2010 Commentary on the World
2010 Commentary on the WorldThis is a running dialog giving me a place to comment upon issues of the day without cluttering up the primary dialog.
The USA
imports tons of drugs from Mexico monthly and and the USA denies that this is an American problem.
The American government has a serious
denial problem and prevents the visibility of the real problem by
magnifying the symptoms. Mexican President Calderon has lambasted
the USA for its red herrings and asked continuously for help in
fighting the American problem.
Drugs
go to the USA. Money and guns go to Mexico. The drugs could
not cross the border without assistance on the American side.
Across Mexico there are drug checkpoints everywhere. Sometimes
even while waiting in the long, slow, lines returning to the
USA.
The USA has installed placebo checkpoints for vehicles going south
into Mexico. The majority of the time
there is a stop sign with no supporting agents.
Many Mexicans in Mexico are dead. Many of them
police officers. Calderon is doing more than his share. It
is time for the USA to step up to the plate and acknowledge that the
entire problem is the American insatiable hunger for illegal drugs. Econ
101: supply and demand. Stop the demand and the supply dries up.
The USA is
a racist country. It was founded racist. President Lincoln
set the country's birthday as the 4th of July. He knew that the
Constitution was flawed and he would not accept celebrating its
signing. He may be the only one with this understanding.
Half of the USA is still fighting the Civil War. Half still fights the Civil Rights Act.
Blacks have made great progress. But Asians, East Asians,
Hispanics, and anyone else who is not a white Christian is still
discriminated against in the USA at every possible level. But the
worst discrimination today is reserved for Mexicans and other people with brown skin or who speak Spanish.
A Republican: a criminal who believes that the United States of
America belongs to the rich, the white, the English-speaking,
Christians. This year the Republicans in fighting our right to
good heath have made their position clear: we will never have a level
playing field. They believe that the inalienable right to the
pursuit of happiness does not include being healthy enough to exercise
that right or to not be one of "them"..
We have "illegal Mexicans:. The better term is
"undocumented persons". A person cannot be illegal. Referring to
"Mexicans" rather than "persons" is just as prejudicial.
Semantics. But the bottom line is that the USA is composed of
racial bigots from the school yard to the President.
The US State Department runs ads telling people to not visit Mexico
because the USA has a drug consumption problem creating violence
in Mexico. I do not have the statistics but I have lived in some
pretty serious places. People are murdered for all sorts of
reasons in every major American city. While I lived in Detroit,
we went to Canada when we needed to eat at a
restaurant after dark. It is worse now. While I lived in
Boston, the average was one person murdered per week in just the Boston
Commons and Gardens. You had a death wish if you even considered
walking across the grass to get to the Winter/Summer subway station. Do you
hear about these murders? Not unless you live in their immediate vicinity. Do you hear the statistics? Never.
But you hear about how dangerous it is to visit Mexico. The US
State Department makes sure that you know. Mexico is a very safe
country. I have walked across the worst parts of a couple border
cities in the night time. Children were playing in the
streets. One time a gang of teenagers asked me for my money
after I asked them for directions. They settled for a handful of
cookies. Try that at King and Story in San Jose. When
robbers appeared on one of the major highways near the border, the
Federal Police caught them in a very short time. No one was killed.
In Mexico, the police are your friends. In the USA, you dread the
sound of a siren because it will cost you money. More and more
Americans are visibly carrying guns.
Displaying a weapon or even ammunition in Mexico guarantees a quick
visit to the local prison.
The drug dealers. I'll tell you about the drug dealers. You
never ever acknowledge that someone deals drugs. If your nearest
neighbors are dealers, you could not have nicer neighbors. As a
matter of fact, the King and Story neighborhood in San Jose has a
similar demeanor: they protect their own. I could walk that
neighborhood at one in the morning and feel safe because I
belonged. And I am a gringo.
