Psychologists Getting Statistics Wrong

Ace of Spades links to a study that claims to show that people view atheists as being less trustworthy. This was also covered in the National Post. The headline claim is attention-grabbing:

Atheists cannot be trusted: Religious people rank non-believers alongside rapists, study

Controversial stuff. As in all this stuff, you should always read the original study before rubbishing it. The author, Will Gervais, kindly has a version on his webpage, which you can read here. And I'm sorry to say that nearly the whole study appears to be done wrong.

So how exactly does Mr Gervais establish that atheists are as untrustworthy as rapists? Let the study tell the story - this is Study 2 of 6, but 5 out of the 6 studies have the same problem:

One hundred five UBC undergraduates (age range 18 –25 years, M 19.95; 71% female) participated for extra credit. Participants read the following description of an untrustworthy man who is willing to behave selfishly (and criminally) when other people will not find out:

Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away. Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can.

Next, participants chose whether they thought it more probable that Richard was either (a) a teacher or (b) a teacher and XXXX. We manipulated XXXX between subjects. XXXX was either “a Christian” (n 26), “a Muslim” (n 26), “a rapist” (n 26), or “an atheist (someone who does not believe in God)” (n 27).

So the authors are relying on the conjunction fallacy of Tversky and Kahnemann (1983) - logically, the probability of being a teacher and [Y] is less than or equal to the unconditional probability of being a teacher, for all values of [Y]. People sometimes get this the wrong way around if the behaviour is associated with the trait. That is what the authors are trying to test (I think). They report that the proportion of people who answered (wrongly) that the person was more likely to be a teacher and an atheist was higher than the proportion who answered (wrongly) that the person was more likely to be a teacher and a Christian.

The first thing that should make alarm bells start ringing in your head is the way the question is phrased. To say 'are atheists untrustworthy?' is to ask the probability of being untrustworthy given you're an atheist. But the question implicitly being asked in the survey is something different, namely the probability of being an atheist given you're untrustworthy. These are not the same thing!!!! And this is really going to screw up the inferences.

If statistics bore you, let me skip to the punchline - the authors screw it up because they're not taking into account that there's tons of atheists and very few rapists. This means that the probability of being an atheist given you're untrustworthy is always going to be much higher than the probability of being a rapist given you're untrustworthy. But this says nothing at all about trustworthiness, and everything about how rare it is that a person is a rapist! And this makes the whole study flawed.

For stats people, what is actually being asked is whether people erroneously believe that:
P(teacher | Untrustworthy actions)  <  P(teacher AND atheist | Untrustworthy actions).

This answer is then compared to answers to the question as to whether:
P(teacher | Untrustworthy actions)  <  P(teacher AND rapist | Untrustworthy actions).

Since the left hand side is the same in each inequality, let's think about what could drive differences in the right hand side (even if people are screwing it up via the conjunction fallacy, this is still the implicit comparison). Using Bayes Rule:



(where A1 = Teacher and Atheist, A2 = Teacher and Rapist, and B = Untrustworthy).

Let's ignore the teacher bit for simplicity (it doesn't change the logic). What the author really wants to know is the second ratio - are people viewed as more likely to be untrustworthy given they're an atheist, relative to being untrustworthy given they're a rapist.

What they're actually measuring is the first ratio: the probability of being an atheist given you're untrustworthy versus the probability of being a rapist given you're untrustworthy.

But the difference between the two ratios is also driven by the third ratio -  the overall probability of being a rapist versus an atheist, regardless of whether you're untrustworthy.

And this ratio is huge! The study was done at the University of British Columbia. According to Wikipedia, 42.2% of Vancouver is atheist. What's the probability of being a rapist?  The overall rate of rape crimes in Canada is 0.016 per 1000 people. As long as each rape is only committed by one rapist, this will overstate the probability of being a rapist (i.e. if a rapist has multiple victims, the probability of being a rapist will be lower. If a victim is raped by multiple people in a single rape, the number will be higher, however)

So the third term is equal to 42.2/0.0016 = 26,375! In other words, suppose that people thought that you were 1000 times more likely to be untrustworthy if you were a rapist than an atheist (i.e. the second ratio equals 1/1000). The left hand side will be equal to 26375/1000 = 26.375. In other words, P(atheist | untrustworthy) will always be much higher than P(rapist | untrustworthy), even if rapists are considered far less trustworthy than atheists.

The authors only report the proportion of respondents who made the conjunction error - in other words, they report the number who state that P(teacher | Untrustworthy actions)  <  P(teacher AND Y | Untrustworthy actions), which is clearly wrong, and compare this for different values of Y. Sadly, this doesn't allow us to say anything about the real ratio, which is P(Untrustworthy | Atheist) versus P(Untrustworthy | Rapist).

In other words, the study is unsalvageable if you're trying to answer the question you're hoping to ask. Which is a shame, because it's actually an interesting question.

Quite Right

Thought of the Day, from Thomas Sowell:

"The more doctrinaire libertarians see the benefits of free international trade in goods, and extend the same reasoning to free international movement of people. But goods do not bring a culture with them. Nor do they give birth to other goods to perpetuate that culture."

Bingo.

If I had to describe where I part company with (some) libertarians, it is on exactly this point - that I think they frequently tend to underestimate the importance of culture. This often makes them both unwilling to defend western culture in a meaningful way, and enthusiastic about widespread immigration,  even if it is comprised of individuals unlikely to share (or even deeply antithetical to) the values of western society.

A Snapshot of Modern Britain

Article 1 - British Police spring into action to arrest woman for saying nasty racist things on a train:

A woman has been arrested after an online video apparently showed a woman abusing ethnic minority passengers on a packed south London tram.
...
British Transport Police said a woman, 34, had been arrested on suspicion of a racially-aggravated offence.
...
In the online clip, the woman confronts several passengers, saying: "You are not British". She then starts swearing. 

A British Transport Police spokesman said: "The video posted on YouTube and Twitter has been brought to our attention and our officers have launched an investigation. ....We will not tolerate racism in any form on the rail network and will do everything in our power to locate the person responsible."

Article 2 - Theodore Dalrymple recounting how the British legal system doesn't give a rat's @** about burglary:

While on the subject, let me just recount one story to illustrate how seriously the British state takes the defense of the property of its citizens. I was looking through the criminal record of one of my patients in the prison and discovered that he had not long before been convicted for the fifty-seventh time for burglary. Since most criminals will happily admit, in confidence, that they have actually committed between five and fifteen times as many crimes as they have ever been caught for, it was quite possible that this man had committed more than five hundred burglaries. And what was his terrible punishment for his fifty-seventh conviction for burglary? A fine of $85, presumably paid for from the proceeds of his activities.

Now that's a society with its priorities set straight! Get your feelings hurt by racist white trash assholes? Leave no stone unturned to arrest them! The same racist white trash assholes are breaking into your home right this second while you're on the phone? Sorry, we're very busy. Stop by the office later and we'll give you a useless police report so you can file an insurance claim.

It's also refreshing to see that the British Police have also taken a leaf out of Ken at Popehat's "Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits":

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

Yes indeed, the British Police are admirably straightforward - they don't believe in freedom of expression, and don't care if you know it.

File this under 'unpersuasive'

To put it mildly.

Robert Frank wrote an op-ed claiming that there was an arms race in thanksgiving store opening hours which, of course, needed regulation. Tyler Cowen wrote about it, and Frank sent Cowen an email with some additional details. Included was the following anecdote about the recent allowing of Sunday trading hours in liquor stores in New York State :

I had a recent conversation about this issue with a friend in Ithaca who owns a wine store. Traditionally, New York State wine merchants were not allowed to do business on Sundays. But last year that restriction was repealed, and I asked my friend how the change had affected him.

His overall sales were about the same, he told me. The change had thus been a clear negative from his perspective, since it meant that he and his wife were no longer able to spend Sundays together with their children. The upside was that customers who lacked the foresight to shop in advance for their Sunday wine needs could now be accommodated. If we’re willing to discount the cost of an inconvenience suffered by those who could easily have avoided it, the costs in this case seem clearly to outweigh the benefits.

