The Best Thing You Can Do Today...

..is download the free new album by 'Girl Talk', the awesome mashup DJ.

I know what you're thinking - "Girl Talk"?!? Has Shylock turned all fruity or something?

Let me reprise a conversation I had yesterday with SMH:

SMH: Just downloaded the new girl talk album (which is online for free), totally joy 

Shylock: What the @#$% is 'girl talk'? I hope that's either a metaphor, or way way cooler than it sounds.

SMH: He's a mashup DJ, I figured you'd be all up in that

Fast forward to my unprompted discussion with SMH today:

Shylock: By the way, you were totally right and I was totally wrong - girl talk is awesome.

Moral of the story? Don't be me, download it now. Unless you hate mashups, fun and life, which case go and boil your head instead.

http://www.illegal-art.net/allday/

The site has been up and down, as it keeps getting overwhelmed with traffic. Keep trying!

Hypotheses from Biased Media Coverage and Casual Empiricism

Tim Blair links to this great story in The Sun - two thugs with a bull terrier attempted to pick a fight with three guys in London, but end up getting their @$$es beat. Turns out that the three men were soldiers who had between them two George's Crosses and one Victoria Cross, and were on the way back from a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.Unlucky!

The British press loves stories like this - there was another one a while back about a Gulf War veteran and black belt in Jiu Jitsu flooring some chav loser who tried to pick a fight, which was hilariously caught on video:



So here's my question - why does it seem like Britain has such an epidemic of unprovoked attacks by random buttclowns? Like I said, I have little systematic data I can point to on this, except the following:

a) a long list of (almost certainly highly selective) media articles over the years about the inability and unwillingness of British Police to confront violent assaults (try some Theodore Dalrymple to get the flavour)

b) an experience being out in Oxford one night a few years ago, and seeing random chav scum hurling abuse at random passers-by trying to pick fights. I felt a visceral uneasiness at the whole scene in a way that I hadn't gotten at these type of places before. It was as if a large fraction of the nightclub seemed to be looking for an excuse to start something.

Is it just me, or does this kind of thing not seem to happen nearly as much in America and Australia?

The Sun is a populist tabloid, but I'm sure the New York Post would equally love to print stories like this if they had a chance. Everyone loves the satisfying moral outcome of thugs getting their comeuppance. If they seem to come up less in America, my guess is that it's a combination of lower frequency of these events, and the fact that in Britain they have the additional appeal of speaking to the kind of fear that average Britons have about how safe their streets are.

So having laid out the fragility of the evidence I draw on, I still have a hunch that something has gone deeply wrong with the culture in modern Britain.

Economics + Snark

One of the developments I like the most about the internet is the advent of blogs that combine accurate reporting of the news with snarky humourous asides. There's a whole lot of economic news that I'm interested in finding out, but wading through the WSJ or Financial Times is like dosing up on Ambien. After being awake for 24 hours straight. Before sitting down to a slide show of your Aunt's latest vacation to Acapulco.

Thankfully Zero Hedge manages to make it far more entertaining to find out about the world of finance:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/111610-midevening-report-suck-irish

I'd give you the breakdown of the news about Ireland joining Greece in circling an increasingly crowded drain, but it's more fun to give you some of the best metaphors of the article:

"The biggest news of the day though was that Ireland is in talks with everyone from the EU to the IMF to NAMBLA to try to reach a deal to help them meet their spiraling budget deficit.

If a bailout can't be reached, Ireland may have to resort to selling some natural treasures such as the Blarney Stone, Michael Flatley's shaved chest hair, and Katherine Jenkins, in order to raise funds.

Citing the EU having to increase Greece's budget deficit three times already from "likely insolvent" to "Stephen Baldwin insolvent," Austrian finance minister Josef Proell..."

And I haven't even mined even half of the comic gold in there. Dig on!

All Your Internet Traffic Are Belong To Us

Where 'Us' equals 'The Chinese'. Apparently some time in April, 15 per cent of all internet traffic was for a time diverted to China. Who knows what they were trying to get, but you're a brave man if you're willing to bet that this was a coding screwup rather than ChiCom spying.

Every time I read these kind of stories (which seems to be more and more frequently these days), I find myself hoping that somewhere in China, there's a bunch of officials reading (confidential) reports about US DoD hackers implementing equally sophisticated attacks on Chinese government servers.

Somehow, I can't bring myself to feel terribly confident about the likelihood of this. But then again, if it were happening, we wouldn't be reading about it, so perhaps I shouldn't be too pessimistic.

Schadenfreude, it's what's for dinner!

Hippy rock star Neil Young tries to convert 1959 Lincoln Continental into a hybrid, succeeds in burning down warehouse instead.

The article mentions the following rather upbeat statement from Young on the LincVolt website:

"We do know that the car has been operating perfectly for almost 2 thousand miles and the system in question would not be in use while driving the car. We are investigating the components involved with plug-in charging." 

Well that sure is a relief! So it might burn down my house when it's charging, but there's a reasonably good chance it won't also burn me to death when I'm driving it on the freeway. At least for the first 2000 miles. Hopefully. Consider me sold!

I note in passing the relative paucity of news stories about warehouse fires started by petrol versions of the 1959 Lincoln Continental.

Taxes are a Moral Issue

I oppose tax increases because they fund a wasteful, value destroying government. I oppose them because they reduce the incentives to work and invest, distorting economic incentives and reducing the size of the economic pie in future periods.

But even if they did none of these things, I would still be deeply uncomfortable with them, because I am not interested in taking somebody else's money. Not if it's given to a good cause. Not if it's given to me personally. It's not my money to give away.

Many on the left are instinctively derisive when you claim that tax rates are a moral, as well as an economic issue.

But to those doubters, let me ask you this: would you consider it morally acceptable if the government decided to implement a tax rate of 100%? That is to say, the government owns all of your output. This is just another name for communism - the government owns everything, and you own nothing. Now, more people are inclined to view that as a moral issue. But once you view communism as just another point on the tax  scale from 0 to 100, it becomes a much more complicated issue. Is it morally acceptable to implement a tax rate of 99.99%? If you earn $100K a year, the government lets you keep ten bucks in spending money. Most people would say that this is substantively no different from communism.

But then if you think that a) and b) are both morally unacceptable, then we're in a bind - somewhere between a tax rate of 0% and a tax rate of 99.99%, taxes become a moral issue. Now we're just haggling over where exactly it kicks in.

