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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69761444620932974732016-05-25T14:47:25.460-04:00West Coast Stat Views (on Observational Epidemiology and more)Comments, observations and thoughts from two left coast bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is a new assistant professor. Mark is a marketing statistician and former math teacher.Josephhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-53666295336787286442016-05-25T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-25T09:00:26.130-04:00What went wrong with Mars One and Hyperloop coverage -- never let a resolved issue stand in the way of a nice think piece One of the many contributing factors to the disastrous coverage of Mars One was the human interest appeal. Almost no publication could resist the temptation to tell the inspiring story of bold colonists about to take a one-way trip to another planet. Some of the articles briefly mentioned the possibility that the mission might not happen, but none owned up to the virtual certainty that it wouldn't. To do so would have ruined the story, or at least made it into something more complex and downbeat.

We see something similar here. The Hyperloop would be a useful example for any number of wide-eyed essays on visionary CEOs and Silicon Valley culture, but much of that usefulness depends on the proposal being a serious effort and not just a sad cry for attention. The desire to make Musk's white paper into what the writer needs combined with a weak grasp of engineering gives us stories like this New York Magazine piece by Kevin Roose.

It's been a day since Elon Musk revealed his grand plans for a so-called Hyperloop, a flashy high-speed transportation system that feels pulled from a Robert Heinlein novel, and nobody quite knows what to make of it. PandoDaily's Hamish McKenzie says Hyperloop is proof that Musk has supplanted Steve Jobs as the tech world's biggest visionary. Sam Biddle at Valleywag says it's an expression of a "very rich man's wild imagination." Pundits and professors are weighing in on whether the proposed technology — essentially, it's a scheme to shoot aluminum passenger pods through giant vacuum tubes at 800 mph — would actually work.

Lost in the debate about the Hyperloop's feasibility, or lack thereof, is the fact that Musk's plan — which he's admitted may never materialize — is not primarily a technical proposal directed at consumers, but a political statement aimed squarely at the Establishment. By proposing a new way to provide mass transportation that is both cheaper and faster than anything approved by state authorities, Musk is taking aim at the government's monopoly on large public works projects. He's saying to policymakers in Washington and Sacramento alike: I can do your job better than you.
Biddle is mildly skeptical; McKenzie goes beyond the credulous into the shamelessly sycophantic. At no point in the piece or in any of the linked articles, do you catch any sense of the real discussion. Even the framing of "whether the proposed technology ... would actually work" shows a weak grasp of the issue. Given enough time and money, there's no question something along these general lines would work. What pretty much all of the professors (at least those who don't have a vested interest) are objecting to is the proposed timeline and, even more to the point, budget. Particularly regarding money, Musk is proposing numbers that are easily one and possibly two orders of magnitude below reasonable.

Of course, Roose can't come out and say this. Acknowledging it would greatly undercut a narrative built around disruptive entrepreneurs trying "to pressure lawmakers to get out of the way of technological progress." That mean he has to go along with at least the possibility that the Hyperloop is viable.

And that's part of the problem.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-3373957528921802782016-05-24T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-24T09:00:28.863-04:00 Essential KaelI have a couple of posts in the draft stage and a few more in the back of my head that center on either quotes from Pauline Kael or discussion of the New Journalism movement that involve her. I thought it might not be a bad idea to do a quick introductory post because Kael is one of those writers who does need an introduction.

Part of the problem is that, when you say "critic," most people think "reviewer." Probably the easiest way to explain the distinction is in terms of audience. Criticism is written for people who know a work; reviews are written for people who are thinking about trying it. Kael was, at best, a deeply problematic reviewer. She could wildly oversell films she felt were particularly deserving. Other times, she would simply use the film as a jumping off point for an essay on films or culture or politics. She almost always had something interesting to say, but little that was useful when you were trying to decide which movie to see.

My advice for those new to Kael is to start with the essays, then check out the full (not the capsule) reviews of films you've seen, then stop.

Here are four to get the ball rolling.

Raising Kane
 The New Yorker, February 20, 1971 and February 27, 1971

Kael's best known essay and my favorite. Also her most controversial, though not always for the reasons normally given (see below). The piece is difficult to describe, part critical essay, part historical narrative, part reflection on American culture, but the unifying thread is the story of the East Coast writers and artists who came to Hollywood. By turns affectionate, insightful and sad. At least part of the vitriol it inspired can be attributed to the people she had pissed off a few years earlier with...

Circles and Squares
Film Quarterly (01/Apr/1963)

A relentless dismantling of the American take on auteur theory, particularly that of Andrew Sarris. In addition to pointing out the various contradictions and logical flaws in the standard arguments of the time, it digs into the dangers of praising works and congratulating ourselves just because we catch various allusions and influences (decades before anyone had heard of Tarantino). It may not be a coincidence that many those who came off worst in this piece (particularly Peter Bogdanovich) were among the most vocal of Welles "defenders" after the release of "Raising Kane."

Trash, Art, and the Movies
Harper's, February 1969

Addresses the fundamental paradoxes of taking pop culture seriously. It argues that we should acknowledge the pleasures and the vitality of a good trashy movie without trying to project upon it artistic qualities and deeper meanings to justify our approval. At the same time, we shouldn't equate the lack of trashiness with great art, particularly when it means praising the boring and the high-minded.

Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers
The New Yorker, June 23, 1980

A prescient take on the end of the Young Turk era of American film. Kael didn't care for auteurism as a critical theory but she tended to like auteurs, particularly the big visionary directors like Welles and Kurosawa and Huston. She looked upon the late 60s and early 70s as a golden age with films like Bonnie and Clyde and directors like Altman.

Kael openly viewed herself as an advocate for what she considered important films and visionary filmmakers, and she was willing to cross ethical lines to promote her favorites (such as when she wrote an ecstatic review of Nashville based on a private screening of a rough cut).

The end of the Young Turks era (combined with a brief stint working in Hollywood) left her bitter and pessimistic about the future of American cinema, which led to this 1980 essay. By far, my least favorite of the four. The topic is too depressing for her to have any fun with and too narrow for her to make the interesting connections that mark the other three pieces. Worse still, the few films of the period she did like are overpraised to the point of exhaustion. That said, the observations on corporate culture are sharp and the predictions about pre-novelization perfectly describe franchises like I am Number Four.firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-62192919191925604362016-05-24T08:30:00.000-04:002016-05-24T08:30:12.921-04:00Keep an eye on the follow-upCheck out Just what were Donald Trump's ties to the mob?

