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December 31, 2008

How is a black monolith like a rock that tells time?

The following quote from God: Philosophers weigh in caught my eye:

An example that briefly appears in Darwin’s Black Box nicely illustrates the point. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, a magnetic anomaly in one of the moon’s craters leads to the discovery of a perfectly regular slab buried under lunar soil. The characters have no idea how the slab was constructed, or what it is for, and have never known an artist capable of making one; nevertheless they reasonably conclude that it was designed. But that is precisely because the characters are not in Paley’s position. They know enough about lunar geology, astronomy, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life to discredit the rival hypothesis that the monolith is a natural object (a big crystal, say) that formed on the moon or collided with it. Paley, on the other hand, had no reason, other than the failure of his imagination, to dismiss the hypothesis of "causes without design."

This argument doesn't cut it. Astronauts could just as easily had a failure of imagination. The universe is a big place and it is easily possible that things that humans have observed only as man-made (or designed) phenomena occur naturally elsewhere in the cosmos. Bumping into something that wasn't place by humans and nevertheless looks identical to something designed by man is not are argument that it was designed by man.All you really know when you see something like that is that it is unlikely given what we know. But wait, that's the exact same argument of "I can't imagine how that could happen naturally so it must be designed" that Paley makes over the watch on the doorstep.

In both cases you are assuming that what you know is close to the truth that governs the construction and operation of the universe. I suspect that's a dressed up appeal to ignorance; since you don't have any evidence that something was natural, it must not be natural. But as they say, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, and therefore absence of evidence of a natural cause isn't evidence of absence of natural cause. You might not have looked hard enough.

The work is excellent but long. Best work of philosophy I've read in some time. The payoff is actually understanding the ontological argument, among others.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:27 PM | Comments (0)

We just finished Jericho

Jericho is a great show about the aftermath of nuclear terrorism in the US. Of course it is not with out its flaws, especially the way the certain evil characters seem evil all the way down, even to the point of rottenness over trivial issues. That said, in many ways it provided a plausible portrayal of how a close knit American town of 5,000 people would deal with the near collapse of civilization. Over the 1,300 or so minutes of the show, they paint of world of Americans trying to put things back together.

The second season caught a lot of flack from family and friends who watched it when it aired, but for a show canceled in the middle of the second season, it pulled together a lot of the major plot points and ended interestingly.

I'd recommend it, and if you have a Netflix account, you can download it there.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:24 AM | Comments (1)

An atheist advocates Christianity for Africa

Matthew Parris has a piece in The Times Online, As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God that I enjoyed a lot.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good. ... The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall. ... There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for "them"; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the "big man" and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
...
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

In areas where Christianity is rare, Parris's observations are perhaps attributable to the selection effect. It may be that the most talented and tribally stifled individuals convert to Christianity. More generally, areas with weaker tribes and greater benefits from individuality may provide a more fertile field for Christianity. That said, I've commented before about how nice and generous I've found religious people, and I think this is an effect of treatment rather than selection.

Respecting the possibility that devotion and worship makes us into better people because it makes are actions harmonious with a divine plan, I've been reading some evolutionary biology books, and so I've been viewing this phenomena through that lens. We know that religious makes us live longer, both by preventing intra-group violence and by providing a healthy social network of observation and support. People who live longer usually have higher discount rates or at least plan for father into the future. That leaves greater opportunities for reciprocity. I may babysit my neighbors children even though I have none of my own, knowing that one day you will bring me soup in my old age, or give alms to pay for my niece's wedding. If we live in a brutal and short horizon environment, better to tell you to care for your own kids, I'd better spend the extra time tilling my own garden or perhaps robbing others.

But tribal religions provide a lot of this same framework, so why should Christianity provide a superior structure. I certainly don't know, but I suspect that this depends on three factors, monogamy, an ever-watching judge of the universe, and a lack of sacrificial worship.

In a few past postings I've linked to articles discussing the purported sociological consequences of polygamous marriage (Big Love?, The Applied Economics Blog, A cool list of human similarities, No, it doesn't make everyone better off, A dark and fascinating* gedankexperiment). The major reoccurring theme is men with lower chances of reproductive success are statistically more likely to be violent, drug abusers, rapists, and consumers of prostitution services. Marriage, on the other hand, encourages men to take less risk and be well behaved (modestly) productive members of society. They also have an interest in the stability and prosperity of the future through teaching their sons and to protect their daughters and provide them dowries. By encouraging monogamous marriage, You decrease the number of men that have no prospect of getting married and increase the number of men who are married. This comes at the cost of decreasing the prosperity of the average woman, but since it seems that the ability of men to wreck havoc outweighs the benefits of the additional female prosperity in total social wealth, this is a trade-off many societies will make. And yes, it is happening in these countries:

In the countries of the Sahel region of Africa, the percentage of women living in polygynous households ranges from 45% to 55%. In West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa, these percentages are mostly in the range from 25% to 35%. In Southern Africa, polygyny is less common, with just under 10% of women living in polygynous households.

On the Economics of Polygyny

The belief in a divine power that is always watching is another mechanism for manufacturing cooperation. We can't watch out fellow villagers all the time, so shirking and cheating may occur when they can't be monitored. Yet if you and I could both figure out a way to make sure that the other didn't cheat, we could form new cooperative ventures. The white bearded man in the sky watching everything and punishing us in the afterlife is just such a supervisory mechanism.

Finally, many religions believe in repentance through sacrifice, not through contrition, apology, and good works. The former puts the rich and powerful beyond religious moral sanction, while the later do not (at least in theory). Because Christianity requires contrition, apology, and good works, it puts everyone's soul on the line, acting as an expensive punishment regardless of personal wealth and power. This not only improves personal behavior, but it also allows the weak to trust the strong. The weak need not worry as much about the strong taking by force. The weak know that the strong know that their wickedness will be punished and this reduces the likelihood that they will be wicked in the first place.

