The Falacy of Very High Level Languages

During my career as a systems programmer, I interviewed hundreds of candidates and was intimately involved with dozens of development projects, from one man teams to teams of hundreds, writing in binary, assembler, C, and various "high" level languages, and a few very high level languages,.  Over the course of all of this one of the things I realized was that language tools, such as big libraries, extremely high levels of abstraction, object orientation, and quite a few other "tools" are at best crutches, which can actually get in the way of solving the problem.  During the 70s and 80s, a bunch of people noticed that developers writing in assembler had a much higher success rate than developers working in BASIC or several other high level languages.  Without thinking very carefully, they blamed the particular high level language--for example, lack of structured programming tools.  But that's not the problem.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this.  What's happening, I think, is that the various tools promote barriers to entry.

On this chart, every programmer/development environment has a point.  A poor programmer is toward (or off) the bottom, better ones toward the top.   Working in a lower level language puts you toward the left, higher level toward the right, as exemplified by a few languages listed across the top.    As everybody knows, working in a lower level language makes it harder to get a program working than in a higher level language.  I think there are actually two thresholds at work.  The lower threshold, the lower, blue line, is the "can get it limping" level.  If you're below that level, you'll never get anything to work at all.  As you can see, a lot more programmers can get something going at the higher level languages than at the lower level.

The higher, red line, is the "good program" level.  If a programmer is working below the red line, they'll never produce something good.  The red line is at a very shallow slope for a simple reason:  The things that make a good program--critical thinking and analysis, memory, good planning, deep grasp of the problem and effective use of approaches to solving it--are largely independent of programming language or style.   If your thinking is muddled, you won't do a good job, irrespective of language, tools, design approach, or whatever.

The key, and the reason the "best" programmers seemed to be working in the hardest language, is that assembler provides such a high barrier to getting anything working at all that most of the muddled thinkers can't ever get anything that even looks like it's working.  There's not much space between the red and blue lines when you're working in assembler.   The lower level languages allow more programmers to look like they're producing something useful, while not actually doing much.  90% of the productive work is done by the 5 or 10% that are above the red line.

Up until about 1990, a programmer's ability to work in assembler was a pretty good calibration of their overall competence.   A good assembler programmer working in a higher level language would simply be more productive.  But after that time, astonishingly few professional programmers really understood the machine.  By 1997, it was rare to find a entry level candidate for an operating systems team that had more than a smattering of assembly experience.  And the higher level languages allow a lot more muddled thinkers into the process.  In the 70s and 80s, we couldn't tolerate much muddled code into the final product--there was some, but memory and disk space was too precious.  Nowadays, nobody seems to care.  The muddled thinking--and remember that with today's very high level languages, which functionally consist of gluing libraries together, that's an extremely high percentage--becomes a very high percentage of the shipping project.  One consequence of this is that you must download and install 700MB to update your telephone.  If all the programmers involved were working above the red line, it would probably be about 20MB.

Job Creators and Tax Cuts for the Rich

The republicans tell us that if we increase taxes for rich people, we will be impacting job creators.  Who are these "Job Creators"?  We're told that most of these are small businesses.  This is wrong in quite a few ways.  Here's the official data from the small business administration for 2008.

the first few lines:

size of firms	Firms	Establishments	Employment	Payroll ($1,000)
Total	5,930,132	7,601,169	120,903,551	5,130,509,178
0-4	3,617,764	3,624,614	6,086,291	232,062,907
5-9	1,044,065	1,056,947	6,878,051	222,504,912
10-14	418,270	435,392	4,892,838	166,372,257
15-19	214,871	232,071	3,604,553	127,162,095

You will notice that even though businesses with fewer than 20 employees are about 90% of all businesses, it's only 17% of all employees.    So while it's true that there are a lot of small businesses, the majority of them are tiny.   If these magic tax cuts managed to create 10% more employment in this sector, this is only 2 million jobs.  But this is totally implausible.  The average employment in this sector is 4 employees.  To add a single employee is a 25% increase, and for almost 3/4ths of them a 50% increase or more.  How is a 4.6% tax rate cut going to generate enough extra revenue for these businesses to increase payroll 25 or 50%?

