So, if the end goal of Wall Street is to spread risk around—to avoid the “too big to fail” problem that just means socialized capitalism—then why is it a positive thing for bank failures or near failures to inspire M&A activity? Doesn’t more M&A activity mean fewer players, higher barriers to entry, and, worst of all, concentration of risk in fewer areas?

To quote John quoting Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

[Perhaps I am biased by being in an industry with very few players.]

When the v2 WordPress plugin for Disqus hit the streets, Chris and I got into a discussion on the forum I run about it. I was vehemently against the plugin, but my reasons were based on previous perceptions:

I’ve seen stuff like FriendFeed do this as well: conversations about content done by third parties. And while this is, at some level, no different in you writing a response on your site to something I wrote and the discussion happening over there [which can and does happen; my favorite recurring one of these is when Mark T links to something Karyn wrote, and his entry gets 10x the comments his does], but then you’re making me work to keep in touch with the conversation.

Chris pointed out that the new Disqus model isn’t that at all.

Whenever I find myself reacting in such a knee-jerk manner, I try to remember that, hey, maybe I need to re-think these things. [Not all the time, mind you. I'm forever in danger of blowing out an ACL with all the knee-jerk responses I have in my life.] This re-thinking brought me to a point I’d like to note and amplify for a wider audience:

Hm. I should not criticize that which I haven’t test-run, I guess.

And as long as comments reference back to the URI, I guess that’s fine, right? I mean, all comments are remarks about a URI, whether or not they’re appended inline or left elsewhere.

Dammit, now I’m re-thinking this.

I’ve been thinking about this at idle times. What is a comment? A comment is a reflection—positive, negative, or otherwise—about something. If Chris writes a reflection or a rebuttal on his blog in the morning when he reads this, it’s a comment, but just one not posted on my site. What’s the difference in a comment that Chris posts on his blog versus a comment that he leaves here? It’s merely the control I have over that comment’s publication. I can leave his comment be, edit it [possibly reversing his point, if I'm feeling nefarious], or delete it altogether. These are all understandable responsibilities for me to have as the person providing the place for the commentary. After all, when you’re posting your comment on my place, I become responsible for it as the owner of this domain. This is why I use Alex King’s Comment License plugin.

Extrapolating from this: pingbacks and trackbacks are merely automated systems for notification of externally-hosted comments, prone as they are to spamming. But if we went to a world where we leveraged the power of GOOG and others to find all URLs that reference our source URI as commentary, well, that list is gonna get spammed. Highly-influential articles are going to get smacked and linked to in the hopes that people see the incoming links and think that there’s commentary there [and the GoogleJuice that comes from that], and low-traffic articles become ghettos for comments. In other words, nothing changes.

But what’s the result of this different thinking on my part? Merely that it doesn’t really matter where the conversation happens—just that it happens somewhere. So any third parties that seek to intermediate this, you have two responsibilities to producers:

1. Limit the spam. [Good luck.]
2. Make it dead easy for me to find the commentary.

That’s it. No other responsibilities are really necessary.

My Intel Mac mini—which was originally a refurbished model, so please don’t let my apparent lemon overly color your opinion of the model—needs to go back to the shop. The random shutdown issue that I took it in for back in early February has come back with a vengeance, and the machine is largely unusable. This is sad for me, because this new machine has become my primary Mac—it’s my only Intel-based Mac, and it has the most horsepower of any of my machines. [I said I'd be getting a MacBook Pro in March, but I've held off for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here. And besides, the longer I wait, the more likely I am to go with a MacBook Air. That's another post entirely.]

I did get it to stay up and running for a bit earlier this evening, so I forced a Time Machine backup. As I did so, I considered this: what if, when I took my mini in to my local Apple reseller tomorrow, they handed me back an equal or lesser mini to replace it? I could take it, load my Leopard DVD, and restore from my most recent Time Machine backup. BOOM! I’d be up and running while my other machine was in the shop.

Consider this: I’d not have any downtime while I worked on a loaner. I’m at no more risk of data privacy with the loaner than I am with the machine being in the shop in the first place. If someone at my Apple reseller wants to fuck with my personal data, he can do it with the loaner that I return just as easily as he could with the machine I’ve given him. There’s nothing that says they can’t power up the in-for-repair machine, clone the HDD, and then try to buy some sweet rims for their souped-up Chevy Cavalier.

I was inspired for this concept by two things: 1) Time Machine, with regular full backups, makes this a feasible option in my mind, and 2) this is functionally what Apple does with AppleCare fixes for iPhones. Have an iPhone problem? They loan you a spare handset while they fix yours. After the repair’s complete, you return the loaner, which they wipe in preparation for handing it to the next guy.

