Gus Van Horn blog

Edmond Lau tells us that "$1 invested in Walgreens in 1975 would skyrocket to $562 by 2000". How did this drug store chain accomplish such impressive growth? By having a clear objective (i.e., becoming the most convenient store for its customers) and correctly choosing a way of measuring successthat supported the goal. The shift in metric played a huge role in aligning the company's focus. No longer focusing on [the traditional metric of] profit per store, Walgreens replaced its inconvenient locations with more convenient ones, buying up corner lots with multiple entries and exits for its customers. It would close down perfectly good stores to move them a block away if it could get a more convenient corner location. In cities, it would even cluster multiple stores in a single-mile radius so that customers didn't have to walk more than a few blocks to a Walgreens. In order to increase profit per customer visit, Walgreens invested in a number of services to optimize for the customer's convenience once in the store. It built one-hour photo stops, drive-through pharmacies, and a network system called Intercom to electronically connect customer data from every Walgreens to a central database so that customers could, for instance, pick up prescription drugs from any Walgreens in the US as if it were their local pharmacy. [minor edits] Lau rightly notes that finding the right way to measure success is just as crucial for individuals and small teams, and provides several positive and negative examples to make his point. For example, many people end up wasting time and actually being counterproductive by working too many hours per week: I've been through a few phases at startups where expectations of 70-hour work weeks became the norm in the hope of shipping a product faster. Not once have I come out of the experience thinking that it was the right decision for the team or the company. The marginal productivity of each additional work hour drops precipitously once you reach numbers anywhere close to that ballpark. Average productivity per hour drops, errors and bug rates increase, difficult-to-measure costs of burnout and turnover often result, and the overtime is typically followed by an equal period of "undertime" as employees try to catch up with their lives. Ultimately, the metric of hours worked per week is unsustainable, and a much more reasonable metric is something aligned with productivity per week, where productivity is measured based on your focus area ... [hyperlink omitted] Lau makes it clear that finding the right metric is crucial to guiding effort among individuals and over time. A vision statement may sound good, and people might be able to recite it off the tops of their heads, but a big part of translating abstract goals into concrete actions is evaluating the actions. -- CAV Link to Original

Several times in the past, I have mentioned my respect for head-hunter Nick Corcodilos' commentary on job hunting, which often also deals with the subject of how companies go about finding the right employees. Corcodilos advises long-range, conceptual thinking, by both parties, about the hiring decision. This approach is starkly opposed to the common practice of the potential employer honing in on a narrow skill set and the potential employee casting out a resume and a formulaic cover letter like a fishing line. To wit: Anyone can hire people with specific skills and deploy those skills to get a job done. The best managers hire talent rather than skills, because when you have talent, you can develop all the skills you want. The best managers know that talented employees can handle new projects because these employees can acquire almost any skills they need to do jobs they've never encountered before. [bold added] This is just one aspect of the hiring decision, but I think it illustrates my point about why I like Corcodilos: He is arguing that the hiring process needs to be thoughtful to be successful in the long run. A trained monkey might work out for an immediate need, but success can't come from doing the same thing over and over for eternity. This morning, I ran across an employer who may or may not have heard of Corcodilos, but he sure sounds a lot like him. Brooke Allen advises fellow employers to hire good people as opposed to nice ones, and no, he is not buying into a commonly-held false dichotomy that equates getting ahead with walking over corpses: Good and nice are not the same thing. The opposite of good is bad. The opposite of nice is unlikeable. Nice people care if you like them; good people care about you. Nice people stretch the truth; good people don't. If you tell a nice person to do something evil, they might do it because they do not want to upset you; a good person will refuse to do it. You might think you are a good person, but you are fallible, so if you want to avoid inadvertently doing something evil you must surround yourself with good people, not nice people. Just about all I could add to the above might be, by way of clarification, to insert "or foolish" after "evil" in the last sentence. The rest of the article is similarly thought-provoking, and, as with the work of Nick Corcodilos, I would recommend it to anyone on either side of the hiring/job seeking process for reasons that Allen makes crystal clear. The employer-employee relationship is a trading partnership: Allen's "nice" employees, by worrying about being liked more than about what the facts are, are failing to look out for themselves. And if they can't or won't look out for themselves, why should a potential employer think they'll look out for his company? -- CAV Link to Original

This shortened post is brought to you by a particularly evil cold. The lack of a post on Monday will be brought to you by the holiday, which I was already planning to take off. Happy Memorial Day! *** "In effect, the Obama administration is openly admitting that their health law won't work without the willing cooperation of people who can expect to be harmed by the law -- including young people, doctors, and health industry workers." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Is Obamacare's Fatal Flaw Taking Effect?" at PJ Media "People who feel that they have too little control over their lives certainly need to address the issue -- but not on the roads of resort towns." -- Michael Hurd, in "Tame Your Fears witrh Facts" at The Delaware Coast Press "The more you avoid something 'just because,' the more you reinforce to yourself that it's best to withdraw from life rather than to experience it." -- Michael Hurd, in "Beware of Vacation Syndrome!" at The Delaware Wave -- CAV Link to Original

