Great Moments in Government Compassion

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg has stood behind a policy to refuse private food donations to the homeless, on the basis that they might not meet the right nutritional requirements. That's right, you're living hard on the streets of New York, sleeping in doorways, begging for spare change, chugging mouthwash because it's the cheapest source of alcohol and hoping that you don't become the target for somebody's random violence. But according to Michael Bloomberg, the real threat to your life expectancy is the salt in that bagel you're being served. Problem solved!

Ace claims that this policy suggests that New York may not have a genuine problem with real poverty after all.

He may well be right, but I don't think you can conclude this from the story.

It seems entirely plausible to me that some pinhead from the food police would refuse donations even if people really were going hungry. This is in fact entirely consistent with the incentives of bureaucrats everywhere - the only thing that matters is following the rules, no matter how nonsensical.

In an ordinary business, employees tend to be given some discretion in their choices to solve customer problems. This is because a private company has to leave customers satisfied or it goes out of business. As a result, it makes sense for management to encourage employees to have some initiative, in order to deal with unexpected problems that arise so that the customer goes away happy.

But the government never has this problem. No matter how pissed off you are when you leave the DMV, this doesn't affect the DMV's viability, or the paycheques of its employees. Because there's no profit, it's hard to measure if the organisation is doing better, or the contribution of individual employees. It is however easy to measure if you happened to break a particular rule. If in doubt, follow the rule. The end result is this kind of lunacy. If you allow the food to be given to the homeless and you gain nothing, but run the risk of some other bureaucrat punishing you. If you refuse the food, the homeless suffer, but nobody will blame you personally for following the rules. In the extreme case where an article gets written, it doesn't mention the individual who made the decision - the problem is just with the rule.

Individual government workers have no incentive to look at the larger perspective. Hopefully that's what their superiors are meant to do. Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg has a long history of monomaniacal pursuit of browbeating people into eating healthier. As Mark Steyn noted:

That’s the very model of a can-do technocrat in the age of Big Government: He can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger but he can’t regulate it on to Seventh Avenue.

But even if he weren't the certified nitwit that he is, Mayor Bloomberg would have a hard time undoing every stupid, hidebound, butt-covering, slave-to-the-rulebook decision being made by New York City officials. It's a game of whack-a-mole that he'll inevitably lose no matter how hard he tries, let alone when he's instead wearing his mole cheerleader outfit.

The bureacrat initially follows the rules mindlessly because that is what his incentives dictate. Cognitive dissonance being what it is, the bureaucrat doesn't want to admit that he's following stupid policies that hurt people only because that's what the rules say - that would make him a coward and a pinhead.

As a result, it's easier for him to convince himself that the rules are in fact just, that the application of the rules is the actual end in itself, and that the world works better if he leaves the judgment calls to somebody else and follows the rules, no matter how bad the immediate impact.

And thus the stupidity gets internalised. Even if that means turning away food for the homeless.

The scorpion bites the frog because that is its nature.

Update: As if to prove the point, here's a story about a council sending a main to prison for not properly putting up siding on his home.

The Positive Commitment Value of Enormous Weddings

I've previously written about how I wouldn't have any desire to organise a massive wedding celebration that lasts many days. These types of events might be fun for the guests (if you're good friends with the bridal party - less so if you're a list C invite), but I can't really see why it's much fun for the people hosting them. Unless they happen to be enormous extroverts or just gluttons for punishment, neither of which would be terms I would self-identify with.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that elaborate weddings have a value. Namely, the prospect of a massive wedding may be a barrier to getting married, but it will also be a barrier to divorce as well. For me, the prospect of having to sink a second year of your life into organising wedding #2 (or 3 or 4) is a very strong reason to work harder on marriage #1. I imagine that if I had to spend months on end organising a four day party for hundreds of people, my feeling at the end would be of such great relief at the prospect that this duty was now discharged and didn't have to be contemplated again. As long as people chase after sunk costs, this should make them reluctant to take actions that would make the investment in time and energy worthless.

Given that a large apparent point of marriage is to raise the costs of ending the relationship (thus making the union more permanent), I guess this is something to put in the 'benefit' column. It's not so much of a benefit that I wouldn't chew my own arm off to avoid it, but then again I write a blog, which probably tells you a pretty strong signal about where I fit on at least one of the Myer Briggs personality components, and my likely desire to organise a big party.

Relative Scarcity in Exotic Travel

If you ever want an example of just how fickle people's preferences really are, look no further than their choice of holiday destinations.

The context I came across this in is the relative perception of Bali and Mexico.

To Americans, Bali is a land of exotic beaches, beautiful resorts and interesting locals. It's a good choice of honeymoon destination, and a holiday choice designed to make people thoroughly envious.

Mexico, on the other hand, is the crass and unoriginal place where low-rent rednecks go to drink cheap beer and stay in some generic resort.

To Australians, hilariously, the perceptions are exactly reversed. Bali is the place where football teams go for their boozy holidays, and you meet lots of other derelict Australians. But Mexico is enticing, with delicious food, amazing beaches, and Corona everywhere you look.

The reality is that both places are pretty similar - they provide fairly easy beach holidays with a range of accommodation options, and attract a lot of locals from their richer nearby neighbours - Americans go to Mexico more, and Australians go to Bali more.

But the relative scarcity of each place determines in part how it's perceived in each country.

As far as I can tell, there's two likely explanations.

The first is that this is about bragging rights - you need to go somewhere special so that you can boast to your friends, and even though Bali might be similar to Mexico, you choose the one that sounds better and makes you feel well travelled when you get home.

The second is that there's a self-fulfilling prophesy going on with accommodation spending. When you spend two grand on an airfare, you're more likely to stay in the expensive resort upon arrival. This makes the place seem super lush, and you go back and tell your friends how great it is. When you spend five hundred on the airfare, you stay in some cheap motel with the other budget travellers, and this reinforces the impression of a bargain kind of place.

While #2 might sound kind of rational, it's hard to reconcile with a proper search of the options - if you're American and want a nice holiday but don't care about what anyone else thinks, why don't you just stay in a nicer hotel in Mexico?

I'm led to believe that #1 must have something to do with it. But strangely, I don't think this is explicit - the Americans I know who went to Bali truly believed that it really was completely different from Mexico in lots of essential dimensions. As a result, they didn't seem especially thrilled when I pointed out that to Australians, Bali was basically like Mexico.

In other words, bragging doesn't work unless you've also convinced yourself that this was a better option. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

Did I mention I also help little old ladies across the street on my way to Mensa meetings?

I was going to write about this piece at the New York Times where this guy called Greg Smith writes about how he's leaving Goldman Sachs because it no longer has the vibrant service culture of putting clients first that it had when he started (no really, stop laughing). He also wrote to say that all you darn kids have no respect any more, and you keep listening to that damn rap music, and back in his day politicians cared about the public interest.

I was going to write about that, but then David at Popehat nailed it so perfectly that you should really just read his post instead. Comedy gold!

Thought of the Day

"In death, Alexander of Macedon's end differed no whit from his stable-boy's. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms.
...
Do you make a grievance of weighing so man pounds only, instead of three hundred? Then why fret about living so many years only, instead of more? Since you are content with the measure of substance allowed you, be so also content with the measure of time."

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Against Tasers

Via Drudge comes a story of our time, of Scott O’Neil, a cop in Mount Sterling, Ohio dealing with an arrest of a 9 year old boy for skipping school. That premise alone may sound ridiculous, but bear with me.

[O'Neil] went to the boy’s S. Market Street home about 8:30 a.m. to serve a complaint filed against Jared for truancy.

Jared — listed on the report as between 5-foot-5 and 5-foot-8 inches tall and between 200 and 250 pounds — refused to cooperate. He begged his mother to let him go to school rather than with the officer, but Perry told her son it was too late.

O’Neil wrote that after repeated warnings, he pulled Jared from the couch, but he “dropped to the floor and became dead weight ... flailing around,” and the boy lay on his hands to prevent being handcuffed.

