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December 21, 2005
The birth of tyranny or business as usual?
I've been thinking a bit about the morality and legality of the recently revealed unwarranted wiretaps employed by the federal government to detect Islamic terrorists. I don't know much about the law, but it seems at least plausible that if the government doesn't need permission to spy on other countries, they shouldn't need one to do it here, as long as they don't intend to use it as evidence to put anyone in jail.
Volokh, a lawyers blog, has an analysis of the relevant constitutional and case law.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:39 PM | Comments (0)
The strike continues
Still sore from yesterday's adventure of biking to work, I decided to walk to the 96th Street barricade to carpool. I took a gypsy cab, which cost me $12, shared with two other passengers. That was actually less than the $20 zone pricing he could have charged me. It took a half hour to get to work, which seems to take about the same, no matter if you take the subway, drive or bike. Let me tell you that taking a cab, even if you have to share it, is pretty luxurious.
Today Jane Galt has a posting on how if the strike goes on for longer than 10 days, the union will have lost more money then they walked out over.
Special fares arranged for the strike will allow cabbies to pick up extra passengers if they are heading in the same directions. In addition to riding with strangers, a passenger will pay more than the usual fare.It will cost ten dollars to get into the cab and ride a short distance.
Manhattan is being divided into four zones. A ride within a zone is the ten dollar fare. However, crossing over a zone will cost an additional $5. Going into an outer borough will also cost $5 extra.
The zones are:
Zone A - South of 23rd Street in Manhattan;
Zone B - 23rd Street to 60th Street in Manhattan;
Zone C - 60th Street to 96th Street in Manhattan;
Zone D - Manhattan north of 96th Street.
So a ride from lower Manhattan to Harlem would cost $25 — $10 for the initial fee and $15 for crossing three zones.
The fares for the airport runs will remain the same.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:34 PM | Comments (1)
December 20, 2005
A pox on the Transit Workers' Union
The Transport Workers Union, Local 100 chapter, has decided to stop operating the mass transit of New York City. That system moves one out of every three American workers taking mass transit on a typical day. It also has the most trains and subway stations of any city.
The workers of the MTA are entitled to strike, it is their right as free men to not work if they don't like the terms of employment.
Nevertheless, I got up early today, strapped my book bag filled with textbooks and study notes to my back, and bicycled b four miles to the the office. It was cold, tiring, and sweaty work. So unsurprisingly, I'm a bit miffed. The Local 100 membership should be destroyed.
Let's take these guys out, replace them with robots wherever possible and non-union workers wherever that isn't possible. Let's start with an ultimatum. Show up to work tomorrow or you will have a lifetime ban from employment from the NYC and NY state government. Then offer a 25% pay cut, a dramatic reduction in benefits and an elimination of early retirement and defined benefit retirement schemes. Then let's see what sort of counter offer we get.
City journal, offers the sage suggestion that if they can't privatize the whole mass transit system, at least privatize the bus system so this doesn't happen again.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2005
A theory fit for Oliver Stone
Check out this vaugely plausable, detailed and insane sounding theory of how Dave Chappelle ran into all the personal problems that resulted in losing his show. In short, an conspiracy of the leaders of the American Black community.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:49 PM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2005
Just how far beyond an economy of machines are we?
An article in Reason discusses how almost 80% of wealth in the rich world is in the form of intangible capital. Over 90% of variations in intangible wealth are explainable with proxy variables for the level of education in society and the quality of rule-of-law. Which isn't surprising, but really reenforces that we aren't spending our aid budgets on things that acutally make people richer.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:01 PM | Comments (0)
Eww
Nothing but disgustingly cute picture after picture of animals doing silly stuff.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:58 PM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2005
Pay day!
I got promoted, which is, you know, cool.
Go me.
I am now second interior manager in charge of regulations concerning matters arcane and mysterious.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:37 AM | Comments (3)
December 14, 2005
Are Christians better than non-Christians?
Eric Rasmusen has a piece where he says that Christians have an obligation to acknowledge that:
I believe Christians are better than other people. A Christian has to believe that. If he doesn’t, he is denying sanctification -- he is saying that even genuine Christian belief has no influence on a person’s behavior. Maybe that is true, but should somebody who believes it be a Christian?
