No, Dave, it's just you

As we’ve all heard, the job of those high-income earners who benefit from Bush-era tax cuts is to create jobs. But they seem to be slashing jobs more than creating them. So why do the job creators still have jobs?

In all seriousness, it’s disingenuous to expect businesses to create jobs. Whether a business sees itself as maximizing profit or maximizing value for a customer’s dollar, employees are expensive and therefore job creation needs to be avoided.

As a software developer, I’ve probably eliminated at least as many jobs as I’ve created. Mostly I’ve eliminated work, which allows people to work on other things and changes the nature of the job. That’s a productivity increase, but not one that gets measured in government statistics. I think I’ve generally made life better for those who have used my software, and the same is true for computer programmers in general. But there’s no guarantee that new jobs (e.g. webmaster) will outnumber the old ones (e.g. phone answering service.) My sense is that most job-creating innovation comes from individuals making incremental improvements to their own jobs, or even inventing their own jobs. And for that kind of innovation you need a middle class with enough of a safety net to take risks.

But it’s not just me. Recently NPR interviewed millionaires affected by the latest tax proposal, and they didn’t manage to find a single one whose hiring decisions would be significantly influenced by changes in the tax rate.

A surprisingly good post-Halloween variation on my regular refried beans.

Make refried beans with black beans, using the following modifications to give it a rich mole flavor.

1. Add 0.5 tsp cinnamon when adding the oregano to the onion and cumin.
2. Chop 3 fun-sized chocolate candy bars in the food processor along with the rest of the refried beans.

Serve in soft-shelled tacos or as burritos. This is rich enough that salsa and cheese shouldn’t be necessary, but fresh lettuce and tomatoes are a nice addition. For chocolate, I used two Nestle Crunch bars and one Milky Way.

Dennis Richie was one of the most important computer pioneers. His language, C, is at the foundation of all operating systems in common use today. If you want some code to run on every smartphone, every desktop, and every server, you write it in C. If you got rid of all the C compilers, Apple couldn’t build Mac OS or iOS, Microsoft couldn’t build Windows, and Google couldn’t build Android or their servers. It is no exaggeration to say that all the most important software in the world is written in C.

John Gruber writes:

Another new pattern: the expansion of the iPhone product line down to free-with-a-contract pricing. Apple did this not by creating a new “low-end” model, but by keeping the 3GS around for another year. This move seems so obvious that I’m disappointed in myself for not having predicted it. Operations wise, the 3GS doesn’t just use cheaper components, but because Apple has been making it for two and a half years, they’ve surely streamlined the manufacturing process.

The most important cost savings is the value of simply keeping the factory doors open. For technology components manufacturers, costs break down into two categories: fixed and operational. The fixed costs can be huge. A new chip fab (factory) costs over a billion dollars. Companies like Intel spend the first several years just paying for the R&D and the factory. An Intel processor doesn’t actually start making them any money until they have a newer high-end chip, and the “obsolete” chip gets sold at discount prices. Without the fixed costs, the discount prices have a healthy profit margin.

Video game consoles are built around this model. They keep roughly the same price and the same specs over their lifetime. For the first few years, consoles are a huge bargain: the manufacturers actually loose money on them. Near the end of their lifetime, the components are laughably obsolete, but the price is justified by the huge library of video games they run. This drives their design. Hard disks were added only reluctantly, since their platters don’t get cheaper. Chips are good. And custom anything (processors, controllers, cases) is the best, as R&D is a pure front-end cost which keeps the console distinctive in later years.

Apple knows streamlined manufacturing, and it shows in the iPhone 4’s design. Using an antenna and two panes of glass for the case minimizes materials costs. As does a small battery. Small and thin, few buttons: it’s not just for looks, it’s to maximize the factory’s lifetime. The iPhone 4 was designed to be a third-world discount product. But for now, it’s cheaper to keep making the 3GS in an old factory than to put old components in an iPhone 4.

