2/28/15 Today's Inquiries

Snow on the ground. Working lots. The culture that is Kentucky:
Patient: Will my heart catheterization be done by 4? I want to watch the UK game.


The Links:

Opiates! Get yer opiates here! No. Literally. This is definitely the place to get narcotic pain medications. How one American pharmaceutical company created our opiate epidemic.

After more than seven years of battling the evasive legal tactics of Purdue Pharma, 2015 may be the year that Kentucky and its attorney general, Jack Conway, are able to move forward with a civil lawsuit alleging that the drugmaker misled doctors and patients about their blockbuster pain pill OxyContin, leading to a vicious addiction epidemic across large swaths of the state.

A pernicious distinction of the first decade of the 21st century was the rise in painkiller abuse, which ultimately led to a catastrophic increase in addicts, fatal overdoses, and blighted communities. But the story of the painkiller epidemic can really be reduced to the story of one powerful, highly addictive drug and its small but ruthlessly enterprising manufacturer.

Homeland Security is funded for 1 more week.

Which is good news because I have a handy guide for you to be able to request your photos and information from DHS. Nobody said big brother wouldn't share!

You may have seen the headlines this past week about the big ISIS bust in Brooklyn. The official story of that these men were planning to either send money to ISIS or to travel to Syria to join the group. However, the real story is more complicated. It seems that, yet again, the FBI is behind the sting. When I say behind, I mean that they are the ones who originated the plot, found vulnerable individuals, radicalized them, and tricked them into joining a "plot."

Meanwhile, Chicago police have an off the books site where they detain people and deprive them of their rights to attorney, trial, and due process. More here.



American foreign policy is delivering unpredictable instability worldwide.

The Road from Westphalia. NYRoB looks at America in Retreat and World Order.

At its extreme, this reasoning holds that the US should not be bound by international rules, even those it has itself developed, but should occupy a position above the rest. In this view, it is in the world’s interest, not merely the American interest, for the US to do so. 

Thinking about human capital. Post decides to use the metaphor of Bruce Campbell's chainsaw arm.

So how should we think about human capital? Here's an analogy that I think works well. You agree that a chainsaw is capital, right? OK, now imagine a chainsaw that you graft permanently onto someone's arm, like Bruce Campbell in the movie Evil Dead 2. It's so thoroughly grafted on that you can't remove it without making it permanently useless.

Yellen's testimony in front of Congress a few days ago. I for one, can't wait for the interest rates to go back up. There will be so much money flowing in the US at that point, it'll be insane.

The FOMC's assessment that it can be patient in beginning to normalize policy means that the Committee considers it unlikely that economic conditions will warrant an increase in the target range for the federal funds rate for at least the next couple of FOMC meetings.

Walker's Wisconsin: lagging behind all its neighbors.

So, in summary, the data I have indicate that Wisconsin’s economic performance since 2011M01 has been lackluster.

Are shifts in industry composition holding back wage growth?

Would average wages have been higher if we had the same mix of employment across industries as we had before the recession? The answer seems to be yes, but not much higher. If nothing had changed in the economy's industry employment mix since 2007, then average wages would have been about 12 cents higher.

More new jobs are being added in cities while employment growth shrinks in suburbs. That's even worse than it sounds because there are added costs to living in the burbs: transportation being the most significant in my mind.

The decline in on-the-job training. The new normal.

Thus, types of skills, who pays for them, and how they are paid for can be sliced various ways. But just looking at the overall pattern, a decline in employer-sponsored and on-the-job training suggest that workers who wish to keep building their skills are getting less support from their employers.

Sweden hates cash.

People who feel they've been unjustly treated will often misdirect their vengeance against innocent third parties.

Jewelry go missing? Torture your housekeeper until she confesses.

Gamer Gate troll says it was all just for the lulz and he wasn't really gonna do anything. Of course, harassment feels real to anyone on the receiving end and Wu obviously thought his threats were real.

