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June 30, 2005
Sanctimonious Socialist Spaniards Sanctify Sin?
What is the right number of Spaniards? Today the Spanish parliament voted to allow gay marriage. You probably saw this in the news. You may not know is that Spain already has the lowest birth rate in the world, 1.07 births per woman. At that rate, the population of Spain can half in a two or three generations. Yet just a few decades ago, Spain their birthrate was the highest in Europe. There are a slew of reasons for this, including the death of religious lifestyles, female education, birth control, abortion, and they all have encouraged women to delay having children until they are older (average age of a mother having her first child is in her 30s). With government welfare supplanting services provided by families and requiring high taxes to provide them, the opportunity cost of having children has increased dramatically.
Stanley Kurtz, in an op-ed that appeared in The Weekly Standard, tries to connect gay marriage and growing rejection of marriage in Scandinavia. If this proves correct, Spain and and the Scandinavian countries will provide a laboratory for observing if there is a critical threshold past which the decline of marriage leads to complete demographic and familial breakdown.
Homosexual marriage may be moral and in any case inevitable, I can't help but believe that this will worsen the demographic problems of Spain. I certainly don't say so definitively. To do that, many questions remain. Do those who want small families avoid getting married (or become gay) or does avoiding marriage encourage them to have small families? Will homosexuals adopt in large numbers from the third world, and will this prove a powerful force for creating population growth and assimilated immigrants? Can anything be done to stem the population collapse? If a society believes that the true price of freed is extinction for their people, should we care if they don't? How do modern, progressive and secular people feel about the descendants of the primitive, angry, and superstitious inheriting the earth?
Judicious use of tax credits (say by refunding social security for those with more than one kid), lowering fuel taxes (to haul those kids), and more afterschool and daycare programs (so moms can work) might reduce the severity of this decline in birthrates. But whatever they are trying now, it isn't working.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:53 PM | Comments (0)
And now for an example of good service
A & A alliance Moving inc, also known as Two guys and a Truck, quoted me a great price of $80 an hour for three men to move me into my new place, with a 3.5 hour minimum. They then sent me an email saying that was their price. I was finalizing a few details when they said the rate was $90 an hour. I was confused, but unwilling to aggravated again in the process for $30 buck. I simply forwarded them the email they sent me and asked which was the correct rate. They called me back a hour later to let me know that they just raised their rates, but were happy to quote me the old rate because they sent me it in the email. I appreciate their decision to stand by their word. Let's hope they give me a gentle and fast move, and I'll give them my hearty recommendation.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:41 PM | Comments (1)
And now for something insane
The LA times has an serious music review of the greatest hit songs from the Seasame Street show in their article, "A serious consideration of an estimable discography -- because it's time"
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
June 29, 2005
Mind reading is easy
Ever wonder how a palm or tarot reading can seem so accurate, even though you mind is telling you that though magic and miracles may exist, the don't this bozo don't got them?
At Psychic Sophistry, you can read all about the tricks that a non-psychic uses to pump information from their client, usually without their notice.
Essentially, they break down into four categories:
1) Asking you questions generic to people of your accent, race, and age (You are from New York)
2) Offering up somewhat ambiguous information leaving it to the client to fit this into their life (I'm hearing from an M-something, is that a Michael?)
3) Make predictions that are either self-fulfilling (worry about your driving), impossible to disprove (someone is thinking ill of you), or entirely subjective (you are a nice guy)
4) People want to believe so they give verbal and non-verbal clues constantly.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:58 PM | Comments (0)
SweatShvitz Shops
There have been substantial changes in the Israeli welfare state and tax rules.
Many ultra-orthodox must find work where before they studied, living off of a stipend from the state. Many of them are highly educated, but rules on gender separation, strict observance of holidays and the laws of kashrut have made it difficult for them to find jobs at many offices. Combine their high unemployment and inexpensive lifestyles and if you can work within their requirements, you might just get a cheap, loyal labor force.
One company, Matrix Software, believes that they've managed to tap this market though gender separation, a strictly kosher kitchen, a modest dress code, and wages that are third of those in the states and a half of those more broadly in Israel. At that point he can take projects that would otherwise be outsourced to India and Eastern Europe. That's a major win for the state of Israel.
However, I could see how some would think it exploitation.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:38 AM | Comments (2)
June 28, 2005
Mu
How does one answer the question, “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” If you were a wife beater, but are no longer, or have never, then correct answer is yes. But that lumps the innocent in with the recovering (and those temporarily refraining) wife beaters. But to answer no, implies either that you are still beating your wife, or could mean no, I'd never do that. Again, the good lumped with the bad.
What is someone to do?
Enter the Japanese word Mu. When used in Japanese conversation, it just means 'without', but used in American conversation, it means "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions".
Often shouted like The Ticks' war cry 'spoon'.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:58 PM | Comments (2)
June 27, 2005
J.K. Dansar doesn't treat their customers right
I'm renting a new apartment and I just wasn't treated right by my broker, so I need to vent. My broker Sam (agent id 40HA1039874, real name Hassounia Hassan) got paid a bunch of money for showing me an apartment for five minutes. In the process, I asked for the details of moving into the building. He said you give a $500 deposit and that's it. Very easy he said.
I relied upon that information in the process of agreeing to a background check, paying for certified checks, giving up my apartment search and scheduling movers. I don't know if he lied, or if he didn't know about it, but there was a hundred dollar fee that you pay to the super for operating the elevator during move in. Maybe they wanted the process to seem as easy and the price as low as possible. Maybe they weren't going to go to bat against my landlord for not telling them because they thought I was annoying for reading the contract all the way through and asking questions. They didn't have the landlord or the superintendent's information at signing, so when I called back a few hours later to get that information, maybe they thought that conversation was annoying. Maybe they were frustrated that I wanted to negotiate their fee down a few percent, or that I didn't want to move in on the first of the month. Maybe they just didn't like my face. What I imagine happened is that rather than confess that the agent or the landlord made a mistake, they decided that their loyalty was more to each other than their customers. But in my book, if your job is to sell things by describing them and showing them to your customers, and you don't do that right and it costs your customers money, you should make up their loss.
Here is what happened instead. When I called Sam to discuss this, he referred me to his boss. His boss Jacob yelled at me, called me cheap, said I was a difficult customer, that the fee was standard, and that I wasn't going to get that money from him. He said he would refund me the money I gave him, but he didn't want me to be his customer if I were going to be so difficult. Of course, no acknowledgement of the fact that I spent money on banking fees for certified checks, wasted hours signing forms, getting certifications of income, and talking to people in in current and future buildings to arrange things with movers. So my choice is walk away from all that to spite them, or pay the $100.
