Killing Goats

One of the funnier Aussies I've met out here walks in. We're not talking so he starts a new conversation:

"I killed a lot of goats once."

He then looks at us all with a worried look wondering what we'll think of him now.

"I was working for this company in Oman, filing papers to make a little money, and they kept saying hey you seem to know what you're doing and having me do things I didn't know how to do. That was how it was back then - no resume, just you seem to know what you're doing - why don't you do this task. So one day they tell me I'm going to manage the water purification system for this town nearby. I don't know any chemistry or crazy things, but they think I can do that, and there's this giant water pump, and these 2 giant tanks of chlorine they use on the water. They fill the tanks with these giant trucks all the time.

One day the tank starts leaking, and as it turns out chlorine will kill you. So I write a letter asking what to do about it. A week later someone writes back saying build a swimming pool, fill that pool with water, and then submerge the tank in it. The chlorine will safely leak into the pool for about a month and that will be that.

So I do that, and it really chlorinated the pool."

So we ask him what that has to do with goats.

"Oh, the goats were downwind from the pool."

Australian TV Ads

So the ads here are a bit funny, because they use a lot of colloquialisms like, "Sure we all buy mince..." - yes, we ALL buy mince, what kind of 2-bit bogan wouldn't buy mince? C'mon. But by far the strangest ad is one for an underwear maker here named Bonds. They'll run 12 short commercials over the span of just one half hour show, so it starts to get really strange if the TV's on in the background. A guy kinda singing like Robert Goulet half asleep just sings a part of "Twelve Days of Christmas" with a couple guitar plucks and fades out.

Imagine this coming on repeatedly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5sgx0Yjnlw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79visS2GafE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqXG28ffG48
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQt1zrDPDKk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rumgnCjAhrI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUdNfmebeMg

So weird.

High-Level Media That Can't Be Bothered To Fact Check

Duty calls. http://xkcd.com/386/

Having worked at Google, people frequently ask me about some of Google's shadier dealings. There's a recurring one that comes up frequently, and here are 2 articles of many that have come up over the past 4 years:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/11/googles-3-top-executives-have-8-private-jets/
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/a-new-fighter-jet-for-googles-founders/

It's important to notice that the first was written very recently (2011) and the second in 2008.

First of all, I'm not Google's biggest fan. They do stupid and evil things sometimes. But this is not one of them - in fact it's the opposite.

NASA and Google have a close relationship. First, they literally are close:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=google+headquarters+to+moffett+field

I recall driving over Moffett Field - where NASA launches many experiments from, and even houses a dorm for budding scientists - on my commute to Google each day.

Second, they are intellectually close - they both run buildings worldwide filled with nerds dreaming of crazy things they can do with technology, that may or may not be useful or a good idea, but from time to time may turn out to be very important to humanity.

They differ in two important ways: NASA is allowed to do crazy things almost no one else can, like launch satellites, fly fighter jets, and drop astronauts out of the sky. Google has a gigantic pile of cash - $42.6 billion. NASA is short on funding as people find it and the space race less and less relevant. And this is where the insane articles people keep asking me about begin.

With NASA's lacking funds, Google loaned a private 747 - with a giant Google logo on the side - to NASA. Knee-jerk reporters took a photo and reported Google was using federal airbases to fly in style. Since then Google lent several more planes to NASA, and even helped them pay for a fighter jet that NASA used to help monitor their European equivalent's mission.

So, Google is making up for the US's lack of funding to NASA by handing some of their giant pile of cash to NASA, with no business win on Google's end unless you believe mankind's gradual progress into space is somehow in Google's business interest. To really hammer this home, these reporters for the New York Times and TechCrunch are slamming Google for doing something philanthropic.

And here's the part that makes me go XKCD on these guys: These aren't some 2-bit bloggers trying to make their name. These are established arms of the media, supposedly the 4th branch of government, meant to monitor government and industry and warn the population when they get out of line. The New York Times article was written in 2008, and updated after the fact with the same knee-jerk headline and a brief, uninvestigated note about NASA maybe owning the fighter jet.

