Up, up, and away

With the opening of the Salesforce Tower looming in the next few weeks, there's a flurry of media attention.

Here are two very interesting articles, with lots of links to chase:

• Transbay Transformed

  As the blocks around the transit center fill up with towers, San Francisco is getting a crash course in what high-density urban living is all about.

• San Francisco’s Skyline, Now Inescapably Transformed by Tech

  While few were looking, tech ate San Francisco, a development encouraged by Mayor Ed Lee, who unexpectedly died this month. There are now 79,129 high-tech jobs in the city, about triple the number a decade ago, according to a new research report from the real estate firm CBRE.

  If you work in an office in the city, there is a 28 percent chance you work in tech. That level is exceeded only by Seattle, where the sharp growth of Amazon pushed the percentage of tech workers up to 38 percent, and by Silicon Valley itself, where it is 42 percent.

  “San Francisco has gone from being driven by multitudes of industries in 2007 to being now focused largely on tech,” said Colin Yasukochi, a CBRE analyst. “The growth feeds on itself. Tech workers are attracted to the great opportunities in the city, and the supply of workers means more tech companies come here.”

And no, I'm not moving into the new building.

And yes, it really does look like all the new office floors will be the dreadfully mistaken awfully horrible open seating arrangement.

Sigh.

Private Equity 401

Happily, I'm mostly out from under the thumb of Private Equity, at least for the time being.

But it's still quite interesting to me, to learn how it operates, and what influences it has on the world.

For example, why do shopping center owners set their rental rates at a level which leaves the shopping center 30%-50% empty? How can that make sense?

It's obviously quite interesting to others, as well:

• Retail’s Woes? Much More Than Online

  Private-equity funds have become involved in retail as developers and landlords. In an era of low interest rates, a business model predicated on higher, steady returns is an attractive use of capital.

  However, what works on a spreadsheet for distressed businesses doesn’t always translate into the commercial real estate space. Storefront businesses are limited to the rent they can afford based on the revenue they generate. Lease renewals with increases of as much as 100 percent from new private equity-funded landlords do not work. If the rent increase can’t be supported by the retailer’s revenues, they fold the tent up.

  It is too easy to blame retail’s woes on Amazon.com Inc. and other online merchants. The broader picture has to take in the enormous changes in how consumers behave. Retail has been very slow to adapt to this. The sooner the industry figures this out, the better.

• Putting on Developers’ Hard Hats, Private Equity Managers Break Risky New Ground

  Private-equity firms’ inexperience in construction and short investment horizons make them unnatural collaborators for contractors, he explained.

  In particular, Callahan said, private funds can run into trouble in negotiating the financial relationships that undergird large-scale construction. “A lot of the contracting world relies on surety credit, and the surety market space has been very suspicious of the private equity investor because [surety firms] build their relationships for the long term. The private-equity model is three to five years. That gives everyone a little cause for concern.”

  Pfeffer, the construction lawyer, also singled out financial arrangements with contractors as a source of risk for private equity.

  “Standard-form construction agreements benefit contractors and design professionals,” Pfeffer said. Typical contracts protect contractors against, for example, accountability for construction delays that could cost the developer tenants. “If there’s a waiver of construction damages on the agreement, the owner is out of luck collecting that big bucket of damages.”

• Real Estate Private Equity: Technology’s Next Victims? (Part 1)

  First and foremost, funds don’t have a strong incentive to invest in new capabilities and tools since things are not going too badly. In the short term, the glut of capital might even seem good: New money flows into the hands of the most established players and, for some, it feels like times have never been better.

  Second, funds do not respond because, strictly speaking, they aren’t allowed to. As you remember, private equity funds usually have a narrow mandate to invest in assets under a specific strategy and in a specific geographical area. What about investing in technology or acquiring new capabilities and expertise? That’s not part of the mandate. Keep in mind that the assets most funds currently manage were acquired 1–5 years ago with money that was raised from investors 2–7 years ago.

• Axios Pro Rata, Thu, Dec 21, 2017

  Private equity executives are largely pleased with the tax bill, but there are growing grumbles about how the change to interest deductibility isn't grandfathered in for existing loans.

  • This could be a particularly acute problem for highly-leveraged companies that are either unprofitable or barely profitable. In those cases, private equity sponsors may have to choose between pumping in new cash and crossing their fingers.
  • Going forward, expect leverage levels to decrease. Per one buyout big: "We use leverage as a tax shield, which is about to become much less relevant."
  • There is likely to be a decline in dividend recaps, at least in the short-term.
  • To be clear, private equity firms are still cheering these changes (at least from a portfolio perspective).
  • The longer-term hold period to qualify for carried interest is unlikely to prevent firms from selling before three years, in the rare cases when applicable. Just expect the funds to essentially defer the carry.

Viewed from their perspective, they are doing what makes sense: making a profit as effectively as they can.

But reread this quote, and think about it:

funds don’t have a strong incentive to invest in new capabilities and tools since things are not going too badly. In the short term, the glut of capital might even seem good: New money flows into the hands of the most established players and, for some, it feels like times have never been better.

This is not a good way for a society to organize its productive resources, even if "for some, it feels like times have never been better."

And the tax reforms passed this month did almost nothing to change the deep systemic incentives in the American tax code which encourage exactly this sort of destructive activity.

Sigh.

Stuff I'm reading, holiday 2017 edition

This was a busy year, and I didn't get to blog as much.

Sorry about that.

• Just watch this

  It’s a good, no, great talk about principles of leadership by Bryan Cantrill. At turns hilarious, angry, and poignant, it is quite simply one of the best talks I have ever seen about what we’re building in tech and why and how to do better. We need to move forward, take responsibility and begin to tear down a culture in which "always be hustlin'" is a leadership principle. A frank, harsh look at Amazon, Uber, and techbro thinking, with some eulogy to Sun baked in. It’s a great talk. Please watch it.

• Google Maps's Moat

  But "buildings" is the wrong word to describe what Google’s been adding; it’s more like "structures". Because not only has Google been adding houses, it’s been adding garages and tool sheds

• We Are Running Out of Time to Make Algorithms Fair

  It’s tempting to presume that technology changes more quickly than society and that software can reinforce social progress by rapidly encoding new norms and insulating them from regressive or malicious actors. A sentencing algorithm can do less harm than a blatantly bigoted judge. But it can also obscure the history and context of bias and hinder, or even preclude, progress. Infrastructure is sticky and the window of opportunity is narrowing: Technology can improve in the future, but we’re making decisions about what tradeoffs to make now. It’s not clear how often, or even whether, we’ll get the opportunity to revisit those tradeoffs.

• Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

  The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers.

• The 2017 Stratechery Year in Review

  the most popular and most important posts of the year: tech and society figure prominently.

• https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/12/10/analyzing-a-confusing-crash/

  It turns out that a common trick when displaying an x86/x64 call stack is to subtract one from return addresses before looking them up in the symbol tables. The return address is the instruction after the function call which could be from an arbitrarily different line of code (thanks to optimizers), but subtracting one from the return address gets an address that is guaranteed to be inside the call instruction, and therefore will let the debugger show the line number of the call instead of the return. This is such a clever and seamless trick that we normally don’t even notice it is happening - until it fails.

• Secret Link Uncovered Between Pure Math and Physics

  Over the past decade Kim has described a very new way of looking for patterns in the seemingly patternless world of rational numbers. He’s described this method in papers and conference talks and passed it along to students who now carry on the work themselves. Yet he has always held something back. He has a vision that animates his ideas, one based not in the pure world of numbers, but in concepts borrowed from physics. To Kim, rational solutions are somehow like the trajectory of light.