So what do we have so far? We're using a police officer to deal with the problem of a kid skipping school. The kid seems pretty hefty, and isn't going along with the officer. It seems like the officer might have to actually grapple with the kid to get his arms free and handcuffed. 

That's what you'd think would happen, right?

O’Neil demonstrated the electrical current from the Taser into the air “as a show of force.” Then, he wrote, Perry told her son to do as O’Neil said or he would be shocked. 

So you threatened to taser a non-violent 9 year old child. Strong words, but perhaps the threat might have been useful. But surely you weren't actually planning on tasering a kid who may or may not be of sufficient age for criminal responsibility ?

The report indicates that after being shocked once, Jared still didn’t cooperate and was shocked a second time. An ambulance was called, but Jared had no sign of injury; Perry signed a waiver for medical treatment. Jared was taken to the sheriff’s office, and a delinquency count of resisting arrest was added to his truancy charge.

Let's all give a round of applause to Officer Scott O'Neil for the 'pathetic cowardice in the line of duty' award! You sure showed that child what for! Without the thin blue line standing with tasers at the ready, why we might have all sorts of children not turning up to school.

This is the problem with tasers. They were brought in, as far as I understand, to give cops a means to apply force that is unlikely (but not impossible) to be fatal.

So without the taser, the cop has the following options:

Pistol: 

Cost to perp: Fatal

Cost to cop: High - psychological trauma of killing someone, mandatory review of their actions, possible career implications. Has the benefit of guaranteeing the cop's safety in a violent confrontation.

Physical Altercation:

Cost to perp: Low. You'll get resisting arrest and might get a violent handcuffing, but you'll live.

Cost to cop: Medium - physically taxing, might get hit, and runs the risk that confrontation could turn nasty if the perp tries to grab your gun, or pull a knife etc.

But now, we introduce into the mix the taser:

Taser:

Cost to perp: Low to medium - guarantees a 'resisting arrest' charge, painful but medical complications are rare

Cost to cop: Zero. Nobody gets hassled for tasing someone. Guarantees the cop's safety about as well as a pistol.

The idea was that the taser was meant to be a substitute for the use of lethal force as a way of ending violent confrontations - instead of reaching for your pistol to kill a subject, you can tase him instead. Since nobody wants more perps to be shot than strictly necessary, this is a benefit. It also stops cops having to go straight to the threat of using a pistol as an escalation of physical confrontation. And this is an improvement too - you don't want to have loaded pistols pointed at yelling and violent suspects any more often than necessary, because they have a tendency to go off in the heat of the moment.

And to this end, the taser is useful. Although frankly, I'm not sure how often this really happens - if the cop truly fears for their life, I imagine they're still going to reach for their pistol, as their main priority is stopping you killing them at all costs.

But what the policy guys didn't seem to take into account is the other substitution - that tasers would be used as a substitute for any kind of physical altercation. 

And this has happened way, way more than the substitution of tasers for pistols, in part because situations that might call for a physical altercation are far more common than situations that might require somebody being shot. 

Cops tend to view tasers as magic button they can press to enforce compliance from people. It's actually a lower cost to the cop than risking a punch in the face, and as long as you come up with some story about the person being threatening, your superiors will go along with it. Good news for the cop.

But it's bad news for everybody else, because the end result is exactly the kind of story above. You threaten the subject with a taser for anything less than full compliance. Subject doesn't comply. You tase them.

Face it - the only thing that makes the story above newsworthy is that the kid was 9 years old. If the kid had been 17, this would be a complete 'dog bites man' story.

But is that what we want? Someone lying on the ground gets tased instead of having their hands grabbed and cuffed?

I want the use of physical force against civilians to be personally costly for the police. That forces the cop to work harder to avoid inflicting harm on the person they're arresting. 

With a taser, there is no incentive at all to wrestle with a suspect - just zap them for anything short of complete compliance.

If you're pissed off at the current story, you should recognise that it's just the logical end point of the current policy. We may end up with fewer fatal shootings, but we end up with a lot more cop-on-civilian violence overall.

We have the law enforcement equivalent of the battlefield nuclear weapon - the good news is that when you nuke the enemy, fewer people will be killed. Hurrah!

But battlefield nukes are actually very dangerous in a different sense, because they increase the risk that nuclear weapons will actually be used. The incredibly negative consequences of nukes are a feature, not a bug - they force countries to think very seriously about whether to fire them.

We've given all our battlefield commanders the availability of small, no-questions-asked nukes, and then we act surprised when the commanders start using nukes to deal with minor border skirmishes.

In foreign policy, nobody would be stupid enough to implement a policy like that. 

But that's exactly what we've done with law enforcement.

On Human Adaptability

Every now and again, I find myself rather impressed at just how adaptable the human body is.

A great example of this is jet lag. This is a phenomenon that is essentially unique to the last hundred years of human existence, out of the god knows how long period that we've been evolving. The body's circadian rhythm is designed to work with fairly evenly spaced days. While the period of day and night changes with the seasons, these changes are very smooth.

Hopping on a plane from New York to Brisbane, however, is an incredibly abrupt change that evolution didn't design us for. There's no particular reason to think that this might not result in you taking months to get back to a proper schedule, if ever.

And yet, it takes a couple of days and things are pretty much back to normal. The systems designed to deal with gradual changes to the seasons are able to deal with a random 36 hour day thrown in without skipping much of a beat.

Evolution may be the blind idiot god, but it makes some pretty damn fine optimisation procedures nonetheless.

Where Were They Then?

Via Jason Kottke, apparently one of Stefani Germanotta's co-workers shot a bunch of photos of her in 2005 in her apartment. Not long afterwards, she went on to become Lady Gaga.

Frankly, I never really rated Lady Gaga. But in these photos, she looks pretty good. I guess when you're wearing a regular cocktail dress with nice hair, instead of a dress made of meat and a ghastly blonde wig, it tends to make you look like less of a weirdo. Who knew?

Resist The Internship Arms Race

One of the things I find unfortunate among American society is the inherent suspicion of unstructured recreation time. There seems to be a large fear among many people of having ‘gaps in your CV’ – that all of your life up to this point must be able to be accounted for when life’s potential employers come knocking.

Personally, I’d never want to work for such a place anyway – if that’s how they expect you to account for every second of your time when you aren’t even employed there, imagine how it will be once you get a job.

In fairness, the suspicion of idleness has its admirable aspects – it is tied up with the strong work ethic that has made America such an economic giant, and is far, far preferable to a widespread desire for handouts and mooching which seems to herald the death spiral of welfare states (see Greece, California).

But perhaps the more pernicious result is that people feel the need to always be working, even if the work itself is not particularly valuable. This seems to find its zenith in the internships that US college students vie for so much.

A lot of these are just worthless CV fillers. Many of them are unpaid – add in the cost of your time and transportation, and you’re literally paying to be there. And what do you get out of it? It’s unlikely to be valuable skills – do you think an employer that won’t even give you minimum wage is going to be assigning you important tasks? Hell, do you think you’re going to be doing much other than photocopying and fetching coffees?

But people want them anyway.

A small number of these internships are genuinely useful – if you’re close to graduating and you want to get a job at Deloitte, you probably want to get a Deloitte internship, because they use this as a screening device for their job offers. That makes total sense. But if you’re just volunteering at some museum? Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not a screening device for the next curator position.

The real tragedy is that there are very few opportunities in life to go backpacking around the world for months at a time. College summers are one of them. If you can afford it, and the alternative is just some worthless unpaid job, take at least one of them off and tour around.

Some people seem to realize this partially, and decide to make their overseas holidays part of some career-building thing – studying abroad for a semester, volunteering in some third world place.

Which is fine, if that’s what you want to actually do.

But if what you actually want to do is just tour around a bunch of countries, get boozed and stay in youth hostels, then  go and do that!  It will be more fun than spending half your time studying for useless classes or pretending that what you actually wanted to do was build houses in Guatemala.

This is cheap talk advice, of course. The sad reality is that a lot of US employers will judge you for these things. But my guess is not as much as people think. Personally, I’d do it for at least one summer. If an employer can’t get over that, screw ‘em.

