Author: Dave

Nixon was right

 

When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal.

Like most Americans, I’m familiar with this infamous quote, from a Nixon interview with David Frost in 1977. I always considered it an example of the maniacal hubris of Richard Nixon.

The thing is, I’ve come to understand that, at least from an functional standpoint, it is basically true.

What happens if the president breaks the law? Well, he might use his executive powers to direct law enforcement not to pursue it. But if he didn’t, presumably, he could be brought up on charges and a court could find him guilty. If it were a federal crime, he could just pardon himself, but if not, I guess he could even go to jail.

But, can he lose the presidency over a crime?

It seems, not directly. As far as I can tell — and I hope legal types will educate me — the Constitution contains precisely two ways to get rid of a president:

  • an election
  • impeachment

Both of these are obviously political processes. There’s certainly nothing there saying that if you commit a crime of type “X”, you’re out.

Conventional wisdom expects that if the president does something even moderately unsavory, political pressure will force the House of Representatives to impeach him. I would have taken comfort in that up until a few months ago, but now … not so much.

Today’s House of Representatives is highly polarized, and the party in power (by a ratio of 240 / 193) is poised to make great strides towards realizing its long-held agenda. Would they let a little unlawful presidential activity get in the way of that? I don’t think so.

What if their own constituents don’t care about a president breaking some laws that they think are pointless or unjust? Let’s say Trump’s tax returns show up on Wikileaks, and forensic accountants come up with evidence of tax fraud. Are we sure voters will not see that as a mark of genius?

Congress will move to impeach if and when the pressure from that activity gets in the way of their agenda, and not before. That time could, in theory, never come.

I’m afraid that people holding their breath for an impeachment based on the emoluments clause may pass out waiting.

Donald Trump once said this:

Also, probably one of DT’s more truthful statements. (Though my legal team informs me that murder is not a federal crime, so he would not be able to self-pardon.)

 

ATIS in your kitchen

One ritual that every pilot observes before launching into the wild blue yonder (or dark gray muck) is tuning in the Automated Terminal Information Service, or ATIS. The ATIS is a recording, usually updated hourly, that contains a very terse version of the current weather and anything else new that pilots need to know.

ATIS is not the first weather information a pilot will hear before flying. In fact, it is more likely to be the last, after she has gotten a complete legal weather briefing (14 CFR 91.103), but before taking off. Pilots also listen to the ATIS at an airport at which they intend to land.

A similar system, called AWOS (Automated Weather Observation System) is like ATIS, except that it usually only carries the weather (no other info) and always sounds like a robot.

As it turns out, I have a doohickey in my home that 1) can connect to the Internet to get the weather and 2) sounds like a robot. I thought, maybe it would be fun to write an app that simulates ATIS on an Amazon Echo.

Well, here it is.

This is a rather straightforward Alexa Skill. A user specifies the airport of interest by using its four-letter ICAO identifier. Standard ICAO phonetics are supported. (alpha, bravo, charlie, …)

For example, Chicago O’Hare’s IATA code is ORD, but its complete ICAO code is KORD. You could say:

Alexa, ask airport weather to get kilo oscar romeo delta.

And it would read you the weather in Chicago. The skill also knows the names of many (but by no means all) airports, too, so you can specify an airport that way, too. And if you give only three letters (like an IATA code rather than an ICAO airport identifier), it will try to fill in that fourth letter if you. For European users, you can get the visibility and altimeter settings in metric format.

A few details of the skill:

  • written in node.js
  • Uses the Alexa Skills Kit API — Amazon handles all the voice stuff
  • Runs as a function in AWS Lambda
  • Accesses weather data from ADDS.
  • Stores user preferences in an AWS DynamoDB (a Mongo-like database thingy)
  • Caches weather info from ADDS for up to 5 minutes to reduce load on ADDS
  • Whole thing runs in the AWS “Free tier” — which is important, as I’m not going to spend money to host a free app.