It's an excellent piece of investigative journalism by the reliable David Cay Johnston, building on the solid foundation laid by Wayne Barrett. It's the kind of story where you run across players like the Genovese and Gambino families.

It's also filled with the kind of revelations that should dominate any discussion of the race not focused on policy proposals, but will it? That brings me to the point of this post. Is the 21st Century press able to handle the hard stuff? After all these years of innuendo and pseudo-scandal, do they still have what it takes to deal with the real thing? I'd like to think so but, based on the response to Johnson's piece so far, I'm not optimistic.
email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-28089422837222125792016-05-23T09:00:00.001-04:002016-05-23T09:00:16.428-04:00Where were we? Oh, yeah, the HyperloopBefore we get further into the story, there is an important aspect that has bizarrely gone unmentioned in most of the coverage of this.

The Hyperloop is a conceptual high-speed transportation system originally put forward by Elon Musk, incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors.

The outline of the original Hyperloop concept was made public by the release of a preliminary design document in August 2013, which included a notional route running from the Los Angeles region to the San Francisco Bay Area, paralleling the Interstate 5 corridor for most of its length. Preliminary analysis indicated that such a route might obtain an expected journey time of 35 minutes, meaning that passengers would traverse the 350-mile (560 km) route at an average speed of around 600 mph (970 km/h), with a top speed of 760 mph (1,200 km/h). Preliminary cost estimates for the LA–SF notional route were included in the white paper—US$6 billion for a passenger-only version, and US$7.5 billion for a somewhat larger-diameter version transporting passengers and vehicles —although transportation analysts doubted that the system could be constructed on that budget.

To the extent that there is an idea in the proposal, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a new one. Pretty much everyone in relevant fields of engineering has at least tossed these concepts around in the back of their heads. Many, if not most, have even sketched out something similar on the back of a notebook during a boring class.

We haven't seen a real life version of one of these trains, not because there's necessarily anything wrong with the basic concepts, but because actually making something like this would require either a tremendous financial commitment or a major advance that dramatically reduces the cost of construction. None of the recent proposals have seriously addressed these problems, let alone solved them; they have simply waved them away.

Joseph Brownstein had an excellent summary of some of the issues:

"There's no way the economics on that would ever work out," said Dan Sperling, founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.

At projected capacity levels, the so-called Hyperloop would transport 840 people each hour, each paying $20. With capital, labor and maintenance costs factored in, Sperling said, "Those numbers, even in the most outlandish visionary way, do not make any sense at all. The whole technology is unproven. I know he's a brilliant guy, but it just doesn't pencil out."

...

Bonnie Lowenthal, chair of the California State Assembly's Transportation Committee told the Wall Street Journal, "Big infrastructure projects in California are very difficult. We have very complicated funding, we have environmental protections, seismic faults and land acquisition – but that's just the shortlist."

Beyond land-purchase issues, any realistic estimate of the costs would say Musk and his team are underestimating them "by at least a factor of 10 to 20," said Michael L. Anderson, an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He said the more realistic price for a one-way ticket would reach about $1,000, based on his own projections of construction costs and Musk's proposed capacity of 840 riders per hour.

"You're talking $100 billion to build what they're proposing," Anderson said.

Anderson said that while some of the infrastructure is novel, the elevated guideway was not unlike existing structures such as the Bay Area Rapid Transit's aerial tracks. For the Hyperloop's tracks, that alone would cost in the tens of billions. As for the pipeline for the cars, he said, oil pipelines are $5 million to $6 million per mile, and they are seven times narrower than the Hyperloop's would need to be. In addition, the Hyperloop track could not change direction abruptly the way an oil pipeline could.

"It really has to be built to much higher standards than anybody has ever built a pipeline to," Anderson said.

Ultimately, it comes down to the Hyperloop not being able to transport enough people, Anderson said.

"If it's going to cost $100 billion, you need to make it very high capacity to make it a worthwhile investment and it's not," he said, explaining that in order to get a 6 percent return, tickets for the Hyperloop built at his projected costs and Musk's proposed capacity would have to be $1,000 each -- a price not enough people would be willing to pay to sustain it.

Like the woman said, that's the shortlist.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-11594501181423203392016-05-20T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-20T09:00:12.770-04:00I'm going to see how far I can go into this thread without using either the expressions "train wreck" or "perfect storm." The hyperloop seems almost designed to prey upon the press's weakness when it comes to engineering and technology. It's a story that demands a grasp of infrastructure, implementation, and the distinction between mature and immature technology. On top of that, it combines an alarming number of the elements of the stories that have suckered the press corps in recent years. Silicon Valley hype, CEOs who are inevitably described as "visionary," ludicrously optimistic cost estimates, and geewhiz heavy technology.

Already, we are seeing many aspects of the Mars One fiasco playing out again:

Reporters are asking all the wrong questions;

They are seeking out "experts" with highly unrepresentative opinions;

They are credulously accepting numbers that are easily an order of magnitude off;

As far as I can tell, few have even bothered to look at a map of the route. Otherwise, we'd surely be hearing more about the bizarre decision to start a super sonic rail line to San Francisco just south of the Tejon Pass;

When the occasional journalist does actual... you know... reporting, it has little to no impact on the discussion.

This is going to get ugly. firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-50288176610506686352016-05-19T16:35:00.001-04:002016-05-19T16:42:36.704-04:00Another puzzle video -- going meta on Dudeney's Beer Barrel Puzzle
First off, you'll notice that things look a bit different. A friend of mine who works in postproduction (welcome to LA) made up an opening title sequence for the series. The video still looks like something done quickly on the cheap, but hopefully we've gotten to the point where the amateurism is not distracting.

My main focus here and what I want to direct your attention to is the meta. The central idea which is basically taken from George Pólya is that mathematics instruction should be less concerned with individual problems and more concerned with teaching the process of problem solving.

Puzzles are a natural fit for this concept. Their value for explicitly introducing heuristics has been demonstrated by any number of smart people such as Pólya, Martin Gardner (particularly in the Aha! books) and Raymond Smullyan, but the approach has never gotten the traction it deserves, perhaps because it requires both mathematical sophistication and a sense of humor, two qualities sadly lacking in both in traditional education programs and in the reform movement.

With that objective in mind, take a look, let me know what you think, and, if you're so inclined, feel free to share this with anyone who might be interested.

