Predictions...

From a few days ago:

In the likely event that no serious military response is forthcoming, let me advance the following prediction: Expect more fatal attacks on US embassies, and sooner, rather than later.

Well, that didn't take long:

At least seven people were killed on Friday in demonstrations over a film made in the US that mocks Islam - as protests spread around the world.

 So what are we up to? Yemen, Egypt (again), Sudan, Tunisia, Lebanon...

I was implicitly wrong in one respect - while the attacks so far have been fatal, they haven't been fatal to any US embassy staff. I think this is in line with the comments that Lopez was making in the previous posts, that Benghazi seems to have been unusual in the extent to which it was an enormous clusterf*** of a security situation. At least we've seen that most embassies are better defended than Benghazi (between much better internal defenses, plus more support from local authorities in some of these places, perhaps because they have a better idea of the stakes).

But is there any series doubt about the claim from Pax Dickinson:

The West lacks the will to defend its own embassies.

Bingo.

It was earlier reported that the US Ambassador in Cairo had refused to permit the Marines guarding the embassy to carry live ammunition. The Pentagon later denied the claim.

But here's my question. How come you don't see a policy statement like the following being issued immediately after Benghazi:

'US Embassies are the sovereign territory of the United States. Any attacks on them will be met immediately with deadly force towards the individuals involved. Should the evacuation of any embassy prove necessary due to the hostile actions of locals, the United States will consider itself at war with the country in question.' 

I understand why you may not want to jump to collective punishment of entire cities after the fact in Benghazi.(I would, but I'm saying that I can see the reasons against it).

But this is very different from raising the stakes in advance, and threatening retaliation against people who haven't yet attacked you. Wouldn't this seem like a reasonable precaution?

It won't happen, of course. It would be just as credible as claiming that the embassies will be defended by dragons and goblins and shining armour. Nobody would believe it, no matter what you claimed.

The stated policy of the US is that the killers of Ambassador Stevens will be hunted down and held accountable. As far as I know, that's the only retaliation planned.

The violence in the last few days indicates that the mobs in these other countries either
a) didn't believe them
b) didn't care, or
c) didn't feel that was a sufficiently scary threat to stop them attempting the same thing as in Benghazi.

You can't blame them, really. Hands up, anyone, who thinks that more than a fraction of the people involved in the attack at Benghazi will actually face justice?

Can you see why the rest of the world jumps to the conclusion that the US is a paper tiger, unwilling to defend its embassies?

Once upon a time, the West had the confidence to put tiny, indefensible bits of its territory in potentially hostile countries, knowing very well that the locals wouldn't attack them because of the correct apprehension of enormous pain that would follow.

Once upon a time, my hypothetical policy statement above didn't have to be made, because it was well understood by all concerned that that was already the policy.

We've maintained the tradition of keeping them there, even though the confidence that justified them has long since disappeared. This internal contradiction is now resolving itself on the world stage.

Any embassy that you're not willing to defend with deadly force shouldn't be there in the first place.

Going to War Over A Few Embassy Officials

Athenios writes to disagree with my previous post:

"Sometimes, your posts are pure genius."

 Thanks!

"Other times, they are laughable."

Up yours.

"Your last post about Libya belongs to the latter category."

Well, you win some, you lose some.

"If you suggest going to war over a small-scale terrorist act, you just don't understand international relations very well. "

I understand that there was a time when sovereign nations considered the treatment of their citizens abroad to be a matter of serious importance. To be a proper test case, we'd be looking for
a) mistreatment of a consul and a subject of the sovereign nation
b) indifference or hostility by the local government, where
c) the sovereign nation had recently supported the independence of said nation.

Interestingly, history furnishes us precisely such an example, when Great Britain dealt with mistreatment of a consul and subject by no other than Greece itself in the Don Pacifico affair back in 1850.

The Don Pacifico Affair concerned a Portuguese Jew, named David Pacifico (known as Don Pacifico), who was a trader and the Portuguese consul in Athens during the reign of King Otto. Pacifico was born in Gibraltar, a British possession. He was therefore a British subject. In 1847 an antisemitic mob that included the sons of a government minister vandalised and plundered Don Pacifico's home in Athens whilst the police looked on and took no action.

...

In 1848, after Pacifico had unsuccessfully appealed to the Greek government for compensation for his losses, he brought the matter to the attention of the British government.

