Two interesting programs about 401ks: FRONTLINE: Can you afford to retire? and60 Minutes: The 401K Fallout.
The big thing I learned is that our retirement system is heavily biased to people like me—not very egalitarian, not very American.
Author: tychay
light writing, word loving, ❤ coding
Affirmative Action™ figure
Many people see affirmative action as a slippery slope to Harrison Bergeron. In light of a previous article and in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that twice in my life I’ve been an Affirmative Action™ figure.
Here they are:
Continue reading about Terry Chay affirmative action figure after the jump
How much does a date() cost?
One of the fringe benefits of open sourcing an existing code base is that you have an opportunity to set error_reporting to E_ALL | E_STRICT, or perhaps rather to 2147483647. When you do that you find small problems with your code base you missed the first time you sloppily wrote it.
In my case, I noticed that date() was throwing strict errors. For example
error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);
ini_set('date.timezone',false);
echo date('c');
shows you
I’m sure if you’re Derick, you are intimate with date()ing, but I had forgotten about this wasted guess_timezone() sys call and the suppressed strict error (which still takes time in PHP 5).
I sent an e-mail with this bug, along with the one line fix to the php.ini, to site operations…and promptly forgot about it. That is until the ticket was sent back with the message that it needed to be “tested in dev and stage before making it to production.”
(The younger, less-tolerant terry would have blown a fuse at this point.) The older, jaded terry simply became curious about what the costs of date() really are.
Continue reading about Benchmarking date() after the jump
Affirmative Action my ass
A position has opened up on the Supreme Court and no one has been nominated yet. But that doesn’t stop people from smearing someone and shouting “Affirmative Action™” from the rooftops just in case she might be. I guess if you’re not an old white dude, it must be affirmative action, because everyone knows only old white dudes are qualified.
This reverse discrimination reminds me of something my brother mentioned the other day about the Ivy League and its presidents:
- Harvard: a woman
- Yale
- University of Pennsylvania: a woman
- Princeton: a woman
- Columbia
- Brown: an African American woman
- Dartmouth: a Korean-American
- Cornell
But we all know that the only reason that the leaders of most prestigious academic institutions of this nation are 25% minorities and half women is only because of Affirmative Action™.
It seems to me that the only people out of touch with “regular Americans” are the bigots who still see gender and race as a defining trait. If people are going to attack this person based on her gender and race, they actually make the case on why we need affirmative action—after all isn’t the reason it exists is as a balance to such bigotry?
The Southern Strategy was a loser in the last election and will remain a loser indefinitely. These people need to wake up before they get run over.
I want a PWNy
Someone has a problem with their “WAP” installation…
Price is a bad thing in recessions
I’ve mentioned the Laptop Hunter ads before. And, if you haven’t gathered, I think it is the first smart campaign from Microsoft in a long time. The reasoning is that portraying Mac owners as “style over substance” and “too cool” hits the right polarizing note during tough economic times.
Sure it’s offensive and not always true, but you have to give them props for being clever.
It is possible, however, to go too far.
What’s wrong with the Laptop Hunter campaign? Well there are arguments about “the facts” (low resolution, slower RAM, etc), but it’s hard to ding Microsoft for that and not say that similar over-simplifications don’t occur in Apple’s Get A Mac campaign. There’s also the issue that the ads seem more about selling HP products, than Microsoft ones. But it’s their money. 🙂
Besides, television advertising has never been about the facts, it’s basically an appeal to emotion.
Instead, the weakness of the campaign centers around a disturbing trend among these ads: they focus on cost, not value.
Continue reading about Understanding downturns after the jump
See ya!
The GOP just discovered something…
Who care’s about the first 100 days? I’m wondering where a later 365 of them is going to go.
I finally figured it out. 2011 is the year we get raptured. As a Christian, all I have to say is “See ya, bitches! Enjoy in the final five years of the Anti-Christ’s administration.” Ahh, schadenfreude never tasted so sweet!
