« February 2006 | Main | April 2006 »
March 31, 2006
Sometimes it pays to just give a man a fish
"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime"
A proverb (sometimes ascribed to Confucius) that provides wise guidance on constructive charity. But is it always better to teach a man to fish?
Stumbling and Mumbling wonders in "Education or redistribution?". It turns out that if you come from a disadvantaged background, the economic returns from an education are low. So low, that it might be better to give them the option of doing manual labor from an earlier age. This is similar to the choice made by the Amish community to not educate their children beyond 14.
Recall that the NYC department of education spends over 10,000 a year to educate children, using teachers that by law must be working toward or have a masters degree. That is very expensive. Perhaps, we could do something different. Have a basic school curriculum funded by vouchers from 1st through 3rd grade. There are only two subjects, reading & writing and arithmetic. A remedial year for those who need it to pass a minimum competency. On going "graduation" you get placement in certified child friendly jobs, with access that placement and supervision until 18. In exchange they put the net present value of that, about $70,000, in a tax advantaged investment structure like an IRA, invested in stocks and bond. You can take the money out tax free for heath care expenses over a lifetime, and after 50 use if for retirement income. Seventy grand could easily grow to over a million bucks by their retirement 41(!) years later and that's with no other savings for the rest of their life. Under historical stock growth rates and minimal health care withdrawals, they could expect their nest egg to grow to $3.5 million in retirement savings by 50.
A couple of other concerns come to mind. How do we deal with truancy? We don't want them doing nothing but are we comfortable with compelling kids to work? Could 9 year olds be effectively employed at minimum wage? Could vendors charge against wages for the special costs of employing children? As low productivity workers I expect them to be the first fired in an economic downturn. What do we do with them when they are unemployed? Can parents be trusted to make this choice for their children? Is 9 too young? Perhaps 14 would be more realistic age, and then the adolescents can make this call for themselves. Although this doesn't provide quiet as large a nest egg.
Also of concern is the positive externalities of an educated populace. If 20% of the population eventually fell into this model, that's 20% (or more) less readers of great books, less potential sophisticated voters, less, less potential consumers of fine arts, and if you believe that tolerance, communiterianism, and nationalism are built in school, less of that too. Also, a larger body of American unskilled labor is a power block to against free trade and immigration.
What can we conclude about all this, is it amoral? The current system, with its huge waste and tragic failings, is amoral. Mayhaps this proposal is insane, that violating treaties we've signed and stinging opinions on a proper childhood. Nevertheless, it is an radical and interesting plan that could be a better use of our limited resources than the ineffective edifice with which we try to help and educate the underclass today.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:07 PM | Comments (1)
March 30, 2006
Pauly Shore quotes
When I was looking for that P. J. O'Rourke quote in the last article, I stumbled across a slew of Pauly Shore quotes. He is much more interesting then I'd given him credit for. Makes me want to see his new movie...
You'd think when you saw my old MTV stuff that I was always drunk and high and all that stuff. I wasn't.When I'm doing comedy it's like Rodney Dangerfield going on stage and not saying I don't get any respect. It's what people love.
All these kids in Hollywood, the people born and raised out here, their parents are all in show business, and that's why I think we're good. That's why we're on top of the game now because we were born in it.
Few if any teenagers can relate to getting up for school and finding famous comics like Pryor and Williams hanging out in your living room after a hard night of partying. But that's Hollywood.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:51 PM | Comments (0)
Poverty as envy, not hunger
The New Yorker has an article on poverty in America, RELATIVELY DEPRIVED. The first part is a facinating look at the history of the measurement of powerty in America. Then assuming that the human urge of envy is not a sinful behavior to supress but natural inclination to support, the second part is a typical proscription of liberal economic policies as the solution to the ills of our time.
As PJ O'Rourke says:
But then there's the tenth commandment: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covert thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."Here are God's basic rules about how the Tribes of Israel should live, a very brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts, and right at the end of it is, "Don't envy your friend's cow."
What is that doing in there? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose, as one of them, jealousy about the things the man next door has? And yet think about how important to the well-being of a community this commandment is. If you want a donkey, if you want a meal, if you want an employee, don't complain about what other people have, go get your own. The tenth commandment sends a message to collectivists, to people who believe wealth is best obtained by redistribution. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell.
