"The first thing we do, let's kill all the (immigration) lawyers"

Yes, shockingly, this is about UK immigration.

The (tweaked) post title comes from Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 2 in a coversation between Jack Cade and henchman, Dick 'The Butcher', in scene 2 of Act IV. There are various literary takes on this line, but a contemporary (Guardianista) focus might look at it as "back-hand praise of how lawyers confront the tribalism, partisanship and herd mentality to thwart mob violence in the public sphere of society." (Wikipedia, obvs).

There is a recent FB post by the "Community Integration and Advocacy Centre", based in Hull, UK; Charity Commission No: 1170984, who are apparently immigration lawyers, and - you'll be shocked to learn - are strongly pro-immigration. They decided to dump the following spew on Facebook to be shared with their many lawyer friends, so I thought it fair game to Robert Fisk the living hell out out it:

1. “Asylum seekers are illegal immigrants.”
❌ Seeking asylum is not illegal and this includes any person seeking sanctuary who may arrive in a small boat. Seeking asylum is a legal right under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Strawman! Not all asylum seekers are illegal immigrants. That said, illegal immigrants (economic migrants, criminals seeking cover and overs) very often pretend to be asylum seekers. This is facilitated by willing UK lawyers (q.v.)

2. “They’re just here to claim benefits.”
❌ Asylum seekers cannot access normal benefits. They receive only minimal support (about £6 a day) and usually cannot work.

Gosh, living in a 3-4 star hotel in UK with living support and ability to work under the table must be terrible compared to life in Nigeria.

3. “The UK takes in more asylum seekers than anyone else.”
❌ The UK receives fewer asylum seekers than many countries, including Germany, France, and Lebanon.

Strawman: island. Come on, you're not even trying.

4. “Most asylum claims are fake.”
❌ Almost half of claims are granted at the first stage, and many appeals are successful, showing the system recognises genuine cases.

Strawman! Immigration lawyers continue to validate immigration petitions and ongoing appeals, and Santa's elves continue to vote for Christmas.

5. “Asylum seekers are a burden.”
❌ Refugees contribute skills, resilience, and cultural diversity. Once allowed to work, they support local economies and communities.

Cultural diversity like... blowing up kids at an Ariana Grande concert? We already have skilled immigration outreach for the NHS, and I would venture to say that the UK has enough Indian restaurants, delivery drivers, phone thieves, and Turkish barbers.

6. “They should just apply from abroad.”
❌ Safe legal routes are extremely limited. International law allows people to apply once they reach the UK.

And also allows them to apply from France/Germany etc. Where it's easier to deny, hence the "I'm already here!" gambit.

7. “They’re all young men.”
❌ Women, children, and families also seek asylum. Young men often travel first because the journey is too dangerous for vulnerable family members.

Strawman! They're dominated by young men. And what's the legal family reunion rate?

8. “They get housing ahead of locals.”
❌ Asylum seekers cannot choose where they live. They are housed in temporary accommodation and do not take priority over council housing lists.

3* or 4* hotels much preferred to council B+B. How about we rehouse them in the wilds of Scotland?

9. “They must stay in the first safe country.”
❌ International law does not require this. Many seek safety in the UK because of family, language, or community connections.

They know from relatives and friends that the UK is a soft touch. And their language skills aren't evident, are they?

10. “We need to protect our women and children from asylum seekers.”
❌ This claim plays on fear, but there is NO evidence that asylum seekers are more likely to commit crimes than the general population. People seeking sanctuary are often women and children fleeing violence, seeking the same protection and safety we want for our own families.

Let's revisit Southport, the Manchester Arena, and these lawyers definitely need to be the first up against the wall.

Darn that undependable "climate change"

Poor Cody Petterson is despondent:

As a child, he had happily played and hiked among these statuesque conifers, which provide shelter to black bears and black-tailed deer. By the age of 37, he wanted to do his bit to conserve and repair the land.
But in the six years since he began, California has experienced severe drought, which scientists link to global warming, and 650 of Cody's 750 seedlings died.

Gosh, that's terrible. What's happening?

In California, the effects of climate change are ubiquitous - recent years have produced record-breaking temperatures, earlier springs and less reliable rainfall.

That would indeed be worrying, what does the per-location rainfall data say? Well, although 2018 was 50% to 70% of "normal" level, it seems that 2019 has already been up to 20% above normal - and there's more unseasonably late rain to come this week. Even worse, the data shows that 2018 was particularly dry in SoCal (25% of normal), and yet is still significantly above normal this year.

So the fact that Cody (or the article's author Georgina Rannard) makes the inference that "climate change" is causing irreversible changes to the California climate seems to be less than conclusively proven by the available data.

Incidentally [prediction] this year is going to be a really bad year for fires in California. We've had a wet, long winter to allow grass to grow and thrive. We're having a second, late, belt of rain that will feed the undergrowth. Fire season is going to start late, but when it starts there's going to be a staggeringly high amount of tinder and fuel for the fires.

• Is this due to a change in weather? Sure! Very different from the past few years.
• Is it due to "climate change"? Sure! The climate is always changing.
• Is it due to man-made contributions? Definitely, but not the way you might think:

  It’s counterintuitive, but the United States’ history of suppressing wildfires has actually made present-day wildfires worse.
  “For the last century we fought fire, and we did pretty well at it across all of the Western United States,” Dr. Williams said. “And every time we fought a fire successfully, that means that a bunch of stuff that would have burned didn’t burn. And so over the last hundred years we’ve had an accumulation of plants in a lot of areas.

  (New York Times, by the way)

What's more, California has been very "successful" at preventing controlled burns, and preventing people from cutting down trees and brush near their houses to make their areas defensible against fire, which has resulted in a huge source of fire fuel right next to where people live. Great job, guys.

I assume the environmental lawyers all live in San Francisco and Sacramento, which are 95% concrete and immune to the consequences of their actions...

Taking advice from Greta Thunberg

Suppose we were looking to build a bridge, say across Avon Gorge, to give us substantially more traffic capacity than the existing Clifton Suspension Bridge has. (The Dear Reader may insert their favourite joke about needing much more capacity for traffic leaving Bristol than for entering it).

It wouldn't be surprising that a lot of people would have strong opinions on what kind of bridge we should build. Imagine, however, that a 16 year old high school student was championing a bridge structure that comprised a sequence of road segments chained together and suspended from helium balloons. Imagine that such a proposal was lauded by at least 30% of the people involved as bold, innovative, and a wonderful example of youthful thinking, despite the fact that a first year engineering student could shoot the proposal as full as holes as a particularly perforated Swiss cheese.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is where we find ourselves with young Greta Thunberg.

Young Greta is clearly sincere , and cares deeply about the environment. Unfortunately, "sincerity" is as useful a factor in planning a 21st century industrial strategy as it is in building a bridge. If a bridge builder tells me that she "sincerely" believes it will support the expected peak weight of traffic in peak adverse conditions, and be durable for a lifetime of 50+ years, I will smile and nod; if anyone I care about will be traversing the bridge, I will then ask pointed questions about stress calculations, FEMs analysis, safety engineering analysis, and all the inconvenient hard science that lets us calculate at least a ballpark probability of the bridge suddenly failing and casting a few hundred people into the abyss. Nearly anyone can be sincere. To be correct requires actual maths, materials knowledge, ability to program R / Matlab / other mathematical tool of choice and produce a verifiable assertion, given generally accepted axioms, that the bridge will meet specs.

Somehow, I don't see this level of mathematical / physical / engineering rigour coming from young Ms Thunberg. Or her singer/actor parents, for that matter.

The correct response to Greta Thunberg and her parasitic (in every sense of the word) hangers-on is as follows:

• Give us a practical - by which we mean can-be-implemented-with-existing-technologies - 20 year plan for reducing carbon emissions world-wide by X%.
• Cover the top 10 current CO2 polluters; either assume they continue on current trend, or argue why they will change.
• You cannot assume any existing technology improves by more than 4% per year for cost/efficiency.
• Include the expected economic impact on the top 10 world economies.

Greta would (quite rightly) say: "I'm 16 years old, how could you possibly expect me to answer this?"

Greta käraste, if you can't be expected to answer the hard questions, why should we listen to your easy answers?

Symbolic of California's struggle against reality - car insurance

Dear readers, it has been a busy couple of months, but I thought I'd check in after reading a barnstormer of a story from CALmatters. First, a little bit of background.

In October 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Senate Bill SB 179, which created a new gender "nonbinary" designation for all forms of state ID - including, of course, driving licenses. This then gave drivers the option of listing their gender as nonbinary. Regular readers of the antics of the Californian government will be forgiven for not falling off their chairs at the realization that this has had some unexpected consequences.