One of the more fun aspects of the project was getting to maximal verisimilitude. The ADDS weather source actually provides a METAR, which has a lot of the same information as does the ATIS, but it’s not entirely the same in form or content, so I had to do some translation and adjustment. For example, wind directions in METARs are true-north references, but in ATIS, they are magnetic-north referenced. In Northern California, where I live, that’s a 16.5° difference — not trivial. The program makes the adjustment based on the location of the airport and calculations from the World Magnetic Model.

So this METAR

 becomes:

 There is even code there to try to get the pauses and pacing to be realistic.

Anyway, code is not the cleanest thing I ever did. Such is the case when things start as personal hacks and turn into “sofware.” Check it out on github.

More instructions here: http://toolsofourtools.org/alexa-metars-and-tafs

Update: Since coding this skill, I have added the Terminal Area Forecast (TAF) capability as well. Just as for the forecast.

The end of computing as a hobby?

I grew up with computers. We got our first machine, an Atari 800, when I was only 8 or 9. An 8-bitter with hardware sprites. 48 KiB of memory, and a cassette tape trive, this was only one step removed from the Atari 2600 game console. Very nearly useless, this was a machine for enthusiasts and hobbyists.

Over time, computers became less useless, as well as more “user-friendly,” but they — particularly the PC style machines — kept the doors open to hobbyists and tinkerers.

The Bad News

I think, however, that that era has come to an end, and I’m saddened. I see three basic trends that have killed it.

The first is that the network-connected world is dangerous. You can’t just fire up any old executable you find on the Internet in order to see what it does. It might do something Awful.

The second is that the closed ecosystem app stores of the world, aiming for a super smooth experience, have raised the quality bar for participation — particularly for “polish.” You simply cannot publish ugly, but highly functional software today.

The third problem is that you can’t make interesting software today without interacting with several systems in the cloud. Your app, hosted on a server, talks to a database, another app, and a half dozen other APIs: a link shortener, a video encoder, etc. And these APIs change constantly. There is no commitment to backward compatibility — something that was an iron-clad requirement of the PC era.

Trend one is a painful fact of life. Trend two could be reversed if the manufacturers had any incentive to do so. They do not. Trend three, I think is the worse, because it is wholly unnecessary. Say what you want about the “Wintel duopoly,” but they did not punish developers like modern companies do.

Together, these things pretty much lock out the casual developer. I’ve learned this the hard way as I try to push forward in my free time with a few open-source apps in a post PC world. It is one thing for a paid programmer to maintain a piece of software and deal, however grudgingly, with every email that comes from Google telling you that you need to update your code, again. But the hobbyist who wrote something cool for his friends, that worked for six months and then broke, is kind of stuck. Does he want to run a zero-revenue company that “supports” his app in perpetuity?

This makes me sad, because I wonder what we’re missing. As many of your know, I have gotten into ham radio. There’s a lot of cool ham-authored software out there. It’s ugly. It’s clunky. But some of it does amazing things, like implement modems that forward-error-correct a message and then put it into a ridiculously narrow signal that can reach around the world. Today, that software still runs on Windows, usually coded against the old Win32 or even Win16 libraries. It gets passed around in zip files and people run unsigned executables without installers. It’s the last hacky platform standing, but not for long.

The Good News

Of course, if the PC, Mac, i-device, and household gadget becomes more and more locked off, there is an exciting antidote: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, and the entire maker world. People are building cool stuff. It’s cheap, it’s fun, and the barriers to entry, though intellectually a bit higher than the “PC” are pretty damn low. Furthermore, the ecosystems around these products are refreshingly chaotic and more than slightly anti-corporate.

One of the nice things about this platforms is that they are self-contained and so pose little threat to data other than what you put on them. On the other hand, they are full-fledged computer and are as exploitable as any other.

If you make something cool that runs on a Raspberry Pi, there’s still pretty little chance every kid at school will soon have it and run it, but then again, maybe there never was.

 

Taking things personally

I’m not thrilled with the outcome of this election. I believe Trump will harm America’s interests, its ideals, its place in the world, and many of its people. Many people who voted for him, who are suffering now, will receive no promised relief, and many new people will likely be immiserated. It’s bad, very bad.

