Monthly Archives: December 2004

My Generation Is So Screwed Without Social Security Reform

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I support the complete privatization of Social Security, and would favor a lot more radical plans than the Bush administration is likely to propose. Even then, I can’t imagine any sort of meaningful reform will be enacted until it is far too late and the system is on the verge of collapse.

The thing about Social Security is the more you dig in to how the government is planning for the future, the more you learn just how screwed those of us who are going to have to support the retiring baby boomers are. For example, take this unbelievable nugget reported by the New York Times (emphasis added),

Tables published by the government’s National Center for Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows more rapid growth.

Claiming that life expectancy will increase by only 6 years by 2075 is ridiculous. The history of predictions on life expectancy is one prediction after another claiming that the previous few decades increase was unprecedented and would not be able to be repeated. Since there is no indication that average life expectancy is anywhere close to the theoretical limits of human life expectancy, estimates that low-ball the increase in life expectancy are foolish.

In fact, it’s likely going to be just the opposite — most of the increase in life expectancy in the 20th century occurred in the first half of the century due to efforts that reduced infant mortality. It wasn’t until the last half of the century that medical developments started significantly improving life expectancy of those already over 65. Since we’ve made so much progress on lowering mortality in the very young, the obvious place for further research — and where it is increasingly concentrated — is on diseases that kill middle aged and older individuals.

I suspect that over the next 70 years, the increase in life expectancy for those over 65 is going to begin to accelerate as information from the human genome, stem cell research, and a wide variety of other areas of inquiry that are still in their relative infancy start to mature and provide treatments for diseases typically associated with aging.

The good news — you’re likely to have a very high life expectancy if you’re relatively young today. The bad news — you’re going to be taxed to death to pay for retirees whose life expectancy is also going to grow.

Source:

Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say. Robert Pear, The New York Times, December 31, 2004.

Key to Confronting Disaster — Look Busy

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Watching the video and reading the stories coming out of Asia and Africa of the recent tsunami’s has been a bit surreal. It was hard enough to comprehend a single terrorist attack killing almost 3,000 people. Death on the scale of hundreds of thousands of people in a weekend is far beyond what I can comprehend. The death toll keeps increasing like some sort of one-sided sporting event.

One of the few visible touchstones of life-as-usual has been the media’s response and criticism — namely that the way to confront disasters is to simply look busy.

First it was Bush who was accused of being heartless for not rushing back to Washington, DC where he would have done who knows what? Maybe given teary-eyed speeches about feeling the pain of Indonesians?

Now the media turned the same sort of criticism to Kofi Annan (emphasis added)

Q: Mr. Secretary, picking up on Richard’s question, I think a lot of people are asking exactly why you waited three days on vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, before you decided to fly back to New York in the face of this extraordinary crisis. Could you give us a full explanation of your thinking on that? Secondly, what kind of signal does that 72-hour delay send to the nations to which you are now appealing for greater help?

SG: First of all, there was action. It wasn’t inaction. We live in a world where you can operate from wherever you are. You know the world we live in now. You don’t have to be physically here to be dealing with the leaders and the Governments I have been dealing with. You don’t have to be physically here to be discussing with some of the agencies that we have done.

I came back here because we have reached a level that I wanted to have meetings with all the people that I have met with today. So, we have taken action. And I don’t have to be sitting in my office to take action. I think the same goes for you in your profession.

Annan is absolutely right — haven’t these idiot reporters heard of cell phones, fax machines, the Internet, video conferencing and dozens of other technologies which allow someone like Annan or Bush to conduct their business pretty much anywhere in the world? Getting on a plane and flying somewhere is just a frigging waste of time and money.

But this is what the media wants — regardless of the actual situation, make sure you look like you’re doing something. This goes back decades. For example, the New York Times in an editorial today calls for the United States to drastically increase foreign aid to the developing world to tackle issues like hunger.

But the countries that need the aid the most are also the countries that are the most corrupt and are unable to provide accountability for foreign aid. The United States and other countries and institutions spent decades throwing billions of dollars at developing countries with almost nothing to show for it today except perhaps for hundreds of millions squirreled away in private bank accounts by corrupt government officials.

That criticism, however, is beside the point. After all when the U.S. or the World Bank gives $100 million to tackle some problem, it looks busy, and the media are experts at rewarding style over substance.

The underlying problems that afflict developing countries where, say, hunger is still a major problem, are not the sort of problems that foreign aid can fix. And its silly to throw all that money away just to tell the media “we’re doing something.”

Sources:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan and UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland at press conference on Asian Tsunami disaster. December 30, 2004.

Real-World New Year’s Resolutions. Editorial, New York Times, December 31, 2004.

