Belligerati

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December 31, 2006

Puerto Rico

just go back from Puerto Rico. Highlights of this trip included reading the Red Mars , wandering around the neighborhoods of San Juan taking pictures, making custom t-shirts with my siblings, eating empanadas, cod-fish salad, mofongo, and chicken of all sorts from beachside shacks and traditional resturants, playing with my little brothers in the watter, site-seeing with my bigger siblings on land, and see the Gigantes de Carolina play the Leones de Ponce in a night game of the Puerto Rican Professional Baseball League.

This was especially cool. What a place of cultural fusion. You could buy beer, peanuts and cracker jacks, but you could also empanadas, grilled dark meat chicken skewers, and plates of pork, rice and beans. If a ball went into the stands an adult would often catch it. Then the crowd would work it itself into a terrible fury, demanding that the ball be given to a kid. Only once did this not work, and they started a chant to demand that that particular fan be ejected. Tired from a long day of doing nothing we got up to go home in the sixth inning and we mannaged to almost catch a ball on the way out. Using our newly discovered local social norm we were able to extract the baseball from the fan who caught it, and one of my younger brothers had a souvenir of a lifetime.

Puerto Rico is a place where it is posible to spend a huge amount of money on interesting, good food (Baru), interesting bad food (Lemongrass), and great local food, which we had at The Spanglish Cafe, El Jibarito, and a beach shack with no name that blasted salsa the whole time we were there. This combined with the proprietor's terrible English and our comperable spanish made it so surreal when the ice cold beer and amzing scalding hot food finally made its way from the kitchen. Yum. The steaks were also great, but that experience wasn't different from a Morton's anywhere else. My general advice is that food is mostly a crap shoot, but look for guidebook-recomended places, Puerto Rican food seemed to be universally good, and that expensive food was no more likely to be good than cheap food. hell, it is good general chowhound-traveler advice to get recomendations from people who know, eat local food when possible (ask them, they love to recomend even if it embarrasses M), and all other things equal go for the cheaper meal.

In walking around, even with my camera equipment out, I always felt safe, and never encountered any anti-USA sentiment, despite warnings to the countrary. The ocean was in the mid to high 80's, and you could walk right in. That was just amazing, especially compared with the freezing waters off my new home of San Diego. As far as we could tell, you can walk around drinking in public. The local beer, Medalla, is the most temperature depended beer I've ever had. At 50 degrees it tastes like nasty puddle water from a ditch in old San Juan, at 30 degrees one of the most delicious beverages known to man.

A great trip, all and all.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:09 AM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2006

Vacation and the Best of 2006

I'm going on vacation for the next week, so posting will be light to non-existent. Have a Merry Christmas if you are into that sort of thing.

Here are the 5 most popular Belligerati articles of 2006

5)Toilet Seats
4)She said yes!
3) How are they getting these drugs anyway?
2)Liberal egalitarianism
1) Libertarian war on terror quiz

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:25 PM | Comments (0)

Transparency is good

Scot Faulkner, chief administrative officer of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1997 has great suggestions on how to make the congress more transparent and by extentition work better.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:36 AM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2006

Who knew gas stations could be so funny?

I was reading the winners of the Weblog Awards, a people's choice of websites, and I discovered a great comic, Malfunction Junction, which didn't win but is a damn funny account of 4 guys that live together.
Check out this example:

Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2006

That's a ticket that would win

Want to hear a plausible narrative for the 2008 presidential elections? Hillary Clinton wins the primary battle, beating, among others, Obama. Senator John McCain cleans up in the Republican primary. Under threat for not looking like a “with it” candidate, McCain chooses the highest profile woman in Republican politics as his running mate, the Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Then the Democrats, not wanting to allow the Republicans to have the only candidate of color, nominate Obama as their vice president. The race and gender issues then neutralized across all major parties' candidates, the country then has a fairly typical election based on the issues and candidate experience. The Republicans win by a large majority of electoral votes, and regain control of one of the houses of congress.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:17 PM | Comments (0)

Ding dong the witch is dead

Saparmurat Niyazov president for life of Turkmenistan died of a heart attack today. For his crimes I hope he meets justice in the hereafter. His surreal tyranny, filled with odd proclamations (like renaming the months and days of the week), bizarre statements (like recommending gnawing bones as good for the teeth) and terrible oppression, ranking 148th in economic freedom and Not Free by freedom house). He was an evil man and the best thing that can be said of him is that he is gone. May the Turkmen find a far better replacement system to replace him.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2006

So your ISP won't let you host images?

