Bumper Snicker...

The G8 Says “Undo It!”

The G8 finance ministers just finished their meeting in Lecce, Italy. As usual, they released a statement afterwards. Most unusually, the statement actually contained something very interesting and unexpected:

We discussed the need to prepare appropriate strategies for unwinding the extraordinary policy measures taken to respond to the crisis once the recovery is assured. These “exit strategies”, which may vary from country to country, are essential to promote a sustainable recovery over the long term. We asked the IMF to undertake the necessary analytical work to assist us with this process.

Whoa! The finance ministers want the G8 countries to unwind the remaining portions of the bailout programs once “recovery is assured” (a phrase that could be interpreted in all too many ways).

Unwinding is accounting-speak for "undo". In the U.S., the vast majority of the money from all the bailout programs has yet to be spent – and in some cases, it has yet to be borrowed. Unwinding these programs would mean repaying the borrowed money that has not yet been spent, and abandoning any future borrowing under these programs. In addition, unwinding would include converting any options, warrant, stock, etc. acquired by the government as part of the bailout (for example, the government's majority position in AIG) to cash, to repay the money borrowed to acquire them.

Dare we hope? Would the Obama administration have the good common sense to follow the G8's recommendations? Would they give back the money that they and the Bush administration stole from us?

My bet would be “No way, Jose!” But I would surely love to be wrong on this one...

Bumper Snicker...

Bolton on Israel and Iran...

Today's Wall Street Journal has a fascinating short analysis piece by John Bolton (aka “The Mustache”). His forthright manner and adult analysis stand in stark contrast to the gobbledegook we're treated to by the Obama administration on this topic. His conclusion:

This brief survey demonstrates why Israel's military option against Iran's nuclear program is so unattractive, but also why failing to act is even worse. All these scenarios become infinitely more dangerous once Iran has deliverable nuclear weapons. So does daily life in Israel, elsewhere in the region and globally.

Many argue that Israeli military action will cause Iranians to rally in support of the mullahs' regime and plunge the region into political chaos. To the contrary, a strike accompanied by effective public diplomacy could well turn Iran's diverse population against an oppressive regime. Most of the Arab world's leaders would welcome Israel solving the Iran nuclear problem, although they certainly won't say so publicly and will rhetorically embrace Iran if Israel strikes. But rhetoric from its Arab neighbors is the only quantum of solace Iran will get.

On the other hand, the Obama administration's increased pressure on Israel concerning the "two-state solution" and West Bank settlements demonstrates Israel's growing distance from Washington. Although there is no profit now in complaining that Israel should have struck during the Bush years, the missed opportunity is palpable. For the remainder of Mr. Obama's term, uncertainty about his administration's support for Israel will continue to dog Israeli governments and complicate their calculations. Iran will see that as well, and play it for all it's worth. This is yet another reason why Israel's risks and dilemmas, difficult as they are, only increase with time.

My read of his piece is that he fully expects Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, and sooner rather than later. He sees the Obama administration's stance as accelerating this possibility, rather than delaying it (as Israel must be less certain of U.S. support now than at any time since at least the Carter era, and probably back to the time of Israel's founding). The longer Israel waits, the worse the tactical situation. Mr. Bolton also believes that the inevitable Iranian retaliation for such an Israeli attack will most likely take the form of “unleashing” Hezbollah and Hamas for terror attacks inside Israel.

I'd sure feel better about the Obama administration's foreign policy if we got this kind of analysis, supporting their positions, from someone on the team...

Poster Contest...

Over at Michelle Malkin's place. There's lots more like the one at right...

Bumper Snicker...

Anna's Pull Gs...

The male Anna's hummingbird (a species abundant around our home) turns out to be the record-setting vertebrate in terms of pulling Gs. This happens in the tight turns the males make while showing off to the females. Read all about it here (and watch some cool video)...

What a Great Idea!

I wish I'd thought of this! A school system in New York City is experimenting with the notion of “paying for grades” – offering cash rewards for students who get good grades. I know from my own experiences that kids in general have a lot of trouble connecting their education to their earning potential. This program removes that trouble very nicely: learn something, prove that you've done it (by scoring well on a test), and you get paid. In cold, hard, cash. Wonderful! The young lady at right certainly looks as though she's made the connection between educational attainment and earning potential...

Read more about the program here.

But I can't help thinking that … if they were going to complete the lesson, they'd flash the cash, then deduct the government's share and hand over the remainder. That lesson would do more for the education of these future voters than anything else I can think of...

Doing Business In California...

From serial entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell:

California's government is the problem. The state is business-hostile. It is merit-hostile. It has the highest tax rates and returns less in services to its average citizens. Massive pension abuses are not dealt with.

