a brilliant idea

Sell Alaska back to the Russians

Alaska Would Be More at Home in Russia by Steven Pearlstein

extract:

The timing couldn't be better. The market value of Alaska's 4.5 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, plus the gas, timber and copper, are at or near all-time highs, while Russia is flush with $50 billion in petrodollars it doesn't know how to invest. And with the Kremlin still smarting about losing all those unpronounceable republics, Alaska would be just the sort of strategic acquisition to appeal to President Putin's imperial instincts.

Alaska: Meeting of the Frontiers (LC).

Think what we could save.

Big time red staters, 61% of Alaskan voters pulled the lever for Bush in '04, a fact that helped convince the Pearlstein to write an article last January called: Red States Make a Mockery Of Self-Reliance. (He says, "this rank hypocrisy might be laughable but for the fact that the fleecing of the blue states has increased markedly over the past decade as Republicans tightened their hold on Washington.")

Not surprisingly, the federal govenment gives more to Alaska than it gets back in taxes. In '92, which seems to be the most recent year for which data are available, Alaska taxpayers got $1.91 in federal funds for every $1.00 they sent to Washington.
Source: Tax Foundation, Tax Data on Alaska

An article in USA Today says that every Alaskan receives $1,150 in "earmark" funding for in-state projects. That's 25 times what the average American gets.
Source: Alaska thanks you, By Nick Jans

Some facts from an article on the budget for fiscal year 2006 in Reason.com:

Nobody made out on the highway bill quite like the state of Alaska and its ravenous political class. Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, bragged to his constituents that the transportation bill (which Young loves so much he named it after his wife) was "stuffed like a turkey" with handouts for his state, and he was not exaggerating. The $721 million in tundra spending includes: a $2 23 million "bridge to "nowhere," connecting the 8,900-person town of Ketchikan to an airport on Gravina Island, whose population is 50; a $200 million bridge connecting Anchorage to a rural port so insignificant even the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce tried to block the project; and $15 million in seed money for a 68-mile, $284 million access road to Juneau. (This last one is opposed by not only the Environmental Protection Agency but a majority of the area's residents.)

Source: The Big Easy vs. the Last Frontier How America's piggiest state can help get New Orleans back on its feet, Tim Cavanaugh

According to the Washington Post, when a fellow Republican tried to redirect money from the bridges to Katrina relief, Senator Ted Stevens shouted "I don't kid people. If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state . I will resign from this body."

Senator Stevens didn't just work his way into one of the largest earmarking totals among all states, he ran away with first place in the national earmarks-per-capita sweepstakes. Every Alaskan "earned" $694 and change, just on earmarks, in defense alone. The ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) finished second to Stevens by sending home $383 in earmark funding for every Hawaiian.

Source: Taxpayer.net - Federal Budget and Tax Policy - DEFENSE PORK REACHES RECORD HIGH: Instead of Cutting, Congress Pays it Forward to the Supplemental, by Austin Clemens

What me worry?

Google's many offerings are valuable. Google hosts my blog. Gmail is one of my main email accounts. Google is the first search engine I turn to most of the time. I use the image server almost daily. I use the big G news search and blog search services. Froogle helps me establish ballpark prices for things I want to buy or on which I want to make ebay bids. I make some delicious finds using print.google.com.

(The image shows Google cofounders Sergey Brin (seated) and Larry Page in the early days. Source here.)

My heavy usage doesn't keep me from worrying about how Google might -- willingly or unwillingly -- compromise my privacy.

I'm not the only one who has this worry.

As Google's success increases, critical articles proliferate.

Danny Sullivan has a good posting on the subject on his SearchEngineWatch blog: Moving Past Google Privacy Fears & Toward An Industry Solution in which he points out that our risk is more potential than actual, at the moment, and Google's data collection is less threatening than Yahoo's.

Other articles: Google search and seizure (Boston Globe), What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade (NYT), Big Google Becomes Big Target (NYT), Privacy Concerns May Impact Google Analytics (WebProNews).

Here are some things I'm doing to protect myself.

Limit use of Gmail. I've decided not to use it as my main email program. It mainly carries my subscription to the Web4Lib discussion list.

Use Scroogle for most Google searches. Click the link to learn about this service.

Use the CustomizeGoogle Firefox Extension. This extension offers lots of protection and Google convience. If you're interested, you can learn more on the CustomizeGoogle site and its blog. Also take a look at this piece and this one on the SearchEngineWatch blog.

kleptocratic cliques of looters and world trade

I'm not ready to give up the thread on global economics quite yet. One of Pietra Rivoli's main points in Travels of a T-Shirt is that economic competition is not as potent a cause of economic hardship as many assume it to be. On the other hand political policies that circumvent competition do help keep people impoverished.

In the introduction to her book, she writes:

My t-shirt's life suggests that the importance of markets might be overstated by both globalizers and critics. While my t-shirt's life story is certainly influenced by competitive economic markets, the key events in the t-shirt's life are less about competitive markets than they are about politics, history, and creative maneuvers to avoid markets. Even those who laud the effects of highly competitive markets are loathe to experience them personally, so the winners at various stages of my t-shirt's life are adept not so much at competing in markets but in avoiding them. The effects of these avoidance maneuvers can have more damaging effects on the poor and powerless than market competition itself. In short, my t-shirt's story has turned out to be less about markets than I would have predicted, and more about the historical and political webs of intrigue in which the markets are embedded. In peeling the onion of my t-shirt's life -- especially as it relates to current debates--I kept being led back to history and politics.

In her presentation at the IMF she underscored this:

Whenever in my T-shirt's life I came across an underdog — and it could have been a cotton sharecropper, it could have been a Chinese sweatshop worker, today it could have been an African farmer — it wasn't the markets that were having the most serious negative effects. It was the structures, especially political structures, that we have in place that were keeping these people from being able to play the game as full citizens.

Brink Lindsey, who was the book's "discussant" at the IMF forum, expanded on this theme:

The removal of the subsidies would do little, at least in the short term, to develop the literacy, property rights, commercial infrastructure, and scientific progress required [for African cotton farmers] to take on Texas cotton farmers in world markets.

[Ironically], yes, agricultural subsidies depress world prices and, therefore, hurt exporters in developing countries. But by depressing prices, they help poor people who buy imported food, and most developing countries are actually net food importers. So our extravagance as taxpayers and consumers to support our farmers does confer benefits to the developing world as well as costs.

Meanwhile, Pietra's wonderful portrait of the mitumba or used clothing market in Tanzania provides some perspective for those of us on the free trade side who are pushing economic liberalization as the cure to all ills. I think it's pretty clear that zeroing out your tariffs on industrial goods is not going to put you on the express lane to prosperity if everything else in your country is a mess. If your country has suffered under brutal colonial exploitation and then under disastrous socialist experimentation, if it's now ruled by a kleptocratic clique that loots your country and sends billions off to Swiss bank accounts, if your country or the neighborhood in which it's located is the scene of ongoing civil wars, if low-level official corruption is endemic, and if on top of everything else malaria and HIV and other diseases are running rampant, then fixing trade policy really isn't the most urgent of your problems.

