Gus Van Horn blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brendan O'Neill asks a question and, perhaps unwittingly, provides much of the answer himself, when he speaks of the need to address the issue of the "barbarism of modern Islamist terrorism". Regarding the barbarism, he notes an interesting change over the past couple of decades: Time and again, one reads about Islamist attacks that seem to defy not only the most basic of humanity's moral strictures but also political and even guerrilla logic. Consider the hundreds of suicide attacks that have taken place in Iraq in recent years, a great number of them against ordinary Iraqis, often children. Western apologists for this wave of weird violence, which they call "resistance", claim it is about fighting against the Western forces which were occupying Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion. If so, it's the first "resistance" in history whose prime targets have been civilians rather than security forces, and which has failed to put forward any kind of political programme that its violence is allegedly designed to achieve. Even experts in counterinsurgency have found themselves perplexed by the numerous nameless suicide assaults on massive numbers of civilians in post-war Iraq, and the fact that these violent actors, unlike the vast majority of violent political actors in history, have &ldq uo;developed no alternative government or political wing and displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern". ... O'Neill wonders what motivates these attacks even as he notes that, "Western observers do all sorts of moral contortions in an effort to present such violence as run-of-the-mill or even possibly a justifiable response to Western militarism." This is part of the answer. Much of the rest lies in the irrationality of the cultural milieu from which these barbarians arise, as Anat Berko explains: The overriding distinction between the two is their native cultures: the suicide bomber's education and attack preparations are diametrically opposed to that of mass killers, as is their socialization. Suicide bombers are radical Islam's celebrated heroes, its darlings, whose acts are viewed by the larger culture as exemplary and heroic; in contrast, the West's mass killers are aberrant individuals isolated from their resolutely life-affirming culture. But O'Neill notes that, at least a few decades ago, even terrorists felt "restrained both by their desire to appear as rational political actors with a clear goal in mind and by basic moral rules of human behaviour". Clearly, that restraint has disappeared, and that is a function of a change in the culture of the intended audience. There has been a change in the culture of the West over that time. Our leader s fail to name an enemy or fight an actual war as our commentariat does the dirty work of excusing atrocities. This has been a trend for several decades and has been accelerating lately. In a discussion of a senseless terrorist attack, Noah Stahl of The Undercurrent names the trend, after rightly noting that "multiculturalism" is only a manifestation of it: Limiting blame in this case (though blame is certainly due) to particular individuals would be an evasion of the actual philosophical culprit: our cultural fear of judgment. If nothing else comes from this loss of life, it should serve as a wake-up call to reevaluate this premise and an impetus to reassert its antidote: not an avoidance of judgment, but the recognition that it is vital, not only in day-to-day life, but in our very self-defense. Judgment entails recognition of facts, the acceptance that facts are what they are, and that they have real consequences. If the military had exercised proper judgment of [Maj. Nidal] Hasan by this standard, it is likely that the massacre may have never occurred. Though it's too late for that, it is only by embracing the value of objective judgment that we will be able to prevent such acts in the future. When their enemy's refusal to pass judgement on anyone (except to condemn themselves) is considered, the mayhem of the barbarians suddenly makes perverse sense. Islamists educated in the West will be told that their culture is as good as any other, and there will be, if anything, a plethora of excuses made -- by their own victims -- for anything they do. Any idiot can blow something up. However, it takes a modern form of barbarism for such behavior to continue unabated, let alone succeed. Yes, jihadists are barbarians, but they are impotent against actual opposition. It is another sort of barbarism -- that looks quite harmless -- that we have to worry about. -- CAV Link to Original

