Jay Lenno's Video Metaphor for Obama's Mortgage Relief Plan

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video translates a thousand-page bill....

Art imitates life; it works... and then the homeowner defaults anyway.

You just can't make this suff up... Why Steve Jobs could ride around without number plates on his Mercedes

According to this article, Steve Jobs could ride around without a number plate on his Mercedes because California law allows a new car to be driven without license plates for up to six months. So Steve made an arrangement with a dealer to allow him to lease a new Mercedes every six months, while the dealer could advertise the off-lease car as having been driven by none other than Jobs himself! A win-win all around.

Folks, you WANT income inequality: Part 1

Richard Epstein explains why income equality is good:

Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

To summarize: the system of the United States encouraged and rewarded innovation. Innovation benefits society by a factor of between 10 and 20 more than what the entrepreneur receives. A Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs has wealth measured in billions, but their contributions to society would be much, much more than their wealth (most of which is locked up in stocks).

Does innovation happen elsewhere? Of course, but not as much of it. Talent and genius are spread equally around the world population. Which system rewards and develops talent better? The Soviet Union certainly had talented people who were discovered and nurtured, but the average citizen still had to stand in lines for basic items because the party mis-allocated scarce resources which had alternative uses. In China's Great Leap Forward, university professors were (literally) dragged out of their houses and forced to work in the fields. Was this a wise allocation of resources? Answer: soon afterwards, tens of millions starved to death. Western Europe, which our president wants us to emulate, has much wealth redistribution, and not much opportunity to raise out of your class. Not just Greece, but Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and even France are in trouble because their governments spent too much money not on infrastructure, but on transfer payments to unproductive citizens.

In the end, professor Epstein paraphrases a quote from Abraham Lincoln, "You don't make the poor rich by making the rich poor."

Here is the actual quote:
"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves." --Abraham Lincoln

Look at what wealth redistribution has done to scores of people: it has robbed them of dignity and incentive, and turned them into feral animals with base instincts. Are the riots in Greece or Oakland caused by extreme poverty or folks on the gravy train who have been sold a bill of goods (either overly-generous government benefits or, in the case of OccupyOakland, the promise of a job after graduation from college), only to have reality smack them upside the head?

I'll write more on this topic later. But what we see in Europe, and what we see in the Occupy___________ movements is the reality of "Chickens...coming home...to roost"

Juan Williams: One Year Later

Juan Williams was fired from NPR a year ago. I may not agree with Juan on many things, but I've always read or listened to his commentary because it came from a thoughtful, rather than rigid, perspective. NPR lost a talented voice of reason when they fired him for expressing honest opinion, and showed how obviously the network skews to the liberal left. Fox news scored a coup in signing him immediately afterwards. Question to NPR listeners; can you cite an example of a left-leaning host, either on NPR, MSNBC, or CNN relinquishing their chair for a day to a conservative (like Bill O'Reilly does for Juan from time-to-time)?

http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/juan-williams/189265-opinion-lessons-learned

Excerpt:

So, in the year since being labeled a bigot, a bad journalist and fired from NPR, what have I learned?

The biggest lesson for me has come from the endless stream of Americans, Democrats and Republicans, who tell me they can’t believe the constant pressure in politics these days to keep quiet, shut up and bite their tongue for fear of being called a bigot, a crazy right-winger or a socialist lefty.

People are fed up with pledges that enforce far right or far left orthodoxy and being told they lack a spine when they listen to the other side of an argument or call for a political compromise to reach a solution.

The shrill, vapid rhetorical exchanges that pass for honest debate these days go back to the roots of what got me fired.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

An interesting article about the divergent fortunes of Volvo and Saab

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/business/global/the-divergent-fortunes-of-saab-and-volvo.html

I would like Saab to revive in some form or another. After reading the article above, it looks like financing is coming along too slowly for that to happen.

