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April 30, 2009
What a fabulous anacdote
But in the case the Supreme Court is deciding today, Ricci v. DeStefano, the idea is that the test is inherently "biased" against black people because black people haven't been doing well on it. In 2003, the highest a black candidate scored for a captaincy was 16th place, behind twelve whites and three Latinos. New Haven's city service board refused to certify the results, and now 18 candidates are suing on the basis of, for one, the Civil Rights Act of 1964--the very set of laws that transformed life for black Americans not so long ago. ... Plaintiff Frank Ricci understood this. He's dyslexic. Instead of doing poorly on the test and charging discrimination, he had textbooks read onto tape, worked with a study group, and practiced hard. He placed sixth out of 77. Any notion that this is too much to ask of someone with more melanin--or even with a different "racial history"--is nonsensical at best and gruesome at worst.Moving Beyond Bias
What a wonder example of the triumph of will over biological limitations.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2009
Upgrading Nspluginwrapper
Nspluginwrapper is a program that let's you use Flash plug-in and other video stuff on 64-bit Linux even though many of those plug-ins are only written to run on 32 bit systems. It tuns out that the libraries make this complicated. I'd been having problems with Pandora, and I thought upgrading from version 0.9.91.5 to 1.2.2 would help (it didn't). Here is what I had to do to make that happen
I had to download the file:
1.2.2-0ubuntu5
Then install several additional libraries:
libcurl4-gnutls-dev
The multilib library for gcc or g++
then the usual
./configure
make
sudo make install
I thought all this might help someone else.
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Update: Once I did the above and then followed the directions at How to Install
Adobe Flash Player 64-bit on Ubuntu 8.10 I was able to eliminate the gray screen problem.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:21 PM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2009
What a weird and interesting idea
Hence, Limited Purpose Banking can accommodate credit default swaps (CDS) as well as any other risk product. But what Limited Purpose Banking won't do is leave any bank exposed to CDS risk since people, not banks, would own the CDS mutual funds.If such mutual funds sound revolutionary, they're not. Funds of this kind have been around for centuries. They go by the name "tontines," or systems of "pari-mutuel betting."
This is interesting, and perhaps better than our current regime. It amounts to replacing all the financial assets of the household with equity. That may reduce systemic risks quite a lot because all capital structures are flat. However, no longer can you tailor your asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, and derivatives to meet your particular needs. In this regime you'd just hold shares of these different vehicles, and you'd purchase your insurance from these various funds. In some frictionless setting this wouldn't matter. You'd have the Modigliani-Miller theorem holding and enough Arrow - Debru securities that this would give you the same insurance as before. But in our messy world of agency problems, transaction costs, and incomplete markets, surely many would be worse off.
Kotlikoff and Leamer are wrong that this would eliminate systemic liquidity risk. Perhaps much reduce it, but not eliminate it. Reducing banking system leverage to 1 removes most of the systemic risk. Financial market makers have to hold cash and shares in all these closed end funds in order to make a market in them. They can still go belly up or mess up trading, leaving assets without market makers.
Further, by structuring these vehicles as closed end funds you eliminate a lot of liquidation risk, but at the price of vastly increasing the costs of changing the number of units in the fund. But that's something that happens all the time in credit default and other derivative markets. That's an example of how this would significantly increase the average cost of financial overhead to reduce the costs when things get really bad.
These may be trades-off worth making, However, their piece doesn't make it seem as though there are any downsides to this approach.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:55 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2009
In case you were ever wondering
I've been thinking about the Sharp Ratio, the ratio of E{asset return -risk free return] / [Standard Deviation of asset return. It usually is better to use the geometric mean because it is resistant to the effects of outliers. But what should we use for the standard deviation? The variance is calculated from the arithmetic mean, so using that messes up the ratio. However, just like there is a geometric mean, so too is there a geometric variance. I was surprised to see that there was no Wikipedia page for this concept.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2009
What's the goal of this policy
Many countries like Germany (pictured) and Switzerland are now mandating that all new buildings with flat roofs must plant a garden on them....In Tokyo, where the "urban heat island" phenomenon has raised local temperatures by several degrees, city officials are mandating green roofs like this one to make buildings more efficient and bring temperatures down.Under the New Gaian Regime, No Roof May Lie Fallow
I'm sure there are many good reasons for flat roofs. However, since building a green roof isn't free, it is easy to imagine the unintended consequences of these laws, far fewer buildings with flat roofs.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)
Will we reduce our carbon emissions?
