tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23743825171809633762024-02-19T15:11:44.109-08:00Neon Derby CarsAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.comBlogger112125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-74878429193043341122014-02-09T11:10:00.000-08:002014-03-31T08:47:49.105-07:00Oh, right wing. How many times am I going to fall for your shenanigans? Obamacare/CBO edition.Part 247 of my 596-part series, "Crap, Snookered Again."<br />
<br />
From <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/02/05/congressional-budget-office-sends-death-blow-to-obamacare/">John Podhoretz</a> (referring to the recent <a href="http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/45010-Outlook2014.pdf">CBO report</a> (PDF)): <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Even more damaging is this projection: “About 31 million nonelderly residents of the United States are likely to be without health insurance in 2024, roughly one out of every nine such residents.”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Why? Because, in selling the bill to the American people in a nationally televised September 2009 address, President Obama said the need for ObamaCare was urgent precisely because “there are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”</blockquote>
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I should have caught the sleight of hand on the first pass. Podhoretz clearly wants the reader to take away the idea that Obamacare won't make a dent in the problem of the uninsured, which seems absurd on its face. I didn't figure it out for myself, and went scouring the Internet for answers. I found them at <a href="http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2014/02/john-podhoretz-doesnt-exactly-explain.html">No More Mr. Nice Blog</a>. Thanks!<br />
<br />
The CBO is referring to "uninsured residents of the United States," while the second refers to "uninsured American citizens." In the report, the CBO actually estimates that there will be 25M fewer uninsured Americans thanks to Obamacare. By pretending we were starting with about half as many uninsured as we actually have, Podhoretz tries to make these 25M Americans disappear. Given that I was three pages into the search results for that quote before I found the answer, it seems he was successful.<br />
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So, who are these 31M uninsured?<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>30% : Illegal immigrants (who are specifically excluded from benefitting from Obamacare)</li>
<li>5% : People who can't get on Medicaid because their states haven't expanded it.</li>
<li>20% : People eligible for Medicaid, who don't enroll</li>
<li>45% : People who have access to coverage, but don't take it.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
Honestly, that 45% is higher than I expected. They'll be the ones paying the fines under Obamacare, a way higher number than I would have guessed.<br />
<br />
Still, it's surprising to suddenly discover that Republicans are now angry that Obamacare doesn't cover illegal immigrants.<br />
<br />
Now, the CBO in context:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
CBO and JCT estimate that the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA will markedly increase the number of nonelderly people who have health insurance--by about 13 million in 2014, 20 million in 2015, and 25 million in each of the subsequent years through 2024 (see Table B-2). Still, according to the estimates by CBO and JCT, about 31 million nonelderly residents of the United States are likely to be without health insurance in 2024, roughly one out of every nine such residents. Of that group, about 30 percent are expected to be unauthorized immigrants and thus ineligible for most Medicaid benefits and for the exchange subsidies; about 20 percent will be eligible for Medicaid but will choose not to enroll; about 5 percent will be ineligible for Medicaid where they live in a state that has chosen not to expand coverage; and about 45 percent will not purchase insurance even though they have access through an employer, an exchange, or directly from an insurer. <a href="http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/45010-Outlook2014.pdf">[page 107]</a></blockquote>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-62202352868049639552013-07-01T06:54:00.000-07:002013-07-01T06:54:14.638-07:00Yeah, so global warming is still a thing...Wait. Really? I have a blog?<br />
<br />
On with the blogging!<br />
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There's long been this meme floating about that says "global warming stopped in 1998." Now, 1998 was a huge recordbreaker of a year, so the meme is clearly stacking the deck. But since about 2001, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly_1880-2012.svg">surface temperature record</a> seems to have plateaued. That's not unusual. Within the long-term rise, there are plenty of areas in the record that can be interpreted as "pauses" (<a href="http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/2013/escalator.gif">observe</a>).<br />
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But there are a lot of short-term variables that can hide (or exaggerate, as in 1998) the long-term trend. The three largest ones are the el Nino / la Nina phenomenon, solar variability, and volcanic eruptions. Despite being bad at math, I was curious to know what the temperature record might look like if those factors were subtracted out.<br />
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Fortunately, two dudes already did the math for me, and published a <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022/pdf/1748-9326_6_4_044022.pdf">paper</a> (which I found via <a href="http://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/gwfactors-studies/">this blog post</a>, which is written by someone smarter and goes into greater depth). So, what does it look like when we remove the short-term noise from the global warming signal?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjijQVqENyLCccejx7GQJr-MA1ggYjQ4Qr1m_2t5KO6sDMbMHN4kEddBw3iVLXih50qnZ2JtE3BaiNOg225EjidrcxZntviTOAyP5KsWpQDOb1Xvvj3nxO7Fuhht22h61Jz4gHTlfyMhJdi/s355/adjusted_temperature_record.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjijQVqENyLCccejx7GQJr-MA1ggYjQ4Qr1m_2t5KO6sDMbMHN4kEddBw3iVLXih50qnZ2JtE3BaiNOg225EjidrcxZntviTOAyP5KsWpQDOb1Xvvj3nxO7Fuhht22h61Jz4gHTlfyMhJdi/s320/adjusted_temperature_record.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
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So no, global warming hasn't "stopped." It's just gotten sneakier.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-71178342574524968752012-11-03T20:59:00.000-07:002013-07-01T06:57:41.647-07:00And this is why you remember to hit "publish" when you're done.<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Originally written just prior to the 2012 election.</i></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I just googled "Romney landslide." Given that ol' Nate Silver is predicting an 80% chance of Obama winning (83% as of this writing) I just want to get the results down, for the record:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/10/09/romney-will-win-in-landslide-las-vegas-oddsmaker-doubles-down-on-prediction/">http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/10/09/romney-will-win-in-landslide-las-vegas-oddsmaker-doubles-down-on-prediction/</a> (<span style="background-color: white;">Wayne Allyn Root is a capitalist evangelist and serial entrepreneur.</span>) Gives a lot of hunches and perceived trends, but mostly focuses on, "hey, I've called races correctly before".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Mark Tooley predicts a Romney landslide, but only among the (increasingly irrelevant) white evangelical demographic. Doesn't really count.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/dick-morris/264935-here-comes-the-landslide">http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/dick-morris/264935-here-comes-the-landslide</a> : Dick Morris, possibly the wrongest person in politics, predicts Romney landslide. Nate Silver's response to the prediction? "Sell Romney on InTrade!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For the record, he's predicting (as of 10/30, eight days before the election), that Romney will take Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado, perhaps also Ohio, New Hampshire, and Iowa. He's calling Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin the new battleground states. He is also predicting 53 Republicans, 47 Democrats in the Senate. I believe he'll be proven somewhere between "thoroughly" and "laughably" on the wrongness scale, but we'll see.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/polling-points-to-romney-landslide">http://www.examiner.com/article/polling-points-to-romney-landslide</a> David W. Thornton has Romney winning <a href="http://www.270towin.com/2012_election_predictions.php?mapid=XJi">331 to 207</a>. Prediction seems to hinge entirely on "the Incumbent Rule", which says that undecided voters mostly break for the challenger. There have been a few famous elections where the rule obviously held, but for the most part it seems to be a myth.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"David W. Thornton is a freelance writer and commercial pilot. He writes from the perspective of a conservative Christian and economic libertarian. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia and Emmanuel College."</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The laughably awful Unskewed Polls is predicting the widest Electoral College margin of anyone I can find, <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/mitt-romney-leading-all-11-key-swing-states-qstarnews-poll">337-201</a> in favor of Romney. Their prediction strategy -- actually, their entire reason for existing -- is to recalculate actual polls, based on the assumption that every single polling organization (including right-leaning Rassmussen and Fox News) are oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 21px;">Other Unskewed predictions to test against: Romney wins Florida 52%-44%. Romney wins Colorado, 52%-46%. Romney wins Iowa, 49.4%-48.6% (too close to round). Romney wins Nevada, 57%-42%. Romney wins New Hampshire, 48%-47%, North Carolina 57%-42%, Ohio 50-49%, Pennsylvania 50-47%, VA 52-46%. Note, these predictions not only include the "unskewed" poll numbers, but also assume a 3/1 advantage for Romney among undecided voters. It's hard to imagine this being even close to right.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 21px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For a similar exercise, visit: <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/11/03/five_delusional_right_wingers_who_have_mitt_in_a_landslide/">http://www.salon.com/2012/11/03/five_delusional_right_wingers_who_have_mitt_in_a_landslide/</a> </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-66546264121090040642012-07-05T11:50:00.002-07:002012-07-05T11:50:43.973-07:00Mia Love: Hater<i><b>Note:</b> Mia Love is running for Utah's 4th congressional district against Jim Matheson, who it appears I will once again be forced to vote for.</i> <br />
<br />
Candidate Mia love has <a href="http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/54398316-90/love-utah-million-billion.html.csp">gone on record</a> to say that her priority is to "balance the budget," and to explain just how she'll do that. Setting aside the fact that the country has had a truly balanced budget for perhaps fifteen of the last two-hundred years, I'll admit that deficit spending is a problem. It's not <i>the</i> problem, as Love seems to think, but it's a problem.<br />
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But given the programs she's got in her sights, her solutions are akin to losing weight by taking a chainsaw to your leg.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Mia Love’s targets (via the Salt Lake Tribune): </b><br /><br />Eliminate HUD housing programs.<br /><br />Cut food subsidies by 50 percent<br /><br />End K-12 subsidies </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
End college assistance<br /><br />Cut Earned Income Tax Credit in half<br /><br />End Environmental Protection Agency grants<br /><br />Eliminate Corporation for National & Community Service (includes AmeriCorps) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Love would also privatize Amtrak, the air traffic control system, and the Army Corps of Engineers; end subsidies to the Public Broadcasting Service; eliminate various energy-efficiency and research programs; and cut various health department grants by half.</blockquote>
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Her list is a Who's Who of the investments this country makes in itself. Cuts in education? <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/reports/2010_Benefit_Cost_Report.pdf">Cuts to the EPA</a>? Raising taxes on the poorest Americans by cutting the EITC? Make it harder -- or even impossible -- for the poor to find affordable housing? Stop refurbishing buildings to be <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/08/31/206655/creating-jobs-and-savings-with-energy-efficiency/">more energy efficient</a>? It seems like Mia Love's typifies the thinking of the modern Republican Party: If it makes our society more humane or invests in the future, it's got to go.<br />
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And here's the kicker. From the story: "[Love's plan] doesn’t touch the Defense Department, an area Love said she needs to understand better before recommending cuts." But she understands HUD well enough to eliminate it? She understands the EPA well enough to virtually defund it? <br />
<br />
<h4>
What we should do instead</h4>
Austerity has shrunk every economy where it's been tried, so cutting a
dollar from anti-poverty programs is the same as taking a dollar from
the till of the grocery store the recipient shops at. That's income the
grocery store won't be paying taxes on, and if they lay off a worker as
a result of the lost sales, you betcha we'll lose even more income with
which to pay our debts. By contrast, the money we send to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts has little stimulus value; it will most likely sit in a bank account or go to pay down debt.<br />
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<br />
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Further, the current national deficit is caused in part by the stagnant economy. When the economy is poor, wages go down which drives down revenues. Meanwhile, many of the anti-poverty programs like food stamps and unemployment need to pay out more. Speed up the economy, and both those problems are solved.<br />
<br />
The "tough choice" may sound morally satisfying, but we're trying to run
an economy, not put on some sort of Puritan morality play. The "smart
choice" would be to continue assisting the people who are struggling,
raise taxes on the "job creators" for doing such a sucky job creating
jobs, and invest in the laundry list of things that will put us on the
road to future economic solvency. <br />
<br />
That list includes health care and nutrition programs for poor children
(making them more productive down the road), investing in infrastructure
(especially by remodeling buildings to increase their energy efficiency
and expanding mass transit and Internet services), increasing funding
for basic scientific research, and tightening regulations against the
pollutants that have the most damaging effects on human health. For
example, the new MACT regulations are supposed to drive up energy costs,
but for every dollar added to the nation's electric bill, about $10
will be subtracted from our health care bill.<br />
<br />
We should also be cutting expenditures where it doesn't make sense. The
DoD is bloated and needs to be radically pared back or given a
secondary mission. The justice department needs to stop wasting money
trying to control marijuana. The FDA could do it way cheaper. Farm
subsidies to any corporate entity with a budget of over $10M/year is
just stupid. <br />
<br />
But for the Love of Mia, cutting support for people who are trying to get an education? Cutting research on the next generation of energy technology? How does that make any sense?<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-46391400688458389272012-06-27T07:10:00.000-07:002012-06-27T07:10:04.602-07:00Because you care what I think about lotteriesA brief discussion with a friend who now lives in a lottery-enabled state (read: not Utah) got me thinking about lotteries in general.
