Cleaning Up an IT Mess

So you have a shiny new job managing the IT infrastructure for Acme Widgets Inc, a company that has been in business for decades. You have barely sat down at your desk when the telephone rings. You pick it up but before you can utter a canned greeting, you find yourself being berated for some random failure of something you haven’t had time to even learn about. You shrug and dive in and eventually manufacture a solution to the problem. No sooner have you done that than the telephone rings again with another irate user. And so passes your first day. And your second. And your third. And your thirtieth. And your enthusiasm. Continue reading “Cleaning Up an IT Mess”

Is the Earth Really Doomed?

If one listens to the currently fashionable hype, the entire planet is doomed simply because some primate creatures are muddling about on and near its surface. The hype can be succinctly summed up with the following statement: “ZOMG! The Earth is Doomed!” But is it really? Sure, if you take a sufficiently long term view. Eventually, the Earth really will be doomed as a result of proton decay if it somehow survives the death of the Sun. But let’s consider things on a smaller time scale than cosmic or even geological time. Continue reading “Is the Earth Really Doomed?”

On Debt Ceilings and Defaults

There has been much commentary about the furore in Washington, DC. The US Treasury is running out of credit because it has reached the maximum it is allowed to borrow (the “debt ceiling”). Congress can fix that by raising the debt ceiling. However this would require cooperation between both houses and the President. And this is not happening. As I write this, the wrangling continues with no end in sight.

For the past week or so, the big “D” word has been bandied about. Is the US Treasury going to default? Is it going to miss interest payments on bonds? Or is it going to do something else? Or is it simply going to be business as usual because Congress raises the debt ceiling?

First, let’s consider if the debt ceiling is raised. That will obviously stave off immediate consequences. However, unless spending comes under control, the whole drama will repeat itself in a few years. The US nation debt will continue to grow at an alarming pace and that growth will likely accelerate as the US population continues to age. So raising the debt ceiling is a temporary measure at best. At least one commentator has suggested that by 2015, things will be looking quite bleak, even in this scenario.

Now, suppose the US Treasury defaults on its obligations, or part of them. This would, of course, have far reaching consequences. The precise magnitude and reach of those consequences is difficult to predict, however. It will certainly cause a major shakeup in the world financial markets as the lemmings who have bought into the USD as a reserve currency flock to another currency to use as such (the Euro? Something else?). It could even touch off another round of “depression” (the other “D” word).

So, it seems that defaulting is not a good option in the short term though it might turn out better in the very long term. It also seems that raising the debt ceiling without changing the status quo is only a very short term solution. Is there another option?

Well, there is. The US Treasury could actually issue more money. That’s right. I said “print money”. Now I can hear everyone screaming at me. That’s bad. It will lead to runaway inflation leading to bread costing $25000 per loaf. There is no way printing more money is going to help! But if you will bear with me long enough to explain, you may find the result interesting.

What is the purpose of the US Treasury borrowing money? You may think it is to meat its obligations when it is short. And, on the surface, that would be correct. However, the net effect of the Treasury borrowing money is to increase the amount of money in circulation. This happens through the magic of fractional reserve lending, which I will not explain in detail here as there are many sites which expend a great deal of effort explaining it. Think about what I just said. The US Treasury is actually adding money to circulation by borrowing money. (See www.positivemoney.org.uk for an explanation of the mechanics and why this is a bad idea.)

Now that we’ve established that the US Treasury borrowing money is actually increasing the circulating money supply, let’s consider the option. Printing money also increases the money supply, but it does so directly. No magic is required. No fractional reserve lending. And, best of all, no hidden interest costs to cover later. (Borrowing to create money using fractional reserve magic requires continual inflation to simply stave off collapse.) And here’s the best part. There is no need to increase the debt ceiling because this new money would not be borrowed from anywhere.

