Gus Van Horn blog

In a piece debunking some of the myths used to justify anti-trust and other regulatory schemes, John Tamny of Forbes makes a very good point about "wealth inequality". First, by way of context, Tamny relays an account illustrating how difficult life could be for businessmen trying to close a deal -- at the last minute, while on the road, and in the days before cell phones: Ugh. But fast forward a few short decades: Notice how meaningless a wealth gap can be in terms of an individual's capabilities in the context of a capitalist economy. Indeed, it is borderline ironic that the very people who have lifted so many to new heights through their hard work merely get money for their trouble. That they see some kind of reward for their effort is the very least that justice demands. Tamny is right that redistributionist demagogues who use wealth inequality to justify their schemes are "economically bankrupt", but he should have gone further: They are also morally bankrupt. The missing context behind the wealth gap (that Tamny supplies) is exactly what people need to see in order to realize that the gap is often earned, and that they should be ashamed of siding with anyone who would seek to eliminate it. Redistribution of wealth implies theft of wealth, but champions of such schemes rarely get called on that fact. Stories like this, being easy for anyone to relate to, can help rectify that problem. -- CAV Link to Original

Rolling "Greenouts" in Store for Britain? Via HBL comes a link to short and clear-cut article on environmentalism and its effect on the ability of Great Britain to keep the lights on: What Britain will be left with after its surrender to the "European Union environmental laws" is a reserve electric power capacity of between 2% and 5% -- roughly half of what it is now. It will lose 20% of its power plants over the next decade, and will have no coal-powered facilities, which provided 39% of the country's electricity just last year. Predictably, customers will face steeper rates. In fact, as a cost-cutting measure, utilities will offer customers "interruptible contracts", in which power can be "cut off when it's deemed necessary". Weekend Reading "One major concern about texting is the potential for speaking impulsively." -- Michael Hurd, in "Driving While 'Intexticated'" at The Delaware Wave "One of the reasons homosexuality is such a hot-button issue is that it forces people to confront their contradictions. " -- Michael Hurd, in "The Real Reason Homosexuality Is a Hot Button Issue" at The Delaware Coast Press "Your doctor may have to choose between following government guidelines vs. doing what's medically right for youas an individual." -- Paul Hsieh, in "How Big Medicine Will Affect Patient Care" at PJ Media My Two Cents I find the following, from the second Hurd piece linked above, to be a brilliant integration of philosophical principles and psychology: Homosexuality challenges that assumption that love must be selfless. If one accepts his or her sexual proclivities, then, by definition, he or she has elevated personal fulfillment above the supposed "virtue" of self-sacrifice. This stirs up a lot of uncomfortable feelings - feelings that go beyond the boundaries of sexual orientation. I have often been puzzled by the visceral reaction homosexuality elicits from some people. Ten Clever Organizing Tricks I agree with the folks at Unclutterer that some of these will make you stop and ask, "Why didn't I think of that." Indeed, I feel almost stupid not to have tried the "refrigerator lazy Susan" since I already use lazy Susans in several of my cabinets only feet away. --CAV Link to Original

1. As a parent, I appreciate a reader's having tipped me off to this discussion of multimedia for children at Slate. Here's a sample: [W]e need to talk about how the apps might be used. Are they nothing more than baby occupiers, or could they be conversation starters? And isn't it possible they could be baby occupiers at one point in the day and conversation starters another? It's this ratio between noninteraction and interaction that should be propelling debates over whether apps are helpful or harmful to babies. Let's focus on what fosters healthy interactions between babies and their caregivers -- whether an app is part of the picture or not. Also, count me among those who think, "Here they go again," when some group of busybodies tries to interject themselves (and their ignorance and thinking errors) between me and making a decision about such matters. This goes for "educators" who think every child needs an iPad, too. How something is used is crucial to such decisions. This article is a breath of fresh air. 2. Here's an amusing example of something I have privately called "word inflation: The shot has been tentatively approved as a potential final pending director's review. I think. I also reminds me of a joke my fellow undergraduates and I were making during a break in our comprehensive senior exam. Include "Or not." at the end of each answer. 3. Not to be outdone by her little brother's first returning of smiles, my two-year-old daughter finally succeeded this week in delivering payload to target when "going potty". It was cute how proud she was of that, and how eager she was to tell Momma Van Horn about her feat. 4. Count me among Juergen Klinsmann's former skeptics: Jürgen Klinsmann has now been completely vindicated. In mid-March, the Sporting News published a piece that called into question virtually everything about Klinsmann's tenure as USA head coach. Klinsmann was judged by former and current players to completely lack any tactical sense, to spend too much time on off-the-field efforts, and to change lineups too often. Since then, the USA squad has won the Gold Cup, established a record for their longest-ever winning streak at twelve games, and now, earned qualification for the World Cup with two matches to go. Not only that, he's never lost to Mexico, with a draw and a win in the World Cup and the USA's first-ever win in Mexico City to his credit. [minor format edits, link dropped] Actually, I changed my mind some time ago, during the Gold Cup, but this seems a good time to mention it. Glad to be wrong! More on USA 2-0 Mexico here. -- CAV Link to Original

I've seen an interesting kind of analysis pop up in a couple of different places. I'd call it "effective stupidity". The idea is that certain situations can cause people to allocate part of their finite amount of attention on distractions, rather than on solving bigger problems. One such situation is poverty. "Urban Wonk" Emily Badger explains this at the Atlantic: This understanding of the brain's bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty - like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time. [links in original] In one experiment, researchers found that priming people to think about financial problems was the functional equivalent of losing a night's sleep -- or 13 IQ points. Blogger Chris Yeh cites other work that generalizes this: hortages lead people to make poor decisions. That's because the brain can only process so much. I wouldn't say that all shortages do this, or phrase the effect quite so deterministically, but I think it's a good point. Yeh also notes that what I am calling "effective stupidity" pops up among middle-class professionals who do not set scheduling priorities well, and suffer what amounts to a time shortage as a result. It is interesting to consider how a problem like poverty or overscheduling can mushroom well beyond having too little money or feeling like one has too little time. -- CAV Link to Original

