Day 3, family time.

Took a visit in to the waterfront area, including Chinatown / Old Town and the Japanese-American Memorial / Waterfront Park, to see the cherry blossoms.  Went to Costco in Aloha (Beaverton), and stopped to check out a magnolia in full bloom nearby.

Lucked out three times today, with an open parking spot at the right time and place, despite the crowds everywhere.  Not a cloud in the sky, 77°F.  In other words, the most perfect day in Spring 2013 so far.

Day 2 visit: Sprint at Portland Nursery.

Mid-Friday afternoon, and you know that everyone's ready for Spring: The parking overflow area is open...and crowded.

The sun was out, the temps rising and the flowers blooming like mad.  It's going to be a wildly busy weekend along the waterfront where the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, and temps expected to hit 70°F.

Busy day.

Fortunately, because the defendant's lawyer (apparently) asked for a continuance, I didn't have to go to court as a  witness today; instead I got to hang out with my father who came to town last night.

(On the way back from the airport last night, I stopped for a brief moment at Broadway Toyota (they were closed) to try to sell him on the idea of getting the Prius C, which is smaller, safer, and double the mileage of his 20 year old car.  His car bottoms out -- no support left in the springs, it just collapses -- when you go over even the smallest of humps or driveways, and contributes a gazillion-times more CO2 and sulfur than the Prius C.  But most of all, with the way he drives (city driving on the freeways), he'd probably get 60 MPG with the Prius C.)

Tonight we had dinner and beer at McMenamin's on Broadway.  I hadn't seen Purple Haze on the menu before, but apparently it's been available for a few years now -- I guess it goes to show how little alcohol I actually drink these days.  Purple Haze is a marionberry-flavored ale that is zero bitter and lighter in flavor than the McMenamin's stable of Ruby.

Good times.

Fall visit to Cyprus?

I just read this from Paul Krugman:

"Cyprus should leave the euro. Now.
...

What’s the path forward? Cyprus needs to have a tourist boom, plus a rapid growth of other exports — my guess would be agriculture as a driver, although I don’t know much about it. The obvious way to get there is through a large devaluation; yes, in the end this probably does come down to cheap deals that attract lots of British package tours."

Or as I wrote last week:

"On the positive side, when Cyprus does leave the Euro behind, I'm grabbing a new passport and booking my first-ever trip to Cyprus!"

And I'm quite serious about it, too.  I'm thinking "Non-Euro" Vacation, Fall 2013.  GB ---> CY ---> GB.  I'd love to visit Greece, because it is so close, but there's a Euro problem (meaning, that it'll be overpriced simply because of the USD/EUR rate).

But as we've seen with Greece, Cyprus will probably settle for no growth, out of a perverse hope to stay in the Euro.

The true significance of SCOTUS overturning DOMA / Prop 8.

Sure, if the SCOTUS overturns DOMA and/or Prop 8, it will create a bold precedence in law, stating that all Americans are equally protected under the US Constitution.  But, there is a greater significance -- in my opinion -- to any decision in favor of same-sex marriage.

The Court is currently filled with 6 Catholic and 3 Jewish justices, with all three Jewish justices (Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan) generally considered liberal.  In one poll last year, 81% of American Jews supported same-sex marriage, so it's a given that these three will support same-sex marriage.

This means that at least two Catholics will have to vote in favor of same-sex marriage, and that would be an unprecedented public outing of opinion in direct contravention of the Catholic Church's official stance, not unlike the issue of abortion.  Additionally, for any conservative Justice to come out in support of overturning Prop 8 / DOMA, he would have to defy social peer pressure.

If you consider my prior post about how Joe Biden got this whole ball rolling last year, I think it'll be quite a remarkable statement to have three very prominent Catholics coming out in the open, supporting equality under same-sex marriage.

So what would a Libertarian think?  A natural Libertarian would prefer government remain neutral on the subject, neither supporting nor blocking it.  It's actually a perfect means of resolving moral dissonance for a Libertarian Catholic.  If, as a Libertarian Catholic, you vote to overturn DOMA and/or Prop 8, in effect you might be signalling that, while personally you disagree with same-sex marriage, it is not up to government to prevent others from entering a mutually-respected contract (which is what marriage is).

Crazy as it sounds, I think the justices could rule 8-1 in favor of overturning most if not all of Prop 8 and DOMA, with the lone holdout being Thomas.

What a weird twist: Conservatives advocating for lowering minimum sentences.

2013 is shaping up to be an odd one.  First we had a normally hawkish GOP turn dovish in protecting the rights of Americans against unreasonable searches / privacy intrusions via drones -- you know, the opposite of what the conservative wing of the SCOTUS has been doing lately, by attacking Miranda Rights.  Now we have some conservatives lining up behind a bill to lower certain minimum mandatory sentences for drug offenses by non-violent people.  One cosponsor is Senator Rand Paul.  You won't believe who backs him: Grover Norquist.

