Rebane's Ruminations

Payday Loans Regulated

George Rebane

There has been a good deal of moralizing and high dudgeon about how those storefronts that make payday loans are ripping off poor people who are denied loans elsewhere.  It is claimed that the interest charged by these establishments is beyond usurious.  Now regulators are beginning to hyperventilate in a similar vein at banks (more here).

I have a very simple solution to this problem of people with no skin in the game making rules for those to whom fate(?) has consigned such a depressed lifestyle.  We start with the most acceptable presumptions that everyone should be able to borrow money in a free society that operates (more or less) free markets.  And everyone should be free to lend money at terms that they consider acceptable.

My simple solution is that all such regulators and legislators seeking to inhibit the poor from obtaining payday loans be required to remit a goodly portion (say, one third) of their investment portfolios into the capital asset pool(s) of payday lenders who will now lend under the newly prescribed, and presumably more favorable, terms that are deemed fair for that cohort of borrowers.  The regulators will then have skin in the game, and obtain a fair return for their lent dollars.  This will guarantee the most equitable terms to all concerned, and no further guidance or considerations of fairness would then be necessary in the evaluation of the new regulations.

(Hmmm..., does this approach have wider applications in the making of sausages?)

Windows 8 and PC Sales

George Rebane

Years ago when graphic displays were first coming into shipboard combat systems, as a developer of such systems we had to ask ‘what’s the best way to work with on-screen information – nominating and manipulating display elements?’  The main contending graphic input device alternatives were wired pens and trackballs, the touch screen was still in the future.  Long story short – a lot of human factors studies and experiments were done, and the trackball came out to be the best performer.  It wasn’t the cheapest solution, but just the best performer in a command and control environment during minutes tense and demanding, and during hours long and boring.

The reason was simple, the fingers are the most dexterous parts of what is called the set of human manipulanda.  And fingers at the end of a stationary and supported hand/arm can do wonders in accurately flitting the cursor around a large screen for hours on end.  Trackballs were rapidly incorporated into combat and sensor systems from the early 1970s onward.

But for commercial apps cost was a major factor, and when the cheaper mouse came along (in the mid-70s) , and PC apps finally started requiring a graphic input device for moving a cursor around on a screen, the mouse was the natural solution.  Touchscreens were expensive in the early 80s, and we used them on the new videodisc-based public information kiosks which we introduced through Disney’s EPCOT Center in 1983.  (I even designed and built a ‘peck screen’ for a pigeon-based security system in the late 70s, but that’s another story.)

So over the years the mouse has been standard equipment on PCs and other computers requiring graphic input from humans.  Touch screens got cheaper and were introduced into ‘personal digital assistants’ in the late 90s.  And now they are ubiquitous in all smart phones and handheld pad computers.  Somewhere along the way Microsoft decided to gain the march on Apple and developed touch screen functionality into the new version of their PC operating system called Windows 8, which was finally available in 2012 after many many delays.

Well, it appears that the market has said that they shouldn’t have bothered.  W8 was supposed to the cavalry coming to save the PC sales wagon train, and, instead, last quarter’s PC sales have dropped 14% as the surging iPad replaces the desktop (and even laptop) versions of the PC (more here and here).  And it looks like this trend is going to be pretty well baked in as new UI (user interface) devices like speech understanding and Google glasses (retinal projection) gain traction.  Of course, the whole UI technology is heading toward implants with direct neural connections, but that’s still a few years away.

April Fun and Foolishness

George Rebane

Nevada County poet Molly Fisk, who is also a regular essayist on KVMR and a fine lady of the liberal persuasion, and I were asked to trade our commentaries for today.  The idea was to have listeners maybe raise an eyebrow or two in fun as they heard familiar voices deliver unfamiliar monologues.  Each of us wrote a piece to be read by the other which was broadcast today.

Here is the piece that I wrote on Calvin Coolidge for Molly to read.

He is Risen!

As Christmas is the promise, Easter is the fulfillment.  Oblivion vanquished, rejoice!

Surviving healthcare better at home

George Rebane

Watching the news we were reminded that 20% of post-op patients are back in the hospital within 6 months at a marginal annual cost of almost $100B nationwide.  It is one of the biggest components in the expense of healthcare.  And we know that hospitals are very dangerous places for your health – medical mistakes kill over 100K patients annually.

