Tell.

About damn time.

The Data-Centric Modus Operandi: Part 2

Cross-posting from my RTI blog:

When you tell your infrastructure what you’re trying to do, it can help you do it better. [I've] used the word “model,” which might sound frightening and esoteric. But everyone does this anyway! They just don’t call it that. When people design a system in a message-centric way, they write long documents (aka “models”) describing who has to send messages to whom, in what format, at what times. Then they email these documents to each other and implement the various components based on what the documents say. In the process, they write a lot of code to encode and decode data, validate it, monitor and respond to the system’s status, manage application state, and so on. And once they’ve done all of this work, they plug their components in and find out whether the documents had any ambiguities in them and whether everyone has correctly implemented all of those infrastructure pieces I enumerated.

The truth is, from the point of view of the real business logic, “the middleware” isn’t just a messaging or data-distribution component purchased off the shelf. It also includes all of the stuff your in-house infrastructure developers had to build on top of that to make the applications work right.

Read the rest here.

This post is a follow-up to a previous post, aka Part 1.

A Bad Compromise on Taxes

Democrats wanted to extend unemployment benefits. They didn't feel they needed to pay for this extension, because it would boost the economy. But they didn't want to extend Bush-era tax cuts; that would be too expensive.

Republicans felt the opposite: tax cuts should be continued and need not be payed for, but extending unemployment benefits would be too expensive.

So what's the compromise Congress has reached? They'll extend unemployment benefit and tax cuts without paying for either of them. That's like if I want to buy a Civic, because the Lexus is too expensive, but my wife really wants the Lexus, so we compromise and buy two cars. How is this a good deal for our country? Why are so many people singing the praises of compromise and reconciliation so loudly?

This issue shines a spotlight on a fundamental problem with legislatures, independent of political party: people send their neighbors to Congress to do things for them, not to sit on their hands and say "government oughtn't to do things like that." (Why are we paying you if your theory of government says you shouldn't have a job in the first place? Quit!) Furthermore, for a legislator -- as opposed to an executive -- "doing" really means "spending." Translation: if someone says to you "vote to send me to Congress, because I will be fiscally responsible," they are lying to you -- or they are so politically naive that you ought to question their qualifications on other grounds.

Enhanced Screening

I was just subjected to my first government-sponsored sexual molestation. I can still feel the screener's hands on my body. I feel dirty.

I'd never seen the new back-scatter x-ray machines before, so I didn't notice them at first -- they're not obtrusive. They look like two large blue boxes with an aisle between them. But I saw the sign in time and opted out. Despite the discomfort, I intend to keep doing so. I have the choice to be felt up or filmed naked. Either one is coercive, embarrassing, and offensive. One of them keeps the person coercing me minimally accountable; the other does not.

Here's what happened:

I had already removed my shoes and placed my items on the conveyor belt when I spotted the x-ray machine. I informed the agent that I opted out of the x-ray and was immediately redirected through the metal detector. Thereafter the agent immediately called for a "male assist," which arrived promptly. The whole process was very efficient in fact. I'm tempted to say "professional" -- in a Godfather "it's not personal; it's business" kind of way.

Has this man done anything suspicious or illegal? Probably not.
(Photo courtesy of Salon.com.)

The agent carried my things to a table and informed  me that because I had opted out of the x-ray, he would be giving me a pat-down. I could request a private room for this. I replied that I would prefer if it happened out in the open. He told me to take off my belt, raise my arms, and keep an eye on my things as he proceeded.

Before each phase of the pat-down, he told me what he would be doing next and whether he would do so with the fronts or backs of his hands. "I'm going to run the back of my hand down the line of your zipper, OK?" He kept saying "OK?". I kept silent when I could; when it seemed he was waiting for consent, I replied, "I understand." Because it's not OK.

I steeled myself to speak when he began going around the inside of the waistband of my jeans.

"Does it bother you," I asked, "that you might do this to literally thousands of innocent people without ever finding anyone who was doing something wrong?"

He stopped the pat-down and stood up, red in the face with embarrassment. "We're doing this for your protection," he said. I told him that from what I had read, the risk from the x-ray was about the same as the risk of getting blown up by a terrorist, so I didn't feel particularly protected. "Do you want to stop the screening?" he asked. "What's my alternative?" I replied, "I have to get home." "You can go back through the x-ray machine." Alternatively, I could move my pat-down to a private area. I repeated that I preferred the pat-down and that it should be public.

He continued his work. When he had finished, he informed me that he would run my wallet, boarding pass, and other pocket contents through the x-ray and that I could gather my things while I waited. I pulled up my pants, put my shoes back on, and reassembled my baggage.

When he returned, he said, "Just for your information, the radiation from the machine is about what you're exposed to in two minutes on the plane because you're closer to the sun." He was still red in the face but trying to be serious and polite. What I should have said, except that I didn't think of it in time, was "...and how many people will look at naked pictures of me on the plane?"

I am ashamed to say that I am sometimes a jerk by accident. I run my mouth without thinking and I say something hurtful that I quickly regret. I am rarely if ever a jerk on purpose. I hate having to become one. But someone running their hands under my clothes and over my groin as a condition of traveling is something that  cannot be borne with good humor.

I am not in a position to give up flying, and I am too cowardly to contemplate a larger act of civil disobedience. I am able and prepared, however, to do my part to wear down the morale of any molesters I come in contact with. So far the TSA has appeased pilots and flight attendants by letting them off the hook. These groups are apparently willing to sell the rest of us out as long as they don't have to be insulted and humiliated themselves. The screeners don't have this choice.

