Category: crazy ideas

Absolute vs. Relative Poverty Line

Economists and politicians routinely argue in favor of basing social assistance programs upon relative poverty lines. Such programs have the effect of favoring equalization of income in a country, rather than emphasizing the idea of a safety net for that country’s residents.

Paul Graham has an interesting paragraph in his Mind the Gap article:
If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I’d take the first option. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to. It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If, as the evidence so far implies, you have to have one or the other in your society, take relative poverty.

In light of this observation, it can be seen that each day, several people from 3rd world countries vote by their feet in favor of absolute poverty lines. They do so by immigrating to more affluent countries. They do so even if they are illegal immigrants. They do so even if they end up being in one of the lowest socioeconomic classes in the affluent country of their choice. They do so because they believe that they and their families would be better off being illegal immigrants in an affluent country rather than be legal and sometimes relatively prosperous in their country of origin.

The most interesting observation for me is that economists and politicians discuss feelings of resentment and discrimination among people who find themselves below relative poverty lines, while ignoring that those people probably value more adequate schooling and medical care for their children, which are better for the poor in affluent countries than for the middle class in 3rd world countries.

One more observation is that humans can be divided into immigrant types and non-immigrant types. The above discussion applies to immigrant types i.e. people who are willing to take a risk, immigrate to an unknown country, try to survive there without the familiar faces and patterns of life – with hope of doing better. Non-immigrant types value more stability and security, and are willing to forego opportunities in favor of this. It is possible that non-immigrants (who are usually the majority in countries without significant percentage of immigrants among their residents) are the ones who favor relative poverty lines.

Proposed Substitute to the Planned Controversial Gay-Lesbian Parade in Jerusalem

The religion-driven homophobes are threatening with widespread violence if the parade takes place as planned.

There are several voices calling on the Gay-Lesbian community to cancel the parade because of the violence threats. I suggest that instead of, or in addition to, the parade, an attempt be made to collect and publicize statistics about lives, which were ruined due to homophobia – demonstrating that such a parade is still essential:

  • How many youths, in the age of army service, commit suicide each year because they found that they have unacceptable sexual orientation?
  • How many teenagers are thrown out of their homes each year into the streets because they are homosexual and their parents are homophobes?

When the newspapers will routinely write about homosexuals, who were thrown out of their homes by their homophobe parents or committed suicide, the way they (the newspapers) write today about beaten women and women, who were murdered by their husbands, provocative parades might be unnecessary.

Avoidance of wheel reinvention vs. NIH – possible influencing factors?

Basically, this is a true story. However, some of the details were made different from what happened in reality.

Once upon a time, in a nonprofit organization, which will remain nameless, a volunteer sysadmin set up a PC to serve as the nonprofit’s public server, serving few Web sites, managing mailing lists and some other services.

The guy was clever and configured the OS (Linux) on the PC in a nonstandard but highly secure way.

Few years later, other volunteers took over the PC. They preferred not to bother to learn how the system is configured and how to administer it. They preferred instead to reconfigure the PC to a more conventional and familiar configuration.

End of story.

The arguments, which erupted due to the above preference, led me to ponder the general question: when and why do software professionals prefer to reinvent the wheel?

On one hand, operating systems and computer languages are not, as a rule, reinvented all the time. Most people are content to learn an existing environment, become expert in it and stick to it. Only very few venture forth and write a new OS or a development framework for a new programming language.

On the other hand, when confronted by legacy software or existing installation, several people prefer to discard any existing work and start from afresh.

What differentiates among those two extremes? I tried to build a list of the relevant variables:

  1. How well is the framework designed for extensibility or for building upon it?
  2. Quality and thoroughness of documentation – especially instructions how to make changes to the system.
  3. Amount of wisdom invested in the basic system design, which is worthy of learning due to its own sake.

In the case of the above story, the first two variables seem to explain the reluctance of the other volunteers to use the first volunteer’s system.

Jews ask: may we be granted a nakba, too?

Between 1945 and 2006, worldwide Jewish population grew by 32%. Worldwide non-Jewish Palestinian population multiplied more than 7 times (growth by 676%). Detailed figures appear in the table below.

In view of those figures, it should be asked why were the Palestinians favored by having a nakba.

Year Jews Palestinians
1922   668 000
1931   861 000
1939 17 000 000  
1945 11 000 000 1 211 000
2006 14 600 000 9 400 000

Before 1948, Jews living in Palestine were usually considered to be Palestinians. However, the Palestinian population figures in the above table exclude those Jews.

Sources:

Budget cuts drive out the best people

After the end of this round of the Second Lebanon War, the Israeli newspapers are full of revelations and protests about the foul-ups in IDF. There are even calls for the current leaders to go home (but who can replace them in the helm?).

