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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: April 2009 (page 1 of 5)

The value of press conferences

During the Presidential campaign, Barack Obama attacked the Bush administration for its abuse of the state secrets privilege. The Bush administration was the first to argue that cases could be dismissed entirely because they would require the disclosure of state secrets — previously that privilege could be used to suppress certain sensitive evidence, but not to toss out a case entirely.

And yet, when President Obama took office, his administration continued to use the policy exactly as the Bush administration had, much to the chagrin of civil rights activists.

Last night, Time magazine’s Michael Scherer asked Obama to address the discrepancy between his campaign position and the position his administration has taken. Dan Froomkin has the full question and answer. This alone was a huge win — now Obama is on the record with his position on state secrets.

As it turns out, Obama’s answer was deficient and somewhat dishonest, see Glenn Greenwald’s analysis for more. At least now, though, we’re having a conversation. Obama has taken a position, that position is somewhat at odds with reality, and so we can see how those reality and that position are reconciled as time goes on.

Quotable: Claire McCaskill

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill on why she tweets:

Second, as his bar graph showed, I tweet an average of 4 to 5 times a day. This has become a welcome discipline for me in Washington. As I am walking to a hearing, or riding the tram over for a vote, I think of what I want to tell the folks at home about my work or life. This, I believe, is a fairly decent way to stay connected. After all, I’m in Washington to work for them and this process reminds me of it several times a day.

The anti-Twitter backlash is stupid, but at least it has given people who enjoy or find value in Twitter a good reason to write smart things about why it’s stupid.

Feed breakage

I didn’t migrate my feeds to my Google account in time and have caused some breakage. The problem is fixed but it’ll take a few hours for the DNS change to propagate. Apologies.

Arlen Specter against Presidential power

Republicans willingly acceded to the Bush administration’s agglomeration of new powers, Katamari Damacy-style, for eight years. Now that they’re out of power, the “unitary executive” seems to scare them more. Despite the fact that this sudden aversion to executive power springs solely from being in the opposition, I think that it’s a good position for Republicans to take. The Democrats did a terrible job of being an effective opposition party. Since the Republicans seem better at it, I strongly encourage them to fight for the things that I care about — like reducing the authority of the executive branch.

Arlen Specter, who probably won’t be in the Senate at all after 2010, has written a piece in the New York Review of Books explaining legislation he has written that will subject warrantless wiretapping to further judicial review, allow suits to be filed in relation to the warrentless wiretapping program, and prohibit federal courts from considering Presidential signing statements when making rulings. These all seem like sound ideas.

My main quibble with this well-intentioned legislation is that the point of signing statements is not to give direction to the courts, but rather to guide executive branch agencies in how to apply legislation, and this bill won’t do much about that. In the end, I think that signing statements will be limited more by political fallout than by any kind of constraint that the legislative branch can apply.

Jason Scott wants to save GeoCities

Jason Scott (of Textfiles.com fame) is leading an effort to archive GeoCities before Yahoo takes it offline:

Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I’ve archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It’s not for me to judge. It’s for me to collect.

I can’t do this alone. I’m going to be pulling data from these twitching, blood-in-mouth websites for weeks, in the background. I could use help, even if we end up being redundant. More is better. We’re in #archiveteam on EFnet. Stop by. Bring bandwidth and disks. Help me save Geocities. Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed.

This is a truly awesome thing to do.

Ain’t that America

Matthew Yglesias nails one of the central characteristics of American culture:

The United States isn’t run along Social Darwinist lines, but we’re closer than any other major developed country. To an extent that I find frankly astounding—and certainly unseen in other wealthy nations—people from modest backgrounds are expected to suffer the economic consequences of poor decision-making or bad luck, all in the name of personal responsibility. But when someone really important screws up, either in terms of provoking a financial crisis or overseeing a policy disaster or breaking the law or whatever, well then it turns out that we have better things to do than “look backwards” at who deserves what.

