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The Luxury of ‘Picking Your Battles’

Economics, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.”
– Sun Tzu

Choosing which battles you fight and do not fight has been a cornerstone of strategy probably for as long has strategy has existed. One can look at the history of military strategy* as a sequence of wrestling** matches writ large, with each of the opponents trying to force the other to fight on their terms.

More recently, the strategy of ‘Picking your battles’ has been applied to many other, more mundane confrontations. When someone accosts you on the street, when the phone company charges you two dollars extra, when that person bumps into you in the supermarket.

And this makes sense. You don’t want to go through your life fighting or arguing with everyone all the time.

But what if you don’t have a choice?

What if every time you walk downtown near your office by yourself, people make sexual comments about you? What if you’re never selected for a job interview because of your name? What if every time you express yourself online, you receive death threats?

Yes, you could avoid doing all those things, or you could do them and simply endure, but is that really picking your battles? You’re having wars of attrition waged against you every day.

Huge parts of the modern reading of ‘pick your battles’ implies that you can win some, or some substantial portion of them.

If you can’t win most, or even any of them, can you really be said to be ‘picking your battles’?

Having battles that you can win is a privilege. Choosing which battles to fight is a privilege. Even choosing which battles to choose from is a privilege.

A privilege that not everyone has.

*This is assuming they knew what they were doing…History is rife with examples of belligerent parties who did not know what they were doing***.

**Perhaps more ‘push hands’ than wrestling…

***Of course, this is often difficult to know with certainty, as the victors generally write the history books…

It takes privilege to be able to do this…

Resisting Regulatory Capture

Economics, Nostalgia, Organizing Systems, Politics

Most people, if you asked them, would agree that corruption is a bad thing, and should be reduced or avoided. Most of them will not have heard about Regulatory Capture, though.

‘Regulatory Capture’ is the process by which an industry ‘captures’ the governmental bodies which are assigned to regulate that industry. It is generally thought to happen because of two factors:
– The people who are assigned to perform the regulatory tasks spend most of their time talking to people in the industry they’re regulating
– There are huge financial incentives for the industry to persuade the regulators to change the rules in their favour

These rule changes can take many forms. They can be laws, regulations, even constitutional changes.

The rule changes can diminish penalties, replace jail time with company-paid fines, make it more difficult for new competitors to disrupt oligopolies or monopolies, lessen oversight or protections against fraud, and many other forms.

The bribery or coercion of regulators can also take many forms. Most countries have rules in place which make it difficult to perform the obvious ‘money in brown paper bags’, but there are many other ways to induce regulators to rule* in your favour:
– Many industries have laws about the amount of time between when you can work in an industry and when you can regulate it (and vice versa), but this does not seem to have stopped anyone
– Many industry consortia write the regulations** which regulate them, so the regulator (who may feel overworked and underpaid) doesn’t have to spend the time to do so.
– Most people have family or other tribal associations of some sort. A spouse’s job has been suggested to influence even supreme court justices
– The politicians who are in charge of the regulators are often persuaded by campaign contributions
– Various illegal inducements such as drugs or ‘favours’
– Threats, extortion, etc. may also come into play

So, how do we solve this? The closest we seem to have come to this is an interlocking set of checks and balances, including freedom of speech, lobbying laws, freedom of information acts, and the occasional incorruptible investigator.

We haven’t solved this yet, and it might not be solvable, given the power dynamics. Next time, we’ll talk about some current and possible solutions.

*Ha!

**There is a lot to be said for including industry as major stakeholders when regulations are written, as for the same goal, there may be very different ways to implement them, which would have vastly different costs.

Analysis: Fractional Home Ownership II

Analysis, Economics

EDIT: The previous post: http://nayrb.org/~blog/2016/01/18/analysis-fractional-home-ownership/ got the most feedback ever (other than the immediately preceding one about facebooking pictures of your kids). It turns out that all you need to do to get lots of comments is to make a post with an incorrect and not-completely-thought-out graph, and everyone eagerly posts corrections and ideas. (It was actually a really fun discussion… 😀 )

