It's Later Than You Think

I finally got around to watching the last episode of House the other day. It wasn’t too bad. I won’t spoil the ending, but it finishes with a version of the song ‘It’s Later Than You Think’. You can see a good version of the song (not the House scene that uses it) here starting at about 1:50.

It has the following memorable chorus:

‘Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself
It’s later than you think.’

I found myself in two minds about this.

The last line is a great one, and the song itself is catchy.

But the first two ring hollow. Sure, the verses dress it up in good advice (don’t spend all your time working), but I found it hard to not find myself thinking, a la William Shatner in the song ‘You’ll Have Time’ – “Is this all there is? Why did I bother?”

The problem of mortality and the human condition is vast and intimidating, but the answer is just… ‘enjoy yourself’?? And it’s not like we’ve got anything like the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to make the eloquent and reasoned argument for the same ultimate proposition, it’s just tossed out there as if ‘enjoy yourself’ is the completely obvious response to mortality.

Still, I found that I kept humming it – folly or half-truth set to music has a much better chance of being repeated than truth written down in a book.

But fortunately I recently came across an infinitely superior version that gives an equally appealing version of the second half of the chorus, but with a much more satisfying set of first half advice on what to do in response.

From the Saṃyutta Nikāya, 3:25, recounting the following conversation between the Buddha and King Pasenadi of Kosala.

“What do you think, great king? Suppose a man would come to you from the east, one who is trustworthy and reliable, and would tell you: ‘For sure, great king, you should know this: I am coming from the east, and there I saw a great mountain high as the clouds coming this way, crushing all living beings. Do whatever you think should be done, great king.’ Then a second man would come to you from the west … a third man from the north … and a fourth man from the south, one who is trustworthy and reliable, and would tell you: ‘For sure, great king, you should know this: I am coming from the east, and there I saw a great mountain high as the clouds coming this way, crushing all living beings. Do whatever you think should be done, great king.’ If, great king, such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life, the human state being so difficult to obtain, what should be done?”

“If, venerable sir, such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life, the human state being so difficult to obtain, what else should be done but to live by the truth (Dhamma), to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“I inform you, great king, I announce to you, great king: aging and death are rolling in on you. When aging and death are rolling in on you, great king, what should be done?”

“As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should be done but to live by the truth (Dhamma), to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“Venerable sire, kings intoxicated with the intoxication of sovereignty, obsessed by greed for sensual pleasures, who have attained stable control in their country and rule over a great sphere of territory, conquer by means of elephant battles, cavalry battles, chariot battles, and infantry battles; but there is no hope of victory when aging and death are rolling in. In this royal court, venerable sir, there are counselors who, when the enemies arrive, are capable of dividing them by subterfuge; but there is no hope of victory by subterfuge, no chance of success, when aging and death are rolling in. In this royal court, there exists abundant bullion and gold stored in vaults, and with such wealth we are capable of mollifying the enemies when they come; but there is no hope of victory by wealth, no chance of success, when aging and death are rolling in. As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should I do but live by the truth (Dhamma), live righteously, and do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“So it is, great king! So it is, great king! As aging and death are rolling in on you, what else should you do but live by the truth (Dhamma), live righteously, and do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

Just so.

Live by the truth (Dhamma), live righteously, and do wholesome and meritorious deeds. It's later than you think.

Why don't people read through the archives and old entries of blogs?

This is something I'm guilty of myself, and it's a strange behaviour.

We can rule out some of the obvious cases. Blogs that discuss mainly current events tend to date in much the same way as newspapers. I think there's a tendency for a lot of writers who don't have a particular dedicated subject to drift towards either 'discuss current events' or 'link to cool stuff someone else has posted', if for no other reason than that these provide a fairly reliable source of new subject matter.

But if the subject matter is more broad, old entries are probably just as interesting as new ones. Perhaps even more so, if you think that people use up their most interesting insights early on in a blog's life. If you switched the dates, it's not always clear that people would even know. This post, for instance, would have read the same if I wrote it last year or next year.

Some people like to comment, and take part in a discussion. That's a good reason, but those people are usually a small minority.

So what about the rest?

My guess, for what it's worth, is that people get used to a very particular process of reading. Clicking on a website is like pressing a button that says 'entertain me'. Sometimes it works, sometimes there's nothing there and you move on. RSS readers are even more extreme - there's the bold 'new' entries, and then there's 'everything else'.

Now, in theory you could just click on the archives and hunt around for other stuff, trying to filter out the bits that aren't relevant any more.

Then again, in theory you could also go read a book, or talk to your co-worker down the hall, or go for a run, or any other number of more useful activities when the Internet has ceased to entertain you.

But instead, like a gambler at a slot machine having another spin, you'll click refresh again, waiting to see if the magic 'entertain me' button has started working again. Even when the archives are a pretty darn similar type of button, you still stick with the one you're used to.

It looks pathological when you see old people at the pokies in Vegas at 3am doing it. But they're on the same hedonic treadmill as the rest of us - mine, for instance, just take place in private.

Part of the impetus for all this, dear reader, is that posting is going to be light for the next month or so, until late August. I have the distinct pleasure of roaming around Europe, in a kind of 'working holiday' type arrangement. Pessimists would forecast that the amount of 'work' in the 'working holiday' will be analogous to the function of 'massages' at a 3am massage parlour - it's the fig leaf that gets you in the door, but nobody takes it too seriously. Still, the only obstacle is my self-control, so we'll see how it goes. Pessimists might further note that describing a lack of self-control as the "only" thing stopping me working is like saying that the only obstacle to me winning the 100m freestyle at the olympics is that I can't swim fast enough. I fear that the pessimists may be right on both counts, but hope springs eternal.

But the moral of the story is that if you're a new reader, I encourage you to dig around the archives on the right in the mean time. At a minimum, I guarantee you that it's no worse than the crap that gets dished up here normally!

Yours truly,

Shylock.

Miscellaneous Joy

-The Last Psychiatrist has a great essay about self-destructive behaviour.

-I got 99 problems, but an incorrect understanding of criminal procedure laws ain't one. (Via AL)

-"Evening dress is the first step towards civilization" (via)

-40 varieties of wrong thoughts, by David Stove.

-Ave Atque Vale, Donald J. Sobol. I remember reading the Encyclopedia Brown stories when I was a kid. When I read the news, however, it reminded me that I hadn't had a single thought about Encyclopedia Brown in at least twenty years. Strange.

Thought of the Day

The contemporary mind, as illustrated by Ms. Roiphe's, has fundamental problems grasping useful concepts like "on average" and "tends to."

-Steve Sailer, opining on an article where the aforementioned Ms. Roiphe got into a huge tizzy over a New York Times piece reporting on the totally obvious fact that children of single parents tend to have fewer opportunities than those born to married parents.

The phenomenon goes much further than this, of course. As Mr Sailer well knows.

Paying to Not Get Laid

If you want some hilarious reading, check out the website 'Miss Travel'.

Lest my screeds prejudice your impressions, let's just quote the company's own description of what it offers:

'Who needs money, beautiful people travel free!'

Generous: Find a Travel Companion
Let's face it, no one likes to travel alone. We made this so that people who travel can meet other people to join them.

Attractive: Travel Anywhere Free
Want to see the world or find new friends? Meet generous travelers who are seeking travel partners, or local tour guides.

 Got that?

There's so much comedy gold to work through here that it's hard to know where to start.

To begin with the obvious, let's look at the pictures displayed on the opening page:

In other words, everyone is only interested in the women side (at first). The female members want to relate to these attractive go-getting normal women! The men want to meet said women. At a first pass, nobody is interested in the men.

