Oh Noz! OMG!

Apparently the USDA website is shut down due to the government funding crisis.

This prompts two responses from me:

1. Oh no! How will we ever possibly survive without whatever the hell it is the USDA website is meant to do. It will seriously impact the ability of the USDA to deliver key services in...er...um...

2. These people apparently have such a low opinion of your intelligence that they think you aren't aware that it doesn't actually cost any money to leave a web page in the same state it was in. Quite the contrary - it costs money to change the web page. If the web server were shut down due to lack of money, you wouldn't get any page at all.

I can scarcely think of a better advertisement for firing everybody who signed off on this absurd stunt. Or, you know, just fire the whole USDA. Be honest, do you even know what these clowns do? Have you noticed the lack of services from them in your life recently? If US farmers stopped making milk, I wager you'd notice that pretty quickly. If the USDA stopped interfering in this process, it's far less obvious that you'd miss it.

Thanks to Hector Lopez for the pointer.

Time-Inconsistent Male Hairstyle Preferences

In the world of male hairstyles, hair length functions something like a cross between mercury poisoning and a syphilis infection. Initially you have a small amount of hair, and you periodically treat the problem with scissors, as applied by a trained expert. You look around at the madmen in their ponytails, appearing like an obscene cross between the crying game and a manga appreciation society. "Ha!", you think. "I'll never look like those fools". And you don't. The hair keeps getting cut, the antibiotics get ingested, the madness is kept at bay, and everything goes on as normal.

But then some time in college, you get lazy and don't take your medicine. You start looking at your shaggy mop in the mirror, and the madness slowly takes hold. "Hey", you now reflect, "this actually looks pretty good! Luxuriant, even. Maybe I'll just let it grow for a while". What you don't count on is the fact that the hair itself is poisoning your ability to recognise what a clown you look like.

This is evidenced by the fact that more and more alarming warnings get completely ignored. Suddenly you need to wear a visor all the time to keep it out of your face. Next you're thinking of buying a headband. Finally, when none of that works, you convince yourself  that it would actually look good to have a full on pony tail. Chicks dig it, yo!

At this point, you have become the madman who doesn't realise he's gone mad. Friends and family gingerly try to intervene, but know it's a lost cause. They just have to wait until one day, you get sick of it and finally get a haircut.

And then, the mysterious cycle completes, in that within a few days you get used to it being short again. And after about a month or so, you look back on the long haired photos and reflect, "Wow, that really did look awful. I wonder why I let it grow for so long? I won't do that again".

But you might, reader. Like all time inconsistent preferences, when not poisoned by mercury you will struggle to forecast how you'll feel when in the throes of madness.

Shining, flickering into that good night

From 30,000 feet in the air, the early evening displays a curious inversion of light. The ground beneath me is a dark purplish grey. I sometimes strain my eyes to try to make out any possible distinct shapes, but the earth does not divulge its secrets. If not for my trust in where the plane is taking me, it would be difficult to tell if I were even above ground or water. But the sky is still clinging to light, as the plane chases the dying embers of the sunset all the way towards the Pacific. The cloud bank that hugs the horizon is rimmed in a thin atmosphere of orange, which slowly leaks to pale blue, then dark blue, then black. Jupiter beckons above.

And then, every so often, the inky  void below is disturbed. A tiny defiant outpost of light appears, absurdly huddled against the black satin all around. Like some strange lichen pattern, a few lines can be made out against the indistinct mass of faint illumination. The edges are fuzzy, and a few single points of light have ventured out further, like scouts into the unknown.

Not yet, the lights call out. The universe may not care whether we are snuffed out or not. But for today, here lives Man. Today, generations rise and fall, struggling to subdue this rock of ours. But our children’s children may one day conquer the stars.

"It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

The History You Don't Know

I was having a discussion with Athenios the other day about the Byzantine Empire. Apparently this is a big part of the curriculum at Greek schools. And for someone who tends to think of themselves as fairly well-versed in history (The Cheap Seats: Really? You think that about yourself? We never noticed!) it became hilariously apparent that I know next to nothing about the Byzantine Empire. It was the continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire after the split, and eventually conquered by the Turks. Anything else? Anything at all?

I suspect I'm not alone in this. In fact, it got me thinking of what a parody version of history would look like if constructed only from the knowledge of a decently educated citizen of a British Commonwealth country. I suspect it would look a little like this:

a) Before 500BC - Nothing.

b) ~500BC - Ancient Greece, Democracy in Athens, maybe the Peloponnesian  War

c) Some time after 500 B.C. (Origins mysterious) -> 400 A.D.ish  -  Roman Empire

d) 400 A.D. ish - Fall of Rome to the Goths

e) 400.A.D. -> 1066  - ????  Mysterious Dark Ages @#$%, nothing much going on

f) 1066 - Battle of Hastings, Norman Invasion of Britain

g) 1066 - 1500ish - ????  More mysterious Dark Ages nonsense

h) 1500ish - Renaissance in Italy

i) 1600ish - Britain appears out of nowhere

j) 16-something (30ish? Who the hell knows) English Civil War, Charles I gets executed, Oliver Cromwell turns out to be a tyrant, King is brought back

k) 1670 -> 1776 - ???? Who the hell knows

l) 1770-> 1790something  - Lots of stuff, American Revolution, Captain Cook discovers Australia, French Revolution

m) Early 1800s - Napoleon takes over Europe, gets beaten first by the Ruskis in 1812, then eventually for good at Waterloo

n) Early 1800s -> 1914  - ???? Probably something going on, but not sure what. The American Civil War was in there somewhere, right?

o) 1914->1918 - World War 1

p) 1929 -> 1933 - Depression, Rise of Hitler

q) 1939 -> 1945 - World War 2.

r) 1950ish -> 1969 - Cold War with the Soviets

s) 1969 - Moon Landing, Vietnam War around this period

t) 1969 -> 1989 - More Cold War

u) 1989 - Fall of Berlin Wall, End of Cold War

v) 2001 - 9/11 Attacks, start of War on Terror.


Now, what's hilarious about this is the huge gaping swathes of ignorance in the middle. From World War 1 onwards they have a pretty good understanding, but before that it gets quite patchy. And as soon as you start interrogating our hypothetical British subject about some of the question marks, hilarity ensues as it becomes obvious how clueless they are. For instance:

The entire Byzantine Empire gets just wrapped up as part of the 'Dark Ages'. Who they are or what they did, nobody knows. The Crusades happened somewhere in there too, right? Oh, you mean there were lots of them? And they were fought by some group called 'The Franks'? Who the hell were they, and what happened to them?

I also hear the phrase 'Holy Roman Empire' thrown about from time to time - what was all that about? Is that the same as the Byzantines? They were all Christian, I think, surely they must be basically the same people. Also, what exactly was going on in Europe from about 1700 onwards, other than Napoleon? The Austro-Hungarian Empire must have been in there somewhere (same with the Ottoman Empire), since I heard about them as part of World War 1, but what else they did is anybody's guess.

And this isn't even getting to the question of what was happening the rest of the world, such as Asia or South America. Maybe it's understandable that people stick to their own region. But the Brits don't even seem to know much about Europe!

These questions all have interesting answers - I do know more than our hypothetical educated Brit above, and half the the remarks above are facetious. But it's still embarrassing how little I know about most of this stuff. It's like the timeline of European history is one of those old-world maps that end in obscurity with the phrase 'Here be Dragons'.

It makes you wonder what alternative perspectives you might have on the world if you knew about all these other events in human history.

Thought of the Day

"Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away."

-Daniel Bliss

Amazon: Supporting Ben Franklin's legacy by making one of two certainties more certain

To paraphrase England's greatest prime minister, commercial partners, like nations, have no permanent allies, only permanent interests.

It used to be the case that Amazon was a fairly reliable partner in helping consumers find the lowest cost purveyors of particular products. Of course, it was only limited to those in their network of people selling through them, but this tended to be pretty liquid. For most products I searched for, there would be a sufficient range of sellers that you'd get decent price competition. This is made easier by the fact that once you're comparing literally the same product, it's basically a commodity market - there's some sorting on reliability of shipping and returns policy, but that's about it.

