Apundectomy

Taking reality down a peg

2011-01-05T09:41:00.001-05:00

When you have an adversarial relationship with reality, as leaders of the Republican party so often do, it becomes paramount to cast aspersions on anyone offering a glimpse of the truth. The latest target appears to be the CBO -- the non-partisan referee who makes all of the budget estimates for Congress:

House Republicans are in a pickle: One of their new rules says that new legislation must be paid for. But the health-care bill reduces the federal deficit by more than $100 billion over the next 10 years. Luckily, they've figured out an answer to their problem: They've decided to simplyexempt the repeal bill from the rules. That means they're beginning the 112th Congress by lifting their own rules in order to take a vote that will increase the deficit. Change we can believe in, and all that.

Republicans are aware that this looks, well, horrible. So they're trying to explain why their decision to lift the rule requiring fiscal responsibility is actually fiscally responsible. Majority Leader Eric Cantor got askedabout this, and he returned the reporter's serve with a volley of nonsense. "About the budget implications, I think most people understand that the CBO did the job it was asked to do by the then-Democrat majority, and it was really comparing apples to oranges,” Cantor said. “It talked about 10 years' worth of tax hikes and six years' worth of benefits. Everyone knows beyond the 10-year window, this bill has the potential to bankrupt this federal government as well as the states."

Aside from being factually incorrect about the accounting for health care reform, or more accurately "a lie", Cantor's argument also implies that the CBO can't be trusted -- that it simply follows the whims of the party who controls Congress. But now his party controls the House, and has this rule that nothing can go unpaid for, a rule that the CBO, presumably, has the responsibility to check. I assume he'll want us to trust the CBO's projections from now on.

When you subvert those who are trying to understand and describe reality, it makes it easier to win an argument by shouting louder than your opponent -- a specialty of the Tea Party movement.

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The Empathy Engine: Achieving Breakthroughs in Patient Service

2010-06-03T19:05:00.001-04:00

Download now or preview on posterous

Empathy_Engine_Patient_Service.pdf (727 KB)

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The Empathy Engine: Turning Customer Service Into a Sustainable Advantage

2010-06-03T17:22:00.001-04:00

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The_Empathy_Engine.pdf (850 KB)

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Eggs, duh

2010-02-11T17:40:00.001-05:00

Eggs, duh

via www.qwantz.com on 2/11/10

– Hah hah!

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Yeesh

2010-01-26T09:48:00.001-05:00

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

via krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

Krugman, amping up the shrill. And I feel like I'm right there with him ... A "freeze" feels like nothing but a gimmick. It doesn't do much to change the deficit, and it sends all sorts of terrible political messages. You know what does cut the deficit? The health care plan! If voters don't know about key provisions of reform, like the ban on denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions, they sure as hell won't know about the benefits for the deficit (especially given the false information that some have spread). But the White House has done an absolutely abysmal job in educating the public, and now he has to resort to Republican gimmicks to make it seem like he cares about a deficit that, just a month ago, his signature health care reform was poised to cut by over $100 billion over the next 20 years.

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The domestic political landscape boiled down to three short paragraphs

2010-01-22T12:42:00.001-05:00

Heuristic-Driven Public Opinion

My view of the public is that it doesn’t have strong views on policy matters. But most voters do have strong views about famous politicians. A large minority of voters really like Barack Obama, for example, and if he tells them something is good they’ll assume he’s right. Another large minority of voters has strongly negative feelings toward Obama, and toward the Democratic Party writ large, but has positive views about the Republican Party and its leadership.

Then there’s another, smaller faction that takes a dim view of both parties and of politicians generally. But even though this group is small, it’s centrally located on the opinion spectrum. And it tends to assume that if elite leaders from both parties get together and say something’s a good idea—like George Bush and Dick Cheney but also Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle and John Kerry and Dick Gephardt say we should invade Iraq—that it’s probably a good idea. On the contrary, if only one party will support something then it’s probably partisan and bad and probably the party pushing the idea didn’t try hard enough to reach a sensible compromise.

Therefore, almost anything that an opposition party succeeds in mounting unanimous opposition to—Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, George W Bush’s 2005 Social Security privatization push, Barack Obama’s 2009 health reform push—will wind up polling poorly.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

This is exactly right. And it's why the problems that face policy-making are much deeper than the super-majority requirement in the Senate.

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Past Decade Warmest Ever, NASA Data Shows - NYTimes.com

2010-01-21T19:22:00.001-05:00

The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.

via nytimes.com

Wait, but it snowed in October in Boulder, and was really, really chilly. Like seriously cold. A lot of the time. Therefore, my experience of local conditions trumps worldwide temperature observations, and global warming's a hoax!

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Yes, we are essentially parasites

2010-01-19T11:32:00.001-05:00

"We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group. “Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.

via nytimes.com

Aggressive, loutish, self-satisfied parasites. It was a good run, guys.

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For a cold January night

2010-01-08T18:59:00.001-05:00

Two Blue Lights - Songs:Ohia

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Que? (En Espanol)

2010-01-07T17:23:00.001-05:00

Plastic Logic Creates the ‘Paperless Briefcase’

By BRAD STONE

Plastic Logic

After a year of slowly dribbling out news about its plans, Plastic Logic has finally unveiled the Que proReader, another rival to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook in the growing market for electronic reading devices.

The Que proReader, a slender, lightweight touch-screen device the size of an 8 1/2-by-11 piece of paper, is designed primarily for mobile business professionals as a replacement for bulky printouts. The device was created with the celebrated Silicon Valley design firm IDEO.

“We are not creating a paperless office, or like the e-book world, trying to create a paperless bookshelf. What we are driving on is the paperless briefcase,” said Richard Archuleta, chief executive of Plastic Logic.

A decade-old spin-out from Cambridge University, Plastic Logic has raised more than $200 million in venture capital to build a factory in Dresden, Germany. The company wants to enable a new generation of electronics with flexible, robust plastic displays instead of glass and other heavier materials. The Que is its first product, but the company wants to license its technology to other companies and types of devices.

“We are going beyond an e-reader, creating a whole new category,” Mr. Archuleta said.

The Que will connect to user’s e-mail accounts and calendars and, with Wi-Fi and AT&T 3G connectivity, wirelessly reach books from the Barnes & Noble online store and a variety of newspapers and periodicals. That development gives the publications the same look and feel as the print version. Barnes & Noble will also sell the device in its stores.

But it’s awfully expensive. There will be two models of the Que. The first, with 4 gigabytes of memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, will sell for $649. A premium model, with 8GB of memory and AT&T’s 3G connectivity, will cost $799. The devices will go on sale in April. The similarly sized Kindle DX today costs $479.

The Que will also suffer some of the same drawbacks as other e-reading devices (no video, no color), particularly with a new generation of versatile color tablets hitting the market soon.

But Plastic Logic believes black-and-white e-ink on a plastic device is better suited to professionals weighed down by documents. “At Plastic Logic, we really celebrate black and white,” Mr. Archuleta said. “Ink on paper – e-ink on plastic. It’s the key to readability.”

via gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com

Not really sure I get the utility of this product ... You can view Office docs so you can annotate them? If you really need to produce on the go, wouldn't you just want a a laptop? I guess it's best for a manager who can annotate a bunch of documents and send them to her minions to make changes ... Guess that justifies the price point -- definitely not minion-sized.

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Making Yemen-aid out of Yemenis

2010-01-04T19:44:00.001-05:00

A headline looking for a story about increased US aid spending in Yemen. Make it happen.

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Enough said

2009-12-21T18:03:00.001-05:00

From Igor Volsky.

I find it very hard to believe that kill-billers can construct an argument by which the expected social return of waiting for the next reform is higher than passing this bill. On the plus side, the next reform could be more comprehensive, but that seems easily outweighed by a much, much lower likelihood of success, and a higher cost today in terms of lives lost as we delay needed implementation of the pre-existing condition change.

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The octopus and the coconut

2009-12-14T13:32:00.001-05:00

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Don't invest in mutual funds

2009-11-30T19:22:00.001-05:00

November 30th, 2009

Mutual fund charts of the day

Post a comment (3)

Posted by: Felix Salmon

Tags: investing

Fama and French have a very long blog entry (over 5,000 words) about the latest version of their paper on mutual fund returns. As you might expect from research sponsored by an index-fund company, it shows that active mutual-fund managers fail to outperform the market. But at least it does so with pretty charts.

Here’s what happens when you compare actual before-fees returns from mutual-fund managers (the blue line) with what you’d expect if no managers had any skill at all, and the returns were simply distributed by chance (the red line).

On the left hand side of the chart, you see actual fund managers significantly underperforming what you’d expect by luck alone. On the right hand side, however, it seems that if you’re skilled at manager selection, there is a glimmer of hope that you might find a little bit of alpha. Not a lot, but something statistically significant.

Unfortunately, all that alpha — and then some — gets eaten away by fees. Here’s the chart for after-fees returns:

The red line, remember, is the distribution of returns you’d expect if all mutual-fund managers had an alpha of zero. The blue line is actual returns. Fama and French conclude:

For the vast majority of actively managed funds, true α is probably negative; that is, the fund managers do not have enough skill to produce risk adjusted expected returns that cover their costs.

Which comes as no surprise, but it’s still good to see some relatively solid empirics here. Anybody wanting to make an intellectually-credible case in favor of investing in actively-managed mutual funds is going to have to attack this paper head-on.

via blogs.reuters.com

... succinctly summarizing one solid piece of advice I have gotten at literally every level of economics education -- high school, college and b-school.