Peter W. Huber, in Bound to Burn says that the low price of carbon and high price of green alternatives means that most proposals for carbon emission reduction won't work. Fascinating and eye opening. I'm not as convinced as he is that we cannot pay the poor to keep their trees, but the logic of continued coal based power production seems ironclad.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
Big problems with this line of reasoning
There are hundreds of young men just like him all along the Somali coastline, calling themselves "coast guards" who protect Somali waters and "tax" foreign shipping to compensate for the fact that foreign fishing fleets, unmolested by any Somali state authority, annually plunder hundreds of millions of dollars of fish from Somali waters — and also for the fact that unscrupulous foreigners have used the coast to dump toxic waste. None of this excuses piracy, of course, and many of these claims are spurious, since the prime beneficiaries of booty extracted by pirates are land-based warlords, many of them associated with the now deposed U.S.-backed government. Still, the plight of Somalia's coastline certainly helps explain why the phenomenon is so widespread — and why the pirates are viewed by many Somalis as folk heroes.Why New York Is No Place to Try Somali Pirates
Utter nonsense.
1) That terrorists are folk heroes in many places, that doesn't mean we should avoid killing as many of them as possible when they threaten us.
2) This is just banditry, not defending the homeland or the earth. The ships that the pirates are robbing, kidnapping, and murdering upon are not the same ships that are fishing and dumping in Somali water. Who would rob a ship full of toxic waste? Who would try to get a ransom from a small Chinese fishing boat? No, they rob ships prepared to pay ransoms, which are mostly big commercial freight ships.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:31 AM | Comments (1)
Hostile takeovers
I learned this morning about Aware, an organization acting as advocates for a gender equality in Singapore. From the little that I saw on their positions, they are similar to NOW and other similar organizations here in the America, that is governed from a generally left of center ideological perspective.
It seems that recently that changed. A group of about 80 members of a conservative Christian church joined the organization and then took over all the committees and sub-committees. Only the new president represented the old-guard, and she resigned a few days later. You can read more details at WHAT HAPPENED over at Save Aware
Which is all sad for the old members and happy for the new ones, who cheaply took over an established lobbying and good works organization. As a financial economist, I'm curious why this doesn't happen more often. The NRA has way more members (4 million) than than the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (1.7 million in dues at $25 dollars in dues is 68,000 members). Why haven't they showed up en mass to join the Brady organization and shut it down with a major contribution to the NRA of money and strategy documents and then firing all its employees?
Corporate takeovers used to be pretty common, it was only when states changed their corporate laws to allow a variety of anti-takeover measures (poison pills, staggered board of directors, golden parachutes, and dead hand rules) that they became more rare. I'm not sure that non-profits are constrained by the fiduciary duty the prevents the most extreme anti-takeover measures. Non-profits may be able to pass anti-takeover rules without the concern faced by corporate boards that doing so prevents the firm from fetching the highest price.
I few thousand highly motivated and united people of even modest means could take over practically any major non-profit with a voting membership and bend it to their policy ends. When you consider the massive endowments and other assets of these organizations, this could be far more valuable than the money that group could raise on their own. I think you'd have to strike in rapid succession because after a short period you'd see anti-takeover policies snapping into place.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:38 AM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2009
To liquidate or not to liquidate
On intransigent creditors unwilling to cave to government demands on Chrysler:
From a public relations perspective, however, gratuitously driving a company as storied and economically important as Chrysler into bankruptcy is generally not the kind of thing that any bank wants to do. Unless, that is, banks in general have already hit the zero bound in terms of reputation. Call it the Ticketmaster strategy: you can do anything you like once everybody hates you.
When banks have no reputation left to lose
I don't expect we'll see the liquidation of Chrysler because the government will cave. However, if they did, that would be a great contribution to reestablishing that:
1) The banking system is independent from the government
2) This is the sort of economy where poorly run firms fail
3) Small creditors won't be pushed around by the government
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:29 PM | Comments (0)
Condemned to repeat it
None of this information had the comment "classified" on it. It wasn't secret, top secret, or even confidential. At least, none of the files carried those labels. Now, no military computer on the Milnet is allowed to carry classified information. There's another computer network, completely separate, that handles classified data. So in one sense, the Systems Command's Space Division had nothing to lose: its computer is unclassified.But there's a deeper problem. Individually, public documents don't contain classified information. But once you gather many documents together, they may reveal secrets. An order from an aircraft manufacturer for a load of titanium sure isn't secret. Nor is the fact that they're building a new bomber. But taken together, there's a strong indicator that Boeing's new bomber is made of titanium, and therefore must fly at supersonic speeds (since ordinary aluminum can't resist
high temperatures).In the past, to pull together information from diverse sources you'd spend weeks in a library. Now, with computers and networks, you can match up data sets in minutes— look at how I manipulated Mitre's long-distance phone bills to find where the hacker had visited. By analyzing public data with the help of computers, people can uncover secrets without ever seeing a classified database.
Back in 1985 Vice Admiral John Poindexter worried about just this problem. He tried to create a new classification of information, "Sensitive but unclassified." Such information fit below the usual levels of Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential; but access to it was to be denied to certain foreigners. Poindexter clumsily tried to apply this to academic research—naturally, the
universities refused, and the idea died. Now, standing in front of my monitor, watching the hacker prowl through the Space Command's system, I realized his meaning. Air Force SDI projects might not be top secret, but they sure were sensitive.
