Asymmetrical Information

Random question for engineers/scientists/architects

I often hear about quick fixes that could save tons of carbon. One of the favourites is painting all the roofs in a city white, so that they reflect heat back out. This lowers cooling costs and the urban heat island effect. This is generally touted with "saves x tons of carbon a year from cooling".

In LA, this is no doubt sufficient. But in the northern states, don't you have to subtract out increased carbon emissions in the winter months? After all, presumably the urban heat island, and heat-absorbing roofs, lower the amount of carbon that buildings emit on heating during winter months.

Question one is, am I right that this effect should be netted out?

Question two is, do the people who do those sorts of calculations already net out the increased emissions from heating?

Question three is, if they don't, how big is the offset? Is air conditioning very much more energy intensive than heating your house in somewhere like New York or Chicago? (go 'way, Minneapolis!)

Talk amongst yourselves. I'm slicing boxes.

Credible committments

They tell you game theory is all about credible committments. So I'll try to make one here. A sample of the things I've been really meaning to blog about:

1) A response to John Quiggin's post on the Stern Report
2) That meme thing
3) A post on "building a basic kitchen" that lays out a bare minimum starting kit, then outlines possible add-ons. It will cover ingredients, equipment, pots and pans, and appliances.
4) A post about the wonders of PAYGO
5) Something on whether we should assume rape victims are telling the truth
6) A piece about the problems of conserving fungible resources
7) An account of my robbery (pending authorisation by the nice polices)

So consider the committment made. I will blog about these things. Soon. And you can nag me if I don't.

Meanwhile, is there anything missing from that list? What would y'all like to see me blog about?

Meanwhile . . .

If you've been wondering how I am, I've been having a lovely small town Christmas with family, much like the one described here.

The eagle has landed

My sister and I have just completed the move to her new digs (and mine, for the next few months) in Silver Spring, MD. And by "just", I mean that the moving guys left about half an hour ago. I am about to find out what this suburban living thing is about--why, already I'm in a Panera Bread, eating a fuji apple chicken salad and onion soup combo, drinking a large skim milk cappuccino,and taking advantage of free wireless. By next week, I expect to be complaining about the local school board and pricing lawn gnomes.

Anyway, that, and a gruelling travel schedule, explain why you haven't heard from me--in person/email, if you know me, and on this blog, if not. This weekend I head up to Philly to experience some of their raucous New Years fun, and then I'm in Chicago for the AEA. Then I will settle back to teh old blogging routine. Promise.

Incidentally, if you will be at AEA, or hey, just in Chicago, the 4th-9th, please let me know; it's possible I'll organise some sort of meetup.

Meanwhile, I see that Dan Drezner has tagged me with this "5 things you don't know about me" meme. Unfortunately, I wasn't the 1985 Snohomish County Tap Dancing Champion or anything. My life is pretty much an open book, albeit one that should probably be banned. However, I am meditating on the question, and hopefully will come up with something this weekend, in between unpacking and accumulating a crushing hangover. Meanwhile, here's one to tide you over:

I'm afraid of the dark.

Not all the time, of course. But let there be a scary movie, a local break in, or hey, rumours of killer raccoons stalking the Upper West Side, and you will find me sleeping with the lights on. Just thinking about something frightening as I tumble off to sleep can set off a heart-hammering, adrenalin pumping panicked need to turn the lights back on. Or a nightmare. Last time I found a cockroach in my apartment, I slept with the lights on for almost two weeks. (In my defense, roaches *do* hate light).

It's not that I don't know the fear is ridiculous; in my rational mind, I do. The fear isn't even of some named thing. Which may be why I can't challenge it. If it were a single thing I were afraid of, I could chase it away with improbabilities. But what I am afraid of is all the hungry and terrible things which live in the primordial night, and who's to say that one of them didn't crawl through the window or ooze under the door.

Nonetheless, unlike a child, I know the fear is irrational even when it is happening. It's just that knowing doesn't make any difference. I can sit there all I want and say to myself "Jane, this is ridiculous. There is nothing out there, and even if there was something, a 60 watt lightbulb wouldn't chase it away." But the panic still rises, and after a few seconds, I have to turn on the light.

It only happens when I'm alone, though. Whenever I've had a roommate or sibling sleeping in the same room, the fear of the dark has vanished.

All this, as you might imagine, makes me rather sympathetic to people with various sorts of psychological problems. Rationality will take you pretty far in this world, but there's a point where it stops abruptly--and if you don't use a little magic, it's straight over the cliff.

Luckily for me, lamps are cheap.

Hee!

Scott Adams takes on free will:

It seems to me that free will can be easily tested. The next time someone is getting brain surgery, just take a few minutes to perform the test. Sometimes the patient remains awake during brain surgery so he can report what functions are changing as the surgeon is poking around. So for example, when the surgeon electrically stimulates the language center of the brain, the patient might temporarily lose his ability to speak.

The test for free will would be this, for example: First the doctor locates the place in the brain where electrical stimulation causes the patient to lose speech. Then the surgeon asks the patient to keep speaking normally despite the electrical stimulation.

If the patient can speak normally despite having the speech center stimulated, then the patient has free will that can overcome the normal chain of cause and effect in the brain. If he can’t speak, then you have proven the brain is nothing but a moist and complicated machine and your life is a pointless series of miseries.

Maybe there’s a reason no one is testing for free will.

In which I am triumphantly vindicated

Back in July, I wrote this:

Pelosi is promising that if they take the house in the fall, Democrats will roll back the Bush tax cuts and focus on deficit reduction. Who wants to set the over-under on how long it takes them to find some pressing need that overrides deficit reduction? Or will the fact that they control only one branch hamper any attempts to pass new spending?

For Democratic economists who have been bashing Bush like a concrete pinata about the budget deficits, the answer is "ASAP".

Can we come up with an explanation for this seemingly inexplicable behaviour? Why, yes, I think I did:

Why aren't we doing anything about the budget deficit? Because no one cares that much

Oh, liberals say they care, just like conservatives cared when they were out of power. But what most liberals care about is rolling back the Bush tax cuts, not cutting the budget deficit. Why do I say this? Because they supported John Kerry's plan to roll back the Bush tax cuts, and replace them with new spending on health care. Even if we rolled back all of Bush's tax cuts to those making over $200K, that would raise (according to the Kerry campaign) about $700 billion over 10 years; this would make a dent in the budget deficit, but won't close it. But given the very high marginal rates that would be required to close it (presuming we don't want to raise taxes on the poor and middle class), it makes more economic sense to look at the spending side, for example by giving up the idea that Medicare should provide prescription drugs.

But given the choice between closing the deficit and getting spending they want--on national health care, for example--most liberals would be full of reasons that the budget deficit isn't nearly as bad as we all have been thinking. Similarly, if they were in the opposition, watching all that new spending get passed, most conservatives would be happy to wax lyrical on the terrible downfall that awaits countries that spend more than they earn.

That, in short, is why we run a budget deficit; whoever is in power has bigger priorities. Perhaps that's a feature of Americans, or the American political system, but it seems to me that the only way we'll see our budget balanced is if we have the same combination of things that hit us in the nineties: a huge capital gains surge that surprises the hell out of our politicians, and a political system too gridlocked to spend the booty.

In other words, I'm not holding my breath.

When I posted that, eighteen months ago, it brought howls of outrage from people who accused me of misreading the Democrats' deep, deep committment to fiscal rectitude. Now it turns out--shockingly!--that what they really have is a deep, deep committment to holding onto power, I hope that we can avoid that sort of thing in the future.

I also want everyone to acknowlege that I am a genius, and bring me flowers and candy on Valentines, and all hold hands and dance around the maypole in May, and . . . excuse me, what are you still doing here?

Anyway, I won't say "I told you so." But you gotta know I'm thinking it.

Michael Abbas

I've long thought that what the Palestinians needed was a Michael Collins: someone with the acuity and authority to accept a sucky deal, make it stick, and work for more later.