But the average person is stuck in a true arms race – they know the internships are worthless, but they know everyone else will have them, so they fear they’ll look bad if they don’t have them too.

It’s hard to get out of arms races - everyone knows they're a negative sum process, but they can't commit to disarm. 

I’m just glad I’m not involved in one myself.

Nude Scanners Force Terrorists To Learn Rudimentary Sewing Skills

Do you want the bad news, or the bad news?

The bad news is that the TSA is still insisting on the right to look at electronic pictures of your wife and children's genitals. Or failing that, to fondle said genitals.

The other bad news is that these same scanning measures are actually astonishingly easy to defeat if you're trying to smuggle in contraband. Don't believe me?

Watch this amazing video where the guy smuggles a metal case through multiple security sections.

What's his trick?

He has to sew it into a pocket on the side of his shirt and put the case in there. That way the case shows up as a black object against a black background.

Yes, it's that easy.

Yes, a metal detector would have done a better job.

Yes, this is what one billion dollars of government purchased scanners gets you - they can see your child's penis, but not a metallic object that's not placed against the skin.

Fire them all.

Update: The TSA decides to get ahead of the story by issuing a lame "ha ha, look at that viral video" post that does everything but deny the substance of the original claim. I treat this as confirmation that the original video is correct. Also, read through the dozens of comments on the TSA post absolutely caning the guy for his bull$***. Comedy gold!

Australia's Free Speech Disgrace

In Australia, the Labor Government and Greens have been unhappy with the press coverage they've been receiving in various newspapers, mainly those owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Fair enough, you might say, on a number of grounds.

The government has done a dismal job of running the country, passing ruinous mining and carbon taxes, harassing businesses with excessive labor regulation, and generally doing their damndest to choke off the economic success story that is modern Australia

Meanwhile, they've received fawning coverage from other papers, notably the Sydney Morning Herald and Age. Not to mention the taxpayer funded ABC, whose reporters opinions range from 'left of centre' to 'crush the bourgeois capitalist pigs!'

And in the marketplace of ideas, News Corp papers compete for scarce advertising dollars and reader eyeballs. If they're unfair or too biased, then other papers will step into the breach. Perhaps Murdoch papers succeed because they air viewpoints that are of interest to readers, or are just more entertaining.

In addition, Australia already has an intrusive self-regulatory body, which does things like forcing opinion piece writers phrases like 'illegal entrants' to be changed to 'irregular entrants' without their knowledge or consent.

But that's not enough for the Labor government - apparently fawning political coverage is their right as the government, and those naughty newspaper editors aren't falling into line.

As a result, they conducted an inquiry into setting up a government regulatory body of media outlets, both print and online. The results are in.

Let's listen to the hilariously self-serving summary from censorious d***head, The Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC. From page 8:

I therefore recommend that a new body, a News Media Council, be established to set
journalistic standards for the news media in consultation with the industry, and handle
complaints made by the public when those standards are breached. Those standards will likely be substantially the same as those that presently apply and which all profess to embrace.

Got that? The things you were doing before voluntarily will now be mandatory! But since the standard will "likely be substantially the same" (that's a guarantee you can take to the bank), and "all profess to embrace" the current rules, what's the difference?

Except, you know, the difference between a volunteer army and conscription, or the difference between going on a diet and being chained to a treadmill, or the difference between working on a cotton farm and being a plantation slave.

The 'voluntary' bit is kind of important in the sphere of human liberty.

And what role will the government have in all of this? Page 9:

The News Media Council should have secure funding from government and its decisions made binding, but beyond that government should have no role. The establishment of a council is not about increasing the power of government or about imposing some form of censorship. It is about making the news media more accountable to those covered in the news, and to the public generally.  

Oh, well that's a relief! At best,  it will be a court that makes up its own laws. In middle case scenario, it will be a puppet of whoever is in power. At worst, it will be another permanent bastion of the left, deciding what constitutes appropriate speech in Australia.

Nothing to worry about there!

Who will be regulated? From page 295:

If a publisher distributes more than 3000 copies of print per issue or a news internet site has a minimum of 15,000 hits per annum it should be subject to the jurisdiction of the News Media Council, but not otherwise. 

Paging Doctor Evil! We need a payment of one million dollars!

Let's put this in perspective. This site is read by nobody. Really, it's true. And yet it gets a couple of thousand hits a month. Some of these are spam sites. Some of them are links to images. Doesn't matter - this website will be under the jurisdiction of these clowns.

If I'm regulated, everyone is regulated. And with the Australian courts absurd view that writing anything anywhere on the planet makes you subject to Australian defamation law, who knows how many sites they'll be trying to regulate.

An important change to the status quo is that, in appropriate cases, the News Media Council should have power to require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply. This is in line with the ideals contained in existing ethical codes but in practice often difficult to obtain. 

I would delete every trace of this blog and eat the contempt of court order before I would publish anything at the demand of the Australian government. I would set up a thousand mirror sites before I would remove one word at the request of the News Media Council.

Why do we need to do this anyway?

These proposals are made at a time when polls consistently reveal low levels of trust in the media, when there is declining newspaper circulation, and when there are frequent controversies about media performance.

Have you looked at the approval rating of the current government recently? Have you looked at the approval rating of lefty academics that would populate such a council? Have you looked at the approval rating of speech-censoring government suck-ups like the Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC? Give me Rupert Murdoch any day.

Do you think that right-wing speech disliked by the government is more likely to get censored? Andrew Bolt makes a great case that it will - when citing examples of biased coverage, what does he turn to but ... News Limited Coverage of global warming! Nothing about unbalanced coverage in favor of the global warming position in The Age (let alone the ABC).

And why, pray tell, is that a problem?

The Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC, would do well to take heed of Ken at Popehat's "Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits". As Ken notes:

The obligatory “we believe in freedom of expression” paragraph in the standard defend-our-censorship communique is simply embarrassing. That’s why the Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits (“CMSCD”) recommends eschewing it and launching straight into the meat of your uninformed and conclusory stomping on First Amendment law.

Back to Finkelstein, sure enough first we get the fig leaf...:

It is worth pausing at this point to affirm that there is nothing wrong with newspapers having an opinion and advocating a position, even mounting a campaign. Those are the natural and generally expected functions of newspapers....

and then the inevitable 'but shut up and say things I like':

However, to have an opinion and campaign for it is one thing; reporting is another, and in news reporting it is expected by the public, as well as by professional journalists, that the coverage will be fair and accurate.
.
Nonetheless, there is a widely-held public view that, despite industry-developed codes of practice that state this, the reporting of news is not fair, accurate and balanced.

I reserve my right to make my reporting exactly as unfair and unbalanced as my heart desires, and not one whit less. Whether what I write about the world is "fair and balanced" is absolutely none of the business of the Australian Government, and only a tyrant would think otherwise.

I have a long-running dispute with Papa Holmes about the appropriateness of swearing on this site. So it takes a large amount of self-control to limit my remarks to these:

Ray Finkelstein, your snivelling and disgusting appeal for for government censorship over the Australian press makes you unworthy of the common law traditions of liberty bequeathed to you by men much better than yourself. Your views on government censorship of papers should make you far more at home in countries that do believe in this kind of censorship, such as China, Cuba, or North Korea.

Drugs Are Perfectly Safe, Unless TMZ Has Ever Written About You

The whole furore (mercifully dying down now) over Whitney Houston’s death gave me cause to reflect on the odd way that the average person of Intelligent Socially Acceptable Opinion tends to hold two fairly contradictory ideas about drugs in their head at the same time.

The first idea is that drugs are basically not harmful on their own – the main ill effects are actually just results of prohibition. Overdoses typically tend to be related to questions of uncertainty about the purity of the drug, which is a natural consequence of the market being unregulated and illegal, since drug dealers will cut the drugs with all sorts of nasty chemicals. If we made drugs legal, people could take them in a controlled environment with known purity, thus eliminating most of the bad side effects.

