Daejeon, Part One: Preflight

About 6 hours into my South Korean sojourn and I want nothing more than to be back in Manila. In Eastwood city, specifically, on my box bed surrounded by pillows and my generous duvet. We're somewhere over the ocean, somewhere. The overhead panels are marking our progress on a colorful map of east Asia, but I've taken my contacts out and can see only blotches from this distance. I believe the white blinking blotch is our plane. I can't make out anything else.

Three hours ago I was sitting in the Sampaguita Lounge, in NAIA Terminal One. To get to the Sampaguita Lounge, one takes a dimly-lit elevator in a ramshackle, construction-barrier-lined section of the airport. It's exactly one floor up, but there are no stairs. The elevator opens up to a corridor, blocked on one end with a bunch of potted plants, and darkness beyond. The other end is the lounge, and there's usually a greeter there waiting for you. At least, there was, 2 years ago. Now there's an electric fan ventilating an empty reception area. It's just before 10 in the evening when I get there, and the handful of staff are sleeping in the armchairs. I take care to pound my feet against the floor as I walk, in the hopes that my approach will wake them and save me from having to clear my throat or something equally tiresome. As the floor is carpeted, this strategy proves difficult to implement. Thankfully, one of them stirs before I'm within throat-clearing distance. She looks at me like they've never had a customer before, and then I suppose, she wakes up.

The Sampaguita was created a few years back as an "airport lounge for the economy class," i.e., the vast majority of flyers who are not quite privileged enough to qualify for the Mabuhay club, or any of the other premier airport hangouts. When I first tried it, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. There was a modest buffet of small sandwiches and drinks, and a decent wireless connection. The plush chairs were loads better than the steel benches in the waiting areas outside. The population density was much lower too, and because there was an entrance fee (PhP450/pax), you rarely saw screaming children here.

All of these things were generally still true of Sampaguita Lounge circa 2009, but it felt worn and used-up, like a promising starlet who has turned to pornography. The low, ambient light was uneven; some bulbs had burned out and had never been replaced. The chairs were beginning to sag, and many needed to be reupholstered. The background music sounded like it was coming straight out of a Magic Sing. Not all the electric sockets worked, so when I asked to charge my gear, they wheeled out an industrial-strength power strip that you would normally use with washing machines or airconditioners.

The restroom was the real discovery: huge drifts of moist, crumpled toilet paper on the floor and sink. The cubicle doors, left ajar, revealed their sordid, unflushed interiors. There were small puddles on the black tile floor and I tell myself that it's just water. Well, technically, all bodily fluids are at least part water, so I'm not being completely delusory. I zip up and get out of there as fast as I can.

As I leave the restroom and its midnight horrors, one of the attendants reminds me that my flight is leaving in half an hour. When I get to my gate, I remember why the Sampaguita is a good choice even in its current miserable state: the rest of the airport is like a marketplace. In NAIA, five departure gates open onto the same huge room, and there are hundreds of people vying for space on the perforated steel slabs. It occurs to me that the only difference between NAIA's waiting areas and Ondoy evacuation centers is that Ondoy victims can queue up for showers. This thought fills me with a great sadness, and I find myself sprinting to the ramp to escape the sounds of the unwashed multitude.

Red Cow No. 10

Almost two years ago, I wrote a piece on the coming Mayan eschaton, i.e., how the world was presumably going to end on the 21st of December, 2012. Well, they’ve gone and made a movie about it so it’s not really all that compelling a topic anymore. However, my interest in eschatology in general hasn’t really waned over the past 20 months, and recently I had stumbled on to an ongoing effort to actually force the apocalypse to happen. An effort led by fundamentalist Christians, no less.

This particular eschatological prophecy has to do with a red heifer – an apparently ultra-rare, scarlet-hued female cow whose presence would allow the Christians to build the Third Temple, and thus facilitate the second coming of their Messiah. (That would be Jesus, to you secular folks.) The rarity of this kind of cow is puzzling – it has only appeared a grand total of 9 times throughout all of Hebrew history. The first was for Moses, he of the Top 10 list. He gave the poor animal to his priest Eleazar to be sacrificed.

Upon the heifer’s tenth appearance, the End Time – man’s final moments on this planet – will commence. Given these circumstances, we’re all quite fortunate that red cows simply aren’t indigenous to that part of the world. They’re relatively common in North America though, which, as it happens, is where this harbinger of doom is currently being bred in large numbers by one Clyde Lott. Turns out he’s been at it since the late-90’s.

Here’s how the fundamentalist Christian view of the eschaton works:

1. The Setup
Three events must occur for the Messiah to return: (1) the nation of Israel must be restored, (2) Jerusalem must be a Jewish City, and (3) the Temple must be rebuilt. (It was destroyed by Romans in 70 AD. Whenever Jews break glass during weddings, they do so in memory of this cataclysmic event.) Of those three requirements, only the Temple currently remains unfulfilled.

Of course, the building of Temple itself has its own set of requirements. The relevant one involves using the ashes of a red heifer to purify its constituents. And naturally, the heifer requirements are pretty tedious as well. Sayeth Numbers 19:

“Speak unto the children of Israel,” the Lord commanded, “that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came a yoke.”

In other words, this cow must be pitch-perfect. Not a single non-red strand of hair, and not a single day of labor to its name. Also, a heifer is by definition about three years of age, so it needs to be properly cared for until its time comes.

