Politifact has an interesting problem. They'd probably like to be fair and accurate. But they know that today's political reality is completely one sided. People from both sides lie, but it's a 90-10 thing. For one side, lying is a central part of their policy. Their economic programs, their foreign policy programs, their social welfare programs, even their military programs, have been consistently somewhere between poor and catastrophic, so they have to lie. And they've been allowed to get away with it. The other party rarely calls them on it, and when they do, it's always timid. Politicians have always known that if you show confidence, it doesn't matter how brazen the lie, a lot of people who don't know any better will believe a confident liar over a softspoken truthteller.
Politifact is trying to be a fair arbiter of this situation, but they know that if they call it as they see it, the Republicans will come after them and probably destroy them. So they twist. Here are a couple of examples, on the ACA's administrative overhead requirement: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/30/barbara-boxer/barbara-boxer-says-medicare-overhead-far-lower-pri/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/24/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-millions-benefit-insurance-compa/. The background: ACA requires that individual and small company insurance policies spend 80% of client revenue providing them health care, 85% for big companies. Historically, single payer programs like Medicare, VA, and big companies "self insuring" etc, spend 95-98%. Private insurance averages 93% for big companies, 74% for medium sized companies, and 70% for individuals and small companies. Payers would be rebated any excess administrative costs. Each of these two articles are discussing an ACA supporter describing this, completely accurately, and if you read the whole article, you get that. Yet they rate both supporters statement as "Half True", because there was some aspect of their statement that could be misrepresented. Sen. Boxer said that Medicare and other single payers have 1-5% overhead, and the single payer part of medicare does indeed achieve that. But there's a private insurance part of Medicare, called "Part C" or "Medicare Advantage", that does not, but has the usual private insurance high overhead. Taken together, the private and public parts net about 11%. Proof, really of the point the Senator was saying. The other one, Obama says that 13 million rebates averaging $100 had been paid. In fact, the numbers were 12.8M and $98. Politifact admits that the rounding is acceptable but insists that because the majority of the rebates went to companies and not individuals, it's only half true. The rebate went to whoever had paid for the policy and the president didn't suggest otherwise.
Every year, Politifact rates the President's State of the Union speech and the rebuttal. They're very good at picking on slight oversimplifications in the Democrat's speech, and ignoring gross lies in the Republicans. This one actually provoked me to try to get a response from Politifact but in their replies to me they dissembled. In 2011, Paul Ryan's rebuttal included the statement "Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise
consumer choices has never worked – and it won’t work now". Well, nobody except Ryan is suggesting solely depending on bureaucracy. But government bureaucracy created the internet, the interstate highway system, the national hydroelectric grid, nuclear power, medicare, social security, and thousands of other innovative, successful programs, many of which promoted private innovation many times the value of the government investment. Ryans statement, very much the central thesis of his speech, is worthy of Politifact's "Pants on Fire" rating. But it got crickets.
The history of the Lie of the Year is interesting. In 2009, it was Sarah Palin and others' completely false statement calling end of life counciling "Death Panels"
In 2010, it was the often repeated and nonsensical claim that ACA represents a government takeover of healthcare.
In 2011, it was the completely true claim by Democrats that Paul Ryan's proposal to privatize Medicare was in effect a proposal to end Medicare as we know it.
In 2012, it was Romney's completely false claim that Chrysler/Fiat was moving Jeep assembly lines from Ohio to China. (In fact, they started doing a small amount of assembly in China for the growing East Asian market for Jeeps)
Politifact is playing a game of statistics. They report that Republicans lie three times as often as Democrats (note that the Lie of the Year statistics match that), and the Republicans scream about this indicating a leftward bias. In fact, they are being extremely generous to Republicans. They tend to soft pedal outrageously false screeds from the right, and ignore many of the worst, and are overly harsh on slight misstatements and even things that are pretty much true from the Ds.
update 25 Jan 2014
I just stumbled on this. Alternet and Salon are not necessarily bastions of neutrality but they are better than Politifact.
