I made a Fitbit account years ago, even though I don’t wear one. As a user, I got an email on Jan 14, 2021 alerting me that they just sold Fitbit to Google. The email assured me that Google will not try to muscle Fitbit users away from iPhones or iOS. Google has said that it will keep Fitbit data “separate from other Google ad data.” TechCrunch had some more details for me, including how many billions of dollars Fitbit was getting out of this deal.
Is it so bad to see adsbased on your sleep habits? What if you had a bad night and then saw more coffee ads the next day? Seems fine. Is it more “creepy” than seeing an ad for something you just bought?
I don’t actually know much about Google’s data structure. But I can imagine ways that a large tech company could use Fitbit data in a way that users would not like. What if Google knows that you didn’t sleep well this week. Say someone else is using Google search to find a person to recruit for a desirable job in Public Relations. What if predictive models indicate that people who don’t get at least 6.5 hours of sleep per night are low performers? What if you ended up not getting linked up with your dream job, because you weren’t sleeping well one week? This is all speculative. What if Google starts measure how your heart rate responds to viewing various website that you access through Chrome? Have they agreed to not do that as part of the acquisition deal?
In 2018, Tyler sat down with Eric Schmidt, a senior executive of Google. Tyler asked him why Google doesn’t use their massive stores of data to inform investments for a hedge fund. Here was the reply:
SCHMIDT: Well, I’ll give you a more generic answer, which is, from the moment I joined the company, there were many people who said, “Why don’t you take this information and do something that will use it for marketing purposes?”
And the answer is always the same, which is that you need people’s permission to do that, and you can be sure you won’t get that permission, if you follow that reasoning. So we decided that was a pretty bright line. For example, if a tech company that were a consumer company were bundled with a hedge fund, you would have to disclose that it was being used in that context. The people would go crazy.
But the other thing that’s true — and Google was good about this — is we took the position that it was important for us to disclose everything we were doing as well as we could.
I’ll give you a governance argument. In a large company, the employees are independent citizens of humanity, and if they see corruption in your leadership — in other words, if they see you doing things which are inconsistent with the values, you will be criticized.
Schmidt doesn’t deny that Google could take advantage of data in order to become a successful hedge fun. He says that it would look bad, and Google doesn’t want to look bad even to its own employees. Hmmm, right? I don’t bring this up to accuse Google of wrongdoing. It just makes you wonder how things will unfold in the future. One can, at least, see why the acquisition of Fitbit was scrutinized.
I use Google products heavily on my laptop. I don’t have many “smart” devices aside from my smartphone. I wore the Fitbit step tracker for a few days, but I didn’t find the information to be helpful. It’s not like the Fitbit does the dishes for me or drives me to the gym. Get me that smart device and I’ll look at any ads you want.
It has been pointed out that the only thing funnier than “someone who never played the game” trying to improve soccer is someone who calls football “soccer”. Admittedly, the nomenclature I use is endogenous to my audience, but that is neither here nor there.
A hypothesis: not listening to American advice about the rules is what makes football (aka soccer) the most popular sport in the world https://t.co/mjhZT1BX2N
The rules of football are perfectly distilled examples of the merits of rules versus discretion in optimal policy. Historically, the “laws of the game” codified by FIFA was a relatively sparse tomb that made copious use of the phrase “in the opinion of the referee”. This reliance on referee discretion has contributed as much to the evolving game as globalization, nutrition, and greater athleticism. YouTube is a wonderful place to watch footage of older matches and stare aghast as the world’s very best players try to shatter each other’s tibias and femurs every few minutes. (Brief digression: to really appreciate this, watch this collection of George Best dribbling and note how to succeed at dribbling at any time meant the opposition would inevitably try to break his legs). As our cultural norms have shifted, away from preferences for ultraviolence on fields of play, so too have the enforcement norms amongst football referees. This is at the margin, mind you, with many inframarginal fans and participants left indignant by the cowardice imposed on the game.