The Palestinians have a very good point: they didn't have anything to do with the Holocaust, and it was pretty appalling that Western powers decided to atone for their guilt by taking a lot of land from brown people who couldn't vote, and giving it to the vastly wronged Jews. Justice would have been a homeland in Bavaria, not Palestine. Nor is there any other reasonable way to read what happened. At the time of the Balfour declaration, Jews were less than 10% of the population; by 1941, they were about 30%. Yet somehow the UN mandate handed them 55% of the land, and of course now they have much more. Nor would even the most pro-immigration libertarian in America (like, er, me) support the basic idea of the Zionist movement--"Hey, why don't we move enough people into another country so that we can take over the government!"--if it were used by, say, Palestinians planning to exploit loopholes in our immigration laws. Especially if a third party was running those immigration laws.

But at this point the injustice cannot be undone. Israel is there, filled with people who love their land as much as the Palestinians, and more importantly, have nowhere else to go. Michael Collins recognized that, whatever the morality of importing a zillion malcontent scots and dissipate younger sons of the aristocracy into Ireland in order to run things, it had happened, and that those people couldn't simply be shipped back to England, or killed. He also recognized that England wasn't going to give the Irish a Republic in 1921, no matter how much they were entitled to one. So he took a raw deal, because it was the best deal he could get. Now Ireland is richer than Britain, and has not only a Republic, but also better beer.

It is hard to overrate the courage of this decision. When he signed the agreement, in the wee small hours of the morning, he turned to Lord Birkenhead and quietly said "I have signed my death warrant." As he had. He was shot less than a year later by anti-treaty forces.

Now it looks as if Palestine may, at long last, have gotten her Michael Collins:

Mahmoud Abbas: Now people have begun to whine about the PLO, about the Executive Committee, and about whatever... They are sitting in comfortable places, and have not got the dust of this homeland on their shoes. They talk from afar. They give orders from afar, and reject offers from afar. Give orders to yourselves! Talk about yourselves. The people here will make the decisions.

[...]

In the past, they said: "Under no circumstances will we accept a state, unless it includes all of Palestine, because Palestine is a land of Islamic endowment." Fine. This doesn’t work. I can say: "We demand all of the land," and you will applaud me. This doesn’t work. This doesn’t work. This doesn’t work. There is a reality – either you acknowledge it, or you will get crushed. Then they began talking about another thing: "Yes, we accept a state within the 1967 borders." Did they or did they not say this? What’s so new about this? But there is one condition. Those people beyond the Green Line – we don’t recognize them, but we will give them a hudna for 15 years. Is this conceivable?! Will the [Palestinian] cause remain in a state of hudna for 15 years? This means the end of the [Palestinian] cause.

Unfortunately, I suspect it is now too late to cobble anything together out of the shreds of the territories. But one should never sneer at a new start.

Wishful thinking

Kevin Drum celebrates! The American People, God bless 'em, have finally kicked out the Republicans, who they didn't really agree with anyway; it was just their gosh-darned institutional advantages keeping them in power. Now the Democrats are in power, and the center will hold:

. . . they do have an interesting point to make: with Democrats now in control, most (though not all) of the Republican Party's institutional advantages are gone, and this means that in the future they're going to find it far more difficult to paper over the extreme rightward tilt of their caucus:

Now, Republicans are in serious trouble. Not only is their pay-to-play alliance with K Street in ruins, but they can no longer use their majority power to obscure their radicalism....After all, the GOP took its heaviest losses within its moderate ranks. In an even more conservative Republican caucus, there will be a powerful faction that blames defeat on insufficient clarity and urges a further pull to the right.

Democrats should give this faction the clarity it wants. In pursuing their own agenda, they need to put the GOP between the rock of its intense base and the hard place of swing voters on every key issue--from basic kitchen-table concerns (like health care and college tuition), to reform issues (like reestablishing pay-as-you-go budget rules and ensuring electoral fairness), to less controversial social issues (like stem-cell research).

Most people -- including a lot of rank-and file Republicans, I think -- simply don't realize just how radical the modern, Texified GOP is. But with majority control Democrats now have the institutional power to expose this at every turn, and Republicans have far less ability to hide it. If they're smart, Dems will use this newfound power at every opportunity.

Let me offer an alternative explanation: Democrats, including some academics, are bizarrely impressed by polls. Well, when you point out that the American public polls in a way that actually sounds pretty pro-life (over 50% of Americans say that abortion should only be in cases of rape, incest, or where the lfie and health--not the state of her delicate psyche, but actual physical health--of the mother are in danger), Democrats ably point out that they also support Roe. To the Republicans I talk to, this indicates that polls are worthless for discerning anything except very broad trends. For Democrats like Hacker, that means that Republicans are "Right of center", while the Democratic party's NARAL-driven policy is firmly aligned with the deepest longings of the American heartland.

The phrasing of poll questions, and the lead in statement, is so important in driving the answer that you should never believe anything you read in them unless you look at the questions yourself, and probably not even then. Polls are very good at showing the direction of things like support of politicians, but they are very bad for showing the actual state of American Belief.

Coupled with this is an apparently overpowering yearning to believe that the last election was really a mandate on single-payer health care and the minimum wage, rather than the mess in Iraq and Mark Foley's indiscretions, and that they therefore are about to get their way on same.

So let me offer my own prediction: if the Democrats continue to confuse their ideas about where the center should be, with where it actually is, they'll be out of power again by 2012, weeping into the shreds of their expensive and expansionist agenda that they were done in by some mysterious and implacable power that Republicans have to fool the American public. Their major centrists achievements will be

a) a minor tax increase on the wealthy¹

b) a moderate increase in the minimum wage which will benefit millions of affluent teenagers while lifting almost no one out of poverty

c) taking a machete to free trade, and thereby miring thousands or millions of people in the developing world in the kind of soul-killing, body-wracking, thoroughly immiserating poverty which does not now exist in the United State except for Democratic campaign commercials.

I'm fully willing to be proven wrong. I'd hope it would be by the Democrats deciding not to pander to the center's worst instincts on trade.

But I sure wouldn't bet on it.

¹ The most probable form of a tax increase is the one proposed by folks around John Kerry: raise the estate tax minimums to 3.5 million, and re-slap the income tax on people earning over roughly 200,000 a year. This was estimated to raise about 70 billion a year, or about 1/4 of the current budget deficit. While the wealthy got a much bigger benefit in absolute numbers than the poor and middle class, they got less in percentage terms, plus there aren't that many of them. Likewise, the estate tax; higher valued estates pay a higher effective rate (until you get to 10-15 million, when it starts going down again), but there aren't very many of them, so the bulk of the revenue is raised on smaller estates.

Kevin Drum offers John Derbyshire's experience as an argument for national health care:

BEST IN THE WORLD, BABY, BEST IN THE WORLD....From John Derbyshire over at The Corner:

CHRISTMAS PRESENT [John Derbyshire]
My health insurer has just notified me, in a brief form letter, that my monthly premiums are to rise from $472.33 to $857.00 on January 1st. That's an increase of 81 percent. ***E*I*G*H*T*Y*-*O*N*E* *P*E*R*C*E*N*T*** Can they do that? I called them. They sound pretty confident they can. Ye gods!

A conservative reader emailed this item to me with the following comment: "I've heard people say a conservative is just a liberal who's been mugged. Then maybe a liberal is just a conservative who suddenly got this in the mail."

I gather that Mr Derbyshire lives in New York State. If so, I can cheerfully attest that the problem is not "the market", but "the government", whose thicket of minimum coverage, community pooling, and like regulations has made New York State's health insurance the most expensive in the nation. $473 in New York state is on the high, but not unheard of end for a single healthy 30-year-old seeking basic coverage. (Employer purchased insurance is on the expensive side in New York, but nothing like the individual policies.)

Speaking of mind altering substances . . .

