Vaccines (snarky)

Far too much is being written about them already, albeit with good reason.  I think the gist of the story can be quite short:

When that one great Scorer comes to mark against your name

It matters not who won or lost, but how you place the blame.

(Emphasis added.)  One of my favourite authors articulated another aspect of the problem very well, and I hope his literary estate will not object to this quote:

The people at the top only get there by doing what the people at the bottom want them to do.  Which is nothing, because the people at the bottom don't know what they want.

From a different author: 

"As a securely dominant species, you could afford to lose touch with reality ..."

and the aliens are talking, not about religion, but about democracy.  We WEIRD people have indeed lost touch.

Do I have anything to say in my own voice, then?  Yes.  It's not surprising that Israel has done such an impressive job of jabbing most of the population.  Israeli institutions are used to dangerous situations where results count and excuses don't.   It is surprising that the UK, especially with Boris in charge, has succeeded as well as it has -- today I hear that over half the population (or the adult population?) has had its first jab.  And as for the USA, there are much worse places I could be.

Things to come

 I've been reading so much Substack lately that I'm tempted to express myself on various topical topics, if only to get certain opinions off my chest.  This blog is the natural place to do so. There is little danger of what I write here being read by anyone who disagrees with me ... or who agrees with me.

I see that Quora has cleaned its question stream up quite well, so I'll probably be back there too.

Declaration of allegiance

 All the cool kids are at substack these days.  So I've subscribed to Matt Yglesias and am following Noah Smith and (could you doubt it? would you believe me if I said I wasn't?) Scott Alexander *******.  I also still read Tyler C and Alex T's joint blog.  On recommendations from the above, I'm reading Zvi Mowshowitz, Jason Crawford, Susanna Viljanen, and Derek Lowe sporadically.  OK, nobody had to recommend Susanna to me.  So if I write something you haven't already heard eight million times, check to see which of the above can have inspired it.

I remain a proud and loyal subject of Her Majesty.   Not that anyone who knows me is wondering about that.

No, It Is Not

Let's get this straight. Today is not π day. That day does not arrive for another 1021 years, two months, and -5 days.

Oh, and there was a rehearsal for it 1706 years, two months, and eight days ago. Sorry I missed it.

Why We Can't Fix Rush Hour

I live in Mountain View, as I have done since before Google was founded. Even in the 1980s it was not much fun to drive on the Bay Area's freeways during rush hour; today, the delays are almost legendary.  A few naive youngsters still have the courage to ask why local (or state, or federal) governments don't Do Something About It. Well, they've opened a new stretch of freeway (I can remember when most of SR 85 wasn't there) and widened an old one, but commuting still sucks. All right, let's look at the causes of the trouble.

Rush hour occurs because many people start and end work at roughly the same time, but what makes it so horrible is that they live far away from where they work, and spend a long time getting there. Thus the people who leave home at 7:30 are still on the road when the people who leave at 8:00 start driving, and the road gets crowded, which makes it even slower. Come 8:15, the 7:30 people still haven't reached work, and more cars are pouring onto the roads. We have a positive feedback loop here. Now, a positive feedback loop can work both ways. Many years ago, I used to work within a mile of where I lived. I would walk (yes, walk) the whole way in ten minutes, and arrive in a pretty good mood. Imagine if most people could get to work in ten minutes! The people who used to leave home at 7:30 "to beat rush hour" could wait until 7:45, and would still be able to vacate the road in time for the 8:00 people to have full use of it. If commutes were short, we could get a lot more people to work, over the same amount of road.

Trouble is, most people don't want to live that close to work because they can get a bigger place five miles further away. Or a yet bigger place ten miles away. Or an even bigger place twenty miles away, with a real back yard. Mind you, this means that after eight hours at work, eight hours for sleep and personal hygiene, two hours commuting, and some yard work besides, they don't actually have much time to enjoy the bigger place (and are too tired and grumpy to do so after driving home), but hey, it's the American Dream, it's going to  make them rich, and they get a tax break on the mortgage. So when we build more roads and widen a few existing ones, people decide they can now live thirty miles away in a really spacious place, which they have even less time to enjoy (and more yard work to do).

