Asymmetrical Information

Terry points us to this stash of suicide notes, and what I can't get over is how spiteful most of them are. I can understand killing yourself because of desperate sadness, or physical pain. But doing it just to get back at someone? You're hardly going to enjoy their discomfort when you are dead. Plus, if they're as awful as you say you think they are, they won't care that you're dead; they might even be relieved. Somehow, this makes me sadder than people who just kill themselves because they feel terrified and alone, even though the latter group are far more deserving of pity.

Department of bad memes

I've heard this meme on a variety of liberal websites: Social Security's finances keep improving! The date of collapse keeps getting pushed out further and further! At this rate, the crisis will never come! Why are evil conservatives who hate old people lying to us?

Typical is this from Angry Bear:

Really quick thought... we have readers like Bruce Webb and Coberly who read through the Social Security Trustee's Report every year. Bruce Webb tells us that the Social Security position seems to have improved with each report he's read, and since he backs it up with numbers and examples, I suspect he's right. And I wonder how you value the future obligations of, say, a treaty to defend Taiwan.

I don't know what Social Security Trustee's Report Bruce Webb is reading. The ones I've read (2003-2007) seem to show a mild worsening of the financial condition of the trust fund, but with a fair amount of fluctuation that calls into question the results of any one year.

2003

• The projected point at which tax revenues will fall below program costs comes in 2018 -- one year later than the estimate in last year’s report;


• The projected point at which the trust funds will be exhausted comes in 2042 -- one year later than the estimate in last year’s report;


• The projected actuarial deficit of taxable payroll over the 75-year long-range period is 1.92 percent -- larger than the 1.87 percent projected in last year’s report;


• The Trust Funds would require another $3.5 trillion in today’s dollars, earning interest at Treasury rates, to pay all scheduled benefits over the next 75 years. This obligation grew $200 billion from last year.
  

2004

• The projected point at which tax revenues will fall below program costs comes in 2018 -- the same as the estimate in last year’s report.
• The projected point at which the Trust Funds will be exhausted comes in 2042 -- also the same as the estimate in last year’s report.
• The projected actuarial deficit over the 75-year long-range period is 1.89 percent of taxable payroll.
• Over the 75-year period, the Trust Funds require additional revenue equivalent to $3.7 trillion in today’s dollars to pay all scheduled benefits. This unfunded obligation grew $200 billion from last year.

2005

• The projected point at which tax revenues will fall below program costs comes in 2017 – one year earlier than the projection in last year’s report.
• The projected point at which the Trust Funds will be exhausted comes in 2041 – also one year earlier than the projection in last year’s report.
• The projected actuarial deficit over the 75-year long-range period is 1.92 percent of taxable payroll, slightly higher than the estimate in last year’s report and the same as in the 2003 Trustees Report.
• Over the 75-year period, the Trust Funds require additional revenue equivalent to $4.0 trillion in today’s dollars to pay all scheduled benefits. This unfunded obligation is $300 billion higher than the amount estimated last year.

2006

• The projected point at which tax revenues will fall below program costs comes in 2017 -- the same as the estimate in last year’s report.
• The projected point at which the Trust Funds will be exhausted comes in 2040 -- one year earlier than the projection in last year’s report.
• The projected actuarial deficit over the 75-year long-range period is 2.02 percent of taxable payroll -- up .09 percent from last year’s report.
• Over the 75-year period, the Trust Funds require additional revenue equivalent to $4.6 trillion in today’s dollars to pay all scheduled benefits. This unfunded obligation is $600 billion higher than the amount estimated last year.

2007

• The projected point at which tax revenues will fall below program costs comes in 2017 -- the same as the estimate in last year’s report.


• The projected point at which the Trust Funds will be exhausted comes in 2041 -- one year later than the projection in last year’s report.


• The projected actuarial deficit over the 75-year long-range period is 1.95 percent of taxable payroll -- .06 percentage point smaller than in last year’s report.


• Over the 75-year period, the Trust Funds would require additional revenue equivalent to $4.7 trillion in today’s dollars to pay all scheduled benefits. This unfunded obligation is about $100 billion higher than the amount estimated last year.

I assume that what's happening is that people are reading one or the other figure getting better in a given year, and deciding that means there's no problem. But since 2003, the projected point at which SS tax revenues fall below outflows has moved up a year, to 2017 from 2018; the projected point at which the trust funds are exhausted has moved up a year, to 2041 from 2042; the projected actuarial deficit has grown from 1.92% of payroll to 1.95%; and the NPV of the deficit has grown to $4.7 trillion from $3.5 trillion. I wouldn't worry to much about this last number, which is at least in large part an artifact of inflation and economic growth. Nor would I use any of this data to claim that Social Security is getting worse, fast; all it really shows is that the projections are fairly sensitive to current economic conditions.

But doing either would be at least (barely) credible; the long-term financial condition of the Social Security Administration has probably deteriorated very slightly. What is completely in-credible is that anyone could claim to have read these reports, every year, and to have found in them evidence the SSA's financial condition is improving. This is hardly rocket science; the reports are right there on the SSA website, and comparing the current year to the earliest year available in order to measure the direction of change is not exactly a novel economic technique.

Musings on the internet age

I just switched RSS readers, after a friend at Google browbeat me into trying theirs. It works offline now, which is nice, but not quite enough to allay my fears that we will all be renting air from Sergei & co in a couple of years.

Everyone should do this every now and again; it forces you to think about what you actually read. And also, how you read it. I had mine neatly categorised into folders on NewsGator: linkers, science, libertarians, progressives, economics, and so forth. But the "Linkers" folder quickly became a daunting morass into which I rarely ventured, even though it only had five or six blogs in it; the volume was just too overwhelming. And my arts blogs got lost in the shuffle. Now everything's in one big alphabetical list; we'll see how that fares.

However, I'm having pangs of regret that I use a reader at all. My blog reading used to have a much bigger element of serendipity. I never delinked anyone from the bloggroll; as my co-blogger once said, unblogrolling someone is an act of violence. As a consequence, my relationships with blogs waxed and waned. After a while of not reading someone, I'd wonder what they'd gotten up to, and wander over to see. Now, though, they're either in my RSS reader . . . or I won't see them unless someone else points me their way. It's more efficient, to be sure, but I'm not sure it's an overall improvement.

Tomorrow's anachronisms, today!

Kevin Maney writes:

The 80th National Scripps Spelling Bee starts today, amid the dawn of an era when spelling increasingly doesn't matter. Just hit "spell check" before sending or printing.

Spelling is one of those things that everyone used to have to be good at, but in the future only people who do it for sport will be good at it. Like horseback riding. Or shooting. The Scripps Spelling Bee will eventually become the intellectual equivalent of the biathlon

Does that mean my great-grandchildren will regard my crossword fetish as something akin to some obscure 16th century ciphering contest?

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Naomi Wolf continues giving feminism a bad name by confusing offhand conversations with data:

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

I would venture to say that all of us have, from time to time, been a little disappointed when comparing our fantasy partners--whether they be from film, television, or novel--with what is actually available in the real world. Why, those people don't always have something snappy and/or wise to say. They generally have fat in at least a few unsightly spots. Their clothes don't send a coherent statement carefully managed by the wardrobe people. Sometimes they don't pay attention to you, and worse, sometimes you don't really feel like paying attention to them. Few of them can fell an army of rogue ninjas with a series of well-placed kicks. And most annoying of all, you have no idea how it's all going to end.

But I can't say that this has ever stopped me, or anyone I know who is not actually mentally ill, from dating. Just as with friends, who are generally not quite so funny, handsome, or willing to put up with our crap as the friends in movies, most of us are able to tap back into reality after the credits roll. No doubt there are some people out there who do substitute fantasy social or dating lives for reality . . . but insofar as that is true, I suspect that they are mostly people who have trouble generating and sustaining real-world contact.

