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Post #1719: A brief note on the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis, or why sometimes It’s (not) a Wonderful Life.

 

FSLIC.  Raise your hand if you are old enough to recall what that stands for.

Briefly, FDIC : Bank :: FSLIC : Savings and Loan

You have to interpret the second  “:” as “was to”, not “is to”.  The Congress formally declared the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) dead in 1989, after a decade-long illness.  It was beyond bankrupt at the time.  Its functions were subsumed into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

I mention this bit of economic history because of the recent failure of the Silicon Valley Bank.  That seems to have been driven by the same factor that drove the majority of S&Ls into bankruptcy in the 1980s.

Briefly, they borrowed short and lent long.  Short, as in short-term.   The money they took in — borrowed from their depositors — could be withdrawn at any time.  Long, as in long-term.  They apparently bought a lot of U.S. Treasury bonds. Which, although liquid enough at any given time, are still long-term loans to the U.S. Treasury.  (And a fundamentally odd thing for a bank to invest in, when you get right down to it.  It’s as if they couldn’t be bothered to find something with a better rate of return.)

In any case, as with any fixed-return asset, the price of those bonds drops as interest rates rise.  Owning a lot of fixed-return long-term securities, in an era of rising rates, is a recipe for bank failure.  (Or, as in the case of the 1980s, S&L failure.)  As I shall explain below.

And, after more than a decade of more-or-less zero inflation and below-zero real interest rates, I have to wonder how many more banks are now lurking out there, in our current environment of rising interest rates, waiting to fail from that same root cause.

If you just want to see a professional write-up of the S&L crisis — minus the dirt — this piece by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is about as good as it gets.

Skipping the details, how does the FDIC operate?

U.S. banking regulation has a lot of generally-unrecognized quirks.  Many of these derive from the fact that States were in the business of chartering banks long before the Federal government got in on that.  States never relinquished that right.  As a consequence, what appears to consumers today as a more-or-less monolithic industry is actually a mix of a institutions following different rules and regulations.

The practical consequence of this is that almost anything you say about bank regulation and deposit insurance will have some exception, somewhere.  In Virginia, it appears that all state-chartered banks are in fact FDIC insured, meaning that they are subject to Federal regulation.   But you can find states that allow some commercial banks to have no deposit insurance (e.g., CT), to (typically) states that operate bank insurance funds secondary to the FDIC, insuring deposit amounts in excess of the $250,000 FDIC limit (e.g, MA).  You can also find entire categories of bank-like institutions that only exist under state charters (read the CT reference above to get the gist of that).

The FDIC insures most bank deposits in the U.S., so it’s worth a paragraph or two to explain the finances of that.  (The FDIC reference page is here, the corresponding Credit Union reference page is here.).

The FDIC gives every bank a risk rating (termed CAMELS), based on factors such as capital adequacy and the riskiness of their underlying assets.  This risk rating seems to be a pretty good predictor of which classes of banks are at higher risk of failure.

Source:  Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Staff Studies. Report No. 2020-01. A History of Risk-Based Premiums at the FDIC, January 2020.

The FDIC charges banks a quarterly insurance premium based on the amount of insured deposits and the riskiness of the bank. As you can see, a large and risky bank might easily pay 10 times the insurance premium of a small bank with low apparent default risk.

Source:  https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/insurance/assessments/proposed.html

In normal times, best I can tell, on average, covered institutions pay insurance premiums equal to about 0.12 cents per dollar of deposits.   Effectively, that’s what you pay, in order to have your deposits insured.  The bank just makes that transaction on your behalf.  But the FDIC can add a temporary surcharge if the amount in the insurance fund gets too low.

The target value for the deposit insurance fund is 2% of the value of all of the covered assets (Source:  FDIC).  Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the FDIC is a “full faith and credit” entity, meaning that the Federal government has to step in and make good on those insured deposits even if the insurance fund itself has been depleted.

(Oddly enough, while banks and S&Ls are insured by the FDIC, Federally-chartered credit unions are not.  They are insured by a different “full faith and credit” entity, the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund, and are supervised by the National Credit Union Administration.)

That “designated reserve ratio” was 1.25% of assets before the near-death of our banking system in 2008-2009.  I went over this years ago, in Post #341.  Since the demise of the FSLIC in the 1980s, we’ve only had one episode where, arguably, the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund was subject to significant strain.

The graph below, courtesy of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), show the surge in bank failures that occurred in 2008 and 2009.  In 2008, despite significant intervention by the Federal Reserve to try to stabilize the financial system, banks with assets amounting to more than a third of a trillion dollars failed.

Accordingly, the balance in the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund ran negative during that wave of bank failures.  Near as I can recall, this got absolutely no press coverage at the time.  Plausibly, the FDIC kept fairly quiet about it, and at the same time the FDIC avoided a cash-flow issue by requiring banks to make their next three years insurance premium payments, up front, to keep the money flowing.  (That, from detailed reporting in the Journal of Accountancy.)

Source:  FDIC

Unsurprisingly, after that, they upped the target from 1.25% to 2% of covered assets.

In short, the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund was stress-tested in that episode, came up a bit short, and, accordingly, has been required to run a bit more conservatively ever since.  Acknowledging that if things really go south, the full faith and credit of the U.S. government stands behind them.

