Reality Check

Posted on by David Wright

Here is some healthy corrective:

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard.

So they go back to collecting unemployment or something? Yikes, that’s crazy-juice for right-leaning voters.

The thing that irritates me about ‘jobs policy’ (what a ridiculous term) is that people are not very concrete about the problem and I like to remind myself sometimes what it’s all about.

First remember that to quiet down voters we need to satisfy several apparently contradicting impulses:

People don’t want to live in rural areas.

People don’t want to do manual labor. People don’t want to work hard generally. That’s not a criticism, mind you. Who wants to be forced to do something unpleasant?

People want a better life than their parents and are happy to wait for it. And live with their parents until it arrives.

“Good jobs” allow people be lazy, urban and rich. Auto workers were the poster-children of this movement, and for good reason.

I grew up in the catchment area for the Motor City Auto industry and I’ll always remember the stories of the Temporary Part Time job contracts some kids of auto workers were granted.

This was stuff that made lazy teenagers salivate: lots of downtime, no skills required, lots of breaks, discounts on cars and $22/hour in 1998 for a 17-year-old. Absolutely outrageous. And the employment practices were no better than the most hideous nepotocracies* on earth. Insiders win.

Anyway, a complete discussion of this should match my criteria above with a picture of who is actually unemployed.

See here too. In order of predictive power, my understanding is that the characteristics go like this: poorly educated, urban, young and dark-skinned. I’m not actually sure this matters, because the unemployed have probably always come from the ranks of the disenfranchised in society.

*I wish I could put that one into the words of the day, but I googled it and found loads of instances. No such thing as a new idea, I suppose.

“Wall Street” Protesters

Posted on by David Wright

I walked by them this morning on the way to work. Hadn’t been by in a week or so. Some observations:

  • It actually smells like manure and compost in there.
  • I wonder what the point of it all is. They’re just kinda sitting there. “We’re going to live like homeless people until… um… until…”
  • What is “Wall Street”? Is that a euphemism for empowered insiders? For rich people? As I walk by in my suit I imagine they think of me as being a “Wall-Streeter” yet I find the idea ridiculous.
  • From a purely personal standpoint, the motivation can only be that they have nothing better to do and are looking for a sense of belonging. People are desperate for meaning and will do ridiculous things searching for it. Read this book.
  • People will say “get these idiots jobs” but that’s misleading. What these people really need are the mortgages, cable bills and car payments that come with having jobs. We need these people’s fear of losing their jobs to insulate us from this kind of stupidity. So yeah, they need jobs, but that’s only a means to an end.

One of my more silly pet theories is that I don’t believe in politics, only economics. Discourse is only good for signaling affiliation and escalating conflict. The only social force that matters is whether people feel they’re better off than they used to be and that means richer than they used to be.

Why Did Steve Jobs Follow His Own Advice?

Posted on by David Wright

EVERYBODY is linking to the Steve Jobs Stanford speech, and I am, too.

It boils down to this: hardship teaches you to savor things. Don’t waste your life.

Robin Hanson isn’t impressed with the practicality of this advice:

Now try to imagine a world where everyone actually tried to follow this advice. And notice that we have an awful lot of things that need doing which are unlikely to be anyone’s dream job. So a few folks would be really happy, but most everyone else wouldn’t stay long on any job, and most stuff would get done pretty badly. Not a pretty scenario.

I commented on his blog with this:

This makes me think of supply-side economics.
Maybe following his advice leads to a gigantic increase in welfare as people compete harder and so innovate more. .
Think of it this way: today Jobsian success has p = 1% and N = 10m. After Jobs’ speech N -> 1b and p -> 0.5%. We’re better off, non?
Or are you saying there’s a fixed supply of Jobsian success stories in our future?
Fewer garbage collectors? Maybe. Maybe we’d have machines doing it much sooner, too.

This makes me wonder a bit more actually.

Steve Jobs takes over (again) as CEO in 2000, gets diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and THEN proceeds to go on a innovation rampage. But he never had an innovative period of his life like that before.

Here’s Cringely from earlier this year:

Steve Jobs is clearly the most important media mogul on the planet right now, and maybe the most fragile.  This latter point is important, because Steve sees himself as having both a unique mission and a frail constitution.  He can’t wait to get things done, which is why the next couple years will be probably the most important in Apple’s history.

He was MOTIVATED.

Is there a way to possibly replicate this motivation without a direct and serious threat to your life? Can people in ‘normal’ circumstances possibly follow this advice?

David Pogue argues today that we won’t see another Steve Jobs because we won’t find someone as TALENTED as Steve.

I completely disagree.

We won’t see another Steve Jobs because we won’t see someone running a company they passionately care about with the motivated sense of urgency Steve had following his cancer diagnosis.

What If Steve Jobs Didn’t Grow Up in Silicon Valley?

