The Skeptical Optimist

New policy: Golden Rule v 2.0

My involvement with the new project I had mentioned previously requires a step-up in the efficiency with which I handle this blog.  As a result, I need to post a frank message about how I'll be handling some comments, and some commenters, from now on.

I will be following Golden Rule v 2.0:

Do unto others as they deserve. 

Almost all of you are welcome here.  Reason: almost all of you, regardless of your ideological leanings, have exhibited an honest desire to engage in objective, respectful debate.  Almost all of you possess enough self-confidence and backbone to use your real name in private messages.  That's the community I enjoy the most in this blogging activity; that's the best forum I've ever found for advancing knowledge; and that's the community that keeps me intent on continuing this blog indefinitely.  Thanks to all of you for making this an enjoyable two-way street.   

However, there's a tiny minority that isn't like the vast majority described above: a few who apparently made a commitment to their chosen ideology at an early age, then learned how to keyboard and name-call... but, sadly, never learned manners, decorum, or respect; a few who prefer to be able to throw their objections, barbs, and smart-ass remarks around, while carefully guarding their own personal anonymity.   

So, especially for that tiny minority, here's the new policy: If you run and hide when I ask you privately for your real name, I will consider you a low-integrity coward.  Expect to be ignored, and expect your comments to be deleted and banned.  One of the best things about the freedom to blog is the freedom to choose who I hang out with.  Low-integrity folks are not on my list. 

Golden Rule 2.0 will be applied from here on out.  Most of you have been abiding by it for years; I thank you for that.  I will trim this community as necessary from now on, with a goal of achieving 100%.  Not much trimming will be necessary, but it's not zero, either. 

Who is this?

Need some technical help.  Firefox is now popping up these security screens on me frequently.  I would appreciate some advice about who this is and why it's intruding all of a sudden.  Comment or email, whichever is easier for you.  Here are two screenshots (click to enlarge). 

Review: Sony Reader PRS-500

Don't buy it; save yourself $300+ and a big headache.  After wasting seven hours' worth of my time, most of it on hold waiting for Sony customer support people who ended up being no help whatsoever, I boxed it back up and returned it to Sony.

I had been looking forward to storing up to 80 books in their new-technology, hi-res ebook reader.  But not any more.

In theory, it interfaces with a Windows machine.  In practice, the Sony software ("Connect Reader") would not even run on my Sony Vaio notebook computer running the latest XP SP2 update, with 22GB free space on the hard drive.  [Note to self: Theory and practice frequently diverge.] 

I remain an optimist, however.  Specifically, I am optimistic that one of three things will happen: either (1) Sony will fix their software so that it works as advertised with Windows XP (on a Sony Vaio, no less); (2) Sony will write their software to interface with the OS X operating system; or (3) consumers will stay away from Sony products in sufficient numbers to drive Sony out of the business of wasting consumers' time and money. 

[One nice thing about running your own blog is the freedom to publish a warning like this every now and then, to help others avoid a time-wasting mistake.]

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End Note:

Not that I need help with this any more, but here is the error message that wouldn't go away no matter which Sony employee "helped" me or what I did to the boot.ini file based on stuff I found in the Microsoft knowledge base.  Click to enlarge—or, better yet, just wait for my next article later today, now that I have free time to work on it.  I'll be using my Mac.

 

Funniest animated gif so far this year

I skim liberal and conservative sites frequently to keep track of the latest and greatest talking points, and ran across the funniest animated cartoon I've seen in a long time.  Others have told me it's "gross" but I think it's hilarious, so I guess that could be a clue to my sense of humor.   

The "liberal disclaimer" that goes along with the animation reads as follows:

We can't be held legally responsible for what this site might cause you to do to yourself.

Now click on this thumbnail:

I stole it from this site.

Spotlight

Posting will be less frequent for several days due to vacation activities, but several people have been asking me how the Mac switch has been going, so this one is an update, and a plug for my new platform.  I'm quite a bit more productive now that I've completed the switch.  Spotlight (the search feature built into OS X) all by itself justifies the switch for me, although it's only one of many reasons I'm glad I made the change.  Spotlight is fast and accurate at guessing, after just two or three keystrokes, which file or application I'm searching for; having to remember where I put a file has become a thing of the past. 

