Anomalous Timestream

Zürich, redux

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:16:58 GMT

It looks like I'll be flying to Zürich again in the near future. I haven't yet booked my flight, but it looks like I'll be there for significant parts of mid-May. We're having a rare face-to-face team meet-up, so I'll be meeting up with most of my team after arriving.

Side note: as an experiment, I'm posting this from my Android phone using "ElJay" (a LiveJournal client). In related news, I recently flashed my phone with a recent build of the Cupcake branch (currently under heavy development), and for the most part I'm quite happy with it.

Trip to Wichita; New phone running Android

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 01:46:10 GMT

Hey, everyone.

Item 1:

On Sunday 12/28, I'll be flying back to Wichita for a week to do the Christmas thing with family (slightly belatedly). I'll be in town through Monday 01/05 and staying with my sister. Saturday 01/03 is booked (Christmas dinner on my mom's side) and Tuesday 12/30 is booked (hanging out with a friend), but other Wichita friends are encouraged to hit me up and write themselves into my schedule.

I was originally going to take a few vacation days, but my group is momentarily understaffed so I'll actually be on-call that week. Shouldn't be too big of a deal, though.

Item 2:

As of this week, I now have a second phone: the Android Dev Phone 1, sister of the better known T-Mobile G1. The HTC Dream hardware is the first cellphone out the door that runs Google's new Android OS. Android is notable for being the first open source cellphone OS that anyone actually cares about (sorry, OpenMoko).

The developer version is now available for sale for $400 (plus a slightly obnoxious $25 developer registration fee). Not only is the developer version carrier unlocked, it also lets you flash the phone with your own custom builds of Android, including any modifications you like. Not that that's actually useful if you're writing an application, since end users can't install your tweaked OS, but it helps if you're trying to patch a bug in the OS or proposing a new feature and you want to debug your code on a real phone. (The cellphone/radio bits are all quite thoroughly separated from the OS, so unlike a lot of other phones there are no FCC legal implications to letting you flash the OS. Yay Google!)

For now, I still have my old Sprint phone with the 316 area code, and that number will probably continue to work for at least another month or two before I kill it. The new number is a 415 area code. Despite the fact that my phone is carrier unlocked out-of-box, I ended up going with T-Mobile for service because the only other GSM carrier in the US is AT&T and their 3G network is incompatible with the G1. (Doesn't help that the AT&T brand name gives me the heebie-jeebies.)

I went with T-Mobile's "MyFaves 300" plan ($40/mo for unlimited night, weekends, and 5 numbers of my choosing) plus the upper-tier G1 data add-on (unlimited data plus unlimited SMS/MMS text messages) for $35/mo. They also offered to insure my phone, despite the fact that I didn't buy it from them, and at $5/mo it sounded like a reasonable deal. Grand total: $80/mo. And I get to ditch Sprint!

There Probably Isn't

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:51:19 GMT

Recently, I heard through the blog grapevine about a site called thereprobablyisnt.com. It's basically a place for people to post their personal stories about how they came to be atheists. Yesterday I submitted my own story... which was in retrospect about twice as long as what they were looking for... but they accepted it anyway, and you can see it live on their website today.

Here's the full text:

I don't believe in gods because... Alzheimer's disease exists. Well, that's really an oversimplification: I don't believe in gods because of a multitude of individual reasons, and I never fully believed many of the things told to me as part of my Christian upbringing. But when my grandmother died of Alzheimer's -- the savage, early-onset, rapid-progressing form that can be inherited genetically -- it hit home in a very deep way that we humans truly exist on our own.

Growing up as a gay teen in the bible belt, I'd become increasingly jaded on the idea of revealed truth: believers were so certain that they were right that they couldn't see how obviously wrong they were. Even so, I still clung to Deism as I entered college: I felt sure that there was a paternalistic supernatural intelligence of some sort, who was happy to see us prospering and thriving in the same way that parents are proud of their child taking its first steps. I also felt a fuzzier sort of hope that death wasn't the end -- that everything works out, when it's all said and done, and that everyone eventually finds a happy ending in some unspecified afterlife.

Contemporaneous with this, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At the time of diagosis around 1991, she was barely 50; her hair was just starting to gray. As I grew from tween to teen, my grandmother began to lose her short-term memory and become more absent-minded. At this stage, it was easy to dismiss the disease's effects: "Oh, that's just Granny's memory acting up again: remind her a few more times and she'll be fine". Some people with Alzheimer's never progress beyond this -- they die of some other age-related illness before it gets worse. But early onset Alzheimer's doesn't merely strike at a younger age: it also progresses faster than standard Alzheimer's.

By the time I was entering high school, a mere 5 years after her first diagnosis, my grandmother's long term memory started to go. She forgot how to take care of herself, and she had trouble with recognizing familiar people. Helping her in day-to-day living became too stressful for my grandfather, so my aunt stepped in. Then it became too stressful for my aunt, so they hired a part-time caretaker.

If it were just a matter of caretaking, I wouldn't have thought twice about it and it wouldn't have pushed against my residual beliefs. However, something strange happened at this point: she started to change radically from the person we knew and loved. Her intellect, which had been subversively feisty for a woman of her era and upbringing, gave way to much more menial conversations. Her behavior changed radically: she lost her social inhibitions, becoming uncharacteristically forceful and rude when she didn't get her way, and shockingly libidinous when she was cheerful. Then apathy started to set in, and the extremes of emotion slowly muted into a forlorn sort of perpetual grumpiness.

By the time I was graduating high school, my grandfather was still in denial about the fact that she needed full-time care. Her speech had degenerated beyond conversations or even sentences, and all that was left was babble, delivered in a very snarky and bitterly sarcastic tone. He brought her to the family business each day, and she would babble and pace and wander the office all day long, each day showing less and less emotion and recognizing fewer and fewer familiar faces. After I left college, my grandfather finally placed her in a care center. The perpetual grumpiness faded, and the babble grew less and less frequent, until both stopped entirely and all that was left was the endless wandering. She refused to stay still long enough for the hospital staff to feed her, so they had to restrain her at meal time. But she never showed frustration or outrage at being restrained: without a hint of emotion she just silently squirmed, like a restless infant that forgot how to cry.

Not long after I left college, she fell while wandering the hospital hallways and broke her hip. After that, she no longer had any interest in wandering, either. She just passively sat in her chair in the hospital, apathetic to everything going on around her. Eventually she refused to swallow food, and my Grandpa didn't have the heart to prolong things any further by putting her on a feeding tube.

She died of starvation in February 2003, just a few days before Valentine's Day and a mere 12 years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. By that point, I'd abandoned Deism for agnosticism, and agnosticism for atheism. My grandmother's Alzheimer's was far from the lone triggering event in this progression, but it did inform my decisions at each step of the way.

In comparison, though, giving up on the idea of gods was the easy part. The toughest blow was abandoning body/soul dualism for materialistic monism, and with it any hope of an afterlife. After all, if an afterlife had existed, what good would it do for my Granny? Piece by piece, the disease had ravaged everything that made her a unique human being: her memories, her personality, her sense of identity. Even if she had an immortal and immaterial soul, there was nothing left for the soul to do: she was long gone. If the soul left her body a long time before her death... then who was in her body, when she had those brief and increasingly rare flashes of recognition? And if the soul left her body at death but somehow retained her identity... doesn't it constitute soul-torture to see your body acting out, harming your loved ones, with no power to reign it in? And if her personality was something separate from her soul... then what good is her immortal soul, if it's not her? None of these possibilities is heartening.

It didn't help me that her illness and death happened in a patch of my life that was already rough enough without any added tragedy. Eventually, though, I learned about secular humanism. And as I pondered science and history and freedom and progress and spontaneous order and technology and capitalism and open source software... I realized that there's plenty to look forward to. There's plenty of hope in this life: no afterlife required.

My new motto: "Sometimes the world sucks. But we're working on it!"

And here's my biography snippet:

As a youngster, I was a huge science geek whose best birthday gift ever was an encyclopedia set called "Growing Up With Science". I originally wanted to become an electrical engineer, until my family bought our first PC when I was around 13. From that point forward, computers were my passion, and throughout high school I knew that I wanted to go on to college and study Computer Science. After a long road that went places I absolutely never planned on -- including dropping out of college and stocking groceries at Wal-mart -- I kept studying independently and eventually landed my dream job in the Silicon Valley.

Yesterday's rally against Prop 8

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:14:51 GMT

If you didn't hear, Join the Impact organized a simultaneous nation-wide protest against Prop 8 yesterday. They managed to hold at least one rally in each of the 50 US states, plus a handful in other countries. I attended the rally at San Francisco City Hall, which had roughly 7,500 in attendance; videos are available on YouTube. Apparently both Los Angeles (10,000 to 12,000) and San Diego (20,000 to 25,000) drew bigger rallies against 8... which is a little embarrassing from a prestige point of view, but we already had a bigger rally on the 7th, the Friday after the election, so I think a lot of people were already rallied out.

FWIW, the Wichita Eagle reports that about 100 people protested in my hometown of Wichita, KS.

More Economics: Fed Addendum

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:32:02 GMT

I was flipping through What You Should Know About Inflation by Henry Hazlitt, and I encountered the following passage that neatly sums up the Federal Reserve System.

Today the method is a little more indirect. Our government sells its bonds or other IOUs to the banks. In payment, the banks create "deposits" on their books against which the government can draw. A bank in turn may sell its government IOUs to the Federal Reserve Bank, which pays for them either by creating a deposit credit or having more Federal Reserve notes printed and paying them out. This is how money is manufactured.