Worst of all, the state's crazy regulation structure creates uncertainty, cost, and risk in doing business here. The system is chilling to investment and innovation. This is true for businesses of all types, from technology companies to basic franchises.

Many businesses founded elsewhere now try to avoid for as long as possible doing business in California. Meanwhile, I have watched company after company leave the state. And, as you might imagine, it is much harder to get businesses back than to keep them from leaving.

This is so sad for those of us who love California...

I'm lucky enough to work for one of the very few entrepreneurial efforts that's doing so well it still works in California, despite the government's best efforts to prevent it. But there aren't many software startups like this one, and California is going to pay for this foray into brain-dead liberalism. It's not hard to see that the startups are going to go elsewhere – and with them will go the best engine for economic growth that the world has ever seen. A few years from now, the name “Silicon Valley” may refer instead to someplace in Montana, Nevada, or some other business-friendly state. Or worse, in some other country.

An Odd Experience...

I've posted several times before about the Descanso Junction Restaurant. It's one of our favorite places to eat, with terrific food at prices that make it an equally terrific value (kinda nice during this downturn). The decor, the people who work there, and everything else about it contributes to a homey, comfortable atmosphere.

Recently they completely redid their menu, with lots of new dishes we haven't had time to try yet. The first few things we've tried have been really good, and sometimes even surprising. For example, who would have expected top-notch crème brûlée way out in the sticks? Even better, they've been doing very well (despite the recession), and they've gone back to a 7-day-a-week schedule. Woo hoo!

Well, Friday night Debbie and I were up there for dinner. We sat at a booth, and the table (like all the others) was covered with a glass top that has lots of photos, clippings, cards, etc. underneath it. As is my habit, I started reading the pieces – some of them were new to me (the staff there changes them frequently). One review was upside-down from where I sat, so I struggled to read it, very slowly. The review seemed vaguely familiar – and that's when I noticed that it was from this very blog, almost three years ago. What a hoot! And what an odd feeling to see that clipping of my article there.

After thinking about it a bit, I decided not to let the crew know who I was. I really don't want any special treatment, so if I'm still unknown to them, I'd rather keep it that way...

More Dyson...

I just love the way Freeman Dyson thinks. And then when I reflect on his age (85), I'm always astonished. A sampler:

No doubt that warming is happening. I don’t think it is correct to say “global,” but certainly warming is happening. I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that’s where the warming is most extreme. And it’s spectacular, no doubt about it. And glaciers are shrinking and so on.

But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it’s made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful.

There’s a lot made out of the people who died in heat waves. And there is no doubt that we have heat waves and people die. What they don’t say is actually five times as many people die of cold in winters as die of heat in summer. And it is also true that more of the warming happens in winter than in summer. So, if anything, it’s heavily favorable as far as that goes. It certainly saves more lives in winter than it costs in summer.

So that kind of argument is never made. And I see a systematic bias in the way things are reported. Anything that looks bad is reported, and anything that looks good is not reported.

A lot of these things are not anything to do with human activities. Take the shrinking of glaciers, which certainly has been going on for 300 years and has been well documented. So it certainly wasn’t due to human activities, most of the time. There’s been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to human activity.

And the most serious of almost all the problems is the rising sea level. But there again, we have no evidence that this is due to climate change. A good deal of evidence says it’s not. I mean, we know that that’s been going on for 12,000 years, and there’s very doubtful arguments as to what’s been happening in the last 50 years and (whether) human activities have been important. It’s not clear whether it’s been accelerating or not. But certainly, most of it is not due to human activities. So it would be a shame if we’ve made huge efforts to stop global warming and the sea continued to rise. That would be a tragedy. Sea level is a real problem, but we should be attacking it directly and not attacking the wrong problem.

Read the whole thing.

My Kind of Brunch...

Debbie is “down the hill” in Bonita to watch her friends compete in a dog agility competition. Next week is her first competition since she broke her arm (it's out of the cast as of Friday, but she's still wearing a wrist brace). She took Race (our border collie) with her, so I'm home with the three field spaniels.

I got hungry around 10 am, so I went scrounging in the refrigerator to see what goodies we might have available. Found some leftover roast chicken: a leg and thigh. Skinned it, and fed the pieces of skin to three very appreciative dogs. De-boned it and diced the meat. Let the dogs clean my fingers and the chopping board (and yes, then I washed them!). In a bowl, combined the diced chicken, a half-cup or so of frozen corn kernels, a can of chick peas (garbanzo beans), a teaspoon or so of mayonnaise, about the same amount of “juice” from the beans, and a generous sprinkle of dried tarragon. Let the tarragon soak up the bean juice, then mixed up the bowls contents until everything was coated and the corn had thawed.