I think what Grover is trying to say, is that unlike Bill, he inhaled, and like Cliffy, he smoked it all.

Although, don't go thinking that Rand Paul is warm and fuzzy.  He's supporting an effort to block strengthening of gun background checks -- the sort of thing the NRA was supportive of, before it was against.  Much like the hypocrisy of how the NRA wanted to establish a national database on people with mental illnesses, less than a decade after it worked to water down restrictions against mentally ill people from owning firearms. 

The NRA's playing games with its position on gun safety, so it seems implausible that anyone would cozy up to Wayne LaPierre and the NRA.

Google killed the +1 Reader button tonight.

Sigh.  I was going to +1 a post, and then I noticed that it had been removed.  I've just moved on to the fourth stage of grief: Depression.

---

Update: Yep...Google's breaking Reader alright. Can't share feed posts on Google+ either. I'm calling it now: Google accidentally damaged Google+.

Logitech K360 wireless keyboard refurb deal.

Huge deal!  I, per usual, ran my usual search for items that I'm interested in, and, having already placed my order, I'm posting about it.  (I had meant to pick up a brand new K360 keyboard last week at OfficeMax for the sale price of $19.99, but the local store has unusually short hours as they undergo in-store renovations.)

Logitech K360 wireless (unified receiver) keyboard, refurbished, is available at NewEgg for $19.99.  With a $10 off promo code (EMCXTVW87) will net this puppy for $9.99 -- note you have to be a newsletter subscriber in order to use the code.

Fair warning: the coupon expires on Wednesday, March 27, 2013.

What I love about this keyboard: the chiclet style keys, its small size, and the unifying receiver that will allow me to use Logitech's touch mouse.

Same-sex marriage: Politicians rushing to get in front.

You can see it, don't you?  Gay marriage will be part of the litmus test for 2014 and 2016, except this time around, you're not likely to gain mainstream support if you do not hold marriage as a universally available right, regardless of sexual orientation.

Coming out in support recently:

05-06-2012 -- Joe Biden

05-09-2012 -- Barack Obama

05-20-2012 -- NAACP
02-21-2013 -- Jon Huntsman
03-15-2013 --Rob Portman
03-18-2013 -- Hillary Clinton
03-24-2013 -- Claire McCaskill
03-25-2013 -- Mark Warner

How Barack Obama changed everything
In my mind, Barack Obama's public pronouncement of support, then getting the NAACP on board, was huge.  The African-American community had long been strongly against same-sex marriage, particularly within the Baptist Church.

But the deal was sealed when Barack Obama won re-election, for it showed that African-Americans and centrists of all colors weren't going to punish him for his support, or that they had changed their minds over the issue; he already had liberal support for same-sex marriage, especially on the coasts, after all.

Following California's 2008 Prop 8 passage, exit polls showed that as many as 70% of African-Americans supported Prop 8's ban on same-sex marriage.  In Pew's 2008-2009 poll, 62% of African-Americans (Black, non-Hispanic) were against same-sex marriage.  In Pew's 2010 poll, 59% were still against same-sex marriage.  Right after Obama's announcement in support of same-sex marriage, 59% of African-Americans backed same-sex marriage.

What was once a slow leak, has turned into flood, especially right after the SCOTUS releases its decision on two related cases, later this year.  But, any serious candidate for POTUS will announce their support for same-sex marriage before any decision can be handed down, or else they risk looking like followers and not leaders.

So, remember this list of respondents and their reactions, especially Marco Rubio, following Obama's announcement last year, because their words in 2012 will come back to haunt them in 2014 and 2016.  Political courage means taking some risks, after all.

Are regulators ultimately to blame for the demise of Google Reader?

On March 12th, Google announced that it had settled with state AGs for $7M over its Street View WiFi privacy case.  On March 13th, Google announced that it was axing Reader.  On March 14th, Felix Salmon suggested that the two might be linked.  Now, we have further proof that he might have been correct: Liz Gannes of AllThingsD writes that her own sources say the same thing.

It turns out that as part of its settlement, Google agreed to closely monitor compliance of privacy issues within each product group.  Because Reader had no product manager -- no one wanted to own it, apparently -- it was decided that rather than dedicate resources to it, they would simply kill it.

State Attorneys Generals -- regulators -- effectively killed off Reader.  No one should be surprised if, in the future, other less-popular but useful services are also killed off, by request of Microsoft or its paid advocates.

No, late snow in the Northeast is NOT a counterargument of global warming.

I think some people need reminding, that despite this late season snow in the Northeast US, the fact remains that we've got very early season wildfires in Colorado and Southern California, near-record levels of drought conditions in the Midwest, and an exceptionally dry West Coast.

Ten years ago, May wildfires were considered early.  Today, it's February.

Cyprus deal is no deal.

The headlines read as though Cyprus and the EU have been saved from chaos as a result of a bailout deal.  No, this is just one chapter in the melodrama of failed economics.