And so by creating more trust and greater opportunity, Christianity provides greater prosperity than traditional African religions through the mechanisms of monogamy, surveillance, inescapable punishment for wickedness.

P.S.
Perhaps the differentiating circumstances are everything but I found it odd that this article would appeal to many Americans that would have balked when Bush suggested we take advantage of the same phenomena here in his faith based initiatives.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:28 AM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2008

I imagine you won't like where this goes

NPR reports (Gender Barrier Persists At Vancouver Olympics) that a group of female ski jumpers is suing to to force the Vancouver Olympics to allow women to compete in the male-only event.

In this particular instance, it seems that one of the parties to the suit, Lindsey Van would have an excellent chance at winning the coed-Olympic event because she holds the coed-record on the course in question. But if they win, this is going to be a net loss overall for female athletes. As I've discussed before, the top female professional athletes in the world are on par with the best American 14- and 15-year-old boys. If we force every sport currently open to only women to be open to men, then men will win the vast majority of slots to compete in the Olympics in these sports. For every Ms. Van taking home a metal we'll miss hundreds of women who didn't get a chance to compete at all.

Let's acknowledge that we separate the genders in sports because sports competition is about achievement and entertainment, not fairness. We like to see women play certain sports, just as we like to see men play others. There is no shame in that. Second, we like to see people achieve their very best, and separating genders, just as we separate children by age is way to do that.

This nonsense about single gender sports as a violation of human rights is a perversion. It seeks to use the awesome and mighty tyranny of the state to archive a piddling end that few people desire and in any case is contrary to the interests of woman as a group.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:28 PM | Comments (0)

Welcome a new arrival into the Belligerati family

My sister got a dog. Welcome Billingham, I'll see you in the spring.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:43 PM | Comments (1)

Counter-intuitive article of the day

eBay and Ivory discusses why eBay's play to ban the sale of items containing ivory is bad for us, bad for the rlephants, and bad for Africans. A tragic tale. It renews my gratitude for the wonderful antique ivory dominoes that Shepherd bought theblueyedgirl and me for a wedding present.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:22 PM | Comments (0)

How appalling

I was reading U-G-L-Y Your Bike, makes guide to making you bike so ugly that no one wants to steal it and it included a link to the Neistat brothers bike theft video below. It is astonishing how easy it is for people to steal a bike in broad daylight with any sort of tool.

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This makes me strongly discount the safety value of parking my bike on a busy street.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

Public policy and discount rates

I read Cowen's recent Op-Ed Bailout of Long-Term Capital: A Bad Precedent? and it caused me to muse upon Keynes' quip that in the long run we are all dead. His quip has been used to argue that moral hazard is less important than somehow getting a handle on panic in the current financial calamity. Cowen says:

As we look ahead, we may be tempted again to put off the hard choices. But perhaps the next "long run," too, is no more than 10 years away. If we take the Keynesian maxim too seriously, and focus only on the short run, our prospects will be grim indeed.

Arguing for a public policy on the basis that in the long run we are all dead is an argument for a high discount rate and a high elasticity of inter-temporal substitution. That is, since we'll all be dead, lets make sure that we fix things for today, regardless of what that does to things some time down the road. What I find interesting about this is that that is exactly the opposite take of left of center policy folks when dealing with environmental policy issues. In order to justify extensive government response to global warming, the Stern Report had to use discount rates near zero, that is to assume that the future is just as important as today and in the long run we'll either still be there or others will and we value their happiness as much as out own.

The more you care about the future the more you should care about the moral hazard created by government entry into the financial industry. The more you care about the future the more you should worry about the potential consequences of climate change.

Of course it could be that the costs of climate change are so high and those of moral hazard so low that the same discount factor would justify both policy interventions. It just seems that given the difference in language we hear in the two policy discussions, it seems different rates are being used to assess the two policies and the outcomes could well be different if a harmonious rate were used in both analyses.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:13 AM | Comments (0)

Things I enjoyed without having much to say about

Is There Really a Credit Crunch? I've been wondering about this too

European Neanderthals had ginger hair and freckles This seems more support of interbreeding between Neanderthals and Humans.

Suspiciously high correlations in brain imaging studies I've been skeptical about the arguments of brain specialization made from MRI analysis because they reek of correlation as causation and the samples are near universally small, say 30 people or fewer. Now I can add statistically shenanigans to the reasons to worry about them.

I want to be a cockroach This is an interesting argument against over specialization. However, I think he's wrong about the lack of differentiation in cockroaches (Mantodea, Isoptera, and Blattaria). Some can fly and others can't. They range in size from tiny to 9 cm. Some hiss or chirp and others are silent.

Physics Murder Mystery Only 3 people can share a Nobel, but what if 4 people deserved it equally? Set the your particle accelerators to murder.

"Students in Montgomery County, Maryland use fake license plates to send speed camera tickets to enemies" These traffic cameras are part of a horrible anti-freedom system of laws where we are guilty until proven innocent. Especially when we know that municipalities have been shortening yellow lights to use them to raise more money. I hope that these jerks in Maryland accidentally strike a blow for the rest of us by discrediting these systems.

Brilliant: Credit Suisse To Pay Top Execs With Illiquid Mortgage Securities Details still seem sketchy, but this was clearly a brilliant PR move. As a business matter, I doubt it makes much difference. Most executives had to be expecting close to zero this year, and whatever they got from this was probably gravy. If there is a liquidity crisis and a market panic, this is a great deal for executives if the bonuses based on the current prices of these assets and not their face value. If the economy recovers quickly they could be quiet valuable. If that happens, in hindsight these will be huge bonuses in a terrible year. That would be bad PR, especially if Credit Suisse stock continues to suffer.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:48 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2008

Thanks sis for introducing me to Battlestar Galactica

My sister and brother in law brought the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica with them on our vacation to Florida. It was great. You can really see how the war on terror informs the way the show was written. Everyone faces hard and terrible decisions of who to save, and what rights to keep. I really enjoyed the show and am planning to watch the rest in the manner of most of my television drama obsessions, in rapid succession.

