One pound of inference, no more, no less. No humbug, no cant, but only inference. This task done, and he would go free.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Law School
Somehow I see Hector Lopez delivering a similar speech 20 years in the future.
I loved the lines:
Woman: I also want to work for legal aid. It must be so fascinating to help poor people with their legal problems.
Man: What's fascinating is that you will be one of these poor people, except you will have $100,000 of law school debt
Ah, so true!
Two Best Metaphors of the Day
"So the Democrats sucked. ....
It’s Godzilla-smashing-through-a-city level of suck — but a really patronizing Godzilla who says you’re just too stupid and hateful to see all the buildings he’s saved or created as he smashes everything apart. Or, to use Obama’s favorite analogy, you have a car stuck in ditch, so you call the mechanic, but the only tool he brings with him is a sledgehammer. And then he smashes your car to pieces and charges you $100,000 for his service. Finally, he calls you racist for complaining. Obama and the Democrats have been so awful, it’s hard for the human brain to even comprehend."
Awesome.
The UN and Famine
A little acknowledged fact is that there was no famine in Somalia prior to the U.N.’s arrival. To be sure, there were localized food shortages and hunger, but no widespread famine.
The famine began when the U.N. arrived and began giving away food. With free food available, farmers cold not sell their crops and so they stopped farming; the U.N. became the major source of food.
Once U.N. aid convoys were the only viable source of food, it was easy for the warlords to seize the unarmed convoys and food warehouses and monopolize the food supply. Presto, instant famine.
This sounds exactly right to me (and not just because of my strong presumption about the UN's tendency to increase corruption and misery). One of the surprising parts of Amartya Sen's research into famines was that, contrary to what everyone presumed, many famines had little to do with underlying shortages of food. Instead they arise from complex interactions to do with price. The Bengal famine of 1943 happened (as Sen showed) during the middle of an economic boom. As Jeffrey Sachs explains:
"Sen demonstrated that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.
And why didn't the government react by dispensing emergency food relief? Sen's answer was enlightening. Because colonial India was not a democracy, he said, the British rulers had little interest in listening to the poor, even in the midst of famine.
This political observation gave rise to what might be called Sen's Law: shortfalls in food supply do not cause widespread deaths in a democracy because vote-seeking politicians will undertake relief efforts; but even modest food shortfalls can create deadly famines in authoritarian societies."So it seems the Somalian famine wasn't the classic Sen case of rising food prices causing people to not be able to afford food. But it still demonstrates the centrality of prices in understanding famines, and how lowering the price of food to zero is a great way to eliminate all food production. It fits in with Sen's idea broader of the 'failure of exchange entitlements' - the disruption in prices undermines the normal ways that people exchange services (farmers stop farming because the disruption causes them to be uncertain of whether their crops will be worth anything, even though they were eventually highly sought after). It's also consistent with the ultimate Sen punchline that modern famines almost always occur in part due to authoritarian governments.
Via Ace of Spades
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Veneer of Civilisation
"Writers have always loved to describe situations in which a man or men (rarely women) have been isolated in the most difficult circumstances, individually or collectively. Generally speaking, what those writers have tried to show is that the civilization of civilized men is but a veneer that is easily stripped off by a little (or much) adversity. Man is thus what he has always been: a wolf to himself. They rarely draw the conclusion that the veneer is the most important thing about civilization."
British Tax Dollars At Work
I have no problem with Kelly Marshall spending her money however she sees fit. Milton Friedman would (and did) agree. Thrift and savings are also not to be derided. If she simply spent her money on booze, drugs and fast food (like so many in Britain's welfare slums), the story would be so common as to be entirely unremarkable.Kelly Marshall saved her benefit money to help pay for breast enhancement.
... she plans to save more of hers for liposuction and a tummy tuck. Miss Marshall, who has never worked, rakes in almost £29,000 a year from benefits - and last year spent £4,500 to go from a 34A to a 34DD.
Most families who are due to lose their child benefit are worrying about how they'll make ends meet without it.And yet, this wretched woman is apparently living the life of Riley on the same payments. Hmm, incongruous isn't it?
For Kelly Marshall, who has five children by four different fathers,
Mia, 11, Nio, ten, Lenni, three, Kallie, 11 and Lewis, 16Naming your child with a misspelled version of Keanu Reaves in The Matrix (the dates line up too) - double classy!
'I know most people will think it is wrong I am spending taxpayers' money on my looks. But I deserve it because I am a good mum.'...
'I always take the kids abroad,' she said. 'We have been to Tenerife and Cyprus, and this year we have been to Magaluf twice. 'Each holiday costs about £2,000, but it's good to get away, and the kids and I deserve it.'
'But I don't think me or my children should miss out on nice things just because I have never worked.'
