Bogonomicon

The passion of the Deaniacs

2004-02-12T12:35:00.000-06:00

You know, in a way I'm glad Arianna lost her bid for Governor of California. Not that I think that she wouldn't make a better governor than the Groppenfeurer, she would have, it's that she has now returned to writting for Salon. Given a choice between Terminator 4 and Arianna on Salon, I'll lose T4.

Because she's one of the few people (along with Paul Krugman) who routinely hits the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned. And today's submission is another example of this. Her point is that the Kerry campaign needs to woo the Dean contingent, otherwise we will decamp. The problem is that I don't see it happen. Kerry isn't winning this election because of the grassroots, he's winning it despite the grassroots. The Democratic Brahimns, of which Kerry is one, view us Nader/Dean supporters not as disenchanted or disaffected, but as disloyal. The Democrats are entitled to our votes and unstinting, unquestioning, support.

The reason why the progressive wing of the party more or less uniformily went gaga over Dean is that he actually wooed us. Arguably to the point of hurting his campaign- I would argue, however, that to the current corporatist media, any wooing of the progressives is enough to hurt a campaign. Fortunately, this isn't a mistake the Kerry campaign is likely to make.

If Kerry loses in November, it'll be blamed on the disloyalty of the Dean supporters- causing a disruptive primary season that unnecessarily hurt the pre-selected candidate, and not supporting him after our candidate was defeated. Mark my words. What we actually do here and now is irrelevent, it'll be all of our fault anyways. It happened after 2000 (unlike the media, my long-term memory works just fine, thank you very much). If 2000 taught the Democrats anything, it's that progressives make good scapegoats.

Unfortunately, a Kerry win in '04 makes things even worse for the progressives. Reagan's win in 1980 was set up because of Ford's loss in '76. What would have happened if Ford hadn't lost in '76? A Kerry win will be touted that the media- and the Democratic voters- were right, that Dean was unelectable and that Kerry was. Of course, if Kerry loses, it'll be claimed that Dean would have lost even worse. It's just that the argument in this case is much weaker. Post hoc ergo propter hoc ("it happened after, therefor it was caused by").

The question of wether the country can afford another 4 years of Bush is not the question, I'd argue. Because it's currently not if we're going to have another four years of coporatist/conservtive christian rule, it's when- wether that particular alliance will regain power in '04, '08, or '12. Kerry representings nothing more than a time out. Unless we change something fundamental, we are going to have another four years of Bush, sooner or later.

What is the real deficit?

2004-02-10T15:09:00.000-06:00

If there is one thing that is consistant about the Bush administration, it's that their numbers never add up. But Bush never was a numbers person, he was more on an idea rat.

Which leads me to this news that the current $7.4 trillion dollar debt limit will have to be raised again come mid-summer. Remember that we hit $7 trillion just last December. This tells me the real deficit- the amount of money the goverment is having to borrow- is higher than even the astronomical $500 billion that's being reported- at least $600 billion, if not $800 billion.

This is rather like when we were being told that Iraq was costing us $4 billion a month- and yet we somehow managed to blow through $64 billion in only 6 months.

Kick me again- I might start to like it

2004-02-10T14:09:00.000-06:00

It's been several days, so I'm finally cooled down enough to discuss this article in polite company.

I generally consider myself a generous friend. I have had, howver, people take advantage of my generosity. When this happens, I start saying "no". Some wake up and stop taking my generosity for granted. Others haven't forgiven me for "failing" them. But, in my experience, saying "no" is the only way to stop people from taking advantage of you.

As a liberal, I've been doing the Democratic party the favor of voting for them fairly consistantly. Consistantly enough that the Democratic party has started taking our votes for granted. The Democrats court "swing" voters- those who regularly tell the Democrats "no"- with great alacrity. Every election is full of talk of how the Democrats are going to woo the soccer moms or NASCAR dads. Liberals are expected to show up, vote the way we're told to, and not complain when the party does absolutely nothing to reciprocate. Can't we see how fundamentally important it is for the party to pander entirely to the swing voters?

Consider this: Nader voters are routinely blamed for putting Bush into power. But what about the people who voted for Bush? Heavens no- we can't blame them. Then they might not vote for us next time. But the liberals have an obligation to vote for Democrats no matter what the Democrats do.