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage circa 1990
Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project in today's WSJ:
Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project -- the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever -- according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force's air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.
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Many details couldn't be learned, including the specific identity of the attackers, and the scope of the damage to the U.S. defense program, either in financial or security terms. In addition, while the spies were able to download sizable amounts of data related to the jet-fighter, they weren't able to access the most sensitive material, which is stored on computers not connected to the Internet.Former U.S. officials say the attacks appear to have originated in China. However it can be extremely difficult to determine the true origin because it is easy to mask identities online.
I hope our information security people designed this system in a way that what the hackers got isn't worth much without the information on the secure network. If we see some of our next generation technology showing up in Russia or China, I guess we'll know.
It seems like our enemies are getting better at stealing our data faster than we are at keeping them from doing so.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:59 AM | Comments (0)
Be afraid of arrogance combined with ambition and power
Obama is building this new leadership class. His administration has become a domestic I.M.F., consisting of teams of experts who can swoop in and provide long-term solutions when systems — finance, housing, health care, education, autos — have broken down.When the members of this new establishment are confronted with a broken system — whether it involves hospitals, energy, air pollution or cars — their approach is the same. They aim to restructure incentives in order to channel the animal drives of the marketplace in responsible directions.
Big-Spending Conservative
I don't see any evidence of this. I hope they don't see themselves this way, as experts who can fix anything with the kiss of government. I just see a new bunch of power loving and ambitious liberals with an appetite for bigger government, deficit spending, and more regulation. They have a crisis that isn't of their making, a long list of national problems, and they are arrogant enough to think they can design their way to a solution.
The IMF's policy is governed mostly by the best thinking in economics . The IMF's policies may be flawed, hubristic, and anti-democratic, but at least it (and its sister the World Bank) usually tries to do the best of what we know works. They also have a small enough budget that the scope of its mistakes is limited and with the knowledge that any country may opt to not take their money and advice if they think they can do better elsewhere.
Instead, Obama's people are using enormous sums, are not ignorable, and their advice seems anything but predicated on state of the art thinking in economics. They would be more realistically predicated on state of the art thinking about politics. The systems that David Brooks identifies as requiring long term solutions, finance, housing, health care, education, autos are complex, expensive resistant to change, and critical to our welfare.
I predict that do not restructure the "incentive channel" in any of these industries. I expect more regulation and higher government spending in these areas. It will be focused on subsidies to prevent industrial failure and regulations that constrain behavior without changing incentives. I may be a cynic of government, but my expectation of additional federal government intervention in these areas is to make them worse.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:17 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2009
What a for profit education system look like this?
In Chinese Learn English the Disney Way, the WSJ reports that Disney is operating English language schools in China.
The company plans to have four Shanghai centers by June, from the current two, and to launch in Beijing within a year. Disney declined to say how many students it has.
They make heavy use of technology, rewarding children, and singing:
Classroom names recall Disney movies, such as "Andy's Bedroom," the setting of the "Toy Story" films. To hold the attention of children as young as two years old, there is the Disney Magic Theater, which combines functions of a computer, television and chalkboard and is the main teaching tool.
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In class, a strong singing voice earns students "magic tokens" that are exchangeable into "reward gifts" like Disney pens and hats on display in the lobby. Students can also get Mickey Mouse book bags as well as bilingual books, flashcards and CDs that feature Disney characters, much of them otherwise unavailable in China.
It is unclear if the school is inexpensive or cheap, it costs about a $1,000 per child per year. That's very cheap for first class child service in the West, but expensive compared with average income in China. Plus, labor costs are lower there.
That said, this picture shows Caucasian employees with the caption "A Disney English class celebrates Christmas last year in Shanghai", so maybe their labor costs are not cheap.
Maybe this is what a private education revolution would look like. Integration with brands we know children like, learning a bit less at the price of enjoying school much more (and perhaps therefore trading off the intensive and extensive margin on education demand), making heavy use of standardized curricula and multimedia, with less skilled teachers, and greater focus on behavioral modification.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:59 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2009
Have you ever seen this?
At this point ten years old, but amazing:
"Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists
I loved this essay when I first read it a few years ago. It is surprisingly difficult to find an essay on the subject on Star Wars and Star Trek, and this essay doesn't even make the first page of Google.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:57 PM | Comments (1)
April 18, 2009
Watchman's Rorschach as Objectivist super hero
Rorschach is no handsome Rand hero as she imagined them; but he’s still probably the most vivid and well-thought-out Objectivist hero that Rand didn’t create.Rorschach Doesn't Shrug (spoilers)
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
Only slightly more economical?
I love they way Mustangs look and I had an opportunity to rent a modern American muscle car once I loved the way it handled and sounded as well. Totally different than my tiny, slow, and efficient Civic. So while normally disinterested in car reviews, the 2010 Mustang review in the NY Times caught my eye and within It I saw this quote about fuel efficiency.