Clyde Lott’s breeding work has thus far produced a bunch of near-misses, but no keepers as of yet. Each potential candidate is subjected to the closest scrutiny. When one candidate (not from Lott’s stock though) was discovered in 1996, some Jews rejoiced, while other camps called for the animal to be shot immediately, and “every molecule” destroyed. The poor calf’s tail turned white as it grew older though, solving the problem for everyone. In 2002, another calf was discovered and subsequently disqualified. One wonders if these calves are not simply willing their imperfections into existence in an act of bovine self-preservation.

2. The Buildup
Once this all-important cow is found, investigated and approved by the rabbis, it will be sacrificed on a pyre, and its ashes mixed into water. Jews will flock from all corners of the globe to be purified by this water, and the restoration of the Temple will commence.

It’s easy for secularists to write off this Jewish predilection for temple-building, but its significance does bear some explanation. The Jews believe that their Temple is the device through which God will manifest His presence to mankind. It’s not a building, it’s a conduit.

3. The Denouement
The Messiah’s return is the part familiar to most Christians. There will be seven years of great tribulation, during which an Anti-Christ will appear to wage war against the believers. One can look at this period as a great shakedown, during which the lapsed, lazy or only mildly serious Christians get filtered out (and most likely, destroyed). Jesus will, of course, eventually emerge triumphant, saving all of the true believers and kicking off a thousand years of peaceful reign.

What happens after those one thousand years are over is anyone’s guess. In my most fanciful imaginings, I like to think that the Christians will come back to find the Earth a perfect utopia ruled by the secular survivors. With no religion to hold us back, humankind has explored the solar system, eradicated disease, ended poverty, expanded the limits of human understanding beyond anything previously thought possible. Perhaps Christ’s millennial reign may end up being beneficial to both believer and non-believer alike after all.

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Other eschatological pieces include the aforementioned Mayan Apocalypse, and the Doomsday Singularity, which talks about how technology will one day literally be the death of us.

An Unpopular Opinion on #BangonPinoy

So here we are again.

I received a lot of negative feedback for my essay on volunteerism some weeks back, and I have a feeling that the same will happen about this opinion on the #BangonPinoy Twitter campaign – Globe’s virtual outreach program for Ondoy victims. But you know what, somebody needs to speak for the dissenters, and although I really wish it weren’t me twice in a row, well, your RSS readers have filters after all.

If you don’t know what BangonPinoy is, you may wanna check out the site, which outlines the program in sparkling marketing speak. The important bit is as follows:

Put #BangonPinoy after your tweets starting today until November 6, 2009. For every #BangonPinoy hashtag used, Globe Telecom, in partnership with the Philippine Blog Awards, will guarantee a P1 donation to be spent for typhoon victims. Our target is to reach 400,000 tweets in 3 weeks!

Sounds innocuous enough, right? PhP400,000 is a decent chunk of change to be donating to the cause after all. There are a couple of small, niggling problems though.

The first is that we need 400,000 corresponding tweets with the #BangonPinoy hashtag. My first reaction upon seeing that number was one of awe. I doubt if there are more than a million Filipino Twitter users currently, so 400k messages seemed like an unreasonably ambitious number. As of this writing, we’re on Day 6 of the 3 week experiment and the current number of mentions is still under a thousand. If you’re too lazy to do the math, we need to be hitting 2,000 tweets per day in order to get to the target. Now, to be fair, Globe said that they would guarantee PhP1.00 for every tweet, so even if we only have 5,000 mentions by November 6, they’re good for at least that amount.

On the other hand – and here’s my real beef – if they wanted to make a PhP400k donation, they don’t need our tweets for that. They could just hand it over to the appropriate organizations. Why delay it for three weeks?

Answer: this is very likely a social media experiment to see what kind of influence Globe can exert on the Philippine social web. Social media is a hot property right now, and lots of local advertising agencies are working out ways to harness it effectively. This is one of the first that’s operated solely within Twitter, and that’s a significant step forward.

My second issue is that Globe is really encouraging Twitter spam here. It’s spam “for a cause,” certainly, but it’s still spam. When the greater twittersphere got wind of the campaign, it took about half a day before they realized that there was no way to hit the 400k number without modifying their tweeting habits. Soon, people were tweeting snippets of OPM lyrics and other miscellaneous detritus and appending the #BangonPinoy hashtag indiscriminately.

Now, one could argue that the ends justify the means here, in that it doesn’t matter what our tweets contain, as long as we hit significant numbers with our efforts. But the whole point of the use of hash-tags is to raise awareness, and right now, all we’re doing is accumulating dozens of tweets that say “Humanap ka nang panget” or “Let’s sing Merry Christmas” and whatnot.

Early on, I tweeted (in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion) about the possibility of simply building a bot that tweeted with the #BangonPinoy hash-tag every 15 seconds or so. Three or four such bots could, in concert, hit 400k tweets in about a week’s time. I argued that ultimately we were doing this for the Ondoy victims that Globe has promised they will give aid to. We’re already spamming anyway. Why waste human brain-cycles when we can apply CPU cycles to the problem instead. (Consider that a bot like this would take about an hour to write for your average Web2.0-aware developer, and the returns seem rather enticing.)

This is not a particularly out-of-the-box kind of idea either, as it’s no secret that the only reason Trending Topics manage to stay Trending Topics on Twitter for any significant period of time is because of bots. They latch on to words and tags that are beginning to trend, and greatly amplify it so they attach marketing links to the messages. Yes, even to #Ondoy.