Posted on by David Wright

From time to time I need an inspirational boost and I turn to this book, which I’m slowly cranking through on the kindle. I recently finished the chapter on Steve Wozniak (the real Thomas Edison of the pair of Steves IMO), which I’m thinking back to a fair bit today.

I think that the most powerful determinant of each man’s future was not himself, but actually Hewlett-Packard, where each worked at one point and which basically sparked culture we know today as Silicon Valley.

Apple, Inc. does not exist if these two kids didn’t meet and, I’d say, also doesn’t exist if they grew up in ANY other city in the world.

Here’s Paul Graham:

The problem is not that most towns kill startups. It’s that death is the default for startups, and most towns don’t save them. Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed with startupicide, it’s more accurate to think of startups as all being poisoned, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote.

Startups in other places are just doing what startups naturally do: fail. The real question is, what’s saving startups in places like Silicon Valley? [2]

On the mark.

Culture mattes more than anything.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles

Posted on by David Wright

I’ve recently come across this new insurance blog by Todd Bault and it’s friggen catnip to me. I disagree with a lot of what goes on in there, in particular (I think) his strange and interesting theory of capital.

That’s cool, though, because it’s making me think my own perceived understanding through more carefully, which is always welcome. His posts are so content-heavy that I’m overwhelmed with where to begin the discussion, so…

I’ll take advice from Barker:

The first step is crucial — keep it tiny. Do not be ambitious yet. That leads to failure.

Consider this the first step: a simple declaration of intent. I intend to keep re-reading Todd’s old posts and figure out exactly where we disagree. Then I’ll try to write something small.

Irritated Rant – Stanford DB-Class Course Notes

Posted on by David Wright

Got an old-fashioned ass-whooping this morning on my XML quiz. I despise this kind of test, though, and have always been terrible at them.

Let’s take it from the top: XML is a standard for machines to read data and so is an excellent example of something humans are crap at. To write valid XML in one swoop on a test, for example, you need to memorize a variety of rules.

Such as: make sure that when there’s a <xs: sequence> opening tag for a subelement, the actual elements need to appear IN ORDER.

Or this one: ” avalid document needs to have unique values across ID attributes. An IDREF attribute can refer to any existing ID attribute value.”

Who the #$%# cares? When you’re actually implementing XML, you are probably using some kind of developing environment that either makes these kinds of errors difficult to make or very easy to identify and fix quickly. Why are we teaching people to do something that COMPUTERS ARE A BAJILLION TIMES BETTER AT?!?

Why not make me take a test on grinding coffee beans or loading ink into a ballpoint pen? ‘Cause, you know, these are things that are important for an office to function as well. No? The division of labor means that we pay others to do these tasks for us? Well, howdy-effing-do.

Now, there MAY be a valid argument that goes like this: memorizing all this garbage really plants an understanding of what XML is good at in my head. Sometimes sequencing elements is really important for a database.

Bollocks. These things are tested because they’re easy to test*. Period.

I’m considering dropping this class.

*and by that I mean easy for machines to grade. Well, I don’t want to learn how to be an effing machine. That’s what I buy machines for.

-=-

Update: I got quite a lot of pushback on the discussion forum for posting something similar to this. Hard to say whether it’s my aggressive and off-putting personality or whether my views actually have no merit.

I was (implicitly) called lazy and one guy said that “somebody has to build the validation tools”.

Well, I certainly am lazy, but mostly I’m just a douchebag. Anyway,  here is my response:

Unpopular sentiment, it seems. Maybe it’s just my unpleasant tone. Let me try again.

I’m not sure I understand the first reply, but I like a lot of the second. Building an XML validating tool is a much more creative and effective way of learning what is and is not valid XML than the given assignment. I’d rather spend 5 hours doing that than 30 minutes wrote-memorizing tag syntax.

Is it so wrong to expect more of a university course than this?

How about testing me on these questions: 1. When should XML be used vs some other standard? (I think this is what the first response is getting at). 2. What are the limit cases for XML use and why might it break down? 3. What are some examples of instances when XML was used and it failed, or was successful?

I remain disappointed. Am I really so alone on this?

Don’t Read With Sharp Objects Nearby

Posted on by David Wright

So I came home tonight in a bit of a mood and elected to shelve today’s work on the weekend project, crack a beer, order some food and curl up with the kindle backlog until my wife came home.

And now I’m depressed.

The first two articles tonight (one by Peter Thiel and the second by Neal Stephenson) were of the TGS variety: big long 3000-ish word whinge-fests on how we’ve stopped advancing technologically. Ugh…

The third (on Google’s dominance) brought me back from the brink but was still so shot through with ominy* that I remain perturbed.

Well, at least my beer hasn’t let me down. Whole Foods. Fantastic selection.

*does this word exist? I want it to be a collective noun for ominous things. Meh, it’s my blog, I can do what I want. There. Done.