Tony K's Blog

Ranked Choice (RC) vs Instant Runoff (IRV) vs Approval RC and IRV are technically different. RC is a way of expressing preference, IRV is a method of tabulating votes from RC ballots. This is an important distinction. IRV, which seems pretty good can solve one problem (e.g. Gore v Bush) but introduce others. Technically IRV is nonmonotonic. That is, a shift of public opinion toward a candidate can cause that candidate to lose, and a shift of public opinion away from a candidate can cause that candidate to win. A different and probably superior method is one called Condorcet. It eliminates most of the IRV issues but introduces a few other, but less likely, issues. IRV is to Condorcet as single elimination is to round robin. Superior to both of them is Approval voting, in which you select all candidates that would be acceptable to you. It’s simple to tabulate and does not have the issues of either IRV or Condorcet. There’s a  website that has wonderful graphics of how the...

--> I have mentioned previously that I am a big fan of Andrew Tobias. Recently, he posted on his blog  the claim that climate "deniers" were massively funded by corporate interests.  I sent him the following note. "You said, "The connection between the climate-change deniers and the Republican budget enthusiasts is that both are massively funded by corporate interests , now entirely unleashed by the Republican Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision.  That’s the one that stacks the political system even more heavily in favor of the rich and powerful, and allows their influence to be hidden. " "For the record, I am a big fan and we are on the same side politically. Scientifically we differ, and this thing about climate-change deniers being funded by corporate interests is simply not true as far as I can tell. People point to XOM funding someone for 25 M illion dollars or so. Compare that to the forces of climate change "proponen...

November 27, 2008 was Thanksgiving Day and unfortunately a sad one. Our family pet of 10 years, a 15 year old greyhound died. We think he was born in about February, 1994. He raced in Tampa in the mid-1990s as "Armed and Dangerou s." He was a good racer, big at 75 lbs. The problem he had is that he would tend to get injured from trying too hard or something. Maybe his connective tissues were not robust enough for a dog his size. They retired him from racing and he lived on the farm for a few years to father some more racers before sending him to the greyhound adoption people. Sparky was a good as pet as one could hope for. He was playful, mellow, eager to please, and naively intelligent. Greyhounds Like a dragster, he was built for straight-line speed. He had no flexibility in his joints except back and forth. Sitting like most dogs do was a chore for him. Contrary to what many people think, greyhounds are not hyperactive. Owners call them "40 mile per hour couch potatoe...

I work with portfolios of real assets. One of the basic concepts of portfolio analysis and management is that you must know what you value. Very seldom does an organization have one single goal that it pursues to the exclusion of all others. It is a useful framework for looking at the mortgage problem that I wrote about earlier. If your single goal in life is to minimize the amount of interest you pay in your life, paying off your mortgage early may be a good strategy. For most people their house loan is the biggest loan they will ever get, typically paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest over the life of the loan. These are big numbers, exagerrated by the size of the loan and the time period. However, most people have goals besides minimizing the interest paid. If you take it up to a higher level, most people want to maximize their wealth, which in simple terms is simply money in minus money out. Money in that equation can represent any form of value including house appr...

The pay-off-a-little-more-each-month-on-your-mortgage fallacy has been around for a long time. The deal is that the numbers are big, so they are really impressive. Yes. It builds equity faster. (But it's just converting your cash from a flexible form of equity into a less flexible form.) Yes. You pay less interest over time. (But you lose opportunity to invest). Yes, you pay off your house sooner. (How many of us will live in our house for 20+ years though?) There are several ways to look at this prolem though. First, from a strictly financial perspective, the right way to look at this is to consider the alternative uses of the extra money you would be putting into the equity. For example, a 6% loan has an after tax 4% rate. Instead of putting the money into your house, why not put it into a SP500 index fund? It will get you 8% over time (5.33% after taxes). So by putting $1000 into your house, you lose $13.33 each year. Put it into the IRA that you haven't been funding and it ...

I am an agnostic on the issue of man's effect on global warming. I do not deny that the earth is getting warmer, maybe even alarmingly so. I feel comfortable saying that man's activities are at least a partial cause of this warming, whether from greenhouse gases, deforestation, paving paradise, or simply pumping heat into the atmosphere. I also suspect there are other natural factors at work. Changing orbits, long-term cycles, etc. I am concerned that a big piece of the data is being misrepresented. I am hearing more and more that this correlation and perceived causal relationship between CO2 levels and temperature may be incorrect, that in fact CO2 lags temperature increase by about 800 years typically. This bothers me. All this is probably not relevant in the short and medium term. The linked article is an opinion piece from the San Francisco Chronicle on March 11, 2007, written by Henry I. Miller, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University. Is re...

Continual loss is a fact of life. That sounds really harsh, but it's true. From the day you are born, you begin to leave innocence and youth behind. When we are young, the loss has some very powerful compensations. Wisdom replaces innocence, strength and ability replace youth. At some point, growth in wisdom tapers off, but it does grow until, perhaps, dementia sets in. Strength begins to decline shortly after you get it unless you work hard to maintain it, in which case you lose time. But those are the gradual losses. We see them coming and they are inevitable. We accept them. Sudden wrenching loss is inevitable for most of us too. The parent or spouse who dies in an accident or from a heart attack. The swindler who cons us out of our life savings (think Enron). These wrenching losses change us--even when they happen to someone else. When we hear of a child who is kidnapped while walking to school, we start driving the kids everyday. We lose time, the kids lose exercise and indepe...

