Bob Hayes Online

Lovely.

Interesting to think what would be happening right now if the old USSR still existed. Suddenly, for a period of several days – maybe longer – jet airplanes are useless over Europe. The overwhelming western advantage in airpower is suddenly neutralized. They could be in the south of France in a week. Would they go for it?

As it is I wonder what that crafty Putin might be planning.

A RealClearPolitics analysis that seems pretty cogent to me. I am biased, of course, by agreeing with its conclusion (and its apocalyptic scenario – although I think it will be even worse for the Democrats.)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/14/how_bad_could_2010_really_get_for_democrats_105152.html

Lovely day. Many speeches, tirades, prayers, invocations, blessings, pledges, singing of patriotic songs. Didn’t spot any racism, but did find a food vendor or two. If there were any infiltrators or agents provocateur about, I didn’t see them. (I’d make a bad spy.) Signage was somewhat subdued compared to past events – it did feel like people were holding back for fear of being considered racist. My wife says there was a woman in a Statue of Liberty costume but I somehow missed that. It was a fairly big crowd – I would guess a couple thousand all told.

Took a few pictures, enjoyed the nice people, look forward to this November. There were a few counterprotestors, but none interesting enough to intentionally photograph.

An excellent essay. Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a buzzword and key concept in website development for several years. Anyone creating a new website is urged to follow SEO guidelines, to pick the right tags and design their site for Google friendliness, all in an effort to attract organic search traffic by being at the top of the Google rankings for particular keywords. For example, a site that sells women’s fashions wants to appear on the first page of Google search results for “women’s clothes”. Companies spend thousands of dollars tuning their websites, soliciting backlinks to boost their site’s credibility within Google, and adding filler copy to produce more keyword-rich content.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this – but in the arms race of website promotion, SEO is the equivalent of rifles and hand grenades. It’s useful, you certainly need it – but it isn’t going to win the war for you. The other side has rifles and hand grenades, too. Even Somali pirates can afford rifles and hand grenades. There is little or no “edge” to be gained by having a slightly better rifle or somewhat more hand grenades than your competition – you’re using basically the same tools to fight for the same ground. You can’t NOT do it, because that would give your competition an advantage over you, but it isn’t going to be enough to win.

To win, you have to focus on something other than impressing the Google algorithm and attracting large quantities of essentially random traffic. To win, you have to focus on providing your customers with something that they can’t get in other places.

Companies hate hearing this, because providing unique value is HARD. Everyone wants to think they have a unique value proposition – but the hard truth is, most companies don’t. Sears isn’t doing anything that Macy’s isn’t doing. One oil-change chain is much like another.

Many companies start out providing unique value, because they were created in order to exploit some hole in the market. If nobody is selling left-handed widgets in Denver, then my left-handed widget shop, just by existing, has a unique value proposition (UVP): “We sell left-handed widgets in Denver, and nobody else does that.” The problem with this is that detecting a new niche is a one-off process: once someone starts to successfully fill a niche, other entrepreneurs will see the business possibilities and move into the marketplace. It won’t be long until Wal-Mart starts carrying left-handed widgets in their Denver stores, once they see that there is in fact a market for that – and then my unique value proposition goes “poof”.

So not only does your company need a UVP, it needs to be aware that the UVP must be dynamic and adaptable, not a one-time decision or discovery. Market conditions change, competitors enter, technologies shift – and your company and its mission have to be able to adapt as well. When Wal-Mart starts selling widgets, I have to find something new to add – and ideally, something that will be hard for Wal-Mart to duplicate. Perhaps I could start compiling performance data on all the left-handed widget models on the market, and publish that data in my shop but not online – so that people who come into Bob’s Widget World have better information than people going to Wal-Mart. Now my UVP is “We sell left-handed widgets in Denver with transparent performance information so that our customers always get the best widget.” Wal-Mart will have a hard time matching that expertise – but if they do, I have to be ready to take another step, continually innovating and finding ways to provide more value to my customers.

When it comes to websites, the bottom line is very simple: providing unique value to the people who use your site is where you can find an edge over your competition. You must invest in SEO in order to stay in the game; you must invest in providing value to customers in order to win it.

Many years ago, when I was an elementary school student, I devised a trick of calculation that greatly sped the work on a particular type of math assignment. Naturally, I shared the trick with my friends and classmates, and soon everyone had the same technique. The aggregate amount of time saved was quite staggering, and I found it extremely gratifying to consider that an innovation that took me perhaps ten minutes to conceive and implement could have such an enormously disproportionate positive impact.

Ever since that time, I have nurtured and developed a keen eye for optimizing processes and systems, particularly organization-level systems where many thousands or even millions of people will be using a methodology or an interface. At the same time, my work in the computer software industry has also taught me that premature optimization can cause problems larger in scope than the inefficiencies the optimization purports to fix. My economics background, meanwhile, informed me that for most situations to speak of an optimum is to grossly oversimplify; most systems and processes have many different functions or outcomes that can be optimized, and finding “the optimum” is in fact a balancing act between competing values – if we can even find out what the values are! Finding the best fit for “optimum”, it turns out, requires an enormous exercise of judgment (hopefully informed by experience) and, often, guesswork.

For example, my boyhood invention undoubtedly saved us endless tedium on our math worksheets – but, lacking a grounding in what the worksheets were trying to accomplish, I failed to understand that the practice was itself the point. We were doing the sheets to get practice with the mathematical rule we had just learned. My clever trick didn’t teach its practitioners anything – it just let them skip ahead to the right answer. As a one-off, that is sometimes a good thing. When we’re trying to learn, it’s a disaster. My “optimization” was in fact a body blow to the process of our class learning math! Someone optimizing for short-term student happiness would mark my idea as a brilliant success; someone optimizing for student learning would stamp with it with a fat red “F”.

