Adaptive Curmudgeon

True story:

Several moons ago I bought a used truck. It is diesel because I’m an adherent to the church of diesel. Diesel is a PITA but it’s also vastly superior to the more common gasoline engines. Analogous to how my computer runs Linux. It seems to suck until I compare it to Windblows (which is so appalling I can’t believe people still use it) or a Mac (which is as far as I can tell are sold through Stockholm syndrome).  In my eyes I’ve got the best type engine and the handiest OS in the county. (Admittedly there are very few people in my county and probably none of them use Linux but all farmer and loggers prefers diesel so score one out of two.) The key point is that it is a diesel truck.

I bought the truck a couple thousand miles away and it didn’t come with an oil pan heater. Research indicated that all engines of my type have a heater but some were shipped without the cord.  WTF?  At any rate it was a serious issue for me.  Folks who live in a “normal” climate have no idea how much engineering is required to survive up here… much less coax a diesel to life in the cold.  Clearly I’d need to install that cord before it got cold.

So of course I ignored the issue through many warm pleasant months until it was Christmas Eve and 0 degrees out.  Yeah, I’m that smart.  (I’d been carrying the cord, ready for installation, for several weeks.)

I’d been hauling firewood and doing farm chores in the bone chilling cold for several hours when I decided I’d better face the cord install.  It should be stupid simple.  Wrong!  Nothing, even taking a leak, is stupid simple when it’s well below freezing!  Also the daylight was waining.  I’d have to hurry.

I crawled under the truck and started poking around.  I had no clue where the cord should be installed but I had a basic idea of how to look.  Because physics is physics it should be on the bottom and not the top.  Because oil is oil it should be on the oil pan (which is like ten acres of surface area on this truck!).  There should be a simple receptacle which would receive the cord.  No tools needed (probably).

I experienced (not for the first time) awe.  A modern diesel engine is a technological marvel with complexity far surpassing anything an ape like me should ever touch.  Plus everything is huge.  This engine is like a Formula 1 race car had sex with a steamshovel.  I was lost.

Meanwhile the cold ground conducted temperatures into my spine which are banned by Geneva convention.  I think there was a serious wind chill too.  I couldn’t actually tell over the sound of my teeth chattering.

Finally I found a receptacle which looked right.  Except some chowderhead had already plugged a sensor or something into it.  A suspicious looking cable left the receptacle and dove into the depths of the engine where a mouse wouldn’t fit.  Who knows what it did or why?  The light was fading and I couldn’t feel…  well anything.  It would take a miracle  to get this handled before sunset and another -10 degree evening.  I was well and truly screwed.

As a last ditch effort I tried tracing the cable.  After a couple twists and turns it wound up at the front of the truck, tucked behind the bumper like it had never been used.  It was the AC plug end to  my already installed block heater!

Merry Christmas to me!

I decided that Saint Nick dropped off mechanically inclined elves which fixed my truck for me.  (I have been good all year!)  It’s as good an explanation as any.  Also it’s uncanny how perfect it is.  I can’t imagine a better Christmas present (except maybe a cannon or a submarine).  Within the realm of reasonable this is pretty much the greatest Christmas surprise ever.

A.C.

P.S.  I tested it and it works.  Which is a good thing because I haven’t seen the positive side of the Fahrenheit scale for a few days now.

Once I had everything lined out I was shocked at what I saw. It seems like you can’t turn over a rock without the Government forming a rock relocation committee. I assumed the workforce has been growing like a waistline at Thanksgiving.

I was wrong!

In the last 49 years (roughly) the government averaged about 5,000,000 employees with a big spike in the late 1960’s (Vietnam?). There has been fluctuation in between but compared to 1962 and the 2010 Fed is just under a million employees smaller. How is it that us “small government” fans aren’t aware of this? You’d think we’d be pleased with the overall trend. (Yes, yes… Some of you are attempting to hammer the word “contractor” into the nearest keyboard as fast as possible. That’s a topic for another time.)

I shall repeat this because it impressed me; the number of employees in Federal government in 2010 is smaller than in 1962. Who knew?

