rg

If this means FiveThirtyEight goes behind a NYT paywall in the next six months or so, it may not be great for anyone other than the principals of 538.

H L Mencken once defined a wealthy man as one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.

It's become rather difficult to set up UK personal bank accounts, thanks to the "know your customer" anti-terrorist regulations. Plus, UK retail banks offer uniformly terrible customer service by international standards (I've experienced three UK banks). Using offshore credit cards has long been a common choice.

When I emailed Pair.com to tell them that my site was about to get a writeup in the Wall Street Journal, they moved my site to a dedicated server within an hour, left it there until the spike of traffic was over, then moved my site back to a shared server--all at no charge. If you use Pair.com properly, they are more than excellent.

Moreover, you can buy a USB version of that ThinkPad keyboard which plugs into any computer: "ThinkPad USB Keyboard with TrackPoint" (part 55Y9003), $59, link to Lenovo store is http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...

Moreover, Brad DeLong writes of this blog entry, "I endorse almost everything Alex Tabarrok Says Here" http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/02/i-endorse-almost-every...

The same (excellent) book has a different title in the US: "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health", by Gary Taubes (Paperback - Sept. 23, 2008).

From the article: "Let me explain. If you consider your diet and exercise as a simple energy deficits/excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links. Your food intake becomes the equivalent of filling up the tank of your new BMW. If on the other hand you look at food and exercise as activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades and nonlinearities from network effects, and with recursive links, then welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan. Both food and workout provide your body with information about stressor in the environment. As I have been saying throught, informational randomness is from Extremistan. Medicine fell into the trap of using simple thermodynamics with the same physics-envy and with the same mentality and the same tools as economists did when they looked at the economy as a web of simple links. And both are complex systems."

FTA: "The problem is, the world has changed. Today's insurgent adversaries don't have KGB-level intelligence gathering or cryptanalytic capabilities. At the same time, computer and network data gathering has become much cheaper and easier, so they have technical capabilities the Soviets could only dream of. Defending against these sorts of adversaries doesn't require military-grade encryption only where it counts; it requires commercial-grade encryption everywhere possible."

Indeed, JungleDisk appears to offer a very similar service. I back up my entire main computer to JungleDisk (automatic incremental backup every midnight). On my minimal laptop for travel is a "Drive J:" which gives me access straight from Amazon's cloud for all the data on all the drives backed up from my main computer without local storage. One charge for the software, no extra cost for any number of virtually sync'd machines. Works great for a travel machine where you want access to all your data but don't want to carry it around with the risk of losing it; there's even a password to gain access to "Drive J:", so a lost computer contains no private data and also can't be used to access the cloud copy at Amazon.

Yep, all true, but just give the site a spin in IE8 (full standards-conforming mode or compatability mode) or IE7 or earlier--the blemish appears in all of them. It looks bad enough to make it not worth standing on principle, especially when the fix is simply to put in the apostrophe character directly with no need for an entity.

Confidence is reduced when the blurbs on the first page are coded with the imaginary HTML entity "'" which does not render as an apostrophe in all browsers. (The fix is just to use a literal apostrophe character there, or if that's hard use "'".)

"TeuxDeux is the to-do app I've been looking for my whole life, and I've been looking!"

"TeuxDeux is like google cal's & google task's better-looking and far more fun sister."

From the article:

"We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports--or to Sweden--to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

Amazon.co.uk has for some time offered same-day evening delivery in urban areas of Greater London (within the M25) and Birmingham--check details on their website--for a fairly-stiff minimum charge. Local Amazon.shops could share whatever infrastructure supports same-day delivery. FWIW, it seems that in the UK local courier service (using motorcycles) is comparatively cheaper than in most major US cities, and much more commmonly used even outside the legal and financial businesses, so this idea could be expanded.

Other possibly-relevant factors:

Logistics of delivery in the US are, on average, much simpler; both UPS and FedEx are superlative (and Amazon uses such private carriers exclusively in much of the US), and there are good contract-delivery options for heavier and bulkier objects. Delivery locations (both residences and offices) are mostly accessible, being on average much newer. It's common for customers to take delivery at workplaces, and use their cars to take objects home.

By contrast, in the UK all the logistics companies are marginal performers, partly because the government's subsidized Royal Mail continues to command some usage. Much of the housing stock is vastly older and less easily accessible than in the US; heavy and oversize deliveries are often very much a matter of engineering custom solutions. Homes and offices can be far apart, and the customers often commute between by train, so there's no convenient auto to carry things home that were delivered to the office.