– SG mentioned that the curve of the graph is likely off, suggesting a convex curve and swapping the axes, also suggested looking up Michael Raynor and Clayton Christensen.
– AB asked exactly where fractional ownership fit on the graph (my statement was it could fit anywhere on the graph, but that’s not really that helpful, is it. 😀 )
– PD (among others) pointed out that I somehow missed labeling the X-axis (it’s ‘ownership’, which is not quite correct, it should be ‘negative ownership’ or something similar, and it got lost in the .dwg to .png translation)
– DR brought up a kind of ownership which exists in Montreal called ‘divided ownership’, which is a form of co-ownership where a group of people own a building

So, to address these comments:

Interestingly, I had always pictured tradeoff diagrams like so:

cost_vs_one_over_benefit_with_isoscience_lines

Where your goal was to get as close to the line which represented the current best technology. (I’ve called these ‘iso-science lines’, for lack of a better term. More on these later.) This way of looking at it also suggests that there’s a ‘good enough’ for your application, that your science/technology may get you closer and closer to infinity, but most of your users will likely not care. (This may be most useful for consumer commodities.)

You might find the following graph more useful. It jibes better with my mental model of commodity CPU performance curves from when I was growing up.:

cost_vs_benefit_with_isoscience_lines

This has benefit increasing without bound, which may be more useful for many other applications. You could also see how the curves could have technological advances more in the cost or benefit directions, such as how the 787 looks very much like the 767. It’s much more fuel efficient, but travels at about the same speed:

http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

Anyways, back to fractional house ownership. I’m not entirely sure how to measure the utility of different types of housing ownership…You could look at financial benefits over time, but what horizon do you look over? You could look at the ‘pride of ownership’, but that is difficult to quantify.

But I had to quantify it somehow, so I put a condo at about twice the ‘utility’ as an apartment, then townhouse, semi-detached, detached linearly improving from there*.

house_prices

As you can see, you get a similar diminishing returns curve as we saw before, but that could just be because we were looking for/expecting that.

Let me know what you think in the comments! 😀

Data from:
5-year variable rate of 2.7% from:
https://www.tangerine.ca/en/borrowing/tangerine-mortgage/index.html

Average rental rates of 1 bedroom $1085 and 2 bedroom $1269 from:

Average apartment rental rates across Canada

Average house prices of:
– Condo 410k (1878/mo @ 2.7%+ condo fees of about $600/mo)
– Townhouse 520k (2382/mo @ 2.7%)
– Semi-detached 660k (3023/mo @ 2.7%)
– Detached 1.0M (4580/mo @ 2.7%)
http://www.thestar.com/business/2015/09/04/average-gta-house-price-up-10-in-august.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/02/19/condo-fees-toronto-canada_n_6714396.html

*Utility:
– Renting 1-bedroom apartment: 2
– Renting 2-bedroom apartment: 3
– Purchase of Condo: 5
– Purchase of Townhouse: 6
– Purchase of Semi-detached: 7
– Purchase of Detached: 8

WEREDOMO

Fiction, Internet Culture

The changes were happening again.

He felt his mouth opening wider. Usually, it stopped here. Once or twice, he had felt his teeth changing texture to something…softer(?)…but this felt different.

In fact, ‘felt’, that was the best way to describe it. His teeth were getting thinner and softer, and he felt them getting more flexible, in contrast to his jaw, which he was having more and more trouble moving. He reached up and twiddled his teeth. It felt odd feeling them move like that. And yet he didn’t feel disturbed, just an overwhelming sense of calm with something underneath he couldn’t quite discern.

But more changes were happening. As he was reaching to test his teeth again, he felt his arm receding into his body, looking down at it, it was changing colour, growing some kind of brown cloth covering.

Now it was covering the lower half of his body, he felt himself shrinking, or was the world growing? The world became blurry, and seemed to change, becoming brighter and more colourful.

Suddenly, everything sharpened. The fog in his head cleared, and he could tell what was underneath. He felt happy, he felt the need to dance, to yell!

Words floated in front of his eyes:

“Who is ‘Mr Yusagi’?” he asked himself. And why was there a television in this grassy field? Best to go check it out. He walked over to the television.

It’s on! But there’s no power cord?

The announcer on the screen seemed to look directly at him:

“Domo, Konnichiwa!”

Japanese? Wait, was he in some kind of Japanese cartoon? That would certainly explain the brightly coloured backgrounds, but what had happened to him?

He spied a path at the edge of the field, and walked towards it, swinging his arms and yelling happy words. Maybe this ‘Mr. Yusagi’ would have some answers.

The Power of Godzilla

Fiction, Idle Speculation, Science!