This morning on the news there was a short piece on kids "robotripping" on Robitussin, or taking Coracedin (sp?) cold and cough, which in the delightful parlance of these young pharmaceutical explorers, is known as "triple-C".

Okay, so I don't want to make myself sound too wild, but I must admit, I've had colds where I sucked down Robitussin like fine champagne. I recall it soothing my cough and making my headache better. But I don't recall any interesting neurological side effects. What was I missing? Is this real, or is this like the kid in my high school class who had half a can of beer at his brother's graduation party and managed to convince himself, and his gullible friends, that he was drunk?

It's the holiday season in New York, which means the festive sight of twenty-somethings decorating the early morning streets with the former contents of their stomachs. It's also a time for me to get sick, since I have all this lovely vertigo which unfortunately clashes madly with my need to make long car trips upstate. Thinking about this as I walked home the other night, I was wondering: why does motion sickness make you sick?

Neuroscientists can tell you what causes motion sickness: it's a disconnect between the messages you're getting from your eyes, which tell you that you're not moving, and your inner ear, which insists that you are. (Or, more rarely, the other way round, as in some movies). All fine, but why should that make you ill? There's no known connection between the aural and digestive systems.

Watching those twenty-somethings, I developed a theory: motion sickness makes us sick, because our bodies think we're being poisoned.

Think back to college. Remember "the spins"? Remember how you knew you were getting a really good buzz on because when you moved your head, there was a slight lag before your vision followed? The neurological symptoms of alchohol poisoning, which are pretty much exactly the same as the neurological symptoms of motion sickness or vertigo, were for me and my friends, what touched off the sickness.

My theory, therefore, is that motion sickness evolved as a way for your body to identify the fact that you had ingested some horrid neurotoxin. At which point, it would be a good idea for you to vomit. Unfortunately, with modern transportation, the evolutionary mechanism gets carried over to inappropriate circumstances.

All I can say is, thank god for Dramamine. In your face, evolution!

Shameless commercial begging: Recommended Reading

This is the last post I'll do on recommended items for Christmas. It's for those of you who have left your shopping until the last minute . . . or are looking for something to escape the clamouring relatives for a blissful moment.

Well, kinda. In fact, my reading this year was a little short on escapism. But I'll do my best.

1) The Economist Do you have a talented, intelligent, difficult-to-shop for special someone in *your* life? What better gift than the magazine newspaper so smart and up to the minute that it employs me. Plus, every subscription comes with complimentary access to the entire web site: all the archives back to 1997 are searchable and browsable by subject. None of this TimesSelect "100 articles a month" nonsense. The web savvy can read the magazine on Thursday afternoon, before anyone but the printers have it.

2) I've been on a kind of an Orwell kick this year. I'm halfway through his four volume omnibus collected writings, and I have no superlatives to describe it; it's just amazingly, quietly, brilliant. The problem with Orwell, for a writer, is that its very hard to shake the image of him standing over your shoulder as you right and shaking his head in despair at your serpentine sentencies, the blunted edge of your observational powers. Volume One, An Age Like This, is the early Orwell; the fresh cut raw materials for books like Homage to Catalonia and the Road to Wigan Pier (both of which are must-reads, I think, for anyone who wants to think seriously about economics, political structure, and justice). Volume II, My Country, Right or Left, is about the thorny problem of supporting your country without supporting its prevailing economic and social arrangements. For a companion read, I recommend Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens--except to budding writers, who may be driven insane by the juxtaposition of two such brilliant writers, and the inevitable invidious comparison of their own work to same.

3) On the cookbook front, this year I'm pushing Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food, which covers cooking, and I'm Just Here for More Food, which is his baking bible. I acquired both of them over the last year. I do not recommend them because the recipes are the best things you've ever eaten--many of them aren't to my taste. I'm recommending them because once you have finished the books you will understand how recipes work down to the molecular science, and that will make you better at cooking old and new favourites from other sources. That, for example, is how I perfected my pancake recipe by buying the electric griddle. That pancake recipe was adapted from Betty Crocker's 1950 Picture Cookbook, which remains my best basic bible; it is solid instruction for the novice moving towards advanced cookery, from an age before vegetable oil became the go-to ingredient for every occasion. Priceless gift for new brides because of the rather extraordinary advice to new homemakers at the back of the book.

4) For heartwarming mother-daughter cooking moments, I cannot recommend Miriam's Kitchen highly enough. It is the story of a woman going from non-observance to keeping a kosher kitchen, told through her memories of her mother and mother-in-law, and their memories, in turn, of their childhood kitchens. Especially good for a Hannukah gift, obviously, but beautiful even for agnotheists like me. Plus, the recipes for Kugel are very good.

5) The economics book of the season is, obviously, Tim Harford's superlative new book, The Undercover Economist. If the econ-geek in your life already has this little treasure, I suggest substituting either White Man's Burden, or, for a really clever twist, packaging Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom with John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society; both of the nation's most famous economics writers died this year. These are not my favourite books by those authors--for sheer fun, I'd substitute Free to Choose for the Friedman, and The Great Crash by Galbraith. But they are perhaps their purest cri de coeurs.

6) Stumbling on Happiness is a great book, and also, a very comforting book. It says you'll fool yourself into being happy with your choices no matter what, so why worry? On that note, don't hesitate to buy the book.

7) The Family that Couldn't Sleep is an odd little non-fiction find from our review pile, along the lines of last year's curiously unputdownable whaling book. It's the story of a family with a hereditary prion disease that strikes in their fifties, their struggle to find a cure, the scientific struggle to understand prions, and the author's own battle with a degenerative disease. It really is extraordinary.

8) For the SF/Fantasy crowd, I'm back with another Robin Hobb recommendation: though her new series, Shaman's Crossing and Forest Mage, have gotten mixed reviews for their ponderous pace, I loved them. They're conventional school and army stories set in a low magic world with a very unconventional main character. For me, the relatively slow pace is a feature, not a bug; I like to savour.

8) I'm a big fan of War Music, which is a modern recast of the first four books of the Iliad. Best taken in small doses, like a drug; the aftereffects linger, pleasantly, for days.

9) I'm not sure you'd want to give it as a gift, but Theodore Dalrymple's Romancing Opiates is an interesting deconstruction of the "addiction as illness" and "addiction as uncontrollable urge" schools of thought about drugs . . . but not from the standard libertarian viewpoint. Dalrymple doesn't approve of opiate use, but he doesn't romanticise it as an unslayable monster, either.

10) If you're a girl who wants to curl up with some girl-trash over Christmas, I recommend two girl-trash icons: The Best of Everything, which really started the trashy novel genre; and Sex and the Single Girl, which started . . . well, you know. This way, you're not indulging; you're being adorably ironic.

My father adds that I should have put Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon into my DVD roundup; my excuse is that they seemed to obvious. Also, I'd like to plug the Horatio Hornblower films, with Ioan Griffud, which are now available in a box set; they are just about the best damn coming of age films ever. If you're still looking for DVDs, kitchen equipment, etc, check out my AStore, or look at my reviews:

* DVDs
* Electronics
* Kitchen Equipment
* Ingredients

Merry Christmas--you've certainly made mine merry with your ordering!

If you want to know why I am no longer a lefty, just read this series on MyDD about PIRG, the organisation that supervised my transition from ultraliberal to libertarian. I have never worked at any organisation, including the Catskills hotel that basically used foriegn temporary labour in sweatshop fashion, that treated its employees as shamefully as PIRG. People talk about workers being disposable, but no other business model I have encountered depends on its employees having an average tenure of two weeks, the better to funnel their lost wages up the hierarchy to god-knows-where. It's all there in the series, what happens to you if you threaten to make too much money: the paycheck mixups that all run in favour of PIRG and somehow can never be rectified, the sudden firings of people for having a bad day, the curiously malleable policies on things like sick leave and holiday pay, which ensure that no one actually ever collects same, the shamelessly llame pretexts for getting rid of the overly successful, and the deliberate assignments to bad turf in order to depress your wages and thus force you to quit, or if that doesn't work, give them an excuse to fire you.

