Easy sign in:

Why Live and not Facebook-connect? At over 700 million users and counting, as a web developer I would rather have them use Facebook connect to sign in. There is a further benefit to this, in that immediately Facebook marketing strategies are available, which is kind of non optional now-a-days for most developers.

Even if Microsoft Live becomes dominant (imagineable because of Windows’s dominance), I still need Facebook sign in to market the app. Means I need Facebook-connect. So rather than have 2 sign ins, I’d rather have one.

Live sign in:
You just used an email address to sign in and never demonstrated a password presumably because that is an account that Windows 8 knows about.  Further when logging into to a web app in IE it was single click, because of the previous login.  But do Chrome and Firefox (probably just over 50% of the browser market) support this functionality& the WL object? Does Microsoft have buy in here? an NPAPI plugin preinstalled for those browsers perhaps?

Doesn’t seem that some of  this live id tech is as complete a  solution to the  ’universal problem’ talked about in the beginning given iOS and Android & other platforms.

Additional:
Zeroclick sign in isn’t always a benefit, if you have private info in some of your accounts.
The way the project I’m working on works is using Facebook connect (using the facebook app token as a timeout) to sign in for private info… and using our own cookie for personalization which lasts months.

Same code:
It’s nice when you said it’s javascript everywhere. However it’s a pity that it’s javascript. Later Dare said that there are different objects for C++/c#/java style apps (maybe that’s not what metro is about), so you can’t simply copy and paste code

Ranting about language tech though…. I think what Google is doing with efforts like GWT (same code everywhere) & Native Client is more future looking. Not that those two are addressing the same concerns. But I like that they are trying to get strongly-type languages, with refactoring capabilities and stronger (potentially with GWT/Angry birds) efficiency experiences in the browser. I think that Native Client will revolutionize games in the browser. Even thinking about sign in, should be future thinking with respect to these technologies… of course this is more a comment about the prevalence and assumed superiority of javascript.. so just a bit of a rant

Sessions:
Sessions were mentioned in the video with respect to data sharing… but no mention of the data itself. Seems to me that these are intimately connected. Are these simply blobs? Or do they represent some form of structured data? If you have large sets of data, can you cache/page as necessary and get at data granularily. I remember syncing Windows profiles on a network and waiting for your profile to copy over and back when logging in and off on different machines was a pain in the neck. I’m sure there are answers to these questions, but since I’m not on Windows 8, I have no incentive to look it up at the moment. Would have been useful in the talk.

Great summary article.

I agree with the WARNING of the article, in terms of considering the adoption of new technology.
However, academically, I’d point out that the technology that supplanted the hyped tech was not necessarily a better solution, just an easier one. I.e. the problems remained in some form. I’m not necessarily defending the older solution, just pointing out that the solving of these problems is necessarily an evolutionary process. Sometimes early adoption puts you two steps ahead, sometimes late adoption does.
With regards to NoSql… I’ve used Db4o and Google’s BigTable (two examples in this space). Neither offer a heavenly solution as opposed to traditional relational databases. Both have advantages, from scalability, to queryability… and both have disadvantages when you inevitably come across ” but all I want to do is…” scenarios.
I suspect that the current frustrating choice of what to adopt here is an indication that yet a better solution exists. Until you can simply and effectively ask for ‘half an object’ from an object database, relational databases will have one upper hand… the solution probably requires new concepts added to typed languages… which will create it’s own set of problems.
Having said all this, I do feel that SQL is long overdue to get replaced by something, even if Relational databases are here to stay for a while.

Technology is both frustrating and invigorating precisely because it is both a solver and creator of problems.

Indeed, this philosophy can be applied outside the programming world, but since I’m responding to this specifically I’ll continue to use the software context.

I don’t agree. Of course I acknowledge that in order to get software out the door, sometimes you have to scale back on feature creep and can’t always satisfy all concerns on version one. Very often by seeing your software being used you find that all the concerns you had thought to satisfy originally aren’t real concerns. What I disagree with is the mantra that ‘Simpler is always better’. I prefer the Occam’s razor version : ‘Keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler’.  It’s ironic that this is easier to understand than the literal translation “Don’t multiply entities unnecessarily”.