In all the debate around evolution and intelligent design, one thing has been lost--does it really matter what is taught? Evolution is a fact; intelligent design is poorly supported opinion. That's my bias on this. Darwinians can't necessarily give evidence-supported explanations of all the complexity of life. This doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Put all that aside though. Who cares? Geologists care. Evolutionary biologists care. From the standpoint of most science and engineering though, it doesn't matter at all. Solid state physicists don't care about evolution or the age of the earth; they care only about how semi conducting materials respond to electrical current. Software engineers don't care. Even doctors don't really care. What happened a million years ago on earth, and whether humans and apes have a common ancestor has zero impact on most people's daily lives. We do know that evolution happens at some scale. It is the reason bacteria beco...

I have Music in my life again. I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean it literally. With the advent of the iPod, iTunes, and MP3s, I have started listening to and appreciating music again. I have digitized my entire CD collection and downloaded a lot of songs from iTunes. now I have all my songs in one place and backed up. I bought an Airport Express to allow me to play directly from my computer to the stereo, so now I have instant access to my music through my stereo. This is all too cool. The other thing I did was buy an electric bass. I have always wanted to play, but somewhere stuck in my head was the idea that they did not make left-handed bass guitars. So I didn't do it. Then one day, I actually saw one in an instrument store. It was a revelation. I bought one and have started lessons from a CD. Unfortunately, my computer chewed up my CD, so I am going to have to get a new copy, but wow!! Rock is my life.

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? Your Linguistic Profile: 70% General American English 15% Yankee 5% Midwestern 5% Upper Midwestern 0% Dixie Kind of fun. No surprise here though.

OK. I'm not as young as I used to be. And I'm a little bit overweight... Actually, overfat. You see, the normal standards of weight vs height as expressed by the Body Mass Index are a bit flawed. I'm not tring to make excuses or anything, but focusing on weight alone can be counterproductive. The medical community has used the weight of average people in computing the range of acceptable BMIs, but it doesn't account for people outside of the norm. For example, Walter Payton, one of the greatest running backs ever to play football was 5'10" and weighed about 210 lbs. That gave him a BMI of 30.2--obese. He was not obese. He probably had about 10% body fat. That is why BMI has problems. It is used as a proxy for body fat percentage. The fact is though that today you can get a scale for under $100 that measures your body fat directly. So if you are an athlete or are somehow outside the norm, you can see your real progress. Which brings me to the topic of this note,...

The title says it all. What the heck is that about? You see it a lot in third world countries and bars in the first world. Do people really think that mothballs can take the place of the urinal "breath mints"?

I am a divorced father and a stepfather. Recently I have done some soul searching around the issue of parenthood vs. step-parenthood and how and when it is appropriate for which parent to provide discipline. I caught my son downloading some pornography on the internet. He's 16 years old. In my book this is not a horrible crime, nor can it be ignored. It was near the end of his week visiting, so I did not make a big stink about it. I did take away his computer privileges for the remainder of his stay (about a day). I called his mom, who lives across the country, and told her what had happened. She is going to do something to punish him. I don't know what exactly. Now, what would I have done if it had been my stepson who lives with us? I think something similar. He has gotten in trouble for computer use and we have taken away his privileges. I had to really think through the issues on this and make sure I was being fair, consistent, and acting in the kids' best inter...

I am a really big fan of well thought out, logical arguments. Two writers whose work I really admire are Andrew Tobias and Bob Lewis. They write on different subjects in general, but I am a big fan of them both. I first learned about Andrew Tobias through his book "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need." That was back in the mid-80s. After a decade of stagflation, shady commodities deals, and my first experience in the job market, Tobias shed a lot of light on my view of the economic and financial world. Much or most of what he wrote in the book was simple common sense, but there's a lot of it, and if nothing else, it will validate your financial astuteness. His insights to markets are still valid 25 years later. The other writer, Bob Lewis , writes for InfoWorld magazine and has his own IT consulting service. His main topics are directly related to IT workers and executives, but the lessons apply equal well to almost any other field. is columns have given me pow...

A strange scene is unfolding in Richmond, CA on San Francisco Bay tonight. A tribe of Indians (Native Americans), those nature loving stewards of our planet, are trying to open a casino on some vacant wetlands. ChevronTexaco, an integrated oil company, those rapers and pillagers of our planet, are opposing them because they want to build a nature preserve. Go figure.

My name is Tony and I am a Macaholic. I own a few shares of Apple stock and have been a Mac User and owner since I bought my Mac Plus in about 1986 or so. I have reviewed software, supported computers, worked with user groups, and am an advanced user of most of the standard programs. There is little doubt in my mind that even since the first days of the Lisa, Macs have represented not only a better product, but also a better value. When Macs first came out they were not cheap, but the beauty of them is that they came in a single package with just about everything you needed. PCs on the other hand were much cheaper, but... If you actually wanted to use them you were stuck with plunking down a whole lot more money to get up to the same capability of a Mac. This holds true today too. I'll write more about Macs later.

My wife, Kathleen, has recently taken up Mosaics. It has opened my eyes to a very cool art form. It has elements of both art and construction. In Ravenna Italy there are mosaics still standing that were created in the 6th century. You have to love art that lasts