The second idea is that celebrities tend to die younger than the average person, often because of the effects of extended drug use – Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, etc. etc. Sometimes this was related to illegal drugs (Houston, Winehouse), sometimes prescription (Jackson, Ledger). But the effects of long term drug use made Amy Winehouse (and to a lesser extent, Whitney Houston) look like a walking corpse even before she died, just like Lindsey Lohan has started to age really badly.

It should be obvious to you by my juxtaposing the two that these arguments cannot both be right. Personally I think it is the first one that is faulty. I’m a supporter of quite a lot of drug legalization, and it’s true that there are a bunch of problems that come about mainly through prohibition (crime, wasted police and prison resources, instability in Latin America, erosion of civil liberties) and a bunch more that are exacerbated by prohibition (drug deaths). These provide a totally sufficient reason to legalise drugs.

But that’s a far cry from saying that drugs (with the arguable exception of pot) are free from significant long term health and mortality risks. People kill themselves deliberately and accidently from all sorts of drugs – alcohol, painkillers, diet drugs, heroin, meth, and all the rest. Not to mention combinations of all these, or combinations of these with cars/bathtubs/heavy machinery/the ocean/busy highways. I imagine that the problems of purity are significantly overstated – people know exactly what the purity of a vodka bottle is, but it doesn’t stop people drinking themselves to death one way or another. It’s entirely unclear how legalizing Cocaine would have had the slightest effect on the likelihood of Houston accidentally drowning in a drugged out haze.

Not everything that we make legal is necessarily desirable. The mistake of the liberal consensus opinion is that a lot of liberals have little intrinsic concept of the idea of letting people freely choose things that may be costly mistakes. Libertarians (and some Conservatives ) tend to be open about giving people the freedom to make bad decisions, partly as a matter of liberty, partly as a reflection on the futility of trying to do otherwise. But since the nanny-state types (mostly liberal) tend to be uncomfortable with the idea of letting people make bad choices, they need to convince themselves that the drugs themselves must be good or at least neutral, and all the problems due to government action.

They’re wrong. Unless you’re willing to make the strong form argument that Winehouse wanted to inject herself to death, having more people using meth or heroin is a clear cost to both society and themselves. And a support for legalization does not require a blindness to this fact.

On Andrew Breitbart and Living Boldly

Conservative/Libertarian blogger Andrew Breitbart has died, unexpectedly but of natural causes, at age 43.

Many disagreed with his politics, but the eulogies for him frequently cited one aspect of his personality - his 'utter fearlessness', as Charles Krauthammer put it. He went after issues that would make him a figure of hatred among the left, breaking the stories about corruption in ACORN and about Anthony Weiner. He was also a wonderful showman, which helped his media activities greatly.

Your views on his political contributions may differ, but rest assured that it takes some serious stones to make permanent enemies with the media and the left. I don't do it - I temper my excessive thoughts and write under a pseudonym, and I'm a nobody being read by nobody. Ace of Spades (who is a somebody read by lots of somebodies) does too, and Breitbart clearly impressed him. Of how many people can you say that they write and speak entirely without fear on any topic of discussion, let alone doing so while committing their words to permanence on the internet and TV, and doing so under their own name? TJIC comes to mind. Steve Sailer too. But there aren't many. Most of us in one form or another live our lives following the parody advice of the xkcd comic, "being careful what we write, because a future employer might read it", and dutifully avoiding anything too controversial being posted or tagged on facebook. xkcd had some great words about that too.

Greg Gutfeld wrote that Andrew Breitbart was 'the only person I know who operated without a safety net.'  What fine praise! What a worthy eulogy in an age of timidity and cowardice masquerading as prudence.

Ave Atque Vale, Mr Breitbart.

Markups and Price Discrimination in RAM

Dell computers have some smart cookies working out their pricing policies. They've (correctly) estimated that a very large proportion of their customers will pay a substantial premium in order to not have to open up the inside of their computer. This is because when you open up a computer, it seems to the newbie like the electronic equivalent of doing open heart surgery when you've only seen a youtube clip of the operation. Screw it up, and there goes your two grand computer.

I know this for two reasons:

1. Until a few days ago, I was one of those people, and

2. My computer tech guy pointed me in the direction of aftermarket RAM.

The latter only occurred because I'd bought a computer hoping to cannibalise the RAM from an old machine. As bad luck would have it, the old RAM was the wrong specification.

But look at the markups they charge!

A Dell Precision T3500 Workstation with 2GB of RAM will set you back $779.

When you increase your RAM to 24GB, using 1333MHz, DDR3 SDRAM, ECC (6 DIMMS), it will add another $1580 to the price.

Now let's go to my new favourite site, www.crucial.com. They're RAM finding device lets you locate RAM that will work with your T3500 workstation. How much will 24GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM set you back?

As it turns out, about 140 bucks. So Dell is getting a lazy 900% markup on their RAM, and that's assuming they're buying it on crucial.com without any discount for bulk.

That's a hell of a premium you're paying because you're afraid of opening up your computer.

As it turns out, not checking the specification of the RAM I'd need cost me $150 in the short term, but has saved me at least a couple of grand in expected lifetime savings.





Update: So I decided to not wait for the computer guy (who had shown me where the RAM would go when he opened the computer up), and tried to install it myself. No dice - it wouldn't start up. Tried to install the old RAM - still no dice. Started to think I'd bricked the computer. Read the manual, fiddled around with it, eventually realised from the error lights that it wasn't reading that there was any RAM installed. More fiddling revealed that I hadn't pushed the RAM in hard enough, and my reluctance to push too hard meant that it wasn't fully in place. Ironically, I was only willing to push hard once I'd decided that I'd probably ruined the computer, which was in fact what it needed to fix it.

So overall, a bit nerve-wracking, but still not worth paying fourteen hundred bucks to avoid.

Judgment Jerry, Judgment!

The worst mistakes are the ones you don't realise you're making. The most poignant mistakes are the ones that you don't realise you're making, but everyone else does realise, even though they're unable to help you.

It's time for some Tarantino-style non-sequential narratives about what happens when Silicon Valley co-founders get jilted. The Hacker News discussion is interesting, but I want to focus on another lesson that can't be repeated often enough.

Let's start with the cut-scene at the end, featuring YouSendIt co-founder Khalid Shaikh:

Shaikh agreed to pay $48,194 in restitution to YouSendIt. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 30, 2012. The sentencing guidelines recommend six to 12 months of imprisonment, but under the terms of the plea agreement, that may be reduced to house arrest.

Hmmm. How did this happen? Time to cut back to the narrator and where it began:

Ranjith Kumaran didn't found YouSendIt on his own, though. Another man, one whom YouSendIt doesn't like to talk about, wrote the original code, built the first servers by hand, and served as the first president. His name is Khalid Shaikh, and he's 34. He was a computer-engineering student at McGill University and a former intern at Microsoft, and he once worked at Hewlett-Packard and Intel. More recently, he has been living in a Motel 6 outside Denver, awaiting sentencing for launching a cyberattack three years ago that crippled YouSendIt's servers.

There's more details at inc.com, but the story is a common one in Silicon Valley - a bunch of guys start a company, big-time investors come on board, the investors plus one guy feel that the other guy isn't pulling his weight, other guy gets booted. Think the Facebook story, as told in The Social Network. Or Steve Jobs (although there it wasn't Wozniak that booted him).

Except this time the guy who got booted ended up bitter and launched a bunch of denial of service attacks on his former company, and (apparently) added to the poor decisions by messing with their wikipedia page. (Fire the passive-aggressive ion cannon!).

So, on a chilly Tuesday morning in December, Shaikh ran a piece of testing software, called ApacheBench, that flooded YouSendIt's servers with traffic. The servers keeled over immediately. Later that day, a sentence appeared on YouSendIt's Wikipedia page: "Looks like the company may be out of business, their site is down." (Shaikh says he didn't write it.)

Okay, so while I have sympathy with what it must be like to get booted from a company that you start, this guy has some pretty serious judgment issues. Apparently the FBI takes computer crime pretty seriously! Who knew?