My dad swore that he would never buy another Volvo after the one we purchased in 1972 ("the poor-man's Mercedes") failed like clockwork. Many a drive to Colorado was spent somewhere between Des Moines and Kearney waiting for repairs on that vehicle. The family we travelled with on our way to Colorado for ski trips would spend the day at a hotel pool (I'm sure they packed their swimming suits near the top of the suitcase for just such a contingency), while my brothers and I were stuck in a repair garage waiting room. Why didn't we just sell the Volvo and get a different car? My dad justified keeping it because we sunk so much money in the thing, it should have been a good car. I'm sure I've held onto a stock a bit too long with the same reasoning.

Saab was bought by General Motors, while Volvo was bought by Ford. While these purchases didn't really help either company, one company seemed to suck the lifeblood out of the purchased company, while the other was more an absentee owner.

My parents owned both types of cars. One our family loved dearly, one we despised. One was totalled on a roll-over (the 'rock-and-roll-over' mobile). The other burned up just a mile from my parents' house (my dad would have lit a molotov cocktail and thrown it inside to finish the job-- after my mom was safely outside, of course). Ultimately, our family switched allegiances and became Toyota loyalists. Japanese reliability is thicker than Swedish blood.

A Toungue-in-Cheek Skewer of Establishment RINOs

Introducing... the candidacy of T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII !

"Luckily for that nation, I have discussed it with my family and have decided to spend less time with them; in fact, both my wife and son seem quite delighted by the prospect. Mariska, for one, recognizes my candidacy as an opportunity to better the country and expand our social circle."

Hat tip to IowaHawk.

I need this software feature from Adobe!

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2011-sneak-peeks/max-2011-sneak-peek-image-deblurring/

The software shows enough smarts to analyze the path of camera shakiness, then compensates and corrects to make a clearer picture.

Cool.

Gallup: Obama Job Approval Slides To New Low In Recent Quarter

The source of this graph is this article. Note that, according to Gallup, the daily tracking average had been rising bit-by-bit for the past three quarters.

According to Gallup's presidential approval comparison application, Ronald Reagan's approval was at 49% and growing, while Barack Obama's approval is at 41% at the same time after their inaugurations.

The Davids (Plouffe and Axelrod) have their hands full this election cycle!

The States Obama Must Win to be Reelected in 2012

I've come up with the following map of states that Barack Obama must win in order to get the 270 electoral college votes needed to be reelected in 2012. It's a best-case scenario for the president that gets him to 272 votes in the Electoral College.

His campaign advisers understand this. His opponents understand this. If I can figure this out, so does any campaign adviser worth their salt.

Unfortunately, in some of the states, like Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and Colorado, Barack Obama's approval numbers are below 50%, which means he's got an uphill climb to keep those states. Also gumming up the president's reelection chances is the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats had a bigger enthusiasm gap in the 2006 and 2008 elections, while the Republicans had a bigger enthusiasm gap in 2010. Currently, according to Gallup, the Democrats have lost their enthusiasm advantage from four years ago.

All a Republican candidate has to do is flip one of the states listed above, and they win the election.

Many spin-misters might tell you that a state like Minnesota is 'in play.' Forget it. In a close election, especially an election where there is an incumbent, states are generally hard to flip. It would need a lot of campaign time and resources. There is an advantage to the incumbent president, no matter which party they're from.

One might note, however, that I've flipped Indiana, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia back to red from blue. That's because, at least with Indiana and Virginia, those two were representative of the landslide-nature of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Obama's campaign will probably visit Indiana and Virginia, but aside from visits, won't allocate too much money in those states because they either elected a Republican governor who've remained popular (Bob McDonnell), or still have popular Republican governor (Mitch Daniels). What about North Carolina, which has a Democratic governor? Unfortunately, Bev Perdue is not popular in her state, and will not be much help to Obama in a state that has traditionally voted Republican. What about Ohio and Florida? While these states have recently voted for Republican governors, these governors do not have high popularity ratings. However, Barack has even lower popularity ratings in these states, and therefore I'd be shocked if anyone thinks they're remaining 'blue' during the next election cycle. Will they be up for grabs? Their electoral votes are too numerous to ignore, but deep in the bowels of Obama's campaign headquarters, they're going to allocate more resources in Pennsylvania and North Carolina than Ohio and Florida. Pennsylvania is critical to the president's reelection chances. He cannot allow it to flip to red and have any hope of remaining in office another four years.