One thing I don't like about the show is that Tricia Helfer is supposed to be this super hot vixen, but she is TV pretty. Takes a bit away from the male responses.

P.S.
If my sister and brother in law felt like logging in and leaving a comment, they could choose a nickname with which I could refer to them. Pick something catchy and don't use your real name.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:43 AM | Comments (1)

December 28, 2008

When are the private costs high enough to prevent externalities?

Eric Posner and Megan Mcardle are having an interesting conversation about when the private costs of bank failure are high enough to not require regulation even if you are going to provide deposit insurance. 7

Almost everything in the world has negative and/or positive externalities. But despite this, we do not intervene to subsidize everything with good negative externalities, or punish everything with bad. That's because things with substantial negative externalities often contain sufficient punishment to deter the individual; likewise, things with positive externalities often carry enough reward to produce a socially optimal amount. For example, if I am a bus driver, the negative externality of my suddenly jerking the steering wheel to the left and driving the bus off a cliff is much higher than the cost to me--many lives against my one. But my own life is very valuable to me. The threat of its loss is enough to deter such behavior 99.9999% of the time.

It's hazard, but is it moral? by Mcardle

In a world with bank insurance but without regulation [corrected, thx to traveler456], I would start up a Posner bank, ask you for a deposit, and then use your money to buy lottery tickets. If I win the lottery, I pay you back; if I don’t, I dissolve the bank and you go to the government for your funds. I wouldn’t bother to hide my investment strategy from you; you wouldn’t care because you would be paid in any event. I would set up hundreds of banks and give the managers a salary that they would receive if and only if they collect deposits and use them to buy lottery tickets; otherwise, they are fired. (Corporate law junkies will point out that the government will pierce the corporate veil and go after my lottery winnings, but in the real world, with thousands of shareholders and not-lottery but still risky investment schemes that unfold over decades during which dividends are paid and the money spent, that’s not so easy.)

Have a lousy Christmas, with a note on banking regulation. by Posner

I think Posner's point only stands if the deposit insurer is charged the same rate for insurance regardless of what they invest in. If Banks holding riskier portfolios (like this lottery ticket scheme) with poor expected returns are charged higher fees, you don't need regulation. Companies will have the incentive to behave without regulation. Only in the one-price-fits all deposit insurance market do we need to force all banks to have the same risk taking behavior.

But Posner has an interesting point about the capacity of regular folks to evaluate bank reliability. Megan comments "The moral hazard for depositors may be large. But I doubt it. Most depositors are not capable of determining whether a bank is faulty or sound, and they weren't in 1830, either." Eric responds "This can’t be true. In the nineteenth century, elaborate efforts were made to keep track of bank risk. Merchants discounted bank notes after consulting books that compiled risk estimates. The notes of larger and more stable banks were discounted less. Since people often made payments with bank notes, they must have had a sense of how risky different banks were, and taken the risk into account when making deposits, to say nothing of common memory about which banks have stayed in business and for how long. Today, people don’t pay attention to bank risk because of deposit insurance; but people certainly think about risk when they make uninsured investments, for example, when they buy stocks or corporate bonds or, for that matter, stereos and personal computers."

In our current regulatory environment we try to protect people from risks that they don't have a good handle on. But we forget that if we stopped nannying them on many of those risks, sources of information and improvements in decision making to assist in this process could be profitably created. Libertarians are often mocked for saying that Consumer Reports like services would pop-up everywhere in their utopia, but there is real truth there.

Oh, and the conversation started with Does the financial crisis discredit libertarianism?.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:48 AM | Comments (0)

Sorry for the light posting

I was in Florida with my family. I'm horribly jet lagged from sleeping on the long plane ride home, so I thought I'd catch up on some posting.

I did several new activities this week. I went to a pet store that let you play with the puppies. I decided that I have a hankering for dog ownership. I guess puppies are geneticly programmed to accomplish that task, but I don't mind. Part of my genetic heritage is that having a dog around was a good survival technique. When the BlueEyedGirl and my landlord eventually relent, I want a hybrid like a Goldendoodle or a Labradoodle.

I got to ride in a airboat in the Everglades. Those are the flat bottom boats that have the big fan behind them that they use for tours and rescues in swamps. It was stunning, filled with birds, turtles, gators, and more. The speed was thrilling, and I took way too many photographs.

Speaking of speed, we also rented jet-skis. This was our first time doing so outside of an empty expanse of ocean water, instead we got to use a sound with islands, a bridge, and other boats. The machines were much more powerful. The BlueEyedGirl and I shared a jetski. I had a good time piloting when it was my turn, and the BlueEyedGirl continued her reign of terror when it was her's. My solace for her turn was that at the speeds that she operated it, she had to grip the machine so hard that the next day pretty sore in every major muscle group. Unfortunately for me, she complained about it for the remaining day of the trip and the way home.

I also saw Yes Man, the new Jim Cary movie. I liked it, and I'd recommend it as a rental.

I went hiking in a nature reserve with my father, which was almost like a jungle. It was filled with interesting flora and fauna, contained a mile long wooden foot bridge with an amazing view, and ended in stairs over great sand dunes stretching to the horizon in both directions.

As is often the case on family vacations, service and to a lesser extent food quality play second fiddle to food genre and the ability to sit a large group. We had great meals at Morton's, Spoto's Oyster Bar, and an Italian place I can't find again. We had weaker ones at RA (rude and incompetent service and agonizingly slow) and Saito Japanese Steakhouse (they rushed our group through drinks, appetizers, sushi and a main course in 45 minutes). For lunch we mostly made sandwiches, but we also had decent pizza, poolside dining and among the grossest buffet Chinese I've ever had.

