SpacBlog

Winter is coming!

2011-11-21T14:38:00.000-08:00

I have always loved the simplicity of winter. Naked trees and cleanly intersecting lines of branches against the grey-white sky are so easy to understand. Monotonous amounts of snow makes every street look the same street in a snow-globe. Even the cold is simple because it drives me indoors, to where I probably want to be anyway. Winter's cold is such a clear and unambiguous antagonist. All of the subtlety and variety in life, whether through food or company or television, takes center stage in winter because there's such a limited color palette outside. Winter is dinner party weather; spring and summer are cookout weather, but their delicate interplay between mosquitoes and darkness and heat and rain inevitably complicate the process. In winter, it's cold and snowing, so the focus is inside. We do indoor things, and we don't have to rake leaves or paint the steps. Spring and summer make me feel bad when I'm not outside enjoying the weather; in winter I can enjoy the entertainment inside and be glad that I'm not outside. In fact I like to be outside in the winter, just so that I can then come back inside.

Who is the marginal student in 2011?

2011-02-15T21:36:00.000-08:00

Listened to another great podcast from EconTalk at the gym tonight. Russ Roberts interviewed Tyler Cowen about Tyler’s new book, “The Great Stagnation”.

The major theme that stuck out was one of Cowen’s three potential causes of our current economic stagnation, namely the difficulty in educating the marginal student. In the 1950s when college enrollments in the US shot up, it wasn’t that hard to educate the marginal student. Because college enrollments were so much lower, there were plenty of talented potential students who could be easily educated.

However, now that college enrollments are fairly high, the marginal student has changed. How difficult would it be for me to turn my C students into A students? Much harder than turning my C students from high school graduates who are not attending college to C students in college. One challenge in education may be that we've actually done a good job finding potentially talented students and gotten them into college, so it's now harder to find that hidden talent, or to get contemporary high school students with no plans for college into college.

This is a spin on education I hadn’t really thought about, and it makes sense that it would be more difficult to improve the educational experience of the marginal student today than 60 years ago. In a way, it means that we did a good job in the mid-20th century, but it certainly implies that additional gains from education will be tougher to come by in the future. As usual, more food for thought from econtalk.

Hair Salons, Economics and Software Engineering

2011-01-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

Last night I listened to another outstanding econtalk podcast that featured host Russ Roberts interviewing Wafaya Abdallah, a small business owner who runs a hair salon in Maryland.

Abdallah’s hair salon is unique in a number of clever and insightful ways: To foster teamwork, the employees are paid a salary instead of per appointment; everyone gets a bonus if the salon hits target numbers for the month; stylists with an empty chair work on promotions or decorating or other tasks; during downtime at work they read books like The Alchemist and The Five Dysfunctions of the Team for knowledge, inspiration and conversation topics with clients; two to three stylists interview prospective employees rather than just Abdallah herself, and so on. It sounds like an incredibly well-run and sucessful business that operates with a different incentive structure than many other hair salons.

One thing stuck out for me as a software engineer. Check out this exchange around the 15-minute mark of the podcast:

Roberts: Do you have weekly sessions where you talk things out?

Abdallah: It's informal. But we do have daily huddles, which are kind of pre-day meetings, inspiration, rah rah, cheerleading, here's our goal, how are we going to get there, here's what everyone needs to know; and then we have monthly meetings.

Roberts: How long does the daily meeting last?

Abdallah: Maybe 5 minutes? So that's basically where you are, trying to inspire them a little bit.

These quick, informal daily huddles are very similar to the daily status meetings used by agile/extreme development teams! Glad to see that the rest of the world is catching up to software engineering! Or more likely, that software engineering finally adopted the effective practices of other successful businesses...

Madden 2011

2010-09-19T19:43:00.001-07:00

Madden 2011: I’ve played Madden 2011 for a couple of hours last night, and there are already four things that annoy the hell out of me.

Instant Replay: I’m obsessive about using instant re-play; I re-watch about two-thirds of my offensive plays, especially passing plays where I may the wrong read. This feature worked flawlessly the last time I played Madden in 2004 or 2005, but in the most recent Madden, if you hit the start button too soon and go to where the “instant replay” option should be, you end up calling timeout. So you either blow a timeout by mistake, or you catch yourself, but then you have to exit out of the menu, wait an extra second, and then hit start again to get to instant replay. There is absolutely NO REASON why this should happen. If I can call a timeout, then the play is over enough to go to instant replay. And once you get into the instant replay mode, zooming out is very slow, and if you’re inside your own 25, the goal posts get in the way of your instant replay.
Camera angles: I would really like to use the wide-angle camera lens on offense (so I can see the outside receivers), and the standard or zoomed in camera lens for defense (so I can find a path to the ball). So far as I know, this feature has never existed in Madden, and I think it should be there for the future.
The play-clock: I always have to rush to call the first play after a change of possession, and I’m not quite sure why the playclock runs down like that. Also, the play clock doesn’t automatically wind down when the other team is in a clock-killing situation, so I have to sit there for 30 seconds while the play-clocks winds down from 35 to 2 seconds when they snap the ball. There’s no reason for this, the last Madden I played would wind down the playclock automatically. I might be able to change some settings, but I don’t know which ones.
Play-calling: The “Ask Madden” feature that gives you three plays is nice, but I prefer to cycle through formations and find my own plays. So far the play-calling seems a little clunkier than in earlier versions. However, apparently there are ways to set up favorites or recently used or something, though I haven’t figured it out yet.

No other complaints so far, and the graphics of course are really good.

Two great podcasts

2009-10-27T09:56:00.001-07:00

Two great podcasts I've been listening to lately:

Black Jack Justice

I cannot say enough good things about Decoder Ring Theater's presentations of Black Jack Justice. It's a golden-age-of-radio-esque presentation about two private detectives, Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, girl detective. The stories have dialogue and sound effects that recall programs from the 1940s, as well as nicely crafted internal monologues both from Jack and Trixie's perspectives. Each program is about 25 mins long and are all well-written by Greg Taylor.

I'm pretty sure that Black Jack Justice counts as a romance novel because it's character-driven and because of the constant banter between Jack and Trixie. Because the plotlines need to be wrapped up in 25 mins, some of the episodes end a little too quickly and too cleanly. But the characters are funny, rich and vivid, the detectives confront a variety of interesting and controversial issues such as domestic violence, and the dialogue is very good.

The highest compliment I can pay to Decoder Ring Theater is that I have been "rationing" the episodes because I don't want it to end.

The BS Report

I've been a fan of Bill Simmons since before he moved to ESPN, and I regularly listen to the BS Report, his podcast.

I'm intrigued at how Bill Simmons has evolved from a sports-writer into an excellent interviewer and conversationalist through his podcasts. He routinely scores interviews with stand-up comedians such as Jeff Ross and Patton Oswald, writers such as Chuck Klosterman, writers and producers for SNL, fairly high-profile actors such as Jon Ham, and of course sports figures such as Steve Nash, Mark Cuban and even the legendary Jerry West. I think one of the most appealing aspects to Simmons' podcasts is that they aren't interviews so much as they are discussions about a variety of topics. He lets sports figures talk about movies and TV shows, and talks sports with the actors. He also interjects his own ideas into the conversations, which makes it less of an interrogation and more of a free-flowing discussion. And best of all, he's funny.

I want to give a particular plug to Chuck Klosterman's most recent podcast (part 1 and part 2). Simmons and Klosterman are both funny and smart and their discussions are always fascinating. I had never heard of Klosterman until the BS Report but I will be buying his latest book of essays to read between the semesters.

Too big to fail?

2009-10-08T12:16:00.001-07:00

Too big to fail?

Gary Stern, former president of the Minneapolis Fed, co-authored a book called "Too Big To Fail" with Ron Feldman. At first glance, this book could be tossed into the pile of books flooding out of the wake of the financial crisis of ought-8. Except that this book was published in 2004, and sounds incredibly prescient based on Stern's conversation with Russ Roberts on Econ Talk.

Economists and libertarians regularly sound the alarm about "moral hazard", whether it's in relation to this most recent financial crisis, or in many areas of public policy. To put it as succinctly as I can, moral hazard means that you will act differently if your actions are insulated from any risks that your actions engender. So you will probably bet more aggressively with someone else's money than you would bet with your own money, especially if you get to keep any winnings garnered by your bets.

The moral hazard argument goes that bailing-out a firm is bad because the people taking the risks get paid if the risks pay out, but the tax-payers take the loss if the risks don't pay out. This sounds an awful lot like gambling with someone else's money, and it creates perverse incentives for future decision-makers to behave irresponsibly because they know that they will be bailed-out.

