Well, aside from finding out that I have a doppelganger, I had an amazing time seeing the bloggers from the first bash -- the Illuminated Donkey, Nick Marsala, Amy Langfield (and her husband, who was most charming when I revealed my utter ignorance of his exalted position), and Raghu
I got to meet others whose blogs I read: the incomparable Walter Olsen, who was kind enough to donate much of his time to explaining the ins and outs of the legal aspects of an article I'm writing; Ravenwolf, who is as interesting in person as she is on the web, although I didn't get enough time to talk to almost anyone; Dr. Weevil, the arch-villain at the center of the Axis of Weevil; intrepid law student Lane McFadden; Orchid, who has the mind of a zillion-year old Zen monk in the body of a 23-year old hummingbird. . . oh, goodness, I'm so tired I can't even remember everyone I met, so if I've left you out, just drop me a note and remind me. Unlike some people I could name (the ones who kept me up long past my bedtime), I had to work today. Oh, and don't forget the newbies, like Steve Kuhn, who everyone has to read not only because he's interesting, but also because he does things like buying pizza for all the bloggers; Avram Grumer, who is new to me, anyway, and very smart and very interesting; the Political Hobbyist, who taught me a thing or two about Enron; and others I know I'm forgetting.
I wish I had been as charming as all the other bloggers -- I've spent a week almost entirely by myself in an echoing trailer and I'm afraid I was so overwhelmed by the experience of having real live people to talk to and real live drinks that I wouldn't let anyone else get a word in edgewise. But I hope they'll forgive me because it was so much fun. I feel rather like I just got off a roller coaster -- whee! Let's do it again RIGHT NOW!!! Which is Lane McFadden's job, and don't think we'll forget, either. To top this he's going to have to get Our Fearless Leader to come.
Blogfest rocked! Among the many exciting revelations -- Asparagirl and I are actually the same person, except she's five years younger. I've always wanted a doppelganger. . .
There's an interview with a guy working for the RIAA side of the Supreme Court suit who says that the case poses serious constitutional issues about whether the court is justified in review, or is engaging in some activism. THat part is compelling.
His defense of the extended copyright terms (from 50 to 70 years after an author's death for private owners; from 75 to 95 years for corporations) isn't.
Putting aside the possible legal dangers of a broad Court decision, how do you think an Eldred victory in the Supreme Court would affect the world of ideas? What are the larger cultural dangers?
There will be fewer derivative works prepared from existing works, because there's much more of an incentive to create a derivative work if you can get an exclusive right from the copyright holder.
There would also be much less incentive to prepare new works. This is difficult to show empirically, but the congressional decision was [designed] to enlarge the period of copyright so that authors would have more incentive to create their works than they had before. It is difficult to show this empirically, but X years from now there will be more works prepared. This is consistent with the congressional viewpoint of the past 200 years.
That just can't be right.
Here's why:
You may remember a while back that I talked about discounting. Discounting is the financial calculation we perform to represent tomorrow's dollars in terms of todays. Now, for many reasons, a dollar today is worth more than that same dollar tomorrow: not only because of inflation, but because of the added risk that you might not get it, and because we are a species that does not like delayed gratification. Now, obviously the farther away that dollar is, the less it's worth.
Choosing an (extremely!) conservative discount rate of 5%, and assuming (totally incorrectly) that payments later will be worth as much as payments today (Mickey Mouse aside, most copyrighted works earn most of their money in the first few years they're out), and also assuming that authors die the day after they copyright their works (to give the most generous possible weight to those future payments), we can still see that this argument is ridiculous. Go look at the little table I made.
As you can see, this guy is arguing that private people would, in the ideal circumstances of a vanishingly low discount, and continuing payments at the same high level as their beginning earnings, make their decisions based on a marginal $117.40 instead of the $1816.87 they earned under the old terms, while corporations would fail to innovate because they wouldn't get an extra $33.70 on top of the $1945.92 they earned under the old system. Maybe there's one guy who really needs that hundred dollars 70 years after he's dead, but the rest of us will keep doing what we're doing, thanks.
There's a new study saying that power plants in the Ohio Valley are/will cause 6,000 additional annual deaths. However, there is no mention of how many additional deaths we'd get by cutting off power to all the people served by the plants.