Click for enlargement

Travels of a T-Shirt

There's a book that deals with some of the themes of my posts over the past couple of days. I haven't read it but I've read discussions of it and have read its introduction. The book is The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade. Here's a link to its Find-in-a-Library page and one to its Amazon page.

Back in October, the author, Pietra Rivoli, Georgetown University, participated in an IMF Book Forum to discuss it. Here's a link to a transcript of the session on the IMF site. You can read about the participants at this IMF page.

Here are some extracts from the forum. At the end, I give a link to the book's introduction and some extracts from it.

MR. LANKES (of IMF): A few words of introduction to the book: I think the organizers made a really splendid choice here. The book is about textiles, which are kind of symbolic of everything that's good and bad about globalization, and are a particularly hot topic this year. ... It contains a whole range of anecdotes and insights and ironies that are very useful. I'll just mention my favorite, which is that the growth of the North Carolina textile mills in the late 1800s when they were established was driven by sales to China! ... More fundamental is an insight that I gained from the book and I found truly remarkable: the role that the textile mills, warts and all, have played and are continuing to play in the emancipation of women in male-dominated rural societies. I found that to be a very interesting aspect of the book.

The book steers mercifully clear of moralizing. It is sort of like circling a Buddhist stone garden. One slips into every conceivable perspective on this issue and there are no villains, only actors in what I call an epic struggle and a fantastically complex, forward-driving, and culture-transforming enterprise.

DR. RIVOLI (the author): I like to think of the book as a biography. It is a biography of a particular cotton T-shirt that I bought five or six years ago in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I brought it with me today just so you could see what it looks like.


Pietra Rivoli

The premise that motivates the book is that these very simple things in the global economy can have very big stories to tell. So we can take this $6 product and try to see what it can illuminate about the very complex and complicated world of trade and globalization.

You can see the basic chronology of the T-shirt's life on a very nifty map that National Public Radio put together when they did the series on the book. If you look at the map, you can see that, as best as we can tell, the T-shirt was probably born around Lubbock, Texas. West Texas is the biggest producer of cotton in the United States. It's the most important cotton-growing region. And if you took that area around Lubbock all by itself, it would be the eighth-biggest cotton producer in the world if you called that region of Texas a country.

The cotton was shipped—cotton is shipped in bales of about 500 pounds—to Shanghai, China. China is America's biggest customer, biggest importer of raw cotton. And there the cotton was spun into yarn, and the yarn was knit into cloth, and the T-shirt was cut into pieces and sewn back together and so forth.
The T-shirt then came back into the United States as an import as part of the wave of imports of textiles and clothing that's coming from China into the United States, and that's where I bought it. But more than the geographical journey back from China to the United States, what I'm looking at in the book is the trade policy and the structures that we have or at least had in place that govern how clothing gets from one place to another. So, really, the T-shirt is traveling through a web of trade policy, and that's one of the middle sections of the book.

Now, of course I'm going to keep this particular T-shirt, but once most people are finished with their T-shirts they throw them away. One of the things that a lot of people find the most interesting about the book is the story of what happens next. Tanzania on the east coast of Africa lists used clothing as its single largest import from the United States. So it's the number one export from the U.S. to Tanzania. So, as I tried to tell this biography, I even tried to figure out what happens to the T-shirt in the afterlife, and it's kind of an interesting story. About half of the clothing that we throw away in the United States ends up being exported. A small amount stays here and gets sold, you know, in your thrift shops or what have you. About a quarter of it is turned into wiping rags and sold to factories. Another quarter is shredded. And maybe you're sitting on it right now because one of the biggest uses for shredded used clothing is to pad furniture.

So I came from the beginning of the life of the T-shirt, its birth in the Texas cotton field, to the very end with its afterlife, whether it's as used clothing in Tanzania or stuffing in the bottom of our chairs. That's the chronology, or the biography's highlights I guess you'd say.

Another thing that made this project very interesting is that almost every chapter in this T-shirt's life is right now a hotbed of some kind of controversy. It was very interesting to me to think about how such a simple thing could be embroiled in so many current public policy battles.

For example, the number one contentious issue right now probably in the Doha Round of trade negotiations is agricultural subsidies, and the poster child for agricultural subsidies has been America's subsidies to its cotton growers. If you look at what derailed the trade talks in Cancun, it was American subsidies paid to cotton farmers. So since I started work on the book and continuing so this moment, these cotton subsidies have been at the forefront of what's happening in international trade.

Then if we think about what's happened on China on the public policy front in the past year, you know, there's just no end to the list of controversies. If you talk to U.S. Congress or you talk to U.S. manufacturers, you can take your pick. Do you want to complain about their subsidies? Do you want to complain about the state-owned enterprises? Do you want to complain about nonperforming loans? Do you want to complain about the undervalued currency? Or if you're an activist, do you want to complain about the working conditions, or do you want to complain about the lack of a free press? I mean China is just this big hotbed of controversies coming from all angles, and that was something that I just kind of had to keep sorting out as I did this research.

The T-shirt's journey back to the United States is also fraught with controversy. As probably all of you know, most of the remaining import quotas on clothing were lifted on January 1 after 40 years of limiting imports of clothing into the United States from most important developing countries. Once those quotas were eliminated, we started to see, you know, various kinds of gushes of goods from China. If you compare the first quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2004, U.S. imports from China of cotton knit shirts—in other words, T-shirts, although they might also include something like a polo shirt—are up about 1,200 percent. That's what we mean by a gush. The quotas were lifted and they sort of just gushed in. And that, of course, has created its own controversy, and if I'm not mistaken, the U.S. chief textile negotiator is in Beijing right now, or else he's on his way back or something. They are trying to negotiate a solution to this so-called China problem. And if you think about it, it's kind of amazing that there is somebody in the United States whose job is chief textile negotiator. I mean, we don't have a chief automobile negotiator or a chief airplane negotiator, but we have a chief textile negotiator whose job it is to try to sort out these trade frictions that have been the result of decades and decades of all kinds of unintended consequences of trade policy.

So it seems like everywhere this T-shirt goes, it's in the middle of one debate or another. The fact that the T-shirt was embroiled in such controversy gave the book a lot of immediacy and made it a very exciting project. But it also relates to one of the lessons I got as I wrote and finished this book, because I will say that the story of the T-shirt's life didn't really turn out the way I thought it was going to turn out.

If you look at cotton subsidies, for example, this is an example of a phenomenon where a group with political power is using structures to protect themselves from markets. This is not about the markets pummeling the poor. The same thing is true in China when we look at the women who stitch clothing together. The set of rules in place that govern household registration in China essentially keep these women from participating in the market as full citizens. And, of course, when we look at the trade policy of the more powerful players in the world economy—the U.S. and Europe—and the way they have been able to protect themselves from imports from producers in poorer countries, you once again have an example of keeping other people from being able to play. I found this as a theme over and over again, except in the very last place of the T-shirt's journey: Things were different in Tanzania.