The business is a business of crooks. The lemons crowd out the honest men. I wouldn't do business with J.K. Dansar again.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:42 PM | Comments (2)
Why do the movies suck?
With AMC buying Loews, theater tickets receipts in the a three month slump, movies out of focus and marketing to starving teenagers, the growth in the quality of home theaters and DVD's, do we need another excuse for why the movie business is in trouble?
The Wall Street Journal seems to think so. They think that the lack of the stern usher with a bouncer's physique could control chatty audiences and eject the owners of beeping cell phones to make the movie theater a cinematic experience again. The idea is an okay one, but coming from US's conservative newspaper of record with a penchant for law and order solutions, it just comes across as a caricature.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2005
Vote those bad drivers off the island
When I got my TIVO a few years ago, one of the features I immediately loved was the remote. As a way of guessing what programming you might find interesting, you can give up to three thumbs up or thumbs down to indicate how your opinion on the shows you watch. Wouldn't it be great if you could down the bad drivers? Imagine a camera mounded on your dashboard, facing forward. It takes pictures as you drive, maybe even video. When you press a button, on the steering wheel, or when you at the device, it sends a the footage from a few seconds forward and a few afterwards to save in memory. Then, when you get a fill up at a gas station, or park in your garage, the system uploads those files to the internet. Once uploaded, either software agents, or low cost offshore workers go through the footage looking for license plates to associate with these votes. This data is either sold or given away to auto insurance companies to help identify dangerous drivers to raise their premiums.
In this way, nice, safe drivers would be rewarded with lower premiums and dangerous and rude drivers with higher ones. This simply depends upon the assumption that if lots of people on the road think you are rude, dangerous, or aggressive on the road, you are more likely to get in an accident. One worries about abuse with such a system. How can we prevent users from voting each other up as safe drivers or cranky drivers giving everyone a bad rating? I believe I've solved that too. Simply flag the license plate of the user doing the voting. Then you have a slew of options on how to interpret the data. You could weigh people less as they vote more. You could calibrate the data with accident information to see who is identifying drivers that actually are getting in accidents and weight their votes more. You could make each vote toward the same license plate within a 6 month period be worth less. You could even tie the data with car registration information to count the votes of neighbors as worth less.
But is the technology ready to make this possible? Certainly the data processing technology is available, as are the algorithms to uncover cheating. Now a critical piece of the hardware need to make this project a reality is now available, an inexpensive ($200) , small (about the size of a radar detector) camera that can mount in your windshield. A bit larger, to make room for some voice recognition chips ($16) and some wireless networking technology and for under $300 even for just a few thousand you've solved the hardware problem. Create a photo website to review your votes and pretty soon you've got the makings of a populist system for addressing road rage and making bad drivers pay for their behavior.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:24 AM | Comments (1)
June 23, 2005
Mapping an organization through email
Downsizing has become a frequent management tool for large corporations. Just recently GM let go 25,000 people to save an estimated $2.5 billion a year. There are many reasons why downsizing has become a popular management tool, but one among them is that anti-discrimination laws have an unintended consequence of making it difficult to fire workers for cause. It is easy for former employees to sue or merely threaten to sue by alleging religious, ageist, or racial discrimination. Because corporations use downsizing to fire incompetent employees en masse, the can check to ensure the population is not biased in a protected category. But if employees were fired one at a time, a pattern of discrimination could emerge, even without deliberate discrimination. In fact, an employee can build a prima facie case of discrimination by "offering evidence adequate to create an inference that an employment decision was based on a discriminatory criteria illegal under [Title VII]."
In a mass downsizing, who should stay and who should go? In a modern corporation, the physical assets of the firm are only a tiny part of its value. The human capital (knowledge of firm systems, product and customer knowledge, management and marketing expertise, etcetera) of a firm's employees make up a big portion of the intangible assets of the firm, Firing employees means losing some of this human capital. Sometimes a firm is overstaffed due to changes in demand, but in all cases one would like to fire the least productive employees (relative to compensation) first. But that expertise (and the higher human capital that causes it) isn't easy distributed evenly and is difficult to measure.
Some of the employees with lots of human capital are obvious. They are senior managers, high grossing salesmen, and researchers with many patents. Others aren't so readily identified. High human capital employees might include the long serving human resources middle manager who continues to help the people she brought into the firm with their careers, an expert Russian computer programmer who everyone goes to with difficult questions, but his thick accent keeps him from being promoted, and the slow mail room clerk whose been with the firm for 20 years and knows where all the forms are. But how can we find them?
We can imagine all the connections between employees and customers as a giant network. In this case, the nodes of network represents the people of the firm, and many of those making the greatest contributions are those that are connected to the the greatest number of other employees and clients. Both The Tipping Point and Linked are books that deal with the enormous assistance that network mathematics can lend to thinking about real world problems. With network maps, we can quickly identify which nodes of a network act as super hubs to hold the network together. These super employees keep the firm humming. Sure, such a network model works as a theoretical tool to model the firm, but how can we see the spokes that connect everyone? It just so happens that most modern corporations maintain a massive database of who talks to whom. We call it email.
All you have to do to is remove the contents of the each email focus on the headers. Just make a map of every employee, along with everyone they email, for a one month period. Some links go outside the firm, of those, many will be customers, while others will be irrelevant person emails. Clever filtering based on domain names should allow these to be distinguished. My firm, like many others, uses LDAP, a database that stores details like phone numbers, addresses, division, sub-division, manager and so on for each employee. By providing a natural way of grouping users, we can simplify the maps of user connections to see who is deeply connected within a a division, who is connected between business areas, and who is lightly connected.
This exercise, which could be highly automated, would generate a list of highly connected users to examine for protection against downsizing, and to encourage promotion and raises. My firm also uses a 360 performance evaluation system. That means that people who work for you, with you and your boss all get to comment on your performance annually. Since few people work extensively with those they don't email, a natural way to make a list of users to review you is those that you are emailing heavily. This tool would be perfect to generate that list.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:44 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2005
Downs Syndrome
Down syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by triplicate (instead of double) copies of the chromosome 21. It is estimated that 1 per 660 births would naturally result in the deformity (the prevalence rate), which results in, among other things an IQ rarely measured above 60, deformed facial features (which is why this disorder was once called mongolism) and shorted life expectancy of about 50 years. They can engage in conversation, hold limited jobs (often in food service) and most can read and write. In a conversation last Sunday, someone pointed out that increasingly people are choosing to abort fetuses with Down syndrome rather than birthing affected children. A quick look on the internet confirmed this, with the Washington Post claiming that somewhere between 55 and 80 percent of Downs Syndrome pregnancies result in abortion. I found that to be awful and tragic and I said so.