Amazon always privileged themselves slightly by defaulting to selling the item themselves if they stocked it. But it was simple to click on the tab for 'new' and find a range of sellers sorted by the total cost of the item plus shipping, which was what you paid. Problem solved - buy from the cheapest guy, the end.

In other words, as long as you clicked on the tab, Amazon would make it easy to tell if they were the cheapest provider of the goods or not, and the sorting process made it clear how you could purchase the lowest cost item, even if wasn't from them. Amazon were willing to take the hit to some direct sales (though they got some back in fees from the marketplace seller) for the repeat business that came from running a good price comparison service. 

But starting about a year ago, the interests of consumers and Amazon started to diverge. The reason is that for residents of various states (now up to 12) Amazon has to collect sales tax on their purchases. The citizen was always obliged to pay the tax, at least nominally, but in the past Amazon wasn't involved in collecting it. Collection was meant to occur because citizens would voluntarily report the sale tax on their internet purchases to the state (Ha ha! Stop it, you're killing me!). In practice, this made the Greek Tax office look like a model of perfect enforcement.

The loophole, which doesn't get greatly discussed, is that while Amazon is now forced to collect sales tax for its own providers, and for providers in the same state as the purchaser, it isn't compelled to (and in practice, doesn't) collect sales tax for third party sellers outside the state of the purchaser.

So what would a permanent ally do? 

Simple - he'd now sort purchases on total purchase price of Price + Shipping + Tax. That's the end cost to the consumer, let them find the lowest cost item.

But this was apparently a bridge too far for Amazon. This would put their own offerings at a structural disadvantage, and a decent one at that. In California, for instance, the minimum sales tax at the moment is 7.5%. This article claims that Amazon's after-tax profit margin, for comparison, is 1%. Can you see why playing at a 7.5% disadvantage is a game they're incredibly reluctant to play? 

And so we witnessed the internet commerce equivalent of the Suez Canal Crisis between erstwhile allies. Amazon felt that listing the total price would hurt them so much that they were willing to significantly degrade the usefulness of the price comparison function of their website. So they continue to only list cost in terms of Price + Shipping.

It gives me the absolute $#!7s that I can't sort on total cost any more. The only way to find out is to click through various sellers, add them to the cart, see if tax is added on, remove the item if it is, go back, find another seller, and then compare the tax with the difference in price. 

For small items, I won't always bother. But I will always resent the fact that Amazon is deliberately making my life harder for their own purposes. 

To give them credit, Amazon fought damn hard for a long time to prevent the states from forcing them to pay, but in the end, they saw the writing on the wall. Tax was going to get collected eventually, because the bankrupt states saw them as a cash cow waiting to be milked. Maybe I should cut them some slack.

Or maybe not. There are, after all, no permanent allies in commercial transactions. They happily screwed us when it suited them, so I have no compunction in reducing my business to them in response.

I don't know if it's possible, but if someone figures out how to scrape amazon prices for the lowest total cost, I'll direct all my purchases through them.

The only thing that would be even better would be to be able to scale the weight placed on taxes by a fixed amount. I'd probably set it at about 1.1 for small purchases. In other words, I'd rather pay slightly more money just for the pleasure of depriving the State of California of additional revenue.

That's not going to happen, of course, because Amazon makes it hard to just scrape all their data. So in reality, we consumers just have to bend over and take it.

Marketers love to tell you that the customer is always right, but it's not true.

It sucks to spend so long thinking that your purchasing dollars made you Dwight Eisenhower, only to find out that you were actually Anthony Eden all along and didn't know it.

Briefly

1. Just $10? Why not $50? Now THAT'S a living wage! It's free, after all.

2. Physicists discover that nominal interest rates are indeed positive.

3. It's not quite as good as Garfield Minus Garfield, but Calvin and Hobbes mashed up with Dune is still quite excellent.

Drowning in Words

From a reddit post recently:



Just remember, ignorance of the EU's 26,911 word missive on the sale of cabbage is no excuse!

David Foster Wallace memorably wrote an essay entitled 'Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed', a title which captured the essence of Kafka perhaps better than anything else that could be said about him.

In both his love of brevity and his appreciation of absurdity, I'm sure the great Mr Kafka would find much of interest in the modern regulatory state.

Postscript: Scholars are still debating the authenticity of the the part in the Dead Sea Scrolls that talks about Christ's '10 Commitments'.

Awesome

Steve Sailer links to this fantastic New Yorker comic:


Ouch! Please report to the burn unit of the hopsital!

This hits so many outrageous buttons at once: 'incisively observing an unusual but true correlation', 'needless withering putdown of other people's dubious choices' and 'old school snobbishness' all in one.

I went through the list of people I knew with tattoos for P(Divorce|Tattoo), and it went 'Yep...Yep... Nope...Yep...'. Okay, what about the other direction, of the non-tattoo folks for P(Divorce | No Tattoo)? 'Nope... Nope... Nope... Yep...Nope... Nope.. .'

Day-amn.

If you, like me, are not particularly enamored of the spreading of this social trend, there are far more eloquently reasoned and interesting critiques of tattooing (for instance, this great Theodore Dalrymple essay), but as Mr Mencken put it, one good horse laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms

As to why the underlying correlation exists, I think it works on two levels.

One is the treatment effect of traumatic parental events in a child's upbringing. Part of the appeal of tattoos (as far as I can tell) is the notion of their permanence - being able to inscribe something on yourself that will stay fixed, committing an idea or picture to permanent association with yourself. I can imagine that this desire is subconsciously more sought out by people for whom a significant event in their childhood was the disruption and dissolution of the home life they'd thought of as permanent.

The other is the likely heritability of time preference, and compulsive decision-making more generally. I can imagine that the kind of parent who enters into a rash marriage, or decides to have an affair with the secretary or mailman, will (through probably both genes and culture) result in a child who will think less about how the tattoo is going to look when they're 50 with wrinkled skin, or 26 and applying to the law firm.

Still, whatever the reason, I'm mentally filing this one away in the list of life's correlations to bear in mind when one needs to get all Last Psychiatrist in one's analysis of a person.

What Henry Blodget Could Have Written

(Some background - the article that started it all)

"There has been a recent furor over the fact that our CTO, Pax Dickinson, made some remarks on twitter that various people found offensive. I'm not going to summarise them - his twitter feed is publicly available, as far as I know he hasn't deleted or retracted any tweets, so if you're curious about the controversy, I invite to go read his words yourself (in their full context) and make up your own mind.

Rather than talk about the specifics of what Pax wrote, I want to talk about a broader question - whether companies should be in the business of effectively policing the private opinions of their employees.

We at Business Insider are in the market of providing news, opinion and discourse about events in the world today, and we do so in a way which disrupts the broken business model of most old media organisations. This line of work attracts people who are interested in the world around them, and their views will cover the whole spectrum of politics and politeness. Some of them will necessarily be iconoclasts, oddballs, misfits, and brilliant free-thinkers of all sorts of stripes. Interesting, competent people are always welcome at Business Insider.

Within this business, some people are employed as writers - that is, their words and public pronouncements are in fact their work flow, and the basis on which their performance is judged. Other people are employed in other capacities, making sure that the rest of the business operates smoothly.

Pax Dickinson is not employed as a writer at Business Insider, and as such is not employed for either his writing or his private opinions. Pax Dickinson is employed to make sure that the website at Business Insider operates at world-beating standards. Which, in case you're curious, it does. He's done at outstanding job at this, and BI wouldn't be what it is today without his efforts. We didn't hire him for his sexual preference, for his choice of reading material, for his political views, or for his ability to peacefully go along and get along. We hired him for a job, and he did it. He still does it.

From our perspective, that's the end of the story. We are simply not interested in policing the private twitter feeds of our employees to make sure they don't say anything controversial. That's it. To the extent we have an opinion on Pax's twitter feed, it is this: the private affairs of our staff are entirely their own business.

I could tell you that I don't agree with what he wrote. It's certainly tempting - I definitely wouldn't have written it myself. But to do that would be to give credence to the more basic assumption here - that we should take a position on agreeing or not with the political opinions of our staff.

Now, I'm also the CEO of Business Insider, and I have to make sure we have a viable business here. Lots of people are upset with Pax. Many are threatening to boycott our site. Perhaps, for business expediency, I should simply jettison Pax to please the people complaining the loudest.