But there's at least a couple of big elephant-in-the-room question left unanswered by the premise of the site. I would submit they are the following:

1. If the guy pays for the woman to travel with him, is the woman expected to sleep with the guy?

2.. If the answer to #1 is yes, is this just glorified prostitution?

3. If the answer to #1 is no, why on earth would guys pay thousands of dollars to not sleep with a woman?

4. Regardless of #1, how often do the people in question actually sleep together.

(Un)Amazingly, none of these questions are answered on the 'FAQ' page.

Let's start with #1. Once you realise the implications of #2 and #3, it's obvious how they have to work it. Go back and read the site, and see if you can figure out the answer.

MissTravel.com is a travel dating website that matches generous travelers with attractive travel girls (or guys).

They square the circle about as best you can.

In other words, the essential dilemma of the site is that women won't go on a site where it's expected that they have to sleep with some guy on the other side of the world, sight unseen. Men, on the other hand, won't fly a woman across the world unless they're pretty sure they're going to get laid.

On face, these seem like incompatible goals. The answer is to pose this as a probabilistic answer - it's a "dating site", so you might get laid, assuming you both want to!

Men hear  "you might get laid, assuming you both want to."

Women hear "you might get laid, assuming you both want to."

Of course, if the expectation of p(getting laid) is radically different between the man and the woman, eventually reality will collide with these distorted beliefs. And the loser will, I predict, be the man.

At the margin though, the whole site is geared up towards attracting women. You might assume that men with money are the scarce resource here. But they're not - the supply of desperate loser men is high, even if the supply of those willing to pay to fly out women to maybe sorta hopefully sleep with them is not so high. At the margin, given it's free for women to sign up, the site owners seem to be betting that if you build a place with lots of hot normal women (well, as normal as you can be while being willing to have a stranger fly you across the country or world), then the losers with fat wallets will come.

But question #2 keeps looming. The moral delineation between 'pay for sex with money', 'pay for sex with things that cost money, but not money directly', and 'have sex consensually unrelated to the transfer of goods, then do nice things for partner which cost money, including gifts' becomes awfully fuzzy when you try to pin it down. The first case is prostitution. The second case is being a sugar daddy. The third case, in various forms, is a relationship. Feminists have argued about this point for decades.

How does Miss Travel deal with this thorny philosophical question? As follows;

ESCORTS: DO NOT ENTER!

MissTravel.com is intended to be used as an online dating website. Our members expect to find genuine profiles, with genuine opportunities to fall in love and enter into a relationship. We understand that every member has a different motivation for joining this site, but we do not support any members who are registering as escorts. This is not an escort site, nor will we permit any type of escorting on this site. MissTravel.com is strictly an online dating service for people who are looking for a travel partner.

If you are an escort, who has advertised your services on any escort website, you are not allowed to use this website. We encourage our members to report any suspicious activity or requests of this nature, and will act upon any complaints.

Let me ask a totally obvious question. Is this message meant to: 

a) deter potential prostitutes from using the site, or

b) reassure regular women with no history of prostitution who are thinking of signing up to the site that doing so will not make them a prostitute.

To ask, as they say, is to know the answer.

Could they make it any more plain? It's like George Bush Sr, with his 'Message: I Care'. They may as well put up a page saying 'FAQ: Does it make me a hooker if I use this site?'. But that would likely be difficult, because then they'd need to disabuse either the men or the women of the nature of the arrangement. This warning is far more clever.

From the male perspective, paradoxically the 'generous travellers' probably don't want to feel like they're paying for a hooker either. Men would much rather pay to probabilistically sleep with someone than they will to sleep with someone with certainty.

So, in theory, this could work. The $64,000 question, however, is #4 - what is the likelihood that the guy will actually get laid?

Obviously they don't put this data on their website. But helpfully they do put some user testimonials, from which we can make some educated guesses. Let's see.

Case #1

The guy in this story is so unimportant that he isn't even mentioned. The woman's second sentence is to complain about the food. The only people who were listed as 'great fun' were the locals. Ouch. It's vanishingly unlikely that the guy got anywhere.

Case #2.

Aside from creepy 'cousine' bit (what better term of endearment for your woman than 'cousin'! Er, or not) this sounds the least like glorified probabilistic prostitution. The fact that he had a GREAT TIME might mean he got some tail, or just that he was too embarrassed to admit that he didn't. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and score this as a win. Note too that the website couldn't wait to include the description of a rich guy from Paris, not a rich guy from Akron, Ohio.

Case #3

This girl at least talks in non-trivial detail about the guy in question, suggesting at a minimum that she didn't just view him as a chump with a wallet. 'I did some shopping alone' = 'I had carte blanche use of his credit card'. Nice! The fact that he didn't bother seeing her during the day screams out lawyer or banker. If they're planning a new trip, I presume this means he did score, unless he's just a glutton for punishment. The 'nice time' made me wince though. I dunno - give him the benefit of the doubt and count it as a win.

Case #4.

Yeesh, this guy is boasting about how much he spent on this girl in the first sentence. The 'indoor fun' bit may just be boasting, but the more relevant part is that the vacation happened in Portland - I don't the stereotypical gold-digger wants to spend a week in Portland, unless they actually somewhat like the guy. I rate it as a win - in fact, I'd rate this as the highest probability so far that he actually got some action.

Case #5.

Nothing quite screams out 'guy who spent a lot of money to not get laid, and is now trying to rationalise it to himself' like the phrase '[we] had a harmonious time together'. That's gotta burn. Fail.

Case #6

I presume 'we' is referring to the guy's wallet, which, as far as this description indicates, is all she saw. Not quite as brutal as the first one, but I don't like this invisible guy's chances. Moral of the story, lads? Avoid the ones who want a Caribbean trip like the plague.

And I've saved the most interesting for last:

Case #7

It took me a second to realise that the picture wasn't mistakenly attached to the wrong testimonial - it's a guy who went to meet another guy. No wonder the picture is a closeup of his face and he seems quite good-looking - he doesn't look like the kind of guy who'd have to pay to fly a woman somewhere to get laid, and sure enough, he isn't. I imagine he probably did score.

So where does this get us? From the straight ones, we're batting 3 from 6. And this is the absolute maximum, because these are the testimonials the website owners themselves cherry-picked in order to seem as good as possible.

And as to cost, these guys probably paid multiple thousands of dollars for these trips. Given you're basically paying to get laid anyway, a hooker seems a lot cheaper.

I'm not surprised that this strategy has a low return. One person who would not have fallen for this kind of stupidity is the great Richard Feynman. Long before the advent of game, he seems to have figured out some of the basic details. As he put it:

"Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything -- not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”

 Ignore this at your peril.

Little Victories

So today was one of those cases of getting unreasonably excited by something completely trivial and ridiculous.

It's taken three years of (sporadically) eating lunch at the same sandwich place, but I finally got asked if I'd like 'the usual'. I thought that kind of thing only happens on TV shows! The investment has paid off.

Being asked if you want 'the usual' of course marks one as the aristocracy of any establishment. The staff recognise me! They pay attention to my whims which, fortunately, never change.

It's like being the foursquare mayor of a place, except that you don't have to wave you phone around for everyone to know about it.

Good times.

A Great Question About Charter Cities.

Charter Cities are an interesting example of how modern development might work. As pioneered by Paul Romer, the basic idea is that they would function somewhat like a special economic zone, where the rules being enforced are different from the surrounding country, and most likely imported from a country with better levels of development, such as Canada. In other words, think of somewhere like Hong Kong, but run with Canadian laws and officials.

Romer looks to be making some progress on the idea of creating one in Honduras, which I think would make an interesting experiment. It certainly can't be much worse than what else is going on in Honduras (or anywhere else in Central America), so qualifies as 'worth a shot'.

The thorny question is - if you want to just recreate Hong Kong, isn't that (*gasp, shudder, cross-yourself-thrice*)... colonialism? And we all know that that was worse than Hitler!!