It all comes flooding back, how with big balloon payments coming to the good door-to-door canvassers at the end of August, suddenly on August 1st no one could lay their hands on our paychecks. (Given that we made $200 a week pre-tax, there wasn't much chance we had been saving up to cover the shortfall). I have many, many favourite stories from that delightful period, but I think the best was the turf that they found to stick me on for one delightful week in mid-August. They were vast tracts of long rectangular buildings, perhaps 15 feet wide and hundreds of feet long. Inside, they were carved into something like railroad flats, one room wide; outside, the paint was peeling, the casement windows were out of plumb with the sagging frames, and the grass was everywhere growing through the cracks in the concrete walks. They looked like decrepit army barracks, which may have been what they were; at any rate, they were built sometime during World War II. Making my way up the seasick waves of dilapidated concrete walkway, I used to try to envision what this all had looked like when it was clean and new, and people had been happy to live there. I could sort of see it, much as you can just barely discern the lingering shadows of a happy young bride in your grandmother's silver anniversary portrait.

But no one was happy to live there now. They were there because it was the cheapest real estate to be had in a low-income town on the border of Philadelphia. People went there when they admitted that nothing was ever going to get any better: welfare mothers, elderly people collecting the minimum Social Security payment, young men on disability. Needless to say, none of them had the $15 minimum membership fee, which we had been told, over and over, was the very least we were allowed to ask for during our "rap".

I was a field manager for PIRG, before that; I would have skipped turf like that. I certainly wouldn't have put anyone on it two nights in a row. And certainly not five nights; there weren't enough houses for that, even if they had been affluent. Yet I stayed there five nights, knocking as lightly as possible on door after door, so as not to knock the things entirely off their hinges.

It seems worth mentioning that missing your weekly quota was a firing offense. Someone wanted to make damn sure I didn't make it to August 28th; I was, I believe, the third or fourth best canvasser in the state that summer*, and I had a big balloon payment coming.

Just around that time, my quota, and that of a few other high performers, was suddenly and inexplicably raised to $85 a night.

I made quota every. damn. night. I did it by never asking for $15, which would have earned a horrified laugh from anyone in that neighbourhood. I collected quarters, nickels, dollar bills, occasionally $5. I had an unprecedented 98% response rate. During the entire week, I think I might have spoken to three people who were employed.

Now, of course, I think of myself getting money from those poor people for PIRG, and I writhe in shame. Because of course, the whole thing is a massive scam. All the money from the canvass goes, not to the cause, but to the canvass: you are paying them to collect your name so that they can sic telemarketers on you several times a year. The canvassers don't believe in what they're saying, at least not in any reasonably creditable way; they are told what to say and exactly how to say it, about issues they know nothing more about than you do. Many of them shamelessly lie; others repeat untruths they picked up somewhere with the best of intentions and the worst of results. Even after the telemarketers are through with it, at almost no point does the money ever get used for the things that are stressed in the pitches, like research, preservation, rescuing human rights victims, and so forth; administrative costs for most of these operations are, as a percentage of total revenues, in the high double digits. Their idea of a really effective use of the money is lobbying the government to take more out of you in tax dollars, and spend it.

"Most people hear `Environment California' and think `oh, sure, I know you guys,' even though it's the first time we were talking to them," said Marcy, who found those campaigns to be particularly easy to call into. Marcy befriends most people instantly, and can give the warm, comforting impression that the person is already quite familiar with whatever it is that she is talking about. Details like 'what is this organization, and what does it do' simply don't matter all that much when Marcy is talking to you about the environment.

"I'd been raising them so much money for so long, and I'd had my doubts before," Marcy says, "but now that I was looking at it square in the face, I just didn't know where it was all going. I'd been there on the phone telling people `we won this with your help, and now we need you to do this other thing,' but the more I looked, the more I just saw smoke and mirrors, just this big circular pattern."

- / -

Supposedly, Environment California's big shining success was that California solar roofs bill for which the TOP raised money so furiously. After several years in which the bill was shot down, taken apart, and forced to regroup, it has finally passed.

I have a PIRG pamphlet ("30 Years of Action in the Public Interest") that lists this victory, along with a set of achievements and victories won by these organizations. But if you look chiefly at the list of the last fifteen, twenty years, almost all of the victories have words like "helped" and phrases like "and a coalition of."

PIRG does have lobbyists; PIRG lobbyists do write reports and send letters to legislators about various policy initiatives. That much is fact enough. Who do these lobbyists report back to? Not the membership. Not the individual state PIRGs. The lobbyists brief the callers and the canvassers every few months, often over the phone, and the briefings are "not much more specific than the raps."

As a result, the canvassers, callers, and directors alike cannot say in any substantive way what it is that the lobbyists and advocates actually do by way of the funds that are raised. The calling raps, like the canvass raps, claim that the campaigns are working to "show" how much support there is, to "hold politicians accountable" and to "get legislation passed" - but beyond those claims, they are almost entirely devoid of information about the campaign at hand. Callers are actively discouraged from getting into time-consuming discussions about the issues and campaigns in detail. As for those members who ask about, say, what a PIRG advocate does and how the campaigns work (in greater detail than "lobbying" to "get" important bills passed) - "those people are supposedly `not worth our time,'" says Joe.

All the workers angry at being abused were also abusers fo the worst sort. Like me, to all of our eternal discredit, they only started wondering about what they were telling other people when they realised that they themselves were being scammed.

I could have stood the abuse, though it certainly dinged my righteous armor to realize that activist groups could behave worse than the most abusive employer--worse, because they had not even private shame about it. It was all for The Cause, you see. But every movement has its bad apples. I could have stood that. But it did me in to realize that being an activist was making me a bad person.

* No, I do not have any excuse for this.

Small town justice

It seems that the New York Times' new Augusta National is the magistrate system in upstate New York, in which untrained lay judges dispense a sort of rough frontier justice to the region's petty criminals. This is the second article I've read on the topic from them recently--a topic that has aroused, as far as I can tell, exactly no interest outside of the editorial offices of the New York Times. Is is just me, or is the article strenuously pushing the pederasty button, despite no evidence of same?

Let us now celebrate the Birth of Our Lord . . .

. . . and the Death of Irony. By reading this thread over on Mark Thoma's excellent blog, in which his commenters criticise federal outsourcing

I will make it clear that I am only against the contracts that are given to unqualified, unaccountable companies on the basis of partisan loyalty or what seems more like payback or favors.... I think many large "contributions" are just payments for future favors....and that is the problem with privatization as we know it now.....(which seems to be part of the point of this op-ed)

I'm not sure it's simply a matter of outsourcing is bad.

In fact, the private company will almost surely do a worse job if its political connections insulate it from accountability

accountability is key, I argue, as well as contracts that deal with cost overruns and place responsibility for fixes with the supplier. The Coast Gaurd ships should be sent back to the manufacturer for free repairs until they are up to snuff.

Contracts that allow companies to deliver shoddy work and then continue to get government contracts are so completely stupid! Accountability,Accountability,Accountability! Why shouldn't these companies have to guarantee their product and services? If they lost money instead of continuing to rake it in.......

The public is being ripped off and worse, poor children, families and eldres are receiving less benefits or no benefits at all.

It's this last part that is really galling.

At a time when everyone pontificates about the need of a well-educated work force, the need to prepare for globalization, the need for new technologies etc;etc; the country is basically creating a brand-new population of poor children becoming dysfunctional adults.

Save a penny now and waste a dollar later seems to be the conservative motto.

Somehow, all of these comments are supposed to be a defense of giving the work to civil service employees who can't be fired no matter how poor a performance they turn in, and use their union dues to help pick the boss they will subsequently negotiate with . . .

Overheard on NPR

"When we come back . . . we'll hear why holiday tipping is not necessarily as altruistic as it seems . . . "

Is anyone under the impression that holiday tipping is altruistic? I give my super $100 and a tin of gingerbread because when my toilet breaks, I don't want him to peer at it and say "That's the way it's supposed to be."*

Why do y'all tip?

*True story

Speed reading

I read fast. Really fast. I read about six paperback pages a minute, give or take. (As timed by someone else, not at my prompting; before they timed me, I was never interested in the question of exactly how fast I read.) I suspect many bloggers are fast readers--I recall speaking to someone who sat behind Glenn Reynolds at a conference, and reported his lightning fast reading speed with awe and wonder in his voice. I have never taken a speed reading course, and never tried to learn how to read fast; I've been doing it . . . well, I don't know how long, but at least since I was in junior high school. The only tricks I know for learning how to read fast are:

1) Be born to parents who read fast, and a lot 2) Read a lot yourself when you are a child

As I get older, though, I've figured out how I do it: I skip things. This may seem obvious, but I actually had to catch myself doing it; it is not a conscious process, and if I think about it, I can't do it. Somehow, my brain selects chunks of text that it thinks won't convey new information, and avoids them. Perhaps this is not optimal, but it works well enough for me to have made A's in most of my college lit classes. I can still read faster than most people while reading completely, and I do for some things, like textbooks, but it takes effort and I don't enjoy it as much.

What brought this on was Tyler Cowen's post on How to read fast, and a comment therein which talked about rereading. The interesting thing is that while I read a lot, I also re-read a lot, mostly fiction. For good books, I find each reading a deeper experience; it now occurs to me that this is because I'm reading a slightly different group of paragraphs than I did the previous time. My friends who read slowly, never reread.

(I rarely bother to re-read mass market books, though I make an exception for the British mystery novels that were my first "adult" books, sometime around fourth or fifth grade. Luckily, I have a pretty remarkable gift for forgetting whodunnit; I can read them every five years, and never see it coming.)

So, I used Yahoo Finance for my every day economics writing. Or, I should say, used. Google just unveiled their new, updated finance site, and it's waaaaaay cool. The charts allow you to mouse over to see the actual level at the peaks . . . no more having to go back and do price lookups! Yippeeee!

Yes, that's me shouting.

They've also got a pretty seriously cool sectoral overview, and a top gainers and losers section, which is mostly good for fun . . . but what fun Schadenfreude is. Now if they'll just add currencies and a little more international data . . . a loan calculator, perhaps . . . they'll have my loyalty for life . . .

Update: They have currencies, above recent quotes. Thanks guys. But how about a little clearer labelling?

Another good reason to get rid of the French . . .

Okay, so he's talking about the language classes, not the people. But I have to keep up my warblogger street cred somehow.

Shameless Commercial Begging: DVD edition

1) The Complete Bertie and Jeeves Megaset If you have not read any of PG Wodehouse's "Jeeves" novels . . . well, then, oh, how I envy you, my friend. You have an enormous treat in store. PG Wodehouse writes stories set in a world of his own devising that's sort of England sometime between the wars, and sort of an American musical comedy about English aristocratic types. This is a BBC series starring Hugh Laurie (whom you may know from House), and his comedic partner Stephen Frye, who is, if anything, more brilliant than Mr Laurie. This is the complete series, and it's simply brilliant. The fourth season drags a little, but only in comparison to the previous three glorious years, and the four-disc set is at any rate cheaper than buying the first three seasons.

2) House Speaking of which, if you're not watching House . . . or if you missed the first season . . . you need to find out what you're missing. You don't watch the series for the deft characterization or gripping realism; you certainly don't watch it for the heartstring tugging medical miracles. No, you watch it for Hugh Laurie's brilliant misanthropy, and the fact that on Season Three, they're still siding with the Vicodin-popping doctor against the drug police. Libertarian heaven.

3) The Americanization of Emily Is possibly the most libertarian movie ever. I suspect this may have been James Garner's finest role, and I'm really very awfully fond of James Garner. As far as I know, this may have been the first (and last) movie that dared to question the portrayal of World War II as a sacred cause. Certain to be a crowd-pleaser at any anti-war party.

4) Reds Possibly the least libertarian movie ever. Answers the question: is it possible to have your heart stirred by the gosh-darned earnestness of someone else's grand ideological battle, while at the same time hating everything they stand for? The answer is yes.

5) Dr. Zhivago While we're on the topic of Russia, I just saw this for the first time this year. Before you ask, the hole was in Central Park around 83rd Street; I have apparently been hiding there for about 20 years. This is a Sunday night movie, after a long weekend when you're just slightly tired, and it's cold outside and warm inside, and you heat yourself a little soup and settle down on the couch with a bottle of wine. Even better if you have someone snuggly there, preferably one who doesn't mind maybe dressing up in your fake fur coat so you can get yourself in the mood by resting your head on his furry chest while you watch the movie.

Excuse me, are you still here? Ahem. Anyway. Great movie. Tres romantic. In a desperately sad, Russian sort of way.

6) Jezebel Speaking of grand romantic tragedies, this is a non-libertarian film in another way: it celebrates all the Burkean values, like blind adherence to tradition. It's also set in the old South. And yet, it's also one of my favourite movies. Rent or buy it if you want to explore the tortured depths of my political soul, or if you like a really satisfying period drama.

7) Firefly of course brings me back to my firm libertarian roots. I know, you're all "Battlestar Galactica is better", but I can resist peer pressure. Besides, I have a thing for orphans.

8) Then there's the dark side of my SF affection, which is Space: Above and Beyond I cannot explain my affection for this series, except to pass along the description a friend of mine gave it: it's like every World War II movie ever, set in space, with models.

Tell me you don't want to pop that in with a six pack and a large pepperoni and sausage with extra cheese.

9) Now, of course, I have to restore my highbrow credibility with you. Unfortunately, Bresson's The Pickpocket isn't available on DVD. The Third Man will have to be a less opaque and emotionally unavailable substitute. It is possibly the finest noir thriller ever made. By the end of it, I felt as if I'd spent ninety minutes vibrating like a guitar string.

10) And of course, you'll want something heartwarming for Christmas. I recommend A River Runs Through It, which may actually be my favourite movie, appealling to my upper-middlebrow sensibilities, my frantic love of running water, my WASP taste for stirring affirmations of good old-fashioned American values, and my Irish affection for the painful beauty of melancholy.

11) The complete Monty Python I don't think I need to explain this, do I?

A random ramble about weight, pie, and television

Tonight is the first night in about a month that I haven't had something I was supposed to be doing . . . and I'm spending it with you, dear readers. I hope you appreciate it. If you are someone I am supposed to be emailing, calling, or otherwise communicating with, I am currently paralyzed by the near-infinite mass of emails in my box. I am flopped on my couch in exhaustion, pondering Christmas gifts and bad television, and that holiday weight gain.

I have something of a sweet tooth . . . well, actually, more of a pie tooth, since I find all other desserts eminently resistible. Unfortunately for my waistline, my mother likes to make pie.

Anyway, so I like pie. And homemade macaroni and cheese. Warm bread slathered with butter. Steak tartare. Pepperoni pizza. Fried chicken, with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy. Fresh pound cake with ripe berries and whipped cream.

What I'm trying to say is, I understand the urge to eat things that aren't so good for you. And so for a long time, I thought I understand what went on in the lives of those who are overweight and obese. Like me, they wanted to eat things that weren't good for them. But unlike me, they didn't do it in moderation. That's what most people are thinking, when they talk about obesity. "Eat less, weigh less."

More and more, though, I think there must be something fundamentally different there. I was thinking that last night, after I filed about 5,000 words to various places. That's because, draped across my couch like an overcooked noodle, I was watching bad television. Maybe you know that feeling, after you handed in your last paper of the term: not happy or sad, but empty. You feel as if nothing will ever happen again. It's the time for bad television, and thoughts about nothing very useful.

