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Doing Something About Tuition Debt

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Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has a plan to deal with tuition loan debt:

My plan for broad student debt cancellation will:

  • Cancel debt for more than 95% of the nearly 45 million Americans with student loan debt;
  • Wipe out student loan debt entirely for more than 75% of the Americans with that debt;
  • Substantially increase wealth for Black and Latinx families and reduce both the Black-White and Latinx-White wealth gaps; and
  • Provide an enormous middle-class stimulus that will boost economic growth, increase home purchases, and fuel a new wave of small business formation.

Naturally, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has his own plan to deal with college debt:

When Bernie is in the White House, he will:

  • Cancel the entire $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt for the 45 million borrowers who are weighed down by the crushing burden of student debt. This will save around $3,000 a year for the average student loan borrower.

There are a lot of things wrong with this idea.

For one thing, it’s not an incentive mechanism. Most of the time, when we as a society give money to someone for doing something, it’s because we want to encourage that activity. So we subsidize solar energy to encourage development of cleaner energy sources, and we subsidize housing to encourage home construction and ownership. Subsidizing certain things is usually a way to encourage socially desirable behavior.

But that’s not the case here: Student debt cancellation does nothing to encourage students to go to college because it only affects people who have already been to college. It’s a pure giveaway (that just happens to be going to a bunch of young people who are likely to vote).

Supporters of tuition debt cancellation are quick to argue that debt cancellation would provide an economic stimulus:

The result is a huge student loan debt burden that’s crushing millions of families and acting as an anchor on our economy. It’s reducing home ownership rates. It’s leading fewer people to start businesses.

First of all, we’re not exactly talking about gigantic loans. 45 million people owing $1.6 trillion works out to about $36,000 per person. That’s not a “crippling” debt. Most of the time, when you hear really high numbers, it’s for people getting loans for advanced degrees such as law or medicine. The average college debt is more like financing a well-equipped Ford Taurus.

Keep in mind, too, that people with college degrees tend to earn more money. According to the most recent Education Pays report,

In 2015, median earnings of bachelor’s degree recipients with no advanced degree working full time were $24,600 (67%) higher than those of high school graduates. Bachelor’s degree recipients paid an estimated $6,900 (91%) more in taxes and took home $17,700 (61%) more in after-tax income than high school graduates.

That difference alone is enough to theoretically pay off a $36,000 student debt in a little over two years at peak earnings. Even taking other costs into account — including the opportunity cost of going to college instead of working — a college education is a good investment:

The median four-year college graduate who enrolls at age 18 and graduates in four years can expect to earn enough relative to the median high school graduate by age 34 to compensate for being out of the labor force for four years and for paying the full tuition and fees and books and supplies without any grant aid.

In other words, paying off the tuition debts of college graduates means giving free money to  people who are already destined to be financially better off than most.

Furthermore, getting a college education is just one way of investing in your future. There are plenty of small business owners who have spent $36,000 to equip a restaurant or machine shop, or remodel an office. I’m sure they would also benefit if Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders cancelled their debt.

Or what about people who took out loans to pay for college tuition and just now finished paying off their debt? They’ve got to feel cheated by all this. And it’s hard to argue that their case is much different, because I’m sure giving them $36,000 would help them buy a house or start a business too.

We should also consider the classic invisible people: Those who didn’t go to college because they couldn’t afford it. Imagine what it’s like the be a woman who made the prudent decision to stick with waitressing for a few more years only to hear that people who went to college are getting a $36,000 handout. Why shouldn’t she get $36,000 too? She probably needs the money more, and giving it to her would be at least as much of a stimulus as giving it to a college student.

Or for that matter, we could just let taxpayers have the money. All other things being equal, not paying college graduates $1.6 trillion would leave $4900 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. 

I should note that there is one group of people for whom debt cancellation makes some sense: People who went to college but did not graduate. These people are seriously screwed, because they’ve got the debt — for the cost of however many years as they went to college — but they don’t receive any of the benefits that come with earning a degree. And unlike college graduates, these people really are likely to be poor, so getting out from under the debt will be a serious struggle.

It’s almost like we need a debt cancellation program that is targeted to these people. Maybe some sort of means-tested program, that only cancels their debt if they really are having difficulty paying it down…

Of course, the U.S. already has such a program. It’s called bankruptcy. When someone has debts they can’t pay, declaring bankruptcy allows them to get out from under the debt and move on. The lender does take a loss when a debtor declares bankruptcy, but if the debtor was never really able to pay the loan, then the lender is really just recognizing a loss that has already occurred. And the great thing about bankruptcy is that it works for everyone who’s in debt over their head, not just college students.