Here is what I learned for the future:

• Keep the process out in the open. The screener wants to be shielded from prying eyes as much as you do. Don't let them avoid thinking about what they are doing. Don't let the other people in line avoid thinking about what they are a party to.
• Don't bother mentioning the risk from radiation. It's not large (except relative to what it's trying to protect you from, ironically), and such statements allow the screener to disregard you as a kook and avoid the issue of the violence he is inflicting on you. Next time, I won't say, "I opt out of the x-ray." I will be explicit: "No naked pictures."
• Keep the focus on what the screener is doing; don't resort to personal insults. I was quite tempted to share alternative derogatory meanings of "T-S-A," but the simple question I asked was surprisingly effective. Getting personal once again gives them the excuse to think about you instead of about their own actions.
• Even if the screener pauses in response to something you say, keep your arms in the air in the posture they told you to assume. You are not engaged in pleasant conversation; you are being exploited. All parties should remain aware of this fact.
• Keep your wallet and other valuables in your carry-on while going through security. Otherwise, the screener may carry them out of your sight after your pat-down.
• Consider the clothes you wear to the airport. The jeans I'm wearing today are pretty loose. This means that they slip down when I take my belt off, and I didn't particularly like the feeling of "getting dressed" after my experience. But maybe that's the point. On the other hand, loose pants also allowed the screener to imagine that running his hands inside my waistband was something less than it was. Women have another problem, as actress Donna D'Errico discovered: "You caught my eye," said a male screener before directing her to the x-ray machine.

Above all, stand up straight, speak clearly, and keep your head up.

God, I hate thinking like this at Christmas time.

Catholic League vs. American Culture

The Smithsonian Institution displayed some artwork critical of Christianity. The Catholic League didn't like that so much and petitioned the museum to remove the exhibit. It did so. This act of self-censorship is shocking and shameful -- artists have a right to be critical of Christianity generally or of the Catholic Church specifically. Americans who are interested in this criticism should not be prevented from viewing their work just as those who are not interested are free to stay away.

But Catholic League president Bill Donohue has gone further, asking Congress to eliminate all funding for the Smithsonian:

Why should the working class pay for the leisure of the elite when in fact one of the things the working class likes to do for leisure is to go to professional wrestling? And if I suggested we should have federal funds for professional wrestling to lower the cost of the ticket, people would think I'm insane. I don't go to museums any more than any Americans do.

Mr. Donohue, how very unfortunate that you do not go to museums. If you had visited the Smithsonian, you might have met some of the 30 million of your countrymen and -women who do visit it each year. They might have shared with you a different point of view.

They might have pointed out to you, for example, that the capsule that landed on the Moon is part of the patrimony of the human species, and that the Smithsonian allows them to see this treasure for free, whether they are elite or not. WWE Smackdown is just entertainment for a Saturday night.

Mr. Donohue, for the leader of a "civil rights" organization, you certainly seem to have a low opinion of those whom you claim to protect and of their rights. The interests of your fellows are not so parochial as you think, and we are quite capable of deciding on our own what does and does not offend us. In the future, please consider keeping your opinions to yourself. Then consider turning off the TV and visiting a museum instead -- you might learn something.

"In storytelling there is always an ethical component"

From Susan Sontag's essay "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning":

In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always – as I have argued – an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution – which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our mediadisseminated glut of unending stories.

Television gives us, in an extremely debased and un-truthful form, a truth that the novelist is obliged to suppress in the interest of the ethical model of understanding peculiar to the enterprise of fiction: namely, that the characteristic feature of our universe is that many things are happening at the same time. (“Time exists in order that it doesn’t happen all at once … space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”)

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

(I was directed to this essay by Alexander Chee and to Alexander Chee by John Gruber. Thanks, Alexander. Thanks, John. And thanks, Susan.)

Protecting Marriage

The legislature of the state of Illinois has taken the first step in approving civil unions for the state's gay citizens -- and for its straight citizens. (California has a similar system: civil unions for everyone; marriage for straight couples only.) For gay couples, this is a welcome incremental step towards marriage equality. But in creating such two-tiered systems, states undermine the very "sanctity of marriage" they seek to protect.

By neither modifying the state's existing civil marriage institution nor allowing gays to enter into it, Illinois placates conservatives: it's clear that civil unions are not quite marriage. And by allowing straight couples as well as gay ones access to civil union protections, they placate some liberals who might otherwise have pointed out that distinct "straight version" and "gay version" institutions would have "separate but equal" written all over them.

The problem is that the availability of a "marriage lite" option for straight couples dilutes the social prestige surrounding marriage that we all want to protect. Want a tax break for living with your girlfriend, but the implied commitment and just plain old-fashioned sound of the word "marriage" is giving you the heebie jeebies? Why not try a refreshing civil union?

So what can states do to protect marriage? Encourage those who have made the commitments that marriage requires to get married, regardless of sexual orientation. Encourage those who haven't not to. And grant to all those committed married couples what the constitution guarantees them: equal protection under the law.

Israelification?

I've seen more than one news piece declaring that American airport security ought to be more like that is Israel: faster, smarter, less brute force. For example:

http://www.thestar.com/iphone/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother

This is a mystery to me, because I have actually flown out of Ben-Gurion airport before, and it was nothing like the praise-filled descriptions I read. It was some years ago; maybe Israel itself has only become recently "Israelified." But when I was there, security took well over an hour, everyone was bunched into a huge line exactly as in the U.S., each person's bags were individually opened and rummaged, and everyone was interviewed by security staff. TSA porno scanners notwithstanding, it was much slower and more invasive than security here.

Art vs. Content

Frank Chimero:

Art seems more relevant than ever, especially in an age of “content.” Content is so easy: it accommodates to your lifestyle, fits seamlessly into the negative space while waiting for the bus or while in the waiting room of the doctor or to fill the extra cognitive space as we mull away at the mundane task of satisfying the demands of our inboxes. Art is being transformed to content to squeeze itself into the cracks of our splintered attention.
...
What I do know is that the more we thin-splice our attention, the dumber we become.
...
So, we should celebrate the things that command more of us. Longer texts, deeper plots, greater nuance. There is worth to being challenged and then rewarded...

University Named After Delicious Beer Predicts Programming Ability

A study of students at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne has measured that performance in a software code review task was highly correlated with personality types, as classified using the Myers-Briggs inventory. Specifically, Intuitive-Thinking (NT) students found more than twice as many bugs as Sensing-Feeling (SF) students.

...And yes, I am an NT. Go figure.

Cordoba Center

My old friend Neil Craigan posted a while ago:

Is it offensive to build a Mosque [near Ground Zero]? I suppose that depends on your vantage point. If you think that Islam in general was responsible for the 9/11 attacks then it probably is offensive, if you don't, then probably not. Of course if you believe that Muslims as a whole have responsibility for 9/11 then every Mosque in every place would be offensive (you need to be consistent).