So they started nosing around after Shaikh's former co-workers trying to find out what was going on. Shaikh got wind of this. Like a slow motion car crash that you can see coming, which of the following alternatives do you think Shaikh did?

a) Called around to find the best criminal defense lawyer he could

b) Cross his fingers and hope that the whole thing would blow over.

c) Decide to head down to talk to the FBI to straighten the whole thing out himself.

Yeah, no prizes for guessing the outcome:

That night, the couple returned to the FBI office. [Shaikh's wife] Saroash was told to wait in the lobby while her husband was interviewed in an adjoining room. Because it was late on a Friday, and almost everyone at the FBI office had gone home, no one noticed when she got up and listened at the door. Inside, the agents asked Shaikh about his background. He told them about going to McGill, moving to the Valley, founding YouSendIt.

They're just asking about my background! What harm could it do?

The agents began asking Shaikh about buying and selling websites with the teenager. They asked him about a site called e.tv. It had been stolen, they said. They asked Shaikh if he knew anything about the sale of that site. Shaikh wouldn't say. Then they showed him documentation that the money for the sale, about $18,000, had been transferred online using Shaikh's IP address.

Oh. Ooooohhhhh.

Hmm, that's quite a pickle, no?

"That puts me in a very negative light," Shaikh said, according to the FBI report.

1. You don't say!

2. You're going to enjoy hearing that quoted back at you at trial.

"Where do we go from here?" He asked the agents if they knew of any "FBI-friendly attorneys."

Now I'm just feeling sorry for the guy. He's so clueless that he's asking the guys whose job it is to put him in the hole with help on how to get himself out of the hole. Good luck with that.

The couple hired a criminal defense attorney and prepared for the worst.

Like buying a fire extinguisher after you just burned down your house by trying to deep fry a frozen turkey.

About a week after Shaikh's wife gave birth to a girl, their lawyer received discovery documents that included FBI reports. Shaikh had said enough during that meeting to give the FBI plenty of evidence to work with.

No kidding! *facepalm*.

Red hot tip - when the interview is over, you'll always have given the FBI plenty of evidence to work with. Trust me.

In this case, the FBI had already gotten a former friend to wear a wire and record a conversation, so he may have been boned anyway.

BUT WHY WOULD YOU GO TALK TO THE FBI BEFORE YOU'VE HIRED A LAWYER??? Especially when you know you're guilty!!

Remember, these investigators are seasoned professionals whose sole job it is to get you to incriminate yourself. They've done this thousands of times. You've done this... never. Who do you think is going to win?

Like a lamb to the slaughter. 

Suppose that you're too broke to hire a lawyer. What can you do then?

I recommend you follow this 24-carat gold advice from Penn Jillette on what you should do when the FBI wants to talk to you.



Speak to the cops in haste, repent at leisure.

(subject line reference)

Classic!

You have to be both a chemist and skeptic of government policy (which I know applies to at least GS, and possibly others) to enjoy this one , but it's comedy gold - how to synthesise pseudoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine, from the Journal of Apocryphal Chemistry, Feb. 2012:

Pseudoephedrine, active ingredient of Sudafed®, has long been the most popular nasal decongestant in the United States due to its effectiveness and relatively mild side effects [1].  In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to obtain psuedoephedine in many states because of its use as a precursor for the illegal drug N-methylamphetamine (also known under various names including crystal meth, meth, ice, etc.)[1,2].  While in the past many stores were able to sell pseudoephedrine, new laws in the United States have restricted sales to pharmacies, with the medicine kept behind the counter.  The pharmacies require signatures and examination of government issued ID in order to purchase pseudoephedrine.  Because the hours of availability of such pharmacies are often limited, it would be of great interest to have a simple synthesis of pseudoephedrine from reagents which can be more readily procured.

A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudoephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material.  Moreover, according to government maintained statistics, Nmethylmphetamine is becoming an increasingly attractive starting material for pseudoephedrine, as the availability of Nmethylmphetamine has remained high while prices have dropped and purity has increased [2].  We present here a convenient series of transformations using reagents which can be found in most well stocked organic chemistry laboratories to produce psuedoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine.  

 Ha!

(via jwz)

Artificial Meat

The Economist has an interesting article about how a researcher is set to make a hamburger patty out of artificially grown meat - that is, the meat was grown in a petri dish from cells taken from cattle.

I'm doubling down on two of my earlier predictions, and revising one:

-Eventually all meat will be grown artificially

-When the process of eating meat is separated from the process of killing animals, within two generations the average person will be revulsed at the thought of killing a cow to eat it.

The one I'm revising is the headline of the earlier post - I now do expect to see this happening in my lifetime.

Within 50 years, I'm guessing artificial meat will become at least the 'free range eggs' equivalent for cruelty free meat, even if it doesn't replace meat completely due to cost.

And when this becomes widespread, the contradictions of our system of animal ethics will be harder to reconcile - it will be harder, in other words, to forget how the sausage is made.

Why is LA So Spread Out?

Actually, this isn't quite right.

It's not that LA is spread out, per se. Instead, it's that the good bits of LA are not geographically contiguous. This means that you have to drive a fair way to get to all the nice parts. The good bits of Pasadena might be a two hour drive away in peak hour from the good bits of Malibu or Manhattan Beach.

By contrast, the good bits of Chicago are pretty much in a solid block from the South Loop to Belmont, and the really nice tourist bits are all downtown within walking distance from each other. The rest of the city stretches out for miles and miles west, but nobody gives a rat's about that, since it's only the residents that ever go there.

So how did LA end up this way?

Well, here's my guess for at least one contributing factor - the downtown area is too far from the coast.

As a city gets richer, people inevitably want to live near pleasant views. And human nature being what it is, this tends to mean wanting to live near large bodies of water.

But why would the downtown be built away from the coast?

The reason is because city location is usually determined by water as well, but in this case, fresh water. When you're an early settler, looking at a beautiful but undrinkable ocean is not much help. So downtown Los Angeles is located near to the Los Angeles River. This is fairly typical - a lot of major cities are located near some river or other water source.

But here's where Los Angeles gets in trouble. The Los Angeles River has two problems:

1. It's too far away from the Ocean.

2. It's a tiny drainage ditch which is not large and pretty enough that it rivals the ocean as a pretty view.

#1 means that there will inevitably be nice areas near the ocean, and these will be a reasonable drive from the city centre.

#2 means that the residents who don't care about the ocean also don't have an incentive to crowd around the river itself, which might otherwise provide a focal point for development. The nice inland areas thus tend to spread out, since there's less reason to build huge residential waterfront skyrises. The river was big enough to get the downtown to locate nearby, but not big enough to attract buildings once the city grew.

Go through the list of sprawling cities and dense cities, and see if I'm right. By my reckoning, this explains a lot of the variation.

I am no strong believer of the Jared Diamond view that geography is destiny, but I think this is a pretty parsimonious theory of urban sprawl.

Outrageous Fact of the Day

From Steve Sailer:

JUST three decades ago, Thurgood Marshall was only months away from appointment to the Supreme Court when he suffered an indignity that today seems not just outrageous but almost incomprehensible. He and his wife had found their dream house in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., but could not lawfully live together in that state: he was black and she was East Asian. Fortunately for the Marshalls, in January 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the anti-interracial-marriage laws in Virginia and 18 other states. And in 1967 these laws were not mere leftover scraps from an extinct era. Two years before, at the crest of the civil-rights revolution, a Gallup poll found that 72 per cent of Southern whites and 42 per cent of Northern whites still wanted to ban interracial marriage.

You read that right - up until 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in 18 US States. And it would have likely persisted longer until the Supreme Court stepped in. 1967! Flying men to the moon, banning interracial marriage.