Eschew preferences

In his post on migrating from Ruby on Rails to Expression Engine, Dan Benjamin references the following quotation from Jianzhi Sengcan:

The Path is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

I think I’m just going to sit and contemplate that for the rest of the day.

FBI interrogator vs Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney has said that torture extracted important intelligence from prisoners. Former FBI counterterrorism agent Ali Soufan says not so much:

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

Are great programmers hired or made?

As sports fans know, the NFL draft is this weekend. In many ways, it’s the most exciting event of the year for football fans. Every team gets to participate, and fans have the chance to believe that their favorite team has improved itself, at least until games are played and reality sets in. Mike Tanier has written the best article I’ve read analyzing the meaning of the NFL draft — Made, not Born. I don’t want to talk about it in terms of football, though, but rather in terms of hiring software developers.

Years after the draft, players are called a “bust” or a “steal” based on how they perform, but Tanier’s inarguably true argument is that how players develop once they reach the NFL is more important than their qualities when they were drafted. Incredible athletes who are drafted into a bad situation often have short, unimpressive careers. Lesser athletes who are drafted into good situations wind up in the Hall of Fame. People obsess too much over draft analysis and not enough over how well teams develop players. (Indeed, many teams that are considered great at picking players in the draft are more likely great at developing the players they pick.)

What does this have to do with software development? Obviously hiring developers is different than drafting football players. What I think is similar, however, is that what you do to enable programmers to succeed once they start work is just as important is hiring the right people in the first place. There are all kinds of situations a talented programmer can be placed in that will lead to their writing poor quality code and developing bad habits that are hard to break. A lesser programmer on a good team with solid processes and better mentors can produce great software.

This is one of the things I wonder about when I read articles about Google’s hiring practices. Does Google produce the software that they do because they hire incredibly talented people, or do they create an environment for developers that enables them to make the most of their talent? I expect that they’re good on both counts, but people seem to obsess more over the former than the latter.

Forget green consumerism

Does buying “green” products rather than the more conventional alternatives really make a difference in terms of improving the environment? Environmental activist Joel Makower says not so much.

He argues that the drive for efficiency and cost savings in business makes a bigger difference:

But there’s a deeper problem with green consumerism: It’s often hard to know which companies are improving their environmental performance—and how. The key element of making consumer choices—knowledge—is missing. Companies’ environmental improvements (or lack thereof) aren’t usually obvious, even to the experts. In fact, some of the most environmentally improved products make no green claims at all.

Here’s why: To save money, reduce risks, improve quality, and remain competitive, companies in nearly every sector are continually engineering waste, inefficiency, energy intensity, and toxicity out of their manufacturing and distribution. A few have upended their business models in the name of efficiency and enhanced productivity. They sometimes do this because of the reduced environmental impact, but mostly they do it because it makes good business sense—not something companies usually bother to tell their customers.

The fundamental problem is not post-consumer waste, but rather the waste that’s generated in creating things and delivering them to consumers. The numbers are staggering:

What’s the point? It’s only a matter of time before the story of GNT gets told and the public recognizes that for every pound of trash that ends up in municipal landfills, at least 40 more pounds are created upstream by industrial processes—and that a lot of this waste is far more dangerous to environmental and human health than our newspapers and grass clippings. At that point, the locus of concern could shift away from beverage containers, grocery bags, and the other mundane leftovers of daily life to what happens behind the scenes—the production, crating, storing, and shipping of the goods we buy and use.

This is not altogether bad news. An inefficient power supply in a computer may raise your electricity bill by $5 or $10 a year, and isn’t something you’re likely to worry about. If Google used that power supply, it would cost them millions of dollars in power bills. So they build their own servers and fund research into improving power supply technology.

Higher commodity prices create incentives to limit waste, but also make increasingly invasive extraction methods economically feasible. There was a recent article in National Geographic about mining for gold in the face of rising gold prices that exemplifies this problem. Rising commodity prices lead directly to habitat loss, which is the primary cause of species extinction.

It’s tough being an environmentalist.

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