Although, actually…college tuition loans are one of the few debts that cannot be discharged through the ordinary bankruptcy process. A series of murky changes to bankruptcy law since the 1970s have made it much harder to get out from under student loans. It can be done, but the process is poorly defined and applicants are unlikely to succeed.

While I question the wisdom of giving gobs of money to college graduates, I think it makes no sense to block people with tuition debt from having the same bankruptcy protections as everyone else. The good news is that there’s actually a bill that would fix this problem. It’s the Student Loan Borrower Bankruptcy Act of 2019, which is supported by both Sanders and Warren. Let’s use the debt protections we have, rather than inventing expensive new ones.

How Much is 16.5 Tons of Cocaine Really Worth?

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A few days ago, the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania put out a Twitter press release with a typical law enforcement estimate of “street value”:

I heard about this because my local neighborhood criminal defense blogger, Matt Haiduk, had a few things to say about the “street value” estimate, using an analogy to ketchup:

If I cut out the middleman I can actually get 60 gallons- or 7680 ounces of ketchup! At a price of of only $457.20 it comes out to a street value of…

…how would I even know? What am I going to do with 60 gallons of ketchup? I couldn’t eat it all before it went bad- that’s nasty. I couldn’t repackage and sell it to my friends- I don’t have anywhere to store it, I can’t ship it, and I definitely don’t have “60 gallons of ketchup” worth of friends.

There is no street value to 60 gallons of ketchup. There’s only wholesale value. And that wholesale value is A LOT lower per-ounce than the personal use bottles I buy.

Read the whole thing.

Matt’s ketchup analogy gets at the problem, but I’m going with a different analogy. Let’s talk about fine handmade wood furniture, like this beautiful Shaker Style desk from Vermont Woods Studios:

Contemporary Craftsman Executive Desk

As depicted, made out of Cherry wood, putting this desk in your office will cost $5,274.

Now suppose the cops stop and confiscate a truck hauling a container full of milled Cherry lumber. The maximum load limit for standard 40-foot shipping container is 57,759 pounds (just under 29 tons). The standard unit of measure for rough wood is the board-foot, which is a 1ft by 1ft piece of wood that is 1 inch thick. Since Cherry wood weighs about 50 pounds per cubic foot, we can calculate that the container holds 13,862 board-feet of Cherry wood.

Given the dimensions of the desk above, I think a woodworker could make the whole thing — top, back and side panels, drawers and legs — from about 80 board-feet of lumber. Thus the truck is carrying enough wood to make 173 executive disks selling for $5,274 each, for a total of $912,402. In other words, by the logic of drug “street value,” the cops just confiscated a truck carrying Cherry wood with a “street value” of almost a million dollars.

But really, they didn’t. What the cops got was a raw material that could eventually be converted into an end consumer good worth a lot more, through the application of rather a lot of labor. But until that labor is applied and paid for, the value of what they got is a lot less — about $95,000 by my estimate. (And even that is assuming small lots at retail prices. A wholesaler would probably offer less.)

It’s the same with the cocaine. Raw cocaine on the truck is of comparatively little value. It doesn’t become valuable until it’s actually in the noses of the people who will be using it, and it takes a lot of work to get it there. That 16.5 tons of cocaine would have to be diluted with filler, broken down into smaller packets, and transported to stash houses around the country, where it would be cut and broken down further into 1 kilo bricks and then eventually into ounces and grams and even individual lines of cocaine for sale to end users. This requires couriers, drivers, packers, and chemists, along with security and lookouts and people to supervise them.

The cocaine intercepted by the government, like the Cherry wood in my example, is just a raw material that has yet to go through a production and distribution process that will add a lot to its value. Trying to calculate its “street price” is like finding a pile of clay and pricing it as pottery, or finding $50 worth of canvas and paint and pricing it as a $500 finished painting.

Drug warriors might object that I am missing the point: They could accept that much of their billion dollar valuation depends on labor that is yet to be done, and then they could argue that by stopping the cocaine in its raw bulk form, they are preventing it from fueling all that future criminal labor that would be involved in getting it out onto the streets. By stopping the cocaine now, they are stopping a bunch of criminals from earning a billion dollars distributing it.

That’s probably a pretty fair argument. But let’s examine why it’s so profitable to distribute cocaine: All of the steps in the distribution process have to take place while the cops are actively trying to stop them. It costs money to secure the operation against law enforcement interference, and even then, getting arrested is still a huge risk for everyone involved, so the price of cocaine has to include both the cost of avoiding arrest and a premium paid to people to accept the substantial risk of arrest that remains.

