The trouble with free parking

We're all familiar with the basic economic principle that if you underprice something, you cause long lines for--and shortages--of that thing, and that if you want that thing to be produced and consumed as efficiently as possible, you should let the free market set its price. Yet somehow, we all seem to have our blinders on when it comes to applying this principle to parking spaces, as Matt Yglesias explains:

When I took economics, we had a little squib in there about price controls. But it was about something nobody would actually think to do these days . . . mandatory cheap bread or something. It was a historical example. At any rate, it’s overwhelming conventional wisdom in the United States that price controls are bad. If I suggested that the city implement price controls on Diet Coke, people would say that it would lead to shortages. And if I proposed dealing with the ensuring shortages by saying that anyone who wants to build a new building needs to also provide millions of dollars worth of Diet Coke to people in the neighborhood, people would look at me as if I were insane. Creating the Diet Coke shortages is not a favor to anyone—neither fans nor haters of Diet Coke benefit—and the regulatory mandate is an absurd subsidy to Diet Coke drinkers with no conceivable policy justification. It’s bizarre. But people have a strong bias toward the status quo, so they tend to assume that status quo policy just must be non-bizarre, no matter how at odds it is with everything else.

It kind of reminds me of dollar beer night at the racetrack. At first you're all excited--beer for only $1!--but when you get there, and you see the gigantic lines, and realize you'll have to wait for like half an hour just to get a stupid Budweiser, you end up wishing that it was more like $3 or $4 beer night. Well, the same applies to parking here in San Francisco: it is basically 0$ parking night every night. And so you get the long lines...

(Photo by Mark Strozier)

Californinformation

Via Harinder, a really useful news aggregation site with a focus on California politics and policy. Enjoy.

A note about "separate but equal"

The other day Eric left a good and substantive comment regarding the recent California Supreme Court decision on Prop 8, and I think now I've read up enough to say a few things about it.

First, though, I want to digress for a bit and clarify some things about the "separate but equal" doctrine and what was ruled in the Brown decision, which overturned it. Eric says:

...From what I understand, a major problem with separate-but-equal in the pre-Brown v. Board of Education days was that, for example, education in black schools was demonstrably inferior to that in white schools; that is to say, they were separate and unequal.

This isn't correct; the ruling in Brown which overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine concluded that separate was inherently unequal, even if all "tangible" properties of the segregated schools were in fact equal. Take it away, Earl:

We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.

...

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.

Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

So you can see here that the majority opinion is actually kind of weird in its reasoning in the way it relies so completely on empirical evidence from psychology. Basically, it's an argument from fact rather than law: Plessy was wrong not so much because it seriously misinterpreted the Constitution, but because it failed to take into account psychological harms that were caused by segregation as a matter of fact. But I guess that's another story. (I ran into a long but interesting article about Brown here which I've skimmed a bit of and bookmarked; also it might be of interest to take a look at Justice Harlan's dissent to Plessy here.)

Oh, and disclaimer: this is just my amateur take on the situation. I'mnottalawyer. So all of what I said could be disastrously, embarrassingly wrong.

I'll tackle the Prop 8 decision in a separate post.

(Photo by cliff1066)

Intimidation fail

The other day when I was watching Lakers-Nuggets with my sister, we noticed that a weird little chicken dance that JR Smith did after making a three had all the downsides of a celebratory dance (poor sportsmanship) and none of the upsides (intimidating the other team; looking awesome). What is the deal with this awful dance?

Long decision

Ok, well, I just spent the evening reading the court's decision (almost all of it: I skipped the section on why they didn't retroactively undo the "marriage" designation for those married before the ruling, and I skimmed some of the case history about the amendment/revision distinction)--so, yay me. But it's damn late, so I'll have to do a post about the decision for tomorrow.

Note, though, that for this issue I think the Pundit Equivalence Threshold is about 20 minutes--where the PET is defined as the number of minutes you need to read in order to know more about it than 90% of the pundits on TV. The court decision is surprisingly accessible and the first couple of pages give you a nice summary of the legal context of the case as well as an overview of how the state amendment process works. I'd say the first couple of pages are a must-read for all Californians.

A quick note on the Prop. 8 ruling

First, the I'm-not-a-lawyer-and-don't-really-know-much-about-the-law disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and don't really know much about the law.

