Core 2 Duo 9300 (2.5Ghz, 800Mhz FSB, 6M L2 Cache)
4GB DDR2 RAM
128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
64GB SSD
Wireless N
TV Tuner
9-cell battery
Product (RED) — Because I’m a sucker for Africa. And oddly enough, after discounts, it was $100 less than the default black.

Main reason for purchase — Only sub-15 inch laptop on market right now with full-powered processor and SSD option. I’m hoping the SSD will cut noise and heat down a bits. Not to mention speedy start-up times. Fun! Oh, and the $698 discount. That helped too.

I was considering integrated graphics in order to extend battery life and reduce heat, but that would have delayed order by 5 days and because of Dell’s discount setup, would actually have cost $100 - $200 more .

Yes, I know the new Centrino 2 processors are coming out in a few months. I’m going to feel crappy when all the new notebooks start getting double battery life, but my current PowerBook (1.25 Ghz with 512MB RAM) is annoying the crap out of me speed and heat-wise. I’m a coder and some of the stuff I’m writing does push the CPU to the limit (sometimes by design and sometimes accidentally). And Firefox alone can bring memory usage to absurd highs. So yeah, time for a new laptop.

1. Sexism doesn’t necessarily mean fewer votes

Did sexism play a role in Hillary’s downward spiral? Sure. As the linked posts above show, there are plenty of examples of that — but did that translate into fewer votes for Hillary? I’m not so sure. First, the morons behind the “Stop running for president and make me a sandwhich” aren’t necessarily Obama voters. I suspect they’re rooting for McCain or perhaps more likely likely, aren’t even voting. These are the Howard Sterns of the world — they’re shock jocks (no pun intended) craving attention, not political operatives. On the other hand, these misogynistic activities have clearly energized Hillary supporters and angered women everywhere. At least some of them are now more likely to vote for her. Indeed, part of the explanation for Hillary’s comeback in New Hampshire was that women felt she was unfairly being picked on, and women voted overwhelmingly for her.

So did sexism hurt Hillary at the ballot box? Unsure.The reasoning could go either way. This is actually the sort of thing that you might be able to get an answer with by sifting through the exit poll data, but I’d prefer it be done by someone with better stat skills and more time than me.

2. Sexism doesn’t necessarily mean fewer delegates

Superdelegates generally vote based on three criteria: political connections, general electability, and whom they actually like. Let’s deal with the first. There’s a lot of anger at the “establishment” and the “old boys club” for trying to force out the female candidate in favor of the male one. I find this a little strange as Bill Clinton is clearly part of the old boys club, he clearly supports Hillary, and there’s no shortage of people who owe the Clintons a favor. You could argue that some of establishment, such as Kerry and Kennedy, dislike this Clintonian domination of the party and are keen to boot them out. That’s an argument about the Clintons however, not about Hillary’s gender.

As for general electability, I really haven’t heard anyone in the Democratic establishment make the argument that Hillary can’t win because she’s female. I have heard, however, the argument that Obama can’t win white people, made rather explicitly by Hillary herself.

So that just leaves likability — and it’s possible that a large number of delegates just don’t like Hillary. But I’m not sure if delegates like Hillary more or less than the general public (see point number one on that).

3. Racism hurt Obama

When Clinton supporters mention race, they usually infer it’s been a good thing for Obama. In some cases, it certainly has. It’s not hard to find an Obama supporter who might have voted for someone else had Obama been white. Yet in many cases, Obama’s race has been a bad thing. The West Virginia exit polls found Obama’s race affected him negatively. And while not about race per se, Obama’s Muslim heritage has resulted in an unusual amount of emphasis placed on his middle name and subsequent allegations about his patriotism. Both of these play some role in Obama’s difficulties with Jewish voters. And being black didn’t help with Hispanics (although how much it hurt is up for debate).

Yes, Obama has overwhelmingly won the African-American vote — but Hillary was leading in black votes prior to South Carolina. And so did Bill Clinton before he made some unfortunate references to Jesse Jackson. And Hillary does lead among women. Yes, the lead among women is smaller than Obama’s lead among blacks — but then again, there are vastly more women than there are black people in America.

