Willpower is not a strategy

Psychological constraints are real constraints. People act as if they're not - because you can't see the process driving them, you should be able to make them just go away. I can see physical evidence of why I can't run 100m in ten seconds. I can't see physical evidence of why I can't work nine hours in a row without getting distracted.

Vanishingly few people ever do this on any given work day, of course. But that doesn't stop the motivated, type-A personality from holding himself to this standard. I'm so lazy, he'll say. Why can't I stop myself wasting time on the internet? When he inevitably falls short of this standard, he'll get frustrated with himself, and try to figure out how he can improve his output.

Usually, "willpower" is the deus ex machina by which this extra work is meant to happen. I'll concentrate more! I'll not check my email! This is, of course, no more practical as advice than 'I'll swim faster' or 'I'll eat less food every day'. It might work. But let's just say you'd probably want a plan B.

Willpower is better thought of as the residual between how much you actually do on a given day, and what a reasonable model of output would predict. In other words, just because you give a name to the part of the model that you can't explain doesn't mean you can now manipulate this part at will.

As Steve Sailer put it recently:

It’s a strange totem of the 21st century that if a brain scan can show us where something would happen inside the skull, we can therefore make it happen in ourselves...
We don’t think this way about other organs, though. Consider the stomach. For a century or more, we’ve had a more than adequate knowledge of how the digestive system works. Yet on average we’re fatter than ever. Why? Not because the science of stomach scans hasn’t progressed enough, but because we like eating more than we like exercising.

What's surprising is that this obsessive focus on willpower tends to blind people to more optimal solutions that recognise the constraints they face.

For instance, if you know you're going to get distracted and run out of energy by 4pm, why not try to do low mental energy admin tasks at that point so you're still getting something done?

When you find yourself not getting anything done at one task, why not switch to something else for an hour or two then come back to it?

Instead of getting up two hours earlier and being tired and unproductive all day, why not get eight hours sleep and work whenever you arrive?

Maybe you actually are unproductive. But what people refer to as 'unproductive' is usually measured against a standard that is
a) derived externally from some hypothetical benchmark,
b) not an unbiased forecast of actual output, and
c) not updated according to how their performance changes.

In other words, if every day you expect to be able to work 9 hours and you actually work 4, one of two things is certain. Either you're really bad at concentrating, or you're really bad at benchmarking what a reasonable output is.

I often hear the rejoinder that unrealistic benchmarks improve output, even if you always fall short. By aiming for 9 hours, I get 4 done, but if I aimed at 4, I'd only get 3.5 done.

Maybe. But do you ever see Microsoft announcing that they're going to set next quarter's earnings target as being earnings of two hundred gazillion dollars per share, just so that people would work harder? They'd be ridiculed, and rightly so.

You set targets so that you can see how different concrete strategies of improving output are actually working. But the hard work of improving output comes from understanding the internal processes at work, and how they can be optimised.

But if you haven't actually put any effort into the more difficult task of figuring out how you're going to change the underlying strategy, it seems largely delusional to think that just setting a higher goal will somehow produce this. This goes tenfold when you're setting the goal for yourself. 

James Bagian made a similar point about blaming people for medical screwups.

When I got into healthcare, I felt like I'd stepped into an entirely different world. It was all about, "Let's figure out who screwed up and blame them and punish them and explain to them why they're stupid." To me, it's almost like whistling past the grave. When we demonize the person associated with a bad event, it makes us feel better. It's like saying, "We're not stupid so it won't happen to us." Whereas in fact it could happen to us tomorrow.

And then, too, medicine is much older than these other fields, eons old, and for most of that time there wasn't PubMed or the AMA or what have you. It was all about the expertise of the individual practitioner. It's a short step from there to assuming that problems in medicine stem from problematic individuals. That's why we have this whole "train and blame" mentality in medical culture; someone makes a mistake, you train them not to do it anymore, and then you punish them if it happens again. I think we've ridden that horse about as far as we can.

Replace 'stupid' with 'lazy' and it describes the lecture you give yourself every day.

The willpower horse is dead on the ground and decomposing, but you keep lashing it with your riding crop.

Figure out something else.

Miscellaneous Joy

-Incentives? Who gives a damn about incentives?

-Partly in regards to this, Obama was asked what Donald Trump has against him. Good question - maybe Jack Ryan would be able to answer.

-Rowan Atkinson continues to kick ass.

-Apparently carousing in North Korea sometimes carries a heavy price.

-With the US election being merely weeks away, this is a good time to not be on facebook. That way you won't be subjected to the brilliant insights of all sorts of fools that insist on blasting their endorsements to all and sundry. This post of mine from a year and a half ago still seems right to me.

Help is on the way!

Do friends and colleagues accuse you of being 'too masculine' or 'too heteronormative'? Thankfully, today's selection of musical items can help provide timely relief to ease the burdens of excessive manliness.

To insulate against the charge that 'your musical posts suck and are boring', these offerings came directly from reader suggestions. Proving that my readers are just as depraved as I, we have not one, but two cover versions of the Carly Ray Jepsen hit, 'Call Me Maybe'.

The first, via Athenios, is a choral and orchestral arrangement:

The second, via The Hammer, is done by Ms Jepsen herself, along with The Roots and Jimmy Fallon:



And in case this pushes things too far in the opposite direction and you need to resuscitate your male bona fides, here is the great Johnny Cash, via Hector Lopez:



Don't say I don't do nuthin for ya.

The Stupidity of the 'China is a Currency Manipulator' Argument

Sometimes it's hard to know whether stupid-sounding statements by politicians are genuinely believed, or just thrown out there for the rubes. Or both.

One firmly in this category is the line that Mitt Romney kept repeating in the debates, about how China is a 'currency manipulator' and he's going to label them as such on day one of his presidency (presumably so that he can start imposing tariffs. Or maybe just for cathartic value - who knows?)