The TechCrunch article had 3 years to figure out the facts, and regurgitated them all over again. They then go on to say that 8 jets are divided amongst 3 Google Execs: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders, and Eric Schmidt, the CEO. Except Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO, replaced by Larry Page, so he could go work for the Obama Administration. So even in their attempt to exaggerate with a "2.6 jets per executive," they failed to do basic research to maximize their claims to 4 jets per "executive" (Google has hundreds of executives that may at any time have need for a flight to a national or international office or business partner, so it's a weak number anyway).

The point being that if a company, individual, or politician can't even do something nice and get away with it - let alone be applauded for it - how is the US supposed to ever pull itself out of the hole it's in? The fourth branch is broken, and the idiots writing the linked articles are part of the problem. Shame on you, douchebags.

How To Convert All Text To Lowercase In Google Spreadsheets

1. Select the column, right-click, and click Insert Column Right.
2. In the first cell of the new column enter formula =LOWER(A1) (or whatever the first cell is of the original column).
3. Copy the cell with the formula in it.
4. Select the column and paste - Google Spreadsheets is smart enough to adjust the row number for each pasted entry. You now have a column with lowercase in it - but it requires that column to the left to still be there.
5. Select the new column again and copy.
6. Right-click and click Paste Special > Values only.

This wipes out the formulas. You can now delete the original column. Yay hacks. Obviously this applies to anything you could do with a formula in spreadsheets.

Utopia Down Under

A point of perspective: Back home, in the US, we're considering rolling back the healthcare reform bill. It doesn't even get us universal healthcare - it just gets us slightly better chances (not 100%) that we might receive healthcare if we've paid the insurance for it.

The Australian Deal

Australia and US dollars trade at about 1:1 with minor variation. When I transferred $200 Australian here I paid? $197 US.

In Australia, here's what every citizen gets - not just their government - everyone:

• Healthcare. It's largely free. You get sick the government pays for the care.
• $14.73/hr minimum wage - nearly double the highest state minimum wage in the US, almost triple the lowest (if you're paid hourly rather than full-time, you make more - $15.51/hr).
• Minimum 4 weeks vacation/year.
• A retirement pension, even if you never saved any money. Retirement/"Age Pension"
• If you're unemployed you make $15761.20/year or about $7.58/hr, forever. If you never find another job, you still receive a living wage - enough to cover rent in a suburb (but almost certainly not in a city, where a studio runs $1800/mo). Unemployment/"Newstart" Rent Assistance 

There are details to these where you might get paid more or less based on whether you need more (kids, single parent, renting) or less (live with your parents, ~$5/hr), but the numbers don't vary that much.

So just to be clear, if you lose your job in Australia, you'll be fine. If you come down with cancer at 21 before you ever wondered "What healthcare provider should I have?" you're covered. And if you never really make it big - enough to really save up - in retirement... you'll be fine.

Well Then It's a Disaster

So the assumption by the kind of person that votes for the kind of person that prevents the US from having any of this is, "Then the entire economy must be in tatters." Well let's check.

Unemployment. Economists say the ideal unemployment rate is 5%, meaning 95% of those wanting to work have jobs and the other 5% are available to employers needing workers. In Australia it's 5.3%. In the US it's 9%; in some parts of the US it's 15% and in some counties it's over 30%.

Non-Employment. Economists abuse the word "unemployment" to only mean people looking for work, when intuitively it means "does not have a job." They use other names for that, so what's that number? In Australia 49% of the population does not work. Those lazy bastards, much lazier than the 54% who don't work in the US.

Taxes. Well then taxes would have to be insane, right? Australia tax brackets - as a point of summary, an Australian making $80,000/year pays 22% of their total income, or $17550, in taxes. A Californian making the same pays Payroll tax (Social Security and Medicare), Income Tax, Unemployment Insurance, and State Income Tax, totaling 49% - a calculation so complicated it merits its own spreadsheet. Note that the Californian still has to pay for their healthcare after all that.

I'll update this with a bit more info and some conclusions later on. But seriously America... get your sh** together.

Updates

To compare with the US spreadsheet for $80k, I've created another that shows several income levels under the Australia tax regime. Both spreadsheets assume you rent an apartment, live alone, and have no kids, because I'm self-centered. The resources to build out a version for married with a mortgage and 3 kids are linked from this post and the spreadsheets, so if you build one, please share.