You all are our customers, and you're entitled to visit or not visit our website according to whatever reasons you wish. That's up to you. We hope you stick around to keep viewing our great reporting. But if you decide you simply can't bear to read a site that employs someone like Pax, we'll sadly accept your verdict. If it turns out that enough people feel that way, then I as a CEO will have a sad choice in front of me, but not a hard one - if it's a choice between 'keep Pax and lose the whole business' or 'fire Pax and keep the business', every CEO in existence will choose the latter.

But before you insist on that course of action, I want to invite you to consider the larger angle here.

We live in a world where the bounds of acceptable discourse shrink ever further by the day. We live in a world where the only people willing to write on the internet under their own name are those who hold the most mild, innocuous milquetoast opinions.

When you choose to boycott a business based on the private views and words of its employees, you are sending a message - we demand ideological conformity from your staff. We demand that you, on our behalf, insist that none of your employees makes controversial statements or jokes that we don't agree with or that we find offensive. We demand that you do this not only for statements made inside your organisation and representing your organisation, but also statements that people make in their own individual capacity in their own free time. We insist that your employment contracts have an effective clause that one should not commit to permanent record any words likely to cause offense to people.

Collectively, you can easily get someone fired for their twitter feed. But there's a catch. You can't just do it for the opinions you disagree with. Because the other side is quickly going to learn the game, and the result will be a narrowing of the discourse all around.

I would ask you, is that really the world you want to live in? If it is, fine - that's what boycotting BI will produce. If enough of you vote with your dollars, that's what you'll get - a world where every single purchasing decision becomes a political decision. Where one cannot buy an icecream or mattress without asking what the political affiliation of its owners are, and what positions they enforce upon their employees.

If you, like me, find that world stifling and invasive, unfit for citizens of a country long praised for its robust discussion of ideas, then you have to check your initial impulse to boycott everything you don't like. You need to accept that there will be people in organisations whose products you buy who hold opinions you don't agree with, and that's okay.

This is not a question of 'free speech', specifically, since there's no government interference going on. You're all free to do what you want. But there's a choice we have to make about how much we as a society want to sanction people for their words alone. We at BI favor a policy that, if in doubt, we're in favor of more expression, not less.

Most corporations simply fold under the pressure of a boycott threat like the one we've received. But we at BI are taking an unusual step today - we're gambling that there's enough people out there who are willing to support Business Insider precisely because it does not police the private views of its employees.

We pledge that when you take a job with us, short of you breaking the law, you can write what you want, under your own name, without fear of being fired.

Imagine that.

Imagine how liberating that sounds.

Imagine if you could do that in your own job, right now.

If that's the world you'd like to see, we hope to continue to see you at Business Insider."

The sad, predictable reality is here.

Trauermusik

In January 1936, King George V was in seriously declining health. He had suffered from pleurisy and pulmonary disease for a number of years, and it had become apparent to his doctors that the end was near. (So much so that his doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn, on January 20th took the step of announcing that "the King's life is moving peacefully towards its close."). The King died on the night of January 20th, apparently hastened by a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine from his doctor.

At the time, German composer Paul Hindemith was in London, and meant to be performing the next night the English premiere of a viola concerto he had written, 'Der Schwanendreher'. With the death of the King, the concert was cancelled. The BBC, however, decided that they wanted Hindemith to be involved with the musical choice for the occasion of the King's death.

After debating that morning about what to perform, eventually it was decided that Hindemith should write something new for the occasion. And so, between 11am and 5pm on January 21st, he did, and it was performed live that evening in a radio broadcast. The result is the beautiful 'Trauermusik' ('mourning music', or 'funeral music'). The strange combination of tonality (giving a clear melody) but non-diatonic structure (giving the non-standard chord progressions) give a sense of sadness and complexity that seems appropriate for the death of a monarch of over 25 years reign.



This beautiful piece was written in six hours. 

Trauermusik for the King.

Trauermusik for the Empire.

Trauermusik for the age when a dignified and solemn British public mourned their departed monarch by listening to classical music on the radio.

I only read it for the articles

Specifically, the obituaries.

The 'it' here is The Economist. Their obituary section, on the last page of the magazine, is far and away the most interesting part of the whole publication, and the part I always turn to first. It's not uncommon that this will be the only bit I actually read.

The reason it's so remarkable is that it pulls off an incredibly difficult feat - surveying a person's life in a way that manages to be respectful but even-handed. This is a fine line to walk - one does not wish to speak ill of the dead, but an obsequious hagiography will simply make for dreary and implausible reading. Consider their obituary for Osama Bin Laden if you want to see them take on an extraordinarily challenging subject for which to pull off this feat.

Most interestingly, they choose their subjects in a way that gives you insight into some or other aspect of society, while still being focused on the person in question.

For an example of a thoroughly unorthodox but excellent piece, look at their recent obituary for Elmore Leonard. Can you think of any other magazine that would publish something like that?

It left me glad I renewed my subscription recently after a long absence.

Then, of course, I flip to the front of the magazine and find masterpieces of grimly comic absurdity, such as endorsing Kevin Rudd in the Australian election. The role of Rudd's earlier 'liberal' policies towards asylum seekers feature several times in their reasoning. Personally, I would have thought that a magazine calling itself 'The Economist' might be able to give some nominal recognition to the fact that thousands of extra boat people have drowned as a result of responding to the incentives of this 'liberal' regime in an entirely predicable and obvious fashion. The dig at Abbott about homosexuality is particularly comical, given that Kevin Rudd's support of gay marriage dates all the way back to ... May this year. Now that's conviction! That, and praising Labor for passing a carbon tax with a price of carbon set at 3 times the world market price. Adam Smith would be proud.

And I get reminded of why I gave up my subscription in the first place.

The one phrase you probably haven't heard being thrown about much in the debate on whether to intervene in Syria.

"Libya".

So, we want to topple a nasty secular dictator we know, who is locked in a struggle with Al Qaeda-linked terrorist 'rebels', confident that we'll manage to turn the place into Switzerland.

How'd that work out last time? Not so hot, as I wrote about at the time.

How's it going now? You've stopped hearing about it, but that's just because the west has a short attention span.

From a randomly-chosen item in the first couple of hits when I type 'news Libya' into google:

"We all thought Libya had moved on – it has, but into lawlessness and ruin"

Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi

A little under two years ago, Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, urged British businessmen to begin “packing their suitcases” and to fly to Libya to share in the reconstruction of the country and exploit an anticipated boom in natural resources.

Yet now Libya has almost entirely stopped producing oil as the government loses control of much of the country to militia fighters.

Well that's just grand.

No, really, things will work out much better this time. Trust us! From the producers who brought you 'The Arab Spring'.

Fortunately, common sense seems to be slowly breaking out this time around.

It started in Britain:

British Prime Minister David Cameron loses parliamentary vote on Syrian military strike

 But now it's catching on everywhere:

TONY Abbott: We’ve got a civil war going on in that benighted country between two pretty unsavoury sides. It’s not goodies versus baddies, it’s baddies versus baddies. And that is why it is very important that we don’t make a very difficult situation worse.

Look, the phrase 'baddies versus baddies' is definitely infelicitous, but the sentiment is certainly correct. (You could probably paste the same quote into most internal conflicts in the Middle East, if not most conflicts in the Middle East more generally). I personally prefer the Kissinger restatement of the same view about the Iran/Iraq war - 'It's a shame they can't both lose'.

Still, better crudely phrased realism than naive dross about dreams of freedom that winds up with thousands more in body bags.

When I said it's catching on everywhere, you can always rely on some people to refute the 'everywhere' part:

Sweden on Tuesday became the first European Union country to announce it will give asylum to all Syrian refugees who apply.

“All Syrian asylum seekers who apply for asylum in Sweden will get it,” Annie Hoernblad, the spokesperson for Sweden’s migration agency, told AFP.

Ha ha ha! "All"?

I don't think you've thought this through.

Rent-Seeking vs. Rent-Collecting

When historians of the future are writing the epitaph for the west, I imagine that one of the characteristics that will strike them about the present age is the increasing prevalence of rent-seeking.

As the government inexorably expands in size and scope, it becomes more of a suckers game to simply outcompete the opposition, and more lucrative to lobby the government to have them shut down.

