Recently there has been a lot of talk about bailing out the automobile industry. I'm against bailouts in general and for the auto industry in particular. They've resisted market changes and are being punished for it, deservedly so. They also seem to be inefficiently run.

People have been rationalizing the bailout on a number of grounds: "The banks got a bailout!", "A million jobs would be lost!". First, the American demand for automobiles isn't going to magically drop to zero (as much as I'd like it to). If one company completely disappears, the demand for cars (and the jobs that accompany it) will be picked up by the other manufacturers. Politicians talk about preserving jobs, but what goes unsaid is that they want existing jobs protected at all costs. Heaven forbid a job be created at a competitor, or that the new efficiencies that made that job obsolete go on to create a new job in another field or industry. A job in and of itself is not worth anything. Keeping someone employed who creates a net negative on the economy is not sustainable. If we improve the operating efficiency of these automakers (at a cost of jobs), then new jobs would be created in other areas with the newly found savings.

Also, I'm tired of people saying manufacturing jobs are important because they "make something". Service oriented jobs make something too, its called wealth, have you heard of it? Just because there is a physical product at the end of the day doesn't mean the job has more value than a service based job. Someone at a financial company that deals with money all day also adds value, if they are improving the efficiency of their business and the economy, otherwise no one would pay them. I work in the service industry, I write software, and judging from the average salaries in my field, I'd say companies believe we add value. If you are creating wealth as part of your job, you are a positive contribution to the economy.

The notion that we, as a nation, don't produce goods is inaccurate. Just because we no longer make cheap steel and other raw materials, doesn't mean we don't make things. There is little money in basic raw materials, which is why we let others do it where the labor is cheaper. America makes advanced and expensive products, such as jet-engines, airplanes, and train locomotives. Intel and IBM have fabs in the United States and a whole green manufacturing industry is popping up in Silicon Valley. We make stuff, alright?

Finally, a bankruptcy could be good for these auto companies. It'd let them restructure themselves and lower costs. If we just keep propping them up with money, they'll keep burning through it and won't improve. By taking money from efficient, profitable businesses and giving it to the automotive companies, which is effectively what would happen, we are removing efficiency from the market and making us all that much poorer.

I just installed the updated version of Google's Mobile App for iPhone because I wanted to test out the voice recognition search. My experience with speech recognition (excluding systems that recognize only a small subset of English, such as digits) has been spotty at best. I know Google has been collecting data using their 411 service for a while, so perhaps they can improve.

I had no faith that the first query I chose would work. Google surprised me when it properly interpreted the query: [can has cheezburger]. Not only did it get the first two words correct, it also used the correct spelling for "cheezburger", even though that word exists in no dictionary. If I just say "cheeseburger", it figures out the correct spelling for that too.

This is one of the reasons I'm so excited about Computer Science. A product like this couldn't have been created even a few years ago because of the vast amount of data that is required to power it (data such as a web corpus, search logs, and 411 voice samples). In fact, in this day and age, data is perhaps more important than algorithms. By throwing enormous amounts of data at the problem, Google's voice recognition algorithm can perform better than any of the best algorithms that don't utilize data. This has only been possible recently because of the affordability of processing terabytes and petabytes of data. I recommend Programming Collective Intelligence for a quick introduction to some of the algorithms enabled by massive amounts of information.

So what's next? I think Google should hook up their excellent voice recognition system with their best of breed machine translation software and create a universal translator. Imagine an iPhone app where you select an output language, speak into the phone, and get back a text or voice translation in the target language. It is still a pipe dream for now. For one, they'd need to port their voice recognition system to other languages, or it'd be a one way conversation. Actually, port is probably the wrong word, "train" would be more accurate. Algorithms created using data—and not code—are language independent from the get go. Instead of writing a whole new algorithm for each language, the system would just need to be trained on an additional corpus, with perhaps a few tweaks to improve precision and recall. To make a truly Star Trek-worthy translator, they'd also have to work on reproducing human speech. Considering how far we've come in the past few years, I don't think a universal translator would take more than 2-4 years to come to fruition.

I'm sick and tired of people making stupid comments when articles about "The Cloud" are posted. If you don't understand the topics on which you speak, then please don't speak! I finally got fed up and replied to a discussion about Microsoft's Azure. Here's the meat of my reply:

"This offering from Microsoft isn't about a web based office suite or webmail, it is foundational web services that allow businesses and developers to build websites and services while offloading the heavy lifting (such as writing distributed systems or load balancing). The primitives Microsoft is offering are similar to those Amazon already has: storage, database, compute, queueing. In general, you don't access these through your browser.

"This isn't some new AJAXy Web 2.0 website. "The Cloud" is about outsourcing the building blocks of software—database, storage, compute—to someone else and paying for exactly what you use. Instead of buying your own machines, managing the fleet, and building or buying scalable software, you pay for a service and someone else takes care of all of that for you.

"It is like the transition to the electric grid. Instead of paying for a generator and diesel upfront, you just pay for what you use from the electric company, and benefit from their economies of scale. This is utility computing."

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon Web Services. However these opinions are mine and mine alone. They do not represent the opinions of Amazon.

My heart goes out to those affected.

I'm getting more disgusted by the week, as the government nationalizes one company after another. I'm being punished for the reckless actions and mistakes of others. I looked into buying a house last summer but decided against it because I thought the market was too shaky and because it would significantly limit my freedom for years to come (for example, the freedom to create a startup).

Now we are faced with an enormous government bailout that will cost each taxpayer thousands of dollars. And this couldn't have happened at a worse time. Since the election is almost upon us, both candidates are veering even more towards populism in order to win votes. They are both blaming the free market for getting us into this mess. However, the government has been engineering this crisis for years by keeping the interest rates low and propping up Freddie and Fannie so people with low income can buy houses. Not only did the government cause the crisis through their policies, but now they are going to exacerbate it with even more broken legislation.

I didn't make irresponsible investments or take out a loan I couldn't afford, but I'm being punished for other people's mistakes. This is an outrage. I want my bailout.