Is Intel Slowly Killing off the PC? The pursuit of Shiny New regardless of the desires of one's customer base sounds like it will do the trick: In response to these painfully obvious problems, what does Intel do? They actually mandated Windows 8/8.1 to get kickbacks, mandated touch screens, mandated a paid anti-virus for said insecure OS, and jacked the prices way up with Haswell. What do users get in return? Slightly better performance, slightly better battery life, and a step up in graphics performance. Notice how many of the solutions Intel mandates are listed as problems by users? Notice how many of the things users didn't want were in fact moved to the mandatory column from optional? See any problems? I wonder what part of "If I wanted an iPad, I wold have bought an iPad," Intel doesn't get. Just because one segment of a market is growing doesn't mean that there is nothing to be made in another. Weekend Reading "Confusion is a signal from your mind that you're wishing for two things that don't go together." -- Michael Hurd, in "Anxiety Liberation" at The Delaware Coast Press "Give your kids the reasons why they should act a certain way." -- Michael Hurd, in "10 Tips for Well-Adjusted Kids" at The Delaware Wave "It is impossible to overstate how different Madoff's motives were from those of genuinely successful businessmen, who thrive and prosper over the long run through their productive exploits" -- Don Watkins, in "Bernie Madoff, Steve Jobs, and Wall Street Greed" at The American Magazine "Paying cash can also protect your medical privacy in the era of electronic medical records." -- Paul Hsieh, in "How Patients Can Protect Themselves Against Big Medicine" at PJ Media My Two Cents The teaser quote for the Hsieh article was something I was unaware of. I suspect that almost anyone would do well to read this piece for specific ways of protecting himself from the progressively slipshod (and expensive) medical care ObamaCare threatens to bring. Collateral Sensitivity Via Instapundit, possibly good news on the antibiotic resistance front: In the new research, systems biologists Lejla Imamovic and Morten Sommer of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby used Escherichia coli to explore how bacteria change when they become resistant to a drug. They found that when E. coli gains resistance to one antibiotic, it also becomes more sensitive others--a phenomenon they call "collateral sensitivity." The new research suggests that careful cycling between drug types could wipe out resistant bacteria in patients. --CAV Link to Original

1. I wouldn't call them the smartest things Amazon's founder and CEO has ever said, but I found this list of twenty things Jeff Bezos has said entertaining and thought-provoking. My favorite? "Your margin is my opportunity." 2. Auto-Brewery Syndrome is not a nice problem to have: The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch -- a bagel, pasta or even a soda -- the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine. [link dropped] Fortunately, the condition seems to be extremely rare. 3. Own a 3-D printer? The point your browser here to print out a Norwegian fjord for fun and profit. You laugh, but this childhood model railroader sees some pretty spectaular possibilities coming from technology like this. (Sadly, the site is having issues as of writing time. I have no idea whether one can, say, set a desired scale or print out parts for assembly.) 4. And speaking of esoteric uses of the web, be sure to bookmark this site just in case you think you might need to know how many people are in outer space at any given moment. -- CAV Link to Original

I am tempted to quote the last paragraph, but it is so much better with the build-up of the full story that I will resist. (It borders on being the punchline to a joke.) The story is its author's go-to story for job interviews when he gets asked a question like, "Tell us about a project you were involved with that failed." Here is a pretty characteristic, non-spoiler passage: ... So I had to write seven or eight different versions of the program that validated and loaded the data. These days I would handle this easily; after the first or second iteration I would explain the situation: I had based my estimate on certain expectations of how much work would be required; I had not expected to clean up dirty data in eight different formats; they had the choice of delivering clean data in the same format as before, renegotiating the fee, or finding someone else to do the project. But in 1995 I was too green to do this, and I did the extra work for free. There was plenty of blame on both sides for the failure of the project, so there are plenty of lessons to be learned. "Know what you want," is probably the biggest one for the client, and it is interesting to see how hard this can be. "Stand up for yourself," is probably the biggie for the contractor. Again, knowing how to do this or, indeed, when it is called for, isn't necessarily straightforward. I am not a programmer, but I found the story to be as valuable as it was entertaining. -- CAV Link to Original

