Friday Four

1. He's not great at it, but Little Man is crawling, just shy of nine months old. We had a good laugh seeing him poke his head around the corner yesterday, after we'd left him for a moment to play in the next room.

2. Man solves vexing problem while at office party:

Well, who cares. He's called the elevator, so he's probably on the way out. Oops, watch it there, buddy--stop looking at your Facebook account on that iPhone, or you'll miss the elevator. The light's off, the car is going to arrive any second now… and you missed it. Haha, you silly idiot, you…

Holy cow.

Holy cow.

He wasn't paying attention. He missed the elevator.

I bet you that's exactly what happens in my code. If the remote end hangs up while I'm waiting for my authentication tokens, my app won't notice, error out, and leak the socket.

If you've ever spent lots of time trying to figure something out, only to have the answer dawn on you at some really strange moment, reading the whole thing will likely amuse you.

3. Like your smart phone? Two innovations I have heard about in the past couple of weeks could vastly improve it. Just swap out a couple of cards to get (a) data storage comparable to a small laptop, and (b) vastly improved signal. Well, okay, the second of these is still some time and a hefty infrastructure improvement away.

4. A picture of Earth surrounded by man-made satellites has been making the rounds. Says Yahoo! News:

... Even those of us with no interest in traveling to space have come to rely on The Final Frontier more so than ever before, thanks to an increasing number of services that rely on satellites orbiting the Earth. Cell phones and in-dash navigation systems rely on GPS satellites, Dish and DirecTV obviously use satellite feeds, and satellite communications systems offered by the likes of Inmarsat and Iridium continue to proliferate across various industries. ...

Those who are interested in travelling to space mght also find a different image edifying.

-- CAV

The Distraction of Altruism

Walter Williams draws an apt analogy between disruptive students and drunk drivers:

No one argues that yesteryear's students were angels. In Philadelphia, where I grew up, students who posed severe disciplinary problems were removed. Daniel Boone School was for unruly boys, and Carmen was for girls. Some people might respond: But what are we going to do with the students kicked out? Whether or not there are resources to help them is not the issue. The critical issue is whether they should be permitted to make education impossible for students who are capable of learning. It's a policy question similar to: What do you do when you have both drunken drivers and sober drivers on the road? The first order of business is to get the drunken drivers off the road. Whether there are resources available to help the drunks is, at best, a secondary issue. [bold added]

Williams is right to remind us that schools are intended to teach kids who are able and willing -- at least without an inordinate amount of adult supervision -- to learn. What interests me is that I found his analogy refreshing and why.

Education, like medical care, is something that statists will go on and on about being necessary (which is correct), and therefore something the government ought to guarantee everyone (which is wrong, since this inevitably requires the government to steal money).

What is interesting is how this presumption that it is okay to steal to help someone who doesn't have something leads to a race to the bottom. Johnny is poor, and the easiest way (they lazily imagine) to educate him is to make someone else pay for it. If he underperforms for any reason, he gets more help, be it in the form of more loot stolen from adults or of a shift of time or resources away from the other children and towards him. The focus is entirely on any observable, negative outcome -- if it entails an alleged lack of whatever it is that is deemed necessary and regardless of what must be done to be able to say that need was met. (Just look at the rest of the column for examples! The fact that Williams has to reach to the world of driving to make his readers see the problem with that approach tells us just how ingrained this kind of thinking is regarding children and education. Altruism is so ingrained, in fact, that people routinely are failing to see that it is causing more and more children to be deprived of an actual education even as more and more loot is thrown at the problem.

Regarding altruism, Ayn Rand says the following:

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: "No." Altruism says: "Yes."

Does your child have a right to study a level he is capable of reaching? Without constantly being distracted? Without fear of assault? So long as you have or can find a way to pay for this that doesn't involve theft, absolutely. Public educators may mouth agreement with you, but their actions resoundingly say otherwise. By focusing on those who are needy, these "educators" ignore the able and the good, consigning them to ignorance and stunting their development.

-- CAV

No Certainty, No Recovery

John Stossel fact checks some recent remarks on the budget by President Obama and, along the way, captures some of the uncertainty businessmen are facing during our economic "recovery":

This post-recession economic recovery is the slowest ever. Usually, after a recession, the cost of labor drops, and companies rush to hire so they can profit as the economy improves.

This time, employers looked at a thousand new regulations, unknowable new rules and taxes coming from Obamacare, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Labor Department and so on. They decided: "I better not try."