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This seems perfectly reasonable to me

2009-11-30T14:47:00.001-05:00

November 30, 2009, 1:44 pm — Updated: 1:44 pm -->
Chicken Little cometh

Readers of classic science fiction may remember the “character” of Chicken Little in Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants — a giant hunk of vat-grown meat from which slices were periodically removed to feed the masses.

Via Crooked Timber, it’s here:

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

Yum.

via krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

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The world still exists

2009-11-23T19:19:00.001-05:00

A Blast at Last at Huge Particle Collider

Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, during the restart of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.

via nytimes.com

Or our alien simulators paused the simulation, spent 18 months offline writing code to fix the "Hadron collider bug," spliced the code into the universal physics model, and reverted to the saved simulation from November 23rd, 2009.

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Friday afternoon wonderment

2009-11-20T17:44:00.001-05:00

via bldgblog.blogspot.com

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Naughty Bernanke

2009-11-17T19:34:00.001-05:00

Let me remind readers that, according to the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve's chief policy mission is:
[C]onducting the nation’s monetary policy by influencing the monetary and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
Emphasis mine. Clearly something here is badly amiss. The Fed has given up on easing further despite the fact that unemployment is approaching its highest level in 80 years, and despite the fact that prices are not stable but are declining.

via economist.com

Every Fed challenge team in the country better be arguing for more monetary easing. We're still looking at zero/negative inflation (deflation), and rising unemployment, and it's clear that fiscal policy won't step in (because people think the Treasury department should be run like a family budget, or something). Therefore, more aggressive monetary policy, please.

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Nonsensical

2009-11-09T17:11:00.001-05:00

“A lot of it is sentiment-driven and there the dollar is getting a vote of no confidence,” Mr. Dolan said. “The massive borrowing by the U.S. government is undermining confidence in the longer-term outlook for the dollar.”
Investors appeared to be directing their focus to riskier equities and turning away from the currency markets. The dollar is considered a low-yield investment, given the historically low interest rates in the United States. Last week, the Federal Reserve gave no indication that it planned to raise interest rates anytime soon, leaving investors to reroute their funds toward the stock market, oil and gold.

via nytimes.com

These two paragraphs don't make much sense to me. A vote of no confidence in the government would result in long-term interest rates on US bonds to shoot up to compensate investors for inflation. That isn't happening. In fact, as the next paragraph states, interest rates are historically low.

I'm no expert on currency markets, but it doesn't make sense to me that a wise bet against the dollar in currency markets (driving the dollar lower) wouldn't also be a wise bet in bond markets (selling Treasury bonds and driving long-term interest rates up). It sounds to me like people don't have much faith in American economic growth over the next 10 years, which explains both trends, and could actually be remedied by additional deficits (stimulus spending). See Brad DeLong for more: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/11/a-joyless-recovery.html.>

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Distressing

2009-11-09T16:16:00.001-05:00

Politico reported that you told colleagues, “There is now a pro-life majority in the House.” Is that true?

I don’t remember saying that, but it’s not inconsistent with what the votes say. That’s been the situation.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

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ZOMFG WTF!!!!! 9.5% THIRD QUARTER PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH NUMBER!!!! - J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles

2009-11-05T12:33:00.001-05:00

ZOMFG WTF!!!!! 9.5% THIRD QUARTER PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH NUMBER!!!!

I WAS EXPECTING A 6% PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH QUARTER, BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS!!!

Productivity increased 9.5 percent in the nonfarm business sector during the third quarter of 2009 as unit labor costs fell 5.2 percent (seasonally adjusted annual rates). In manufacturing, productivity increased 13.6 percent while unit labor costs fell 7.1 percent...

Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.

For thirty years, ever since I got into this business, I have been mocking Michel Kalecki. I have been pointing out that recessions see a much sharper fall in profits than in wages. I have been saying that the pace of work slows in recessions--that employers are more concerned with keeping valuable employees in their value chains than using a temporary high level of unemployment to squeeze greater work effort out of their workers.

I don't think that I can mock Michel Kalecki any more, ever again.

via delong.typepad.com

How long can this productivity growth continue? At some point, businesses will run out of ways to squeeze more production out of their current workers ... But will they be able to meet demand with productivity growth alone?

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Election day

2009-11-03T20:04:00.001-05:00

Results start rolling in after 9pm EST.

<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>

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Check yourself before you wreck yourself, Democrats

2009-11-03T18:37:00.001-05:00

A Year After Obama’s Election, How Do You Feel?

By The New York Times

One year ago, we asked NYTimes.com readers for a single word to describe their mood about the presidential election. The response was overwhelming (73,400 words) and varied widely, with “hopeful” and “anxious” as the top choices.

Now, a year after the election of Barack Obama, we want to know: Has your mood changed? Are you energized, hopeful, disappointed, ambivalent or outraged? As Jeff Zeleny wrote Tuesday, Mr. Obama has now seen his pledge to transform the country give way to some of the hardened realities of office. While it will be years before it is possible to gauge the success of his governing agenda, his record for some of the issues on which he campaigned is beginning to come into focus.

What one word best describes how you feel a year after President Obama’s election? Let us know.

via thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com

Watching Democrats' single words to describe their mood after Obama's election scroll across the page (like "betrayed"), all I could think of was: "We were thiiiis close to a McCain administration that would have driven us right into a second depression."

Progressive anger that Obama isn't living up to their (lofty) expectations is understandable, but misplaced. This administration is so much better than the alternative that we should still be thanking each and every one of our lucky stars that he was able to get elected.

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Blizzard afterglow

2009-10-30T20:17:00.001-04:00

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October

2009-10-28T11:10:00.001-04:00

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Nora Bredes - County Legislature - 18th District

2009-10-27T19:32:00.001-04:00

via youtube.com

Gosh, she's good.

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Altar altered

2009-10-27T13:45:00.001-04:00

via bldgblog.blogspot.com

Our civilization's pursuit of parallel processes of innovation and preservation, in a handy postcard-sized image.

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Let's get together to watch the World Series if you're not too busy keeping a Mets fan on suicide watch | Free Sports Ecards, Sports Cards, Sports Greeting Cards, Funny Sports Ecards at someecards.com

2009-10-26T13:17:00.001-04:00

via someecards.com

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Yes, my mom's badass

2009-10-23T12:06:00.001-04:00

Democrat Nora Bredes for Monroe County Legislature District 18

October 23, 2009

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Nora Bredes, who moved to the Rochester area from downstate in 1999, continues to demonstrate she is fully invested in this community.
Bredes, a Democrat, is running for the Monroe County Legislature from District 18, which includes parts of Perinton and Pittsford. Her impressive credentials and vision for improving county government earned her the Democrat and Chronicle's endorsement.

via democratandchronicle.com

She just received the endorsement of Rochester's largest newspaper, but it's still going to be a tough uphill battle ...

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Dow 10,000, Goldman $3 Billion: Welcome to the ‘Bush Recovery’ - The Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

2009-10-15T20:47:00.001-04:00

And yet what is on display in this seemingly nonsensical rise of 10 percent in the value of the Dow over the past few weeks? Nothing more than speculation that certain numbers look promising going forward. In other words, what we have here is a case of the “efficient markets hypothesis” working for the benefit of a Democratic politician, in that the collective wisdom of the market has it that the economy is going to grow at some point relatively soon and that the time to buy is now, so that stocks don’t get more expensive later.

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

This from John Podhoretz, explaining why it's grossly unfair that liberal economists get to bash conservative, "efficient market hypothesis"-believing economists and take credit for the rising Dow for their man, Obama. Two things:

1. What Podhoretz described isn't the efficient market hypothesis. The "Let's buy now before things get pricier because other people are going to buy now" is a rational response to an inefficient, irrational market -- i.e. one in which you expect crowds of people to stampede in and drive up share prices, even if the underlying assets haven't increased in value. In an efficient market hypothesis world, markets go up because we're getting more information about the underlying assets -- they're making lots of money, and the market prospects are looking good. But we're not hearing uniformly good news. Citi's being dragged down by credit losses; consumers are still stretched thin; unemployment's still going up. All in all, signs are mixed at best. Which is why folks like Robert Reich thinks this is an irrational market movement, not evidence of "efficient markets." So Podhoretz is incoherent.

2. Podhoretz admits that Krugman, whose article about the battles in macroeconomics, won't be taking credit for the market gains. Neither is Robert Reich. So two leading liberal economists who criticize efficient markets aren't taking credit for the market gain. Who is Podhoretz talking about?

So, this isn't evidence of efficient markets, and liberal economists aren't taking credit for it. Why did Podhoretz bother writing all this?

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Covered: Matt Layzell covers Avengers 217

2009-10-15T12:03:00.001-04:00

Matt Layzell covers Avengers 217

Original cover by Bob Hall and Dan Green; Marvel 1982. Matt Layzell's website is here.

via coveredblog.blogspot.com

This might be the best covered cover I've seen on Covered so far. I love the conceit of Covered -- amateur or professional artists giving their takes on classic comic book covers. Often I think the covering artists don't go far enough in reinterpreting the classics, frequently opting for a more cartoon-y rendering. But this one really hits the mark.

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Rocky Mountain National Park

2009-10-04T19:03:00.001-04:00

Rocky Mountain National Park

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Woe is us

2009-10-02T12:21:00.001-04:00

Another Bad Employment Report (I-Wish-We-Had-a-Ripcord-to-Pull Department)

The adult civilian employment-to-population ratio drops below 59% to 58.8%, down from a December 2006 peak of 63.4% (and am April 2000 peak of 64.7%):

via delong.typepad.com

What's amazing about this chart is that the civilian employment-population ratio is now around where it was in the early 1980s while women were still establishing their current foothold in the labor market. There are more job-seekers now, with more families shooting to have two bread-winners, and yet the actual ratio of the population employed isn't any higher.