Now, tactically and politically, this has got to be chalked up as a desirable result for those--like me (and Andrew Sullivan)--who are pro-gay-marriage. The reason is simply because an overturning of the popular vote would have caused an enormous backlash, divided supporters of equal rights, and in the eyes of many people would have reduced the moral and democratic legitimacy of the California Supreme Court. Moreover, it would have retroactively made the anti-Prop-8 movement an exercise in bad faith: it is unfair to engage in a public debate over an issue only to go ahead and nullify the result if it doesn't suit you. That is perhaps an unfair reading of the situation, but it is a reading that I'm sure many Californians would have subscribed to.

If and when California can reinstate gay marriage (and if demographic trends continue, it should be any year now), it will be a victory all the more powerful and convincing, because the law will have been changed by the people, and not by some imagined elitist liberal cabal. Opponents of gay marriage will have no retort.

Now--all that's the strictly political side. But what about the legal, and, indeed, moral side? Well, in this respect--and on the face of it (I haven't read the opinion)--I couldn't disagree more with the decision.

The thing I don't understand is: what's a right in California? Certainly, any right that can be overturned by a simple majority vote is hardly a right at all. My understanding was that in a previous decision, the Court agreed that equal rights guaranteed by the California constitution mandated that there could not be "separate but equal" institutions of marriage; that gay couples were entitled to all the rights and privileges of marriage, including the legal title of the arrangement--"marriage". It would seem that this decision makes a hash out of all that.

Well--I've gone and committed the sin of having an opinion about something without properly researching it first, but I just couldn't help myself. Consider this an "initial reaction".

I will read the court's opinion and report back what I find.

(Photo by Jamison)

"We're history's actors..."

Some nifty writing from Ezra Klein on Cheney's new role as right-wing gadfly:

Dick Cheney, rather, acts by acting. That is, in a way, his legacy. The simple insight that power need not be popular.... That you don't need to be transparent or well-liked or broadly trusted. What you need is a hand on the levers of power. Let others argue. You can act.

The problem, however, is that if you act alone, your impact is not durable. It can be undone. Cheney didn't build -- didn't even seem interested in building -- consensus around his vision. He forged on even as the public turned angrily against him. In the short-term, that allowed him to avoid significant compromise with the trends in public opinion. In the long-run, it rendered his achievements fragile once they lost their protector.

And so now Cheney is in an unexpected position. He is without agencies to direct or armies to control. But he cannot bear to see his policies unwound. The consummate inside player is forced into an outside game. But there is no outside game. Barack Obama controls the levers of power. And no one knows better than Cheney what that means. It means that Obama can act. All Cheney can do is argue.

He's on the outside now, looking in.

The rise of empiricism on the right wing

Yet another conservative figure scoffs at the notion that waterboarding is torture, decides to waterboard himself as a stunt, and is completely humbled by the experience.

I just want to say that though a lot of liberals make fun of this sort of thing, it is actually a very admirable commitment to empiricism, in my opinion. I mean, this is a guy who formed a belief, and then decided to test that belief to see if it was true. Well, not quite: surely the only reason he went through with it was because he was so certain that he was right in the first place. But the important thing is that he was honest about the results. I don't think you can ask for much more from a person than that.

Incidentally, I think an odd side effect of this sort of thing--where torture apologists volunteer to have themselves tortured to demonstrate their point--is that it has become routine for liberal bloggers like Matt Yglesias to call on various conservatives to torture themselves. It's kind of crazy.

PS: I think another interesting thing for someone who defends the various torture methods used by the US would be to undergo not just waterboarding, but the other methods as well--e.g., sleep deprivation. These are just as much torture methods as anything else, even though intuitively they may not sound so bad and don't seem to entail any simple physical harm. But if you've been kept up for days straight, sleep deprivation really is torture, and a person will say or do anything to be able to go to sleep.

(Photo by The Ardvaark)

Let's get succinct

A point I was trying to make earlier about the contradiction at the heart of the "it's not torture" argument is better and more succinctly expressed by this joke.

Predictions, con't.

