Summing up

Barack Obama: please end our dependence on cheap platitudes about foreign oil

You're on your own

Another problem with the Michelle speech. In order to paint both her professional life and her husband's, and in order to communicate what she feels is his singular compassion, she had to paint an America that is darker, sadder, grimmer, than most Americans experience their country to be. And this of course is an incomplete picture, an incorrectly weighted picture. Sadness and struggle are part of life, but so are guts and verve and achievement and success and hardiness and...triumph. Democrats always get this wrong. Republicans get it wrong too, but in a different way.

Democrats in the end speak most of, and seem to hold the most sympathy for, the beset-upon single mother without medical coverage for her children, and the soldier back from the war who needs more help with post-traumatic stress disorder. They express the most sympathy for the needy, the yearning, the marginalized and unwell. For those, in short, who need more help from the government, meaning from the government's treasury, meaning the money got from taxpayers.

Who happen, also, to be a generally beset-upon group.

Democrats show little expressed sympathy for those who work to make the money the government taxes to help the beset-upon mother and the soldier and the kids. They express little sympathy for the middle-aged woman who owns a small dry cleaner and employs six people and is, actually, day to day, stressed and depressed from the burden of state, local and federal taxes, and regulations, and lawsuits, and meetings with the accountant, and complaints as to insufficient or incorrect efforts to meet guidelines regarding various employee/employer rules and regulations. At Republican conventions they express sympathy for this woman, as they do for those who are entrepreneurial, who start businesses and create jobs and build things. Republicans have, that is, sympathy for taxpayers. But they don't dwell all that much, or show much expressed sympathy for, the sick mother with the uninsured kids, and the soldier with the shot nerves.

Neither party ever gets it quite right, the balance between the taxed and the needy, the suffering of one sort and the suffering of another. You might say that in this both parties are equally cold and equally warm, only to two different classes of citizens.

Alea iacta est

Lights . . . camera . . . .

The very, very special tribute video is starting.  If you wondered what Obama's biopic would look like . . . well, now you know.  I'm really hoping that after the video ends, the entire stadium will break into the final number from the Muppet Movie.  Indeed, it occurs to me that the Obama campaign to date bears a certain resemblance to the opening:

Grim pub quiz

Convention liveblogging: prelude

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are here because of the American Dream.  Barack Obama, that is--isn't he dreamy, folks?  And he cares about hardworking American families, because that's the kind of guy he is:  a hardworking American.  With a family.  An American family.  That's why he's going to make all of your dreams come true.  Vote for Barack Obama and you'll be taller, smarter, and possessed of a fuller, more luxuriant head of hair.  That's right, your whites will be whiter and your brings brighter if you'll just pull the lever for Obama/Biden.  Also, every one of you will get a free trip to Disneyland!

The banality of cable news, part 84,908 in a continuing series

Romney no longer under consideration for VP spot?

Why yes, I will be live-blogging Obama's speech

(Fighting) crime doesn't pay

Briefly-- this post reminded me of an important fact about the debate over crime. Discussions of crime and crime prevention tend to be deeply political and often quite harsh, with differing camps making various accusations of each other. Liberals' concern for rights of the accused is often represented by conservatives as a failure to be tough on crime. Conservatives' tendency to push for harsh punishment and aggressive enforcement is often represented by liberals as a slouch towards totalitarianism.

But the actual small-scale policy prescriptions that work best to reduce crime tend to be rather apolitical, or so it seems to me. Much has been made of the aggression of the Giuliani-era police force in New York city, and the enormous reduction in crime during that period. (I find the NYPD's record on racial equity and the number of violent acts against black men during that time very disturbing.) But the people who know the best all seem to think that the gains weren't from racial profiling or more aggressive police actions, but from the increase in the number of police officers and the large increase in information-sharing within the department. Boots on the ground and intra-agency interoperability and communication seem to be the most important facet of reducing crime in our nation's cities. And those are both things that I find people of most political stripes are amenable to.

A more perfect union

Things We Thought We'd Never See: Democrats Rally Against the Teachers' Unions! I went to the Ed Challenge for Change event mainly to schmooze. I almost didn't stay for the panels, being in no mood for what I expected would, even among these reformers, be an hour of vague EdBlob talk about "change" and "accountability" and "resources" that would tactfully ignore the elephant in the room, namely the teachers' unions. I was so wrong. One panelist--I think it was Peter Groff, president of the Colorado State Senate, got the ball rolling by complaining that when the children's agenda meets the adult agenda, the "adult agenda wins too often." Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically--and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention! "The politics are so vicious," Booker complained, remembering how he'd been told his political career would be over if he kept pushing school choice, how early on he'd gotten help from Republicans rather than from Democrats. The party would "have to admit as Democrats we have been wrong on education." Loud applause! Mayor Adrian Fenty of D.C. joined in, describing the AFT's attempt to block the proposed pathbreaking D.C. teacher contract. Booker denounced "insane work rules," and Groff talked about doing the bidding of "those folks who are giving money [for campaigns], and you know who I'm talking about." Yes, they did!

As Jon Alter, moderating the next panel, noted, it was hard to imagine this event happening at the previous Democratic conventions. (If it had there would have been maybe 15 people in the room, not 500.) Alter called it a "landmark" future historians should note. Maybe he was right.

The problem with teacher's unions is inherent in the way that Democrats talk about unions:  by banding together, they say, you create a powerful counterweight equal and opposite to the power of the companies in negotiations.

So the schools have a gigantic, powerful bargaining bloc.  Who doesn't have a bargaining bloc?  The kids. 

Of course, the customers of corporations don't bargain with unions either--but they have the right of exit, which is what prevents the unions (or their corporate bosses) from turning them upside down and shaking them until the last nickel falls out of their pockets.  Unsurprisingly, the schools in this country that function worst are the ones where the kids have no realistic ability to exit.  So for whom are those schools run?  The teacher's unions, the principal's unions, the janitor's unions, the friends and relations of people with seats on the school board.  The children have the least powerful voice.  Which is why, as far as I can tell, every single thing that is proposed by any of these groups "for the children" has the primary side effect of employing more teachers/janitors/principals, paying same more, or making their jobs more pleasant.

Moreover, if you talk to reformers in urban schools--ardent Democrats all!--every single one of them will say that they can't get anything done with the unions blocking them.  Nor are they merely looking for an excuse.  They always come armed with ample, and chilling, cases in point. 

One example:  extraordinary principals can make a big difference in urban schools.  Joel Klein offered a proposal to give principals sizeable "hazard pay" bonuses of tens of thousands of dollars a year to transfer to the most severely underperforming schools in the district.  The principal's union blocked it.  Why?  The principals wouldn't accrue pension benefits on the extra pay.  

So what? any sane person would have asked (and indeed, my understanding is that Joel Klein did just that).  The transfer was entirely voluntary.  The principals would be sacrificing nothing, and indeed, getting extra money.  But the principal's union shut it down. 

On the face of it, this seems incomprehensible:  a union turning down a deal that gave some of their members more money, and none of their members less money, and might well turn around some failing schools.  Was this for the kids?  No.  Was it even for the principals involved?  Again, no.  It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this was about protecting the underperforming principals--making sure no Johnny-come-lately transferred into their school and demonstrated that you could, so, improve the place.  After all, a union's job is to act as if its membership is, save for objective (and usually almost useless) credentials like seniority and education degrees, entirely interchangeable.  Musn't imply that some of the cogs are better than others.

This should not happen.  And certainly, it should not be a policy priority to give these unions the power to make it happen, as it most certainly is for the Democratic party right now.  Leave aside the question of whether unions are just and right in other fields.  Education is too important, and in this country, too screwed up, to tolerate this kind of rent seeking.

Chicken?

Since Crunchy Cons was published in 2006, I've taken on a lot of criticism from fellow conservatives about the supposedly unrealistic ideals the book champions--especially when I call on conservatives to make consumer and lifestyle choices that are more in line with what we profess to believe.

Some of these challenges have been valid. But I've found that many, perhaps most, of the criticism says more about the challenger's unwillingness to try something difficult and discomfiting than about the inherent value of the ideas. How easy it is for mere expedience to masquerade as principled realism.

And, truth to tell, that's where my chicken agita came from. See, I'm the sort of person who loves to read Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, and to talk about Slow Food, and the integrity of our farms, yada yada. I really do believe that not everyone is called to light out for the organic prairies, and that city people have an important role to play in the sustenance and growth of small family farms, if only by choosing to purchase their meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables from these producers.

But raise chickens myself? Even just three? Well now, squire, let's not be hasty. Why risk failure, and making fools of ourselves? I thought back to how in my childhood, we country people used to laugh at the city lawyers and politicians who used to come up to the hills during deer hunting season and prance around like seasoned woodsmen. Wouldn't I, long removed from my rural roots and thoroughly urbanized, risk being that kind of poseur?

Crunchy cons--and everyone else--wouldn't be so afraid of this if the rest of us didn't get mad at people who have difficult ideals, and then put them into practice.  As long as no one else is doing it, we can let our own behavior go, swept along unthinkingly in the comforting certainty of the herd.  But once one of the sheep starts moving in a different direction, we have to start wondering if we're going the right way.

Luckily for me, I'm pretty sure my apartment is too small to do much in the way of farming.

Musical time out

Just because

Department of unfortunately leading indicators

News you can use

The big news this week is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are in love. Everyone is cool with it, especially Bill Clinton. This may prove to be a complicated relationship, however, because Obama is actually Jesus Christ. His ascension is scheduled to take place before a live audience tonight in Denver at approximately 8:30 Mountain Daylight Time.

There was some question about whether Obama's heavenly citizenship will prohibit him from serving as U.S. president, but legal experts concur that since heaven is somewhere "way way up there," it is technically in U.S. airspace. They note by way of precedent that Dick Cheney did not stop being Vice-President for the 18 consecutive months he spent flying across the country after the 9/11 attacks.

In related news, Obama has selected Joe Biden to be his Vice-President. Biden is a wise statesman from the Senate, and not the mean-spirited, plagiarizing, third-rate legal mind and lifetime politician from Scranton who also goes by that name.

Obama's team is also expected to include Moses as National Security Advisor, St. Paul as Secretary of State, and Elijah as campaign spokesman.

The Republicans, meanwhile, plan to proceed with their convention next week at an undisclosed IHOP in Canada, where John McCain will lie in state.

How to eat tofu without really trying

In my view we do have duties to behave more responsibly at the dinner table but the simple admonition "eat less meat" will do.  Maybe you don't like tofu but sardines are delicious, or use Goya small red beans with shredded Mexican cheese (even the Kraft package is decent) and ground chile on a corn tortilla.  Don't forget the lime on top.

Amen

I feel like there is an unarticulated doing/allowing issue floating around in the background in this debate. Say the U.S. Congress cuts top tax rates. Is this politics causing higher inequality? Or is this evidence of relative indifference about allowing higher inequality? The left has the tendency to characterize every policy that might allow income inequality to rise as one intended specifically to have this result. This is a lot like the right's characterizing, say, workplace safety regulation as a specific attempt to stymie the growth of small business. In each case, those opposed to a policy see its side-effects as more salient than the primary effects intended by those who favor it. Imputations of bad faith -- "you're really after the side-effect and your stated intention is garnish for malice" -- are never far behind. Having read most of the recent left-leaning literature on the politics of rising inequality, it is disconcerting to see the argument from malicious bad faith as far and away the dominant narrative. It's hard to find anyone who even tries to fairly understand the ideas behind the recent American right's preference for policies that do in fact tend to allow greater income inequality. Am I wrong to find this pathetic?