This might take any number of forms - ludicrous licensing requirements that lower supply, absurd restrictions on competitor firms, tax breaks for your particular boondoggle industry - whatever works.

If you want a list of some of the more outlandish ones, browse through the cases the Institute For Justice has fought over the years. It's a Sisyphean task, alright.

The strange thing, though, is that most people profess to hate rent-seeking. So how come we end up with so much of it?

Part of this is simply political economy. A small but organised group fighting for a large benefit will often out-lobby a large dispersed group (e.g. taxpayers, consumers) who each suffer a small harm.

Part of it is just rank hypocrisy - when other companies lobby for their licensing requirements, it's just to squelch consumers, but I'm deeply worried about customers not getting their hair braided correctly.

Nobody is the villain in their own narrative, after all.

But I don't think that's all of it.

I think that to really understand the extent of rent-seeking, you need to appreciate those who enable them - the rent-collectors.

The way I would characterise it is that rent-seeking, properly defined, is about lobbying for socially inefficient laws and regulations that will benefit you privately.  The trial lawyers lobby turns up to argue that we really truly ruly need to have a legal system where the loser doesn't pay the other side's costs, for instance.

Rent-collecting on the other hand, is what happens when a party simply takes advantage of a bad law that is already on the books. Unlike the rent-seeker, the rent-collector does not actively push for socially inefficient legislation. Instead, he simply takes the inefficient law as he finds it - somebody is going to get the rents due to the bad law, and it may as well be me.

These are the much wider circle of folks who are thus corrupted by the process - their own self-interest stops them agitating for a repeal of the bad laws, but their lack of involvement in the initial setup means that their consciences are clean.

For every community organiser who gets a cushy job on the rent-control board, there are hundreds of tenants getting a few hundred bucks a month for free from their landlord.

For every creep in the restaurant lobby fighting to outlaw food trucks, there are hundreds of restaurant proprietors vaguely relieved to not have a truck parked nearby.

And sometimes, the rent-collectors (at least indirectly) will be people who in other circumstances would be the first ones to crusade against rent-seeking.

American securities class action lawsuits are like something out of a Kafka novel. The shareholders of a company collectively own the company. Suppose the company makes some screwup and causes the share price to drop. Based on the fact that the company is a separate legal entity, some lawyer and a gold-digging lead plaintiff will file suit on behalf of the shareholders against the management of the company that they themselves own. The management is of course protected by the company, so money is coming out of the company coffers (which the shareholders own) to nominally compensate the shareholders of the company. Got that? Well, actually, the current shareholders (who don't owe an actual duty to anybody) are indirectly paying money to the old shareholders (who often overlap substantially with the current shareholders). In theory, anyway. Part of the money is coming from insurance companies who write the professional indemnity insurance for the directors, but the company is going to be paying that back in higher premiums in no time flat. You can rest assured that the only people making any money off the whole farce are the lawyers.

Or are they? Who else benefits from this ridiculous charade?

A lot of the time, it's economic consulting firms. They make a decent living defending companies against these lawsuits, and showing that the damages aren't as high as the often ludicrous plaintiff's claims make out to be. These are some of the most free market types you can imagine, with economics degrees from the best universities.

Don't get me wrong, in the scheme of this whole monstrosity, these guys are far and away the most defensible. They're fighting for good guys, so to speak.

But still - how many of them would be out there lobbying to get securities class action reform to eliminate all this absurd waste? How many of them would honestly greet such reform with the same zeal that they would if it happened in any other industry? Even if it put them out of a job?

To ask these questions is to know the answers.

When despotic regimes take prisoners of war, one of the things they often try to get the captives to do is to write out statements that are disloyal to their home country. Sooner or later, cognitive dissonance takes over - the things you wrote down that you originally didn't believe, you come to believe, because you subconsciously prefer this view to the alternative that you wrote cowardly and disloyal things rather than face punishment. The extreme form of the result is Stockholm Syndrome. There's a reason that making disloyal statements is punished as a serious offense.

The reality is that behind every rent-seeking lobbyist are thousands of rent-collecting regular joes who have convinced themselves either that a) the current regime is either downright sensible, or b) at a minimum, it's terribly unfortunate but there's really nothing to be done, old chap.

Thus are the sheep corrupted to be complicit in their own fleecing. They'd all acknowledge that, sure, this is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. They'd further acknowledge that, sure, everyone here thinks they're Paul, and sure, they can't all be right. But still, when all's said and done, I really will be Paul, and that's all that matters, right?

Briefly

A sad but sweet comic from SMBC.

Brave Zack Weiner! That was drawing! Good alike at grave and gay!

How to tell if a coffee shop serves good coffee, part 2...

Without drinking it, obviously.

This is continuing in the 'news you can use' category, among the trivialities that have been occupying my life of late while the events of the world pass me by.

I used to go with the smallest cup size offered by the cafe. There's a tendency among bad coffee shops to serve you up enormous bathtubs full of bilge water. Of course, to get a larger cup of coffee, they simply run the water through the same set of grounds until it turns into a burnt mess. The places that offer you a small sized coffee are more likely to know what they're doing.

But this was superseded by a tip from AL - the number of milk jugs on display. Good places will never heat their milk more than once. As a result, they tend to have a lot of small milk jugs around. If you see that, it's very likely somewhere that knows what they're doing. On the other hand, I've never had a good coffee from a place that had a single giant milk jug that kept being reheated.

If the place is failing the above signals and you still need a coffee, at a minimum order the smallest size you can.

(For the previous best signal, see here)

Short Answer Exam Technique

If confronted with an exam question of the following form:

"Two friends are having a discussion. Simon say that [ABC]. Sally, on the other hand, claims that [XYZ]. Who do you agree with? Why?"

and you are unsure of the answer, assume that the female is right. Social rules in exams follow television ads - in a mixed sex group, the man is almost always depicted as the stupid one. This is the mirror image of the default assumption in TV ads in the 50's and 60's, where the silly housewife was the staple reason why you should buy a given product, and society seems to have been furiously overcompensating ever since.

There's another similar rule on TV - in a mixed race group of males, the white guy is depicted as the stupid one. The latter case oddly doesn't seem to feature as commonly in exams, as Marmeduke isn't frequently in discussion with Jamal. But if he were, I'd bet that way too.

Truancy, etc.

I have been rather tardy with this particular web diary of late. As usual, a lack of posts either means that my life has gotten a lot less fun or a lot more fun.

Thankfully, in this case it's the latter, as part of an extended holiday/general goofing off. So as between my two readers and myself, there's been a conservation of total utility, rather than a pareto loss.

The Wackiness of Hotel Pricing

As far as I can hotel, there are only two possible prices for services at a hotel:

a) 5 times market price, or

b) Free.

And that's it. Nothing is charged at market pricing, and nothing is charged at marginal cost either. It's just cross-subsidisation up the wazoo.

To make things weirder, the list of which stuff goes into the 'free' category and which stuff goes into the 'massively expensive' category seems to vary widely from hotel to hotel.

In some places, internet is free. In others, it's $15 a day. Breakfast is either complimentary, or $30. Parking is either free or $30 per night. The fitness centre is either free or $20 per day. etc.

Personally, I'd gladly trade the crappy hotel room coffee and widescreen TV (both nearly always complimentary) for free internet, but of course that option isn't on offer.

When wifi first became a thing, I was very much hoping that it would be put in the 'TV' category of 'essential services that every room gets gratis'. This battle for social norms seems to be ongoing, currently in the trench warfare stage where neither side is making any particular progress.

A lot of this seems to be just weird mental accounting and salience. Some places now charge a single, mandatory 'resort fee' to cover all the incidentals. Of course, if it's a mandatory fee, you could just add it to the cost of the room and make it all truly free. My only guess as to what's going on here is that this is a ruse to fool price comparison websites into displaying a lower price than the total value.

For all the IO models we have, sometimes it just seems like the best working model is 'companies fool around with pricing and charge as much as they think they can get away with'. This is probably a crude version of some of the IO models, like the Gabaix and Laibson model.

Pricing is weird.

With the evening set out against the sky...

How strange it is to be in the twilight of one's youth!

To gaze around and reflect on the set of choices you made (whether deliberately, accidentally, or some combination of both) that now see you still out in the fading embers of the sunset.