In my opinion, taxes are always a moral issue. When the government takes your money under threat of imprisonment, it is a form of stealing like any other. This remains true even if they subsequently do worthwhile things with that money. It remains true if the money is spent on genuinely important public goods that a market may not supply enough of, like police, courts, an army, and (perhaps) public roads. It remains true even if the welfare gain from the spending outweighs the welfare loss from the taxes. It remains true even if on balance we should actually do it.

Regardless of what you think of the cause on which taxes are spent, none of this changes the morality of the funding part of the equation. Things are either taken based on voluntary exchange, or they are taken by force, whether implied, threatened or actual. Everything else is just detail.

This suggests that governments should be very hesitant to take money by force from the citizens. It may be morally justified and necessary because of other reasons. But the ledger is starting with a theft. A budget neutral increase in both taxes and spending is not a morally neutral act.

Pooling and Separating Equilibria In Cool Places to Live

These days, areas predominantly populated by gay people tend to be the cool parts of town (The Castro in San Francisco, Boystown in Chicago, West LA) but they never seem to stay as gay areas for very long. The problem is that trendy yuppies  want to live where gay people live, because those areas have all the good restaurants, bars, and a generally fun vibe. Hordes of yuppies flow in, and quickly destroy the hip gay vibe that made the area attractive in the first place. Gay people can try to co-ordinate to live somewhere else (Andersonville in Chicago, for instance), but this can only delay the effect of the yuppies moving there too.In economics, this is known as a pooling equilibrium - gay people would rather not hang out with yuppies, but they end up pooled together because the yuppies will follow them where they go. They can't set up circumstances where the yuppies will voluntarily separate out, and can't make an actual requirement to be gay to live somewhere without likely violating exactly the same housing laws designed to protect them from discrimination.

[Edit: The people who really benefit from this pooling equilibrium are of course gay yuppies, who get the best of both worlds]

Compare this with the separating equilibrium you get between unwashed hippies and the same yuppies. Venice Beach, for instance, manages to keep most of its, ahem, "Bohemian" atmosphere for long periods of time. This is because while the yuppies may enjoy going down there every now and then to get "medication" for their "glaucoma" and soak up the ambience, nobody really wants to live in a place where there's a real risk that a homeless man might take a $#@% on your very expensive doorstep during the night. So the place is populated by tourists and unwashed vagrants during the day, and just the unwashed vagrants during the night (and the rich aging hippies who can afford the houses nearby, but enjoy the freakshow that is Venice). Yuppies, by and large, live elsewhere.

Maybe gay people could learn from the hippies and bathe less. That might finally drive off the yuppies and restore the separating equilibrium!

Thought of the Day

From Christopher Hitchens:

"Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea, anywhere that the concept of human rights doesn't exist, it's always the Chinese at backstop. And always for reasons that you could write down in three words: blood for oil."

It's a good point, and clearly true today. Of course, human rights were absent from these places for much longer than just the period for which the Chinese were bankrolling the whole affair. It would be much simpler if the problem were just the Chinese (not that I think this is what Hitchens is implying) - find some way to bribe them to do the right thing, and hey presto! Unfortunately, the desire of men to enslave other men springs eternal from the human breast.

Quantitative Easing

The funniest gags are rarely fair to their subject matter (and this is no exception), but this is funny and hits the mark.

My favourite lines:

"R: What does that mean?

L: It means they are going to print a ton of money.

R: So why do they call it the Quantitative Easing? Why don't they just call it the printing money?

L: Because the printing money is the last refuge of failed empires and banana republics, and the Fed doesn't want to admit that this is their only idea."

Nothing makes a burn sting more than having it delivered by a cartoon animal!

(hat tip )

Great News!

Scorn not democracy lightly, my friends. It has been so long since most of our countries have had to experience (or even seriously contemplate) the harsh reality of the alternatives. In the west, elite opinion is all Stewart-Colbert style irony and detachment. But it is worth frequently reflecting on the fact that in much of the world, it is still a deadly serious matter.

It is hard to imagine a more lovely people ruled by a more repulsive government than the Burmese. I doubt anything much will change, but this is still a good day for freedom.

Flip The Script on the TSA

Public affairs vex no man, as Dr Johnson observed:

BOSWELL. "Perhaps, Sir, I should be the less happy for being in Parliament. I never would sell my vote, and I should be vexed if things went wrong."

JOHNSON. "That's cant, Sir. It would not vex you more in the house, than in the gallery: publick affairs vex no man."

BOSWELL. "Have they not vexed yourself a little, Sir? Have you not been vexed by all the turbulence of this reign?"

JOHNSON. "Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not vexed."

BOSWELL. "I declare, Sir, upon my honour, I did imagine I was vexed, and took a pride in it; but it was, perhaps, cant; for I own I neither ate less, nor slept less."

At a minimum, I aim to not be seriously angered by political matters. It is a sad state of affairs to go through life railing angrily at the world.

But I find it difficult to maintain my equilibrium reading about the damn TSA and their genital groping antics. Ken at Popehat has a great piece on the subject, and links to a guy who describes what happened when he refused to be groped.

The only way I can not be furious is to think of creative ways to deal with the problem. Now, admittedly these only work for guys. But what I have in mind is this:

Try to make it as uncomfortable as possible for the TSA agents who have to touch your genitals. In other words, reverse the power dynamic. How would I do this? Simple. Firstly, opt out of the penis-viewer and agree to the pat down. 

BUT Say that you want the procedure carried out by a female agent. Then make an exaggerated show of getting sexual enjoyment out of it. Try the following:

"So you're going to fondle my balls, huh?"

"Mmm, that feels really nice."

"I think you're giving me an erection"

"Usually I have to pay to get women to fondle my balls. But now the government does it free, and I'm betting they're paying you a lot less than what I normally have to pay, that's for sure" 

Try to make it as humiliating as possible FOR THEM, and indicate that you're not put out at all.Most of these lines can be modified only slightly if they give you a male agent:

"So your job involves touch other guys' balls for $8 an hour, huh? I guess they didn't have any openings at Burger King"

"Can you jiggle them a bit when you're down there? I like it when guys do that to me"

"If I throw in a crisp George Washington, could you pat down my penis as well?"

@#$% the TSA. Let them find out that with just the right amount of sarcasm, touching guys junk in public can be even more embarrassing for the guy having to do it.