Of course, you have to discount the fact that I have a tip jar, and am therefore prejudiced in favor of donations. Nonetheless:
First of all, as to profiteering, my monthly take from the tip jar works out to an hourly wage considerably less than that of the Bangladeshi garment workers who send all those people with too much body hair and too few inches of clothing with which to cover it into a tizzy.
Second of all, honestly, the WTC victims families don't need it. They're each going to get over a million dollars, tax free, which is either vastly more than the earnings power of the person they lost (not that I am trying to put a price on losing a loved one -- but that's not what the money is for. It's to help those devastated by the financial repercussions of losing that loved one, not to repay them for the loss of someone that no amount of money can replace) or less than the earnings power of the person they lost, in which case they don't need our help. All the money we donated is now helping such "victims" as residents of Tribeca who were traumatized by the event.
Now, of course I like getting tips. First of all, I'm addicted to three meals a day, and my loan officer likes to get a check each and every month. And second of all, it tells me that someone likes what I do enough to say "thanks" with some cold, hard cash. There is no higher compliment than to have someone give you money that they don't have to give because they value what you do.
But if you don't want to give me money -- if you think it's crass, or whatever -- don't give it to WTC relief. Find a charity that does something you like -- my personal choice is this private school voucher charity -- do your homework to make sure that the money goes where you think it goes, that it actually achieves what the charity claims it achieves, and that no more than 20-25% goes to administrative overhead. We owe it to the WTC families to honor their dead and remember forever their suffering. But we do not owe them any more money.
Charles Murtaugh takes off after the Godless Capitalist for asserting that James McWhorter wouldn't be where he is without affirmative action. Let me say that I'm a big fan of McWhorter, although I don't savvy linguistics, so I'm unable to say whether he's the real deal in his own field. But I'm afraid I have to agree with Godless Capitalist on this one. Here's the offending comment:
McWhorter would likely not have a job at UC Berkeley without affirmative action.
Now, hang onto your britches. I'm not maligning McWhorter; it's just that if he were on a level playing field, the odds that he would have landed a position at Berkely are astronomically low because for your average white, male academic, getting a tenure-track position is akin to winning the lottery. It's the law of supply and demand -- frankly, there are just too many humanities PhD's and not enough jobs. Because they have so few jobs to award -- between none and a small handful each year -- and hundreds of candidates, the criteria they end up using to distinguish between the dozens of qualified candidates are, to put it politely, somewhat arbitrary.
Now add racial set-asides to the mix. (I know, we're not supposed to have quotas. It's just a "plus factor". Except that if you look at the hiring pool against the representation on the faculty, it's damn clear that it's a quota). Blacks are not represented among PhD candidates in proportion to their representation in the population at large. They tend to pursue careers other than academic ones. This is true to varying degrees in various disciplines -- if you're a black astrophysicist, you can pretty much write your own ticket (or so the only astrophysicist I've personally met alleges); on the other hand, it doesn't help you much if you're trying to get a position in African American Studies.
However, universities want blacks represented in their departments at a much higher number than their distribution in the population of PhD's. So a good academic linguist like McWhorter who's white is competing against a couple of hundred other good academic linguists for that Berkely spot. Unless he's the next [oh, I don't know -- insert the name of some famous linguistics guy that isn't J.R.R. Tolkien here], it's unlikely that he's going to get the spot. McWhorter, on the other hand, is competing for the "minority" slot with a handful of other good, minority linguistics PhD's. The odds are simply better. No matter how good he is, if he were dumped in that general pool, it's just not as likely that he'd have the job he has today. That doesn't have to be a slur on McWhorter; it's just a recognition of the chronic oversupply of humanities PhD students.
William Quick has some choice words for the Stanford officials who are trying to do a little post hoc CYA:
Smarmy little backtracking weasels. I see absolutely no problem denying Brown a promotion on the grounds of his beliefs. And if Brown were the athletic director of a Christian school, I'd have no problem with him refusing to hand his football team over to an avowed atheist.
Repeat after me: You are free to believe anything you wish. Your beliefs, however, no matter how sincerely held, do not imply that anybody else should have to honor them, believe them, agree with them, reward them, or ignore them.
Being fresh out of my labor relations classes, I've learned that with Universities it ain't that simple, because they're knee-deep in government money.
And government money means that they're essentially federal government contractors.
And government contractors are legally forbidden to behave in ways, when they are acting for the government (which universities are, legally, pretty much all the time) in which the government is forbidden to behave.
And the federal government is bound by the constitution in all its actions.
