Author: chogan@directresearch.com

 

Normally my posts tend to be reality-based and fact-oriented.

Today, by contrast, I’m having a hard time dealing with reality, so I’m going to blather about the current state of affairs in the U.S.A.

I will eventually get around to those I-bonds.  But it’s not exactly a direct route.

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Business 101:  Scope of authority should match scope of responsibility.

Your scope of authority is the stuff you have control over. Things you can change.  Decisions that you get to make.  That sort of thing.

Your scope of responsibility is the stuff you’ll be held accountable for.  Financially, legally, morally, socially, or whatever.  It’s all the stuff that, if it goes wrong, you take the blame and/or penalty.  And if it goes right, you get the praise and/or reward.

If you’ve ever taken a class on how to manage a business, you’ve almost certainly heard some version of the maxim above.  In an ideal business — and maybe in an ideal world — each person’s scope of authority and scope of responsibility would coincide.

Where scope of authority exceeds scope of responsibility, you get irresponsible decision-making.  The decision-maker doesn’t have to care about the consequences of the decision.

Where scope of responsibility exceeds scope of authority, you get stress.  A classic case might be where a customer screams at a waiter over the quality of the food.  It’s not as if the waiter cooked it.  But the waiter is held responsible for it.

This is really not much deeper than saying that you should be held accountable for your decisions.  And, conversely, that you shouldn’t be held accountable for things outside your control.

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Boaty McBoatface:  This is what happens when you violate Business 101.

Source:  Wikipedia

You can read the full saga on Wikipedia or the New York Times.

Briefly:  About a decade ago, an arm of the British government (the NERC) decided to make a major investment in a nearly $300M polar research ship.  That ship has the serious mission of measuring the effects of climate change in the earth’s polar regions.

As the ship neared completion, it required a name.  And so, to gin up popular support, they decided to choose the name of this new capital vessel via internet poll.

Hijinks ensued, in the form of the most popular name, by a wide margin, being Boaty McBoatface. The name was, in fact, suggested as a joke.  The guy who suggested it eventually sort-of apologized for doing so.  But it won handily.

In the end, the NERC reneged and gave the ship a properly serious name (the RRS Sir David Attenborough).   But they did name one of the autonomous submersibles the Boaty McBoatface.  As shown above, courtesy of Wikipedia.

This was a classic violation of Business 101.  The scope of authority — the right to name the ship — was handed to an anonymous internet crowd who bore no responsibility whatsoever for their actions.  Meanwhile, the people responsible for paying for and running the ship had, in theory, no control whatsoever over the name.

This is hardly the first time that a seemingly serious internet poll led to a frivolous outcome.  But it was such a stunning backfire that “McBoatface” has now become a verb in its own right, per the Wiktionary:

Verb

Boaty McBoatface (third-person singular simple present Boaty McBoatfaces, present participle Boaty McBoatfacing, simple past and past participle Boaty McBoatfaced)

1. (neologism) To hijack or troll a vote, especially one held online, by supporting a joke option. [from 2016]
   
   

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Did we just McBoatface the U.S. House of Representatives?

In the U.S., an election is an anonymous poll in which those casting votes bear no individual responsibility for the consequences.

It’s hard for me to see much difference between that, and a typical internet poll.  Other than the fact that it’s difficult to vote twice.  And that some people actually do take elections seriously.

I guess it’s a bit pejorative to suggest that the current chaos in the House of Representatives has occurred because we McBoatfaced the last election.  Still, you have to wonder about the people who voted for candidates whose sole promise was to be loud and disruptive, and do their darnedest to interrupt the normal business of government.  Did they think that would be fun prank, the same as the McBoatface voters?  Own the libs, or whatever.  Or was that really their serious and thoughtful goal?

At least their candidates seem to be carrying through on their campaign promises.

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What people are getting backwards about the current situation.

Here’s one that kind of cracks me up, but kind of doesn’t.  You hear a lot of people saying that the lack of a functioning House is OK, because the Federal government already passed a budget for FY 2023.  They won’t have to face that task until this fall.