The obvious argument against the bot idea is that it goes against the very principle of this campaign, i.e., these tweets should be coming from concerned citizens. Without trying to be facetious about it though, it stands to reason that these bots would be written by a developer who is himself a concerned citizen. And if you wanted to make sure the tweeted messages are marginally relevant, you can program your bot to re-tweet what other (human) twitter users are saying. (Or if you want something inspirational, you could compile a list of quotes from ThinkExist, about hope and the strength of human resolve. Or the words to “Panatang Makabayan.”)

A caveat however: anyone who is seriously thinking about writing these bots and deploying them needs to remember that Globe reserves the right to call the whole thing off if they smell something fishy. In other words, you are running the risk of ruining the whole campaign by “helping out” in this manner. (There are, of course, workarounds for this problem as well. Twitter allows you to change your username multiple times after all, and there’s no limit to the number of accounts you can register.)

With all that said, I would be cautious about actually doing this. The way the social web reacts to this situation will lay the ground rules for many other social-media marketing plays to come. How would the big corporations and their advertising agencies interpret it, I wonder, if our first reaction to their social-media campaigns was to write bots to circumvent them?

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UPDATE: I originally drafted this piece on Saturday the 24th, and in the 36 hours since then, BangonPinoy’s numbers have grown to 1,048 tweets, an average of about 140 tweets per day. Still not very encouraging, but I did notice something interesting in the aggregated feed. There’s an RT-bot already on there (_bangon) that’s operating almost exactly as I described above. It came online in the late evening of Sunday the 25th. Of course, it may not even be an actual bot. With this kind of low-volume tweeting it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between an automaton and a human who has simply gone the extra mile, so to speak.

One other new Twitter user, _bangonpinoy, came into being on Sunday as well. For the most part, it’s been broadcasting lines from nationalistic poems or lyrics from patriotic songs, which are, in my humble opinion, slightly more relevant that simply spouting random 80s OPM. One can only hope that it is enough though.

An Unpopular, Mildly Clarified Opinion on Volunteerism

Yesterday’s piece on volunteerism and why you may be helping your countrymen more by simply staying in your office cubicle got some really great, well-thought-out comments from people. I’d like to thank all those readers who really went out of their way to contribute to the discussion. As expected, there were lots of dissenting opinions, but provoking debate is a great way to expand our thinking on these matters. I didn’t get any “fuck you”s or anything vaguely Neanderthal, which is nearly unbelievable in this day and age.

From Erol:

I do think that volunteering AFTER work is not such a bad thing, and neither is it an under-utilization and a waste of an employee’s hours. [...] If volunteering can satiate a person’s desire or urge to help, it is no different from a person going to the movies, mall or an amusement park to fulfill his or her need to enjoy and have fun.

You are correct in the sense that many people derive pleasure from volunteering. A lot of readers seem to have mistaken my commentary as a call to stop volunteering. If you want to volunteer – for any reason, be it religion, boredom or a misplaced sense of guilt – you should. I’m simply saying that you need to consider whether that’s truly the best way for you to help the relief effort.

From teem:

You need to consider the urgency of the situation. More people could get sick, die of hunger or whatever, if everyone goes on with their jobs and not volunteer to be able to give more.

Well, we need to differentiate “emergency rescue” from the volunteerism that I was referring to previously, i.e., organizing and/or distributing relief goods. Both of these things are urgent, but I would argue that feeding victims is not as urgent as rescuing the drowning. Also, I fail to see how you mobilizing your friends to help during an emergency is any faster than you mobilizing a group of hired professionals (the latter would be one phone call away, the former would be three to four).

Please do not misunderstand though, I fully appreciate how devastating Ondoy’s effects are – our family was affected like many others. During the typhoon, the first floor of our family’s house in Katipunan was completely flooded, and two of our cars were submerged. When the water had receded, we essentially had two choices. My father, my sister and I could all work together on cleaning the place up, or we could hire a small crew to do the work for us. Although the former option might have been an interesting bonding experience, the total value of our combined time would have been well in the $US1,000 range, i.e., a very expensive cleaning crew. Meanwhile, the real cleaning crew cost about PhP1,000, and they got the job done faster. (Guess which option we picked.)

Now imagine that the house in question wasn’t ours. The same logic applies to volunteering to clean your friends’ houses, or a random stranger’s. Instead of handing a bunch of senior engineers shovels and mops, you could just pay for someone to do it in your stead. Keep in mind that this does not make your contribution any less significant. You’ve still cleaned that person’s house – you just did it in the most cost-effective way possible.

From Ryan:

If most developers took your advice and decided to simply donate more money and stop volunteering, would the goods be packaged as efficiently? Would there be enough people to take their place?

This question stumped me momentarily, then I realized that the phrase “more money” already provided a solution. It doesn’t matter if there would be enough volunteers to take their place because if the operation heads had more money, then they could simply announce (on the radio, say) that they are willing to pay each “volunteer” PhP100 per day. Or if you’re in a hurry, PhP200 per day, but only to the first 100 volunteers. Your relief center would be running on full steam within an hour.

And then there’s the consideration of time, ie how long does the money you donate take to be converted into relief goods? how many lives might be lost for lack of a proper meal at the soonest possible opportunity?

Well, now we’re talking about the actual relief packs, instead of the act of packing them. Whether I make a donation, or haul ass to the nearest relief center, doesn’t affect the availability of anything for me to sort and pack. I daresay that my cash donation has a higher chance of eventually being converted into relief goods though, as opposed to my butt parked on the floor of a relief center waiting for contributions.