A Thought Experiment

If a man's height were subject to as much fluctuation as a woman's weight, I wonder if women would still have the reputation of being less attracted to the opposite sex based purely on physical appearance.

The Rudest Word in America

When people think about rude words, they usually focus on their raw power to cause offense. This tends to prioritise the usual suspects like n***er and  c**t. (Although in the case of n***er, Americans don't get offended by the word in general, just when a white person says it - nobody blinks at its use in gangster rap)

But let me suggest an alternative measure of how rude a word is. It's based on squeamishness of people in using it. So in this view, the real test is the extent to which ordinary people will avoid using the word when it's actually appropriate, and reach for a synonym (especially a euphemistic synonym) instead.

So based on this metric, let me suggest the following word:

Toilet.

It's amazing the lengths people here go to in order to avoid using the word. In Australia, it's common for people to ask 'Where are the toilets?.' Not here. They go to the 'bathroom'. This is used regardless of whether the room is a combined bathroom/toilet (such as in a house) or whether it's obvious that there's only a toilet (e.g. in a restaurant).  This sometimes gets modified to the 'washroom', as if to emphasise even further that it's the bodily cleaning aspects of the 'bathroom' that they're after, rather than the toilet. They use the 'restroom', as if they're going for a relaxing sit down and chill out. Occasionally, it's referred to as the 'little boys/girls room', whatever that means.As for the purpose of their visit, it's to 'use the facilities'. Or 'wash their hands'. Or 'powder their nose'.

The only time that people use the word at all is when they're unavoidably  forced to refer to the mechanics of the device ('The toilet is broken/clogged'). And even then, oblique references to the 'bathroom being out of order' are common.

And yet I bet everybody would claim that they're perfectly fine using it. They just, you know... don't really want to.

Exactly.

Silicon-based Life Forms Not Wanted

Apparently Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars, two of the biggest poker sites have recently been having a purge of poker bots, according to The Register. They spot them by the similarity of play, but also the more obvious metrics of players who play for long consistent periods of time. I dunno, if I were designing a bot, I'd spend at least some of my coding prowess figuring out ways to make it look unpredictable (take random, non-normally distributed breaks of time at random points, occasionally make weird bets, etc.)

It's hard to see this as anything more than a PR exercise. Suppose I have a poker bot sitting next to a person, who just inputs their moves. Would this be a violation of the terms of agreement? Beats the hell out of me. What if I hire some guys in Bangalore  at 12c an hour to input the moves, but one in 50 moves to do something weird? It would be pretty hard to prove anything.

But check out this outrageous line:

In October, Full Tilt removed an unstated number of players, confiscated the funds in their accounts, and pledged to redistribute this money to players who'd lost to the bots. PokerStars took similar action with 10 accounts in July.

Got that? They suspect you of being a bot, and they take your money. Not your winnings. All your money.

Now, I think two things when I read this kind of thing.

1. If you're doing anything that might be breaching a contract, read in advance damn carefully exactly what you've signed, and what provisions are allowed. It may be startlingly different from what you think a fair outcome is.

2. If it's unclear whether what you're doing is actually legal, then it's also unclear whether you have a contract at all. And if it turns out you don't, when the Poker Site takes your money because it claims you're running a bot, you're basically S.O.L. You're in the same position as the guy who calls the cops because somebody stole his marijuana plant. Except the guy who stole your plant is a faceless corporation with a lot of lawyers, so there's nobody's arms to break and not much chance of successfully suing them. Yeah, good luck with that.

Corner Solutions and Johnny Cash

In economics, a corner solution is (roughly speaking) the solution to an optimization problem that involves being up against a binding constraint such that the quantity of one of the arguments is zero. Suppose I have a budget of $50 to spend on apples and pears. Apples are more expensive, but I like them more than pears. Then again, the more apples I eat, the less I enjoy each one. An interior solution (the opposite of a corner solution) is when I trade off my enjoyment for each, and buy some amount of apples and some amount of pears. A corner solution would be if I buy only apples. It implies that, if had some amount more money, I'd buy even more apples. Given my budget, all I want is apples.

What, you may be asking, has this got to do with Johnny Cash? Well, I recently downloaded the song above. When choosing which songs to play, my attention is like a budget constraint that operates sequentially - I can only play one song at a time. I get enjoyment from each song, but the enjoyment diminishes with each successive play.

When my music collection is in equilibrium, the interior solution is that songs will be played with certain probability according to how much I enjoy them. The songs I enjoy will be played on average more, the songs I enjoy less will be played less, and these probabilities reflect the relative enjoyment of each song. At the margin, my enjoyment of each song that gets played is the same. The songs I like more in general I hear more so that I'm more sick of them, and I enjoy them as much as the songs I like less in general but are fresh each time due to being played less.

But suppose I come across a wicked new song? The equilibrium is temporarily disrupted.

The interior solution to this problem is the following:

Prob(Play Johnny Cash's "Devil's Right Hand") = 1

Prob(Play Anything Else) = 0

So far we're up to 17 plays in a row!

Bullying and Incentives

Human nature and human motivations are rarely simple. Pithy rhetoric and evocative examples cannot paper over the fact that the same actions and incentives will motivate some people (often lots of people), but will always manage to frustrate and deter others. This is made more difficult by the fact that people often make statements about principles that are really just stories from their own lives with the names removed. But since they're phrased as principles, they end up in inevitable conflict with other people who have different principles which are really just different stories from their own lives.

There's been an interesting thread going on Hacker News about bullying. It started with this quite moving post by Single Dad Laughing, where he talks about what it was like to be bullied. It ends with a plea for adults and contemporaries to show more love for bullies, so that they will be less likely to be mean to those around them:

So, please, I beg you. If you're an adult, put your arm around your own kids. Put your arm around your neighbor's kids. Put your arm around every kid you can. If you're a student, put your arm around the bully and the bullied. You simply don't know what person needs to feel like somebody loves her. You simply don't know what person's life you will save by showing him that, today, you care. And tomorrow you'll still care.

Regardless of whether this is actually good policy or not, I think it's a very good mark of character to be able to look back years later and forgive. Had I been bullied like that, my attitudes with respect to bullies would probably be closer to Kurtz's edict to "Exterminate all the brutes!".