Most of the guys I know a) consume pornography and b) seem to date women fairly regularly. This indicates that actual women have benefits that pornography can't offer, just as actual men are in most ways preferable to Rhett Butler. Online pornography has been pretty freely available for ten years now, and yet marriage and dating still seem to be pretty much de rigeur for most of the country. Besides, anyone who's ever been in a relationship without consuming pornography--a group I'd assume includes Naomi Wolf--should be well aware that you don't need glossy photos to generate elaborate fantasies about a partner who immediately fulfills your every desire without asking anything in return.

(Would I actually want to date such a person? No; it would bore me to death. Which is the other reason that I don't see pornography substituting for real life any time soon.)

This is your brain on the web

Daniel Drezner and I went on Bloggingheads yesterday to discuss MySpace pages, short shorts, and the problems of Venezuelan oil.

Politics and the language of . . . me

Hmmmmm . . . Julian invites us to consider our verbal tics, and get our readers to weigh in.

. . . there are individual prose-crutches particular writers tend to fall back on again and again. One has to be careful here, because you don't want to lump ordinary elements of someones personal style and authorial voice into this category—those are good things to have—but rather focus on those little tics that breed laziness by substituting for words or constructions that might be fresher or more apt for the particular piece.

Of course, one's own tics are usually more obvious to others, so I thought I'd impose on you guys: What are the words, phrases, and constructions any of you who've been reading for a while notice recurring? Once I know what these are, I can make sure I really mean to use them when they pop up on my screen.

My vanity here conflicts with my obsessive introspection.

After a few moments consideration, here are the verbal tics I've noticed in myself:

1) "Of course". I use it all the time. Actually, you guys have no idea how often; I frequently delete it from successive sentences. I also wildly overuse "obviously", generally for things so obvious that I don't need to point out their inevitability.

2) I am under the impression that my tendency to refer to my readers as "My little chickadees" drives some of them up the wall. But I've tried to cut way back on that.

3) "This is why". I lean far too heavily on it in explanations.

4) "Yes, . . . ". When acknowleging other peoples' arguments I almost invariably use this construction, which might be better varied.

5) "I mean" probably stopped being cute five years ago.

6) "Indeed" could profitably be substituted with some other, less monotonous construction.

7) "I hear you cry" is probably getting old, but I might stand by this one.

8) "Presumably" does have close substitutes. I should look into that market.

What do my readers think? (Be gentle, my little chickadees).

Not every argument is instrumental

One of the things I wanted to say in the previous post, but didn't, because hey, you were already falling asleep, is that too often when I discuss environmental issues, I feel as if my interlocutor is arguing with someone else. They have put me in a box: "libertarian=hates the environment", and proceed to have an argument with this imaginary libertarian, instead of me. Too quickly, the discussion founders on dark implications about my motives. After all, we all know that libertarians are just selfish bastards looking for an excuse to overconsume at everyone else's expense.

Surprise! I'm green. I eat certified humane meat, or none at all. I try to avoid having a car, or driving one unless I'm hauling heavy objects (not just my carcass) from point to point. I seek sustainably small, dense housing. I only run full loads of laundry, more than occasionally wash my dishes by hand, yada yada. I support massive carbon taxes. I like nuclear power. I buy things that claim to help the rainforest. I'm not saying you'd confuse me with a Yoruba tribesman or anything, but on environmental issues, I'm considerably to the left not only of libertarians, but of most of the Democrats I know.

And I luuuuuuuuurve mass transit. I come by it honorably; my Dad is a transportation guy. I am the one hopping on the subway after a long night's drinking rather than take a cab.

()Actually, I should qualify that: I love trains. Buses I would be happy to see vanish from the earth in a cloud of diesel exhaust. Buses are like cars, except crowded, slow, and ungainly. Blech.)

At one point, when I noted that people who take mass transit tend to be delay-intolerant, Mr O'Hare rather snottily informed me that the solution to delays is to take a book. Well, d'uh! I grew up in Manhattan. I've been taking a book on the train since I was old enough to read books. The delays I was referring to were not train delays, but personal delays. If a normal person is two minutes late getting ready to go to an event like a movie or a play, their companions don't stress it; they'll be two minutes late at the destination, is all. If a New Yorker is two minutes late, their companions are tapping their feet and tearing their hair, because small delays can quickly translate into big ones during off peak hours. And if they're on commuter rail? Okay, enough with the nebuliser, Marge, we're late!

This is a symptom of the considerable time costs of mass transit. When you ride a train, you ride on someone else's schedule, which means it takes longer. In the comments to the previous post, my commenters suggest an average doubling or tripling of commute times in California, which seems about right to me based on my (limited) experience there. In areas that are already kind of not dense, this quickly becomes a completely impractical way to get around.

But I digresss. The point being that I am not writing posts saying that mass transit doesn't work in most of America in order to justify my car-luvin', carbon intensive lifestyle, because I don't have one, nor am I in the market for same. I actively seek to live in urban areas with public transit systems, so that I don't have to have a car. I wrote the post because I thought that first, some of the economics was flatly wrong; and second, that he was making another economic error in thinking that price rationing is a significant problem on mass transit. I do not believe there is any city in America where the monetary costs the primary barrier to taking public transit.

Loving mass transit doesn't prevent me from seeing the drawbacks of public transit, and the vast difficulties in moving existing American cities towards a non-car lifestyle. I can agree that this would be a lovely new equilibrium, and also believe that we will not reach it; just as I can agree that it would be lovely if eating ice cream did not make you fat, without thinking that I can somehow translate this belief into action.

It is astonishing how often I have arguments about environmental issues, and a few others, in which I state a belief that the political and economic realities mean that some pet solution won't happen, and am rewarded with an angry/exasperated "Well, then how do you plan to fix the problem?" It is as if they believed that to state a problem, is also to imply a solution.

There are plenty of problems in the world, from unrequited love to people with stubbornly obnoxious beliefs, that I have no plans to fix because the solutions, if there are any, seem self-evidently worse than the problems they would replace. Yet many people seem to believe that if I refuse to state such a plan, or agree to theirs, it must be because I don't want to solve the problem--that I hate people who are unlucky in love, or the environment, or at the very least selfishly wish to continue harming same--rather than from any honest belief that sometimes life's a bugger and there's not much you can do about it.

Talking transit

Michael O'Hare responds to my post on transit, saying I dipped a toe in the waters of sarcasm. honest, I didn't mean to; it's just that his discussion of marginal cost made no sense to me. And still doesn't, though I think I understand where it has gone wrong. Glen Whitman sensibly points out that Mr O'Hare seems to have confused declining-marginal-cost industries with constant-marginal-cost industries.

The marginal cost of something is the cost of producing one additional unit. The average cost is the total cost of producing all the units, divided by the number of units. These things can be, indeed generally are, very different.

Most industries display, at least up to some point, declining marginal costs. The benefits of specialisation, learning, and often better capital equipment, produce increasing returns to scale, which is to say, the more units you produce, the cheaper each additional unit will be. This is why a table from Crate and Barrel costs much less than a table from a hand-craftsman, or even a table you make yourself at home (once you factor in the value of your time and the medical care for tool-related injuries). So it makes no sense to claim that the problem with mass transit is that it is a declining marginal cost industry; first of all, it isn't (after you've built the system, the costs of adding any additional passenger are roughly the same, and near zero); and second of all, even if it were, plenty of declining marginal cost industries work just fine.

What he means to say, I think, is that it is a constant marginal cost industry. Obviously, when marginal costs are constant, and fixed cost is high, the industry displays declining average costs. These industries are known to have problems, particularly when the marginal cost is near zero: airlines, pharmaceuticals (where the problem is remedied with patents), telecoms. But as I pointed out in my earlier post, the evidence of this as the primary issue with mass transit is kind of thin. The problem in those industries is generally oversupply and fierce price competition, which cannot be fairly said of mass transit. Yes, there is overcapacity; but the overcapacity is a result of governments building mass transit regardless of demand. This is a political problem, not a pricing problem.