Do you agree with the author's assessment that the V-6 is only slightly more economical?
Fuel economy ratings for the V-8 are 16 miles a gallon in the city and 24 on the highway with the 5-speed manual gearbox and 17/23 for the 5-speed automatic. The base Mustang engine, a 210-horsepower 4-liter V-6, is only slightly more economical, with ratings of 18/26 for the manual transmission or 16/24 with a 5-speed automatic.Original Pony, Now Playing Catch-Up
16 vs 18 urban and 24 vs 26 highway. That doesn't sound like a big difference. Though it is.
I thought I'd mentioned this phenomena before, but I don't see anything in the archives. Measuring MPG makes the ordering of car efficiency easy, because higher numbers are better. But it makes cardinal comparisons more difficult, because each increase in the MPG by 1 has a non-linear relationship with fuel savings. Each such increase saves you (1/MPG)% in fuel per mile. Gallons per mile is a much easier way of comparing fuel usage than miles per gallon. Your fuel use is in gallons. Take the gallons per mile times the number of miles and you will quickly know. If you know the MPG here is what you do.
The V-8 uses 1/16 of a gallon for going an urban mile to the V-6's 1/18th of a gallon. That means that it uses .0625 gallons to the V-6's .0556. So the V-6 is actually 12.4% more efficient, which I would describe as more than slightly more efficient. The highway difference is less pronounced but still 8.3% more efficient. With the average American household spending about $1000 on automotive fuel, that about a $100 a year in savings. That's your two annual oil changes paid for on the fuel savings.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:33 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2009
Never seen it myself
Marginal Revolution brings to my attention that from time to time Americans boo at the opera.
The rafters of the Metropolitan Opera House recently rang with the raucous sound of booing. The occasion was the premiere of Mary Zimmerman's production of Bellini's "La Sonnambula," a 19th-century opera that Ms. Zimmerman, a noted avant-garde theater director, set in present-day New York and turned into a postmodern extravaganza complete with cellphones and leather jackets. Such high-concept stagings are old hat in straight theater, but the Met's opening-night crowds run to the staid, and much of the audience reacted loudly and angrily when Ms. Zimmerman and her production team took their curtain call.Why Not Boo?What happened to Ms. Zimmerman, while not unprecedented, is highly unusual.To be sure, booing at the opera house is far from uncommon elsewhere in the world, especially in Italy, but American audiences are reluctant to express their displeasure vocally.
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Is there a kinder, gentler way for an audience to make its displeasure felt? After reflecting on Ms. Zimmerman's tumultuous curtain call, I came up with a substitute that I call "The Silent Boo." Since many theater companies now encourage playgoers to recycle their programs, why not place two transparent recycling containers in the lobby after the show, one marked CHEERS and the other JEERS? That strikes me as a neat and practical method of reaping the benefits of booing while simultaneously minimizing its incivility. Wouldn't your emotional investment in a performance be heightened if you could "vote" on its merits in a simple and convenient manner that was easily visible both to the performers and to your fellow audience members?
I like this suggestion. I'd add that they could darken the sides of these containers to so that people would be less tempted to go with the flow and give the majority opinion. Think of it as moving from a delegate to a secret ballot based voting system. Each container should be big enough to hold unanimous position on the work's quality, and the typical audience member should pass both drop boxes on their way out.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:53 AM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2009
Quote of the day
But picture Isaac Newton scribbling down the laws of physics every day, and every night God comes in and erases the scribblings, changes the laws, and fiddles with the constants. That is what macro is like.In Defense of Macroeconomists
I also liked that this is titled In Defense of Macroeconomists and not In Defense of Macroeconomics, because the problems are not with the idea of macroeconomics but with the execution.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2009
Unexpected Matlab Shortcut keys
Have you ever wondered why Matlab for Linux has unexpected hot keys (for example, none of the cords control-c, control-x, control-v, or control-s have the same behavior as in Windows)? I couldn't figure out who would want those shortcuts to be different. Steven Lord provides the answer. They are set for Emacs hot keys. Changing them is easy if you know how. "There are preferences in the Keyboard & Indenting sections under both Command Window (for command window keybindings) and Editor/Debugger (for keybindings used in the editor) that you can toggle between Windows standard and Emacs standard." In my version (7.40), I found these options under File-Preferences-Keyboard.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)
Was justice done?
Most striking is these books’ consensus: despite their authors’ different aims and methods, and despite their contending interpretations of a host of questions, they all agree that, contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews.Hitler's Co-Conspirators
In the end, it seems like at most a few hundred people were judicially punished for their crimes against humanity under Nazi Germany. Yet we know now that knowledge of the purpose of the the train cars, the gas chambers, and the crematories were widespread. That means that many who said that they didn't understand how they were contributing to these crimes in fact did understand. In light of this, I am tempted to say that insufficient punishment was meted out. Far more people deserved punishment, on the order of tens or hundreds of the thousands.