This is even more pathetic when you consider how effective the Democrats have been at wooing the swing voters.

Well, Democrats, this is your 2004 wake up call. You've hit the snooze button at least twice so far- in 2000 and 2002. But I hate being taken advantage of. It stops now. Get used to the word "no" because you're going to be hearing it a lot from me.

And I refuse to accept any blame or guilt for what Bush has or may do. I didn't vote for the moron, nor am I going to- wether I vote for Kerry or no. Blame for the Bush presidency should lie squarely on the shoulders of the people who voted for him- where it belongs. If the Democrats want me to vote for them again, they can woo me, just like they woo swing voters.

They know where to find me. I'll be over here on the left.

Disney leagues with MS against democracy

2004-02-10T12:23:00.000-06:00

Disney has signed on to Microsoft's DRM initiative, along with Time-Warner-AOL-We're-Beatrice. Disney wants to make sure no one can pirate it's content, like it pirated the content of Hans Christian Anderson, the Brothers Grim, and (it appears) Pixar. They don't want anyone else to be able to steal a swag the way they stole theirs.

I agree that I don't have the right to distribute someone else's copyrighted material against their wishes- I'm not one of those "information wants to be free" radicals. I'm even willing to admit it's open to debate wether I have the right to space- and time-shift copyrighted materials I have legitimate license to. But I still have two fundamental, basic problems with DRM.

The first is do I have the right to produce- and distribute under terms of my choosing- original work of my own? Me, Brian Hurt, a person who doesn't have a huge law department and several elected officials in my pocket. If you say yes, then there is no technical way to prevent piracy. If you say no, then freedom of speech has gone the way of the dodo, and democracy is following closely behind. Unfortunately, the media conglomerates have painted themselves into the corner of demanding that the mere possibility of piracy needs to be eliminated. Which is obvious- they sole value-add is distribution (especially the music industry). The internet is nothing if not an efficient distribution mechanism. And while the future may be good for artists and writers as a whole, it sucks if your sole purpose for existance just went away. I'm just not willing to sacrifice democracy on the alter of protecting the buggy whip manufacturers.

The second problem is the persistance of culture. All means of inscribing information degrades- what the computer programmers call "bit rot" is a fundamental function of entropy. Even words carved into stone slowly abrade away. Most of our current forms of distributing information have a life expectancy of at most decades. The earliest CDs are already degrading into unplayability. Content only survives the millenia if it is copied. The works of Plato, Aristotle, etc. only survive to this date only because they were copied.

If we eliminate the ability/right to copy our current works, we run the risk of waking up one day to discover we've lost whole eras of our culture. It will make the burning of the library of Alexandria look like a small mistake in comparison. Unlike Alexandria, it won't happen overnight. Certain titles, certain works, will simply become more and more rare. The death of the last dodo wasn't marked at the time- it was just a while later that someone looked around and said "hey, wait a minute- what happened to all the dodos?"

Speaking of Disney classics- is it still possible to get a legal copy of "Song of the South"? Is it comming out on DVD?

Unfortunately, this debate is not going on- the decisions are simply being handed down the way the big corporations, who don't care a whit about democracy or preserving culture, but instead care only about profits, want.

Nothing so powerfull...

2004-02-07T12:19:00.000-06:00

There is nothing so powerfull as a bad idea whose time has come. Teaching computer science via x86 assembly language has to be one of the worst idea's I've ever come across.

First, let me mention the difference between correlation and causation. Is it that some of us are great programmers because we know assembly language, or do we know assembly language because we are great programmers? I'd actually argue there is a causal relationship between the two- but not in the direction this author is assuming. The great programmers know assembly language because they are great programmers, they are not great programmers because they know assembly language. The great programmers are, to a great degree, dedicated to our craft, and keep learning. We never say "OK, I now know everything I need to know"- we're constantly pushing the limits and learning new things. Sooner or later we get around to assembly language. As evidence of this, I point to the large number of mediocre and even piss-poor programmers back in the day when assembly language was the only choice.