 Dates of repeal of US anti-miscegenation laws by state

   No anti-miscegenation laws passed

   Before 1887

   1948 to 1967

   12 June 1967

And this being the early 20th Century, they weren't just trying to stop the symbolic recognition of interracial marriage, but instead stop the actual mixed race union, and mixed race sex in general:

Typically defining miscegenation as a felony, these laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different races and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies. Sometimes, the individuals attempting to marry would not be held guilty of miscegenation itself, but felony charges of adultery or fornication would be brought against them instead. All anti-miscegenation laws banned the marriage of whites and non-white groups, primarily blacks, but often also Native Americans and Asians.

In many states, anti-miscegenation laws also criminalized cohabitation and sex between whites and non-whites. ... While anti-miscegenation laws are often regarded as a Southern phenomenon, many northern states also had anti-miscegenation laws.

Steve Sailer is exactly right - 'not just outrageous but almost incomprehensible' is indeed the description.

I guess it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I simply cannot conceive of how the public justified these opinions to themselves. Even if you were racist to the core, and disgusted by interracial marriage. Was there no libertarian urge at all? Was there no sense that your own revulsion at two people having sex is not a public policy rationale for passing a law? John Stuart Mill wrote 'On Liberty' a full century earlier. Had nobody read it? Did they think it was all nonsense?

Conservatives would do well to not get too misty-eyed about America's glorious libertarian past that's being trampled on by modern liberals. In certain aspects (regulatory overreach, taxation levels, nanny-state condescension), this is definitely true.

But in other very important respects, today is a lot better than it used to be. The past is not only another country, but one that on closer inspection you may like less than you'd thought you would.

Everything Old is New Again!

Australia's former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was booted out as PM during his first term by Julia Gillard. Now that she got elected (by the three independents that chose Labor in this hung parliament), Rudd has been angling to return the favour to Gillard. She'd gotten sick of this, and was threatening to sack him. Rudd beat her to the punch, and resigned in Washington. Now Rudd is  former Foreign Affairs Minister, and leadership questions keep arising.

I guess we can at least enjoy this as farce - as long as the Chinese keep buying Australian resources, this makes it less likely that value-destroying legislation will be passed.

Tim Blair lays on the mockery, while Andrew Bolt rounds up the reactions of the commentariat.

As Henry Kissinger reputedly said about the Iran-Iraq war - it's a shame they can't both lose.

Uh-Oh Spaghetti-Os!

Apparently if you leave your fancy Tesla Roadster unplugged long enough that the battery drains to zero, it turns into an undrivable brick until you replace the entire battery. Which, as it turns out, costs a cool $40 grand. The phrase 'brick' is a term of art, meaning the car apparently can't be started or even pushed down the road. 'Unplugged' is also a term of art, which can also include having an extension cord that's too long, and thus providing insufficient charge.

Unsurprisingly, Tesla is not exactly upfront about this risk. They've (correctly!) identified that this probably won't attract a lot of buyers. Whether they've correctly identified the likely PR disaster of this information slowly leaking out and being covered up is another question entirely.

While I'm not pleased that this happens,it doesn't surprise me that the Tesla has hidden costs. The whole marketing strategy is based on hidden costs, since they advertise that the car has zero emissions. This is true only as long as your electricity comes entirely from renewable resources. Which is to say, it's broadly false, unless you happen to be driving it entirely in the Pacific Northwest, which has a fair amount of hydro power. Otherwise there's emissions - they're just coming out of someone else's property, not yours. Amazingly, the environment cares not one jot whether you burn coal and oil in a power plant or in an engine. But people that fetishize visible, variable costs flip out for this kind of pea-and-shell game. At least they're not my emissions!

Over and above the environmental dubiousness of the whole affair, the process is designed to appeal to people who like the upfront investment of lots of money to offset smaller gasoline purchases. Let's just say that the $50K to buy the model S roadster would pay for a lot trips to refill the Hummer. Or equivalently, it would for a gigantic number of refills of your Nissan Micra. Which uses the old-fashioned technology of a lawnmower-sized engine to reduce emissions. Apparently that doesn't excite people nearly as much.

LOL, I can park my car at the airport without it dying.

Thought of the Day

"Just when you think you've got it all worked out,
That's probably when they'll put you in the ground."

From the excellent song 'The Future', by The Limousines.

(via JWZ Mixtape 111)

Random correlations from a weekend in San Francisco

-Since it has been established by rigorous analysis that McDonalds restaurants tend to be the most profitable places at airports, it seems vanishingly unlikely that their absence in any first world airport is due to lack of demand. Hence a leading indicator of maddening nanny-state-ism gone mad is when airport terminals lack any fast food. This is becuase some pinhead bureacrat or politician deciding that it would be too low brow, or too unhealthy, or too commercial, or [insert modish condescending reason here]. True to form, the worst examples of this are the American Airlines terminal in SFO, and the international terminal in Heathrow. I leave the reader to their own conclusions.

-A bizarrely strong indicator that you're in a tourist trap area is the presence of a Bubba Gump Shrimp store. They always manage to find the area in any city where the worst rubberneck tourists congregate, and plonk their store down there. Pier 39 at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, Navy Pier in Chicago, Times Square in New York, Cancun in Mexico, Mall of America in Minnesota, Santa Monica Pier in LA... I challenge you to look at their location map and find me an exception to this rule. Shylock's tip - if you see a Bubba Gump store, leave the area you're in straight away.

-Notwithstanding this grousing, San Francisco is a very fun city. Great Chinese food, very walkable, pretty architecture, and even the hordes of weirdo hippies lend a colourful charm when one is only there for the weekend.

French Free-Market Economic Wisdom

No, that is is neither a typo, nor sarcasm.

From the great Frédéric Bastiat:

When James B. gives a hundred pence to a Government officer, for a really useful service, it is exactly the same as when he gives a hundred sous to a shoemaker for a pair of shoes.

But when James B. gives a hundred sous to a Government officer, and receives nothing for them unless it be annoyances, he might as well give them to a thief. It is nonsense to say that the Government officer will spend these hundred sous to the great profit of national labour; the thief would do the same; and so would James B., if he had not been stopped on the road by the extra-legal parasite, nor by the lawful sponger.

Let us accustom ourselves, then, to avoid judging of things by what is seen only, but to judge of them by that which is not seen.

Words to live by.

This is taken  from one of his most famous essays, about the broken windows fallacy - that you cannot spur economic activity by destroying assets and claiming that the increased production to replace them is an economic benefit, because this ignores the cost of the forgone spending on other items.

Everyone knows that, right? Nobody is seriously advocating destroying productive assets to boost the economy?

Ha ha ha! Oh, how little you understand Washington!

Bastiat himself was quite familiar with the difficulties of getting politicians to not justify wasteful spending because of it's stimulating effects:

Dear me! how much trouble there is in proving that two and two make four; and if you succeed in proving it, it is said, "the thing is so plain it is quite tiresome," and they vote as if you had proved nothing at all. 

Bastiat discusses at length the implicit arguments of those who demand government protection for their industry:

Ought not the protectionist to blush at the part he would make society play?

He says to it, "You must give me work, and, more than that, lucrative work. I have foolishly fixed upon a trade by which I lose ten per cent. If you impose a tax of twenty francs upon my countrymen, and give it to me, I shall be a gainer instead of a loser. Now, profit is my right; you owe it me." 

They're still saying exactly that.

Bastiat also makes the oft-neglected point that to oppose the government subisidising an activity is entirely different to the question of whether you desire that activity in general. His essay makes the point that subsidy policies are only ever about transferring wealth, not creating wealth. The policy must live or die on the merits of the thing to be susidised, and not the claim that the employment of the labor itself is productive:

But, by a deduction as false as it is unjust, do you know what economists are accused of? It is, that when we disapprove of Government support, we are supposed to disapprove of the thing itself whose support is discussed; and to be the enemies of every kind of activity, because we desire to see those activities, on the one hand free, and on the other seeking their own reward in themselves. Thus, if we think that the State should not interfere by taxation in religious affairs, we are atheists. If we think the State ought not to interfere by taxation in education, we are hostile to knowledge. If we say that the State ought not by taxation to give a fictitious value to land, or to any particular branch of industry, we are enemies to property and labour. If we think that the State ought not to support artists, we are barbarians who look upon the arts as useless.