The bad television I was watching was about gastric bypass surgery--those who get it, and those who don't. And maybe because I was so empty of any feeling myself, it seemed clear, suddenly, that what these people were describing did not bear any resemblance to my relationship with food.

They talked about being hungry all the time when they were on a diet. I've been hungry, all the time, but only once, and that was because for reasons too tedious to discuss, for about three weeks, I didn't have any money for food.

But even then, I wasn't hungry all the time. I was hungry when I went into a stranger's house and saw food on their counter (I was canvassing for PIRG at the time). I was hungry when I woke up in the morning, and when I went to bed at night, and at odd moments throughout the day. I was especially hungry after I'd eaten, because it usually wasn't enough.

But even so, most of the time I wasn't hungry, at least not that cranky way you get when it's mealtime and you unexpectedly have to wait an hour. My stomach hurt a lot. But I didn't think about food all the time. And I would have thought about it a lot less if I'd known when my next meal was coming.

And then these people on the television, every one of them, would describe this cycle where they'd be fat, and that would make them sad, so they'd eat more to comfort themselves. And that is totally alien to me. Food has never in my life offered me comfort. It tastes great, and when I'm hungry, it makes me not be hungry any more. But no matter how sad or lonely I feel, eating a cookie does not produce any sort of emotional reward in my brain. It tastes good. But I don't feel any happier, or sadder, after I've eaten. I just feel full.

I wonder if that's emotional or genetic. I don't think my mother ever gave me food to comfort me, to be sure. But is that the reason that I don't find food comforting--or did my mother not use food as a reward/palliative because food didn't soothe me? Or her, for that matter; we're both normal weight.

So anyway, I was just thinking that it pretty much sucks for obese people. I think probably they got handed a terrible genetic hand--some combination of insistent brain signals telling them to eat that I do not have. I was--in that washed out disinterested way that is all you can muster when you've finished a big writing project--angry at the world for them.

But then they had these fat acceptance people on, and I was angry at them too. Obesity is bad for you; at the very, very least, it destroys your joints and puts a heavy strain on your heart to pump blood for an extra hundred pounds. Studies showing that being underweight is worse for you appear to have all missed an obvious control: people who are seriously ill often lose weight even long before their disease becomes apparent. If you use a longer lag, the effect disappears. Conversely, the "fat but fit" studies are selecting out the small number of people whose genetic endowments are so remarkable that they can do heavy excercise carrying around the equivalent of a fully loaded weight bar, and then acting as if those results can be extrapolated to the majority of seriously overweight people who find it difficult to walk up a couple of flights of stairs without stopping to rest.

It seems like they're taking a true statement--"society shouldn't assume that the overweight are simply lazy slobs with remarkably little willpower"--and extrapolating it to a ridiculous result: "which means that seriously overweight people shouldn't try to lose the extra weight". Even if we shouldn't judge obese people, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to encourage them to do something they find very, very hard. Most people find quitting smoking or giving up sugar really, really hard, but we don't tell them not to bother treating their diabetes because it's not their fault their pancreas isn't pumping out any insulin. Fair just isn't very relevant. It isn't fair that every cold I ever get goes straight to my lungs and hangs out there for a month, and I have to carry an inhaler with me everywhere I go, because otherwise I could die. It's certainly not fair that I could go blind in my eighties like my grandmother. Nature doesn't care about fair. That's why it's called natural selection, not natural distribution.

Anyway, there's your random ramble for the night. Maybe later, some DVD and book recommendations, for those of you who still haven't bought your Christmas presents.

Pardon me for going all Andy Rooney here, but . . . some people got a bad tummy. Why is this on the news?!!

Hacktacular

I always cringe when I see someone use the word "hack". I don't doubt I've used it myself, from time to time, but I shouldn't have. The word generally tells you more about the user than the target; more often than not, they are projecting onto their victim their own willingness to committ sins of omission For The Cause. More pitifully, it shows to all of their readers who are not equally ethically challenged.

Even those who are not themselves willing to shade the truth have almost certainly tolerated it in others they agree with. If the word "hack" has never come out of your lips (or keyboard) in public reference to someone on your own side, you have no right to use it about anyone; for your tolerance or your ideological compatriots, and more often, your approbation for their less-hackish work, has made their guilt yours. The fact is, almost all public intellectuals have tolerated hackery from their team, if for no other reason than a fear of making enemies who could hurt them.

Really, the only person who is entitled to use the word is the kind of non-partisan curmudgeon who really means it when he says "a pox on both their houses", fearlessly points out the hypocrisies of both sides . . . and exists only in novels. The rest of us have to be a litle more tolerant.

This meditation was inspired by Chris Bertram's attack on Arnold Kling, which prominently featured the h-word. It was made worse by the fact that Mr Bertram had clearly misread the paper he was arguing about, due to his unfamiliarity with the subject of discount rates and intergenerational equity. It is an entirely understandable misreading--the paper is a little light on background explanations--but it became risible when Mr Bertram started out in attack mode. Particularly since he continued to insist that the mistake had not been his, but Mr Kling's.

There's a valuable lesson for bloggers in there, one that I have only learned in painful embarassment: never make personal attacks unless you are very, very sure that you understand the subject so well that there is no possibility of error. In general, if you are, say, a philosopher arguing about technical economic questions, the odds are very great that you do not. But Mr Kling does not need my defense; he ably explained the source of the misunderstanding, and excercised admirable restraint in not responding to the personal side of the attacks.

Shameless commercial shilling: Electronics edition

As long time readers know, now is the time of year when I engage in an absolutely shameless attempt to encourage you to earn me money from my Amazon.com associates account, under the thin pretense of suggesting things you can buy your loved ones for Christmas. I am poor, and my student loan officer is hungry, and the people at the workhouse will only give me one serving of gruel a day. . . this brazen commercialization of The Birth of Our Lord is the only way that I can afford to buy myself the books with which I enrich my mind so that I can offer you keen insight and witty commentary on a quasi-daily basis.

If you're going to do your Christmas shopping on Amazon this year, just click the handy links provided by me or another of your favourite bloggers (mine's over there at the right, if you scroll down a little!), and at absolutely not cost to yourself, you can send a little commission our way. We get the commission even if you buy something other than the product we linked

However, even if you don't order through Amazon, all the stuff I'll suggest here is stuff that I genuinely love, so do consider purchasing for yourself or your loved ones at the local outlet mall or discount centre. And if you do buy something I recommend, please, please, please email me to let me know how it went over.

And if you don't like anything you see here, please feel free to peruse last year's selections, though there is some overlap. And if you want to browse all the items in once place, try my AStore.

I'm a little bit of a gadget freak. Not a huge one, mind you; for one thing, I'm poor. And for another, I'm a girl. There's a limit to how much I can spend on things with LEDs, when there are new makeups to try, perfume to buy, fantastic new boots on special at the outlet mall . . . sorry, where was I?

Anyway, so here are my recommendations for gee-whiz gadgets. Last year's are here; I tried to keep the overlap minimal.

1. Tivo: You must have Tivo. You don't know how great it is until you have one. With a Tivo, you can do instant replay of anything you missed, whether a football play or a throwaway line (even slow-mo). You can pause it to answer the telephone, the door, the call of nature, or an angry spouse. You can set it up to record your programmes every week, and even set priorities to arbitrate conflicts between shows. You can set up wishlists that will capture every Alfred Hitchcock film, Yankees game, or Scott Baio appearance. It will provide you with enough content that you need never watch infomercials because you are sick or can't sleep. (If you can't afford a Tivo, or have a compliant doc, I recommend Ambien.) The only person who doesn't need a Tivo is the kind of person who makes me feel all stupid and lowbrow because they don't have, or want, a television.