Second, large chunks of computer science are not bound to any specific language. Sorting a list is the classic example of CS knowledge that transcends time and language. Especially the early education should be focused on these extralingual essentials, and not on the epiphenomena of a given language or architecture. My first real programming language (I don't count Basic) was Pascal- a language I have had 0 use for in my professional career. But it taught me huge amounts of how to program. I would argue that the first language you should learn should be a specialized teaching language. You don't learn to fly in a 747, and you don't learn to drive in an 18-wheeled truck- you learn to fly in a Piper Cub or equivelent, and learn to drive in an Escort or equivelent. Despite the fact that 747s and 18-wheeled trucks are what the professionals fly/drive. Same with programming.

I'd like to take this moment to point out the TeachScheme! project. The lessons of learned by the TeachScheme project are very relevent to this debate- especially with their comparisons of teaching Scheme compared to teaching Java or (a subset of) C++. One of the problems they experienced was just getting students over the hurdle of the syntax. And Java's syntax at least I consider regular and easy to predict (as I mentioned earlier, I don't consider C++ consistantly parsable even in theory). This may sound like heresy comming from me, but Scheme is a better first language than Ocaml. Of all the assembly languages to pick, they picked the x86- a more irregular assembly language I don't know of. 68K would be way better, as would PPC . Or, better yet, not teaching assembly language at all until much later in the course.

I've commented multiple times that the computer programming industry seems to have gotten stuck circa 1968. I'd like to see us move forward at least into the 1980's. But the alternative- moving backwards into the 1950's, is also possible.

No one here but us chickens

2004-02-07T11:42:00.000-06:00

From this article:

A TOP MICROSOFT lawyer has been appointed as chair of a committee which will monitor the behaviour of US courts judging antitrust settlements.

How on earth do you make fun of something like this?

10 new pipeline stages in Prescott?!?

2004-02-03T14:31:00.000-06:00

According to Ace's hardware, the new Prescott core has 10 more stages post-decode, for a total of 31. Add in the 8 stages to decode the instructions, and you have a total of 39 pipeline stages. By comparison, the Athlon XP has 15 (5 for decode), the Opteron has 17 (5 for decode).

It's obvious that Intel is going for sheer clockrate scaling, and damn the performance.

North Korea isn't how you think it is

2004-02-02T16:37:00.000-06:00

Just added the Island of Balta onto our links list, as this is the third article from there I've posted today. I have programming, he has football- no one's perfect.

The article in question is this op-ed peice, by someone who has actually negotiated with North Korea.

What we need to do with NK- and Cuba, as well- is to stop making them more paranoid and get them engaged in the world. This is, curiously enough, why I'm in favor of MFN status with China. The last thing we need is China going isolationists on us. Once the country is engaged, we can build a middle class with economic and political power and encourage liberalization. It worked with the Soviet Union, and it is working with China. But there are two problems with this. First off, it doesn't admit to a solution in a short time frame. We'll be decades chivying these countries slowly towards democracy. And second, it's boring to watch. We sit and talk and talk and talk and talk and nothing ever happens. War is, at least, exciting. Especially for those who don't have to fight it, and can just sit back and watch it on TV.

But a war with NK would be bleeding expensive. Too many countries and manufacturing regions important to our economy are within easy striking distance. For example, it's basically impossible to buy a computer these days without some part or another being made in either China, Taiwan or South Korea. All of whom would be in the "fallout" zone of a war with NK.

Civil War, here we come

2004-02-02T16:16:00.000-06:00

Two terrortist attacks on the Kurdish political leadership have left possibly as many as 200 dead.

We're ahead of schedule for Iraq degenerating into civil war. That wasn't supposed to happen until August at the earliests, hopefully even Novemeber.

I want off this rock

2004-02-02T16:13:00.000-06:00

From this article:

The Kansas Court of Appeals for a second time upheld the 17-year prison sentence of a youth who, at age 18, engaged in oral sex with a 14-year-old boy. For the same crime, if it had involved an act between an 18-year-old male and a 14-year-old girl, the sentence would have been 13 to 15 months.

This is the shining beacon of freedom and justice in the world?

The forgotten consequences of Columbine

2004-02-02T12:31:00.000-06:00

Today's Salon lead is today's required reading, about how the new Zero Tolerence policies at school are destroying kid's lives.