To answer the runaway inflation concerns, this is easily handled by limiting government spending to something reasonable. If the current level of spending is not causing runaway inflation, then financing it by printing money instead of borrowing money will not either. And printing money instead of issuing bonds will have the net beneficial effect of reducing annual operation costs by eliminating interest payments over time. While these interest payments may be a fairly small fraction of the overall budget, when you are facing a debt crisis, every cut matters. You do not solve personal financial woes by eliminating your biggest expense (housing probably), but by cutting a bit here and a bit there until it adds up to enough to balance the books. The same applies to a government. Reduce debt service costs as part of an overall strategy to reduce the deficit. Every dollar saved by reducing debt servicing is one less dollar that needs to be cut from social security or health care or which has to be raised through additional taxes.

I’ll leave with one final note about printing money as a solution. It is critical that printing money not become the primary mechanism by which governments fund operation for that way leads to runaway inflation. Instead, the government must fund its operations at a level that keeps new money creation at a level that maintains inflation at an approximately neutral level. That is, enough to keep the economy liquid and no more. Thus, balanced budgets are still needed and are, in fact, critical.

The positive money site I mentioned above talks about much of this from the perspective of the United Kingdom, and without reference to debt ceilings. However, the basic concepts still apply, regardless of the specific implementation referenced. In this particular case, the United States and the United Kingdom have similar enough structures that the same problems and solutions generally apply.

 

Canada Post Shutdown

Canada Post is currently not operating. That means that no mail is being delivered anywhere in Canada. This is, of course, only the most recent development in a long running feud between CUPW and Canada Post.

For the tl;dr crowd: the lockout is justified on purely economic grounds that arise from the consequences of CUPW’s rotating strike action.

Now, I have not kept up with the precise details of the dispute. CUPW may well have legitimate grievances which Canada Post is not addressing. On the other hand, Canada Post may well have legitimate concerns that CUPW refuses to concede. Rather than focusing on the relative merits of the two sides in the dispute, I want to talk about tactics.

It used to be that when a union or employer decided that bargaining was not working, a total strike or total lockout would happen. This would be painful for both sides – the employer because operations are halted and the employees because the longer the strike continues, the more likely they can’t make their mortgage payments and other obligations. This state of affairs can be seen as a disincentive for either of these actions to be taken so they are only taken as a last resort.

CUPW’s tactics this time, however, were short localized strikes affecting one or more areas for a day or two. The idea behind it is obviously to hurt Canada Post without decimating the earnings of their members since they would still be paid their usual wage for the days worked. It also has the side benefit that mail still gets delivered if more slowly. The problem, however, is that it imposes substantial costs on Canada Post with relatively little cost on the union members. Thus, there is no incentive for CUPW to bargain in any better faith than they have been all along. In other words, it’s an extortion tactic, pure and simple.

Canada Post continued operations with this labour action going on for nearly two weeks. However, the public simply threw up their hands and said, “Why should I trust the post office to deliver things during a strike when I can use the Internet?” Thus, unlike in previous cases, the pain felt by the public is relatively minimal. In fact, a lot of people simply don’t care. As a result, because the opportunity cost of using the post office has suddenly become very high or unpredictable, many people that had simply been using traditional post because they had always done, or because it was convenient, have switched to alternatives such as the Internet. And, of course, companies like FedEx and UPS are still operating. This, of course, means that mail volumes are substantially down.

With reduced mail volumes, inability to meet delivery guarantees, and continued operating overhead, Canada Post determined it was simply not economically viable to continue operating. As a matter of fact, any well managed corporation would have made the same determination given the same equations. It would be irresponsible to continue any operation that is hemorrhaging money, crown corporation or not. Of course, I don’t think CUPW thought that Canada Post would have the guts to take the action it did simply because it is a crown corporation and, thus, has “unlimited” resources.

The end result is that all CUPW members are currently out of work and receiving “strike pay” (don’t get me started on that) and many are moaning because it’s not enough to make ends meet. That’s the bleeping point, people! Going on strike should be painful! However, all other employees of Canada Post are also currently out of work and NOT drawing any sort of strike pay! (To be fair, the same result would likely have occurred if CUPW had gone for a full blown strike in the first place due to the nature of Canada Post’s operations.)

