The Google Rises

 FADE IN:

EXT. NEW ENGLAND TOWN - NIGHT

Screenplay written in conjunction with ChatGPT

The camera pans over a small, isolated town nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley. The sky is dark, the air thick with a sense of foreboding.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

It is said that in the year 1996, two young scholars by the names of Larry Page and Sergey Brin created a tool that would change the world forever. But what they didn't know was that their creation would attract the attention of an ancient, malevolent force.

The camera cuts to a dark laboratory, where Larry and Sergey are hunched over their computers, their faces bathed in an eerie blue light.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

As they typed away, a strange feeling overcame them. It was as though some ancient, cosmic horror was watching their every move.

Suddenly, the computer screens flicker and distort, and a sinister voice echoes through the room.

VOICE

Who dares disturb my slumber?

Larry and Sergey exchange fearful glances.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

They had awakened a dark force, one that had been slumbering since time immemorial.

The camera cuts to the streets of the small town, where a misty figure rises from the ground.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

The spirit of Google had been unleashed.

The figure transforms into a terrifying monster, with tentacles that writhe and squirm in the darkness.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

It was a creature of such immense power and malevolence that the minds of men could scarcely comprehend it.

The camera cuts back to the laboratory, where Larry and Sergey are frantically trying to shut down their creation.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

But it was too late. The monster had already been unleashed.

The creature bursts into the laboratory, sending Larry and Sergey running for their lives.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

And so began a new age of terror and madness, as the monstrous entity known as Google spread its tendrils throughout the world, devouring the very essence of human intellect and consuming all knowledge.

FADE OUT.

Things We'll Laugh At in 30 Years

Hanging with other parents of children who are between high school and college, a fellow dad was talking about the things our children take for granted today,that we didn't even dream about thirty years ago. He folded this into the question, what will their children look back on and consider primitive, out-dated or laughable thirty years from now? Here's my short list.

Facebook (Unless it Takes Over the World)

Though considered a juggernaut by many, Facebook is vulnerable on several fronts. It could easily be dropped en masse out of boredom or a sudden interest in personal mental health. Or supplanted by a better or completely different technology, unless they buy that technology and Take Over the World. In which case, we may be saluting the flag of Zuckerberg.

Game Consoles

The general notion of Couch Potato syndrome, and something as primitive as sitting in one place to play a game -- well that will seem totally crazy when augmented reality puts the game all around you.

Siri 1.0

When it first came out, many people were wow'ed by Siri, at least in principle. But the first three demos I got of it fell flat. Siri couldn't understand or misinterpreted what was being asked, sometimes in hilarious ways.

Car Chase Scenes

"In a world..." where all the cars are robotic and self-driving, the notion that people could chase each other up the wrong side of the 405 -- well the Back to the Future 2 hoverboard scenes will look more realistic by comparison.

Back to work!

My Windows PC is back to work at doing the three things it does best:

1. Install updates
2. Run AV software
3. Run Zero Day malware

Not much chance of wedging some game play in there.

Insider trading and the unlevel market

 Reading through Is the Stock Market Rigged? I get to the part about Mississippi College School of Law professor John Anderson. His opinions smack of an academic who has been immersed in their field a little too long.

Of course, his opinions may be more nuanced than the article suggests. According to te article's author, Liam Vaughn, Prof. Anderson believes insider trading should largely be legal, because they are making the markets function better. Better for whom? Would they still have to disclose their trades? Where would we draw a distinction between "legal" insider trading and price manipulation? Given the wealth and the quantity of stock controlled by executives, price manipulation would be easy to implement. Or should that be legal as well, to release government from the burden of regulating it? I could see this becoming quite the side hustle for a lot of executives, colluding together to shove prices around, get another 20-30% annual return on their income, and improve "market efficiency".

Within the scope of the article, insider trading sounds like a near-victimless crime, with the person taking the other side of the trade out a few dollars per share, at most. But that's a very narrow focus. The perception that executives willfully take advantage of inside knowledge undermines confidence in the American market as a whole. This undermining could, as article does point out, be driving interest in cryptocurrency, and is definitely a driver in the meme stock trend.