• When You Can’t Afford Not to Have Power Redundancy

  It seems sensible for the operators of the biggest airport in the world and the airlines that fly through that facility to collectively pay $21M for 10 years of protection and have power redundancy. Considering this from a regulatory perspective and looking at the value of keeping the largest of the nation’s airports operating, a good argument can be made that it shouldn’t be possible for a single power event to take out such a facility and it should be a requirement to have reasonable redundancy through all the infrastructure of any airport of medium or larger size.

• Only Verify State-Changing Method Calls

  Instead of verifying that they are called, use non-state-changing methods to simulate different conditions in tests

• Motel Living and Slowly Dying

  The particular rhythms of what I do - track the pig in its journey beneath the prairies, hand off the job to my counterpart on the other shift, find a hotel near where I’ll rejoin the line, sleep, lather, rinse, repeat - have made me something of an unintentional expert on hotel living and on the America nobody dreams about seeing on vacation.

  I travel by secondary and tertiary roads, skulking around the pipeline on 12-hour shifts, either midnight to noon or noon to midnight. I work alone, mostly. And when the shift is done, I catch my rest in places like Harrisonville, Missouri, and Iola, Kansas. Lapeer, Michigan, and Amherst, New York. Toledo, Ohio, and Thief River Falls, Minnesota.

• How AlphaZero Wins

  To evaluate a position, it simply plays hundreds of random games from that position. To you or me this may seem like a crazy idea, but actually it makes a certain amount of sense. In some positions there may be only one "correct" way for White to win - but often in these positions Black is visibly in trouble anyway. If you give the position to two grandmasters, they might play the correct line and White would win. If you give it to two 2200 players, they may play almost correctly and White will still win. If you give the position to two 1400 players, they will make mistakes right and left - but White will still win. So the point is that even incorrect play will still give you a sense of who is winning, as long as the mistakes are equally distributed on both sides.

• Truth From Zero?

  The Dec. 5 paper is sketchy and only 10 of the 100 games against Stockfish have been released, all hand-picked wins. I share some general scientific caveats voiced by AI researcher and chess master Jose Camacho-Collados. I agree that two moves by AlphaZero (21. Bg5!! and 30.Bxg6!! followed by 32.f5!! as featured here) were ethereal. There are, however, several other possible ways to tell how close AlphaZero comes to perfection.

• From Automata to Zelda, These Are the Best Games of 2017

  2017 was an incredible year for videogames-a mixed bag of genre, style, and mood. The best titles ranged from sweeping adventures to tense shooters to meditations on the existential burden of life. Some of the games released this year will go on to be lauded as the most important, profound videogames of this generation. If you don't know how to dive into videogames in the coming days, here is where to start.

• The Best Games You Might Have Missed in 2017

  More than 400 videogames were released this year. Four. Hundred. With a firehose like that, it's all too easy to miss some of the gems that become available, so we pored through our played list to pull together our favorite under-the-radar titles.

• 16 Best Gifts for Gamers, According to Gamers

  For our latest installment, we found ten gamers to tell us what they want for the holidays, from wireless earbuds to vintage-ish Tamagotchis.

• Table-top generals

  A board-game café sounds like the sort of niche business that appeals only to hip millennials with a fondness for ironic nostalgia. But, on a Friday afternoon, the crowd is more diverse than that, with families and 50-somethings alongside the youngsters. Draughts is doing so well that its owners are now pondering opening another branch. It is just one beneficiary of a new golden age in board games.

• The Best Jazz Albums of 2017

  Even as the world goes up in smoke, artists still make art, and this very much includes jazz musicians, whose best work this year (at least the best that I managed to hear amid the noise) plumbed old and new, tradition and innovation, structure and freedom, with - under the circumstances - heroic strivings.

• Chicago's underground city that’s becoming a design star

  Mazing for five miles under 40 blocks of The Loop (Chicago’s business district), this network of tunnels connects some of the city’s most famous buildings, including Macy’s, City Hall and the Chicago Cultural Center.

  Construction began in 1951 to provide safe, weatherproof passage between the buildings, and the hotchpotch of corridors has been built piecemeal ever since. Each section is independently owned and maintained by the corresponding building above, so each section has different lights, even different air temperatures.

• The Most 2017 Photos Ever

  Not necessarily the top photos of the year, nor the most heart-wrenching or emotional images, but a collection of photographs that are just so 2017.

Yes

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

And particularly yes to:

The consequences of these trends weren’t clear to most for a long time. It was just new, and exciting, and oh-my-god-look-at-that-kitty!!! The distraction worked until it didn’t. More and more people are waking up to a world driven by Silicon Valley software companies and thinking: is this really better?

Sure, it’s better in some ways. And those ways have gotten the lion’s share of the press and focus over the past decade. But in all the many, many ways it is not, well, we’re just starting to look at that critically as a society. It’s beyond overdue.

Thank you, DHH (not the first time I've thought that, and undoubtedly won't be the last).

Drawing the line

There are now, according to local news reports, nearly 1,500 fire engines deployed in the Santa Barbara/Montecito area.

Drawing the line, trying to send the raging Thomas Fire away. Somewhere else. Somewhere, not here.

The power is apparently out, from Ventura, nearly up to Lompoc.

So news reports tonight will probably be scarce.

The wind this weekend, here, nearly 400 miles away, was astonishing. Trees blew down everywhere, you could barely stand at times.

I'm sure in Santa Barbara County it was far, far worse.

From what I understand, schools are canceled, even hundreds of miles away, and everyone is just staying in their homes, trying to avoid the smoke and ash.

Everyone, that is, except those brave souls in those 1,500 fire engines.

Drawing the line.

Yes

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

YES.

Yes, yes, yes.

And, at the very end, the very last line, most definitely: yes.

The Likeness: a very short review

The Likeness is the second in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series of mystery novels.

Although The Likeness is not quite as great as French's thoroughly superb first book, it is still quite good indeed, and I devoured it apace.

The characters are fascinating; the scenario is very intriguing; the pacing and reveal is just right.

But perhaps most importantly, French's wonderfully lyrical touch again does not fail her.

Here we are, mid-story, just as our hero is learning something new about a crucial character:

The garden dumbstruck, in the fading gold light. The birds hushed, the branches caught in midsway; the house, a great silence poised over us, listening. I had stopped breathing. Lexie blew down the grass like a silver shower of wind, she rocked in the hawthorn trees and balanced light as a leaf on the wall beside me, she slipped along my shoulder and blazed down my back like fox fire.

I love the way this passage depicts how "time stops" sometimes, when you suddenly realize something new.

I love the way this passage depicts the way that evidence can have a voice of its own, making inanimate artifacts come to life.

I love the way this passage evokes the spirit of a departed human soul, simultaneously here and not here.

And I love the beautiful way she makes us feel our own spine tingle.

There's plenty of good solid policework, of course. And plenty of action, and plenty of evidence, and plenty of mystery.

But there's a wonderful amount of this, too:

I listened to the static echoing in my ear and thought of those herds of horses you get in the vast wild spaces of America and Australia, the ones running free, fighting off bobcats or dingoes and living lean on what they find, gold and tangled in the fierce sun. My friend Alan from when I was a kid, he worked on a ranch in Wyoming one summer, on a J1 visa. He watched guys breaking those horses. He told me that every now and then there was one that couldn't be broken, one wild to the bone. Those horses fought the bridle and the fence till they were ripped up and streaming blood, till they smashed their legs or their necks to splinters, till they died of fighting to run.

Of course, she isn't really talking about horses at all.

I can't wait to read more of her books.

A winter adventure in Zion

It was time to go, so we got up and went. We packed our bags, with as much warm clothing as we could reasonably carry, flew to Las Vegas, picked up a nice new rental car (what a nice car the new Toyota Camry is!), and drove northeast on interstate 15.