What's going on?

In order to receive a bailout from the troika, Cyprus is closing their second-largest bank, Laiki, and restructuring its largest, Bank of Cyprus.  The shutdown of Laiki spares deposits below €100,000, but above that amount, because nothing is guaranteed, depositors may lose everything.  The Bank of Cyprus restructuring also spares all deposits below €100,000, but may result in as much as 40% losses for amounts over that (backstopped at 40% by the EU).

The shutdown of Laiki, as well as the restructuring of the Bank of Cyprus, ends up cutting thousands of jobs, too.  You know where I stand on austerity.

Bank controls have placed the clamps down on withdrawals, now at €100 daily limits; all last week, banks were closed.

Moral play in Capitalism

I've read a lot of moralizing, suggesting that because a lot of this money being confiscated could be ill-gotten goods from Russian oligarchs, it is better than hitting the average Cypriot under the initial bargain.  I have mixed feelings about this, and in any case, I think this is a false choice.

Do we have a case of Cyprus and the troika trying to play Robin Hood?  (Aside note: redistribution of income is not Robin-Hoodish, in my opinion, because most rich people support redistribution, even if they disagree on how much redistribution to apply.)  The way I read it, people are saying that it's okay to steal, so long as the money was stolen from someone else.  The logic breaks down however, because the aggrieved are not made whole; the parties being saved are separate from those whose money was initially stolen.

Frankly, because Cypriot bank losses stem from their poor choice to invest in Greek bonds, essentially the troika is saving itself from the haircut they pushed on Greek bondholders -- that is how we should look at this situation, in my opinion.

The better path, I believe, would have been to allow large depositors to choose between a large, one-time tax on their deposits (say 20~25%) or have 100% of their deposits pushed into 10+ year bonds.  This way, large depositors could choose the plan most appropriate to their needs.

The bailout may not be good enough
There are questions over whether or not the numbers add up, however.  And, if when things get worse, the bailout will prove insufficient, because the writing is now on the wall: No deposit is truly sacrosanct.  In the worst-case scenario, people will begin to pull out money if they see the Cypriot economy continuing to collapse; actually, they might pull out their money anyway.

With its banking sector responsible for most of its income, it's difficult to see how the Cypriot economy will recover, any time soon, now that it will shut down one bank and restructure another.  Transitioning an economy takes a very long time, after all.

Thus, we're just reading one part of the Cypriot story, which is itself just one chapter in the EU economic experiment.

Did Jim Cramer just imply that the Keystone XL expansion will raise gas prices?

I was just listening to Jim Cramer yak on his Mad Money show, about oligopolies. He was spiel was targeting US refiners and the bottleneck of bringing new refining capacity online, when he drifted ever so slightly to the split in price between Brent Crude and WTI. He noted that the reason for this differential was that the oil from the Heartland / Texas / Oklahoma region has trouble reaching ports in order to export, and therefore local refiners had better bargaining to get that oil at a discounted rate.

Considering WTI is lighter (lower sulfur content) than Brent, it should be priced higher than Brent.  The cost of transportation to a port certainly seems credible.  So what does this have to do with the Keystone XL pipeline?

West Canada Select is priced $16 lower (it was much lower, in 2012) than WTI, making it about a $30 gap to Brent.  That would imply that, because WCS is even more transportation-constrained, those folks currently in the Midwest are getting quite the bargain as there are no other buyers.

via Wikipedia

The two proposed pipeline extensions of the Keystone XL, is designed to hook up the Athabasca Oil to ports in East Texas, for export.  That Canadian oil will then have multiple bidders, and the price will go up.

The cost of building the pipeline will also offset earnings via tax breaks for those companies benefiting from the pipeline.  Thus, a lot of oil people will be getting richer while the folks in the Midwest will be feeling poorer as gasoline prices increase.

And as it turns out (and unbeknownst to me prior to writing this up), my hypothesis was previously highlighted by the NRDC:

"If built, the Keystone XL pipeline daily would transport up to 830,000 barrels of the world’s dirtiest oil through America’s heartlands and breadbasket—diverting oil from Midwestern refineries, which now produce more gasoline per barrel than any other region in the United States. 

Today Midwestern refineries buy crude oil at deep discounts, allowing them to produce gasoline far more cheaply than they could otherwise. Keystone XL would change that, the study said."

via EIA

Bidding competition means prices should go up, not down.  But let's say that in some strange world prices go down despite more bidders.  Two things to consider:

1. Gasoline refining won't necessarily increase in the Gulf, just because there's more oil coming in from Canada; after all, refining capacity is adjusted to meet demand at the pump, and the Gulf already has one of the highest volume of oil coming through it;
2. Gasoline markets are relatively local; oil refined to gasoline on the East Coast, isn't trucked across the country.  Even if every drop of oil from Canada were to be solely refined in the US, the only states to see this benefit would be regional areas: Gulf Coast PADD3.