As unpleasant as my grade school experiences were (hint: shit I suffered on a daily basis the first 18 years of my life would result in my filing criminal charges today), I have to say I'm lucky I went to school when I did. I would have been one of those children who were expelled at the least, if not arrested. This is assuming that I wasn't taken away from my parents for "abuse". I was always turning up with poorly explained cuts and bruises- most of which were my own damned fault, and the vague unlikely explanations were a combination of "it made sense at the time" and leaving many details out so I wouldn't be punished for doing things I shouldn't have been doing.

The problem is that this is only one data point. Also relevent are the increasing popularity of three strike laws- which mean that there are now people spending life in prison for stealing a peice of pizza. And the popularity of mandatory sentencing guidelines for all sorts of violations- zero tolerance for adults. The increasing popularity of the death penalty. The increasing beleif that "once a perp, always a perp". We as a society are losing our ability to forgive.

There are a lot of reasons behind this increasing draconian behavior in our society. Part of it is political lobbying by the incarceration industry- there are companies who are hired to own and run prisons, who get paid per prisoner per year. Of course they'd like more "customers". Another problem is the emotional logic of 1+1=0, that 1 crime + 1 crime = 0 crimes, that if you've been hurt, that somehow if you just cause enough pain to someone else, your pain will be lifted. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

But a large part of it is that we're moving to a two-law society. There is one law for the privileged, and another law for everyone else. That's where the word "privilege" comes from- the latin for "private law" (privi from the same root-word as private, lege from the same root word as legislation). It is demonstratably true that if you are of the right clan, you can get caught smuggling crack cocaine into drug rehab and only get 10 days in jail. Anyone else would get tens of years.

Our current situation reminds me of that of pre-revolutionary France, where the Marquis deSade (where are our word "sadism" comes from) could rape and torture to his heart's content with little or no punishment, because he was the cousin of the King (rather like Noelle). Meanwhile, the historical antecedents to Jean val Jean from Les Miserables really were spending 25 to life for stealing a loaf of bread.

Now think long and hard about where this lead ~200 years ago. Injustice always breeds violence. As it looks likely we will learn yet again.

The truth comes out

2004-02-02T10:39:00.000-06:00

I've developed a theory. The basic idea of it is that whenever Republicans accuse Democrats of something, they're usually guilty of it themselves. I first developed this theory at the height of the Clinton impeachment circus, when it was exposed what sordid love lives the Republicans who were most voracious in attacking the President had. There are a number of reasons for this- guilt transference, clouding the waters for when the crimes of Republicans will be exposed, and simply already thinking along those lines. The application of this theory to the Republicans who accuse liberals of committing treason and being anti-American is left as an exercise for the reader.

But the specific crime I want to inspect is the decades-old charge that Democrats use the welfare system to reward Democratic voters. The theory here is that Democrats support welfare, and that the people on Welfare would then vote Democrats back into power. Sprinle that statement with proper racist code words and you have a pretty standard Republican stump speech. For bonus points, throw in references to honest, hard-working (white) people taking their goverment back from the shift, lazy, (black) freeloading Democrats.

So, what would my theory say about this? That it is the Republicans who are rewarding their voters with federal support. And guess what we find- this article, talking about giver and taker states. Giver states are those states which pay more in Federal taxes than they get in Federal aid. Taker states are those states which receive more in Federal aid than they pay in Federal taxes. What's (perhaps) unexpected is that giver states tend heavily towards being Democratic, while takers tend heavily towards being Republican.

Now, to be fair, I don't think the entire disparity is due to the contrivance of the Republicans. The liberal states also tend to be rich (comparitively) economically- states like California and New York. And, yes, Minnesota. The rich should pay to help the poor. I would also argue that the wealth of the giver states comes, in large part, from being fundamentally liberal. Take one example- state funding of higher education (UC Berkley/Stanford in California, MIT/BU in Boston, UMN in Minneapolis) is what lead directly to the tech businesses locating in those places. People came to attend college, and then stayed to work. The rewards of being liberal occur years, often decades, later, and dispersed throughout the entire economy, but they do happen. And that many of us do see that the money we currently spend to help the taker states comes back to us, just like the money we spent on our own state has come back to us.

