A Spreadsheet of Old

At the bottom of a very, very old pile I came across a pad of paper which produced nostalgic memories. It was an all-purpose AmPad miniature spreadsheet, of the old-fashioned kind, thus neatly pre-ruled pages. Herewith an image of it. I call it a miniature because, on full-sized jobs of calculation, we used pads of much greater size. But they were essentially the same format you see here but made both wider and deeper.

The old spreadsheet—which also gave its name to the electronic kind—served exactly the same purposes. Ever notice that when you open a new page of Excel, for instance, one of the first tasks is to make the left-most column  wider—because that’s where the descriptive labels usually go? Well, in the old days the paper versions came that way. And, of course, both rows and columns were numbered. The electronic versions introduced column-marking using letters, which made it less confusing to reference a cell.

To be sure, working with the vast, physical, ancient spreadsheets was a bother. You had to have a calculator handy. And in the really early days those were not small and handy but big and bulky and almost too heavy to move.

Yes. Nostalgia. Most of it is of this flavor. Somehow the past appears in a rosy sort of light whereas the present is always in black and white. Until you recall what a major labor it was to revise a column already filled with numbers. All that erasing, all that cursing. Ah, the good-old-days.

It Ain’t Over Yet

The housing market started to plummet as soon as the 2005 was over—and then, measured in the value of business done, it plummeted like one of those cars falling off the collapsing bridge. Here is a chart from an earlier posting. In effect we’ve had a period of seven years and five months in which the housing market was dead in the water, and ship taking water on top of that. Obviously time enough had passed so that natural demand for housing would begin to build up sooner or later. And now we have reports that housing is up. Not surprisingly, these figures are over-hyped. Consumer confidence is also showing gains, although these are not dramatic—and have been fluctuating up and down. But suddenly everything is all right again?

Don’t think so. The housing market must be viewed narrowly—and pragmatically. Much as the automobile market. Those two categories are basic. Sooner or later people must buy a house, must replace the car. And these two areas will therefore respond to actual need. But when we look at the economy as a whole, it is still treading water. In the most recent monthly employment reports, all of the gains were in the Services sectors. Construction lost jobs, Manufacturing showed zero gains, Mining and Logging lost jobs too. The real economy is still stirring in uneasy sleep.

The upsurge of optimism is a function of unreasoning exaggeration. Our media does not simply report the news—with proper additions of the relevant context. It behaves, instead, like a megaphone with a mind of its own. The message is “Housing sales are picking up, home values are on the increase.” What we hear is something else: “Great news. America is confident again and the bonanza will soon resume.” But it isn’t over yet. The fat lady is still in the dressing room. It will be a while until she rolls on the stage and starts to sing.

In the 3-D Cul de Sac

A story in the Wall Street Journal informs me this morning that Amazon is developing a smartphone that will produce 3-D images on its screen. How will that look? Here from the story:

Using retina-tracking technology, images on the smartphone would seem to float above the screen like a hologram and appear three-dimensional at all angles.

Reminded me of my handful of experiences with 3-D attempts in the entertainment field going back into the 1950s. Each of these, from my perspective, was a total failure—introduced with a lot of hoopla but never taking hold. These foolish wastes of developmental money keep recurring at right regular intervals, but never bearing fruit.

On the same 2-D page where this story is, Aflac has an ad depicting, wouldn’t you know it, the Aflac duck. It looks perfectly three-dimensional to me, achieved by color shadings and a realistic perspective. What would I do if Aflac ducks were rising from my newspaper and seemingly floating in the air. Would shivers pass over my skin? Amazon, Amazon! Please! Don’t try so hard to amazon me.

Looking for Caffeine?