It seems that as a follow-on, California's outgoing Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones issued a regulation last month prohibiting the use of gender in automobile insurance rating. One can speculate why he did this, but (judging from the self-centeredness of transgender people I've met around here) if I were a car insurance company, I'd be giving a hefty premium bump to anyone checking that box ; perhaps this was Mr. Jones' attempt to get out in front of that problem. Ten out of ten for forward thinking, minus several thousand for economic illiteracy - of which, more later.

The proximate effect: California's Department of Insurance has decreed that auto insurance companies can no longer grant breaks in insurance rates to teen drivers who are female, or charge young men more. So if you're a woman - in particular a young woman - in California looking to insure a car, you can expect your new rate to take a sharp move skywards:

[California auto insurers' rep] Frazier said the gender of teen drivers can result in an additional cost for boys or discount for girls of about 6 percent on their premiums.

Honestly, that seems low-ball to me:

The association also cited a 2016 Insurance Institute report saying: "Men typically drive more miles than women and more often engage in risky driving practices, including not using safety belts, driving while impaired by alcohol, and speeding."

Yep, I'd agree with all of that, especially for late teens/early twenties. Given that, a 6% male-over-female premium seems really low. I'd expect it to be more like 25%. We'll know for sure when insurance renewal rolls around and California girls start yelling on Twitter.

The real prize for willful ignorance or brazen lies, however, must go to the new Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara:

Lara supports that policy, saying in a statement: “Gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation are beyond your control, and it is not a fair or even an effective way to predict risk.”

That's right, Ricky. Any insurance company could charge boys the same as girls with no additional risk, and quickly get every single boy in the country insuring their car with them, but they don't do so because they... like leaving huge sums of money on the table? Yes, that must be it.

Commissioner Ricardo Lara made history in 2018 by becoming the first openly gay person elected to statewide office in California’s history. Commissioner Lara previously served in the California Legislature, representing Assembly District 50 from 2010 to 2012 and Senate District 33 from 2012 to 2018. Commissioner Lara earned a BA in Journalism and Spanish with a minor in Chicano Studies from San Diego State University.

I guess he skipped all the finite math classes in high school. Or worse, he know's he's talking bollocks but simply doesn't care because no-one will call him on it.

Consider yourself called on it, Ricardo.

It's possible, however, that it won't actually work out in practice as Ricky intends. We saw how this worked out in Europe after a European Court of Justice ruling. [note: link from that notorious right-of-center rag The Guardian]:

But what has happened since the rules came into force? Instead of the gap between men’s and women’s premiums narrowing, as expected, it has actually widened. In 2012, men on average paid £27 more for a car insurance policy than a woman, but rather remarkably they now they pay £101 more – nearly a four-fold increase.
...
What appears to be at work is that car insurance companies set a price very much according to all the other data they can find on you – without actually asking your gender. So the quote you get back reflects the risks attached to your occupation, how much you drive, the sort of car you drive and whether you have made any modifications to the car.

Perhaps this is fine with Ricky - as long as there is the appearance of fairness, and he's protecting his favored class of people from reality, this is all Working As Intended.

CASH / CASSH 2017 and the importance of attracting funding

Both my regular readers will recall my personal crusade to investigate the Marcela Trust and why UK "charities" such as "Consensus Action Salt for Health" (CASH) and "Action on Sugar" (different branch of same charity) are being funded to stop people eating bacon.

As part of this ongoing investigation I downloaded CASH accounts for 2016-2017 from the UK Charity Commission website. Saved a copy as well for future reference. The TL;DR:

• Rebranded to Consensus Action on Salt, Sugar and Health (mission-merged title, happened some time after April 2016);
• Notes that they're associated with charity Blood Pressure UK featuring long-time CASSH reps Katharine Jenner and Prof. Graham MacGregor (and they accidentally mis-cite the charity number, it's 1058944 not 1059844);
• Blood Pressure UK burned through 30% of their funds in year-end 2017 (£210K to £140K) so it's anyone's guess how long this venture will last without a cash infusion;
• CASSH brought in £50K in 2017 - down from £215K in 2016 - and spent £250K in 2017 - up from £153K in 2016. So they're down from just over £750K in funds to a bit over £560K. This doesn't seem very sustainable long-term
• Basically, no-one is giving CASSH any significant amount of money. Tragic, really. I'd imagine that the general choke-off in government funds to "charities" is starting to bite.
• About half their expenditure is in food salt/sugar surveys; seems that those surveys aren't translating into funding for action. No-one cares about what they find.
• In summary, CASSH is going to run out of cash in the next 3-5 years unless they can find a charity or government agency with reasonably deep pockets to fund their surveys

Great quote from their annual report:

Andrea Martinez-Inchausti told attendees [of the CASH reception at the House of Commons, sponsored by Sir David Amess MP] that BRC members, such as Tesco and Waitrose, are committed to salt reduction but following initial reductions, further reductions in salt are posing a technical challenge.

Let me guess: no-one wants to eat food with near-zero salt?

In fairness, I'd note that a key difference between CASSH and the Marcela Trust is that the latter sends large chunks of its finances to a few directors in remuneration, whereby CASSH at least has the decency to avoid hosing money at its trustees. (I'm curious about where in detail the £120K of survey cash goes, but have no reason to believe it ends up in CASSH trouser pockets).

Ah, CASSH. It seems that trying to reduce sugar and salt consumption in the UK, or indeed world-wide, is very much a minority interest and not one than people are prepared to back with significant quantities of their own money. I'm sure people talk a good game, but their revealed preferences in funding show that they don't actually care. Sorry guys!

BBC shilling for illegal immigration AGAIN

I don't want to claim that this is a trend but they have recent history in this area.

Today Ms Taylor Kate Brown, DC-based BBC reporter temporarily reporting from Mancos CO, reports on the plight of Rosa Sabido who's sheltering from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the local United Methodist Church who have decided to provide sanctuary to anyone breaking the law as long as it's just related to immigration. Anyone familiar with today's UMC will not be falling off their chairs in surprise.

I searched for the word "legal" in the article, and the only instance relevant to her actions was reported speech from an ICE spokesman:

She entered the country illegally and ignored multiple orders to depart

which, I note, nothing in the article tries to refute apart from a quote from Ms Sabido:

I've been trying all this time to become a citizen... I just tried to do the legal thing and in the end all I get was an order of deportation

The "legal thing" - presumably ignoring the (repeated?) deliberate illegal immigration into the USA which was the root cause of the pending procedures?

At least Ms Brown is honest about the motivation of Ms Sabido:

It is an extreme option and one that extracts a high and potentially lasting price.

Really? What "price" are we talking about? Presumably by Ms Sabido's calculations, it's worthwhile - what benefit might she be anticipating?

Rosa keeps busy but her time in the church is about waiting - waiting for a new Congress, waiting for a potential private bill, waiting for a different president.

Basically, a broad amnesty for people already in the US illegally. How nice to have a substantial fraction of a foreign government working directly for your benefit without any thought of payment - save, perhaps, a future vote in their direction?

However, I find the hints about the church itself of particular interest:

But sheltering Rosa was never the original plan. The church had spoken to a nearby organisation that believed there were a handful of families in the area at risk of deportation, all of whom had lived there for at least 10 years.
"They were our brothers and sisters," he says.
A few people left the church over the decision, but more have joined in support of Rosa, says Paschal.

Aha. I'm sure. So the pastor led the congregation into approving the sanctuary policy in support of a few people that they knew, but it turned out to be available to anyone in the neighborhood. Who knew?

Here's the church. Total congregation: 70. That means fewer than 30 people turning up regularly for services. In a town of 1500 with a total of 5 churches that doesn't look like a particularly successful church, and honestly I don't know how 30 people's contributions are funding a full-time pastor. One assumes that the United Methodist Church - or rather, their national congregational contributions - are covering the deficit. So the pastor doesn't have to have much local buy-in, he gets the $ from the mothership. Nice job, if you can get it.

Anyway, Ms Brown is officially no longer reporting for the BBC:

*clears throat* AHEM.

So, some ~personal news ~ (please forgive me, I haven't gotten to do Personal News Twitter. Ever.):

Today's my last day at @BBCNorthAmerica. I'm heading west for a new adventure, much of it TBD.

— Taylor Kate Brown (@taylorkatebrown) August 3, 2018

so this is presumably her swan-song. If she's moving out west in a career growth move, it's almost certainly to California so presumably this article is a final burnishing of pro-illegal-immigration credentials...