The waves existed, as they have since the Earth had oceans and spun enough to displace them. It has been said that the quest of the waves is to travel all the way around the world, and that erosion of rocks is their slow and patient way to achieve this. Some say that they are opposed by the forces of fire and earth, who combine to make volcanoes, or to move plates, to create mountains and more land. But this is a story of a smaller disturbance…

The surface waves felt a new object coming up from below. The object reached the air, and the waves lapped around it, trying in their patient way to erode it, to continue on their traveling quest. The waves noticed that the object was green, not in the green way of tropical waves, but the green of an algal bloom out of balance. It had spikes, a crest, but the waves could no longer crest it, as it was rising further out of the water. A round head emerged, eyes open even underwater, showing that this creature was at home in salt water. This creature was larger, much larger than the largest of the underwater singers that the waves loved to listen to as they swam the oceans. The waves especially loved the large underwater singers because they would surface to take air, and sometimes even play with the waves, but that is another story, for now the green creature was emerging from the water.

The head was emerging from the waves. As the eyes passed, the waves saw that they were in pain. The waves did not like seeing creatures in pain. But they did not understand. So they watched, and waited, in their endlessly patient way.

A neck, arms, a torso emerged, then finally legs and a tail. The creature, now walking, still in pain, was walking towards the shore. The waves could see the small hairless creatures fleeing from the green creature. Sirens from the land. Screams of pain from the beast.

Doctor Kayama’s team was ready. They had analyzed all the recordings from the creature, and decoded a language they hoped to use to communicate with the beast. They rushed to the power station nearest the beach, as that was where the beast always attacked. They had increased the defenses and the walls, but it was never enough.

[The pain, the pain, the pain!] the beast cried. [Make it stop!]

It was now or never. Setting the speakers to maximum power, the team roared their own broadcast.

[What is the pain? Why do you always attack us?]

[The pain! The Noise! Why do you make that noise?!?]

[What is the noise?]

But it was too late. The beast had reached the power plant and was destroying the generators, as it had so many times before.

Reduced to battery power, the team only had enough power for a few more words:

[Why do you do this?]

The beast seemed to be calming down, or was it? It turned towards the broadcast, but instead of stomping, it stopped and roared:

[It is your electrons, you make them vibrate at 180 Maakktars. It causes so much pain! Why do you not vibrate them at 216 Maakktars like the other side of the island?]

The team spoke into their translator “What do you mean Maakktars?”, but it was too late. They were out of power.

The beast, seemingly no longer in pain, plodded back to the waves, who were much happier to see it now, as it always wanted to play on the way below the surface.

The beast played with the waves for a time, then started to sink beneath, to return from wherever it came. The legs and tail were the first to sink below the surface, then the torso, the arms, and the head, its eyes now serene.

Last to sink below the waves was the crest. As it sunk below the waves, it created a small whirlpool, which, in time, became waves who re-embarked on their endless quest to travel around the world.

Hat tip: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/40nb1o/wpafter_destroying_tokyo_yet_again_godzilla/

Analysis: Fractional Home Ownership

Analysis, Economics, Idle Speculation

EDIT: This post got the most feedback ever (other than the immediately preceding one about facebooking pictures of your kids). It turns out that all you need to do to get lots of comments is to make a post with an incorrect and not-completely-thought-out graph, and everyone eagerly posts corrections and ideas. (It was actually a really fun discussion… 😀 )

I’ve followed up here:

Analysis: Fractional Home Ownership II

********************************************************

So, one of my former students just started a company doing fractional home ownership. Their theory is that there’s some middle ground between fully renting and fully owning property that they’d like to facilitate. Here’s why I think they might be right:

This is your standard engineering/product/tradeoff/price-features/etc graph that people/your customers are used to.

House_Ownership

What they’re suggesting is that the graph is really only populated at the edges* (with condominiums allowing lesser monetary costs with a reduction of ownership).

Airbnb and Uber/Lyft have monetized the space for unused housing and vehicle resources. Fractional and micro lending have started to do this for banking. Why not do this for the actual ownership of property?

People have been jointly owning property since there was the concept of property. The difference now is that we can do it in smaller tranches, and perhaps we can streamline the legal process. I think this streamlining is what will make the most difference. Condos are the closest we have in the consumer market (REITs are somewhat similar, but don’t let you own a part of the dwelling you actually live in).