Now, with the lockout, CUPW and Canada Post are an even footing. Nobody is happy. That means it is more likely that both sides will find a solution that does not involve one side completely yielding to the other. It also means that the longer the lockout continues, the less likely CUPW is going to get a favourable result and the more likely its members will say “Screw it! Make a deal. I need to eat!” In fact, I am reminded of the transit strike in Calgary a few years ago when the union remained out on strike for several weeks and the final deal they ended up with was actually worse than the final offer from the city before the strike. (Of course, every situation is different.)

Now, as I said earlier, I don’t know the relative merits of the respective positions of CUPW and Canada Post. Whether CUPW’s strike action is justified is not something I can comment on. Whether either side has a better case is for them to decide. What I can say, however, is that the lockout the inevitable result of CUPW’s partial strike action. It was also completely justified.

If you don’t agree that the lockout was justified, stow your emotions for a bit. Forget that Canada Post is a crown corporation. Now consider it as a stand alone entity. If that entity was losing millions of dollars due reduced work and was likely to run out of operating capital, what would happen if it continued to operate? Yes, that’s right. Bankruptcy. What good would it do the union or its members if the employer they are picketing no longer exists? How happy would the share holders be if the company did not take action to protect its solvency? Now, put that back in context. As a crown corporation, every citizen of Canada is a shareholder by proxy! We should be outraged if they do NOT take cost saving measures in this situation. And while Canada Post is unlikely to disappear due to bankruptcy, that should NOT be a factor in the decision!

So, my opinion is that the lockout is justified in light of economic realities.

As a final note, people who know me know I am vehemently anti-union. But that does not mean I always take the employer’s side in a dispute. There have been cases in the past where I have agreed that the union had a grievance and the employer was problematic. The point of this comment is to say that my opinion on the lockout has nothing to do with my views on the validity of either side of the dispute.

Time Streams in Fiction

Temporal effects are a common gimmick used in science fiction and fantasy. Unsurprisingly, it is handled with varying degrees of competence in various circumstances. In fact, aside from magic and/or technology (depending on context), it is probably the most mishandled gimmick of all.

Like with the rest of the writing process, where most writers fail is at the planning stages. They don’t think through the implications of time travel for either their characters or the universe those characters exist within. Below I am going to discuss several important factors that need to be considered when developing a time travel (or other temporal effect) story.

The most important thing to consider is causality. Your audience lives in a universe where effects follow causes linearly and usually in a straight forward manner. So do you, for that matter. What this means is that your audience will expect a chain of events that is consistent, and which makes sense. That is not to say that you have to spoon feed them every little implication or detail; most will be willing, or even pleased, to spend a bit of effort figuring out how things work. They will, however, be extremely miffed if when they finish expending that effort, they discover that you have provided them with an inconsistent mess that completely defies any concept of causality. What this means is that you must make absolutely certain that there are no holes in your causality chain that are introduced due to time travelling. This includes temporal paradoxes. Of course, this is somewhat less than a strict rule depending on other factors.

You must also think carefully about the mechanism that causes the temporal effect, whether it is one character living in the reverse order to everyone else or a garden variety time travel story or some funky temporal anomaly noodling around causing weirdness. You need not explain the physics or metaphysics behind the effect, and often it is better if you do not, but you do need to be absolutely clear about how it works and you must think through the implications of it carefully. You have to know what the effect allows to happen and what it does not. For instance, a simple time dilation field will likely only affect the speed at which time passes within the field. But this might have implications at the edge of the field. Also think about what happens if the field collapses, and why that might happen based on how the field works. Make sure you understand why you have chosen a particular effect and avoid having some cool effect happen simply to make your plot more tense. It must make sense within the existing context of your story. If it doesn’t, your audience will be left with a vague sense of confusion at best.

You should most certainly avoid adding cool sounding explanations of your effect in the event you are writing science fiction, especially if you are not a physicist involved in the field you are borrowing. Quantum mechanics is often abused to handwave away random weirdness, for instance. While this may be plausible, the more detail you give, the less plausible it is going to be, especially if you happen to get some detail of quantum mechanics subtly wrong. It’s much less jarring for the gimmick that allows your effect to be named after some fictional scientist who discovered it in your universe and leaving it at that. Or naming the gimmick after the actual effect it has.