Unlike the S&Ls, discussed below, the proximate cause for those bank failures was the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage bubble, leading to a sharp downward adjustment in US housing prices, of a sort that had not been seen in the US for generations.  The blue line below (from the Saint Louis Federal Reserve) shows an index of U.S. housing prices.  The hump, peaking around 2006, is “the housing bubble”.  The  red line, for reference, is the US Consumer Price Index.  The graph runs from 1975 at the left, the 2019 at the right.  The gray bars are recessions.

Basically, a lot of banks made what in retrospect were a lot of really bad loans, based on ludicrously inflated real estate prices.  Based, in turn, on what in hindsight was clearly a speculative bubble in real estate, driven by exceptionally easy credit, even for high-risk properties.

Finally, the billion-dollar question:  How much does the FDIC lose when it shuts down a bank?  Obviously, that varies, but after staring at a few tables in various sources, a good guess is about 8% of the assets of the bank.  So if the Silicon Valley Bank is typical, and has $200B – $250B in assets, the Deposit Insurance Fund can expect to take a hit of about $20B.  Far below the current balance of around $120B in that fund.

The 1980s S&L crisis and the death of the FSLIC.

Source:  An Examination of the Banking Crises of the 1980s and Early 1990s,

The first thing to grasp is that S&Ls are not the same as banks.  Back in the day, they were a distinct class of depository institutions with their own separate regulators and insurance fund.  For purposes of this discussion, these were institutions that, by law, offered savings accounts to small depositors and used that money primarily to fund home mortgages. In their heyday, half the home mortgages in the U.S. were funded by S&Ls.

Note that I said “savings accounts” above.  Not checking accounts.  The radical notion of allowing S&Ls to offer checking accounts (NOW accounts) did not occur until 1980, with the Congress’s first attempt to quash the S&L crisis.

The interesting historical difference between a savings account and a checking account is that you couldn’t demand to withdraw your money held in a savings account.  These days, all vestiges of restrictions in withdrawal from savings accounts have disappeared (reference).  But there was a time when S&Ls could say, sure, you can have your money — sometime.

In fact, I have both a checking and a savings account at my local credit union.  If you bother to read the fine print in the account agreement, I find the following disclosure:

" The Credit Union reserves the right to delay the availability of funds deposited to accounts that are not transaction accounts for periods longer than those disclosed in this policy."

Translation:  If they are having a problem, they have the right to prevent me from withdrawing money from my savings account.  Even now.  Even in 2023.  These days, with both savings and checking paying close to zero interest, this hardly matters.  I might as well keep the entire balance in checking.  But this is a holdover from the days of bank runs and interest-bearing savings accounts.  You got paid interest for your deposit, but the quid pro quo is that in the event of a bank run, you were stuck.  For other specialized types of saving accounts — Holiday Club, Christmas Club — the restrictions are more explicit, and typically involve penalties for excessive or early withdrawals.

And that’s by design.  With clauses such as that, the bank needs to keep fewer “reserves”, that is, less cash-on-hand and other liquid assets, to satisfy regulatory requirements.  This lets it put a higher fraction of deposits to work earning interest, and so (in theory) should lead to better economic performance.

In short, prior to 1970, say, S&Ls were a backwater of American banking.  They could only offer savings-type accounts, and they were highly restricted in the types of assets they could invest in.  The maximum interest they could pay on deposits was set by law.  By and large, they were community lending institutions that issued mortgages, and little else.

Then along came the economic turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s.  Let me summarize the situation — borrowed short and lent long — in one graph.

The key to understanding why the S&Ls were trapped by rising interest rates is to understand that as interest rates go up, the value of fixed-income securities goes down.  Among which are fixed-rate mortgages. When the prime rate is 4%, a mortgage paying 6% is an attractive investment.  When the prime rate hits 21.5%, not so much.  If you want to sell a 6% mortgage in that environment, you’re going to have to sell it at a deep, deep discount.

And so, as rates rose, two things happened.  The value of S&L’s existing mortgage fell, so that if they had to sell them, they’d take a loss.  And, separately, they began to lose deposits, and (once rates were deregulated) then had to pay higher interest to keep those deposits. Higher than what they were earning on their portfolios of mortgages.

They were trapped.  If they liquidated their mortgages to pay off depositors, they took a loss.  If they raised interest rates enough to keep their depositors, they took a loss.  There was no way out.

Congress then spent the better part of a decade trying to do anything other than liquidate the bankrupt S&Ls.  They loosened restrictions on S&Ls.  They loosened them some more.  They basically urged S&LS to take ever-more-risky bets in the hope that they would somehow earn themselves out of the hole they were in.

In short, the Congress turned what had been a backwater of American banking was turned into America’s biggest casino.  All in the hopes that the S&Ls could earn enough to make up from the losses incurred by borrowing short and lending long in an era of rising interest rates.

From the original chart, it looks like a lot of S&Ls lasted until the end of the 1980s, but that’s an illusion.  Regulators turned a blind eye to the fact that many of those S&Ls were technical bankrupt, because they didn’t have enough money in the FSLIC to liquidate them.  At the time, the term was “zombie” S&Ls. Technically, dead, yet still functioning.  Meanwhile, the industry kept falling deeper and deeper into the hole.

