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July 29, 2005
If they have to be ugly eye sores, can they at least be useful?
Regular readers know that I regard a car dependent lifestyle as wasteful and stressful. One reason for this is that the resulting economic and architectural impact of supporting all that motoring is large and negative.
Kyocera needed a large blacktop desert (a parking lot) to access the labor pool of California. As anyone who has been in a parking lot on a sunny day knows, a tremendous amount of solar energy is falling, wasted in heating cars to promptly be air conditioned at use. Kyocera figured out a way to keep the cars cooler while offsetting the cost and environmental impact of the parking lot. Tree hugger reports they are opening of the first parking lot covered in a roof of solar panels. They say that the project will pay for itself in 12 years. Assuming that the project is close to a break even, this a fantastic idea.
Imagine if the larger parking lots of the south and west were covered in panels. A major complaint against solar panels is that they require roughly 20 percent of the area of Arizona to meet US energy needs. This is a vast expanse of already ugly land, with no environmental purpose, that could be tapped for energy production. Maybe it wouldn't wean us off fossil fuel, we'd still need nuclear power, and we're likely to never give up cars, but at least we can make a bit less CO2, consume a bit less oil, and breath a bit less soot.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:29 AM | Comments (0)
Bloggers love blogging
I've been fascinated with opinion formation and surveying since my junior year of college when I took a few courses on them. Especially Electoral Systems and Processes and my independent study. I recently heard about a study in The Telegraph where UK Muslims were asked "Do you think the bombing attacks in London on July 7 were justified or not?" It seems 6% think it was "On balance justified." The idea of 100,000 UK Muslims supporting terror really bothered me, so I wanted to know if this survey was accurate. Enter the mystery pollster.
The mystery pollster is a poling industry blogger who writes about the design and interpretation of surveys. So I wrote him an email 3 days ago for help.
I was floored this morning when he posted a long article on my question. Check it out and learn all you ever wanted to know about polling rare groups but were afraid to ask.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:47 AM | Comments (0)
July 28, 2005
Someone is awake over there
U.S. military operational commander in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya is hiring Afghans to do simple manual labor like rebuilding clinics and schools. That's a great idea. People who end their day exhausted from manual labor with some coin in their pocket aren't likely to strike with rage at their employers. In fact, with a GDP per capita of $800, we could employ the whole country for just 21.5 billion a year. This is a fantastic idea, even if the projects don't have a humongous economic return. Aid seems to work better when it is distributed most locally, so this is a great way to actively spend all that aid. You get money to the people who need it most, you protect the populace, and you get much of the infrastructure you need. Maybe you get lucky and you kick start a middle class too. Doing the same thing in Iraq would only cost 89.8 billion, which is less than the cost of fielding the troops.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:36 PM | Comments (0)
The pointlessness of random searches
Today, in a New York Times Op-Ed, When the Profile Fits the Crime, explores whether in this case profiling would be much more effective than the current system of random searches. I've commented about how hard it would be to actually patrol the entrances to the subways to prevent bomber infiltration. The staff required is simply too great. But it is nice to know that even if it could work, the way we are doing it insures that it will fail.
Two great quotes:
...done properly, profiling would subject relatively few Muslims to searches. Elderly Muslim women don't fit the terrorist profile. Young Muslim men of Arab or South Asian origin do. But rather than acknowledge this obvious fact, the New York Police Department has advised subway riders to be alert for "people" in bulky clothes who sweat or fiddle nervously with bags.Truth be told, commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. Law enforcement knows this, and so should you. According to a January 2004 handout, the Department of Homeland Security advises United States border authorities to look out for certain "suicide bomber indicators." They include a "shaved head or short haircut. A short haircut or recently shaved beard or moustache may be evident by differences in skin complexion on the head or face. May smell of herbal or flower water (most likely flower water), as they may have sprayed perfume on themselves, their clothing, and weapons to prepare for Paradise."
Further philosophical justification here.
A challenge to the effectiveness of profiling here.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:46 AM | Comments (1)
July 27, 2005
Just because they want to take away your freedom doesn't mean we have to let them
We could thwart the new bag checking policy easily. Every staircase in the subway system has a unique ID. Just make an email address that you can SMS (text message) when you see cops near your stairwell checking bags. A website could easily integrate all that data and make it accessible on any browser, even mobile devices. As a result, they would have to police every stop to actually protect the system. There are 734 token booths in the system, so let's use that as the lower limit of places the cops have to cover. There are 39,110 police officers in the NYC police dept. If we assume that it takes 2 officers to cover each booth, and they each work a 8 hour shift, then
more than 11% of the police would be needed to police the subways. Given the likelihood of a terror attack, alternative usage of police resources, and the real possibility that terrorists would still find a way in, we could make it so difficult to use this method of policing that they discontinue it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)
Probate the Wind
Inherit the Wind is a play about the infamous trial over the teaching of evolution in Kansas. Evolution lost. Those fascinating folks over at Volokh Conspiracy have a detailed account of how the real trial went down. The play covers only the events surrounding trial itself. If all you know about the case you learned from the play, you may be surprised by how odd what preceded and followed the trial was.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:54 PM | Comments (0)
Zimbabwe reelected to the UN Human Rights Commission
Foreign Policy notes that the reelection of Zimbabwe to the UN Human Rights Commission might be the best thing to ever happen to the UN.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:28 PM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2005
An apology starts the healing
One of my dad's best friends died when I was in college. He has been in for a full physical just a few weeks before, but somehow they missed a flaw in his heart that killed him quickly and without warning. His friends wife ended up suing for and winning tremendous damages for that incompetence. She said something to us one day about the horrible experience. She tiredly told us that she would have settled for an apology.