Just how large are the costs of risking or avoiding getting arrested? Well, it turns out that cocaine has a legitimate medical use as a topical anesthetic during sinus surgery. Last I heard, medical grade cocaine sold for this purpose at a cost of about $30 per ounce, or a little less than $1 million per ton. I can’t find current pricing, but if that still holds, then the 16.5 tons of cocaine seized by the cops would be worth about $15.8 million dollars if it were legal. In other words, if we accept the U.S. Attorney’s office’s claim that the cocaine has a street value of $1 billion, we can estimate that police attempts to suppress the cocaine trade have driven up cocaine prices by 6200 percent!

And all of it goes into the hands of criminals, thanks to the war on drugs.

Sri Lanka and the Ongoing Social Media Panic

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Immediately after the terrible Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, the government there took the questionable step of blocking a bunch of social media sites.

There can be legitimate reasons for such drastic measures: If you know the terrorists are using cell phones or the internet to set off remote-detonated bombs, it makes a lot of sense to shut down those communications networks until the situation is resolved.

A less credible reason for shutting down communications is if authorities believe the terrorists are using cell phones or social media or whatever to coordinate their operation. People in our government have talked about developing similar capabilities — everything from being able to shut down cell towers in the middle of a terrorist incident to an “internet kill switch.” The idea is that we can disrupt the terrorists’ plans by denying their access to communications.

I’m not convinced by that argument, however, because it neglects the harm to civilian welfare from shutting down civilian communications. Protecting our national infrastructure has always been one of our domestic anti-terrorism priorities: If the FBI discovered a terrorist cell was going to shut down internet access in a major American city, you can bet the FBI would try to stop them. So doesn’t responding to a terrorist incident by shutting down the internet just give the terrorists a gift by causing fear and disruption?

The Sri Lankan government did not block social media for either of those reasons, however. Their reason was much worse:

The government has decided to temporarily block social media sites including Facebook and Instagram. Presidential Secretariat said in a statement that the decision to block social media was taken as false news reports were spreading through social media.

The Washington Post gives an example of the sort of thing they might be worried about:

Sanjana Hattotuwa, a senior researcher at Center for Policy Alternatives in Colombo who monitors social media for fake news, said he saw a significant uptick in false reports after the bombings Sunday.

[…] He cited two instances of widely shared unverified information: An Indian media report attributing the attack to Muslim suicide bombers, and a tweet from a Sri Lankan minister about an intelligence report warning of an attack.

As Joe Setyon of Reason points out, that’s kind of ironic:

Notably, neither of those instances appears to have been fake news. As previously mentioned, the Sri Lankan government does indeed believe Muslim extremists were responsible for the attacks. And intelligence agencies had been warned about a possible terror attack in recent days, as CBS News reported.

What’s going on here is that the Sri Lankan government is saying they want to protect against false news reports, but I’m pretty sure what they really want is to suppress news they don’t control. That’s usually the real motive when people in power complain about some unruly form of media.

What made me want to blog about all this was the disturbingly positive tone of the response from some corners of the media. Consider Global Voices, an activist organization which describes itself as

…an international and multilingual community of bloggers, journalists, translators, academics, and human rights activists. Together, we leverage the power of the internet to build understanding across borders. How do we do this?

  • Report: Our multilingual newsroom team reports on people whose voices and experiences are rarely seen in mainstream media.
  • Translate: Our Lingua volunteers make our stories available in dozens of languages to ensure that language is not a barrier to understanding.
  • Defend: Our Advox team advocates for free speech online, paying special attention to legal, technical and physical threats to people using the internet to speak out in the public interest.
  • Empower: Rising Voices provides training and mentorship to local underrepresented communities who want to tell their own stories using participatory media tools.

You’d assume that the Executive Director of an organization dedicated to “free speech online” and to that idea that “underrepresented communities” “whose voices and experiences are rarely seen in mainstream media” can “tell their own stories using participatory media tools” would be outraged over Sri Lankan censorship. As it turns out, not so much:

What really gets me about Sigal’s tweet is that he describes Sri Lankan censorship as a “signal for lack of platform trust.”

My God, who in their right mind cares how the Sri Lankan government feels about media platforms? Since when do we consider any government to be a reliable arbiter of news and truth, let alone the Sri Lankan government. They’re not the worst, but it’s not a good thing that Sri Lanka is rated by Freedom House as only “Partly Free” — with the addendum that the Sri Lankan press is “Not Free.” Furthermore, it turns out Sri Lanka’s President Maithripala Sirisena is an admirer of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous war on drugs, which is definitely not a good sign.

