Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Were the strikers wrong to do what they did?

I'm being chided for "chiding workers for striking selfishly". But I didn't. I merely reported that others were chiding workers for striking selfishly. There's a difference, and in fact, I meant to post about it, but events intervened; between travel, work, and getting ready for Sunday's party, I've been too swamped to follow up.

I hadn't any sympathy for the union, whose complaints about their jobs seemed either unfixable--what was the MTA supposed to do, exactly, about rude passengers or the lack of bathrooms along bus routes?--or unworthy; I just don't think that anyone is entitled to retire at 55.

I had sympathy for those stranded by the strike. And I thought it was really terrible that those who were truly affected weren't the upper-middle-class* professionals like me, but the poorest working stiffs who lost salary they could ill afford. But my sympathy was of the "hey, that really sucks" variety, not the "the bastards have no right" kind. I thought the people lashing out at the union for being greedy were being rather silly. of course they were being greedy. It's their job to be greedy. The whole magnificent capitalist enterprise performs because everyone is greedy, workers as much as companies. Some stripes of conservatives seem to have forgotten that--or were under the bizarre illusion that anyone who accepts a public service job is supposed to be magically transformed into the kind of selfless altruists that in every other context conservatives claim does not exist.

No, I didn't think that there was anything wrong with the union being greedy; I thought that they were being stupid. They were trying to appeal to public sympathy, which on average tends to go to the workers rather than the employer, particularly in Moscow-on-the-Hudson. But by striking at Christmas, in the middle of a cold spell, they alienated their natural constituents--who, unlike me, do believe that you're supposed to care more about public service than private gain. They struck not at big, unpopular companies, whose employees were all on vacation anyway, but at small, photogenic retailers. And because the strike occurred at such a crucial time, they impressed upon the mind of every single New Yorker what a great pension deal they had. And when New Yorker's lashed back, their PR response was comically inept, consisting basically of "that's for not smiling at me when you bought that Metrocard, you bastards". The outrage forced them into a humiliating public retreat. If anything, the strike seems to have made their bargaining position worse.

The union seems to have developed an outsized sense of entitlement due to the fact that without them, the city would not be able to function normally. I get the impression that they expected that the realization of their vital role in the city's life would bring their fellow citizens to a humbling realization of the true worth of transit workers. But there are lots of people without whom the city would not function: sanitation workers, police officers, doctors and nurses, grocery store workers, and the investment bankers whose salaries and taxes pay for it all. New York city could probably get along just fine without me. But most of the rest of the citizens are pretty necessary. When their transportation was taken away, these citizens did not, in aggregate, find a new sympathy for the transit union burgeoning in their hearts; their general reaction was more like "Who the hell do you think you are, Miss Thing?"

* well, by upbringing, anyway

From the desk of Winterspeak:

Who pays for health care?

Paul Krugman has a good column on rising healthcare costs and how to ration them. Krugman has been a frothing nutter for about 6 years now, so it's nice to see something honest and reasonable for a change.

On the topic of rising healthcare costs, Krugman correct identifies the main culprit: new (expensive) medical technology

Consider what happens when a new drug or other therapy becomes available. Let's assume that the new therapy is more effective ... than existing therapies ... but that the advantage isn't overwhelming. On the other hand, it's a lot more expensive than current treatments. Who decides whether patients receive the new therapy? We've traditionally relied on doctors to make such decisions. But the rise of medical technology ... makes ... medicine ... in which doctors call for every procedure that might be of medical benefit, increasingly expensive.

Krugman's prescription is to have the government step in and regulate pricing. He does NOT point out that this fix works by eliminating new (expensive) medical technology. This does not matter if you are an old person or someone with a treatable disease, but sucks if you are a young person or have a (currently) untreatable disease.

Transfering healthcare from future generations to the Boomers may seem like a clearly Good Thing to Krugman, but not to me.

One area where public interest has killed research is in AIDS vaccine research. Current retroviral therapies costs hundreds of dollars a year and need to be taken over a lifetime. Activists have agitated for these drugs to be given for free to poor nations, and patients have agitated to have these free drugs re-imported into rich countries at lower cost. This appeals to our human moral sense, but it reduces the profit from the drugs, and so reduces the incentives to create new drugs.

An AIDS vaccine would eliminate the value of retroviral therapies. Since those are expensive now, an AIDS vaccine would only be worthwhile to develop if it could be priced high -- say $100,000 a pop.

Some people would pay this. Certainly it is worth far more than $100,000 a pop -- in Africa we are told repeatedly that AIDS is costing these poor countries billions of dollars in healthcare and lost productivity. But Merck, or whichever poor schlub actually invested the damn thing could not charge Africa, or anyone, $100,000 for a dose of AIDS vaccine. Public opinion would force them to give it away for free, or for a very low price. For God's sake -- we're talking about the AIDS vaccine here! (And if anyone got sick from the vaccine they would sue the company for $billions.) Therefore, drug companies will not invest money in developing this vaccine, but they will not say they are not developing a vaccine for the very same reason.

You can see this simple logic play out in this CNN piece, where an NIH expert says the private sector has no incentive to develop a vaccine, and a bunch of pharma execs say "no, we're working on it".

In short, this is what Krugman--and all public-healthcare advocates--advocate. Since expensive new medical technologies increases the price of healthcare, eliminating healthcare development (by taking the profit out of it) will reduce the costs. We can then spend this saved money on... I don't know, the leisure needs of healthy 55 year old ex-government employees.

Update
Some commenters have taken issue with my pricing an AIDS vaccine at $100K and comparing that to the cost of retrovirals -- they say I am making a "lump of labor" mistake. This is a good point, so let me clarify.

The question is how high can a pharma company price an AIDS vaccine? Obviously it is very valuable--AIDS is a terrible disease and very expensive to treat (until recently it was fatal). Assuming that the pharma company has some sort of patent and can price above marginal cost (which is a very reasonable assumption -- most drugs under patent are priced much higher than marginal cost), how high politically can the company price? They will certainly come under pressure to dispense the drug, for free, across the continent of Africa and various other poor countries struggling with AIDS. National drug buyers in richer companies will surely demand bulk rates. Citizen groups in the US will surely demand the right to re-import the cheap foreign versions of the drug. Politicians will surely reimport drugs and dispense them at cheap prices. All of these will reduce the profitability of the drug by limiting the drug company's ability to price.

And remember -- they can only price high until the patent wears off and competitors enter the market. At that point competition will reduce the price to marginal cost (or close to it) and the profit is gone.

All new drugs face the above pressures, but I think the AIDS vaccine will face it more strongly since AIDS is a more political disease and it exists in both the rich and poor world. As the power to price goes away--whether for a treatment, vaccine, or cure--the incentive to create new medical technologies goes away as well.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Who's the real empire?

If you want to look for an empire on the North American continent, look north, where the french minority was conquered in the eighteenth century and has been kept in the union ever since against its will, or south, where there's still a large separatist movement. Of course, one might argue that this is because we killed the Indians, unlike the Mexicans, and one would have a very good point. But today, both Canada and Mexico look more like the Chinese and Russian empires than we do.

What about Iraq? Perhaps it was an imperial venture, but it's not now. It seems to me that an important part of the critique of imperialism (spare me, please, the bland dictionary definitions) is that one is trying to essentially operate another country for one's own country's benefit. Otherwise, what we did in Europe and Japan after WWII was an imperial venture, and a damn good idea at that. Perhaps it's just my American blinders on, but we aren't doing that. They're having free elections, and it's clear to everyone (even those who disagree with the policy) that we intend to withdraw and leave them to run their own military and their own state. Certainly we gain from a more stable middle east, and a less volatile oil market (I think almost everyone can agree that this was the goal of the invasion, no matter what one thinks of the actual result), but so does almost everyone else in the world, including the Iraqis . . . and not in some aerie-faery "White Man's Burden" sort of way. The racial/nationalist arguments that animated Western (and Chinese and Russian) imperialism are also absent; few people are arguing that there's anything wrong with the Iraqis except that they had a crappy government.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Oh my

Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The essentials of life

Journalism beats "pre-washed bagged salads"! Scratch that career change to lettuce bagger.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tu quoque?

From Alex Tabarrok:

Liberals are claiming that President Bush has violated constitutional restrictions on torture and spying on Americans. Don't they understand that the constitution is a living document that must be reinterpreted in light of new events and understandings? An originalist reading of the constitution would throw us back into the primitive past when the minimum wage was unconstitutional. Fortunately, conservatives know that constitutional interpretation must change with the times and never more so than now. We live in a different world. The Founding Fathers may have been great in their time but they did not face the problems that we face today and we should not be bound by their 18th century ideas of liberty and executive tyranny.

Just to be clear, I am not endorsing the spying programme. From what I know, I'm against it, not because I think that what the Bush administration has done has seriously violated valuable civil liberties, but because I think we need to draw a line in the sand to prevent the government from accumulating dangerous powers to pry into our lives, and being a staunch civil libertarian, I would like to draw that line well shy of the point where actual harm is done. I'm just engaging in a bit of enjoyable finger-pointing, in the full knowlege that there are just as many hypocrisies on the other side.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is America an empire?