What we have here is a negative feedback loop. We can build roads, or paint carpool lanes, or do anything that makes for shorter commutes, and after a year or two there will be an increase in land values in the places that used to be out of reach for commuting to the Googleplex. Some people will have decided that they can now afford that spacious house, and have not really reckoned with the cost of the extra commute in money, time, and temper.

What else is there to do? I don't imagine that more meetings will help much. Driverless cars may well increase the effective capacity of freeways, but such an increase will quickly fall victim to the negative feedback loop, pushing property values up until commutes are, once again, just barely bearable. The same applies to mass transit: a bus or a train is, from the commuter's point of view, a very large self-driving car. Ask people to take jobs closer to where they live? Good luck with that! Having the best possible job is important. (I must admit to commuting twenty miles. I do value my job.) Telepresence? It works for some jobs, some of the time; not enough, not yet.

One fix that is gaining some traction is denser housing, which I can see being built in many places. Simple geometry permits people to live closer to work (or to mass transit) if they live closer to each other, and perhaps they'll even get rich out of it. In fact, if rush hour gets worse, it would be hard not to get rich out of owning a place that allows of a short commute.

I still live in the house we bought twenty years ago, but I haven't traded up to a place with a spacious back yard. My kids don't need a back yard to play in: they have YouTube. Telepresence, you might call it.

[This is adapted from something I wrote on Quora a year or two ago.]

Is the USA short of SWEs?

Reposted from Quora, to be sure.  Lightly edited.

Is there actually a STEM shortage that requires foreign workers? If so why are Americans lacking in these fields?

• EDIT: please also read Kathryn Berck's answer to Why does the US have an H1-B Visa program when we have great universities and a well educated population? to find that some of the statements I make below are misleading.
• This is kind of an addendum to Ernest W. Adams' excellent answer to Is there actually a STEM shortage that requires foreign workers? If so why are Americans lacking in these fields?
• Consumer warning: I am in the middle of reading Why Nations Fail so I reflect some of its thesis.

TL;DR: the industry that employs these damn’ foreigners also provides some of the fastest progress and best value in the USA.

Many excellent Americans, including a girlfriend of mine, a crush of mine, and others I’ve known, have gone into the legal and medical professions even though they mostly had the brains to go into STEM. Why? Those two professions have high barriers to entry, reinforced in the USA by government-mandated licencing that gives foreign credentials much less weight than domestic. This boosts the incomes of Americans in those professions artificially, for which they express their gratitude to their lawmakers every election season in the customary manner $$$.

The only STEM field I know well, software, has no such barriers or licences that matter, and will accept anyone who can demonstrate the needed ability. I’ve worked alongside engineers from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lebanon, Mexico, … Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, but nobody from Western Sahara, Yemen, nor Zimbabwe. (I myself am from England.) Do I need to spell it out? Oh: I just did.

I expect even the Canadian would have found it tough to qualify as an attorney in most states of the US. Almost for sure, the others would have found it very tough. So my ex-girlfriend and others command famine prices for their talent, and the famine is caused, just like real famines where people starve to death, by government policy. Does anyone care to suggest that the USA spends too little on medical care and lawsuits?

Now, if you think Google or Amazon or Apple or Facebook are charging famine prices for the software they provide, or that American software is less good than what other countries build, please shout it from the rooftops. The only criticism I hear (living in Silicon Valley) is that these giants pay their engineers too much and thereby drive house prices up, causing gentrification etc. Certainly house prices have climbed. Don’t tell me that people who buy a three bedroom house for a million bucks are underpaid.  But these foreigners are paying such prices, out of their income from work.


Footnote: if you want to shout from the rooftops about privacy on the Web, you have every right to do so, but the aforementioned companies would not offer you any better privacy if they were forced to hire fewer engineers at higher pay.

as I bite my nails tonight

... I am reminded of some frogs