I used this problem as a jumping off point to discuss trial and error methods. For the more mathematically inclined, Dudeney's original solution might be of more firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-12585858028006058952016-05-19T09:00:00.001-04:002016-05-19T09:00:24.354-04:00From sandwich-makers to sitcoms -- more tales of monopsonyContinuing our abuse of economic power thread from yesterday, Ken Levine (the writer/director/producer associated with about half the classic television shows you can think of) has an excellent post on the annual upfronts. For those of you not from LA, here's a primer from Wikipedia:

In the North American television industry, an upfront is a group of gatherings hosted at the start of important advertising sales periods by television network executives, attended by the press and major advertisers. It is so named because of its main purpose, to allow marketers to buy television commercial airtime "up front", or several months before the television season begins.

The first upfront presentation was made by ABC in 1962, in an attempt to find out how advertisers felt about the network's new shows.

In the United States, the major broadcast networks' upfronts occur in New York City during the third week of May, the last full week of that month's sweeps period. The networks announce their fall primetime schedules, including tentative launch dates (i.e., fall or midseason) for new television programming, which may be "picked up" the week before. The programming announcements themselves are usually augmented with clips from the new television series, extravagant musical numbers, comedic scenes, and appearances by network stars, and take place at grand venues such as Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall, or Carnegie Hall. It is also the time when it is announced (by virtue of not being on the fall schedule) which shows are canceled for the next season. In recent years, the networks have mostly revealed this information to the public a few days before the actual presentation. Most cable networks present earlier in the spring since they usually program for the summer months; press attention to these announcements is usually much lighter.
Levine's whole post is worth reading but given some of our recent discussions, this part seemed particularly relevant.

Originally, before networks could own shows, the fights were with studios over number of episodes ordered and license fees. The license fee is what the network gives the studio to produce the show. The network was allowed two airings. If the cost of the show was more than the license fee then the studio paid the difference. The networks made their money by selling commercial time.

So if a series was cancelled after thirteen weeks and the studio shelled out a lot of additional costs it took a bath. But if the show was a hit, like say FRIENDS, then the studio owned it outright. At the time, syndication was the brass ring. Warner Brothers has made billions on FRIENDS. 20th continues to rake in money from MASH. It's like a slot machine that just keeps paying out for over forty years.

Studios made so much money that the networks eventually cried poverty and lobbied the government to participate. They won and were allowed to own studios and shows. There was concern that the networks would then just pick up their own shows and squeeze out outside studios. "Oh no," they promised, "Our goal is to get the highest ratings so we'll buy the best shows regardless of who produces it." You know the result. For the most part networks only picked up shows they owned. If they bought a show from an outside studio they usually required partnership.

If you had an ownership stake in a series (let's say you were the writer/creator/showrunner) you now had another partner. Sort of reminds you of the Sopranos,' doesn't it? And even the big syndication dollars were in jeopardy. Why? Because networks began buying cable networks and selling their shows essentially to themselves at reduced rates. The ownership partners were undercut again. The networks profited in that they had quality programming for their upstart networks and they alone profited on the advertising. This prompted several lawsuits by folks with ownership stakes, like Alan Alda.
As a bit of context, the television networks have spent more than half their lives under predictions of eminent demise. Go back to the late 70s and early 80s and you'll find columnists speculating that cable and the VCR would kill off at least one of the big three before 1990. These columns were recycled over the years with the advent of digital cable, DVDs, video games, the internet, the boom in original programming, streaming services and probably a few other developments I can't think of at the moment.

All of these new sources of competition continued to erode (losing a monopoly will do that), but they remained one of the dominant forces in the media landscape and thanks to deregulation and industry consolidation, companies like NBC/Universal/Comcast have unprecedented freedom to abuse market power.

We're thirty-plus years into an experiment in laissez-faire economics and certain conclusions are difficult to avoid.

1. Left unchecked, economic power tends to consolidate.

2. Once gained, that power is remarkably difficult to lose, even in the case of spectacularly incompetent management.

3. Inevitably, that power will be abused.

As a statistician, I know I'm always supposed to be calling for more data, but in this case, I think we have enough.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-30685545136768171432016-05-18T09:00:00.002-04:002016-05-18T09:00:05.920-04:00What does Mark Thoma think about Jimmy John's?

Sometimes articles just demand to be paired up.

From Professor Thoma:

The second view of inequality, one that is gaining traction, emphasizes market imperfections and the exploitation of power relationships. Adherents to this school of thought believe that market systems have an inherent tendency toward large monopolies, and this tendency has been furthered by technological change, globalization, and economic strategies by incumbent firms that make it hard for new competitors to enter the market.

As monopoly power becomes established, those with economic and political power can capture the political process and prevent the enforcement of antitrust law and regulatory change that could threaten their market dominance. The political power large firms have can also be used to undermine unions destroying any chance workers have to bargain on equal footing for wages. This leads to even higher profits and more inequality.

...

These courses do spend time looking at the economic consequences of monopolistic completion, oligopolies, and monopolies, though not enough in most cases. But students are left with the impression that these market structures are aberrations from the norm rather than the normal state of affairs. That needs to change. And what is missing altogether in most cases is a discussion of power relationships. Quoting Professor Stiglitz once again, "historically, the oppression of large groups – slaves, women, and minorities of various types – are obvious instances where inequalities are the result of power relationships, not marginal returns."

I'm not an economist so obviously anything I say on the subject should be viewed skeptically, but I would assume that when people in power routinely demand concessions from those without power and those concessions are of slight value to those making the demands while being onerous to those complying, we have strong evidence of an unhealthy power dynamic.

From Kerry Close:

Of the workers who have signed non-competes, fewer than half say they had access to trade secrets that a potential rival company could take advantage of. What's more, 37% of workers say they have signed non-compete agreements at some point in their careers.

While engineering and computer/mathematical occupations have the highest prevalence of non-competes, the agreements aren't exclusive to highly-skilled professions. For instance, 15% of workers without four-year college degrees are subject to non-competes, while 14% of employees earning less than $40,000 a year have signed a non-compete. That's despite the fact that employees in both sectors are about half as likely to possess trade secrets than more highly educated and higher-earning counterparts in the work force.

...

