Alex Jacobson

Does San Francisco cause infertility?

Yahoo News reports:

San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city. Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under.

It is no mystery why U.S. cities are losing children. The promise of safer streets, better schools and more space has drawn young families away from cities for as long as America has had suburbs.

But kids are even more scarce in San Francisco than in expensive New York (24 percent) or in retirement havens such as Palm Beach, Fla., (19 percent), according to Census estimates.

So, if you live in a city, do you abandon it when you want to raise kids, or do you decide you like your city life so much that you decide not to have them. Do you only have kids in the city if you have lots of money?

Kids are fundamentally more expensive in cities than in suburbs. Cities are valuable because they concentrate people who need to reach each other. Kids take up space in cities without providing commensurate social networking value. Certainly parents meet each other because through their kids, but there are less expensive hobbies that produce the same result.

Can open source compete with integrated hardware?

As hardware gets cheaper, more and more of the value comes from software and integration. That is the Apple strategy (keeping the Mac closed) and it is not Microsoft's strategy with the X/Box. There is no room for open source in these models. The only way for open source to compete is to stay open from top to bottom and build an ecosystem around developers. This is a variant of the Clayton Christiansen thesis. As software and hardware get sufficiently cheap, value comes from integration.

Efficient Outcomes: Selling Service. Buying Service. No "IT"

Jeff Nolan has two recent posts on IT. In "IBM Moves in FIrefox's direction," He says

The interesting dynamic that I referenced in the beginning of my comments is that these large companies are adopting many open source projects without any expectation of support from a providing vendor. They are going it alone. Obviously in the case of Linux itself there are large vendors providing services, and many large projects like Apache and Sendmail have strong support organization, but the vast majority of open source projects don't so when a large enterprise IT organization officially supports them it is their intention to be the first and last line of support, and this should strike fear into the hearts of every enterprise software company out there

In "The End of Corporate IT" he taks about corporate customers prefering hosted applications because they don't want to deal with their own IT departments. He says

So it looks like the trend is towards vertical integration of software stacks by hosted app providers. If you are doing vertical integration you get efficiency by sharing costs through support of open source projects. Companies don't want IT. They want to buy a hosted app or sell a hosted app. Anything in between allows someone to blame someone elsse.

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Free speech: Echo chamber or error-checking?

Virginia Postrel in the NYTimes talks about economic models for media bias. That media bias may simply be market differentiation. She says:

The article makes some provocative predictions. It suggests that adding relatively moderate competitors may push rivals to take more extreme positions to hold onto their audiences.

Trying to correct Al Jazeera's bias, for example, by introducing pro-Western competition, as some analysts recommend, "might cause Al Jazeera and similar networks to further differentiate their product by advancing yet more extreme views," write the economists. "The effect might be only to radicalize, rather than moderate, their audience."

The defense against this sort of extremism is to maximize the quantity of new sources so people end up with sane portfolios. There is no reason to believe that people with diversified news portfolios will tend toward extremism. The real problem is people who just rely on e.g. the NYTimes in order to oppose the view of the administration. Or the NYSun just to oppose the view of the NYTimes, etc.

Advice for Living One Thousand Years

The Sunday Times of London describes improvements in science that may eliminate aging as a cause of death. Until they arrive, here are its points of advice. Note: I think it is highly likely that there are different best options for different people so take this with a grain of salt.

1 Don't even think about smoking and, preferably, don''t hang glide.

2 Eliminate sugar to lower blood insulin levels. Use stevia as a sweetener. It is a South American plant that is both very sweet and good for you.

3 Don't eat any animal fats. Government guidelies tend to say cut these down, but they probably only say this because they think it's the best
people can manage. No saturated fat at all is probably best.

4 Eat lots of vegetables that grow above ground. Those below ground are heavy in carbohydrates that turn into sugar and raise insulin levels.

5 Don't overdo the fruit. Contrary to popular wisdom it's not unconditionally good as it contains sugar. Non-drinking Arabs and Indians who
sit around sipping orange juice all day end up with diabetes.