Noticing their similarly low success rates, blogger Sean McBeth draws some striking similarities between online dating and job boards. Among them: People talk about their "type": the ideal man or woman that they see themselves dating, presumably even to eventually marry. You know you think red-heads are pretty, but if you are including it in your "type", then you don't know that it's inconsequential to being happy in a relationship, and you miss out on what a wonderful individual who just so happens to be blonde or a brunette could offer. So it is with job listings that say they need someone with "15 years of C#" or "MSCE Certified blah blah blah". That stuff doesn't mean anything. That could be 15 years of hiding behind far more competent teammates at a company that has a pathological problem with not firing under-performers. That cute Asian girl might like taking rides with you in your car everywhere because she's a drunk who lost her license from a DUI conviction. I've both tried online dating and, when networking has failed me, resorted to applying for jobs online. I think McBeth is on to something -- at least regarding using ads to find a serious relationship viz-à-viz hiring in the professions. McBeth concludes that the problem is that "both people and [the] problems cannot be quantified". I wouldn't put it quite this way, although this is true for all practical purposes. I think that the problem is that people and matching them to some purpose have a huge number of variables to consider. Discovering the variables required, what value range is acceptable, and what values someone brings to the table are all very difficult problems on their own. (Fewer variables or wider ranges or both make, say, finding someone for a card game or hiring a ditch digger, infinitely easier.) But, yes, attempting to solve all these problems at once with severe, self-imposed data limitations, will usually get "abysmal results". -- CAV Link to Original

An academic has posted to his blog a letter sent anonymously to all the researchers at his university by a student who has decided to quit pursuing his Ph.D. just shy of completing his thesis work. I agree with the blogger that it raises issues "worth thinking about" by anyone who is or has been "in the academic world". Let me also echo both the author and the blogger in making it clear that my personal experience has also included numerous examples of good people doing good science. Science isn't dead, but it's in deep trouble. Three things strike me about this letter. The first is the author's overall concern: ... I'm starting to think of [academia] as a big money vacuum that takes in grants and spits out nebulous results, fueled by people whose main concerns are not to advance knowledge and to effect positive change, though they may talk of such things, but to build their CVs and to propel/maintain their careers... It is interesting to consider where most of this money comes from and how it is distributed (i.e., government grants doled out by scientists established in the sense of having a track record of publications) in light of the following concerns, which are also the second thing I wish to highlight: ... Very quickly after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that being "too honest" about your work is a bad thing and that stating your research's shortcomings "too openly" is a big faux pas. Instead, you are taught to "sell" your work, to worry about your "image", and to be strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. Preference is given to good presentation over good content ... And, much later: This seems to leave the student with a nasty ultimatum. Clearly, simply telling the advisor that the research is not promising/original does not work - the advisor has already invested too much of his time, reputation, and career into the topic and will not be convinced by someone half his age that he's made a mistake. If the student insists, [he] will be labeled as "stubborn" and, if the insisting is too strong, may not be able to obtain the PhD. The alternative, however unpleasant, is to lie to yourself and to find arguments that you're morally comfortable with that somehow convince you that what you're doing has important scientific value. For those for whom obtaining a PhD is a *must* (usually for financial reasons), the choice, however tragic, is obvious. The real problem is that this habit can easily carry over into one's postgraduate studies, until the student [himself] becomes like the professor, with the backwards mentality of "it is important because I've spent too many years working on it". We clearly have a system that, while not making it impossible to do good work, stacks the deck against those who want to judge its value objectively, as opposed to how it looks to others. And this brings me to the third salient point about this letter, and the one with which I disagree. The author, who I would surmise is as anti-capitalist as any other typical academic, seems to blame capitalism via the surrogate of common popular stereotypes about "business". (I'd say that to the extent there is truth in the stereotypes, it is due to the pragmatist (i.e., range-of-the-moment, expedience-minded) mentality shared by some businessmen and some academics.) ... With so many business-esque things to worry about, it's actually surprising that *any* scientific research still gets done these days. Or perhaps not, since it's precisely the naïve PhDs, still new to the ropes, who do almost all of it. And: ... [T]he majority of the world's academic research is actually being done by people like me, who don't even have a PhD degree. Many advisors, whom you would expect to truly be pushing science forward with their decades of experience, do surprisingly little and only appear to manage the PhD students, who slave away on papers that their advisors then put their names on as a sort of "fee" for having taken the time to read the document (sometimes, in particularly desperate cases, they may even try to steal first authorship)... It is simply wrong to claim (on the basis of time spent in a lab, at least) that non-PhD's are "doing most of the work". Karl Marx (and anyone he has influenced) is wrong to write off the intellectual and managerial effort of running a research lab as somehow not being work. Perhaps it is the last point that is making it hard to see the relationship between the first two, to diagnose a possible cause, or for either the author or the blogger to see a solution to the problem. If anything, academia needs to become much more like a business -- one that can't count on a government bailout if it fails -- rather than one of the many tentacles of the welfare state that it is now. I suspect that many of the problems the author describes above would disappear were money to come to those who deserve it, rather than to those who curry favor with those holding bags of loot. -- CAV Link to Original

Walter Williams writes an interesting column in defense of freedom of association, comparing it with freedom of speech and taking the Supreme Court's 1967 Loving vs. Virginia decision as his first example. After pointing out that forcing people to enter interracial marriages would be just as wrong as preventing such marriages (and for the same reason), Williams similarly considers a Jim Crow-era ban on whites and blacks playing tennis in public. And then he goes for the kill: [W]hat about freedom of association as a general principle? Suppose white men formed a club, a professional association or any other private association and blacks and women wanted to be members. Is there any case for forcing them to admit blacks and women? What if it were women or blacks who formed an association? Should they be forced to admit men or whites? Wouldn't forced membership in either case violate freedom of association? His point is well taken: We have to accept the fact that, if we wish to have our own freedom protected under the law, some will exercise their own freedom in ways we will find objectionable. -- CAV Link to Original