Yes, no one’s made a Facebook group called “Stop running for president and shine my shoes you uppity terrorist negro,” but I would argue that, frat boys aside, people take the allegation that Obama is Muslim Manchurian candidate more seriously than they do Hillary’s gender.

So again, net effect of Obama’s race? Unclear. Exit poll drilling is needed, but it’s certainly not so clear cut.

4. Racism and sexism are BOTH bad — why quibble which is worst?

What bothers me the most is this argument about whether sexism or racism is worse. They’re both clearly bad, and efforts to address them are not mutually exclusive. A black man can make the world less sexist and a white woman can make the world less racist. You don’t need to push a woman to the top to break the glass ceiling. You just need a rock, thrown hard. I understand than in the furor over race, Hillary supporters are annoyed that sexism isn’t brought up too. But then again, neither is anti-Semitism, homophobia, or xenophobia. The real frustration isn’t about sexism vs. racism — it’s just that the mainstream media likes Obama better and is more willing to over the “isms” relevant to him (in this case, racism). And the reason the media likes Obama better isn’t because of his race or Hillary’s gender. After all, no one took Al Sharpton seriously in 2004. They like Obama simple because he’s new, he’s a good speaker, and his life story is interesting.

5. Sexism isn’t Obama’s fault

All of the above isn’t to diminish sexism in this country. It’s there, it’s real, and it’s really bad. But it’s not as if Obama ordered his “Obama-bots” to be misogynists. It’s not as if Obama and MSNBC convene in the wee hours of the morning to decide what unfair plan of attack they should make on Hillary today. Obama certainly should go out of his way to condemn sexism, but it’s not as if Hillary goes out of her way to condemn Bill Cunningham.

6. Beware the echo chamber

I mean this in two ways. First, the misogynists that Clinton supporters are railing against tend to be in a few areas — namely the media and Silicon Valley (i.e. the Internet). After some time in Silicon Valley working on a startup, I can certainly attest that valley is much more comfortable with race (lots of Asians doing business here) than with gender (not a lot of female startup founders). That may be reflected to some extent in the blogosphere. And if all you watch is MSNBC, Chris Matthews does come off a sexist jerk.

The thing is — that’s not America. That’s certainly not the Obama campaign. And while MSNBC has some influence and while Silicon Valley has loads of cash, it’s not as if there’s a massive sexist conspiracy to bring down female presidential candidates than must be repudiated.

The second meaning is that you have to be very careful about what is and is not a sexist comment. Was Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson racist? Maybe — but maybe it just be an over-reaction. Likewise, are the efforts by the superdelegates to force Hillary out part of some old boy’s network? Well, if you spend all your time getting outraged over the “make me a sandwhich” crowd and then hop over here, then yes, it does look that way. Yet evaluated from an external perspective, maybe the superdelegates want Hillary out because the delegate math just isn’t working in her favor.

7. Hillary is losing because of her campaign, not because of external forces

Sexism certainly hurt Hillary (although the net effect is still to be determined), but that’s not the only (nor even the biggest) reason why she’s losing. Some possible answers here.

8. Anger leads to the Dark Side

Hillary is losing. You’re angry. Be careful. It’s not very good for you. Bill Clinton once said something about when faced with a choice between hope and fear, you should choose hope. Decisions based on fear tend to be bad ones. I (and Yoda) would also argue that the same applies to anger.

Besides, anger (at least of the “let’s write long blog posts” kind) is just bad politics. I suspect part of the reason Obama does as well as he does is that he remains cool under pressure — something that McCain and Clinton don’t do as well. If someone makes a sexist attack, you certainly do have the right to get angry and demand an apology. But the smart thing to do would then be to give a big deep historic speech about sexism in the country, a la Obama.

And now … advice for Obama

I’m a nobody, so I suspect no one of consequence will read this, but still, here’s what I do. Obama, you clearly have a problem with Hillary voters who felt their candidate was the subject of unfair misogynistic attacks. You gave an historic speech on race. Now give one on gender. Reach out to them. Be honest and say “Yes, I should given this speech earlier”. I think you’re underestimating the amount of convincing you have to do, so get started now. The longer you wait, the more it’ll look like pandering.

And if you must pander, you can try nominating a female VP candidate. Kathleen Sebelius, the popular governor from Kansas, is actually a good choice on her own (non-gender) merits.