About 45 minutes out of Vegas, we took a back road recommended by my wife's colleague, which took us about 15 miles off the freeway, into a Nevada State Park named Valley of Fire. After a short stop at the Visitor Center to get our bearings, we found the picnic area named Mouse's Tank, populated by the boldest little ground squirrels you could imagine, practicing their cutest poses to try to convince us to donate some of our lunch to them.

After lunch, we took a short walk to admire the Valley of Fire petroglyphs, which are nothing short of astounding.

Then we were back in the car again, and soon back on I-15, and not long after that we were through Nevada, and had sliced a corner off of Arizona, and were solidly into Utah, before we left the freeway to take Utah State Route 9 east into Zion National Park.

The days are short, this time of year, so even though we got to the park gates at about 5:45 PM, it was already pitch dark, and we crept along the park road quite slowly, peeking around every corner for deer, trying to figure out where our turn was. Zion Lodge is located most of the way up the canyon road, deep in the main canyon, enjoying a location that can stand toe-to-toe with any hotel on the planet for claim to "Most Beautiful Lodge Location".

But, as I say, it was completely dark out, and we were exhausted, so we simply checked into our room (which was wonderful: spacious and elegant), had dinner at the lodge restaurant, and collapsed into bed.

Deep in the main canyon, sunset comes early and sunrise late, particularly this time of year. But up we got, the next morning, and bravely we set out to explore Zion National Park. Lo and behold, as the sun started to crawl slowly down the western walls of the canyon toward the valley floor, we found ourselves nearly alone in a place of tremendous beauty, with nearly as many mule deer as human visitors keeping us company on our explorations.

At the very end of the canyon road, one of the most famous trails is the Riverside Walk, which leads into the section of the Virgin River canyon known as The Narrows, launching spot for those interested in the sport of Canyoneering. We could barely imagine this, for at the time we walked the trail the temperature was 34 degrees, and a steady breeze was blowing, so we were fully encased in every shred of clothing we could layer upon ourselves, but at the trail's end there were nearly a dozen people, of all ages, clad in little more than long-sleeved swimsuits, waterproof hiking boots, and gaiters, setting off confidently into the rapidly-flowing, near-freezing waters of the Virgin River, headed upstream for adventure.

We had decided to work our way, slowly, back down the main canyon, and so we did, stopping to hike the Weeping Rock trail, the Emerald Pools trail, and the Watchman trail, among others, as well as stopping along the road for half an hour or so to watch people hiking up Walter's Wiggles (as well as rock climbing the cliff face below the Angels Landing trail).

No, we didn't do the Angels Landing trail. Yes, it's true: I ruled it out from the start. Uh, here's the reason why.

By the end of our first day, we were well and thoroughly exhausted, but also extremely pleased with the day.

There's just nothing like the experience of spending an entire day in a National Park: waking up in the park, spending all day in and around the park, and then remaining in the park when all the daily visitors go home, and it's just you lucky few. And the mule deer.

Once again we woke up the next morning in complete darkness, and made our way over to the lodge for breakfast, with aching muscles yet still aching for more.

Zion National Park is fairly large, even though compared to some national parks it's not gigantic, and I was hungry to see as much of the park as I could.

So we popped into the car and drove up Kolob Terrace Road, which in barely a dozen miles took us up from the 3,500 foot river elevation to the 7,000 foot elevation of Upper Kolob Terrace.

We were well-prepared: we had brought our lunch, and, as it turns out, we had brought the right clothing, for by the time we reached the Northgate Peaks trail it was already in the low 50's, and by the time we reached trail's end it was in the low 60's. Sunny skies, perfect temperatures, no bugs, and a nearly-level 2 mile hike to an amazing canyon viewpoint: is there any better way to spend a day in the mountains?

On our way back down, we stopped at Hoodoo City and tried to follow the trail over to see the peculiar rock formations, but it was slow, sandy going, and the closer we got to the rocks, the more they seemed to fade into the distance. Our decision was made for us when we met a couple returning from the trail who told us they were pretty sure they'd heard a mountain lion growling just a few dozen yards from the trail.

So back down the hill we went, and decided to settle for a yummy dinner at the local brewpub.

All good things must come to an end, and it was time to return to civilization, so we got a good early start on our final day in the mountains and made a short stop at the third part of Zion National Park which is easily accessible: Kolob Canyons. Happily, we had just enough time to drive up to the end of the road to take in the truly remarkable views. The views from the roadside parking lot are superb; the views from the end of the Timber Creek Overlook trail are even better.

Back down I-15 to Las Vegas we went. My mother, who knows a lot about this part of the world, swears that U.S. 395 along the Eastern Sierra is the most beautiful road in the 48 states, and she's got a fine case, but I think that the stretch of I-15 from Las Vegas, Nevada to Cedar City, Utah is a serious contender, particularly on a clear winter's day when the view goes on forever (well, at least 50 miles).

It was as nice a way as one could ask to end as nice a weekend as one could hope for.

If you ever get a chance to visit Zion National Park in winter, take it.

In the Valley of Gods

Oh boy!

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!!!

Campo Santo return!

Campo Santo, makers of the astonishingly great Firewatch (you know, the game with that ending), have started to reveal some of the information about their next game: In the Valley of Gods.

In the Valley of Gods is a single-player first person video game set in Egypt in the 1920s. You play as an explorer and filmmaker who, along with your old partner, has traveled to the middle of the desert in the hopes of making a seemingly-impossible discovery and an incredible film.

Here's the In the Valley of Gods "reveal trailer".

Looking forward to 2019 already!

Another milestone in computer chess

This just in from the Deep Mind team: Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm

The AlphaZero algorithm is a more generic version of the AlphaGo Zero algorithm that was first introduced in the context of Go (29). It replaces the handcrafted knowledge and domain-specific augmentations used in traditional game-playing programs with deep neural networks and a tabula rasa reinforcement learning algorithm.

...

AlphaZero convincingly defeated all opponents, losing zero games to Stockfish and eight games to Elmo (see Supplementary Material for several example games), as well as defeating the previous version of AlphaGo Zero.

...

we analysed the chess knowledge discovered by AlphaZero. Table 2 analyses the most common human openings (those played more than 100,000 times in an online database of human chess games (1)). Each of these openings is independently discovered and played frequently by AlphaZero during self-play training. When starting from each human opening, AlphaZero convincingly defeated Stockfish, suggesting that it has indeed mastered a wide spectrum of chess play.

As for myself, I seem to hang pieces more frequently than I did a decade ago.

But I still love chess.

And, in that part of the world not (yet) inhabited solely by deep neural networks, That Norwegian Genius is going to play again, in London, next November: London Will Host FIDE World Chess Championship Match 2018.

Fallout 4: a very short review

Fallout 4 is pretty much centered in the sweet spot of Computer Games For Bryan:

• It's a single-player, open-world RPG
• With an absolutely enormous world to explore
• Hundreds of different locations
• Dozens of quests
• Hundreds of NPC characters with stories and interaction
• In a fascinating, kinda-sorta-but-not-really believable post-apocalyptic universe (Boston after the nuclear war)

So it's no surprise that it's consumed most of my game-playing time over the last six months, closing in on 75 hours of game play (I don't get all that much time to play computer games, nowadays).