After a few well-publicized scandals, the Congress finally threw in the towel circa 1989.  About a third of S&Ls were declared insolvent and were liquidated.  The FSLIC was bailed out by abolishing it and transferring the liabilities to the FDIC.  I assume the taxpayers in general made up for those cumulative losses, but I haven’t bothered to look up the details of that final FSLIC transaction.

I’m sure there was plenty of malfeasance along the way.  And some pre-existing regulations got in the way.  But the basic story — the reason a third of the industry went bankrupt — is far more mundane.  A combination of

  • Lending long (e.g., 30-year fixed mortgages).
  • Borrowing short (e.g., checking deposits, savings deposits, CDs).
  • Rising interest rates.

That’s just bad news, no matter who the actors are.  Maybe they have adequate capital and current earnings to keep going.  Maybe not.

And now?  Of toilet paper and bank runs, or bank runs were the original flash mobs.

Much like the 1970s/1980s, we’re now in an era of rising interest rates, following a prolonged period of low interest rates and low inflation.

Public information about of the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank sounded like the S&L crisis all over again.  Sure, if you look hard enough, you can find some combination of malfeasance and incompetence.  But from what I’ve read, the main problem is that they tied up much of their capital in long-term Treasuries.  Borrowed short, lent long.  Which, in the era of stable and low interest rates that existed from 2008 to circa 2022, was just fine.  But in an era of rising rates, was a form of economic suicide.

As long as their depositor base remained stable, that wasn’t necessarily a problem.  As long as they could earn enough to stay in business, they didn’t have to realize the losses on those long-term bonds.

But as soon as somebody suggested that withdrawing your money might be prudent, it was game over.  That rapid withdrawal of funds forces them to sell off assets to pay back their depositors.  And if the bulk of your assets are now far under water — well, you’re bankrupt in short order.

Are there more of these in the pipeline?  Now way for the public to know.  But I wouldn’t be surprised. And, I wouldn’t be worried either.  If you look at the numbers, banks fail all the time.

The problem here isn’t with the regulators.  Having learned some hard lessons from the foot-dragging of the S&L crisis, our regulatory authorities don’t screw around when a bank is in deep trouble.  They come down like a ton of bricks.  That’s not because they’ll somehow salvage more value out of the bank if they do that.

The problem is that — let’s face it — people are idiots.  Bank regulators act decisively to quash any general run on the banks.  The same mentality that gave us months of toilet paper shortages during the pandemic will give us bank runs. 

Now, deposit insurance should have put an end to that.  But in the era of constant internet disinformation, you know there’s somebody out there, right now, trying to start a bank run just to see if they can do it.  Maybe a foreign government.  Maybe just a home-grown jerk.  It doesn’t really matter.  Not to mention that you don’t even have to get up out of your chair to move your money out of a bank.

My take on it is that for the Feds to come out and say, hey, you’re covered, no matter what the size of the deposit?  I don’t necessarily think that was good policy.  I don’t think it was bad policy.  I think it was probably the only policy that would work, in this circumstance.

Because now deposit insurance isn’t just facing traditional human stupidity.  It’s facing stupidity, as amplified by social media and the internet.  Bank runs were the flash mobs of their day.  My guess is that bank regulators have to work faster and harder now, to stop those, than they have for the past half-century.  So far, they seem up to the task.  Let’s hope it stays that way.

 

Post #1717: An unremarked silence

 

I just want to interrupt your day for 60 seconds to point out something that you’re not seeing in the news.

Recently, a prominent elderly politician fell down in a hotel room and suffered a concussion.   That’s the second serious fall he’s taken in the past couple of years.  He broke his shoulder in that prior fall.

Currently, we observe the media/social media doing which of the following:

  1. Claiming that this politician is senile.
  2. Clamoring for this politician’s resignation, due to poor health.
  3. Creating and circulating deepfaked videos that exaggerate the issue,to mock the politician.
  4. Assert that the politician has permanent traumatic brain injury.
  5. Reporting on the fall and concussion.

Hint:  The politician is a Republican.

Answer:  5.

Sometimes, what doesn’t get reported tells more of a story than what does.

Post #1671: The future belongs to Boaty McBoatface, or, Why it’s time to cash in my I-bonds.

 

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

 

Post #1670: Time for reflection and garbage collection.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Post #1653: The life table as the cure for lucralgia.

 

As we approach the end of the year, I think about my final charitable donations for the year.

“Give all you have to the poor, and follow me.”  You can find that said, as the supposed words of Jesus,  in one form or the other, in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

In fact, in the most radical interpretation of those various passages, one cannot follow Jesus unless one does that.  “Easier for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle, than for a rich man to enter heaven”.  And all that.

How nutso is that? 

I mean, just work out the literal implications of that for the modern U.S. suburbanite.

“Honey, I’m selling the house, the cars; liquidating the IRAs and the investment accounts; and giving all the proceeds to the church.  We and our children can live as beggars.  But it’s OK, we’ll get our reward in heaven.”