Someone claimed that much of the motivation for these abortions stemmed from a feeling that the revulsion and ill health that their child would suffer would justify preventing their birth as an act of mercy. That does not follow at all. If the suffering of a being is relevant to our decision to end its life, so must its joy. We do not have to speculate if the lives of people with Down syndrome are worth living. All we have to do is ask them. Moreover, like just about any other conscious being, they are happy to be alive and fight to protect and advance it.
I have not explained why aborting downs syndrome fetuses have become common. The average age of mothers creeps up as more and more delay motherhood for education and work experience. Downs syndrome is much more common among older women than younger ones (an incidence of 1/106 at 40 and 1/11 at age 49). These women are more likely to have their own careers, and on average, more educated, less religious, and wealthier than younger mothers are. That makes them more likely to know their full choices when pregnant, so when the amniocentesis detects Down syndrome, they are more likely to know about, afford and get an abortion.
There really are two major arguments for aborting these fetuses, the first being financial efficiency. Those with Down syndrome are not as productive as other members of society, require more vocation training, have higher medical expenses, and as said before, do not live as long either. Of course, efficiency is a means, not an end. We try to run an efficient society so that we can make more people happy. This is simply the kind of family thinking that takes place everyday, but taken to an extreme. I will do without a sports car so my son can have his braces. However, in this case we are talking about killing fetuses so that other fetuses and living people can have more resources spent on them. A society could insist that it has a utilitarian obligation to the aggregate welfare that requires it spend money on its members such that it maximizes productive efficiency. Nevertheless, it can morally do so only do so if it can show that the resulting higher efficiency maximizes social utility.
This has the same difficulty of all utilitarian arguments, that even if we could somehow measure the utility that individuals experience, the act of aggregating utility is doomed to failure. An example should help with this. You and I are both miners. There is only enough money to train one of us in advanced mining techniques. A simple efficacy argument might say that if you will mine more with the knowledge than I will in a lifetime, then you deserve the education. However, remember that efficiency is not utility. Utility is essentially aggregate hedonism across a society, so if I am very unhappy at not being selected, but you don't care if you are selected then utility arguments might in fact require that I get the training. If such aggregation is ambiguous here, what can we say about the utility of death? How many others must be made slightly better off to justify your death? If it were my own money, I'd spend it all to save my own life rather then make the world slightly better off. The horrible moral conflict comes from the fact that when people spend their own money so save their own lives, people don't care, but when we make it a matter of social policy, all of the sudden we must weigh the value of each human life to the other. If you are the sort of person that doesn't like how elections turn out, you don't like the movies that most people see, and can't understand why anyone watches Fox news, consider whether that same group of people should be making intimate life and death decisions for you unless absolutely necessary.
I don't think that is efficiency is the real reason why so many people are aborting Down syndrome afflicted fetuses. Ascetics is the problem. It isn't that they are worried that their child's life won't be worth living, cursed by ugliness, stupidity, and a mayfly like existence. It is that they don't want an ugly, stupid, short-lived child when they could have at least an average child. In this sense, this isn't any different than wanting a tall child or a blue eyed one. I can understand this argument, but based on the utilitarian arguments made above, I can't take it more seriously. There may be moral forms of abortion. We might even be able arrange abortions into those that are more moral and those that are less. If we did, I'd put aborting a fetus on the same part of the scale as an abortion because you really wanted a girl, or a child with brown eyes. I'm not talking about making it or any other abortion illegal. Abortion is a complicated moral issue, and even if it were not, not everything unpleasant or even amoral should be illegal. Remember when Clinton said that abortions should be safe, legal and rare? best way to keep them rare is judicious use of shame. People should feel shame for aborting a fetus because of downs syndrome, just as we react to chinese female fetus abortions or hopefully would do so when someone suggests that we abort the short or ugly.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:09 PM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2005
Who is subsidizing whom?
My father and I have had ongoing discussions about the sad state of affairs in the health care business. On the one hand, America is producing a disproportionate number of global medical innovation. We have short waiting lines for medicine, and our invasive care is much more likely to save the patient. Our generic medicine is the cheapest in the world. Nevertheless, millions are without private care (though many voluntarily) and must depend on emergency care, which puts pressure (by raising prices) on those who can just barely afford medical care. It also consumes about 1/6th of all us economic activity.
One of the reasons why branded American medicines are more expensive than than that of other wealthy nations is that the nationalized socialist medical models that they employ allows centralized negotiations on the price of medicine. The national monopsony (only one buyer) gives tremendous negotiating power on price.If the drug companies balk at the extortionist price, the government can threaten to void the patent as a public good. The French government essentially did this with RU 486 and the drug maker Roussel Uclaf. But that isn't how it usually goes. Normally, they make a modest profit on each pill, with a far larger share of the profit from medicine sold in the United States. A natural question is why should American consumers support cheap medicine for foreigners? But that's actually the wrong way to think about it. It is true that we help other rich nations get access to medicine that the profit they provide would not create. Even so they hold down our medicine prices buy buying up that artificially cheap medicine.
The foremost decision in how much money to spend in pursuit of a treatment or cure is the profit that it is expected to fetch. That means that if the drug makers only sold medicine in the US that they wouldn't be able to make as much money as if they sold it worldwide. Making less money means fewer dollars spent on new cures for American ailments. My theory is that the US drives the research agenda by supplying the lions share of the profit, then other countries subsidize those goals by chipping in profit. They further hold down costs by allowing greater economies of scale for production. To prove this we just need to see if the diseases on which the international pharmaceutical business focuses are American more than European. We know that the rich world overall is getting the medicine it demands. For example, there were 1,223 drugs were licensed worldwide between 1975 and 1997, but only 4 dealt with primarily tropical diseases . Yet tropical diseases cause far more than .33% of the years of healthy life lost to disease. But can we parse out the differences between European and American diseases?