But I’m almost embarrassed to say that there is another, more personal reason I detest Trump: his absolute disdain for professionals, facts, and details, for consideration of others’ interests, for a qualitative and quantitative weighing of costs and benefits to various winners and losers. In short: he is a policy anti-analyst, and people love him for it. I am a policy analyst, and his type are my natural enemy.

I have a degree from an institution who’s motto is “Speaking Truth to Power.” I hold that motto dear, as I do the hope that when presented with “truth,” the powerful, will, in good faith, integrate such information and act on it.

Before Trump there was already ample evidence that policy analysis was not getting much traction. I have even written before about how policy analysis itself has become debased, leading to its total disregardability. Corporate communications departments seem to employ the lion’s share of “policy people,” and anyone with an agenda and a few bucks can generate realistic looking “policy analysis.”

In further evidence of the weakness of policy analysis, I have heard the current and former deans of the policy program where I got my degree wonder out loud why more graduates of our program did not end up in leadership positions. The answer, it seems to me, is rather obvious. First, the pathway to modern political leadership is indifferent to whether you know what you are talking about, or if you work diligently to maintain objectivity and an open mind. Policy skills are simply no help. Worse, the temperament that draws someone to the application page of a policy program (plus a few years of his or her life) is probably negatively correlated with power-seeking and leadership.

But this election was something completely new, at least to my generation. Knowing exactly what Trump stood for, many people voted for him anyway, in what amounts to a stunning rebuke of technocratic analysis in favor decision-making by ideology and “common sense.” It was a vote for George W. Bush’s famous “gut-based” style taken to a level that I suspect would give even W indigestion.

Furthermore, Mr. Trump has been assembling a cabinet comprised almost entirely of yes-men and ideologues. These are not curious people. They are policy anti-analysts as much as Trump himself.

Power, it seems, has a lot to say to Truth, and we’ll be hearing all about it in the coming months and years.

So, now, driven into the wilderness, what is the next move for those who prefer reality-based policy? Practically, speaking, retreating to liberal states and organizations is probably the short-term answer — an unavoidable step if policy analysts want to continue to remain employed. However, in the long term we must advance. How?

I can think of two projects that seem worthwhile to me:

First, policy analysts must somehow, as a group, figure out a way to separate hackery from serious analysis, and to make that separation readily apparent to the most casual observer. I don’t know what form that would take. Professional certification? Peer review? Code of conduct? This will be hard, because the ideologues and their paid spokespeople have become masters at painting anybody who disagrees with them as just as interested as they are, turning every conversation into a “both sides do it.”

Second, policy analysts must put aside their cherished memo-writing skills and deep love of complexity, and learn to convey their results differently to different groups. For the electorate at large, it’s time to master the soundbite, and sadly, the Tweet. This will hurt, because real situations are complex, and soundbites cannot properly convey a complex truth. I’ll admit, I have no idea how to do this, but I fear that is part of our collective problem. Maybe graduate policy training should include not only memo-writing, but all manner of modern “propaganda:” billboard, bumper sticker, lawn sign, protest sign, tweet, Facebook post, newspaper op-ed, blog post, 30 second radio blip, 3 minute TV interview, etc. Policy analysis must learn to fit on a smartphone screen.

Anybody else have some good ideas?

Total War?

Mitch McConnell famously said his party’s “number one priority is to make this president a one-term president.” That was in October of 2010, nearly two years after Obama was elected. However, there is pretty good evidence that Republicans plotted an agenda of obstruction from day one.

They pursued a strategy of “total war,” not yielding or compromising on any of Obama’s agenda. How did that work out for them? Well, with today’s perspective, it looks pretty good. R’s in deep red places were rewarded. R’s in purple places did not too bad, certainly nothing crushing. And of course the presidency speaks for itself. Total war did result in significant collateral damage, though: no compromise, no governance — essentially reduced performance of our institutions and the commensurate reduced faith in them to solve problems.

So far, Democrats have gone along with the standard rhetoric of accepting the will of the people, yadda yadda. Which I think for now is fine.

Should liberals adopt a policy of total war?