From Marco:

First of all, you begin by using a developer in your company as an example. This automatically invalidates many of the arguments, should they be directed at the general public.

I wanted to thank you individually for the exhaustive comment; I didn’t know the comment-box could even accommodate that much text, to be honest. I wanted to discuss your post point by point, but there were so many that I might not be able to. (Folks, jump on over to Marco’s full comment here.)

UPDATE: I've written a lengthy response to Marco's comment at the bottom of this entry.

I will say though that you seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the point of the piece, if you think that my engineer example invalidates my arguments. The example was intentional, not accidental. My post was never meant to be directed at the general public, because the general public doesn’t make US$25/hour, as I’m sure you’re aware. I picked an engineer as my example primarily because lots of my readers work in the tech industry, but more importantly because they make well above the average income. That part is key to the argument, and does not invalidate it in any way. In other words, I would not make the same recommendations to someone earning minimum wage (i.e., the general public), because the numbers wouldn’t make sense. Generally: the higher your income is, the more valuable your time is, the more you need to think about the value of standing in that packing line.

On Facebook, my friend Monica had this to say:

[...] you should look for something to do that will have the maximum impact. For instance, Kris Aquino did an excellent job of being the spokesperson for ABS-CBN’s fundraising efforts vs. the classic photo op of a celebrity going to Marikina to hand out food packs.

High-income citizens have a little bit of Kris Aquino in all of them – if you’ll allow me to be momentarily facetious – in that they are in a position to provide aid in a wider reaching way than simply packing relief goods.

From Aissa, also on Facebook, in support of my larger point:

Repacking etc. only goes so far, and several centers for these relief activities are already overstaffed. They don’t really need you to be there, so go find something more useful to do.

What she said.

From April:

Can it be that this article only applies to an obviously small chunk of the Philippine populace? You know, the rational above minimum wage earner with no sick leaves?

I don’t know about sick/vacation leaves, but yes, the article was meant for a small chunk of the populace, i.e., the kind of people who read this blog. I mean, duh, if I didn’t feel they were being misallocated, I wouldn’t have written this piece, you know?

From Noreen:

[...] and with the number of relief goods a person can pack, even the smartest guy’s time can never be wasteful.

If you truly had “the smartest guy” at your disposal, you should have him rewrite PAG-ASA’s prediction software. Having him sort relief goods, when he could be preventing the deaths of hundreds or thousands instead, is horrifically wasteful.

From Hunter:

There is one thing you may not have considered with donating the money directly to an organisation. As with most aid organisations only a proportion of the donations would go directly to benefit the people affected. The rest going to keep the organisation running (staff, marketing, etc). So, a fair amount of inefficiency there if you are looking for the most impact.

That’s a great point, and you’re right, I hadn’t considered the overhead. Perhaps the lesson here is that a donation in kind would be more impactful. Or perhaps, you could contribute to logistics, i.e., hiring a truck for the social workers to use. There are tons of alternative ways to help out, we just need to think creatively.

From Someone (jeez, is that hard to come up with a real first name):

Lets be more reasonable – the average dev will make $10-12. Take the BIR percentage and you are left with what? $8-10 per hour? Which means your $125 is now only $40-50. Guess the allocation of resources doesn’t sound that wasteful anymore. And that’s not counting the fact that people can help on non-work hours.

I’m not gonna argue with your math since that depends on a lot of factors, but I will say that even at $40-50/day, your time is still worth about 6 to 7 minimum-wage workers. So yes, unless you think you can pack food 6 to 7x faster than the average person, you are still being misallocated.

From Someone, again:

But the worse is that it just put money as the parameter for help. Help and volunteering is a LOT deeper than that.

Using money as a parameter is the only way to discuss this in quantifiable terms, detestable as that may be to you. I’m not going to argue about the “depth” of volunteerism here, as that’s purely subjective and honestly I don’t see how useful that is to the discussion.

Another way to look at it: quite a few male volunteers are going to relief centers because there are lots of hot, perspiring chicks volunteering there too. Others are doing it primarily because they want to be seen helping. I suppose in your eyes that would be defiling the concept of volunteerism, but ultimately, what does it matter? What difference does it ultimately make what your motivations are. They’re still helping out, wolf-whistles notwithstanding. I know that “the end justifies the means” is a slippery slope, but it seems to me that “beggars can’t be choosers” either.

This piece fusses about the overall output, i.e., how quickly and efficiently we can help our countrymen who are in need. Do you really think they would care if they received aid from someone who volunteered vs. someone who was paid to be there? We’re talking about starving, injured people here. If you can provide aid in a manner that is 6 to 7x faster than before, wouldn’t you do it, even if it meant losing that personal touch? That’s pretty logical, isn’t it?

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Marco:

In the interest of open discussion, I should've commented on your points. I'll do that here now:

Point 1: The funds the volunteer would have earned had he stayed in his cubicle are being under-utilized. This may be true, if everyone were paid on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, most people in this country are paid bi-weekly, causing a delay in the arrival of cash.

The frequency of compensation doesn't change the value of that person's time, methinks. It'd still be US$25/hour, and what that means, from a business standpoint, is that the loss of that person for X hours means that the company is paying for time that went elsewhere. You're under-utilized because of the loss of *potential* output.

That said, I totally agree that rescue operations cannot wait for money to come in, and in these instances, whoever is able-bodied and physically closest to Ground Zero is the overall "best person to volunteer." But that's kinda common sense, isn't it, and not really something I needed to spell out in my piece.