27 August 2013
23 August 2013
Types of BS Artist
Bullshit is a useful skill, but there are a lot of people who abuse it, to the general detriment of all.
The Artist. I knew a guy who reveled so much in his talent to BS that he seemed to make it a policy to never do anything else. His office was across the aisle from mine and we got to be fairly good friends. He was a very smart guy and showed enough comprehension that I believe he could have done useful work, but he chose not to. I asked him about this and he of course gave me BS for an answer. He had me snowed for more than a week when I first met him. It took his boss several months to really grasp what was going on, and when his boss tried to use more force to get him to shape up, his boss stepped in. The boss's boss was prone to referring to him as one of the biggest talents we have in this company. I left the company about two years later and the boss's boss still thought the world of him. He contacted me about ten years later and was working for a politician--an appropriate job for him--but I think he was too much of a rebel to go very far with this. His memorial (he died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few years ago) was all full of wonderful praise for his generosity and wisdom. Not the guy I knew.
The Embellisher. I've known quite a few of these. The best of them are pretty knowledgeable and can make a lot of useful contributions, but when their expertise runs to its limits, they keep going. They can make educated guesses and the audience is no wiser. Sometimes they're even right. As long as it's only a tiny fraction of the point that they're making, it's actually valuable. Rarely does the customer know as much as the embellisher, and the small embellishment is really more like a white lie than willful deception. The most impressive embellisher I know is regarded by many as a great visionary. He is not. He's a small visionary and a hypester, and a stealer of other's ideas. He could be a useful guy--he's very smart and knows a lot about a lot of things, but he's more interested in getting his ideas heard and implemented, good or bad, than he is in their actual usefulness. His present venture is a patent mill, which is an excellent fit, but among the most harmful things he could be doing.
Almost all Salesmen are embellishers, but they generally have too little knowledge to be useful. They are generally unconcerned with the right answer, only with making the sale and not getting caught.
The Flack is a very special case. The job is to make people think they're saying things that appeal to the widest possible audience; to seem like all things to all people, while never getting pinned down on anything even slightly controversial and never saying anything that might get them caught lying or give away strategy. It takes a lot of skill to do well, and it's evidently very stressful, because the best of them seem only able to do the job for a few years. E.g. presidential press secretary.
Many Hacks started out as flacks but discovered that their audience doesn't really care whether they're telling the truth or not. Rush Limbaugh is almost the defining example of this. In the late '80s, he said lots of controversial stuff that was appealing to right wingers, but was very careful to edge right up to the edge of the truth and not actually lie. My favorite was when he pointed out that there's more old growth forest in the US today than when the Declaration of Independence was signed. It's true. There's more old growth in Alaska, all by itself, than in the original 13 colonies in 1776. But his listeners were meant to think that the old growth had come back. Some time during the GHW Bush administration, he realized that his listeners didn't care whether he was telling the truth or not, and were paying for controversy, not sense or reality, so he gave it up and became a hack. Most hacks where never anything but hacks though.
The White Lie is an important piece of BS. They're usually harmless and smooth social situations, but in bulk they can do a lot of harm. Many obnoxious people have no idea they're being obnoxious. A little truthtelling might give them a chance to figure it out.
addeda dec 2013
I think Paul Ryan started out thinking he was an embellisher who didn't initially realize that his whole world-view was based on a fantasy novel, that described people and behaviors which could only exist in a world of magic. He became a full-on artist when he discovered that nobody on the political right even cared whether he was connected to reality or not, and succeeded in selling himself as a wise, competent man, when in fact he is an incompetent boob who can deliver nonsense speeches well. Functionally, he is pure Hack. The true artist I describe above did have some notion of ideas.