I previously questioned the overreliance of the game on referee discretion, much the way I sometimes questioned discretion in monetary policy. My views on monetary policy have shifted somewhat away from pure rules commitment, in part because of what I have viewed in football, and the introduction of a massive institutional shift away from discretion in two dimensions has been nothing sort of disastrous for the experience of both watching and playing a high-level professional game. The introduction of Video Assisted Replay (VAR) and its application to the enforcement of 1) Offsides and 2) Handball infractions has changed not just how the game is optimally played, but the entire emotional arc of observing and playing the game.
Offsides
The offsides rule is quickly defined as such: you may only pass the ball to a player who has between themselves and the goal either i) the ball or ii) two opposition players. The two player bit always confuses people until they remember that the goalkeeper counts as a player.
The rule is, historically speaking, revealing in its continued structure. First, it is on its face silly that they’ve never changed the rule to “one non-goalkeeper between the player and the goal” and make an already cognitively challenging rule to monitor that much easier to enforce. It seems like the kind of rule change easily smuggled in with little opposition, not unlike eliminating offsides for throw-ins, which happened roughly a century ago. Second, there has always been a looseness to what body parts can place a player offsides – in a sport where hands cannot be used, it seems odd that they might shift the imagined lines.
For the purposes of this discussion, what matters is that what might seem a rule with little gray area was actually rife with two forms of important discretion. First, the already alluded to application to body parts. Second, given that a linesmen 40 yards from the middle of the pitch must track the ball and players often 50 yards from it, the triangle of vision they must manage simply does not allow for fine-grained analysis. They’re not tracking limbs, they’re tracking center mass, and barely at that. All of this adds up to enforcement guided by the discretion of the referee and the norms that inform them. Those key norms over time boiled down to 1) Even is onside, 2) When in doubt, the benefit is given to the attacking player, 3) the only parts that should matter are those that can play the ball i.e. flailing arms don’t count. Defensive lines were welcome to play an offside trap i.e. a high line with a governing centerback managing the line and yelling “step!” when a key offensive player might be put in an offside position. But such a strategy came with the risk of relying on a cognitively overwhelmed linesman not leaving your hapless goalkeeper one-on-one against a marauding forward.
VAR was erroneously introduced on the false premise that the weakness of offsides enforcement was the fuzziness of observation when, in fact, the entire institution was predicated on that fuzziness. Without that fuzziness, the advantage shifts strongly to the defensive player(s) because they are facing the passer, giving them the half-second to step forward, placing the offensive player offsides. Such a strategy was too much of a gamble before – placing a player 3 inches offside was sufficiently unlikely to be acknowledged, and goals too scarce, to warrant frequent reliance. Further, as it turns out, the “even is on” norm is critical to offensive counter-attacking. Which leads to the single greatest error in the introduction of VAR: the comically thin 1-pixel lines with which positioning is assessed. Presented with the fallacy that video technology could assess position with <1inch precision, “even is on” ceased to exist because effectively no two players would ever be deemed even. Without additional explication, I will simply note that assessing when a pass was executed is sufficiently fuzzy that <1 inch precision is not on offer.
How to fix it
It’s actually fairly simple in this case – you reconstruct VAR to mimic the ideal referee of the past. You make the lines wider. If those lines overlap at all, the players are deemed even. The system should either a) assign the body parts that are relevant to the rule and make the lines 6-10 centimeters wide or, b) construct the lines at center mass and make them 15-25 centimeters wide. In this manner, we get the best of both worlds – the key elements revealed by 100 years of discretionary enforcement and the uniformity of computational augmentation.
2. Handball
There is this silly posture that players now frequently assume, with their arms hidden behind their backs, as they try to move about athletically without the balance of their arms (it’s really hard, try it some time). This posture is a product of the rule that any violation inside the your defensive penalty box results in a penalty kick which results in a goal roughly ~70% of the time. That’s a very high value event when fixtures average fewer than 3 total goals per game, and is actually even higher value when you consider that scoring opportunities are endogenous to the current score i.e. teams are more conservative with a lead.
In case you did not know, you can’t use your hands, or arms, in football. You’d be within your rights to imagine that players have always gone about pegging the ball at the other teams arms when in the penalty box, trying to draw penalty kicks. You’d have been largely wrong though, for the simple reason that referees have historically been reluctant to reward such tactics. Under the loosely codified rubric of intent of action, proximity to the strike of the ball that eventually contacted their arm, awareness of the ball, or other such language, referees repeatedly made it clear that the penalty they least desired to award was one for a nebulous handball.