By now, most of your peers have gone inside and given up skylarking for the day, and are busy preparing dinner, stoking the home fires, and other such responsible things.

In a few short hours, night will have set in in earnest, and it will be cold and inhospitable to be out here alone.

But in the meantime, the sky is a brilliant orange. The sun still bathes the world in a glorious light, but without the same heat as before.

Let us stay and linger here just a little longer...

The most interesting data set I've seen in ages

The age old question, as most readers of this august diary will know, is the following:

Do you know what it takes to sell real estate?

The answer, of course, is that it takes brass balls to sell real estate.

A few years ago, Heartiste talked about the Apocalypse opener in picking up women. This was taken from Ciaran at Bristol Lair, and proceeds as follows:

You rock up to a chick and, in a confident, level voice you say

“Hey, how’s it going.”

She will say

“Fine.”

You then say

“Cool. What are you doing later?”

She will say

“I’m not sure.”

You then say

“Do you want to come home with me?”

Then you hold.
Hold.
HOLD………………..
HOLD IT MY SON……………………..
HOLD THE F***ING LINE………………

Boom. Makeout.

And that’s the Apocalypse opener. You don’t ‘build rapport.’ You don’t ‘elicit values.’ You don’t ‘kino escalate.’ You don’t even ask her fucking NAME. You ask if she wants to sleep with you in the THIRD SENTENCE, hold the line, and reap the whirlwind.

Yowser.

That my friends, is some serious real estate transacting right there.

The second, more interesting part, is Ciaran's analysis of how to make the thing work:

The key to making it work is not how you say it, but what you do in the 30 seconds after it’s left your mouth.

Before I talk specifics, let’s state the single CARDINAL SIN of the Apocalypse, which is the ONLY THING that can blow you out.

NEVER BE WEIRD

That’s it. Don’t be weird. You have to deliver the opener deadpan. Like you are talking about the WEATHER. You are not making a BIG THING of it. You’re just ASKING.
You are not MOCKING. You are not JOKING. You are not TOO SERIOUS.

It is NOT PLAYFUL however – it is REAL.

You are REALLY ASKING HER.

If she says no – you only need ONE COMEBACK.

It is this:

“Ok.”

Then you strike up a ‘normal’ conversation about the colour of the wallpaper, or the music that’s playing, or the fact that you did your laundry earlier today.

Whatever.

In other words, the reason it works is not because girls have a desire to go home with any guy that asks. Rather, the reason is that it takes some sizable cojones to deliver this deadpan, and not lose your nerve. To the extent that it may work at all, it's that you definitely show yourself as being unusually self-confident. As long as you don't come across as autistic or a sociopath, this is a clear plus.

The question is, of course, how well does it work? Or more realistically, does it work at all?

Some guy decided to test it out. A hundred times. And what are the results?



The standard comments over at Reddit are pointing out that none of the girls say yes. This is the dog bites man aspect.

But I think it misses the much larger man bites dog story here.

Don't ask how many girls would sleep with him. Ask how many girls stick around, laugh, and don't run away immediately. And bear in mind that this guy guy has several handicaps relative to the stated method, namely:
-He isn't doing the crucial conversational follow up.
-He's doing it often on groups of girls, or guys with girls, both of whom are WAY less likely to be seen to say yes in front of their friends
-He's doing it in broad daylight
-He's doing it in girls who are stone cold sober, and whom are unlikely to be looking to score.

Because if you believe the stated explanation, if you did this in a better setting and kept up the conversation afterwards and sounded mostly normal, would they continue to respond positively?

So how does that metric work?

Look at girl number 6. Look at the way she continues to linger and smile at him after saying no.

Look at girl number 8. She laughs and says 'maybe, I don't know. Perhaps?'

Think about that for a second. Think about it and try to tell me that the real story here is that the guy didn't get a concrete yes immediately.

Number 21, in a group of two, says that he's made their day.

Number 44 says, 'Um no. I mean, you're attractive, I'd probably make out with you.'

More to the point, look at all 100, and count how many responded angrily. The answer is one. One out of a hundred throws a drink at him. Be honest, would you have estimated only a 1% rate of angry retaliation? Because I sure wouldn't. How many guys could claim that their opening line elicited at least a smile and a laugh in 50% of cases?

Again, the unsurprising part is that this doesn't work as implemented.

The remarkable part is how positive the overall response is. Bemused, sure. But positive.

This guy has a bright future ahead of him in the real estate sales business.

Short answers to stupid questions

"Because they enjoy it. Why does anyone do anything?"

Singapore and Hong Kong - A Tale of Two Reactionary Cities

Singapore is often held up as a kind of model reactionary state among the nations in existence today. It has incredibly low crime rates, low taxes, general social harmony, and has broadly built itself up from being a swamp to first world country in 60 years. It's also done this while juggling a tricky ethnic mix that's produced social conflict in many other countries. Lee Kuan Yew pulled this impressive feat off in part by restricting democracy and the freedom of the press, thus reducing the means by which ethnic tension can be whipped up. Most westerners dislike both of these aspects, but its hard to argue with results.

Back when I was but a wee Holmes in high school, I was a fervent (small 'd') democrat. I remember in an otherwise worthless social science class discussing with a Singaporean friend of mine about how his country was run. He was a defender of their system, and argued that it was actually popular with the people. I tended to not believe him, and always wanted to know why, if the government thought they were so popular, didn't they put matters to a fair vote? A failure to do so must mean that they suspected they'd lose.

It took me a long time to realise that on this point, I was wrong. The firstfact to understand about Singapore is that even though their 'democracy' is a joke, the government would very likely win an actual fair election. They are popular. The fact that people aren't voting on civic matters cannot be equated with them being unhappy about civic matters. Witness the outpouring of genuine joy and interest in the royal baby if you don't think this kind of thing is possible.

But here's the bigger question - what is the one, big genuine knock on Singapore as a place to live?

It's boring.

And this, alas, is true. There is really nothing interesting going on there. You can shop. That's about it.

It's tempting to dismiss this as a trivial concern, or as being a spurious one-off point, but I'm not sure that's true.

My guess is that the policies used to maintain the very high level of  social order -- restricting freedom of the press and voting, high alcohol taxes, large punishments for all crimes -- are indeed likely to discourage creative types from moving there, and potentially likely to discourage certain aspects of creativity in the local populace. 

In other words, you may not like the hippies of San Francisco, but it's not an accident that the interesting restaurants and art galleries are located nearby. When it comes to eccentric thinking and bon vivant lifestyles, there may be a certain amount of taking the bad with the good that's required.

But this is where (British) Hong Kong provides an interesting counterpoint.

Hong Kong managed to achieve a lot of the same material successes as Singapore. But it never had the same reputation for being boring. Hong Kong cinema was long famous, and the city is filled with interesting restaurants, bars and galleries. Also, notably, Hong Kong does not share Singapore's restrictions on civic life. The newspapers were largely free to publish whatever they wanted. The court system was actually applying genuine British Common Law, rather than twisting concepts like defamation to become de facto censorship tools against criticism of the government. And while the crime rate was not so famously low (the Triads, for instance, have no obvious Singaporean equivalent), it was fairly peaceful.

So what explains the difference? Should we just conclude that Singapore should just chill out a bit on the freedom of the press?

Well, maybe. But there's something else that may explain it.

If you haven't read it yet, Slate Star Codex gave a pretty good summary of reactionary ideas. In particular, consider the claim of Mencius Moldbug - that a truly secure sovereign would have no need to care what its citizens thought. This is true, and also would be a big benefit - you don't have to constantly wage a propaganda war over what people believe.

But Slate Star Codex also pointed out some of the conceptual problems with this idea - in particular, you can't just assume a hypothetical totally secure sovereign. Real sovereignty has to be enforced, and that almost always means caring about the opinions of at least some subset of the public, even if only the guys with guns. Cryptographic weapons are the Moldbug answer, but with 3D printed guns already available, it's not clear how feasible this is.

Still, this mental exercise helps to illuminate part of the difference between Hong Kong and Singapore. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew only had the resources of Singapore to secure Singapore. If enough people start agitating for change, and the army isn't willing to shoot them, then he's out on his @$$. Hence the somewhat draconian efforts to control the popular discourse.