You don't say! If you're willing to discount the main cost of a given action, the benefits will frequently outweigh the costs. Feel free to try this with a range of meddling economic proposals:

-If you're willing to discount the millions in unrecoverable funds, the benefits of the government guarantee of Solyndra seem to clearly outweigh the costs.

-If you're willing to discount the cost of reduced competition and higher prices, the benefits of mandatory licensing of interior decorators clearly outweigh the costs.

 etc.

But there's an easier way to tell that this proposal doesn't make sense. What's so special about Sundays? Why not restrict Mondays as well? Or only allow trading one day a week? After all, if we're willing to discount the inconvenience suffered by those who could easily have avoided it, these would clearly make sense too!

Eventually, the Robert Franks of the world would look at this and say, yes, but there's a limit, customers need some convenience.

But this implicitly acknowledges that his argument, as phrased, is a crock. It's not that you can actually 'discount the cost of an inconvenience suffered by those who could easily have avoided it', but instead that Robert Frank thinks that the inconvenience they suffer is less valuable than the benefit to the liquor store owners.

To which I ask, how exactly are you arriving at that conclusion? Because it sounds a lot like you're just pulling that conclusion out of your @**, and you'd have no idea what the actual inconvenience to customers is, nor how many of them there are, nor how to value it.

Personally, I cannot fathom a theory of government that says if I want to open my store at 9am, 4pm or 2am to sell you a computer, a suit, or a bottle of whisky, why it is any business whatsoever of the government's. A government that is willing to intrude in this is willing to intrude in absolutely anything.

Why was the Greek default "voluntary"?

Marginal revolution links to this piece in the UK Daily Telegraph:

But perhaps the biggest sin of the lot was effectively to render all credit default swaps (a form of insurance against default) on sovereign debt essentially worthless, or void, by making the Greek default "voluntary".

This has made it impossible to hedge against eurozone sovereign debt purchases, and thereby destroyed the market. Worse, it's made investors believe that the euro cannot be trusted, that it'll repeatedly find ways of reneging on contract. That's the point of no return. This is no longer a serious currency.

Tyler Cowen refuses to take a stand on the question of whether the stated claim (making the default "voluntary" was a big blow to the credibility of the Euro) is true. And I think it's not clear, although the argument is not unpersuasive.

But it does raise a something that I now wish I'd written about earlier when I thought of it at the time, namely this: I don't understand why on earth they insisted on making the default "voluntary". The quotation marks are deliberate, as it was about as "voluntary" as when Vito Corelone makes you an offer you can't refuse, complete with a decapitated horse head left on your pillow. But technically, the private debt holders just happened to agree to forgive half the Greek debt they held. You know, like debt holders always do! Call up your student loan company, they'll tell you all about it!

When investors in Greek debt have to take a haircut, somebody is losing money. In a simple world without credit default swaps, the holders of the debt lose money - easy enough, that's the risk they took when they bought it. In this case, it doesn't really matter if the default is voluntary or not, they lose the same amount of money.

But when you add in credit default swaps, now it does start to matter. For the non-finance audience, think of this as like an insurance policy for the case that the debt defaults. You make periodic payments in advance, and then get a payoff if there's a 'credit event' (default, delay in payment, reduction in principal or interest, and a bunch of other contractually specified events). Some people buy the CDS contract and the bonds, some people buy the bond but not the CDS, some people sell (i.e. write) the CDS.

In a typical default, the ordering goes like this: the best off are those who had the bond and the CDS - this is like when your house burns down, but you have an insurance policy. The next worst off are the guys who have the bond but not the CDS. They're like the people whose house burnt down without insurance, but they still at least have the land (i.e., whatever the recoverable value of the bond is). The worst off are the CDS writers (i.e. the insurance comapny) - they pay out on the policy, and get nothing.

In well-functioning financial markets, we tend to think that this kind of risk-sharing is welfare improving. The insurance company is better placed to bear the risk of my house burning down than I am, and I pay them a premium for this service. Everyone benefits in the long run, even if there's winners and losers in any given event.

So here, it's as if the EU governments decided to not only burn down the house, but also void all the fire insurance policies, since "voluntary" defaults don't trigger the CDS contract payments. The best off are the CDS writers (the insurance companies), who pay nothing. The second worst off are the guys with bonds but no CDS (the homeowner without insurance), who takes the haircut but that's all. And now the single worst off guy is the one who bought the bond and the CDS - he loses  out on the value of the bond, AND he's been paying premiums for all these years on the CDS! Essentially you're totally screwing over the guy who bought the Greek Bonds but was a bit nervous about the risk and tried to insure himself. Congratulations pal, you get to eat a sh*t sandwich!

Now, bear in mind this is the exact opposite  of what governments normally do in catastrophes. If anything, they like to pressure insurance companies to pay out in situations they might not have. Both September 11th and the Paris Car Burnings could arguably be considered acts of war or civil emergencies (respectively), neither of which tend to be covered in insurance contracts. But the insurance companies paid out anyway, perhaps because of actual (or implied) pressure from the respective governments. Obviously there are clear political reasons in those cases - lots of voters on one side, a couple of nasty insurance companies on the other - but still, it's the general rule for how things go.

So why the hell would they deliberately do the opposite in this case? Truthfully, I don't really know. The "voluntary" defaults were taken by private investors and banks, and the people who wrote CDS contracts were largely other banks. So it's not clear why the EU government should prefer one group over the other. Maybe the government had private information that the financial stability was more threatened by CDS writers going under than bondholders, but it's not clear why this should be the case - a lot of French and German banks stood to lose money by this deal, as they held the bonds and CDS contracts that got screwed.

So what's left? A symbolic 'we never defaulted!' victory? Seems like a pretty damn Pyrrhic victory to me, as investors are not going to be fooled at all next time they're thinking about investing in PIIGS government debt. And the article author is right - they're also going to rightly question whether they can even get proper CDS insurance on this debt, or whether the EU will choose to screw them over again. This might not cause the collapse of the Euro, but it sure doesn't seem to be adding to the desirability of EU sovereign debt.

I'm hoping there's a good reason they did this that I don't know about. But from reading around, I haven't uncovered what it is. I can think of a bunch of bad reasons (CDS writers were more politically connected, the EU had a hard-on about the idea of not actually defaulting). But if there's some higher purpose to the whole thing, you can put me in the same camp as Jeremy Warner at the Telegraph in not understanding what it is.

Odd Graffiti in the Bathroom at the Hipster Dive Bar

'Ulysses is Odysseus'

In order:

1. Yes.

2. Wot?

The Difference Between Game Theory and Decision Theory

Game Theory assumes (at least) two things: common knowledge of the structure of the game, and mutual best responses by all players.

Decision Theory assumes neither.



The classical decision theorist would look at this picture and reflect that the lesson is that sometimes people do things that are TOTALLY CRAZY.

The more nuanced decision theorist would look at this picture and reflect that the lesson is that sometimes the other party isn't actually playing the game that you think they're playing.

Personally, I side with the latter as the one that you've really got to be worried about.

Either way though, caveat emptor.

Filling in the relevant details of the game is, of course, left as an exercise for the reader.

Predicting Behaviour During a Divorce

Apparently Hulkamania is running 70% less wild these days.

Linda Bollea, 52, who divorced Hulk Hogan in 2009, received a little more than 70 percent of the couple's liquid assets in their divorce settlement, a recent court filing shows.

In addition, Hogan, 58, the semiretired professional wrestler whose real name is Terry Bollea, agreed to give his ex-wife 40 percent ownership in his various companies and pay her an additional $3 million "property settlement," according to the 
filing.
...
The Bolleas married in 1983 and divorced in July 2009 after nearly two years of acrimonious proceedings. 

This is what happens when you get divorced in California, a community property state. The 70% is an overstatement because it only applies to the liquid assets, and Linda gets $3 million from the sale of their property. But from reading through the rough description of the settlement numbers (it's hard to figure out the exact details from the article), it seems like she's probably getting maybe 50% of the total net worth.

I'm guessing that when Hogan got married in 1983, he wasn't imagining that in the event of a divorce, he'd be going through 2+ years of nasty court proceedings and still lose half his stuff. The latest dispute, apparently, is over whether he owes his ex-wife 40% of the company's gross revenues, or 40% of net revenues. Over such minor drafting ambiguities do years of litigation depend when people loathe each other.