6 Eat nuts. For incompletely understood reasons, people who eat nuts live longer. Not salted peanuts, however (see 7).

7 Don't salt things. Salt raises blood pressure and will kill you through a stroke or heart attack. For this reason, don't touch processed food.

8 Don't have heart bypass surgery or have a stent installed to hold a blocked artery open. Latest figures suggest neither works. People who live
longer after them probably do so because the shock made them eat better and exercise more.

9 Have a massive medical assessment, preferably at Kronos in Phoenix, Arizona, to establish what you are doing wrong and, if possible, what genetic
weaknesses you have. Continue these assessments throughout your life and adjust supplements accordingly. Read all the latest medical journals to keep
up.

10 Exercise vigorously and daily but dont run. Running is bad for your skeleton.

11 Take a childs aspirin once a day to thin your blood and a much larger dose before you get on a plane. Ideally, don't get on a plane.

12 Eat very little. Rats on restricted diets live longer but it is not known if this would damage humans particularly their brains. So if you forget
what 2+2 equals, eat more.

13 Ignore all of the above. They may be wrong and, if a piano falls on you, pointless.

Stanley Fish gets it wrong

Stanley Fish attempts to argue that there is no principled way to differentiate between Ward Churchil's claims that the victims of 9/11 were "little Eichmans" and Larry Summers comments that the preponderane of males in Harvard's physics department might be partially the result of genetic predispositions. He claims that both sorts of speech are equally permissible from a First Ammendment perspective and that it is inconsistent of the right to condemn Churchill and demand his resignation while at the same time making Larry Summers a free speech martyr.

Fish is largely missing the point. Summers is making a factual claim that may or may not be justified using scientific evidence. See this fabulous debate to betwee Steve Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke to see how such a discussion can proceed. In contrast, Churchill is making a value judgement about America and terrorism that is not per se provable or disprovable. Discussion and evaluation of factual claims are the substance of science and acadamia and it is indeed scandalous that Harvard's faculty appears unable to engage in it. In contrast, Churchill is infusing facts with value judgements that at odds with those of the people and institutions that employ him. The left has indeed been entirely ok with the politicization of academia. The right has largely stood for the idea that academia should be the province of intellect.

Churchill's abuse was to shift from intellectual discourse to political discourse and to represent his political discourse as intellectually valid. Summers was making a factual hypothesis ammenable to proof or disproof. The fact that Fish can't see the difference is indeed part of the problem with academia today, a problem that Ward Churchill so vividly makes apparent.

"Free Muslim Against Terrorism" rally has low turnout. CAIR decides not to show

Pics here. Lots of details here. The mainstream Muslim organizations stayed away.

Did Newsweek shout fire in a crowded theater?

Austin Bay describes it as The Press' Abu Ghraib. Michelle Malkin as "Newsweek Lied. People Died. She quotes the London TImes story

"At least nine people were killed yesterday as a wave of anti-American demonstrations swept the Islamic world from the Gaza Strip to the Java Sea, sparked by a single paragraph in a magazine alleging that US military interrogators had desecrated the Koran."

A commenter notes on Austin Bay's post notes

In every other walk of life, professionals are subject to criminal charges if they engage in grossly negligent behavior that results in injury to innocent third parties. Here have we grossly negligent (if not outright malicious, and I’m still not convinced that Newsweek didn’t make up most of this story out of whole cloth) behavior that has resulted in harm to American servicemen in wartime. This is much, much more serious than Rathergate. Newsweek has crossed over the line from ordinary leftist media conceit into Lord Haw Haw / Tokyo Rose territory.

Newsweek falsely reported that US soldiers descrate the Koran at Gitmo and now 15 people are dead as a consequence. Should Newsweek be punished? What is the punishment for shouting fire in a crowded theater?

Transhumanism vs Democracy

I've been saying this to various friends for a while and Ronald Bailey says it in Reason more concisely:

Politics in the 21st century will cut across the traditional political left/right rift of the last two centuries. Instead, the chief ideological divide will be between transhumanists and bioconservatives/bioluddites.