It took three months to transition, but now that it's done, everything I do with a computer just seems easier.  (Changing to Google Calendar was a big help, by the way.)  Anyway, after twenty-five years on a PC, it was time to try the Mac and OS X.  Maybe in another twenty-five years it will be time to try something else, but for now, I'm enjoying the stability and the productivity boost.

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Full disclosure:
As soon as I realized the Mac switch would work for me, I bought a few shares of Apple.  It has a long way to go before it makes up for the Global Crossing investment I rode all the way down to zero, however (...I bought that one at about the same time Terry McAuliffe was selling, as I recall). 

Thanks Mr. Wizard

Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) died Saturday.  I remember looking forward to every one of his shows, starting in the late '50s when I was a kid.  He taught a lot of us baby boomers how to think, by making it engaging and fun. 

Everyone I know has a short list of teachers they'll never forget, mostly for that very reason.  Mine includes Mr. Brammel (shop), Mr. Miller (math), Mrs. Bowman (English), Miss Norris (math), Mr. Maiers (math), Prof. Charlie Brown (thermo), and the only one I never met in person, Mr. Wizard (science).  I guess it's no coincidence that my favorite pastimes today are woodworking, writing, and science.  Funny how that works, isn't it? 

Goodbye Mr. Wizard; thanks for molding this mind into a better shape. 

Correction to "Where the Middle Class Went"

Yesterday I posted two charts and drew some implications about "where the middle class went" based on US Census Bureau numbers.  My gut feel had been that the inflation adjustment wouldn't make much difference, but that wasn't correct.  This article fixes the charts and revises the implications I'm drawing from them.  [Anyone interested in the adjustment details should read the end note.] 

Revised implications
Of the total increase of 5 million families (from 72.4 million to 77.4 million):
• The number of families under $50K increased by 3.1 million;
• The number of families between $50 and $150K increased by 2.6 million;
• Big surprise: the number of families making above $150K decreased by 0.6 million.

In short: Fewer rich, more non-rich.  [I wonder if part of that is explained by a few ex-execs from Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing?]   

Here's the corrected chart of the change in the number of families (2005 vs 2000). 

And here's the corrected chart of the total number of families, '05 vs '00. 

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End note:

To adjust the year 2000 ranges to constant 2005 dollars, I used the CPI-U inflation (13.4%) between those two years.  Then I used straight-line interpolation to approximate the range cutoffs.  A hassle, but necessary; I should have waited the extra day to get that done properly before posting. 

Yesterday I guessed that the "middle class" was the two ranges spanning $50K-$100K family income.  I heard from a few people who think the next higher range, $100K-$150K, should not be classified as "rich," and others who think $25K-$50K is not exactly "poor."  I compromised, and shifted the $100-$150K range to the middle group for these charts.  From now on, I'll wait for the official definitions of  rich, middle class, and poor; until those are available, I'll just describe the ranges by using the endpoints.

I've left yesterday's article up for anyone who'd like to compare this correction to yesterday's too-hasty post.  Comments are open, so let the flogging begin. 

Switched to the Mac

Eleven weeks ago I mentioned I might switch to the Mac.  After a lot of mostly successful experimenting with my new MacBook, I went back to the Apple store last week and purchased a Mac Mini for my desktop.  The Mini is powerful, but its dimensions are just barely larger than Adam Smith's 1776 book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.  (In other words, it's small enough to fit unobtrusively on, or under, the desktop.) 

The PC is now unplugged; the main thing I'll miss about it is the street mapping software (...that's a hole in the Mac software suite that Google maps does not fill).  I wonder how Microsoft would respond if I asked them when they plan to make MS Streets & Trips available for the Mac. 

(Actually, I had a great run with PCs, but I made myself a promise back in 1982 that I'd switch platforms every 25 years.) 

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Coming soon...

Is economic doomsday just a decade or two away?  If so, is my generation the culprit?  I'll have a better idea in a few days.

After finishing a few more cleanup tasks on the switch, I'll finish digging into the baby boomer demographics question, which I've had in the works for a while now.  (As you may recall, that problem is supposedly going to crater the economy and force our grandchildren back to subsistence farming, according to our fear-peddling politicians and journalists.)  I'm approaching it from a different angle: instead of figuring out how much everyone's taxes will have to increase, I'm figuring out how much productivity-driven growth it would take to make it a non-problem.  The doomsters tend to bury their economic growth assumptions, I've noticed; but I'm making growth and productivity the centerpiece.  Should be ready in a few days.  (Graphics and fonts will look a little different from now on.)