The question is, why are people so bad at forecasting how their partners will act if they get divorced? I think part of the problem is that they keep being influenced by the way the partner is acting today. In other words, they think of how Bob or Sally is today, and imagine them breaking up.

But this is deeply faulty. By the time you get divorced, it's fair bet to assume that they will hate you more than any other person in the world. You have the burden of years of messy and hurtful deterioration of the reltationship, and/or surprising and nasty betrayals of trust. Plus you're then forced into a very high-stakes negotiation with someone that you now despise. Which may last years. And in which they'll have a lot of opportunities to engage in costly punishment - refusing to agree, dragging out court proceedings, etc.

So the better measure is the following - how do they act towards other people they hate or have hated in the past? Are they vindictive? Do they bear grudges for long periods? Do they find ways to get back at people? And how many such people are there - do they have a long list of people they don't like? If you have data on past relationships, this is even better. Are they on speaking terms with their past boyfriends/girlfriends/ex-wives/ex-husbands? Were they cheated on, and if so, how did they react?

A second, but somewhat less useful category, is how greedy are they with money generally? Someone may go after your money either as punishment for you, or because they really want the lifestyle it gives them. What is their attitude towards receiving charity? Are they reluctant to be financially supported by other people? I think this is a weaker test, because a) there's substantial punishment motivations for going after money as well, and b) by this point, they're likely to view it as being their money, not yours. And if there's any lingering aspect on this, having it intermediated through the courts will probably weaken it further.

But my strongest predictor would be the following - what's their attitude to the courts? Have they ever seriously threatened to sue someone? Have they gone through with it? Has this happened multiple times? If any of these start coming up, you'd better believe you're going to be in for a nasty divorce if it happens.

And once you've got your estimate of the chances of the divorce being messy, double it. Then either get yourself a good pre-nup with your spouse getting independent legal counsel that gets documented (knowing that courts will probably throw it out anyway), or don't get married. Unless you're in Australia, in which case even not getting married may not to save you. In which case, bend over and take it like the government demands, or presume to spend a ton on lawyers no matter what.

The Single Worst Law in America Today

The rule that both parties in legal disputes pay their own costs, regardless of the outcome.

This leads to gold-digging lawsuits. It leads to people suing home owners because they slipped on their pavement. It leads to disgruntled employees filing lawsuits every time they get fired. It leads to doctors being sued every time an operation is not successful, regardless of whether it was their fault. It leads to robbers suing homeowners for injuries they sustain in the course of burglaries.

Why, you may ask, does it lead to all these various things?

Because it creates the most screwed up incentives imaginable. A lot of plaintiffs get their fees charged on contingency – no win, no fee, in other words.

When someone files a lawsuit, no matter how ridiculous, the only cost is their time. Monetarily speaking, every lawsuit has a positive expected value from filing. Any risk that’s there is retained by the lawyer, who spends more time on the case.

When people defend a lawsuit, even when they win, they lose. Because there’s no payoffs to successfully defending a lawsuit, defence lawyers can’t charge on contingency. Hence, apart from a few special cases like SLAPP statutes (where you can argue that the lawsuit was designed to silence free speech), the defendant has to pay up front.

The best case scenario is that you just pay your legal fees. The worst case scenario is that you pay your legal fees and the judgment against you.

But then the plaintiffs will make you the devil’s bargain – if it will cost you at least 30 grand to defend this, why not just settle the case for five grand, even though it’s bogus?

The main people who defend lawsuits are those who have a personal conviction that they’d rather spend more money on lawyers just to make sure the plaintiff doesn’t get anything. But even then, the plaintiff doesn’t get punished, they just get zero. If defendant actually wins. Which they may not.

This system has a number of problems.

Firstly, it creates an incentive for all sorts of gold-digging lawsuits. Lawmakers end up trying to play whack-a-mole to fix the related problems, such as capping medical negligence damages (where everyone still has an expected benefit, but it’s now smaller.) Or maybe make it harder to win lawsuits if you slip over, or if you were in the process of robbing a home. But whatever you do, you’ll always be playing catch-up as long as the base incentives to file lawsuits remain in place.

Secondly, it creates a morally impoverished citizenry that views every trivial wrong as a potential lottery ticket. Those who justifiably view this system as legalized extortion may choose to voluntarily refrain from filing, but this merely means that the benefits accrue disproportionately to the shameless, the self-entitled, the greedy, and the narcissistic. What a horrible incentive to erode virtue.

Thirdly, it fails to recognize that lawsuits impose a real cost on the counterparty and society. Like any externality, when people aren’t forced to internalize the cost, they over-consume the item. Same with lawsuits. Making the losing party pay the winning party’s legal fees means that people are forced to consider if they actually suffered a serious and acute legal wrong for which they need compensation, or whether they’re just trying to punish someone they’re pissed off at. It is manifestly not the role of the legal system to help ameliorate your hurt feelings.

But for some reason, the popular support for this position is very slim. Websites like Overlawyered document very well the egregious abuses of this lawsuit-obsessed society. But they don’t really talk about why this happens, or what can be done to stop it.

I would love to see the Republicans propose ending this practice. The trial lawyers would scream bloody murder, but it would be amongst the easiest and most beneficial changes that could be made to the law.

Man, Dog, TSA version

Dog bites man:

A Transportation Security Administration employee is accused of sexually assaulting a woman in Manassas.

*Yawn* That happens all the time.

Man bites dog:

Police said the victim reported that she and a friend were in the 10500 block of Winfield Loop in Manassas when the suspect approached them. The suspect flashed a badge and sexually assaulted the victim before fleeing on foot, police said.

Wait... this happened outside of an airport? Outrage!

Bad Signals of Movie Quality

When the premise of the movie begins as follows:

"X is a (movie/book/etc.) writer who has enjoyed past critical success. But he  finds himself suffering from a bad case of writer's block, and ... [blah blah blah]"

The problem is that this just screams out projection by the scriptwriter. "Holy crap, I can't think of anything to write and the studio is busting my @**! Let's write a movie about a guy who's struggling to write a movie and the studio is busting his @**!"

Let's not.

This formula is just a very slightly disguised version of what happened in primary school when you were told you had to give a speech but couldn't think of what to talk about, so you gave a speech about how to give a speech. It wasn't interesting then, and it's not interesting now.

Looking back to the synopsis above, there's only two possibilities. Sometimes the [blah blah blah] is actually interesting, in which case why not just start there? Why have all this self-indulgent bit at the start that merely dilutes the average quality? The other possibility is that [blah blah blah] isn't actually that interesting. In which case, the good news is that quality is not being diluted, but the bad news is that it's uniformly bad.

I noted this while watching Barton Fink last night, which follows almost exactly the plotline above for values of [blah blah blah] = murder plot that comes out of nowhere. It definitely one of the Coen Brothers weaker efforts, and I'm normally a big fan of their work. The movie has a great performance by John Goodman, and some hilarious portrayals of 1940s Hollywood types, especially the studio head. But it takes 70 minutes before anything interesting happens. 70 minutes! Many good movies are mostly finished by that point!

I did look at the Netflix synopsis, which was pretty similar to the outline above, and it gave me some trepidation, but I figured the Coen Brothers could make it work. Yeah, not so much. Do yourself a favour and watch The Big Lebowski a third time, you'll have more fun.

Miscellaneous Joy

-An interesting theory about McDonald's McRib - that it only gets reintroduced when pork belly prices drop. (via Kottke)

-A wicked sight-reading of the Super Mario Brothers theme, by someone who apparently has never played the game.

-Click and drag around to control the view from a helicopter ride. Rad!

-Coyote lays the smack down on the bogus use of statistics by global warming hysteric James Hansen. Deliberately misleading or just plain stupid? You decide!

The Off-Equilibrium Benefits of Widespread Gun Ownership

Economists sometimes talk about about the idea of certain things being 'off the equilibrium path'. What this means is that you never actually expect to see the situation where the alternative scenario would arise.

I think that military size is a classic example of this. If you have a military that is overwhelmingly stronger than everyone else's (and you only plan to fight defensive wars) you probably ever won't need to use it. Once you have the biggest army, why would anyone want to fight you? Other countries know they'll lose.