Chris Bertram says yes. Like others on Crooked Timber, he can't resist a little bit of "See! Americans aren't so great anyway, the bastards!" His main argument is that our displacement of the Indians by white settlers is similar to that of imperial Russia and China; QED, we are an empire.

I think his definition is too sloppy. Most people do not now think of the main body of Russia and China as empires, because they are, in the main, full of people who think of themselves as Chinese or Russian. The imperial accusation comes from the substantial populations of Tibetans, Latvians and so forth who do not identify with Russia, and yet get ruled by them anyway.

Indeed, the definition that Mr Bertram uses is useless: if an empire is a nation where one or more dominant ethnic groups kicked the asses of smaller or weaker groups and took their land, then every single nation in the world is an empire. Our sins are merely more recent.

This is not to excuse them; historically; the fact that other people rape and murder and plunder is not an excuse to do so yourself. It is only to point out that such a definition of empire reduces the word to uselessness.

Nor is Mr Bertram correct in thinking that Americans particularly care to divide their colonial sins from Europe's. No one in America is unaware of what happened to the Indians; no one that I have ever met has tried to justify it, though we are all awfully glad that we have a country. Our exceptionalism comes from the fact that, for example, we actually lived here, rather than simply trying to ship the booty back home across the sea. There is a difference between having an overseas empire and having a local one; Russian and Chinese expansionism may not be superior to the European kind (although I would argue that, for all its brutality, in many cases it was), but it has a very different character. But Americans are not unaware that Manifest Destiny was a nationalist/imperialist impulse; indeed, we are so aware of it that the word "imperialist" is generally attached to it in our textbooks.

When Americans react to the word imperialism we are, at least in my experience, reacting to the accusation that what we do in the world now is somehow meaningfully comparable to what Europeans did to Africa in the 19th century. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert: it isn't. While America does try to influence world events in its favour, it does not run governments, much less exploit local economies for its own advantage. Anyone who purports to be unable to distinguish a shoe factory in Malaysia from what King Leopold did to the Congo seems to me to have perceptions so hopelessly deranged as to make further discussion useless.

Were we imperialist in the past? Absolutely. Are we now? I think not. Mr Bertram's post (and, to be fair, the sources which he is debating), conflates the two questions, which just ins't useful.

A propos of absolutely nothing, I haven't seen many Americans going over to Europe to inform them what they think, and then grandly disabusing them of their illusions. That, at least, appears to make us exceptional.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Omnibus recommendations post

For those who asked, here are my recommendations for presents:

Kitchen gear

Electronics

Books

2004 Recommendations

From the desk of Winterspeak:

Ask and you shall receive

Firstly, Merry Christmas.

Secondly, I recently wrote that "I would like the government in general to shift from cash accounting to GAAP accounting. While GAAP accounting has lots of room for fudging, the mismatch between long-term liabilities and short-term cash plays havoc with discussions around pensions in general and social security in particular"

It seems my wish has been granted. This NYTimes article states that

When the numbers are added up under new accounting rules scheduled to go into effect at the end of 2006, New York City's annual expense for retiree health care is expected to at least quintuple, experts say, approaching and maybe surpassing $5 billion, for exactly the same benefits the retirees get today. The number will grow because the city must start including the value of all the benefits earned in a given year, even those that will not be paid until future years.

The pay-as-you-go accounting method that New York now uses greatly understates the full obligation taxpayers have incurred because it does not include any benefits to be paid in the future. Most other state and local governments that offer significant health benefits to retirees use the same method and will also have to bring newer, larger numbers onto their books in the next two or three years.

I would love to know how they got this rule change pushed through. I'd also love to see it happen for social security, medicare, and other long-term government obligations.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More contest mania

We've been nominated for a very special blogging award. And of course, there's still time to vote for my recipe for Citrus Cake, which has made the finals of the Epicurious October recipe contest. I don't think I'll get enough votes to win the refrigerator, but I'm gunning for third place, and with you guys behind me, I just may make it. Remember, you can vote once a day until December 31st, so help me make my recipe stand out.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Long and lean

According to this article, how you're born often correlates with what you look like when you grow up:

An Oklahoma woman gave birth to a 14-pound, 3-ounce baby girl on Friday. Hospital workers say the newborn is already wearing diapers and clothing designed for nine-month-olds. Do giant babies like this one turn into giant adults?

Yes. There's no way to predict exactly how big this enormous infant will become, but studies have shown a linear correlation between birth weight and adult size (as measured by the body mass index). We also know that the length of a baby is associated with its eventual height and weight. In other words, heavy babies tend to grow up fat and long babies tend to grow up tall.

That's certainly true of me. I was 23 inches long at birth, and 7.5 pounds; when my mother told my new pediatrician this, he told her that she had misheard, because there was no such thing as a 23 inch baby, especially one that weighed so little. [cough] years later, I'm 6'2 and 144 pounds.

On the other hand, many of my seriously skinny friends were seriously fat babies, so I'm not sure how strong the correlation is.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

$20M over three years?

The NYTimes declares that

Yet for all the rage and bluster that followed, this war was declared over a pension proposal that would have saved the transit authority less than $20 million over the next three years.

I'm betting that the next three years is the wrong time period when evaluating the cost/benefit of pensions. Later on, the article says

But he said the plan would achieve significant savings, more than $160 million in the first 10 years, with some officials estimating that it would save more than $80 million a year after 20 years.

Mr. Dellaverson said it was important for the authority to try to control its pension outlays even in a year when it had a surplus. The authority's pension outlays for the transit workers have soared to $453 million this year, triple the amount in 2002.

I would like the government in general to shift from cash accounting to GAAP accounting. While GAAP accounting has lots of room for fudging, the mismatch between long-term liabilities and short-term cash plays havoc with discussions around pensions in general and social security in particular

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Memo to self

. . . do not blog about the people I kill. It can only get me in trouble.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Fast food nation

It looks like the Center for Science in the Public Interest is gearing up for another lawsuit, this one against soda manufacturers for selling their wares in schools. It seems crazy that you could sue Coca-Cola for allowing distributors to sell their products to state education systems, but then, it seemed crazy that you could sue tobacco companies because you lit up a roll of burning leaves and stuck it in your mouth twenty times a day for forty years.

As it happens, I was one of the first journalists to predict these lawsuits, waaaay back in 2002. Still seems crazy to me. But then, that's why I'm a journalist and not a plaintiff's lawyer.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

We can't go on like this

How long can the housing bubble sustain itself?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Et TWU?

And what are the transit workers getting out of the strike? Not as much as they undoubtedly expected. Over 1,000 of them have already crossed the picket line and returned to work, according to NY1. Presumably, these are the lily-livered lukewarm members who could be expected to cave almost instantly. Still, Toussaint can't be feeling too frisky if so many workers can't even stand a second day of striking.

The union is getting hammered from all sides. A court ordered the union fined $1 million a day, which will rapidly throw the union into receivership if the strike goes on. Meanwhile, the national union is taking the MTA's side:

"TWU (International) hereby notifies all members of Local 100 of their obligation under the December 13, 2005 preliminary injunctions and the December 20, 2005 temporary restraining orders issued by the New York Supreme Court to cease any and all strike or strike-related activities and to report to work at their regularly assigned work hours and work locations.

"As has been reported in several media outlets, I personally spoke before the Local 100 Executive Board when it met on the morning of Dec. 20, and told them that I would not approve this strike. I told them that the only road to contract victory for the membership was not by strike but continued negotiation. I continue to believe this. It should not be construed in any way that my refusal to sanction this strike lessens my resolve to secure the best possible contract for this membership."

It even posts the court opinion on its website without one word about oppressive, anti-labour judges, or the rights of the working man. I think it's safe to say that the TWU members, who by law lose two days of pay for every day they strike, cannot count on any financial help from the national, and the fines will gut the local's strike fund, such as it is.

A correspondant writes:

[The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA)] took almost everything off the table in exchange for a new pension tier for new employees that would have them contribute 6% to their defined benefit plan, not the current 2%.

If you presume a 4% annual turnover in staff, in 10 years, 40% of the 30,000 covered workers will pay. That's 12,000 workers. That's the equivalent of 2500 employees. Now the TWU workforce loses in penalties the equivalent of 250 employees each day. So if the strike goes on for 10 days, even if they win, they will have struck for nothing.Worse, existing employees will pay for the future employees

And the union will hurt because the penalties will empty their treasury and the loss of check off will hurt their income.

I hope that this makes sense. The union can only win if the MTA waives penalties, and I don't sense any willingness to do this.

Of course, they may have to, if they can't get the workers back on any other way. Steven Malanga is arguing in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that they shouldn't bother:

New York officials should take a page from President Reagan's playbook: The MTA should start sending out termination letters to striking workers for breaking the law, and hiring a new work force -- including offering jobs to current workers, but on terms set down by the MTA.

While rebuilding the work force, transit officials could unleash the privately owned van services and bus lines, which they currently prohibit from operating along public bus lines, to protect the MTA's and the TWU's monopoly. The MTA should begin handing out long-term contracts for these operators to provide alternate, competitive services on a permanent basis.