It’s easy to find examples to counter the WWW/Xanadu example that Dare points out. In fact a surprising number of them come from Google. A notable one is Gmail. I was a hotmail user and liked the benefits of a web client. Gmail was late to the game, but they brought with their client significantly more complexity. Namely, threaded conversation view, tagging of emails instead of folders (and the inbox tag, for archiving), and a thick javascript client that would take longer to load initially, but user experience once logged in would be super quick. Coupled with the incentive of significantly more space which was actually eventually matched by hotmail at the time I switched, the added complexity/functionality was a boon for the user. Even as I show off the features of my gmail client to users of MSNLive and Yahoo, they grimace to think that all their organizing of their mail would be lost if they were to switch, the plight that can come from early adoption, coupled with a fear of the unknown.

More examples from Google: GWT, a more complex and yet surprisingly powerful way to write javascript, without more simply hacking away at native JS. And Google Wave, a potentially incredibly powerful and more complex way of merging chat, document editing and email into one. Of course it’s usefulness has yet to be proven at the time of writing. Inevitably Google Wave has already been under attack by the same people that live in the ‘Simpler is always better’ camp.

Of course duck-tape programming is often inevitable. Working in software, I often choose a duck-tape solution knowing full and well that it won’t scale simply because I don’t have the confidence in management to back me up were I to suggest the more complex solution. Complexity needs more time and educating to implement. I view this as not my problem because I know I probably won’t be around when it finally fails and it’s not worth the career risk to vouch for the better solution. It’s great when you do work under projects where you know that management has the foresight to stick with the better/disruptive solution even if that means coming at loggerheads with clients for a while. It’s incredibly dismaying to occasionaly see the hacky solution being chosen even when the better solution would take the same amount of time to implement, but is simply harder to think through.

I feel that an article favouring simplicity doesn’t do justice to the problem because sometimes the more complex solution is better. A more mature take would be to advise programmers to strike the right balance. Of course this is particularly hard advice to give and I fear I have no more generalized rules to offer than say look at all cases on a case by case basis. This would be a worthwhile area of research.

Let me start by saying the show is very entertaining viewing. In fact I highly recommend everyone gets it out and watches it with friends and pizza… provided you can take almost all of it with a pinch of salt. It gives you that feeling of -all the dots are connected man- running up and down your spine. I briefly looked for a decent commentary of it on the net (so I wouldn’t have to write one) but most of the decent detractors out there seem to use an argument of “if you have common sense, you know it’s BS”. That’s not helpful for people who want to know why. The problem is that it takes a lot of work to explain why it’s BS in full. Like the Myth Busters episode debunking the moon landing nay-sayers (a great show!), it took a lot of work to go through each claim to show why we actually DID land on the moon. However, I’ll give a stab at some of the points. Not all of them… I have a life.

It’s been said that a lie is more dangerous depending on the amount of truth it contains. There are three major claims if I remember correctly. One, that all the major religions share the same story based on the pagan astrology. That 911 is a government created conspiracy. Lastly, the conspiracy that central bankers and politicians cause all the wars for profit and oil.

I’ll start with the most ridiculous claim, that 911 is a conspiracy. More specifically that some large secret organization was responsible for collapsing the world trade centres and that it wasn’t the airliners crashing into them. I’ve worked for some time in the VFX industry in London on movies with a fair number of explosions (Poseidon, Kingdom of Heaven, Harry Potter), admittedly on the CG side of things but I know how much time/effort (months/years) and planning the pyro guys take to prepare for much much simpler drops. Now if you’re talking about having demolitions specialists drop the World Trade Centre (THE BIGGEST DROP IN HISTORY) there would only be a very short list of companies with enough experience to tackle such a project. So the creators want us to suspend disbelief that not only was such a group of people found, but they were acquired to perform this drop despite moral misgivings, all keep quiet about it, prepare for it all without twin tower workers suspecting, perform it on not one but two buildings! And sync the drops with just after two airliners had hit the buildings to give them credibility. And lastly (phew) ensure that all the charges and triggers laid would go off exactly as planned despite the disruption that airliners hitting the building would cause? Sure, I have no problem believing this theory

A much less theoretical approach to dismiss this is to tackle the claim proposed by a so called “expert” that there is no way a building like that can cascade collapse due to a fire caused by airline fuel. To see this as bogus, it’s worth looking at the collapse of a much smaller building, a faculty of Architecture in the Netherlands. Here a simple fire started by a fault in a coffee machine which spread throughout the building and eventually caused it’s demise in a very similar fashion. In this case the fire wasn’t as equally concentrated because there was no aid of jet fuel and the building wasn’t as top heavy, and yet still similar results are seen. You can click on the video here on youtube. Also the claim that lower floors are seen shattering before the building had reached them could be explained by the centre of the building collapsing faster than the exterior, causing pressure to explode out the windows… but hey… I’m no expert.