Romney is not unusually obtuse in this matter - Hillary Clinton has moaned about the same thing in terms every bit as stupid.

Now, is there anything implausible about the claim that China is printing lots of yuan in order to keep their currency low in value? Absolutely not - they are. It's a matter of public record. Is there anything incorrect in the statement that this is hurting  US exports to China, and making Chinese imports in the US more competitive relative to domestically produced goods? No, this too is obvious - it's microeconomics 101.

What is far less clear is the implication that the net effect of all this is negative for the US economy. For a long time, the US deliberately pursued a policy of wanting a strong dollar - i.e. they wanted the yuan to be weak relative to the dollar. Why? For exactly the same reason that politicians are now bitching about - it makes imports cheap, which is great news if you're someone who needs to import things, or if you're worried about keeping inflation low. Frankly I wasn't aware that this policy had even been officially abandoned, but what do I know?

Still, if this were all there were to the debate, I'd let it slide - you don't really expect nuanced economic discussion at these rube-fests.

But what's hilariously unexplored is the question of what exactly China is doing with all those extra yuan they're printing that keeps their currency artificially low. How do these translate into an expensive dollar?

Simple - the Chinese pump tons of money into buying US Treasury Bills. You remember those, right? They're the means by which this thoroughly bankrupt nation keeps running trillion dollar deficits and kicking the can down the road on its untold trillions of unfunded liabilities.

Reader, if China ever took the US up on their offer to stop making their currency cheap by printing yuan and buying T-Bills, do you know what would happen? The viability of US T-Bill auctions would become a hell of a lot less certain. And I can promise you, if (or more likely, when) a US Treasury auction fails, it will create consequences far worse than those of China having a currency that may or may not be too cheap. The specifics of how exactly it would play out is not something that you'd want to explore, as things like stock market crashes, runs on money market funds and bank failures start to become realistic possibilities.

As the Hilltop Hoods put it - like a free trip to Afghanistan, you don't want it.

Do you know who agrees with me about this?

Hillary @#$%ing Clinton, that's who. In between complaining about the Chinese currency being too cheap, she was begging the Chinese to keep buying T-Bills which would keep their currency cheap. At least Romney hasn't descended to that level of stupidity of demanding both [A] and [Not A]. Yet.

It is difficult to help people who know what they want but can't achieve it.

It is nigh on impossible to help people who don't even know what they want.

When those people are running the government, it is even more disturbing.

On the plus side though, there's two positive aspects.

One is that these politicians may not actually believe this nonsense, but might just be cynically manipulating the idiots of the electorate that will determine the outcome of the election.

The other is that the federal reserve is buying so much of the current T-Bill auctions already (by just printing money) that the auctions may never fail, and we'll just get pleasant hyperinflation instead.

Small victories, I suppose.

Good News, Bad News

People are apparently still surprised that when you take a country like Egypt and remove most of the forces ensuring law and order (however imperfectly and corruptly), this kind of thing happens.

At this late stage in the proceedings, I honestly cannot figure out why they would be.

Shylock's free tip to aspiring female reporters - if offered the lucrative assignment of covering the freedom-loving democracy protest in Tahrir Square, Cairo, you should politely decline.

My initial reaction to the first-mentioned story was "You mean they're still sending in female reporters to cover these events without a full bodyguard contingent? Seriously?".

Thank goodness she seemed to escape less harmed than some of the other cases, in part because she managed to not get separated from the rest of her news crew. That's when things tend to go downhill really fast.

The bad news is that public rapes are up.

The good news (apparently) is that people are voting!

The bad news is that the voters include the rapists.

The other bad news is that they're voting for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Not sure I'd score this as a win overall, methinks.

Praying for victory

The setup has been done many times (Bob Dylan's 'With God On Our Side' being a classic example), but the mark of a great comedian is what they do with it. The great George Carlin:

The Zeroth Rule of Presentations

"Put your most important content at the top of your slides."

Interesting.

Freedom is Tyranny...

...when you're mentally ill.

Hacker News linked to this very interesting article in the Washington Post by Paul Gionfriddo, talking about how his own son fell victim to the very reforms of the mental health system that he himself helped pass as a member of the Connecticut legislature:

If you were to encounter my son, Tim, a tall, gaunt man in ragged clothes, on a San Francisco street, you might step away from him. His clothes, his dark unshaven face and his wild curly hair stamp him as the stereotype of the chronically mentally ill street person.
...
Tim is homeless. But when he was a toddler, my colleagues in the Connecticut state legislature couldn’t get enough of cuddling him. Yet it’s the policies of my generation of policymakers that put that formerly adorable toddler — now a troubled 6-foot-5 adult — on the street. And unless something changes, the policies of today’s generation of policymakers will keep him there.

An interesting mea culpa, to be sure.

(A long post, so more after the jump)

Great Question

From Pax Dickinson:

"Mr. President, would the US be better off today if you'd been prosecuted for smoking pot as a youth, or are you a total hypocrite?"

 Don't hold your breath waiting for it to be asked, let alone answered.

Miscellaneous Joy

-Entirely Alive! defends giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union. I tend to agree. Let's put it this way - it's a hell of a lot better than giving it to that tree-planting woman who wasn't sure if AIDS might be created by western scientists or not.

-The War Nerd is back with a surprisingly positive assessment of Obama's foreign policy, at least the war-fighting part. I can't say I'm thrilled with said foreign policy, but it sure could have been a lot worse (and it's unlikely that John McCain would have been any better either). Incidentally, I tend to dislike parts of it - the Libya intervention, for one - because I didn't see what political purpose the whole thing served, and I still don't. The US didn't lose many troops, but losing an embassy is no laughing matter. I did find myself wondering how Brecher would reconcile his like of Obama military policy with a) Brecher's own Law of Counterinsurgency Warfare: 'Bribe 'em, Nuke 'em, or Just Leave 'em the Hell Alone!', and b) his suggested response to the Iranian hostage crisis, c.f. the Benghazi crisis. I'm guessing that this is more a 'if you're going to fight it, how should you do it?' than a 'should you fight it?', but I don't know.

