In making policy, it seems that sometimes the possibility of unintended consequences is not considered. Unfortunately, whether by oversight or some other force, policies get created which create perverse incentives. Our complicated tax law has got people doing all kinds of unproductive things in order to get around paying taxes. In our welfare programs, we have some systems in place which actually make or keep people impoverished.

For example, consider a program which provides health insurance for families below the poverty line. For a family of four, this would be an income of $21,200 annually. If a job offer were extended to the father of this family for $30,000 per year, without health insurance, should he take it? It appears so, but actually, he might be worse off. If the health care benefit he is receiving is worth $12,100 per year (the average annual premium for an employer health plan covering a family of four), then in the first case, he is making practically $33,300; in the second case, he is only getting $17,900. The perverse incentive is for him to stay below the poverty line by staying underemployed.

What do you get when you extend welfare benefits to unwed mothers? Why, more unwed mothers, of course. This, in turn, creates more poverty. I'm sure the designers of our welfare programs did not intend to make more people impoverished. The fact is, when you pay for something, you get more of it.

The No Child Left Behind Act seems like a good idea, right? I mean, nobody wants to leave a child behind. The Act requires that schools show improvement in student test scores. This provides an incentive for the school to encourage low-performing students to drop out before they take the test. Oops.

Or, consider the various Digital Rights Management schemes which make it harder to copy and access music, movies, or video games. It seems like a good idea, right? But there are some fair uses of copyrighted material which DRM prevents, like saving your movies to your computer's hard drive so you can watch them without having to bother with the discs. Since pirated content doesn't have these restrictions, it creates a perverse incentive for people to pirate content instead of buying it, which is exactly the opposite of what the designers intended.

Instead of blindly reforming, we need to carefully consider all the implications of a policy before implementing it. There is an ecological balance, and if you adjust one side of the equation, you've got to deal with the other side, too.

My family recently moved into a new neighborhood in Bountiful, Utah. We are in a bigger house now, the drive to work is much shorter, and we have lots of fruit trees. My wife and I made a lovely pie from our fresh backyard peaches on Sunday. I couldn't be happier.

One thing that has pleasantly surprised me is just how warm and friendly our neighbors are. I feel like my family has received a very warm welcome into the local community. I have experienced this sense of hospitality in other places where I have lived, but never quite as strongly as in Bountiful. When we were moving in, my mother told me how happy she was for us, because "the people are so polite and courteous there." I haven't been disappointed.

I've lived in four different neighborhoods in Bountiful and the people have been friendly in each of them. This begs the question: Is this a trend, or a coincidence? Are the people of Bountiful really friendlier than in other places, and, if so, why?

My theories are thus:

1. The low crime rate makes people feel safe opening up to others in the community.
2. The homogeneity in religion, culture, and heritage help people feel at home with one another. People feel comfortable around people who are like them.
   
3. The very family-oriented lifestyle here helps people to love one another.
4. The slower pace of life makes people more relaxed and less in a hurry.
5. The people here are older (Bountiful's median age is 32 compared to Utah's 27, making it the 9th oldest in the state), and old people are friendlier.

Or, perhaps I am just starry-eyed. It's impossible to determine something like this quantitatively, so I think I will never know for sure. But of all the places I've lived in Utah, this place feels the most like Zion.

Labels: utah

Refrigerators, televisions, and computers all cost about the same amount. You can get a good one for $2,000; a decent one for $1,200; or a cheap one for $300.

Computers stopped being cool once they started selling them at Walmart and at furniture stores.

People see computers now as just another appliance. They aren't something to be experienced, just something to get the job done. Nobody cares how a refrigerator works, they just want their food cold.

I remember when computers had mystique. When it was something special to know how one works and to have the ability to build, fix, and modify a computer. When people used to have computer hobbyist clubs. Now, computers are built in boring factories in east Asia using slave labor, and they're serviced by clueless drones at Best Buy.