Before we move on, it's important to understand what, exactly, happens when there is a bail-out. My understanding is that, in general, bond-holders get bailed-out while equity-holders get wiped out. What does this mean? Equity
holders own stock in a company, so they reap large profits if the company does
well, but they can lose their entire investment if the company goes
bust. A bail-out of a trouble firm usually forces equity-holders to take big losses. Bond-holders, on the other hand, are essentially the firm's creditors: They loan money to the firm at a fixed interest rate, and expect to be paid back their principal plus interest, regardless of how well the firm does. Bail-outs usually protect bond-holders from big losses.

Why does it matter that bail-outs protect bond-holders but wipe-out share-holders? One of the counter-arguments is that, while bail-outs do create a moral hazard, there is still tremendous pressure from equity-holders for the firm to act responsibly because the share-holders don't want to lose their investment. The bond-holders, who are usually the ones who get bailed-out, don't really care if the firm acts irresponsibly because they are going to get back their investment anyway. So they're not exerting any major pressure on the institution because they're protected one way or the other.

Here's the key insight I took from Stern and Roberts. The pressure exerted by equity holders for firms to act responsibly is greatly, greatly exaggerated. Why is this the case? The majority of people and institutions who own stock are almost universally well-diversified, which means that they never own too much of one company (or one sector) that if that company goes bankrupt that they'll lose very much. There simply aren't any equity holders who have so much at stake with the success of one company the they're going to bother putting much pressure on that company to act responsibly. And the bond-holders don't own the company in the same way that the share-holders do, so they couldn't exert much pressure even if they wanted to. And bond-holders don't really care anyway because they are the ones that get bailed out.

This brings us to the decision-makers---the investment bankers and managers and CEOs---who are running the company. What are their incentives? As Stern and Roberts point out, investment bankers get paid a big salary, but they also get paid stock options. So they themselves are equity holders in the company and have an incentive not to bankrupt the firm. However, employee stock-options are rarely structured such that employees can cash out everything all at once, so the stock options are a little more theoretical than shares of stock you or I might have purchased in the firm with funds in our IRA. Now, throw onto this mix the fact that many managers are paid bonuses based on the "performance" of their firm, and you can see the moral hazard for excessive risk-taking start to take shape: You'll be paid more in bonuses if your risky bets pay off, and while you'll lose your stock options if those risks don't pay out, you can't exercise all of those stock options anyway, so there's nothing truly lost out of your pocket. Plus you're being paid a very large salary all along the way, and you'll be able to exercise at least a small number of your stock options. So why not take excessive risks to jack up your bonuses and the value of the few stock options that you can exercise?

The point is that there is no single investor on the hook for enough losses when a firm fails to put pressure on that firm to act responsibly. Equity-holders are either diversified investors with a plethora of other stock, or employees of the firm who can't exercise all of their stock options anyway, while the bond-holders get bailed out if the firm goes bust.

There's much more great information in the podcast, and I'm sure there's even more information in the book, such as a history of bail-outs over the last couple of decades. But one thing is for sure: I'm much less sanguine about the claim that some firms are too big to fail, and much more critical of why we let some firms get too big to fail in the first place.

What do education reform and health-care reform have in comon?

2009-08-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

I've been reading (listening to podcasts?) about health-care reform and education reform lately, and both issues have one thing in common: We measure the inputs but not the outputs.

What does it mean to measure inputs but not outputs? Basically we measure what goes into the system, typically in terms of dollars, but we don't do a very good job measuring what comes out of the system.

In health care, this means that we measure health treatments (tests, medicines, doctor visits, specialists and so on) but we don't measure health outcomes (does the patient get better?). For schooling, we measure spending on education, but we don't have fine-grained data on student outcomes. It's true that NCLB has forced all states to use standardized testing, but only at a very course-grained level. We could do much, much better.

Why do we measure inputs? There are a number of reasons, but the most obvious, and probably most important reason, is that measuring inputs is fundamentally easier than measuring outputs.

Why is this the case? Well, consider the task of measuring health outcomes for a heart surgeon. A crude approximation is to measure the percentage of successful surgeries performed. Except maybe the best surgeons perform the most difficult surgeries, so they're going to fail more because they're better. So we need to take into account the difficulty of the procedure being done, which makes measuring the outcomes more difficult. Furthermore, some successful surgeries are more successful than other successes (and some failed procedures are worse than other failures), so we need to adjust for that as well. At the very least, we need standards for evaluating degrees of difficulty of the surgery to be performed, and we need to follow-up for years after the surgery to see how well the surgeon's work holds up.

Now consider measuring health outcomes for a general practitioner responsible for caring for people for many years. How do we measure a successful outcome? Average lifespan of the patient? Quality of life of the patient? What does a successful outcome even look like?

The point isn't that we can't measure health outcomes. We can track degree of difficulty for surgeries, we can do follow-up with the patient. We have the technology to do that. We can compare a GP's patients against the general population, while controling for factors like the region of the country, the age of the patients, their income, their heritable disease risks, and so on. We have the technology to store and analyze all this data, we just don't do it aggressively enough.

Once we can track health outcomes, we can evaluate doctors based on health outcomes. And once we can do that, we can stop paying doctors based on treatments administered, which can be very expensive, and start paying doctors for better health outcomes. So long as doctors are paid for treatments, there is incentive to order every test that a patient's insurance will pay for. I don't see how this can not lead to over-consumption of health care for people with insurance, since they're not paying for the extra tests, and litigation-averse doctors will happily order every test covered by insurance.

We have a very similar problem in education, namely that we measure how much money goes into the system, but we have crude measurements of what comes out of the system. And it's hard to evaluate teachers for the same reasons that it's hard to evaluate doctors: some teachers have wealthy students with highly-involved parents, and some teachers don't. Sometimes the best teachers educate the worst students, where 50% of the students passing a basic proficiency exam is a big success.

As in medicine, these challenges don't mean that it's impossible to evaluate student learning in a more fine-grained way. It just means that it's going to take some more work to collect better data.

One intriguing idea is Value-Added Testing (VAT), where you measure a class at the beginning of the year to establish a baseline of what they know, then again at the end of the year to see what they've learned---in other words, what value has the teacher added to the students' knowledge? This controls for some of the problem of diverse student bodies.

Another exciting trend is performance-based pay, or merit pay, for the best teachers. Right now, faculty salaries are determined by seniority and not much else. So if you work for 10 years as an industrial chemist, then decide to teach high school chemistry, you make the same money as a 22-year old college graduate. In fact you probably make less because you don't have the teaching certificate that the 22-year old has, and you have to go back to school to earn that certificate. And while I'm not very familiar with the literature, I'm pretty sure that there's very little correlation between teaching certifications and performance in the classroom.

So you can't switch into teaching and make good money, and if you happen to be an excellent 22-year-old teacher, the only way to get a raise is to wait until you've been there long enough. So long as you don't get fired, it doesn't matter how well or how poorly you teach, you get the same raises everyone else does. It doesn't matter if the teacher next door is terrible and you're great; you get paid the same. Very few competitive industries pay everyone the same; why do we expect it to work in education? I don't think there are enough selfless individuals who will work long hours for little respect and no chance at a raise.

Are there problems with merit-based pay? Certainly. Basing pay entirely on standardized testing or value-added testing puts an awful lot of pressure on tests, and tests never tell the whole story in education. Plus it creates a huge incentive to teach to the test, to the exclusion of everything else. Merit-pay will have to include other metrics, like classroom observation and follow-up studies on how well the students do down the road. But it's hard to imagine a worse system given the amount of money we spend on education in the US.

The point of all of this: Statistics matter. In 1986, we thought that batting average and home runs were the most important statistics; most fans didn't understand the value of on-base percentage. Hell, most general managers didn't understand the critical importance of OBP. Baseball stat geeks have revolutionized our understanding of the game of baseball by looking at the data in great detail.

How the heck can we understand baseball so well, but we don't know nearly enough about health care or education?

In defense of partisan politics

2009-08-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

I highly recommend listening to EconTalk, hosted by Russ Roberts.

Bipartisanship has been the buzzword since Barack Obama's election, and bipartisanship is generally considered to be a good thing.

In a recent EconTalk, David Brady, a political scientist at Stanford's Hoover Institute, made a strong and provocative defense of partisans politics. (He also enunciated several clear reasons why bipartisanship isn't really feasible given the current dynamics of US elections, but I'm focusing on his intriguing defense of partisanship).

Brady claims, in essence, that major changes have always been partisan. The elimination of slavery was not a bipartisan (or bi-regional) compromise, it was a unilateral partisan decision enforced at gunpoint, and that was arguably the only way it was going to get done.

There are other, less dramatic examples as well. Social Security was pushed through a Democratic congress by a Democratic president. Republicans kept the US on the gold standard in the 1890s, and isolationists were swept from power after WWII and the debate in Washington has never seriously returned to that position.

The key is that all of these decisions were highly partisan and involved little compromise with the other side. And that's how things often have to change.

