Catching up with comments

I don't get too many comments here, and some of the ones I have received, particularly since I criticized the non-newspaper called Triblocal (see here and here), have been pretty scurrilous. Others have just been dim-witted. Most, however, have been interesting or thought-provoking, and I always like getting those (my post last week on libertarianism generated some very good comments; I shifted my view a bit, but still think libertarianism has some serious image problems that will continue to interfere with its viability as a major political force...as a party).

A while ago, I got into something of a dust-up on another site with someone named mcfnord (I'll assume for convenience that mcfnord is male - my apologies if I assume too much). While not a major contretemps, we did have a disagreement that, in my opinion, came from a too-idiosyncratic way of looking at the issues we were discussing, the danger of generalizing from one's own particulars.

I'm pleased to be able to moderate my views based on a comment received from mcfnord on my post of last week, Yes, you get it. Without getting into a lengthy rehash of what was said there, I contended that our future as a nation is going to be compromised by current trends and our failure to do anything about them, and how "we need to reconcile ourselves to a somewhat lesser life than we anticipated." If I had known that mcfnord was going to comment, I would have expected something other than his actual comment:

We've been living beyond our means throughout the last decade (or two), culminating in a negative savings rate and huge federal spending deficits, so yeah, like economists like to say: the unsustainable ends eventually. Factoring out the new advances in medical care, mostly in pharma, lowers both costs and quality of life, but there will be a massive nursing shortage. Time for skilled labor immigration? Don't tell Carrie!

I am probably in a minority saying things are going well for me as compared to my parents. I do believe there's a "dual income trap" that didn't exist in my parents' era, but my response is to live far below my means. Communities that require a lot of gasoline are suffering, and there will be changes. I don't understand her statements such as "as we fill up our gas tasks each day..." but I know vast swaths of this nation built their civilization on the stuff, and they are suffering. I ride a bicycle. I live in an environment where that's viable. So I fill my gas tank each month or so. I'm not sure what people expected from home prices when the historical trend is 1% since the Great Depression. We all rode a bubble, and of course that's not sustainable. But I'm not convinced things are so different in this era. In the end, how useful and accurate an indicator is "gloom"? Mondale asked in his campaign, "So we'll all flip burgers?" and it didn't turn out that way. A willingness to adjust to market conditions, work hard, retrain, and save liberally for the future will probably continue to result in sustainable first-world standards of living.

Let's put it another way: Monofuel dependency, deficit spending, credit card abuse, home equity reliance, a meat-heavy diet, and a hope that nothing will ever change: WAS IT EVER A GREAT IDEA?

My response:

And so we begin to see a kind of convergence in our thinking, mcfnord. For all that some might accuse me of peddling gloom, my primary contention is not that we are in a "malaise," but in a state of denial. We're refusing to accept the reality of our future, and, in our belief that the way we live is the acme of progress, we'll be very disappointed.

mcfnord, we should absolutely do all the things you're talking about, though I continue to believe there are structural problems with some of your remedies (retraining is too easily passed off as just another economic transaction, whereas I believe it to be a major relationship change - far more wrenching - but probably necessary).

And those things you correctly point out as weaknesses in our way of living are, unfortunately, perceived by many as among our strengths. When a president tells us to spend our way out of our national trauma surrounding 9/11, it is no wonder we see
spending psychosis. Stability has become the goal for many, rather than the flexibility to ride and enjoy change (but I do think we as a nation are rather glib about the potential negative effects of change).

You say that we can continue "in sustainable first-world standards of living." I'm not sure exactly what that will mean, especially if the trends toward income and wealth inequality increase, but I do know that that will represent a major shock to a country that expects excessive, luxurious first-world standards of living. It is true that not everyone needs a big-screen TV, but everyone thinks they do, and the change in mental frame that is needed will be wrenching in a nation that sees those things, things that are unfathomable to the vast majority of the world's population, as absolute necessities.

One quibble: we're talking about vast long-term trends here, and, while I'm no apologist for Walter Mondale, that we aren't all flipping burgers yet does not entirely invalidate the statement (not that I believe that we all will be, either, just that we haven't played it out long enough to determine anything).

**********
By the way, I recently received a comment from Anonymous asking my opinion of HR 5924. Since this was also alluded to, if indirectly, by mcfnord, I will give a somewhat abbreviated response. (For those without an encyclopedic knowledge of House bills, this provides for more visas for nurses.)

It's certainly possible that this comment is an attempt to find some inconsistency in my thinking. After all, I have expressed doubt about the attempts to increase the number of H-1B visas, most of which would be used to give software development jobs to foreign nationals. So, if I were to come out in favor of HR 5924, one could easily posit a "Gotcha" response (perhaps in tribute to the late Tim Russert).

First, I don't know and don't profess to know much of anything about the market for nurses. When I comment on the profession of software development, it comes from better than 20 years of experience in that profession, and it would be pointless of me to think that knowledge qualifies me to have an opinion on nursing.

Second, it seems almost trivial to point out that every market is different. I don't contend the market for CEOs should have the same rules as those for software developers any more than I see equivalence between, say, baseball players and teachers. There would be no necessary inconsistency if anyone saw the need for different policies and practices in the market for nurses than for software developers.

Third, what I do know tells me that there are differences. Nurses have seen a major upswing in their market power of late (as far as I know), commanding bigger salaries and better terms of employment; software developers and most other engineers have not (by the way, I'm not contending that nurses even now get what they merit; it's an incredibly difficult job and I have the utmost respect for them). If, after the upgrades to the compensation, we still don't have enough nurses to fill real needs, then it might be necessary to do something different.

Have we, however, exhausted other possibilities before we leap on the expedient of importing more nurses? Or is this just taking the easy, cheap way? Are hospitals and medical corporations funding scholarships for potential nurses to go to school? Is the well-known nursing instructor shortage being dealt with in some way?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions, because I am not plugged into the nurse labor market. One thing I do know: we should ask some very serious questions about the specific numbers in HR 5924, because we don't know where they came from. One of my biggest objections to the various H-1B visa "adjustment" bills floating around is that the numbers seem plucked out of nowhere - 130,000, 180,000, 195,000. I don't think anyone knows what the "right" number is, and I'd be very surprised if the nursing market yields any greater precision.

Review - Brainiac

Ken Jennings is the fellow who won 74 consecutive episodes of the TV game show Jeopardy!, and, soon thereafter, he wrote a book called Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs (2006). The book blends Jennings's experience on and around Jeopardy! with an exploration of various manifestations of trivia (from bars to college quiz bowls to Stevens Point, Wisconsin; oddly, he omits cruise ships, so has no idea how enjoyable it can be to win caps and water bottles). There are also 170 trivia questions woven into the text, and a look at the history of trivia.

This is a nice book, charmingly self-deprecating in tone - Jennings does his best to dispel the notion that he is the smartest man in the world. He regards trivia as something of a childhood obsession that conicided with good fortune to earn him $2.5 million in 74 days.

There isn't a lot of deeper meaning in Brainiac, but it's a pleasant 269 pages. I'm a big fan of trivia myself, would love to be on Jeopardy! sometime, so the backstage look at the show was interesting. If you don't like trivia, this book probably won't be your cup of tea, unless you want a look at the life of a self-admitted mediocre programmer who beat the odds and made money (and gained fame) out of an activity that does not normally lead to anything like that (the aforementioned cap and water bottle are pretty much the only things I've ever received from trivia, and it's a pretty perverse kind of fame to walk into a ship's lounge and have people say, "Oh, great, we're not going to win").

Capsule review: a real niche book, but well worth reading if you have any interest in trivia contests or Jeopardy! in particular.

Flip-flop? Who cares?

I'm not really much into the nuances of campaign financing. It's not very interesting, and whatever limits seem to be imposed are easily bypassed through party money and 527 groups and so forth. I don't really understand the purpose of the check-off box on the 1040 form, but I never check it because it somehow feels wrong.

Now Obama has decided, counter to previous statements, that he will reject public financing. (Three articles from the New York Times sum this up: for a straightforward report on his decision, here; for a summary of financing and how Obama's decision may affect it in the future, see here; for David Brooks's mixed view, see here).

Republicans want to make hay on this, accusing Obama of flip-flopping, of going back on his word. There are two reasons I expect that this is a non-starter. First, few people have any more understanding of this topic than I do - we don't know what's going on and we don't much care.

More importantly, when you look at the headlines, "Obama rejects public financing," the vast majority of the public sees that as a good thing. Since the system has been corrupted by so many quasi-legal influences, that public money, taxpayer money, is used at all seems like a pretty bad practice, especially when there have been so many stories about the money that's being raised. That a candidate would turn down a draw off the public dole has to be positive.