The worst part of the trip was definitely that Interpott couldn't be there. He wanted to be, but inclement weather in the north-west rewarded his travel efforts with 4 days of snow, boredom, and emotional trials. We missed you and toasted to you often.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:04 AM | Comments (1)

December 19, 2008

Reconsidering It's a wonderful life

A love when a review allows you to see a work anew. A simple argument of a few thousand words and a piece you thought you knew well reveals new facets. Wendel Jamieson provides just such a new interpretation in his review of It's a wonderful life: Wonderful? Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life.

If you've seen the movie, or avoided it as typical Christmas schlock, take a look at his review and see the film with new eyes.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:59 PM | Comments (0)

Harsh but funney joke of the day

This reminds me of a joke Tina Fey told at the Television Critics Association awards ceremony. She thanked us “for making ‘30 Rock’ the most successful cable show on broadcast television,” and added: “Oh, it’s a great time to be on broadcast television, isn’t it? It’s exciting! It’s like being in vaudeville in the ’60s!"

Extinction-Level Television Event

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:52 PM | Comments (0)

Bush decides to bailout the auto industry

The NY Times reports that Bush Approves $17.4 Billion Auto Bailout. It will go only to Chrysler and GM (in worse shape than Ford) for now.
Important details:

The loan deal also requires the companies to quickly reduce their debt by two-thirds, mostly through debt-for-equity swaps, and to reach an agreement with the United Auto Workers union to cut wages and benefits so they are competitive with those of employees of foreign-based automakers working in the United States.

To gain access to the emergency loans, G.M. and Chrysler must agree to a range of concessions, including limits on executive pay and the elimination of their private corporate jets.

The plan announced on Friday by Mr. Bush offered a compromise between those positions, by making the requirements non-binding, allowing the automakers to reach different arrangements with the union, provided that they explain how those alternative plans will keep them on a path toward financial viability.
...
If, by March 30, the two companies cannot meet that standard -- and clearly they could not meet it today -- the $13.5 billion in Treasury loans would be "called" for immediate repayment, with the government placed in priority, ahead of all other creditors.

I was so happy with Republican opposition to the bailout that I was considering making a donation to the Republican party in appreciation. Now I won't be doing that. If there is a silver lining, it must be that to get the funds to do this deal, he needs to go back to the congress to get the next few hundred billion from the TARP. That means that congressmen opposed to the bailout can try to prevent the next release of funds or adding riders prohibiting their use for automotive firms. I don't expect that to happen, but I can hope. Alas, "[b]y law, once Mr. Paulson makes a formal request, Congress has 15 days to reject it and deny the additional money.", so it looks like the burden is on congress to get the majority to pass the bill, and there isn't that kind of opposition around.

I expect the government to rubber stamp whatever plans the car companies have put together. While it seemed possible for a time that the government would allow the auto firms to fail by inaction, there is no way that that they will take an overt action (like failing to certify they are on a path toward financial viability) that would bankrupt them immediately. It is impossible to believe that these conditions will have any bite. Whatever the car companies do will be certified as on the right path. It won't be until years and many billions of dollars from now that we finally allow them to fail.

As I mentioned before, there may be constitution problems with government funded loans that are superior to other claims on firm assets because of the rule that Congress shall make no law impairing the obligations of contract. If this clause means anything (and of course, IANAL) then firms can issue the government new debt that is superior to all other debt only to the extent that the firms do not already have covenants on existing debt requiring that the firms not issue more senior debt, They can sell off a firm's assets to repay such a debt to the extent that they are not already pledged against other assets. To lend them a huge pile and then once they inevitably fail, if we end up at the end of the creditor line instead of the front it will be good for a dark laugh.

Felix Salmon is worried that this isn't structured to give the firms enough leverage over their creditors.

[T]his is going to make things very hard on the automakers' managers, who need to impose a swingeing 67% haircut on their bondholders without having the help of a bankruptcy judge to enforce such a thing. I'll be very interested to see how they try to do that; expect a huge fight, and no guarantee of success. Yes, the bondholders are well aware that if they say no, the only other option is liquidation, and zero payout. But that doesn't mean they'll be remotely complaisant.

Paulson Grasps the Automaker Nettle
We know that this requires accepting the government as a most senior creditor. Other debtors may not be interested in that deal, especially if they don't think they can get the right concessions out of management and labor. Some creditors, especially senior ones, could rather take their chances on liquidation.

According to one source, global excess car production capacity is about 20 million units. That probably can't be true because global production is just 72 million units. But if GM and Chrysler failed, and only the brands Sorkin thinks should make it make it, then we'd see a massive global production reduction (though not the full 20 million). Which would be excellent for all the remaining car companies, and probably good for whatever smaller firms emerge from the wreckage of GM and Chrysler.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:09 AM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2008

Greatest theft in history?

Perhaps you've been following the appalling story of Bernard Madoff, the money manager who seems to have stolen almost $50 billion of his investors' money. This may very well go down as the greatest theft in history, but Sean McMeekin suggests another theft holds the title of the world's largest. He says that that the massive thefts by the Bolsheviks from about 1917 to 1922 were even larger, at least $45 billion, maybe more.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

Greatest theft in history?

Perhaps you've been following the appalling story of Bernard Madoff, the money manager who seems to have stolen almost $50 billion of his investors' money. This may very well go down as the greatest theft in history, but Sean McMeekin suggests another theft holds the title of the world's largest. He says that that the massive thefts by the Bolsheviks from about 1917 to 1922 were at least $45 billion, maybe more. The total isn't clear from the article, but it it is interesting to know that what thefts give the Madoff scandal a run for the title of greatest rippoff in history.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

Few postings

Sorry for the week of low postings. I've been having internet and web hosting problems. More tomorrow.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2008

Doppelganger couple living on a dollar a day of food

There is a couple nearby that is trying to live on a dollar of food per day. We were in synagogue yesterday and a man approached us, asking us if we were they. I went to their website ([url=http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/]One Dollar Diet Project[/url]) and looked for the photograph of them that looked the most like us. See any resemblance? I saw a little.

v

Assuming they can succeed in this project, this strikes me as a serious problem with their goal. If people can really get by on a $1 a person a day, then food stamps and pantries are actually quite generous. It is only through serious weight loss and malnutrition that they can really attract the right sort of attention to the plight of the poor.