It is therefore forbidden to base hiring/firing/promotion/etc. on a person's religion, because that violates their first amendment rights.
Now, as to whether this legal chain violates basic precepts of common sense I will not venture to comment, but that is why the Stanford officials are frantically denying that it has anything to do with his religious beliefs. (It may also violate a stricter state law; I don't know)
But as terrible as this statute may sound, it's also what is probably going to rid us of the scourge of affirmative action at our nation's universities -- if the Supreme Court finds it unconstititutional at state schools, that federal money will carry the ruling over to private ones. Even Harvard's endowment would have a hard time replacing all that federal largesse, and I misdoubt that Larry Summers would be inclined to try.
Steven Green is quoting Dorothy Parker for poetry Wednesdays. Since I spent most of my college years plagued by the delusion that I could become the next Dorothy Parker (any college girls out there who may still be under this delusion, take note: not unless you're short, Jewish, and alchoholic. Also note that the closer you get to dying tragically alone, the less romantic this seems.) I feel that he is tramping on my turf. You don't see Jane Galt swapping margarita recipes, now do you?
Coda
There's little in taking or giving, There's little in water or wine; This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine. Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is The gain of the one at the top, For art is a form of catharsis, And love is a permanent flop, And work is the province of cattle, And rest's for a clam in a shell, So I'm thinking of throwing the battle- Would you kindly direct me to hell?
So I get home from a long day at the construction site, and I hang up my hardhat and take off my boots, and log on to check my email. The first thing to greet me is a note from someone named zzzzlphyskkx wanting to know "WHY ARE YOU STILL LOOKING AT OUTDATED PORN?!"
All I want to know is, where the hell does someone named zzzzlphyskkx get the gall to criticize my taste in pornography?
In theory, a flat tax is slightly simpler than the current graduated tax rate system. But in practice, a flat tax would be exactly as complex as the current system. The difference between a flat tax and a graduated tax is in how, given a certain taxable income, you compute the amount of income tax owed. But that is the last, and simplest step in the tax filing process. One hundred percent of the complexity in the current system is in determining what your taxable income is. Once you have that number, you simply use the look-up tables to figure out what your income tax is. The only thing a flat tax would do would be to change the numbers in that look-up table.
In theory this is true; in practice, the people advocatig a flat tax today are advocating an entire package of reforms, called the "flat tax" for shorthand, which would eliminate all deductions except a generous standard deduction to keep the poor from paying too much tax. That's what would make the system so simple: no need to figure out your taxable income, because it's -- your income.
That's why I often say I'm in favor of a flat tax, even though I'm not against a mildly progressive tax system (I think the current system is too skewed; we're trending dangerously towards the majority, who pay no taxes, being able to vote themselves rich at the expense of the minority who do. Goodbye, invisible hand; hello, stagnation. But I digress). What I'm really in favor of is eliminating all deductions, including the mortgage interest deduction and the differential treatment of capital gains income (heresy!) and having a broader, flatter tax at a lower rate to keep the #%@! billionaires from advocating that I pay more tax.
For all those screaming about the fact that options aren't recorded as an expense to corporations (both Warren Buffet and I agree with you that this is silly -- and if you think that's bad, you should see how they're valued in the models analysts build to value those corporations -- enough to make you faint) you want to know why corporations can get away with it?
I thought so too, at first, but after a couple of days when there didn't seem to be any punchline, I changed my mind.
Good trolls are self-sustaining. This one isn't -- we've all got better things to do. So Warbloggerwatch has to keep saying dumb things to get a rise out of us. If it's a troll, he's putting an uncommon amount of effort into it.
Oh, I admit, I enjoyed myself -- it's been a long time since I got into a good flame war. I'm really too old for them now (as aren't most people over the age of 21, one hopes), but it's like drinking yourself into a coma or committing spontaneous acts of juvenile idiocy -- you wouldn't want to make a habit of it, but once every few years won't hurt you.
But I've retired now. Actually, I didn't contribute much -- no time. And I had my fun, and now it's time to unclog the mailbox and go back to blogging.
But if I've been trolled, good on you. Perhaps I'm slipping.
