The 1.5% Real Return Estimate

Last night I had dinner with folks that included a couple who worked in the financial industry. As might be expected, the dinner conversation turned to financial planning, and what strategies are involved. The folks involved did private account management and financial planning, and as you might expect were quite financially sophisticated. I asked one of my favorite financial planning questions: if you needed $X in income over the next 60 years, how much in assets in a diversified portfolio (one that's close to the efficient frontier) would you need to be able to generate that much income in inflation adjusted terms?

Long time readers of my blog, of course, are well aware that the answer can be found on the retire early safe withdrawal spreadsheet. I wanted, however, to see what a conventional financial planner would say. The answer came out to be 150% of what the retire early number was. What was very interesting to me was that the number the planner used for the return from the average portfolio was described as a conservative 1.5% over inflation.

1.5% over inflation. Think about what that means. Current I-bond rates are at 1.4%. What that would mean is that the equity risk premium is only 0.1%. Can it really be that low? Even Warren Buffett, the pessimist, has been quoted as being able to expect a 4% real rate of return from businesses. So 1.5% seemed excessively conservative. Then I thought about the numbers from the conventional planner's perspective: the average cost of a separately managed account is approximately 1.5%. So that 4% real return now is really a 2.5% real return. Taxes can easily eat up another 1% of the remaining return, so now you're down to 1.5% real return.

So from an conventional financial planning perspective, the planner was absolutely correct! The lesson here, of course, is that paying someone else conventional financial planning fees is extremely costly, quite possibly costing you your retirement!. Which means that if you aren't doing your own financial management, you're really giving up half your real returns (to your financial planner, who probably blows 1/2 million a year flying private planes!).

Phil teaches Emacs

One of my former gtags interns, Phil, went back to school at MIT and taught a class about Emacs. His slides were great (much better than the ones I did for Google), and will soon be incorporated into the GNU Emacs distributions. Awesome work, Phil!

Beautiful Aptos Beach

 

Turbo Tax 2007 Review

This is a review of TurboTax for the Mac versus TurboTax for Windows. I've been a Turbo Tax for Windows user for years. This year, as an experiment, and since I had a Mac Mini, I installed the Mac version to see what the difference was.

The first two returns were for my mom and for Lisa. Neither were very complicated, though at least one involved the earned income tax credit. In both cases, I could download W-2s through Turbo Tax. So far so good. Both taxes were done in under 2 hours total (an hour on average).

Then I got to my own taxes. I'll admit that my taxes aren't the least complicated possible, but compared to another colleague who had to spend 50 hours on her taxes last year (because of multiple state taxes), I still consider mine easy. The first sign that all was not well was the investment downloads page. The investment download from Vanguard was straightforward, but the overview screen refused to show me the details of which investments yielded which numbers (capital gains, dividends, etc). This made it quite painful to use the downloaded results, since I couldn't corroborate the sells and buys with my knowledge of what happened.

OK, I know how to type, so I wiped out the imported data and entered all the data manually. This was fine until I got to individual stock sales. I entered all the data, saved and quit the application to get reboot my Mac for an unrelated reason, and then started up Turbo Tax again. To my surprise it refused to start from the saved file!

Chalking it up to user error, I started my return all over again and did my taxes again. The same thing happened when I saved and reloaded the application, this time, without rebooting.

I opened up Turbo Tax for Windows in a Parallels Virtual Machine and proceeded to do my taxes there. To my relief, not only does the Windows version of Turbo Tax happily load and reload my saved files (though it wouldn't load the Macintosh saved files, of course), the investment downloads page on the Windows version is usable, and saved me at least 10-20 minutes of data entry.

The moral: if your finances are non-trivial, get a Windows license and run the Windows version of Turbo Tax. This is another reason my next machine will not be a Macintosh.

No, I did not cheat...

Your results:
You are Dr. Doom

Dr. Doom 68% Magneto 60% Lex Luthor 52% Green Goblin 52% The Joker 52% Apocalypse 49% Two-Face 48% Riddler 47% Mr. Freeze 43% Venom 36% Catwoman 36% Mystique 32% Kingpin 28% Juggernaut 24% Poison Ivy 23% Dark Phoenix 15%

Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.

Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz

Review: Dreaming In Code

Scott Rosenberg follows the Chandler project as a reporter, unraveling the mysteries of software development gone wrong. What's interesting for me, at a personal level, is that I know several of the principles through work at a previous life: Katie Capps Parlante, and Aparna were both with me at Escalate, ironically, a startup that failed for business reasons. (To give you an idea of the quality of the folks at Escalate, at this point, 4 of its first 20 engineers are at Google, while another 4 or 5 are at Yahoo)

The part of the narrative that sticks out to me like a sore thumb is the lack of impatience at OSAF. In fact, the general approach was so muddled that even software luminaries like Andy Hertzfeld left. When building a project, the most important thing to do right away is to build something that works as quickly as possible and get it out there. It doesn't have to be pretty, and it definitely doesn't have to have a fancy object layer. It has to work and do something useful. That gives you a user base that can drive more feedback to help you refine future versions. On top of that, once you have a significant user base among early adopters, you'll get more contributors to your open source program, and the code will snowball. The architecture astronauts approach, however, seemed to have overtaken OSAF, which led them down the garden path of building infrastructure first without an application in mind. I don't under-estimate the importance of infrastructure: I build it all the time, as does the company I work for, but infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is wasteful, as you'll invariably build the wrong thing.

The book is well-written, and worth reading, even if you work in software on a daily basis. If you're successful, you'll say to yourself, "at least I'll never get caught in this morass." If you're unsuccessful, you'll comfort yourself by Rosenberg's repeated assertions that software is hard. Ultimately, however, there are lots and lots of ways for software projects to fail, and only a few ways for them to succeed, so this book is another reminder that unfortunately, the state of software engineering is such that you can go years without reading many new books and still be ahead of most of the field.

I met Rosenberg when he visited Google to promote the book. As he signed my copy, I quoted one of the original hackers Brian Harvey, "All the best software is written by one person." Rosenberg repeated something obviously told to him by many other practitioners, "The software systems we build now are too big, too complicated for one person." I told him that I didn't believe that for a minute. Even in his book, you could trace many programs to one person: Alan Kay and Smalltalk, Charles Simonyi and Bravo. I can name more modern examples: Paul Buchheit and Gmail, Louis Monier and AltaVista, Larry Wall and Perl, Linus Torvalds and Linux. Sure, as the programs evolved and grew, more and more people got involved and ended up building a big system. But right at the beginning you can only have a program written by one or two engineers to scratch their itch. While Rosenberg wasn't willing to write-off Chandler yet, I am. Today, Google's calendar does everything Chandler's trying to do --- by designing the program by committee instead of Mitch Kapor rolling up his sleeves and just writing code, OSAF has doomed Chandler to permanent irrelevancy.

"We've consistently overinvested in infrastructure and design, the fruits of which won't be realized in the next development cycle or even two---that is, not in the next six or twelve months. You pay a price for that in a loss of agility. The advice I would give is to do even more of what we've been doing in the last couple of years, which is to sequence the innovation, stage things, and be less ambitious..."

Review: Ex Machina

Note: My copy of The First Hundred Days was checked out from my local library, and it had pages missing.

Ex Machina is about a superhero who retires and runs for the Mayor of New York in 2001. Where his powers come from, what his past exploits were, and what the limits of his powers are is secondary to the story of his career as a politician.

The first collection (The First Hundred Days) covers his first days in political office, his origins, and a mysterious murder of snowplow men, as well as introducing the characters. The second collection, Tag covers a bit of the period before his election, gay marriage, and the a mysterious series of murders.

The plotting is tight, the art is acceptable, and the use of his abilities very well thought out. I'm considering buying up all the comics I can find.

Recommended.

Review: Whistling Past Dixie

This book is an excellent companion and counter-point to Gene Sperling's The Pro-Growth Progressive. Rather than pontificate on policy that would be good ideas if the Democrats regained control of the government, Schaller focuses on how to win.

Schaller's thesis is that the Democrats have shot themselves hard in the foot by trying in vain to appeal to the South, the most racist, backwards, and evangelical part of the country. Since that requires the party to hew harder to the right than its base wants to be, you get two problems: first of all, you get the general population thinking that there's no difference between the two parties (which is as wrong as you can get), since the Democrats try to blur the differences between them and the Republicans in the South, and secondly, the public gets the impression that the Democrats don't stand for anything by pandering to whatever the public says it wants through the polls, rather than leading the Nation.