But the Mexicans are the 21st century blacks. Nobody will
question you if you are black. Even a dark tan will get you
inspected along border highways. "American" will not shop in
stores with Spanish banners. "Americans" become angry when they
see a Mexican flag north of the border. The Mexicans see many USA
flags south of the border: Mexicans are not so angry as they are
depressed: just another stupid American. Maybe he will buy
lots of trinkets.
Maybe GWB did the USA a favor when he made the USA a second class
country. America no longer has the moral high ground.
America scores low in education due to the rape of public
education. America scores low on health care as it promotes
economic inequality with its profitable insurance companies.
America scores high in racism as it proudly flies the Confederate Stars
and Bars but spits on the Mexican flag.
The Mexican Constitution declares all persons equal. The
American Constitution has been updated to remove stated inequalities
and laws have been passed. Meanwhile the Americans still believe
that rich, white, English-speaking Christians are the only people
deserving the benefits of "equality".
The border fence? In ten more years it will be the Americans
fleeing south. I am already there. Life in the USA is too
expensive and too dangerous. When was the last time you slept
with your front door unlocked? Open? My doors are never
locked while I am at home and rarely when I leave home. Three
Mexicans tacos make a great dinner: you choose the tortillas, the meat,
and the toppings. Three Jack In The Box tacos are pre-made,
sealed with grease, and you may need the bag for what comes out rather
than just what goes in.
Oh, heck. Why bother? This could be an entire
book. The Mexicans will not read this: they already know
it. The Americans will not read this because it is beneath
their dignity.
The job of a scientist is to discover and analyze so that new things
become known. The job of an engineer is to apply what science
discovers into everyday (more or less) availability. I was an
engineer professionally for 40 years. Now I just think like one
and do nothing useful. There are several problems for an
engineer. The first is that he attempts to analyze everything as
a problem that needs to be solved. Since this is an integral part
of the male psyche already, and engineer solves problems with
gusto. This may not be conducive to good relationships with the
other sex. It certainly makes life interesting (or maybe
difficult) for his children.
The main professional problem for an engineer when given a problem
to solve is to evaluate the problem from multiple levels. Does
the product need a bandage? Does there need to be a new
product? If so, how much of the previous products will be
involved? If the current product is to be enhanced, again what
portion can be retained. If there is an error, do we need that
bandage or do we need to look at the problems in terms of systemic or
higher levels?
There is no pat answer. If there wee then the ability of
modern day computers could replace all engineers. The job of the
engineer is very complicated. He must think in multiple
dimensions. He must think in terms of side effects, negative and
positive. He must think in terms of evolving changes in
usage. He must think in terms of the dollars to make the change
and the dollars involved in the enhanced product profitability.
Here he works closely with hs counterpart: marketing.
In my experience I have found that most product problems are
improperly evaluated and therefore the changes made to correct the
problem will only solve the initial problem by luck or repeated
corrections. I have never found a problem that could be resolved
properly by a "tweak". Never. My manager at my previous job
hated me playing solitaire on my computer. WHen he was under
pressure, he passed his pressure onto his employees by frequent
visits. My attitude in the office caught on slowly but it did
catch on. WHen he would walk into the office and ask about
progress, the answer was always the same: he was an impediment and the
problem would be resolved faster if he went away until he was
needed. One of the funniest episodes in my office when we were
round-housing a problem among the group was when he interrupted with his
usual question someone else other than me gave the response that the
problem would be better resolved if he went away.
Solitaire? Some things do not resolve by thinking of only the
problem and nothing else for extended periods. Your brain just
locks up and recycles the same ideas. Ideas which do not lead to
an optimum solution. The brain, at least mine, needs to digest a
problem and work in the background with various aspects rising for
attention and then going back into the mix. As it does this, the
various levels are identified and the requirements for each are put
into place. While this is happening, I play solitaire.
When I have digested enough analysis, I go back to my papers and
organize what I have obtained. This process may be repeated
multiple times. In addition, a good night's sleep may be required
as well as consultation with others.