These days, it seems like nobody cares. I have almost no emotional attachment to my home computer. I can't even remember the processor speed, what kind of video card it has, or how much RAM is in it. The fact is, it doesn't matter anymore. When it starts to get slow, you just go out and buy a new one. Ho hum.

There seems to still be some magic left in software, at least.

Labels: computers

Last night, my wife and I finally signed the papers to sell our first home.

We bought the place in October 2005, and moved in during General Conference. We were a young married couple expecting our first child, and we wanted a place of our own to raise him in. After a couple of months searching for a place we could afford, we found this one and fell in love with it. We negotiated the price and the terms with the previous owners over the kitchen table.

Compared to the other places we had looked at, it seemed wonderful. In our price range, we had been stuck looking at old houses in bad condition in questionable neighborhoods in Layton, Utah. So when my mother-in-law told us about this for-sale-by-owner house in Kaysville that she discovered, we were pleasantly surprised. It was newer (only 8 years old) and less expensive than the ones we had been looking at, and it was closer to Bountiful, which is were we both grew up and were living at the time.

There were only two problems. First, that it was small (1,213 square feet), although it was rather bigger than the one-bedroom basement apartment we had been living in. Second, it abutted Interstate 15, which was very noisy. I-15 is the major thoroughfare for Davis County residents going to and from Salt Lake County, so it gets a lot of use.

We decided to go through with it anyway, and were happy with it. I planted strawberries and had my own lawn to mow. I felt like I had more roots in the community because I was a landowner. The local ward had lots of young families like us, and we made very good friends with a couple of those families, even sharing Family Home Evening with them. After a couple of days, I didn't even hear the freeway noise, but it bothered my wife the whole time we lived there.

Eventually, I changed jobs from a software company in North Salt Lake to one in South Jordan, which changed my commute time from 20 minutes to 60. The long drive came to wear on me and so we decided to move closer to work. We fixed up and decorated the house, put it on the market, and spent a few months keeping it spotless. It all finally came to a close yesterday.

So, this is adieu to my first bit of soil. I'm happy for the memories and hope to make many new ones in our next place.

Labels: real estate, utah

My little family has been living with my wife's parents in Bountiful for the past couple of months, because my wife had some complications with her pregnancy of our second child, William. (They are both doing fine now.) Her parents have been very helpful and supportive and I am very grateful that they helped take care of us while Chelsea was incapacitated. It was a good experience and I enjoyed getting to know her parents better.

We moved back into our house in Kaysville last night. It is good to be in a place of our own again, with all our familiar furniture, utensils, and appliances. Still, it doesn't feel quite like home. We put our house up for sale about the time we moved in with her parents, and it hasn't sold yet. It has been getting a lot of showings, but no offers. I understand this is pretty typical of the market right now. As part of our preparation to sell the house, we gave up our emotional attachment to it. So, it feels kind of like we are living in a hotel.

I am looking forward to when we can sell the place and buy our next house, and start that new chapter of life. It will be nice to finally settle down again. For now, though, I am just happy to be able to walk around the house in my underwear again.

Labels: real estate, utah

My wife and I were driving up to the University Hospital in Salt Lake City yesterday afternoon. As we were heading up South Temple street in the Avenues neighborhood, there was a man staggering lackadaisically in the middle of the road. He loosely waved to us as we changed lanes to avoid hitting him. He must have been stoned.

Only in Salt Lake.

Labels: utah

I remember the many frustrating hours I spent in C and C++ dealing with arrays. I remember the nights hunting down the cause of a bug, only to realize it was the result of exceeding my array bounds. I remember having to redefine and copy arrays when I wanted to change the number of elements in the array, because in C, array length is fixed.

When I learned about linked lists, it got better. Rather than allocating a specific chunk of memory, like a static array did, linked lists are much more flexible because each element simply contains a memory pointer to the next one. This is very flexible, because you can add, remove, or change the nodes in a linked list quite easily.