Further, you have to understand that, because tar sands (Athabasca Oil Sands) are more difficult to process and extract oil, Canadian producers have an incentive to find the highest price above their baseline (production cost), not to lower their price.

Obviously, it is fully reasonable that if Keystone XL isn't expanded, Canadian oil companies will build a horizontal pipeline through Canada, out to a Canadian port.  If that happens, domestic oil prices will rise and people will point to this increase, as proof that the XL was needed in the US.

But again, the point of Canadians building the pipeline wasn't to benefit Americans; it was to raise the price of their oil products.  The best way to raise the price of their oil has always been to make it readily available to the global market place via cheap transportation; going through the US was their cheaper option because of existing pipelines, and nothing more.

(There is much more to all this, considering the number of temporary jobs and a slight increase in permanent jobs at Gulf ports, as well as the cost of greenhouse gas emissions.  With Canada unwilling to impose strict emissions rules for tar sands extraction, we are practically subsidizing their pollution, and, if in 20 years the world is hell because of greenhouse gases, that pipeline will be all but dead and those jobs lost.  But this post is already too long.)

Oh puke...Fred Meyer lemon creme pies.

Holy crap.  I was just finishing a Fred Meyer lemon creme pie -- similar to Hostess pies -- and with my last bite I hit a piece that tasted like chemicals, chlorine to be exact.

I nearly puked...I tried, but then I remembered that I really hate puking.  So I had to down an entire glass of water, and now I'm left with the aftertaste of what can only be described as lemon cleaner.  Bleh.

I threw out the remaining.  Never again.

Cool video of comet Pan-STARRS, from NASA.

It's a great video from NASA, showing the Earth, Sun (with CMEs) and comet Pan-STARRS.

Tried the Dev channel of Chrome...couldn't stand it.

Holy cow.  There were some cool things in the Dev channel (v.27) of the Chrome browser, but it was slowing itself up, and I could not figure out what it was that triggered it, despite disabling a handful of features (about:flags).  I mean, it was so bad, it would stop while trying to navigate with my mouse and I'd have to wait a few seconds.

So I settled back into the Beta channel and its genuinely fast and smooth experience,.

Whew.

Closer up and more daffodils!

Starting to use an LED flashlight along with soft CFL side lighting, to allow me to photograph up close, and control shadows and highlights.  The daffodils started opening up the moment I put them in water, but are now at 100% fully open.  Can't wait to go outside when the weather is better.

March 22, 2013: Groupon has $5 for $10 Starbucks.

In a short few hours, there are already over 25,000 people who have bought this deal from Groupon:  Buy $10 of Starbucks credit for $5.  You're limited to one for yourself, but it's still a great deal!  Good only for Friday, March 22nd, so hurry up!

Oh, and in a separate deal from Starbucks, you can get a $5 gift card if you buy a pound of coffee, VIA 12-packs, K-Cups or Verismo packs, until March 24th.

Is the Oregon Ducks' win over OK State an upset?

I'm sorry, but I don't care how the media spins it, 12th seeded Oregon beating 5th seeded Oklahoma State is not an upset; rather, it should have been expected!

In the PAC-12 Tournament, the Ducks beat the Bruins to take the title, and the Wildcats beat the Buffs in the second round, prior to losing to the Bruins.  Yet the Bruins, the Buffs and the Wildcats were seeded ahead of the Ducks!  That's a big slap in the face to the tourney winners who sported a better overall record than everyone except Arizona, don't you think?

Oregon was not a huge underdog; they were improperly seeded.   Instead of 12th, they deserved to be seeded somewhere between 6th and 9th.

Just look at some of these teams that were seeded higher than Oregon:

7 Illinois (22-12)
7 San Diego St. (22-10)

9 Villanova (20-13)

10 Oklahoma (20-11)
10 Colorado (21-11)
10 Cincinnati (22-11)
11 Minnesota (20-12)

So excuse me, but Oregon's no underdog...they're a superior team that got shafted.

"The economy is going to tank in Cyprus no matter what."

Best quote to illustrate the situation, IMO, and it comes from Austria's Thomas Wiesner, president of the EU's Economic and Finance Committee, "The economy is going to tank in Cyprus, no matter what."

Why is it the best quote on the Cypriot condition?

Because it's a tacit admission that the EU has no solution to fix Euromess 2013.

So if the EU doesn't think it can do anything to help the Cypriot economy recover, and that the only solution is -- shhhhhhh...austerity -- unworkable and ineffective, then there's little incentive to stay in the EU.

What if, during the 2008 banking crisis, the US federal government were to tell Alabama that excess inflows from US taxpayers would stop and their banks would be unilaterally allowed to fail, unless Alabamans were taxed on their bank deposits?  I would expect to see a fight for secession or another civil war; wouldn't you?

On the positive side, when Cyprus does leave the Euro behind, I'm grabbing a new passport and booking my first-ever trip to Cyprus!