I think that’s backwards.

Rephrased:  Senate Republicans saw this predictable train wreck months ago, and so worked with Democrats to pass the current (2023) FY budget.  That’s presumably because they already knew (or strongly suspected) that the House wouldn’t be capable of doing that.

Re-interpreting today’s events:  The predicted chaos has come to pass.  I’d have to bet, then, that there will be no new budget for the next fiscal year, and no increase in the debt ceiling.

The currently-funded fiscal year (2023) ends on 9/30/2023.  So that’s a known.  Even then, I believe that entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare) remain funded.  It’s only the “discretionary” part of the budget that is not.

But as to when, exactly, we hit the debt ceiling, nobody can quite say.  Consensus seems to be mid-2023.

At that point, the Federal government will continue to make what payments it can.  So, likely, Social Security checks will continue to go out.  (Figuratively speaking — I don’t think they’ve mailed out physical checks in decades.) Other payments will not be made.

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On lock-picking, McBoatfacing, and I-bonds

Source:  Covertinstruments.com

Which brings me to my final speculation.  Everybody is working under the assumption that, eventually, this will all get straightened out.  Somebody will figure out some way to rein in the House of Representatives so that they can do their required business.

By contrast, I keep asking myself, what if this is as good as it gets?

What if the house is permanently McBoatfaced? 

Back when I was a kid, we had joke Presidential candidates.  Comedian Pat Paulson was one.   There was a movement to elect the fictional TV character Archie Bunker as U.S. President.  And so on.  But everybody knew they were jokes, or that they were fictional characters.

Enter Representative Santos of New York.  Line, meet blur.  The people of that district definitely elected a fictional character.  They were simply not aware of it at the time.  To which we can add a handful of Republican house members whose sole platform appears to have been being mad as hell, and stating their unequivocal unwillingness to go along with anything required to conduct the business of government.  I guess we all now know they weren’t kidding.

A couple of days back, a friend asked me to see if I could open a couple of old suitcases that had belonged to her grandmother. Luckily, I happened  to own the Covert Companion (r) tool, pictured above.  The version I use has a few tools to help with what are called “low skill” attacks on locks.  (“Low skill” being an accurate description of my lock-picking ability).  Because I happened to own those crude little pieces of steel circled above, I had relatively little problem opening the simple warded locks on those suitcases.

But if I hadn’t had the tools, I’d have been helpless.  The only way to open the suitcase would have been to destroy it.  It’s a case of any tool, no matter how crude, being better than no tool at all.

Right now, I’m not seeing the tools in hand to fix the U.S. House.  Not even the crudest tactic that could possibly resolve the current impasse, let alone get the place functional going forward.  And, unlike those old suitcases, nobody has the power to destroy it, to achieve some end.  The House works the way it works, or doesn’t, until such time as it works well enough to change the way it works.  Which can’t happen.  Because right now, it’s not working.

Which finally brings me to I-bonds.  Is it smart to own I-bonds when the House is broken?

I’ve owned these for decades.  In fact, they are so old that they are going to quit paying interest just a few years from now.  Pre-tax, they pay just a bit more than the rate of inflation.  Most of the decades that I have owned them, they’ve paid little more than zero.  But now, as these things are reckoned, they are paying pretty well, compared to the alternatives.

But that high rate of return means nothing if you can’t spend it.  And of all the people the Federal government could choose to stiff, in the event of a permanent failure to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling, I’d bet that small bondholders would be right at the top of the list.  (N.B., I-bonds are marketed at small savers, with a purchase limit of $5000 per person per year.)

In any case, my conclusion is that if the House is permanently McBoatfaced, I might be wise to cash those I-bonds before we hit the debt limit sometime this summer.  Otherwise, I just get the feeling that the longer this goes on, the longer it’s going to go on.  Combined with the feeling that maybe this is as good as it gets.  That there is no tool for fixing it.

And that if everybody has their hand out, to the Feds, I’m going to end up at the back of the line.

I told you I’d get to I-bonds eventually.  It just took a while.