I just sometime wish we'd also follow the other golden rule- you know, he who has the gold, makes the rules.

The so-called liberal media

2004-02-01T12:48:00.000-06:00

Arnie- smart enough to realize he's a creation of the media, dumb enough to say it out loud. As the guy who told his third grade teacher that she was using that phsycology stuff on me, and further more wasn't doing it right amd proceeded to critique her style (proving I was very intelligent, but not real bright), I have a certain amount of sympathy.

Note, when you read that article, that there is no introspection as to why Arnie would think something as blatantly silly as that the press corp is his personal team of publicists. Except maybe that he's just not from around here.

To every who thinks Kerry is more electable than Dean

2004-02-01T12:22:00.000-06:00

Read this op-ed peice in the LA Times.

A quote:

Those minor problems paled, however, next to Kerry's positions on Iraq. To his credit, he was one of the Democrats who voted Oct. 11, 2002, for the resolution giving President Bush the authority "to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" in Iraq. This has caused Kerry a lot of grief among Deaniac Democrats, and he's twisted himself into a pretzel to explain away this vote.

What, you thought that the Karl Rove clique would say to themselves "Oh drat- they're nominating Kerry. Guess we'll have to play nice"?

A change in the reasons

2004-02-01T11:39:00.000-06:00

Every once in a while I like to rant on daily Kos- it's free advertising for this site. Today is one of those days- go read the article here.

As a bogo exclusive, I'm working on a long rant on Malthus. The problem is that's one of the core rants that touches dozens of other topics, each of which are rant-worthy in an of themselves. Patience- more is comming.

Sorry for not posting more

2004-01-30T01:41:00.000-06:00

I've been in coder monkey mode for the last couple of days. But good news- the bit blit routine works! Getting all the corner cases correct is most definately NP-annoying. Now if I can just get the assembler version working...

While I'm muttering, I wonder- how many people are actually reading this Blog regularly at this point? Hit the comment link below and say hello.

New reasons why C++ sucks

2004-01-27T23:15:00.000-06:00

I've just discovered that if my browser (Mozilla) crashes after I post a message, but before I publish it, when I restart my browser and come back, I can't publish my unpublished articles until I write a new one.

My browser only crashes because it is written in C++, and is therefor prone to memory leaks and wild pointers and corrupted memory. And, after running so long, or hitting the wrong web page, or opening too many copies of itself, or on days that end in Y, it has a bad habit of crashing without warning. So I decided to write an article about how C++ sucks. That way I'll at least be able to publish my articles.

First of all, all the arguments about how you can add garbage collection to C++ don't work in practice. Yes, you can add the Boehm-Demers-Weiser Garbage Collector, unless of course you're linking in a library that already overrides ::new(). Like, say, QT. Garbage collection should be designed in. Take a gander at that page, especially the advantages and disadvantages of Garbage Collecting C and C++ programs, and this paper. Oh, and while you're at it, this paper and this paper and this FAQ and this book. And so on. But hey- why let facts get in the way of a good theory?

C++ is not parsable. This isn't even something as mundane as a shift/reduce conflict- although my experience has been that if you have a shift/reduce conflict in a LALR(1) parser, you have a potiential for a bug (this is a fault I will lay at the feet of Ocaml- it has way too many shift/reduce conflicts in the language grammar). The classic shift/reduce conflict is C's dangling else. Which does cause real program bugs. And which, of course, C++ imported wholesale, but that was because it's a (more or less) superset of C. No, when I mean C++ isn't parsable, I mean something deeper. Consider the following sequence of tokens:

a < b , c > d;

Is this a) a weird expression using C's comma operator, and grouped like (a < b), (c > d), or a variable declaration using templates, and grouped like (a < b, c >) d? Even typing information doesn't help you- the same identifier can be both a variable name and a type name/template name simultaneously. This language is unparsable.

If they had simply used some different tokens than < and > for templates, these issues could have been avoided (not the other issues I have with templates, like code bloat and misuse, but at least the language would be parsable). This highlights the Ur-flaw as it were of C++. Effectively, it was designed by committee. A committee that would approve major language features, like templates, without them ever having been implemented- because even the most cursory implementations would have demonstrated the parsing problems and caused a change in tokens. Rather like the C99 committee (and there's a rant for another day).