So what makes an energy drink energetic? The usual presumption is that it is caffeine. But if that is so, what is the best kind of beverage to drink to get that little boost? The answer, not surprisingly, is coffee! Herewith a selective listing of different beverages showing their caffeine content per fluid ounce:

Drink	Caffeine: mg per fluid ounce	As % of Brewed Coffee
Brewed Coffee	13.4	100.0
Mate	10.6	79.1
Red Bull	9.5	70.9
Instant Coffee	7.1	53.0
Instant Tea	3.2	23.9
Pepsi	3.2	23.9
Green Tea	3.1	23.1
Coke Classic	2.8	20.9

My source for this is energyfiend.com (link). Gatorade, often considered the energy drink for athletes, is not on the list because it contains no caffeine at all. Gatorade is designed to replace the salts lost in sweating. Mate, sometimes spelled maté, is a tea derived from the Latin American herb called yerba mate. Not surprisingly, it is drunk down there as if it were, well, like coffee…

Happy To Be Blue

Lots of people this morning must have chuckled grimly reading—be it in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times—that the not-yet-one-year-old and “revolutionary” Windows 8 will soon be replaced by Windows Blue. When Windows 8 was launched last October, I compared it New Coke. Are you old enough to remember that fiasco? Coca-Cola introduced a new formula for Coke, named by the public the New Coke. This took place on April 23, 1985. Less than three months later, on July 10, 1985, the company made an about-turn. It went back to the old, traditional formula again—in the face of an absolutely massive public resistance.

Well, it looks like it will take Microsoft a little longer to correct its own error, but the change is already on the way. Windows Blue will return with the “traditional” interface, albeit, with a little nostalgia for its own errors, a few of the “tiles” so beloved by users of mini-devices will still clutter up part of the opening screen. And while they’re at it, Microsoft might well fix the big problem it heaped on unlucky owners of certain printers—by providing properly working printer drivers on its Blue.

To be “blue” means to be “sad.” Well, in this case, if all goes well, I’ll be happy to be Blue.

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Earlier posts on this subject: October 11, 2012, October 25, 2012, April 11, 2013.

Employment Update: April 2013

In March of 2013 the economy gained 202,000 jobs, not the 88,000 as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment data are usually revised. And March was revised upward by a quite significant amount. Now as for April, job gains last month were 165,000 (see BLS release). But, of course, they may also be revised in the June report. In any case, the news made everybody breathe easier. Herewith the updated chart. Please note that the March revision is highlighted in pink.

The next graphic show revisions of the actual data, by year, for 2007 through 2012 and for 2013, projected. The projection is based here on four months results. The patter looks good. If things continue as they have thus far, 2013 will outperform 2010 through 2012.

Herewith a tabulation of average job gains, or losses, per month for the 2007-2013 period:

Year	Average job gain/loss per month in 000
2007	89.8
2008	-293.8
2009	-421.0
2010	85.2
2011	175.3
2012	182.8
2013	195.8

The trend is favorable—if very slow. As of the April results, we have recovered 70.9 percent of total jobs lost in  2008 and 2009. We have 29.1 percent to go.

In April sectors showing small job losses were Mining (3,000), Construction (3,000), Information (9,000), and Government (11,000). Manufacturing neither added nor lost jobs in April. The biggest gainers among the rest Professional and Business Services (up 73,000),  Leisure and Hospitality (up 43,000), and Retail (up 29,300).

Crushed Between Clouds and Insects

An article in the New York Times today suggests that Intel, which got about 84 percent of its revenues in 2012 from PCs and the more muscular servers, has now joined the ranks of major computer companies upset by the maturing of the PC industry (“Intel Looks Past PCs for Foothold”). PC sales have been declining of late; the economy is sluggish, hence corporations and institutions, the major users of that tool, are not investing. But Cloud Computing is on the rise. Cloud computing? The phrase refers to the use distant servers, owned by others, to store an institution’s or enterprises total data “in a cloud.” Cloud servers are simpler and have fewer features than those used by corporations to perform broader computing services, along with file serving, in-house. Therefore they are less profitable. Intel, apparently, finds itself crushed between clouds above and insects (read smartphones and tablets and pads) below; these latter, according to the Times story, rarely incorporate Intel processors.

