Mitt has been making mumblings about how President Obama doesn't understand our Anglo-Saxon heritage. So I thought I'd look into figuring how how American, and how Anglo-Saxon each of them are. It turns out there's a really great website for this sort of information: there's a fairly complete genealogy for both men available on-line:
Wargs:romney.html
Wargs:obama.html
Obama was born in Honolulu, Romney in Detroit
Romney's Mom was born in Logan, Utah in 1908. Obama's in Witchita, Kansas in 1942
Romney's Dad was born in Chihuahua, México, in 1907. Obama's in Kenya in 1936.
So, their parents are exactly equally American, although George Romney was born of American parents trying to evade polygamy laws by moving to Mexico.
Romney's paternal grandparents were born in Utah Territory.
His maternal grandfather was born in England, and his maternal grandmother was born in Idaho Territory.
so NONE of his grandparents were born in America, although 3 were in US territories. 2 of Romney's great grandparents were born in England, one in what is today Germany, one in Canada, the rest in the US. Only 5 of his 16 GG grandparents were born in the US and 8 of his 32 GGGgrandparents. The rest were in Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, or what is today Germany. Most came after the revolution, although he has ten ancestors who participated in the Revolution. At least 25% of his ancestry cannot be regarded as Anglo-Saxon. At least half of his ancestors moved to Utah before it was a US Territory, and later Mexico, specifically to avoid being considered American.
All of Obama's paternal ancestors were born in Kenya.
All 6 of Obama's maternal grandparents and great-grandparents were born in Kansas. On his mother's side, basically all of his ancestors were born-in-America WASPs, with very few exceptions: he has a great-great-grandmother who was born in Ireland. He has a G^6 grandfather who was born in Switzerland. All the rest were born in America or the colonies, and apart from the few exceptions, essentially all of his maternal ancestors seem to have emigrated to America in the 17th century. At least 14 of them fought on the American side in the American Revolution. At most 55% of his ancestry is not Anglo-Saxon.
So: Romney is indeed more Anglo-Saxon than Obama, but only by a little. It seems to me that leaving America to try to avoid its laws (at least two generations of Romney's ancestors did this) undercuts his Americanism a little.
28 July 2012
25 July 2012
Al Gore Invented the Internet!
Well, not really, and he didn't say he did either. But he did play a crucial role.
The internet is a collection of protocols--TCP/IP, DNA, HTTP, RFC-822, lots more. Nearly all of them were invented by, or under the aegis of, some US or European research grant. The most important of these came from the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA or ARPA. A number of computer networks were invented in the late 60s, but nearly all of them were fundamentally centralized. DoD saw great value in the networking, but realized that centralized networks were extremely susceptible to attacks on the critical links. At the time, the Cold War and the risk of Nuclear Attack was at the top of DoD's mind. Two ARPA researchers, Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, realized that a highly decentralized network would be immune to this problem, and designed some rudimentary protocols, which they called NCP, and commissioned some other researchers to begin implementing them. It didn't take long to come up with something useful, and BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman) built the first router under DARPA contract, which they called an IMP (Interface Message Processor)
The nascent network, called the ARPANet, became immediately popular for academic and military. ARPA, which was footing the entire bill, quickly put their foot down and banned commercial traffic lest the bill get too large. Since it was fundamentally a research network that had become far more popular than expected, they'd included no billing mechanism at all. At the same time, a number of other companies were selling various other types of networks. The most popular were Bulletin Board Systems and Local Area Nets. Nearly all of these used the Star organization--a central hub with all communication passing through it, although there were a few decentralized networks that grew up, such as UUCPNet, and a few LANs that used token passing. Token passing is decentralized, but limited in scale, and Star is not decentralized--to make it bigger, the central hub needs to be bigger and pretty quickly becomes an unaffordable bottleneck. But the completely decentralized ARPANet did not need any big hubs. IMPs got cheap fast, and a lot of people quickly realized that service providers could be small and independent and they could all work together, making a whole that was much larger than the sum of the parts. But there was a problem of how to charge the users, to make the thing scalable and commercial.