Anderson is also quoted as saying “The whole reason people come to the market is because they think they have better information, better understanding than their counterparties.” Which seems like a phenomenally shallow view of the average retail investor, who may be buying stocks on impulse, through a mutual fund in their IRA, a "hot tip" on Reddit, or by scouring a website like Morningstar, but who is definitely not going to the market thinking they have better information than everyone they're trading against. 

Personally I think the practice of paying executives in stock grants and options has a corrupting influence, and is detrimental to the long-term health of both the companies and the country. This focuses execs on increasing shareholder return at any cost. If we want executives to have skin in the game, let them get it like the majority of their employees -- have the stock go into a retirement fund and they can't draw on it without paying huge penalties prior to actual retirement. And in the meantime, they can earn a modest salary (at least modest by today's standards).

Random thoughts

Nowzac, the drug that puts you in the moment, nicknamed "the Now Zone". Leaves you totally focuses in a Rain Man sort of way on what's immediately in front of you. Other pills for zapping short-term memory (forget that disaster date forever!) or for having an eidetic memory for a couple of days, the ideal college cram drug.

How stoopid izzat? He sticks his gum onna unnerside of a glass table.

The woman kept hooting and hollering through the entire concert. I hadn't heard a racket like that since the neighbor's great dane passed a kidney stone.

"Guysa" for the fellows who are smart enough to be in Mensa, but aren't stuck up about it.

To walk while talking
Yet no one is there -- insane?
No, just a cell phone.

Characters for the Novel "Not til Death Did We Part"
Felice -- Fluff romance novel writer
Roger -- Historical fiction writer, obsessed with Jimmy Hoffa
Sandy -- Writes hard sci-fi that never makes sense
Tom -- Writer of murder mysteries that are usually dead on arrival
Martha -- Writes poetry so bad, she can't find a poetry group that will admit her

Capitalism: an economic system that generates material wealth while causing catastrophic ecological damage.

Communism: an economic system that generates abject poverty while causing catastrophic ecological damage.

The "Maybe Good Enough Sort Algorithm" An algorithm that provides an approximate ordering, this algorithm getint about 90% of the elements into some sort (haha) of order. Has the dubious advantage of providing a "good enough" result quickly.

iPad Wands or Wii Sticks Small rods that give positional feedback. With five, there'd be one for each finger. Okay, K'nect may be a better answer.

http://all-story.com

http://www.pshares.org

There are few things you can't do in C++. Writing correct code is one of them.

 

Stupid product idea: a chamber into which a person inserts their hand and gains tactile feedback from a stream of small pellets that push against the skin with programmatically controlled forces and vectors. On the one hand, what could possibly go wrong? On the other hand, there may be no market for it, but it might make a cool art fixture.

 

Stupid product idea: for race cars, wheels that thread onto the axle in the reverse direction to the line of forward motion. The hope is that by simply reversing the direction with sudden torque, the wheel would pop off more rapidly than can be done with the traditional lugnut approach. You could even lock the wheels in place, put the car in reverse and "back up" a little bit to get them started. Once again, what could possibly go wrong?

Maybe not stupid product idea: a trash chute for apartment buildings that can identify items on the fly (haha) and bat them into an appropriate bin for recycling, composting or landfill.

Software and the Doggie Doo Effect

DDSM (Doggie-doo Software Management)

The unpleasant and unintended stickiness of legacy software.

Example:
Manager: "Jim, you were the last person to work on X. I'm assigning this bug to you."

Jim: "This stinks!"

Does Microsoft Exist in a World Without People?

 The Microsoft Windows lock screen features an ever-shifting series of landscapes, sometimes pastoral, sometimes of adventurous heights, or even famous landmarks (Stonehenge recently came up for me) but all of them have one thing in common: no people.

I don't know why. This could be intentional and they edit them out, perhaps worrying that people would be "disturbed" to see other people on their PC when they were logging in. It could be some massive self-selection process where early on, people just trained the AI serving these up that people-less pictures are preferable. Or perhaps that AI is sending the subtle message, "the world is better without you".

