12/30/14 Today's Inquiries

No comments today.


The Links:

And here is why, no matter who is in charge, we are so totally screwed as a nation:

She is a deeply religious Christian, with a tightly knit family that prays together even at fast-food restaurants and has suffered one health crisis after the next. Her mother was run over by a car and spent six months in hospitals and rehabilitation centers. Then her father got cancer and died within months. And this year, Ms. Mayhew’s cherished grandmother died of complications from a stroke. Her grief, she said, has been hard to bear. ...

A nurse practitioner at Family Health Centers had prescribed anti-depressants after Ms. Mayhew had her last baby in 2013 — at the time, she had temporary Medicaid for her pregnancy — but she stopped taking them when the coverage ended. Now she is back on them, and feeling good.

“That’s been a big thing for me,” she said.

And yet.

“I don’t love Obamacare,” she said. “There are things in it that scare me and that I don’t agree with.”

For example, she said, she heard from news programs that the Affordable Care Act prohibited lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer....

For Mr. Elson, with advanced diabetes, chronic high blood pressure and an income too high for Medicaid but too low to pay all his bills, the Affordable Care Act came too late.

He had forgone insulin for most of the year when he arrived at his eye doctor’s office in September, huffing and puffing due to fluid in his lungs. He was off his blood pressure pills, too, and all of his medications except a drug he takes for neuropathic pain caused by diabetes. His swollen legs were covered in painful blisters where excess fluid had seeped out...

There, he was told something he had been dreading: his kidney function had dropped to less than 10 percent of the normal level, and he had to start dialysis to save his life. That would mean being hooked up to a machine four hours a day, three days a week, to clear the toxins and extra fluid from his body. 

So, it's important to remember here that the default position on the right is to simply let people die. They deserve to die because they cannot afford health care. But, here's the thing, that's also apparently the default position on the left.

10 things political scientists know that you don't. (.pdf)

Political scientists rarely talk about special interests. We used to use language like “interest-group pluralism” to describe the resulting political environment. The most important distinction in this world is not between special and general interests, but between organized interests (like unions, religious groups, and the NRA) and unorganized interests (like the unemployed or homeless). 

Oil Prices fall, rig counts drop, oil employment falls. This is only bad news for Texas and North Dakota.

Working overtime has pretty much disappeared. In 1975, 65% of salaried workers earned time and a half. Now it's 11%. Hey, gotta cut costs to keep those share prices elevated.

Liberal billionaires outspent conservative billionaires in the midterm elections.

Testing Ricardian Equivalence. If you're not familiar, Ricardian Equivalence holds that the public will see all government spending as future taxes to be paid and will adjust their consumption and saving habits accordingly because they expect to pay higher taxes in the future. This is often the basis for certain arguments about government spending crowding out private sector spending. There's not a lot of evidence that it actually happens.

School lockdowns and the illusion of order.

We will need writers who can remember freedom:


House Majority Whip continues the fine tradition of republican minority outreach by admitting that he spoke at a 2002 white supremacist conference.

Sometimes I forget how stupid the rest of the world is: Argentina's president adopts a jewish kid to prevent him from turning into a werewolf.

An interview with Jay, the key witness from the Serial podcast.

Being cold makes you thinner.

3/5 of farmland is used for raising beef but beef only accounts for about 5% of our protein intake.

Someone recut all of the Marvel films to put all the scenes in chronological order.

12/28/14 Today's Inquiries

Fever.


The Links:

Just before Christmas the Dow hit another record high. Take a look back at the 2009 editorial arguing that the end is nigh and it's all Obama's fault.

More thoughts on oil prices.

Britain will be paying off a variety of historical debts next year, including debts incurred during the 1720 South Seas bubble.

The road to serfdom is through America's growing rental costs.

Big Food: Michael Pollan thinks Wall St. has way to much influence over how we eat. His thesis is that big ag and big food are constantly pressured to achieve ~5% growth every year which forces them into constantly looking for cheaper and cheaper foods. He's only partially right. The other half is that big ag and big food constantly lobby the government for subsidies which buoy their bottom line.

Given my recent discussion with Alex, I thought I'd link the Post Apocalyptic diet.

Speaking of the apocalypse, here's an argument that apocalyptic thinking is an underrated aspect of evangelical political thought.

The 12 years of NSA Christmas. It's a big document dump in response to years of FOIA requests. I can't wait to hear what they find.

The Metric System is a hazard to public safety, America's greatest enemy.


Meet the most important anti-environmentalist in America. And the new chairman of our environment committee.

Ayn Rand reviews children's movies.

An excellent movie. The obviously unfit individuals are winnowed out through a series of entrepreneurial tests and, in the end, an enterprising young boy receives a factory. I believe more movies should be made about enterprising young boys who are given factories. —Three and a half stars. (Half a star off for the grandparents, who are sponging off the labor of Charlie and his mother. If Grandpa Joe can dance, Grandpa Joe can work.)

Verner Herzog inspirationals.

A quest to dig up the bodies of numerous children abused and killed while in the custody of the State of Florida.

Rethinking IQ tests.

1. Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

• A) Yes 
• B) No 
• C) Cannot be determined

Star Wars finally gets a black woman in a major role. Let's hope she's not another purple lightsaber urban market-grabbing Samuel L. Jackson.

What did we get stuck in our rectums last year? Congress surprisingly absent.

12/23/14 Today's Inquiries

Broadcasting live from Peachtree City, GA. Fox News blaring in the background 24-7. It must be Christmas!


The Links:

3rd quarter GDP growth revised up to 5.0%. Thanks Obama.

41 states had a decrease in unemployment last month. Georgia is no longer number 1, having been replaced by Mississippi.

The FED's dirty little secret.

Opting out of the US corporate income tax. I'd call the ability to opt out a feature, not a bug.

Do safer banks mean less economic growth? 

In fact, Cecchetti believes "We should seriously consider requiring further additions to bank capital, given that the social costs of post-crisis capital increases appear to have been small." Such an increase would make the banking system safer from collapse with little cost to the national economy.

Smart commentary on Russia. So Vladimir Putin is Kaiser Soze?

Instead of attempting to explain the failures of the reformers and intellectuals who tried to carry out radical change, we ought instead to focus on the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist KGB officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves.

Smart commentary on oil prices.  I thought this was a good point to make:

It’s just a matter of how long it takes for the high-cost North American producers to cut back in response to current incentives. And when they do, the price has to go back up.

Remember the Saudis are playing at three objectives. 1. Low oil prices hurt Iran and Russia, which have poor relations with the Saudis. 2. Low oil prices hurt alternative oil industries, like US frackers. 3. Numbers 1&2 help Saudi Arabia maintain a dominant portion of the market for oil. They like having that influence and growing alternative and non-OPEC oil producers threatens them. Hence, their indication they will not cut production for the foreseeable future. Then we have to add in all the other market forces at work: US production was already driving prices down a bit because we're making so much more oil than just a few years ago. Several other nations in the mid-east and north Africa have restarted oil production after a decade of turmoil. China and Europe have weakening demand as their economies stagger a little.

Children are cleaning up an oil spill in Bangladesh. With their bare hands.

But right now, it is all about recovering and selling back the oil

What happens to society when robots replace workers?

Red Light cameras cause more injuries and accidents. Yeah, but somebody made a ton of money and that's the important point.

What do real life prosecutors and defense attorneys think about the Serial podcast?

our sampling demonstrates that how lawyers see a case depends on whether they play defense or offense. The prosecutors were more inclined than the defenders to pronounce Syed guilty.

Ferguson is facing a budget deficit so they're going to increase police ticketing to close the gap.

Blue Lives Matter.

White Southerners have a larger amount of African ancestry than you'd imagine.

Americans love torture. More here with added commentary from disillusioned naturalized citizens.

Basic rights for orangutans.

The 2015 Women in Science Calendar.

The most popular people on Pinterest.

A long read about Kentucky and in-state migration.

I recently completed original research, surveying Kentuckian consumption of two nostalgic goods: Ale8–One soda and Kentucky bourbon (can e-mail PDF for anyone interested; working copy currently). To my knowledge, my study was the first to systematically explore nostalgic trade in a domestic context. But before I get into the fun stuff (such as answering weirdly detailed questions about why people drink bourbon), I should give some background.

Stuff the TSA confiscated in 2014:

It’s the people that are carrying stuff like chainsaws that make me wonder.

Beer makes you more creative right up until you hit the legal limit for drunk driving.

Scrooge is an anti-capitalist hero who bravely resisted the commercialization of Christmas.

Kamchatka is an amazing place.

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12/18/14 Today's Inquiries

It's flu season.


The Links:

If you're wondering what life is like in Pikeville, here's a great example:

Yes, it's in a parking lot. Yes, the location is exactly as described .

Good news, lynching is a thing again.

Georgia leads the nation in school shootings.

Jeb's bubble.

Actually, this would have been silly even if Florida had a well-founded boom — governors don’t matter that much. But in any case, we now know something about the other “Bush boom” — as you can see from the attached chart, it was all about a monstrous housing bubble. Bush the other didn’t cause that bubble — but all his alleged success involved taking a ride on it.

Comments on the FOMC meeting yesterday. More easy liquidity for the banks. Wall St. loved it.

Elizabeth Warren was right about the links between government and Citigroup.

Related: Obama insulated banksters who donate to democrats.

Jeff Bezos defends his profitless corporation.

The 11 richest people have all received government subsidies. Obviously. Afterall, rent seeking is the quickest way to the top.

New Jersey corruption: State money paid to Christie's family. Son and Wife. I'm shocked, SHOCKED!

Wealth inequality and the marginal propensity to consume.

Inequality in the US is worse than in apartheid South Africa, slaveholding colonial US, and ancient Rome. Holy hyperbole.

The "sharing economy" must share the risks.

It also requires platforms such as Uber to take greater responsibility for the quasi-employees they keep at a distance in order to minimise their liabilities and costs. The alternative is a highly fragmented and insecure workforce that cannot support itself.