Note, the rest of this piece contains spoilers to The Forge of God. Read the review, buy the book, and let it age a bit on your unread book shelf until you forget exactly what it is about and read it then. Stuff like this is why I never read the backs of the books I'm about to read.
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At the end of TFOG, one alien race destroys (through robotic agents) most of humanity and all of Earth. Another alien race saves the a few hundred or thousand members of humanity and begins to prepare them for hunting down and exterminating the the first alien race for their crimes. That story is told in Anvil of Stars, which I've been meaning to read.
One survivor asks, what if we find the first alien race and they regret their crimes and have long since reformed themselves. The second alien race answers, it does not matter, the law requires that punishment. Some things are so terrible that they are unforgivable.
Which brings us back to the punishment dished out to the many collaborators to the war crimes of Germany in WW II. Justice is often inconvenient, expensive and unpleasant. I understand why many were not punished. As the cold war started their was tremendous motivation to pull Germany in to the orbit of The West. Collective punishment was also seen as a failure in WWI. War reparations created an ongoing grievance that partially motivated WWII. Nevertheless, given what we now know about the collective culpability of the German people, their punishment seemed inadequate for their crimes.
Some will point to the enormous loss of blood and treasure suffered by the Germans in WW II as proof they paid enough. I had a teacher in high school, I think it was Dr. Hirshman, who said that if you cheated on his exam and were caught, you got a zero on that test as well as the next test. After all, he reasoned, you would have failed this test anyway, that's why you cheated. That's an important lesson. To properly punish you requires giving something worse than if you hadn't cheated in the first place. Germany's war suffering was self inflicted. Within this framework, Germany's war deaths, misery, and wasted resources can't count as punishment. Punishment has to be beyond what you do to yourself.
What would have been enough? It is hard to know. However, I recently learned that some Nazis did choose to defy their orders and not commit certain crimes, and sometimes ... had nothing to fear from making such a choice. It is difficult to reach back and point out which people were inappropriately granted amnesty. Nevertheless, that quite different from saying that none or few of them were inappropriately granted amnesty. Rather than sending a few dozen people off to hang, it seems more just that closer to everyone working for the Nazi state at a death camp, concentration camp, ghetto, or prison should have hung.
What a lesson that would have been to would be order followers. If you participate in a genocide, even at the point of a gun, you will die. Perhaps then it will be harder to find those willing to follow such orders.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:42 AM | Comments (0)
First they imposed the cigarette taxes, and I didn't complain because I wasn't a smoker
Actually, I did complain about those taxes in Nonsense at The Times. But in the category of low externality, high private cost and benefit consumption choices that the state decides to tax because they have a highly inelastic demand, I bring you the beer tax of Oregon.
Oregon ...plan to raise taxes by 1,900% on . . . beer. The tax would catapult to $52.21 from $2.60 a barrel. The money is intended to reduce Oregon's $3 billion budget deficit and, ostensibly, to pay for drug treatment. ... But Democrats who run the legislature are desperate for the revenues to help pay for Oregon's 27.9% increase in the general fund budget last year. If they have their way, every time a worker steps up to the bar and orders a cold one, his tab will rise by an extra $1.25 to $1.50 a pint. Half of these taxes will be paid by Oregonians with an income below $45,000 a year. Voters might want to remember this the next time Democrats in Salem profess to be the party of Joe Six Pack.This Tax Is for You
Is their a utilitarian theory of justice that would support a tax like this? Is there a theory of natural rights that would do so? These taxes are felt most by poor smokers and heavy drinkers. These sorts of people are disproportionately unhappy, unhealthy, in addition to their poverty. We may want to use these taxes to change behavior rather than revenue. That's not the case here. The point is to raise revenue. However, even if behavior modification were the motive we could not willfully ignore our knowledge that these customers have inelastic demand for products like cigarettes and booze. If we are to judge the tax by its consequences rather than its motives, as we generally should, this is a real loser, a regressive tax on the poor and unhappy. Judged by the stated motive of the proponents of the Oregon law, it appears even worse. The goal is not to improve the health of the poor, but to deliberately raise taxes upon them.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:43 AM | Comments (1)
Freedom works
I believe that legalizing drugs would on balance save lives in addition to making us safer. Evidence from Portugal suggests this is true:
In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.
5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results
Over the years I've become frustrated with how political The Scientific American has become on issues like anthropogenic climate change and gun control. It is nice to see they are open minded enough to still make reference to a study by the Libertarian Cato Institute.
Hat Tip Neatorama:
Decriminalizing Drug Use in Portugal: 5 Years Later
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:06 AM | Comments (0)
One way to view Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's tax cheating
Forget about holding him to some perfect standard, if we held him to the standard of current IRS employees, he'd lose his job.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:01 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2009
Class in America
Class Dismissed is Sandra Tsing Loh's rambling and fascinating meditation on class in modern America. Worth a read.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2009
Evidence that about a quarter of political party members are partisan hacks*
Ben Bernanke is pretty much the same guy in 2009 that he was in 2008 and doing a similar sort of job. Yet we see that approximately 25% of both Republicans and Democrats has switched their confidence in the man from favorable to unfavorable or vice versa as the President he serves with has changed.