Pros

  • Will probably be effective in stopping/slowing R agenda
  • Will rally base and, potentially, energize party. Nobody likes a bully, but nobody likes people who let bullies roll over them, either.
  • Negotiating in good faith while your opposition as a total war philosophy results in a “ratcheting” effect, whereby when your in power, you get nowhere, and they’re in power, they somewhere.
  • The R’s have already shown their willingness to pursue this approach, so it’s not like D’s holding back will stop them from doing it the next time D’s are in power.
 Cons

  • Obstruction generally at odds with Democratic principles of governance. Or maybe blocking bad policy is good enough for a minority party?
  • Compromise is the essence of governance, and by shunning it, we validate the idea that compromise is bad.
  • It encourages the same behavior from your opposition if/when you gain power again.

I seriously am not of one mind on this issue. Everything I know about policy says total war is beyond bad. But what I’m learning of politics makes me think it might be the only path forward. Furthermore, it may be that most of the damage from the total war approach may already have been done, which is tragic, but there may not be much to lose from pursuing such a strategy.

On the other hand, this might be a decent short- and medium-term strategy, but as faith in government to solve problems and improve life is kind of core to D thinking, it might be a very bad long-term strategy.

Really, I dunno.

Voices, ideas, and power

So, a day or so ago I was discussing the problems facing a democracy when a group of people, previously able to control outcomes with their vote, lose power. They may, not getting what they want democratically, turn to undemocratic approaches — the dangerous last gasp of a majority group becoming a minority.

Apparently, it turns out that that is not a problem we will have to deal with soon.

But it is with some irony that, tables turned, am today thinking about the limits of democracy. That was not on my mind yesterday morning.

Clearly, I need to come to grip with the fact that I and many of my friends were not hearing a lot of voices, or if we heard them, we dismissed them as uninformed, ignorant, and potentially irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. That is wrong for at least two reasons. First, duh, you end up losing. Each voice comes with a vote attached. But also, it just isn’t OK to dismiss people, even “bad” people. My main weapon against the Trump phenomenon of the last year was utter derision. That made me feel better (and I’m not giving it up) but it didn’t help stop him, and who knows, maybe it even helped fuel the response we saw last night?

If voices cannot and should not be ignored or somehow put on the sidelines, I don’t think the same goes for ideas. Ideas can vary from the brilliant to the disastrous, and we desperately need some way to sort them and then to make them stay where they belong. I’m not talking about censorship. Again, that’s focusing on voices. I’m talking about finding a way to make sure bad ideas are clearly, obviously so to everyone.

This has been a problem since the beginning of time, and it is clear that we are not very close to solving it. Back in olden days we had a system like this:

good idea bad idea
king likes happens, yay happens, disaster
king dislikes does not happen, opportunity lost nothing happens, ok

This turns out not to be fantastic system for decision-making, so we switched over to this:

good idea bad idea
people like happens, yay happens, disaster
people dislike does not happen, opportunity lost nothing happens, ok

This is much better, as people should generally like things that are good, or at least the people who have to deal with the consequences are the same ones making the decision. But if you believe that idea popularity and idea quality are not strongly correlated, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Well, idea popularity and idea quality are not particularly well correlated. This is something that the Framers would have taken as prima facie obvious. The technology of the day would not have allowed for direct democracy, but they would not have wanted it anyway. They discussed this at length and put plenty of checks into the system to make sure runaway bad ideas do not gain power. Most of the time, in fact, I tend to think they put in too many checks. (That I suddenly feel different today says what?)

Well, my theory is that we relied on extra-governmental institutions: newspapers, intellectuals, clergy, to help pre-sort ideas. The most hideous ideas were put in the trash heap long before they became birdies whispering in candidates ears. I grew up in a world where it appeared that elites had pretty good power over ideas. They could not kill them, of course, but they could push them out of certain spaces, and that was good enough to keep them out of the mainstream and the ballot box.

That’s over. Unless the intellectually motivated, the curious, the skeptical, the open-minded, the thoughtful, the trained, the expert, the conservative, somehow reassert power over ideas, things are going to get worse.

How do we do it?

STEM vs STS

IEEE Spectrum (what, you don’t get it delivered?) recently published a short article about the relationship between STEM and STS.