So this T-shirt then, in the context of the globalization debate, doesn't put forth the markets as either the savior of humanity or the villain. Instead, what the T-shirt has to say to all of us is that what needs examining are the rules by which we all play.

Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

QUESTIONER: Fascinating story, and certainly I'll be looking forward to reading it. You don't seem to have mentioned enormous role of companies that are bulk buyers of products and also companies which are involved in the grading and marketing of T-shirts and so on.

DR. RIVOLI: Well, this is what you hear quite a bit about Wal-Mart. I keep hearing the statistic that if Wal-Mart were a country, it would be our eighth or ninth—or something—biggest exporter to the U.S. I did look at this to some extent in the book. I looked at the apparel supply chain. Generally what you have with apparel is you have a system of subcontracting. You have virtually no American apparel firms that produce their own apparel anymore. All of it is subcontracted out, and most of it is imported.

QUESTIONER: I'm Stephen Hendrickson from the Wilson Center. There was an article today in the Financial Times about the increased production of computer components in China and subsequent increase in research and development there as well.

DR. RIVOLI: You know, I for one would not want to say to China or to any other country that your role in the global economy is to produce cheap T-shirts and mine is to produce research. The whole point of stepping on this industrialization ladder to begin with is that you want to end up near the top of the ladder. I don't think that there's a limited amount of research to be done, and I don't think the size of the pie is fixed. The notion that there's a fixed pie that China is getting a bigger piece of is an erroneous one.

What's interesting with China right now in textiles and apparel is you have some very advanced research taking place. They used to just sell the cheap T-shirts, but now they're doing the research on textile processes. That makes sense. That's where the research should be going on. You know, we don't have the mills in South Carolina. So it doesn't make sense for Clemson University to be doing that research anymore. It makes sense for it to be happening in Shanghai. So I view it as an example of the process working rather than not working.

MR. LANKES: Okay. Well, thank you very much, Pietra and Brink.

[Applause.]

======================

Excerpt: The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

Preface: How Student Protests Sent a Business Professor Around the World

extracts:

[About WTO protestors:] In 1999, I watched a young woman seize the microphone. "Who made your t-shirt?" she asked the crowd. "Was it a child in Vietnam, chained to a sewing machine without food or water? Or a young girl from India earning 18 cents per hour and allowed to visit the bathroom only twice per day? Did you know that she lives 12 to a room? That she shares her bed and has only gruel to eat? That she is forced to work 90 hours each week, without overtime? Did you know that she has no right to speak out, no right to unionize? That she lives not only in poverty, but also in filth and sickness, all in the name of Nike's profits?"

I did not know all this. And I wondered about the young woman at the microphone. How did she know?

During the next several years, I traveled the world to investigate. I not only found out who made my t-shirt, but I also followed its life over thousands of miles and across three continents. This book is the story of the people, politics, and markets that created my cotton t-shirt. It is a story about globalization.

Trade and globalization debates have long been polarized on the virtues versus evils of global markets.. Economists in general argue that international market competition creates a tide of wealth that (at least eventually) will lift all boats, while critics worry about the effects of unrelenting market forces, especially upon workers. Free trade in apparel, in particular, critics worry, leads only to a downward spiral of wages and working conditions that ends somewhere in the depths of a Charles Dickens novel.

My t-shirt's life suggests, however, that the importance of markets might be overstated by both globalizers and critics. While my t-shirt's life story is certainly influenced by competitive economic markets, the key events in the t-shirt's life are less about competitive markets than they are about politics, history, and creative maneuvers to avoid markets. Even those who laud the effects of highly competitive markets are loathe to experience them personally, so the winners at various stages of my t-shirt's life are adept not so much at competing in markets but in avoiding them. The effects of these avoidance maneuvers can have more damaging effects on the poor and powerless than market competition itself. In short, my t-shirt's story has turned out to be less about markets than I would have predicted, and more about the historical and political webs of intrigue in which the markets are embedded. In peeling the onion of my t-shirt's life -- especially as it relates to current debates--I kept being led back to history and politics.

Many once-poor countries (e.g., Taiwan or Japan) have become rich due to globalization, and many still poor countries (e.g., China or India) are nowhere near as poor as they once were. The poorest countries in the world, however, largely in Africa, have yet to benefit from globalization in any sustained way, and even in rapidly growing countries such as China many are left behind. My t-shirt's life is a story of the wealth-enhancing possibilities of globalization in some settings, but a "can't win" trap in others, a trap where power imbalances and poorly functioning politics and markets seem to doom the economic future.

During the past five years, the students and their compatriots around the globe have made remarkable progress in changing the rules in the race to the bottom, and in changing the way some of the world's largest companies do business. Thanks to the backlash, the life story of a t-shirt made today is a different and better story than that of a t-shirt made just a few years ago. I thought, when I started this book, that I would in the end have a story that would help the students to see things my way, to understand the virtues of markets in improving the lives of the poor. I do have such a story, I hope, but it is not the whole story. To the students, I also say, I (now) see where you're coming from.

more on inequality, invisible taxes, world trade

The discussion thread on John Quiggin's post on inequality has some arguments over whether people lack the basic necessities of life: warm coats in winter and enough food to eat. It's interesting that folks who are contributing to the debate don't have data, only subjective impressions. One says lots of winter coats are distributed in NYC so they must be needed there, but I recall helping a neighbor distribute winter gloves at a soup kitchen one winter and being surprised (though I shouldn't have been) that there was a serious problem in that street entrpreneurs were grabbing up the free gloves so they could sell them. At that place and time the "market" was demonstrating that the community didn't want gloves as much as it wanted other consumables (cigarettes, say, which the entrepreneurs were trading for the gloves). I don't mean that coats and food are not needed, but that you can't simply assume what's needed.

So here are some interesting facts from an article in the Business Section of today's Washington Post.

First, the tariff structure that is supposedly designed to protect American producers and American jobs is skewed so that people at the low end of the income scale are effectively paying an inordinate tax on their purchases while people at the high end are not.

Examples given include disproportionate tariffs on underwear, luggage, handbags, and sweaters. One of the most dramatic of these is footwear. The tariffs on low-end sneakers range between 48 and 67 percent, but tariffs on higher-end sneakers are only 20 percent, and for leather dress shoes, the tariff is 8.5 percent. This set of footwear tariffs is particularly noxious since low-income families have to purchase lots of sneaks as their kids grow. It might be thought that the tariffs enable low-income families to purchase American-made products relatively cheaply, but we all know that this is not the case. To put it bluntly, what you buy in Wal-Mart is made overseas, particularly in China.

The high tariffs are effectively a highly regressive, and largely invisible, tax, but they are not really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to screw the poor. It's more a case that tariffs are created in time of need (real or percieved) and just don't go away. For example, as the article says, "the [sneaker] tariffs have their origins in the 1920s, when U.S. tire companies -- which then made rubber footwear -- wanted to fend off an onslaught of cheap shoes from Czechoslovakia. In later decades, U.S. athletic-shoe makers lobbied successfully to maintain protection against imports from places such as Taiwan, so tariffs remained high on sneakers even as they fell on leather shoes. The tariffs, however, haven't kept shoe firms from moving most of their production to developing nations with low-cost, high-productivity labor pools -- China in particular."