Another interesting thought, the US population increased in that time. Thus the relative size of the Fed diminished from 29 to 16 Feds per million Americans. Huzzah!

Now was the time to see if I would eat crow or not. This all started when I claimed that Reagan increased the size of government. Specifically he hired more Federal employees. I’d skated on thin ice. To some folks, bitching about Reagan increasing the size of government is like complaining that the Pope’s keg parties are too wild. Was I wrong?

(Warning: Math/) Any spreadsheet can fit a linear regression. I made one for each president. My crude regressions have a slope and an intercept. Forget the intercept and look at the slope. The slope is the average change per year exhibited by that president. If the slope is positive, then the president increased the number of people working for the government. If it’s negative he decreased it. The size of the number is how aggressively this happened. A small slope means virtually no change. A big number means a big change.(/Math)

Ronald Reagan added just under 54,000 Feds a year. Overall he accumulated about 307,000 additional employees total in 8 years as head poombah. Based on America’s population in 1985, Reagan added a total of about 0.129% or more than 1/1000 of the citizenry to the already existing Federal force.

Delightfully, the numbers had backed up my statements! Almost a third of a million additions in eight years means the hero of small government somehow managed to hire another person every 10 minutes, day and night, weekends included, the entire time he was in power. I laughed hard enough to annoy my dog.

What about my boast that the two parties are pretty similar? I’d stated my theory that Republicans (which talk a big game about small government) had not behaved much better than the Democrats (which have never met anything that isn’t, in their eyes, under the purview of the Federal government). Was I correct?

On my chart there has been a Republican in charge 28 years and a Democrat for 21 years. Nice bi-partisan sample. All I needed was a weighted average of presidential “slopes” by party. Republicans cut 71,000 Fed jobs a year on average. Democrats add just under 50,000 employees a year. Ironically, Democrats rack up new hires roughly as quickly as Reagan did.

So I learned something new. With the exception of Reagan, the “small government party” does indeed reduce employees more than their counterpart. Fair ’nuff.

What else is there to learn? It looked like the Democrat’s record of adding Feds is almost entirely due to a spike that happened on Johnson’s watch. Every other Democrat (except Obama) shed jobs. What if I took out the spike?

As an experiment I zeroed out the temporary spike that is probably Vietnam. It started more or less in 1965 and it was more or less erased by 1972 (every job added on the way up was cut on the way down). Retaining the spike meant that Dems got the blame for the build up and Repubs got the credit for the reduction. (“Credit” and “blame” being dependent on your point of view.)

Removing the seven year spike didn’t change much. Johnson and Reagan remain the big expanders. Clinton and Nixon remain the big reducers. In keeping with the overall trend, Republicans reduce -42,000 Feds a year while Democrats shave only about -10,000. No matter how you slice it, (ditching Johnson’s buildup and keeping Reagan’s expansion) Republicans still generally cut the number of Feds 400% faster than Democrats.

You can split hairs further. For example I didn’t pro-rate changes between presidents. My chart implies that the day after Bush Jr. left office, a quarter million more Feds simply materialized out of thin air and neither Bush nor Obama had the slightest influence on that. Of course it could be examined, but doing so is a political hassle I don’t need. Nor does it matter. I wasn’t interested in what a specific pinhead politician did. My question was what the herd of pinheads have done en masse. Well, that and having fun taunting a friend over Reagan.

I sense commentary arguing either for or against a particular president or party. One could write books about how such and such unfortunate growth in the size of Government was totally necessary at the time because the Lemur harvest in Indonesia affected Boris Yeltzin’s left nut… Not interested. I’ve seen everything under the sun justified by very earnest people and it gets weird fast. All I care is what presidents of both parties did; what actually happened on their watch. In fact I pretty much don’t care what any of them said or intended. Presidents shouldn’t get a pass for having good intentions.

P.S. I used the following rough numbers for USA population in 1962 = 186,000,000, in 2010 = 281,000,000, and in 1985 = 238,000,000.)

In case you’ve been battered by markteters or hammered by travel I give you the words of Linus.