There's also a philosophical problem. Republicans don't believe in big government (so they say), so why would they want the public to have a multi-million dollar hand in paying for political ads and lawn signs and pizza for volunteers? It seems (and I understand that, in actuality, it's more nuanced than this) that Republicans would be the first to applaud any candidate who takes government out of the equation.

I think the McCain campaign needs to move down the road and find a different issue.

Can we get more stupid?

I try not to rail too often against so-called celebrity news, because it's all so ridiculous. Occasionally, however, I run across something that is so far away from rationality that it makes me giggle. A headline on Google News, linking to a People story, did that for me just now:

John Legend & Natasha Bedingfield Congratulate Jamie Lynn

That headline links to a "story" titled "John Legend, Blake Shelton Think Jamie Lynn Will Be a Good Mom." I'll quote the whole thing because, well, why not?:

The music industry sang notes of congratulations to Jamie Lynn Spears Thursday night at a Songwriters Hall of Fame event in New York.

Spears's infant daughter, Maddie Briann, made her debut Thursday morning.

"Congratulations Jamie Lynn. Wow, I've not had a baby yet," English singer-songwriter Natasha Bedingfield said at the soirée. "She'll be able to give us all advice when it happens to us."

The performers and songwriters told the Zoey 101 star not to get too discouraged by the overwhelming media coverage of her early pregnancy and engagement to 19-year-old Casey Aldridge, a Mississippi pipe layer.

"My sister had a child at a young age, too, and I understand what that is like," soul singer John Legend said.

"You just hope that her family supports her and helps her with the baby and she'll be all right."

Country singer-songwriter Blake Shelton echoed the sentiments of many of Spears' friends and family, saying he expects she'll be a wonderful mom.

"I'm from a small town in Oklahoma, and any time you have a teenage girl that is pregnant and has a baby that's going to be the focus," he said. "It doesn't mean she's not going to be a great mother."

Let's leave aside the extolling of an unwed, 17-year-old mother. It's not a great situation, but I'll stay off my moral high horse on this one; kids, don't try that at home.

What made me laugh was the idea that the opinions of John Legend, Natasha Bedingfield, and Blake Shelton mean anything. I actually like the music of each of these people, though I wouldn't consider any of them essential, but it is risible that this is even a story. I know the Web is content-greedy, but, really, is there anyone in the world who cares about John Legend and Jamie Lynn Spears and his opinion on her baby? I mean, really?

(And Natasha, maybe part of the problem is that Jamie Lynn saw it as something that just "happens to us.")

Yes, you get it

EconomistMom.com is a new blog, started last month, and I've been following it since then. The author is an experienced economist, with years of experience in and around the centers of economic power. I'm not precisely sure which way she leans; she currently works for the Concord Coalition, which is a group primarily focused on budget balancing and deficit reduction. I'm not absolutely convinced that those should be our highest priorities right now, but it would certainly be nice to see the trend moving in the right direction, which it isn't. The blog is engagingly written, delightfully personal, and close to math-free (I don't mind some, but I've read that even the hint of an equation hurts readership; don't shy away from this one because of an occasional graph).

At any rate, I'm always inordinately pleased when someone "official" seems to understand what the vast populace is seeing, because I'm not at all convinced that the ivory tower academics, the marble-halled politicians, the plush-carpeted executives, or the ink-stained media come close enough to the real world to get the very real nervousness experienced by those of us without tenure or a big bank account. The level of risk that has been thrust upon the bottom 90% over the past 20 years or so, with little in the way of reward or potential for reward, is felt, but it's not discerned at all by the opinion-makers.

So I'm probably a little happier than I should be when some of the anxiety actually filters up to the elite. We who've been writing about such things aren't really helped by the occasional light than dawns on the big folks; nevertheless, when a "real" economist sees what we see, it's gratifying far beyond any potential real effect.

Therefore, I "enjoyed" reading Why We're So Gloomy, which pivots off a Washington Post piece that offers the standard, everything-is-OK, it's-probably-just-that-negative-media spin on why consumer confidence is so low. EconomistMom takes a different tack, believing that we may well feel the way we do because "much of what we’re seeing in the short-run economy is symptomatic of longer-run challenges that aren’t going to go away within the next few months or even years."

Gas won't go back down, home prices will not rise quickly enough to allow us to use our equity as we planned, health care prices keep going up and up, layoffs will continue -

I think there is this feeling of much more permanent unsustainability that we are seeing repeatedly in our daily economy–little doses of daily evidence that we have been living beyond our means.

While the post ends with the feeling that our national will may be able to counteract some of these large, long-term trends, and I think it minimizes the very real concerns about jobs and how education fits into career paths, it is on the whole, I think, dead on.

In a way that transcends simple lack of confidence, I believe Americans are getting some sense as to how their children are likely to live, the extent to which our leaders have neglected so many issues for so long that weaknesses have emerged in the very system. Can they be fixed? It's not clear that the remedy isn't just about as bad as the illness, and the perfect storm of problems has coincided with one of the most negligent governments in our history. I've said before that I see disruptions coming to our way of life that will not yield to simple solutions, that we need to reconcile ourselves to a somewhat lesser life than we anticipated. It doesn't have to be a catastrophe, we don't have to buy into a James Howard Kunstler-esque view (though that is within the realm of possibility), but our casual abundance will be, simply, less than it is. I'd rather see us prepare for that than to insist that magic will happen, that we can continue on our same path. It's good to know that others are beginning to see this too.

Crime statistics

Interesting post by the Wall Street Journal's The Numbers Guy about the possible undercounting of murders in Houston, and he makes two points about crime statistics: "(1) They are self-reported, and therefore subject to fudging; and (2) Despite their weaknesses, the stats have a broad influence."

I spent a couple of years going to school and living in the Hyde Park section of Chicago (now famous as the home of Barack Obama). At the time, the bordering areas hadn't seen any gentrification, so Hyde Park was considered an enclave of safety in the midst of a pretty nasty place. And official Chicago Police Department (CPD) statistics bore that out.

Yet...the first day on campus we were "oriented," and a lot of time was spent on how careful we should be, and not just if we ventured out of the roughly 1 square mile of Hyde Park. It was made very clear, especially to female students, that caution needed to be exercised within the boundaries of the neighborhood.

Some of this was undoubtedly for the benefit of the urban-challenged among us; if you had spent your young life on the farm, then went to Iowa City for college, it would be natural to suppose that your street-smart instincts might be somewhat lacking even in a relatively safe area of Chicago. But the message still seemed somewhat at odds with the concept of Hyde Park as safe oasis.

As we soon learned, the "oasis" idea was not quite right. While the area was not anarchic lawlessness, neither was it the urban equivalent of a leafy suburb. It was part of a city, a sometimes-dangerous city, and vigilance was not to be discarded.

What was happening, and this was borne out by talking to people who had lived there longer, was that campus security was handling a lot of the crime that would, in other neighborhoods, be the sole province of CPD. And not simply handling it, but failing to report it (I did not know then, nor do I still know, what the requirement is for this reporting, so I cannot say that there was anything legally wrong with that practice).

Ever since that time, I have taken reported crime statistics with a huge grain of salt, and treated them like any other statistics. Try to understand any incentives people have for reporting them as they do (in the Hyde Park case, a big desire to make the university look more attractive), look for alternative explanations (the presence of a surprisingly large campus police force), and understand that, in the real world, small gradations are rarely significant.

Who am I?

Today's post will not be as existential as that title may imply. Instead, it is prompted by an e-mail I received from Kyle Leonard, managing editor of Triblocal, a new concept in local reporting that is "sponsored" by the Chicago Tribune. I was pretty critical of its print edition last week in a post and in a letter to the Public Editor of the Tribune. (Given my level of readership, I'm surprised even to have been noticed by Mr. Leonard, but it is one of the vagaries of the Internet that, when you Google "kyle leonard" triblocal, my humble post comes up fifth; bizarrely, my old post on "shannon carlson" "us cellular" still comes up first, so there's no accounting for the Internet.)

At any rate, Mr. Leonard sent me an e-mail:

Nice blog...we put our names on our writing. Why don't you?

I responded:

Thanks for the kind words.

As for your question, I gave that very issue a lot of thought when I began writing my blog. I weighed the pros and cons, and very narrowly fell on the side of anonymity, largely because I exist in a different frame from that which you, as an employee of a large newspaper, inhabit.

