JasonMorrison.net

Oh man, I really have to find something geekier to write about.

Recently a video of Mitt Romney speaking at a fundraiser has been all over the web. It’s gotten a lot of attention because of claims that 47% of Americans are with President Obama “no matter what” because they “believe that they are victims”, “believe the government has a responsibility to care for them”, and “these are people who pay no income tax.”

I’ve seen a lot of blog comments and the like saying how this video is a huge problem for Romney, how this will turn the election against him, etc. Supposedly this is the secret message to the millionaires that, once out, will turn the 99% against Romney.

I don’t think that’s the case at all.

I think Romney is playing a totally different game. In fact, I don’t think he really believes the “47 percent think they are victims” talk at all, and he knows that he can count on the votes of huge numbers of people who are dependent on government benefits.

This is easy to demonstrate. For example, here’s an article showing that 8 of the top 10 states by percentage paying no income taxes are so-called red states, which vote Republican. Here’s a cool interactive map that shows in more detail where government benefit recipients live, by percentage and benefit type. Clearly that map covers a lot of Romney country.

This New York Times article from earlier this year spells it out in detail: many, many people voting for candidates who promise to slash benefits are currently dependent those same benefits. How can this be?

Some of those votes can be explained by sheer ignorance, but I bet most are explained by human psychology. In Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini writes about the most effective methods for influencing behavior – covering everything from how tupperware parties influence sales decisions to what convinced everyone to drink the koolaid in Jonestown.

One of the tools is called “liking”, specifically association. We want to link ourselves to positive events and disassociate from negative events. Cialdini’s examples mostly deal with the way people talk about sports teams (“we won” instead of “the team won”, etc.), but the same applied to political parties and other political groups. In fact, the more damage we feel to our self-image, the more likely we are to make these associations. So if a life-long Republican loses their job and is forced to live on unemployment, it makes sense if they stand in lock step with the party that’s demanding spending cuts, rather than changing their opinion.

Another related tool of persuasion is similarity. According to Cialdini’s research, we consistently like people who have similar opinions, background, etc. to ourselves, and we’re much more likely to be persuaded by someone we like. Salespeople are trained to find (or fake) similarities with their customers to get them to buy that car. What’s more, we don’t necessarily value objective similarities as much as similarities to who we think we are, or who we would like to be. If you want to change someone’s mind, appeal to their aspirational identity.

So I’m not sure that leaking this secret message to millionaires is that devastating to Romney’s campaign. In America, we are all millionaires who just happen to be facing some setbacks right now. In our heart of hearts, we’re all just one step away from being celebrities and rock stars.

When Romney is talking to millionaires, he knows he’s talking to a lot of thousandaires and nothingaires too. Are you “dependent upon government”? Do you believe you “are a victim”? Do you think you “are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it”? If you feel deeply that you aren’t that kind of person, then you’re mentally placing yourself in that room too, even if you can’t afford the $1000 donation (or whatever) to get in.

Note that I’m not saying that Mitt Romney, or the Republican party, has a monopoly on the use of these techniques, but I think it’s clear they are extremely good at using them, way better than the Democrats. It’s like watching the Harlem Globetrotters play against the Washington Generals.

I have my own political opinions, but my point with this blog post isn’t to convince you to vote one way or another. I just think this is a brilliant demonstration of how human psychology works, and how the psychology of persuasion is used to achieve very counterintuitive results in elections.

What do you think?

I ran across this article on Mitt Romney’s $101-million IRA and it led me to comment on Google Plus. The max yearly contribution for an IRA is $5000 (with some caveats) so it’s hard to see how one could get from there to $101,000,000 without something a bit more creative going on.

I got a few comments to the effect that Romney could have rolled over 401Ks into his IRA without penalty, and that’s definitely true. But 401Ks also have limits, and in fact the government has had limits on total deferred compensations for quite some time.

So I decided to look up the total limits for IRA and 401K contributions and do a little math. You can see the spreadsheet here.

With just an IRA, making the max contribution since 1974, and assuming a 10% annual return, a diligent saver could have amassed around $730,000. Let’s say they were also contributing the max to their 40K since 1987 (I had a hard time finding numbers before then, not entirely sure when 401K started). Our super-saver then rolled over their 401K into their IRA right before running for president in 2012, reaching a total of about $1,700,000. That’s still two orders of magnitude lower than the number cited for Romney’s IRA.

We’re still missing something important – most companies contribute something to employee’s 401K plans as well. I could find some numbers on total deferred compensation limits since 1974, so I put those into a column in our spreadsheet, again with 10% annual return. So assuming between our saver’s and their company they completely maxed out 401K contributions, we could reach $13,000,000 or so. Still an order of magnitude too low.

Now of course none of these numbers are perfect, there’s “catch up” contributions you can add when you’re past a certain age, there may have been other limits over time, etc. I’m definitely not an expert on any of this, so feel free to point out glaring errors in the comments below. It’s also possible that the Reuters article is full of hooey.

But I’m a programmer, and one thing you learn as a programmer is to watch out when your numbers are an order of magnitude too low or too high.

