There's only one Shaq

As someone pointed out to me, he clearly wants to retire as a Laker.

Only Nixon could go to China; only Rachel Swarns could mention Michelle's purple power suit

I was perusing The Caucus today, and came across this subtly tone-deaf bit of writing:

Michelle Obama stepped into the public-policy spotlight as first lady for the first time on Thursday, hailing a new law that will give women greater power to challenge sex discrimination in the workplace.

...

Mrs. Obama’s comments marked her first public appearance since she moved into the White House with her family last week. She stood in a purple power suit alongside Lilly M. Ledbetter, a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant in Alabama.

My first thought was that if you're talking about Michelle Obama's support of anti-sex discrimination legislation then you probably don't want to go out of your way to mention what she happens to be wearing. But then I noticed that the author of the post was a lady, so I thought, "Well that's okay then."

And, yes, this blog will now be devoted entirely to nitpicking the writing at the NYT. Because, you know, I'm in a position to make those criticisms.

Forget. Doomed. Repeat.

I like Nicholas Kristof as much as the next guy, but really there's no excuse for this sort of writing:

But as George Santayana, the eminent Harvard philosopher wrote: “Those who forget history are destined to repeat it.”

I can't believe he actually wrote that in a column. He sounds like an 8th grader.

Programming note

Rest assured, I will add an account of my Inauguration experiences to this space sometime soon. Stay tuned.

Not a politician

Well, it looks like Caroline Kennedy is withdrawing her Senate bid, which is as it should be. Senators should not be elected based on who they are descended from. And if something like her uncle having medical problems is truly keeping her from taking the position, then perhaps she never truly had what it took to be a US Senator.

Of course, neither I nor anyone else believes for a second that Kennedy is really withdrawing because of concerns about her uncle. What really happened is that she had the idea that she could saunter into that seat at any time and--by virtue of the Divine Right of Kennedys--everyone would be just tickled about it. And maybe if this were 1972, she would be right. But it's not 1972--it's 2009. And people, by and large, don't give a shit about the Kennedys any more (or, at least, not enough of a shit to just elect any old person who has the last name "Kennedy").

Let me reiterate that I don't necessarily have anything against Caroline Kennedy's politics or the person herself. If she really wants to be a Senator, than I say more power to her: let her run when the Senate seat comes up for reelection. But to appoint someone who is already a scion of the most powerful political family in the United States is an insult to the very notion of a meritocratic democracy.

Getting used to it

Man, it's almost jarring to hear this coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States:

“Starting today,” Mr. Obama said, “every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.”

This is going to take some getting used to.

I've been thinking for a while now that never in my life has the US government actually been on my side: even during the Clinton years, Newt controlled the agenda, and anyway, Clinton was busy reinventing the Democratic Party (which meant granting lots of concessions to the Republicans). But now we have a genuine liberal Democratic majority in Congress and a liberal in the White House, and the Reagan era is definitely over. So it's nice to finally see what the US government looks, acts, and sounds like when it's being run by my guys from top to bottom.

To DC

Tonight I fly to Washington, DC for the inauguration. I was in DC four years ago for Bush's second inaugural, and was able to get tickets for the speech and everything. I must say it was all pretty fun (my loathing for Bush notwithstanding).

In any case, if anyone's interested, I will be Twittering the main event (at the behest of my sister). You will be able to see the updates here.

Medicareandsocialsecurity

As Ezra Klein likes to point out, when people talk about the long time fiscal liability of "Social Security and Medicare", it's pretty misleading, because the problem is overwhelmingly with Medicare--specifically, the rising costs of healthcare which is causing it to bust the budget.

For example, check out this excerpt from the Economist:

Mr Bush’s biggest failure, however, is on entitlements. The ageing of the population, coupled with rapidly rising health-care costs, means that in coming decades Social Security and Medicare benefits will outstrip workers’ payroll contributions by trillions of dollars.

...

Between the Medicare drug benefit and the failure to restore solvency to Social Security, the long-term unfunded cost of America’s programmes for the elderly had last year reached a stratospheric $43 trillion, or 5% of future wages, compared with $13 trillion, or 3% of future wages, in 2000.