Merry Christmas from the Curmudgeon.

The Internet is my friend. Data can hammer beautiful fictions into dust faster than you can say “bullshit detection” and the Internet is awash with data. It took no time at all to find a chart with the number of employees in the Federal government from 1962 to 2010. The source, the OPM, is reasonably sound. The OPM isn’t known to cook numbers particularly outrageously. Also, the chart included uniformed military as well as executive/legislative/judicial branches. Good.

I’ve no idea why the chart began in 1962 but it was ideal; enough to cover a long span without not stretching so far back that I’d have to grapple with the great depression and WWII. I wished it went to 2012 but at least it covered a smidge of the current rainbow in chief. I was more interested in what I’d said about Reagan anyway. (I had declared that there were more Federal employees when Reagan was done than when he started. Had I skated on thin ice? If I was wrong I was due for a verbal thrashing and the forced shameful admission that I was completely incorrect. I might be flogged.)

What fun to look at actual numbers. Facts are a meat cleaver against talking points. (That’s why we’ve had an election season largely devoid of them.) I dumped the table into a spreadsheet and spent a whopping 2 minutes assigning each year to a president. As with all number crunching, there were details. New president take over in late January. We do this because… well I’ve got no idea but I wish it was January 1st. Plus Kennedy got shot on a day that’s not December 31st. Nixon was also rude enough to resign in the middle of the damn year. Oh well, neither event changed the party of the sitting president. I simply made units of a year and rolled with it. In the long term, a month or two is irrelevant.

Then, because I’m a stud, I made a chart. Because I’m lazy, I didn’t make a pretty chart. Because I’m evil (and also it’s Christmas dammit), I’ll wait a few days to post the results.

Ring ring…

Me: “Hello”

Dr. Mingo: “We’re fucked!”

Me: “That’s a new discovery? By the way, I like the way you start conversations.”

Dr. Mingo: “The fiscal cliff; we’re going over and I’m displeased.”

Me: “When I paraphrase this for my blog I’m going to substitute ‘displeased’ for what you just said.”

Dr. Mingo: “Who cares! That moron Obama is going to tax us back to the stone age. We’re going over the cliff!”

Me: “First of all we already went over the cliff.  In early 2011 Congress took a good look at the bigget debt in the history of mankind and wet themselves.  Ballsy lot eh?  By August they pooled all their leadership skills and decided to punt until 2013.  Now, 16 months later, I’m supposed to be surprised? D.C. has been running in the red most of my adult life and December 31, 2012 is when I’m officially scheduled to hyperventilate? Even my dog knew this was coming.”

Dr. Mingo: “Well this wouldn’t turn out so bad if Romney had won. He’d actually cut spending…”

Me: “Ha ha ha, and I fart rainbows. Whomever won the election was pre-ordained to look the dragon in the face and then bravely keep doing the same stupid shit.”

Dr. Mingo: “Compared to Obama…”

Me: “It’s better to die from Tuberculosis than Cancer? Both parties are spineless. Romney would have caved like a house of cards…”

Dr. Mingo: “But…”

Me: “…a house of cards dumped into a wood chipper…”

Dr. Mingo: “But…”

Me: “…a woodchipper that’s been set on fire.”

Dr. Mingo: “But…”

Me: “…and dropped in a tar pit.”

Dr. Mingo: “Um… that’s a pretty complete level of ‘collapse’. I disagree with you. A Republicans core belief is smaller government…”

Me: “Ha ha ha. Fart. Rainbows. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.”

Dr. Mingo: “I sense disagreement.”

Me: “Regardless of what they say, neither party is in favor of smaller government. Forget their words, look at their deeds.”

Dr. Mingo: “I’m incredulous!”

Me: “I’m going to paraphrase that as…”

Dr. Mingo: “Shut up! Are you saying the party of Reagan expands government? Are you high?”

Me: “I’ll admit Reagan rocked a cowboy hat but he spent money like an actor from California.”

Dr. Mingo: “You have insulted Reagan! I’m going to have to beat your ass for that.”

Me: “He expanded government.”

Dr. Mingo: “You’re full of baloney.”