'My mum worked all her life and she paid taxes so I feel I am getting what I deserve,'Okay, so she does realise that taxpayers are picking up the tab somehow. I am going to go out on a crazy limb here, and predict that her mum didn't pay nearly enough taxes to cover the value of what her daughter will receive from the government (even assuming that her Mum was relieved of any obligation to contribute towards anything else the government does).
'I don't care that it is at the taxpayers' cost,' she told Closer magazine. ...
"A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor--
it is a fixed characteristic of human nature;
and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it."
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Market for Picking Up Women
Monday, October 18, 2010
Pandora
Signs you may be watching the wrong show
Sunday, October 17, 2010
From the Sublime to the Ridiculous
Here dead lie we because we did not chooseTo live and shame the land from which we sprung.Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;But young men think it is, and we were young.If there's a poem with more wisdom condensed into four lines, I have yet to read it.
From the Vault
I particularly loved this paragraph about the possibility of creating a civil war by playing factions off against each other:
Not even those old-school Brits could do it now, in Iraq. Because whereas the 1920-vintage IRA had a fairly disciplined leadership to play games with, we've got -- who? -- to talk to in Iraq. You'd be better off trying to divide and conquer the roaches in your kitchen. Nobody runs the insurgency, and nobody really runs the Shia militias either, not at national level. Sadr? He's their poster boy as long as he mouths off the way the hardliners want, but he'll go the way of Sistani if he tries to curb the boys' enthusiasm. They don't need help. They're having the time of their lives. It's not so much fun for the other focus groups, like women and men over 25 but for Iraqi boys from 15-25, these are the Wonder Years.If ever there was a master of combining gallows humour with brilliant military insight, Gary Brecher is it.
Thoughts on The Social Network and The Olympic Games
Anyway, the movie left me with a feeling I can best describe as 'life choice envy' for Silicon Valley types starting their own companies and attempting to change the world. Actually, 'envy' isn't quite the right word, as there wasn't any sense of resentment of their success.It was more a feeling of being impressed by people who really are trying to do something big with their lives, and a slight hollow sense that one's own aims and achievements are insufficiently ambitious.
I originally encountered a similar sensation when watching the Olympics as a teenager. There was a dawning sense that a) this was something that I'd abstractly wanted to do when I was a child, and b) I wasn't ever going to get there. There are two potential ways of interpreting this. The first is that one should have tried harder, as in aiming for world-beating success in some endeavour, and that one's own decisions were too slack and unambitious. This was always the initial feeling I got when watching the Games. The second interpretation (which usually came after a day or two's reflection) is that one is simply envying an outcome, not a decision - what you really want is the feeling of great success and winning a gold medal, not the whole package of the gold medal plus what's required to actually get it.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Prison - Worse, Better and Different Than What You Might Imagine
An old timer told me that when he first went inside, in the 80s, prison was all about cliques. There were different gangs, people stuck together because of ethnicity, even religion. Back then there were Irish Catholic cliques, Nation of Islam cliques - even white collar guys started cliques to avoid getting stepped on.
One thing the boss' do very well is create an atmosphere of constant paranoia. If you get shaken down and you get contraband found on you, they'll stick you in solitary and finger your best friend for setting you up. If you come inside with a pre-existing gang affiliation, like a lot of black guys do, they start by stepping on your friends straight away and blaming you for it until you're a pariah. Forget about the yard being full of big groups of guys chilling together. No one hangs with anymore than three people for a stretch. If you're seen with a big group, you'll be targeted by the screws. Mostly, people do their time alone. Pacing the yard, or even just ignoring their cell mates completely.
That gets to you more than anything. The constant suspicion, and knowing you're alone.
What did you miss most about sex while inside? Just the sex itself or the intimacy? I know there are cliches on both sides about that so I was wondering what your thoughts were.
You know how a lot of people that hang around these boards will say how they're desensitised to sexuality? How years of the most twisted porn the Internet's underbelly can offer has made them numb? I guess I was like that going in. If you had have asked me, the day before I went inside, what my ultimate sexual fantasy was I'd have said something stupid like 'Emma Waton, a rubber tube, two mexican fighting fish, a chainsaw and a bucket of grease'.
Now, I s*** you not, my answer would more likely be 'a beautiful woman that loves me'.
Every convict has a jack bank. Scraps of magazines, smuggled porn, that kind of thing. I used to keep mine under the inner sole of my sneaker. If you took a survey of what convicts keep in their jack bank, you'd be shocked to learn that mostly, it's women's faces. The single most sought after item in the common area was the TV guide. Because you'd get full page ads for movies and beautiful women.Huh. Interesting. Not what I would have imagined, but I'd definitely believe it.
Read the whole thing. Most fascinating piece I've read in the past month.