Cerf and Kahn and a few others set about solving the problem, and came up with a new set of protocols, which they called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) which improved a lot of things, and included some sourcing information, which allowed service providers to implement billing. Since the ARPANet had been around for over ten years and was very popular by this point, it took a lot of politicking to impose this change, and it was Al Gore who was the champion of it in congress. (I was one of the skeptics at the time. I was wrong. Cerf was right) He got the bill passed, and on New Years Day 1983, called "Flag Day" for internet users, NCP was abandoned and TCP/IP replaced it. The internet was born. At the same time Domain Name Architecture or System (DNS...the obvious acronym would be confusing) was imposed.
Over time, a number of competing protocols have been in play. Some of them, such as X25, are potentially superior, but none have been able to compete with the incredible flexibility and installed base of TCP/IP. All of the Star/Hub networks have been forced to accommodate the internet or go out of business. Many are still in use as LANs or ISPs, but the majority have switched to using TCP/IP. During the late 80s/early 90s, a great many BBS-like networks grew up, including Compu$erve, MSN, Prodigy, AOL, and more. All of these used the Star architecture. It made billing simple and and forced users to mainly use content of the providers choice, which of course created more profit centers. Each had incompatible ways of generating content, although they began to focus on what were called Markup Languages and HyperLinks. On the ARPANet, you had to have some level of sophistication about files and data in order to use things. the network providers provided, among other things, a high level of user-friendliness. They used HyperText and so did most of the non-network CD-ROM content, such as HyperCard and Microsoft Encarta.
HyperText had been invented in the mid 70s by a brilliant eccentric named Ted Nelson. His idea was that all the information in the world could be brought together and linked, by placing them all on a centralized set of computers and putting pointers in the various documents to one another. He saw there being a centralized editorial board to make sure all the content was correct and consistent. Nelson's idea was consistent with the Star/Hub idea. He wrote a fun book about it and lots of other things, called Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1974 which caught the imagination of thousands of computer scientists. One of them was Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman and researcher at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Center (paid for by a consortium of European governments). Berners-Lee realized that by modifying a markup language and making a browser to use it, and providing a simple internet protocol layer, which he respectively called HyperText Markup Language and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTML and HTTP), he could create a version of Ted Nelson's vision. His motive was to provide a flexible host for CERN researchers to document their experiments, apparatus, and more, but it didn't take long before he realized that everybody could use it. He called it the World Wide Web.
The internet is a collection of protocols--TCP/IP, DNA, HTTP, RFC-822, lots more. Nearly all of them were invented by, or under the aegis of, some US or European research grant. The most important of these came from the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA or ARPA. A number of computer networks were invented in the late 60s, but nearly all of them were fundamentally centralized. DoD saw great value in the networking, but realized that centralized networks were extremely susceptible to attacks on the critical links. At the time, the Cold War and the risk of Nuclear Attack was at the top of DoD's mind. Two ARPA researchers, Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, realized that a highly decentralized network would be immune to this problem, and designed some rudimentary protocols, which they called NCP, and commissioned some other researchers to begin implementing them. It didn't take long to come up with something useful, and BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman) built the first router under DARPA contract, which they called an IMP (Interface Message Processor)
The nascent network, called the ARPANet, became immediately popular for academic and military. ARPA, which was footing the entire bill, quickly put their foot down and banned commercial traffic lest the bill get too large. Since it was fundamentally a research network that had become far more popular than expected, they'd included no billing mechanism at all. At the same time, a number of other companies were selling various other types of networks. The most popular were Bulletin Board Systems and Local Area Nets. Nearly all of these used the Star organization--a central hub with all communication passing through it, although there were a few decentralized networks that grew up, such as UUCPNet, and a few LANs that used token passing. Token passing is decentralized, but limited in scale, and Star is not decentralized--to make it bigger, the central hub needs to be bigger and pretty quickly becomes an unaffordable bottleneck. But the completely decentralized ARPANet did not need any big hubs. IMPs got cheap fast, and a lot of people quickly realized that service providers could be small and independent and they could all work together, making a whole that was much larger than the sum of the parts. But there was a problem of how to charge the users, to make the thing scalable and commercial.