Forget the veracity of this point, it is not a logical conclusion from believing genuine Christian belief has influence on a person’s behavior. If Christianity makes the people who adopt it better, if they start below average then Christianity might be good for individuals, but a bad predictor of their resulting moral quality.
Take for example Alcoholics Anonymous. It is a faith based treatment program for those who abuse alcohol. Check out this blurb about how they conducted their early treatments.
Only the Bible was allowed in the room. Recovered drunks visited the patient and told their success stories. The newcomer had to identify, admit that he too was licked, and that he would do whatever it took. Dr. Bob visited daily. Then, he would explain the disease as they then understood it; and, on the final day, asked two questions to which there was only one answer: (1) Do you believe in God? (2) Are you willing to get down on your knees and pray? The newcomer then gave his life to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
That would make you, as far as I am concerned, a Christian. However most people get to AA because they've done terrible, sinful things while drinking.
The average atheist might have lived a more morally upstanding life than the average new inductee to AA. So making a predictive call based on who is Christian today depends significantly on what people did before they came to the church.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:32 PM | Comments (0)
The decline of the real rates and the equity risk primium or how to make money off of the arrival of immortality.
Most people who die (about 2/3) die for some reason related to old age. However, as we grow in our understanding of apoptosis we close in on technologies we need to reach the end of age. Simply put, we may soon enter an era where lifespan will grow faster than average age.
How can we make money off of this situation? One way is to invest in biotechnology stocks, but with the P/E ration of the drug and biotech companies at at least 35, maybe investing in stocks isn't the best way to go about making money. One also has to worry about small private companies in which one cannot invest coming from behind with new drugs and treatments.
Instead, save as much as possible, then invest in high (real) yielding bonds, stuff like emerging market debt and junk bonds.
That may seem highly counterintuitive. First, with a 100 or a thousand lifetimes with which to save, why would I want to start now when I could be having fun with my money?.
First we have to consider what an interest rate really represents. Most simply, interest rates are the price of borrowing money. Consider that consumption later is worth less than consumption today.
All that borrowed money must be lent by someone. The willingness of others to lend you money has to do with deferring consumption. Essentially, the believe that it is worth delaying consumption because they will get enough additional consumption to justify the delay. The longer you delay, the greater a premium.
Immortality will change the perception of what constitutes a reasonable delay. We consider it entirely reasonable that doctors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their life to learn their trade because doctors earn much more than most people once they start working. To the cave man, That delay would be absurd, the equivalent of spending 25 years learning to be a doctor today. There would be no way to recoup the investment.
According to "A History of Interest Rates", in ancient Greece, a land mostly without inflation because the economy ran on precious metal coins and barter, nevertheless saw interest rates of between 8% and 16% to the safest of borrowers. Ancient romans and Greeks had the same life expectancy at birth, and if their demographics were anything like the somewhat later Romans, then they had a life expectancy at five of 48 years. By comparison, the average rich world resident can expect 77-81 from birth, and a bit longer from 5. The social security administration estimates that the return on a safe bond in the US is about 3.5% over the long term.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:33 PM | Comments (2)
December 13, 2005
For get about text to speech, we want text to song!
Let them sing it for you is a website that takes a text input, then converts it to music, where each word you typed is sampled from a song.
You type "this is only a test" and then a crooner sings "This", "is" comes from a rapper, "only" from a hip hop song you can almost place and so on.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)
Better cooking with search engines
Last year I bought my mother a beautify illustrated cookbook, Off The Shelf: Cooking From the Pantry. Which is a really cool idea, but a book isn't the best way access data when each user will use a varied subset that depends not on the cooking task, but on the ingredients they have.
Enter this cool website, cooking by numbers, which lets you enter the ingredients you have and it provides recipes that contain only those ingredients. Their recipe list is limited, but it is a great proof of concept. Epicurious, should take this idea, hire some savvy perl coders to automate the flagging of recipes by ingredients and equipment, and allow allow searches. You could even save profiles for each user, giving them another excuse to login. That should increase the website stickiness, something that websites always strive for. In fact, Fresh Direct, the online grocer, could use a technology like this to help sell you extra groceries. All you have to do is take a look at the cart of the user, and say, I see that you have basil and Parmesan cheese, would you like some pine nuts so you can make a pesto?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:00 AM | Comments (4)
December 9, 2005
Age of miracles
Need directions on getting to a new place in an unfamiliar city with public transit? Check this out.