In the 18th Century, the Framers of the American Constitution debated whether slaves should count in aportioning representation. The slave owners wanted them to count more because it would increase their power. The free states wanted them to count less because property can't vote. The result was the "three fifths compromise" counting slaves as three-fifths of a whole person. As transhumanism moves forward, we will be reviving this debate. Do de-encephalized clones count in the census? What about clones in general as they will be more likely to share the original's political preferences? Are sufficiently modified humans still human enough to vote? They may have preferences, but those preferences may be determined by the gadgets implanted into their heads rather than randomly based on environmental factors. Should unmodified humans be voting as they may be obviously stupider than their transformed counterparts?

At a less esoteric level, will be be coercing people to accept certain treatments (in the same way we coerce immunization)? What are the boundaries here? How dangerous is this?

On the other hand, will be be allowing people to undertake arbitratry treatments? How will they be stopped? How do we protect ourselves from the bio-transformative virus produced in our neighbors kitchen? What about their dogs?

Big vs Small, Private Sector vs Public Sector, Personal vs Impersonal

Many people on the left are concerned about Big Business. They worry that individual expression and liberty will get trampled by a corporate bureacuracy intent on self preservation and growth. Many people on the right are concerned about the behavior of Big Government. They worry that indivual expression and liberty will get trampled by government bureacracy intent on self preservation and growth. Entrepreneurs and artists are or should be concerned about both.

On the flip side, there is a lot of value to scale. For example, the quality of produce in my neighborhood has increased dramatically since Whole Foods arrived. Neither cars nor computers would not be available to most people if there were not big corporations and mass markets producing them. It took the might of the US government to stop both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia from spreading misery and death around the world.

In general I am biased in favor of letting individuals negotiate differences among themselves. I am not at all certain that government enforcement of contracts and payments serves anyone. More on this later. In the interim, read this post by Jeff Jarvis about the problems when companies grow. He is responding to this post by Fred Wilson asking whether Google is becoming AOL.

MSM Silence on Arab Silence on Genocide

Joseph Britt wrote a brillian post over a Belgravia Dispatch.

Friedman doesn't mention Darfur in this column. By contrast, his fellow Times columnist Nick Kristof writes frequently about Darfur without mentioning any Arab country or government other than Sudan's. This is a remarkable coincidence, at least to an admitted layman to whom one slaughter looks much like another. Arabs in Darfur seem to use rape as a weapon more often than Arabs from Saudi Arabia or Ramadi, and explosives not as often. But these look like details to me, a case of different people relying on different chapters of The Savage's Handbook.
I know all the likely rebuttals to this deliberately brutal and inflammatory language. None of them explain the Arab genocide in Darfur; the silence of other Arabs about Arab genocide in Darfur; or the Western media's silence about Arabs' silence about Arab genocide in Darfur. Friedman, for example, seems oblivious to the subject. Kristof, who is not, follows the conventional practice of American journalists witnessing something awful. This is to demand that the American government do something about it.
Well, this is fine. We'd all like Washington to put out this particular fire before it burns itself out, and I don't really object to any of the specific steps Kristof recommends in this case. As a practical matter, though, this habitual treatment of every actual or potential disaster around the world as primarily an American problem is a good way to ensure that actual disasters get worse and potential disasters turn into real ones.

Google to offer web cache

Fron CNet:

A beta, or test version, of Web Accelerator was introduced via the Google Labs technology incubation site late Wednesday. The tool, which must be downloaded, will tap into the power of Google's global computer network and thus help sites load faster, according to the company.

Web Accelerator works by sending URL requests through company servers designated specifically for speeding site downloads. The application also can compress site data before sending it to computers.