You should also carefully consider if it will be possible to change the timeline if you allow time travel. Not allowing changes may seem like it severely limits your options for tension in the story because your characters’ actions will already be part of their own history, or it means that the future is predetermined depending which perspective you attack it from (one implies the other if you look at it carefully).  However, an understanding of how history is recorded and how many details are simply not recorded at all, and even the fact that we notice only a fraction of what goes on around us at any time, should provide you with a nearly unlimited set of stories anyway.

On the other hand, if you do allow the timeline to be changed, you need a mechanism by which that can happen. This is the part of time travel that is usually messed up substantially because it is the one that directly affects causality. There are a number of aspects of this which need to be considered. For instance, if time is changed, what happens to the original time stream? Does it still exist in a branch? Does each choice create a branch in the time stream and time really isn’t changing at all? Does anyone remember the original timeline, and if so, why? What is the effect on causality? What happens if the change leads to a paradox (“I killed baby me.”)? Who can change the timeline? Is there an objective frame of reference from outside the timeline being changed? You begin to see the picture. There are many variations, some of which work better than others. It is probably helpful if you have at least an implied explanation of what mechanisms are at play.

It is probably clear to most that it is easier to do temporal weirdness in a magical universe than a technological one since magic is generally not bound by any rules of physics. But even so, if you are going to allow time travel in your fantasy universe, you still must define exactly how it works in the context of the universe. Otherwise, you will still end up with something that rings false.

I’ll close with a few examples.

The movie Timeline gets things exactly right. While it is unclear during much of the movie, the timeline is not altered at all during the course of the adventure. It turns out that their trip to the past was always part of the past. There is no rewriting time just so everyone gets a happy ending.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s Timegod’s World is another example where things are basically sound. While the exact mechanism of the causality preservation system of the universe is not clear, it is clear that it has specific rules. There must always be one person that remembers things the way they were before the change. And, it turns out that the entire story is about the consequences of tinkering with time.

A recent episode of Sanctuary (“Carentan”) gets a time dilation field almost right. It may even be completely right depending what comes out in future episodes. However, there is a direct causality violation that seems apparent. If the time dilation field was merely causing time within to run at a vastly accelerated rate (6 years per 24 hours in this case), then collapsing the field would not have caused anything to cease to have existed. That effect seems to have been added in after the fact to add extra unnecessary tension to the overall plot, and possibly to avoid having to deal with the consequences later. It is not adequately explained how collapsing the field causes people born within to cease to exist yet does not kill or wipe out the outsiders. The comment about time resetting actually muddies the situation more rather than helping because a time reset would imply that absolutely nothing within the field even happened yet the main characters can clearly remember it. (And if none of it actually happened, how did the field get collapsed in the first place since that was done by characters within the field!)

Any discussion of temporal weirdnesses cannot avoid Doctor Who which makes no obvious attempt at internal consistency. It even goes so far as to describe time as a “wibbly wobbly ball of timey wimey stuff”. But then, that is the general point of the time related stuff in Doctor Who: it just doesn’t make sense. But even so, there are some rules that are generally followed and they do deal with paradoxes on occasion. And messing with time often goes badly or has long reaching consequences. That said, Doctor Who is most certainly not a model to emulate for time travel or other temporal weirdness stories.

Other works which I will not analyze in detail are listed below. Some get things right, some get them wrong, most get them partly right or partly wrong. Some might actually be consistent but there is insufficient information to figure it out.

  • Back to the Future
  • Millennium
  • The Girl from Tomorrow
  • The Time Tunnel
  • Vanishing Point
  • The Callahan stories by Spider Robinson
  • The Time Machine
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
  • Terminator (and sequels)
  • Star Trek
  • The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and related)
  • Time Storm
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife
  • Planet of the Apes
  • Seven Days

There are, of course, many other examples. Being familiar with what works and what doesn’t in many different examples will help you avoid the same pitfalls others have fallen into.

Of course, nothing is stopping you from writing a story that makes absolutely no sense and specifically uses every possible error when dealing with time. But if you do, expect ridicule, or indifference.