I have a few ideas how we could do that. Obesity might seem like a natural candidate, as Americans are considered to be the fattest people on earth. We could check to see if their are more obesity drugs in the pipeline than something like prostate cancer, which we might presume to not vary between the US and Europe. However, Europeans may be quickly fattening up to the weight of Americans, so obesity and appetite drugs may be the wrong place to look for differences. Instead, I'd check a remark that a doctor mentioned to me a few years ago, that when confronted with the same symptoms, doctors in different countries predict different diseases. That is, two middle aged men come in to the doctor with trouble sleeping. The American doctor tells him he needs to cut the salt out of his diet because he is at risk of a heart attach, and the French doctor might say that he has liver trouble and needs to reduce the wine in his diet. If we could figure out common symptoms groups that were treated as different diseases in the US and Europe, we could check their relative drug developments.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:00 AM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2005
Did you find this article as stupid as I did?
The usually excellent Chronicle of Higher Education has a stinker of an article about the impact of Jews on American life. All The Great Jewish-American Synthesis can come up with is that by supporting left wing politics, improving the American university system, promoting musical theater and psychoanalysis Jews have made America a much better place. The weakening of these contributions is all that Alan Wolfe can offer to dissuade American Jews from a deep withdraw from their broader culture to preserve themselves.
Alan is a professor of Political Science and a Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. Let's ignore whether the contributions of a people should have any sway in their internal decisions to survive as a separate group. Let's also ignore that the Jews are foremost a religious group, with a commandment to perpetuate certain truths. And let's say that we really could take four attributes to define Jewish contributions. The four that he choose are clearly not the right ones.
Dealing first with the most trivial contribution, that to popular entertainment, Jewish contributions to the movies have had a far greater impact on America and the rest of the world than musical theater has. Psychoanalysis, that un-provable, expensive and self-indulgent pseudo science, is hardly the greatest psychological and sociological contribution of the Jews in America. In the category of psychology and sociology, the concept of the judeo-christian world broadened the umbrella of the west's religious tolerance (eventually, if briefly Including the Muslims) , which helped build a unified alliance against the Soviets which in hot and cold wars in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa resulting the defeat of that evil monstrosity. Rather implying that Jewish contributions to liberal causes are a tremendous net contribution, I see far too many expensive, failed and disastrous great society programs to accept this at face value. I'd focus more on racial politics, where Black / Jewish alliances played a powerful role in shaping modern values on tolerance and integration.As for Jewish contributions to the modern university system, I see strong merit in his arguments that by making universities more tolerant and open, they improved dramatically. But that isn't their foremost contribution. Before WW II, the Germans were running the world's finest universities. Widespread use of peer review, and phenomenal work in physics were taking place there. Jews bringing that work to our shores (rather than giving it to the Germans) may have, in winning WW II, done more than anything else to save the 20th century from darkness.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)
Truth stranger than fiction, etcetera
My lady and I were watching a law and order episode yesterday, Religious Convictions, where a nun ends up accused of murder when a girl dies in a botched exorcism. So needless to say I was stunned when I saw on BoingBoing that a 'Possessed' nun crucified after row with priest.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:41 AM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2005
Inflation
Inflation is a confusing economic beast. Superficially, it seems to be just when prices go up. Closer inspection suggests that this isn't quiet right. If the Potato blight attacks the potato supplies then there aren't as many potatoes to go around. If demand remains constant we expect the price of potatoes to rise, but that isn't really what we think of when we use the word inflation. Second, if a new labor regulation raises the cost of employment throughout the economy, we'd expect the price of goods and services to increase, but that isn't inflation either. That simply means it is more expensive to make stuff. Inflation is really a persistent increase in the level of consumer prices. Much thought has gone into why this is, but I'd like to show you why it usually results from from increases in the amount of money in circulation.
A basic economic identity follows: PY = MV which means that
price level * real output = money supply * velocity
Let's break this down. The price level is a hypothetical perfect measure of prices at a moment in time. An increase in P is inflation
Real output is the total GNP of the economy (not exactly but that will do)
The money supply is the perfect measure of the money in circulation (for example, gold might have value, but since it is unlikely to be used as money, it wouldn't count much toward this number)
And finally velocity, which is just real output/money supply, or how many times each dollar of the money supply changed hands that year.
By treating this as a change rather than an instantaneous observation, (replace P with P1-P0, Y with Y1-Y0, etcetera) we can see how this helps us to understand inflation. The price level increase (inflation) is equal to money supply increase + velocity increase - real output increase (output increase - price level increase) .
Are you beginning to to see why estimating this is complicated? Here are a few of the wrinkles.
First, This turns out to be very difficult to measure the money supply. Why? Well for one, it is very difficult to measure accurately the amount of money in circulation, and it all doesn't impact the economy equally. Cash (what economists call m0) is just a small part of the money supply. In 2004 there were $688 billion worth of M0. But M2, which is cash, checking and savings accounts, money markets accounts, and cds, was about $5.4 trillion. More money then M2 gets into the system because eventually other valuable assets like stocks, gold and real estate can be used for financial transactions. Also, when you get a loan against the value of one of these assets, you pump even more money into the economy.
Second, you can't know what the real velocity of money is. We have reason to believe that within a society, velocity is stable, but new money technology (wire transfers, direct deposit) is making it creep faster. Third, even measuring aggregate output is difficult. By counting the income declared on taxes (because another identity of economics is that income and output have to be the same) you can measure the value of production. However, you can't know aggregate real output, because all transactions take place in nominal dollars. What does that mean? Let's say your want to see the real value of goods and services at the beginning and end of 2004. However, because there is inflation dollars weren't worth the same amount at the beginning of the year and the end. Now you have trouble teasing out changes in inflation from changes in output.
But you see an inflation number frequently in the news, so how are they calculating that? We'll it turns out they don't derive it this way at all. All they do is visit a bunch of cities and try to buy the same basket of good, then see how much is cost to buy it compared with last year. Sounds okay, but it isn't. It doesn't deal with either of the problems mentioned in the beginning, that sometimes thing belong being more expensive and shocks can move prices without an economic or monetary cause (caused by the supply or quantity of money). It also leaves you with two nasty problems. First, you have to figure out what belongs in the basket of goods. Eggs might be an obvious entry, but what about rent? If you include rent, should you include the price of owning a house? But some people own them as investments, so if you include that, do you need to include stocks? You'd better make sure what you buy and where you buy it is representative. Even worse, you have the nasty problem of figuring out how to get quality out of the equation.
