Is the Internet overhyped?

Is the Internet overhyped?
Melvyn D. Magree
Originally published in
Northland Reader
now
Reader Weekly
May 25, 2000

“We know we must connect all our classrooms to the Internet...”  (Pres. William J. Clinton, State of the Union Address, January 27, 2000) (1)

Really?  The band room?  The wood shop?  The English class?

Does the band room need Internet access to provide music?  Or would the money be better spent on buying sheet music and acquiring and maintaining instruments?

Does the wood shop need Internet access to provide project plans?  Or would the money be better spent on acquiring and maintaining tools?

Does the English class need Internet access to provide copies of Shakespeare?  Or would the money be better spent on buying hardcover copies of Shakespeare, Richard Wright, and Ursula K. Le Guin?

Clinton’s statement and similar statements by many others are indicative more of a mania to adopt the “latest and greatest” without thinking through all the consequences.  This mania is seen both in government and private organizations.  Sometimes it comes from the top down, sometimes from the bottom up.

“OK, Mr. Author, if the Internet is such a mania, how come you make so much use of it for your articles?  And if you use it, shouldn’t school kids learn to use it?”  Yes and no.

Yes, the Internet can be a wonderful tool, but it can also be a great waste of time.  “A library is where you go to find facts. The web is more like a garage sale: it's possible you'll find what you want, but only with a lot of digging, searching, and wading through things that smell funny.” (2)

I found out just how true this was in researching this article.  I’ll come back to this later.

No, school children can learn to use the Internet at anytime in their lives.  I am active in the University for Seniors at UMD.  Many of the members are using computers for a wide variety of tasks.  Many of them first used a personal computer within the last ten years.  The successful users among them have two common traits: a love of learning and an ability to type.

“Even some usually pro-technology types, like Apple Computer Co. founder Steven Jobs, have expressed doubts [about computers in schools], suggesting that what students need is more classroom focus on basics like writing and mathematics and higher-level skills such as critical thinking.”  (3)

Because Frank James paraphrased Steve Jobs, I wanted to find Jobs’ own words.  I did a search with Alta Vista for “critical thinking”, “steve jobs” “apple”, and “education”.  Alta Vista found 39 web pages.  The first page was an Apple page of “Hot News”.  I searched it for “critical thinking”, but it had changed!  It was the only Apple page of the thirty-nine.

I checked a few other pages, but most of them “smelled funny”.  So, I decided to start with Apple’s home page and search within Apple’s own site.  I did a search of “critical thinking, steve jobs”, but my browser (Internet Explorer 4.5 for the Macintosh) wouldn’t load the page!  The URL (or address) that Apple’s search feature created was so long that it wouldn’t even fit in the error message window!  I couldn’t even search for “Jobs”!!!

One of the Internet success stories is Amazon.com, a bookseller!  In fact, if you do a search for something on the internet, you are quite likely to find reviews of books on the subject rather than the text as written by the original authors.  Of course, you can search the Internet for free because the search site depends heavily on revenues from booksellers who want to sell you books on the subject of your choice.

One of the most optimistic works on the future of technology is Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead.  It is available in good old-fashioned paper form.  The only way to get the electronic form (a CD-ROM) is to buy the book.  I searched for “the road ahead” on the internet, and no Microsoft page was in the first 10 pages of the 3,997 found.  I went to Microsoft’s home page and did a search for “the road ahead”.  The first 10 pages of the 67 found were not the text of the book.  I did find that the CD-ROM might have an error!  (However, on August 2, 2007, the page describing the error is no longer available.) (

Should computers be in schools at all?  Of course computers should be in schools, in appropriate places.  The first is in typing, sorry, keyboarding.  Who wants to learn to type on a big heavy mechanical typewriter like I did over 40 years ago?  But we don’t need to have the latest, biggest, fastest computers to teach typing.  Even a Commodore 64 can do that.  The second is in the library as an addition to a great, humongous collection of books.

For it is from books and great mentors that we learn writing, mathematics, and critical thinking.  Let us make sure we have well-stocked libraries and highly-respected teachers.  When we have achieved those two goals, then maybe we can think about adding computers.

(1)I accessed this quote May 4, 2000 at http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/SOTU00/sotu-text.html.  That page is no longer available.  I imagine each President deletes his predecessor's records after the National Archives has copied them.  However, the Clinton library's copy of the speech does not have that phrase or any other mention of connecting classrooms to the Internet!  After an exchange of emails with an archivist I learned that there is a briefing copy and a transcript.  My search had only turned up the briefing copy.  The archivist gave me the link to The American Presidency Project's copy. and the correct link in the Clinton library.  I couldn't find the latter because I searched on the date of the speech, but the speech was indexed under the date of inclusion into the web site!  Searching the web is not always a solo endeavour.

(2) “Kev's Collection of Cool Quotes”, Kevin Killion, accessed August 2, 2007.  Kevin moved from the URL that I originally had.

