2013-01-16T13:27:10+00:00

Facebook Graph Search is pointless, says Farhad Manjoo without meaning to

January 16, 2013/stevereads/Leave a comment

Farhad Manjoo’s piece about Facebook Graph Search is the best possible case for why we should care about Facebook Graph Search, which leads ineluctably to the conclusion that we shouldn’t care about Facebook Graph Search. Here’s the sort of thing that Facebook Graph Search lets you do, according to Manjoo:

> The most interesting searches werent necessarily the most complicated, but those that asked Facebook to combine its knowledge in ways that other sites cant. In an effort to suss out authentic cuisine, I tried, Mexican restaurants in New York liked by people from Mexico.

Let’s pick apart what’s wrong about this. First, the problem for any search engine is that it has to be not only *better* than Google, but better than Google by enough of a margin to make switching worthwhile. So you have to ask yourself whether searching like this is going to get you better results than just Googling for [authentic Mexican New York]; and if it does get you better results, will it require a lot more effort to do so? How about if you, like many people, eventually find websites that you trust for food questions? (Me, I use Chowhound.) How easily can you answer this Mexican-restaurant question by narrowing your search to Yelp?

Much more fundamentally, though, the problem with Facebook Graph Search is that it’s for people who don’t want to interact with people. Look at Manjoo’s Mexican-food example: I’m supposed to ask Facebook to search among those people who are from Mexico. Why wouldn’t I, instead, just *ask people from Mexico?* It’s supposed to be a *social* network, right? Like, with people? So shouldn’t I ask people things? Manjoo wishes he could ask FGS about “running shoes liked by people who have run marathons”; I know what I’d do in that case: I’d post on my friend Laura’s wall (or better yet, email Laura), “Hey Laura: which shoes should I get?”

In its defense, maybe FGS will not just query what my friends like, but rather query what all Facebook users like. But if that’s true, FGS is even *less* valuable: I *don’t care* what all Facebook users like. I hardly care what’s outside my own network, *contra* Manjoo’s example of searching for “photos of friends of friends who like Girls who live in NYC who are single women between 20 and 34 and like Arcade Fire.” That is a question that no one has ever had or will ever have. Either you’re querying the tastes of people you know, or you’re querying the tastes of strangers. And if you’re querying the tastes of strangers, why not use a site that makes no pretense about being “social” — like Google or, in that Arcade Fire dating example, like OkCupid?

The useless use cases come thick and fast in Manjoo’s article. I’m thankful for that, because he’s trying as hard as he can to show why we should care about this thing; given that no one could possibly care about these examples, there must be no reason to care about FGS. Like this:

> What captivated me was Facebooks search interface. Its unlike any search box youve ever used. Googles search is based on keywords. If you type restaurants chicago into Google, it guesses that youre looking for restaurants in the city even though you typed just two nouns. Facebook, by comparison, wants you to connect nouns with verbs. You can ask, restaurants in Chicago, or restaurants liked by people who live in Chicago or restaurants liked by my friends who are from Chicago. (The search box offers drop-down suggestions as you type, so you dont usually have to finish writing these full queries.)
>
> This method of searching is instantly intuitive. After just a few queries, I started asking the engine for more and more complicated things, just to see if it could keep up. I tried: My friends of friends who work in Palo Alto, California and are from California and are male and who like Indian restaurants.

Is natural-language searching something that anyone needs? Was it a problem that Google required you to search for [restaurants chicago] rather than “I would like to know where to eat a meal in Chicago”? This is a natural-language solution in search of a keyword problem.

If you want to know “restaurants liked by my friends who are from Chicago”, shouldn’t you *ask your Chicago friends which restaurants they like?*

The fact that Facebook and Manjoo think there’s a problem a computer can solve here is bottomlessly sad to me. It exposes a deep poverty of interpersonal relationships.

Help me learn how to read laws

January 9, 2013April 21, 2026/stevereads/Leave a comment

I wonder if my dear readers could educate me. Here’s where I got started: my employer’s payroll company, ADP, emailed me to say that as of this year, the mass-transit-pass employer fringe benefit reduces taxable income by as much as the parking-permit fringe benefit; it used to be that you got more for parking. I found this unjust, and was pleased when the injustice was corrected.

So now I want to go find the part of the law that rectifies the injustice. As per that earlier blog post, the relevant section of the tax law appears to be 26 USC 132.