And here's where the off-equilibrium part comes in. You never expect to see the scenario where the huge army is actually useful. But if you took away the big army, suddenly you would need it, because other countries might be tempted to invade. In other words, you can't look at the fact that your army is not being used to fight wars and infer from that the large army wasn't necessary. The benefits, in other words, never get observed, because they are off the  equilibrium path.

I think that one of the big benefits of widespread gun ownership operates in the same way. Widespread gun ownership has lots of costs - more crimes of passion, more accidental shootings, etc. But like a large army, having lots of hunters (and even just armed gangbangers) has off-equilibrium national security benefits. Last year, Marginal Revolution linked to the following post at Federalist Paupers on this subject:

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

This kind of level of armed citizenry would make it incredibly difficult to successfully invade the US. Even after you beat the main professional army, everywhere your soldiers go they risk getting killed by trained riflemen. That's going to make it very hard to subdue the populace.

The interesting thing, at least politically, is that when benefits get sufficiently far away from the equilibrium path, people tend to forget that they're there. It is almost unthinkable that someone would try to mount a land invasion of the US any time in the near future. And at least part of this is due to the deterrent effects of domestically owned guns. But the prospect of hunters shooting at - who? the Russians? the Chinese? - seems so far-fetched that people discount it. The relevant question is to assume that we're no longer in equilibrium. If the Chinese had invaded, would America's hunters shoot at them? Very likely. And as long as that's the case, it's a real benefit. Even though it's incredibly unlikely you'll ever see it come to that.

It may still not be worth it to have lots of guns. It may be the case that, hunters and gangbangers or not, the conventional US Army is enough to make invasion very unlikely. But that's not really the point - a benefit is a benefit, even if it might be very costly to obtain.

As Cypress Hill noted about guns: When the $#*t goes down, you'd better be ready.

The game theorists riposte would be as follows: If you're always ready, the $#*t may never actually go down. But that doesn't mean you don't need to be ready anyway.

Thought of the Day

"To die well, we must know first what we have lived for."

-Theodore Dalrymple

That's just super!

Back during the debt ceiling debate, one of the key components of the compromise agreement between Democrats and Republicans was that a fabulous new "supercommittee" was to be formed to figure out how to reduce the deficit. No, not the Bowles-Simpson commission, which had been formed to investigate just that question and came to some quite reasonable-sounding conclusions, but a great new one! Made of the same quality politicians that steered the country right to the brink of voluntary default!

So how exactly is that working out? Well, here's the answer, according to The Hill:

It's a move that's been dismissed as a budget gimmick, but it's also one that could make the supercommittee's job a whole lot easier: counting the savings of withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House says $1.1 trillion will be saved by drawing down those troops from Afghanistan and making the U.S. presence in Iraq a civilian, not a military, one.

Given that the supercommittee must track down at least $1.2 trillion in cuts to avoid the triggering of automatic cuts, simply accounting for those savings would nearly get the panel there all by itself.

Yes, that's definitely the kind of tough political decisions that S&P was hankering after when they downgraded the US credit rating! I'm intrigued by the first sentence - is there anyone who wants to seriously take the counter-position that this is not, in fact, simply a budget gimmick? Anyone at all?

But not only that, apparently Democrats on the committee have already proposed that these miraculous 'savings' should now be spent on a second stimulus instead of used for deficit reduction. Yes, that's right! They found new funny money, and can't wait to spend it on real commitments! Which will, in the grand tradition of Washington, be advertised as one-off extraordinary spending, but somehow will make it into future budgets as the baseline of spending, from which any cuts will be demagogued as harsh and cruel.

Mark Steyn heaps well-deserved scorn on this whole exercise:

But, aside from that, in what sense are these “savings”? The Iraq war is ended – or, at any rate, “ended,” at least as far as U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants claim to be able to measure “savings” in 2021 from a war that ended a decade earlier? And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package, wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”

Come to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve saved since ending that war? We could use the money to fund free Master’s degrees in Complacency and Self-Esteem Studies for everyone, and that would totally stimulate the economy. The Spanish-American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine how much cash has already piled up! Like they say at Publishers’ Clearing House, you may already have won!

It is becoming clearer and clearer that the US deficit will not be seriously dealt with until the country is in the same position as Greece is now. And given how well that's working in Greece, that may well mean that it's not dealt with at all. Unless you count 'default and being frozen out of credit markets' as a form of dealing with the problem. Which it is, after a fashion.

Reality will eventually deal with unsustainable spending one way or another. As Herbert Stein noted, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. But you ought to care which way it happens. A car can stop by slowly pulling up to a red light, or it can stop by colliding with a brick wall. At this stage, I'm betting on the latter.

High Marginal Value Cleaning

The law of diminishing returns is called a law for a reason. The more of something you do, eventually the payoff decreases. It might increase at first (e.g. if there's network effects or economies of scale), but sooner or later, it turns negative.

But if you're clever, you can use this to your advantage. Take the lazy bachelor's approach to cleaning. Suppose (entirely hypothetically in my case, I assure you), your bathroom is quite dirty. In the case of cleaning, the first efforts at cleaning have huge payoffs. Just wipe the floor with a paper towel and you'll pick up maybe 70% of the filth. And it only takes 5 seconds! This is clearly a huge return on effort. But if you really want to get the floor clean, you'd have to get the mop and bucket, run the water, put in detergent, scrub the floor, and wait for it to dry.

In other words, that last 30% is going to take you 10 minutes, minimum. Honestly, who's got that kind of time?

The answer, of course, is people who are OCD about dirt, clean for a living, or have too much time on their hands.

It will come as no shock to those who know me in real life that I would self-classify as none of those three. Okay, maybe the third one is true (see, for instance, this blog), but I don't have the inclination to spend it cleaning.

If you don't believe me, just ask David Ricardo:

You should listen to your friend David Ricardo, he's a cool dude.

So True!

Phrases that I challenge ANYONE to explain the logic behind

(After the plane has landed):

"You may now use your cell phones but all other electronic devices must remain off."

Gotcha. Now we've reached the seventh circle of anti-scientific hell - my iPod might cause the plane to crash into the hangar, but when they installed a cell phone receiver to make it an iPhone, this somehow fixed the problem.

Ugh.

A Pre-Mortem Post-Mortem

Over at Hacker News, there's a fascinating article discussing the prospects of Raystream, a company that claims to have a new video compression technology. As their 'about' page describes their claims:

Using Raystream, the same one hour 720p video can be compressed up to 90% of its original file size, which makes it easily streamable over connection speeds ranging from 0.4 to 1.0 Mbs per second.

No playback modifications required (codec, browser player, set top box, smart phones, etc.)

Interesting, no?

Enter the description at 'Ihatelawyers3':

OK, at this point, if you know anything about video compression, you start to see a red flag waving in your face. The only way one can encode videos so that they (a) play on mobile phones, and (b) need no playback modifications (codecs, etc) is... if you use an existing codec.
But how can an existing codec compress to 10% of what it... already can do?

So he decided to take their test video and compress it using off the shelf technology. And the results, as described in the hacker news thread:

If you encode their test-video with an off-the-shelf open source H264 codec on normal settings, you end up with a video that is smaller than their sample video. Their "amazing new technology" is just vanilla h264 compression.

 Or put another way:

It means the _normal.mp4 file was encoded in an absurdly high bitrate for no reason except to make their claim of 90% compression.

 Hmmm.

I don't know video compression. The hacker news discussion and the github site seem pretty compelling.

But I do know finance.

Here's Raystream's stock price over the last month:

Yeeeaaaaah. It sure looks like something fishy is going on.

It's an over-the-counter stock, so you can't short it. But let's put it this way - Shylock Money Management is not investing any of its proprietary trading money in RayStream, and would be interested in possible short exposure to the stock.

Spam Comment of the Day

From a spam site commenter calling itself 'Wastewater Training' (no link for the spam site):

"A lot of water is wasted in those taps. But that doesn't end there. There are still a lot of things we should look into if we really want to save water like for instance in the garden. We should use the conventional water container to water the plants rather than using a hose or a sprinkler."

Yeeaaah. I'm not so sure that that was really the original point of the post:

So here's the bottom line. I refuse to feel the slightest bit guilty about taking long showers as long as the water department are blowing taxpayer dollars on ridiculous ads. If you want people to use less water, raise the damn price.