He also seems to have confused the declining average cost issue with the problem of a high minimum efficient scale (MES). High MES is a barrier to entry, which in theory creates monopolies that allow industries to price above marginal cost. But while this is indeed a characteristic of many industries with constant marginal costs (think telecoms), it is by no means true of all of them. Software companies, for example, generally face a roughly constant marginal cost, but the minimum efficient scale in most sectors of the market is quite small, which is why the software market remains extremely competitive. In the areas where it isn't competitive, most analysts attribute the problem not to MES, but to things like lock-in and network effects, which have absolutely nothing to do with the cost structure.

Now onto the new post. Mr O'Hare's original post seemed to have two points, which are somewhat confusingly intermingled:

1. The cost structure of mass transit means that it will not be priced efficiently in a free market

2. The social benefits fo mass transit are such that we should change the price until a lot more of it is used.

I see no evidence for the first; transit may be a natural monopoly, but it's not clear that this is so. There were lots of railroads until cars put the railroads out of business; there are still lots of airlines. The issue with ridership has nothing to do with marginal costs or natural monopolies. Amtrak exists not because rail is a natural monopoly, but because the disadvantages of rail are so great that no one can make any money providing it--the exact opposite of a natural monopoly.

Which brings us to the second issue: price. Mr O'Hare accuses me of committing what we might term the "lump of demand" fallacy; assuming demand exists independent of cost:

The first is to treat demand as though it's a number. It's not a number, it's a function, and for most things there's more at low prices and less at high prices. Of course the empty seats on a transit vehicle show there's not enough demand - at the price being charged. What's important about those seats is that the economic cost of letting someone in them is practically zero, and what's important about demand is that at a lower price, there would be riders. How many? Hard to tell, but BART charged $2.75 for my trip; at 50c I bet (and we should find out, not just opine) lots of people would figure out how to ride instead of driving. If that happened, we would have created at least 50c worth of value for each one of them at practically no cost.

But in my previous post, I specifically said that lowering the price

. . . might not even improve ridership; the non-monetary costs of taking public transit are considerable, and zoning laws, over which the transit authority has no control, often limit the potential usage quite sharply.

I should say that Mr O'Hare is committing the basic tyro error of failing to consider that non-monetary costs might exceed the monetary one; and that demand might be highly inelastic. In New York, the transit system has basically pushed the marginal costs of a trip to zero, thanks to the introduction of the unlimited fare metrocard in 1995. During that time, ridership grew 36%. But much of the gain was attributable to two things: population grew by 7%, and Rudy Giuliani made it safe to ride the trains at night, something I do regularly now but would never have dared to contemplate in the early 1990s.

36%. In the only city in the world which runs trains 24-7. In the only city in America where the majority of people do not own a car. In the richest, densest transportation network on earth, zero marginal cost pricing brought a ridership increase of about 3% a year. And remember that another chunk of that increase wasn't replacing comfortable, convenient car rides; it was replacing walking. Before the unlimited fare metro card, I would never have considered taking the train ten or fifteen blocks. Now I do it all the time.

So how much does Mr O'Hare wish to bet that if he dropped the price of a trip to 50 cents, he could fill all the BART cars with repentant drivers? Because I like my odds on this one.

This is not to dismiss his argument that driving has high social costs; but he is refuting an argument I have not made. If you changed the relative prices of driving and public transit enough, you could probably force people onto the trains. And indeed, I am an avid fan of gas taxes, as my readers know, for all the reasons that he cites. But changing the price of public transit by itself is inadequate; a real solution would involve massive car and fuel taxes. And even those will be inadequate unless they are combined with heroic changes in land-use patterns to mimic the hyper-dense hub that makes New York mass transit work so well; people simply will not commute three hours each way, no matter how you mess with the price structure. The problem is not in our transit system, Horatio, it is in our fuel tanks.

This one goes into the RSS reader

Frankly, I don't think we need any more young whippersnappers in the blogosphere . . . we old cranks need a little job security, you know? In fact, I've been rethinking this whole competition thing. Having spent my whole life learning to be a miserably remunerated web pundit with no benefits and scant job security, I think it's a little unfair to change the rules on me just as I've reached my peak earning years. Nonetheless, for this one, I'm making an exception.

(H/T Ezra)

Update Okay, it would go in the RSS reader if it had an RSS feed.

Department of huh?

In the course of lecturing Arnold Schwarzenegger on economics, Michael O'Hare says something I just. don't. understand.

Of course reducing GHG emissions from fuel is only useful if fuel use doesn't increase; indeed, if we don't (along with everything else) drive less and do it in less thirsty vehicles, we will not get on top of global warming. People have to have some other ways to get around than big thirsty individual cars, like bicycles, feet...and buses and trams. Accordingly it was a major wardrobe malfunction of those green garments when the governor's budget came out with a $1.3 billion cut in transit funding. This is a really inexcusable mistake, especially in California, indeed one could fairly say he's on stage with his environmental pants down.

I happened to return to Berkeley from San Francisco last night on the BART at 5:30, high rush hour, and there were some seats empty for much of the trip and lots of standing room for all of it: a New Yorker would think he had died and gone to heaven. This means BART is way overpriced, far above marginal cost, even at the busiest time, and one of the most important ways to attack global warming would be to get people into those empty spaces. Transit always has to be heavily subsidized, not because it's a communist plot but because it's a declining-marginal-cost service that can never pay for itself and be efficient at the same time.

Emphasis on both passages mine.

This makes absolutely no sense. The fact that a service is not fully utilised doesn't necessarily mean that it is priced above marginal cost; it might simply mean that there is inadequate demand. There are free trolleys in a number of small cities running empty through the streets. It is quite possible, even likely, that BART is priced above marginal cost, but empty seats are not proof of it. Moreover, in industries where demand is not high enough to cover current costs (i.e., money losing operations such as BART) and where price discrimination between customers is not feasible (again, as with BART), the rule that goods should be priced so that marginal revenue=marginal cost does not hold; if demand is very inelastic, one could well push revenue down near zero.

It might not even improve ridership; the non-monetary costs of taking public transit are considerable, and zoning laws, over which the transit authority has no control, often limit the potential usage quite sharply.

The latter bolded phrase makes even less sense to me. There are plenty of businesses with declining marginal cost structures that make money; indeed, it is thought to be a quite desireable situation, because declining marginal costs present high barriers to entry for competitors. I presume that what he means is businesses with low marginal costs. These are indeed often plagued with problems; but the problems centre around overcapacity and fierce price competition, which cannot fairly be said to characterise the public transit industry.

The reason public transit does not make money is that the non-monetary costs of it are very high. You have to walk at each end, crowd in with unpleasant people, and wait (often in the heat or cold) for your chariot. Like many New Yorkers, I get very impatient at even very small delays, and I recently figured out why; a delay of a minute or two can be transformed into a delay of fifteen minutes or more when you factor in a missed train. Plus, on a systemic level, public transit's speed is inversely proportional to its convenience. The more stops and interconnections a system has, the easier it is to move from any given point A to point B; but the longer it will take you to get there. All these things mitigate against public transit. Since moving to Washington, I--a lifelong New Yorker and mass transit afficionado with an ideological and financial opposition to owning an automobile--have begun seriously considering the acquiring a car.

As long driving is more convenient and comfortable than taking a train, most people will prefer it even at a relatively high price premium. It is notable that the one American city where public transit is the dominant form of transportation is New York, where driving during rush hour is generally much slower than walking or taking the train. But New York has the unique advantage of having grown to its physical limits before widespread automobile usage; and also, of centering around an island that is long and narrow. This made it easy to essentially run the core train system in closely parallel stripes up the entire island, making it very convenient to get almost anywhere in Manhattan quickly. Chicago managed a somewhat similar feat by planting a big lake down one side of the central business district, but even there, cars dominate. I just don't see how you'll pull that trick anywhere else, no matter how much you slash the fares.

Oooooh, yes

“Lieutenant Karl Marx, US Marines. You got a problem with that, pal?”

More here.

The phrase: "Don't make me get all Labour Theory of Surplus Value on your ass, sucker" is woefully underused in contemporary America.