In one of the most puzzling and criticized example of non-competes, fast food sandwich chain Jimmy John's requires workers to promise they won't work for a competitor, defined as a nearby business that derives at least 10% of its revenue from sandwiches, within two years of leaving their job. Specifically citing Jimmy John's, two senators introduced a bill last summer that would prohibit the use of non-compete agreements for employees earning less than $15 an hour, $31,200 a year or the minimum wage in the employee municipality. It would also require employers to tell prospective hires that they may be asked to enter into such an agreement.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-73988658827608718682016-05-17T09:00:00.001-04:002016-05-17T09:00:18.300-04:00The shift from "is not" to "is" framing or when the irresistible appeal of not-Trump meets the immovable obstacle of is-Cruz[I wrote this (or at least dictated it to my phone) a month ago back when Cruz was still in the race, albeit fading fast. The tenses are, as a result, occasionally a bit weird but I'm still comfortable with the basic thesis.]

These two posts from TPM got me thinking:

From Trumpmentum. Yes, Trumpmentum. Really.

I don't deny this could still happen. It's quite possible. But it is worth noting that in the nationwide GOP primary polls, after a brief Cruz Boomlet (Dead Ted Bounce) Trump's numbers have rebounded and actually appear to be rising again. Yes, rising. (The rise could just be wobbliness in the polls; but he's at least stabilized his support nationwide.) Conventional wisdom was - perhaps still is - that Trump had hit his ceiling and the sheer weight of bad news was pulling him down. That probably wouldn't stop Trump from winning more primaries. But it would likely make it impossible for him to secure 1237 delegates. Meanwhile, Ted Cruz would accrue enough to make him a plausible alternative nominee.

Again, that's not what's happening. Cruz's numbers nationwide are going down, seemingly shedding at least a margin of support to both Trump and Kasich. There's also little doubt that a big win in New York, which seems highly likely, will give him a wave of good press and allow him to reclaim the look of a winner.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Trump will get 1237 delegates or that he'll be the nominee. I find it hard to figure out or at least game out the chances of any of this - mainly because all the possibilities seem deeply implausible and yet one must happen. What does seem clear to me is this: Conventional wisdom seems to be or has been that Trump had peaked and started to fall with mix of the Lewandowski 'assault', the terrible week with four different positions on abortion, various protester beatings and unified elite GOP denunciation. He likely couldn't be caught by any other candidate. But he might be a 'zombie' plurality winner - still in the lead but so clearly damaged and losing steam that he could with some ease be denied the nomination. But the polls show Cruz is falling and Trump has not just stabilized but actually seems to be gaining steam.

What's not totally clear to me is how much this is being driven by Trump and how much people seeing Ted Cruz is turning people against him. Remember, always start from the axiom of EHTD (Everybody Hates Ted Cruz). And you can't go far wrong. Clearly the anti-Cruz wall Cruz built in the Senate is holding strong. But whether it's more strength from Trump or the failure of the anti-Trump stalking horse doesn't really matter. The upshot is the same. Trump is getting stronger, not weaker. And that portends bad things for any effort to deny him in Cleveland.

And from New York City GOP Gala Crowd Ignores Ted Cruz During His Speech

Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-TX) speech at the New York City Republican gala on Thursday night was met with a cool reception from the crowd, who spoke amongst themselves and milled about as Cruz delivered his campaign stump speech.

"I will admit to you, I haven't built any buildings in New York City," Cruz said at the beginning of his address, drawing some applause, according to Buzzfeed News.

But it went downhill from there.

As Cruz continued with his speech, his applause lines drew little attention from the New York Republicans at the dinner, according to NBC News. The sound of chatter and cutlery on plates grew louder as Cruz's speech went on, according to Buzzfeed News. People also began wandering the room to chat with acquaintances at other tables.

Though for very different reasons, both Romney and Trump were front runners who were highly unacceptable to a substantial faction of the party. The result has been two consecutive Republican primaries with a distinctive piston-like action. On a fairly regular basis, some alternative candidate suddenly moves up in terms of polls, coverage, buzz, and expectations, peaks briefly then goes back down.

As mentioned before, game theory gives us a pretty good model of how voters unhappy with the front runner can converge on a second choice, but I think another theory is needed to explain why these candidates almost always fade.

I would argue that we see a shift in voter thinking when the alternative candidate peaks. On the upstroke the question of whom to vote for is framed as who is a viable alternative? While on the downstroke the question is framed as is this a viable candidate? Put another way, the theory is that when people looking for a focal point, they are on the lookout for points that might attract other people; after they've converged, they start examining the choice more critically.

Another somewhat complementary theory is that some people will tentatively move toward a possible focal point only so long as others appear to be converging around that point. I want to be careful with this one. Momentum is perhaps the most overused term in political reporting, and I generally tune out when I hear it. However, in a case where voters unhappy with a front runner are trying to coordinate their efforts and present a united opposition, I think the concept makes sense.

(If all this is true, then both Nate and Nate got it completely backwards when they repeatedly declared Donald Trump to be another Herman Cain. Under these theories Trump was Romney; Rubio and the other candidates who had their brief moment in the sun were Cain.)

Being down to a two-man race changes the dynamic quite a bit, but we are still seeing a similar pattern. A week of bad news for Trump gets voters (and perhaps more importantly analysts and pundits) thinking about the possibility of Ted Cruz as a viable alternative and we see something of a bump. Then the thinking shifts to Ted Cruz as an actual candidate...

"Remember, always start from the axiom of EHTD"

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-84867817907241122162016-05-16T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-16T09:00:40.960-04:00TFA's enrollment woes – the importance of putting numbers into contextThis Washington Post piece by Emma Brown on the problems at Teach For America is interesting on a number of levels, definitely something you should take a look at if you've been following the story. [emphasis added]

Applications to Teach for America fell by 16 percent in 2016, marking the third consecutive year in which the organization — which places college graduates in some of the nation's toughest classrooms — has seen its applicant pool shrink.

...

TFA received 37,000 applications in 2016, down from 57,000 in 2013 — a 35 percent dive in three years. It's a sharp reversal for an organization that grew quickly during much of its 25-year history ["grew quickly" is certainly true in terms of budget, not so much in terms of members. See below -- MP], becoming a stalwart in education reform circles and a favorite among philanthropists.

Teach for America now boasts 50,000 corps members and alumni; some have stayed in the classroom and others have gone on to work in education in other ways, joining nonprofits, running for office and leading charter schools. Its alumni include some of most recognized names in public education, including D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and her predecessor, Michelle Rhee.

...

The declining interest means that TFA is providing fewer corps members to school districts each year: The organization generally accepts about 10 percent of its applicant pool, and it refuses to lower its bar for admission, [Elisa Villanueva Beard, TFA's chief executive] wrote. This year's corps is likely to be several hundred smaller than last year's.