VAR stepped in, along with some mind-bogglingly stupid reinterpretation of the handball rule and said “Nope, if it touches the defending player’s arm in the box, it’s a penalty, and absolute chaos ensued. professional players quickly realized that any outstretched arm was to be chipped at and any leaping defender was to be collided with, in the hopes of producing a random arm-ball contact and, in turn, seven-tenths of a goal. Everyone hated it.
So what went wrong? Once again, it’s a case where the equilibrium of the game had evolved to entirely depend on discretion. The penalty box, and its single-sanction system for violations, was designed to deter teams for being overzealous in defense, and give attacking teams fair opportunity to score. That single-sanction, however, was so strong, that it only held in equilibrium through its discretionary, and therefore unpredictable, application by the referee. Sure, it’s arguably the single most powerful referee tool in major sports, but given that soccer is the most popular sport in the world, it certainly warrants respect as a stable second-best solution.
When VAR robbed the institution of its discretionary fuzziness, however, the equilibrium was shattered and the combination of a single-sanction system with a rule that cannot be perfectly complied with, well, the game was sent into minor chaos. The de factor rules had shifted so rapidly and so completely that neither players nor fans understood what was happening. Everyone was thinking more about if and when balls were in contact with arms than if and when it might go in the net. That’s not the ideal equilibrium for a sport, particularly if you’d prefer highlights that are more than penalty kicks (which make for exceedingly boring viewing).
How to fix it
There’s no getting rid of the handball rule. There’s no way to eliminate random contact with arms/hands. There’s no way to adjudicate intent well. If you can’t change the rule and you can’t change the monitoring quality, there’s only one thing left to do: change the punishment. Football should walk away from the single-sanction system.
Indirect free kicks from the spot of the handball
Why Indirect free kicks in the penalty box?
They offer lower expected value than penalties,
The expected value that does emerge reflects the ability of both teams, rather than just the shooter and goalkeeper.
They sneak in a little bit of referee discretion when they identify the spot of the foul i.e. location determines value.
Classic arguments about rules versus discretion are typically about constitutional constraints of elected and appointed officials. Maybe the most salient to our modern lives is how the Federal Reserve should go about it’s policy of increasing or decreasing the money supply i.e. what is the optimal amount of inflation? Regardless of what that number might be, or whether it should be adjusted with the assessed stage of the business cycle, the underlying argument is really about whether or not the targeted number should be chosen by people or set by a rule to which we are bound by a codified pre-commitment.
I myself was once a hard line “rules” person, or at least as hard line as one can be without being a monetary economist by field or training (for an informed opinion, ask this guy). Over time, though, I’ve come to appreciate that rules only work if we know what we are doing when we set them and if we can credibly commit to them. These are big “if’s”. The reality is that there is no such thing as a “pure rule” setting – some amount of discretion is always baked in. If you can’t identify exactly where the status quo discretion is, or, more importantly, why we arrived at the current equilibrium level of discretion, you should proceed with extreme caution. You may find that the discretion you didn’t know was there was the only thing keeping the system afloat this whole time.
The Federal Reserve System has the ability create virtual dollars with the stroke of a key. They also issue the physical bills of U.S. currency ($1, $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100). The actual manufacturing of the bills for the Fed is done by the federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just print up a bunch of $100 notes yourself? Well, the feds have already thought of that, and include an ever-growing array of features to make it hard to duplicate these bills.
Counterfeiting of dollar bills has a long history. Following a distasteful experience of runaway inflation with paper money during the Revolutionary War, the U.S. remained primarily on a gold standard for most of its existence. The first major issuance of paper money was in 1862, to help finance the Civil War. Counterfeiting of these bills soon became a major problem, with up to half the dollars in circulation being phony. A primary mission of the U.S. Secret Service when it was founded in 1865 was to combat counterfeiting.
