The worst law in London

What does absurd government monomania in the face technological irrelevance look like?

Back in the early years of the 20th century, before computers had become widespread, the word 'calculator' actually referred to people. They would perform large numbers of arithmetic calculations, essentially being a slow and kludgy version of a spreadsheet.

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that being a human computer was a licensed and highly regulated profession in 1920. The government required you to study for years, and prove that you could do hundreds of long division calculations without making a mistake. A whole mystique grew up about 'doing the sums', the examination required to become a calculator. Only licensed calculators were permitted to perform arithmetic operations for more than half an hour a day in a commercial setting

Then IBM popularises the computer, and  Richard Mattessich invents the spreadsheet, and it becomes totally clear to absolutely everybody that 'doing the sums' is completely worthless as a skill set. Not only is keeping the current regulation raising costs by a lot, but it's producing huge deadweight loss from all the people devoting years of their life to studying something that's now completely redundant.

What do you think the response of the government and the public would be once it became apparent that the new technology was cheap and easily available? Immediate repeal of the absurd current regime? Outcry and anger at the horrendous government-mandated inefficiency?

Ha! Not likely,

I suspect the old regime would trundle merrily along, and the New York Times would write philosophically-minded pieces extolling the virtues of it.

Because, dear reader, there actually exists regulation exactly this disgraceful - The Knowledge, the required examination for London taxi drivers.

The New York Times Magazine wrote a long piece describing just how much taxi drivers are required to memorise:

"You will need to know: all the streets; housing estates; parks and open spaces; government offices and departments; financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools; colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and coroner’s courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists.

 Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, of laundromats, of commemorative plaques. One taxi driver told me that he was asked the location of a statue, just a foot tall, depicting two mice sharing a piece of cheese. It’s on the facade of a building in Philpot Lane, on the corner of Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge.

What, in the name of all that is holy, is the purpose of making it a legal requirement of driving a taxi that you can name the location of a foot-tall statue of two mice that exists somewhere in London?

In the first place, the demand for finding the location of a statue like this from your taxi driver is zero. A precisely estimated zero, as the statisticians say. The revenues side of the ledger is a donut. It is literally inconceivable that the location of this statue has been the subject of a legitimate question towards a London taxi driver in the history of the entire profession. The only benefit is rent-seeking and limiting the size of the taxi industry. So why not just make them memorise the Roman Emperors in chronological order, or the full text of War and Peace? It would serve just as much purpose.

Not only is there no value to your taxi driver knowing this, but if I type in 'statue of two mice in London' into Google, the first image lists the location as 'Philpot Lane'. (The only sites that come up, ironically, are ones referencing the damn test, suggesting just how pointless this knowledge is). The internet has made memorising this kind of trivia, for all possible sets of London trivia, irredeemably useless.

Everything a taxi driver needs to know has been replaced by a smartphone. Everything. Which is why every man and his dog can drive Uber around just fine.

So what threadbare arguments does the NYT offer when, three quarters of the way through the article, it finally gets around to discussing the question of whether this damn test is worth anything?

Taxi drivers counter such claims by pointing out that black cabs have triumphed in staged races against cars using GPS, or as the British call it, Sat-Nav. Cabbies contend that in dense and dynamic urban terrain like London’s, the brain of a cabby is a superior navigation tool — that Sat-Nav doesn’t know about the construction that has sprung up on Regent Street, and that a driver who is hailed in heavily-trafficked Piccadilly Circus doesn’t have time to enter an address and wait for his dashboard-mounted robot to tell him where to steer his car.

Okay, I'll bite. They beat them in staged races by... how much? One minute? Maybe two? Perhaps 60 or 70% of the time? And the value of this time-saving is what, exactly? How does it compare to the extra time the person waited trying to hail a cab because of the artificial limit on the number of taxis?

It seems that New York Times writers are not required to distinguish between statements like 'the revenue side of the income statement here has literally no items on it' and the statement 'this is a positive NPV project that should be invested in'. Disproving the first statement is sufficient to establish the truth of the second. Look, there's a benefit! Really! See, it shows it must be a good idea to do the project.

Perhaps sensing the unpersuasive ring of this argument to anyone who's ever ridden in an Uber and found it cost 40% of the price, we then get another tack:

Ultimately, the case to make for the Knowledge may not be practical-economic (the Knowledge works better than Sat-Nav), or moral-political (the little man must be protected against rapacious global capitalism), but philosophical, spiritual, sentimental: The Knowledge should be maintained because it is good for London’s soul, and for the souls of Londoners. 