The greater part of the "money supply" of this country is represented not by hand-to-hand currency but by bank deposits which are drawn against by checks. Hence when most economists measure our money supply they add demand deposits (and now frequently, also, time deposits) to currency outside of banks to get the total. The total of money and credit so measured was $63.3 billion at the end of December 1939, and $308.8 billion at the end of December 1963. This increase of 388% in the supply of money is overwhelmingly the reason why wholesale prices rose 138% in the same period.

More Economics: Operation of the Fed

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:29:15 GMT

In my previous post, I basically gave a condensed history lesson on fractional-reserve banking, the creation of the Federal Reserve System, and the last gasps of the gold standard as Nixon fully switched the US dollar to a fiat currency. I meant to post a follow-up soon after, but I got sidetracked by Real Life™. But late is better than never, so without further ado...

Next in the series: so, how does the modern Fed work, anyway?

The system as a whole is much bigger than the Federal Reserve itself. For this discussion, the important parts of the system are the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the 12 Federal Reserve Banks spread throughout the United States (collectively, "the Fed"), roughly 2,000 national commercial banks, and around 900 state commercial banks. (There are almost 5,000 state commercial banks that are FDIC insured but choose not to be members of the Federal Reserve system. Nationally-chartered banks are required by law to own stock in a Federal Reserve Bank, making them part of the system. State-chartered banks can choose to buy stock and join the system, but it's not required. Shares in a Federal Reserve Bank are very bizarre, because they give no voting rights and are illegal to sell back or trade to someone else — but they do pay dividends.)

Recall from the previous post that the Fed system was created to protect fractional-reserve banks from the danger of bank runs. To limit the amount of danger in the overall system, the government mandates reserve requirements. To meet their reserve requirements, National and State member banks are required to deposit money into one of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, where the reserved money joins the federal funds. (Keep in mind that the reserves belong to the customers of the banks, not to any of the banks involved.)

Once deposited, the federal funds can be moved around from bank to bank as numbers in a ledger, rather than by physically moving bars of gold or even paper dollars. This makes it convenient for banks with excess reserves to loan them out to other banks: the two banks iron out an agreement, then tell the Federal Reserve to twiddle their numbers in a spreadsheet as appropriate. This alone turns out to provide most of the stability of the Fed system: so long as the money fluctuations are random, and aren't correlated across multiple banks, then federal funds loans between banks will effectively smooth out the variation in the system as if they formed a single, enormous bank.

Sometimes, though, the fluctuations aren't random: they're part of a financial crisis. At that point The Fed's most important job kicks in: it is the "lender of last resort" for member banks. If a bank is hurting for money, because too many customers emptied their accounts or too many debtors declared bankruptcy, one of the Federal Reserve Banks can directly loan money to the ailing member bank via the discount window, at the discount rate. In the modern system, discount window lending normally costs more than lending from another bank. However, discount lending is always available, whereas bank-to-bank loans require the hassle of finding a willing creditor.

Wait a second. Where does the Federal Reserve Bank get the money?

Well, that's easy enough. Each bank's reserve balance is kept in a ledger. If a normal bank-to-bank loan looks like this...

Transfer	Bank A	Bank B
Loan	-$1mil	+$1mil
Repayment	+$1.001mil	-$1.001mil
Net	+$1000	-$1000

... then a loan through the discount window looks like this:

Transfer	Federal Reserve	Member Bank
Loan	$∞	+$100mil
Repayment	$∞	-$101mil
Net	$0	-$1mil

In other words, the Fed creates the money out of thin air for the duration of the loan, then destroys the money when the loan is repaid. This sounds very bad, except that discount window loans are normally for a very short duration — most are for overnight, and very few are for longer than a few days. So, uh, yeah. That's concerning... and violates all rules of accounting and bookkeeping... but it still doesn't fully explain where new money enters the system, because the money created for a discount window loan doesn't have enough time to create much price inflation. In fact, a small amount of money leaks out of the banking system whenever the discount window is used.

So, let's move beyond the discount window. Hardly anyone cares about the discount rate anyway. What happens when everything is running according to plan?

Well, remember the federal funds loans mentioned earlier? Suppose a bank is getting a bit worried because a few more people declared bankruptcy today than the bank was planning on. So, the bank's demand for federal funds goes up — but there's no corresponding increase in federal funds at another US bank. Simple supply and demand says that, if the demand for something goes up, but the supply remains constant, then the price must go up. Thus, the federal funds rate rises. If lots of banks want to receive loans, or if a few banks desperately want to receive loans, or if too many banks are keeping their reserves near the legal limit and don't have extra money to loan out, then the rates would eventually rise so much that it'd be cheaper to use the discount window. And if the bank is worried that it might rely on loans for a longer period than a few days, it would stop making new loans in order to build its reserves back up, because the interest paid out to other banks would be greater than the interest brought in by customer-facing loans backed by borrowed reserves.

Well, in a way, that still meets the minimal goal of the Federal Reserve System: to prevent bank collapses. Because the Fed is willing to lend via the discount window even when the bank is hurting badly and at significant risk of collapse, it takes a much larger hit to dislodge the bank from its stable perch. But if the economy is going downhill, and lots of people start declaring bankruptcy on their loans, then lots of banks will all be hurt at the same time. The federal funds rate will go through the roof, all the banks will flock to the discount window instead, and the consumer-facing credit market will shut down as banks avoid the higher interest rates by simply refusing to loan money to consumers.

None of that makes the politicians look good, so the Fed has a secondary duty: to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. The Fed has a trick up its sleeve to artificially control interest rates: the so-called open market operations.

Several times a year, the Fed's Board of Governors sets a target federal funds rate. This is the actual rate that you hear about in the news: when Bernanke announces a change in interest rates, it's the target federal funds rate that he's talking about. Once the target is set, the Fed then attempts to manipulate the effective federal funds rate (i.e. what banks are actually charging each other for federal funds loans) so that the effective rate matches the target rate. And open market operations are the means by which it does this.

Well, what the heck is an "open market operation"? Every morning, the Fed conducts a series of transactions on the "open market", where it trades securities with banks. (What are "securities"? Investments that pay money: US Treasury bonds, home loans, whatever. Usually it's Treasury bonds.) The Fed keeps a stock of securities just for the occasion. If the effective federal funds rate is below the target, which is a rare occurrence, then the Fed sells more securities than it buys. If the actual federal funds rate is above the target, which is far more common, then the Fed buys more securities than it sells. Either way, it conducts many buys and sells every morning, and just makes sure that the average of them all goes in the right direction. Occasionally, it conducts more of them during the day, but it's usually just in the morning.

As with discount window lending, all rules of accounting are thrown out the window. Here is what a security purchase roughly looks like:

Time	Federal Reserve	Member Bank
Before	$∞	Securities
After	$∞ + Securities	$1mil

This is known as "injecting liquidity" into the banking system. Because there are no paper dollars involved, and because the bank is trading something of value, it's not quite as obvious as just printing new dollar bills and handing them to the bank. But the net result is that the Federal Reserve Bank loses no money and yet gains a security, while the bank has profited by selling the security. (Why did the bank profit? The bank wouldn't have sold the security at a loss. Because it's an "open market", the bank can just walk away if the Fed isn't offering enough money. Therefore, the Fed's price must have been high enough to attract the bank's attention.)

The proceeds go directly into the target bank's reserves (by twiddling a number in a spreadsheet), which means that the bank can now make more loans: either to other banks via the federal funds system, or directly to consumers via fractional reserve banking. This increases the supply of loans, thus nudging the effective rate downward. Similarly, when the Fed sells securities, the reverse happens: the money is removed from the bank's reserves and destroyed, which correspondingly raises interest rates due to a reduced supply of loans.

I think I'll cut things off here for today. My next post in the series will probably cover the money supply, demand deposit accounts versus time deposit accounts, and the fact that the reserve requirement isn't a hard number.

More Economics: Rise of The Fed

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:58:26 GMT

It's occurred to me that, in my previous post describing how inflation causes the boom-bust cycle, I hadn't really adequately explained some of the details of how the Federal Reserve System works, or why it is inherently inflationary. I think the best way to lead up to that is to describe the history of banking, show how the older banking systems worked, and explain how the transition happened to the Federal Reserve System.

First up: a rather lengthy history lesson, focusing on the appearance of bank runs.

Note: this discussion will center around the US and Europe in relatively recent times. Banking predates writing itself, and many of the concepts discussed here were independently invented in the Middle East, East Asia, the pre-Columbus Americas, and other places.

Rewind time to 1609. In that year, the Bank of Amsterdam was formed. The Bank of Amsterdam was the first institution in history that directly resembled what we would recognize as a modern bank. People could deposit their money (gold or silver, preferably in the form of uncoined bullion), and the bank would give them a receipt. At a later time, the bearer of the receipt could then redeem it, at which point the bank would withdraw the money and return it to the bearer. The Bank of Amsterdam operated with full reserves: they guaranteed that they kept on hand the full value of all the receipts, at all times. Essentially, they acted like a warehouse for gold and silver; the receipts were proof of ownership that allowed you to remove your gold or silver from the warehouse.

How did they pay for this? When the receipt was created, the bank took a fee for the costs of warehousing the money: the receipt given to the customer would have a face value that was slightly less (0.25% less for silver, 0.50% less for gold) than the actual value of the gold or silver that the customer had deposited. The receipt would expire after six months — if the receipt expired, the bank could keep all the money for itself. Thus, if you wanted to keep the money in the bank for longer than six months, you would need to visit the bank every six months and buy a fresh receipt, by withdrawing the money and then immediately re-depositing it. You would then receive a new receipt that subtracted out the warehousing costs for the next 6 months. Thus the bank got paid for the ongoing costs of storing the money, and even made a small but healthy profit. (The profit was actually a bit of a pleasant surprise — the bank was a creation of Amsterdam's city government and was only meant to break even, not turn a profit. From the profits, they could now afford to offer loans and thus make small investments in the city's economy.)