(3) “Plan to wire all schools to Internet falls behind”, Chicago Tribune Online, Frank James, Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau, June 22, 1999,  file available in Chicago Tribune paid archive.

©2000, 2007 Melvyn D. Magree

Who decides radical design change?

After the dust for "Seamless" settled, I went to the Star Tribune web edition, expecting to see the usual facsimile edition.  Instead I found a clutter with a page occupying less of the screen than before.

Why do management and designers make radical changes that maybe only a few want?  Many users like the way things work and only want tweaks to fix a few things that don't work well.

Apple is notorious for this.  What worked one way well suddenly works in a completely different way.   Way back in the first decade of the Mac, I looked forward to updates, especially new levels.  Now, I won't touch a new level unless I buy a new gadget.  And many times, I wish I had stuck with the old gadget even if the newer is faster and has more data capacity.

I think the problem is "focus groups".  Management pays a few selected participants to attend a meeting while management watches behind one-way glass.  The moderator works and works to get the participants to agree to management's proposal.  Only when the participants agree to management's proposal do they get their honorarium and get to go home.

I know!  I was in a focus group to approve "Comfort Systems" for the Duluth gas and water department.  Few of us were happy with "Comfort Systems".  We didn't know until later who the entity was; we assumed it was a private utility.

Back to technology: "New and Exciting" may mean "Frustrating and Buggy".

To add insult to injury, Google won't let me scroll the text I pasted here.  It moves the window as a block instead of the text in the frame.  It didn't do that for the last post!!!

Why do we have to know more about computers than cars?

Just after I posted “Erratic cellular settings” I thought about cars and problem solving.

Long ago I learned a little story about car problems that may have been older than me.

A car dealer gave his wife a new car.  She was delighted with it, but she complained that it ran erratically.  A mechanic checked it out and could find nothing wrong.  She brought it in again with the same result.  Finally, the head mechanic went out with her.

She started the car, pulled out the choke, and hung her purse from the choke.

Sometimes, you have to just be there to solve a user’s problem.  I found this out when a user couldn’t access a document because his computer terms didn’t the same meanings as others did.  I had to go to his house to understand the problem.  I found out the cause of an error in my own software when I saw a user print a document on his on printer.  I had assumed a negative number for a printer line would not get printed.  It worked fine on my Apple printer, but it didn’t work on his third party printer.

The problem with computers is that the designers expect their users to be expert car mechanics, masters of intricate analysis of problems.  But all the average user wants to do is touch a few buttons or type a few words to get his or her work done.  If their cars sputters when it should purr, they take it to a mechanic who often can diagnose the problem within an hour.  But if their devices sputter when they should purr, they are expected to put in hours trying to get enough information to get somebody to finally make a correction to the software (or tell them not to hang their purses on the menu bar).

My plaint about all this complexity is whatever happened to the “Computer for the Rest of Us” (The 1984 Apple Macintosh)?

Magree's Law on technology

Magree's Law: the occurrence of user problems is proportional to the square of the "improvements".

I came up with this contemplating how as computers get more powerful and "user friendly" they seem to have more and more head-banging user problems.  See Apple Support Community for verification.

Actually, this applies to all sorts of technology.  Just think of all the great stuff there is our cars and how much harder it is to find the right buttons.

You thought your grandparents saw a lot of change!

We ain't seen nothing yet!

My maternal grandfather was born in 1890 and died in 1974.

By the time he was an adult, cars were starting to be everywhere, but most people still got around by walking or taking a streetcar.

He managed to stay out of “the war to end all wars”, but one of his brothers died in France during the flu epidemic, less than a month after arriving.

When he was in his forties, airplane travel was available, but most long distance travel was by train.

When he was in his sixties, 25 miles away was a long distance call.  I remember him calling us in Cleveland from Chagrin Falls when area codes were introduced for direct dialing.

When he died in his eighties, his grandsons had been flying here and there frequently, including in Europe or to Hawaii.

My own life has seen dramatic changes.

One of the admonitions to get me to clean my plate was that I was taking food from a kid starving in China.

The “starving kid in China”?  Well, unfortunately, there are still hungry kids in China and too many other places.  On the other hand, the middle class is getting larger in almost every country, with India and China each having as many middle-class citizens as the United States has citizens of all classes.  The New York Times just featured a Chinese female billionaire who had to feed pigs as a child; her company makes most of the glass for smart phones.

My first car was a 1940 Chevy coupe, bought from a friend for $20 about 1958.  It had manual transmission, no windshield washers, no air-conditioning, crank windows, and no turn signals.  I had to stick my arm out the window, no matter the weather.

Now lot of people won’t even consider a car without GPS and a Bluetooth connection.

When I learned to drive, the only freeway I knew of was the Lakeshore Drive in Cleveland.  Then came the Ohio Turnpike, a wonder of safe driving built so you would not be blinded by headlights in the other lane.  Now entire neighborhoods have been wiped out by freeways.  I’m not sure, but I think when I drive one of these freeways in Cleveland that I had a paper route 50 feet above where I am driving.