Earlier, I predicted the Lakers in seven, with home court advantage proving the difference. The funny thing is, though, is that I didn't really think that they would win all of their home games--intuitively I thought they would split the first two. However, also in the back of my mind was the belief that the Lakers wouldn't be able to win in Denver.

So what I'm trying to say is, I didn't really have a consistent scenario played out in my head. It can't be the case that they split the first two, Denver wins all its home games, and the Lakers win in 7. And yet: that's what my gut's telling me.

My gut's kind of dumb.

Addendum:

To make this post not complete gibberish, I would like to quote Andrew Bynum, who shares my thoughts about the Lakers' defense:

"Honestly, I think we need to rethink how we are doing the defense. … They are just attacking it and swinging [the ball] to the other side. It is an easy three-on-two every time that they swing it to the other side."

In engineering, a design principle you try to follow is to make failures as graceful as possible. This is an outlook that recognizes that system failures are inevitable and that it's infeasible to try to eliminate them completely--but that you can take steps to minimize their effects when they happen. So for example, it might be inevitable that a computer program will crash from time to time--but it is much better for that program to display an error notice and close itself than, say, abruptly exit or freeze up. You want the program to crash gracefully.

The same applies to basketball defenses. A defense that completely collapses whenever someone is slow on the rotation is a poorly designed defense. Failures and missteps on the defensive end will occur, and they will result in an advantage for the offense. But you want that advantage to take the form of an open jump shot--not an uncontested dunk.

(low whistle)

How 'bout that LeBron? That fellow should consider a career as a professional basket-ball athelete.

It's time to call bullshit on: keyboard cat

Look: I enjoy an internet meme as much as the next guy. But I feel like the internet phoned in keyboard cat. It seems contrived to me--basically just a combination of LOLcats and FailBlog.

This is America. We can do better.

The crux

Obama says:

We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrasses the government.

And he also says this:

In short, there is a clear and compelling reason to not release these particular photos. There are nearly 200,000 Americans who are serving in harm's way, and I have a solemn responsibility for their safety as Commander-in-Chief. Nothing would be gained by the release of these photos that matters more than the lives of our young men and women serving in harm's way.

So the basic principle that Obama outlines is: if releasing information will endanger "the lives of our young men and women serving in harm's way", then it should not be released--even if the information reveals government law breaking.

But this seems perverse to me. If you allow the executive branch to evade accountability by claiming that evidence released will endanger the troops, then the executive branch will simply cook up various rationales to justify the protection of damning evidence. What you need is an outside authority determining if the threat described by the executive branch is 1) legit and 2) of sufficient severity to offset the public interest in holding the executive branch accountable for its actions. It's not clear to me that Obama lays out such a mechanism.

Moreover: what if the release of information really will endanger the troops, and also reveals serious law breaking? Do these laws simply go unpunished? Is there some mechanism for seeking justice "behind closed doors"? Or does law breaking that falls into this category receive a free pass?

An afternoon diversion

First, the prequel:



Now the main feature. You don't have to watch more than a few minutes to get the idea:

Cacaphonies! Constitutional conventions! Terminators! California politics has never been more exciting

Now this:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned home from a White House visit on Wednesday to find the state dangerously broke, his constituents defiant after a special election on Tuesday and calls for a constitutional convention — six months ago little more than a wonkish whisper — a cacophony.

I wonder how the hell this works? What kind of a majority do you need to pass amendments at a constitutional convention? Will the Republican minority be able to block any changes? I will look around for some kind of California-politics-based blog, and get back to you...

(By the way--what a slap in the face to local media outlets that I'm getting all my CA news from the NYT...ah well..)

A much needed W

Some Laker game. The first quarter was awful, and I think it had something to do with the quick turnaround for the Lakers--they had only one day to prepare for the Nuggets, which led to confusion on the defensive end and plenty of breakdowns. The Lakers gave up something like 3 uncontested dunks that quarter.

(By the way--it seems like the Lakers' defense gets stymied a lot. I feel like maybe our basketball IQ is lacking on the defensive end? Or maybe the system is just too failure-prone? I mean, if one person is late on his rotation it will often result in an easy layup/dunk. I don't know how many times I've seen someone blast past a Laker on the wing, and the baseline help is just nowhere in sight. And it seems that teams are good at coming up with offensive schemes that scramble the Lakers D and leave people wiiiiiiide open--like what the Rockets were doing with Brooks penetrating and swinging it to the weak side. So maybe it's a design flaw in the defensive system: when it's not implemented perfectly, it totally implodes. I dunnow.)