Consumption-ability is an article on the amazing progress in absolute wealth in just the last 30 years.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:26 PM | Comments (1)
March 29, 2006
Fly me to the moon And let me play among the stars
Are we getting sick of thinking about the stars or are we just reading blogs like The Superficial and Pink is the New Blog instead?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:03 PM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2006
An immodest proposal
What if we scrapped the welfare state and gave every adult $10,000 per year instead?
That's Charles Murray's idea to replace the entire welfare state.
It starts off more expensive than the current system, but by 2011 (just 5 years!) it ends up cheaper. He proposes that $3000 per year has to be spent on a no-increase health insurance plan in the form of a reverse annuity. $2000 goes towards a stock and bond market invested mutual fund.
If we have to take communal responsibility for the welfare of others using the tyrannical power of the state, then is is a way to do it.
We could abolish poverty, keep overhead costs lo, and w give people the freedom to spend in ways that reflect their values while preventing their personal problems from becoming more expensive public ones later. That reflects a harmonization of popular American values like frugality, a love of freedom, and communal responsibility for the less fortunate among us.
$5000 shouldn't be so much money that it provides much of an incentive to avoid work, but in these days of Walmart should keep families with couples fed and clothed. A modest amount of additional work can catapult a family above the poverty line.
With this policy in place, a family of two adults and two children only has to raise another $8,000 a year to live above the poverty line. At the minimum wage of $5.15, that's 32 hours a week plus 2 weeks vacation a year for one parent and the other parent not working. All the while building real savings for retirement.
But what an amazing disruption. There are about 1.7 million civilian employees for the federal government, excluding the post office. Could 10% be cut be abolishing housing aid, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? Health and human services, HUD, and the SSA employ 136,000 people. There's got to be more savings in there someplace. This could also encourage states to follow suit, leading to additional disruptions.
All those regulations left unwritten, easily over a hundred thousand talented people freed up to go into the labor market, what an exciting possibility. He details it more extensively in his new book, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:34 AM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2006
The Applied Economics Blog
Big Love is a great new show on HBO about a polygamous man, his three wives, and seven children. The Church of LDS (aka the Mormons) gave up polygamy in 1890 , but it seems that it lives on in quiet corners of Arizona and Utah.
The Applied Economics Blog is a new blog I've been reading. They put current events in economics, politics, and strategy within the context of advanced undergraduate economics. In their new piece, two girls for every boy, they talk about some of the consequences of polygamy suitable for economic analysis.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:34 PM | Comments (0)
What can you see from space?
Contrary to rumor, the great wall of China isn't the only man made object viable from space. The list is actually much longer.
But to this list we must add an enormous bit of sky pollution, a giant Video Ipod. It seems that Steve Jobs, after winning some Australian land in in a poker match, used it to build a 555 square mile video Ipod as a satellite viewable advertisement.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:23 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2006
When is a survey not a sample?
Ever notice that the surveys in the newspaper usually have a footnote that estimates are accurate +/- X%? There are a variety of methods by which there can be differences between the results of a survey and the true opinions of the population, even if you believe that such a thing as public opinion exists.
Survey mathematics works like this. If you accurately sample from the underlying population, as the sample gets larger the you will have less and less expected difference between the actual population and the sample population. It turns out through something called the central limit theorem that statistics taken from properly calculated samples are normally distributed around true statistics.
The biggest sources of survey error are survey nonresponse and coverage errors. Survey nonresponse is when the people who are included to participate in a survey are different from the population at large. Coverage errors occur when the wrong people are surveyed and so larger samples don't converge to the true population statistic.
But what do you do when you don't have a large survey, you don't know how well it represents the true population, and you can't do much about the non-response? You need not despair, as long as you are careful with the conclusions you draw, and you know directional information about your sampling biases, you can do a bunch with your survey. Check out the mystery pollster for tips on doing an analysis accurately.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2006
Pointless security theater 3
A few weeks ago I consented to my first subway bag search because I was in a hurry to meet some friends for a road trip so I didn't have time to walk to the next station. I've long been frustrated with the low quality random searching on the subway, feeling it gives the illusion of security, is expensive and serves no serious security purpose. It seems that airline searches, which search every passenger with advanced equipment are likewise deeply flawed.
Boing Boing tipped me off to a report by Bruce Schneier on invasive searches for bombs, guns and knives in airports. It seems screeners suck at finding the dangerous stuff. How bad was it? The "screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs."