-Ken at Popehat responds to the free speech critics who suggest that America needs to reconsider cultural values other than free speech. The 'alternative cultural values' on closer inspection turn out to be exactly what you'd expect - narrow-minded bigotry, cry-babies with exquisitely sensitive feelings, hypocritical 'tolerance for thee but not for me' types, and barbaric lynch mobs more at home in the middle ages. It's worth being reminded of this.

-Still on free speech, Jonathan Turley at the Washington Post describes the arguments being advanced in favor of censorship. Julia Gillard, Australia's worst Prime Minister since Malcolm Fraser, made an appearance with this quote: “Our tolerance must never extend to tolerating religious hatred and incitements to violence”. I couldn't tell whether this meant that we shouldn't tolerate hatred of religions (as Turley seems to imply) or hatred by religions (which, in the context of Islam, implies the opposite side of the debate). The UN press release seems to imply that she meant the latter. Which is good! Except that this was preceded with the statements that 'denigration of religious beliefs was never acceptable'.*  Wrong, you clueless pandering fool. It is acceptable. Otherwise we live in a country with de facto blasphemy laws. It seems there are no depths that she (continuing the cringeworth tradition started with Kevin Rudd) will not debase Australia in order to try to get the pointless prize of a temporary seat on the UN Security Council.

*(This was quoted indirectly in the UN press release, but it turns out that the statement 'denigration of religious beliefs was never acceptable' is a direct quote. Honest to god, I sat through the whole 15 minutes of pathetic bromides to make sure there wasn't some context I was missing. There wasn't).

Other clanger lines delivered:

'Australia's values in the world are those of the UN.'

I certainly hope not.

'The UN is.. the story of navigating the winds of change, the end of colonialism, bringing self-determination to the worlds great majority, the billions of the global south'.

It's also a story of cliches lifted straight from a third-rate sociology faculty lounge!

'2015 is a goal, but it is not a destination.'

Madam, fire your speechwriters.

"There can be no poverty alleviation without the creation of wealth and jobs. Growth alone is never sufficient.'

Fight that mangled strawman! I know I've heard lots of people advancing the argument that 'growth, without the creation of wealth and jobs (whatever the hell that is) is sufficient for alleviating poverty'.

Cancel that - madam, fire yourself. Or just wait for the Australian people to do it for you soon enough.

-Nydwracu rounds out the latest anarcho-tyranny in the UK. The UK Police - they can't catch the guy that burgled your house, but they can catch you if you make an off-colour remark on twitter.

Revenue (if not NPV) Positive Graffiti

I loathe graffiti. Courts tend to view it as a petty crime, just kids letting off steam.

But I find it aesthetically angering in a way that might make me seem like some crazy zero tolerance fanatic.

Sure, the cost to remove it may not be that high. But the mindset of ruining something beautiful merely for your own enjoyment is barbarism on the most primitive level. It is deadweight loss for the sheer enjoyment of deadweight loss. And I hate, hate, hate deadweight loss. If there is one thing that unites economists, it is that.

To make things more galling, the people who deface property will mark it with their own tag, so that others can know who did it. They may be doing it pseudonymously, but they are proud of their destruction of other people's property. I simply cannot fathom that mindset.

Jason Lee Steorts said much the same thing:

Let me end on a personal note. I hate vandals. My friends ask what makes me a conservative, and sometimes I wonder myself, but there is an answer, and it’s that I hate vandals. The problem with vandals is not that they are wrong about a conceptual matter. The problem is that they smash beautiful things. They couldn’t care less about your rules or your God or your conception of the good. You have to stop them with tools that work.

Recently though, I found something that I didn't think possible - graffiti that didn't strike me as completely value destroying.

I'm not talking about political slogan protests, although that might qualify depending on your view of the NPV of various political causes.

The graffiti that I found interesting was a couple of cases where the spraypaint scrawl gave the URL of either a youtube channel, or a soundcloud link.

This is by far the most entrepreneurial use of graffiti that I've come across. At least the vandal is hoping to get something out of it - ad revenue, and perhaps new audience members. If their stuff is actually interesting, there may well be consumer surplus to the people watching the clips.

Looked at this way, it's far more akin to traditional advertising billboards, except a) they're not paying the property owner, and b) it's not as attractive.

Both of these are genuine problems, to be sure. Because the property rights aren't secure, you can't appeal to the Coase theorem. We can't determine whether the value to the property owner to not have the graffiti is higher than the value to the vandal of having it. Presumably, in fact, it's not, because otherwise the vandal would have negotiated with the city to put up their URL (yeah right). It's at least positive revenue, if not positive NPV. Most graffiti is just loss piled on loss.

Still, it inspired in me a curious grudging respect for the guerrilla marketing skills of whoever came up with it. If the counterfactual is more youtube graffiti, I would be unhappy about it. But if the counterfactual is that existing graffiti artists turn their hand to promoting social media channels instead of inane gang logos, moving from 4th best to 3rd best is still a change for the good.

Call Their Bluff

Do it.

I dare you.

Wherein Feminism May Have a Point

Famed internet movie critic Jabrody has a list of the 50 most memorable movie characters, parts 26-50, 11-25 and 1-10. Check it out.

I'm going to take a cue from the Steve Sailer trick of using a list compiled for one purpose to answer an altogether different question. So what was striking about the list to me?  One thing that does stand out is just how few female characters make the cut - only 9 out of 50.