Jonah Goldberg draws several interesting comparisons between Barack Obama and Ted Cruz, perhaps the most interesting one being his last: If Cruz's effort fails -- and I fear it will -- it will be for the same reasons that Obama's second term has been such a legislative dud. The way you bring change to Washington is through elections. After the elections, change comes from the unsightly process of consensus-building (aka sausage-making). Both Cruz and Obama have shown little interest in that approach. Goldberg had earlier made the point that both men see voter consensus (viz-à-viz consensus among politicians) as key to political change, and one of his points is that such consensus isn't enough to effect political change in Washington. Goldberg raises an interesting point with which I am inclined to agree: I think election results do define, in crude terms, how much change might be possible over the next few years. That said, the piece leaves me a little bit dissatisfied. I think Goldberg could have made a distinction that he didn't make: between intellectual movements and voters organizing for a specific purpose. The "communities" organized by Barack Obama are full of collectivists who made up their minds long ago that the government should be running everything. Cruz's Tea party is more of a mixed bag of people who oppose the results of collectivism, but not in an intellectually consistent manner. And the American public currently, in terms of political philosophy, is indifferent/vaguely in favor of the government taking care of things. Intellectually, the cards are stacked in favor of Obama: Whatever kind of "sausage-making" is tolerated will reflect that. I think Obama knows this and Cruz either doesn't, or he overestimates how pro-individual rights Americans currently are. It may well be that neither man appreciates sausage making, and that thwarts each to a degree, but that makes cultural change no less important in achieving political change. Given America's current cultural climate, Barack Obama can better afford to be a lousy sausage maker. The real lesson to be drawn from Cruz's overreach isn't just that he needs to hone his political skills: It's that he needs to understand where the culture is right now and how to change where it is for the better. -- CAV Link to Original

... but do take care of them. Following a "related posts" link from a recent John Cook posting about expertise, I encountered the following interesting example of bad pedagogy: [T]he computer science department deliberately used a different programming language in nearly every course. The idea was that programming language syntax is unimportant, and constantly changing syntax would cause students to focus on concepts. This had the opposite of the desired effect. Since students were always changing languages, they were always focused on syntax. It would have made more sense to say that since we don't believe programming language syntax is important, we're going to teach all our lower division courses using the same language. That way the syntax can become second nature and students will focus on the concepts. What this department did is an excellent example of how not to deal with something unimportant, but life abounds with mundane examples. I am astounded by people who, for example, don't seem to keep track of keys very well, and so regularly waste time and energy looking for them that could be put to much better use. As a parent, I have a heightened appreciation for the scraps of time that exist, say, when I'm cooking for the week. (I now either cook two "big things" in parallel or work on some task that lends itself to incremental progress, like folding laundry.) Of course, I wouldn't have even seen the time gaps had I not approached recipes the way I do, which is to spell out every step and do things the same way every time. Mundane details should be thought about periodically and dealt with procedurally and habitually so that they don't cause one to waste time and effort. It is also interesting what paying some attention to mundane details can buy in terms of evaluating advice. I have often gotten friendly advice on how to save time cooking, only to see immediately that it would actually cost me time, money, or both, compared to what I usually do. Here's an example I'd hoped would work, but which didn't: There are some really good things out there, like frozen pulled pork, that can make good meals quickly -- but they make just one meal, and even the minimal preparation (starting with defrosting) alone takes far longer than just microwaving the complete meals I make. (I also have some quick meals in my repertoire that take about the same amount of time to prepare -- and yield leftovers). I'd had the pulled pork and liked it, so I tried it anyway. It was tasty, but I was right about it not saving any time. The basic idea is to not waste focus on the unimportant. That is not the same thing as never focusing, however. Learning, say, a computer language or a recipe well saves time for doing more creative or interesting or urgent work. But unless one is open to changing one's routine, one might miss out on further opportunities to save time as they become apparent. Just yesterday, for example, I switched a couple of steps in my laundry routine because of an unusual time constraint, and then realized that I should always think about which order to use because the reverse order will usually save me time. I dwelt here on nailing down the unimportant things, but this ties directly in with the earlier Cook post on expertise. Experts have the small things nailed down to the point that it's second nature. They both spend less time fixing errors caused by small things and have more time to spend on truly important matters. -- CAV Link to Original