The premise that lowering the individual tax rate affects small business hiring is that over 60% of businesses are S-Corporations, meaning that the business doesn't pay corporate income taxes, but passes revenue on to the owner where it is taxed as income.  There are a few S Corps that are bigger than 5 employees, but very few.  For over 90% of all jobs, a change in the personal income tax rate of their employer has zero effect on how the business is taxed.

The Bush tax cuts had two parts.  For incomes under around $350K, all tax brackets were reduced by 3%, while the top bracket was reduced by 4.6%.  Then capital gains, which had been taxed at 28%, and dividends, which had been taxed as ordinary income, were reduced to 15%.   So who is mostly affected by the Bush tax cuts?  Everybody took 3% from their ordinary income under $350K. In 2007, just over 1 million people (of the 140M filers) were affected by the cut to the top marginal tax rate and they had a cumulative AGI of about $2T.    Those with incomes under $100K had on average less than 1% of their income as dividends and capital gains, while those with incomes of a $million or more had almost half of their income in these things.

So who is it who benefits from the cuts?  Basically three groups:  The savings from the ordinary rates are small, but real.  If you're making the median $50K, after exemptions and deductions, those 3% are under $1K.  If you got a salary of a $million, you got about $40K. If you made a profit selling your house, you may have had a big capital gains windfall.  During the bubble, lots of people did.  But the real beneficiaries are people who invest in the equity markets: stocks, bonds, commodities and so forth.  If you make most of your income this way, and among $million earners, that's most of them, your tax rate roughly halved.

So to our big point: does any of this create jobs?  Well, an executive or lawyer who brings in an extra $10K because of these cuts might be able to have a little extra work done: some gardening, a nanny or such.  Per person this is not much, but together, a few of these people add up to an extra job.  The extra home sales definitely created a market for realtors.  It wasn't what caused the housing bubble, but the low capital gains rate surely added a small amount of lift to it.  But the big thing is the equity markets.  These things create very few jobs.  The way they're supposed to work is to provide an incentive to invest in new businesses.  That does create jobs.  But once the IPO is done, the only work that's generated is for stockbrokers.  It creates nothing, and removes money from the "real" economy.  During the downturn, there have been very, very few IPOs. 

The bottom line here is that tax cuts for the rich have almost no effect on job creation.  Not zero, but certainly not enough to justify undermining other types of government job creation.

Republicanese

The neocon publicity machine has generated an enormous amount of what George Orwell called “Newspeak”.  Neocons have fallen out of repute since most of this was written, during the GW Bush administration, but today's Republicans are still doing it.  Here are a few examples:

Non-Starter:  We can't find any fault with this idea at all, but we're immovably against it anyway. E.G., R51 is a non starter.  It would result in huge improvements to our congested highways at a trivial cost to taxpayers, proportionate to their use of the highways, but we're against it anyway.  Therefore it is a non-starter.

Clear Evidence: Not one shred of evidence, or sometimes fraudulent evidence. E.G. We have clear evidence that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, therefore we will attack him and commit ourselves to many years of "peacekeeping" in a hostile environment, in the process alienating ourselves from the rest of the world.   The scant evidence we have shown publicly is in fact a complete forgery. E.G.  We have clear evidence that tax cuts help the economy and increase employment.   every single previous tax cut has triggered a significant rise in unemployment and the majority have provoked an economic downturn, therefore we are going to try it again, this time in a way guaranteed to bankrupt the government at the same time.

Defending freedom: Suspending or overthrowing constitutional protections of freedom and civil liberties. 

Fighting terrorism: Starting or provoking conflicts that make people who were already angry at us willing to go to almost any extreme, including suicide bombings, to revenge themselves upon us.   Also: Wasting huge amounts of money in bureaucratic boondoggles that make it much more difficult to deal with the social and political problems behind terrorism.