Why this need to “look past PCs”? The only explanation I can find is pressure on Intel’s stock. The company is magnificently profitable. In the 2007-2012 period, the company’s net income in the worst year, 2009, was 12.4 percent of its net revenues. In 2007 it was 18.2, inn 2012 it was 20.6 percent. This is a company with 53.3 billion in sales (2012) which has grown at a compounded annual rate of 6.8 percent a year 2007 through 2012. There is nothing wrong here except for the bloody market, and I mean the stock market. The market cannot stand a maturing industry. The lady may be but 43 years of age, but as soon as she has shown the first few grey hairs, she is immediately labeled a crone—and we must now “look past” the lady. Here is a chart of Intel’s revenues, net income, and an index of its stock, with 2007 set at 100:

What, if anything is wrong here? Revenue and net income show the consequences of the Great Recession—and the sluggish nature of the recovery. But the stock has responded much more dramatically. And, to be sure, the people who run Intel are not in the computer chip business. They are in the stock market business. Never mind the fundamental value of a corporation that absolutely dominates a market, computing, by owning most of the market share of its most fundamental component, the central processing unit. The same madness also governs the pea-sized brains of almost all those who run publicly traded companies—even one like Food, which can only really grow as population does. That industry has ruined a basic, necessary, and “always will be present” industry by trying to squeeze growth from it by making more and more high-margin prepared foods with too much fat, salt, or sugar—or artificially formulated foods with less of those three than natural foods ought to have.

Ears that hear, eyes that see. But we are lead by the deaf and the blind.

Revisiting Windows 8

Without much pleasure I note, in a Wall Street Journal article today (“Computer Sales in Free Fall”), that PCs remain in the doldrums—and that lots of people blame Windows 8. I held forth on that subject roughly six months ago (link) and have touched upon the essentially irrelevant war between hand-helds and desk-helds as well. It gives me no pleasure to note what are, deep down, knee-jerk and irrational reactions to markets by various once much admired leaders—like Microsoft, which brought us Windows 8 and Hewlett Packard which is still trying to dump its PC business. Hand-held devices and desktop computers are totally different products and markets. The difference might be described as that between a basket of hand tools on the one and a machine tool on the other hand. The PC market is now mature; the economy is still largely stagnant; hence, what with corporations holding off on purchases, PC sales are declining. But this decline is rooted in the economy’s performance, not in the operating system on the screen of the PCs. Replacing a quite excellent user-interface with a touchy-feely interface people in offices don’t routinely, habitually, use is simply not going to change broad market movements that have zero connection to flim-flam (link).

Here a quote from the WSJ article:

Ricoh Americas Corp., which replaces about a third of its 17,000 PCs every three years and upgrades to the most current operating system available, said this year it is sticking with Windows 7…. Tracey Rothenberger, the company’s chief operating officer, said the benefits of switching to the new software aren’t worth the effort of training employees to use it.

If our business media were innovative—rather than reacting simply to news releases—somebody would stage a trial. Pick a handful of heavy PC users in several companies—you know, the whole ball of wax: spreadsheets, databases, serious text processing like typesetting, and, in the graphics category, artists using Apples with extra-large screens for creating commercial graphics. Select tasks these people do on a certain day and note everything that they do. The next day deploy the same number of heavy iPad users to carry out the identical tasks during the same period of time. I’d love to read the story that would result from this comparison.

Is the PC really going away? I seriously doubt it. Will even the cyber industry mature, and probably quite soon? Most likely. Will the next great market be another of those where you can sell a pound of plastic, silicon, and bits of copper to hysterically-enthused consumers for $395 ever six month? Probably not. The big new markets may turn out to be quite different—and may have nothing to do with electronics.

Employment Update: March 2013

The unexpected news of very weak gains in employment in March, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics yesterday (link), were actually not quite so dismal. In effect, the BLS revised both January and February result upwards, showing gains of 90,000 jobs (29,000 more in January, 61,000 more in February). This total added to the 88,000 jobs gained in March brings total jobs added, since the last report, to 178,000. Okay. That number also produces a mood a little shy of exuberance but sounds a lot better. Here is the graphic, with January and February shaded in light blue, to indicate revisions, and red showing the weak gain.

The gloom and doom arises because of expectation. The expectations are that the economy will, finally, come roaring back. Finally we shall return to the old Sky’s the Limit, Growth Galore, Don’t Look Back, Spend-Spend-Spend. Well, that certainly isn’t happening. Indeed, as the next graphic shows, right now, projecting three months’ of numbers out to the entire year, we are on a pattern which will make job-growth in 2013 worse than either 2011 or 2012—unless something happens in the next three quarters.

The biggest decline (a loss of 24,100 jobs) came in the Retail sector, indicating that shopping is certainly no longer Job 1. Wholesale Trade, and, yes, Transportation and Warehousing, also came in with job erosions of 1,000 and 2,800 jobs respectively. Manufacturing also lost 3,000 jobs in March. Now, of course, these numbers may well be revised upward next month again, but the overall pattern is not one of the Return of the Good Old days.