"These shortfalls matter. Corps members are good at their work," she wrote. "Our school and district partners want to hire far more of them than our current recruitment effort is producing."

This certainly sounds like a big deal, but a few seconds on Google and some very quick, back of the envelope calculations reveal just how small these numbers are in relative terms.To put things in perspective, there are over 3 million full-time teachers. A drop of several hundred applicants won't be all that noticeable, even if all of them were going to high-need areas (and quite a few aren't).

As previously discussed, TFA is a minor player viewed as a supplier of teachers, but in terms of fundraising, it's a big deal.

From Wikipedia:

Year	# of Applicants	# of Incoming Corps Members	# of Regions	Operating Budget

2003	15,708	1,646	20	$29.8M

2004	13,378	1,626	22	$34.0M

2005	17,348	2,181	22	$38.4M

2006	18,968	2,464	25	$55.6M

2007	18,172	2,895	26	$77.9M

2008	24,718	3,614	29	$122.3M

2009	35,178	4,065	35	$153.4M

2010	46,359	4,493	40	$176.0M

2011	47,911	5,066	43	$229M

2012	48,442	5,800[21]	46	$244M

2013	57,000	6,000[22]	48

If all TFA did was recruit six thousand new teachers a year, there would be no way to justify these budgets, but of course, that was never the main focus. TFA is an advocacy group with a stated mission to "enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation's most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence." [again, emphasis added]

Though the organization is sometimes coy on the point, the focus has never been on leading from the classroom. The positions of real value are administrators, think-tank fellows, politicians, and education journalists, and the program is set up to help them rise to those spots, often at exceptional speed. We can go back and forth on whether a decline in the influence of TFA would be a good thing or a bad, but we probably don't need to worry about what the loss of "several hundred" prospective TFA mombers will do to the teaching pool.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-37289703001713190272016-05-13T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-13T09:00:32.986-04:00One of these I'm actually going to write that ddulite mega-thread...And when I do, I'm definitely going to use extensive quotes from this beautifully brutal piece by Evgeny Morozov.

What the Khannas' project illustrates so well is that the defining feature of today's techno-aggrandizing is its utter ignorance of all the techno-aggrandizing that has come before it. The fantasy of technology as an autonomous force is a century-old delusion that no serious contemporary theorist of technology would defend. The Khannas have no interest in intellectual history, or in the state of contemporary thought about technology. They prefer to quote, almost at random, the likes of Oswald Spengler and Karl Jaspers instead. This strategy of invoking random Teutonic names and concepts might work on the unsophisticated crowds at Davos and TED, but to imagine that either Spengler or Jaspers have something interesting or original to tell us about cloning, e-books, or asteroid mining is foolish. "A new era requires a new vocabulary," the Khannas proclaim—only to embrace the terminology that was already in place by the end of the nineteenth century. They may be well-funded, but they are not well-educated.

Their promiscuous use of the word Technik exposes the shaky foundation of their enterprise—as well as of many popular discussions about technology, which inevitably gravitate toward the bullshit zone. To return to Harry Frankfurt, the key distinction between the liar and the bullshitter is that the former conceals "that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality," whereas the latter conceals that he is not interested in reality at all. The bullshitter "does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose." To suggest that Parag and Ayesha Khanna—and numerous pundits before them—might be pursuing purposes other than describing—or improving—reality is almost self-evident. (A look at the website of the Hybrid Reality Institute would suffice.) The more interesting question here is why bullshit about technology, unlike other types of bullshit, is so hard to see for what it is.

It is here that the Khannas stand out. Technik, as they use this term, is something so expansive and nebulous that it can denote absolutely anything. Technik is the magic concept that allows the Khannas to make their most meaningless sentences look as if they actually carry some content. They use Technik as a synonym for innovation, design, engineering, science, mastery, capital, the economy, and a dozen other things. It is what fixes cities, reinvigorates social networking, and grants us immortality. Technik is every pundit's wet dream: a foreign word that confers an air of cosmopolitanism upon its utterer. It can be applied to solve virtually any problem, and it is so abstract that its purveyor can hardly be held accountable for its inaccuracies and inanities.

Of course, any discussion of embarrassing ddulite hype will include an inevitable section on TED Talks,,,

I can surmise why the Khannas would have wanted to write this book, but it is not immediately obvious why TED Books would have wanted to publish it. I must disclose that I spoke at a TED Global Conference in Oxford in 2009, and I admit that my appearance there certainly helped to expose my argument to a much wider audience, for which I remain grateful. So I take no pleasure in declaring what has been obvious for some time: that TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas "worth spreading." Instead it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister.

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED "ecosystem"—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how "ideas worth spreading" become "ideas no footnotes can support."

So much BS, so little time.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-11859945489952177382016-05-12T09:00:00.001-04:002016-05-12T09:00:12.045-04:00The wages of bad journalism are TrumpA number of commentaries have sprung up trying to argue that the rise of Trump shows that democracy is fatally flawed and that we should think about transferring more power to "the right sort of people" (the elites, thought leaders, the political and journalistic establishment, etc.). One of the many flaws of this argument is that a careful survey of how we got here shows that the vast majority of the blame goes to the elites, thought leaders, the political and journalistic establishment, etc.

One of the few establishment figures who has been getting the story right, Paul Krugman, has a post up today that beautifully illustrates the point.

Still boggled by reports that Trump, having realized that the numbers on his tax plan aren't remotely credible, has decided to fix things by bringing in as experts … Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore. I mean, at some level this was predictable. But it still tells you a lot about both Donald the Doofus and his chosen party.

...

I mean, Kudlow is to economics what William Kristol is to political strategy: if he says something, you know it's wrong. When he ridiculed "bubbleheads" who thought overvalued real estate could bring down the economy, you should have rushed for the bomb shelters; when he proclaimed Bush a huge success, because a rising stock market is the ultimate verdict on a presidency (unless the president is a Democrat), you should have known that the Bush era would end with epochal collapse. And then there's Moore, who has a similarly awesome forecasting record, and adds to it an impressive lack of even minimal technical competence. Seriously: read the CJR report on his mess-up over job numbers:

The recurring "oops," intended as a dig at Krugman, took on an unintended irony after Abouhalkah discovered that Moore's numbers did not match those of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In fact, Moore later acknowledged, he was using BLS numbers not from "the last five years" but from an earlier five-year period: December 2007 to December 2012. Focusing on that period is arguably dubious, because the span captures the depths of the Great Recession and the housing crash, which hit some states harder than others—and whose impact likely would have swamped any tax-rate effect. There are other issues with the quality of Moore's argument, too, like its glancing-at-best treatment of how factors like housing costs shape population and job growth.