Prospects for unionizing in Silicon Valley

A topic I've heard increasing buzz about at parties^[1] is the idea that Silicon Valley tech workers should be unionizing. The New York Times was discussing unionization in digital media a month ago:

Daniel Marans, a reporter at HuffPost, said the treatment of employees at digital media companies should not remain stuck in a time when websites were small and scrappy, staffed by younger workers who were happy to see their names in pixels.
"That comes to things like transparency on pay, having a decent pay scale that allows a ladder of sustainability where you can support yourself on such an income, and having due process and a guarantee of severance in the case of layoffs," Mr. Marans said.

Ooh, that looks like a great slate of demands, straight out of the union playbook. Let's unpack it.

The union demands

Transparency on pay

Know what everyone else is paid based on level - no practical scope for varying pay based on the positive or negative impact to the company. Any perceptible skew by race, gender or other minority status gets jumped on. This ties in to the next point very well.

Ladder of sustainability

a.k.a. "pay by seniority". The longer you work here, the more pay you get. No concept of "you haven't materially contributed more - or even as much - this year than you did last year, no rise for you." Per the above point, if you're a mother who's been working short hours to match with your daycare needs then you should be paid as much as a single man who's been employed for the same duration as you but has put in twice the hours. (Also as much as a single woman in the same situation as the man, which is even more invidious, but for some reason the law doesn't care about this situation.) And if you've spent 75% of your working day on Twitter supporting the Resistance Against Trump, or endorsing Chelsea Manning for Senate, that is a perfectly appropriate component of your day job.

Due process

Several states in the USA - including California, home of Silicon Valley - follow employment at will where a company can fire a worker just because they don't like them. They don't have to conduct a specific act of misconduct, it's just "it's not working out between us, goodbye!" There are carefully crafted exceptions in each state's laws, but the basic principle holds true for most employees. This violates one of the fundamental tenets of union laws worldwide - employees should not be fireable except in the most egregious circumstances.

Where you can support yourself on such an income

This refers to the lower-level employees - in practice, contractors - and the minimum wage. The more money union employees earn, the higher the dues that the union can ask for. "You're getting $15/hour? We Fought For Fifteen!" Of course, the employees who lost their jobs because their labor wasn't worth $15/hour don't really benefit from this. But screw them, right?

Guarantee of severance in the case of layoffs

As noted above, unions don't really believe in layoffs unless you're irretrievably conservative or Republican - in which case, fuck you. But if severance is unavoidable, you may be out of luck. I was surprised to learn that even in California, severance pay is not required although in practice it's present in most contracts.

Where is this coming from?

My personal opinion - which you should take with a whole bag of salt - is that this drive is a reaction to the past year's tepid (by Social Justice Warrior standards) reaction by Silicon Valley engineer peons to the cases of "hate speech" by such luminaries as Googler James Damore. The 2014 ousting of Mozilla's Brendon Eich seems to have been a misleading catalyst for social justice organizing: the perception was that the relatively small number of social justice crusaders had disproportionate power to influence media opinions and drive online lynch mobs.

The carefully union-unaffiliated Tech Workers Coalition has been pushing this line for a while:

The Tech Workers Coalition is a home for progressives in tech in the Bay Area. We’re an all-volunteer community organization. Our active participants include workers in the tech industry, members from labor union locals, community organizers, and friends.

"Labor union locals", huh? Why am I not surprised?

And now unions are concerned about the possibility of a nationwide “right-to-work” law which would effectively gut their funding. Tech workers need to stand with service workers in these fights.

Translation: we need tech money to fight the union-gutting right-to-work law. California in particular is not a right to work state - if you want to be a public school teacher, for instance, you're going to pay union dues.

Certain things are safer than others, and safer for different people. An undocumented contract worker is in a very different situation than a salaried citizen worker.

Well, there's the teeny tiny issue that the contract company is clearly breaking the law of the nation, so yes...

For tech, it’d be cool to see the strike weapon on the table. History shows us the tactics that will change the world for the better — the tactics that will not only get rid of Trump, but change the conditions that we’re all forced to live and work under.

Oh, that'll be an interesting one. Tech workers striking - "Facebook will go dark for 24 hours unless FB guarantees contractors the right to employ undocumented workers". How exactly do you expect the tech company leadership to react to this existential threat?

You should also give careful scrutiny to Coworker.org who has been publicly allying with union-oriented Silicon Valley employees. It looks to be funded principally by New Venture Fund (a $315M turnover organization whose turnover doubled from 2014 to 2015, and whose 2016 and 2017 turnover I'd be extremely interested to see. In turn they get "advised" by Arabella Advisors who have a very interesting management team with cited connections to e.g. Barack Obama's secretary of commerce, a company focus on regional food and divestment from fossil fuels.

Will it work?

What do I think? Twitter, Facebook and Google offices in the USA are going to be hit with unionization efforts in the next 12 months, initially as a trial in the most favorable locations but if they succeed then this will be ramped up quickly nationwide. This will be framed as a push to align the companies to approved socially just policies - which their boards mostly favor already - but will be used to leapfrog the activist employees into union-endorsed and -funded positions of influence. That approach neatly nullifies the increasing concern about their lack of material contribution to the company as they spend more time on Twitter and producing social justice memes than actually writing code and making the applications work better.

I wonder, though. The bulk of Silicon Valley engineering employees - who are still the majority of the company - are white, Indian and Chinese males. They are used to ruthless meritocracy from the age of, oh, eight or so. The prospect that some slacker [foreign epithet] could supplant them in promotion or pay just by unfireably hanging around the company while they sweat blood, or block them from a union-favored sinecure by dint of being black / female / transgender / identifying as a dragon is unlikely to be something they'd lie down and accept. I fear that the social justice crusaders are mistaking silence for acceptance, and the settling of accounts after the unionization effort will be (metaphorically) bloody indeed.

I doubt this will get off the ground with Apple. They are notoriously controlling and will both detect and ruthlessly act on any twitches of unionization.

For Amazon, of course, it's much more simple. Any Amazon employee pushing unionization will be deniably but publically killed by an Amazon warehouse robot. I can't imagine Jeff Bezos taking such a challenge to his authority lying down.

TL;DR - there will be a big unionization push for Silicon Valley companies in 2018, and it will go horribly wrong.

[1] You almost certainly don't want to go to the kind of parties I go to. There are no kegs, vol-au-vents, or mini sausage rolls. There's organic Chardonnay, sushi of dubious provenance, and acceptably ethnic cuisine like Vietnamese bánh cuốn and Mexican chilaquiles. I happen to like bánh cuốn, but am under no illusion that the food and beverages are based on what the guests find appealing.

Solving the sub-letting problem

The mainstream media is curiously quiet about the practice of sub-letting: where tenant X rents a property at a substantially discounted rate - typically, from the local council - and then finds a sub-tenant Y who pays them less than the commercial rate but more than the discounted rate. X makes a profit of close to 100% of the differential. If the local rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in Camden is £2400/month and tenant X gets a council rate of 30% of that value, tenant X is paying £720/month and could easily charge tenant Y £1560/month, for a monthly profit of £840. The council - or rather, its taxpayers - are spending £1680/month for zero social benefit. Meanwhile, tenant X and tenant Y are laughing at them.

The effect of this phenomenon obviously depends on its frequency. If 1 in 1000 council tenants sub-let, this is too small to worry about. If 1 in 10 tenants sub-let, this rises to a significant level of concern.

Google found a very interesting study from 2012:

In 2,120 cases, 8 per cent of the total, HJK found "red" indicators of fraud, where the registered tenant had a mortgage, bank account, active credit or utility bills at another residential address.
In 3,180 cases, 12 per cent of the total, they found "amber" indicators of fraud – active credit, bank accounts, Sky TV or utility bill records held by a person with a different surname at the tenancy address, but no such activity there by the registered tenant.

In the light of the Grenfell fire, where the "rumblings" were that a significant number of tenants were sub-letting and hence it was difficult to identify who was missing and who was not, you'd have thought that there would have been more interest from the London councils in identifying illegal sub-letting - apparently not, though...

How to fix this? The first step is to find people who are being sub-let to but are unaware of this fact (their landlord is tenant X). Every council knows which properties it is providing at sub-market rates. Have a major cross-London publicity campaign with letter mailshots to "Occupier, <ADDRESS>" at each subsidised house; each letter says

we believe that you are tenant X and are currently paying £YYY/month to the council. If tenant X is not living at this address, please provide evidence of your current rent payments to them and we will accept you as a social housing resident instead of them, at that payment level. If you do not do this, and we subsequently find you, you will be evicted with no notice and we will impose a fine of £ZZZ

Complying sub-letters get a year of their current rate, then council has discretion to ratchet up the rent significantly above rent inflation (say, 3x).