All these considerations may have contributed to the model of ordering over the web and picking up from a physical location. This model has been very rare in the U.S., but is not so uncommon in the U.K.

"Roger W. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in physics and is a former Manager of Strategic Planning and Programs for ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Co. He has more than forty years experience in the electronics and energy industries. He is a recent recipient of the Otto Schade Prize for Image Quality for research leading to improved digital television, work that was also recognized by an Emmy in 2000. He is currently working with a group of partners on developing and commercializing a technology for extracting carbon dioxide from the air. Roger lives in Durango ..."

Aspen Global Change Institute website, http://www.agci.org/programs/past_workshop_participants/abou...

From the physicists' letter:

"By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled 'The Climate Science isn’t Settled,' for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. ..."

"The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat."

A much deeper article by software entrepreneur "Mencius Moldbug":

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/12/gold-an...

"If gold will eventually be remonetized, gold is insanely cheap. If gold will never be remonetized, gold is insanely expensive. It's one or the other. Therefore, if you guess right about this question, you will make huge profits, and if you guess wrong take huge losses."

"The reason I still expect gold remonetization to happen - in the long term, not tomorrow! - is that there's simply no other viable alternative. Everyone knows that the global economy needs a new currency. Most can see that the dollar cannot be saved or replaced by any other sovereign currency or basket thereof - because no central bank could tolerate the economic effects of the upward revaluation that would result if its currency replaced the dollar in C[entral] B[ank] portfolios"

It's not just any old lame opinion piece, though. Here is how the author is described by Case Western Reserve Professor Jonathan Adler:

"MIT’s Richard Lindzen is one of the world’s leading climate scientists. He is also a climate 'skeptic,' rejecting claims that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are likely to create a climate catastrophe. Above all others, he is the climate skeptic environmental activists most fear, as he has unimpeachable credentials. As a prominent climate scientist who believes global warming could cause an environmental catastrophe confided to me, Dr. Lindzen’s views are not easily dismissed, even if his views are somewhat outside the 'mainstream' of climate science. (Of course, we may have to reconsider what constitutes 'mainstream' climate science after the leak of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.)"

   http://volokh.com/2009/12/01/mits-lindzen-on-climategate/

Most people choose the wrong time periods for thinking about work/life balance. The usual discussion is about achieving a balance every day or every week. That just dilutes and compromises both your work and the remainder of your life. A startup is a chance to balance out your work and life over many decades. If you can work, say, five times as effectively as other people (which is hard), and if you can get paid for that, you have the possibility to compress your working life into 9 years instead of 45 years--that will give you an extra 36 years with no work commitments at all, free to travel and choose your own interests. Balance in this form can make up for a lot of all-nighters during the startup.

I pay for a subscription to Murdoch's WSJ, and get a paper copy delivered every morning as well as online access (cost is huge, $400/year). Even so, I read most WSJ stories because I find them linked from Google News where I have lots of special news-search sections defined. I just don't have the time to page through 75 sheets of paper every day (as I did twenty years ago), or poke randomly around the WSJ's very slow and poorly-organized web site (vastly inferior to NYT). If Murdoch's WSJ disappears from Google News, it will disappear from my world and very likely I'd just end my subscription. More subtly, when the WSJ writes about me (very occasionally), most of the value to me comes when their story is chosen to be placed outside their paywall and can be linked freely; if WSJ stories become uniformly inaccessible, there will be little incentive for sources to cooperate with WSJ reporters and columnists.

Need to look up what "dearth" means.

Twenty years ago, I seriously planned to set up an endowed trust to educate mid-western young people about the advantages of moving to the coastal cities of the US, along with some modest financial aid to move. Since then I have dropped that plan, because the Internet now provides all the information needed to convince mid-western young people to move as soon as they can.

It's eye-opening to try "Blind Search", which submits your query to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing simultaneously, and displays to you the three sets of results without (at first) identifying which is which:

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

I was amazed to discover that I was consistently choosing the blind results from Yahoo! as best for my own searches.

More recently, there was a writeup about me in the New Yorker. Just before publication, I got a similar call from a "fact-checker". The checking was detailed, and (as for jwecker) focused on hard-to-verify matters. I asked the fact-checker about the process, and she said that the job had gotten much easier, since they could now check most facts using the web.