Quality? What does that have to do with inflation. In early 1976, the VHS VCR was launched in Japan for about $1050. Today you can buy a DVD player, with surround sound, and far higher resolution for $40. So describing this as a 96% price reduction actually underestimates the real fall in prices. Project this across coats with fancy new materials, ever faster computers, more comfortable cars, bigger houses and everything else and you realize that you have to sort this out to get this accurate. Yet somehow they claim to be able to estimate this number to within a tenth of a percent!
So next time you see inflation on the news, understand it for what it is, a convenient approximation to shadowy statistic, not a genuine observable environmental fact like the temperature.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:57 PM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2005
Traffic
In much of the urban United States, traffic is the scourge of the citizen. Prolonging commutes, wasting fuel, and otherwise being unpleasant and boring are just some of traffic's sins. But Mayor Bill White of Houston may have a solution to much of the traffic problem. Tow, and tow fast, without asking permission.
A program to clear disabled vehicles from freeways during peak travel times eliminated 1.8 million hours of delays since starting in January, according to a report last week by the Texas Transportation Institute and Rice University. Accidents dropped by almost 10 percent. Commuters saved $70 million in lost time and collision-related costs, the report said. Cameras and roving tow trucks with contracts with the city prowl the freeways looking for broken down vehicles. They then tow them at a below market rate off the highway, and for more money to a repair shop. Motorists cannot refuse to have their vehicle towed. The program was unpopular at first, but now is a beloved program. Most cars are removed in 20 minutes. Safe Clear has cost Houston $1.1 million but saved 1.8 million hours of delays. Sixty one cents to avoid an hour of wasted time is a very low price. Even if you consider that private individuals bear a higher cost by being forced to pay for some tows they would not otherwise want (they'd change their own tires thank you very much, this still looks attractive. The average tow is $54, so even 100% of tows aren't needed, you only need to avoid 88 hours of traffic to pay for each tow, even if your time is worth nothing. If you value time in traffic as lost wages, well the the average hourly worker makes about $16 an hour. So you only have to avoid 3 hours and 15 minutes of traffic for each tow. Say 6 hours after taxes. Since tows are rare, this is a great deal.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:54 PM | Comments (0)
That is funny stuff
There is a certain type of highly annoying Jewish clone girl who lives in Murray Hill, dresses in expensive, slutty clothingm and always seems to be from some rich subburb of an east cost city. As a rather bizzare Jewish New Yorker, I had to deal with a ton of these girls to find my (totally different) girlfriend on JDate, I find the Interchangeable Jappy Chick site a hillarious critique, and if you know the kind, you will to.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:51 PM | Comments (2)
Whistle blowing
The Center for Equal Opportunity has created a website for reporting violations of federal laws forbidding using a preference of race or ethnicity in education, employment, or contracting. Had this been in existence at my last job, I could have reported the inappropriate racial and gender balancing that was put forward as an alternative to merely hiring the absolutely most qualified candidates.
They develop a three part framework for understanding discrimination, elaborated at The National Review. They are, type A, where overt pursuit of a certain group is written. Type B, where a quota of such a preference is an overt goal. Finally, type C is where these preferences or quotas are obvious, but only verbalized. It should go without saying, but these protections apply to both minority and majority groups. That is, you can available yourself of their whistle blowing functionality even the organization is discriminating in favor of a minority.
Useful public service or needless witch hunting in an already overly litigious society?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2005
Harpers Bazaar bizarre magazine
Harpers has a funny new piece on a Austrian who wrote in to a newspaper Kurier to protest the seduction of gay penguins by imported female penguins. I came across this article trying to dig up a copy of the article by Daniel Lazare titled "Your Constitution is Killing You." That amazing article basically lays out all the arguments on the second amendment and concludes (to, in his mind, our detriment) that it guarantees an individual right to firearm position. We discussed in one of my favorite undergraduate classes, Conflict and Dispute Resolution, with Dr. Covey. I thought back on this paper because of a fascinating article on the immorality of factory farming. This is not another tree hugger screed against eating meat, but a conservative Christian, published in a conservative magazine, discussing that, though we may have permission to eat meat, we must concern ourselves with how the animals it comes from are treated. We don't need Gaia, reject cost benefits arguments, or to think that humans have no right to exist, "The usual distinctions that conservatives draw between moderation and excess, freedom and license, moral goods and material goods, rightful power and the abuse of power, will all do just fine."
Chapter 9 9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. 9:2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. 9:3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. 9:4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:11 PM | Comments (0)
Wealth without envy
The blog Chicago Boyz has an article on a concept wealth without envy. He offers up a concept of wealth similar to the one that I've always enjoyed, that wealth should be an absolute rather than relative measure. We should think about our wealth in terms of what we can buy, rent and use, not what share of society's pie we can get. All the kings wealth couldn't buy him antibiotics, and Washington, though President of the United States, could not keep his teeth. You and I have medicine, food storage, transpiration and other riches unavailable just a few centuries (and sometimes decades) before.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
Unsual hobbies
Machinima is both a genre of film as well as and a collection of production techniques of rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) with ordinary PCs and video games. This is different from professional move making because such "filming" is in real-time (recorded on the computer as the game plays, instead of on a massive array of link machine painstakingly rendering each frame of a CGI animated film.
To get an idea of how this art form is practiced, take a look at the follow tutorial on making a startling recreation of a scene from the first Lord of the Rings film.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:19 AM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2005
Build a real movement if you want to win
If you wanted to be the dominant political party of the next generation or two, how would you do it? I don't mean what positions would you take, because I think that may be exogenous. That is, successful parties make issues, not the other way around. What I mean is how would you organize? What would your short term goals be?
One thing you'd do is insure that you have a deep bench of
young talent being trained in your ideology. You'd cram the lower level courts with judges sympatric to your ideology so that when it came time to appoint more senior judges, if you were in charge you could appoint the most ideologically extreme, and if you weren't your opponent would have to draw from a skewed pool of applicants. You'd focus your recruiting among religious groups that are growing. You might think to come up with new ideas that resonate with your base and centrist voters that no one had .
If you could figure out a way to rename all your to get them moving again, we'll . You would focus on your state level and grass roots infrastructure, going first for lesser offices like state legislatures and eventually governorships. Get people used to voting for your party locally and you get them to vote for your for the house, and eventually,
So, this goes a long way to understanding why the Democrats are losing despite have a big majority among American elites and a platform of policies that overtly appeals to the economic interests of the lower classes. I guess it could be that Republican policies resonate better with the American people, that they have better leaders, that their recommended policies actually are more effective, that social rather than economic interests determine voting patterns, or just plain luck has been at work. But, ignoring the actual seats in the federal government controlled by both parties, would you rather have the junior league politicians, the donors, the professional political flaks and idea people of the Republicans or the Democrats working on your issues?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:24 PM | Comments (0)
Disarmed for your own safety?