Microsoft v. Google: the sleeping giant awakens

Microsoft has unveiled its Internet Explorer 8 browser equipped with a privacy feature that could threaten the advertising model of web search rivals such as Google.

Users of the browser can opt to access websites in private, hiding their personal details from search engines that use the information to target advertising at individuals.

The feature, called InPrivate, has been dubbed in some blog postings as "porn mode", because it also hides the browsing history from other people using the same computer.

However, Microsoft points to examples of buying birthday presents or searching for medical ailments as areas where InPrivate was also of benefit to customers.

John Curran, a director at Microsoft UK, said: "Some people will always want to be 'In­Private', but there is a trade-off."

Google has faced an outcry over the amount of information it collects from users of its services. David Mitchell, an information technology analyst at Ovum, said: "If the hype around privacy gains more credibility, more people will hit the private button. There is a potential threat here to click-through [display] advertising."

I think we may be sure that Microsoft was less concerned with the tender feelings of porn consumers (and/or their spouses) and more concerned with striking a blow at Google.

But this has broader applications than Google.  Media companies are still trying to figure out how to make web advertising lucrative enough to support a full, print-style application--Politico is a rousing success, and yet makes 60% of its revenue from a cheat sheet it prints for a paltry few tens of thousands of readers.  We don't need a new web browser making things even harder than they already are.

Is the hydrogen economy nearer than we think?

I think this is a point that's worth making here and at some length: "presum[ing that] battery technology improves" is setting yourself up for failure.

In truth, there have only been a few noteworthy improvements in battery tech during Ryan and my lifetimes: longer-lived NiCd and NiMH batteries; some improvement in alkaline batteries; and the popularization of lithium batteries. But look closer and you'll realize that most of these aren't actually battery innovations, per se: they're benefits of the microprocessor revolution. Cheap, smart charging circuitry allowed us to avoid memory effects; to balance load across cells; and to monitor lithium cells' temperature and voltage as they charge so that they don't catch fire (well... usually), thereby finally making lithium a viable option for consumer electronics. Those are all important developments, but at this point we've wrung about as much as we can out of charging our batteries more cleverly.

None of this has done much to improve the fundamental energy storage densities of the underlying chemistries. These have been known for a long time now, and nothing is going to change them -- nor are there any more promising elements like lithium waiting to be tamed (well, none that aren't radioactive, anyway). The glacial pace of improvement in battery technology really can't be overemphasized. The lead-acid battery was developed in 1859, for pete's sake. It's really heavy relative to the energy it stores, can produce explosive fumes if overcharged, and sometimes requires the addition of distilled water. Yet it's still the best battery technology we have for supplying the high current necessary to turn over an engine. A century and a half and we haven't come up with anything better!

It may seem like batteries have improved dramatically -- consider the lifespan of an iPod Nano versus a portable cassette player. But this is misleading. In fact it's a byproduct of more energy-efficient technologies. Which isn't to dismiss energy effiency! But electric motors are already extremely efficient. And when it comes to vehicles, we're unfortunately dealing with hard physical limits related to how much energy it takes to move a car. So long as we're committed to EVs being able to perform like and drive safely near gasoline-powered cars, we will find ourselves with less room for improvement than people would like to think.

I don't mean to be a downer, but it's difficult to overstate what a serious problem this is, or for how long it's been one. Hydrocarbons are an unbelievably efficient way to store energy when compared to electrochemical cells, and I seriously doubt anything will change that. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong. But smart people have been working on the battery problem for decades and decades, propelled by the lure of the financial bonanza that a breakthrough would represent. And while they've made impressive improvements, none come anywhere close to competing with gasoline's energy density. We're still an order of magnitude away.

There's a lot of optimism on both the center-left and the right that all we really need to do to tackle the problem of global warming/peak oil is throw a hell of a lot of money at the problem, and presto!  A new technology will arise that will obviate the need for any lifestyle change more obnoxious than keeping the house size to 3,000 square feet.  But as I've said to liberals in re: other problems, the fact that there is a problem does not imply that there is a solution.  Yes, we found petroleum to replace whale oil.  This does not therefore mean, as night follows day, that we will find something to replace petroleum.  We will find something to replace petroleum if there is something that can replace petroleum.  There might not be.  And if there is something, Tom's post implies that it probably isn't going to be hyper-efficient electric cars, which might at any rate merely shift the anxiety from petroleum supplies to lithium.

Hydrogen looks more promising in many ways.  On the other hand, finding a way to make the stuff cheaply out of clean energy is necessary, but not sufficient, to solve our problems.  You also have to build a distribution network, and make it so the highly pressurized hydrogen doesn't set your car on fire.  This is a massive task.  Think how long it took from the emergence of the internal combustion engine in the 1890s, to being reasonably certain of finding a gas station wherever you happened to be driving:  decades, even as automobile use exploded.

Culture at 11

In which I explore parallels between evangelical Christianity and BDSM, though probably not in the way you're expecting

This popped up in my Digg feed this morning:

You might think that wanting to be tied up and whipped is a guaranteed sign of psychological distress, but according to a recent study, people who participate in bondage and dominance/submission play may be happier and less anxious than those with more conventional sexual tastes.

Public health researchers studied 20,000 Australians to determine that despite the stereotype that people with off-the-beaten-path sexual interests are somehow damaged, men who take part in BDSM score significantly lower on a scale of mental distress than other men.

The prurient mind immediately wonders if there is a difference between the anxiety levels of those who are beaten, and those who do the beating; being tied up and flogged does seem like the sort of thing that is supposed to make you anxious.  But that's not really where I'm going with this.

My secondmost immediate thought was, of course, of evangelical Christians.  Specifically, the fact that they report being happier than the rest of us.  The article in Christianity Today argues that this is a function of the social support provided by an inclusive community.  But I wonder if it isn't, in part, the decision to stand out from the community that leads to greater self-reported happiness.  People who have decided to do anything so far outside of the mainstream are people who a) have a powerful preference and b) have satisfied that preference.  The mainstream, on the other hand, contains all the people who have extreme preferences, but not the willpower to buck convention and satisfy them.

Against this, of course, are the people who have stayed in the evangelical Christian community since birth.  But the churn rate is quite high, which is why we all know so many people who used to be religious, and also quite a few who have found religion in adulthood.  In modern America, it's relatively easy to exit a religious community, either by a series of steps through progressively less demanding congregations, or by moving across country and letting your parents think you're still going to church.  And I'd imagine that those who have the courage to leave a church that isn't satisfying them are also happier than the run of the mill.

Accounting: the new world order

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously to seek public comment for 60 days on a "road map" to move from U.S. to international accounting. SEC Chairman Christopher Cox predicted U.S. regulators likely would vote again "late this year" on whether to endorse the plan.

The plan calls for early, voluntary use of international accounting standards by large U.S. multinational firms in 2010, followed by an SEC vote in 2011 on whether to require all U.S. companies to make the switch. The decision would rest on whether key changes occur by then, including international accounting standard-setters obtaining independent funding.

Under the timetable outlined by the SEC, the switch to international accounting could be staggered, starting with large U.S. companies in 2014, followed by mid-sized companies in 2015 and small companies in 2016.

"The proposed roadmap is cautious and careful," Mr. Cox said at a public meeting to consider the matter. SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter called the plan a momentous one that shows the U.S. is serious about considering a movement toward international accounting standards.

However, Ms. Walter said the U.S. should vote in 2011 to approve the switch "if and only if" certain conditions are met by then. The plan sets seven "milestones" to be met, including obtaining an independent, stable source of funding for the London-based International Accounting Standards Board.

The "road map" also calls for continued collaboration between the IASB and the Connecticut-based U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board to narrow differences between U.S. and international accounting rules; and changes to the ways in which U.S. accountants are educated and trained.

The transition may well be messier for small firms than for large firms; large firms have more complicated finances, but they also have the means to hire top-notch accountants with loads of international experience on their staff.  An even bigger issue is what happens when the SEC disagrees with the IASB.  Currently, it has the power to overrule the nominally private FASB that sets accounting standards for the US.  It will not have so much pull with the international board.

Overall, however, this makes sense.  The difference between international and American accounting standards has cost US exchanges business in recent years, as companies decline to keep two sets of books.  And it has made it somewhat harder to compare the performance of American firms with their foreign counterparts, which makes global capital markets marginally less efficient than they should be.

When the first accounting scandal hits, however, stand by for the wingnuts on both left and right wailing about the tyranny of global finance.

Crash into me

As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn't struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process--stop, go--the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.

A year after the change, the results of this "extreme makeover" were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection-- buses spent less time waiting to get through, for ­example-- but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signals-- of the electronic or hand variety-- more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman's ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he "would have changed it immediately." Emphasis mine.

When thinking about human behavior, it makes sense to understand what people perceive, which may be different from how things are, and will almost certainly be very different from how a removed third party thinks them to be. Traffic accidents are predominantly caused by people being inattentive. Increase the feeling of risk, and you increase the attention. I know when I am in traffic on my bike, I'm hyper-vigilant, and this has made me a better car driver.

Crash into me, part II

I think Yglesias has made this same point before, but it's always good to reiterate the many ways transit can be good for safety. As an adult, I enjoy that I can get home from bars in this city, quickly and easily, by walking or taking transit or hailing a cab. As an occasional driver, I'm very happy to know that other people have those options, as well. This goes for other stuff, too. Young drivers are dangerous to themselves and others. I'd rather my sixteen year old (if I had one) be able to get around via transit than be in a car all the time, and I'm glad sixteen year olds in this city have a transit option. Ditto for older drivers.

Driving is an inherently dangerous act-you're piloting an enormous hunk of metal around at high speed-and should only be done by sober, competent adults who are preferably not distracted by phones or dinner or make-up or the newspaper. It would be nice if those who weren't competent adults or sober could get around without a car, and it would be nice if more people who wanted to read or talk on the phone during their commute could do so without driving. Maybe then, we wouldn't be celebrating 41,000 annual traffic deaths as a good year for highway safety.

Monthly reminder

Flublogging

Good for thee but not me . . .

This isn't an easy pattern to understand. If you take market failure theories seriously, it's child's play to apply them expression. Negative externalities? Come on - many bloggers write for the sole purpose of offending others! Asymmetric information? Hey, if information were symmetric, what would be the point of sharing your thoughts with the world?

I'm curious about why economists so uniformly embrace civil liberties. But I'm especially curious about why so many non-libertarian economists end up being civil libertarians. So I'll aim my questions at the latter group - but whatever your view, feel free to chime in.

Questions:

1. Are markets for ideas/culture less subject to market failure than other markets? Why or why not?

2. Is well-intended regulation of idea/culture markets more likely to have unintended negative consequences than well-intended regulation of other markets?

3. Is regulation of idea/culture markets less likely to be well-intended than regulation of other markets?

4. Is the average consumer a better judge of his own best interest in idea/culture markets than in other markets?

5. Is efficiency less normatively important in idea/culture markets than in other markets? If so, what normative goal(s) do we satisfy by sacrificing efficiency?