So it occurred to me that a promising alternative to recuperating in the hospital would be to recuperate at home, a place that is usually much more free of all those drug resistant bugs comfortably ensconced in our hospitals.  Today, the desperate loved ones of patients essentially park themselves bedside in the hospitals to monitor what the staff and docs do and shouldn’t do.  The stories of the mistakes they catch are hair raising.  In addition, their being there provides much more attentive care to the patient who can otherwise go into early stages of starvation, bedsores,dehydration, over/under/mis medication, ... when waiting for a response from a nurse.

My solution is to bring the patient home and set him up in his own bedroom or house where a loved one is already in residence.  Bring all the electronic monitoring equipment along, and wire him up like in the hospital.  It doesn’t take much to add a smart (and tomorrow even smarter) box that communicates the whole myriad of readings to the hospital staff at the nurse’s station, and also to the cell phone of the home caregiver.  This is the caregiver who now doesn’t have to drive to the hospital, stay there interminably, and try to get some sleep in a chair.

Besides the psychological benefits to the patient, the savings in such a set up would be enormous.  The caregiver can be taught fairly quickly to do almost all of the routine maintenance of the patient, including administering certain drugs and procedures under the direction of healthcare professionals at the hospital or the attending physician’s office (recall that we have video monitoring now).  When some combination of patient signs triggers an alert, the professional can contact the at-home caregiver to instruct him what should be done.  And, of course, if the situation is beyond the ken or capability of the caregiver, then a professional can be dispatched or the patient brought in.  But that is a low probability event over the aggregate population of such recoveries.

Yes, there is always the chance that something can happen to the patient that requires the full facilities of a hospital’s emergency response capability, but again look at the probabilities.  No doubt some patients will die if this policy is implemented nationwide.  But I submit that the attendant morbidity and mortality rates of this approach will be insignificantly different from those encountered in hospital recoveries.  And none of this home care will take place without the full permission of the patient or his responsible agent.

However, such enlightened approaches to healthcare will make a difference only when the informed patient (or agent) is allocating his own healthcare dollar.  The perception of spending other people’s money in any medical undertaking will only continue the insane policies of today’s government mangled healthcare markets that promise to become more so as Obamacare increases its cold embrace of the nation's ill and infirm in the coming months.

Two greats take their leave

George Rebane

Contemplate your god or oblivion, for it will reveal that you will never experience mortality, and at least in that sense you are indeed immortal.

Concert pianist Van Cliburn is dead at 78.  Cliburn won world fame in 1958 by taking first prize at the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow at the height of the cold war, a competition designed to highlight Soviet culture and musical talent.  And he did it playing nothing less than Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1 (more here).  This was also a time when I was starting to mess around with the piano at idle moments.  I was blown away by his interpretation, one that has since become a world standard. 

After Jo Ann and I started dating, his artistry remained a part of our lives for years afterward.  We were both classical music fans and shared a habit with many other UCLA couples of going up into the Bel-Air heights during evenings now and then to enjoy the city panorama.  The radio was tuned to KFAC, the LA classical music station, and as we settled in at 8pm the Gas Company Concert came on with the triumphant opening phrases of Tchaikovsky’s Number 1 – talk about motivational music.  Two hours later the program’s end was again announced, this time by the concerto’s second movement, the languid refrain from its Adagio – it was time to start getting things together to go down the hill and back into the real world.

And so it went during our undergraduate years as Sputniks launched, Camelot came to Washington, and Cuba and Berlin vied for the touchpoint for WW3.  Throughout it all Van Cliburn played his masterful rendition every weekday night for Los Angeles audiences that also included some young couples on local mountain tops in cars with foggy windows.  Thanks for the memories Van – RIP.

And yesterday we also buried Leo.  Leo was a cat to behold, given to us by friends as a frisky little ball of black fur nineteen years ago.  We lived on Saddle Peak Rd in the Santa Monica Mountains.  This was wild country where on the roads or in your driveway you could see pumas, bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, owls, eagles, hawks, deer, …, and rattlesnakes galore.  We always took in cats and had lost over 30 of them to local predators (mostly coyotes and owls) by the time Leo arrived.  Cats were our first line of defense against rattlers, territorial critters that eat the same things that cats do.  The idea was to limit their food supply to keep their population down (in ten years we reduced the annual rattler kill rate from seven to one), but the kitties paid a price for our living in God’s country by also becoming part of the food chain.