Advice for Hillary

The odds of you winning are between 0 and 2%. The delegate math doesn’t work out — you need to win something like 90% of the remaining races (you didn’t even get that in West Virginia) to win that count. And you’re not going to get the superdelegates to overturn the pledged delegates, especially since Mark Penn and Patti Solis Doyle didn’t exactly demonstrate the strength of your campaign. If some massive revelation destroys Obama before the convention, you’re still the default second choice so you can make your efforts then. Otherwise, your only chance at success is to tear the party apart and that’ll earn you enough ill will that you might not even be able to keep your Senate seat.

You’re also unlikely to get the VP slot. Even without the wounds inflicted during the primary, it would be difficult thanks to your long history (you really thought you heard the last of Whitewater, presidential pardons, etc.?).

But you can sure as hell keep trying. And maybe you’ll end up winning, being VP, or maybe Senate Majority Leader. Or something. And right now, that requires making nice and being honest. Your top negatives are that you are seen as a dishonest conniving politician willing to do anything to win (and it’s not gender-related; Bill has the same problem). So apologize for those tactics. Repudiate them. Maybe talk about how your gender influenced your Iraq war vote — that has to be an interesting topic and one that could win you goodwill. Talk about race to finally settle that old dinosaur that the Clintons have suddenly become racists. Maybe time it with an Obama speech on gender. People start to like you again and maybe you’ll get more (good things) than you bargained for.

Heat: I should be able to put my laptop on my lap without fear of sterilization.

Battery Life: I like to work in coffee shops. Coffee shops often suffer from a shortage of conveniently placed power outlets.

Size: I don’t like to work in cramped spaces, but I often have to — whether it be in the back of the airplane or squashed in between two fat people in a lecture hall. Smaller laptops are more convenient.

Weight: This was initially a higher priority for me but the more I think about it, it actually isn’t. I used to get really annoyed carrying around such a heavy laptop but upon further thought, what really bothered me was the fact that I carry a heavy laptop in a shoulder bag that causes me to tilt to one side. This is easily rectified by simply putting my laptop in a backpack. Still, all else equal, lighter is better — so I probably won’t be getting a desktop replacement anytime soon (I actually like desktops — you can open them up and tinker with them — so why replace?).

Linux support: I expect to be doing a lot of programming over the next year or so. Since most of the stuff we use comes from the open-source community, I need to spend a lot of time in a *nix environment. Windows is a non-starter obviously, but OS X is actually not that ideal either. A lot of tools we use are developed with Linux (and Ubuntu / Debian-based distros in particular) in mind. What might require a simple “sudo apt-get” to install on Linux often requires manually  downloading dependencies and recompiling  source code on OS X. Heck, our web server is Ubuntu, and it makes sense for the development environment to match the production one.

Linux can be a headache though. Trying to fix an audio driver or figuring out what battery life is so abysmal really isn’t something I want to do. Keep in mind that I’m not entirely sure I want to use Linux all the time — so maybe a bad audio driver isn’t a big deal, but since virtualized OSes probably entail reduced battery performance, I’ll have to dual-boot into Linux and having a manufacturer with some history of supporting Linux and being willing to release the appropriate drivers means far fewer headaches.

Cost: My ceiling is $3000 but I’d really like it to be closer to $2000 (or even less!)

Performance: I’m obviously going to pay attention to this, but it’s fairly low on the priority list. I’m not playing games on this and any serious computation related to work will probably be done on a separate server. So video card probably isn’t important. A low-voltage CPU is probably more useful than a slightly faster one that kills the battery. You can never have enough RAM but again, it’ll have to judged against the price increase. That said, if viewing this in terms of an investment, it makes sense to max out everything once above conditions are met. The cost-effectiveness of upgrading down the road are overstated.

Anyhow, will post later on some systems I’m considering.

Bush was accused of making the same mistake — rewarding loyalty over competence — with appointments such as “Brownie“. These mistakes are, to some degree, pretty understandable though. In a cutthroat environment like politics, where you have to suspect that everyone is, to some degree, plotting to backstab someone else, loyalty is an incredible valuable virtue. We all like to extoll the virtues of a meritocracy, but after a few months in the start up world, I can tell you that while individual ability is certainly important, the ability for a team of individuals to work together is also important — and in order for individuals to work together, they need to trust each other — trust that each person in the group is loyal either to their fellow group members or to some larger purpose for which they’re working. Given that, I wouldn’t blame Bush or Clinton for rewarding loyalty.