Another thing these decisions did, according to Brady, is shift the terms of the debate. Prior to the civil war, the debate was how to preserve the union and to preserve slavery; afterwards, slavery was off the table and the debate was about reconstruction. Prior to Social Security, the debate was welfare VS no welfare; now it's about how much welfare. It used to be isolationism VS engagement; now it's how much and what kind of engagement.

All of this reminds me of the classic problem of mediating disputes through compromise: The older brother asks for the whole cookie, the younger brother wants half, so the bipartisan compromise is to give the older brother 3/4 of the cookie. That's clearly not the correct compromise, unless you're the older brother.

I don't know the examples of great bipartisan legislation, so I don't know how properly to compare partisanship with bipartisanship. But listening to the podcast has me thinking more about why my gut instinct has always been to value bipartisanship, and whether I should be more careful about when I should do so.

The mean face of mental illness

2009-08-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

I'm the trustee for my disabled aunt, who hasn't worked for over 30 years due to severe anxiety. It's a gut-wrenching, challenging job for me because she's mentally ill, but not obviously so, and I don't always know how to treat her. She has a college degree, she's a good artist, and she can pass for a perfectly functional person at first glance. But if you look a little deeper, you see a messy picture. She lives in a filthy condo packed full of junk, she has no friends, and if she doesn't get what she wants, she lashes out as fiercely and as viciously as a cornered animal. I've heard her, as an grown woman, say to her own mother, "I hate you and I wish you had died instead of Dad."

The hard part is that I know that she's mentally ill, that she has anxiety, that telling her to just relax is like telling somehow with diabetes to just produce more insulin. She also has a host of other health problems, and is in the process of having her knees and hips replaced.

But at the same time, when she says the cruelest and most hurtful thing she can think of, is that simply mental illness? Does she get a free pass to hurt people whenever she wants? It's not like she doesn't know that she's trying to hurt someone, because if one hurtful tactic doesn't work, she's intelligent enough to try something else. She knows exactly what she's doing.

For example, when I was younger I used to get upset and defensive when she would tell me that my mother was no-good. Then I got a little older and started disregarding her opinions on the matter, so she tried other tactics. She would tell me that I was selfish. That my best friend confessed to her that he didn't like me. That my nieces don't like me. That my father is a no-good drunk. That I come from bad genes. That I was brought up without any class. That I'm spoiled. When all of that doesn't work, she'll instantly start crying because of all of her health issues, and beg me for sympathy. If that doesn't work, she'll go back to anger. She will never, under any circumstances, admit she was wrong, nor will she apologize, nor will she accept responsibility for any of her actions.

One night I tried to get her to admit that she was at least 1% responsible for the rift between her and her twin sister (my mother). She went through a litany of reasons why she was not responsible for any part of it. She was brought up to act that way. Her Dad was sick when she was young and that screwed her up. She hates my step-dad. We went in circles for over an hour, and in the end she was unwilling or unable to admit any responsibility for anything. She is beyond reproach for anything.

What sucks about the situation is that I have to treat her like a child, because she is unable to act like an adult, and that feels very condescending. It's not natural for me to treat adults like children, and even with children I try to teach them responsibility for their actions. She can't be taught anything, so I constantly have to remind myself that she's not an adult but that she's not exactly a child either. It's hard for me to take her verbal abuse when I have agreed to be her trustee for free, and paid over $2000 out of my own pocket to hire lawyers to handle her disability case. Like hell I'm selfish! Like hell I don't do anything for her! But it doesn't help me to explain that to her because she either doesn't care or isn't capable of understanding.

And what about her outbursts? Every single lie, outburst, nasty personal attack or bad decision she's made was not a choice but rather the result of mental illness? I don't know enough about the subject, but it's hard to accept that she has no ability to make choices. It's not natural for me to treat her, not quite as a person, but as a special type of person who is never responsible for their hurtful actions. That's not something I have much experience doing, and it's very draining.

What's especially hard is that her constant attempts to hurt me whenever she feels like lashing out have greatly diminished the amount of sympathy I can muster for her. She's bitter, alone, and nasty, and I can't even feel sympathy. All I feel is pity, and that doesn't feel very good.

How made-for-sci-fi channel movies are like Scooby Doo

2009-06-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

Made for sci-fi movies are great. Not "Lord of the Rings" great, or indy movie great, or even summertime blockbuster great, but genre-film great. Some decent dialogue, some comic relief, a few decent tricks with the genre-induced expectations, some stock characters and some depth, and occasionally decent direction. Sure, the plots usually unravel halfway through, but I enjoy these movies on a weekend. Especially when I'm folding laundry or doing other chores.

I just watched one about a Sasquatch that's killing people in the woods in the west somewhere (Colorado?). You've got bank robbers running into the woods, the local cops chasing them, Bishop the android coming after everyone because his wife was killed by a hit-and-run 12 years ago and with her last dying flip of the camcorder somehow recorded a sasquatch in the woods, and Cerina Vincent (who was in Cabin Fever, a reasonable horror movie from around 2003) as the hostage.

Before this there was the movie about the werewolf next door who thought that his cute teenage neighbor was his long-lost love. I didn't see the whole movie but what I saw had good comic relief, like the geeky teenage neighbor who also has a thing for the girl, the spunky little brother, and of course Kevin Sorbo, Hercules himself, as an actor who plays a big-game hunter.

I guess what fascinates me about sci-fi channel movies is that they're just like a typical Scooby Doo episode. Seriously, think about it... The beginning of each Scooby Doo episodes has a great setting and some kind of scary monster. The haunted swamp. The haunted amusement park. The haunted jungle with the Jaguaro. There's a new mystery to solve, with tons of potential!

Then we cut from the creepy setting that was just established to the Scooby gang, at the malt shop or in the Mystery Machine, and they somehow get stuck wherever the mystery is happening. At this moment, a Scooby Doo episode has peaked, and will play out the same way as every other episode. Some kind of trap with Shaggy and Scooby as the bait, the unmasking, the "meddling kids" line. If I could just watch the first half of Scooby Doo episodes, I'd be thrilled.

Sci-fi channel movies are quite similar. They establish a creepy setting, some stock characters, one or two heroes, some comic relief. If you're lucky there will be one or two spots where the genre conventions set you up for one thing, but something else happens instead.

Unfortunately, sci-fi channel movies usually play out in the same mostly uninteresting fashion as a typical Scooby Doo episode. This reminds me of how difficult it must be to end a movie, even when you've got a great set-up.

A different angle on the auto industry bailout

2009-06-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

I've heard all the regular theories about the failure of the American auto industry---that the unions have created an unsustainable set of benefits for their retirees ("the unions are to blame!"), the the companies haven't been agile enough to handle foreign competition ("poor corporate culture is to blame!"), that the companies are managed so poorly that there's no way for them to compete ("the management is to blame!").

I had also heard a vague theory that the car companies needed to get out of bad deals with their franchises, but I had no idea what the heck that meant. At least I just heard an explanation on an Econtalk podcast with Michael Munger (Econtalk is hosted by Russ Roberts of George Mason University and is currently my favorite podcast). Munger has been doing some reading about the auto industry and he floated some new information (new at least to me).

Here's the gyst of his analysis: It is illegal in 46 of the 48 continental states for the major auto companies to run their own dealerships. This is ostensibly so that the car companies don't use the threat of setting up their own dealerships to push around dealership franchises.

Car dealerships also cannot close any franchises without paying back the full franchise fee---only the franchisee can make the call to shutter a franchise. Now, on top of that, the car companies are required to produce and market a certain number of vehicles for each franchise. So if GM has a bunch of franchises selling an unprofitable line of cars, it's often cheaper to lose money manufacturing unprofitable cars than to pay back all of the franchisees to close them.

I'm not sure about the history of this legislation; it's very possible that state legislators passed these laws in a good-faith attempt to protect their local car dealerships from the big car companies. But given how the system works, it currently prevents the big three in the US from being nimble, agile, compete 21st century companies.

So let's review:

The big three automakers in the US cannot legally run their own dealerships.
The car companies cannot close franchises without paying back the full franchise fee to the franchisee.
The big three must produce and advertise a certain number of (possibly unprofitable) cars for each of their franchisees, or else they need to close the franchise by paying back the franchise fee.

So if this analysis is indeed accurate, far from the big bad automaker pushing around the poor defenseless dealership franchises, it looks like the opposite is true, at least in this regard. The only way to get out of these franchise deals, then, is through bankruptcy.

One other angle here is that car dealerships are extremely profitable, especially in rural areas, and are big contributors to political campaigns, especially in the house of representatives. This may explain why congress has had a strong appetite over the decades to bail out the car companies on a semi-regular basis.