Second step: exclude most innocent council tenants. Each 6 months, random visit from a council member. They provide their ID and ask to speak to tenant X face-to-face. Crucially, they don't arrange follow-up appointments - if they can't speak to X on the day, they call back one day in each of the next 2 weeks - but they do follow suggestions about what time of day is good to catch X. If they don't speak to X within 2 weeks, X gets a black mark.

Black-marked tenants then shift to being the subjects of active detection:

• Inspect the mail going to that address: how much is addressed to X, how much to someone else? Check with utilities, specifically TV and mobile phone companies.
• If there's significant evidence of sub-letting then bring in the police, enter and inspect the property, illegal sub-letters have their property seized.
• Councils publish a bulletin every 6-12 months - sent to "Occupier, <ADDRESS>" at all subsidised housing - with statistics of sub-lets detected and seized, and the amount of money saved.
• Active publicity to residents in the same building: "do you know of illegal sub-letting in your building? Provide evidence to us at <EMAIL> and be eligible for a reward up to £5000, no questions asked.

Coming back to the root cause, though - why aren't councils more interested in detecting illegal sub-letting? It's direct theft from them, and not small amounts either. If Geraldine in accounts snaffled £10K with invoice fraud over 12 months they'd happily throw her in jail and trumpet the detection. Why aren't they similarly vocal about the sublet fraud by Darren and Beyrooz which is ratcheting up a similar loss rate? Is it just too much hassle? Is this a classic example of P. J. O'Rourke's classification of "other people's money spent on other people" - you don't care how much is being spent, and you don't care whether the receivers are getting value for money, as long as you're getting your regular salary and don't have to work too hard?

Teachers vs engineers

"If we paid teachers like we paid engineers, just think how far ahead we would be!"

If we assessed teachers on the results of their work like we did for engineers, just imagine the outcry from the California Teachers Association.

"Class X results in Maths have plummeted year-on-year compared to equivalent classes Y, Z taught by other teachers; class X's Maths teacher objectively sucks and should be demoted/fired."
"How dare you! Won't you think of the children?"

I've met some great teachers in California, but The System is very clearly working against them.

Government-class service

I was chatting at the coffee machine yesterday with a buddy - let's call him Mike - who was just back from paternity leave. He was showing me many, many pictures of his baby son - we can thank Apple and Google for making death-by-mobile-photostream a thing - and mentioned in passing that he'd spent half the morning phoning around local post offices to make a passport appointment so they could go en famille to visit his brother's family in NZ.

"But you said you're not planning to go until October?" I pointed out, puzzled.

Well, it turns out that if you're applying for your first US passport, you can't just send off a few forms. The American passport application form (DS-11) isn't as bad as you might think if you've dealt with other US government forms, but first passports and passports for any under-16 child require that you appear in person at an "acceptance facility". This, in practice, means one of a small number of passport offices, some city clerk offices, or a subset of US post offices. Passport offices allow you to turn up on the day; city clerks and post offices are appointment-only. The appointments are usually only available 3-4 days per week - not weekends, natch - and only a few hours per day, e.g. midday through 4pm.

After canvassing four or five different venues to get a handle on availability, Mike had managed to find himself an appointment for Wednesday 2nd August as the earliest available - ignoring all other scheduling concerns. That's 2 months hence.

"That's a bit tight for an October flight - why not go in person?" I wondered. Unsurprisingly Mike had already done the research, and pointed me to the Yelp reviews for Willow Glen Passport Station, San Jose as a guide to what he'd be dealing with:

#1 tip is get there early - and I mean 3, 4, 5, 6 AM early (the doors open at 10 AM). There will always always be a line. I talked to so many people who just expected to walk up and have their application processed. Even if it LOOKS like there are only 2 or 3 people in front of you, it's entirely possible they are saving a spot for additional people. We thought we were 7th in line but once everyone's relatives showed up at 10, it was more like 15th in line.
[...]
Weekends have WAY more people in line and some people have been known to show up as early as 3 AM. We took off work on a weekday just for this reason. Arriving at 4:30 or 5 AM on a weekday SHOULD ensure you're near the front of the line.
[...]
Arrived at 4:30. Nine families were there already. At 5, about 20 people. At 6 about 30 people. Total 50 numbers were issued. Therefore, after 6 am chance is small. Numbers were given out by post office employee at 9:55. Got in at 10. Finished at 11:10. Staffs are nice and professional.
[...]
Got in the line at 3.20AM. There were 15 folks ahead of me. Long line formed behind me by 8AM. A post office employee came out at 8AM and said "if the applicants are in the line, please come inside, 10 at a time, and I'll validate the forms". Chaos ensued, since most of the folks in the line were holding a spot for their families. Eventually things calmed down. The employee was out again and stated that they would only process 30 passport applications (not 30 customers).

Do you think that there might be a demand signal here? (In case you think Willow Glen is a special case, read the Eastridge reviews.)

What I took away from those reviews is that the passport station staff (generally) were individually trying to do a good job and make things run smoothly, e.g. by pre-validating application forms, but were totally ham-strung by being desperately under-staffed relative to the demand. Similarly, the city clerks and post offices had no incentive at all to add staff and expand the number of face-to-face appointments. It looks like they're limited to claiming $25/person fees so there's no ability to raise fees to respond to demand, and hence no reason to hire extra staff to increase their processing capacity because that's probably below the employment cost here in Silicon Valley.

I remain completely baffled by Americans who want more Federal government involvement in their lives. This is what Federal government involvement looks like. (At the state level, they should examine the well-oiled customer-service-friendly machine that is the Department of Motor Vehicles.)

Corporate welfare from Steelie Neelie and the EU

I used to be the starry-eyed person who thought that governments pouring into a new concept for "research" was a good thing. That didn't last long. Now I read The Reg on the EU's plan to chuck 2.5 billion euros at "Big Data" "research" and wonder why, in an age of austerity, the EU thinks that pissing away the entire annual defence budget of Austria is a good idea.

First, a primer for anyone unfamiliar with "Big Data". It's a horrendously vague term, as you'd expect. The EU defines the term thus:

Big data is often defined as any data set that cannot be handled using today’s widely available mainstream solutions, techniques, and technologies.

Ah, "mainstream". What does this actually mean? It's a reasonable lower bound to start with what's feasible on a local area network. If you have a data set with low hundreds of terabytes of storage, you can store and process this on some tens of regular PCs; if you go up to about 1PB (petabyte == 1024 terabytes, 1 terabyte is the storage of a regular PC hard drive) then you're starting to go beyond what you can store and process locally, and need to think about someone else hosting your storage and compute facility.

Here's an example. Suppose you have a collection of overhead imagery of the United Kingdom, in the infra-red spectrum, sampled at 1m resolution. Given that the UK land area is just under 250 thousand square kilometers, if you represent this in an image with 256 levels of intensity (1 byte per pixel) you'll need 250,0000 x (1000 x 1000) = 250 000 000 000 pixels or 250 gigabytes of storage. This will comfortably fit on a single hard drive. If you reduce this to 10cm resolution - so that at maximum resolution your laptop screen of 1200 pixel width will show 120m of land - then you're looking at 25 TB of data, so you'll need a network of tens of PCs to store and process it. If, instead of a single infra-red channel, you have 40 channels of different electromagnetic frequencies, from low infra-red up to ultra violet, you're at 1PB and need Big Data to solve the problem of processing the data.

Another example, more privacy-concerning: if you have 1KB of data about each of the 7bn people in the world (say, their daily physical location over 1 year inferred from their mobile phone logs), you'll have 7 terabytes of information. If you have 120 KB of data (say, their physical location every 10 minutes) then this is around 1PB and approaches the Big Data limits.

Here's the press release:

Mastering big data could mean:

• up to 30% of the global data market for European suppliers;
• 100,000 new data-related jobs in Europe by 2020;
• 10% lower energy consumption, better health-care outcomes and more productive industrial machinery.

My arse, but let's look at each claim in turn.

• How is this project going to make it more likely for European suppliers to take over more of the market? Won't all the results of the research be public? How, then, will a European company be better placed to take advantage of them than a US company? Unless one or more US-based international company has promised to attribute a good chunk of its future Big Data work to its European operations as an informal quid-pro-quo for funding from this pot.
• As Tim Worstall is fond of saying, jobs are a cost not a benefit. These need to be new jobs that are a prerequisite for larger Big Data economic gains to be realized, not busywork to meet artificial Big Data goals
• [citation required] to quote Wikipedia. I'll believe it when I see it measured by someone without financial interest in the Big Data project.