Well, that's a bit tricky. Romer does have two conceptual difference that he can point to.

The first is that the city is to be built on 'uninhabited land', so nobody is (in theory) being dispossessed to make this colony. I mean, charter city! Sorry.

The second, and more interesting one, is that the rules in this city will only be enforced on those who voluntarily enter. It's like a genuine version of the social contract, because you apparently get to choose whether to join in the first place. Of course, it's not clear how things will work if the laws change while you're in there. I guess you can leave again - maybe. Who knows.

The real question is, how much difference do these distinctions really make? Are you still deep down just recreating the Racist Hitlercaust that was the British Empire?

There's two ways of answering this. In the court of progressive public opinion, Romer is doing a pretty good job of attempting to circumvent the nominal complaints of the anti-colonialism crowd. There's still the awkward aspect that if it's white Canadian officials ruling over local Hondurans it might not make for great photos, but that more of an aesthetic complaint than a concrete example of injustice. The jury is still out on this, since it's a sufficiently untried idea. Romer in his TED talks tries to get the anti-colonialist crowd on board with these musings:

Why is this not like colonialism? The thing that was bad about colonialism, and the thing that is residually bad in some of our aid programs, is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension. This model is all about choices - both for leaders and for the people who will live in these new places. And choice is the antidote to coercion and condescension.

But screw progressive public opinion. Do you buy the distinction?

The 'vacant land' thing is fine, and is a good start. But confiscating land is a one-off startup cost that may well be worth paying to set up Hong Kong. The ongoing injustice, if you think there is one, is the lack of choice by citizens as to who they're going to be ruled by. And everyone here will be free to enter or exit, so no problem! Sounds watertight, right?

Mencius Moldbug would disagree. He delivers a long and stinging rebuke of Romer - I think it's perhaps unfair on Romer personally in parts, but I think he makes a great argument that if this actually works, it will do so for the same reasons that colonialism works. In other words, Romer wants to pretend that this is nothing whatsoever to do with colonialism, when in actual fact it's probably best described as colonialism with a better PR department, redesigned for modern political sensibilities to appeal to progressives.

But even that may not be enough. The Achilles heel of the current setup is that progressives, Romer included, at heart all believe in democracy. The system being proposed is definitively undemocratic at a local level (but for which individuals join only by choice).

That's fine - the city claims a right to enforce its laws, and people, by entering, forfeit the right to change the rules themselves.

But is this a credible threat by the city?

Moldbug, I think very presciently, looks ahead and asks a very tough question that I fear Romer doesn't want to answer:

Professor Romer, here is a question for you: suppose your good Mr. Castro says yes, and you get your Guantanamo City up and running, with its Haitian population and Canadian proconsuls. It is, of course, a smashing success, with investment galore.

And then, in ten years, a mob of Haitians gathers in the beautifully landscaped central square, wearing coloured rosettes and throwing rotten eggs, all chanting a single demand: democracy for Guanatanamo City. The Canadians, all in a tizzy, call you. It's the middle of the night in Palo Alto. You pick up the phone. "What should we say?" the Canadians ask. "Yes, or no?"

If they say yes - what, in ten years, will be the difference between Guantanamo and Haiti? If they say no - what do they say next? You'll notice that you have no answer to this question. Hell has little pity for those who decide to forget history.

Perhaps the reason you have so much trouble imagining this scenario is that your own country has been so successful in suppressing actual political democracy, in favor of the administrative caste of which you are a member. To you, the proposition that "politics" should affect the formulation or execution of "public policy" is no less than heresy - like Velveeta on a communion wafer.

Thus, you reinvent colonialism by simply teleporting this managerial state from Canada, where democracy has been effectively suppressed, to Cuba, where democracy has been effectively suppressed. But the subjects of your new state are not Canadians, or even Cubans. The job has not been done.

If you want to suppress their lust for power, a lust which grows in the heart of every man, you can do so. All it takes is a bit of gear and the will to use it. As Wellington said: pour la canaille, la mitraille. But then, my dear professor, you are really reinventing colonialism - not just pretending to do so, for an audience as ignorant, hypocritical and naive as yourself.

Bingo.

Charter cities, should they get off the ground, will last only up until the local citizens start agitating for democracy.

Which they will.

And when that happens, do you think the Canadian administrators will have the nerve to tell them no? And to order the local army and police to enforce such an edict? What, exactly, is the argument that Canadian public servants will be able to advance as to why they should use force to suppress political agitation for a democratic vote? Can you see them making any such pronouncement without their heads exploding?

To ask the question is to know the answer.

I'd be delighted to see Charter Cities succeed. They seem a damn sight better than foreign aid. Moldbug claimed that he didn't think the idea would ever get off the ground. In the three years since, it looks like he might be proved wrong on this point.

But I fear he'll be right on the larger point.

Iterate forwards, Mr Romer. The day will come when you'll have to face a stark choice.

One choice will make you the next Deng Xiaoping.

The other choice will make you the next Ian Smith.

The implications for the ethics of these choices are complicated and thorny.

The implications for economic development, (which this was apparently all about in the first place), alas, are not.

Quote of the Day

I came across this old interview with Theodore Dalrymple, when he's talking about his [thoroughly excellent] book 'Life At The Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass'

He describes perfectly the attitude of so many urban youths:

"It doesn't take long or cost much to have a small tattoo done," Dalrymple writes. "You can stigmatize yourself thoroughly in an hour or more for a mere fifty dollars. . . . Watching as yet untattooed young men browsing through the patterns in the parlor reception areas, I felt like a Victorian evangelist or campaigner against prostitution, an impulse rising within me to exhort them to abjure evil; but their adoption of the characteristic expression of the urban underclass (a combination of bovine vacancy and lupine malignity) soon put [an end] to my humanitarian impulse."

'Bovine vacancy and lupine malignity'. Is that not the best metaphor you've read in months?

At first I thought this was said in the interview itself, but on re-reading I think it's from the book. If he came up with that extemporaneously, it would put him up there with the wittiest men of this century (even if the humour is somewhat grim). As it is, it's still brilliant.

Stop playing with your damn phone and talk to the person in front of you

One of the most striking modern pathologies is the nervous twitch of obsessively checking one's phone.

I use the terms 'obsessive' and 'pathology' advisedly. People will check their email literally hundreds of times a day, even though they might get only 15 emails (if that). And most of the emails are rubbish anyway. How many of them couldn't wait half an hour until you were back at your computer?

Now, ordinarily I'd just put this down to de gustibus non est disputandum. If people want to spend all their lives poring over a tiny screen, that's their business.

But as a question of manners, I find it strange how much obsessive phone checking intrudes into otherwise polite situations.

Last night, I was out at a quite nice restaurant. At the table next to me was a couple, late 20's or early 30's. Quite stylishly dressed. I overhead them say to the waiter that they were on holiday from Dallas.

And yet during the meal, when I glanced over the guy was on his phone continuously for perhaps a two minute stretch at least (or happened to be on it both times when I glanced over). Phone in his lap, head down tapping away. The girl was sitting there poking at her salad, looking bored. It didn't look like the guy was quickly checking wikipedia to settle an argument as to whether the English side in the Battle of Hastings was lead by King Harold or Ethelred the Unready. It looked like he was just zoning out to do his own thing.

Seems like a funny way to spend an evening at a nice restaurant with your girlfriend.

Now, in some ways this isn't the most perplexing case though. Phones are a great way to deal with boredom and social isolation. Perhaps they'd just ran out of things to say, and the guy wasn't good at dealing with silences. It's still somewhat poor form, but understandable.