Because the bank was so trusted, people started using the receipts as a stand-in for the actual gold or silver that was physically located inside the bank. The bank didn't require that the person who deposited the money was the same person who took it out, and the receipts were lighter and more convenient than actual gold or silver, so the receipts (in modern terms, bank notes) were traded enough that they became one of the earliest forms of paper money.

Now, skip ahead to the early-to-mid 1800s. Since 1609, many more banks had sprung up, and banking had become a well-established idea. However, the 1700s had seen the appearance of fractional-reserve banks, and the 1800s had seen a boom in their popularity. A fractional-reserve bank was a bank that kept the money only somewhat safe. Say that a person has $100 worth of silver — at the time, US$100 was by definition exactly equal to 37125 grains of silver, which roughly equals 5.3 pounds or 2.4 kilograms. As with the Bank of Amsterdam, the customer deposits their $100 of silver in the bank for safekeeping, and the bank gives the customer slightly less than $100 worth of bank notes, skimming a small bit of value to cover the bank's costs. Departing from the older system, though, the bank would then turn around and loan out bank notes, say $100 worth, to someone else. At this point, even though there were only 37125 grains of silver (exactly $100 worth) at the bank, there were $200 worth of bank notes floating around. Since each bank note is a guarantee by the bank to pay out an exact amount of silver, the bank has now made promises that it can't actually keep.

Why would the bank do this? Because it can make much larger profits that way. If the bank creates legitimate loans, risking money from its own profits, it can slowly turn a small profit into a large one. If the bank creates bogus loans, risking money that the bank doesn't even have permission to use, it can quickly turn no profits into large profits — so long as no one asks too many questions.

When one person offers a loan to a second person, the second person must eventually pay back both the principal and the interest to the first. The principal is just the amount that the first person loaned to the second. The interest is the price of the loan: some money to cover the risk that the loan will not be paid back, plus some more money to make up for the fact that having money now is more useful than having money later, plus a small bit more for profit. Since the bank charges interest on its loans, the bank will probably get back more than the $100 that was loaned out — and in practice a real bank has many small loans outstanding, which spreads out the risk of any one person failing to repay a loan. As the loans are repaid, the bank can then re-loan the principle to yet another person, thus turning the deposited silver into a continuous stream of profit from the ever-accumulating interest.

So long as the bank can keep enough silver on hand to cover what people are actually withdrawing, the house of cards doesn't collapse and the bank can profit "forever" by continuously making these bogus loans.

Now imagine the fractional-reserve bank from earlier, with only one $100 deposit and one $100 loan. Say that the original customer presents his $100 worth of bank notes and asks to redeem them for the 37125 grains of silver that he rightfully owns. The bank is in a dilemma. It could refuse to redeem the bank notes... but this would make the customer very upset (because the bank has stolen his silver), he would tell people, who would tell more people, and all the bank's notes would become worthless overnight. Everyone would stop taking bank notes as money, instead demanding actual silver or gold, and nobody would deposit their silver or gold at the bank out of fear that the bank would steal from them, too. The bank would then dramatically collapse, and the only profitable action left for the bank's owners would be to steal all the silver deposits and flee town as outlaws before the angry mob attacks them.

On the other hand, if the bank does give the customer his silver, then the remaining $100 worth of bank notes — which are now floating around the local economy because the recipient of the loan has already spent them — are suddenly unbacked by any silver whatsoever. At that point, they would be truly worthless... but only the bank is in a position to know that. If the bank could keep it a secret, and it found a customer who could deposit new silver before anyone else tried to withdraw the missing silver, then nobody outside the bank would ever find out. The bank would survive, maintaining its continuous stream of profits.

One of these options results in the bank's guaranteed destruction and the end of the revenue stream. The other results in the bank's possible destruction and the continuation of the revenue stream. Therefore, the bank takes the second option: it gives the customer his silver, lies to people about its true financial state, and hopes for the best.

This scam works best when the bank has a large number of customers. If no single person holds enough bank notes to threaten the bank's existence, then the bank can redeem bank notes without worries — so long as the bank's underlying insolvency remains a secret, the amount of silver flowing in will roughly equal the amount of silver flowing out when averaged over time. The larger the bank is, the more bank notes it can loan out against its reserves, because a bigger bank can more easily weather the random ups and downs from people withdrawing and depositing silver. The small bank with one customer was dangerously threatened just by doubling the amount of money in the system — it had $200 of outstanding bank notes, backed by $100 of actual silver, giving a reserve ratio of 2:1. A large bank can gamble by increasing the reserve ratio even further: a very large bank could "safely" keep a 10:1 ratio, for instance, and use the same $100 of silver to back $1000 of bank notes ($100 to the original depositor, plus $900 in loans). People hardly ever withdraw all their money from the bank all at once, so the bank seemingly can't get caught.

Like all scams, though, this can't really last forever. What happens when a bank offers all these fraudulent loans? Inflation.

The bank creates new bank notes and loans them out, the loan recipients spend it, the people paid by the loan recipients spend it again, and so on as the bank notes circulate through the economy. Because the bank notes are treated as money, the amount of money in the system has increased... even though the amount of silver is constant. However, the amount of silver isn't the only thing that's constant: the number of goods and services in the local economy hasn't changed, either. Farmers don't become twice as productive at growing wheat, for instance, just because there is twice as much money in the economy. Therefore, prices rise: twice as much money chases the same amount of wheat, which means that the price of wheat must double.

(If the number of bank notes doubled but the price of wheat didn't double, people would go hungry because the wheat would run out. The people who received shiny new bank notes would go shopping, see that the price of wheat in bank notes was the same, and figure that they could now afford to buy how much wheat they wanted instead of how much they needed, since they normally couldn't afford to do so but now they have enough bank notes to do it. Then the wheat runs out, and everyone else is out of luck.)

Up to this point, the bank doesn't care. Their profits grow faster than prices rise, so they're happy with this state of affairs (as they siphon value out of the economy and into their pocketbooks).

However, the prices are only higher locally. A few people notice that, three towns away, there is a town where the price of wheat is still at the older, cheaper price. So they redeem their local bank notes for silver, travel to the town that has the cheap wheat, deposit their silver at that town's bank in exchange for that town's bank notes, then buy the cheap wheat and take it home. (In the 1800s, unrelated private banks didn't like holding on to each other's bank notes for the same reason that you can't walk up to a hot dog stand in the US and pay in Russian Rubles — here in the US, we don't trust the Russian Ruble as much as we trust the US Dollar, and different private banks likewise didn't trust each other's bank notes.) Now that the entrepreneurs have cheap wheat in their possession, they can go back to their home town and sell the wheat, for a price that's more than what it cost them (to cover the cost of the travel plus a small profit) and yet far less than the price of local wheat. On the surface, everybody wins... except the bank.

Now the bank is worried. The bank has less silver on-hand, so it cuts off new loans and waits for old loans to be repaid. It then destroys the repaid bank notes until the reserve ratio approaches something safer. But now people see that the bank is loaning out less money, and they wonder why. Meanwhile, prices stop rising because there are fewer loans, but they continue to stay elevated. People continue to withdraw silver so they can buy cheaper goods from far away, especially consumables like wheat.

The bank gets more worried. It tries to collect more silver by giving new depositors an equal value in bank notes for new silver deposits, rather than skimming off the top. This works for a while, but prices are still cheaper in the far-away town: inevitably, silver keeps flowing out of the bank and leaving town to buy cheaper goods, so as silver becomes more and more rare within town, people stop depositing it at the bank. Eventually, the bank ups the ante by giving people a cut from the interest payments: it actually pays people to put their silver into the bank. Again, this results in a temporary reprieve as more people deposit silver, but prices are still cheaper in the far-away town, so silver inevitably continues to flow out of town.

The bank starts to panic a bit. It tries to strongly discourage people from withdrawing their silver, but without actually refusing outright (because that would mean the collapse of the bank). The people now get really worried. Despite the added hassles that the bank has added, more people start to withdraw their silver — not to immediately spend in the far-away town, but just to keep it on-hand in case they want to spend it there. Merchants start to discourage people from paying in bank notes and encourage the use of physical silver, because the merchants themselves need the silver to buy cheap goods from the far-away town and keep local prices low.

Now the bank really panics. The bank starts a shake-down on the people who have outstanding loans, trying to intimidate them into early repayment. The debtors try to scrounge up enough bank notes to repay the bank (which isn't as hard as it sounds, since bank notes are becoming increasingly worthless) but now even the debtors want silver, too. This pushes up the demand for silver versus bank notes even further, and eventually the whole thing builds up into a financial avalanche called a bank run. All the people line up at the bank to redeem all of their bank notes. Eventually, the bank completely runs out of silver and becomes bankrupt. The bank gives what few assets it still owns to the remaining depositors, in the hopes of staving off the angry mob, and shutters the business. The bankers leave town in disgrace. The bank notes become worthless. Everyone who still had bank notes after the bankruptcy is now missing their money.

The actual, physical money (the silver) has all been shipped to the far-away town. Prices there are now higher due to the influx of silver — but the townspeople there can now spend their silver by buying cheap goods from other towns near them, and without the fear of another bank run. Since their own bank kept full reserves at all times, there will be no more bankruptcies, and the prices will gradually fall again as the silver is traded out of town. The people of the second town end up with more real wealth than their neighbors, because the people of the first town were tricked by the fractional-reserve bank into spending their fake wealth on imports.

Suppose you're a fractional-reserve bank. You see this coming. What do you do to prevent it?