In 1850 the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, a philhellene and supporter of the Greek War of Independence of 1828-1829, took decisive action in support of Pacifico by sending a Royal Navy squadron into the Aegean to seize Greek ships and property equal to the value of Pacifico's claims, which had been decided by British courts, and were exorbitantly high. Palmerston did not recognise Greek judicial sovereignty in the matter, as the case involved a British subject. The squadron eventually blockaded Piraeus, the main port of the capital, Athens

.... 

The blockade lasted two months and the affair ended only when the Greek government agreed to compensate Pacifico.

That, my friend, is what a serious foreign policy looks like. You think I'm crazy to threaten military action over an embassy invasion? These guys actually went through with it over a civil case! And yes, in reply to your suggestion, I understand very well that that's not how the west rolls any more. More's the pity.

Back to Athenios:

"Hint: US embassy officials have been killed by Greek terrorists in the recent past. Does this mean that the US should go to war with Greece?" 

I presume you're referring to this. Should the US go to war now to avenge murders from 20-30 years ago? No, that would serve no purpose at all. Should it have done more at the time? Perhaps, I don't know the full details of how that went down.

But yes, in answer to the point, a firm message needs to be sent that killing US officials will result in disproportionate pain.

A large part of the question in international relations terms is whether the local government is a) supporting the actions, explicitly or implicitly, or b) powerless to stop them.

If the government is going to seek out and punish the offenders themselves, there is less of a need. I'd still want to see something done to make a strong point, but if it turns out that some nutjob shoots at the US embassy in Ottawa, no, the US shouldn't nuke Toronto. If I didn't say that, it's because I thought it was obvious.

But in the case here, you had the local police looking on as the mob attacks. That's a little bit different, no? In the case of Iran, the actions were carried out by the representatives of the new revolutionary government, which is very different. It is, in other words, a declaration of war. And there is no principle in war that one only attacks the enemy in the same manner and extent that he attacks you first.

If the local government is powerless to stop them, then the US has the responsibility to avenge the attacks themselves. A government that does not control its own territory may be a government de jure, but it is not a government de facto.

To return to the Greek 17 November organisation, I understand that the Greek government at the time hated the group too, and was working to eradicate it. Greece was, and is, an ally, and an important one at that. Libya is at best neutral, and may turn out to be actively hostile, and its entirely unclear how much support the government has for the objectives of those who attacked the embassy.

But in the end, there's more to it than realpolitik. A self-respecting country ought to consider it a personal attack on the dignity of the country to have its embassy stormed and its ambassador killed. Maybe you're willing to just throw your embassy staff to the wind as a cost of doing business. Maybe you've disavowed any aspects of collective punishment, and think that unless you can isolate the punishment down to the exact individuals involved, you should err on the side of doing less (or nothing at all).

But the symbolism you send to the rest of the world is atrocious. And the world pays attention to symbolism. You may think it's unimportant, but Osama Bin Laden didn't. Don't be so sure that you're saving lives in the long run by not responding with firm force. Other countries thought twice about trying to push around British subjects after 1850.

Lord Palmerston (who, I have it on very good authority, was England's greatest Prime Minister), had this to say, in defence of his actions in the Don Pacifico affair, and his foreign policy more generally:

"As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, Civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong."

Exactly.

I hope that's still true.

Some Thoughts Regarding The Repulsive Slaying of American Consular Officials in Benghazi

So this is  where "democratic" revolution in Libya has gotten us. Some nobody in the US makes a film months ago saying nasty things about Islam. Newly liberated Libyans decide that the anniversary of September 11th is a grand old time to respond by sending a mob to butcher US consular officials. Local authorities are either complicit in this, or powerless to stop it.

So we now have in Libya a society where the important decisions are being made by the terrorists - thuggish, humourless religious fanatics who are on hair-trigger alert for anyone, anywhere saying things that might hurt their delicate and precious feelings (or their supporters). Either the government supports this, or the government is unable to stop this. I loathe the old butcher as much as anybody, but I am at a loss to hear the explanation as to how this state of affairs is a clear improvement over Gaddaffi.

We've also got the same trend going on in Egypt, causing the US consulate to make cringeworthy statements attacking US free speech trying to defuse the mob on its doorstep. Another triumph for democracy! Things were so boring and predictable under Mubarak.

Look, I understand why US embassy officials might say cowardly things to try to save their skin when an angry mob is on their doorstep. The bigger question is, why did the Cairo embassy staff feel that they were on their own, and the only way out was appeasement?

It's somewhat a trick question. Embassies are always at the mercy of the locals, at least in the short term. What protects them is the threat of the sovereign might of the country. Sometimes this registers with the mob directly. More likely, it registers with the local country officials, who rein in their citizens instead of letting them murder foreign diplomats.