1. The beer-a-day calendar on my desk recently featured a short list of "can't go wrong beers". Founder's Breakfast Stout made the list. Here's the brewer's description: The coffee lover's consummate beer. Brewed with an abundance of flaked oats, bitter and imported chocolates, and Sumatra and Kona coffee, this stout has an intense fresh-roasted java nose topped with a frothy, cinnamon-colored head that goes forever. Based on my limited experience of its quality, it definitely belongs on the list. Its ratingat Beer Advocate and my poor luck at finding it on shelves indicate that I may not be alone in holding such an opinion. 2. My daughter had been sick with a cold, but bounced back strongly one morning early this week. She was radiantly happy and so enthusiastic about everything in general, in fact, that I was disappointed that it was a daycare day. While she was sick, she didn't seem to care which clothes I dressed her in in the morning, but that changed. I saw a pretty, mostly yellow floral jumper. "Would you like to wear this? I asked, not really expecting much of a reply. "Yeah!" She said. She even called it a "jumper", which was a word I didn't know she knew. The next day was funny. She saw my green and blue shirt and decided she wanted to wear green. Sadly, blue-green was as close as we could get. After her initial disappointment, Momma Van Horn offered to wear a shirt and pants that matched her. She liked that idea, of course. 3. I love the name of the company, and they have an interesting idea: For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. Suppose we had a default meal that was the nutritional equivalent of water: cheap, healthy, convenient and ubiquitous. Soylent will be personalized for different body types and customizable based on individual goals. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost. [bold added] I'm not part of the target demographic: I enjoy cooking food and eating it too much. Also, I am not confident enough about the state of knowledge of the field of nutrition to contemplate subsisting on this, even if I were so inclined. 4. The title both says it all, and compels one to learn more: "I was Struck by Lightning Yesterday--and Boy am I Sore". I'm glad this guy is okay! -- CAV Link to Original

An off-duty soldier has been brutally murdered in London by a small group of men wielding meat cleavers. Consider for a moment the degree of attention such an act ordinarily merits: a brief report of the crime and a trial and punishment for the offenders. The only concern we would have for the motive of the perpetrators would be to establish such things as exactly what type of crime was committed and whether others might have been involved. In this case, the men made their motive clear: They were religiously motivated. (This indicates not just a crime, but an act of terrorism, and thus probably also an act of war. Beyond that, what these people say they want is irrelevant.) The last thing any civilized person would concern himself with is attempting to please such a person, and yet this is the whole basis for committing acts of terrorism. This is what the chief butcher had to say: He added, in the video obtained by ITV News: "Remove your governments - they don't care about you. You think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start bursting our guns? You think politicians are going to die? "No, it's going to be the average guy, like you, and your children. So get rid of them - tell them to bring our troops back so we can... so you can all live in peace." Notice the semi-correction/Freudian slip there at the end. This is the only thing I have ever heard from a jihadist that is remotely in the neighborhood of an honest description of the merits of paying any attention to them: They will live in what they think of as "peace" -- at least until they find another excuse to kill someone. We won't, because peace with someone who arbitrarily kills other people is impossible. I hardly know where to begin with how mindless this latest Islam-motivated atrocity was. These jihadists saw someone wearing a "Help for Heroes" shirt. Not that his being a soldier would have given them the right to do what they did, but for all they knew, this was an al Qaeda operative in disguise. So they see a man in a shirt. They run him down with a car and murder him with meat cleavers. They try -- but fail -- to behead him, as if that will be more "persuasive". They demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that they cannot be trusted -- and then start speaking to us as if they have the moral high ground. And this is supposed to achieve what? Not just allowing them to go about their daily business, but to begin doing what they tell us to. One second's thought will reveal that the practical application of acting on this will have the same result as ignoring it: Islamic fanatics will find some random excuse to kill some random person again. The British paper's use of words like, "chilling" to describe this savage's utterances is as ludicrous as calling the roar of a lion "chilling" after its rampage is over. The proper term here is not an emotional one, but a legal one: "aggravating". A thing does what a thing is. Wild animals that take or endanger human lives are, in the long run, only as dangerous as we let them be. Cages, guns, and governments have legitimate uses. (To be clear, I favor the use of government against terrorism outlined here to be a major part of the proper response.) The sooner the West remembers this, the sooner we will see that terrorists are only as powerful or "chilling" as we allow them to be. -- CAV PS: This episode incidentally causes me to realize just how ridiculous Pascal's Wager is. An all-powerful being demands that beings he created -- without a means of detecting his existence -- will destroy them or worse if they don't believe he exists. So we should believe he exists? As if a being that "warned" us we'd go to hell if we didn't believe in him in such a circumstance would take the trouble to keep a promise... Link to Original

Writing in The Washington Times, Douglas Holtz-Eakin notes that Americans aged 18-40 are likely to vote against ObamaCare with their pocketbooks. Polling data suggest that the premium hikes that will kick in in 2014 are going to have a large negative effect on the program's incoming cash flow: In this group of current insurance purchasers, only 83 percent will still purchase if premiums rise 10 percent; 65 percent, if premiums rise 20 percent; and only 55 percent, if premiums rise 30 percent. The economic lesson is simple: As premiums rise, eventually, some consumers reach a price point at which they simply stop buying health insurance. Holtz-Eakin notes that despite this behavior, many of these people are "not anti-ObamaCare": The poll shows a response to the health care law split more or less right down the middle: 29 percent viewing it favorably, 33 percent unfavorably, and 38 percent "half-and-half." Within the law, some features are viewed favorably (coverage for pre-existing conditions is a positive for 68 percent), while others are frowned on (55 percent have a negative view of the individual mandate and penalty.) This reminds me quite a bit of the people who find that they can't afford to live in blue states, and so move to red states, and yet continue voting for the policies that caused them to have to move in the first place. While people ultimately will vote according to what they believe is right, it could help some to begin to question whether the are doing the right thing to be clear about terms. In this case, I wonder how people might have voted at the ballot box if they knew that ObamaCare is tantamount to outlawing (actual) health insurance? Or that, as Holtz-Eakin notes, they are serving as milch cows? Either lesson will require education: The uneven approval of parts of the plan suggest to me that many people do not understand how the "bad" is related to the "good". We are thus in danger of people taking home the wrong lesson: that ObamaCare was merely a badly-executed idea. -- CAV Link to Original