 

 

It’s a brand new year.  But if you expect “… and new beginnings”, or “… and looking forward”, or some other such fluffy nonsense, you’ve come to the wrong website.

Instead, I’m focused on “garbage collection”, as used by computer programmers.  More-or-less, it means freeing up memory or storage space by getting rid of obsolete, archaic objects.

In practical terms, this post is a bit of navel-gazing prior to re-configuring this blog.  After doing a bit of manual garbage collection (tossing out draft and private posts, emptying the trash can) I am left with more than 1700 valid posts, stretching back four-and-a-half years.  Much of that is material that nobody could possibly want to read again.  It’s time for archiving the obsolete, restructuring the rest, and getting on with it.  This post is my way of figuring out what I have, and what to do with it.

It’s just a question of figuring out what to do.  And, as importantly, figuring out how to do it.

Perhaps tellingly, the Wikipedia article on garbage collection mentions roughly 35 distinct computer programming languages.  Of which, I am familiar with exactly one:  Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC).

Seeking out the obsolete and archaic?  Perhaps I need look no further than the mirror.

Source for title image:  Wikipedia, Janus.

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Preamble:  I will cease to exist if you close this tab.

N.B.  Younger readers, if any,  may feel free to substitute “app” for “program” throughout this section.  “App” is short for “application”, which in turn is short for “applications programming”– the computer code that actually gets stuff done, stuff-wise, taking input from you, the “end user” — versus “systems programming”, the code that allows the computer/phone/gizmo/app to function, written by computer programmers.  In my book, writing the Excel program itself counts as systems programming, while using Excel to calculate something is applications programming. New-school, Excel is therefore “an app”.  And yes, the rest of the discussion will be every bit as clear as that was.

I am (or was) a data analyst, writing my own little old-school computer programs to draw information out of data.  When you see original data analysis on this website, that’s me, plugging away with Statistical Analysis System (SAS) programs.

It’s a job that demands “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.”  (That, per the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)  For any given task, I may be clueless about what’s actually happening in the real world, or how a particular set of data was created.  But I need to be as sure as possible that the computer program I’m using does exactly what I say its doing.

In the modern lingo, I am well-versed in “procedural” programming.  A  program consists of things that are very close to plain English sentences, showing what I’m doing to the underlying data.  Except for the arcana, anyone with a logical mind can look at programs of that sort and get the gist of what’s going on.

It’s not rocket surgery or brain science.  Even if you don’t program in SAS, you can probably figure out what I’m doing, below, literally a piece of the program that I currently use to analyze COVID-19 case data.  This, even if some of the arcana of SAS programming may strike you as a bit odd.

* this section fixes known anomalies in the data, usually when old cases are dumped in (negative adjustment) 
* or when duplicate cases are pulled out (positive adjustment), so that the adjusted data reflect the actual 
* ongoing flow of new cases ;

if state = "New Jersey" and date ge input("20210104",yymmdd8.) then do ; 
    cases = cases - 57652 ; 
end ;

* etc ;

Quaint, right?  It’s computer code designed to be read and understood by humans.  If you’re looking at the case counts from New Jersey, and the date is greater than or equal to January 4, 2021 (2021 01 04), subtract 57,652 cases.  (Because that’s the day they dumped that many old cases into their count data, producing a big spike in the numbers.)

This “procedural programming” mindset is an almost insurmountable handicap when it comes to understanding how a blog functions.  It’s just not how things are done any more.  I don’t think that internet programmers actually go out of their way to make the logic of their programming as indecipherable as possible.  But “indecipherable” pretty much sums it up.

By contrast to the above, here’s a little baby snippet of C++ code.  If I stare at it hard enough, I can eventually figure out what it does.  But I have to say, it’s not like they went out of their way to make it easy.

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    int num1, num2, add;
    cout<<"Enter Two Numbers: ";
    cin>>num1>>num2;
    add = num1+num2;
    cout<<"\nResult = "<<add;
    cout<<endl;
    return 0;
}

Source:  Codescracker.com.  This piece of code adds two numbers together, so it’s roughly analogous to, but somewhat simpler than, the SAS code above.