6. Should countries with weak civil liberties liberalize their regulation of idea/culture markets? If so, would you advocate "shock therapy"? Why or why not?

Just so you can't accuse me of having a hidden agenda, let me state my agenda openly. I think that the typical social democratic economist's arguments in favor of civil liberties are much weaker than the typical free-market economist's arguments in favor of laissez-faire for the broader economy. If a free-market economist opposed regulation of the oil industry on the same grounds that the typical economist opposes regulation of religion, the typical economist would dismiss him as a "market fundamentalist."

If we think of academics as being dominant players in the marketplace of ideas, this doesn't seem to me to be all that different from the liberal professionals I know who can explain why every industry except the one they happen to work for needs heavier regulation.  But then I'm a market fundamentalist in all markets, including those for ideas, so you'd expect me to say that.

Not ready for prime-time

Blather, blather, blather, American dream, blather, blather, hard working American families, blather, blather, future, blather, blather, anecdote about how the candidate comes from a hardworking American family, blather, blather, national service, blather, American dream, blather, blather, blather, community, blather, God, blather, education, blather blather blather blather environment, blather, God again, blather blather blather blather blather blather sea to shining sea, the end.  God Bless America!

Dumont Network: Takedown Notice (crime drama). A fast-paced new drama focusing on the heroic self-appointed enforcers of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Tonight: In the pilot episode, Dirk and Moira go after a gang of church mothers whose "entertainment" for their youth group consists of commercial DVDs not licensed for public exhibition.

Northern Broadcasting System: Stones of the City (crime drama). This latest entry in the vampire-building-inspector genre follows the adventures of Sam Ionescu, inspector for the city of Washington (Penna.). Tonight: New tenants complain that the walls of their 18th-century farmhouse are oozing blood. Has Sam found his dream house?

Metromedia: Al 'n' Me (comedy). The wacky adventures of best buddies Alexander and Hephaestion as they look for new worlds to conquer. Tonight: Stuck in the two-bit burgh of Gordium, Al and Hephaestion really need an ox-cart to impress the chicks - but the only one available is all tied up with an impossible knot.

Golf Network: The Golf Show (golf). Tonight: Badminton.

A little more gadget blogging

Life choices

Annals of idiocy

Peanut butter contains peanuts!

Yes, I am serious.  A bridge buddy tonight told me that his favorite peanut butter, Wegmans, has a warning that it contains peanuts!

Check it out yourself if you do not believe me.

Warnings:

Allergens: Contains peanuts. Made in a plant that processes tree nuts.

We live in degenerate times, my friends.  Our ancestors got into ships that would hardly do for a weekend sail on the lake, crossed stormy oceans, fought mountain cats and drought, sailed their prairie schooners into the wilderness, all without as much as a single "Warning:  Contains wild animal ingredients" label slapped on the prairie.  Ours is perhaps a more complicated time, and farther from the food chain, we may need more guidance.  Indeed, as a vegan, I'm very glad of the labels informing me when something contains milk.  But I hardly need to be told that all of the t-bones decaying wetly in the refrigerator case have meat in them. 

If it is true that Americans have come to a state when they need to be informed that their peanut butter contains, yes, peanuts, then it is time to give the land back to the Indians.  Forget the injustice of our initial seizure.  A people who cannot determine, merely by glancing at the label, that something called "Peanut Butter" is likely to have quite a few groundnuts in it--that people does not deserve to be in charge of the sunglass concession at the mall, much less a once-great nation.

Dispatch from a lost city

"It is a complex miasma of longstanding social and economic gentrification; of people, regular and celebrity, of various races and ethnicities choosing to remain sequestered from one another, except during the hours between 9am and 5pm, or when they get their Chinese food delivered; of hot dog carts parked next to falafel carts parked next to storefront Wendys and Starbucks, creating a wonderfully malodorous assault on one's senses, and possibly killing them; of the media elite and the blogging underclass, and vice versa, of course; of traffic and pigeons and sometime smells of caramel or fudge or swamp gas wafting in from New Jersey; of layoffs at newspapers, TV anchors under layers of makeup and radio reporters acting like the days of the week are 'dress-down Fridays'; of sidewalk vendors selling goods you'd rather not know, or acknowledge, weren't and will never be 'the real thing'; of tall buildings that spit debris onto unwitting pedestrians below, and pedestrians that spit; and, above all, of triumph in love, of love in triumph, of all things ever thought romantic and tragic, right and wrong in the affairs of the heart. That, my child, is Manhattan, a floe of schist in humanity's complex sea, and never, my child, shall we tramp there."

Dispatch from a lost city

On the train up to New York, where I am working this week, I read Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life.  Pete Hamill is, in many ways, a very unlikeable man, and the book breathes a certain belief that to state one's sins firmly is to be forgiven for them.  But the book is nonetheless still very good in many ways, not least of them the powerful invocation of a New York City before television, widespread automobile ownership, or Urban Renewal.

Perhaps because of this, I've been paying particularly close attention to my surroundings this trip.  I've been living in DC for eighteen months now, long enough that the streets of New York no longer absorb me as unremarkably as water surrounds a fish.  At odd moments, I find myself surprised by their utter familiarity.

It's hard to describe if you haven't grown up in a big city how comforting and homey it is to walk along streets with fifteen story buildings rising on either side.  A friend who recently left Washington for more rural climes said, right before he left, "I know you won't understand this, but I find the bustle of DC stressful."  He was right; I don't understand it.  Another friend, who grew up in suburban Florida, tried to explain it to me.

"All these people," he said, pointing at my apartment walls, "all around you, all the time."

"I know," I said, beaming.  "Isn't it cosy?"

All those people give New Yorker's the kind of privacy they crave most--perfect anonymity.  I love the fact that in Washington DC, I rarely pass a day in my neighborhood without running in to someone I know.  But I confess it would be nice, occasionally, to be able to run out for milk with your hair a mess and your rattiest old sweatpants on, and not be confident of running into someone you used to date with his new girlfriend in tow.

The streets full of people, the tall buildings, call back to something in my childhood, walking along them with my hand in my mother's, when their towering presence made me feel as safe as if they'd been keeping the Mongol hordes out.  And walking among them calls up--not memory, exactly, but a thousand memories faded into wordless sensation.  I imagine one feels that way about wherever one grew up, but for me, today, it was turning off Broadway into a street lined with trees and tall buildings, pressing into the shadows with sunny broadway twenty feet behind me and the noise of the traffic already fading.

This made me feel the sad impossibility of conveying anything like the New York I grew up in--not the New York of spaldeens and knickers, definitely, but the world that replaced the world that Pete Hamill mourns.  We had the little old Jewish ladies who made rugelach in the rent-controlled apartments they'd occupied since 1946, the Hungarian pastry shop, the German-Jewish butcher who gave a slice of bologna to every child who came in and the pizza places still run by wizened Italians--but we also had the heroin addicts playing chess on the poured-concrete tables that had been, for some reason, installed beside every housing projects on the Upper West Side.  There were the grim, bare streets where the trees had been allowed to die and all summer the sidewalks glittered bleakly with broken glass.  Graffiti on every train car, children bathing in open fire hydrants.  I still remember many scenes from my childhood in the grainy footage of the opening to Good Times.  The show was about the Chicago housing projects, but they looked enough like the ones on Columbus Avenue to permanently embed themselves in my childish mind as stories of home:

Or rather, near home.  I went to school with the kids from the projects, but I returned home to a nice middle-class building west of Broadway.  But small children don't register economic distinctions.  To them, the buildings are all scenery.

What defeats me is the sheer volume of details.  Today in the building of my father's elevator, I read the elevator inspection certificate--chiefly because it noted that the elevator had been briefly shut down for failing inspection.  These certificates from the New York City Department of Buildings are in every elevator in New York.  I must have stared at thousands of them in my life as I rode from floor to floor; they are an excellent way to avoid looking at the other people in the elevator.  But before today, I don't think I ever consciously noticed that they existed.  Had you given me a thousand years to list things about New York City, I doubt I would ever have recalled them.

They aren't important, in themselves, except the fact that I never really noticed them makes me wonder what else I am not noticing, and which of those unnoticed things really does matter.  All of them, in some sense--they city is the millions of tiny details that everyone in it has in common.  Even when you're in it, it's already something of a lost world. 

That's deep

The silly season continues

The death of a city

Over the last 50 years, Detroit has lost almost a million of its former 1.85 million people. About three-quarters of those one million people were white.

Good deal

Welcome home

A man you don't meet every day

Best commentary so far on Joe Biden comes, not surprisingly, from mad Scotsman Alex Massie:

I sort of had half a sneaky hope that Biden might actually somehow fluke his way to the nomination itself, but that's largely because since I don't expect to agree with any of the candidates on most of the issues** that matter most to me there's something to be said for supporting the fella most likely to provide quality entertainment. In the Democratic race that was, by a mile, Biden.

He's the sort of man I've met many a time in Irish pubs. Biden will tell you, at some length for sure, all about his plans for the future, how he's on the cusp of greatness just waiting for that last piece to fall neatly into place. The fact that  - stubbornly - it has never yet done so deters him not a bit. Next time, lads, next time...UPDATE: See what I mean! Priceless!

He'll often seem as though he's auditioning for the position of Official Pub Bore but then every so often there'll be a flash of wit or a moment of self-deprecation that punctures the bluster and bombast, rendering Biden warm and human.

You can picture him propping up one end of the bar for thirty years; long enough for all to be forgiven, all ancient battles and blunders forgotten as we grow older, more charitable, more sentimental. Biden's the sort of fellow who'll make a wildly inappropriate and suggestive comment about your wife. To your face. On your wedding day. But he'll do so in such a guileless fashion free from any hint of malice that, dash it and almost half despite yourself, you forgive the silly old fool. He was, you realise, probably trying to ay something complimentary.

Heck, even his 1988 disgrace was so preposterous - plagiarising Neil bleedin' Kinnock! - that it seems utterly artless. So bizarre there had to be an innocent, brain-frying explanation for it. Despite all those years in Washington, there's an endearing child-like quality to Biden. Or, to put it another way, observing Biden in full flow is a glorious sight; it's like watching a labrador bound after a bouncing ball even though, being a puppy, it doesn't quite have the co-ordination to grab the ball cleanly. Instead there's a frenzy of yelping delight as the ball carroms around the yard, always tantalisingly just out of reach...

Of course, I immediately thought of this immortal recording from my favorite Pogues album, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.  YouTube doesn't have a good video of the Pogues doing it, but this is a fairly serviceable rendition by . . . some random guy on the internets.

Ezra on taxes

I've argued often on this blog that given how much income is concentrated in the hands of the rich, you can cut taxes for the majority of the country, raise taxes on a small slice of wealthy Americans, and raise revenue, even as the average American's tax bill goes down. As Leonhardt argues, the relentless march of wealth accumulation -- the rich getting much richer, year by year -- made this truer in 2008 then it was in 2007, truer in 2007 then in 2006, and a helluva lot truer in 2006 then it was in 1993.