On the question of "Islam in general": Many people seem ready to make glib generalizations about those of other religions (including those of no religion, about people of any religion). Few Christians are so naive as to presume that the values, priorities, and politics of all Christians -- from the Pope in Rome, to Christian Animists in Africa, to Unitarian Universalists in eastern North America, to Midwestern Methodists, to snake-charming Pentecostals in the desert Southwest -- are the same. (Indeed, many Christians do not even agree with the leaders of their own denominations, much less with Christians of other stripes.) Yet many non-Muslims, Christians among them, happily paint with broad strokes another religion of equal size and geographic distribution.

There's a great line in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War": Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) retorts to his boss, upon learning that he was denied a promotion because his father was an immigrant:

For twenty four years people have been trying to kill me! People who know how. Now do you think that's because my dad was a Greek soda pop maker? Or do you think that's because I'm an American spy?

We might ask a similar question in regards to those American Muslims serving their country in the armed forces and to those who lost their lives, alongside people of many other faiths, on the ground where some would now deny them the right to pray.

Words Matter

"International Burn A Koran Day" is off, says the Florida preacher who had planned the event. In the wake of this good news, however, I've read some unfortunate sentiments online that I want to respond to.

Here are some samples (paraphrased) of what I'll call the "burn it for the sake of the First Amendment" view:

• "The burning should have gone ahead to demonstrate that there's still a First Amendment in this country."
• "Churches should be all-loving, all-forgiving, and model the Golden Rule, so it's wrong for a church to burn the Koran -- but if another organization had wanted to do it, that would have been just fine."

Statements like these boil down to "Don't do hurtful, hateful things -- unless someone tells you not to, in which case, go ahead just to prove you can." A question for those who believe such rubbish: when you were nine years old, you were the one chasing your sibling around with an outstretched finger yelling, "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!", weren't you? If your mama done raised you right, you would know that wrong is wrong, and right is right, and the First Amendment doesn't magically transform the one into the other.

Here are some other responses I've read recently; I'll call this the "sticks and stone" view:

• "A book is just a book, and burning it harms no one. Burning the white pages doesn't kill everyone listed in it."
• "There are millions of copies out there. If someone burns yours, just go get another one."

Surely no one can be this naive; this is willful pigheadedness. This sentiment amounts to "Lighting a campfire and torching a cross in someone's front yard are the same, because both involve burning two sticks in an open space." Words and actions have meanings, and those meanings have power. Even small children know that. Do you?

How I Want to Watch TV

The other day, I watched Apple's recent "Special Event" keynote, which covered the new Apple TV. My first thought was "Rental only, no purchases anymore? That sucks!" Then it occurred to me that I watch a lot more TV once than I care to watch over and over again. Then it occurred to me how much money I could save if I could pay for just the shows I actually watch instead of the oceans of schlock that my cable company tries so hard to pour down my throat. And the truth be told, I'd much rather watch TV on my TV, not browse for stuff to buy. My god, I do want to watch TV that way!

Have I been won over because Apple is clever and insightful, or because Steve's Reality Distortion Field is twisting my perceptions?

Later, I watched the Google TV demo at the IFA consumer electronics conference (thanks to John Gruber for the link; skip to 32:00 to see the Google TV bit). I hope before this product hits the street that someone from Google will explain how this is not just WebTV with a Google logo on it. The market decided a decade ago that people don't want yet another gigantic remote control, and they don't want to have to wave that remote control around trying futilely to control a cursor on a screen on the other side of their living room so that they can type something into a search box with the keyboard they have to keep in their lap. Google is trying to play this game again, expecting it to turn out differently this time around.

Ah, here's the difference (42:00): Google TV will have apps! In the words of Scott Beale, "My eight-year-old niece's shitty Boost mobile phone has apps on it." In fact, Google TV will run the same apps as your Android mobile phone. But does anyone at Google believe that an app designed for a touch interface running on a six-inch screen one foot from my face will look and work great when controlled by a wireless pointer on a 32-inch screen six feet from my face? Am I missing something?

Dear Google,

You've got thousands of brilliant folks working for you. They've created some truly innovative products that hundreds of millions of people use every day. How is it possible that you're getting it so utterly backwards when it comes to television? Slapping the same old web browser onto my TV doesn't make it a better TV any more than slapping a web browser onto my toaster makes it a better toaster. Throw it out; try again.

Sincerely and regretfully,
Yours Truly

Tiny Ponies

Frank Chimero gets into my Google Reader subscription list with his post "There is a Horse in the Apple Store."

Thanks, Ryan, for the link.

Very Clever, Mr. Kim -- Very Clever Indeed

North Korea has a new Twitter feed and YouTube channel, reports the Associated Press. Now some might reason that the only people on earth who have been living in a hole deep enough to fall prey to the utterly naked propaganda they see on these sites are the utterly oppressed North Koreans. And because almost none of them can actually access these sites in the first place, the sites are pointless. Pointless like a fox!

Clearly, anyone in North Korea who would spend $1 on broadband instead of on a hot meal is a counter-revolutionary stooge in the pay of wealthy Western provocateurs! So now we see the plan behind the plan:

1. Post shiny videos
2. Make lots of new friends
3. Arrest them

The Data-Centric Modus Operandi

Cross-posting from my RTI blog:

Data distribution is about observing a changing world. A system whose communication is based on this paradigm tends to become data-centric: it becomes more concerned with modeling the first-class concepts of its business domain and less concerned with managing second-class “who-told-whom-to-do-what” middleware concepts like queues and messages. Along the way, it enjoys the benefits of decreased coupling and improved reliability, scalability, and performance.

Read the rest...

For the person who has everything...

Thanks to my sister in law and the LA Times for teaching me about the latest emerging cottage industry: artisanal pencil sharpening. What will the effete Blue-State bourgeoisie think up next?

Liberty -- For Now

"Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite sex couples."

-- Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker

Judge Walker struck down California's voter-approved Proposition 8, which stripped the right to marry from gay Californians, on the basis of both equal protection and due process.

This is not about the agenda of a particular political faction. It is about whether a simple majority can vote away the civil rights of a minority. Judge Walker was appointed to the federal bench by President H. W. Bush, and several prominent Republicans were represented in the anti-Prop 8 legal team and among the witnesses they called.

Prop 8's defenders have vowed to appeal the ruling.

Stop! Thief!