Someone should find George W. Bush and force him to continue to hold press conferences, just so we can continue to publicly ridicule him in the fashion he deserves.

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Song for a windy western Thursday

2009-10-01T16:17:00.001-04:00

Rather Lovely Thing - Nick Cav...

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Zeffirelli Adds More of His Own Boos for ‘Tosca’ - ArtsBeat Blog - NYTimes.com

2009-09-25T15:16:00.001-04:00

It’s like having married a woman who’s still beautiful in your eyes, still wonderful, and for some legal reason they replace her with another one,” Mr. Zeffirelli, 86, said Friday by telephone from Rome.

via artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

This analogy makes no sense to me. Can they replace one's spouse for legal reasons? I mean, they might upgrade you to the newest Stepford wife model, but would they really downgrade you?

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Yeah, you can see -- but don't look in the mirror

2009-09-22T15:17:00.001-04:00

Video: doctors implant tooth into eye, restore sight, creep everyone out
by Vladislav Savov posted Sep 22nd 2009 at 6:25AM
Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis. It's a real procedure that really does revive people's ability to see, yet we get the feeling that people will be more, um, excited about how it's done than why it's done. The seemingly Mary Shelley-inspired doctors extract a tooth from a blind person and drill a hole through it, where a prosthetic lens is placed, and the resulting macabre construction is implanted into the blind person's eye. The tooth is necessary as the body would reject an artificial base. It's not at all pretty, and it cannot repair every type of blindness, but it's still a major step forward. To hear from Sharron Thornton, the first American to have undergone the procedure, check the video after the break, but only if you can handle mildly graphic content -- you've been warned.
[Via Daily Tech]

via engadget.com

Let's hit the rewind button on technological progress. We've gone too far.

And yes, that's horribly insensitive.

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Probe gets clearest glimpse yet of cosmic dawn - space - 17 September 2009 - New Scientist

2009-09-17T18:59:00.001-04:00

The Planck spacecraft has obtained its first peek at the afterglow of the big bang, revealing it in unprecedented detail. Its first map of the entire sky is set to be complete in about six months.

via newscientist.com

"The afterglow of the big bang" ... We are sending peeping tom probes into deep space. The Planck spacecraft, sitting in a tree staring into the universe's window.

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Sunset from my office.

2009-09-02T21:05:00.001-04:00

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Yale and service

2009-09-02T16:34:00.001-04:00

Washington Monthly ranks Yale 23rd in its social contribution. While I think it's fair to rank Yale well below the nation's top public universities, I have a nit to pick. WM's "Service" metric includes ROTC participation; for reasons dating back to the Vietnam War, ROTC has a very low profile on Yale's campus. But WM doesn't effectively track community service performed on campus, so the work of Dwight Hall, an independent organization on campus that generates thousands and thousands of student community service hours, goes unnoticed. Yale definitely felt like a place where service was considered extremely important; sadly, that's not reflected in the ranking.

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My window, again.

2009-09-02T10:57:00.001-04:00

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My bedroom window.

2009-09-02T10:55:00.001-04:00

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Coors Field

2009-09-01T21:49:00.001-04:00

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Snowy Range, WY

2009-09-01T01:27:00.001-04:00

Liz and I drove up to the Snowy Range in Medicine Bow National Forest,
only a few hours north of Boulder. We hiked to the top of Medicine Bow
Mountain where there's still snow at 12000'. We also saw a moose and
her calf when we came around a bend along the Libby Creek trail. We
weren't more than 15' from the two of them. They watched us warily for
a bit before going back to breakfast. Lifelong dream to see a moose:
check. Time to dream bigger.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Westward, ho!

2009-08-11T07:38:00.001-04:00

Road trip to Boulder, CO. Follow my progress here.

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Dress Like Harvard

2009-08-07T09:28:00.001-04:00

HT to Daniela

http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=e0c13888eaec6d0331c4d8d4dc5166c5

The true Harvard man wears Harvard Yard.

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Settlers of Cataan

2009-08-01T17:48:00.001-04:00

The game I love to hate -- can't decide if it's worth the family tension or not. I sat this one out.

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Wonder what he does in Las Vegas?

2009-06-26T12:22:00.001-04:00

HT to Daniela for this amazing man's Global Vision of his Goddess. Inspiring. I was a little confused by this, however:

I have an apartment in Westside of Los Angeles where I spend most of my time, but I am a Nevada citizen and make several trips per year to Las Vegas (I have zero interest in gambling). With the success of my computer technology, my vision is eventually to have one mansion in Los Angeles and another mansion in Las Vegas.

What is he doing in Las Vegas if he isn't gambling? Perhaps it's research for his forthcoming book:

If she has been a prostitute, that is GOOD!! We can discuss it at length. I have written a book (not yet published) entitled, Resurrecting the Innocence in Prostitutes. Fascinating topic! And it's an important part of my Global Vision.

So brave. I hope and pray he will find what he is looking for. How can you look into his old soul eyes without feeling for him?

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What a difference 30 years makes

2009-06-23T17:06:00.001-04:00

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases, such as interracial pregnancies.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding: “Or a rape.”

via nytimes.com

See: Obama, Barack.

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Beyond salvation

2009-06-23T11:52:00.001-04:00

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

You really have to wonder at what point these high unfavorables for the Republican party among all ethnic groups other than whites will be beyond repair. Even if the Republicans find a Hispanic national candidate, will that lead to a 180 in the way Hispanics perceive Republicans? Or will Republicans have so badly poisoned the well that Hispanics will revise their view of the candidate to the negative, not of the party to the positive?

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Busted Evan Bayh

2009-06-21T20:40:00.001-04:00

Vanilla Ice cream with Nestle Quick Cocoa powder on top, yummy.
Now to go off topic as usual. I just watched Republican Senator Evan Bayh on the Fox Morning Show. Sen. Bayh very intelligently explained that President Obama was handleing the Iran situation in the correct and smart way. How refreshing to see a Republican Senator support our President and break from partisan politics to speak the truth. This is the kind of young Republican that can restore our Republican Party and break from the ignorant nasty rhetoric of the Limbaugh, Hannity mob.
— mike allen

via thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com

Not sure if this commenter is in on the joke, but I thought his pegging Evan Bayh as the "Republican" Senator to lead his party out of the doldrums was hilarious. It's kinda like when the kid on the other team keeps hitting the volleyball into the net and you're like, "He's the best player on our team."

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Like rabbits? Like macaques.

2009-06-20T16:26:00.001-04:00

Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?

So asks Time’s Krista Mahr. I think both the article and the research paper on which it’s based seems to be really stretching to analogize this to human prostitution:

According to the paper, “Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market,” published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male’s odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.

If you think about human society, “paying for sex” denotes a pretty specific kind of social practice—prostitution—and isn’t a catchall phrase to cover every mutually beneficial relationship that involves sex. You could probably do a study of married human couples that would show that sex is more likely after a husband is nice to his wife than after he’s been a jerk; I don’t think you’d call that a study about “paying for sex” among married couples.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

3.5 times an hour? I might pay for a break ...

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Low blow

2009-06-19T22:29:00.001-04:00

CIA Hiring Failed Wall Street Analysts

by Dollars and Sense

ShareThis
According to the Wall Street Journal, the CIA is recruiting out of work financial analysts from Wall Street.

Why would they seek out the financial expertise of the people most directly responsible for the global economic meltdown?

The CIA now produces a daily Economic Intelligence Brief for President Barack Obama, chronicling economic, political, and leadership developments that could impact the world economic order.

Describing the importance of the new briefing, CIA Director Leon Panetta told reporters in February that its purpose was â€œto make sure that we arenâ€™t surprised by â€œthe implications of the world-wide economic crisis and what happens with countries throughout the world as a result of that.â€

We can only hope that this explanation is only a cover for their real mission: covertly placing Wall Street's failed finest in charge of the financial and economic sectors of our worst enemies.

--d.f.

via dollarsandsense.org

I'm fairly certain that it wasn't the analysts truly at fault -- I wouldn't assign the blame for the financial crisis to them. I'd assign more of it to their supervisors and managers who were most likely the ones guiding the analysis, choosing methods, ignoring problematic results, and setting policy. Blame them for choosing the wrong industry for, potentially, the wrong reasons; don't blame them for blowing that shit up. They're probably guilty of being "yes" men and women, but they weren't setting the course.

(HT to Daniela.)

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Very different from the GMAT essay

2009-06-18T13:41:00.001-04:00

Are You Smarter than a French Teenager?

Alex Massie

Thursday, 18th June 2009

The Bac began today with, as is traditional, the philosophy paper. Via Charles Bremner and Art Goldhammer, here are some of the questions our French friends had to answer:

For the Literature Stream:

1) Does objectivity in history suppose impartiality in the historian? 2) Does language betray thought ?

For the Science Stream:

1) Is it absurd to desire the impossible? 2) Are there questions which no science can answer?

Well, is it absurd to desire the impossible? Have at it, Spectator readers...

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Who is the market supposed to serve? Producers or consumers?

2009-06-12T11:23:00.001-04:00

Consumers, I say. I think most people would agree with me, and I think that given the government's role in creating markets, a government that created a market that generated surpluses for producers at the expense of consumers would not be fulfilling its end of the social contract. Producers, generally corporations, are legal constructs, and their surpluses -- economic profits -- would not be evenly distributed among employees and owners of capital. Favoring consumers on the other hand should result in a more egalitarian distribution of benefits. Fo egalitarian reasons, and since its consumers as citizens for whom the government exists, the market as artifact of government action ought to favor consumers. I don't think I've said anything controversial or stunning so far.