In any case the real job of the engineer is to formulate a solution
to a problem in such manner that he can sell his solution to the proper
authorities. The selling is most important here. If he
cannot sell his solution and it is the best solution, then the problem
will eventually be resolved improperly. The proper solution is
final. That is, the problem does not pop up somewhere else and
need to be solved again. This only happens when the initial
engineering effort is completed properly.
I can give you an example of this. On the IBM 360 computer,
model 40 and 50 both I believe, there was a problem with the divide
operation code. WIth a combination of positive and negative
operands, the remainder would come out with the incorrect sign.
This was identified and corrected with a circuit change. The
effort it took to identify this problem was extensive. People
blamed it on programmer error. They blamed it on compilers.
Finally they blamed it on the hardware. The analysis would have
been simple if the problem were properly addressed i the first place
rather that thrusting blame at every turn. The zinger here is
that the same, identical problem was found in the next generation of
computers, the IBM 370, in the same models with the same blame
throwing. I remember the programmer coming to me and wondering
what he was doing wrong. Since I was aware of the 360 problem i
was immediately able to refer contact IBM hardware support. But I
suspect that someone somewhere in IBM was already aware of the problem
and had a correction waiting.
This could go on. I believe thoroughly in implementing design
into product. If there is a problem, refer to the design as well
as the product. Determine the nature of the problem, update the
design and then update the product to match. A bandage not
implemented in the design gets you the IBM 370 problem. This
method can be costly if someone is analyzing the implementation.
Where I worked there was actually a program that calculated the risk of
changed by the number of program code lines changed per error. My
code was deemed the most "dangerous" of any program code in the
office. The statistics proved this. So a team of 5 people
were assigned to go through my programs code, line at a time, to
identify remaining errors. My design was analyzed. My code
was analyzed. After one month of 5 people devoted to identify
errors, one error was identified. The error was that the
incorrect error code was given in a section of code designated as
"can't get here from there". In other words, that error message
would never be generated. We put such conditions into our code as
a defensive measure: if you got to this code, then there was a serious
error in the design or implementation. After this month long waste of 5 engineers' time no more
criticism was made of my methods. In fact, many of my friends
started emulating my methods. But I doubt that they irritated
their bosses by playing solitaire while they were thinking.
Also during these sessions the comments that I wrote in the code
were deemed inappropriate and not conforming to shop standards.
The team actually wrote a program to edit and reformat my
comments. They then removed comments considered
inappropriate. Interestingly enough when the sister division
implemented my code into their system, they found my original code and
copied my original comments. One of their engineers saw me one
day some years later and complimented me on the code and its
organization and was especially complimentary on my comments.
More random thoughts here. I read a study early on that when
you were tired that your changes had a high statistical probability of
having to be redone. for this I adopted a code: I would not
change a program or design after working 8 hours. I could test, I
could work on something else, I could do many things but implementing
changes was never done. Under high pressure of needing something
changed first, this caused some strain but even when yelled at to do so I
refused. One instance of this caused me to sleep on an error that
when I arrived the next morning with a solution, the solution was not
one that was on the table the night before. The time lost in the
other solutions would have been staggering.
I think it was L. Ron Hubbard who disliked "solutions".
Semantics can get in the way. The rule is to make changes only
when mentally fresh and able to understand the ramifications of the
changes.
There is another part of that same study. Programs that
generate reports are less likely to have errors than those which only
do analysis. My boss posed this to me. My answer to him was
that all programs should be made to output reports. This seemed
obvious and I think he took it seriously: programs should at least keep
a log of the decision processes involved. This is easier than it
sounds and the log logic can be made optional either by turning of the
log function while running or by removing it by option on the
production product.