My first commercial flight was in a DC-3.  When I moved to and traveled in Europe I flew in either Boeing 707s or Douglas DC-7s.  I remember standing outside an office building in Rome watching a 747 fly over.  Do I really want to fly in an aircraft carrying that many people?  Now they are even bigger (with far less space per passenger).

I grew up on AM radio and no TV.  Now there are so many AM and FM stations, it’s hard to find an empty frequency to use for an iPhone podcast on the car radio.  I remember when a TV station filmed me going down a sledding hill; we had to watch the news in the window of a store.  Now TVs are ubiquitous conversation killers with large flat-screens in restaurants and fitness centers.

My first computer job was on an IBM 650, about the size of two refrigerators plus a card reader and a card punch, each about the size of an office desk.  It had 10,000 characters of memory.

When I left Univac over twenty years later, we were starting to use internal email from cathode-ray-tube monitors: green letters on a black screen.  Many programmers were being dragged kicking and screaming into using compilers instead of assemblers.  A compiler takes a set of statements and converts them into code the computer understands.  An assembler takes a symbolic representation of each individual instruction.

Some will disagree with me, but I find that the languages now used to program computers are more obtuse and overly complicated from the elegant languages I used when I first programmed a Macintosh.

Now we can put the equivalent of a very large mainframe in a pocket, plus we can make wireless telephone calls, take and view photographs, and send those photos and more to people anywhere in the world.

When we first hooked Teletype machines to mainframes, the sending/receiving speed was 110 bits per second.  Now we get irritated when our 7 megabits per second service only sends at 4 Mbps.

Some of those early mainframes had a memory capacity of about 3/4 million characters.  Now we can buy smart phones with 64 billion characters.

One summer while in high school, I had a job with a surveying crew.  I got to hold the rod while the surveyor looked through his transit or I held one end of a steel tape.  Now surveyors bounce light beams to get the distance.  On one of the construction sites I was told that, by union agreement, the carpenters had to use hand tools.  Now almost all commercial carpenters have a huge array of power tools including power saws and nail guns.

As for the “war to end all wars”; it didn’t work.  There are still wars to keep people in power who don’t want to give it up, wars to make sure others have the “right” religion, and wars to protect a country’s influence on others.  On the bright side, I have read that the number of conflicts are less than ever.  Think of Western Europe, no wars since 1945.

Here’s hoping our grandkids can write similar articles about more techno-wonders and about far fewer wars.

Also published in the Reader Weekly 2015-08-06 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/05/5741_you_thought_your_grandparents_saw_a_lot_of_change.

Free market? What free market?

Certainly not in telecommunications!

All but one telecommunication company* that I know of violates two of the four requirements of a free market.

1) Many buyers and sellers (there are only a few sellers)
2) Buyers and sellers are free to enter and leave the market (we can give up our phones, but…)
3) Buyers and sellers have all the information they need to make a decision (the sellers sure don’t want to give you complete pricing information)
4) All costs are in the sale, that is, no externalities (well, there are externalities like telephone wires, but few really care about their existence)

This little screed was triggered by my desire to have better internet speed than about 5Mbps (nominal 7).  In Duluth, I can get 23Mbps on my cell phone, but if I use it as a hotspot for my laptop the speed drops down to less than 2Mbps.  That means I can’t easily replace my DSL modem by using my cell phone.  My cell phone is with Consumer Cellular* which in turn uses AT&T.  My DSL modem and home phone are with CenturyLink.

AT&T does provide quite a menu to match what you think you need with what is available.  Plans can get pricy if you use several devices, say two tablets and two computers.

The best deal I could figure out was a mobile hotspot with 4GB/month of data at $50.  I can only guess on how much I use.  The mobile hotspot (Unite Pro) costs $200 but is $50 with a 2 year contract (“excluding other account charges”).  If could be sure that we would stay in that limit, it might be a good replacement for our DSL.  Dropping the land line entirely, we could add a home base for our telephone and use our Consumer Cellular account.  That would only be a $10/month charge.  But, how much more voice time would we use?

As for staying in the 4GB/month, I can’t be sure.  My wife spends a lot of time on Skype.

Also, I can’t be sure the AT&T hotspot would always get above 20Mbps.

Also, just how much are those “other account charges”?

On the other hand, CenturyLink is offering 100Mpbs in certain locations.  Try to find those locations!  I got a gibberish page.

To get more detailed information, I had to have an online account.  I won’t go through the hassle I had for that, but I need not have done that.  My wife already had an online account.

When I eventually got my account working, I found the best we can do is 12Mbps.  I can’t find out the price until I request the upgrade!!  So much for the free market.  New subscribers can get it for $19.95/month.  If we’re paying about $60/month for phone and internet (including “other account charges”).  If the cost is split, we’re paying more than new subscribers for our nominal 7Mbps!