New York officials should also privatize big chunks of the transit system, as many other cities in the U.S. and abroad are doing. For the past 50 years New York has unfortunately moved in the opposite direction, preferring to take over private lines and to house transit operations in a gigantic state agency, the MTA, or to offer no-bid franchises to a few politically connected and heavily subsidized private lines -- all in the mistaken belief that having workers on the public payrolls would prohibit strikes and make the system more reliable.

Elsewhere, transit authorities are more like outsourcing contractors than operators, bidding out lines and overseeing routes. Denver and San Diego have contracted 35% of their bus routes. But perhaps the best model is London, where, spurred by Margaret Thatcher, officials began an aggressive transit privatization program nearly 20 years ago. London's bus lines, though designed by the city, are now operated by some 40 private companies. Only on such a model can New York begin to rein in its high costs and stop repeated union blackmail.

This is rather kind to the British rail system, which has had severe problems from the strange structure of privatisation. But certainly, deregulation would ease the havoc the union could wreak. I'm still betting on the union, though. Sometimes crazy is better than smart.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Strike II

Another day of New York's exciting transit strike.

Judging from the news shows, the union has not ingratiated itself with New Yorkers. Even other civil servants being interviewed basic took a "to hell with them" attitude when interviewed by the roving cameras. The people who expressed support of the union seemed to be disproportionately people who lived two blocks from work.

My commute was, of course, hell . . . it took me a full three minutes to roll over and pick up my computer this morning. I'll be working from home until the strike ends. It's not even keeping me from doing my Christmas shopping, because my parents have a car, which I can drive out to the suburbs any time I want. I suspect that if nothing else, the transit union has given a nice boost to telecommuting. Props to the organisation with the strategic vision to try and put itself out of business before its competitors do.

The people being hurt by the strike, unfortunately, are mostly people who make less than the transit workers do. Small businesses are being gutted by this; the last few days before Christmas is the busiest time of the year for most retail establishments, and their customers can't get to them. One of the news shows had small businessmen complaining that this was going to bankrupt them, and I've no doubt that it's true for at least some of New York's retail stores, which often operate on a shoestring.

Meanwhile, poor workers, who tend to work hourly, are losing salary that they can ill-afford. The Transit Union put up a blog early in the process to report on the strikes; they seem not to have realised that they were going to get flooded with angry denunciations of the strikes in the comment section. As of 3:30 yesterday, they had almost 800 comments. While there was a fair amount of anonymous anti-union trolling, the comments were running about 2:1 against the union. Sometime yesterday evening, the union disabled the comments section. Unfortunately for them, I left the page open overnight, and was thus able to save the comments for your delectation. I've posted them in a handy Word document for anyone who's interested.

It's hard not to gape at the astonishing cluelessness of MTA workers, and some of their boosters, a substantial portion of whom merrily announced that they were supporting the MTA's fight from the safe remove of cities thousands of miles from New York. While the strike has so far deprived me of one free lunch and drinks with some friends from grad school, even I was tempted to endorse one acquaintance's plan to go to Seattle and Cleveland and encourage the fire departments that serve these yahoos to go on strike before engaging in a spot of selective arson. To people who complained about having to carry their children to day care through the frigid weather, lost pay that was forcing them to cancel Christmas, inability to take exams or get home for the holidays, being stranded uptown without Christmas presents for their kids, or losing so much traffic at their businesses that they might lose the shop, the MTA workers and their supporters proclaimed . . . suck it up, because the transit workers need to retire at 50! My favorite comment so far (I haven't yet read them all) came from an MTA worker, responding to a parent who had had to push their tot to day care in a stroller during the early morning freeze:

To the mother who must walk with her son in the cold...We all have to do what we have to do...My son has to figure out a way to get to school but is he crying?? NO because he understands that his mother is doing what she has to do.To those that feel this strike is an selfish act on MTA employees parts I say you are the true selfish ones only now thinking about how you'll get to work or around the city when any other time you take us and our duties for granted. It seems actually it is obvious your unappreciativeness towards the people that get you from point a to point b on a daily basis regardless of most circumstances. Belive and trust we do feel bad and apologize for what many of you will feel and for the inconvience our actions may cause but I will not apologize for doing what I can to make a better life for MY CHILDREN and MYSELF and if it means at this point to inconvience the people of NYC then so be it. Why are we the selfish ones?? Why should we work for month or years with out raises. Yes I took this job because of the benefits it affords and I am glad for the most part that I did it serves my purposes for the life I choose to live despite the indfference,mistreatment and disrespect that has been meted out to myself and my coworkers.But I'll be damn if after the opportunity arises to make the things that should/could be/get better better will I apologize. Please please try and understand the reasons for a event that has been long long long over due.

I feel that commenting on this response would be gilding the lily. But I begin to suspect that the TWU took down the comments not because of the nastygrams they were getting, but because of the rotten image their putative supporters were projecting.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Blame Canada

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I joined Derek Lowe in making fun of drug companies for pretending that drugs from Canada were somehow dangerous, because they didn't have those good old American quality controls. This is silly, though in their defense, if they offered the true arguments against drug reimportation, they would be stampeded by seniors groups who basically don't care if some young whippersnappers who don't know how to show proper respect to their elders maybe don't get any new drugs in twenty years.

But according to this WSJ piece (subscription required), I may have been wrong . . . not because Canadian drugs are substandard third-world counterfeits, but because many of the drugs being represented as "Canadian" are coming from somewhere else:

The agency looked at packages suspected of containing pharmaceuticals sent from India, Israel, Costa Rica and Vanuatu -- four countries the FDA said appeared to be sources of drugs that were ordered from pharmacies alleged to be Canadian in origin.

Out of nearly 4,000 parcels examined, almost 1,700, or 43%, had been ordered from "Canadian" Internet pharmacies and were represented as being of Canadian origin. Of the 1,700 packages, 85% of the drugs weren't manufactured in Canada and came from 27 different countries.

"This operation suggests that drugs ordered from so-called Canadian Internet sites are not drugs of known safety and efficacy," Andrew von Eschenbach, the FDA's acting commissioner, said in a statement Friday. "These results make clear there are Internet sites that claim to be 'Canadian' that, in fact, are peddling drugs of dubious origin, safety and efficacy."

While Canadian drugs are just as safe and effective as American ones, there are lots of countries where that isn't true. Another reason to tell my family to steer clear of Canadian internet drugs.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why didn't they get a warrant?

The big issue with the NSA scandal seems to be not that they spied on people located in the US, but that they didn't get a warrant to do so. Why not? Good question. A possible answer from The Poor Man:

. . . a lot of bloggers have been coming to the conclusion that there was some kind of new technology or technique being employed which would either make it difficult to obtain enough warrants, if any at all (Noah Shachtman seems to have picked this up first). I should mention that there’s an alternate theory that the WH just wanted to spy on domestic political enemies, which certainly seeems like their MO, but even if that were the case, they would need some kind of cover story to sell to both the career NSA types and the few congresspeople that they briefed. Looking at Jay Rockefeller’s letter, it seems clear that this was the case, that his briefing referred to some kind of technological mumbo jumbo:

Clearly the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues. As you know, I am neither a technician or an attorney. Given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities.

As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter’s TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveiliance.

So what is this magic surveillance technology that confused John Rockefeller and obsoleted the FISA court? Well, who knows. It’s Top Secret. But this being the blogosphere, we can speculate: first of all we turn to the original NYT article for hints:

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

“Dirty numbers” in this context means phones - most likely pre-paid cell phones, but any kind of phone can be gotten pretty anonymously - that terror suspects use to contact the “home office”, as it were. The government’s goal, presumably, is to get taps on any dirty line (I’m using phones as an example but it could apply just as easily to e-mail addresses, IP addresses, or screen names) as quickly as possible. That is very difficult if the subjects keep switching to new prepaid numbers. So, if you’re not particularly concerned about civil liberties, what to do? The most obvious idea is to tap EVERY international call, and analyze the substance offline. This requires a lot of time and a lot of manpower, and, unless your arabic voice recognition software is extremely good, doesn’t necessarily give you a lot of accuracy. The next idea is to determine via other methods (name or address matching, tracking calls from known locations) what numbers are attached to suspects, and use those. This potentially gives you great accuracy, but finding the right numbers takes quite a bit of time, and if the suspects are switching phones often enough, you might never get any intelligence. The third option is to algorithmically determine what numbers are most likely to be of interest (based on calling patterns, more or less), and then focus on those. Techniques for doing this kind of network analysis are well known (there’s a paper, which I can understand about three words of, here, if you’re interested) and have been used for years by phone companies to determine, for instance, what accounts are likely to be delinquent. The problem with this is that it takes time and a good chunk of data to determine the anomalous nodes, and while you’re waiting for enough statistical certainty to pick a target, actionable intellligence will be lost. So I think that the NSA is using essentially the opposite of this approach. When a novel phone number places or recieves an international call, that call is automatically recorded, and a tap stays on this line until the statistical analysis indicates that it is likely not a number of interest. This corresponds pretty well with several of the points in the NYT article: they said that there were “as many as 500″ of these warrantless taps going at any one time, which sounds like a reasonable number if you assume that only numbers (e-mail addresses, etc.) with no previous international traffic are added, and older numbers are dropped constantly. It provides a great deal of “mobility”, as discussed by WPE in his press conference, since you would be sure of continuing a tap even if the subject moved to a new phone. Also, using this approach makes it very difficult to obtain individual warrants, because the rate of number turnover would be high, and the number of simultaneous taps large. Not to mention that the vast majority of lines tapped would have nothing to do with terrorism, although it’s sounding like the FISA court may be pretty mellow on that score. It also sort of explains what the risk is in revealing this program, since now suspects would know that any international call they made, even if it was from a brand new phone to a “clean” number in a safe country, would be tapped.