In the mind of the average taxpayer, the lottery is some kind of blessed magical fairy creature: the government gets revenue to provide services, and you don't have to pay for any of it. Yay!<br />
<br />
But the reality is a lot uglier, more like a slimy cave troll: it raises the effective tax rate on people who are simultaneously poor, desperate, and mathematically challenged, while lowering tax rates for people who can better afford to pay. So it's inherently regressive. The fact that it's voluntary doesn't mitigate the ickiness much.<br />
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I went looking for an article that <a href="http://www.durangobill.com/PowerballOdds.html">estimated the ROI for a lottery ticket</a>. It's about <b>fifty cents on the dollar</b> once you account for income taxes and the fact that the cash payout is much lower than the advertised prize. Yes, the cash payout is the one to plug into the equation. Just roll with it.<br />
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But even that may be overstating the value. I'm sure people buy tickets for lots of reasons, but to simplify the discussion, let's assume that every person who buys a ticket does so to receive a small chance of never having to work another day in their life. It sounds fairly reasonable, but it entirely changes the effective value of a lottery ticket. To see why, we need to account for something called...<br />
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<br />
<h3>
The Law of Diminishing Returns</h3>
The law of diminishing returns comes out of economics 101. It says that, the more you have of something, the less valuable another one of those things is.
Take eyeballs. If you have no eyeballs, and someone fits you up with a working eyeball, that eyeball is very, very valuable. Now say that you have one eyeball, and someone fits you with a second eyeball. You might end up with a wider range of vision, but it's not nearly as dramatic a change in your life. Now say that someone hooks you up with a third, fourth, and fifth eyeball. You look at them with all your eyes, and think to yourself, "how are you being helpful?"<br />
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It works similarly for television sets, bottles of beer, cars, and laptops. In fact, most useful things become dramatically less useful as you get more of them. This includes money.<br />
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Say that your income rises from $0/month to $1000/month. Now, rather than starving in the street, you can suddenly afford food and a roof over your head. Maybe bus fare as well, if you're lucky.
Now let's raise your income again, from $1000/month to $2000/month. Now you can afford slightly better food, a slightly classier roof over your head, a car instead of a bus, perhaps health insurance, and the occasional luxury item.
Now let's raise your income again, to $3000/month. You use it to start buying organic food, a house of your own, a slightly nicer car, more comprehensive health insurance, and start saving for retirement.<br />
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I could go on like this all day, but the point is that, each time your income is raised, you use the new money to buy less value than the old money was buying. I'm 35, so let's assume I'll live another fifty years. How big a lottery jackpot would I need to give me $3000/month for the rest of my life? About $1.8M (pretending the jackpot doesn't accrue interest). A jackpot of $18M would give me $30K a month, which is more than I could imagine spending on myself.<br />
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So if your goal is a comfortable income, a $100M jackpot is barely more valuable than a $20M jackpot, which is only a fair amount more valuable than a $2M jackpot. In the astonishingly unlikely event that you win the lottery, most of the "return" comes in the form of a useless pile of money piled on top of the much smaller pile of money that you would actually miss if it disappeared.<br />
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<br />
<h3>
What does this mean for you, gentle ticket-buyer?</h3>
<ol>
<li>This cannot be stressed enough: DO NOT BUY LOTTERY TICKETS!!!</li>
<li>It would be better for participants if lotteries were restructured so that, instead of having one $300M jackpot, it had 300 $1M jackpots (or perhaps even 3000 $100K jackpots). If people are dumb enough to buy these tickets in the hopes of gaining a better life, let's give them a slightly better shot at it.</li>
<li>The law of diminishing returns can also apply to other forms of gambling, or any game where money is on the line. If you're playing "Deal or No Deal," it suggests that you should walk away way sooner than an ordinary ROI calculation would suggest. Remember that the ROI doesn't distinguish between a 100% chance at $500K and a 50% chance at $1M. But the latter will make a somewhat smaller impact on your life.</li>
<ol>
</ol>
</ol>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-76663025895589900802012-05-08T11:29:00.000-07:002012-05-08T11:29:47.921-07:00Self-driving cars: Safety and Liability<p><strong>Why would we want self-driving cars?</strong> Self-driving cars could reduce auto fatalities, let people be more productive with their driving time, lower stress, liberate people who aren’t able to drive for themselves, and do away with the concept of the ‘designated driver’. Later on, when self-driving cars dominate, they’ll be able to talk to each other to reduce traffic congestion by coordinating maneuvers and by letting each other know which roads are too congested. Lots of other, more speculative goodies may also be there for the taking.</p>
<p>Trust me, you’re going to love it.</p>
<p><strong>So where’s the problem?</strong> In two words: legal liability. By removing the driver from the equation, the auto manufacturer is making the car’s on-board software (which is part of the product they’ve sold) responsible for any accidents that might occur. Even if the overall accident rate drops significantly, the manufacturers can’t succeed if they’re paying out several million dollars each time the system fails.</p>
<p>Further, you can expect that in many of the collisions between human-driven and automated cars, the human will be at fault but the judicial system will convict the machine instead. So even a perfect system doesn’t eliminate the liability issue.</p>
<p>There are other problems as well. Each state in the US has a thicket of laws explaining in detail how a driving vehicle should behave, and most of these laws assume that there is a human at the wheel. Manufacturers aren’t going to field self-driving cars in any state where it’s unclear whether the “driver” spoken of in the laws refers to the person sitting behind the wheel or the software that actually controls the car.</p>
<p><strong>You got a solution?</strong> I have some ideas. I’m nowhere close to being an expert in this domain, so be very skeptical of them. </p>
<p>Let’s start by certifying the self-driving systems. I’m imagining four levels of certification:</p>
<ol>
<li>Experimental Autonomous Vehicle</li>
<li>Highway-only Autonomous Vehicle</li>
<li>General-purpose Autonomous Vehicle</li>
<li>Driverless Vehicle</li>
</ol>
<p>Level 1 is meant for manufacturers who are still refining their technology, and for new, incompletely tested software builds for existing hardware configurations. These cars could only be used in self-driving mode if there was an alert employee of the manufacturer sitting behind the wheel, ready to take control of the car in an emergency.</p>
<p>Level 2 is meant for public use, but autonomous driving mode would only be available on the highway. My thinking here is that normal highway driving is a much easier problem to crack than driving through a neighborhood. The driver would not have to be paying attention to the vehicle, but he or she would still need to be able to take over and operate the vehicle at a moment’s notice. </p>
<p>This level is meant as an interim step on the way to fully autonomous vehicles. There would still need to be an awake, licensed, sober driver sitting behind the wheel.</p>
<p>Level 3 is much like Level 2. The only real difference is that autonomous mode could be engaged on surface streets as well as highways.</p>
<p>Level 4 (Driverless Vehicle) should be self-explanatory: the person using the vehicle does not require a license, and doesn’t have to be able to operate the vehicle. Puke-your-guts-out drunk? No problem. Nine years old? No problem. Blind in one eye, can’t see out the other? The roads are yours to command.</p>
<p>Level 4 also opens up the possibility of microcar delivery services. So when you order a pizza, a small electric vehicle – perhaps large enough to hold ten extra-large pizza boxes – delivers it to your driveway. So long as there are legacy drivers (a.k.a. “humans”) on the road, these little cars are going to have to drive very defensively.</p>
<p>But all these levels require some sort of certification, to ensure that they’re safe being used in those ways. I’m guessing this would be the responsibility of the NTSB, but what do I know? Now, testing in the real world isn’t easy. Human drivers are actually pretty safe, (2009 passenger fatalities were 1.14 per 100M vehicle miles) so you have to put a lot of miles on an autonomous car before you can show that it’s safer.</p>
<p>So I expect that much of the certification testing will be done in software, in virtual simulations that demonstrate the vehicle’s responses to different scenarios. This form of testing might be required for each new version of the onboard software. So the certifying agency is going to need a data center full of computers, and (if the testing regimen is going to be efficient) there will need to be standards for auto sensors so that they can be accurately be simulated.</p>
<p>Post-certification testing would be very helpful. If all the cars on the road were collecting and submitting data about the driving situations they get in, what choices they make, and how those choices succeeded or failed, new and dicey situations could quickly be added to the testing suite. Thus, the next version of the onboard software would be better able to handle those situations.</p>
<p>But the specifics of the testing regimen are less important than the results: vehicles that pass the tests and are certified for the appropriate level should be expected to be “safe.” For Level 1 (Experimental Vehicle), we might be lenient, targeting maybe 3 fatalities per 100M miles, meaning that they’re actually somewhat less safe than the average human driver. For Levels 2 and 3, we’d expect a much higher safety standard, say 0.5 fatalities per 100M miles. Level 4 would need to be dramatically safer, to the point where people would eventually consider it irresponsible to question the vehicle’s judgment. A target of 0.05 fatalities per 100M miles would reduce auto deaths by over 95%. I think that’s the sort of safety standard that would be needed before you could persuade the public that we should trust these vehicles completely.</p>
<p>Now, these safety standards wouldn’t be static. As we gain familiarity with the problem space, it might be possible to dramatically tighten the standards, saving even more lives. Or we might discover that, however we try, we can’t make an automated vehicle that is significantly safer than your average human driver.</p>
<p><strong>Legislation:</strong> Once the certification is in place, it’s much easier to write appropriate legislation. Here’s what I propose to get the legal liability issues out of the way: If the vehicle has been certified, and the vehicle is being used as described in the given level, both the driver and the auto manufacturer are absolved of any legal liability. Their insurance company will pay their auto damages and medical costs, and the other driver’s insurance will pay those damages.</p>
<p>For Levels 1, 2, and 3, from a legal standpoint, the person operating the vehicle should be considered the driver. For level 4, the vehicle itself should be considered the driver, and laws that presume the driver to be a human being will not apply.</p>
<p>The bigger point here is, this technology presents huge opportunities to make our lives better, and it would be a shame to let legal liabilities block it for decades. Manufacturers will need some immunities from lawsuits (or at least caps on payouts) before it’s safe to enter the market, but that immunity should come at a price: they need to show that their cars are much safer than human drivers.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-25452364594369977132012-04-27T06:07:00.001-07:002012-04-27T06:07:36.600-07:00Why did Henry Ford pay better wages?<div class="comment-content">
<p>[response to <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/minimum_wage_misconceptions/singleton/">Minimum-wage Misconceptions</a> over at Salon.com, wherein I put on my Pretend Economist Hat.]</p>
<p>Nice article, but I do want to say something about Henry Ford. I've often heard this motivation dismissed as mythical: Ford did not raise wages in order to create demand for automobiles within his company.</p>
<p>I suspect that's true, because when you look at the economics of such a move, it doesn't make any sense. First, there's nothing stopping your workers from spending the wage increase on the many things that aren't automobiles. Second, there's nothing stopping them from buying their autos from your competitors. Finally, even if you ignore those (huge) problems and assume that every dollar you send out in increased wages is applied to the purchase of one of your cars, you're still losing money hand over fist. If your profit margin on an auto is 20%, then for every dollar you put into raising wages, you can't get more than twenty cents back.</p>
<p>If Ford's goal was to use that money to increase demand for automobiles, it would have been much more sensible to use it to lower the selling price of his cars.</p>