I think I have covered much here. The bottom line is that the
engineer must look at the logical levels and determine at which level
the problem solution should be addressed. If you address only
the lowest level, the symptom level, you will only solve the
symptom. You keep going higher until you understand all of the
effects of a solution to the problem and then resolve it at that
level. The resulting code may be the same but the confidence
level is not. ANother example. In a product copied from
another division at one point, we compared the change log located at
the front of the code a couple of years later. Our change log was
contained on one printout page. Maybe 20 to 30 changed. The
original from the other division had several hundred such
changes. The two divisions were in different countries. The
cultural differences between the engineering in the two countries was
immediately obvious. Our engineers did a much better job of
problem analysis than the foreign counterpart. This is where I
adopted my mantra: "German engineering is an oxymoron". I can
give you specifics outside our country. The most obvious is the
quartz crystal watch: look at its history and compare it to the demise
of the mechanical watch. The word "paradigm" becomes critical here
and the company that I worked for is also now as popular as the
mechanical watch.
One of America's greatest institutions was the public school
system. I mean this was the greatest education system in the
world. Starting with the consistency of the grades Kindergarten
through 12 and onto the university systems. There were the Land
Grant Universities. Great. Then came the Republicans.
They recognized that a true democracy needs an educated people.
They started a program of dumbing down our schools. A very
successful program. A program whose obvious intent was to make it
so that they, the Republicans, had an electorate, like sheep, that would follow them into
the loss of our freedoms and greatness. And they did this with
the 1984 Doublespeak. Say you are improving something when in
fact you are destroying it. Set up a testing program that
penalizes schools not producing high test scores. Make everyone
teach to a set of tests without regard to local values, cultures, or
norms. The teachers spend all of their time teaching to the tests
and lose any creativity for themselves and their students. And
the tests are bigoted. The failing schools are
dropped from the system and the government supports private schools,
many of them religion-based. Boo on the Republicans.
This dumbing-down program has been very successful. The proof is in the pudding:
the public schools are rapidly losing quality. The private
schools are obtaining government money. The average person is
dumber than the previous average persons. I am not sure how you
measure dumb but later I give you a list of "dumbs". The
easiest way to see the results of this system is to notice that the
American education has dropped in quality to the bottom quartile of the
industrial nations. America was at the top.
The Mormons had it right: pay for one school system and make it the
best. This is still the best idea. Paying for multiple
schools systems is a waste of taxpayer dollars and creates bigotry.
You really do not need more -- but the list goes on.
I know, gripe, gripe, gripe. Having grown up with motorcycles,
I know the problem is not with the vehicle. The problem is
serious. People who take their vehicles off road fall into two
groups. The first have no brains at all. The second are
those who have brains but have decided to pretend not to so that they
can fit into the first group. That's it. There is no third
group.
How do know this? When I walk my dog on the beach, the
quads will buzz us and gun their motors as they go by hoping that my
dog gets killed. They think that killing my dog is a joke.
I do not agree and I take this idiocy as my prime example.
Oh. They pretend they just want to tease the dog but this is a
lie. If my dog moves away from me, the second bike will kill
him. These quads will attempt to drive between my dog and
myself. This guarantees that the dog will be injured. The
only hope is that my dog is smart enough to know that these people
intend to murder him.
I actually had one suburban truck driver pull up, stop, and inform
me that my dog was stupid for not getting out of the way of his
car. It is a big beach. Why was he aiming his car at my
dog? It is true that a dog does not have the intelligence of the
average person. The dog does have more intelligence than the
average off road driver. This is not difficult. The average
off road driver displays by his every action that he has no brains at
all. Any intelligence (my dog) is better than no intelligence
(off road driver).
This is not a recent thing. Some years ago my wife and I were
tent camping in a National Forest campground outside of Cave Creek,
Arizona. All night long the dirt bikes buzzed our tent.
They would have hit it for not my parking the car along side the tent
with the picnic table on the other side. They kept their distance
during the day as they did not like rocks falling on their heads.
Another time in a similar environment, the dirt bikers were enjoying
jumping the bluff immediately behind my motor home. The motor
home was parked parallel to the bluff giving us a great view -- except
for the bikers attempting to destroy every living plant for
miles. I stopped the bluff jumping by moving the motor home about
5 feet to the rear. The geometry of the bluff was such that the
new jumping target was almost impossible. a couple of crashed
bikes (with riders) soon proved this to be true.