The claim about the religions being simplistic folk tales is not one that I really want to bash… because I agree with it. Even still, anyone critical can’t buy in to the extent of the conclusions that they draw. Never mind that the difference between -sun- and -son- only works in the English language, which wasn’t the language of Christ. They go through fact by fact from messiahs in various religions showing how the data is EXACTLY THE SAME. A simple follow up of Horus on wikipedia shows that he was principally the sky god and a sun god in as much as the sky contains both the sun and the moon. There are also many other sun gods in the Egyptian religion. If he was of a virgin birth, it was a bizarre one. Two female gods ‘merged’ together and out he came… whatever that means (ask an Egyptian). Feel free to look up the deities in other religions but the point is that the creators of the film cherry pick facts and twist them to suit their argument so it seems the details are identical. I think the theme is right, but it is not nearly as awe-inspiring as they would have you believe. I know my religious friends will hate me for saying this.

The most dangerous claim is the one about bankers. Hey… having switched industries I now work at Allan Gray, an investment bank, so obviously you can’t believe what I’m going to write because I’m technically a banker. Haha. Let me just state that the views stated on this blog are my own and in no way reflect the views of my employer. The claims are dangerous because they are mixed up in a lot of truth. If you are looking for a more rational conspiracy theory about the Federal Reserve then check out this podcast interviewing Edward Griffith, the author of “The creature from Jekyll Island” about the creation of the Fed. It’s at least a much more measured conspiracy theory, but at least goes to show how complex financial situations are and that to say that wars are created by bankers is far fetched. Even this however is far too conspiratorial, but I’ve already listed my complaints about that interview in a previous separate blog post. The bottom line is that central banks can do a lot of damage and a lot of good, and anything futher than that has yet to be properly resolved. It is particularly relevant for the current crisis and we’re all waiting to see what changes are in the pipeline if any.

In conclusion. Zeitgeist gives us the illusion that big brother is out there, the world is not what it seems and there is indeed a target that we can blame for all our troubles and misfortunes. The idea that “we now know the REAL story” is an incredibly empowering feeling. It is much less satisfactory to delve into the complexities of the world and find that our misfortunes are the results of complex ever changing scenarios which tend not to be clear cut nor someone’s fault specifically. Definitely not the witch-hunt that Zeitgeist claims. Zeitgeist’s simplistic point of view of stories that are easily digestible ultimately shares a lot of parallels with the way it describes the dogma of the major religions.

People that have invested too much in these concepts are likely to retort “But the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. I read this as saying that a world without the stories of good and evil is a much sadder ordinary world and people are simply not ready to believe it.

Apologies for spelling and grammar. I simply don’t care too much.

However the debate centred around the interesting problem of national health. Now I could site material that my dad told me about showing how life expectancy in the US on terminal diseases was better than that of the UK NHS but I won’t. It’s a mute point as France has come out tops in health ratings by a number of studies over recent years. France has had private doctors but public health care (and public hospitals for doctors to operate in) for all citizens, although there is some evidence that is not financially sustainable. The sustainability can be left for a different debate.

To the pro government speaker’s credit, he didn’t mention whether he wanted state provided health or state funded health (not that I saw anyway). We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was only proposing state funded health like France and not like Britain. Now his argument can be put as follows “Even if a government solution provides better health care for the people than a private one, players in South Africa like the company Discovery health insurance will fight against such proposals by scaring patients with marketing claims of how they will be left destitute and lobbying against proposed bills to make sure they aren’t passed”. I personally don’t think Discovery has that much power … but again that’s not the point.

The point is I started wondering if there wasn’t a solution that would work for both debaters. My dad had always told me about the benefits of a voucher system for education, and so successful they are in countries like Sweden that despite it’s more socialist attitudes can’t do anything to remove it. Could the same system not be used for medical aid?