Cerf and Kahn and a few others set about solving the problem, and came up with a new set of protocols, which they called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) which improved a lot of things, and included some sourcing information, which allowed service providers to implement billing. Since the ARPANet had been around for over ten years and was very popular by this point, it took a lot of politicking to impose this change, and it was Al Gore who was the champion of it in congress. (I was one of the skeptics at the time. I was wrong. Cerf was right) He got the bill passed, and on New Years Day 1983, called "Flag Day" for internet users, NCP was abandoned and TCP/IP replaced it. The internet was born. At the same time Domain Name Architecture or System (DNS...the obvious acronym would be confusing) was imposed.
Over time, a number of competing protocols have been in play. Some of them, such as X25, are potentially superior, but none have been able to compete with the incredible flexibility and installed base of TCP/IP. All of the Star/Hub networks have been forced to accommodate the internet or go out of business. Many are still in use as LANs or ISPs, but the majority have switched to using TCP/IP. During the late 80s/early 90s, a great many BBS-like networks grew up, including Compu$erve, MSN, Prodigy, AOL, and more. All of these used the Star architecture. It made billing simple and and forced users to mainly use content of the providers choice, which of course created more profit centers. Each had incompatible ways of generating content, although they began to focus on what were called Markup Languages and HyperLinks. On the ARPANet, you had to have some level of sophistication about files and data in order to use things. the network providers provided, among other things, a high level of user-friendliness. They used HyperText and so did most of the non-network CD-ROM content, such as HyperCard and Microsoft Encarta.
HyperText had been invented in the mid 70s by a brilliant eccentric named Ted Nelson. His idea was that all the information in the world could be brought together and linked, by placing them all on a centralized set of computers and putting pointers in the various documents to one another. He saw there being a centralized editorial board to make sure all the content was correct and consistent. Nelson's idea was consistent with the Star/Hub idea. He wrote a fun book about it and lots of other things, called Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1974 which caught the imagination of thousands of computer scientists. One of them was Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman and researcher at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Center (paid for by a consortium of European governments). Berners-Lee realized that by modifying a markup language and making a browser to use it, and providing a simple internet protocol layer, which he respectively called HyperText Markup Language and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTML and HTTP), he could create a version of Ted Nelson's vision. His motive was to provide a flexible host for CERN researchers to document their experiments, apparatus, and more, but it didn't take long before he realized that everybody could use it. He called it the World Wide Web.
14 July 2012
Fungible workers
I just woke from a very dark, almost dickensian dream. I was working in a large factory which consisted of many work teams using metal worktables, doing various metalworking sorts of things. Some of them had machine tools, and many of them were working on greasy things. The lunchroom was in a separate room, to keep it clean, but it had the same sort of metal tables.
One day the factory was shut down for reorganization. As most of the workers stressed over not being able to do their jobs, other workers were reconfiguring their work tables. After several days of this, we found out why. All the worktables had been converted to lunch counters!
Being a dream, this was an exaggeration, but only a little. To a lot of management thinking, workers are fungible, and the ones who work in the lunch counter are the most fungible of all: everybody understands what they do, and many other workers could do their job, so they are probably the lowest paid workers on site. Moreover, the workers who are responsible for bringing in all the companies income, the sales force, does most of their work at lunch. So management had made what is to them, the obvious optimization. Emphasize the parts that bring in the money, and make them cost as little as possible.
Most workers who have more than a few months of training are not very fungible. This includes nearly the entire manufacturing and engineering staff. However, the sales staff, large parts of management, some clerical workers, janitors, and yes, the lunch counter workers, are quite fungible. They can quickly switch from doing what they do for one type of company, to doing the same thing for a different type of company. There's some specialization for sure, but selling a car and selling a computer are more similar than different. But building a car and building a computer are quite different.
The people that want to believe that workers are fungible have outsourced the majority of manufacturing in this country. Some of it went to outside contractors who are working in America, but a lot has gone to countries where labor is much cheaper. But the parts that can't be outsourced: the lunch counter, health care, sales, etc., are still here and taking an ever larger share of the national income. But the workers, the non-fungible majority, are being forced to split the shrinking remainder. Each individual company has done this to maximize its own profits. But like a tragedy of the commons, if everybody does it, we destroy the core of the economy.
