Anil Dash named this blog one of his blogs of the year. Needless to say, I’m completely humbled by the compliment, and especially humbled by the fine company I’m in. Anytime I’m mentioned in the same light as Nelson Minar, I know I must be doing something right.
In rural India, a fake government office set up originally as a scam expanded to employ 20 people in various civil service roles, like street sweeping and issuing birth and death certificates. The enterprise was discovered when some of the employees complained to the government about problems at the “branch office.” Without blogs, how would we learn about such wonderful things?
In my day to day work, the definition of precision is usually, “All my unit tests run successfully.” The level of precision achieved by the clockmakers at the NIST is significantly more impressive.
Slate’s Emily Bazelton and Dahlia Lithwick break down exactly what was lost when the CIA lied about having taped the interrogations of top al-Qaeda detainees and then destroyed them in 2005.
Bruce Schneier notes that if the CIA destroyed the tapes, they must have been really bad, because such tapes are valuable from an intelligence perspective.
Malcolm Gladwell has written a timely article on IQ, specifically about the Flynn effect, which is described thusly:
He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter. Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years.
Needless to say, the implication of Flynn’s research is that if IQ is increasing so rapidly from generation to generation, it can’t be described as innate.
I’d recommend reading the whole article, not only is Gladwell’s argument interesting, but he includes plenty of entertaining anecdotes that are worth the price of admission. The explanation of achievement by Chinese immigrants to America is particularly good.
What’s the state of the art these days in building your own community site? The basic idea is that you start with a blog, but you want user registration, profile pages, forums, and perhaps the ability to give users their own blogs.
Yesterday I read some horrible things about Joomla in a private forum. There’s also Movable Type Community Solution. I expect that the UI is very nice, but I can’t get over the idea that Movable Type is slow. That’s a conclusion I’ve come to running this site on Movable Type. (I’ve even installed FastCGI and eAccelerator, but some operations still feel slow.
I have installed Drupal, and impressed by how finished it seems. (There’s a FreeBSD port for it, which is really nice.) I’m still not sure I like it, though. All of the themes are pretty ugly, and I don’t love the tools for laying out the site particularly well.
There are also plenty of people who are building sites using forum software like phpBB and the various extensions that other “community site” features people have become accustomed to.
There are also sites where you can set up social networks like Ning and Tribe.net. Heck, you can even just set up a blog on Vox and try let other people who are interested in the community set up their own Vox accounts.
So what’s the right answer these days. I’m going to continue pushing forward on the Drupal path for now (for a site other than this one), but I’m curious to know what people think of the market these days.
Today we learned that top Congressional Democrats were briefed by the CIA on their plans to torture detainees in secret facilities in other countries, starting in 2002. While I’ve been hard on the Republicans for the part they’ve played in supporting the torture of suspected supporters of terrorism, the Democrats deserve plenty of blame as well. Extraordinary rendition was introduced by the Clinton administration, and while the Democrats have not given torture their full-throated support, they haven’t done much to oppose it, either. And let’s be blunt, I knew back in 2002 that the United States was torturing prisoners, does anyone really believe that the Democrats in Congress didn’t?
The bottom line for me is that I’m not going to vote for anybody who’s a supporter of torture, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, or any other practices that violate our Constitution or the treaties that the United States has ratified. I didn’t vote for the Democratic incumbent in the Congressional election last time because he voted in favor of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and I won’t be voting for any torture apologists in 2008.
Oh, and don’t buy the argument that the people in Congress couldn’t speak up. Michael Froomkin explains why that’s not the case.
We’re in the middle of the bursting of the real estate bubble, and one of the most interesting things is how unexceptional it is.
One of the best-documented bubbles in recent times was the junk bond market in the eighties that led to the collapse of the savings and loan industry. Like nearly all bubbles, it started when some smart investors figured out that certain assets were underpriced. In this case, it was junk bonds. All bonds are rated by bond rating agencies, and bonds with a rating below a certain grade are considered “junk bonds.” Someone realized that many companies with low bond ratings were actually quite stable and were almost certain to pay off their debt, and that the bonds were a good investment. (Basically, the bonds were not as risky as their rating portrayed them to be, so they payed more interest than they needed to.) People started making money by buying the bonds, soon the demand for junk bonds exceeded their supply.
As usually happens under capitalism, when demand exceeds supply, new suppliers enter the market. Corporate raiders added to the supply of junk bonds by buying companies via leveraged buyout. The idea was simple and yet crazy, you buy a company with borrowed money, and you use the company you’re purchasing as collateral. You could take a company with high rated debt (or no debt to speak of), buy it out via an LBO by issuing a bunch of junk bonds, and then sell those junk bonds to a ravenous market that would buy anything. The whole thing was facilitated by the investment banking industry, which gets paid for the transaction, not for the results.
As is the case with bubbles, as demand went up, quality went down. So while at the beginning, junk bonds were an undervalued and shrewd investment, by the time the heyday arrived, they were a joke, propped up only by the demand of other people who wanted to buy junk bonds. The people who got into the game late (like the savings and loans) lost their shirts when the bubble popped. In the end, taxpayers ended up picking up the tab.
The dot com bubble with which we’re probably all more familiar took on a similar pattern. Early investment returns on Internet companies led to there being a glut of capital looking for places to land. Suddenly, any idea could get funding and huge numbers of bad ideas did get funding. In the end, investors lost their shirts, employees lost their jobs, and everyone went home bitter.
Now we find the same pattern repeated in the real estate world. In this case, the asset in demand was mortgage-backed securities. Because people selling mortgages were packaging up and selling them off, they no longer had an incentive to make sure that people could actually pay their mortgages when making the loans, and because the companies turning the mortgages into securities had such an easy time selling those securities (due to the growing bubble), they had no incentive to check into the practices of the mortgage brokers. What we’re left with is perhaps trillions of dollars in bad debt that was eagerly lapped up by investors all over the world.
What’s the lesson in here for most of us? It’s that if you’re interested in value, beware scarcity. In markets where assets are scarce, prices go up and quality goes down. It’s one reason why you have to be careful when hiring Ruby on Rails developers. Right now there’s something of a bubble in terms of demand for Ruby on Rails skills. The best developers already have good jobs or are commanding a price premium, and there are a lot of other people out there claiming to be Ruby developers who don’t really have the skills. I think most companies would find more value finding good developers who don’t know Ruby on Rails and letting them get up to speed on the platform, rather than demanding Ruby on Rails right out of the box.
Scarcity is great for collectors of baseball cards or fine art, but for those of us who want to allocate our limited resources wisely, it’s best to be wary.
The New York Times Bits blog writes about the acquisition of Gemstar, a company that provides electronic program guides for TV by Macrovision, a company in the copy protection business. That doesn’t sound promising for consumers.
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