But in Hong Kong, the British were able to entirely secure the colony almost without regard to what the subjects thought, should they desire. The reason is that they could just send in the Royal Navy. And because this force operated effectively without any concern for the average Hong Kong resident's opinion, Britain had a role much closer to the hypothetical Moldbug sovereign - they say what they want, I do what I want.

And this allowed for something closer to Moldbug's Fnargl - the sovereign immune to any attack from the locals. At least as predicted, this allowed for a much more relaxed attitudes towards civil society.

But we arrive at a somewhat awkward conclusion - the ideal sovereign is not truly sovereign, but reliant on some larger power to ensure its survival irrespective of local opinion.

And hence you can see why Hong Kong features perhaps less prominently in the reaction circles. Until you can find a way to make us all subjects of enlightened British civil servants, one may need the guarantee of some higher authority to get a sovereign that truly doesn't give a rat's. Or accept that order requires no freedom of the press and not many art galleries.

This is not an ideal conclusion, of course, but nobody said that reality had to conform to our highest hopes.

On the other hand, both Hong Kong's governors and Lee Kuan Yew would have likely done a damn sight better job at managing Detroit than democracy has done. No sense letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Two Hundred Millionth Verse, Same as the First…

So much has been said on the Trayvon Martin case already. It feels a little bit like World War I – when you try to explain that France is fighting Germany because a Serbian nationalist shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, it’s not immediately clear why either of the two belligerent parties would give a rat’s @$$.

So it is here – a Hispanic wannabe cop shoots a teenage black thug, but as always, the fault is white racism. Goyim kill Goyim, and they blame the Jews. And so everyone must take up cudgels again to defend their accustomed sides.

After almost a decade of living in this country, it’s hard to express just how dreary all this is. Lordy, I am sick to death of race, and the peculiar American preoccupation with the subject. The faux outrage, the sheer humourlessness, the constant walking on eggshells, the pissant cowardice it inspires, and the way it paralyses people from making even the most straightforward observations about the world around them.

This is the most uniquely American of pathologies. Not racism, of course. America today is perhaps the least racist country on the face of the earth. You may seem surprised, but honestly, who else would lay a claim to the title? The only other contenders are small, mono-ethnic  countries for which issues of race simply don’t arise in daily life.

No, it is the paranoia about racism, regardless of the absence of any actual racial animus, that is America’s most appalling invention. Even if you disagree with my claim that America is the least racist country on the planet, if you formed the ratio of Race Paranoia = (Worrying About Racism) / (Actual Racism), I defy anybody  to claim that America doesn't lead the world on this metric by miles and miles.

The question is not whether racism (that is, racial animus) is a problem. Like the Copernican view of the solar system, it’s absurd to pretend this is still any kind of social controversy. It is a problem, where it occurs. Rather, the question is whether you choose to see expressions of racial animus in ever more innocuous speech and actions. The question is whether you continue to view the possibility that someone, somewhere, is harbouring racial animus as the single most important problem in the world, even as the actual level of racial animus in society drops precipitously.

And what has all this brought? Has being ever more exquisitely sensitive to people’s possibly hurt feelings about the matter of race actually, you know, produced more social harmony? If it has, I can’t see much evidence of it. All I can see is what John Derbyshire memorably described as ‘an evolution towards the ever thinner-skinned’.

Like all American cultural traits, good or bad, race paranoia is slowly taking over the world.  When I left Australia, it was mercifully a place where one was largely spared the constant, relentless hand-wringing, the non-stop ‘Serious You Guys This Is The Most Important Issue In The Whole World’ evangelism of race hucksters, do-gooders and fools.

I suspect, with considerable resignation, that when or if I return, Australia will have become America in my absence.

Some PR advice for the PRC

If you look across the countries of the world, it is a reliable trend that any country featuring the word ‘Democratic’ in its name is both
a) A hellhole, and
b) Not at all democratic.
Think ‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo’ or ‘The German Democratic Republic’.

In many ways, this is isn’t surprising – the countries with the worst governance records and the least scruples want to cloak themselves with the veneer of respectability by claiming to be what they think polite society demands they be. This doesn’t fool anybody except the rubes, of course. But at least it indicates a clear estimate of where they think the positive brand equity lies, and it seems to be in ideas like ‘Democratic’.

Which makes China all the more puzzling.

The Chinese Communist Party has been becoming less communist ever since at least when Deng Xiaoping took over. These days, it is not meaningfully Communist at all.

In fact, if it were to rename itself ‘The Chinese Capitalist Party’, the description would probably actually be more accurate (although clearly imperfect).

But instead, they still want to keep clinging to the title ‘Communist’. This is odd to me. Maybe it just reveals my biases, but at least by my estimate of the ‘polite society’ metric, Communism has some pretty toxic brand capital – the forced labour camps, the gulags, the man-made famines, the hundred-odd million corpses piled up over the course of the 20th century. It’s not as toxic as the ‘Fasicm’ or ‘Nazi’ brands, of course (in public perception at a least, regardless of whether you think the relative ranking is deserved).  But if you just wanted to convey a sense of ‘caring about the workers and the poor’, what about ‘Socialist’ or ‘Social’? Surely that would be an improvement.It’s almost as if the Republican Party wanted to use its current policies but refer to itself as the Nazi Party.

My guess is that this is mainly due to wanting to maintain the legitimacy of the current regime by implying a historical continuity in the lineage of power (to disguise the almost 180 degree turn in some of the policies). How else do you explain the cultish devotion to images of Mao, notwithstanding that Mao would probably have a fit if he saw the current policies being implemented by the current ‘Communist’ party?

The best description to me of the current Chinese government, at least domestically, is ‘like Singapore in a number of its attitudes towards policy, but more corrupt and with a more puzzling internal party mechanism’.
But ironically, unlike the Democratic Republic of Congo, I think this current labeling does fool more people than just the rubes. I imagine it colors a fair bit of the instinctive hostility to the Chinese government in the west,  at least to extent that they continue to pay obeisance idolize a bankrupt and depraved ideology, even as they disavow it through their actions.

In other words, their actions have actually justified jettisoning what seems to me to be a disastrous linkage, but they cling to it tightly.

I guess they just don’t think that Communism is such a loathsome thing to be associated with. I’d like to think they’re totally wrong, but depressingly I’m not so sure.

On Shanghai

-One of the classic experiments in psychology to indicate overconfidence is to ask people to self-rate their driving ability. Nearly everybody is ‘above average’. Part of this is certainly everyone thinking they’re better than everyone else, but part of it is also people disagreeing on what it means to be a good driver. Shanghai really illustrates this distinction quite sharply. The drivers are not ‘good’ drivers in the sense of being safe and prudent. Instead, it’s hair-raising – squeezing  in between cars, non-stop games of chicken with buses and other cars trying to merge, motorbikes regularly just breezing through red lights while pedestrians are walking at a cross-walk. But in another sense, the drivers are highly skilled in their ability to navigate these hazards without crashing more often. The number of times my taxi driver would be totally comfortable driving maybe 10cm away from another car trying to merge was outrageous. And the games of chicken always end at the last minute, but without the driver seeming noticeably put out. I would be freaking the hell out long before.

-It is fascinating to watch the behaviour of the native Chinese in China versus the native Chinese when in America. The latter tend to be quiet, incredibly polite and soft-spoken, and give off a strong vibe of wanting to avoid causing offence. But in Shanghai, people yell and shout all the time, often in ways that make it difficult to tell if the people are irritated at each other, boisterous, or simply have difficulty controlling their volume. Their faces don’t necessarily indicate anger, but the other parts of their body language seem oddly loud and confrontational.

-The notion of body image is very different from the US, particularly among the men. I didn't see anybody that looked like they lifted weights, and few that looked like they even did regular exercise. Notwithstanding this, some of the men have a tendency when hot to simply lift their t-shirt up to expose their stomach. The men that would tend to do this on average had a slight pot belly, making it a hilarious image of not-giving-a-@#$%.

-To my mind, skyscrapers have enormous positive externalities simply in terms of producing interesting vistas. Shanghai has a particularly excellent skyline. The guidebooks wax lyrical about the elegant historical buildings near the Bund, with their classical early 20^th century architecture. But the people, both Chinese and foreign alike, have voted with their eyes, which are all turned towards the massive skyscrapers of Pudong. They are right to do so. A hundred storey glass and steel structure is an amazing sight, and a fitting tribute to man’s mastery over a world that cares not one whit whether we perish or not.