Ruminations - 19feb13

George Rebane

TV weathercasters will soon need AGW certification if they want to talk about climate change on the air, according to a new initiative started by a South Carolina meteorologist.  On National Propaganda Radio this morning was a segment on climate change lamenting that it’s not getting much traction in the public mind lately.  The piece made clear that there was only science behind promoting the ‘reality’ of AGW, and just “disgruntled” troglodytes who refuse to accept truth.  Nowhere was there a hint that the debate is not over, or that there were any material weaknesses in the popularized AGW case (here).

So, to bring the public around to a more compliant stance on AGW, there is work afoot for broadcast weathercasters to get certified on climate change before they can talk about it on their weather forecasts.  Of course, certification will require that you swallow Team Gore’s version of the UN’s IPCC reports hook, line, and sinker.  As for the public, we recall the song from South Pacific, “… they must be carefully taught.”

Public debate, as often reflected in the blogs, seldom leads one away from heat to light.  In the 19feb13 WSJ’s section on healthcare you can see blaring examples of dysfunctional discussions.  For example, “Should all women over 40 get annual mammograms?” is answered YES with “catching cancer early improves odds of beating it”, and NO with “the benefits are small but the costs can be great.”  Now there’s a case of apples and oranges that is oh so common in the public round.  The winner of such debates will be determined by hyperbole, emotion, and repetition.  And some idiot legislator will then introduce a bill to get government involved at great cost to most, with resulting benefits to the fewest.

No one, it seems, can gather their wits and ask ‘what objective are we trying to achieve with mammograms?’  A quantifiable answer to that would definitely refine the responses and expose the charlatans in the ensuing discussion.  But that kind of process makes it much harder to manage the sheeple.  (For more, google ‘Principled Negotiation’ or here on RR.)

Tonight at the Grass Valley Veterans Center is the Oathkeepers presentation given by co-founder Stewart Rhodes that I reported on last Friday.

Administrivia – I’m now in the heat of finalizing the test and solution versions of TechTest2013 that always requires a lot of equations and figures (see past tests here).  The test will be given at NUHS on 23 March 2013.   Until this effort is put to bed, I may be a bit tardy in my usually pithy comment responses, and also infrequent in new postings of the high quality RR readers have come to expect ;-)

Numbers get a (confused) boost

George Rebane

The importance and magnitude of EVERY social problem lies in its numbers.  If you don't understand the numbers and how they relate, all you can do is emote about the problem.

RR has argued from the start that applying the tools of the systems sciences is critical to the solutions of all social problems (see end notes below).  For obvious reasons, also presented and discussed in these pages, the Left has been the major opponent of bringing analytics and numeracy to bear on social issues – this for the simple reason that it deflates their emotion based fuzzy rhetoric which they use to promote their collectivism.

Well, now we have no less than Bill Gates coming out in a major piece promoting quantitative “measurement” for solving worldwide problems ranging from high infant mortality to the classroom evaluation of teachers.  His proposals contain absolutely no new ideas, but what is important is that the world’s most famous billionaire and philanthropist is going public with 'new' notions the youngest of which is about fifty years old.

In his ‘My Plan to Fix The World’s Biggest Problems’ there is no plan presented, save the exhortation to start measuring and recording things to do with the problem that you’re trying to solve.

For reasons unknown, Gates does not make clear the difference between a utility function or figure of merit (FOM), that would serve as an objective or goal or to define ‘good’, and the measured attributes that go into the FOM.  Perhaps it’s because the piece was written for broad audiences who would be confused by such nuances.  However, regular RR readers should not suffer similarly.

A clarifying example might serve here.  Consider buying a car from the many models offered – which one to buy?  To keep it simple, the only attributes you consider important are its top speed and cost.  Somehow you have to trade off these contentious attributes since the faster cars cost more.  The tradeoff is performed in your formulation of the cars’ FOM which combines the numerical values of each car’s speed and cost.  Then you can collect the numbers for the cars, calculate their FOM values, and pick the one that for you yields the maximum utility.  (For you phormulaphiles, a typical FOM formulation here might be FOM = weight*(mph top speed) + (1 – weight)*(K$ cost), where weight is a number between 0 and 1 that reflects your speed/cost tradeoff.)