Schaller brings plenty of evidence to the table, with charts, graphs, and statistics and numbers peppering the book. His answer is that the right thing to do is to stand strong on the Democratic progressive values by pointing out that the Republicans want to reach into America's bedroom by proscribing behavior ranging from sexual preferences to what women are allowed to do with their body. These themes resonate everywhere in America except the South, and the Democrats do not need the South's electoral votes to win (and they're not going to get them anyway, so why tarnish your brand by seeming desparate). Schaller proposes vilifying the most racist and evangelical and backwards citizens in the South the way the Republicans have turned all Democrats into latte-drinking liberals, and using that as a wedge issue to force the Republicans to defend themselves in the rest of the country.

Fortunately, I think the current Democratic candidates for the presidencywill have no choice but to follow Schaller's strategy: Hilary Clinton is too hated in the South to even have a chance there, and she knows it. Barack Obama is black, and doesn't stand a popsicle's chance in the South, and he knows it. So unless there's an unexpected entrant who beats out these two, we'll get a chance to see Schaller's theory in action. This book is highly recommended.

To build and unify themselves, and begin to drive a wedge straight through the heart of the conservative base of the Republican Party, the Democrats need to spend a little less time micro-targeting messages to this or that group based on the latest focus group results. Chasing voters only scares them away, and so Democrats ought to spend less time in pursuit and more effort luring voters by staking out firm positions and showing the resolve not to budge... No party should define itself entirely by its base, but neither should a party define itself by starting with the elements of its coalitionfarthest from that base. That said, it is time for Democrats to replace the party's passive, confused, and muddled national message with a muscular, unapologetic advocacy of an elevator pitch that will not only poll well in the swing states and regions of the country but, properly politicized, can win elections too.

Review: Nintendo Wii

I've never bought a game console in my life, though I did own an Atari Lynx once upon a time. But when a colleague brought in his Wii and I tried it, I thought that this game would be something that Lisa would love. So over the holidays, I brought her over to another friend's place to test that theory. Needless to say, she was hooked. She got so into the Tennis game that she kept hitting me by mistake. When she tried the boxing game, her palms were so sweaty that my friend had to wipe the controls dry when she was finished.

The hard part was to find a console. I was fortunate that Kekoa worked down the hall from me and had a script that scraped Amazon's Wii page, and when it was available (for all of 5 minutes) I got one. The console only comes with one controller and one nunchuk, so I immediately bought another set, and then signed up for Gamefly, the Netflix of computer games.

I've had the console for a week, and tried a couple of games with Lisa and a few friends. The choice of Wii sports as the game to bundle with the game is nothing short of inspired. Lisa would start having to remove jackets or sweaters by the second round of tennis, because she was getting such a workout. The internet features are a little disappointing, and I've crashed the console a few times, so it's not the most stable right now, but when playing the games you won't notice. (It's mostly crashed when I was running the beta Opera browser)

I also tried two games, Zelda: Twilight Princess is a fun console RPG. (Note the emphasis on console RPG. Balder's Gate or Neverwinter Nights this is not --- the story is strictly linear) The controls are very intuitive and a lot of fun, and the story is nice. But it's a little involving, and there are a few places where if you don't quite follow the story line you might have to do a lot of backtracking. Nevetheless, if the game appeals to you, it's worth buying since it's quite a long rental to finish it.

Trauma Center: Second Opinion turned out to be another winner. It's got amazingly intuitive controls (especially the defibrillator, which vibrates just enough when you activate it to feel real), and fast, short, uninvolved gameplay. You could pick this up and play for half an hour every other day, which I doubt you can do with Zelda.

In any case, the Wii has proved to be an amazingly good game, and in terms of the amount of use we'll get out of it, I think it will prove to be a fantastic purchase. My only complaint is that the SDK is extremely expensive (and not at all easy to get), as there are quite a number of games I can think of that can use this intuitive interface amazingly well. I think the Wii is the first truly original video game concept I've seen for a long while, and I am convinced that it's going to stay the runaway success it's been for the past few months.

Review: Jersey Boys

Jersey Boys is the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. If you've never heard of either one of those, I assure you that you've heard their songs before, but perhaps not by them directly.

Here's a link to one of the most famous Frankie Valli Song. Go ahead, Click on it. =)

Most people probably have heard of that song from one source or the other...at least I hope. With that background information, this story tells you the story of the group. How it came to be, the rise to stardom, the problems they faced, and the eventual split of the group into just Frankie Valli. It is a most poignant tale and the directorship of the story was simply amazing.

If you watch the link on the header, one of the talking points of the director was that they wanted to tell the story first and foremost, and then retrofit the songs in the places within the story where it best fit. This is quite different from most musicals of this sort, like say, Mama Mia, where the music is selected first, and a story written around it.