I have ridden off road bikes. A bike is a bike. The
controls are similar. Some bikes are louder than others.
Some are faster. Some are tougher, etc. I have driven in
the Sonora desert at noon. Talk about being lost. A couple
of arroyos that were not there an hour ago and you understand quickly
why people die out in the desert. But I had friends and a full
tank of gas and I was safe. In general I find my way by shadows
but at noon in the desert, there are no shadows. There is no
shade. If you do not have proper clothing and water, you
die. But this is all beside the point for a couple of
reasons. Today you have portable radios or cellular or GPS --
getting lost is a matter of choice. Secondly, this has nothing to
do with the abuse by the brainless sycophants riding around seeing what
they can kill or maim or otherwise destroy. And for some reason
they like to believe that whatever they destroy should have been
protected by someone else.
This is the same attitude as the graffiti artists: if you do not
want it painted then do not put it where I can reach it with my paint
can. I do not know which to blame this upon. The Republicans or
the Christians or maybe just Republican Christians. The problem
is that accepting responsibility for your own actions makes you a
dinosaur. Like me.
I may have hit this someplace else. There is an exercise
machine out there: an elliptical walker, that advertises that its
exercise is like walking in soft sand. Every morning I walk the
beach for a couple of miles. If I am up to it, also in the
afternoon. From the parking lot to the water varies due to the
tides. The distance of soft sand also varies. I seek the
shortest distance from the entrance to the hard sand. why?
Walking in soft sand is murder on your ankles, knees, and hips.
My walk on soft sand is about one minute. Then I get to harder
sand. Harder because it may be still wet and not yet really hard.
If the advertising is correct, then no one would want such a
machine. If they survived more than 5 minutes before collapse
then I suspect they are reading for some sort of --athalon.
Walking in soft sand is so much exercise that I doubt anyone would do
it on a machine and then keep the machine.
I know that I have knee problems and a single misstep will put me
back on the cortisone shots but even still, that walk is murder.
By the time I return and am exhausted, that final 50 feet is all my
heart can take. And the reason for the walk is for my heart in
the first place.
But then the advertisement may just be gross exaggeration. I
have a real beach with real sand so I do not need to find out.
I worked for SIemens for 11 years. 4 in Boca and 7 in Santa
Clara. During those 11 years the world marched on from analog to
digital, from copper to glass, from wired to air. In many was
this was as significant as from 1903 to 1914 when the world changed
from horses to gasoline, from dirt tracks to MacAdam, from leather
reins to mechanical levers. Or from 1949 to 1960 when home
entertainment went from AM radio to FM, records went from monaural 8
RPM to 33 1/3 RPM stereo. Etc. Eleven years covers many social
and technical paradigm shifts. Siemens did not keep up with the world and so, like the horse and buggy, has become history.
In those 11 years I met a great number of professional people.
Many of whom I still call friends although I have now been gone from
SIemens almost as many years as I was there. I saw my VP, Shmuel
Shafer as a great visionary. He saw past the fog and saw where
the world was going. He could not make Siemens peddle fast enough
and so he went to the new paradigm. He tried hard. Many did
not. Many corporate cultures are pathological and eat themselves
from the insides.
Our department was one of these. We had a mix of very talented
people and some with empires that should have never been permitted to
exist. I can give you one example. We had a release of
software ready to go out when a critical error was found by the system
test people. This error was a show stopper. The problem was
that the person responsible for this error had already released his
change to correct the error and the documentation said that his change
was included in the release. Shmuel called an emergency session
of all involved and said that we must fix this within a few days.
