This is impressive

Note that not only is Franken drawing a map of the US, he's drawing each state's border with surprising detail and talking about each one while he's drawing

Saturday Morning Watchmen

This is just wrong.

My experiences buying a car

It has been quite some time since I've blogged; I'll get into why in a later post.

In these tough economic times, the last thing you might want to do is to make a major purchase. On the other hand, sometimes you have no choice, or at least are headed that way, and you may feel relatively secure in your employment (after all, the unemployment rate is under 50% -- how's that for looking on the bright side?). And if you are thinking of such a purchase, such as buying a car, it is possible to get a better deal now than in more prosperous times. So, with that preface, join me as I recount a recent adventure my family had.

Until recently, we owned a 9.5 year old Dodge Grand Caravan with around 125,000 miles on it. I had taken to recording maintenance and mileage information in a spreadsheet and was watching as cost of ownership per mile started to climb. The minivan was also giving signs of potential major expenses to come. So, we were faced with a choice: pay whatever it takes to keep the minivan in working order, waiting for plug-in hybrids (like the Chevy Volt) to come out in about two years, or take advantage of the various special offers from manufacturers to buy a car now and figure on buying a second-generation plug in (figuring that there will be long waiting lists for the first-generation ones, with people paying more than sticker price for them). Anyway, it wouldn't hurt to look.

Web Resources

Compared with 9.5 years ago, car buyers have a wealth of information available. Of course, there are the manufacturer web sites. In addition, dealers often have their inventory on-line, which at least gives you an idea of what type of equipment they order for cars they will have in stock (which is what you'll get the best deals on). Here are some of the most useful sites we found:

Edmunds

This is the "canonical" web site for determining both sticker and approximate invoice prices for cars, including options. It also has reviews, comparisons, etc. Dealer invoice is an important first step towards figuring out what a reasonable purchase price is.

Real Car Tips

There are a lot of tips on this site. One of its nicest features is a user-entered database of recent car deals people were able to negotiate. This can help you get an idea of what is reasonable to expect. They've also got a process for attempting to solicit bids from dealers via email, get them to bid against each other, etc. I tried this approach (it's similar to a fax version I tried 9.5 years ago); I can't say I was very successful. For the most part, even the internet salespeople refused to bid. I was able to cut down a bit on driving, by finding out what models dealers had in stock and get some idea of how resistant they were to coming down in price.

Car Buying Tips.com

This site also has a lot of advice, links, and a consumer price database. But the best part of the site was a spreadsheet that allows you to organize the MSRP, invoice price, incentives, holdbacks, etc. It also calculates a fair profit for the dealer, and gives a final price. It was very useful to go into a dealership, put down the spreadsheet, show them the invoice price, show the incentives, etc. subtracted from that, your allowance for a reasonable profit, and then the bottom line price. Of course, then the salesperson would argue the invoice price was wrong, that there weren't any holdbacks, and so on. But it was a start, and it gives you additional information to help you determine if your price goal is unreasonable.

Psychology

Almost all factors favor the salespeople in the process. They have the advantage of information (you can get most of this on the web, but they will still try to discredit what you find, obfuscate things, and generally do whatever to restore the imbalance in their favor), experience, controlling the type of product available (for example, by only stocking fully-loaded cars, requiring you to special order less expensive ones which you won't get as good a deal on, thus reducing the cost advantage), and sheer experience. Plus the various games they'll play during negotiations. Your advantage is that you have the money, and they need to money more than you need the car. You need to work on your frame of mind to take maximum advantage of this, since the only way to use this is to be willing to walk out of the dealership.

Our approach to this was similar to what you might do when looking for a college: a safety car. Pick a late model used car that you'd be satisfied with, that you can get a deal on that won't leave you feeling too cheated, and that won't give you any trouble. We went in with the idea that, if we couldn't get what we considered a good deal on the cars we were looking for, we'd get a used Camry. If nothing else, it would be reliable, and there wasn't as much room in its price for us to get screwed (at least, not as badly as a more expensive car). So, armed with that idea, we proceeded to visit car dealerships.

Process

We first spent some time telling dealers we were collecting information and not ready to talk deal yet, taking test drives, collecting business cards, drinking some free coffee from the various automatic espresso machines they had. I think this was useful for a variety of reasons, making us more comfortable in the dealerships, of course giving us first-hand experience with the cars. We also were able to get list of the actual cars that the dealers had in stock, including exactly what their options were. This is critical, because it's not possible to prepare yourself well for negotiations without doing your homework and pricing the particular car you'll be talking about, using the spreadsheet mentioned above.