Ah well. It's good to see Kobe back--you don't realize until you see him play another team how thoroughly Battier and company had shut him down. He had the one 40 point game, but that was basically a fluke. I'm expecting him to average over 30 this series and make a difference in every game.

It's also good to see him in the post. I feel like he can hit fadeaway jumpers in the 8 to 10 foot range all day long--and of course draw all sorts of fouls by doing his nifty spin moves and up and under stuff. Kobe in the post = good.

Anyway, a loss would have been disaterous. If we can just start playing at tip-off rather than halfway through the second quarter, I think we might actually get through this series without too much trouble.

Props fail in California

Predictably, voters rejected myriad propositions that would have closed the budget deficit by, among other things, taking money away from services such as mental health and early development programs. The reason, I think, is because most voters are liberals and would like to see higher taxes for more services.

Of course, despite this, the legislature can't ever pass a tax increase, because such bills require a 2/3 supermajority, and so a small coterie of hard-core conservatives are able to squelch it every time.

The budget situation is only going to get much worse from here. But I like it that way. I want there to be a budget meltdown. Because this is the only way we're ever going to force meaningful reform of the screwed-up budget process in this state.

No more 2/3 supermajority! No more budgets by referendum!

Oy

SF is considering a new tax on cigarettes:

The proposal, to be introduced next month to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, would add 33 cents to the cost of a pack of cigarettes, to offset the estimated $10.7 million the city spends annually removing discarded butts from gutters, drainpipes and sidewalks.

First: how the hell do you estimate the specific cost of removing discarded cigarette butts? I mean really--what is the methodology there? Is it that the city would have to do less street cleaning and other maintenance if there were no cigarette butts? I'm not buying this statistic at all.

Second: why pick on cigarettes? If you can actually isolate the cost of litter that comes from specific products, shouldn't those other products have a "litter tax" as well? For example, should there be a litter tax for soda? How about fucking gum? And if the only reason why cigarettes are different is because there is also a health benefit to taxing them, then that negates the notion that this tax had anything to do with offsetting the costs of litter in the first place.

Bah. I'm not a smoker, and I don't think smoking is a good idea--and I'm even okay with the idea that we should tax tobacco to dissuade people from picking up the habit. But at some point, if you've agreed in principle that smoking tobacco should be legal, you have to afford the users of tobacco some--pardon the phrase--breathing room to legally partake in it without being bludgeoned with exorbitant and capricious taxes.

(Photo by flickr user netan.)

Generations

In Schindler's List, the accountant says to Schindler: "There will be generations because of what you did." That always stuck with me, because it makes you realize that an individual means more than just that single life; it is also a node on the great family tree of history that begets exponentially more nodes over time. When you prune it, it's not a leaf that falls to the ground--it's a gigantic branch.

So when we consider a situation like Iraq, I think it's important to keep some perspective on what's important. And what's important is, quite simply, human lives. When we talk of the costs and benefits of war, we talk in the same breath about many things--the dollar cost, the soldiers killed and wounded, the infrastructure destroyed, the civilian deaths, the prospect of a free and democratic Iraq, the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. But really the most important thing in this list--orders of magnitude more important than anything else--is the sheer level of civilian death that has occurred since the war began in 2003.

Low-end estimates for the number of civilians killed are around 100,000, but there is good reason to believe that the number is quite a bit higher than that, upwards of 600,000. When you think of how many of those people would have gone on to have children had they lived, the sheer loss of humanity, from the generational standpoint, is staggering. To invert the accountant Stern's line: Because of what we did in Iraq, there won't be generations.

Hundreds of years from now, it seems likely to me that no one will think much about the Iraq War, it's objectives, or whether it was a success. It won't really matter whether the Iraqis of this time period lived under a cruel tyrant or a functioning democracy. What will matter, however, is whether the direct descendants of the Iraqis of today exist. That is the great impact the Iraq War will have on history--not some grand geopolitical effect or historical turning of the tides, but the simple demographic fact that millions upon millions of people who would have been alive were, in fact, never born. When our bombs exploded in Iraq, untold millions of descendants disappeared in a counterfactual puff of smoke.