I recently got a new iPhone 4. It's beautiful. I love it. It's the best phone, and my first smart one. I'm sure that one day soon, my favorite thing about it will be that I have all of the information on the Internet at my fingertips all the time. But it's so new that most of the time it doesn't occur to me that I have all of the information on the Internet at my fingertips. So for now, my favorite thing is that the NPR News app frees me from my former slavery to my local affiliate's soul-defeating weekend schedule. Also, every time I pick the thing up, it's flimsy plastic case, wobbly buttons, and too-ugly-for-words user interface don't remind me what a cheap PoS I'm using. I love life's simple pleasures.

With my books, news, music, movies, and email always available, I tell myself that I can avoid wasting a ton of time. What I didn't expect was just how quickly my bar for "wasted" is changing: already, I listen to the news as I walk the two blocks to the grocery store. I read an ebook while waiting for my wife to fetch her shoes. I catch up on my RSS feeds while I sit on the train. I'm not "rotting my mind" like some TV-watching couch potato; I'm going about my daily business -- and I'm listening to NPR, for God's sake! But the space in my life for ambient thought is draining away, just the same (thanks to John Gruber for the previous link). I may not be making myself dumber with constant exposure to nonsense and dissolution, but I fear I am decreasing my capacity for wisdom by starving myself of opportunities for reflection. I learn; I react; I move on. But I (all of us) have less time than ever to synthesize and to stop and smell the poetry.

From the time we are very young, we have the opportunity to see anything, hear anything, and spend anything at a moment's notice. If we follow all of these impulses, we will soon find ourselves fat, broke, self-indulgent, and utterly trivial. The question is no longer how can I -- you can! It is rather which shall I -- and which shall I not. I can teach my children to answer the first question by showing them the value of hard work, perseverance, and a stable trade. But teaching them the second is much harder: I must teach them self-awareness, self-discipline, and to look always to their values. Those have always been useful, admirable life skills. But with so many modern temptations, and with the line between short-term help and long-term hindrance becoming so very grey, they have never been more important.

There must be a web site out there that can give me some advice about all this stuff. Perhaps I can find it with my iPhone, my precious.

Wanted: Official Poet

I learned recently that this year, for the first time, the Wimbledon tennis tournament had an official poet. My first reaction was what a delightful, whimsical idea. My second reaction was that it's so much better an idea if you don't demean it by calling it delightful or whimsical -- if you instead take it seriously.

How inspiring to think that what we do might be worthy of poetry! And how revelatory to think that we might be so self-confident and so intentional as to appoint the poet beforehand, to in effect promise ourselves and those close to us that what we do will be worthy.

In fact, let's take this as our challenge: If you find it incongruous that someone might write a poem about what you do every day, maybe you ought to be doing something else.

How clean are electric vehicles?

There have been a couple of interesting articles recently about the greenhouse gas impact of all-electric vehicles -- one in Scientific American (subscription required) and another in EnergyDSM, a web site devoted to demand-side energy efficiency. Such vehicles aren't really zero-emission, of course: they just emit from the local power plant while they charge instead of emitting from their own tail pipes while they run. So where does the balance come to rest? Here's the short version:

According to a 2008 report referenced by EnergyDSM, in an area with an average mix of power from coal, natural gas, and renewables for this country, plug-in vehicles produce 40% less greenhouse gas emissions than conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. Go Volt! However, here's the rub: in an area mostly dependent on coal (such as West Virginia), plug-in vehicles actually result in more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional hybrids. Go Prius!

(Beyond the issue of energy efficiency for its own sake, there are other reasons to favor electric-power-train vehicles. See my earlier post on the subject.)

Life Lessons

We find ourselves now in the rebellious adolescence of our species, in which we question which of those shalts and shalt-nots that have been passed down to us by our fathers and mothers are Good for Us and which of them merely were good for us when we were children, and reasoned as children. Like all adolescents, we go often astray and can hope only that we survive these trying times with some measure of health and dignity remaining to us.

It is in this hope that I write to you today. Setting aside rape, genocide, and the loss of continence that comes with age, there can be no greater trial of the human spirit than air travel. As one who has recently come through this experience, I have learned lessons great and small that I pray will grant a benefit to those who come after me.

Part 1. While I was in a shuttle on the way to the airport, the driver played cool jazz renditions of favorites like "Girl from Ipanema" and "Summertime." I see you fidgeting in your seat. You start to raise your hand querulously; you have a question to ask. That question is: Aren't those songs already cool jazz? Yes. My friends, they are -- but not cool enough. The driver turned up the volume, nodding his had abstractly in the absence of a beat.

This brings me to the first of today's lessons: Nothing good can come of cool jazz, leastways of cooler, jazzier derivatives of already cool, jazzy songs. This kind of sad pap desecrates and insults perfectly good music and dulls the senses and wits of those who listen to it -- even of those whose senses and wits come pre-dulled by the experience of being awoken before dawn by the prospect of riding in a flying cattle car.

Part 2. Upon arriving at the airport, I went immediately in search of breakfast. I found something resembling it, poorly, in an egg and sausage bagel. This brings me to my second lesson. If you have ordered a meal with a protein component and find that 3.5 minutes later it has already been delivered to you, hot and in a wrapper, one of two things is true. One, you are about to feast on some cheap-but-delicious smoked something that requires no real preparation in between ordering and eating, on account of its having been slow cooking for hours in a way that nature may not have intended but can certainly appreciate. Or two, you are about to endure a tragic uncanny-valley food experience with something that may or may not have been cooking for hours but in any case has not been improved by it. If your meal includes eggs, it is in the latter category. Fast-food breakfasts are all about carbs. If you can't find an all-carb option, starve.

Part 3. My third and final lesson: When that plane takes off, and you've passed through the stages of grief into Acceptance that Yes, you will be trapped where you are for a certain amount of time, you may become aware that you're tired. You're sore. You're in fact very uncomfortable in your seat. You may think to yourself, Maybe I would feel better if I put my seat back a bit. Children, never forget that God sees you, and that He is judging you.

Now, if it is between the hours of 9:00 pm and 6:30 am, and there is an ocean far below you, then you put that seat back. Put it all the way back! You and your fellow hand-basket travelers deserve a rest. But if not, consider that you are being Tried; do not be found wanting. Keep that seat in its full upright position, or you will surely hear the cracking of the knees of the poor soul behind you, and you will surely be judged harshly.