Me: “I’m going to paraphrase that as…”

Dr. Mingo: “Shut up! I think you’re wrong. How sure are you of your facts?”

Me: “Um… We’ll I’ve been wrong before. There was this incident with my tractor’s crankshaft…”

Dr. Mingo: “So you’re backing down?”

Me: “No, but one of us is wrong. Being that we’re evolved beings let’s examine actual facts…”

Dr. Mingo: “You going to do that before or after you fart rainbows?”

Me: “I deserve that. However I have a plan.”

Dr. Mingo: (Cautiously) “Um… I’m not sure where this is going.”

Me: “I will research the matter.”

Dr. Mingo: “Whew…”

Me: “If there are more Federal Employees after a president leaves than when he takes office he’s expanded government. Is that a clear definition?”

Dr. Mingo: “Yes, well given extenuating circumstances…”

Me: “No extenuating circumstances. If you start as boss with 100 employees and quit four years later with 101 then you’ve ‘expanded’ the company. There might be very good reasons to expand; I’m sure Obama could list them…”

Dr. Mingo: “Aak!”

Me: “…but regardless of the cause, reasoning, logic, or explanation I’m going to find a number and write it on a piece of paper. More people on the payroll equals bigger government. No whining. No Mulligans.”

Dr. Mingo: “Agreed. More employees equals expanded. Simple.”

Me: “Fine. Then I will state my hypothesis.”

Dr. Mingo: “You want a lab coat and chalk board Dr. Spock?”

Me: “Hypothesis one: Reagan left office with more people in Federal employment than when he started.”

Dr. Mingo: “I think you’re wrong. I look forward to watching you eat crow.”

Me: “Hypothesis two: if I look long term, presidents of both parties have increased the number of Federal employees more or less equally. I won’t see a big difference between the two.”

Dr. Mingo: “Oh man. I’m going to be depressed if you’re right.”

Me: “Welcome to my world.”

Dr. Mingo: “So call me when you know.”

Me: “Remember my blog?”

Dr. Mingo: “You’re going to string everyone along with a cliffhanger aren’t you.”

Me: “Of course!”

Earlier this year I made several predictions (some funny, others in earnest).  My track record appears to be dismal.  However there was one that I nailed!

38. The world will not end. It’s a calendar carved on a rock by people who didn’t have enough technology to make an electric toaster…get real.

Just in case the world ended and I didn’t notice (it has been busy on the homestead lately) I referenced the mainstream press which, like me, was actually correct for once.  Check out the greatest headline of the quarter: Mayan calendar ends; world doesn’t.

This is the third year of a new Festivus Christmas tradition.  We gather around the warm glow of the laptop and watch A Very Zombie Holiday.  It’s a heartwarming classic!

David Sedaris can get a little preachy at times but the guy is a master storyteller.  This one hits it out of the park.  Apparently everything I’ve ever known (in America) about Santa is turned on it’s head by the Dutch  interpretation of Christmas.

Hat tip to Fire Mission: Hippies In The Open for this obscure gem.

I’ve been on the road and busy to boot.  Combined with a Curmudgeonly personality and a history of TV avoidance I can find myself downright disconnected… which is just how I like it.

Unfortunately something evil went down Friday and I couldn’t avoid it.  I heard the news when I made the mistake of switching on the radio.  (I’d been happily listening to my MP3 player.)  I was looking for a weather report and instead found out that some sick bastard shot his mother, a bunch of kids, and some adults.  It cast a pall over the formerly cheerful truck cab.  Asshole!  I’d only reconnected with the news for ten minutes and was faced with this…  this… abomination?  I flipped the radio back off.

Tragedy.  No kid deserves to be shot.  Even as I wrapped my mind around it I knew that political gamesmanship would commence soon.  (Nothing is too ugly to become a political tool anymore.)  As usual, I’d be on the shit end of it.  I like my gun rights.  Invariably this horror would be used to hammer me and my ilk.

Surely there would first be a period of mourning?  Nobody is such a monster that they’d jump on it right away.  Also I really needed a weather report.  The road conditions were looking dicey.  I turned on the radio again.  Two minutes had passed since I’d heard the news.