The basic contradiction at the heart of the "it's not torture" argument

There are two lines that torture apologists take: either they say that torture is justified in certain circumstances ("it works"), or they maintain that what the US did was not torture ("the United States doesn't torture").

Addressing the latter argument, I think a fundamental problem with it is this: if the methods under consideration--waterboarding, sleep deprivation, exploiting insect phobias, "walling", etc.--are not "harsh" enough to rise to the level of torture, then why do they yield results? If forced standing is really no different than Rumsfeld "being on his feet" for most of the workday--in other words, if forced standing is no big deal--then why would we expect it to make a hardened terrorist spill the beans? So the contradiction is this: if the methods are lax enough to not be torture, then it doesn't make sense that they would succeed in wresting information from an incooperative detainee, and so you would be against using these methods on efficacy grounds. But if they are effective in coercing information from detainees, then there must have been a point at which the detainee decided that he would rather stop the abuse than keep mum about what he knows. But pushing a person beyond this "breaking point" pretty much just is torture.

Predictions

Cavs in 5: Orlando edges one out at home from a combination of a good shooting night and Cleveland finally getting a bit complacent. The rest is LeBron.

Lakers in 7: home court advantage (and, I'm guessing, scandalously favorable whistles) will be the difference. If Denver steals a game in LA, though, it's going to be panic time.

YES

Adande:

...shouldn't that be the next candidate for one of those playoff commercials when the players and crowd slowly appear in the empty arena? I love those. My favorites yet. What other great plays would you like to see done in those commercials? Starks dunk on Jordan and Grant? the Robert Horry shot vs. Sac?

J.A. Adande: HOw cool would it be to see the ball bouncing out to halfcourt, then Horry just materializes like he was beamed down from the Enterprise, collects the rock and fires up the 3

Arrrrgg!

I've been saying this for years--but I never thought to put it on Twitter!

I'm ordering an immediate investigation of all jokes I've ever made to see if they can be put on the record.

Twitter, #googlefail, and the viral misinterpretation of data

Some hay has already been made about this, but basically today for a couple of hours Google and all of its attendant services--search, Gmail, etc.--went down. And so on Twitter there were a flurry of messages tagged #googlefail that said something to the effect of, "Google's down!"

But a lot of the messages were re-Tweets of this:

@chr1sa : Graph of Internet traffic showing impact of this morning's #googlefail. Google practically IS the Internet: http://bit.ly/nICxj

However, these people totally misinterpreted the graph: it does not show all internet activity, but rather, it "shows average traffic from ten top North American ISPs sending data to Google’s network". So of course it's going to go down to virtually zero when Google's network is down.

And, really, wouldn't it be strange if all internet activity declined so drastically because Google went down? Why would people stop using the internet simply because they couldn't use their favorite search engine? Silliness.

(PS: Even though this post is about the internet, I'm not going to deploy the "internet icon", because of how incredibly stupid it is.)

Makin' movies

Via Lindsay, an awesome site that lets you generate little 3D movies. As a trial run, I've added to the President Cartwright/Jimmons canon:

That rule of law thingy

Ted Sorenson--a John Kennedy advisor--addresses law students:

“In a country based on the rule of law, in which no man is above the law, whatever his rank or title, no man can undertake, authorize or immunize unlawful conduct,” Sorensen said.

“Our current wonderful president cannot promise the CIA practitioners of torture that they will not be prosecuted,” he said.

Right. And yet you never heard so much as an "Um, he can't do that" from the establishment punditry when Obama made his royal proclamation.

Iconz, bitch

The idea just occurred to me that I could be including topic-relevant icons for my myriad blog posts. For example, this fellow could be the icon for any internet related posts.

I dunnow, we'll see. In any case, I think I'm going to put a little more effort into sprucing up the posts with images--even if they're only tangentially related.

We create our own reality

Sullivan distills the danger of a government that uses torture to extract "information":

And so Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was first captured by the US and tortured by CIA surrogates in an Egyptian cell. Apparently, they beat him and put him in a coffin for 17 hours as a mock-burial. To end the severe mental and physical suffering, he confessed that Saddam had trained al Qaeda terrorists in deploying WMDs. This evidence was then cited by Colin Powell as part of the rationale for going to war in Iraq. Bingo! And we wonder why torture is such a temptation. Which politician wouldn't want to be able to manufacture evidence to support what he wants to do anyway?