Do I go for an AT&T hotspot or do I replace our nine-year-old CenturyLink modem?

*Consumer Cellular is about the only telecommunications company that I know that tells you all of your costs (except “other account charges”).  Not only that, they warn you if your usage might go over your selected usage limit.  And you can change your limits up or down at any time.  The only problem I have, other than the cell phone as hot spot is not as fast I thought it would be, is that the max data limit is 2.5GB/month.

Decisions, decisions!  Computers may be more powerful than pens and paper, but buying pens and paper was a lot easier.

Technology: A Big Bother We Can’t Do Without

Technology: A Big Bother We Can’t Do Without

Melvyn D. Magree
Originally published in the
Northland Reader
now the
Reader Weekly
March 2, 2000

 

Life is so much easier with technology,
but it's care and feeding can be time consuming at the wrong time.

Harvey Mackay, author of Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive, recently wrote a paean to technology (Star Tribune, 3 Feb 2000).  In the main I agree with him that technology has given us lots of freedom: freedom to travel, freedom to communicate, freedom to enjoy art, and on and on.

Many of us have traveled far and wide thanks to technology.  Even in our local travels technology has given us more and more freedom.  I remember when tires lasted 10,000 miles and oil was changed every 1,000 miles.  Now many tires are guaranteed for 50,000 miles and oil can be changed every 6,000 miles.  And I’m glad “they don’t build them like they used to.”  My current vehicle has nearly 60,000 miles and has never broken down (not including a flat tire); it’s the first of over a dozen vehicles to give such reliable service.

Many of us no longer write letters and articles with pen.  I have moved from pen to mechanical typewriters whose keys stuck to electric typewriters and carbon paper for copies to computers from which I can send as many copies as I want anywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, computer technology has not become as reliable as the modern automobile.  In fact, the reliability of computer technology seems to be inversely proportional to the complexity of the technology.

In a speech given in 1998 Gary Bachula, then Acting Undersecretary for Technology in the Department of Commerces, tells a good anecdote about the computer/auto comparison.  Bill Gates said that if autos were like computers they would weigh 30 pounds, get a 1,000 miles per gallon of gas, and cost less than $500.  Bachula responds that if autos were like computers they would crash twice a day, stop and fail to restart, and have to have the engine reinstalled periodically.

Bachula's speech contains several other items where computer technology fails to meet our needs.

Ten years ago, some software crashed but online connections seemed rather stable.  We could send email without problem though only to people on the same network.  We could download kilobytes of software but it seemed to take forever, or at least all evening.

Now email packages contain a great array of editing and formatting features, a number of user defined mailboxes to organize messages, and more features than most people can use.  We can send email to almost anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.  But the email software might crash when organizing the mailboxes and lose all the mail we just sent.

Now we can download megabytes of software and it still seems like forever, but it takes only an hour or so.  But, the browser may crash or decide that it has received everything even though it has a few megabytes to go.

Now we can print pages that look like they came out of a book and with multiple colors.  But then when we have a deadline, the system may say that it can’t find the printer or the cartridge starts smearing or the system crashes every time we try to print more than a few pages.

To make matters worse, we have to maintain our computers a lot more.  In the simpler days we only had to dust the computer once in a while, change the printer ribbon occasionally, and clean the disk reader head periodically.

Now there seems to be lots of care and feeding of the operating system and many programs.  We have to make sure all the programs are compatible with our settings of the system.  We may have to track down some weird setting that is not even mentioned in the manuals to make something work.  Every so often we have to do a “clean install” of the system or a program to get rid of an accretion of stuff whose purpose we know not.  We have to defragment our hard drives periodically to make our software run more efficiently.

It is ironic that as the computers become easier to use, they require more work to use.

This is but a part of a trend of a larger issue: pushing costs off to the end user.  Costs may be monetary or may be of time.  ATMs can be a great convenience but banks push the costs to the user with transaction fees.  Public Radio’s 75Music closed its 800 number and opened a web site.  It saved on personnel costs but it takes more customer time to gain information online than it did to talk to a live person.

This trend was brought up over 25 years ago in a computer publication that few even in computer professions read, which is too bad.  The article was “Guidelines for Humanizing Computerized Information Systems: A Report from Stanley House” by Theodor D. Sterling; it was published in Communications of the ACM, November 1974.  The portion that has stuck in my mind is “One of the most common methods of increasing the efficiency of a system is to employ the recipients of the service as unpaid components whose time, effort, and use of intelligence do not appear in the cost accounting.”

I missed my calling.  Instead of being a pseudo-retired programmer, I should have been a successful envelope salesman like Harvey Mackay.  Then instead of spending so much of my time in the care and feeding of my computer, I could have passed the problems on to my IT department and forgotten about it.

Addendum: 2014-09-18

Our use of technology has changed greatly in the ten years since I wrote the above.  And the change will probably be even greater in the next ten years.  In the ten years since the above, the number of problems has probably increased even more than the benefits.  I sometimes I think I spend more time searching for solutions to things that don’t work right than I do actually doing something with the technology.