Percent Expressing Great Deal/Fair Amount of Confidence in Ben Bernanke:
Democrats Independents Republicans
2008 40 43 61
2009 64 44 36
The Partisan Public (Exhibit #14612)
How many of these people really think that he's doing a worse job now then he was last year? Since only 43 percent of American adults can name at least one justice who is currently serving on the nation’s highest court., and fewer than one in five know who the Senate Majority leader is and three out of ten can't name the Vice President, I'm skeptical that most of these people even know that Bernanke is the same guy who served under Bush, let alone have an informed opinion on how well he is doing his job. The best explanation is as Five Thirty Eight suggests, simple partisanship.
*- Not really, just evidence that 25% of the members of these two parties changed their opinion on a political official when the president changed even though that new president had nothing to do with that politician's appointment.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:31 PM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2009
Instant communications and sitcoms
I noted to my friends a few years ago that cellphones would have eliminated the storylines of about half of the sitcoms from 1995 and earlier. That's pretty incredible. That means that we've entered a period where the new stories are at least partially in new territory, they represent the work of writers in a new world where we can communicate with people nearly instantly.
I was reminded of this idea by the article If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone, a New York Times piece that expands upon this premise.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:50 PM | Comments (0)
Rare things do happen
It seems that someone hard boiled a one dozen Trader Joe's eggs, each with a double yolk. If true, that's a nice demonstration that rare events happen all the time. A little digging online showed that the probability of getting a double yolked egg ranged from 0.1% to 5%.. If the eggs in a supermarket dozen could be considered independent events, that's a maximum probability off occurring of 9.5367431640625e-25 %. Very rare indeed. Is this plausible? Given that eggs share a common expiry date, I'd guess that in general all the eggs in a carton are laid by different chickens. Even the finest breeds of chicken in the best circumstances don't lay a egg every day, so this seems reasonable. Chickens sharing a coop are likely to be related, so they might be more likely to share a mutation encouraging double yolk formation. Brenda at taste of home reports that some chickens lay only double yolk eggs, some lay eggs with no yolks, so again we have more evidence that double yolk formation could be genetic and therefore shared by a group of chickens living together.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:57 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2009
Still messed up
In my weird exchange with TD Bank, I mentioned the bizarre, good heated, and incompetent attempts of TD bank to get me pre-addressed, pre-paid envelopes with which to make deposits in our account there.
I thought I'd provide an update on the continuing saga. The arrived yesterday. Nine days seemed like a significant delay to get my promised envelopes. Then I quickly saw why, the address on the envelope was wrong. Two numbers in my street address were transposed. I am fortunate that I got it at all. Then I looked inside. The envelopes were not prepaid. They were just plain pre-addressed envelopes. So at this point I still don't have what I wanted when I wrote my initial bank mail 2 weeks ago.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:06 PM | Comments (0)
April 9, 2009
Quote of the day
"No city, however massively fortified, is impregnable to a mule carrying chests of gold coins"From the thus far excellent Devices and Desires (Engineer Trilogy) on page 237.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:35 PM | Comments (0)
April 8, 2009
Obama bowed to a monarch?
Obama's staffing problems are blatant -- from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another -- from the president's tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady's over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama's sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol.Bow-ow-ow: Obama's painful missteps
That is astonishing. I wonder if he made a mistake or got bad protocol advice. I know such things are difficult. I never considered how difficult the details of protocol with other states was before watching The West Wing episode A Change Is Gonna Come, where a Taiwanese flag makes problems for the Bartlet administration. I know it is difficult and even experts will make mistakes. But they should be few and relatively minor because the people in those roles should be experienced and talented.
Bowing is for subjects not citizens. I would like to think that I wouldn't bow in the presence of a monarch. As a free man and a Jew, I save my bowing for the almighty. I'm sure Obama meant nothing by it and regrets it upon reflection, but what a terrible message that sends. And yes, the bow is on film.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:13 PM | Comments (0)
Big claim of the day
But history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline. IDrunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb
I'm a believer that as a general matter demography is destiny. Still, this seems too strong a claim. Certainly material standards in Malthusian societies improve when there is a large population decline. For example, the black death eventually lead to substantial wage increases in Europe (Before and After the Black Death: Money, Prices, and Wages in Fourteenth-Century England).
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:18 AM | Comments (0)
April 7, 2009
Paid for with your enormous textbook prices
Jim Stewart, author of my undergraduate calculus textbook had himself built one of the most amazing houses on earth with the 24 million bucks he's made selling them.