Right now it only works for Portland, Oregon, but Google maps now has a technology that combines their map functionality with public transit schedules and maps. They can tell you the combination of public transit and walking to reach arbitrary destinations within their coverage. IF they get penetration with other transit agencies this will be another big win for Google.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
December 8, 2005
A victory for pluralism
The Magen David Adom is the Red Cross like organization of the state of Israel. It looks like this:
For obvious reasons, they are unwilling to use the red cross, red crescent, and the red lion and sun, a symbol used by Iran until it adopted the crescent in 1982 that are the three symbols for relief agencies authorized for international use by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The ongoing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors, has allowed 27 members of the International Red Cross to justify excluding Magen David Adom from membership.
Until today. Bloomberg reports that the International Red Cross approved a truly neutral symbol, the red crystal for use in international humanitarian efforts.
Other symbols, including the Magen David Adom were approved to domestic use. With the approval of the host country, other symbols can be embedded inside the red crystal.
That should look like this:
This should allow the Red Cross to get back to important stuff like helping people. More information on the new symbol here.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:19 PM | Comments (2)
Cows have noisy bowels
Treehugger reports on a new food additive (based on fumaric acid)for cows that decreases their methane production by 70%. Animal flatulence of methane, especially the large number of domesticated ruminating (cud chewing) herbivores used by humans for food, make up the vast majority of these animal emissions. Ruminating animals have bacteria in their guts which they use to process cellulose into sugars. Fumaric acid is used by cells to produce energy from food, and used in the manufacture of polyester resins and polyhydric alcohols. It is speculated that this works by increasing digestive efficiency by decreasing pH in the animal's stomach.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)
December 7, 2005
The binding
The Akedah, or the binding of Issac, is the story from the bible where Abraham takes Issac up Mount Moriah, binds him to sacrifice him, and G-d stops the situation, and this become the repudiation of human sacrifice by the Jews and perhaps plants the seeds for its disappearance in all of the west. Many, perhaps most, ancient societies practiced human sacrifice. The Romans was abolished it by a senatorial decree as late as 97 BCE!
When I was a kid, I always thought (perhaps I was told, or maybe I just assumed) that Issac was a child or perhaps a teenager. But according to Josephus, Isaac is twenty-five years old at the time of the sacrifice, while the Talmudic sages teach that Isaac is thirty-seven. So Abraham, who is either 125 or 137 (thus the confusion about Issac's age) was an old man who could easily have
been stopped by the young Issac.
I've never heard anyone argue this before, but I wonder if this is an important componant of Issac's piety. Being dutiful to his father and hearing G-d's call.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:47 AM | Comments (1)
Questions for Rumsfeld
A friend of mine had a chance to hear Secretary Rumsfeld speak, but never got a chance to ask any of questions. I tried to make interesting questions that chanaged the secretary, were hard to dodge, and were important without being hostile.
The Baghdad airport road was extremely hard to keep safe and clear. In the last few months a lot of progress has been made. The solution seemed to be using Iraqis to patrol and run check points. Are there other examples of this? What have we learned from this transition?
How many more Americans in our armed forces and intelligence establishment speak Arabic today then did on September 10th? What's been done to encourage the study of middle eastern and central Asian languages?
We've seen in France and Israel what frustrated and idle young men can do. Yet, Aljazeera reported a Baghdad University study saying that unemployment in Iraq was 70%, higher than the infamous suburbs of Paris or even that of Gaza. What macroeconomic strategies are being used to combat unemployment in Iraq? Have make-work civil infrastructure programs been considered?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:02 AM | Comments (0)
December 6, 2005
Press 17#, your SSN and dance on one leg to speak with a human
Here is a handy little site that tells you how to speak with a human being on an ever growing list of companies' voice mail systems.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:33 PM | Comments (0)
At what point does homosexual behavior make you a gay?
Perhaps you know this joke:
One day an 85-year-old man is taking a stroll around his hometown, which he has lived in for his whole life. As he sees the landmarks, homes, and streets from his youth, he starts reminiscing....
"I remember helping build that bridge when I was 25. I worked hard on that. But people won't call you 'the bridge builder' if you do that here. No, no, they don't!"