The poor appear to face higher inflation than the middle class. This makes me think of the link about cost of living yesterday. We tend to measure things like inflation and cost of living broadly but there are numerous smaller economies at work in any city.

Law school enrollment is at a 40 year low.

Wall St. is a black hole for our best and brightest.

1.2 Million Teachers aren't covered by Social Security. Scary.

The 2 minute OED.

Web 1.0 online religious cults were a thing. Vice looks them up to see how they're doing now.

Hyperrealistic cartoon eyeballs.

Goodbye Colbert Report. It was a lovely ride.


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12/17/14 Today's Inquiries

I'm starting to like these morning shifts.


The Links:

Jeb Bush is on the up and up. 4 more years! Also, he's done a great job of branding himself as a centrist which gives him general election bonuses but is he conservative enough to win primaries? More here.

So he's going to run with a Mitt Romney level of financing but a Jon Huntsman approach to the issues -- a belief that if he defies litmus tests, he'll be respected for that. (Ask Huntsman how well the latter worked out for him.) But meanwhile, he's likely to clear the field quite a bit -- if he's in, Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney are almost certainly out, Chris Christie will struggle to get funded, and Scott Walker, John Kasich, Mike Pence, Rick Snyder, and other potential fresh faces will probably have second thoughts about running. Paul Ryan will probably decide he'd rather pursue power in the House. We really might be down to a top tier consisting of just Jeb, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, with Ben Carson punching above his weight until the big-money primaries start, in the Huckabee/Santorum role.

Thoughts on making America more like Disney World.

[He] concludes that what makes Disneyland different is….happy thoughts. If only we were more like W.D., he says, “we could make America into a happy place.”

No, what makes Disney invest in infrastructure is not happy thoughts. Johnston is in fact clear about this:

The Walt Disney Co. invests in infrastructure because it makes the company money.

The problem with America is that our public infrastructure has been turned over to a fickle political process that is not governed by a rational calculation of cost and benefit, market test and experimentation but by a pursuit of power, glory and advantage that only rarely coincides with the public interest.

The secret to the Uber economy is inequality. Yeah, if there were numerous well paying jobs, they wouldn't have any drivers.

Cost of living is probably more complex than we think.

Consider that, at a national level, economic experts soberly analyze changes in trend productivity growth of 0.5 percent per year. To measure productivity changes, you need to have accurate measures of real GDP. To measure real GDP, you need to have accurate measures of “the” rate of inflation.

But what if inflation is 5 percent higher in downtown LA than it is 30 miles away? Which is the accurate measure of inflation? Even a slight mistake in aggregating across different areas could completely change the picture for national productivity growth.

I find myself thinking that the multiplicity of economies within the U.S. really matters. For example, I could imagine that the minimum wage would have a much bigger effect on employment in the locations with those sub-$200,000 houses than in higher-cost areas, where employers probably have to pay above the minimum, anyway. I can imagine that downward stickiness of wages matters a lot if you have inflation differentials across areas of 5 percent or so.

Local commission is looking into Fergusson's court system which one participant described as "debtor's prison."

A TPM reader asks, do we really want to live in the world advocated for by defenders of these recent police actions?

But listen to the defenders of the police in these latest cases… do you really want to live in the world they are promoting? One where you must immediately acquiesce to any request/order give by anyone in a uniform, without question or complaint… under penalty of death if you don’t comply, or comply too slowly for them? Do you really mean to give people in uniform the power to kill, maim, imprison any person simply because they questioned why they were being confronted or resisted rough treatment? Is the uniformed officers word to be deemed absolute, without recourse… and his/her power to punish to be deemed limitless?

Antibiotic resistance will kill 300 million people by 2050.

Russia's currency is spinning out of control. Seems like old times.

In other words, reserves useful for defending the currency against speculative attacks are more like $200 billion than $400 billion. That has made the evolution of recent events much more akin to a classic Krugman first generation balance of payments crisis. It also has elements of third generation crises to the extent that balance sheet considerations complicate matters for Russian policymakers. 

What are the odds of a commodities led global financial crisis?

Nonprofits sure are making a lot of money. They just aren't spending it on helping people. You know, like the NFL.

Pearson says there's a renaissance coming in assessment. Let's hope so. The state of standardized testing at the primary and secondary level is abysmal.

Bringing blogging to the classroom. So, bringing classrooms to 2004? How about we bring Instagram to the classroom? Or books. Bring the classroom to 1436.

Chunks of online education.

Herein lies the lesson for online education. Hart and Case put an enormous effort into this. They are not ‘star professors.’ They are not experts in this area. They just explored the knowledge and acted as the translators. And there are similar efforts going on around the world.

This means something for online education. These chunks are the components. All of the efforts, the experts or professors are putting into courses with videos etc are mere place-holders until the true best-practice mode of expression is created. In the end, we will have to think of online education as a vetting and then curation of these components to give students an education. Suffice it to say, we are surely still in the Wild West of doing this.

How humanity will survive a mass extinction.

Rather priceless:

12/15/14 Today's Inquiries

Still somewhat without my main computer. But. We can rebuild him!