Now that isn't to say it is totally useless, as raising the likelihood of being caught does raise the cost of planning a terror attack. To the extent that serious acts of terror require
coordination between several armed assailants, the likelihood of one being discovered and the plot foiled is far blow one person sneaking a weapon onto a airplane. This encourages to take their terror to other places. Likewise, there isn't a lot of evidence that the current search methodology is failing in practice. Sure about a dozen men managed to get their box cutters aboard on September 11, but box cutters were allowed on planes at the time. The fact that they didn't bring guns or bombs a board suggests they thought they have be been caught if they had done so.
I've written before about random searches on the subway.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
Good math or bad?
Good math has an article that seeks to determine how comparatively dangerous serving in Iraq is with respect to other relatively dangerous activities.
He finds that it is over 20 times as dangerous as the four most common causes of accidental death.
My immediate instinct was to compare this with the death rate for police officers killed in the line of duty...
I knew that this number included cops dying in accidents, but so does the soldier number. There aren't precise breakdowns available, but about 1800 of the 2300 deaths in Iraq are from hostile action. So that's about 600 a year in a Iraq to compare with 153 police officers killed last year. Now, there are about 120,000 - 150,000 troops in Iraq, to compare with as little as 650,000 cops. I'll assume that 1/3 of these officers have desk jobs (or handle while collar crime) so that I can withdraw them from the comparison. I won't do that In Iraq because every soldier in Iraq seems to have a real possibility of death.
That gives me .36 deaths per thousand police officers and 5 per thousand soldiers, or about 14 times as dangerous. Of course, timber cutters have a death rate of 12 per thousand, so maybe that isn't a huge multiple.
Another interesting point in the conversation is how to properly calculate the danger ratio of deaths / participants. You have to make sure you get your units correct. The numbers cited for deaths by auto accident, falling, poisoning, and drowning are all annual numbers, so those are deaths per thousand people per year. That's why we don't use 1800 total combat deaths but instead use 600 or so that died last year. The alternative, figuring out have many unique people served (or drove, risked falling, etc) and how long they put themselves at risk is too hard to calculate.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:18 AM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2006
What makes it a good school?
I've been working on a personal update for my high school update, which in a roundabout way lend me to the Stuyvesant High School Wikipedia entry. It points out that spending per student at Stuyvesant is below the average for public schools in NYC. At first I thought, "thats neat, look how much good they do with an average amount of money". Yes there must be some donations, but the school has 3500 kids so it only works out to about $100 per student.But then my thoughts drifted to Stuy's fancy building.
The new ten-floor building, located near lower Manhattan's financial district, was constructed at a cost of about $148 million, and includes 65 classrooms with about 450 computers on 13 networks, 7 pairs of escalators, various indoor sporting facilities including two gymnasiums and a pool built to Public Schools Athletic League standards, a theater with acoustics and lighting to accommodate music and drama productions, two lecture halls with movable partitions, a skylit cafeteria overlooking the Hudson River, 12 science laboratories (including a molecular biology lab and an analytical chemistry lab) and special shops for instruction in ceramics, photography, wood, plastics, metal work, robotics, and energy studies...The school's library has a capacity of 40,000 volumes and overlooks Battery Park City...the $10 million TriBeCa Bridge was built to allow students to enter the building without having to cross the busy West Street.
So if you include capital costs of the $158 million facilities, it no longer seems that low. Even at 5% total cost of capital that adds $2250 per student per year. A few years ago I took a look at spending per public school student in NYC and found it was $10,513. Since special education students are especially expensive to educate and they are 10% of the kids, and costs about three times as much, That only leaves about $7000 per student. Let say Stuy gets average funding. That's a 30% bonus from the implied capital charges. Sure, other schools have buildings they they too get to use for free. That said, few, if any other schools in NYC are nice, advanced, and large as Stuyvesant. So to say the school has low spending per student, is, at a minimum, misleading.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2006
A gedankenexperiment
Consider the US armed forces policy of "Don't ask, don't tell".
The idea is that homosexual soldiers hurt moral morale and same sex fraternization is more difficult to prevent, having other knock-on effects. In times of war these effects would be even more important, so you'd expect that you see an increase in soldiers being tossed out for being exposed as homosexual. If the policy was a mere act of bigotry, or perhaps taste, then you'd see the opposite effect. Victory in war is so important that we can't afford to lose skilled troops, so we'd boot fewer people out for being publicly gay.