The Artist. I knew a guy who reveled so much in his talent to BS that he seemed to make it a policy to never do anything else. His office was across the aisle from mine and we got to be fairly good friends. He was a very smart guy and showed enough comprehension that I believe he could have done useful work, but he chose not to. I asked him about this and he of course gave me BS for an answer. He had me snowed for more than a week when I first met him. It took his boss several months to really grasp what was going on, and when his boss tried to use more force to get him to shape up, his boss stepped in. The boss's boss was prone to referring to him as one of the biggest talents we have in this company. I left the company about two years later and the boss's boss still thought the world of him. He contacted me about ten years later and was working for a politician--an appropriate job for him--but I think he was too much of a rebel to go very far with this. His memorial (he died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few years ago) was all full of wonderful praise for his generosity and wisdom. Not the guy I knew.
The Embellisher. I've known quite a few of these. The best of them are pretty knowledgeable and can make a lot of useful contributions, but when their expertise runs to its limits, they keep going. They can make educated guesses and the audience is no wiser. Sometimes they're even right. As long as it's only a tiny fraction of the point that they're making, it's actually valuable. Rarely does the customer know as much as the embellisher, and the small embellishment is really more like a white lie than willful deception. The most impressive embellisher I know is regarded by many as a great visionary. He is not. He's a small visionary and a hypester, and a stealer of other's ideas. He could be a useful guy--he's very smart and knows a lot about a lot of things, but he's more interested in getting his ideas heard and implemented, good or bad, than he is in their actual usefulness. His present venture is a patent mill, which is an excellent fit, but among the most harmful things he could be doing.
Almost all Salesmen are embellishers, but they generally have too little knowledge to be useful. They are generally unconcerned with the right answer, only with making the sale and not getting caught.
The Flack is a very special case. The job is to make people think they're saying things that appeal to the widest possible audience; to seem like all things to all people, while never getting pinned down on anything even slightly controversial and never saying anything that might get them caught lying or give away strategy. It takes a lot of skill to do well, and it's evidently very stressful, because the best of them seem only able to do the job for a few years. E.g. presidential press secretary.
Many Hacks started out as flacks but discovered that their audience doesn't really care whether they're telling the truth or not. Rush Limbaugh is almost the defining example of this. In the late '80s, he said lots of controversial stuff that was appealing to right wingers, but was very careful to edge right up to the edge of the truth and not actually lie. My favorite was when he pointed out that there's more old growth forest in the US today than when the Declaration of Independence was signed. It's true. There's more old growth in Alaska, all by itself, than in the original 13 colonies in 1776. But his listeners were meant to think that the old growth had come back. Some time during the GHW Bush administration, he realized that his listeners didn't care whether he was telling the truth or not, and were paying for controversy, not sense or reality, so he gave it up and became a hack. Most hacks where never anything but hacks though.
The White Lie is an important piece of BS. They're usually harmless and smooth social situations, but in bulk they can do a lot of harm. Many obnoxious people have no idea they're being obnoxious. A little truthtelling might give them a chance to figure it out.
addeda dec 2013
I think Paul Ryan started out thinking he was an embellisher who didn't initially realize that his whole world-view was based on a fantasy novel, that described people and behaviors which could only exist in a world of magic. He became a full-on artist when he discovered that nobody on the political right even cared whether he was connected to reality or not, and succeeded in selling himself as a wise, competent man, when in fact he is an incompetent boob who can deliver nonsense speeches well. Functionally, he is pure Hack. The true artist I describe above did have some notion of ideas.
13 August 2013
Hyperloop Safety
Several of the detractors of Hyperloop have suggested that it's an attractive target for terrorists. This is silly. No more than a few dozen people ever accumulate at the station. It's the same attractiveness as a city park or the lobby of an office building. If you want to kill lots of people, Hyperloop is a difficult way to do it.
Lets look at a few cases: The tube is steel, almost an inch thick. A pipe bomb or other crude explosive, such as used in the Boston bombing, will barely scratch the surface. A shaped charge might. Somebody with a large gun--a tank, for example, could. Rednecks taking pot shots can do little harm, unless they're using a Barrett 50 or bigger. We're not really talking about "terrorists" doing this sort of thing. This is a much more sophisticated operator.