During the last few years, the defense budget was cut several times. There are several important programs, which were delayed or canceled due to the budgetary cuts. I “wonder” why the Arabs considered those cuts to be signs of weakness, rather than as indication of wishing to have peace. Those budgetary cuts were very popular among those, who wanted to emphasize economic development, social welfare and education. And if our neighbors were really peace lovers, they would have been right.

My conclusion from juxtaposition of the above two facts (and from another observation of the consequences of budget de-prioritization and cutting in other places) – is that if you cut the budget of an operation, the operation loses not only what it could do with the missing budget. This loss is a calculated risk, because you figure out that the money had better be spent somewhere else than on this operation.

However, the operation loses also its best people. The top people like to work on challenging problems, on pushing forward the envelope, on overcoming challenges. They do not like to struggle to solve problems caused solely due to budget cuts. This kind of drudgery drives them out.

Then few years later, it is found that the operation has deteriorated and no longer delivers a value for the money still budgeted for it.

Moral: managers need a better way to divert funds to other operations.

Maybe David Ben-Gurion had after all the right idea when he decreed that IDF, as the people’s army, do also various civilian projects, such as building settlements (NAHA”L), sending soldiers to educate illiterate people, and the like. This was a way to have the smart people in IDF continue to do challenging projects, and not feel the pain of budget cuts – yet to cut budgets to operations, which were no longer as essential as they were, once the War of Independence was over.

Another example – the practice of well-managed Hi-Tech companies not to lay off employees when business becomes slow. They transfer those employees to other projects, whose future is better.

A response to a Leftist in the wake of the Qana disaster

I participate in a mailing list with subscribers from all the world. The recent events in Qana provoked a discussion. In this discussion, a Leftist suggested to me that it would be a good idea if I were to write to some Tel Aviv newspaper editor and explain that it is immoral to bomb civilians.

My response:

  • How about writing to editors of Arab newspapers explaining that it is immoral to sacrifice oneself and one’s children in order to kill civilians?
  • How about writing to explain that it is immoral to be suicide bombers?
  • How about writing to explain that it is immoral to use people as human shields, the way Hizbollah are doing in Lebanon?

Not expecting better from the Arabs, I am not amazed anymore at their hypocrisy at approval of Israeli civilian deaths from rockets, yet crying foul when Arab civilians, who proclaim readiness to die in the war against Israel – get their wish and die – only because they die from Israeli bombs rather than from exploding themselves in middle of crowds of Jewish civilians.

HOW MANY ISRAELI CIVILIANS HAVE TO DIE IN ORDER FOR THE IDF TO REGAIN ITS FREEDOM TO ACT TO PROTECT THE REST OF US FROM HIZBOLLAH MISSILES?
Obviously one or two (the usual number of casualties of missile attacks) are not enough. How many of us do you, bloodthirsty Leftists, want to die before you reluctantly allow us to defend ourselves against enemies, who use human shields forcing us to kill civilians in any act of self-defense we commit?

Finally a test for aptitude for programming?

It is well known that it is impossible to use currently available tools to test for ability to program computers.

In their paper The camel has two humps (working title), Dehnadi and Bornat claim to finally have a test, which can predict one’s ability to program. Basically, their test assesses the candidate’s ability to manipulate symbols according to rules without looking for a meaning in those symbols.

A note to self:
According to the above paper, the following are the major semantic hurdles, which trip up novice imperative programmers:

  1. Assignment and sequence.
  2. Recursion/Iteration.
  3. Concurrency.

Novice declarative programmers have to leap the following semantic hurdle:

  • Argument substitution.

In addition to the above semantic hurdles, I know of one additional major semantic hurdle:

  • The concept of a pointer.

I wonder whether there are additional semantic hurdles, listed in some obscure (or not so obscure) paper published somewhere in the world – or even unrecognized so far.

Unlikely inspiration for the characters of Xena and Gabrielle

According to Experts: Xena, the character of Xena could have been inspired by several characters from Greek mythology.

However, I would like to offer another source of inspiration. Xena is described as someone, who was evil in the past, but repented and is now virtuous. The hypothetical source of inspiration, who was in vogue about 30 years earlier, was described as evil. Both of them had coal-black hair and they both were sexy and domineering women.

Each of them even has a female companion, with blond hair and very youthful look. There is also an hint of Lesbian relationship in both pairs.

Welcome abroad, Wicked Wanda and Candyfloss!
Oh, Wicked Wanda!
Oh, Wicked Wanda!

A reliable way to estimate unemployment rate

Instead of using statistics of people who registered as job seekers and/or getting unemployment benefits to measure the real unemployment rate, I suggest that supermarkets and grocery shops honor coupons for giving discounts on foods and other basic needs.

According to Eric.Weblog() and Joel on Software, coupons are an effective way to segment the market into people who are well-paid and people who are poorly-paid. Those who are well-paid do not bother with coupons, and those who bother with coupons to save some money are the ones who are not well-paid and/or have too much free time on their hands.

Thus, a well-oiled socialist government should keep tabs on the rate of coupon usage and use it to switch on or off its socialist policies.