Free advice for musicians composing song lyrics
Nothing like topical comics
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Good Advice
Let’s turn to the granddaddy of software development:
Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone
The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun
That’s a headline and sub-head from a press release. (Thanks, DF)
What the hell does any of it mean? What do users really want to do? Absent Robbie Bach and J. Allard, I don’t trust the word “fun” anywhere in a new product announcement from Microsoft, either. They probably mean an optional Comic Sans UI.
Untaxed Externalities
Best Correction Ever
This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men. "
Via Jonah Goldberg's The G-File
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
High Praise Indeed
The steadfastness and courage with which More held on to his religious convictions in the face of ruin and death and the dignity with which he conducted himself during his imprisonment, trial, and execution, contributed much to More's posthumous reputation, particularly among Catholics. Many historians argue that his conviction for treason was unjust, and even among some Protestants his execution was viewed as heavy-handed. His friend Erasmus defended More's character as "more pure than any snow" and described his genius as "such as England never had and never again will have." When he knew of the execution, Emperor Charles V said: "Had we been master of such a servant, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than such a worthy councillor."
More was greatly admired by Anglican writers Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. Johnson said that ""He was the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced".
Winston Churchill wrote about More in the History of the English-Speaking Peoples: "The resistance of More and Fisher to the royal supremacy in Church government was a noble and heroic stand. They realized the defects of the existing Catholic system, but they hated and feared the aggressive nationalism which was destroying the unity of Christendom. [...] More stood as the defender of all that was finest in the medieval outlook. He represents to history its universality, its belief in spiritual values and its instinctive sense of other-worldliness. Henry VIII with cruel axe decapitated not only a wise and gifted counsellor, but a system, which, though it had failed to live up to its ideals in practice, had for long furnished mankind with its brightest dreams."
Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton said that More was the "greatest historical character in English history".
I think it's a good rule of thumb that anyone praised by Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Winston Churchill and G.K. Chesterton is almost certainly a cool dude. I think Churchill well identifies the reservations that a conservative would have felt when presented with Henry VIII setting up the Church of England.
To get but a small flavour of More, consider how he composed himself as he was about to be executed for treason:
When he came to mount the steps to the scaffold, he is widely quoted as saying (to the officials): "I pray you, I pray you, Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down, I can shift for myself"; while on the scaffold he declared that he died "the king's good servant, but God's first."
Huh
Professor DAN ARIELY (Behavioral Economist, Duke University): So, you know, you go to a dentist and the dentist - X-ray your teeth, and they try to find cavities. And one of the - question you can ask is, how good are dentists at that, right?
Prof. ARIELY: So imagine: You came to a dentist; you got your X-ray. And then we took your X-ray, and we also gave it to another dentist.
Prof. ARIELY: And we asked both dentists to find cavities. And the question is, what would be the match? How many cavities will they find, both people would find in the same teeth?
SIEGEL: And I'd really hope it would be somewhere up around 95-plus percent.
Prof. ARIELY: That's right. It turns out what Delta Dental tells us is that the probability of this happening is about 50 percent.
SIEGEL: Fifty percent?
Prof. ARIELY: Fifty percent, right. It's really, really low. It's amazingly low. Now, these are not cavities that the dentist finds by poking in and kind of actually measuring one. It's from X-rays. Now, why is it so low? It's not that one dentist find cavities and one doesn't. They both find cavities, just find them in different teeth.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Prof. ARIELY: And here is what happens. Imagine you're a dentist, and you see a patient, and you really want to find a cavity because you get paid more if you find cavities and you can fix them. And the patient is already on the chair. He's already prepped. You might give them the treatment right now, really good marginal income for you. How is this motivation to find cavities - will influence your ability?
Now, you look at an X-ray - which is a little fuzzy and unclear, and there are shadows and all kinds of things are happening. What happens is this unclarity of the X-ray helps, in some sense, the dentist to interpret noise as signals, and find cavities where there aren't really any.
SIEGEL: And fill them?
Prof. ARIELY: And fill them, and drill them, expand them. I don't think they ever tell their patients, hey, I thought it was a cavity but turns out it was just a mistake.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Things that make me dislike Justin Timberlake less
Weight Loss and Agency
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Gay Marriage
Not New (Clearly), But New To Me
On October 18, 1952, Williams married Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar (born 1933) in Minden, Louisiana.It was a second marriage for both (both having been divorced with children). The next day two public ceremonies were also held at the New Orleans Civic Auditorium where 14,000 seats were sold for each ceremony. It has been written that Williams wanted the two public ceremonies in an attempt to spite Audrey who wanted him back and threatened that he would never see his son again. After Williams' death, a judge ruled the wedding was not legal due to the fact that Billie Jean’s divorce did not become final until eleven days after she married Williams.Hank's first wife, Audrey, and his mother, Lillian, were the driving force behind having the marriage declared invalid and pursued the matter for years. Little mention was made that Williams also married Audrey before her divorce was final. He married her on the tenth day of a required 60 day reconciliation period.Man, those days are gone and not coming back.