Point 2: It doesn’t matter who you are when you volunteer; what matters is that you do what you can.

Actually, yes, it does matter who you are. I'll give you a concrete example, since I was on the whole developer thing earlier. We've got an open-source disaster management project called Sahana that software engineers are volunteering to help populate and maintain. The project is an online sitrep of a given disaster, with a missing persons registry, aid management, inventory management, etc. Remember how I said that software engineers need to think about whether they are maximizing their skills by being at the relief center? The average volunteer does not have the ability to run Sahana, it's a skill that's unique to software engineers.

Let's say you were a musician, instead. Playing a large charity event to raise funds for the typhoon victims is a great way to maximize the aid you provide, and again, this contribution is unique in that not everyone has the capacity to help in this fashion. So, yes, it matters that you "do what you can," but I'm saying there are ways to do a heckuva lot more, the more specialized your skills are.

Point 3: The number of available minimum-wage earners is already quite low, and yet the operations are still lacking in manpower.

Perhaps I'm in a unique position to have an optimistic opinion on this matter because our family runs a manpower agency, so we have a good idea of where to find minimum-wage earners quickly. Also, there are varying reports on the availability of volunteers - some places are over-capacity, others are utterly bereft. I would argue that it's not an issue of *numbers*, but a problem with information. If we could quickly see which centers were running light - like say, with Sahana - then volunteers could be more properly allocated.

Point 4: Volunteering for the joy of volunteering is romantic and selfish. While this might be true, it also means that the need for immediate help is being addressed.

Again, I don't disagree on any particular point. But see Point 2 for my thoughts on what is appropriate "immediate help," given certain skillsets.

Point 5: I’m not saying that you HAVE to volunteer, but it would help to see this issue from another perspective.

I thought this piece *was* the other perspective, seeing as everybody is already predisposed towards the notion of volunteerism in the first place. At the end of the piece, I clarified that I wasn't saying that people should stop volunteering, so again, we are in agreement here. I'm also saying that you should think twice about what you should volunteer for, coz there are so many other ways to be of use to the relief effort.

An Unpopular Opinion on Volunteerism

The ongoing tragedy in the aftermath of Typhoon Ondoy has spurred a nationwide push to rebuild and reclaim all that we have collectively lost, and it is nothing short of amazing how quickly people can self-mobilize when a dire enough need arises. Donations in cash and kind are pouring in from all over, and dozens of organizations are fielding volunteers for every aspect of the relief operations. Recently I had a very frank conversation with a friend of mine regarding the latter, during which I explained my rather unpopular stance on the subject. I will attempt to do the same here, although I will warn anyone reading this that some may find it objectionable and/or heartless. Rational thinking often is.

Every day, colleagues of mine volunteer at various centers, helping with the sorting, packing or distribution of relief goods. They spend 4 to 5 hours at a time, on average. Now I believe that this is the wrong thing to do, and here's why.

At our company, the value of a developer-hour is US$25, which is close to the industry average. What this means, roughly, is that the 4-5 hours that each of my colleagues spend packing or distributing relief goods is worth about US$100-125. The reason why I think it's the wrong strategy for a developer to be volunteering is not because I think that that US$125 is being wasted; it's just being grossly under-utilized.

Consider this: a given developer cannot sort relief goods any faster than your average minimum-wage employee. (In some cases, the developer, with his soft, developer hands, might even perform worse than the minimum-wage guy, who likely has more experience with manual labor.) However, since that developer's time is worth so much more, placing him in that job is a _misallocation of resources_, and is thus wasteful.

But, you cry, the developer wants to help his fellow man!

Yes, and he should. But there are two better ways that I can think of. The first is obvious. Instead of under-utilizing himself at the cost of US$125 per session, the developer should just donate that US$125 to the relief effort. This money can be converted into goods, thus maximizing its benefits. In fact, if the developer is serious about helping, the best thing he can do is to work longer hours at his job every day so he can earn more money to donate to the cause. Or figure out a way to generate extra revenue. (And if you can't come up with the money fast enough, just take out a loan and then pay it back over time. Seriously.)

The second way is less obvious. If you have a working budget of US$25/hour, you could just hire a whole squad of minimum-wage earners to work on your behalf. They would quite literally be 10x more effective than you would be on your own, and you're creating more jobs as a result, too.

But, you cry again, it's different when you're willing to get your own hands dirty!

That's needlessly romanticizing things. One of the reasons why people like volunteering instead of giving donations is because there's a sense of actually accomplishing something. It's a lot more substantial than, say, writing a check. However, I think that this is ultimately selfish behavior, because it makes you feel good while doing a disservice to the people you are trying to help. Unless you have a unique set of sorting/packing skills, your output will be the same as the minimum-wage volunteer next to you. You could be helping in vastly more significant ways. (Ironically, writing that check is probably one of them.)

But, you cry a third time, if everyone thought that way then no one would volunteer!

I find that about as unlikely as PAG-ASA upgrading its prediction systems. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that we lived in a country where everyone was earning above minimum-wage. (Again, a logical impossibility, but thought experiments are strange that way.) What would happen is that the relief operations would be flush with cash because everyone would be donating in an effort to maximize the aid they were extending. The operation heads could then simply hire people to do the work of volunteers. Or, God forbid, fly low-wage workers in from other countries to do the job for us.