Australians point out to me that healthcare in Australia has 2 major caveats:

• There is essentially a $500 annual deductible. That is, the first $1000 worth of care in a year you pay 50%; the remainder is on the government. However, there is a debate in which they are considering eliminating this deductible.
• Many Australians fret at the long waits for doctor's appointments and go to pricier doctors instead. When they do, they exceed the limits the government will reimburse. When that occurs, the government kicks in the maximum and you pay the rest. Often these private doctors charge about double. So there is an inconvenience to free care, and occasionally an undue lack of urgency. On the other hand, these private visits are often so expensive in part because they're lavish - they involve spa treatments etc.

I need to include a comparison to MY healthcare's caveats. I called my healthcare plan and this is literally what they told me - I'm not exaggerating what they said or misreading my plan. This is the plan I pay for with Anthem Blue Cross:

• If I have a heart attack, it's my job (yes, struggling in the hospital) to gather up the relevant paperwork and submit it to them as a claim.
• If it occurs overseas, not only is it my job to do that, but also to cover the full costs of coverage myself in the meantime, and they will optionally reimburse me for what they deem as covered.

Australians have to worry about a $500 deductible that may be legislated away. I have to worry about owing $500,000, how to gather what paperwork to send to who, what lawyer to sue my healthcare company with to recoup my costs, and whether I'll live long enough to see the court case through.

Crazy Neighbors

There's some crazies across the street that amuse me with some amazing shouted quotes periodically.

You listen to me. I'm a woman. I don't care if my parents still treat me like I'm a child. You shut up! I'm a woman. I'm one of the most beautiful women in the universe!

-Ugly woman who lives across the street, to a man driving away

Challenge: Get Jobs Numbers in Real Time

E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post can be a bit Keith Olbermann in his rants, so read with a step back:
The Last Labor Day?

But he makes a great point: People too often view the stock market as the real measure of the economy. He notices that the President addresses it, that many news shows hold him and Congress accountable to it, and that many news stories treat a major turn in the stock market as though it were indicative of the entire economy.

He goes on to make the obvious point that this is not the case - the fact that less than 10% of the US population capable of seriously investing in the stock market are doing better or worse on average isn't very relevant to the economy as a whole. And if you take bubbles into account, the stock market can jump up and down with no relevance to the economy - it can even say things are going well when they're really falling apart.

What matters is employment as a whole - are people working, and what are they doing?

He points out that the stock market is used instead because it's available in real-time.

It seems ridiculous but I think he may have found a simple truth. Why DO we use the stock market, and not jobs numbers, as indicators of how the economy is doing? When we get stock numbers we can all check them in real-time, whether you're a citizen, reporter or the president: finance.google.com. But getting jobs numbers is a lot murkier, never real-time, and your access to those numbers varies based on where you work.

So it's time to pose a challenge to the American public. Who among us can build a real-time indicator for employment in the US?

Giving it some thought, the first step is reporting. The most obvious approach is to ask people to report they took or lost a job, but it's not likely to succeed. On the other hand, employers already do report in with several governmental agencies when they hire a worker. There's a significant amount of paperwork that generally has to be filed within a tight timeline of when the worker is hired. So there's your source of data.

The remaining steps are accessing it in aggregate, and offering it in real-time. What's the best way? Do we ask the Obama Administration to offer their existing numbers up over an API? Is there an existing database we can ask for read access to? What's the best way to do this?

Update:
Monthly isn't real-time, but Google has monthly US Employment in millions, and with a lag time of 2 years, the US population.

If you assume the US population is now 314 million, some math for August:
140 million employed / 314 million = 44.6% employed, or put another way, 55.4% of the population of the US does not work.

There's a pointless number provided by the US Dept of Labor on the size of the Labor Force, but they don't count those not actively looking for work/those who have given up, which is ridiculous. Not a useful statistic. If you did use that number you'd get what you occasionally hear on the news: 9% unemployment, or put another way, of the <50% of the US that seeks work, 9% of those aren't finding jobs.