So the real question becomes this - why did the mob (and the local governments) feel that they could violate US sovereign territory and murder US citizens with impunity?

This is why. This is why.

Gary Brecher had some strong thoughts on what a real response to the Iranian hostage crisis might have looked like. I wouldn't want to take it as far as he suggests. But there's a whole range of possible options that would have sent a clear message of deterrence for future embassy looters. You can bet, however, that the appropriate response sure as s*** didn't involve sending in 8 helicopters in some hare-brained rescue scheme doomed to failure.

Beckwith had no choice but to scrub the mission right there in the desert. All because Carter only authorized eight lousy choppers.

When Nixon heard about it, he had a great comment: "Eight? Why not a thousand? It's not like we don't have them!"

Clinton, meanwhile, sent a firm and fearsome lesson by bombing a camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Yeah, they got that message loud and clear.

This time around, everyone, from the consular officials, to the mob, to the local government, predicted that the US certainly wouldn't do anything beforehand, and likely wouldn't do anything afterwards either.

So far, they've been right.

In the Iranian hostage crisis, at least, the US was under the moral blackmail that any strike on Tehran would likely cause the deaths of the US consular officials.

Well, that ship has already sailed this time. The question is what the US is going to do.

We've got a thousand choppers now, too. Are you holding your breath for a military response? In election season? I'm sure not.

If the US isn't willing to strongly punish countries that violate its embassies, it has no business putting consular officials in hellhole countries in the first place.

In the likely event that no serious military response is forthcoming, let me advance the following prediction:

Expect more fatal attacks on US embassies, and sooner, rather than later.

A Memo to United Airlines

George Gershwin is rolling in his grave every time you play your sh***y bastardised adult contemporary version of 'Rhapsody in Blue'. There's a good reason that the original song didn't just have one small section of the melody looped repeatedly with an easy-listening drumbeat in the background.

Lifestyles of the Not-Quite-Rich-and-Famous

Athenios and I sometimes frequent the restaurant Fogo De Chao. It's one of those all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouses. They give you a coloured token where green side up means 'keep bringing me more succulent meat!' and red side up means 'now please bring a nurse specialing in patients at risk of coronary emergencies'.

The piece de resistance is always the feeling of self-loathing and extreme fullness at the end of the meal. It is, after all, the gastronomical equivalent of binge drinking.

What's funny though is that you often see a certain clientele at these places that seems at odds with the description above. Namely, slightly thugged-out guys, often somewhat dressed up, on dates with their girlfriends (who are always in cocktail dresses). The beverage of choice tends to be name brand champagne, consistent with the conspicuous consumption vibe that they give off.

And all this seemed odd to me, because it's a place that, notwithstanding it's expensive price, I'd be rather embarrassed to bring a girl, certainly for a one-on-one date.

I rarely see these kinds of couples at the other nice restaurants I go to. So what's the story? Obviously they're trying to impress their date with a fancy meal, but why this place?

My guess is that Fogo De Chao is essentially the poor person's idea of how rich people would eat. Start with an item at the expensive end of restauarnt menus, a steak. Then jack up the price and quallity. And finally, consume it in enormous quantities, since that's clearly how the wealthy live.

Of course, the wealthy distinguish themselves by their thinness and their meager consumption of food. If they are going to eat a lot, it has to be spread out across lots of tiny courses and given a fancy name like 'degustation'. In addition, it has to be healthy, and made from fresh ingredients. Eating a meal comprised entirely of meat would seem horribly gauche. You might be able to sell it in other contexts as some spin on the Atkins diet, but that's a harder claim at the all-you-can-eat restaurant.

In other words, other than the price and quality of the meat itself, this is entirely a low-brow eating experience. The wealthy are more likely to be eating a salad at the raw food restaurant, or checking out the Michelin recommendations in their city.

It might seem, then, that the signalling of these guys would be a failure, since no rich person is going to be impressed by this kind of consumption. Indeed, it seems possible (and likely) that many of the people in question aren't aware of how high class people would perceive it. But realistically, they aren't actually signaling to these people - the signaling is all done for the girl. And if she shares the same conceptions of what wealth looks like, it will probably be successful.

Still, it's a funny business model alright - the high-brow go there to feel low-brow by their huge consumption, and the low-brow go there to feel high-brow by how much they're spending

Thought of the Day

The great David Foster Wallace, describing the mindset of the suicidal:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”  

Bach's Little Fugue in G Minor (BWV 578)

If I had to submit a candidate for the category of 'music video that adds most to the underlying song', this would have a very good chance of victory.