We are now at the end of what I have to teach to you today, Theophilus. Think carefully upon what you have learned, and go forth now into the world a wiser, gentler, better human being than you were.

Miscellaneous Musings

I'm writing this from my wife's laptop. It was already downstairs by the couch where I'm sitting. Mine is upstairs with peripherals attached to it; I couldn't be bothered. I'm thinking, if I had an iPad, it would be by the couch too. It would not have a big screen that stands up in front of my face, getting in the way of wherever I happen to be and whatever else I happen to be doing there.

I'm eating my dinner. Has this ever happened to you? You have leftovers in your fridge for three weeks. You find them there, unexpected. You open them -- they're still good! You eat some and close up the container. Like, the next day you open the container again to finish them off and find them absolutely, God-forsakenly rancid. The question is: was the food rotting from the inside the whole time in some undetectable way, so that the first day when you ate it, you were eating filth without knowing it? Or is the entrance of bacteria into the container a probabilistic thing, so that you might keep food fresh indefinitely, if only you got lucky enough?

I am watching "Defiance." I don't know much about it. I expect it to be something like what "The Diary of Anne Frank" would have been if Anne were 007 and had her own private militia. But militia or no, I expect it to end badly for little Anne all the same.

Update, 10:18pm
I was wrong! I hope this isn't too much of a spoiler, but it's uncanny how many important characters were still alive at the end of the film. And the tone is not what I expected -- for one thing, I've never seen a Daniel Craig picture in which he killed so few people. (Yes, of course he did kill people, but they were all bad.)

Flippant tone aside, an excellent film; I recommend it.

In a Hole in the Ground

...there lived a Hobbit movie, trapped in bankruptcy negotiations. Will it ever emerge? I am bereft.

Help me, Rhonda! I shall have to seek comfort in the arms of another film. But whatever I watch, I fear it can never be anything to me but a transitional movie.

The Power of Positive Thinking

Thanks to Claude for passing along this brilliant quote:

"I wouldn't say it's failed yet. What I would say is what we attempted to do didn't work."
-- BP representative, after the first failed attempt to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

See also my previous post responding to the "drill here, drill now" craze during the 2008 presidential election campaign.

Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong

If you are a computer nerd, I predict that the blog post "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages" will be the funniest thing you've read in a while (well, at least since your last visit to xkcd). If you are not a computer nerd, you may learn just enough about what the nerds are talking about to appear wise, witty, and appealing jaded when conversing with them at parties.

Saying the Wrong Thing

When I'm heading out of town and need a ride to the airport, I have a guy I call. He works for a local shuttle company. I like to call him instead of SuperShuttle; I like to feel like I'm dealing with an individual human being instead of a massive chain of franchises.

He speaks broken English with a thick accent, and the white-bread English name on his business card is in quotation marks. No doubt his given name is difficult for Anglos to pronounce and he's tired of the hassle. When I first started using him, I tried for the longest time to figure out where he was from. Turkish, I wondered? I didn't dare ask; I surmised that wherever it was, it was someplace where a lot of the people hated a lot of their neighbors, and an incorrect guess would land me in a lot of hot water.

One day when he picked me up, I saw he had several small pennants mounted on his van, snapping jauntily in the breeze. Perhaps it's New Years or something in his country, I thought: a perfect opportunity to discover the truth. "I like your flags," I said aloud. "Is it a holiday?"

"It is to remember genocide against my country. 1915, millions of people murdered by Turks."

An awkward silence followed. I tried to say something to make him feel that I was in solidarity with him, but it's hard to speak with such a large foot in your mouth. Thank God I never said "Turkish" out loud, I thought to myself.

(I was still relatively new in town at that time; I discovered later that all shuttle drivers around here are Armenian. It's just one of those things: film directors are Jewish; cooks are Mexican; drivers are Armenian. It's like the first guy from each country came to the American continent, got a job doing whatever it was that he did, made some money, and then called all of his friends from back home -- who were also in his line of work -- and encouraged them to come over and do the same thing. Voila, a whole colony is born of people who all come from the same place, all do the same work, and all know each other. Perhaps if the first white guy to come ashore 500 years ago hadn't been a brutal genocidal conqueror by trade, things might have gone differently for the Native Americans.)

A lot of our conversations go the same way as that one. He's clearly had a tough life, and he's not a jolly guy. I know this, but its like I'm standing in front of an oncoming train, and somehow I'm too stupid to step out of the way; I just keep trying to make pleasant conversation with the train until it hits me. Every time he sees me, he asks, "How's business?" ...Which is polite banter, but which also means, "Will you be needing a lot of rides to the airport soon?" And as a fellow small-talker, I feel obliged to reply, "And how about you?" Then I cringe and wait for the inevitable reply: a sigh, then "The same."

Last fall, I was heading out on a business trip. The morning was beautiful. The air was crisp. I was in high spirits. Business was good -- "...And how about you?"

"I come back from visiting my country. It snows there," he replied.

Now we're getting somewhere, I thought to myself. I said, "How wonderful! I've always missed the snow since coming to California. It's so beautiful."

"Farmers all crying. Snow comes too soon. Crops all die."

Shit.

He continued: "But I see my family. I see my mother."

I managed weakly, "That sounds nice. It's good to see family, especially with the holidays coming up..."

"Probably last time. My mother is very old and sick."

I give up.

Object Management Group Update

Cross-posting from my RTI blog:

Perhaps the most important milestone for DDS followers was the recommendation for adoption of the new specification Extensible and Dynamic Topic Types for DDS (sometimes abbreviated “DDS-XTypes”). I wrote about DDS-XTypes late last year; it will make it much easier for DDS users to upgrade and evolve their systems over time. It will also enable whole new categories of plug-and-play tools and integration components — such as database connectors, recorders, and bridging/routing services — to be developed in a way that’s portable and interoperable across DDS implementations, increasing the size and diversity of the DDS marketplace and increasing competition. RTI was a lead author of this specification, and a number of the capabilities defined in it are available in pre-standard form in RTI Data Distribution Service today.

Read the whole post here.

On Fate and Time Traveling

I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife. It was hard to read but harder to put down; it is so beautiful and so sad. Perhaps to one but recently married this story of endlessly (no, not endlessly) losing and finding and losing love hits too close to home.