The home's owner is equally eccentric. Jim Stewart, who will only say he is in his 60s, is a top-shelf classical violinist who earned his millions writing calculus textbooks. The math professor named the building "Integral House", after the calculus sign. ... "I think it's one of the most important private houses built in North America in a long time," says Glenn D. Lowry, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art who visited the house in November. "The curved walls make it almost impossible to relate it to spaces that you know. It's one of the most remarkable houses I've ever been in."An 'Accordion' of Wood and Glass With the Stewart calculus texts going for about $120 each, and him getting 50% tops, that's at least 1.5 million copies of his books to pay for the house.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:27 PM | Comments (0)
Sureal moment of the day
Sir-mix-a-lot remixes his classic work, "Baby Got Back" to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Sponge Bob Square Pants on behalf of Burger King.
Myself, I prefer round buttocks to square ones.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:36 PM | Comments (0)
April 3, 2009
Quote of the day
There's already a huge ongoing government intervention in the economy. Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, "Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook."A New Circus Comes to Town They're going to need more than three rings. by P.J. O'Rourke
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:33 PM | Comments (0)
Something I hadn't considered
Because a wind turbine extracts energy from the wind, the wind downwind of a turbine will be less powerful and more turbulent than the wind entering the turbine. As a rule of thumb, expect that these downwind effects continue for a distance up to 10 times the size of the turbine’s rotor diameter.Is “First in Time, First in Right” the best way to allocate rights to wind energy?
In a better world, we'd have well tested and worked water rights regimes on which to base our policy on wind-steading. Since we live in a world of poor water property rights, we can't, and we have to listen to economic theory. Fortunately, since water is a more local resource than water (no aquifer equivalents), a bit of a land boarder on the outside may serve instead of a full wind rights trading regime. Some clear boiler-plate legislation on the sale of wind use easements (the way in urban areas people sell air rights) would be useful. Then you wouldn't even have to buy the land to protect the wind investment.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:39 AM | Comments (0)
Supply and demand for malpractice
The law blog over at the Wall Street Journal remarks on a positive role played by the medical malpractice plaintiffs in reducing the supply of malpractice:
LB Readers, there are plaintiffs lawyers out there who would argue that this is all nonsense; that the current system has actually done a good job of curbing incidences of malpractice — and that the plaintiffs bar, and the threat of big verdicts, helps keep doctors in check.Howard’s Prescription for Med-Mal Reform: Scrap Layperson Juries
That's got to be true. By acting as a tax on malpractice, this should reduce the supply. Unfortunately, the revenue of the tax goes as a subsidy to the demands of malpractice, those that consume medical services and then sue for malpractice damages. The total effect depends on the relative elasticity of demand and supply of malpractice. Given my prior beliefs that doctors don't like messing up, hurting people, or being sued, I guess the elasticity of supply is highly inelastic. On the other hand, there are people who sue in today's environment would not do so unless the potential windfall were large. I gather that from the subway advertisements that brag about the enormous sums that the plaintiff bar has secured for its clients. That suggests that this subsidy could increase the total amount of malpractice.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:09 AM | Comments (0)
April 2, 2009
Implausible statistics?
Currently, one in five U.S. residents speaks a language other than English at home. The language-services industry generated $14 billion in revenue last year, according to the American Translators Association.Separated by a Common Tongue: Foreclosures Trap Translators in Middle
Immigrants are about 12.8% of the US population (Immigrants as percentage of state population). The most recent data on household size I could find was that in 1986. households headed by immigrants were on average larger than those headed by non-immigrants—2.9 persons versus 2.7 persons. Current average household size is 2.59. This implies that about 13.75% of households are immigrants. Some families aren't immigrants, but speak another language at home like the Satmar Hasidic Jews or the Amish. Some immigrants speak English at home as a choice made to encourage assimilation or because their native language is English. Unless we include the occasional use to call immigrant family members or foreign language words for religious, culinary, cultural, or cursing (e.g. Shabbat Shalom, Latke, Mazel Tov, and Meeskeit) I'm skeptical that this 20% number could be right.