After hearing the podcast, I was thinking a little bit about car dealerships, and I remembered hearing something about the relationship between TV ad revenue and car dealerships. If you notice, often the last commercial before the show starts back up is a spot for the local car dealer, which usually involves the owners of the dealership, poor acting and madcap antics ("You simply can't beat our prices! Why am I punching this monkey with a foam hammer? His name is Prices and only I can beat him!").

So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that car dealership franchises are extremely profitable, politically strong, and more than happy to throw the unions and the car companies under the bus to protect the deal they have set up.

Moving sucks, or why Jedi really developed the force

2009-06-26T10:37:00.001-07:00

I just helped two of my closest friends pack up for the move from the Albany area to Oregon yesterday, so I have moving on the brain. So some thoughts on moving, in no particular order.

First, the dirty secret of the Jedi order is that the force was an evolutionary adaptation to having to move. Seriously, given a modest 2% economic growth rate per year for all the years until interstellar travel becomes possible, can you imagine how much stuff we'd have? Look at how much crap Americans in 2009 have compared with Americans in 1909! A hundred years ago, what did the typical American own? The bible, farming equipment, uncomfortable wool undergarments, and a very short life expectancy. Rich people also owned a piano. Kids played with dirt and rocks, and if they were lucky they could get a sticks. There was no need to rent storage facilities for all the crap that you couldn't jam into your house, because there just wasn't enough material wealth for people to own very much. Think about it: would you rather be the richest person in 1900 or make the median income in 2009? I'd rather make the median income today because even if I can't buy everything the richest person can today, I can still go to a useful doctor and buy an iPod and I didn't die in childbirth.

(So another quick aside about sparseness in home-decorating: One of my favorite details of Brokeback Mountain was that when Heath Ledger's character visits his Jake Gyllenhall's parents farmhouse, it's nearly completely empty, and everything is dusty and worn-down, because that's how a lot of ageing farmers live. Another quick aside on the topic of re-using things is that the Greenland Norse couldn't produce their own iron, so they re-used metal tools until there was just nothing left. Archaeologists have found knives with a handle bigger than the blade in Greenland.)

Anyway, so in 1909 America there were no beanie babies collecting dust in attics or baseball card collections languishing in basements. People didn't own that much stuff because the economy couldn't produce that much stuff. 100 years later Americans have quite a lot of stuff, most of the stuff in the world according to Affluenza. Now imagine these trends continuing unabated for centuries or millenia, up until humanity can colonize distant galaxies. Can you imagine how much material wealth we'd have by then? And by material wealth, I of course mean stuff. You think you have a lot of collectible mugs now? Imagine in 1000 years when you have around 398 million times as much disposable income as you do now! This is why I've never understood why Duncan MacLeod wasn't absurdly wealthy. He should have just invested a little money in the Royal Bank of Scotland and then waited 400 years. Silly immortals...

I think it makes sense that only Jedi, with the power to move objects with their mind, would be able to keep up with the constant need to move into bigger and bigger houses or palaces or spaceships. Imagine the sophisticated mating calculus that would go on... "Let's see, this girl is beautiful and smart and loving, but this other girl can move objects with her mind and would allow me to accumulate limitless amounts of junk and move it into bigger houses without throwing out my cybernetic back again... Jedi-girl, here I come!" Not to mention some of the less-than-PG sexual implications of Jedi sex.

Another incredibly dorky thought I've had about far-fetched sci-fi paraphanelia is that if transporter technology a la Star Trek ever arrives, it will be heavily used for immigration. You think it's hard to keep Mexicans from crossing the border now, wait until they can beam themselves into the country!

One of my favorite aspects of science fiction is that sci-fi writers take something to its logical conclusion. I especially like the notion that sci-fi writers don't predict future technologies, they predict the human implications of future technologies. So they don't take buggies and engines and imagine cars, they look at cars and imagine road trips and traffic jams (I read this from Robert Sawyer, though I don't know if he said it originally).

So I figure that there's a lot of potential for sci-fi writers to expand on sci-fi concepts themselves, like Jedi and transporters. Much of this has probably showed up in fan fiction or in other blogs that I haven't read yet.

So the take-home message of this posting is that moving sucks, but it was great to see my friends before they head to the west coast and I don't see them as much anymore. And we had a lot of laughs, for example Chadd's response to Debbie's frantic worry about us packing up the broom before she had a chance to sweep: "Honey, we have 79 boxes of stuff to put into the moving truck. Packing up the broom is the last thing on my mind. And everything needs to go outside at some point anyway. It's not like we're going to get so confused about what to move that we start moving things from the truck back into the apartment." I guess you had to be there, because at 87 degrees and 65% humidity in suburban Albany, that was a hilarious line!

In defense of selfishness

2009-06-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

So on my drive home from Ithaca, I was listening to a Bill Simmons podcast with Dan LeBatard as a guest. I've been a huge fan of Simmons since his days as the Boston Sports Guy, and while I only know LeBatard from some of his work guest hosting PTI, I really like what I've heard from him so far.

What got me thinking about selfishness was their discussion of how the sports media seems to create the same nice storylines to describe the winning team. For example, Simmons points out in a great column about Kobe the belief that in 2009 suddenly Kobe "gets it" (where "it" has something to do with teamwork, passing, or camaraderie), when in fact his performance in the finals was statistically the same in 2009 as it was in 2008. What primarily changed is that his teammates shot 40% from behind the three point line in 2009 and thus his team won. Kobe didn't change, or at least his numbers didn't change, but the storyline has changed, all because of the scoreboard.

LeBatard points out that the year Allen Iverson's 76ers made it to the finals, casual fans were convinced by pundits that Iverson had learned how to be a better teammate, when in reality his team outlasted a weak eastern conference to make the finals. Iverson hadn't changed, his team just won, and that changed his storyline.

This got me thinking about The Wages of Wins, three economists take on sports. They concluded that Kevin Garnett has been the league MVP for many of his years in the league, in that he has had the same extremely high statistical performance for many season. Until he got traded to Boston, he was labeled as a guy who can't get it done in the playoffs, when statistically, he played with well below average teammates. The year his Timberwolves team made the conference finals, Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell played extremely well, and Garnett's numbers were at essentially the same excellent level they had been every other season.

I'm also reminded of a classic conundrum in sports about how much quality, high-character role-players matter. If your team wins, it's easy to point to the "good chemistry" provided by your basketball team's 10th man who plays hard in practice, or by your baseball team's prankster utility infielder. But if your team loses, suddenly the lack of size on your bench or the .225 average from your backups matters a lot more. Do we create storylines about chemistry because it gives us something to talk about? For that matter, how much does chemistry really matter? The Mets won the world series in 1986, and the Yankees win with Reggie Jackson. Those teams had no chemistry. The Spurs in the 2000s had great chemistry, but they also had great players. I don't know if chemistry matters, but I suspect it matters a lot less than sportswriters say that it does. Good chemistry comes from the scoreboard. Chemistry is revisionist.

So what does this have to do with selfishness? Well, LeBatard brought up another good point: whatever job you work at, are you happy if you are underpaid and underappreciated but the company does well? I teach at Colgate; how likely am I to take less money so that the school can hire extra personnel and do better? I'll tell you this: If Swarthmore offers me a 25% pay raise to do the same job, I promise I will shed at least one tear as the emerald green campus disappears in my rearview mirror, but I'm moving back to Philly. Well, I'd have to see if the move made sense for me and for my family, and maybe I'd conclude the pulling the (hypothetical future) kids out of school and having my (future) wife switch jobs isn't worth the extra money. Fine. But throw in enough extra money, and I wouldn't even slow the J-Train down on my way south. It would still be a calculation of what's best for me.

How exactly is it that athletes shouldn't take these factors into account? How on earth was the city of Boston so mad when Johnny Damon took more money to play for the Yankees? They offerd to pay him a lot more money, both teams were good, and in NY he can do the talk show circuit and host SNL. How can fans criticize him for making a perfectly rational decision? The same fans that have no problem giving running backs their walking papers with their 30th birthday cake?

Anyway, how does this all tie back into selfishness? Well, fans don't want athletes to be selfish about money or personal success. We want our athletes to respect winning and not be greedy and play the game the right way. But sports fans secretly love and respect selfishness. Even if the don't know it.

Why? Well, what makes great athletes great? Selfishness. Athletes focus on only one thing in their life, usually to the exclusion of everything else. If they don't do this, we complain that they lack the passion for the game. They we engage in some kind of psycho-babble, then go back to surfing the web at work.

For many great athletes, their whole life is their career. Do you think Tiger woods gets up at 3am to change his children's diapers? Do you think Brett Favre does his own laundry? Do you think LeBron James picks up his suits at the dry cleaners and then heads to the bank and the post-office on the way home from practice? I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story that when Eisenhower first got out of office, he picked up a phone and told the dial-tone "Granite-two-four" because he hadn't made a phone call since 1951. People doing high-pressure, highly-sought after jobs don't have time for minute details.