<p>Ford's real motivation in raising wages, as I understand it, was to reduce employee turnover, and also to act as a bonus in exchange for some demands that he put on his employees that his competitors didn't (no alcohol, no gambling, learn English).</p>
<p>So if you're a single company, who mostly sells its products to people outside the company, raising is a losing strategy for boosting demand.</p>
<p>But raising wages does make a lot more sense when discussing a national economy, where most of the goods and services being sold are sold to your fellow citizens. In that case, most of the money a company loses in the form of higher wages will come back to it in the form of increased demand for their products.</p>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-84654326946536268692012-04-06T18:29:00.001-07:002012-04-06T18:30:36.251-07:00Mitt Romney is telling the truth about gas prices.I just heard that Mitt is denying his big oil ties, his support for oil subsidies, his opposition to increased fuel economy standards. Instead, he says, Obama's "attack ad" is simply Obama refusing to take responsibility for the fact that gas prices have doubled under Obama's watch.<br />
<br />
At first, I was incensed. Then I realized, he was actually paying Obama a backhanded compliment. Check out this here chart:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/12/442536/wall-street-journal-and-koch-cato-agree-not-obama-fault-crude-oil-prices-have-increased/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwhbmfrSxi48605Mukebv-dPjypI5P5sdTVnMdwo8YLKaJXzu2H3roM7P0QAVrjtEY_5p6KNQt6ZuflmvrMzzcARWdOh29H3aQ171ZWOqDbjXyH8GGFVrd8UYr4KV40PMgLAi3ULhYVWR0/s1600/drilling_gas_prices_chart1.jpg" width="400" /><br />
</a></div><br />
Hey, he's right! Gas prices have doubled between December 2008 and the now times. But does that mammoth dip just before Obama took office look a little suspicious? <br />
<br />
Obama took office just as the economy bottomed out, and just as gas prices hit their lowest point in several years. These two things are not a coincidence: when the economy struggles, demand for gasoline goes down, so gas prices drop. As the economy has recovered, demand has risen.<br />
<br />
So to the extent that Obama can take credit for the economic recovery, he also shares the blame for rising gas prices. I guess Mitt's saying that Obama should have done right by American drivers by keeping the economy hobbled.<br />
<br />
Mitt has to know this. He and his economic advisers can't be quite that ignorant, but I'm sure he <i>can</i> imagine that the voting public can be that ignorant.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-43789694647608711292012-03-21T07:08:00.000-07:002012-03-21T07:08:48.497-07:00What is a "luxury?"Cross-posted from the comments board of the WSJ:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>StlJoe wrote, "I didn't have a cell phone until I was over 30 and yet somehow I had been working for 8 years." <br />
<br />
::golf clap:: <br />
<br />
It's one thing to "not have a cell phone." A cell phone is a luxury. But when you're job hunting, having some way for an employer to contact you to schedule a job interview is an absolute necessity. And I'll bet $10,000 (that's the standard Republican betting rate, right?) that at no point in your job hunt did you have to apologize to an employer for not having a phone number. I'll bet you didn't ever have to put a homeless shelter down as your primary mailing address either. <br />
<br />
If you consider a cell phone to be a "luxury" that you could easily forego, it's because you've always had a land line for conducting the necessary business of life. Can you even imagine trying to run your life via the payphone half a block away? Or begging phone time from your neighbor three doors down every day? <br />
<br />
Have you even bothered to try imagining it? <br />
<br />
In other words, have you ever questioned your privileged viewpoint? <br />
<br />
Here's a handy mnemonic: "No cell phone, no problem. No phone service, no job." <br />
<br />
I'll bet you'd be horrified by the idea of government paying for internet access as well, even though the Internet is now the primary means for hunting for jobs, educating citizens, contacting government officials, and a whole host of other activities critical to being a part of modern society. I could talk about this until I'm blue in the face, and you'll just respond with, "I ain't paying poor people to surf Facebook all day."</blockquote><br />
It always angers me when Republicans disparage simple, cost-effective ways to improve the lives of poor people -- even if these services increase their ability to find and keep employment -- as "paying for luxuries." Short-sighted, blinkered... grumble grumble.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-7970995920316596092012-01-22T12:36:00.000-08:002012-01-22T12:36:33.015-08:00390 parts per million. Do you know how small that is?I see, over and over again, the claim that CO2 is less than 400ppm (0.04%) of the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. That's entirely correct. The conclusion we are meant to draw is that such a tiny fraction of a sliver of a gas can't possibly have a noticeable effect on the climate.<br />
<br />
QED, right? Can a very small amount of a substance dramatically alter the behavior of a complex system?<br />
<br />
200-300mg of cyanide constitutes a lethal dose. A large human weighs perhaps 100kg. So the lethal dose of cyanide is about 3ppm.<br />
<br />
0.1 mL of dimethyl mercury can be fatal. An adult has perhaps 30 L of volume, which figures out to about 33ppm.<br />
<br />
The LD50* of ricin is 22 parts per *billion*, or 0.02ppm.<br />
<br />
So such an argument, standing by itself, carries zero weight.<br />
<br />
* the dose that kills 50% of the subjects it's given to.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-71035245992081167982011-12-22T16:25:00.000-08:002011-12-22T16:25:16.728-08:00Are Japanese people just saner than us?[context: someone claimed that the US's high incarceration rate might be a product of more effective law enforcement]<br />
<br />
That's an interesting theory. It kinda sounds sensible, and you can make a theoretical argument for it. After all, as one of the richest countries on the planet, wouldn't we be able to afford more security than other countries, in the form of better law enforcement and lower crime rates?<br />
<br />
Let's test it, insofar as we can, by comparing it with other countries. If our superior incarceration rate is a sign of excellent law enforcement, then we should also see America as having a surprisingly low rate of violent crime.<br />
<br />
Let's pick Japan.* According to Wikipedia, the US has 743 prisoners per 100,000 of population. Japan holds only 58 per 100,000.<br />
<br />
If you think about it, the theory is already starting to come apart. US law enforcement might be better at catching criminals than Japanese law enforcement. But nearly thirteen times better? Sounds fishy. Law enforcement's ability to find people to incarcerate can't be the sole difference.<br />
<br />
Now let's turn to crime statistics. The United States has a homicide rate of 4.8/100,000 (2010, according to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate">Wikipedia</a> ). That's really safe compared to some third world and developing countries (Honduras is #1 with 78/100,000), but you don't see any European Union countries beating us (Sweden 3.5, Ireland 1.25, Germany 0.84).<br />
<br />
So we're middle of the pack worldwide, and practically the bottom of the pack of relatively well-off nations.<br />
<br />
Where is Japan? 0.83/100,000. And they are unique in that their statistics count murder attempts and "planned murders" along with actual murders. Their real homicide rate is significantly lower.<br />
<br />
The US has an only slightly larger police force**, not nearly enough to explain anything.<br />
So it's not that our law enforcement is better, and it's not that we chose to buy more safety. Japan seems to simply have way fewer murderers, whether inside or outside the prison system.<br />
<br />
So here are the possibilities I can think of: <br />
<br />
<ul><li>Japanese people are just better, more moral people.</li>
<li>The Japanese invoke the death penalty far more often than we do. (Okay, I checked, and they don't. Since 1993, they've only been executing 1-7 people per year. Before that, they were executing people at a pretty good clip, though.)</li>
<li>Something about American society breeds violence.</li></ul><br />
I vote for option 3. For more details, here's <a href="http://neonderbycars.blogspot.com/2010/05/spirit-level-why-greater-equality-makes.html">a blog post I wrote</a> about a book called "The Spirit Level."<br />
<br />
<br />
* not at random, mind you... I'm making a point here, though other countries like Finland and Iceland could be used to make the same point.<br />
<br />
** 233 officers/100,000 vs. 197 officers/100,000 in Japan. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... It's not really significant when trying to explain the US's 13 times higher incarceration rate and nearly six times higher homicide rate.<br />
<br />
*** Seems to be the case. JapanAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-68732086708130259302011-11-12T08:37:00.000-08:002011-11-15T06:58:58.506-08:00Occupy Mayor Becker's inbox<b>Update:</b> The Mayor (or a designated representative) responds below.<br />
<br />
<br />
Occupy Salt Lake is being kicked out of Pioneer Park in the wake of <a href="http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/52896438-78/occupy-park-protesters-pioneer.html.csp">the death of a (probably) homeless man in their camp.</a> I disagree with the decision, so I wrote the Mayor's office.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Mister Mayor,<br />
<br />
A man died. I understand that, and I take this tragedy seriously, just as you do. But Chief Burbank appears to be casting the blame on the Occupy Salt Lake encampment, before the results of the autopsy have even been released to the public. The decision to disperse the camp is wrong.<br />
<br />
I haven't camped overnight, but I've spent a lot of time in the encampment during the evenings and gone on several marches. I've donated food and helped people set up tents and other facilities. My impression has always been that the homeless people there are happy that the encampment allows them one place in the city where they can safely and legally set up a tent and spend the night.<br />
<br />
Source: <br />
<br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VU1bV2eY81U" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
Chief Burbank says we're "affecting" the city's ability to provide services, even though he admits that the homeless services of Salt Lake are inadequate to meet the needs of the population they're trying to serve. He claims that nobody has died in Pioneer Park in his memory, and that were it not for the encampment, nobody would have died there this year. He ignores the fact that fifty-plus people have died from homelessness in each of the last two years. So why would he expect that this death would have been prevented, rather than simply moved to some quiet, out of the way freeway bypass or Jordan River encampment? By the same logic, thousands of people die at the University Hospital each year...<br />
<br />
He also seemed to claim in the video that the new, stricter anti-panhandling ordinances have somehow benefited the homeless population. I fail to see how; it may reduce the number of complaints against homeless people, but it does so only by driving them back into the shadows. We have criminalized homelessness in this city, which angers me and breaks my heart.<br />
<br />
The services we provide to our homeless citizens are inadequate, especially for those who -- for various reasons that we probably shouldn't pass judgment on -- choose not to use the shelters. This death -- in fact, the death of any homeless person -- ought to be used as an opportunity to point out this inadequacy and lobby for more comprehensive services. Instead, I feel like the city has closed ranks and scapegoated the encampment, thereby throwing the problematic corpse in the unshowered hippies' backyard. In doing so, you're forcing a needless confrontation with a group of people who are merely exercising their constitutional right to peaceably assemble. <br />
<br />
Dozens of homeless people are going to die this winter, if past is indeed prologue. Leave the camp open. Perhaps the services being provided by Occupy Salt Lake down at Pioneer Park will help prevent a few of those deaths. Perhaps it will bring the realities of homelessness out of the shadows. Like all of us, the homeless need more than food and shelter: they need a feeling of community, a place to belong. Giving them a place where they can come together to legally live, and keep their meager belongings without fear of having the police confiscate their campsite, could mean the world.<br />
<br />
I'm sure you're getting a lot of flack from the angry Right. Just know that, if you choose to support us, a lot of Salt Lake residents have your back. That goes double for anything you can do from the Mayor's office to create more comprehensive and compassionate services for our homeless residents.<br />
<br />
Bryce Anderson<br />
<br />
<a href="http://neonderbycars.blogspot.com">http://neonderbycars.blogspot.com</a><br />
<a href="http://twitter.com/darth_schmoo">http://twitter.com/darth_schmoo</a><br />
<br />
<br />
May you live in exponential times.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<b>Update:</b> Mayor Becker's response.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Dear Bryce:<br />
<br />
I appreciate your inquiry regarding Occupy Salt Lake City, and I hope this information is helpful, please let me know if you have any additional questions once you’ve had a chance to review. I am also including an earlier statement from Friday/November 11th which you may have already seen.<br />
<br />