One might plausibly expect some negative feedback to that plan.  As in, I’d expect to be declared mentally incompetent if I tried to do that.  That’s how contrary to any sense of self-preservation or self-interest that particular piece of New Testament wisdom runs.  If you actually tried it, the courts would stop you, one way or the other.  For your own good.  Because no rational individual would do that.  They would assume you were nuts.

But is that necessarily true?

Lucralgia

When I was a much younger man, I made up the term “lucralgia” to describe something I felt from time to time.  It’s a portmanteau of lucre (money), and -algia (pain).

It’s that special pain you feel when giving away a significant sum of money.  It’s the “hurts” in “give ’til it hurts”.  I suspect that each person’s sense of lucralgia sets an upper limit on their charity, barring those who literally follow the rules of their church (e.g., literal tithing).  You can only stand to give but so much.

I’ve always felt inadequate, somehow, in my philanthropy.  You’re supposed to feel cheerful and upbeat about all the good your doing by contributing to worthy charities.  All those babies saved, trees hugged, and whatnot.

But all I ever felt was a vague sense of duty.  And lucralgia.  That ache behind your solar plexus when you do your duty and sign a bunch of checks to worthy charities.

No joy.

The life table.

Those of us in the business know it.  Actuaries.  Health economists.

For the rest of you, find your line.  Then read ’em and weep.  This is an excerpt from the 2020 U.S life table, showing how likely it is that, all other things equal, 100,000 Americans will live past a certain age.

Source:  CDC

The life table as the cure for lucralgia, or the rewards for a lifetime of hard work.

Here in the U.S.A., if you work hard, succeed financially, invest with wisdom, and live modestly, and generally are lucky enough to have all suns shine, you will eventually be rewarded with the epiphany that you will die before you can spend all of your money.

I am one of the fortunate ones who has met the criteria.

Perhaps less fortunately, I figured this out, for myself, a few years back.  Maybe  it’s because I am a health economist, working mainly with Medicare data.  But I was completely familiar with the life table.  And when I slapped that up against an estimate of expected financial returns — that’s when I retired.

The truly weird thing about that is that once you reach that realization, then, rationally, as long as you place little or no value on passing your money on to your kids, then the value of money is zero.

If the checking account balance is going to be massively positive on date-of-death, then, what’s the value of another $1000 more or less?  It’s zero. 

You can’t take it with you.

An aside for my favorite economist-religous joke.

Old Mr. McGill is getting on in years.  He’s exceptionally well-to-do, but never married and has no close relatives.  All throughout his life, he’s donated millions to the Church.  But all he has now, in life, is his fortune.

So he asks the parish priest if he can take his fortune with him when he dies.  And he gets the stock answer, no, you can’t take it with you.

Not satisfied, he kicks it up the Church hierarchy, based on his history of massive charity toward the Church.  At some point, the Pope Himself communes with God.  And, lo and behold, in this one case, God will make an exception.  The decision comes down.  Mr. McGill can take it with him.

Overjoyed, Mr. McGill starts liquidating his assets, converting everything to gold bars and stacking them in a big aluminum suitcase.  Block upon block of the precious metal.  And, as is so often the case, as he almost got that suitcase filled, he suffered a massive stroke and died.

And there he went, suitcase in hand, off to heaven.

St. Peter met him at the gate, took one look at Mr. McGill and his suitcase, and said, “Nope, you know the rules.  You can’t take it with you.”

To which Mr. McGill replied, “There’s an exception in my case”.

St. Peter promptly conferred with God, found out that this was true, opened up the Pearly Gates, and waved Mr. McGill into heaven.

“But,”, said St. Peter, “I have to know.   What was so important that you couldn’t leave it back on Earth, but had to drag it with you to Heaven?”

And McGill gets a big smile on his face, places his suitcase down, and opens it up to display the contents.

Said St. Peter, incredulously:  “You brought pavement?”

Lucralgia no more

My point is that, if you get old enough, and have enough, it’s all just so much pavement.

As a consequence, what hurt badly as a young man doesn’t sting any more.  Inverse Widow’s Mite, I guess, as long as I’m in New Testament mode.  I’ve found the solution for lucralgia.  Or it has found me.

Weirdly, I’m still as cheap as ever.  All those habits of thrift, ingrained over a lifetime, continue to function.

But when it comes to writing those checks at the end of the year, it’s just not the painful chore it once was.  I still find no joy in it.  It’s just something that needs to be done.  But I no longer have to fight down that pain as I sign my name.  It’s just another chunk of pavement.

Post #1648: Perhaps I’ve done a bit too much on-line shopping of late.

 

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I sat alone with Siri,
Christmas presents still to purchase, Cyber Monday deals to score,
     There perched I with nerves now snapping,
     packages in need of wrapping,
Gifts awaiting Christmas trappings, overlapping on the floor.
“Tis the season” grumbled I, “all glory that there isn’t more.”
Else I’d never find the floor.

Ah, so vaguely I’d remember, items ordered mid-November
As a Costco member, now were squatting glumly by the door.
     Eagerly I wished the morrow;—
     vainly I had sought to borrow
From my charge-cards I might borrow happiness from days of yore,
For the spirit of the season urges buying more and more,
Overnighted to my door.