It did however prompt this reply from Sebastian Marshall, where he says that the bullied are much better off fighting back, even if they lose:

But son, as soon as someone puts their hands on you, they've crossed a line. @#$% them up. It's the only thing these vicious freaks understand. They're wild animals. They make violence on you, you need to show them that you're the stronger, bigger animal. When someone attacks you maliciously for no reason, you need to impose your will on them.

Even if you lose, lose swinging. They respect it. Be a tough fight.

This "talk it out" $#!* doesn't work, it's been the dogma for the last 30-50 years, it assumes the nobility of human nature will win out. It doesn't. It's nonsense. It just simply doesn't work.

I think the best summary of this position was from commenter 'Legion', in terms of advice to his future children:

"You are allowed to defend yourself. You will avoid physical conflict whenever possible, but should you ever be physically threatened or subject to ongoing torment, you have the GREEN LIGHT to use physical force to protect yourself, OR to assist a friend who is unable to protect themselves."

"You may get in trouble with your school. THIS IS OK. Your well-being is more important than their rules. If you get suspended for three days, then I'll take three days off work and we'll keep up with your studies. I will be on your side. Do not let concern over the school rules stop you at all from defending yourself."

"However, you will never use force to do anything but protect yourself or your friend. If I find that YOU have been the aggressor, I will smite you."

Single Dad posted a follow-up that noted that he didn't actually say that the bullied should be trying to reach out to bullies, but rather adults and contemporaries around them.

What I find interesting about this whole exchange is that disagreement about the basic premises of bullying doesn't mean that these policies are mutually exclusive.

Reasonable people disagree deeply on why men do evil things.

The Single Dad Laughing premise seems to be that nasty bullying actions by kids tend to indicate a response to feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and a desire to inflict hurt on a world that has been cruel to you, usually to make up for a lack of love from those around you. In this view, if you make the person feel wanted, you take away the underlying source of their nasty behaviour. To my mind, the best evidence in favour of this proposition is the fact that a lot of bullies do tend to be generally unhappy, and don't have many actual friends.   Additionally, bullies can grow out of their behaviour when their life circumstances change.

The Sebastian Marshall premise is instead that some people are just inherently mean, and can only be deterred, not reasoned with or made to become your friend. Psychologically, bullying gives the feeling of power and control over a weaker person, which some people enjoy as a mark of status and respect. I think the best evidence in favour of this is that bullies are usually very careful in picking their targets - they deliberately avoid people likely to fight back, people with friends to back them up, and those who will generally make it hard for them. This suggests that deterrence from the bullied (in the form of fighting back) is likely to have large effects on stopping the problem.

The reason this is important is that it gets to the moral question of the culpability of the bully. Under the first premise, the bully is ultimately to be pitied, as well as (although probably not as much as) the bullied. Under the second premise, the bully is human scum, preying on the weak, and deserving of punishment and reprobation.

Personally, I'm closer to the Sebastian Marshall school, but that's not really important. Certainly in the case of children, it seems highly likely that poor home circumstances contribute to bullying problems, but that makes me only slightly more sympathetic to bullies. And it certainly doesn't make me misty-eyed about the power of deterrence.

But putting aside culpability, it seems that both policies can be implemented simultaneously. That is:

a) Adults and those in positions of power should try to show love and affection, thereby trying to win over those bullies capable of redemption, and

b) Kids being bullied should fight back hard and immediately, indicating that they are not soft targets. Fighting back on your own behalf creates deterrence. Fighting back on behalf of your friends and the weak creates extended deterrence, and both reduce the incidence of bullying.

I am certainly not one who thinks that wisdom is always (or even generally) found in balancing out all competing sides to an argument.

But the world is a complicated place nonetheless.

How Not To Respond To A Hoax

This lesson in publicity 101 comes from Ryan Maloney, a.k.a. 'Toadfish', a longtime character on the Australian soap opera 'Neighbours'

Suppose someone put up a facebook page claiming that you had died in a drowning accident. Would you:

a) Be slightly annoyed, but ignore it, figuring they'll get bored eventually

b) Post a lighthearted note on the page, noting that you're still alive, but indicate that you get the joke

c) Post an angry, flailing, abusivee note on the page, demanding its removal but indicating your powerlessness to do anything about it

Well, let's see what Ryan did:

Okay, so you've taken option c), and it's become apparent it hasn't worked. Would you:

a) Remove your original post, and go back to ignoring it?

b) Double down by posting more abuse?

No surprises for guessing the decision he makes again:

...and again

...and again

...and again

...and again

Oh Toadfish, when will you learn. Repeat after me, the number one lesson of bad publicity on the internet: Don't feed the trolls.

Greece - Circling the Drain, Fiddling with the Second Derivative of 'Screwed' with respect to 'Time'

Zero Hedge has an interesting post about how the European debt crisis is set to be the next focus of the market.

What's well known is that in Greece they've been rioting over the austerity measures.

Now, given things are so cruel and awful (apparently) that these pampered government sponges are on the brink of revolt, you'd assume that the government  must be paying down the debt pretty fast now, right?

Okay, they're not.

But surely, at a minimum, they've at least stopped adding to new debt, right?

Okay, they haven't.

No, all these cry-babies have manged to do so far is commit to add to the mess at a slower rate.





What a triumph of public policy for this society of moochers!

Somewhere, Socrates is spinning in his grave and muttering to himself  "Stop claiming national greatness by association with me, you lazy selfish clowns."

(This post dedicated to The Greek, who was complaining today that "there's been too much Oprah stuff on the blog recently, and not enough economics")

Expressions I'm Trying to Popularise

"Irish Breakfast - it's the whiskey of teas."

Orwell on Kipling

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/Orwell-B.htm

The title of this post alone ought to be enough convince you (Men of Letters, all) to read this. Both Orwell and Kipling were complicated men who are difficult to pigeonhole into a particular political box. I think Orwell gives a very interesting and balanced portrayal (even where I don't agree with it all). As a matter of aesthetics I find Kipling's poetry to be amongst my favourites. There is much wisdom condensed in poems such as "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", and "If'", and if they are popular to the point of cliche, it is only because they resonate with so many people. I also think that Kipling had a wonderful ear for rhyme and rhythym, almost unmatched in poetry. Orwell can only muster the backhanded compliment of him writing 'good bad poetry'. But I think that the snobbery that attached to Kipling-haters (of which Orwell doesn't seem to be one, exactly) has become less important. I attribute this to the fact that the distinction between those who enjoy good poetry vs. bad poetry has been dwarfed today by the distinction between those who read or think about any poetry at all vs.the rest. In that sense, those today who like any poets have much more in common with each other (relative to everybody else) than they used to.