Which, given the song, may seem odd at first, but being able to visualise the different voices is incredibly interesting.

On Roombas

Great sentences from Steve Sailer:

Robot & Frank raises the metaphysical question of what makes something human. Can simulacra easily manipulate our emotions? Can we actually care about things that can only pretend to care back?

The answer is yes. For instance, people who buy Roomba vacuum-cleaner robots frequently develop parental feelings toward their faithful—if often inept—servitors. Why do humans feel more warmly toward their Roombas than toward their dishwashers? The key emotional triggers are that Roombas move on their own, try hard, aren’t very bright, and they need much guidance and grooming. They’re like small children who love doing their chores.

Ha!

The specific emotional response isn't the same from person to person. I call my Roomba 'The Cleaning Lady', and tend to get irritated when it inevitably gets caught on clothes or cords on the floor.

But the level of emotional involvement is indeed much higher, exactly as Sailer notes. The satisfaction from not having to do the vacuuming is way higher than the satisfaction from having to clean the dishes.

In Defence of Wasted Food

There was a CNN article on Hacker News recently complaining about the amount of wasted food in America today.

Forty percent of food in the United States is never eaten, amounting to $165 billion a year in waste, taking a toll on the country's water resources and significantly increasing greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council released this week.

The group says more than 20 pounds of food is wasted each month for each of 311 million Americans, amounting to $1,350 to $2,275 annually in waste for a family of four.

While wasted food is certainly not aesthetically satisfying, I find myself somewhat in the minority by viewing this as rather cheerful news. 

The main reason is that this is a huge celebratory victory lap in the quest of human beings to overcome what was the central problem of their existence from roughly 1 million B.C. until about 1950-ish: namely how to secure enough calories to stay alive.

Doubt not this fact - people waste food only because they know that there's plenty more where it came from. If there were some enormous, prolonged civil emergency in America where the food supply became insecure and sporadic, you can bet your bottom dollar that hungry people would very quickly revert to eating everything still in their refrigerator, tasty or not, out of expiry code or not. 

The definition of "wasted food", or even "food" in general, is something that varies with how desperate the economic condition is. There's a reason that people eat brains, kidneys, tripe, etc. in much smaller quantities than they used to. You know why? Because back then, meat was so scarce that you had to eat the whole animal. But now, cheeseburgers are delicious and cheap. If you go back to, say, the Battle of Stalingrad, people got so hungry that they would eat literally anything that contained a calorie. They would boil old leather boots - leather is skin, and has calories. Lipstick, made from animal fat, became a dessert. Even those bemoaning food wastage probably don't boil their shoes when they've worn through them.

The other problem with this view of the world is that it ignores the fact that food has a significant option value. When I do the shopping, I don't know exactly how many times I'm going to be eating at home in any given week. Maybe dinner plans will come up, and I'll go out. Maybe I'll have a big lunch and not be hungry. Maybe I'll just not feel like cooking.

When I'm buying food with a short expiry date, I'm buying the option of eating it later. The nature of options is that they sometimes expire unused. This doesn't mean the option wasn't worth something, it just means that something better came along. 

The types of foods that tend to have short expiry dates (and thus are more likely to be wasted) are fresh foods - fruit and vegetables, milk, meat, cheese. If all you eat is baked beans and spam, you'll probably have not much wasted food. But you'll be eating less healthily. I imagine that wasted food is probably also correlated with aspirations (unsuccessful, perhaps) towards healthy eating. You buy the broccoli thinking that you'll eat it. Maybe you go for a hot dog instead - hyperbolic discounting springs eternal. But if you never bought the broccoli, you would have eaten the hot dog with certainty.

I figure you always want to keep an eye on what the counterfactual is. Wasted food is generally fresh food. It would be nice if the counterfactual were more efficient consumption of fresh food. But it's probably just more processed food instead. Be careful what you wish for.

Whole Foods Doesn't Want My Money

In many ways, I would be a natural demographic for Whole Foods, grocers to crunchy yuppie mums everywhere, to market to. I like high quality fruit and vegetables. I'm fairly price insensitive. I live in an area where they are located fairly close by. I could be upsold on a bunch of other random interesting food items.

But I don't go there very often, except for certain specialty items. I certainly don't do my regular shopping there.

And why not?

Because they don't sell any Coca-Cola products.

Now, I'm not saying this means I boycott them on principle.

But rather, it means that if I want a regular supply of Coke Zero and want to buy their fruit and vegetables, I now have to visit two stores per shopping cycle*, instead of one.