Why Merging Software Products is Harder Than Expected

Recently a friend of mine told the story of in a small company that was acquired by a larger company with a competing product. The idea being "to take the best parts of both products" and make something better. Ten years later, that had not happened, and in fact technical issues plus tensions between the two product teams, pretty much ensured it never would.

At one of my previous companies, something similar unfolded. The company had two tiers of products for the same market. One was high-end and very expensive, the other was the lower-cost alternative. Both were very mature products and as you might expect, over time functionality converged a bit, as the high-end product extended into features suitable for smaller customers, while the low-end product expanded its offering. Each product had its own strengths and weaknesses.

Management noticed that and said, "hey, these two products do a lot of the same things, why not combine them and get the best of both worlds?" They filled a chart board with post-its showing the commonalities between the products. Each post-it contained words like "generates reports", and "computes portfolio balances". Never mind that each post-it encapsulated big piles of bespoke code that had only ever talked to post-its within the same product.

 This is a bit like some big manufacturer saying,"we build trains, and we build buses, and they both do similar things -- moving people and stuff around. The great thing about a bus is that it can go anywhere there is a street. Trains can only go where the tracks have been laid, but they have a much greater capacity, better energy efficiency, and can be customized out of modular components. What if we take the best of a bus and the best of a train, and put them together? We change out the wheels and we have a tra-bus that can go anywhere! And the bus windows are much nicer, they're bigger and people can open them. Let's put those on."

And so it goes, until you have an incredibly ugly train-like thing built on a bus frame, that isn't street legal, that can't use existing modules (railcars) and now it needs more engines and better brakes, and so on.

As incredibly bad as this idea is in (vehicular) hardware, it's even worse in software; with these bu-train monstrosities, the problems of connecting the disparate parts are physical and easy to visualize.
In software, its too easy to lose sight of how parts fit together, and the possibilities are unbounded (blocking API, async API, restful API, redirected I/O, mapped memory, named pipes, sockets, protocols built on sockets, databases, data files, etc). Also, the parts can be written in entirely different languages that have trouble talking to each other. It doesn't even have to be different languages to be hard. Combining C++ written for Windows with C++ written for any other operating system can be insanely difficult. The challenges of integrating software products are enormous, and easy to grossly underestimate if you just break the product down into a bunch of functional boxes scribbled on post-its and say "hey, most of these boxes do the same thing!" If you see management doing something like that, its either time to speak up, or time to update your LinkedIn profile.

Inverting the emulation stack as a thought exercise

The very first processor I worked on as a software professional was the Motorola 6800, an 8-bit processor that could access 64K of RAM with a clock rate of 1-Mhz. The machines I worked on had less memory, and everything was done in assembly (of course).

Today I'm working on a Windows machine with a 64-bit, 4 core processor clocking 2.8 Ghz, and accessing... well, its Moore's Law in action.

Would it be possible to write a AMD64 emulator on the 6800? I don't think it can be done within the RAM of the processor. Given the complexity of a modern core, more code may be needed to emulate the instruction set than will fit in 64K. Restricting the code to a subset (off-boarding floating point, for example) might help it squeak by, and we would not implement many internal features such as instruction reordering or prefetch.

So.. if it takes a couple hundred 6800 instructions to emulate one x64 instruction (on average) and the 6800 runs at 2 MHz, and emulation doesn't require any I/O to a file system, then the emulated x64 would be executing about 5K x64 instructions a second, or "only" a 400K to 1 slowdown.

Science vs Economics

An important aspect of good computer science is understanding the root causes for bad behavior in a system. Without a deep understanding, hacking around the problem often leads to bigger problems down the road. The original problem was not addressed, and the workaround can easily introduce unintended side effects or new errors.

 Similar rigor is true for hard sciences like biology, chemistry, and physics. Einstein's famous theorems could be seen as an evaluation of the root causes for physical phenomena that didn't agree with classical physics.

This doesn't happen with economics. Case in point: economists point to the start of the Great Recession to 2008, when the acceleration in mortgage failures could no longer be ignored. However, the root causes for those failures can be traced much further back, like the repeal of Glass-Stiegal in the 1990s, Greenspun's lackadaisical and obfuscatory management of the Fed, the lack of regulation of the mortgage industry that followed, corruption across the board in the finance industruy, including regulators, the de-fanging of the STC and so on.