The only real pro I could come up with in "publishing" under my real name is that doing so might lend some credibility that I may not have, at least to some people (though, in an Internet world in which new identities can be created and discarded, that may be less important now than it has been). But my real name carries no cachet, no particular identity that would add to or detract from my believability. I am a fairly average person of no fame, of no particular reputation, and my identity is of no more importance than the name "Androcass." Would my credentials, such as they are, be more acceptable if they could be checked? Would you be more likely to believe that I have two master's degrees, or 25 years of experience in business and technical companies, or have run 10 races of marathon length or longer, if I signed my real name? Perhaps, but if you saw my readership numbers, you would know that establishing my bona fides to my vast public is a pretty low priority for me.

And what of the cons? The greatest of these is that I might feel constrained in what I can say based on my real situation, whereas Androcass, living outside of this world, can say what he likes. As an example, as a real person who finds himself in a precarious employment situation, I probably have to consider a job with any company that would have me, even, say, United Airlines.

As Androcass, I have called United Airlines "perhaps the worst-run major company in the history of the U.S." I believe that to be true, but I would hardly like that to show up in a pre-employment Google search when I am a finalist for a job. Cop-out? Probably, but a reasonable one to me given the constraints in which I live.

For I do not have the luxury of being backed up by a large media concern, with its legal staff and layers of editors. I don't profess to be a journalist, and, even if I were, that would have no protective force when it came time for UA to turn me down for employment because I made a negative comment about them. And, though I try very hard to be even-handed and reasonable in what I write, I haven't the resources to research libel laws, nor to defend myself against them if someone got it into their heads to object to something I write.

And there is some precedent in the mainstream press for my stance. We don't have to go all the way back to Publius to establish this (though this quote from Federalist 1 seems apropos: "My motives must remain in the depository of my own breast: My arguments will be open to all, and may be judged of by all."). The Chicago Tribune itself prints unsigned editorials, a stance only slightly mitigated by its annual exposure of the editorial board. Clearly, your employer finds some justification for that practice.

It is not my desire here to be contentious at all, merely to explicate my thinking on this subject. However, I respectfully point out that your own publication is not exactly pure on this point. Last week's Naperville Triblocal featured a front-page article by "Naper Days 2008 PR Marketing," which is only slightly more of an identifier than "Androcass." Furthermore, knowing a name is often insufficient to discern the intent of the writing behind the name, something I have read that you have had to personally deal with in the recent past in your political coverage.

You may think my reasons less than convincing, which is your right. After all, your name is right out there for the world to see. The difference, of course, is that you are paid for what you do, and have an amendment and a big company to back you up. None of those applies to me; until one or more of them do, I shall remain veiled in my alternate persona. I'll leave what few readers I have to decide whether that invalidates the value of my opinions.

Thanks for writing.

Androcass

Bonus coverage:

In a strange bit of synchronicity(??), I received another e-mail on the same topic, from a Frank Skeffington:

Why isn't your name posted on your blog?

Are you ashamed of your opinions or afraid to be associated with them?

Why do you not assert responsibility for your opinions? You have no trouble posting them? Do you fear accountability? Why linger in the shadows?

Why do you criticize people by name but hide your identity?

Did your parents not love you enough?

A friend thinks you were abused as a child.

Did one of your relatives abuse you, perhaps your father or a sick uncle?

Are you a coward?

What are you so afraid of?

I don't have much to say, except to point out that Frank Skeffington is a character in the novel and movie The Last Hurrah, so it is possible that the very person casting aspersions on my motivations is him- or herself pseudonymical. Otherwise, I'll just offer the opinion that whomever is sending e-mail under frankskeffington91@gmail.com is almost certainly not qualified as a practitioner of psychoanalysis, and leave it at that.

Fine whine

This will be my 23rd post of the month, which means I'm tracking well behind the other months of this year in terms of posting. It's been harder to motivate myself this month, and I'm not 100% certain why that is. I know the exciting Democratic primary is over, so the ebb and flow of that are now absent. It's summer, and one can always find interesting things to do in the summer that don't involve sitting at a computer, formulating thoughts, and trying to express them in quasi-coherent fashion.

But there's an extra anomie in me that is starting to break down the extent to which I even have the desire to maintain the every-day habit. Back on January 1, when I pledged to myself to write each day, I didn't put a particular timeframe on it; I just wanted to create a new habit (so I would post more than the once a month I managed last year). I'm in a state, now, where I'm not even sure I want to read myself, my own work, and, when you get there, it becomes harder to think that anyone else might want to either.

What I'm trying to figure out now, is this a reflection of a generalized feeling about the world? I have some building frustrations about certain things, and I suspect I may be laying those off on the activity that has consumed somewhat more of my time and attention than I originally expected.

Something that I find counterintuitive, when I started writing regularly, I thought that it would provide a safety valve, that by writing about some of the things which I find, say, disappointing about the world, I would feel better about them. I don't think that's happened at all; rather, I find these things even more aggravating than I do before I start writing.

I'm going to have to spend some more time thinking about this subject, maybe take a break, let some of the other fine Androcassian-thinking people take the ball for a while. For now, I'll continue to lump along, searching for inspiration. Thanks for listening.

Sometimes...

there is nothing much I can add. So go to Carrie's Nation, read this, and decide if we are even close to understanding what our needs are when we talk about immigration policy. The H-1B question has been so misreported by the media; the press has just acted as a pass-through for monied interests.

There is a lot to discuss here: the real need for foreign talent in certain professions, the extent to which we're working to identify that talent, the possible long-term effects of segmenting off certain professions to immigrant labor (allowing those professions to move when the visas run out), the effects to this country on ceding certain job categories, the effects on our education system, and so forth. I don't like to have a knee-jerk reaction to issues like these, because that very emotionalism leads to poor policy choices, but when I see the forces arrayed on one side, forces that have powerful incentives to take the positions they're taking (I'm talking to you, Bill Gates), it's natural to leap in the other direction.

I don't know the right number of H-1B visas to offer - but neither does Congress, Bill Gates, Infosys, Wipro, or anyone else. I do know that much of the common rhetoric that's reported makes no sense, that shortages should lead to higher wages and a dream environment for people with skills, and that's not happening. I know that fine reporting from Citizen Carrie and others demonstrates that Indians themselves get quite the chuckle at how our policies are helping them.

Sure, I have incentives, too. As a software guy, I want an array of possible jobs at desirable locations with great perks and big bucks. I want to be able to write my own ticket. I want people to look at me for what I can bring to their table, and not what year I was born.

But everyone can see my biases. Why can't we equally see that Mr. Gates has similar biases, that Microsoft and he make more money if they can get more visas? It doesn't mean that his point of view should be ignored, it does mean it shouldn't be the only one considered. Why is this so hard to see?

And for someone who had nothing to add, I sure wrote a lot.

Does this exist?

I don't really have enough regular readers to ask questions of them, though I kind of wish I did. You know, where you post something tentative, then throw it open to the crowd. If you're Matt Yglesias or Kevin Drum or Andrew Sullivan, you get back all kinds of responses, and a few of them are actually meaningful. Yglesias, for example, has taken to asking his readers for ideas on future blog posts - would that we all had such a way to generate ideas.

Nonetheless, I am going to do that today in faint hopes of getting a useful answer. Does anyone out there know of a notification system for the comments you yourself leave on other blogs, notification of subsequent comments? It's similar to what I found, somewhat belatedly, as an option in Blogger to notify my e-mail account of comments on my posts. But what I'm looking for now is a way to find out if the discussion is continuing on other sites.

Because now, if I make a comment on another blog, and the discussion continues, I have to go back and look to see if there are more comments if I'm to continue to engage. If I forget where I made a comment, I can lose the thread entirely. So, if anyone out there knows, feel free to give me a pointer.

Give me libertarianism or give me...anything else

I have friends who lean Libertarian, calling themselves "closet Libertarians" or "Libertarians in basic philosophy." Most of them, being smart people, are also pragmatic and recognize that there is no real movement to the party of that name, and so, somewhat uneasily, forge a compromise between their leanings and their reality.

I'm not going to launch into a critique of libertarianism today. I understand its attraction, even have some leanings that way myself, but there are two aspects of it that cause it problems and, I believe, will prevent it from ever being a major political force (in and of itself; its influence may well be felt, for good or for bad - I'm talking about the concept of a Libertarian Party).

The two aspects actually have one root cause: Libertarianism is a philosophy. What this implies is that it is very hard to define libertarianism in the context of the real world. One needs only read the Wikipedia entry to see how up in the air it is. Even if you accept the current-day common definition, that libertarianism restricts the role of government to providing for common defense and protecting of property rights, that still leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Again, this is not the post for me to look at specifics, other than to point out that most of our existing laws can be construed as protection of our property rights, depending on how we define "protection," "our," "property," and "rights."