In thinking back on Steve Jobs, I remember an insight I had years ago, while he was at NeXT. Most people in the computer industry are either perfectionists or pragmatists. The perfectionists do well in academia, where it doesn’t matter that their big ideas take years to turn into practical products (think Donald Knuth.) The pragmatists do well in the private sector, where a steady stream of adequate hacks trump elegant designs. Think Microsoft under Bill Gates: they had a reputation for shipping a laughable 1.0, followed by a nearly respectable 2.0, and then kill the competition with 3.0. Compare the Mozilla Foundation, which disappeared and left MS Internet Explorer with a monopoly while they perfected their browser. Or think of well-designed but expensive SCSI disks, which got eaten alive by the inconvenient, cost-cutting ATA format. Or BSD vs. Linux. (Or both vs. GNU Herd, which never shipped.) And on and on.

Of all the paradoxes of Steve Jobs, this is perhaps the most important. He was a perfectionist who didn’t miss deadlines.

Here is my letter to my grandchildren which I wrote this summer. I’ve scrambled it to discourage you, dear reader, from reading it. So why am I linking to it? So the Internet Archive and other spiders will find it and archive it permanently. That way, once leppik.net is long gone, my descendants will simply need to know that it was there, and that the URL was http://www.leppik.net/david/7gen/1_OtherGrandchildren.html in 2012. (I hope I’ll be able to entice the spider to archive it by 2012.)

Just watched an interesting lecture on IQ and genomics which makes a number of interesting claims. First, that IQ is as inheritable as height, which is to say that genes are 70% responsible. Second, that it appears to be the result of many different genes, each of which contributes a little bit. (With height, they’ve found 200 such genes.) And third, that although no IQ genes have been discovered, we’ll likely have discovered many of them within the next decade.

This raises many interesting questions, but from an evolutionary standpoint, I see one big one. If IQ is mostly genetic, and it is a major influence in life success (both of which are claimed), why isn’t everyone high-IQ? Is there an evolutionary advantage to a lower IQ (e.g. lower caloric requirements, thus more likely to survive a famine; or lower birthrate?)

This also raises some interesting quandaries. It’s standard practice to do genetic testing on fetuses, to screen for particularly nasty disorders. It’s possible to sequence the entire fetal genome. By the time my kids are grown up, there’s a good chance they’ll be able to do prenatal IQ testing which won’t be as accurate as a real IQ test, but will have decent predictive power.

At work, we’re updating old audio files (uncompressed WAV format) into more modern audio formats. It takes about a second per recording, and we have several million recordings. This means our conversion process will take over a month. These files are big, and the output is on a distributed filesystem: they get copied to many of our servers. So we don’t want to speed the process up too much if it will strain our critical servers.

This gives me some insight into YouTube’s reluctance to embrace additional media formats, even Google’s pet project WebM. Like us, they are sensitive to hardware constraints. Even with virtually unlimited money and resources, it takes time to move gigabytes from one disk to another. Google gets around this by splitting data across many servers, so rather than touching a gigabyte on a single disk you move a few megabytes each across several servers. But when all their data needs to be updated, then every server needs to move gigabytes. So Google has no advantage over an average Joe trying to restore his hard disk from backup. Even if Google could build a new datacenter just for video processing, they’d still have to move all the data out of the existing datacenters into the new one and back.

My guess is that YouTube is using its existing video servers to create WebM versions of its videos, while continuing to serve those videos to users. But it will take months, if not years, to get to a point where they can serve WebM content to users.

Michael Hart is not exactly a celebrity. But as founder of Project Gutenberg, he’s an inspiration. He had a simple idea, digitizing and disseminating public-domain books. Perhaps it was inevitable that paper books would end up digitized, just as hand-copied ancient manuscripts were made into printed books. But he was the first. Often times the march of progress seems inevitable, especially in retrospect; just as often the appearance is misleading. When it comes to books online, the world doesn’t begin and end with Google and Amazon. Typically their source is Project Gutenberg, and it can be your source too. Thanks to Michael Hart.

I’d been wondering who those 46% who don’t pay federal income taxes are. Here’s a break-down. In short, 23% are at or below the poverty line, 7% get deductions related to cost-of-living (e.g. earned income tax credit, child credit) that push their taxable income below the line, 10% are retired. That leaves 6% in the “other” category.

I find it mind boggling that, here in the USA, 30% of people are struggling to make ends meet.