Now, absent some serious explaining, I'm aware that the previous sentence would be in the running for 'most pissweak sentence ever written on this blog'. So hear me out.

First of all, there is absolutely no implied criticism of Jabrody here. Quite the contrary, in fact - I thought he was maybe even overly generous in including interesting female characters (Princess Leia wouldn't have made my top 50, and Kim Basinger was, to me, eminently forgettable in LA Confidential). Not only that, but the next names on my list would have been men (Gordon Gekko, Trent from Swingers, Arnie in Terminator 2). In fact, if you pressed me for my most memorable female character, I could only think of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Scratch that - how many movies can you name where the female character is even the most interesting character in that movie, let alone all movies? Nurse Ratched doesn't pass that test for me. The only one that comes to mind there is Amelie.

So let's assume for the purpose of argument that there really aren't many memorable female characters, and this isn't just because I'm an evil misogynistic patriarchal oppressor, it's some kind of consensus view. Why is this interesting?

The reason is that movies, like advertising, give a direct window into our collective psyches. There's lots of reasons why there might be few women in boardrooms, including boring facts about education and the impact of child-rearing. But movies are just fantasy - we put in what we want to put in.

And for one reason or another, that doesn't include interesting female characters. The category of 'interesting' or 'memorable' is sufficiently broad that it's not like the women need to succeed in a male role either. But for some reason, scriptwriters aren't compelled to write in witty dialogue and back stories that makes women seem memorable as characters.

I suspect that part of the issue is that a lot of women are in movies more to look attractive than to be 'cool'. Sure, it helps for guys to be attractive. But can you imagine a female version of Philip Seymour Hoffman or Woody Allen? It seems that being attractive is almost a strictly necessary condition for being famous as an actress. This makes it more likely that the actresses being selected might just not be that good in the acting part. Some of the characters on the list make it purely from knock-it-out-of-the-park performances by the actor in question. Heath Ledger as the Joker and Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in 'No Country For Old Men' come to mind as characters that might have been boring or trite in the hands of less capable actors.

The standard feminist answer is that movie audiences, like society in general, are sexist in their expectations of women. But this doesn't seem to explain why there aren't memorable female characters in movies marketed specifically to women. Can you think of any interesting female character in a romantic comedy? Me neither. I don't think you can pin this just on audience sexism. If this is audience demand, I think it's not limited to one gender. If women demanded interesting characters instead of hotties that they could aspire to be like, studios would probably deliver.

Part of the reason might be that scriptwriters tend to be male, and thus have more ability to empathise with their male creations. Hence they end up getting the more interesting dialogue.

Truthfully, I don't know the answer, but it is puzzling.

It reminded me of the other interesting feminist critique of movies, the Bechdel test:

Does the movie

1. Have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man?

I certainly don't think that every (or even most) movies would be more interesting if modified to pass the test.  But that doesn't mean it's not an interesting question to consider.

The Cruelty of Small Zoo Cages

 (image credit)

If you're at the zoo with educated types, a frequent complaint you'll hear is about the cruelty of keeping these animals in small enclosures. Look at them! They look so miserable and idle. It's like living your whole life in prison, or in a mental institution. Why don't they put them in a proper-sized enclosure?

For starters, these people rarely tend to list the other side of the ledger than comes from this captivity - lots of animals, primates in particular, tend to live considerably longer in captivity than in the wild, for much the same reasons that you and I live longer in modern society than we would in the wilds of Borneo.

Still, let's take the complaint at face value, and ask the question that the bleeding hearts never seem to get around to asking - why don't  they put the animals in larger enclosures?

The simplest answer is cost - double the size of the enclosures and you'll need roughly double the land area to hold the zoo. That means that either the admission cost is going to have to go up, or the zoo will have to be located miles away where land is cheap. Are you willing to pay either of these costs? Probably not.

But I think there's an even more pervasive reason why the enclosures have to be small - humans insist on being able to see the animals close up.

The chimpanzees sure aren't getting any bigger. If you put them in a huge enclosure, then you're more likely to only see them at a distance, or not at all. Not nearly as exciting that way, is it? At a minimum, if you have a really large area, like the wildlife parks or safaris, you need to be able to enter the enclosure to find the animals yourself. It's not hard to see why this model doesn't scale very well if you want to have thousands of people passing through each day, because the potential for accidents becomes enormous. There's a reason they're called "wild animals" - chimpanzees might look cute, but they'll rip your face off.

What people actually want is for the animals to live in a huge natural enclosure, but also to be magically walking by really close at exactly the moment that the person is ready to see them. No such enclosure exists. 

Viewed in this light, all the complaints about small cages are just so many crocodile tears, designed to assuage the guilty feelings that visitors feel knowing that they're benefiting from the animal's captivity.

As always, don't be surprised when the zoos cater to your revealed preference for small cages rather than your stated preference for large cages. They won't even mind if you complain about the small cages as you demand their existence, to make your conscience feel better. Very few businesses ever do.

Fighting for order in the Chaos

If you want further evidence that the Dredd idea about order is a reactionary one, consider this great statement of principle from famous reactionary Klemens von Metternich.

To me the word freedom has not the value of a starting-point, but of an actual goal to be striven for. The word order designates the starting-point. It is only on order that freedom can be based. Without order as a foundation the cry for freedom is nothing more than the endeavour of some party or other for an end it has in view. When actually carried out in practice, that cry for freedom will inevitably express itself in tyranny. At all times and in all situations I was a man of order, yet my endeavour was always for true and not for pretended liberty.

Klemens von Metternich: fighting for order in the chaos of the Austrian Empire.

Exactly how bad was last night's debate for Obama?

Reddit is the home to more-educated-than-average teenagers and twentysomethings. As a result, they post a bunch of interesting and funny stuff, but they also tend to be smug and condescending in their overwhelmingly liberal political leanings.