As it turns out, this style of direction gives you the best of everything. The songs are shown more or less in chronological order, the story is first rate, and the choreography and stage work is most excellent as is expected from Broadway productions nowadays.

The story is presented in seasons, with Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter representing one each of the Four Seasons. Each of the Four Seasons also represent an epoch in the timeline of the band, and their individual perspectives drives and perhaps even steals the show! This is one musical where the story actually is as good as or even better than the music!

All in all, I highly recommend this show and its well worth an Orchestra level seat as you can see the nuances of the actors even better. As I said, this is one musical where the dancing is kept to a minimum, and the emphasis is on the story and songs. Not all the songs are presented in full, as its not a concert, but its always more than enough to get you grooving to the tunes.

The Four Seasons never quite gathered the attention of the media the way the Beatles or other more glamarous bands did, and this story serves very nicely their story, and what a compelling story it is!

A must see!

Michael Pollan on Nutritionism

I frequently like to write off the New York Times (especially since their science articles are overly simplistic, and in many cases simply wrong), but Michael Pollan's book was exceptionally good, and this article is worth reading.

For those who don't have time, here's the quick summary:

1. Eat food.
   
2. Avoid food products bearing health claims
   
3. Avoid food with too many ingredients or contain high fructose corn syrup.
   
4. Get out of the supermarket
   
5. Pay more, eat less
   
6. Eat mostly plants
   
7. Eat ethnic foods
   
8. Cook
   
9. Eat like an omnivore
   

Review: Pan's Labyrinth

Run, don't walk to see this movie. There is nothing that I am going to say here that will give you a better understanding or any higher urgings than what I said in the first sentence of this review.

Billed as a fairy tale for adults, it really is the best way to describe this movie. It is a fairy tale in the mood of what fairy tales are really supposed to be, or what they were before fairy tales were disneyfied. When fairy tales were about cautionary warnings about what happens to bad children if they disobeyed, when consequences were more real, fairy tales were dark, cruel, and very often did not have a happy ending.

That in a nutshell is the best way to describe this movie. If you've ever read any of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, when he turns a fairy tale into something much more than you assume, this movie comes very close to that sentiment, and surpasses it in many ways. It has great warmth for a very dark movie, glimpses of hope in a hopeless situation, and an ending that has so many interpretations for it that no two conversations about the ending will be quite the same.

In other words, run, don't wait, to see the movie. It is gorgeous.

I'll stop here before I start gushing more praise for the movie.

Scott Burns: Americans not that badly off

There's a lot of doom and gloom usually about how little Americans save, so it's nice to see a bit of good news (especially from Scott Burns, who's usually a pessimist).

One household in four owns its home mortgage-free. An impressive 61 percent of households age 65 and over have no mortgage.

What's amusing is that he's mystified by apparel expenditure:

The survey shows that spending on apparel and services is only $1,509 a year for middle income households, rising to only $3,704 for top quintile households. I know we’ve got the most efficient distribution system in the world, but if that’s what we spend, what’s supporting all those Wal-Marts, Kmarts and Targets — not to mention a zillion other clothing retailers?

A quick search finds that there are about 100 million households in the US. If each of them spends $1500 a year, then apparel is a $150 billion market. The Gap only had 16 billion in revenues, so the US market can support 10 companies of approximately that size, plus or minus a couple to account for Wal-Mart.

$1500 a year still sounds like a lot of clothing to me, but I guess that's only 10 sets of cycling jerseys + shorts at full retail. I guess if you have to buy suits for work, that $1500 goes really quickly.

China's Capitalistic Healthcare System

(Link good for 7 days only)

Ironically, it's China that's first to suffer from the ravages of a capitalistic healthcare system. This doesn't happen here (yet), but one gets the feeling that the Republicans would love to have this kind of scenario:

Resentment over health care is increasing. In November, some 2,000 people mobbed a hospital in southwest China after a boy died there. The boy was rushed in by his grandfather after swallowing pesticides, according to a report by the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. Doctors sent the old man away to fetch more cash, according to the report, but by the time he returned, the boy -- 3 or 4 years old -- was dead. There are conflicting accounts about what treatment the boy received. But angry crowds were convinced that doctors let him die while they waited for money. They smashed hospital windows and equipment and clashed with police. At least 10 people were injured.

Of course, most of the Republican Base of "have-mores" wouldn't even notice, since they are presumably already on one of the concierge type healthplans.