For example, I have a more powerful computer with software that can do much more than ten years ago.  But it seems like it takes ten times as long for a program to load now than then.  Supposedly, I can take some steps to improve this.  However, I think it will take me two or more weeks of full time effort to back everything up, weed out unnecessary files, and do a “clean install”.  When do the two minute waits for a program to load accumulate to be more than the two weeks of new installation?  I think I might just hold out until the next time I upgrade, possibly two to four years from now.

©2000, 2004, 2007, 2014 Melvyn D. Magree

keywords: Harvey Mackay, technology, computers, software, problems, cost benefit, end user, crash, slow response, clean install, Theodore D. Stirling, Gary Bachula, ACM, Association for Computing Machinery

What did I learn outside school?

Last week I asked what did I learn in school, with an emphasis on how much I had forgotten of what I supposedly learned.  What I really learned in school was to learn.  I had teachers who excited me about a subject, and I had subjects that excited me even if the teacher didn’t.

I also had many other people outside school who enticed me to learn, something too many kids don’t have.  The high point of this seems to me to have been when we lived with my mother’s aunt and uncle, especially between the ages of 9 and 14.  My environment was rich with printed publications.

They subscribed to the morning Cleveland Plain Dealer and the afternoon Cleveland Press.  They subscribed to Saturday Evening Post or one or two of  its competitors.  They may have even subscribed to National Geographic.  I loved comic books and subscribed to Walt Disney Comics and bought Looney Tunes from time to time.  But we also had books.  I remember having a set of “East Wind Stories”, a set of stories about fictional animals.  I borrowed books from the school library and the downtown public library.

We also listened to the radio.  I remember that Aunt Gertrude had to have the station changed five minutes before Walter Winchell came on: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.”  We also had 78 rpm records and listened sometimes to the station that played some classical music.  Was that WDOK?  I remember preferring piano music to violin music because the pitch was often lower.  And of course, lots of pop music.

We had no TV then.  I remember a when TV cameraman came to the sledding hill I often went to. He filmed me going down the hill with hands and feet in the air.  To see the newscast, we stood outside a TV store.  We also went to the TV studio where they graciously showed it to us.

I had many more outside school learning experiences before I graduated from high school, but in interest of space, I’ll skip forward to the summer before my senior year of college.  I wanted to learn about computers and found a summer job at Ohio Oil Company (Marathon).  Because I was put in a clerical job rather than a computer job, I borrowed Elliott Organick’s “Programming the IBM 650” from the company library.  With that knowledge, I wrote a program to calculate the square root of any number.  I gave it to my supervisor who passed it on to others. Within days I was transferred to a group more closely involved in computers.  Eventually I was given the task of writing a program to process quotas for gas stations and others.  I had lots of help from others on details of how the IBM 650 worked.  On my last day, I handed in the manual for how to use the program.  I think it was used by Ohio Oil for a year or two.

When I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, Case took me back for a masters program in mathematics. Not only that, but I was given a graduate assistantship in the Computer Center that covered tuition and paid $75 a week too!

One of the jobs of Computer Center assistants was to provide help to sophomores who were taking the mandatory numerical analysis course.  We started in July, were given the ALGOL manual for Burroughs 220 and let loose.  In the fall, we were answering all kinds of questions for the undergraduates.

We also learned the assembler called SAVE written by a PhD candidate.  As a project for the only computer class I took, I wrote a simpler assembler called HELP, of which SAVE was the answer. Darned if there wasn’t somebody using HELP long after I left Case.

Case had ordered a Univac 1107 and I learned its assembler and instruction set from a manual. When I completed my master’s work I applied for work with Univac and was hired.  I was first set to some mathematical project that I had no idea of how to proceed.  Luckily for me that group was dissolved and I was moved into the FORTRAN compiler support group.  My boss never learned to write FORTRAN but he was a crackerjack at solving problems with the compiler.  I wound up solving problems with the FORTRAN library, pieces of code called on by users that did things not part of FORTRAN itself, like mathematical functions.  I never took a class in the compiler or the assembler it was written in.  We just jumped in and started solving problems.

Because I did have experience (or was it interest) in ALGOL, I was given the responsibility for fixing problems in the compiler, written by somebody else.  A Norwegian customer wrote an extension for simulation, called, surprise, SIMULA.  Without any training except the manual and trial and error, I fixed problems in SIMULA and its library.

I spent nearly twenty years at UNIVAC and kept learning things on the fly and even giving classes in what I learned!  I’ve lost track of the software I learned.

Then I went off on my own and learned more and more computers and software.  Even now with thirty years experience with the Macintosh, I learn something new with every release.  I’ve lost track of the number of software programs I’ve learned.

With these I’ve learned three things: software can be easy, software can be obtuse, and we ain’t seen nothing yet!

Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/21/3928_what_did_i_learn_outside_school.