The fact is I am absolutely supportive of the right to protest and for the Occupy movement to be in Salt Lake City. This is not a “shut down” of the Occupy Salt Lake City it is simply a rescinding of the exception for camping in parks.<br />
<br />
We continue to work with organizers to figure out how they can have a continuous physical presence to occupy both Pioneer Park and the Gallivan entrance Main Street while not actually camping overnight and we are very optimistic that we can work this out.<br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />
<br />
Ralph Becker<br />
<br />
Mayor<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
November 11th Statement:<br />
<br />
Mayor Ralph Becker and Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank reiterate their commitment to ensuring and protecting the essential rights of all residents of the City to peacefully assemble, protest and exercise free speech.<br />
<br />
The decision to discontinue allowing overnight camping on public property was precipitated by much more than the tragic death late Thursday night at the Occupy SLC encampment at Pioneer Park.<br />
<br />
Since the onset of camping at Pioneer Park, local law enforcement has responded to a dramatically increased amount of criminal activity in the park, and has made over 90 arrests in the area since early October. In addition, a melee involving over 30 people the night before the fatality led to four arrests and marked, along with the elevated criminal activity, an indication that public safety in and around the encampment has become increasingly questionable. Additionally, the amount of human and animal waste, as well as drug paraphernalia, is an escalating public health concern.<br />
<br />
Local social service providers and advocates for Salt Lake City’s homeless population have decried the contention made by Occupy SLC that the group is somehow providing services not already available in the area. On Friday, Pamela Atkinson, an advocate for Utah’s homeless population, addressed the group on this issue.<br />
<br />
“Many of our homeless friends have great need, but meeting those needs takes a certain amount of training, education and expertise,” Atkinson said. “We need to take care of our homeless friends in the proper way, with the most expert care that we have and this kind of tent city is not the kind of environment that helps people. You may provide food here and a caring kind of attitude, but that is not sufficient.”<br />
<br />
A Salt Lake Tribune story (see it here), published later on Friday, included statements from shelter operators that confirmed Atkinson’s assurance that shelters and social service providers in the area of the Pioneer Park encampment were under capacity and available to provide accommodations and meals.<br />
<br />
Salt Lake City works closely with individuals and agencies that provide services to the homeless community. Mayor Becker formed the Committee on Homelessness last year to address the concerns of those who are homeless in Salt Lake City. The committee is comprised of local, county and state representatives, as well as community advocates, and meets regularly with the Mayor.<br />
<br />
The City, through allocation of federal dollars, appropriates funding for Emergency Shelter Grants, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, and the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program. These programs aid those who are homeless those who are at risk of being homeless, and low-income families.</blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-62494925313482066962010-12-23T13:58:00.000-08:002010-12-23T13:58:24.456-08:00Net Neutrality@jasoninthehouse (Jason Chaffetz, R-UT3) has finally blocked me. Enjoy your impermeable echo chamber, sir.<br />
<br />
Chaffetz doesn't understand the Internet. But because he's a knee-jerk conservative, he knows exactly how to regulate it: not at all.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb7XZ7OYa5zTfroeYtS91pzx8Cjw1RsObA9_QEUN1q5XmAfXcMvPr7Y2ys5wIsnd2hm5hm9T16trhnvfvN8vM2jHLbFFz2M-j87SlsYlBJT768KJ42Jzv_7N0rxFrOC4pbcFzPgRYIGe-X/s1600/chaffetz_no_network_neutrality.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="91" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb7XZ7OYa5zTfroeYtS91pzx8Cjw1RsObA9_QEUN1q5XmAfXcMvPr7Y2ys5wIsnd2hm5hm9T16trhnvfvN8vM2jHLbFFz2M-j87SlsYlBJT768KJ42Jzv_7N0rxFrOC4pbcFzPgRYIGe-X/s400/chaffetz_no_network_neutrality.png" width="400" alt="jasoninthehouse (Jason Chaffetz): Classic government trying to regulate Internet. NO to 'net neutrality'. The internet works...'fixing' something that isn't broken." /></a></div><br />
In other words, given the choice of putting a corporation between citizens and the communication they want to access, and putting the government between corporations and the pile of protection money they'll earn from their privileged position, Chaffetz sided with the corporations.<br />
<br />
The thing is, the Internet doesn't work. So far, the U.S. has adopted a "business-friendly" low-regulation approach, as opposed to the market-unfriendly, "Internet as a public utility" approach of other industrialized nations. According to Chaffetz' free-marketeering*, our foresight should give us the best Internet on the planet. <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2007/06/23/true-or-false-u-s-s-broadband-penetration-is-lower-than-even-estonia-s.html">Not one on par with Estonia's</a>. We pay more money for less speed than just about anyone in the industrialized world.<br />
<br />
Quick note for anyone new to Net Neutrality: It's the idea that Internet providers shouldn't be able to create toll lanes for the Internet or prioritize the traffic of some services over others. For example, Microsoft shouldn't be able to sign a deal with Comcast to make their search page load faster than Google, nor should they be allowed to throttle traffic from Hulu in order to make it a worse customer experience and drive people to their own video on demand services.<br />
<br />
Or, to be more apocalyptic: <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5391712/net-neutrality-worst-case">here's the worst case scenario</a> if we don't have Net Neutrality.<br />
<br />
Or, to put it in terms that even Jason Chaffetz can understand: Imagine if George Soros bought out Comcast, and issued a directive to block customer access to a boatload of right wing sites like Heritage, Cato, FoxNews, RedState, WND, etc., while providing a fast lane straight to Rachael Maddow and Keith Olbermann. Nothing so dramatic has happened in the real world, but there have been plenty of cases of Internet carriers blocking access to information they didn't like, including pro-union sites and information critical of their business practices. Also, at the moment, Comcast is trying to extract money out of Netflix by threatening to charge them punitive<br />
<br />
I'm not surprised that yet another Republican has sided with the right of corporations to make fistfuls of cash, and against an open and democratic society. But I'm disappointed.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
* Which is similar to mouseketeering in both enthusiasm and lack of substance.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-30152194859514447062010-12-03T07:13:00.000-08:002010-12-03T07:13:12.649-08:00Is Obama or Palin more authoritarian? Facebook has the answer.Both released their obligatory "Hanukkah is awesome" greeting to Facebook this morning (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/barackobama/posts/107686952638637">Obama</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/sarah-palin/happy-hanukkah/466968173434">Palin</a>). The comment sections beneath the two highlights one very important difference between them.<br />
<br />
In real life, both politicians have an active, engaged, inflamed group of citizens who hate everything about them. But if Facebook were your guide, you would think that Sarah Palin had an approval rating hovering near 100%. The only hint of an opposition comes from the fact that any time a negative comment gets through, five or six of her devoted followers post a quick STFU HATER before it gets taken down.<br />
<br />
I know from firsthand experience that posting any hint of disagreement to Palin's notes on Facebook lead to immediate banning. I was polite, respectful, and cited my sources. Didn't matter. I only got two posts off before being banned. I still get to be counted among her "fans" and can still access to her deep thoughts on economic and foreign policy, but I must suffer them in silence.<br />
<br />
Obama has to be censoring the most inflammatory commentors. But you can still see lots of comments that question his patriotism, criticize him for specific acts, and generally remind us that there are people out there who really, really hate him.<br />
<br />
Being the President, it's hard to imagine that Obama just doesn't have the staff to police his Facebook activities effectively. The continued existence of the negative comments must stem from an outlook that values freedom of expression and the views of political opponents far more than Palin does.<br />
<br />
One more data point in support of my belief that Obama wants to be President of the Whole United States, while Palin is running for President of "Real" (read: Rural) America.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-56874431130480218612010-11-28T17:37:00.000-08:002010-11-28T17:37:10.148-08:00I read it on WikiLeaksThis is just collection of summaries of the WikiLeaks cables I've randomly stumbled into. For a full explanation of what "WikiLeaks cables" are, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?pagewanted=all">go here</a>:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/2008/09/08ANKARA1643.html">2008/09/08ANKARA1643</a> : A Turkish trade minister meets with London investors, tells them to ditch their stock in a Turkish media company that has been criticizing elected officials. Minister claims that the company will be gone soon. Too soon to tell, but smells like insider trading.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/2008/10/08STATE116392.html">2008/10/08STATE116392</a> : Condie's "What we'd like to know about Palestine" Christmas list. Includes requests for Internet handles, credit card numbers, and frequent flyer account numbers for prominent and influential Palestinians. Also looking for military readiness, opinions on the peace process, etc. If you have any such information, please forward it to cia.gov.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/2009/11/09MANAMA642.html">2009/11/09MANAMA642</a> : This is just silly. Bahrain lobbies Gen. Petraeus to encourage Americans to participate in the Bahrain air show. A more relevant tidbit: Bahrain's King Hasam supports stopping Iran's nuclear program "by any means necessary."<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/2009/03/09TELAVIV654.html">2009/03/09TELAVIV654</a> : Qatar, UAE concerned about Iran, pushing for progress on Israel-Palestine peace process. Point out that it would make things easier on Israel diplomatically.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/1972/02/72TEHRAN1164.html">1972/02/72TEHRAN1164</a> : This tastes a bit stale. The Shah of Iran would like a squadron of F4-E's ASAP. I guess this one got lost in a filing cabinet somewhere. :)<br />
<br />
<a href="http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/1979/08/79TEHRAN8980.html">1979/08/79TEHRAN8980</a> : PERHAPS THE SINGLE DOMINANT ASPECT OF THE PERSIAN PSYCHE IS AN OVERRIDING EGOISM. [...] THE PRACTICAL EFFECT OF IT IS AN ALMOST TOTAL PERSIAN PREOCCUPATION WITH SELF AND LEAVES LITTLE ROOM FOR UNDERSTANDING POINTS OF VIEW OTHER THAN ONE'S OWN. [...] COUPLED WITH THESE PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS IS A <br />
GENERAL INCOMPREHENSION OF CASUALITY.<br />
<br />
No worries. It was okay to be racist back in 1979, right? I wonder what they would have to say about the "psychological limitations" of the Americans who (a few short years earlier) thought they had a right to decide who ran their country.<br />
<br />
Five down, over 200 to go, and that's just the first batch. There will be a quarter million documents in this puppy when all is said and done. Most of the documents are fairly uninteresting, and it's going to take a lot of eyeballs to find the most relevant stuff. Go to <a href="http://cablegate.wikileaks.org">cablegate.wikileaks.org</a>, and hope they can build some better tools for interacting with the data.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-46465674231760564882010-11-10T20:20:00.000-08:002010-11-10T20:20:54.775-08:00Will Sarah Palin be the next chair of the Federal Reserve?The best part of this whole financial meltdown has to be watching Sarah Palin try to pretend that she has valuable insights on monetary policy. It's kind of cute, really, like watching a four year old sitting in front of a chess board, moving the pieces around at random.<br />
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Not that I'm a grandmaster, by any means. I know just enough to recognize when someone is playing well and when someone is bouncing the knight all over the board and making whinnying noises. Krugman is putting grandmaster level stuff on his blog. Palin doesn't know how the pieces move.<br />
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Palin fears runaway inflation -- in fact claims it's already occurring -- even though the last two years have had such tame inflation that we didn't need to increase Social Security payments to keep pace. Which, if you've been watching FOX News' ongoing quest to terrify the elderly, is All Obama's Fault. <br />
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When the non-inflation was pointed out to her, she lashed out at the messengers, because someone at their very own newspaper -- don't you guys read your own newspaper? -- ran a story explaining that food prices were, well, very low but starting to creep up again. 1.4% inflation is ridiculously low by historical standards, and by any objective measure, Palin was just plain wrong.<br />