Review: Ship of Fools

Richard Paul Russo came to my attention several years ago for his delightful twin thrillers set in San Francisco, Destroying Angel, Carliucci's Edge, and Carliucci's Heart, hard-hitting, realistic science fiction which is highly recommended.

Ship of Fools combines two frequently encountered devices in Science Fiction, the Generation Ship, and the first encounter with an Alien object. Unlike other Generation ships, however, the ship in question, the Argonos isn't a generation ship intended for one destination, but is actually an FTL-capable ship whose mission has been lost in time.

The narrator, a deformed person with prosthetics starts the story as a confidant of the ship's Captain, the last of his line of hereditary captains, with political jockeying for his position already happening. The ship discovers a signal, and finds the ruins of a civilization. The landing party discovers some horrors, and a signal is sent from the ruins to an object elsewhere. Following the signal finds an alien ship, and the story proceeds apace from there.

There are several subplots, including a mutiny by members of the underclass, a love interest (which does not turn out the way you might expect, and is extremely effective that way), so as a reader your mind is occupied by a lot of distractions. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite make the mystery of the alien ship a surprise, which is disappointing since Russo's previous books did quite well in surprising me.

This book was worth reading, but I'll be having a very bad year for reading if it made even the top three books this year.

Time. There wasn't much of it left to Nikos because the ship was in crisis---we had not made landfall in all these years, and we had no unified mission. We were travelling almost at random through the galaxy, had been for decades, if not centuries, and there was no consensus of purpose or goal. This had always been the case, at least during my lifetime...

Review: The Perfect Thing

Steve Levy's latest book is yet another example supporting my thesis the English majors/journalists are no longer capable of explaining the complex world we live in. The Perfect Thing is a love paean to the ipod, about how cool it is, how nice one is to use. In imitation of the ipod's shuffle function, Levy even has different copies of the book with the chapters out of order, so each person would read the chapters in a different order. The cute little device works, but that's all it is, cute.

I read the book hoping for an insight about the design and the development of the ipod. Levy has proved himself in the past capable of understanding the people dynamics of software, but in this case he was so caught up with love for the ipod, that he skimmed over the development process in 1 short chapter that was mostly about how good Apple was at UI design. From anyone else, I might understand an excuse saying that he was not given sufficient access, but Levy makes a point of bragging about how many meetings he had with Steve Jobs. And of course, any question of journalistic integrity was long gone when he bragged about being one of the first recipients of the first review products from Apple (presumably he gets all his ipods for free for writing such positive articles about Apple, the ipod, and Steve Jobs).

The last straw for this book came when he spent an entire chapter on the shuffle feature, on how it wasn't really random for him, but his personal ipod liked Steely Dan anyway. Anyone with even a slight understanding of probability theory should be insulted by this chapter.

All in all, the 3 hours spent reading this book is time wasted. This book does not deserve shelf-space in any thinking person's home, not even if you're a fan of the ipod.

Review: Battlestar Galactica Mini-Series and Season One

As a note to people who buy DVDs, do not buy the original mini-series DVD. Buy the Season One DVDs because that includes the mini-series in the first disk.

I did originally watch quite a few episodes of the first season (as well as the entire mini-series) last year. However, because of some snafus, I missed the last few episodes until recently, when I managed to borrow them from a friend. So now I can review the entire series with a complete picture.

I can't emphasize how important it is that you watch the mini-series before starting on the series. When I first saw the first episode of the series (the Hugo-award winning 33) out of context, I was impressed mostly by how boring the series was. Watching it in context, after seeing the entire mini-series, on the DVD without ads and with a good sound system, I was blown away. The soundtrack, the tension, and the characters already made sense, and the pacing, which I've already commented on before, was spot on.

I was not a fan of the old Battlestar Galactica show . It was one of those shows that I'd watch as a kid and promptly forgot. This version starts with the Cylons infiltrating the defense systems of the Humans, and then launching an attack by complete surprise on the Human fleet. The only surviving military ship was the Battlestar Galactica, by virtue of its equipment being so old and un-networked that old-style AT&T type phone units were still the major means of communications throughout the ship. The Galactica was about to be mothballed, and the surviving President of the Colonies is the former Minister of Education, who was 33rd in succession to the President.

The remaining civilian fleet, along with Battlestar Galactica head for Earth, a mystical place lost in the past, and concocted up by the heads of state just to keep hopes up amongst the survivors. Unknown to the crew, the Cylons have already infiltrated the Galactica, with human-lookalikes that are programmed as sleeper agents...