Current Email Solution (VAST IMPROVEMENT OVER BEFORE)

• CRM114 to filter spam. I wrote a script that grabs all mail saved into teach-mail and teach-spam folders and uses them to improve CRM114. The result has been a 95% drop in inbox spam with less than 1% false positives.
• All mail goes into my INBOX and stays there. I bcc all outbound mail to myself. I view my mail most recent first. Now regular mail usage is compatible with POP and lots of other mail readers. If a mail needs to be processed then it can be saved into a folder. But following the philosophy of Dave Allen's Getting Things Done, I only check email when I am ready to process it. Any mail that I can answer quickly I do. Any other mail that requires a larger response gets put on a todo list. Using your inbox as a TODO list is just a recipe for trouble.
• All bulk messages are delivered to a bulk folder that I can check when I anm ready to read random news broadcast. Email in my INBOX gets presumptive priority. The result is a much lower aggregate interrupt level. I created a cron job that grabs all the from: addresses from a teach-bulk folder and adds them to a buklist. See here for info on how. My procmail filter looks like this :0 Whic :$BULKLIST$LOCKEXT | (formail -x received: -x X-Envelope-From: -x from: -x sender: -x reply-to: -x return-path:| fgrep --quiet --ignore-case --file=$BULKLIST) # :0 Wa AAADailies Note: From enumeration appears to be the best way to do this. Custom addressing doesn't help enough.
• I set my email client to check for new email ever hour rather than every minute. That is also a vast reduction in distraction.

All of these changes have made me gigantically less distracted and hopefully more productive. Yay! Update: A sideeffect of a consistent inbox is that I now have things configured so that all from addresses of mail accepted in my INBOX are whitelisted. Note if you use CRM114, you should only whitelist AFTER training.

Sometimes in April: More PC Damage and (argh!) A RALLY!

Two nights ago, I attended a showing of Sometimes in April by the AJWS. The movie attempted to dramatize the attempted genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 and the way the world just stood by. The movie was shown in an attempt to galvanize action to stop the ongoing genocide of Blacks by Arabs in the Sudan. But the movie uttely sends the wrong message on this front.

In a testament to PC nonesense, all characters in the film fell into three basic categories, evil males who do nothing rape and kill women, helpless males who can do nothing to stop them, and heroic women who occassionally do. There are no images of heroic men attempting to defend their households from the attackers. There are not even images of Tutsi rebel forces fighting to retake Rwanda from these monsters.

Instead we are invited to view the genocide as being like the rains of April; something that comes unbidden, like the weather. And something that magically departs just as suddently, when the Tutsi rebels announce over a bullhorn that the Tutsis can come out from hiding in the swamp. There is no coverage of the fighting that allowed the Tutsi to take power. The folks who made the movie really want to avoid the notion that bad things happen when good men fail to act and that the action that these good men take sometimes needs to be VIOLENT.

It also images the Tutsis as helpless victims of Rwandan aggresion. It ignores the Tutsi massacre of 300,000 Hutus in 1972 in neighboring Burundi (also Hutus killed 100,00 Tutsis in Rwanda over the period from 1955-1965) and the fact that the UN had just escorted the main Tutsi force to the center of the capital. There was real fear on both sides. (For killing history see here).

The film covered the widespread rapes that the Hutu militias perpetrated on women without showing any of it. It did show some of the killing of women and girls. At the same time it shows little of the killing of men and boys. There are two possibilities here. Either the man and boys ran away leaving the women and girls alone to face the militias or they were simply killed first. If the former, the movie fails to confront the possiblity that some concept of male honor is an important part in the maintenance of civil society. If the later, perhaps it would have been better if all Rwandan were armed. Either way, it is simply that the men and boys who were killed prior to the rapes, then what is being shown is a cruel reprise of the joke : "world coming to an end. women and children hardest hit!"

The movie attempts to dramatise the fecklessness of the US, showing decision makers trying to avoid a repeat of Mogadishu. Coverage of the US response centers on the Prudence Bushnell, the heroic female Deputy Assistant Sec. State for Africa. She becomes increasingly alarmed at the genocide, repeatedly tries to persuade male US policy makers to act, and is rebuffed by them. In one scene, she is exhorting a US commander to shut down the Rwandan radio station goading the Hutu militias to greater levels of violence. He responds "Radio doesn't kill people. People kill people" and then goes on to talk about freedom of speech. She is exasperated by the refusal of anyone to act. But we never see her doing the obvious alternative, COMPETITION. Perhaps it is too MALE, but perhaps we could have arranged to have the US broadcast radio into Rwanda with a competing message of peace and hope. Perhaps its just that Democracts prefer regulation to competition.