Anyway, over at the front page right now is a  very good question:

As a Canadian, I was quite surprised to see so little discussion of the Presidential Debate making it to the front page this morning. Is this because Romney apparently "won" the debate?

The answer is "Yes, obviously. As a basic fact about human nature, most people don't enjoy talking about miserable things. In addition, liberals have a sizable dose of cognitive dissonance to resolve regarding the question of why the guy they thought was such a magical public speaker and political genius got trounced by a guy they've universally derided as an empty suit. Rather than resolve this dilemma, it's easier to just ignore it."

I clicked on it expecting a lot of 'No, really, it's not like that, we just thought that politics suddenly became really uninteresting!'.

To their credit, the highest rated responses are a lot more self-aware and honest than I gave them credit for.

"I think the fact that I haven't seen anyone on reddit claiming Obama won is pretty telling."

"..... if you think its crickets now ... Ryan and Biden debate LOL"

"Even msnbc admitted Romney won so yeah...it was pretty bad for obama"

"It reminds me of the 2010 election results, where the Republicans made huge gains in Congress. I thought when I opened reddit I would see a bunch of news stories on the results of the election. This was back when I still thought of reddit as a news site, or at least the news and politics subreddits.
However, it was crickets all around. That's the day I realized you cannot hope to remain current on politics and the news by reading reddit. I expected bias, what I didn't expect was complete self-censorship."

The last point is spot on.

I read it for a different reason - I expect exactly this kind of bias and the self-censorship, but it's useful to read people who disagree with you. I don't want to end up in an echo-chamber where I only hear viewpoints that reinforce what I already think.

If you only read things that support what you already believe, you end up like the guys on Reddit, baffled when reality doesn't conform to the only data you've been receiving.

Update: From Pax Dickinson:

Obama is working on a devastating "jerk store" zinger for the next debate. It's gonna be CRAY

Ha! Comedy gold.

That depends. When are you going to lose some weight?

As part of your introverted correspondent's mission to understand social conventions, I find myself interested in what personal questions are considered polite and impolite to ask.

One that I find particularly odd is the fact that sizable numbers of people seem to think it's appropriate to ask newly-wedded couples when they're going to have children.

I think this isn't considered impolite by a lot of people, but perhaps ought to be.

Now, this isn't in the category of easily disclosed facts that needs to be concealed in order to prevent social friction between the questioner and the respondent. An example of this kind would be how much someone earns - there's not much ambiguity about what the number actually is or what it means, but disclosing it might provoke either envy or embarrassment. I'm not a big fan of those types of taboos, but I can understand why they exist.

The problem, rather, is that the question seems quite likely to be unresolved, and possibly a sore point as well.

Let's assume your early thirties married couple hasn't had children yet. There's a range of possible reasons that this might be the case, and a lot of them suggest you probably shouldn't have asked.

1. One of the two parties wants children and the other one wants them either later, or not at all. This is almost certainly likely to be a mildly sore point (at a minimum) between the two, and likely not an argument that they would relish re-litigating in front of a public audience.

2. They're actively trying to have children, but are having difficulties conceiving. Way to go! Their medical issues are undoubtedly something that they'd love to talk about at the dinner party. As a bonus, you can also delve into who might be at fault between the two of them! Is he shooting blanks? Is she barren? At worst it's hugely awkward, at best it can publicly reopen rounds of hurtful recriminations!

3. Neither of them want to have children yet, but they'd rather not explain this to you. This is the most compelling reason to not ask, that for the vast majority of people on the planet, it's simply none of their business. Having children or not seems like a fairly important and personal consideration that lots of people might not want to discuss in front of everyone. In addition, the question is almost always phrased as if they need to justify their decision to not have children. I understand why the potential grandparents might feel compelled to inquire, but some guy at the office? Really?

I do my bit for the married couples in my life by never asking. I was talking to a friend the other day, who complained how people tend to ask him when he's going to have kids, impatient for them to happen soon. I told him that I thought it was weird how people always asked these kinds of questions, and to the extent I had any thoughts on the matter, I was quite happy that they seemed content to not have kids in a raging hurry, because if they did it would really put a dent in our hanging out time. Even that, I said only because
a) he'd know I was kidding -I didn't actually consider it any of my business, and would be delighted with whatever choice they made, and
b) he'd possibly find it a welcome counterpoint to the pro-child chiding he receives too much of.

I like people having children. I also like people making their own choices free from needless nosiness.

You wouldn't ask a couple "how's your marriage holding up?". You wouldn't ask "how's that embarrassing medical condition of yours?". So why ask about something that has a good chance of bearing upon both of these?

Methinks the douchebag doth protest too much...

If you've ever had cause to say 'I'm not like those other guys', it is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are, in fact, exactly like those other guys.

The guys that are truly different almost never need to explicitly state this. It's just one more example of the 'Message: I Care' mistake, which Jonah Goldberg calls "reading the stage directions".

Dredd

The new Judge Dredd movie is actually surprisingly good. It's at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is unusually high for an action movie.

The line that stood out to me (and was repeated twice, once at the start and again at the end) was the following:

800 million people living in the ruin of the old world.

Only one thing fighting for order in the chaos - the men and women of the Hall of Justice.

This is a surprisingly reactionary concept of "the good". They are not fighting for justice. They are certainly not fighting for social justice. No, they are fighting for order, which is a good in itself.

This is not a common viewpoint. That's because we live in such a generally ordered world that we take it for granted. But you notice order when its not there - the London Riots, Hurricane Katrina, the LA riots etc.