And you know what? There are closer substitutes to Whole Foods high quality fruit and veg at the povvo supermarket than their are substitutes for Coke Zero among the gourmet artisan Mexican soft drinks, or whatever junk it is they have instead.

The thing I find so funny is that there is no chance that a small amount of shelf space devoted to Coke wouldn't shift some product. Hell, they'll devote entire aisles to ridiculous placebo pills and potions for every conceivable ailment, real or imagined. You're telling me that the fifth brand of echinacea sells more than Diet Coke would in the same shelf space? Don't make me laugh.

So why do they do it?

Simple. Because Whole Foods knows that they're marketing themselves to the demographic of wankers. These people pride themselves in part on not buying soft drinks because they're "bad for you", but clearly that's not enough. Not only do they not want to buy it themselves, they also don't want you to be able to buy it there either. They think that the presence of Coke would somehow taint their wholesome organic good-for-you vibe. With all of the puritan fury they can muster, they're eschewing patronising anyone who sells Coke products because ... well, frankly I've got no idea why. Insert crappy modish cause here.

The people running Whole Foods are no fools, of course. They seem to have estimated that there's far more money to be made appealing to the Anti-Coke puritan crowd than there is to be made appealing to me.

That's fine. It's a free country, they're a free company, and I wish them the best of luck.

But I'll take my low brow dollars somewhere that isn't too pompous to sell me a Coke Zero, and avoid the professional shopping-cart busybodies.

Which is a shame, because they have really good fruit. So it goes.

*The phrase 'shopping cycle' is used under advisement. The original draft read 'week', but then a fit of honesty compelled me to admit that the actual frequency is less than that.

Nice ' n ' Smooth Exponential Discounting

So I managed to be perhaps the last person in America to watch 'The Dark Knight Rises'. It reinforced everything I've thought about the fact that seeing movies when they first come out is just hyperbolic discounting on stilts. I got to see it in IMax, in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, at a really centrally located seat, and without having to queue up days in advance.

Now I just need to go back to Reddit from six weeks ago and read all those 'Good Guy Bane' memes that I was deliberately avoiding.

The one plot twist that I thought was going to happen (and would have been really excited to see) was when Bane took over the stock exchange. I was hoping that they'd put up fake data saying that the NYSE had fallen 80%, T-Bills had fallen 40% and that the entire economy was collapsing. That would definitely have had a huge destructive effect on markets around the world, and may have had persistent effects even after the truth was known. Sadly, they didn't do that direction.

On The USA

I'm now back from my sojourns abroad, and in the brief period where one is reminded of what is different about one's adopted country, I thought it would be fitting to round things out with a post on what the same thing would look like if written about these fair shores.

-The system in lifts of labelling the floor that exits to the street level is such a small act of sheer genius, rather than trying to shoehorn everybody into the 'ground floor is the street, no, first floor is the street, no...'. Other countries should take note.

-The US has the best public bathrooms that I've ever seen. (I hear Japan is interesting too, but I haven't been). Due to a combination of squeamishness about hygiene and high technology, you rarely have to touch anything at all. In addition, the divider walls between urinals are a brilliant compromise between efficiency and privacy.

-There is a crassness to some of the people that I can't forebear mentioning. They talk loudly, the women are very made up, and the political culture is very in-your-face. Try sitting through one of the political party conventions if you don't believe me.

-Dedicated bike lanes are good, but freeways (in low traffic periods) are fantastic if you have a nice car. The existence of me having a nice car is entirely endogenous with a number of things that make this place great. Low taxes, and demanding consumers that result in efficient markets.

-Oh Lordy, the restaurant service here dwarfs everywhere else I've been. You don't wait for your bill, but there's no hurry to pay it. You don't wait for your water refill. The soft drink refills are free, virtually always. Give me American restaurants over any other country.

On Gdansk

The most striking feature is the grim look on the faces of all the local men, particularly the young men. It's rare to see them smile at each other during conversation, and if they do it's typically a closed-lip kind of smirk. A Scottish guy I met here suggested that smiling may be somewhat viewed as a sign of weakness. I have no idea, but the trend itself of low-level glaring is quite noticeable.

The women, by contrast, are more friendly, particularly in the offhand interactions with waitresses, ticket agents etc. They laugh, often slightly nervously.

I am ashamed that I hadn't heard of the region of Pomerania, except through the dog of the same name.

The Polish language includes far more consecutive consonant combinations (particularly amalgamations of c, z, y, w and j) than I would know how to pronounce.