Overwhelming majority:  between 20 and 49.9% approval. E.G. President Bush enjoys support from an overwhelming majority of the American people.

Completely baseless charges:  Guilty as hell.  E.g., the corruption charges against Tom DeLay and the influence pedaling and bribery charges against his crony Abramov are completely baseless.  They did them and more.

Clear Skies: Allowing polluters to do whatever they want with impunity.

Healthy Forests: Allowing lumber companies to do whatever they want with impunity.

Abstinence only: Disseminating lies about, and promoting legal impediments to,  any means of contraception more effective than wishful thinking. (the studies aren't all in yet, but it's starting to look like "abstinence only" may have caused the largest increase in abortions in our country's history)

Junk Science: Anything which is carefully researched, peer-reviewed, and widely accepted by people with expertise in the topic.

Fact: Something which has no basis in reality except for how it sounds to someone with no particular expertise in any relevant subject.

Bipartisan: Supported by most republican legislators and maybe (but not necessarily) one or two extremely conservative democrats.

Saving ____: cutting funding to ____ in such a way as to severely undermine its future sustainability but ensure that the ultimate collapse doesn't occur on the present administration's watch.  e.g. Saving Social Security, Saving Medicare.

Class Warfare:  The victims of long term, sustained attacks finally waking up and complaining about it.

Fairness: Anything that gives wealthy corporations and individuals an unfair advantage, power or money.

Average Person: A person with income between the 90 and 99th percentile.  in 2003 this was the range $125,000 to $300,000.   The actual median family income then was just over $44,000.

Job Creator: Someone who makes most of their income in the stock or bond market or by collecting rent or interest, and thus creates few or no jobs.

added 27 Jan 2012

Totally Dishonest:  Exactly right. E.g.: Mitt's ads about Newt are totally dishonest.  That is, they're completely accurate.  (Very little Mitt says is truthful, but about Newt, he's right on.  Of course Newt is right about Mitt, too.)

added 28 Feb 2013
Showing Leadership: do exactly what Republicans want, in clear violation of what the voters said they wanted or any actual facts on the ground

added 28 Mar 2013
Baseless Assertion: carefully researched, well documented and reasoned.  When a republican tells you something is a baseless assertion, it's a fairly safe bet that it's true.

added 27 Apr 2013
Put Politics Aside: I've lost on the facts or the politics but I want to keep pushing my (probably nonsensical) position anyway.  (both parties use this one but the Rs use it far more)

Not Picking Winners and Losers: Rigging the game so that the powerful can do whatever they want with impunity and the less powerful have no opportunity to do more than grumble.

added 18 Apr 2014
Nobody Could Have Predicted: It isn't what our rich backers wanted, so we prevented it from happening. Scientists and other people with real expertise not only predicted, but were screaming a warning as loudly as they could.

Cooking the Books:  similar to "Junk Science" and "Baseless assertion".  Carefully researched, documented and peer reviewed.  Tends to be used for statistics.

added 18 Dec 2014
Right to Work: The right of business owners to do whatever they please to workers, especially lower pay, blocking union membership, stealing pensions and more.

Things it's not possible to both understand and disagree with

Scientific ideas are sometimes a little hard to understand.  But quite a few ideas are so compelling, that once you do understand them, it's basically not possible to disagree.  Here's a short list.  In each case, if you disagree, it's not because you have a legitimate argument with the idea, it's because you don't understand the idea.


The earth is approximately spherical.  Prior to Magellan's first circumnavigation, and more recently, spaceships from which you can actually look and see,  you had to do some slightly sophisticated reasoning to understand this.   Despite the overwhelming evidence, there are still flat-earthers.   In ancient Greece most educated people understood that it was round, and the mathematician Eratosthenes actually figured out how big it is using remarkably simple and primitive tools, and got it right within a few percent.  He also measured the distance to the sun and was pretty close on that too.