I really doubt Mitt Romney has done anything illegal with his IRA. But it’s hard for me to see how Romney could get to such heights without something along the lines of putting in investment partnerships and setting their value low, as alluded to in the Reuters article. Which is great for him, and a nice clever trick to get around paying his taxes, but personally I don’t find it very impressive.

Not to get too political on this (mostly) geeky blog, but it seems like yet another one of those things you can do if you already have a ton of money / lawyers / accountants at your disposal. Of course, everybody goes through their deductions, puts in last-minute charitable contributions, etc. to try to bring their tax bill down, but not everyone can take it to this level and the people who can take it to this level need tax relief the least.

Let me pull this post back by putting it in the geekiest way possible: You ever play D&D with one of those guys who’s a total rules lawyer? Like, he has memorized every expansion of every edition since Gary Gygax threw a magic missile, and every encounter takes an eon as he pulls out every possible table, caveat, and vaguely-worded paragraph to ensure that his character never loses not even one hit point? Playing D&D with guys like that is excruciating, but it’s even less fun if they insist on starting the game 10 levels higher than everyone else too.

BTW, here’s the spreadsheet for your viewing pleasure. Like I said, feel free to point out everything I’ve gotten wrong, I’m sure there’s something.

One thing Twitter and a lot of other social sites have that Google+ lacks is a nice, short url to give to people. I can say:

“Nice to meet you, I’m at twitter.com/iamjason.”

And there I am. That’s a lot easier than saying:

“Why hello there, would you like to follow me at https://plus.google.com/u/0/101453275162405736930/posts?”

After the 6th digit or so people wander off. Just imagine trying to spell it out during a candlelit dinner on your first date with someone. Ruins the mood.

I could use a redirect service, like gplus.to, for a vanity url, but then they get to see who’s going to my profile and it’s sort of up to them if it keeps working.

So now I just tell everyone to go to jasonmorrison.net/+. It’s easy to set up, if you have your own domain. Here’s how to do it if your web server is running Apache, which is pretty common:

Step 1: FTP to your server, go to the root directory for your site, and open or create an .htaccess file.

Step 2: Put this in your .htaccess file:

Redirect permanent /+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/(your profile id)/posts

This will create a 301 (permanent) redirect to your profile, which also tells search engines that you mean business.

Step 3: Order a new box of business cards, with your spiffy new Google+ profile link.

Hope this helps!

From More Around Mystic, CT

I have a problem: some people are following me on Twitter, some friends and family are only on Facebook, and others are using Google+. Personally, I like using Google+ most – I like the UI and using my Circles to share certain things with just family, and G+ ties into Picasa really well. I’m also probably a little biased.

I just don’t have time to manually post everything I want to share with all of these people in all three places. So I decided to write all my inane ramblings into Google+, and from there automatically update Twitter and Facebook.

Before I start, I feel like I have to add a disclaimer: Please don’t spam Twitter and FB by shoveling all sorts of autogenerated content into your feed, with no intention fo actually interacting with people. No one wants that, you will lose all your friends, and even your dog will stop loving you. Be judicious.

Here’s how you can automatically post from Google+ to Twitter:

Step 1: Get an RSS feed of your public Google+ posts.

Many sites offer RSS feeds, usually you just have to look for the little orange icon, or a link that says “subscribe”. Google+, at this point, does not – but it does offer an API, so it’s not too hard to write a Python or PHP script to convert. Actually, many developers have stepped in to offer RSS feed services – I found a good list of them here.

A word of caution: these services may be unreliable, they may come and go, developers may run out of money or go crazy and post weird stuff on everyone’s feeds. If you don’t want to take the risk, you should probably write your own code using the Google+ API or wait for Google+ to support RSS.

Step 2: Take your RSS feed and add it to FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a feed management system run by Google. It lets you do all sorts of fun things with your RSS feeds, including posting to Twitter (Step 3). First, go to http://feedburner.google.com/, there should be a text area titles “Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here:”. Do that. FeedBurner will walk you through a couple of simple steps.

Step 3: Set up FeedBurner to post to Twitter.

Click the “Publicize” tab and look for the “Socialize” option in the menu. There you’ll see an option to add your Twitter account. Click the button, authorize FeedBurner in Twitter, and you are ready to go.

By the way, FeedBurner also offers some interesting analytics options so you can see how many people click through from Twitter, Facebook, or wherever else they might see your feed.

How to update Facebook too:

Actually, I already had Twitter updating Facebook – that’s easy to do, simply go to http://twitter.com/settings/profile and connect your Facebook account. This has a drawback, though, in that it squeezes my G+ posts through the 140-character wringer of Twitter before passing it on to Facebook.

Facebook does have a few apps that are able to publish an RSS feed directly to your wall. RSS Graffiti looks like a likely candidate, with lots of positive reviews, but I haven’t actually tried it. The list of permissions the app demands scared me away.

Hopefully this is useful and I’m not annoying my friends with too many reposts. If you feel the need to stop following me on Twitter since you’ve already seen my hilarious anecdotes on G+ (or vice versa), I’ll understand. I should also add that I’ll read any comments and probably reply in all three systems – I don’t want to force everyone to use G+ to talk to me.