Now that many states have recognized the right of law abiding citizens to carry firearms, it is now employers that are a leading reason why citizens cannot carry a gun in self defense. My employer, like many universities, corporations and food delivery companies forbids me to carry a firearm while working. However, the West Virginia Supreme Court
has held as a wrongful discharge the firing an employee for using a firearm in self defense.
How exciting. I hope this is the start of a trend. Until this right is recognized in your state, boycott Pizza Hut.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
You go out of the office for one day...
...and your boss quits and Jackson is aquitted. Only my near information adiction kept me informed. Nice to know that being creepy and wierd is still legal, as long as you are also otherwise a criminal.
Not like in England, where they made being rude and rowdy is a crime.
Some actual legal insight into the case over at the National Review.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:15 AM | Comments (0)
I'll do it, but only if you help
The Pledge Bank is a new website that allows people to make public pledges, along with the criteria for the participation of others needed to trigger them.
For example, I'll help clean up that filthy park on the West Side Highway just south of the Intrepid, but only ten other people can help. I signup at the Pledge Bank, and either it gets enough signers, or it it expires. If it gets enough signers then it notifies you and can email all the signers to let them know more details, where to post pictures etc. This is a great example of how the internet allows entirely new communities to sprout that may have nothing to do with nationality, geography, religion or your work. And those communities that do concern nationality, geography, religion or your work can organize cheaper, faster, more extensively than ever before.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:58 AM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2005
They are talking about how funny you look
New research suggests that prairie dogs have a complex language of cheeps and yelps that contains nouns (cattle, elk, antelope, cats, hawks, coyote's all get their own words), adjectives (notably colors), and maybe verbs. Unlike tool use in chimpanzees (some of whom use stones and others that use sticks) , this is stable across different populations of prairie dogs, suggesting that there is not a prairie dog culture. The researchers have tackled the problem of translation using tools developed for computer recognition of human speech. They suggest that this could eventually lead to portable devices for translation of dog, dolphin and other animal speech,
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)
A marijuana catch 22
Marijuana has been in the news lately due to the Supreme Court case
Gonzalez (Ashcroft) v. Raich. They ruled that the inter-state commerce clause allows the federal government to regulate intrastate non-commercial medical consumption of marijuana. That seems insane to me, but other blogs have covered that to death. But what I've often wondered is how can we live in a country where dangerous drugs like some of the COX-2 painkillers remain available. If you want to build a nanny state, at least do it right. The basic rule is that the FDA can only approve drugs "proven" to be safe. But now that medical marijuana can't be produced by the states, how will doctors ever establish its safety? Wired reports on a group suing the federal government for access to the one remaining legal supply -- the federal government's National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:32 AM | Comments (0)
June 9, 2005
Social Responsibility for Fun and Profit
The Economist has an article in last weeks issue by the head of . "The biggest contract". The basic point of the article is that long term maximization of corporate profits requires careful stewardship of a firm's reputation and regulatory environment. That stewardship requires active participation in discussions of social ills and the externalities of business activities. He takes a while to make this point, but along the way he has a beautiful defense of the profit motive:
"Business's ultimate purpose as the efficient provision of goods and services that society wants.
This is a hugely valuable, even noble, purpose. It is the fundamental basis of the contract between business and society, and forms the basis of most people's real interactions with business. CEOs could point out that profits should not be seen as an end in themselves, but rather as a signal from society that their company is succeeding in its mission of providing something people want—and doing it in a way that uses resources efficiently relative to other possible uses."
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:36 PM | Comments (0)
Cute, profitable, and a sign of the need for reform
The WSJ reports on a new firm, CDARS, that will ensure that your money will remain FDIC insured for up to $20,000,000 in their article Protecting Your $20 Million: Firm Raises Deposit Insurance. The FDIC, or Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, insures the principle and interest of deposits in most US banks for up to $100,000. The trick is that they ensure you per bank, not per person. So what the CDARS people have done is built a network of 850 small and medium size banks to hold your deposits. They Break up your deposit of up to $20,000,000 into sub-$100,000 chunks and deposit it into their member banks. They then handle all the administrative overheard, giving you a unified statement, interest rate, and tax form. More proof that the regulatory system, once built to protect the savings of ordinary Americans and their confidence in the banking system, is now merely preventing the formation of real free market insurance solutions. After all. all these people do is arbitrage the limited insurance subsidy of the federal government into private profit.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)
Mass flag burning?
Suitably Flip, a new libertarian blog has a posting on a national flag burning campaign scheduled for July 4. I'm not a flag burner. Of course, people who burn flags, like members of the KKK, the communist party, PETA, and the teachers unions, all get their rights too. They may hate the flag, or what it stands for, but like blasphemy, which derives its powers by acknowledging the power of the divine in others, the power of the flag as a symbol of America is what gets people all riled up. But you might be surprised to know that flag burning, like all other open fires, is illegal in NYC, and you might get a ticket or go to jail.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
June 8, 2005
The price of genius is madness inbreeding and cancer
The Economist reports that European Jews (or Ashkenazim as we like to call ourselves) may be more intelligent than the average person of western European decent, and it is caused by the same genes that cause diseases that uniquely plague that population like Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick. This is similar to, but not as clearly established as the relationship between sickle cell anemia and malarial resistance in Africans.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:47 PM | Comments (3)
Not apples to oranges
The folks over at Treehugger are praising Japan for its high energy efficiency. But Japan has 4.1% of the land of the US and 43.1% of the population, so doesn't high density living give them much of their 300% higher energy per $1 of economic output for free? The dwellers New Yorker City are the most energy efficient New Yorkers because they live stacked upon one another, they walk and take public transpiration to work and shop, and they have small families and homes. But this behavior is a side effect of living in NY, not a deliberate policy. I bet the Americans living in comparable living arrangements have similar energy consumption.
With a much less aggressive regulatory regime the US has made its economy far less energy intensive, reducing US energy consumption per unit of GDP by more than 40% since 1973.
That said, Japan is using expensive, new technology and a national advertising campaign to get to even lower energy consumption, so at least going forward, the state can claim some credit.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:19 PM | Comments (2)
Grade Inflation
The Washington Post has an interesting article on professorial encounters with grade grubbing.
