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Showing posts from April, 2012

More Failure

This time the job I didn't get was at The New Republic , being a reporter-researcher, which is a kind of small step above intern, but paid a little with some benefits. Rats. The funny—or perhaps unsurprising—thing is that each rejection is a little less of a downer. I feel like I'm learning something from each one, honing my technique, and learning how this business actually works. I didn't think it would really be easy—though I have had some breaks already—but the big realization has been that all the big-time names I have been reading these last few years all got tremendously lucky. It's no coincidence that most of the big-time bloggers—Sullivan, Yglesias, Drum, Klein, Dave Roberts, etc.—all started blogging from about 2000-2003. There was a window there, and that window is now shut. But I ain't giving up, not by a long shot. Something Old Man Coates said in the video above really spoke to me (about 45:00), when he was telling his own story of coming up as

Table Update

My folks finally got some chairs to go with my dad's awesome custom sandstone table . Check em out! Apparently they're made by honest-to-god Amish craftsmen.

Occupy the SEC and Public Virtue

I was very interested to read Suzy Khimm's  long take on the Occupy the SEC group, who are apparently in large part composed of former Wall Street traders and the like:  In its heyday, the tea party turned to elections to enact change, rallying supporters to primary incumbents and helping the GOP retake the House. Occupy Wall Street, by contrast, has largely eschewed the traditional political process. Instead, as protesters have moved off the streets, a small minority of Occupiers has waded deep into the weeds of the federal regulations, legal decisions and banking practices that make up the actual architecture of Wall Street. And they’re drawing on the technical expertise of the financial industry’s own refugees, exiles and dissidents to do so.  Many of the Occupy wonks once worked on Wall Street, and some of them still do. They’re former derivatives traders, risk analysts, compliance officers and hedge fund quants. They hail from Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Bear Stearns,

Collected links

1. I do miss some of these things from Mzanzi . Not the bogobe, though. 2. Can psychedelics help people face the fear of death ? 3. Why immigration matters for America's well-being . 4. Conor Friedersdorf says people are justified to be paranoid of the new "cybersecurity" bill, given the government's track record . 5. " There's an Anomaly in the Crotch Area ."

American Decline?

Over at the Why Nations Fail blog Acemoglu and Robinson have two interesting posts, the first providing evidence for  American decline . They cite high school graduation rates as flat for people born after 1950 or so, flat college graduation rates for those born after 1970 or so, and levels of incarceration that are hugely racially disproportionate, and stupendously high overall. The other is arguing for American resilience . But we have also argued that there are reasons for optimism: we have been here before, and rebounded. The most direct parallel is with the Gilded Age, when despite the huge economic and political power of the elite at the time, US institutions turned out to be more open and resilient than most feared (see  here ). The major reforms of the Civil Rights era, which ended the disenfranchisement of a large fraction of the population, are also grounds for believing that the US can rebound from the challenges it is facing today. They go on to talk about congression

Why Tyler Cowen Is Wrong About Evil

Tyler Cowen posted a link to this little animation, which as an aspiring blogger I very much appreciated: However, I was troubled by a short section about how Cowen doesn't go in for a lot of traditional blogging: People have a tendency to approach issues, and they want to apply simple good-versus-evil narratives, heroes versus villains, a certain kind of intolerance. What I do in my writing on the blog is I try to deliberately subvert all of  those expectations and to present points in some other way, with some other emotional framing, almost just to trick people, or force them to think about things in a new way again. That to me is more the mission of the blog. Again, I think that's a great clip with much wisdom, and I like Tyler quite a bit, though I often vehemently disagree with him. But I don't like the word "trick." I view my duty as a writer to say, for the most part, exactly what I mean as precisely and (I hope) elegantly as I can. While it's g

They Write Books

Bruce Schneier, probably the most prominent critic of TSA and America's security theater madness, has written a book , not just on security, but about trust and our crisis of authority. It's surprisingly well-written and timely. I've started it and it's pretty good. You should check it out!

Somebody Get This Man a Times Column

At my notorious interview for a new job (still no word on that, by the way) one of the questions which I rather flubbed was "Which New York Times  columnist would you fire, and who would you hire as a replacement?" Decent question, but I don't read every columnist, rather I get them filtered through Twitter and blogs, so I couldn't really answer for the first part, but for the second I blurted out Karl Smith of Modeled Behavior, though his paragraphs are way too short. Sort of like how when someone insulted you on the playground back in elementary school, leading you to think up a devastating retort sometime late that night, now I think of the best answer to that question: Steve Randy Waldman . He's got a brilliant update to his post on depressions , and while it's as usual a bit technical, here's a quick answer to my point about breaking the plutocracy: There is supposed to be a constituency for stimulative policy. The conventional story is that, d

Weekend Jams

New Deadmau5!