But the debate over the public plan and health care reform seems to implicitly challenge this premise. Republicans say, "The public plan is bad because people would get the same service at a lower price, and for-profit insurance companies wouldn't be able to compete." Given that market action ought to benefit consumers, not producers, this on its face is a positive development, not a negative one. I haven't really heard Republicans build their story from there, explaining why despite these lower prices, consumers are worse off. They have blustered about the lack of choice, but couldn't we end up in a situation in which consumers are provided their basic health insurance by the government and purchas supplemental insurance if they wish, providing greater choices in treatments? Is that so unreasonable?

I won't know what the story Republicans will tell about how reducing producer surplus (health insurer profits) for the benefit of consumers will end up hurting us until I hear someone ask the question, and I haven't heard it yet. Somehow, we have come to think of corporations as ends in and of themselves as opposed to means to an end -- our happiness, security, wealth, and health. That is not the explicit argument that Republicans make, but when your dots connecting harm to corporations with harm to consumers are sufficiently far apart and great in number, it's impossible not to wonder whose interests are most important.

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The feel good movie of the year

2009-06-01T07:56:00.001-04:00

via wired.com

Down to Pixar's Up. Not sure how I feel about the attempt to show the catastrophe that puts the man and his son on the road, since I thought it was more effective as an unknown. I also hope they don't give the man a whole bunch of bullets, since it's a crucial plot point that he only has a couple. The trailer seems to have him constantly shooting at people -- perhaps they're trying to appeal to the action movie audience at theaters this summer.

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Management -- the incomplete profession

2009-05-23T12:33:00.001-04:00

I spent two years of my life and a substantial amount of money earning an MBA, a degree I share with many of the people running the largest companies in the world, and many of the people who ran those companies into the ground. NPR recently considered to what degree business schools are responsible for the financial crisis still running its course. After diligently giving voice to both sides of that debate, the story then explores the idea of turning management into a true profession, with a standard set of values, knowledge and, perhaps, a Hippocratic-esque oath akin to medicine or law.

It's indisputable that changes of this sort would be valuable to society. But not for the reasons one might expect. Arguments for teaching a stricter set of values and forcing people to swear to a code of ethics imply a transformative process at work in the MBA education -- people are changed by their experiences in an MBA program. Of course that's true to an extent; livers damaged, vlookup skills gained, networks widened, people walk away from MBA programs with broader horizons, loftier ambitions, and some skills. What they don't learn, even at the Yale School of Management with its commitment to creating leaders for business and society, is a coherent set of professional ethics. There are no required ethics courses, and the State and Society course taught in the core curriculum is a disorganized agglomeration of political science, law and sociology, not a true exploration of business's role in creating social benefit.

This results in some strained conversations about professional ethics and responsibility. When we discussed a case about pharmaceutical companies, I pointed out that the consistently high returns on equity suggested that they were over-compensated for the risk of drug development and that we could afford to shorten patent terms and gain cheap generics more quickly. Rather than addressing the empirical questions of how consistent the returns on equity really are, or what returns are necessary to encourage entry and drug development, my professor called me a "communist" for using that line of argument. In a subsequent class, we discussed the case of the acquisition of one publicly-held government defense contractor by another. The acquired firm was characterized as being deeply committed to delivering unbeatable value to the government, consistently pricing below competition and delivering higher quality work. The acquirer was more profitable, but charged higher prices and had had complaints about quality. I pointed out that the acquisition was a clear social detriment; we as taxpayers would all be paying more money for the same or slightly lower quality services, while the debt- and equity-holders involved in the acquisition would benefit. A few students argued against me, and the professor shrugged his shoulders. In both these cases, there were obvious trade-offs between social benefit and corporate profits, and in both cases the notion that we had a right as a society to determine how those trade-offs were made was dismissed. Conservative students who ascribe to free market orthodoxy over-apply it to these instances where there is no free market; the government creates monopolies with patent law, and is the monopsony buyer of defense contracting. Meanwhile, students who might be more willing to consider social benefit do not have a vocabulary or framework with which to make their arguments. These incidents occurred in the same year that the school released the first issue of its magazine Qn, asking the question, "Can we make management a profession?" The Yale School of Management was asking the right questions, but has shown little desire to implement any answers.

All that said, the Yale School of Management is a very different place from Harvard Business School or Wharton. The curriculum is structured differently, classes are smaller, electives in not-for-profit management are many and of high quality, and the case method is supplemented with a hefty dose of classic rational-market and behavioral economics. However, it is not these differences in curricula that make the Yale School of Management so different -- it is instead the student body. Many people come from not-for-profit backgrounds, and there are a lot of joint degree students with the Forestry School. Even the bankers and consultants If students at the Yale School of Management become leaders for society and business, it has more to do with their values coming in and their mutual support of those values than it does anything they learn while at the school. More generally, for a Hippocratic oath of business or a beefed up curriculum to be most valuable, it will have to change the pool of applicants to business schools, not necessarily change the students once they arrive.

If you want to change the applicant pool to business school, you're going to have to make it attractive to the right people and painful to the wrong people. Unfortunately, I don't think shoving an ethics class or two into the core curriculum and requiring an oath upon a graduation is going to significantly deter the greedy and conniving. And the marketplace does not care enough about ethical MBAs to give those who demonstrate their values a leg-up in hiring, which could serve to attract the right kinds of people. These steps may turn management into a profession, but they won't consistently turn out managers that act like professionals. The people who come into MBA programs who care about social impact will leave with a better sense of what that means and how to achieve it. But those who come in concerned only with the marginal increase in salary, or access to venture capital networks are likely to leave no different than they do now.

The ugly truth is that professions are not constituted only by values and curricula -- they require regulation and punishment. The bar examination and the medical licensing examinations are necessary to police the profession and ensure sound professional practice. Until every vice president or above in a public corporation is required to pass a management licensing exam -- until there are some serious sticks and carrots at work -- management will not be a true profession. These regulations may go against every fiber of the free-market champions that typically enter business schools, but the market has shown itself to be completely incapable of letting the social-value maximizing cream rise to the top of corporate ladders. Instead, we've had villains, hucksters and incompetents, alongside the occasional paragon. If the management profession is going to spot the bad apples before they drive the economy of another cliff, it's going to have to look for them and kick them out. Business school might not be the place to apply that rigorous filter, but it has to exist.

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Dopey NPR story about the CAFE standards

2009-05-20T08:27:00.001-04:00

"It's a very tricky situation," says Marc Cannon, a top executive at AutoNation, the country's biggest car retailer.
Cannon says consumers care about the environment, but they care even more about money. Unless the price of gas is consistently high, Cannon says there just isn't enough demand for the fuel-efficient cars Obama wants manufacturers to build.
"This summer gasoline was $4, and every single automaker was trying to put out fuel-efficient vehicles as fast as they could," Cannon says. "All of a sudden, come December, gasoline drops to $2 and nobody wants fuel-efficient vehicles."

via npr.org

Completely missed the point. The market environment in which consumers switch to/from fuel efficient cars was one without strict CAFE standards. With the standards in place, consumers won't be switching to/from fuel efficient cars -- all the cars will be more fuel efficient (at least all the new ones). That's the whole point of the standard. I don't understand what these paragraphs have to do with anything.

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For your class

2009-05-19T21:15:00.001-04:00

via feministing.com

I don't even know where to begin.

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Hurrah!

2009-05-18T11:28:00.001-04:00

Radiohead Recording New Album

Red alert, batten down the hatches, let the dogs out, etc. Radiohead are currently recording new music with longtime producer Nigel Godrich, according to a BBC interview with bassist Colin Greenwood.

"It's at the stage where we've got the big Lego box out and we've tipped it out on the floor and we're just looking at all the bits and thinking what's next?...It was very noisy and chaotic and really fun," says Greenwood.

via pitchfork.com

Not that the last five albums have gotten old, but this news is like finding out you're going to meet your new best friend.

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"New Zealand Launches Hookup Airways"

2009-05-18T09:14:00.001-04:00

Register on the website and you can look for love in categories that include American boyfriend, Canadian girlfriend, Kiwi friend, and, our favorite, “business contact. The airline says 75 people have signed up. They’re about evenly split between North Americans and Kiwis. Men and women are also equally represented. Air New Zealand hopes passengers will be in a romantic mood just thinking about their destination.

via wired.com

What's worse, sharing a 13 hour flight with an awkward stranger who thinks you two ought to be soul mates, or finding out your soul mate lives in New Zealand? Love conquers all, but I don't know too many successful long-distance relationships that span the Pacific Ocean. Of course, you could just have sex. Who doesn't look/smell better after a 13 hour flight?

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Jesse V, large and in charge

2009-05-13T11:35:00.001-04:00

Jesse Ventura on Larry King:

Jesse Ventura: I would prosecute every person who was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it, I would prosecute the people that ordered it, because torture is against the law.”

Larry King: You were a Navy S.E.A.L.

Jesse Ventura: Yes, and I was waterboarded [in training] so I know…It is torture…I’ll put it to you this way: You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

via harpers.org

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Poor ASU

2009-05-13T11:12:00.001-04:00

via gawker.com

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Ha, Pooh. (Or the sound a pig makes when it sneezes.)

2009-05-05T14:27:00.001-04:00

via mail.google.com

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NL efficiency, 5/4/09

2009-05-05T10:31:00.001-04:00

Latest effiiciency data and motion chart here. Bad week for the Mets. Oliver Perez was demoted to the bullpen, and the bullpen let a couple of victories slip away, offsetting continued improvement in offensive efficiency. Now estimating that Mets have third most-losses due to inefficiencies, behind Nationals and Rockies.