Here's a link to the article:
The Tariff Mismatch
Purchasers' Unseen Penalty Hits Hardest on Low-End Items
By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer

---

Tariffs aren't the only invisible tax on low-income families. Early in November, the U.S. negotiated quotas to limit imports from China. The agreement covers shirts, slacks, underwear, fabric and other textile products. It's intended purpose is to protect American jobs, but it's not at all clear that it will accomplish that goal; at best it might just lengthen the time over which the American textile industry collapses. (The agreement lasts three years.)

The article in the Post notes that U.S. tariffs will soon be discussed in Hong Kong during the next round of negotiations by members of the World Trade Organization. The journals, Foreign Affairs has devoted a whole issue to this subject.

Here's a link to an overview article by Jagdish Bhagwati, who teaches at Columbia Univ and is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations: From Seattle to Hong Kong, From Foreign Affairs, December 2005 -- WTO Special Edition


As you might expect, the plight of low-income families in the U.S. is low on the list of WTO priorities. Poor nations suffer greatly from European and U.S. farming subsidies. The EU's complex system of farm subsidies accounts for 42.2 per cent of Europe's £72 billion budget. In the U.S. the system of subsidies for cotton farmers keeps west African farmers in poverty. Although west African countries produce cotton far more cheaply than we do, U.S. farmers receive hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies that enable them to produce cotton in vast quantities and dump their produce on world markets, thus reducing prices.

========================

As I said yesterday, there has been little or no progress in solving international financial problems. One case in point is the U.S. deficit. Early in November, the press reported a huge increase, mostly resulting from the disruption caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita and by the related increase in oil prices. But deficit growth was higher than economists expected. The reports said analysts now expect the gap for 2005 to be much higher than 2004 was: more than$700 billion for 2005, compared with last year's record of about $615 billion.



Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the U.S. economy remains so strong that politicians have little gumption for dealing with the deficit. American consumers are the backbone of the world economy and their confidence remains strong. Employment and unemployment stats are good. Interest rates have been growing very slowly and remain low.

Perhaps most importantly, foreign investors continue to invest in U.S. securities. Though our interest rates seem low to us, they are high relative to those in Europe and Japan and the U.S. economy continues to grow at a faster rate than the economies of other industrial nations.

So, the warnings of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan continue to go unheeded.

He says deficits and a current fiscal policy are unsustainable. He says the government likely will not be able to make good on promised Social Security and Medicare payments and will probably have to reduce benefits to future retirees. He says, the world economy could be adversely affected by a combination of "fiscal instability" in the United States and growing protectionism. "At some point, foreign investors will balk at a growing concentration of claims against U.S. residents, even if rates of return on investment in the United States remain competitively high, and will begin to alter their portfolios." (I didn't capture a link for this quote.)

economic inequality

An Australian economist, John Quiggin, believes he can demonstrate that the quality of life is deteriorating for many Americans, at least in a relative sense. As you can see, he puts it in terms of income and consumption inequality.

The comments are every bit as interesting as Quiggin's thesis. If you've got any interest in this subject, do read the whole thing. I give the following to whet your appetite.

Income and Consumption Inequality Posted by John Quiggin

extract:

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out what’s been going on with income and consumption inequality in the United States. Partly that’s because the subject is of interest in itself and partly because social and economic developments in the English-speaking world often (not always) follow the lead of the US.

However, there seem to be lots of contradictions in the data, and between data and popular perceptions, for example regarding social mobility and consumption inequality. I’ve finally managed to sort out what seems (to me, at any rate) to be a coherent account of what’s going on. A list of the main points follows, with supporting links, some of which may require registration/subscription. I’ve tried to indicate which bits of the story reflect my judgements, and which are drawn from the literature.

Here’s the outline

1. Measures of inequality, mobility and so on reflect a combination of transitory variations and more stable effects arising from social class, occupation, education and so on.
2. Although the US displayed exceptionally high social mobility in the 19th century, social mobility declined from the beginning of the twentieth century the US and is now comparable to that in European countries.
3. Because of greater income inequality in the US, mobility within the income distribution is lower in the US than elsewhere.
4. Wage inequality in the US has grown greatly since 1970. Income inequality has also grown, but not as much since low-wage households have increased hours worked.
5. (Annual) Consumption inequality has not changed much since 1970. In my judgement, this reflects increased use of credit markets to smooth out short term fluctuations in income, which offsets increased long-run inequality
6. In my judgement, increased reliance on credit has been the main cause of the dramatic increase in bankruptcy, particularly evident since 1990.
7. Bankruptcy laws act as a kind of income insurance, and generous (to debtors) bankruptcy laws are a substitute for redistributive taxation.

Obviously, More Research Is Needed™

Addendum:

My favorite economist at the International Monetary Fund gave a good speech recently on the need for reforms in Europe. Some of what he said makes sense for the U.S. as well.

For the world altogether, there has been precious little progress toward the changes needed to avert serious problems, at least from the IMF point of view. The U.S. needs to deal with its deficits and give up its artificially low interest rates. China needs to liberalize its monetary policy. Emerging nations need to make structural changes so they can attract investment from cash-rich nations (oil producers and China principally). Japan needs to increase domestic consumption. And so forth.

Here's the link to the speech:

Revitalizing Reforms in Europe, By Raghuram G. Rajan, Economic Counsellor and Director of the IMF's Research Department

extracts:

It might have made sense for an individual to finish university at 25 when he or she were likely to be active in the labor market for only another 25 years; it no longer makes sense when his or her workspan has doubled. Not only do universities need to expand their continuing education programs, they also need to seriously consider whether their programs should become more modular, with lifelong learning being the objective. Admission should be for a lifetime, not for a degree. Individuals should be able to take a short basic undergraduate course in their 20s, return repeatedly for specific skills as they specialize or shift careers in their 30s, pick up management courses in their 40s and 50s, and renew interests in art appreciation and philosophy in their 60s.

The world will not stand still while Europe makes up its mind on whether it wants to reform. Clearly, Brazil, China, India, and Eastern Europe are becoming more competitive. India alone has over a million students enrolled in engineering colleges. But before loose talk starts about hypercompetitive Asian economies, let me point out that only 3000 students graduate every year from the Indian Institutes of Technology and only about 20,000 more from other reputable technical institutes. The remaining come from schools of varying quality—some not even equivalent to a good high school education here. I would guess something similar is true of China.

Europe's per capita GDP has been falling relative to the United States. As is well known, some of this reflects a voluntary reduction in average hours worked: as is sometimes simplistically put, Europeans earn to live while Americans live to earn. But some of it also reflects lower labor participation rates as well as greater unemployment. Again, not all of this is involuntary, or even inefficient. For example, in Europe, a greater share of production is undertaken in the household, and this is not reflected in GDP numbers.