My travelling companion (a historian of some note) pointed out that there were about 8 million ethnic Germans expelled from Poland after World War 2. You certainly don't hear about it very much here, or anywhere else for that matter. Germans after World War 2, civilian or otherwise, did not seem to elicit a lot of sympathy.

Scandi Stupidity on Stilts - Unisex Toilets

If anything captures the 'forced equality at the cost of anything resembling efficiency' aspect of Scandinavia, it's unisex public toilets.

Unisex toilets stem from two desires, one completely stupid, one mostly stupid. The first is a desire to deny that there are any important biological differences between men and women, outside of the purely reproductive aspects (and even those ought to be overcome with technology). The second is a desire to ensure rigid equality between the sexes in all matters, large and small, consequential and trivial.

In matters of bathroom logistics, men have some clear biological advantages. Mechanical aspects of their appendages allow them to pee standing up, and direct the flow with reasonable accuracy. Both of these allow for the urinal, that great time-saving device of the water-closet world. They're not pretty, they offer limited privacy, but damn can they get people in and out of the bathroom quickly.

This has produced the well-known side effect that women end up waiting in line for bathrooms much longer than men. Scandal! Oppressive patriarchy conspires to keep women waiting while men get smug privileges! Stop the bathroom apartheid!

Hence, the brainwave of unisex toilets. Let's do away with urinals altogether, and make everyone use the stalls. That way men can feel the irritation of waiting in line for the bathroom just as much as women. It gets worse, because we can also engineer non-stop friction in public, as well as private, over the clearly demarked gender preferences over whether the toilet seat should be up or down afterwards. It can create irritation by also exploiting gender-based differences in how clean the seat must be afterwards (if the next guy is peeing into the stall as well, does it really matter? Not saying that's my view, but just saying that seems to be a prevalent male view, at least by revealed preference) Instead, we'll create a vibrant community of conversations in line at the unisex toilets as men can express their grumbling during the interminable, unnecessary minutes of delay.

In classic Scandinavian style, this isn't even an efficient way to achieve equality of bathroom waiting time, if for some strange reason that's a big social priority. It's as if somehow only men were biologically capable of driving cars, so they decided that we'd all have to use the horse and buggy instead.

If you want efficient bathroom equality, you'd retain the separate toilets, but just build more space for women's toilets than men's, knowing that they operate with longer time delays. This may be a strange goal, but it's at least pareto efficient. Pure unisex toilets are not. There's no cosmic rule that says men and women must be allocated equal floor space for their bathrooms.

But that would still allow for the chance that men might wait less time than women, and would reinforce the fact that men and women aren't literally, biologically identical. Hence the stupidity must go on.

I think if I had to reflect on these facts for two minutes a day while waiting in an unnecessary line at the toilets, my head might explode.

On Copenhagen

- If I had to give it a shorthand description, it would be ‘halfway between Helsinki and Amsterdam’. This holds on a number of dimensions besides geography. In terms of visuals, the canals and bicycles are reminiscent of Amsterdam, but the architecture looks somewhat more Nordic in a way that I can’t quite describe. The people seem to have a reserved aspect to their character, although not quite with the same seriousness that seems to mark the Finns (I gather that having a historically hostile Russia on your doorstep might tend to concentrate the mind somewhat in this aspect, reminding one that one’s freedoms are hard-won and precarious). The Danes don’t quite rise to the level of the Dutch that I’ve met in terms of geniality, but they’re definitely friendly. The look of people is probably closer to the Finns, in the Nordic way of blonde hair and (it took me a while to figure out this as a defining trait) slightly narrow eyes that look as if they might squinting somewhat. That's not meant to sound condescending, but it's the only thing I can think of as to why blonde Danish people don't look like blonde Americans. Which they don't.

-If socialism looks like Copenhagen, I can understand why liberals come to Northern Europe and think that it’s a model of how society should be organised. This, of course, raises two immediate concerns.

Firstly, the tourist gets the visually appealing aspects of socialism without most of the costs. Bicycle lanes everywhere and few cars make things convenient when you want to tonk around the city centre, but probably less so when you’re trying to buy a large house 30km from your job. And it’s easy to admire the pretty visuals and afford the high prices when you’re arriving with an income that’s been determined by a tax rate that doesn't have to pay for any of these things. You’ve arrived at the restaurant to eat a delicious meal, and half the cost has been subsidized by someone else – what’s not to love?