First thing I seem to have discovered: you can’t understand any part of that law until you read all of it. Here’s the first relevant piece:

(f) Qualified transportation fringe
    (1) In general
    For purposes of this section, the term qualified transportation fringe means any of the following provided by an employer to an employee:
        (A) Transportation in a commuter highway vehicle if such transportation is in connection with travel between the employees residence and place of employment.
        (B) Any transit pass.
        (C) Qualified parking.
        (D) Any qualified bicycle commuting reimbursement.
    (2) Limitation on exclusion
        The amount of the fringe benefits which are provided by an employer to any employee and which may be excluded from gross income under subsection (a)(5) shall not exceed
            (A) $100 per month in the case of the aggregate of the benefits described in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of paragraph (1),
            (B) $175 per month in the case of qualified parking, and
            []
In the case of any month beginning on or after the date of the enactment of this sentence and before January 1, 2012, subparagraph (A) shall be applied as if the dollar amount therein were the same as the dollar amount in effect for such month under subparagraph (B).

That final paragraph says “equalize transit passes and parking”. Got it. But two things:

ADP says that the benefit is $240 per month, which disagrees with the $175 in (f)(2)(B).
The final paragraph says that this equality of benefits ends when 2011 ends, which disagrees with ADP.

So I look around some more and I find two things that address these problems:

Section 6(A) in this same law applies an inflation adjustment — hence my statement that you need to read the whole thing to understand the rest. It seems to say that you take the CPI from the preceding calendar year and divide by the CPI for 1992, then multiply by whatever (f)(2)(A) or (f)(2)(B) say.

All right, so we consult the CPI. First of all, I don’t know what ‘the CPI for 1992’ means: does it mean January of 1992? It probably doesn’t much matter which part of 1992 I pick (we’re not Zimbabwe), so I’ll just grab 140.3, the annual average for 1992. Then we get 2012’s CPI, which is about 230. So the multiplier is 1.64. Multiply by the $100 in (f)(2)(A), and I only get $164 — not the $240 that ADP reported.

But again recall that final paragraph, quoted above. It says that mass transit and parking are equal. So let’s assume the pre-inflation-correction benefit is $175 per month, and again apply the 1.64 multiplier. That brings the mass-transit benefit up to $287 — which is now too high. So now I’m confused where the $240 came from that ADP mentioned.

The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 extended benefit parity until the beginning of 2014, specifically

SEC. 203. EXTENSION OF PARITY FOR EXCLUSION FROM INCOME FOR EMPLOYER-PROVIDED MASS TRANSIT AND PARKING BENEFITS.

(a) IN GENERAL.Paragraph (2) of section 132(f) is amended by striking January 1, 2012 and inserting January 1, 2014.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE.The amendment made by this section shall apply to months after December 31, 2011.

The law as it’s archived at Cornell doesn’t seem to reflect this.

So I’m confused on three general points:

How do I know that I read all the parts of the bill that modify the particular paragraph I’m interested in? (John E. McDonough’s magisterial Inside National Health Reform explains very patiently the complicated way in which one needs to read the Affordable Care Act. Do I need a McDonough by my side to read any law? Do I need a Marion Nestle to walk me through the farm bill?)
How do I know that I’m looking at the most up-to-date version of a particular section of the law?
How do I know that there isn’t another section of the US Code that’s relevant to the particular policy — in this case, commuter fringe benefits — that I care about?

Social Security and Medicare are unjust: sure. So let everyone have them!

December 3, 2012April 21, 2026/stevereads/Leave a comment

There are at least two possible reactions to the realization that a lot of your Federal taxes transfer money from the young to the old (Medicare, Social Security, etc.). One is to argue that this is unjust and try to cut these programs. Another is argue that this is unjust, and therefore to expand them: eliminate the injustice by making the benefit available to everyone. Expand Medicare to everyone. Make Social Security available to people 50 and older. After all, we’re a more prosperous country than we were when Social Security was passed; shouldn’t we reward ourselves for our productivity by providing official support for greater leisure?

It seems like people (e.g., “the execrable Robert J. Samuelson”) only ever take the first option: we must cut Social Security. But why? We’re wealthier than we’ve ever been! (That’s disposable personal income per capita, where disposable personal income is defined as personal income minus taxes. Personal income, in turn, is what you’d expect.) Social Security is an unjust transfer? Sure it is! So make it more just and let more people have it; problem solved.