We brought our spreadsheet to the dealer with our top-choice car and told them we were ready to buy. We showed the salesman our bottom-line price, with all of the steps towards figuring it out. At one point, we pulled out a credit card and said that if he could close the gap between his price and ours, we'd make the deposit then and there (this was on a weekend, and we would have to go to the bank to arrange for full payment). In our case, we got a verbal agreement and then, when we asked the salesman to print it all up, he came back out from the back office saying that the sales manager misunderstood something and that the price was no good; he only would agree to a higher price (this was after several trips back to speak to the manager during the negotiations, as if the salesman didn't have the authority to negotiate deals). So, we said we needed to pick up our daughters at their cello lesson, gave the salesman our cell phone number, and told him to call if he could clear up the misunderstanding.

End Game

This is an important principle: you must be ready and willing to walk away, or be prepared to pay extra. We felt we were being jerked around and so we left. We were ready to either go to the dealer with our next choice, or go for the safety car and feel satisfied with a reliable car and less expense. In this case, the salesman called back in about a half hour, and we got our new car for not much more than what we paid for our minivan 9.5 years ago.

Employee furloughs at Arizona State University

I've been crazy busy with a new position here at work, so I haven't been able to indulge myself in the luxury of ranting and raving on the internet (except for 140 characters at a time, on twitter). But the article linked from the title above caught my eye, and then the following quote from that article made me laugh out loud:

Faculty members will take furloughs on days they don’t teach class...

I wonder if this means that faculty can refrain from grading on those days and hand things back late. Seriously, about the only thing this frees faculty from, I suppose, is going to meetings. And, considering that meetings are scheduled in the cracks between the various members' classes, that's probably not even true.

Change.gov

What will the web presence of the Obama administration (I still feel weird thinking about that, like something good can't really be happening) look like? Change.gov may be a sneak peek. It's really just a very straightforward web site, however, with lots of content, fairly well indexed, a blog, and some ability for people to send in their opinions. Not very exciting, even compared to the campaign web site.

One of the great features of the campaign e-presence was the ability for volunteers to self-organize to accomplish constructive tasks. This was facilitated by the inherently parallel and uniform nature of the tasks to be done. For example, making phone calls is the same task applied to millions of phone numbers. The same isn't true of governing, a great part of which involves developing ideas for laws, considering the various ramifications of each of these ideas, and then discarding, merging, compromising, and writing final legislation.

So, can developing policy and laws be done like open source software development? Possibly not the best model, because the problems may not be decomposable into parts addressable by individuals and because individuals cannot fully test the components they've "developed". Instead, perhaps a participatory governance web should look more like a wiki, perhaps with some hierarchy of user credentials to prevent vandalism (but with anyone free to comment on parts of proposed policy or legislation). Could we develop an energy policy, or specific implementation of such a policy, using a wiki? Perhaps the Obama administration could start with some small task as a test of this.

Ass kissers

Ass kissers
Originally uploaded by stiber

Interesting to see the "clean coal" folks advertising on CNN.com, congratulating Obama on becoming President-elect.

Barack o' Lantern

Barack o' Lantern
Originally uploaded by stiber

Having voted by mail a couple weeks ago, all I can do is go to work and try not to think about the election. Well, at least until 4PM Pacific time, when the first state polls close. Right now, the nation is like Schrödinger's cat: pretty much everyone has decided who'll they'll vote for (and if they'll vote), but we still don't know what the country will be like until we open the ballot boxes and look inside.

iPhone users get free wifi

iPhone users finally get free wifi from AT&T. Basically, you connect to the access point and enter your phone number. AT&T then sends you an SMS message with a 24-hour access key. I haven't tries it yet...

Spreading the wealth

Do the McCain/Palin campaign people really think that most people in the US are opposed to "spreading the wealth"? Because, in case they have forgotten, they need to convince most people (otherwise known as "more than 50%") to vote for their ticket. This seems to me to be more like something you say to people who already agree with you and intend to vote for you (because it's hard for me to imagine anyone other than a hard-core Republican, well, maybe some Libertarians, too, being against spreading wealth), which is clearly less than a majority of Americans.

So, are they deluded about the number of hard-core Republicans out there? Or is this just the best they have?

What will the student vote turnout be?