Well, in that case!

But riddle me this - how, exactly, can I tell whether this egregious rent-seeking and artificial deadweight loss monopoly is good for London's soul? 

The Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself. 

'Enlightenment'. You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Learning is definitely good. Government-mandated learning, especially when used as part of banning the consensual commercial activity of many individuals, is a wholly separate matter.

Just ask someone from the Enlightenment, like John Stuart Mill:

But, without dwelling upon supposititious cases, there are, in our own day, gross usurpations upon the liberty of private life actually practised, and still greater ones threatened with some expectation of success, and opinions propounded which assert an unlimited right in the public not only to prohibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it admits to be innocent.

Like, for instance, driving a cab without studying for years to satisfy a ludicrous exam requirement. 

But it's not just the higher taxi fees and difficulty getting a cab at the wrong time of night that make up the real tragedy here. What's the human toll of making every potential taxi driver learn this kind of nonsense, regardless of whether they ultimately succeed?

McCabe had spent the last three years of his life thinking about London’s roads and landmarks, and how to navigate between them. In the process, he had logged more than 50,000 miles on motorbike and on foot, the equivalent of two circumnavigations of the Earth, nearly all within inner London’s dozen boroughs and the City of London financial district. 

 It was now 37 months since he’d paid the £525 enrollment fee to sign on for the test and appearances. “The closer you get, the wearier you are, and the worse you want it,” McCabe said. “You’re carrying all this baggage. Your stress. Worrying about your savings.” McCabe said that he’d spent in excess of £200,000 on the Knowledge, if you factored in his loss of earnings from not working. “I want to be out working again before my kids are at the age where someone will ask: ‘What does your daddy do?’ Right now, they know me as Daddy who drives a motorbike and is always looking at a map. They don’t know me from my past, when I had a business and guys working for me. You want your life back.”

Apparently this must be a strong case of the false consensus effect, because reading this paragraph filled me with furious rage, but the NYT writes about it as one of those quaint things they do in old Blighty.

In the end, McCabe gets his license, so it's all a happy story!

He does not, however, get the three years of his life and £200,000 back.

How on earth do the parasites who run the testing and administration of this abomination justify all this to themselves? How do they explain their role in this shameful waste of money and fleeting human years, the restrictions on free and informed commerce, the ongoing fleecing of consumers, and the massive, groaning, hulking, deadweight loss of this monstrous crime against economic sense and liberty?

They must be either extraordinarily intellectually incurious, morally bankrupt, or both.

As the Russians are fond of saying, how can you not be ashamed?

The Arbitrariness of Social Conventions

Social customs are strange things. Some rules are totally arbitrary (fork on the left, knife on the right), but usually these end up being conventions where the choice of alternatives didn't really matter much anyway. Mostly social conventions exist to solve some or other common problem in society.

Some rules tend to take odd views of human nature. In Chicago, for instance, if you try to swim out past chest height at most of the beaches, 15 year old pin-head lifeguards sitting in row boats will blow whistles and yell at you to go back on pain of being fined. This, bear in mind, is in a lake that has no waves, no submerged obstacles, and a gently sloping shoreline. I spent frustrated hours trying to work out whether this was a liability issue (if so, hand me the damn waiver, I'll sign it), or a paranoia about the inability of literally anybody to swim. Although frankly, short of a heart attack, I don't know how you'd drown if you tried.

Other rules make sense on their own, but are hard to reconcile with a consistent view of the world. For instance, if you think people are too stupid to figure out where they can walk out to in a lake, how on earth do you justify letting such people vote to decide US foreign policy? If you think that people need to be protected from the prospect of inadvertent mistakes (as one rationale for the insane swimming restrictions), why doesn't this apply consistently? In Chicago, for instance, you're able to ride your motorcycle to the beach without a helmet, but not allowed to swim freely once you arrive. I challenge anyone to explain these two facts as being the result of a consistent approach to anything.

