Facebook

I'm not really using Facebook, although I have an account on there. I feel that its design is fundamentally flawed because it doesn't reflect how I actually interact with my friends.

Facebook (and, to be fair, most of its peers and competitors) is designed to treat all the people you know as a single pool, an equivalence class of others; adding someone as a friend basically allows them to interact with you and all your other friends. When you make a "post" on your "wall", your friends, and maybe their friends, and maybe the world can see it; if you let friends "post" on your "wall", all of them can do so, and see each other's entries.

That doesn't mirror how I communicate with others in the real world; I don't interact in the same way with all my friends. My relationships with different sets of friends revolve around different activities, along orthogonal axes. For example, many of my friends are ones with which I share a particular hobby or interest; I don't particularly care what their political or religious views are, because they're not important in those contexts (business colleagues are a typical example). Then there are people with whom I specifically share values and ideals, and with whom I work to accomplish other shared goals or changes. Finally, I have family, with whom I have even different ties. To make it even more complex, the groups are not mutually exclusive; there are overlaps.

I'm just not convinced that there are that many things I want to communicate to all those people at the same time. For example, I might choose to express a political opinion, but I really don't want to discuss it with everyone. I also don't necessarily want my "wall" to be in the middle of a heated discussion between people I know, but who may not know each other, and who may never find common ground. And I think I'd like to have some space where I can discuss, plan, or do things with my friends or family which I would not necessarily want to disclose to my business colleagues.

The online facility which I think may be closest in spirit to what I think would be appropriate is Google Wave. I should be able to create one or more Wave(s) for each of my groups of friends, and collaborate with them inside. Individual "wavelets" can be open to all the people on the Wave, or to some subsets. In addition, the collaboration facilities will be much richer than any existing social media platform; for example, I've not been able to share documents with people on Facebook, so small groups of us use Google Documents together.

So that's a long explanation for why I might not "friend" you on Facebook. It's nothing personal; I'd just rather we keep in touch some other way.

HOWTO: Houston Flu

The City of Houston has a resource dedicated to information about the H1N1 and seasonal flu viruses, including a list of places where the vaccines (shot and spray) are available at no charge. Google has a map facility where you can put in your zip code and find commercial sites which have stocked, are stocking, and will stock the various vaccines. Houston ISD is opening campuses to provide vaccines this weekend; check back because they're likely to continue the program for a while.

And finally, Google Trends is predicting flu severity by tracking geographically-identified searches for flu related terms. Their methodology is interesting; they basically look for search terms whose temporal frequency matched historical outbreak data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for particular locations, and then use those terms to predict forward what CDC trends will be based on current searches. It's an interesting approach, especially since CDC data is only available after a lag of two weeks or so. It's just a correlation, and may be useful to provide earlier warning of outbreak. But it all depends on how well current and future search terms match ones used in the past, and depends on how representative Google searchers are of the population, etc. YMMV.

Stay healthy and safe this flu season!

This, I don't understand

The Houston Chronicle published a story about the Texas unemployment tax going up again next year. The logic behind such a move is perplexing. The fund, which is established by the Texas Labor Code, increases its impact on businesses (especially small businesses) during bad years, and reduces its impact on business during good years. This is because the tax rate goes up in bad years; the rate is calculated (roughly, and in part: see 204.062ff) by taking the unemployment claims to September 30 (in bad years, this goes up) and dividing this by taxable wages for the same period (in bad years, this goes down). The result is to essentially exacerbate the effect of recession by putting a higher burden on solvent businesses to support the unemployment fund in bad years.

The fund is organized as a reserve (see section 203.028(b)), so contributions should instead be increased during good years, to reduce the load on businesses during bad years. This would allow the state to assess businesses when they can best afford it, and save money for periods when businesses could use a break.

Disclaimer: I'm neither an economist nor an actuary. There may in fact be sound business reasons why the tax is structured the way it is, but I'm afraid they're too obscured by what seems like an obvious flaw in the reasoning behind the calculation. I'd appreciate any comments explaining why the current setup makes sense.

Privity of Estate

One of the concepts in our Property class which seems to confuse people is called privity of estate. Essentially, two parties have privity of estate when they can trace their land back to a common parcel. However, the analysis taught in our casebook and in the literature (I think even going back before Llewellyn) uses a two part process: first look for "vertical privity" on each side, back in time to a party who has "horizontal privity" with a common vendor.

Well, there's no reason why the terms "horizontal" and "vertical" make any sense in this context. Our casebook authors suggest that professors have, from time immemorial, drawn the analysis on a chalk board, and have put the original vendor and vendees in a horizontal line, and then drew subsequent conveyances in a vertical line (in some imperfect fashion representing time). I think people get confused because the adjectives "horizontal" and "vertical" have no other specialized meaning in this area of law.

As long as we're making terms up, I'd like to suggest some more descriptive phrases for what's occurring in these transactions. Perhaps the term "horizontal privity" would be better described as privity of estate following partition, privity of covenant (if there is an enforceable covenant), shortened to perhaps "partition privity" or "covenant privity" (a related concept is "contract privity"). A vendor who partitions their parcel and sells part of it to a vendee is in "covenant privity" (or "horizontal privity") with the buyer. Then you could have privity of estate in the whole or privity of assignment, which might contract to "transfer privity", "conveyance privity", "whole privity", "assignment privity", or something similar. This describes "vertical privity" in which the vendor conveys an entire parcel (without partition) to a vendee.

Any takers? Does these make more sense than "horizontal" and "vertical" privity?