The failure to dig into root causes is one of the things that constrains the utility of economics (pun intended). Another is its dependence on the notion of people as rational actors, but at least this problem is being addressed to some degree by the field of behavioral economics. But perhaps this is optimistic.

Illustrating this blindness to root causes is an interview of Neel Kashkari, where he says he bought a house in California in 2005, and "didn't see it coming." I found this stunning. I was shopping for a home in California in 2005, and everything was screaming "this is insanity!" Ads on the radio for insane loan offers, home prices outstripping every other economic indicator,  a dentist I met who was doing interest-only loans and laddering up into ever-more expensive zipcodes, and who thought he was a genius. It. Was. Nuts. The writing was on the wall, in wall-tall letters.

The best part, the truly best part is that guys like Kashkari take credit for turning things around, but did they really do anything to improve the odds of against future financial disasters? Like, some perp walks for the greedheads who almost destroyed the world's economy? Or a serious restructuring of the financial industry to counter the centralization of wealth and power? Ironic scornful laughter ensues.

Breaking Out

Maybe I should write a Chrome plugin that deliberately makes the browsing experience so painful, you'll want to do just about anything else.

Advanced feature: Whitelist certain sites and certain hours (would still like to get work done). But this should be difficult to do, with prompts that keep asking "do you really want to do this?" and "Are you sure this isn't a site that's a mind-numbing time suck that's trying to hoover all your private data?"

Car talk

Scene: a couple is conversing at an outdoor table for a restaurant. A large SUV starts up a couple feet away. Conversation continues for a while. The SUV doesn't move, its engine still running.

The couple have to raise their voices, then begin to complain about the SUV and its driver. It should be illegal to just sit there and let the engine idle, especially near people trying to eat. They speculate about what the driver could be doing that's so important.

CUT to the SUV interior. Looking forward over the driver's shoulder. The dining couple is framed in the windshield. The driver is watching a youtube video on his phone about how to back back his SUV out of a parking space.

The video is in the middle of a checklist of what to do: check side mirrors and rear view mirror for obstructions. Check left and righ for oncoming traffic. Put car in reverse. If you have a manual transmission, see this other video.

Driver can't keep up with instructions, especially confused by the manual transmission bit. Rewinds the video, gets a commercial for the SUV.

CUT to the diners. I could ask him to move. No don't do that, people who drive cars like that always carry guns. We could move to another table. Maybe he'll leave soon.

CUT to SUV. Commercial has ended, the checklist has begun again. Start the engine. Driver complies, and gets a horrible grinding noise, since the engine is already running. Driver winces, couple winces, mutter not-nice things.

CUT do diners. He's got to leave soon. You think so, I mean its like he doesn't know how to drive or something.

CUT to SUV: driver rapidly spins head around as he gets through the "check mirrors" part of the video, at the manual transmission part, he pauses the video and thinks for a moment. He presses a couple buttons and says "Okay google, how do I tell if I have manual transmission?"

Eventually the SUV lurches away.

============================

Robot cars an end to vehicular crimes?

Bank robber with a gun and a bundle of loot jumps into his robot car, yells go go go! "Where to?" Anywhere. North! Go north!" The car activates its turn signal and smoothly, slowly pulls into traffic.

"Faster!"

"We have reached the speed limit, sir!" says the car, in an annoyingly perky voice. Sirens grow in the background.

"Turn left up here!"

"I can't do that,  left turns are not permitted at this intersection."

"Then go faster!"

"We have reached the maximum speed limit. A faster speed will require emergency authorization."

"This is an emergency, go faster!"

"Yes sir. Increasing speed. I have also notified the authorities that we have an emergency, and am sending them our location and projected route."

The Run

This year's JP Morgan Corporate Challenge was the best yet. Note to self, travel with the George Positioning System every chance you get. He knows where it's at, indeed where everything is at in the Bay Area. He worked as a tour guide.