Mencius Moldbug had an excellent article years ago talking about this point. The Dungeons and Dragons World classifies characters on a 3x3 scale of {Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic} x {Good, Neutral, Evil}. But Moldbug raises the question of whether there really is a Chaotic Good - whether the only real dimension is Lawful (and Good) vs Chaotic (and Evil). I'm not sure he's right, but it's an interesting perspective.

The world of Dredd is one in which Judges are fighting a rearguard action to preserve the minimum amount of social order. The movie also flirts with another reactionary theme about martial law that is surely true, but rarely acknowledged: that due process and compassion are luxury goods, relative to the basic good of maintaining a functioning civil society. Substantive fairness is a Louis Vuitton handbag. Procedural fairness is three square meals a day. Order is oxygen.

When the world gets sufficiently violent and crime-ridden, the first priority is to put a stop to the violence and crime. Indeed, when things get bad enough, ideas like martial law may actually become very popular. This seems like a strange possibility, because the average westerner today is perhaps more worried about police brutality and abuses of power. But if citizens start to feel that they have much more to fear from thugs than the police, you might be surprised what a change that produces. Sending in the marines to finally stop the LA riots was a highly popular decision.

Dredd is the ultimate personification of the idealised policeman in this framework - tough, and absolutely fearless in his fight on crime. There is one interesting scene early on where you see that he also does not mechanically apply the rules in every single case - there is a homeless guy at the start that Dredd warns to not be there when he gets back, after quoting what penalty he is guilty of. He has more important things to deal with than minor infractions that don't threaten social stability.

In the Dredd universe, the law's main function is as a tool for maintaining the peace. This is the context in which Dredd's catchline, 'I am the Law', need not be ironic. What stands between society and chaos is ultimately a small number of individuals.

Or, as Orwell said about Kipling:

He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them

I imagine a lot of cops would agree.

Things that make me feel patriotic

I was in an English-themed pub on Friday night (in the US of A), watching the Australian Rules Football Grand Final. I don't know why, but it seems to be a regular trend that random sporting events in the US, of whatever sort, are screened by British pubs, usually with British proprietors (this guy was from Liverpool).

As those of you who watched know, it was a great game (I'm a Dockers man, so I didn't really care about the result, but it's rare to see such a close finish). The crowd was quite Aussie-heavy, and it was enormous fun to be reminded of the subtle cultural differences between Australia and the US. Things started well when some player had been knocked down after failing to prevent a goal, and some guy yelled 'Get up, you wuss!'.

Anyway, what warmed my heart greatly was that at some point, the camera flashed to a picture of Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime Minister, in the crowd. At least three quarters of the room booed loudly.

What a refreshing change from the bogus choreographed boosterism and cheering of the US national conventions! Julia Gillard is deeply unpopular, but the irritation went deeper than that (and I suspect that the fraction of the room booing was considerably larger than the fraction that would have voted for Tony Abbott at the last election) Indeed, I'm quite confident that if you'd been in that room in previous years, the response would have been very similar for Kevin Rudd, John Howard, Paul Keating or any other Prime Minister.

Australians tend to regard their politicians with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. This holds almost equally for the ones they vote for and the ones they don't. And this seems to me to be a far healthier attitude for a free citizenry to have towards the people that want to rule over them.

I remember when Barack Obama got elected in 2008, and they had the huge victory celebration in Chicago. Such a spectacle would be inconceivable in Australia - the whole idea simply wouldn't pass the laugh test. I'm meant to spend my night turning up to cheer for a politician? If you held it, nobody would turn up.

When politicians turn up at non-political events of national enjoyment, such as the AFL Grand Final, Australins tend to resent the intrusion. The whole 'man (or woman) of the people' nonsense is recognised for the contrived and artificial performance that it is. Meanwhile, the whole vibe given off is of a monarch enjoying the privilege of swanning into prime seats at major sporting events by virtue of their position.

And none of this needed to be explained to anybody in the room. This healthy disrespect of government authority was entirely spontaneous and widespread.

In a free country, elected officials may get your vote, but they ought not get your cheerful subservience. The message, which politicians everywhere need to be reminded of, is clear: we tolerate your presence out of a conviction that voting is superior to dictatorship, but we do so reluctantly and grudgingly. Do not mistake this for a desire to be ruled.

Reply Paid Arbitrage

What charities say on their reply-paid envelopes:

Your stamp on this envelope adds to your gift!

What charities should say on their reply-paid envelopes:

You could put a stamp on this envelope to save us money, but why not donate an extra 45 cents and let us pay the postage, since our charitable institution reply-paid rates are much lower than what you'd pay?

That way our charity gets more money, the post office gets less money, you get a bigger tax deduction, and the government gets less money to start foreign wars and hire meddling bureaucrats to make your life hard!

I guess the people that think hard about  how to arbitrage the government don't tend to end up in the charity fundraising business.

Postal reply arbitrage does have a somewhat checkered past, but I think it's now time to rehabilitate its reputation.

Planking, Considered

A tale of two UN Speeches

Barack Obama recently made a speech at the UN talking about the recent attacks on the US Embassy in Benghazi, and the anti-Islamic film that may or may not have sparked the whole thing.

The line that got a lot of attention was the following:

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Taken at face value, this is a deplorable and pathetic response to this whole sordid mess, sounding like a combination of apology and pandering.

But as Ken at Popehat points out quite eloquently, the context of the line does make it somewhat less unpalatable. Taken as a whole, the speech is actually a fairly good defense of free expression, which you can read over at Popehat. Even the 'The future does not belong to Islam' line is part of a repeating rhetorical device:

The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt – it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women – it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons. The future must not belong to those corrupt few who steal a country’s resources – it must be won by the students and entrepreneurs; workers and business owners who seek a broader prosperity for all people. Those are the men and women that America stands with; theirs is the vision we will support.

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims. It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” Together, we must work towards a world where we are strengthened by our differences, and not defined by them. That is what America embodies, and that is the vision we will support.