If you thought the campus barbarism of the 1960s was long dead, Thomas Sowell has an update for you: An all too familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4th to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that dealt in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object. Although there were professors and administrators in the room -- including the college president -- apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm trooper tactics. ... Correctly calling the current status quo, in which we have "whole departments of ethnic, gender and other 'studies'", a "peace of surrender", Sowell nevertheless finds a hopeful counterexample in history: Back in the 1960s, the University of Chicago was a rare exception. As Professor George J. Stigler, a Nobel Prize winning economist, put it in his memoirs, "our faculty united behind the expulsion of a large number of young barbarians." The sky did not fall. There was no bloodbath. The University of Chicago was in fact spared some of the worst nonsense that more compliant institutions were permanently saddled with in the years that followed, as a result of their failure of nerve in the 1960s. When the entire culture, seemingly, is on the side of goons, many who would oppose the tide lose their resolve. It is they, the decent people who might otherwise stand against barbarism, who need reminding of such historical lessons and of the reasons the sky will not fall down. That said, Ayn Rand's analysis of the so-called student "rebellion" of the 1960s supplies an element missing from Sowell's analysis: Those who oppose such nonsense often would find it helpful to know that others understand that they are right to do so. Of course, the mere fact that someone isn't acting like a storm trooper doesn't mean he is necessarily opposed to them. Sadly, knowing this, we have to wonder whether the lack of spine on display at Swarthmore was really due to a faculty too "wimpy" to oppose the barbarians -- or to join them. -- CAV Link to Original

In her aptly-named "Potomac Watch" column in The Wall Street Journal (via HBL), Kimberly Strassel makes some astute observations about the targeting of conservatives for scrutiny by the IRS under Barack Obama: Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot. Later, noting that, "The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone," Strassel elaborates on how Obama targeted conservative groups: The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned. In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation." Read the whole thing. -- CAV Link to Original

Exhibitionism vs. Eroticism If you find modern culture to be awash with sex, and yet completely unerotic, Emily Esfahani Smith has written an essay for you. She asks, "Is Sex Still Sexy?" Eros, in fact, is everything that Speak About It and the hookup culture are not. Casual sex, readily available sex, publicized sex, sloppy drunk sex, sex for the sake of self-gratification and self-discovery--this is not eros. "Sex-on-tap," Nehring writes in A Vindication of Love, "attenuates rather than inflames passion. It is for this reason that the relentless emphasis on sexual climax that distinguishes our day from most others in historical memory has a largely depleting effect on the life of the emotions... The natural distances between people have been diminished so radically as to make romance--which depends on the retention of other-ness, tensions, and reserve--impossible." I don't agree with everything she says here, but find her piece thought-provoking, and a good description of the general state of modern culture. Smith is clear that her objections to this state of affairs are not religious. She makes a point to noting that one commentator she quotes is an atheist, for example. I am reminded of the following, by another atheist thinker, Ayn Rand: Sex is a physical capacity, but its exercise is determined by man's mind--by his choice of values, held consciously or subconsciously. To a rational man, sex is an expression of self-esteem--a celebration of himself and of existence. To the man who lacks self-esteem, sex is an attempt to fake it, to acquire its momentary illusion. Romantic love, in the full sense of the term, is an emotion possible only to the man (or woman) of unbreached self-esteem: it is his response to his own highest values in the person of another--an integrated response of mind and body, of love and sexual desire. Such a man (or woman) is incapable of experiencing a sexual desire divorced from spiritual values. Yes. Sharing everything lessens mystery, but one must also have something to share. Merely not talking about mindless sex isn't the solution. Weekend Reading "It's virtually impossible to get a point across to anyone who feels that you're meddling in something that's none of your business." -- Michael Hurd in "10 Tips for Good Communication", at The Delaware Coast Press "Consider apology as a way of honoring what you know to be true, while at the same time honoring yourself and those you care about." -- Michael Hurd, in "Apology as the Last Word", at The Delaware Wave My Two Cents Michael Hurd's treatment of the subject of apology shows that the conventional wisdom on the subject is both wrong and harmful. It is easy to forget, in this age of insincere, conditional "apologies" that making an apology can be moral and practical. Explosion on the Moon My daughter's love of the moon has made me more alert to stories like this one: "On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before." Anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion--no telescope required. For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a 4th magnitude star. There is video available at the link, but you need to view it as a loop to really see anything. --CAV Link to Original