Is Sigal so naive that he believes the Sri Lankan government is really imposing censorship to protect their citizens from “fake news,” rather than employing the time-honored authoritarian trick of exploiting a tragedy to grasp for more power? (Later retweets in his timeline suggest he’s coming to his senses.)

Perhaps the worst response I’ve seen comes from Kara Swisher at the New York Times:

[…] when the Sri Lankan government temporarily shut down access to American social media services like Facebook and Google’s YouTube after the bombings there on Easter morning, my first thought was “good.”

Good, because it could save lives. Good, because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built. Good, because the toxic digital waste of misinformation that floods these platforms has overwhelmed what was once so very good about them.

One of the things going on in Swisher’s piece is the natural tendency of social media participants to overestimate how much of social media content is about the things they happen to be following. Those of us who follow politics and political issues tend to assume twitter is mostly about politics and political issues, but there is so much more to Twitter. We filter and curate our feeds, and then forget we are seeing what we want to see.

To be fair, sometimes the filtering is done by algorithm. I’ve seen people complain that every time they search for something on YouTube — even something innocuous — YouTube includes Nazi-themed videos in the results.

That never happens to me, not even if I do the exact same search. Unless these people think anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is a Nazi, they’re doing something that makes the algorithm think they want to see those results. I want to ask them, “Are you, perhaps, clicking on the Nazi videos to see if they are what they appear to be? Are you visiting lots of racist websites because you are monitoring hate groups?” If so, the search engine is just trying to give you more of what clearly interests you. It’s not smart enough to tell when you’re just hate-reading something.

The same thing can happen with political issues on social media: If the algorithm figures out that’s what interests you, it will keep showing it to you. If you only follow people who repeat unverified rumors, you will see a lot of unverified rumors.

It pains me as a journalist, and someone who once believed that a worldwide communications medium would herald more tolerance, to admit this — to say that my first instinct was to turn it all off.

That’s an excellent instinct. Turning it off is a great response to fake news…for yourself. But please let everyone else make up their own mind.

In short: Stop the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter world — we want to get off.

Obviously, that is an impossible request and one that does not address the root cause of the problem, which is that humanity can be deeply inhumane. But that tendency has been made worse by tech in ways that were not anticipated by those who built it.

I noted this in my very first column for The Times almost a year ago, when I called social media giants “digital arms dealers of the modern age” who had, by sloppy design, weaponized pretty much everything that could be weaponized.

I resent the hell out of the word “sloppy” in that sentence. To the surprise of absolutely no one who knows anything about product development, it turns out that a first-generation world-wide social media site, available to two billion people, every day, for free…isn’t very good. That’s not sloppy, that’s the evolutionary curve of new technology. Just because a brand new piece of technology doesn’t work as well as it could doesn’t mean the inventors were sloppy.

“They have weaponized civic discourse,” I wrote. “And they have weaponized, most of all, politics. Which is why malevolent actors continue to game the platforms and why there’s still no real solution in sight anytime soon, because they were built to work exactly this way.”

Can we take a minute to regret the now widespread use of the word “weaponize” in the metaphorical sense? The first time I saw somebody use “weaponize” that way, it seemed edgy and inventive. It may even have been a fairly clear analogy. But now it seems everyone is talking about everything being weaponized. It’s quickly evolved into a way make something sound sinister without saying anything substantive.

Swisher goes on to discuss the role of social media in the aftermath of the recent mass shooting in New Zealand:

After the attacks, neither Facebook nor YouTube could easily stop the ever-looping videos of the killings, which proliferated too quickly for their clever algorithms to keep up. One insider at YouTube described the experience to me as a “nightmare version of Whack-a-Mole.”

New Zealand, under the suffer-no-foolish-techies leadership of Jacinda Ardern, will be looking hard at imposing penalties on these companies for not controlling the spread of extremist content. Australia already passed such a law in early April. Here in the United States, our regulators are much farther behind, still debating whether it is a problem or not.

By characterizing U.S. regulation of social media as “much farther behind,” Swisher makes it clear that she is on the side of the censorious thugs. The U.S. is not behind on regulating social media. Rather, New Zealand and Australia are weak on free speech and freedom of the press.

Heck, the shitbag authorities in New Zealand are actually trying to send ten people to jail just for distributing the video. A few of them, including a 16-year-old boy, were held without bail, and a guy named Philip Arps has plead guilty and is probably going to jail. Make no mistake, from the description in the news pieces, Arps is an awful human being with awful ideas, but he’s still being locked in a cage for the “crime” of sharing a video that someone in the government didn’t like. (Specifically, the someone in the government who didn’t like the video is David Shanks, Chief Censor in New Zealand. Fuck that guy.)