Tired talking about austerity.

I'm going to try my best and make this my very last posting on the issue of austerity.  I've done long hours of research and reading, and frankly I'm tired of writing on this subject, having come to a level of understanding about how it all works.

If anyone continues to push for austerity despite empirical evidence that says austerity is counterproductive at this time, I say...

Send them to a country -- which shall be established in Mexico the heart of the Midwest (say Kansas or Oklahoma?) completely secured in a giant Gorilla Glass enclosure -- called FM, or in French parlance, "Fuck Me."

In the nation of FM, or Fuck Me, there shall be just one law: There are no laws but this law to establish that there are no laws in the land of Fuck Me.

The Gorilla Glass enclosure shall be fully sealed in a manner such that, nothing may come in or leave.  Air shall not be vented; shit shall not escape, and most importantly, what goes on in Fuck Me stays in Fuck Me. To ensure that no one can smuggle in or out of Fuck Me, there shall be a 3 foot thick, steel-encased barrier going down 50 feet below ground, all around.

If these inhabitants of Fuck Me wish, they can use gold as their form of trade; if they wish, they can all carry high capacity guns at all times; if they wish, they can smog it up if they want to, but again, the sole law of Fuck Me is that there are no other laws, so these are presumably voluntary actions between all parties.  And though the concept of self-sufficiency and responsibility may be a guiding principle, there are no restrictions on the number of trees you cut down or the amount of water you drink.

In one month, after all the inhabitants of Fuck Me have died from killing each other -- a result from their distrust of each other and the fear of collectivism -- we'll turn it into a museum (visual only -- no entry allowed).

It will be a memorial to remember the sacrifice these folks made, to show how a civilization without laws to balance rights and provide equal treatment, and a system of taxation to provide for the enforcement of these rights, will eventually die.

We'll call it the "Southwest Museum of the Fuck Me People".

And thus I end my very last post ever on austerity, a subject I consider definitely answered and therefore, closed, by a satirical piece on the fate of such people who support austerity.

Spring comes, regardless.

I thought I'd just note that the Portland waterfront cherry blossoms are starting to bloom; right now about 1/4 of the buds are open.  And to reiterate: The Willamette River is very low right now, which is unusual for the time of the year.

Cherry blossoms starting to bloom -- sorry, it was getting dark.

River level so low, you could bypass the locked gate and jump onto the dock!

Hurry: 1saleaday has refurb Nexus 7 for $140

Today (meaning until Thursday, 8:59 pm PDT, March 21st, 2013), you can get your hands on a refurbished Nexus 7 8GB tablet for $139.99, with the usual free shipping, from 1SaleADay.

Having a Nexus 7 means you'll immediately have the current Android OS and you'll be at the front of the pack when it comes to Key Lime Pie.

It's worth noting however, that Google stopped selling the 8GB variant several months ago.  I think the reason was probably that most people couldn't do with just 8GB, which was closer to 6GB of free space after taking the OS into account.  With my Nexus 7 16GB, I have a lot of tablet storage space available as I store most everything in the cloud.

Anyway, it's so cheap, it's a safe way to flirt with the latest version of Android without having to root anything.

Officially official: Google Keep

It's official: Google Keep is here.

What it is: A competitor to Evernote, a note-taking / photo-note-annotating / voice-reminder service.

Where it falls short: In the Android app, inline style attributes that are available in Evernote are missing; in the desktop app, Evernote adds a ton of inline style options as well as various export abilities while Keep on the desktop keeps its minimal inline style options, and loses sharing options -- that last one is a bit odd.  You can't group notes as you can in Evernote, with different notebooks.

Where it comes out ahead: Keep's Android app checks your device for services you use then adds them to the list that you can share a note with.  Once you share a note with one of your device's services, it turns it into a de facto share button.

Keep also allows you to add it to your lock screen, so that you can easily add new notes without unlocking your phone; this might also be seen as a negative, but because it's optional, I don't see it as necessarily bad.

Visually, notes can be colored, although it is limited to 8 colors.

Verdict: Keep could be a big competitor with Evernote, but not now.  It reminds me of Google Docs Drive, in how Drive Documents falls short on creating inline styles (though it has improved somewhat), and how there are just small annoyances that force you to use Open Office, etc.

Imagine if they used customizable tags as in Gmail: then you could have colors as well as tags to help you sort out, much as Evernote's notebooks do.  Practically speaking, this is the biggest obstacle to switching from Evernote to Keep.

Well, another obstacle (at least for me) is TRUST.  If Keep doesn't earn $, can you trust that it will stick around?  I'm still reeling from the death of Reader.

Thus, the best workflow I can discern: Use Keep to create notes easily and rapidly; share them with Evernote; edit them and sort them appropriately in Evernote.  Keep is your front line note-taking app, but Evernote is your actual workhorse.