It's pretty much unavoidable, for me at least, to compare Fallout 4 against The Witcher 3, and unfortunately Fallout 4 doesn't fare so well:

• The Witcher 3 was nearly flawless, nearly bug-free, while Fallout 4 is, frankly, riddled with bugs, even if most of them are trivial and just annoying (graphic glitches, crafting disasters, audio fails, quests that get "stuck", etc.)
• Fallout 4 is beautiful, in its stylized way, but The Witcher 3 is STUNNING.
• The quests in Fallout 4 are fun, and the characters have interesting stories, and it's enjoyable to chase through them and find out where they go (I'm talking about you, Nick Valentine), but the quests in The Witcher 3 are heart-breaking and captivating, so much so that making the wrong choice in The Witcher 3 is something you'll think about for years afterwards

So why do I keep coming back to Fallout 4? Why haven't I moved on?

Well, I think this fun article on the Comicsverse site goes a long way to explaining what it is about Fallout 4 that gives it true staying power: 10 Ways FALLOUT 4 Will Make You Question Your Existence

Two years, and it’s still one of the most played games out there. That’s simply because FALLOUT 4 has so much to offer, way more than you’d expect from a video game. I firmly believe that this game can make people question themselves. I say this because two years later I still think about the impact it’s had on me.

Countless parts of FALLOUT 4 stand out and make it one of the greatest games released in the past few years. Several parts of this game have made me think differently about what it means to be alive. Here are ten ways FALLOUT 4 will make you question your existence

The Stockholm Octavo: a very short review

Karen Engelmann's The Stockholm Octavo is a curious nugget.

• Is it historical fiction?
• Is it a fantasy?
• Is it a mystery?
• Is it a novel of political intrigue?
• Is it a rags-to-riches novel?
• Is it a feminist novel? An anti-feminist novel?

Well, yes, yes, yes to all of the above. It's rather a little bit of everything.

But, somewhat like going to the casino buffet and wishing they'd spent a little bit more time making the chicken good instead of providing chicken, beef, lamb, pork, and turkey, The Stockholm Octavo tries to accomplish a lot, perhaps rather more than one ought to attempt in a single book.

Still, it's extremely enjoyable, and you certainly will never have thought so much about the role of ladies's fans in elegant society as you will when reading it.

You might consider pairing it with A Place of Greater Safety for your what-was-the-experience-like-for-people-in-Europe-during-the-French-Revolution double-header.

If you do happen to read The Stockholm Octavo, drop me a line; tell me what you think!

Another edition of HPTS

The International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS) is a bit of an unusual conference:

Every two years, HPTS brings together a lively and opinionated group of technologists to discuss and debate the pressing topics that affect today's systems and their design and implementation, especially where performance and scalability is concerned. The workshop includes position paper presentations, panels, moderated discussions, and significant time for casual interaction. The presentations are not recorded, and the only publications are slide decks by presenters who choose to post them.

HPTS was created back in 1985 by Jim Gray, as conference organizer Pat Helland describes in his reflections on Gray:

In 1985, Jim and a number of other senior leaders in the field of transaction processing started the HPTS (High Performance Transaction Systems) Workshop [HPTS]. This is a biennial gathering of folks interested in transaction systems (and things related to scalable systems). It includes people from competing companies in industry and also from academia. Over the last 22 years, it has evolved to include many different topics as high-end computing morphed from the mainframe to the Internet.

The amazing thing about HPTS is that it is a collegial and supportive community in spite of the fact that many of us are competitors. We gather as old friends and catch up on life’s changes in family, friends, and work. We share almost all of the latest technology trends while holding back only the truly critical trade secrets. When someone needs a new job, there is a supportive network with common passions. This culture was based on Jim’s natural supportive, caring, and HUMAN approach to technology and persists today.

Last month saw the 17th convening of the HPTS Workshop, and you can read all about it on the HPTS site.

This year, in addition, SUNY Buffalo professor Murat Demirbas posted his notes about the conference, although as he noted, doing so is a tad controversial:

Although some people prefer to keep what happens at HPTS to stay at HPTS, I find it hard to not talk about HPTS. I learn a lot at HPTS and I want to share at least some of those. And this year I don't think there was any confidential technology discussed at all. So I don't think Pat Helland will find this post and shout at me.

I'm certain Pat found the post, but I don't think he's going to shout about it.

Here are Demirbas's notes:

• HPTS'17 day 0
• HPTS'17 day 1
• HPTS'17 day 2

(You can tell a true Computer Scientist because they start their notes from Day 0.)

I didn't attend HPTS, although a number of my colleagues did (no surprise: Pat Helland leads my team at work). Among my team, the panels of most interest were the "Verification of Systems" and "Antifragile Exercises" panels, which were both super-practical panels, focused on how to build reliable distributed systems out of unreliable components. It's super-interesting stuff, comprising both practical tools for analyzing system behavior and finding implementation errors (e.g., Jepsen) as well as practical tools for "hardening" your production systems (and personnel!) in most surprising ways (e.g., Chaos Monkey).

It sounds like it was another very successful workshop, and it was fun to get a closer view into it this year.

Maybe one day I'll attend.

Stuff I'm reading

Been Too Dang Busy To Read. Well, busy is good, I think?

• America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

  The reason isn’t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share or twenty-somethings spending more on experiences than things. The root cause is that many of these long-standing chains are overloaded with debt—often from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms. There are billions in borrowings on the balance sheets of troubled retailers, and sustaining that load is only going to become harder—even for healthy chains.

  The debt coming due, along with America’s over-stored suburbs and the continued gains of online shopping, has all the makings of a disaster. The spillover will likely flow far and wide across the U.S. economy. There will be displaced low-income workers, shrinking local tax bases and investor losses on stocks, bonds and real estate. If today is considered a retail apocalypse, then what’s coming next could truly be scary.

• The Cause and Consequences of the Retail Apocalypse

  This is a robbery in progress. Private equity firms borrow massively to buy companies, and use corporate cash reserves to pay themselves back. Workers who supply the value to the business see nothing; in fact, to service the debt, companies usually cut staff. When the retailer collapses under the borrowing weight, all workers lose their jobs. And even when sales go up, like they have by 5 percent annually in the toy sector over the past five years, dominant toy sellers like Toys“R”Us cannot compete because of the debt burden. The company’s profitability was increasing when it filed for bankruptcy.

• When Should the Government Stockpile Software Vulnerabilities?

  Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith called out the U.S. government for “stockpiling” vulnerabilities rather than reporting them to software vendors.

  Now the government has a newly released vulnerabilities equities process charter to help guide when to stockpile and when to disclose. The 14-page document outlining how the government will make those decisions moving forward doesn’t shed a whole lot of light on which types of vulnerabilities will be kept secret for internal use by the government and which will be disclosed so that vendors can patch them. Instead, it lays out the process for making that decision—who will be involved, what factors should be considered—while still allowing for the necessary degree of secrecy and case-by-case analysis. This process itself is not brand new—it was developed in 2008 and 2009—but the government did not release the details publicly until January 2016, after the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. Unlike the newly released charter, the previous heavily redacted version, dated February 2010 and released in 2016, did not include a list of specific considerations or questions that the government would take into account.

• Math and Computation

  This is a draft of a book that will be published by Princeton University Press.

• Entering the Quantum Era—How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster

  Over the past seven months, we’ve been rapidly replacing major parts of the engine, introducing Rust and parts of Servo to Firefox. Plus, we’ve had a browser performance strike force scouring the codebase for performance issues, both obvious and non-obvious.

  We call this Project Quantum, and the first general release of the reborn Firefox Quantum comes out tomorrow.