As it happens, the government has been keeping close watch over productivity statistics since after World War II. If I’m looking at the right data series, and I think I am, aggregate productivity — that is, output per hour of labor — is 4.6 times what it was just after the war. The miracle of compounding, brothers and sisters! Imagine if we as a society had made the decision to take half of that productivity and plow it into our own leisure at the end of a lifetime of hard work. We’d still have the standard of living of postwar America — the most prosperous time this country has ever known. We’d just be able to enjoy more of it.

I’m sure I’m missing important pieces here. For instance, maybe Social Security does now indeed consume twice as much of every person’s paycheck as it did back then; maybe we’ve quite kept up with the productivity gains. Chart A in a summary of the latest Trustees’ Report, for what it’s worth, says that even in their fevered dreams, the actuaries can’t conceive of Social Security consuming more than about 6.5% of GDP.

You could certainly continue working past age 50 under this idea. By all means! You can continue working under the current system. Some people will choose not to, however. And I’m sure the hardworking Social Security actuaries have plenty of good estimates of the benefit level that would induce x many millions of people to drop out of the workforce.

Not that Social Security is any kind of panacea. It pays out an average of $1,230 per month. Even with that meager payout, Social Security constitutes the majority of retirement income for the poorest 60% of retirees; retirees are poor. Social Security is a way to keep people out of poverty; it’s not a retirement with dignity.

Likewise with Medicare: despite liberals’ love for the program, and our desire that everyone be allowed to buy into it, it’s by no means salvation. Marilyn Moon goes into great and fascinating detail about this in her Medicare: A Policy Primer, of which I desperately need to write a review. Moon’s take, which is woefully rare, is to look at Medicare from the perspective of the beneficiaries; too often we look at it only from the perspective of the Federal budget. From the beneficiaries’ perspective, Medicare is a den of complexity. It’s not the single-payer health-care system of our dreams, and it leaves too many retieees (who are, again, by no means wealthy) paying a significant portion of their disposable income toward medical care. In the single-payer system that I think most liberals imagine, you’d pay some amount in taxes, and that would be that. No one expects me to pay a Department of Defense co-pay if the country gets invaded: my taxes are supposed to do the job on their own.

Decades of bludgeoning by the Republican Party has left us with the mistaken impression that we’re a poor country, and that the only thing we can do is cut cut cut. We’re not; we’re an astoundingly wealthy country. What is that wealth buying us? (Well, other than $1.121 trillion to fly money to the Middle East, drop it out of planes, and blow it up.) Wealthy societies should be willing to spend more on health care: a year of life is worth more to us than a year of life in a poorer country — indeed, worth more to us than a year of life to our relatively impoverished 1960s selves. (That’s the fundamental argument underneath David Cutler’s excellent Your Money Or Your Life, which I’ll review soon if I know what’s good for me.)

Wealthy societies should also, at some point, decide whether to convert some of their hard-won gains into leisure. We never seem to have had that discussion. Even opening up this discussion in “libertarian”-friendly ways — like allowing people to contribute money to their Social Security now to buy themselves extra retirement income — would be a worthwhile place to start.

Instead all our discussions are of a crabbed and nervous and desiccated sort. We act as though we’re a poor country. Every politician likes to say that he opposes the story of U.S. decline, but this incessant poverty drumbeat says quite the opposite.

The Affordable Care Act and 2014

November 8, 2012/stevereads/Leave a comment

We’ve all been hearing that the Affordable Care Act will come online in 2014, so I thought I’d take a moment and read the bill text to see where ‘2014’ shows up. Turns out it shows up in a lot of places, actually: 164 different pages in the 906-page bill, by my count. But this, on a quick scan, seems like where 2014 rubber hits the 2014 road:

PART IICONSUMER CHOICES AND INSURANCE COMPETITION THROUGH HEALTH BENEFIT EXCHANGES
SEC. 1311. AFFORDABLE CHOICES OF HEALTH BENEFIT PLANS.
[…]
(b) AMERICAN HEALTH BENEFIT EXCHANGES.
(1) IN GENERAL.Each State shall, not later than January 1, 2014, establish an American Health Benefit Exchange (referred to in this title as an “Exchange”) for the State that
(A) facilitates the purchase of qualified health plans;
(B) provides for the establishment of a Small Business Health Options Program (in this title referred to as a “SHOP Exchange”) that is designed to assist qualified employers in the State who are small employers in facilitating the enrollment of their employees in qualified health plans offered in the small group market in the State […]

Then there’s the dreaded “mandate” — section 1501, starting on p. 124. It amends Chapter 48 of the Internal Revenue Code, in part, as follows:

(b) SHARED RESPONSIBILITY PAYMENT.
(1) IN GENERAL.If an applicable individual fails to meet the requirement of subsection (a) for 1 or more months during any calendar year beginning after 2013, then, except as provided in subsection (d), there is hereby imposed a penalty with respect to the individual in the amount determined under subsection (c).