In any case, Abouhalkah found, Moore's numbers were wrong even for 2007-12, in ways that complicated the "low taxes = more jobs" message.

Texas did not gain 1 million jobs in the 2007-2012 period Moore measured. The correct figure was a gain of 497,400 jobs.

Florida did not add hundreds of thousands of jobs in that span. It actually lost 461,500 jobs.

New York, with [its] very high income tax rates, did not lose jobs during that time. It gained 75,900 jobs.

Oops, indeed.

Of course, Moore remains the chief economist at Heritage. And maybe Trump believes that this is a certificate of quality, that anyone in that position must be a real expert.

At some point in the past twenty or thirty years journalists (or probably more preciselyeditors and publishers) decided that once someone had been recognized as an authority, that person was in for life. You could be a complete babbling idiot, a raging bigot, and about as accurate as a knave in a knight /knave puzzle. It wouldn't matter. Once on the list, you will be treated as a sober and credible source until the day you die or until concerned family members have you institutionalized for your own good.

In any system with even minimal standards of accountability, neither Kudlow nor Moore would still have careers in media or economics or politics. Instead, not only are they still employed, they are treated with sufficient respect that Donald Trump is able to improve his respectability by hiring them.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-35354410569815566042016-05-11T08:00:00.000-04:002016-05-11T08:00:00.259-04:00So speaks a person who has never lived with room-matesThis is Joseph.

Kevin Drum wonders about apartments with common living and dining areas, but private bedrooms and baths. The reason I would be skeptical about this arrangement is that you end up with whomever should happen to rent one of the units. If a group of people pool resources to purchase an apartment then they get to pick who they live with. Even so, these arrangements often end in a messy or unfortunate way. It's the same in college (I lived in a dorm like this once, except with a shared bathroom) in that you have the pressure release of this living arrangement being time limited (and, even then, it can be pretty tough).

So what happens when your apartment mate is loud at night? Or does something illegal? Or is very messy? Who picks what goes on the TV (I remember this as a non-trivial issue in student residences)?

This strikes me as an endless series of room-mate fights. At some point, the shared kitchen is likely to end up in a bad state as that is where bad behavior (dirty dishes, food "borrowing", unsanitary counters) is likely to first peak. The dorm I lived in mitigated this somewhat using maid service, but it was not a perfect fix.

Josephhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-79264318515376843282016-05-10T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-10T09:00:08.712-04:00 Aleatoricism and Social Media
Often when I'm writing a post, I realize that what I had intended as a supporting passage would work better freestanding. In this case, I was revisiting an old thread about how the vast majority of even the smartest journalists and politicians on Twitter don't understand Twitter. Part of the problem is the tendency to think that you can simply cut up something linear and structured into 140 character increments and call them "tweets."

This is one of those cases where the medium most definitely is the message, and the medium is fast and random with people dropping in and out unpredictably and each reader having a different context based on who he or she is following and what's on his or her screens. In order to effectively use Twitter, you have to channel your inner McLuhan..

All of which got me to thinking about the way previous writers have tried to incorporate the random into their work.

Bryan Stanley Johnson (1933–1973) wrote an experimental novel The Unfortunates (1969), which was published in separate sections, consisting of a "first" and a "last" section, with the sections in between allowed to be shuffled randomly by a reader. This was an attempt to reproduce the randomness of personal memory. The overall narrative is about a sports journalist traveling to a city, to cover a football game, and recalling events and people from years earlier when he had lived in the city.
I wonder if there's an online version of The Unfortunates. It would seem to be a natural fit.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-63850148528662449902016-05-09T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-09T09:00:22.116-04:00Product placements and hidden costsIntrusive product placement was one of the reasons I stopped watching White Collar. The annoyance wasn't up there with the plot holes and character inconsistencies, but it was a factor. The spots were so clumsy and blatant that I wondered if they were meant as a protest by the writers, directors, and actors. Either way, it was a major distraction in a show that couldn't afford it.

In the television market of 2016, the field is so crowded that every viewing choice comes with opportunity costs. By choosing to watch Veep or Kimmy Schmidt or Silicon Valley or any of the dozen or so of the shows you really do mean to get around to. That level of competition for viewers heightens what has always been a perverse incentive in most corporations and the delayed, the hidden, the intangible.

When an executive suggests a change that saves money or brings in revenue at the cost of quality or customer loyalty, the positives are immediately evident; the negatives (assuming they are recognized at all) are usually delayed until the executive has moved up and out of the blast radius. In a market where all shows have to fight to hold on to viewers, that can deadly.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-31624441365536192052016-05-06T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-06T09:00:34.694-04:00How a hit show loses (or perhaps "loses") moneyThis is one of those cases where threads may or may not be colliding. The following could be yet another story of Hollywood cost spirals. We have lots of unambiguous evidence that things are getting out of control. What's more, these examples it into a larger narrative of cost shooting up in the very areas where technology are to be driving it down.

On the other hand, we could have just another instance of a far older and better established genre, the Hollywood accounting story. There is a long history of films that obviously turned huge profits being labeled as money losers when the time came to pay contributors their share.

Regardless of which version you pick, it is interesting and always useful to look at some actual numbers when trying to follow a business story.

From the Hollywood Reporter

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-45158606305211484062016-05-05T14:07:00.003-04:002016-05-05T14:10:05.667-04:00 Puzzle and Problem-solving videos [Doublet edition] – now slightly less beta
First the usual caveats. These videos still aren't all that pleasing to either the eye or the ear (which doesn't leave a lot of senses to engage). The plan is still to focus first on concept then on specific content while hopefully keeping the production values at least adequate. For example, recording the audio in a relatively quiet closet-sized hallway to get a reasonably clean track and ignoring the weird acoustics and stilted, choppy delivery that comes from wrestling with a jury-rigged arrangement while trying to narrate.

The concept is a series of math video (initially concentrating on puzzles) that focus less on specific problems and more on problem-solving. The video embedded here talks about analyzing problems to see what makes some easy and others difficult, then seeing if we can use that information to suggest strategies for tackling the more challenging ones. In the follow-up ("turn GRASS GREEN" -- also from Carroll), I talk about flipping problems and working forwards then backwards then forwards... In the Kakuro video I discuss finding footholds. In a couple based on Dudney puzzles, I cover mixing algebraic and trial-and-error solutions to be better guessers. You get the picture.