What is hard to dispute, however, is that since 1995, total factor productivity growth, as well as labor productivity growth, in the United States have outpaced that in the Euro area. Moreover, the US has considerably improved its performance over the last decade, while Europe's performance has declined. While a percent point or so of difference in TFP growth may seem small, pretty soon the power of compounding leads to substantial differences in wealth and competitiveness.

a respite from the bone-chilling cold

We wuz robbed! The weather forecast said lots of snow. We got only some, plus yuckky rain. All the schools called off, natch, but the Fed Gov and my place of work are open for business. No free Friday for us. I wouldn't have made a different decision were I in charge, but all the same.....

Earlier this week the temperatures plunged and brought to mind the sunny artwork around us here where I work. Here, we have a cadre of designers, that is professionals whose title is Designer. They oversee our remodelling work, but they're also responsible for artwork. I'm in meetings most days and generally find myself idly gazing at a work of art, generally a poster for an exhibition of paitings or a print made from a painting. The other day at a bi-weekly meeting of the search tools subcommittee of the internet operations group (a cross-jurisdictional advisory body that churns and churns but does not churn up any useful decisions, unfortunately), I gained respect for a piece by a 19-century "classicist" named Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who worked in Britain but was Dutch-born (evidently Friesland by the name). The painting is a Northerner's day dream of Southern beauties relaxing in a white marble amphitheater with the sun-drenched green-blue Aegan in the background.

This isn't the exact picture, but it gives the flavor of the thing.

Click image to view full size.

freedom is made of brambles

I've spent a fruiless hour or so looking for a poem by John Updike. I read it in the New Yorker many years ago. It's definitely not in his Collected Poems and I'm giving up the search, at least for now.

His theme was irritation, ugliness, guilt, regret,.... negative feelings that retain their hold in memory. The poem tells us to value these sources of pain because they provide hooks into treasure troves of the past to which we've lost our maps. Giving them space in our minds leads to chains of thoughts yielding up precious recollections of times that might otherwise be gone from us forever. Though Updike does not say it, the ancient Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne was the name for a river in Hades, counterpart to Lethe: the one of remembrance the other of forgetting.

Though I did not find the poem, I did find some others on dwelling "in a world whose Hell I will" and suchlike.

Here's the closing of the poem, Report on Health

I may not write again. My voice
goes nowhere. Dear friend,
don't let me heal. Don't
worry. I am well.
I am happy
to dwell in a world whose Hell I will:

the doorway hints at your ghost
and a tiger pounces on my heart;
the lilac bush is a devil
inviting me into your hair.

Here is an entire poem, called Omega on time, encirling, and terminations. (Omega is a brand of watch, which, with its jeweled movemement, was much prized before quartz movements became available).

This little lightweight manacle whereby
My wrist is linked to flux and feels time fly,
This constant bracelet with so meek a jewel,
Shall prove at last implacable and cruel
And like a noose jerk taut, and hold me still,
And add me to the unseen trapper's kill.

Other fragments:

In the poem Minority Report, written in London, celebrating America with all its faults, Updike reminds us:

(Brer Rabbit demonstrated:
freedom is made of brambles).

In the poem Wind, he evokes a feeling like the one Vladimir and Estragon dwell upon in the scene from Waiting for Godot that I quoted the other day. Updike writes:

If God has any voice it is the wind.

. . . . .

It is death made loud:
nowhereness bellowing,
now reedy along the copper eaves,

. . . . .

I lie here listening.
God is crying, for-
giiiive, demanding for-
go-ooo, proclaiming no-
wheerrre, and begging,
let go-oo-ohhh.

In His mouth my body tastes like stale milk.

From Updike's poem Pain:

Pain flattens the world -- its bubbles
of bliss .........

What children's pageant in gauze
filled the skull's ballroom before
the caped dark stranger commanded, freeze?

Life is worse than mere folly. We live
within a cage wherefrom escape
annihilates the captive; this, too,
pain leads us to consider anew.

And finally from Crab Crack:

         If when we die we're dead,
then the world is ours like gaudy grain
to be reaped while we're here, without guilt.
If not, then an ominous duty to feel
with the mite and the dragon is ours,
and a burden in being.

         Late at night
the ghosts of teh crabs patrol our intestines,
scampering sideways, hearkening à pointe
like radar dishes beneath the tide, seeking
the safe grave of sand in vain, turning,
against their burning wills, into us.

Addendum:

This painting is called "Held in Brambles." Click to see full size.

A Christmas story

Umberto Eco states the obvious: "you are a mortal animal. Indeed, the more you try escape that fact, the more you are forced to realise that your possessions can't make sense of your death."

A nonbeliever, he goes on to say: "Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death."









And this nice essay concludes:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

As a child of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the Enlightenment values of truth, open inquiry, and freedom, I am depressed by that tendency. This is not just because of the association between the occult and fascism and Nazism - although that association was very strong. Himmler and many of Hitler's henchmen were devotees of the most infantile occult fantasies.

I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.

I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.

Source: God isn't big enough for some people

Happy St. Nicholas Day!

Saint Nicholas

Feast of Sinterklaas

Sinterklaas explained

lips trembling and longing to kiss, and teeth to bite

Over the weekend, the Goucher Theatre Dept put on a production called Showcase of Scenes from Students in the Lighting Design and Directing Classes. Students produced sixteen scenes from famous and interesting plays. B and I attended the five last ones on Sunday evening. Julia's boyfriend Ben directed a very funny scene from Christopher Durang's play Betty's Summer Vacation. He was also lighting designer for a scene from Shaw's Pygmalion. Julia was Abbie in the second scene of Act Two of O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, a difficult role which she handled very well.

Here are links to all five scenes that showed on Sunday. The beginning of the Second Act of Waiting for Godot was very well done, Vladimir particlarly fine. Betty's was very funny, as I said, and Eleemosynary both funny and quite touching. Julia and the other two characters in the O'Neill made the most of a difficult scene, Julia surprisingly forceful.

- Betty's Summer Vacation, Christopher Durang
- Pygmalion, G B Shaw
- Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
- Eleemosynary, Lee Blessing
- Desire Under the Elms, Eugene O'Neill

Here's the last part of the scene in which Julia played Abbie:

Desire Under the Elms
ACT TWO SCENE TWO

EBEN--(threateningly) Git out afore I murder ye!

ABBIE--(quite confident now) I hain't a mite afeerd. Ye want me, don't ye? Yes, ye do! An' yer Paw's son'll never kill what he wants! Look at yer eyes! They's lust fur me in 'em, burnin' 'em up! Look at yer lips now! They're tremblin' an' longin' t' kiss me, an' yer teeth t' bite! (He is watching her now with a horrible fascination. She laughs a crazy triumphant laugh.) I'm a-goin' t' make all o' this hum my hum! They's one room hain't mine yet, but it's a-goin' t' be tonight. I'm a-goin' down now an' light up! (She makes him a mocking bow.) Won't ye come courtin' me in the best parlor, Mister Cabot?

EBEN--(staring at her--horribly confused--dully) Don't ye dare! It hain't been opened since Maw died an' was laid out thar! Don't ye . . . ! (But her eyes are fixed on his so burningly that his will seems to wither before hers. He stands swaying toward her helplessly.)