Most workers are not fungible, but money is. This leads to a very interesting and slightly counter-intuitive consequence: when there is demand, workers find employment. The average American taxpayer's income is over $80K The median family income is about $50K, and the median individual income is under $40K. What's going on? A few people have extremely high incomes--many, many times the average. Many families have multiple earners. Imagine we did a little redistribution--not enough to make everybody equal, but enough to give work to a lot of the workers who are now making under $20K. Many of these people had skills which are going to waste. Employ them doing useful things. These people will need things: groceries, cars, places to live. Some of the underemployed will create new businesses, and if they have customers, the new business might survive.
One day the factory was shut down for reorganization. As most of the workers stressed over not being able to do their jobs, other workers were reconfiguring their work tables. After several days of this, we found out why. All the worktables had been converted to lunch counters!
Being a dream, this was an exaggeration, but only a little. To a lot of management thinking, workers are fungible, and the ones who work in the lunch counter are the most fungible of all: everybody understands what they do, and many other workers could do their job, so they are probably the lowest paid workers on site. Moreover, the workers who are responsible for bringing in all the companies income, the sales force, does most of their work at lunch. So management had made what is to them, the obvious optimization. Emphasize the parts that bring in the money, and make them cost as little as possible.
Most workers who have more than a few months of training are not very fungible. This includes nearly the entire manufacturing and engineering staff. However, the sales staff, large parts of management, some clerical workers, janitors, and yes, the lunch counter workers, are quite fungible. They can quickly switch from doing what they do for one type of company, to doing the same thing for a different type of company. There's some specialization for sure, but selling a car and selling a computer are more similar than different. But building a car and building a computer are quite different.
The people that want to believe that workers are fungible have outsourced the majority of manufacturing in this country. Some of it went to outside contractors who are working in America, but a lot has gone to countries where labor is much cheaper. But the parts that can't be outsourced: the lunch counter, health care, sales, etc., are still here and taking an ever larger share of the national income. But the workers, the non-fungible majority, are being forced to split the shrinking remainder. Each individual company has done this to maximize its own profits. But like a tragedy of the commons, if everybody does it, we destroy the core of the economy.
Most workers are not fungible, but money is. This leads to a very interesting and slightly counter-intuitive consequence: when there is demand, workers find employment. The average American taxpayer's income is over $80K The median family income is about $50K, and the median individual income is under $40K. What's going on? A few people have extremely high incomes--many, many times the average. Many families have multiple earners. Imagine we did a little redistribution--not enough to make everybody equal, but enough to give work to a lot of the workers who are now making under $20K. Many of these people had skills which are going to waste. Employ them doing useful things. These people will need things: groceries, cars, places to live. Some of the underemployed will create new businesses, and if they have customers, the new business might survive.
05 July 2012
Things the Free Market Can't Do Well
It's an article of faith on the the right that the Free Market will always do better than government run business. This is certainly true in a great many cases, but there are lots of counterexamples. Here are a few
USRA: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the railroads were engaged in a "race to the bottom", trying to outcompete each other with lower fares, lower operating costs, emphasizing popular routes at the expense of less popular ones, and so forth. In a lot of ways like the post-regulation airlines of today. They kept maintaining locomotives, track, and rolling stock at the minimum level that would get the job done, and as a consequence, all had very high maintenance costs and poor performance. When the US entered World War I, the extra demand placed on the railroads immediately exposed huge deficiencies, which the private railroads were plainly incapable of fixing on their own. So the government nationalized all of them into an institution called the United States Railroad Administration. They immediately set about rationalizing and repairing routes, designed a new set of state of the art locomotives and freight cars, streamlining management, and more. The railroads never ran better or were more profitable, and when the war ended, the railroads kept all the improvements and continued many of the patterns established by USRA, even dragging their feet on un-nationalizing until almost two years after war's end. It wasn't until the government agreed to fairly major support that the old management finally agreed to go their own paths.