There are a lot of interesting observations, such as this one about Kipling and the Indian literary tradition:

One must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have... It took a very improbable combination of circumstances to produce Kipling's gaudy tableau, in which Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background of palm trees to the sound of temple bells, and one necessary circumstance was that Kipling himself was only half civilized.

I think he hits the mark with some criticisms, such as the accents that soldiers in the poems speak in:

[T]his accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve Kipling's poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into standard speech.

And others which I'm not entirely sold on the premise of, but are interesting nonetheless:

It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed "natives," and then you establish "the Law," which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese.

But the overall picture gives an interesting view of some of the world views that make Kipling so enyoyable :

Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, "In such and such circumstances, what would you do?", whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. 

 As they say, read the whole thing.

(Via Andrew Bolt )

Credit Card Fraud End Game

Check out this great story in the New York Times magazine about Albert Gonzalez, a big-time credit card fraud operator.

He's sure fallen a long way from his former position as Attorney General of the United States.

But seriously, it's an amazing article. When you've got enough moving parts to your operation, and enough agents tracking you, it's really damn hard to not screw something up eventually. But it's amazing how simple it can be. Like using a known alias as your email address when signing up to AIM, rather than a random combination of letters. The mob is motivated by money - you can be damn sure they wouldn't screw that part of it up. But someone who has a large component of their sense of identity tied up in being a hard core hacker? The esteem of other hackers, and the 1337 h@X0r names that go along with it, are part of the cool.

This line was also fascinating:

Gonzalez relished the intellectual challenges of cybercrime too. He is not a gifted programmer  - according to Watt and Toey, in fact, he can barely write simple code - but by all accounts he can understand systems and fillet them with singular grace.

Exactly. In the end, it's not just about being able to write clevercode. It's about being about to figure out systems, and then execute all the mundane parts involved in not getting caught - hiding identities, laundering money, converting credit card details into dollars without getting busted. Those skills are likely to be just as scarce, if not more, than raw programming smarts.

Guys like him seem only tangentially driven by the money component - it's more about the thrill of the heist, particularly the intellectual achievement. And people hooked on that (like people hooked on lots of drugs) have a hard time letting it go. Same dopamine, different underlying source. They end up like World War 2 bomber pilots - you keep flying missions until you die. It's not that these guys want to get caught. It's just that getting caught is the only way the game ends.

The Half-Life of Dreams

Here's something I've noticed about my recollections of dreams. The amount I seem to remember follows something like an exponential decay process. The amount of decay each time has reasonably big error bars (it could be 30% or 70%, I dunno), but the time intervals seem about right.

Immediately upon waking up instantly I've forgotten about 50% of the dream.

10 seconds after waking up, I've forgotten 50% of what I initially remembered

1 minute after waking up, I've forgotten a further 50%.

5-10 minutes after waking up, I've forgotten a further 50-70%

1 hour after waking up, I've forgotten more (the rate slows down a bit by now, but call it 50%).

By that afternoon, I've lost maybe another half (which by now gets us to about 1.5% of the original memories, which seems about right). The decay continues, so that after a week or so it's practically all gone. The number of dreams I can remember over the space of years (anything about at all from the dream) is probably about 5, and all were weirdly vivid at the time.The process can get delayed somewhat if I repeat my dream to someone soon after waking, but even then they get forgotten for good before long.

It's as if the brain knows not to junk up valuable neurons with recollections of dreams. Evolution has wrought strange mysteries indeed.

Broken

A Google researcher on social networks has a fascinating slide show on how social networks operate in real life. In particular, one of the interesting punch lines is that people don't have a single group of friends, but they have lots of multiple (largely disjoint) groups of friends from different parts of their life, with whom they want to communicate different stuff. More importantly, a lot of social network type software doesn't work well for taking this into account.

The bit that really stuck out to me was his description of how people avoid being online on things like instant messenger and skype:

This is my wife, this is a friend of a friend, and this is someone I'm not sure I know. So people have this list, and they are worried that someone they don't want to talk to might see that they are online and say hello. So they turn themselves invisible. Everyone in their list sees them as offline. This is broken. This is a broken user experience. It's broken because the people they care about, people that they would welcome a chat with, also see that they are 'offline.'

Very well put. This is in the category of 'things I'd never stopped to consider, but when pointed out seemed both brilliant and obvious'. It is broken.What I think is really interesting about this is that tons of people must do this. But I'm sure that most of them a) don't consider whether this problem is likely very widespread, and b) just view it as a bad reflection on them - they feel guilty for wanting to avoid people who they're apparently 'friends' with.

I think it takes a systems perspective to realise that this is first and foremost a problem with an interface that hasn't considered how people want to communicate with each other. Most people I think revert to an explanation that problem must be the fact that they're a shallow person for not wanting to talk to all their skype contacts.

The Power of Marketing

The Last Psychiatrist has an interesting post about the images that marketers use to subtley convey cool:

It's easy to think that the ads are designed to draw in the demo shown in the ads, but that's not the way advertising works, and consequently that's not how America works. If you're watching it, it's for you. These ads play heavy during late and late late night talk shows: the target is boring middle aged white people. Blackberry isn't targeting gays and limber blondes, it's pretending they are already on board so you don't feel like a dork without a touch screen.... They know you better than you know yourself. Strike that: they know the lies you tell yourself better than you.

It reminded me of a conversation with AL years ago during our undergrad days. The question he posed, not dissimilar from Enrico Fermi's 'Where Are They', was this:

If marketers are so brilliant, why are all the people studying marketing at uni complete dumb@$$es?

Which brings me to the question of how much marketers know me better than I know myself. To help answer the question, let me quote from some marketing material that Château Holmes recently received from United Airlines. It was in a separate fold-out book attached to some letter:

"The day miles got set free"

One sunny morning, a man woke up to find his miles anxiously tugging at his toes. "Let's go out and play", they seemed to say. Unable to resist, the man decided to see where his miles could take him. Turns out, they could take him almost anywhere.

This was as far as I got before throwing it across the room in rage.