This passage especially caught my attention  (pages 76-77 in my edition):

"The choices we're working with here are a block universe, where past, present, and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted...; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it's all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway. ... And what do you vote for?"

Clare is silent. Her pragmatism and her romantic feelings about Jesus and Mary are, at thirteen, almost equally balanced. A year ago she would have said God without hesitation. In ten years she will vote for determinism, and ten years after that Clare will believe that the universe is arbitrary, that if God exists he does not hear our prayers, that cause and effect are inescapable and brutal, but meaningless. ... She shakes her head. "I don't know. I want God. Is that okay?"

I feel like an asshole. "Of course it's okay. That's what you believe."

"But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true."

Our world is very like Henry's and Clare's, and I have often had these same thoughts. When I was a teenager, I voted for determinism myself. And one day when I was 20, I enjoyed a beautiful morning full of sunshine and an afternoon of good conversation with my friends before learning that hours before, before I had even awoken that morning, someone close to me had been killed in an accident, and I knew indeed that cause and effect are brutal and are meaningless.

Yes, our worlds are very alike, but by grace we do not know it, because unlike poor Henry, we live our lives in one direction only, one moment following the next like pearls on a string, each one fresh and new and bright. Our wills to us seem free, for not knowing what the next moment will bring, we cannot tell the difference.

So rejoice in every borrowed choice; it is a gift. Take it gladly and with reverence as if the future really were yours to make how you would. For a story is not less true for being fictional nor less real when it is finished.

Oklahoma City: a Reminder

Today is the 15th anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, a Irish-American security guard. McVeigh was white, Christian, a natural-born U.S. citizen, and a veteran. He committed what is still the second-deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. His personal history is a solemn reminder that the struggle against terrorism is not a struggle against a particular country or a particular people or a particular religion. It is a struggle against violent extremism of any stripe, a struggle between those who believe in the rule of law and those who believe in vigilantism.

Getting in Touch with My Feminine Side

I have a dark and humiliating secret: I convinced myself to start reading the "Twilight" books -- and now I can't put them down.

In my favor, I do get a subtle urge to vomit whenever Bella refers to Edward as her "marble Adonis" or when she moons about how he's so dangerous but makes her feel so safe. (All my fellow nerds who have ever watched the perfect girl go off with Leather Jacket Guy, who's totally wrong for her, know where this feeling comes from.)

Unfortunately, that small point in my favor is utterly overthrown by this much greater and more emasculating one: I read the first two books in the series this past week. That's 1,000 pages of Twilight from Monday morning through late Friday night, or 12 and a half pages per waking hour.

...And this morning, I started book three.

I Did Not Know You

I overheard a telephone conversation in an airport the other day -- or rather, I overheard one half of the conversation.

"Did you tell them to call you at my number? They called me, asking for you. I didn't know what they wanted, so I told them I didn't know you."

I thought of the story I had just finished reading, a story of slaves, and I thought of how the safety of a slave lies in unfailing loyalty to his own kind, and to silence. The slave does not converse with his master; he does not collaborate with his master; he does not confide in his master. For being powerless, and having no friends among the powerful, what shall be his recourse if his master betrays his trust in even the smallest thing?

I heard the words again: "I did not know what they wanted, so I told them I did not know you." And I thought, "These are the words of a slave."

Then I was sad for my country, and ashamed, to think that among us are those who have learned, no doubt through bitter lessons, instinctively to relate to one another in this way.

The Other Guy Running for California Governor

Jerry's talking up his record and style of leadership.

Meg's describing her policy action plan.

Steve's scapegoating immigrants and donning the mantle of conservatism.

Steve Poizner's been around the political block before, and I presume he feels that he's engaged in the kind of debate that best serves the people of California. Kudos to Ms. Whitman for telling a different story. But she's new to politics; maybe she just doesn't understand yet how the game is played in a Republican primary these days.

We had to listen to a lot of this "I'm the true conservative! Nuh-uh!" in the 2008 primaries too. When did the party of Lincoln stop being the party of bold vision and courageous leadership and become the party of fear and of political litmus tests? Gentlemen, Mr. Lincoln would not know you. Forget Lincoln -- Mr. Reagan would not know you.

Try and Try Again

One of the big political stories of this past week is the possibility that the Obama administration might change course on trying alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a military tribunal instead of in a civilian trial. If you look at this case in isolation, this move might make sense: here's a guy who planned and executed an attack that resulted in battlefield-scale casualties, and did so from a foreign country with which we subsequently went to war in response to that attack. Sounds like a military act, not a civilian criminal act, right? But I would argue that "in isolation" is precisely not how we should look at this case.

A government cannot devise an entirely new system and standard of justice on a case-by-case basis and retain any claim to a rule of law. The question is therefore not, "How shall we try Khalid Sheik Mohammed?" The question is "How shall we try all people accused of crimes of terrorism?" Is terrorism a crime like all others, to be tried according to the standards of justice that hold for all alleged crimes -- or is it in a separate legal category, to which very different standards apply?

The trouble with the latter approach -- with applying different legal standards to terrorism cases than we do to other cases -- comes down to the nature of the alleged crimes committed. Terrorism differs from "conventional" murder and property destruction in that it aims not only to accomplish those acts themselves but furthermore to leverage those acts to achieve a more profound psychological impact on a whole community. That is, it differs from conventional crimes with respect to the motive of the perpetrators and with respect to the impact of the crime on the victims' community. These things are not material facts of the case -- they are not preconditions of the trial; they are things that can only be demonstrated at trial. Therefore, to use them as a basis for a separate criminal process is precisely backwards.

Consider the difference between first-degree murder (with premeditation) and second-degree murder (without). These crimes do not differ in their outcomes -- someone is dead in either case. They differ with respect to the intention of the perpetrator: if someone kills someone else meticulously, in cold blood, we deem it a more serious offense than if the murder is one of passion. But the existence of premeditation is for the jury to decide, not the state. The police collect evidence; the prosecution makes its case. The defense makes its case. The jury decides whether the standard of proof has been met.