The Ivory Tower Trap

As recent developments show, the current addressing scheme on the Internet (IPv4) is nearly depleted. There is, fortunately, a replacement scheme called IPv6 which should last some time. In fact, IPv6 has been around in one form or another since the 1980s. The age of the original discussions and specifications may have some relevance to some of the current designs related to the IPv6 protocol. It seems apparent to a mildly interested observer that some of these design decisions have or will have unfortunate consequences. Continue reading “The Ivory Tower Trap”

English Spelling Reform

I’m sure almost everyone has encountered some gag related to spelling reform in English. I will not bother to reproduce any of those here as one can simply apply any reasonable search engine to the task and discover many dozens of pages discussing such schemes.

Before I go too far in this commentary on the subject, allow me to mention the wonderful article at Zompist.com that discusses the subject of English spelling. I highly recommend that anyone interested in spelling or other topics linguistic to check out that site.

Now, on to English spelling.

I’ll assume that since you are reading this that you have at least a passing familiarity with written English. If you don’t, how are you reading this? (Yes, I know there are translation gimmicks out there but they will no doubt have made a hash of this.)

In any event, it is a common complaint that spelling in English is difficult. Of course, there are basic rules which are helpful to some extent but there are exceptions to many of them and then there are exceptions to the exceptions and so on. This leads to what many have described as a complete mess.

Let’s take an example of some of the commentary that has occurred. It has been suggested at least once that under the current spelling system in English, one could write “ghoti”. Apparently that is a common word. I have to admit, however, that no matter how I squinted at it, I only managed to come up with a pronunciation that sounds like “goatee”. However, “ghoti” is alleged to be a valid spelling of “fish”. This example, however, assumes there is far more chaos to English spelling than there is. For instance, no native English speaker would even begin to think that “gh” at the beginning of a word is anything but a hard “g” sound like in “ghost”. In fact, most will not even associate the “gh” in “cough” with the “f” sound since most will have learned most of the words ending in “ough” by rote since the pronunciation varies. The “ti” runs into the same problem because it only has the “sh” type sound when it appears in specific contexts such as “action”. And even then, depending on your dialect, it may sound like “ch” rather than “sh”. The “o” may have more justification except for the fact that it is allegedly from the “o” in “women” which is something of an aberration rather than something any English speaker will recognize as a rule. Go ahead, find other words where “o” sounds like a short “i”. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. No, when I see an “o” in the middle of a stressed syllable (which it must be if there is only one in the word), it takes one of the various sounds like in “cot” or “caught” or “coat” or what have you. It does not even degenerate into a schwa, stressed or not.

Let’s leave aside the fact that English spelling is considerably more regular than the spelling reform advocates wish it to be. English has a far bigger problem for spelling than the complexity of the current system. This particular problem must be solved by any replacement system. The fact that no replacement system has gained any real traction is suggestive that this particular problem has not been solved. The problem I am referring to is, of course, the insane number of regional dialects that exist.

While these dialects are all clearly English, their pronunciation varies wildly, particularly with respect to vowels and the letter “r”. The “r” business is easily handwaved away as the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic dialects is quite regular and need not cause any substantial trouble for a writing system. Vowel sounds, on the other hand, are critical. Have you ever wondered why “cot” and “caught” are spelled differently? If you haven’t, then your dialect distinguishes between the two vowels. If you have, then your dialect doesn’t. A trivial amount of research and thought reveals many dozens of such examples between varying dialects, and that only counts the major ones. It turns out that the vowel variance between dialects, even within a single country, simply cannot be represented uniformly by any spelling system. There are too many variations. The Zompist link above talks about that problem.

So any reformed spelling system for English must have the following characteristics to be useful:

  • It must be regular and straight forward to learn.
  • It must be applicable to all dialects of English to be useful. After all, if only one region can read the particular spelling, what’s the point of it?

Let us return to the current spelling system. It certainly has irregularities but the vast majority of words do follow known patterns which can be identified by readers with little effort, to the point that even most unfamiliar words can be pronounced with a bit of thought and practice. It does, however, have its warts, particularly with respect to the vowels, but there are also some issues related to consonant sounds.