The reason that scenario sounds so ridiculous is because it'd never happen. There will always be people who want to volunteer for relief operations, either because they derive pleasure from it or because they are otherwise unable to donate in cash or kind. I'm not saying that people should stop volunteering, all I'm saying is that they need to think long and hard about whether they are helping more that way or not. As heartless as it may sound, the most effective way to help your countrymen just might be to get out of that sorting line and get back to your day-job.

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If you are interested in helping out, you may donate directly to the Philippine Red Cross via PhilippineAid.com.

The Economics of the LDR

I’ve been musing recently about LDRs – those long-distance relationships that I keep hearing about but have never actually experienced myself. Recently, I saw it mentioned again in Tim Harford’s “Dear Undercover Economist,” in which he analyzes its utility, and found myself profoundly enlightened.

First, some definitions. The Wikipedia entry is frustratingly vague in that it defines an LDR simply as “an intimate relationship that takes place when the partners are separated by a considerable distance.” But what kind of distance is considerable? And even if you lived far apart, if you still saw each other once a week, is that an LDR?

I offer a more specific definition: an LDR is an intimate relationship in which the parties involved can not physically see each other more often than once every two months on average, without incurring prohibitive costs. (I believe that the concept of “distance” in “Long-Distance” is so ambiguous and relative that I’ve avoided including it in the definition altogether.)

Under the proposed definition: if you were living in Manila and your boyfriend was in the States, it would not be an LDR if either of you could afford to fly over and visit regularly. Likewise, even if he were somewhere closer, like say Baguio, that would fall under the definition of an LDR if it were too costly for him to come down more than once every 8 weeks. (Keep in mind that “costs” are a broad umbrella term that includes money, time and other personal resources. He could, for example, be deathly afraid of wheeled transports, and insist on walking the whole way – an unreasonably high personal cost.)

Why two months, instead of, say, one? I have to admit it’s an arbitrary number: if both parties are busy individuals, seeing each other once a month can sometimes be all they can manage. That would not necessarily mean they were in an LDR, it just means their respective calendars are often full.

Using this definition, what does the science of economics have to say about LDRs? Well, a lot, as it turns out. The Alchian-Allen Theorem, commonly known as the “third law of demand” offers a great analysis of how to carry out your infrequent encounters. Here’s the nose-bleed version: “the Alchian-Allen Theorem is often associated with the phenomena in which a common fixed transportation or shipping cost added to the price of a high and low quality good results in a relative increase in consumption of the high quality good.” Fun, huh?

The layman’s version is elegantly clarified by economist Tyler Cowen:

“The theorem [...] implies that Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine than Californians do, and vice versa, because it is only worth the transportation costs for the most expensive wine.”

LDRs, or the notion of being in an LDR, act like the most stringent of filters. No one really prefers being in one – it is a situation borne of unfortunate circumstance. And so it happens that during those few, happy moments that you are able to spend with your partner, you will not stand for anything but the most scintillating of conversations, the finest restaurants, the most vigorous of sexual encounters. You need to maximize the fixed costs of shuttling one (or both) of you back and forth, after all.

The converse can also be said to be true: when our partner is in close proximity, our standards tend to be lower. There’s very little effort involved in seeing a partner who lives 15 minutes from you, so vegging on the couch in front of your television suddenly becomes an acceptable activity.

(The Alchian-Allen Theorem, btw, also explains why countries like the Philippines only get mainstream movies in its cinemas, and very few of the arthouse variety. The costs of shipping of either the Hollywood production or the independent release are the same, and in the interest of generating the largest profit margins, the former is the most rational choice for the majority of theater owners.)

Economics does not, unfortunately, put forth an opinion on whether an LDR is a good idea or not, although I imagine that they are bound by the same free-market rules as everything else: Because it’s the higher quality stuff that gets traded over long distances, only LDRs involving truly exceptional parties will usually last any significant period of time. Anything else would simply not justify the costs.

The Music of Corn: Lessons in DRM from Early 20th Century Farming

In Michael Pollan’s excellent “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” the author explores the complexity of modern food technology – where our food comes from, and why we eat what we do. It’s a thoroughly engrossing piece of work, and it includes a snippet that I thought was particularly relevant to our times.

In the late 19th to early 20th century, corn was beginning to gain a foothold as one of America’s most important crops. Its resilience and genetic flexibility made it the go-to plant for practically every aspect of the contemporary human food chain—from main course to seasoning to drinks to the feed that our livestock subsists on. Pollan opines that one of the reasons it became so ubiquitous was due to the fact that it exhibited the unusual trait of even having a built-in patenting system.

Back then, various types of corn could be “designed” by taking two seeds from two lines that both exhibited desirable traits. We all know the basic Mendelian plot here: combine the traits of two original seeds and you get an improved offspring, one that could be larger, sturdier or produce more yield than its parents. Corn-breeders made a living off of cross-breeding various seeds and then selling those über-seeds to farmers. However, they had a problem: they could sell their work to a given farmer only once, because the seeds could, by nature, reproduce themselves endlessly. In other words, the farmer never had to worry about getting new seeds because the crop produced by these super-seeds would guarantee that he’d always have lots available for future harvests. That farmer could even potentially “pirate” those generation-2 seeds and re-sell them to other farmers. This meant that the breeders’ business model was screwed from the moment they sold that first batch of super-seeds, which simply would not do. Much like the digital media of today – infinitely reproducible and redistributable – the intellectual property of corn seeds needed to be protected somehow.