Getting back to Swisher’s article:

It is a problem, even if the manifestations of how these platforms get warped vary across the world. They are different in ways that make no difference and the same in one crucial way that does. Namely, social media has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check.

This Is the Future Libertarians WantTM.

These platforms give voice to everyone, but some of those voices are false or, worse, malevolent, and the companies continue to struggle with how to deal with them.

In the early days of the internet, there was a lot of talk of how this was a good thing, getting rid of those gatekeepers. Well, they are gone now, and that means we need to have a global discussion involving all parties on how to handle the resulting disaster, well beyond adding more moderators or better algorithms.

We can have a discussion. Discussions are fine. I’m all for discussions. Just don’t involve government thugs in your response to the “disaster,” because throwing people in jail is not a discussion.

It’s one thing to argue that Facebook (or Twitter or whoever) could improve social welfare by doing a better job of removing objectionable content, but recently social media critics have begun to advance the pernicious idea that social media companies should have a legal obligation to police the content that users post.

That’s actually been the normal rule in print media: The publisher is responsible for what they publish, because they make the decisions about what to publish. On the other hand, the distributor is not generally held responsible, because they don’t have knowledge of the content they are distributing. So if a columnist writes a defamatory article for a newspaper, the columnist can likely be successfully sued for libel, as can the newspaper, but newsstand owners need not worry.

For digital media, the prevailing rule is spelled out in Title 47 USC §230 — commonly referred to as “Section 230” — of the Communications Decency Act, which includes the clause “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

In a real way, these 26 words defined the form of the modern Internet. That protective clause is the reason I don’t have to carefully examine every comment on my blog to see if it contains libelous statements, and that protection is why I can have open comments. Section 230 is also the reason my hosting provider doesn’t have to worry about my content, which means its also the reason why I can have a blog. It’s also the reason Twitter and Facebook and Instagram can exist: These sites host billions of user-provided content items, and they couldn’t possibly afford to review every single one of them for actionable content.

Unfortunately, Section 230 is coming under attack in recent years. The most serious blow so far is the passage of FOSTA (the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) which opened up websites to criminal and civil legal action for allowing ads for sex work. A bunch of websites closed down, and opportunistic lawyers launched lawsuits against offending sites such as Backpage, which had for years allowed ads for sex work.

Of course, as predicted months in advance by everyone who opposed FOSTA, Backpage was not the only victim. Lawyers naturally went after the deep pockets at Facebook for not preventing sex traffickers from using its services. Then, rather Amazingly, the lawyers went after Salesforce.com. To be clear, Salesforce.com has nothing to do with sex trafficking. They’re a Fortune 500 company that provides business software solutions loosely organized around customer relationship management. But apparently Backpage was one of their customers, and thanks to the hole FOSTA poked in Section 230, that may make them vulnerable to a lawsuit.

This is a horrible legal development, and it is paralleled by the recent cultural trend of blaming social media sites for content posted by their users. Although arguably an extension of “political correctness” from college campuses — where having to listen to ideas you disagree with is often treated as some kind of “verbal violence” — it seems to have spread to social media in response to the rise of Trumpism and the alt-right, with the accompanying attention given to racists, white supremacists, and more-or-less actual Nazis.

Suddenly, it was no longer enough to merely confront the Trumpists, racists, and what-have-you. Instead, people started yelling at Facebook and Twitter to “get rid of the Nazis.”

(As private enterprises, Facebook and Twitter have every right to refuse access to people who would ruin the environment they are trying to create for their users. But as always, the remedy for bad speech is good speech, not demanding that your ideological enemies be shut out of open forums.)

I’ve even seen people yelling at CloudFlare, of all things, for “protecting Nazis.” Cloudflare isn’t even a social media site. They’re about as content-neutral is it gets: They provide DNS, caching, optimization, and security services to millions of websites (including this one). It just takes a few minutes to sign up for protection, and many of the base services are free. One of those services is protection against denial-of-services attacks, and so people are mad at CloudFlare because they tried to crash Stormfront’s website and couldn’t.

I see this, and I wonder what’s next. Are people going to accuse utility companies of “supporting white supremacists” for selling them electricity or gas? Is Walmart going to be guilty of supporting racists if they sell toilet paper and cleaning supplies to Stormfront headquarters? There’s a certain level of madness to this, and I don’t know where it ends.