Meh. "Targeting" (i.e. murdering) Coptic Christians is not at all equivalent to making a crappy movie about Islam. And the atheists would dispute even the narrowly defined claim, as they would argue that Islam, like all religions deserves ridicule and contempt. Still, if you were to weigh up the sum of all the sentiments expressed in the speech, it's not too bad.

But here's where things get murky. As one of the commenters, Tarrou pointed out, the line about not slandering Islam is the only thing that most people will ever hear from the speech. And what should you make of that? As I wrote over in the comments section:

I guess it comes down to whether you think that the speechwriters put that line in knowing that it would be the only thing that gets quoted. I could see it going either way, but the the way you interpret the overall speech seems to vary a lot based on the answer to that question.

On the one hand, if you write speeches for a living, you've got to know that one wrong line means that that will be the only thing that gets quoted. You might assume, therefore, that they write speeches accordingly, and the line was thus deliberately chosen knowing it would be quoted (but in a context where they can point to the rest of the speech and say "see, we were defending free speech!").

On the other hand, I can also imagine that it would be immensely frustrating to be a speechwriter and know that the vast majority of people will never read past the headline if you happen to put in one infelicitously chosen remark. If it was just a slip, then they'd be sharing Ken's frustration that nobody is reading everything else that was said, which does indeed defend free speech quite robustly.

And there's the rub. I tend to favor some part of the former interpretation - that line was deliberately chosen to sound like a highly quotable passage of appeasement in a speech that generally wasn't appeasing. Weigh that accordingly, but these guys are pros, writing for a worldwide audience.

In other words, it's a mistake to assume that everything in a political speech represents the balance of exactly what the politician means. More often, it's just designed to have a specific effect on the various parts of the audience.

So should you give Obama most of the credit for a reasonably good defense of free speech, with the remark about Islam merely a way of getting the Islamic part of the audience onside by showing he respects their religion? Or should you be skeptical that the Islam line was the deliberately chosen, quotable part of the speech, and the rest was just a way of insulating himself against criticism?

I dunno.

The whole thing reminds me somewhat of what Glenn Reynolds said during the 2008 election about Obama's anti-free-trade rhetoric while Austan Goolsbee was singing a different tune to the Canadians:

When it comes to things like NAFTA, there seem to be only two possibilities. Either Obama's anti-NAFTA talk is a ruse to fool the rubes, or his coterie of distinguished economic experts is a ruse to fool a different batch of rubes.

On the NAFTA one, thankfully, it seems that he was actually listening to Austan Goolsbee and not the unions. On this one, I guess we'll see.

So much for the first UN speech. What was the second one?

Via Half Sigma, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's UN speech about, among other things, the coming 12th Imam. Yes, really.

Mr. President, Friends and Dear Colleagues,

Creating peace and lasting security with decent life for all, although a great and a historic mission can be accomplished. The Almighty God has not left us alone in this mission and has said that it will surely happen. If it doesn't, then it will be contradictory to his wisdom.

-God Almighty has promised us a man of kindness, a man who loves people and loves absolute justice, a man who is a perfect human being and is named Imam A1-Mahdi, a man who will come in the company of Jesus Christ (PBUH) and the righteous. By using the inherent potential of all the worthy men and women of all nations and I repeat, the inherent potential of "all the worthy men and women of all nations" he will lead humanity into achieving its glorious and eternal ideals.

-The arrival of the Ultimate Savior will mark a new beginning, a rebirth and a resurrection. It will be the beginning of peace, lasting security and genuine life.

Even supposing you believe this (and lots of people do), it's a rather strange thing to throw into a speech to the world's leaders. Say what you will about the specific claims, you have to agree that it's pretty straightforward - you're not left in enormous doubt trying to parse the subtle political meanings. As Half Sigma noted, expect to read about this exactly nowhere.

As part of his visit, he also apparently wanted to meet with the Occupy Wall Street folks, but that didn't seem to actually happen.

So cheer up, conservatives! You could be ruled by Ahmadinejad instead.

You'd think they'd learn...

I keep telling 'em, but they just don't listen.

Not a Shylock Holmes reader, clearly.

Six Degrees of "Germany Should Pay"

Every time I hear EU politicians speak (other than a few hilarious exceptions), I like to mentally play a game called 'Six Degrees of "Germany Should Pay"'.

A la 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon', the prediction is that from the initial premise of the argument, within six steps of the chain of logic will come the conclusion that German taxpayers ought to be contributing more money.

For instance, here's one I heard a little while ago:

-Different European banks currently face a variety of different regulatory regimes, so...

-To overcome the discrepancies in liquidity and solvency that this creates, Europe needs a central banking regulator, so...

-As part of having a central banking regulator, there will be the need to have a central bank deposit guarantee, so...

-This will mean the need for a fund to bail out insolvent European banks, so...

-Germany should pay!

Here's one I didn't prepare in advance, taken from a random Google search of 'EU Politician Proposals'

EP President Schulz Proposes Economic (Bubble) Zones for Greece under EU Control

Let me merely number the quotes taken directly from the article, with the verbiage removed

Growth-Plan: Special Economic Zones to rescue Greece

[1] Greece has enacted a rigorous austerity program, but the country also needs a strategy to get the economy back on growth track.

(blah blah, boilerplate about creating growth)

[2] Cuts alone would not bring growth, Schulz said in a SPIEGEL interview, “so I’m looking for a special economic zone in Greece.”

[3] For it, a “Growth Agency” should be created, Schulz demands.

[4] In this agency, European and Greek politicians should jointly identify promoting eligible projects and control the cash flows.

(blah blah PR nonsense)

[5] Prerequisite for this SEZ is a commitment to the euro in Greece, a willingness to reform in Athens and investment allowances for companies that invest in Greece. And so... (drumroll)...