Who exactly is this drivel appealing to? 5 year olds with a frequent flyer account? Senile old people with too many miles on their hands? I honestly have no idea. But someone signed off on spending thousands of dollars, printing up this junk and sending it across the country. In entirely unrelated news, United Airlines posted a Net Loss of  $651m in 2009, and a Net Loss of $5.348b in 2008.

Some marketers have deep understandings of human nature, and manage to cleverly work this in to the messages they convey. On the other hand, most of the clowns you knew in uni doing marketing? Yeah, they're still clowns.

The Market for Roombas

I got a Roomba a few months ago. They're a brand of robotic vacuum cleaners. I refer to it affectionately as 'The Cleaning Lady'.

I found it to be awesome. For the record, I also bought earlier an expensive Dyson vacuum, which sits (somewhat ironically) gathering dust, because I'm too lazy to use it. The Roomba has its down sides - it keeps knocking things over (surfboards, guitar stands, that kind of thing), and has a tendency to get caught on cords lying around.

But all that is dwarfed by the satisfaction of emptying all the dust that used to be on my floor, but now is cleared away thanks to my robotic slave. Ha ha ha! Work tirelessly, my electronic minion! Soon, we will take over the world!

I think that the Roomba is designed to appeal brilliantly to:

a) People too lazy to vacuum themselves (i.e. all straight men)

b) People who enjoy gadgets (i.e. techy people, engineers - a subset of a) )

c) People rich enough to afford an actual cleaning lady, but too socially awkward to want to deal with them every week (i.e. the whole set of b) ).

I anticipate it will break within six months, at which point I can perhaps convert it to a mobile drinks tray that drives your beverages to random locations around the house, periodically spilling them when it bumps into things. I will still, however, consider it money well spent.

Gold

From the excellent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

What's funnier is that I know people who'd actually do this:

He's Strong, Yet Vulnerable!

I think I've figured out part of the secret of Robbie William's success.

It's his carefully crafted persona that broadcasts "I'm an alpha male bad boy" but lyrics that frequently suggest "But I'm somewhat vulnerable and introspective too".

Chicks love it, because bad boys are always appealing, and the sensitive part builds rapport. Average schlub guys like it, because they think 'Hey, I'm somewhat vulnerable and introspective too! Maybe women will like me now!' (They won't).

Add in some catchy pop/rock instrumentation, and it's a winning formula. Clearly Robbie Williams understands vulnerability game. Which sounds about right, given he seems to have pretty good game in general.

Take the song 'Feel'. The chorus is standard wuss rock:

'I just wanna feel real love,

Feel the home that I live in.

'Cause I got too much life,

Running through my veins, going to waste'

But look how he contrasts this in the next verse with his implied status of a) having lots of women and b) treating them as he pleases :

'I don't wanna die,

But I ain't keen on living either.

Before I fall in love,

I'm preparing to leave her.'

Demonstration of High Value, with a hint of Romantic Vulnerability.

'Come Undone' features another motif of his - I'm alpha enough to engage in reckless behaviour, but this recklessness leaves me exposed emotionally to you:

'I'm contemplating thinking about thinking

It's overrated Just get another drink and

watch me come undone...

If I ever hurt you your revenge will be so sweet

Because I'm scum, and I'm your son,

I come undone.'

Perhaps the epitome of this is in 'Strong'.

Here he threads the needle entirely - his sensitivity and introspection is about his own bad boy lifestyle! The Mobius links back on itself!:

'Early morning when I wake up

I look like Kiss but without the make-up

And that's a good line to take me to the bridge.'

Yes,that is a great line actually - easily the best in the song.

The chorus is inane, but hammers home the same tried and true formula to a catchy tune:

'You think that I'm strong.

You're wrong. You're wrong.

I'll sing my song.

My song. My song'

etc. It's all the same shtick. Whoever he's paying to write this stuff has got it figured out.

Ah, Robbie Williams! He's so cool and tough, and yet sensitive too! How dreamy...

Public Masters, not Public Servants

If you ever needed proof that the government views us as its subjects, rather than its masters, consider the way the TSA has rolled out its latest security screening procedures:

"While I was in the room for “private screening,” Kathy and other travelers watched in embarrassment and horror as a sweet-faced, white-haired, old woman with an artificial hip and a long skirt (she had the calm and grace of a nun) was subjected to the same treatment from a female TSA agent, who warned her loudly in advance that she was going to touch “breasts” and “genitals.” When offered the “private screening” room, the lady hesitated. Everybody knows that when the government wants to take you into a private room at the airport, it’s not going to be good. So of course the woman chose to be violated and humiliated in public, with witnesses."

In the tradeoff between civil liberties and national security, I tend to generally side with the national security concerns. Reasonable people disagree on these points, and libertarians often make very persuasive cases for protecting civil rights, even if they're less open on what exactly the tradeoff is in terms of security.

But whatever my views are, they are secondary to a more basic principle - the tradeoff between civil liberties and security is one for the people to decide. It is not for bureaucrats to decide on our behalf.

Witness the bald-faced contempt with which the TSA holds you and I. Why would they just announce regulations that force surly, rude TSA rent-a-cops to touch people's genitals in public?

Simple. To force people to instead choose the alternative of having their genitals visible via x-ray to other surly, rude TSA rent-a-cops in another room.

Yes, you read that right. People were objecting to these new devices. The bureaucrat's response? Not modify the devices. Not eliminate them, or hold public hearings to evaluate alternatives and the prospective national security benefits. No, just make the alternatives even worse.

Can you imagine a more open contempt for citizens? It's as if Microsoft were to greet the widespread complaints about Windows Vista by announcing 'Hmm, people don't seem to like Vista, huh? Well, let's forcibly remove all versions of XP and Windows 2000 so their only choices are Windows 3.1 or Vista!'

At some point, enough is enough. I am not interested in granting $10-an-hour cro-magnons powers of genital groping, cavity searches, or electronic strip searches in a dubious furtherance of national security issues, especially when the need for such powers has not even been demonstrated.

Somebody needs to be fired for this. Preferably the whole TSA. Contract it out to people who actually lose money when their customers are outraged, rather than viewing it as an excuse to make things even worse.

Fake But Real

For those of you who think that mental accounting isn't real or significant, I ask you this:

Is not the end of daylight saving the best day of the year?

(I exclude of course for those schlubs who turned up to appointments an hour early)

Few things are as sweet as the apparent ex-gratis gift of an hour of your life, on a weekend no less, to do with as you see fit.