The other source of the trend toward holding social media platforms culpable seems to be the discovery of Russian intelligence efforts to influence the 2016 election through social media. It boggles my mind that Congress held hearings about social media and blamed Facebook for this, as if Facebook was supposed to carefully evaluate every single ad for its political content. That’s not what Facebook is built for. That’s not what social media is for.

In the 15th century, the Gutenberg press reduced the cost of publishing so much that almost anyone could afford to read written works. Now in the 21st century, the world wide web has reduced the cost of publishing so much that almost anyone can afford to publish written works. With costs that low, companies like Facebook don’t have the resources to mediate more than a tiny fraction of the material that flows through their platforms. Instead, readers are expected to curate their own reading choices. The role of the platforms has been to provide them with efficient means to do so.

I thought everybody understood this — that everyone realized social media was a nationwide electronic bathroom wall — and that we all knew it was going to be a wild ride. But now people are demanding that social media sites step up and do a job we never asked them to do before.

I have so many questions about the thinking here. Did people do this with telephones when they were the scary new technology? I’m sure people were upset by political calls during elections, but did they blame the phone company for them? Were TV stations blamed for allowing awful political ads to run? What about other misdeeds? Was Henry Ford hauled in to testify before Congress because gangsters were using cars to commit crime sprees? Or because teenagers were having sex in them?

Sigh.

I know that record labels and comic book publishers and video game houses have all been blamed for society’s ills at one time or another. So I understand on some level that this kind of moral panic at new media is not unusual.

I guess I was hoping that, just this once, we had skipped that miserable tradition.

Getting a Few Things Off My Chest: Game of Thrones Edition

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The final season of Game of Thrones is starting today (you may have heard something about it) and there are a few things I want to get off my chest.

For one thing, I’m wondering if all the death-related magic is connected in some way. Everybody makes a big deal about the Night King and his army of White Walkers because they can raise the dead, but there’s a lot of that going around. The Red Woman, Melisandre, raised Jon Snow from the dead at Castle Black. And Thoros of Myr claimed to have raised his friend Beric Dondarrion from the dead six times, and we saw him do it once.

Then there’s whatever Cersei’s disgraced former maester, Qyburn, did to The Mountain after his near-fatal injuries from his fight with Oberyn. I don’t know what’s going on under that helmet, but I can make out tinges of blue that make him look a bit like one of the Night King’s risen dead. I can’t help but wonder if the Night King will have some influence over him, which could come as a nasty surprise for Cersei.

Finally, Arya Stark is an acolyte to the Many-Faced God of Death, who has clearly granted her some gifts. That seems like it should figure into all this somehow, doesn’t it?

And yet George R. R. Martin has been maddeningly annoying about making things like this pay off. I mean, we saw our first White Walker in the first episode of the show, and then we met Daenerys and learned of her family history not long after. So it was obvious that Westeros was eventually going to be caught between the icy White Walkers from the north and Daenerys’s fiery forces from across the sea. And yet…Daenerys didn’t set foot in Westeros until the beginning of the seventh season. And the Night King’s army of the dead, which has been marching south all this time, still wouldn’t reach the wall until the end of the season.

Moreover, with the exception of the White Walkers and the dragons, many of the fantasy elements in GRRM’s stories don’t ever really seem to land. The Lord of Light seems to communicate entirely in visions that we never see, and they don’t seem to be very useful to the people who receive them. And those flaming swords look really cool, but it’s not clear from anything we’ve seen in the show that a flaming sword gives any advantage to the wielder in a fight.

And even the magic that works doesn’t seem to be used properly. I mean, if you’ve got people like Melisandre and Thoros who can raise the dead, shouldn’t you hold them in reserve as an important resource instead of allowing them to wander the countryside?

Furthermore, while Daeneyrs knows how to use her fire-breathing dragons as weapons of war, no one seems to have thought to use them to gather battlefield intelligence. The Unsullied wouldn’t have been surprised at Casterly Rock — nor House Tyrell at Highgarden — if Daeneyrs had periodically overflown the territory to spot enemy troop movements.

As for the big question of who will take the Iron Throne, Daeneyrs seemed to have the strongest claim until we learned Jon Snow’s true heritage, but would he even want the throne? He seems quite likely to yield his claim to Daeneyrs. Or I suppose they could marry and rule Westeros together. They may be closely related — she’s his aunt — but incest is kind of a thing for the Targaryens, to keep from diluting their dragon-wrangling genes.