Planet-friendliness in China and the USA

China's Premier Wen Jiabao, in the same article I mentioned in my previous post, also mentioned how diligently his government is going to act in order to cut energy consumption from 2006-2010; specifically:

We have set a target for cutting energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 percent from 2006 to 2010. Although the Kyoto Protocol has not set obligatory targets for developing countries, the Chinese government is acting with a sense of responsibility to the world and is earnestly fulfilling its due international obligations.

If China pulls that off, or even a substantial portion of it, I have little doubt that world opinion will smile on that country for being so green-conscious.  After reading that, I thought to myself, Just think how much cleaner and fresher the atmosphere will be, relatively anyway.  If China can act with that kind of responsibility to the world, why can’t the good ol’ USA? 

But before I allowed my emotional self to turn green with envy that China, not the USA, would get the world’s approving smile, I told my analytical self to check the numbers before jumping to negative conclusions about my country’s performance regarding energy efficiency. 

When Premier Jiabao said “energy consumption per unit of GDP” I took it for granted he was talking about real GDP, which is adjusted for inflation.  (Otherwise, all a country would have to do is inflate its currency to get more “energy efficient,” and I’m sure the Kyoto crowd would call a foul on that; I would, in any event.)  So I grabbed some of the data I used for article 3 of my energy series last year, and focused my attention on the USA’s energy usage per dollar of real GDP, year by year for a half century. 

The chart below tells the story.  What a surprise: since 1971, the USA has reduced its energy consumption (using China's definition) by 49.1 percent!  That’s a steady, long-run average improvement of 2.01% per year.  I’m glad I checked the numbers before jumping to the false conclusion that China deserves energy accolades and we don’t. 

Here’s the chart; click to enlarge. 

Conclusion
China is targeting a 20% improvement over four years.  The USA has already achieved a 49% improvement over thirty-four years—and we’re still improving steadily.  And we did it without any “obligatory targets.”  By Premier Jiabao’s logic, that’s “acting with a sense of responsibility to the world.” 

When one considers the size of our economy, a decades-long track record of steady improvement should be enough to get us some kind of planet-friendliness award, don’t you think? 

Things keep getting better—so why aren't we happier?

Most Americans, most of the time, have been getting better and better off in most aspects of life—and this has been happening for decades.  Shouldn't that be good news to our politicians, newspaper editors, and journalists?  Their silence on that subject is deafening. 

Each day, during midday exercise time, I catch up on various topics by listening to podcasts I select and download earlier in the day.  Yesterday I discovered one that's a must-listen for three types of Americans: optimists, pessimists, and fence-sitters.  Be sure to allocate 55 minutes to this listening session, because it's divided into two equally important halves:

• Why most aspects of our lives have been improving for most of us for decades, even though we don't hear much about it from our politicians and journalists; and . . .

• Why we are getting more and more unhappy—in spite of these improving conditions.

[The link to the podcast is at the very bottom of this article.]

Here's one excerpt with which I certainly cannot argue:

Institutionally, reporters, editors, and political figures just can't deal with evidence of progress—whereas they're very comfortable with scandal, corruption, claims of doomsday, etc.  There's a cohort of American life that seems to like scandal and doomsday.

That is Gregg Easterbrook talking, and the excerpt is from the first half of the interview. (Easterbrook is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.)  After his recent book was published—The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse—he learned that, paradoxically, "good news either scares people or makes them angry."  (I've independently observed that phenomenon, by the way.) 

The second half of the interview is just as interesting.  He mentions a relatively new development in psychology: research into the causes of happiness.  Research reveals several apparent causes, one of which is that the happiness level within different cultures is significantly higher "where honesty is highly regarded."  He points to Scandinavia as a leading example: telling a lie in that culture is regarded as scandalous and repulsive.  The high priority they place on truthfulness is one reason why Scandinavians are among the happiest people in the world.  It's not a coincidence, it's almost certainly cause-effect.  [Side note: I'd personally prefer a world in which a higher proportion of cultures and individuals held truthfulness as top priority, but my experience tells me that's wishful thinking.] 

The entire podcast interview is at this web page.  Be sure to listen to the whole thing on your computer or your iPod.