In a way, I'm glad C++ has operator overloading. Because now I can state definitively that it's a bad idea, whereas before I was just unsure. It creates bugs, gets misused more often than not (even not counting iostreams) and is often not used by the very people who are most supposed to benefit from it (numeric programmers). Consider the following code:



    int i = 3;

    cout << i << 2;

What does this print? Does this print '6' or '32'? Now, for bonus points: what did the writer of this code intend to print out? And simply saying the programmer should refrain from making this mistake is missing the point. I'd love to stop making mistakes. I just haven't figured out how to yet. People new to programming make simple mistakes like the above for simple reasons. Seasoned professionals make simple mistakes like the above for complex and subtle reasons. And I've yet to be a on a programming team of more than three people without at least one yahoo who thinks he's being clever. This is not even counting the times I was a yahoo too.

I would actually count iostreams as a serious misuse of operator overloading- in that it weakens and obfuscates what an operator means- even to the most experienced C++ expert imaginable. In this slashdot interview, Bjarne Stroustrup himself demonstrates this confusion when he says, and I quote:

For example, It's clearer to say that a class must have a << operator than to say that it must be derived from "Printable" (that then has a << operator).

To the inventor of the language it is no longer clear what the "real" meaning of the << operator is- output, or left shift. There are classes I can easily think of that might want to implement both meanings of the operator- a bignum class, for example. But even ignoring iostreams, in the C++ code I've seen I see operator overloading abused more often than used legitimately. How many classes overload ++ so the authors can use for loops instead of while loops? Even when the concept of "successor" is entirely meaningless? There is no way C++ could gaurentee that the code that implements the operator actually fullfills some expectation of how that operator behaves. Operator overloading is the 21st century equivelent of old FORTRAN programmers redefining the number 2.

And lastly, the people who are most commonly cited as needing operator overloading- numeric programmers- tend to avoid it. Especially if they've had any experience with C++. The problem is temporary creation. If what you're dealing with is sufficiently small, like complex numbers (the classic example), then temporary creation isn't a problem. But if what you're dealing with is 1024x1024 dense matricies, temporary creation is very much a concern. And no, inlining does not solve the problem- optimial matrix multiply routines, for example, are difficult to inline (read this paper on the importance of blocking and copying to matrix multiply- and the remember that this makes matrix multiply a recursive operation).

Well, that's enough flaming on C++ for now. You will no doubt get more next time I have to work with the bastard. Or the next time my browser crashes near the end of a long post.

Quote of the day

2004-01-27T17:58:00.000-06:00

I do have to make fun of Attny General John Ashcroft for this quote, it's a moral imperitive:

"Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions," Ashcroft said.

I have to agree with Ashcroft- there is certainly signs that both chemistry and biology were taking place in Iraq before the war. And we know that both chemistry and biology are evil, because they scientifically support evolution and not creationism, and therefor lead to godless secular humanism. Praise the Lord that we have George W. Bush in the Whitehouse, who is committed to stamping out chemistry and biology everywhere- even on Mars, which was recently discovered to have chemistry, and maybe even biology!

Iraqis want to see Saddam's allies stand trial with him

2004-01-27T10:23:00.000-06:00

Kudos to Michael Moore for pointing me to this gem. It seems that many Iraqis want to see Saddam's allies- specifically, us, or more specifically, the Bush administration, put on trial for war crimes right next to Saddam.

I guess the "Liberation- from the people who brought you the original Oppression!" advertising campaign wasn't as effective as we had hoped it would be.

Fear and Loathing at HP

2004-01-26T21:03:00.000-06:00

Personally, I think a new level of hell is being prepared for Carly for when she finally shows up, for what she did to the HP calculator division. But that's me. I see some of my predictions about the future of HP are comming true.

My basic feeling of what is going at HP is comprised of two points. The first is that HP is not the company Carly wanted to run. At a guess, the company she really wanted to run was Dell. Dell makes sense from an MBA's standpoint- do it faster and cheaper. HP's technical culture simply doesn't make sense in MBAville. I've experienced companies managed by management that really wanted to run some other company, and it was a diaster. Management made decisions that either only made sense in the context of the other company, not in this company, or that they felt would work to change the company to be more like what the company they really wanted to run. Notice how in neither case are the decisions noted for making sense for this company and this situation. The Compaq merger was a classic example of this- it was a way to bring in a more Dell like management structure. As was killing the calculator division (despite the fact that it was a profit center)- Dell doesn't make calculators.