I read that to say that you need to have coverage (“minimum essential coverage,” as it happens — a term defined starting about halfway down on page 130 and extending for about a page) for every month of every year after 2013 — which would be 2014 and after, if I have my math right.

So that’s where 2014 comes from. When January 1, 2014 rolls around, Obamacare will be here to stay. By the time the midterm elections happen in November of that year, Obamacare will have spent 10 months rectifying one of our great national tragedies: that there are about 48 million uninsured Americans.

Mitt Romney on privatization, devolution to the states, and insurance

October 28, 2012/stevereads/1 Comment

A fellow with whom I used to work tweeted today,

> Watch Mitt Romney say federal disaster relief for tornado and flood victims is “immoral” http://youtu.be/OhXyJeKaj8E

That’s not actually what Romney says in the linked video; Judd is being disingenuous. But I think Romney is wrong in there for some reasons that bear elucidating.

First he says that we need to move programs from the Federal government to the states or to the private sector when possible. He goes on to say that racking up giant debts and passing them on to our kids is immoral, as though the debt piece were connected with the privatization/devolution-to-the-states (just “privatization” from here on in) piece.

The only way this argument makes sense is if you believe that the private sector or state governments are likely to do things more efficiently than the Federal government. If you don’t believe that they will, and if you believe that the thing the Federal government is doing needs to be done — for instance, if you believe that *someone* needs to be handling disaster relief — then transferring this job to the states is just shifting a bucket of money from one place to the other. If states are no more efficient than the Feds at this, then you’re replacing one source of debt (the Federal government’s) with another. Most states are required to maintain balanced budgets, so shifting this burden to the states would result in an immediate tax increase for all state taxpayers.

Privatizing disaster relief has its own problems. If we’re lucky, it would be privatized such that everyone who needed it could afford it. If we as a society believe that people shouldn’t be devastated when natural disasters strike, then we’d probably have to impose some kind of regulation to ensure that everyone who wants it can get it. This starts to look like the act of pantomime that a friend has done for many years: “capitalism picks its nose like this” (right arm reached around behind the left side of the head to pick the left nostril). Rather than simply have the Federal government do what needs doing, we privatize it and then impose a lot of regulations to achieve the outcome that we as a society want. Seems wasteful. Though by all means: if it happens that society can achieve what it wants to achieve using fewer resources in the private sector than it would through government — *including* the costs of the necessary regulation, and including all the efforts that private industry will then go through to evade regulation and get a leg up on its regulated competitors — then that’s a strong argument for privatizing.

Another direction this disaster-relief argument might go is to privatize disaster *insurance*, rather than disaster *relief*. I don’t know how disaster insurance works offhand. With insurance in general, we want to prevent two bad outcomes: __adverse selection__ (only the riskiest cases bother to get insured) and __moral hazard__ (the insured take more socially harmful risks than the uninsured). The way to prevent adverse selection is to require that everyone get insurance; that way the riskiest cases and the least-risky cases are buying in together, and the market doesn’t completely unravel. So if we want flood insurance to work at all, we’re going to have to require everyone to carry it, for some value of ‘everyone’ (maybe only ‘everyone’ in flood-prone areas, for instance). So again, government regulation to make the market work properly seems unavoidable.

*Federal*-government involvement seems unavoidable, in particular, because you want to spread risk over as many people as possible. This is one of the virtues of living in a country as large as the United States: when one group of flood-insurance beneficiaries is cashing in because, say, there’s flooding in the Southeast, another group in the Midwest is doing just fine, and the insurer doesn’t go broke. So having separate state-by-state insurers doesn’t seem like a stable equilibrium: risks are too concentrated in one state to make this work, and we’d likely end up with national insurers. These could either be private national insurers or the government itself. If it were a private insurer, it would have to be regulated: the insurer would have to hold onto enough of a cash buffer so that it wouldn’t be bankrupted by the “storm of the century”. And we as a society want insurance to really be there when it’s needed, so there would be a government backstop of some sort to make beneficiaries whole in case the insurer goes out of business. In exchange for providing this backstop, insurers would have to subject their books to regular auditing, would have to hold sufficient reserves, etc. Again, government involvement is unavoidable.

