Katherine Siva Saubel, the one of the last fluent speakers of the Cahuilla (pronounced ka-wee-yah) language, has died:

Katherine Siva Saubel, an elder of the Cahuilla Indian tribe of Southern California, once described herself as “just a voice in the wilderness all by myself.” She meant that she had few people with whom she could speak the Cahuilla language or sing the songs that conveyed her people’s ancient stories.

“My race,” she told The Times in 2000, “is dying.”

Now Saubel, long its feistiest guardian, has died.

“It’s a huge loss … the end of an era,” said Nathalie Colin, an ethno-historian at the Malki Museum near Banning, which Saubel co-founded more than 45 years ago to preserve Cahuilla history and traditions.

Saubel, 91, died of natural causes Tuesday at her home on the Morongo Reservation near Banning, said her nephew, Kevin Siva.

The Cahuilla language is a language of the Uto-Aztecan family and was once spoken over a substantial portion of central California. Dr. Saubel was clearly a remarkable individual.

When anyone dies it’s like burning a library and Dr. Saubel very much brings that to mind.

I guess this post is an excercise in peevishness more than anything else. It bugs me when people who don’t know what the heck they’re talking about are picked up by other people who don’t know what the heck they’re talking about and suddenly that becomes the prevailing wisdom.

What’s bugging me today goes back to an article at Scientific American in which the author asserts that Moore’s Law applies to solar power:

Over the last 30 years, researchers have watched as the price of capturing solar energy has dropped exponentially. There’s now frequent talk of a “Moore’s law” in solar energy. In computing, Moore’s law dictates that the number of components that can be placed on a chip doubles every 18 months. More practically speaking, the amount of computing power you can buy for a dollar has roughly doubled every 18 months, for decades. That’s the reason that the phone in your pocket has thousands of times as much memory and ten times as much processing power as a famed Cray 1 supercomputer, while weighing ounces compared to the Cray’s 10,000 lb bulk, fitting in your pocket rather than a large room, and costing tens or hundreds of dollars rather than tens of millions.

He then goes on to demonstrate with facts, figures, and charts that Moore’s Law does not apply to solar power.

Let’s start at the beginning “Moore’s Law” is a rule of thumb that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. It’s derived from a paper published by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, back in the 1960s (1965). Moore’s Law predicts quadratic growth in the number of transistors that can be place on an IC. It says nothing whatever about cost and no direct straight-line relationship exists between the number of transistors on an IC and its cost.

The SA article, after asserting a relationship to Moore’s Law, illustrates what may be either an exponential or hyperbolic decline in the price per watt of solar photo-voltaic cells. The author then produces a log scale chart in an attempt at distinguishing between exponential growth and hyperbolic growth and claims, IMO rather unconvincingly, that the growth is exponential. The reason I’m not convinced is that I think he needs to control for the research dollars spent and for the price of oil. What his graphs of price declines in solar photo-voltaic cells look like to my eye are charts of the reciprocal of oil prices.

However, and this is my essential point: quadratic growth (doubling periodically) and exponential growth (increasing at a fixed rate periodically) are not the same thing.

I think there are good reasons to suspect that the returns to investment in solar photo-voltaic cells will diminish, among them limits in how much sunlight falls on a given area. Further, it’s misdirection. Oil still produces significantly more watts per kilogram than SPV and that will continue to be the case for some time. And there are other hurdles. There is no Moore’s Law for batteries, none for energy storage generally.

The SA article was picked up by Paul Krugman who alluded to it in a NYT column and now the idea that there’s a Moore’s Law for SPV is spreading like wildfire.

Walter Russell Mead takes note of a massive group of police corruption indictments in New York City:

Together with a string of other recent cases, the Bronx case suggests that a culture of corruption and entitlement has spread through the ranks of the thin blue line. Worse, it is clear that police union officials are the mainstay of the illegal ticket fixing enterprise, so much so that prosecutors considered indicting the union as a corrupt organization under racketeering laws. The police demonstration in the Bronx was apparently orchestrated by the union, which sent text messages to officers urging that they show up to support colleagues involved in ticket fixing. “It’s a courtesy, not a crime,” was the slogan.