It seems that even if your ISP won't allow you to host images you can convert them into a file type that allows you to store them within the HTML file itself. It is covered in RFC 2397. It seems that spammers could work serious mischief with this because they can imbed the image as part of the HTML of the email, so there isn't a remote download that they can intercept. That said, because normally spammers can tell the email address is valid by waiting for the user to download the image (that's why they don't show them to you automatically any longer) there isn't any way to tell that an email with this sort of image has been downloaded. Since it also makes them more expensive (each email is larger, so it uses more bandwidth instead of only valid emails being opened) it might be too expensive for them to make much use of.

Thanks to Hackzine.com for the tip.

The code itself looks like this, but I couldn't get it to work on the blog software.

Source

SRC="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhMAAwAPAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAMAAw
AAAC8IyPqcvt3wCcDkiLc7C0qwyGHhSWpjQu5yqmCYsapyuvUUlvONmOZtfzgFz
ByTB10QgxOR0TqBQejhRNzOfkVJ+5YiUqrXF5Y5lKh/DeuNcP5yLWGsEbtLiOSp
a/TPg7JpJHxyendzWTBfX0cxOnKPjgBzi4diinWGdkF8kjdfnycQZXZeYGejmJl
ZeGl9i2icVqaNVailT6F5iJ90m6mvuTS4OK05M0vDk0Q4XUtwvKOzrcd3iq9uis
F81M1OIcR7lEewwcLp7tuNNkM3uNna3F2JQFo97Vriy/Xl4/f1cf5VWzXyym7PH
hhx4dbgYKAAA7"
ALT="Larry">

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:24 PM | Comments (0)

Need we fear China?

Is China a soon to be despotic world hegemon?
Will Hutton say that's unlikely and Meghnad Desai disagrees in "Does the future really belong to China?" (Jan 2007 Prospect)

Nice quotes like:
China had markets, property and technology in the 18th century; it fell behind because it didn't have Enlightenment structures. It lacked the "trinity" of pluralism (multiple centres of political and economic power), capabilities (rights, education, private ownership) and justification (accountability, scrutiny, free expression).

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

Another bit of childhood gone

I am sad to learn that Shopsin's, an eclectic restaurant and cool NYC institution owned by the father of a friend of mine from high school closed its doors last Sunday.

With this gone, and that all you can eat sushi place on 16th and Lexington, how long until Stromboli's and Sammy's bite the dust? Perish the thought.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2006

The number you shouldn't care about

I don't generally care much about the trade deficit. However, it has a strong chance of eventually causing a sudden weakening of the dollar in FX markets, then I would start to concern myself with it. Over in the free section of the WSJ, in a piece called Dollars, Debt and the Trade Gap, Thoughts on the Dropping Dollar, you can see a discussion of the likelihood of that very calamity by international ecconomists Menzie Chinn and Kash Mansori.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)

Saying it better than I could

I've been trying to put my finger on what I find so upsetting about the people who claim that the Sunnis and the Shiites have been fighting for over a thousand years and who are we to think a little purple finger ink is going to stop it.

Juan over at Informed Comment nailed it:

I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 years. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don't see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we're seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.

While I agree we've unleashed it, I doubt we created it. My point is simply we should not pretend that Sunni-Shiite animosity made this historically inevitable.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2006

Math and Music

A cool example of Bayes Law in calculating the odds of going to a concert given that you plan an instrument. I always enjoy simple, but sophisticated mathematical thinking whipped out to solve a real world problem.