Then I ate it all, while the dogs watched forlornly. Yum.

I did let them clean the bowl and spoon, though, and I was quickly forgiven...

Congressional Motors...

IowaHawk strikes again. Tip of the hat to Doug S. for pointing this out...
Heh: “...even in the choppy waters of a Cape Cod inlet.$rdquo;

Septic Tank Shenanigans...

We just found out that existing law on the books in California mandates septic tank inspections (by state-approved inspectors) and upgrades to ambiguous standards when the inspection results aren't up to snuff. Worse, these inspections will be paid for by us; estimates run up to $650 not including the cost of opening, draining, and cleaning the septic tank. Required repairs and upgrades could run into the thousands of dollars. Note that this isn't a requirement to fix broken septic tanks – this is a requirement to periodically inspect each and every residential septic tank in the state.

Just what we need. More nanny statism, more expenses.

Assemblyman Joel Anderson (Republican from El Cajon) is coauthor of a bill that would repeal this absurd regulation. He needs our support. You can reach him in several ways:

email: anderson@assembly.ca.gov
phone: 916/319-2177
mail: State Capitol, Room 2130, Sacremento, CA 95184

Modern Communications...

Reader Larry E. writes:

I was sitting here thinking how communication has changed so much.

Right now I’m sitting in a room around a table with 10 people. Developers, tech writers, qa. There are at least 5-6 other team members working from their homes at the moment.

In the room there are two distinct conversations going on verbally and at the same time a lot more going on via IM and still others via email. I’m sitting right across from my QA lead and I IM him asking for the updated QA Plan. I tell him that Christophe in France has a patch for our import problem which I got from email and he says, Christophe told him (via IM) and that Christophe is looking the ETL run as well. With a team spread over 5 sites in 3 countries this instantaneous communication is so important.

The other day I realized that when I left home for the USMC, communication with my family and friends back home dropped off to a trickle. Occasional letters and phone calls. Now my son left home for the USMC and even though he is on the East Coast, I hear from him a great deal. He calls me on the cell, text messages and emails. I get emailed pictures occasionally or he just takes a picture on his phone and sends it to me in a message. My son keeps up with his friends still in California via text and sites like facebook.

While it may not be as personal as face-to-face communication, and it is certainly very different, it is communication that would not happen at all without this technology. It enables you to maintain relationships you would not otherwise be able to do so otherwise.

Fascinating. At least from the perspective of someone that didn’t grow up with it.

This is a topic I've often thought about. Usually what brings it to my mind is “talking” (usually by email) with one of our soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. This always reminds me of my days in the U.S. Navy, and how sawed off from the world we were whenever we deployed to the Western Pacific or Indian Oceans. There were intervals of months when I had no communications of any kind (not even mail!) with friends or family. Often the only news we got was from highly-filtered one-page news summaries sent to the ship's radio room (weekly, if I remember right) and made available in the ship's library. Very urgent family news (births, deaths, etc.) was occasionally sent via U.S. Navy radio traffic; it was a big deal when one of these came in. I remember very clearly the profound sense of isolation while on one of these deployments.

Contrast that with today's military, as Larry points out. Soldiers literally on the front line of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are using cell phones, email, instant messaging, and blogs to communicate with friends, family, and the whole world. They take digital photos and video, and post them up on Flickr and YouTube. I've watched videos of countless battles and actions just hours after they occurred, thanks to these technologies. And certainly our troops aren't cut off from the world in any sense of the world.

Neither are the homeless:

Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge.

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet."

Amazing!

In my profession (hardware and software engineering), another Internet-enabled phenomenon has been equally revolutionary: search engines and freely available technical information.

Years ago, if I wanted to design a piece of electronic hardware, the starting point was to talk with the hardware resellers and try to convince them that they should supply me with “data books”. These were thick catalogs of the parts from a particular manufacturer, and owning a library of these was an absolutely essential prerequisite for any hardware design work. Today those data books are completely unnecessary. You can look up the parts on any of hundreds of web sites (for hardware vendors), and just click to get a PDF of the data sheet for the exact part you're interested in. It's hard to overstate the extent and importance of that liberation from the data book tyranny – it means now that any individual (not just engineers working for big companies) has wide-open access to all electronic parts.