I like Tivo better than the cable-company DVRs or Replay TV; the menus are more intuitive, and the guides appear in a clear frame over the show, rather than zooming the picture into a little box. There are more add-on features, like suggestions, and it can connect to your wireless network and stream your iTunes folder and photographs through your home entertainement system. Hell, I just love it. In fact, a few years back, I wrote a poem on the occasion of my last Tivo's untimely demise.

If you do not have an HDTV, the model I recommend is the dual tuner 80-hour recorder. 80 hours is a lot of recording time, and the dual tuner enables you to record one show, while watching another. Sadly, I purchased mine too early to get this feature, but I am nonetheless quite content. If you do have an HDTV, you'll need the Hi-def Series III model. It is--let us be honest--very expensive. But if you do not get this model, your picture will look all crappy. Come on; you just dropped several K on a flat-screen television. Isn't it worth it to have one touch recording and slow-motion replay at your finger tips?

2. Flat screen television: I've now supervised the purchase of multiple televisions by family members this year. We always ended up back at the same place: the Sharp Aquos 37" D90U. The picture is bright, the sound is great even from the included speakers, and it is 1080p. Most flat-screens this small are not true HDTV; they're what's called EDTV, which uses various algorithms to give you an improved picture without actually as fine resolution. 1080p means true HDTV. Everyone in my family who has bought this model adores it. It's the perfect size for an apartment--or any room that's not a McMansion LivingCourt, really.

3. Dell Axim X51V I couldn't be happier with mine. The PocketPC software means that I can use all my office apps (except Access) in native format, which I didn't realize I would like so much until I got it. The handheld itself is beautiful--very light, small enough to fit in my tiny handbag, and loaded with memory. It supports expansion cards, which let you use it as an MP3 player (and get very decent sound). It also has Bluetooth and a very easy to use wireless card. My office uses MSN Messenger to communicate between far-flung staff, and I can sit down with this handheld in a Starbucks, hook up to the wireless, and actually gotten work done. Now I'm eyeing one of those folding keyboards . . .

4. Olympus voice recorder This might be a specialty item; I use mine to record interviews. It's shockingly good; even when I accidentally left it on dictation mode and left it four feet away from my soft-voiced interviewee in a crowded cafeteria, I got a fully intelligible recording. Allows you to sort your recordings into folders, so that you can keep stories separate. Then you just load tem onto the computer for permanent storage. It holds 70 hours of audio on low quality. I don't know how many it holds on the highest quality (stereo), which is what I've used; at least 20 hours of interviews. But it also might be a great gift for the busy or forgetful; since I've gotten it, I've found (to my surprise) that I grab it while I'm driving or walking to note stray thoughts. It can also be used as an MP3 player; though I haven't tried that, the sound output is very good.

5. Bose wave radio My serious audiophile friends pooh-pooh Bose: "No highs, no lows, that's Bose!" But even they have to agree that Bose makes a great clock radio. I just got one, a years-old cast off from a relative, and while the music is exceptionally lovely to wake up to (I have it set on the local classical station), the user interface is sublime. I've never had any sort of alarm this easy to set--among many lovely details, it has the obvious, and yet never present, feature of allowing you to set the clock backwards or forwards, rather than having to cycle through 24 hours if you overshoot. It also raises the volume gradually, allowing you to come out of sleep with a modicum of grace. And it has a remote--which you should hide if you have as much trouble getting out of bed in the morning as I do.

6. Logitech Harmony Remote Control. It controls *everything*, all at once. If you press "Watch a DVD", it will turn on the television, switch it to the right video channel, turn on the DVD player, and tell it to play whatever's in there. It will even dim the lights, if you have them on remote-something I didn't know existed until I read the manual. I really bought this because I kept losing my Tivo remote, but I've been enjoying this surprisingly well . . . particularly the fact that it's rechargeable, so it never needs new batteries. I have last year's high-end model, which has since gone on sale; there's a newer version, but the reviews are mixed, and I can't see why it's any better. Then there's the really high end model, which looks terrifically slick, and apparently allows you to do gaming with it, but costs more than a journalist could afford. These remotes are especially good if you have a Tivo, since normal universal remotes will not work with your DVR.

7. Wireless keyboard and mouse I love not having cords; it looks neat, but more importantly for me, it allows me to sit in weird positions without having the keyboard cord sweep everything off my desk. Microsoft and Logitech both make them, but in my opinion, Microsoft's keyboards are somewhat better in terms of layout and features, though this Logitech model looks pretty slick. More importantly, I've find that Microsoft keyboards are less likely to lose their signal from the wireless base. If I were buying one now, I'd get this one, which has a scroll wheel built right into the keyboard for those of us who never quite got used to the mouse.

8. iPod It's the king of MP3 players, and the network effects have started to burn in; the bevy of accessories make this an obvious choice. I don't need video storage, and I don't have *that* much music, so I think the 30 GB is more than adequate. Perhaps the Zune really is great, but it will be quite a while, if ever, before it gets accessories to match the power of the iPod.

9. RAZR Love mine. Lightweight, the address book and so forth are easy and intuitive, and the rings are fun. The camera isn't something I'd pay for, personally, but it is easy to use, and kinda nice to have.

Shameless commercial shilling: Ingredients edition

A reader writes in to ask if I can do something similar for ingredients that I did for cookware. I'm not sure what I did for cookware, but here's what I'll try to do: offer tips on ingredients I've found. There are some things it is worth it to pay a premium price for; for others, buying in bulk is fine. Distinguishing which situation is which can save you some $$$$. Readers are invited--nay begged--to chip in with their own observations below. And, of course, to do their shopping by my Amazon link or my AStore.

The list is kinda long, and boring for the non-cook, so if you're interested, click on the link below.

Chocolate: the quality of chocolate matters. I like Valhrona, for European, or Ibarra for Mexican (a very different quality from European chocolate). Of course, I also like BMW's, but I can't afford to drive one. Lindt and Ghirardelli baking chocolates are quite acceptable, and I'm hearing good things about Nestle Chocolatier. For cocoa: I use Ghirardelli unsweetened cocoa unless the recipe specifically calls for dutch process, in which case I use Droste. Nestle toll house morsels are quite satisfactory for chocolate chip cookies.

Eggs: I like cage free eggs. It doesn't make the eggs taste any better, mind you; that's some weird urban affectation. But chickens on traditional farms lead really horrid lives, packed into stacked cages where the feces from the birds above drops onto the birds below (which is why they have to have all those antibiotics). They never see the sun, and are slaughtered after less than two years of unendurable hell. Cage free eggs cost an extra buck, which is what I spend on . . . things so trivial I can't remember what I spent them on. Don't use jumbo eggs in baking unless the recipe calls for it, or you are likely to have a Very Big Mess on the bottom of your oven.

Extracts: You probably think that naturally flavoured extracts are superior. This is not always the case. Imitation almond extract is just as good as natural; ditto rum, lemon, orange and maple. Nor are they healthier; in some cases, like almond, the natural ones are actually (very) mildly poisonous, while the imitations aren't. Imitation vanilla is inferior. McCormick's is fine, Nielsen-Massey is better if your supermarket carries it, but I like buying in bulk from Penzey's, which is also where I get many of my spices. Penzey's also carries unbelievably cheap vanilla beans; 1/2 bean makes an extraordinarily superior substitute for the vanilla in any custard or ice cream recipe. (Cut the bean open and scrape out the seeds with the tip of a knife, and then boil the pod in the milk. Mmmmmmmmm.) For chocolate lovers, I highly highly highly recommend ordering Chocolate Extract, which is not generally available in supermarkets. Add a tablespoon to any chocolate recipe; it somehow makes the flavour blossom.