Universal gravitation.  Prior to the middle of the 17 century, apparently nobody connected the fact that things fell to earth and the motion of the planets.  Once Newton came up with a formula that predicted everything exactly, nobody was able to disagree.   A little over 200 years later Einstein realized that there were some adjustments that needed to be made at near the speed of light, and that those changes had some profound ramifications, but they didn't change the basic math.

Evolution by natural selection.  A lot of people find this controversial, but if you actually grasp the underlying statistics, the power of even very tiny advantages or disadvantages to change species over many generations is undeniable.   If you don't believe in Darwinian evolution, it's because there's something you're not understanding.   Like understanding the spherical nature of the earth without direct evidence, the math and the biological mechanisms involved are a little hard to get your head around.  But once you do, it's undeniable.   Nobody's thought of a demonstration as compelling as a circumnavigation, but MRSA, MRTB and all those experiments with fruit flies and E Coli sure work for me: These are all clear examples of evolution in action.  Over and over, purported examples of non-evolution have been debunked.  The fossil record, the eye, flagella and more, are all clearly evolutionary developments, and in fact attempts to prove that they are not have generally resulted in strengthening evolution's case. As with Newton and Einstein, there have been some refinements made over the years, but the essential concept remains undeniable.

Keynesian economics.  Even before Keynes published his great book in 1936, his ideas were becoming difficult to argue with.  He'd accurately predicted German hyperinflation, the Great Depression and its recovery during WWII and much more.  But there was a faction that disagreed, and had strong financial support from a few people who had a lot of money.  They mounted an almost completely political campaign to undermine Keynesian thought and managed to create a sizable but closed circle of economists, centered around the University of Chicago, who listened only to each other and ignored uncomfortable facts.  They got little traction until the late 70s, when one of the popular and most compelling Keynesian models, the "Philips Curve", seemed to be wrong.  In fact, there was just a parameter had previously been ignored, or more accurately, misapplied.  The basic idea was still right.  But the politics of that single failure were blown up into what looked to outsiders like a complete repudiation.  More recently, Keynesians predicted the various bubbles and crashes, Japan's lost decade, calculated that the Obama stimulus wouldn't be sufficient, and more.   If you get it, all the evidence supports Keynes' model.

Anthropogenic global climate change.  There were people worried about human-caused climate change from fairly early in the industrial revolution.  Many of these were Luddites, but the horrible working conditions and pervasive soot were serious problems that didn't really get addressed until well into the 20th century.  The solutions found were generally effective and relatively low cost.  The new boogieman is rapidly climbing CO2 emissions, which cause warming and acidification of the oceans, with widespread consequences throughout the climate. The evidence is overwhelming.  Even a little climate change will be enormously costly, in the hundreds of $trillions, and millions or even billions of deaths, while returning fossil fuel consumption to the levels of the first half of the 20th century through alternative energy sources and uses will cost only one or two $trillion.  (the famous "hockey stick" doesn't really get going until the 1970s).   But the beneficiaries of existing modes have enormous money to spend on disinformation and lobbying, and so far, it's working.

Economists who predicted the crisis

We're told by conservatives and mainstream media that nobody could have predicted the crisis.

Here's a partial list:

Brooksley Born, 1996-8 Cassandra of the Derivatives Crisis.  Warned about unregulated derivitives, especially Credit Default Swaps and other Collateralized Debt Obligations.  Greenspan and his allies destroyed her agency as thanks for her prescience.

Sheila Bair (FDIC chair at the 2006-2011) warned of derivatives and initiated the first legal actions, in March 2007, against a subprime lender, and began advocating for mortgage restructurings shortly later.

Nouriel Roubini, September 2006 Dr. Doom.  Predicted a crash of the housing bubble, an oil shock, and a long, deep recession.

Robert Shiller: August 2005: Be Warned:  of the housing bubble.  says that we'll be seeing housing decline 40% and think it's a "soft landing" compared to what might have happened.