During World War II, the Nazis in “Operation Bernhard” succeeded in producing enough counterfeit British money that the U.K. had to switch production of banknotes to a different format. The work was carried out by prisoners at concentration camps. Later in the war, the prisoners were tasked with counterfeiting U.S. currency as well. Due to the security features in the dollars, this was a more complex task. Also, the prisoners realized that their chance of being killed was higher after they succeeded in devising a process for making counterfeit dollars, so they slowed the work down as much as they could. The $100 bill has been a frequent target of more recent counterfeiters, including the British Anatasios Arnaouti gang and (allegedly) North Korea.
Modern U.S. currency includes numerous feature which make it difficult to duplicate. Only about 1 note in 10,000 in circulation is fake. You can click this link
to zoom in on each of the seven denominations of U.S. currency and see the current security features for each one. The more valuable bills get more sophisticated. The $100 bill has color-shifted numerals and bell image, a 3-D security ribbon with shifting images of bells and 100s, a security thread which glows under ultraviolet light, and subtle watermarks. Magnetic features are also included.
But it turns out that one of the most reliable and hard-to-duplicate features of dollars is the feel in your fingers, a result of the material they are made from and the printing process which gives a 3-D texture:
Perhaps the most difficult-to-duplicate counterfeit deterrence feature of U.S. banknotes is its unique yellow-green paper, manufactured under close security by a single U.S. firm from a mixture of 75 percent cotton and 25 percent flax. When combined with intaglio-printed images and numerals, this gives the notes a unique “feel,” which surveys have reported is the most common method of counterfeit detection by the public and bank employees.
So, if you want your own $100 bills, it looks like you will have to earn them, or wait for the next stimulus check to arrive.
I’m currently working on understanding the gender gap in tech careers. Here’s a paper published in 2016 about a survey conducted in 2011. They found that male students reported more time on the computer for leisure. However, if they asked about computer use for school activities, there is no gender difference. The question remains as to how much one’s leisure time and subjective attitudes affects one’s ability to take a high-income software engineering job.
Abstract: This study responds to a call for research on how gender differences emerge in young generations of computer users. A large-scale survey involving 1138 university students in Flanders, Belgium was conducted to examine the relationship between gender, computer access, attitudes, and uses in both learning and everyday activities of university students. The results show that women have a less positive attitude towards computers in general. However, their attitude towards computers for educational purposes does not differ from men’s. In the same way, being female is negatively related to computer use for leisure activities, but no relationship was found between gender and study-related computer use. Based on the results, it could be argued that computer attitudes are context-dependent constructs. When dealing with gender differences, it is essential to take into account the context-specific nature of computer attitudes and uses.
We’ve already talked about different methods for distributing the vaccine in the face of limited supply on this blog (see my post and Doug Norton’s post). But today I want to talk about something different: the speed at which this vaccine was developed. It is truly amazing.
This chart from Nature (adapted from the fantastic Our World in Data) dramatically shows just how quickly the COVID-19 vaccine was developed compared with past vaccines. What used to take decades or even a century was done in mere months (yes, even with all the regulatory barriers today).
Exactly how we developed this vaccine so quickly is a complex story that involves the advanced state of modern science, incentives offered by concerned governments, and the harnessing of the profit motive to advance the public good. We don’t know all the details yet, and likely won’t for a long time since, like a pencil, no one person knows how to make and distribute a vaccine.
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably saw at least one image of Elon Musk’s “Starship” rocket blowing up last week. This is a really big rocket, some 165 ft high, which Musk intends to use to ferry humans to Mars, as early as 2026. And before that, paying passengers like you and I are to climb aboard for brief tourist excursions to outer space.
The rocket is designed to land back on its launchpad, to be ready for its next flight. That part is what went wrong last Wednesday. I snagged three screenshots from the live-streamed SpaceX video on YouTube to show what happened. The first image shows the vessel descending on its rocket jets, obviously dropping way too fast as it neared the ground.
This is what happened upon impact:
Ouch. It turns out that not enough fuel was getting to the rocket engines to slow the vessel’s descent.