Now, it's all just time-accounting jiggery pokery - the earth both spins on its axis and revolves around the sun just as before. And you know this - it's the same hour you lost in the spring.

But even after all that, boy it just feels great to sleep in for an hour more! Even when you know it's mental accounting nonsense, it doesn't stop you enjoying it.

Science is Awesome

There's something really satisfying about seeing science applied rigourously to areas normally ruled only by rumour and superstition. It's what makes Mythbusters such a great show.

The Guys at Serious Eats do this as well, tackling recently the question of whether McDonalds hamburgers ever go moldy. Apparently they don't. Crazy stuff!

So we're on the 'Mythbusters - Confirmed!' level. But here's where the real science starts.

Is this happening (as is usually assumed by snooty health food losers) because of strange preservatives McDonalds is putting in? If so, are they in the patty or the bun, or both? Is it because of the salt level in the patty? Is it because of the size of the patty? Does it happen with other hamburgers as well?

Read on for yourselves and find out!

I came across them a while back when they had a similar experiment to figure out what made McDonald's fries so tasty.

I confer upon the folks at Serious Eats the Richard P. Feynman Award for scientific excellence in pursuit of cool and interesting everyday stuff.

Science - it's what makes your french fries awesome.

Untranslatable Words

Everybody tells me that I should learn a language. It's the trendy thing to do. Wouldn't it be amazing to go to some remote village in Bolivia and speak to the locals, and find out about their lives?

Well no, frankly. At the moment, if you put me in a truck stop in the middle of Nevada, I am completely capable of speaking to the locals and finding out about their lives, which are surely quite different from mine.

And yet I don't want to. I feel like a slightly lesser person for not wanting this, but that alone doesn't get me over the hill. And somehow, I can't imagine this feeling changing when the locals are in some godforsaken part of a foreign country.

Still, there is one legitimately cool thing about learning foreign languages - finding out about awesome words that English doesn't have an equivalent for.

But thanks to Jonah Goldberg's G-File, I don't actually have to go to the hassle of learning to get this cool! Here's a fascinating list of 20 'untranslatable' words, which they really mean 'words which require a whole sentence to describe, as the single word version of the concept doesn't exist'. A really untranslatable word would be, well, untranslatable.

My favourite:

Toska (Russian) – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

Huh. That does warrant a separate word.For all its faults, Russia sure has some interesting cultural ideas.

Second Person Obituaries

For various reasons, my family tends to take a very matter-of-fact approach to death. As I grew up, it became apparent that this wasn't in fact the norm. Most people seem to avoid contemplating it altogether, and find any significant focus on it to be morbid. I find it more surprising that one could go through long periods of one's life and not reflect on one's own impermanence, but that's human nature for you.

But in the Holmes household, I remember my uncle would frequently read the obituaries each day in the paper, sometimes out loud. I think he was just interested. One of the things he used to point out, which I still find interesting, is the number of  condolence notices written in the second person - 'Bob, you were a great father to us all.'  I guess it takes people a while to come to terms with the fact that their loved one is really gone.

My uncle was of course no man to scorn another man's mourning. But his sadness towards death was devoid of a desire to hide what it was, which allowed him to appreciate the ironies that death entails, and indeed help to make it more bearable (an attitude he maintained when my grandparents died, so he walked the walk here).

And those who tend to view death as a fairly ordinary occurrence are more apt to notice that it's strange to write to the dead through the medium of the public notices of The Sydney Morning Herald. If one's messages are in fact being delivered to heaven, wouldn't they be just as likely to get there if you just wrote it on a piece of paper in your room? And if it's just a public expression to celebrate and mourn the person's life, why address it to the deceased?

I told him that when he dies, I'm writing him a notice in the paper addressed to him personally, done in his honour.

Suspend That Disbelief!

I consider myself fortunate to have had to endure only minimal exposure to women's magazines, usually when a girl I know is reading them. But one thing that always struck me as hilarious and absurd was the stories submitted by readers. For instance, let's look at Cosmo's 'Sex Tips from Guys'. Here's a couple chosen at random:

Jamie, 23, informs us that "I can't be the only one who loves when a woman licks that soft patch of skin in front of my ears."

Donnie, 34, wants to share with us his insight that "when I lean in to kiss you, hold the back of my head gently in your hand. It's tender, yet sexy."

Now, dear reader, let's leave aside for the moment the implausibility of some of this advice. Let's also ignore the tenor of the writing, and whether the expression 'It's tender, yet sexy' seems more likely to have originated in a male or a female speaker.

No, what I find amazing is this. Cosmo never seems to invite its readers to actually send in anything! Apparently they're just inundated with readers just sending in unsolicited stories about sex tips, their hair, exercise secrets and all sorts of other junk. This is doubly curious for all the tips coming in from men, given they're not actually reading the magazine. Pity the poor mailmen who, week in, week out, must deliver endless sacks of missives from readers who (curiously), never include their surname, but are extraordinarily punctilious in always including their age. Apparently this is how people sign off all their correspondence.

My question is this: sure at some point, readers would at least wonder about whether all this junk is actually just made up by some intern earning eight bucks an hour, not actually readers? Apparently not.

I know that I am clearly preaching to the choir on this one, as illustrious readers of this periodical are more likely to be perusing National Review, National Geographic, The New Yorker, The Economist or Monocle. But still, it's amazing how much the inclusion of a first name and an age is sufficient to get people to not question what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly obvious fraud.

Surely You're Joking, Mr Gates

http://www.sellsbrothers.com/Posts/Details/12395

The premise is Richard Feynman applying for a job at Microsoft:

Interviewer: Here's the question: Why are manhole covers round?

Feynman: They're not. Some manhole covers are square. It's true that there are SOME round ones, but I've seen square ones, and rectangular ones.

Interviewer: But just considering the round ones, why are they round?

Feynman: If we are just considering the round ones, then they are round by definition. That statement is a tautology.

Very nice. Read the whole thing.

Risk Shifting, Government Patronage, and Too Big To Fail - Chess Club Edition

This guy is brilliant - he figured out the same thing that Bear Stearns, Citigroup and Goldman figured out, except he was in High School :

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-time-i-hacked-my-high-school.html

Clubs made money by reselling burritos or pizza from nearby restaurants during lunch. Each of these lunch sales typically made about $100 in profit. 

...