No, the truly bizarre trait is the people who'll compulsively check their phone while carrying on a conversation (at 50% attention level, of course). That's just plain rude. It's saying that the discussion with the other person is not worth your full attention. Would you just pick up a newspaper and start reading when the other person was in mid-sentence? Would you turn on the TV? No! So put down the damn phone.

This is a trait concentrated almost for the most part in young people. This is partly because they're more technology-obsessed to begin with, and partly because they were less likely to be raised with proper manners. They get used to fiddling with it, and nobody calls them out on it.

Well, screw that. If you're hanging out with me, and I like you enough to consider you a friend, you're going to get called out on it. 'Are we playing phones? Woo! Email!'. Or I'm going to do my annoying thing of swatting at the phone while telling you 'Put it away! Put it away!'. (If you're someone I don't know well enough to do this too, I'l just be quietly judging you as having poor breeding, while deciding if I can extricate myself from your boorish company).

And for the most part, people will put it away without too much hassle. Because they themselves know that they weren't really expecting to find anything more interesting there, and that it basically is just a nervous twitch. (If people really are expecting a particular email or text message, they'll usually apologise and say so, which is always fine).

One alternative to it being compulsive is that they genuinely prefer the company of whatever person they're communicating with by email or text message. You can rule this one out easily by noting that if you reversed the roles of 'person in front of them' and 'person on the other end of the text message', they'd still be doing the same thing.

Another is that social discourse has become sufficiently shrivelled that modern teenagers actually prefer to communicate electronically than face-to-face. This is probably part of it - I note an increasing discomfort among young people to speak to anyone on the phone - you'll call them, and they'll text message you back. (Again, this is likely to get you mocked by me). But how do you explain the behaviour by people who are outgoing and gregarious? They don't have any reason to avoid real conversation. Instead they just want to get the positive buzz of an email or text message and (sort of) continue the conversation. It might be that they're selfish in assuming their time is more valuable that yours. It might also be that they're equally happy for you to be doing the same thing back (which seems like one of Dante's circles of conversational hell). It's both hilarious and scary to watch groups of teenagers all sitting around, all playing on their phones and half-talking while texting whichever of their friends aren't immediately in front of them.

The one saving grace in all this is that I'm old enough that my generation doesn't communicate so much by text message, so most of the obsession is on the email front. Because of the immediacy and greater intrusiveness of text messages, people feel the need to respond quickly. But then the other person responds back, and now you're doing nothing but text messaging each other back and forth. At least with email, if there's nothing there when you check, you have to face up to the rejection and go back to the person in front of you. Text messages succeed more with the phone-obsessed  because they provide a never-ending stream of distractions.

Do you ever find yourself  laughing at the idiots playing farmville on facebook, obsessively logging in to water their crops every four hours so that imaginary animals don't die?

Don't. The psychology of people gettting stuck in stupid hedonic feedback loops and ending up doing obsessive things is exactly the same as compulsive phone checking. Farmville just figured out how to turn a profit on it.

And so, in their own way, did the phone companies. It's not for nothing that the prices charged on text messages are astronomical relative to their cost to send. Addicts will always pay up.

The Obamacare Ruling, Part 1

So I'm about half way through the Obamacare ruling - so far, I've gotten through the Roberts opinion and the Ginsburg opinion. My thoughts on the relative merits of the cases may change when I read through the dissenters.

A couple of thoughts on what I've read so far.

First, there is a marked contrast in how much the different opinions seem to opine on the merits of the law. Here's Roberts take, at page 59 of the PDF:

The Framers created a Federal Government of limited powers, and assigned to this  Court the duty of enforcing those limits. The Court does so today. But the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act.  Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people.

By contrast, Ginsburg's opinions have an irritating habit of inserting thinly disguised editorialising about her support of the laws in question as a matter of policy. From page 74 of the PDF:

To make its chosen approach work, however, Congress had to use some new tools, including a requirement that most individuals obtain private health insurance coverage. See 26 U. S. C. §5000A (2006 ed., Supp. IV) (the minimum coverage provision). As explained below, by employing these tools, Congress was able to achieve a practical, altogether reasonable, solution.

I guess she didn't get the Roberts memo about not expressing any opinions on the wisdom of the legislation.

Here's Ginsburg, dishonestly repeating one of the classic talking points of the left about healthcare, from page 70 of the PDF:

Not all U. S. residents, however, have health insurance. In 2009, approximately 50 million people were uninsured, either by choice or, more likely, because they could not afford private insurance and did not qualify for government aid.

The Census estimate was 46 million, but what's a few million between friends. And out of this number,  (by the Politifact estimate) at least 15% of those 'residents' don't have health insurance because they're illegal aliens who shouldn't be in the country in the first place. To describe their problem as being one of 'not qualifying for government aid' is deliberately disingenuous.

But what is most egregious about the Ginsburg opinion is the reliance it makes on the free-rider problem.This is an important part of her argument justifying the law under the Interstate Commerce Clause. The individual mandate is justified as being 'necessary and proper' for regulating interstate commerce. There's a long argument starting on page 70 of the pdf, which I won't reprint in full, but the gist of it is that you can't force insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions at the same price as everyone else without the individual mandate. This is because guaranteeing that pre-existing conditions will be covered at no extra cost creates an incentive for people to wait until they get an expensive illness, and only buy insurance then. This causes huge cost-shifting in the insurance market, and threatens to make the whole thing collapse. It's a classic free-rider, or moral hazard, problem.

Ginsburg's description of this problem, as a matter of economics, is really quite good, and I don't have much to quibble about there.

But why is this a social issue? Can't the hospital just deny them treatment? That may be considered unfair, but it's a pretty damn effective solution to the free-rider problem. And here's where Ginsburg's argument comes in:

The large number of individuals without health insurance, Congress found, heavily burdens the national health-care market. See 42 U. S. C. §18091(2).  As just noted, the cost of emergency care or treatment for a serious illness generally exceeds what an individual can afford to pay on her own. Unlike markets for most products, however, the inability to pay for care does not mean that an uninsured individual will receive no care. Federal and state law, as well as professional obligations and embedded social norms, require hospitals and physicians to provide care when it is most needed, regardless of the patient’s ability to pay.

Let's reprint the key bits again, in case you missed them:

Federal and state law, as well as professional obligations and embedded social norms, require hospitals and physicians to provide care when it is most needed, regardless of the patient’s ability to pay.

Got that? Federal Law has created a free-rider problem in this market, and now it requires a solution.

Now, as a practical description of the problem, that's totally fine. It is, indeed, the root of a lot of the problems.

But as a constitutional justification for the law, this is insane.

The government wouldn't ordinarily be able to compel individuals to purchase something under the interstate commerce clause, as I read the Ginsburg opinion, unless this is 'necessary and proper' to some already constitutional purpose.

No problem! The government passes laws that create a free-rider problem. One solution (not the only solution, but who cares!) to the problem is to mandate a pool of customers to subsidise those that you've legislated to ride for free. And the existence the government-created free-rider problem is used as the constitutional basis for justifying the entire edifice.

Don't believe me? Listen to Ginsburg's description of why it would be absurd to suggest that the government might be able to create a mandate for eating broccoli:

Consider the chain of inferences the Court would have to accept to conclude that a vegetable-purchase mandate was likely to have a substantial effect on the health-care costs borne by lithe Americans. The Court would have to believe that individuals forced to buy vegetables would then eat them (instead of throwing or giving them away), would prepare the vegetables in a healthy way (steamed or raw, not deep-fried), would cut back on unhealthy foods, and would not allow other factors (such as lack of exercise or little sleep) to trump the improved diet.  Such “pil[ing of] inference upon inference” is just what the Court re­fused to do in Lopez and Morrison. 

I don't know whether this argument is presented as deliberately misleading bull#$%^, or just very sloppy thinking. This is what the government would have to do to justify a broccoli mandate under the guise of it reducing healthcare costs.