The essay is most famous for the broken windows analogy. But in fact the whole essay is brilliant throughout. As they say, read the whole thing.

Frédéric Bastiat, in other words, pioneered the concept of opportunity cost (although he didn't coin that term). This is such a basic tool of economic thinking these days that we tend to forget that it wasn't always there. It came about largely because of Frédéric Bastiat. And it's still one of the most powerful arguments against hare-brained government programs - where did the money to fund this come from, and what else could have been done with that money instead?

Here is the moral: To take by violence is not to produce, but to destroy. Truly, if taking by violence was producing, this country of ours would be a little richer than she is. 

As true now as it was in 1850.

Trenchant advocate of economic liberty and opponent of sloppy thinking, M. Bastiat is richly deserving of the posthumous induction into the Shylock Holmes Order of Guys Who Kick Some Serious Ass.

Conversational Dynamics

One of the things about being an introvert (The Couch*: You're an introvert? And you write a blog? Unheard of!) is that conversation with strangers is not something that comes naturally. Like athletic ability, musical ability, or mathematical ability, conversational ability is a skill that you acquire either through being born with an innate aptitude, or something you need to work to acquire. Or both, in reality.

The difference between conversational ability and the other three is that there is very little formal training for how to make small talk, versus tons of training available for the others.

I tend to describe myself as a 'reformed introvert'. The ability to make small talk is not a natural skill of mine, but one I've worked to improve. It's still not great, but the measure of success is that people are sometimes surprised when I self-identify as an introvert.

But being an analytical type and an introvert (The Couch: Wait, you're socially inept and a wannabe intellectual, and yet you write a blog? No seriously, call the newspapers!), the question of exactly how to make conversation better is something I've had cause to think about. The guys that do it naturally don't need to think about it - it's only the guys who need to learn it who have to back out what exactly the naturals are doing.

As far as I can tell, the central challenge of conversation is how to find a topic that you both (or the group) have interesting things to say about, and then maintain that interesting thread. And when that thread ends, you then need to be able to transition to a new interesting thread.

Now, if you think about all the stuff that you know about, there's surely something  that you and the stranger could have an interesting discussion about - football, politics, military history, food, hip hop, whatever. When conversations fail, it's usually because you weren't able to find that joint interest.

The place where conversations seem to break down the most is at the transition between topics. This includes the opening, which is just the extreme form of the transition, from nothing to the first interesting area.

The people that are good at making conversation are almost always good on the transition part. This involves a number of related skills:
1. Being able to detect when a conversation idea is coming to a natural conclusion, and steering things towards something new before the awkward silence sets in.
2. Being good at identifying a new topic of likely interest, and
3. Being bold and good at changing the topic to unrelated areas without it sounding forced.

Out of the three, I think the last one is probably actually the most underappreciated. If there's one skill that can improve conversation the most, I think it's the ability to be confident to replace a silence with a segue to a new subject smoothly. And usually this is just about the transition, and the willingness to do it.

On a slightly different topic, I was reading this article the other day where...

Random question, what are your favourite restaurants in this town? I always end up going to the same places, and I'm trying to expand my list... 

So the other day, I was at the supermarket line when this guy...

The reason that conversation changes are important is that natural transitions only work well when the original topic was itself interesting. Sometimes you can get stuck on sort-of-boring topics, but the only natural conversational progressions are to other boring topics. A good conversationalist is able to figure out when things need a subject change, and move the topic along without it sounding jarring.

The final skill is having an appreciation of what might make an interesting topic, and boldly searching it out. This sometimes needs changes of course - you think something is interesting, but the audience doesn't. Reacting to these kinds of subtle cues is what stops you becoming a bore.

It sounds strange to break down conversations in this way, and almost painfully obvious. But as far as I can tell, the people who aren't good at making conversation rarely seem to think about it as something they need to explicitly work on. Which is why they don't get much better at it. It's only the weirdos like me who make attempts to actually improve the quality of the conversations they have with strangers, aiming to make them successively longer and more interesting.

If you start out as an introvert, it seems like your choices are to feel like an idiot trying to explicitly learn how to make small talk, or get left behind in a world that values social skills.

Sign me up with the first group.

*I stole the 'The Couch' gag from Jonah Goldberg.

Miscellaneous Joy

-Headline of the Day, from Maetenloch at Ace of Spades:

"Island Scandis So Inbred They Need a Website to Avoid Incest"

Ha!

-Statements that it's hard to disagree with:

"To put it politely, Nigeria is a failed nation. To put it bluntly, Nigeria is f***ed."

-Economist Valentines Day Jokes (via the CM)


-In America, the furthest you can get from a McDonalds is 145 miles by car. Thank God for that - USA! USA! USA!

"Austerity Measures"

So Greece has been rioting again, as the parliament passed a set of "austerity measures" designed to combat their rampant budget deficit.

This headline from The Daily Beast is instructive, and typical of the way it gets written up:

Greece Riots: Have Greeks Had Enough of Austerity?

This is why it has been such a marketing disaster to call these rounds of budget cuts "austerity measures".

Austerity implies that the relevant aspect of these cuts is a kind of severity, a harshness of measures designed to achieve a strong outcome. More tellingly, it implies a choice. Austerity describes an action you take to limit your intake of something to more humble, and less pleasant, levels.

And who wants that?! Nobody. I've had enough of this austerity! Let's go back to the days of plenty.

The message that needs to be gotten into the heads of the marginal Greek voter is the following: riot all you want, but those days ain't coming back. Not if Greece defaults. Not if Greece raises taxes. Not if Greece prints money.

If it were me, I'd call these 'The New Normal Cuts'. That ought to indicate the correct mindset. Get used to it, because this is how it's going to be. I'd also settle for the "There's No More Money, Because It's All Been Spent Cuts". It's been spent, and borrowed, and spent again. And now there's nothing left, and no private investor with two braincells to rub together is going to lend the Greek government money again any time soon.

Because this is the problem - you can default on the debt, but it doesn't make the deficit go away. And once you default, you've got very little chance of being able to finance that deficit with borrowing at any reasonable rate. So sooner or later, the pensions and the government wages will get cut, by hook or by crook. The only other option is printing money to close the budget deficit, which is the triumph of imbeciles who think that money illusion is a fast track to prosperity. Sadly, it doesn't take much experience of hyperinflation to realise that this isn't actually the case. Ask Zimbabwe how it's working out.

These aren't the austerity cuts. These are the reality cuts. Which is why the headline is so inane:

Greece Riots: Have Greeks Had Enough of Reality?

You bet they have. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Tolstoy, you may not be interested in fiscal reality, but fiscal reality is interested in you.

Market Mispricing, Female Nudity Edition

Marginal Revolution linked to this interesting piece in the Sacramento Bee on how the Burning Man Festival has run into lots of problems because it replaced its first come first serve online ticket system with a lottery. This led to a lot of the regular people not getting tickets, which is a particular problem since it's the regular people who designed the structures and cool stuff which made the event fun.

But what was most prophetic to me was one of the closing sentences:

Jones said there is legitimate concern that this might be the "jump the shark" year for Burning Man, when the artists are overpowered by those merely hoping to see topless women

Is there anyone who seriously doubts that the potential size of the latter category vastly exceeds the number of people in the former category?

The former is made up of a few idealistic hippies. The latter is made up of the half of the population known as 'men'.

It thus seems inevitable that sooner or later the perverts will price out the artists. When this happens, of course, that will be the end of the festival. Who wants to stand around in the desert with nobody but a group of seedy men? Nobody. In addition, you can expect the supply of topless women to dry up pretty fast too. Without the artsy atmosphere, how are you going to get the naked hippy girls to show up?

In other words, even if this isn't the end of burning man, I'd expect it to end this way eventually. A reputation for having naked young women walking around in public is too much of an arbitrage to not be eliminated by throngs of leering, gawking men.

"Please Place Towels On The Floor If You Want Them Cleaned"

Man, do hotels love trying to get you to reduce the amount of laundry you do. It's always couched in the language of saving the environment. Think of all the towels in the world being laundered after only one use! All the water! All the detergent! All the energy!