Lo, we have an opportunity to test these hypotheses. The Afghanistan and Iraqi wars allow us to review the period between 1993 (when Clinton introduced the policy) to 2001 (October) when war began in Afghanistan.
Here is the data on the number of people discharged for being a homosexual:
1993 682 Don't Ask Don't Tell (peace)
1994 597 Don't Ask Don't Tell (peace)
1995 722 Don't Ask Don't Tell (peace)
1996 850 Don't Ask Don't Tell (peace)
1997 997 Don't Ask Don't Tell (peace)
1998 1,145 Don't Ask Don't Tell (peace)
1999 1,034 Don't Ask Don't Tell (peace)
2000 1,212 Don't Ask Don't Tell (peace)
2001 1,273 Don't Ask Don't Tell (war)
2002 906 Don't Ask Don't Tell (war)
2003 787 Don't Ask Don't Tell (war)
Some see a steep effect here. They declare an upward trend in the data, and then see it suddenly turn negative. But 11 points of data isn't much to test a breakpoint hypothesis. I tried doing a single factor ANOVA to test if the data was different in before 2001. I didn't get a significant difference. Then I tried using 2000 instead, figuring that 2001 was mostly in peace anyway. That also wasn't significant.
In the end, the cyclical trends in the treatment of homosexuality by the military is too subtle to pickup with the amount of data we have.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)
Guess not everyone liked it
The article I liked so much yesterday is roasted by Julian Sanchez over at Reason.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
Voting with your shelf space
The Online Computer Library Center has a collection of the 1000 most widely held library books. It is nice to see a serious list from the western canon, and just a giant list of popular fiction. But some of the highest ranked books seem unusual for the lay reader, like #48, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. Though, I am glad to know it is there if I want to read it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:40 AM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2006
Liberal egalitarianism
I found the article over at Cato Unbound, "When Inequality Matters", a helpful and insightful look at what sorts of inequality matters and what do not. He discuses two different theory, equality as liberation (1 below) and equality as mitigating misfortune (2 below).
1. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (letting wives have bank accounts, say) is liberating while moving in the other direction is oppressive.2. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (toward equality of income, say) fosters prosperity while moving in the other fosters destitution.
In one sense this is a rehash of the freedom from / freedom to discussion that pop up in a freshman philosophy class, but I found the moderate tone, excellent quotes, and good choice of supporting statistics a helpful refresher.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2006
Keeping your image formats straight
When posting images online it can be difficult to choose the correct digital image file format. The alphabet soup of jpg, png, gif, RAW, and others can still confuse me, and I've had a website since 1999. So I found when I found an article that lucidly explained their relative advantages, I had to share.
The author, who seems to be a serious Atheist and Darwinist thinker, also has a neat list of quotes that creationists would love to see. Note that the second to last one, "Is Evolution Probable?", relies on unreasonable assumptions, and is thoroughly dismantled by the blog Good Math.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:35 PM | Comments (1)
Is the US too pro-Israel?
I just read an article critical of America's relationship with the state of Israel. Essentially, they argue that supporting Israel the way we do is no longer in the strategic interest of the US because Israel isn't a special country and supporting them is making us enemies. The only reason we do so, they argue, is that they have powerful support by Americans.
I didn't agree with most of its conclusions, but I found it interesting to learn about how pro-Israeli Americans manage to lobby their government so effectively. Normally these things come across as anti-semitic screeds, but I thought this was lucid and fair analysis if you buy their assumptions.
Here are links to a few other versions of the paper in case the main one expires. For extensive criticism of several points in the article check out Protein Wisdom, Volokh, as well as Daniel Drezner's blog.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:26 PM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2006
Wasting your life?
Heredia coffee has a new campaign where they present the reader with an enormous list of places and books. The idea being that without coffee, you'll never hit them all.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:00 PM | Comments (1)
Was it worth it?
A couple of different blogs tipped me off to an interesting paper on the costs and benefits of the second Iraq war. They found no clear answers.
The high cost of the Iraq intervention is sometimes seen as a compelling argument against the decision to forcibly overthrow the ruling order and install a new regime. This argument is deficient because it ignores the costs of alternative responses to the national security and humanitarian concerns presented by the pre-war Iraqi regime. A well-founded verdict on the Iraq intervention requires, at a minimum, an evaluation of what these alternatives would cost. We tackle this issue by assessing the costs of sticking with the pre-war containment policy.