The Links:

We have a spending deal. Don't worry, Obama will sign the gift to bankers. How did they pull it off?

Are low oil prices an indicator of a global economic slowdown? Yes.

In other words, of the observed 45% decline in the price of oil, 19 percentage points– more than 2/5– might be reflecting new indications of weakness in the global economy.

The dark side of the oil shock:

If there is a really dark side to this oil shock, it is likely to stem not from the developed economies, but from its destabilising effects on Russia (as Paul Krugman has argued) and some other oil producers in the emerging world. That is what transpired, eventually, in the oil shock of 1997/98.

A collapse of the Russian economy, with its dangerous political consequences, is the most important reason to worry that the “idiotic optimists” will be wrong about the beneficial market impact of the 2014 oil shock.

Here is your must-read for today: How to Uphold White Supremacy by Focusing on diversity and Inclusion.

Since the civil rights movement, white people have exploited every opportunity to conceal their colonialist legacy and longstanding (ab)use of white supremacist power. They’ve proven time and again that they have no interest in rectifying that history, only in dealing with the fact that they could no longer deny the reality of those injustices. One effective tactic has been to separate white supremacy and colonialism from the way racism is understood and taught through schools, history textbooks, news media, and through any white-controlled institutions. These lessons, of anti-racism as-told-by-white-people, will be familiar to you: that racism is only explicit racial prejudice; that separatism is the essence of Jim Crow (and therefore inclusion is the antithesis to de juresegregation); and that the remedy for a racist society is a colorblind one.

I think this sounds a lot like that 9/12 project Glenn Beck tried to get started. Does conservatism really need rebranding following a successful election?

A Feminist Critique of Silicon Valley.

When the hostage crisis began in Sidney, thousands in the business district decided to head home for the day. Uber responded by increasing prices fourfold. Hurray surge pricing.

Who has accountability for civil asset forfeiture? Apparently it's not the local prosecutor's office.

The devalued American worker. Don't worry, we'll all get jobs at Uber driving each other around on our days off.

The Vanishing Male Worker. Women too.

The media wealth of whites is $142,000. For Blacks it's $11,000.

Do development workers underestimate the poor?

Arnold Kling makes several predictions about future technological change.

Teach For America trojan horse among the Ferguson protests.

Teach For America recruits young, mostly white grads from elite colleges to undergo a 5 week training program which supposedly enables them to replace experienced, mostly black teachers in inner city schools. Although TFA used to claim it sends its recruits to “underserved” schools where experienced teachers don't want to go, the facts are that underprepared TFA temps have replaced tens of thousands of experienced teachers in Newark, Chicago, St. Louis, and dozens of other cities around the country. Teach For America contends that inner-city public schools are NOT underfunded, that chronic poverty, joblessness, homelessness and short staffing are merely “excuses” used to protect the "bad teachers" which its mostly white temps are replacing. This is precisely the opposite of what knowledgeable young activists like the Dream Defenders Phillip Agnew will tell you.

The TED talk geniuses who gutted journalism.

Thoughts on unsecured personal lending being popularized by sites like Lending Tree and Lending Club.

Would you make an unsecured personal loan to an individual so they can pay off $14,000 in credit card debt? If so, at what interest rate (the credit card debt is at 17%). The person has a 15 year credit history, a FICO score of 699, an annual income of $73,000 and a DTI of 17% (excluding mortgage debt).

The Sony hack is so bad that the company's financials are a mess because the software they use to manage their money is FUBAR. They've also ceased filming.

The Pickup Artist Simulator. Surprisingly tongue-in-cheek.

This movie is getting too much publicity on the NPR/NYT circuit but it does look pretty good. I've never been a huge Pinchon fan though.


While Blackhat may never be as awesome as Hackers, it may still be a decently fun movie.

12/10/14 Today's Links

So, my beautiful gaming desktop finally bit the bullet. I'm getting nasty blue screens whenever I do any thing more intense than use the internet. I guess I'll be putting together a new PC a little earlier than intended and I'll be posting from work more often.


The Links:

The biggest news, clearly, is the Senate's torture report. Vox roundup here. Andrew Sullivan live-blogged it. I usually don't go for this kind of thing but his commentary here is pretty good. Greenwald's coverage is also excellent.

Does torture even work? No. But don't let that stop us. I mean, let's really be honest with ourselves here. The CIA knew torture didn't work at the outset but getting information was never really the point. It was about punishment, sadism, and revenge. Moreover, Americans freaking love torture. Also, paging Dr. Mengele.

Nearly a quarter of the world's countries helped run the CIA torture program.