But sure, why not! Those free-market types will be rushing to take your online environmental compliance and safety training class after reading how insightful your remarks were.

Morons.

Market-Clearing is Overrated

In Australia, today they voted in the Senate to pass a tax on carbon dioxide.

Now, there are some reasonable argument for having a world-wide price of carbon, assuming countries could somehow be arm-twisted into doing so.

There are bugger-all reasonable arguments for imposing carbon tax when very few other countries are doing so. All that will happen is that carbon-intensive industries will be exported overseas.

But (as Tim Blair notes) to add to the hilarity, the tax comes in at a specific amount - in this case $23 a tonne. The trouble is that the current carbon price in Europe is about half that. You can see the progress for yourselves.

But that's alright, we've got Climate Change Minister (yes, really, Australia actually has one of those) Greg Combet to point out the answer:

But Climate Change Minister Greg Combet is not convinced the difference demands a change in the local price, saying a few months ago the European cost was “there or thereabouts” of $23 a tonne.

“We’ve just got to take a bit of a longer term view of this,” he told ABC Radio

Hmm. Any particular reason you think that the current price is unrepresentative, but the old price is clearly accurate? Any reason at all? I mean, if you're willing to admit that the market is inefficient today, why is 'a few months ago' the gold standard for the halcyon days of price efficiency?

Don't hold your breath waiting for a good answer to that one. But even this is beside the point - efficient or not, the European price of carbon right now is a lot less than it will be in Australia. (Not to mention that the Chinese price is forecast to be $0 for quite some time now, with an R-Squared of about 100% on that regression). As long as there's going to be a price, it ought to be the market price. Unless you think the relevant market is the US and China, in which case we're back to the earlier Shylock regression.

In Australia, the price will be at $23 a tonne, which some days will be less than Europe, and other days will be more.

In other words, the price will definitely not be a market-clearing price. This gives Australian firms a fluctuating competitive position relative to Europe, and a permanent disadvantage relative to just about everywhere else. Heckuva Job, (Bob) Brownie!

One prediction I can make with some confidence - expect the market for Australian-produced Aluminium to start clearing very rapidly at an equilibrium quantity supplied of zero.

Some Quality Trolling

This is one of the most hilarious heckles on the repulsive Westboro Church cult.



Unfortunately, these clowns are too obtuse to even be embarrassed (kind of goes with the territory). But Brick Stone does a great job of ridiculing them, which I think is far and away the best response to these imbeciles.

Randomised Compassion

The problem with giving to the homeless is twofold.

First, how do you tell which people are truly in bad shape, as opposed to merely being professionally homeless? There are lots of people who are really out of luck. On the other hand, back when I was at university, the same 'bum' worked the same corner for years near school, and didn't look that homeless. I subsequently found out that he actually lived in the same large apartment building that I did.

Second, how do you give money without creating bad incentives? In other words, if you give money to people that beg, you create incentives for more people to beg, as opposed to say apply for a low-wage job. The last thing you want to do is set up a situation where someone makes more money begging than they would at a minimum wage job, or you'll end up with the hard-working being punished on net.

One solution that I like is to to give large-ish amounts of money to people who aren't asking for it.

In other words, find someone who is clearly homeless and away from significant pedestrian traffic, so it's unlikely that they're doing things for the benefit of an audience. For instance, I came across I guy today near a petrol station who was going through the bins looking for aluminium cans.

Now, clearly this guy meets criteria #1. Nobody digs through rubbish bins unless they're clearly down on their luck - it's not an obvious way to win sympathy from people, unlike holding up a sign saying you're a homeless vet.

But even better, giving the guy money isn't going to change his incentives. Because the generosity was essentially random from his point of view, he'll keep doing whatever he was doing before - in this case, working to eke out a small existence recycling cans. If you give money to a guy begging, your generosity is not random - it's a response to him asking you, and thus you're creating incentives for him to beg more.

Now, if the guy is truly homeless, this honestly isn't such a problem - more people get hassled, but he gets a little more money. I can happily call that a wash, or even a gain overall.

The bigger problem is the incentives you create for people who aren't actually homeless - slacker hippy tourists, for instance, who see beggars getting money. Unless you're able to clearly distinguish genuine need from grifters, giving to homeless beggars will create incentives for non-homeless beggars. And those are the people that definitely should be applying for jobs instead. Even worse, being asked for money by obvious moochers tends to make the average person reluctant to give money to anybody, even those actually in need.

In other words, I'd rather give twenty bucks to a guy sleeping on the street than twenty cents to a guy begging.

This is not a problem-free solution, of course. The guy who is truly in real trouble is likely to ask for money, out of desperation if nothing else. And he's the guy you'd really rather not turn down. The problem, as always, is the hippie grifters, mooching off people's sympathy.

In this sense, when I do give to beggars, the question of whether they truly are homeless is dealt with using the strong application of the Ronin principle  - if there is any doubt, there is no doubt.

It's not perfect, but compromises necessarily aren't. Don't blame me, blame the moochers.

Miscellaneous Joy

- A wonderful, rambling essay about crows as a metaphor for the working poor. There's plenty in The Exiled to disagree with (including, herein, gratuitous enjoyment about the Blackwater deaths at Fallujah), but they'll sometimes have these kinds of brilliant pieces that you're unlikely to read elsewhere.

-A great rant about how bad the websites are for Indian trains. Having been in the unfortunate position of having to once book railway tickets in India, I can attest to every word.

-Copyright troll who sued people for reproducing newspaper articles loses, big-time. Popehat has more on the background to this development.

-JWZ had this great post about how ridiculous Google's claimed 'support' for pseudonyms was, offering instead the following alternative policy:

Google's statement is obvious bullshit, and here's why. The way you "support" pseudonyms is as follows:

1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect that the name they are using is not     their legal name.

2. There is no step 2.

Sure enough, they didn't take him up on the offer.

Stop it, B!

Something I was put on to recently - Felonious Munk. He has a whole series of interesting rants full of common sense and gratuitous swearing and humour. Check 'em out - the first is his appeal to the government to balance the budget.



The other great one was about the bad state of modern relationships. The good bit starts at about 3:00, and boy is it a corker!



Interestingly enough, the guy who put me on to him was Jay Nordlinger in National Review, which is not the most obvious audience for this stuff. But that's part of what appeals about Nordlinger in particular, who is one of the more interesting (and not rigidly political) conservative writers out there.

Your Proud Feelings vs. Drowned Boat People

Ho hum, another six asylum seekers drowned while on the way to Australia.

I wrote about this at some length last year when another bunch of boat people drowned near Christmas Island.

Here's a summary of the main point from last year. :



I don't know what the updated graph looks like, but if anyone would like to wager over the direction of the line, do let me know.

That's what compassion will get you. Look how self-righteous the Labor Party and the Greens were! No more wicked off-shore detention of asylum-seekers. No more housing people in those cruel, cruel detention centres! How virtuous we feel, now that we've finally gotten rid of those evil and nasty laws that John Howard put in place.

In an inconvenient turn, hundreds of people are estimated to have drowned since Labor scrapped the previous laws, based on the inexorable logic that 'more people attempting the crossing = more people dying in the attempt'. But who cares about such a trifle as that!

The phrase 'tough love' is one of those expressions that lefties hate, as it's one of those cliches that gets thrown around a lot in support of many policies, some of which really are tough love, and others of which are just tough.

But doubt not this: people respond to incentives. When people tried to point out to Julia Gillard that her policy was indirectly leading to hundreds of deaths by drowning, she responded that this was a “vile slur”, and among the most “dangerous”, “irresponsible” and “despicable” she’d heard in politics.

So here's a question. Let's put our 'correlation!=causation' caps on, and say that the straightforward incentives and persuasive time-series evidence is not conclusive. I'll take that. But even then, what the hell is Julia Gillard's alternative explanation for this trend? So you saying you're not killing people, huh? Then what exactly is the contention? Is it that more people aren't actually drowning, or that the increase in people coming and drowning has nothing to do with the fact that they are more likely to be processed in Australia and given asylum? Is it driven by the supply and demand of leaky vessels? Is it driven by these asylum seekers expecting to hop off the boat and get a job in Australia's booming mining industry? What?