The EU even has a website devoted to the topic: Big Data Value. Some idea of the boondoggle level of this project can be gleaned from the stated commitment:

... to build a data-driven economy across Europe, mastering the generation of value from Big Data and creating a significant competitive advantage for European industry, boosting economic growth and jobs. The BDV PPP will commence in 2015[,] start with first projects in 2016 and will run until 2020. Covering the multidimensional character of Big Data, the PPP activities will address technology and applications development, business model discovery, ecosystem validation, skills profiling, regulatory and IPR environment and social aspects.

So how will we know if these 2.5bn Euros have been well spent? Um. Well. Ah. There are no deliverables specified, no ways that we can check back in 2020 to see if the project was successful. We can't even check in 2017 whether we're making the required progress, other than verifying that the budget is being spent at the appropriate velocity - and believe me, it will be.

The fundamental problem with widespread adoption of Big Data is that you need to accumulate the data before you can start to process it. It's surprisingly hard to do this - there really isn't that much new data generated in most fields and you can do an awful lot if you have reasonably-specced PCs on a high-speed LAN. Give each PC a few TB in storage, stripe your data over PCs for redundancy (not vulnerable to failure of a single drive or PC) and speed, and you're good to go. Even if you have a huge pile of storage, if you don't have the corresponding processing power then you're screwed and you'll have to figure out a way of copying all the data into Amazon/Google/Azure to allow them to process it.

Images and video are probably the most ripe field for Big Data, but still you can't avoid the storage/processing problem. If you already have the data in a cloud storage provider like Amazon/Google/Azure, they likely already have the processing models for your data needs; if you don't, where are all the CPUs you need for your processing? It's likely that the major limitations processing Big Data in most companies is appropriate reduction of the data to a relatively small secondary data set (e.g. processing raw images into vectors via edge detection) before sending it somewhere for processing.

The EU is about to hand a couple billion euros to favoured European companies and university research departments, and it's going to get nine tenths of squat all out of it. Mark my words, and check back in 2020 to see what this project has produced to benefit anyone other than its participants.

Don't ask for your emails to be deleted

Darrell Issa, Republican congressman from California (yes, amazingly they exist) releases the oversight report on the initial rollout of Healthcare.gov and it wasn't pretty. The bulk of the report was based off emails that they managed to retrieve from Health + Human Services and their CMS subsidiary, and the report authors did a nice job of excerpting the damning snippets from the emails that confirmed everyone's suspicions about the rollout: the grunts implementing and testing the site knew darned well that it wasn't ready, but they were overridden.

I don't find any particular reason in the report to believe that the President knew the site wasn't ready; it looks very much like he and his advisors were assured that everything was in hand, and he had no particular reason to disbelieve it. The problems occurred lower down in the hierarchy:

Mr. Sivak showed Mr. Baitman emails that were made public by Congress in the wake of Healthcare.gov's disastrous launch. In these emails, dated September 27, 2013 [launch date was Oct 1st], a CMS official working on the FFM development, wrote "the facts are that we have not successfully handled more than 500 concurrent users filling out applications in an environment that is similarly in size to Day 1 production." In response, Mr. Baitman wrote "Frankly, it’s worse than I imagined!" Mr. Sivak replied, "Anyone who has any software experience at all would read that and immediately ask what the fuck you were thinking by launching."

Indeed, we were asking almost exactly that question. And there was no naivety about motivations:

How did one week Henry Chao tell us there was no way Account Transfer would be ready, then a meeting at the White House and a week later, oh, yeah, everything is back on track, we’ll meet the dates? That’s what I mean by WTF. You could definitely see the CYA moves coming a mile away

Doublethink is clearly very important for project managers. Henry Chao was one of the prime Healthcare.gov project managers and it appears he knew that the site was heading to disaster, but for some reason he couldn't or wouldn't articulate this to the administration.

Issa, of course, has plenty of partisan reasons to bash the administration and the Healthcare.gov backers, but it's hard to conclude anything other than that this launch was destined to crash and burn spectacularly, that this was known well in advance, and that it was egregiously mis-managed. That Mikey Dickerson and his crew managed to retrieve some semblance of success from this state was amazing, but not something that should be relied on by any future project manager.

Once again, the maxim "Do not write anything in an email that you do not want to see on the front page of a major newspaper" is confirmed. The usual wisdom around this is a combination of a) mail is transferred in the clear between servers on the public internet, although this is changing, and b) the risk of including the wrong person on your To: or Cc: lines. This report highlights a third option: the risk that your email will be retrieved during a legal discovery process. If you send your email from a company email system it'll be archived there and prone to later legal discovery even if you and the recipient delete it. This also applies if any of your recipients use a company or government email address.

The Verge provides a nice summary of the highlights in the report if you don't have the stomach to read the whole thing.

Surrender monkeys don't eat balut

A fascinating shit-storm is brewing between the Philippine Army and the UN Disengagement Observer Force as a result of recent events in the Golan Heights:

The Philippine military said Monday that a U.N. peacekeeping commander in the Golan Heights should be investigated for allegedly asking Filipino troops to surrender to Syrian rebels who had attacked and surrounded their camp.
[...]
When the besieged Filipino troops sought his [Gen. Catapang's] advice after they were ordered to lay down their arms as part of an arrangement with the rebels to secure the Fijians' release, Catapang said he asked them to defy the order.

It seems that in order to facilitate negotiations for the release of 45 Fijian soldiers captured by the (al-Qaeda affiliated) Nusra Front rebels - such capture perhaps due to less-than-stellar planning by UNDOF - the UNDOF commander decided that yielding to the rebels' demands for the Filipino troops to give up their weapons would be just dandy. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Gen. Catapang is Chief of Staff of the Philippine Armed Forces, so can't really rise any higher in the command structure, and isn't well-known enough to run for high government office, so he's got no real motive to puff up his role in this dispute. I'm inclined to believe the main thrust of his account. Since the army has been in near-continuous counter-insurgency campaigns, with the communist NPA in the central Philippines and the Islamic groups in the south and south west, they've accumulated quite a lot of experience with fanatic groups and have presumably absorbed the lesson that doing what your opponent tells you to seldom works out well.

It'll be interesting to see if the resolution of the dispute is made public:

Catapang said an investigation would allow the UNDOF commander to explain his side and the Philippine military to explain why it advised the Filipino peacekeepers to defy his order.

I doubt the second part will take very long. I'd start with "Because it was bloody stupid" and work up from there. Catapang, as a 4-star general, comfortably out-ranks UNDOF's 2-star leader and so there's no insubordination problem I can see. The first part would be educational though: just what did the UNDOF commander think would happen if the Filipino troops had laid down their arms as ordered? And what involvement did the UNDOF commander have in the Fijians being captured in the first place? The Philippine Army is withdrawing from the UNDOF mission in the Golan, presumably because they have no appetite for being put in the same position again when UNDOF decides that covering its backside is more important than the safety of the troops in its command.

It seems that si vis pacem, para bellum is still true: if you want to keep the peace, you have to be prepared to kick the ass.

Update: Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club is well worth reading on this topic:

In the past the UN apparatchiks have relied on the faithfulness of their subordinate commanders to take a bullet for the team. "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." But Tennyson had never been to the Philippines where the word for blindly following orders is tanga – or sap.

Healthcare.gov - it's not over yet

After the well-publicised last-minute save of the Healthcare.gov federal health insurance exchange in 2013, there was a general sighing of relief from the Affordable Care Act's supporters. The months of suspense and error codes had been very painful, but finally the federal exchange was working more or less, and millions were able to enroll in time for the deadline (even if they couldn't then find a doctor who would accept their plan).

It seems that such confidence may have been misplaced; the federal site was fixed but a number of states decided to implement their own exchanges and it hasn't turned out too well for many of them, and people with badges are looking at Oregon's exchange quite hard:

The various state exchanges were funded by the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. As of March 28, it had awarded $4.7 billion in grants nationally. Oregon has been awarded $303 million in five increments.
Typically in federally funded projects, states must show evidence they've met certain milestones before they get additional grants. In Oregon's case, the Oregon Health Authority at first, and later Cover Oregon, had several "gate reviews" where federal officials reviewed progress on the project.
Documents show Oregon may have presented a misleading picture to the federal government.