1. Recent astronomical discoveries are challenging long-held hypotheses about how planetary systems develop. As of this month, we've discovered 884 planets, 692 planetary systems, 132 of them with more than one planet and, strange to tell, almost none of them look like us.Indeed, the Earth may well be a strange planet in a strange system. 2. David Pogue of The New York Times recently vistied Europe and encountered some clever uses of technology. I liked this one: And most controversial (to Americans) of all, your room key has to be inserted by the hotel-room door to turn on power and air-conditioning. Yes, it means that your room takes a couple of minutes to cool when you return in the summer. But it also means that you can't leave for the day with all lights and chillers blazing. (As a handy by-product, you can't misplace your room key, either.) Pogue likes this one because it's "green", but I am no convert to environmentalism. I could see a mom-and-pop hotel or a budget chain using something like this, even without the perverse incentives of green guilt and fascistic governmental "nudging" that are at play in Europe. Pogue also saw an elegant solution to the problem of switching planes in Helsinki. 3. Even after watching my baby daughter develop for nearly two years, I sometimes find it hard to be completely sure exactly where she is. For example, we've been playing, "I see you" at the park a lot lately. Is she really using a sentence here or are the syllables an imitative noise? I strongly suspected the former, but got confirmation last night. We're transitioning to me being in charge of Pumpkin's going-to-bed routine ahead of our son's arrival, and I currently rest on a bed nearby while Momma Van Horn does the routine. Pumpkin piped up at one point, "I see Daddy." 4. He died some years ago, but we should all take a moment to reflect on how fortunate we are that Maurice Hillman invented the mumps-measles-rubella vaccine. For most children, mumps was a nuisance disease, nothing worse than a painful swelling of the salivary glands. But Dr. Hilleman knew that it could sometimes leave a child deaf or otherwise permanently impaired. He quickly dressed and drove 20 minutes to pick up proper sampling equipment from his laboratory. Returning home, he woke [his sick daughter] Jeryl Lynn long enough to swab the back of her throat and immerse the specimen in a nutrient broth. Then he drove back to store it in the laboratory freezer. The Times goes on to note that, "Over his career, [Hillman] devised or substantially improved more than 25 vaccines, including 9 of the 14 now routinely recommended for children." -- CAV Link to Original

Am I the only one who finds irony in the following statement by David Axelrod? The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. "Part of being president is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast," he explained. This person has spent an entire career promoting paternalistic politicians. Paternalism relies on the premise that individuals are incapable of caring for themselves and need central planners like Barack Obama to take care of them. As Axelrod has now admitted (and pro-capitalist economists have known for ages), the goings-on of the government (let alone a nation of over three hundred million) are too much for one man to track. Perhaps it's time for us to reassess Axelrod's notion of what the government is supposed to be doing, and move towards individuals taking more responsibility for (and having more control over) their own lives. Clearly one individual can't do this for all the other individuals. That said, the alignment of Obama's political agenda with whom the IRS targeted is too convenient for Axelrod's argument, however true in general, to have a shred of credibility for this situation in particular. Even Barack Obama knows something about what his underlings are doing. The man who ran as everyone's personal savior has no business pleading "I couldn't help it!" now. Oh. Barack Obama wasn't the one talking? Obama can't know what some random loose cannon like David Axelrod might choose to do? Well, then, let's see what Barack Obama says about the matter himself. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing for The Week, Peter Weber asks whether Republicans will overplay the various scandals that could engulf the Obama Administration. That's a fair question, given how the GOP handled the Lewinsky scandal back in the 1990s and, more importantly, why it did so. Weber quotes blogger Jonathan Bernstein regarding the how: Scandal-mongering, obviously, is very lucrative within the conservative marketplace.... [but] actually finishing an impeachment presumably ends whatever scandal they are mongering. It might be better to just keep the witch-hunt going.... On balance I think the final word on this is likely to be John Boehner's demonstrated ability in guiding House Republicans past their worst self-destructive instincts. This may be, but Weber indicates earlier that the American public is weary of scandals and, at least in the case of Bengazi, indifferent to them. So even this much political calculus looks futile to me. Regarding why the GOP might overplay any or all of Obama's scandals, one need only consider why they overplayed the Lewinsky scandal and why they were unable to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. As I said after the 2012 election: Barack Obama did not win comfortably. He has no mandate. If America is so brain-dead as to actually want this non-entity for President again, our goose is cooked. But this "win" seemed more like something happening by default. Perhaps if voters had had a clearer and more inspiring choice, the result would have been different. Perhaps Scott Brown wasn't the only Republican who sounded too much like his opponent, but only the most obvious one. Obama -- or the man who first signed ObamaCare into law in his own state? A man who wants to run a massive welfare state somehow -- or one whose Vice President wants to save the massive welfare state by slowing its rate of growth? This wasn't really much of a choice, was it? The Republicans only spoke of dismantling the welfare state "brick by brick" when they took Congress during Clinton's presidency. Based on their subsequent actions, they made this promise only because they thought it would get them elected. They did no such thing, and they did not represent a true, principled alternative to Bill Clinton's vision of improper government. The GOP didn't truly oppose the welfare state then, and they don't now. Until they do, the Republicans can only hope to gain power as a more palatable alternative, whatever that might mean -- at least until most voters become completely cynical about all politicians. So I see scandal-mongering as a poor long-term strategy as well as a poor short-term one. That said, if Barack Obama deserves to be impeached and removed from office -- and I would hope that anyone would see using the IRS to violate freedom of speech as sufficient reason -- the GOP should cast aside any forecasts of short-term electoral losses (or Democrat gains due to "healing") and move precisely in that direction. They should, that is, for the right reason, which is protecting the individual rights of all Americans. Such a move would represent a step in the right direction, and, by that fact, show that the GOP is (a) serious about providing Americans a proper-government alternative and ( trustworthy. If the GOP hopes to use Barack Obama's scandals to oust a man from power, they might succeed. However, any attempt on their part to use Barack Obama's scandals as a substitute for having to make a case to voters that they deserve to hold office will backfire sooner or later. -- CAV Link to Original