He suggested that this person be the team lead. He was, after
all, the "senior" engineer in the department. Others suggested to
Shmuel that I lead the team. This surprised Shmuel but he handed
it over to me. I had a mixed reputation at the time for being a
problem solver. I went to system test and we verified the problem
as exactly the same as the one Dick "fixed". I went to production
control and verified that Dick's fix was included. We rebuilt the
software to make sue that everything was in place. There appeared
to be no reason for this error. This is why it was a
problem. These things had already been done. Dick was, of
course, too busy to talk with me. For three days. One the
4th day, his friend, a supervisor, returned and the two of them quickly
ran off to system test with their own build of the software. One
that really had Dick's fix installed. Problem solved.
Shmuel was informed that Dick had solved the problem. The problem
that he, Dick, could have solved the first day by stating that he had
withheld his fix. But the problem had gone on for as long as it
did to make me appear to be totally incompetent. This level of
non-professional behavior was new to me. I worked for 40 years
and had met a lot of people, competent and incompetent. I had
even had one paranoid manger who distrusted me and any other
intelligent engineer under him. But to actually sabotage a
product to make yourself a hero at someone else's expense was a new
experience for me. Obviously it stuck or I would not be writing
about it.
But there is a sub-story here too. The PBX boards communicated
to the PBX mainframe on one channel of a chip and to the connected
telephone line on the other side of the same chip. The two sides
were identical with the exception of the port addresses used by the
processor to communicate. The best implementation of this chip
would be two have one program controlling both sides but having two
tasks each using its appropriate port numbers. The problem
here was that DIck had refused to permit this. It minimized the
value of his ownership share of the product. The other
side? Mine. Really someone else's but we had a different
problem. The board overloaded at half of its specified capacity
and the overloaded function belonged to an engineer working with
Dick. While that engineer was on vacation, my manager assigned to
me the responsibility of fixing the overload.
WIth full permission and the assistance of my first-line, I rewrote
entirely the software driving the PBX side of the chip. My code
was 75% smaller and therefore almost that much faster than the original
code. It was also dynamically configurable to the available board
memory. This was done in two weeks. The amount of time that
the "owner" was on vacation. When the owner returned I even let
him put the finishing touches on the code to return ownership to
him. Since I had bypassed all of the paradigm that Dick had
forced upon the remainder of the shop's software, I did not have his
support.
<>But now we had another problem. The lab test equipment was
only able to test single calls of varying types. We had no system
test facility. We could fake something but why bother?
There was an entire group of people in Boca who did this level of
testing. The problem was political. We were never to send
them pre-release software. We were only to send them software
officially released. Catch-22. We could not test it and they
could not accept it. But we were forced into a corner. We
had a customer ready to toss us. I called my friend Tom in system
test and he assigned an engineer to work with me on the problem.
I sent her my new software. At triple the board specification of
calls per hour, the PBX system failed but the board worked fine.
Everyone was happy. We had solved the overload problem. My
partner engineer got a nice letter of recommendation to her boss from
me. My boss got a letter from me, and a copy of the other letter,
stating that we had solved problem and that System Test was waiting for
the official release.
<>I got a good chewing out for letting System Test see unreleased
software. I was almost a hero in Boca. The new software
(when they got it) worked. The new test engineer got a good
review and was forever my friend. So was Tom. My management
team distrusted me because I could get things done in Boca that they
could not. My management always found a way to give me a bad
review every year. And they did not like that the other
departments trusted me more than them.
<>
<>But Boca got no official release because the software on the
other side of the chip could still overload. Rather than
just remove his code and use mine, Dick trumped up a story of why it
must be different, caused the release problem, found insignificant
efficiency changes, and made himself look like a hero.
<>By the time I left, even the customer support team in Dallas would
alert me to problems before the official notice came to my
management. I could have kept my mouth shut but instead would
give my managers a heads up that a problem was on its way to us.
There was no need for me to compromise my principles. Enough.
<>Eleven years later and sour grapes? No. I could give a
couple more examples almost as egregious. Maybe many more than a
couple. The point is that I believe that it was unprofessional
behavior that caused the demise of our company. I am proud that
those engineers with whom I worked respected my abilities and even more
proud that they respected my principles and my desire to help anyone
who asked.
<>