Altruism on Steroids A reader sent me a link to an article by a product of our culture's default moral philosophy and our government schools, aptly calling it "altruism on steroids". Here's an excerpt: I went K-12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn't offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book. There wasn't even soccer. This is not a humblebrag! I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone's read? I haven't. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don't quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. I'm not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I'm doing fine. I'm not saying it's a good thing that I got a lame education. I'm saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all. [link in original] The author is condemning parents who send their children to non-government schools and seems to feel that everyone going "all in" will somehow improve our government education system (while also minimizing the need for improvement as she does above). It is interesting that she sees parents as somehow becoming more invested in improving schools that their own children attend, and yet does not seem to have any inkling of an alternative or why it might not improve everyone's lot. She regards "public schools" as "essential institutions", but does not offer a reason for this assertion any more than she does her condemnation of parents seeking what is best for their own children. Weekend Reading "Many of my clients find relief from their problems when they realize that we all have the right -- indeed, the duty -- to challenge our feelings and make sure they correspond to the facts." -- Michael Hurd, in "Are Feelings Hazardous to Your Health?" at The Delaware Coast Press "There are tens of thousands of books and interviews premised on the opinion of 'experts' peddling countless years of analyzing the past - but nobody has yet to explain why." -- Michael Hurd, in "Pop-Psychology vs. Real Life" at The Delaware Wave "More centralized control of health spending will inevitably mean more centralized control of health care." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Your Future Under Obamacare: Big Medicine Getting Bigger" at PJ Media My Two Cents In the first piece linked above, Michael Hurd observes of rude drivers that: [P]eople who do things like that usually don't have much power in their lives, and don't feel like they're in charge of much anyway. Years ago, I came to a similar conclusion and noticed right away that I became far less annoyed by such behavior than I had been before. In fact, but for safety concerns, such "power trips" can sometimes be quite amusing. The Present as the Distant Future Isaac Asimov's 1964 article, "Visit to the World's Fair of 2014", is available online. --CAV Link to Original

1. Reading an article by someone who tried a cleverly-named food substitute for two weeks, I ran across the following interesting quote from Craig Venter, who is known for being among the first to sequence the human genome and is attempting to design a minimal life form: We're trying to design a basic life form-the minimal criteria for life. It's very hard to do it because roughly 10 percent of the genes are of completely unknown function. All we know is if we take them out of the cell, the cell dies. So we're dealing with the limitations of biology. Every once in a while, a quote like that reminds me of the incredible amount that we know -- and don't know -- at the same time. 2. My favorite soccer team, Arsenal, managed to bring Mesut Özil, arguably Europe's best playmaker, on board during the recently-closed transfer window. This news came on the same day the Arsenal topped its arch-rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, in the North London Derby in a scintillating match. (Oh, and I got to see the whole game: This was easy enough to do given the time difference and the fact that someone had to watch the baby.) What a great day that was to be a Gooner! 3. Speaking of the baby, our son has definitely reached an important developmental milestone: He is returning smiles now. 4. I didn't know that commercial orange growing was facing a crisis, but I am glad that the science of genetically modifying crops may well be equal to the challenge of what the article aptly calls, "the daunting process of genetically modifying one well-loved organism -- on a deadline" [my blold]. -- CAV Link to Original

Although I think that even voucher plans and scholarships are examples of improper government involvement in education, I might be able to support such measures as part of a transition from our current government-run educational system to a free market in education. That said, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal still raises some interesting points in his letter to President Obama asking him to drop a lawsuit against his state's program of helping low-income children in (particularly) bad public school districts pay for alternative schooling. For generations, the government has forced these families to hope for the best from failing schools. Shame on all of us for standing by and watching generations of children stay in failing schools that may have led them to lives of poverty. Unfortunately -- and setting aside for a moment the propriety of the government redistributing income -- neither this program nor Jindal go far enough: Low-income families with children in schools graded C, D or F by the state are eligible to apply for a scholarship and send their children to schools of their choice. Why should only poor children -- and those in government school districts deemed particularly bad by the very entity that runs them -- be the only ones with a wider range of educational choices? More to the point, why not (as a start) end the compulsory schooling laws that lock criminals up with actual students all day, and phase out subsidies to the "free" competition to private schools represented by "public" (i.e., government) schools? If the free market is indeed better at educating, why only half-apologetically advocate it in the name of helping only the poor? Why not proudly and consistently uphold it so that everyone can benefit from it? Jindal's heart seems to be in the right place, but the causes of freedom and education are too noble to go begging for scraps. -- CAV P.S. I have not followed this story nor do I have time to dig deeper now. Perhaps the suit is partially founded on the objection that this program is funnelling money into religious schools. The government shouldn't be doing this. However, parents who really believe that their children should have religious educations should be free to send their children to religious schools at their own expense (or at that of willing donors). If, as I think it possible with the religious Jindal, that having tax money flow into the coffers of religious schools is part of the motivation behind this program, it exposes him and other such supporters as the enemies of freedom that they are. It is wrong to steal money for any purpose, including education, regardless of whether it is good or bad, or secular or religious. It is also wrong to abridge religious freedom by having the government serve as a conduit for educational funding. Doing so at some point abridges someone's freedom of conscience by coercing him to fund the dissemination of ideas to which he is opposed. -- CAV Link to Original