Here are the smoking ruins:
Another man may have been chagrined over this outcome, but not the indomitable Musk. He had given this flight only one in three odds of landing intact, and he was ecstatic over the vast majority of things that went right, and the useful data collected. After all, the rocket did successfully take off, ascend to 40,000 ft (12 km), and mainly descend in the desired horizontal orientation to minimize overheating. Right after the blast he tweeted:
“Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!”
When you are Elon Musk, a little RUD (Rapid Uncontrolled Disassembly) is all in a day’s work. Which may be partly why he accomplishes so much more than most of us.
Although I write on a variety of subjects, my main professional training (through the PhD level) is as a chemical engineer. Chemical engineering is one of the broader technical disciplines. It bridges between chemistry, which is mainly associated with academic-type laboratory work, and huge chemical plant equipment. One year I was making and testing catalysts in the lab, then next I was calculating fluid flows and designing internals for a 100 ft high distillation tower (and climbing around inside that tower to insure the parts were being properly welded in place):
In my work in industrial research, I have been paid to develop technical improvements which could have economic value. A key incentive my company had for investing in this research was the expectation that if we came up with a novel improvement, that we could have exclusive rights to practice that improvement. There would have been little point in paying for research if our competitors could immediately make use of our hard-won insights. A snip of one of my patents is shown below.
For the world, and for most large groupings such as nations, the average income per capital is roughly equal to the average production per capita. The way to get more “stuff” (goods and services, and all their benefits) is to make more stuff. The way to make more stuff (per capita, and for fixed a workweek) is to make workers more productive. A key factor in productivity is technology. Two hundred years ago, nearly everyone in the U.S. had to be out in the sun and cold, working the soil, sowing by hand and plowing with the aid of animals, to grow enough food to feed everyone. Now I believe we are fed by only 2% of the workforce, using artificial fertilizers, improved seeds, huge tractors and combines, and satellite-aided computer scheduling. Most of the rest of us get to work in air-conditioned offices (or homes, in a pandemic year) and eat as much food as we want.
The patent system of the U.S. and other nations is designed to promote progress in productive technology. Early on, the newborn U.S. Congress passed the Patent Act of 1790, titled “An Act to promote the progress of useful Arts”. Without getting into all the legal details, a valid U.S. patent allows the inventor to exclude any other party from practicing their invention, for a period of twenty years. However, one of the requirement for a patent application is to clearly explain to the public how the invention works. When the twenty years is over, anyone can take advantage of the technology which the inventor has disclosed, which hopefully leads to widespread practice of technical improvements. While we can always ponder improvements to our system of patents, readers can thank it in part for many medical advances, and for delivering them from trudging behind a plow.
Two recent books warn Americans that our society stagnated after the moon landing: The Decadent Society and The Complacent Class. Both imply that the 2000’s are running on fumes and have no equivalent of the Saturn V rocket. We have barely altered our physical world in decades, improvements in cell phones notwithstanding.
This has launched an interesting debate (you could even call it a game) where people look for counterexamples. Here’s the most recent one I’ve seen
This week I saw a reinforcing example of stagnation.
In the 1990’s I used to read the American Girl doll catalogue from cover to cover every year. Everything is terribly expensive but also delightful to look at. I had the Molly doll and I read a few AG books about how she was inconvenienced on the homefront during World War II. She complained about having to eat turnips from a Victory garden, but she was encouraged to be patriotic and support a cause greater than herself. Her father is away with the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
I was a little dismayed when I saw that you can now buy a mini Molly doll for your 80’s doll. My life is now “historical”, so I am officially old. Great.
It’s not lost on me that American Girl is playing on nostalgia to sell more product. Millennials like myself might buy this mini Molly doll so we can re-live memories of childhood vicariously. However, I’m going to use this to illustrate “the great stagnation”.
You can be inwardly focused or outwardly focused. The WWII war effort was a time when America was dynamic and focused on achieving great things.
“Courtney” the 80’s doll is pictured next to a Pac-Man arcade machine. Her goal is to keep herself sufficiently entertained. She can listen to her Walkman if Pac-Man gets boring.
Today, 40 years later, people are still starting at screens just like Courtney the 80’s doll. The reason we are buying a mini 1940’s doll to gift to a 1980’s doll is because so little has happened since 1980.