This sounds like the least feminist movie I could imagine. Not the most chauvinist or most misogynist just the least feminist.

It’s a movie that Gamergate participants will unabashedly love, in that there is only one woman in it, she is insanely beautiful, all she does in the film is wear minimal clothing and ask men to impart all their manly wisdom, and all the men do in her presence is talk about “hitting that” and distract her with sparkly pink flower necklaces and imagine her having sex with other women and complain that she’s having “the world’s longest period.”

It might surprise you (it does me!) that movies like this still get made without anyone poking their head in to point out that not all wives are nagging shrews, and not all beautiful women are “skanks,” and not all men are experts whose wisdom women crave with every fiber of their Juicy Coutured beings.

Big data is the new phrenology. Get the calipers! Are we supposed to be surprised when companies that use these tests tend to employ only privileged whites? See also: IQ tests are biased against minorities.

Basically the idea is you play video games and the machine takes note of how you play and the choices you make and comes back to you with a personality profile. That profile will help you get a job or will exclude you from a job if the company believes in the results. There’s been no scientific tests to see if or how this stuff works, we’re supposed to just believe in it because, you know, data is objective and everything.

It would seem that period tracking apps are only meant for one kind of woman. More evidence that the tech universe is easily the most socially conservative one imaginable.

The second thing I noticed was that I had a fertile window. Why the fuck do I have a fertile window? It would take a miracle of biblical proportions for me to conceive with my current partner. This makes even the idea of a fertile window completely irrelevant to me.

We must bulldoze what's left of the nerdy white man's internet.

YouTube is not making any money. Maybe there is something behind all these insane Apple valuations. After all, they are actually making money! Amazon doesn't turn a profit. Google does but it loses it elsewhere (YouTube, Glass, search). Yahoo! has been in the hole for quite some time. Microsoft is, well, they might be, umm, yeah.

We all want security but we also want  our technology to have access to all of our data. If only there was a way to encrypt the data on the device and only share it with selected parties.

Professors behaving badly. Getting caught citing yourself.

Spock died yesterday. Which is sad because there's not quite anyone else like him. Also, don't smoke. COPD sucks.



This dress thing has gotten way out of hand. The Amazon reviews are fantastic.

And, we've got trailers:

2/24/15 Today's Inquiries

So apparently snow and ice means a water shortage.


The Links:

Great article on the failed libertarian experiment that is the deep web.

A similar paranoia appears to be even more endemic on the hidden internet, where anonymity is built into the architecture of social interactions. When Sicilian Mafiosi deal with each other, they do at least know each other and can retaliate, often in horrible ways, if they think that they have been cheated. This allows them to maintain a wary peace for much of the time. On the hidden internet, by contrast, people do not know the true identities of those who want to buy or sell.

More about auditing the Fed. I think I found the author's problem:

I’ve been trying to understand why any sensible person would think this is a good idea.

This part is also very important:

If we did want to see a lot more inflation for the U.S., Paul’s bill would be the way to get it. The main effect of the bill would be to give Congress an additional tool to exert operational control over monetary policy. The political pressures will be very strong not to raise interest rates when the time does come to start to worry again about inflation. And when the Fed does get to raising rates, it will mean extra costs for the Treasury in paying interest on the federal debt– Congress isn’t going to like that. The primary effect of the legislation would be to give Congress one more stick with which to try to beat up on the Fed when the Fed next does need to take steps to keep inflation from rising.

In fact there’s a pretty dependable historical correlation– the more political control over monetary policy that a country gives to the legislature and the administration, the higher the inflation rate the country is likely to get.

It looks like Scott Walker is getting economic advice from people who make a career out of being wrong.

Huckabee says the 2016 southern super primary is a gift from God and apparently God wants to elect Mike Huckabee. I have a feeling that the God crowd will be getting behind Walker.

Grifters gotta grift: The Mitt Romney Connection. Though the bit about the treasure hunting business seems unrelated.

Copper King Mine had raised millions of dollars from investors, including from Mitt Romney’s son Josh Romney, who had been lured in with the promise of extraordinary returns. The mine was touting it had the potential to become the largest of its kind in the world. Unfortunately, the operation would soon collapse into bankruptcy taking millions of investors’ dollars down with it. (Unlike most investors, Romney got most of his money back.)

Game theory figures out that the state of nature is exactly as Hobbes thought.

Press and Dyson’s new solution to the problem, however, threw that rosy perspective into question. It suggested the best strategies were selfish ones that led to extortion, not cooperation.

Competing for Jobs: Local Taxes and Incentives. Count me among the critics. Seriously, look at the Kansas Cit,y MI vs Kansas City, Kansas race to the bottom.

State and local governments frequently offer tax incentives to attract businesses to locate in their area. Proponents view these incentives as a valuable tool to encourage economic development. Critics, on the other hand, argue either that incentives have little effect on business location decisions—and hence are wasteful giveaways—or that their benefits come at the expense of reduced economic activity in other areas. A key element in this debate is distinguishing what is best from a local versus a national perspective.

Did you know there's an early retirement movement? I didn't. Apparently one proponent goes by the handle Mr. Money Mustache. So that's great. Also, it's not quite the get rich and then retire early on your bed of money. It's more about how we're super rich in the developed world and even a poor life on a fixed income is wildly wealth compared to being poor anywhere else.

Strangely, the highest rates of default on student loans are on the loans with the smallest balances. Why? I guess I'll have to wait for the next post.

the highest default rates, at nearly 34 percent, are among the borrowers who owe less than $5,000. These borrowers made up 21 percent of the 2009 cohort. The default rate among the borrowers who leave school with more than $100,000 in debt is almost 50 percent lower, at 18 percent.

Tyler Cowen comments here.

dropouts have less debt and also less income. But while the debt rises proportionally with years of education the income rises in less than proportion. As I said in Launching, students who drop out after 2 years get less than half of the gains from completing a four-year degree (the sheepskin effect). Thus the 40% or so of students who dropout see their debt rise faster than their income so burdens are higher and default rates increases

Acute affluenza strikes! Thoughtful response.

My family's household income is $250,000 a year, but I promise you I am middle class. I live in a $2 million dollar house, but I promise you I am still middle class. It has one story, doesn't have a pool or its own movie theater. It is a modest three-bedroom, two-bath.

Aiming for diversity does not mean sacrificing quality or productivity.

Getting a better than base proportion of women isn't impossible, but it does require more work, often much more work. This extra effort reinforces the rarity, if people have difficulty finding good people as it is, it needs determined effort to spend the extra time to get a higher proportion of the minority group — even if you are only trying to raise the proportion of women up to 30%, rather than a full 50%.

Feminists are quitting the internet and writing in general because harassment has become so prevalent and fierce. Glad to see we're making progress.

Techies behaving badly.

A jury is about to hear claims by the now-interim chief executive of the news and social-networking site Reddit that a high-flying Silicon Valley venture capital firm made her a victim of its culture of sexism when she worked there.

Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.

Some have called the growth in healthcare jobs a "female path to the middle class" which is misguided. Lots of men are entering healthcare. I'd say that we're due for a shock, though, as healthcare workers see an overabundance of graduates who then can't get good jobs. What's interesting is that about 25% of our consumer spending is going to be on healthcare by 2020, so 5 years from now.

The inmates are in control of the prison. Well, I'd use inmates loosely because they;re mostly undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation hearings. So, maybe we ought to call this a concentration camp or something.

Citizenfour and Laura Poitras win a well deserved Oscar. I hope they give the statue to Snowden.

More Simpsons theories: Springfield is in the southern hemisphere. Of course if it's all in Homer's mind, then the moon could be completely irrelevant.

2/21/14 Today's Inquiries

Holy Ice Storm Bat Man!

The Links:

There's a Greece deal, hooray, maybe? I go back to the previous posts arguing that the whole thing is an exercise in politics and has much less real economic impact now. 

Also:

In case you need more info.

Robots are Us: The Economics of Human Replacement. Very interesting. Current programers are, in many ways, destroying the need for future programmers. The clearest example of this would be machine learning which allows robots/computers to rewrite and maintain their own code. 

over time, as the stock of legacy code grows, the demand for new code and, thus for high-tech workers, falls.

The resulting tech bust reflects past humans obsolescing current humans. . .these robots contain the stuff of humans – accumulated brain and saving power. Take Junior – the reigning World Computer Chess Champion. Junior can beat every current and, possibly, every future human on the planet. Consequently, his old code has largely put new chess programmers out of business.

. . .tech busts can be tough on high-tech workers. In fact, high-tech workers can start out earning far more than low-tech workers, but end up earning far less.

Furthermore, robots, captured in the model by more code-intensive good production, can leave all future high-tech workers and, potentially, all future low-tech workers worse off. In other words, technological progress can be immiserating

Counterargument to the above here. Counter counter counter argument to the whole thing here: everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while. Which is true, I mean, without technology we'd be dead in days. 

Labor and Management have avoided a west coast dockworker strike. Look, unions work!

Fiscal conservatives strike again! Scott Walker is going to restructure Wisconsin's debt and place an even greater burden on the taxpayer. The US right never fail to deliver exactly the opposite of what they promise. 

Measuring the progress of student loan repayment. 

After all, the story goes that if households can afford the modest payments they are making, then why worry about the cost of debt? But, of course, widespread failure to repay is a problem for the lender, in this case, federal taxpayers. We don’t fully understand yet how the burden of large amounts of debt on households’ balance sheets for long periods of time affects student borrowers’ behavior, but our research so far suggests that growing student debt has contributed to the recent decline in the homeownership rate and to the sharp increase in parental co-residence among millennials.

What sized firm has created the most jobs in the recovery?

Canon and Liu concluded by discussing potential implications of large firms creating a significantly higher fraction of jobs since the Great Recession than after the 2001 recession. In general, labor markets tighten after recessions, so large firms have to poach workers from small firms to fill their ranks. However, the labor market took longer to recover after the Great Recession, meaning there were more unemployed workers available for hire, so large firms did not have to poach workers from small firms.

The Upside of Waiting in Line. Yeah, but I'm an oligarch American and should be able to bypass the line with a slight expenditure of my every increasing wealth. Right?

1870: An inflection point for global trade and travel. 

First, it meant that everyplace in the world was, as long as there were connecting harbors, docks, and railroads, cheek-by-jowl to every other place, economically. Everyone’s economic opportunities and constraints depended on what was going on across the globe. This had not been true before. Before just the consumption patterns of the elite depended on what was going on in other countries and on other continents. 

Second, wherever you could cheaply move goods in mass you could move other things. Most particularly, you could also move and supply armies. Thus conquest—or at least invasion and devastation—became things that nearly any European power could undertake in nearly any corner of the world.

10 Insane Things We Believe on Wall Street. Yeah, I especially like the part about how continual profit are demanded and therefore successful companies should be laying off workers to maintain profits. Do read all 10.

Coverage of a new documentary about racism in America. It's called American Denial and comes form PBS.

Some stuff about how we're all going to get killed just like the dinosaurs. 

The extended forecast for New York City sucks. 

What If does snow removal via car mounted flame thrower or microwave. Tougher than you think.

Video Films!

2/19/15 Today's Inquiries

Having grown up in the South, I am completely unprepared to function in an environment where we have 18+ inches of snowfall. Being the amateur that I am, I've managed to get Lisa's Jeep stuck in a snow drift. And, I've thrown out my back while shoveling a path from the garage to the street. 

Yeah, it got plowed 2 days later!

Here's my Doc telling all the grannies to stay home. 

Oh well. At least we are better off than our neighbors in West Virginia.

Going multimedia heavy today. 

The Links:

Let's abolish the Department of Homeland Security. 

Since neither side is fighting to make the case for DHS, it's as good a time as any to look back over the agency's decade-plus-long history, and assess how the department's actually worked. The answer appears to be that the problems built deep in the department haven't aided national security — and might have damaged it.

Your info-porn for the week is a chart of FDA drug trials. The article says it's proof that the FDA isn't protecting Americans' health. Okay, remember folks, the FDA, USDA, and most of the other food/farming/drug regulatory agencies were created with the specific mission of furthering US farming, agricultural, and pharmaceutical interests. Protecting consumers was never a part of the mission. Rather, these organizations were repurposed in the post war era to combat perceived Soviet agricultural and medical superiority. 

Mighty fine Police Work there Lou:

Can violence be virtuous? Only when fighting Nazis and brown foreigners. 

What ISIS really wants. 

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

Insights into radicalization. 

Life in the algorithm. 

The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market. The surveillance society. The police state, and the drones. All guided by a force we never see and few understand.

UPS uses the algorithm to drive the trucks. 

I more or less hate Elon Musk but count me in for the home battery. In fact, I'd like it used like a really high end uninterrupted power supply where the battery conditions the power to the house. Nice smooth sine wave of power! It's be great during brown outs, outages, and reduce grid load (except maybe right after thousands of people buy them and hook them up the first time. 

The intellectual war over the rise of the machines continues. Meanwhile, researchers fire the opening salvo in the war against the machines by kicking a defenseless robot dog. 

I think there was a Mass Effect subplot about this.

Why does financial sector growth crowd out real economic growth?

Analysis of post recession wage growth.

Data about young people and jobs and stuff. 

The new Census data provide a striking look at how today’s young adults are different on many important demographic characteristics compared to their counterparts in 1980. We can also see from the Census study how the geographic center of gravity in the US for the highest-paying jobs for young Americans has dramatically shifted over the last several generations, from cities in the Midwest and Rust Belt states to the West Coast (Silicon Valley and Seattle) and East Coast (Boston, Washington, New York, Baltimore). 

What happens when wives out earn their husbands. Apparently the answer is not permanent vacation. Or is it?

[A]ctually, in 1 in 3 of those cases, the woman's only earning more because her husband isn't earning anything at all...

It found that once a woman started to earn more than her husband, divorce rates increased. Surprisingly, though, this data showed that whether the wife earns a little bit more or a lot more doesn't actually make much of a difference. So the researchers concluded from that that what really matters is the mere fact of a woman earning more. 

Is teaching about instruction or selection. Given that I see our education system as tasked with social reproduction, I tend to think it's about signaling which is basically what the selection hypothesis is leading to. Related.

Teaching is commonly associated with instruction, yet in evolution, immunology, and neuroscience, instructional theories are largely defunct.

We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which exists to preserve the physical self, while teaching episodes are designed to alter the mental self.

Also, a lot of information about how to fix inequality in US schools collapsed into a manageable form. Here's your hook:

So Fryer and fellow researchers began to study successful charter schools, like the Harlem Children’s Zone led by Geoffrey Canada, as well as some less successful schools. The team spent several years interviewing and videotaping, and came up with five rules to follow to close the academic achievement gap. Here are the five (from the slides accompanying Fryer's talks), with some comments from Fryer

Owning guns changes the way you think. 

The painkilling properties of hot peppers. 

If you're a language nerd, you might like this news about origins of Proto-Indo-European. 

Zadie Smith never really kept a diary. She did however, have a Yahoo! email address which she's used since 1996. 

A guide to insulting scientists. Oh snap! Isn't no.5 a feature of the university research system? 

5. ) Trainees are not attaining academic positions.

Lifehacker says not to trust your doctor. Yeah, what do they know anyway?

Is the One-Ring of out times a Tech Startup? Apple maybe?

This one is right up there with the theory that all of the Pixar films exist in one continuous universe: Homer Simpson has been in a coma since mid 1993 and everything since has been in his head. 

Movies! Shows!

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2/12/15 Today's Inquiries

Snow Flurries giving way to lots of ice. And then it all melts.


The Links:

The worst case climate change scenario is bad. Earth's population: 500 million.

An increase of seven degrees Fahrenheit would see mass migrations from some of the most humid places on Earth – the Amazon, parts of India, northern Australia. Rising sea levels of four feet or more and ferocious storms would flood coastal cities from Tokyo to Mumbai, and submerge low-lying areas such as Bangladesh and Florida, displacing millions. Earth’s most populated areas, that belt of land extending from central China and most of Europe, Africa, Australia, the US and Latin America, would be parched by this century’s end, drying up surface water and killing crops that hundreds of millions depend upon for survival. Nearly half the world’s population, almost 4 billon people, could be enduring severe water scarcity and starvation, numerous studies suggest.

Tyler Cowen gave a talk at OU about the end of Pax Americana. Obviously there's been quite a bit of war around the world but Pax Americana refers to great power wars like, well, WWII. What scares me the most is his second point:

There is a myth of the rational autocrat.

However, there's a new cease-fire plan in Ukraine. But, Putin's got a lot of friends in Europe.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Yalta. Well, the Yalta conference, not the place.

A combat veteran explains why he is changing his military reserve status to one less likely to land him in combat again.

Three tours in Iraq put paid to that notion. I went to fight al-Q’aida, and instead hun­kered down under indi­rect fire from mostly Shi’a old men and young boys, shooting off decrepit, refur­bished rockets for the paltry sums they needed to keep their fam­i­lies fed for another day. These people hadn’t attacked us on 9/11. They weren’t plan­ning to attack us in the future. And we were killing them. I was killing them.

More rev­e­la­tions fol­lowed: Man­ning and Snowden, the slow reversal in Iraq, watching every­thing I fought for, that my friends died for, return to the hands of ISIS. I finally stood in the lobby of a hotel in Wash­ington, DC as Obama announced that we were sending another 1,500 troops to Iraq and I asked myself: “if they called you now, would you want to go?”

And I real­ized that, for the first time, the answer was, “no.”

The Saudis are building a 600 mile wall along the Iraq border. Hey, it worked in Texas...

If you're worried your child might be a terrorist, this helpful government checklist will give you some guidance.

The Bush campaign is off to a great start. First it fired its chief technical office for slut shaming women on social media and now i's published unredacted emails from his time in office, exposing the personal information of thousands. And he's the smart Bush!

Arnold Kling drove to Florida. His thoughts are brief and interesting. I wonder how the older and sicker commentary matches with the whole people-moving-South for jobs trend. Maybe the population growth in the South is not all job/cost of living seeking productive young adults? He also writes about Obesophobia.

In Florida, my casual observation is that the buildings with the guards are in affluent neighborhoods in communities that are miles from any urban diversity, and the buildings in the urban diverse neighborhoods have less security. I attribute that to selection bias–people who are comfortable with diversity are less xenophobic.

Is it time to reassess the low-wage recovery? Hey, market forces work. As more jobs become available, workers are able to push for higher wages or change jobs.

Are H-1B workers replacing Americans? Yes, because they are cheaper. At least initially.

The long term impact of inequality on Entrepreneurship and Job Creation. Does this sound like our tech sector to you?

We find that in countries with higher levels of inequality in the 1700s and 1800s, businesses today are more likely to die young and create fewer jobs.

Rand Paul's ideas about auditing the Federal Reserve make no sense. Yeah, but isn't the point to make your base feel all happy that someone is finally searching for the truth about things? For example, voting to repeal Obamacare 50+ times or Benghazi.

The first thing you need to know about the Fed is that its emergency lending during the crisis was already audited as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform. The second is that Dodd-Frank already requires it to disclose any future emergency lending at a one or two-year lag. The third is that the rest of what it does is already audited by, count 'em, the Government Accountability Office, the Office of the Inspector General, andindependent private auditors. And the last is that the Fed already publishes a summary of its balance sheet every week.

Paul Ryan isn't getting off the crazy train either:

I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech, at Bill Taggart’s wedding, on money when I think about monetary policy. Then I go to the 64-page John Galt speech, you know, on the radio at the end, and go back to a lot of other things that she did, to try and make sure that I can check my premises.

Here's an update on those people that were paid $100,000 to drop out of college.

For Mr. Gu and other members of that first class of fellows, their experiences have been neither as dire nor as dramatically successful as observers on both sides predicted. While many fellows say they appreciate what college gave them, they also didn’t feel they needed a credential to pursue their dreams. And while they agree that dropping out isn’t the right choice for many students, they hope they’re proof that there’s not just one path to success.

The key to financial success isn't saving more, it's investing more buying money.

The National Rise in Residential Segregation.

Analysis of neighbor-based segregation over time establishes several new facts about segregation. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to previous estimates, we find that urban areas in the South were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, the dramatic increase in segregation in the twentieth century was not driven by urbanization, black migratory patterns, or white flight to suburban areas, but rather resulted from a national increase in racial sorting at the household level. 

Gendered language in Teacher Reviews.

This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.

What it's like for a woman to reject a man for a job. This experience meshes with what +Rachael Jones has told me of editing science fiction writing.

And of course, there was one older, white, academic man who felt the need to tell us that we are, “imperious little girls,” and that “we are not superior to [him].”

Go read the Amazon reviews for the children's book, Melanie's Marvelous Measles.

Melanie's Marvelous Measles was written to educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully

and

As a carpenter who specializes in itty bitty coffins I can't say enough good things about this book, my customer base has been growing at an epidemic rate!

Michael Pollan eats a ton of psychedelic mushrooms or something.

Smoking is bad for you.

Dubai unveils plan for the world's largest human rights violation.

How many Harvard Students attend class? It looks like it's about 80% at the start of the semester and 60% by the end.

Our brains process information in a way very similar to how Alan Turing broke codes.

Hypnocat:

2/7/15 Today's Inquiries

Ugh, need more food. Want diabetes. 

The Links:

The hack that warmed the world: It looks like Carbon-Credits are a huge freaking scam overrun by corruption and outright gangsters. I remember flying to Malmo and being asked when I bought the Ryanair ticket if I would like to pay a 1 pound carbon offset. I though it was a scam for several reasons. 1. The plane is going to fly whether I'm on it or not and whether I pay or not. 2. The money I pay has no effect on the emission of the flight. 3. Ryanair already bought the right to pollute in the form of carbon credits and therefore I'm reimbursing them for that purchase. In other words, I'm subsidizing their pollution. 

Here's a fascinating longform article about the heroin epidemic and the "miracle drug" which ought to be made more widely available. It also points out the failure of 12 step programs. There are also several videos within the article, each interesting. 

When kids accidentally kill themselves with guns in Florida, only black parents get arrested. 

The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech. 

Using religion to brutalize other people is not a Muslim invention, nor is it foreign to the American experience.

Protest is terrorism. Move along citizen. Nothing to see here. NYPD did clarify that they will only bring ordinary guns to protests, not machine guns. Homeland Security, however, is worried that all those consumer drones are going to become flying bombs. 

Confessions of a congressman. I like number 7:

Congress is no longer a destination but a journey. Committee assignments are mainly valuable as part of the interview process for a far more lucrative job as a K Street lobbyist. You are considered naïve if you are not currying favor with wealthy corporations under your jurisdiction. It's become routine to see members of Congress drop their seat in Congress like a hot rock when a particularly lush vacancy opens up. The revolving door is spinning every day. Special interests deplete Congress of its best talent.

Don't tell the crowds who lined up a few weeks back to see American Sniper but our Founding Fathers and other important patriots in US history were often very skeptical of the Military. That's because the history of military occupations is more George RR Martin than George C Marshall. We're so far removed from the terror of a military run state that we don't often realize how bad it can be. 