Dan Drezner comments here.

to suggest that this Senate report will really tip the scales when it comes to the United States’ enemies rallying support, you have to believe that the following exchange is happening somewhere in the Middle East:ABDUL: Ahmed, why won’t you come with me to attack the infidels? You are not outraged that the United States has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and caused so much suffering in two Muslim countries?AHMED: It’s not enough for me to take up arms.ABDUL: You are not outraged that in the past three years the great Zionist oppressor has waged air campaigns against two Arab countries — Syria and Libya — and accomplished little but to extend the suffering of our Muslim brothers and sisters?AHMED: It’s not enough for me to take up arms.ABDUL: You are not outraged that the great Western imperialist power has launched drone strikes with impunity in two other countries — Yemen and Pakistan — killing scores of innocent Muslim families in the process?AHMED: It’s not enough for me to take up arms.ABDUL: You are not outraged that the infidel superpower has defended Israel as that Zionist pig-state has done nothing but displace, bomb and humiliate our Palestinian brothers and sisters?AHMED: It’s not enough for me to take up arms.ABDUL: You are not outraged that two successive U.S. presidents, in two flowery speeches, have claimed that the United States wants to bring human rights and democracy to the Middle East, only to tolerate authoritarian crackdowns in Egypt and the Gulf states?AHMED: It’s not enough for me to take up arms.ABDUL: You are not outraged about all the stories of infidels torturing our Muslim brothers in Abu Ghraib, in Bagram, in Guantanamo Bay? The stories about infidel soldiers desecrating the Koran?AHMED: It’s not enough for me to take up arms.ABDUL: You are not outraged by the just-released Senate report about CIA torture?AHMED: Wait, did you say ‘Senate report’? Okay, I will take up arms now.

Is the Rust Belt about to come back to life?

Two factors drive this change. One is the steady revival of America as a productive manufacturing country, driven in large part by new technology, rising wages abroad (notably in China), and the development of low-cost, abundant domestic energy, much of it now produced in states such as Ohio and in the western reaches of Pennsylvania.

The second, and perhaps more surprising, is the wealth of human capital already existent in the region.

We might get a nice little upward revision in GDP for last quarter.

Uncivil Disobedience.

This Article asks how we might make sense of these more paradoxical protests, involving not explicit law-breaking but rather extreme law-following. We seek to identify, elucidate, and call attention to the phenomenon of "uncivil obedience."

So, I read this as an argument for giving the poor proles the table scraps instead of inviting them to dinner.

If firms cannot or will not offer rising wages, they should at least offer non-pecuniary benefits: more control over working conditions and the assurance of good rewards if the business thrives in future.

Moreover, inequality is bad for growth! Why, as a firm, whose interest is in the long term growth of your company, would you seek to degrade your employees' ability to function and grow the company? For example, people who work too much aren't actually more productive.

Minimum wage workers ripped off even more than we thought. More excellent Bill Moyers:



So, Google admitted that about 50% of internet advertising is never seen. Gald to see that so much money is shifting toward half-useless new media advertising and away from legacy media.

Rise of the Machines: bad for the economy?

The Periodic Table of Figures of Speech.

Like Harry Potter? Well now's your chance to go LARP in a real-life Hogwarts. In Poland, but it's kinda close.

Delightful:

12/7/14 Today's Inquiries

A nice slow Sunday at work.


The Links:

Goodbye to the last Southern Democrat. It seems like pretending to be a republican didn't help her win any votes anyway.

Energy firms secret alliances with state GOP officials. Of course they leave out the democrats who also kowtow to the energy industry. For example, all of Colorado.

Michael Hanlon argues that human progress has ground to a halt. Sometimes it certainly seems that way but I am skeptical. Although, the emphasis is now on making money rather than bettering the world so the noble pursuits aren't, umm, pursued.

Many of the achievements of the Golden Quarter just wouldn’t be attempted now. The assault on smallpox, spearheaded by a worldwide vaccination campaign, probably killed several thousand people, though it saved tens of millions more. In the 1960s, new medicines were rushed to market. Not all of them worked and a few (thalidomide) had disastrous consequences. But the overall result was a medical boom that brought huge benefits to millions. Today, this is impossible.

Tyler Cowen argues that technology could improve income inequality. I can't help but feel he is talking down to people here:

Another set of future gains, especially for lesser-skilled workers, may come as computers become easier to handle for people with rudimentary skill. Not everyone can work fruitfully with computers now. There is a generation gap when it comes to manipulating electronic devices, and many relevant tasks require knowledge of programming or, more ambitiously, the entrepreneurial skill of creating a start-up.

New estimates of the effects of the minimum wage.

Over the late 2000s, the average effective minimum wage rose by 30 percent across the United States. We estimate that these minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point.

Why poor people stay poor. An excerpt from Hand to Mouth which I linked last month.

It actually costs money to save money.

It is impossible to be good with money when you don’t have any. Full stop. If I’m saving my spare five bucks a week, in the best-case scenario I will have saved $260 a year. For those of you that think in quarters: $65 per quarter in savings. If you deny yourself even small luxuries, that’s the fortune you’ll amass. Of course you will never manage to actually save it; you’ll get sick at least one day and miss work and dip into it for rent. Gas will spike and you’ll need it to get to work. You’ll get a tear in your work pants that you can’t patch. Something, I guarantee you, will happen in three months. 

Compare the above to this take on poverty from The Economist. Although they have largely the same conclusion, one seems far more paternalistic.