• Preserving Malware

  Jonathan Farbowitz's NYU MA thesis More Than Digital Dirt: Preserving Malware in Archives, Museums, and Libraries is well worth a more leisurely reading than I've given it so far. He expands greatly on the argument I've made that preserving malware is important, and attempting to ensure archives are malware-free is harmful:

• Andy Weir Visits the Moon

  We get to see Weir’s newest creation this month with the release of his new novel, Artemis. The action is set on a lunar city in the not-too-distant future, which Weir calculated as much as imagined. He estimated the cost of reaching the moon from Earth by assuming a future commercial launch industry that will reach the efficiencies of today’s airlines, then combining those numbers with an obscure and complex Earth-moon orbit called the Uphoff-Crouch Cycler. He wrote a 10-page economic analysis constructing the future lunar economy, whose currency, the slug, is based on the cost of transporting one gram from the Earth. He referenced modern-day nuclear power plant designs in determining the base’s energy production and consumption budget.

• A Tale of Three Rankings

  The US News rankings have a long history and since they are reputation based they roughly correspond to how we see CS departments though some argue that reputation changes slowly with the quality of a department.

  US News and World Report also has a new global ranking of CS departments. The US doesn't fare that well on the list and the ranking of the US programs on the global list are wildly inconsistent with the US list. What's going on?

  75% of the global ranking is based on statistics from Web of Science. Web of Science captures mainly journal articles where conferences in computer science typically have a higher reputation and more selectivity. In many European and Asian universities hiring and promotion often depend heavily on publications and citations in Web of Science encouraging their professor to publish in journals thus leading to higher ranked international departments.

• Brilliant Jerks in Engineering

  Should brilliant jerks be tolerated? To explore this, I described two fictional brilliant jerks

• Card catalogs and the secret history of modernity

  Card catalogs imagine an endlessly growing collection of books and other documents. It imagines institutions capable of standardizing the treatment of those documents. And it imagines a democratic public, scholars, students, and amateurs with both the urge and the ability to seek out such materials. The card catalog is everything that is the best of the 19th and 20th centuries. And they look beautiful, and smell fantastic.

• New Harbor Bay Ferry Schedule in effect December 4

  The new departure will provide riders with an option to the 6:30 and 7:30 AM departures while the 331 passenger M.V. Peralta is away for its mid-life refurbishment. During the Peralta’s absence, some Harbor Bay morning departures will be operated with vessels that have less passenger capacity than the Peralta. The extra trip is intended to help maintain overall system capacity while the Peralta is out. The Peralta is expected to return to service in summer 2018.

Up, up, and away

They're taking down the construction cranes at 181 Fremont, one block from my office; soon it will be the new Facebook offices in the city.

Across the bay, and closer to home, Oakland isn't missing out on the construction boom.

There are buildings being built: Emerging Oakland high-rise to cover beloved mural

The only problem with this location is that it’s also right next to Jimmy’s Deli and the Academy of Chinese Culture on 17th Street, the site of a massive mural by anonymous New England street artist Believe In People (BiP).

BiP painted the piece, titled Vintage, depicting an elderly woman rocking out to thrash metal, on the side of the building overlooking the parking lot in 2016.

And there are other buildings proposed to be built: Planning commission approves Oakland's tallest residential building

Oakland's planning commission voted Wednesday night to recommend the approval of the city's tallest housing development ever, a soaring 40-floor tower by developer Carmel Partners, that would replace the Merchant's Parking Garage at 1314 Franklin Street diagonally across form the historic Tribune Tower downtown.

Meanwhile, I unfortunately managed to miss the blockbuster 60 Minutes episode on the Millenium Tower, which sits precariously in between my office and 181 Fremont.

For now.

half a world away, in a suburb of Amsterdam, San Francisco's sinking tower came across the radar of Petar Marinkovic, an engineer who works with the European Space Agency to track earthquakes. Using signals from a satellite 500 miles above the earth, Marinkovic measures ground movements around fault lines. In 2016, he happened to be studying the Bay Area, when something caught his eye.

Later, 60 Minutes gets to the heart of the matter:

Everybody is afraid to tell the truth. Because if we get to the bottom of this, they are worried that it is going to, in some ways, slow down the building boom that is happening in San Francisco.

Everyone's in a hurry.

The time is now, and the White Rabbit is in a hurry; there's no time to waste.

After all, there are fortunes to be made.

Sandy, we miss you

Some nice candids from a lovely event in honor of Sandy Hamilton.

Friend, colleague, inspiration.

Five observations about Stranger Things

1. The Netflix series Stranger Things is a parable: it is about adolescence, and about the hopes, fears, and (quite literally) the demons that children wrestle with during those terrifying years when everything seems to be changing, and nobody knows why, or what things will become.

2. The show is at its very best when it is most firmly rooted in those middle-school years, helping us see and remember what it was like to be that age, and it is most rewarding when it shows how children develop those coping mechanisms that sustain and guide us through our lives.

3. The portrayal of the differences between those adults that "get it" (Will's mom, Sheriff Hopper, the middle school science teacher) and those that don't (pretty much everyone else) is particularly fine and elegant.

4. The government research lab, and all the scientists that work there, are evil to the core? Bleah. Weak and cliched. But it is an easy way to stage a show that really wants to focus on the children, and keep nearly everyone else anonymous.

5. The single worst part about Stranger Things, though, is the notion that El's power derives from her anger. Boo! Hiss! Shame on all the script writers and creatives! This is more than just vastly disappointing, it's so completely unnecessary. If they had just done this one single thing right, Stranger Things would truly be a show for the ages. Instead, it's in that list of stuff I'll watch, but won't really actively recommend to people.

Up, up, and away

As the new San Francisco Transit Center nears its grand opening, do not miss this wonderful interactive exploration of the project and all its impacts on the city, from the Architecture Desk of the San Francisco Chronicle: Symbol of a New San Francisco

... eye-popping novelties and numbers aren’t nearly as important as the long-term question of how the tower will settle into the landscape, once the shock of the new fades away.

“Ultimately, this aims to be a building about San Francisco,” Clarke said last month. He emphasizes such details as the facade’s grid of silvery aluminum sunshades, which relate more to such structural high points as Coit Tower than to the clutter of thin-skinned glass towers nearby.

“Many architects today approach tall buildings almost from a wholly artistic point of view,” Clarke said. “We’re much more comfortable with buildings that feel quietly confident and that ultimately are good citizens of their community.”

Are buildings citizens?

Probably not.

But buildings are important.

And this building is important.

And I'm pleased to see how the process is progressing.

San Francisco is evolving.

We are all evolving.

Here we go.

The Tears of Autumn: a very short review

Somebody, somewhere, alerted me to Charles McCarry, and his marvelous The Tears of Autumn.

I know, I know: The Tears of Autumn was published in 1974.

And it's set in 1963.

But it is just so marvelous!

Partly, it's because McCarry is a very elegant writer. There is a certain way in which you are supposed to write This Sort of Book, and McCarry pulls that off as well as anyone:

In Orvieto Christopher found a coffee bar just opening and sat by the window drinking caffe latte, alone with the teen-aged boy who worked the early shift. At eight o'clock the street filled up with Italians, as though the town had been turned upside down like a sack and its people spilled into the morning. Once, after a week in Switzerland and a drive through the night over the Saint Bernard, he and Molly had arrived at the same time of day in Torino. When she saw the Italians again, shouting and gesticulating, Molly had leaped up, spread her arms as if to embrace them, and cried, "The human race!"

Christopher walked through the crowd to the post office and mailed Pigeon's confession and Dieter Dimpel's photographs and Yu Lung's horoscopes to himself in care of general delivery, Washington. The envelope would arrive by registered airmail in four days' time.

But even more than the fluidity and grace of McCarry's writing, what really sets him apart is the efficient and economical way in which he manages his story.

Imagine a modern thriller writer delivering a tale like this, spanning four continents, involving politics, culture, military affairs, language, and so much more; surely it would require seven or eight hundred pages to accomplish. But McCarry handles it in barely two hundred and fifty pages.

Yet it never feels rushed or crowded.