Happy Labor Day! I was already planning to take Monday off, but then I looked at our flight schedule for this evening and realized that I probably will want to sleep in tomorrow morning. That may be true Tuesday as well, but those flights aren't quite as late. We're on a two-legged flight each way -- with a two-year old and a two-month-old in tow. I won't post over the holiday weekend, but I'll check for email and comments now and then. In any event, I wish you a happy Labor Day. I'll see you back here again Tuesday or Wednesday. Now, without further ado... Friday Four 1. It sounds like more trouble than it's worth, but a man in England has found a way to make money off telemarketers: In November 2011 Lee Beaumont paid £10 plus VAT to set up his personal 0871 line - so to call him now costs 10p [per minute], from which he receives 7p. The Leeds businessman told BBC Radio 4's You and Yours programme that the line had so far made £300. To crunch some numbers: 300 pounds * (100 pence/pound) * (1 minute/7 pence) * (1 hour/60 minutes) = over 71 hours spent entertaining unplanned intrusions into his time at home. While Beaumont's solution wouldn't work for me even if that kind of line were available here, it does suggest a free market solution to the problem of unwanted cold calls. If enough people had lines like Beaumont's (or people had the option to accept a call free or charge per minute upon answering), telemarketing would become a much more expensive proposition, due to the volume of calls it requires. 2. There is a story at Slate about the blizzard of negative media coverage Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer, has received since joining the ailing Internet giant from Google. Call me a contrarian, but I am inclined to like her after reading the following: ... Mayer has gotten more criticism in one year as Yahoo CEO than Microsoft's Steve Ballmer did in 10. Most recently she's caught flack for posing for a high-fashion Vogue spread (accompanying a feature written by Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group). She's been taken to task for "suffering from gender blindness" and for exhibiting a "princess" problem in refusing to "own up to her own ambition." And in this much-talked-about Business Insider piece by Nicholas Carlson, Mayer is portrayed as "robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with detail," at least according to her "many enemies within her industry"--some of whom Carlson evidently interviewed for his 19,000-word "unauthorized biography." With section titles like "Questions persist," "Mayer goes missing," " 'Who is this woman and what is she actually saying?' " and (gasp!) "In the middle of all this, a baby," the piece reeks of sour grapes from those she bested. [links dropped] The article points out, among other things, that employee morale has improved greatly at Yahoo under Mayer's leadership. 3. It is always nice to see progress in my young daughter's grasp of language, however incremental it might seem to a non-parent. A couple of days ago, a dog barked as I was helping her into the car. "I heard a dog," she said. Notice the indefinte article. Nice. 4. As someone who finds sitting for long periods of time uncomfortable, I have had an interest in standing desks for some time. I even experiment with working while standing when I have the chance. (I will adopt a setup that easily permits standing or sitting when time/space/funding line up to permit it.) That said, and in light of recent media hype about the alleged deadliness of sitting for long periods, I was intrigued and amused when I saw the following pair of links posted to Hacker News: "What Happens When You Stand for 2 Years", and "What Happens When You Sit at a Desk for 13 Years -- And Actually Exercise". A math and science blogger I follow chimes in with an interesting post, too: "Standing Desks Considered Harmful". I don't know how much to make of Dr. Hedge's remarks. I take most fitness studies with a grain of salt (which, by the way, some studies are saying isn't bad for you after all). But it makes sense that it's probably best not to sit all day or stand all day but to alternate your time sitting, standing, walking, and even spending some time in a hammock. [link in original] I wonder if, in his parenthetical remark, John Cook might have been thinking about the work of John Ioannidis. Weekend Reading. "Wanting what you can't have is the easy way out." -- Michael Hurd, in "Wanting What You Cannot Have" at The Delaware Coast Press "If you feel you have no choice but to rush, then something else is probably wrong." -- Michael Hurd, in "Rushing: What's the Point?" at The Delaware Wave "The federal government considers it appropriate to spend $134,000 on screening mammography to save a single woman -- but not $190,000." -- Paul Hsieh, in "How Much Will Your Life Be Worth Under Obamacare?" at Forbes -- CAV Link to Original

A remarkable piece by W. James Antle III in the Daily Caller diagnoses what's (been) going wrong with the GOP. For example, Antle considers the party's threat to defund ObamaCare: There was no effort to abolish the Departments of Energy, Education, Commerce or Housing and Urban Development, [Former New Hampshire Senator Bob] Smith observed. No attempt to defund the Legal Services Corporation or the National Endowment for the Arts. Think of those last two budget items in the context of today's Obamacare defunding debate. The NEA and Legal Services Corporation are two tiny expenditures. Between the two of them, they don't cost Uncle Sam $1 billion a year. Among their direct beneficiaries are lawyers and people who soak crucifixes in jars of urine, not uninsured kids with cancer. Antle notes later that even if Republicans were sincere about defunding ObamaCare, the political process for doing so would make it very difficult, and that the attempt would almost certainly backfire. But the above illustrates by precedent and implicit principle the fundamental reason this will not occur: Republican politicians are not generally sincere about doing what they were elected to do, at least when it comes to not redistributing wealth. If Republicans actually meant it when they mouthed such campaign slogans as, "It's your money," they would at least have a spine when it came to the small programs mentioned above. And, although Antle doesn't spell it out, I suspect that many of them would be able to make a better case against ObamaCare than its onerous "public" expense or the fact that it ultimately won't really help the "uninsured kids with cancer" (when they even do that much). This is because they would understand that the theft Obama's scheme requires is immoral, and should be stopped. -- CAV P.S. I am not familiar with Antle's work and suspect from the passage I quoted that he might be a religious conservative. I'll state for clarity that I oppose any and all attempts by politicians, Republican or otherwise, to introduce religion into politics. That's one thing I wish the Republicans would stop running on. Religion, with its calls for self-sacrifice, is fundamentally incompatible with a system based on absolute respect for ownership and disposal of private property. Link to Original