May I hire interns to see if I like them before offering them long-term jobs? No. It may not be legal to employ interns anymore.

May I build a pipeline? Maybe. But the Environmental Protection Agency must approve. And state utilities. And state environmental officials. And the State Department. And the White House. And ... who knows whom else?

Already-existing taxes and regulations are bad enough, but at least they are known quantities. The uncertainty that comes with the prospect of new taxes and regulations -- and with having to justify one's decisions to the satisfaction of some third party -- makes long-range planning nearly impossible.

-- CAV

What Don't You Know?

A couple of years ago, upon encountering the notion of "risk intelligence", I noted the following:

Based on past experience, I think it is possible for people with this kind of self-awareness [i.e., of what they do and do not know] to appear to be less confident than they actually are. This can happen when one communicates his level of uncertainty poorly (or too conservatively) or when one is dealing with someone who lacks this form of self-awareness (and hence equates certainty with confidence or views admitted uncertainty with suspicion). I can even recall doing the former while in the latter situation quite a few times when I was younger. (This ultimately culminated in me being ignored after correcting someone I absolutely knew to be wrong! Fortunately, the stakes were low.)

And so it is that I found refreshing one entrepreneur's tale of how he made a crucial hire, as well as the lessons he learned from it:

... While there are lots of tactics, there is no one true silver bullet. I had lots of ideas I wanted to try. One of the reasons I was so excited to have Kiran on board was that he would be the one who would actually get to try them, as well as come up with tons of new ideas.  But at this moment, the most truthful answer I could give him was, I don't know.

And he smiled and responded back, "I was waiting for that. I like it when people say I don't know."

I burst out laughing.

Kiran explained that he likes it when people say I don't know because it lends credibility to everything else that they've said.  He was already pretty close to making up his mind that he was coming to 42Floors, he just wanted an honest accounting of what we had answers to and what remained as questions. [italics in original]

Far from being an admission of defeat, a sign of low confidence, or a confession of unwarranted skepticism, "I don't know," can actually help us see who knows his stuff. Nobody is omniscient, but those who know something understand best of all where the limits of their knowledge lie.

-- CAV

Know What You Mean

Karen Cheng reports that the question, "What do you mean?" can stop someone who is being rude in his tracks. She gives a couple of examples, including this:

I stopped him and said: "So you said that your employees are behaving like a bunch of women. What do you mean?"

Immediately he apologized, said it was the wrong choice of words, and said he meant to say "stop behaving like a bunch of children."

This example is actually better than the earlier one she gives, which inspired her to try it herself. In that example, an investor admits he might not have funded a startup whose founder then became pregnant. As a parent of two young children, I know how their arrival can radically alter one's time landscape and priorities. As I see it, the investor's worst sin was being too blunt. (At least he tries to be careful with his money.) Indeed, one could even make the case that he did the pregnant founder a favor by helping her see why she has lately had/might have future trouble raising money. Absent further context (See P.S.), I think implying that this investor  is an "asshole" is inappropriate.

This is not to deny that Cheng's question is valueless: There are many times that putting someone on notice that his attitudes are out of line is warranted. But one must weigh whether his evaluation of that person as immoral is correct and further consider what raising the issue might accomplish. Simply getting an apology over the phone may feel good -- but if someone really is a jerk, the chances are that he knows he can make himself look good to most people by apologizing.

The question is better in a few other situations I can think of off the top of my head:

• The "asshole" is an employee of yours, in which case he now knows you will not tolerate him acting this way on your watch.
• There are others around who might need to hear that they now have an ally against such a person.
• He is a friendly acquaintance who you know probably didn't mean what he said, and whom you'd like to gently help realize how badly he is coming across.

On the other hand, firing this question first and asking questions later can be worse than saying nothing in several situations I can think of off the top of my head:

• You seem offended (and not merely confused), giving the impression that you are prejudiced.
• You put on notice and antagonize a powerful opponent -- and also immediately cede any advantage that might be gained by patience or camouflage.
• The frequent and careless use of this one-liner can make you look like you will use any random utterance to blackmail any random acquaintance.

Neither list is exhaustive. I like the one-liner, but it can't and shouldn't be used  in every situation. The real lesson is to think before one speaks in all situations.

-- CAV

P.S. Glancing back at the Cheng post and seeing who the founder is, I think the term more likely to apply in that case...

Updates

Today: Added P.S. 

3-1-14 Hodgepodge

But Would They Govern Like a Different Party? This Time?