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Her first album was good, this one's better

2009-05-05T10:26:00.001-04:00

Actor - St. Vincent

Seems rather like what the movie Revolutionary Road would sound like as an album ... yearning, domestic violence, discontent.

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Profoundly idiotic Fox business channel anchor doesn't understand "risk"

2009-05-01T10:46:00.001-04:00

via prospect.org

Robert Frank takes the uncontroversial position that any personal economic success involves some luck. I don't see how this could possibly be controversial, since making it through any given day takes some luck. But Stuart Varney, anchor, is insulted and outraged at the suggestion that it wasn't his talent and hard-work that got him his high-paying job. Then comes this bit, at the 1:47 mark:

"That's outrageous. That is outrageous. What about the risk I took? .. Do you know what level of risk is required for this level of success?!"

Stuart Varney decides that his strongest argument in contending that luck was not involved in his success is to ... contend that luck was involved in his success. After all, what is risk but luck? Sure, he might have taken good risks, but risk by its nature has a probabilistic element. Even if he took only good risks, say gambles where the chances are 95% of winning and each is needed to "be successful," after 5 of those gambles, he only has a 77% chance of being successful. If, as he says, he was constantly taking risks early in his career, we can reasonably assume that the probability of his having won all those gambles he was taking is pretty small. But he's successful, despite all of his risky behavior. Lucky him.

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See, Product(Red) does help people

2009-04-30T14:33:00.001-04:00

via picasaweb.google.com

In Uganda.

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Measuring efficiency in the NL, again

2009-04-30T09:29:00.001-04:00

The motion chart/data set I've been working on is now at steady-state. I'll try to update this every Monday, not because you care, but because I'm curious about what this will look like. There are a lot of ways to figure out how well a team ought to be doing, and this method is by no means as straightforward as the simple Pythagorean theorem method based on runs scored versus runs allowed. But it does make for some very pretty pictures, and some estimates of losses due to offense versus pitching/defense (assuming all teams' have around the same variance in runs scored from game to game). There's a walkthrough in the second tab that takes you through some potentially interesting views of the data.

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Swine flu -- now and later

2009-04-29T07:42:00.001-04:00

When I first heard news about swine flu, I asked my girlfriend, a medical student, if I should be worried. Having just returned from Uganda where she had worked in a hospital where a resident on call could check in over 60 patients in an evening only to see all but a handful pass away before the end of that call shift, she responded with a simple, "No." Seeking a second opinion, and still worried, I found this blog, written by a Columbia University virologist. He argues that the seasonality of flu transmission will reduce the spread of infection in the northern hemisphere while tending to exacerbate it in the southern over the next few months. Apparently, flu is much harder to transmit in the hot weather of summer, creating, perhaps, the first summer where New Yorkers can be thankful for their steam bath of a city. From the blog:

Q: Should this be considered a prime candidate for next winters flu season?
A: It depends on what happens in the southern hemisphere. In the next week or two we will know whether A/California/07/2009 (H1N1) spreads in the lower half of the globe and causes epidemics of disease. If it does, then it is highly likely that the virus will return here in the fall. If the virus fails to spread, then everyone can go back to worrying about H5N1.

Luckily for us, if H1N1 becomes a deadly epidemic in the southern hemisphere, we may have just enough time to produce a working vaccine by the time it attacks the northern hemisphere in force as temperatures drop. So I'm less worried now than I was, but still feel the urge to make swine flu jokes about once an hour -- a real indication of anxiety.

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Banks complain that stress test is too fair

2009-04-28T12:19:00.001-04:00

Regulators have told Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. that the banks may need to raise more capital based on early results of the government's so-called stress tests of lenders, according to people familiar with the situation.

The capital shortfall amounts to billions of dollars at Bank of America, based in Charlotte, N.C., people familiar with the bank said.
Executives at both banks are objecting to the preliminary findings, which emerged from the government's scrutiny of 19 large financial institutions. The two banks are planning to respond with detailed rebuttals, these people said, with Bank of America's appeal expected ...

via online.wsj.com

This article is behind a subscription wall, but I get the print version of the WSJ at school, so I got to read these final three paragraphs, true journalistic gems that they are:
One question is how the government is projecting banks' revenue streams through 2010. Some bankers are optimistic that the Fed will use their first-quarter numbers to predict their performance for teh enxt two years.

That could inflate the banks' earning potentials--and thus their capital cushions--because many of the companies had strong first-quarter performances.

Analysts, investors and most executives say those results probably aren't sustainable.

Shorter WSJ: Banks want everyone to believe they can sustain first quarter's profitability; everyone thinks that's bullshit. Given that regulators believe Citi and BofA to be undercapitalized by billions of dollars, it's unlikely that they're projecting forward the banks anomalous first quarter results, which are highly suspect as I've written about earlier. So that puts the government in agreement with, apparently, everyone else.

If only there were a "too big to lie about financial performance" corollary to the "too big to fail" maxim. I would also settle for "too big to complain about executive pay caps after destroying the economy." Come on guys, be the bigger banks.

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NL Batting Efficiency - 4/27/09, Take 2

2009-04-27T11:13:00.001-04:00

Well, after struggling to get this embedded into the post, I've given up (Verifiable -- way easier than Google to embed into Posterous, but sadly lacking a motion chart). Here's a link to a Google motion chart showing NL batting efficiency, now normalized by the number of games each team has played. As you can see, the Mets are not doing so hot. While their efficiency has increased, that's due to their getting fewer hits while scoring the same number of runs -- not the way you want to go. And their winning percentage deteriorated. Plotting runs per game on the x-axis and winning percentage on the y-axis provides a neat picture of how well teams are actually turning offense into wins.You can watch the Mets drop like a rock -- scoring the same number of runs, but getting fewer wins thanks to some truly execrable starting pitching (see: Perez, Oliver).

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2009-04-27T10:41:00.001-04:00

Untitled

2009-04-23T10:02:00.001-04:00

Wired loves to come up with cool ways of graphically representing data and relationships. I usually like them. But this "Enigmatrix" is bizarre.

Game theory and Math are unconnected. Huh? Game theory is math. What do you think John Nash was scribbling on all those windows?
Dungeons & Dragons does not connect to Plot, but Magic: The Gathering does. WTF is the plot of Magic: The Gathering? It's a money-sink that increases your social seclusion in junior high. What's the plot of Dungeons & Dragons? Ask my elven fighter-mage on a quest to restore his homeland.
The Magic node connects to the Code node. I don't know anything about writing code or magic tricks, but I use Windows -- nothing magical about it.
Jeopardy is in a connecting chain to Plot with Propaganda. Alex Trebek -- the Joseph Goebbels of game shows.
Settlers of Cataan is not the central node.

I'm sure if I could identify more of the links on this chart, I'd find more problems.

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Pour one out for Chrysler

2009-04-23T09:26:00.001-04:00

Fiat denied any plans to invest directly into Chrysler, the heavily indebted US carmaker, or fund it in the future as it reported a wider-than-expected first-quarter loss.

via ft.com

Well, it was nice knowing you, Chrysler. I have fond memories of riding to Little League games in my parents' used Town & Country. That was a comfortable minivan.

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More like this please

2009-04-22T18:44:00.001-04:00

via youtube.com

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The first time was for information. The next 182 times, not so much.

2009-04-22T14:08:00.001-04:00

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

via mcclatchydc.com

Remember how I was curious about how the need for 183 and 83 waterboarding sessions on two prisoners lined up with a former agent's claim that Abu Zubaydah gave everything up after his first session? Seems that those next 82 times in Zubaydah's case were not for information, but to get him to say that Al Qaedah had ties with Iraq so that we could invade. This is exactly analogous with how torture is generally used by oppressive regimes throughout history -- not to gather reliable information, but to force false confessions.

I guess that explains it.

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Terrifying Somali pirate

2009-04-21T10:26:00.001-04:00

via nytimes.com

Something tells me that this poor kid has no idea what's going on.

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The New York Mets -- the worst offense in the NL

2009-04-20T18:45:00.001-04:00

Yes, that's a provocative statement. But consider this -- when compared to other NL teams, the Mets are the least efficient in turning offensive baserunners (as measured by hits (H), walks (BB) and batters hit-by-pitches (HBP)) into runs.

While the Mets have scored 55 runs -- more than 7 other NL teams, they are third in H + BB + HBP. Using a method of measuring efficiency called Data Envelopment Analysis and Excel's Solver function, we can score each team on the efficiency by which they turn inputs (H + BB + HBP) into outputs (runs). And the Mets are dead last in this efficiency score -- behind even the Nationals.

The chart below plots H + BB + HBP along the X-axis and runs along the Y-axis. If you were to drop a string down from the top of the graph, and imagine that each point is a peg, the pegs along which that string would lie when pulled taught are the most efficient teams. I've color-coded the points by efficiency, to make it a bit easier to see. Running your mouse over the graph reveals that the teams along the efficient frontier are the Phillies, the Marlins, the Dodgers, the Rockies, and the Diamondbacks. These teams have an efficiency score of 1. The Mets are furthest below the frontier, and have the lowest efficiency score -- 0.77. The next lowest are the Nats with a score of 0.80.

Obviously, it's not all about runs. And it's not all about efficiency -- if the Mets were collecting 50 hits a game to score 10 runs, nobody would be complaining, even though they'd be horribly inefficient. But what's so worrisome about the Mets is that it's not like people aren't hitting -- the team's not slumping, in the usual sense, and yet they still can't generate enough runs to win consistently. This crude measure of efficiency reveals exactly what Met-fans have been griping about -- the Mets are leaving a lot of runners on base. I didn't realize just how bad it was.