Well, you're already a big bank, but you need to be bigger. You need to join forces with all the other banks nearby, so that all of you are creating inflation at the same rate. If all banks in the area are printing bank notes at the same rate, then prices throughout the area will rise in lockstep and there will be no chance for free trade to spark a bank run. But if one bank undercuts the inflation from another bank, by keeping more reserves versus loans, then the undercutting bank will draw wealth away (due to free trade) from the banks that create more inflation. That means there's an incentive for each bank to "cheat" the rest of the banking cartel — simply expecting all banks to cooperate isn't enough. Either all banks need to be consolidated under a single owner, or else a single "lender of last resort" bank needs to hold the reserves for all banks in question.

The end result? You lobby the government for the creation of a Federal Reserve System: a single, gigantic bank that all other banks in the country are required, by law, to store their reserves in. If a bank tries to undercut the Federal Reserve's inflation rate, the bank loses money: it has just put more of its reserves into the shared pool, and if it doesn't create fraudulent loans on top of the reserve's value, then some other bank will. This punishes banks who try to run a more honest, trustworthy bank... i.e. the banks who "cheat" the Federal Reserve. Once the Federal Reserve is in place, you retire older bank notes from each individual bank, and replace them with a single, unified system of Federal Reserve Notes. If the bank notes are indistinguishable, every bank will be forced to honor the bank notes issued by every other bank.

Fast forward from the 1800s to 1913: President Woodrow Wilson passes the Federal Reserve Act, which creates exactly such a system. This directly leads to the Roaring Twenties (through the decline of reserve ratios and the reckless expansion of credit), followed immediately by the Great Depression (because vast amounts of wealth had been squandered through bad loans and inflation).

It turned out there was one remaining catch: the Federal Reserve cannot control inflation in other countries, so trade between countries could still bring down the Ponzi scheme. The banking system responded by lobbying for protectionism, to keep people from buying cheaper goods through international trade, and by lobbying for the end of the gold standard, so that the banks would be protected from bank runs on the Federal Reserve Note. The banks achieved their first goal when the US and other inflation-damaged countries passed massive protectionist tariffs to isolate themselves from cheap imports and prevent a total collapse of their fraudulent financial systems. A few years later, US banks achieved their second goal with the passing of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934: the US Dollar was devalued from US$20.67 per troy ounce of gold to US$35 per troy ounce, and it was made illegal for a US citizen to redeem dollars for gold, or even to own gold except in the form of jewelry. Gold in any form of exchange became a Federal crime to possess: owning gold coins, gold bullion, or even government-issued Gold Certificates were serious crimes with serious jail time. The "US$35 per troy ounce" figure could only be redeemed by foreign governments, and even then only at the whim of the US government.

The earlier protectionism, however, wasn't going to work in the long term. Without further action, the demand for cheaper imports would inevitably create a black market to meet that demand. In the aftermath of World War II, with all the European economies in deep financial debt to the US, the US decided to impose its relative financial strength on the world: the Bretton Woods system (1944) was invented and implemented. The newly-created IMF (1944) would act as a "lender of last resort" on an international scale, thus extending the sphere of influence of the US Federal Reserve system to all the major countries devastated by World War II. The IMF would also convince additional countries to "modernize" their banking practices and join Bretton Woods by tempting them with large, cheap loans and promises of currency stability. Eventually, the GATT (1947) and WTO (1995) formalized the punitive aspects of protectionism: countries which "played ball" by keeping inflation in lockstep with the IMF "club" would be rewarded by having free trade with IMF member countries; countries which "cheated" by having less inflation than the IMF would be punished with tariffs and embargoes — for "unfairly" "dumping" their cheaper goods on the inflation-damaged markets of IMF countries.

Perhaps most significantly, Bretton Woods started weaning the international market away from the gold standard. Bretton Woods forced participating countries to stop using gold as the international reserve currency, and to use the US Dollar instead (continuing the US$35/oz valuation set in 1934 — a figure that was already divorced from reality at the time Bretton Woods was implemented). This switch to the "dollar standard" ensured that the IMF inflation rate would remain relatively close to the US Federal Reserve's inflation rate, with the hope that it would solidify the financial system's stability and keep the Ponzi scheme from collapsing like it had during the Great Depression.

Post-Bretton Woods, the US had little intention of maintaining even the pretense of the US$35/oz valuation. By 1970, massive inflationary spending to pay for the Vietnam War had caused the cost of gold in dollars to skyrocket well beyond $35/oz on the open market. Other Bretton Woods countries were demanding the right to redeem their US Dollars, in exchange for the gold that the US had promised them.

In one of the most shocking moments of economic history, Nixon unilaterally overthrew Bretton Woods without consulting anyone — not even the US Department of State, much less any of the other Bretton Woods countries. This moment was the official death of the international gold standard, and signaled the rise of the most ambitious financial experiment ever conducted: the fiat currency.

Inflation, The Fed, the Bailout, and Austrian Economics

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:21:01 GMT

I've always found Macroeconomics to be deeply unsettling. And not in the sense that I don't understand it: when it comes down to it, I don't really understand General Relativity, or Electrical Engineering, or Organic Chemistry, either — not in the hard sense that I can make sensible statements about them and be taken seriously by experts.

With those other fields, though, I can see how they build on what I do understand about them. While there are a lot of subtle nuances that go completely over my head, I can at least form a vague picture of how things work when you look at the bigger picture, and when I take a peek at the deeper details, I can see how they can combine to form the parts that I'm more familiar with (even if there's a certain amount of trust that people smarter than me have taken the time to rigorously prove it).

Macroeconomics gives me the same feeling I get when I read particularly bad bits of Philosophy or Literary Criticism. In short, when I compare Macroeconomics (the big picture) to Microeconomics (the details), I feel like I'm being tricked or swindled, because I don't see any possible way to build the former on top of the latter.

In contrast with Macroeconomics, Microeconomics is easy and intuitive:

If the price of a good gets cheaper, buyers will tend to buy more of it. If the price gets more expensive, buyers will tend to buy less of it, or find alternatives to it. That's called a demand curve.

If a good becomes more useful than it used to be — gasoline before cars versus gasoline after cars — buyers will buy more of it at the same price. If a good becomes less useful — saddles before cars versus saddles after cars — buyers will buy less of it at the same price. That's called a demand shift.

If sellers had an infinite and free supply of a good, they could sell an unlimited amount of it at zero cost. However, real sellers have limited resources — they can only sell a good as fast as they can produce it, and each unit of the good costs them money to make (the marginal cost). If a seller sets the price too high, buyers buy too little, and the seller produces more than he can sell — thus forcing him to hold inventory, which can put him out of business, since production isn't free. If a seller sets the price too low, buyers buy too much — and the seller is constantly running out, because he can't afford to produce more. There is a single price where the buyers buy exactly enough that the seller produces just as fast as he sells. With a little math, you can prove that this price is both the best price for buyers (it's the cheapest price possible where everyone still gets as much as they need) and the best price for the seller (it's the most expensive price where he doesn't lose money by holding inventory). This is called a price point or a market price.

If a seller is smart, he will invest his net profits back into the business to increase his production or reduce his marginal cost (the cost of production per unit of good). With more production for the same price, he can now sell more goods at the same price, and make more profits. He can even afford to cut his prices a bit, winning buyers away from the other sellers who still sell at the higher price, which will eventually shift the price point. This is competition.

When looking at the Microeconomic big picture, that's really all there is to it. The rest is just details.

However, when you broaden your view further and treat Microeconomics as the details underlying Macroeconomics, it doesn't work — even though there's no good reason why it shouldn't. As I struggled to wrap my head around it, it got to the point that I relied on my intuition on a lot of issues (based on my knowledge of Microeconomics), despite the fact that the "experts" had exactly opposite positions (based on their study of Macroeconomics) — I couldn't for the life of me understand how the "experts" had come to their conclusions. For instance, a typical macroeconomist will tell you that government debt is good, fractional-reserve banking is the hallmark of an advanced civilization, low interest rates stimulate the economy, and inflation is only bad when there's too much of it but deflation is bad even in tiny amounts.

Balderdash. And I've finally found a school of thought that agrees with me.

The Austrian School of Economics is perhaps best represented on the Internet by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Austrian Economics says that fractional-reserve banking causes the boom-bust cycle, inflation is government-sponsored wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, and low interest rates stimulate a pyramid scheme and not genuine economic growth.

The Austrian view of the boom-bust cycle can be summarized as follows:

The Fed cuts interest rates to "stimulate" the economy.

Banks borrow cash from The Fed to increase their reserves. The lower The Fed's interest rate goes, the more willing banks are to rely on Fed loans to pad their reserves.

Because fractional-reserve banking is legal, each $1 borrowed from The Fed becomes $10 worth of loans that the banks can lend out. This is effectively legalized counterfeiting.

Businesses see easy loans and low interest rates so they invest in equipment, infrastructure, or real estate, hoping for future growth.

The suppliers make profits from the companies that took out the loans, and pass some of that to their employees. The "boom" begins.

The employees are happy with their current savings, so they spend the new cash. Savings are a cushion against risk, and risk seems to be the same as before, so there's seemingly no need to save the extra cash.

The stock market sees a boost in consumer confidence, growth in sales, and rising profits — so investors dive in and create a "bull" market. As the stock market rises, Bernanke gets out the champagne for a "job well done".

Monetary inflation, which has been lurking in the system ever since The Fed first loaned money to the banks, eventually drives up prices and becomes price inflation. There's more money chasing the same number of goods and services, so prices must rise or there will be shortages.

Even though things still look good at this point, The Fed hikes interest rates to "cool off" the economy and "fight" inflation. (Genuine economic growth cannot get "too hot" and never needs to "cool off". This "cooling off" is only necessary because the "growth" is really a pyramid scheme.)

Businesses that took out loans notice the higher interest rates, but profits are up enough to cover the extra interest costs. Rather than pay off the loans, the businesses bet that sales will continue to grow. They continue to invest in their own growth because, if sales really do grow, the businesses must do so in order to compete and survive.