So part of the reason that I haven't been posting as much is that we've moved at work, and I don't have a phone or anything where I can dial up at lunch. But I do have some tasty pictures of my new digs:
my new office
the view from what we are currently calling the Veranda, though there is a movement afoot to rename it the "sun porch".
closer look at the view
Anyway, so until this move, I had been sharing my office with a nineteen year old. Like most persons of that age, she likes to listen to the kind of radio station that plays the same song eighty-seven times in a row until you have to smack yourself repeatedly in the head with a small hammer in order to dislodge it from your memory banks. Today, in my new abode, as the blessed silence was intermittently broken by the sound of my classic musical selections, I had the opportunity to reflect on what we may learn of the youth of America from their music.
We can learn much. Most importantly, we can learn to fear for them. If their music is anything to go by, theirs is a lost generation.
This thought first occurred to me as I sat through a Saturday-morning Infinite Loop-A-Thon of a song that I think may have been rap, or hip-hop, or perhaps pop – I’m afraid that in these degenerate days, the formal distinctions that we drew between these genres are somewhat blurred, not to say slovenly. At any rate. The song in question concerned a young man with many issues in life, issues which he could apparently only verbalize through growling subaudible imprecations about his desire to party, interspersed with the oft-articulated assertion that he “got what it takes to rock the mike right”. How little they have learned from our experience, I thought. A generation that grew up with the national tragedy of Vanilla Ice safely behind it should know that if you indeed have what it takes to rock the mike right, it’s the sort of thing that should go without saying. No need to draw attention to yourself. People will notice if the mike is right when you rock it. And if it isn’t right – well, then their opinion of you will not be improved if you continue to insist that it is..
Perhaps my thoughts would have stopped there if we had not had several more hours to go before we could switch to another song I’d already subliminally memorized. There is something of the camp sing-a-long flavor to listening to these top forty stations, except of course that I am forbidden to sing because the nineteen-year old somehow feels that my caterwauling is worse than that which is emerging from the radio.
Well, there I sat, continuing to muse upon this bard of the Bronx, thinking, “ahh, teenagers. He’ll soon learn not to allow his mouth to write checks that his ass can’t cash.” Upon saying as much to the aforementioned nineteen year old, however, I was informed that this particular hipster is not only on the downhill side of twenty, but also has several children to his credit. I think we can all agree that while a certain lingering in the golden tides of youth is acceptable, by the time you have fathered children with two separate women, one’s ability to charm with braggadocio has worn thin.
But no wonder they fail to learn from our experience. Their horizon of available emotions, to judge from their music, runs the gamut from A to B.
While even in those long-fled days when I was in the first flower of my youth, there was a somewhat limited repertoire of things which inspired our rock stars to burst into song, yet these children are narrower still, apparently incapable of imagining things outside a few, oft-repeated, tropes:
1) I like to party, and I’m going to do a lot of it.
2) I love some person who doesn’t know I’m alive, and my life would be perfect if only they would “get wi’ me”
3) Now that you’ve gotten wi’ me, my life is perfect, and I’m going to hold onto you forever.
4) I can’t believe things didn’t work out when I was so certain that everything was perfect and I was going to hold on to you forever.
5) You and that trashy thing you’re dating now can go to hell, because I wouldn’t take you back if you were hand-crafted in genuine fourteen carat gold by master craftsman at the Franklin Mint. I’m going to party!
6) I’ve met someone new, so you can just turn right around and walk out the door, because now that I have this new person, my life is perfect and I’m going to hold onto them forever.
From this, one can predict some dire things about the divorce and illegitimacy statistics in years to come. Not to mention the number of forty-something paunchy people wearing too much spandex who will someday be found trying to force their way into the hot new clubs with the tired claim that they’ve got what it takes to rock the mike right.
I can only assume that this lack of emotional depth in their music is the explanation for the latest song stuck in my head (honestly – don’t the DJ’s have enough space for more than five singles at a time on their shelves? Is there some charity to which we can donate in order to rectify the situation?). Its subject is a young man trapped at Stage 4 of the above emotional ouroboros, wandering the streets in an unhappy daze. Its catchy chorus line, which the nineteen year olds like to chime in on for a sort of harmonic stereo effect, is “Can’t believe that this is real/Do I really feel the way I feel?”