Secondly, socialism seems to empirically produce better outcomes in areas that are fairly culturally and ethnically homogenous. This wouldn’t surprise Robert Putnam, who wrote a whole book (with a ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ flavour) about how diversity reduces trust. Without which, subsidising a bunch of strangers and relying on them to not shirk becomes a lot more problematic. In other words, if socialism were tried in earnest in the US, do you think the effects would be closer to the cheerful equality of Nordic countries or the disastrous effects of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs? Would we, in other words, end up with something that looked like Copenhagen, or something that looked Detroit or the London Riots? I know which way I’m betting.

-All this is to say that the place itself is visually stunning, and presents a very pleasant aspect that causes an open-minded conservative to perhaps question the certainty of his assumptions about the world. If Scandinavia is the consequence of increasing progressive policies, this may be less desirable than what America has (arguable, of course), but it’s certainly not the nightmare one lies awake at night fretting about.

Then again, I'd probably also like the place even more if it weren't socialist - it's just a lovely part of the world.

Immature, But Hilarious

Every now and again, I worry that this site may be at risk of being too self-serious.

So with rectification in mind, I laughed hella hard at this one:



Ha!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled high-brow pomposity.

Random Thoughts on the Turkey

-It's very refreshing to see people smoking outdoors in restaurants. Not because I smoke. Nor because I like the smell of smoke while eating my food. But just because I love the smell of governments not interfering with how private businesses wish to operate their dining establishments.

-Perhaps related to the above, it was interesting to see large-ish (~15-20 storeys) glass office buildings where the windows actually opened, so the building was basically a glass rectangular prism, but with a few windows tilted open. I haven't come across that anywhere else.

-The 'Stray Animals Measure of Poverty' has another out-of-sample confirmation. There's a fair number of them, tilted mainly towards cats for some reason. They mostly look healthy, so it clearly ain't India, and there's definitely more than what I saw in Greece (a perhaps regionally comparable country in some respects, but not others). Sure enough...

-Out of all the places I've been on holiday, the proportion of tourists (not locals) who were speaking English was probably lower than nearly anywhere else I've been. Except for the beach parts in the southwest, which were populated with uncouth Brits on holiday, with all the attendant delights that that brings.

-If I had to nominate something for the language trait most characteristic of Turkish English (at least on the low level of street tourist interactions) it would be beginning sentences with either 'Yes' or 'Yes please'. So you'll walk past a store, and they'll open with 'Yes please, come look at these beautiful necklaces' or 'Yes, what would you like to drink?'. This was common enough that I'm guessing that it's a feature of spoken Turkish that they're just literally translating across to its English equivalent.

Questions of which I am less sure of the answer than the median person seems to be

It seems to be a commonly-repeated trope that the Olympic Village is a crazy party town of non-stop action and poon on tap. Lots of good-looking athletes, all of whom have been denying themselves fun for years on end in order to nothing but train, and have a very low alcohol tolerance because they haven't been drinking either. Once their event is over, they want to cut lose - if they won, they want to celebrate! If they lost, they want to party to forget it and enjoy the spectacle. Either way, they're up for wild times. You've got lots of exotic strangers that you're never going to see again, and a commonly accepted 'what happens at the Olympics stays at the Olympics' vibe. All of this sounds like the perfect storm for picking up.

We economists, however, do not take all this at face value. Remember, the default assumption is that the probability of getting laid should be the same at all bars in town. If we believe the model applies, the Olympic Village should be no better than a dive bar.

But one of the key assumptions of the model doesn't hold, namely the assumption of free entry. In other words, the Olympic Village is not open to random loser men to gatecrash. If it were, I would wager that the whole 'pickup paradise' thing would disappear really quickly. So on face, the claims might actually be true - like an exclusive nightclub keeping out the riff-raff, the whole athletes-only aspect keeps out the plebs who would otherwise gross-out the Polish volleyball team until they stopped going out for sexy party time. Barriers to entry, literal and metaphorical, keep the market from clearing.

So far, so good - the claims still seem plausible on further reflection.

But there's another aspect that still makes me a little nervous. And it's the following:

Suppose that a male swimmer spends two weeks at the Olympics without winning anything major. Without the glory of victory, his main claim to fame is the awesomeness of attending the Olympics. He comes back, and his friend says to him, 'Hey man, how was it? I hear the Olympics are a pickup heaven! Did you score with any beach volleyball hotties?'

Now, suppose further that said guy didn't in fact score with anyone. Reader, which response to do you think is more likely?

a) "No, that aspect was actually really overrated. I didn't end up scoring at all. But it was still fun!"

b) "Er, sure! I nailed this totally hot Russian gymnast! Then this Swiss Hockey player! It was wild, man!"