Overlearning the Game

A good article on politics and corruption:

http://andrewoneverything.com/the-overlearning-the-game-problem

Short on proposed solutions. Here are two:

1. The Severe/Ben Franklin approach: The founding fathers were in a time of revolution, and many were quoted as expecting more revolutions to occur that would throw out our Constitution in favor of an even better one in 50 years or so. With this you also throw out all the corruption of those who have not only "overlearned the game," but also those who have invested massive amounts of wealth to change society's rules so its wealth is diverted back to them. This seemed likely to those in the midst of a revolution, but not very likely to us, and, well... what would happen to all my stuff?

2. The Gradual/Videogame Cheater approach: Game authors attempting to fight cheating fight on a naive technical front first, and later a complex behavioral front second. The technical front is like many of the basics of campaign finance laws, like "You can't pay people to vote for you." The obvious hacks. But you eventually realize you're not really trying to stop obvious hacks, you're trying to stop creative, insidious ones too. So you model good behavior, and basically treat everything outside of it as cheating. The challenge is to include modeling very strong performance in that model so you don't risk punishing it if it arises legitimately.

Google is arguably working against SEO entities who "overlearn the game" and either google bomb or push their company's result to the top. The big difference between Google/Videogame companies and law is how nimble they are. The companies acknowledge there will be cheaters and have teams to quickly respond to new workarounds for the system. The law sits idle and a big messy Congress that can be corrupted by cheaters themselves is in charge of fixing it, in a really ugly process. Arguably Congress should continue to set the broad strokes like "Prevent campaign finance abuse," but a nimble more company-like organization within the government ought to be responsible for implementing that and quickly responding to new abuses.

Wall Street actually has a limited version of this model - the SEC is not an elected body - but it's somewhat limited in scope, and impotent when for example its powers are delegated to the OMB when it comes to Collateral Debt Obligations, and down comes the world economy.

I think Congress might be suited to setting the powers more broadly and the metrics for success on these nimble organizations, but they definitely aren't suited to creating the laws that actually trap the cheaters. They're just too slow, by design.

No Student Loans for Low-Pay Degrees

In 2015, if a private college can't show that at least 35% of graduates with a given degree can pay back their loans, students entering that major won't be eligible for student loans. Pretty smart program.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/02/136897408/for-profit-colleges-face-new-rules

Not surprisingly, private colleges are upset about it - they want that free money to keep people entering majors they know don't lead many kids to successful careers.

It would be nice if a law went farther, and required students entering a major or considering majors to be informed of:

• Average employment rate
• Average employment rate within the chosen field
• Average salary in 1 year and 5 years
• Average time to repay
• Average delinquency rate

of past graduates as a whole. It's fine if people want to say they went to college for intangible hard-to-measure reasons, but when it's putting you in a tangible $100,000+ in debt, it's time to be serious.

Dying soon?

Dying soon? Put your life story into your grave, so people can listen to it with their cellphones when they visit:
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/30/136676964/technology-brings-digital-memories-to-grave-sites

MIT actually predicted this 40 years ago with Project Oxygen: http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html

We would someday use "handheld devices" to get "location-aware data" about our environment, like whether there's a meeting going on on the other side of a closed door. In their version though, the data about the dead person was stored in the grave itself, rather than just having that position, RFID tag, or QR code associated with a website about the corpse.

One reason I dislike Daylight Savings Time

Suppose you're adding features to a site that stores times in local time. You're trying to calculate how many hours it's been since Nov 4, 2007, at 1:30am Eastern. You have to ask the question, Which 1:30am is it? The 1:30am before the clocks rolled back, or the one after?

Suppose a user enters a date and time of Mar 11, 2012, 2:14am. You'd have to return:

ERROR: Time does not exist.

Daylight Savings Time is stupid.

How My Dad Thinks Modern Civilization Will End

My dad's crazy but he's also a pretty smart guy. Not surprisingly his take on this isn't rapture (even though he's Catholic) or anything I had ever heard before.

My dad thinks that one unlucky day a little chunk of the sun will fly off and hit the Earth at a time when the magnetic field that usually protects it is unusually weak. Then everything electronic on the side of the Earth that happens to be facing the sun that day will burst into flame. Considering that includes the spark plugs in engines - including those in fire engines - it's going to be hard to put those fires out.

It's a pretty strange thing to think about but I can't really say it's impossible or even unlikely.