Instead, time and again, as our hero visits some place, talks with some person, or observes some event, what you originally take as "just" color, "merely" background, turns out to be critical information that all falls neatly and precisely into place, at just the right moment.

It's immensely satisfying.

I'm not sure if I shall find the time to dip back in to McCarry's many other books. Are they all as good as this?

I suppose there's only one way to find out.

Nothing says changing of the seasons ...

... like noticing that, while we weren't quite paying attention, a group of 8 (!!) paper wasps found their way inside the house and are all clustered against the upper window.

Do paper wasps come in through the chimney? Is there anything one can do about that?

Abaddon's Gate: a very short review

Book three of the Expanse series is Abaddon's Gate.

Abaddon's Gate starts out as a continuation of books one and two.

Which is great, and I would have been just fine with that.

But then, about halfway through (page 266, to be exact), Abaddon's Gate takes a sudden and startling 90 degree turn, revealing that much of what you thought you knew from the first two books is completely wrong, and exposing a whole new set of ideas to contemplate.

And so, then, off we go, in a completely new direction!

One of the things I'm really enjoying about the series is the "long now" perspective that it takes. You might think that a couple thousand years of written history is a pretty decent accomplishment for a sentient species, but pah! that's really nothing, in the big picture of things.

If you liked the first two books, you'll enjoy Abaddon's Gate. If you didn't like any of this, well, you probably figured that out about 50 pages into Leviathan Wakes and that's fine, too.

Bryan's simple rules for online security

I seem to be posting a lot less frequently recently. I was traveling, work has been crazy busy, you know how it goes. Oh, well.

I was looking at some stuff while I was traveling, and reviewing what I thought, and decided it still holds, so I decided to post it here.

It ain't perfect, but then nothing is, and besides which you get what you paid for, so here are my 100% free of charge simple rules for online security:

• Always do your banking and other important web accesses from your own personal computer, not from public computers like those in hotel business centers, coffee shops, etc.
• Always use Chrome or Firefox to access "important" web sites like the bank, credit cards, Amazon, etc.
• Always use https:// URLs for those web sites
• Always let Windows Update automatically update your computer as it wants to, also always let Chrome and Firefox update themselves when they want to.
• Stick with GMail, it's about as secure as email can get right now. Train yourself to be suspicious of weird mails from unknown senders, or with weird links in them, just in case you get a "phishing" mail that pretends to be from your bank or credit card company, etc.
• If you get a mail from a company you care about (bank, retirement account, credit card, health care company, etc.), instead of clicking on the link in the mail, ALWAYS open up a new browser window and type in the https:// URL of the bank or whatever yourself. It's clicking the link in the email that gets you in trouble.
• At least once a week or so, sign on and look at your credit card charges, your bank account, your retirement account, etc., just to see that everything on there looks as it should be. If not, call your bank and credit card company, dispute the charge, and ask them to send you a new credit card, ATM card, whatever it was.
• Don't accept phone calls from people who aren't in your contacts, or whose call you didn't expect. If you accept a phone call that you think might be legitimate (e.g., from your bank or credit card company), but you need to discuss your account, hang up and call them back, using the main service number from their web site, not the number that called you. Never answer "security questions" over the phone unless you initiated the call yourself. Con artists that call you on the phone can be really persuasive, this is actually the biggest threat nowadays I think.

If you do these simple things, you have made yourself a sufficiently "hard" target that the bad guys will go find somebody who's a lot easier to attack instead of you.

WC 2018 ? Not this year, I guess.

I can't say this was a total stunner, but still: USA Stunned by Trinidad and Tobago, Eliminated From World Cup Contention

The nightmare scenario has played out for the U.S. men's national team.

A roller coaster of a qualifying campaign ended in shambles, with a stunning 2-1 loss to Trinidad & Tobago, coupled with wins by Panama and Honduras over Costa Rica and Mexico, respectively, has eliminated the USA from the World Cup. The Americans will not be playing in Russia next summer.

Trinidad and Tobago, which hadn't won in its last nine matches (0-8-1), exacted revenge for the 1989 elimination at the hands of the United States, doing so in stunning fashion. An own goal from Omar Gonzalez and a rocket from Alvin Jones provided the offense, while Christian Pulisic's second-half goal wasn't enough to save the Americans.

Oh, my.

And it seems like there's a fair chance I won't be able to root for Leo Messi, either?

Well, what shall I do?

Let's see: there's still Iceland! They're easy to root for!

Perhaps Wales? Perhaps Costa Rica? Perhaps Chile?

I'm ready, I'm an eager Yankee, looking for a team with some charisma, some elan, some heart, some fighting spirit.

Where are you? Are you out there?

It's still a few weeks until the tournament qualifications are known.

I guess I've got time to start looking...

In the Woods: a very short review

One of my voracious reader friends introduced me to Tana French and her Dublin Murder Squad series, of which In the Woods is the first entry.

Structurally, In the Woods is a classic mystery: something horrible has happened, and the detectives are called; evidence is collected; witnesses are interviewed; leads are developed and followed; more is learned.

Along the way, we explore issues such as gender discrimination in the workplace and the ongoing effects of the great recession of 2008.

What distinguishes In the Woods is not these basic elements, but more the style and depth with which they are elaborated and pursued.

But did I mention style? What really makes In the Woods a delight is the ferocious lyricism that French brings to her writing.

For instance, here are three children, playing follow-the-leader in the woods:

These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the microlandscapes of their own grazed knees; put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing and they could find their way out without putting a foot wrong. This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams.

They are running into legend, into sleepover stories and nightmares parents never hear. Down the faint lost paths you would never find alone, skidding round the tumbled stone walls, they stream calls and shoelaces behind them like comet-trails.

How marvelous is this, at every level!

Structurally, it's almost poetry, with a natural sing-song cadence and a subtly-reinforced pattern induced by the simple rhythms ("they know...", "they rule...", "they scramble...", "they stream...").

Stylistically, each little turn of phrase is so graceful and just right ("their own grazed knees", "wild and lordly as young animals", "calls and shoelaces").

And then:

They are running into legend, into sleepover stories and nightmares parents never hear.

Wow.

Anyway, that's just page 2. French is just as polished and capable on page 302, and, like any good mystery, once you start, you won't want to stop, even as you know (or think you know) what lies ahead.

From what I hear, French's subsequent books are wonderful as well; I shall certainly read more.

John Cochrane's After the ACA

All that anyone has been able to talk about recently (or so it seems), is "repeal and replace."

It's a pretty interesting topic to me, partly because, as I get older, I'm thinking more and more about healthcare, and partly just because I think it's an awfully important topic.

But I didn't feel like I learned a lot during all the recent debates.

So I wandered here, and I wandered there, and eventually I found myself looking at a John Cochrane paper: After the ACA: Freeing the market for health care

Now, Cochrane is a pretty serious fellow, with pretty serious credentials, so my expectations were fairly high, perhaps unreasonably high.

And this is a major effort: the paper is nearly 50 pages long, and covers lots of ground

At the very least, I hoped to learn something new, and certainly, the paper sets out well:

I survey the supply, demand, and market for health care, and health insurance, to think about how those markets should work to provide quality care, low cost, and technical innovation. A market-based alternative does exist, and it is realistic.

As a survey, I was surprised how narrowly-focused Cochrane seemed to be. For example, there is almost no discussion in the entire paper about the role of malpractice lawsuits in driving up healthcare cost, modulo a mostly-throwaway line about its role in constraining the outsourcing of certain medical work:

Personal-injury law firms are already lining up to sue based on the “inferior quality” of outsourced readings, with requisite horror stories.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the effect that malpractice lawsuits have had on healthcare costs. Surely he should have more to say than this?