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He spilled it after 35 seconds ... and then we waterboarded him 82 more times

2009-04-20T14:12:00.001-04:00

With the recently released torture memos making it clear just how many times we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (83 and 183 respectively), my mind raced back to a vaguely recalled article from a couple years ago. In this article, there was a statistic about how quickly waterboarding had worked to loosen the terrorism suspect's tongue, and I remembered being simultaneously horrified and impressed with the speed at which it worked. A little digging, and I came up found the article.

An AP article that quoted a former CIA agent from December of '07, it was one of the first public confirmations that we had used waterboarding. Interesting, though, is the fact that the former agent claimed Abu Zubaydah was talking "in less than 35 seconds." We now know from the memos that that's at the long-end of a normal waterboarding session. So, if we can believe this agent, they used it once to great effect, and then used it 82 more times.

So, one of two things is true.

1. It was really effective and we tortured him 82 more times anyway.

2. It wasn't effective, but we tried it 83 times.

Which one nauseates you more?

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Further explorations of CEO compensation

2009-04-18T11:56:00.001-04:00

I was pointed to the data visualization website Verifiable by this blog post. I then came across a chart of total CEO compensation against stock performance, showing little correlation between performance and pay.

I snagged the data and made some changes. Since stock performance is highly variable, and CEOs probably don't have all that much control over one-year stock returns, I was curious to see if CEO compensation was related at all to the size of the company. After all, it's reasonable that boards of directors will consider the difficulty of CEO's job to increase as the company grows larger and its operations more complex, and so pay more to entice top talent. Market cap may not be the best proxy for size and complexity, but it's pretty good.

I excluded Apple, where Steve Jobs makes $1 a year, and took the log of both total compensation (including stock options and grants) and total cash compensation, and compared them with the log of market capitalization. As you can see, there does some to be a weak correlation in both charts. The correlation between total compensation and market cap is 0.36 and that drops to 0.33 between cash compensation and market cap.

<a alt="verifiable.com" title="verifiable.com" href="http://verifiable.com/charts/2684"><img style="border:0;max-width:800px;max-height:600px;" src="" /></a>

So what have we learned? Not that much. There's probably an extensive academic literature on this subject that I haven't looked at. But this does suggest that CEO compensation isn't a total black box.

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Stanky banks

2009-04-17T09:28:00.001-04:00

Go Citigroup! Best quarter since 2007! Thanks to an accounting trick and revenue from their fixed income trading unit.

What is with these fixed income trading units? They made JP Morgan money, they helped Goldman sell $5 billion in stock. In fact, they seem to be single-handedly keeping their banks in the black. But what are they trading, and why is it they're making so much money now?

Seems that AIG, owned by you and me, is selling these banks entire portfolios of fixed income instruments at really, really low prices. This is what it means, apparently, to "unwind" AIG's business -- sell still-valuable assets to investment banks at well below their market value in portfolio-sized transactions. The investment banks make big profits, and the soon-to-be-unemployed managers of these trading desks at AIG are eminently employable heroes to the investment banks.

But how could this happen? Probably because the government wants it to happen. This is one sneaky, anti-capitalist, anti-markets, anti-democratic method of giving more money to ailing investment banks. With Congress unwilling to give more money to bail the big banks out, these transactions provide another injection of capital into the banks through a third-party -- AIG.

One more quick observation: As Obama delivers noble rhetoric about why torture can't be justified in the name of expediency, his Treasury Department is subverting free markets and the democratic system to save the banking sector. I'm not drawing a moral equivalence, or suggesting that saving the financial system isn't necessary. Call me crazy, but funneling money to i-banks through selling AIG's tax-payer owned assets for cents on the dollar does seem logically analogous to torturing people for the sake of potentially life-saving information; in both cases, you damage our democracy for the sake of expediency. No caterpillars in bank vaults yet, though.

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Who to pay and how much, or CEOs don't earn what they make

2009-04-16T16:05:00.001-04:00

This is really the critical point. According to the standard textbook model, an increase (or a decline) in the labour income of a given individual should be interpreted as a rise (or a fall) in his or her marginal product, i.e. his or her contribution to total economic output. That is, if Mr Smith's wage rises from $30,000 to $50,000, then it must be that Mr Smith has produced $20,000 of extra economic output. The beauty of the market system is precisely that the increase in Mr Smith's wage should in principle correspond to the creation of new economic value and well-being, and is not obtained at the expense of anybody else (i.e. even with fully selfish economic agents there is no externality on others that is not being internalised by the price system). This textbook model probably provides an (approximately) accurate description of 99% of the labour market. However it is extremely naïve—to say the least—to imagine that it adequately describes the pay determination process at the very top end of the labour market. Assume that the CEO of AIG or GM manages to get an increase in compensation, say a rise from a $5m to a $10m total annual compensation. It is truly heroic to conclude from this observation that his or her contribution to AIG or GM output has increased by $5m, and that the total output of AIG and GM has risen by that much. There is tremendous evidence showing that the invisible hand of the market simply does not work in this very peculiar segment of the labour market, and that top executives will keep setting their own pay to the highest possible levels (with no connection whatsoever with their marginal product, which nobody can properly estimate) as long as they are not prevented to do so. Historical evidence suggests that highly progressive taxation on very high incomes is the most efficient way to achieve this goal.

via economist.com

This from Professor Thomas Piketty in his Economist debate with Cato Institute's Chris Edwards about instituting high (like 80% marginal tax rates) on incomes over a couple million dollars. It's a good summation of the back and forth that's been happening among policy wonks over how to regulate executive pay.

In this paragraph, Piketty puts his finger on the central perceived problem with paying CEOs a lot of money -- they don't produce value equal to what they earn. But what I haven't seen anywhere is much discussion of the reasons for setting salaries beyond a worker's marginal product, and there are a lot of other reasons.

Most relevant for CEO pay is the way someone else's pay -- someone above me in the corporate hierarchy -- can affect how hard I work. When I am making a decision about how much effort to expend in the current period, I'm balancing the cost of my effort against the benefit I get not only from my current salary, but also from the improved probability of being promoted, and the concomitant salary boost. So if I'm an Executive Vice President at a Fortune 500 company competing with five other EVPs and innumerable outside candidates to become the next CEO of the company, the CEO pay package could incentivize me to work harder to win that promotion. Without that incentive, you may have to pay me more. Paying me and my five other competitors more may actually cost you more than what you saved by paying the CEO less. And it's not that you're paying the CEO for her work -- some of her pay is just to incentivize me.

Obviously, this effect may not explain all big CEO pay packages, but it's at least worth thinking about, because if you don't, you're really not thinking about the problem in a complete way, and could end up misclassifying good corporate policy as bad, or criminal.

To me, big CEO pay packages are not a root problem, but a symptom of weak corporate governance. If we could be reasonably certain that a company's board was truly independent and their CEO was still making a ton of money -- more than they earn themselves -- then we could be reasonably confident that the company had other good reasons, like providing incentives to others within the organization.

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Goldman Sachs thinks we're stupid

2009-04-14T10:32:00.001-04:00

6:50 a.m.| Where’s December?: Goldman Sachs reported a profit of $1.8 billion in the first quarter, and plans to sell $5 billion in stock and get out of the government’s clutches, if it can.

How did it do that? One way was to hide a lot of losses in not-so-plain sight.

Goldman’s 2008 fiscal year ended Nov. 30. This year the company is switching to a calendar year. The leaves December as an orphan month, one that will be largely ignored. In Goldman’s earnings statement, and in most of the news reports, the quarter ended March 31 is compared to the quarter last year that ended in February.

The orphan month featured — surprise — lots of write-offs. The pretax loss was $1.3 billion, and the after-tax loss was $780 million.

Would the firm have had a profit if it had stuck to its old calendar, and had to include December and exclude March?

via norris.blogs.nytimes.com

How to run a profitable financial institution in five easy steps.

1. Shift the fiscal year so that it excludes a bad month (December) and includes a better one (March).
2. Stick all your write-offs in the bad month.
3. Report a big quarterly profit.
4. Sell $5 billion of stock to the suckers who believe you.
5. Pay back the government so you can give yourself that big bonus you deserve.

Lloyd Blankfein, everybody. It's also worth noting that Goldman Sachs has set aside $4.8 billion for salary and bonuses -- a larger percentage of revenue than it set aside last year. Also a number suggestively similar in size to the $5 billion in stock they want to sell.

I hope to God this doesn't work out for them.

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I share this problem

2009-04-07T14:42:00.001-04:00

via feministe.us

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Why shouldn't I buy one of these?

2009-04-07T10:51:00.001-04:00

Pogoplug review
by Joshua Topolsky, posted Apr 6th 2009 at 12:27PM

When we first caught wind of the Pogoplug -- a small box that essentially lets you turn any USB hard drive (and drives only) into a network device -- we were pretty darn excited. Having a house full of disparate storage boxes and no easy way to connect to them made the prospect of the 'plug seem very enticing. Not only does the Pogoplug make your drive accessible via your PC (with accompanying software), but it -- we think more importantly -- makes the drive accessible via a web front-end and an iPhone app. We finally had a chance to break one of these out and see how it performs, and our findings are below.

via engadget.com

Sounds pretty sweet. And I don't use my external HD at all as it stands.

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Pussy Cat Dolls are terrible role models

2009-04-06T12:01:00.001-04:00

via blogs.nypost.com

I would not recommend anyone ride a motorcycle without a headlight or helmet.