Reader Snedcat tipped me off to an entertaining and informative piece by filmmaker Phelim McAleer that debunks ten myths about fracking. My favorite -- and the one that explains quite a bit about the ability of the others to gain traction -- is the first. The whole idea that anti-fracking activists are open to debate is posturing on their part. Here is just one example: Or take actor and activist Alec Baldwin. In the run-up to a debate about fracking in the Hamptons that he was taking part in, following a screening of the anti-fracking movie Gasland, Baldwin approached the New York Independent Oil and Gas Association (IOGA) to see if it could suggest a speaker who was not as anti-fracking as the other speakers on the panel. IOGA suggested me as an independent voice, a journalist with an international perspective who has researched fracking for over two years in two continents. But suddenly Baldwin was no longer interested in debate or diversity of opinion, and he vetoed me from the panel. Then, a few hours later, he popped up on Twitter and posted the following: @phelimmcaleer Come debate me, Phelim, you lumpy old gas whore. Who's paying you? -- ABFoundation, 1 June 2013 @phelimmcaleer Phelim, you are a dreadful filmmaker. But come debate me, you tired old bullshitter. -- @ABFalecbaldwin, 1 June 2013 The only regard for reason on the part of the anti-fracking crowd is to put on just enough of an appearance of being rational to dupe the inattentive. Most people haven't given the issue of fracking that much thought. This isn't so much out of laziness as it is due to a couple of facts: (1) Fracking is safe and has been around for awhile. There is no smoke (aside from what is coming from gasbags like Baldwin) because, in this case, there is no fire: Why would they spend lots of time thinking about it? (2) Most people, not having the time to approach every single aspect of their lives like a doctoral student preparing a dissertation, end up relying on experts to help them make decisions about specialized topics. People like Baldwin are aware of this fact and are able to present themselves, often effectively, as the experts ordinary people should turn to. They even get away with spiking opponents and pretending to want to debate them at the same time. I think that there are cultural reasons Baldwin and his ilk have such an easy time getting away with posturing like this, but part of the remedy is exposure, such as what this article provides. -- CAV Link to Original

Mark Steyn makes several trenchant observations about ObamaCare as a law: ... "Comprehensive" today is a euphemism for interminably long, poorly drafted, and entirely unread - not just by the peoples' representatives but by our robed rulers, too (how many of those Supreme Court justices actually plowed through every page of Obamacare when its "constitutionality" came before them?). The 1862 Homestead Act, which is genuinely comprehensive, is two handwritten pages in clear English. "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" is 500 times as long, is not about patients or care, and neither protects the former nor makes the latter affordable. Steyn notes later on that the law ends up meaning whatever Obama wants it to mean, both due to its vagueness and the exhaustion that sets in for anyone who wants to decipher it. He ends his piece by giving too much credit for guile to the current administration. The cynical among us have always assumed Obamacare was set up to be so unworkable that a grateful populace would embrace any 2016 Democrat promising single-payer health care. The causes of the convolution are epistemological, moral, and political. Epistemologically, most Americans are no longer confortable with thinking in terms of principles (which makes it seem like dawdling on everything in minute detail is necessary for a law to be comprehensive). Morally and politically, too many (if not most) Americans want to have their loot and be able to look at themselves in the mirror, too. The convolutions of the law make it easy to distract (or be distracted from) its redistributive nature, so nobody has to feel like a crook for supporting it. By contrast, laws were much plainer when everyone was on the same side and agreed on a principle: not wanting to be harmed by others. Whether or not those others had government credentials had no bearing on that principle, except that the credentials implied an obligation to protect. The consequence Steyn sees needs no guile on the part of Democrats (or, what I fear, delusions of opportunity on the part of Republicans) to play out. It needs only for Americans to remain: unclear about what liberty is and requires, vaguely hopeful for loot laundered by the government, and weary of all those pesky details. Liberty requires vigilance. We are in trouble. -- CAV Link to Original

Government officials from several municipalities across the country are attempting to use their constitutional power of eminent domain to force banks to sell loans for less than they are worth. (It was tempting to say "misuse", but I think the founders were wrong to include this power in the first place.) Richmond[, California], working with San Francisco-based Mortgage Resolution Partners, offers $150,000 to buy a $300,000 bank loan on a house that is now worth $200,000 and is in danger of foreclosure. If the bank agrees, the city and the company then obtain the loan at $150,000. Richmond and the company then offer the homeowner a new loan of $190,000, which, if accepted, lowers the monthly payments and improves the owners' chances of staying. ... If the bank refuses to sell the loan to Richmond, then the city invokes its power of imminent domain and seizes the mortgage. It would then offer the bank a fair market value for the home. Wow. But for the fact that government officials are involved, this is no different than the following scenario: I go into a store, decide that some big-ticket item I want costs too much and then "offer" to buy it, gun in hand, for some made-up, lower price. If the merchant balks, anyway, I then take it and leave whatever made-up price I deem "fair" on the counter. Oh, and maybe I leave a note to the effect that my "purchase" is okay because it will somehow prevent urban blight. These officials may think they are on firm legal ground. Maybe they are: Slavery was once enshrined in the Constitution, after all. But if they are, that is law that ought to be repealed as it clearly is at odds with protecting individual rights. (Yes. Even people in the banking business are individuals and have rights.) The article correctly notes the danger to the banking system that the successful use of such a tactic would represent. That this is even being considered seriously is cause for concern. -- CAV Link to Original