Agree? Disagree? Go to 270toWin.com and make your own map. Compare maps from previous presidential elections, and you can form an opinion based on historical data.

But don't just take my word for it. Even prediction markets like InTrade show a < 50% chance that Barack Obama will be re-elected as of mid-September. (Note the spike on May 1st coincided with the death of Osama bin Ladin.)

In a future post: deep, deep in the bowels of the president's campaign office in Chicago-- making moves to drop Joe Biden and have Hillary Clinton be the VP.

And deep, deep, DEEP somewhere in Bill Clinton's offices; if the poll numbers continue to drop for Barack, maneuvers to have Barack step down, like LBJ, and have Hillary run as president.

Hey, you can't make this stuff up.

R.I.P. Dennis Ritchie, "Hello Afterworld!"

Dennis Ritchie died last week. He is the father of, amongst many things, the C programming language, and the Unix operating system. Here is a link memorializing his memory. Here is another.

One of the first software development books I owned before entering engineering school at Washington University was Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kerningham's "The C Programming Language." What set C apart from other programming languages at the time was it's ability to compile programs to work on different processors, and different operating systems, with one code base. One would need to include header files for the various operating system platforms, but one could, and still can, compile a C/C++ program from source code to Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris, Amiga, and even AS400. That takes a level of indirection that understands assembly language, how it generally works across processor architectures, and yet finds similarities that could be abstracted into geek-readable code. Although one could create software through machine/assembly language instructions, and it would be highly efficient, it would take a long time to get anything accomplished. And forget the maintenance nightmares of walking onto a project developed in assembler by someone else; this wasn't done much. One can walk into a C or C++ codebase and get up-to-speed a lot quicker.

What was a hallmark of the "K&R" book (as it was affectionately known) was its terseness. In a software publishing industry where thickness and 'heft' are signs of worth (at least worth forking over ~$50 for a book with a limited shelf life), The C Programming Language gave a few, elegant examples of what the language was about.

C (and its Object-Oriented cousin, C++, developed by Bjarne Stroustrup) also set the standard for speed, since it compiled directly to assembly language, and its compilers became more and more optimized for fast assembler. Subsequent programming languages, which used interpreters (such as Visual Basic or Java) to create intermediate code, which would then be interpreted by a compiler for the platform, always had a perception of being slower than C and C++. One could 'hope' to become 'as fast' as C, but not faster.

The father of Java, James Gosling, chose for its syntax something like C to make Java attractive for C programmers to switch to. Java tried to one-up C with respect to universal code, in that one could compile a Java archive (Jar) library, and drop it onto the filesystem of a Linux/Unix/Windows machine and it would work without having to re-compile.

The father of Ruby, Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. 'Mats'), created its interpreter in C, as do most dynamic language authors (like Perl's Larry Wall or Python's Guido van Rossum). As with a lot of things in technology, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Perhaps more influential for the computer industry, was Dennis' contribution, along with Ken Thompson, of the Unix operating system. Built as a multiuser operating system from small programs that did limited things well, which would all run at the same time (multitask). If you don't use Windows, you're likely running a derivative of the Unix operating system (including Mac OS X, which was a derivative of Steve Jobs' NextStep, derived from Berkeley Unix 4.3), Linux, or Andrioid (a Linux derivative), or iOS (another Linux derivative). It was Ritchie's C language which allowed Unix to be ported to many platforms.

So rest in peace, Dennis.

Gates and Jobs Interviewed at D5

One of the best interviews of these two titans of the tech industry. Both come off as self-deprecating and appreciative of what the other has done for the industry, and that although both their companies have competed against each other, they also collaborate.

I got this video from one of the many Steve Jobs memorial blog posts.