And as fans, we love this about our athletes. Sure, in our own lives, we may not like obsessive, narrow-minded, hyper-competitive people who only think or talk about work... But we love the results when it comes to athletes. And most casual sports fans don't really care if athletes are good people or even if they are interesting people. We want them to sacrifice everything else in their lives for our enjoyment, just like we want from our artists and actors and entertainers.

I read a really interesting article from The Economist about autism that had one image I can't get out of my head: Autistic children will watch things like spinning coins or dripping water for hours on end, and where I would get bored quicker than a freshman who thinks that they're going to learn how to use excel in computer science 101, autists instead become experts on dripping water or spinning coins or counting toothpicks, and learn to spot subtle differences. They become connoisseurs of these seemingly identical events.

Now, I'm not claiming that athletes are autistic, but they certainly devote quite a lot of effort getting really good at one thing, typically to the exclusion of nearly everything else. With athletes we call this passion; with our neighbors we call this OCD and we try to run into the house before they can engage us in coversation.

Seriously, how well-balanced is Tom Brady really? Don't get me wrong, I admit without a trace of shame that I have a man-crush on Brady, and I've even been lobbying my girlfriend to put him on her "list" (from Friends). But I'm afraid that if I met him it would crush my illusions, because I'll bet he's pretty boring. Now, his profession is fascinating, and I'd gush like the middle-school boy who gets to help the hot substitute teacher wash the chalkboard after math class if Brady watched some game film with me... But come on, if he worked those kind of obsessive, meticulous hours at almost any other job, there's no way he'd be the coolest dude in the room. What if Tom Brady were a customer service rep, or an actuary, or a paralegal, and all he talked about was work? His friends would be all, "Tom, goddamit, nobody wants to hear about new innovations for modeling life expectancy!" But because his job is awesome and we want the Patriots to win another superbowl and put those Steelers fans back in their place, we are willing to excuse what could be called selfish, obsessive behavior.

(Plus if I met Brady, all the cultural reference points I've got that help me be the life of the nerd party would be useless---wow, you're in magazines and married to a supermodel and have three superbowl rings? Yeah, I just scored a silver medal on the lighthouse level of Left 4 Dead, so you know, I know a think or two about excellence as well. And there's no way that he can code. If Brady can hack Java, I'll cheer for the Cowboys. And don't tell me he took a Basic course in high school or something---I played football in high school but that doesn't make me a jock.)

The point is that sports fans like excellence, which comes from selfish, hyper-specialized athletes, but we want to read certain stories about chemistry, and players "getting it", and playing the game the right way, so sportswriters feed us stories about the winning team that probably aren't true in the least.

I'd like to read a book about the place of selfishness in sports. I'll bet a lot of top athletes are pretty obsessive about their craft, and I'd like to read more about this aspect of sports. I'm sure there are some biographies I need to look up.

In a related note, a lot of top scientists are incredibly narrowly-focused people as well, but that's a blog post for a different time.

The Proposal: Nerds in Love

2009-05-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'm engaged! I proposed to my girlfriend tonight. Let me lay out the story:

It's Thursday, May 28, 2009, my Mom and step-dad's 16th wedding anniversary (1993 was 16 years ago? Wow!). I head into work with Helen tonight to keep her company because she has instrument time around midnight. She's a chemistry post-doc, which means that she's tethered to her lab like I am to my laptop, only my laptop is a helluva lot more portable.

My Mom sent me my grandmother's engagement and wedding rings, and I had been trying to think of a nice romantic proposal. One idea I scrapped involved slipping the ring into the DVD box set of the Lord of the Rings, which I'm going to buy for Helen at some point anyway (you know, it's the lord of the rings so it would be clever!). Never mind that I would need to get the box shrink-wrapped after opening it (which my friend Brian figured out is totally doable if you can get your hands onto a shrink-wrap machine), but it didn't seem romantic enough.

Another plan I scuppered was to acquire a girl teddy bear for Ranger Bear (Ranger Bear is my teddy bear that I've had since I can remember and who has amassed quite a collection of pictures of himself in various exotic locales around the world), and present the girl teddy to Helen with a story about how Ranger Bear couldn't live his whole life alone, and neither could I, at which point she would notice that the girl teddy was holding a ring. Honestly, the main reason I scrapped this idea was that I'm afraid of commitment. Not to Helen, of course, because I can't imagine living without her at this point... I was afraid of the commitment for Ranger Bear! It's not like you can just pop into Walmart and find the perfect soulmate for your childhood teddy bear, and so far as I can tell there's no e-harmony for teddy bears. So that plan was out.

I finally decided to slip the ring into the rubber gloves to her glovebox and then have her put her hands in there to find it. So after she was done with whatever it is she was doing, I headed into the lab and stuck the ring into the glove. Then when she came back in I asked her if she could show me how to use the glovebox again. Puzzled, she put her hands in there and... Nothing. I shoved the ring too far into the finger of the glovebox. Damn. So to be smooth, I said something like "This isn't working... Can you do it again?" The elusive ring was still too far for her dainty little fingers to find... So finally I resorted to "Um, just, like, feel around in there..."

Then she found it, and now we're engaged! Yay us! She thought it was romantic and sweet, and I've scored a lot of points with the chemists that I know for originality and nerdiness. And it was a surprise because she didn't know it was coming. I mean, she knew something was coming because we've been talking about a July 2010 wedding for a while now, but the actual proposal was a total surprise. Go me!

Our relationship is based entirely on the desire to watch DVDs and have babies, which means that it's a very strong relationship. Seriously, we can watch DVDs together until we're, like, 100 years old, and having babies will be awesome because I can't think of anything more challenging for us to take on at this point in our lives. We've both done graduate school, figured out we're not going to be famous scientists, and we need something important to sink our energies into. Plus, what better way for me to watch kids' movies and read kids' books in a socially acceptable fashion?

Anyway, so Helen, you said yes and I couldn't be happier!

The Phantom Menace, 10 years later

2009-05-12T20:22:00.000-07:00

I saw the new Star Trek movie the weekend it opened, and the experience reminded me that it was about 10 years ago that I saw The Phantom Menace. Needless to say, Phantom Menace was terrible, and I've spent the last 10 years vehemently denying that the first three prequels happened. (Seriously, they never happened. George Lucas considered doing another couple of Star Wars movies, but then he decided not to. They never happened. Am I right about this? Who's with me?)

This topic has been heavily mined over the last 10 years, so I won't repeat some of the more obvious complaints about Jar-Jar and metachlorians and the unnecessary nature of the entire first movie.

One small quibble... I think Lucas based the first movie around the "Pod Race" scene because he already had a deal in place to produce the video game. Which means that this movie should really be thrown onto the scrap head of terrible movies based on video games.

Now on to the more subtantial things that were wrong with Phantom Menace... What upsets me the most is that this movie had at least some potential, if some things were done a little differently. I feel the same way about Titanic, another movie that I hated, not because it was a bad movie (though it most certainly was), but because it had potential that was utterly wasted. Suppose Titanic, given its titanic production values, elaborate sets and costumes and makeup, and big-name cast, were done as a period piece where characters obeyed the norms of the 1910s. Suppose the evil fiancee wasn't a totally worthless and evil human being, but was a more sympathetic character who was a bastard because he was being the best man that he knew how to be. Suppose Leo DiCaprio's character was a tough, gritty lower class character, but had some darkness and violence to him, more like Stanley from "A Streetcar Named Desire" than a romanticized version of a 1990s teenager? And then maybe you could have a couple of other interesting plotlines related to the upcoming end of the long 19th century a couple of years later? That would have been a more interesting and challenging film to watch, at least for me.

So what potential does Phantom Menace, and by extension the other two prequels, manage to squander?

Well, for one, Darth Maul is a wasted opportunity. He's following in the footsteps of Darth Vader, one of the greatest screen villains of all-time. Vader is a huge, imposing, shiny gun-metal black bad-ass who kills his own crew with his mind and destroys entire planets on a whim. He was utterly terrifying to little kids of the early 1980s such as myself. Oh, as an aside, this reminds me of the Darth Vader nightlight someone gave me for my birthday---it was a ceramic bust of Vader painted glossy black with silver-and-red colored foil for his eyes and chest plate that would glow from the bulb inside it. It scared the hell out of me and gave me far more nightmares than I would have had without it, but damn, it was a beautiful gift and I wish I still had it!

Anyway, the point is that Vader is on par with Jason Vorhees and Count Orlock for scary, imposing, enigmatic villains of the silver screen, and following (preceding?) him is no easy task.