In other words, even if the Olympic Village weren't some kind of orgy, all the [male] participants have strong incentives to claim that it was. Because to claim otherwise is to either make everyone think that you were a loser who couldn't score in the middle of a sex party, or alternatively that the Olympics kind of sucked and that you probably wasted years of your life.

So the signal-to-noise ratio of this claim is low - I'd expect this rumour to persist regardless of whether it was actually true or not.

Frankly, I hope it is true. Training for the Olympics is almost certainly a very bad bet in expectation. Those poor buggers have been doing nothing for years but train for that moment, and it's a mathematical certainty that most of them are going to go away disappointed. A two week wild party is a pretty good consolation prize. Then again, when you think about how much they had to pay, in terms of the opportunity cost of those endless hours of their lives, it's still likely to be a rotten deal, more akin to the casino comping you a hotel room after you've gambled away thousands of dollars.

That thought may not be likely to enter your head when looking at the Scandinavian pole vault contingent, but it's probably true.

Hierapolis, 2012 A.D.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.' 

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Random Thoughts on the Olympics

- It's always good when you're watching a group of runners lined up on the track without hearing the earlier announcements, and you can tell the event purely by the competitors involved. Hmm, Kenyan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Kenyan, Ethiopian ... it's starting inside the track, so it's not the marathon, meaning it's got to be the 10,000m. Sure enough, it is. Correlations, man - is there anything they can't tell you?

-It was grimly hilarious a few days ago to watch the Australian Olympic officials trying to put on a brave face after winning Sweet F. A. when the swimming was all done.

http://au.oztips.yahoo.com/news/article/-/14433008/aussies-not-panicking-over-low-medal-count/

But fear not, says Australia's deputy chef de mission Kitty Chiller.

"Very early days, we're only just starting the second quarter," she said.

"We've got rowing, we've got track cycling, we've got sailing, genuine gold medal hopes - three in each of those events.

"We're certainly not panicking. There's a still a very positive feel amongst management and the athletes.

"Sure, we maybe have missed out on a few medals that we thought we could've one but we've also won others - 4x100m freestyle wasn't a gold medal favourite.

"There's certainly no fear at the moment that we've failed, that we're not on track.

"We still believe we can genuinely finish in the top five overall."

Translation: the tanks are descending on Berlin from both the east and the west, but the German Army is about to fight a glorious rearguard action!

Why Does the Post Office Always Lose Money, Part 2

Why, that does sound convenient! And some people say that the government doesn't understand customer service.

Part 1 here.

Why I don't use hotel safes

People focus on the salient risks. OMG, someone might steal my passport!

Fair enough - they might. But truthfully, how high is the risk of this if you're staying in a decent hotel and it's somewhere not in plain sight, such as in a bag?

I submit that it's not very high. The only guy I know who ever personally got anything stolen was while staying in a dorm room in a backpackers, and it was stolen by the other guy in the room, not the maid. As it turns out, the backpacker stole his MP3 player that he'd fallen asleep while listening to, right from out of his ear! Talk about chutzpah. We'll file that as 'one more reason to avoid hippies in backpackers'.

But a low risk of theft is, on its own, no reason at all not to use a hotel safe.

On the other hand, if you're anything like me, do you know what the much bigger risk of you being separated from your passport is?

Leaving it in the damn hotel safe when you check out of the room because you forgot to get it out.

I've done that at least once, years ago, but thankfully I remembered when the taxi was only halfway to the airport.

It's not a salient risk, but it's much, much higher.

It's Later Than You Think

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

It has the following memorable chorus:

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

I found myself in two minds about this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what about the rest?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours truly,

Shylock.

Miscellaneous Joy

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

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

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

-40 varieties of wrong thoughts, by David Stove.

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

Thought of the Day

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

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

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

Paying to Not Get Laid

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

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

'Who needs money, beautiful people travel free!'

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

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

 Got that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They square the circle about as best you can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ESCORTS: DO NOT ENTER!

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

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

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

a) deter potential prostitutes from using the site, or

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

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

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

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

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

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

Case #1

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

Case #2.

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

Case #3

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

Case #4.

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

Case #5.

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

Case #6

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

And I've saved the most interesting for last:

Case #7

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

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

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

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

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

 Ignore this at your peril.

Little Victories

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

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

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

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

Good times.

A Great Question About Charter Cities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But is this a credible threat by the city?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bingo.

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

Which they will.

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

To ask the question is to know the answer.

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

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

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

One choice will make you the next Deng Xiaoping.

The other choice will make you the next Ian Smith.

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

He describes perfectly the attitude of so many urban youths:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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