What I Learned Today

I attended an excellent lecture this evening by Dr. Lucy Jones of the USGS titled, “The Science Behind the ShakeOut.” The Great Southern California ShakeOut is an exercise that will involve millions of southern California residents and responders in simulating a magnitude 7.8 earthquake at 10:00 a.m. on November 13, 2008. The scenario is pretty dramatic, but was deliberately chosen not to be the worst-case scenario; the goal is for the exercise to feel realistic enough to send a “this could really happen” message. Participants are encouraged to plan out how to get messages to friends and relatives in the aftermath of the quake (tip: text messages are more likely to get through than live phone calls), how to survive (stock up on water!), and to do a thorough check of what could fall/ignite/explode in the house.

The simulation videos are pretty fascinating (and disturbing). The earthquake originates south of L.A. but quickly propagates northward up the San Andreas, then gets “stuck” in the L.A. basin as the thickly piled sediment floor rattles around like jello for an estimated 55 seconds. (The 1994 Northridge earthquake lasted a grand total of 7 seconds.) Likely damages include:

• Power lines crossing the San Andreas will be severed. This will trigger a cascade of failures that will take out the entire West Coast power grid. Interestingly, we will probably lose power 20-30 seconds before the quake reaches L.A.—a kind of “early warning” system.
• Water crossing the fault will be disrupted. This is the most severe threat to post-quake survival, since the water distribution system is mostly concrete, quite old, and has little likelihood of being retrofitted to be more robust, and because humans don’t live very long without water. And we live in a desert…
• On the other hand, our lack of water means that the chance of soil liquefaction (scary thought) is low.
• Landslides will be rampant, causing damage and blocking roads.
• Natural gas and gasoline pipelines crossing the fault will be severed. So will fiber optics and telecom lines. Just about all of our incoming lines and pipes of this sort cross the San Andreas somewhere and are therefore vulnerable.
• Roads and rail lines crossing the fault will be broken. Fortunately, heavy investment in bridge retrofitting since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake has reduced the chance of bridge failure in the major highways.
• 1 in 16 buildings will be “significantly damaged” (defined as incurring damage that would cost more than 10% of the replacement value to correct).
• 133,000 houses will be burnt due to post-quake fires.
• $213 billion in damages is expected.
• There will be 53,000 injuries and 1,800 deaths. The latter apparently is quite a small number for a quake of this magnitude, due to increased building safety codes and other existing preparations.
• Yes, this really isn’t the worst-case scenario. It assumes no Santa Ana winds (that would spread fires much further) and that the quake doesn’t propagate much further north than the San Fernando Valley. It also does not account for any damages that would occur due to the (probably large and several) aftershocks.

After the quake, we are likely to experience “rolling light-ups”, in contrast to rolling black-outs; each block will get a couple of hours of electricity per day, at rotating times, as the electricity comes back up to speed.

Overall, the talk was full of fascinating detail, and it’s clear that they’ve invested a lot of effort in defining the simulation scenario details. Many of the estimated numbers are the result of multiple independent teams making estimates and then pooling them together, to increase the reliability of the estimates. The likely outcome is sobering, and this isn’t a low-probability event; large quakes happen on the San Andreas about every 100-150 years. The last large one at the south end (where this scenario originates) was in 1685.

I signed up for the ShakeOut a few months ago, out of curiosity. Now I’m even more motivated to get around to preparing an actual earthquake kit and stocking up on water—and planning how I would get word out to friends and family to assure them of my survival.

Being for “change” is good, as long as it’s change in other people. Actually changing your own opinion is bad. To paraphrase part of the New Hampshire debate on Jan. 5:

Obama: I’m for change.
Edwards: Me too!
Clinton: Obama has changed his position on health care, the Patriot Act, and fifteen other issues in the past 3 years.
Obama: No, I didn’t. [Maybe he’s not for change?]
Clinton: Yes, you did. And you said Edwards was “unelectable” because he changed his position on other issues.
Obama: I never said he was “unelectable”… Anyway, I’m for change. [Maybe he is!]
Edwards: Me too! The evil forces of the status quo want to stop us.
Clinton: What do you mean, evil? I’m for change, too!
Richardson: When did experience become a bad thing?