But, following up Vader we have Darth Maul. Maul is nimble and lithe and cloaked in black and red where Vader was big and synthetic and covered in black. Vader was faceless and masked, Maul was just ugly, with funny little horns and bad teeth. Maul seemed like a really good successor villain, but what exactly does he do in the movie? Does he destroy a planet? Does he choke a prisoner? Does he freeze anyone in carbonite? Nope. He shows up on Tatooine and sends out some annoying little probe-droids, then has a quick sword-fight. Would Vader have sent out roombas to do his dirty work? Hell no! Vader would have been out there torturing Jawas, ripping the arms off of droids, choking Tuskan Raiders with his mind, and wreaking various and sundry forms of havoc to find those renegade Jedi. No way Vader would have sub-contracted that type of work to a couple of roombas.

And so Darth Maul is a wasted opportunity to create a truly scary villain for a new generation. He was much scarier than Count Dookie and the emperor himself. I would have liked to see Anakin slay Maul to become the new big-bad.

The next wasted opportunity in the movie... At the end of Phantom Menace, Anakin the Yippie-Kid ends up destroying the single-point of failure for the bad guys, and they play it off like a big cosmic accident. The whole scene is mostly comic relief.

These movies are tragedy! Anakin should be Macbeth for the sci-fi generation. Imagine this alternate version: Anakin knows exactly what he's doing when he takes the ship into space to try to take out the droid mothership and save many lives, and he has some kind of discussion with R2D2 to this effect. Then when he does save all those lives, Obi-Wan and Yoda realize that he must be the chosen one, that they have to train him, and they inadvertently shower way too much glory on him way too soon. He now knows that he's the chosen one, that he's destined for greatness. And we see that the seeds of Anakin's self-destruction are inadvertently sown by his closest friends, with the best of intentions. That would be an awesome plotline! How did Lucas not see this? The plot elements are right there, he just needed to change some of the dialog a little. The scene practically writes itself!

The final bit of blown potential has to do with Anakin and Padme's relationship. The one point in the entire movie series that approaches drama is where Anakin slaughters all the Tuskan Raiders. His mother is dead, he's young, he's under pressure, he's powerful, and he snaps!
Upon returning, hurt and scared and angry, to Padme, he says something like, "I slaughtered them all, and not just the men, the women and the children, too!" At this moment, with this angry and scared boy becoming a powerful, wounded man before her eyes, I thought Padme would fall in love with him to heal him. She would be his caretaker, her love would assuage his pain, she and she alone in the universe would be able to tame the torrents of rage inside of him. At least that's what I thought would happen.

Of course nothing of the sort happens. Padme delivers terribly forgettable dialogue, there is no discernible reason for them to fall in love other than the fact that it's in the script, and the series never again approaches any real sense of drama.

But what if the movies had been a little darker? What if Anakin's arc were truly tragic? It's amazing to me how close, how tantalizingly close, some of the scenes of the movies came to actually being tragic, only to miss (avoid?) the opportunity completely...

Nothing better epitomizes the wasted opportunity of these movies than the juxtaposition of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock with "Everybody Loves Raymond" from this article from cracked.com. The point is that the same generation loved both of these things, at very different points of their lives. Can we expect the obscure, angst-ridden artist who made Star Wars in 1977 make the same kind of edgy, ground-breaking art as a middle-aged kazillionaire in 1999? Evidently not. Look, there's nothing wrong with being happy and well-adjusted. It's just that you lose a bit of edge. Unless you're Joss Whedon, but that's a different story for another time.

And so we got three terrible films that made anyone who's taken a decent literature course scream in frustration at the obvious wasted opportunities and blown potential. Blech.

At least the newest Star Trek movie was pretty good! Though I can't watch Star Trek the same way anymore now that I've seen Firefly show what character-driven sci-fi is supposed to look like, but again, a different story for a different time...

Just How Stupid Are We?

2008-10-21T18:20:00.001-07:00

Last fall I finished reading Just How Stupid Are We, a book about the American electorate by Rick Shenkman. The book claims that the American electorate is woefully uninformed on a variety of national and international issues and therefore can't be expected to make good decisions at the polls.

I had two major qualms with the book.

First, the book chooses a very ideological topic to focus on---the decision to invade Iraq. One of the central claims was that many Americans claimed that the war in Iraq was one of their top 2 issues when voting in the 2004 presidential election, but that many Americans were uninformed about Iraq. Specifically, many Americans believed there was an Iraq/9-11 connection, and that Iraq had WMDs (both of which have been shown to be false). There were some widely-discussed surveys about media bias showing that viewers of Fox News tended to believe in an Iraq/9-11 connection and in the WMDs at a higher proportion than the rest of the country. So there's certainly evidence that many Americans were uninformed.

This sort of presupposes that WMDs and 9/11 were the only reasons to invade Iraq. There were many who didn't want to invade Iraq even if they did have WMDs, and there were many others who wanted to invade anyway, even if they didn't have WMDs. It's also a complicated issue because the intelligence community seems to have failed as well, whether by failing to collecting the right information or by failing to steer clear or political pressure. I'm not an expert on the issue, but I think it's a little more complicated.

Then there are the claims that the administration deliberately tried to create a connection between Iraq and 9-11, even if only in people's minds by repeatedly putting them in the same sentence. This would certainly lead to misinformed voters, which is a little different than stupid voters. There's a difference between being misled and being stupid.

At any rate, while I don't necessarily disagree that many Americans are uninformed or under-informed, I wouldn't hold up the Iraq war as a great exemplar. The Iraq invasion might better illustrate how the American press is inherently pro-war due to the inevitable ratings boost, or that the modern executive branch is quite difficult to check by legislative branch, or maybe that enough Americans generally supported the war regardless of WMDs and 9-11. The author seems to assume that voting for Bush in 2004 was uninformed while voting another way was informed. You're crushing a lot of information down into a binary decision and the binary outcomes are going to be very heavily overloaded with meanings and contexts. I don't think Iraq explains it adequately.

My second concern with the book is that, well, duh, elections are always won and lost by uninformed voters anyway. Uninformed voters are probably easier to sway because they are uninformed and therefore can latch onto a variety of reasons to vote a certain way. Think about it... If you're running a campaign, the vote of an 18-year old high school dropout who only reads the sports page is worth the same as the vote of a 33-year old college professor who tries to stay informed on a variety of issues. If you can get the uninformed vote cheaply, either with slogans or rhetoric or empty promises or whatever, doesn't swaying uninformed voters have to be a plank in the winning strategy? You have limited funds to run the campaign and you need to maximize votes-per-dollar to win. How could maximizing your haul of uninformed voters not be a good idea?

To be fair, the book is careful to point out that voters both identified Iraq as a major issue in the 2004 election and showed that they were uninformed about Iraq. So he's making the point that many voters voted on the basis of bad information. Would they have voted differently if they had good information, or would have they have voted the same way for different reasons? Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that many voters want contradictions, like higher spending and lower taxes. This book doesn't shed enough new light on these inherent quandries in democracy.

I imagine that sometimes one candidate wins the informed vote, but loses the uninformed vote and therefore loses the election. But I don't know how to fix this. Well, I mean, clearly if you have a highly educated and well-informed population, then they can sort through all the information themselves. But that requires a lifelong commitment to information literacy on the part of the entire citizenry. It's a good long-term goal for society, but in the short-term it's always a better election strategy to find a way to reach as many uninformed voters as possible.

I don't see how elections can really be determined any other way until we end up with an information-literate citizenry. And even then, there may be points of disagreement that no amount of information can change.

In the meantime, I haven't read The Myth of the Rational Voter, though I plan to listen to an interview with Bryan Caplan (the author) on Russ Roberts' excellent EconTalk series. From what I've heard, this book covers a lot of the ways in which voters are rational and irrational. I will blog about it once I've listened to the interview.

Some of my Favorite Things

2008-09-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

Let's see... Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens... What are some of my other favorite things? Good news sources! Specifically, that wonderful British paper, The Economist. I enjoy a non-American perspective on the world that isn't necessarily anti-America, and I like their droll use of humor. For example, a recent article about Russia sending warships to Venezuela to perform joint exercises notes that:

The public response from Washington has been a barely-stifled yawn. The State Department noted that if the Russians were indeed coming, then “they found a few ships that can make it that far.”

I love that they found a way to make me laugh at my fear that we're heading towards a new cold war!

Useful sources of information

2008-09-06T15:04:00.000-07:00

I'm becoming a political junkie of sorts, and I've always been a knowledge junkie. But also being a nerd, I want good analysis from the best sources. My rule of thumb: If your analysis of the situation fits on a bumper sticker, you're probably an idiot.

