Jonathan Birge

It has been assumed that the cost of the putative bailout will be born by taxpayers. However, since that the Fed and Treasury will pay for it with debt and by printing money, the people who will pay for it are anyone who holds dollars. Given that the final cost could end up in the trillions, the result will be quite a bit of that hidden tax called “inflation,” as all the debt and new money dilutes the currency. Inflating the currency is actually a very regressive tax, however. Poor people generally have to live month-to-month, and thus aren’t able to save and invest money, holding most of their wealth in cash. They also don’t have access to as high yielding investments as the rich. Most importantly, they occupy jobs which are usually the last to see inflationary wage increases filter down to them (which is as it “should be” or otherwise inflation wouldn’t work so effectively as a hidden tax).

So, this bailout of Wall Street is going to be disproportionately paid for by the working poor. Good job congress.

Here is an e-mail I just got from the Libertarian party, suggesting that perhaps we should be a little more upset than we are with the bailout. Even if you’re not normally inclined to listen to the Libertarians, I think they have a point here. A trillion dollar bailout to avoid a financial disaster? That is a financial disaster, and one being paid for by the wrong people!

Like most Americans, I’m sure you were glued to the news about the “financial crisis” and the government’s “fix” for the problem. You probably heard that the government was going to come in and save the mortgage industry by bailing out failing corporations. And, you probably heard both Barack Obama and John McCain say that this bailout was necessary, and good for the economy.

What you probably didn’t hear was that it was going to cost up to $1 trillion dollars, and you were responsible for this money.

“American taxpayers will come up with the money,” says the New York Times.

Such a number is hard to conceptualize if you’re not the government. So, in order to show you just how much $1 trillion dollars really is, we’ve put together these figures:

One trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) is enough money:

• To buy everybody living in Los Angeles at least one Lamborghini Gallardo. 
• To buy 88,052, 394′ custom mega yachts; enough to stretch around ¼ of the world. 
• To buy everyone living in Belize and Malta a Manhattan apartment.
• To get half of the Democratic Party into a fundraiser for Barack Obama at the $28,500 admission price. 
• To give one out of every two men in the United States a Men’s Presidential Rolex watch.
• To buy every woman in the United States a Tiffany Diamond Starfish Pendant.
• To get two Mitsubishi 73″ HDTVs for every household in America.
• To buy four copies of The Office: Season Four on DVD, to every person on earth.
• To send everybody in America on an all-inclusive vacation to Tahiti (and some people can stay a few extra days).

AND…

$1 trillion is enough money for everyone in Buffalo, NY to buy their own 65-acre island in Panama.

This is how much the government is going to cost you (roughly $3,278 for every man, woman and child in the United States).

Barack Obama is for it. John McCain is for it.

But, Bob Barr and Libertarian Party are against it.

“No one voted to pour taxpayer funds into Wall Street,” says Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, “and no one voted for the government to take over an insurance company. If the Federal Reserve can spend as much money as it desires to bail out any company that it desires, is there anything that it cannot do with taxpayer funds?

One can credit the academic far Left with the current climate of gender politics, where the difficult goal of equality has largely been forgotten and in its place we have the expedient of reverse sexism. So, it is an irony that must be pretty damn savory to those on the Religious Right that the same identity politics invented by the Religious Left have led millions of independent women across the country to rally behind McCain simply because they can identify with the profoundly unqualified Sarah Palin as one of them. From a recent Post article:

“She justifies what we do every day,” said Beth Tweddle, who works in sales and carried a sign she drew herself, saying “We [heart] Pit Bull Palin.” Tweddle was already a McCain supporter, she said, “but Sarah just energizes us and got us out here because she does what we do, she lives like we do.”

We don’t live in an age of looking up to authority anymore. We don’t cotton to the idea that there are people who are our betters. In this time of “American Idol,” bedroom bloggers and the belief that experience, knowledge and education don’t necessarily mean a whole lot, Palin is a symbol, a statement that anyone can make it if he or she really tries.

Karla Rupp, a real estate agent, went to see Palin on behalf of her three children, especially the one who has multiple disabilities and is in a nursing home. Val Lewis couldn’t stay away — “that’s how empowering it is to have Sarah up there. I have four children; she has five. And we get it done.”

…

“She’s just as flawed as we are,” Tweddle said. “It’s not the fact that she’s a woman but the way she does it all. And let me tell you: There’re more American parents with unwed pregnant teenaged children than American parents with Harvard grads. She’s real.”

For hours, I walked through the crowd talking to people, mostly women. Again and again, I heard variations on this idea: “She’s more like us than Obama, McCain or any of the others,” as Rupp put it. “She knows what we go through.”