But suppose that a government wanted you to eat broccoli. Justice Ginsburg has created a far simpler method for them to justify it! Just pass a 'Broccoli Human Rights Act of 2014', requiring that no person shall be denied broccoli by any supermarket or store based on their inability to pay, provided that they can prove that they are sufficiently hungry. There's a real problem - some people go hungry. Broccoli is a good solution to that problem. Presto! Our starving poor now have access to broccoli.

But we've now created a terrible free-rider problem. Broccoli-sellers have started to lose tons of money. One might characterise the problem as being that 'Federal and State Law, as well as professional and social obligations to not let people starve to death, require stores to provide broccoli when it is most needed, regardless of the customer's ability to pay'. One solution to this is the Affordable Broccoli Food Act of 2020, with it's Broccoli Individual Mandate component.

And this is exactly the same logic that Ginsburg found so compelling above. She'd pass it here. She'd pass it there. She'd pass that legislation anywhere.

So what are the other limits on the likely existence of the Broccoli mandate under the Ginsburg reasoning?

Other provisions of the Constitution also check congressional overreaching. A mandate to purchase a particular product would be unconstitutional if, for example, the edict impermissibly abridged the freedom of speech, interfered with the free exercise of religion, or infringed on a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause. 

At last we've gotten an honest argument. Legislation justified under the interstate Commerce clause will be struck down if it's explicitly prohibited elsewhere.

You can tell me this is a good way of running a government. But don't tell me that this is still a Federal government of enumerated powers. Everything that is not prohibited is permitted.

Fortunately, this is not the current law of the land on the Interstate Commerce clause. (The law was upheld under the taxing authority, which I might get to in part 2). Unfortunately I fear that Justice Ginsburg will prove spot on in one assessment in particular, though:

THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s crabbed reading of the Commerce Clause harks back to the era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress’ efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it.  See,  e.g., Railroad Retirement Bd. v.  Alton R. Co., 295 U. S. 330, 362, 368 (1935) (invalidating compulsory retirement and pension plan for employees of carriers subject to the Inter­state Commerce Act; Court found law related essentially “to the social welfare of the worker, and therefore remote from any regulation of commerce as such”).  It is a reading that should not have staying power. 

Absolutely.

For one reason, because the vast majority of interstate commerce clause decisions they've made in the past have gone in this direction. 'Regulating Interstate Commerce' includes banning marijuana that's grown in one state and sold within the state, regulating swimming pools (which are pretty darn hard to transport across state lines once they're in the ground), and stopping a farmer growing too much wheat on his own property for his own farm use.

The only rule I can glean from their precedents before now is 'If it affects a price of something, somewhere, somehow, it's interstate commerce.' Now the court has said that, in theory, it won't keep going in this direction, even though it didn't have the stones to overturn the law in the end.

But let's get back to the quote itself. The other half of the problem is that a good chunk of the Court thinks that it is appropriate to put in an important and widely-read opinion that it feels that New Deal legislation was 'efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it'.

Just under half the court think that this is what constitutes being non-partisan, and they usually manage to find a swing voter from among the rest, I suspect her assessment will prove entirely correct.

That's why you're in admin, not in IT

In the annals of hilariously lame administrative @$$-covering messages, I always enjoy receiving these emails:

'Department [X] would like to recall the message titled '[Mistaken Subject Y]'.

You'd like to recall it, would you? I bet you would.

Unfortunately, that's not how email works - you don't get an 'undo' button after you send it, and you don't get to magically delete it from people's computers if you send the wrong thing.

So why don't you just send the obvious message:

'The message [Mistaken Subject Y] was sent in error - please disregard it. My apologies for the confusion.'

Ah, because that would imply that someone in particular was to blame, and admin fools can't ever commit that to writing. Let's just press the magic 'recall' button instead!

Tools.

The Imagined Thoughts of Randolph Churchill

John Derbyshire reprints this wonderful essay by Winston Churchill, written in 1947, where he recounts a fictional conversation with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who had been dead over 50 years by that point.

If you ever doubted that political views have changed a lot in the last 200 years, this essay does a great job of imagining how a Tory in the 1890s would view the history of Europe in the 20th century.

To pick a line that is straight out of Mencius Moldbug, how's this from Churchill:

'War?' he said, sitting up with a startled air. 'War, do you say? Has there been a war?'

'We have had nothing else but wars since democracy took charge.'

'You mean real wars, not just frontier expeditions? Wars where tends of thousands of men lose their lives?'

'Yes, indeed, Papa,' I said. 'That's what has happened all the time. Wars and rumours of war ever since you died.'

Indeed.

Read it all here.

Ugh

So Obamacare is constitutional.

I'm going to swallow my own advice and refrain from commenting on the substance of the case until I've read the decision. But it's going to be a glum and melancholy task alright.

In the meantime, does anyone seriously doubt the wisdom of Mencius Moldbug on this matter:

In reality, no sovereign can be subject to law. This is a political perpetual motion machine. Law is not law unless it is judged and enforced. And by whom? For example, if you think a supreme court with judicial review can make government subject to law, you are obviously unfamiliar with the sordid history of American constitutional jurisprudence. All your design has achieved is to make your supreme court sovereign. Indeed if the court had only one justice, a proper title for that justice would be "King." Sorry, kid, you haven't violated the conservation of anything.

The Kings have spoken - Obamacare stands.

Bad News, Good News

The bad news: Chicago is broke, homicides are up 37% this year, and the police department is feeling the strain.

The good news:  Chicago is so broke that they've decided to stop flushing money and lives down the toilet for marijuana possession:

People caught with small amounts of marijuana in Chicago will be ticketed instead of arrested under a new ordinance passed by the city council on Wednesday, as the third largest U.S. city became the latest to support more lenient penalties for using the drug.

The council voted 43-3 in favor of the measure, which was backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Under the ordinance, police in Chicago can issue a written violation with a fine of between $250 and $500 for possession of 15 grams (0.5 ounces) of marijuana or less rather than make an arrest.

It turns out that ruining lives for needless drug convictions are a luxury good, and one that Chicago has decided it can no longer afford. This is a great outcome - off the top of my head, this would have to be one of the worst NPV projects the city undertakes, so it's good that this is the one that gets canned when the crunch comes.

Somewhere at HBS, Michael Jensen is muttering to himself, 'I told you so.'

Your Daily Schadenfreude

Journalists go to play paintball with Hezbollah to see what happens.

Psychologically illuminating hilarity ensues:

We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.

The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.

As my eyesight returns and readjusts to the dim arena light, I poke out from my position behind a low cinder-block wall. Two large men in green jumpsuits are bearing down on me. I have them right in my sights, but they seem unfazed—even as I open fire from close range, peppering each with several clear, obvious hits. I expect them to freeze, maybe even acknowledge that this softie American journalist handily overcame their flash-bang trickery and knocked them out of the game. Perhaps they’ll even smile and pat me on the back as they walk off the playing field in a display of good sportsmanship (after cheating, of course).

Instead, they shoot me three times, point-blank, right in the groin.

Ha!

Scumbag terrorists demonstrate their worthiness for having a state by acting like scumbags - naive western reader expectations hardest hit.

(Via Kottke)

'This is Dylan and Maddie's Mum'

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on how American children end up so spoiled. They relate it to the idea of parents doing ever more for their children, rather than giving them responsibilities early on and making them follow through.

I don't know the right parenting strategy to combat it, but I've certainly noticed an unusual indulgence of misbehaviour by kids in this country. Is you child of 4 yelling in the plane/restaurant/shopping centre? Never mind, that's just the joys of children, and everyone should just deal with your little precious! How dare you, stranger, ask my son to keep his voice down!