Of online debate and hidden agendas

I'll try to post on Zimbabwe itself soon, but this reflection by Lessing made me think about something entirely different. I'm going through one of my periodic bouts of disaffection with reading aggressively political or partisan blogging, but I don't feel any comfort or shelter in studied moderation, either. I'm having a hard time putting my finger on it, but it just doesn't seem worth the time or the bother because there isn't anything I recognize as a conversation going on a lot of the time in many political blogs, nor does there seem anything like a remotely adult sense of weary awareness about the messiness of the world as it is lived and experienced by most people.

Lessing helped me to recognize that one feeling I'm having is that I simply don't trust people who are selling this kind of "idealistic, rhetorical, politics" and yet don't confess to having experienced this kind of heartbreak. Or worse yet, tell themselves that if they can only find the right romantic partner, the next time everything will be perfect and there will be ponies and rainbows for everyone, that it was only this regime, these people, this leader, that disappointed. Or, from what I can see in a lot of American conservative writing, it was the damned political opposition or overseas enemies or corruptors of the youth or some such again that kept all the good magical things from happening which otherwise would inevitably have happened.

Most of the time, it seems to me that trying to write anything more reflective, more ambiguous, more exploratory in a blog is either going to bore an audience that's come seeking their Two-Minute Hate or it's just going to be willfully misconstrued by someone else who needs fresh meat for their own hounds to feed upon. Read the comments section at Inside Higher Education, for one example. There's no point to trying to talk about nuance or complexity or what makes for a good research design or anything else in that kind of back-and-forth.

In most online conversations I've been involved with, you eventually come to a point where the people interested in an evolving, exploratory dialogue, in learning something new about themselves and others, in thinking aloud, in working through things, find themselves worn out by a kind of rhetorical infection inflicted by bad faith participants who are just there to affirm what they already know and attack everything that doesn't conform to that knowledge. (Or by the classic "energy creatures" whose only objective is to satisfy their narcissism.) I used to think that was a function of the size of the room, that in a bigger discursive space, richer possibilities would present themselves. Now I don't know. Maybe it's a product of the form itself, maybe it's a sign of our times, and maybe it's my own unfair expectations or my own character that's the problem.

1. The houses thing is a silly issue that shouldn't make any difference in peoples' willingness to vote for McCain
2. The houses thing is funny, especially when set to Feist.

More media me

Math for dummies

Most of us find that it is easier to remember a long list when it has been set to music.  Someone has helpfully put this together for John McCain:

Get it while it's hot

The hardest job in the world

"Sometimes people take a gun to the head of a branch manager," says Jihad al-Wazir, governor of the Palestine Monetary Authority. "Then I get a phone call."

The PMA is a most unusual central bank. It lacks a currency and a country. It can't control interest rates or fight inflation, like other central banks. And it communicates with its Gaza branch office by videoconference because Israel regularly blocks the border to PMA officials. Meanwhile, Hamas, the militant Islamist party that rules Gaza, wants to boot out the central bank's leader.

The PMA is playing a critical role nonetheless, pressing banks in the West Bank and Gaza to modernize. Its efforts have made it easier for well-off Palestinians abroad to invest back home. That's a big reason households' bank deposits rose by 20% in 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The PMA also is encouraging enterprise in the territories, where much of the population now depends on make-work government jobs. It aims to turn itself into a "full-fledged central bank" by 2010, meaning one with the ability to manage a currency in case a Palestinian state is created.

I don't think its possible to build a viable state out of the shreds the settlements have left.  But if such a miracle is possible, it will need a solid banking system, with serious standards of corporate government, to repair the ravages of the current conflict. 

The age of responsibility

Setting the minimum legal drinking age at 21 saves lives by reducing drunk driving, and not just among the 18-to-21's; if 18-year-old high school seniors can buy beer at the supermarket, then 16-year-old high school sophomores have access to it. Common sense and evidence agree: drinking and driving by people who are both inexperienced drinkers and inexperienced drivers is really, really dangerous.

Setting the minimum legal drinking age at 21 also encourages disrespect for the law and encourages young adults to acquire and use false identification documents, which is not a social practice we want to encourage just right now. Moreover, that policy insultingly treats people who are adults for all other purposes as if they were still children, and deprives them of lawful access to an activity that forms part of the normal U.S. social scene and which some of them enjoy. And it may (the evidence isn't clear) lead those who are drinking illegally rather than legally to do so irresponsibly rather than responsibly.

Now, given those facts, what do you want to do about it?

How about looking for policies that would offset the bad effects of lowering the drinking age? They aren't hard to find.

To address the specific problem of youthful drinking and driving, we could -- as some states have already -- change the drunk-driving laws so as to forbid drivers under 21 to drive with any detectable level of alcohol. (These are called "ZT" [for "zero tolerance"] laws.) For someone still learning both to drive and to hold his or her liquor, even a little bit under the influence can be too much. Anyway, a bright line (and zero is a very bright line) may be better observed than a rule that enables the proverbial "two beers."

To address the more general problem of excessive drinking by teenagers (not to mention the still more general problem of excessive drinking, period) we could raise alcohol taxes. This summer has provided a useful object lesson in the Law of Demand: when gasoline prices went up, people drove less. Drinking is the same, especially heavy drinking. Price matters.

I'd add that we should strengthen this with something that Mark himself suggested to me a while ago:  driver's licenses for convicted DUIs that tell bartenders not to serve you.  Combined with a zero tolerance policy, this would be a pretty effective deterrant to drunk driving for teens.  Right now, groups of teens drink together, in secret.  But if your friends can drink at a bar, and you can't, you'll find your social life dramatically curtailed.  Teenagers are very sensitive to penalties that separate them from their friends.  I'd lower the drinking age to 16, as in Europe, but require licenses to show that you haven't had a DUI.

This would also be a more effective deterrent than the current tactic of suspending licenses for DUI, incidentally, since what happens right now is that a lot of chronic drunks get on the road without one.  Let them drive to work--but make it damned difficult for people who drink and drive to get their hands on alcohol.

No, really, I'll pull out

The US and Iraq have apparently agreed to a deal to withdraw combat troops by 2011.  This is good news for us; let's hope it's also good news for Iraq.

The election being nigh, of course, thoughts immediately turn to who this is good for in the presidential election.  Kevin Drum is very sure that the answer is Obama.   My first instinct was the opposite.  McCain gets to claim that the Surge worked, the war issue is off the table, and McCain gets the credit for steely resolve without people fearing their sons will end up in Iraq.  I'm puzzled by war opponents who think that voters will suddenly love Obama for having been "right all along".  Assuming arguendo that this is true, the psychological logic is off.  Most Americans supported the war.  Do you become more endeared of your spouse when it turns out that you really should have taken that left fork thirty miles ago?  Most people prefer folie à deux.

Thursday dogblogging

To your right is Winston, the bulldog who lives next to my friend Rachel.

And on the left is my very own Bartleby, a nine-month old Bullmastiff puppy. Bartleby is doing his very best "What? Me? On the couch? I have no idea what you're talking about" look.

Here, Bartleby continues his attempts to convince me that he was just sitting there, minding his own business, when this couch came out of nowhere and slid itself under his butt.

By request: grab bag #3

1) As a small-l libertarian (like you), this part of the election year is usually spent by me growing gradually more and more disappointed in one or both of the presidential candidates. This year, as I already know enough about McCain to never vote for him in a million years, I've only been getting disappointed with Obama. Would you care to discuss his missteps lately vis a vis failing to maintain a moral high ground (Ayers, the racism card, etc.) and do you see this as an almost inevitable polluting of a good and well-meaning man by the political process, or just another example of another politician being shown to be just another politician under scrutiny?

My recent post on McCain inspired a heated email exchange as to whether or not these alleged missteps might reveal something important about McCain's character.  It occurred to me, with some surprise, that the Obama supporter with whom I was debating actually thought that it was important to determine which of the two candidates was a finer human being.  It's refreshing to be reminded that educated and intelligent people actually think Obama is a better grade of person than the usual politician.

I never did.  I have a very low opinion of politicians as people.  People who run for office are, well, the kind of people who crave power and fame more than almost anything else.  These are not my favorite kinds of people.  Now, I do think there are some extra-specially awful politicians (no, I name no names).  But I don't think McCain is one of them.  I disapprove of the man as a politician, but I'm not going to not vote for him merely because I think he cheats.  My interlocutor argued that this shows that McCain thinks the rules apply to everyone but him.  I would say that such a belief seems to be a prerequisite for running for office.  Check, say, Al Gore's position on a) vouchers and b) sending his own children to private school.

I have other reasons not to vote for McCain, namely that I do not think I would like the policies he would put into place.  I'm not sure I'd like the policies Obama put into place either, which is why I'm wavering between him and Bob Barr.  But "playing the race card" or any of his other alleged sins won't enter into it.  Politicians will do whatever they think will get them elected.

2) Given that the last couple years' weather and some near future forecasts have not gone the way global warming hypothesis supporters expected, what would it take for you to say, "I think I was wrong." Certainly the true believers will smoothly find another crusade without acknowledging what I believe (but am not totally sure) will turn out to be much ado about nothing, but what about you, Megan? Not that you should be there yet, but what would it take, assuming AGW is either wrong or just not a big deal, for you to change your mind?

Evidence that the planet isn't warming any more.  So far, I haven't seen it.

By request: grab bag #2

The Fairness Doctrine

An idea whose time has gone.  There are more than two sides to any issue of interest, and attempting to give them all equal representation would take more energy than the trivial public benefit that might result.  The actual system would, of course, simply involve a bureaucrat deciding what is "fair".  I expect that this would be about as effective as having a bureaucrat determine "what is art".

Anti-"gouging" laws

Another incredibly stupid idea.  Actual gougers get punished by the market, because no one buys their goods, and the neighbors remember.  These laws are more frequently deployed against vendors who are selling goods that have suddenly become scarce, like gasoline generators after a hurricane.  This discourages conservation.  Moreover, the spiking prices generally attract new supply to the area, which is a good thing.   People in a disaster area who can't get their hands on generators are no doubt comforted by the fact that at least they didn't pay too much for the privilege of sitting in the dark without refrigeration.

Your favorite economists, (1) all-time and (2) current (maybe the same).

My favorite historical economists are the standard list.  I am too wise to make "Who do I love more lists" for public consumption, but on a personal basis, am very fond of the Fabulous Mason Boys, Austan Goolsbee, and Bart Wilson of Chapman.

By request: subsidising the arts

By request: the precautionary principle

By request: investment advice

By request: grab bag

1. Given what you've said about for-profit companies being the main source of medical innovations, do you think it's worthwhile to give money to private medical research foundations like the Michael J. Fox Parkinsons organization?

Depends on the foundation.  In general, yes, I think funds directed towards research are well spent, but you have the responsibility to look at the foundation's operations and make sure they're good at what they do.

2. What do you think makes single women in their 30's decide to get pregnant on their own using a sperm donor? Do you think this phenomenon will continue to grow?

The answer to the first part of the question seems obvious:  they wanted kids, and didn't meet the right man.  As to the second part, I doubt it will stay even as popular as it is.  Having kids is tough enough with a partner--even a deadbeat dad is usually more help than no dad at all.  Having watched the experiences of women who've done this, not to mention my married friends with small children, I sure as hell wouldn't go the solo parenting route.  I know a number of other single thirtysomethings who feel the same way.

3. What are your favorite parts of the Bible?

The Psalms.  Also partial to Ecclesiastes, Acts, and the Book of Job.

