Branko's Weblog

It seems everybody and their kitchen sink is discussing the debate around US health care reform, with only a few opinion leaders actually reading and analysing (typically: cherry picking) the actual text of the law. But if the American right doesn’t want to suffer the consequences of these reforms, there is a simple solution. Give them what they want. Let them (well, at least those of over 18) opt out of any state funded health care.

My friend Natasha pointed me to an article in De Pers about people working 80 hour work weeks in the Netherlands, rare creatures indeed. Fortunately, she also pointed out that it is apparently a slow news day. The author had interviewed five or so people and the article consists mainly of their words, which is a nice job if you can get it. It almost made me feel sorry I once quit journalism.

I have a problem with people in intellectual jobs claiming to work 80 hour work weeks, and it is this:

The actual amount of work done seems to be overshadowed by large swaths of posturing. I’d say:

• Actual work, 37.5 %
• Harassing co-workers with mindless meetings and micro-managing, 10 %
• Being at the office, going through the motions, 27.5 %
• Being at home, being available and reading documentation, 25 %

I know these 80 hour work weekers. It’s not that they don’t work hard. I am an entrepreneur, so I put in a fair share of hours myself. I have customers who call me at 10 at night on a Saturday evening, expecting me to drop everything to listen to problems that would easily survive the weekend even if nobody did anything—and some of whom would be irked if I billed them for that time. The thing is, being available all the time, not really having your own time, that sort of gets to you. There is rest and there is rest. I can well imagine that people in similar roles want some appreciation for what they do. But it’s not work.

The Polish guy who came to the Netherlands to put in your second bath room that you are paying for with your 80 billable hours per week, now he is actually working 80 hours a week.

One of my biggest fears is getting in an accident, because I don’t want to be operated on by the sort of goofball who thinks putting in 80 hours in the operating room makes him a hero. Give me a fresh and relaxed surgeon any day.

I came across this picture of a robotic camera eye on Google Maps. Hah, fooled you! It’s a picture of Wembley Stadium in a state of repair.

Just because we have to die one day, doesn’t mean online personas cannot live on forever.

What went on before: fishing highlights the tragedy of the commons. Since there is no incentive for fishermen to limit the amount of fish they catch, they tend to catch too many. The supply does not have the time to restock, and the price of fish is low because everybody is selling fish. The classic solution is to turn common property into private property, so that every owner suddenly has an interest.

This insight is what led Iceland to go from being one of the poorest countries in Europe circa 1900 to being one of the richest circa 2000. Iceland’s big change began in the early 1970s, after a couple of years when the fish catch was terrible. The best fishermen returned for a second year in a row without their usual haul of cod and haddock, so the Icelandic government took radical action: they privatized the fish. Each fisherman was assigned a quota, based roughly on his historical catches. If you were a big-time Icelandic fisherman you got this piece of paper that entitled you to, say, 1 percent of the total catch allowed to be pulled from Iceland’s waters that season. Before each season the scientists at the Marine Research Institute would determine the total number of cod or haddock that could be caught without damaging the long-term health of the fish population; from year to year, the numbers of fish you could catch changed. But your percentage of the annual haul was fixed, and this piece of paper entitled you to it in perpetuity.

Even better, if you didn’t want to fish you could sell your quota to someone who did. The quotas thus drifted into the hands of the people to whom they were of the greatest value, the best fishermen, who could extract the fish from the sea with maximum efficiency. You could also take your quota to the bank and borrow against it, and the bank had no trouble assigning a dollar value to your share of the cod pulled, without competition, from the richest cod-fishing grounds on earth. The fish had not only been privatized, they had been securitized.

It was horribly unfair: a public resource—all the fish in the Icelandic sea—was simply turned over to a handful of lucky Icelanders. Overnight, Iceland had its first billionaires, and they were all fishermen. But as social policy it was ingenious: in a single stroke the fish became a source of real, sustainable wealth rather than shaky sustenance. Fewer people were spending less effort catching more or less precisely the right number of fish to maximize the long-term value of Iceland’s fishing grounds. The new wealth transformed Iceland—and turned it from the backwater it had been for 1,100 years to the place that spawned Björk. If Iceland has become famous for its musicians it’s because Icelanders now have time to play music, and much else. Iceland’s youth are paid to study abroad, for instance, and encouraged to cultivate themselves in all sorts of interesting ways. Since its fishing policy transformed Iceland, the place has become, in effect, a machine for turning cod into Ph.D.’s.

But this, of course, creates a new problem: people with Ph.D.’s don’t want to fish for a living. They need something else to do.

Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair, Wall Street on the Tundra, via Scalzi.

Maciej Ceglowski was once in Iceland, and I only mention it because any reason to link to his writing is good.

Have a happy monkey and an inspirational 2009!

“Tell me once more,” she said, “how to make rounded corners. You’ve shown me before, but I forgot.”

So here goes.

Input is a picture (photograph, drawing), output is the same image but with rounded corners against a transparent background. The transparent background makes it easy to position the image against any backdrop. If you don’t need that, just skip the bits where I talk about transparency.

Where I say “image menu” I refer to the menu that since around GIMP 2.0 was shown by default at the top of the image windows. Since GIMP 2.6, this menu has become GIMP’s sole menu. (Before 2.0 you had a toolbox menu, and between 2.0 and 2.4 you had both.)

Step 1. Start The GIMP.

Read the rest of this entry »

The headline says in Dutch: “I am NOT a BMW dealer.”

“But Branko!” you will cry surprised, “you are the essential Universal Man, if you would want to sell Beemers, I am sure you could!” Ah, I am not so sure if I could, but that’s beside the point. I don’t want to sell BMWs in Amsterdam, and I do not sell BMWs in Amsterdam, so how come, if you search Google for “BMW Amsterdam,” does it show me and my initials at the top of the page?

As a result I have been getting a lot of phone calls lately from people wanting to buy BMWs off me. Sorry, BMW-buying people! Follow the other links.

The lesson I’ve learned today is that being the top search result in Google helps (if you want to be the top search result, that is).

My apologies for being so late with approving comments. I’ve been very busy lately (still am).

If you’re not a geek you probably don’t know SourceForge. It is a very useful website for computer programmers (or developers, as we like to call ourselves), because it provides an aggregation point for people, code and knowledge, and it does so for free. It unfortunately was built by a certain sub-type of geek that thinks they automatically understand the internet, simply because internet uses technology, and technology is something they understand.

A result of this is that for a long time SourceForge used link texts that looked like package.zip or program.exe that promised to lead you to a downloadable file. The only correct expectation that a visitor could have is that if you right-clicked the link and selected Save As in your web browser, the browser would store the promised file on your hard disk. Instead, you would get a web page with links to the actual files on your hard disk. You see, the .zip-link would not actually lead to the file itself, but instead to a collection of links that in turn would lead to (several instances of) the file.

Now SourceForge has changed this method. By the time I finally learned not to “Save As” the linked document, they’ve made it so that a download will start automatically. Of course, they won’t tell you this. Instead, you get a page with several links to downloadable files, just like before, except this time the files aren’t the ones you requested, but completely different ones that are part of advertisements. Might even be virusses, who knows? Since the web isn’t immediate, I didn’t realise I just needed to wait until the download started, and instead clicked the most likely looking link. Which was the moment I realised I was wrong, because the file that started downloading was several hundreds of megabytes large, whereas the file I had requested was supposed to be only several kilobytes in size.

Once again, FOSS geeks, sterling work! Please don’t ever learn, you might have to admit to having been wrong in doing so!

(follow link for enlargement of screenshot)