Think about the win that Apple [and its resellers; my nearest Apple store is almost two hours away, either north or south] gets from this:

1. Customers don’t have downtime. If your PC is in the shop, do you have that option? No, you’re up a creek without a paddle.
2. The repair folks don’t have to work as tight of a schedule. Just ask the repair guys at Mac Resource about how much I was up their ass about the AppleCare repair they did of this last time. [I'm giving them one more shot in doing this, and I will be paying their reasonable expediting fee to get it back if they tell me how deep their queue is tomorrow. If they burn me this time, I'm never using them again.] This is a win for resellers as much as it is for Apple, because they look like heroes.
3. You’re validating the strength of your Time Machine platform, which is a big selling point over Windows these days.

Seems like a no-brainer to me, but you may disagree. I’d love to hear what you have to think in the comments.

Today’s Washington Post has an anecdotal story about the failure of No Child Left Behind to force any improvements at tiny Como Elementary in Como, Miss., a school that has been the state’s worst at a time when Mississippi is coming in last in standardized testing. [Dangit, what happened to "Thank God for Arkansas"?!] The story discusses all what you’d expect: those who can afford it have gone to the local private school, a common occurrence in Mississippi that’s created separate and unequal [although my experience with most of these private rural academies is that they're worse at teaching than the public schools]; the difficulty of bringing in teachers, leading to Como taking on faculty generally considered unqualified or incapable by other districts; and the general issues of getting lost in the system. Most days, I would have read this, shaken my head slowly, and said, “Yeah, NCLB didn’t make much inroads, and it’s made a lot of things worse.”

But as I was in the airport yesterday, I read “How to be top” in the 20 Oct 2007 issue of The Economist. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment studies what makes education actually tick:

Are students well prepared for future challenges? Can they analyse, reason and communicate effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) answers these questions and more, through its surveys of 15-year-olds in the principal industrialised countries. Every three years, it assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society. The results of the PISA 2006 survey will be released on 4 December 2007.

–OECD.org, 28 Oct 2007

There are many things that make other countries’ educational systems perform well, but how they do recruiting is, to me, one of the most important:

In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren’t. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

I have friends who are teachers or are studying to be them: Adam, Jeremy’s wife Hallie, Brian, and Kari’s husband Mike. All of them are smart folks who have chosen teaching over other careers where they could make more money or have more prestige. That said, I don’t think that any of them would feel that there was much competition for them to get into their educational coursework. At many universities, including my alma mater, the education department is the 90-pound weakling; as an engineering major, I arrogantly considered most of my liberal arts peers to be slacker punks, but I at least knew that the kids majoring in English or history or whatever were working their asses off. It never felt like the education majors were pushed all that hard, and it was widely known at UAH that education majors had the lowest average incoming ACT and SAT test scores.

And sure, we all know an Adam, a Hallie, a Brian, a Mike—a smart, dedicated student who chose education. But are those folks the norm? The statistics nationwide say that they aren’t. Why is education not considered a high-prestige major at UAH, where nursing is? I’ll argue along with the PISA folks and McKinsey: at UAH, nursing is a selective major. The upper division slots are limited—more folks are trying to get into them than spots exist. Do nurses make more money than teachers—certainly they do. But at UAH, nursing majors were respected because there was competition; conversely, education as a major seemed like a last resort, the degree you got if you weren’t smart or hard-working enough to stick in some other major. Sure, we all know the smart folks who choose to become educators, but they feel like the exception, rather than the rule.

Smart students today in America have a lot of educational and vocational possibilities. Medicine is still considered an ideal, despite the hours and workload, despite the time commitment of medical school, internship, and residency. Even in a time when our nation needs desparately needs more doctors, our nation’s medical schools refuse to lower their standards; instead, we import top talent from South Asia. The statistical evidence of other nations, as taken by PISA, would argue that we might see the same network effects if education suddenly became a difficult school to get into. Just as with highly-selective educational institutions themselves, smart kids seek the selective places not because they’re demonstrably better than anyplace else—most studies show that undergraduate education is generally good at most any nationally-recognized university—but the best of the best want to go to the toughest places not only because they are good, but because there is prestige merely in making it there. Education doesn’t have that cachet these days, and so I believe that smart students generally pass it by in favor of more prestigious, challenging, and lucrative prospects.

[And hey, I'm one of these people that argues that it's not all about the money. I could make a lot more money in middle management in fully private industry than I do working as a government contractor. But dadgummit, there just aren't that many people who get to put stuff into space, either.]

So, 95% of Americans have had premarital sex, and that result hasn’t changed for decades? Can I be in line with all the people saying, B.S.?