It also is a hairy middle finger to the idea of purchasing power parity (PPP). Under PPP, living in an area were non-tradable goods are inexpensive (like China) makes you richer than your income appears if you simply converted it to dollars at current exchange rates. For example, in nominal rates China was listed as having a per-capita income of $2,483 in 2007. Yet using the PPP methodology, China had a much higher $5,325 personal income. If in America, one of the more expensive countries in the world, two teachers can eat for a dollar a day, then maybe the price of non-tradable goods matters less than it seems. Maybe more of the difference in consumption between the poor and rich world is a product of unobserved taste and quality issue, not just a difference in the price of non-tradable good. It is hard to take issue with the general idea of PPP, but if this project succeeds, I'll assume that PPP exaggerates the difference it tries to elucidate.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2008

Denis Leary was right

We tested 32 people (from Britain, China, Germany, Japan and the United States), some of whom were social smokers and some of whom were two-pack-a-day addicts. Most of these subjects reported thatcigarette warning labels reduced their craving for a cigarette, but their brains told us a different story.

Each subject lay in the scanner for about an hour while we projected on a small screen a series of cigarette package labels from various countries — including statements like “smoking kills” and “smoking causes fatal lung cancers.” We found that the warnings prompted no blood flow to the amygdala, the part of the brain that registers alarm, or to the part of the cortex that would be involved in any effort to register disapproval.

To the contrary, the warning labels backfired: they stimulated the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the “craving spot,” which lights up on f.M.R.I. whenever a person craves something, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, tobacco or gambling.

Further investigation is needed, but our study has already revealed an unintended consequence of antismoking health warnings. They appear to work mainly as a marketing tool to keep smokers smoking.

Barack Obama has said he’s been using nicotine gum to fight his own cigarette habit. His new administration can help other smokers quit, too, by eliminating the government scare tactics that only increase people’s craving.

Sure understanding the external validity of this requires noting that correlation isn't causation, the sample is tiny, and we don't much about how the mind works, Nevertheless, it is nice to see someone in the field of public health arguing against scare tactics.

Bonus:
The incomparable Denis Leary on smoking in his NO CURE FOR CANCER stand up routine.. Not sure which of the 9 parts has the warning label section, but watch the whole thing and laugh.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:47 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2008

A rap retelling of the story of robocop

This was fantastic.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2008

What's the problem with the loan modification plans?

The biggest obstacle to loan modifications by far is securitization--the fact that an estimated 80% of the troubled loans have been sliced and diced and sold to many investors. This gets in the way of servicers who might otherwise be given incentives to modify loans in ways that are in the best interests of society. Existing commercial law allows loan servicers to make only changes that are in the holder's best interest--"not materially adverse to the Owner." The law also says that if a mortgage is in default or in the servicers' opinion close to it, then servicers have no authority to make changes in interest rates, or principal amount, or time of payments.

Could Congress pass a law that allowed servicers to modify loans by invoking a standard such as "a good faith effort to advance the collective interests of holders"? Possibly it could, but it may run into the problem that the constitution provides that "Congress shall make no law impairing the obligations of contract."

Intelligent Design Thomas F. Cooley

If we want to meddle in the mortgage market,I have a different proposal. Offer to insure mortgages at say 80% of their face value, but only if whole mortgages are delivered. None of this hard to value stuff. Simply whole mortgages. With the insurance offer, market participants will get rewarded for working their way through the horrible bureaucratic and legal hurdles to unwind these complicated tranche structures into easier to value and presumably more liquid mortgage pools. By making all the holders of the pool have the same sort of claim it will be easier for fiduciaries (the people who administer the loans) to represent the interests of owners. They may well mean coming up with clever ways of rewriting mortgages to increase the total net present value of payments they generate.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

More web comics

I've really been enjoying the web comics over at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC). Just wanted to share the deranged laughter. Reminds me a bit of the dark and surreal humor of The parking Lot is Full or Space Moose. The themes are not safe for work, but the images and language usually are.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:32 AM | Comments (0)

Why is making pornographic movies legal when prostitution is not?

Eugene Volokh has a discussion of a recent case in New Hampshire where the government unsuccessfully tried to put a pornographer in jail for soliciting sex for money. I cannot say that I understand how this legal distinction works, but I always assumed pornographers paid for the rights to distribute and market the pornographic performance, not for the sex act itself. Similarly, if I needed an kidney I couldn't pay anyone for theirs. However, I could accept a donation, make a movie about it, and pay them for their participation.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:30 AM | Comments (0)

December 9, 2008

Why can't Stata remember my directories?

I had a lot of trouble getting the statistical package Stata to remember the home directories I set (changing the path) using the sysdir command. For example:

sysdir set PLUS "C:\Program Files\Stata10\ado\plus"

Cornell came to the rescue. Essentially, the solution is to put the commands you want to run at start-up in a file called profile.do in the directory where you start your copy of Stata.

To make this a "permanent" change do this:
Create a shortcut to the Stata application on your desktop (Start --> All Programs --> Stata10 --> right-click on Stata10 --> choose "send to" --> Desktop). Then find the newly created shortcut on your desktop, right click on the icon and choose "properties". In the "Start In" field enter the path for a chosen location in your home directory. Use the Stata do file editor to create a file called "profile.do" file which contains the sysdir commands you wish to use. Be sure to place the profile.do file in the directory to which your shortcut points. Stata will automatically look for the profile.do file when opening. and run those commands.