Conventional economic thinking assumes the poor will want to earn their way out of poverty. But as studies from countries as different as Ethiopia and France show, poverty makes people feel powerless and blunts their aspirations, so they may not even try to improve their lot. When they do, they face obstacles everywhere. They have no margin for error, making them risk averse. If they do not know where their next meal is coming from, saving and investing for the future is hard. George Orwell said, “Within certain limits, the less money you have the less you worry.” He was wrong. 

As college costs rise, food pantries are sprouting up on college campuses. That's a long way from Let the Big Dawg Eat.

Despite the persistent lack of hyperinflation, social and political collapse, or other kinds of apocalyptic events which usually drives people toward the yellow stuff, gold-bugs are still pining for the Golden Years.

Wasting away again in our dementiaville. I see lots of dementia cases with the physicians in the ED. It's pretty sad. This article is a good,although poorly formatted, window into elder abuse. It's also a great call for restoring the humanity of the demented.

  They are not. Dementia, except in the advanced stages, leaves much of the mind -- and virtually all of the character and personality -- intact.  These are delightful, observant, funny and even subversive people who are starved for freedom and affection. Our warehousing of them is almost as heartless as our prison system. To their overlords at the facilities, they are little more than cash cows, which need a modicum of care and feeding -- and milking, of course. Then they are herded out to the semi-dark barn (euphemistically known as "the TV room"), where they spend one comatose day after another. 

Myths about Pearl Harbor. Not good when the article starts off with a big correction.

How to write tall tales.

A paper written by two Simpsons characters was accepted for publication in two scientific journals.

Benefits of being a white male gamer.


How is Ayn Rand still a thing?


Video Game Trailer premiers from the Video Game Awards:


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12/6/14 Today's Inquiries

Coffee is the best!


The Links:

Yesterday's unemployment report. Lots to like about it. Although the percentage rate remained unchanged, we now have 10 straight months of 200k or more job growth, we've added more than 2 million more jobs than were added last year, and there are 1.7 million more jobs than the previous pre-recession peak employment. September and October numbers were also revised upwards. It's the best year since the 90s for employment. Krugman lays into the "worst recovery ever" crowd here.  Thanks Obama.

Many of those jobs are in oil and gas extraction which is probably going to change if low oil prices can't sustain that workforce.

Small business borrowing is back up too. Go, go job creators.

Did the Nanny State kill Eric Garner? No, the asshole cop who choked him killed Eric Garner. However, I find Paul's arguments effective and, yet again, I wish this were a larger libertarian position with more concern for minorities who are constantly harassed by the state.

Ghetto policing spreads to the suburbs.

The demonstrators were not responding to the deprivations of the ghetto but to confrontations that have taken place in the suburban areas where many black people have moved in recent years as the forces of gentrification have made their traditional urban neighbourhoods too costly for them to afford.

The grievances being aired are those of African-Americans who made their way out of the slums but feel they are viewed with suspicion in the suburbs, particularly by police mimicking the aggressive tactics of their urban brethren.

The next battle in the pension plan wars: Congress will soon allow companies to cut benefits to currently retired pensioners. Wait, isn't a pension a contract? Have things like this been litigated before? I simply can't believe it would stand up to legal scrutiny. Usually it comes to bankruptcy or buyouts of current pensioners.

You know what business you won't find any climate change deniers in? The reinsurance business. I guess the free markets are also in on the climate change scam.

An anti LBGTQ discrimination bill in Alabama is going to be named after Apple CEO Tim Cook. Good on them although it doesn't stand a chance of passing. They might love capitalism and he might be CEO of the most valuable company in the world, but he's got the gay so he can be fired at any time (in AL).

Rolling Stone decides not to stand by the UVA gang rape story it published recently. Since this case is so high profile, have they done irreparable harm to the credibility of rape victims everywhere?

Middle class pay is elusive for teachers. Apparently the Atlanta area pays very well. So why are their schools so bad? Or are they? Honestly, it's mostly a cost of living calculation which pushes the compensation so low in placed like New York.

The incredible shrinking income of young Americans.

You know, if we stopped the disappearance of the Comp Sci classroom, we might also help address tech's diversity problems. Because if only rich white schools have computer science, only rich white comp sci grads will exist.

Arnold Kling on college incompletion data.

Still, my position is that the reason that few come out of the funnel on time is that too many unqualified students are being crammed into the funnel in the first place. Talk to anyone who has taught at something other than a prestigious private institution, and chances are the professor will be surprised that the graduation rate is as high as it is. Most of those professors are bending over backward to grade generously, and even so….

Cowen reviews The Student Loan Mess.

Shared purely for the title: Murder on the Orientalist Express.

In the 1990s, TIME picked 50 people to keep an eye on in the coming decades. Where are they now?

I've been playing the Eilte Dangerous beta a little bit. This game is basically Euro Truck simulator in space. With lasers and pirates. So it's fun. The article mentions visiting planets' surfaces but that's not an option in the game yet.

If George Lucas had directed the new Star Wars:


If Wes Anderson had directed it:

This War of Mine: Day 2

So, we left off with Pavle returning home from scavenging supplies in a nearby villa. It turns out the villa was inhabited and poor Pavle took a few punches on his way out. He returned with very little as I had seen fit to load him down with unnecessary supplies for the trip. As he walks into the front door, Pavle expresses some concern for the people he just stole from.