The sun is a big continuous explosion. Occasionally some of it flies off in a chunk, and not surprisingly sun bits are really dangerous. Sometimes they just miss us, but sometimes they strike Earth. Or rather, they strike near us - because our magnetic field protects us.

For the past several thousand years, our magnetic field has been shaped like an apple. The indents on the top and the bottom lie at the North and South poles. That means that when sun bits try to hit us they mostly get pushed out and around the Earth, but they have the most impact on the poles where the field is weakest.

Lately the Earth has been doing something weird, a weird thing it does every hundred thousand years or so - it's swapping the North and South pole. That's right - eventually a compass that points North today will point South instead, and vice versa. If this happened uniformly we would in fact lose our magnetic field entirely for several years and humans would probably be wiped out by mild events in space. Fortunately reality is more complicated, and the pole is actually shifting in parts, so that over time there will be pockets on earth where compasses have flipped, and pockets where it hasn't, and along the boundaries compasses will just point nowhere useful at all - someplace in between.

So for several years along the way our magnetic field will look less like an apple and more like cloud tops - lots of random bumps all over of normal or reversed field. Eventually "reversed" will become the new normal and everything will stabilize.

So the problem is what if a bit of the sun flies at us during that time where the boundaries between these fields aren't isolated to just 2 points at the top and bottom of the earth, but rather when they trace trails all over the earth, and expose large sections of it that directly face the sun?

Probably a big disaster for anyone who likes electronics. Or not being on fire (I'm a Fan).

Limb Regeneration - We Can Have It If Evolution Goes Backwards

P21 Knockout Mice - mice with a gene named p21 removed from their DNA - can have a leg cut off and it will regrow in a matter of months.

http://www.physorg.com/news187879295.html

Gene p21 has 3 seeming evolutionary benefits. First, it causes you to heal sooner - you end up with a big scar instead of a limb, meaning a less vulnerable area for a smaller amount of time. Second, it causes you to heal more cheaply - regrowing limbs costs a lot in terms of food, right when you're probably pretty crappy at obtaining food. And third, regrowing anything is probably going to make you more susceptible to cancer.

So the first 2 are all about food. In our overfed environment, I wonder if some humans will just happen to devolve and end up with a damaged p21 that unlocks the limb regeneration already in our DNA. We already have many segments of the population that arguably have degraded genes - people who can't digest certain foods or are unusually susceptible to certain diseases. It's not that strange to think that this gene could also degrade. Who knows - maybe we already have humans with this degradation - they just haven't had any limbs cut off.

Mancakes

me: Man, I switched my pancake recipe over to whole wheat

So much more delicious

There is a bit of wheaty taste that I'm not in love with but I bet I can smooth that out with more tweaking

But the texture, soooooo gooooood

Bramlage: Hahahaha, I'm glad you enjoy

But yeah, its pretty common in recipes with wheat flour

To actually split it wheat and all purpose 50/50

You could give that a try?

me: Yeah I was gonna pussy out like that

But then I checked my pants

And found a set of BALLS

Health Insurance Needs Consumer Testing Legalized

Right now, if you were to file a test claim with your insurance company to verify they'd actually fill it if you got cancer, they'd be able to sue you for a substantial amount of money - even if you gave the claim money back in say, three days, just to verify they really followed-through on their promises. That needs to change.

A mattress salesman once told me that a mattress typically sells for 3-4x what it costs, and that for the most part, none of them are very good. Often people pay extra for features they don't understand or need. Compare this to groceries at the grocery store. These goods arrive and are sold for razor thin margins - and the quality tends to be very high.

So why are mattresses expensive low-quality items, and groceries nice things you buy for very little? Frequency. You buy groceries over and over, so when you go to buy an apple or a can of beans next time, you have a strong idea of the value you're getting. You also buy them so often that each time you go to purchase them, you can go to a different vendor to look for better prices, and better quality goods. Each purchase is a chance to optimize the cost and quality of the product in your favor, and better informs you of the relative value you're getting.

Obviously a mattress is the opposite. Someone buying a mattress is unlikely to ever come back. You buy mattresses so rarely you don't really know what to look for in one mattress to the next. You also have essentially no concept of what a "good" price for a mattress is, because you have very little experience buying them. As market forces go, the value is going to tend to be low and the price high because the consumer is inexperienced at making this purchase. In summary, the frequency with which consumers buy and receive a product has a linear correlation with the value delivered for cost.