What if they do manage to poke a hole big enough to cause loss of vacuum? Well, they've just shut the thing down. If a vehicle happened to be in the path of whatever did the damage, they'd be hurt, but any other vehicles would simply see a sudden rise in air pressure and the vehicles would slow to a stop due to air friction--if they're going at top speed, this could be several Gs. By designing the vehicle so it's still pretty slippery in normal air pressure, passengers would be uncomfortable, but unhurt. Get the passengers out and begin repairs.
I'm a lot more concerned about manufacturing errors and acts of nature than I am about terrorists. A lightning hit could potentially cause some damage, although I'd think grounding it properly should be easy. Manufacturing errors could cause splits, but they should mostly be slow leaks--and most of them should be discovered before it's carrying passengers.
The tube is stiff enough that if it's missing a few support columns, such as if a wayward truck ran into one, it should be inconsequential. They should be fixed as soon as practical but there's probably no need to even shut the thing down. Of more concern is if an earthquake or flood or coordinated attack damages a bunch of them. The tube should settle gracefully to the ground, where it's most likely still operable. One special case: the supports for spans that cross rivers or big valleys or such need to be specially hardened. This is already true for more conventional bridges.
One particular vulnerability is the slowdown LIM. By breaking the circuit, vehicles would still be going extremely fast at the end of their trip and crash into the station. A certain amount of redundancy can make this more difficult to attack and reduce the chance of malfunctions. In a worst case scenario, the tube can be opened to normal air pressure and the vehicles will slow down pretty quickly.
The vehicle carries a large battery, which powers life support and a large fan, which propels the vehicle enough to maintain speed in near-vacuum, and lifts it. I suspect this can be made to still work in normal atmosphere, but it won't propel the vehicle very fast. The system should be designed with emergency exits every few miles. The vehicle would move along to the nearest and stop. There should be a mechanism which allows the passengers to get out and then move the vehicle further to allow another vehicle to use the same stop. I suspect the emergency exit would be integrated with expansion and other sorts of airlocks. more on this in another article.
What happens if the vehicle itself loses power while the rest of the system is still fully functioning? It slows down--potentially fairly rapidly, depending upon how fully power is lost. If other vehicles are still functioning normally, the next in line will smack into it pretty fast. So there needs to be active communication between vehicles. If one slows mysteriously, or contact is lost, the ones behind need to slow, until they figure it out. It may be necessary to have some alternate way of moving the disabled vehicle--e.g. the one behind pushes. I'd hope to avoid this but it may be necessary to allow the system to come to atmospheric to recover the passengers in some cases of failed vehicle. Obviously it's worth a great deal of redundancy to minimize the chance of this happening.
Lets look at a few cases: The tube is steel, almost an inch thick. A pipe bomb or other crude explosive, such as used in the Boston bombing, will barely scratch the surface. A shaped charge might. Somebody with a large gun--a tank, for example, could. Rednecks taking pot shots can do little harm, unless they're using a Barrett 50 or bigger. We're not really talking about "terrorists" doing this sort of thing. This is a much more sophisticated operator.
What if they do manage to poke a hole big enough to cause loss of vacuum? Well, they've just shut the thing down. If a vehicle happened to be in the path of whatever did the damage, they'd be hurt, but any other vehicles would simply see a sudden rise in air pressure and the vehicles would slow to a stop due to air friction--if they're going at top speed, this could be several Gs. By designing the vehicle so it's still pretty slippery in normal air pressure, passengers would be uncomfortable, but unhurt. Get the passengers out and begin repairs.
I'm a lot more concerned about manufacturing errors and acts of nature than I am about terrorists. A lightning hit could potentially cause some damage, although I'd think grounding it properly should be easy. Manufacturing errors could cause splits, but they should mostly be slow leaks--and most of them should be discovered before it's carrying passengers.
The tube is stiff enough that if it's missing a few support columns, such as if a wayward truck ran into one, it should be inconsequential. They should be fixed as soon as practical but there's probably no need to even shut the thing down. Of more concern is if an earthquake or flood or coordinated attack damages a bunch of them. The tube should settle gracefully to the ground, where it's most likely still operable. One special case: the supports for spans that cross rivers or big valleys or such need to be specially hardened. This is already true for more conventional bridges.