STEM, as most of us know, is Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics. Pundits the world over like to remind us how important it is that we graduate as many STEM folks as possible. (That notion is wrong, by the way. We should encourage people who like STEM to pursue STEM.)

STS is less commonly known. That’s “Science and Technology in Society,” and the name describes well enough. STS people study science itself: its processes, people, culture, and outcomes.

I believe I am one of a relatively small cohort of people who are both STEM-y and somewhat STS-y. The former, I get from my engineering degree and my natural proclivity to figure out how things work and to make my own working things. The latter I get from my policy training, which included an introduction to some of the basic concepts in that field. (My wife, an STS scholar herself is also a big factor!)

But I think the seeds of my STS-orientation came much earlier in life, when I was still an undergraduate in engineering school. My engineering program, at the University of Virginia, required all undergraduates to write a thesis, and that thesis had to address important STS concepts like engineering ethics. It was not just the thesis, either. My BSEE required several classes at SEAS’s own engineering humanities program, with required books, such as To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (Petroski),  The Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Normal Accidents (Perrow), The Civilized Engineer (Florman) and, of course, Frankenstein (Shelly). At the time we wondered, why, at a world-class university, would the school of engineering host its own humanities classes? Now I can see that there was something truly cutting-edge about it. (It’s not like we were barred from taking classes outside the engineering school.)

Perhaps because I was indoctrinated at a young age, or because the concepts are right, I firmly believe that an engineer who works without considering the consequences of his creativity is at risk of creating less valuable things than he might. We can all easily conjure a list of the “blockbuster bad ideas” of the 20th century (mustard gas, nuclear weapons, etc). But even when the engineering output is an unalloyed good, with a bit of STS consideration, it is entirely possibly that something even better could have been created. Also, I just find it kind of bizarre that STEM folks might be discouraged from thinking about what there work means. I guess its part of the myth of the objectivity of science that there is no meaning to think about. That’s wrong about science, and it should be prima facie obviously incorrect about engineering, which is by definition, a process directed by human desires.

But this kind of more holistic thinking isn’t particularly common, and as a result, places like Silicon Valley seem to be pretty bad at considering consequences. When you’re racing to create something, who has time to stop and think about its implications, much less let those implications determine the course of development? One simple example: hundreds of years of history led to the universally accepted notion that the integrity of a sealed letter should be maintained by all couriers involved in its delivery. When email came along, no such consideration was made. Why? How would the Internet as a means of communications have evolved if privacy were a consideration from the get go? Could the Internet have been “better?” (Yes, duh.)

Anyway, the IEEE article seems to conclude that most of the barriers to getting STEM folks to take on STS thinking are due to the culture of STEM. Though there is truth to that, it’s not the whole story, by far. For example, STS, philosphy, and policy folks have their own jargon and shibboleths, and it’s not easy for someone not trained in the game to participate. Furthermore, even when you do have something to add, I have found the policy crowd rather hostile to direct participation from STEM folks. One reason is that STEM folks are very analytical, and want to talk about all sides of an issue. On the other hand, policy people, at least non-academic “practicing” policy people are usually focused on a predetermined desired outcome, and the whishy-washiness of the engineers is not very welcome or useful to their campaign. It doesn’t help that engineers often expect carefully curated analysis to “speak for itself.” It doesn’t. I can also attest, again, from firsthand experience, that analysis is not highly prized in policy circles. Analysis comes with strings attached: subtlety, complexity, and confounding factors that are of no help when you are trying to persuade.

It’s also important to remember that most engineers work for someone else. They make their living realizing others’ goals. As such, their leeway to affect the direction of their work is limited and to engage in too much STS thinking is to risk their livelihoods.

And finally, in our toxically overspecialized world, it’s just punishing to be a “boundary spanner.” There are no rewards, and it’s a lot of work. If you have the skills, it is very difficult to find employment that will draw meaningfully on both reservoirs of knowledge. This, perhaps, has been the biggest frustration of my career, as I have bounced between these worlds repeatedly, missing one while in the other.