It feels like there’s somewhere where this will make sense/take off, and it will have to do with the ratio between rent prices and ownership prices. A larger difference between these would give a larger space for partial ownership to work.

However, it feels like it needs a simple(r) set of easily enforceable rules, with benefits and reasons to comply for those buying and selling. I don’t know what these are yet, but I do know that all of the rules about condos are there for a reason, so it’ll have to be a really innovative contract to incentivize everyone to comply.

*Yes, I know that ownership is not absolute, but within the scope of this post, the space to the left of the graph is unreachable.

Facebook, Consent, and Pictures of your Kids

Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Politics, Thoughts on Thoughts

Earlier today, I was having a conversation with an old friend of mine about the idea that parents oversharing about their children is ‘ruining their lives’, as mentioned in this article:

http://aplus.com/a/sharenting-parents-oversharing-facebook-social-media

My initial response was to say that this was a social change that people were going to need to ‘learn to get over’, and that they should focus on doing the things they want to do, and ignoring those who want to judge them over unimportant things.

After some discussion, I realized that my opinion was coming from a place of significant privilege, not just cis/white/male/etc, but because I’d never experienced that horribly invasive mocking and worse that so often happens to people on social media.

I think this really revolves around issues of consent, and I wonder how much the posting of pictures of children without their consent is similar to giving them a hug without their consent. It could be that in a few years, this will be seen as just as important.

We have very stringent laws about privacy of medical records. Why not for photos? I’m assuming this is mostly about the ability of photographers to do their jobs and the total unenforceability of such an idea.

But if you can be denied a job because of something you did in your spare time the same way you could be denied a job because of an existing condition, why would we not extend those protections?

alt.comp.risks and Swiss Cheese

Analysis, Engineering, Nostalgia, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

If you’ve never read alt.comp.risks, you should do so. In fact, you can read the digest here:

https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/

If you don’t know what alt.comp.risks is, it is 30 years of all the things that can go wrong with complex systems (especially computers). Anyone who has done a post-mortem or incident report or accident report will familiar (if not happy) reading there. They will probably also notice that the same problems keep happening again and again and again.

Young Drivers mentioned a study* which said that a typical traffic accident requires four errors on the part of the drivers (two each). In the accident and risk analysis world, this is often referred to as the ‘Swiss Cheese’ model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

The ‘Swiss Cheese’ model is the idea that adding more layers of checks and protection can help make a system safer, as long as the holes in those layers do not align.

This is a major reason why it is just as important to investigate incidents as it is to investigate accidents. ‘Incidents’ are occasions where something ‘almost went terribly wrong’, where two or more of the ‘Swiss Cheese’ holes aligned, ‘Accidents’ are where all of the ‘Swiss Cheese’ holes aligned, and something terrible actually happened. In the Diagram below**, the ‘Accident’ is the arrow that made it all the way through, all of the other arrows are incidents, which left unchecked, could lead to accidents some day.

raeda-icam-image

Why do we not just spend our time and energy closing those holes in the ‘Swiss Cheese’ (or to making sure they don’t align)? All of that takes money or other resources***. So, given the modern legal system, most organizations balance money and safety in some way, shape, or form. This balance between resource allocation and safety is such an issue that there is an entire regulated profession whose purpose is to properly maintain the balance.

I’m speaking of course of Engineering. The perception of Engineering is perhaps of people building things, or Leah Brahms and Geordi arguing about how to make warp engines go faster, but fundamentally Engineering is about balancing safety with costs.

Probably the most pernicious obstacle to this proper balancing is the dismissal of incidents as unimportant or contained. Any incident which makes its way through 3 of your 4 layers of safety is one mistake away from a disaster, and should be treated accordingly.

*I can’t seem to find it at the moment, but I believe them, as it is consistent with my experience.

**From http://raeda.com.au/?p=115 “The ICAM (Incident Cause Analysis Method) Model Explained

***Often not stated is that spending time on safety-related things is a distraction, both in time and context switching.

The 5-Minute Standup

Agile, Organizing Systems, Software Development, Thoughts on Thoughts

Many people have written about daily standups*, and many people have written about the benefits of short meetings**.

I want to talk today about the idea of the 5-minute standup. This is an evolution of the daily standup that is part of the Scrum*** Agile methodology. I’m writing this from a Development perspective, but this could just as easily be applied to many other types of organizations.