One particular vulnerability is the slowdown LIM. By breaking the circuit, vehicles would still be going extremely fast at the end of their trip and crash into the station. A certain amount of redundancy can make this more difficult to attack and reduce the chance of malfunctions. In a worst case scenario, the tube can be opened to normal air pressure and the vehicles will slow down pretty quickly.
The vehicle carries a large battery, which powers life support and a large fan, which propels the vehicle enough to maintain speed in near-vacuum, and lifts it. I suspect this can be made to still work in normal atmosphere, but it won't propel the vehicle very fast. The system should be designed with emergency exits every few miles. The vehicle would move along to the nearest and stop. There should be a mechanism which allows the passengers to get out and then move the vehicle further to allow another vehicle to use the same stop. I suspect the emergency exit would be integrated with expansion and other sorts of airlocks. more on this in another article.
What happens if the vehicle itself loses power while the rest of the system is still fully functioning? It slows down--potentially fairly rapidly, depending upon how fully power is lost. If other vehicles are still functioning normally, the next in line will smack into it pretty fast. So there needs to be active communication between vehicles. If one slows mysteriously, or contact is lost, the ones behind need to slow, until they figure it out. It may be necessary to have some alternate way of moving the disabled vehicle--e.g. the one behind pushes. I'd hope to avoid this but it may be necessary to allow the system to come to atmospheric to recover the passengers in some cases of failed vehicle. Obviously it's worth a great deal of redundancy to minimize the chance of this happening.
12 August 2013
Hyperloop
This is a topic that interests me a lot, so I expect this will be the first of many posts.
Elon Musk and team have posted his "Hyperloop Alpha" essay today. It's not quite what I'd thought (I thought Vactrain) but it's close. They've done quite a bit more than "envelope" level engineering but it's still very far from something that can actually be built. There are a lot of appealing concepts, and the most appealing of all is that he's beginning to work out costs and they're surprisingly reasonable--under $8B for the initial SF-LA route. This compares with $65B for the proposed High Speed Rail with roughly the same service and less than 1/3rd the speed.
It consists of a pair of steel tubes, normally elevated, which are evacuated to 0.015 psi. This not quite a hard vacuum but "soft" enough that relatively ordinary equipment can be used to maintain it, and some tiny leaks can be tolerated. This is about the same pressure as a spacecraft flying at about 30 miles would feel. Pretty low drag, but far from zero, especially at the proposed 760mph, approximately 1/1000th of sea-level drag. The vehicle is substantially smaller than the tube (roughly 30%) and has on the front a big fan, which sucks in air. Most of this is spat out the back, helping to keep it going, but a little is squeezed out the bottom through what they call "Skis", which ride on the floor and sides of the tube, generating a cushion of air to ride on. This is familiar to people who play air hockey, and it's been used in lower speed transit before, such as the people mover in the Detroit Airport.
The low pressure in the tube means that it doesn't take a lot of power to overcome air friction and can be sustained by on board batteries (using numbers gleaned from their work with the Tesla S), and the big power drain from acceleration is accommodated by Linear Induction Motors (many existing transit designs use LIMs, such as the Vancouver Skytrain). These are mounted in the tube and the vehicle itself is passive. They are also used to decelerate the vehicle, recovering a large fraction of the energy used. They propose mounting solar panels on the guideway and calculate that those and a rather minimal amount of battery storage will fully power the thing.
They've actually done quite a bit of engineering on the support columns, concerned (it being proposed for California) about earthquakes. They allow the tube to shift freely a little bit relative to the support in three axes and have the ability to make more permanent adjustments to accommodate shifting terrain. The propose most of the route down the center divider of Interstate 5. They'd first connect LA and San Francisco, and later add extensions to Sacramento, Fresno, San Diego and Las Vegas. Most of the trip would be at 760mph, handling the curves required by the hilly sections near the ends at 550 and 300 mph, leading to a time en route of 35 minutes.