ABBIE--(holding his eyes and putting all her will into her words as she backs out the door) I'll expect ye afore long, Eben.

EBEN--(stares after her for a while, walking toward the door. A light appears in the parlor window. He murmurs) In the parlor? (This seems to arouse connotations for he comes back and puts on his white shirt, collar, half ties the tie mechanically, puts on coat, takes his hat, stands barefooted looking about him in bewilderment, mutters wonderingly) Maw! Whar air yew? (then goes slowly toward the door in rear.)

This scene, from another production, shows Abbie and Eben before Cabot, her husband, has left to sleep with his cows, and before Abbie has gone to her step-son Eben's room to seduce him.

---

Here's the beginning of the Second Act of Waiting for Godot.

An image from another production showing Estragon's boots at the beginning of the scene.

Lucky's hat at same place.
The tree has four or five leaves.
Enter Vladimir agitatedly. He halts and looks long at the tree, then suddenly begins to move feverishly about the stage. He halts before the boots, picks one up, examines it, sniffs it, manifests disgust, puts it back carefully. Comes and goes. Halts extreme right and gazes into distance off, shading his eyes with his hand. Comes and goes. Halts extreme left, as before. Comes and goes. Halts suddenly and begins to sing loudly.

VLADIMIR:

A dog came in–

Having begun too high he stops, clears his throat, resumes:

A dog came in the kitchen
And stole a crust of bread.
Then cook up with a ladle
And beat him till he was dead.

Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb–

He stops, broods, resumes:

Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb
And wrote upon the tombstone
For the eyes of dogs to come:

A dog came in the kitchen
And stole a crust of bread.
Then cook up with a ladle
And beat him till he was dead.

Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb–

He stops, broods, resumes:

Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb–

He stops, broods. Softly.

And dug the dog a tomb . . .

He remains a moment silent and motionless, then begins to move feverishly about the stage. He halts before the tree, comes and goes, before the boots, comes and goes, halts extreme right, gazes into distance, extreme left, gazes into distance. Enter Estragon right, barefoot, head bowed. He slowly crosses the stage. Vladimir turns and sees him.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ESTRAGON:
The best thing would be to kill me, like the other.
VLADIMIR:
What other? (Pause.) What other?
ESTRAGON:
Like billions of others.
VLADIMIR:
(sententious). To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
ESTRAGON:
In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

VLADIMIR:
We have our reasons.
ESTRAGON:
All the dead voices.
VLADIMIR:
They make a noise like wings.
ESTRAGON:
Like leaves.
VLADIMIR:
Like sand.
ESTRAGON:
Like leaves.
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
They all speak at once.
ESTRAGON:
Each one to itself.
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
Rather they whisper.
ESTRAGON:
They rustle.
VLADIMIR:
They murmur.
ESTRAGON:
They rustle.
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
What do they say?
ESTRAGON:
They talk about their lives.
VLADIMIR:
To have lived is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON:
They have to talk about it.
VLADIMIR:
To be dead is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON:
It is not sufficient.
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
They make a noise like feathers.
ESTRAGON:
Like leaves.
VLADIMIR:
Likes ashes.
ESTRAGON:
Like leaves.
Long silence.
VLADIMIR:
Say something!
ESTRAGON:
I'm trying.
Long silence.
VLADIMIR:
(in anguish). Say anything at all!
ESTRAGON:
What do we do now?
VLADIMIR:
Wait for Godot.
ESTRAGON:
Ah!

---

This is the beginning of Eleemosynary by Lee Blessing

ECHO: Eleemosynary. E-L..E-E-äM-O-SäYäN-A-RäY. Eleemosynary. It's my favorite word. Not just because I won with it, either. It was always my favorite. Eleemosynary . 'Of or pertaining to alms: charitable.' It's from the Latin, of course, but it's our word now. We're responsible for it. Eleemosynary. Like a small song.

This is my grandmother. She had a stroke. She can't really talk. I can hear her, though. At least I think I can. She's seventy-five years old. I know she doesn't look it. That's not how I see her. My grandmother believed she could fly using only a pair of homemade wings and the proper classical training. In 1958 she made a ten-minute movie -- fully professional -- of herself and her daughter, my mother, trying it out. Sometimes I think all my troubles began in 1958.

Spelling the words becomes easy, really -- almost a nuisance N-U-I-S-A-N-C-E nuisance. What I really concentrate on is the meaning of the word -- or more than that, the feel of it. Lots of words have a special feel. Words like prink and zenana. Words like dysphemism and autochthonous. Spelling them is nothing compared to just feeling them. Beautiful words for ugly things. Limicolous. L-I-M-I-C-O-L-O-U-S. Limicolous. Means, 'dwelling in mud.' Or this one: Esurient. Just means hungry. But the way it feels. I used to stop right in the middle of spelling it. Esurient. E-S-U-R- IäThere are words I'd give my life for.

the old polar bear in a snowstorm joke?

Paintings by aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye. {Source: Uncertain quest for the sublime}

This makes me think of zebras, of course, and also Julia, who was excellent in her coniving boldness as the "Strindbergian woman" in a scene from Desire Under the Elms last night.

To search the ways of life; man’s evil and his virtue

Tennyson's Ulysses is a wonderful poem. It's better simply to read and enjoy for its pleasures.

Why cast about for its context?

I don't know why, but the temptation is strong and I do not wish to resist.





Christopher Ricks, maveric professor; eccentric, overwhelmed by his enthusiasms for T.S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett, and, yes, Alfred Tennyson. No one reads a poem more closely nor writes more allusively and without pity on readers. He's something of an addiction of mine and my family recoils inwardly when his name comes up.

Ricks shows Homer to be one of Tennyson's sources, of course, but not the main one.

Here's the Homeric source. It's Tiresias' speech, in book xi, lines 112-37, of the Odyssey, translated by A.T. Murray:

Late shalt thou come home and in evil case, after losing all thy comrades,
in a ship that is another's, and thou shalt find woes in thy house— proud
men that devour thy livelihood, wooing thy godlike wife, and offering
wooers' gifts. Yet verily on their violent deeds shalt thou take vengeance
when thou comest. But when thou hast slain the wooers in thy halls, whether
by guile or openly with the sharp sword, then do thou go forth, taking a
shapely oar, until thou comest to men that know naught ... ships. ... And
death shall come to thee thyself far from the sea, a death so gentle, that
shall lay thee low when thou art overcome with sleek old age, and thy
people shall dwell in prosperity around thee.

Surprisingly, Tennyson's main source was Dante. In the canto he used, Virgil has taken Dante to a section of Hell where the damned are surrounded by flames. He questions one of them, who turns out to be Ulysses and Ulysses tells him of the last voyage of his life, the one which in Tennyson's poem he tells us he will make.

Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
Of my old father, nor return of love,
That should have crown’d Penelope with joy,
Could overcome in me the zeal I had
To explore the world, and search the ways of life,
Man’s evil and his virtue. Forth I sail’d
Into the deep illimitable main,
With but one bark, and the small faithful band
That yet cleaved to me. As Iberia far,
Far as Marocco, either shore I saw,
And the Sardinian and each isle beside
Which round that ocean bathes. Tardy with age
Were I and my companions, when we came
To the strait pass, where Hercules ordain’d
The boundaries not to be o’erstepp’d by man.
The walls of Seville to my right I left,
On the other hand already Ceuta past.
‘O brothers!’ I began, ‘who to the west
Through perils without number now have reach’d;
To this the short remaining watch, that yet
Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof
Of the unpeopled world, following the track
Of Phœbus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang:
Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes,
But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.’
With these few words I sharpen’d for the voyage
The mind of my associates, that I then
Could scarcely have withheld them. To the dawn
Our poop we turn’d, and for the witless flight
Made our oars wings, still gaining on the left.
Each star of the other pole night now beheld,
And ours so low, that from the ocean floor
It rose not. Five times reillumed, as oft
Vanish’d the light from underneath the moon,
Since the deep way we enter’d, when from far
Appear’d a mountain dim, loftiest methought
Of all I e’er beheld. Joy seized us straight;
But soon to mourning changed. From the new land
A whirlwind sprung, and at her foremost side
Did strike the vessel. Thrice it whirl’d her round
With all the waves; the fourth time lifted up
The poop, and sank the prow: so fate decreed:
And over us the booming billow closed.

Source: Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). The Divine Comedy. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. translated by H. F. Cary Canto XXVI, 90ff.

Ricks says that Tennyson wrote a friend about the importance of Ulysses to him. The death of his friend Hallam was the greatest tragedy of his life and a source of great inspiration to him, particularly with respect to his immense sequence of poems, In Memoriam. Tennyson wrote: "There is more about myself in Ulysses, which was written under the sense of loss and all that had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many poems in In Memoriam."
Source: Tennyson, Christopher B Ricks (New York, Macmillan [1972]) - Selected Edn. 1989, p 138.

Tennyson's son gives another anecdote about the poem: "Ulysses, my father said, was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in 'In Memoriam.'"
Source: Alfred lord Tennyson; a memoir by his son, Hallam Tennyson Tennyson (London, The Macmillan Co.; Macmillan & Co., 1897)

Standing on winter's verge, dreaming

I've been thinking about Tennyson's Ulysses -- a poem of the week on Gobbergo. He's a poet whom I disrespected when young; learned to love in my age. I enjoy imagining what it must have been like to encounter the poem when it was fresh and himself not well known.

Like Keats, Tennyson suffered from nasty critics and pursued his vocation in the face of poverty, personal tragedy, and the form of depression then called melancholy. They both wished to marry, became engaged, and were prevented from marrying (or in Tennyson's case forced to delay). They both lost a dear companion (Keats his brother Tom and Tennyson his all-but-brother Henry Hallam).

Like Keats, Tennyson had a few significant supporters. Emerson was an early admirer. Dickens bought his books and praised his work.

Like Emerson and unlike Keats, he lived long and slowly gained an admiring public. I imagine Sarah Thorn opening his Poems in 2 vols of 1842 when she was in her mid-twenties. On Sunday Aug 7, 1842, Dickens - just back from a trip to America - wrote to his friend Forster that he was "reading Tennyson all the morning on the seashore". So Dickens, but I imagine Sarah with her 6-year old daughter (my great-grandmother Annie) just put to bed, lighting the gas lamp and opening the book to read Ulysses for the first time, and then reading out of the poem to Henry Lefman, her husband.

Before her marriage she had copied part of a Wordsworth poem in her composition book. It was a stanza from Despondency Corrected in the 4th book of The Excursion. Like Ulysses, Wordsworth's subject is an aged wanderer. From the poem, Sarah wrote out:

Life's autumn past I stand on winter's verge
And daily lose what I desire to keep,
Yet rather would I instantly decline
To the traditionary sympathies of a most rustic ignorance,
Than see and hear the repetitions wearisome of sense,
Where soul is dead and feeling hath no place.

I imagine she would have loved her first reading of Ulysses: he an egoist like Wordsworth's narrator, on his own death watch yet impatient of idleness, suffused with yearning, and seeking the heart of truth - a newer world.

Here is a comparable part of Ulysses:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

It's curious that Sarah dropped the middle part of the Wordsworth stanza, leaving out:

                   ...and take
A fearful apprehension from the owl
Or death-watch: and as readily rejoice,
If two auspicious magpies crossed my way;--
To this would rather bend...

Why do you suppose she omitted these lines?


Alfred Tennyson from a portrait painted by Samuel Laurence

Google musings (and worries)

Here's my Friday quotation posting from the internal blog at work. It's about Google.

First of all, from Karen Schneider, an answer to the question "what is Google?" She says: "the world's largest brain in a jar."

Second, a post from Xooglers, which is a group blog by some folks who used to work for Google. The post comes from "Doug (nee Xoogler)" and it concerns how to speak Googlese (or should that be Google-ese?).

Word

And because that last post had so many words, here’s a shorter one about, well, words.

A few key phrases to know if you ever attend a meeting in the GooglePlex:

Orthogonal
Engineers are always talking about things being orthogonal to each other. The first time I heard the term, I thought it meant something like “11-sided.” It doesn’t. I’ve read the definition many times. I still don’t really get it, which didn’t stop me from casually dropping it into conversations with engineers. “Oh, yeah, that press release is totally orthogonal to the ads we’re running on Yahoo.”

Cruft
Cruft is bad. Like the stuff that grows under ungroomed toenails. Like barnacles on a speed boat. It usually refers to old code or dead links on a web page, but it can be applied to any unwanted material that accumulates anywhere. The men’s locker room in the Googleplex was filled with cruft, much of it unwashed and hockey-related.

Canonical
When engineers don’t want to say “the customary” or “the usual” way of doing something, they talk about the canonical example, which is pretty much the same thing, but conveys a more exalted sense of correctness to the practice in question. The canonical way to avoid spending an hour in traffic is to come to work at noon.

Non-trivial
It means impossible. Since no engineer is going to admit something is impossible, they use this word instead. When an engineer says something is “non-trivial,” it’s the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly telling you that you might encounter “just a bit of turbulence” as he flies you into a cat 5 hurricane.

So…
This all-purpose word is not a word at all. It’s the sound of an engineer clearing his or her throat before beginning to speak. The first week I worked at Google, it seemed like some sort of linguistic virus had infected all the technical staff. Every sentence in every conversation began, “So…” So… I eventually got used to it.

Here is an image to illustrate some growing worries about Google:

And, finally, here, from Stephen Abrams, vice president of Sirsi - the library automation company - a list of current Google products, so far as it's possible to tell:

Just what does Google have?

I thought that I would try to make a list of Google's products. Hmmmm. Seems they're averaging a new product introduction about every two weeks since they came out of their quiet period after the IPO. Some on this list are fully-formed products, some are beta and some are tools and features. It's a pretty interesting list.