And here’s rub and the benefit – the adoption and expression of every FOM or utility function is completely subjective for whatever problem you’re solving.  The FOM captures your values, judgments, experience, likes/dislikes, and even constraints on what can be done.  And such explicit FOMs can do the same for a government, community, or a corporation (business has been using them for decades).  Gates is finally saying to America that we have to approach problems with systems thinking if we want to make progress.  Continuing with the Left’s approach of “issues activism” based on selected anecdotes and fuzzy emotionalism, while rejecting data and a common understanding of ‘good’, will not accomplish much, and has gotten us to where we are now.  (That last italicized bit I added because Bill Gates couldn’t.)

The belated call for such quantitative approaches is encouraging, even though it might turn out to be just more relieving yourself over the windward gunnel.  I hope not.  Read the article.

End Notes:  For a brief summary of RR postings related to reasoning and systems thinking, I have culled the following short list.  More can be found filed in RR’s ‘Science’ and ‘Science Snippets’ categories.

'Economic Development in Nevada County'
'Systems Science Rules (almost)!'
'Healthcare Utility Metric with Scriptural Underpinnings'
'A Thoughtful View of Climate Change'
'Why Reason Fails'

MOOCing a Bachelor’s degree

George Rebane

A quick update on a major developing theme in education – the massively open online course or MOOC.  I last reported on this progress earlier this month (here).

While MOOCs are providing tens of thousands of online students with low cost education and certification in various areas, they have yet to be accepted as a sufficient means of getting a baccalaureate degree.  Well this is about to change.  In today’s (25jan13) WSJ we learn (here) that the University of Wisconsin has launched a program wherein taking MOOCs and passing online tests, a student can earn a BA or BS degree.  What’s more, the university is accepting the student’s experience and knowledge, as demonstrated through testing, as sufficient requisites for certain parts of the accredited degree it will award.

Times they are a’changin’.  The impact on the requalification of America’s workforce for the changing jobs landscape is yet to be determined, but in my view, very hopeful.  MOOCs are the visible solution to bypass the education industry’s established and costly labyrinth for students who have the wherewithal to absorb knowledge needed for the new jobs.

Who should (not) vote? (updated 29dec12)

George Rebane

The comment stream under ‘How to Protect School Children in Schools’  is another long one which inevitably becomes a bit hairy by developing threads that start covering the waterfront of issues of interest in these times.  Voter qualification was a thread that, to the best of my knowledge, appeared through some process of immaculate conception.  While entirely appropriate to the season, that thread diverts quite a bit from the posted topic and deserves its own venue for discussion.  This is it.

My long held position has been that more than being able to fog a mirror should be required of a US citizen before he is allowed to vote; even more than gaining a majority of 18 years, or not having been convicted of a felony, or not being institutionalized as a mental incompetent.  In short, there should be some intellectual and/or cognitive skills that the citizen should demonstrate that may even alleviate the majority and/or mental incompetency requirements.  But what would these skills be and how would they be measured and certified?

Our Founders recognized similar requirements and left it to the states to set the specifics.  Many required the demonstration of substance through ownership of land, or commercial interest, or wealth.  Various levels of these were judged to be a sufficient proxy for some minimum level of intellectual and cognitive skills.  Later, and mostly under Jim Crow laws, specific tests were imposed that required literacy (gasp!) and a basic knowledge of US civics.  These were struck down under various civil rights rulings.

So now we have a nation of voters who are 40% functionally illiterate, almost totally innumerate and innocent of science, and possess no essential knowledge base of how their governments at any level are constituted and work.  These people are supported by certain of our political minions as long as they can be reliably convinced to vote for bigger government, concentration of federal power, and more transfer payments paid for by higher taxes from the producing class.  And their proportion, as demonstrated by the last election, is such that we are now way past the tipping point at which democracy begins to devour itself.

So, before I taint the discussion with my own prejudices on voter qualifications, can you dear readers present any reasonable basis for change, if any, and if so, what kind?

[29dec12 update]  This post’s comment stream is now mature enough to detect some trends in how the title question is being answered.  First, what some of the progressive readers have confused are the orthogonal notions of 1) what improvements could/should be made to the voting franchise that is granted to some citizens, and 2) what is the likelihood that any given set of changes to voter qualifications would actually be adopted.