It seems so simple that I couldn’t believe that no-one else had thought of it. I did a brief search in google but found only rru.worldbank.org/Documents/PublicPolicyJournal/243Sandi-042302.pdf describing how the voucher system lowered the emotional transaction cost of providing health at clinics in a poor country case study. Not the same thing.

So this is how it would work. The country would offer medical aid vouchers to all citizens at a particular value defined by the budget to give whatever health standard the government could afford to pay from taxes for the entire population. These vouchers would only be redeemable from registered health insurance firms. The government would also create and maintain a default insurer similar to France with policies on what they are and not prepared to cover for that amount for equal cover for all citizens. This is where it gets interesting. You would be able to move your voucher to any private insurer that you wished. The private insurers would have to offer a basic plan equal to that of the government one, BUT would give you the option of topping up the amount for more cover. The top up feature is unique to that of a voucher as opposed to pure public health which doesn’t offer better service even if you’re prepared to pay for it. See more about the advantages of that on education vouchers on wikipedia. Also by empowering the population with vouchers, it gives people the power to decide which insurer they are going to move their account to, which improves service delivery. Discovery might actually make more money under such a system as they would potentially have revenue from the budget assuming they delivered a good service. Everybody wins!

There are other details that need ironing out like insolvency of firms and past payments, and moving people back to the default insurer, but all these issues can be sorted out. I think that such a system would improve the lifes of all. Is it likely to happen? You’d need some serious visionaries in power to suggest and implement such a system, so I’m not hopeful.

I always find their shows contrarian which is great however this week they made no effort to find fault in Edward Griffin’s analysis. Now a lot of what he says make sense, but they brush over the subtleties of the claims.

I’m willing to believe that the Federal Reserve was forged in the way claimed. I’m willing to believe that it acts as a cartel in that it limits the extent to which members can do business.

However from here I have questions.

Regular cartels is that the action of cartels always hurt the consumer for the period in which they last. They don’t perform any benefit to the consumer. When the Fed is allowed to be a lender of last resort, it does offer a benefit to consumers. When Lehman brothers was allowed to collapse, credit markets seized up. This is demonstrable. The Government/Fed won’t allow this to happen again. It is true that they are experimenting as they go because no-one is certain of the rules.

Once a cartel is written into law it is no longer a cartel. Cartel’s don’t work in practise over long periods as members that have a competitive advantage to break from the rules will do so when the incentives are right. That is not possible here, so even if it was a means of enforcing the rules of a cartel at one point, it no longer is. It is law. Because of these points it is unfair to call the Fed a ‘regular’ cartel.

Other claims that were made were that the whole inflation scenario works in the banks and governments favour. “That’s where the money goes”. Inflation undermines the value of all assets in the designated currency, whether they are being held by banks, government or the private sector at large. Can Mr Edward Griffin please provide data to show that bank’s shareholders have outperformed other sectors over the period since the Fed’s creation? The barriers of entry to becoming a bank are not so great that other companies could not become banks if they saw a market opportunity in doing so.

The biggest claim of Mr Edward Griffin’s which stinks of propaganda is that he gave an example that the banks would easily pass up on the small person’s loan, but wouldn’t when it came to cities, big corporations or foreign countries. Now although it may be true that there are banking departments geared for different kinds of loans, the US housing bubble is a clear indication that they would extend easy credit to the small man as well.

Come on McAlvany! You need to drill your guests when they make claims that sound bogus, even if they have a lot of good points as well. Otherwise your show doesn’t sound credible.

I do have an issue though with the two recent podcasts I have been listening to, interviewing Thomas Woods Jr. and Walter Block. The theme of both episodes is how the US Central Bank’s tampering of the money supply is largely responsible for the current recession.  Thomas, siting Hayek, stating that the Fed is responsible for the whole boom and bust cycle and Walter saying largely the same thing advocating that a gold standard would be a more responsible system. Although I think that they might have valid points overall, I think that their arguments are overly simplistic and to blame the Fed entirely is unfair.

First off, bubbles have occurred under the gold standard since it was formalized in the early 1700s. The railway speculation around the world in the 19th century was very real and ultimately very painful for a lot of people who didn’t get out at the right time. To deny the gravy train phenomenon as part of human make up is to be very naive. People want in on the action they perceive others to be enjoying. It’s why McDonalds would pay 1000 people to stand in line for a new product line release. I’ve also heard of experiments of people joining bogus queues simply because they existed without knowing what they were for but I can’t find the links. Unless detractors of the Fed are going to make claims that the gold standard wasn’t enforced properly during these periods, which I’d like to see evidence for, I can’t see how a completely slanted view of the Fed is justified. It’s not true when Mr Wood says there is no reason for stating the Free Market comes part and parcel with boom and bust cycles.