Bleg

Who can tell me the best place to have an extravagant solo tea in London? This must include:

1) Little sandwiches, including egg mayo and cucumber. They must be willing to substitute something for salmon, which I love raw but despise cooked or smoked. The sandwiches should be actual good sandwiches, not stale bits of bread hiding slivers of dispirited chicken.

2) The inevitable scone with clotted cream and jam. I prefer blackcurrant jam.

3) A selection of cakes, to include a really nice slice of English fruitcake.

4) All right, if you insist: a pot of tea.

5) (Optional) Surroundings that suggest an England where the sun has not yet set on the Empire.

Yes, I am well aware that actual British people do not actually consume this meal. I am not attempting to have an Authentic Experience; if I'd wanted that, I would have rented an overpriced flat with dodgy plumbing two hours from my office and plopped down in front of the television with a takeaway curry. I just like eating little sandwiches and starchy sweet things once in a while. I used to take tea at The Wolsley when I was in town, but the last time I went the sandwiches were dry, and there was no fruitcake, just an assortment of french-looking things with too much almond flavouring in them. So I'm looking for a new spot. Keeping in mind that I'm working at St. James's and staying in Bloomsbury, and won't have time to train down to, say, Wimbledon even if the very platonic ideal of tea is on offer there.

Public service announcement

Have I mentioned that Dan Drezner is guest-blogging this week at Democracy in America, The Economist's American politics blog? No, I see that I haven't. Well, you should go read him there.

Did I err?

My assertions of yesterday are (as usual) coming back to haunt me; I am being attacked for making gross factual errors in the course of analysing the split between liberals and conservatives. A few of my emails have passed the point of argument into gross vilification. Nonetheless, I stand by my previous assertion.

S'mores flavoured pop tarts are repulsive.

To start with, the words "smores" and "repulsive" go together like, umm, chocolate and peanut butter.

For my foreign readers, a S'more is a food traditionally made at American campfires. Here is how you make one. Take something delicious: a chocolate bar. Combine it with something healthy and flavourful: graham crackers or digestive biscuits. Then take a big wad of some white, sugary, petroleum-based substance (dusted with cornstarch for extra tastelessness and poor mouth feel): a marshmallow. Melt the thing on a stick in the fire, and smack it down on top of your chocolate and graham cracker so that any interest you might have had in eating it evaporates as quickly as the 180-proof liquor I'd have to hoover just to consider the possibility of putting something like that in my mouth. As a diet food, it's marvelous. As a source of sustenance, or pleasure, much less compelling.

Nonetheless, they are inexplicably popular among my countrymen, which just goes to show that we will put anything in our mouths if it is sugary enough. So some enterprising young thing at Nabisco decided that a S'mores flavoured pop tart would be just thing thing to appeal to that young male demographic with more money than taste.

A pop tart, for my foriegn readers, is a sort of stale cookie with no particular flavour, filled with something like jam or chocolate, sealed shut at the edges, and often frosted. To prepare it, you put it in the toaster until it is brown outside, and the filling is piping hot. Since, like most of my countrymen, I will put anything in my mouth if it is sugary enough, I have been known to toast my way through a box of the frosted strawberry variety on the occasional rainy Sunday afternoon. But even I draw the line somewhere. And S'mores flavoured pop-tarts are precisely where I draw it.

Those benighted souls in my audience who have defended these monstrosities, and who live in the Washington area, are welcome to drop by and pick up the box of them that a friend inadvertently left at my house. They've been there for a few months, but that shouldn't worry you; the things have about the same half life as Uranium-238.

Update If S'mores are revolting, then why do I want to give them to poor children? I hear you cry. I don't. Liberals want to give S'mores to poor children, which is one of the many reasons I am not a liberal. I don't say that S'mores are the biggest problem with the modern progressive platform, but I do think they are emblematic of the flaws at the heart of the liberal vision.

Left makes might

So is it true? Is there something inherent to the medium of talk radio that favours conservatives, and something inherent to the web that works best for liberals progressives?

I'm not averse to the idea, mind you, even though I suppose that as an . . . er . . . antiprogress blogger, that limits my career prospects somewhat. Nonetheless, the universe is not here to please us; it's entirely possible that progressivism works better on the web than conservatism.

But I have difficulty figuring out why that would be so. Perhaps because I've never really understood the failure of liberal talk radio. I mean, I get the failure of Air America: too much ego and idealism, too little attention to the bottom line. What I don't understand is why Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity so thoroughly dominate the airwaves, with no plausible rivals from the other side of the political spectrum.

I can come up with stories, of course: liberals have NPR, and three out of four television stations, so they don't need talk radio; conservatives are, as a demographic, more likely to spend time driving around, or perhaps more likely to buy stuff that's easily advertised on the radio; liberals are too smart to listen to talk radio.

But they're not really satisfying. For one thing, progressives are less educated, on average, than conservatives; most of the people on DailyKos don't have PhDs. And too many of those allegedly uberbrilliant liberals apparently enjoy whiling away the hours on websites that consist mostly of rants about Rethuglicans and homespun theories about implausibly vast conservative conspiracies.

And the other two are, at best, explanations for why there would be fewer liberal talk radio powerhouses, not for why there are none. The existence of silly liberal columnists in approximately the same number and volume as silly conservative columnists indicates that there is some sizeable market on the left for factually challenged opinion journalism delivered in a tone of overtowering righteous indignation. I would wager hard cash that many of the progressives who read those columns do drive, in cars with radios, and that they also frequent appliance repair shops and mediocre local restaurants. Why don't they have a radio programme to call their very own?

Likewise, I am suspicious of the assertion I've seen on some liberal blogs that the fractured nature of the progressive audience makes it ideal for the web, but poison for radio. Yes, anyone who's spent any time on the left has spent some of that time rolling their eyes while the feminists and the civil libertarians shouted out the 831st installment in "Pornography bans: the Celebrity Cage Match". But there are a lot of areas of broad agreement, like national health care, and slow-roasting Dick Cheney over an open fire while toasting marshmallows for S'mores. S'mores for inner city children that is. (They can't get S'mores in the slums, you know; they have to make do with those gross S'mores flavoured pop-tarts.)

I digress. But anyway, that seems like enough to support a few hours of radio. As far as I can tell, Rush does three hours a day, every day, on "there is a giant Liberal media conspiracy" + "I hate feminists". Surely some bright young vocal entrepreneur could get similar mileage by swilling together some "giant corporate media conspiracy" with a little "I hate the Christian right", tossing in a dash of "your employer is stealing from you" and inviting America to have a taste during drive time.

If I knew why that hasn't happened, I think I'd have a better idea of why right wing blogging is so comparatively anemic. Of course, if I had a Unified Field Theory, I'd have a Nobel Prize in Physics, too, but the thought doesn't bring me much comfort.

In other news

If you are in the Washington DC area, you should go see Jenufa, if it's still playing at the Kennedy Center, and you should definitely check out Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Studio Theater. More on the latter later, possibly, when I am not babbling incoherently from exhaustion. Possibly: even on video! Meanwhile, buy your tickets. Tom Stoppard is always brilliant, and probably my favourite living playwright (read into that what you will), but the staging of this one is particularly well done, and several of the performances are exceptionally good.

Things can only get better, con't

Tyler Cowen explains more fully:

Holding quality of type constant (an important qualification, as some people are simply prone to bad events, and receiving another bad event signals as such), I more readily expect reversion to the mean. Good economies grow rapidly after wartime, often because they find it easier to reassemble preexisting pieces than to press forward from full employment. Much of the human capital is still there and rebuilding can occur quickly once in motion. The personal analogy is that once you start recovering from (some) catastrophes, the process is speedy. You already know where you need to go, and you might sample more randomness to court additional good events.

There is also a "naive" evolutionary argument for bad things getting better.

When things go badly, your body borrows resources from the future. It pumps adrenalin, eats stores of fat, in some views it mobilizes the (only temporarily available) placebo effect, etc., all of which restore better states of affairs and make up lost ground. More psychologically, a setback may cause a person to try harder. If a computer crashes and wipes out a page I wrote, I can write it again at an especially high speed and with the energy of anger and adrenalin.