Things I don't like:

the so-called "echo chamber" of cable news programs
liberal blogs laced with "let's impeach Bush" rhetoric
conservative blogs full of "if you criticize Bush you're a terrorist" rhetoric
local news (I'm not that interested in sensationalized coverage of hideous crime)
right-wing talk radio (Rush Limbaugh)
left-wing talk radio (Air America)

I don't really have a problem with opinions, I just don't like "spin", and I don't really like uninformed opinions on issues I'd like to know more about. Some things that I generally like:

The Economist --- A view of the US from a non-American, but not necessarily anti-American, perspective. Plus, I read all the articles with my best "BBC World Report" accent inside my head. Another things I like about The Economist is that they use numbers and relevant statistics to back up things they say. I like statistics, it comes from my love of baseball in my childhood.
Friday Morning News Roundup on the Diane Rehm Show --- Journalists talking about issues in the news. The journalists aren't necessarily experts on every subject, but they are extremely well-informed on how events are being covered, and can do a good job of explaining the sub-texts behind various issues in the news, such as the implications of a move made by a political campaign or politician, or the ramifications of a diplomatic visit or diplomatic statement. The guests on the show are also adept at anchoring issues in the news in their relevant historical context. The show is split into one hour for domestic news, and one hour for international news. The international hour is usually stronger, especially during campaign season.
UChannel --- Recorded lectures and panel discussions by leading scholars. Many universities participate, though UChannel was started by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and their influence seems to have gained the project a lot of credibility. From UChannel's website:

"The UChannel presents ideas in a way commercial news or public affairs programming cannot. Because it is neither constrained by time nor dependent upon commercial feedback, the UChannel's video content can be broad and flexible enough to cover the full gamut of academic investigation."

I particularly like that, while certainly opinionated, the lectures aren't sound-bytes and are generally designed to clarify an issue, not deceive or confuse as many of the pundits on cable news.

CSpan Booknotes --- No longer running, but their archives are online. I used to listen to this program in grad school on Saturday or Sunday nights while driving from my Dad's outside of Baltimore back to the University of Maryland near DC.
The Teaching Company --- Check out any of their lectures. I'm not exaggerating, this company has changed my life. So long as I have my iPod, there is almost no wasted time in my life anymore. Driving, walking, doing dishes, shoveling snow, cleaning the bathtub---they are all opportunities for learning.

left/right outer join in Hibernate

2008-08-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

Hibernate is great, but while HQL automates a lot of SQL, sometimes you run into things you can do in SQL that are hard in HQL...

For example, I wanted to do a left outer join between two tables, but I don't understand how to set one-to-one or one-to-many relationships in the XML config files for Hibernate, and as of August 2008, I believe that there's no syntax for simply doing an outer join without editing config files.

Suppose I've got two tables, A and B, both of which are properly mapped in Hibernate, and I want to do an outer join on A.x and B.y. I'd write this:

List list=
session.createSQLQuery(
" select {a.*}, {b.*} " +
" from A as a " +
" left outer join B as b " +
" on (a.x = b.y) " +
" where a.x = b.y "
).addEntity("a", A.class).
addEntity("b", B.class).list();

Note that if there is no corresponding entry in B for an entry in A, Hibernate correctly gives you back null (i.e. it doesn't give you an instance of class B with all the fields set to null or default, you legitimately get back null in row[1] of that entry in list).

The {a.*} syntax is a placeholder and the addEntity() calls fill in the fields based on the mappings in Hibernate. This syntax is kind of awesome because I can write SQL queries but take advantage of a lot of the automation and simplification that Hibernate provides. And I can do this without actually understanding a lot of the more complex aspects of Hibernate's config files (not great in the long-run, of course, but great today!)

The Gospel of Judas

2008-08-20T14:29:00.000-07:00

Until age 10, I lived in Quincy, an Irish-Catholic neighborhood south of Boston. My family wasn't particularly religious, but still I dutifully went to Sunday school, completed my first communion, and sporadically attended church. My nominally Catholic upbringing (inadvertently, I'm sure) taught me that the bible was akin to a magical book---ancient, thick, and thoroughly inaccessible, at least to mortals like myself. My Dad, who had a similar Catholic upbringing, jokes that remembers the bible being spoken about with such awe and reverence that he feared to open it lest ghosts fling themselves from the pages.

Imagine my surprise my sophomore year of college when I realized that I could take Steve Finley's "The Bible as Literature" course, where we would read the bible as a literary text. Since then, and especially since I have very little patience with people who cite chapter and verse to justify their (usually intolerant) anti-science or social conservative agendas, I've become fascinated with the bible, especially the New Testament, and its intriguing history.

Back in August, on my way to and from Baltimore to visit my Dad, I listened to an audiobook version of Bart Ehrman's "The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot", as read by Dennis Boutsikaris and Lew Grenville.

First some backstory: The Gospel of Judas was discovered in 1978 in Egypt, but did not find its way to scholars until around 2001. In the interim, the document spent time in a safety deposit box in Jersey and was put into a freezer to "protect" the text (of course this damaged the text further). The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic text that tells the story of Judas as Jesus's closest disciple, and the only one who truly understood Jesus. In this document, Judas does Jesus a great service by betraying him to the authorities. It's such a radical re-telling of the story that it almost reminds me of Gregory MacGuire's alternate takes on well-known stories such as "Wicked".

I learned a number of fascinating things from the book:

The Gnostics were (arguably) Christians who believed that there were many more Gods and divine beings than merely the God of the Old Testament. In fact they believed that the God of the Old Testament is not the most powerful being, but rather a blood-thirsty, reckless being, and also a fool. For the Gnostics, this secret knowledge (Gnostic comes from the Greek work for knowledge), along with a divine spark (which some humans ave and some do not), allows us to transcend this material world of suffering. There's quite a lot more to it than that, but the main take-home point for me is that the Gnostics believed the God of the old-testament to be a blood-thirsty fool.
One way to look at the historical Jesus is that he was a first-century Jewish Apocalyptic prophet. What is an apocalyptic prophet? The apocalypticists believed they were living in dark times, with some dramatic event on the horizon coming to shake things up. Apocalypticism was in part a response to the observation that just, righteous, upstanding Jews suffered greatly, often in proportion to their righteousness. This contradicted the doctrine of the supremacy of the God of the Old Testament, who was not holding up his end of the bargain to protect his chosen people, and caused considerable re-interpretation and re-figuring of the Jewish tradition that eventually placed all of the suffering of the chosen people into a context: The end was near, and people would be judged. There is textual support for this view in Mark, the earliest gospel, especially Mark 9:1 where Jesus says: "Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power". There are some people there right now who "will not taste death" implies the to be very, very near. There is other textual evidence supporting this view as well, but that verse stuck out most in my mind. There were also other first-century apocalyptic prophets, including John the Baptist, Thudas, as and someone referred to in Acts only as The Egyptian.
Ehrman sketches out a fascinating hypothetical scenario about what, exactly, Judas betrays to the authorities, since it's unlikely that the location of Jesus was that difficult to figure out. It goes something like this:

Mark notes that Jesus was tried for proclaiming himself to be the king of the Jews, though Jesus never publicly proclaims anything like this in Mark.
Considering that he raised a ruckus at the temple and that passover always had the potential for riots, it's possible that the established Jewish leaders wanted to get this charismatic upstart out of the way before riots or violence did break out, both to protect their own authority in the Jewish community and to keep the Roman authorities from swooping in to quash a perceived rebellion. But first they needed some plausible excuse to have Jesus arrested...
The Romans always dealt harshly with anyone proclaiming themselves to be a "king" of any kind, but Jesus never says so publicly. Thus what Judas may have betrayed to the authorities was Jesus's private proclamation that he would be the king of the Jews. The fact that Jesus meant that this would happen in a strictly metaphorical sense after some kind of divine apocalypse was too fine of a distinction for anyone to bother parsing.
If this scenario were true, it's possible that Judas meant to protect Jesus from harm during this tumultuous passover season. He figured they'd arrest him, quickly realize that he had no political aspirations, hold him until after things had calmed down, and then they could all get back to preaching in Galilee.
It's also possible that Judas betrayed Jesus because he, like the other uneducated and illiterate disciples, had been promised leadership over one of the tribes of Israel in the coming kingdom. When would his happen? Soon. When? Soon. How about now? Not now, soon. Maybe he just got sick of all of this apocalyptic talk and betrayed Jesus out of frustration that the coming apocalypse... simply never came.

You must treat each gospel as a separate work of art. Each Gospel has a very particular message; these are works of literature, each with its own agenda. They are not histories. For example, in Mark, none of the apostles understand who Jesus really is, they all abandon him in his time of greatest need, Jesus asks three times that he not have to endure crucifixion, speaks not a word during his crucifixion, and his last words on the cross are "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?". The women who find him after his resurrection are so terrified that they run out of the cave screaming, telling no one what they have seen. This is radically different from Luke, writing years later, who portrays Jesus as all-knowing, confident and in command of each situation, who carries on a series of conversations during his crucifixion, and who dies at peace, knowing that he will be resurrected. It doesn't make sense to conflate these two narratives into one big meta-narrative.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Bart Ehrman's book about the Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot for anyone interested in early Christianity, Gnosticism, or some brief insights into the historical Jesus. Ehrman has another book called "The Historical Jesus" which I will probably read next. I've already read "Misquoting Jesus", another Ehrman project that looks into the history of the texts that have come to be called the New Testament. I'll write about that sometime later.