The real problem, I feel, isn’t rewarding loyalty per se but rewarding sycophancy. Loyalty emphasizes a genuine allegiance to and concern about the wellbeing of the person you’re loyal to. Sycophancy, on the other hand, is focused on the person demonstrating loyalty. More often that not, this person is not genuinely loyal but is simply making a show of loyalty to win favor.

True loyalists are willing to sacrifice themselves if that furthers the cause of whomever they are loyal to because that person’s cause is also their cause. True loyalists are not afraid to offend those to whom they are loyal because they trust that their relationship with that person is strong enough and deep enough to withstand such rifts. True loyalists are not offended if they are tossed aside without reward because they swore allegiance without any expectation of quid pro quo. In contrast, the sycophant is self-serving. They curry favor and use that favor to dominate others, to establish their own little fiefdom, and to elevate the perception of their own importance.

In times of crisis, loyalists will help when they can and remove themselves when they cannot. Sycophants however will demand some favor when their assistance is required and simply get in the way when they are no longer needed.

A leader who surround him or herself with sycophants instead of loyalists is either so stupid they cannot distinguish between the two, so insecure about their own abilities that they constantly need someone to reaffirm them, or so paranoid that they confuse the lack of fawning with a plot to usurp their authority.

Ideally, leaders could simply surround themselves with the most qualified individuals and expect that each individual would work to the best of his or her ability and get along with all the other individuals. This is rarely possible in environments where trust is lacking — e.g. those involving power and substantial amounts of money. In such cases, loyalty should be rewarded. The trick is distinguishing the loyalists from the sycophants.

One of the trends in programming is to move to even higher level languages — that is, to building abstractions on top of the original abstractions. You can write new computer languages using older languages, and so long as the new language meets conditions that make it Turing Complete, you can do everything with the new language that the old one did. The Ruby programming language is written in C which compiles into Assembly Language which in turn breaks down into Machine Code.

Every time you add in another language layer, performance takes a hit. Why? Well, code written in the newer layer needs to be interpreted or compiled down to code understandable to the lower layers. If you had a lot of time on your hand, you could rewrite the higher level languages to eliminate many of the layers of abstraction, but frankly, that’d be a pain in the ass.

So why use higher level languages? Well, mostly, it’s because it’s easier to program in. It allows you to think of your programs in terms of abstraction and metaphors while letting the language’s interpreter / compiler deal with figuring out how to translate that into 1s and 0s. You can also adjust the syntax of the language to remove little annoyances you don’t like (e.g. the Ruby language greatly reduces the need for semi-colons and parentheses in your code). Yes, you lose efficiency, but sometimes waste can be good.

However, the title of this post is “High Level Government”, not “High Level Programming”. Why this little exposition on programming languages then? Well, as law school professors studying the Internet are fond of saying, code is law, that is, computer code regulates human behavior online in much the same fashion that legal code regulates human behavior in societies governed by the rule of law. Based on that metaphor, I’d like to suggest that just as computer programming languages use abstraction to trade efficiency for simplicity and ease of use, forms of governance will also be abstracted to make a similar trade.

In fact, it’s been happening already for quite some time. Just as almost all computer code boils down to 1s and 0s, almost all government boils down to beating people with sticks. The first “government” was probably a caveman named Og threatening to beat up all the other cave people who didn’t listen to him. Overtime, this government evolved. Og threatened to have other cavemen beat you with sticks if you didn’t listen. Og called himself Hammurabi and write down the explicit conditions under which he would beat you with a stick. Og let the other cave people decide what the I-will-beat-you-with-a-stick conditions would be. Og traded his wooden stick for a metal stick that spat out hot lead death. And so on.

We introduced concepts such as rule of law, taxation, democracy, and the judiciary into government, but at its core, government, for the most part, still depends on the use of force. All we’ve done is build abstractions on top of this core idea — the use of force — and abstractions on top of abstractions. The system has, in some senses, become less efficient — the IRS threatening to take to court if you don’t pay your taxes is much slower and less effective than a mobster threatening to bash your head in with a baseball bat if you don’t pay up, but these abstractions make it easier to build larger and more complex systems (e.g. try building a national tax system based around mobsters).