But what if I'm (whimper) one of those people bad things happen to? Certainly, in the hotel room last night at 3:30 am (GMT), that seemed like a distinct possibility . . . .

PSA

I owe a really huge number of people emails. But I'm in London, and plagued by seriously horrific insomnia/jet-lag; I had something in the neighbourhood of three hours of sleep last night. You would think this would be a very good opportunity to write emails. But unfortunately, they tend to come out like "Hey, thanks for writing, I'm in London and I can't SLEEP, would you mind flying over here and hitting me in the head with a HAMMER, please?" so it's really better that I wait until I'm coherent.

Seriously?

From a New York Times article on the quest to revive old kids' games:

Conn Iggulden said in an e-mail message that he routinely received correspondence from parents who yearn for a “return to simple pleasures,” which seems to stem from “potent forces, like the realisation that keeping your kids locked up in the house on PlayStations isn’t actually that good for them; or the appalled reaction of many parents to a health-and-safety culture that prevents half the activities they took for granted as kids — and that they know were important to their growth and confidence.”

Nevertheless, such simple pleasures have not always been conspicuous in the lives of children over the last two decades. “These kind of games, including tag, have practically died out,” said Joan Almon, who is coordinator for the United States affiliate of the Alliance for Childhood, a play advocacy group in College Park, Md.

I am aware that kids these days lead more scheduled, sheltered, and electronically enriched childhoods than I did. But is it really true that they don't know how to play tag? It seems to me that I spent hours playing tag, kickball, etc at recess, where the little blighters presumably don't have access to their computers . . .

The disappearance of monkey bars, on the other hand, is a clear national tragedy. Ours were helpfully made out of steel and soared over our parents heads, so that when you fell onto the concrete below you knew you'd really climbed something. The current models in that playground are less than two feet off the ground, made of plastic, and look like about as much daring fun as Singles Bingo Night at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.

I fear . . .

I have unduly excited my readers with references to previous modeling. My modeling career was extremely short lived, and leaned heavily on "King of Prussia Mall summer sale!" circulars, and things of that short. As with my basketball career, it turned out that the only part of it I was good at was being tall. This is, sadly, not enough to make the big leagues. I am not particularly photogenic, easily bored, and never developed the feeling that it was all so wonderful and glamorous that it was worth developing a class A eating disorder, much less standing around for hours chain smoking for the privilege of being told that there was something wrong with you, and where the hell is MAKEUP?

Mental note

Do not go to any pub trivia run by Alex.

Clarification

I realise, looking back over today's posts, that it sounds as if I am writing them from the bridge railing, typing with one hand because the other arm is wrapped firmly around the piling. Perhaps you have shivered as you imagined me pausing between posts to gaze down at the deep, deep waters, rushing inexorably onward under my feet towards fate, and the sea . . .

Everyone has an anno horribilus now and then. Mine has been, perhaps, a little longer and more horribilus than most, but on the other hand, only because I had more to lose. My last such stretch, right after 9/11, was followed by three very good years; I presume the same will be true again. The references to my bad luck were intended to be amusing, not to produce an outpouring of sympathy. It is, after all, quite lucky that bad luck is so often so funny.

Not that I am not grateful for every nice word. I just don't want you to think that I'm one of those tiresome people who is constantly demanding that others rush to comfort them. I exist to amuse and edify, not annoy.

Photomagic

Why didn't they have this when I was modeling? It would have been a nice substitute for the photography director reducing girls to tears for the unspeakable crime of having gained three whole pounds:

Good things come to those who wait

My recent rather startling run of bad luck has generated a couple of interesting emails. One asks "Is there anything we (the blogosphere) can do for you?" Alas no; sometimes life's a little rough, that's all.

Then there is Tyler Cowen, who mailed that "Very likely something very good will happen to you soon. At the very least you will get an extra serving of dessert."

The specifics of this theory are faulty, since the first thing that happens to me when I get stressed is that I lose my appetite and drop ten or twenty pounds. (Eight down, ? to go, according to the scale this morning . . . but some of that was winter weight that would have come off anyway, since I also lose my appetite when it gets warm. I'm a cyclical creature, I am.)

But what about the general theory? Intuitively, this is what we expect to happen, even those of us who are agnotheists and do not expect the universe to respond to us in any volitional way. We expect it in the same way that we expect a coin to turn tails after a long run of heads.

Of course, any statistician will tell you that this is nonsense. Provided the coin is honest, your probability of flipping a head for the 100th time is exactly the same as your probability of flipping a head the first time: 50%. We tend to confuse the probability of flipping the 100th head with the probability of flipping 100 heads in a row, which is indeed very low; it's (.5)¹⁰⁰--a number so small that I can't give it to you, because my calculator only goes out to 30 decimal places. But our intuition is wrong. Once you have flipped 99 heads in a row, it is not particularly unlikely that you will flip the 100th.

So probabilistically, the chances that something good will happen to me right now are, I assume, about the same as they always were.

Do you believe that luck exhibits conditional probabilities? I asked Tyler.

"Regression to the mean", he replied. Fair enough. As I understand it, regression to the mean expresses the fact that highly improbable events are unlikely to be repeated. It's seen, for example, in the heritability of talent; the child of an Einstein or a Mozart is almost never* the genius his father was. In this case, it's reinforced by the fact that I'm rapidly running out of stuff to run out of, except for the aforementioned relatives and health.

So Howard Jones was almost right . . . there's a high probability that things can only get better. But no higher than it ever was. I just have to figure out what the general probability is that something very good will happen to me . . . if I can remember that far back.

* _{I'm tempted to say actually never . . . can anyone thing of counterexamples?}

Learn something new every day

1) My ear canals seem to be quite small

2) The new US passports are really pretty and colourful

Too much information

Every time someone at The Economist talks about putting up a "Most Emailed" feature, a little shiver of fear runs up my spine. Now I know why . . . .

I'm baaaack

And backing up the site as we speak.

Thanks to everyone who linked me, offered help with hosting, and tried to track down the bastards who screwed up Kathy Kinsley's billing, since as suspected, the problem was on their end, not hers.

I've ported the posts from the other site, but not the comments, so go there for good reading.

Meanwhile, thanks to everyone who pointed out that the basic Wordpress template is, like, a zillion times nicer than this site's design. Point taken. There are good and plenty reasons why I am not launching into a redesign right now, but rest assured, I too see the need, and will try to rectify the problem ASAP.

Although, don't you think the place has kind of a nifty homespun air? Like those bunchy quilts your grandmother used to make you out of old shirts?

. . . oh, that's just me, then.

I earned this, of course

Just the other day, I said “at least I have this much: unless me or a family member gets sick or dies, things actually cannot get any worse”. Obviously, this was an irresistible challenge to the gods.

It never rains but it pours

You may have noticed something about my old site . . . like, it isn’t there.

Where’d it go? Who knows? I know exactly as much as you do, which is that when you type in www.janegalt.net, you get a page saying”This Account has been suspended. Please contact our billing department as soon as possible.” That appeared last night sometime between 6:04, when I received my last email at the janegalt.net address, and 7:31 when the first friend IM’d me to tell me my site was down.

As far as I know, the billing problem is not on my end. It appears to be affecting Kathy Kinsley, the woman from whom I buy server time, as her Bloghouse site is also down, so I assume one of a few things:

1. There has been a massive snafu in the accounts department
2. She, or someone above her in the hosting reselling chain, is having a little bit of a cash flow problem
3. Something bad happened to Kathy, and I didn’t know it, and now the host has pulled the plug

Obviously, we’re pulling for 1 or 2 to be true.

This presents me with a slight problem. I would love to contact the billing department at eLinuxservers (the folks whose “account suspended” page currently graces the spot where my site used to be), I can’t. They have no observable website. Of course, I am enterprising, and mildly web savvy, so I looked ‘em up on WHOIS and called the number that I found there.