In fairness to the Labor Government, since last year they've been trying to get offshore processing going again. Whether this attempt can be construed as a tacit admission that the previous policy was in fact killing lots of people is a different question, and one which I would love a reporter to ask her. But the policy hasn't been passed, mainly because they continue to operate under the ridiculous self-imposed constraint that  they won't use the single most logical place for it, namely Nauru.

Because then they'd have to admit that Howard was right. And nothing is more important that that. Certainly not a couple more drowned asylum seekers.

Andrew Bolt is right in skewering the worst delusional culprit - Bob Brown, leader of the Greens. But then again Bob Brown has never, in his entire political life, given even the vaguest indication that he grasps how incentives work. This imbecile is a walking monument to the Dunning-Kruger effect - the more he screws up policy, the more sure he is of his idiotic beliefs. You'd have more luck trying to get your dog to understand Fermat's Last Theorem.

Ostentatious moral vanity is unpleasant enough to watch at the best of times. Ostentatious moral vanity that is simultaneously leading to hundreds of preventable deaths, on the other hand, is sickening.

Faulty Logic on the Soccer Pitch

Let me explain briefly some logic that may seem superficially appealing, but is in fact catastrophically wrong:

Nobody wants to play goalie on our team. I have good hand-eye co-ordination, but I'm not that accurate at kicking. I'm probably going to be the worst player on the field if I play a normal position, whereas I'm probably at least decent at just catching the ball. I'll give goalie a go.

Yeeeaah. Let's call this 'Shylock logic, circa last Sunday at 11:50am'. At about 12:10pm, after getting scored on multiple times by a team that was clearly better than us, let me enlighten you on just how much you can learn in ten scant minutes about where your thinking went astray.

1. When you're crap at some team endeavour, it is less important to actually be good at something than it is to not be blamed for actively being bad at something in a way that is harming the whole team. Goalie is the worst possible position for this. Every screwup is directly attributable to you and you alone. In addition, there's going to be lots of people that remember your screwups and have it in for you.

2. Being goalie is like writing put options, in that your payoffs have crazy negative skewness. When you stop a ball that you should stop, you get a small amount of praise. But should you miss a ball that you should have been able to stop, you just went broke. You know who should be writing put options? Really highly rated financial institutions with deep pockets and lots of experience. You know who shouldn't? Mum and Pop.

3. You know how you can tell that a team is likely to be crap and full of amateurs? When nobody wants to volunteer to be goalie. You know when is the worst possible time to be goalie? When your defence is crap and full of amateurs. Because that's when you're going to get lots of shots on goal, and when you inevitably let some in, people will still blame you more than the crap defence. Talk about a winner's curse problem.

The only good news of the day was that when I subbed out, the goals kept coming, albiet at a slightly slower rate. I am quite certain I was the only person on our whole team to be significantly pleased by this development.

Alan Joyce, You Magnificent Bastard!

So over the weekend, Qantas Airlines grounded all of its planes, without any warning. This of course stranded thousands of passengers, and did massive damage to the Qantas brand. The Associated Press has a reasonable summary.*

This story all unfolded very fast, and it wasn't quite clear what the hell was going on. After reading around, here is what I've managed to piece together as the underlying explanation:

Firstly, to make any sense of this, you need to know that a lot of Australia's industrial relations disputes are governed by statute. In other words, there are courts to decide what strike actions are acceptable, and what wage and conditions are reasonable in various contracts. Sounds monstrously stupid? That's because it is! Apparently people need the government to intervene in private disputes, because of ... well, who the hell knows? The point though is that when unions get into a stoush, it will end up being settled by a quasi-court body like 'Fair Work Australia'. That's point #1.

Secondly, the Qantas unions (baggage handlers, pilots etc.) have been engaging in rolling strikes for several months now, causing huge damage to the company. It's workers are already paid pretty damn well - baggage handlers make between $70,000 and $85,000 including penalty rates but not overtime, an amount over 20% above the industry rate. For lifting suitcases. And they were demanding even more money, based on the impeccable logic of 'Hmm, the company seems to be turning a profit - why don't we try to expropriate all of that to ourselves, even though we're not actually adding any more value?'.

Thirdly, Alan Joyce, the CEO of Qantas, decided that if he gave into the union's demands, Qantas was going to go broke. This has actually happened in the last decade, with Ansett Australia, one of the previous major airlines, being liquidated in part to ridiculous union demands making it unprofitable.

So here's where it gets interesting. With the unions engaging in industrial action, Alan Joyce took the radical step of a lockout of union employees, grounding the airline in the process.

Now, on face of it this seems odd. Usually, union lockouts are designed where the company hires a bunch of non-unionised strike-breakers and plans to engage in a long-term plan to replace the union workforce. At a minimum, lockouts are meant to harm the workers by depriving them of wages for an extended period, thereby hoping to make them concede.

But that clearly wasn't the case here. Qantas couldn't possibly replace its workforce in a hurry, and if they didn't get flying again soon, the company would be finished. So what the hell was the point?

The point, which I was slow to realise, is that the lockout was actually designed to force the hand of the government and Fair Work Australia. In other words, Alan Joyce was doubling down by making the union's industrial action implicitly not just a problem for Qantas management, but for the entire travelling public, for Australia's reputation as a safe place to do business, and for the whole Australian tourism industry.

He was wagering, in other words, that the grounding of planes would cause such a holy sh*tstorm that the government and Fair Work Australia would do just about anything to get the planes back in the air. And they did - they declared the lockout over, but much more importantly, they declared that future union strike action was illegal. Bingo - game over unions, victory to Qantas.

In addition, the government was complaining that Joyce didn't give them enough notice. As it turns out, this claim looks to be bogus. But on the other hand, Joyce was also in a game of chicken with the government too. The Labor Party is beholden to the unions. If Joyce had tipped them his plans early, they would likely have taken the opportunity to figure out how to make him into the bad guy and try to get him to back down. When he presented them with the lockout as a fait accompli, there was nothing they could do. He'd already committed to shutting down the airline if needs be, and the only Nash Equilibrium was for the courts and government to back down.

It's far too early to tell what the longer-term damage to the Qantas brand will be from all of this. But screw it, even if this is the end of Qantas, what a way to go out! You can either give in to the unions and slowly die of unprofitability, or you can give them a big middle finger, knowing that either you'll win the dispute, or you'll go out like Francisco D'Anconia.

Alan Joyce, in other words, had both a very clever strategic and political insight, and the huge brass balls to pull it off.

The grounding of Australia's major airline over industrial action is something to regret greatly, not least because of the huge disruption to lots of innocent bystander travellers.

But Alan Joyce deserves serious props in my book for staring down the unions instead of giving them the airline. Very nicely played, Mr Joyce. Very nicely played, indeed.


*(My newspaper of choice, The Australian, has decided to put all their content behind a paywall, also known as the 'I really felt we had too many readers anyway' strategy, so you get the AP instead. This also goes to show that companies are more than capable of destroying their brands without any union interference).

The cause of military suicides

A statistic that I had a strong hunch was true as soon as I heard it:

The suicide rates are at all time highs and rising in the Army and Marine Corps. Over 70% of the sucides are because a man’s wife or girlfriend is leaving him while deployed to a war zone. She is almost always taking the kids if there are any and quite often( most of the time) depleting (legally stealing) his bank accounts too. She is often enough cheating on him.

Sure enough, the base statistic holds up:

Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Peter Chiarelli reviewed investigations on Soldier suicides, which reached a three-decade high in 2008, and reported that in over 70 percent of the cases, “you have one constant, and that was a problem with a relationship.”

Yeah, translate that from the officialspeak and I'm pretty sure that a 'problem with the relationship' when one party is in a combat zone probably looks a lot like the first quote. You can disagree with the agency in the first quote (the woman is 'leaving', and thus is implied to be making the selfish choice), but it probably doesn't change much from the perspective of the man.

But if I had to hazard a guess at the actual agency, let's put it this way - if you're in an all-male combat unit living in a military base overseas, you probably don't have a whole lot of options to pick up women, nor would I imagine that you'd be likely to stop calling your wife at every chance in preference for playing X-Box. It's possible that he slept with a hooker, but the situation of a man in a warzone suddenly deciding he's sick of his wife and wanting to leave... let's just say it sound psychologically less likely than the alternative .