Conservatives and Liberals Agree: Punish China

There are some unifying themes that Tea Party types and Occupy Wall Street demonstrators can actually rally around... One of them is to slap a tariff on Chinese imports that would be proportional to the perceived amount they undervalue their currency with respect to the US dollar, the Yen and the Euro.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, and their supporters, generally oppose free trade because it allows companies to export factories (and jobs) to facilities off-shore. A tariff would lessen (but not eliminate) the incentive to export to China, and might even keep some manufacturing here.

Tea Party demonstrators want countries to play by the rules, and China's currency manipulation flies in the face of what other industrialized countries (like those in the US, EU, Brazil, Japan, Russia, India, other non-EU countries in Europe, etc) have to do in order to live with the headaches of fluctuating currencies. Others in the Tea Party (myself included) strongly dislike subsidies, in that they distort markets and create inequalities (read:bubbles) that inevitably rectify themselves (read:pop), often causing significant turbulence (read:market crashes). Currency manipulation is one giant subsidy. There are also a significant number of Tea Party types who agree with the protectionist sentiment of the Occupy Wall Street'ers, who are similarly frustrated by the job loss caused by seeing manufacturing moving overseas.

So a bill that slaps tariffs on Chinese imports should be a slam-dunk in Congress, one would think. However, the Republican leadership in the House is pushing back against this bill because they don't want to start a trade-war with China, and because they're being lobbied heavily by Chinese-backed interests.

Increasing tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods will be a hidden tax on many items consumers purchase. China's currency manipulation has indirectly benefitted the American consumer by making their imports cheaper than they otherwise would be if the Chinese Remimbi were to float along with other currencies. The Chinese people themselves are hurt by the lowering of their currency, since imported commodities (like grain, oil, coal, timber, etc.) are all more expensive with a devalued currency. However, all other countries would secretly applaud the US for slapping a tariff on Chinese goods if, simultaneously, we pursued trade agreements with other countries to remove existing barriers with them. It could be a win-win for everyone except China. Even if we kept the status quo, other countries would benefit from increased trade as some manufacturing would leave China and go elsewhere.

At some point, China would have to let their currency float. At that point, the Chinese people would benefit from a fairly-valued Remimbi. The world economy would benefit from the subsequent equilibrium, since other countries' exports would benefit in comparison. The American consumer would pay more in goods, but it wouldn't come at the cost of Chinese workers being underpaid for their labor.

So what would happen if the US were to pass a bill? There would be winners and losers, and Wall Street  indexes would drop with the initial uncertainty. However, if done properly, the amount of disruption would be minimized by allowing markets to actually work. If I were to craft legislation, I would use carrot-and-stick incentives to hike tariffs higher than the perceived devaluation of the Remimbi, while clarifying the ability of immediate tariff reduction and elimination based on Chinese actions towards letting their currency float. I would not subsidize companies that export goods or services to China, even if that means a loss of exports to China--better to pursue trade with other countries which have played by the rules. I would not subsidize companies dependent upon cheap Chinese manufactured goods: let the market create incentives or find alternatives--as would inevitably happen anyway.

The ultimate goal is to create equilibrium with respect to elimination of subsidies on both sides of the Pacific. We need to reduce, if not eliminate, subsidies to our industries. We need China to phase-out their currency devaluation. American manufacturing can compete with the rest of the world if we keep energy prices low (to allow automation to keep productivity high for each worker) and allow innovation to be rewarded.

Steve Jobs’ Passing -- a Geek’s Perspective

“Good artists copy... Great artists steal”  P. Picaso
Aside from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs was the second-most influential entrepreneur who influenced my career. I grew up using Apple II computers in high school. I was fascinated with their power and relative ease of programming (through AppleBasic). What made the Apple II a success was software invented by Dan Bricklin -- VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. It allowed accountants, scientists, and engineers to ‘play’ with numbers. It offered thousands of business owners a reason to plunk down $3000 in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s to gain insight into their businesses. IBM couldn’t release their first PC without an equivalent application from Lotus.