It was the coldest race I've ever attended. Fog was low over the Golden Gate Bridge, and a chill wind whipped across Chrissy Field. Runners were huddled on the leeward side of the few structures on the field, like sheep hiding behind hedges.

We shuddered and hopped around and made jokes about the people handing out the free iced coffee and free iced fruit drinks. Yeah, right. Someone passing out hot apple cider would have needed a riot squad for protection.

Finally, we were told that the race was about to start. We lined up and faceless amplified voices boomed out warmup instructions. Then there were speeches and more speeches, and some reporter also talked, but I don't watch TV, so I didn't recognize her voice. It would have been nice if they'd changed the order and did the speeches first, then the warmup, because we were cooling down but at least massed together, penguin-runners on the ice floe.

Then we were off! Okay, the front of the pack was off. A minute or so later my part of the flock began to shuffle forward in the way harried commuters shuffle into crowded trains, elbows in, careful steps, trying not to bump each other. Eight thousand feet trying to find room to run.

I ran for a while and didn't see anyone I recognized until I saw Danette just ahead. "Ah," I said, "If I can keep pace with her, that will get me through the race with a reasonable time."

So I ran and ran, and I wondered about the people on their cell phones while they were running this race. What's with that? "Hello? Oh hi... Nothing much, just running a race. Sure I'll pick up some takeout on the way home. Watchu uptwo?"

Then I paused in my wondering and noticed that I couldn't see Danette anywhere. I was pretty sure I hadn't passed her.

Oh well, the die is cast, we must struggle valiantly on. It's been a while now, and I began to wonder how much further we had to go. And then I saw Robin up ahead. I figured, "Aha, I'll keep pace with her and get a not-so-pathetic time." But again, while bemusedly wondering about the carbon consumption involved in getting all these people in one place at one time to run around in a big -- well, it's not a circle really, more like a beat-up triangle -- I lost track of Robin and I was very sure I'd not passed her.

This was getting embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as my stupid idea of hiring my son to be a trainer in preparing for this race. The idea was that he'd run with me as training. Well, he has his own training regimen, it's called "oversleeping". By staying in bed as long as possible, plus three to five minutes, he has to get to school in a hurry. Normally this would mean walking, but since he uses "oversleeping" as his training regimen, he has to run the entire way. With his backpack.

So now he's a much better runner than his old man, and he has the patience of youth, which is to say "none". Our training sessions amount to: we start out running. He gains a Gignormous Lead. I meet him at the turnaround point, feet sore and winded and he's totally relaxed and razzing me.

That's when I notice Shant. Surely I can keep pace with Shant, I figure. So I run and run, and then I realize that I can't see Shant anymore either. Dang, maybe I should consider taking up his training regimen. What was that bar he mentioned the other day?

So I run and run, and I can see the finish line coming up, but it's looking awful quiet; people usually hang around at the end of the race but today I guess the extra cold and extra damp darkness is driving people home early, or so I hope. And just as I'm about to cross the finish line I notice that there's quite a racket behind me. I'm not alone!

I turn around and there a bunch of men are carrying the bright blue porta-potties away on these huge dollies coming up behind me. I'm thinking wow, that must take a lot of skill, to run this course with those porta-potties on dollies. What if it tipped over?

So I finished the race, barely beating out the guys with the blue porta-potties. Later I found out that something that cheered me up after what had been an otherwise rather depressing performance:

I beat Ignatius' time.

IM conversation 01

...irrelevant stuff up here

That is mildly annoying, eh?!

35 PM Me

"Mildly" is an interesting way of putting it.

4:36 PM Him

Okay, hair pullingly, tooth gnashingly annoying.

4:37 PM Me

just-short-of-screaming-tantrum-in-someone's-cubicle annoying.

4:39 PM Him

Ah... I've only experienced one tantrum, but I was the object of the tantrum and not the tantror. (Would that make me the tantree?)  It was at another company and others around were astounded that this happened.  The tantror was known for this.

4:40 PM Me

I think the word is "tantrumator". Yeah, those people are pretty unpleasant to deal with, which is why I usually try to stop short of that.

The victim or target is the "tantraumatized"

4:41 PM Him

Ahha!  I like your term a lot!!!!