I also had another interpretation of the data. Given that instrument players are 3 times as likely to attend concerts as non-players, that statistic alone might be enough to justify spending the marketing money to appeal to music students rather than the general public they might still have a higher marginal willingness to spend money and time on concerts even though they are such a smaller audience.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:57 AM | Comments (0)

A new blog

A new blog exploring rurmors in the economics academic job market.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2006

Peter Singer's new article

I thought I'd discussed Princeton professor Peter Singer before, but it seems not. This guy has strong, sincere moral beliefs that I find monstrous and alien. He is however, interesting and articulate. He has an article in the NY Times magazine that is worth a look. It is a proposal to solve nearly all the world's serious poverty by increasing the gift giving of the rich in the US to a level that he deems acceptable.
As with all his always controversial pieces, there is lots to disagree with.

His argument about the morality of taxation blows my mind a bit. He argues through the agent of Herbert Simon quatations, that tax rates on income as high as 90% could are justified (morally if impractically) by the fact that natural resources, the technology, organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government make your income possible regardless of your skill level. To this I offer up those oh-so-quotable words by Adam Smith, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest." If someone acts to benefit you for their selfish reasons that does not and cannot create a moral obligation on your part. He feels that he can decide what level of entitlement other people have to the wealth of others and then backs into a rate of taxation to fund such an exercise.

One curious bit is about his discussion is in assigning the burden across countries.
Obviously, the rich in other nations should share the burden of relieving global poverty. The U.S. is responsible for 36 percent of the gross domestic product of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. Arguably, because the U.S. is richer than all other major nations, and its wealth is more unevenly distributed than wealth in almost any other industrialized country, the rich in the U.S. should contribute more than 36 percent of total global donations. So somewhat more than 36 percent of all aid to relieve global poverty should come from the U.S. For simplicity, let’s take half as a fair share for the U.S. Aggregate social wealth shouldn't matter to this calculation. Only the number of people in your country above a certain wealth threshold. It may well be that a disproportionate number of these people live in the US, but many live outside of the OECD because many of the world's poorest countries are also home to a small number of very rich people. It may be that 80 of the world billionaires live in the US, but that's only 16.5% of the 486 on the list. If that's at all representative of the geography of extreme wealth, then a 50% share of the burden for the US is way to high.

I recommend the article. He is always interesting and though he may boil my blood I always have to get my thoughts in order to explain why, and I appreciate that.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:18 PM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2006

Not as bad as it seems

Ilya Somin over at The Volokh Conspiracy argues that the Texas 10% education plan is a failure. It creates the following policy:

The ten percent plan gives any high school student who is in the top 10% in his high school class automatic admission to any Texas state university, regardless of standardized test scores, the content of the classes he took, the strength of his high school, extracurricular activities, and other considerations.

By and large the argument is convincing, However, one complaint is not. Ilya complains that "Second, and probably much worse, the article notes that the formula creates perverse incentives for students to try to game the system by transferring to weaker schools or taking easier classes." Having students take easier classes is surely a problem, but having the high quality students transfer to lower quality schools is not an automatic bad. Having those high energy PTA-parents distributed more evenly in state high schools would be a good thing, making sure that passion, energy, and money made a larger marginal contribution. Don't take my word for it:
The supposition that the pace and content of whole classroom instruction must be watered down for the benefit of slow learners in the mixed-ability classroom has been disproved by the "untracking" of schools and entire school districts. In many of these untracked schools, scores on standardized achievement tests for the high achievers were quite stable or increased during the untracking process, and the test scores of the slower-learners rose dramatically.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:12 AM | Comments (0)

A better deal for the global poor than reducing CO2 emissions

In the market for an inexpensive, guaranteed effective method of helping the global poor? The NY Times says add iodine to salt.

[P]utting iodine in salt, public health experts say, may be the simplest and most cost-effective health measure in the world. Each ton of salt needs about two ounces of potassium iodate, which costs about $1.15.