In implementing this the administration may also have believed that (as in the TIA debacle) the fact that surveillance of innocent American citizens would not be indefinite in this program might have made it an easier sell for those members of Congress they were obliged to inform. It seems like the biggest mistake they made may have been believing they needed to circumvent the legal system to implement this program; while warrantless wiretaps of Americans in this form are risible, it’s not too hard to imagine a variant of this program that would have easily gained Congressional approval in November 2001, abhorrent as us crazy civil libertarian types might find it.

This doesn't actually seem particularly likely to me; I'd think that there were more phones than this initiating their first transatlantic phone call during any reasonable time period. But it's better than the other answers I've heard, which have consisted of a blank stare.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Strike!

So the transit system has shut down.

It's not affecting me personally; I'm just working from home. (Although I am missing our editorial holiday lunch, and I will be unable to inflict holiday baked goods on my coworkers, since my office closes for the holiday this afternoon.) Other people aren't so lucky. Midtown traffic is ordinarily very bad; on the worst bits of the avenues you can expect to go about one twentieth of a mile every 2-3 minutes (one block per stoplight cycle). But today it is, if you can imagine such a thing, even worse. The news shows are full of people trying to walk to work across the Brooklyn Bridge. It's cold out there.

A few blocks to the north of me, 96th street is blocked off by police lines; I saw them when I was out walking the dog. It looks like something out of one of those movies where right-wing militants turn America into a police state and you have only 72 hours to get the secret plans to the rebels before you go straight to video.

The union, meanwhile, is running ads on local cable whining that they didn't want to strike, they just had to because the MTA is so awful to them. This is not true. The union is very hard left, like transit unions in most places. I'm not sure why this should be; perhaps because most of the workers have to do very little to earn their pay. The train drivers don't actually, y'know, drive; the rails take care of that. I'm told that they could easily be replaced with the kind of self-driving systems you see in airports, if the union weren't so powerful. Admittedly, the conductors are highly skilled: it takes them years to learn to mumble into the announcement microphones in a secret language that no one in the entire world except them understands. But their main useful task appears to be sticking their heads outside the window to make sure no one's limbs are sticking out of the train, a job that could be eliminated if idiots didn't try to cram themselves through closing doors because they know the conductor will keep the train from driving off with their arm waving out the door. And the primary responsibility of the toll both workers is making sure that the line to buy Metrocards never gets shorter than ten feet. All of these jobs leave a great deal of time for contemplation, which the transit workers presumably spend eradicating every vestige of false consciousness.

The point being that the workers did indeed want a strike. They've been itching for it for years. That's because they know they will win. In the private sector, the company would probably fire them and replace them with machines. But this is not the private sector, and the transit union controls not only a large number of votes, but a huge amount of funding. The City Council recently changed the law to allow political campaign contributions to come from individual locals, rather than the national union. That means that they can swing a huge chunk of change by getting locals from around the counry to donate to our council members.

There's a surprising upsurge of sentiment for going Ronald Reagan on them. This will not happen; Reagan had a large reserve of skilled air-traffic controllers from the military that he could instantly deploy to take over the ATC jobs while new people were trained. There's no such reserve of non-union train drivers, and while driving a subway train is not exactly rocket science, transit folks are still haunted by the fact that one of the worst subway disasters in New York history occurred when scabs were brought in during a strike in the early twentieth century. That's even presuming that there were union-busters in the Metropolitan Transit Authority; there aren't. The organization is solidly Democratic, as is the city power structure that is trying to influence the negotiations.

But the union's position is surprisingly unsympathetic, even to liberal New Yorkers. The workers make an average of $55K, more than what your average New York journalist makes. They have a lavish pension, on which they can retire at 55, and incredible benefits. And yet to judge from their interactions with ordinary New Yorkers, you would think that they were enslaved in Egypt. Everyone I know detects an expression of positive glee on the faces of the conductors who close the door just as you are getting to it, or the booth operator who makes you stand there, watching the trains come and go, while she stacks her pennies in orderly piles. No one I've talked to feels that they are entitled to more money, fewer disciplinary hearings, or better benefits. Everyone seems pretty eager to see the transit workers forced to wait until their sixties to retire like the rest of us. It's not as if the bulk of the jobs are so physically demanding that it's unreasonable to expect them to keep sitting in their booths for another ten years.

It won't happen. The union will win, as unions always win in New York City. All this strike is doing is providing moderate excitement to stranded New Yorkers before the MTA caves. Sic semper tyrannis.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Dell hell

You know, over and over again I have stood up for Dell Computer. Sure, their outsourced technical support people generally can't speak English so well, and given that they are, like, 5,000 miles away from the mother ship, they don't really understand the company procedures well enough to help customers when something goes wrong. But who is better, I asked. Who is providing the kind of good old American service we used to expect from our computer companies? No one, that's who, and given that, you certainly can't beat the value of a Dell.

That was then. I have just had what may be the worst customer service experience of my life with Dell. They may have soured me permanently on the company.

Let us travel back through time to one month ago, November 15th, when my mother asked me to order a computer as a surprise Christmas gift from my grandmother to my Aunt Annie, who has taken over the job of running the house and paying the bills since my grandfather died. "I will order it from Dell right now," I told her, and forthwith did, finding a very nice deal on a Dimension 3000 that set us back a little over $850 including shipping and tax.

Fast forward to December 5th, when the computer has still not arrived. There begins the odyssey of telephone calls to people at Dell, the US postal service, and my grandmother's caregiver, trying to track down the elusive package. No one knows where it is. Nor do the Dell people evince that much interest in finding out, despite their promises to locate it immediately and call me back with the information.

Trusting in them, I let things slide until sometime around the 10th, at which point my mother begins to worry that the computer will not arrive in time for Christmas. Another call to Dell. Where is the computer? No one knows. But not to worry, they will order us another one and have it Fedexed when it is ready. It will arrive in plenty of time for Christmas.

At that point, I begin my routine of calling Dell once a day to see where the computer might be. It's in process, I am told; the people at the customer service desk cannot track it down until it comes out of manufacturing and is ready to ship.

Today, I call them again. "Where is the computer?" The first fellow I call, located somewhere in Latin America, seems to be very nice except for his near-total inability to comprehend my English. Now, I have never won any diction prizes, but when I say "two", very few people in my experience mistake that for the number "three". He also cannot locate my records in the system, despite being provided with the original order number, my name, and my telephone number. Eventually I ask to be transferred to a supervisor. I am transferred . . . to the supervisor's mailbox.

I hang up and call Dell again. This time the Indian fellow has no difficulty whatsoever locating my record. "it's been cancelled," he informs me cheerfully. Apparently, Dell is no longer manufacturing that model. Why didn't they, y'know, call us to tell us that the order had been cancelled? Blank silence. I mean, it's a pity that it's now six days until Christmas and all, but they'll transfer me to hardware support, who will tell me what my options are.

Keep in mind that I have been calling them every single day since we ordered the replacement, to make sure that the thing was actually percolating through the system. On Friday afternoon, five days after the replacement had been ordered, no one mentioned this little issue to me. Apparently, they stopped manufacturing the Dimension 3000 some time this weekend. Undoubtedly all the workers were in Hong Kong, protesting at the WTO.

Hardware support, when they finally pick up the phone 15 minutes later, is, of course, completely befuddled as to why I, who have not yet received a computer, am speaking to them. I, too, had tried to suggest that hardware support might not be the appropriate place to transfer me, but the customer service representative had assured me that they would be able to help me out. Of course, they could not. What they could do is waste another ten minutes asking me for the exact same information I'd given to the previous fellow, and then a further 5-10 minutes transferring me back to customer care--whereupon I was informed that Dell was doing me the tremendous favour of crediting my account for the $850.

You would think, that with all the customer service problems they have been having, Dell would not want another customer out there saying "Dell strung me along for a month and then dumped me on the computer market five days before Christmas." You would think, in fact, that they would be falling all over themselves to fedex me the closest thing they could find to what we ordered at no extra cost to myself. Or maybe you wouldn't think that. Maybe I'm some sort of woeful naif with an outsized sense of entitlement who believes that just because Dell's colossal screwups threaten to leave my family without a present under the tree for my much-put-upon Aunt come Christmas morning, that Dell should try to fix it.

I am currently holding for a supervisor. I have now been on the phone with Dell for well over an hour, and so far all I know is that I should have bought the damn computer somewhere else. I'll know better next time.

Update Should have seen it coming: Dell disconnected me, but not until after I waited another ten minutes or so to speak to a supervisor. Now on call #3.

Update II They've cancelled the order. Five days before Christmas, and I have to find another computer that my family can afford. Dell's idea of resolving the problem is magnanimously informing me that they will credit the money back to my account, as if not charging me for merchandise that they haven't, y'know, sold me were some kind of enormous innovation in customer service.