Lunch Truck Concepts

The New Hot Thing in many  cities are lunch trucks that serve high-quality, gourmet meals. An example here in San Francisco is the Voodoo Van, offering such double-entendre delights as the Skirtlifter (a steak sandwich), Famous JuJu Balls, and the Tranny Chaser, a Setain and cole slaw vegetarian sandwich. A while back a coworker whom I shall call John and I came upon the Voodoo Van, placed our orders and went back to our office to eat at our desks.

We sit at opposite ends of a short hallway of cubicles, one of those modern open workspace plan (aka "cheap"). A few minutes of chowing down, John suddenly calls out to me, "Greg, did you also get the Tranny Chaser?"

"Uhm, yeah. Why?"

"Does it squeak when you bite it?"

Okay. I circle around to John and try to point out to him that some people in the office may be sensitive to such a conversation.

"Why?"

"Well, didn't you notice that all of the names of the items at the Voodoo Van are all double entendres?

"Yeah. So?"

It finally dawned on me to ask, "do you know what's meant by Tranny Chaser?" He didn't, so I explained it.


"Oh-h-h-h-h," he said. I thought they meant like a transmission on a car!" He grew up in the midwest. What can I say?


Anyway, I've been thinking of some concepts for a lunch truck.

The War Zone

A seriously beat up van covered with old graffiti, scorch marks and faux bullet holes. Serves up:

• Bloodbath Ribs
• Hamburger Hill Burgers 
• Coup de Taters
• Insurrection Salad
• Just Desserts

Climate Change Naysayers

Global warming? No problem. It's not happening, and if it is happening, it's a Good Thing. All items are imported to maximize their carbon footprint. Features:

• High methane meat dishes
• New Zealand Lamb
• Argentinean Beef Briskets 
• Green House Greens
• High Fructose Corn Syrup with Almonds

How Did Healthcare Get Equated to Broccoli?

As the debate over health care reform rages through the Supreme Court, I have to wonder how the arguments became so supremely silly. Broccoli as an analogy to healthcare? Seriously?

Perhaps a better argument could be made that healthcare is like the interstate highway system. Everyone who pays federal taxes pays for some portion of those highways. There are no doubt many people who could meet their business, shopping and social needs without using any interstate highway, but very few people protest paying the taxes for them. Anyone who demanded that the feds get out of the highway business and leave it to the free market would probably not get taken seriously.

Just as the highways deliver a common good (mobility, promotion of commerce), a national healthcare system would provide a common good in providing health care to millions. It's the humane thing to do.

Unfortunately, the court isn't considering arguments of this form, and because constitutional dogmatism has replaced pragmatic consideration over what is actually best for the nation, it seems unlikely that healthcare reform will carry the day.

What the Presidential Debates Need

An eight-way chess clock. Each candidate gets 10 minutes to answer all questions they receive, and any left at the end of questions could be used as the candidate wishes. Candidates who zero out the time on their clocks have their microphone turned off. If that isn't good enough, then it's time to be escorted off the stage.

Or: No Time Limit At All. Let them go at it as long as they want. Any time they look like they're losing steam, that's when the moderator tosses out another question.  

Disinfo-meters on the Screen. As candidates are speaking, dials along the bottom show how relevant the answer is to the question, the degrees of factual the content and/or hypocrisy in the answer. 

You've Got USPS Email

Recent news about the United States Postal Service has been mostly bad. Buffeted by a massive shift to electronic media and the recession, the USPS is struggling to maintain its existence, much less its relevance.

So, perhaps it's time for USPS to do email. Consider what the postal service offer to physical mail, that could be extended to email:

• An assurance of privacy, backed by federal law
• A legally enforced prohibition on mail scams 
• A promise of a best effort to deliver
• No banner ads (okay, maybe not)

Privacy
The postal service provides a guarantee that your mail was private. Opening it without a court order or a similar special dispensation, or tampering with it in any way, is breaking federal law.