Roman Nanotechnology Smithsonian Magazine describes how it is that the angle of lighting causes a famous Roman goblet to change colors. The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind--a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn't solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They'd impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing--"an amazing feat," says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London. Their accidental discovery, now understood, may pave the way towards "handheld devices for detecting pathogens in samples of saliva or urine, or for thwarting terrorists trying to carry dangerous liquids onto airplanes". Weekend Reading "Elon Musk, you've created a great coal car. Don't stop others from creating a great coal life." -- Alex Epstein, in "With the Tesla Model S, Elon Musk Has Created a Nice Fossil Fuel Car" at Forbes "In this 'Mother may I?' system, each proposed merger is automatically delayed thirty days--longer if the government requires it--while the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission sift through company documents and emails, compile statistics, run computations, and consult experts." -- Thomas Bowden, in "Justice Department Should Let US Airways & American Airlines Merger Proceed" at Fox News "Victim-think means assuming that because you are helpless and powerless to force other people to change their behaviors and choices, that you are equally helpless and powerless to do anything about people who annoy you." -- Michael Hurd, in "'Victim Think' Not Good for the 'Victim'" at The Delaware Coast Press "It saddens me to think of people approaching a psychiatrist or therapist for help, saying, 'I want to move past the trauma,' and being told, in effect, 'The trauma is who you are.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "Is PTSD a Medical Disease?" at The Delaware Wave "Is it any wonder that the health law's redistribution schemes had to be forced on people, by law? Nobody would choose to spend their own money this way." -- Rituparna Basu, in "Obamacare Is RealIly, Really Bad for You, Especially if You're Young" at Forbes My Two Cents It is interesting to consider the fact that, in covering two entirely different topics in psychology, Michael Hurd demonstrates the omnipresence of helplessness -- be it learned or encouraged -- in our culture. When the Toddlers Run the Kindergarden Via an email from my mother, I have learned of a very amusing list of ten ways that having a toddler is like being in prison. --CAV Link to Original

1. If you like maps, head straight over to this collection of "40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World". My favorite was #23, which uses a map of the United States to visualize how much area a city containing the world's population would have to be, at various population densities. (For example, such a city would be the size of Texas if it were as densely populated as New York City.) 2. I guess this is why web designers get the big bucks: The website should essentially be about the negative effects of drugs, the dark side, you know, the horrible truth of addiction and desperation. And, also; I want a picture of Gandalf on there somewhere. 3. Via reader Snedcat, a poster about consistency informs us that, "It's only a virtue if you're not a screwup." See his comment for links to more of these classic spoofs of motivational posters. 4. I haven't tried it, but I ran across a site that can convert your handwriting into a font. -- CAV Link to Original

Whether or not you are seeking employment, I recommend stopping by Nick Corcodilos' the Ask the Headhunter website and blog: They are replete with fascinating examples of the application of independent, creative thinking to a common problem that our current culture and politics make unnecessarily complicated. A bonus is that there are lessons to be learned from his advice on headhunting and job seeking that are more broadly applicable. As an example of the master at work, consider the Headhunter's answer to the following question from a reader: I've applied for a job (online, to a headhunter) for which I easily meet all the criteria. I even have several "value add" items in my past that make me an extra good candidate. But I have not been invited for even a preliminary interview. Should I just give up, or is it acceptable/advisable to contact the headhunter and essentially say, "I can't believe you've overlooked me!" Corcodilos advises the client to move on, based on little information as to the particulars of the case. This he is able to do by bringing to bear his knowledge and expertise (in the form of rules of thumb for judging headhunters) to ascertain what is likely going on. He also shows respect for the questioner in the manner of his answer. Corcodilos identifies what he sees as the essential problem, lays out why he sees it that way, and then presents actionable advice. I especially appreciate the fact that he subtly help his questioner gain confidence in the midst of what many find to be a frustrating, powerless-feeling situation: Applying indirectly puts you so far down on the list of realistic candidates that you're really wasting your time. But I'm not here to berate you. This is a good learning experience if you understand why you're wasting your time with this headhunter -- who seems to have overlooked you because he's working blind. [bold added] I was originally interested in posting on this Q and A because I was impressed with how well Corcodilos could make a call with what many would see as having little information. However, upon further thought, I am actually more impressed with how well he communicated what he knows (that the questioner did not), leaving the questioner and anyone who stopped by wiser and stronger. -- CAV Link to Original

Lenore Skenazy rightly mocks a popular "viral" "tip" for parents who might use smartphones to photograph their kids: The fact that the vast majority of crimes against kids are not committed by criminal masterminds poring over the Internet to find a stranger to stalk makes no difference to the news team. It prefers to dream up the wildest, least likely chain of events (seriously, what kind of predator has the time for all this?) and act as if it's a danger all parents must be aware of. And now -- thanks to the "share" button -- we are. I wouldn't blame technology for the popularity of uncritically passing along bad advice couched in life-or-death language any more than Skenazy blames technology for child predation. Technology is only a tool that can be used or misused, just like any other. The problem is cultural. Most people continually hear that reason is no better than -- or even inferior to -- faith. On top of that, many of these same people have such poor educations that they have little introspective basis to question such assertions. Too many people are unable to construct an independent hypothesis based on actual evidence, at least past a certain point of complexity; and they are also fed a steady diet of propaganda in government schools. That is, too many people have had the virtue of independence beaten out of them, if they ever really had a chance to cultivate it. Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it--that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life--that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence. -- Ayn Rand (linked above) The Skenazy piece puts a face on two blog postings I ran into recently regarding the "wisdom" of most crowds. In the first, Vivek Haldar examines a common assumption about the Internet: Ever since James Surowiecki published "The Wisdom of Crowds", I've often heard the glib "rule" that "many minds are smarter than one." But as Surowiecki constantly stresses in the book, crowds are wise only if each individual judgment is uncorrelated with the others. When the judgements are correlated, you don't have a wise crowd, just a stupid herd. The second post examines such a phenomenon mathematically, considering the simple case of a five-member jury whose members independently have differing chances of reaching an incorrect verdict on their own. The chance of the whole jury reaching an incorrect verdict rises dramatically if everyone follows one juror than if everyone votes independently -- even if all who follow are worse at evaluating the evidence than the one they followed. Of course, a stupid herd can be behind something that stands on its own merits, just as a jury with only one person doing any thinking can render a correct verdict. But can you really say that most of the people involved in either case really judged anything? "What he said," could summarize such "thinking". It would also serve as a warning to someone seeking to make his own judgement that he should ignore such a person. Whether something is regarded as conventional wisdom is inconsequential for seriously considering it unless most supporters can give solid reasons for holding it as such. If Skenazy makes a mathematical paradox or a speculation about the wisdom of crowds more concrete, Rand explains them: The probability involved is the chance that a check of a claim against the facts has been done correctly. When two or more people do this, the chances of an error being detected rise. When everyone trusts an authority figure, they put themselves at the mercy of any error or deception on his part. Part and parcel of the popularity of spreading panic on the Internet is human psychology. What confidence level can someone have if he never thinks for himself? Such a person will be easy to panic and quick to adopt a "fix". And he will want to feel good about himself by passing along the "tip". -- CAV Link to Original