People mistakenly think that the Macintosh was the first computer that used a mouse and a graphical user interface; actually, the first commercial computer to use these innovations was the Apple Lisa, which debuted at $10,000. It was a flop. A smaller team at Apple, led by Steve Jobs, focused on a more elegant, consumer-friendly device which had a couple of nice applications--AppleWriter and Paint, included. But what really made the Mac a hit were “killer apps” such as Adobe’s PageMaker and Illustrator applications, which, used in conjunction with Apple’s LaserWriter printer, made desktop publishing and layout accessible to many talented designers around the world, including my aunt, Jan Leadholm. Of course, one can’t forget the innovative Mac commercial that aired at the 1984 SuperBowl.

In 1985, after losing a power struggle with John Sculley and the board at Apple, Jobs was fired. During this hiatus, he founded NeXT, a computer company later acquired by Apple for its innovative operating system: a version of Unix that had a nice, graphical user interface. In 1986 he purchased the computer graphics division from Lucas Films and spun it off as Pixar.

When I attended engineering school at Washington University in the early 1990’s, the computer lab had two rooms. One filled with PCs, the other filled with Macs. While much of the PC room was empty, there was hardly an empty chair in the Mac room. Students didn’t want to use PCs for writing their papers, they wanted something easy to learn and use.

While Steve Jobs is thought of as an innovator with a Midas touch, not all his ideas turned a profit. The Apple III was a bust. The NeXT computer, while innovative, was targeted at too narrow a market that was already serviced by Apple. After ditching the hardware division, NeXT turned a small profit in 1994. Following a similar theme was Toy Story, Pixar’s first blockbuster, which wasn’t released until 1995, nine years from the time Jobs acquired the division. But through failure, Jobs gained valuable insight. In one of the more viewed commencement speeches on YouTube,

he told his audience how his being fired from Apple freed him from the ‘heaviness of success’ and allowed him the freedom to create and start from the beginning. He became less full of himself. Above all, he learned from mistakes and incorporated those lessons into his subsequent successes. From the failure of the Newton, grew the success of the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. From the missteps of Apple’s MobleMe came iCloud.

As I write this, there are hundreds of students protesting outside Wall Street. They rail against capitalism, corporate greed and corruption, and have support in certain segments of our population. But as they blog on their MacBooks, or take photos with their iPhones, do they comprehend the shoulders they stand upon? Innovators like Jobs & Wozniak, Gates & Allen, Ellison, Page & Brin, Hewlett & Packard and others don’t happen spontaneously. They are nurtured by a drive of calculated risk and potential reward. You don’t get engineers to work tirelessly in the wee hours in an office laboratory to perfect touch screens or other technologies to beat competitors, known and unknown, without the outside chance of remuneration. This creates products that we all use and love. Technical innovations that, directly and indirectly, save and enrich our lives. Every country, every population, occasionally produces someone with extraordinary talent and vision. Where they end up depends on their environment’s ability to nurture and reward this rare talent. We’ve been lucky enough to live in an age that allows a disparity in wealth, because such disparity, like a tide, does raise all boats. We see when governments crack down on individuals with talent and drive, who "make too much." In the end, it doesn’t lift the rest of the citizens, but drives everyone further into poverty.

What the protesters don't realize is that for all the success of an Apple, or Microsoft, or Exxon, or Virgin Atlantic, there are a few spectacular failures, and millions of smaller ones as well. Capitalism requires failure as well as success. Evolution dictates winners and losers in its mutations. In his final story during his commencement address at Stanford, Steve talks about death. He talked about his diagnosis of operable Pancreatic cancer. He talked about how death makes way for new life. "Death is life's change agent." Wherever your spirit dwells, Steve, here's to you. Through your imperfections and mistakes, you've made my life, and the lives of millions of people, much richer.

UPDATE: A nice memoir of Steve Jobs from Walt Mossberg, http://allthingsd.com/20111005/the-steve-jobs-i-knew/