It's one thing when your kids are brats in your own home. It's another when you merrily let them impose social costs on everyone around you without making any effort to stop it. Everyone understands when your one-year old baby is crying on the airplane that there's not much you can do. They'll be irritated, but they'll understand. But when your 4-year old keeps kicking the seat in front of you and you do nothing to stop it? That makes you a tool, not just your child.

I remember thinking about a broader version of this problem when I was behind a four-wheel drive. Everyone seems to have those stickers that have stick figures of all the people in the family. This lady had gone one step further - her license plate decal read 'This is Dylan and Maddie's Mum'.

What a strange way for an adult to define their identity! Not only inwardly, but to proclaim this to the whole world. I understand the solicitude for one's children, but it seems perverse that the parents come to view their own existence in terms of being appendages to their offspring. Is that really the first sentence that you want to use to describe yourself - I am my children's mother? Even if you were to phrase it as 'I have two children', that would be an improvement, as you haven't relegated the subject (of yourself) to an implied noun to emphasise the object.

Can you imagine a parent of a hundred years ago writing such a thing? Or even fifty years? It seems pretty damn unlikely.

If I were a gambling man, I would bet that Dylan and Maddie were indulged a lot as children. I hope it didn't turn them into entitled brats, but I'm not optimistic.

Here's one thing you can take to the bank - you wouldn't have caught Papa or Mama Holmes with a license plate like that, and when/if I sire offspring, you won't find me with one either.

Just Circling the Drain Isn't Nearly Fast Enough! We Need A Vacuum Pump!

Some people think that Europe is a bloated, worthless bureacratic state that has managed to transform an attitude of self-important entitlement amongst its citizenry into some of the most inflexible labour regulations on the planet.

Some people may think that such regulations, making labour ever more costly and ever more difficult to fire, contribute to the massive unemployment and economic stagnation that has seen large parts of Europe unable to repay their national debt, thereby threatening the existence of the Euro and the economic security of European countries.

Some people may think that as the Euro, and European economies, appear to be on the brink of collapse, it would behoove any sensible leaders to be doing all they can to address these problems.

Some people may think that Europe's leaders, institutions, and ultimately, voters, have proven themselves unwilling or unable to address these issues, and would rather vote for more government-provided lollipops even as their countries collapse around them.

Such people are clearly nothing but embittered, Euro-hating capitalist pigs. And here to prove this to them comes the European Court of Justice! Their latest ruling is, as the New York Times puts it:

[W]orkers who happened to get sick on vacation were legally entitled to take another vacation.

Yep, that's going to be just the shot in the arm that sluggish European economies need. All those unemployed citizens who were afraid to take jobs because they worried that being sick might eat into their holiday time will now flood back into the labour force, reinvigorating national output and tax coffers.

Master of moral hazard, these clowns at the ECJ don't appear to have considered the possibility that claiming you were ill while in Tahiti is very difficult to disprove, and thereby easily allows workers to effortlessly expand their vacation time. Which, in case you Yanks had forgotten, currently is between four and six weeks.

Somebody give these countries a bailout!

At least the New York Times Reporter seems to have a sense of humour about the whole thing, evidenced by his closing line:

The ruling does not apply to the 25 percent of the Spanish labor force that is currently unemployed.

Ha! You don't say.

How Not To Interact With The Police

File this one under 'Positive, Not Normative'.

I think not nearly enough people give any thought to plausible psychology when interacting with police. You can observe this by the dumb@$$ things they do.

If I had to guess at what motivates people to be police officers, it might be some combination of the following:

1. They like the idea of keeping the city safe.

2. They like the thrill of fighting crime.

3. They like having authority over other people.

4. They like being part of a fraternal organisation that looks out for each other while doing the first three items.

You can read blogs like Second City Cop to get a sense of what I'm talking about.

To my mind, this set of motivations explains both the positive and negative aspects of typical police responses:

a) If a police officer decides that you're an innocent bystander being threatened by some thug, they'll put themselves in physical danger to help you out. Say what you will about this being their job, it's still an admirable trait.

b) If the police officer decides that you're a minor nuisance but otherwise not a serious problem (speeding by a small amount, yelling too loudly in public) and are being polite and respectful to them, they'll likely tell you to stop, and will perhaps be content to let you go on your way, or give you some small fine.

c) If the police officer decides that you're being disrespectful to him, even if you're not posing a serious threat to public order, they're almost certainly going to make your life difficult. They'll do this knowing that point #4 will work in their favor - other cops, and law enforcement generally, will back them up, even if they've acted like a bully.

d) If the police officer decides that you're being disrespectful to him AND being a threat to public order, you'd better believe that they're going to bring the pain.

Let's suppose the 4 stated assumptions form a fair amount of motivating psychology for police officers. How should you react when interacting with a police officer who stops you?

Consider the following example of one way to behave:




Let's begin by noting that you have no legal obligation to be polite. The cop in question was acting like a power-mad bully, and manufactured a bogus reason to arrest the guy. In a more just society, the cop would be fired, and the guy would get an apology, if not compensation.

We all know, however, that that ain't gonna happen. The cop will get off scot free, and the motorcycle rider has already had several hours in prison, regardless of whether he eventually gets prosecuted. Remember, positive not normative. We're working with the world as it is, not as it should be.

If you're the kind of person who stands on principle that you're going to be rude to a cop who acts rudely to you first, I can see a fair case to applaud that action. Cops shouldn't just be able to get away with any kind of bad behaviour.

But suppose you're just interested in making your life as easy as possible. What overarching principle would you choose?

I would venture the following four bits of advice :

1. Always be scrupulously respectful.

2. Only offer verbal resistance to the cop's demands in order to assert your legal rights.

3. Think very carefully whether asserting your legal rights is likely to be worth it, and do not offer any verbal resistance unless you think you're going to be arrested or charged anyway. 

4. Never offer physical resistance.

If we believe the psychology we described earlier, cops really hate it when you don't defer to their authority over you. Being rude or swearing is an obvious way of getting them pissed off. You're already in either case c) or d) of their likely responses, and what have you gained? You've given vent to your feelings. If that's all the benefit you get, you're paying very heavily in the amount of hassle in the next hours and days of your life for that opportunity to tell Officer O'Malley to get f***ed.

Another obvious mistake is to demand to know their badge number. People think that because this isn't swearing, it won't land them in trouble. Think again - this indicates your desire to retaliate against the cop, and that's going to annoy him a ton. If you're getting arrested, there'll be plenty of time later to find out the arresting officer's name and file a complaint - why make that intention obvious up-front? Demanding to know his badge number if you don't actually intend to file a complaint is just as stupid as swearing at him.

But does that mean you should always submit to everything a cop asks you?

No. This is where point #2 comes in. You do not want to give the police officer further evidence that will help convict you of a crime, should the matter proceed to court. What kind of things does that mean?

If they want to ask you questions about a crime you may have committed, don't answer anything without a lawyer. If you're unsure, just don't answer. What if you didn't commit the crime, or don't think you did? Doesn't matter - shut the hell up.

If they want to search your car, house or pockets, you want to indicate that you don't offer your consent. In the US, if you  don't consent to a search, the police must establish probable cause in order for any evidence they find to be admissible. If you consent to the search, they don't have to establish squat.

But, (and here is the rub), you can't refuse to do any of those things without indicating that you're not submitting to their authority. And that will piss them off - there's no avoiding it.

Hence point #3 - you want to be very careful before offering the first signs of not acquiescing to the cop. You only get one chance to be a nice obedient citizen. Once you've given that away (by politely resisting demands or by being a jackass), it won't come back. Trying to be polite once he starts arresting you won't win back his good graces.

It's not easy to know exactly what the threshold is for resisting demands though.