Consumers see that prices have risen, and slowly realize that their savings aren't worth as much as they used to be. The same number of dollars now protects against less risk.

Consumers lose confidence and cut spending to improve their risk cushions. The "bust" begins.

Businesses discover that the growth in sales wasn't permanent. They discover, to their surprise, that they made bad investments and are losing money, because they now have too much production capacity and are sitting on unsold inventory — and, worse, the interest paid on those loans made waaay back at the start of the "boom" is now cutting into profits, hurting them even more.

The bad investments become apparent to the public investors, resulting in a "bear" market as investors pull out.

The Fed cuts interest rates to "stimulate" the economy....

If inflation were instant, it wouldn't have any particular effect on the economy — prices would rise by X%, but wages and profits would also rise by X%, so the net effect would be 0: inflation would harm and help in equal measure.

In the real world, however, inflation is not instant. Inflation gives the most help to the people who touch the money first: the government, the banking system, the recipients of bank loans, and the businesses that boomed from loan-induced spending. Inflation gives the least help to those who touch the money last: blue-collar workers, the Joe Average who makes $20,000 a year working at Wal-mart. Inflation gives no help at all to those who never touch the money: the unemployed, retirees, and everyone else on a fixed income.

The harm done by inflation, however, cuts across economic lines: everyone feels the crunch of rising prices. The net result varies broadly: at the high end, people are helped by inflation far more than they are harmed; at the low end, people are harmed far more than they are helped; somewhere in-between, a tiny handful of people experience inflation as a toss-up. The net result is wealth transfer, a reverse-Robin-Hood situation where the government robs from the poor to give to the rich.

This must be why (macro-)economists fear deflation so much: deflation would be a net wealth transfer from the rich to the poor!

So... the Bailout. The $700 billion (with a "b") boondoggle.

The $700 billion bailout is one of the most inflationary pieces of legislation to ever disgrace the halls of Congress. The government will now use sleight-of-hand to make $700 billion dollars appear out of nowhere (i.e. it will counterfeit them), and then will give them to banks and other businesses in the financial industry. The banks, in a largely perfunctory gesture, will then give the government the resulting quagmire of "low risk" worthless packaged loans as if it were some sort of "payment". Perhaps the government will then hold the loan bundles long enough that they're worth something, then sell them to make back some of the money.

Sounds good, right? If the government makes $700 billion from selling the loans, shouldn't that counteract the $700 billion being wished into existence, leaving a net inflation of 0?

That might be true (a) if the government simply burned the profit dollars, instead of funneling them into something unrelated like Social Security or Iraq — but we all know that won't happen — and (b) if the government were bailing out any industry except the fractional-reserve banking industry, where the bank money that created these loans never should've existed in the first place — where it only did exist due to "leveraged" accounting shenanigans that were less honest than anything Enron did, yet backed by the full faith and credit of the US Treasury. The result is massive inflation if the government loses all $700 billion, and even more massive inflation if the government makes back all $700 billion. No matter what happens now, we lose.

Zürich photos; Folsom Street Fair

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:23:59 GMT

Here are the photos I took while in Zürich:

View Album

Get your own

Also, the timing of my trip worked out quite nicely: I ended up missing the trip to Munich for Oktoberfest, but I got back to San Francisco just in time for the Folsom Street Fair. I ended up sticking around for about 4 hours, admiring the scenery. If you're not familiar, Folsom is pretty much the world's premiere fetish festival, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from countries all over the world. Lots of leather, a fair number of people carrying paddles or crops... I'm pretty sure I spotted a spanking booth. Lots of shirtless guys, lots of jockstraps, a rather significant number of shirtless women, and the occasional exposed genitalia (of either gender).

Besides the more "vanilla" leather/BDSM stuff, there were also a number of Dom/sub couples, including one memorable couple with a sub man wearing what vaguely looked like a full-body butterfly costume (with a few well-placed holes in the fabric) being led around on a leash by his Dom girlfriend wearing black plastic devil horns.

Quite a bit of the stuff on display didn't really do it for me, but if I'd been expecting it to I would've been missing the point: Folsom is basically a celebration of human sexuality, in all its diverse perversities, and getting to try out new ideas about sex to see if you like them. It has something for everyone, but the particular "something" differs from person to person -- if it didn't, Folsom wouldn't need to exist.

All in all, I had a blast. My only complaint was that it wrapped up at 6PM.

Zürich: Cool/Not cool

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:53:59 GMT

Cool: Public transportation

The Swiss S-Bahn heavy rail network is superior to BART, and the Zürich tram system completely kicks Muni's ass. Seriously.

The tram system has multiple transfer hubs, it actually obeys the posted time schedule, and it goes places other than downtown. It's a bit more expensive than Muni — CHF4.00/US$3.70 for one trip within town, or if you're smart CHF82.00/US$75.50 for a monthly pass, versus US$1.50 for a two-hour Muni pass or US$45.00 for a Muni adult monthly fast pass. However, Zürich tickets also more useful: they're good for all buses, ferries, and the S-Bahn. The catchphrase is "Ein Ticket für alles" (One ticket for everything), and it lives up to the name. A normal-price ticket is tied to a single zone, but Zone 10 contains pretty much everything significant in and around Zürich, except for the airport itself, so you hardly even notice it. Buying the S-Bahn ticket to cross zones to the airport is only CHF6.00/US$5.50, so it's right around the same price point as what BART would run you here in San Francisco (and the S-Bahn is far nicer than BART).

Oh, and the S-Bahn can actually take you to other countries. Beat that, BART and Caltrain!

Cool: Walkability

San Francisco is a very walkable town by US standards. The hills are sometimes a bit more than you bargained for, but the idea of driving to the grocery store is a pretty foreign concept here.

Zürich, however, beats San Francisco handily on this front. All the guide books suggest a two-hour walking tour from the Hauptbahnhof ("Main Train Station") down Bahnhofstrasse, past all the ritzy shops, then across the river to Bellevue and then back up Niederdorf through Altstadt ("Old Town"), which includes both the old churches and the red light district, and finally crossing the river again to the Hauptbahnhof to wrap up the tour. The "two hours" figure assumes quite a bit of touristy gawking; you can easily walk up one side of the river in about 25 minutes, so the whole route would be an hour or so if you were in a hurry.

San Francisco doesn't quite have this. If you flattened out the hills, moved downtown to a more central location, relocated Haight-Ashbury, The Castro, the north end of The Mission, and the Folsom/12th end of SOMA to all be one continuous neighborhood on one side of Market, relocated North Beach, Union Square, and Nob Hill to stretch along the other side of Market, then replaced Market with a river, then you'd have a version of San Francisco vaguely similar to how Zürich is laid out.

Cool: History

Zürich was the birthplace of Dadaism, and thanks to Switzerland's famous neutrality it was also a crossroads for many famous figures and an incubator of many 20th century schools of thought and ideological movements. Café Odeon, which today is sorta halfway a gay bar, was once an old haunt of Lenin and Trotsky (before they got famous), Mussolini (ditto), James Joyce, and various other figures who were staying in Zürich to take advantage of Swiss neutrality.

Oh, and Zürich was an important crossroads going back to pre-Christian Roman times, continued to be so through the Holy Roman Empire, and was one of the epicenters of the Protestant Reformation. Zürich is chock full of famous churches and abbeys that are steeped in that history: for instance, Fraumünster abbey once held absolute power over the city, but in 1524 as Zürich was being swept by the Swiss Reformation, the last Fraumünster abbess Katharina von Zimmern turned control of the abbey over to the city, abdicated her position, and even got married the next year.

Not cool: Schweizerdeutsch

One of my co-workers, a U.S. native who's now been living in Zürich for over a year, previously spent some time living in Germany and is a fluent German speaker. Even he has trouble wrapping his head around Swiss German, which is a mostly-spoken dialect of German so distinct from High German that it's almost its own language: not only does it have a lot of peculiar vocabulary, but it also changes a lot of pronunciations, a few spelling rules, and the occasional grammar rule. German-speaking Swiss are capable of speaking Swiss Standard German, which is mutually intelligible with standard High German, but would rather speak English than speak what they consider a clumsy dialect.

Mixed: Multilingualism

Basically everyone in Zürich speaks two versions of German (Schweizerdeutsch and Swiss Standard German), plus English, possibly plus either French or Italian. Any American posessing even a sliver of shame will feel embarrassed at how monolingual he or she is. Imagine how Americans react to a tourist visiting the US who speaks no English, and contrast that with how Zürich natives don't bat an eyelash as they switch to speaking your foreign language, and how the restaurants almost always have English menus (or bilingual German/English descriptions).

I suppose if you have no shame, this counts entirely as a "Cool".

Not cool: MySpace

Dear MySpace,

Wow, this Internet thing sure is exciting, huh? Did you know that a bunch of computer engineers got together and wrote a bunch of standards on how it works? It's true! There's even one for the web! It's called RFC 2616, and it was published in June 1999. That was almost ten whole years ago! Wow, time sure does fly, doesn't it? There was even this nifty feature called the "Accept-Language" header: the user tells the web browser what languages he or she can read, and then the web browser tells the web server so that the server can figure out the best web page to send back to the user. The best part is that the user doesn't even have to click anything!

It sure is better than guessing what language the user speaks by figuring out what country their computer happens to be in. People visit other countries sometimes, and they might even bring their computers with them! It sure would suck for a native English speaker to visit Switzerland, then be forced to navigate the "MySpace Schweiz" page in German, then be forced to choose between German, French, and Italian with no option for English. That would totally suck if you guys did that!

Um, you guys don't do that, right? Right?

Hugs and kisses, Chronos.

As a side note, MySpace has taught me that I'm apparently "schwul". Humorously, I have trouble keeping the words "schwul", "Schwert", and "Schweiz" separated in my head.