And I was saddened that there was very little reflection about the basic fact that the biggest reason that the United States spends dramatically more on healthcare than we did 75 years ago is because of ADVANCES in healthcare: people are living longer, so over the course of their lives they get more healthcare. Moreover, many ailments which were formerly not treatable now are reliably and safely treatable, so we treat them.

More treatment, over longer life spans, equals a greater amount of resources spent on healthcare.

But this is a GOOD thing! We should be happy that people are living longer, and are having their illnesses treated. And Cochrane seems to understand this, for he notes that

We don’t want 1950s care at 1920s prices

But then he moves rapidly on, without really spending any time to discuss how we might get by with less healthcare, overall, in some sensible fashion.

I did learn a few things:

• I had not previously been aware of the role of the "Certificate of Need." Here's how Cochrane describes it:

  In Illinois as in 35 other states, every new hospital, or even major purchase, requires a “certificate of need.” This certificate is issued by our “hospital equalization board,” appointed by the governor and, like much of Illinois politics, regularly in the newspapers for various scandals. The board has an explicit mandate to defend the profitability of existing hospitals. It holds hearings at which they can complain that a new entrant would hurt their bottom line.

• And Cochrane makes a well-worded argument in favor of a new conceptualization of health-care insurance:

  To summarize briefly, health insurance should be individual, portable, life-long, guaranteed-renewable, transferrable, competitive, and lightly regulated, mostly to ensure that companies keep their contractual promises. “Guaranteed renewable” means that your premiums do not increase and you can’t be dropped if you get sick. “Transferable” gives you the right to change insurance companies, increasing competition.

  Insurance should be insurance, not a negotiator and payment plan for routine expenses. It should protect overall wealth from large shocks, leaving as many marginal decisions unaltered as possible.

These are both tremendously good insights, and were certainly worth the time I invested in Cochrane's essay.

But most of the rest of Cochrane's paper baffled me.

More than just baffled me; it flat-out astonished me.

Cochrane's main point seems to be that consuming healthcare should be much more like going to a restaurant, or hiring a gardening service for your house, or buying an airplane ticket, or choosing a new set of tires for your car: you should check Yelp before you make your decision; you should shop around for the best price; you should probably even try to use a coupon or negotiate for a better deal.

Is he serious?

Does he really think that selecting medical care is like these other activities? Apparently, he does:

Health care is not that different from the services provided by lawyers, auto mechanics, home remodelers, tax accountants, financial planners, restaurants, airlines or college professors.

Does he really think that it makes sense to change medical providers on an incident-by-incident basis, just like you go to one restaurant one day, and a different one the next week? He certainly doesn't seem to think that a person's medical information is very sensitive or private, dismissing that notion breezily as:

Confidentiality regulations, apparently more stringent than those for your money in the bank.

Is it possible that Cochrane has never had to have a sensitive discussion with his doctor? Never felt like he needed to have any deeper of a relationship than he has with the barista who makes his coffee in the morning? Is his life really that uncomplicated?

Even more astonishing is this notion he has of "negotiating" for your healthcare. Cochrane is a big proponent of negotiation, and wonders why it is missing in healthcare, when it is so prevalent elsewhere:

You don’t need an “insurance” company to negotiate your cellphone contract, home repair and rehab, mortgage, airline fare, legal bills, or clothes, as we do for health.

Is he serious?

I'll grant that people certainly negotiate the price they pay for their house, and there may be some people who negotiate the price they pay for their legal bills, but do you actually know anyone who negotiates their cellphone contract? Their airline fare? The price of their clothes?

And how many acquaintances do you have (other than medical professionals) who have the requisite base knowledge to negotiate, say, a reasonable price for spinal surgery?

Discussing the well-known (and, admittedly, frustrating) strawman that "a man in the ambulance on his way to the hospital with a heart attack is in no position to negotiate," Cochrane just completely dismisses it:

Our health care system actually does a pretty decent job with heart attacks.

... have they no families? If I’m on the way to the hospital, I call my wife. She’s a heck of a negotiator.

And then continues to invoke The Mighty Yelp:

In a competitive, transparent market, a hospital that routinely overcharged cash customers with heart attacks would be creamed by Yelp reviews

Is he serious?

When you have a heart attack, your wife should be negotiating with the hospital while you're in the ambulance? Or she should be browsing Yelp, deciding whether to tell the ambulance to take you to hospital A or hospital B?

Maybe all Cochrane means by "negotiate" is "shop around", and if that's true, then certainly I grant that there's a big place for that.

For example, when my parents were planning to get cataract surgery, they certainly did their homework, tried carefully to select the best surgeon. (Although, I don't think they actually used Yelp? Maybe they did?)

And it definitely seems like it used to be Common Wisdom that for any significant medical issue, you should get a second opinion, so maybe that's what Cochrane is trying to say.

Although, when people used to say "you should get a second opinion," it was typically the QUALITY of the medical advice that was of concern, not the PRICE of the medical advice.

The people that I know are generally much more concerned about the SUCCESS of that triple bypass, not about its cost.

Most of the people that I know don't even really negotiate the price of their house. Rather, they try to pick a decent real estate agent, and let the agent handle the negotiation. I do know a handful of people that are able to do this successfully on their own; a much smaller number of them enjoyed it; a smaller segment still have actually done that multiple times in their life.

Ask around about buying a car: this is really the experience you want when you need arthroscopic surgery on your knee?

What you want is for the pain to go away, and for you to be able to take up hiking again.

So, in the end, I struggle to comprehend what sort of world it is that Cochrane envisions.

It seems like his ideal is a situation in which we are all informed consumers, and have no trouble evaluating whether we are being given a good deal for duodenal atresia surgery or base cell carcinoma immunotherapy, in which we arrange to have strokes, aneurysms, broken arms and heart attacks with enough advance notice that we can consult Yelp before the ambulance arrives, and in which we respond to being told that the yearly mammogram will cost $375 by saying: "how about $225 instead?"

I guess I'm still looking for that informed, readable, clear-headed, approachable paper which explains what we, as a society, can truly and effectively do about healthcare costs.

Thank you Mr. Cochrane for trying.

But I'm afraid that, for me at least, you were not successful.

In which people discuss things I do not understand

We all thought: "Hey! New CEO search is over! Things will be boring and normal now!"

• God Is a Bot, and Anthony Levandowski Is His Messenger

  In 2002, Levandowski’s attention turned, fatefully, toward transportation. His mother called him from Brussels about a contest being organized by the Pentagon’s R&D arm, DARPA. The first Grand Challenge in 2004 would race robotic, computer-controlled vehicles in a desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas—a Wacky Races for the 21st century.

  “I was like, ‘Wow, this is absolutely the future,’” Levandowski told me in 2016. “It struck a chord deep in my DNA. I didn’t know where it was going to be used or how it would work out, but I knew that this was going to change things.”

• Uber-SoftBank Deal Ensures Limits on Kalanick’s Power

  SoftBank Group Corp. has overcome a major obstacle to its planned multibillion-dollar investment in Uber Technologies Inc. The Japanese firm agreed to block any attempts to elevate Travis Kalanick, Uber’s controversial former leader, back to the company’s top ranks, according to people familiar with the discussions.

  Venture capital firm Benchmark, which led Kalanick’s ouster in June, has sought a guarantee in writing from SoftBank that it would reject reappointing Kalanick as chief executive officer and block his appointment as chairman of the board or head of one of its subcommittees, said the people.

• Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick just appointed 2 new board members, a defiant move the company is calling a 'complete surprise'

  Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick appointed Xerox chairwoman Ursula Burns and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to the company's board of directors on Friday, a surprise move that's almost certain to re-ignite the bitter internal fighting that has destabilized the ride-hailing giant for months.