Now, inconsistency generally isn’t a good thing, as it lies a little too close to “lying” for most people’s comfort. But I have no problem with a leader changing his or her mind over time, as new information comes to light; in fact, I consider this a good attribute of a leader. Why is no one willing to step up and say, “Yes, I changed my mind on that issue. Here are the reasons.”? Do we really want a static leader with frozen opinions that don’t respond to the current state of the world? Haven’t we had enough of that already?

In my opinion, one of the major strengths of humanity is our ability to adapt to changing environments and to come up with new strategies and ideas when old ones don’t work.

And as for the near-hackneyed concept of “change”, it cannot be characterized as an unadulterated good or bad thing. Does it even make sense to say that you’re for “change”? Changing the status quo could result in improvements or in things getting worse. It’s the quality of the proposed change that matters. I would like to see the candidates stop picking on each other for being for or against “change” and simultaneously for “changing too much” (I’m getting confused as to what the real issue is, and I’m sure I’m not the only one). Instead, how about focusing on what kind of changes they each propose?

Out on a walk the other evening, I encountered this sign. It was so egregious that I was forced to whip out my cell phone and take a picture. Now this may be a common exercise for you all, but my cell phone is more like an afterthought than an appendage. I had to spend several minutes standing in the roadway while I figured out how to get the picture off the camera and up onto the Internet somewhere. Apparently, the only method on my severely crippled Bluetooth Motorola RAZR (thanks, Verizon!) is to send it to “MY PIX PLACE”. (Have you been counting the number of misspellings this post has forced me into so far?)

Once home, I slogged around the Verizon Wireless website until I finally found MY PIX PLACE, where I can turn the picture into an e-card with a teddy-bear frame, or send it to someone else’s phone, but not, of course, simply download the thing. MY PIX PLACE assures me that the picture has been stored at its “full resolution” (800×600, according to my “gallery”); it’s all there, sure, but I’m not permitted to get at it.

Stupid technology rant aside, the real reason we’re here is the content of the photo. One asks: why was “careful” left stripped of its suffix? Was there an “ly” shortage at the letter factory? Was there too little room to squeeze two more letters in? Why was “careful” given the shaft while “road” was decorated with a completely unnecessary “way”?

We may never know. For now, I’ll just amuse myself by inserting punctuation to correct the grammatical mistake and make it read just a little bit better.

DRIVE;
CAREFUL
PEDESTRIANS
MAY BE IN
ROADWAY

Like homeowners everywhere, I am regularly inundated with mail offers to refinance my mortgage. I have no desire to refinance the quite attractive interest rate I got when I bought my home, so most of these go straight to the shredder. But sometimes the mortgage companies disguise their offers in blank envelopes, so I open them before realizing what they are.

Today, I received an offer (from Union Fidelity Mortgage) so egregious that I had to share. Ignoring the complimentary “vacation for two” being offered as a teaser, here is an excerpt from the front page:

Loan Amount	New Low Payment**
$300,000	$759
$400,000	$1,012
$500,000	$1,265

Examples shown based on APR 7.13%.
** See other side for important information.

Wait a minute… a $300,000 loan at 7.13% for only $759/month? That doesn’t look right. I whip out my calculator (actually, bc -l) and determine that the interest accrued on $300,000 at 7.13% in a single month is $1782. Therefore, after making your payment, you would still accrue $1023 each month… on top of the principal, which you wouldn’t have paid down at all. How can this be?

I turned the page over to read the “important information”, in all of its hideous glory:

Payment shown in the minimum payment for the first year and is available on a non-fully amortized loan of 40 years based on a 1% payment rate. If this payment is made it will result in interest being deferred to the balance of the loan. It is possible at the end of term to still owe principal. If this payment is made no principal is paid down. APR shown is variable rate with an annual cap of 2% and lifetime of 10.9%. Payment can increase by a maximum of 7.5% per year on payment minimizer.