The second problem is that our political system doesn't really accommodate pure philosophies. I'm no expert on how other countries work, so, when I read that Italy has put the Socialist party in power, I'm never really sure what that means (though I have a feeling that the multipartite structure of their government doesn't allow "pure" socialism to take hold).

Our parties are labeled Republican and Democratic, and we associate them with conservative and liberal labels, respectively, but they are far from pure. And there are liberal Republicans (though very few now) and conservative Democrats (probably a larger number), whereas it's hard to be a "kind-of" Libertarian.

There is also a personal aspect to pure libertarianism, perhaps best expressed in the Objectivism of Ayn Rand (and yet, unbeknownst to many, there are huge conflicts between Rand-ians and other libertarian movements), that is remarkably off-putting to the vast majority of Americans. We like to think of ourselves as independent actors, each wrapped in a cocoon of individual achievement, but we really aren't; there is a collective sense of what it means to be an American that is easily offended by a philosophy that is so resolutely individualistic.

I'm actually happy there are libertarians. Their ideas provide a counterweight to the power-accreting tendencies of government, and it is this push and pull which offers the best chance to achieve a balance that accomplishes the objectives of our nation. But Libertarians, as a party, I don't see that ever becoming a serious force in this country. It just runs too counter to the overall self-view of the American people.

Happy Father's Day

I never really got to know my father, he passed away when I was five, and I never really heard a lot about him, as my mother couldn't get over his leaving her with the problems of forging a career and raising two boys (I'm not sure she ever advanced beyond anger in the five stages). And I am not a father, as my life didn't really work in a way that could have made that happen.

So Father's Day is not a concept that has a lot of resonance to me, I just don't feel it as I've never celebrated it. But being a father is an incredibly important job, one that has, I think, been overshadowed by the concept of "mother." Fathers are often treated as uninvolved buffoons in popular culture, maligned in a way that no other group could be these days. While there has been some progress, our court system still systematically downgrades the rights of fathers.

And so, to all of you guys who are fathers or are about to become fathers, enjoy your day, take some real pride in what you do, no matter how maligned, the other 364. Happy Father's Day, all!

It's only money

In an otherwise workmanlike account of Thursday's exciting Chicago Cubs game, Dave van Dyck of the Chicago Tribune begins:

On their first day without Alfonso Soriano, their $136 million left fielder, the Cubs won a game with two players they will pay about $600,000—combined—this season.

The implication is, of course, that $600K is just a trifle, that one could hardly expect players working for such a paltry sum to perform at a major league level.

But it's all relative, and I'm not taking van Dyck to task; the minimum salary in major league baseball is $390,000, so getting two productive players for $600,000 (they make the rest of their salary out of payments from their previous teams) is truly a bargain in the context of today's professional sports.

My point is, how remarkable that a reporter would toss this number in and count on every reader to understand the context. Salaries are so high, and so commonly accepted as high, that it's commonplace for a reporter to cite this as evidence of poverty - and we all read it and understand.

I don't need comments telling me what I already know, why the limited supply and insatiable demand for sports creates huge income streams and the players are just getting their due. There's a good chance I've read more than you have about the economics of professional sports.

I'm just making an observation as to how casual we've become about these matters; an athlete or entertainer makes millions, the Forbes Celebrity 100 draws quite a bit of interest, and it's ho-hum, just the way the world works.

I could go on and write something about the dubious power of Ashley Tisdale (#94) or the Jonas Brothers (#89), contrast it to the very real unseen struggles of the great majority of Americans, point out that three chimps could open for Miley Cyrus and make $12 million, but my readers are smart enough to fill in those blanks for themselves.

Tim Russert

Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press, has just passed away at 58. I certainly have had some criticisms of him, never really buying into the commonly-held idea that he was the toughest questioner of them all or anything like that, but he was a knowledgeable guy who lived and breathed politics, and we need more of them. It is truly sad that he did not live to see the outcome of this very interesting year.

Condolences to his family and friends.

We write it, we read it?

As I referred to last week, the Chicago Tribune is planning some unspecified cuts, likely to take place by the end of September. Their Public Editor (something of an ombudsman), Timothy McNulty, talks about those cuts today:

Why do you read the newspaper? Let me put it another way: What do you value in the newspaper?

For those not keeping up with the news about the media world, there are radical changes afoot.

A week ago, the new executives of Tribune Co. told lenders that their newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, are going to be radically "right-sized" in keeping with reduced advertising revenue.

Plainly, that means "downsizing" the paper you are holding; it will have fewer pages and fewer people to produce the stories. This isn't a "less-is-better" argument; this is a "less-is-what-we-can-afford" moment.

In addition to that, the current publisher is stepping down. McNulty goes on to discuss the different ways readers use the newspaper, but accepts that there will be major changes:

That's what the journalists here are focusing on now: how to re-engineer the newspaper to accommodate financial realities and still remain true to the traditions of the Chicago Tribune and its commitment to provide readers with the best news-gathering and information possible.

Very little is sacrosanct. Different formats could save newsprint, sections can be collapsed, and a magazine or a tabloid-style presentation may be more readable. Stories can always be cut back, and sometimes a chart is a faster read than a narrative.

There will be redesign, just as there has been several times in the past, but this will, I suspect, be much more dramatic. Physical changes will alter the look and feel of the paper. Not that that will be the first time; the paper you are reading now is an inch and a half narrower than it was eight years ago.

McNulty solicits comments, but I doubt those will be of much help to the people "re-engineering" the paper. If I had to guess, the journalists will be allowed the first crack at the changes, the money guys will analyze those and decide they're not enough (since the journalists will still want to retain things like news), and the journalists will be required to stand back and watch the pillars fall. Some will get crushed under them.

There are those who think these changes are possible without hurting the quality of the newspaper. One often cited is that, in a multi-newspaper company, there is no need for each paper to have a film reviewer. Instead, there will be one reviewer for the whole chain.

While that seems plausible, it ignores the very real connections that readers feel with the bylines. The late Gene Siskel was quite beloved, there was pride in this local figure going national, and those feelings simply wouldn't exist if the critic came out of L.A. Is there value in those feelings? I don't know, but I do know a lot of marketing and advertising is built around trying to create that sense of connection, and it seems counterproductive to get rid of it.

Perhaps, though, the Tribune has already tipped its hand as to the kinds of changes they foresee. In yesterday's paper, we received an extra section titled Triblocal (I guess that's Trib-local, not Tri-blocal). Apparently, Triblocal's web site has been up since April, and, according to "managing editor" Kyle Leonard (I guess it's more friendly to put Kyle's title in lower case), it "has been serving the communities of Naperville, Lisle, and Aurora in a new and exciting way." Tell me more, Kyle.

Your friends and neighbors have reported news, posted events and shared their photos on Triblocal.com. Now we will share the best of each site every week.

Our small team of writers will deliver stories we think will be of interest to you, but we want you to post the news important to your lives on Triblocal.com.

Essentially, this is Web 2.0 seeping back into Life 1.0, what some have called "citizen journalism," in which the readers themselves create the content. In the case of Triblocal, the web material will be filtered back into a weekly newspaper, 24 pages in yesterday's version, that is designed to create more interest in the web site, and in this circular fashion will snowball into, well, what?

[By the way, Kyle wrote an article for Harvard's Nieman Reports about this endeavor:

Citizen journalism, as it’s called, isn’t really journalism. Instead it resembles what you’d hear in small town barbershop conversations. It’s stories about you, your neighbors, your friends, sometimes your town leaders, and what’s happening in your life and in the place you call home.

If citizen journalism isn't really journalism, is the print edition really a newspaper? Let's see.]

There are roughly 22 stories in Triblocal. (There is also a local events calendar that is, apparently, the result of reader submissions.) Four of them were written by Naperville/Aurora reporter Patricia Murphy. One was written by Triblocal.com staff reporter Mary Rakoczy. One was written by Triblocal.com staff reporter Jeff Vorva. (By the way, these three also took the pictures; apparently, there is no room for professional photographers.) One was the introduction by managing editor Kyle Leonard.

Which leaves 15 articles that were written by PR and marketing people. The articles promote upcoming festivals and concerts, or they're warmed-over press releases. There is an article taglined, "Aurora Dist. 129 details pursuit of excellence," and it's a puff piece written by the school district outlining all the wonderful things they'll be doing with new referendum money.

Is this journalism? Perhaps it's not supposed to be. Kyle:

Technology enables what gets sent to TribLocal to flow directly into a publishing system built on templates. Seven staff members of TribLocal are able to do the work that in a less automated setting would require 15, maybe more. Our four “reporters” also work as editors, photographers, designers and ambassadors. As managing editor, I help to layout pages, edit stories, and direct Web site-to-publication workflow.