Imagine if instead we tried murder cases like we do terrorism cases: if you are accused of second-degree murder, you will face a normal procedure. You will have rights to a speedy jury trial, to face your accusers and the evidence against you, and to a verdict of innocence unless your guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But if you are accused of first-degree murder, at the prosecutor's discretion, you will have none of these rights. You can be detained indefinitely. You can be tried in secret, without a jury. And you can be convicted on the basis of secret evidence to which you have no opportunity to respond. The government need only point a finger and say, "I accuse you," and you can be thrown into a dark hole from which you may or may not ever emerge. Would we call this justice?

It is a founding legal principle of the United States that those accused of crimes cannot be stripped of their rights on the say-so of government officials. We cannot abandon this principle, even in the face of the most heinous crimes we can imagine, without losing the very virtue and character of our country. There will always be those fearful and uncreative people who claim that the problems of today are so unlike those of yesterday that we must forget our history and discard all precedent. We must not hold these self-styled great men accountable according to long-established standards; instead we must for our own good allow them to have their way with us, trusting implicitly and indefinitely that they will one day restore our rights to us. I say: nonsense.

Jerry for Governor (Again)

I just caught the last few minutes of an interview with California Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate (and former mayor, and former governor, ...) Jerry Brown. I like the guy already.

The interviewer asked Brown what he's learned since his first term as governor in the 1970's. He gave two answers:

1. When he was younger, he didn't appreciate the importance of each "personality" in the legislature. You can't ram your ideas through; you have to work with people -- individually -- to succeed.
2. He's learned that having good ideas isn't enough; you have to understand how to implement them, step by step.

Meanwhile, Meg Whitman, his main opponent in the gubernatorial race at this point, is sounding off with a message we heard from Governor Schwarzenegger when he first ran several years ago: we need a "business perspective." It's time to bring in someone untainted by any political experience to tell those children in Sacramento what to do, to sweep away the old and bring in the new. But it hasn't worked out that way, has it?

California is completely paralyzed by what I like to call "good idea politics," by which I mean: I and a few of my friends think ponies for kids with terminal cancer would be a good idea, so we have 10 or 12 people sign a petition to get an initiative on the statewide ballot. A few months and a couple of celebrity endorsements later, and 7% of all gas tax revenue collected from lumber magnates in suburban areas who drive cars making no more than 27 miles per gallon has been constitutionally earmarked to buy ponies for dying children. Wash, rinse, and repeat several hundred times, and you get the constitutional and legislative state of affairs in California. Who would I want wading into that morass to serve my interests: the guy with more years of experience at it than I have years on this earth, who knows everyone and understands the importance of working with them to get the job done, or the newbie who thinks she can order people around on the basis of her position and personality and everything will turn out OK?

Why can't every application be like Stickies?

Mac users may know Apple's Stickies application, which comes with Mac OS. What it does is really simple: it emulates a sticky note, but on your digital desktop rather than your physical desktop. But how it does that is just great; it's too bad more applications do things the same way. In particular:

• When I close and re-open Stickies, it remembers what I had opened the last time. If I restart the application, or if I restart my computer, I don't need to remember what I was working on and reopen it manually; Stickies does that for me.
• It saves my changes automatically. In a world of multiple undo, not-saving-my-work isn't necessary as an undo technique -- it's more likely a technique for accidentally losing everything. Better to have everything saved all the time, and let me undo if I make a mistake.

What could make both of the above even better: persistent undo stacks. Why does my list of changes get reset when I close and reopen a document? If it were saved with the document, then opening and closing, and quitting and restarting, would be entirely irrelevant to the changes I make to my content.

(One obnoxious thing about Stickies: why, oh why, doesn't it have scrollbars? In 10.5 and earlier, I could add scrollbars to Stickies myself. In Snow Leopard, I can't.)

Staying Flexible

There's a guy at work that I've worked with for years. He's brilliant, and for the most part, I enjoy working with him. But he does this thing that's always driven me crazy. I've just very recently come to understand and appreciate why he does it.

Here's the situation: It's the eleventh hour of a big, complex project. Everything is going as smoothly as can be expected, and we putting some finishing touches on. Then suddenly, he goes into brainstorming mode. It's like we've spent a year building a sports car, and I say something like, "What color do you think we should paint it so that it looks its best?" And he'll reply, "What if we didn't build a car -- what if we built ... an airplane?"

As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly concrete sequential, so my historical response has been along the lines of: "No, we're not building an airplane; we've already built a car! Are you @%&*ing crazy? Focus! Focus!" If we had wanted an airplane, there was a time when we could have built one. When we're shipping tomorrow, it's not that time. Brainstorming impossible things with people under a deadline increases everyone's stress levels for no reason, and furthermore it disregards and disrespects all of the work that's gone into the project thus far.

But what I've come to understand is this: he doesn't really want an airplane. Brainstorming is just his way of stepping back from the solution to make sure it's really solving the problem. He's thinking to himself, "We wanted to build something that can go really far and really fast. Does this thing we've built do that?" He's walking around it, looking at it from all angles, and trying to put himself in the shoes of someone who's just asked for a go-far-fast thing and been handed a car thing. Would she like it? If she were to say to us, "Gee, I was sort of hoping for an airplane..." would we understand why a car was a better choice for her so that we could explain it convincingly?

To the question "What if we built an airplane?", the correct answer is "Then it would cost 10x more, and all of our customers would have to have pilot's licenses, and consequently no one would buy it." My instinctive answer, "Because we planned all along to build a car, dummy" is actually the worst possible answer, because it implies that I don't understand the problem I'm trying to solve, and furthermore that I'm less interested in finding out than in following a checklist.

So the next time it happens, I will pause, take a deep breath, take my blood-pressure medicine, and play my part in the dialectic. I wish I had understood how to do this five years ago.

That Feeling of Freshness

Have you ever noticed how, if a television commercial features only women, and if those women are having a really good time together, the commercial is almost certainly advertising a product to treat a disgusting bodily malfunction?

In fact, the more fun they're having, the more disgusting their affliction is likely to be. If it's just a group of friends chatting in a living room, they're probably just talking about digestive aids and toilet habits. (Yes, I'm talking about you, Jamie Lee Curtis.) But if they're running and laughing in a meadow, and if there are time-lapse flowers blooming, watch out!

Ladies. Please. It's just disturbing.