What have we done to our youth, dear readers? This am-I-hip-hop-am-I-rap? music has clearly stunted their spiritual and intellectual growth until they are unfit to become the leaders of the free world. I mean to say, how can we remain the world’s only superpower if these are the sorts of questions that occupy their minds? Look at the songs of a generation ago, grappling with issues of war, peace, inter-generational conflict, deep metaphysical questions, and the distressing aftereffects of poor quality control in the peyote factory. Two generations ago, singers not only faced down Hitler with a smile on their face and a song in their heart, but also attacked grammar, spelling, and the future of the transcontinental rail network, all while forcing anyone who wanted to dance to learn complicated partners routines. Compare this now to the newest generation. If their minds are unable to come to a definite decision as to whether what they are feeling is, yes, what they are actually feeling, how can we expect them to address complex balance-of-trade issues, much less create a really satisfactory low-calorie dessert? I tell you, reader, I have seen the future, and we should be afraid. If you have any doubts about the eventual collapse of the social security system, I invite you to spend ten minutes listening to your local teenybopper station. Then I advise you to get in your car and head for the hills.
Sorry I haven't posted little chickadees -- I've been mucho busy with little things like taxes. But I'll try to get something up (including an exciting bit on The Nash Equilibrium and the Coase Theorem (my personal favorite theorem in economics) later today.
So McLaughlin says that the Arab nations are asking Pakistan to donate their nuclear weapons for retaliation against Israel if Israel launches a nuclear strike.
Because it's not like Pakistan has a large, hostile neighbor on its border with nukes -- really, Pakistan's nukes are just lying around collecting dust, like old copies of National Geographic.
And it's not like we'd cut off their foreign aid and/or worse if they handed nukes over to say, Syria.
Or, say, seize the nukes while they were shipping them to a location where they could actually be used against Israel, before we slapped on the sanctions and left them to the mercy of aforementioned large, hostile neighbor.
What kind of drugs do they have over there in the Middle East? Is this why (according to Justin Raimundo) Israel's trying to infiltrate the DEA?
James Ridgeway thinks that terrorism exclusions in insurance coverage are a plot by big, mean insurance companies to re-introduce redlining (the illegal practice of refusing to offer coverage in certain areas, or offering different coverage, because of their racial composition).
Where the insurance industry has been prevented from openly redlining areas it won't cover for racial reasons, terrorism is providing it an entirely new way of limiting or outright excluding inner-city areas, along with certain industries. Put cynically, it's another way for this huge, virtually unregulated segment of the financial services industry to make money off the September 11 attack by limiting policy holders to the cream of the crop and casting aside others on the grounds that they may be subject to terrorist attack.
In what amounts to a new national policy, big insurers (who are now part of an industry that includes banking, real estate, travel, and securities firms) issue terrorist exclusions on policies covering office buildings and businesses such as the chemical industry. But the exclusions reach down to small objects. The owner of two flutes, for example, in the West Village in New York City recently received a "Terrorism Exclusion" that read, "We will not pay for loss, destruction, damage, cost or expense to Covered Property occasioned by or happening through as a direct or indirect consequences of 'Act(s) of Terrorism.' "
For those of us who live in Manhattan, referring to the West Village as "the inner city" seems a little odd, given that most of us can't afford to live there, eat there, or even shop there. And no, I'm not being disingenuous -- after the dramatic opening, there is no further mention of any way in which this is going to affect the inner city, as distinct from the 99% of Manhattan south of 96th Street that is thoroughly gentrified.
Nor does Ridgeway seem to have a damn clue about insurance. The reason insurers won't offer terrorism insurance, especially in a fat, juicy target like New York City, is that the risk can't be quantified. Insurers can estimate how many houses will burn down, etc. in a given population and spread the risk accordingly. There's just no way to figure out what the risk of terrorist incidents is in New York City, because the only people who know that are the terrorists and they're not talking.
Think of it this way: would you be willing to bet, say, 5% of your annual income that a terrorist attack won't damage property in New York over the next year? Because I wouldn't bet one thin dime.
The insurance commission can talk all they want about forcing insureres to offer coverage, but what they'll get is what New Jersey got when it tried to pass a law forcing insurers to sell insurance for less than it cost them to provide it -- the insurers will leave. Insurance companies these days don't carry a lot of their own risk -- they sell a big portion of it to reinsurers like Swiss RE. Which nearly lost everything on the 9/11 disaster, and wouldn't touch terrorist reinsurance with a 10-foot pole. If you force insurance companies to offer terrorist insurance with their other coverage, they won't start writing terrorist policies; they'll stop writing all the others.
Perhaps Ridgeway thinks it's worth the moral victory. Me, I'd rather have the insurance.
So there's a scam where people tell blacks that there are tax credits for descendants of slaves, and charge them hundreds of dollars to help them file for their "credit".