This morning, I noticed the following blurb at Instapundit: "Most Transparent Administration in History Releases Completely Redacted Document About Text Snooping." It may surprise many people that an administration that spends so much time preening about "transparency" would do this. But it makes perfect sense when some of its other actions are considered, like using the IRS to intimidate political opponents -- or obtaining months of the phone records of a large news agency. As I wrote over a year ago, regarding the fad of "transparency": Ayn Rand once rightly pointed out that privacy is a hallmark of civilization. Those who truly appreciate this, but won't stand up for privacy, risk opening themselves up to all kinds of mistaken suspicion and plain old bullying about anything they happen to do that might be misinterpreted -- or "misinterpreted". and Where the minutes of a meeting might once have served a legitimate purpose -- as a memory aid for those for whom the meeting was a concern -- they now serve as an ammunition depot for anyone with an ax to grind to seemingly base an allegation of wrongdoing or bad intent on reality. Predictably, transparency laws have had a stifling effect on debate in the corridors of power... Of course, since federal regulations and the tax code manufacture criminals, who needs misinterpretation? Barack Obama's fascistic record of introducing government control over every aspect of our lives that he can provides the clue. If, as he wrongly sees it, the government should run everything (individual knowledge or opinion be damned), who else has the right to or need for information? Barack Obama not only fails to see a double standard, he sees this prying as moral and necessary. Whether the people who populate this country are Americans, who understand that civilization is founded on privacy -- or are not, and regard themselves as part of a collective -- remains to be seen. Perhaps there is hope, given that even Massachusetts Democrats are upset enough to draw parallels between Barack Obama and Richard Nixon. To paraphrase a character in an Ayn Rand novel, "Run for your life from any man who tells you that privacy is evil. That sentiment is the leper's bell of an approaching blackmailer." There is no legitimatereason on earth for the government, absent objective evidence that the information might solve a (real) crime -- or is relevant to a court proceeding or national defense -- to compel (openly or not) a private citizen to disclose personal information. -- CAV Link to Original

I'm late to this one, but I can't help but mention that one man's account of going a year without using the Internet reminds me of an article from The Undercurrent from a couple of years ago. Paul Miller of The Verge begins his tale: I was wrong. One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul." It's a been a year now since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I've managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I'm internet free. And now I'm supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I'm supposed to be enlightened. I'm supposed to be more "real," now. More perfect. But instead it's 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I'm watching Toy Story while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the epiphanies my life has failed to produce. I didn't want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey. Miller's journey began with a notion that has gained wide currency in our culture: I'd read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I'd begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was "doing to me," so I could fight back. But the internet isn't an individual pursuit, it's something we do with each other. The internet is where people are. But what are people? More to the point, of what is one's character made? Miller is right that our choices are a big part of the answer, but what if we are unhappy with those choices? Valery Publius of The Undercurrent makes a similar point when she argues against the idea that techology is making us less intelligent or creative: [D]oes technology really mold our minds? To be sure, it is a tool that extends the reach of our hands and of our senses. As a tool, it can be used poorly or used well. People who watch a lot of television can become illiterate couch potatoes. But they can also become media critics. Twitter can be used to share meaningless gossip about celebrities, or it can be used to foment political revolutions. Even media critics and revolutions are not guaranteed to deliver anything true or meaningful. If we sometimes don't like what they deliver, isn't it obvious that we shouldn't blame the tools--but the choices made by the tool users? Publius goes a step further than Miller, who, to his credit, sees that he was blaming a tool and owns up to it. Consider an alternate big idea: the manmade world we see around us is the product of the choices of individual human minds. If we don't like the world, we should rethink the choices that produced it. [bold added] I see a strong dose of determinism in modern critiques of communications technology. Determinism obviously suggests the Internet as a scapegoat for one's problems, but Miller's piece still ends with an air of uncertainty. Even though he sees through "What has the Internet done to me?", it's as if Miller isn't quite sure where to go from there. Is the pervasiveness of determinism in our culture making it harder for Miller (or many others like him) to realize that one can make the deeper changes necessary to find happiness? The tools for doing so exist, although they have (understandably) been blamed for failing to do just this. -- CAV Link to Original

A Cure Worse than the Disease Helene Goldberg's preview of a book about the left's latest excuse to meddle -- I mean the anti-bullying crusade -- makes several worthwhile points. Among them is the following, which she quotes from Sticks and Stones author Emily Bazelon: If real change can and has come from a concerted effort to stop bullying, there's also a risk that a search for solutions will end up doing more harm than good. By prying too far into the lives of teenagers, we impinge on the freedom they need to grow. We stifle development when we shut down unstructured play at recess, for example, or censor every word online, in the name of safeguarding them from each other. We risk raising kids who don't know how to solve problems on their own, withstand adversity, or bounce back from the harsh trials life inevitably brings. [bold added] In recent years, I have come to see almost every cause of the left -- in so far as it is an attempt to replace individual judgement and initiative with some government-enforced outcome -- as similarly undercutting independence. Weekend Reading "ecause abortion is a right, the government's circumscription of it is tantamount to nullification of that right and a physician's right to practice medicine is similarly curtailed." -- Amesh Adalja, in "When Abortion Rights are Restricted, Gruesome, Gosnell-Style Black Markets Arise", at Forbes "By making it harder (if not nearly impossible) for the government to regulate gun possession and transfers, his development could move the government to instead (properly) focus its efforts on punishing gun misuse." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Why 3D-Printed Untraceable Guns Could be Good for America", at Forbes "If you respect the one you love, their point of view should matter." -- Michael Hurd, in "Is Arguing Healthy?" at The Delaware Wave "Believing that other people make you feel a certain way is a denial of personal responsibility; a surrender to the false view that you're not responsible for the workings of your own mind." -- Michael Hurd, in "What Makes You Mad?", at The Delaware Coast Press "[J]ust as the flattered, puffed-up student gets a painful dose of reality after graduation, so the economy gets it when the never-liquidated errors finally bring about the inevitable crash." -- Harry Binswanger, in "By Eliminating Failure, the Government Robs us of Success", at Forbes Government-Funded Exuberance The Binswanger piece linked above offers the following insight on the phenomenon that a government official once called "irrational exuberance": omething does change, psychologically, in the boom preceding a crash. The change is not an increased desire for wealth. Nor is it that people become fixated on the short range. What changes is people's assessment of risk. People do not become more greedy, they become over-optimistic. Seeing stocks and real-estate go up and up, they imagine that this is the new normal and that a decline in prices is not in the cards. [bold added] I found this piece quite valuable for making several connections like this. Thief Schooled by Old Man I always enjoy stories like this: "I give him three good rights -- I caught him right in the face. He went down and he never got up again." --CAV Link to Original