The second point, which is really a variant of the first, is that the MBAs have taken over HP at all levels. Carly election to CEO was just the final acknowledgement that it's been all downhill since Bill and Bob left. See, HP used to be famous and/or infamous for being an engineer run company. Because that's what Hewlett and Packard the men were- old school engineers. Now the MBA's are in charge, the company will be incapable of making a rational engineering decision for the forseeable future. See, the rational engineering decisions will always be proposed by those who best understand the engineering issues- the engineers. And were a manager to actually follow the recommendations of his engineers, that would create the image that the engineers and not the managers were in charge again- among the poor guy's fellow managers, if not among the engineers. In companies where there is no question that the managers and not the engineers are firmly in charge, and managers will not face repurcussions for acquiescing to engineering requests, sane decisions can still be made. Not so in HP. They've got to put those unruly engineers in their place!

Unfortunately, once corporate insanities like this get wedged into a corporate culture, I have no clue how they can get unwedged. The manager makes dumb decisions (like kill calculators, merging with Compaq, and betting the future of the company on the Itanium), and then later needs to either admit that they screwed up (yeah, right- that'd be worse than agreeing with the engineers in the first place!) or defend to the death that it was the right decision, despite the overwhealming evidence to the contrary. Which means the insanity gets metasized. The logic of paranoia is that it's never safe to relax.

So, as much as I hate to say it, we're seeing the death throes of HP. It's sad- it was a good company, back in the day.

The Truth Deficit

2004-01-26T19:45:00.000-06:00

Today's required reading is this screed from Cal Pundit. At the very least, take a look at the graph. The report from the Congressional Budget Office has a baseline that shows us getting back to balanced budgets in 2011, and maybe a $200B surplus by 2013. But, if you add in all the goodies that Bush has already asked for, he has managed to turn that surplus into perhaps as much as a $800B deficit. That's a $1 trillion dollar turn around.

Here's the problem I have. According to the CIA World Fact Book, the US has a gross GDP of $10.45T. With a debt of $7 trillion dollars. In other words, the federal debt is already 67% of our GDP. But the Bush Administration is seriously proposing to add $500B to $800B a year in new debt between now and 2013. That's another $5-8 trillion in debt, making our total debt $12-15T. And, at current rates, our GDP will only grow to about $15.5T.

The last time the US Gov't was this heavily in debt, we had just finished defeating global fascism. What do we have to show for the debt this time? Even worse, who holds the debt has changed. In 1945, the debt of the US Govt was largely held by US citizens, with a personal stake in the American goverment (aka patriotism). Today's debt is primarily held by foreign investors, looking for good returns on the money they've made from the US trade deficit.

"Recipie for diaster" doesn't begin to cover it. We can go too often to the well- the supply of credit for the US Gov't to consume is not endless. And a bankrupt goverment can not do much of anything for anyone- stimulate the economy, provide for the well being of it's citizens, or even provide for the common defense. The best it can do is inflate the currency like mad in the hopes of getting out of it's trap- a cure almost as bad as the disease. Which is why this election budget matters are second only to fundamental issues of preserving our democracy. And why everytime on of these articles comes out, it instantly becomes the required reading of the day.

Billmon and the Blogs

2004-01-26T19:07:00.000-06:00

I'm reading this screed from Billmon about how the social elite have discovered blogging. I found the one advertising exec talking about swooping in and buying up blogs while they're still cheap to be incredibly humorous. If she's reading, Bogonomicon is up for sale- opening bid is a measly five million dollars. Call me, baby- we'll do lunch.

The freeloader problem is interesting, and, in the context he presented it, unsolvable. His fundamental flaw is assuming that the only reward for doing something is monetary. If you don't pay for it, it doesn't get done, or isn't worth anything. I call this the libertarian fallacy, as "mainstream" outlets which call themselves libertarian- for example, the Cato institute- tend very strongly to make this mistake. This is also a very common mistake made when considering open source software. If we don't pay our programmers, how will software ever get written? The trick is, once you realize that not all rewards are monetary, a number of otherwise unexplainable phenomema become readily explicable.