Nothing like it holds for public sector email. Google and other major providers reserve the right to scour your email, to better target you for advertising.I really don't like the way the content of my email is scraped for ad targeting. Or the ads themselves, for that matter. Leaving email in the hands of the Googles and Microsofts of the world is uncomfortable at best and eventually it will lead to serious problems. I'm sure there will come a day when Google lawyers will equivocate on the company's "Do no evil" byline with the argument, "it depends on what your definition of 'evil' is."

Corporate email goes even deeper into this hole. Anything in your business email account is the property of the employer, who can inspect it, back it up, delete it or do pretty much as they please with it.

Consumers could pay a nominal subscription fee for a USPS email account, but then, we're used to paying postage for physical mail already. And the payment would comes with guarantees regarding privacy and delivery.

Email Scams
Committing a crime using the mail is a crime itself, and it has teeth: imprisonment up to 20 years, and a fine of up to $1 million. It'd be something if email were similarly protected.

While this won't eliminate spam, it could help control the problem. Spam-vertisers -- excuse me, legitimate bulk email advertisers -- could pay fees for the privilege of sending email to people that have opted into their mailing lists. Those fees could cover the bulk of the post office' IT costs, much as bulk mail subsidizes traditional mail costs.

No Banner Ads (Or Maybe Not)
If the USPS did put up banner ads on their site, they'd probably be the kinds of ads you already see in the post office: USPS products and services, the "ten most wanted" list, and pointers to other government services. How did the post office become the place to get passports done, anyway? This isn't a bad thing. At least the banner ads would have a sensible context, unlike what Yahoo scrapes up. And the ads should not be the bulk of their earned revenue.

Other People's (Planet) Money

Recently, Planet Money on NPR broadcast a story about the three reports of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. There's the majority report (the Democratic Party's), the minority report (the official Republican Party version) and the minority minority report (I won't even go there).

The story goes into some detail contrasting the two versions, then they comes to the conclusion that the Dem version says the crisis was avoidable, and the Republican version said that the crisis was not. Their conclusion is confirmed by Keith Hennessey, one of the authors of the minority report.

Of course that would have to be the Republican position. If the crisis was avoidable, then Republic economic policy must be bankrupt (forgive the pun). It was the Republican party that appointed Allen Greenspan to the Federal Reserve, who in turn pushed a laissez faire attitude towards the derivatives market and investment banks. It was the Republicans who pushed for free market "reforms: and deregulation of the financial industries for the last thirty years, and it was the Republicans that dominated either the White House, or Congress, or both, for that period.

Editing in HTML -> Docfail

Exec Summary:

I like Wikis. I don't mind Wiki markup so much. Recently I had to investigate using the Sharepoint 2007 Wiki, and found that it goes directly to HTML. This led me to formulate the following rule of thumb:

Any documentation system that forces you to edit HTML is a failure.

Involved Discussion:

True, Sharepoint has a limited WYSIWYG editor that you can use, but the data is stored largely in HTML format (Wiki words being the exception). For many tasks, or to get a consistent appearance across documents, you'll have to work with the HTML tags.

Why is this a bad thing? Googling around, I found a few people who actually thought this was a strength of Sharepoint. Total control of the output, right?

Three points:

• HTML is verbose
• HTML is exceedingly error-prone
  
• HTML is not 100% portable

Say you want to create a level one header on Sharepoint, I see two alternatives:

1. In the WYSIWYG editor, type in the text, select it, bold it, enlarge it.
2. In the HTML editor, bracket the text with

   …

   tags.

With the first technique, everyone could build the header differently, leading to inconsistent appearance. And it gets ugly if you do have to drop into HTML mode:

<DIV align=center><STRONG><FONT size=4>This is a Title</FONT></STRONG></DIV>

(Don't even think about documenting HTML in the Wiki page!)

The second technique gives a consistent appearance, but you have to work in HTML, which can become a major distraction from getting work done.

In the Media Wiki, the text is bracketed with “==”.

==This is a Title==

All the nested tags in HTML leads to endless problems with unbalanced or mismatched tags. Complicating this is the way different Web browsers will handle those errors. Some will render the text the way you expect, others are less forgiving.

And having brought up different browsers, there's always the possibility that as you add a greater variety of HTML tags to your document, your page could render very differently for users of Safari vs those using IE.