Had to smile at this one.
We Need To Do More When It Comes To Having Brief, Panicked Thoughts About Climate Change
Brad DeLong admits to a problem
Four years ago we economists were writing learned papers about the “Great Moderation”: about how it looked as though the governing institutions of the world economy had finally learned how to control and moderate if not completely eliminate the business cycle–the epileptic seizures of the economy that leave us with pointlessly high unemployment, pointlessly idle capacity, and pointlessly rusting away machines in spite of there being no fundamental cause for machines to be idle, factories closed, and workers unemployed. In such an epileptic seizure of the economy, workers are unemployed and machines are idle because there isn’t the demand to employ them, and there isn’t the demand to employ because the workers are unemployed and have no incomes.
We have been seeing these epileptic seizures called business cycles fairly regularly since at least 1825.
And we have been claiming that we have it licked fairly regularly since 1825 as well.
British Prime Minister Robert Peel thought we had it licked with his Bank of England reforms in the 1840s.
While some of the explanations in that post are to my mind a bit off, the overall message is that economics is still not very good at predicting what will happen with the economy.
Not sure what it is about the magazine, but it seem to be incapable of reporting the implications of actions. A stunning example of this comes from their Babbage Blog reporting on the delays in the acceptance of the reports that CO2 is warming the planet…
Erring on the side of extra caution is not a bad idea, and various efforts are underway to develop, corroborate and better to underpin the work on temperature records that has been done to date.
Erring on the side of extra caution for climate change would suggest that we take steps to reduce CO2 emissions, not that we do yet more studies on whether the planet is warming and how fast. We already have the warming data, and it does not look good. “One sure bet is that this decade will be the warmest” on record – James Hansen
Recently I had to replace a Volkswagen TDI Golf (after 300,000km it was well used), but was appalled at the lack of improvement in fuel efficiency over the past 10+ years.
Overall I normally averaged 5.1 l/100km in the TDI, normally managing 1000km between 51 liter fill ups. In Canada the Ford Fiesta is advertised as Best in class fuel efficiency
. Well it might be, but only because nobody seems to be importing the really fuel efficient cars. Based on the Canadian figures, the Fiesta will probably end up somewhere around 6.0 to 6.5l/100km. On the european figures, it is listed as 5.9l/100km, for the 1.6L 120 HP version - the only engine spec that is available in Canada.
Read this and weep
The 1.6 Duratorq TDCi ECO version of the same vehicle that is NOT available in Canada gets 3.7l/100KM and still pumps out 90HP, there is another version listed at 95HP that gets similar fuel efficiency. For people who do not like diesel, there is a 1.25L version that still does 5.5l/100km, and another1.25L petrol engine that does 85HP that does 5.6l/100km.
Canadian figures for the Fiesta are 7.1 city, 5.3 highway. There is supposedly going to be an ECO version out later, but for now an average that we might be able to expect is 6.2 l/100km.
Current vehicle
After much looking around I ended up with a Honda Fit, (Jazz in europe). It claims 7.2 city. 5.7 highway for a combined 6.4, but in practice I’m averaging 6.6l/100KM, more than 2l/100km worse than I would be if I could have got one of the fuel efficient cars that are available in Europe.
A new TDI Golf was not on the cards since it is only available in the high “comfortline” spec, for CDN$28,000, and not very fuel efficient as the version available in Canada is 140HP, so 6.7l/100km city, 4.6l/100km highway for a combined 5.65l/100km. So in 10 years the car has more power and worse fuel economy than the previous model.
Time to keep on watching the CO2 level.
It turns out that I was mistaken, the Onion did not write the Rugged Software Manifesto, or at least if they did InfoQ got taken in as well.
But it still sounds like a parody even if they are serious…
Rugged takes it a step further. The idea is that before the code can be made secure, the developers themselves must be toughened up.
The InfoQ article is not a complete waste of time though, there has been some conversation sparked by the parody, but Andrew Fried seems to have taken the idea in a new direction with his condensed version with just three points:
- The software should do what it’s advertised to do.
- The software shouldn’t create a portal into my system via every Chinese and Russian malware package that hits the Internet virtually every minute of every day.
- The software should protect the users from themselves.
The first point is obvious and does not really require stating except to those developers who are not aware of authors like Gerald Weinberg.
His second point is again obvious, if you are building any software, you should know what the libraries you are including do. Well, Duh!
His third point is just plain wrong, and shows the usual arrogance of developers. Protect users from themselves is not an attitude I would like to see on my teams. Yes, protect users from stupid programmer mistakes, but the kind of arrogance shown in protect users from themselves leads to the kind of problems that fly by wire aircraft have had, notably the Airbus that did a low level pass and continued in level flight into trees and more recently shutting off a warning alarm that released the brakes causing the plane to slam into a wall.
Overall, it still sounds like a parody, but it is getting to sound like a very sick parody, more like graveyard humor.
I think that the Rugged Software Manifesto has to be a parody.
I am rugged… and more importantly, my code is rugged.
Ok some of the statements are reasonable,
I recognize that software has become a foundation of our modern world.
but overall the whole thing is so over the top that it has to be a parody.
I am rugged, not because it is easy, but because it is necessary… and I am up for the challenge.
No Thanks Google
How Do I Disable Sidewiki?
Comments are deliberately turned off on this blog, but now Google wants to enable commenting via Sidewiki so that anyone can put comments directly in view while others browse what I have written.
NOT a good idea.
As Dave Winers says my Website Is My Space
Possible way to disable Sidewiki
Google site states “Sidewiki currently does not support comments over internal or SSL (https) encrypted pages.” So that might be a temporary fix - making the entire site SSL, but again there is the word “currently” which means that it might at some point allow for comments on SSL pages….
Decentralizing social media s likely to become a hot topic.
Dave WIner has created RssCloud to enable more or less real time RSS updates and notifications, helping to decentralize the notification system. Twitter was an interesting model for a while, but it has demonstrated that it does not scale to a real flash mob. Sure it works well for large traffic volumes, but when there is a massive spike in traffic the centralized model is always going to be in danger of slowing down.
At some level high traffic is indistinguishable from a denial of service attack, sure the traffic is wanted, but if the servers cannot handle it, then the system exhibits the same behaviors that it would under a real denial of service attack - no new traffic gets through in a timely manner.