You can make jokes about an infinite recursion of American Girl dolls. It’s funny because it won’t happen. You can be inwardly focused or outwardly focused. Molly’s America is outwardly focused, and that makes her exciting.
I don’t think anyone is going to give a 2050 doll a mini Courtney 80’s doll. I’m even more certain that no 2050 doll is going to get a mini 2010 doll complete with tiny 2010 iPhone.
Maybe by 2040, there will be something new to ignite the imagination.
This is the time of year when we often think of gifts to give to others, or for others to give to us, if they are so moved. So I will share an item which took a bit of research to lock in on, and which has worked out very well in practice.
When I was in my teens, I was content to throw a sleeping bag on a tarp right on the ground when camping. In my 20s, I used a half inch thick dense foam pad, a classic Ridge Rest. I wanted a little more cushion under me in my 30s, and so graduated to a 1.5 inch thick self-inflating sleeping pad like this Stansport. For backpacking in my 40s and 50s, I craved yet more air space underneath me, especially for curling up on my side, and got good usage out of a narrow, 2.5 inch thick inflatable sleeping pad.
Now my wife and I are pretty much done with roughing it. We still enjoy the great outdoors, but find we enjoy it even more when we have essentially all the comforts of home, which includes a full size queen air mattress. It takes a pretty big tent to accommodate that plus all our other gear, without feeling squashed.
I have had some large tents in the past, which were very tedious to set up. So I was pleased to find a huge, airy tent, which almost erects itself. This is the Ozark Trails 9-Person Instant Cabin.
Image from Amazon website
The main room is 9 x 14 ft, which is plenty big for glamor-camping (glamping) for two people. In huddled masses mode, probably 8 bodies would fit comfortably. The tent has a screen room across the front, for a bug-free place to sit. The fly over the screen room provides a roof over the door to the main room, keeping out rain even when the tent door is opened. Here are two views from within on our latest camping trip, first looking out the door through the screen room, and then looking straight up through the roof before we put the fly over the tent at the end of the day.
As an engineer, I am tickled by the clever joints that allow you to make the structure arise with just a few strategic tugs. Going from stage 2 to stage 3 in the photo below takes all of fifteen seconds. Taking the tent down for storage simply involves doing all these motions in reverse. The tent itself stays always attached to the poles.
Image from Amazon website
The only major drawback is the price, about $300, which is a lot for a tent. Considering our wants at this stage, for us that is a fair exchange. It gives us much of the space and utility of a small pop-up camper trailer, for a fraction of the cost.
The presidential debate on September 29, 2020 was an embarrassment. I don’t remember what the candidates said because I just kept panicking thinking about the fact that other people could see what was happening. Didn’t some adult somewhere have a kill switch?
After an hour of listening, I expressed my sincere wish that this had never happened:
It’s not just true in America. Much of what passes for “debate” is just people firing off talking points at each other. Usually it’s not quite so obvious and awkward because there are not such clear rules being broken.
If there’s one thing that Americans agree on, it’s that you wait your turn in line. This is the most basic schoolyard etiquette. No matter how rich or famous you are, cutting in line is deeply resented. It felt like President Trump was not taking turns (so then it was strange for me to fact check this and see that Biden spoke only 2 minutes less total than President Trump).
If it were in my power to undo that night I would. However, a new podcast gave me some more to ponder about in terms of what Americans can be proud of. A lot of true news comes out about Americans making mistakes. That can be useful for others. Audrey Tang said of our misdeeds:
COWEN: … the United States, has made … many mistakes … What’s our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?
TANG: I don’t know. Isn’t America this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and share it with the world? That’s the American experiment.
Being open about our mistakes might be the next best thing to not making them in the first place.
Tang, a transgender Taiwanese computer policy expert, said something that I think Americans can be happy about.
Speaking of software, here’s a recent conversation with a 5 year old about what exactly is software and what does it mean to buy it. My son imagined that if I bought it in a store I must have picked something up off a shelf. (I could have explained that software is a nonrival good, but I think it’s too soon.)
Economist Writing Every Day 