This of course is what everybody thinks of special privileges. That’s what doctors and lawyers think when they cover up professional wrongdoings by their guild brethren. It’s what investment bankers think when they pass on inside information to favored clients — a courtesy not a crime. It’s what politicians think when they do favors in exchange for money and it’s what Don Corleone and Tony Soprano think when they do favors for their friends. The essence of privilege (private law, etymologically speaking) is exactly that: exemption from the laws that govern other people. The police union in New York believes that based on longtime practice it possesses certain unique rights to circumvent the written law.

Whenever I hear of cases like this I always think of the lithograph that used to hang in Victorian parlors of Russian peasants in a troika being drawn in panic through the snow, tossing a baby out of the troika to slow the pursuing wolves. Can anyone reasonably believe the sixteen indicted in the Bronx were the only crooked cops or that many, many others knew about what was going on. I recall a scandal in a company for which I once worked. Not only were the dozen or so offenders terminated, scores more were terminated simply for knowing about what was happening and failing to report it.

Whether it’s police corruption in New York or police torture in Chicago, do not be fooled. These are not perversions of the system. They are the system.

I see that Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, has come around to the position that I advocated two years ago:

The promise of “no more bailouts,” enshrined in last year’s Wall Street reform law, is just that — a promise. The financiers (and their lawyers) will always stay one step ahead of the regulators. No one really knows what will happen the next time a giant bank goes bust because of its misunderstanding of risk.

Instead, it’s time for a fundamental reform: Any person who works for a company that, regardless of its current financial health, would require a taxpayer-financed bailout if it failed, should not get a bonus, ever. In fact, all pay at systemically important financial institutions — big banks, but also some insurance companies and even huge hedge funds — should be strictly regulated.

My preference would be that if a private institution is too big and systemically important to be allowed to fail it is too big to be allowed to exist. However, Dr. Taleb’s proposal is a reasonable second best alternative.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that it can any longer be maintained with a straight face that bailing out the banks was a sad necessity and let the chips fall where they may! The bailouts are recycled into bonuses and then into campaign contributions and lucrative billets when appointees have completed their terms of alleged government service. That’s not just a coincidence. It is the system.

Why does the Wall Street Journal persist in peddlling the rosiest of scenarios when characterizing the likely outcome of the Ryan plan for Medicare reform?

As for the hardest nut, Medicare, Mr. Romney has moved about two-thirds of the way toward Paul Ryan’s “premium support” plan. Like the Wisconsin Congressman, he’d give all seniors a defined cash contribution to choose among private insurance options.

Still to come are major details like how the premium-support payments would grow over time, but even endorsing the Ryan concept is unusual in this Republican field. (Jon Huntsman is the laudable exception.) Mr. Romney also attempts to inoculate himself against Mr. Obama’s inevitable Mediscare attacks by retaining traditional fee-for-service Medicare with its arbitrary price controls as an option for seniors, unlike Mr. Ryan.

But the key reform point is that Mr. Romney says that all beneficiaries would receive the same fixed payment whatever plan they chose. In other words, premium support would ensure that all seniors get basic coverage, but if they wanted more expansive coverage they’d have to pay for it themselves. This would introduce competition to keep down costs over time—the alternative to the brute price controls and rationing of ObamaCare.

The problems with this are that the course of treatment is not prescribed by the patient but by the physician, standards of care constrain the physician’s options for a course of treatment, and in many places the alternatives for care are too limited to provide real competition. In summary, healthcare is not retail trade.

A far greater likelihood is that, having exhausted their funds, seniors would be fobbed off on the Medicaid system, contributing to an even more rapid fiscal collapse in the states, already strapped to pay for healthcare.

The snippet above appears in a rosy review of Mitt Romney’s latest budget speech which might well have bee subtitled “Positions to run in a Republican primary on”. Eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse are evergreens but most of the federal budget is Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest on the debt.