This can get particularly striking when dealing with rules designed to guide conventions of behavior when people are forced to interact in environments when their immediate interests are at odds. An increasingly common indignant complaint in modern life is when one is forced to endure the merest whiff of unwanted cigarette smoke. The tradeoff here is fundamental - one person gains enjoyment by emitting smoke, the other by not having to smell it. If we can't simply separate, as in smoking versus non-smoking sections, who gets their way and who has to lump it? One rule says that smoke is a minor imposition, and the rest of the world has to deal with it. The other says that it's rude to pollute other peoples air, whether by farting, smoking, or not showering after exercise or wearing deodorant before. You should only do any of them where others aren't impacted. Both are individually defensible. Society used to favor view #1, but the evangelists for #2 seem to have won the day, imposing their will on everyone else. They don't tell you it's just their preference, of course - it's all about the cost to society of second hand smoke. Yeah right.

Some of these indignant smoke-botherers would do well to reflect on the fragility of their own intellectual consistency. My favorite in this regard are the people who ask other people to not smoke nearby, because their children will breath it in. I find this such a tone deaf complaint. Personally, I don't get annoyed by smoke very much. But I do get significantly annoyed by loud noises in environments not conducive to them - loud and boisterous tables at restaurants, young children yelling and carrying on, that kind of thing. If you bring your very young child to a restaurant, there is a chance they may start crying and you won't be able to comfort them. If this happens, it's not going to be pleasant for the people around you. Triply so if you're on a plane. This is totally predictable in advance, of course - when you bring the kid along, it's just the risk that goes with the territory.

There's a very reasonable argument that say, tough luck, it's not a large imposition, and we can't expect young parents to just be pariahs for years. Which is fine. But would you be happy if the same argument were applied to smoking? This goes even more so when the child is above the age where they might be taught better manners. If your 6 month old won't stop crying, people understand that sometimes there's not much you can do. But when your 4 year old is talking at full volume in the art museum, and you just carry on thinking it's adorable (as happened to me today)? That, my friend, is the equivalent of lighting up your cigarette at the table just before the dessert course.

The first order response to all this is that most people turn out to be quite flexible in matters of abstract principle once a sufficient quantity of their oxen are about to be gored. As Ace of Spades once memorably put it, everyone is a property rights absolutist right up until the point that their neighbour, also a property rights absolutist, wants to open a fat-rendering plant.

The second is that there is a certain type of utopian that wants to set down consistent principles in all social behaviour, and if certain practices need to be upended to make it happen, so be it. The small-c conservative takes a Camus-like view of the absurdity of much convention - sure it's arbitrary, but that's okay. Ripping up long-standing practices tends to not have a great track record, so maybe you're better off just accepting that it doesn't make any sense.

Part of me is sympathetic to the Utopian view that we need to hammer out consistent principles once and for all. But I don't think it's every going to happen. You're probably better off just embracing the absurdity and contradiction.

I try to remind myself of this when it's my meal being disturbed. As Mr Dylan put it - be easy baby, there ain't nothing worth stealing here.

The Intrade End Game

The most useful source of information on US political events, Intrade, is shutting down:

With sincere regret we must inform you that due to circumstances recently discovered we must immediately cease trading activity on www.intrade.com.

These circumstances require immediate further investigation, and may include financial irregularities which in accordance with Irish law oblige the directors to take the following actions:

-Cease exchange trading on the website immediately.
-Settle all open positions and calculate the settled account value of all Member accounts immediately.
-Cease all banking transactions for all existing Company accounts immediately.During the upcoming weeks, we will investigate these circumstances further and determine the necessary course of action.

To mitigate any further risk to members’ accounts, we have closed and settled all open contracts at fair market value as of the close of business on March 10, 2013, in accordance with the Terms and Conditions of our customers’ use of the website. You may view your account details and settled account balances by logging into the website.

At this time and until further notice, it is not possible to make any payments to members in accordance with their settled account balance until the investigations have concluded.

Hmmm.

The outcome of shutting down was bound to happen eventually. But it's hard to know what to make of this press release in particular.

Part of the backstory is this disgraceful attempt by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission to sue them over the fact that US investors were using the markets. Imagine that! US citizens having a bet on the outcome of an election! How will the republic survive?

They did the same thing with the sports betting version, Tradesports a few years ago. Under the rubric of the standard 'Think of the Children!' argument, the US government had to work hard to stamp tradesports out for a much bigger sin - offering a better sports gambling product at a lower cost than Vegas was willing to offer. And hey presto! Out you go. Tradesports made the Superbowl actually fun (no mean feat), as you could watch each play and see how the price reacted, getting real-time information on the progress of the game.

Tradesports was taken out sooner, because Vegas makes decent money off sports betting. They were willing to let the political side linger a bit longer, because this is small potatoes. Seeing the writing on the wall, the company who originally ran both (Intrade and Tradesports) sensibly decided to split the two parts off into separate companies. This managed to stave off the crocodile a little longer. What they really needed to do was start bribing making donations to some US senators. That would have been more useful. The trouble with being incorporated in Ireland is that you're far enough away that you can't have political influence, but not so far away that you can escape prosecution. Then again Full Tilt Poker was incorporated in Ireland. Then again again, when the DOJ came looking for them, they ended up getting acquired by PokerStars, incorporated in The Isle of Man. I don't know how much the jurisdiction helps. If it were me, I'd try for Macau. You can bet the ChiComs wouldn't bother you. If you are going to do it, though, you need to learn the lesson that DeBeers executives figured out, but David Carruthers of BetOnSports.com didn't figure out - don't plan to set foot in the US.

As with all this stuff, the way they go after you is the Wikileaks trick - they make it illegal for credit card companies to transfer you money. He who controls Visa and Mastercard controls the world. At least until BitCoin gets big. Mencius Moldbug predicted that if BitCoin ever did look like it was getting big, the government would shut it down. Care to take the other side of that wager? I'll give you pretty good odds.

Whether the CFTC is motivated by the same considerations that make the government put the squeeze on Tradesports is unclear. Frankly, bureaucratic petty jealousy would be more than enough to motivate these pinheads. Look, someone somewhere is trading a financial product without our authority! Shut it down! Sue them into oblivion!

The real question is why Intrade decided to stop trading now. After all, the loathesome CFTC press release was from November. Why now?

As far as I can see, there seem to be two possibilities.

One is that the government is pulling a Conrad Black. This is where they charge you with a crime and then find some pretext to freeze your assets, thereby making it incredibly hard for you to raise the money to pay for decent lawyers. How freezing their members accounts will help them is unclear - I'd be quite surprised if under Irish law they're allowed to used member funds (which are likely in some kind of trust) to pay for legal bills.

The other is that they've figured out that the money simply isn't there. Corporate directors don't use the words 'financial irregularities' unless they really have to. In other words, the reason they can't pay out members is that they've figured out that someone has been skimming money off the top, and now there aren't enough funds there to pay out everyone in full. In which case, you can't pay out anyone until you find out what the hell is going on. This was the substance of the allegations against Full Tilt Poker. If you're skimming money off the top, you're effectively running a Ponzi scheme, although not one with explosive growth.

It's possible the two ideas actually interact. In other words, the member funds are held in trust, but the company has been forced to make some provision for losses under the CFTC action. If you think there's now a chance that you'll be insolvent when it's all finished, it's not clear exactly what steps you'd take as a company, but this may well be one of them. (Not remembering all of my trusts law so clearly, I tried getting some kind of answer for the US here, but it looked rather hard. Actual lawyers would probably know the answer). So even if there isn't anything untoward going on in the company accounts, it wouldn't surprise me if this had something to do with it.

So at last, the government gets their way! The prediction markets in the US get eviscerated, except for BetFair, which actually does make it hard for US investors to take part (which probably doesn't help the accuracy of US election predictions), and, more importantly, is large enough in the UK that they have political power and can't be pushed around so easily.

The government doesn't specifically want inaccurate predictions. It just doesn't want anyone other than Vegas  or Wall Street to make any money on contingent financial contracts, no matter how small the amount, no matter how trifling the event being predicted.

The real winner in all this is Nate Silver. If you want predictions for important events, don't look to markets to save you. The markets would be happy to oblige, of course, but too many important people stand to lose money if that happens. Nothing personal old chap, you know how it is.

Bad News From Election Night

LA passes a law mandating the use of condoms in porn videos.

Genius! As if the industry weren't unprofitable enough already, let's insist that their product be less desirable to consumers who, after all, are buying a fantasy, which usually doesn't include padding up. There's also zero worry about the industry moving to Ventura County, or Nevada. It's not like any Motel 6 will do as a set, you know. You need the LA ones for the certain je ne sais quoi.

Apparently some guy named Obama won re-election too. This is great news, because it means that you can now get a carbon tax / cap and trade passed by the government. If Obama had lost, you would have had to get the carbon tax imposed unilaterally by the EPA instead.

Also, I laughed watching CNN's coverage where they showed the exit poll numbers on support for Obama broken down into various groups: White, Hispanic, [Obvious Missing Category], Catholics, Suburban Voters, Anabaptists, People Missing a Leg, etc.

There's a curious omission there. Now why would that be?