See, just like I said.

Katia is just plain thankful he made it back and Bruno seems to be the realist of the bunch. He states he doesn't care where the supplies came from. I set them to work crafting and clearing the remaining rubble. The situation is precarious, though. All three are tired and hungry and Katia is still sick.

Bruno is able to build a simple cooking stove and some flammable materials so I give the ex-chef the task of cooking up our meager amount of food. It turns out to be just enough to feed everyone. Meanwhile, Pavle sets about building a bed which should improve their sleep quality. Poor Katia is stuck digging the last remaining rubble piles.

The is the house. It's a bit of a fixer upper.

Pavle gets the bed immediately since he was out the whole night. Bruno makes as many craftables as he can which ends up being mostly firewood for the stove. Katia gets the bed when Pavle wakes up so she can rest for the evening. I plan on sending her on the next scavenging run just in case negotiation is an option.

When night comes, I have Pavle guard and Bruno gets the bed. Katia will go to the nearby cottage which I passed on the previous night. There are two new scavenging options available: a bombed out school and a supermarket in the military occupied part of town. Maybe another time. What the group really needs is food, medicines, and building materials. Preferably in that order.

The Cottage

The cottage is thankfully unoccupied. Save for a few rats running around, Katia is free to scavenge her heart out. She manages to find some gun parts, ammo, and a broken pistol which she takes. She also finds some food and building materials. However, there is a locked door upstairs which I can't get Katia to open. I wasted all my lockpicks on the first day. There's also a cabinet behind some rubble in the right hand corner. Katia has to dig with her hands (still no shovel) and it takes her several hours to clear the way. The cabinet is also locked so no medicines tonight. Katia will have to remain sick for another day. She also finds an ominous message about the cottage's former inhabitants.

I have to imagine he's dead in the locked room. It also explains the gun I found. 

So day 2 was a bit more successful from a survival standpoint. I send Katia home a bit early having filled her pack with all the food and building supplies I can fit. Things are looking up for the party and I plan to be a bit more adventuresome the next night. The absence of medicine is going to take a toll if Katia becomes incapacitated. I also need to know a bit more about these people. Tomorrow I'll explore the interpersonal side of the game and try to tease out the relationships between the characters. Also, I want to craft a shovel.

12/3/14 Today's Inquiries

Posting links like it's my job. So, part time job. I guess.


The Links:

Who'd have thought that the LAUSD's 1 iPad per student project would be fertile grounds for corruption? Well, the FBI just seized their records relating to the billion dollar deal. More info here. Last I heard, they were abandoning the project because the kids might have access to the internet, or something. Sounds like rent seeking got a little too corrupt:

The tech project was dogged by problems almost from the start, from technology and security snafus to broader questions about why a curriculum supposed to be pre-loaded into the devices was not ready. The curriculum problems caused confusion in LAUSD schools, as was documentedby Education Week's Benjamin Herold in a detailed report about the district's tech rollout.

Over the past few months, other controversies followed—including revelations, documented in a district report, that Deasy and a then-top-deputy, had contact with officials from Apple and Pearson in the period before the district awarded the contract. Deasy, who has since resigned, has strongly denied any wrongdoing, saying criticism of him was politically motivated, and that the communications with the companies were routine and not indicative of favoritism.

Are colleges failing mentally ill students?

It's time to being back that good old fashioned class prejudice.

Which is good because recent evidence shows that elite families can stay in the elite for centuries.

Ferguson protests and a new civil rights movement. Making these changes is going to be more difficult than in the past because much of the problem has roots in whites' perceptions rather than outwardly discriminatory laws.

Looking ahead to the jobs report this Friday, ADP's estimates are below expectations.

What happens when your paycheck is variable both in timing and amount but your bills arrive like clockwork?

A Farewell to (Keynesian) Arms.

It is one of the strange paradoxes that those who disbelieve that government spending can stimulate the economy are sometimes the same individuals that believe reduced government spending can decrease economic activity. (G.W. Bush is not subject to this criticism; see [1].) Well, internal consistency has not always been a strong suit for some. What is interesting is that spending on national defense has declined substantially proportionately; my view is that this has resulted in some drag in growth.

Social insurance schemes provide a safety net for entrepreneurs. Perhaps that's one reason why the recent boom in tech entrepreneurs seems mostly privileged and white.

Why are there fewer abortions?

The Tea Party and traditional Republicans are split on science.

"There are greater differences on environment and science questions between Tea Party supporters and non-Tea Party Republicans than there are between non-Tea Party Republicans and Independents," says sociologist Lawrence Hamilton of the University of New Hampshire, who co-authored the paper with his university colleague Kei Saito. "As far as I know, that hasn’t been found before, and we found that standing out in our data analysis." 

The real world contradicts right wing tax theories. There's more than I can quite here but there is a comparison between policies in California and Kansas. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Oil prices are dropping fast. That's good news in come ways but bad news for the Fracking economy, which is bigger than you might think. Also, lots of international relations ramifications. Saudi Arabia has basically declared Oil War.