The movie neglects to cover the real background of domestict liberals and leftists rampant opposition to any US military action and de facto complicity in the
genocides in Vietnam and Cambodia perpetrated after the US departed South East Asia. What makes Rwanda a better genocide to cover than Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1970's or Iraq in the 1980's? Perhaps that it lets the left off the hook in allowing these prior genocides to happen. The movie manages to be relatively silent about the fact that the UN troops left without firing a shot in defense of the Tutsis that they had committed to protect and the fact that the French were actively supporting and providing arms to the Hutus.

At the end of the day, we must confront the fact that sometime the only way to stop bad men is through violence. Men who are willing to rape and kill for their own ends will not be stopped by words or arm bands. They will be stopped by force.

And that gets me to the current context. It is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The AJWS site says:

This month we commemorate Yom Hashoah and remember the consequences of inaction by the international community in the face of genocide. We remember and we still cannot, nor will we ever, comprehend how the world looked on as six million of us were gassed, tortured, displaced, starved and worked to death.

We vowed, “never again!” But is this declaration to be reserved for Jews alone? Jews must be the guardians of this call for action, highly sensitive and responsive to all attempts by any people to annihilate another people. The world stood idly by 60 years ago, and again as massacres unfolded in Cambodia, Rwanda, and now Sudan.

I fully support the sentiments in this text. I plan to attend to the rally scheduled for 4:30PM this Sunday in Central Park (on Cherry Hill by Strawberry Fields) to raise awareness of the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan. According to the email

The rally is being coordinated by students from Yeshiva University (YU), with participation by students from Columbia, NYU, Rutgers, Harvard, and Georgetown. Among the speakers will be Ruth Messinger, President and Executive Director of the American Jewish World Service, Yahya M. Osman, general secretary, Darfur Rehab Project, Inc, who lost six members of his family to the Sudan genocide in 2004, and human rights activists Simon Dang and Maria Sliwa. There will be elected officials present as well. Sponsoring organizations include Human Rights First, ADL, AJWS and the Anti-Slavery Group.

I hope this rally will both raise awareness of the ongoing genocide and raise recognition that the way these sorts of things get stopped is by violence. The silence of many on the left about the prior ongoing killing and genocide in Afghanistan and Iraq that was stopped only by the US military is alarming. The possibility that the US may equip rebels to fight the Sudanese government gives me hope. I'd also like the US to grow the military sufficiently so that we have the resources to impose no fly zones on the Sudan. But again, the domestic liberals can't stand any money spent on the military. They voted for John Kerry's "fire houses in the US and not Iraq." But I have hope that awareness of this tragedy will straighten them out.

Terrorism in Manhattan. Winer Hypocricy

From NY1

Two novelty grenades filled with gunpowder exploded outside the British Consulate in Midtown early Thursday morning, causing minor damage but no injuries. Police do not have any suspects or a motive but say there is no evidence linking the blasts to national elections underway in Britain.

Yesterday, I saw that Dave Winer had posted :

Sure we led the war effort in Iraq, but Blair was right there providing political cover for Bush, the whole way. If he hadn't maybe Bush wouldn't have gotten re-elected. So why wasn't there (or was there?) an effective campaign to deny Blair re-election for what he did in the war, the lies he told? Or do the British think somehow that Bush was lying and Blair wasn't, because if you do, I got a bridge I want to tell you about. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

So Dave is clearly angry with Bush and Blair. I'd like a better sense of what lies he thinks they told and whether or not the outcome was worth it e.g. freedom and elections in Iraq. I am curious because later on in the same set of posts he says:

Hats off to the Internet for bringing us the girl band from Afghanistan, they're hip, they're girls, and they wear Burkas! Wow.

So I wonder if he is willing to express any actual gratitude to Bush and Blair for toppling the Taliban and making this girl band possible. Or is it all just churlishness?