As for the moral-hazard piece: maybe there’s an argument that people with insurance are more likely to build on flood plains, and maybe we want to discourage this. One way the private market might do this is by setting the premium on flood-prone homes very high. There would then be at least a couple possible responses: either people continue building on those spots, even though they’re not insured, or they don’t build there. Without any regulation at all, maybe a lot of people would continue planting homes on uninsurable spots; when they get wiped out by floods, they’re bankrupted, and maybe we as a society are okay with that. Alternately, maybe we just forbid people from building on spots that no one is willing to insure; the only way to do this is through law or regulation, which — again — means that government involvement is unavoidable.

I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to Romney on this: it’s hard to describe real-world privatization in a 30-second soundbite. Here’s my 30-second soundbite: if we have reason to believe that something is better done by the states or by private industry, by all means let’s consider privatizing it. But privatization is not a magic potion that makes industries efficient — particularly when you consider the government involvement that necessarily has to accompany a lot of industries. Regulation is there for a reason; it’s because we as a society believe that certain things need to be accomplished, and for whatever reason we’ve left those things up to the private market.

Of course, from there you could also ask, “Well, do we actually need to do these things?” Do we actually need flood insurance or disaster relief? The really infuriating thing about watching Romney and his Republican brethren during this interminable election has been watching them try to walk the line: on one side, they want to say that principles of good government require us to drop things like universal health insurance (Ron Paul’s uncomfortable answer when asked whether to let an uninsured patient die) and flood insurance; but on the other side, they know that the public finds these positions morally vile, which they are. Which is why the Republican approach has been to answer a different question: Romney lectures us on the evils of Federal debt rather than say whether the Federal government has a role to play in disaster relief, and Ron Paul just says that the patient should exercise personal responsibility.

I strongly suspect, without having gathered the data on this, that people are liberals when they’re not asked to self-identify that way. Ask people the same question that Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul: should society let him die? I suspect most people would say, no, of course not. But in return for not allowing him to die, and for picking up the tab when he falls ill, we should expect him to pay for his own insurance while he’s healthy. And what if he can’t afford to pay that insurance? Should we help him out, in exchange for his subsidizing poorer folks when he gets back on his feet?

Whether or not most people would answer yes to that, that’s the question. The debate over these big moral questions has been hidden behind a technocratic or legal shroud of late. Maybe there was actually an urgent legal question about whether the government can ‘compel you to buy broccoli’, and whether that is meaningfully different from just giving you broccoli and including that in your tax bill. I don’t think so, though. The real root of the issue is whether you believe that society has a responsibility to protect its weakest members. Having decided that the answer is yes, we can set about deciding the best way to achieve that goal. When Republicans make a stink about requiring people to buy broccoli, they’re actually saying that the answer is no, and that society needn’t serve that protective role. They should be honest and just say so.

“The poor”

October 26, 2012April 21, 2026/stevereads/Leave a comment

I had a realization today: when we talk about ‘the poor’, we have a labeling problem. I think people are inclined, when they envision ‘the poor’, to envision a permanent underclass — the perennially helpless. The mental picture that a lot of people have is of people who were born to poor parents, will be poor and uneducated throughout their lives, and will raise children who are stuck in the same class as well for all their lives.

There may be some of that. Who knows, it may be the case that most of those who fall on hard times will spend their entire lives there. But the point is that, by envisioning the poor this way, we envision them as ‘the other’. And by envisioning them as the other, we don’t picture ourselves as people who could be poor by a stroke of fortune tomorrow. Consequently, we imagine a program like Medicaid as a program for ‘the poor’, rather than as a program that we ourselves could benefit from. We envision food stamps as something for other people. That makes it hard for us to defend food stamps as a thing for all of us. If the society is lucky, most of us will be altruistic enough to defend social programs for others, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Seems to me that if we really want to sell these things, we need to convince Americans that any of us could fall into the social safety net at any time. That turns Medicaid into a middle-class benefit, which the middle class should defend purely out of self-interest. (1 in 7 Americans is on food stamps. Medicaid and CHIP provide coverage to 1 in 5 Americans. There is no state, among those from which records are available, in which Medicaid pays for less than 1 in 4 births. Etc.)