Finally, a parting shot: If you want to bring STS concepts to the fore, you need to bring them to the people with power. Those are not the heads-down STEM practitioners, those are the C-suite masters of the universe. Let’s see some STS thinking more deeply integrated into the curricula at top business schools. Not just an ethics class to check a requisite box, but something more integrated that leads students to think holistically about their companies’ activities and products rather than, say, applying some post-hoc greenwashing or CSR.

Cultural variation in phalangeal deployment in the service conveying antipathy

I have a lot of thoughts about politics these days, but so does everybody else, right? So I will not write about politics.

Instead, I want to write about “the finger.” I’ve been giving the finger as long as I can remember. I probably learned it from my brother or sister, though, its use was heavily reinforced in social settings — at least those not policed by grown-ups.

I don’t give the finger very much these days, but I still enjoy seeing a good display. I noticed, recently, though, that there seems to be a lot of variation in how people give the finger, and I’ve become curious about it.

The gesture I learned, which I’ll call the “basic” finger requires that the middle finger be extended fully, and all the others be curled down as much as possible. This includes the thumb. It looks like these:

the_gesture021p5b3199

 

 

However, for a long time, I’ve been aware of an alternative interpretation of this gesture, which I will call the “John Hughes.” In this variation, the other fingers are not held down, but merely curled at the knuckles — sometimes only very slightly. The thumb may even be extended. In film, the person giving this gesture often wears fingerless gloves.

Here are some examples:

via GIPHY

 

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I actually find performing this variation rather difficult, as I cannot seem to get my middle finger to extend fully while the others are only bent. However, for my wife and many others, this is the default form — she does not associate it with the Chicago suburbs at all.

So, I ask you, my loyal readers, what’s going on? What drives this variation?

Some theories:

  • geography (soda / pop / coke)
  • class-based
  • disdain vs. anger

 

Does one skew more Republican and the other more Dem?

Are there more types out there? I realize that if you widen the scope internationally, there are many more variations, including the “V” and the thumb, but I’m mostly curious about the intra-US variation.

More election nerdism

Keeping up my streak of mildly entertaining, though basically useless Chrome Extensions, I have create a very tiny extension that keeps the Nate Silver fivethirtyeight predictions in your Chrome toolbar at all times.

You can choose which of Silver’s models is displayed, and clicking brings up more detail as well as links to a few other sites making predictions. Check it out!

For those who are interested in such things, the code is up on github. It’s actually a reasonably minimalist example of a “browser action” extension.

screen-shot-2016-10-05-at-11-09-46-am

On the morality of tax avoidance

People were pretty unhappy when Donald Trump claimed that not paying taxes “makes him smart.” Similarly, nobody was impressed when Mitt Romney claimed that he “paid all the taxes I am required to, not a dollar more.”

What these folks do is legal. It’s called tax avoidance, and the more money you have, the harder you and your accountants will work, and the better at it you’ll be. There is an entire industry built around tax avoidance.

From www.ccPixs.com
From www.ccPixs.com

Though I want to disapprove of these people, it does occur to me that most of us do not willingly pay taxes that we are not required to pay. It’s not like I skip out on deducting my charitable giving or my mortgage interest, or using the deductions for my kids. I’m legally allowed those deductions and I use them.

So what is wrong with what Trump and Romney do?

One answer is “nothing.” I think that’s not quite the right answer, but it’s close. Yes, just because something is legal does not mean that it’s moral. But where do you draw the line here? Is it based on how clever your accountants had to be to work the system? Or how crazy the hoops you jumped through were to hide your money? I’m not comfortable with fuzzy definitions like that at all.

What is probably immoral, is for a rich person to try to influence the tax system to give himself more favorable treatment. But then again, how do you draw a bright line? Rich people often want lower taxes and (presumably) accept that that buys less government stuff and/or believe that they should not have to transfer their wealth to others. That might be a position that I don’t agree with, but the case for immorality there is a bit more complex, and reasonable people can debate it.

On the other hand, lobbying for a tax system with loopholes that benefit them, and creating a system of such complexity that only the wealthiest can navigate it, thus putting the tax burden onto other taxpayers, taxpayers with less money, is pretty obviously immoral. Well, if not immoral, definitely nasty.