Dr. Codd Was Right: I Still Hate Neil Irwin, part the fourth

The Kleptocracy of Muskistan Devours You

The world is not linear.
-- Dr. McElhone/1974

[T]he massive push to relocate federal jobs outside the Beltway comes with the risk of kneecapping agencies through the loss of experienced workers and bogging them down in logistical minutia.
-- Curt Devine/2024 [that's the point: make the Damn Gummint incompetent, then destroy it because it's incompetent]

Scientists aren't vocal enough about science. There are large groups of people who think scientists are all frauds and who don't believe in science, and they're being cultured by some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders.
-- Drew Weissman/2022

To date, Microsoft is stating that organizations testing In-Memory OLTP have seen transaction speeds improve by up to 30 times compared to past performance, with the best performance gains achieved when the business logic resides in the database and not in the applications.
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]

I have had to explain and re-explain and re-explain and re-explain, you know, how relational databases work, what is an eigenvector, what is dimensionality reduction.

-- Christopher Wylie/2018

... but Flash-based storage has such a different performance profile from rotating media, that I suspect that it will end up having a large impact on filesystem design. Right now, most filesystems tend to be designed with the latencies of rotating media in mind.

-- Linus Torvalds/2007

I believe quite strongly that, if you think about the issue at the appropriate level of abstraction, you're inexorably led to the position that databases must be relational.

-- Chris Date/2009

This Week's thought

[Scotland's HPV] vaccination program began in 2008, and so far the women who were vaccinated as 12- or 13-year-olds have shown not one single case of cervical cancer. And the rate in women who were vaccinated at later ages was 80% lower than the unvaccinated. Cervical cancer is almost completely preventable through such vaccination programs, and the anti-vaccine activists who have come out against them (such as the dangerous fool nominated to be secretary of HHS) can go to hell.
-- Derek Lowe/2024 [the morons will be running the asylum, if we let them]

See you next week in a brand new show^{©Heckle and Jeckle}

Therefore:

In a time of SSD, multi-core/processor, two terabyte memory and Optane App Direct Mode machines, there is no reason not to build from BCNF data. Time to do what Dr. Codd demonstrated. Technology has finally caught up with the maths.

28 March 2016

I Still Hate Neil Irwin, part the fourth

The best part of not being an academic quant is that I don't have to read every word written by every academic quant on planet Earth. The worst part is the occasional time when an original insight turns out to have a name. Sigh.

In yesterday's Easter Homily, I mentioned an oft offered truth: the US buck is the global reserve currency, and for that reason we have to run a current account deficit against the Rest-of-World economies. The alternatives: 1) forsake reserve currency status or 2) forsake the deficit. Both ways be dragons.

So, as I'm sipping my coffee and reading my dead trees NYT, I find yet another reason to hate Neil Irwin. The piece is a cute Baby Econ essay on international trade (but, CarNation and BananaLand? sounds a bit racist, dontcha think?), and worth the read on its own. But what really frosts my cookies is that the reserve currency problem has a name:

There's even a name for this: the Triffin dilemma. In the mid-20th century, the economist Robert Triffin warned that the provider of the global reserve currency would need to run perpetual trade deficits to keep the world financial system from freezing, with those trade deficits potentially fueling domestic booms and busts.

The key idea is that if a President Trump or any other future leader really wants to reduce our trade deficits in a major way, that leader is going to have to rethink the very underpinnings of global finance.

Damn you, Neil Irwin!!

Dr. Codd Was Right

The Kleptocracy of Muskistan Devours You

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28 March 2016

I Still Hate Neil Irwin, part the fourth

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