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In a second Facebook broadside, she blames our slow economy entirely on burdensome government regulation, high taxes, and businesses living in fear of Obama's next major initiative.<br />
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Which is pure idiocy. If it were Obamaphobia keeping businesses from expanding and hiring, their terror would have been assuage the moment CNN declared that the Republicans had retaken the House. Obama won't be passing any major government-expanding initiatives or oppressive, burdensome government regulations anytime soon, so by Palin-logic (as opposed to the real sort) those mountains of cash that corporations are sitting on should be on their way.<br />
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Maybe she should start listening to the actual economists, who are pointing out the blindingly obvious: companies aren't hiring because they don't see much demand for their products.<br />
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Taxes are already absurdly low. They're low as a percentage of GDP, when compared to the rest of the industrialized world. They're low by historical standards; we've paid much more in the past. We paid much more during the Clinton years, which were years of spectacular growth for people of all incomes. Bush cut taxes, and gave us a decade of anemic growth, the largesse of which went almost entirely to the wealthiest 5%. Oh, and need I mention that all that anemic growth was followed by the collapse of the whole economy?<br />
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Lastly, it shouldn't even have to be argued that more "burdensome government regulation" would have prevented much of the recent economic collapse. The fact that supposedly serious people can claim otherwise is a testament to the power of the right-wing noise machine.<br />
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Palin is a card-carrying member of that noise machine. Gears in that machine don't get held accountable for anything. Their proposals don't have to make sense, so long as the person doing the proposing sounds confident. That's why Palin can talk about how we need to be serious about paying off our national debt in one paragraph, and then demand huge tax cuts for the wealthy in the next. Actual economists know that tax cuts have never come close to "paying for themselves," and that in a situation like ours where there are mountains of cash lying idle, adding more to the pile is an ineffective way to stimulate the economy.*<br />
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Her last mistake is to imply that inflation is bad for most Americans. Actually, moderate inflation is good for just about anyone who has a mortgage. Their debts become worth less as the years go by. If you owe as much on your house as you have set aside in your 401K, inflation is robbing Peter, paying Paul, and then telling Paul to write Peter a check. As Paul Krugman pointed out (for which the Nobel-prizewinning economist received a tongue lashing from our girl Sarah) inflation did a lot to make our post-WWII debt more manageable.<br />
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Who does inflation hurt the most? People who have grotesque sums of cash lying around. Which I believe is why, even though the economy would be generally better off if the Fed targeted lower unemployment and higher inflation, they continue to choke off inflation. The Fed is run by rich people and people who hang out with rich people. The only thing that makes QE2 palatable to them is the fact that the new money will go straight to banks. If the plan were to print new money and sending it to people who would actually spend it (you and me and people poorer than you and me), they'd be screaming bloody murder.<br />
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The point is, Sarah Palin really sucks at this, and I pity the people who mistake her semi-coherent, ghostwritten Facebook posts for genuine economic thought.<br />
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* That actually *is* a problem with QE. But it's just about the only weapon the Fed has left. Normally it would be lowering interest rates to juice the economy, but they can't lower it below zero, because it rips a hole in the fabric of spacetime. We don't want that.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-67692305408147605342010-10-17T10:44:00.000-07:002010-10-17T10:44:33.194-07:00Barack Obama, Small SpenderRepost of something I put on <a href="http://philpotforcongress.com/">Morgan Philpot's site</a>, replying to <a href="http://philpotforcongress.com/posts/morgan-philpot-exposes-the-blue-dog-myth-on-fox-news">this story</a>:<br />
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There is a lot of myth to the "big spending Obama/big spending Democrats" meme. <br />
TARP was a holdover from the Bush era, and the funds we loaned out are thankfully mostly being paid back with interest. Admittedly, it had more support from congressional Democrats than congressional Republicans.<br />
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The stimulus bill mostly went to 1) tax cuts designed to garner Republican support (which never came), and 2) shoring up state and local government budgets, so that they wouldn't have to lay off teachers, policemen, firefighters, etc., which would have caused unemployment to skyrocket and worsened the recession. Only a small fraction was left over for infrastructure investments. Read Paul Krugman's column, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/opinion/11krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss">Hey, Small Spender</a>" for details.<br />
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Health Care Reform is a big-ticket item, but as the expensive parts don't kick in until 2014, it has absolutely nothing to do with the current deficit levels. Also, HCR generates a lot of direct and indirect savings that will offset the costs of the program. It will reduce Medicare costs, promote efficiency by getting medical records online, and give insurance companies less incentive to develop giant bureaucracies designed to stand between you and your doctor. According to the CBO estimate (which Republicans consider the gold standard when the numbers work out in their favor) Health Care Reform will knock $130B off the deficit over the next decade, and $1.2T off it in the subsequent decade.<br />
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The biggest area of government spending growth hasn't been in new programs, but in expansions of the existing programs that are helping people through these rough economic times: unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, etc. These programs are designed to help people who are in trouble, so it's no surprise that they would go up when more people needed them. Again, reference Krugman; see <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/the-non-surge-in-government-spending-continued/">his blog from Oct. 16</a>.<br />
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On a related note, why is Philpot criticizing Matheson for raising the ceiling on the national debt? The national debt is a long-term problem that requires a long-term solution. "Solving" it by just letting it hit the ceiling is like solving the problem of "my car is going the wrong direction" by slamming it into a brick wall. Consider what would happen to the economy if the government hit a financial crisis where it had to suddenly cut millions of workers from its payroll. [It would also require a sudden, dramatic scaling back of vital government services that people actually want, like food, water, and occupational safety, education, scientific research, oversight of industry, etc. -B]<br />
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I was a soldier training at Fort Sam Houston, TX in 1995, when Newt Gingritch and Co. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_government_shutdown_of_1995">shut down the government</a> in order to try and get Clinton to agree to spending cuts in Medicare. One day I woke up, took my weekly stroll out to the base library, and found the doors locked. At that point, I was a hard-core Rush Limbaugh fan. But Newt had taken away my books. The books I was using to make myself a smarter, better-informed citizen and soldier. I would gladly have agreed to a massive tax increase to get my books back. :)<br />
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That anecdote represents one of the least-consequential aspects of a government shutdown, the sort of shutdown that candidate Philpot is demanding when he criticizes Matheson for raising the ceiling on the debt.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-76419856693117314452010-10-07T19:17:00.000-07:002010-10-07T19:17:42.325-07:00LDS Apostle Boyd K. Packer battles the pink menaceI try to stay away from "Mormon stuff" these days. But sometimes the temptation is just too much. Sometimes I hear that siren song, that sexy, gravelly voice beckoning from over that distant pulpit, saying things that are so hurtful, so distant from human decency, that unnatural desires swell within me, and I have to... blog the living daylights out of some old geezer.<br />
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In about a half hour, there is a protest near Temple Square in reaction to some things Boyd Packer said during General Conference last week. A bunch of my friends are attending, and I'm with them in spirit if not in person. I think that a protest is just what this situation calls for. Why? Because when tens of millions of people all over the world -- including by my estimation about 5600* gay LDS teens -- look to you for spiritual and moral guidance, you sort of have a responsibility to not damage them.<br />
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When you elevate a few abstract principles, such as "God will not tempt you more than you can bear," or "the Church does not change its moral positions" above the experiences of those who struggle valiantly to be true to themselves and also to the Church, you cause them agony. Because you have never had to try and deny some fundamental part of yourself to be a part of your faith, you assume that it must be easy. The lack of empathy and imagination, coming from someone I myself once revered as a spiritual leader, is saddening (if not surprising).<br />
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There is hope on the horizon. Young Latter-day Saints views on homosexuality are, if not exactly progressive, then at least nuanced. I know a handful who are even accepting of the idea of gay marriage. They see that those who want to commit their lives to each other should be allowed to do so, and that laws that separate people from those they care about most are inhumane.<br />
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So my message to the young LDS people, gay or straight, who listened to Packer's speech and found themselves concerned is this: Despite Packer's claims, the Mormon Church changes. Not quickly, not painlessly, not without struggle and courage. But one day the leaders wake up and find the ground beneath their feet has moved. They find that their membership expects that blacks will be granted the priesthood soon, that women no longer expect to submit to their husbands or sacrifice their careers for their children, that the survivalist mentality they brought across the plains has been replaced by more cosmopolitan aspirations, and that most of their members were actually relieved to set aside the practice of polygamy.<br />
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The Church has long been the master of changing its mind and then pretending that the new way is the way it was always intended to be. Just ask any bishop being confronted with an angrily highlighted copy of the Journal of Discourses: sometimes, even across the pulpit, LDS leaders speak their own opinions, not those of God.<br />
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I believe -- no, I am convinced -- that what he said last week has nothing of the inspiration of God, and everything of the cranky griping of an old man who doesn't understand the world anymore, and therefore thinks it's all going to hell. I'm also willing to bet that, before I see my 70th birthday, the Mormons will be sealing men to other men and women to other women "for time and all eternity," and the words of President Packer will be viewed as an odd relic of an earlier, more barbaric time in Church history.<br />
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Full transcript (stolen from <a href="http://latterdaymainstreet.com/2010/10/03/will-this-hateful-rhetoric-continue-once-boyd-k-packer-has-passed-on/">here</a>):<br />
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<blockquote>We raise an alarm and warn members of the Church to wake up and understand what’s going on. Parents be alert, ever watchful, that this wickedness might threaten your family circle. We teach a standard of moral conduct that will protect us from Satan’s many substitutes and counterfeits for marriage. We must understand that any persuasion to enter into any relationship that is not in harmony with the principles of the Gospel must be wrong. In the Book of Mormon we learn that “wickedness never was happiness.” Some suppose that they were “pre-set” and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and the unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, He is our Father.<br />
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Paul promised, “God will not suffer you to be tempted above what ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” You can if you will, break the habits and conquer the addiction and come away from that which is not worthy of any member of the church. As Alma cautioned, we must “watch and pray continually.” Isaiah warned, “Wo unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”<br />