Christmas Gift from Macrobyte — Improved Performance and Feature Updates

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I haven’t posted a fan letter about Conversant in awhile, but since Macrobyte just implemented a number of upgrades/new features this is a good time to re-visit my content management system of choice.

The thing that continues to excite me about Conversant is how it well it balances the power/ease-of-use equation. Over the past six months a friend and I have installed about dozen different CMS systems, with most of those being PHP systems. Some of them are very good.

My favorite was Mambo — its one of thew few open source CMS’s that, with a number of additional modules, would come pretty close to duplicating the features I enjoy in Conversant. The problem is that Mambo and others are much more complex than Conversant. As I told Seth Dillingham, to exploit Conversant to its fullest, you just need to be able to think really logically in order to use Conversant’s macro system to produce whatever results you’re after. With, Mambo and these other systems, you really need to know a lot about PHP (or pay someone who does to help you) to do the sort of things you can easily accomplish on your own with Conversant.

For me, it is important to be able to make complex changes to my site myself, and to be able to do so quickly — I’d prefer to spend my time writing and editing rather than tinkering, and Conversant does an excellent job of providing a lot of power with a minimum of effort.

Anyway, earlier this month Macrobyte upgraded Conversant which resulted in nice speed increase and this week released a new, improved update to the macro processor, which will allow even more complex behaviors to be added (not to mention improving overall performance).

Sound interesting? Get a free personal Conversant site here and give it a whirl.

Stupid Fundie Atheists

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Just like the fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, we atheists have to endure a lot of idiocy from self-righteous, idiots who call themselves atheists and make the rest of us look bad.

Fox News’ Brit Hume reports on one of these folks,

An effort to boost Christmas Tree recycling in Chicago has come under fire by atheists, who say it unfairly benefits Christians. Authorities planned to hand out a year’s worth of blue recycling bags in exchange for one used tree, but atheist activist Rob Sherman says the program is inherently unfair to those without Christmas trees.

Officials told him he could bring someone else’s tree but Sherman complained that “Atheists shouldn’t have to go begging from home to home for a Christian who will sponsor them.” The city will now offer the blue bags to anyone who visits a tree recycling location and brings a large bag of any recyclable material.

Ugh. Many of these atheists seem to exist pretty much to complain how much this or that public expression of religion is oppressing them.

Consider another horrible example of discrimination. Sherman takes credit for Wisconsin’s decision to remove “Happy Easter” displays from that state’s rest areas,

This past weekend, I drove through Wisconsin, primarily on Interstates 39 and 90. At several of the Interstate rest areas where I stopped, numerous signs and decorations had been erected which said, “Happy Easter.” Other signs, as many as one hundred per building, promoted Easter by depicting bunnies and eggs in a manner consistant with Easter decorations. I wasn’t happy about it. Can’t a guy go to the bathroom at a government facility without the government cramming the Christian religion down his throat?

Today, I contacted the Wisconsin Governor’s Office to express my concern about this state/church separation matter. I was referred to the Highway Department, which referred me to the Engineer in Charge of Roadside Facilities and Maintenance. The engineer took my call.

. . .

The engineer said that the rest stops are maintained by a sheltered workshop (an organization that provides work for mentally handicapped individuals), and that he understood my perspective. He said that he’d make some contacts and get back to me with a response and a decision by Thursday of this week.

Five minutes later, he called back. He said that he told management at the sheltered workshop that they could put up signs promoting the Spring season and Spring scenes, but that the Easter signs had to go.

Sherman is clearly proof of his own position — would a just God really tolerate such silliness?

When he’s not crusading against Christmas tree recycling programs or Happy Easter signs, Sherman worries about a number of issues, including the lack of legally enforceable clothing size standards.

Source:

Lost in Translation. Brit Hume, Fox News, December 29, 2004.

MobiPocket Creator 4.0 Home Edition

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Although it is far from perfect, Mobipocket remains my preferred ebook reader for the PocketPC. After playing around with it for most of the day, I am also impressed with the Mobipocket Creator 4.0 Home Edition.

It has a nice drag and drop function that lets you take HTML files, drop them into the software and very quickly convert to the Mobipocket format. Once it’s converted, the software lets you immediately preview the file in an emulated PocketPC so the user can doublecheck to make sure there aren’t any problems.

I do a lot of editing of HTML documents. Usually I put them on a disk and edit them at my desktop or laptop. From now on I think I’ll be converting them to Mobipocket format and throwing them on my PDA.

MobiPocket Version of Star Dragon

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Boing! Boing! points to Mike Brotherton releasing his scifi novel Star Dragon under a Creative Commons license. Brotherton has text, RTF and HTML versions of the novel on his web site.