There are a variety of other with claims. Robert Baratheon’s conquest arguably moots the Targaryen claim and establishes a Baratheon royal line, so his bastard son Gendry arguably has a claim. Then again, the Lannisters and the Baratheons intermarried at some point, so Jaime might be able to claim the throne as the oldest living male with Baratheon blood. If he refuses, the throne would fall to Tyrion. Alternatively, there have been hints that Tyrion is not really Tywin’s son — that his wife had an affair with the last Targaryen king — which would give him an even better claim than Jon Snow.

Then of course there’s Cersei. Her claim by marriage into the Baratheon line is weak, but she’s the only one actually sitting on the throne. But can she hold it? Cersei is not good at holding people’s loyalty. Even Jaime has left her, and will her armies obey her without his steady hand to guide them?

I guess I can imagine four endings I’d find interesting:

  • Daeneyrs and Jon take the throne together and everyone lives happily ever after…which doesn’t sound like a George R. R. Martin ending.
  • Daeneyrs or Jon dies fighting the army of the dead. The other one takes the throne.
  • Cersei takes the Iron Throne, but having alienated everyone, she has no power, no friends, and no family. She is queen of nothing. This is the ending I’d like to see.
  • Cersei has a change of heart, everyone fights the army of the dead together, all is forgiven, and Cersei is proclaimed Queen of Westeros. She returns to King’s Landing to reign from the Iron Throne, with Sansa Stark as her Hand of the Queen. In the final scene, Cersei peels her face off to reveal Arya Stark. This is the ending I’d really like to see.

Of course, I would be remiss as a libertarian blogger if I didn’t say that I find this whole Iron Throne business offensive. It doesn’t matter who has the best claim to the Iron Throne because there is no such thing as a legitimate king. I kind of want some previously unknown distant wealthy liberal republic to fill the Blackwater with a fleet of steam-powered warships which promptly reduce the Red Keep to rubble with naval gunfire. And I daresay a few hundred Gatling guns could probably make short work of the army of the dead. Or, if it came down to it, the Unsullied, the Dothraki cavalry, and a couple of dragons as well.

Because Death to Tyrants, one and all.

The Software Engineer’s Bar Exam

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I follow a bunch of legal blogs, and one of the things they consistently complain about is the content of the bar exam. As Ilya Somin describes it, “the bar exam is primarily a test of memorization that covers huge amounts of material most lawyers won’t need.” As a consequence, time and effort spent preparing for the bar exam do very little to make one a better lawyer.

I’m getting my own taste of what that’s like.

In the near future, I will be looking for a new software development job (why is a story for another day), and everyone is telling me I should prepare for what’s called a “coding interview.” That’s where potential employers give you small programming problems to solve and expect you to write the code for the solutions during the interview. A typical question might be something like,

  • Generate a list of all the prime numbers from 1 to 1000.
  • Given two strings of letters, figure out the smallest number of characters you’d need to delete from either string to make them anagrams.
  • Given an array of integers, how many sets of three integers can you find — in order, but not necessarily consecutive — where each is a specific ratio of the previous one? For example, if the integers are 3, 4, 9, 12, 27, 36 and the specified ratio is 3, there are two sets: (3,9,27) and (4,12,36).

Those are certainly problems you can solve with a short computer program but — as with many of the items not on the bar exam — they’re not really representative of the kinds of tasks most software engineers do every day.

First of all, in most industrial strength applications, the core problem-solving code is only a small part of whole software system, which will also include code for:

  • getting input from the user
  • validating the input
  • storing the data someplace safe
  • retrieving the data
  • displaying the data to the user
  • logging activity for later analysis
  • handling errors (and logging them too)
  • bulk-importing data
  • bulk-exporting results
  • querying stored results
  • graphing results
  • testing individual pieces of the code for correctness
  • testing the integrated system for correctness
  • building the code into the final product
  • deploying the product

…and so on. Even in products that revolve around algorithmic solutions to certain problems, the algorithms themselves are only a small part of the code.

Second, one of the biggest goals of software engineering for the last few decades has been code reuse. This is the idea that we should be able to build software as a collection of reusable components, so we don’t have to reinvent everything from scratch. The industry’s success at this goal is murky, because we really like inventing new things from scratch. Nevertheless, there are also a whole lot of code libraries out there for doing things someone else has figured out how to do.

The C++ language, for example, comes with a Standard Template Library that defines a collection of useful data structures and includes a bunch of algorithms for working on those structures at a very low-level. If you’re looking for somebody else’s solution to a more complex problem, the Boost collection includes over 80 libraries of useful C++ code. Beyond that, there are resources like Faraz Fallahi’s Awesome C++ curated collection of code libraries. Or Erik Rigtorp’s Awesome C++ collection, which takes a different approach.