As discussed above, the vowel problem is not truly solvable. However, since English has such a complex vowel system, it was never really going to be solvable anyway without the addition of letters to the alphabet or the introduction of diacriticals. (Try enumerating all the different vowel sounds you use in common words; ignore how the vowel is written but rather listen to how the word sounds compared to others. You may be surprised how many distinct vowel sounds you find in your own dialect.) I contend that it is not the vowels that cause the trouble anyway, but the irregularities with consonants.

Consonant sounds do tend to be more consistent across dialects and where they vary, they tend vary due to vowel variance and they tend to do so in predictable, and natural ways. The consonants in English are relatively simple and, for the most part, have perfectly simple means of expression. For instance, the “k” sound or the “s” sound or the “z” sound or the “t” sound. However, there are extra ways of writing such sounds which tend to confuse the issue. As a common example, why is “ph” needed as another way to spell “f”? Why does it matter that the “ph” words come from Greek? We are not speaking Greek nor are we using the actual Greek alphabet so why keep an archaic spelling? After all, “fotograf” is as clear as “photograph”. But that one is not a particular problem for reading English, only writing it. Let’s take the letter “c” as a real example. It sounds like “s” sometimes and “k” other times. Why is that needed at all? Simply replace it with “s” or “k” as appropriate! There are many other examples of such irregularities which have crept into the language for various reasons ranging from aesthetics to laziness to spelling standardization going one way in one part of the world and another in another part.

My contention is that if we were to clean up the mess with consonants some, English spelling would become quite a lot easier. It seems to me that a great deal of the variation in spelling for various sounds exists in the consonants rather than the vowels. If there was only one way to write “f” and only one way to write “sh”, then even with vowel confusion, one might be able to at least guess what a “fosh” is. At the very least, “fosh” looks like it could be English where “ghoti” looks foreign.

There is one important further note that I feel I should add. I have to this point completely ignored the issue of foreign words coming into English. Aside from the consonant confusion we inherited from various sources, there is a much bigger issue with loan words. Almost all of the confusion with spelling in English could be eliminated if load words were respelled to follow standard English phonetic rules! Why should I need to know that “gila” is actually pronunced “heela”? It should not matter where “gila” comes from; it should be spelled according to standard English rules when it is being written as an English word. If one must represent it as its original language source, it would be more properly written gila (note that italics to denote a foreign word).  The same thing should apply regardless of which language the word or phrase came from. For instance, “maître d'”. I usually hear it pronounced in English as “maiter dee” so why do we not write it that way?

Since I have, as is usual, blathered on at great length, allow me to summarize what I believe we should do for spelling reform.

  • Keep the current alphabet and basic spelling rules for basic English words
  • Do not mess about with the vowel representations at all because any such effort is doomed fail; there is simply too much vowel variance between dialects
  • Clean up some of the more obvious extra spellings of various consonants. We can replace such things as “ph” with “f” and “c” with “k” or “s”. “x” is another candidate for complete replacement. Also, we can make all hard “g” sounds “g” and all soft “g” sounds “j”. There are other things that could be done to improve consistency among the consonants.
  • Naturalize the spelling of all foreign loan words to follow the standard rules of English spelling and phonetics where possible. The rules of English spelling are sufficiently flexible that a great many foreign sounds can be spelled without overloading existing spellings. Particular attention should be paid to consonent sounds but vowel sounds should be adjusted as well to reflect the fact that English underwent the Great Vowel Shift while other languages did not.
  • Finally, recognize that it is not possible to have a grand unified spelling system that represents all English dialects accurately. Simply accept that each dialect is going to have exceptions that speakers of that dialect will have to learn.

I hope you enjoyed my rant on spelling. As you can see, I am in favour of some reforms but not a wholesale replacement of everything. Even if none of my suggestions are taken except this one, I would be happy. When we mean the “j” sound, let us write “j”; we have the letter so why do we insist on overloading “g”? And no, “historically ‘j’ did not exist as a distinct letter” does not cut it. We have it now. Let’s use it. And no, “j” does NOT sound like “y” in English!

Okay, enough griping. I now return you to your regularly scheduled whatever it is you do.