Paul Krugman: August 2005. Greenspan and the Bubble and That Hissing Sound. Describes the housing bubble and its causes, and predicts that we're in for a "rough ride".


What do these people have in common?  They are all Keynesians.   The truth is that no anti-Keynesian could have predicted the crisis, but quite a few Keynesians did.

More:  John Paulson now famously built funds that bet against the housing bubble, and made a pile.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's long time business partner, pointed out in 2002 that unregulated derivatives are "a sewer, and if I'm right, there'll be hell to pay in due course"

Michael Burry made a fortune betting against derivatives and was able to explain why at the time.  Michael Lewis wrote a book about him and several others, The Big Short.

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) spoke passionately on the floor of the Senate in 1999 against overturning Glass-Steagall:  "I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010".  Dorgan was one of only 8 senators who voted "No" on the deregulation bill (the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act).  The timing of his prediction was almost perfect.

Non-Issues

Political parties love to create issues to divide the voters...so much so, that they'll turn issues that sound like they're plausible problems but are not, into major "wedge" issues.

Here's a partial list, in alphabetical order:

Abortion: Through history, there have been societies that gave the father the right of life and death over their children until puberty or marriage.   There have also been groups that regard not taking opportunity to procreate as a sin.  The point is that the mandates of one faction are the sins of another. There aren't many who follow these extremes today, but there's still a wide spectrum.  Some people regard life as beginning at conception, some at birth.  The bible says that "Life is in the blood" which would make it about 6 weeks after conception, yet that's not what "Project Rescue" wants to hear.  Prior to about 1870, quietly abandoning unwanted children to die of "exposure" was accepted practice in nearly every culture around the world, but with the invention of safe abortion, the loonier voices of the right decided to make this a big issue.  With Roe vs Wade, a middle ground was picked.   Nobody is ever going to be fully happy, but RvW is a compromise that works.

Increasing crime rates.  Crime rates have been DROPPING radically over recent years.  One study tells us that the rate of violent crime today is 1/100th what it was 150 years ago. It's certainly true that we hear about more crimes today: as recently as 50 years ago, spousal and child abuse was rarely reported at all, though it was clearly happening.  But since murder and other violent crimes, including against spouses, have dropped so dramatically, it's implausible that these haven't been on the decline too.  These need enforcement, but the idea that there's some new terror here is just wrong.  It's all about the increase in media.
 
The Deficit and Debt: These are problems, but there's no urgency.  The debt becomes a problem when, with high interest rates, debt service becomes a big part of the budget.  Interest rates are at historic lows and debt service is a trivial part of the budget.  When this changes, they will need to be dealt with, but when that happens, the economy will have improved.  For now, borrowing could be used to stimulate the economy.

Gay Marriage:  anybody who actually knows a gay couple realizes that they're pretty much like any other couple. There's a passage in the bible that speaks against homosexuality.  But there are several that speak against the handling of the flesh of a pig.  A much stronger biblical case can be made against football than against gay marriage.   

Gun Control:  Contrary to the NRA, there's no serious effort to take away the guns of law abiding Americans.  There are people who are trying to take them away from crazy people and criminals, and there are a number of groups that want guns to be registered and to mandate safety training.  There are even a few people that are trying to keep weapons specifically optimized for warfare or crime out of the hands of criminals.  There are a few people who do advocate a complete ban of handguns, but their number is minuscule, and they are not part of the platform of any major party.  The NRA has consistently advocated against all these things, including objecting to perfectly reasonable safety standards for firearms.  They have gotten basically everything they wanted.

Immigration:  A case can be made that population is too high, but that's not the problem that the anti-immigration people are fighting.   Illegal immigration in 2007 was less than 1/3rd of what it had been 10 years earlier.  After the crash of 2008, lots of those went home.  The most extreme studies put it at under 12% of the total US population and most put it at just 2 or 3%.  It never was a serious problem and it's now not a problem at all.