Oregon has a population of about 4 million people. Since ACA sign-up is about 2.5% of the US population, let's be generous and say 3% for Oregon; that's $303 million for 120K people, or about $2500 per sign-up - just for the website. They've now dropped the idea entirely and fallen back to use the federal site which at least kind of works.

Most of the money went to Covered Oregon's contractor Oracle, who probably won't be promoting this as a triumph because the website has not managed to enroll a single private customer:

After discovering a series of technical problems before the Oct. 1 launch -- including inaccurate calculations of the tax subsidies for which consumers would be eligible -- Cover Oregon decided to scratch its plans to go live along with the rest of the country and never managed to get online enrollment started.

This hasn't come from out of the blue: back in November Oracle were being grilled about missed deadlines. Their VP Tom Budnar reported that they were bringing in an Oracle "SWAT team" but it would appear their efforts were in vain. Oracle's stock price has steadily risen from $39.5 to $42 in the past month, so at least Mr. Budnar doesn't have to worry about loss of public confidence in the company. Mind you, a search of Oracle's website doesn't show any results with his surname, so maybe they're already planning to cut him loose - if they've not done so already. He's going to have a difficult round of interviews if that's the case; I'd advise him to take a year of sabbatical and hope most people have forgotten about Oregon...

Oregon is egregiously bad, but unfortunately not too far out of line with other states' exchanges. As NPR reports this week, costs per enrollee of the exchanges have made the federal effort look like a model project:

Even Covered California, the most efficient of the state-run exchanges at $758 per enrollee, still spent more than the average for the federal exchange. And California was the only state-run exchange with a per-person average under $1,000.

Okay, so why did this cost so much? We can look at a comparable solution in the private sector in the USA: TurboTax (web edition) which is delivered by the firm Intuit. Filing federal and state taxes in the USA is a substantial undertaking; most people either go to a tax preparer (H+R Block is a popular one for lower-income taxpayers) or use some tax prep software. Filling in Form 1099 and its many supplemental forms by hand is a great way to lose money, get audited, develop a drinking habit and hate of humanity, or all three. TurboTax is a popular web system for filing taxes; it does automatic imports of data from a number of sources (major employees and brokerages), has a user-friendly interface, lets you submit forms electronically, and generally makes tax preparation a breeze. My expat colleagues who have used TurboTax sing its praises as being slightly easier to use than the short-form UK tax form, performing substantially more complex calculations and optimizations.

US tax season is not dissimilar to healthcare signups - a short period (1-2 months) after you get the tax information from your employer and brokerages and before the April 15th deadline, usage spiking in evenings and on weekends. So lots (millions, I'd estimate) of users crowd onto the TurboTax site in a short time, with downtime or even slowness being commercially unacceptable - there are several alternatives to TurboTax. Turbotax covers its costs and generates income by serving basic users for free, simple uses for $30 per user and complex uses for $50 per user (state filing is an additional $20 or so). You can even cover your costs if you use Amazon heavily.

It's not an exaggeration to say that if the states and federal goverment had contracted TurboTax's Intuit to build and operate the site for $70 per user - one tenth of the current cost in reality - then they could probably have made it work. They already have the storage and serving systems capable of handling that level of traffic, the marginal cost is probably less than developing from scratch. So why didn't the states and feds do this? Why did Oregon contract Oracle? Because Oracle and other consulting firms are very good at bidding for federal and state contracts. They're pretty awful at making them work, but this doesn't matter - strange to relate, contracts are not issued and paid based on whether the delivered solution actually works. The incentives in government contracting have generated an ecosystem where actual ability to build working systems is one of the less important characteristics for which the environment selects.

The defence of the federal contracting system (instead of assigning the contract to a company who might actually be able to make the contract work) starts with "we have to protect the taxpayer from being exploited in no-bid contracts." Except that it seems that the taxpayer is already being exploited. If Intuit charged $400 per user, made out like a bandit, gave bonuses through the company right down to the mailroom boy's cat and sent the execs off on 1 year fact-finding trip to the Bahamas, the taxpayer would still come out ahead, and would have the bonus of a website that actually worked well and was user-friendly.

Obamacare is going to have a doctor problem

An aspect of the American Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) which I hadn't appreciated until this week was the degree to which it may be scuppered by primary care physicians (PCP, the USA equivalent of a GP). Chatting with a middle-aged friend who is moving to a small-ish American town and changing jobs, she opened my eyes to the mysteriously unpublicised problems which the implementation of the ACA is about to cause everyone.

She was visiting her new town last week, sorting out her house and meeting her new workmates in preparation for moving there for good in June. One item on her list was sorting out a new PCP. She had the details for her new insurance plan with one of the state providers, so dropped by a doctor's office near her house to register. No joy, that doctor wasn't accepting new patients. OK, so go back to the insurance provider website to identify a wider shortlist of providers in town.

No joy at the first doctor. Or the second. Or the third. This was getting ridiculous. She had a friend already working in her new workplace, so asked him if he could help. His doctor wasn't accepting new patients either, but the friend had a good relationship with the doctor, so asked him directly. Still no luck. Eventually my friend managed to find a large medical center open to new patients - over 60 miles away. She signed up, because that was the best offer there was.

There was one doctor in a nearby town open to new patients, but after a quick check on his reviews it became rapidly clear why. It sounds like he hadn't progressed much past the "trial by ordeal" approach to illness, and was still reading pre-Pasteur literature on infection control.

Why this insanity of unavailability? It turns out that the coming avalanche of patients signed up on ACA-compliant plans is not making doctors sleep well at night. Not only are these patients much more likely to be sick than their current patients, the main concern of practices is that they're going to lose money on treating these patients. The remuneration rate for doctors for ACA patients is - at least in some states, and I suspect all - based on 80% of the standard practice fees from 3 years ago. That's not great, but much worse is the experience with Medicare (federal medical coverage for the elderly). My friend used to work in a doctor's office, and they had a profitably employed office employee whose sole job was to push back against government agencies spuriously denying payment for Medicare claims. If there were any abnormalities at all in a claim, Medicare would deny it in the hope that only solidly valid claims would be retried. A denial is, after all, cheap.

I digress, but bear with me. Do you older readers remember when The Simpsons started and they introduced us to Marge's sisters Patty and Selma, stalwart misanthropic employees of the local Department of Motor Vehicles? There's a reason why the American viewers of the show laughed, and it wasn't to do with absurdity. There's no-one more un-fireable than a federal or state bureaucrat, and their attitude to their customers is exactly what you'd expect - entirely down to their general disposition to humanity. That's what the doctors' billing teams are going to be dealing with. Only by being better acquainted with the rulebook will they be able to get their due payments out of the ACA system, and even then those payments will be small and paid late.

Having a new government agency and new set of rules means that small practices are extremely worried about their costs and ability to maintain existing patients. Because (I believe, from chatting to the front desks of a few offices) you can't be selectively open to new patients based on their particular insurer, the easiest option for small providers is to batten down the hatches until the picture is clearer. Only the very large healthcare centers can take advantage of their economy of scale to accept the new stream of ACA-covered patients - and with them the standard employer-covered and easier to manage new patients.

I wonder whether this problem with finding doctors is behind the proposed rise in rates for ACA-compliant plans? Perhaps you will be able to look at the rate rise in the next few years and extrapolate the "marginal cost of doing business with government". As it stands, the best they can hope for is to break even:

Cigna, which is selling Obamacare plans in five states and is considering whether to expand that further in 2015, has said it won't make money on the business this year. It expects to have signed up as many as 100,000 new members under the program for this year.

So for the Affordable Care Act, if you're sick then you may be able to get coverage where you couldn't before, but sure as heck if you're outside a major city then you're going to find it a challenge to get a primary care physician to see you and get your care started. Now I'm wondering what the ER departments of ACA-plan-accepting hospitals are going to experience in the next year.

Aligned incentives to improve uptime and usability

Something I've been chewing over for the last couple of weeks is why we see such a disparity between applications that work really well, scale well and are extremely reliable (e.g. Facebook), and others which are and remain a complete disaster despite huge amounts of money spent developing and supporting them (e.g. Healthcare.gov). I'm going to propose Hopper's Law of Operational Sanity:

Axiom: Your codebase can only be significantly improved for users when your developers feel users' pain.
Corollary: If you're outsourcing support for your application, you don't really care about making it better.

A bold claim; let's try to justify it.