I wish I could be funny about this. But we had a limited budget for the computer--my grandmother is not wealthy--and now I have to go out and try to find something decent in that price range, which is going to be pretty damn hard. There's a very good chance that my Aunt Annie, who has been taking care of my grandmother without complaint for over a year since my grandfather died, will not have her gift under the tree. Everyone in the family was so looking forward to having something special to give her to reward her for all her hard work, and now we're back at square one, with five days to the holiday and no time to find a good deal. If I weren't so mad, I'd cry.

Update III One of the major pitfalls of outsourcing to India, it seems to me, is that when I said "this is a Christmas present for my Aunt, who's been taking care of my frail little 91-year-old-grandmother all year", I was met with the same suave lack of interest as if I'd informed them that I planned to start writing a memoir of my years as the assistant sanitation chief for Dubuque as soon as I got the computer. That only added to my rage, which, to be fair, was already pretty considerable. They also displayed no motivation to even pretend that they were going to do anything except repeat that the Dell Dimension 3000 is no longer being manufactured, but--never fear!--they are graciously prepared to give me my money back.

Update IV I seem to have inadvertently implied that Indians are incompetent and/or mean in the update above. The point was just that Indians presumably don't understand the cultural significance of Christmas, any more than I understand the cultural significance of . . . umm . . . that holiday where they throw colored powder all over each other. Although it looks like mad fun. I assume that Indians are just as compassionate and caring as Americans are. Although I have only met a small fraction of India's 900 billion people, my experience so far has been very pleasant. If we can generalise up from my small sample, Indians are lovely people indeed.

Update V I contacted Dell's press office to give them a chance to respond. They're being very nice and trying hard to resolve this.

Update VI Dell has just called to offer me free expedited shipping and a 10% discount on a similar refurbished machine from their outlet. I've had very good experiences with their outlet machines . . . I'm typing this on one right now . . . so I'm very happy with that. In fact, all I wanted last night was for them to Fedex me an outlet machine, which I could see they had on hand, and pay for the expedited shipping. Mistakes do happen, and I don't blame Dell for the fact that things went awry. I was just angry that they weren't fixing the problem, which they've now done, and exceeded what I thought I was entitled to. So three cheers for Dell, after all.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Crimes of passion

Like many spirited young girls, I chewed the legs off my Ballerina Barbie. I had no idea, however, that such violence was epidemic, much less that it was so dangerous to society.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

How thoughtful

Don't forget to get those cards out this holiday season.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Worthy work

The Mark Kleiman post to which I responded below contains this this lovely sentiment:

Could there by anything crazier, at a social level, than telling young people with the talent and determination to pursue careers in the natural sciences that doing so isn't a wise move from a personal-financial-planning perspective? It's true, of course. But think of the social waste involved in converting a potential biologist in to, say, a detail man for a pharamaceutical company. Even at an individual level, do we really want to live in a world in which most of us have to choose between work that is materially rewarding and work that is satisfying?

Well, if we don't tell them that, who will take out the garbage? Do our taxes? Teach snotty, disinterested undergraduates what a demand curve looks like? Do you think people would do any of these things if the wolf weren't pawing at the door?

This is a pretty regular political plaint, and it strikes me the way much of feminism does: extremely privileged educated people attempting to disguise their class interest as concern for those less fortunate than they are. Not consciously, I mean. But underneath the surface, the movement ends up being all about *me*.

I, like Mr Kleiman, am one of those lucky enough to have an extremely fun and rewarding job. Should I also get to be paid as well (or even nearly as well) as my classmates who went into consulting or banking? If there weren't such a dramatic income differential between journalists and academics and silmilarly gifted people who go into more lucrative professions, everyone in the entire world would be trying to get my job. And frankly, journalism is competitive enough already. Isn't it nicer that some people can be compensated for their willingness to spend dreary weeks studying Nucor Steel's supply chain by having a bigger house and nicer vacations than I do?

The world doesn't really need more journalists; people already have more writing than they can (or will) read. Perhaps it needs more academics, though it seems to me that the big surplus supplies are in fields that produce little obvious benefit to anyone except the academics themselves. (I mean, I think it's nice that someone knows all about the fishing industry in 15th century Denmark, but I doubt my fellow citizens benefit very much thereby). We have a shortage of American students who want to be engineers, organic chemists, and so forth, even though these fields pay quite well; science is hard work. I see no benefit from encouraging more people to pursue a career in teaching university-level history rather than becoming marketing executives at Kraft--certainly not one worth inserting the hammer-hands of the government into the economy.

At the lower level of the income/education scale, the choice that people are making is generally not between work that is entertaining and work that is remunerative; it's between work that is physically demanding, and work that is mind-numbingly boring. And the fact is that there's a huge amount of very boring, often disgusting work out there that needs to be done. Someone needs to make sure my computer gets shipped, change old people's diapers, clean school buildings, drive busses, sort mail, stock shelves, answer phones, file papers, and so forth. It is pretty unfair, of course, that that person isn't me, just because I happened to be born smarter and a better writer than the average person. And it's also pretty unfair that, in general, crappy boring work is less well remunerated than more mental endeavors. But that's the cruelty of a bell curve; intelligence is clustered along a distribution, and as jobs get more complicated, they get more interesting, even as fewer and fewer people can do them well. Severely disrupting the relationship between intelligence and wages (by which I mean, not "increasing the minimum wage", but setting things up so that file clerks get paid more than biology professors), would play havoc with the economy in ways that would ultimately make us all poorer.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Happy are they who redistribute their income

Mark Kleiman argues that my posts below imply support for Robert Frank's thesis that we should enact a liberal income redistribution scheme, because money doesn't buy happiness above a certain low income threshhold.

No, no, a thousand times no. I have been distinctly underwhelmed by Robert Frank's work, which argues from happiness research to conclude that--shockingly!--it proves scientifically that we should adopt the political platform that Mr Frank just happens to have believed in before he wrote the book.

Now, I am not as hostile to happiness research as, say, Will Wilkinson. I am willing to posit that status-seeking expenditure, on things like houses too big for a normal family to regularly use all the rooms, or expensive cars when the owners are not the kind of people who particularly care for driving or auto mechanics, does indeed strike me as a collective action problem. (A collective action problem is one where all the individuals in a group would be better off, say, striking to get more wages, but because they are only better off if everyone does it, they generally take another course of action acting alone.) Everyone buys expensive goods in order to signal their status to the community, but because status is a zero-sum game--one person must lose status in order for another to gain it--these are wasted activity from the point of view of the group; there is no net gain in happiness from all that expenditure.

But while to a liberal that implies that we should take some of that money that isn't producing any happiness and give it to others, to a conservative this points up the essential futility of income redistribution. Since you will be redistributing the money without redistributing the status, you'll produce no net gain in happiness. The average welfare mother in America has better health care, entertainment, food, shelter* and clothes at her disposal than the Rockefellers did at the turn of the last century.

You could give welfare mothers in New York City $1000 more a month to spend on housing, and they would still live in exactly the same crappy apartments they now occupy, because there is no more housing being built, and with a 2% vacancy rate, landlords can afford to be choosy about their tenants. That's why they're all herded into government housing projects. And in my experience, admittedly limited, public housing tenants complain about two things that no amount of money will fix absent major institutional changes (most of which would be opposed by the left): having the government for a landlord (imagine trying to get your pipes fixed by the DMV) and the other tenants, many of whom are criminal or antisocial, and tend to destroy both safety and the physical plant of the housing project.

Similarly, let me posit that any fashion trend, automobile, restaurant, or what have you, that is adopted by the poor will rapidly become a low-status item among higher income quintiles. SInce Robert Frank's writing implies that the physical objects do not actually make anyone happier, why should we give the government massive intrusive powers in order to give the lower quintiles objects which will not confer upon them the status that the objects are purposed for? Why, indeed, should welfare cover anything but enough food to keep you from being hungry, enough shelter and clothing to keep you from being cold? Our pioneer ancestors managed to live full and happy lives on such a regime.

What about those intangibles that could make us all so much happier: income security and increased leisure?

I have several problems with this. For starters, while I think that people spend a lot of money that doesn't make them happier, that doesn't mean I think that no spending makes people happier. My high speed internet connection, for example, makes me materially happier than I used to be, because it has enabled me to discover a community of people that I never would have met otherwise. A tired mother getting off her feet at an Arby's while the kids toss french fries at each other is certainly happier than she would be making mac-and-cheese for the zillionth time at home. Robert Frank (and Mark Kleiman's post) implies that there are certain activities and professions that are more worthwhile than others, and that we should design the economy in order to push more people into those things. But this presumes that Mr Frank (or any technocratic planner) has the ability to correctly identify the right activities. I am deeply sceptical of this--and I am certainly not going to hand that sort of power over to anyone based on studies who data comes from self-reported surveys, a notoriously unreliable data source.

Because I don't know which new technologies will make people happy, and which ones will merely enable them to waste more of their hard-earned money, I want the economy to sort that out, not some exquisitely educated clown like me. And while Mark Kleiman apparently thinks that following Robert Frank's suggestions would have no impact on GDP growth, I vehemently disagree.