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Years ago, I visited a school in Albuquerque. The teacher told me about a youngster who brought a kitten to class. As you can imagine, that disrupted everything. She had him hold up the kitten in front of the children. It went well until one of the children asked, “Is it a boy kitty or a girl kitty?” Not wanting to get into that lesson, the teacher said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s just a kitty.” But they persisted. Finally one boy raised his hand and said, “I know how you can tell.” Resigned to face it, the teacher said, “How can you tell?” And the student answered, “You can vote on it.”<br />
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You may laugh at the story. But, if we’re not alert, there are those today who not only tolerate but advocate voting to change lives that would legalize immorality. As if a vote would somehow alter the designs of God’s laws of nature. A law against nature would be impossible to enforce. For instance, what good would the law against – a vote against – the law of gravity do?<br />
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There are both moral and physical laws irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundation of the world that cannot be changed. History demonstrates over and over again that moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot. To legalize that which is basically wrong or evil will not prevent the pain and penalties that will follow as surely as night follows day.<br />
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Regardless of the opposition, we are determined to stay on course. We will hold to the principles and laws and ordinances of the Gospel. If they are misunderstood, either innocently or willfully, so be it. We cannot change, we will not change the moral standards. We quickly lose our way when we disobey the laws of God.</blockquote><br />
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* Oh, fine. 14,000,000 Mormons, 20% activity rate, 10% of which are teens, and (lowballing it) 5% of those are gay, and 40% of those were watching Conference. The math is very rough.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-43255953282876263732010-09-11T15:58:00.000-07:002010-09-11T15:58:40.906-07:00Reaganomics punches me in the faceSo I got beat up by a biker gang last night. Granted, the "beat up" was limited to two punches to the face, and the "biker gang" was really just two guys on motorcycles. Hell, one of them was just standing there ready to back his friend up. But I'm tired, my jaw hurts, and I feel I'm entitled to a bit of artistic license here.<br />
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The facts were these: I was on my bike, when two guys came the opposite direction, zipping down the Jordan River Parkway on motorcycles (illegal) with their headlights off (illegal and stupid). I yelled at them. They turned around and came back after me. One rolled up next to me as I pedaled. A conversation ensued, the most eloquent snippets being, "What the hell are you doing?" and "You don't know me!" The conversation concluded with him sideswiping my bike, me grabbing onto him, and both of us tumbling to the ground.<br />
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I got up, ready for a fight. He punched me in the face, and I no longer wanted to fight. He punched me again, and I no longer wanted to stand up. He asked me if I wanted any more. I did not. Satisfied that his point had been made, he and his friend took off, leaving me to limp home.<br />
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Like I said, my jaw still hurts, and my lower teeth feel a bit wrong. But my pride is more wounded than anything. I've always wondered how I'd do in a fight. This may be the Universe trying to tell me to embrace pacifism.<br />
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I joke now. I've got the safety of distance, and the big picture realization that I was facing a couple of kids trying to blow off steam, not hardened, merciless slayers of men. But I remember the thought that went through my head right after the second punch landed. "So, this is how I die. God, I'm an idiot." That was some scary, scary stuff, and while I'm still a bit angry, I'm grateful as hell to them for not taking it further than they did.<br />
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They say a conservative is just a liberal who got mugged. I'll admit that, comparatively puny as this experience was, I can feel the urge to rescind my trust in the general goodwill of humankind. Part of me wants to embrace the idea that there are people like me and there are people who are not like me, and that the proper role of society is to protect the former from the latter. But I'm not giving up on society. I'm not even giving up on the guy who attacked me. He's right: I don't know him.<br />
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Why do I blame Reaganomics? If you remember my post on <a href="http://neonderbycars.blogspot.com/2010/05/spirit-level-why-greater-equality-makes.html">The Spirit Level</a>, societies with greater income inequality have higher murder rates. That correlation is clear and powerful. Less extreme forms of violence are more difficult to compare, simply because there is more variation in reporting and measurement. But I strongly suspect that if those things could be properly controlled, a correlation would pop out there as well.<br />
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So, Reaganomics basically says that people are on their own. Government won't protect them from the hard times, or help you when you're down. It won't tell your employer that they have to pay you more.<br />
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If you're rich, though, Reaganomics will do whatever it can to help you. It will keep taxes low and regulations light. You owe nothing to society beyond that which you freely choose to give back.<br />
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Reaganomics isn't heartless. It's distrustful of government, and it believes that huge income gaps are both a natural result of a free market and an incentive for hard work and innovation. It's also deaf to pleas of class envy, because hey, it's only your own sorry ass keeping you from achieving whatever level of success you covet. Right?<br />
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But the downsides of this plan are enormous. People struggle more. They fear losing what they've won. People feel alienated, hopeless, dissatisfied, and angry. The marks of societal rank become more apparent, and worse they begin serving as a mark of personal worth. The social cohesion that allows members of society to accept and trust one another begins to fray.<br />
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The Spirit Level mentioned a plausible mechanism, a sort of evolutionary context that links violence and alienation. When a person -- especially a young male -- is on the outskirts of society, with little hope of getting back in, reckless behavior can create reproductive opportunities that quiet resignation never would.<br />
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It rings true. If you have a lot to lose, you don't go picking fights with anyone who cusses you out. In fact, you don't go speeding down a pedestrian/bike path in the dead of night.<br />
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Shame and humiliation are powerful social emotions. The Reagonomics people make a huge mistake by pretending that their economic shaming plan can drive only one response: a redoubling of the person's efforts in pursuit of legal, socially responsible economic increase.<br />
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I honestly believe that, if America's wealth distribution were as narrow as, say, Finland's, my jaw would feel just fine right now thankyouverymuch. So, soak the rich, raise the minimum wage, and smile at a stranger.<br />
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P.S.: Happy <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/koran10.txt">Read a Qu'ran Day</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-1725521643924864162010-07-25T12:53:00.000-07:002010-07-25T12:53:21.041-07:00Rough thoughts on unemployment and socialism[Modified from something I tried to post on 538, but there were technical difficulties.]<br />
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The belief that new jobs will always replace old jobs is misguided in many ways.<br />
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First, unemployment is much higher than the official figures let on, and the true surplus of non-working, potentially productive people has been rising for decades. People spend more of their lives in college. People spend more of their lives in retirement. We have more people on government disability, more people in prison, more part time workers, and more people leaving the job market entirely.<br />
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Those jobs that disappeared didn't all come back.<br />
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Second, when you automate all the manual labor jobs out of existence, and replace them with more mentally taxing work, there are going to be millions of people who were perfectly capable of holding the old jobs, who can no longer provide the engines of capitalism with any service it's willing to pay for.<br />
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What is the free market answer to their plight?<br />
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1) They should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Start your own business! Be dynamic and innovative! Reach for your dreams! Or failing that...<br />
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2) Die. Survival of the fittest, you know.<br />
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If you don't have a better answer than that, then you cede that capitalism + technological progress can bring great misery and suffering to those made obsolete by technology.<br />
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We've reached a point in our technological climb that is somewhat analogous to the situation we have with oil reserves. New reserves of jobs are being found, but the old jobs are being depleted at a much faster rate.<br />
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Take the precarious position of my bro. His job at the postal service is to sit in front of a computer all day, looking at pictures of individual pieces of mail, and routing them appropriately. There are thousands of people similarly employed at routing stations across the country.<br />
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Or, at least, there were. As the Post Office's handwriting recognition software has improve, the volume of mail that needs manual routing has fallen dramatically, and center after routing center has been closed, their employees released into the wild to make their ways as best they can. Now only two or three centers are left.<br />
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Nor is it just repetitive tasks that are being obsoleted. Software development and deployment has gotten easier in a variety of ways, driving down the costs of bringing new ideas to market. A web app that might have taken a team of a hundred people a year to deploy back in 2000 could be done by a team of three people in a couple of months today. Even Facebook (a site with hundreds of millions of active users) only employs about 800 people.*<br />
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I'm not sure where the next big "growth industries" are, the ones that are going to absorb all the medical transcriptionists, all the long haul truckers, all the taxi drivers, all the delivery people, all the tech support and customer service representatives, all the janitors, all the airline reservation people, who are going to be made obsolete over the next few decades. <br />
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I see the march of technological progress as a good thing. Nobody is asking that we halt the march of technology to save jobs. But unless we find some way to "spread the wealth," to ensure that everyone can have some claim on the products of a highly automated economy, then we really will hit the crisis point that Marx predicted.<br />
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A compromise between socialism and capitalism could be forged in several ways. Guaranteed income floor, make-work jobs, wage subsidies, etc. Right wingers will fight all these measures, right up until the moment that their own jobs go on the chopping block. Then they'll see the benefits of "institutionalized theft."<br />