From this it sounds as though both entitlements are more or less equally to blame for the looming budget crisis. But when you look at the chart that the Economist itself provides, you see a different story:



Believe it or not, those numbers on the right vertical axis are trillions of dollars. Even so, it is easy to see that the trouble is not with Social Security, the costs of which are actually quite stable--it's with Medicare (and the drug benefit), the costs of which have more than doubled over the last eight years (and are continuing to rise precipitously). Conservatives tend to lump the two entirely separate entitlement programs together because it serves their ideological aversion towards entitlement spending in general, but it's important to understand where the real budgetary problems are, and why healthcare reform that reduces healthcare costs is so necessary.

Adobe plug

As a loyal Adobe employee, I am pleased to link to an instance of Flash being used for good instead of evil. Everyone's always saying how much they hate Flash, but 99% of the time what's really being hated is Flash content (i.e., ads).

Facebook valuation by way of Whopper

I don't think what Kottke's doing here makes much sense. The basic premise is, Burger King has a Facebook app called Whopper Sacrifice that lets you delete 10 friends in exchange for a free Whopper. This sets up a Facebook-friend-Whopper exchange rate. After determining the value of a Facebook friend in terms of Whoppers, he then determines the value of Whoppers in terms of dollars, and, presto, comes up with the dollar value of a Facebook-friend.

But there is a problem here. Once Kottke gets the dollar value for a Facebook-friend, he then multiplies that by the total number of friends in the Facebook network to arrive at a valuation of the network. But this doesn't make sense, because it's not as if Facebook friends are a commodity (like Whoppers) that are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable with each other. Some friends are more valuable than other friends. I may happily exchange my least favorite ten friends on Facebook for a Whopper, but decline to do the same when it comes to my ten most favorite friends.

Assuming an efficient Facebook-Whopper market, what this scheme does do is set the cost of keeping a Facebook friend to 1/10 the cost of a Whopper. This is, I think, a win-win for everyone involved, because it will purge the Facebook network of non-meaningful friendships and get Burger King some nice publicity.

Of course, there also seem to be some perverse incentives, like for instance friending strangers just so you can unfriend them for Whoppers. But presumably the app is robust enough to guard against this kind of exploitation (for example, it could be that you must be friends for a person for X amount of time in order for your unfriending of them to count towards a Whopper).

Twitter

I started. So far it's actually making me a little nervous, because I'm unsure how often I'm supposed to--er, tweet--and I don't want to spam people with boring messages. But I suppose I'll get the hang of it soon enough.

By the way, I don't know who he is, but I hate this fucking guy. Every other message from him is really, really funny.

PS: Lisa, if you're reading this, can you hook me up with a AAA battery? Thx

Economy blah blah spending blah blah

Now, I've been trying really hard the last few months to understand what's been going on in the economy, and still I find most of this article to be pretty inscrutable. I'm not even saying that it's wrong: I'm just saying that I don't understand it. For example, first it says this:

Big deficits force the government to borrow more money, saddling future generations with large financial burdens. The problem is especially acute now because credit markets, which at times in recent months have been all but frozen as the financial system has been buffeted, could be further strained by the need to finance the huge deficit.

Well, wait a minute. Yes, there is a credit freeze--for private individuals, companies, and investors. But there isn't a credit freeze for the United States government--in fact, the whole reason there is a credit freeze is because lenders will only lend to the United States government (because it is perceived to be the one borrower that cannot possibly fail). The article even explicitly mentions the favorable interest rates that the government can borrow at as a result of this investor "flight to safety":

...the good news, at least for the moment, is that the Treasury’s borrowing costs are as almost as low as they have ever been. Short-term Treasury rates are hovering just above zero, but the rates on 10-year Treasury bonds are below 2 percent.

Maybe he means that huge government deficits will worsen the credit crunch because the government will end up sucking up all the dollars that would have been lent to private borrowers? But isn't the whole point of the deficit spending to increase demand to get the economy back at full capacity and get lenders confident enough to lend again? I mean, if there was no stimulus everyone agrees the recession, unemployment, and credit situation would be worse, right?

