Posts

To borrow an idea from Tyler Cowen, here’s a really interesting sentence: After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. That’s from a Felix Salmon blog post on Charles Komanoff’s study of the externalities associated with driving in New York. Since my spell checker doesn’t know the word “externalities,” I’ll link to its definition as well. ...

Here’s Matthew Yglesias explaining why many Senators are not experts on public policy: Senators and members of congress have extremely time-consuming jobs, and the job is basically to fundraise, to travel a lot, and to hustle on behalf of the interests of donors and parochial local interests. This is one of those everyday economics lessons that I think comes in handy in many phases of life. I used to work fairly regularly with people who were consultants for enterprise software companies. What I soon realized was that the core competency for these people was not software development skills or even product expertise but rather willingness to travel. Most of them just showed up and then spent most of their time asking people in the same office questions we could have asked them. ...

Daniel Jalkut posts on the disadvantages of the GPL. He argues that the viral nature of the GPL is off-putting to some developers who may otherwise contribute to a project that is licensed under a BSD-like license. That’s completely true. But it’s also beside the point. The GPL is explicitly and intentionally political. The goal is to force more software into the open source world. The political nature of the license is certainly going to alienate some people, but any true advocate of the GPL will be completely OK with that. Knowingly choosing the GPL means you’re willing to take the “bad” with the good. The problem Jalkut describes has more to do with people who mistakenly equate “open source” with “GPL”. ...

Matthew Yglesias makes a good point about all of the compromising taking place in Congress when it comes to health care reform. A bill that appeases “moderates” may not be appealing to voters. Health care reform that does not relieve people from their dependence on their employer for health insurance is not interesting to me in any way. I’d like to see coverage for the uninsured, of course, and a bill that reduces the rate of growth in health care costs is necessary, but what I want is for people to be able to go out on their own and purchase health insurance at a reasonable price. ...

Every time a new iPhone is released, there’s a spate of articles that analyze the its success as a product. My friend Stephen O’Grady puts the success of the iPhone down to the apps. He’s got a point – the applications available for the iPhone are great. But the truth is that when the iPhone launched, the only opportunity for developers was to create Web sites that were optimized for the iPhone’s Web browser, and Apple was still selling a ton of phones. ...

Since judge Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama, one case in particular has captured people’s attention – Ricci v. New Haven. Judge Sotomayor joined a 7-6 majority in ruling in favor of the city of New Haven at the appellate level. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the firefighters. The case is easy to describe. New Haven, Connecticut created a test to determine which firefighters should be promoted. Few minority candidates scored high enough on the test to be eligible for promotion, and New Haven declined to certify the test results. Rather than promoting anyone, the city decided to come up with an alternative test. This seems patently unfair, but things become more complicated when the applicable laws are taken into account. ...

I’ve finished Scott Rosenberg’s history of blogging, Say Everything, and wanted to finish writing up my thoughts. The other day I wrote about the first half, now I’m adding my impression on the whole thing. As I mentioned in the earlier post, Scott does a truly outstanding job of capturing the essence of events as they occurred. The toughest job for a historian or journalist is making the events recognizable to those who observed them closely, and Scott succeeds admirably on that front. ...

Good links on the topic of health care are coming fast and furious this week. New Yorker writer Atul Gawande has written another piece on health care to follow up on his widely read article on disparities in health care expenditures and the reasons for them. In his new article, he lays out his prescription for health care policy. The article is really a pep talk on the necessity of health care reform. As he points out, there are many health care systems around the world, and all of them are products of the time and circumstances within which they were instituted. Gawande recommends a mandate for universal coverage as they have in Massachusetts combined with greater measures to control costs, which brings me to my next reading recommendation. ...

Tim Bray posts on the actual practice of Test Driven Development. Here’s my thesis: As a profession, we do a lot more software maintenance than we do greenfield development. And it’s at the maintenance end where TDD really pays off. I’m starting to see lapses from the TDD credo as more and more forgivable the closer you are to the beginning of a project. And conversely, entirely abhorrent while in maintenance mode. ...

On the subject of risks undertaken by dissenting Iranians the other day, I wrote: If these protests fail, the people who are identified as having participated are likely to be discriminated against in every way possible until some other effort to change the regime succeeds. Today I read that the Iranian soccer players who expressed solidarity with the protesters have been banned for life.