrifice CPU to make the Mini smaller and cooler. Of course Apple will also drop the firewire connection, so performance will take another big hit.

I'd buy a more powerful Mac Mini that would sell for, say $800 base and $1000 or so with 4GB. I'd attach an external firewire hard drive and/or a NAS.

It's not that the iMac is all that more expensive than a similar Vista box, it's that Apple doesn't offer the package I want. This isn't the time to be buying a $2,400 computer that we don't desperately need ...

Update 1/27/09: I originally titled this "Macs are expensive". On reflection though, it's more true that the iMacs are expensive. The newly renovated plastic "low end" MacBook is suddenly quite a bargain.

True, it's very hard to find on Apple's site, but there is a page. An adequate CPU, firewire, big drive, NVIDIA graphics, external monitor, 4GB RAM capacity, did I mention firewire ... The general MacBook tech spec page claims it outputs up to 2560x1600 external video -- sufficient to drive some 30" monitors ...

Update 3/3/09: Not any more! Evidently Apple agreed with me. A price drop from $2,400 to $1,500 is damned aggressive.

Performance-based compensation and novel financial instruments: an explosive combination

Econbrowser draws a connection between known problems with performance-based compensation, given to CEOs to “align” their interests with those of shareholders, lack of regulatory oversight, and financial innovation (emphases mine) …

Econbrowser: Executive compensation

… That the incentives for CEOs need not necessarily coincide with those of the shareholders is a well understood phenomenon that is a special case of what economists call the principal-agent problem. This arises in situations when an agent (in this case, the CEO) has better information about what is going on than the principals (in this case, the shareholders) who rely on the agent to perform a certain task. One way to try to cope with these problems of asymmetric information is to tie the agent's compensation directly to performance.

What caused that principle to go so badly awry in the present instance? I believe there was an unfortunate interaction between financial innovations and lack of regulatory oversight, which allowed the construction of new financial instruments with essentially any risk-reward profile desired and the ability to leverage one's way into an arbitrarily large position in such an instrument. The underlying instrument of choice was a security with a high probability of doing slightly better than the market and a small probability of a big loss. For example, a subprime loan extended in 2005 would earn the lender a higher yield in the event that house prices continued to rise, but perform quite badly when the housing market turned down. By taking a leveraged position in such assets, the slightly higher yield became an enormously higher yield, and while the game was on, the short-term performance looked wonderful. If the agent is compensated on the basis of current performance alone, and the principal lacks good information on the exact nature of the risks, the result is a tragically toxic incentive structure…

In point form then the contributing factors were:

  1. the well known principal-agent problem
  2. poorly designed performance based compensation (an attempt to mitigate the principal-agent problem, but the time scales are not aligned)
  3. leverage without regulatory oversight
  4. novel financial instruments with a no more than average* (probably below average when expenses are incorporated) expected value but a skewed probability distribution – so there was a high probability of slightly above average returns and a low probability of catastrophic failure

It’s a persuasive argument, consistent with Lewis and Einhorn on repairing the financial world, Lewis (again) reporting on the “end of Wall Street” and Henry Blodget writing for the Atlantic – Why Wall Street Always Blows It.

My take away lessons are:

  1. We need to be very careful with performance based compensation. The problem isn’t that it’s not an effective incentive, the problem is that it’s too effective an incentive. The physician “pay for performance” crowd should pay attention to this, but they won’t.
  2. We need regulatory oversight. Yeah, we knew that.
  3. Novel financial instruments, whether they provide new ways to skew probability (2008), or new forms of leverage (1929), need to set off red flashing lights and screaming alarms in the Treasury, Congress, the White House and the Federal Reserve. Our government and regulatory agencies need to be doing continuous “war gaming” about how new technologies will transform finance, and constantly about how to avert future catastrophic scenarios.

See also:

  1. Jumping the canyon of Great Depression II
  2. Stimulus and the scale of under-utilized global productive output
  3. Lewis and Einhorn: repairing the financial world
  4. The role of the deadbeats
  5. Complexity collapse
  6. Disintermediating Wall Street
  7. The future of the publicly traded company
  8. Marked!
  9. Mass disability and income skew
  10. The occult inflation of shrinking quality
  11. You get what you pay for. The tragedy of the incentive plan.

* In this sense “average” refers not to the averaging over the lifespan of the instrument, but rather all the probable outcomes – an expected value calculation really.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Obama falls for the Jena meme

Not Obama's best speech line ...
Obama Addresses Homophobia, Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia Among Black Americans | The New York Observer

... We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others...
Except the Jena story wasn't that simple. Wikipedia provides excruciating detail.

The speech would have been better without that line ...