The Euro crisis, in musical form

DOOM.

On the edge of the storm

Satellites are astonishing: right now it's merely cloudy, but I can see that the clouds here are at the edge of the giant storm. My father is one block away from the NYC evacuation zone, so he may be heading out of the financial district and to my grandmother's place in upper Manhattan as I type.

Economic disasters are harder to see, especially if everyone involved has a motivation to pretend it's not coming. But if you pay attention, you can see some of those coming too... like the collapse of the housing bubble in Australia, perhaps finally about to arrive.

The Lessons of War

I've been reading Beatrice Webb's autobiography, "My Apprenticeship", and came across this astonishing quotation she includes from Charles Bradlaugh, who wrote this in 1872:

"These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals; our minds have already outgrown them; already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come when Science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which if explained to us we would not now understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, steam. Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed; immortality will be invented. And then the earth being small, mankind will emigrate into space and will cross airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. Man will then be perfect; he will be a creator; he will therefore be what the vulgar worship as God."

She explains however that this religion of science is no longer conceivable: "In these latter days of deep disillusionment, now that we have learnt, by the bitter experience of the Great War, to what vile uses the methods and results of science may be put, when these are inspired and directed by brutal instinct and base motive, it is hard to understand the naive belief of the most original and vigorous minds of the 'seventies and 'eighties that it was by science, and by science alone, that all human misery would be ultimately swept away."

And yet, this "naive belief" survived well into the 20th century among Science Fiction writers. Are SF writers just behind the times? Personally I suspect it's more that so many of the writers were Americans, and the impact of World War I, and later World War II, was never really felt in the same way in the US. Wikipedia suggests almost 10 million combat casualties in WWI of which only 116,000 were Americans; if the US had some proportion of casualties to population as the rest of the combatants, it would've been more like a million US casualties, ten time as many... and that's even before civilian deaths.

A bunch of quacks

Kragen hates object-oriented ducks:

"The problem with examples like `Duck extends Bird` is that it gives you no understanding of the kind of considerations you need to think about in order to decide whether the design decisions discussed above are good or bad.

In fact, it actively sabotages that understanding.

You can’t add code to ducks.

You can’t refactor ducks.

Ducks don’t implement protocols.

You can’t create a new species in order to separate some concerns (e.g. file I/O and word splitting).

You can’t fake the ability to turn a duck into a penguin by moving its duckness into an animal of some other species that can be replaced at runtime."

Oh dear

The always excellent "Behind the News" interviewed Yanis Varoufakis a few weeks ago on the crisis in Greece (the second half of the show). Short story: if Greece leaves the Euro, bank runs in other periphery countries on expectations of devaluation (e.g. Ireland), and Germany will leave the Euro so it doesn't have to bail them out; the Euro monetary union will be gone within days. At that point Germany and other surplus countries will have a deep recession as their new currencies appreciate and their exports become expensive.

More at Varoufakis' blog.

Arithmetic, it is hard

From the Massachusetts Association of Realtors®:

When REALTOR® members were asked about what they thought was going to happen with interest rates in the next 12 months, 67 percent responded that rates would either increase significantly (1 percent) or increase slightly (66 percent). Thirty-six percent thought interest rates would stay the same and four percent thought interest rates would drop slightly. None of the respondents thought interest rates would drop significantly in the next 12 months.

67% + 36% + 4% = 107%. Obviously there are too many Realtors® in MA...

Political question of the day

Does being associated with an unpleasant substance like santorum impede one's ability to run for President? How do you fight back against what you feel is a smear campaign, especially when you can't call it that?

Rick Santorum's solution is to complain about a double standard of incivility. My proposal: double down with more comparisons of homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia and then choose a new campaign slogan: "More civility, less civil rights." The conservative base will love it.

On the other hand, I've seen some conservative blogger who dislikes Santorum because he supports food stamps. So maybe the faction of the Republican party that hates poor people more than it hates gay people will kick him out in the primaries and the interwebs will have to stop making horrible puns.