The solution turned out to be simple: breeders discovered that when you crossed two corn plants that had come from their uber-seeds, the offspring exhibited some unusual characteristics. They found that although the first generation of corn raised from this child seed was genetically identical to the original uber-seed, the second generation was not. The harvest yields from the second-gen seeds were only about 70% of the originals, making them virtually worthless. Once they had established this fact, the breeders were pretty much set. Farmers had to buy new seeds from them every year, because the seeds that their harvests were producing would be no good to them. It was the biological equivalent of a copyright restriction.

Fast forward a century and we find ourselves in much the same situation, in a vastly different arena. Musicians need to protect their work so they can make a living off of it. Some of them charge a one-time fee to download their work (iTunes) and some of them have subscription-based offerings (Rhapsody). Their content is protected by various forms of DRM that prevent you from creating more than the ascribed number of copies of the music. It’s the corn breeders all over again, in other words.

The difference though is this: the whole point of having digital content is to allow for infinite copies and infinite distribution. The fundamental difference between digital and traditional media is that the former has no physical manifestation (and thus no limits to its reproducibility), and yet we continue to secure and sell them as if they did. Part of the reason why traditional media is so expensive is because the cost of shipping, warehousing, and distributing are prohibitive. Not so with digital content.

The notion of selling a person permission to create up to X copies of a digital file (ala iTunes) is silly. That’s like selling someone a camera and telling them that they can only take a set number of pictures with it, otherwise they’ll be violating your terms of service. DRM contradicts the very nature of the thing it attempts to protect.

What we’re witnessing with DRM, you see, is the capitalism of corn being transplanted into an arena that cannot possibly support it. Part of the reason why corn is the world’s biggest cereal crop today (bigger than rice – even in China!) is largely because of its business-friendly attributes, and I suppose record labels are looking for that same kind of dominant, all-consuming victory here as well.

Hair Apparent

I woke up this morning and had a brief second of intense panic before I remembered what had happened yesterday. After 10 years of wearing my hair long, I had had the whole thing chopped off. Unceremoniously, as if the decade we had spent together meant nothing to me. A few snip-snip-snips, then it was gone. Then some more snips, for shape and texture. Then some crackling foil, for color. And suddenly I wasn't quite sure who the dude in the glass was.

The tail itself is still with me, in a sweaty ziplock. I don't know whether I'm keeping it for sentimentality's sake, or because I'm hoping I can one day reattach it, like a finger that's been hewn off in some freak accident. The back of my neck feels weird. Hell, my entire head feels weird, what with the weight of 8 inches of thick, unwieldy hair suddenly gone. I look at my odd collection of hair elastics now with a kind of strange revulsion.

Ten years ago I was an incoming junior in college. I didn't smoke yet, and barely drank. Barely knew anything about websites. Had only had one girlfriend. Hadn't worked a day in my life, really. If I think about all the things that have changed since then, it astounds me how the only thing that seemed to remain the same was the ponytail. Through three more years of college, two relationships, three career changes, two startups, an acquisition, and a whole bunch of smaller u-turns and hard lefts. A decade of circuitous life.

And now, here we are.

The back of my neck feels cold.

On Strawberries, Smileys and Sheep

So I delivered the keynote address (cheekily titled “Strawberries, Smileys and Sheep”) at yesterday’s Form Function & Class, organized by the great folks at PWDO. Got some good feedback from the audience, which I’m going to keep here so I have a record of it, since Twitter Search seems to excise old archives. (I can’t find any of my old @replies from two or three months ago, and it’s too much of a hassle to go that far back using the pagination. Bad Twitter. Bad.)

marco_palinar: Keynote speaker @helloluis is in the house yo! #ffc2009

guitarchic: @helloluis’ turn now. STRETCH!! #ffc2009

[ I asked everyone to get up and stretch at the beginning of my talk. A cheap trick to get everybody’s spirits artificially raised for a few seconds. ]

marco_palinar: Eto na! @helloluis #ffc2009

sarahcada: Last speaker: @helloluis on Strawberries, smileys and sheep (rofl) #ffc2009

maepaulino: Last speaker: @helloluis on Strawberries, smileys and sheep

michaelbantigue: @aescnt @pwdo @maepaulino @helloluis : speaking of drinking, is there an afterparty post #ffc2009? if so, where?

sarahcada: Is this a convoluted way for @helloluis to pick up girls? (from @sofimi) LOL #ffc2009

guitarchic: Panel discussion among “taken” ladies about fields of strawberries by @helloluis (whut?) #ffc2009

sarahcada: @helloluis’ volunteers are brilliant! #ffc2009

marco_palinar: Parang talkshow lang ni @helloluis #ffc2009 http://bit.ly/alX6b

[ I had 3 members of the audience get up on stage and sit on the couch with me, Oprah-style. I forgot to do her signature “Hellloooooo” though. Rats. Photographic evidence here. ]

marco_palinar: http://yfrog.com/ Si @helloluis ma-chicks! #ffc2009

brevity: @helloluis Infidelity. #ffc2009

hyperory: strawberries = sex? wth? kudos to @helloluis though for entertaining us #ffc2009

hyperory: @helloluis: “the smileyface is anybody.” DEEP. #ffc2009

[ I told the smiley anecdote from this previous article, as a way to illustrate our tendency towards simple things. ]

polats: @marco_palinar + @helloluis in a conference = BEST. CONFERENCE. EVAR

brevity: Also, @helloluis is showing some 400 ppl his tats. #ffc2009

marco_palinar: “Plurk laos” – @helloluis #ffc2009

[ “Just to put it into perspective, Ashton Kutcher has 5 times more followers than Plurk even has members.” ]

guitarchic: Common behaviors on the web, accdng @helloluis: Promiscuity, Simplicity, Comformity. #ffc2009

polats: @marco_palinar nice pic, @helloluis in his element http://bit.ly/alX6b

michaelbantigue: @maepaulino : testing the 5% thesis of @helloluis. guess its true! #ffc2009