Naturally, the phone number now belongs to an insurance agent who has no idea where one might contact eLinuxservers. I’ve emailed them, but frankly, I’m not exactly holding my breath.

This presents me with several small problems. I don’t want to move hosts, but if I don’t hear from Kathy (and Kathy, if you’re reading this, try my gmail address!), I think I kind of have to. Which means I have to find a host. More worrying is the archives; I haven’t backed up . I’m happy . . . well, willing, anyway . . . to pay some fraction of any bill in order to recover my files, but who to?

Any reader suggestions on any of this very much appreciated. Meanwhile, I’ll be blogging here. Apologies for the weird blog name; it was a test, and I can’t figure out how to change it.

The life of leisure

Ezra is worried that American workers don’t get any paid vacation. Julian points out that most of us do, in fact, get paid vacation. Which is basically what I was thinking when I read that post: the government doesn’t mandate that we get free milk or cushy blankets, and yet most of us manage to secure some anyway. To which Ezra rejoinders that some, mostly low paid workers, still don’t and isn’t that a scandal?

This seems to be to be based on several unwarranted assumptions. The first is that paid vacation is a free good to employees: that employers can just be forced to offer people ten or thirty days off a year, and they’ll take the money out of profits (or from some other bad people we don’t like), rather than, say, paying the workers less per hour to compensate. Of course, we could have a higher minimum wage law. But a really stiff minimum wage, combined with lavish perks like generous vacation time, actually do have noticeable disemployment effects, which is one of the reasons that European unemployment, and particularly European youth unemployment, is so much higher than ours. So every low-wage worker enjoying twenty days of paid annual leave does so in part, by foregoing higher wages, and in part, by putting other people out of work. It is possible that he also does so in part, by taking money from the owners; but not in all cases, and the first two effects probably dwarf the third, labour markets being what they are.

If paid vacation days are not a free good to employees, then of course, this represents not a government goody, but the rough hand of the state forcing you to take vacation when you’d rather have cash . . . or letting your neighbour take vacation, when you’d rather have a job.

The second assumption is that Europeans use their vacation to, well, vacate. And of course, sometimes they do. But there is also evidence that Americans substitute money for leisure in performing chores. Europeans have more time off; but they spend a lot of that time painting their houses, cleaning out the gutters, taking care of the lawn, drying clothes by hand, and so forth. Much of this is work that even poorer Americans outsource.

I went to see Benjamin Barber talk yesterday, he of the “We consume too much! We need a more authentic, non-consumer lifestyle!” books. No doubt he would argue that this is a feature, not a bug . . . Europeans are caring for their bodies and homes in an authentic, natural way. To which I say, feh! I like many domestic tasks, like cooking, but that’s in part because I don’t have to do them; they’re a labour of love. And I challenge anyone to say that they get joy from regrouting their own bathroom tile.

No pork, no shoes, no service

Matthew Yglesias, who very kindly redirected the two users we have in common to this site, points out that Porkbusters will not solve our budget problems:

This kind of thing is why people are always reaching for the name “Ramesh Ponnuru” when asked to name conservative pundits worth reading. As Scott Lemieux says “this is the central purpose of the Porkbusters campaign: to make difficult choices magically disappear, especially where the Iraq War is concerned.” As Ponnuru points out, the world simply doesn’t work like that. Conservatives either want to cut some major programs with substantial constituencies, or else they don’t really want to cut spending — pork is neither here nor there in big picture budgetary terms.

Too true, I’m afraid; the really big ticket budget items are entitlements, defense, and interest on the national debt . . . which is why we need Social Security Reform Now! Oh, yes, my little chickadees, I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waiters.

But seriously, while this is true on some level, isn’t porkbusters still a good idea? There are other reasons to want to cut pork, besides being worried about the budget deficit. Pork may well have a big dragging effect on the economy by the distortions it introduces. And more than that, it’s morally distasteful that senators and congressmen spend so much time–time we pay them for–trying to grab fistfuls of cash out of the public trough before the other pigs can get at it. The people pushing porkbusters may not succeed in paying for the Iraq war, but surely they’re still doing God’s work?

Wow. Just. Wow.

I've never seen Salvador Dali live before:

Then there is the commenter who lambasted me both here and on his own site, for whose words profanity is rather too weak.

I recently lost my dog, Annie, a beautiful and very empathetic Springer Spaniel.

Your response to your dog's death, however, is indicative of just how warped your perspective has become by being a childless, self-worshipping woman.

Have children. Develop some perspective. Quit living like a child.

It's not very attractive.

Oh, and by the way, there's a fairy tale that describes this "I'm so sensitive that I'll die" syndrome. It's "The Princess and the Pea."

No wonder the childish ravings of Andrew (Cartman) Sullivan appeal to the author of this blog.

What a collection of spoiled children!

 I could shrug this off, for after all, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and whatever psychological scarring produced the urge to say that in response to, let us recap a poem posted during an emotional moment at 4 am must be pretty catastrophic.  But however deeply broken this man may be, it's rather harder to sanction this:

We've discovered in the past few weeks that the proprietor of this site is a fag hag, childless and treating her dog as a child. Yet, she wants to have adult input into the tradition of marriage. In other words, she wants nothing to do with the adult responsibility of tending to the future. Yet, in infant that she is, she thinks that she should be able to destroy an institution that she takes no part in.

In response to the others who have asked, I've posted my comments on my site: www.harleyscars.com.

Apparently, Shouting Thomas feels I've betrayed him by hiding my childlessness, my dog, and oh yes, my fag-haggery.

Frankly, I'm puzzled.  Puzzled, first, because I cannot even begin to comprehend how my dog's death has become so tightly linked in his mind with the issue of gay marriage, an issue upon which I have never expressed an opinion pro or con.  Let me reassure you that there was absolutely no evidence that Finnegan was homosexual; indeed, long before the issue became salient, we permanently curtailed his interest in all matters sexual with the aid of a cooperative veterinarian.  Nor do I meet any of the conventional definitions of "fag hag", at least as the term is employed in any of New York's more unpleasant social circles; though I have a lot of male friends, most of them are heterosexual, and I do not knowingly date, much less marry, homosexual men.

I am thus searching for less common usages that my cover me.  "Has had dinner with Andrew Sullivan" seems to be a prime suspect.  Or is it that I think gay people are . . . erm, people, who should be treated like other people?  Perhaps it is that I think Andrew Sullivans are people?  Or that I count non-Andrew-Sullivanish gay people in my circle of friends and loved ones?  On any of these definitions, I am out and proud.  Indeed, though the unexpected moving and veterinary bills have left the grouch bag a little low here at Stately Galt Manor, if there's a club I'll join it, and if there's a t-shirt, I'll order one.

What. The. Fuck.

I've never sworn on this blog before . . . this is a family blog, as I like to say. (Hi Dad! Hi Aunt Cathy!) But somehow, other words are just inadequate.

Other people's grief is always opaque, particularly on a blog like this, where I rarely post about my personal life. I, like everyone else, have occasionally thought that someone else was overdoing it. And yet, never in my most fevered moments of nannying self-superiority, have I even dreamed of saying as much to them. I mean, after all, if I think someone is being too sad, making them sadder by pissing all over their grief doesn't seem like the right response; and also, I have manners.

Plus, you never really know what's actually going on in another person's heart, do you? For example, the person to whom you have just taken it upon yourself to instruct in the inappropriateness of their sadness might, in the last year, have finally seen the end of a long-term relationship, had her parents get divorced and sell her childhood home, had her remaining grandparent move to assisted living and sell that childhood home, been evicted from her own apartment, left the city she grew up in and lived in for thirty years, and generally lost every stable thing in her life except for the bullmastiff who has been her constant companion since graduate school. She might have gone on what was supposed to be a cheering day trip to Philadelphia which turned into a three day nightmare of vet visits, culminating in a 1:30 am phone call to tell her that her beloved companion needed surgery, followed by a 2:30 am consultation with the surgeon, a 3:00 phone call to announce that the dog had gone into cardiac arrest, and a 4:00 phone call to say that the dog couldn't be saved and do you want to come down and watch us put him to sleep, or do you just want us to go ahead without you? Alone, in the dark, in a strange house and a strange city, she might have been, oh, I don't know, somewhat upset. And so she might have posted to her blog a poem about grief--about the terrible moment when nothing else matters to you but the fact that a slice of love has gone out of the world.