1. Blogger
2. Froogle (and Froogle Mobile)
3. GMail (or Google Mail)
4. Google AdSense
5. Google Alerts
6. Google Analytics
7. Google Answers
8. Google Base
9. Google Blog Search
10. Google Book Search (formerly Google print)
11. Google Catalogs
12. Google Code
13. Google College Life
14. Google Compute
15. Google Deskbar
16. Google Desktop
17. Google Directory
18. Google Earth
19. Google Firefox Extensions
20. Google Glossary
21. Google Groups
22. Google Homepage
23. Google Image Search
24. Google Labs
25. Google Language Tools
26. Google Local
27. Google Maps
28. Google Mobile
29. Google Movie Showtimes
30. Google News
31. Google Personalized Search
32. Google Personalized Webpage
33. Google Reader
34. Google Ridefinder
35. Google Scholar
36. Google Send to Phone
37. Google Sitemap
38. Google SMS
39. Google Special Searches
40. Google Suggest
41. Google Talk
42. Google Toolbar
43. Google University Search
44. Google Video and Google Video Upload
45. Google Web Accelerator
46. Google Web Search
47. Hello
48. Picasa
49. Google Moon

Anyway, they're about to hit 50 on my list. I haven't included the worldwide stuff either - language or ownership stakes. This is a picture of the future but it's more like an unassembled mosaic. The mosaic tiles are there, they're on the floor and we don't know what the picture will look like when it's done. Howver, something is emerging from the fog of creativity and innovation here. Add in Google's interest in providing free wireless to San Francisco and their investment in broadband access through the electrical wires and you get an inkling of an intereting future direction.

Stephen

Baby book

My mother kept a baby book, but not obsessively. It's called Our Baby's First Seven years and was published by the Mother's Aid Society of the Chicago Lying-In Hospital in 1941. She filled in some of the forms (birth, Christening, first medical exam, ...) and wrote occasional notes from time to time. Though she started the book not long after my birth, it wasn't just about me. She would occasionally put in notes about my sister since, it seems, she didn't have separate baby book for her. Most of the book is empty and there are not too many anecdotes, just the usual first this and first that.

Here are a couple of exceptions.

1. On a page meant for some photographs:

April 14, 1950 - Today is Jeffrey's 8th birthday. He radiates happiness and is very proud of his Lionel train. It was snowing when we got up and Jeff said, "The snow is like confetti because it's my birthday."

2. On the page headed "Six Years Old:"

1949 - Jeffrey would not eat all his dinner but wanted his dessert. His explanation: "You see there are shelves in my stomach. The shelves on one side for the good things are all filled upbut the shelves for the dessert are empty."

Elswhere in the book: "Baby's First Home" is given as RFD#1, Box 3, Briarcliff Manor, NY. I remember that we didn't have a house number until the 1950s, but I'd forgotten how mail was addressed to us. I recall our first phone number, a party line: 2151R. You picked up the receiver and told the operator who you wanted to talk to.

Under newspaper clippings (right where it belongs!), there's a paid birth announcement in NYT:

Heynen-Mr. and Mrs. F. C., announce the birth of a son, April 14, 1942, at Polyclinic Hospital.

Other info on nearby pages:

Born on a Tuesday, 11:30am; 8lb. 50z. at birth [not bad for the times - presume mother smoked & drank during pregnancy]; 5Hr 40Min labor, normal delivery. Christened at All Saints, Feb 28, 1943. Named J for Julius. Edith is Godmother, Robert Ackerman is Godfather.

Edith was mother's eldest sister; I adopted her as surrogate mother after my mom died. Robert Ackerman was father of my friend Bobby. They lived in the last of the houses in our row and moved away when I was about five. As far as I know the my family and the Ackermans had no real contact after that time. I grew up thinking that my Uncle Ben was my Godfather. Odd memories just show up: The Ackermans had current bushes in their back yard, both black and white. Delicious. Their garage was plastered with old license plates and they owned a phonograph player in which accepted the old 78rpm records sideways through a slot rather than top-down onto a spindle. Bobby and I would sell Cokes to golfers on the verge of the 14th green diagonally across the street from his house. His dad had a mustache and smoked a pipe.

red-tailed hawk

Kathleen Connally, my favorite photo blogger, made this excellent photo of a red-tailed hawk:



And this one of two dogs:



Her blog: A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania

Story of a backhoe and a bike

Yesterday. One of those days. A Monday. One coming after four days of fun, feast, and family.

A morning of rain, not heavy but enough. A wet commute. The psychology of it caught my attention - my own feelings. First, a wish - very emphatic - that the rain stop. Then, once stopped, a new feeling. You can take it; bring it on. Then rain again and misery. But misery in moderation - not a soaker - all garments did dry during the day. No wet shoes riding home.

At work the day was a burden. Myself sleepy. Unmotivated. Growing weary to the bone as afternoon wore on.

But the afternoon commute was something else. Warm with light cloud cover and breeze mostly from behind or to my side. Shorts instead of tights. A shirt without windbreaker.

And an intersting encounter. On a longish climb but not steepish up Sherman Ave I found myself behind a big backhoe tractor going about 18 or 19 MPH. Didn't I speed up to ride in his draft! Tiring but exhilerating. An affirmation. Yes! After four days off the bike, a big bike pleasure.

Heavy rain forecast for today, but not in the morning. I ride in, expect to subway home. Dentist Thursday. No bike then. I think - At least one good ride this week. That's something.

Sarah Thorn's warnings

I haven't posted anything from my great- great-grandmother's composition book lately. As you'd expect, some of its contents are morally uplifting in a way that's a little offputting today. We don't voice these sentiments any more. All the same, though not complete in themselves, they contain simple truths. I expect it's Freud more than anyone else who keeps us from appreciating them in what I expect is their unselfconscious integrity. Examples include the following couple of maxims:

Bear and forbear a maxim true
As erring mortals ever knew.

====================

Beauty displays a twofold kind
That of the body and the mind.

That said, Sarah had a good ear for poetic phrases. I particularly like "Joy rings our steps" in the following verse. If you can make out any of the missing words, please supply them in comments.

Pleasure
Pleasure's a syren with inviting arms
Great is her voice and powerful her charms
Lur'd by her call we tread the flowery ground
Joy rings our steps, and music wafts round
Lull'd in her arms we loose the flying armies
And lie embosomed mid'st her ..... .....
Till armed with death! she watches our undoing
.... ! while she sings, and ..... in ......
25th Febr. 1834



I like the flowery penmanship of this, which comes at the end of the little manuscript:

How do you pronounce that?

Some unintentional humor from people who register domain names from a site called Webmasters who didn't think when they registered their URL

1) Who Represents?, a database for agencies to the rich and famous:
http://www.whorepresents.com

2) Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange
advice and views:
http://www.expertsexchange.com

3) Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island:
http://www.penisland.net

4) Need a therapist?
http://www.therapistfinder.com

5) Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
http://www.molestationnursery.com

6) Gas central heating anyone?
http://www.gasheating.co.uk

7) New to Milan and you need electric light? Why not sign up on-line with
Power-Gen?
http://www.powergenitalia.com

There are a few more and some explanation at:

Hilarious Domain Name Mispronouncings