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* It would be 400, but they have trouble keeping their employees from goofing off on Facebook.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-53225082042549101412010-06-20T08:01:00.001-07:002010-06-20T09:04:25.150-07:00Would the Founding Fathers join the Tea Party?Alexander Hamilton: "An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty." <br /><br />Sounds applicable to our times.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-74687438295935757482010-06-11T20:36:00.000-07:002010-06-11T21:36:15.933-07:00Tim Pawlenty vs. The Bong MonsterTim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota and rumored 2012 hopeful, has finally convinced me that it is always, always, always a bad idea to vote for Republicans. Because it turns out that even the ones who can give the appearance of being reasonable, thinking people will quickly disappoint and then horrify you.<br /><br />So I'm watching <a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-june-10-2010/exclusive---tim-pawlenty-unedited-interview-pt--3">his interview</a> on The Daily Show, and John Stewart (for no reason that I was aware of) starts making bong water jokes. I wasn't aware of <a href="http://politicsinminnesota.com/blog/2010/05/pawlenty-strikes-down-bong-water-bill/">the backstory</a> on this. But it turns out that, in Minnesota they classify bong water as a controlled substance, so that law enforcement can vastly inflate the charges that they bring against citizens.<br /><br />In other words, Governor Tim "Common Sense" Pawlenty thinks that a law written to apply to a guy trundling around two pounds of marijuana -- no, officer, that's not <span style="font-style:italic;">my</span> colon -- should equally apply to a guy with one ounce of marijuana and thirty-one ounces that he would have poured down the sink if he ever got around to cleaning out his apartment.<br /><br />In his "defense", Pawlenty said that the law usually didn't get enforced that way. Instead, law enforcement only uses the law when they need to put someone behind bars. Which should make you feel warm and fuzzy all over if you believe that cops are always fair-minded, objective, uncorruptable, and in possession of certain knowledge of who belongs in jail and who should go free.<br /><br />For those of us with a firmer grasp on reality, the thought is chilling. In the interview, the governor expressly endorsed a law enforcement practice whereby the police, unable to marshal evidence for the crimes they believe a suspect is in jail for, can levy huge penalties against the suspect for a minor offense, and thereby get the "justice" they feel the suspect deserves.<br /><br />This would almost be funny, if the practice didn't mean ordinary citizens are rotting in jail on the basis of laws that were meant to deal with large-scale distributors. Pawlenty himself apparently thinks it's a riot. The <a href="http://www.governor.state.mn.us/stellent/groups/public/documents/web_content/prod010002.pdf">letter</a> he sent back to the legislature along with his veto was nothing but a one-paragraph setup for a bong water pun.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-85632439483981970022010-05-28T17:40:00.000-07:002010-05-29T07:47:48.985-07:00DIYU v. the skepticism of the commonsMy Salon post <a href="http://neonderbycars.blogspot.com/2010/03/repost-on-future-of-education.html">about the DIYU book</a> got noticed, the author sent me a copy, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R2SQEUOR8CO8WC/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm">I reviewed it</a>, and lately I've following the progress of the book through blogville in a not at all creepy or stalkerish way.<br /><br />In this post, <a href="http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/">Rortybomb</a> (aka. Mike Konczal) <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/diy_u_and_the_romance_of_the_p.html#more">seems to be arguing</a> that "free" educational resources aren't free enough. Until they're rammed down the throat of every man, woman, and child, they will serve only to exacerbate the power inequalities between people.<br /><br />Okay, that's a grossly distorted characterization of his argument. Read the whole thing. But I think he overstates his case, and offers little in the way of solutions.<br /><br />Two obvious points come to mind. First, open source textbooks aren't genomic data. They're written in one or more human readable languages, with pictures and whatnot. They're much easier to digest than ATGCCAGTCTCAGATTACATCGATCAAGAABAGTCCC.* Second, even if a piece of data is useful only to a handful of genetics PhDs, that's a far broader access than if it were only useful to the subset of PhDs who happen to work for a specific biotech company.<br /><br />Which leads to broader point 2b: the only thing that happens when you open source something (like a textbook, or a video lecture) is that certain restrictions that would allow for monopolizing/rent-seeking/whatever-the-cool-kids-in-econ-call-it behavior. Open sourcing isn't magic pixie dust that will usher in the hippie singularity, but I'm not understanding how opening education resources can do anything to make learning <span style="font-weight:bold;">less</span> democratic. Really, it's like objecting to a public library in a town where not everyone can read.<br /><br />I believe the conclusion Rortybomb is drawing from that is that some structure will still be needed to guide the students through the material, to make it accessible. That's true, but it seems like a trivial point. Do people really think that in a DIYU model, five year olds would be handed an iPhone loaded with a hodgepodge of textbooks, reference material, and video, and told to come back when they're ready to enter the job market? Judging by some of the arguments, it seems that way.<br /><br />The takeaway line seems to confirm this:<br /><br /><blockquote>Will a self-directed educational goal primarily benefit those with stable homes and the time and capital to cultivate this? Is "DIY U" accessible according to need? This is the framework I think of as I read and explore this work.</blockquote>So, even under the worst-case scenario, we end up with an education that is nearly as stratified and inaccessible as the one we have today?<br /><br />I often cite the statistic that, in America, the least academically successful quarter of the children from the wealthiest quarter of families are slightly more likely to graduate from college than the most academically talented quarter of the children from the poorest quarter of families. We also live in the country with the greatest disparity between the performances of the financially best and worst-off students.<br /><br />The college education we offer now is too expensive, too inflexible, and doesn't fail gracefully when confronted with students whose lives are full of the disruptions and distractions caused by poverty. Some DIY U critics write as though they skipped over the entire Part I of the book -- the part that explains how the system got so screwed up in the first place -- then apply absurd standards of perfection to proposed open education systems. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">How will the poor access DIY U?</span> How do they access education now?<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Where will the money come from to create all these free textbooks and course materials?</span> Maybe from the tiny sliver of the billions of dollars that students are now paying for overpriced textbooks. It doesn't <span style="font-style:italic;">all</span> have to go back into beer money.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">But what will they read them on?</span> Probably an <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html">iPad-like</a> device that now costs about as much as a semester worth of books, and will be radically cheaper and more useful in five years.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">How will teachers get paid at DIY U?</span> They'll be paid for services rendered, I suppose. Relieved of much of the burden of delivering prepared lectures, creating course materials, and administering tests to assess student progress, they'll have more time to do the sort of one-on-one coaching on areas where the students need the most help. There will always be structures designed to connect those who want to teach with those who want to learn. An educated citizenry is a clear public good, and much of today's education spending is wasted. If this radical transformation requires a bit of government spending or some money from students to get the incentives right, I think it will happen.<br /><br />I do worry that the open education movement might inadvertently reduce the size of what you might call "the academic class." But given that the demand for education currently outstrips the supply, I'm betting that there will be jobs aplenty for the foreseeable future.<br /><br />* I'm pretty sure that string is in my genetic makeup somewhere, and that it will kill me before I turn fifty. The 'B' has me especially worried.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-39166274214322456752010-05-22T18:03:00.000-07:002010-05-23T10:40:55.277-07:00The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies StrongerDuring World War I and World War II, Great Britain was threatened with extinction. Enemies hounded its shores, its people lived in a state of material deprivation, and the nation mourned daily the loss of friends and family who died on the front lines.<br /><br />Under such conditions, what would you imagine happened to the health and life expectancy of the non-combat population?<br /><br />A) Health and life expectancy worsened.<br /><br />B) Health and life expectancy improved.<br /><br />Obviously, we would expect the answer to be A, but since that would be unsurprising and uninteresting, the answer is of course B. According to the excellent new book, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Level-Societies-Almost-Always/dp/0141032367/">The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger</a></span>*, the British society of that era had several characteristics that led to greater health and longer lives (with lower crime rates, too):<br /><br /><ul><li>Full employment.</li><li>An erosion of class distinctions and class consciousness.</li><li>Greater social cohesion.</li><li>Narrowed income inequality, caused by a fall in middle class wages and a rise in working class wages.</li></ul><br /><br />Some of you, having read this far, may be asking themselves, "Are the authors saying that we should have more wars?" or "Are the authors advocating Communism?"<br /><br />Yes. Yes they are. That is exactly what the authors are saying. Now please go away. The grownups are trying to have a chat.<br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Spirit Level</span>, the authors collect evidence that countries with narrower income inequality show remarkably good results in a number of social metrics:<br /><br /><ul><li>Longer life expectancy</li><li>Better health at all ages</li><li>Reduced infant mortality</li><li>Higher educational achievement</li><li>Lower homicide rates</li><li>Lower rates of petty crime</li><li>Lower teen pregnancy rates</li><li>Lower incarceration rates</li><li>Higher rates of social mobility</li><li>Lower rates of illegal drug use</li><li>Lower rates of homelessness</li></ul><br /><br />A few caveats and details: The authors are making comparisons only between relatively wealthy, industrialized societies. Think U.S. vs. U.K. or Norway or Japan, not U.S. vs. Cuba** or Bangladesh or Zimbabwe. Among the poorest countries, the best predictor of how well a country is doing is (unsurprisingly) median income. Among the wealthy countries studied, median income predicts almost nothing.<br /><br />The authors also present their evidence in such a way that it becomes immune to the standard right-wing counterattacks that afflict most comparisons between countries. Usually, if you say something like, "The United States has the same infant mortality rate as Cuba," you could expect a cleaver critic to try to undermine the comparison by citing some difference in how the data is collected and reported, while a slow critic would just say, "But we don't want to be Cuba."<br /><br />But the authors rarely compare two countries. Instead, what they do -- repeatedly, and to great effect -- is plot the countries on a chart with two axes, with the y-axis showing some rate of some metric of social well-being (obesity, drug use, life expectancy, etc.) and the x-axis showing that country's level of income inequality***, then show the trendline that best fits the data (if such a trend is statistically significant).<br /><br />So if you don't like the way Italy collects its teen pregnancy stats, or think France's life expectancy is some artifact of their diet, throw both points out. The trendline remains.<br /><br />They also make all the same comparisons between the fifty states of the U.S., and invariably find the same correlations between income inequality and societal outcomes. "Icelanders just eat more fish" does nothing to explain why Texas has a longer life expectancy than Kentucky, but a shorter life expectancy than Utah.(*4)<br /><br />That's the beauty of statistical analysis: when you have twenty or fifty points all helping to paint the same picture, the individual quirks of given states and population tend to get averaged out.<br /><br /><br /><br /><h2>A challenge to right-wing orthodoxy</h2>The results really are counterintuitive, and I think they represent a serious challenge to the whole right-wing, <span style="font-style:italic;">laissez-faire</span>, dog-eat-dog orthodoxy. Here is just one example:<br /><br />Imagine two relatively wealthy, industrialized societies. In society A, the price for not getting a good education is a life of poverty and shame. In society B, there is little market incentive not to squander your education, because the government provides generous welfare and unemployment benefits.<br /><br />In Society A, the wealthiest people (those in the top 20%) make about ten times as much as the poorest people (those in the bottom 20%) do, so the rewards for being ambitious and doing well in school are huge. In Society B, the same comparison shows the wealthiest members of society only make about four times what the poorest do, so there is markedly less financial incentive to do well in school.<br /><br />In Society A, polls of high school students show that almost all of them want to attend college. In Society B, a large fraction of the students say that they'd be happy with trade school. Thus, you would expect students in Society A to be more motivated to excel in their college preparatory work.<br /><br />No surprise, Society A is the U.S., Society B is Finland, and despite what a social darwinist right winger would say are strong disincentives against performing well in school -- no chance at great wealth if you succeed, no risk of poverty if you fail -- Finnish kids outperform American kids by a wide margin. An interesting feature of this gap is that it is narrower when comparing the children of our wealthiest to the children of their wealthiest, and widens steadily as we go down the socioeconomic ladders.