Take income security. Now, believe you me, if anyone knows how much it sucks to have your carefully planned life overturned, it's me. I didn't just watch my city blow up due to 9/11; I saw my career and my relationship with my then-boyfriend implode, leaving me, at the age of 29, living with my parents and doing clerical work. If you had asked me beforehand if I wanted to buy insurance against just such an eventuality, I would have paid a pretty penny to avoid it.

But I would have been wrong. That was undoubtedly the worst period of my life, made even more dreadful by a growing fear that it would never end, and my life would be ruined. But the loss of everything I had counted on was what enabled me to take an enormous risk: becoming a journalist. I never would have dared to do something so insane if I'd had a cushy job. And that was possibly the best thing that ever happened to me.

The overwhelming majority of people simply will not reach their potential without the fear of catastrophe dogging their footsteps. There are some standouts; perhaps Mr Kleiman is among them. But there's a reason that I have produced a lot of stories on the world economy, and almost nothing of the novel I've wanted to write for years: I have a demanding editor who controls my paycheck demanding regular work out of me.

I don't mean to paint some Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook farm picture of the world, where suffering always spurs innovation, and risk is always rewarded. Some people whose expectations go awry never do get back on their feet. But most people whom I met have managed to pull together fuller, richer lives after the disaster pared their life back to essentials. And if the possibility of failure weren't real, the impetus to rise above wouldn't be, either. Guaranteeing people that their living standard can never really fall strikes me as a very bad idea.

Would leisure be bad for the economy? Well, it seems to me that France's experiment has revealed that mandating more leisure would, at the very least, be bad for full time employment. And the availability of full-time employment is one of those things that happiness research suggests does make people happier. At the upper reaches of the professional scale, it would also be bad for innovation. You can split a waiter's shifts pretty easily, but you cannot get as good as a result by splitting a lawyer's work in half and assigning the two halves to two different lawyers. That's because the true work--the reason you need a lawyer and not a paralegal--takes place in the lawyer's head, where all her knowlege about the case swims around together and forms connection between the various facts of the case. That's the main reason that big law firms don't have many part-time associates, and partners don't get to take it easy once they've got it made.

What about income distribution? I've said before that I think the supply-siders who argue that lowering our marginal tax rates will raise revenue are full of bunk. But that doesn't mean that I believe the Laffer Curve doesn't operate anywhere. High taxation has a pretty high deadweight loss, and given that the Fortune 500 is increasingly composed of people who earned, rather than inherited their money, I think it's inadvisable to risk it with the really large government taxation and regulation plans that would be necessary to bring Mr Frank's plans to fruition.

In sum, just because I think that people spend money on things that don't really make them happier doesn't mean I want the government to step in and make them stop, especially when so many of the prescriptions are potentially so harmful. Nor do I agree with Mr Kleiman's claim that individuals really can't deal with the vicissitudes of life; a middle aged man who loses his job could deal quite well if he'd been saving 25% of his salary. That he has failed to save adequately does not instantly present to me either a moral or a utilitarian case for rectifying his failure, particularly since doing so will encourage other people not to invest in their future. (I'd certainly vote to keep him from starving, but not to replace all his lost income). That is why I encouraged individuals to look hard at their spending to eliminate the things that do not truly make them happy, rather than calling for government programmes. They're in the best position to actually know what they need.

*Yes, the Rockefellers had a lot more space, and marble floors to boot. But would you rather have a big house with marble floors, or a little apartment with central heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing? I know which one I'd pick.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Do we have a Social Security problem?

Calculated Risk says it's not worth bothering about compared to other problems:

This chart shows the relative sizes of the three major fiscal challenges over the next 75 years. The NPV for the General Fund deficit is based on deficits equal to 5% of GDP. Note: the fiscal 2006 general fund deficit will be close to 5%.

The estimates for Medicare and Social Security are from the GAO report (pdf): The Long Term Fiscal Challenge

From the GAO report:

"Health care is a bigger problem than Social Security. Participants acknowledged the need for Social Security reform but emphasized that Social Security is a relatively small part of the long-term fiscal challenge when compared to spending on health care. ... Several participants observed that few members of the public are aware of this. Rather, the general public impression is that solving Social Security would solve most of the longterm fiscal challenge, and this is not correct.

And on the General Fund deficit:

"Participants agreed that a key moral context is the impact federal budget deficits will have on future generations."

Conclusion

The debate should be focused on the two major issues: Health Care and the General Fund deficit. Without addressing those issues first, reforming Social Security is irrelevant.

Arnold Kling takes issue with this:

But the premise is also wrong. If we allocated a larger share of payroll taxes to Medicare instead of SS, we could argue that Medicare is not a problem but SS is the big issue. We should be looking at the challenge of funding spending as a whole, not looking at the arbitrary allocation of taxes to different programs. In terms of overall spending, Social Security is a gigantic issue.

Finally, it is disingenous to whine that we need to solve the other problems first, without offering a solution. Overall, this stance of "solve X and Y before you tackle Z" comes across to me as mere demagogic rhetoric, the end result of which will be that X, Y, and Z will remain unsolved.

I agree that the people saying "Social Security's not the problem, Medicare's the problem!" in general show an astonishing lack of interest in fixing Medicare; indeed, they are often the same people who want to add nationalised health insurance to the budget, which seems to betray a lack of committment to solving our budget problem.

But there's another problem with Calculated Risk's argument: Social Security is a major contributor to the General Fund deficit problem. The social security surplus masks the general fund deficit; if you take social security out of the picture, no president has run a budget surplus for more than thirty years. Taking the social security surplus away from our legislators is the most obvious first step to force them to address the general fund deficit. Moreover, after the surplus disappears, social security will become a major drain on the general fund.

It looks to me as if Calculated Risk's chart acts as if the "trust fund" were real. But as discussed many, many times before, the "trust fund" is not, from the perspective of the US taxpayer, funded. I'd argue that the relevant question, for the US taxpayer, is not the accounting distinctions that the US government makes, but what percentage of (tax revenues + borrowing) is devoted to paying Social Security benefits. Bringing the "trust fund" into things arbitrarily changes a substantial portion of the Social Security burden from benefit payments to interest payments. This substantially overstates the general fund deficit and understates the Social Security problem.

More broadly, the deficit has some institutional limits on it: lenders will not continue to indefinitely extend us unlimited credit, and as it goes on, political pressure will build, albeit slowly, to reduce it. Social security, on the other hand, has very weak limitations. While under statute, benefits are supposed to be slashed to meet revenues when the "trust fund" runs out, there seems litle realistic possibility that Congress will allow benefits to be suddenly slashed to 70% of their previous levels. And if they did, that would hardly rate as a good outcome in my mind, or presumably in the minds of the people saying that the Social Security system is "just fine".

By far the biggest problem with our budget, to my mind, is that we are communicating to senior citizens, and more importantly to future senior citizens, that they do not need to save all that much for their retirement, because someone else will cover their medical expenses and help them pay their bills. This is not an affordable promise, either financially or politically, and when it finally breaks down, either young workers or senior citizens--and probably both--will find themselves in big trouble. The purpose of reforming Social Security is to force people to consume less and save more, thus increasing the productivity of the economy that will have to support them. This is a very big problem, and pretending it isn't is just making it bigger.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Welcome back

Terry Teachout, who not only runs one of the best art blogs out there, but also is a charming and brilliant dinner companion and all-around mensch, has been having some health troubles. Head over there and wish him a speedy journey on the road to recovery.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

More cheap, healthy, easy things to cook

Inspired by Jane, I thought I would add more cheap, healthy, easy things to cook. At least they are cheaper and healthier than most restaurant food.

Full disclaimer: Much of my cooking comes from Best Recipes and Think Like a Chef. Over time I've found myself focusing more on technique and much less on recipe or ingredients, and these two books focus on technique.

1) Pan Searing
I'll use burgers (cheap) as an example, but steak (not cheap), duck breast (not cheap), lamb chops (not cheap) also sear up a treat.

Get fatty ground chuck (30%). Mix with lots of kosher salt and pepper. Work into patties, with big dimples in the middle (otherwise they become spherical).

Heat a cast iron pan until it's quite hot. Put patties on pan (do no crowd). This will release a lot of smoke, so if you're doing it indoors turn off the smoke detectors.

Let the patties cook 80%-90% on one side. Do not mess with them while they cook, you want a powerful sear. If they start blackening, turn off the heat and hope for the best. Once they are done on one side flip and brown the other side (here you are just browning the outside, so it should not take long).

Serve with ketchup and raw onion.

Freeze any extra raw patties.

2) Roast any meat
This works very well with chicken, fish, and any meat you want to pan roast. You really do need an anodized pan through (like the ones Calphalon makes). If you use chicken, buy kosher chicken. It comes pre-brined and that makes a difference.

Take your meat and liberally sprinkle it with salt and pepper on both sides.

Heat up your pan with extra virgin olive oil.

Put meat in pan, pretty side down.

Leave it *alone* so it develops a nice crust. Reduce heat so it sizzles but does not spatter. If you have trouble controlling the heat on the stove top, preheat your oven to 450 degrees and finish the dish in that by putting the whole pan in.

Cook it 80%-90% on one slide, then flip it and finish it on the other side.

That's it. This also works really well with duck legs btw. which essentially confit in their own skins. Duck breasts work better using the searing method (above).