Flour: I like King Arthur's--but let's be honest, it doesn't matter much. I've used store flour with great success. More important is to match your flour to your job: bread flour, which has lots of gluten, for yeast breads; cake flour, which has very little gluten, for cakes and delicate quick breads; unbleached flour, cut with a tablespoon of cornstarch, for pie crust; all purpose flour for everything else. Self rising flour is an abomination unto the Lord, and should be illegal. Cornmeal is likewise not very variable; I like Quaker or Aunt Jemima, but I haven't ever gotten a bad batch. Specialty flours are tricker. Oat flour I make at home in the food processor using Quaker Old Fashioned Oats (NOT NOT NOT quick or instant, unless you are trying to make Baked Glue). For whole wheat, etc, I recommend your local health food store; whole grain flours degrade rather quickly (they're oily), so you want fresh ground. The obvious corollary is that you shouldn't be tempted to save money by buying a large supply of whole grain flours in bulk. Bisquick is a waste of money and short on flavour; it takes approximately two extra minutes to measure the baking powder and shortening.

Fruit and vegetables: For baking, unless you have access to fresh local produce, you're better off buying frozen. Frozen fruits and vegetables are picked ripe and flash frozen near the field, so they actually have better flavour than the "fresh" produce in your supermarket, though their texture is often inferior. Soups, similarly, are better made with frozen vegetables. Fresh local produce is always best, of course. Pay attention to what's in season, and eat accordingly. In the off season, almost any vegetable you like can be bought frozen and made into delicious soup by simmering in chicken stock and a little wine with some onion, then pureeing with your food processor and hand blender; helps to fend off longings for spring. I never buy canned anything except for corn.

Meat: pay attention to the supermarket; if it's a little skeevy, steer clear of the meat aisle, particularly the poultry. For something that is going to be grilled, pay for quality: prime steak, good chicken breasts. Pot roast and soup, on the other hand, can use cheap cuts. Grind your own hamburger if possible, for flavour and health, especially if (like me) you like it rare; you can either use a grinder attachment for your kitchenaid mixer, or do it (as I do) in the food processor, which takes, like two minutes. For beef lovers, here's a secret: choice tenderloin roasts (which is what filets mignons are cut from) are nearly as good as prime, and can be purchased very affordably from Costco. Buy one for $50 and cut into filets, or smaller roasts; 45 minutes will produce a lovely, tender rare roast that can be gussied up as desired with sauces. It also obviously makes great gourmet hamburgers, carpaccio, or steak tartare. Pork is so lean these days it has no flavour; I lay strips of bacon or fatback on top of my chops or loin roasts before cooking.

Milk: With the exception of absurdly expensive artisanal farms, it all tastes the same. I buy whatever is cheapest. Loyalty to organic milk is based on a mistaken idea about the friendliness of nature by people who have never experienced it. For yogurt making, I buy Parmalat steam-packed milk (the shelf-stable stuff in the boxes), which avoids the need to pre-heat it.

Oatmeal: In theory, I like the Irish steel cut oats. In practice, I rarely have time to spend forty minutes or more on my breakfast cereal. I make old fashioned or instant oatmeal in the microwave. I am embarassingly fond of maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal.

Pasta: It's all the same. I buy Barilla or DiCecco, but only because they're available in bulk at Costco; Ronzoni is just fine. The important thing is to salt your water well, use lots of water (like, a gallon or two--you cannot make good pasta in a little saucepan, bachelors), and make sure you don't overcook it.

Salt: Fine ground salt, the kind that goes in baking, is chemically identical no matter where you buy it. I get the store brand; I've found no difference between iodized and non, and I have a thyroid problem, so I buy iodized. Cooking salt, on the other hand, varies widely. There are two considerations: size of the ground, and subtle flavour. For brining your poultry (if you don't, you should), and for grilling steaks, kosher salt. For everything else, sea salt--and not just any sea salt. Use Maldon, and accept no substitute. It's hard to find in most places, so order from Amazon. It has a lovely, lovely flavour. You can also use it on the table, though I prefer fresh ground salt; you can get beautiful salt and pepper grinder sets like mine for not terribly much money. Unlike pepper, the fresh grinding doesn't matter nearly so much as the variation in the size of the crystals, which makes it much harder to oversalt.

Sugar: Doesn't matter. Chemically, it's all the same. I buy the store brand, and have never had reason to complain. Exception: Domino's brownulated sugar, which is outstanding for things like topping apple cakes. Do not get carried away and sprinkle it on your pie crust, however; it will turn a nasty burned colour. (Sorry, Aunt Cathy!) I am similarly uninterested in fine distinctions between brands of molasses, and anyone who has an opinion about brands of corn syrup is on crack.

Shortening: The most important thing is to keep it well. I like my butter soft, but not rancid, which is what normally happens if you leave it out, so I use butter boats, which use evaporative cooling to keep the butter magically soft and fresh at room temperature. For my normal baking butter needs, I use Land O' Lakes. It is pricier than other brands, and that is because it is better. Like every young new housekeeper, I thought I knew better than my mother, and could save on my butter consumption. That's when I found out that butter matters, particularly in things like shortbread and pie crust, where it is a dominant flavour. For pie crusts and cakes, I often cut it with 50% Crisco--not because I am cheap, but because it produces a lighter, and in the case of pie crusts, flakier, product. You should never do this for something that is supposed to be ultra-rich, like pound cake or flourless chocolate cake; but for a normal angel food or two egg cake, it will actually give you a superior product. Do not buy butter flavoured Crisco, which is perfectly revolting. Nor will I ever use margarine, either on my toast or in my cooking.

Spices: The decision between fresh and dried is always tricky. Basically, dried have a stronger flavour, and are easier to store; fresh have a more delicate, rich flavour, and are very expensive. If I had room for one of these indoor herb gardens, I would get one, for pesto if nothing else. Sadly, I don't, so I make do mostly with dried (though not for pesto). There are a few exceptions, however: garlic salt/powder is an abomination for anything except sprinkling on your pizza at the pizza parlour; onion flakes/salt are likewise a silly idea. Fresh ginger makes a nice substitute for dried, though it's a pain to peel and you need to use a lot of it; candied (or "crystallized") ginger, on the other hand, is disgusting, no matter what the Williams Sonoma catalogue says. Melanges like pumpkin pie spice, apple spice, "italian seasoning" and so forth should be shunned. If you don't know what goes into them, write me and I will tell you. (Poultry seasoning is actually okay, IMHO, though you can get pretty much the same effect with salt, pepper, thyme and sage.) In general, anything that takes control out of your hands is a bad thing. I do use Indian spice melanges, since I'm otherwise clueless. Where possible, dried spices should be purchased whole and ground, particularly cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and black/white pepper. This sounds worse than it is; get one (or a few, for convenience) of these spice mills. You will be truly astonished at the difference it makes in flavour. You can also now often buy those little throwaway-jars-with-included-grinders at the supermarket; that's what I have for nutmeg. Salt and pepper are almost always available in this form now--so if you aren't grinding your pepper fresh, hide your face in shame (and then get your ass to the supermarket). I like Spice Islands, in the supermarket; or Penzey's, for mail order; their spices tend to be cheaper and fresher, since they bypass the distribution network where spices get old. You should throw out your spices after, at a maximum, three years if you want the best flavour; I have friends who swear that twelve months is the limit.

Measuring ingredients: for liquids, I like the Oxo cup; for dry ingredients (no, you cannot use a liquid measure: you need to be able to level off the top), you need accurate sizes; I like a set like this, which goes down to 1/8 tsp and 1/8 cup, and contains all the odd sizes like 2/3 cup for convenience. I particularly like the shape of the spoons, which are designed to easily go into spice bottles. If you already have measuring cups, but like the idea of the spoons, you can pick up similar ones almost anywhere. Don't underestimate the power of the 1/8 tsp measure. I don't like plastic cups/spoons as much, because the numbers eventually wear off, specially if you have a dishwasher. Yes, embarassingly, I cannot always eyeball the difference between a 1/4 cup measure and a 1/3 cup measure.

The best thing to do is get a kitchen scale and weigh your ingredients (here's a chart to convert your recipes). This eliminates variation due to aeration or improper packing.