As a consequence, even though I have been writing computer programs for the majority of my lifetime, computer programming related to the internet (and to phones) leaves me baffled.  It’s a combination of things:  The odd argot to describe even basic concepts.  The emphasis on “user friendly” interfaces that hide the actual computing going on.  And what seems to be a never-ending competition to see which object-oriented language can write their operations in the most dense, opaque, and obscure fashion possible.

This is a serious handicap when the goal is to reorganize the roughly 1700 posts on this website.   I keep thinking up simple things that I’d like to do.  And I keep being completely stumped as to how to do them.

Worst, because I don’t really understand what’s going on, I take a guess as to how this website works, based on my “procedural programming” background.   I figure out how I’d do it, and more-or-less assume that’s how things work.  These guesses are invariably wrong.

As a result, more-or-less everything I assumed about how this blog actually functions has been incorrect.  That now matters quite a bit, as I try to re-organize 1700 blog posts.

Here’s my fundamental misunderstanding:  Where are my blog posts stored, on the server that hosts this blog?

Seems like a reasonable question.  The answer is: No.

I figured that if I had 1700 posts appearing here as 1700 pages, then, somewhere on this website, there must be 1700 readable files that contain those posts.  Because that makes sense to me.  Compile each post once, then display that on demand as any end-user wants to see any given post.  Therefore, logically, I ought to be able to find each post as a human-readable file.  Somewhere.  And it was just a question of figuring out where.

Or, even more simply, page:book :: post:blog.  Naively, if this blog is like a book, then I’m asking where the individual pages of that book are stored.  So that I may lay them all out in one place, look at them, and re-shuffle them to re-organize this blog.

But, as it turns out, that’s fundamentally wrong.  This post — what you’re reading right now — does not exist.  Not as any sort of file, on (say) a disk drive, on a computer.  Nothing that you could search for and read, natively, on the server for the host of this blog.

Instead, this post — the text you’re reading right now — exists only as a single, long, unreadable line in an SQL (structured query language) database.  (That’s what’s shown in the blue block, above, courtesy of reading my website backup files using an extremely old-school piece of software known as Vedit.)

That  — that ugly, unreadable unformatted bloc of crap above — that’s how my posts actually exist, in the real world.  They exist as entries in a database.  All 1700 of them.  The only practical way to extract the text of those posts is to query that database.  And, as far as I can tell, the software to allow me to analyze that content, so that I can reorganize it efficiently, simply does not exist.

Worse, the only readable blog pages are totally ephemeral.  They exist only as what WordPress compiles, on the fly, and presents to you on your screen.  You literally look at a unique copy, constructed in real time, just for you.

When you close this browser tab, this blog post will cease to exist.  In the sense that there will be no human-readable form of it, anywhere in the universe.  (Unless somebody else has a browser window open to this blog entry.)  The only permanent version of this blog post is that incomprehensible blue block of text above.

The screwy upshot is that many things I’d like to do to reconfigure this website — things that I figured ought to be easy, based on my old-school, “procedural” view of the world — are flatly impossible on a WordPress website like this one.  Because the things I’m looking for — my blog posts — don’t really exist.

It’s a whole new world out there, programming-wise.  And the more I know, the less I like it.

But on with the show.  Even if I can’t yet actually implement the changes I need,   I can still figure out what content I want to keep and toss.

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Blog history 1:  MAC zoning, 2018-2020.  We won?

This blog began in 2018 as an act of desperation.  I was trying to organize opposition to a local zoning ordinance — so-called “MAC” zoning — in my home town of Vienna VA.

MAC zoning was repealed more than two years ago.  Repealed, in some part, thanks to the reams of analysis posted on this blog.  And to some well-designed yard signs, above.

A big chunk of what I did via this blog was simply to record what was said and done, and remind people of it, because otherwise they’d conveniently forget (Post #268).  That, and occasionally doing the calculations and measurements that the Town Council should have been doing (e.g., traffic noise adjacent to Maple Avenue).

The yard signs have long since been collected and recycled into raised garden beds (Post G05, June 2020). 