Intelligence Is Overrated, ctd

Felix Salmon was flipping through a recent book by David Rothkopf, and found some striking evidence for Chris Hayes' theory of rot in the meritocracy recently: Later there's a similar interview with Robert Rubin. Both Summers and Rubin are clearly brilliant people, and the products of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world. Summers entered MIT at 16, and was a tenured professor at Harvard by 28, one of the youngest of those in history. Rubin has degrees from Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Yale. Yet they both espouse beliefs that I am quite confident in labeling total horseshit. Am I so arrogant to think I'm smarter than these two? Nah. I bet either of them would whup me good on the SAT. These men are just being human. To admit that deregulation is a problem would be to say a large part of their lives' work--probably the most important part--was a terrible, catastrophic mistake. It's an extraordinary person indeed that wil

Yet More on Helicopters

It could be just me, but I feel like we're seeing a dramatic flowering of high-quality video-blogging. There's Scishow , Smarter Every Day , CGP Grey , and Minute Physics for starters. Offhand I reckon it's due to the crashing cost of high-quality video equipment, and widespread availability of high-speed computers and video editing software. What's your favorite?

How to Break the Plutocracy

Steve's brilliant post from yesterday rightly called most developed countries "democratic plutocracies." I think he's right to do so, and I think it's quite unlikely that the plutocracy will be broken anytime soon. Nevertheless I think it can be done. My rough model of our plutocracy is that the wealthy and the privileged use their money not to bribe people, but by making the politicians dependent on them for donations, creating a favorable intellectual environment through think tanks and payouts to favored economists, paying former staffers and friends of politicians huge sums to lobby, and of course through shadowy SuperPACs that flood the airwaves with agitprop. Probably the most important aspect of this is it's all aboveboard. Nobody has to take sacks of money and consciously acknowledge to himself that he is corrupt, and therefore the corruption can spread much  further. I think this edifice is more vulnerable than it appears. Obviously Obama has b

Energy Storage Innovation

Matt Yglesias bemoans the lack of battery innovation: This is bad news for the world. If you look at the mobile computing space, precisely the area in which you don't see breathtaking innovation is this battery stuff. We're just not getting better at the basic physics of storing electricity in a reasonably compact way. Battery life for things like smartphones and laptops has improved, but that's all coming as improved efficiency of the chipsets. But here, too, the basic physics of translating engine power into forward automobile motion are not amenable to enormous improvements. It's true that batteries have not kept anything like close pace with the rate of innovation in the rest of the tech world. In fact, when you take recycling into account, it's still hard to beat the old lead-acid batteries from the days of yore. Capacitors, via Wikimedia However there has been stupendous innovation in a different area of charge storage: capacitors . I remember my int

Depressing Depressions

Steve Randy Waldman has a bracing post on the massive policy failure that we have witnessed over the last four years. This depression was a choice, he says: But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary. These preferences are reflected in what the polities do, how they behave. They swoop in with incredible speed and force to bail out the financial sectors in which creditors are invested, trampling over prior norms and laws as necessary. The same preferences are reflected in what the polities omit to do. They do not pursue monetary policy with sufficient force to ensure expenditure growth even at risk of inflation. They do not purse fiscal policy with sufficient force to ensure employment even at risk of inflation. They remain forever vig

Einstein Was Right About Insanity

Jonah Goldberg, noted right-wing intellectual , has a new book out about cliches. He doesn't like them, and today he highlights one he especially doesn't like: “Einstein defined insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  First of all does anyone know if he really said that?  Second, this is absurd. You know a better word for “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?  “Practice.” I can't find definitive proof of the veracity of the Einstein quote one way or the other, though I think Goldberg is right to be skeptical of it; that sort of thing is common. But this is a tendentious misreading of the cliche. When practicing, you expect the same thing every time, namely to get better at whatever you're practicing. Einstein (or whoever) obviously meant that if you're trying to accomplish some goal, and you do something and it doesn't work , then it's foolish to keep doing tha

Collected links

1. Texas Monthly has a big report on GW Bush and the Texas Air National Guard years . Read it quick, they're supposedly going to paywall it soon. 2. Lovely profile of Robert Caro . 3. Will gated communities like Facebook and the Apple app store destroy the free internet ? It's from Google's Sergey Brin, but he makes a good case. Apple's dictator mentality towards their customers is the reason I don't own and will not buy any Apple products. 4. Can ibogaine cure addiction ? Not proved by any means, but intriguing. 5. Blog of the week . Physics' limitations on economics.