First of all, I'm not asking for all the world's towels and sheets to be cleaned, just mine. And they ain't much. I know, because I do it myself. Or, you know, pay someone, which is basically the same thing.

You know what? Now that you mention the Hindenberg-scale disaster of all those laundered towels, I'm thinking about it, and it doesn't seem like much. Not because it's not a big amount - it is. But simply because the percent of the world's energy use that goes to the unnecessary laundering of towels is basically zero. If you did nothing but devote your life to washing towels over and over at the laundromat, your actions are going to be rounding error compared with the amount of energy the aluminium smelter down the road uses on a given days.

And even when the total amount still seems like a large number, that's mainly because if you take absolutely anything and aggregate it over the whole planet, it becomes huge. Think how many miles of cotton are wasted every day by people pulling on loose threads on their shirts, jackets and pants. It would be enough to stretch to Pluto! It would be enough to manufacture garments for all of the starving children of Guinea Bissau! It would be enough to let 300 tired garment workers take a whole extra year of vacation! etc. etc. etc.

The reality is that the hotel cares about the environment only to the extent that it cares about its profits. Which is fine - that's how capitalism generally works.

But you'll forgive me for not getting all misty-eyed about how I need to sacrifice so that the hotel makes twelve cents more profit.

Screw that. You know the Holmes motto? No Linen Too Fresh! It's my contribution to the Keynesian stimulus that I'm reliably told the economy desperately needs.

It would be funny if I thought it were intended as a joke

Never let it be said that Britons don't appreciate irony.

Miscellaneous Joy

-MIT at its best: students were sent their early admission letters in steel tubes, and told to 'hack' the tubes somehow. One girl decided that the best thing to do is to send it into space. Nice!

-A hilarious review of the book 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad', which slays it mercilessly. Oooh, the burn...

-Steve Sailer documents a particularly self-parodying David Brooks column. This reminded me of his other great quip about Brooks, which is so good I'm going to quote it again:

The public doesn't want new ideas, they just want to be told that their old ideas are new ideas that have been discovered by brain scans.

-The toughest guy to hold a PhD? (via Kottke)

-Gabriel Malor on the State Department in Iraq:

The State Department is cutting and running from its Iraq mega-embassy. It seems the salad bar ran out and there's no Splenda for coffee. Really. Those are their actual, ISYN, complaints. Oh, and they're limited to only six wings each on chicken wing night. Poor babies.

Yes, really.

On Police Brutality

A long-ish quote, but I thought this summary of the broad issues of police brutality from Taki's Magazine was interesting:

Dark decades of direct experience with human beings have given us reason to operate from an ecumenical distrust of human nature. ...

Since there’s literally no “government” beyond the humans authorized to run it, our distrust of human nature leads us to a special wariness of those who possess the legally sanctioned power to harm and extort others. Without ways to keep government power in check, the whole world would devolve into the Stanford Prison Experiment within a week. Then again, since the “governed” are also human beings, we also greet their every word and deed with suspicion—if not outright disdain.

So when someone complains about police brutality, our default presumption is that both sides are at least guilty of something and that we’d need clear evidence of innocence to exonerate anyone. Yes, sure, some police officers are sadistic rageballs who take out their castration fears on the skulls of hapless citizens they’d stopped for minor moving violations. But flipping the flapjack over, many citizens are irredeemably unhinged drunken lunatics who endanger everything in their path and aren’t above lying to score a huge civil-rights judgment that the taxpayers, not the “state,” are obliged to pay. Faced with such a dismal choice, why should we even pick sides?

Sadly, not everyone is so evenhanded. Opinions about police mostly fall into two rigid camps: “Shoot the scum pigs” or “Shoot the scum criminals.

It's a good point - it's rare to find any kind of nuance in reporting about allegations of police brutality.

Then again, I'm not sure that this leads to an equal presumption against both parties. The level of relative disdain will vary a lot with the facts of the case, something which the Taki editorial recognises. My general feeling is not that police are insufficiently punished for incorrect judgment calls, but more that they're insufficiently punished for egregious bad behaviour, when it's clear they're in the wrong. The city gets a civil lawsuit, the cop gets a slap on the wrist.

Sometimes you are faced with cases where things do seem strongly leaning one way rather than the other. Radley Balko describes how the NYPD recently shot dead an unarmed man who was in the process of trying to flush marijuana down the toilet.

The question is, of course, how reasonable were the police actions ex-ante, rather than ex-post? How often do suspected armed drug dealers have guns? How often do they shoot at police? How frequently do the cops get this wrong, and what are the consequences? You can't know the answers to all these things just by looking at the cases where they get it wrong.

Balko's remarks I think focus correctly on what's worst about this whole event, and they are searingly bitter:

But let’s not lose sight of what’s important, here. Thanks to the good work of these undercover narcotics cops, the pot Ramarley Graham allegedly flushed down the toilet just before he was killed is no longer on the streets of New York. No children will get high on that pot. And that’s really all that matters.

The whole damn raid shouldn't have happened in the first place. If the cops had been assigned to some task that was actually improving welfare ex-ante, we'd be much more willing to tolerate mistakes in judgment.

Brutal actions in furtherance of astonishingly bad policy - that's what really stings.

Take That, Catholic Church!

The Obama Administration has decided to mandate that all employers have to provide birth control, including abortion-inducing drugs. This mandate now covers the Catholic Church. Which, understandably, they are not jolly pleased about.

“This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets,” [Catholic League head Bill ] Donohue said.

You don't say.

This law seems to be on dubious grounds to start with - the constitution protects freedom of religion, but the constitutional basis for healthcare mandates is unclear (and still awaiting a Supreme Court decision). This is only a concern for reactionaries like me that don't read the Commerce Clause as being the 'Do Absolutely Anything Clause'. But frankly that ship sailed many years ago. On the other hand, how this plays in with the First Amendment is not at all obvious.

The question is why the Obama administration would be so hell-bent on making the Catholic Church provide birth control to its employees. This would cover Catholic schools, hospitals and charities. But honestly, how many employees does this really affect in the overall economy? It seems more likely that this is the administration's decision to give the finger to the church in order to curry favour with women's groups. I presume their logic is that not many Catholics vote Democratic anyway, so screw 'em.

As a basic matter of liberty, if the Catholic Church doesn't want to provide birth control, then it's no business of the government to make them. Then again, if you take this kind of radical thinking too far, you might wonder why the government has any business demanding that other employees provide birth control, or why the government has any business mandating health insurance provision at all. This thinking would clearly make you as the worst kind of dangerous libertarian loonie.

You can rely on the National Abortion Rights Action League to dissemble and mislead on this kind of thing:

“The Catholic hierarchy seems to be playing a cynical game of chicken and they don’t seem to care that the health and well being of millions of American woman are what’s at stake here,”National Abortion Rights Action League President Andrea Miller said.

Ah yes, the old canard of deliberately obscuring the relationship between health insurance and health care. The people involved are already employed (or they wouldn't be affected by the bill). If contraception is really important to you, then either don't sign up to work for the Catholic Church, or pay for it yourself. In equilibrium, if the average person has a demand for birth control, then the Catholic Church will have to pay higher wages to compensate for the healthcare that they aren't providing. Use the higher wages to buy the pill on your own - you don't need the Catholic Church to hold your hand. It's not like this is a one-off $100K cancer treatment expense, where if it's not done through insurance you can't afford it. The pill is pretty cheap, and it's a regular ongoing expense, so budget for it yourself. It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference if my employer gives me a $40 pill, or the $40 in cash to buy it myself.

For obvious moral reasons, it does make a big difference to the Catholic Church. And for utterly opaque and wrong-headed reasons, it apparently makes a big difference to the government and the National Abortion Rights Action League, who think that buying the pill on your own would constitute a horrible travesty. So much so, that they're willing to risk a brawl with America's Catholics.

Way to contribute to the Republican Get Out the Vote effort, guys!