It’s time to do that for the hundreds of pieces of analysis that I posted on MAC zoning.  Except for the occasional piece that has relevance beyond that local ordinance, such as this post on acoustics.  And a handful of others that occasional get a hit.  In the main, I don’t think anyone could possibly care about a law that’s no longer on the books.

The only practical impact on this website is that I can greatly simplify the list of blog post categories.  If you try to search this blog by category, you’ll see a lot of seemingly useless stuff (e.g., “Building Height”).  All of that dates to the MAC era.  And all of that can be eliminated now.

I say “we won?” because after rescinding MAC zoning, the Town of Vienna immediately decided to redo all of the zoning regulations.  Complete overhaul.  Nothing was out of bounds.

But, as far as I can, there seems to be consensus to keep it small.  And the staff member who was arguably the driving force behind some of the crazier parts of MAC zoning (E.g., Marco-Polo-Gate) has since moved on.  So I’m not seeing a lot of value in keeping a close eye on this any more.

Verdict:  Garbage collection, with a few exceptions.  My plan, if I can implement it, is to write all those posts off to one large file (likely as a .pdf).  Then remove them from the website.  Then remove all the MAC-specific post categories from the website.

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Blog history 2:  COVID, 2020 – 2022-ish.  We won?

Then, in the spring of 2020, along came COVID-19.  At some point, I decided to track and analyze it, because a) what else could I do and b) I’m a retired health economist will the programming and other skills sufficient for processing and interpreting disease-related data.

Early on, I think that had some real value-added.  That’s true mainly because, early on, the U.S. CDC dropped the ball regarding airborne transmission of COVID and the need for masking.  They denied that airborne transmission was real, despite overwhelming examples to the contrary.  They first said that masks were not required (social distancing only), despite the obvious failure of that policy.  Then switched to “cloth masks”, as if, at that point, there was still some risk that consumers might wipe out stocks of masks needed by health care providers.  (There was no risk — the retail channels had been wiped clean of N95s months beforehand.)

But the CDC eventually and grudgingly aligned itself with reality.  The vaccines came to fruition.  The absolutely horrendous initial case-mortality rate dropped to something a little less scary.

And we mostly just got on with our lives, plus or minus the million plus who died, the shocking reduction in U.S. life expectancy, the loss of in-person K-12 education time, the biggest increase in the national debt since WWII.  The hoarding, the shortages, the supply-chain issues, and the world-wide inflation.

And the nearly-endless bickering.  Let’s not forget that.

And the vaccine nuttiness and disinformation. Which I also must classify as literally endless, because it continues to this day.  No end in sight.

Latest from the CDC suggests that the folks who kept up with their vaccinations have a roughly 19-fold lower risk of dying.  To which, Florida responds:

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 1/2/2023.

But, by and large, despite an ongoing 350 deaths and nearly 6000 hospitalizations per day for COVID (per the CDC COVID data tracker today), as a society, we’re over it.  Things have been stable for quite a while now.  And only about one eligible person in seven bothered to get the last dose of COVID vaccine.

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 1/2/2023

Still, there may be a bit of value in continue to track this from time to time.  Lately, my sole value added has been in poo-poohing the notion of a “triple-demic”, and dismissing vague scare-mongering about a new winter wave of COVID.

Verdict:  Garbage collection of everything except for the last few posts.  At this point, I have about 900 posts on COVID on this website.  Which is a bit obsessive, as that works out to just about one per day that we’ve had COVID circulating in the U.S.  Keep COVID as a category, and maybe post every couple of weeks, if the data remain available.

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Blog history 3:  Gardening: 2020 – ??.  The bugs won?

I started gardening during the pandemic, just as a way to have something to do.  Mostly, it started out as a way to get some exercise, because at that point, I believe gyms were shut down here in Virginia.

Arguably my most well-read gardening posts were the ones that tracked the canning lid shortage.  Because, at the end of the day, preserving food is part of the gardening process, for most of us.  More to the point, this was a serious problem for people who rely on home canning to provide a significant portion of their food, and it completely pissed me off that write-ups in the popular press treated it as some kind of a joke. So I took it seriously, and at one point had hundreds of hits per week on that topic.