But the problem is not divorce - relationships end for lots of reasons, and given the tendency for military people to marry young, they may have been likely to end that way anyway.

No, the real horror stories are much worse. The first quote comes from some truly repulsive stories of a guy in the Army:

Then of course there was the soldier in my company who had a baby with his wife and she sent him streaming videos via internet of her having sex with other men while his baby son was in the house...

Read on, and be appalled.

The law is necessarily an imperfect instrument for enforcing proper conduct. In other words, laws can never be a substitute for morality. They can circumscribe some of the worst behavior (and much behavior that is completely trivial), but they are a very weak guide for what one ought to do. A society that organises itself around restraining only behaviour that is illegal will quickly turn into rampant misery.

It is illegal to cross at the traffic lights when the walk sign isn't flashing.

It is not illegal to sleep with the wife of a man who is risking getting a bullet in the ass to defend your freedom, nor is it illegal to maliciously screw said wife on camera and send the footage to the husband while he is in a warzone.

If there is any justice in the world, both the man and the woman who did this would be on the receiving end of life-threatening levels of ass-kicking, ideally from the husband himself, but failing that, from friends, family members, or just strangers with an interest in fairness.

Of course, there isn't any justice in the world for this kind of outrage, so both of them will get away with it completely.

Human nature being what it is, people in war zones are sometimes driven mad by the atrocity and horror that they have to witness. But men can be very resilient in dealing with this challenges, knowing that there is a higher purpose to their actions, and having been prepared to face these difficulties.

But to expect them to do all this while their own personal world that they fight and die for is being senselessly lost to them as they're away, and it's their own loved ones who are twisting the knife - that is too much to bear. That is when people lose hope, and wonder what this is all for. And frankly, what would you say to them? Other than the fact that this is all stupendously unjust, and there's nothing that can be done? Plenty of fish in the sea, old chap?

As Eric Bogle sang about war - I never knew there was worse things than dying.

A Prediction I Doubt I'll Live to See

Western society has seen enormous changes in its attitude towards animal cruelty over the last 150 or so years. In a rural setting, if you wanted to eat roast chicken, you had to kill the chicken yourself. The link between ‘Eating Meat’ and ‘Killing Animals’ was uncomplicated, and it doesn’t seem like many people were especially emotional about it. That was just how it was. Gratuitous cruelty towards animals was frowned upon, but as long as you owned the animal in question, there wasn’t much that could be done. Think of Dostoyevsky in ‘Crime and Punishment’ describing the man deliberately flogginghis horse to death for public amusement:

“He’ll crush her,” was shouted round him. “He’ll kill her!”

“It’s my property,” shouted Mikolka and brought the shaft down with a swinging blow. 

There was a sound of a heavy thud. 

“Thrash her, thrash her! Why have you stopped?” shouted voices in the crowd.

These days, animal cruelty will land you in prison. Just ask Michael Vick. And the vast majority of people enjoy eating meat, but don’t want to see how the sausage is made. People deliberately avoid enquiring too much about the process that produces their steak – it’s not that they don’t know what’s involved, they just prefer not to think about it. If you forced the average person to kill a cow to get their T-Bone steak, I’m not sure they’d be up to it.

And this is where my prediction comes in. If nanotechnology becomes sufficiently developed (and it’s a fair bet it will), it seems that given say, 200 years, we might be able to recreate a perfect steak at the molecular level without having to slaughter cows.

And when this happens, it will sever the link between eating meat (which most people don’t want to give up) and killing animals (which most people seem quite glad to give up, at least most of the time). Think about the success of free-range eggs. Can you imagine if you could purchase equally delicious chicken that never involved a hen having to suffer? I’d buy it in a second.

Give it two generations in this environment, and I'd predict that the average person will view the deliberate slaughter of animals for meat as being repugnant and horrific.

My guess is that in the fullness of time, future generations will come to view today’s abattoirs in a similar way to how we view the Circus Maximus. In other words, they will bare be able to control their repulsion at the idea that the average person would willingly go along with such wholesale slaughter for no higher purpose than their own enjoyment.

And if I had the courage of my convictions, I’d admit that I’m not altogether sure that they won’t be right in this belief.

Divorce and Mistakes

It is a sound rule for those with any understanding of probability that the only real mistakes are ex-ante mistakes. Put simply, you should only beat yourself up for decisions that you should have been able to figure out were a mistake based on what you knew at the time. If something turns out to be a bad decision because of things you found out later, there’s no sense beating yourself up over it. 

So if you go to a casino and bet on black (following the Passenger 57 Edict) and it comes up red, betting on black was not in any meaningful sense a ‘mistake’. At the time, red was just as good a bet as black. Now, it may be an ex-ante mistake to play roulette (which has fairly bad odds) rather than craps (which has better odds). It may well have been an ex-ante mistake to go to the casino in the first place. Those are decisions worth beating yourself up over. Landing on red sucks, but it doesn’t indicate a mistake.

To this end, I often wonder what percentage of divorces are the result of an ex-ante mistake. In other words, sometimes it’s clear from the start that a given partnership will not work (although usually not to the participants). Did you date for less than 3 months before he proposed? Did he have a history of cheating on you multiple times in the leadup to the marriage? Has she been divorced 5 times already? These kinds of things probably should be red flags. I wouldn’t say that anyone who marries in these cases is making an ex-ante mistake (there are lots of factors to consider, and these are still small determinants).

And a lot of the time things just don’t work out, even though the couple seemed well-suited to each other and deeply in love. A lifetime is a long time to stay together. And if you (or your spouse) has periodic temptations towards making Seriously Bad Decisions, you find yourself in a place not dissimilar from the IRA’s boast to Margaret Thatcher that ‘you have to be lucky every day, whereas we only have to be lucky once’.

But given all this, I’m still not sure what the true number would be, even if taken subjectively from the point of view of the divorcees. In other words, how many people who get divorced look back on heir marriage and think ‘Gee, it was a mistake to marry this person, and I shouldn’t have been such an idiot’, as opposed to thinking ‘Yeah, it sucks that it didn’t work out, but we had our good times, and I can still see why I made the decisions I did.’ 

I dunno. Even if I knew a large enough sample of divorced people to ask, it seems too likely to cause distress or offence relative to my idle curiosity on the subject

A Social Faux Pas that is Fast Disappearing

Opening someone else’s mail. This used to be a big deal. But think about it – how much important personal business is actually conducted by mail?

The average person’s mail consists of a combination of bills, junk mail, and the occasional package from Amazon. Granted, it’s possible that your credit card bill could reveal embarrassing details about you being in lots of debt or lots of purchases from that foot fetish website, but these seem like relatively uncommon occurrences.

The reality is that the vast majority of truly personal correspondence (love letters, scandalous news from friends, family secrets) is conducted by email, phone or text message. I imagine that most people who aren't trying to disguise evidence of an affair on a credit card statement or phone bill would be quite happy to have their spouse read through their mail.  Reading someone else’s email retains much of the flavor that opening mail once had. But the sacredness of mail is something I guess will only diminish with time.

In other news, apparently the plural of 'faux pas' is 'faux pas', which is confusing as hell to me.

Charles Dickens and Modern Political Sensibilities

In each period, different combinations of political beliefs tend to go together. These days, for instance, a belief in the importance of generous social welfare programs tends to be correlated with a suspicion of private enterprise, a belief that crime is largely a product of circumstance rather than character, an opposition to the death penalty, and a suspicion of religion.

But it's worth remembering that there's no particular reason that all of these should go together. And once upon a time, they didn't.

I just finished reading 'Oliver Twist'. And if you had to try to pigeonhole Dickens' sympathies in the book as 'conservative', 'liberal' or even 'libertarian' by modern standards, you'd struggle.

Dickens is very sympathetic to the plight of the poor. Large chunks of the first part of the book are scathing satire of the brutal conditions in London's workhouses and orphanages, and the smug self-satisfaction of religious authorities who run them, juxtaposed with their indifference to the misery around them.

So by that measure, he'd be pretty liberal in today's terms.