…

Most people I spoke to readily conceded that Palin lacks experience with or knowledge of many important national and foreign issues. But, as Allison McGarvey, a teacher who lives in Stafford County, said, Palin is “a courageous woman, and what she doesn’t know, she can learn quickly. Let’s face it, no president knows all the issues. Anyway, I don’t see how a candidate can pick one stand and just stick to it. The world situation changes every day. It’s their moral and ethical background that’s important.”

…

Like many at the rally, Victoria Robinson-Worst sees Palin’s lack of experience as an asset. “I know people who have experience who are totally incompetent,” said Robinson-Worst, who lives in Loudoun County, designs wedding flowers and raises two children. “And I know people who have no experience who step in and get it right. I mean, women can do amazing things.”

Yup. They sure can.

Among the myriad problems the 2.1 firmware was supposed to solve was poor 3G reception. How did Apple achieve this? Apparently by simply artificially displaying more bars, at least in part: In their release notes for the update, they list “improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display.” That’s just corporate speak for “we can’t fix these pieces of junk, but we don’t want to pay for a recall, so we’re going to just fool you into thinking your phone is working properly.”

Sure enough, I now get five bars of 3G signal in my office, where I used to get one or two! However, when I try to make a 3G call, the audio is warbled (is if packets are being constantly dropped) and it eventually either drops the call entirely, or switches back to standard GSM. All while showing five bars of 3G signal until it dies! Five bars of lies and deceit.

Update: Using my wife’s 2.0.2 iPhone 3G, I can confirm that Apple has, in fact, done little to nothing to improve the 3G reception beyond the psychological bromide of increasing the number of bars displayed. Holding the phones side by side, she gets one bar and I get five. However, download times for web pages are virtually identical (i.e. slow).

I had plenty of time to write this, because I missed class today. The reason I missed class was that my iPhone’s alarm never went off.

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was “You know, I feel way too good for a guy who’s only gotten four hours of sleep.” I then clicked the home button on my iPhone to check what time it was. I was not happy, not happy at all, to find that it was thirty minutes past the start of class and two hours after the alarm was supposed to go off.

As if to mock me, the alarm then finally starts to go off!

I checked online, and this is happening to other people, too. Apparently, if anything else triggers a notification (like a text message or calendar notification) the alarm will not fire until those notifications are seen. I’m not sure if this is what happened to me (I was pretty groggy) but it fits the observations of others that when an alarm is missed, it suddenly goes off when you wake up the iPhone.

So, we can add one more bug to the list of reception problems, crashing apps, crashing browser, etc. in the Apple public beta test that is the iPhone 3G.

The going rate for a text message is now $0.20, up from $0.05 a year or so ago, a puzzling increase given that every underlying component of communications technology has become cheaper over that time. Given that a text message is billed both for sending and receiving (which should be criminal) this means that it costs a total of $0.40 to complete a text message between parties. It would be cheaper to buy a postcard, print out that message on the postcard, and then have the USPS physically carry that postcard 3000 miles across the country and deliver it right to somebody’s doorstep.

OMGWTF?!?

NB: The recent release of the F# CTP breaks much of this code. I will update this page as soon as I get a chance, but please be aware that if you copy the code in as-is, it will not work.

I think the best way to appreciate how efficient F# is, especially for numerical analysis, is to show an implementation of a short program. The following is a bare-bones application which computes the basins of attraction for a Newton fixed point iteration which finds the roots of a polynomial in the complex plane. This computation is threaded across all available processors, and is a stand alone (albeit absolutely minimal) Windows application. The entire program is less than 50 lines, a testament to F# with respect to numerics and the .NET framework with respect to the GUI.

Briefly, Newton’s method is an iterative way to solve for the zeros of nonlinear functions. You start with an initial guess, and based on the local slope of the function, you make a refined guess for the root by following the slope all the way to zero. Unless the function really is a line this guess will be wrong, of course, but hopefully a little more accurate than where you started. If you start close enough to a root, repeated applications of the approximation will end up converging to the correct answer to arbitrary precision. If you start far away from one, however, you could end up at a root far away from your starting point, or you might never converge. It turns out that the map of where you end up as a function of where you start is a fractal, and a rather beautiful one for many equations. Below is a screen shot of the final program. Visible in the task manager is the nearly full usage of both cores of the processor during the render. (Click for a bigger version.)

Screenshot showing the nearly full use of both cores during the render.

The program below will iterate through up to 32 steps of Newton’s method on an arbitrary polynomial, starting at a grid of points in the complex plane. It shades each point based on the location of the final root found, with the hue determined by which root is converged to and with the brightness determined by how many steps were required. I’ll go through most of the functions, explaining each and pointing out how functional programming techniques are used. I do not claim this program is a highly efficient implementation! The main point was to illustrate several aspects of F#. It is however, pretty fast and makes use of multiple threads. In fact, the ease with which this program was parallelized is one of the main points I am trying to illustrate, and is made possible by the immutability of data in F# (and the Flying Frog Numerics library, a review of the which will be the subject of my final post on F#).

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