Shameless self-promotion

I’ve spent way too much time documenting a problem with Apple software.  I phrased my description in a manner that it was moved from the support people to the programmers.  The latter asked for a bit more information.

To add to my “bona fides” I suggested they do a search for

“melvyn” “magree” computers

The quotes are important.  Without them Google would also search for melvin and magee.  The “melvyn” is also important because there are many Magrees who are better-known than I am, especially in Australia.

Wow! Over 20,000 hits going way back.  Gosh, if I could have gotten $100 for each of those items…

Disconnect on subsidies

Why is it bad to subsidize an industry such as wind or solar but it is all right to subsidize a company for locating in a particular spot?

There are many who call for an end to subsidies for alternative energy, but do they complain about subsidies for fossil fuel companies?  For example, Sasol is getting a $2 billion subsidy from Louisiana to build a gas-to-liquid plant.  See "Sasol Betting Big on Gas-to-Liquid Technology",  John M. Broder and Clifford Krauss, New York Times, 2012-12-17.

I wonder if any economist has ever done a long-term study on the value of subsidies.  I know there have been subsidies to get companies to locate in a particular city or state, and many companies abandon that city or state before the locality has even recouped its investment.  I also know that government subsidies have transformed the economy mostly for the benefit of many.  Lincoln called for subsidies to the transcontinental railroad which greatly improved the U.S. economy.  Would we have computers and the Internet without many other government subsidies?

What we really need are some metrics that show whether a government subsidy will provide a huge social benefit or will only be a drain that lines the pockets of a few.

The fallacy of Buy American

Once again the cry "Buy American" is heard from high and low places.  One was Chip Cravaack, R-MN8, putting a statement into a transportation bill that the steel used in highways should be American-made.

A little aside I can't resist.  Aren't the Republicans the one who are all for free markets and no government intervention?  Shouldn't the free market decide the best quality for the lowest price?  Not some government bureaucrat or politician?

I try to buy American and buy local, but in general this is only a preference, not an iron-clad rule.  We buy local produce when it is available.  I love my made-in-Minnesota Red Wing work boots and some of my made-in-America yard equipment.  For decades I wore 36-30 Levis and then they suddenly became too long.  It wasn't me that changed; I found the 30-inch inseam was actually over 31 inches!  Could that have been because Levi Strauss outsourced the making of Levis and that somebody didn't make a proper conversion to metric?

On the other hand we own one American vehicle and one Japanese vehicle, each bought for specific reasons, not the country of manufacture.  Can you find an American-made digital camera?  Same for most computers and related stuff.  The software might be made anywhere.  I prefer a French music-composing program to a Minnesota program.  Do you know anyplace in the U.S., other than Hawaii or greenhouses where bananas are grown?  Would you rather have chicory than coffee?

On the other hand, we should be grateful that many other countries aren't pushing too strongly on Buy English or Buy German, and surprise, Buy Chinese.

Personally, I'm very glad that in the 60s and 70s European governments weren't pushing very hard to buy only European computers.  Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to live in Europe for six years maintaining software for Univac computers made in Minnesota.  Our customers included Lufthansa, the French Army, and the Swedish Police.

Minnesota doesn't make many computers now-a-days, but many medical devices are designed and made in Minnesota.  If we don't buy goods from other countries, should they buy our medical devices?

Farmers in the U.S. are glad that they have a big export market for all kinds of agricultural products, from grains to meat.  Although India still has many import restrictions "Indian Consumers already buy almonds and grapes from California, and apples by the truckload from Washington." Adam Belz, "Minnesota looks for a bigger taste of India", Star Tribune, 2012-07-19

The military-industrial complex is probably very glad that military establishments around the world aren't restricted  by Buy Nationally policies.  Even the most militarily-oriented Congress couldn't raise enough taxes to buy all the weapons that the U.S. military-industrial complex could produce.  So, those countries buying U.S. military hardware have to raise funds to purchase the hardware.  To do that, they have to sell goods and services outside their own countries, for example, oil!

One of the most interesting news items is the direction of parts for wind turbines passing through the Duluth Harbor.  Big blades are coming from Europe to U.S. destinations.  Big blades are going out to many other countries, the latest being Brazil.  Probably each set of blades had different features that met the requirements of the buyers.

And then there is the name game.  Some years ago a U.S. city was considering buying a piece of heavy equipment.  The city council favored Caterpillar over Kubota because the later was an American name.  Surprise!  The Caterpillar was made in Japan and the Kubota was made in the U.S.

It isn't easy being a free-marketer and a protectionist at the same time.

The wonders of computers

Many of our computers nowadays will flag spelling and grammar errors. I've found that the Macintosh OS X operating system corrects French and Swedish spelling.

We will have a Russian guest later this month and I sent her a short welcome message, with a little bit of Russian. I was quite surprised to see some of the words underlined in red. For one of the words my computer gave some choices and I selected the one I thought was appropriate. The other I had to look up on Google to get the correct spelling.