I was watching TV this evening, and a commercial came on featuring a cadre of young attractive women laughing and hugging in a mall. (You know: more fun than the living room; not quite as much fun as a meadow.) And I asked myself: When was the last time I saw a commercial featuring a bunch of guys, say, playing football on a bright summer morning while simultaneously engaging in a frank-but-surprisingly-pleasant conversation about wetting themselves? Then I remembered: Never. I have never seen a commercial like that. A man who wets himself would never admit to it on TV and would certainly never fantasize about admitting it to his friends while playing football with them. And, I might add, he would be most unlikely to purchase a product pitched to him by someone who did.

Democracy: Getting Our Money's Worth

Whither campaign spending limits? Speech and money are fungible, and that principle cuts both ways. It costs money to buy a megaphone, print a newspaper, or buy off a congressman. More money means more megaphones and more congressmen on your side. It distorts our representative democracy. At the same time, limits on spending are implicitly (some would say explicitly) limits on speech. It's a bit strange for us to claim that a person can advocate for whatever views he might have while at the same time stripping him of a powerful and lawfully-obtained means of doing so.

This issue has come to the fore again recently with the recent Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. (Astute readers may recall that I wrote about the Citizens United case back in September.) Our courts have in the past issued inconsistent rulings with respect to whether corporations enjoy the same free-speech protections as do individuals. The ruling in the Citizens United case sways the balance far into the Yes camp. They may speak -- i.e. spend -- as they wish, as we do. (Thanks to John Gruber for the FreeSpeechForPeople.org link.)

I think this idea is nonsense and that by holding to it we throw away an excellent opportunity to thread that needle I talked about in the first paragraph above. Let me break down what I think would be a better model.

We the People

...should face few or no limits on our political spending, aka political speech. The Constitution grants us extensive free-speech rights, irrespective of the state's interest, limited only when speech turns into violence.

Corporations Are Not People

...and the law has only recognized their rights as pseudo-people selectively. They may currently receive free speech protections, but they do not vote and are they not taxed in the same way as individuals. (Although at least one corporation is running for Congress, albeit in jest.)

A corporation isn't "real." It's an abstraction to to make it easier for people to do business with one another. But it has no natural interests beyond those of their members.

This is not to say that the interests of a corporation reflect those of all of it's members. In fact, a corporation's actions and messages are determined by its executives but funded through the actions of all of its workers. The effect is to amplify the voices of a very few, regardless of the wishes of others.

Moreover, the power relationships and financial motives in a corporate environment encourage people to act against their own beliefs and values. People are far more likely to contribute to a project they don't believe in if they're told to do so by someone above them, if their jobs depend on it, and/or if they're paid to do so.

Therefore, let us purge from our minds any thought that a corporation is entitled to the same speech protections as a person. I favor a strict ban: corporations should not be allowed to spend money on political campaigns -- at all. Our electoral system must not be for sale.

Voluntary Associations Are Different

...from corporations. Corporations are defined and circumscribed by statute. Churches, charities, and clubs, by contrast, come about directly through the will of their members. This distinction means that a restriction on corporate speech/spending need not -- should not -- apply to these other kinds of voluntary associations. "[T]he right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government" is established in the first amendment to the Constitution; corporations are not.

This distinction is critical. Without extending the protections due individuals to groups of individuals, you and I could not join together in petitioning the government, I could not hire you to lobby on behalf of our shared interests, and we could not bring our friends together to discuss our values and priorities.

Just to Stir the Pot

...a little bit more, let me bring out one more idea from our country's founding creeds: No taxation without representation! If corporations aren't really real, why do they pay taxes as if they were? The revenue of a corporation will eventually become the revenue of individuals. Therefore, let's further support in law the concept of unreal corporations by eliminating corporate income and payroll taxes. We're all paying those taxes indirectly anyway, so let's make those payments directly. We'll simplify our tax regime and make it more transparent along the way.


Our goal should be the elimination of barriers that prevent government from representing and responding to the will of its citizens. To that end, we should strengthen the protections granted to those citizens, remove distorting and distracting influences, ... and perhaps offer some inducement to hurry the money men out the door.

An Unexpected Celebrity Endorsement

I knew that the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can was based on a true story. I knew that Frank Abagnale, its protagonist, went legit after the events portrayed there. Yes, he consults for the FBI. But apparently the whole truth of his professional career is more mundane, as I learned after my wife returned from the convenience store the other day: he also endorses pens.

The back of this uni-ball 0.5 mm package reads:

Endorsed by:
Frank W. Abagnale,
SECURE DOCUMENT EXPERT

...and then repeats in French and Spanish.

Brilliant.

Prop 8 and the Catch-22 for Conservatives

California's Proposition 8, overturning gay marriage in the state, is in court once again. This time, it's in federal district court -- no doubt as a step on the way to the Supreme Court. It strikes me that this case pits social conservatives against Libertarian conservatives.

To the extent that anti-gay-marriage forces prevail, they will be supporting the precedent -- previously established by the California Supreme Court -- that a simple majority can strip legal protections from a minority. Don't think this precedent could ever be used outside the context of gay marriage? Wake up.

To the extent that they fail, they will establish a federal precedent for the recognition and protection of same-sex marriages. If the court goes this way, it may well try to craft a very narrow ruling. It will fail. In this case too, interest groups will run with the ruling and do all they can to expand its scope.

Give My Banker a Bonus

A year ago, we were outraged that bankers were collecting huge bonuses while their companies were in the toilet. "Bonuses should be tied to performance!", we cried, secretly pleased to hear how business-savvy we sounded.

Since then, the banking business has picked up. Yes, many of those companies are only here today because we all invested heavily in them. But my retirement account is up 25% for the year. That's not because the government bought stock in the banks; it's because everyone else bought stock in the companies my account is invested in. We're still complaining! "How dare those bankers take bonuses, just because their companies are doing well. We got them where they are today!"

Yes, we did. We invested money in the banks because we wanted them to succeed. They have. We wanted them to pay out bonuses when they're doing well, not when they're doing poorly. They're doing well. So I say: sit down, calm down, and cut them some slack.

The fundamental question is, do you want the government setting compensation levels for private companies or not? To the extent that our tax dollars paid for voting shares of the bailed-out banks, we already have a say in what executives get paid. To the extent that our government bought non-voting shares, we don't. Those are the rules everyone plays by, public investors and private, in every industry, in good times and bad. Let us run our country according to consistent law, not self-righteous outrage.