Serve pretty side up.

3) Roast any vegetable
I've had good luck doing this with zucchini, carrot, mushroom, etc. If you try this with potatoe, use high starch potato (like Russet) and make sure your oil is good and hot first.

Cut vegetable up into appropriately sized slices/chunks. Toss with olive oil and lots of kosher salt and black pepper.

Preheat over to ~300-400 degree.

Heat heavy pan on stove. Put all vegetables in pan (making sure they do not crowd). Put entire pan in oven.

Wait for ~15-20 mins and see if they are browning nicely on one side. If they are, let them fully brown before flipping them over. If they aren't give them some time.

The goal here is essentially to dehydrate the vegetables and caramelize the outside at the same time. They should be markedly smaller and browner when they come out, with crispy outside and molten insides. They should not be burnt.

All of these "recipes" are very simple in that they don't involve much beyond the ingredient, extra virgin olive oil, kosher salt, and black pepper. You also don't need to fuss with them much once they are going (in fact, fussing with them reduces your crust, and therefore makes them worse). You do need to keep an eye on them though and develop a sense for when things are ready. But I've found them to be easy, quick, and tasty.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ten incredibly cheap, healthy and easy things you can cook for yourself

So what sort of things are cheap, easy, and delicious? Very few, I'm afraid. But here are some I've found:

1) Fruit compote (delicious, healthy, and filling as a dessert or breakfast with lowfat yogurt and granola)

1 bag frozen raspberries
3 bags mixed berries (or 3 bags of whatever berries you like)

Put frozen raspberries in small saucepan on stove with 3 tablespoons apple juice or water. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Boil for one minute, then add 1/3 cup of Splenda. Stir to combine.

Empty other three bags of berries into a large bowl. Pour raspberry mixture over them, and allow to cool. (Heat from raspberry sauce will thaw them) Put a couple large spoonfuls over yogurt (I make my own for a fraction of the cost of storebought) and sprinkle with 1/4 cup granola.

2) Almost-homemade chicken soup

Super-thrifty way: Take picked-over carcass of roasted chicken. Place it in a stock pot and cover with 2/3 fat-free chicken broth, 1/3 water. Toss in a bay leaf, chopped onion and celery, 1/4 tsp sage or poultry seasoning, and a cup of wine. Bring to a boil, then turn down heat to low and simmer for 2 hours. Strain.

Less thrifty way: Just use chicken broth from a can/box. Pour it into the stock pot to give 3-5 inches cover of the chicken breasts.

Take two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts (bought on special,naturally) and cook in the chicken broth over medium heat until chicken breasts are white all the way through, 15-30 minutes depending on your stove. Remove breasts from chicken broth and strain broth again to get rid of scum.

Add two or three stalks of celery, minced, a bag of baby carrots cut in half, a box of mushrooms cut into quarters, and any other vegetables you fancy, except peas (they'll get soggy). Cook until the carrots are tender. Now toss in half a box of frozen baby peas and noodles or alphabets, if you like. Cook for five minutes, until pasta is barely tender. Cut up the chicken and add it back in. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve. Not as good as recipes that start with a whole chicken, but much better than canned, and it only takes half an hour.

This basic principle can be extended to all sorts of soup; if you like Chicken Tortilla soup, add some tomatoes and hot peppers and bake some cut up tortillas at 400 degrees until they're crispy. If you like creamy soup, add cream. If you're on a diet, and want creamy soup, take out the chicken and the vegetables and throw a cup of rice in the soup. Simmer for 45 minutes, then puree the resulting mixture. Looks just like cream of chicken soup.

3) Scrambled tofu stir fry

Non vegetarians groan at this. Tofu? Gross. It's not the flavour, they explain; it's the consistency.

Okay, so here's how you get around that and eat your cheap, healthful tofu.

First, cook some rice, of course.

For two people, take 1/3-1/2 container of firm tofu and mince it into little pieces. I recommend using one of these hand choppers, which are really cheap and useful enough to make them a must-have for any cook.

Now take a bag of mixed vegetables, like broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. Add some chopped onions and mushrooms, and if you can get them, bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, and/or water chestnuts. (one of the things I miss about London is that they sell stir-fry vegetables in handy pre-packed bags in many supermakets there).

Use a bottle of your favourite stir-fry sauce from the supermarket, or make your own; I like to use a mixture of dry sherry, garlic, minced ginger, soy sauce, oyster sauce, and a tablespoon or so of peanut oil. You can mix up a bunch in advance, and use it several days running, but it's probably best to start with the store-bought stuff.

Take one or two tablespoons of peanut oil and heat it on the stove over high heat for several minutes. (A wok is great, but I stirfry in a regular frying pan. Just make sure it has decently high sides). When the oil is really hot, throw your vegetables into the pan and stir them around for three minutes while they cook. At the three minute mark, throw in all that chopped tofu. At the five minute mark, throw on your stir-fry sauce until you have the level of sauciness you like; I tend to err on the dry side, since sauce adds fat and calories (and I like the flavour of broccoli) but it's your call.

Cook for a minute, and then take off the heat and serve with rice.

I wouldn't serve this at a dinner party--it doesnt really look that appetizing--but then, neither does tuna noodle casserole, and we all like that. It's very healthy, it's cheap, it takes under ten minutes to prepare (twenty, including making the rice and your own stir-fry sauce) and you'll never know the tofu is there.

4) Scrambled eggs.

Everyone thinks they know how to make scrambled eggs. But to make really good, creamy scrambled eggs, you need two things: lot's of milk, and very low heat. I mean, put the burner on simmer.

For one averagely hungry person, use two eggs and 1/4 cup of milk. (If you use lowfat or nonfat milk, add a tablespoon or so of lowfat milk powder to the milk to beef it up. Don't worry-I guarantee that you won't taste it.) Beat that up well in a bowl, and put a frying pan over the lowest heat your burner will do. Spray the pan well with cooking spray, and pour the eggs in. Then let it sit. It will probably be about five minutes before the eggs even look like they're cooking. That's okay. Patience, grasshopper. Just stir it around every few minutes to scrape up the cooked bits and let the raw egg run into their place. Towards the end, you'll have to stir more frequently, but don't manhandle the eggs--only move them when the bit touching the pan is clearly cooked.

This is not super-quick; it probably takes twenty minutes to cook a pan full of eggs. But it's pretty low-work, and they're really lovely, creamy, fluffy and moist. And it really doesn't get much cheaper than $3.00 for six people.

5) Fish in foil

Expensive restaurants do it in parchment paper, but foil works nearly as well, and it's cheaper.

Take a cut of white fish, such as Orange Roughy, Sole, Flounder, or whatever you find on special this week. Divide into portions. Don't ask me "how big"?--don't you know how much you eat? But generally, about 6-8 ounces.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

For each portion, make a piece of foil big enough to completely cover the fish, with room to spare, when folded in half. Brush the inside of the foil well with olive oil. (If you like garlic, I recommend crushing a clove of garlic into the oil before you do so). Place the fish onto the foil with a slice of lemon and a sprig of whatever fresh herb you fancy; tarragon, thyme, and rosemary are all especially nice. Then fold the foil over the fish, and fold the edges over each other until the packet is sealed shut. Cook on a cookie sheet for about ten minutes. You'll get delicate, herb-infused fish steamed gently in their own juices. They're very nice on their own, or with a quick sauce, such as one made by melting a tablespoon of flour and a tablespoon of butter together then adding a cup of white wine and the juice of one lemon and cooking until slightly thickened.

6) Easy lentil rice

Take one box of Near East Lentil Pilaf mix. Cook according to the directions, except that when you add the rice, you also add a half a box of mushrooms, sliced or cut in quarters, 1/4 cup chopped onions, one extra tablespoon of butter, and A LOT of fresh ground black pepper. It's a lovely side dish, but it also makes a healthful, vegetarian main dish, at only about $2.00 a servince. Lovely with a big salad and some hummus and pita.

7) Really good vegetarian lentil soup

Most lentil soup tastes like dirt, especially if it's made without meat. The secret, I've found, is to add half a small jar of those roasted red Italian peppers.

So melt 3-4 tablespoons of butter in a soup pot and saute 1 chopped small onion, 1/2 a jar of roasted italian peppers (chopped), 2/3 cup of chopped carrot and 3 minced stalks of celery until the onion is translucent. Add a bag of lentils, a bay leaf, and some fresh ground black pepper, and cover with water or vegetable broth--or, if you like it tomato-ey, with water mixed with one can of chopped plum tomatoes (unseasoned). Cook over medium heat until the lentils are tender, about 1 hour. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

8) Turkey sloppy joes

Take one can of Manwich sauce and cook according to the directions, except use ground turkey instead of ground beef.

You can also make turkey soft tacos this way, using El Paso or McCormick taco seasoning (no, really, it's actually pretty good), but if you do, I recommend using two packets; ground turkey has no flavour of its own, so it really needs a lot of seasoning.

9) Pea soup

Not split pea soup; regular pea soup. It's very springy.

Saute 3/4 cup of chopped onion in a tablespoon of butter for five minutes. Add a large bag of frozen peas, and 2 1/2 c chicken broth, and simmer for five minutes, or until peas are tender. Puree in a blender, then add 1/3 cup buttermilk (contrary to the name it's low fat) and salt and pepper to taste. Heat and serve, swirling a little more buttermilk in.