_third: loved @helloluis ’ strawberries, smiles and sheep (birds) #pwdo

iandmac: last speaker mr @helloluis rocks! i <3 ur keynote.. #pwdo #moonfruit

jhisk: @iandmac hahah I agree sir @helloluis rocks!

jasontorres: “Plurk laos” – @helloluis #ffc2009 (via @marco_palinar) – LOL

owrange: did it become sikat? =) RT @jasontorres “Plurk laos” – @helloluis #ffc2009 (via @marco_palinar) – LOL

mcometa: @helloluis the kokology was entertaining! hahaha (though i may have heard it before, but not in from a large crowd ^_^)

Bots Don't Cry

I love robot movies. I cry at robot movies. More so than at movies where the humans are the ones getting blown up, oddly enough. I used to think that there was something wrong with me, but then I realized that I was just experiencing a form of high-tech Smiley syndrome, and I started to feel a little more normal.

Have you ever asked yourself why the smiley is such a well-loved, internationally-recognized symbol? Sure you have. That's why you're reading this blog, remember? The theory (which I first came across in Scott McCloud's seminal Understanding Comics) is that everybody on the planet can relate to a smiley face. Everyone has two eyes and a mouth, and unless you've got some really uncooperative facial muscles, you probably know how to crack a smile. The smiley could be anyone, therefore, the smiley is everyone. The converse of this theory is that the more detailed and figurative you make a rendition of a human, the less relatable it becomes: Now it's got pronounced lips and eyelashes, so it's probably a female. Now it's got long, black hair, so it's probably Asian. Now it's got twin pigtails, a pleated skirt and knee-high boots, and suddenly we're cosplaying.

Like the smiley, robots are abstractions of human appearance. When we look at them, we see something that could be us, but since it doesn't look like any particular one of us, a shared ownership is formed amongst the viewers. We start to focus more on their actions and our emotional responses to those actions. This focus is magnified further by the lack of facial expressions that would ordinarily help us figure out what the robot is thinking. Suddenly every small gesture, and every oddly-enunciated word, takes on a weight that a human character would be hard-pressed to achieve. (Exempli Gratia: Compare the Iron Giant's final heroic act to, say, Leo diCaprio freezing to death in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and tell me if you aren't more moved by the former than the latter. I mean, never mind that Titanic had about as much story as your average telenovela.)

And so, I cry at robot movies. Vigorously. If your robot-movie knowledge is limited, I've provided a list below of the best tearjerkers I know of:

1. The aforementioned Iron Giant.

Also one of my favorite animated movies of all-time, this Cold War period film about a boy and a giant robot is perfectly-written and brilliantly-directed. The final scene, in which the Iron Giant rumbles, "Soo-per-mannn" before flying to his death still has me reaching for a hanky every time I see it.

2. Transformers (1986)

TremendousNews put it best when they said that this was "the first time someone important to me died." In the pivotal scene, Optimus Prime is shot to bits by Megatron because of Hot Rod's grandstanding. As he lies dying, he admonishes his loyal Autobots: "Do not grieve ... Soon, I shall be one with the matrix." Prime was like a father to me growing up, and losing him was a coming-of-age experience.

3. Terminator 2: Judgement Day

T2 breaks the robot-abstraction rule that I mentioned above (although there was a considerable dearth in facial expressions), but I happened to see this movie during a time in my life when I so wanted to be the young John Connor. Finally having a friend with guns, who wouldn't let anyone hassle you, and would even say stupid shit like "Hasta la vista" because you ask him to, was every adolescent boy's dream. I was crying throughout most of the final battle: the T-800 gets his face pounded so badly that he goes offline, then locates a backup power source, then proceeds to take down the techologically-superior T-1000, only to then sacrifice himself for the good of the future conflict. If James Cameron had shot Titanic like this, I think I would have liked it a heck of a lot more.

4. Wall-E

You know the scene. Robots are extremely handy lead characters because screenwriters can put them through so much punishment and just write it off by saying that they don't feel physical pain anyway. So Wall-E being cruelly crushed to a pancake is visual agony for the viewers; the scene is less than 10 seconds long but it successfully squeezes every last drop of emotional investment from our collective tear ducts. (Try to imagine how that scene would have worked if Wall-E had been a dog, for example.)

5. Edward Scissorhands

People sometimes forget, when they talk about this movie, that the lead character was a machine. He wasn't a guy with scissors for hands, he was a human-sized toy. Tim Burton's fairytale has a mean-spirited denouement, and we are treated to a rather chilling view of how humans can be less humane than the humanoids they persecute. The dude just wanted to trim hedges and stuff, why won't you assholes leave him alone???

Other minor tearjerkers include Roy's sad expiration at the end of Blade Runner, Data's sacrifice in Star Trek: Nemesis, Bishop getting summarily ripped apart at the end of Aliens. I cannot help but look back on all these heartwrenching sequences with a sense of wonder: why is it that we experience such intense emotional connections with the apparently emotionless? Bots don't cry, but we do.