Punitive damages seek to further punish the wrongdoer beyond compensating the victim for financial hardship. While no exact estimates exist, and they are rare, they are also large and covered by malpractice insurance. As such, reducing the number of lawsuits that are unnecessary to archive justice would help control medical costs. And sometimes an apology provides more catharsis then money ever could.
With this in mind, I propose the Martin letter, named after my dad's friend. This letter is simply a written explanation of what went wrong, why, the doctor's name, and an apology. The apology would be covered by a legal immunity, meaning that that it is not an admission of guild nor a statement of legal facts.
A recent article in the Times said that 16 states have laws providing cover for medical apologies. This could very well allow some of those harmed by incompetence to be placated by apologies when money is their due.
But a satisfied life requires more than money, and sometimes solace is what you really need. Every state needs a Martin letter law and every doctor taught about and encouraged to write them through ongoing education.
In this age where medical information is readily available on the Internet, the time of the doctor as infallible medical sage is over. Mistakes happen, but punishment is rarely necessary. The remaining mysteries of medicine, the causes a death or maiming, leave them hurt and frustrated. Let's vindicate their need for reconciliation without accepting that court is always the right place to get it. Let's treat medical consumers like grownups and maybe they'll start acting like them.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:22 PM | Comments (0)
Nice people, but a bit confused
One of the public ways to support US troops is to tie a yellow ribbon around a tree or place it on your car. Every wonder why we do that?
It turns out that this is a common question. "During the last decade, no single form of expression documented in the Archive of Folk Culture has stimulated more letters, more phone calls, more in-person inquiries than the yellow ribbon"
Read the bizzare, ancient and winding tale of this folk symbol in How the Yellow Ribbon Became a National Folk Symbol by Gerald E. Parsons
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
How to improve the copyright system
The film stock of old movies rot in vaults due to disputed ownership. On hard drives, the code of long extinct computer software sleeps until the vultures pick the firm's carcass. Old and important wittings and drawings lie unpublished because the copyright owner cannot be found. Musicians remixing old music into something new are treated like thieves. The current copyright system has problems.
Many people are wracking their brains to preserve private control of intellectual property while encouraging the preservation and richness of our culture of ideas. Their efforts are beginning to amount to something.
Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor, recommends requiring authors, musicians, and others to register their work within 25 years of publication. Software developers would get less time -- five years -- because software becomes obsolete much more quickly. A search of the government-supported registry would be enough to determine whether or not a work was an orphan.
What a brilliant idea! Long copyrights, but only for those who are actively managing them. Everything else rapidly falls into the public domain. But there are problems with this. Take for example, the work of a professional photographer.
In general, he says, a registry requiring him to dig through and register thousands of illustrations is an unfair burden, and it is worse for photographers, who can take scores of pictures in a single year."Lessig wants to argue that I need to register everything that I do, or it's an indication that I don't see any commercial value," Mr. Holland says. A registry would require him to dig through and register thousands of illustrations.
As a result, they wouldn't publish many of their pictures (only those they can profit from) so that they had a easier time of registration. Since unpublished work has special copyright consideration of either Life of the author + 70 years or 120 years from date of creation if the author is not known, this would could discourage the sharing of ideas.
The right solution hasn't been found, but with technology is moving in the direction of Lessig's ideas. Cheap bandwidth, better search and cataloging software, and cheaper storage are marching us toward a practical and relatively inexpensive electronic Library of Congress (LoC) containing copies (or photographic reproductions) of nearly all copyrighted works, with the ability to search it from your desktop.
Here is a link to a group within the LoC that is working to reform copyright law to allow greater preservation of electronic and fragile media.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:31 AM | Comments (0)
That's not what that means
EconoPundit is one of my favorite economics bloggers. Nevertheless, attentive readers keep writers honest, and I think he's made a bit of a blunder in interpreting his projections on the level of prices in the EU for the next 25 years.
Yup. You got it right. Major deflationary collapse starting in or around 2015. With 95% certainty the index (by 2030) will stand somewhere between 130 and -260.Of course if forced to decide I'd choose the quadratic rather than the cubic trend as the more reliable model, but my point is the table of criteria suggests one is for all practical purposes as reliable as the other.
You should read his article before continuing. That way what follows will make a lot more sense.
I noticed two problems with this posting. First of all, this simplistic analysis reeks of the blind econometric data mining that plagues finance and economics. When one of the models he unthinkingly applies shows the real level of prices going negative, he keeps the model as a posability because it has some nice fit statistics. But those fitness statistics are only useful when the model is correct, which in this case we know is false. There is no reason to suspect that goods and services will become so plentiful in Europe that we will have to pay people to take them away. Therefor, we must impose a limitation into our model that forbids the price level from going below zero. In fact, with the European Central Bank strongly in the monetarist camp, it seems unlikely that inflation in Europe will go below one or two percent.