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I am not as fun as I think I am

2009-04-06T11:00:00.001-04:00

While procrastinating by using my monthly emusic downloads today, I realized that I really don't understand my own music consumption very well. Or at least my purchasing decisions do not match my consumption habits. Here is a chart detailing the degree to which I over/underweigh my music purchasing by type of consumption:

I know I listen to music a lot while studying and working. So I download a lot of jazz, electronica (i.e. Boards of Canada), and indie music where vocals are fuzzy (i.e. Sea and Cake, Beach House). But I also download music because I would love to listen to it at a party. But I host 0 parties. And I'm still waiting for that first invitation to DJ a party.

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Must read from Nate Silver on GM

2009-03-31T15:12:00.001-04:00

GM's Problems are 50 Years in the Making

by Nate Silver @ 7:45 AM

Let's take something of a 30,000-foot view on the condition of General Motors. The chart below details GM's operating margin -- its profits divided into its revenues -- over the past 50 years:

I haven't provided the dates on the chart because they aren't important. The auto business is highly cyclical because consumers are buying expensive assets that last for years at a time. Nobody ever really has to buy a new car (they can buy a used one if their car breaks down), and therefore consumers are willing to hold on to their existing vehicles and wait out economic slumps. You can't do that with, say, a loaf of bread, or even something like a cellphone, which has a much shorter lifespan.

But you knew all of that already. The remarkable thing is that, once you account for the economic cycles, the trend for GM is exceptionally steady -- an exceptionally steady trend downward. There were still bad times thirty years ago -- but they weren't bad enough to threaten GM's survival, and conversely, the good times were much better. These are General Motors' operating margins by decade:
Average Annual Operating Margin, General Motors
1960s: 8.7%
1970s: 5.5%
1980s: 3.0%
1990s: 1.3%*
2000s: -0.5%
* Excludes one-time $20 billion accounting charge for retiree health benefits in 1992.
If I were an alien beaming down from Rigel-3 looking at this pattern -- an alien with an MBA degree -- my first guess is that it would reflect some sort of systemic problem, some chronic imbalance that magnified over time. Something, in other words, like the costs of GM's retiree pension and health care programs. It's difficult to get a precise figure on these so-called legacy costs, but they averaged about $7 billion per year between 1993 and 2007 and are probably at least $10 billion per year now. Considering that GM has never made as much as $10 billion in profit in a year and that its entire operating lossses in 2008 were $13.8 billion, you can see why this is a significant problem.

Of course, GM benefited by promising its employees access to lucrative retirement programs -- it benefited by being able to pay less to those employees in the form of salary. But whereas the benefits to GM came long ago, the costs come now. This, indeed, is the entire crux of the problem, as is cogently explained by this Washington Post article from 2005:

GM began its slide down the slippery slope in 1950, when it began picking up costs for medical insurance, pensions and retiree benefits. There was huge risk to GM in taking on these obligations -- but that didn't show up as a cost or balance-sheet liability. By 1973, the UAW says, GM was paying the entire health insurance bill for its employees, survivors and retirees, and had agreed to "30 and out" early retirement that granted workers full pensions after 30 years on the job, regardless of age.

These problems began to surface about 15 years ago because regulators changed the accounting rules. In 1992, GM says, it took a $20 billion non-cash charge to recognize pension obligations. Evolving rules then put OPEB on the balance sheet. Now, these obligations -- call it a combined $170 billion for U.S. operations -- are fully visible. And out-of-pocket costs for health care are eating GM alive.
GM was willing to cut its employees some very attractive deals in the 1950s through the 1980s -- provided that they took them in the form of retirement benefits rather than salary, which wouldn't hit GM's books until much later and which until 1992 weren't even required to be carried on its balance sheets all, making its financial statements (superficially) more appealing to its shareholders. That health care costs have risen so substantially in the United States have made a bad matter worse.

This issue is wrongly portrayed by both the liberal and the conservative media as one of management versus labor, when really it is a battle between General Motors past and General Motors present. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, everyone benefited: GM and its shareholders got the benefit of higher profit margins, and meanwhile, its employees benefited from GM's willingness to cut a bad deal -- for every dollar they were giving up in salary, those employees were getting a dollar and change back in retirement benefits. But now, everyone is hurting.

Nor does this provide for much in the way of solutions. The retirees might have benefited from GM's short-sightedness -- but they also worked hard Monday through Friday every week of in expectation of receiving the benefits that GM had promised them. From the standpoint of fairness, it would be much better to require GM to take the hit -- but there isn't much of GM left to punish, as its outstanding retiree obligations exceed its market capitalization many times over, and as the decision-makers who led GM into this position left the company decades ago. Today's employees at GM, and the unions that organize them, likewise don't have anything much to do with the problem -- most of the excess costs it requires to produce a Buick versus a Toyota come in the form of legacy costs, not what those employees are receiving in salary and benefits today. And the taxpayer is bound to to get screwed either way, either picking up the tab to bail out GM, or bearing the costs of the pension programs, which are guaranteed by the government (although the legacy health benefits aren't guaranteed).

Policy-makers, finally, share in the blame too. General Motors might be the latest casualty of the distorted incentives created by our employer-based health care system. Meanwhile, the government would probably improve incentives by providing a more generous Social Security guarantee in lieu of guaranteeing private pension programs. The whole idea of Social Security is that people do an inadequate job of saving when left to their own devices. But companies, even companies as big and proud as General Motors, are overly concerned with the present as well.

via fivethirtyeight.com

Dynamics like these have played out in miniature in the past few years, with GM and other domestic automakers borrowing future sales by offering extremely attractive financing and low prices in order to meet their present debt, pension and health care obligations. At some point, "the future" was bound to become "the present." These behaviors are exactly what rational markets are supposed to prevent. GM shouldn't have been able to fool rational investors by shifting labor costs to the future (by shifting payments from salaries to pensions) and revenues to the present (by borrowing future sales). But GM was trading at $40 a share in 2007, whereas it's worth $2 a share now -- a price much closer to the true value of a company involved in these shenanigans. Further evidence that equity market rationality is a myth.

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Uganda - Lake Bunyonyi

2009-03-27T11:28:00.003-04:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Uganda - Murchison Falls

2009-03-27T11:28:00.001-04:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Mzungu Circles

2009-03-25T14:43:00.001-04:00

This post is also up at Liz's blog about her trip to Uganda:
www.kvachinuganda.blogspot.com

We have just returned from Lake Bunyonyi, a lake in the southwest
corner of Uganda formed by volcanic eruption only 10,000 years ago.
Free from crocodiles, hippos, and schistosomiasis, it’s safe for
swimming, both for us and for the otters that hunt crayfish. Along the
shores live a variety of birds, including weavers and the crested
crane, Uganda’s national bird. Over twenty islands dot the lake, and
in the early morning they are interspersed with clouds of mist rising
from the water. Because of its high altitude, the area is cooler than
Kampala.

Liz and I spent three nights and two days at two different locations
around the lake. The first, the Bunyonyi Overland Resort, is a popular
stopover for enormous overland buses, on their way to or from gorilla
trekking. Each evening, tourists spill out and fill the restaurant and
bar, cheering football and rugby matches beamed in by satellite. The
incompetent, mustachioed restaurant manager hovers near tables,
berating the waiters when service seemed to slack. Not exactly a
peaceful scene.

On our first morning on Bunyonyi we decided to escape the other
tourists and take one of the dugout canoes out onto the lake, with the
goal of paddling to Punishment Island. A desolate piece of local
history, Punishment Island is a small flotilla of reeds with a single
tree where women impregnated outside of wedlock were brought to either
starve, or be picked up by any opportunistic man who could not afford
to pay a bride price. (Many Ugandans, even those who live on the lake,
have never learned to swim and the pregnant women would flounder in
the few hundred meters from Punishment Island to the shore.)

As it turned out, paddling the dugout canoe was much more difficult
than it appeared from the shore, where we had watched locals
crisscrossing the lake with ease. Heavy, long and wider at the front
than at the back, they were very different from the aluminum canoes we
were used to. Paddle on the left, and the canoe would, as expected,
turn to the right. However, gain too much rightward momentum and
paddling on the right to straighten the canoe would only accelerate
its rightward turn. Savage backpaddling could, eventually, straighten
the boat out – and bring it to a halt. So we meandered our way happily
enough, tracing a curlicue course out into the lake

But then the rain came up. It appeared over the hills behind us,
wrapping the lake in grey curtains with the sound of a waterfall. Liz
and I looked at each other, each without a raincoat, and suddenly, our
inability to chart a straight path wasn’t so funny. We made for the
nearest shore to beach the boat and get under a tree out of the rain.
Liz, piloting, did her best to keep us on course, but we couldn’t
avoid a thorough soaking.

While we waited out the rain under a eucalyptus tree, I decided I
would try my hand at piloting on the return trip, confident I had
learned from watching (criticizing) Liz’s technique. Not so. We didn’t
make it to Punishment Island that day but we did, eventually, make it
back to the restaurant. Eating lunch, we laughed as two canoes left
the dock, filled with American tourists, to make wide, unintentional
circles in the bay. Our waiter told us that these were “Mzungu
circles” – the expected outcome when white tourists paddle the dugout
canoes.

One of the surprises I’ve had here in Uganda is how infinitely
forgiving Ugandans are of foreign tourists. While so much of getting
around Uganda is completely unintuitive to me, Ugandans are always
happy to help point in the right direction, or explain the way things
work. (Luckily, I have Liz as a guide, so I don’t have to ask very
often.) Mzungu tourists can be loud, arrogant, demanding, and
oblivious. But as we make Mzungu circles around the country, Ugandans
seem ever willing to straighten us out with a helping hand and a
smile.

