Views of a Modern World

Everything else Rick writes

That Stupid FB Notice

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Someone I know posted this on FB.

Just in case Notice:..An attorney advised us to post this. The violation of privacy can be punished by law. NOTE: Facebook is now a public entity. All members must post a note like this. If you do not publish a statement at least once, it will be tacitly understood that you are allowing the use of your photos, as well as the information contained in your profile status updates. I HEREBY STATE THAT I DO NOT GIVE MY PERMISSION.
Copy and re-post

I’ve seen it before, of course, as have all of you.

This was the comment I was going to add, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to harsh on them individually – that wasn’t my intent. So here you go:

If your attorney advised you to post this claiming it was useful in any way, consider suing them for malpractice. If some other non-attorney told you it would have some kind of effect like this for you, consider suing them for unauthorized practice of law, and then for malpractice for doing a crappy job.

Signed, a real attorney.

Short version: the terms and conditions are likely binding on users if those users keep using the service, particularly when it comes to the permissions they need to show a user’s photos in the photo tool when they’ve been shared.

If a person doesn’t want Facebook to use their stuff, they should keep it off of Facebook.

Today’s legal education minute. This is legal education about general principles, not legal advice about your specific facts. I’m a lawyer, but I’m not your lawyer.

Memorial Day 2020

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Memorial Day Celebration Playlist

I’ve gotten to the point where I no longer feel bad for gently correcting people who want to say “thanks for your service” to me on Memorial Day. I remind them that I feel lucky that I was never really in harm’s way during my service and that I’m glad there are no memorials for me because I didn’t die in combat.

Here are some stories of Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. Most of these folks lived, but they sure didn’t expect to, from the young marine who jumped on a grenade to save his buddy to the captain who led a bayonet charge up a hill in Korea against the Chinese.

Col. Lewis Millett’s Story
Col. Millett was a Wolfhound. No Fear!
His medal of honor citation:

Capt. Millett, Company E, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action. While personally leading his company in an attack against a strongly held position he noted that the 1st Platoon was pinned down by small-arms, automatic, and antitank fire. Capt. Millett ordered the 3d Platoon forward, placed himself at the head of the 2 platoons, and, with fixed bayonet, led the assault up the fire-swept hill. In the fierce charge Capt. Millett bayoneted 2 enemy soldiers and boldly continued on, throwing grenades, clubbing and bayoneting the enemy, while urging his men forward by shouting encouragement. Despite vicious opposing fire, the whirlwind hand-to-hand assault carried to the crest of the hill. His dauntless leadership and personal courage so inspired his men that they stormed into the hostile position and used their bayonets with such lethal effect that the enemy fled in wild disorder. During this fierce onslaught Capt. Millett was wounded by grenade fragments but refused evacuation until the objective was taken and firmly secured. The superb leadership, conspicuous courage, and consummate devotion to duty demonstrated by Capt. Millett were directly responsible for the successful accomplishment of a hazardous mission and reflect the highest credit on himself and the heroic traditions of the military service.

The rest of these are about 20 minutes each. You don’t have to watch them all; maybe you’ll watch one.

House Rules

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This post on Slate has an effective clickbaity title.

I’m just going to comment that I think it was instigated by people who don’t let you win all the money in the middle on Monopoly when you land on Free Parking.

Lost Spring

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This is something I came up with to express one aspect of how we’ve all put lives on hold in different ways.

Hey, let’s get together; let’s get a drink and meet;
Hey, let’s get together; I really think you’re sweet.
Hey we got together; had a meal and talked all night;
Hey we got together; wrapped my arms around you to hold you tight.

Hey let’s get together, I’m crazy ‘bout you
Hey let’s get together, wanna wrap my arms around you.
Hey let’s be together, I’ll try anything with you
Hey let’s be together, firefly squid got the best of you.

We didn’t know then
It was gonna be a lost spring
We didn’t know how
It was gonna upside-down
We didn’t know it was gonna be a lost spring
We started out fast and we never slowed down.

The days and weeks I spent with you really blew my mind.
My love for you broke through; I wanted you to be mine.
Hey let’s stay together; this is something true.
Hey let’s stay together; I wanna live my life with you.

We didn’t know then
It was gonna be a lost spring
We didn’t know how
It was gonna upside-down
We didn’t know it was gonna be a lost spring
We held each other then but we didn’t see now.

[bridge]

What if we put our lives together? I could build my life around you.
Hey let’s put our lives together; our families, me, and you.
But the world got between us, slowed everything down. [spoken]
Told us to stay apart, to stay in our towns. [spoken]
I got sick and you got scared.
Were the two of us beyond repair?

We didn’t know then
It was gonna be a lost spring
We didn’t know how
It was gonna upside-down
We didn’t know it was gonna be a lost spring
We tried to hold on but we didn’t know how.

So we’re searching for that lost spring
Even though they’re all lost that came before.
I’m looking for you in our lost spring
I think you’re there, waiting somehow.
Searching for each other in that lost spring
Don’t forget the one coming to your door.