If you’re not using C++, there are similar collections for every other widely-used modern language. As a professional C#/.NET developer, I can solve a lot of problems with one or more of the 149,000 packages at nuget, and as I teach myself Python, I’m finding solutions amid the 175,000 packages at pypi. Of course, just as most programming is not about writing core problem-solving algorithms, most of those packages are intended to address other programming concerns. Even so, there’s still a lot of canned algoritm code available.

Third, if you can’t find working code in your language of choice, you can still find descriptions of tons of useful algorithms. In college, I learned algorithms from the classic Data Structures and Algorithms by Aho, Ullman, and Hopcroft, which I still have on my bookshelf. (The classic algorithms really haven’t changed much.) Some more modern books are Algorithms by Sedgewick and Wayne, The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S Skiena, and the comprehensive CLRS book (Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Clifford Stein, Ronald L. Rivest, and Charles E. Leiserson.) There are also textbooks focused on algorithms for specific problem domains such as cryptography, bioinformatics, and image processing.

It takes work to translate the books’ algorithm descriptions into working code, but it’s still easier than inventing the algorithms from scratch. You can also find lots of books on algorithms that give examples in a real-world programming language. These are often less-rigorous than the more theoretical books, but they are less likely to have errors because the code can be tested just by running it against test data.

(If you need to find seriously cutting-edge algorithms, you will likely have to search through academic journals, although if you have the kind of job where that’s necessary, then you probably really do need a good understanding of algorithms.)

Fourth, even if you do have one of the minority of software development jobs that requires constructing algorithms on a regular basis, you won’t write the code the way it’s done in a coding interview. In the real world, developers write code in bits and pieces, and they test it as they build it. They start with simple cases and then they handle the edge cases. They move snippets around to make the code faster or cleaner, using performance profiles to study the effects of the changes. They have meetings to clear up requirements, they subject their work to code reviews, and they write documentation.

Finally, professional software development is done with tools to make the job easier, and a modern software developer interacts with them constantly. (I recently realized I had forgotten the format for writing a “for loop” in C# because I have been using the editor’s template to write them for me.) Switching to a text editor, a testing website, or worst of all, a whiteboard, tests the applicant in highly artificial conditions.

Despite all that, employers still do these kinds of interviews, and to be honest, they’re not as useless as I have been making them sound.

Evaluating software development candidates isn’t the easiest thing in the world, so even an imperfect evaluation is better than nothing. Watching how a job applicant works through a software problem will give you an idea of how they think when solving software problems, and stripping away all the real-world issues keeps the interview focused on core problem solving skills. Ultimately, employers want to avoid hiring dumb people, and there aren’t many dumb people who can succeed at this kind of challenge.

Unfortunately, there are a fair number of smart, hard-working developers who aren’t very good at these kinds of problems. Algorithms courses are a standard component of a Computer Science Bachelor’s degree, but I know a number of good software developers who didn’t learn their craft in college, and this sort of interview is worrisome to them, because they fear their hard-won practical knowledge will be of little use.

I actually have two degrees in Computer Science, but I earned them a long time ago, so it’s been many years since I had to solve these kinds of problems. I’m a little worried too.

For better or worse, this situation has lead to a small ecosystem of interview preparation materials. If you think you might be facing a coding interview, the canonical preparation guide is Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. This gives an overview of the coding interview process — with specific descriptions of interviewing practices at major software companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Palantir — and some general guidance to solving these kinds of problems. It also includes 189 questions similar to those that might be on interviews.

I’ve read through sections of that book, but I haven’t tried to answer more than a couple of the example questions. Instead, I’ve been practicing my algorithm skills using a site called HackerRank, where developers can try writing solutions to small programming problems.

I’ve been working on the problems in Visual Studio (Microsoft’s development environment) and then copying the relevant code into HackerRank. Some would argue that I should be working the problems on paper, to simulate the whiteboard experience, but I think my time is best spent reacquainting my brain with solving these kinds of problems, and working in a less efficient way would just slow down the learning process.

The HackerRank site includes an Interview Preparation Kit that collects 69 coding problems, and I’ve worked my way through 50 of them so far. It’s been a very nostalgic experience, since the last time I did so much of this kind of programming was in algorithms classes in college. I’ve kind of missed it, and it’s got me thinking more broadly about the kinds of jobs I might be interested in.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to in my spare time. It’s been keeping me busy enough that I haven’t had time to work on my Model Justice project, although I plan to get back to it one of these days.

And if you happen to need an experienced .NET Senior Software Engineer/Project Lead for a full-time remote position, you know where to find me.

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