It's interesting that "reporters" is in quotes, and that anyone would think of a journalist as an "ambassador." (It's also troubling that managing editor Kyle doesn't know that "layout" is a noun.)

Kyle believes that he has achieved a 50-50 split between stories and ads, but 2/3 of the stories are, in effect, ads. Are there things that people want to know about? Sure. Are they a reflection of journalism? Absolutely not.

One might hope that Triblocal will evolve over time, that reporters will "begin to report on issues that are crucial to the community." But they've gone to press with this lackluster first issue, and, I suspect, as long as they can sell ad space, they'll continue whether it improves or not.

Let's not pretend about what's going on here. The Tribune wants its readers to do the work, to write the stories and take the pictures, then the corporate conglomerate will reap the profits. Might this be the future for the main Tribune? Might they move to a "participatory" model, in which much of the newspaper is taken up with advocates and flacks masquerading as reporters? This is frightening to those of us who believe that the daily newspaper might possibly have some standards, some sense of larger purpose. It tilts the editor vs. publisher model so far towards the bean-counters that truth will fall through the cracks.

[Note: I have found an article written in January by Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader that anticipates some of my points, and finds a specific case where a "citizen contributor" was using Triblocal as an avenue for political flackery. Miner also talks to Kyle Leonard and discovers that the main job of their "reporters" is to stir up interest in Triblocal.com.]

Quasi-empire?

Interesting post by Andrew Sullivan, in which he responds to a reader who dislikes Sullivan's use of the term "empire." Without getting into the specifics of the post itself (Sullivan pretty well captures my thinking on this, and I still think we need to put ourselves into other people's heads - how would we feel if Canada decided to garrison some troops in Wichita, no matter how noble the stated reason?), I'm fascinated that so much of the argument concerns the term.

Without getting into Sapir or Whorf or Saussure here, there are times when we really do frame our arguments based on the words we have. Maybe our presence in Iraq is not the expression of empire, but it's something, and a lack of a word for it should not (but often does) constrain our discussion.

I had a similar experience about a month ago when a post of mine received fairly harsh comments from a reader over the term "recession." That many people in this country are hurting seems to me of far more importance than the term we use to describe it, but, to this one reader, the way to cast aspersions on my idea was to point out that the term was not wholly accurate.

So we have a presence in Iraq that isn't quite an empire, and we have an economic situation that isn't quite a recession. Can we find new words for these concepts, or, barring that, discuss them on the merits rather than worrying about which term applies?

The invaluable ones

Greg Glockner has mastered something which I have been unable to do - he writes for two blogs at once, his own, Greg's Rants, which features his thoughts on "technology and business" but delves into other matters (such as his dissatisfaction with the non-race, Bay to Breakers), and his corporate blog, Decidedly, which focuses on, well, business and technology. (As you have seen, I maintain only the one blog, so everything goes in here, from soup to nuts.) (Disclaimer: I have known Greg for years, meeting him back when he was a violin-playing math competitor - now he is a marathon-running COO.)

Despite the separation of the two blogs, occasionally Greg will find some synchronicity, as he does this week with his rant, CEO week, and his corporate post, The king is dead - long live the king. Both posts talk about CEOs, a topic I've talked about a time or two. In the first, Greg links to a Business Week item that laments the lack of good CEOs, and infers that the message is that "senior executives are the only ones who matter, while other employees are expendable." In the second, the salient point is: "Seems like the board of directors should be doing a cost-benefit analysis when hiring a CEO."

One thing that's interesting here is that Greg is a business executive, so we would tend to take his opinions more seriously than, say, mine (which also makes The Corporate Cynic so invaluable). But now we're into my opinions, and I would argue that what Greg is noting is an absolute failure in business terms, and threatens the system we're counting on to lead us into the future.

I worked for a few years for a small consulting firm, small enough that I got to know the CEO reasonably well. This fellow had the look of a CEO, he could go on for hours about the industry and how technology could be applied, and he came off very well with customers and other movers and shakers. But he had one flaw: he had no idea how to deal with people and their issues.

When I started, there was a triumvirate of really good middle managers serving to buffer this CEO from actual employees (and there were only about 30 of those in the whole company). Fairly quickly, though, those managers peeled off, and the CEO was left to deal with real people. And he became utterly undone. What he did do was to search for a savior, someone who could re-buffer him. He was terrible at it, finding a succession of people who were ill-equipped to handle what should have been his role, until he found a COO who essentially ran the company into the ground.

My point here is that boards of directors do the same thing. They have no idea how the company should be run (even the outside CEOs who sit on the board don't take the time to understand how this company works, and the non-CEOs can't possibly do so), so they tend to grasp at straws. When someone comes in for an interview who has energy and ideas, the board jumps, giving the candidate anything they want if they'll just make all the problems go away.

Cost-benefit analysis? You've got to be kidding. I know, it seems odd that we have more of an idea of marginal contribution for a baseball shortstop then we do for someone who is going to run a major enterprise, but it's true.

But there is also a pernicious problem built into this. Remember, the CEO is being hired to do everything, to walk on water, and being compensated accordingly (and the compensation structure, purportedly based on bringing value to the company, is hugely flawed). Anyone who has spent any time in business knows that's not possible, that there are real challenges that won't yield to a hearty handshake and an ability to schmooze stock analysts. So investors and the board quickly become disillusioned, the CEO gets the heave-ho, and off we go in search of the next savior ("and if we just offer them even more money, we'll get the right person - this time").

There are some people, including even the usually level-headed Robert Reich, who believe that CEOs are worth the money because of the added value they bring. Lee Raymond as head of ExxonMobil brought $16 billion of extra value to the company, and got only 4% of that, and many would cite that as appropriate. I might be willing to accept that if under-performing CEOs had to give money back, and if other employees were evaluated the same way.

Because, pursuant to Greg's first point, it is frequently the case that the CEO is not even the most valuable person in the company. Do we really believe that the media-seeking Carly Fiorina was the most important person in Hewlett-Packard, or was it an engineer who came up with salable technology? But that engineer is invisible to the board, and the shareholders, and the analysts, and so is "expendable" as soon as an executive convinces him/herself that the new grad in South Korea could do the same thing for less money.

Perhaps one day we will realize that the celebrity culture that has grown up around CEOs is wrong, that more than one person is responsible when a company pulls in $15.6 million per employee. If that ever happens, and it's a big if, CEOs will be compensated more in line with what they actually do, and we'll have reasonable expectations of what they actually can do. At the same time, we'll have a lot more respect for the guy or gal who comes in every day and does their job, and we'll be less likely to treat them as a fungible, costly commodity. I'm not holding my breath.

What I'd like to see in debates

It still seems to be up in the air as to what kind of debates Obama and McCain will hold (though I hope they maintain their resistance to more of the ABC-style junkfests in which ersatz journalists ask nothing questions). But I would like to see a change to the typical format in which someone, whether talking head or average citizen, asks a question, the candidate answers with a talking point only obliquely relevant to the question, then points the throng to the campaign web site to read a white paper that explicates the talking point.

What I want to see is the questioner ask the candidate, What is the goal of [something]? That is, what should a well-working economy do? What should be the objective of an energy policy? What are the true national interests of the United States versus those of other countries? What is the goal of a health system?

Since the answers are likely to be vague, the questioner will have to be relentless in getting the candidate to lay out their thoughts. If a candidate says, for example, that America needs to be energy-independent, let's delve into that - does that mean if wind power is to be a major component of the independent strategy, that we'll restrict all manufacturing of blades and turbines to this country? If a health care plan is to give basic health care to all citizens, let's talk about how we can provide certain specialty physicians to rural North Dakota.

Once we understand what the basic beliefs of the candidates are, we can evaluate their current policies as laid out in the white papers, but we would also have a basis for evaluating what their actions would be in unforeseen situations. If a candidate believes that the free market is paramount, then it should be obvious that he or she will not support an expansion of bankruptcy laws that allows a company like United Airlines to survive, to enrich its executives while stiffing employees, retirees, shareholders, and suppliers. UA and other poorly-run corporations will have to sink or swim.

One problem that this scheme avoids is the abhorrence of hypotheticals that any smart candidate holds. The question is not, what do we do if China invades Taiwan? It's, should we always uphold agreements we have made with foreign governments? If not, what would present a compelling national interest that could allow us to break those agreements?

Of course, the probability of such a debate format is pretty much zero; I said it's what I'd like to see, not what I expected ever to see. But it sure would beat flag pin and real estate developer questions.