Think of how difficult the New Yorker's fact checking was before the web! The process of fact-checking goes back to the early days of the New Yorker under editor Harold Ross. James Thurber wrote (in "The Years With Ross") of "Ross's later intense dedication to precision. He studied the New York Telephone Company's system of verifying names and numbers in its directories ... He found out about the Saturday Evening Post's checking department, which he said consisted of seven women who checked in turn every fact, name, and date. ... His checking department became famous, in the trade, for a precision that sometimes leaned over backward. ... Ross's checkers once informed Mencken that he couldn't have eaten dinner at a certain European restaurant he had mentioned in one of his New Yorker articles, because there wasn't any restaurant at the address he had given. Mencken brought home a menu with him to prove that he was right, but he was pleased rather than annoyed. 'Ross has the most astute goons of any editor in the country,' he said."

There is one very interesting example at a fairly large scale, the John Lewis Partnership which runs very successful major department store and food store chains in the UK. This is a real partnership, owned by the permanent staff (no public shareholders), with a written constitution which sets out how the management operates and how the employee-partners participate and share the profits.

A FAQ about the organization with copy of its constitution is online:

http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/Display.aspx?MasterId=...

Alex Payne doesn't appear to see the connection between one of his good points:

"San Francisco boasts superb weather. ... There may be some fog, or a bit of rain from time to time, but most of the time it’s sunny and hovering around the high 60s to lower 70s."

and a closely-related bad point:

"the sight of homeless persons in varying states of dishevelment".

If you're homeless, being so in a spot where it's nearly always comfortable to be outside is perfectly sensible. It's not surprising that there are fewer homeless people in areas where it snows and freezes.

His link to http://emptyage.honan.net/mth/2009/07/are-you-going-to-san-f... is well worth following, particularly for the good advice:

"If you're moving 3,000 (or even 300) miles to live in San Francisco; live in San Francisco. And by I don't simply mean that you should not live in the East Bay or the Peninsula or Marin. I mean live in a part of the city that your great-grandparents would recognize as being San Francisco. Somewhere that was entirely residential, and all of the homes in your neighborhood existed, prior to 1915."

The old neighborhoods of San Francisco are wonderful, with considerable village character, nothing like living in SOMA or the Tenderloin.

Interesting, it looks like I'm just about using up the cost of my license fee by listening to Radio 4 or Radio 7 constantly:

365 * 16 = 5840 hrs/year, 5840 * 2.5 pence = GBP 146.00

(BBC Licence Fee 2009 is GBP 142.50)

--and 10 minutes is the outer limit. Good dense places to live have food shops open long hours within 5 minutes walk, because all those people depend on them.

Marc Andreesen has testified that he really does this: from http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html (the link is to Marc's old blog, which now appears to be inaccessible):

"Let's start with a bang: don't keep a schedule.

"He's crazy, you say!

"I'm totally serious. If you pull it off -- and in many structured jobs, you simply can't -- this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity.

"By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day.

"As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time.

"Want to spend all day writing a research report? Do it!

"Want to spend all day coding? Do it!

"Want to spend all day at the cafe down the street reading a book on personal productivity? Do it!

"When someone emails or calls to say, "Let's meet on Tuesday at 3", the appropriate response is: "I'm not keeping a schedule for 2007, so I can't commit to that, but give me a call on Tuesday at 2:45 and if I'm available, I'll meet with you."

"Or, if it's important, say, "You know what, let's meet right now."

"Clearly this only works if you can get away with it. If you have a structured job, a structured job environment, or you're a CEO, it will be hard to pull off.

"But if you can do it, it's really liberating, and will lead to far higher productivity than almost any other tactic you can try."

Even when a startup seems to be doing very well, and is able to attract new rounds on favorable valuations, the insiders may be able to discern weaknesses such as weak or quarrelling founders, VCs with defocusing aspirations, or strategies with limited term potential (e.g., reliance on a third party such as Yodlee for critical technology). This means that chances of continuing success are lower than appears to outsiders, and the insiders are wise to sell at the temporarily favorable valuations. The VCs can be easily convinced to agree merely by frank discussion of the weaknesses, but both the founders and the VCs are motivated to claim that the sale was best for everyone, and to have the initial transition or work-out go smoothly. Once the money is in the bank and any hold-backs are settled and released, there is time to drift away from the acquirer.