Since we have strong reasons to believe this, we should filter our choice of econometric tools to exclude the ridiculous and impossible. The highly unlikely must produce significant evidence to get us to discard these prior assumptions. In his case, he sees just as much evidence for the ridiculous (negative prices) as the expected (gradually increasing prices). To believe a forecast of negative prices, we must demand much evidence. When the two are close, choose the one you believed was simpler and more reasonable.
The second problem concerns his interpretation of the 95% confidence level. He says "With 95% certainty the index (by 2030) will stand somewhere between 130 and -260." However, A 95% confidence interval is not that 95% percent of the time the price level will be within these bounds. This is probably one of the most common mistake made in the presentation of statistics, misinterpretation of confidence intervals. While his vauge language doesn't make this mistake, his interpretation of the results doesn't clarify either.
A 95% confidence interval means that, assuming the model is correct, we are 95% sure that the true value will be between these two values. But what does that mean? For one, that we believe it is more likely to fall within the 95% band than the 90% one. If two different estimates are thought to be equally good, then the one with the narrow band is the one we feel we can estimate with greater confidence. We do not mean that there is a 95% chance across all models that the true value will be in the interval, that we would take 20 to 1 odds on the value being in the interval, or that if we could somehow rerun history over and over we would see the value fall in this interval 95% of the time. Any deeper understanding of this metric is difficult. I fancy myself an amateur Bayesian statistician, and like most, I'm not crazy about this line of thinking.
I'd like to know the true bounds that estimate within 95% the price level. What is one supposed to do with a statistic that estimates, if a certain model is true, the price level, if you have no understanding of the accuracy of the model?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:44 AM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2005
That doesn't sound like it would be legal.
Slate weighs in on the legality of ransom bag searchs on the subway.
Their take is that unless the New York Police Department and the MTA they can convince a judge that an attack is "imminent" and the searches "effective", then isn't legal.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:31 PM | Comments (1)
Kill yourself if you are ever this desperate for time
Steve Pavlina has a tongue in cheek article on ways to save time using the microwave. But if I ever need those extra few seconds a year, please wrap me up in a warm blanket and take me to milk and cookies until I relax.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:31 PM | Comments (0)
July 22, 2005
How do we measure odd?
Marginal revolution has an brief article on being weird. His position is that airplane travel lowers the cost of being weird. How? First it makes more people weird by bringing different people in proximity and second by habituating us to weird people by frequent contact.
This reminds me of the book The Handicap Principle, which discusses animal signaling. One of many fascinating ideas in the book is that normality is special because it is narrow. For example, take a plate of fine China. Notice that it has a ring of gold or pigment that . Why is that there in nearly all fine plates? The inner ring shows flaws in the construction of the plate, so unless it is a perfect circle, the plate would be better off without the ring. That narrow context allows precise judgments of quality.
So in a sense, the marginal revolutionary is right, by widening the people in need of judgment we must either widen our context (making it harder to judge quality within it) or simply lump more and more into the non-normal category. But I don't see how this actually lowers the cost of being weird. People may be so unwilling to mix with people they can't rank (because they are foreign) that they pull tighter into their insular groups. By making us unwilling to talk to strangers air travel might make our lives more isolated even as it brings us together physically.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:09 PM | Comments (0)
Useful for kidnap notes too
Spell with flickr is a web tool that takes a text string and turns it into a word spelled out with flickr pictures of letters.
Here is an example of Belligerati spelled out in pictures.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
Take the long way home
I'm often surprised that most people put a low financial value on privacy. They happily fill out forms with personal information, post websites with lists of their interests and friends, and complete surveys that tie their shopping habits and lifestyle to them. But that doesn't have to be a problem. As David Brin points out in The Transparent Society, if that information is available to everyone, then it has the potential to make us safer, happier and richer. But the immediate expediency of filling the form doesn't reconcile well with how angry they get when their privacy is violated. Do they want to sell their privacy and they use government force to reclaim it? Or perhaps making the burden sufficiently small is all that is required to get people in the habit of protecting their privacy. As they see how easy and valuable it is, perhaps it would serve as a gateway to more expensive privacy.
Isee is an application developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy. It shows a rout between any two places in Manhattan that avoids all the closed circuit television cameras. Imagine combining this with a GPS cell phone. Simply type in a destination and this application could tell you the fastest way their that avoids as many cameras as possible, telling you when to turn and about the best chinese food along the way.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:58 AM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2005
America the beautiful hedge fund?
You may be aware that the United States imports more than it exports. This is called the trade deficit and it has been at or near all time highs for the last couple of years. This deficit must be balanced somehow, so what happens is that foreigners end up owning US financial assets to make up for the real goods they aren't buying. Put another way, they are selling stuff to us and putting much of the proceeds into investing in out society. But they don't buy all assets equally. Mostly, they buy US government bonds.
Which you may have noticed, doesn't pay very well. As of this writing 10 year US government debt yields less than 4.3%.