The purpose of the daily standup as I see it is twofold:
1) Let everyone know what everyone else is working on
2) Let everyone know when someone is in trouble/blocked, so they can help

Classically, the daily Scrum standup has three questions:
A) What did you do yesterday?
B) What are you planning to do today?
C) What is blocking you right now****?

In my (limited) experience, people are pretty good about the status update part of things (what did you do yesterday?), and the forecasting part (what are you planning to do next?). You may need to explicitly ask the blocking question for a while until your team fully trusts you and the rest of the team to listen to their (often embarrassing) blockers and actually help them.

For me, I’m very much a proponent of short meetings. I love being as concise as possible (Think Ulath*****). I have an acute sensitivity for people who are uncomfortable with a situation or have checked out, and I try to do everything I can to fix that. (This makes me a good host, but it can be very tiring.) If I’m running a meeting, it will have a defined purpose, and it will be only as long as it needs to be.

I’ve found that developers especially will check out of a standup within minutes. Having a meeting of 5 minutes or less was the only way I could find to keep people engaged in a status meeting.

The way we’ve found best to run these meetings is to have the current set of tickets up on the screen, and we go through them in order. People are generally only working on one or two at a time, so it’s effectively the same as going around the circle, but with the added benefit of the visual aid. You can also do all of your ticket status changing at this time, along with asking for code reviews. Anyone who was missed then gives their update, then you break out to whatever after-meeting conversations were deemed necessary during the meeting. This way, only the people who need to be in those conversations are, and everyone else can get back to whatever else they were doing.

Some tips:
– If you find your standups routinely taking longer than 5 minutes (or 1 minute per person, max 10 people in a standup******!), try giving the most ‘detail-oriented’/rules-based person on your team the timer, and telling them to give each person no more than 1 minute to talk. It worked wonders for us. (I often do this myself, by being the most impatient one in the meeting.)
– Announcements should happen very quickly (max 30s), or over email. Discussions can happen after the standup is over.

To Recap:

Pros of the 5-minute daily standup:
– Less time
– No time spent on details, just high level, in depth discussions pushed to smaller groups
– Devs are much less likely to check out
– Not dreaded like interminable meetings
– A good outlet for the detail-oriented member of your team who cares about process, and wants to time things

Cons of the 5-minute daily standup:
– Still takes devs out of the flow, distracting them for much time before and after
– You still have to have all the one-on-one meetings to resolve things afterwards…
– It can make you think you’re having full communication when you’re not

*Interestingly, this is a very old tradition, as the UK privy council only has meetings where all members stand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_Council_of_the_United_Kingdom#Meetings

**Randy Pausch gave an excellent lecture on Time Management https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0 and the benefits of making meetings as short as your scheduling software will allow.

***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28software_development%29

****Many people would say “Is anything blocking you right now? I mostly avoid yes or no questions, as they’re too easy to dodge with a one word answer, and a lot of having effective meetings is getting people to be present and trust you and not dodge.

*****http://davideddings.wikia.com/wiki/Ulath

******If you have more than 10 people on your team, your team is too big. Note that more than 10 people can be listening or watching, if they also want an update, but there should be no more than 10 people talking, at 1 minute each.

Emotions and Control

Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Organizing Systems, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

So, I was listening to Adema’s “Everyone”, and one line in particular stood out to me:

“Why am I so angry inside my head?”

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/adema/everyone.html

A classic question that people have been asking themselves for generations, and one of the questions that we’ve been trying to answer for the next generation I imagine for as long as we’ve been trying to answer things. (It also seems to be consistent fertile ground for many genres of music…)

Every generation brings new people, angry about new things (or the same thing, again and again).

Do we have more anger in our youth than usual?

Kondratiev wave theory would suggest yes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

At least in North America, there’s been a squeeze going on for probably 20 years (a whole slew of other topics, out of scope). Add that to they standard “Is that all there is?” as you approach adulthood, and that’s fodder for whole genres of music.

But really, the original question, about trying to control the non-grey matter portions of your brain…

When I was doing safety training, I used to say that I could deal with no sleep, or crappy food, but not both at the same time, or I would get cranky.

And how do you teach the next generation to control their brain? Do you want to?

How do you educate them to control the ‘proper’ parts of themselves, while still expressing their creative and exploratory sides?