So now let's consider health insurance. Health insurance may be a perversion of this model. In some ways, health insurance is similar to groceries - many health claims pay out in small ways frequently, like covering a simple doctor's visit. But these small claims generally don't add up to enough to account for the premiums you pay in. These are not what you're actually paying for, and if you were, you'd be easily able to shop around for something a lot cheaper than the typical cost of health insurance.

What you're paying for is calamity protection. Cancer, a car accident with broken limbs, a life-threatening disease - something that puts you in the hospital. Fortunately, this happens to you infrequently. Yet unfortunately, that means the value for the money spent is also delivered to you infrequently. This means that you don't know what you're going to get. You probably don't even know how much say, a week in the hospital would cost - or 3 months of cancer treatment.

The worst case scenario for the market economy model is one where the only time the consumer's promise comes due is a time when they are at their absolute worst to demand it. It's really horrible to think about, but when an insurance company is barely scraping by and someone who has 3 months to live files for a massive claim the company can't afford, what if the insurance company just delays payment? The patient is more likely to die and both the risk of lawsuit and the risk of additional claims filed goes away. The insurance company has every economic reason to act against the consumer. How often this occurs is something I'll leave to others, but what's clear is a really awful incentive exists in this very specific scenario for this very specific product - just about as far from the grocery-buying scenario as you can get.

So what we need is to be able to get that value tested more often. You'll never be able to test health insurance as often as you verify the value of the apples at your local grocer, but we could bring market forces back into alignment if we make it legal for any journalist, or everyday citizen who wants to play the role of one, to test their insurance for calamity protection. Here's my proposal:

Any false medical insurance claim filed with the intent of testing one's insurance is not insurance fraud. If a test claim is paid in full, the payment must be returned within 3 days of the final portion of the claim payment being completed, or the claim returns to being treated as insurance fraud.

You might be saying, what if we suddenly had a deluge of fraudulent claims and people just kept the money? Well, this doesn't make it OK to keep the pay out - it makes it OK to file a claim while you're healthy and able to follow all the paperwork and hurdles before you, and then if the insurer ever pays out - give it back. Keeping it for longer than 3 days leaves you with existing law and today's existing situation - and today there is insurance fraud, but nothing so out of control that the industry can't keep up with it.

Second, you might say this risks people filing these sorts of claims in order to obtain a large 3-day loan. This is a somewhat obscure possibility, but consider that typically a medical insurance claim doesn't actually get paid to the patient - it gets paid to the medical service providers that performed the work. So to turn this into a useful 3-day loan, a medical services provider would need to convince a patient to file a test claim. It is possible that a shady doctor or hospital might do so - so let's add a clause that adds fines for such coercion:

Any medical provider who financially benefits from coercing a health insurance consumer into performing a test claim is subject to a fine triple the financial gain they accrued.

Finally, you might worry that consumers do this en masse and the number of claims filed with insurers doubles. But what's the incentive? If something is difficult, it doesn't happen very often. Coordinating an authentic-looking test claim to test the insurers is going to require a lot of coordination. A lot of fake paperwork is going to have to travel from multiple service providers to the insurance companies, and part of that coordination is that they're going to have to return their share of the payout. It's likely that only a well-organized existing group like Dateline could even put this together, but the door is left open for a very intrepid consumer who wants to test their insurance (and has quite a bit of time on their hands) can do so as well. Nonetheless, we should limit these to a reasonable level to prevent unforeseen consequences - let's add a limit clause:

Any beneficiary of test claims may not participate in more than 4 per year, paid or unpaid. Test claims in excess of this limit are fraud.

Market economies work best when the consumer can verify the value of what they buy often. Government works best when it intervenes only in case of an exception - of a dispute. This proposed law lets consumers, rather than government watchdogs, verify their own purchase's validity anytime they're willing to put in the work, and only if they keep the money or the insurer breaks their promises does the government have to get involved (via a lawsuit in either direction). So let's get a law in place that lets healthy people test their insurance - before they're too sick to fight.