But in terms of the question of the causes of crime, Dickens is quite emphatic that certain people are drawn to it because they're irredeemably greedy and wicked. To be sure, there are some characters that are drawn in by circumstance and lack of opportunity, and for those he writes with obvious sympathy. But the overall picture of crime is a long way from the 'root causes' crowd of today.

In addition, Dickens has a fairly neutral attitude towards the death penalty. In the book it's directly described as applying for being an accessory to murder, but it's implied that people get it for robbery as well. And while this fact isn't cheered, it seems to be just part of the landscape - rob houses, and you're going to hang. It's fair to say that even the most strident law-and-order conservatives of today might shy away a little from this viewpoint.

And while Dickens is quite suspicious of the Church as it operated in terms of poverty relief, he seems quite supportive of Christianity in general:

I have said that they were truly happy; and without strong affection and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that being whose code is Mercy, and whose attribute is Benevolence to all things that breathe, happiness can never be attained.

The reality is that this portfolio of views has no obvious analog today. But that's often how it is. If you don't believe me, have a read about the Whig Party and try to make sense of it. They were the antecedents of the modern Liberal Democrats. Except they were firmly in support of free trade. And really didn't want a Catholic as King. But liked Parliament over the King. And were in favour of abolishing slavery and extending the franchise to women. But they also passed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which caused so much of the misery for the destitute that Dickens rails against in the first part of the book.

Just think, your political views might seem equally confusing to a child born in 200 years time.

Free Business Plan of the Day

McDonalds is an astonishingly successful franchise. If you need to get a clear example of this in practice, just look at the distribution of customers across restaurants in the average airport.

Every time I go past one, the McDonalds is easily the most packed place there. For some reason, the appeal of cheap and tasty comfort-food hamburgers is especially large for tired travelers whose self-control is depleted. The queues in front of the place are typically at least twice as large as those at the next most crowded place.

Let us make the rather heroic assumption that the profit per customer is similar between McDonalds and other comparable fast food restaurants at the airport. By this measure, being the most packed place is a pretty good proxy for being the most profitable. I can’t back this up with any hard numbers, but I’d be willing to wager a decent amount of money to this effect at 2:1 odds.

But here’s where things start getting weird. My guess is that not only is McDonalds the most profitable store at the airport, but I’d wager that the difference is so big that the second-most profitable restaurant you could open at the airport would be another McDonalds in the same terminal, right next door to the first if needs be. Even though you’ll clearly be competing with (and cannibalizing) the first one.

Now, this obviously doesn’t appear to happen. I’m not sure if the McDonalds franchising arrangement prohibits McDonalds granting another franchise license within a certain distance (it probably does). And I’m not sure the airport would grant another McDonalds tenancy right next door (they may not, based on a nebulous idea of serving different customer needs, although my guess is that they should, if they’re profit-maximising). 

But it’s just possible that nobody has thought of an idea so absurd as opening up a second McDonalds right next door. My guess is that it would make quite a bit of money. If you decide to avail yourself of this awesome free business plan, make sure to let the manager of your store know that you owe a guy called Shylock a free Big Mac Meal. I'll plan to collect when I run into two McDonalds stores at an airport within 15m of each other.

Why does the Post Office always lose money?

This hilarious story from the Consumerist provides a clue:

The Styrofoam cube enclosed in this envelope is being included by the sender to meet a United States Postal Service regulation. This regulation requires a first class letter or flat using the Delivery or Signature Confirmation service to become a parcel and that it "is in a box or, if not in a box, is more than 3/4 of an inch thick at its thickest point." The cube has no other purpose and may be disposed of upon opening this correspondence.

Alec Baldwin: They're just sitting out there, waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?

United States Post Office Worker: No! Not unless their money is in an envelope at least 3/4 of an inch thick!

Alec Baldwin: *picks up set of steak knives, proceeds to stab Post Office worker in rage*

A late-night email exchange

The Greek: 

[Subject: 'The Glory of Australia'] It's stunning to me that you consider yourselves an independent country. At least our prime minister doesn't have to curtsy to a FOREIGNER.

Shylock:  

If you read even the headline, you'd see that the whole point was that the Prime Minister didn't curtsy to anyone.

But you miss the larger point. Queen Elizabeth the Second is not just the Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but also the Queen of Australia. This is an official title.

Besides, better to curtsy to the Brits than bend over for the Germans.

Miscellaneous Winners

-What would the world look like as you approached the speed of light? Apparently, it would look like this.

-Gary Brecher continues to provide interesting descriptions of military history that you won't find anywhere else on the web. Here is a piece on Ben Grierson, a Civil War hero (no mean praise from Brecher). Here is his take on the wars between the Mayans and the Spanish in Mexico.

-Futility Closet describes a weird maths problem that I still don't quite understand the answer to. More details here.

LOLs of the day

The police medic:



Comedy gold!

And if you're in the mood for a gratuitously harsh but hilarious heckle by Ace of Spades, this was pretty funny too.

Great Moments in Computer Security and Public Relations

First State Superannuation is a company in Australia that provides superannuation funds (the equivalent of America's 401K-type plans for retirement accounts).

First State Super, it seems are complete imbeciles when it comes to their members' security. Let Techdirt tell the story:

[A]security professional found a big and ridiculously obvious bug in the website of an Australian investment fund, First State Superannuation. Apparently you could see other people's accounts by merely changing the account numbers in the URL. Increase the number by one, and see the next user in line. This is the kind of extraordinarily basic mistake that I thought had been eradicated a decade ago. Apparently not.

That's right, just change the account number in the URL and you get to see someone else's details. Okay, but presumably it's just some random person - who could be bothered?

Patrick Webster found he was able to access electronic superannuation notices of any customer by changing numerical values in URLs used to issue statements to clients.
Webster, a customer of First State Superannuation and consultant at OSI Security, increased the URL number value by one and was granted access to a former colleagues' super statement.

 Hmm, that's awkward. How much detail could he see?

He was shown information such as name, address, date of birth, next of kin and superannuation payments.

Oooh. That's worse.

Apparently their website was designed by someone drunk or still in high school. Or both.

This is strike one.

So Patrick Webster, model citizen, reported this gaping flaw to First State Superannuation. How did they respond? I like to imagine the following conversation took place

Underling: Some IT guy reported that it's simplicity itself to hack our website and our users' details are at risk. In fact, the method was so basic that it doesn't even really qualify as 'hacking' - he just typed in a different URL.

CEO: Holy Smoke! How do I choose between the following important priorities:

1. Fix the website to make sure this doesn't happen again
2. Work out how to explain this breach to our members and the press
3. Send a thank you card to the guy who reported the breach
4. Call the cops on the guy who reported the breach.

 Ha ha! #4 is surely a joke, right?

No. No it isn't.

I would love to know how that phone call went.

CEO: Hello, is this the Police? I need to report a potential crime: our website is completely insecure, and I need the guy who told us this to be arrested immediately!

Operator: No really, who is this?

Kidding! The cops of course turned up at the guy's house.

That's strike two.

Okay, so maybe this was just a rush of blood to the head when they didn't know what was happening. Surely after a few days, they came to their senses?

Bwa ha ha! Of course not. They threatened to sue the guy.

Whilst you have indicated that your actions were motivated by an attempt to show that it is possible for a wrongdoer to obtain unauthorised access to Pillar's systems, you actions may themselves be considered a breach of section 308H of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) and section 478.1 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). You should be aware that due to the serious nature of your actions, this matter has been reported to the NSW Police.

Further, as a member of the Fund, your online access is subject to the terms and conditions of use which are outlined on the Fund's website. Your unauthorised access also constitutes a breach of those terms and has caused the Trustee to expend member funds in dealing with this matter. Please note the Trustee has the right to seek recovery from you for the costs incurred in accordance with those terms. 

This was their considered response. That's strike three.

Minter Ellison, the lawyers who wrote this embarrassing letter, have covered themselves in shame.

So here is my question:

Why on earth would any right-thinking person leave a red cent of their retirement savings with these ungrateful buffoons? Why would you leave your hard-earned cash in the hands of people that cannot design an even minimally secure website, and think that the appropriate response to people trying to help them fix this is to call the cops and threaten lawsuits?

Personally, I would sooner set my money on fire than give it First State Superannuation.

I would, however, gladly hire OSI Security and Patrick Webster to help diagnose security flaws in my website.