A few others:
Forcible regime change in Iraq has proved to be a costly undertaking. As of January 2006, it appears likely that the Iraq intervention will ultimately unfold along a path that implies present value costs for the United States in the range of 410 to 630 billion in 2003 dollars. These figures reflect a 2 percent annual discount rate. They capture the estimated economic costs of U.S. military resources deployed in the war and postwar occupation, the value of lost lives and injuries sustained by U.S. soldiers, the lifetime medical costs of treating injured soldiers, and U.S. outlays for humanitarian assistance and postwar reconstruction.
...
The available evidence suggests that real income per capita fell by roughly 75 percent as a consequence of Saddam’s misrule. In addition, much of Iraq’s greatly diminished output was diverted to an oversized military, an apparatus of terror and repression and the relentless glorification of Saddam.
...
All told, the regime killed or caused the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqis. Under the policy of containment after the 1991 Gulf War, a reasonable estimate is that at least 200,000 Iraqis died prematurely at the hands of the regime or as a direct consequence of its policies, including its refusal to comply with U.N. Security Council Resolutions and its diversion of oil revenues and other resources to palaces and monuments. Had containment remained in effect, the historical record suggests that premature Iraqi deaths would have continued indefinitely at the rate of 10,000 to 30,000 per year.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)
Wilt Chamberlain and Pokemon
Robert Nozick, a recently passed philosopher who provided secular, philosophical justification for libertarian justice, had a famous gedankenexperiment about income inequality.
Consider a world where everyone has equal initial income but unequal distributions of talent. Such is the proposed just distribution by Rawls, someone with whom he strongly disagreed. In such a world, there arises a Wilt Chamberlain, an amazing basketball player who towers literally and figuratively above the other players.
Wilt Chamberlain will only play if each person coming to see the game pays him twenty-five cents. This is above and separate from the ticket price. Over a season, a million fans pay him a quarter. Now Chamberlain now has about $250,000 more than any of his fans do. Since the initial distribution is just, and the final distribution happen with a series of voluntary transactions, this new distribution must also be just.
But what if Wilt Chamberlain wasn't a lot better than other basketball players, just enough better that everyone knew it and were still willing to pay him a lot extra to play. In a society where this is widespread this is equivalent to saying that there are sharply increasing returns to ability. This is sometimes called a winner take all society.
In the real world this is a difficult hypothesis to test. Precise measurements of true talent, performance, and initial endowments of wealth would be required. A more controlled situation is required. Consider the value of Pokemon trading cards. You can learn to play online, but each card has certain easily observable endowments of talents. Some cards are powerful (some in general others in specific situations) and others are not. Some are rare and others not. All this is known. A perfect strategy might not exist, but there is wide agreement on the in-game value of cards. Although the cards are randomly distributed in packs, there is a liquid secondary trading market. I saw over 21,000 auctions on Ebay when I checked. Examination of price verses performance found that the highest quality cards have a higher resale value than their quality would predict.
The authors of the paper don't explore all the reasons for this. My hypothesis is relates to the distribution of prizes in tournaments. I couldn't find any recent prize comparisons, but I assume it is like that of other game competitions. The winner is whoever wins that the end of a series of 1 on 1 games. Second place is the loser of the last match, and so on. You only need to be marginally better than your opponents to win, but the prizes fall off steeply. The winner may be 1% better, but he gets 100% or more value in prizes. Because of this log-normal prize distribution, the expected play advantage from from the best cards need only be small to justify a massive difference in prices.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:32 AM | Comments (1)
Global Firms
A cool part of working for a massive global firm is how different everyone is. At times it is as if "It's a small world after all" meets Pink Floyd's "Money". You have IT people from India, Israelis writing reports, the British in sales, and French administrators. Yesterday I helped a guy in Japan with a problem. The response "Thank you, OneEyedMan-san for your help as always. Nozaki" I thought that was cool. That's the first time I've had a foreign honorific added to my name.
On the subject of foreigners in need of help, I wanted to give a shout out to my sister's project at the JCC of Manhattan. I'll be helping and we'd love for you to join us.
...a particular dark part of Jewish history involves once every couple of decades, being hated by all your neighbors and having to run, hide, starve or move. It's a reality and it's forced us to become really resilient. But resilience doesn't always go hand in hand with empathy or justice. We're not the only people who have struggled against genocide, and we’re never done enough to protect others whose bad luck is taking them where we've been so many times.Right now, every day, since 2003 a horrific genocide is taking place in Darfur, Sudan. And I’m prepared to do what I can to help stop it.