If you didn't know all of this . . . and had the paucity of empathy and imagination that apparently leads some people to believe that they can divine the contents of another person's heart based on a single poem they posted in an emotional moment at 4 am, you might incorrectly conclude that she was posting the poem, not to share her sadness (and a work of genius about a universal emotion), but to send the message "Losing my dog is exactly like losing a person I loved".

Indeed, you might even take it upon yourself to note, in the comment section, that dogs are not people. Ummm . . . okay, well, thank you, Dr. Insight. Who said they were, other than some alterna-Jane in someone's fevered imagination? I'm not grieving for my dog the way I would for a parent; I'm grieving the way one does for a dog, who was loyal and trusting and loving, and loved. I'm not sad because now he'll never fulfill his dreams of going to med school, or get married and have children. I'm sad because he was a constant presence in my life, and because like children, he was capable of pure joy, and of transmitting a little of it to others. I'm sad because I keep thinking I should give him some leftovers, or hearing something that sounds like him sighing, because he will never again chase balls in the yard with maniac glee, and because the couch sure seems empty without him curled up next to me. Suddenly all the ways in which the dog has ordered my life have evaporated, and every time I slip into one of those empty spaces, I miss him terribly.

Obviously I do not think that losing a dog is like losing a person; no one sane believes that the two things are the same, though I grant you that some people do make creepy implications (calling themselves their dog's "mom") in that direction. Losing a dog or a cat is in some sense sadder, because they don't understand what is happening to them, because they live such a little time, and because with a pet, you generally have to choose the moment of their death. And in many other ways it is not nearly as sad, because they have no dreams or aspirations to die with them; because one can never be as close to an animal as to (some) sentient beings; and because hey, everyone's a little bit speciesist. But psychologists will be happy to tell you that we use the same basic mental equipment that loves people to love our pets, even if we can never love them as fully as we love people; and when they leave us, the same basic mental facility that grieves for people helps us scar over the hole our animals leave behind them. It's not some completely alien process that has no business being compared to human death; it's a difference of degree, not kind.

Indeed, a woman in my old building who had recently lost, first a daughter, and then a dog, told me at the time that at first the pain was much the same. The difference, she said, was that with a dog, you got over it eventually. I have no idea, because Finnegan is the only daily presence in my life who has died. But she wasn't some unfulfilled spinster using her dog as a child substitute, and thank you very much, neither am I; I have never referred to myself as my dog's "mom", or thought of him as anything other than a beloved animal. Any normal person should have enough love in them to bestow it on people, and pets, without needing either to hoard it for the more deserving species, or equate the two.

My dog died. I'm sad. I'm not as sad as I would be if my mother died, but why do so many people seem to believe that it is therefore inappropriate to be sad at all? I mean, sure, maybe I'm an over the top hysteric who is prostrated by grief for unworthy objects . . . but it's just as possible that you're a spiritually stunted emotional troll so incapable of love that you only miss your Mom as much as I miss my dog.

Or maybe we should know a little bit more about each other before we start passing judgement?

Human beings aren't very good at grief, especially in others. We hate it, and fear it, and so we want to belittle it. Or we strive desperately for something to say that isn't so . . . trite, so banal, so meaningless in the face of pain. This is why death and illness present such an excellent opportunity for alienating family members and losing friends. When my grandfather died -- and I do hope that my commenters think it was all right for me to be sad about that? -- I was shocked by the number of perfectly awful comments that were made to me by people who gave every appearance of meaning well. ("Hmmm. Well, we all have to go sometime, right?" was probably the least offensive of these, or else the mangled sentiment that "there must have been some reason that God wanted him dead".)

So I understand that not all of the commenters enjoining me to lighten the hell up, because hey, it was just a dumb dog, aren't meaning to say "Hey, while you're really sad, have I mentioned that I think you're an asshole?" Unfortunately, that's what you're communicating, and not just to me; there's a reason that most of the people in the comment section aren't leaping in to agree with you.

Conventions are conventions for a reason. In this case, the reason for the rule that after any sort of death or accident, you say either something highly conventional, or nothing at all, is that it keeps you from making a bad situation worse. It's not that I'm heartbroken about it; I'm a big girl, and I've long understood that as long as I blogged, a lot of perfect strangers were going to think I was an asshole, and say so frequently. But I found the cheery callousness of some of those comments so utterly amazing that it seemed impossible to let them pass without response.

I should also note that all the hackneyed, dull, traditional comments: "I'm so sorry"; "How awful"; "I felt terrible when I lost my dog", "you're in my prayers" and so forth have meant a tremendous amount. They're semantically empty, perhaps, but they convey something that is never empty, namely that other human beings know, and care, how you're feeling.

Requiem

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Dog update

The vet called at 1:30 this morning to say that the dog appears to have some sort of septic condition in his abdomen requiring really unbelievably expensive surgery with a guarded prognosis. They were supposed to call me back within a half an hour to tell me what the plan was. Now it is 2:23, and I am alone in a friend's house in Philadelphia . . . well, not alone, but bereft of people one can call at 2:23 in the morning. There's really no way to put a chipper face on it: everything is pretty rotten. 2007 may just have beaten 2006 and 2002 for the title of "worst year of my life" and it's only May.

Sorry about the light blogging

I'm marooned in Philadelphia with a dog who can't walk. Will update when I can.

Bleg

My mother is thinking about moving to Georgetown for a year. Does anyone know of a place there that allows dogs? She wants an adult apartment, not student digs, and is an extremely conscientious tenant. The dog is mine: an elderly well behaved bullmastiff who does not climb stairs or chew on furniture. Any ideas?

Okay, I confess: I went to prep school. There is nothing wrong with having gone to prep school; you get a really outstanding education, although unfortunately also some very funny ideas about wealth. I got rid of those (I would say), though I still bear the marks in other ways, of course: for example, I have had the same haircut since approximately 10th grade, and yes, at camp I sported a goofy animal nickname that even now occasionally comes up in emails.

But as I say, there is nothing wrong with having graduated from one of our nation's elite secondary educational institutions. Some of my best friends went to prep school.

Nonetheless, I find the notion of wanting to hang out with other people because they went to prep school pretty extraordinary. I can't say I've noticed that people who went to private school were any more interesting or charming than those who went to public school; in fact, I find the borg-like sameness of places like Nantucket, where everyone is not only white and fit, but also buys their clothes and haircuts from the same three vendors, pretty oppressive. Okay, so I went to Dorian's after college. But just a couple of times to look and ogle the way our former football hero was already losing his hair. And at least we had the excuse that, when I was in high school, Dorian's was a high school bar*, and the people I knew were flocking to a familiar watering hole. (I presume it is now packed with screaming toddlers for Sunday brunch).

There is no excuse whatsoever for this.

* Does such a thing exist any more?

I can't say that I've ever been impressed with the argument that equality for homosexuals is just one short step on the slippery slope away from incest and bestiality. If nothing else, the demand for the latter two is low enough that I don't see how an interest group could ever form, plus neither seems a good way to form the kind of social networks that supported the gay rights movement. Nonetheless, this is even stupider. I quite like William Saletan's human nature columns; frankly, I'm kind of shocked this made it past his own internal editor, much less one from Slate.

Thought for the day

From Eliezer Yudkowsky:

If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.

Reality is laced together a lot more tightly than humans might like to believe.

Whoa

Why is this the the first I've heard of this? It's probably false; but isn't that the sort of thing that should make a news story?

Question of the day

Big fans of top-down government solutions often point to GSM, the cell phone standard that was anointed the winner by European regulators. As a result, all European cell phones work anywhere in Europe.

Of course, my cell phone works anywhere in the US, Canada, and much of Mexico; it just doesn't work in Europe. On the other hand, I can't simply switch networks, because say, Sprint can't use my phone. Still, this isn't a huge problem for me.