As if the plot wasn't complicated enough, the relationships between the characters are also tangled. Captain Lee Adama, the son of the Galactica commander Adama, has a complicated relationship with Starbuck and his father. The second in command of the Galactica is a perpetual drunk, and the civilian and military leaders do not always get along. Laura Roslin, the President of the colonies, has terminal breast cancer, and takes drugs that give her visions that may or may not be true. The casting is excellent: Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama steals every scene he's in. Mary McDonnell plays President Roslin as a serious woman contemplating her fate, but her delight at certain events (such as a baby being born in the fleet) lights up her face in ways words cannot express. Katee Sackhoff plays a very tomboyish Starbuck, whose self-confidence and brashness has you wondering when she's going to be taken down, but in the grand tradition of mavericks, she always gets away with it.

This is a dark show, with serious themes, though not as serious as the ones that will come up in season two . If you look for happy endings all the time and a lot of comedy, this is not the show for you. But for serious drama, intelligent writing, first class acting, and a science fiction show that takes all of science fiction's possibilities and runs with them, this is the show to watch.

Nike+ Resolution

Not sure how this will turn out, but I figure I'll give it a shot. =) So Nike+ is letting you do resolutions, and here I am, deciding to do another easy one, just for fun. So here it is!

Review: Battlestar Galactica Season Two

If I had to vote for a show that I think is the modern successor to Buffy, it would be Battlestar Galactica. The show is incredibly well-written, the actors excellent, the plot (up to season two anyway) believable and interesting, and above all, the pacing is nothing short of astounding.

Ron Moore, the producer/director is I believe the best modern user of negative spaces on TV. The show is filled with silences. Characters stare and look at each other for long moments, allowing your mind to fill in the details in the thoughts and the interactions between the characters. The soundtrack is moody, slow, percussion heavy, and heavy with foreboding. The tension builds until it's unbearable, and the release when it comes is a complete relief.

But the show is by no means plodding! When plot is revealed, the revelation is real, uncontrived. When you learn something new about a character (such as the Cylon agent in Season One), it really causes you to think, "Oh yeah. That's why he behaved like this previously!" There are frantic battle sequences which punctuated the story, but the battles are always meaningful, as though the producer said, "Here's the budget we've got. Better make every special effect count!" And indeed it does.

I never expected the modern remake of the extremely cheesy original Battlestar Galactica to be excellent, but I think this show beats recent shows I've seen, even Veronica Mars and Smallville. To make things even better, the writers do not shy away from possibly controversial themes, including terrorism, the trade off between security and freedom, when brutality towards the enemy ultimately robs us of our own humanity, and ultimately whether survival is sufficient, or whether we need more justification for that for the human race. The themes are not hammered home with obvious morals, and each episode is written with care and respect for the theme as well as the milleu.

Characters are complex and realistic --- even good people do bad things, and sympathetic characters can turn out to be extremely cold-blooded and willing to do harsh things to enemies. There is but one obvious villain --- Gaius Baltur, a scientist who betrays humanity to the Cylons but nevertheless manages to insinuate himself into high office. Yet even he does pull miracles out of a hat sometimes and does something unexpected.

In any case, this show (the mini-series, seasons one and two) are very much worth watching, and highly recommended. Worth paying full price at the DVD shop for.

Little Asia on the Hill - New York Times

The New York Times has an article lamenting the number of Asian students in school, especially top Universities like Berkeley, which is apparently is apparently now 41 percent Asian.

Even at that apparently high percentage, Asian students apparently do so well that the schools still turn away more qualified Asian candidates than they should. And of course, there's the usual complaint that Asian students are nerds, uncreative, and don't ask questions in class.

As someone who grew up in Singapore, where we had 40 students per classroom, and only half-day classes and an incredibly uncreative teaching curriculum, I have to say that the excuses of poor high schools for other minority groups are just bunk. If there's a culture of learning and education, the students will do well and become great students. If not, then it doesn't matter how much creativity the school tries to give them, without a mastery of the fundamentals, all the creativity in the world just produces junk.

As someone who grew up in a much tougher academic environment than most Americans can imagine, all I can say is that if we continue to place value on ridiculous unimportant measures of quality and ignore the important ones, our living standards will drop. The argument should be about why our Math and Science education is so poor, not why there are so many Asians in America's best colleges.