...
On Sunday April 30th there's a rally in Washington DC to protest the genocide in Darfur. The JCC has decided, with me leading the charge, to make a goal of bringing 5000 people to the rally. I rented 100 buses and we're all going to go en masse. Nothing would mean more to me than to have you on the bus with me. I know it means giving up a Sunday, but it’s for an AMAZING cause. The rally will be tremendous, and so will the outpouring of love for these incredibly vulnerable people.I'm going to make it really easy on you. I'm taking the JCC bus, though I set up buses for lots of other groups. I’d love it if you were on my bus. The whole deal- roundtrip cost per person and the rally and the whole thing is $30. All you have to doround tri is show up at 7:30 am on April 30th, get on the bus, argue over who can sit with me, and we can go. To register for the buses on line you can go directly to the bus registration CLICK FOR BUS REGISTRATION...or call the JCC box office at 646-505-5708. If you are not interested in going with me, you can sponsor a seat for someone who can’t afford one (like a college student.) You can do that on the web or on the phone too, just tell them “I’d like to sponsor a seat” rather than “I’d like to take the JCC bus.”
I know it seems far away. I know it feels like there's nothing we can do. I know we all feel like we don’t know enough about the situation. Doesn't matter. Take the bus. Take the bus because we should all know better.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:34 AM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2006
No accounting for taste
Paul Krugman it seems likes Ian M Banks. I picked up a used copy of Bank's The Player of Games at a fund raiser at my junior high school. That was probably the best $1 I ever spent. There were many new things to think about, utopia, bisexuality, new human glads to please and adapt the body, weapons of enormous power, the painful boredom of plenty, benevolent computers far smarter than man, dieing only when you bore of living, and monstrous and inventive alien societies. I read the book half dozen time until the cover fell off. I could only find 2 others books by Banks at the book store, so I set out to the library for more.
I could find but one book, The Wasp Factory. Not exactly what I expected, not sci-fi, but a wonderful romp through the insane, the ugly, and the disturbing. Since then I've read just about everything he's written, even taking trips to the book store while on vacation in London to catch a few extra that haven't made their way onto our side of the pond. Read something and enjoy.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:44 PM | Comments (0)
Feeling safer yet?
The petty regulation of small businesses is one of my pet peaves.
On this second day of Purim, the capricious use of state power to oppress the small man is on my mind.
One of my favorite stories (after the scroll of Ester) of the victory of the small man over the petty power of the state concerns Vidal Sassoon, famous hairdresser and not-so-famous
fighter in the Israeli war of independence.
In 1966...[he] moved to New York and promptly got into a fight with state cosmetology regulators. Sassoon's precision cuts had freed straight-haired women from the confines of permanents, teasing, and gobs of hairspray, but to practice his trade in New York he was required to take a test based on the sort of hairdressing he hated. "The test requires that I do finger waving, reverse pin-curling, and a haircut in which you thin as you cut--things that haven't been used since Gloria Swanson was in silent movies," he said. "I simply cannot take it on the grounds that it violates everything I've worked for for 21 years." Sassoon eventually forced state regulators to promise they'd change the test.
But this nonsense is alive and well. Yesterday the NY Times reported chefs using Sous Vide are being fined and otherwise harassed by the food police. Sous Vide is when you pack food in plastic and then evacuate the air in the package. You then simmer the food at low heat, allowing tender, moist food. But it isn't as if these dishes are being foisted upon unsuspecting diners. This is isn't cooking a steak dropped on the floor. This is a avant-garde technique deliberately sought out by foodies looking to taste at the cutting edge. Save the cops for the thieves and murderers.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2006
Funny Blogs
I've just got my first RSS reader, RSS OWL. The joy of having all that news and blogs pushed to my desktop has put me on the prowl for new stuff to read. The sixth annual boggies just awarded their prizes, so there was ample opportunity to find some new stuff.
The most humorous blog winner was Overheard in NY. Think of it as half the best of Craig's list and half Metropolitan Diary, but far more prolific than either bust just as funny.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:11 PM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2006
Are you a Splenda fan?
Splenda is a non-caloric, bakeable, sugar substitute. Most people seem to agree, making it the best-selling American diet sweetener. Walmart liked it so much that they ordered a custom version of Diet Coke that uses it. Oh, and you can even by splenda in liquid form.