Last week James posted at OTB on the perennial question of whether public (in this case federal) pay is lower or higher than private pay. I think it’s so difficult to come up with a reasonable answer to that question that it’s barely worth trying and I’d like to try to explain why. It comes down to two questions that you might think are easy to answer:

• What’s a public employee?
• How do you calculate compensation?

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but I think are actually quite difficult. The easy answer to the first question is that if you receive a W2 from a federal, state, or local government or agency you’re a public employee. However, there are, probably, millions of other workers who are contractors working for governments at various different levels who are either permanent, full-time, or both but who nominally work for private companies. I’ve been working for some time on a post on this very subject. It’s darned hard to calculate how many of these people they are not to mention how much they’re paid but one estimate I’ve read puts it at $500 billion.

Then there’s the thorny issue of compensation. Is a pension delayed compensation or not? Those receiving public pensions or who expect to receive public pensions argue pretty vehemently that it is. If that’s the case shouldn’t the cost of that compensation be added in? I guess what I’m suggesting is that the way we should be calculating compensation is from the moment the employee is hired possibly until death not just until termination or retirement.

Consider the two graphs of employment data presented by Matt Yglesias. The first graph is of the change in the number of jobs over the period, confusingly oriented so that the vertical axis is centered on a loss of 350,000 jobs. It’s a graph of the first derivative and illustrates the change in the change. The second graph is of the number of jobs over the same period and illustrates the change in the number of jobs. If, as MY suggests, the administration had focused their attention on the first graph, my reaction was very much the same as Brad DeLong’s: that’s an awful lot of confidence in the second derivative. MY’s conclusion:

Note that these are just two different presentations of the same US private employment data. Both valid glances at the situation, and indeed to a trained eye they’re perfectly equivalent. But the affect associated with them is quite different. Everyone knows better than to just naively project that current trends will continue, but the human mind has trouble not implicitly seeing momentum in these visualizations. In the first chart, things are on the upswing. In the second chart, things have just bottomed out. The second chart was a much better guide to future action.

I think that’s a little too kind for a couple of reasons. First, those are charts derived from Bureau of Labor Statistics data and are so highly contrived I don’t know what sort of reasonable policy they could be used to support. Just to name one it was, is, and has been quite clear that there’s something terribly wrong with the birth/death model that the BLS is using.

But I think there’s a larger problem. Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that the pump priming fiscal stimulus that the administration did what it was intended to do (the empirical evidence for that is ambiguous). What would the stimulus operate on? I would be inclined to say that it operated on the number of jobs (the second graph) and operated on the rate of change in the number of jobs (the first graph) only indirectly. Did the administration’s other actions support the notion that they simply assumed that they were building up momentum?

I don’t think so. Since before he took office and right down to the present the president and his surrogates have been persistently talking the economy down in any number of ways. One of my clients put it this way: “Every time the guy opens his mouth the market goes down 100 points”. If you don’t believe me, go look at some of my posts from the end of 2008. I complained about this very thing at the time.

What policy would have operated on the second derivative? Not the one that was put into place unless they were assuming that animal spirits would buoy the economy back to robust growth and what were they doing to foster those animal spirits?

Contrariwise, I think that there was a faction, the political faction, in the White House that held on to the belief that there would be a V-shaped recession, i.e. a robust, sharp recovery and were determined not to let a crisis go to waste, as one of the members of that political faction put it.

I think that very early on the president made a number of missteps:

• Appointing Tim Geithner Secretary of the Treasury, signalling a continuation of the Wall Street-oriented Hank Paulson policies
• Appointing Rahm Emanuel chief of staff. Emanuel never had any interest in postpartisanship so his appointment was a signal that at best any moves in that direction would be stymied if they hadn’t been political posturing all along.
• Leaving Ben Bernanke in place and two board of governor positions unfilled.
• Talking the economy down.

The kindest interpretation is that it was over-confident. Or maybe, as the administration has contended, they were just plain wrong. Or maybe they were just stupid. Smart people can do stupid things.