Then my mind seized on the burden, gaze ashamèdly averting
From the pile of acquisitions spilt across my kitchen floor.
     So that now, bank-balance bleeding,
    poverty I’ll soon be pleading,
To my creditors unheeding I shall pay forevermore.
Bankruptcy shall be proceeding, that is where my life is borne.
Christmas spendthrift to the core.

Presently a doorbell-ringer forced me not to longer linger,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
     Packages they need a-wrapping,
     creditors may come knee-capping,
Sorrows I was now recapping, yapping as I crossed the floor.
“Wouldst thou stay, converse a moment?” —here I opened wide the door;—
Packages and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams of Fridays Black no shopper dreamt before;
     Etsy with their goods bespoken?
     Hoping nothing had been broken,
And my only thought unspoken was that I would buy no more!
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the words, “Oh, sure”—
This I heard, and nothing more.

Dragging boxes undiscerning, sinews of my back now burning,
Soon, again, I heard a tintinnabulation as before.
    “Mayhap”, said I, “Barnes and Noble?”,
    breaking from my trance immobile,
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—
Lamentation to dispel with caissons bearing lit’rature?—
‘Tis the wind and nothing more!”

Motionless amidst the clutter, gazing outward toward the gutter,
Up now stepped a stately Postman, clothed in blue to reassure;
     Not the least obeisance made he;
     not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with bureaucratic mien of those who serve whom they abhor,
No kindness shone, nor outright malice, standing at my entry door.
“Sign”, spake he, and nothing more.

Then amidst my sad stockpiling, could not help myself reviling,
Poker face and postal uniform that he so blandly bore.
     “You, man, are a public servant,
     surely you must be observant,
Tell me what the sender’s name is ere I sign my name once more.
Alibaba? Ebay? Target? Amazonians galore?”
“Matters not, you will buy more.”

Much I marveled this ungainly fellow to discourse so plainly,
Answer so offensive, ‘neath my breath I sotto voce swore;
     Yet amid this Christmas season,
     no soul capable of reason
Could deny the reasonableness of his prophecy of more.
Flesh or spirit, care not I, deliver boxes by the score!
“Sign”, saith he, and nothing more.

For the Postman, standing lonely at the threshold, he spoke only
That one phrase, as if his world admitted but that single chore.
     With his mail-sack then he puttered,
     not a further word he muttered.
Thought I — might I utter phrasing, solely him to reassure?
“U.S.P.S. is my fav’rite, other shippers I deplore.”
Saith the Postman, “oh, for sure”.

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “The Post Office badly lacks esprit-de-corps.”
     Doubtless the Postmaster General
     glories in this true disaster
Of a workforce who no faster than a snail our burdens bore—
Till the packages we wait for — are but ghosts on Lethe’s shore.
Post December 24.

Ignore now this Postman’s riling, other places call beguiling,
Best Buy, Zappos, Wayfair, Walmart, to me now these all implore.
     Time is wasting, I was thinking,
     Christmas is upon us sinking.
Shopping days are shrinking, slinking past the deadlines I abhor.
Mystery of kraft-wrapped beauty, parcel that I so adore!
Sign for it, then order more.

Signed I now without obsessing, gave me now his Postal blessing,
Knowing not the sender, tossed the package by the kitchen door.
     Turning now to be about
     his still-unfinished postal routing,
Humming dirges that his doubting melancholy burden bore.
Leaving, he could not restrain from off’ring up one parting score:
“I’ll return, you shall buy more.”

Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if man or devil!—
How payest I for all these goods that you deliver to my door?
     Christmas spending goes undaunted,
     in my home by lenders haunted,
Driven to me by my lack of lucre for the deals I score.
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Postman, “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign of parting, friend or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get ye gone onto your route and bring me goods o nevermore”.
     Leave no package as a token
     of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my poverty unbroken!—mat of welcome step no more.
Take thy bag from off my stoop, and take thy form from out my door!”
Quoth the Postman “Nevermore.”

Source:  (c) 2022, Christopher Hogan, with considerable theft from Edgar Allan Poe.

Post #1645: Swearing off angertainment for the new year.

 

A recent Washington Post opinion piece used the term “angertainment” to describe the antics and publicity stunts that seem to be the meat-and-potatoes of  Republican politics these days.

The case at hand was the narrow victory by Representative Boebert of Colorado.  While she is particularly noted for inflammatory stunts, I’m sure we can all recall other examples.  You might recall local political ads suggesting that a candidate planned to hunt down and kill Democrats.  On the national scene, surely you remember statements encouraging violence against the vice-president.  Or maybe it’s just a case of using taxpayer funds from one state, to fly asylum-seekers between two other states.  Because, why not?

That Post opinion piece offered two general descriptions of “angertainment”.  It’s “… an approach to governing that mistakes “owning the libs” for getting things done for constituents.”  Alternatively, it’s behavior specifically chosen to elicit news coverage along the lines of “You won’t believe what this GOP candidate is saying or doing!”

I guess I’d characterize it maintaining political power by appealing to the mob’s anger, rather than actually trying to solve any problems or address issues.

But as I was reading through yet a different Post article — this time on beach erosion in Florida — it occurred to me that the comments sections on most Washington Post articles are themselves nothing but angertainment.  Person after anonymous person, spewing venom and expressing their hatred for fill-in-the-blank.