I noticed the cashiers in my cafeteria store the Splenda underneath the trays, the same place they keep the big bills, yet other artificial sweeteners are available by the handful. I wondered why.
It seems we are in the midst of a massive Splenda shortage.
Why can't they just raise the price to avoid shortages? Some time this year they will be doubling their production capacity, so they may prefer shortages than people thinking of Splenda as a luxury product. Likewise, soda a massive consumer of sweeteners is largely the same price regardless of product, so charging a very different price could shut them out of that market. They may prefer to restrict the supply to non-critical customers in the short term rather than raise prices.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:05 PM | Comments (0)
March 9, 2006
Get as MAD as you want, it won't stop US
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is largely credited with forming the US policy on mutually assured destruction (MAD). Essentially, potentially hostile counties retain sufficient nuclear arms to destroy their enemies even AFTER suffering a nuclear attack. As such, any country that destroyed them would also be assured total destruction. This held up for a long time, essentially from the Cuban Missie crisis onward.
Longtime readers know I don't think much (morally or practically) of the mass killing of a fascist dictatorship's serfs in the name of retaliation. That said, our enemies seem to have bought it, as there hasn't been another nuclear weapon used as such since WW II, and there haven't been any wars between great powers either. On the other hand, it has also forced the US to make some serious strategic compromises with some of the worlds worst countries, so it hasn't been without cost.
Good or bad, the age of MAD is coming to an end. For the foreseeable future, the US will have the first strike ability to destroy the nuclear weapons of Russia, China, and all other lesser nuclear powers. If winning a nuclear war. Our weapons have become so powerful, accurate, and hidden, that the US could start and win a nuclear war with any country and win. That is, if winning means destroying your enemy without yourselves experiencing a nuclear holocaust and not simply avoiding one in the first place.
Will this make the world a calmer place? Will the US use its nuclear superiority to take a harder line with Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran? Will hubris push her into raining hellfire in the innocent? I don't know, but I'm hopeful about America. I expect she'll stand up well to Clio's withering review.
When Reagan said,
"Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way." he was talking about himself, but I hope it will also be said about about America.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:10 PM | Comments (0)
Can Libertarians win local office?
I have great affection for the Libertarian party. I certainly consider myself a libertarian (notice the little "l", meaning I like ideas and not the party), and if I didn't consider much of their hopelessly ineffective and cynical, I might still be a party member.
Two time Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Brown died last week, and he worked hard to raise the profile of the party. Nevertheless, even a hopeful, small government man like myself can recognize that a Libertarian President it in the cards anytime soon.
But at the local level? That's a different story. Libertarians elected to local zoning boards, to state crime task forces, the state senate, or even mayor has real potential to bring additional freedom to the lives of Americans, without worrying voters that the US will suddenly close all of its external bases.
Kn@ppster has another perspective on this. Even if Libertarians can't win, by finding effective vote maximizing strategies, in the right districts they can influence policy decisions and win a few appointed positions.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
March 8, 2006
voluntaryXchange
voluntaryXchange is an economists' blog. He has a recent posting on the game theory of the odd Nordic sport of curling. Along the way, he ends up explaining the vocabulary and some of the rules of play.
I once hypnotically watched curling in a cramped British hotel room and didn't learn much. Now I'm excited to watch at my next opportunity.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:19 PM | Comments (1)
March 7, 2006
Economics of the housing market
I missed this article over the weekend, but the NY Times has an article about Dr. Edward L. Glaeser, a housing economist with all sorts of interesting ideas and strange opinions. It seems as much as half the price of NYC housing is from the zoning regulations.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:56 PM | Comments (0)
March 6, 2006
Those things on the end of your laces
An aglet is the tight plastic or metal material on the end of the shoelace that keeps from unraveling and otherwise looking messy. They are a bit frustrating, because they eventually fall off, often forcing the wearer to discard otherwise excellent laces. As such, there are website devoted to their repair.
When I buy new shoes, the laces look and fit great. Just a little bit of extra lace with which to tie your shoes. But as the shoe ages, even if the aglets all stay in place, the laces and leather gradually stretch, and i end up with an excess of lace, encouraging double knotting and other less attractive solutions. One guy tried to solve this with movable aglets, but his solution requires elastic laces, which forbids the leather dress shoe laces I wear most days, and wouldn't be as durable as other solutions.