Chand John writes a short piece that ought to be required reading for anyone considering graduate school or having doubts about finishing it. He begins his description of the "Ph.D.-Industry Gap" with the following apt metaphor: Imagine you're a brand-new Porsche in 2011. You're sitting in a dealership, being test-driven by many enamored consumers but never purchased. Later you hear that the 2011 Toyota Camry outsold the Lexus 1.5 to 1, the Cadillac 2 to 1, and the Porsche 10 to 1. You ask yourself: Was it worth being an impressive, expensive car, if no one ever buys you? He goes on to describe what he concluded from data he collected from his own exasperating job search, and sums it up with yet another metaphor: As a scientist, I had already been gathering data about that question. Each time I was rejected from a job, I asked the companies for reasons. They were often vague, but two patterns emerged: (1) Companies hesitated to hire a Ph.D. with no industry experience (no big surprise) even if they had selected you for an interview and you did well (surprise!). And (2) my Ph.D. background, while impressive, just didn't fit the profile of a data scientist (whose background is usually in machine learning or statistics), a product manager (Ph.D.'s couldn't even apply for Google's Associate Product Manager Program until recently), or a programmer (my experience writing code at a university, even on a product with 47,000 unique downloads, didn't count as coding "experience"). It was like being a chameleon and trying to get jobs where you had to be red, blue, or black. Yes, you're capable of becoming any of those colors, but companies would rather hire animals that already werethose specific colors. My unusual Ph.D.--in contrast to my professors' beliefs--severely limited my career options in industry, despite my software background and my Stanford computer-science degrees (which are widely considered synonymous with wild success in Silicon Valley's tech scene). [bold added] John is describing a real problem, but I find myself pondering its causes. I think there can be the kind of gap he decribes, but cultural and political factors are combining to make it both more common in fact and appearto be more common. Appear to be more common? Yes, and John's chameleon analogy leads me to say so. While there will always be jobs for which an immediate need will call for a very specific type of experience, I think these are really a much smaller fraction of jobs than it seems in today's job market. This market is severely broken on at least two levels. (John's piece is really only concerned with the second of these, in which companies hire for specific skills, rather than talent.) I think this part of the problem is cultural: Many people, strongly influenced by credentialism, are reluctant to go out on a limb to evaluate talent and advocate an unusual candidate. (Paul Graham sees this as a problem to which large organizations are prone, but I think the cultural penetrance of Pragmatismis also at play to make it crop up elsewhere.) It is more straightforward to see how gaps can be more common. Our government has been distorting the market for Ph.D.'s in science for decades, as I have mentioned here before. Even if companies got their HR bureacracies out of the way and started evaluating job candidates for talent, so many people have been funneled into acquiring terminal degrees for so long that candidates with doctorates are much cheaper than they should be. How many people who have talent, but have honed their skills in the wrong part of a marketable field -- or even in the wrong field altogether -- would there be were there not so many perverse incentives in place to do so? There are too many Ph.D.'s out there, they are often trained to do things the market doesn't demand, and many companies are fixated on hiring for skills rather than talent. Those are facts that too many grad students take too lightly when they consider them at all. -- CAV Link to Original