Government is becoming increasingly abstract. So what? Well, I suspect you’ve already put some thought into it if you’ve managed to read this far, but I’ll throw some specifics:

1) Democracy, as we know it, is not the pinnacle of human governance

Programming languages have evolved over time to take advantage of increased computing power. What makes a programming language good today may not meet the demands of tomorrow. Likewise, changes in global economics, cultural integration, the environment, and a whole bunch of other things loosely tied to technological and scientific progress are going to necessitate changes in how we govern.

We Americans like to pretend that the government we invented with the Constitution two hundred odd years ago was mostly perfect, but in reality, it’s rearranged itself quite a bit. Women and non-whites can now vote, the federal government is a gajillion times larger and most everyone pays a somewhat absurd income tax. What has remained somewhat constant are the basic ideas though — equality, representation, rule of law. I’d liken this to certain concepts in programming languages — e.g. encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism — that many programmers consider to be Good, although it’s worth noting that there is often significant debate about whether these ideas actually are good, especially depending on the circumstances.

2) Government becomes more easily accessible

The other day, I was having lunch with a bunch of high school friends when one of them started pitching an idea he had for a new startup. The problem was, of course, that he didn’t know how to do any of the coding necessary for this. At this point, he asked if he could quickly learn to create a web application using Ruby on Rails, which he had heard was easy to learn and let you create web applications in minutes. Having spent seven or eight months using Rails, I believe that claim to be greatly exaggerated. None of the current programming languages are to the point where a complete amateur, with zero programming experience, can create anything useful, nor do I think we’ll get to something like that in the neat future — that is, it will be a long time before we can create Maroon.

That said, programming has become increasingly egalitarian. Once the domain of military scientists, programming is now open to millions of hobbyists. Those programmer have, in turn, built more limited abstractions that allow the general online public to do some cool stuff — e.g. you can create your own blog in minutes, even if you don’t know how to make said blog automatically post a new lolcat every Friday.

Likewise, government is becoming increasingly egalitarian. It used to be that in order to establish a government, you had to have a big stick and know how to use it. Now, it’s become a lot more open to ordinary people. There is of course, voting, but there are a lot of other ways in which citizens command government power. Any lawyer can, for instance, formulate a bunch on contracts that regulate the behavior of those who sign it. Those contracts are backed, implicitly, by the government’s agreement to use force to enforce them, just as lower-level programming languages make the higher ones work. Now, you no longer have to be a caveman with a stick or a powerful politician to get people to do stuff — you just need 3 years of law school.

I predict that this is going to become increasingly simplified as time goes on. We’ll keep throwing more abstractions on top until we eventually enable the average person to create legal systems and means of governing people’s behavior without direct intervention from the lawyer of the government. Let’s say, for instance, that I was making an online game with its own virtual currency. Currently, getting users to obey any regulations on how to use that virtual currency requires making your online code force such behavior (a digital “stick”) and an army of lawyers to back your regulations with the government’s “stick”. Just as changes to coding languages are making it easier for people to write code regulating virtual currency usage, I expect changes to our legal code that will make it easier for people to make their own contracts and regulatory agreements.

3. Domain Specific Governments

One nice thing about high level programming languages is that they allow programmers to delve into topics specific to what they’re interested in. With a lower level languages, getting the screen to say “hello world” was a triumph. Now, it’s just a single line of code. You can instead focus on, say, artificial intelligence, rather than making sure the computer knew how to print out a line of text on the screen. It allows amateur programmers to focus on things they care about that the professional programmers working for large corporations or the military might not — e.g. a free online photo sharing site.
Similarly, with a lot of the basic enforcement mechanism simplified, citizens are going to try to create governments — or government like objects — for domains for which they’re interested in. We’ve already seen lawyers craft laws and contracts for just about every imaginable area — there are environmental laws, business laws, technology laws, and so forth. As this becomes more easily accessible however, I believe ordinary people are going to write laws for specific domains that professional lawyers and politicians just don’t have any interest in — e.g. student governments could have a legally binding ruling that prohibited their students from wearing paraphernalia of a rival school without any assistance from the lawyers.