Psychodrama

It's occurred to me that the political events of the past week have led me not to joy, but to relief. While there's still an arduous general election campaign to go through, the finish of the Democratic primary race has been a long time coming. I've expressed before my general preference for Obama over Clinton, and I won't rehash the reasons now that it's over; I've also expressed my reservations about my choice - I'm willing to walk beside the bandwagon, not ready to hop on just yet.

Now that things have quieted down somewhat, the pundits have moved on to the vice-presidential choices, and their favorite speculation is the "dream ticket" of Obama-Clinton. I'm not in favor of this for a number of reasons, primary among them that Obama needs to establish his independence from the previous party dominance of the Clintons.

Of somewhat more interest are the post mortes that are being done on the Clinton campaign. Much is being made of sexism as a factor in Hillary's failure when the evidence of that being a net negative is sketchy. The campaign brain trust clearly suffered from hubris, severely underestimating the Obama challenge (and overestimating the extent to which Hillary could turn around her huge negatives).

In the end, however, I think the biggest factor was this: America is sick and tired of the Clinton psychodrama, the Billary marriage dynamic, the probing into the minds of these personalities.

Sure, there is a fascination with it, how Hillary has dealt with her husband's recklessness, what has driven her as she has tried to emerge from Bill's large shadow, what they actually talk about in Chappaqua at night after flipping off Letterman. Books are written, books are sold, (some) books are read, and those tomes will continue to come as the nation tries to understand this family. The comparisons to Shakespearean plays will propagate (Hillary as Romeo, Bill as Juliet, with James Carville as the Nurse) as analysts reach to find some analogy to make sense of their turbulence.

But, interesting as some of this is, the nation is faced with stark and simple-to-understand problems. There's an economy, a war, an occupation, a warming planet, a lack of cheap energy resources, a food crisis, a water crisis, and on, and on. We're hungry for our leaders to understand that these are problems, real problems, and that they are planning to take a stab and making them better. What is entertaining against a relatively benign backdrop (the '90s do seem somehow quiet and simple now, don't they?) is distracting in the world we face at the moment.

I, for one, don't want to have to think about how President Hillary will tamp down her past demons about the failure of her earlier health care initiative when wading into the fight; I just want a president who will zero-base the problem and make some progress with it. I don't want to have to think about what role Bill would play in the government, even if he's Second Dude instead of First; I'm perfectly content to have him jet around and support foreign dictators in return for putting another shelf in the presidential library (or whatever is done with all that money).

The Kennedy family went through that same kind of collective fatigue, I believe. While it seems this country will always have an interest in their doings, there seems to have been a serious decline in the utter fascination (which, paradoxically, has allowed Ted to be more effective as a senator). Similarly, I expect to see articles about Chelsea the rest of my life, but banking the fires of interest in the Clintons can only help.

I think the country as a whole is ready for the Clintons to move away from center stage, to start taking the character roles that more befit people who have started to melt from the footlights. Enough, already.

A thought on race

Via Andrew Sullivan, a post by Ta-Nehisi Coates titled, Message to the White Man: We're not thinking about you:

One of the most poisonous ideas to emerge out of the cultural wars of the 80s and 90s was this portrait of black America as a hotbed of radical leftists who spend their days berating Jews, demanding reparations, and thinking of new and exciting ways to make white folks feel guilty. I think that image has come to dominate because so many public intellectuals working in the arena of race began to confuse the debates occurring in the sociology departments of elite campuses and in the salons of the Upper West Side, with the debates that rank and file black folks have amongst themselves. No disrespect, but New York City and the Ivy Leagues may be the most distortive influences on the picture of black life, short of BET.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an African-American writer who really hadn't figured on my radar much until the past few weeks when he guest blogged at Political Animal. Some pretty interesting stuff, and I'm going to follow him for a while and see what he has to say.

The quote above is from a longer piece about Obama and racial identity and the real attitudes of black people; it's almost too full of ideas. So let me just talk about the quote, because I think Coates misses one thing, one vital person who did a lot to frame that debate - Jesse Jackson. (He does mention Al Sharpton, and has written perceptive articles in the past about the reverend's irrelevance. But I don't think Sharpton has had the same effect over the long haul across the entire nation as Jackson.)

Jackson has been the voice, at least in the media, of the African-American community (to the point where he is credited as the person who popularized the adoption of the term "African-American" over "black"). One can make the argument that no one person should be given that responsibility, to speak for a large and diverse group, but that's what happened, and it certainly wasn't a title that Jackson eschewed.

And every one of the items that Coates discusses, the berating of Jews ("Hymietown"), reparations, white guilt, each of these was a major component of the Jesse Jackson strategy for keeping himself in the limelight. It is very hard to argue that Jackson was simply the product of "New York City and the Ivy Leagues," especially when he spent so much time presenting himself as the man of the people, the heir to Martin Luther King.

Was the media too quick to anoint Jackson as their go-to guy concerning any and all black issues? Probably. Did Jackson truly represent the views of black America, if there is any such thing? Probably not. But you cannot legitimately discuss the white America attitude toward black America over the last 30 or so years without mentioning the role of Jesse Jackson.

Jim McKay, 1921-2008

There are all too few people in public life who strike me as being essentially decent people, decent in the sense that they are unwilling to impose themselves too much on a situation. The job of politician seems incompatible with this, as they see their role to control the arena. The same is true of executives or lawyers, who may be fine individuals, caring and involved, but are perhaps too disposed to ensuring that everyone knows they're on the scene.

I've worked for a few, too few, people who had this innate decency, who reacted to situations as they truly were, giving credit where it belonged, fading into the background when warranted. I've known others with this self-effacing quality, but they don't tend to fare well in our chest-thumping, credit-taking culture.

It's always dangerous to assume you know anything about people you see on a screen or in print. As much as I might want to ascribe positive qualities to, say, Michael Jordan or Barack Obama, I don't know either, so I run the risk of being disappointed if I were ever to discover the real person.

However, when you've grown up allowing someone into your family room or den, even through the one-way medium of television, and you've never heard anything to contradict the view you want to hold, the image becomes powerful, and you tend to go with it.

So I feel the loss of sports broadcaster Jim McKay, a man who covered even the most bizarre "sports" with respect, understanding that those participating took barrel jumping as seriously as most of us treat football. The ESPN biography to which I linked has all the facts, so I won't recount them here. All of the tributes mention his work at the 1972 Olympic tragedy; I can never forget that wrenching time and the way that McKay helped us through it (in a way that would never be possible today; the news division would immediately big-foot it and we wouldn't see the sports people until the games came back).

Jim McKay is one of those fellows, few of whom seem to be produced in this very-different era, who understand that the event's the thing. I can think of a few others, perhaps the exemplar of which is Dick Enberg. That McKay cared about cliff diving made me care about cliff diving, and he would bring us enough of the people behind the event to show us why we should.

So, thank you and goodbye, Jim McKay.

[Note: my wife pointed out that McKay's signature phrase, "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," probably couldn't be uttered today. It would more likely be, "the thrill of victory and the inspirational character-building experience of defeat."]

Error-correcting language

How large would our language have to be to be self-correcting, or at least error-flagging? If you're at all familiar with error detection schemes, you know that the goal is to present the receiver of a message with: 1) the information needed to correct a faulty message, or 2) minimally, the information to know that the message is faulty, allowing a request to retransmit.

What I want is to be able to type a passage in which I would have all typing errors flagged. For example, I often type "tome" instead of "time"; since "tome" is a legal word, it isn't flagged by spell check. So I guess what my real question is, how could we create a language in a specific keyboard context for which we couldn't have those errors?

But then, I also wouldn't want the kind of errors where I forget one keystroke ("wan" is a word, so leaving the final 't' off "want," as I just did, should be flagged). That makes creating the language even more difficult ("an" could be a word, but we couldn't then have "any," "ant," etc.).

This strikes me as a worthwhile problem for someone to work on, if it hasn't been done already (not that I'm volunteering). I suppose any such language would feature too many long words, would probably not be utterable, would be unworkable. It is kind of an interesting problem, though....

Place in history

[For personal reasons, a very short piece today...]

As the time grows nearer for the end of the Bush 43 years, I will probably have more to say about where I think history's judgment will weigh on these eight years. But there are people discussing this already, and Andrew Sullivan points us to a debate between Daniel Larison and Ross Douthat, and how the outcome of the war in Iraq will tell Bush's story as people of the future look back.

In brief, my feeling is this: Even if Iraq ends up a wild, exceeds-expectations success, Bush will get very little credit for it. Instead, the credit will go to some Iraqi who will be seen as the symbol of the new Iraq. It is typical, and probably appropriately so, that those from the outside who enabled a major change are not given their due.

de Klerk in South Africa, Johnson in the United States, and so forth generally stand behind the Mandelas and the Kings and the Gandhis. This is entirely logical and inevitable, but it doesn't bode well for Bush to become the symbol of a new democratic nation. It might ameliorate history's judgment, but it is unlikely to reverse it.