[6] Germany should pay!

And that's being generous with what counts as a step.

Try it with a few others and see how often I'm wrong.

As I've said, the $1 trillion question is when German taxpayers are going to get sick of of their designated role as  the chumps at the table week after week buying dinner for their friends who mysteriously keep forgetting their wallets. Let's kick that horse a little longer and find out!

There's a related EU politician game of 'Six Degrees of "Europe Needs Greater Centralisation"', but that's less fun to play because the number of degrees rarely exceeds two.

The Stars

One of the things I miss the most by living in an urban environment is the fact that you don't get to see the stars in the evening.  Sometimes you see a few, but you never see the full grandeur of the Milky Way. To get that, you need to be away from light pollution, and to get that, you need to be away from civilisation.

It's unfortunate. Not just because of the lost beauty. But I think it contributes ever so slightly to the relentlessly increasing narcism of modern youth. When you seen the enormity of the galaxy spread out in front of you, it's hard (for me, anyway) to not be reminded of the puny insignificance of one's problems. On the properly appreciated scale, your entire existence is so utterly inconsequential that it really doesn't make sense to get too worried about things. As A.E. Housman put it:

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.

Point, Counterpoint

Point:



Counterpoint:

"I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind: It would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this government falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination we will have."

- Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy - 1864

Whack That Mole!

Over at Hacker News comes another story of patent trolls at PersonalWeb trying to use the legal system to extort money out of a company that actually produces something of value - Rackspace.

Rackspace describes the hilariously inept lawsuit:

To explain, this suit claims that Rackspace infringes the PersonalWeb patents “by its manufacture, use, sale, importation, and/or offer for sale of the following products and services within the PersonalWeb Patent Field: Rackspace Cloud Servers and GitHub Code Hosting Service.” It’s apparent that the people filing the suit don’t understand the technology or the products enough to realize that Rackspace Cloud Servers and GitHub are completely different products from different companies. By now, it’s widely known that GitHub is hosted at Rackspace, but beyond that, there is no other connection between the two.

In other words, they named both Rackspace and a client of Rackspace as both being things sold by Rackspace.

But don't let this kind of pathetic 'failure-to-google-even-basic-details-about-the-tech-industry' ineptitude fool you - these guys are technology pioneers, and its crucial to protect their right to innovate for ... well, nobody knows quite what fig leaf they're even claiming.

Rackspace in its post describes legislation they're supporting to try to combat this problem.

The next legislative effort will likely center around what is known as the SHIELD Act, which has been introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) and Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). This bill would require plaintiffs to pay defendants’ legal costs if the suit is unsuccessful. Under current law, the patent trolls don’t have any meaningful risk in bringing litigation. The defendants, on the other hand, are subjected to enormous legal expenses and discovery costs. The SHIELD Act is designed to level the playing field and take away the trolls’ unfair advantage. We encourage all of our customers, partners, open source collaborators and friends to support Reps. DeFazio and Chaffetz in their effort to discourage these abusive patent troll lawsuits.

I applaud this effort, but it seems to miss the forest for the trees.

Tree #1 - patent trolls keep filing lots of frivolous lawsuits, extorting money out of technology company. This needs some sort of specific remedy, such as making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the defense's legal costs.

Tree #2 - Unscrupulous junk science trial lawyers keep suing doctors for enormous amounts of money over any perceived problem, driving up the cost of malpractice insurance and healthcare. This needs some sort of specific remedy, like capping damages for pain and suffering in malpractice lawsuits.

Tree #3 - Thugs desiring to silence public debate file lots of lawsuits to bankrupt opponents. This requires some sort of specific remedy, such as an Anti-SLAPP statute to help stop egregious discover processes and make unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the defense's legal costs.

What is the forest? The fact that America refuses to implement an across-the-board loser pays system of civil proceedings.

The great reasons why unsuccessful patent trolls should pay the other side's legal costs apply to everybody - lame unfair dismissal claims, Americans with Disabilities Act gold-digging lawsuits for trivial breaches of building codes, frivolous claims that you slipped over on somebody's sidewalk, etc. etc. etc. You can get rid of the whole lot of them, all at once, by just making the losing party pay the legal fees.

The lawyers will howl that this will discourage people from filing lawsuits.

Exactly. There are far, far too many lawsuits in America. A big part of the reason for this is that filing a lawsuit when your own counsel is operating on contingency (as lots of plaintiffs have) gives you a call option - your payoffs are zero or positive. And people are surprised when lots of people load up on call options?

If you simply made plaintiffs bear some of the costs, in expectation, that they impose on society through their lawsuits, you wouldn't have to screw around with a zillion other makeshift fixes for the enormous numbers of problems that this underlying legal deficiency creates.

Is this going to happen any time soon?

Sadly, no.

You've Got To Be F***ing Kidding Me

What a disgrace. What a complete, disgusting disgrace.

Ken at Popehat points out, correctly, that this guy has potentially violated his parole terms by using a computer when he wasn't supposed to, and using an alias to secure funding for making this movie. So they have some notional reason for arresting the guy.

My question is this - don't you think that the matter has escalated a little way past the point where the question is one of violating parole terms?

Let's put it this way - it is incredibly unlikely that the Islamic world is going to view this arrest as indicating 'Wow, those US guys have a firm and unwavering commitment to free speech, but boy do they sure take parole violations seriously!'.

When it suits their political purposes, the Obama administration has no problem whatsoever using executive orders to waive prosecutions for violations of federal law by hundreds of thousands of offenders.

And when it suits their political purposes, they will throw absolutely every law in the book at you if you make a movie insulting Islam that happens to cause political embarrassment for the government.

This is a craven, cowardly surrender to mob violence, and absolutely no good will come of it.

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.