We didn’t know then
It was gonna be a lost spring
We didn’t know then and we don’t know now.

(c) Rick Colosimo 2020.

Notes:
I’m clearly a word guy, not a music guy. So as I got started, the melody from the Grateful Dead’s St. Stephen helped me give it a bit of structure to pull things together. A few days later, I think I realized that it’s a folksy, almost country, sound in feel.

Did not find

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NB: Now that some time has passed and we’ve moved from the Mueller Report to the House Investigation to the Impeachment to the vote, this is not a “hot” topic but one just about the nature of proof and belief and the words we use to describe them.

“Did not find” vs. “found no”

I’ve been surprised at the number of “journalists” who have made a high-school level mistake in reporting on the Mueller report as described by the Barr letter. The Barr letter says several times words to the effect that the report “did not find collusion/a crime” and does not say the report “found no collusion” or “found no crime.” Now, I guess that most folks read those as meaning the same thing because nearly every report I’ve seen (even form people who write enough puns that I think they pay attention to words) has used words more like “The report found no collusion….”

Now maybe my very expensive law school education has warped me permanently, but those two phrases don’t mean the same thing. In general, the second means that the report cleared the president and his campaign; the first, the words used by Barr, say only that the report did not find a crime and leaves open the possibility that there was a crime.

Now, I don’t know who did what, and as someone wrote yesterday, we’re all better off if the President didn’t in fact commit any crimes. But until we see what the report says, I’m not in favor of slanting the words to favor the president when the Attorney General didn’t do that.

iPhone App ideas

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So I’ve had this idea for an iPhone seismograph app that a person could use on a rollercoaster or taxi ride on the FDR or regional jet flight.

Here are a couple apps I’ve come across that are in the same vein:

Noise:
Decibel X is a free app for the iPhone (also available on Android) that is a noise meter. It pretty accurately measures noise on a decibel scale. I use it to monitor the noise levels in restaurants and workplaces in an effort to increase quiet. When I am recording podcasts I use it to ensure there’s little background noise. It’s also entertaining and instructive to measure sound levels outside in nature and urban areas. — KK  (from Cool Tools)

Potholes:

Consider Boston’s Street Bump smartphone app, which uses a phone’s accelerometer to detect potholes without the need for city workers to patrol the streets. As citizens of Boston download the app and drive around, their phones automatically notify City Hall of the need to repair the road surface. Solving the technical challenges involved has produced, rather beautifully, an informative data exhaust that addresses a problem in a way that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. The City of Boston proudly proclaims that the “data provides the City with real-time in­formation it uses to fix problems and plan long term investments.”

Yet what Street Bump really produces, left to its own devices, is a map of potholes that systematically favours young, affluent areas where more people own smartphones. Street Bump offers us “N = All” in the sense that every bump from every enabled phone can be recorded. That is not the same thing as recording every pothole. As Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford points out, found data contain systematic biases and it takes careful thought to spot and correct for those biases. Big data sets can seem comprehensive but the “N = All” is often a seductive illusion.
Source: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740–9713.2014.00778.x

These couple ideas make me think that a Richter-scale app must be doable.

Efficiency is free [in the long run]

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Efficiency is free in the long run, argues Seth Godin.

I read his post as saying two very different things:

First, shifting costs to other people ends up costing more money overall. That’s what economists call a negative externality (and the genesis of many NIMBY complaints — no one wants to be on the receiving end of a negative externality, like a cement factory or pig farm, the two business endeavors that seem remarkably common in legal casebooks). The idea that one person can do something that’s more profitable because costs fall on a third party generally offends our sense of fairness, and it makes us realize that if a party is not tracking the true costs and benefits of its proposals, it might make a poor decision.

Second, Seth seems to be saying that many profitable investments in the long run are not being made in the short run. As articulated by Tom Nonnenmacher, that’s indicative of a discount rate problem.

The first issue is a big-picture legal/societal/moral/ethical one,that we’re not going to solve today. We have lots of rules that allocate responsibility for things. Laws exist (or don’t) because we want to assign costs for externalities to certain parties. For example, “allowable” limits for discharge of pollutants are set by governments for various reasons, but one legitimate reason is how much the public gains from that behavior. To shift a bit, we have a law that allows persons harmed by vaccines to recover from a fund administered by the federal government, in part because the legislature has determined that the public good is increased so dramatically by the use and prevalence of vaccines that it’s worthwhile for society to bear the costs of those infrequent injuries to persons from vaccines (rather than making the manufacturers directly liable to those persons).

The second issue, though, of discount rates is one that can be fixed, or at least addressed, by good leaders and managers. Firms need to start from a position of understanding about the returns that they’ve actually made from different projects (rather than guessing about overall returns, or assigning corporate-level weighted-average returns to each project beyond the first step of the process). Then, managers should work to understand what happened between the plan for the project and the outcome: what factors affected the variance, which factors improved vs. worsened results, and how much did each factor contribute to the final result? This source of change analysis will eventually become table stakes at the C-level; once you see it in action, you realize that it’s the only way to run a railroad.