Stealth Startup needs final engineer
I know this isn’t likely to be a PHP posting (I’d thinking they’re probably thinking more along the lines of C or Java but I don’t think it’s been settled), but since I don’t know the details (they’re in stealth and I don’t ask), I can’t say. Besides, it’s a good friend who told me of this job. 🙂
Continue reading about back-end rock-star coder job after the jump
Bad advice
A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck. For decades, the typical college graduate’s wage rose well above inflation. But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn’t grow, even among those who went to college. The government’s statistical snapshots show the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor’s degree, adjusted for inflation, didn’t rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level. College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only.”
—The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2008
I was listening to a this American Life program with a segment titled “Hey Mister DJ.” In it NPR financial reporter, Adam Davidson, attempts to convince his cousin, DJ, to go back to college.
The spoiler is the Georgetown economist that he enlists to convince DJ ends up taking DJ’s side of being a dropout.
I don’t object to the advice per se. But I do have three issues to pick with this idiot economist.
- The economist claims that because DJ’s job is non-tradeable it is more secure than a job after a college educator? Where is the economic data for that? The answer is, there is none.
- The economist says that the reason people want you to stay in college is “because [college educated people] have snotty biases” Where is the proof of that? The answer is, there is none because it’s a statement of belief. Dj admits that the members of the family who have been college educated are “very successful.” I guess very successful == snotty. I’d like to see that economic study.
I shouldn’t be surprised of such a fact-free advice from a a free-trade nut.
Why does that get me angry? Because here are the facts.
- A college graduate earns, on average $25,000/year more than a high school diploma. Adjusted for inflation and the cost of that education, that’s $300,000 ROI—pretty much the best deal around.
- You need a college education to get a higher degree which opens even larger pay and higher lifetime economics ROI. A college education doesn’t preclude you from any of the jobs that DJ has had.
- Here is a typical statistic against a college education, it comes from the Wall Street Journal and I quoted it at the top of this article. Read it very closely, what it is saying is that the wage gap between college and high-school is no longer increasing and that you have to get an even higher degree if you want guaranteed employment. The clever use of words omits the fact that from 2001-2006, all wages have been depressed—hence the economics term “jobless recovery.” It never disputes the basic premise that college-educated workers make more money, have more job security, and have more stable and healthier households. And how will you get that higher degree anyways without a college degree?
Let’s apply my overpriced, college-educated brain to this economics professors arguments, shall we? (All of which gives me my third issue with her if you’re counting at home):
Continue reading about The application of my college education after the jump
Autoloading and Lazy Loading
Two and a half years ago, when first wrestling with the Tagged codebase, I asked Andrei about replacing all my PHP includes with __autoload. I was told under no uncertain terms to not do this.
It’s not that Andrei is wrong in his admonition. Far from it! For reasons that I don’t quite care to know, there are caching and lookup optimizations that APC cannot do when it has to switch context to run __autoload. But the problem in practice was two-fold:
- The company was bug-driven and the easiest way to eliminate an “Undefined class” error was to go into the preinclude script and include it. Voilá! problem solved at the expense of code bloat. (This bug happens often when deserializing nested objects from cache.)
- There are slowdowns when you use include_once where include would do, or when you don’t use the full path in your include, or when you construct your full path from symbols. How many of us do this? Heck, I’m still trying to get used to the idea of include_once and require_once. Ahh the days when I’d have to write symbols with every include file!
- More to the previous. If you have deep dependencies and don’t use a FrontController pattern, you’re going to have to use require_once() which will get executed multiple times. An __autoload only gets executed once.
At a certain point, optimization gives way to convenience and practicality.
For Tagged, this was that PHP would allocate 12MB/80ms to say “hello world”, 20MB/465ms to display the homepage, and 22MB/1965ms/1207ms to return my profile page
After the rewrite it takes 0.3MB/3ms to say hello world and 3.7MB/109ms to return my profile page.