In a strange way, the torture program was the logical--if horribly unethical and illiberal--extension of the post-modernization of truth that was movement Conservatism's modus operandi. They created their own shadow version of every truth-seeking institution that didn't produce the results they desired: so you had think tanks instead of academia, Fox News instead of the mainstream media establishment, Alberto Gonzales instead of an independent Justice Department, a political hack going through scientific reports on global warming with a red pen.

The torture program was in the same mold: the traditional institutions and methods weren't generating the right results, and so they created their own alternative institutions and methods on the fly--Gitmo, extraordinary rendition, torture--justifying all of it, I'm sure, with the sincere belief that the old institutions had been long ago compromised by Liberals and their anachronistic, "pre-9/11" mindset.

Apologies in advance

But I thought this "chain comment" (is that what they're called?) on a YouTube video was kind of funny:

1. copy and paste
2. send this to 2 other videos.
3. hold your breath for 10 seconds
4. press refresh twice
3. LOOK AT YOUR HANDS

Yeah, I'm gonna start saying that.

New terminology

If you have a beard because you are too lazy to shave, then that is having a beard ex res ignavus. If, however, you have a beard because you are intentionally growing one, then that's having a beard ex penitus.

Currently, I am sporting a healthy beard ex res ignavus.

The team from my area is superior to the team from your area

Via Sullivan, a hell of a quote:

"The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man extinguished his," - Hugo St. Victor, 12th Century.

It's interesting that we would associate a practiced distance from the accidental properties of ourselves with strength, wisdom--even perfection. I think it's the right way to think about it. I don't know of any kind of wisdom that doesn't start with self-awareness, and self-awareness, I think, is the practice of distancing yourself from yourself, viewing yourself through the eyes of others. What starts as empathy leads inexorably to a kind of universalist outlook, that recognizes that the accidental differences between us are arbitrary and capricious, and so we shouldn't pay them too much heed. Indeed, according to this Hugo fellow, the perfect man shuns them entirely.

But ultimately, all of this relies on exercising the empathy muscle, and this exercise is exhausting. The brain labors to carry out all the psychic computations needed to translate the world into the viewpoint of someone else--and so, just like any kind of grueling task that is good for us, we tend not to carry it out nearly as often as we should. To do it regularly and as an ever-present feature of your thought process is like running a mental marathon. It's so much easier to relax into the cushy couch of our baser tribal tendencies, saying "fuck you" to the out-group while we congratulate each other on having been born in the United States.

That's where the idea, specifically, of strength comes in, I think: you exercise the muscle regularly, and it becomes strong.

Lies, damn lies, etc.

Via Sullivan, someone quotes some statistics:

There is a 1 in 1.5 million chance that your kid would be abducted and killed by a stranger. It is hard to wrap your mind around those numbers, and everybody always assumes: What if it's my 1 in 1.5 million? If you don't want to have your child in any kind of danger, you really can't do anything. You certainly couldn't drive them in a car, because that's the No. 1 way kids die, as passengers in car accidents.

These kinds of comparisons always bother me, because they don't seem like a very good basis on which to make decisions. Presumably, these "odds" are arrived at by dividing, say, the number of child abductions by the number of total children. But it's not like you can conclude that if you leave your kid outside unattended, those will reflect the odds of an abduction. In some areas and in some circumstances, the chances of a child abduction will be higher than in others. Indeed, it could be that the very reason why the odds are so slim of a child abduction in the first place is precisely because most parents take lots of precautionary measures to make sure this never happens. If this is the case, then it certainly doesn't make sense to use this as a reason to stop taking precautionary measures!

It'd be like if someone refused to wear a bike helmet on the grounds that the odds of serious head injury are low, when in fact the very reason why head injury is rare is because everyone wears a helmet. You'd want to know the odds of a serious head injury amongst people who don't wear helmets.