Here in South Africa, the Reserve Bank (Fed equivalent) has a policy of inflation targeting given that they’d like to ideally keep the price of bread constant for the masses of predominantly poorer population. This means that although there are pressures that would influence the Reserve bank otherwise, usually the way rates move are quite predictable to the private sector in theory. So how is this then reconciled with Mr Woods’s idea that people don’t know the true value of their own wealth? The McAlvany podcast spoke of inflationary pressures in the bond market and the housing market. The fundamental formulae that tie bond pricing to interest rates and longer term trends in terms of both the housing market and the bond market are public knowledge. So unless the Fed/Reserve bank moves rates in ways that come as a surprise to the market, I don’t understand how one can blame the Fed entirely when the market over-inflates these asset classes. The analogy about giving a builder more alcohol tries to blame the would be barman for the fact that the builder actually drinks the alcohol. This is separate from government stimulus which is the barman drinking his own alcohol.

Having said this, I do potentially agree with Mr Block’s assessment that the Fed may do more harm than good. Mr Block more obviously acknowledges that the boom and bust cycles exist but could be shorter lived. I actually do believe that in theory the Fed could help to smooth out the boom and bust cycle, but in practise it is unlikely to ever work. The incentives not to spoil the party during good times are simply too strong for any politically appointed body. Standing stead fast to a policy of price stabilization is just too hard.  However the gold standard brings the risk of deflation if gold is not dug out of the ground at the same rate as legitimate production increases. Mr Block mentions that deflation is not a bad thing for computers and cars. In fact it’s a brilliant thing when deflation happens with consumable asset classes and those involved in the means of production. The population expects this and it means that everyone is richer in real terms and can produce more. The problem is when deflation happens in those asset classes used by the population for the preservation of wealth. This is not a happy thing as it means everyone is poorer in real terms. To fully convince me, Mr Block would have to present a model which shows that the potential gold standard deflation in wealth preservation asset classes is less of a problem than what would be caused by the exacerbated cycles the Fed causes over and above regular cycles. All this specifically in terms of matching peoples expectations… although the evidence does make me lean in favour of the gold standard as the lesser of two evils.

This gets me to the subject of this piece. As far as I can see it doesn’t matter what system you have to change the money supply as long as the majority of the population understands fully how it affects their wealth. The incentive to be foolish, whether it’s from ignoring fundamentals and wanting to get in on the action during bubbles, or whether it’s the fed not wanting to spoil the party, or whether it’s people not willing to put in the effort to understand the complex asset they are buying, all makes for a bad end. There will always be investors, like Grantham last year, who saw the bubble for what it was and didn’t allocate his resources to it. The problem is that he is in the minority and will probably always be. If the population is not willing to do the homework to evaluate which bank will best protect their money then you need systems like the depositor insurance program, which shouldn’t be a necessary tool in a market of perfect information. Likewise the ideal system for controlling the money supply should be one that the majority of people can cope with intellectually for protecting their wealth.

To leave you with something to think about. I propose a system where the money supply is linked to the size of the population, which I’d imagine probably better correlates to a country’s production than the gold standard which is arbitrarly the rarity of the precious metal on the planet in human hands. Fat chance though that any adopted system won’t be suspended towards a fiat currency when the political pressure becomes too great, just as the gold standard was in order to solve the funding problem of/after WWII.

Anyone who thinks I’m pro Keysian government spending has misunderstood this blog. The question is how do we best allocate the size of the money supply which is a necessary but not naturally occuring part of the free market economy.

An expectation fulfilled can never beat the same experience unexpected.

I’ll add more examples to the list later, but the common thread here is that each example involves a quantity that it’s difficult for the human mind to take in at once. It becomes, just a inconceivable number. It’s possible to know that one number is bigger than another on paper, but when confronted with it in front of us, the mind just boggles. So our intuition tells us unfortunately that it’s not possible, but scientific enquiry and particular mathematics often tells us that it is.

The moral here is: Don’t be scared of big numbers! Don’t trust your intuition, find a formula.