Not cool: Uptightness

Switzerland tracks fairly well with the rest of Europe on a lot of things, like gay rights or a laissez faire attitude toward nudity. (It was interesting to walk around Niederdorf and actually have to stop and ask myself, "Back in the US, could someone get away with showing this in plain view of the public, even in San Francisco?" Doubly so when you consider how close Niederdorf is to various famous historic churches.)

But on most other matters, Switzerland is apparently the Singapore of Europe. If you have the (mis)fortune of owning a car, you do not speed, even by 1kph, or you will be ticketed. Also, many places in Europe have become less and less religious over the years, but not Switzerland: many businesses are required by law to close on Sundays, and apparently it's a little bit scary to be atheist there — the country is very Christian and very Protestant (and I don't mean Methodist).

Worse than all that, the level of xenophobia manages to exceed even that of the US. The Swiss People's Party (SVP), which holds beliefs roughly analogous to, say, Pat Buchanan, is now the single most widely supported party across Switzerland, and enjoys 29% popular support — which is large when you consider that Switzerland has a 4-party parliamentary system with proportional representation. One of their ads shows three white sheep standing on a Swiss flag and kicking out a black sheep, with the words "Bringing safety" emblazoned across the poster — and these people get votes in Switzerland.

Not cool: Prices

Eating at a fast food place like McDonalds or Burger King (both are ubiquitous) will set you back around CHF15.00/US$13.80 for a combo meal, or CHF10.00/US$9.20 for just a burger by itself. A sit-down meal at a restaurant will normally run between CHF30.00/US$27.60 and CHF50.00/US$46.00, and that's for a steak-and-potatoes kind of restaurant.

Housing is even worse. Zürich makes San Francisco look cheap, and house prices are such that only 37% of the Swiss own their home, which is one of the lowest ownership rates in Western Europe. From what I understand, rents are a 60%-80% premium above San Francisco prices for equivalent space — although most renters instead opt for spaces that are small by any American measure.

Not cool: Food

The Swiss policy on vegetables is similar to the German one: they boil vegetables until they are no longer a threat. Hopefully you like potatoes, because you're going to be eating a lot of them. Seasoning consists of salt and, if you feel adventurous, ground black pepper. Spicy mustard is sometimes available for those who like taking their life into their own hands.

Zürich

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:52:34 GMT

I'm flying to Zürich, Switzerland tomorrow morning, and I'll be flying back on Friday the 26th. Sprint's CDMA doesn't work in Europe, and I wouldn't want to pay for international roaming even if it did, so I'll be leaving my cell phone behind and turned off. I'll still be online, though.

Rafting Trip

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 06:00:34 GMT

Last Thursday, a bunch of us at work went on a company-sponsored white-water rafting trip down the South Fork American River, out near Lotus, CA. A co-worker has a side job with All-Outdoors Rafting as a rafting guide, so he was able to wrangle a slight discount and guide one of our boats. The rapids we ran were mostly Class II with some Class III+ thrown in, which as I understand it means "just dangerous enough to be fun".

It's actually a surprising amount of work. Each person in the boat gets a paddle, and teamwork and a lot of elbow grease are required to steer the boat through obstacles. The river does most of the hard work of pushing the boat forward, but sometimes the raft needs a little extra "oomph" to slip past an underwater boulder or to plow through a rapid at maximum speed to keep from getting caught in an undesirable current. And there's lots of turning, which is hard work by itself.

Shockingly, our managed it through the toughest parts without a single rafter overboard... although one person did get dunked at an easier part that caught him off-guard.

I put some photos up on a Picasa photo album.

In summary: I had a blast, and I might end up doing it once a year or so.

ADDENDUM: Oh, I forgot to mention, I saw my first real-life gold farmers while I was out there. Turns out that we weren't too far from the place where gold was first discovered in California, triggering the famous Gold Rush, and while it's not quite enough to justify a big commercial mining operation, there's still enough gold in the river for small-time dredgers to suck up the muck on the riverbed and sift for gold.

Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:41:22 GMT

I'm somewhat shocked that this hasn't made it to the @Google Talks page, but Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn spoke at the San Francisco office on Monday morning as part of the Women@Google program. She's a biologist who's made her career out of studying telomeres, the protective DNA caps found at the ends of chromosomes, and she's a co-discoverer of telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomeres after they are damaged during cell division.

It was really a rather amazing experience. The first half or so of the talk was largely review for me, as she was basically rehashing what the telomeres are, what telomerase is, and how telomerase is at the center of a delicate balance between cancer and aging. However, during latter half of the talk she really got into the swing of things, mentioning tidbit after tidbit of cutting-edge information about the role of telomerase -- albeit with significant uncertainties and a lack of proven causation for many of the most exciting new results.

There were 3 big surprises for me.

The first surprise was that telomerase is highly dose-dependent. There is a disease (Dyskeratosis congenita, or rather the rare autosomal-dominant form) that is caused by a mutation in the RNA template that telomerase uses as a scaffolding. Normally, you'd expect a mutation like this to be no big deal: if you got a bad copy from one parent, then the copy from the other parent still gets the job done. But in this case, the fact that 50% of the telomerase is slacking on the job means that a host of problems crop up, particularly in the bone marrow and the cells that are created there (red blood cells, platelets, and immune system cells), and affected individuals are much more likely to die relatively young (from any of a number of causes).

The second surprise was that, thanks to a study spearheaded by Blackburn's team, we now know that there is a clear, strong link between chronic emotional stress, shortened telomere length, and reduced expression of telomerase. This study was one of the few to actually examine telomerase expression directly, rather than just telomere length. It examined mothers caring for a child with a burdensome condition, such as cystic fibrosis; when the number of years as a caregiver was compared to the telomere length in the mother's white blood cells, there was an inverse linear relationship. By itself, this would suggest that either (a) stress reduces telomerase production, or (b) stress increases the rate of telomere damage despite normal or rising telomerase levels. However, since this study measured telomerase as well, it found that short telomeres were found paired with reduced telomerase expression, which tends to invalidate (b) and point to (a). There may be a mechanism by which a cell, when exposed to stress hormones, reduces telomerase production, perhaps to conserve energy (analogous to how cortisol promotes fat storage).

The third surprise, which ties in to the second, is that short telomeres are strongly associated with many diseases, seemingly unrelated except by chronic stress. For instance, an examination into 6 major risk factors for cardiovascular disease -- high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, diabetes, smoking, and two that I'm forgetting -- found that shortened telomere length was independently correlated to all of them. ("Independent" means that, even ignoring the people who did actually have cardiovascular disease, short telomeres were still associated with smoking, diabetes, etc.) It's been known for a while that stress is a risk factor in cardiovascular disease, but now it looks like telomere shortening might explain how stress impacts cardiovascular disease. Short telomeres also directly impact the immune system, causing vulnerability to infectious disease because the bone marrow can't make enough white blood cells to mount an effective response. Short telomeres also increase the risk of cancer, since the immune system normally kills a lot of cancer cells before they become tumors. Interestingly, Dr. Blackburn holds the opinion that high telomerase levels probably hurt most cancers more than they help them, and seems to anticipate more interesting activity from the aging/stress/disease front (where telomerase is a good thing) than from the cancer treatment front (where telomerase is a bad thing).

Long story short: meditate and take a laid-back approach to life, and you'll probably live longer and healthier. (A controlled study is underway to demonstrate or disprove it, she promises, but for now it's what the evidence suggests.)

San Francisco Photos

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:53:55 GMT

I've been posting photos of San Francisco to Flickr.

The batch posted on May 27th has pictures of where I live, where I work, how I get to work, and the view.

The batch posted on June 18th has pictures I took during a pair of trips down to Google HQ in Mountain View; I snapped some photos of landmarks and tech companies (some even famous), just of places I could photograph from the highway.

The batch posted on June 21st has pictures I took at City Hall on June 16th, the day when the California Supreme Court ruling took effect that legalized gay marriage here. San Francisco decided to hold off until the 17th to open things up for everybody, and instead held a ceremony for a particular lesbian couple in their 80s who've been pushing for gay rights since they met in the 1950s(!).

BART

Sat, 10 May 2008 18:08:26 GMT

Oh, I forgot to mention that, during the course of flying to Phoenix and back, I took BART for the first time.

BART vs. Muni Metro:

BART is generally on-time. Muni... isn't.
BART is fast. Muni stops at red lights.
BART will take you to places outside San Francisco. Muni is strictly in-city.
BART within the city... is next to useless. Muni Metro has gaps, but Muni buses fill most of them.
BART charges you based on distance. Muni charges you a flat fee for a 1.5~2 hour period.
BART is a bit expensive. Muni is... not cheap, but competitive.
BART is much more pleasant to ride. Muni is crowded, and you stand more often than you sit.

Since the SFO airport isn't actually located within San Francisco -- it's really down toward Millbrae in the next county -- public transit is basically limited to two options: BART, and Caltrain. And I'm far less familiar with Caltrain, so I took Muni to the BART station, and BART to the airport, and the reverse when I got back to the city. Ticket cost: $5.35 each way for BART. Ouch. Far cheaper than calling a cab, or parking at the airport, but far more than Muni prices.

Oh, and I discovered the answer to a riddle that had plagued me when I needed quarters every day.

Here's the setup:

The downtown stations on Market serve both BART and Muni: one level below the surface is a shared concourse with ticket machines and turnstiles, the next level down is the Muni platform, and the third level down is the BART platform. The Muni turnstiles accept only two things: coins, and Muni Fast Passes. The BART ticket machines have a button, obvious once you know to look for it, that allow you to change a $1 bill for quarters without buying a BART ticket. So far, so good. If you have $1 bills, you can use them at the station, just like the surface stops. There's just an extra step involved.

There also exist bill changers. These prominently display a notice that they accept only $10 or $20 bills. They dispense only $5 bills.