However, accessing the elements of a linked list is more complicated than accessing an array. In an array, if you wanted to loop through and output all the elements of an array, you could do the following:



A linked list is not much more complicated:



However, the linked list really showed its limitation when trying to access elements randomly. You can do the following with a C array, but not a linked list:



Thankfully, in C++, the standard template library introduced vectors, which are a kind of dynamic array. The stl::vector saved me a lot of headaches once I learned how to use it.

In C#, you can use what are called generic lists, which are like C++ vectors. As I was programming my GEDCOM importer last night, I really came to appreciate generic lists. They have all the conveniences of the C array and the C++ vector. You can create them dynamically, but you can also access them just like an array. They're really easy to use, too:

Labels: genealogy, programming, web

Thanks to the rise of the popular anti-Global Warming movement, more and more people in America are becoming environmentally aware, even those who would not have traditionally been environmentalists. Car manufacturers are producing more hybrid and alternative energy vehicles. Congress is debating legislation to reduce carbon gas emission. Walmart is selling reusable cloth shopping bags for $5. But is this a good thing?

I imagine that the old guard, hard-core environmentalists feel frustrated that their movement is being hijacked by politicians and consumers wanting to show off their "green" credibility. I think a lot of people are getting in on the movement because it is hip, and not because they actually care about Earth in a meaningful way.

For example, consider the Honda Prius. An owner may buy one solely so he can smugly show off to the world how environmentally righteous he is. In fact, the New York Times reported that 57% of people who purchased a Prius in 2007 did so because "it makes a statement about me." It's a fashion statement. If people really wanted to save the world from the carbon-emissions bogey man, they would drive less.

We will have to wait and see whether today's green chic actually makes a difference. I, for one, am hoping it does. Personally, I didn't care much about protecting the environment a few years ago, but now, I am starting to think about it more. I hope that we the people of planet Earth can change our ways of exploitation and overuse and become more responsible stewards of this wonderful blue sphere we call home--whether it is fashionable or not.

Labels: environmentalism

When I visit the old neighborhoods of Salt Lake City or Farmington, I am impressed by the magnificent trees which have grown up alongside the streets. When I travel on those streets, I feel a certain kind of excitement and a connection with nature. I imagine what it would be like to live on such a street.

Besides being beautiful, tree-lined streets are shady in the summer, making for a pleasant walk or stroll. An ancient tree with its roots deep in the ground also acts as a symbol of the dignity and tradition of a neighborhood.

I wonder why more streets aren't lined with trees. I understand that sometimes, the roots of a tree can disrupt the sidewalk. However, if the homeowner selects the right kind of tree, this will not be a problem.

I suppose I am feeling sentimental not only for tree-lined streets, but for the communities they represent. Modern suburban developments tend to be devoid of trees except perhaps for tiny saplings. New developments, like the trees that are in them, lack maturity and "roots".

Perhaps with time, these new developments will also have great green trees towering gently over the quiet street, when today's new developments become tomorrow's old neighborhoods.

Labels: real estate, utah

1. Your car could automatically pick up deliveries for you.
2. Automatic cars could manage to have the optimal amount of space between them, which would make merging smoother and reduce traffic congestion.
3. Those who are too old or too young to drive themselves would be able to get around.
4. Drunk driving would not be a problem anymore.
5. The technology necessary to create viable self-driving cars could be used in many other agricultural and industrial settings.
6. Your car would be able to easily find a destination without getting lost or making a wrong turn.
7. Publicly owned auto-automobiles could be used to ferry people from a mass transit station to their final destinations, thus increasing mass transit use and reducing pollution and energy use.
8. Cars could automatically move aside to let emergency vehicles pass with greater speed and safety.
9. Traffic speeds would be more uniform, which would increase safety while allowing speed limits to be higher.
10. You could sleep or watch a movie on your way to work.

Labels: robots