4. How should unemployment benefits be improved?

They should be replaced with guaranteed government part time jobs.  Only those who need it would take the benefit, and no one would stay on benefit longer than they had to. 

5. I think Jonah Goldberg once said the invention of the automobile did more to disrupt traditional societies than any political or legal change. Do you agree?

Probably true.  Certainly, it was the first step towards the sexual revolution.  It also disaggregated communities, separating peoples' business interests from their residential interests.  In my opinion, the latter was not a salutory development, and should have (but was not) been matched by larger regional government bodies to bring those interests back into alignment.

By request: auctioning landing slots

Mayer and Sinai's study also identified the real culprit: the deliberate overscheduling of flights at peak periods by major airlines trying to increase the amount of connecting traffic at their hub airports. Major airlines like United, Delta, and American use a hub-and-spoke model as a way to offer consumers more flight choices and to save money by centralizing operations. Most of the traffic they send through a hub is on the way to somewhere else. (Low-cost carriers, on the other hand, typically carry passengers from one point to another without offering many connections.) Overscheduling at the hubs can't explain all delays--weather and maintenance problems also contribute. But nationally, about 75 percent of flights go in or out of hub airports, making overscheduling the most important factor.

American Airlines, for example, uses O'Hare as a hub and schedules a cluster of flights to arrive there from the east in the earlier afternoon. Another cluster leaves for points west and south soon after. In the 30-minute period between 2:45 p.m. and 3:15 p.m., American has scheduled about 18 takeoffs, not counting its regional flights. That comes close to maxing out the airport's capacity, without any other airline. Other airports are even more extreme. Continental has seven flights scheduled to depart during the exact same minute (11:45 a.m.) out of Newark, as well as almost 20 other flights in the surrounding half hour. Some of these flights leave late more than 80 percent of the time. The major airlines know perfectly well that these hideous statistics are inevitable.

By request

Comment problems again

What's the matter with Massachussetts?

Tuesday recipeblogging

Snakes on a plain

One of the more dire predictions of the consequences of climate change came from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) a few months ago: The giant Burmese python currently wreaking havoc in the Florida Everglades could find itself "comfortable" in as much as a third of the nation once temperatures rise as projected.

A new study using a different computer model released this week suggests otherwise. Climate change will actually seriously impact the current range of the reptile in the U.S., confining it to the swampy southern fringe of Florida.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a person!

The claim that undergirded slavery--and really Jim Crow--wasn't simply that blacks lacked "personhood" it was that they either weren't human, were sub-human, or were a lower order of human. This wasn't simply an ethical debate--whole reams of bad science sprung up to back up this notion. Eventually, better science prevailed. I'm arguing that that's a lot more cut and dry than abortion, and that religion was a constant on both sides, and basically dominant among those who defended slaveholding. Science, which rose above the level of alchemy, on the other hand, was not.

Olympic indifference

I'm getting rather steamed up about the complete silence by the perky staff on the Today Show about the fact that China is an authoritarian government that has a spotty record on human rights and lacks free elections and a free press. Instead, we getting dreamy montages of the Chinese culture and loving descriptions of the Bird Nest stadium. All that is fine. But right after they show a reporter wolfing down roasted bugs in the markets of Beijing, they should also mention that China has denied visas to athletes who have dared protest China's position on Darfur.

Who gagged our media? Is NBC so afraid of getting kicked out of China that they happily serve up dishes of cultural puff pieces and can't even mention that China has refused to allow its citizens to protest?

Yes, and it's shameful.  China is proving that American companies will throw freedom of speech out the window if the price is right.

The voice of God

Faith without (public) works is an empty vessel . . .

1. There is an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity, and man's highest destiny is to fulfill His purpose
2. I routinely ignore what this deity says because my neighbors disagree

Obama and the netroots: looking a tad desperate these days

McCain's been getting a lot of mileage out of his "Christianity-in-captivity" story. It's been in ads, and speeches, and his talks from the pulpit. And for good reason: It's extraordinarily affecting. In it, McCain is spending another Christmas Day locked in a Vietnamese prison. A guard walks up to him and, with his foot, etches a cross in the dirt. McCain and his captor stare at the symbol for a moment, before the guard scratches it away and leaves McCain to his thoughts. "To me, that was faith," says McCain. "A faith that unites and never divides, a faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity."

What's peculiar about this story is that, as a DailyKos commentor noticed, it precisely echoes a tale from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago:

Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

It's quite a coincidence. A couple bloggers have started looking for some further evidence that this story actually happened to McCain.

But he wasn't; he was in his limo on the way to the church. His staff says he didn't listen; maybe that's true. But nothing would have prevented a staff member from listening and calling McCain on his cell phone. (I believe that he does know how to use a cell phone.) McCain didn't bother to correct Warren when he told the audience about the "cone of silence," and Warren seemed surprised to learn that McCain hadn't been in the communications-free room.

This was a serious misstep on the part of the Obama campaign, and his supporters could best help him by never mentioning it again.  Sure, it's conceivable that this could have happened.  Is there any way to get any evidence that this happened?  No.  There are two possible scenarios:

1. After a bad showing, they make an accusation they can't possibly prove, thereby looking like bad sports.
2. After a bad showing, they make an accusation they can't possibly prove, and the McCain campaign produces his cell phone records, thereby making them look like jealous toddlers.

Masters of the Fryolater

The problem with having narrow skills, like being able to structure CDOs, is that if you lose your job, your employment prospects are limited. Unless you have personal connections that are willing to give you a chance at something where your skills might be distantly relevant (say being the CFO of a small company), most employers, especially large companies, want to hire someone who is already doing precisely what the job calls for. I've seen enormously talented senior people (and I don't mean from Wall Street) unable to land jobs because employers write the job specifications so narrowly.

Recall that in the dot-com bust, those who lost jobs in Silicon Valley faced similarly bleak situations, and stories abounded of principals of failed companies seeking work at the likes of Home Depot.

It is hard to be sympathetic with people who made so much money in the fat years. Nevertheless, naivetee, optimism, peer pressure and (of course) big bucks lead young people to chose these high paying careers and not consider how risky they are. Even though Wall Street's cyclicality is well known, many assume the cuts will happen to someone else, and if something bad were to happen, they could always find a job on the buy side. They are learning otherwise.

One interesting thought is that the two current banes of left-leaning economists, income-inequality and "jobless growth", may be linked. 

I, for one, do not welcome our new robot overlords

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy

Modern manners

Of course, the downside of putting things on Facebook is that you have to be very careful, when you fake your way out of one obligation so you can do another, to ensure that no reference to the other thing appears where the faked-out friend can see it.

The World's Tallest Woman has Died

Sandy Allen, 53, who grew to be more than seven feet, seven inches tall died Wednesday at a nursing home in Shelbyville, Indiana.

A spokeswoman for the Heritage House Convalescent Center in Shelbyville said Allen "had been in failing health in recent years and died of natural causes."

She had been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's tallest woman.

By the time she was 10, Allen already stood six foot three. By 16, she was over seven feet tall, the Indianapolis Star daily said.

It's believed that a tumor on her pituitary gland caused her abnormal growth.

She'll probably end up being the tallest woman in (recorded) history, because we can now identify and remove the tumors that caused that kind of abnormal growth.  And a good thing, too, because the human body is not designed to work at that size; the leg muscles can't support the weight, the back buckles, the heart gives out.  Most of the people I know who are as tall as me (4σ) already have back and circulatory problems.  Not to mention the difficulty of finding pants with a 27 inch waist and a 35 inch inseam.

Twitterpated

Can it be long before the first couple meets and falls in love over Twitter?  A friend points out that that great prophet, Walt Disney, foresaw all of this decades ago:

Atlantic Monthly: Fair and Balanced

Obama: not the antichrist. No, seriously.

What's to be done with Fannie and Freddie?

Government matters

One of Megan McArdle's correspondents rants against the evils of the DC Department of Motor Vehicles before snarking " I can't wait for the government to take over our healthcare system."

A common enough sentiment. But look -- the government already runs a fleet of air craft carriers. Worse! The government's taken over our national monetary policy -- mistakes can plunge the country into recession or a destructive cycle of inflation. And as if that's not enough, they run a vast arsenal of nuclear warheads capable of destroying the entire planet. Which is just to say that if it's not conceivable that there could be a well-managed government agency, then we're all doomed irrespective of what happens with health care. But in fact if you look across the country or around the world, you see some highly effective public agencies and some highly dysfunctional ones. Obviously, you wouldn't want the health care system run like the worst of those agencies, but that's hardly to say that a highly effective government health care agency would be impossible to achieve.

This strikes me as odd because I wouldn't have thought it a particularly controversial proposition that the military is not a particularly effective organization.  The US military is indisputably the most effective military in the world.  But militaries are not very effective.  At any of the tasks the military does which are comparable to a private organization, it performs worse than top-notch private organizations; it is not as good at logistics as Wal-Mart, as good at food service as McDonalds, etc.  Military procurement is expensive and insanely inefficient.  This is the nature of the beast; governments have all sorts of rules that are designed to achieve goals other than effectiveness.

It keeps growing, and growing . . .

Almost famous

Brian Wood is best known as the writer behind the fierce New York dystopian comic DMZ, which posits a future in which Manhattan is in the grips of a Baghdad-style civil war. But one of his most personal works is Local, a collection of twelve interconnected stories about vagabond Megan McArdle and the cities she lives in, from Minneapolis to Richmond to Halifax. One of Local's most moving stories takes place in Park Slope, and with the hardcover collection of Local coming to stores next month, we're pleased to present an exclusive excerpt on the Comics Page.

Read the entire saga of Megan McArdle, in Local, out in September from Oni Press.

I'm sure buying a copy.  From the teaser strip (available at the link) it seems I've led quite a life.

But how do you <i>feel</i>

Activists on both sides are awaiting a comprehensive report reviewing two decades of published research on mental health and abortion, to be presented this week at the American Psychological Association's annual conference in Boston.

The report comes at a pivotal time as some judges and lawmakers have begun to make decisions in part based on peer-reviewed studies suggesting women who have had abortions are at higher risk of anxiety, depression and substance abuse.

Abortion opponents cite these studies, as well as testimony from women who describe years of psychological turmoil after abortions, to make the case that the state must restrict abortion to protect women's mental health.

The U.S. Supreme Court cited this reasoning last year in upholding a ban on a late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion. South Dakota incorporated the same rationale into a new mandate that abortion doctors must tell prospective patients they will be putting themselves at risk for psychological distress and suicide.

The abortion-hurts-women view is also being used to promote a broad abortion ban on South Dakota's fall ballot. The argument: A woman may think she wants to end a pregnancy, may even feel relief when she does, but she will suffer for it later. So the state has a duty to stop her.

To supporters of legal abortion, this is equivalent to saying the state has a duty to warn women away from giving birth because some might later suffer postpartum depression. They acknowledge some women may regret their decision or feel sad about it, but say there is no proof abortion leads to serious mental illness -- or that women would be better off if they were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies.