So I came up with my own, the double aglet lace. Instead of a lace ending in a single aglet, it has one aglet about an inch before the end of the lace, and then another at the end.
Like this:
Then when the laces get too long or too ragetty, just cut them off at the top of the lower aglet. Instantly you have a clean look and a better fit.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:11 AM | Comments (0)
March 3, 2006
The Numbers Guy
My favorite writer for the WSJ is probably a Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy. He does a fairly detailed analysis of a study, survey, or statistic in each issue. His most recent article is "Ambitious Homeless Count Fills A Void, but Has Its Limitations" which alas, isn't free. It covers an attempt to count the number of homeless in NY. Basically they divided the city up into high and low homeless density areas. They visited all the high density areas and then sampled from the low density areas to try to create a good estimate.
But how can you know if these counters are equally effective? How can you know if low density areas are truly low density, and if your $10 temp homeless counters are doing an effective job? You hire 150 actors to pose as homeless people distributed according to the assumptions of the model. If you sampled half the low density areas (say with 50 actors), and all the high density areas (with 100 actors) and you find all the high density actors and half the low density ones, then your assumptions are strongly defensible. If they aren't, then you can correct your measurements based on the number actually observed.
For example, if you a district had 2 actors and only one was found, there would be strong reason to suspect undercount. If there were no actors in a district and yet more homeless were found there than anywhere else, that too would implicate the sampling model.
At first I thought 150 actors in a city with thousands of micro-districts to search wasn't enough sampling power. But the study found that there were an estimate 4,400 people living on the streets of New York City (with another 30,000 people who sleep in shelters) so a few plants might make a big difference, because most districts have at most a few homeless.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
March 2, 2006
The theists will out breed the rest
Last year I was reading The End of Faith, and I had a lot to say about the role of faith.
My closing remarks were this:
Secular liberalism delivers great wealth, but current demographic evidence suggests that their number gradually is replaced by religious immigrants or not all, what then? If, two hundred years from now, there are a quarter as many people living in the rich world, will it be judged a success, no matter how rich they are? Can an ideology that jeopardizes the genetic connection to posterity of its subscribers be unequivocally successful?
This idea has hit the mainstream press. An article in the March issue of Foreign Policy, The Return of Patriarchy, Phillip Longman discusses how the conservatives (and near synonymously faithful) are going to inherit the earth. Not that this is good or bad, just that it is going to happen and there isn't a lot that public education or tax policy can do to change it.
Essentially, his argument is that globally, conservative, faithful, male-headed households are out breeding the rest of us. As a result, the vast majority of the next generation will be within a more conservative, larger family, and more faithful context. For example, 50% of all the children born to women born in France in the 1960's, were born to women with 3 or more children. As more couples have one child, those that choose to have 3 or more have a humongous impact on the demographics of the next generation. They may even have a higher survival rate. He notes that the aging of the West will put tremendous pressure to cut back on welfare state benefits. Those with
larger extended families to draw upon will suffer less from misfortune. Those raised in larger, conservative families are also more likely to have such families themselves, so this could have knock-on effects. That's one way thatGenghis Khan has 16 million living descendants.
And it seems, this has happened before. Adultery, divorce, homosexuality, opportunities for female employment and ideas about their empowerment had severe demographic consequences on the progressive elements in Greek civilization. Ultimately this contributed to the Roman civilizations taking them over and the Germanic tribes outlasting the Romans.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:52 PM | Comments (2)
March 1, 2006
Abortion and philosophy
John Rawls was an important 20th century American philosopher. His most famous contribution was the "Veil of Ignorance". This veil suggests that that we should pretend a veil conceals our current talents, wealth, privileges, gender, race, height, and temperaments. Ignorant of all this, we should think about what social order, public policies, and other rules we would want to govern such a society. He assumed that man would be extremely risk adverse in such a situation, and developed the concept of maximin, where society should maximize the utility of the worst off members.
It occurred to me today that this would surely be an argument against legalized abortion. With the knowledge that a given zygote could just as easily be aborted by its mother as be a mother choosing an abortion. In utility modeling there isn't much worse than not being born at all, so the veil applied here would mean that we should avoid all abortions. This fascinates me because Rawls' ideas on distributive justice made him very solidly in the camp of America's liberals. Even more interesting is that Rawls seems to have gone in the other direction on this matter. He firmly supported a moral right to first trimester abortions.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:02 PM | Comments (0)