Let's assume that our application in question is used heavily by the public, and that it includes a reasonable feedback mechanism for problems (e.g. a forum, FAQ page, static support pages with a feedback form for more detailed problem reports). We're doing all the monitoring basics; logging success/failure rates, have trend reports around these stats, have a QA/test team and do reasonably frequent releases to production, and have an operations team responsible for monitoring the system and reacting to problems. I claim that this is nowhere near enough for a system that users actually want to use. Why not?

The problem comes with the disconnect between the interest of the engineers developing and testing the application, the interests of the operations team, and the interest of people using it. Developers are paid based on features they launch and on the visibility of bugs they fix. If the operations team is getting alerts every hour for a condition that isn't really important (or, at least, can't be fixed) the development team is unlikely to care - they will just tell the ops team to ignore the alerts. That's fine, but you're desensitising the ops team to alerts, and filling their mailboxes with noise. When an actual problem happens and an alert is sent, it'll take the ops team longer to notice; they may even have set up a mailbox rule to file these alerts, and not notice the real one for days.

Similarly, if there are occasional system overload problems the ops team will have to scramble to fix them, generating lots of bustling activity. The developers don't care because the ops team can deal with them. The ops team are paid for their activity, so don't mind the occasional panic. No-one has the interest in adding code to detect this condition arising and making it easier to handle (e.g. by measuring system capacity and prophylactically alerting if the system goes over 80% of that level, or adding the option to switch the system into a lower-load mode by temporarily blocking expensive functions) despite the fact that this would be of great long-term benefit to the company in reducing failures and associated cost.

The gap between the developers and the users is even more straight forward. The developers and the marketing team can come up with all sorts of cool ideas and features for the product, spend months developing and launching them, and still be left with the product being slammed by unsatisfied users. How come, after all this effort developing and testing the product? Well, it could simply be that, according to the old saw, the dogs don't like it. If the developers are relying on feedback from the launched product to know if the users are happy, they've already lost; the development feedback loop will take way too long. Instead they need to know about problems before they launch the feature. How to do that? Dogfood it!

"Dogfooding" is the process by which employees at a company use a pre-release version of the application for their daily work; ideally, nearly all the developers of the app would dogfood. This is very different from system and QA testing because this work is not done with test data and test users; instead, a real person is interacting with the app and trying to make it do what they want. The only difference between this person and a regular user is that the tester has (or should have) an easy way of raising a specific bug on the developers if they run into something that gets in their way.

Scaling is certainly a user-facing problem, and you can't easily test scaling with a dogfood app in isolation; however if you can measure its resource consumption in isolation then you can get a delta of resource usage between dogfood releases which should at least highlight whether a new release has a CPU/memory/network-devouring bug. This is not a foolproof method, but it's certainly better than the standard approach of running load tests; the only problems load test will normally detect are gross changes in performance for whatever standardised actions you're feeding into the load tests.

If you want your system to work well, the people developing it need to feel the immediate pain of their errors - make them responsible for the monitoring of their part of the system for at least three months after its launch, and only allow it to be handed over to the operations team when it's demonstrated a suitably low level of alerting and a suitably high frequency of actual error conditions generating alerts. Make the developers use a pre-release version of the system for their daily work; if it's a web mail system then use that for their mail, if it's a bug database then keep the bug database's bugs in a pre-release copy of itself. You're going to take a slight hit on productivity, but you'll be surprised how quickly and smoothly you can fail over from a bad version to a known good version after the first few such problems - and if you can do it for developers, you can do it for your production version.

Incidentally, the a facet of this law was in evidence in the recent revelations about Edward Snowdon's access to NSA data:

Intelligence officials have claimed that Snowden was able to do all this [automatically web-crawling the NSA pages] largely because the Oahu NSA facilities had not gotten the software purchased to prevent insider threats in the wake of WikiLeaks. "He was either very lucky or very strategic" to get the positions he held in Hawaii, one official told the Times. But it's also entirely possible that his activities would have gone unchecked in any case, simply because of his system administrator status.

I suspect it's even more simple than that. No-one in a position to detect and stop Snowdon was sufficiently interested in securing the network. They'd certainly implement any system they were asked to and investigate any alert that went off - that's what they were paid for, after all. No-one was really engaged in pro-actively hunting down and preventing security threats. This is a hard thing to set up, admittedly - how do you pay someone for a security breach failing to happen because of their actions? - but if you can't figure out how to do it then Snowden-like security breaches will keep happening.

All the stable door slamming currently going on will simply make it harder for people to do their jobs, because the formerly loose data access that they benefited from will be taken away in the name of security; the pendulum has swung in the other direction, and now no-one will benefit from highlighting a security change with a good security/access trade-off because everyone is in arse-covering mode and no-one will countenance loosening security for any reason.

Incentives matter; this is as true in software as it is anywhere else. Now we need to start acting like they matter.

Misplaced "trust" in "trustee"

It appears that I was, if anything, too kind about Detroit's pension problem. The outside audit report has been released, and it apparently does not make for pretty reading:

[Pension trustee spokesperson Tina Bassett] said that the trustees were administering benefits that had been negotiated by the city and its various unions and that they had established an internal account to set aside “excess earnings” that would cover the cost. She said it was appropriate for retirees to benefit from market upturns because they had paid into the pension fund, so their own contributions had generated part of the investment gains.

In other words, whenever returns went above projections they promptly gave away the excess. And when returns went below projections, and the huge gap was visible, what did they do?

So much money had been drained from the pension fund that by 2005, Detroit could no longer replenish it from its dwindling tax revenue. Instead, the city turned to the public bond markets, borrowed $1.44 billion and used that to fill the hole.
Even that did not work. In June, Detroit failed to make a $39.7 million interest payment on that borrowing — the first default of what was soon to become the biggest municipal bankruptcy case in American history.
Detroit said at the time that making the interest payment would have consumed more than 90 percent of its available cash.

I'm not sure that there are words in the English language suitable to describe this.

Policy wonk Megan McArdle nails the most likely explanation for this demented behaviour by the trustee:

My best guess is that they were thinking the pensions would have to be paid, one way or another. After all, it’s in the Michigan State Constitution. So they could pay out bonuses, please various constituencies, and then force the city or the state to make them whole when it all came tumbling down. They didn’t reckon with the possibility that the city would simply run out of money, and the state would decline to step in, leaving them with no deep pockets to make up for their mismanagement.

This is only speculation, but I fear it's an all-too plausible motivation for the trustees. I cannot see how a pension fund trustee can see this hole growing steadily in the accounts over many years and yet blithely continue handing out "excess" cash. Whom exactly did they think they were helping?

It appears that Detroit pension trustee spokesperson Tina Bassett used to be Chief Communication Officer for the city of Detroit and was "widely recognized for her innovative and creative development of high-impact communication programs." I'll say; the pension trustees have had quite the impact on Detroit.

Fortunately now the city unions have recognized the severity of the financial situation and are stepping up to the plate to be responsible:

Detroit's bankruptcy judge should allow a state employment panel to reinstate a pension program that gave an extra check to retirees every year using excess earnings, a city union said in court papers.

Oh. Maybe not, then.

There was a lot wrong with Margaret Thatcher's policies, like any politician, but she very accurately anticipated this situation back in 1976:

I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money.

She was talking about the UK Labour government at the time, but the criticism could be perfectly well pointed at Detroit. And probably LA, Washington D.C., San Diego, San Jose,...

I was talking to a Canadian the other day who said that the best option for Detroit was to raze most of it to the ground and just let Canada extend its border a few miles to include the Detroit metropolitan area and airport. Canada gains a handy additional major airport, can move people and industry out of the overcrowded Greater Toronto Area a few hours west to Detroit (provisionally renamed "Harperville"), and the remaining Detroit residents get proper Canadian healthcare and easier access to Tim Hortons coffee and donuts. What's not to like?

How public money is spent

Rarely have I seen a more perfect example of the care with which public bodies expend public (tax) money. The Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco with Oakland is a $6.4bn two-span bridge, connected by Yerba Buena Island in the Bay. It has There is already a bike + pedestrian path on the 2km east span (Yerba Buena Island to Oakland). So why not provide a dedicated bike path on the 1.5km west span?

Why not, indeed. Here (from the proponents) is the case for a bike path over San Francisco Bay:

With the east span finally open, planners are already at work on the next mega-Bay Bridge project - a $1 billion-plus makeover of the western span that would include a $500 million hanging bike path.
"I'm sure the bike advocates are going to start agitating for that" soon, Metropolitan Transportation Commission Executive Director Steve Heminger said

I'm sure they are. Since they're not paying for it, why wouldn't they? And who is going to pay for it?