Nowhere in the BART/Muni station is there a change machine which will accept a $5 bill.

I experienced this riddle during my second week of commuting to Mountain View. I took the Google shuttle to Civic Center station, and only had a $20 on me. In the end, I gave up trying to solve the riddle, went to the surface, and found a bank that would give me a roll of quarters.

The solution to the riddle:

The BART ticket machines accept $5 bills. They clearly warn that they give a maximum of $4.95 in change.

A significant amount of BART profit comes from people buying tickets with more value than they need, and never getting around to using them.

Some small fraction of this is clearly 5¢ BART tickets bought at the downtown BART/Muni stations. They are literally nickel-and-dime-ing people.

Google, Phoenix, Zürich

Sat, 10 May 2008 17:34:49 GMT

I've been too busy with work to blog about what's been happening since my last post.

Back on Monday April 14th, I started at Google with 2 weeks of training at the main campus in Mountain View. I drove the first two days — it's about 40 miles away, but traffic on the highway frequently crawls or stops, so it's not a pleasant commute. I quickly discovered the schedules for the shuttle bus routes that Google runs for employees, and started taking that on Wednesday. I had to ride the N-Judah to the nearest pickup ($1.50/day), plus back from the most convenient dropoff ($1.50/day), but that was still far cheaper than gas (I was getting far less than the 30mi/gal that my car gets under peak conditions), and as an added benefit it was much more pleasant because I didn't have to stress out over navigating Silicon Valley traffic.

So, after I took my two-week crash course in getting up to speed on how Google does things, I finally showed up at the San Francisco office on Monday April 28th. I finally met my boss, and we had a chat that included an exchange similar to the following:

Him: So, how do you feel about travel?
Me: Uh, OK I guess.
Him: Well, you really ought to visit the offices in Phoenix and Zürich in the next few months.
Me: Uh, I've got a high school reunion coming up around late July, but other than that my schedule's pretty open.
Him: Oh, then let's fly you out to Phoenix tomorrow and get that out of the way.
Me: ...?

So I did some poking around on Google's internal site, figured out how to book a flight, and flew to Phoenix the next day.

Phoenix is hot. Vastly, mind-blowingly hot. I mean, you may think it gets hot where you are, but that's just peanuts to Phoenix.

Seriously, though, the highs were edging toward 100°F, and this was late-April, early-May. I found this mind-boggling, especially after living in San Francisco for a month. Phoenix is also much more sprawling and suburban, which was a change from San Francisco (in ways that are at once pleasant and distressing). But I met the Phoenix members of my extended team, and they were pretty cool. I learned a lot about the project I'm going to be attached to. And on Friday I flew back.

Now I need to get a passport on pretty short order, because I'll be staying in Zürich for a while to do more of the same.

Anyways, Monday May 4 started (and yesterday ended) my first full week in the San Francisco office. It's conveniently near the Embarcadero/Folsom stop of the N-Judah, so my commute is still pretty straightforward. I got a Muni Fast Pass last month for May, so I don't have to lug quarters around anymore, and it's a bit cheaper ($45 versus $66, if you took Muni twice every weekday in May). The office was rather quiet for most of the week, since the people around me were variously on vacation or in Mountain View, Phoenix, or Zürich. Yesterday, two of my fellow new hires came to the office, so I finally had the chance to meet them. Again, they seem pretty cool.

So, overall impression of my first 4 weeks at Google: a little crazy when it comes to coordinating schedules ("herding cats" comes to mind), tons of information to absorb before you can wrap your head around what's going on, but fun and exciting and totally worth it.

Still Alive

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:20:48 GMT

So... tomorrow I start at my new job. I'll be spending lots of time down in Mountain View for the first few months while I train. I'm hoping I've got my head around the traffic situation well enough that I'll be there on time: I have to drive down through some nasty traffic (the worst of which is probably right here in San Francisco on 19th Avenue, heading south toward Daly City). If all goes according to plan, I'll be showing up about 40 minutes early on my first day, which should give a broad safety margin if my plan is wrong.

I've been settling into my new apartment for a bit over a week now. I'm starting, a bit, to get a feel for the neighborhood. Yelp has been a great resource for restaurants. I'm still a bit lost on less immediate things, though. I went on a two-hour expedition (to a Target that ought to be 15 minutes away but isn't thanks to traffic) and bought a few goods I'd found myself without, but came home empty handed on several important items. I still haven't gone looking for a good grocery store. There are lots of corner liquor/grocery stores around, but I have serious doubts about their selections; I might end up going to Safeway regularly. Parking in this city sucks even worse than driving, though, so I've been seriously reluctant to take my car out and actually do any shopping.

I've been reading up on the public transit system. It's... a royal mess. The Muni Metro wants to be a subway system, except the tracks run through the middle of traffic along most its length. Yes, the "subway" has to stop for red lights here. BART is better according to hearsay, but goes nowhere in-town; it's pretty much useless for everything except crossing the bay to Oakland and thereabouts. (There has apparently been talk of extending BART clear down to the San Jose area and back up the east side of the bay to form a loop, which it desperately needs.) Caltrain theoretically could get me to Mountain View without driving, but the trains are too infrequent for it to be reasonable. So, for my Mountain View commute, I'm pretty much stuck with driving unless the rumors prove true about Google operating some sort of shuttle bus service. Once I'm spending my time at the local office, that will be much easier, since the N-line should take me straight to work and back. As screwy as the Metro is, they schedule stops frequently enough that I should have no trouble getting to work, and it'll definitely be no slower than driving.

I'll be posting some photos once I get around to uploading them. I have a bunch of my new apartment, a handful I took on the road, and a bunch from the march in Topeka that I went to with Richard on the 30th.

A Thought

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:57:37 GMT

(Yes, I'm putting off packing. A U-Haul is reserved, and I should have an apartment.)

I was reading this Wired blog about the Q&A with Barack Obama at Google from a few months back. It's a cool interview, but that's not the point of this post.

Down in the comments of the Wired blog, someone was complaining about Obama promising that he'd push for universal broadband access:

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when he stated that as president, he would make broadband available to everyone in the US, regardless of income. Is he going to buy them all computers too?

The One Laptop Per Child XO runs $200 apiece. The Asus EEE PC is slightly pricier, with the low-end models running around $250 each. (Both run Linux, thus avoiding Microsoft's $200+ monopoly tax.)

In comparison, the economic stimulus package hands out around $300-$600 per taxpayer.

Now, is the economic stimulus package a big, ugly, expensive thing? Well, yes.

But it wouldn't be nearly as ugly if it weren't happening during the midst of a war that will cost over $3 trillion dollars and the deepest deficit the United States has ever had — roughly twice what it was under Reagan's SDI (and Iraq is no USSR). The cost of the Iraq war has already been about $4,300 per U.S. citizen so far — plus our soldiers and guardsmen are bogged down in Iraq, away from their families and jobs, so the actual economic cost (just to-date, not projecting into the future) is far more than that simplistic $4,300 per citizen figure. If the economic cost of Iraq comes out to $3 trillion, as calculated by economists, then it'll be more like $10,000 per citizen.

We could've bought a low-cost budget laptop for every home in the United States, for cheaper than the economic stimulus package (much less the damn war), and it probably would've paid for itself in 10 years or less thanks to just the increased economic productivity from kids entering the workforce with a broader understanding of computers than Microsoft's monopolistic walled garden. Throw in universal access to broadband (note: not necessarily free), and that'd probably do more to reduce our dependence on foreign oil than Bush's silly change to Daylight Savings Time ever did.

But, of course, Iraq is tearing our economy apart, so we can't afford to do that. We can barely afford the stimulus package itself.

(Yes, I'm aware that the current economic situation is far more nuanced than being solely the result of the Iraq war. Greenspan's massive interest rate cuts after the Dot-Com bubble and 9/11 led directly to the current credit crisis and the housing bubble; Bernanke's new cuts are rather frighteningly large and threaten to repeat Greenspan's mistakes. And then there's the trade deficit. But Iraq is the elephant that's breaking the camel's back; I'm quite convinced that the economy will never recover until we're out of Iraq, or at least not spending outrageous amounts of money in Iraq.)

Moving to San Francisco

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:41:59 GMT

I've been keeping this under wraps, but I've been interviewing with a company out in the Silicon Valley again, and I survived the interview process and will be receiving an official offer by FedEx within the week. Frankly, I'm scratching my head over whether or not my NDA permits me to say who they are before I sign an employment contract, so I'll omit that information for the time being. (The NDA wasn't onerous, just a bit vague.) [Update: Nevermind that bit about the NDA. It's Google.]

But the upshot is that I'll be relocating to San Francisco in relatively short order, and I just put in my 2 weeks notice at Wal-mart.

Woohoo!

I just lost all respect for John McCain

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:25:39 GMT

And for a very surprising reason:

John McCain Enters the Autism Wars

At a town hall meeting Friday in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that "there's strong evidence" that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. -- a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical establishment.

McCain was responding to a question from the mother of a boy with autism, who asked about a recent story that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program had issued a judgment in favor of an unnamed child whose family claimed regressive encephalopathy and symptoms of autism were caused by thimerosal.

...

McCain said, per ABC News' Bret Hovell, that "It's indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what's causing it. And we go back and forth and there's strong evidence that indicates that it's got to do with a preservative in vaccines."

(Found via a post on Aetiology.)

The evidence is clear-cut. Thimerosal was phased out in the United States almost 10 years ago. Rates of autism diagnosis continue to rise; there wasn't even a blip in the numbers. To the extent that science can prove anything, science has proven this: thimerosal does not cause autism. (It's also clear at this point that the vaccines themselves don't cause autism, either.)

And any politician who's willing to ignore reality in favor of a warm-and-fuzzy photo op doesn't deserve to be president. We just had 8 years of that, and we've suffered for it.