"I remember building that house over there when I was 30. But people won't call you 'the house builder' if you do that. No, no they don't!"
"I remember building that tavern that I still lounge at when I was 35. If you do that people won't call you 'the tavern builder' either. They sure won't!"
"But if you suck one cock..."
Recently the Vatican published Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders. Which established that those with "deeply-rooted homosexual tendencies" could not be priests. This document was surprisingly hard to find. Not a single news article I read referred to it by name, and I actually had to got to The Holy See's website (they have the TLD va!) to find the title. They didn't have an English copy so I had to then go looking for that.
I, among others, wonder what exactly the difference between "deeply-rooted homosexual tendencies" and homosexual tendencies of any other sort.
Over at James Alison's website, he has a different take.
This is a perfectly reasonable distinction easily grasped by common sense (and usually especially clear to gay people): the same-sex horseplay of adolescents, or the circumstantial “homosexuality” of long-term same-sex confinement in prison, on shipboard, or during military service is not the same thing as being gay.
Is this true? It doesn't seem ridiculous, but neither is is self evident. Popularly, this might vary by gender of the actor. Many women I know under 30 have kissed another woman, but are not regarded as gay. I think most male readers would confirm that their own sexual explorations would not be regarded as neutrally.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:49 PM | Comments (0)
Must the government run a deficit if people are giving money away?
Jane Galt has a piece last Friday where she discussed the US deficit. She argued that the cost of borrowing money for the United States after inflation (the real cost of borrowing) is negative, so our government has an ethical obligation to take advantage of the foolish foreigners who would offer us such a thing.
I am an optimist about America's future. I expect that future Americans will be richer, better educated, healthier and live longer, so I don't mind if, as part of a broader welfare state that isn't going anywhere, we saddle the future with a extra debt. We have intra-temporal wealth redistribution, so why not inter-temporal? So if we are in a period of cheaper money, we should expect to consume more.
The leaders of our government often sees themselves as the stewards of all of America, present and future, and craft policy accordingly. For example, companies often use 7-10% as an acceptable discount rate for future profits. However, the government often uses a far lower rate, like 3% in considering the . This makes a huge difference. At 10% discount, a dollar of tax revenue 10 years is worth $.12 today, but at 3% it is worth four times as much ($.54). That almost suggests a rule of of thumb for public spending. Argue as a matter of public policy what should be the inter-temporal rate of substitution for a society. Then manage the debt load so that the real interest rate equals this rate of substitution.
But something bugs me about this, it sounds suspiciously like treating the US government as though its citizens were shareholders, and the our leaders have similar obligations to those of executives. But it isn't that simple. One of the functions of our state is to protect those that lack a voice, and those in their minority today or yet un-conceived certainly lack a say. Is it fair to spend their money, in the obviously incompetent way that our state does, on policies that they don't choose, and in many cases probably wouldn't support if we could ask them?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:43 AM | Comments (2)
December 5, 2005
ACLU loses over bag searches
Most of the readers around here are NYC residents and regular subway riders. Therefore, by know you should all be aware of the easily circumvented bag searches that go on in the subway. They check one in five riders, supposedly at random, and if you decline, you can leave no questions asked. Millions of innocent riders give up a bit of dignity and privacy, but a criminal or terrorist merely finds another way to enter the station.
The NY ACLU has been fighting this policy since the NY PD implemented it this summer. They just lost their first round in federal court, and they will be appealing. The judge felt that ""The risk of a terrorist bombing of New York City's subway system is real and substantial,"" that may be so, but this isn't going to do anything to stop that from happening, so why put up with this nonsense?
You can find a helpful guide to refusing searches at Flex Your Rights.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:55 AM | Comments (1)
December 1, 2005
Philip Pullman is a jerk
On the recommendation of a friend I read "His Dark Materials", by Philip Pullman, a rabid anti-religious atheist. I hated them. I found the antagonists cartoonishly unlikable, the child protagonists stupidly capable, and mature, the story plodding and the constant scorn piled on religion and the religious both boring and distracting. In contrast, the chronicles of Narnia, which were the first novels I ever read, were inspiring, touching, and entertaining. So I wasn't the least bit surprised to find that Philip Pullman was strongly critical of the forthcoming "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" movie. The Chronicle Review has an article that reviews his criticisms, and finds them largely wanting.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:06 PM | Comments (2)