When World War II broke out, many of the railroads essentially volunteered to be nationalized again. Since the reforms installed 20 years earlier were still working, the government didn't see the need, but the railroads willingly submitted to fairly extensive government control throughout the war. This was effective too: the railroads continued to work well. Much as before 1917, loads were fairly high and management was loath to try changes that might possibly cause them headaches, but also might improve things. As soon as the war ended, many of the new innovations that had been deferred were instituted, such as switching from steam to diesel-electric locomotives. These dramatically reduced the time locomotives spent in the shop, at tremendous savings in operating costs. They also made some foolish errors: the "mechanical" refrigerator car allowed huge efficiency improvements over their ice-cooled counterparts, but the railroads almost universally stuck with ice. Private truckers on the new and rapidly expanding highways were more willing to try the newfangled mechanicals and soon completely took over the market. Not having to pay for roads and fuel being close to free also helped them compete.
Interstate Highways, Bridges, and Dams. All of these things had been invented and installed at one time or another by small operators, charging tolls of some sort to recoup their initial investment. But it wasn't until government got involved that these things really took off. No business is big enough to fund even a single interstate or big dam on its own. But building them created millions of jobs directly, and the improvements to the economy they generated created millions more, and in nearly every case completely paid for their costs within a decade or so. Not always directly. For example, the economy of the "East Side" of Lake Washington is about $50B/year. Without the bridges (one is currently being replaced and substantially upgraded at a cost of $4.6B), it would be closer to $5B.
Health Care Insurance: I'm not aware of a single case where private insurers provide better coverage than public. US health care costs are nearly twice those per capita of the second most expensive country, and we leave at least 20% of customers completely without insurance and that many again with inadequate insurance. V.A. and Medicare costs are 20-30% less than the equivalent private insurance, even using what is otherwise largely the same basic health care system. And our outcomes are much worse than most of the countries that pay half or less what we do, even if you account for the poor outcomes of those who have no insurance at all. It's true that in America if you can afford it, there is no better medicine available, but only the 1% can afford it.
The Internet: Between 1970 and 2000 we unintentionally ran a very interesting experiment comparing the private and public markets for networking. The thing known today as the Internet was developed (by a consortium of universities and private companies) at the behest of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), hence its original name: "ARPA-Net". For military reasons, it used a decentralized, many-hubbed architecture, reasoning that if part of it were destroyed (by a nuclear strike or sabotage, for example), the rest would continue to function uninterrupted. It was strictly non-commercial and had no billing mechanism, although many private companies joined up and mostly followed the rules. This had tremendous advantages: decentralization meant that nobody was in charge, so new sites could come on-line and expand with a minimum of interference. Very "Free Market". Meanwhile, many computer companies were inventing their own network systems. Nearly all of these (e.g. Compuserve, Prodigy, MSN, AOL) used the "Star" architecture, meaning logging into a central hub, with all the users communicating only through the hub. This made billing very natural, but made it a little awkward for users of competing networks to communicate with each other. . In 1983, a Senate committee headed by Al Gore set about "commercializing" the ARPANet, changing a number of protocols to support billing and larger numbers of users, renaming it "Internet". Within very few years, all of the Star networks found that providing internet access improved nearly everything about the user experience, and after the invention of the World Wide Web (also by a government funded researcher), very few people even remember that there ever was a serious market for Star architectures.
The uniting theme of these examples is that the government institution did what was most effective at solving the problem for the long term, while business always did what was most profitable for the short term. In every case, doing the right thing was vastly more effective in the long term and with only the one exception (health care) vastly more profitable for the businesses that adapted to the government mandate.