-If I had to describe the city briefly, it would be thus: imagine Singapore, but ten times bigger, and considerably more chaotic.

-Inspecting the boarding passes and flight times for my flights from Beijing to Shanghai and Shanghai to Hong Kong reinforces in my mind that I have not the foggiest notion of Chinese geography, including even basic questions about how large the place is.

Mourning the Loyalist Cause

As a tribute to the dying hours of the National Holiday over here, everyone who hasn't yet read it should read the great Thomas Hutchinson's 'Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence'. It is long, but I promise you it is worth it. You may be surprised to find that the best description ever written of the Declaration of Independence is from someone who was deeply skeptical of the entire affair.

Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence is also a wonderful secret handshake of sorts, because my strong guess is that nearly everyone who has read it is no more than one degree removed from a Mencius Moldbug fan.

Egypt and the Endless Wellspring of Western Optimism

So the Military in Egypt decided they'd had enough of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government and removed them in a coup.

Firstly, can you blame them?

This Business Insider article from May details quite well exactly how screwed the country has gotten since the Muslim Brotherhood took over in the glorious Arab Spring. Some highlights:

Homicide rates have tripled since 2011

The number of armed robberies rose from 233 in 2010 to 2,807 in 2012.

Brotherhood president Morsi declared no court is authorized to overturn the president's decisions.

And on, and on, and on...

Should these events have come as a surprise?

The average westerner, to the extent that they think about the matter at all, is convinced that democracy is both an inherent moral good and an effective intrumental good. It is morally just to put matters to a vote, and doing so produces outcomes that will be judged as good even aside from the manner of decision.

The reactionary viewpoint tends to view democracy as inherently a moral neutral - what does it matter if things are voted on? Is it better than just having a wise king decide on what he thinks is the best outcome? And in terms of the practical angle, it tends to produce permanent social conflict - the Cold Civil War, in John Derbyshire's description.

Still, a Cold Civil War is a hell of a lot better than a hot civil war. The current state of the west, however decayed, is still rather pleasant. And the governance, while sclerotic and disfunctional, works way better better than most non-democratic places in the world.

But even a passing familiarity of places that have tried to implement democratic systems will reveal plenty of places that actually got significantly worse once people started voting (Zimbabwe, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq), and way more that certainly didn't improve (see: all of Africa, nearly all of the Middle East).

So what to make of it?

A skeptic's middle ground might be to simply note that democracy is a tool whose outcomes depend entirely on the quality of the people voting and what they're minded to vote for. If you have civilised people voting for their best estimate of what will be in the overall national interest, then it will probably turn out pretty well. Then again, if you have a population of civilised people who are looking out for the national interest, your country will probably turn out pretty well even if they're not voting (see: Singapore).

But if you have people minded to vote for tribalism, or for tyrannical religious rule, or to attack and drive out minorities, or to eat the rich, or to start endless wars with their next-door-neighbours... well, then that's what you'll get.

Sometimes, you can shrug this off as a national comeuppance - if people want stupidity, they deserve to get it.

But what about when a majority votes to oppress the minority (e.g. the Copts)? Do the Copts 'deserve' their fate for simply not being numerically superior? Someone has to be a minority group, after all.

The real question is whether it is predictable that certain national populations are likely to view voting as an excuse to impose a tribal or religious totalitarianism.

Of course, to even begin to answer that question, you'd need to be willing to contemplate the possibility of such a thing as 'national character'.

And since nobody is willing to do that, when democracy seems to lead to disaster, it must be posited that there was some flaw in the voting or political process that prevented righteousness prevailing. This is No True Scotsman meets Whig History on steroids - the good are always more numerous than the evil, and so elections will always produce good outcomes, unless they're thwarted by some evil group. The protesters in Tahrir square must all be freedom-loving democrats, notwithstanding that they seem to keep raping female reporters that stray too close.

In other words, the answer to disastrous outcomes following elections is always more elections:

As acting leader, Mr Mansour will be assisted by an interim council and a technocratic government until new presidential and parliamentary elections are held. No details were given as to when the new polls would take place.

Second verse, same as the first.

Ex ante, I wouldn't have thought that Egypt was a particularly bad candidate for democratic elections, at least as far as third world countries go (certainly more so than Afghanistan). But it keeps not working out that way. At some point, it must be considered whether in Egypt, Liberty and Democracy are at inherent odds with each other.

This is Egypt under liberty but not democracy.

This is Egypt under democracy but not liberty.

The more things change...

In Egypt, a Dutch female reporter who was reporting on demonstrations in Tahrir Square was savagely raped. Apparently she was an intern covering the protests for Egyptian TV.

Lest you think this is just targeting western female reporters, the protesters are sportingly equal-opportunity when it comes to their rape targets. They've raped up to 91 women in the past 4 days, with reports saying they attacked a grandmother and a seven-year-old child.

This kind of thing is obviously tragic and repulsive.

And yet, this has happened so many times now that it's approaching a farce.

Back in October, I reported that female reporters covering protests in Tahrir Square were getting raped. And this was already thoroughly predictable at that time. It had already previously happened here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

Are you starting to see a pattern?

What in the name of all that is holy are news organisations doing sending female reporters into Tahrir Square? I know that the modern zeitgeist is that apparent differences between the sexes are entirely due to discrimination and that women are entirely as capable of doing any job as men.

Purely for the sake of argument, let's assume that this statement is largely true.

Do you think that at some point the equality fetishists might consider that men and women reporters at least may not be equally attractive rape targets for vicious third world mobs?

Or even if this possibility didn't occur to you immediately, do you think that after, what, the hundred-and-something-th such occurrence, you might at least partly reconsider your hypothesis?

I can only think of two possible reasons why as a female reporter you'd still sign up to report on protests in Tahrir Square.

One is that you're tragically and hopelessly naive about the darker aspects of human nature.

The other is that you have been paying no attention whatsoever to what's been going on at these protests.

Both possibilities suggest that you're probably in the wrong line of work.

Almost Great Moments in Science

Let's take a moment to celebrate the uncommon genius of  Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov.

What did Professor Ivanov do, you well may ask?

He was the first man to attempt to create a human/ape hybrid using artificial insemination.

Wikipedia calls this proposed beast a 'humanzee'. While this is pretty good, I personally would prefer 'humangatan', but I'll take either.

So how does one attempt to create such a monstrosity, well may you ask?

On February 28, 1927, Ivanov inseminated two female chimpanzees with his own sperm. On June 25, his son inseminated a third chimpanzee with his sperm. 

This guy is really trying to give Giles Brindley a run for the money in the stakes of 'most outrageous science experiments conducted on oneself'.

The Ivanovs left Africa in July with thirteen chimps, including the three used in his experiments. They already knew before leaving that the first two chimpanzees had failed to become pregnant. The third died in France, and was also found not to have been pregnant.

Boo-urns.

So putting human sperm into female chimps wasn't doing the trick. Did he just pack up and call it quits then? Oh no he did not!

Upon his return to the Soviet Union in 1927, Ivanov began an effort to organize hybridization experiments at Sukhumi using ape sperm and human females.... In the spring of 1929 the Society set up a commission to plan Ivanov's experiments at Sukhumi. They decided that at least five volunteer women would be needed for the project.

Great news, comrade sisters! The Party has selected you to 'volunteer' to be impregnated by a chimp. For the glory of the Soviet Union!

Okay, those women would have won hands down the 'human self-experimentation award'. 

However, in June 1929, before any inseminations had taken place, Ivanov learned that the only postpubescent male ape remaining at Sukhumi (an orangutan) had died. A new set of chimps would not arrive at Sukhumi until the summer of 1930.

Given that you haven't heard of humanzees, you can probably guess that things didn't work out.

In the course of a general political shakeup in the Soviet scientific world, Gorbunov and a number of the scientists involved in the planning of the Sukhumi experiments lost their positions. In the spring of 1930, Ivanov came under political criticism at his veterinary institute. Finally, on December 13, 1930, Ivanov was arrested. He was sentenced to five years of exile to Alma Ata, where he worked for the Kazakh Veterinary-Zoologist Institute until his death from a stroke on 20 March 1932. 