Everyone knows that Prayer in School is against the law.  Except it's not.  If you want to pray in school, in a manner that's not disruptive, that's perfectly legal in every school in America.  What's illegal is someone in authority in a government-funded school leading students in prayer, because that could easily be taken as endorsing a specific religion.  Those in authority in the school, and those who might be perceived to represent them, have to hold to an especially high standard, because all the rest of the educational process is so authoritarian and young children are so naive.

Social Security is not a part of any federal budget crisis.  It is not funded through the income tax.  It's funded through the payroll tax and with no changes is fully funded until the late 2030s. By simply raising the FICA payroll cap, it can be funded for much longer.  Social Security is the single most effective anti-poverty program in history.

Tax cuts for rich people don't stimulate the economy, they stimulate the stock market, which creates very few jobs.  They actually damage the rest of the economy a little, because they take the money out of the hands of people who would spend it right away.  Some tax cuts for rich people, especially on dividends, capital gains and carried interest, are strongly destimulative: they create a powerful incentive for those who can to take their income in these ways instead of things that do create jobs.

Voter Fraud.  The theory is that there are a bunch of people who either shouldn't be voting at all, or are voting twice, or some such.  Study after study has shown that this is a tiny problem, amounting to a few dozen instances a year, nationwide.  So Republicans are imposing laws that significantly raise the identification standard, in a way that would make it much harder for certain classes of  people to vote.   In an amazing coincidence, these are consistently groups which vote for Democrats by a wide margin.  In an equally amazing coincidence, what the fraud studies do show is that Election Fraud is a widespread and growing problem.   That is, elections where there is significant mis-counting, broken ballots (remember the butterfly ballot in 2000?), groups which are being wrongly disenfranchised by methods such as caging, and more.  Evidence is pretty good that in the last three presidential elections, the ultimate result was swayed by as much as a million votes toward the Republicans

The Hippy Movement

I regard the Hippy movement of 1967 as a sort of high point in American social and intellectual life.   It ended badly in many ways, but the intentions were good, and many great things resulted.    Here's a short description of the Hippy belief system:

Love.  Love your neighbor, love your enemies.  This is not about sex.  This is an old idea and is central to the dogma of many of the great religions.  The hippies really believed in it, unlike the so-called Christians.

Free Love.  This is about sex.  The pill, cures for most STDs, safe birth control removed most of the taboos associated with free love.  AIDs and the profit motive made it not work out so well as it had seemed at first, but the intentions were good.  (The "summer of love" ended when pimps and pushers moved in on Haight-Ashbury to exploit the thousands of teens who had come from all over the country)

Sharing.  Perhaps the most important thing the hippies did, it's an outgrowth of Love.  We're all in this together.  If I have something that you need, I should give it to you.  The Personal Computer and the World Wide Web are very direct outgrowths of this idea.  Jobs, Woz, Felsenstein, and many others were all Hippies at one time in their life or another.  Most of the early BBS systems were done by hippies. Ted Nelson invented Hypertext to share knowledge, and Tim Berners-Lee figured out how to put it on the Internet, so Jimmy Wales could do Wikipedia--the ultimate implementation of Ted Nelson's idea.  All were strongly inspired by the attitudes of the hippy movement.

Appearances are irrelevant.  except when they are, for example an artists work.  A persons value is their contribution to the community and how happy they are, not the way they look, how much money or stuff they have, how good they are at throwing a football, etc.  The hippies used "Beautiful" to mean something very different than the dictionary.

Drugs and Music are capable of great things.  I'm not so sure about the drugs part anymore, but the main hippy drugs, marijuana and LSD, are far less harmful than their detractors insist (and compared to Alcohol and Crystal Meth respectively, pretty harmless in absolute terms).  Music is the fastest, most direct, most universal form of communication yet invented by man.   The nomenclature is a little vague at times, there are clearly some people who just don't get some types of music.