But more broadly, I've kind of always generally assumed that GSM might have been better when it was chosen, but also might be fragile; when the government picks a winner, it tends to have short-term biases, and it's very slow to change. Witness France's MiniTel, which was cutting edge when released, but got its lunch eaten by the web.

It seems to me that now the problems with GSM are emerging: GSM 3G networks (known as EDGE) are much slower than CDMA ones (known as EVDO).

Can my readers comment on CDMA v. GSM? Is one better than the other--not in the sense of "what phone should I buy?" but rather, "Is the US free-market wireless infrastructure more or less robust than Europe's regulated one?"

Media alert

Over at Free Exchange this week, we have the inimitable Will Wilkinson guest-blogging for us. I just put up his first post, on the French economy; I suggest you check it out.

Status blind

Daniel Gross acidly deconstructs Tom Wolfe's new article in Portfolio. (Full disclosure: I bought a copy, but then left it in the rental car, and am too cheap to buy another. So I haven't read the article.) But the deconstruction, as it stands, requires a little deconstruction. For one thing, his attempt to paint Wolfe as an anti-semite seems a little forced, not to say scurrilous:

The Wolfe piece is terrible. It's lazy. It has many uncheckable facts. It's clichéd, resentful, and sometimes self-parodic. And when you finish reading the piece, the faintest whiff of anti-Semitism lingers.

Then there's the Jewish Question. "Many prominent hedge fund managers are Jewish," Wolfe writes, "and on Round Hill Road and Pecksland Road in Greenwich, as well as on Park and Fifth in Manhattan, there has arisen, like a breeze after dark, the sibilant sound of people with social cachet whispering to one another, behind the hand, variations on the theme, 'Some of my best friends are Jewish, but.' " A little later, Wolfe catches himself. "Mercifully, such statistical breakdowns don't exist, but it would appear that no extraordinary fraction of hedge fund managers are Jewish." Mercifully? Give me a break. And when Wolfe does name names in this piece, it sounds like an old Jewish law firm: Cohen, Loeb, Icahn, Lampert, Feinberg & Kovner. The obnoxious guy in the lede reminds us of Meyer Wolfsheim from The Great Gatsby.

To me, this reads like Tom Wolfe pointing out a not-exactly-unheard-of phenomenon--previous generation Wall Street WASPs resenting successful Jewish interlocutors--not evidence of anti-semitism on Wolfe's part. Which is not to say it isn't true, since as I say I haven't read it, but if it's there, please find us a better example.

And his closing is just ridiculous:

Here's the big difference between these masters of the universe and the ones he wrote about in the 1980s and 1990s: Wolfe doesn't seem to have any empathy for them (as he did for Sherman McCoy) or any awe or admiration for them (as he did for Charlie Croker). He seems to have only resentment. Wolfe notes with glee that posh clubs and elite museums still won't admit the arrivistes into their midst. He harps on the status anxiety that impels them to behave in such a ghastly fashion. These highly paid people are inordinately fixated on status symbols, on their place in the pecking order. They're horrid because they want to be recognized not just for professional accomplishments but for their taste and style. Or so says the dandy who tools around the Upper East Side in his white 2003 Cadillac, which, the magazine informs us, "even has white faux-suede floor mats with clear vinyl covers to keep them clean." Says Wolfe: "It's the most important thing in my life right now."

It's not just ridiculous because it's so clueless, particularly from a man who has himself been known to complain about the really enormous jump in income inequality that is largely due to the salaries of the people Wolfe is writing about. Wolfe is not the only man in New York who thinks that the changes in the financial industry in the last decade have created an increasing class of people who are changing the character of New York for the worse--and not because they are Jewish; the influx of finance people into my childhood home on the Upper West Side has if anything given the place a more Goyish hue. Their money, and penchant for combining three apartments into one, is slowly turning the island of Manhattan into one gleaming white pillar of rich people from stem to stern. I don't want to stop it, mind you, even if I could; but I don't have to enjoy the destruction of the city I grew up in, which had different types of people doing different types of things, in a place they actually lived in, rather than resting there between trips to the office and the country house.

But that is an aside. Because that's not the reason that my jaw literally dropped when I read Mr Gross's complaint. I mean, okay, so finance and economics journalists are not, like, the hippest scriveners around. To be frank, the word "nerd" gets tossed around a lot. And it's not like I personally know anything about cars, or have my fingers on the pulse of New York's elite consumer culture.

But I do watch cable like, once a month. Which is enough for me to know that a "white 2003 Cadillac", even one with "white faux-suede floor mats" is not a status item for anyone east of Dubuque. Particularly when it comes with "clear vinyl covers" for the mats. To anyone with enough taste to remove the tags from their clothes before wearing, this should scream "Grandma" more than "Grand Cru". Tom Wolfe is not driving a white Cadillac to cultivate a reputation for taste and style; he's doing it to cultivate a reputation for flaming eccentricity, which is one of the things that sells his persona, and his books.

Frankly, I'm stonkered. And to be honest, unable to shake the image of Daniel Gross trying to curry favour with the hedge fund managers he writes about by donning say, a Wolfesque white fedora . . . with one of his grandmother's rain bonnets tied jauntily around it to keep it pristine.

Fitness cost

In re today's earlier post, this article on fertility treatments contains a line that is, upon reflection, not so startling:

In fact, like many patients, Orenstein wants overwhelmingly to have a baby. (One doctor tells Mundy that fertility patients are more motivated than cancer patients.)

Being human means being evolution's bitch. And once you hit 25 or so, evolution thinks survival is a secondary concern to getting those genes back out into the pool.

I have an Andy Rooney moment

What the hell is with multiple page web articles? The reason books have pages is obvious; it's hard to carry around a single 110x80 foot sheet of paper, much less unfold it to read. Not so much for web articles. Does someone actually find this preferable? I hate having to click and wait . . .

Quote of the day:

The myvu (Myvu Corporation, $299.95) is a sleek visor that jacks into a video iPod (and only a video iPod) to project video into a virtual, in-visor screen. According to the company, it uses a proprietary technology called SolidOptex that's based on "refractive optical polymers." I admit that I'm not sure what that means. To test the device, I borrowed my friend's iPod and queued up several episodes of The State. That turned out to be an unfortunate choice. Laughing can be dangerous while wearing the myvu, since bobbing your head with this thing attached can cause motion sickness. Thus, I'd primarily recommend the myvu for programs that elicit no emotional reaction whatsoever, like Inside the Actors Studio.

Survive and reproduce

Most people, when they hit thirty, are tempted to grab the person they are with and declare them the Love of Their Life. Yes, men too, but obviously especially women.

The marriages aren't obviously doomed. But children, while cute and the future of the race and so forth, are also screaming, tedious, and indescribably needy*. They strain even very strong marriages. When I think about having them with someone with whom I otherwise wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life, I rapidly start feeling like an extra in a Bergman film. I do love children, and want to have them if and when I am with someone with whom I am so besotted that I long to personally carry his genes into the future. On the other hand, meeting someone with whom you are that besotted is the goal of most dating, so it doesn't really affect things. The ticking of my biological clock is not the frantic spur that most women over thirty seem to feel; more like a pleasantly low hum.

However, I'm in a minority. Megan non-McArdle (as Tyler calles her) wrote a cri de coeur on her longing for children a few days ago which I thought would stir sympathy in the heart of any sentient human being. But no, not the guys at Croooked Timber. They immediately entered into a contest to see who could deliver the nastiest version of "Who the [expletive deleted] cares?". It's really a stirring lesson in the iron jawed stoicism with which a determined person can bear someone else's pain.

* _{Yes, I really do like them. No, I am not a heartless spinster. Even the fondest parents admit to this aspect of things, normally in the process of complaining that their spouse doesn't spend enough time alleviating the tedium.}

Update I realise that this sounds like I'm accusing the men who blog at Crooked Timber of being heartless. Not so; I was talking about the male commenters in that thread.