So I made a comment to that effect.  In the angertainment opinion piece.  As politely as I could.  And was immediately flamed, called names, told I was an agent of Trump, and so on.

Thus more-or-less immediately proving my point.

I think I had a little epiphany, after that.  And after reading through the comments on a story about beach erosion in Florida.  In a nutshell, the U.S is going to lose a huge swath of coastal land as a result of climate change, with all the hardship, displacement, and loss that implies.  And 99 percent of the comments boiled down to “Florida sucks, and they deserve it”.

After reflecting on that a bit, I’ve decided that I’m just not going to read comments sections any more.  I’ll read what the professional journalists write.   And skip the amateur bile.  No matter how entertaining it might be to get all stoked up on the anger expressed.

For newspapers where comments are heavily moderated — such as the New York Times — there is still some climate of reason in the comments sections.  And the comments there are frequently worth reading.

But in the Washington Post — and, frankly, almost everywhere else — the comments sections really seems to be in a race to the bottom.   Just a bunch of angry people, who got stirred up by the newspaper article, and who feel the need to mouth off.

So I’m just not going to go there.  Surely, even in retirement, I can find a better use for my time.

Post #1602: Legal radio use!

Source:  Fandom.com

Police scanner! This post is notes to myself on the quick and easy way to get a modern police scanner functioning.  It boils down to:

  • Ignore the directions.
  • Buy the software.
  • Buy the data.

Am I really that dumb?

Source:  Fandom.com

In my quest to Get Rid of Stuff, I’m now working through a lot of old electronics, including a bunch of different radios.  Most of it, I knew what to do with, or the stuff was good enough that I could easily give it away.

And then there was my police scanner.  This is a Radio Shack Pro-197 digital trunking scanner.

I bought this years ago — I’m guessing mid-2000s — for reasons that escape me.

All I recall about it is that:

  1. I paid a lot of money for this, years ago.
  2. I never could figure out how to get the damned thing to work.

I figured it would be like a short-wave radio.  Plug it in, turn it on, turn the dial.

Boy, was that wrong.  And welcome to the world of Object Oriented Scanning.  Where everything is an object.  And nothing makes sense.

Realize that I spent my professional career writing complex computer programs. Yet I couldn’t make head or tail out of Object Oriented Scanning.  I won’t go into how absolutely useless the user manual is.  Except to note that it’s so awful that somebody took the time to rewrite the entire manual into a more readable form.   And even that went over my head.

Moreover, my usual approach of turn it on, push the buttons, see what happens, yielded more-or-less nothing.  All the elements appeared to be in place — frequencies, system types, all that jazz needed to define the modern communications object.   All that was missing was noises coming out of the speaker.

Nor was I alone in this.  You can look at internet chatter and see that many, many people were baffled by the brave new world of Object Oriented Scanning.

In any case, after years of occasionally trying (and failing) to get this to work, I finally cracked the code.  So I thought I would share it.  All I had to do was:

  1. Ignore absolutely all the bafflegab about Objects, Trunks, Talkgroups, and so on, in the user manual.
  2. Realize that all of the frequency (etc.) information that came pre-loaded on the radio was wrong/obsolete.
  3. Buy the software, hardware, and data access to replace the incorrect frequency information with the correct data.
  4. Now it works like a charm.

I suspect that a big part of the problem is that I really needed the software and the (hardware) data transfer cable from the get-go.  But Radio Shack provided neither of them.  It is possible, in theory, to program that information in manually.  But it’s a lot easier just to buy and use the right software.

The quick guide

These folks will sell you the PC software, for about $40.  They have a one-time free trial, which for Radio Shack radios is at this reference.  I believe that’s all Windows only.

If you want to use this more than once — say, take another crack at downloading the information that lets you listen to your local public service providers, or download different types of radio networks  — you’ll need to subscribe to the RadioReference database, for about another $20 for six months. 

If your radio is like mine, you’ll need a cable to connect your PC’s USB port to the input jack on your radio, which, archaically, uses a headphone jack instead of a USB port.  Mine, I bought years ago from Radio Shack.  For your radio, you’ll want to look on your manufacturer’s website.  Mine was so old it was very old-school in term of manually loading the drivers and all that.

Using the software on the PC, look up the information for your state and county.  Say, for trunked systems, which is going to cover most urban police forces.  Download it off the RadioReference database.  Edit it, if you must.

Then, turn on your radio, plug in the cable, and download all that correct and current information to your radio.  Instructions for the radio side of this were nonexistent.  That’s because, near as I can tell, when you plug in the cable, with the radio turned on, the radio stands by to download the information.  The computer software controls the download.

At the end of which, all that information is in your radio’s active memory.

Then, to be safe, you should save that information to a permanent file in your radio’s memory.  For the Radio Shack model, these permanent files are termed V-scanner folders.  The radio comes with 21 of them, and you should just think of them like awkward Windows folders.  On my radio, you access that via Function – Program.  Pick a folder, and save the current memory to that folder.

You’re done.

Hit “scan”, and the radio will scan all the systems that you just downloaded.  In my case, every trunked pubic provider system in Fairfax County.

I suppose there’s a software method to limit that search to just a subset, but with 20 more V-folders available, if I want to do that, I’ll just edit the list and load that into another V-folder.  If I want to restrict to that subset, I’ll load the contents of that edited list — from the V-folder to active memory — and use that.