Bah. Time to go find a blog post somewhere that actually explains what the hell is going on with this stuff...

Ad hoc sports statistic time

At espn:

For exactly 28 years -- spanning Dec. 30, 1980 to Dec. 30, 2008 -- there was never a day on which two NBA teams with winning percentages of at least .800 through at least 30 games of the season both lost. It's happened twice in the past six days, as the Celtics and Cavaliers both lost Tuesday and again Sunday.

Thanks, sql! Although it makes one wonder: when was the last time there was a day on which two NBA teams with winning percentages of at least .800 through 30 games both lost--and whose team names both started with the same letter??!?!?

Obama porn: Check Please! edition

Um, okay this is weird. I catch a San Francisco version of Check Please! on public television from time to time.

What's next? Barack kicking it with Huell Howser on a never-before-aired episode of California's Gold? The Obama's discovering that their Civil-War-era wooden chest is worth $20,000-$30,000 on Antiques Roadshow?

Abiding astonishment

In the book God's Presence In History, Martin Buber is quoted as saying this:

The concept of miracle which is permissible from the historical approach can be defined at its starting point as an abiding astonishment. The ... religious person ... abides in that wonder; no knowledge, no cognition, can weaken his astonishment.

This passage gets at what I think is a very important thread in the tangled ball of yarn that is religion: the abiding awe--or astonishment--that comes when we contemplate the question of why there is something rather than nothing. That there is anything at all is a wondrous fact, and no amount of reflecting upon that fact dampens its exhilarating effect on us, or lessens its mysteriousness.

Moreover, note how this "question of existence"--the question of why there is something rather than nothing, of why there should be anything at all--is framed. To talk of "there being something" or "there being anything" is to talk in maximally general terms about the world. We are not expressing abiding astonishment that there is this or that particular thing; it is not that we experience awe because the world is the way it is as opposed to some other less desirable possible arrangement. The source of our astonishment, in other words, is not that we inhabit this or that possible world, but that there are possible worlds. We are celebrating and wondering at the fact that existence exists.

To even conceptualize the world in such a maximally general way requires, I think, a non-trivial feat of imagination. It means really apprehending, in one moment, the all of everything. It is a dizzying experience, and also a frightening one, because apprehending the all of everything naturally leads one to think of the absence of the all of everything--of utter, abyss-like nothingness.

These sensations of dizzying exhilaration on the one hand and utter terror on the other find their religious expression, I think, in the various sensations that God causes in men: the abiding astonishment, the bottomless terror. In religion, humanity's concerns surrounding a maximally general conception of the world--surrounding, in other words, our conception of existence as such--is anthropomorphized, bringing this cluster of difficult and troubling questions into a framework that any human can easily interface with. The question of existence, so elusive before, is now no more difficult to access at a superficial level than some surly authority figure: it walks, it talks, it commands, it emotes, it does stuff in the world (like part oceans).

Of course, many people's conception of God is more refined than a bearded man sitting up in the clouds. If you ask ten different people what their conception of God is, you will often receive ten different answers, each one varying in its degree to which God is conceived as a human-like being or capable of affecting human affairs. However, insofar as God is a window to the abiding astonishment that there is something rather than nothing, all conceptions of God (that are not flatly pantheistic) are flawed--or at least potentially very confusing--because God is a particular thing, and the moment you veer away from a maximally general conception of the world you also veer away from the topic of existence as such. It seems to me that while it is quite possible that a religious person with a sophisticated outlook could be experiencing abiding astonishment at basically the same thing as me but with theological rather than secular/philosophical/analytical window dressing, it is more likely that the God-concept--with all of its anthropomorphic trappings--has led him down a false path to a sort of existential idolatry, where what is generating awe and astonishment is not the higher-order, maximally general conception of the all of everything, but a lower-order conception of a particular possible world: specifically, the possible world in which a being "God" exists that has all manner of amazing and superlative properties.