I'm more or less satisfied with the concept and content (or at least with the direction they're headed) but production and promotion still have a long way to go and I'm not entirely certain how to proceed. A few years ago, if you found a good niche and posted some videos of acceptable quality, there was a decent chance that you'd find an audience through organic search. Based on conversations with people who've worked with SEO, that's very difficult now between the competition and Google changing its algorithms to crack down on people gaming the system (which creates a lot of collateral damage among small players).

I'll be exploring other ways of promoting the videos starting here.If you're interested in the approach I outlined earlier or just in puzzles in general, please check this out (feedback is always appreciated) and keep an eye out for future installments. If you like what you see in terms of content, spread the word around. I'm getting advice from some acquaintances who work in video production so the quality on that side should definitely be improving.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-56866671142363867392016-05-05T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-05T09:00:02.315-04:00Maybe I'll get around to a post on...- The extraordinary value of name recognition in the 21st Century built around this post from Ken Levine.

- Exploring (or at least seconding) the points Paul Campos makes in "The key to a more egalitarian society is for everyone to go to elite colleges."

- Indulging in a bit of schadenfreude on how the establishment press's quarter century of tolerating increasingly shoddy and sensationalistic reporting is catching up with them in the form of the Trump campaign, as explained by Mr. Pierce.

- I have great respect for the crowd at FiveThirtyEight (when they're good they're very good), but given their track record, is there any question you'd less like to hear them tackle than Why Did The 'Stop Trump' Movement Fail?

- Connectography is the name of an actual book and not just the title for a parody TED Talk.

- Tierney Sneed does a good job pointing out the limits of the Goldwater analogy. Jon Huntsman proves her point.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-67670106716178733772016-05-04T08:00:00.000-04:002016-05-04T08:00:05.051-04:00Dean Dad on Zero Sum PerformanceThis is Joseph.

From Dean Dad:

In most states or systems with performance funding, the overall level of funding -- the pie to be sliced, if you prefer -- is either flat or declining. Which means that if everyone improves by the same five percent, then everyone gets the same zero percent increase. You may be making progress, but you're still essentially running in place. Worse, if you improve by three percent but the statewide average is five, you actually lose ground.
I find these sort of systems to be extremely tough environments to build motivation and success in, so I am glad that they are being scrutinized. One issue is that it creates some very perverse incentives. Consider this in a human resources context -- you do well at your job, get promoted, and now you are at the bottom of the ranking for the new rile you are in. If the bottom group tends not to survive (long term) it suggests promotion is bad. Or that politics will be played to make a promotion survivable, which can be pretty toxic.

Where I have seen this system thrive is in very high reward environments. Only one actress could be cast to play "Rey" in the new star wars film (no matter how good the second best applicant was), but there are no shortage of volunteers because the pay-off is so great.

But placed into a less highly leveraged environment and it is a recipe for lowering motivation and, occasionally, penalizing the colleges that take on the toughest challenges. We all want to think that we are so awesome that we can do amazing things with tough problems, and sometimes people do, but it can be a thin line between that and being set up to fail.

Josephhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-20363824332178085942016-05-03T09:00:00.000-04:002016-05-03T09:00:00.215-04:00Context only counts if it shows up in the first two dozen paragraphsThe New York Times has a good piece on the impact of voter ID laws but I do have a problem with a few parts (or at least with the way they're arranged).

Stricter Rules for Voter IDs Reshape Races

By MICHAEL WINES and MANNY FERNANDEZ MAY 1, 2016

SAN ANTONIO — In a state where everything is big, the 23rd Congressional District that hugs the border with Mexico is a monster: eight and a half hours by car across a stretch of land bigger than any state east of the Mississippi. In 2014, Representative Pete Gallego logged more than 70,000 miles there in his white Chevy Tahoe, campaigning for re-election to the House — and lost by a bare 2,422 votes.

So in his bid this year to retake the seat, Mr. Gallego, a Democrat, has made a crucial adjustment to his strategy. "We're asking people if they have a driver's license," he said. "We're having those basic conversations about IDs at the front end, right at our first meeting with voters."

Since their inception a decade ago, voter identification laws have been the focus of fierce political and social debate. Proponents, largely Republican, argue that the regulations are essential tools to combat election fraud, while critics contend that they are mainly intended to suppress turnout of Democratic-leaning constituencies like minorities and students.
In the third paragraph, we have two conflicting claims that go to the foundation of the whole debate. If election fraud is a significant problem, you can make a case for voter ID laws. If not, it's difficult to see this as anything other than voter suppression. This paragraph pretty much demands some additional information to help the reader weigh the claims and the article provides it...

More than twenty paragraphs later.

Mr. Abbott, perhaps the law's most ardent backer, has said that voter fraud "abounds" in Texas. A review of some 120 fraud charges in Texas between 2000 and 2015, about eight cases a year, turned up instances of buying votes and setting up fake residences to vote. Critics of the law note that no more than three or four infractions would have been prevented by the voter ID law.

Nationally, fraud that could be stopped by IDs is almost nonexistent, said Lorraine C. Minnite, author of the 2010 book "The Myth of Voter Fraud." To sway an election, she said, it would require persuading perhaps thousands of people to commit felonies by misrepresenting themselves — and do it undetected.

"It's ludicrous," she said. "It's not an effective way to try to corrupt an election."

I shouldn't have to say this but, if a story contains claims that the reporter has reason to believe are false or misleading, he or she has an obligation to address the issue promptly. Putting the relevant information above the fold is likely to anger the people who made the false statements, but doing anything else is a disservice to the readers.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-24102581958811230982016-05-02T08:00:00.000-04:002016-05-02T08:00:11.447-04:00When is the presumption of reasonableness reasonable?From Wikipedia [emphasis added]

Since the first corps was established in 1990, more than 42,000 corps members have completed their commitment to Teach For America. In September 2015, the organization reached a milestone of 50,000 corps members and alumni, who have collectively taught more than 5 million students across the nation.

Unless I lost a zero somewhere, that comes to presumably not that much above 100 students per teacher. If we're just talking about the two years of official TFA service, that seems a low but not out of the question if you had more elementary than secondary classes in the mix.