There is no knowledge that is not power...

2008-08-12T22:30:00.000-07:00

I'm an information junkie. I listen to lectures from The Teaching Company on my iPod on my weekly pilgrimage to Ithaca, I rarely miss a Friday News Roundup, and upon first moving to the splendid isolation of Hamilton, NY, tried for over a month to replace regular television with old episodes of CSpan Booknotes and the Sopranos on DVD. (The latter experiment, however noble, lasted from late August until a mid-October breakup, combined with the lack of anyplace within 25 miles where I could watch NFL games, finally drove me to Time Warner Cable.)

I should note that I also like to read, but I don't have all that much time these days, and listening to books or lectures on my iPod lets me combine educating myself with exercise, which is the ticket I hope to ride to a lean body and a fat brain. Check with me at age 40 and see if I'm still under 200 lbs...

Recently I've realized that apparently I come from a long line of information junkies.
My Nana was a total information junkie when I was little, only I didn't recognize it as such until recently. I have fond memories of riding around in the plush purple leather backseat of her Chrysler, slightly sick to my stomach from either the scent of Parliament cigarettes or her erratic use of the gas pedal, bombarded with the sounds of her favorite call-in talk show. I recall the jingle for re-financing services (USA Loans, 848 3006, 848 3006, home-owners, when you need a loooooooan!) more vividly than all of the programs... Well, all of the programs except the one about Roseanne Barr's crotch-grabbing rendition of the national anthem before a baseball game (yes, I'm ashamed that I remember that one)... But there was always some new something being discussed on the radio.

Looking back now, the call-in show host probably wasn't too insightful, the callers were probably not very sharp, and I probably wouldn't bother with the show these days. Heck, I can barely stand some of the callers to the Friday News Roundup on NPR... I'm seriously going to flip out if I hear one more person call to complain that "the media didn't pick up the story on [fill in a story about impeaching Bush]" or "why isn't Ron Paul getting more attention?" or my favorite, "why is the media always covering stupid things about the candidates, what about the issues" (which as often as not comes from someone who doesn't appear to understand "the issues" very well themselves). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for criticizing the media, for example for their frenzied excitement over wars and the corresponding war-induced ratings bump, and the major TV networks' willingness to trot out retired military personnel to provide an independent analysis of the Pentagon's handling of the war, even though some of those military analysts were looking for lucrative Pentagon contracts that could clearly jeopardize their independence. It's not that I'm against bashing the media, especially in the US... It's just that I'd like a more nuanced perspective than "I didn't see the issue I'm interested in covered on the nightly news tonight, so the media sucks".

Anyway, the point of this is that, although the talk show she listened to was not something I would listen to, Nana was an information junkie. She always had the radio going in the house as well as the car, and she was a pretty enthusiastic TV watcher, especially during baseball season (the poor woman lived from 1919 until 1998, one of a generation of Red Sox fans who never saw them win it all). She never listened to music in the car, except for Frank Snotrag (pronounced "Sa-not-rag" so as to cleverly pun, as only 8-year-olds can, on Sinatra). This seemed strange to me when I was little... Why didn't she listen to music? Even to bad music that I didn't like? What was soooooo interesting about people talking? (This reminds me of the time I switched her Frank Sinatra tape for Michael Jackson's Thriller, and then waited in vain for what seemed like months for her to finally play some of Old Blue Eyes.)

Now I too have followed in her footsteps and become an information junkie. Lectures from The Teaching Company and NPR podcasts aren't enough anymore; I've discovered UChannel, short for University Channel, on iTunes, which is a clearing-house of recorded lectures, so while I'm coding I can have something "light" playing in the background. I can't stop trying to soak up information!

I don't quite know why I'm so obsessed with information... I'd like to think of it as a life-long commitment to education, but I think there's something else going on as well. For example, I'm not an information whore by any means; in fact, I'm very picky about what I listen to. I like people who are extremely informed on whatever they're talking about. I like people who speak reasonably well. I gravitate towards science, economics, archeology, and history. I don't like generic "news" all that much because it never provides enough context. I'm definitely entertained by learning new things, and I especially love the "knowledge is power" aspect of this where I can know more about a subject and not be fooled into thinking that something (like negative campaigning) is much worse today than in the past (I don't think it's not worse, maybe less histrionic and more manipulative). I definitely don't like hearing horrible things, like the use of rape as a weapon of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, because I get depressed. I like reading the economist online, and I'd love to listen to the Economist, because then I'd get all the articles in a British accent, which is about as cool as you can get.

More thoughts on this later, I need to sleep.

The airline industry

2008-06-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

The airline industry

Very interesting program on the Diane Rehm Show on the ill health of the American airline industry. Clearly record high prices for jet fuel are a major contributor to the problem, but there are other problems with the airline industry as well, some of which I don't fully understand. Some interesting tidbits from the program:

The airline industry was de-regulated in 1978; wikipedia suggests that prices as well as routes and schedules were regulated by the government. One claim is that the de-regulation of the industry has allowed new carriers to spring up rather quickly and drive prices down throughout the industry. These new carriers can evidently buy or lease planes with little or no money down, charge low prices until their IPO, then declare bankruptcy later. Bob Crandell, former chairman and CEO of American Airlines and one of the guests on the program, points out that over 200 new airlines have come and gone since de-regulation in 1978. On one hand, the constant pressure of new carriers charging low prices drives down prices for consumers; on the other hand it doesn't allow the major airline companies to price flights high enough to cover their costs and leads to an industry that doesn't make any money as a whole, which is disconcerting given the relative importance of air travel to the overall health of the US economy.
For background on regulation: Timothy Taylor devotes a lecture to regulation in Economics, 3rd Edition, a series of lectures recorded for The Teaching Company

His observations about regulation of the airline industry are not unique and he cites a number of sources in the lecture's bibliography
By the way, the lectures from The Teaching Company are of very high quality, and once you buy something they send you enough special deals and put enough material on sale that you can pretty much guarantee the $50 sale price to download 36 30-minute lectures on a topic of interest.

The airline industry in the late 20th century resembles the railroad industry in the late 19th century in that there are very high fixed costs to build the network (expenses to lay track VS expenses to buy places, build airports, set up a massive air-traffic control system, and establish a system of flight connections), but very low marginal to operate the network. So once the network is set up, new companies keep forming, driving down prices, and preventing everyone from making any money.
Other industries that are chained to an expensive fixed network, such as gas, electric and water utilities, also don't lend themselves nicely to competition and are typically regulated in some way, such as a regulated monopoly
The telephone network used to be a regulated monopoly, but was eventually broken up into several smaller companies
Notes on government price regulation:

Cost-Plus Regulation: The company can charge a price that's high enough to recover their costs, plus a certain amount of profit. Terrible idea because there is absolutely no incentive to cut costs!
Price-Cap Regulation: The company is allowed to charge a certain price for a period of time, and can make more profit but cutting their costs substantially below that price. Not as good as market competition, but much, much better than cost-plus regulation.

Note that de-regulation in this context means that the prices were de-regulated; this does not mean that the FAA got rid of safety standards for the airlines! That's a different type of regulation.
Also note that government regulation carries the risk of regulatory capture, the term for a revolving door for personnel between the regulatory agency and the industry under regulation that weakens the impact of regulation.
Reading between the lines, I imagine there airlines were regulated by cost-plus or price-cap prior to 1978, and the price de-regulation in 1978 opened the door to competition from new start-up airlines that has decimated the industry.

So it looks like there are structural problems to the airline industry such that unfettered competition drives down prices for consumers, but ultimately drives all the airlines out of business. One thing I'd like to know is how to measure the impact of air travel on the US economy, and what happens when an airline goes out of business. I've heard that the government routinely bails out bankrupt airlines, but I don't know what exactly this entails and what it costs if it indeed happens.

The US has an outdated radar-based air traffic control system from the 1950s, which means that commercial air traffics needs to fly inside special lanes so that the radar can find the planes. Needless to say, these lanes are not always the most direct way between two cities, and the lanes are fairly congested. Research done by the FAA through the MITRE corporation suggests that a new satellite/GPS-based system for tracking (for which the technology already exists, though guests on the DRS suggest would cost $20-30 billion or more) would allow airports to increase their volume of flights by 15-20%.
Bob Crandell points out that the US Dept. of Transportation doesn't really have a cohesive national transportation plan, and that if there existed the political will to craft such a plan and then spend the necessary capital to make it happen, then it's likely that we'd connect the northeast corridor from DC to Boston with really fast trains and not clog up the skies in that part of the country.