One big drawback to this setup is that I can’t share privately across the three social networks. If I post pictures of my kid playing at the park to just my Friends and Family circles, I don’t have a way to post that to my network in Facebook. Drop me a note if you’ve figured that one out.

I’ve been hearing about 9/11 all weekend on NPR and I thought I’d share a tiny bit about my experience. I usually post about geekier topics so I hope you’ll excuse a bit of a tangent – though this might be one of the geekier experiences of the tragedy that you’ll read today.

From NYC 2011 Shots

In 2001 I was out of college and working for Cleveland.com. It was a pretty good job coming out of school with a major in journalism and a minor in computer science, though it didn’t involve as much journalism or programming as I had hoped. I got to help out with some man-on-the-street interviews, write headlines, etc. but most of my time was spent doing things like layout section pages, manually scrubbing errors from XML files, and deleting profanity from the forums.

I was off that day, I worked weekends. I was still living at my parents’ house, and when the news started pouring in I was glued to CNN just like everyone else. I called the office to see if they wanted me to come in, but my boss told me to stay home, since there was talk of evacuating downtown Cleveland (Cleveland, can you imagine it?) – so stay home. I have nothing interesting to add about that day – go listen to the survivors’ stories on NPR – I watched TV and checked news on the web obsessively just like everyone.

My story gets a little more interesting the next day. I came in and was given a few tasks:

1. Keep an eye on wire reports of victims lists for locals.

This might sound a bit weird if you haven’t worked in regional or local journalism, but people become much more interested when something happens to a complete stranger who grew up in their hometown than when the same thing happens to a complete stranger who grew up in Kalamazoo. I was used to this. Still, continuously scouring the victims list was a grim way to punctuate my days for the next couple weeks. I never got used to it. As I checked the list of victims for the 20th time, though, I started to wish everyone had to read this list over and over just as I did – that way they would see names like Mohammed, Ahmed, and Abdoul, sprinkled through the long lines of Adams and Smiths. The US is a nation of immigrants, and the WTC was a hub of international business. It seemed like trivial, uncontroversial facts like this started to slip away from the national memory on that day.

2. Help cover the wire for photos.

This was another duty I wish the whole country had to share, but for different reasons. The wire was not filled with “death to America” chants, it was filled with an international outpouring of grief and support we are unlikely to see again. It’s hard to imagine it now, but there was a brief moment where almost everyone really was with us, from Europe to Asia to the Middle East (though not quite everyone). It was hard to imagine it in those days as well – I would see thousands of photos of Palestinians holding candlelight vigils over the wire only to come home and hear about nothing but American flags burning in streets, real and imagined. There were clearly two stories to tell in those days and one of them, the hate-provoking story of the minority of reactions, got all of the coverage.

3. For the love of god, try to keep things under control in the forums.

There’s a bit of a debate over requiring real names online right now, but at the time Cleveland.com forums didn’t even require a login to post. Other than a few helpful answers to gardening and wedding questions they were usually filled with pages of schoolyard name-calling lubricated in boastful logorrhea. The attacks put things into overdrive. Racism, conspiracy theories, accusations against everyone’s patriotism – eventually we gave up trying to really moderate and started deleting any threads that had devolved into nastiness, which was almost all threads on some boards. I didn’t have to wait for “Loose Change” to try to “wake me up”, all of the scapegoats and crackpot theories were already there.

It would be nice to think I was above all of this but I knew how the forum posters felt. One moment I will never forget was just a walk from my car to the office – I parked in a very cheap lot down in the Flats, so I had to walk up hill to the Warehouse District every morning. One of my least favorite duties was occasionally manning the front desk – but that morning I started really looking forward to it. We had been getting threats against one of our staff from some nut, and I had heard he even showed up to the office once. As I walked up that hill, I found myself wishing he would show up again, so I could do something physical to someone who deserved it. Before I realized how crazy the feeling was, I’m not sure I ever wanted anything that badly before.

By the time I got to office I had calmed myself down, like an adult. Ready to clean the forums and scour the list of dead for another day, though I wouldn’t be there much longer. Cleveland.com had weathered the dotcom bust fairly well until the advertising spend decline following 9-11, and I was laid off.

In two ways, 9-11 was the event that turned me away from a career in journalism toward programming. For one thing, I couldn’t find a job in the field. The tech job market was bad for a long time, but it was possible to eventually feed yourself as a programmer or web developer. At the same time, that post-9-11 news coverage, and especially the coverage in the lead up the Iraq war, made me lose interest in the field. War is not something to enter into lightly – regardless of whether you were in favor of invading Iraq or not, shouldn’t someone have been asking really hard questions? For the past decade, I have had a hard time finding anyone asking hard questions, unless they were doing a comedy show.

I’m posting this late, on the West Coast, so the anniversary is basically over. My story is small and peripheral to the really tragic stories of that day, but I learned something from it. So now, back to your regularly scheduled geekery.