Installing STB and user written ado files on the CISER Research Computing System

Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:48 PM | Comments (0)

A curious lottery

Bryan Caplan asks:

Suppose you were offered the following gamble:

1. With probability p, you will live forever at your current age.

2. With probability (1-p), you instantly, painlessly die.

What is your critical value of p? If you combine expected utility theory with the empirical observation that happiness is pretty flat over time, it seems like you should be willing to accept a very tiny p. But I can't easily say that I'd accept a p<1/3.

Perhaps the main reason is that all the people I care about would suffer a lot more from my instant death than they'd gain from my immortality. But even if I were fully selfish, I wouldn't be enthusiastic even at p=.5. Should I get my head examined?

The Immortal Dilemma

My answer:
Isn't this just an observation about your discount rate?
If no other risk exists, and your utility is essentially flat over time. maximizing the discount utility between living for another 40 years as is, vs living forever isn't worth that much.

If Beta is .98, then this implies that living forever is worth 50 times current utility. Living 40 more years is worth about 27 times current utility. So living forever is only worth about 1.8 times as much as your normal life expectancy. Even if you were risk neutral, you'd have to have a p of almost 55% to be interested in this. Since you are certainly risk averse, I'd suspect you'd need a p near 1 to be interested in trading in your remaining year for this lotto.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

American kids get better at math but they still suck at science

American fourth and eighth grade students made solid achievement gains in math in recent years, according to an international survey of student achievement, released Tuesday. But in science, fourth graders eked out only small gains, and eighth grade performance fell. ... The latest Timss study, the world’s largest review of math and science achievement, involved testing a representative sample of students in each country in 2007, the first time it had been administered since 2003. ... Upwards of half of all eighth graders scored at the advanced level in math in Taiwan, Korea and Singapore, compared to just 6 percent of American students scoring at that top level. ... In the fourth grade math survey, average scores in eight countries were significantly higher than the United States: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Kazakhstan, Russia, England and Latvia.

Average scores were equal to the United States in four European countries: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Germany and Denmark. Average scores in 23 countries, including many in the developing world, were significantly lower.
...
Students in two states, Massachusetts and Minnesota, also participated in a special study that attributed a score to the states as if they were individual countries.

Those students outperformed their classmates in all but a handful of countries. In eighth grade science, for instance, Massachusetts students on average scored higher than or equal to students in all countries but Singapore and Taiwan.

Math Gains Reported for U.S. Students

It is nice to see education improving in the US. It is scary how little we know about how to get significant educational improvement. In the set of inexpensive policy choices we know directed instruction, a little better teaching, and making sure kids eat breakfast all work. Class size seems to have an influence too, but that's enormously expensive.

Interestingly, no country (on which I could find statistics) that beat the US on these tests spent more on education (as a fraction of output) than we did. In the words of Scrooge McDuck, we have to work smarter not harder on education.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:31 AM | Comments (0)

December 8, 2008

I'm skeptical but intrigued

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.

Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? by Malcolm Gladwell I find it almost impossible to believe that we could fix our schools this way, but I have trouble saying why. I do believe that good teachers make a difference, it is just that in my personal experience they boosted learning by helping interested, hard working students from education valuing backgrounds flourish. That doesn't strike me as the reason why public education is on average worse in the USA. That seems to have more to do with lack of parental involvement, the unpopularity of book learning in some ethnic groups, and high discount rates and low life expectancy among too many urban youths.

That is what is so astonishing about this. Maybe we could attract the right staff to public education and turn this thing around without profound cultural change in those communities. That would be wonderful, because I'm skeptical that we can change their culture.

However, I'm not so sure that doing this would be as cheap as the article suggests:

Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

If we wanted to change education so that the people in in were on average better at it we would probably have to pay teachers more. Presumably, a major reason why potential great teachers are doing something else is that they can make more money doing something else.

________________________
Update, later in the article he echos this point:

But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:17 PM | Comments (0)

Plane crash

Sadly, it seems a plane has crashed a little more than a mile from my house. Even though the plane crashed into a residential neighborhood, it seems that no one was injured, and the pilot parachuted out.

The BlueEyedGirl and I are fine, and aside from the inconvenience of snarling traffic, and the noise of news copters, things are normal. These are the exact sorts of emergencies that the proposed bridge over Rose Canyon was supposed to alleviate. However, a NIMBY attitude leaves it un-built and a neighborhood aflame as it is difficult for firefighters and police to reach the neighborhood because of the traffic.

Update:
Two people are now confirmed dead on the ground.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:16 PM | Comments (0)

December 7, 2008

Can I persuade you to read one fantasy novel this year?

Barry Hughart's The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox is a trilogy in one volume of the most extraordinary China that never was. It is a funny and riveting set of detective stories set in an medieval China where it seems only the bad guys have magic.

If you've ever read a fantasy novel and enjoyed it, you'll like this.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:37 PM | Comments (0)

metonymy vs. synecdoche

What is the difference between metonymy and synecdoche?

They must have forgotten my column of only 16 years ago, which explained that metonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh mee, identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it — like “the brass” for high military officers, “the crown” for royalty and “the suits” for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. “Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche,” I wrote in a display of trope-a-dope, “which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole” like “wheels” for automobiles and “head” for cattle.

On Language: Synecdoche

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

December 6, 2008

Interesting, but I doubt it

I didn't realize that Boston and San Fancisco all spent several decades in decline after WWII. I blame it on the facts that 1) It started to turn around before I was born and 2) It isn't widely discussed. The WSJ says that property tax cuts were the reason for the turn around and that they would work for upstate NY as well.

The good news is that tax incentives work quickly and powerfully. Today San Francisco and Boston, for example, are considered "superstar cities." But it is often forgotten that both were, like upstate New York, in decline for much of the post-World War II era. San Francisco's population fell 12% between 1950 and 1980, and in the early 1970s it had a higher proportion of families with incomes below the poverty level than Albany, Rochester and Syracuse. Boston's 30% population decline between 1950 and 1980 was slightly below Buffalo's 38% figure, but it lost more manufacturing jobs than Buffalo over that period and its 1970 poverty rate was higher.

