Looking to Washington for Action

The workers who are returning home to tell their husbands and wives and children that they no longer have a job, and all those who live in fear that their job will be next on the cutting blocks, they need help now ... They are looking to Washington for action. --President Obama

No they're not, if they're smart. It's fine for Washington to try to do something to help people, but if you have all these major problems, you live in fear, and you need help now; Washington isn't a reliable place to look for action. People with these financial problems need a) to look to people who are poorer and see how they survive with lower consumption, and b) to look to people who earn more to see how they do it so they don't have to use the skill of lower consumption from part "a" indefinitely.

Washington didn't create the a feeling of needing more, and it can't make it go away. It can and should do something to help people at he federal poverty line, but it doesn't have a great record of fast acting help. I have high hopes that President Obama will improve the government's record at helping the poor, but until then people in need should look to themselves, their families, their friends, vendors, and anyone else they can think of before looking to Washington.

Planning for the Next Expansion / Recession Cycle

There is widespread support for the government to pursue another round of borrowing to stimulate the economy. The theory is that the Federal Reserve has done all it can through monetary policy, so the only tool left is fiscal policy, in this case borrowing money. I agree that borrowing money can reduce the severity of this recession, but the price tag is too high.

The economy will continue its cycle of expansion and recession, and at some point in the next few years it will be producing more goods and services than it is today regardless of whether we do more stimulus. The question we have to ask is if we borrow a trillion dollars this year, will that help the economy in the long-run enough to justify the extra debt we will have. I suspect it will not. The main benefit from borrowing the money is to reduce the severity of the recession.

What we need in place of stimulus (i.e. gov’t borrowing) is to structure our economy to handle the ups and downs of the economic cycle. Any politician talking about dealing with this recession needs to talk about the plan for the next recession. Are we going to build a bunch of luxury items (i.e. 5000 sq ft houses or something like that) in the next expansion and then panic when the expansion turns to recession? It isn't hard to avoid this behavior and make the economic cycle be no big deal. Portugal has something like 60% of US per-capita GDP, and it’s not a constant crisis there. We ought to be set up to handle even a 10% drop in GDP without it causing major problems.

We’re like a flu patient who wants antibiotics (which aren’t effective against the flu) and who doesn’t want to hear that the best thing to do is to let the flu run its course and next year get the flu shot to keep this from happening again.

Don’t wait for politicians to do it. They're mostly operating under the idea that government must smooth out the economic cycle. The probably will not succeed in making the economy grow in a nice straight line, so people should have a plan for how they will respond to the next economic expansion or contraction.

I'm a Chiphead

Here's a video about electronics engineering that's actually funny.

I need three hands while I'm watching the screen: two for the mouse and keyboard, one for sipping caffeine.

Voting for the best Chiphead video contest is open until February 4.

Michelle Singletary Says We Need a Get Away from Excessive Borrowing

Washington Post commentator Michelle Singletary was on Meet the Press just before the New Year. Here are some of her comments:

I love that [Jeff Immelt] said "reset," because--I am actually glad that we had this recession because we were on a path that we couldn't get off, and we did need that reset. We need, we needed people to step back and stop taking on so much debt and really go back to the basics. The basics are the basics because they always work no matter what the economy is. Live below your means, don't take on so much debt and save.

This is the first time I recall hearing on Meet the Press the idea that the solution to our crisis caused by excessive debt is not more debt. We need to hear more of this.

Trying to get back to the world of maximum consumption balanced on a wire is the wrong policy. Our goal should be that by the next time our economy cycles into recession, it has little impact on people's ability to get basic needs. The goal should not be to smooth out the economic cycle completely.

We are at a critical time. The US government has a one-time offer to borrow money at very low rates. If we don’t spend the money on things that increase structural GDP (not just things that make the recession end sooner), we will have a hard time funding the government when rates rise. For this “stimulus” to work, the borrowed money needs to be invested in things that literally change the world. The government doesn’t have a great record of excellent long-term investments, so this is a huge challenge. We should exercise moderation in any stimulus package. Otherwise if rates rise, we could see a much larger portion of our tax dollars going to service debt.

Catching a Malicious Hacker (somewhat geek-wonkish)

It’s amazing how an assumption can sometimes lead me down the wrong track and make me believe things that aren’t true.

Just before the holidays I had a problem with a 802.11 Wi-Fi Ethernet radios I was working on. I had a pair of wireless radios connecting a PC to an office network. Something coming in on the radios caused severe interruptions to our network, including taking out a VoIP telephone system used for customer service.

A wireless sniff showed a weak signal connecting to my pair of radios under test. That means they must have intentionally selected my test network by selecting the same SSID (network name). When we looked deeper, it appeared that the offending signal was rapidly changing IP address to addresses used by various equipment on the office network. It had to be a hacker. The signal was weak, probably not in the immediate area. Maybe it was someone from the glacial hills a mile north of the office, I thought as I looked out the window at the hundreds of snow-coverd roofs in the distance. Were they just sitting there, in front of a computer with a small 2.4GHz antenna on their roof or in their attic, messing with me? Or did the have an automated script running that hacked into networks and logged its activity for later review?

I immediately turned on encryption on my test radios. I used an advanced encryption setting because the older WEP encryption can be easily defeated. The hacker couldn’t get in anymore. I tried turning off encryption, and he came right back.

A colleague eventually found the source of the problem: it was another unrelated product I have been working on only a few meters away from the two radios under test.

The signal appeared weak because this unrelated product had no antenna connected. A unfortunate “feature” of the product is that when not directed to connect to a specific network, it would connect to the first un-encrypted network it found. The product includes a module that is designed to be a client and take the address of a single device attached to it. A problem in the product caused it to attempt this on a port connected to an entire network. As a result it kept taking the address of the last thing it heard. Since it was connected to the office network and my wireless network, which was also connected to the office network, a loop was created.

I wonder how many times I spend more than a few hours on the wrong track. I had such a specific image of a person intentionally interfering with the network. I didn’t want to hear that I was indirectly responsible for the problem. It’s a reminder to avoid hasty conclusions and other pitfalls to critical thinking and to stay open to undesirable possibilities.

Unintentional Parody of Breastfeeding Dogma

Since the birth of my baby last summer, I've been considering writing a post about the dogma surrounding breastfeeding. If you haven't had a baby in the past few years, you probably haven’t even heard about it.

There have been several studies showing breastfeeding infants is superior to giving them formula. There is strong evidence that breastfeeding is correlated to better infant health, although the case that breastfeeding directly causes better health is weaker. This has led to a campaign to press parents to breastfeed.

The many problems of breastfeeding dogma campaign are beyond the scope of this post. I have been looking for a way to convey the problems in 60 seconds or less. Fortunately, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ran a 60 second message during Face the Nation last week that is an excellent unintentional parody of the campaign. It gives you a quick overview of the campaign’s key points and its level of sophistication.


That woman could lactate like nobody's business.

It's like some piece in a museum showing sexism of the past that makes you wonder how people could have ever taken it seriously. This is the same, except it’s from last week. It tries to be funny but ends up being offensive.

I don't know what's behind this push. I suspect breastfeeding zealots provide the Office of Women's Health with material, and the Office of Women's Health can get more funding by producing reports for their parent agency showing they're indeed doing something with their budget.