If you've been pulled over for speeding and they ask you if you know how fast you were going, most answers you give are going to hurt you from a legal standpoint:

-"I was going 70 in the 65 zone" - you just confessed your guilt. Case closed.

-"I don't know how fast I was going" - this makes it hard for you to assert in court that you weren't speeding, since the officer will testify that you claimed at the time you couldn't be sure you weren't speeding.

-"I was doing 65" - if the officer can prove you were speeding, they might decide to get you for making false statements, yet another crime.

So legally, it's in your interests to refuse to answer the question. But this will piss off the cop, and at a minimum it guarantees they'll give you a ticket, and perhaps hold you up for longer. Is that worth it?

In general, probably not. The main time it might be is if you're planning to challenge the ticket in court. If you're not, you're probably just better off admitting you were speeding and offering your apologies.

For me, I'd draw the line at the point that they want to search my car (or house). At that point, my response would be 'I know you're just trying to do your job officer, and I don't have anything to hide, but I'm sorry, I don't consent to searches.'

I'd do this knowing that they're going to be pissed off. They might call the K-9 unit. They might call for backup. They might insist I get out of the car and search it anyway. They might hold me up for the next 3 hours.

That's the price I pay to increase my chances in an actual court case. If the officer wants to search my car, he's already pissed off with me. I'd rather not take the chance that he breaks something, or plants evidence and I've now consented to the search.

None of this means that we shouldn't be angered by scenes like the video above. It's maddening that cops get to act like thugs and bullies and just get away with it.

But everything in the video was entirely predictable. Guy is part of a motorcycle group roaming around. That's your right, but it makes you look like a potential threat to public order. At 1:42, the guy gives the two-finger 'up-yours' sign to the cop as he drives by. When he gets pulled over, the guy tells the police officer that he can't take the camera (instead of just that he doesn't consent to the camera being taken although he will not physically resist such an action, a different formulation). Guy asks for the cop's badge number. Shortly afterwards, guy gets arrested. Guy doesn't immediately acquiesce when asked to place his hands behind his back, raising the possibility of a resisting arrest charge.

It may well be that the cop was going to make up a bogus arrest reason in order to confiscate the camera. It may be that the arrest was unavoidable.

But all the acts of resistance displayed were almost certain to irritate the cop, and did very little to help the man in court.

If you feel that as a matter of principle that it's worth it, more power to you.

If you, like me, don't feel it's worth it, you're better off swallowing your pride, shutting up, and acquiescing to  their demands when the po-po start acting like bullies.

Either way though, you should know the cost of your actions when you make them. Otherwise you resist running afoul of the advice of the great Sun-Tzu:

To begin by bluster, but afterwards to take fright at the enemy's numbers, shows a supreme lack of intelligence.

How To Be Alone

Random Observations From Travels Around The USA

Apologies for the lack of updates, I've been travelling around a fair bit recently. Here's my sociological travelogue.

Miami

-To slightly paraphrase Athenios's memorable econ-nerdy description: Take the set of {Los Angeles} AND NOT {New York}. Then lever it up like crazy. The result is Miami.

-To my politically incorrect eye, it seemed like that, for a US city with a high Hispanic population, there was a much larger and more visible Hispanic middle class and upper-middle class than other places I've been. My guess is that this is partly to do with the fact that Miami has a lot of Cuban immigrants, many of them refugees from Castro. During the 70s these tended to be some of the elite of Cuban society, which seems to be less true of the median immigrant from Mexico. The fact that Cubans tend to vote Republican already puts them in a somewhat odd position relative to other Hispanic groups, and the visible trends in Miami seemed consistent with that.

-In the multiple times I've been there, I think I've gotten Haitian cab drivers on nearly every occasion - the giveaway is always the French names on the ID cards in the cab.

Vegas

Earlier thoughts here, here and here.

-Outside of a cocktail party itself, I can't think of any place I've been to where the cocktail dress was so prevalent on the women walking around. Day time, night time, doesn't matter.

-Part of this seemed to from the, how shall I put it, 'professionals'. They tend to stick out. I wonder if the men who partake in such services realise how easy they are to spot at a distance of 50m. My guess is that they kid themselves that people might be mistaking them for friends, girlfriends etc. But they're not.

-Related to the above, it's amusing when you think about it how much men will pay to probabilistically sleep with a women, but how they'll shy away from paying money to sleep with a woman with certainty. The most likely explanations are a very high implied cost of dignity, or the fact that the purchase itself is not the same. In the latter case, one ultimately wants the pursuit and the conquest, and only the probabilistic scenario delivers that. Of course, there's always the explanation of George Costanza cheapness - why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?

Caned!

Nigel Farage lays into the EU over the madness of having the Spanish bailout being funded by the same countries who are themselves on the brink of needing a bailout.



I love watching Nigel Farage in action. He's aware that he's never going to change anything at the EU, so he just acts like a professional troll for their dim-witted schemes, pointing out all the ridiculous fictions that EU boosters love to tell each other.

Truly Understanding What Combat Mortality Statistics Mean

I find it interesting sometimes to imagine how my worldview might change if I experienced different events.

It seems elementary that if you've made the best use of the data available, you should only change your mind based on new information. Merely experiencing an event without finding out anything you didn't know before ought not change your perception of things.

So it's funny to read about how the average person's views change with a particular experience, and try to hypothesize where your current views fit along the claimed evolution.

What prompted this (and continuing with the 'All-Fussell-All-The-Time' theme of the blog of late) was Paul Fussell's description of how the average soldier's views on the chances of death change over time.

In war it is not just the weak soldiers, or the sensitive ones, or the highly imaginative or cowardly ones, who will break down. All will break down if in combat long enough. "Long enough" is now defined by physicians and psychiatrists as between 200 and 240 days. For every frontline soldier in the Second World War, according to John Ellis, there was the "slowly dawning and dreadful realisation that there was no way out, that . . . it was only a matter of time before they got killed or maimed or broke down completely." As one British officer put it, "You go in, you come out, you go in again and you keep doing it until they break you or you are dead." This "slowly dawning and dreadful realisation" usually occurs as a result of two stages of rationalization and one of accurate perception:

1. It can't happen to me. I am too clever / agile / well-trained / good-looking / beloved / tightly laced / etc.

Personally, I can't imagine ever thinking this. Death is always certain, and there's always a chance that you're going to draw the unlucky number even in much safer events than combat. So while this might be a subconscious starting point, I doubt it. What about the second stage?

This persuasion gradually erodes into

2. It can happen to me, and I'd better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by keeping extra alert at all times / watching more prudently the way I take cover or dig in or expose my position by firing my weapon / etc.

This conviction attenuates in turn to the perception that death and injury are matters more of bad luck than lack of skill...

At a minimum, I think I'd start at this stage (or the first half, anyway) - it definitely can happen to you. The question is how much agency you have over the matter. Note that the description above tends to not focus on probabilities - it can happen, but if I do X, then it can't. I think this is empirically a good description of the world - most people don't think in probabilities.

But to those that do, it's obvious that you dying in warfare can be both a) largely determined by chance, and b) something you can still shift a bit at the margin by not doing stupid things.

In essence, you're spinning a roulette wheel, and any number above 3 means you're dead, or something equivalent. You can have crummy odds and still understand what the odds are.

So that, in short, would be where I think I'd view World War 2 combat probabilities.

But I don't think I would have gotten to the conclusion that makes up Fussell's stage 3:

...making inevitable the third stage of awareness:

3. It is going to happen to me, and only my not being there is going to prevent it.

Huh.

On a number of dimensions, that is actually incredibly clear-sighted. Granted, it still makes the mistake of not thinking in the probabilistic way (a probability of 99% is not the same thing as a probability of 100%).