Since the 1980 census, however, San Francisco's population has surged 14% and its real, median household income is up 35%. Boston's population grew 5% and its real income 26%. How did they turn things around?

Both were high-tax jurisdictions that benefited from statewide ballot initiatives that suddenly made them friendlier to capital. Voters capped property taxes in California at 1% of market value with Proposition 13 in 1978. That forced San Francisco to cut its rate by 57% overnight and brought forth a tidal wave of investment, even amidst a recession. By 1982, inflation-adjusted city revenues were two-thirds higher than they had been before Prop. 13. Massachusetts voters passed Prop 2 ½ in 1980, forcing Boston's property tax rate down by an estimated 75% within two years. Massive reinvestment, repopulation and urban renewal followed.

A Property Tax Cut Could Help Save Buffalo

I'm skeptical that tax policy was the primary difference here. The was a major invigoration of coastal cities that hasn't seem to hit most inland cities. Boston and SF have major human capital based industries in biotech, entertainment, finance, and education which don't apply to upstate. I'm willing to accept that NY has horrible tax policy and they'd be better off with a new deal of lower taxes and lower services as a kick start to growth. I just think that even so, the glory days of upstate are behind them. I see almost no chance that this has the panacea affect promised.

The article also has an astonishing statistic. "This school year, New Yorkers (even excluding the Big Apple) will spend $18,768 per pupil, more than any state in the union and 50% above the national average. Upstate school enrollments have fallen 15,900 since 2000". In my article 6 years ago, Why is the NYC board of education such a cesspool?, I mentioned that six years ago spending per student on public education was $6,638 while in New York City spending per student is $10,513. If this statistic from Hanke & Walters is correct, and the city's spending is higher than the rest of the state, then their spending grew at least 10% a year during that period. That is breathtaking.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)

December 5, 2008

Quicktime sucks

I've been annoyed for the last couple of months with excessive skipping in my playing files from Apple Quicktime. I've tried reinstalling, as well as a number of kludge work around techniques, which I won't link to because they don't work. And yes, my computer shouldn't skip because it has 4 gigs of ram and a 2.4ghz cpu. In any case, I've checked my task manager and cpu utilization is low (a few percent) when the files skip.

In the end, I found the following solution or more accurately an alternative. QuickTime Alternative is a combination of media player and codec collection able to replay Quicktime files. Now I choose the HD Quicktime files. The system downloads them and plays them back using the QuickTime Alternative without skipping and HD glory, all the way to 1080p. It is annoying that Apple can't write a Quicktime plug-in manager that doesn't skip on a machine well capable of playing the highest resolution media files. Now I don't have to use their lousy software anymore, and I hope others benefit from what I've found. Thanks to the all the nice folks working on Quicktime Alternative, without them, I'd still be aggravated.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:47 PM | Comments (1)

The brain is an amazing place

An astonishing and nice man died on Tuesday. Because of his terrible misfortune humanity was blessed with a unique opportunity to understand how the brain works. It also shows what you can learn with simple tests, without access to an MRI, CAT scans, or any other fancy technology:

In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories. ... That began to change in 1962, when Dr. Milner presented a landmark study in which she and H. M. demonstrated that a part of his memory was fully intact. In a series of trials, she had Mr. Molaison try to trace a line between two outlines of a five-point star, one inside the other, while watching his hand and the star in a mirror. The task is difficult for anyone to master at first.

Every time H. M. performed the task, it struck him as an entirely new experience. He had no memory of doing it before. Yet with practice he became proficient. “At one point he said to me, after many of these trials, ‘Huh, this was easier than I thought it would be,’ ” Dr. Milner said.

The implications were enormous. Scientists saw that there were at least two systems in the brain for creating new memories. One, known as declarative memory, records names, faces and new experiences and stores them until they are consciously retrieved. This system depends on the function of medial temporal areas, particularly an organ called the hippocampus, now the object of intense study.

Another system, commonly known as motor learning, is subconscious and depends on other brain systems. This explains why people can jump on a bike after years away from one and take the thing for a ride, or why they can pickup a guitar that they have not played in years and still remember how to strum it.

Soon “everyone wanted an amnesic to study,” Dr. Milner said, and researchers began to map out still other dimensions of memory. They saw that H. M.’s short-term memory was fine; he could hold thoughts in his head for about 20 seconds. It was holding onto them without the hippocampus that was impossible.
...
Henry Gustav Molaison, born on Feb. 26, 1926, left no survivors. He left a legacy in science that cannot be erased.

H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:17 AM | Comments (0)

December 4, 2008

Best comments on the Mumbai tragedy

Note that this contains a lot of profanity.

Thanks to Coyote for the tip.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:12 AM | Comments (0)

A better way still

Before the recount began on Nov. 19, Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken were within about 200 votes of each other. With a little under three million ballots cast in the election, that margin was unbelievably small: a few thousandths of a percent separated the two candidates. So, as Minnesota law requires, election officials began counting, by hand, every single ballot from the more than 4,000 precincts around the state. ... Even if all missing ballots are found and all the typos are corrected, the recount is still doomed. Just considering precincts where every ballot is accounted for -- where Coleman and Franken observers are not challenging votes -- there are mistakes. ... If, at the end of the recount, Mr. Coleman or Mr. Franken is ahead by a few dozen or a few hundred votes, that would be because of errors rather than voter preference.

Minnesota’s instruments for counting votes are simply too crude to determine the winner in a race this tight. This is not the state’s fault. In fact, Minnesota’s election laws, procedures and equipment are among the best in the country. The problem is that a voting system that is based on physically recounting chits of paper is inherently error-prone, and in a close election like this, the errors are too large for the process to determine a winner. Even though, at the end of the recount, it will seem as if one candidate has won by a hair, the outcome will really be a statistical tie.