Swish

Now that the Democratic race really seems to be over, and all reports are that Hillary really will be leaving the stage, this post by Christopher Orr is a bit dated (though only two days old) - but it's still worth reading.

Right-sizing

The Chicago Tribune is planning to cut back, reducing editorial content to 50% of the paper. Officials have found that there is "a significant discrepancy between the output of individual reporters," and that the productivity ("in terms of sheer output") is higher in their smaller papers than in the big ones.

The implication of that difference in output, as measured by story production is that "We can eliminate a fair amount of people, while eliminating not much copy."

United Airlines is giving up on fighting low-cost carriers by eliminating Ted Airlines, eventually dropping domestic capacity by 18%. They're following American Airlines, which announced a drop in capacity last month.

"At United, we continue to do the right work to reduce costs and increase revenue to respond to record fuel costs and the challenging economic environment."

One tenet of business I learned a long time ago is that you don't cut costs to gain success. The implication is that companies succeed by finding and producing things that people need, not by reducing the footprint.

But the Tribune and United have decided to go the other way, giving people less of what they want. When is the last time anyone complained that there is just too much news in the paper, or that an airline offers too many flights to a destination? The message to customers is, we're willing to give you less for more, and we'll just keep our fingers crossed that this will make us profitable again.

And there's a great danger that these companies will keep the wrong things. A chill goes through me when I read that productivity in the newspaper game is going to be measured in "story production."

I've seen this before, in the software industry, where periodically someone comes up with the bright idea of measuring "lines of code written" as a way of ascertaining individual productivity. That never works, because the goal should never be lines of code, but well-written code that fulfills a business function. Furthermore, when you're maintaining existing code, one goal should be to reduce the code base (that's the objective of refactoring).

I would rather read a newspaper story of four paragraphs that has some insight or conveys information than one of a full page that has no new content (I have made this letter longer than usual,
because I lack the time to make it short [Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus
longue parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus
courte]~Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales (1656-1657), no. 16, from here).

Similarly, I want to be able to take a plane where I want, when I want. Hey, I understand trade-offs, that I can't always get what I want, but it seems questionable to very publicly announce that you're going to do less of what you do.

Again, I understand the need to reassure investors, and know that a lot of this new smallness is about that. But it poses a great risk, convincing customers that quality won't suffer while you're telling stock analysts that it's all about "right-sizing." It could work out, but gathering less news to compete with an Internet that offers "more" is pretty counter-intuitive.

The corporate tap dance (Part 2)

Yesterday I wrote a post about how the opinion shapers in this country, the corporate executives and their captive politicians, abetted by a lazy press, have had to shift their messages periodically to support their desire to hire whom they want, when they want, at whatever price they want.

Because the message frequently defies logic (our high schools are the worst, but our colleges are the best), it has to be reshaped and modified on a regular basis. In every case, it comes down to sloughing the problems off on someone else (improve the schools, more students should choose to go into technology) and finding ways to impugn the workers who just happen to cost more.

Reluctant as I am to make predictions, I will offer one up, my forecast of the next big idea to come rolling out of the PR machinery that is bought and paid for by Big Industry. We may see it first in an op-ed, or in a magazine article, or a book, who knows, but it will have a big push behind it. It will be presented as the key, the key to national competitiveness and corporate riches and innovation and all the other buzz words that represent the decline that we see around us.

My prediction: loyalty. Any day now I expect to see some grave social scientist drawing a chart that shows that there is a statistically significant correlation between median income and some bundle of attributes that purport to represent loyalty. People make less because they stay in their jobs for a shorter time, they'll say, or because they just don't have that gung-ho corporate spirit. Columnists will pick up on it, spread the idea across the land that Americans simply don't have that sense of comity that will allow them to succeed. A new Tom Friedman will emerge with his or her book, The World is Loyal, which will feature stories of the solidity of Bangladeshis banding together to create new success stories.

And the best part for the espousers will be that logic has already been proven to be suspended when talking about these matters. If a Charlie Rose has the temerity to ask, during a discussion of the "new disloyalty," one of our corporate chiefs why they lay off employees with 15 or 20 years of experience (and, presumably, loyalty), they'll just fall back on one of their extant skills arguments. What's great about this is that it will give the CEO a palette of reasons for their decisions: our employees are stupid, or untrained, or undisciplined, or disloyal, so we have to replace them with other people (those people who just happen to have visas of indenture or, better yet, live in a country with lower expectations). Any possible action will be covered by one of these, for sure.

Obviously, I don't know for certain that loyalty will be the next concept on which corporate America will pin its hopes. It could be something else. But it's pretty powerful, especially in a world in which cause and effect are often confused (in my experience, people stay loyal to their jobs well beyond the time their companies stop being loyal to them).

So I guess we'll see. But if, at this time next year, the New York Times non-fiction bestseller is titled, "Loyalty: How Employee Turncoats are Undermining American Business," just remember, you read it here first.

Not 48, not 24

Andrew Sullivan points us to a post by Hilary Rosen (which he praises by calling it an Yglesias Award Nominee) that states:

Senator Clinton's speech last night was a justifiably proud recitation of her accomplishments over the course of this campaign, but it did not end right. She didn't do what she should have done. As hard and as painful as it might have been, she should have conceded, congratulated, endorsed and committed to Barack Obama. Therefore the next 48 hours are now as important to the future reputation of Hillary Clinton as the last year and a half have been.

The first three sentences are absolutely correct from the standpoint of a Hillary Clinton supporter, as Rosen admits to being (I am personally growing a little tired of the proud, heroic, courageous campaign idea, given her low downside, her ample fallback position of two mansions and $100 mill in the bank, but, whatever).

It's the fourth sentence, the one that gives her 48 hours to do the right thing. Who picked 48? I understand the reluctance of Clinton and her supporters to give up on the dream, but it's over, dead, finished.

I wrote four weeks ago that the time had come, that the party should take action to end this and stop fearing the power of someone who represents the past, and I was not the first or only. It's time for Howard Dean and Donna Brazile to take Hillary by the hand, make her sign a concession statement with shaking hand, and lead her to a beach where she can rest and regain whatever sense she has (and they can drop Terry McAuliffe off at a loony bin on the way).

The corporate tap dance (Part 1)

Tommy Flanagan: Hello, my name is Tommy Flanagan, and I'm a member of Pathological Liars Anonymous. In fact.. I'm the president of the organization!

I didn't always lie. No, when I was a kid, I told the truth. But then one day, I got caught stealing money out of my mother's purse. I lied. I told her it was homework - that my teacher told me to do it. And she got fired! Yeah, that's what happened!

After that, lying was easy for me. I lied about my age and joined the army. I was thirteen at the time. Yeah.. I went to Vietnam, and I was injured catching a mortar shell in my teeth. And they made me a three-star general! And then I got a job in journalism, writing for the National Enquire.. er, Geographic! Yeah.. I was making twenty thousand a ye.. month! In fact, I won the Pulitzer Prize that year! Yeah, that's the ticket.

And then my cousin died - Joe Louis - and I took it hard. Maybe too hard - I tried to kill myself. Yeahh.. I did kill myself! Sure! I was medically dead for a week and a half! It was a woman that brought me out of it - Indira Gandhi! Yeah, right.. And she told me about Pathological Liars Anonymous.

Oh, you'd be surprised how many famous people belong. In fact.. at one of the meetings I met my wife - Morgan Fairchild! Yes, I'm a change man now, and all because of Pathological Liars Anonymous. Why, I - I even have my picture on the cover of Newsweek magazine. Yeah. Every day! Yeah.. that's the ticket! Yeah, you betcha! [Saturday Night Live, 1985]

Many of us remember this Jon Lovitz character, the one who couldn't stop lying and would ratchet up the lies to preposterous levels.

**********
I wrote last week about an interview Charlie Rose conducted on May 23 with Fred Smith, founder of Federal Express. In addition to the two men's enthusiasm for a Tom Friedman misquote, there was an exchange about our educational system that, for any sentient being living in the U.S. today, must have seemed pretty familiar.

The assertions were made (and I confess, I don't recall if these contentions were made by Smith or by Rose; by this time Charlie was in his feeding-the-answer mode) that we have a completely terrible primary and secondary educational system, but our colleges and universities are the envy of the world. We hear this sort of thing all the time, though rarely so starkly juxtaposed, so much that we rarely stop to question it.