Drivers are already paying up to $6 at peak hours to cross the Bay Bridge. Redoing the western side to include the bike path would probably mean "putting something in front of the voters," - like a "temporary" $1 hike in bridge tolls, said MTC spokesman Randy Rentschler.

Let's do the maths here. Over a 40 year lifespan, assume that the $500M cost is approximately tripled by maintenance (5% per year, which seems optimistic if anything). Looking at weekday traffic of ~ 250 days per year, that's 10,000 days of cycle traffic. Divide $1.5bn by 10,000 and you see a $150,000 / day cost of the bike lanes. Assuming - in a fit of optimism - that 10,000 bikers per day decide to bike to Oakland, over the bridge and along to their office in (notably steep and traffic-snarled) San Francisco, that's $15 per biker per day. Are they going to charge that to bikers? My arse, they are. This, as Rentschler notes, will be going straight onto the tolls of motorists (as they are a captive audience) who will reap less than zero benefit from this extension. But the San Francisco politicos have a Green source of campaigning dollars to appease, and they're in no danger of being voted out, so why wouldn't they do this?

This is a classic destruction of wealth. That $1.5bn of money could easily be invested into a project with a better social pay-off - or even, horror, returned to the voters to spend in lowered state and city taxes. However the bike path is an irresistably visible and "green" capital project for egocentric politicos to attach their name to. There's no way that it's not going to be built, despite the economic insanity of the project.

The business of tipping

The has been a marked contrast between restaurant service in Britain and restaurant service in the USA - and by "the USA" I mean "pretty much any randomly-selected location in the entire United States of America" - at least as long as I've lived, and I suspect a lot longer than that. The general impression you get in a UK restaurant is that you're intruding on the waiting staff's quality time; to be fair, this has become less apparent recently as East European staff have proliferated in London and other major cities. I hope that the irony of British people in a restaurant hoping that their server comes from Tallinn, Riga or Wroclaw instead of Bristol or Derby is not lost on Nick "Chubby" Griffin. American restaurant and diner waiting staff can't, in general, do enough for you. This is clearly due to the tipping culture in America where good service is rewarded with good tips, and bad service punished with derisory tips. (Giving no tip could mean that you're a complete asshole, or just a furriner who doesn't know what's expect). Simple enough, yes?

Even in that seminal California film "Reservoir Dogs", tipping is intimately dissected by the participants:

Mr. White: You don't have any idea what you're talking about. These people bust their ass. This is a hard job.
Mr. Pink: So is working at McDonald's, but you don't see anyone tip them, do you? Why not, they're serving you food. But no, society says don't tip these guys over here, but tip these guys over here. It's bullshit!
Mr. White: Waitressing is the number one occupation for female non-college graduates in this country. It's the one job basically any woman can get, and make a living on. The reason is because of tips.
Mr. Pink: Fuck all that! I'm very sorry the government taxes their tips, that's fucked up. That ain't my fault. It would seem to me that waitresses are one of the many groups the government fucks in the ass on a regular basis. Look, if you show me a piece of paper that says the government shouldn't do that, I'll sign it, put it to a vote, I'll vote for it, but what I won't do is play ball. And this non-college bullshit you're givin' me, I got two words for that: learn to fuckin' type, 'cause if you're expecting me to help out with the rent you're in for a big fuckin' surprise.

Screwing over waitresses (I chose that word deliberately, and you should read about tips, sex and power at some point) is not done by anyone who regards themselves as a civilised human being. My median tip when eating out in the USA is 20%. Average is probably the same. Outliers are 25% (for really good service) and 5% (extremely rare, for British-quality service); if I'm anywhere near the latter, I'll be asking to speak to the manager in most cases. So everything's working as expected - or so I thought...

Back in 2008, San Diego restaurant owner Jay Porter decided to try an experiment: eliminating tipping in his restaurant and replacing it with a fixed (18%) service charge. So how did this work out? Conventional wisdom would suggest that the lack of incentive for better service would lead to a general lowering and flattening of the quality of service curve. After all, if removing tips worked well, wouldn't every restaurant do it?

The results make fascinating reading. Jay Porter's series of blogs on the results are compelling, and a rare case of actual data supporting the facts. What I found particularly interesting were the worked examples. I'd forgotten - because I've never waited tables - that the waiting staff are only part of the restaurant team. The problem is that, if you pay all your staff minimum wage (which is all the average restauranteur can afford), the waiting staff benefit strongly from tips but the kitchen staff do not, despite contributing just as much to the dining experience. Hence the approach in some states (e.g. NY) to pay the waiting staff much less than minimum wage, expecting the wage to be made up with tips, and redistribute that money to the kitchen staff; the waiting staff still do pretty well, but the curve is at least flatter. In other states (e.g. CA) you're not allowed to pay waiting staff less than minimum wage, so there is a customary "tip out" where the waiting staff share some of their tips with kitchen staff, but it's still ad-hoc and prone to abuse.

Porter's approach was to charge a fixed service charge and forbid tips. The service charge gets distributed reasonably equally around waiting and kitchen staff. Now I (and most economists) would have expected this to reduce overall quality of service, but in fact Porter claims this doesn't happen - good waiting staff don't pay much attention to tips throughout the service period, since they're too busy actually serving. It also removes an interesting perverse incentive on a server to maximise his or her tips at the expense of overall restaurant income; read the blog for the full details.

Equally interesting is the case where substituting a service charge for tips doesn't work - tips in a bar:

n a crowded bar, bartenders are expected to just say the price of a drink order to a guest — we wouldn’t present physical checks. And it was during the presentation of the physical checks that we could best explain the service charge/no-tipping concept. The check also had the policy explained on it, so guests had a pretty good chance of understanding what was going on.
[...]
Given that the line item service charge seemed like a lost cause, we switched to building the service cost into our pricing. This is known as service compris, and a lot of people advocate for it, but it wasn’t a success for us. With service compris, an $8.50 cocktail became a $10 cocktail on the menu, and that was a huge psychological leap for our market

Note that the factors which made tip elimination in a bar painful were to some extent due to this being a very unusual situation in a bar. One wonders how it might work out if a state or city banned tips all together in bars in favour of a service charge.

I'm still not convinced that Porter's service charge approach would work as proposed across the huge range of restaurants and diners in the USA, especially in dubious establishments where one or two really good waiting staff keep the business afloat. Still, he makes a compelling case that the conventional wisdom about tipping is not completely supported by the available data.

Amber crying wolf

Some parts of the USA have implemented an interesting system based on the ubiquity of mobile phones: "Amber Alert". This is something that freaks you out the first time you're watching TV and an alert triggers - the screen goes black, loud white noise erupts, and you see text scrolling across warning you of an escaped convict / missing child / rabid mountain lion in the area. The idea is that the local authorities can alert people in the area of emergency conditions that effect them directly. Since December 2012 they've added this functionality to most mobile phones, and so as well as broadcasting the alert on TV they can cause phones to emit a loud beeping and show the message as a pop-up.

Yesterday they initiated this alert across the entire state as the result of an alleged child abduction following an alleged mother and child murder in Southern California. All very laudable: except that California is big. Really big. And now they've extended the alert to Washington and Oregon. You're talking about alerting 50M people "just in case". The suspect left Boulevard, CA (near the Mexican border) four days ago. He could be anywhere. The alert just had a car make and color with California licence plate. It was no use at all in finding the suspect, especially in California and Oregon where cars of that model, color and bearing California licence plates are ten a penny. Later news announcements had photos of the suspect and children which were much more likely to trigger a response in someone who had seen them recently. The Amber alert was, in essence, annoying tens of millions of people for no benefit. Many people interviewed commented that they'd turned off the Amber Alert feature on their phone as a result, and others were aware that this would happen:

Lappin is worried that the annoying sound and seemingly random message -- the alert had no background on the kidnapping or the missing children -- will discourage people from using the notification system. "It should be for imminent danger that we should all be aware of," he said. "That's what I expect to hear when there's an earthquake, or something where I need to take action."

I'm dubious about the utility of an earthquake alert as xkcd notes, but for yes - alerts are for when you need to take action, not "just FYI".

This is a classic example of the "receiver pays" hazard that has given us email spam. Even with the best intentions, the senders of these messages are not considering the trade-off between the tiny marginal benefit accrued by alerting tens of millions of people with an unhelpful message, and the penalty of millions of pissed-off people turning off their alerts so that when an actually useful message is sent out they will miss it. Nice one.

"But please, won't someone think of the children!" I am thinking of the children - all the future kidnapped children whose alerts will be missed because of an over-eager child protection officer this time around. Perhaps that's not a hip concern, but in the long run it will save a lot more kids.