  Uber quickly decried the move as "a complete surprise" to both the company and its board.

  "That is precisely why we are working to put in place world-class governance to ensure that we are building a company every employee and shareholder can be proud of," an Uber spokesman told Business Insider.

• Here’s the proposal to change Uber’s governance, which is aimed at limiting Travis Kalanick’s power

  Some of the proposal points are expected to be voted on by the board on Tuesday:

  It would institute “one share, one vote,” which would eliminate shares distributed early in the company’s history that hold “high” voting power. Those shares are held by Kalanick and also Benchmark, the venture firm that has sued him, as well as some employees.

  Sources said Kalanick wants to defend the removal of those potentially lucrative shares, without the consent of those who have them, and that it also impacts all shareholders unfairly. Sources close to the board said that a majority of those shareholders are in favor of this change.

• London's Uber ban shows how driverless cars will cut jobs

  Driving to work in a private car imposes an average daily commuting cost on the owner of €24 per day (about $24), UBS says. In a world of robotaxis, with no need to buy a car, that cost falls to €7.2 per day. "Getting rid of their private car would enable the shared mobility user to travel about 10,000km per year in a robotaxi and save €5,000 per year," UBS calculates:

  "Robotaxis will likely price-compete with mass-transit systems. The shift towards electric autonomous vehicles, combined with more advanced fleet optimization and servicing platforms, next-generation traffic management and more intense competition, should reduce the fee charged to passengers of robotaxis by as much as 80% versus a ride-on-demand trip today. The technology to make robotaxis a reality is already available. In this new paradigm, owning a private car will cost almost twice as much as using robotaxis regularly."

  That is an extraordinary thought: An Uber ride that costs £10 today — already roughly half the price of a back cab — might cost only £2 in a few years' time, UBS says. The cost of providing cars without drivers might be so small that companies could offer rides for free, UBS speculates, and make money on the advertising inside them.

Some Saturday night stuff

This is the most beautiful time of the year in the Bay Area, so it's hard to think of all the sad things that are happening in the world.

Still, life goes on, things happen.

Anyway, here's some Saturday night stuff, the typical mixture, I suppose, of wonderful and awful.

• A First-Person Account of the Fatal Yosemite Rockfall

  Drew and I drive to the El Capitan meadow to get a better look at the rockfall. There is a helicopter idling nearby, rescue trucks line the shoulder of the road, and Yosemite park personnel are moving about. A couple of rangers keep the traffic moving and the area clear. The SAR team is debriefing beneath a tree. Our friend, Josh Huckaby, a YOSAR veteran, gives Drew a look that means one thing: bad news.

• Anatomy of a Moral Panic

  The implication is clear: home cooks are being radicalized by the site’s recommendation algorithm to abandon their corned beef in favor of shrapnel-packed homemade bombs. And more ominously, enough people must be buying these bomb parts on Amazon for the algorithm to have noticed the correlations, and begin making its dark suggestions.

  But as a few more minutes of clicking would have shown, the only thing Channel 4 has discovered is a hobbyist community of people who mill their own black powder at home, safely and legally, for use in fireworks, model rockets, antique firearms, or to blow up the occasional stump.

• Illustrating Group Theory: A Coloring Book

  Math is about more than just numbers. In this "book" the story of math is visual, told in shapes and patterns.

• NEW REPUBLIC NAMES J.J. GOULD NEW EDITOR

  Prior to The Atlantic, Gould was an editor at the Journal of Democracy, as well as with McKinsey & Company—where he worked with the public- and social-sector practices. A lecturer in history and politics at Yale University, he has written for the Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Chronicle Herald, The European Journal of Political Theory, and The Moscow Times.

• Michael Cohen (1992-2017)

  Within those five minutes, it had become obvious that this was a freshman who I could—must—talk to like an advanced grad student or professor. Sadly for quantum computing, Michael ultimately decided to go into classical parts of theoretical computer science, such as low-rank approximation and fast algorithms for geometry and linear-algebra problems. But that didn’t stop him from later taking my graduate course on quantum complexity theory, where he sat in the front and loudly interrupted me every minute, stream-of-consciousness style, so that my “lectures” often turned into dialogues with him. Totally unforgivable—all the more so because his musings were always on point, constantly catching me in errors or unjustified claims (one of which I blogged about previously).

Thinking about freezing on a hot day

Has anyone done this?

Are there pros and cons besides what's listed here?

• The Equifax Breach: What You Should Know

  Q: So should I take advantage of the credit monitoring offer?

  A: It can’t hurt, but I wouldn’t count on it protecting you from identity theft.

  Q: Wait, what? I thought that was the whole point of a credit monitoring service?

  A: The credit bureaus sure want you to believe that, but it’s not true in practice. These services do not prevent thieves from using your identity to open new lines of credit, and from damaging your good name for years to come in the process. The most you can hope for is that credit monitoring services will alert you soon after an ID thief does steal your identity.

  Q: Well then what the heck are these services good for?

  A: Credit monitoring services are principally useful in helping consumers recover from identity theft. Doing so often requires dozens of hours writing and mailing letters, and spending time on the phone contacting creditors and credit bureaus to straighten out the mess. In cases where identity theft leads to prosecution for crimes committed in your name by an ID thief, you may incur legal costs as well. Most of these services offer to reimburse you up to a certain amount for out-of-pocket expenses related to those efforts. But a better solution is to prevent thieves from stealing your identity in the first place.

• Consumers Union’s Guide To Security Freeze Protection

  When a security freeze is in place at all three major credit bureaus, an identity thief cannot open a new account because the potential creditor or seller of services will not be able to check the credit file. When the consumer is applying for credit, he or she can lift the freeze temporarily using a PIN so legitimate applications for credit or services can be processed.

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Security Freeze

  Freezing your credit involves notifying each of the major credit bureaus that you wish to place a freeze on your credit file. This can usually be done online, but in a few cases you may need to contact one or more credit bureaus by phone or in writing. Once you complete the application process, each bureau will provide a unique personal identification number (PIN) that you can use to unfreeze or “thaw” your credit file in the event that you need to apply for new lines of credit sometime in the future. Depending on your state of residence and your circumstances, you may also have to pay a small fee to place a freeze at each bureau. There are four consumer credit bureaus, including Equifax, Experian, Innovis and Trans Union.

• Frequently asked questions about security freeze

  Security freezes do not apply to any person or entity with whom the consumer has an existing account, nor to a limited number of other parties who may access the files for purposes not related to new accounts, such as law enforcement agencies and certain governmental agencies that need them for investigations and other statutory responsibilities.

• Things to Consider When Deciding Whether to Place a Security Freeze

  Before opening a new account, most reputable creditors evaluate the creditworthiness of the applicant by checking the consumer credit report or credit score. A security freeze stops potential creditors from seeing the consumer's credit report and credit score unless the consumer decides to unlock the credit reporting file with a PIN. The freeze stops the new account in the name of a thief because the creditor who is considering the thief’s application can’t check the real consumer’s credit report or credit score.

  A security freeze does not stop misuse by a thief of your existing bank account or credit accounts, which is called existing account fraud. You still have to check the monthly statements on your existing accounts for any erroneous charges or debits.

• Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

  Do not use the following advice to correct a problem with an account which is factually yours. If someone has stolen your credit card number and used it to buy things, you should not send letters. Just call your bank; they’ll take care of it. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, that is a really well-understood scenario that banks are very customer-friendly about. The only thing we’re talking about here is accounts / debts which were never yours.

  Was an account opened in your name without your consent? Great, you’re in the right place. The rest of this article assumes that you’ve either checked a credit report or been told by a bank that an account exists in your name which you didn’t open.