John  Podhoretz offers a rosy forecast for the GOP regarding control of the Senate after this year's elections:

... Republicans are coming on strong in other races no one expected. In Michigan, where another Democratic incumbent is retiring, Republican Terri Lynn Land has shown strength for months, leading her likely Democratic rival, Gary Peters, by a few points in a state Obama carried by eight points in 2012. In New Hampshire, the one-term ex-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen seems to have a formidable foe in Scott Brown, who won the surprising January 2010 special election for Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts that portended the huge GOP wave later that year.

Ugh. Scott Brown? If he's any indicator, my warnings about the GOP failing to make a difference once in power again will look more like accurate predictions.

Weekend Reading

"It isn't often that a doctor is mistaken about how many feet his patient has." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Can You Trust What's in Your Electronic Medical Record?" at Forbes

"I see the aftermath of a lot of breakups, and one thing that stands out is the denial people exhibit about the flaws in their relationships before the end." -- Michael Hurd, in "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" at The Delaware Wave

"[I]nstead of Jim Crow laws, they use public education mandates and taxation, environmental regulation, government health care edicts, and a plethora of other legalized individual rights offences to sacrifice you and your loved ones to their own interests." -- Anders Ingemarson, in "Freeing the Individual from the Conceits of the Collective" at RealClear Markets

In More Detail

I'll briefly throw something out there for each column today: (1) Hsieh offers concrete advice to readers who want to protect their health from government-incentivized errors-carried-forward in their medical records; (2) Hurd brings up a fallacy ("Heaven's Reward") I'd never heard of; and (3) Ingemarson makes lots of good points, despite, as a newletter I follow pointed out, the fact that the column does not mention that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually violated individual rights with its provisions against non-government racial discrimination.

Many Apps Cost Way too Much

A widely-circulated Internet joke lampoons people who complain about the noiminal dollar cost of some smart phone or tablet app, but drop a fiver on coffee without batting an eye. The point about the value of a good app is well-taken, but developer Jeff Atwood notices that the argument doesn't apply to all paid apps:

Imagine you bought your coffee, only to open the lid and find it was only half full, or that it wasn't coffee at all but lemonade. If only 1 in 5 cups of coffee you bought actually contained coffee, a $3.99 price for that coffee starts to seem unreasonably high. When you buy an app, you don't really know what you're going to get. [link and bold in original]

You may have wasted your money, but you will have also paid in time, which is, being irreplaceable, is worse. Mobile phone apps that could be replaced with a decent web site (or mobile version of one) are worse than pointless, as the rest of Atwood's piece shows.

--CAV

Friday Four

Editor's Note: I have a backlog of "proud father" stuff today...

1. Three cheers for the web, this time for saving me from my own carelessness. One evening, Pumpkin wanted to "work" (i.e., play with my desktop "becuter" in my office area), and I let her. Of course, in the span of a half-second of my being distracted, she managed (I think) to invoke a settings selector a couple of levels down in a right-click menu, thereby accidentally removing the borders and controls from all windows. This "stacked" all my open applications and x-terminals uselessly on top of each other. Persistently, too: Neither logging out nor rebooting changed anything.

Luckily, I was able to search the problem on my laptop and find a solution almost immediately.

Time to create my little girl's first user account...

2. Little Man, my eight-month-old son, impressed me a couple of days ago, just before his bedtime. Rather than start crying, he looked at me and reached for me with both arms -- and got slightly fussy only when I incorrectly guessed he wanted to practice standing. (He pulls himself up now, by the way.)

No: He was trying to ask for bedtime. He quickly went to sleep after I figured that one out.

3. Our recent vacation was part of a surprise party for my wife's sister's birthday. It was fun seeing Pumpkin and her cousin -- about the same age, but a head taller -- interact over the course of the trip. My wife has an amusing series of pictures of them fighting over who could dance with Mickey Mouse. Unintimidated by being pushed away, my daughter pushed right back -- not that we encourage fighting as the go-to means of dispute resolution!

4. My favorite moments from the vacation, in no particular order, were as follows: (1) my son buying me a rest on the beach by wanting a nap; (2) visiting an aquarium with my daughter, like we frequently did in Boston; (3) the massage my wife and I got for ourselves as a belated anniversary present; (4) a morning walk alone; and (5) the whole set of three families actually making it to a show on time (hard to do with two toddlers and an infant involved!). It was especially fun to see how Pumpkin lit up whenever it was time to clap.

-- CAV