There are really three problems here. One is Automation/ Mechanization, which is eating jobs, and we are finally seeing the consequences. The Second is income disparity whereby all of the economy’s gains are being absorbed by the top fifth of the top fifth income quintile. The Third is that our government is no longer willing and able to redistribute income from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. Alas, a strong economy needs masses of confident buyers.

Almost overlooked in yesterdays news coverage was that the unemployment rate remained at 7.6 percent—and that because, once more, people were voting themselves out of the labor pool by stopping to look for work. People who give up—because they cannot see any jobs—will make the unemployment number look good, sort of, but they are not shopping either.

One-and-a-Half Earths

I’d heard the phrase before—global footprint—but did not realize, until yesterday, that a quite massive statistical effort has been underway since 2003 actually to measure what, using other words, would be called the sustainability of modern culture or measuring the Earth’s carrying capacity. The institution is called Global Footprint Network (GFN), with headquarters in Oakland, CA and an office in Geneva, Switzerland (link).

GFN obtains statistical data from around 230 nations, of which 150 are routinely available; it collects more than 6,000 data points from each; using these data it produces an Input-Output table showing resources consumed and resources either returned for reuse to the ecology or accumulated as waste. The global footprint is the cumulated from country data. The footprint is expressed as global hectares (gha) available and equivalent global hectares used. A global hectare is defined as a biologically productive area of land or water; approximately 12 billion hectares were available to humanity in 2008. A hectare, by the way. is 0.45 of an acre, about the size of a soccer field. If human activity uses no more or less than 12 billion gha our activities are sustainable. If human activity is greater than that, we have what GFN calls overshoot. In 2008, the calculated equivalent usage was 18.2 billion gha, which GFN abbreviates by saying that we are using 1.52 planet Earth-worth of resources—one and a half earths. That, of course, is not sustainable.

According to GFN, our way of life became unsustainable around 1971. By 2050, assuming a moderate “business as usual” projection, we will be using the equivalent of 2-3/4 earths to support our civilization. Definitely unsustainable.

There is a great deal on the site worth studying. I found it especially interesting that GFN does not treat fossil fuel use in the conventional manner (“we’re running out.”) Instead it views fossil fuel use from the perspective of our ability to handle its wastes, thus the Earth’s capacity to absorb our carbon dioxide production.

The Global Footprint Network is, ultimately, looking at population pressure—thus falls under a tradition begun by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834).  At the halfway point in Malthus’ life, circa 1800, world population was around 1 billion. We were then a long, long ways away form an unsustainable population. But we’ve increased population since then more than six times. And at some point somebody will be right. Unsustainablity will be reached. Does that mean that humanity will disappear? No. But the return to long-term sustainability will be neither pretty nor due to some clever gifts of technology, no matter how ingenious.

Why Can’t We Stop When We’re Ahead?

Occurs to me that humanity has not yet learned to stop when it’s ahead—and leave well enough alone. The occasion for this thought (it’s an old one) is the second failure of our expensive front-loading GE washing machine, Model WBVH6240FWW. In both cases the dial up front, intended to select the kind of wash you want to do, has failed to work.

Up to the time when we bought this machine, we’d owned other kinds that, when they failed, I could, to be sure with lots of study and effort, fix myself. But this GE machine is of the modern kind. It is much more consistently electronically controlled. Therefore failures such as these require replacement of entire structures. The defective part, containing valuable heavy metals and such, becomes a problematic waste—because teasing the traces of gold and other metals out of it is too expensive.

The very forces that produce innovation later produce excess of innovation: too many features, too much razz-ma-tazz. Briefly, and always only briefly, new features benefit producers. But very rapidly every maker has the same features. A simple-enough function, like washing clothes, become Boeing-like complex. We began our household with a simple washer-wringer machine—something like the one I’m showing (link)—which was itself a marvel of technology. It had a simple on-off button. It washed the clothes. The wringer squeezed them dry. Yes, we had to change the water and do some rinsing. It took a little attention—but habit filled in for the future electronics…

My point more broadly is that we could, theoretically, stop when we’ve produced a decent tool. But the madness of letting the Market do our thinking causes, in due time, perfectly useful products to disappear. Things are in the saddle?—something’s in the saddle. If this repair doesn’t do the job, our next washer will be a Maytag wringer washer. Looking around I see that I could get one for about $60-$100—much less than this repair will cost.