A list on fatherhood is long overdue... 1. It happens so often that it took me a month or so to remember to mention it here: My daughter likes to stand on my feet when I'm sitting on the couch and she wants to use the coffee table. It may seem to be a silly thing to put down here, but one day, she'll stop doing it, and other memories and concerns could eventually crowd out my memory of this now-daily small delight of fatherhood. I don't want to forget the fact that it always makes me smile when she does this. 2. Another delight of fatherhood is the element of surprise inherent in seeing a new personality develop. This week, I was amused at how indifferent my daughter was to seeing elephants at the zoo, and yet how much she liked prairie dogs. Also she is currently fascinated by boys. She often points and says, "Boy!" when she sees one. She also giggled with delight during a one-sided game of peek-a-boo with one during a trip to the Magic Houseyesterday. 3. Lately, whenever we arrive home from picking Mrs. Van Horn up from work, Pumpkin has been saying, "Out! Out!" because she wants to get out of the car seat, just as we get into the driveway. Usually, I unlock the front door, then come back to get the baby. Whenever she is released from the seat, she gets out and goes to the other side of the back seat, and giggles as she tries to avoid me picking her up to get her out. I guess that means we're playing "chase" now. When I go to the other side of the car to get her, she tries to "escape" back to the other side. 4. Our son is on the way: One month and one week from now, Mrs. Van Horn will be headed to the hospital for a c-section. Experience makes me no less excited or nervous than the first time around. -- CAV Link to Original

Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal refrains from the cliché about a crisis being both a danger and an opportunity -- but maybe he shouldn't have. Henninger notes that young Americans face high, chronic unemployment and underemployment, to the extent that it is beginning to affect the culture: The U.S. under Barack Obama is at the edge of the dark jobs forest Europe disappeared into in the 1970s, with our annual growth during his term down around 2% instead of over its normal 3%. Our kids are starting to look and sound like Europe's smart kids--despondent and resigned. It doesn't have to be this way, but politicians are too busy fighting each other over nonessential "hot button" issues to exploit the underlying opportunity: For an alert opposition, openings exist. The Young America's Foundation just did a deep polling dive into the attitudes of these voters, and one answer stands out. Asked if the "free market is mostly unfair and requires government intervention to correct," 33% agreed and 45% disagreed. And a November analysis by Civicyouth.org at Tufts University noted that younger black males (age 18-24) have never been as excited about Barack Obama as women are. Not having a job could chill enthusiasm for any president. [bold added] Part of the problem is that too many conservatives are not truly pro-capitalist: If you don't really understand how capitalism could eliminate problems like this, you likely will not even realize that there is a chance to offer such a choice. I am glad that at least some, like this author, understand what's going on: Opportunities like this can have a short shelf life. -- CAV Link to Original

Surprise, surprise! It appears that Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's hand-picked successor was truly (and just) that. His narrow electoral "victory" appears to have been engineered by an election machine heavily assisted by Cuba: On April 14, everything was in place to ensure a Chavista electoral victory just as it did last October. However, that machinery could not compensate for Maduro's failure to motivate his party's base. Instead, the system detected an impending defeat in time for the Chavista authorities to tamper with the vote primarily in polling places where they knew opposition monitors were absent..[ sic] It is telling that since the night of the election the [Venezuelan National Electoral Council] has stripped all precinct-level reporting from its website. However, the opposition's monitors collected tally sheets from at least 60 percent of the voting centers, including some that show a 15-30 percent drop in turnout in Chavista bastions since last October's election. Reports that opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski won in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the country suggest that Maduro was defeated soundly. The article details how the Chavistas, with lots of help from Cuba, rigged the elections, such as by "reminding" people with government jobs to vote and sending opposition supporters to vote at inconvenient locations. I agree with the author that such findings will erode the moral legitimacy of the current regime, but do wonder what practical consequence this can have, given the details about how the voting was rigged. Oh, and then there are other problems with removing such a regime (i.e., Why it came into power in the first place, and why a principled opponent of Chavez didn't arise). Even the freeest elections can kill freedom, if the voters don't want or understand it enough. -- CAV Link to Original