Oh, for my Russian readers, the words were русский and извините in Извините! Не понимаю русский язик! (Excuse me! I don't understand the Russian language!) I had an й where I shouldn't and didn't have an й where I should.

Stock market – humans need not apply

Yesterday afternoon I sold shares in a stock through my online broker.  As soon as I clicked Submit, up popped a message that the order was filled!!!

In the past, this process has taken minutes or even hours, especially for odd lots like mine.  It's all done by computers owned by the really big guys who are taking advantage of the small ups and downs of the market.  The cents part of my price was .1902.  The stock closed about five cents higher.

And to think that many financial articles talk about investors doing this or that to the market.  Buying a stock and then selling it a few minutes later is not investing.  Recently I read that the majority of stock trades are done by computers, not people.

Foreign language spell-checking?

I have been writing a bit of French and Swedish lately, using Apple's TextEdit and Microsoft's Word and Outlook.  I've found that TextEdit will correct my French and that Microsoft's software corrects both.

For example, I deliberately typed "Je ne peut pass écrir français bein" and it corrected my text to "Je ne peut pas écrire français bien."  In fact I had to un-correct the first phrase.

I still have to look up words and grammar, but a lot less than a few years ago.

Oops!  Le spell-checker n'est pas parfait.  "Je ne peux pas écrire français bien" est correcte.  (2011-03-29)

Here we are at Irregular Blog entry 1000

This is the 1000th blog entry I've posted in the "Irregular Blog".  It's been nearly four-and-a-half years since I posted the first entry at http://magree.blogspot.com. 

It hasn't been the most popular blog around; it took a long time to even get to over 20 subscribers per day and to get two followers.

I suppose it doesn't matter in the bigger scheme.  I've gotten some ideas out of my head.  Some of you, if you didn't get new ideas in your head, you might have gotten a little different view of some ideas.  I do hope that long-time readers, if any, have had a few "Ah, hah" moments and a few chuckles.

Almost twelve years ago, newly arrived in Duluth and walking around, I was struck with the urge to write more than letters to the editor.  I told myself, if you want to write, you have to write.

I did join the Lake Superior Writers Group and wrote a few essays.  One was a collection of bear stories, but only Kyle Eller, editor-to-be of the Duluth Budgeteer, was the only one to show up that evening.

I started picking up the Northland Reader, which had ads for writers.  I called Richard Thomas, the editor, and he said I should send something in.  I sent in "Bear Stories".  Lucky me, he published it in the 1999-09-30 issue.

Every few issues, I would send something more and he generally would publish it.  Then I started submitting something for every bi-weekly issue.  Then the Northland Reader became the Reader Weekly, and I started writing weekly.  Then I was bumped down to bi-weekly.  My guess is that I had about 160 fans; that is, something like that many people told me they enjoyed the columns.

I think I wrote over 200 articles until I was bumped one too many times.

I posted many of these at my website, http://www.cpinternet.com/~mdmagree and still have a few buried on my hard drive.  I also started writing a blog at the same site.  Then I discovered Blogger and started writing entries for it.

People often asked me what I wrote about.  I replied, "What I damn well please."

I have continued that attitude with this blog.  But now I don't have to meet a deadline.  Of course, I like to post something everyday, but if I don't, I don't.  However, if I want to write two or three entries, I can.  I have no space limitation except my readers' attention span.

If you like what I write, please tell your friends.

Here's to the next 1,000 blog entries.  No, let's be ambitious, here's to the next 10,000 entries.

Are fewer manufacturing jobs always a bad thing?

Dick Palmer picked a poor example about the decline of manufacturing when he mentioned Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak.  How many rolls of film has he been buying recently?  Few people use film anymore; most cameras are now digital and can take many more pictures than film cameras.  In fact, it is difficult to even sell a film camera on eBay. "State exports may be up but nation still hurting", Dick Palmer, Duluth Budgeteer, 2011-01-06.

Technological changes have led to many more job changes, but I'll come back to these in a bit.

Another contributor to job changes for over two hundred years has been low cost manufacturing, whether by low-cost labor or high productivity.  Weavers in England and India were put out of business by power looms in England.  Instead of high-skilled weavers, children could and did operate the machines.

New Englanders stole some of the designs and set looms up in Massachusetts.  They hired hundreds of young women to operate the machines.  Feeling exploited, workers organized into unions to push for more rewards for their labor.

Then the textile mills lowered their costs by moving to the South where unions were not tolerated. Even then, people found opportunity for better paying jobs and to attract labor, the companies had to raise wages.

Then shipping became cheaper, and textile companies found even lower cost labor in Asia and Central America.  And as labor becomes more expensive in those countries, the companies move on to other countries.

Higher productivity means fewer people are needed to manufacture the same amount of goods.  Higher productivity comes from more and more mechanization and now computerization.  Even in the 80s, Ford could produce cars for less than GM because it used more mechanization and fewer workers.  Fewer highly skilled machinists are needed thanks to numerically-controlled machine tools.  Write a little program to make the cuts, put the code into the machine, and have a cup of coffee.