1. What’s with the strong skewing towards women? 33,000 of the 38,000 people sampled were women. That’s … not a good demographic balance.
2. The data comes from the surveys taken “in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth”. “What’s the nature of this study?” is the question most asked by the people I’ve sent this to via email. [Especially by all my librarian friends.] We all wonder: is this study demographically skewed? Anytime you see federal studies of this sort, you wonder if they’re aimed at a demographic: we were all left wondering if it was perhaps something done with individuals who use Federal insurance safetynets [Medicare, Medicaid, etc.], stuff that skews towards low-income families and single parent households. I guess that I’m being prejudicial in assuming that low-income families are going to be more promiscuous, and if you want to skewer me for that, go ahead. But single mothers are often unwed mothers, so … that’s just the very definition of what we’re getting at here. But in any regard, I think that the larger point is that there’s concern on my end for the demography of the sample as to how it relates to the public as a whole. The AP story doesn’t give us much data on this.
3. Lastly, if you believe demographers that argue that, on the whole, people who identify as homosexual are 10% of our population, you’re accepting that there are twice as many self-identified homosexuals as there are self-identified premarital virgins. Now, I admit that, as a religiously-inclined engineer living in the American South that I’m surrounded by a population that one would presume to be more likely to count among its number the 5% minority, much less knowing folks who openly admit their homosexual identity, I … think I know a whole lot more people who claim to have stayed virgins until marriage than who identify as homosexuals.

I wouldn’t have blinked if this study had said 75%. I might not have spent much time thinking about it if it was 80-85%. But 95%? Doesn’t that just seem a little high to you?

[I'm aware that I'm allowing my own individual anecdotes affect my perceptions of this research. I guess I'm wanting to see the actual paper and the methodology to cure my skepticism.]

A quick riposte while on a lunch break after nine hours at work mostly spent writing a proposal:

Buzzwords aren’t all bad, 37 Signals. The examples cited typically seem to indicate a desire to be anti-elitist and inclusionary. Well, not all communication is meant for outsiders! A great example is all the communication we do at work: we have a lot of shorthand for a lot of the work we do. The only time that we really have to break out of that shorthand is when we have to communicate with people outside of our group—and doing so then is quite, quite vital. A lot of buzzwords come from insider shorthand—it’s only bad when it escapes the insiders!

As an example: I’m quite sure that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had his fair amount of shorthand. If nothing else, he was a seminarian, and those folks are prone to the development of lots of conceptualizations that are best expressed in theological terms—on the inside.

But this “buzzwords are always bullshit” stance is, in and of itself, bullshit. If you closely watched the 37Signals Campfire room, I’m more than willing to bet that you’d find a lot of internal shorthand that could, at some point, be buzzworded. [Ruby on Rails, for instance. Rails is their framework, their name for their system. Rails is short, quick, and to the point. But now it's a buzzword. My point exactly.]

When making sweeping statements, be care to note context. This writer failed to adequately do so, which brings about this response.

I’ve been mulling the stem cell funding debate this past week, and here’s where I’ve come to on this:

1. Bush’s veto to deny Federal funding to research on embryonic stem cell research doesn’t mean that the research can’t be performed at all; rather, Federal funds just won’t go towards it.
2. Bush made a mistake in how he pitched this politically: going for the pandering to the right-to-life base [a group that I'm only peripherally part of---I personally don't believe in abortion, but I'm just not that chuffed on what the Federal government allows the citizenry to do, within reason] rather than saying, “My science advisors tell me that very little embryonic stem cell research has shown promise to date. Given the nature of the moral issues involved and the lack of progress on that front, I see no reason to change the Federal government’s stance on funding for this research, when we can choose instead to fund other research areas, such as adult stem cell research, that are producing results today.” Now, you can argue that, perhaps, Federal funding opens the door to embryonic stem cell research producing results, in the “throw enough money at the problem and it’ll work out” kind of way. I get that; I work in the NASA sphere, and that’s how we got to the moon. But Bush is working with a radically strained Federal budget, and he could have pitched this more as a fiscally conservative position rather than a moral stand. But that’s more nuanced than Bush tends to be, for better or worse. [Usually worse, especially as it regards to domestic policy.]
3. Scientists looking for funds on this need to stop looking to the Feds and going after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. With BillG’s money combined with Warren Buffet’s, they have nation-state level funding capabilities. They both have shown a willingness to fund promising technologies that will produce good returns on investment. If you can convince them, maybe you get results and you can kick at the Feds’ door down the line.

Okay, something here for most everyone to assail if they want. Thankfully, you have to have an account to comment. Mmmm … barriers to entry.

Google has pledged to donate $15,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation, which is the 501(c)3 that backs MusicBrainz. I’m hopeful that two things will result of this:

1. Mayhem gets a fair chunk of time to code on MB and make it lots better. I think this will definitely happen.
2. Google’s clear interest in MB will draw the interests of both donors and users alike. MusicBrainz is something that I very much believe in—I’ve added nearly 300 items to the database [mostly bootlegs]—and I think that it deserves a ton of attention.

Thanks, Google!