Worldwide, about two billion people — a third of the globe — get too little iodine, including hundreds of millions in India and China. Studies show that iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development.

It seems that the whole world that is iodine deficient could have that need met for maybe a hundred million a year. As with most of these things, the iodine is the cheap part and upgrading salt processor equipment the slightly more expensive part.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:36 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2006

Good Sequels

Normally, sequels are just dreadful, but Evan Almighty, the sequel to Bruce Almighty actually looks pretty funny. The trailer to Evan Almighty made me laugh.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:14 AM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2006

Good service

I was just in the bathroom reading my brothers copy of Sports Illustrated. I noticed in the letters section a little box that said, "If you'd prefer to not receive a copy of the swimsuit issue, just let us know by calling us at ###-###-#### and we'll extend your subscription. I thought that was a nice touch. Not everyone wants pictures of nude and semi-nude women mailed to their door, and this is a great way to embrace the diversity of their readership.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:38 PM | Comments (0)

Just take a little off the top

A U.S. National Institutes of Health study in Kisumu, Kenya, involving 2,784 men aged 18 to 24 showed a 53 percent reduction of HIV infections in circumcised men compared to uncircumcised men. A parallel study involving 4,996 men aged 15 to 49 in Rakai, Uganda, showed circumcised men were 48 percent less likely than uncircumcised men to become infected.

Also see the related posting: Three Things You Don't Know About Aids In Africa

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:35 AM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2006

That's peculiar

Did you know that the wash sale rules apply to losses, not gains? That is, that when you sell an asset that has a capital loss on it and then buy it right back you don't get a tax deductable loss, but if you sell one with gains and buy it back you can take it as income. That's odd, I guess they think that that maximizes tax revenues, although the article points out that at least in one case it reduces it.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:54 PM | Comments (0)

That's not a knife, this is a knife

The largest, silliest Swiss Army Knife ever made.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:08 PM | Comments (2)

December 12, 2006

Machinima worth watching

BloodSpell is a feature-length Machinima film. It is a fantastic story of blood magic in a world where religion reigns and some wield mighty powers by virtue only of the birthright power that runs in their veins. You may recall that I discussed Machinima earlier this year. It was great. Sure it doesn't always seem to have the highest production values, but was moving, the characters had depth, and the story was exciting. I recommend you watch the whole thing, it takes about an hour.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:15 AM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2006

Bio of Edmund Phelps

Edmund Phelps was the 2006 winner of the Nobel prize in Economics. Check out Project Syndicate for a decent, if a bit hagiographic biography of Phelp's contributions to economics.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:50 AM | Comments (0)

December 9, 2006

Well, I don't know about that...

"What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat?" That's part of Steve Landsburg's defense of Scrooge in Slate. You likely recall that Scrooge, the protagonist of A Christmas Carol is a huge miser.

Ilya Somin over at The Volokh Conspiracy points out a few obvious ethical criticisms. Note also, that while avoiding consumption does hold down the costs for everyone, Scrooge certainly doesn't do so in an equitable manner. He directly subsidizes people in direct proportion to the amount of wealth they have, because Scrooge's removal of his income from society acts as an open market operation on the money supply. Even if he doesn't hoard the money as cash and instead invests it, he reduces prices of the things he'd consume if he weren't a miser. Since as an old man he'd be limited in how much food and clothing he could really use, he'd likely use it in the manner that rich old men are want to do, art, collecting, fine dining, the arts. Since he's competing with other rich men for these things, his thriftiness would have a larger impact on the prices in those markets. Given that some of these things have a totally inelastic supply, all the more so.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:59 AM | Comments (0)

December 7, 2006

Someone loves freedom...