The TSA may ban all carry-on luggage because terrorism or something. Thank goodness they've been so vigilant up until now by catching all those bombs hidden in carry-ons.

Criticism of Vox's revenue strategy.

Berlin adopts pre-crime system, casts Tom Cruise as detective.

Pizza Hut wants to read your mind.

Stephen Hawking warns of the rise of the machines.

Highschool girls build kickass robots.

(No picture here.)

12/2/14 Today's Inquiries

I bet you thought I wasn't going to post these.


The Links:

TNC on Ferguson. Again.

Widening wage gap linked to more deaths among black Americans.

White people can't tell how old black people are. That's why they keep shooting black children. Or something.

Police in Utah kill more people than gang members. I wonder what the national statistics look like?

Police are evolving into a security service.

Not an iPhone commercial:

More here.

An excellent interview with Chris Rock which covers much of the above.

My Health Insurance Company Killed Me, Despite Obamacare. Yes, but they saved money!

Calling out corruption in medical care.

Hartzband and Groopman, who teach at Harvard Medical School, explain that cold numbers are poor drivers of quality care. What’s commonly called “metrics,” or numerical standards doctors are supposed to meet under contracts for medical care that reward “pay for performance,” are derived from whole population studies. That is, they’re generic standards for large groups of people, not measures to be applied to individual patients. People are different, and although metrics are useful in research and in shaping policy, they’re woefully inadequate in the assessment and support of a single human being.

Metrics, the writers say, do not account for patient preference, differing opinions or optimal practice for a given doctor-patient circumstance. Yet metrics are what the industry demands from providers if they expect financial support.

Obama's immigration action is going to lead to an ethnic cleansing of whites, according to Kansas republican Kris Kobach.

The US and UK governments are painting social media companies as allies of terrorists.

But there’s something else significant going on here that I want to highlight. All of this is part of a clear and definitely coordinated campaign by the U.S. and UK Governments to demonize social media companies as terrorist-helpers in order to force them to act as (even more) obedient snooping agents for the National Security State.

More lawsuits against Apple for its illegal no-poaching deals. Good thing Obama cleared the way for more H1B folks. That should keep wages nice and low.

Your surge-priced nightmare future.

I am Uber. I can see my thousands of cars. I don’t know if I am an extension of them or they are an extension of me. They run over streets filled with pipes and electricity that I am also responsible for monitoring and optimizing. Hundreds of thousands of people are reporting back to me where they are. Beneath them is also an unoptimized subway system that runs empty trains at night, where everyone pays the same price no matter the time or demand. It is a form of madness. And of course it is failing, flooded, useless.

There is no American Dream. Link goes to awesome local news video.

Failed for-profit schools bought out by student-loan debt collector. This should end well. Fox, welcome to the hen house.

Meanwhile, colleges that pledged to help the poor have been doing the opposite.

The proceeds from Mr. Jefferson’s Capital Ball are destined for merit aid for applicants who have the high grade-point averages and top scores on entrance tests that help institutions do well on college rankings. Merit aid can also attract middle- and upper-income students whose families can pay the rest of the tuition bill and therefore furnish badly needed revenue to colleges and universities.

As institutions vie for income and prestige in this way, the net prices they’re charging the lowest-income students, after discounts and financial aid, continue to rise faster on average than the net prices they’re charging higher-income ones, according to an analysis of newly released data the universities and colleges are required to report to the U.S. Department of Education.

Why couples move for the man's job but not the woman's.

The big take-away: Women enter professions that make it easy to work anywhere, and move for any reason, including for a spouse. Men choose careers in fields that are geographically-constrained. In other words, men have to move in order to move up.

Demographics for renting and buying.

For buying, the 30 to 39 age group (blue) is important (note: see Demographics and Behavior for some reasons for changing behavior).  The population in this age group is increasing, and will increase significantly over the next 10+ years.   

This demographics is positive for home buying, and this is a key reason I expect single family housing starts to continue to increase in coming years. 
Read more at http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/12/housing-demographics-for-renting-and.html#SeEbwYVeUe5GQFM7.99

Home ownership and wealth creation. I'm not sure that I agree that we need more policies to promote home ownership if they're not sustainable for the individuals buying the homes. I liked this part though:

The solution is to lift wages, not only with new policies like higher minimum wages and toughened labor standards, but also with approaches to managing the economy to ensure that a fair share of growth goes to wages and salaries, rather than going disproportionately to corporate profits.

More on the job market being better than it looks.

More on the success of the Stimulus program. If only all the states hadn't simultaneously cut their budgets and fired lots of workers.

SCOTUS tackles whether or not online threats are really threats. 

Pope: God is not a magician.

Chernobyl by drone:


42 Million dead in bloodiest black Friday weekend on record.

Cards Against Humanity literally sent people bullshit for Black Friday.

Do you like comics? Then you have 2 days to get Marvel Unlimited (a digital subscription to all of Marvel's comics for the last 75 years) for 75 cents for the first month.

Star Wars: