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Gus Van Horn blog

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Everything posted by Gus Van Horn blog

  1. "Invisible"? To Whom? There is a thought-provoking article on "invisible work" in The Atlantic. Among other things, it considers how (and why) investors and government regulators might want to measure the economic impact of web-based businesses, such as Airbnb. As you might expect, the entitlement state both wants a piece of the action and, ill-informed by ancient stereotypes about capitalism, seeks to control it: Do follow the first link in the excerpt to see why a company founded on enabling consenting adults to do business with each other is having to explain that it is a "good neighbor", and to whom. It is about equal parts amusing and pathetic that every new technological advance that frees up time from less productive activity is viewed as a "threat" by a meddlesome third party. Weekend Reading "[T]rying to compromise when none is possible is futile." -- Michael Hurd, in "Appeasement Isn't Smart" at The Delaware Coast Press "Rand's great insight was that every element of this anti-capitalist framework came from the same error: ignoring and denying the mind." -- Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, in "Ayn Rand Rewrote the Story of Capitalism to Show That It Is a Necessary Good" at USApp My Two Cents The Brook and Watkins piece underscores a crucial aspect of cultural activism by specifically addressing weak defenses of capitalism: Even many people whose hearts are in the right place have work to do if they are to be able to help turn the tide in favor of freedom. Should We Call It "Cultural Illiteracy"? The following passage, from a column about soccer, reminds me of occasional encounters I have had on many other subjects: One must tailor his message to an audience, yes. This does entail some setting of context, some clarity about one's premises, and a degree of patience in making one's evidence and logic clear, But at a certain point, one has to stop. Some people, through lack of intellect, poor thinking habits, or outright evasion, can not or will not see even the best-put, most straightforward points. Never let such "readers" -- and our culture has made them as common as flies -- wear you down to the point that you feel like you have to write what Ayn Rand aptly called "the Unanswerable Article" [my caps]. They are beyond help: Ignore them, and address a truly rational audience instead. --CAV Link to Original
  2. 1. It's hard to believe we've been in St. Louis for just over a year, but this was our second Halloween here. Mrs. Van Horn took our daughter out to trick-or-treat while my four-month-old son and I manned the door at home. I like the local custom of having the kids earn their candy by telling a joke: We had our daughter, who is just over two, ask, "What is a cat's favorite color?" (The answer is "purrr-ple".) 2. Currently, my daughter's favorite game is to "go hiding", which means she gets under a blanket while I pretend to have no idea where she is. She then picks a moment, often well before I'm done wondering out loud where she might be, to pop her head out and giggle, "Here I am!" 3. Once, back in our Boston days, I was waiting with my daughter on a subway platform. A lady approached to admire the baby and eventually got around to asking about her name. After I answered, she grinned and said, "Wow! I can spell it and pronounce it!" I have a feeling she might have enjoyed this piece on bad names, which reader Snedcat pointed out to me. Snedcat notes that the piece presents a "convincing argument that the hippies might not have been ... worse than the Victorians, and possibly not as bad as the Puritans," when it comes to naming children. 4. According to Dan Goodin, the IT Security Editor of Ars Technica, reports of "badBIOS" are "the advanced persistent threat equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting". Explicitly denying that his article is a Halloween hoax, Goodin describes an airgap-jumping, OS-agnostic, self-repairing virus that sounds more like science fiction than fact: I regard myself as more of a hack than a hacker with respect to computers, but the various individual observations reported in the piece all sound plausible to me. -- CAV Link to Original
  3. Correctly callingentitlement spending "legalized theft", Walter Williams wonders whether there is a "way out" for a declining America, the vast majority of whose public is dissatisfied with her direction. Williams notes the enormity and recent growth in entitlement spending: Just by projections -- as if we can't ramp up our profligacy even more before then -- Big Trouble is just around the corner. Williams identifies the origin of this mess in the moral attitudes and repect for law of the American public at large. He concludes: Although I share Williams' pessimism, the silver lining to his piece lies in the question he raised in its title, which I will note is rhetorical. -- CAV Link to Original
  4. John Stossel bluntly calls for an end to the Federal Reserve: The Fed, created to shore up capitalism, has become an instrument of government economic management not so different from a socialist planning board: a tiny handful of powerful people attempt to fine-tune the entire economy. Its main mission has become continually goosing economic activity through infusions of new cash to maintain the illusion that good times will never falter. The result isn't stability, but one economic bubble after another. Along the way, he hurls the following timely barb: Alan Greenspan said he tried to be obscure because he didn't want to spook markets. He called his obfuscation "Fedspeak." It's a far cry from the clarity of his language -- and principles -- when he was young and a disciple of libertarian Ayn Rand. (I'll overlook the common, but inaccurate description of Rand's political views.) Stossel also notes something most of his readers will not know: that Canada, lacking a central bank, did not suffer bank failures during the 1930s. The nomination of Janet Yellen to the charimanship of the Fed practically makes this piece required reading -- and it provides an excellent reason to pass word of it along to others. -- CAV Link to Original
  5. Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, who calls wanting to be a writer "mistake #1", nevertheless offers some very good advice on ... how to become a writer. Holiday clearly doesn't mean that nobody should want to be a writer, but he plainly wants to counter what he sees as a flood of bad advice on writing. I don't agree with everything he says -- for example, he sounds like he undervalues the formal study of writing -- but he draws attention to something more writers could stand to hear: the relationship between good writing and motivation. Holliday rightly rejects a tendency among writers of an academic bent to focus too much on writing as a craft, and not enough on experiencing life: Write all the time, they'll tell you. Write for your college newspaper. Get an MFA. Go to writer's groups. Send query letters to agents. What do they never say? Go do interesting things. Holliday goes on to show us why this is important: What matters more now than any other single thing is that what you're saying is different-that it's interesting, that it provokes some response from people. You'll only accomplish this if you've got something you have to say. Better yet, you need to have something that you can't NOT say. If what you're writing is a compulsion rather than a vehicle for your display how smart and well practiced you are. So think about it one more time. Is it that you want to be a writer? Or it's that you have these things inside you that you want very badly to communicate to people and writing is the best way to do it? Getting the answer to that question right is the day you really become a writer How can one know what one must talk about without experience? How can one relate what he learns about to others without developing some sense of how to relate to others? How can a reader become interested in prim, well-crafted verbiage that never really goes anywhere? That's all "writing" is when it is not a vessel for passion. Those are vital considerations for anyone afflicted with the desire to write. -- CAV Link to Original
  6. It isn't just those who are ignorant of history who are doomed to repeat it. Those who ignore it or misinterpret it badly enough can, too. The New York Times reports that inflation is once again all the rage among central planners. Notice that current crop of officials appear to be combining the aforementioned biases by cherry-picking: Lately, however, the 1970s have seemed a less relevant cautionary tale than the fate of Japan, where prices have been in general decline since the late 1990s. Kariya, a popular instant dinner of curry in a pouch that cost 120 yen in 2000, can now be found for 68 yen, according to the blog Yen for Living. This enduring deflation, which policy makers are now trying to end, kept the economy in retreat as people hesitated to make purchases, because prices were falling, or to borrow money, because the cost of repayment was rising. [links in original] Fortunately, for anyone interested in helping voters get up to speed on the truth, we have Ayn Rand and Thomas Sowell. Ayn Rand did a nice job of making inflation intelligible to an ordinary person decades ago through a thought experiment, which I quote here in part: [P]roject what would happen to your community of a hundred hard-working, prosperous, forward-moving people, if one man were allowed to trade on your market, not by means of gold, but by means of paper--i.e., if he paid you, not with a material commodity, not with goods he had actually produced, but merely with a promissory note on his future production. This man takes your goods, but does not use them to support his own production; he does not produce at all--he merely consumes the goods. Then, he pays you higher prices for more goods--again in promissory notes--assuring you that he is your best customer, who expands your market. Then, one day, a struggling young farmer, who suffered from a bad flood, wants to buy some grain from you, but your price has risen and you haven't much grain to spare, so he goes bankrupt. Then, the dairy farmer, to whom he owed money, raises the price of milk to make up for the loss--and the truck farmer, who needs the milk, gives up buying the eggs he had always bought--and the poultry farmer kills some of his chickens, which he can't afford to feed--and the alfalfa grower, who can't afford the higher price of eggs, sells some of his stock seed and cuts down on his planting--and the dairy farmer can't afford the higher price of alfalfa, so he cancels his order to the blacksmith--and you want to buy the new plow you had been saving for, but the blacksmith has gone bankrupt. Then all of you present the promissory notes to your "best customer," and you discover that they were promissory notes not on his future production, but on yours--only you have nothing left to produce with. Your land is there, your structures are there, but there is no food to sustain you through the coming winter, and no stock seed to plant. ["Egalitarianism and Inflation", in The Ayn Rand Letter, no. III, vol. 19, pp. 338-339] But the above is almost made to look superflous in the face of historical evidence analyzed with the goal of understanding what can cause a nation to prosper (vice what can make printing money look like a good idea), as Thomas Sowell demonstrates: [Federal Reserve Chairman nominee Janet Yellen's] first question, whether free market economies can achieve full employment without government intervention, is a purely factual question that can be answered from history. For the first 150 years of the United States, there was no policy of federal intervention when the economy turned down. And, much later: Under Calvin Coolidge, the ultimate in non-interventionist government, the annual unemployment rate got down to 1.8 percent. How does the track record of Keynesian intervention compare to that? Earlier, Sowell reminds us of a term we might soon need to take from the shelf and dust off: "stagflation". (Astoundingly, even the Times brings it up -- before trying to help us forget it.) So long as Obama is in power and voters don't mind this kind of thinking too much, we are at the very least in danger of this problem recurring. Fortunately, we can work to show that he and his big government cronies are wrong by spreading the word. -- CAV Link to Original
  7. Between You and Your Doctor Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz discusses (via HBL) the regulatory and bureaucratic maze of ObamaCare, correctly noting that, "The officials who planned ObamaCare blame their Web engineers, but they're passing the buck." His column is well worth a read. However, if you're pressed for time you could also just take a gander at the schematic posted on the Senate's web site... ... and remember it the next time you see or hear this monstrosity referred to as a "marketplace". Weekend Reading "[P]erfectionism and the quest for excellence are not the same thing." -- Michael Hurd, in "You Can't Be Too Perfect..." at The Delaware Coast Press "Even in the midst of something heartbreaking and disastrous, we can use the strength of our minds and our free will to rebuild our lives around the disaster and possibly even come out stronger than before." -- Michael Hurd, in "It Really Is How You Look at It!" at The Delaware Wave "Note that none of these promotions were mandated by the government (nor should they be)." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Northwestern University Did Right in Offering a Peanut-Free Football Game" at Forbes My Two Cents The Hsieh piece notes a common knee-jerk reaction against the Northwestern event among conservative commentators (i.e., equating the game to yet more political correctness run amok). It was good to see Hsieh step in and do what they failed to do: Note the difference between (a) a business concern -- which Northwestern practically is, in this context -- electing to hold an event like this and ( the government forcing it to hold such events. This was a lost opportunity on those conservatives' part to support the right way to deal with an uncommon health problem, not to mention a revelation regarding their intellectual sloppiness. So what if leftist multiculturalists glom on to every problem anyone might have? That doesn't mean that someone choosing to address a problem afflicted by such attention is necessarily a multiculturalist or a useful idiot. Computer Nostalgia Wired ran a story about a collector of computer viruses who posts screenshots and videos of the malware in action. Some of the early stuff -- the article focuses on DOS viruses -- reminds me of some of the more artistic grafitti I have seen over the years. Unsurprisingly, so do the attitudes of its authors resemble those of the vandals who regard themselves as artists: For at least some of these mischievous coders, the virus truly did serve as a creative medium. When asked about his view on destructive code in a 1997 interview, Spanska, the French lava master, replied: "I really do not like that…There are two principal reasons why I will never put a destructive code inside one my viruses. First, I respect other peoples' work…The second reason is that a destructive payload is too easy to code. Formatting a HD? Twenty lines of assembler, coded in one minute. Deleting a file? Five instructions. Written in one second. Easy things are not interesting for the coder. I prefer to spend weeks to code a beautiful VGA effect. I prefer create than destruct [sic]. It's so important for me that I put this phrase in my MarsLand virus: 'Coding a virus can be creative.'" [link in original] Sure, "Spanska", but you were still forcing your audience to view your work, not to mention stealing time and resources (however small) from them on top of that, in the form of having to make sure you didn't just trash their data and work. --CAV Link to Original
  8. 1. It's hard to believe it, but nine years ago today, I started this blog. My thanks to everyone who has followed or otherwise supported this blog over the years. 2. The desktop computer is not so much obsolete as it is a victim of its own success argues Ibrahim Diallo: When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was in 2004. A 2009 desktop is old in computer years, but not so much in processing power. It maybe [ sic] true that there are a zillion new processors out in the market and their benchmark show exponential improvement. But to me benchmarking is just a marketing gimmick. PC sales are plunging but they are the wrong indicator to determine the advancement of the technology. The reason we are not buying PCs anymore is because those we have are already pretty amazing. Even if you don't have time to read it all, click on the link and scroll down for an amusing picture satirizing the idea -- unavoidable in the echo chamber of tech journalism -- that Diallo is questioning. 3. Sure. CONCACAF, the soccer federation through which the United States must qualify for the World Cup is no Europe. It doesn't follow, however, that the qualification tournament wasn't worth following: And then, like some old Western movie, the American cavalry arrived at the last second and saved the day for Mexico. Edgar Castillo, who made three friendly appearances for Mexico before switching to the Stars and Stripes, dribbled inside and sent a pass out wide left for Brad Davis, whose one-time cross was met by the head of Graham Zusi and sent into the back of the net to equalize. Panamanian hearts sank. Mexico exploded. One Mexican announcer shouted in English, "We love you forever and ever, God bless America!" before ripping apart the Mexican team in Spanish. Kudos go to American coach Juergen Klinsmann for both getting business done with two games to spare and playing to win the last two games anyway. The coach used the games to prepare for the trip to Brazil and, at the same time, give a few less familiar players chances to prove themselves, 4. I like this post on computing happiness by Vivek Haldar. It is short and tightly-integrated, owing to the author's explicit tack of distilling his advice down to general principles: Corollary of the above: never use software that locks you into proprietary formats, or if you must, make sure to export your files out to a more portable format. The chance that you will be able to run the same hardware/software/version snowflake in a decade to decode your data is close to zero. This comports with both my own thinking and personal experience, good and bad. Amusingly enough, I found in the cmments something I want to check into, despite the fact that the author omitted it because he "didn't want to proselytize" (also something I appreciated). -- CAV Link to Original
  9. Possible Light Posting Opportunity has come a-knocking -- not unexpectedly, but a little more quickly than I anticipated. I may need some time in the wee hours at the beginning of the week to get prepared. I won't rule out posting here, but I may not have the time until nearly the weekend. Weekend Reading "An ancient principle is to deny one's enemies resources so that they are forced to turn their attention away from fighting and to focus on basic tasks of survival." -- Wendy Milling, in "The Real Obamacare Fight Is Between Establishment Republicans and the Tea Party" at Forbes "Even if you're stuck with a dishonest co-worker or landlord, it doesn't follow that you have to become like them." -- Michael Hurd, in "Honesty Is Not Your Enemy" at The Delaware Coast Press "Avoiding conflict on principle can lead to a false and inauthentic relationship where false assumptions will build up on one or both sides." -- Michael Hurd, in "Is All Conflict Bad?" at The Delaware Wave My Two Cents Anyone who thinks the news media, always carrying water for the Democrats, had the upper hand in the budget showdown over ObamaCare should read the Milling piece. Word. I don't agree with everything in this blog posting about Microsoft Word, particularly the anti-capitalist slant, but it does a good job of outlining what is wrong with the common word processing program and why. A biggie for me is the fact that the file format is ever-changing and obscure, making it worthless as an archive: [P]lanned obsolescence is of no significance to most businesses, for the average life of a business document is less than 6 months. But some fields demand document retention. Law, medicine, and literature are all areas where the life expectancy of a file may be measured in decades, if not centuries. Microsoft's business practices are inimical to the interests of these users. I have avoided Microsoft Word as much as possible for well over a decade, but I have had similar problems with the file formats of competitors, although for different reasons. If something is really important, I save it as plain text, perhaps with markups. -- CAV Link to Original
  10. 1. "Headhunter" Nick Corcodilos demonstrates once again why I am a fan of his work when replies to a reader who asks how to optimize his first day at a new job: It's a good idea to stop by your boss's office at the end of your first day to say thanks for the job and to "check in." But you should also check in with your boss regularly, to ensure you're meeting his or her expectations and that you understand your objectives. As always, Corcodilos reminds us to keep our eyes on the prize, and his advice flows quite naturally from it. The blog posting also contains a link to a longer article on starting a job on the right foot. It, too, goes beyond what one might expect, with advice that is really good to follow throughout a career. 2. This week, I really enjoyed a visit from my mother, who came to help me with the kids while my wife was away for a conference. Pictured at the right is one of the batch of Halloween cookies she and my daughter made on the morning of the last day, while it was raining outside. 3. This article contains more than you'll ever need to know about North American phone numbers with the 555 prefix. You'll be surprised to learn that they are not all fictional. 4. Will scientists have to prune our evolutionary tree, based on an analysis of several skulls found in Georgia? The odd dimensions of the fossil prompted the team to look at normal skull variation, both in modern humans and chimps, to see how they compared. They found that while the Dmanisi skulls looked different to one another, the variations were no greater than those seen among modern people and among chimps. The scientists went on to compare the Dmanisi remains with those of supposedly different species of human ancestor that lived in Africa at the time. They concluded that the variation among them was no greater than that seen at Dmanisi. Rather than being separate species, the human ancestors found in Africa from the same period may simply be normal variants of H erectus. Maybe, maybe not, but based on what the article presents, it seems reasonable that a few purported species may well disappear from textbooks. -- CAV Link to Original
  11. Via HBL a few days ago came a recommendation of John Tamny's evisceration of Janet Yellen, Barack Obama's nominee for chairmanship of the Fed. Harry Binswanger recommended it for its "excellent" "anti-Keynesian economics". Here's an excerpt: Of course the mere mention of 'economic recovery' perhaps does the most to explain why we never experienced a real one under Bernanke, and why we won't enjoy one under Yellen insofar as Yellen's meddling hand resembles Bernanke's. We won't because lost on both is the essential truth that the recession IS the recovery, it is the fix, it is the happy reversal of that which made us ill initially, including excessive consumption of housing. Recession is the market's way of correcting the mistakes, the misallocations of capital, the labor market mismatches, and in a more literal sense, it's the market's way of releasing the human, physical and financial assets of Webvan and theglobe.com to nascent concepts that the markets actually want like Google and Facebook. I was impressed by Tamny's lucid presentation of his case, which any reasonably intelligent lay reader can grasp. Not only are the economics impressive, so too is the psychological insight. The very fact that someone wants this job is indeed a red flag. Now that I've had a chance to read it, I highly recommend it. -- CAV Link to Original
  12. Walter Williams has written a pair of columnsoutlining some of the "racial trade-offs" black leftitst politicians make with other pressure groups in the political coalition that forms the Democratic party. Along the way, he points out some very interesting facts pertaining to educational policy and the minimum wage in particular. On education: Comparing these figures to the eleven percent figure for parents among the general public, Williams aptly compares this to a restaurant whose "owner, chef, waiters and busboys" eat elsewhere. We'll forgive him for not reminding us that we're all footing the bill regardless of whether we need a meal or want to do so at that establishment, or even at a restaurant at all. Moving to the minimum wage, Williams confirms a suspicion that Thomas Sowell recently raised about its early supporters: Williams backs up his claim that these laws are hurting minority employment and questions whether these "racial trade-offs" are really helping the constituents of these politicians. I'd have gone further, and asked whether anyscheme involving the government bullying or stealing from private individuals really helps anyone, but this is a fine starting point. It is obscene that politicians routinely treat things like the futures of children and the ability of parents to provide for them as bargaining chips. The best way to put a stop to this is to begin reigning government in to its proper purpose, of protecting individual rights. -- CAV Link to Original
  13. A mainstream journalist is finally saying something that Objectivists (Peter Schwartz, for example) have been saying for years: that a third party will not save us from our two-big-government-party system. Here's the money quote from conservative Cal Thomas: A third-party president, or a few members of Congress who eschewed the traditional party labels, would likely find themselves in the same rut if attitudes toward government and entitlement do not change. The problem lies less in Washington than in each American citizen. Since Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal," many Americans appear to have abandoned self-restraint, individual responsibility and accountability in favor of government as provider, protector and guarantor. The notion that people are "owed" what others have earned is primarily responsible for our enormous and growing debt. We once promoted individual initiative and people who overcame difficult circumstances. Now we seem to punish the successful and treat the unsuccessful as victims who have no hope of improving their lot without government. This is a fallacy of course, based on the results of the failed "war on poverty." I'd go further: Without significant cultural change, those politicians would be substantially similar to the current lot of bums, anyway. (Consider Ross Perot, John "Unity '08" McCain, and Jesse Ventura.) Based on the fact that the public of FDR's time was behind the New Deal, I'd date the start of our problems much earlier than Thomas does. Although Americans were more self-reliant then, they condoned the massive government theft of the New Deal on altruistic grounds. We do need to become more self-reliant again, but we will also need to call altruism into question. Neverthless, Thomas is dead right about one thing: Our political problems are cultural in origin. To change Washington, we must first begin to change our culture. -- CAV Link to Original
  14. George Will is onto something when, in a discussion of the arguments of a case the Supreme Court is set to hear, he sees similarities to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. [O]pponents of Michigan's amendment are simultaneously arguing contradictory propositions: Racial preferences serve everyone by producing diversity in academia, but banning preferences is unconstitutional because they primarily benefit a minority. As far as I am concerned, Will is barely scratching the surface of the multi-layered absurdity here. Seeing the proper purpose of the government as being the protection of individual rights, rather than controlling the economy or redistributing wealth, I see the entire case as equally absurd. Another pundit notes that the case is a chance to end "racial preferences in college admissions". The government has no business running schools or telling them whom they can or cannot admit. I certainly think that, if and while the government is running some colleges and regulating others, it should not permit racial discrimination of any kind in the admissions process any more than it would segregated restrooms. Given recent legal history the bizarre arguments Will outlines, I don't think that even such a victory is necessarily at hand or that it will be more than very narrowly applied. That's too bad, since government-enforced racial quotas violate freedom of assication no matter where or why they occur. And we haven't even gotten around to the absurdity of the whole idea of the government "serv[ing] everyone" by making them less free... -- CAV Link to Original
  15. Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell? That's the question Paul Raeburn asks in MIT's Tracker. The article itself sounds damning, but some commenters show up to defend the popular author. The most interesting quote for me was the following: But it's Gladwell's own comments that are most disturbing. "If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: you're not the audience." This is an interesting twist on the more common authors' response that if the book is too complicated for you, try something else. What is Gladwell saying--that he's aiming for the lowest common denominator? Anyone who's read his work knows that is not the case. Excerpts from is books fit very nicely into the pages of The New Yorker, which publishes some of the most intelligent and literate writing in America. [format edits] There can be a big difference between writing about a specialized fields for a general audience vs. doing so for a specialized one. That said, expert and layman alike speak the same language, and there are ways to simplify a complex topic without cherry-picking or devolving into what amounts to making arbitrary pronouncements. Being less-than-familiar with Gladwell's work, I can see his reaction as either one of annoyance at an unjust attack by an "expert" who disagrees with him -- or a sneer aimed for his lay audience to deflect valid criticism. The real lesson for any reader is that one should never take just one person's word, however glib or authoritative, for anything. One should seek out and weigh opposing views. And one should weigh whatever is said either way against the facts, increasing one's factual knowledge if necessary and possible. In the end, one may yet have to admit not having enough knowledge to form a definitive judgement. Weekend Reading "n the name of 'transparency' ... industry-sponsored events, in which busy physicians are detailed on new products, devices, and services over dinner, are now being targeted under a provision of Obamacare." -- Amesh Adalja, in "Obamacare's Onerous Rules Include a Blacklist of America's Doctors" at Forbes "Allison is that rare combination: a reality-oriented, intellectual businessman able to recognize the ethical and productive superiority of laissez-faire capitalism and its rule of law." -- Richard Salsman, in "To Understand the Financial Crisis - and Its Cure - You Must Read John Allison's Book" at Forbes "Growing up occurs at the moment you stop caring about what others think." -- Michael Hurd, in "Tell Me What I Want to Hear" at The Delaware Coast Press "On a moment's notice, we can dig up convincing reasons to do just about anything." -- Michael Hurd, in "Reality Is the Best Diet!" at The Delaware Wave In More Detail The Salsman article outlines John Allison's thesis as follows: ... Allison names six "fundamental themes," all of which he documents and proves in subsequent chapters: 1) "government policy [was] the primary cause of the financial crisis," 2) "government policy created a bubble in residential real estate," 3) "individual financial institutions (Wall Street participants) made very serious mistakes that contributed to the crises," 4) "almost every government action taken since the crisis started, even those that may help in the short term, will reduce our standard of living in the long term," and 5) "the deeper causes of our financial challenges are philosophic, not economic." In elaborating on this fifth theme, he insists that destructive government policies are typically based on "philosophic ideas taught in our elite universities to future elitist leaders," that such ideas "are inconsistent with the founding principles that made America great," and, furthermore, "are inconsistent with individual rights, especially property rights." At a deeper level, he adds, such ideas are "inconsistent with humans' fundamental nature as thinking beings who must make independent judgments that are based on the facts and that use their ability to reason." From this comes his final, predictive theme: 6) "If we do not change direction soon, the United States will be in very serious financial trouble in 20 to 25 years." I am glad to hear from the same piece that sales of the book have been quite healthy. Heh! World class attacking midfielder Mesut Özil demonstrates an astounding degree of ball control. File under "neat, but kind of gross". --CAV Link to Original
  16. 1. If you've ever wondered how popcorn became such an integral part of the filmgoing experience, Food & Think has the article for you. Not only has this not always been the case, but in their early days: Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn, ... because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn't want popcorn being ground into it. By the time the Great Depression hit, the stage was already set for popcorn to appear in theater concession stands. Its high profitability made selling it a no-brainer then. 2. Fans of Scott Berkun will be interested to learn that he has posted a list of links to articles by and about him. Seeing that he once interviewed Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani, I followed the link and found the following: I agree with you that the value of technology and gadgets is how much they can provide me with uninterrupted time, but I don't think that's the popular viewpoint. I think most people see the value in gadgets and tech as things that keep them constantly connected and bathed in up-to-the-second information wherever they go, whatever they're doing -- which is only a good thing to a point. I also agree with Trapani that, "Focus is underrated in too many work environments today". 3. Last week, I imparted the following bit of parental wisdom: [P]arents get one chance to pick out their kids' Halloween costumes. I guess I need to elaborate since I soon learned that my daughter has also decided that her little brother will be a cat, too: The above is a one-time, first-child deal! 4. I admit that I found the story appealing when I first heard it years ago, but honesty demands that I help debunk a bad example. In "The Myth of NASA's Expensive Space Pens", one learns the following: Fantastic story, right? Except that's not what happened. NASA originally used pencils in space but pencils tend to give off things that float in zero-g (broken leads, graphite dust, shavings) and are flammable. So they looked for another solution. Independent of NASA, the Fisher Pen Company began development of a pen that could be used under extreme conditions. [link in original] What really happened here was a small triumph of captalism rather than one of many failures of government bureaucracy. In a world full of big, negative stories, one can always use a positive example, however small. -- CAV Link to Original
  17. Writing in Forbes, Keith Weiner of the Gold Standard Institute makes an interesting analysis of income and costs over the past half-century, and reaches the following conclusion: According to Weiner, wages have fallen by eighty seven percent since 1965, to the point that an engineer today makes less, measured in gold, than someone earning the minimum wage would have in 1965. Weiner rightly points out that much of this precipitous drop has been masked by more efficient production throughout the economy. Regarding the minimum wage, Weiner's use of that statistic early in his column bothers me since it is arbitrarily set by the government, rather than by market forces. Fortunately, his analysis doesn't lean too heavily on that statistic, and even survives a similar criticism regarding milk prices, which I believe the government meddles with. The latter analysis is saved by the fact that Weiner looks at milk production in terms of the time and effort required to produce it. Those are figures the government can't distort. -- CAV Link to Original
  18. A lengthy article about a trend in San Fransisco to shutter neighborhood recycling centers provides a morbidly interesting look at what it calls the "ecosystem" spawned by California's nickel and dime bottle tax. More interesting to me is what Frédéric Bastiat might have called the "unseen", as well as the barely-glimpsed parts of this story. The first community recycling operations appearedin San Francisco in the 1970s. They followed two decades of increasing environmentalism efforts including the first celebration of Earth Day, the Clean Air Act, and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. By the early 1980s, all the precedents of modern recycling systems existed. Scavenger associations dating back to Italian immigrants making a living by recycling materials gave way to formal, licensed operators and the first curbside collection bins. (New, unlicensed scavengers were partly responsible for the failure of curbside bins at the time.) Community recyclers ran small buyback programs. [links in original, bold added] It is interesting to see an entire article bemoaning the lost "opportunity" a possible center closure represents, but barely mentioning as an aside the wholesale destruction of an entire venerable industry by these environmentalist taxes and regulations. That said industry existed even before the government over-incentivized the collection of aluminum and plastic for recycling testifies to its superior cost-effectiveness. A real opportunity to make a profit has been replaced by widespread scrounging for nickels and dimes. Near its end, the article claims that bottle taxes disproportionally hurt the poor. This is even after unwittingly (1) showing in excruciating detail what a dangerous, inefficient, and demeaning wealth redistribution system this is (not to defend the theft that any such scheme requires); and (2) alluding to actual opportunities in trash removal and resource reclamation that once (or could have) existed without the government stealing -- nickels, dimes, and refuse -- from practically everyone to artificially raise the prices of aluminum and plastic. These taxes do hurt the poor, but not in the way it implies. -- CAV Link to Original
  19. For some much-needed clarity regarding the proximate cause (and some of the possible consequences) of the government "shutdown", look no further than this recent Thomas Sowell column: As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that Congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity. And, a little later: The hundreds of thousands of government workers who have been laid off are not idle because the House of Representatives did not vote enough money to pay their salaries or the other expenses of their agencies -- unless they are in an agency that would administer ObamaCare. The Senate chose not to vote to authorize that money to be spent, because it did not include money for ObamaCare. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that he wants a "clean" bill from the House of Representatives, and some in the media keep repeating the word "clean" like a mantra. But what is unclean about not giving Harry Reid everything he wants? We have a combination of things creating the false appearance of an immediate crisis: Widespread ignorance about how the government is supposed to work and lies by leftist politicians promulgated, unchallenged by a lapdog media. But many opponents are also falling for the nonsense. Sowell states later that, "[p]erhaps the biggest of the big lies is that the government will not be able to pay what it owes on the national debt". I no longer recall where I saw it, but I am pretty sure that I saw a conservative commentator swallow that whopper hook, line, and sinker. I recommend reading the whole thing -- and drawing the attention of others to it as well. -- CAV Link to Original
  20. Over the weekend, I ran into some interesting advice on tackling very difficult problems at work. Matt Ringel boils his advice down to the following easily-remembered aphorism: "You must try, and then you must ask." Ringel then elaborates, giving us a more detailed description of what he advises and his explanation of why it works. The advice seems quite compatible with "Thinking on Paper" and related techniques advocated by Jean Moroney of Thinking Directions. In fact, it may be better to say that it incorporates Thinking on Paper, while taking advantage of the brainpower of coworkers in such a way as to improve collaboration. This compatibility is illustrated by Ringel's explanation of what he means by "try", which should take a solid fifteen minutes: During those 15 minutes, you must document everything you're doing so that you can tell someone else. So, what does "look at the problem one more time" mean? It means taking notes. Lots of them. I'm a big fan of using a paper notebook with an excruciatingly fine-point pen, because I don't need to move windows out of the way to keep writing in it, and I can fit a lot of words on a single page. Use what you like, but keep writing. Write down all the steps, all the assumptions, everything you tried, and anything you can do to reproduce the problem. More likely than not, you've now probably figured out at least one other way to solve the problem, just by getting it out of your head and onto paper. [emphasis in original] Ringel's advice is likely to yield good results quickly and set a positive tone for future collaboration for several reasons, including this: [Y]our colleagues will know that if you come over to ask for help, you'll already have taken time to look it over and documented your findings so they can help you figure out the problem faster or point you in the right direction. It's possible you'll end up Rubber Duck Debugging the problem, and the act of talking through the problem will help you solve it. [link and emphasis in original] The technique also fosters respect for the value of one's own time as well as that of one's employer. -- CAV Link to Original
  21. A Century of Federal Looting CNBC reports that the income tax turned 100 yesterday: "In 1913, the tax code consisted of 400 pages," said Timothy Nash, a professor of free market economics at Northwood University. "By 2012, the tax code was 73,608 pages," he said. "We have gone from a simple tax system to a complex, unfriendly system." It is interesting that nowhere in the article is any moral objection to taxation raised -- and that Nash is the "small government" guy. The "opposing" expert speaks of huge, unsustainable entitlement programs as if they are immutable facts of nature. Until our culture changes enough that the moral legitimacy of entitlement programs and theft from individual citizens are regularly called into question, it would appear that we are in store for another century of parasitism, unless its enormity or further growth causes it to kill its host first. Weekend Reading "[T]he government may have a vested interest in definitions that err towards undertreatment, rather than overtreatment." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Why the Federal Government Wants to Redefine the Word 'Cancer'" at Forbes "Over a quarter-century of clinical experience has convinced me that hypnosis - as it's popularly understood - is a fraud." -- Michael Hurd, in "Sexual Fraud" at The Delaware Coast Press "The two of you will come out of this with one of two outcomes: Your friendship will either be stronger, or you will experience a disappointment deeper than a normal bad business experience." -- Michael Hurd, in "Can You Mix Business With Friendship?" at The Delaware Wave My Two Cents It is interesting to consider the politicization of disease Hsieh discusses in his article. Hsieh notes that some researchers, wanting a better place at the government trough, are lobbying for obesity to be declared a disease. (Conveniently for them, this happens to be Michelle Obama's pet cause.) I also strongly suspect that, partially spurred by feminist stereotyping, ADHD is already being overdiagnosed among boys. ObamaCare is already proving to be a Pandora's Box of bad medicine and worse government. Caveat Vendor! Some time ago, I ran across an article that debunked the myth of "passive income". Among the interesting points it articulated was the following: Again, no leader worth her salt will be attracted to such an opportunity. And anyone you do hire to lead the value creation, if they have two brain cells, will see that she's the one adding all the value. Sooner or later she will simply find a way to cut you out of the value chain, either by requiring more and more compensation, or by going off and competing against you (and actively at that.) Why does she need you? You're not adding any value anyway! This morning, I ran across an amusing exchange posted at Clients from Hell that perfectly illustrates this point: Client: I want to make a social networking website which I can earn profits from. Me: Can you provide me with more details? What ideas do you have? Client: I want it to be like Facebook and Twitter but people will have to pay to use it. I really can't tell you any more than that. [link in original] This story has zero value to most people who are so clueless as to make such a pitch, but much for someone hearing one. Yes. There are people out there who will pitch an amorphous blob as an opportunity and leave the details -- all of them! -- to you. This sort of "opportunity" is a tar baby and should be avoided like the plague. Often, the difficulty lies in recognizing these for what they are, especially if there actually is a good, less-than obvious idea involved. Determining the scope of the work is vital. --CAV Link to Original
  22. 1. Having just watched Disney's classic Winnie the Pooh with my daughter a few days ago, I encountered the below paragraph through my RSS feed and knew I'd found comedic gold: Pooh and Piglet and Rabbit and Owl and Tigger had all gathered together at the center of the Hundred Acre Woods for a Very Emportent Meeting. They knew it was Very Emportent because Rabbit had said so in the note he'd left on the Giant Oak Tree... After all these years, it turned out that Christopher Robin had finally opened a Facebook account. 2. Via HBLcomes a deservedly satirical take on a piece that cautioned against hiring lone geniuses: Since there is no Lone Genius, there must have been no Newton. And, obviously, no one should ever hire anyone like Newton. It isn't that everything Beth [Comstock] suggests is wrong. But consider how Newton contradicts this popular, conventional Whiz-Dumb. By her standards, one of the greatest, most innovative minds of all time should have been avoided by employers! Blogger James Rothering later asks, "Why is it that while everyone loves innovation, they hate the lone innovator?" Good question. 3. Like many other Arsenal fans, I was excited by the club-record purchase of the services of German midfielder Mesut Özil. However, another, unheralded, summer signing has turned out to be of arguably comparable importance to that of Özil: that of Matthieu Flamini. [T]he Frenchman is loving the specific role assigned to him just now, the one that requires him to sit stoically in front of the back four, to put in a foot or two, to block off a runner, to generally act as a human shield. Flamini is a sleeves-rolled-up type of scuffler, the sort who never stops running or indeed talking. His ability to organise, in fact, comes as a welcome addition to a team that hasn't always been vocal enough in the past. It could be far too quiet when things needed to be said. I recall seeing elsewhere that manager Arsène Wenger has a policy against taking back players who have left, but that Flamini apparently managed to impress him while training with his old team. This has been a thrilling capaign so far, due in no small part to the steel that Flamini has added on defense. 4. It our daughter is any indication, parents get one chance to pick out their kids' Halloween costumes. Mrs. Van Horn had already bought a couple when we learned that Pumpkin definitely wants to be a cat. -- CAV Link to Original
  23. The Department of Defense has issued an order preventing the service academies from participating in intercollegiate athletics due to the government shutdown. This is despite the fact that the athletic programs of these academies operate on private funds, and that some of the cancelled games, such as the upcoming Navy-Air Force football game, will cost these morale-building programs huge sums of money, in the form of lost television revenue, for example. Asked why the Department of Defense was suspending intercollegiate athletic contests if government funds are not required, [Naval Academy Athletic Director Chet] Gladchuk said he was told it was about "optics." "It's a perception thing. Apparently it doesn't resonate with all the other government agencies that have been shut down," Gladchuk said. It is interesting to consider where this order might have originated. With our Commander-in-Chief? Many in the military are Republicans. Is this a punishment or is he making an example of them? If not, why does the Department of Defense feel the need to cancel something that isn't even funded with "appropriated funding", as Gladchuk puts it. Either way, this silly episode holds a lesson for us, precisely because it could have come about either way. This is the United States of America, a nation founded on the premise that petty tyrants have no business interfering in our daily affairs. This decision is idotic, but at least the soldier-athletes involved do legitimately fall under the authority of the person who made it. When government isn't limited to its proper scope, ordinary citizens can also get bossed around. Americans seem to have forgotten the value of personal autonomy lately, being willing to exchange bits and pieces and chunks of it in order to be under the "care" of such officials. The result of this is that the above episode is something that we will become less and less capable of laughing off as just another example of dumb military bureaucracy. That is, we are becoming less like free men and more like conscripted members of a military, in the sense of being subject to the whim or the personal failings of individuals higher up in a chain of command that shouldn't even exist. That is too bad: If even a small matter like a football game isn't safe from meddling by a human being in power -- be he petty or timid -- why should something important be? Whether a game is played on a weekend isn't the proper concern of the government, at least when it is between private citizens. And neither is, say, whether I take this or that medical advice, or decide to buy medical insurance (or what kind of coverage), or have an operation. I thank whoever made that decision for giving us all a relatively cheap lesson. -- CAV Link to Original
  24. John Stossel expresses a preference for the phase "government schools" over the more common "public schools" in his latest column: He also does a nice job of calling into question a favorite kind of leftist "argument" he found in a "bizarre column in Slate" I also encountered, thanks to a reader: Of course, they also don't seem to realize that the improvements don't take "generations" to occur. Unlike the good Mr. Stossel, however, I am more prone to yield to the "temptation" he refers to in his last sentence. -- CAV Link to Original
  25. The fact that many conservatives do not see the various rights they defend as related to one another (in contrast to Ayn Rand) is painfully obvious in the brouhaha subsequent to a Virginia school suspending several students for playing with toy guns on (gasp!) private property. An editorialist for the National Review complains that schools are not parents. Lenore Skenazy also doesn't think the kids should have been suspended -- despite the fact that the kids were apparently firing pellets in the direction of a bus stop and leaving marks on some students in the process. (The NRO writer notes that this incident was also one of many disciplinary problems for these students.) Both of these commentators complain of the school's "overreach", which is understandable coming from someone who is looking at the school as a government entity. Shouldn't government entities have limited jurisdictions? There may also be a real issue with the punishment being excessive, in today's context of anti-gun hysteria made worse by the bureaucratic impulse to cover one's backside. Let's set this aside for the sake of argument. Let's assume the worst: that the school is dealing with students who constantly misbehaved and who injured others as they waited to be taken to school. It might be useful to consider how a private school might handle such a situation. Or, better, it might be useful to consider what any business might do regarding a disruptive customer whom its proprietor learns has harassed some of its better customers. Yes. The businessman could refuse further service. That wouldn't violate anyone's property rights. It wouldn't smack of the school treating the student like "property". It might or might not be overzealous, but it would be the action of a private individual. It would be anything but government reaching beyond its proper scope. The parents of the expelled student could look elsewhere for schooling. It is hardly difficult to see -- outside the context of government schools -- that the school may have acted appropriately, or might need to act similarly under pretty similar circumstances. That said, while conservatives are right to raise an alarm over government overreach, they are missing a chance to note that the inappropriate involvement of the government in education (By what right does the government loot my wallet to pay for this?) is having the very undesirable side-effect of weakening the lattitude of school officials to decide who belongs in school and who doesn't. I have only one question for anyone complaining of "overreach" only now: Why is it okay to take my money to educate someone else's children, but not for the school to remove a few bad apples? -- CAV Link to Original
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