A cool new add campaign at Consumer Freedom in response to the trans fat ban in NYC.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:34 PM | Comments (0)

Cool toys they aren't making yet

The Elekson Gadget Bag is a tablet PC bag that has a fabric keyboard on the side that works. I've wanted a tablet PC for a while, but worried that without a keyboard I couldn't do all the work I wanted and with one it would weigh too much. Now all that remains is tablet PC's enormous price tags, like the X41 of which I've long dreamed.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)

December 6, 2006

Game theory and toilet seats

The social norm of leaving the toilet seat down in inefficient in
the sense that it does not minimize the total cost of toilet seat operations per
household...
For "mankind", the analysis in this paper has the following appeal: Once again,
it has been found that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down is
inefficient; hence, "mankind" may feel vindicated.
For "womankind", the analysis in this paper is appealing for the following
reason: It has been shown that the social norm of leaving the seat down is a
trembling-hand perfect equilibrium. Hence, this norm is not likely to go away, at
least in the near future.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:04 PM | Comments (0)

December 5, 2006

What MTV is going to look like circa 2010

From a recent episode of Dutch show "Kinderen voor Kinderen", "I have two fathers", a teen's earnest musical take on having two gay parents If same-sex marriage hits the mainstream here, it is going to look a lot like this.

Thanks to Crooked Timber for the tip.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:57 PM | Comments (0)

Another reason to hate NY Governor Eliot Spitzer

Besides his self-serving changes in his position on campaign finance, he also has no sense of humor. He is still complaining about and mis-remembering a stinging defeat for President of the Princeton Student government by a bunch of dadaists.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

December 3, 2006

Klidre has a blog

I'd like to announce the arrival of a new blog, Stars and Pinstripes, a obsessed look at physics and baseball.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:43 PM | Comments (0)

December 2, 2006

Living under socialism

In The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism by C. Bradley Thompson
has an interesting piece on whether the conservative movement can ever be trusted to shrink government. He makes interesting points and it is a good read.

He makes the following point with which I must take umbrage:

Increased spending inevitably means increased taxes. Thus, despite President Bush’s much vaunted tax cuts, Americans actually pay more in taxes today than they did during Bill Clinton’s last year in office. The 2006 annual report from Americans for Tax Reform, titled “Cost of Government Day,” sums up rather nicely the intrusive role played by Republican government in the lives of ordinary Americans. The report says that Americans had to work 86.5 days just to pay their federal taxes, as compared to 78.5 days in 2000 under Bill Clinton. In other words, the average American has worked 10.2 percent more for the federal government under George Bush than under Bill Clinton. When state and local taxes (controlled in the majority of places by Republicans) are added to federal taxes, Americans worked for the government eight hours a day, five days a week, from January 1 until July 12, meaning they worked full-time for the government for more than half the year. As Tom Feeney, a congressional Republican put it: “I remember growing up and reading in some school textbooks that if more than half your paycheck went to the government, then you were living in a socialist society.”7 Just so, Mr. Feeney.

The US Per Capita Income is about $43,555 (2006), in 2000 it was $33,970. We know much of that accumulated to the richest portion, so it would make sense that the average number of days to pay your taxes would go up as the rich get richer. Even if you index tax rates to inflation, if you have a progressive tax system and the rich get richer, the average rate of taxation on a dollar of national income is going to go up.

This makes sense even considering Bush's tax cuts. We know it is unpopular to give the rich bigger tax cuts than the poor. But when you don't pay much taxes, it is hard to give you any significant tax relief.

So you end up with a situation where many people pay no federal taxes, Forty-four million tax returns filed in 2005 will rightly demand the return of every dollar or more that is being withheld from their paychecks during 2004. While a rising number of rich people pay a higher average rate but have much larger net take home pay.

So while Congress and Bush are certainly to blame for rising spending, it not appropriate to treat them as though they raised taxes.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:19 PM | Comments (0)

December 1, 2006

That's not a flashlight, this is a flashlight

A flashlight 50 times brighter than a Maglight, and capable of starting fires. Oh yeah, rechargeable too.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:56 PM | Comments (0)

Rationalists in relationships

The onion has a hyper rational look at the nature of the love of for your wife.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:52 PM | Comments (0)