Beyond that, it’s been more a case of testing various bits of garden advice you can find on the internet.  Much of which — surprise — turns out to be wrong.  It seems like a lot of gardening blogs repeat advice that they read, on other gardening blogs, without bothering to test it.  At the minimum, testing that advice rigorously satisfies my need to do the occasional bit of amateur science.

In addition, I spend some time explaining what I’m trying to do, and tracking how it goes.  I test equipment from time to time, such as pipe and such for irrigation.  Or Mason jars for frost protection.  And I think there’s some value added there.  And there aren’t a lot of posts.

Verdict:  No garbage collection, for now.  It’s not that many posts, and it’s only a couple of fairly discrete post categories.  Really, I ought to gather all that material into a small pamphlet, and be done with it.

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Blog history four:  Ongoing:  The science and engineering section.

Every once in a while, when I can’t find a good answer to a question that’s bothering me, I’ll go ahead and test it myself, if possible (e.g., Post #1658)

Or when I see the need for some sort of helpful device, that I can’t find for purchase anywhere, I’ll gin something up (e.g., Post 1663).

And so on.  Just a potpourri of posts, whose sole link is that there’s some element of scientific method or engineering behind them.

Many of them have a very small, tightly defined audience. Such as this one, on making a floor-to-chair transfer device for paraplegics (Post #886).

The odd thing about these is that occasionally, out of the blue, I’ll get a lot of hits.  This has been true of my post on heated covers for outdoor faucets.  When the weather turns cold in early winter, I always seem to get a lot of hits on that one (Post #1412).

Verdict:  No garbage collection, for now.  No clue what to do with them, either, other than create a new post category for material of this type.

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Blog History Five:  Other Town of Vienna material, ongoing.

I have more-or-less lost interest in posting about the Town of Vienna.  As I explained to a Town Council member a few months ago, it’s mostly that Town Council doesn’t get me nearly as angry now as they did in the past.

Arguably, I did quite a bit of good in the past, by (in effect) reporting on what was happening.

Mostly, when I started getting up to speed on MAC zoning, I noted that the Town often took months before posting any information whatsoever regarding what had taken place in various official Town meetings (e.g., Town Council meetings).  So I bought the biggest microphone I could carry, and started ostentatiously recording Town Council meetings and posting the recordings (with my index and commentary) the next day.  This apparently goaded the then-Mayor to get the official Town recording out before I did. To deny me the audience.

This has had the lasting effect of (at least) having recordings of most Town meetings, available in nearly-real time.  It’s still awkward, because the Town won’t let you download the recordings.  You have to view them through the Town’s approved interface.  And yet, with enough effort, interested citizens can pull those up in Chrome (not Firefox) and FF through them to find the information they want.  Whatever the shortcomings, it’s better than nothing.  Which is what we had before.

I still need to follow up on a few items.  The ongoing rezoning.  The coming train-wreck of Town elections (Post #1591).  But in terms of providing some sort of independent citizen oversight of what Town Council is up to, I’m just not up to the task.

Verdict:  Garbage collection, other than current topics.  I just don’t care enough any more to deal with it.

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Conclusions?

There are plenty of other smaller categories to consider.  But I think this gives me some direction as to where I’m going with my blog reorganization.

Get rid of:

• most of the old zoning-related material, and the associated categories.
• pandemic-related posts, except those that are quite recent or have some abiding interest.
• most material related specifically to the Town of Vienna

Keep:

• a few posts on tracking COVID trends
• science and engineering posts
• gardening.

And I guess that’s where this blog is heading.

But keep in mind, as you read this post, that it doesn’t actually exist.  Per the discussion at the top of the post.

And that means that the biggest headache now finding any way to archive the older material, in bulk, in a readable format.  Arguably, I’ll be able to find some software to do that.  For sure, WordPress does not seem to have any native functions that will do that.

And once I’ve archived the old stuff in a form I’m comfortable with, I can concentrate on what comes next.