Gillian Tett of The Finacial Times discusses and comments on the results uncovered of several private studies of American buying habits versus known pay and benefit cycles. These studies have revealed a marked recent deterioration in the American standard of living: Before 2007 ... consumer spending on food and drink was fairly stable during the month in most US cities. But since 2007, spending patterns have become extremely volatile. More and more consumers appear to be living hand-to-mouth, buying goods only when their pay checks, food stamps or benefit money arrive. And this change has not simply occurred in the poorest areas: even middle-class districts are prone to these swings. ... I have to agree with Tett that this is alarming. The second reason I find this trend intriguing - if not tragic - is what it reveals about our attitude towards time. During most of the past century, it has often seemed as if a hallmark of modern "progress" [ sic] is that our planning horizons, as a society, have expanded. Unlike peasants or herdsmen in the pre-modern age, who lacked the ability to measure the passage of time or calculate future risks with precision, 20th-century man appeared to have so much control over the environment that it was possible - and desirable - to take a long-term view. No longer were people destined to scramble in a reactive manner; they could plan ahead, mastering time. The fact that people were no longer foraging for food each day, but were able to visit a supermarket proactively at pre-planned intervals, was a good metaphor for a much bigger social and cognitive shift. [bold added] Improper government, in the form of central "planning" and the redistribution of looted wealth, is to blame for our current economic hardship, but many people, buffeted by the storm will understandably (but mistakenly) seek any port, even if that means more of the same. This doesn't mean we are doomed, but it does mean that people need to be aware of a positive alternative to this state of affairs in a hurry. -- CAV Link to Original

Recently, an Android update informed me that my note-taking app, Epistle, was no longer supported. The developer had decided to create a new app for purchase, called Draft. When I first checked the page for Draft in the Google Play Store, it appeared that work was incomplete, and that for my purposes the new app was not as good as Epistle. But then, about a week later, I noticed that my notes were no longer syncing, due to an API change in Dropbox and the fact that Epistle hadn't changed since 2011. This meant that I had to use something instead of Epistle. So I checked the page for Draft again at the Google App Store and found that significant progress had been made since the time before. Since the app is only about $2.50, I went ahead and bought it. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it does everything Epistle did and more. I was especially pleased with its better markup editing. Among other things, I can dictate a note into my phone using Draft and Google Voice, and then edit the result as a markdown file without having to toggle app settings to do so. (Most of my other uses for Epistle/Draft are for plain text files.) Realizing this made me wonder how easy or difficult it would be to compose a blog post on my phone, so I tried it one afternoon. This post is the result. --CAV P.S. I composed the above on the phone. Although Draft handles markdown editing quite well, I could not paste links into the document from my browser. That wastes time by requiring me to add them once I've imported the markdown into Blogger. Also, editing anything on the phone is a chore, and reminds me of a quip by some developer that went something like this: "If you're trying to replace the keyboard, your users shouldn't be saying, 'I wish I had a keyboard.'" The original editing, even for this short post took about twenty minutes. I then found myself editing it heavily in Blogger for a similar amount of time. This was an interesting experiment, and it tells me that composing with Google Voice/Draft could conceivably come in handy from time to time, although it isn't easy and doesn't save time. Apart from the above unorthodox use, I highly recommend Draft as a note-taking app. Link to Original

The Cult of "Positive Attitude" As someone who has to be careful not to sound hypercritical, I assure you that that particular problem is not what this post at Meeting Boy describes: f you stack the deck with yes-men, then consensus means nothing: A very large organization which we're all familiar with had a leader who insisted on positive attitude and people who work to find solutions and make things happen. "Can-do attitude" was very important. So in a short time they were racing to the launch of his big project. The consensus within his team was that it was a good plan, with one department head even calling it a "slam dunk". If anyone had any concerns, they stayed quiet. The project ended up a huge disaster despite a very impressive first month, with lots of back-patting and one group even declaring "mission accomplished". In the end it: Turned out to have been sold-in with faulty information. Had a promised price tag of $60 billion, but exceeded $1 trillion. Was supposed to take 3 months, but lasted over 8 years. It didn't turn out too well for that leader either. Sure, he has his pension, but he's a pariah now, invited to nothing, and trying to make the best of retirement by painting pictures of animals.As someone who has become suspicious of almost any attempt to build a "consensus" in recent years -- and not just because of global warming "activism" -- I found this piece a valuable dissection of what goes on during the building of such meaningless consensuses. I also suspect that many people who have been slammed for being "negative" in such situations might welcome knowing that at least someone else appreciates their more objective "attitude". Weekend Reading "If U.S. policymakers aren't willing to enact these fundamental reforms, at the least it should consider shifting from bail-outs to bail-ins." -- Richard Salsman, in "Bankruptcies, Bail-Outs & Bail-Ins: The Good, Bad & Ugly of Bank Failure Resolution", at Forbes "[ObamaCare is] like having a law requiring homeowner's insurance to pay for lawn care, house painting and water heater replacement, while at the same time prohibiting the companies from operating an actuarially sound business." -- Beth Haynes, in "Almost All Americans Lack Health Insurance", at The Huffington Post "If it's true that your marital relationship is one of the things you value in life, then why would you want that relationship to suffer because of your unwillingness to 'selfishly' work to find a solution that satisfies you both?" -- MIchael Hurd, in "Compromise Isn't Always Good", at The Delaware Wave "[T]hinking before you speak presupposes that you have somewhere else to think!" -- Michael Hurd, in "Is That ME Talking?", in The Delaware Coast Press Cyprus Better than Bailouts? To be clear, the Salsman piece is not advocating Cypriot-style measures as answers to bank failures. Rather, it makes the point (among others) that such measures are less bad than the kind of bank bailouts we have seen in the U.S. I know that many fellow readers of his piece will find his position controversial (or at least initially shocking). But hear him out: He makes a good argument. Heh! (But I hope I don't bank there!) A reader's comment on an interesting list of myths about password security reads in part as follows: True story. My wife and I went into a major bank this morning, just as they were unlocking the doors. Had to wait while they booted up. One employee yells across the bank, "What's the password?" and the other one yells back, "1-2-3-4!" The fact that they could even be ALLOWED to SET such a password tells me everything I need to know about their "IT people". Not only is the password bad, I am astounded that people were yelling it back and forth, and with members of the public within earshot to boot. Were I privy to the identity of the bank, that would be all I needed to know about it. --CAV Link to Original