The reason why I connect the manhattan "terrorism" with Dave Winer is that the blinding anger at Bush and Blair is a characteristic feature of the left. This type of action, novelty grenades, seems less like the work of sophisticated international terrorists and more like the work of someone local with an ax to grind who wants to make a statement. Given all the left paraphenalia advocating assasinating Bush, this is perhaps an obvious next step.

Note, I am not making an accusation here. Just stating an alternative to the Al Queada theory that appears to be floating around elsewhere.

OK City Bomber Reveals Co-conspirators

From the LATimes

WASHINGTON — After a decade of silence, Terry L. Nichols, who was convicted in the Oklahoma City bombings, has accused a third man of being an accomplice who provided some of the explosives used to kill 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building 10 years ago.

Nichols, in a letter written from his cell at the U.S. government's Supermax prison in Colorado, said Arkansas gun collector Roger Moore donated so-called binary explosives, made up of two components, to bomber Timothy J. McVeigh that were used in Oklahoma City, as well as additional bomb components that recently were found in Nichols' former home in Kansas.
[...]
Nichols' letter to Sanders was dated April 18, the day before the 10-year anniversary. In it he said the government knew that others were involved but would not prosecute them, and he wanted to work with Rohrabacher and Congress "to help expose the gov't coverup in my case and thus reveal the truth in the OKC bombing."

He said ongoing FBI tests of the components found at his house in Herington, Kan., would support his allegation that the material came from Moore and his friend, Karen Anderson.

"That case of nitromethane came directly from Roger Moore's Royal, Arkansas, home, and his prints should be found on that box and/or tubes, and Karen Anderson's prints may be there as well," Nichols wrote.

Anderson also could not be found Tuesday.

Has the next flu pandemic started?

Via MarginalRevolution, I found

These changes have striking parallels with the 1918 pandemic which began as a mild infection in the sping of 1918 and evolved into an efficient killer in the fall. The current information coming out of northern Vietnam suggests a similar sequence of events may be happening in 2005, and the flu pandemic has begun as indicated. Moreover, the finding of WSN/33 in swine in Korea suggests the pandemic in 2005 may be beginning on two fronts, with avian viruses becoming more human-like in Vietnam and human viruses becoming more avian-like in Korea. Unfortunately, both sets of viruses can infect birds which could create more mixing and matching of genetic information. This genetic instability could frustrate vaccine efforts based on the last 2004 isolates form Vietnam.

Sign the Rescind the AUT Boycott Petition

Daniel Johnson reported in the NYSun last week

Last Friday something happened that made me ashamed to be British. The Association of University Teachers, which represents 49,000 academics, voted to boycott two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan. They are likely to boycott a third, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This boycott is the culmination of years of pro-Palestinian agitation on campus, which has seen Jewish students and pro-Zionist academics subjected to frightening levels of vilification and intimidation. But not since the Third Reich have Jews been the targets of an official boycott in a civilized country.[..] Just as German universities were hotbeds of anti-Semitism even before the Nazis came to power, so in recent years British universities have become the bastions of the latest mutation of anti-Semitism: denial of Israel's right to exist.
Opponents were given no opportunity to challenge the two militants from Birmingham who proposed the boycott. Moreover, the vote was held on erev Pesach, forcing Jewish delegates to choose between religious and civic duties.
[...]
This, then, is the university that Ms Benjamin wishes to isolate from the outside world. The agenda was set out by the founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, Omar Barghouti: "The taboo has been shattered at last. From now on, it will be acceptable to compare Israel's apartheid system to its South African predecessor." Nobody makes such comparisons with Arab universities, where academic freedom is still only a dream.

At very least we can sign the petition in protest:

To: British Association of University Teachers

We, the undersigned, are men and women from all walks of life, Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and non-Israelis, academics and non-academics, who feel deep concern about the AUT’s misbegotten boycott of Israeli universities.

As an expression of this concern, and the negative impact we know it will have on Israelis, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, Jews, British teachers and students, and many in other countries, we hereby petition the Association of University Teachers to rescind its boycott.