Well, in a sense, I am. Part of it is moral scruples but most of it is simple economics. When dealing with illegal downloads, the odds of downloading a song of poor quality, a virus, or something that’s been mislabeled is fairly high. That makes finding the right song in the P2P underbelly is a time consuming process. And depending on the song, downloading through a P2P network can be several times lower than going through Amazon or iTunes. I’m not exactly a voracious consumer of music but every once in a while, I hear a catchy song on the radio and I want to listen to it again. Paying 89 or 99 cents to download a song every once in a while isn’t a huge expense, and the time saved is worth every penny.

Yet it’s because of that same argument that a substantial amount of music piracy does occur. For teenagers, music piracy makes all the economic sense in the world. First, they’re either not working or not working at a job that pays a lot of money, so their time is worth a lot less. Second, they don’t have a lot of money to begin with. You can argue that if you can afford paying $50 a month for high-speed Internet, you can afford 99 cents every once in a while, but the key is that the parents are paying, not the teenagers. This is exacerbated by the fact that in order to purchase almost anything online legitimately, you need a credit card (or equivalent). Teenagers don’t have credit cards. That means the legitimate route requires going through their parents, and for teens, that’s a huge hurdle. There are tons of online users who balk at using their own credit card number — imagine how many more would be turned away if they had to get someone else’s credit card to use a service.

Yeah, they could go buy the album itself from the record store, but for teenagers without cars, that still involves going through the parents. Even if the record store is within walking distance, heading out the front door runs the risk of resulting in an inquiry from someone. No matter how legitimate the purpose, teens prefer doing something themselves over doing something with mom and dad. Also, walking involves exercise.

All of this actually ends up suggesting an interesting way to reduce piracy. Give teenagers debit cards. That is, give them an allowance with the ability to use that allowance online. Buying things through legitimate channels then becomes more economically feasible a teen, and they’ll do it because diving through the P2P underworld isn’t exactly fun. And once they’re conditioned to doing things legitimately, they’ll be more reluctant to turn to illegal means when their cash runs low. It’s no guarantee, but it’d probably save the record companies some money if they just asked parents to give their kids debit cards.

1. They’re not going to buy your software anyway — Start-ups are frugal. Take Microsoft Word. Best-case scenario for Microsoft: Startups use the Microsoft Word XP Academic Version disc they had in college. Worst-case scenario: Google Docs.
2. Good marketing — Startup founders are those smart tech guys who tells everyone else what to use. You want them on your side.
3. Good acquisition strategy — You get to know and identify all the promising start ups before they get big. It lets you get into a position to influence the direction of their company (e.g. in a direction compatible with your company) and, if appropriate, buy them.

Seriously, Microsoft should have a StartupCon in Silicon Valley, let any halfway promising startup come in, and offer them free copies of Office, Visual Studio, and Windows Server. That’s not to say all the startups will use said software (in fact, most of them won’t I bet), but at least some of them will, if only because of those few aspiring business type guys with no programming experience foisting said software upon their developers (It normally costs money! It must be better!).

Suppose you Google “Barack Obama Muslim”. As it stands right now, the first result if a page dispelling the urban myth that Barack is some kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate — but what if you got a right wing propaganda page alleging the exact opposite? Google would then be in a position where they were spreading a false rumor. It’s certainly not that hard to see happening — if a lot of right wing bloggers decided to push it and link to each other, their articles would probably move up near the top. And your casual searcher only clicks the top two links or so before declaring themselves Satisfied that this is the Truth.

The problem is that there’s a divergence in how Google (or at least its search algorithm) and most Internet users see it. For Google, the purpose of search is to provide information. For the casual Internet user, Google presents the truth. Information, however, is not truth. You can have false information, misleading information, and uninformative information — but the truth is, well, the Truth. The mainstream media has had to deal with this for some time (e.g. does “fair and balanced” imply stating what you believe to be true or both sides of the story, even if one side is positively ludicrous?). Wikipedia obviously faces these issues (popular consensus does not always equal truth and has, on occasion, been overridden by a smaller group of editors). It’s really only a matter of time before someone looks at the political affiliations of well-known Googlers and start drawing connections that aren’t necessarily there.