I'm considerably more ambivalent about abortion than most pro-choice pundits, but this time I'm firmly on the abortion rights side.  I can see this being relevant in boundary cases, like teenagers petitioning for judicial overrides of parental notification laws.  And I can certainly see requiring providers to inform patients of any mental health risks, provided that the best evidence shows that there are indeed such.  But it is not the state's job to prevent me from dating jerks, taking long car trips with my mother, reading Russian novels, or doing any of a number of other things that put my mental health at risk.  It's my job to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

More generally, I'm kind of disgusted by the way both sides look to do an end run around the central issue:  the personhood of the fetus, and the mother's right to bodily integrity.  If you can't make your case on those grounds, you're setting yourself up for a bad situation when biological technology changes.  On current pro-choice rhetoric, if it ever becomes possible to harvest a fetus and gestate it outside the womb, the organization is going to have to change its name to "Unplanned Parenthood".  Meanwhile, basing your case on the mother's mental health just means that your arguments will collapse as better treatments emerge for mental illness.  Meanwhile, you've set up a pretty damn offensive nanny-state framework that will no doubt intrude into other matters you'd like to hold sacred.

Japanomics

Gross domestic product, the widest measure of economic activity, fell 0.6% from the previous quarter on a seasonally-adjusted basis, the government said early Wednesday. That translates to an annualized rate of decline of 2.4%, and it represents the first quarterly contraction in a year.

The decline was the largest in nearly seven years, coming as rising prices of energy, food and raw materials hit consumers and corporations. Many Japanese companies are suffering from higher costs of materials at the same time as their sales decline around the world, and they are responding by cutting production. Japan is particularly vulnerable to higher energy prices, as it relies nearly entirely on imported oil.

They're being hit hard by the shrinking American trade deficit, among other things.  And unlike American consumers, Japanese people respond to rising prices by buying less stuff, instead of borrowing the money to keep their consumption level.

Though some hysterical commentator will undoubtedly say it, this isn't a harbinger of another decade-long decline; it's the natural result of a bad patch in the global economy.  The problems that sapped Japan's economic strength in the late nineties and the early half of this decade have been at least partially dealt with:  its banking system is no longer so prone to keep underperforming loans on their books, throwing good capital after bad, and its corporations have become more flexible.

What this does indicate is how dependent the global economy remains on the American consumer.  Most of the other large industrialized nations have so far failed to generate robust growth in domestic demand, which means that every time we cut down on imports, their economies swoon.  That has to change, because American consumers can't keep borrowing and spending forever.

Georgia . . . Georgia . . .

Terrific headline on this New York Times story: "Georgia Says Accord Broken as Russia Occupies City".  Do we really need to question Georgia's claim that the accord has been broken?  I mean, I'm no diplomat.  But I feel like when a country signs a ceasefire, and then hours later occupies a city with a tank battalion, then no matter how hard that country denies that the tank battalion exists, they have pretty clearly broken the ceasefire.

Russia is denying that it is occupying Gori.  On the other hand, only several hours ago they were denying that they had any tanks there.  If they don't, then some other nation seems to have lost an armored column somewhere.  I can only presume that they allowed one of my ex-boyfriends to drive the lead tank.  They were probably headed for America, and accidentally turned right at Greenland.

Several commenters have expressed disappointment that I have not expressed any outrage about this.  Well, I'm outraged.  Also, not a fan of a resurgent Russian empire.  I think we should do something about it, not that I think we will.  But we could certainly do more than we are, which is nothing.  George Bush appears to think of this as an unwelcome distraction from the main job of any US president, which is watching Olympic swimming.

Continue reading "Georgia . . . Georgia . . . " »

Pigeons on the pill

More motor madness

When I moved to DC from Virginia two years ago, I did exactly what I new resident is supposed to do: I got my car inspected, and then went to the DMV to both register my vehicle and get a license.

 

When I got my DC license, I surrendered my Virginia license (as required by law). At this point, the DC DMV is supposed to inform the Virginia DMV that I've surrendered my Virginia license. It even says so on their website. But that didn't happen, as a DMV staffer forgot.

 

So, Virginia still had me in their system as an active driver. But soon, my no-longer-existent Virginia license expired. As did my Virginia car registration. As did my Virginia car insurance. So, the State of Virginia had me in their system as an active driver with no license and an uninsured, unregistered car. Needless to say, that's a problem.

 

So, when pulled over for speeding in Virginia, the police officer kindly asked (after I showed him my active DC license and DC registration) if I was the same person who once lived in Alexandria, VA. At that point, he informed me that, despite being a legally licensed driver in DC, my privlege to operate a motor vehicle in the state of Virginia had been revoked. Although he admitted that it was likely a bureaucratic error, he had no choice but to force me to abandon my vehicle because of what the "computer said." This was, as you would say, a Rule That Must Be Followed No Matter What. He informed me that, had I not been so polite, he would have been forced to cuff me and have my vehicle impounded. I was, after all, operating a vehicle without a license.

 

When I returned to my office (via an expensive taxi ride), I called the Virginia DMV -- and as soon as I faxed over my DC registration, they fixed the error. Nonetheless, I still had to show up to court a month later, as technically, I was arrested for operating without a license. The judge dropped all charges. 

 

I can't wait for the government to take over our healthcare system.

Healthcare: the chicken problem is the egg problem

From my perspective, the health care cost issue is a bit of a red herring. If you had government out of the health care financing business, you would not worry about what health care costs are doing. If my fellow citizens choose to spend more of their money on their health care, that's not my concern. It's the prospect of my fellow citizens spending more of my money on their health care that has me worried.

The sinister side of the PennDOT incident

I think everyone is missing a deeper issue regarding your incident.  Namely, how did the the DC database link to the PA database.  What was their criteria for knowing that it was the same Megan McArdle in both databases?  Social Security number (you know the one that is not for identification purposes)?  It's not like those could be faked or stolen. Or what if it was a different Megan McArdle (from THAT McArdle branch of the family) who was the danger to society and received a citation?

In your situation, the facts all line up and it is bureaucratic stupidity.  Imagine if you were trying to prove that it wasn't you and that the SYSTEM was wrong. Time to reread Kafka.

My (guitar) hero

No shirt, no shoes, no credit

The conduit, the market for securitization, through which mortgages and other debts are packaged and sold as securities, has become sclerotic and almost totally dependent on government support. The problems, intensified by bond investors who have grown leery of these instruments, have been a drag on the economy and have persisted despite the exercise of extraordinary regulatory powers by policy makers.

"The mortgage finance system in the United States has been badly damaged," said Anthony Lembke, co-head of investments at MKP Capital Management, a hedge fund firm that is a big investor in mortgages. "There is definitely some reinvention that will need to occur, and that will include some explicit involvement by the government."

Bond investors first stopped buying private home mortgage deals, then shunned commercial mortgages. Now, they are becoming wary of credit card debts and auto loans. In the first half, private securitizations reached just $131 billion, down sharply from $1 trillion in the same period last year, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters.

Save me!

Much of the way America has come to live and do business is predicated on low energy prices. After the last price spike eased in the mid-1980s, many consumers, once again, appeared to give little thought to how much energy they used. They traded in their sedans for SUVs and their ranch houses for McMansions.

U.S. companies moved manufacturing overseas where labor was cheap, unconcerned with the resulting need to move products thousands of miles back to their customers. Low fuel costs facilitated "just-in-time" delivery systems -- supplies were delivered as needed, frequently by air rather than truck. The additional fuel costs were seen as a small price to pay to keep inventories low and customers supplied with the latest goods.

The era of cheap fuel began drawing to a close three years ago, and many businesses now are taking a hard look at their energy costs.

. . . 

Fuel prices are causing many companies to change what they ship and how they ship it. "You want to reduce the amount of distance, you want to reduce the amount of transportation in the network," says Tom Jones, a supply-chain manager at Ryder System Inc., a Miami-based truck-leasing and logistics company. "That really leads to people doing things differently."

Ryder has adjusted engines in its truck fleet to go no faster than 63 miles per hour, down from an earlier 65 mph limit, and to shut off after they've been idling for five minutes rather than 10. Londonderry, N.H.-based Stonyfield Farm, which leases trucks from Ryder, is using onboard computers to keep tabs on whether drivers are wasting fuel with bad habits like accelerating too quickly, says Ryan Boccelli, the company's director of logistics.

Another way companies are trying to cut fuel costs is by changing their packaging. Procter & Gamble, which makes Tide detergent, shifted to more concentrated detergent last year to reduce transportation costs and to enable retailers to fit more on their shelves.

Companies that ship cheap but bulky goods are adapting the quickest. Three years ago, Kimberly-Clark Corp., maker of Kleenex tissues and Huggies diapers, started revamping its distribution network. Its distribution centers were located next to its production plants. Now the company has eight giant distribution facilities spread around the country. The new setup, which allows the company to rely more on rail, helped it save 470,000 gallons of fuel last year.

Railroad transport, however, can slow the flow of merchandise from warehouses to store shelves. That forces retailers and manufacturers to carry more inventory or risk not having enough to meet customer demand.

How deep the changes go will depend on how much longer oil prices stay above $100.  And since as I've said before, the best estimate of the future price is the current price, there's no real way of knowing how long that will be.

Georgia on my mind

Just hours after Russia agreed to a French-brokered cease-fire, Russian troops followed by irregular Ossetian militias pushed deep into Georgia, seizing the strategic city of Gori and deploying armored vehicles on the nation's main highway that leads to capital city Tbilisi.

Thick black plumes of smoke rose from Gori as panicked residents -- including the doctors and patients of the local hospital -- fled to Tbilisi in packed cars and minivans. Most locals had already abandoned Gori after it was heavily bombarded by Russian forces on Tuesday, just before Presidents Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and Nicholas Sarkozy of France announced a provisional cease-fire.

Eyewitnesses and fleeing residents said that with Russian tanks securing Gori, Ossetian militias and Russian cossacks began pillaging stores and homes. Some Georgians attempting to escape said they were told by irregulars to abandon their cars and valuables at gunpoint, and forced to walk toward Tbilisi. At least one vehicle of Western journalists was also seized at gunpoint by Russian-allied irregulars.

"The Russians are looting everything in sight. The whole city is full of marauders," said Roland Bochiashvili as he left Gori.

It still seems more likely that they're just trying to worsen Georgia's BATNA in order to get a more favorable deal.  And demonstrate to the world that they can do whatever the hell they want.  Still, if I were in Europe, I'd be locking in my home heating oil prices now.

More media me

Hillary, we hardly knew ye

Dope fiends

John Tierney is suggesting that we abandon this fruitless attempt to keep athletes from doping:

Once upon a time, the lords of the Olympic Games believed that the only true champion was an amateur, a gentleman hobbyist untainted by commerce. Today they enforce a different ideal. The winners of the gold medals are supposed to be natural athletes, untainted by technology. After enough "scandals," the amateur myth eventually died of its own absurdity. The natural myth is still alive in Beijing, but it's becoming so far-fetched -- and potentially dangerous -- that some scientists and ethicists would like to abandon it, too.

I'm with those unnamed scientists and ethicists.  The absurdity of the amateur ideal is evident when you watch Chariots of Fire (still a good movie, btw)




One of the heroes, rich and Jewish, is upbraided for hiring a trainer and thereby making it hard for the others to compete.  Certainly, training for a race is not natural--particularly with the ever-finer-grained videotaping an so forth that perfects modern technique.  But we don't view it as unfair.