<br /><br />It's almost as though giving kids security about their future and their place in society leads to a more conducive learning environment. But no, that's crazy.<br /><br />One other example: while highly-paid sports teams win more games than low-paid sports teams, those teams with big gaps between their best-paid and worst-paid players tend to win fewer games than would be predicted by aggregate salary.<br /><br /><br /><h2>Mechanisms</h2>I hope you're convinced now that these correlations exist. But if they're so compelling, what causes them? I accept the explanations provided by the authors, which can be boiled down to this: we are status-obsessed monkey people who get stressed and freak out when we don't feel accepted within the social order.<br /><br />This makes all kinds of evolutionary sense. In the world that molded our monkey brains, there was no more important resource -- or more pressing danger -- than the monkeys around you. If you were an accepted part of the tribe, you could expect a share of their food, protection from outside threats, and opportunities to procreate. If you were not a part of the tribe, you might be beaten, driven away from sources of food and water, or killed outright. The ability to read the social landscape, to know who was allied with who, who might be expected to return altruistic gestures, and how to keep yourself in the good graces of the tribe, were critical skills, and those who excelled at them got vast evolutionary rewards.<br /><br />It's no wonder that so much of our conversation revolves around who likes who, who is fighting with who, who just broke up and why, ad nauseam. It's also no wonder that politicians spend their careers promising to do things that will increase your opportunity to improve your social status (jobs programs, homebuyer incentives, assistance with student loans, etc.) or promising to protect us from those who would reduce our social status (welfare recipients, illegal immigrants, big business) or demonizing those who seem to give their base inadequate respect (East-coast liberal elites, academics, fundamentalists of all stripes).<br /><br />Studies in animals show that moving an ape from a population where he is the alpha male to a population where he is the... omega male? What do they call the animal at the bottom of the totem pole? Anyhow, moving to the other population will dramatically raise his cortisol levels, meaning that he is under stress, which has strong life-shortening, mood-altering consequences.<br /><br />All this indicates that humans don't generally do well at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy.<br /><br /><h2>So now what?</h2>In light of this, what sort of policies should we be pursuing? Here are a few suggestions.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Treat conspicuous consumption as pollution.</span> Like pollution, ostentatious displays of wealth have negative effects on those downstream.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Treat marketing as pollution.</span> The most effective advertisements are often the ones that target your sense of social status. Your teeth are unacceptably yellowed. Your flabbiness tells others that you are lazy, and causes them to find you unattractive. What does your car say about you? A certification in the hot new field of penitentiary services is a ticket to a better life. You need makeup. Now you need better makeup. Your hair color doesn't "pop". Your acne repulses even your best friends. Your Mac tells people that you are a creative person who recognizes quality craftsmanship(*5).<br /><br />There is something immoral about attacking peoples' insecurities in order to make a buck. But in the United States it is not only perfectly legal, it's tax deductible. Advertising -- even excessive, Nike-scale advertising -- is treated as a business expense. We're effectively paying Pepsi thirty cents for every dollar they spend blighting the landscape with billboards. Advertising works by trying to make people unhappy enough about themselves to buy a product, and the negative influence of advertising needs to be confronted.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">We need more equal outcomes, not just more equal opportunity.</span> The more unequal a society is, the harder a sell this one becomes. If you're already extremely conscious of social status, you're already primed to fear that such measures may reduce your ability to improve or maintain your own status. The Right will take advantage of that.<br /><br />But facts are stubborn things. It's easy to speak glowingly about living in a meritocratic, equal-opportunity, colorblind society where hard work is rewarded with great wealth. It's much harder to do so while simultaneously explaining why generational wealth and poverty persist in such a paradise of opportunity, or why the United States ranks lower in many measures of social mobility than the supposedly crippled economies of Europe.<br /><br />It's easy and cheap to shame the poor into believing they are wholly responsible for their lot in life. But those who want to do so are trying to lower the bar by which we judge policy; rather than demanding that policies demonstrate good outcomes based on hard numbers, they want us to be satisfied with a notion of equality that can be endlessly redefined to suit their agenda.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Attack inequality directly</span> with greater educational funding for the poor, higher minimum wages, more generous unemployment benefits, universal health care, high taxes on excessive concentrations of private wealth, caps on CEO pay, and other measures. Replace the income and social security taxes of most Americans with a carbon tax (while expanding the EITC to fight the somewhat regressive nature of a carbon tax). Research ways to make education more affordable, effective, and accessible.<br /><br />If the authors are correct, doing this will not only reduce poverty, but slim our waistlines, increase our life expectancy, reduce crime rates, and cause a whole host of other social goods. <br /><br />Will it work? I think it's worth a try.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />* The subtitle of the UK version was, "Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better."<br /><br />** Though Cuba does have some notable features which are discussed in the book. For example, it manages to have a life expectancy on par with the United States despite living in what we would consider extreme poverty. Also, it has the highest U.N. Human Development Index rating of any country which has what the World Wildlife Fund calls "a sustainable ecological footprint."<br /><br />*** I believe they use the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient">Gini coefficient</a>, but they claim that the specific measurement used doesn't make any difference to their findings.<br /><br />**** Note that we're discussing statistically significant trends in noisy data, not perfectly linear correlations where a certain amount of increase in inequality always results in a proportional increase or decrease in obesity or life expectancy. For example, New York ranks #1 in income inequality, and it's not even a close contest. Yet it has nearly the same life expectancy of Utah (the second most equal state), and a way higher life expectancy than Arkansas.<br /><br />While the authors never explicitly mention it, my impression of the many, many charts is that classic "blue states" (states with strong commitment to social welfare, that traditionally vote Democratic, like California, New York, Massachusetts, and Hawaii) tend to overperform the trendline. That is to say, they seem to do better than you would expect just by looking at inequality in isolation. Southern red states seem to underperform, though Utah seems to overperform somewhat.<br /><br />I'll hazard a guess about Utah: it's the Church. We have to get our sense of social unity and equality from somewhere, and for a big chunk of the Utah population, membership in the Church provides that. I saw it as a member; no matter who you were, what you did for a living, or what marks of social status you had or lacked, as long as you were an active member you had a clear path to social acceptability.<br /><br />***** Written on a Mac.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2374382517180963376.post-2035022783963743752010-05-01T09:47:00.001-07:002010-05-02T16:56:54.889-07:00Repost: I guess the future of a Master of the UniverseSpecifically, the future of <a href="http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2010/04/30/a-disgusting-little-email-making-the-rounds-on-wall-street">this guy</a>. The missive is truly vile, and whether it was written by an actual trader or someone trying to embarrass traders, I think it comes close to the way a lot of Wall Streeters actually think of themselves. So I think he gets off easy in my version of events.<br /><br /><blockquote>[snip]<br /><br />Nor do I expect "Wall Street" to maintain his vaunted work ethic when he's earning $10-$50/hr for his efforts, and not $200-$500.<br /><br />Here's how I think it might play out.<br /><br />He loses his job. The collapse of Wall Street makes it impossible to find another trading position. He never set much money away because, hey, there was more where that came from, right? His girlfriend dumps him when she realizes that, without his money, he's just a kinda short, pudgy guy with a hairline that's already starting to recede.<br /><br />Broken and humiliated, he moves back to his home town. He even has to live with his parents for three months while he job hunts. Finally, he manages to find a teaching position.<br /><br />He soon realizes that his herculean efforts won't be rewarded with sportscars, coke-fueled orgies, or the bragging rights that come from being among the best-compensated workers in America. He figures out that he's not God's gift to the teaching profession, that try as he might he can't actually teach kids better than the middle-aged woman one classroom over. He notices that wiping the noses of third graders doesn't give him the same surge of adrenaline that he once got placing million dollar bets with other peoples' money. It dawns on him that he can't teach the kids twice as much by pounding a Red Bull and talking twice as fast. In fact, he doesn't even like his new job; most days, he'd be happy to quit, and would happily take a pay cut to be back at Goldman Sachs.<br /><br />He starts thinking about how it's time to start writing that novel or taking a vacation to Europe. He notices that he has time to date. He takes up that sketching hobby that he dropped after high school, and realizes that hey, he's still got it.<br /><br />He meets a girl. She's unambitious and her specialty is French literature, not corporate mergers. She's nothing like his last girlfriend, which he finds oddly refreshing. One thing leads to another. Finally, despite her misgivings, she moves in with him, and her little dog too. He thought he'd hate the dog, but soon finds out that he enjoys long walks and that "I want to be you" look that the dog gives him from time to time, the same look the waiters at those high class restaurants used to give him.<br /><br />The girl drags him off to Burning Man. Amid the dust and the fire, he breaks down. The life he has been missing all these years is gone, and the new life he's stumbled into is more beautiful and more perfect than his old, unworthy ambitions deserved. He says to hell with it: he likes who he is now, and doesn't care what his old self or his old trading buddies would think. <br /><br />He asks his girlfriend to marry him.<br /><br />She says yes.<br /><br />He's no longer a Master of the Universe. He's barely master of an unruly mob of third graders. But he's no longer consumed by the arrogance or the ambition that once caused him to write that embarrassing e-mail, so he no longer needs to be a Master. He just needs to be.</blockquote><br /><br />Wall Street has a uniquely unhealthy culture where money matters more than people and you're only as good as your next trade. I suspect that most of the Wall Streeters are ruthless bastards because on Wall Street, being a ruthless bastard is a mark of honor. They see themselves as the real driving force behind America's prosperity because, hey, most everyone does; everyone wants to feel like their work is important, and Wall Street Traders are no exception. They see the poor as either parasites or rubes because it's hard to sleep at night if you believe deep down that you're bilking unwary grandmothers of their pensions. <br /><br />Besides, Atlas Shrugged is probably the only fiction the author has read since he got his job, and that only because everyone around him was telling him how awesome it was.<br /><br />The point is, we're naturally egotistical, rationalizing creatures, and never more so than when that ego is being fueled by million dollar bonuses. It's easy to see how someone under the influence could look at their paychecks and see evidence of their innate moral worth, rather than the good fortune of having one particularly well-remunerated skillset.<br /><br />Mister "We Are Wall Street," if you ever read this, I don't judge you harshly. That rant was ugly and out-of-touch, but I've written quite a few of those myself, and I know how much fun they are. Your belief that the people below depend upon your largesse, or that we should tremble to compete with you in the job market, says more about you -- or at least the culture of Wall Street -- than it does about the real world. When you decide that you can't handle another year of eighty hour work weeks, and want to try your hand at a simpler life, we welcome you to join us.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11711667081879686112noreply@blogger.com0