A Steady Drop in the Crude Birth Rate

In a post on Ghulf Genes a couple of days ago (link), in the context of “generations” named by popular culture, I showed a chart of the crude birth rate, thus births per 1,000 population for 1909 through 2008. In that post I wondered what the nineteenth century data might look like. Today I show a chart extending over 211 years, from 1800 through 2010.

The chart is rather instructive. The crude birth rate, which was 55 births per 1,000 people in 1800, has declined over two centuries to 13 birth per 1,000 in 2010, the lowest recorded in this time span. The rate was already dropping apace when the first reasonably effective birth-control devices were introduced in 1839, courtesy of Charles Goodyear. The “womb veil” mentioned on the graphic was the forerunner of the diaphragm. The second, call it technological, intervention came in 1960 when the FDA approved “the pill.” The third development was the legalization of abortion by the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade in 1973—not that the public was waiting for that in the decades that came before. Technology and law aside, the phenomenon we’re seeing here is driven by cultural factors; technology and law are products of culture, not causes of demographic change.

If we fit a trend line to this curve, it becomes clear that the Baby Boom was simply a consequence of delayed opportunities for breeding, shown by the birth rate dip in the 1930s and 1940s. After the Boom, the long-term trend resumes.

Note that data for the nineteenth century are from census years only, obtained from Historical Statistics of the United States, published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in 1975. I obtained the data from 1909 forward from a series, Vital and Health Statistics, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This rate is called “crude” because it is a simple calculation; more refined birth rates, based on births by women in their childbearing years, the total fertility rate, requires much more careful calculation than simply dividing total population by total births.

The trend we see here underlies several “issues” that plague us, among them the aging population, the costs of maintaining such populations, and the immigration battles. Population growth in the United States is gradually having to rely on bringing population in, and, we hope, a population still willing to breed. And unless we have a growing population, we shall not have a growing market to consume the goods our machines produce.

To add more context—lest that great downward slide produces consternation—some comparisons. Of the 197 countries for which the World Bank provides data, 135 had a lower crude birth rate than the United States, 4 other countries matched our rate, and 57 had a higher rate, among them India (22). The top baby producer per 1,000 population was Niger (49). Those under-performing the U.S. included China, Russia, Japan, and all of Europe. The worst performer, with 8 per 1,000 was Germany.

The United States had a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 children born to women in their child-bearing years in 2010. A TFR of 2.1 is equal the so-called replacement rate. This means that such a rate will replace all deaths in a given year. Our population, at present, is only growing by immigration. 116 counties in the world (of 197) had a higher rate, among them India (2.625), 80 had a lower rate, meaning that they were not replacing their population. Among them, again, are China, Japan, Russia, and all of Europe. The highest rate in 2010 was measured in Niger (7.06), the lowest in Macau (1.09).

Maps of Catholicism Worldwide

No, I’m not showing any maps—but I am pointing to them. Here is the first link. It is one provided by the National Geographic and entitled “Map: The Roman Catholic Diaspora.” I suggest looking at the three maps there before reading on, one each for 1900, 1970, and 2010. A tab to the left and under the map lets you go forward and backward in time.

It is fascinating to see how the demographic center-point of Catholicism has shifted between 1900 and 2010. In 1900 Europe represented 67 percent of the global Catholic population; in 2010 it had declined to less than 24 percent. As Europe’s share declined, that of Africa and Latin America rose, so that in 2010 Latin America represented 41 percent of all Catholics, the new center-point of Catholicism. The Conclave of Cardinals this year for the first time reflected the facts on the ground and elevated a Latin American Archbishop to the Papacy. With a lag, always, demography rules.

Another view of this situation is provided by a map taken from the 2003 Encyclopedia Britannica by Mapsorama.com (link). It shows countries colored by the predominant religion in each—together with a chart suggesting increase world-wide of selected faiths by 2050 as projected by World Christian Trends. What this map shows is the diversity of the world of faith—but it also gives the nod to the Conclave, which gave the nod to Pope Francis.