On a practical level, I don't think you can get doping out of the games.  It has been over a decade since a friend pointed out that every time they find a test for a new drug, you suddenly see a lot fewer world records being broken.  Which isn't surprising.  We're not genetically any different from the people twenty years before us, so if world records are constantly being broken, that's because something besides the athlete has gotten better.  Sometimes its training and equipment--modern tracks are faster, as are swimsuits.  But that's hardly enough to explain the constant smashing of records.

Athletes are crazy competitive.  They will do anything to win.  Why not acknowlege that, rather than making fruitless rules?  It's not "natural" or "fair", you say?  But is there anything less natural or fair than sport?  I will never be a good athlete because I don't have the genes for it--hours of practice would make me somewhat better than I am, but not good enough to compete with a decent JV athlete.  Hardly fair, that I am shut out by accidents of birth.  And as for natural, just imagine what our Homo Erectus ancestors would think if they could see us suiting up for a modern track circuit, swimming competition, or basketball game.

Oil falls free

Pennsylvania Department of Transportation: incompetent, or malignant?

The EXACT same thing happened to me.  I too was cited for underage drinking in 1992 (I had an out-of-state drivers license at the time).  Life went on until the DC DMV linked into a national data network in 1997.  When I went to renew my DC license after that date, I was told that PA had placed a flag on my record and that I could not renew.  The nice people at the Penn DOT told me that I never signed a form acknowledging my license suspension and that I would have to sign it and begin to serve the suspension.  They were insanely inflexible.   I ended up tracking down the District Magistrate in the town where I got the citation and she was kind enough to have mercy on me.  She retroactively changed my violation from underage drinking to disorderly conduct.  As a result, I could avoid the license suspension.  Sadly, the DC DMV never could properly clear the flag in their system (the also charged me $100 to "reinstate" my license).  Every time I had to interact with them after that, I had to explain the situation all over again.  Not sure what I would have done if the Magistrate didn't help me.  I don't think I have ever been as mad as I was when talking with Penn DOT.

Alt-A Mortgages: Don't panic

The idea of just handing the keys back and walking away from a house worth less than the loan made against it tends to catch the imagination. Hence fears that the expiry of initial fixed rates on Alt-A loans could result in another wave of foreclosures, just as the pain in the sub-prime segment appears to be peaking.

Yet there are reasons for cautious optimism. Alt-A borrowers have better credit records than sub-prime debtors, and the pool of Alt-A mortgage backed securities is smaller - about $600bn for loans made between 2005 and 2007, compared with about $1,000bn for sub-prime. Home owners will not necessarily default just because plummeting home prices have left them with negative equity. Research by the Boston Federal Reserve examining house price falls in the early 1990s found that while negative equity was a necessary condition of foreclosures, borrowers also had to run into cashflow difficulties before losing their homes.

Will they? Many of the Alt-A mortgages were made with interest rates typically set at between 5.5-7.5 per cent for those with a fixed period of 12 months or more. These then "reset" to adjustable rates. With wholesale interest rates currently low, those resetting will see little shift in their interest cost. Instead, it is the end of "interest-only" periods that will be most painful. New research by CreditSights out this week, however, suggests principal re-payments kick in within the first three years in only 4 per cent of 2005-origin Alt-A mortgages and in only 1 per cent of those of 2006 vintage. That is a significant ripple, but not a wave.

After every bubble, there's generally a sort of an anti-bubble--when analysts start looking for reasons that this is, like, the worst crisis ever.  The worries about Alt-A mortgages seem to me to be largely part of this fever.  "Everything in the future will be exactly like everything that just happened" is what got us into this mess in the first place . . .

Apologies

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation: Sheer genius

The logic of empire

It's hard to overstate what a bad idea I think it would be to offer NATO membership to Georgia at this time. Allowing a country to join NATO isn't just some random 'screw you' gesture to Russia. It's entering into a military alliance, whereby we construe an attack on that country as if it were an attack on us. It means accepting a binding commitment to send our army to fight and die for that country. And we should never, ever enter into such a commitment lightly.

I supported expanding NATO to include Eastern European countries. I wanted to make that commitment to them, to ensure that the Iron Curtain would never again fall with them on the wrong side. But I think it would be madness to take the same view of Georgia. For one thing, if we're going to enter into a military alliance with some country, that country should not have ongoing territorial disputes with Russia. If it does, then unless we are willing to go to war with Russia over those territorial disputes, we have no business entering into a military alliance with that country. For another, that country should have a basically reasonable government -- the sort of government that would not do something completely stupid, like attacking a city garrisoned by the Russians. Moreover, its political system should give us confidence that this reasonable government is not a fluke.

Another way to look at the question is:  are we going to allow Russia to reassemble the old Russian empire?  At its heart, that's what this is about.  Maybe we should; maybe it's none of our business who Russia decides to invade, or what puppet governments they decide to prop up, so long as they don't share a border with Germany. 

I don't mean that sarcastically--I can make all sorts of arguments in favor of this attitude.  On the other hand, it has obvious, dramatic costs, including the fact that Russia's imperial ambitions are unlikely to stop at the Georgian border.  Also, as far as I know, Georgia controls the only major pipeline to Europe not owned by Russia or Iran--Russian control of Georgia would dramatically increase its negotiating power with the entire European Union. 

If this war ends up with Russia occupying Georgia, NATO will probably be worse off than it would have been if it had let Georgia join--though to be sure, the US might still be better off.  I don't know how likely such a scenario is.  But it's been clear for a long time that Russia's goal is to regain its former imperial borders, effectively if not nominally. 

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of Obama . . .

The only post I will ever write on Edwards' affair

Vive la difference

Most nations gain their advantage by making things more efficiently, and at lower cost, than their competitors.

To the extent that the French enjoy a natural advantage, it is in their inefficiency: They are the world's most efficient producers of structured indolence. They are the kept women of the global economy; their status depends, in part, on their practical uselessness.

Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.

It is only somewhat marred by the fact that I have heard its opening anecdote from, to a first approximation, every single American I have ever met who has spent any time at all in Britain.  I find it hard to believe that every one of my compatriots, even those who spent a month on a course at Oxford, have been so unlucky as to encounter hapless shopkeepers who stop stocking things because "we kept running out".  I find it especially hard to believe that they stopped stocking Chocolate-dipped McVities Digestive Biscuits (which are indeed one of the world's most delicious convenience foods), which are to British grocers as 97 versions of diet coke are to the modern American convenience store.

Besides, the story about ordering 20 channels of cable, and finding out that this consists of 10 channels during the day, and 10 other channels at night, is much funnier.  It is also, as far as I know, true--a business school acquaintance responded to this by cutting a 50 pound note in half and mailing it in, which did not amuse the cable company but gave the rest of us a little flutter of patriotic pride.

Weird things I get in my email

I don't know quite what to say about this.

Just when you thought you'd seen everything . . .

What's good for Peter is good for Paul . . .

American exceptionalism

I thought I'd get this rant out of the way before the season hits. Watching the Olympics in the US is no fun, because the only thing you can watch is Americans winning. You'd think the U.S. is the only country ever winning from the coverage. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for Americans to win, but I'm happy for other people to win, too. In fact, in some ways it's much more interesting when you have a diversity of folks competing and this is portrayed clearly in the coverage. It gets boring fast when all you can hear is the U.S. national anthem.

Growing up in Hungary, I remember watching all sorts of sports competitions - and I don't just mean the Olympics - where people from all over were taking home the gold. Sure, Hungary is a small country (population 10 million, that's like Chicagoland having its own team) and its athletes are only going to win so many medals so you could argue that by definition coverage would have to feature other competitions as well. But actually, for a small country, Hungary ranks very high on the all-time medals list (whoa, I actually had no idea how high before writing this post) so it's not as though there aren't opportunities to feature its own. Also, TV could just show less of the event if there were not enough Hungarian nationals to feature. But that's not what happens as featuring one's own doesn't seem to be the point. I remember hearing plenty of other national anthems and seeing lots of different flags.

I don't want to deny that there is some element of national pride here.  But here's the thing:  there are a lot of people in America, and a huge amount of money supporting professional athletes.  That means that in most events that Americans enjoy watching, we have competitive teams.  There's something of a chicken and egg problem, of course, because of course sports that Americans aren't particularly good at will be dull and not attract wide audiences.  But mostly, the direction runs from the interest to the competence.  The largest European nation is less than a third of the size of America, and therefore will have competitive teams in fewer sports.

Moreover, it's not entirely true that we only watch events we win at--the marathon is widely broadcast, and Americans basically never win that (though some of the winners are American residents).  We also watch a lot of ski racing and luge during the winter olympics, even though Americans are generally outclassed by the Scandinavians and not infrequently by other European teams.

What you don't get is the elevation of obscure sports because someone might medal in them, which happens frequently in small countries.  That can be kind of enjoyable--I, for one, love watching Olympic curling.  But it's not really America's "fault" that it has medal contenders in most of the popular sports.

I do find American Olympics coverage annoying, because they spend too much time "humanizing" the athletes with sob stories.  Call me insensitive, but I don't watch runners because their puppy died tragically when they were fourteen.  I watch them because they can run fast, and that's beautiful.

What a catch

"I triple-majored at Stanford, have an MBA from Wharton and a good paying job. Oh, wait--that's what would make me a good catch if I were a man. Hmm. I'm a reasonably attractive, quick-witted, intelligent woman who is just as comfortable in jeans as she is in heels and a little black dress."

Guessing games

Crazy!=criminal

The measure of faith

describing oneself as an "evangelical" tends to be a proxy for religious intensity in a way that describing oneself as a Catholic isn't. Many evangelical churches subsist within mainline denominations, attracting a self-selected pool of the denomination's most devout churchgoers; many others, especially in the megachurch sector, rely heavily on spiritual seekers looking for a more intense experience than their mainline upbringing (or Catholic upbringing, more often) provided. If you're a member of an evangelical church, chances are your congregation demands more from you - and you demand more from your congregation - than even the minority of Catholics who fulfill their Sunday obligation every week, let alone the lukewarm, once-a-month variety. And if you're born and raised evangelical, you're getting a very different experience of religion than the typical cradle Catholic, since evangelical youth ministries tend to emphasize the necessity for personal conversion - of making an active choice for Jesus, and being "born again" - much more heavily than your average Catholic confirmation class. American Evangelicalism is thus at a deep level a religion of converts and enthusiasts in a way that American Catholicism - which of course includes its share of converts and enthusiasts - simply isn't. And it's hardly surprising that this difference would manifest itself in polling on abortion and related matters, since as a general rule (with, of course, myriad exceptions), the more seriously a given Christian takes their faith, the more likely they are to come around to some variant on the pro-life position.

We're in your browser, watching your gender

Parks

I don't mean to pick on Atrios, because he does a lot of great urbanism stuff, but this is also only half right. You can have walkability and a big yard, so long as you aren't picky about whether or not the yard is your own private property. That's the tradeoff.

The essence of a good, walkable, urban place is density, but it's density that's achieved in part by publicly supplying a lot of the things people want, and thereby achieving a more efficient use of space. Is it necessary for every last home on the block to have a decorative, manicured lawn that does nothing but sit there getting watered and mowed? No way, a couple of public gardens will suffice. Is it necessary for every home to have its own blacktop square with basketball hoop that sits unused 99 percent of the time? Is it necessary for every home to have a place for a father and son to play catch, or for a guy to sit in the shade and read?