The vehicle itself is a low tube, with the fan section and associated mechanism at the front, and 14 pairs of very recumbent seats for passengers on either side of a big central longitudinal hump. The whole thing is less than 5 feet wide. They would depart every few minutes, unscheduled.
The have a separate design which is big enough to carry cargo, including three cars. It requires a bigger tube. They seem mostly to be concentrating on the smaller one.
This seems silly to me. The size of the vehicle is limiting for a lot of people: elderly and other sorts of low-mobility people will need considerable assistance to get in and out of the seat, and even fully able passengers are trapped there for the duration. A child requiring assistance will be fairly far from their caregiver. There's lots of necessary luggage that could easily be accommodated with vehicle that's just a little bigger: wheelchairs, bicycles, etc. Making it big enough to handle a passenger in a wheelchair will allow people to move around a little, including relieve their bladder, caregivers to help children and disabled, ease entry, and more, while only growing the overall size of the vehicle and structure 20% or so.
Elon Musk and team have posted his "Hyperloop Alpha" essay today. It's not quite what I'd thought (I thought Vactrain) but it's close. They've done quite a bit more than "envelope" level engineering but it's still very far from something that can actually be built. There are a lot of appealing concepts, and the most appealing of all is that he's beginning to work out costs and they're surprisingly reasonable--under $8B for the initial SF-LA route. This compares with $65B for the proposed High Speed Rail with roughly the same service and less than 1/3rd the speed.
It consists of a pair of steel tubes, normally elevated, which are evacuated to 0.015 psi. This not quite a hard vacuum but "soft" enough that relatively ordinary equipment can be used to maintain it, and some tiny leaks can be tolerated. This is about the same pressure as a spacecraft flying at about 30 miles would feel. Pretty low drag, but far from zero, especially at the proposed 760mph, approximately 1/1000th of sea-level drag. The vehicle is substantially smaller than the tube (roughly 30%) and has on the front a big fan, which sucks in air. Most of this is spat out the back, helping to keep it going, but a little is squeezed out the bottom through what they call "Skis", which ride on the floor and sides of the tube, generating a cushion of air to ride on. This is familiar to people who play air hockey, and it's been used in lower speed transit before, such as the people mover in the Detroit Airport.
The low pressure in the tube means that it doesn't take a lot of power to overcome air friction and can be sustained by on board batteries (using numbers gleaned from their work with the Tesla S), and the big power drain from acceleration is accommodated by Linear Induction Motors (many existing transit designs use LIMs, such as the Vancouver Skytrain). These are mounted in the tube and the vehicle itself is passive. They are also used to decelerate the vehicle, recovering a large fraction of the energy used. They propose mounting solar panels on the guideway and calculate that those and a rather minimal amount of battery storage will fully power the thing.
They've actually done quite a bit of engineering on the support columns, concerned (it being proposed for California) about earthquakes. They allow the tube to shift freely a little bit relative to the support in three axes and have the ability to make more permanent adjustments to accommodate shifting terrain. The propose most of the route down the center divider of Interstate 5. They'd first connect LA and San Francisco, and later add extensions to Sacramento, Fresno, San Diego and Las Vegas. Most of the trip would be at 760mph, handling the curves required by the hilly sections near the ends at 550 and 300 mph, leading to a time en route of 35 minutes.
The vehicle itself is a low tube, with the fan section and associated mechanism at the front, and 14 pairs of very recumbent seats for passengers on either side of a big central longitudinal hump. The whole thing is less than 5 feet wide. They would depart every few minutes, unscheduled.
The have a separate design which is big enough to carry cargo, including three cars. It requires a bigger tube. They seem mostly to be concentrating on the smaller one.
This seems silly to me. The size of the vehicle is limiting for a lot of people: elderly and other sorts of low-mobility people will need considerable assistance to get in and out of the seat, and even fully able passengers are trapped there for the duration. A child requiring assistance will be fairly far from their caregiver. There's lots of necessary luggage that could easily be accommodated with vehicle that's just a little bigger: wheelchairs, bicycles, etc. Making it big enough to handle a passenger in a wheelchair will allow people to move around a little, including relieve their bladder, caregivers to help children and disabled, ease entry, and more, while only growing the overall size of the vehicle and structure 20% or so.