As it happens, right now I’m reading a book (Frank J. Thompson’s Medicaid Politics: Federalism, Policy Durability, and Health Reform) that tries to understand whether Medicaid has the political clout to survive; and if it does, why it does. The maxim has always been that “a program for the poor becomes a poor program”; so why does Medicaid, the classic program for the poor, not become a poor program? Why does it seem to be thriving?

I recall some Jacob Hacker data showing that income variability is quite high: the probability that your income will drop by half next year is rather high; you might need that safety net after all.

Then of course there are the second-order effects of making middle-class life more predictable: if your future is more predictable, you can do more planning and long-range thinking. You can choose to stay in the community you want to live in, knowing that a layoff won’t force you to pack up and find work elsewhere. If you know your children will have health insurance regardless of whether you’re employed, you can go off and start a small business — you can take the sort of risks that society is supposed to encourage. Now that you and your neighbors are more stable, the guy running the bakery down the street knows that he can rely on a steadier stream of business; so he can plan further ahead in his future; and so forth. The benefits of a middle-class safety net radiate out far beyond the immediate beneficiary.

More on all of this soon. Hopefully more data, in particular.

Is there any rational reason to buy books locally?

July 15, 2012/stevereads/1 Comment

There’s a good argument against buying books locally. Consider my beloved local bookstore, the Harvard Book Store. I buy books from them, and I pay a premium to do so — happily, I might add. But a large part of my brain knows that this is irrational. If I want a book, why not buy it where it’s cheapest? It’s one thing to buy something local that is legitimately local and can’t be made by anyone else — for instance, cocktails from Drink or food from Craigie On Main or produce from a CSA that supports local farmers or ice cream from Toscanini’s. Books aren’t at all like that; they’re not local, and a large chunk of my book dollar is going to publishers in New York City. Why not take every penny that I spend at the Harvard Book Store and instead donate it to my local library? Or buy the books on Amazon?

Three answers come to mind:

1. Local bookstores support new authors in a way that Amazon does not. I don’t think there’s much evidence for this, though I’d be glad to hear it if there were. And come to think of it: if you spend less on a given book by buying it where it’s cheapest, you can then *buy more books*, including books by upstart authors. So buying from Amazon might, in this sense, be *better* for new authors.

2. The Harvard Book Store brings speakers to the local community, and in general runs author events locally that Amazon does not. True. But in the absence of local bookstores, wouldn’t this happen anyway? Those authors aren’t coming to the HBS out of community altruism; they’re promoting a book. I assume that they’d continue promoting their books even if HBS weren’t there. Authors like Paul Krugman come to Cambridge because they think that the audience here would buy their books. Krugman would likely continue to do so.

3. A general love of local commerce. Sure, no doubt. But that’s not really what we’re arguing. Hollywood Express had a local video store in Central Square in Cambridge, which went out of business because of (among other things) Netflix and YouTube and Hulu and Vimeo. It was an outmoded business model. The Hollywood Express was replaced by Life Alive, a delightful restaurant whose first outpost was in Lowell. An outmoded business was replaced with a business that still makes sense. If local bookstores don’t make sense, replace them with local businesses that do. It’s not as though the alternative to the Harvard Book Store is the Wal-Martization of Cambridge.

But as I said, I spend a good chunk of money at HBS, and I intend to continue to do so, irrationally or not. Anyone want to convince me that it’s actually rational to spend my dollars at HBS rather than spend less money at Amazon and redirect the surplus to other worthy local businesses?

__P.S.__: Writing this out has really made me question whether I *want to* continue spending money at HBS.

__P.P.S.__: My friend Josh, on Facebook, made a good argument in local bookstores’ favor: they, and local cafés, are places where like like-minded people congregate. If you really love books, you’re likely to buy from a local bookstore rather than, say, from a grocery store. And if you love coffee, you’ll go to a place where others who love coffee go. Josh prefers to support the places that support real lovers of the book (and of the cup). I do, too. This seems like an excellent argument in HBS’s favor.

One counterargument is that this is a temporary state of the world, and that the market always wins. People will increasingly be buying their books on e-readers like Kindles, or from Amazon, so as time goes on fewer and fewer book lovers will buy books from places that self-identify as “book lovers’ retailers”. As the community moves elsewhere, these places lose their character.

But of course that’s a ways off, and in the meantime we should support homes for that kind of community.

A SQL question!