A well-planned city will provide good public spaces-sidewalks and retail corridors and public gardens and parks. When you frame the tradeoff as being between open space and walkability, many will say, oh well, it would have been cool to walk places. But that's not necessarily how it has to be. Washingtonians can sit on their patio or balcony and grill or have a coffee, and when they need more space to shoot hoops or admire some greenery or whatever, there are plenty of places to do that. And when they don't want to make their own coffee and sit by themselves, well, they can walk to places where they don't have to.

Parks are definitely the key to building a city that works over the entire life-cycle.  But I'd dispute that DC has done a good job of this.  Indeed, this is one of the things that my mother, who has just moved here from New York, often complains about--there aren't really any adequate parks in Northwest, at least east of Rock Creek.  I live a few blocks from one of the better ones, but it's not very good for dogs, and no good for children at all; it's basically a place for adults to take a stroll (and at night, to sell drugs). 

Middle class families are, IMHO, the backbone of a thriving city--they're the stabilizing force that keeps civil society together.  And those families will not stay in DC, in part because of the schools, but also in part because DC is not constructed to make it easy to have small children here.  In New York, on the other hand, there are dozens and dozens of neighborhoods where families can live within walking distance of a sizeable park, replete with playground equipment, sledding hills, and fountains to splash in.

Huge tracts of land

I Want A Big Yard In A Walkable Community

But you can't have it! Or, more specifically, if everyone has a big yard the community ceases to be especially walkable. That isn't to say that you can't have developments with yards relatively near to retail, so that there is stuff within walking distance. You can still have corner shops or similar, but having sufficient residential density to support significant neighborhood-serving retail isn't really compatible with everyone has a big yard.

Keep your yard!  Just understand the tradeoff.

Because I've always lived in cities, I don't even understand the utility of the big yards I see in the suburbs.  I get the purpose of a yard for children and dogs to play in, and summers on the patio.  But I don't get the point of the vast expanses of lawn that lie fallow in the more upscale suburbs.  They require vast upkeep for the benefit of . . . looking at green, empty space.  And the tradeoff seems to be a world where you can't get anywhere without driving and your neighbors are distant apparitions.  Am I missing something?  Or do others perceive features where I see bugs?

If at first you don't succeed

President Hugo Chávez is using his decree powers to enact a set of socialist-inspired measures that seem based on a package of constitutional changes that voters rejected last year. His actions open a new stage of confrontation between his government and the political opposition.

The government quietly revealed last week that the president had approved 26 new laws on Thursday, when the 18-month decree powers bestowed on him by Congress were set to expire, but officials withheld offering the full text of the new laws until this week.

Some of the laws significantly increase Mr. Chávez's power. For instance, one law allows him to name regional political leaders who would have separate budgets, which could help him offset possible victories by opposition candidates in state and municipal elections scheduled for November.

(In a further blow to the opposition, the Supreme Court upheld a measure on Tuesday that prohibits more than 250 people from running for office while the comptroller general investigates claims of corruption against them. The measure will prevent Leopoldo López, one of the country's most popular politicians, from running for mayor of Caracas.)

Mr. Chávez is also trying to assert greater control over the armed forces through a decree creating militias, a new military branch he has pushed for.

Reigniting private property concerns, another law allows his government to "occupy and temporarily operate" private companies not in compliance with bookkeeping rules.

The set of decrees stops short of removing term limits for Mr. Chávez, which was one of the most polarizing measures in the package voters rejected in December. But more than a dozen of the laws are strikingly similar to items included in the failed constitutional overhaul, angering the president's critics.

One might have asked why Chavez needs emergency decree powers during an oil boom when his country is at peace.  Just askin' . . .

Time after time

So what did the article say? Well, it started out with a reasonable enough point. One of the basic assumptions of classical physics is that time flows in one direction and that when describing a physical system one needs to know the equations of motion and the initial conditions in order to predict the future behavior of a classical system.

However, quantum mechanics changes this a bit. Classical mechanics can be formulated in such a way that one sets up an "action" integral. The solution to the physical system can be expressed as the path that minimizes the action integral. It turns out that in quantum mechanics one needs to not simply take one path--but take the sum over all possible paths. For example, if you want to work out how a photon gets from a lightbulb to your eye, you need to take into account not just its straight-line trajectory, but contributions of all possible paths it could have taken, including paths where the photon bounces round the room. It's a bit strange, but it seems to work and 60 years+ of detailed experiments have confirmed this description over and over again to remarkable quantitative precision.

The authors of this paper claim to show that other terms can be added to the quantum mechanical action that are consistent with current theory and experiment. However, some of these possible terms include conditions in the future that need to be taken into account and summed over. That is to say, what happens in the future could (according to this paper) affect what happens in the present.

Why the LHC? The authors argue that these sorts of time-violating interactions could be associated with whatever new particles we create at the LHC. For example, the production of a large number of Higgs particles in the future could have a backwards-in-time causal effect on the machine that produced them, stopping the machine from ever running. As possible "evidence" for such a backwards-in-time effect, the authors cite the now-canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)--a particle accelerator that was meant to hunt the Higgs and was partially constructed in Texas before Congress pulled the plug on the project. As the authors write in their paper: "Such a cancellation after a huge investment is already in itself an unusual event that should not happen too often. We might take this event as experimental evidence for our model in which an accelerator with the luminosity and beam energy of the SSC will not be built."

It's as though the Higgs plays the role of the time traveler who goes back to the past and murders his grandfather, thus preventing his own birth.

Obama on car maintenance

Sign of the times

A local bar which had seemed to be doing relatively well, closed down for non-payment of rent:

Congress, help the American people. Stay home.

"Let's make peace . . . the way they did in Stanleyville and Saigon"

Annals of security

Why don't Walmart and Louis Vuitton discount?

Just say no to terrorism

Vegas hits a speedbump

MGM reported net income of $113.1 million, or 40 cents a share, down from $360.2 million, or $1.22 a share. The latest results include $19 million in insurance recoveries from the January Monte Carlo fire, while prior-year results included a gain of $264 million on property sales.

Net revenue slipped 2% to $1.9 billion.

The mean estimates of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were for earnings of 42 cents a share on $1.89 billion in revenue.

Casino revenue decreased 4%, largely due to a 7% drop in table-games volume at the company's Las Vegas Strip resorts, while slots revenue dipped 2%, including a 10% drop on the Strip.

Revenue from the company's hotel rooms fell 6%. Revenue per available room at Strip properties -- which include Bellagio, MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay -- declined 5% as the average daily room rate slipped 4% and the occupancy rate declined to 97% from 98%. Food and beverage revenue rose 2%.

The casino industry is facing what insiders and analysts call its biggest challenge in years. Rising gasoline prices, the housing crisis and other economic troubles are prompting consumers to gamble less and to spend less at the luxury boutiques and restaurants where casinos draw most of their profits.

The casino business makes most of its money on "avid gamblers", which is a euphemism for people who don't quite have control of their habit.  They tend to fall into two categories:  high rollers with high net worth, and ordinary folks who do extremely unwise things like go into massive debt in order to gamble.  With credit drying up, the latter group is probably having a hard time finding the money to gamble.  And as for the former group--well, the middle class suffer more during recessions, in terms of actual decline in personal utility.  But the rich actually take the larger financial hit, because their income is more dependent on business profits and capital gains, which varies strongly with recessions.

Radley Balko wins the internet: farewell, Steven Hayne

Signs of the times

• Georgie James is breaking up, and breaking my heart in the process.
• Local school board is planning to put security cameras in selected cafeterias to prevent theft.  The economy must be dire indeed if people are reduced to stealing school cafeteria food.
• Shell has started a weekly gasoline lottery--buy gas from them, and become eligible to win free gas.

More on Obama, Pigovian

A picture is worth a thousand words

Welcome to the funhouse

Housing: are more and worse defaults to come?

Good news, the Dow is falling

Culture matters

Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It was buzzing with news of an attack against the Epilepsy Foundation's Web site. Trolls had flooded the site's forums with flashing images and links to animated color fields, leading at least one photosensitive user to claim that she had a seizure.

. . .

As we discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. "I can't push you into the fire," he explained, "but I can look at you while you're burning in the fire and not be required to help."

What's not to like about Obama's "energy rebate"?

My impression is that many economists of all political leanings (perhaps most notably Greg Mankiw) favor a revenue-neutral "Pigovian" carbon tax as an economically optimal but politically impossible method of reducing America's carbon footprint (though I don't know where you stand on that.)

Obama has proposed a "windfall profits" tax on "big oil" to fund a "$1000 energy rebate" for consumers.  You've criticized this plan for introducing unnecessary complexity and unpredictability in the tax code and reducing the incentive for investment in oil companies.  Fair
enough, but how is Obama's plan effectively different from a Pigovian carbon tax?  Won't new taxes on oil companies will necessarily be passed on to consumers in the form of higher gas prices?

Has Obama found a way to dupe America into taking its medicine, or is there something about taxing Exxon's profits instead of John Q Public at the pump that reduces the effectiveness of such an approach?

Ectogenesis

1. If this technology were safe and effective, what fraction of prospective parents would pay an extra $10,000 to avoid pregnancy?

2. If insurance covered ectogenesis, what fraction of mothers would still opt for a traditional pregnancy?

3. How much do you think the availability of ectogenesis would affect family size?

I've never had a baby, of course, but looking at my friends, the pregnancy seems trivial compared to caring for a newborn.  And there are good reasons to go through pregnancy:  the ability to breastfeed, for one, and also the pair-bonding hormones that flood your body during and after birth.

On the other hand, pregnancy is pretty hard on the body--I've never seen a woman come out of her first pregnancy as good looking as she went in, which is emotionally difficult.  And it's risky.  $10,000 seems a pretty cheap price to pay--though I'd add that I bet ectogenesis would cost a lot more than that.

The interesting question he doesn't ask is what this would do to the politics of parenting.  Pro-choice advocates don't talk so much about the right not to be a parent; they focus on the right to control your own body.  That's also where the constitutional law seems to be focused, or so I read the right to privacy.  The minute you can take an aborted fetus and put it in an artificial womb, that argument falls away, and we get down to what pro-choicers really care about:  not having a kid.  I'm not saying that pregnancy is minor, but most people don't have an abortion because they don't want to be pregnant; they have abortions because they don't want to have a kid, or at least not this kid right now.

I can construct a libertarian argument for a right not to parent, but once the pregnancy leaves the sacred space of the individual body, both the logical and the emotional arguments get a lot weaker.  What will society look like when unwanted pregnancies start turning, once again, into unwanted kids?

Have they caught the anthrax killer?

Car talk

Obama: so many drawbacks

Is Obama too skinny for the presidency?



As Eric Martin says,

So in addition to being too popular, too charismatic and too eloquent to be President, Barack Obama is apparently too physically fit as well.  Those are some serious drawbacks. 

If we can confirm that Obama is also exceedingly intelligent,
displays good judgment and is competent, this guy's gonna be downright
unelectable. 

I'm frankly disappointed in the negative campaigning from the McCain side.  It's nowhere near as bad as the ads that ran from both sides in 2004, but still . . . here in DC, McCain is now running anti-Obama ads with a voice over in the same tones that the ninth grade bully-princess used to inform everyone that her newest enemy had, like, totally slept with a tenth grader behind the bleachers.  This does not make me more likely to vote for Senator from Arizona.