Your alternate workflow, is to export into Drive.  But once you open it up with the Documents editor, it'll create a separate Documents file with the same name.  The upside is that you'll have full inline style editing; the downside is that you'll have two different files with the same name, which, I'm guessing means that most people will take the extra step of killing the originally imported file.  Now you see why this is the alternate workflow and not the best one.

Visually, all your notes are cleanly organized into two columns.

You can choose to view as a single column, too.

You're currently limited to 8 colors.

Keep searches for installed services that you can share with.

Share with an app, it turns into a quick-share button.

After importing into Evernote, you can further modify and organize.

There are several options for widgets in Android.

Meh.  Desktop app (online) isn't so pretty as the Android app.

---

An update: After playing around, it bugs me that I can't move the notes around like tiles, while in portrait view, but I can when I'm in landscape view, on my tablet and phone. Weird.
A second update: Hmm, well it works now.  Before it just wouldn't move in portrait, but now it does.  Oh well, maybe user error! :D

Lev is my doppelganger

I wish I could write down what I'm thinking about, when I'm thinking about it, then do something about it.  The best I can do is this blog.  But I found my doppelganger who has thought about, written down and done something about the same sort of stuff that's previously gone through my mind...and subsequently left it.

Lev.  Thanks bro.

Did GOP perform an autopsy...on itself?

This bothered me last night when I saw its referral on the Newshour, and again when it was repeated by ABC News: The GOP call their post-2012 elections self-review an autopsy.

An autopsy, really?

I know that there has been some hand-wringing over the losses of the 2012 election, but is the GOP dead?  Hardly!  They've launched numerous filibusters and blocked movement on replacing the sequester cuts, so it's hardly appropriate to say that they're dead, right?

As far as I can tell, they screwed up the nomenclature frequently used throughout the high tech industry, and whose popularity has been growing beyond the confines of high tech: postmortem reviews.

A postmortem, at a minimum, is a review following the completion of a project, to determine what worked and what didn't, concluding with possible solutions to improve the process and outcome for the next project.

This is exactly what I did, two days after the election, when reviewing why GOP pundits got their election predictions all wrong.  Except of course if you compare and contrast, their analysis was focused on changing tactical operations, while mine was focused on how they got the issues wrong:

• It was always about more than just the current state of the economy.
• It was about women's rights.  Mitt Romney paid lip service to the Lilly Ledbetter Act, insisting that a resurgent economy was the only meaningful concern for women.  Throw in the odd rape comments from other male Republican politicians, and you could see that many women were completely offended.
• It was about gay rights.  This was not a decade ago and the rise of the Defense of Marriage push.  2012 marked widespread support for gay marriage, just as President Obama became the first sitting president to express support for the cause.  It seemed incredulous that a sitting president could express this view, without being punished at the polls, and yet if anything, he helped push Americans into accepting this as a civil rights issue.
• It was about minorities.  In no small part because of the changing demographics, many older and working-age white Americans engaged in a counter-revolution, known as the Tea Party movement.  Their charge was to take America back to the whiter version of itself; they spoke openly of disdain and with disrespect for the authenticity of Obama's birth in America.  When Mitt told folks in Michigan that everyone knew where he was born, that was a coded reference to the legitimacy of Obama's heritage.
• It was about integrity and the big American moderate pie.  Many people just simply could not trust Mitt Romney.  A lot of people thought Mitt was moderate, but in the last several years it seemed that he had embraced the far right.  Some people decided to cross their fingers and hope that he would not do what he said he'd do; most people refused to accept that risk.  Once they heard him embrace the far right, they stopped trusting him and his message.

And hey, I think most of these are absolutely still valid.  Look at what they discussed at CPAC: gay marriage, minorities and Rick Perry questioning Mitt Romney's conservative credentials.

Regardless of autopsy or postmortem, 100 pages and they think it boils down to operational issues: fewer debates and earlier primaries to pick a candidate.

We're still far apart on the causes of their failure at the ballot box, but that's okay, because if they want to continue to chase the wrong narrative, I'm perfectly fine with having to do an autopsy in 2016.

This chart says it all: DON'T MAJOR IN ARCHITECTURE!

Okay, maybe slightly over-dramatic, but this Coroflot review and chart reflects a basic truth I've known since I was in high school: Architects are not well paid, contrary to what people think.  I blame Greg Brady and Howard Roark.

I know what you're thinking: Wait, the principals at my firm earn way more than that!  Well, for one, you don't really expect some old people to respond to a Coroflot survey, do you?  ("Coro-what?" said the old man.)  But, the point really is that you'd expect the same sort of bias across the board, therefore the relative salaries are still relevant.

It's worse in Oregon than Washington for Architects, by the way.  If you simply compare the total aggregate salaries of all creative jobs in both states, then look at just Architects, there's a larger discrepancy in Architect's salaries.

Using Google Street View at the White House.