My father was a well-regarded dental prosthetic technician specializing in crowns.  I have a folder of letters from dentists praising his work.  When I got a crown last year, the dentist waved a wand over my teeth, an image appeared on the computer screen, he rotated the image and made some adjustments, he clicked OK, and a machine in the basement proceeded to make the crown.  We chatted awhile, and then he went downstairs to get the crown.  He put it in my mouth, pulled it out, made some adjustments with his drill, put it back in again, had me grind my teeth, and so on.  In two hours, I had a new crown in my mouth, not a temporary to be replaced in three weeks and several visits later.

What is manufactured has changed dramatically in the last few decades.

When I worked at Univac programming mainframes mainframes in the 1960s, dozens of people would thread wires through little iron donuts for the main memory.  When I started, a large memory had less than 400,000 characters, each character represented by six donuts.  When I left nearly twenty years later, a large memory had about six million characters on an array of integrated circuits on several sets of large circuit boards.  Now I carry eight billion characters of memory in my shirt pocket.

The miles of film that Eastman Kodak spewed out and put in little boxes have been replaced by memory cards the size of the end of one of those boxes.  On a 1991 trip to Japan I shot nine rolls of film; my cost was over one hundred dollars for film and processing.  On a 2007 trip to Japan I shot almost forty percent more pictures on a single memory card that cost less than fifty dollars, and I used the card over and over again for many hundreds of pictures more.  My cost of processing was my time to download the pictures to my computer.

What is considered manufacturing has changed even more dramatically.  We don't consider software on a disk or downloaded from a website as a manufactured product, but it is.  It's just that the balance between design and physical rendering has moved dramatically to the design side.  I haven't checked, but I assume that Apple Computer has more employees today than IBM and the "Seven Dwarves" of mainframes had thirty years ago.  Apple definitely has more customers spending a lot more money than the mainframe manufacturers did.

The problem is not the decline of an economic sector, but the rate of change of the economy.  I think few people, whether individuals or people in government, business, and education, have sufficient understanding of the change.  Too many people are judging tomorrow by what happened a decade ago.  And too many people are assuming that solutions that seemed to work twenty years ago are going to work today.

Abraham Lincoln said it 165 years ago, "As our case is new, so must we think anew."

To his credit, Dick Palmer has started to think anew.  He does end his column with and elaboration on "The secret ingredient to success today is education…"

Is "Consumerism" such a bad thing?

So-called conservatives and so-called progressives seem to deal in sweeping generalizations rather than looking at the sweeping scope of ideas and facts.

"Slow Consumption" is a case of looking at one facet of American life and assuming that it holds across all of American life. (Utne Reader, March April 2010)

Yes, there are cheap goods that wear out and that we toss and replace. But there are also many things that last and last.

Among these are the modern automobile. I am so glad that they don't build them like they used to. I bought a new 1997 F-150 truck in May 1996. In the fall of 2009 somebody asked me if it was new. Only a few times in those 13 years did I cancel a trip because of a problem. But it was undrivable only once; it had a flat tire. I traded it in this fall for an SUV and later met the buyer; he was pleased with his purchase.

We have furniture that is over thirty years old. We live in a house built in 1922. We have appliances that are less than ten years old, but mostly because their energy consumption is so much less; that is, the new is truly better.

Yes, we have gone through many coffee makers. But we wouldn't have to do so if we were willing to accept a little less convenience. We could buy a stovetop percolator for less than $15. If we kept it clean it would last for decades.

Film cameras lasted for years and years. I had an SLR for over 30 years with few repairs. But then digital cameras came along. They are so much more convenient and they are so much less expensive to operate. I can take the equivalent of over twelve rolls of film on a single memory card, over and over again. Think of all the chemicals that are not needed and that do not go into our water supply. I put the photos on my computer and never use prints except for display on a wall. Think of all the trees that are "saved".

Ah! computers! They are not long lasting. Not because they are not durable. I have a couple in my closet that are over ten years old that still work. But I don't want to use them; they cannot access all the information that is out there, including the online version of the Utne Reader.

Why? Because of Magree's first law of computing: the capability of software rises to meet, if not exceed, the capability of the available hardware. And hardware capability will keep increasing rapidly over the next several years.

Why? Because of innovation. What was known about computers in 1984 is a small fraction of what is known about computers now. Ideas build on ideas. We have a precursor in automobiles.

When Henry Ford built the Model T, did he have any idea about windshield washers, turn signals, side view mirrors, electric starters, automatic transmissions, seat belts and air bags, radios, power steering, power brakes, and hundreds of other features we would not be without in today's cars?

Change is a constant in our society. It has many downsides, but change can bring about a better life for all. Without change, many of us would be peasants in Europe working long, hard hours for the lord of the manor.