Stepping back, though, the question of overly high discount rates (leading to favoring near-term, short-risk projects over longer-term projects) is impacted by different factors as well. One is sensitivity to short-term, i.e., quarterly, financial reporting. Another is understandable but probably not well-understood concern about projections (will we really make that much?) and execution (can we really accomplish those tasks?) and timing (will it really happen that fast?). Those three are all sensible; the issue I think about as a board member is whether the company has really thought through these issues and really “forecast” the numbers vs just throwing them into excel and tweaking them until the bottom line looks okay. Imposing higher discount rates because of internal risks – things that the company should be able to know and influence over the course of the project – is a bit of sloppiness or intellectual laziness. After all, if you don’t understand what the underlying factors really look like and what the variance in the estimates is, then adding a top-level discount factor is probably just as unknowing. It’s like saying, “I don’t know how much that car is worth, so I’ll offer you $100.” A similarly unsophisticated approach is setting a high/medium/low number for some item without any real understanding of why the number might be different, what the distribution of the possible outcomes is, or why any of those three numbers were actually picked other than that one is highest, one is lowest, and the third sits in-between. In other words, there’s too often no information present in that choice.

What’s the point of all of this? The point is that it’s the job of the leaders to dig into the elements of underlying business risks and put them into the plan in some way based on what’s going on. The job of the board is to dig into those risk analyses and think about them in a few ways: what is the distribution of likely outcomes for some factor? How does that change the total outcome? Will we be able to mitigate negative results along the way? How does this range of outcomes fit into our total corporate portfolio of activities?

Ultimately, finding profitable investments and allocating capital to fund them is the job of the CEO, and it’s the board’s job to take a big-picture view and keep the entire corporate portfolio in mind so that each project fits the company’s strategy and strategic plan.

Collar stay punch

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I saw this guitar pick tool in the Uncommon Goods website some time ago. Around that time, I had the idea (since I don’t play guitar) of a similar tool that would punch out collar stays for dress shirts. However, between not wearing as many formal dress shirts at work and life, I never really followed through with my manufacturing contact friend.
Pick Punch

Now, though, someone has caught up to me (my fault for not publishing this years ago, I suppose).

Behold, the collar stay punch!
Pick Punch Collar Stay Punch

Someone’s gone further and turned it into deliberate marketing at CollarCard, where they pre-print the card with your design and prep the collar stays so they can be popped out.

I guess we need another use for all those hotel key cards now….

Occam’s Safety Razor

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Occam’s Safety Razor

Occam’s Safety Razor: when you don’t know what the answer is, start with something that almost certainly can’t hurt.

Everyone talks about Occam’s Razor, usually getting it wrong in the process. I generally prefer the Karl Popper interpretation that it’s just about ease of testing and not an actual “law” because sometimes things are in fact complicated.

But if you don’t have an explanation or solution or prescription for your problem, start with something that is almost certainly not going to hurt and is likely to do some good. Personal problem in your life? Eat better or exercise. Those surely won’t hurt you and you might get somewhere while you’re figuring out the rest. Business problem? Start by improving free cash flow.

In the Army, we’d call this hitting 50-meter targets (the closest targets on the basic rifle qualification course are the 50m left and the 50m right; they are much easier to hit than the 300m target). People who like football metaphors say things like “blocking and tackling.” Other people say “pay attention to the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” The point is always the same: there’s likely to be some clear (not necessary simple or easy) fundamental task that will make almost every situation better while you’re trying to solve the big problem.

In college volleyball, we’d do this by starting with a strong effort to establish a clear pattern of hitting hard, fast spikes right in the center of the net. Once that was working, only then would we start to expand our offense and try other shots.

What’s the point? The point is that the principle of Offensive – seize, retain, and exploit the initiative – is your friend even when you don’t know exactly what to do. Find something that’s not going to hurt and start doing that. You’ll find your way eventually.

Library v Amazon

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At some point I looked over my Amazon wish list and saw a lot of books that I wanted to read but wasn’t sure I really wanted to keep for a long time. So I wondered if there was a tool that would track my wishlist and then pop up and tell me if the book was available in my local library.

I saw a mention in Lifehacker (and then again recently in Cool Tools) for a Chrome plugin that does this for some library networks. Library Extension does exactly that. I get excited when I see these things making their way into the world, even if I’m not the one doing it, or getting credit for it, or anything at all. I am happy when people have slightly easier lives.

A different angle on this is creating a tool/script/webapp/Alfred workflow for sending a book name to my library’s auto-bookbag interface and adding it to my list. What we should do with our libraries is treat them like our Netflix queues, where we add books and eventually they make it to the top of the list (and sometimes a book jumps the queue, like when Sapolsky recommends James Gleick’s Chaos).

I think that there might also be a related need for an ISBN cross-lookup tool to get the same book in different formats (or whatever might trigger different ISBNs for what people would consider the same book).