Oh. Ooohhh.

Still, 93% support for Obama (Fox had the same answer) is less than I thought - I'd seen poll estimates considerably higher than that (inasmuch as you can get considerably higher than that without Pierre-Simon Laplace shooting you down with bolts of lightning for violating elementary probability theory)

Seems like another of Gavin McInnes's 'Hate Facts' - if too many people read about that, they might start asking uncomfortable questions, and we can't have that.

Scandi Stupidity on Stilts - Unisex Toilets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

54% of UK doctors are either pig-ignorant about statistics and/or meddling nanny-state fools

At some point, the incremental loss of liberty in Britain becomes such a constant depressing dripping that it's hard to maintain the incredulity. 

On the one hand, the police harassed a gallery that displayed a photograph of a sculpture that depicted a mythical scene from Greek antiquity, because they thought it might "promote bestiality". (No, really). Despite the fact that nobody had complained about the photo. That's a separate outrage post all of its own.

On the other hand, the Daily Mail cites a recent UK study where 54% of doctors agreed that the NHS should " be allowed to refuse non-emergency treatments to patients unless they lose weight or stop smoking".

Those god damn smug condescending prats.

If a doctor refused to treat the injuries of a drunk driver at a hospital and let him bleed out on the floor, we'd label him as a monster. And drunk driving has way, way bigger costs to other members of society than smoking does.

In the first place, the size of the true effect of smoking on health is hard to measure. The chances of you dying of lung cancer given you smoke seem to be only around 0.3%. More importantly, very few people seem to have any real sense of magnitudes when considering the question of exactly how harmful things like smoking are.

But let's give the doctors the benefit of the doubt, and assume they know the risks perfectly. 

What exactly is the principle at stake here? Is it:

a) You shouldn't get treatment if the actions were your fault.

b) You shouldn't get treatment if your actions cost the government too much money

c) You shouldn't get treatment if you're an unfavored group.

The first one is a ridiculous way to run a health care system. All of us take risks in things we do all the time. Driving 5 miles an hour over the limit? Increases your risk of death. Take part in an equestrian event? Increases your risk of death. Fail to eat only lentils and beans to minimize your chances of heart disease? Increases your risk of death. Go out drinking at a pub in Covent Garden on a Saturday night? Increases your risk of death, by stabbing or road accident if nothing else.

Where the hell does it end? The reality is that everyone is going to die at some point or other. Actions that you take might make it happen earlier or later, but there's no escaping it. Any test on this point is going to end up transforming into test c) - some risks are deemed politically acceptable, and others aren't.

The second test is actually a fair basis for running a healthcare system (assuming you buy the assumption that it's the government's business to be doing that in the first place, which I don't necessarily). But does it really apply here? It's pretty damn hard to tell, because it depends a lot on how much stuff you account for.

Suppose you die of heart disease that comes from smoking. Since heart disease kills a lot of non-smokers as well, it's not clear that the difference in treatment costs in nominal dollar terms are large, or even positive. It's not like this is a $10 million treatment for some rare disease - smokers die from heart disease and cancer, the same as everyone else, and treating these costs about the same as for everyone else. The cost does arrive sooner for smokers than non-smokers. This does mean that the present value of costs is higher, but it's not clear how large this difference is.

But what else happens? You don't claim the pension for thirty years, either. And based on a fair accounting for these two effects, it's not at all obvious that smokers on net cost the government more money. Absent healthcare costs, dropping dead right before the pension cheques are about to start is good news for the government budget.

So what's really going on here?

The answer is of course option c). Smokers and Fatties are today's out-of-favour social groups. Everyone loves shaming smokers, and nobody sticks up for their right to smoke, notwithstanding its bad effects on health.

Tax them! Make them stand out in the cold! Deny them medical care so they die quicker! When you see them huddled outside in the snow, tell them what a 'disgusting habit' it is, with as much condescension in your voice as you can muster! Feel smug and self-righteous about your own superior decisions!

*#$% THAT.

For some reason people's general sense of politeness in terms of not offering up gratuitous, unsolicited criticisms of people's personal choices that don't affect others seems to go out the window in the case of smoking. No level of hassling is too great. We'll badger them into health! Then when they get fat from giving up the smoking, we'll badger them into going jogging too.

Don't like smoking? Don't smoke. Otherwise, shut the hell up. They're adults. They know the risks. If they decide that they enjoy cigarettes enough that it justifies the reduction in life expectancy, that's their damn choice.