How much sense does this make? Business leaders, politicians, media people, all tell us over and over that our high schools turn out woefully underprepared students (we need only refer to our old friend Randall Stephenson), a group of stumblebums characterized for their inability to do the work necessary to remain competitive in the 21st century. If only we taxpayers would pony up more money to "fix" the schools, we'd be OK, but we won't, so....

This concern happened to coincide with the rise in the capacity of companies to send jobs overseas, as shipping became cheaper and universal, and communications technology allowed information to move freely. Many of the jobs that previously had to be done in this country, especially in manufacturing, now could be done anywhere for a fraction of the cost.

And PR-conscious corporations had a problem: How do we move the jobs and garner the massive profits without appearing to be unconcerned about America? Easy, we embark on a massive campaign to convince Americans that their schools are so bad that the poor companies, thrust into a cut-throat marketplace, must look elsewhere for help (it was just a happy coincidence that Chinese workers would take 1-2% of the salary).

Now, I'm not naive, I know that our elementary and high schools could be better, a lot better. I'm as critical of them as anyone, I decry their emphasis on trivial matters (does a high school absolutely need a separate swimming and diving pool?) and inability to give a truly equal education to everyone. But this was true years ago when I was in school, I'm not convinced it's that much worse today. What I am convinced of is that the CEO who rails against school inadequacy is not doing so out of concern for future American competitiveness.

But now there's a problem. Executives are willing to offshore manufacturing, and they now can go further and move other specialized fields such as computer programming. All that needs to be done there is to convince the public that there aren't enough Americans to do those intricately technical jobs, and off they go. (It does require a certain amount of suppression of inconvenient facts when we start to move accounting and legal jobs, but we can just sweep that away.)

However, the executives still come from American colleges. How do they justify our own existence if they come from lousy schools? They can't. So there has to be the belief that American university education is the best in the world, the envy of the world. Somehow these captains of industry transcended their awful high schools, magic happened, and their colleges imbued them with the brilliance they now most surely possess. (Yeah, that's the ticket!)

That this makes little sense is logic that falters in the swell of enthusiasm for this idea. As long as no one asks the obvious questions, conventional wisdom remains intact.

More recently, another problem has arisen to challenge the corporate flacks. Business wants to hire foreign workers on the vast array of visas that we offer (I defer to Job Destruction Newsletter for details on H-1Bs, L-1s, OPTs). These workers tend to be graduates of American colleges; now, Big Biz has to explain why they prefer hiring these young people to the young people who are already citizens (and whose ancestors built the infrastructure that facilitates current-day profits).

Since terms like "indentured servitude" are unpopular, the challenge was on. But the answer was simple. Despite their graduation from the world-renowned American college system, American young people are lazy, committed more to YouTube and Facebook than to their jobs - they feel entitled and are not willing to work hard.

Of course, this is in contrast to the young people from other lands who came to study in our (tax-supported) schools and come out fired up to give their brains and lives to the glory of American capitalism. They work harder, work smarter, and are free from the distractions that plague pampered American kids. (Yeah, that's the ticket!)

And so, on goes the dance. Every "fact" raised by the executives and PR-ers just happens to coincide with their desire to make more money, to plow more corporate profits into vacation homes and airplanes. Anything that contradicts the narrative is countered by a buck-and-wing. Tomorrow I'll predict the next "truth" that will be presented to us as received wisdom.

Programmer? Developer? Engineer?

[Interesting weekend - for the first time in a while, I dropped in only long enough to post on Sunday; otherwise, I was off from Saturday morning until now. There really is life going on outside the Web.]

I have some thoughts about the essential paradoxes of the positions being taken by those in power, but I haven't worked them out thoroughly. So I'll write about something of which I was reminded in an article by Norm Matloff of UC-Davis, to which I was pointed in a comment by Citizen Carrie. Matloff writes:

The job title Computer Programmer has for some years been in the process of being replaced by the title Software Engineer. Same job, fancier name. So don't be fooled by the fact that the BLS separates the two titles in their data.

As someone who has been in this field for quite a few years, I'm disappointed to see this collapse of titles (I knew it was happening based on the ads I've been seeing, but I hadn't realized it was pervasive enough to be seen by academe).

The problem, of course, with any language change of this type is that it removes important and useful distinctions (I wrote a post about this months ago, referring to the words "legendary" and "historic" - I understand why the descriptivist linguists think of this as part of the natural process of language change, but what are we supposed to use for events or people that really are "legendary" or "historic"?). Once you call every entry-level position Software Engineer, you lose the ability to set the bar (and the salary) for a job that actually requires engineering skills.

To me, these terms are two elements of a spectrum to which a third term needs to be added: developer. I do not say that there was ever a time at which these terms were used the way I will propose, but I believe there was a time when we seemed to be moving toward a standard. Apparently, we are moving away now.

A programmer is someone who works at writing code for a computer to execute. They can most readily be defined as what they are not, that is, not developers or engineers. They tend to write code to the exclusion of all else unless required to do something else, their code tends to need rework to be made robust, and they enjoy the hacker mentality. They may be very productive if measured by raw lines of code, but come up well short if measured by effective lines of code. You might think that programmers are only valuable as a transitional state on the way to one of the other two categories, and that companies would have a strong incentive to help them move, but, in practice, that often doesn't happen. There are an amazing number of programmers who have 15, 20, 25 years of experience and are still just throwing code down, hoping it works.

A developer represents the next level of proficiency. This is someone who understands the interactions between various parts of a project, has some inkling of the business side and its requirements, and voluntarily does non-code activities (though reminders may be necessary). They have an idea as to what makes a professional; perhaps they've read one or more books on software development but have little interest in anything more than cherry-picking the hints they like to use. The better ones have some idea of development as an exacting discipline, and have confidence in their abilities in tackling new challenges.

An engineer represents the highest level of professionalism. They recognize that writing code, while still the most fun and satisfying, is a relatively small part of the job. Requirements need to be gathered; if the engineer isn't doing that themselves, they are reviewing them rigorously. Similarly, testing needs to be seen as an essential part of the process, and the engineer devotes a good portion of time to that. Most importantly, they see software development as more than just slapping down code to accomplish a task, but as a communication to the future, a way of explaining a business process through a computer language. No challenge is too great as long as the problem can be broken down and expressed as a sequence, and the tools used are whatever is most useful to the task at hand.

If you know anything about the current job market, you recognize that the engineer can have big trouble. There is a perception that the emphasis on quality is inimical to the goals of the business, namely, churning out product to the waiting market. Were there true engineers with any power working on Vista, it couldn't have been released in its initial state. Engineers, with their insistence on repeatable process and bulletproof standards, are seen as troublemakers (and I would grant there are times some engineers focus too much on the product and not enough on the "needs" of the company...but someone has to).

There are many engineers who believe that no one in software should call themselves "engineer," because there is no generally accepted licensure for software engineers. But, as you can see in my taxonomy, there is a fair amount of rigor in the definition. A software engineer should be someone who reads assiduously in the technical literature and the process literature. He or she should be as well-versed in The Mythical Man-Month as The Art of Computer Programming.

That we are inflating the title of a hack programmer into the title of a rigorous engineer is distasteful. The worst effect is that the person who has experience as a true engineer is competing against those who have merely possessed the title, and the latter will undercut the former on compensation every time. And the company will never know the difference, mainly due to the "evaluation crisis" (about which I wrote briefly before, and should probably write more). So not just the titles collapse, but the reward structure as well - and then there is no incentive to put in the work necessary to be an engineer, so we don't have any.

Then where do the jobs go?

Lost in a morass

I really enjoy the TV show Lost. What I really appreciate is its density, a quality I don't often associate with a television series. There's a lot going on, wheels within wheels, and this plot richness is married to a rare depth of characterization. I understand that, to some, these very qualities make the show a turn-off, that many people are looking for something neater and simpler to enjoy in their leisure time (as I do too, sometimes; I can enjoy the simple-minded Two and a Half Men, but it fulfills me on a different level than does Lost).

That said, I find the speculation engaged in by fans on web sites and critics in columns to be largely a waste of time. [Even worse are the people who try to steal scripts or comb through trash bins or bribe crew members to obtain spoilers.] When I read Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune or Alan Sepinwall of the Star-Ledger pick obsessively through the final episode, I wonder exactly what all this effort is being spent on. A little of this goes a long way.

If people enjoy all that, I guess it's fine with me. But there is a tendency to treat it like it's something real, when it is an arbitrary set of decisions by the staff. You know who's in the coffin? Anyone they choose to put there. Is he or she (no spoilers here) really dead? If Cuse and Lindelof have decided so, then yes - but maybe no.

I'd rather let it play out, enjoy this remarkable creation. We've got two more years, and I'm willing to experience this universe without guessing what's in it. Chacun à son goût.