I enjoyed finding the following profanity list: Yiddish Language Swearing & English Translation.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)
Nobility and the Nazis
I have long seen the connection between Nazism and German nobility in literature, movies, and television. I never really gave it much thought if those connections were historical or if they just combined two national pastimes, hating Nazis and hating nobility. It seems such connections are real:
The Nazi movement acquired supporters as high up in the traditional social elite as it was possible to go. Among Hermann Göring’s close associates was Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, son of the Kaiser, who became interested in Nazism in 1926 and joined the Stormtroopers in 1930. Through August Wilhelm, Göring gained access to his brother Crown Prince Wilhelm von Preussen, and to the princes of Hessen, Christoph and Philipp. Göring was renowned (and resented by some Nazis) for his sycophantic attraction to the high-born, but he was not alone. Himmler, too, targeted the nobility, in the firm belief that they embodied the principles of selective breeding espoused by his SS. By 1938 nearly a fifth of all senior SS officers were titled noblemen (the figure for the lower officer ranks was 10 per cent). From a sample of 312 families of the old nobility, the Freiburg historian Stephan Malinowski found 3592 individuals who joined the Nazi Party, including 962 who did so before the seizure of power in January 1933. These noble Nazis included members of the oldest and most distinguished East Elbian families: the Schwerins supplied 52 party members, the Hardenbergs 27, the Tresckows 30, and the Schulenburgs 41.Vases, Tea Sets, Cigars, His Own Watercolours
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:14 PM | Comments (0)
April 1, 2009
Understanding Twitter
I really don't get Twitter. It seems inane, slow and above all boring. Therefore, it was with great amusement that I saw the following cartoon:
For some reason, Twitter reminds me of the computer based telepathy described in the David Gerrold's War Against the Chtor series. I've mentioned this series before in Someone at the Pentagon has been reading David Gerrold. In the War Against the Chtor, telepathy comes from brain implants. However, it only allows you to read the mind of others with similar implants. Eventually, as you learn to use the implants you can switch minds with others that use them, and finally you disappear into a giant hive mind. When I read that, it didn't make any sense to me and I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to participate. Who would want to participate in a hive mind? Who would give up their privacy? Why want to read the mind of exhibitionist losers with weird thoughts and boring lives? I still wouldn't want to participate, but between live journal, twitter, Wikipedia, and open source / free software, I'm it is becoming easy to imagine others wanting to participate in such a project.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:05 AM | Comments (0)
My weird exchange with TD Bank
It seems that TD Bank can get you prepaid bank by mail envelopes, but only if you ask a few times and you know in advance that they do it. Otherwise they lie to you and tell you they don't have any. The following is a recent exchange I had with them using their bank mail system.
_____________________________________________________________________________
To: Customer Care
Subject: Bank by mail
I do all my banking by mail ever since moving away from any nearby commerce bank (bought by TD Bank) branches.
I now need more deposit slips May I have the personalized ones? I also need more bank by mail envelopes. Sometimes it seems that these envelopes are prepaid and other times not. I would appreciate prepaid enveloped.
___________________________________________________________________________
To: Customer Care
Subject: re: RE: Bank by mail
Thank you for contacting us
Your deposit ticket order request has been received and processed. Please allow 7-10 business days for delivery.
We do not currently offer the prepaid envelopes for deposits.
If you have any further questions, please contact us via email or call 1-888-751-9000 to speak with a Customer Service Representative, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Regards,
Kevin
TD Bank On-Line
E-mail Specialist
_________________________________________________________________
To: Customer Care
Subject: re: RE: Bank by mail
Thank you. I received the deposit slips in the mail yesterday. I don't understand the policy on the prepaid envelopes. When I went to the branch on 14th street and 5th avenue in NYC a few days ago, they were able to give me a few of these envelopes. Why can't you send me some?
________________________________________________________________
Sender Customer Care
Subject re: RE: Bank by mail
Message Thank you for contacting us
A request has been sent to have some pre-paid deposit mailing envelopes sent to you. Please allow 7-10 business days for delivery.
If you have any further questions, please contact us via email or call 1-888-751-9000 to speak with a Customer Service Representative, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Regards,
Cookie
TD Bank On-Line
E-mail Specialist
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:39 AM | Comments (1)
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Boing Boing (Ant slaves' murderous rebellions) tips me off to a new paper, FIRST EVIDENCE FOR SLAVE REBELLION: ENSLAVED ANT WORKERS SYSTEMATICALLY KILL THE BROOD OF THEIR SOCIAL PARASITE PROTOMOGNATHUS AMERICANUS.. It seems that Protomognathus Americanus is a species where "Slave-making ant queens invade host colonies and kill or eject all adult host ants. Host workers, which eclose [The emergence of an adult insect from a pupal case or an insect larva from an egg.] from the remaining brood, are tricked into caring for the parasite brood". But in a phenomena not yet documented in other ant species like this, from time to time the victimized acts have a coping strategy after the attack. Instead of normally and dutifully following the pheromone directions of their captors, from time to time there is a "rebellion of enslaved Temnothorax workers, which kill two-thirds of the female pupae of the slave-making ant Protomognathus americanus. Thereby, slaves decrease the long-term parasite impact on surrounding related host colonies. This novel antiparasite strategy of enslaved workers constitutes a new level in the coevolutionary battle after host colony defense has failed. Our discovery is analogous to recent findings in hosts of avian brood parasites where perfect mimicry of parasite eggs leads to the evolution of chick recognition as a second line of defense."
How astonishing. Creation a more diverse place than I imagined. Slavery is an anthropomorphic idea to describe this, but seems an accurate analogy because of the rebellion aspect. I knew ants use aphids like cows to produce foods that they cannot. I thought this was good for both species, and maybe it is. But this too seems harsher than I had imagined. It seems ants clip aphid wings to control adults and produce chemicals to keep them from growing in the young in the first place. Maybe that's analogous to chaining up the family dog or maybe that's like chaining up the family slave. I'm not sure.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:05 AM | Comments (0)