No weather report.  Instead some airhead was blathering about the need to eliminate guns.  Imagine that!  Hours after the incident and two minutes after I’d first heard about it.

Like the tide follows the moon there is always someone who’ll exploit misery.  “In light of this horrible tragedy it is obvious that all Americans must submit to precisely what I’ve always wanted.”

I flipped the radio off again.  It was too much.  Capitalizing on the death of innocents more or less immediately.  Who thinks like that?

I never got the weather report.  I just kept driving.

The next day, Saturday, got even creepier.  Every station on the radio was playing with it like death was a theme park.  They even interviewed the coroner and discussed the autopsy.  Someone, presumably a grown adult who should know better, asked “What did it feel like?”  To get shot to death?  Who asks a question like that?

Worse yet, I was driving through Chicago.  Chicago is the home planet of gun control and various other forms of political control.  Chicago also has terrible traffic.  I inched along while a herd of talking heads paraded through my speakers with the unanimous theory that ignorant rednecks and their guns were clearly the cause of all misery.  I myself have never shot anybody and I like owning guns.  There is no room for me in Chicago.  I wished I was home with my family.

By Sunday I’d given up on even the merest hint of the radio.  My MP3 player is earning it’s keep.

By Monday I picked up the free newspaper at the hotel room lobby.  The headline said “Gun control nearing tipping point”.  It took less than 72 hours to go from a tragedy to that headline.

I suppose I’m not surprised but I’m saddened.  Not all tragedies are lessons.  Not all evil is a chance to start a crusade.  There is a time when one might do well to pause and reflect before starting the next political battle.  (Both parties should know this.)  Our nation is getting pretty darned good at turning on each other; an unwise reaction to sorrow.

I have been suspicious of Utopian plans to drop technology in impoverished hellholes.  One such program is One Laptop Per Child.  I’ve long harbored the concern that folks are prone to focusing on toys instead of learning.  (Notice I said “learning” and not “education”?)  I even see it in my child’s massively (overly?) funded school.  Bureaucrats and teachers alike get orgasmic over wads of Apple products when the kids would fare just as well (if not better) with boring traditional materials like books and pencils.  Here’s a hint; people have learned to read and write since literacy was invented, a $50,000 tech lab isn’t the key ingredient.

On the other hand I have long thought that it’s sad to deny any human access to the Internet.  Everyone (and I mean everyone; illiterate pig farmers and tribal goatherders included) can, if they wish, benefit from information.

Information is power.  It allows us to be more.  I endlessly appreciate the information I can dredge from the Internet!  Mine is the last generation of Americans (one would hope) that remembers how difficult even the simplest of endeavors was before the Internet.  (Try this test; turn off your Internet connection and then determine the proper spark plug gap for a Buick, who won the Sheriff’s election in Munsee, the distance to Bangalore, and the proper climactic zone to plant rhubarb.  Now do it with a cheap laptop.)  A reasonably bright citizen in 2012 (with the Internet and a cheap laptop) is like an intellectual God from 1950.

Back to the Utopians; if only the technology could be supplied without a heaping helping of condescension on the hands of whatever yahoo provides the e-toys.  So sad…

What’s this?  Just such an experiment happened.  Huzzah!  The result is pure awesome!

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Brilliant!  OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference describes what happened next:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

Isn’t that beautiful?

It gets better.  There’s a tie in (however far removed) with Science Fiction:

“If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it’s not a coincidence: Nell’s Primer in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell.”

Those of you who’ve read The Diamond Age know that the subtitle is “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” and it goes into detail about a high tech “book” providing the intellectual underpinnings for a top notch (if fanciful) education.  Those of you who have not read The Diamond Age should drop everything and read it now.

Hat tip to Aretae for the link.

A.C.

P.S.  If you buy The Diamond Age I don’t get a red cent.  This blog is totally for my own amusement and I recommend the book because it’s a damn fine tome.  (Though not as good as Cryptonomicon.)  Also, why the hell haven’t you read it yet?