But which bias are you more likely to be succumbing to? Being overly optimistic that you will somehow be different and escape it all, or ignoring the tiny chance that you might actually make it? To ask the question is to know the answer. The bias is all on the side of optimism - if you round your estimated survival probability down to zero, it won't change the answer by much, the same way as if you assume that you'll never win the lottery you'll almost certainly make better choices than if you assume any non-trivial probability of the event occurring.

And indeed, it only takes a minor modification to the premise to make it technically correct as well, by beginning the sentence with the phrase 'Given long enough, ...' . This is expressed most memorably in the motto of Zero Hedge - on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

In wartime, you don't even need the timeline to be that long.

Which makes the second half of the sentence all the more powerful - the only way out is to not be there.

That is something that I wouldn't have figured out with equivalent clarity.

In the middle of combat, there are also very few ways out. Desert and you run a good chance of getting shot.

I can imagine that goes a fair way to explaining why people go insane in war - you figure out that it is now inevitable that you'll die a horrible, gruesome death at some random (but imminent) point, and until then you're going to be surrounded by horror and brutality.

The phrase 'only my not being there is going to prevent it' can also be paraphrased as 'the only winning move is not to play.'

Fatties Are Optimising

Let me repeat a frequent refrain that I hear from smug skinny people from time to time:

Hur hur hur. Look at that fat guy at McDonalds, getting a super-sized Big Mac meal with a diet coke. As if the diet coke makes up for the huge number of calories he's consuming! What a moron!

Reader, I am here to tell you that at least along one metric, the fattie is behaving in an entirely rational way, and the skinny guy is in fact the moron for not understanding optimisation.

When I say 'rational', I don't mean that they are doing the optimal thing in some cosmic sense. Rather, I mean it in the classical applied microeconomics sense that they are maximising something.

So what exactly might they be maximising that would be consistent with their behaviour?

Consider that they get utility from eating equal to

U = Taste*Quantity

It's better to eat tastier stuff, and it's better to eat more of it. Not too controversial, right?

In addition, suppose they can't eat an unlimited amount - let's grant them a binding calorie budget for each meal. The exact budget doesn't actually matter for the analysis.

So the fatties want to eat as much tasty food as possible given a maximum total calorie allowance. How do they choose the amounts of foodstuffs to get to this point?

Well, if you work through the fairly simple constrained optimisation, the relevant metric for comparing across food items is the taste per unit calorie. This is a measure of how good the 'value' of each food is, if you think of calories like money. In other words:

"Value(Food X)" = Taste (Food X) /  Calories (Food X)

In equilibrium, you will want to allocate more consumption towards foods that deliver higher value, and reduce consumption in low value foods.* When faced between two foods, that's how you'll decide between them.

Let's add further the assumption that the person must have at least one food item and one drink item.

So how do you choose between the items?

Let's start by comparing Coke versus Diet Coke.

A 12 ounce can of Coke has 140 calories. Let's call it's tastiness = y.

A 12 ounce can of diet coke has, say, 1 calorie (it's closer to zero, but never mind). Let's say you find diet coke much worse than coke - it's only 30% as tasty, say.

So the value of coke is V(coke) = y/140
The value of diet coke is V(diet coke) = 0.3y/1

In other words, Diet Coke is 42 times better value than Coke.

Now let's compare a serve of fries relative to our equivalent of 'Diet Fries', say a Premium Southwest Salad with Chicken.

A large McDonalds French Fries has 500 calories. The salad has 290 calories.

But everyone knows that the salad is not 60% as tasty as the French Fries. At best, it's about a quarter as tasty.

In other words, the Salad is worse value than the large fries.

So the fatty that is rationally optimising the problem we've set out will choose the large fries and the diet coke, and ignore the southwest salad and the coke. This will give him more tasty food for the same amount of calories.

And this conclusion holds no matter what the calorie budget. It doesn't matter if you let the guy eat a huge meal - he's still better off ordering more fries and a diet coke. Coke has a much (calorie)-cheaper substitute than fries do for the same level of taste.

I think it's a mistake to assume that fatties don't care about being fat. My guess is that they care deeply about it. They just really like food.

And these are exactly the people whom I'd expect to figure out the optimal way to eat the most amount of tasty food for a given level of calories.

Frankly, if I only optimised over the things above, I'd eat McDonalds a lot more. It's tasty as hell, and doesn't even have that many calories. As we've seen, you can eat it every day and not necessarily get fat.

The only thing that stops me getting to this point is adding in a health cost to each item. If you care about your health (and on this front, I think it's safe to assume that fatties may not care as much), then you're more likely to pick the salad. But most people are unlikely to pick the salad based on the taste/calorie tradeoff alone. Unless they're idiots. In addition, Kevin Murphy's back-of-the-envelope calculations about how large the health costs of a hamburger are suggest that they're only in the range of $2-$3 per hamburger. What the costs are in terms of attractiveness, however, is another story.

But the bottom line is that it's the fattie at McDonalds who isn't ordering the diet coke who is more likely to be making the mistake. You're always better off ordering the diet coke and getting a larger fries instead.

*Technical aside: if you don't specify a declining function of taste with greater consumption (i.e. each fry tastes as good as the last), the equilibrium will be a corner solution - e.g. you only eat french fries. The fact that people tend to want a burger and fries suggests that taste declines with consumption, and thus the optimisation is at an interior solution. Fact.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines

Via Hacker News comes this great observation:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.

The logic being that this tends to be attached to controversial claims, and if the author had enough facts to determine conclusively that the the claim were true, they would assert the matter directly.

'Wartime', by Paul Fussell

After the previous post on the subject, I've been making my way through Paul Fussell's book on World War II, 'Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'.

Like his essay on the same subject, it's very eye-opening.

On the tendency of bomber crews to place enormous importance on medallions and other tokens of luck:

In a world whose behavior seems to define it as nothing but mad, "You cannot call the things that happen to bomber crews superstition." In the midst of calmly committed mass murder, reliance on amulets will seem about the most reasonable thing around. 

On the frequent indignities suffered by soldiers at the hands of their own officers, a concept that Fussell describes as 'chickens***':

'I joined the army to fight facsim', says [a British soldier], 'only to find the army full of fascists.'

On the German understanding of why, just because they were fighting the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, they wanted to invade Europe as well:

Few in Germany had any idea why the Americans had invaded Europe. One German officer could conclude only, as he told his interrogator, that they had attacked the Reich "in order to save Churchill and the Jews". 

On the reputation of the Italian army:

This myth of Italian military haplessness served a useful psychological function in the Second World War, helping secretly to define what Allied soldiers wanted the "enemy" universally to be - pacifists, dandies, sensitive and civilized non-idealogues, even clowns. The antithesis of committed, fanatic National Socialists. At the same time the Italians could serve as the definition of incompetence, fraudulence, and cowardice: no one really wanted to be like them to be sure, but how everyone wished it were possible! The world was laughing at Italy, and yet the Italians were sensibly declining to be murdered. The Allied soldier couldn't help wondering that if contempt and ridicule are the price of staying alive, perhaps the price is worth paying.  

Interesting stuff indeed.

The People's Kleptocracy of China

An interesting theory of the Chinese economic system.

It includes answers to the questions of 'why do the Chinese keep buying US T-Bills', 'why do the Chinese build so many worthless buildings' and 'why do Chinese peasants riot over inflation', among others.

I don't know if I buy the whole thing (if the SOEs are so efficient, and the peasants only earn negative real returns on bank deposits, how would they be so badly off if the SOEs do worse under low inflation? Economic contraction, perhaps, but that seems to imply that the house of cards may have some positive value).

Still, it makes oddly compelling narrative

Thought of the Day

"No man can ever truly be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune."

Boethius, The Consolations of Philosophy