Lame. You can always rely on the commies to spoil everybody's fun.

This whole thing is apparently not as wacky as you may think:

In 1977, researcher J. Michael Bedford discovered that human sperm could penetrate the protective outer membranes of a gibbon egg. Bedford's paper also stated that human spermatozoa would not even attach to the zona surface of non-hominoid primates (baboon, rhesus monkey, and squirrel monkey), concluding that although the specificity of human spermatozoa is not confined to man alone, it is probably restricted to the Hominoidea.

Okay, so humaboons and humonkeys are out, but humibbons might be a possibility. How is nobody investigating this?

Frankly, I think there should be way more research into creative mixed breeds of animal. Consider some of the awesomeness we already know is out there:

Ligers and Tigons

Grolar Bears (or Pizzly Bears, if you prefer):

I think to stimulate interest, these need to be referred to as 'mashup animals'. Sure, the purists at the zoo think this kind of thing is an abomination. Tell it to Charles Darwin, you ninnies! Do you think nature cares about your foibles? Grolar bears occur in the wild, for crying out loud.

The singular advantage of the humanzee, however, is the possibility of a hilarious spectacle whereby earnest people debate whether current law requires that the humanzee be allowed to vote. At which point universal suffrage will have jumped the shark even more than you already thought was possible.

On the Supreme Court and Gay Marriage

-First and foremost, read the damn decision. Otherwise you'll be one of those absolutely insufferable people who view every court decision as a 'Gay Marriage Yay!' or 'Gay Marriage Boo!' pantomime. These people have zero conception that there actually is a question of law going on, and that a badly decided case with a desirable policy outcome will create other problems down the road that the pantomime crowd never think about.

You can find a pdf of it here. I heartily recommend reading Scalia's dissent, even if you're broadly happy that gay marriages in one state will now be federally recognised. In fact, you should especially read Scalia's dissent if you're broadly happy with the policy aspects of the decision.

-As I mentioned to you a few months ago, Justice Scalia predicted way back in 2003 that the Supreme Court was going to legalise Gay Marriage, and that Lawrence v. Texas (which overturned the Texas anti-sodomy statue) was merely a prelude to this result, the Court's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Well, the Court this time decided not to settle the Elephant in the Room question of whether for a State to prohibit gay marriage violates the 14th Amendment equal protection clause  (which, if they did, would have decided the issue once and for all). Instead, it was held that for the Federal government to define marriage to exclude gay marriages in states which allowed them was a violation of the 5th amendment because it served no legitimate purpose and thus was a violation of basic due process. From the majority opinion:

DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.

In other words, we're not deciding the substantive issue of gay marriage, just one part of it. Roberts wrote separately just to emphasise this point:

But while I disagree with the result to which the majority’s analysis leads it in this case, I think it more important to point out that its analysis leads no further. The Court does not have before it, and the logic of its opinion does not decide, the distinct question whether the States, in the exercise of their “historic and essential authority to define the marital relation,” ante, at 18, may continue to utilize the traditional definition of marriage. The majority goes out of its way to make this explicit in the penultimate sentence of its opinion. 

In other words - listen up you lower court punks, don't think we've given you carte blanche to insist on gay marriage everywhere.

Scalia mocks the majority super hard for this feint of judicial modesty:

The penultimate sentence of the majority’s opinion is a naked declaration that “[t]his opinion and its holding are  confined” to those couples “joined in same-sex marriages made lawful by the State.” Ante, at 26, 25. I have heard such “bald, unreasoned disclaimer[s]” before. Lawrence, 539 U. S., at 604. When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” Id., at 578. 

I haven't forgotten Lawrence, you clowns.

Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it  “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,” ante, at 23—with an accompanying citation of Lawrence. It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here—when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with. 

In other words - at least own up to what you're proposing, rather than maintaining this nonsense that this is all just about the solemn dignity of states to define marriage however they wish (a notion that will last about 5 minutes into the oral arguments for the next case).

I do not mean to suggest disagreement with THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s view, ante, p. 2–4 (dissenting opinion), that lower federal courts and state courts can distinguish today’s case when the issue before them is state denial of marital status to same-sex couples—or even that this Court could theoretically do so. Lord, an opinion with such scatter-shot rationales as this one (federalism noises among them) can be distinguished in many ways. And deserves to be. State and lower federal courts should take the Court at its word and distinguish away. 

Ha!

In my opinion, however, the view that this Court will take of state prohibition of same-sex marriage is indicated beyond mistaking by today’s opinion. 

If there's anyone in the country who disagrees with the last sentence, I'm yet to meet them.

-Laws are complicated things. I am quite certain that the vast majority of the people who are sure that the Defense of Marriage Act is a hateful piece of legislation designed only to injure gays have not tried to deal with the mess that is overlapping definitions of different terms when the laws of different jurisdictions come into conflict. Even the notion of a 'US Resident' is virtually impossible to get a clear answer on - there's tax residence, and immigration residence, and driving license requirements (which I've heard dozens of answers about) etc. So even if you didn't want to limit the federal definition to exclude gay marriage, there are plenty of other reasons why you might want a uniform definition. Scalia mentions some of them:

To choose just one of these defenders’ arguments, DOMA avoids difficult choice-of-law issues that will now arise absent a uniform federal definition of marriage. See, e.g., Baude, Beyond DOMA: Choice of State Law in Federal Statutes, 64 Stan. L. Rev. 1371 (2012). Imagine a pair of women who marry in Albany and then move to Alabama, which does not “recognize as valid any marriage of parties of the same sex.” Ala. Code §30–1–19(e) (2011). When the couple files their next federal tax return, may it be a joint one? Which State’s law controls, for federal-law purposes: their State of celebration (which recognizes the marriage) or their State of domicile (which does not)? (Does the answer depend on whether they were just visiting in Albany?) Are these questions to be answered as a matter of federal common law, or perhaps by borrowing a State’s choice-of-law rules? If so, which State’s? And what about States where the status of an out-of-state same-sex marriage is an unsettled question under local law? See Godfrey v. Spano, 13 N. Y. 3d 358, 920 N. E. 2d 328 (2009). DOMA avoided all of this uncertainty by specifying which marriages would be recognized for federal purposes. That is a classic purpose for a definitional provision.

If you are expecting the boosters of the recent decision to provide you with a clear answer to any of the above questions, I would advise you not to hold your breath.

-As for myself, I find myself broadly disliking the decision, but for conflicting reasons. As a matter of policy, I'm fine with gay marriage. If I were minded to vote (or registered to vote. Or allowed to vote), I'd vote to allow it. So to that extent, while it's not high on my list of priorities, I'm happy enough with the practical aspects of the outcome (subject to the previously mentioned practical concerns).

But I deeply hate judicial activism. It poisons the legal certainty that lets people organise their lives according to well-settled precedent. Democracy may have plenty of flaws, but the makeup of the current Supreme Court seems to have managed to reproduce most of the maladies and perversions, just on a micro scale. We've got 4 (mostly) conservative justices, not all of whom can be relied on to produce politically conservative outcomes, 4 consistently liberal justices who can unfailingly be relied on to produce politically liberal outcomes, and Justice Kennedy playing the role of the entire swing voting electorate -  inscrutable, unpredictable, and of principles that are, shall we say, difficult to forecast. The voters in this case are definitely smarter, but do you think the policies produced are better?

Judicial activism - combining all the disfunction of democracy, but without the benefit of the law of large numbers and De Moivre's theorem!

In other words, judicial activism is just one more manifestation of the many ways that this republic has decayed from the original founders' vision. I second the Moldbug critiques of such a vision, but it's certainly a zillion times better than the monstrosity we're currently saddled with.

At the risk of this post being an 'All-Scalia-All-The-Time' one, I cannot help but excerpt his closing remarks

We might have covered ourselves with honor today, by promising all sides of this debate that it was theirs to settle and that we would respect their resolution. We might have let the People decide. But that the majority will not do. Some will rejoice in today’s decision, and some will despair at it; that is the nature of a controversy that matters so much to so many. But the Court has cheated both sides, robbing the winners of an honest victory, and the losers of the peace that  comes from a fair defeat. We owed both of them better. I dissent.

As do I.