Vaccines are continuing to become political as the third GOP presidential hopeful in a week argues against science, public health, and common decency. The fact that there's a perceived audience for this drivel scares me even more than the prospect of getting these guys as president. For example:

 the poll was worrying in one political respect: In 2009, there was no partisan difference in attitudes toward these requirements. The latest study did find some small differences along party lines. According to Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political science professor who has done research on effective communication around vaccines, injecting partisan politics into individual decisions about whether to vaccinate could have unintended consequences. 

Do the Republicans have an advantage? This is a good counterpoint to the demographics is destiny argument. More here:

Since the dawn of the Obama era, the whole country has shifted to the right. Literally every state but one is now more Republican it was than six years ago.

Thanks Obama

Don't worry, the Republican tax cut deficits will return. Our budget will be back to it's spendiest old self in no time too. It's just going to defense instead of social goods. 

Christie moves toward privatizing New Jersey's water. Also, gambling, casino, shocked to have found it:

The bill has the potential to benefit water companies with ties to Christie. Top representatives of American Water and United Water sit on the board of directors at Choose New Jersey, a tax-exempt organization that was created by Christie's office in 2010 to help sell New Jersey as a business-friendly state but lately has been helping pay the governor's expenses for overseas trips.

Self selection and political bias in Universities. 

Commentary and graphs about yesterday's jobs report. More here. 

This was a very solid employment report with 257,000 jobs added, and job gains for November and December were revised up significantly. 

Which sectors have the strongest job growth? 

As is probably apparent from the above chart, the fastest growing sector in both percentage and absolute terms is professional and business services. It added 2.9 million jobs for an 18 percent gain. The biggest single contributor to that was temporary help agencies, which added 888,000 jobs.

The rich and the Great Recession. Gotta love this conclusion (emphasis mine):

Our results suggest that the standard narrative of the Great Recession may need to be adjusted. Housing played a role, but so did financial assets, which actually accounted for the bulk of the loss in wealth. The middle class played a role, but so did the rich. In fact, the rich now account for such a large share of the economy, and their wealth has become so large and volatile, that wealth effects on their consumption have started to have a significant impact on the macroeconomy. Indeed, the rich may have accounted for the bulk of the swings in aggregate consumption during the boom-bust.

Is your first grader college ready? Did your 10 year old go on any campus visits yet? I feel like this obsession is a symptom of decreasing middle class wages. Also, schools everywhere are merely implementing policy which tells students to go to college or else. 

Matriculation is years away for the Class of 2030, but the first graders in Kelli Rigo’s class at Johnsonville Elementary School in rural Harnett County, N.C., already have campuses picked out. 

Thoughts about how to best implement school vouchers. 

Enrollment targets would be required to be uniform across grades; i.e., you couldn’t offer hundred kindergarten slots but only fifty fourth grades slots. This would prevent schools from using selective attrition to weed out tough to serve kids. Moreover, it would force each school to equally share the burden of midyear enrollees.

As San Francisco parents get more school choice, schools re-segregate. The effects of all that tech wealth are making the bluest city in the US into a red state paradise. 

Since 2010, the year before the current policy went into effect, the number of San Francisco’s 115 public schools dominated by one race has climbed significantly. Six in 10 have simple majorities of one racial group. In almost one-fourth, 60 percent or more of the students belong to one racial group, which administrators say makes them “racially isolated.” That described 28 schools in 2013–2014, up from 23 in 2010–2011, according to the district.

The US DOT published a study last week about the future of transportation in America. It ain't pretty. 

If you don't have anything nice to say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS. This American Life contributor interviews her worst online troll. 

Good news for anyone who runs slowly: Slow runners live longest. 

The ideal amount of jogging for prolonged life, this nuanced analysis showed, was between 1 hour and 2.4 hours each week. And the ideal pace was slow.

Health experts recommend standing at desks, leaving office, never coming back.