So it isn't surprising that many of the US' creditors might want some tangible assets with either a higher yield or having a tactical and strategic value. The Chinese government was keeping all of this in mind when They recently made an offer for the US oil company Unocal, financed by subsidized state loans to the the state gas giant CNOOC. Surprisingly, despite this cheap funding, Unocal ended up accepting another offer from Chevron, another US company.
The Chinese government made a lot of self-serving noise about allowing capital markets to function in an efficient manner and they were clearly annoyed to have lost this contest. But are they laughing last?
Today's huge economic news was that China is revaluing its currency to be worth more dollars. They are also switching from a fixed exchange rate to the dollar to instead pegging the yuan (their currency) to a basket of currencies, of which the dollar would be a component. Perhaps the two are connected. It could be that the Chinese leadership, seeing that the US would resist parting with valuable economic assets in exchange for cheap Chinese goods, decided that they had a limited appetite for what they were permitted to buy.
They only want so many 4.3% US govt bonds and no more.
The potential economic consequences of this are hard to exaggerate. The deficit will become more difficult to finance. Interests rates will go up, potentially pricking the housing bubble. The dollar will continue to slide against other major currencies. US vacationing and imports will continue to suffer. The growth in exports may cause inflation. Billions of dollars of domestic savings will be needed, or businesses will stop growing more productive.
So keep an eye out. We'll keep looking at this issue for repercussions.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:14 PM | Comments (0)
What to ask Roberts
Reason has a fun little article on the 7 Questions for John Roberts that they want answered.
My favorite was the fifth question:
You're on a lifeboat, but it can only hold 8 of the original 10 amendments without sinking, killing your whole family. Which ones go?
For a quick refresh on the first ten, look here.
How would you answer that question?
The first two, rights concerning free speech and guns are critical, as is the last (even if it isn't interpreted to mean much)
IV, on warrants? Essential. V on property, grand juries and more is another victory for freedom. VI, on fair and speedy trials, likewise essential.
III, on quartering soldiers without your permission? Nice to have, but I don't value it as the rest.
That leaves me with VIII, cruel punishments and excessive bail, and IX which says the enumeration of rights, should not be construed to deny other rights. Since IX has a similar meaning to X, but doesn't seem to serve as a check on government power, I guess I'd live him behind as well.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2005
Do we like this guy?
As most of you may now know, Judge John Roberts is the president's nomination for supreme court justice. He is being lauded as an excellent lawyer as well as acceptable to many Democrats.
Nevertheless, please allow me to read the tea leaves for a while. CNN has the transcript of the judge's nomination announcement. Judge Roberts says in closing:
And I also want to acknowledge my children, my daughter Josie, my son Jack, who remind me every day why it's so important for us to work to preserve the institutions of our democracy.
Is this a subtle indication that Roberts wants to act like a social conservative to nip gay marriage in the bud? Is it a signal that more generally he wants to advance a conservative social agenda? Or does the guy just mean that the happiness of his family reminds him of the government that makes it possible, without any specific intent to deal with any particular issue? The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both seem to not pay any particular attention to this comment, so maybe I'm chasing shadows.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:25 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2005
We will go silently into the night
We've discussed before how Europe will depopulate significantly if present demographic trends persist. That depopulation has already begun in Eastern Europe, and as a result, some of the land is returning to the wild and bringing bears and wolves with it. The article hints at a major tool the rich world could use to protect its wild spaces. It seems that much of the newly wild land were farms that have closed because they are unprofitable. If we removed the subsidies that so many countries provide to their farmers, many farms would close and the land allowed to go wild. At a minimum the price of land would decline allowing environmental and other anti-development groups to buy the land or development rights for far less.
Don't expect these movements to rail against subsidized farming any time soon. The growth of the local foods movement suggests that environmentalists are unlikely to get excited about their food coming from farther away.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
Terrorists are people too...
...that is they respond to incentives. Different River reports on how economic tools can be used to better understand the motivation for and prevention of terror. There is a serious split in the libertarian movement over the war in Iraq, and this article really gets to the heart of it. Was going into Iraq the cheapest way of dealing with the possibility of serious harm or was it an expensive and harmful way of antagonizing our enemies?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:37 AM | Comments (3)
July 18, 2005
But what if it worked?
The New York Times reports on the storm that ensued when a blogging teenager journaled that he was being shipped off to a re-education center where they would attempt to change him from gay to straight.
The usual suspects all weigh in, about how this is stressful for the young person, how wrong it is to try and change someone like this, etcetera. However, I wondered, is there any reason at all to support this beyond a religious argument?
First, grant the possibility that this could work. We know that the amount of expressed homosexuality is not constant. Some ages, like today, or ancient Greece have had more than the average. Others, like Afghanistan under the Taliban, have had far less. It seems unlikely that this is caused by genetic differences between populations. Therefore, some incidence of homosexuality is environmental rather than genetic. Since most learned habits that can be unlearned, it does not seem beyond the pale of sense that we might either today or at some point be able to change the sexuality of some people. Add in genetic modification later and we may be able eventually to nearly eradicate the likelihood that a person is born or raised with homosexuality urges.