11 August 2013
How is it that they Got a Law Degree?
Tennessee Judge Lu Ann Ballew ordered a 7 month old child name be changed from "Messiah" to "Martin", making the argument: "the word Messiah is a title and it's a title that has only been earned by one person and that person is Jesus Christ." While I agree that this is probably the right call, her rationale is historically wrong, plainly a violation of the first amendment, flies in the face of a parents right to name their child, and several other things. I also have some big questions about standing. I haven't been able to find out why the court got involved at all, but if a relative complained, she might have ruled that the kid would be hassled in the highly bible thumping area he was being raised in, and given the parents an opportunity to choose a different, less contentious name. But the religious argument is nonsense. Apart from the fact that it is illegal for the government to involve themselves in religious matters (especially imposing some particular religious strictures on a family), there were hundreds of people who claimed the title "Messiah" or its translation in other languages during the era the New Testament takes place in. Not only that, "Messiah" was in 2012 the 387th most popular name for boys, right between "Scott" and "Jay". Having grown up with slightly unusual name myself, I got hassled for it. I feel for this poor kid....) How did she get past the first few months of Law School with this thinking?
Roy Moore was recently elected again as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme court, after having been removed by unanimous vote of the Alabama Court of the Judiciary (the overseer for judges). He'd refused to obey repeated orders from a federal court to remove biblical monuments from the Alabama state courthouse that he'd had installed. He argued that the ten commandments are the "moral foundation" of US law. (had the claim been about the Code of Hammurabi, which predates the old testament by about a thousand years, it would have made more sense but Moore's claim, like Ballew's, flies in the face of history and law)
Congress has many lawyers who demonstrably do not understand some of the basics of the law. Louie Gohmert has for some years been leading polls as the stupidest member of the US congress. He too has a law degree (from Baylor, which I'd thought was a good school) and worked for years as a District Court Judge. One of his top rivals for this rank is Michelle Bachmann, who also has a law degree (from Oral Roberts--less reputable than Baylor but still a real school). Jeff Sessions (JD University of Alabama) was elected repeatedly as a District Attorney. He was nominated for a District Court appointment but was rejected when several appallingly racist remarks came to light. (Sessions has repeatedly called the ACLU and NAACP "unamerican" which represents a rather shocking misunderstanding of what these organizations do. He also thinks fewer than 1% of lawyers support ACLU. In fact, around 1% of attorneys have actually donated legal work to the ACLU and far more than that are members) Hank Johnson (famous for wondering if Guam might capsize...I suspect this was meant as a joke but it came out badly) got his JD from Texas Southern University and practiced law for 25 years.
Roy Moore was recently elected again as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme court, after having been removed by unanimous vote of the Alabama Court of the Judiciary (the overseer for judges). He'd refused to obey repeated orders from a federal court to remove biblical monuments from the Alabama state courthouse that he'd had installed. He argued that the ten commandments are the "moral foundation" of US law. (had the claim been about the Code of Hammurabi, which predates the old testament by about a thousand years, it would have made more sense but Moore's claim, like Ballew's, flies in the face of history and law)
Congress has many lawyers who demonstrably do not understand some of the basics of the law. Louie Gohmert has for some years been leading polls as the stupidest member of the US congress. He too has a law degree (from Baylor, which I'd thought was a good school) and worked for years as a District Court Judge. One of his top rivals for this rank is Michelle Bachmann, who also has a law degree (from Oral Roberts--less reputable than Baylor but still a real school). Jeff Sessions (JD University of Alabama) was elected repeatedly as a District Attorney. He was nominated for a District Court appointment but was rejected when several appallingly racist remarks came to light. (Sessions has repeatedly called the ACLU and NAACP "unamerican" which represents a rather shocking misunderstanding of what these organizations do. He also thinks fewer than 1% of lawyers support ACLU. In fact, around 1% of attorneys have actually donated legal work to the ACLU and far more than that are members) Hank Johnson (famous for wondering if Guam might capsize...I suspect this was meant as a joke but it came out badly) got his JD from Texas Southern University and practiced law for 25 years.