The title of the Chronicle of Higher Education article linked above is "Poll: Students Less Engaged Than Thought". It's about student involvement in the presidential campaign. Given the expectation that younger voters would vote in numbers significantly higher than in previous elections, and that they would greatly favor Obama, this seems rather disheartening news. However, that's not the case; you have to read the article to find out.

The disengagement the title is concerned with is students being actively involved in the campaigns. In terms of voting, however:

...a whopping 94 percent of students at four-year colleges in the battleground states — Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — said they were registered to vote. Barack Obama had a two-to-one edge in their support over John McCain.

And the vast majority of students said they definitely planned to vote.

"Young people, once registered to vote, are very likely to go and vote — particularly college students," said Karlo Barrios Marcelo, a research consultant with the nonpartisan Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, at Tufts University.

I'll take this as good news: that the polls that attempt to predict voter turnout in ways other than just replicating turnout for 2004 may be accurate.

Two Minutes Hate

Seems like any event that brings together a number of McCain/Palin supporters these days degenerates into an Orwellian experience. Here are two example videos (hat tip to The Lippard Blog):

These sorts of things give one pause. What will these people do when their candidate loses?

More on Palin's failed Turing test

The title above links to an AP story about a University of Reading (UK) contest in which chatbot software developers competed to see whose programs were best at fooling humans that they were real. Judges carried on dual computer chats with the programs and real humans, then after five minutes had to decide which conversant was human and which computer. The programmers' strategies were familiar to anyone following Sarah Palin's failed Turing test. One program referred to its home town (Odessa, rather than Wasilla). The winning program "...tried to dominate the conversation to keep it from wandering into areas it was not properly programmed to handle." This is something that Sarah Palin proved unable to do in her interviews, though she was more successful at this in the debate as that event didn't really require domination -- just her ignoring the questions and saying whatever she was pre-programmed for ahead of time.

So, what Loebner Prize do you think Sarah Palin could earn?

wordle for Expert Opinion

wordle for Expert Opinion
Originally uploaded by stiber

Here's the word cloud for this blog, courtesy of wordle.net.

Compare your taxes under Obama's and McCain's plans

Courtesy of Jeff Gramlich, L.L. Bean/Lee Surace Professor of Accounting at the Univ. of Southern Maine, a tax calculator that compares how you'll fare under a McCain/Palin administration, an Obama/Biden administration, and the current tax rules. Well, at least it's a comparison of your taxes, not how well you'll survive the hordes of cannibals that descend upon your home after the total collapse of civilization that Palin likes to call "the rapture".

Turing test for Sarah Palin

I was looking at the Singularity Institute's web site when the thought occurred to me that artificial intelligence (AI) is a perfect analogy to Sarah Palin's selection as McCain's running mate. The idea of the "Singularity" is that computer technology will inevitably progress to the point where we can create a machine intelligence that is qualitatively superior to human intelligence -- not just equivalent to genius-level human intelligence, or even prodigal intelligence in specific areas (like Mozart), but an intelligence far enough beyond our capabilities that it holds the potential to do things that we can't understand or predict. This event is called a singularity in analogy to a mathematical or physics singularity. One example of this is the location of longitudes or time zones around the earth. When you get to either pole, they all come together at that point, and you can either say that you are in all time zones or in no time zone (in practice, we arbitrarily define the time zone at the pole, but that's merely a convention). Super-human machine intelligence is a singularity in the sense that we can no longer predict what paths technology (or history) will take after that point.

So, what does AI have to do with Sarah Palin? Well, one of the tests proposed for AI is the Turing test: converse with the AI in such a way that you cannot see whether there's a machine or a human on the other end of the phone/chat session/whatever. If you can't tell by asking questions whether it's a machine or not, then for all practical purposes, a machine could be considered intelligent.

By analogy, what Sarah Palin has been going through is the national leadership version of the Turing test, but only a couple times. She was "built" by the McCain campaign, which asserts that her performance should be indistinguishable from that of a national leader (i.e., someone qualified to take on a significant position of influence in the national government). She's been asked some questions, and has mostly failed: we can easily tell that she's not a national leader. Tonight's debate will be just like a Turing test: though we will know that she's the one answering questions, we won't (if we're willing to suspend our disbelief) know if she is qualified to be a national leader. Will she produce answers indistinguishable from those of a national leader? Is there a difference between simulating the behavior of a national leader and actually being one? Can the human version of the Eliza program be filled up with a giant look-up table of responses and act like a national leader? Get yourself a Palin bingo card -- or a good, still drink (or three) -- and tune into the debate.