Anyway, for the first time since I bought this close to two decades ago, it works as advertised.  Nothing wrong with the hardware.  Major issues with the input data.

And, I guess, operator ignorance.  Funny thing is, I’m still ignorant — I have no clue how this actually works.  But now, at least, it does work.

Post #1601, illegal radio use!

 

Those of you who just got done tossing all your 3G phones may get a kick out of this.  Or maybe not.

Today I applied for and was granted an FCC license to operate GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service) equipment.

For just 35 bucks, I may now legally operate a GMRS radio.  The license is good for ten years.

But wait, there’s more!  The FCC tosses in licensure of my immediate family members, for free.

Such a deal!

There were only two qualifications:

  1. I could not be a convicted felon.
  2. I had to be dumb enough to think I needed a license for a toy walkie-talkie.

This post is mostly a note to myself, so I can keep straight everything I think I just learned about some of the radios that you, as Joe or Jane Citizen, can buy and use for short-range communications.  Unsurprisingly, I guess, that world has changed substantially over the past five years or so.  Owing, in large part to a 2017 revamp of the FCC rules covering those devices.

The main surprise is that these radios keep getting better.  Even in the age of cell phones.

To be clear, your kid’s Buzz Lightyear walkie-talkies don’t need a license.  Not now.  But, weirdly, until 2017, technically speaking, they actually did.  As evidenced by the ancient manual for the Motorola toy radios that I bought for my kids years ago, shown at the top of this posting.

I’m guessing the number of FCC seizures of unlicensed Buzz Lightyears was pretty small.

In any case, here’s the story behind my newly-minted radio operator’s license.  And everything I just learned about CB, FRS, GMRS, and other citizen two-way radios.

 

Background:  Swedish Death Cleaning

I’m going through an extended period of GRS (Getting Rid of Stuff, to keep it family-friendly).  My version of SDC.  It’s a long-overdue thinning out of 30 years’ accumulation of stuff that I don’t need, but is too good to throw away. 

Much of the volume of material is the result of those twin evils, Cheaper if Bought in Bulk and Free Shipping.  There’s a reason my wife revoked my Costco membership.

But in other cases, I own perfectly functional items that I no longer have a use for.  Sometimes I can recall why I bought a particular item, and the memory sparks joy.  But most of the time, it’s more a case of “What was I thinking?”.

Luckily, for most of my stuff, even if I have no use for it, somebody else does.

This week’s task was electronics.   Not computers — I dealt with my computers last year.  This is mostly radios, cameras, WiFi extenders, weather monitors, adapters, cables, and similar assorted other electronic junk.

Mostly, radios — lots and lots of radios.

Breaker 1-9.

Amongst which was a perfectly useful Citizen’s Band (CB) radio.  (Which, believe or not, has been officially re-designated by the FCC as “CB radio”.  So “CB” is no longer an abbreviation for anything.)

Worse, it was a virtually brand-new radio.  I bought it years ago, for a family vacation to Florida, thinking I’d use it to assess traffic conditions on the road.  And otherwise pass the time on I-95.  Only to find out that almost nobody uses CB any more.  Not even truckers.  Drove the length of I-95 and didn’t hear a peep.

 

But it’s not your grandfather’s CB any more

I found a good home for that particular unit.  So that’s a happy ending.  As part of the process, I decided to see what was going on in the world of CB.  And that led to something of a surprise: CB FM?

I knew that CB had been around, with only minor modifications, for decades.  It was first authorized by the FCC in 1958.  The number of channels was increased to 40 in 1977.  The use of some channels was restricted (e.g., channel 9 is used for emergencies).  There was, at one time, a requirement that you have a license and call sign, just like ham radio.  That was eventually dropped after people routinely ignored that requirement during the 1970’s CB craze.   (All of that information comes from Wikipedia.)

The point is that, aside from a few legal changes, and the increase in the number of channels, the technical specifications for CB remained virtually unchanged until very recently.  Other than SSB (below), until recently, I believe that every CB radio ever made for the U.S. market, since its inception in 1958, could communicate with every other CB radio.  Which meant that if a bunch of people wanted to communicate, and they all had “a CB radio”, then all that equipment would play nicely together.

The only technical innovation (or equipment incompatibility) was the gradual addition of single-sideband (SSB) transmission, in addition to standard AM.  Even with that, I believe that every SSB unit sold is also capable of broadcasting and receiving standard AM signals.  Without going into detail, you need specialized equipment to translate SSB into intelligible speech.  If you only have a standard AM receiver, SSB transmissions sound like a cross between Donald Duck and voice synthesizer.  You can tell that somebody is talking, because it has the pattern of human speech.  But you can’t make out a word.  (It’s downright creepy to hear somebody laughing in an SSB transmission heard on a non-SSB radio.) If you ever tune in to ham radio bands, and hear something that sounds like speech, but isn’t, that’s probably SSB.

 But, to be clear, CB uses AM transmission, and AM radio isn’t “nice”.  It’s static-y, for want of a better term.  And the weaker the signal, the worse the sound.