I realize that I’m very late to this party but better late than never, I guess. Lately my wife and I have been watching and loving The Guild:

The Guild is a independent sitcom web series about a group of online gamers. The show started in the late summer of 2007, and for the first season was financed solely by Paypal donations from LOYAL FANS. Since season 2, The Guild has been distributed by Xbox Live and Microsoft and sponsored by Sprint.

Episodes vary from 3-8 minutes in length, and follow the Guild members’ lives online and offline.

“The Guild” has won numerous awards, including the SXSW, YouTube and Yahoo Web Series Awards in 2008, and 3 Streamy Awards in 2009: Best Comedy Web Series, Best Ensemble, and Best Actress for Felicia Day.

A season of The Guild covers a single story arc and is roughly equivalent in total length to a Made-for-TV movie. Its fifth season just wrapped. It’s a combination of simulated webcam sessions by Codex AKA Cyd Sherman, charmingly portrayed by actress and writer Felicia Day, with regular video footage, frequently with a handheld, homemade quality. This web series really does put the “fun” in dysfunctional.

I find The Guild funny, zany, whimsical, sly, and enchanting. It skewers role playing games and gamers, modern relationships, twenty-somethings, teenagers, shut-ins, movies, television, and just about everything else within range. It’s available at the web site (linked) and on Netflix and Hulu. Recommended, if only to take a look at the future of television. You don’t need a studio, a distributor, name actors, or pots of money to create a quality show.

I want to draw your attention to an excellent, thought-provoking, and infuriating post at RealClearPolitics on the link between job reductions and excessive executive pay at the largest companies, a distinctly American phenomenon. Sometimes the connection is a straight-line one, as in the outrageous case of Viacom’s Philippe Dauman, Thomas E. Dooley, and Sumner Redstone’s firing 850 people then awarding themselves 80% of the savings realized by staff reductions in increased compensation for themselves.

Generally, the connection is a bit more roundabout as in the case of IBM’s Samuel Palmisano’s termination of 10,000 IBM employees while his own pay rose by 30%.

This greedy behavior isn’t limited to big corporation CEOs, BTW. The other day I read an article about a teacher’s union president whose pay rose 30% even as the pay of the rank and file teachers remained the same.

There are, essentially, two ways to improve a company’s profitability: you can either cut costs or increase sales. Increasing sales is hard and, frequently, risky. You can re-concentrate your efforts in core businesses, expand the marketing universe for your existing products, or develop new products to find new markets or potentialize your existing markets.

If you’re stupid and hardnosed enough, cutting costs is easy: reduce staff. If the savings realized are used to stabilize the company or expand the business as suggested above it can be necessary and even desireable. When the savings are used solely to increase CEO pay, it’s reprehensible. I don’t believe that any company in the history of the world ever cost-reduced its way to greatness. The objective of a manager should be to maximize shareholder value and you don’t cause a company to grow just by reducing costs. It’s a quick fix and very likely a temporary one.

Take GM, for example. Since 1980 its worldwide unit sales has actually fallen and its U. S. market share has been almost cut in half even as its number of hourly employees has been more than cut in half. Staff reduction alone cut costs but hasn’t improved the company’s prospects.

Let me suggest some reasons for the huge, unjustiable increase in the compensation of top management

• Corrupt corporate governance. The interconnectedness of the directorates of large firms is tremendous and there’s a well-known practice of “you vote for my compensation package and I’ll vote for yours”
• Incompetent corporate governance. I blame large mutual funds for at least part of this. Just making the stock price go up is not enough to run a company well.
• Plain old-fashioned greed. Lack of a moral core.
• Too much emphasis, at least in part derived from the tax code, on short term gains.
• Because they can. This goes back to the incompetent and corrrupt corporate governance but I would also point the finger at the government. There’s been a lot of saber-rattling but not much effective action.

I’ll close with the quotation from Peter Drucker with which the article itself closes because it’s so to the point:

“What’s absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people,” Drucker said. There’s no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we’ll pay a very nasty price.”