10) Barbecue chicken

Okay, this isn't quick. But it's cheap and good.

Take a cut up whole chicken, or just breasts, or just legs, depending on how much you want to spend. Soak in 5 cups of water, 1 cup of sugar, and 2 teaspoons of kosher salt overnight in the fridge. The next day, preheat the oven to 300 degrees and put the chicken parts on a cookie sheet or jelly roll pan. Brush with barbecue sauce on both sides then bake, skin side up, brushing with barbecue sauce and the pan juices every twenty minutes. It'll take a little over two hours, but the skin will be richly infused with barbecue flavour, and there's very little actual work involved.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Real genius?

Peter Watson, who has just written a book on ideas, describes himself as "the know-it-all from hell". But his interview with Deborah Solomon doesn't make him sound like the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree:

On the other hand, not all big ideas are good ideas. In fact, most big ideas are probably terrible ideas. What do you think is the single worst idea in history?

Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.

Monotheism: responsible for most of the wars in history. I was unaware that the early Romans, Greeks, Assyrians, Babylonians, Chinese, Japanese, Vikings, Mongols, Huns, Persians, Medes, Visigoths, and Zulu had all been monotheists. I was under the impression that they didn't really give a hoot what the people they conquered believed; they just wanted their stuff.

Perhaps he doesn't mean the majority of wars, but only the majority of deaths. This would tend to bias the results towards monotheism, simply because monotheism pushed into the far corners of the earth at the same time as the population explosion that followed the Industrial Revolution. But his definition doesn't really fit the Nazis, either, who could have cared less what the Slavs believed; all they cared about was bloodlines. Nor the parties in World War I, who didn't line up by any sort of recognizeable religious or cultural practice. And while I suppose one could categorize communist regimes, who are the other major source of body counts in the twentieth century, as believing in "one true God", none of them were notable for their emphasis the afterlife, unless you count badly executed bronze statues as "life after death".

The shallowness of this response does not make me inclined to buy Mr Watson's book. It's the sort of "daring" statement that actually relies completely on the unquestioning acceptance of his audience, whose prejudices it neatly caters to. If they actually thought about it for a minute, they would see that it doesn't make very much sense. But why bother thinking about things that just feel so true?

Who needs ideas at all, really? We know what's true in our guts, where it counts.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

That sounds like a plan

Andrew Samwick blogs a plan that sounds like it is not only sustainable, but also could achieve broad consensus across the left-right spectrum--although not across the old/young spectrum. I imagine the AARP will go nuts, making such a plan DOA. But one can hope.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hee!

Dungeons and Dragons: the Devil's tool.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Another contest

Reminder! There's still time to vote.

My recipe for Citrus Cake has made the finals of the Epicurious October recipe contest. Needless to say, this is pretty exciting for me, and I'd love it if y'all would wander over there and toss a few votes my way.

In other news, we're slipping behind Club for Growth in the 2005 Weblog Awards. I told you before what will happen if I don't win. No one wants to see me cry, do you? Because I'm so fond of you.

It is perfectly legal to vote once every 24 hours in both contests, so vote early and often.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stop snitching?

After reading this article on snitching, I'm well prepared to believe that there are serious problems with the way our nation's police forces use informers. But this seems a little bit crazy to me:

Finally, as the T-shirt controversy illustrates, snitching exacerbates crime, violence, and distrust in some of the nation's most socially vulnerable communities. In the poorest neighborhoods, vast numbers of young people are in contact with the criminal-justice system. Nearly every family contains someone who is incarcerated, under supervision, or has a criminal record. In these communities, the law-enforcement policy of pressuring everyone to snitch can have the devastating effect of tearing families and social networks apart. Ironically, these are the communities most in need of positive role models, strong social institutions, and good police-community relations. Snitching undermines these important goals by setting criminals loose, creating distrust, and compromising police integrity.

Call me heartless, but I don't feel like fostering stronger bonds between criminals should be a goal of our nation's policy.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Jack 'em up

The Fed raised interest rates by 25 basis points today. On the one hand, they indicated that they were keeping a close eye on resource utilization (which probably refers mostly to the unemployment rate) as an indicator of possible inflation; on the other hand, they took the word "accomodating" out when referring to current monetary policy, which indicates that we've moved into the end stage of tightening. The upshot is that we're largely in the same place we were a couple of weeks ago, expecting to get increases of 25 or 50 basis points before the Fed slacks off its "measured pace" of tightening. After last week's stellar economic indicators (3Q GDP growth of 4.3%, productivity growth an even sexier 4.7%), there was speculation that the rapid GDP growth might spur tightening, or the productivity growth might mean a looser policy out of the Fed. Meanwhile, everyone's worried that sustained high oil prices will feed through into broader price inflation, although it hasn't yet. But Greenspan seems to be staying the course--which, generally, is what you want a central banker to do.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Adverse news for adverse selection

Alex Tabarrok has a marvellous post up on adverse selection. As he puts it, the central insight of adverse selection ". . . is simple enough for your friends to understand but profound enough for them to be impressed at your learning. so it's a hard story not to tell!"

Unfortunately, he argues, besides being elegant and important, the central insight behind adverse selection is also not true--at least not in many of the contexts in which it is used.

The basic idea of adverse selection is that in certain markets, all or most of the relevant information is known by one party, but unobtainable (at least cost-effectively) by the other. When you are selling your car, you know whether it is a good car, or a piece of crap that breaks down every two miles. But you have no incentive to tell prospective buyers this. So the information that the buyer gets--"this car is completely reliable!"--is the same whether the car is a lemon, or a mechanical dreamboat.

Buyers, knowing this, will discount the price they are willing to pay by the probability of getting a lemon. But if you are a car seller, why sell a good car at a hefty discount because of some other dishonest schmuck out there? Sellers with very good cars will exit the market, leaving only the relatively poor cars. But soon buyers will demand a steeper discount, because the probability of getting a lemon has gone up. The process is iterative; sellers with relatively good cars will exit the market, making the average quality even poorer, which will cause buyers to demand an even bigger market.

The theory of adverse selection is a favourite of national health care advocates, and has to my mind been one of the more convincing arguments in their arsenal (though not convincing enough to get me to endorse their plans). They argue that as sick people drive up the cost of health insurance, healthy people will decide not to buy insurance. This will increase the average cost of the people left in the pool, which will cause insurers to raise rates, which will cause more healthy people to drop their insurance, which will increase the average cost of the people left in the pool . . .

It makes intuitive sense, yet it is, as Mr Tabarrok says, profound. Just not true:

The facts of the matter, however, are that adverse selection is not an important part of the market for automobiles (trucks), or of auto, life insurance or health insurance (on the latter see below).

One reason adverse selection may not be that important in practice is because buyers and sellers use testing and certification to remove the most important information asymmetries.  You can buy a decent used car, for example just get it inspected or certified.  Only if such adjustments are illegal, or in some other way not allowed, will adverse selection become important.

Second, the asymmetry may run in favor of the sellers.  Do I really know more about my own life expectancy than an insurance firm that has access to sophisticated actuarial models?  And, assuming that I do have extra information is it all that important?  After all "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise... but time and chance happen to them all."  Or, more prosaically, the signal is near irrelevant when the signal to noise ratio is high. 

Third, propitious selection can be more important than adverse selection.  What sort of person buys a lot of life insurance?  Is it people who expect to die soon?  Or is it the sort of person who is so worried about not leaving their family in trouble that not only do they buy life insurance they also buckle their safety belt and eat healthy?  The price of life insurance falls the more you buy so evidently insurance companies believe it is the latter.

Everyone talks about adverse selection in the market for health insurance but in fact non-group policies in these markets are not relatively expensive and not hard to get.  The national average annual premium for reasonably generous coverage for a single person is just $2,268.

Sure, that's a lot of money but the point is that it's not a lot relative to what an employed person and their employer would pay for similar coverage in the group market.  There is no evidence for an adverse-selection death spiral in the market for health insurance.  That's not surprising because non-group health insurance is medically underwitten (i.e. medical inspections just like car inspections).  Most people are accepted a few are not.  Only in states that require insurance companies to accept all or most buyers are rates high relative to the group market (rates in New Jersey, an outlier, are almost three times as high as the national average.)

There are problems in the health insurance market, including a lack of long term insurance, job lock and the inequity of affordability, but adverse selection is not one of them.

That pretty thoroughly undercuts any support I might have had for nationalised health care.

You are cruel! my critics will say. No, not really. It is true that I now have good health insurance, but I was also against nationalised health care when I did not have health insurance, whih I could not afford thanks to New York's practice of "community rating"; i.e. forcing health insurance companies to sell insurance to anyone who can breathe and sign a check. The reason that I am against nationalised health care is that I think the market is the primary vehicle for medical innovation, and I do not want to see the government become the monopoly purchaser that destroys that market. Believing as I do, if I supported nationalised health care I would be privileging the needs of those who are undertreated now, over those who have diseases that we could cure in the future. Since there are more of the latter than the former, this does not seem to me to be a reasonable moral choice, though I am sure that there is more than one left-wing moral philosopher out there who would like to explain to me why I am wrong.