I've never toured the White House, and so I was excited to explore it using Google Street View.  Of course not every room is available, but exploring the interior allows you to find the portraits of most of the Presidents and First Ladies, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Note: Hillary is downstairs while Bill is on the main floor at the South Lawn side.  If Hillary becomes the next President, I expect she'll move on up to the main floor.

(Please ignore) My thought experiment on being a Cypriot. (Updated)

This is my thought experiment:

Assume that ordinary Cypriots had to pay some sort of tax on their savings, even those with less than €100,000 in the bank.  If I were a Cypriot facing this situation, how would I react?

I would first pull out as much cash as possible, as quickly as possible.  It makes no sense to endure a tax, if you can avoid it, after all.  And as they say, you don't want to be the last sucker out when there's a bank run, which brings me to the next point.

That savers are being taxed, should be enough warning of what's to come at the end of a bank run.  Even if the Central Bank of Cyprus guaranteed your bank deposits up to a certain level, the fact of the matter is, the CBC cannot say "no" to the European Central Bank and the IMF, if push comes to shove and the CBC runs out of money: That guarantee may be unilaterally come with a further haircut, so to speak.  I'm not taking any risk of additional haircuts: Even after getting my savings taxed, I'm going to pull out the rest of what remains.

Forget putting my money into any Eurozone bank; they're all at risk of having their deposits taxed if things get worse and the troika get desperate.  But I don't particularly like the idea of keeping all my money in the mattress.

Any earnings I get will be invested into either foreign bonds such as TIPS, or I will lend it out directly to people who wish to borrow from me.  Just think about it for a moment: If I invest in TIPS and the US grows while the rest of the EU collapses or remains stagnant, I'm actually benefitting like crazy, even as my country -- Cyprus -- is failing!  If I find out that there is an off-the-books bank that I can get in on, that pays even minimal interest, I'm in.  In other words, shadow banking system.

I would then use the internet or word of mouth to find ways of buying durable and daily goods for less than I would from within Cyprus, legally.  We're talking black and grey markets, baby.

Granted, these actions will further erode the financial condition of Cyprus, but I'm not going to allow the EU (especially that Merkel) to determine my livelihood.  As such, if it results in Cyprus leaving the Euro currency behind, that's fine by me.  The UK seems to do okay (aside from its nutty, self-induced austerity policies) by being half in and half out of the EU, so why can't Cyprus?  Knowing that my money is already stashed in overseas investments, I have less fear of the transition away from the Euro currency, after all.

End of thought experiment.  Conclusion: taxing savers is counter-productive.

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Update:  Well there we go. Yet again there is proof that we have an abundance of very intelligent, creative people in this world (and if only we had wide open discussions to vet the best ideas!).  Felix Salmon covers this brilliant solution: instead of taxing savings, the money needed to secure a bailout comes from pushing deposits over €100,000 into long-term bonds, then roll bonds about to mature, back into these same long-term bonds.  It prevents a bank run but also avoids the need to pay out bondholders in the near-term.

It's an eloquent solution -- I love it!

Daffodils!

Bought some daffodils -- soooooo cheap at $2/bunch (10 stems) -- at Safeway tonight, to play around with my new (refurbished) camera, old manual macro lens, old micro-focusing mount, and the built-in HDR toning software inside of Photoshop CS5.1.

It hasn't been blue skies outside, so I figure I'd spend some time playing around with the camera indoors.

Some things I learned:

• Photoshop CS5.1 (included in the CS5.5 suite) doesn't support RAW from my Nikon D3200;
• I can preview, import and convert them (RAW files) using -- of all the software to support RAW -- Google's Picasa, but that it leaves it with a small purple stripe on the right side;
• It doesn't make a whole lot of sense (at least for macro, indoor photography) to bracket photos then import-merge as HDR into Photoshop, when you can use the HDR toning inside of Photoshop;
• My eyes are in terrible shape, as my first batch was poorly focused.

Cyprus + EU + IMF = worldwide shock?

I predict, without any real powers of foresight or inside knowledge involved, that US stock markets will tumble huge on Monday, March 18, 2013  (hint: stocks are already down big (banking stocks down more than 2%) in pre-bell trading, so at the opening bell, the US markets will already be in negative territory).

With that crazy tax on Cypriot bank holdings, the EU and IMF have managed to shoot the Eurozone in the foot, with a bank run that started with Cyprus, but has hints of spreading to the PIIGS and beyond.

You can't tax people on their savings, without triggering a bank run.  Why, after all, keep money in the bank that'll get taxed, when you can put it in your mattress and not suffer the tax (and probably come out ahead)?  And as all bank runs do, they force a bank into insolvency as its ability to make loans (and therefore generate income) dries up.

It's not a done deal, though.  Cyprus still has to vote on it, and it is not looking good.  But the markets are cognizant that this mechanism may be required of the PIIGS, should they require additional help, and that fear has already pushed some people to pull their money out of banks in those areas.