In software engineering, the Internet has been just as revolutionary. Years ago the only method available for advancing your knowledge of the field was to buy (and read, of course!) expensive texts. Often you also had to buy expensive software development tools as well. These days that model has completely blown up. There are tens of thousands of web sites chock full of interesting and relevant technical information on any conceivable (and sometimes inconceivable!) and arcane software engineering topic. I still buy some books, but it's more for the convenience of at-hand access to a familiar reference than it is for learning. Perhaps an even more profound impact has come from sharing knowledge with others, often through web forums. Now when I run into some kind of unfamiliar problem, or I have a how-do-I-do-this? question, the first thing I do is launch a Google query – and very often this will lead me directly to a solution in a few seconds. In the past, I might have beat my head against the wall for these problems, for hours or even days. Not any more.

This Internet thingie has had quite an impact!

Fire Lookout Tower...

This caught my eye in a U-T article:

The forest service also will have two lookout towers staffed around the clock this fire season, one near Jamul in the south central part of the county and the newly renovated High Point Lookout Tower on Palomar Mountain.

Naturally, being the U-T, there are no more details. I can only think of two lookout towers they might be talking about: Los Pinos and Lyon's Peak. Los Pinos is regularly manned (though not full time), and Lyon's Peak hasn't been used in a long time. Do you know for sure what the plans actually are?

Grab You by the Ankles...

Don't miss today's Day-by-Day cartoon. An excerpt:

Amusement ride operator: “So...can we take you all for a ride today?”
Customer: “What's the ‘Stimulus Surprise’?”
Amusement ride operator: “Hydraulic grippers grab you by the ankles, bend you over, and – let's just say the ride's over when we say it's over.”

Earliest Audio Recordings Ever Found...

These recordings were made 20 years before Thomas Alva Edison made his famous recordings. Unlike Edison's, these recordings were never intended to be played back – the original goal was simply to make a “picture” of sounds. They were made by a French inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The picture at right shows the apparatus he used.

The actual recordings can be heard here.

Hope 'n Change?

Ted Rall is an editorial cartoonist, sometime columnist, and author of the raving liberal lunatic persuasion. He's not someone I'd normally find myself agreeing with. He is someone I'd expect to be a rabid Obama supporter.

So imagine my surprise when I read one of his columns this morning, to find that contained the following (but not out of context!) quotes:

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through...

...Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss...

...Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him...

Whoa, there, lefty. Steady on, there, Ted. And right on!

In my own defense, the reasons behind these quotes are most definitely not the reasons I might use in arriving at the same conclusions.

I guess this is some evidence that Obama is moving toward the “center” (whatever that actually is). Long reviled from the right, he's now starting to be reviled from the “respectable” left...

A Beautiful Idea...

Would eliminating the current state government completely and starting over with a clean slate appeal to you? Until I read this web site, I didn't know such a thing was even possible (at least, not without an actual revolution). The general idea is to call a “Constitutional Convention”, and rewrite the state's constitution from scratch.

Currently California's Constitution requires two thirds of the legistature to vote in favor of placing the question of a Constitutional Convention on the ballot, where it must win a majority of the voters to gain approval. The first part of this is unlikely in the extreme – it's hard to imagine two of the current legislators voting for this, much less two thirds.

However, the voters in California have the power to place propositions on the ballot that would amend the State's Constitution (as we did recently with Proposition 8, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman). So the folks at RepairCalifornia.org propose exactly such an amendment proposition, to amend the State's Constitution to allow the voters to directly call a Constitutional Convention.

This would be like a revolution without the guns and tanks. I want to think about this some more, but on a first pass I'm inclined to agree with Peter Robinson:

Will California default, forcing states and municipalities throughout the nation to pay higher interest rates to bondholders? Will it persuade Washington to bail it out, rewarding the Golden State's political class while punishing the citizens of prudent, solvent states such as Indiana or Texas? Or will California cut its budget so sharply that basic state agencies--the California Highway Patrol, for instance, or the Department of Corrections--will be impaired?

None of the answers are pretty.

Yet this financial crisis has produced one beautiful idea.

Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, a business group, has begun calling for a constitutional convention. The current constitution, Wunderman argues, is so long, convoluted and encrusted with amendments that Californians ought to toss it out and start again from scratch.

To keep the political class from taking over the convention, Wunderman wants to choose delegates from the state jury pool. Does that sound like placing trust in chance? If so, you've got the idea. Ordinary Californians, redesigning the entire state government.

William F. Buckley Jr. once said, "I would rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University." Me? I'd rather be governed by a few hundred jurors from Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Irvine, San Diego, Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto and Stockton than by all the lobbyists and union officials in Sacramento.

It is, as I said, a beautiful idea.

A clean slate. A system of government designed by ordinary citizens, not the political in-crowd. A beautiful idea, indeed...