I have bolded all of the gotchas. I’m actually not sure what they mean by a “1% payment rate”. But it’s clear that the low-low payment of $759 is only permitted for the first year. Who knows how high it will go next year? There’s a cap on its increase of 7.5%, but obviously you aren’t doing yourself any favors by keeping that payment low — you’re just accumulating more and more “deferred interest”. At the end of the first year, you will have paid $9108, and you’ll owe $312,276. You’re racking up debt to “Union Fidelity” at a rate of more than $1000/month for the privilege of… what? Living in the moment? Robbing your future self to pay the present? (There may be those who would intentionally choose such a loan, counting on an increase in equity to compensate for the mounting loan balance, but that’s way outside my comfort zone in terms of rational risk.)

And that’s not all. That assumes that the interest rate stays at 7.13%. But according to these terms, not only might the minimum payment go up, the interest rate itself is variable and can go up by 2% each year. Ouch.

But wait, there’s still more! Unlike traditional 30-year loans, or the more cost-effective 15-year loans, this one is a whopping 40-year loan. If fully amortized (that is, you pay interest as it accrues *and* pay down principal on a 40-year schedule, so as to not end up owing anything at the end), the monthly payment should be $1893. Anything less than that just helps you dig yourself a financial hole so deep you may never get out. And if you do make that fully amortized payment, then over the 40 years you will pay… wait for it… a total of $608,490 in interest. *Twice* the amount of your $300,000 principal! (A 30-year loan with the same rate, fully amortized, would have you paying $427,980 in interest.) And the reality, with this loan, would be so much more costly.

This stuff makes me sick to my stomach. In terms of “learning”, this was a yet another one of those sit-up-and-take-notice moments, and a chance to be surprised anew at how manipulative and opportunistic money lenders can be. Before today, I wasn’t even aware that “non-fully amortized” loans existed. Or maybe I’d just turned an instinctive blind eye.

To top it all off, the microprint for the terms concludes with:

This is a great loan for many different circumstances.

Do tell, Union Fidelity Mortgage. Just which circumstances make this a “great loan”?

Recently, I received a pingback on one of my posts at this site. This inspired me to find out how trackbacks and pingbacks work. The main question was: how does a site know about posts that are made elsewhere that link back to a local post?

As usual, wikipedia came in handy, complete with a table comparing refbacks, trackbacks, and linkbacks. Here’s my summary:

A trackback occurs when server A notifies server B that A contains a reference to content on B. B can then publish a link back to A’s content (often with a small bit of context); this context-link is often referred to as the “trackback”. Since this activity involves communication between servers, it only works for blogging software that is trackback-enabled. Often the person writing weblog A must also use a special “trackback URL” (specified by B) when referring to the content on B — and not just in the content of their post, but in a separate “trackback” field (e.g., for WordPress).

Note that a trackback doesn’t actually require that A had a legitimate post that pointed to B. Anyone can send the web request to B suggesting a site to link back to. This seems to have quickly become another route for incoming spam on various weblogs, so a new form with additional verification has arisen.

A pingback is a trackback in which server B checks A for an actual link back to B’s content. Again, both A and B must actively support pingbacks for this to work. An advantage is that no special URLs are needed; when A links to B, there is an automatic notification to B (and B can confirm the legitimacy of A’s pingback).

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Well, the pingback I received was a bit perplexing. It wasn’t a pingback in the sense of someone writing a post about something I wrote. But it wasn’t (quite) spam, either. As far as I can tell, it linked to a kind of automated blog that links verbatim to posts on a variety of subjects (probably specified by keyword). I was unable to determine what the purpose of the site was. I’ve deleted the pingback. But it gets a small kudos anyway, for inspiring me to find out something new.