USRA: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the railroads were engaged in a "race to the bottom", trying to outcompete each other with lower fares, lower operating costs, emphasizing popular routes at the expense of less popular ones, and so forth. In a lot of ways like the post-regulation airlines of today. They kept maintaining locomotives, track, and rolling stock at the minimum level that would get the job done, and as a consequence, all had very high maintenance costs and poor performance. When the US entered World War I, the extra demand placed on the railroads immediately exposed huge deficiencies, which the private railroads were plainly incapable of fixing on their own. So the government nationalized all of them into an institution called the United States Railroad Administration. They immediately set about rationalizing and repairing routes, designed a new set of state of the art locomotives and freight cars, streamlining management, and more. The railroads never ran better or were more profitable, and when the war ended, the railroads kept all the improvements and continued many of the patterns established by USRA, even dragging their feet on un-nationalizing until almost two years after war's end. It wasn't until the government agreed to fairly major support that the old management finally agreed to go their own paths.
When World War II broke out, many of the railroads essentially volunteered to be nationalized again. Since the reforms installed 20 years earlier were still working, the government didn't see the need, but the railroads willingly submitted to fairly extensive government control throughout the war. This was effective too: the railroads continued to work well. Much as before 1917, loads were fairly high and management was loath to try changes that might possibly cause them headaches, but also might improve things. As soon as the war ended, many of the new innovations that had been deferred were instituted, such as switching from steam to diesel-electric locomotives. These dramatically reduced the time locomotives spent in the shop, at tremendous savings in operating costs. They also made some foolish errors: the "mechanical" refrigerator car allowed huge efficiency improvements over their ice-cooled counterparts, but the railroads almost universally stuck with ice. Private truckers on the new and rapidly expanding highways were more willing to try the newfangled mechanicals and soon completely took over the market. Not having to pay for roads and fuel being close to free also helped them compete.
Interstate Highways, Bridges, and Dams. All of these things had been invented and installed at one time or another by small operators, charging tolls of some sort to recoup their initial investment. But it wasn't until government got involved that these things really took off. No business is big enough to fund even a single interstate or big dam on its own. But building them created millions of jobs directly, and the improvements to the economy they generated created millions more, and in nearly every case completely paid for their costs within a decade or so. Not always directly. For example, the economy of the "East Side" of Lake Washington is about $50B/year. Without the bridges (one is currently being replaced and substantially upgraded at a cost of $4.6B), it would be closer to $5B.
Health Care Insurance: I'm not aware of a single case where private insurers provide better coverage than public. US health care costs are nearly twice those per capita of the second most expensive country, and we leave at least 20% of customers completely without insurance and that many again with inadequate insurance. V.A. and Medicare costs are 20-30% less than the equivalent private insurance, even using what is otherwise largely the same basic health care system. And our outcomes are much worse than most of the countries that pay half or less what we do, even if you account for the poor outcomes of those who have no insurance at all. It's true that in America if you can afford it, there is no better medicine available, but only the 1% can afford it.
The Internet: Between 1970 and 2000 we unintentionally ran a very interesting experiment comparing the private and public markets for networking. The thing known today as the Internet was developed (by a consortium of universities and private companies) at the behest of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), hence its original name: "ARPA-Net". For military reasons, it used a decentralized, many-hubbed architecture, reasoning that if part of it were destroyed (by a nuclear strike or sabotage, for example), the rest would continue to function uninterrupted. It was strictly non-commercial and had no billing mechanism, although many private companies joined up and mostly followed the rules. This had tremendous advantages: decentralization meant that nobody was in charge, so new sites could come on-line and expand with a minimum of interference. Very "Free Market". Meanwhile, many computer companies were inventing their own network systems. Nearly all of these (e.g. Compuserve, Prodigy, MSN, AOL) used the "Star" architecture, meaning logging into a central hub, with all the users communicating only through the hub. This made billing very natural, but made it a little awkward for users of competing networks to communicate with each other. . In 1983, a Senate committee headed by Al Gore set about "commercializing" the ARPANet, changing a number of protocols to support billing and larger numbers of users, renaming it "Internet". Within very few years, all of the Star networks found that providing internet access improved nearly everything about the user experience, and after the invention of the World Wide Web (also by a government funded researcher), very few people even remember that there ever was a serious market for Star architectures.
The uniting theme of these examples is that the government institution did what was most effective at solving the problem for the long term, while business always did what was most profitable for the short term. In every case, doing the right thing was vastly more effective in the long term and with only the one exception (health care) vastly more profitable for the businesses that adapted to the government mandate.
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