How Much Is Too Much? I have seen psychologist Michael Hurd question the conventional wisdom that alcoholism is a disease several times in the past. Nevertheless, until this recent posting at his blog, I'd never given much thought to what this might mean to someone facing that problem: ... Alcoholism, while not a disease, is not a choice in the normal sense of the term, because "choice" is a concept that applies to being in a rational state of mind. Most people's minds are altered, at least somewhat, after even a drink or two. An alcoholic's judgment is so suspended after just one or two drinks that he feels compelled to drink many more than where he started. This doesn't just happen occasionally, but all the time. What someone who has had a drinking problem in the past -- but might consider taking up drinking responsibly -- can do follows directly from this definition. Weekend Reading "It all boils down to what you get out of being with a person." -- Michael Hurd, in "Can You Agree to Disagree?" at The Delaware Coast Press "Manners go by the wayside when people become mentally lazy." -- Michael Hurd, in "Manners -- Why Bother?" at The Delaware Wave "Imagine the effect on our culture, particularly on the young, if the kind of fame and adulation bathing Lady Gaga attached to the more notable achievements of say, Warren Buffett." -- Harry Binswanger, in "Give Back? Yes, It's Time for the 99% to Give Back to the 1%" at Forbes "What fuels demand for ever-more financial regulation is this basic mistake about the ethics of greed." -- Richard Salsman, in "The Financial Crisis Was a Failure of Government, Not Free Markets" at Forbes "[T]he biggest danger is that their data will be used as intended-- i.e., to control Americans' health care by controlling the caregivers." -- Paul Hsieh, in "The Eyes of Big Medicine: Electronic Medical Records" at PJ Media In More Detail The Salsman piece linked above contains the following recommendation: I've read many articles and books on the financial crisis of 2008-2009, but only one account gets both the diagnosis and prescription just right: John Allison's book, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope (McGraw-Hill, 2013). A long-time CEO of BB&T Corp., one of the nation's most ethical (self-interested) and thus successful banks, Mr. Allison has been president of the Cato Institute for the past year. You must read his book closely if you are to understand what happened five years ago, why it happened, and why it'll happen again unless interventions are removed. [link in original] Salsman will be saying more about Allison's book in future columns, which I plan to note here as they come out. Amazing(ly Cheap) Quoth Benjamin Franklin in a letter: A Beggar asked a rich Bishop for Charity, demanding a pound. -- "A Pound to a beggar! That would be extravagant." -- "A Shilling then!" -- "Oh, it's still too much!" -- "A twopence then or your Benediction." -- "Of course, I will give you my Benediction." -- "I don't want it, for if it were worth a twopence, you wouldn't give it me." What can I say to that but, "Amen"? --CAV Link to Original

1. "You're not a hipster until you've taken a typewriter to a park." Now that you've had your chuckle, meet the man behind the "meme": For all the hateful words that were lobbed at me, it barely ever bubbled over from the world of online forums and websites. I received zero angry emails, only a few mean tweets. My Facebook was never broken into and vandalized--my typewriter remains unsmashed, no one has ever threatened violence towards me in real life. Instead, there are these pockets of the web that are small and ignorable, filled with hate for a picture of me, for this idea of a hipster--for the audacity of bringing a typewriter to a park. Apparently all but absent from the lengthy comment threads about this man's out-of-context picture were any genuine curiosity and any sense of irony about spending so much time and energy hating someone for a desire for attention. Too bad for the commenters: this guy had a pretty clever idea. 2. What would doing homework be like for an adult? One man, concerned about his daughter's work load decided to see for himself. To say that his title, "My Daughter's Homework Is Killing Me", "says it all" is tempting, but it would be to use a colloquialism rashly. I think the article raises some very important issues about education, directly and indirectly. I'll also take the opportunity to note here that not all schools are like the one described. 3. Speaking of daughters... This week, as we were finishing up the board-book version of Finding Nemo, my two-year-old daughter said, "I yove my daddy", to me for the first time. (Her L's come out as Y's most of the time.) Heart melted? Check. Week made? Check. 4. From an account of the contribution of the Monopoly board game to the WWII war effort: Under the paper surface of each doctored board was a map printed on durable silk showing "escape routes from the particular prison to which each game was sent," Waddington's chairman Victor Watson told the Associated Press in 1985. "Into the other side of the board was inserted a tiny compass and several fine-quality files." Real French, German, and Italian currency was hidden in the stacks of Monopoly money. Nobody knows how many of the approximately 35,000 POW's who escaped prison camps were able to do so thanks to these special game sets. -- CAV Link to Original