But in July of 2021, the FCC approved use of FM transmissions on CB channels.  The radios themselves have to be capable of both FM and AM, so they are backward-compatible with the original standard.  But they will allow individuals who purchase new, FM-capable CBs to communicate using a far less static-prone FM signal.

Based on the reviews on Amazon, the resulting voice communications are a lot cleaner and a lot easier to listen to.  Judging by the price, you more-or-less get the FM option for free.  Give it another couple of years, and I’d bet that, with the possible exception of those who require the additional range offered by SSB, you won’t find a unit offered that doesn’t have FM.

So, weirdly enough, 67 years after the standards were first established, in a country where everybody has a cell phone, you can now get these niche-market radios with an FM option.  That, along with the general improvement in electronics in general, means that you can now get a CB that has pretty good (or at least, non-annoying) sound quality.  And yet, by law, every CB radio can still communicate with every other CB radio, using the original AM standard.

Who would have guessed that in the era of the cell phone, CB could still evolve?

FRS, GMRS, kids’ walkie-talkies, and the risks of believing what you read on the internet.

As part of this process I exhumed three old kids’ walkie-talkies.  Probably bought them in the early 2000s.

They still work, and they are occasionally useful things to have around.  So I looked into getting them up and running again, starting with the users’ manual.

To my horror, I discovered that these “toys” required an FCC license for legal use.  The users’ manual said so, with zero ambiguity.  Using these “toys” without a license risked fines, imprisonment, and confiscation of equipment.  All that time, I thought I was just having a good time with my kids.  And the FCC could have come gunning for me at any moment.

But that didn’t quite make sense.  These things look like toys.  We used them as toys.  And the only other people we ever heard, through these radios, were clearly kids.  Using them as toys.  Yet, there was the manual, straight from the manufacturer.  FCC license required, under penalty of law.

I looked around and found numerous seemingly-well-informed internet sites that said — again unambiguously — that any device capable of broadcasting on these channels requires an FCC license.  In particular, use of any 22-channel walkie-talkie absolutely required an FCC license.

Seemed kind of silly, but $3.50 per year seemed like a small price to pay for staying on the right side of the law. So I got a license.

But, at some level, who’s kidding whom?  I could go on Amazon and see 22-channel walkie-talkies that were obviously made to be toys.  Barbie walkie-talkies.  Buzz Lightyear walkie talkies.  Hello Kitty walkie-talkies.  There’s no way that the FCC is going to confiscate a kid’s Buzz Lightyear walkie-talkie for lack of the appropriate license.

And, as it turns out, that license requirement was the law, when my walkie-talkies were made.  But what most internet sites failed to mention is that the law was changed in 2017.  As with CB above, this market continues to evolve, and the law is evolving with it.

Not only do those little half-watt toy walkie-talkies require no license, but you can now buy and use the 2-watt versions without a license.  Anything more powerful than that requires an FCC license for legal use.

You see a lot of stuff about this that comes across as just so much gibberish.  So let me try to distill the current law.  Without resorting to any of the arcane language that we have inherited from prior law and regulation.

Family Radio Service (FRS) and General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) are two FCC-authorized radio communications options intended to be used for short-distance, low-power communication.  Once upon a time FRS consisted of just a handful of channels, restricted to very-low-power (half-watt) transmission.  And GMRS encompassed a larger set of channels, and allowed mostly higher transmitting power (and allowed the use of remote antennas).

To cut to the chase:

Any device with a fixed (attached) antenna, capable of broadcasting at no more than two watts power, can use all 22 channels found on your standard kids’ walkie-talkie.  No license required.

For want of a better term (and possibly even technically correct), I’ll call those devices FRS radios.  Functionally, FRS no longer applies to a restricted set of channels, it applies to the limits on power and use of external antennas of any 22-channel walkie-talkie.  (There may still be a lower power limit on the original FRS channels, but the device itself will automatically take care of that.)

Any more power than that, or if you want to use a remote antenna or repeater, and you need a GMRS license from the FCC.   GMRS base units can operate at up to 50 watts, with reductions required around the subset of channels that was the original FRS channels.  The law also added new “interstitial” channels that presumably would be available to newly-manufactured GMRS radios.

My recollection is that my kids’ walkie-talkies worked exceptionally well.  Certainly had far better range that I would have imagined.  Now I can operate them legally without a license.  And I should be able to get license-free two-watt walkie-talkies with even better range.

Most importantly, all of that equipment will play nicely together.  The two-decade-old units and any modern counterparts.

That said, manufacturers have complicated the situation with use of various “privacy code” standards.  (See this reference).  But the bottom line is that if you turn that off, every FRS/GMRS walkie-talkie or base station can talk to every other one.  Still.  Newer ones will have access to a few more channels.  But that’s the full extent of incompatibility.  My old units are weaker than is now allowed by law.  But they remain usable, decades after they were manufactured.

Post #1569: When the Rapture comes, will fetuses count as part of the 144,000?

Purely as a matter of probability, when the Rapture comes, at least one of the 144,000 will be pregnant. Unless pregnancy at the time of the Rapture automatically bars you from heaven.  Which would have to be God’s Own Catch-22, given the number of religions that frown on birth control. Continue reading Post #1569: When the Rapture comes, will fetuses count as part of the 144,000?