Grade inflation in a frustrating topic for a few reasons. First, it isn't really inflation. The maximum grade isn't going anywhere. It really just is grade range shrinking. The real range of grades used to be F-A, now it is B-A for most students. Second, the proposed solutions are not effective. They all revolve around a coordination problem. Professors can't control grade inflation because any one professor has an incentive to inflate grades to attract pleasant students with positive course evaluations. When Cornell tried to combat grade inflation by shaming teachers by publishing average grades, it failed. Cornell students simply took the easy classes. The real answer to this problem is to separate the act of evaluating performance from teaching students. We could combine the British model of standardized normal (B level) and honors (A level) final exams (end of semester) for 80% of the grade, with homework being 15% and class participation being the remaining 5%. That way grades are far more objective without being over focused on exams at the end of the year. Then professors can focus on teaching and researching.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:50 AM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2005
Personal Mantras
43folders has an interesting new article on personal mantras. Mine are "fail gracefully", "let's do it now", and "don't cross the rules of consulting"
The rules of consulting (as told by my father to me)
1) Always remember the name of the company you are visiting
2) Always go to the bathroom (when the opportunity presents itself, take it. You don't know the next time you'll be able to.)
3) Keep moving forward. (left with the choice of dealing with a rain delayed flight for a few hours or getting a transfer through another city closer to your destination, always take the transfer, or get a train, or a bus or whatever, and you might just outrun that storm)
4) Always eat. (when something nutritious and delicious presents itself, eat it. That banana might spoil that steak dinner, but you might avoid spending a few hours on a plane hungry and stuck)
5) Always check one example in a spreadsheet with another person and a calculator. If you can't get the numbers to match by hard, don't show the client (or the boss or whoever)
6) Always call home, they miss you
7) Dress the right way for travel. Never check bags, no metal in your shoes, keys in your bag (goes through the machine anyway), and a thin wallet to prevent back problems on long flights and meetings,
Lesser known rules
8) Don't use TV, radio, or print advertisements if you know the name and addresses of all your potential clients, use direct mail
9) Good news and praise by email, bad news and criticism by phone
10) Manage downtime well. Every job has downtime and if you use yours to learn, research and publish with yours, you'll prosper
43folders is a personal productivity website devoted to, among other things, The Getting Things Done system.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)
The Lord works in mysterious ways
Did you know that in the late 1970s, John Lennon watched Billy Graham on as a form of campy entertainment? "Then, one day, he had an epiphany --he allowed himself to be touched by the hand of Jesus Christ, and it drove him to tears of joy and ecstasy. He drew a picture of a crucifix: he was born again, and the experience was such a kick he had to share it with Yoko. John and Yoko sat in front of the TV watching Billy Graham sermons. Every other sentence out of John's mouth was ‘Thank You, Jesus or Thank you, Lord."
Weird huh?
In other news, people seem to crave that old time religion, or none at all, with liberal religious institutions bleeding members, but more demanding religious institutions growing despite broader secularizing trends. Meanwhile, Salman Rushdie demands that atheists give religious ideas and people a hard time, while Os Guinness thinks that the secularists have overstated the evevatibility of their triumph.
In case you were wondering, you can see Rev. Graham on one of his three free concerts in Flushing, Queens on June 24-26.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:56 AM | Comments (0)
June 6, 2005
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
In 480 BC, Xerxes, then the king of Persia, brought one of the mightiest armies the world had ever seen to attempt to finish a war his father Darius had started with the Greeks. After detecting the scouts and advance troops of Xerxes army, the Greeks mustered a tiny response of 7000 soldiers, led by 300 Spartans. They used the mountain pass of the pass of Thermopylae, narrow and mountainous settle in against the pending Persian attack. Xerxes didn't understand the situation, and growing impatient, sent his army of variously estimated of 100,000, three million or 5 million men to the slaughter. The force was so mighty that it was said that Persian arrows blocked out the sun. A Greek simply remarked, "So much the better, we shall fight in the shade." Xerxes, stunned at the ferocity of their defense, offered the Greek soldiers the option to be spared if they would simply give up their arms. To which General Leonidas of the Spartans replied "ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ" (Molon Lave) which means "Come and get them." In the ensuing battle, 20,000 Persians perished.
The defense was ultimately flanked and overrun, resulting in the death of the Spartan general, and most of the few thousand defenders. However, it rallied the Greeks and set in motion a series of events that let to a Greek triumph over the Persians. This set the groundwork for Alexander the Great's military conquest and the Hellenization of much of the west. A few men, asserting their rights as free men changed the face of history.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
Class and the New York Times
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house; neither shalt thou desire... his servant, nor his handmaiden, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his.
Exodus 20:17
In his new and highly annoying Op-Ed, The Mobility Myth, Bob Herbert tries to get us all worked up that the rich are richer then we are and getting more so. Of course, like the rest of the times hideous coverage of class in America, this too rings false. I continue to be frustrated by these articles. The honestly earned wealth of the rich does not punish me. It should inspire me to make my own contribution to society's wealth. The minimum wage may be low, but a childless married couple can live on it in much of the country. In any case, those able to hold legal full time jobs for more than a few months quickly earn far above the minimum wage. House rich men, unable to maintain their lifestyles but also unwilling to sell their fancy homes are out forward as examples of the suffering middle class.
This coverage in general and Herbert's analysis in particular doesn't control for many important variables. First, the fact that the richest this year are not the richest next year, so progressive income taxes harm those with unpredictable income more than those with steady income is ignored. Second, it ignores that fact that absolute income is far more important than relative income in explaining real injustice. No one feels sorry for the poorest investment banker in Greenwich, Connecticut. He claims that "Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000." Yet this was the same fallacious reasoning that that Republicans tried to use against John Kerry for his wife's extensive holdings of municipal bonds and other careful tax strategies. These strategies serve real public interest, that of subsidizing borrowing costs of municipal issuers as well as encouraging buy and hold investing. He trucks out silly old statements about the pain of the American worker, who continues to be richer, more likely to own his home and car, and more regularly employed than his European counterparts, yet enjoys a far cleaner environment and longer life expectancy than those workers of the developed world.
Ah, The Times, foolish, annoying, dangerous, but too powerful to ignore.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:37 AM | Comments (0)
Freakonomics get's its own column
Drs. Dubner and Levitt, the lucid economist authors of the book Freakonomics, now have a weekly column in the New York Times magazine of the same name.