For those, like me, using MobiPocket Reader on a PDA, I’ve created a MobiPocket version of Star Dragon. Update: This can now be downloaded from Mike Brotherton’s site. The PRC file is located here.

Note: I’ll soon be removing the MobiPocket version of the novel, as the webmaster for Mike Brotherton’s site is going to add it there.

I have added, however, the cleaned-up HTML version of the noel that I used to create the MobiPocket version, which should help others wanting to convert the novel to other formats.

This differs from the HTML version currently on Brotherton’s site in that,

  • All of the non-breaking spaces have been removed
  • All open paragraph tags now have accompanying closed paragraph tags at the end of each paragraph
  • All of the HTML-encoded characters have been replaced with straight ASCII versions — i.e., I replaced all the HTML encoded single quotes with actual single quotes
  • Chapter and other headings are now center-aligned paragraphs and with opening and closing bold tags

You can download the cleaned-up version here.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0

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I take a lot of photos — I’ve averaged just under 7,000/year for the last several years. I’ve been looking for a good program to track, organize and edit all of those photographs for the past couple years with little success. The basic problem was everything that had the power to do what I wanted was $200 or more, while everything at the lower end also had lower serious deficiencies.

The past few days I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0, which combines the old Elements and Album programs into one, and it seems to be able to do everything that a non-professional would need at a reasonable price.

Adobe has finally included the feature whose absence in prevoius versions was a deal killer — after you’ve tagged your photos to your heart’s delight, the program will write the tags to the individual files as IPTC keywords. This means you’re not stuck using Adobe’s proprietary database to track your photographs, but can switch at a whim to any program capable of importing IPTC keywords from the image files.

There are still some minor gotchas — the biggest being that if you rename or delete a tag within Photoshop Elements, the program will not rename or delete the tag in the image files. So once the tag is written as a keyword to the file, you’re stuck with it unless you want to use a third party utility. This was apparently done to prevent users from inadvertently deleting tags in files that were placed there by other programs. I’d prefer some sort of override pref, but it’s a minor annoyance rather than a deal breaker.

Elements continues to be improved and perfected as an excellent photo-editing centric program suitable for those of us who don’t want to have to learn the full version of Photoshop or would prefer something with a smaller featureset for basic photo editing.

Dell Axim X30 Review

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I have a reputation at work as the gadget guy — I’m always showing up at meetings with some new gadget that I’ve purchased or am demo-ing. My view is that life is short, and anything that can help me finish more tasks in less time is always worth a try.

Last March I bought an IPAQ 4155. Between my experiences with my HP laptop and then this latest HP IPAQ, I’m forgoing all HP products from now on. It’s just not worth the hassle. Besides which, companies (including HP) recently began releasing PDAs based on the new Intel 624mhz XScale processor. Since I rely on my PDA to help manage remotely located equipment, it was time to move on from the IPAQ 4155.

So I convinced the boss to spring for the Dell Axim X30. I thought about the Axim X50, but I really need something that I can carry with me comfortably on my belt clip pretty much 24/7 without getting in the way too much.

This week, the X30 finally arrived. Overall, it is a big improvement over the IPAQ 4155.

The X30 is quite a bit bigger and bulkier than the 4155, but it is still pretty small. Dell still uses a very rectangular design which makes the PDA feel a bit like a small paperback book. That suits me fine, but users who absolutely must have the smallest, thinnest PDA available will probably want to stick with the IPAQs.

I didn’t do any benchmarks, but it feels significantly faster than the 400mhz XScale that the 4155 uses. 80 percent of my time on my PDA is using Agenda Fusion to sort and filter the thousands of “to-do” tasks I have going on at any moment. Filtering those on the 4155 would frequently bring up the Pocket PC version of the hourglass, but I’ve yet to see such slowdowns when performing similar operations on the new PDA.

I do a lot of work with audio and video, and am impressed by the combination of the faster processor along with Windows Mobile 2003′s audio/video options. Obviously you’re not going to get DVD-quality video on a 320×240 screen, but I’ve played around with a few clips that would be more than adequate to show clients using just the X30. It’s not something I will use often, but it’s nice to know the option is there.

The X30 nicely implements the improvements in Windows Mobile 2003. The single biggest improvement there is the ability to switch between portrait and landscape mode. The Axim X30 allows me to set a button to toggle back and forth between the two modes, though novice users would be hard-pressed to figure out exactly where they would need to make that change and how they’d go about making it. I read a lot of novels, technical documents, and other materials on my PDA, so having landscape display baked into the OS was reason enough to justify an upgrade.