That afternoon, we walked to the Heart of Eridrisa, a commune where
foreign volunteers and local employees run a nursery, a primary
school, and a rudimentary, three-room clinic. The manager, who
repeatedly invited Liz, the soon-to-be-doctor, to come back and
volunteer, gave us a tour of the facilities. The seven-classroom
primary school hosted nearly 600 pupils, and the nursery another few
hundred. Like most Ugandans, the manager was mostly nonplussed with
the beauty of the lake; unlike tourists who can see the countryside
while sheltered from want, for the locals, the beauty of the region is
of a piece with its remoteness, its poverty, its lacks. Tourists value
remoteness while the locals curse it, and our compliments must seem
deeply ironic.

The next morning, we planned to transfer to a camp on Bushara Island,
more secluded and quiet than Overland Camp. But before leaving, we
wanted to hike one of the hills along the shore to get a better view
of the lake. While ascending on a local footpath, we ran into 14-year
old Lucky and his younger brother, Christophe. Lucky immediately
demonstrated his very skilled English, and asked if we wanted a guide
up the hill. When we told him we were only on a short walk, he offered
to paddle us out to Bushara in a dugout canoe. We negotiated a price,
and he ran the few hundred yards to his house to collect his paddles.

Liz and I, meanwhile, returned to Overland to checkout. Lucky and his
friend Moses paddled up a half-hour later, helped us into the canoe,
and provided me a paddle. As we made our way to Bushara, a trip that
took about 45-minutes with Moses piloting an arrow-straight course,
Lucky told us about himself. He is a Manchester United supporter, and
a fan of Christiano Ronaldo. He attends the primary school at
Eridrisa, which we had visited the day before. His father died before
he was old enough to remember him, and his mother farms to support
him, his younger brother, and three older sisters. Two of his sisters
were in secondary school, their school fees paid by sponsors, and he
was currently working to save the 100,000 shillings ($50) he would
need to take his tests for the term. So far, he had saved 65,000, and
would need the balance by early April. Upon reaching Bushara, we paid
Lucky and made arrangements to have him pick us up the next morning
before school to paddle us to Rutinda village for transport back to
Kabale to catch a bus to Kampala. Lucky asked us to give him our email
addresses, and we said we would have them for him the next day.

Our stay on Bushara was very restful. We read, watched the rain, and
made the trip to nearby Punishment Island late that afternoon,
catching a glimpse of two pairs of otters. Liz demonstrated what she
had learned from watching Moses; I still couldn’t paddle straight.

The next morning, it was 45-minutes back to Rutinda. Liz and I decided
to pay Lucky double what we had given him the day before, and throw in
the rest of what he would need to pay his school fees that term. When
we reached Rutinda, Liz handed him the money and our email addresses,
and we waved goodbye.

Our ten-hour bus ride back to Kampala featured mid-journey repairs and
a live chicken in the overhead luggage rack. Along the way, we passed
stores in every village selling mobile phone credits, painted pink
(Zain), turquoise (Uganda Mobile), yellow (MTN), or white (Warid). As
a student of economics and business, I found myself thinking about
development – why it had moved so quickly in some directions (mobile
phones), and so slowly in others (absence of free secondary
education).

And so it seemed to me that the story of African economic development
is a massive Mzungu circle. Western governments gave large loans to
newly independent countries for development in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and
then forgive the debt, sometimes, thirty years later. American policy
propped up brutal dictators during the Cold War, and today the World
Bank punishes countries for corruption and bad governance. The World
Bank spends billions digging tube wells and building dams with dreams
of development at a grand scale decades ago, and then the Nobel
committee awards the Peace Prize for the development of microfinance.
Western policy-makers still don’t really know how to guide
development, and we have just taken another turn in our great Mzungu
circle to try and fix our own broken economies. Hopefully we’ll find
someone who can paddle this thing straight ahead.

Posted via email from Aught he has to know it with.

Out of the country Re: Posterous | Re: A few quick Uganda pics

2009-03-19T15:26:00.001-04:00

Hello,

I am currently traveling in Uganda with very limited email access. I
will be able to respond to your emails on March 27th.

Thanks,
Nathan

Posted via email from Aught he has to know it with.

A few quick Uganda pics

2009-03-19T15:22:00.001-04:00

Still in Uganda, but wanted to share some quick pictures, all from a trip to Murchison Falls in north western Uganda, near the border with Congo. Back in Kampala now, and leaving early tomorrow morning for Lake Bunyoni.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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File under: things I wish I had come up with

2009-03-11T13:14:00.001-04:00

via engadget.com

Posted via web from Mhm.

Conservatives reveal themselves to be heartless assholes, shocking no one

2009-03-09T13:21:00.001-04:00

Do Lawyers Work Harder Than Movers?

I’m just now getting to read Lisa Schiffren’s contribution on the Corner to the growing overclass revolt taking the American right by storm:

The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and, as Tigerhawk points out, in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife’s former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

When Lisa Schiffren was born, she received one of the rarest winning tickets in the genetic-geographic-historical lottery -- she lives in the United States in an era of incredible wealth and luxury, is well-educated, and, apparently, was able to find a job where you get paid to write staggeringly ignorant crap. There is so much so wrong with what she wrote that criticizing it is a little like playing Supermarket Sweep -- so many options, yet so little time! But here goes.

The first point I'd like to make has to do with how you evaluate how "hard" people work. Unlike Schiffren, I think it's worthwhile to differentiate amount and cost of effort, and then consider the benefits received for effort expended. I think work is hardest when you get the lowest payoff for the total cost of your effort (payoff - (units of effort * cost of effort)). I think it really sucks to do mind-numbing work (high psychic cost of effort) for low pay. Now let's consider a critical factor that shifts this equation significantly in meritocrats' favor.

Lawyers, doctors, engineers, other "meritocrats" are not merely compensated for their work with money. Most of those people are intrinsically motivated to do the work they do. They get some psychic benefits from waking up every morning and lawyering or doctoring or engineering. Sure, being an entry level lawyer in an up-or-out firm involves long hours, but you're looking ahead to more control over your work and tasks that are more personally rewarding. The middle- and upper-classes, especially as you move up the pay scale, are not only concerned with pay but whether they enjoy what they do. This makes the cost-benefit differential between lawyers and movers even greater. Not only do lawyers make more money, they also enjoy lawyering, or at least enjoy it more than movers enjoy straining backs to move sofas. Meritocrats get dollars and psychic benefits; movers get fewer dollars and a lifetime of back pain.

My other big criticism has to do with entitlement. There's this sense that if you're in a position to earn a high salary, you've earned it. Bullshit. As I suggested at the outset, the productivity our labor is largely due to a random draw upon birth. Some of us are gifted with parents who can afford education and mind that can make use of that education. Sure, we make investments of effort and time to reap the rewards, but it's still mostly luck. I studied hard in school, but not as hard as others who will earn less than I will in less fulfilling jobs. I worked student jobs, but never had to wait tables, mow lawns, or donate sperm to pay for school. I am profoundly lucky, though not profoundly deserving.

Conservatives need to check themselves before they wreck themselves. This whole, "I work harder than you" thing needs to stop. People making more than $250,000 can afford to pay like 5% higher taxes on every dollar they make beyond $250,000. They can afford that more easily than the poor can afford no health care, or the residents of Florida can afford global warming. And no one can afford more of this inane bitching.

Posted via web from Mhm.

Correlation is not causation

2009-03-06T10:48:00.001-05:00

via stat.columbia.edu

I laughed as I read this comic, but was it funny?

Posted via web from Mhm.

Rich does not equal smart

2009-03-03T13:05:00.001-05:00

Imaginary notches

Oy. No, your income tax doesn’t suddenly shoot up if your taxable income rises one penny into a new bracket. To belabor the obvious, the tax code specifies marginal rates: your rate rises from 33 to 35 percent if your taxable income exceeds $372,950, but only the income above $372,950 pays the higher rate.

via krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

Further evidence that it doesn't take a genius to make a lot of money. I'm in luck!

Posted via web from Mhm.

'Bad Bank' Funding Plan Starts to Get Fleshed Out - WSJ.com

2009-03-03T10:31:00.001-05:00

These private investment managers would run the funds, deciding which assets to buy and what prices to pay. The government would contribute money from the $700 billion bailout, with additional financing likely coming from the Federal Reserve and by selling government-backed debt. Other investors, such as pension funds, could also participate. To encourage participation, the government would try to minimize risk for private investors, possibly by offering non-recourse loans.

The public-private partnership grew out of the "bad bank" concept, an idea popular among some economists that would have required the government alone to buy up the troubled assets.

The Obama administration jettisoned that idea after running into the thorny issue of pricing. To help banks, the government must pay enough so that firms don't have to suffer additional losses from selling or writing down the value of other similar assets. But there is little public tolerance for overpaying with taxpayer money.

via online.wsj.com

Okay, so the government no longer has to pay banks directly for toxic assets, but has to subsidize other people until it becomes economically viable for them to buy the assets at a price high enough that banks don't have to write the assets off. So we still have a price floor -- the price at which banks can sell their assets without write offs -- but now the government won't have to pay that full price. Instead, investors will contribute some of the necessary capital in exchange for a crack at the upside. But how much risk will the government have to take on to induce them to enter?

Posted via web from Mhm.

John McCain can't manage a beaver

2009-02-28T01:18:00.001-05:00

Not having ever worked in beaver management before, I couldn’t say in detail how a beaver-management program would work. But again the basic concept here is really pretty clear. But if McCain is really confused, he could look it up. Brendan Nyhan suggests that we may need to let the GOP know about Let Me Google That For You.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Here you are, John. Can you manage this?

Posted via web from Mhm.

I love you, Buster

2009-02-27T12:21:00.001-05:00

via img182.imageshack.us

Posted via web from Mhm.