Their fist installment covers teaching small monkeys to use silver disks as money. They see stealing, prostitution, rebudgeting, budget and price effects as well as common economic fallacies that are common in humans.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:46 AM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2005
A liberal claims that capital punishment is morally required
The "Primary Sources" section of the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly tipped me off to a new paper by the Drs Sunstein and Vermeule at Brookings. Entitled Is capital punishment morally required? it argues that every state execution prevents at 18 murders. They argue that this makes these executions not simply just, but morally mandatory. The amazing thing about this is that one of the authors, Cass Sunstein, is a renowned liberal scholar, hater of Bush, and defender of the role of taxes in ensuring liberty. Sunstein has a reputation for being a bit of a maverick and among other criticisms of liberal dogma, is that he thinks the precautionary principle is dumb.
The full paper isn't online for free, but you can read the draft here.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:13 PM | Comments (0)
June 3, 2005
Taught to lie
In reading about the controversy over Amnesty International comparing Guantanimo Bay to the Gulag, I learned that the al Qaeda handbook teaches operatives to level charges of torture once captured.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:07 PM | Comments (0)
The Hanko system of Japan
A signature is a personalized and stylized version of a name, that when written on a document, serves as a proof of identity of the signor. Originally, it served as a simplified contract alternative to a a seal for certain activities, but proved superior enough to fully displace them in the modern day.
The west loves signatures. When my dad was a kid, playing cards to kill time while my grandfather minded the car dealership's lot, he on a few occasions saw a man buy a car and sign an 'x'. Which, even today, is still binding. In Japan, they have another system, called the Hanko or Inkan system.
In this system, a signor uses a ink stamp of their last name, customized to try to be unique, despite a limited pool of last names. Now this might seem crazy, but a person's own signature varies, so banks don't carefully inspect signatures until the check or document is for a large amount. Or so says my friend who works in check clearing. Just as it is impossible to exist in America without some sort of signature, so is it impossible to do without a hanko in Japan.
However, it seems that the system is not working, and Hanko fraud is on the rise.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
We must demand liberty if we are to have it
In a disturbing scene in Seven, Detective Lt. William Somerset uses a contact in the New York Public Library system to uncover the identity of book borrowers delving into unusual religious books. We used to treat such activities as sacrosanct. Just a few years ago, Amazon plead the first amendment over a request to turn over book selling records. However, now
we live in a post 9/11 world, and the patriot act allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Section 215) to subpoena library records. This is more idiocy. If the 9/11 murders had real, valid state IDs under fake names, surely they could get fake library cards to check out books on flying, poison and terrorism.
As information today reports, anonymous library cards are on the way. Simply deposit cash onto a card, your balance is reduced when you checkout a book, then credited when you return it. The library software people at Dynix are even working on software to make this possible.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
June 2, 2005
The joy of open APIs
Dealazon is a neat website that helps you get the best value out of Amazon. It has lists of the most highly discounted products on Amazon and cheap stuff to get your cart up to $25. Funded by his Google ads and Amazon referral fees, and content generated by automation scripts, Pete Freitag proves that there is real value (and money) in transforming data into information.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:28 PM | Comments (0)
World's thinnest wallet?
I recently got an amazingly thin wallet that I read about in the WSJ.
Called the All-ETT wallet, it is so thin that it doesn't leave a bulge in your back pocket. In fact, it is thinner full than my old wallet was empty. It is made of this ultra strong nylon-like material used mostly in making sails. It arrives flat, an just looked like a black square of fabric, so I wasn't even sure what it was. I've been using it two days and already I love it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:13 PM | Comments (1)
How much of the cost of driving is the gas?
As anyone who parks, insures, repairs and drives a car in New York City will tell you, the gas is only a small fraction of the price of operating a vehicle. As such, when the price of gas goes up 50%, the price of driving goes up far less than that. An article in the WSJ explored this issue. It mostly discussed a AAA study found here. It seems that AAA has found that the average annual driving costs were about 56.1 cents a mile in 2005, barely changed from 56.2 cents a mile in 2004. Yet in this time, gas prices went from about $1.90 a gallon to about $2.05.
With the real cost of driving so insulated from the true cost of operating a vehicle, no wonder American drivers seem so resistant to driving more efficient cars. Europe triggers this behavioral change with high fuel taxes. At their $5 a gallon prices it begins to really hit the driver in the wallet. But another idea was mentioned in the economist. Make people pay for the true cost of parking. Parking is very expensive, and developers are much less powerful than drivers are. If you can tax new parking spaces, or just require through zoning that there be garage buildings rather than vast lots, you might just get people to change the culture of expensive driving. A strategy like this would work best where population density, public transportation and walkability combine to make alternatives more practical.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:49 AM | Comments (2)
Could the 14th amendment help reduce medical malpractice suits?
In this article on tort reform, Robert Levy explores in more detail than I've ever seen the various constitutional arguments for an against a federal tort reform solution. He ultimately rejects the commerce clause as inapplicable. Instead, he sees huge punitive damages as a due process violation of the fourteenth amendment. It is a novel and fascinating avenue of attack.
He argues that while punitive damages serve the same purpose as criminal penalties, they have different standards of proof (preponderance rather than no reasonable doubt) and the availability of double jeopardy (in a civil suit you can be tried many times for the same act). As such, congress could use its powers to "enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article" to protect victims due process violations in the form excess punitive damages by capping such damages or introducing a criminal standards for their application.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:23 AM | Comments (0)
June 1, 2005
Wickedness is impossible
Is a dog moral? If it breaks no laws, does what it is told, voids itself in the proper location, can it be ethical? Can it be unethical? Generally speaking, we don't think so. Morality requires understanding of and the choice to act. This underpins the religious arguments for free will. We need free will to be moral. Mindlessly obeying biological or computer rules is not choice and therefore, the actions that result are not ethical ones.
A Reason article explores the issue of medically forced ethics. it seems modern medicine, having created vaccines (who knew?) for cocaine and nicotine resistance, as well as inventing chemical treatments to reduce violent tendencies, has provided us with an opportunity to eliminate (or at least strongly moderate) addiction and violence in modern man. Will we do so? Dare we allow victims to languish in jail, knowing that the might be cured of wickedness? Can we deprive a man the sanctity of his own thoughts, the privacy of his soul? Does going for yet another medical solution just pass the buck on the underlying moral, educational, economic and sociological underpinnings of crime and addiction? What then, do we tell the victims we could have spared?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:25 AM | Comments (1)