Okay, so maybe it is possible. Is there any reason we might want to do so? Could love of a child be a reason? Homosexuality behavior makes one more likely to be the victim of discrimination, and in the case of male homosexuality, more likely to experience a sexually transmitted disease. It doesn't seem out of the question that a parent would want to tell their children not wear an anti-abortion t-shirt (to avoid heated arguments with strangers) or making them stop smoking (because it is bad for your). They could do so out of love and in the teen's interest even if the demand is stressful for the teen. Homosexuals give up the opportunity to have children where both parents contribute DNA to the child. Since this is the one lasting way that most people can contribute to the future, this might have some merit as well. Since heterosexuals greatly outnumber homosexuals, there might be an argument that to have the best shot at finding an excellent life partner, you have to fish in the deepest pool. I am not crazy about this argument because it suggests that maybe we should all convert to the dominant religion, political ideology, manner of dress and hobbies for the same reason.
Or maybe they are just fundamentalist bigots who hate their children and would rather rule over a kingdom of ash than have homosexual child.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:48 PM | Comments (3)
Fatalities among foreigners in Iraq
Tim Klimowicz has a stunning time lapse Flash website of the locations of fatalities in Iraq. It make we want an overly of population density an sectarian breakdown to better grasp the situation. That might shed some insight that superficial media reports have obscured.
Thanks to Future Feeder for the tip.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)
The tyranny of the court
The rancor that surrounds the appointment of justices to the Supreme Court bothers me. If the Supreme Court is beloved by the American people, it is only because it remains above the fray of daily politics by serving as a source of wisdom in American government. So if the appointment of justices becomes merely an infrequent exercise in ideology, we risk ruining the special character of the body, much as we have in the senate. That's much of the reason I'm against reforming the court for 14 terms or appoint them by national election.
I have an alternative. Currently the number of justices is fixed at 9 by the Judiciary Act of 1869. Why not allow a larger court, say 21 justices. The average service tenure of a justice is 15 years. Assuming retirement decisions are independent, identical random trials where each justice has a 1/15 chance of retiring in any year, a President has about a 8.34% chance of not appointing a justice in any four year term. Raise the court to 21 and the odds of that plunge to .3%. With every President getting a shot at appointing a justice, the consequences of any one appointment drops considerably. The role of any one maverick or swing justice becomes much reduced, without compromising the special legal perspective of the court or requiring constitutional changes. Increasing the number of justices by 12 could give too much power to the sitting president, so we could increase the number of justices by 2 per term for the text 6 terms.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:50 AM | Comments (0)
How you say it matters
Framing an issue is to craft the language used to describe and educate on that issue in a manner that supports your position. A great new article in the times discuses how the Democratic Party has grabbed on to issue framing as a salvation from Republican rule.
But at some point, does substance matter? Are there real, deep preferences that underlie our values or are we just programmed on each issue afresh?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2005
Can religion be useful regardless of if it is true?
Truck and Barter has a piece titled Death and the meaning(lessness) of life several positive regions for religiosity that do not depend on truth underlying religion.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)
July 14, 2005
Are they really relaxing more in Europe?
Truck and Bater has an article on the true amount of leisure enjoyed by Swedes and Americans. It seems that if you add together paid work to unpaid work done during free time (cleaning, painting your house, cooking you don't want to do, etcetera) that Americans actually work less than the Swedish do.
The article doesn't mention another way that labor statistics mislead. Hourly productivity studies show that several European countries have the same or higher productivity than America does. However, the very people most likely to be unemployed are those with the lowest productivity. SO the high unemployment rate hides the fact that were the economy in full employment, productivity would be lower.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:06 PM | Comments (0)
But it is gross
Slate has an article on Rachael Ray, that bubbly, annoying host of the cooking show "30 minute meals". The article defends her from her on and off-line critics. Some of that defense is fair. She does cook as many Americans do, harried for time and limited to an ordinary grocer's supplies. I don't take issue with either of the major complaints. I have no problem with boxed mixes. Even Alton Brown of Good Eats says that boxed cake mix is often better than anything you can make at home.
That isn't my problem. What I hate about her show is that the food sounds nasty and her personality is vapid. Meat is added senselessly to vegetarian dishes. Her efforts to contemporize traditional dishes always seems inferior to the original. Emril may grate me, but at least the man can cook interesting, good food with a novel style. She is in serious danger of making Italian food into the same kind of parody that that American-Mexican food has become, where everything is lettuce , tomatoes, peppers, meat, sour cream, cheese, rice and beans recombined.
As for her style, good cooking is art and science, and teaching either well requires some modicum of intellectualism. How about a pinch of that in your next show, Ms Ray?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:40 AM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2005
I think I might cry with joy
Someone has created a blog devoted to pizza, primarily in NYC, but also around the world.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)
Thieves?
The New York Observer seems to have copied The IJC. You may recall that The IJC is that hilarious blog on Jewish young people in Murray Hill. The New York Observer in their article, Welcome to Murray Hell!, seems to have copied many of the most scathing and wry observations.
Read them both and see for yourself.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:59 PM | Comments (0)
Fuddy duddies win again
The New York Times is reporting that many fire house throughout the city and across the country are having their brass fire poles removed and replaced with air conditioners.
That's so lame. With the manned space program reduced to a nub, the job of fireman being made safer and the pay of doctors going way down, what will little boys dream of growing up to be?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:32 PM | Comments (0)
The case against paternalism
Reason has an article, Save Me From Myself, on paternalism that picks apart just why people want others to make decisions for them (and everyone else)
There are plenty of practical problems with the parentalist impulse. As economist Glen Whitman notes in a forthcoming Cato Institute paper, we cannot assume we always help people by giving preference to their "long term" over their "short term" interests. Imagine an aging man in ill-health lamenting his sybaritic youth. We are tempted to say that his younger self, seeing the pleasures immediately available to him and giving short shrift to their long term consequences, exhibited a foolish bias toward the present. But surely it's also possible that his older self, faced with the proximate pains and inconveniences of poor health, discounts the pleasures past he'd have forsaken had he been more health-conscious. If we're prone to the first form of cognitive bias, why not the second?
Which I'd never thought about that way
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:22 PM | Comments (0)
...and in the morning I will be sober
The WSJ has two great facts in an article on the benefits of moderate drinking (2 drinks per day).
Economists assert that benefits from alcohol are also financial, showing that moderate drinking is associated with higher earnings. If two workers are identical in education, age, and other characteristics except that the first has a couple of beers each night after work while the second is a teetotaler, the first will tend to enjoy a "drinker's bonus" in the range of 10% to 25% higher wages. (Don't get carried away with this information, though. Research also shows that beyond about two drinks per day, wages start to fall.)...Recently, while toasting the drinker's bonus with a friend, he asked me whether drinking might not be related to virtuous behavior as well: Are moderate drinkers more likely to give to charity? A worthy question, so I did a bit of analysis and found that, indeed, moderate drinkers tend to be more charitable than nondrinkers. For example, 54% of nondrinkers contribute to charity each year, giving away an average of $1,100. In contrast, 62% of those who take one to two drinks per day have an average annual giving level of $1,200. The alcohol effect has diminishing returns, however: Just 40% of people drinking five or more drinks per day are donors, and they give only $230 per year on average. (So once you get past two or three, you have to stop claiming you're "doing it for a good cause.")
I guess it could be that the more income that drinking provides engenders more giving, as when they they controlled that, the effect was much diminished.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2005
That's an odd piece of law
Some of you may be eagerly awaiting the release of Harry Potter's Half Blood Prince -- but I doubt it. The latest installment is shipping July 18, 2005. It seems that a few copies have leaked out of their holding pens and into the general public. Now the publisher is using a whole heap of stick and and a bit o' carrot to get the books back. They are even preventing the buyers from publishing reviews or even talking about the books.
What really fascinates me is the law behind this:
You may want to check your own law [cornell.edu]. A work is not considered published until it has been published in some form. That it has been printed with the intent to publish is not sufficient. You may also want to read Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. The Nation Enters [findlaw.com] for a ruling by the Supreme court where the Nation obtained a printed copy of Ford's memoairs (SIC) before release, much like this case.Read it in context here.
You may note that a) it is considered unpublished, despite having changed hands because it was not officially published and b) the Supreme courts holds that the "right of first publication" counts extremely strongly against fair use. That means that the people who have received the book have no right to quote even small bits. The Nation used 300 to 400 words.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2005
Words I hate
There are many wonderful and fascinating words in English. I love to learn new ones. But some words are evil, ugly things, certainly to be avoided.
Examples?
Proactive (see active)
Excessions (see excesses)
Mission statement
Resigned (when you mean fired)
Another great hater of inane abuse of English is an Australian by the name of Don Watson. MSNBC has an interview where he details the threat that business-speak is to modern English.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)
Can you know a man?
I don't imagine you'd find it controversial if you gave a man life time tenure in a job nearly absolute power to shape public policy and it changed him. The The Volokh Conspiracy has a discussion of Supreme Court Justices that famously and public changed their mind on major legal issues.
That is certainly something to consider in the great food fight to ensue over O'Connor. Maybe we should worry more about how good they are as thinkers, writers and leaders instead of the ferocity of their ideology.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:53 AM | Comments (0)
July 8, 2005
Conservative elites are still elites
There was an article in The National Review right before the Supreme Court rulings came down that abolished sodomy laws. A big pundit of the conservative movement said that when push came to shove, while he thought that homosexuality might be wrong, and that discouraging with laws might be both good public policy and constitutionally permissible, it still shouldn't be illegal. Yet the author was well aware that such an opinion distanced him from the hordes that make up the conservative movement.
Well it turns out that like homosexuality, evolution is one of those issues where the leaders of the conservative movement seem to part from the rank and file. Half of Americans surveyed think that the world was created by a deity in the last ten-thousand years, but a majority of the high profile conservative leaders interviewed by The New Republic basically accepted that evolution explained the process of the creation and variety of life on earth.
When it comes down to it, there are certain things that relatively wealthy, highly educated Americans tend to believe, and sometimes the strings of class pull harder than the chains of ideology.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:57 PM | Comments (0)
Bad reasoning II
I wanted to explore the CAFTA vs. NAFTA free trade support among Democrats to see if there is evidence to support the WSJ's position.