Some time ago, I posted on an article that debunked several myths about electric cars. On top of that, the article warned that the vehicles could pose problems for people with legitimate uses for electricity: Here's another catch: Electric cars aren't necessarily green at all. Electric vehicles require large amounts of electricity -- so much that Toronto Hydro chief Anthony Haines says he doesn't know how he'd get it. "If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails," he said recently. More recently, the MIT Technology Review painted a more complete picture of the grid failure problem, which has become worse with the advent of fast chargers. In fact, utilities in California are "scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages": The trouble arises when electric car owners install dedicated electric vehicle charging circuits. In most parts of California, charging an electric car at one of those is the equivalent of adding one house to the grid, which can be a significant additional burden, since a typical neighborhood circuit has only five to 10 houses. In San Francisco, where the weather is cool and air conditioning is rarely used, the peak demand of a house is much lower than in the hotter parts of California. As a result, the local grid is sized for a much smaller load. A house in San Francisco might only draw two kilowatts of power at times of peak demand, according to Pacific Gas & Electric. In comparison, a new electric vehicle on a dedicated circuit could draw 6.6 kilowatts--and up to 20 kilowatts in the case of an optional home fast charger for a Tesla Model S. There are ways to get around the problem that are kind of interesting -- until one realizes how much time and money is being wasted (by people other than the car owners) on top of that represented by the electric cars themselves. We can blame government subsidies and "incentivization" for the easy availability of electric cars, and, I strongly suspect, government regulation of utilities for the fact that the car owners themselves aren't footing the full bill for their folly. Not only do the greens want to dictate to the rest of us how we can produce or use power, they are already being insulated from the practical costs of their crusades by the mixed economy now. The article states that, "The upgrades are paid for by all rate payers, not the electric car owners." Capitalism can't make men see the truth, but it is obvious here how it could protect one man from the foolishness of another. -- CAV Link to Original

If you'd like to start your week with something inspirational, by all means go to this New York Times story about inventor-entrepreneur Meredith Perry. Here, she describes her "eureka moment", at the end of a long day of research on her laptop: "I was just standing in my room," she said, "wrapping up my laptop charger and trying to fit it into my bag and suddenly it occurred to me: Wow, this is so archaic. Why are we using these 20-foot wires to plug in our quote-unquote wireless devices?" The story describes the many obstacles she faced along the road from this moment to running her own company, including "constricted thinking" on the part of specialists she consulted with and a general lack of interest on the part investors -- but the following stood out to me: As Ms. Perry soon learned, there are very good reasons that we don't beam electricity through the air. Though you can transmit the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, there are problems. "I realized that anything on the right half of the spectrum was too dangerous to beam," she said, "and anything on the left half of the spectrum that was closer to radio was either too inefficient or tightly regulated by the government." [bold added] If memory serves me, I recall seeing something to the effect that a student in Pennsylvania had come up with a way to charge electronics wirelessly some time before I encountered this article. This sounded too good to be true to me, in part because I figured that if it were possible, someone would have already solved the problem by now. Maybe further investigation of the artificially off-limits parts of the EM spectrum would have resulted in an impasse, and sound would have proved to be the solution. I have no idea. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder whether a couple of unforeseen consequences of government regulation here have been that (1) we've all been having to waste time fiddling with chargers long past a time when wireless power transmission at home might have been realized, and (2) Perry's considerable drive and hard work are being diverted from other challenges. -- CAV Link to Original

Evil as Self-Limiting, Chapter 291: Management Jacob Shapiro (via Bruce Schneier) discusses the additional managerial overhead that terrorist organizations face. Shapiro takes the reputation of jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri as a poor boss as his starting point. After considering what he would face in Zawahiri's shoes and looking at similar behavior on the part of other terrorist organizations, Shapiro explains why micromanagement is the only option: Terrorist leaders also face a stubborn human resources problem: Their talent pool is inherently unstable. Terrorists are obliged to seek out recruits who are predisposed to violence -- that is to say, young men with a chip on their shoulder. Unsurprisingly, these recruits are not usually disposed to following orders or recognizing authority figures. Terrorist managers can craft meticulous long-term strategies, but those are of little use if the people tasked with carrying them out want to make a name for themselves right now. Terrorist managers are also obliged to place a premium on bureaucratic control, because they lack other channels to discipline the ranks. When Walmart managers want to deal with an unruly employee or a supplier who is defaulting on a contract, they can turn to formal legal procedures. Terrorists have no such option. David Ervine, a deceased Irish Unionist politician and onetime bomb maker for the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), neatly described this dilemma to me in 2006. "We had some very heinous and counterproductive activities being carried out that the leadership didn't punish because they had to maintain the hearts and minds within the organization," he said.... Even criminal syndicates have a more manageable pool of potential recruits than terrorists do. Weekend Reading "[M]y graph shows that the part-time share of U.S. employment has remained disturbingly elevated since the U.S. recession ended four years ago." -- Richard Salsman, in "Obamacare Will Foster a Part-Time Jobs Bonanza for Our Limp Economy" at Forbes "Marriages that fail almost always suffer from a lack of open exchange and a sad overabundance of secretive, resentful sacrifice." -- Michael Hurd, in "I'm Happy When You're Happy" at The Delaware Coast Press "The irony is that passive-aggressives think they're being 'nice,' but they end up coming across as inconsiderate and flaky." -- Michael Hurd, in "Passive Anger Is the Worst Kind" at The Delaware Wave My Two Cents My favorite line from the Salsman piece was the following: "ObamaCare pushers ... didn't know insurers plan ahead." This fact -- amazing to the very people who like to pretend they know better what everyone else thinks than they themselves do -- Salsman then generalizes and uses to great effect to analyze a graph of hiring trends. It is indeed very interesting that the very threat of HillaryCare likely caused the same anemic full-time hiring that we are seeing now. Symptom of the Present Someone recenty caught a design flaw in a skycraper being built in Spain and billed as the "Standard for the Future": It lacks elevator shafts. Too bad nobody noticed or spoke up about this until the building was nearly complete. This brings back memories of a lab building some past colleagues were reluctant to move into when a curious lack of sinks came to their attention. --CAV Link to Original