July 11, 2012/stevereads/2 Comments

Suppose you have

SELECT a+b AS some_sum, a-b AS some_diff
FROM some_table

It would be syntactically invalid, as far as I understand it, to have

SELECT a+b AS some_sum, a-b AS some_diff,
some_sum + some_diff AS something_else
FROM some_table

, because `some_sum` and `some_diff` aren’t names that yet exist in the scope of that `SELECT` statement. To use `some_sum` and `some_diff`, you need an outer scope that has access to all the names created in the inner scope — so you need either

SELECT some_sum + some_diff AS something_else
FROM
(
SELECT a+b AS some_sum, a-b AS some_diff
FROM some_table
)

or, if you don’t need to attach a name to `some_sum + some_diff`, you can just do

SELECT a+b AS some_sum, a-b AS some_diff
FROM some_table
HAVING some_sum + some_diff >= 0

(or whatever it is that you might want to do with `some_sum + some_diff`)

So … are there some nightmare scenarios that would result from allowing the names ‘`some_sum`’ and ‘`some_diff`’ to be visible in the inner scope? Does anyone know the SQL spec well enough to understand the problem?

__P.S.__: Oh, I think I can answer the question a moment after asking it: the problem is that you can create a name in the inner scope that’s the same as the name of a field in the base table. That is, you can do something like

SELECT 2*a AS a, 3*a AS triple_a
FROM some_table

, and that `3*a` statement is ambiguous: are you referring to triple the *derived* `a`, or triple the *base* `a`?

Even still, I can imagine allowing one scope to refer to a name created within that scope, but then making it a syntax error to introduce a name in a given scope that’s the same as a name in a base table. The way to resolve the ambiguity in this case would be to do

SELECT 2*a AS double_a, 3*(double_a) AS sextuple_a
FROM some_table

I wonder if a Sufficiently Smart Compiler (“a classic argument often pulled out in a LanguagePissingMatch”) could find all ambiguous uses of names, or whether there’s some logical reason why it just couldn’t.

Then again, forbidding the creation of a name in a given scope that is the same as the name of a name in an inner scope or base table would make a lot of common usage impossible. I routinely do

SELECT one_thing, sum(something) something_else
FROM some_table
GROUP BY one_thing

I.e., I’m reusing `something_else` in this scope, even though it also exists in the base table. If I had to constantly use new names for derived fields, just because the derived fields might be referred to in the outer scope, I think I’d find that annoying.

Then, of course, there’s the ever-available argument that it’s just simpler to implement a compiler which imposes certain mild aesthetic constraints on its users.

Affordable Care Act silence is deafening

July 1, 2012/stevereads/Leave a comment

Does it seem to anyone else like Democrats — including the President — passed the Affordable Care Act and then promptly stopped talking about it altogether? If my read on the situation is right, that’s because they perceived the law polls very poorly. But

1. If you’re going to lose an election, lose with your back straight. Either voters dislike your voting for the law or they don’t. If they don’t care how you voted, there’s no need for you to be silent about it. On the other hand, if they dislike it, and you believed in the law when you passed it, then stand up for it. You didn’t run for office just to win re-election; presumably you ran because you wanted to achieve something positive, and you thought the law was positive. If the voters do care and you didn’t believe in it when it was passed, your opponent is still going to hound you for your vote when you run for re-election. So what’s the point in hiding from it?

2. Whether something polls well or poorly isn’t an objective fact ‘out there’ in the universe; whether it polls well depends a lot on whether people whom Americans like — such as President Obama — are out there selling it. Which they aren’t.

3. The ACA as such polls poorly, because it’s been demonized as ‘Obamacare’. But some of the individual provisions — no discrimination against pre-existing conditions, lengthened coverage under one’s parents’ health insurance — poll well. In many cases I think it’s just that people don’t know what’s in Obamacare. In other cases, like the mandate, people genuinely seem to hate it. That seems like a failure of education: people need to understand that there are only a few ways to make health coverage universal without the market unraveling. Democrats have been *terrible* about selling the mandate.

4. Do you care about ensuring that everyone has health insurance, or don’t you? We really need to make clear that that’s what this comes down to: we believe in universal coverage; they don’t. If you believe in universal coverage, something like a mandate is unavoidable. (Expanding Medicare to everyone would have been another option, but insurers never would have stood for it.) Lately Republicans seem to be facing up to this, and at least admitting that they don’t care about universal coverage. If nothing else, that has the virtue of consistency. But it’s morally repugnant.