Getting to optimum is not easy or trivial.

An interesting Craigslist ad for any of my Denver-area bloggy/journo friends.

http://denver.craigslist.org/wri/1502872237.html

I think the debate over AGW has grown confused for many reasons, but one of the important ones is that there actually two related but separate propositions being argued. For political reasons, proponents of the AGW theory have deliberately fused the two propositions, but for clarity of perception I think it important that we separate them and see them in their actual relatioship.

The first proposition is that due to the activities of mankind – eating, breathing, farming, building cities and factories, driving – the planet is getting somewhat warmer – not drastically, but measurably.

The second proposition is that these changes, combined with our species’ other environmental depredations, is going to lead to some type of Climate Armageddon, with the species’ future in doubt and our poverty all but assured. (I regularly see AGW-friendly commentators expounding this doom and gloom as a simple stated fact, something assumed as obvious, as a consequence of AGW.)

Science has largely decided that the first element – it’s getting warmer, mostly – is true. Wrangles over the CRU’s exact level of culpability aside, they don’t need to fudge the data to show some warming; the exact instances of malfeasance at CRU look at this early date to be in areas like trying to eradicate inconvenient truths like historical climate optima when things were a bit warmer than they are now. That effort, to dampen debate by trying to create a pretend consensus that something inconvenient to a simple, easily-sold narrative simply never happened – an “unevent” – is reprehensible and vile, but not central to the core of AGW proposition number one. Other data sources also show a warming trend, and while I am very willing to believe that there are corrupt scientists in the world, I do not believe that they are everywhere. Someone is always willing to be the hero by proving the truth in the face of such conspiracies of lies, and climate science is hardly Mafia-like enough to enforce complete silence.

It’s the second element where the real debate should be occurring, and mostly, it isn’t.

Could AGW lead to catastrophic scenarios? Sure. I’d wager it won’t, for complex reasons having to do with human adaptability and the survival instinct, but I’ll readily admit I could be wrong in my guess. But the burden of proof for such catastrophic possibilities is on the people proposing them; the rest of us don’t have to justify our use of energy to selfishly heat our homes and feed our families by first disproving that this is going to cause Gotterdammerung.

Society must tread warily. Advocates of the strong AGW position are fond of arguing the precautionary principle, but seem much less heedful of its guidance when it comes to social engineering. Our EPA has just declared that every human being (and other breathing life form) on the planet to be polluters, by virtue of our respiratory metabolism and its production of carbon dioxide. Global elites are meeting now in Copenhagen to throw bones to the developing world and monkey wrenches into their own economies.

I do not believe that the science justifies such strong measures. A social precautionary principle, that we should not throw away centuries of economic progress and betterment of human welfare on a whim, must guide us as we determine how best to match the needs of our species with the constraints of our planet.

Preface: I wrote this intending to submit to the Onion as a “hey, how about hiring me to write funny bits like this for ya” entry. Then I found out they don’t accept submissions. Alas. Thus, I present to you the fruit of my genius.

Area man and political activist Aaron Mulholland has no idea that not a single person among his 573 Facebook friends actually reads his multiple daily Facebook status updates, notes, and online game achievements. To the contrary, he believes that his “social networking” efforts not only boost the bottom line of his online candle distribution business, but advance his bafflingly wide array of political causes.

“Every time they click on my profile they see that URL for ultimate-candles.com, and those sales add up!” says the sad-eyed University of Oregon graduate, who did actually have friends in college but lost them through a series of divorces, ill-advised moves, parasitic outbreaks and natural disasters. “And for my friends, working to make the world better was always the most important thing, so I know they appreciate being kept informed of the struggles going on.”

Mulholland’s extensive collection of online friends was accumulated by a painstaking cross-indexing of multiple yearbooks and employer internal telephone directories with the online networking site’s “Search” feature, coupled with thousands of unsolicited “Friend” requests to anyone with a similar-enough name. Despite the tenuous or nonexistent connection he actually has with nearly all of those on his friend list, there are actually approximately 87 people who do not automatically block his never-ending series of updates on health care reform, political corruption, libertarian theory, Bolivia, and rumors from the sets of upcoming science fiction movies.

Forty-three of those addresses are in fact automatic spam harvester accounts, which send the greying would-be candle mogul approximately 99.998% of the e-mails which regularly fill his e-mail Inbox, contributing to the illusion that he is connected to anyone in the entire world. Of the remaining 44 accounts, 42 are people who actually did know Mulholland in his younger, much less annoying, days, and who for their own sense of being committed to keeping the social enterprise alive allow his rambles, oblique political references, and raving delusions to pass across their Facebook screens, quietly unread save for an occasional “Like” bestowed on a link to a particularly clever YouTube video. The remaining two accounts are Mulholland’s alternate account that he uses for cyber-dating, which he friended in a moment of loneliness one solitary Christmas, and his cousin Edward in Tuscaloosa, who registered for Facebook in August of 2003, accepted Mulholland’s friend invitation, and then never logged in again.

“In the end, what matters is that I make a difference. Almost every day, I add another friend from my unceasing cultivation of some tiny shred of genuine contact. And that adds up – within a few years, I’ll have a network of thousands of loyal friends! Friends who won’t desert me when some bitch runs away with my fucking best friend. Fuck me, Pete. I mean, fuck me.” Mulholland then collapsed sobbing on his couch, where he would cry for the next twenty minutes before regaining some sense of equilibrium, smoking three joints, ordering a pizza and settling in for some World of Warcraft.