Any claim that Israel is an 'apartheid state' is demonstrably wrong in
all its aspects, legal, ethical, factual, and in comparison to other
countries and belittles the true horrors of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The boycott is counterproductive, racist, and bigoted. It was voted on and approved under conditions which guaranteed its outcome without full and proper debate. It singles out the only Jewish State in the world for punishment , yet ignores the numerous despotic, oppressive, tyrannical, fundamentalist, and repressive regimes in the world. It is, for that reason alone, hypocritical, and represents the interests of a small minority of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic activists only.

Sign the Petition

Email interruptions damage effective IQ more than being stoned!

Read this article
Really, if you want to get anything done set your IM and email to interupt you as little as possible. Then do things to set your brain to do the same.
e.g. block out specific time to do distracting tasks like reading/writing blogs.

Simple Entitlement/Tax Reform

NoSpeedBumps proposes:

1. – Begin mandatory Retirement Savings Accounts (RSAs) and phase out Social Security


2. – Begin mandatory Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and achieve universal health care coverage, phase out Medicare and Medicaid


3. – Implement a loophole-free Effective Flat Tax (EFT) that has a completely flat perceived rate

Read the whole thing to understand why this is actually very progressive and very much saner than our current system.

Philosophically I prefer taxing estates to taxing income, but that is a subject of another post. If we are going to stick with income, this is a good way to do it.

Introverted vs Extroverted Productivity

In VII Pillars of Productivity, Erik Brynjolfsson attempts to enumerate what makes a company productive. But his analysis is sooo old school. In the Internet economy the smarted people are outside your company and the job of the company is to create value by recruiting participating users (ecosystems). Lets review his items in these terms

• Move from Analog to Digital Processes: Obviously. Get on the Internet. Run a blog. Run a wiki.


• Open Information Access You have very little information that should be private to your company (or is if you have more than a few employees)


• Empower the employees. Make that Empower the users. Wikis are the most extreme example of this.


• Use merit-based incentives. Recognize your best users. Listen to them. Give them more power. Give them rebates/payments


• Invest in corporate culture. Invest in user culture


• Recruit the right people. The best people might not be available as EMPLOYEES. Find other ways to involve them


• Invest in human capital. Invest in user capital. Cultivate the abilities of your users. Gather them. Run free classes.
  

Update: Virginia Postrel notes an MIT study that shows most innovations originate with users rather than marketers

New Email Handling Experiment: NO FOLDERS

I recently shifted my email processing to storing all my already processed email is an archive folder (rather than lots of special purpose folders).
Now that I have reduced my incoming spam by 95%, I am trying a new inbox experiment.

• View email recent first


• BCC all outgoing mail into my inbox


• leave all email in my inbox


• note a set of processed email by sending myself a STOP POINT message

If this works, I will no longer be dependent on IMAP. I'll be able to do useful searching and sorting with whatever mail client I want. And I will spend even less time "managing my email".

Also, I set my email polling interval to check for new email every hour rather than every minute. That leads to a much higher level of sanity. I may start switching all my subscription email to a different folder and then increase the polling frequency. We'll see.

Is Separate Actually Better Than "Equal"?

In 1896, in a case called Plessy v Ferguson, the US Supreme Court decided that:

A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races -- a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color -- has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races...The object of the [Fourteenth A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."

In 1954, it changed its mind and in Brown v Board of Ed. ruled that

"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does...We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

But now Alex Tabbarock of Marginal Revolution presents two studies that put the conclusion of Brown v Board into doubt. The first is a study that shows that white students perform better with white teachers and that black students perform better with black teachers. The study does not address the question of how much benefit each group derives from same-race teachers, but it does imply that students would be better off if they could select the race of their teachers.

The other study shows that women perform much better when they compete with other woman than when they compete with men. Male performance is unchanged. This study implies that women would perform better in all female environments. So it encourages single sex schools and firms.

We don't have data about whether students perform better or worse with classmates of the same race, but it stands to reason that the more similar the students in a classroom are the easier it is for the teacher to pick a teaching method that works for them. The more the teacher is like the students, the more likely it is that the teacher will be able to choose such a method correctly.

That being said, it feels like there is a lot of benefit from learning about differences from peers. But, perhaps it is only white males who benefit from classroom diversity. What a depressing thought!