The deeper I look the stronger I reject their position. I dug up the voting rolls for CAFTA and NAFTA and put them into excel for some mapitulation.
In the CAFTA vote, 74% of the non-Yea (Nay + didn't vote) votes were cast by Democrats. Guess what percentage of non-Yea NAFTA votes were cast by Democrats -- 74%!
Some other findings
..............................................R....D + I
Lost free trade support............1.....8 (between NAFTA and CAFTA)
Gained free trade support........1.....1 (between NAFTA and CAFTA)
Now what does one make of this?
..............................................R....D + I
Pro-NAFTA voted out / retired.....18.....16
Anti-NAFTA voted out / retired.....7.....14
First time against free trade.........9.....12 (for CAFTA)
First time pro free trade............27......7 (for CAFTA)
What it looks like to me is that the Republicans replaced pro free trade Democrats with pro-free trade Republicans.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)
July 7, 2005
Who says that third partiy candidates never have a chance?
The following is a list of every party ever to elect a senator:
Adams
Adams-Clay Federalist
Adams-Clay Republican
Anti-Jackson
Anti-Administration
American (Know-Nothing)
Conservative
Crawford Republican
Democrat
Federalist
Farmer Alliance Party
Farmer-Labor
Free Soil
Independent ( I guess this isn't a party)
Independent Democrat Independent Republican
Jacksonian
Jackson Republican
Liberty
Liberal Republican
Law & Order
Nullifier
Party Unknown (nor this)
National Republican
Opposition
Populist
Progressive
Pro-Administration
Republican (Democratic Republican or modern GOP Republican)
Readjuster
Silver
Silver Republican
Unionist
Unconditional Unionist
Whig
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:19 PM | Comments (1)
Bed fellows makes strange politics
Did you know that Supreme Court justices Sandra O'Connor and William Rehnquist dated while they studied at Stanford Law School?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:53 PM | Comments (0)
Bad reasoning.
The WSJ has an op-ed, on Democrats and CAFTA, where the journal's op-ed board laments the death of free trade leadership in the democratic party. The author chalks it up to efforts by the democrats to stymie Bush rather than to actual principled differences on free trade. As evidence, they offer up the fact that 10 Senate Democrats supported CAFTA, whereas 27 who voted for NAFTA in 1993.
I have a simpler explanation. Many of the voters who supported NAFTA
under Democratic leadership now support CAFTA under Republican leadership. In 1992, there were 57 Democratic senators. Now there are 44, 45 if you count the socialist from Vermont. Those 12 seats went to the Republicans. Most of the conservative wing of the Democratic party is located in areas where the Republicans have the best shot of winning seats. So when the Democrats lose seats, they are disproportionately from these areas. If the democrats loose 12 conservative, pro-free-trade senators and they are replaced by 12 liberal, pro-free-trade republican senators, then you expect only 15 Democratic senators to vote for CAFTA, assuming all other things equal. Since only 10 did so, this can't explain everything. But CAFTA isn't NAFTA and 2005 isn't 1993, so we can't expect everything to be the same. NAFTA hasn't been quiet the huge success it promised to be and the anti-free-trade movement has gained both in popularity and profile since then. We don't need an elaborate theory politicking to these changes in legislator voting, just seats changing hands and the issue becoming more controversial.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)
Aid skepticism from the Germans!?
The German newspaper Der Spiegel has an article, Choking on Aid Money in Africa in their English edition. The is timed to the G8 discussions on aid to Africa. The article goes into the hazards of graft, the disincentives to work it engenders, and how aid workers necessarily lack the incentives to fix problems quickly (because their job is to put themselves out of business. The rich world's contributions to problem are singled out, including tariffs and agricultural subsidies. They also go into detail on how loan forgiveness creates a moral hazard for poor states to borrow lots of money knowing they will be forgiven for it someday. All and all it is a detailed introduction to aid criticism that isn't entirely one-sided.
This last criticism is a bit unfair. Many of these loans that the G8 wants to forgive are doubly flawed. First, much of these loans were for military purposes of the cold war. To that end they never really were loans, more like grants, and it hardly seems fair to ask them pay for fighting our wars by proxy. Second, we lent this money to some of the foulest dictators around, and many of these countries are rules by democratic successors. How can we make them suffer twice for these monsters' actions?
This last problem provides a solution for not controlling third world despots, encouraging democratic revolution, and alleviating human suffering. The G8 could pass laws that in the event of a democratic overthrow of a dictatorship and the arrest of the old leadership, all loans to that government are null and void. That will drive up the borrowing costs of dictatorships, as well as setting up concrete financial benefits for the establishment of democratic institutions. It also unleashes a tremendous amount of national balance sheet at exactly the moment when a country is desperate for liquidity.
Several problems must be resolved first. How will nominally friendly dictatorships react to a rule like this? Can they be fairly exculded, and if not, how can we prevent them from simply teaming up with outher foul nations into a genuine axis of evil?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
July 5, 2005
How can I make my own pizza?
Great directions on making your own pizza from scratch can be found at Billy Reisinger's Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza.
He has a couple of unusual points in his guide. Unlike http://www.americastestkitchen.com/, he prefers a pizza screen to a pizza stone. He also uses a chef's knife to cut instead of a wheel based pizza cutter. I especially liked his directions on making your own dough. He makes a task that has seemed onerous and slow seem tractable.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:44 PM | Comments (0)
The Supreme Court battle
Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring. Now there is a scramble to see who Bush will nominate as a replacement. The bookies have their opinions, putting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the lead and Emilio Miller Garza (a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit) in second.
Others are already frustrated by the process, requesting we abolish the court, or at least replace it with an elected body.
Oh, and it seems that the role of O'Conner as a swing vote may be exagerated.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
I'm not the greenest guy around.
I didn't vote for Nader, and I'm a believer that if someone pays the costs of polluting that polluting isn't a moral issue for a secular person. But I try to hold myself to a higher standard.
Treehugger has a article on ten things you can do right now to reduce your ecological footprint. No new legislation or technology required.
I was pleased with evaluation.
1. Reduce home energy use by 10%
Pass. I use energy efficient bulbs and I air dry my dishes
2. Choose an energy-efficient home & appliances
Tie. I have new appliances, but I didn't pick them and my power bills till feels high, so I guess I'm not doing great here.
3. Don't use pesticides
I don't with my house plants, but I don't by organic food, so I guess this is a fail
4. Eat meat-free meals one day a week
Pass. Mmm, Pizza
5. Buy locally grown and produced food
Fail. While I do use a farmers market from time to time, I'm mostly a supermarket guy.
6. Choose a fuel-efficient vehicle
Pass. How about not owning one?
7. Walk, bike, carpool or take transit
Pass, I walk or take the train.
8. Choose a home close to work or school
Pass, Three miles is closer than most Americans.
9. Support alternative transportation
Pass, I take public transportation, so I vote with my wallet.
10. Learn more and share with others
Pass. I think this post counts.
More at the David Suzuki's website where they created this list.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:06 AM | Comments (3)
Circumcision Reduces AIDS Risk
The WSJ reports a study by a French and South African team that circumcision reduces AIDS risk by as much as 70%. The article points out that this indirectly protects women by reducing the number of infected men. How does it work?
... a type of cell that HIV targets, called the Langerhans cell, lies close to the delicate underside of the foreskin, whereas the head of a circumcised penis tends to develop a thick layer of outer skin that may armor it against HIV. Another theory: Rather than acting against HIV itself, circumcision may help prevent other sexually transmitted diseases that are known to facilitate the acquisition of HIV.
This certainly adds more fuel to the circumcision debate, with pro-circumsicion camp picking up another point to go along with the covenant, the better sexual performance, cancer prevention, and it being more sanitary in some conditions. The anti-camp trails with slightly reduced sexual pleasure and the ritual's appearence of barbarism, and .
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:24 AM | Comments (0)
July 1, 2005
Politics makes strange bedfellows
A great article in Reason, A Heap of Precedents, they explore why Raich vs. Gonzales, in giving federal drug laws precedence over California marijuana law, and Kelo v. New London which allowed broad terms for using eminent domain, has evoked scorn from not just conservatives and libertarians, but serious liberals as well.
These two decisions prompted outrage not because either was a radical departure from precedent --neither was -- but because they called attention to just how many grains of precedent had been piled atop the terms "public use" and "interstate commerce," reaching so far from the common-sense meanings of those terms as to seem preposterous if one is only eyeballing the heap, rather than attending to the process.
Oh, and more on this at skippy the bush kangaroo
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
LOL
Count me a Don’t Know on this one. Do I want big decisions about the shape of society made by a bunch of self-important lefty law-school grads, their brains all addled with 1960s-ish flapdoodle about rights and penumbras? Or would I prefer to have it done by a crew of not-very-successful, not-very-bright small-town lawyers whose pockets are stuffed with cash from teachers’ unions, chicken-processing magnates, Saudi princes, and Mexican drug lords?
Pass.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:54 AM | Comments (0)
Why do the subways require subsidy?
I've been wondering why the subway system, which has about 1.4 billion riders a year, is dependent on state, city and federal subsidies to operate, despite obviously being crowded beyond capacity nearly every day. I've been assuming that the crowding is a sign of charging the wrong price, and the loses are a sign of outrageous costs.
But once, long before I as born, indeed, before most of my grandparents were born, the subways made a fantastic profit, received no subsidy, served much of Manhattan and the Bronx. The tragic tale of misguided urban planning,Bronx shortsighted public finance, populist grandstanding and powerful unions that wrought these changes on a once self financing system is detailed in City journal's "How to Save the Subway -- Before It's Too Late"
One solution proposed:
The best systems work like this: the government invites each would-be operator to submit the fixed annual price that it would require to provide service along a bundle of routes for a three- to five-year period. The winning bidder earns its profit by keeping costs below that fixed price paid by the government. American cities that have contracted out bus services have saved an average of 35 percent, Savas and McMahon note—which would translate into savings of $1 billion a year for the MTA, Savas told me.
And another:
hike the fares steadily, until today’s average fare of $1.30 (with MetroCard discounts) reaches the actual $3–$4 cost of a ride. Fares should cover operating costs (after federal and state capital grants), just as they did in 1904, and should be indexed yearly to local and national inflation.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)