Dad; Stepmom

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:22:38 GMT

I've been meaning to write this since last week, but I needed to calm down a bit before I posted it.

First, a digression about my dad.

My dad's been traveling a rocky road over the years. It was pretty obvious back when I was a teenager that he had a drinking problem, and around the time I was leaving college I found out he had some *cough* other problems as well. He's been trying, on and off, to get his life back in order since then.

Last week my dad called me. He wanted me to come over to his place, so we could catch up and he could do his best to make up for lost time. So I came over, and we had a nice talk. My stepmom Mary woke up and came out to the living room when she heard our voices, so she sat down with us but mostly listened. It would've been nicer if she'd given us some privacy, because there's a lot of stuff I don't feel comfortable talking about in front of her, but other than that, it was pretty good.

But around 9-ish my dad had to leave, since he'd promised one of my step-cousins (I'd be lying if I said I could keep them straight) that he'd take her to get her learner's permit at the driver's license office. I was getting ready to follow my dad out the door and head home, when Mary (who'd snuck off to the kitchen when I wasn't paying attention) said she'd started cooking food for me and said she was hoping I would stay.

I'll be up front: I've never felt at ease or comfortable around her. Ever. Growing up, my nickname for her in my head was "dragon lady". I always felt like she was moments away from biting my head off.

After I figured out I was gay, circa age 12, this was compounded by the fact that she made a fair number of comments that made clear her position on gay people. Once when us kids were in the backseat, she made some very negative comments as we passed by Fantasy (the biggest, oldest, most famous Wichita gay bar). I can't remember the exact words she said, but it wouldn't be unfair to say that it went something like "That's disgusting. It's where those people go. I don't understand why they don't shut it down."

That said, it seemed fair to give her the benefit of a doubt. People change. She was obviously trying to be hospitable, so it seemed the only polite thing to do was to stay. (Although if she was expecting me to stay solely because of food, then she doesn't know me very well.)

So, she sits down on a stool in front of the stove while she cooks pork chops, and I sit down in a chair in the kitchen. It's mostly awkward silence. We don't have much to talk about. She starts talking about my dad, and how much he misses me. Yeah, I'd discussed that — with him. She talks about how important family is, and darkly hints at both my parents' divorce and the stuff that my stepdad pulled on me (material for a future blog post). Okay, whatever. Then there's a sprinkling of stuff about God and Jesus, and she brings up my stepdad again. My stomach starts knotting up as I see where this is going, but there's no polite way to get out of it. Then she starts asking me questions about my relationship with Richard — who cooks, who cleans, that sort of thing. I'm groaning internally at this point, because she's clearly trying to size up who's the "man" and who's the "woman". Then she brings up my stepdad, yet again, and says I need to "move past that". I have, bitch. Then, out of left field, she suddenly stops and asks if I believe in God. Well, there's not really any wriggling out of a question that direct. I really, really resent being dragged into this conversation, but I say, "No, I'm an atheist". She starts blah-blahing about the "power of prayer", and states very emphatically, "I believe in Heaven, and I believe in Hell", and basically starts darkly hinting (without quite saying it outright) that I'm going to Hell because I don't believe in God, and that if I became Christian (or, more to the point, her flavor of Christian) then all I'd have to do is pray to God once and I'd turn straight (like Rev. Paul Barnes?). What's more, she also pretty much laid the "blame" for me being gay at the feet of my dad and stepdad.

What's more, she based all this on less than one minute of me actually telling her anything at all about my life, and everything she knows about my stepdad comes from the rumor mill, not me. If there's ever been a more obvious case of someone using religion for selfish reasons, to make her feel good about herself and pat herself on the back, I've never seen it.

At this point, I'm about to just walk out the door, when the phone rings. She gets into a conversation, there's a lot of "Hallelujah"s and "Praise the Lord"s as she presumably plays it up, thinking it will somehow win me over after she just finished shoving a knife in my gut. That at least gives me the chance, once she hangs up the phone, to interrupt her before she can get started again. I quickly say my goodbyes, she complains that the food is ready (i.e. it's been ready all this time, but she wanted to use it as bait to corner me), I tell her I'm not really that hungry anyway and I have to be going.

Gah. If I never have to see her again for the rest of my life, I won't regret anything.

World of Warcraft; Harry Potter; Google

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 03:34:11 GMT

As some may already know, I reactivated my dormant World of Warcraft account last month. That's part of why I haven't been posting as much.

So far, I'm having fun again. I'm now playing on a PvP (player versus player) server for the first time, and it's quite a change of pace. It actually affects the game economy, for instance.

My new characters are Bandanu (27 Tauren Druid), Inthos (26 Blood Elf Warlock), and Folazi (12 Troll Mage) on Deathwing.

In other news, I recently finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final Harry Potter book. I won't say much about it, to avoid spoilers, but I thought it was great. There were some side-threads that could have used wrapping up, and the ending leaves a lot of unanswered questions, but overall it was well-written fun.

And, finally, I still haven't heard back from Google. A friend with a friend who works there says that a normal part of the interview process is to leave the potential hire hanging for 3 or 4 months, so it's not out of the question that I could still get it, but I'm not counting on it. Oh well.

Possible job offer

Wed, 09 May 2007 18:03:35 GMT

I was recently approached via e-mail by a recruiter for a very large, very famous company based in Mountain View, CA, which is probably where I'd have to relocate to.

Nothing is certain, yet, but they're interested in my skills as a programmer or as a Unix sysadmin. The fact that I never went back to college to complete my Bachelor's is a bit of a damper, especially on the programming, but I've got a good 7 years experience as a sysadmin and a good Computer Science backing as a programmer.

I e-mailed my updated résumé back to the recruiter yesterday, and he's going to call me for a preliminary questionnaire sometime this week. It's far from a shoe-in, but I think I've got good odds.

Mountain View is about a 45 minute drive away from San Francisco. That's shockingly close to Belgand, one of my old college friends.

Food safety issue at Wal-Mart #3492 (E Kellogg, Wichita, KS)

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 17:07:12 GMT

At work, they've been performing maintenance on the refrigeration systems over the last few weeks. For each refrigeration circuit, they empty all the food out of the affected areas, shut down the system for about 6 hours, turn it back on, then put the food back in once the system has returned to a safe temperature.

At least, that's the theory.

The reality is that hardly anyone knows which coolers and freezers are attached to a given refrigeration system, so there have been several glitches. There was a near-mishap with the frozen seafood two weeks ago, but the problem was corrected in time and the food never thawed. There was a lack of coordination about manpower that resulted in some squishy (but below 32°F) ice cream last week when the freezers were turned off with the ice cream still in them. And, most recently, there was a complete and utter clusterf*** on April 5th that resulted in unsafe temperatures across several departments.

My current advice to friends and family is DO NOT BUY THE FOLLOWING PRODUCTS FROM MY STORE:

Cheese (Dairy dept.)
Lunch meat (Meat dept.)
Lunchables and other snack kits (Meat dept.)
Hot dogs (Meat dept.)
Bacon, raw or cooked (Meat dept.)
Anything from the refrigerated wall (Deli dept.)
Anything from the refrigerated island (Deli dept.)

The cheese shouldn't be in terrible shape, since it doesn't spoil so fast, but it now has reduced shelf life. However, the lunch meats and snack kits are very worrying, since they're havens for bacterial growth, and they're normally eaten without cooking.

I contacted 1-800-WMETHIC (the Wal-mart Ethics Hotline) and filed a report, but no action has been taken. Sadly, this is far from the first food safety violation I've witnessed at Wal-mart that was ignored; however, it is the most severe.

I've posted 4 photos to Flickr showing the evidence of these allegations.

Fun sites

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 14:09:29 GMT

Crossposted from MySpace.

For the last month or so, I've been changing up my web routine and hanging out on some new sites.

~~~

Foremost is Jyte. Jyte essentially started as a toy site to act as a demo for OpenID, but it's attracted a tight-knit but sizable following. The basic idea behind the site: users post "claims" (simple yes/no polls), then other users vote on those claims, and a comment system allows people to debate things, hash out details, and so on. If you think somebody knows what they're talking about, you can give them "cred", and due to the weird-but-cool way the system works, they'll get more cred if they give you cred back. Essentially, you get a little blue dot that measures how much you're a part of the clique, but unlike most cliques it's fairly newbie-friendly. There's the occasional problem with trolls and sock-puppets, but overall it's pretty fun.

My Jyte profile includes, among other things, a list of claims that I've created, and another list of claims that I've commented on. Also, Jyte Spy is an addictive little page that shows you everything happening on the site, in near-realtime.

~~~

More recently, I've actually started using Flickr after having an account sitting idle for a while. Flickr is a photo-sharing site that's sort of like a blog for photos only. They've been around for a few years, actually, but I recently bought a fairly decent digicam (a Fujifilm FinePix A500) so I signed up for an account and started playing with my camera. I like it.

My Flickr photo stream shows you what pictures I've been taking, and my Flickr map shows you where I've been taking them. Nifty, eh?

~~~

Lastly, I've been mirroring my MySpace blog to LiveJournal for about the last month and a half. For a long time I avoided LiveJournal on principle, but now that I've got a MySpace, who am I to complain? :-P

One nifty feature of LiveJournal is that they implement OpenID these days. If you have a LiveJournal account, your username.livejournal.com page is an OpenID you can use on other sites; and if you have an OpenID from somewhere else, you can comment on other people's LJ blogs (if they've enabled it) without signing up for a full LJ account. They could stand to improve a few things here and there, but it's overall quite cool.

My LiveJournal blog is, for the moment, a mirror of what I post to MySpace. However, due to two very cool features — post by SMS, and post by Jabber — I might well start posting the occasional LiveJournal-only blog entry in the near future.