The same holds true with car accident deaths. Defensive drivers have much better odds of avoiding accidents than aggressive drivers. Maybe some areas are more prone to car accidents than others--there is more traffic in some places, for example. The point is, within the set of all drivers, I'm sure that probabilities of an accident vary widely among individuals within the set depending upon their behavior and their environment. So general statistics that take into account all drivers everywhere don't necessarily tell you your personalized odds of an accident.

I mean, I understand that the point the author is trying to make is that we tend to misjudge certain risks, and it is possible that parents are being too risk averse if they, say, deprive their children of a playful childhood because they won't let them go outside unattended or something. But quoting statistics like these certainly doesn't make that case.

On Bulworth

A very good take-down of Bulworth here, including one of the more entertaining animated GIFs I've seen. Read it.

Lay off Hook

I'm not sure why, but I think this is quietly one of the best comments I've ever seen on the internet, by one Kyle at the Onion AV Club:

Hook is okay. I don't know why that movie is such a punchline. It's an average kids flick and it moves along breezily enough

Lay off Hook, everybody

It's like the opposite of a horrible YouTube comment.

Incidentally, there's definitely an art to not using a period. It really changes the feel of a sentence. Sometimes it can be just the thing.

A trolling expedition

Ordinarily I don't go in for these sorts of shrill cognitive dissonance-athons, but I just couldn't resist--I mean, he's a law professor for God's sakes. He shouldn't be able to get away with a post this stupid.

If you feel moved, by all means leave a pithy-sounding-to-our-side comment, like I did.

"You can't guard me!"

Wow, Ron Artest is an idiot. He basically let Kobe get under his skin, and ended up getting ejected for it.

Shit's gonna get crazy in Houston. And you know Kobe's loving every second of it.

The internet is watching

One thing about this brave new world of communications technology that we don't hear much about is the almost ubiquitous, distributed surveillance that results from the fact that everyone carries around a handheld video recorder. So when Condoleezza Rice has a rather testy exchange with a Stanford student after some event:



...it can eventually find its way into an editorial of the nation's paper of record:

Consider a recent chat at a college reception between a student and Condoleezza Rice, who as White House national security adviser was deeply involved in the development of the authorization of brutality and torture.

Among the many absurd things Ms. Rice did was to offer this argument that waterboarding is legal: “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

Pretty neat. And incidentally, I've always thought of this "distributed Big Brother" phenomenon as a good thing, giving us the benefits of surveillance (people get punished for doing bad things) without the accompanying specter of government abuse. Be good: society is watching you!

On a separate note, Rice's behavior in the video made me rise an eyebrow or two. When you accuse someone of stealing bread, and that person starts talking about how hungry they were at the time of the theft, that person starts to sound pretty guilty. Likewise, if you accuse someone of authorizing torture, and that person starts talking about how dreadful 9/11 was, it sounds like this is a person who, as a matter of fact, has authorized torture, and who is basically pleading for mercy given the circumstances.

Anybody else would have done the same thing! You don't know what it's like to go hungry! I had children to feed--I had to steal it!

And I'll tell you something. Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11^th, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans....If you were there in a position of authority, and watched Americans jump out of 80-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people, then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again.

Black and white and red all over...er, you know, from the bloodbath

Ezra Klein nicely summarizes why the newspapers are dying:

...[R]eaders of the Boston Globe can now read the Washington Post or the Guardian right there on the internets. Newspapers from different regions didn't compete with each other 30 years ago. They do today. They didn't compete with Craigslist 30 years ago. They do today. Large regional newspapers once had near-monopolies over both news and advertising in a region. They've lost both. That's why they're failing. Not bad management.

It seems to me that each time you have a technological advancement in how information is distributed, a couple of familiar things happen: the amount of content increases dramatically; publishing becomes more democratic; the overall quality of content decreases dramatically; people fret about losing the benefits of the old technology; existing information outlets that rely on the older technology die off or consolidate. I guess it took a recession to really expose this process with regards to the internet supplanting newspapers.

Google's critique of humanity

When you enter "why won't" into a Google search bar, you get the following suggestions, in this order:

why won't--

• limewire connect
• god heal amputees
• my iphone sync
• my car start
• my ipod turn on
• he marry me
• itunes open
• he propose
• my dog eat
• he call

These are the deep philosophical questions we all face.

Captain Kirk is a dick