1. Here's a great example of me telling my two-year-old daughter about something, only for her to floor me weeks later by demonstrating how well she rememebers things. A few weeks ago, I heard a familiar noise that had gone missing for the last few years: the buzzing of cicadas in the trees overhead. I was playng with our daughter in the front yard, and told her they were cicadas, and that the "babies" live underground for a very long time before they crawl out and fly away. I mentioned that they crawl up trees and, since their "skins" are too small, they take them off and leave them behind before they fly away. "When I was a little boy, I would find them on tree trunks and keep them in a drawer." (And yes, the drawer was full of them!) We then looked around, failing to find a shedded exoskeleton, but coming across an actual bug, which shortly flew away. The above picture shows our first "bug skin", collected from a tree in our front yard about a month later, after we got home from a park. While at the park, Pumpkin had suddenly started looking on tree trunks for bug skins. We came up empty there, but not at home, to my surprise. We found just this one. 2. For those of you who were wondering, here is a final crucial robin update. With the arrival of our new son just days before I took the last two shots, I am amazed that I even remembered to take them. As usual, click for full sized images. 3. Can red-green color blindness be cured by a six hundred dollar pair of glasses? Not quite, but tech writer David Pogue, "severely" color blind himself, was still quite impressed: Then I put on the glasses. Unbelievable! Now I saw two entire additional color bands, above and below the yellow arc [of a rainbow his kids had discovered --ed]. It was suddenly a complete rainbow. I don't mind admitting, I felt a surge of emotion. It was like a peek into a world I knew existed, but had never been allowed to see. The glasses require very bright light to function, and were designed to help physicians get "a clearer view of veins and vasculature, bruising, cyanosis, pallor, rashes, erythema, and other variations in blood O2 level, and concentration," 4. Reader Steve D. sends me a link to a story titled, "Drone Delivers Beer at Music Festival in South Africa", saying, "If this doesn't make everyone pro-technology, nothing will." -- CAV Link to Original

Via HBL comes a fascinating Wall Street Journal article about South Korea's hugely successful "shadow educational system", which it calls "as close to a pure meritocracy as it can be". Aside from some impressive national educational statistics and the millions some of its "rock-star teachers" make, what impressed me most favorably about the system was that it is quite open to innovation: Private tutors are also more likely to experiment with new technology and nontraditional forms of teaching. In a 2009 book on the subject, University of Hong Kong professor Mark Bray urged officials to pay attention to the strengths of the shadow markets, in addition to the perils. "Policy makers and planners should…ask why parents are willing to invest considerable sums of money to supplement the schooling received from the mainstream," he writes. "At least in some cultures, the private tutors are more adventurous and client-oriented." The tutors take full advantage of modern communications, placing lectures online and keeping parents apprised of progress through frequent text messages, for example. The whole thing is worth reading, although I do have a quibble with a rock-star teacher quoted within. "The only solution is to improve public education," the millionaire teacher says. (In his defense, he is not an economics instructor.) This quote is amusing, coming as it does from the same article as this: Under this system, students essentially go to school twice--once during the day and then again at night at the tutoring academies. It is a relentless grind. Improve? Or abolish? Imagine what these tutors could accomplish with students who hadn't had to waste an entire day in government schools before attending class. -- CAV Link to Original

John Stossel comprehensively demolishes the myth that the gap in earnings between men and women of comparable ages is due to sexual discrimination. I had heard that much of the gap could be attributed to the choice many women make to leave the workforce to raise children for years at a time, and that is implicit in Stossel's argument. But Stossel frames the argument differently, emphasizing what women are getting in lieu of higher pay: [Facebook CEO Sheryl] Sandberg's been criticized by feminists for this common-sense message. The critics claim she "blames the victim." But most women are anything but victims. Making a different choice, choosing a less career-driven life, may be why women have more friends and live longer. Many women don't want "corporate success," though it's politically incorrect to admit it, says Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of the Independent Women's Forum. "I don't think that most women want what Sheryl Sandberg wants," Schaeffer told me. "In some recent studies, only 23 percent of women said that they would prefer to work full-time, let alone (have the) sort of CEO quality of life that Sheryl Sandberg is living." It may be technically correct to simply note that less time in a career equals less experience and, therefore, should come with the expectation of lower pay. Nevertheless, Stossel's approach does two more things. First, it underscores the justice of how the market sets compensation for those who make such choices. Second, it appeals to the women that feminists are pandering to, helping them realize that it is wrong to effectively demand "redress" for a choice that is already being rewarded in other ways. Salary numbers yanked out of all context, save sex and age, are insufficient evidence that sex discrimnation has occurred. (But even the occurrence of unjust discrimination in no way justifies rights-violating, prescriptive, and discriminatory "equal opportunity" laws.) On top of that, those numbers do not even reflect all forms of compensation one obtains from one's choices in life. Stossel deserves our thanks for showing just how thin a reed number-based arguments for egalitarian solutions really are. -- CAV Link to Original