Unfortunately, the rules around lunch sales were restrictive. Only one club could sell per week, and other clubs like the Science Club had a much stronger precedent for needing lunch sales. Without a precedent for needing money, I was unable to acquire enough lunch sale dates.

...

I studied the rules for operating clubs on campus and found the loophole I needed: clubs were allowed to go into debt to the student government for $200. I figured that if I were in debt to the student government, I'd have more leverage in getting lunch sale dates.

I immediately spent $200 on chess boards, chess clocks, and books. I bought more than we needed because I wanted to maximize our debt. Then I went to the student government treasurer, gave him the receipt, and was reimbursed for the expense.

The student government wasn't too happy about the situation. They wanted me to pay them back as they were on a tight budget. I told them I couldn't raise money because they wouldn't give me lunch sale dates.

Checkmate.

They relented and started giving me lunch sale dates so that I could pay them back. Even though we made $100 per lunch sale, I only paid them back $50 at a time to maximize the time we were in debt. Soon afterwards, the student government relaxed the rules to let clubs have lunch sales more days per week.

Sounds a lot like TARP, doesn't it? When the government is effectively on the hook for your debt (either literally in the Chess Club case, or via a potential collapse of the banking system and currency in the Financial Crisis), it's amazing what kind of patronage you can secure from them.

Headlines From The Election

Pot Smokers Too Stoned To Get Their Act Together And Show Up At Voting Booths! Shocking New Findings! News At 11!

The best result of the night was Marco Rubio's victory in Florida. I rate that guy. The fact that Charlie Crist is sleazier than the Pakistani used car salesman who sold me a Honda Civic with wheels of different sizes (true story) makes it even sweeter. You can Rubio's victory speech here, it's pretty damn good. It also reminds me that the Republican Party hasn't actually had a presidential candidate who was a good public speaker since Reagan.

The worst result of the night was that Barney Frank, the nincompoop most responsible for monstrosity that is federal housing policy, hung on to his seat. Bah. In a better world, he'd be being chased out of town by citizens with pitchforks.

Analogies

The Scottish Enlightenment was to the Ancient Greeks what Black and Scholes were to Bachelier.

From a discussion over lunch with The Greek over whether Ancient Greece was (in his words) 'the founding of all civilisation' (he disagrees with the analogy, you may be unsurprised to find).

Predicting The Climate Where You Grew Up Based On Your Descriptions of Heat

Here's something I've noticed. Typically without realizing it, people use different adjectives to describe when they're feeling hot based on the humidity.

Where I grew up, it was a quite dry Mediterranean climate. On really hot days, everyone described it as 'like an oven' or 'like a furnace'. They themselves were always 'burning' or 'roasting' or 'baking' or 'scorching'. I just assumed that this was how everyone described it.

I found it interesting when I was in Chicago (which has very humid heat in the summer) that on hot days there, people always described themselves as 'melting', but never 'burning'. (Melting was the overwhelming description, and there were fewer variants - sometimes you got 'frying', which can go either way as it connotes a kind of oily heat). The air was 'like a sauna'.

And that's how it actually felt. It didn't feel like you were roasting.

Here's a prediction I can make with perhaps 70% accuracy. People are slow to update these adjectives, and generally go with what they were used to. Anyone who instinctively says 'melting' grew up in a humid climate. If they say they're 'melting' when it's a dry heat, I'd raise the estimate to 95%. 

I remember hearing about a linguistics professor who could identify where in the US you were from based on how you referred to the interstate highways - '94', 'I-94', 'Highway 94', 'Route 94' etc. I know in Australia, there's a variation between the east coast and west coast based on whether highways have a definite article or not - on the east coast, everything is 'The Pacific Highway', whereas on the west it's just 'Stirling Highway'. I've known of east coast people who instinctively added the definite article to west coast highways.

The inferences I'm happiest with are those that use the minimum of data to draw reliable conclusions about broad and apparently unrelated phenomena.

Mini Cannon

Not to be confused with a Mini Canon or a Mini Canon.

It looks like you could do some serious damage if you fired one of these into a person. Which is all the more outrageous, given how small and playful it looks.

Via Kottke

Doing What You Love

If you looked at all the advice that's dispensed, and compare the numbers for 'Frequency That Advice X is Given' and 'Actual Value of Advice X', some of the most frequent and useless seems to be the admonition to 'Do What You Love.'

To my mind, the best job to aim for is the one that maximises (roughly speaking):

P(Getting & Keeping Employment in Job X) * [(Wage in Job X) + (Personal Non-wage enjoyment of Job X, expressed as an equivalent dollar value)].

For simplicity, call this P*(W+N)

'Do What You Love' says to focus on N, and ignore the rest.

Viewed from this perspective, it's obviously stupid to ignore P and W.

But it's even worse than that. Maximising N will generally cause you to aim for jobs that you can't get, and that pay nothing. The problem is that if your tastes are the same as everybody else, N is likely to be negatively correlated with P and W (holding constant the demand for the end product being produced)

Suppose Bob loves playing X-Box and sleeping with hot women. Should Bob aim to become a video game tester or a porn star?

Seen from this perspective, it's obvious. Lots of guys enjoy these things, so the competition for these jobs is huge (P is low for male porn stars and video game testers). Because lots of people are competing for the jobs, the market clearing wage will be low (W is low for male porn stars and video game testers).

Same for being a political staffer, a journalist for the New York Times, an intern at a trendy nonprofit, or a sitcom writer.

On the other hand, it's possible to modify this advice to something more useful:

"Do things you love more than the average person."

Things that you love more than the average person will be roughly loading up positively on N. So you'll still be more likely to end up in jobs you'll somewhat enjoy. But more importantly, they will also be loading up positively on P and W. Jobs that fewer other people enjoy will have less competition and higher wages. This is doubly true if you think that lots of other people are foolishly following the 'Do What You Love' advice.

In other words, you don't have to love reaching into clogged toilets to be a plumber. You just have to dislike it less than the average person. Because plumbers make some pretty serious coin. You know why? Most people can't stand the prospect of reaching into clogged toilets.

Combine this with the secondary part of :

"Do things you are better able to do than the average person."

(which will also lead towards higher P and W) and you're a long way to a good rule of thumb.

Finish it off with:

"Do things that there's a high and reliable demand for the end product being produced"

(which focuses on some of the demand determinants of P and W), and you've got a pretty damn good way of evaluating employment.

I remember Coyote making a similar point a while ago.