Why "Rational Self-Interest" Bugs Me

The phrase "rational self-interest" chafes my strap. I don't think it's entirely worthless--I do think an assumption of amoral self-interest, broadly defined, can be a highly useful first approximation, which is why economists are so excited about the concept. Profit-maximizers are a lot easier jam into a mathematical model than irrational actual people. But it is often taken too far. Here are three complaints: People aren't terribly rational . I'm willing to concede that most people have a strong tendency toward self-interest, especially those in a position of authority, but behavioral economics is full of irrational tendencies  people display that have been documented extremely well, even when measured in terms of self-interest. People take shortcuts and procrastinate; our reasoning systems are somewhat ad-hoc and don't always work perfectly. "Rational" is a normative term, and I don't like how it's attached to "self-interest.&

Power and Evil

Another problem I have with Why Nations Fail  and public choice theory is that it if anything understates the amount of horror one is likely to get out of a public choice dystopia. One can account for a great deal of the cruelty and terror inflicted by extractive dictatorships by a rational agent hypothesis--in Syria right now, for instance, Assad is murdering his own people by the score for fairly obvious self-interested reasons. His position is threatened by an uprising and he intends to bludgeon protesters into submission because that's the the only way to hang on to power. The next question, of course, is whether the repression itself is only fueling the uprising, but these sorts of things take on a life of their own quickly; once you've started, it's easy to get caught in a ratcheting cycle of violence. Robert Moses, via Wikimedia But pure, rational self-interestedness doesn't quite capture the full behavior of unaccountable elites. They are also often crue

Weekend Jams

I'm taken with this music video:

*Why Nations Fail* and *Twilight of the Elites*

The central problem of society is the problem of power. Any society much beyond subsistence level is too complex to governed without delegation. A leadership of some sort must be given power so that the basic functionality of government can be provided--security, transportation, etc. People ain't got time for that stuff. This means an elite must be developed, a class of people with extra power. The trouble is that power is dangerous. People tend to use it for their own benefit, especially if no one is stopping them. This is the thesis of Why Nations Fail : countries which cannot restrain their elites are robbed blind by them and remain poor. Their institutions are extractive . Successful countries, on the other hand, dole out power while restraining corruption and self-dealing. This well-delegated power allows the construction of complex public services: trains, highways, intercontinental ballistic missiles, spaceships, etc. Their institutions are inclusive . WNF  gives a fairly

Books For the 99 Percent

Apparently Paul Krugman is going to be published in a reader called The Occupy Handbook , which made me think of a couple books that are perfect for a rebirth of the Occupy movement. 1. The Great Divergence , by Tim Noah. This isn't too polemical, it's just a good overview of inequality that digs deep into the details of just what is happening and how. 2. Why Nations Fail , by Acemoglu and Robinson. This is nominally a big-picture history book, but it gives a good, hard look a just why some governments suck and others don't. Suffice to say it's not hard to apply their thesis to the US. 3. Twilight of the Elites , by Chris Hayes. This is the best of the lot. It's nominally about how our meritocracy has become just another self-perpetuating elite concerned solely with their own power and money, but really it's a beautiful, fiery testament to what he calls the "fail decade." Nothing else I've read grasps our crumbling institutions half so well.

Webcomic Recommendations?

Here are the webcomics I currently subscribe to, in no particular order: 1. XKCD 2. Tom Tomorrow 3. Sci-ence! 4. Penny Arcade 5. SMBC 6. Reptilius Rex 7. Garfield minus Garfield . I have the distinct feeling I'm missing a few. What are your favorites?

Quote for the day

"I'm not sure how anyone expects 'the housing market' to 'recover' when buying a house now involves handing a bunch of money over to a bank which will then proceed to steal your house from you." -- Atrios . I think this might be slightly too cynical, in that banks for the most part  only steal houses that have distressed mortgages and so forth, but only just. This country is developing a galloping case of the extractive institutions .