10 August 2013
Vaporware
I just read the wikipedia article on Vaporware, and tracked down a few of its references. Interestingly, the inventor of the term is purported to be an engineer for Microsoft Xenix in 1982. There are only about 8 people which that title describes and I'm one of them. The ultimate reference is this 1995 article in the New York Times, which describes a 1982 meeting Ann Winblad had with Mark Ursino and John Ulett. I knew Ursino and Ulett quite well and I think I know what the meeting was about, although I wasn't there. First of all, they're what we called in those days "Marketeers", which was a job that included sales, marketing and what later came to be called "program management". They have some technical understanding, but they were not engineers. For a purely OEM product like Xenix, their job mostly consisted of talking to folks--media like Winblad1, Dyson, etc., potential customers, existing customers, etc., and ultimately the engineers themselves. If I understand the context, what U&U were trying to say with the vaporware comment was that while we intended to do what we'd promised, but there was not an engineer actually working on it at that particular moment. After all, there were only 8 of us and hundreds of promises made. We did eventually stop working on Xenix, but it was not until 1987. We earnestly did try to do everything we'd committed to. We did a lot--Xenix for 8086, z8000, 68000, 286, 386, and in most cases, several wildly divergent platforms for each, and several versions of Xenix. The specific thing I'm guessing Winblad was concerned about, the ability to make an atomic database operation in the face of file system caching and several processes having the file open simultaneously, was done in early '83, about a year after the relevant meeting. It wasn't terribly hard, but it took more than a week.
In the 1960s and '70s, IBM made a determined effort to capture the entire computer market. They came quite close to pulling it off. One of the many dirty tricks they would play was to announce and attempt to sell a bunch of products that somebody thought might be useful, and see which ones had the most buyers. Once they found out, they'd set about implementing those few, not bothering to implement the majority of the proposed products. A smaller company wouldn't have the working capital to pull this off. A customer considering choosing a competitor can easily be reigned in, for the cost of some hype. Eventually, this, and many other of IBMs monopolist stunts, would be banned, but not before most of their competitors had failed. This strategy is now known as "selling vaporware".
It seems to me there are three legitimate things which might be called vaporware:
4. We don't intend to do this, but we're pretending we are, to inhibit you from going with our competitor.
In other words, lying to the customer. Unfortunately, too many people on the marketing side think this is ok. If you change jobs every year or two and never have to face the consequences of being caught in a lie, this may be ok for you. But it undermines the future of the organization that appears to have done it.
1 Winblad was at the time still with a company doing accounting software, Open Systems, Inc, but her real importance was the articles she was writing.
In the 1960s and '70s, IBM made a determined effort to capture the entire computer market. They came quite close to pulling it off. One of the many dirty tricks they would play was to announce and attempt to sell a bunch of products that somebody thought might be useful, and see which ones had the most buyers. Once they found out, they'd set about implementing those few, not bothering to implement the majority of the proposed products. A smaller company wouldn't have the working capital to pull this off. A customer considering choosing a competitor can easily be reigned in, for the cost of some hype. Eventually, this, and many other of IBMs monopolist stunts, would be banned, but not before most of their competitors had failed. This strategy is now known as "selling vaporware".
It seems to me there are three legitimate things which might be called vaporware:
- We're working on it, but it'll take some time before it's ready.
- We intend to work on it, but it'll be a while before we can even free up enough time to start.
- We don't really intend to work on it unless we get enough customer demand.
4. We don't intend to do this, but we're pretending we are, to inhibit you from going with our competitor.
In other words, lying to the customer. Unfortunately, too many people on the marketing side think this is ok. If you change jobs every year or two and never have to face the consequences of being caught in a lie, this may be ok for you. But it undermines the future of the organization that appears to have done it.
1 Winblad was at the time still with a company doing accounting software, Open Systems, Inc, but her real importance was the articles she was writing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)