And the "mainstream media" is not as indispensible as it thinks. Yes, their is this romantic image of reporters meeting trenchcoat wearing deepthroats in shadowy garages, dodging hails of bullets as the bad guys try to scare them off the story, and yelling "stop the presses!" as they break the pulitizer prize winning story of the century. But how much of that goes on in reality? And standing against that you have Robert Novak- who is just one of many "journalists" who make their living dutifully parroting whatever spin is comming out of the halls of power.

OK, Billmon can't afford to go to Iraq himself, and neither can I. So if the news media doesn't exist, who is going to report from Iraq? Umm, how about the Iraqis themselves? Every Dean event is followed by a spate of blogging entries as eye witnesses report. In blog space, everyone is a reporter, therefor any event with human beings in attendence has potiential blog-space reporters there. And if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to witness it, is it news?

And objectivity isn't an argument either- primarily because I don't beleive objectivity exists with humans. Heinlein said one of the most artistic ways to lie was to tell the truth, just not all of it. The old gray lady herself, therefor, is telling you right on their masthead that they're lying- "All the news that fits in print". Not all the news, just all the news fits. Which, since it isn't all the news, it becomes a question of what aren't they telling you- and there (if nowhere else) does bias sneak in. What qualifies as "news"? And, if you've somehow gotten the notion that Bogo is fair and balanced, let me correct you right now. Bogo is unfair and horribly biased, almost as badly as the TV network which uses the "fair and balanced" slogan. Caveat lector- beware of the physciatrist with the odd eating habbits.

Which is the biggest value a blog can bring- the chance to tell your side of the story. The city council meets to discuss the highyway bypass. In attendence is the half a dozen city council members, fifty concerned citizens, and one reporter. The next day, only one person's viewpoint is printed- the reporters. And 56 people are left screaming at the newspaper "that isn't what happened at all!" It's not money that will drive those 56 people to write up their experiences of the meeting, it's the chance to set the record straight. And maybe make a difference in the city plans.

When thinking about starting this blog, in what I envisioned it might someday mean, the thought "and then we make money off it" never crossed my mind. Indded, I would argue any attempt to turn any blog into a "profit center" would destroy the blog- Bogonomicon, or Kos, or Instapundit. I did dream that one day I might have a vast readership- maybe even more than a dozen people :-). And therein lies the value of Bogo to me- it's the ability for me to affect the debate, and maybe put some ideas into people's heads. Bend reality a little closer to my heart's desire.

Which is why the death of mainstream media doesn't frighten me. And I think it's going to happen sooner or later anyways- as everyone who isn't a reporter stands to benefit. Five hundred years ago the invention of the printing press doomed the goverments based upon hereditary nobility. I imagine the dukes and earls asked each how on earth goverments would manage to function without control being firmly in the hands of the nobility. The answer, of course, was "just fine, thank you very much".

Dean & Roses

2004-01-26T13:25:00.000-06:00

Smirk of the day- this take on the Dean Iowa speech.

The physics theory I like...

2004-01-25T23:41:00.000-06:00

...is that the mysterious "dark energy" that is expanding the universe against the force of gravity is, of course, the expanding pressure of the storage requirements of google groups.

The fact that google groups, and therefor the web, is expanding faster than light does not violate relativity, however, as no information is being transmitted.

Political lightweights

2004-01-25T13:12:00.000-06:00

So the Democratic race has narrowed down to four frontrunners, all able to win - Dean, Kerry, Clark, and Edwards. Something to think about? Dean is the only one who is a political heavyweight. Clark is a virgin. Edwards is a neophyte. Kerry is a seatwarmer, with no significant legislation in his 19 years as senator. Dean, of course, gave Vermont the best fiscal record and the best health care of any state in the Union during his 11 years as governor. He has delivered everything the other candidates have talked about, and more.

I find this worrisome. Given the strange storm-tossed seas of the race, there is a substantial chance that Dean won't get the nomination (although I still consider him by far the frontrunner). Are we going to wind up with a candidate whose political record looks no better than this?