Luckily, Minnesota’s electoral law has a provision for ties. After all the counting and recounting, if the vote is statistically tied, the state should invoke the section of the law that requires the victor to be chosen by lot. It’s hard to swallow, but the right way to end the senatorial race between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken will be to flip a coin.

Not Every Vote Counts

I'm not against this in principle. We should collectively recognize that elections are imperfect. We should also recognize that they are not designed to tell the difference between which candidate got 41.988% and which got 41.981% of the vote.

There is a better solution here. In Georgia, if the candidate with the most votes fails to get 50% or more of the vote, they have a runoff with the second place candidate. They just had their runoff and it appears to work well, giving a clearer margin of victory than the original election. Chambliss extended his 2% margin of victory over Jim Martin before the runoff to 7% afterward. In this recent senatorial election in Minnesota, Dean Barkley of the Independence party (think Jesse Ventura) got 15.158% of the vote. That's about 2,100 times the difference between the first and second place candidates. Here is a simple rule. Every state should have a runoff election when the margin of victory is less than 1%. I can think of better and more complex rules, but even this rule would be an improvement. If Minnesota had a runoff the resulting winner would have more credibility the current one picked essentially by chance.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:06 AM | Comments (0)

Don't count on it

In Calling All Pakistanis Thomas Friedman asks "Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?" In his mind, it is inconceivable that a cartoon could warrant protests and rioting but murder of almost 200 innocents would not. He says, "But while the Pakistani government’s sober response is important, and the sincere expressions of outrage by individual Pakistanis are critical, I am still hoping for more. I am still hoping -- just once -- for that mass demonstration of “ordinary people” against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake." Such a response would be strong evidence that most people in Pakistan don't hate or think worthless non-Muslims. It would make me joyous to see such a response. But I doubt it is coming because I suspect that the do think the average non-Muslim is
worthless and they do hate him. And, as we've discussed lately, hatred is a tool, an evolved strategy with costs and benefits. I'm skeptical that this hatred is a liability for Pakistan. It allows them to have people bring the war to their enemies, but their enemies are unwilling to blame the producing societies enough to bring the war to them. I agree with Friedman that "...this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village -- all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country -- declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons." But demanding or even hoping that this will occur is pissing into the wind. The average member of Pakistani society doesn't care much for the value of

The international war on terror is mostly about stopping radical Muslims from killing moderate Muslims and non-Muslims. So it is interesting to know what the people of Pakistan think about the war on terror. It isn't good. "When asked if they thought that Pakistan should cooperate with the United States on the War on Terror, 15 percent replied yes while 71 percent were opposed..."
IRI Pakistan Index. A society where "...only 45 percent said that Al Qaeda and the Taliban were a serious concern", and where in rating the favorably of various groups, "...the Taliban was rated favorably by 23 percent while Al Qaeda received 18 percent.This is a society that really doesn't share our values.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:17 AM | Comments (0)

Oh really?

Gov. David A. Paterson said for the first time on Wednesday that he supported a financial rescue plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that includes charging tolls on bridges over the East and Harlem Rivers. The plan, he said, would substantially reduce the size of a fare increase the authority had sought. ... The governor said the plan would include an increase in fare revenues of 8 percent next year, scaling back a 23 percent increase that the authority had previously said it would need to offset plummeting tax revenue and enormous debt payments.

The plan also calls for a tax of one-third of 1 percent on the payrolls of companies in the region served by the authority. That would amount to about $330 for every $100,000 of payroll. Companies, not workers, would pay.

Paterson Voices Support for M.T.A. Rescue Plan

The confusion of tax incidence with the location of the tax burden is a common economic ignorance. A national newspaper should be better than this. As far as the article suggests, this isn't even a quote, it is commentary by the newspaper.

It does not matter who fronts the money for a tax. The person who is made poorer by a tax need not have any connection to the person to person who fronts the cash. If NY/NJ employers can raise prices as a result of the tax then area consumers will ultimately pay the tax. If employers can pay lower wages as a result, than workers pay the tax in lower salaries or lower salary growth. It is only to the extent that customers cannot be charged more (typically if there is highly inelastic demand) or suppliers and employees paid less (typically if there is highly inelastic supply), that capital will have lower profits after this tax. That is, capital will pay the tax out of profits.

In ultimate effect, this is exactly equivalent to a a cross the board income tax hike of 1/3% for all tax brackets in the MTA region. If you believe that such a tax hike would ultimately be funded by capital and not labor (at least poor labor), then this is progressive policy. However, I see little reason to suspect this.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:54 AM | Comments (0)

December 3, 2008

Smoking weed is at least 2700 years old.

Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly ``cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.

"To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

2,700-year-old marijuana found in Chinese tomb

Alcohol and opium are both older psychotropics.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:11 PM | Comments (0)

December 2, 2008

Learn a lot about the super-senior tranche of CDOs

Felix has by far the best explanation I've seen yet.

What's a Super-Senior Tranche?

Super-Seniors: Your Questions Answered

Sorry for the slow news day, I'm behind after a relaxing and fun trip to NYC for Thanksgiving.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:57 PM | Comments (0)

December 1, 2008

A review to make you change your mind

Twilight is an adolescent book series about vampires. They just made the first volume into a movie getting decent reviews. I wasn't planning on seeing it or reading them. However, I just read an extraordinary review by Caitlin Flanagan and I'm reconsidering. Take this excerpt.

Twilight is fantastic. It’s a page-turner that pops out a lurching, frightening ending I never saw coming. It’s also the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me. In fact, there were times when the novel—no work of literature, to be sure, no school for style; hugged mainly to the slender chests of very young teenage girls, whose regard for it is on a par with the regard with which just yesterday they held Hannah Montana—stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it. Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life’s fortunes, I thought I had subdued. The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof.

What Girls Want

Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:59 AM | Comments (0)