I think we might be seeing something close to a test on a counterfactual over Hank Paulson's 2008 move to give money to banks to backstop them from failing.  (Counterfactual: With deference to moral hazard, TBTF should have been allowed to fail, allowing the market to dig itself out on its own, and faster.)

What do you think?

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Update: They've closed Cypriot banks until Thursday. I guess that's one way to prevent a bank run.

In rapid succession everyone denied responsibility for the tax idea, followed by the Cypriot government announcing that it would try to rework the deal and halve the below-€100,000 tax rate.  Don't hold your breath.

I would presume (not really, because it's obvious) that Germans don't feel especially gracious to encourage the ECB to turn on the printing press and simply deliver Cyprus a wad of Euros.  I guess seeing the collapse of the Eurozone, down to a handful of core nations is palatable.

Spring organize your cloud today.

It's nearly the official start of Spring (equinox is Wednesday, March 20th), and after seeing this post in Lifehacker, I decided to take the plunge and join Jolidrive (Jolicloud), to help me get a handle on the different cloud storage services I'm using.  Now, while they're not able to connect to every cloud storage service I use, what they currently have on tap is a great start.

My Box.com, Drive, and Dropbox all accessed easily from one app.  Awesome.

I'd love to see them connect to Google Play Music, Pinterest and Picasa.

Spring-Cleaned in a day: Google's note-taking app.

According to Android Police Google let slip a new note-taking app -- Google Keep -- that seemed to be something short of an Evernote competitor. It was live for all of one day, then they took it back, once word spread.  It was probably in testing all along, but coming on the heels of Reader getting axed, I couldn't agree more with AP's sarcasm:

"Probably another victim of a spring cleaning. These Google products just don't last as long as they used to!"

Am I going to switch once Google Keep goes live, for real?  Hell no!

I'll definitely play with Google Keep when it is officially available, but I'm keeping my Evernote!  Right now, I've lost trust in Google, after what they did to Reader.  For them to cut off a program that cost them a reported $7M annually, despite about $50B in annual revenues, is disappointing, annoying, aggravating, disheartening, dumb, petty, ridiculous...etc.

So, if Keep does not contain a revenue stream, it is subject to getting axed in the future -- this we learned the hard way, with Reader.

It's like getting your heart broken: once some woman breaks your heart, it takes time before you're able to face her again, let alone trust her.  In the five stages of grief, I'm still going back and forth between Denial, Anger and Bargaining.  In other words, I'm not one of the reported 500K+ Reader users who made the switch over the last few days over to Feedly.

"Look at how your dog looks back at you!"

"Look at how your dog looks back at you!"

I've gotten that comment many times over the years.  Watching episodes of The Dog Whisperer on YouTube, I guess I'm left wondering...why aren't your dogs looking back at you?

My dog was a rescue, at 10 months old.  It was apparent from day one, that he had never been walked on a leash, and was discouraged from barking.  Actually, he hadn't seen much of the world, and it scared him like you wouldn't believe.  He didn't trust anyone.  He was in really bad shape, so skinny that you could feel all of his ribs and bones.

The first thing he did when he got home was to run to the sofa and hide his head between the sofa and the wall, with just his butt sticking out; figuratively, he stuck his head in the sand.  He was that scared of the entire world.

We went from having never walked on a leash (that was a crazy experience!) to walking off-leash in a matter of a few months after he came home.  I actually started training him to walk off leash in about a month.  I'm no Cesar Milan, though; he'd probably have my dog walking off leash and well-behaved in a week.

My dog looks back at me, because he knows I'm the alpha.

Google Now, with college sports.

You can add college sports teams to Google Now sports cards (about time!).  Got the USC Trojans and Oregon Ducks in my cards now.  It only shows up as basketball, so I'm curious if this is just for basketball season, or for all sports.

Clocks should change automatically.

I'm so sick and tired of the ridiculousness of having to change the clocks back and forth, as we move in and out of Daylight Saving Time.

Most people have wireless networks; pop a Raspberry Pi in all clocks and make that darn clock change itself automatically, I say.

Everyone knows the GOP is RED, right?

So why does the conservative confab CPAC, of late, feature a completely BLUE background, and many of the prominent speakers donning BLUE ties?

Is this a subconscious projection of wanting to look like Democrats, a facile attempt to cover conservatism in a comforting shade rather than an angry red, a Freudian slip of the 2012 election results, or some terrible oversight by organizers and some speakers?

Rand Paul didn't wear a blue tie.

Pope Francis...a few last thoughts.

He has a great smile, doesn't he?

Yesterday, one of the Free Digital Reads on Amazon's Kindle bookstore, was "The Life and Prayers of Saint Francis of Assisi".  No kidding.  What a seemingly prophetic and amazing coincidence, don't you think?

How do we judge a man who chooses to be named after St. Francis of Assisi?  As a man concerned with all life (both humans and animals) and the condition of their environment, as the man who discards materialism and class separation, or both?

It is all very intriguing.