I complained earlier this year about how difficult it was to properly configure the IPAQ 4155′s wireless features — in fact I have had a number of people bring me their 4155′s to configure their WiFi because it’s a bit too difficult even for relatively advanced users. The Axim X30 is much better, though still a bit difficult, I suspect, for novices. The problem remains that to successfully configure WiFi on PDAs, you need to know all sorts of networking jargon. Maybe it’s just a problem that can’t be configured for easy install, but I suspect that some enterprising interface company could come up with a better solution. The X30 also supports bluetooth for those who care.

One additional caveat — I tend to wear 3-4 gadgets on my belt at any given moment, depending on what I’m going to be doing during the day, so I have no problem coming across as unfashionably geeky. Those not so inclined, however, shoudl be aware that the engineers at Dell apparently have a thing for lights, blinking and otherwise. The X30 has a very small external antenna which lights up blue when activated. The power button starts blinking red when the battery runs low. Depending on the battery status and WiFi connection, the X30 can look like a Christmas tree at times. Some reviewers have complained that this might be a downside for business users.

With a 624mhz processor and WiFi options, the X30′s only downside is the short battery life. Setting the processor to full speed, turning on WiFi, and turning the brightness all the way up, I barely achieved 3 hours worth of battery life. Turning off the WiFi helped a little, but I still received less than 4 hours of battery life. Like I said, I do a lot of reading on my PDA, and it was a bit annoying to read a novel during a three hour trip and worry that the battery was going to run out before reaching my destination.

Dell does sell an extended-life 1800mAh battery, which I did order. The problem is that the battery sticks out about 1/4 inch from the rear of the X30 which then renders the PDA incompatible with all of the cases for it. It also means you can’t lay the PDA flat on a surface for reading or other task. I’ll probably end up carrying mine around solely for emergencies or breaking down and buying another 900mAh.

Speaking of charging the X30, the folks at Dell skimp and leave out a cradle for the X30. I don’t really use cradles, since I don’t sync my PDA and rarely take it out of its RhinoSkin case, but for people who do want to sync/charge with a cradle, that’s going to be an extra cost (Dell does include a sync/charge USB cable which works fine).

Clearly PDAs with 4″ screens and 640×480 resolutions are the future, but I’d prefer to wait another 8-12 months to see more options there and perhaps even faster processors (from my personal testing and reviews, the 624mhz processor is still a bit sluggish pushing around the pixels required for a 640×480 display). Until then, the X30 is an excellent alternative that will more than fit the bill until the VGA PDAs come down in price a bit.

Anti-Porn Witch Hunts Are So Creepy When They’re In India

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This Boing! Boing! link is fascinating, I think, because it really highlights just what partisan hacks the authors of that particular blog have become.

Here’s the short version — a kid in India uses his cell phone to take video of some girl giving him a blow job. Someone posts a copy of the video for sale on an Indian subsidiary of Ebay.

Here’s where things start to get bizarre — the Indian government arrests the president of the Ebay subsidiary, Avnish Bajaj, and charges him with disseminating obsenity because, (after all, the video was offered for sale on his service.)

One can imagine the well-placed outrage, for example, if the U.S. Justice Department ordered the arrest of the CEO of EBay in this country because someone posted an obscene video for sale.

In the Indian case, it turns out that Bajaj is an American citizen and so the U.S. government is actively intervening on his behalf with the India government. But instead of lauding the government for looking to protect the rights of its citizens, the move is derided by the usual suspects,

Update: Fleshbot picked up an interesting/creepy angle on the story as reported by Agence France-Presse: the incident is
reportedly being followed at the “highest levels” of US government as well. Fleshbot’s editor asks, “Yes, the manager of Baazee.com is an Indian-born US citizen, but still. Is this the sort of case the US State Department usually gets involved in? We’d have thought they were busy with other things, like … oh, war and stuff.” Link

And reader John McCarthy says, “According to todayÂ’s Salon, CondiÂ’s on the trail of the India phone sex scandal.”

[Condoleezza] Rice is understood to have telephoned the U.S. ambassador in India, David Mulford, about the case. The Bush administration’s national security advisor and future secretary of state has let it be known that she is furious about Bajaj’s humiliating treatment. He is, after all, a U.S. citizen.

Again, I can’t imagine Boing! Boing! treating so cavalierly the arrest of a U.S. citizen by the U.S. government for such a tertiary (non-existent actually) role in disseminating obsenity. The obvious comment that comes to mind about the administration’s role is that it is nice to see them defending the rights of Mr. Bajaj, and that hopefully they can start to take the rights of Americans living on U.S. territory as seriously as they take the rights of Americans living in India.

Instead, the U.S. efforts to protect Bajaj are simply (emphasis added)”intersting/creepy.” What the hell is creepy about protecting Bajaj from an anti-porn witch hunt? Oh, that’s right, since John Ashcroft and George W. Bush aren’t leading the witch hunt, the story’s just not the same.