1. Admitting that he has dismissed some very good ideas "at least four times", entrepreneur Dustin Curtis relates a couple of amusing examples. Here's the end of one of his accounts: "What a stupid idea," I thought to myself. As we finished our coffees, I think he sensed my apathy, and we parted ways. But just before I walked away, he asked a question: "What do you think about the name we've been using? It's called Pinterest." I think the author is being a little hard on himself when he calls his stories possible warnings against "arrogance": There's no way to bat 1.000 when evaluating new ideas. That said, I think there is value to be had in the sense of being able to remember that some really good ideas have been laughed at in their infancy. If you have an original idea, don't forfeit your own judgement of it just because it has naysayers, which it will. 2. An old friend told me recently that, thanks to the expanson of Google Steet View into Russia, it is now possible for anyone to see a building -- 120 Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg -- that Ayn Rand called home for a time in her childhood. 3. Since we live so close to it and it has a great penguin exhibit, we've taken our daughter to the excellent St. Louis Zoo quite a few times now. She has recently started branching out from her love of penguins to also being fascinated by owls. (Thanks, Warner Brothers!) So it is that we had reason to take her to the zoo's bird exhibit, which turned out to have only two owls (each of a different species) on display that day. I like to think of the following as her two-word review of that exhibit: "More owls!" She has been surprising me daily with the speed at which she has been improving her speech. She often uses nearly complete sentences, like, "Take coat off," or "Let me sit," and frequently surprises me with words I recall using rarely, if ever, with her. As I write this, specific examples elude me, as this is now near-daily, and the words are not particularly unusual. 4. Think of the implied personal security tip as "hacking" the range-of-the-moment mentality of most criminals: As lame as this ATM skimming attempt was, a few aspects of this crime are worth highlighting because they show up repeatedly in skimming attacks. One is that the vast majority of skimming devices are installed on Saturdays and Sundays, when the crooks know the banks will be closed for at least a day. As a result, you have a much higher chance of encountering a skimmer if you regularly use ATMs on a weekend. The rest of the post is worth reading and ends with an even more general way to safeguard your bank account from card skimmers. -- CAV Link to Original

A couple of times before, I have relayed the following quote, by economist George Reisman, regarding a common misconception about economic planning: The overwhelming majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and planning about their economic activities that they perform in their capacity as individuals actually is economic planning. By the same token, the term "planning" has been reserved for the feeble efforts of a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions, and to call that planning. (as quoted in Andrew Bernstein's Capitalist Manifesto, p. 345) [bold added] An article discussing the growing number of government agencies purported to combat terrorism illustrates an aspect of the problem faced by those who would attempt central planning quite well: In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work. " I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. ... [link in original, bold added] And remember, this guy is merely trying to keep up with the activities of a relatively small number of people compared to the population at large. (This is not to say that government can't successfully combat terrorism if properly applied to the problem.) -- CAV Link to Original

Two articles about different aspects of ObamaCare came to my attention this morning. Both use the term "train wreck" in their titles. First, John Stossel describesthe new regulatory morass that the people in charge of your health will be mired in: Government likes to think regulations can account for every possibility. Injured at a chicken coop? The code for that will be Y9272. Fall at an art gallery? That means you are a Y92250. There are three different codes for walking into a lamppost -- depending on how often you've walked into lampposts. This is supposed to give government a more precise way to reimburse doctors for treating people and alert us to surges in injuries that might inspire further regulation. And that's just a sample from the 20,000 pages of new rules -- seven feet high, printed out -- that the regulatory apparatus has added since passage. Second, John Kartch of Americans for Tax Reform paints a gory picture of tax time next year. Before Obamacare, Americans facing high medical expenses were allowed a deduction to the extent that those expenses exceeded 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI). Obamacare now imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI. Therefore, Obamacare not only makes it more difficult to claim this deduction, it widens the net of taxable income. According to the IRS, 10 million families took advantage of this tax deduction in 2009, the latest year of available data. Almost all are middle class. The average taxpayer claiming this deduction earned just over $53,000 annually. ATR estimates that the average income tax increase for the average family claiming this tax benefit will be $200 - $400 per year. And that's just (part of) the beginning, too. Other parts of ObamaCare being phased in over the next few years will draw out the agony. I guess, as Nancy Pelosi put it, we are " ". Perhaps, in a literal sense, we did have to pass it to find out in concrete terms what unimaginable idiocy could gush forth from government bureaucrats. But was this lesson really necessary? Our founders' preference for a nation of "laws and not men" should have helped us know what debacle awaited us for placing such an important matter as our health in the hands of an unaccountable bureaucracy. There's a lesson or two in this bag of goodies about handouts and government regulation. We'd better learn it and start applying it fast. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing in FrontPage Magazine about the need to "call Islam 'Islam'", "recovering Muslim" Bosch Fawstin (via HBL), offers the following bit of clarity in response to some critics: Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it’s not because of Islam, it’s because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn’t stop some among us from thinking that his choice somehow shines a good light on Islam. It doesn’t. A good Muslim according to us is a bad Muslim according to Islam. I could have used this degree of clarity about a week ago! The rest of the piece is similarly good, and I consider it required reading on the War We Should Be Fighting But Aren't. On his blog, Fawstin notes that his piece has generated over a thousand comments, and he invites further discussion. f you disagree, make your counter-argument and let's keep this conversation going until I win, which means we All win. So read the whole thing, and discuss it if you wish. -- CAV Link to Original