The Climate Hawks Are the Economically Rational Ones

New York City, via Wikimedia Here's a great story from Climate Central on the vulnerability of New York's transport system to climate change:  This was also supported by Climate Central’s own scientific research published in March, which showed that during the next several decades, the frequency of damaging storm surges in places like New York will rise significantly as sea levels creep up. The research projected a sea level rise of 13 inches in New York by 2050, and found that global warming-related sea level rise more than triples the odds of a 100-year flood or worse by 2030.  Without global warming, the odds of such a flood would be just 8 percent by 2030, but with global warming the odds rise to 26 percent. [...]  Even without sea level rise, a 100-year flood would inundate large portions of the subway system, Jacob’s team concluded. But with a 4-foot rise in sea level, storm-related flooding would inundate much of Manhattan’s subways, including almost all of

The Graveyard of the Colorado, part I

Cataract Canyon, via Wikimedia  [ This is another story from my dad, about the flood of 1983  on the Colorado through Cataract Canyon. I'll be posting it in installments. ] They thought it was probably going to start dropping soon. The river was already higher than any flood since the gauges went in back in the 20’s, so the safe bet for forecasters was to say it had just about peaked. “Highest water ever recorded,” would be a fair statement. How much water that was in actual volume would be hard to say. It was off the graph. Floods like this are suppose to be a spike in the pattern. Once the level started down it was expected to fall off precipitately, which would be good. The Green River wasn’t anything I recognized at this level. The camps were gone, the side hikes under water.  The river was painfully cold and going so fast it was hard to get all the boats landed in one place. I’d had a sketchy time of it just pulling in to the notch in the tamarisk trees where my boat

*The Republican Brain*

[ For a primer, check out Kevin Drum's critique  here and Mooney's response here . ] This is the latest from Chris Mooney, the man that brought us the book The Republican War on Science , which was quite good. This time he's trying to figure out why not just science denial but straight-up reality denial (e.g., birtherism) has taken such a firm hold on the right. I don't think this one is quite as good as TRWOS , but it's an admirable effort. The plain fact is that denialism is not just common on the right but mandatory . Look at what happened to Jon Huntsman. Mitt Romney has given in to it on climate. These are facts that cry out for an explanation, and Mooney offers a pretty convincing one on the merits. The argument is all heavily hedged, which is entirely appropriate given the infant state of the field, but basically it says that because conservatives are more closed, fixed, and certain in their views, they are more prone to the universal human traits of

Boo!

Via Sullivan , more magic from Pogo (best with some decent bass response):

Murphy's Law in Action

Like everyone these days, I carry a cell phone everywhere. My number changed when I came back from South Africa, though, and given that I'm not a particularly popular chap in the first place, hardly anyone calls me. I do most of my conversations by email and text SMS, and those are with only a few people. Of the actual phone conversations that I do have, basically all of them are with my family and girlfriend on the nights and weekends. I would honestly estimate (really, not exaggerating) that I receive incoming calls during the day about once every other month. All of which is just a long excuse for something that's really just a bit of stupidity on my part--I didn't have my phone on silent yesterday. And when do I receive that bimonthly call, but the worst imaginable half-hour out of the roughly 1,600 half hours present in two months' worth of business time: a really important job interview yesterday. The worst part was that it felt like I was doing quite well up to

Wall Street Arms Race Makes for a Shoddy Infrastructure Plan

Felix Salmon finds an interesting fact : File under “unexpected societal benefits of high frequency trading”: it’s doing wonders for building IT infrastructure. Sebastian Anthony and Jeff Hecht both have good overviews of the three — count ‘em — fiber-optic cables being laid deep below the arctic sea floor, all in a $1.5 billion attempt to shave 60 milliseconds, or less, off the amount of time it takes to get digital information from London to Tokyo. Ok, fair enough, that's pretty cool. But one wonders if this is really the best way to go about this. To clarify, if a trader hears a bit of public information about a stock, and executes a quick trade or two before it's widely known, then she can make a quick buck. That's been true since the dawn of stock markets. But now that we have computers, people have been writing programs that do this automatically, and buying big servers to run the programs as fast as possible. The obvious result of this is that Wall Street and i

Collected links

1. Good review of a couple books on the marijuana industry . 2. How to save the Earth from an asteroid . Few think about this kind of thing enough. 3. Andrew Sullivan has an interesting cover piece in Newsweek  about a de-politicized Christianity . 4. A quantum theory of Mitt Romney . Very funny and well written, by someone who knows his physics. 5. Zakaria on the US prison state .

Checking Your Work

Over at Real Climate, they've got an interesting look back at one of James Hanson's old papers, which was predicting the likely course of global warming: Always a good idea to go back and check one's work. The kicker, though, is that the paper was published in 1981, when heavy-duty climate science was still getting off the ground. Things have gotten a lot more sophisticated and accurate since then, but the basic conclusions have been basically solid for more than 30 years.

How Do Helicopters Work?

Destin from Smarter Every Day is here to show us, in the follow-up from his previous video : Watch the first one carefully, and the second one will blow your mind. Awesome.