What bothers me is that, in order to get to a reasonable number, I have to assume that the writer meant something he or she didn't actually say. I have to change

In September 2015, the organization reached a milestone of 50,000 corps members and alumni, who have collectively taught more than 5 million students across the nation.

to

In September 2015, the organization reached a milestone of 50,000 corps members and alumni, who collectively taught more than 5 million students across the nation during their two year commitments.

In this case, I think the change is reasonable because I don't find the alternative credible (specifically that the average career total of current and former TFA members is a little over one hundred taught). I am certainly open to changing my mind on this point as new evidence comes in, but, for now, I'm going to stick with the second version.

There is, however, a real danger in automatically assuming people meant something more reasonable than what they actually said, particularly when the people in question are not very honorable and are aware that you'll be shading things in their favor. Which brings us to this repost from 2012

_____________________________________________

Following up the follow-up

Following up on Joseph's latest, I actually think the problem here is more James Stewart than Paul Ryan. Ryan's budgets have been fairly obvious attempts to form a more Randian union. That's not surprising coming from an avowed follower of Ayn Rand. Ryan also comes from a Straussian tradition so I'm not exactly shocked that he would try to sell proposals that are likely to increase the deficit as a path to fiscal responsibility.

But that's OK. The Ryan plan is exactly the kind of bad idea that our national immune system ought to be able to handle. Liberals should savage its underlying values (Rand is always a hard sell); centrists and independents should spend their time pointing out the endless ways that the numbers don't add up and the evidence contradicts the basic arguments; respectable conservatives should damn it with faint praise or simply avoid the topic. The Republicans would then come back with a new budget, hopefully a proposal based on valid numbers and defensible assumptions, but at the very least one that obscures its flaws and makes a cosmetic effort at advancing its stated goals.

For Ryan's proposals to maintain their standing as serious and viable, the system has to have broken down in an extraordinary way. Specifically, the centrists such as James Stewart have had to go to amazing lengths to make the budget look reasonable, up to and including claiming that Ryan intends to take steps that Ryan explicitly rules out (from James Kwak):

Stewart is at least smart enough to realize that a 25 percent rate is only a tax increase if you eliminate preferences for investment income (capital gains and dividends, currently taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent):

"Despite Mr. Ryan's reluctance to specify which tax preferences might have to be curtailed or eliminated, there's no mystery as to what they would have to be. Looking only at the returns of the top 400 taxpayers, the biggest loophole they exploit by far is the preferential tax rate on capital gains, carried interest and dividend income."
So give Stewart credit for knowing the basics of tax policy. But he is basically assuming that Ryan must be proposing to eliminate those preferences: "there's no mystery as to what they would have to be."
Only they aren't. Stewart quotes directly from the FY 2012 budget resolution authored by Ryan's Budget Committee. But apparently he didn't notice this passage:

"Raising taxes on capital is another idea that purports to affect the wealthy but actually hurts all participants in the economy. Mainstream economics, not to mention common sense, teaches that raising taxes on any activity generally results in less of it. Economics and common sense also teach that the size of a nation's capital stock – the pool of saved money available for investment and job creation – has an effect on employment, productivity, and wages. Tax reform should promote savings and investment because more savings and more investment mean a larger stock of capital available for job creation."
In other words, taxes on capital gains should not be increased, but if anything should be lowered.
These distortions aren't just journalistic laziness or rhetorically overkill on Stewart's part; it's essential to a narrative that writers like Stewart have built their careers on.

Here's Paul Krugman:

But the "centrists" who weigh in on policy debates are playing a different game. Their self-image, and to a large extent their professional selling point, depends on posing as high-minded types standing between the partisan extremes, bringing together reasonable people from both parties — even if these reasonable people don't actually exist. And this leaves them unable either to admit how moderate Mr. Obama is or to acknowledge the more or less universal extremism of his opponents on the right.
The point about self-image and professional selling points is remarkably astute and when you combine those with the decline in fact-checking, diminishing penalties for errors, and a growing trend toward group-think, you get a journalistic system that loses much of its ability to evaluate policy ideas.

And for a democracy that's a hell of a loss.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-66474194694390182782016-04-29T09:00:00.001-04:002016-04-29T09:00:12.037-04:00Actually, Whole Foods are both high-price and high-volume
I have said before, I am in many ways generally sympathetic to the utopian urbanists. The problems they address are real and substantial and many of their proposed solutions make a lot of sense to me. That said, the movement, at least in the form that makes it into the popular press, often seems overly narrative-driven, romanticized,and derived and debated from a top decile viewpoint

Cities are all much nicer if you have money, and this is even more true in high density upscale places like New York and San Francisco. Unfortunately, many of the pieces you read advocating the charms of city living are written from the perspective of a six or seven-figure income. There is nothing this is nothing wrong with this perspective as long as the writers maintain a degree of self-awareness, but this is often not the case.

Recently, we've been hearing a lot of arguments claiming we can get the costs of housing down to reasonable middle-class levels in places like NYC by aggressively building those cities up. Without that middle-class target, the argument would certainly be valid. With the target, the number of new housing units necessary would appear to be huge, particularly since many if not most of the specific proposals we've seen so far focus on upscale housing with relief for middle and lower class markets to come through trickle down effects.

But getting the prices down is only half the problem. We also to consider what living in these hyper-dense cities would look from the vantage of a median income, which brings us to this (with the usual caveats about quoting something you read in one of these pop sci sites).

Indeed, that's what Colin Ellard, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo and director of its Urban Realities Laboratory, has found in his own work. Five years ago, Ellard became interested in a particular building on East Houston Street — the gigantic Whole Foods "plopped into" a notoriously textured part of lower Manhattan. As described in his book, titled Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life, Ellard partnered with the Guggenheim Museum's urban think tank to analyze what happens when someone "turns out of a tiny, historic [knish] restaurant" and encounters a full city block with nothing but "the long, blank façade of the Whole Foods Market."

In 2011, Ellard led small groups on carefully planned Lower East Side walks to measure the effect of the urban environment on their bodies and minds. Participants recorded their response to questions at each stopping point and wore sensors that measured skin conductance, an electrodermal response to emotional excitement. Passing the monolithic Whole Foods, people's state of arousal reached a nadir in Ellard's project. Physiologically, he explained, they were bored. In their descriptions of this particular place, they used words like bland, monotonous, and passionless. In contrast, one block east of the Whole Foods on East Houston, at the other test site — a "lively sea of restaurants with lots of open doors and windows" — people's bracelets measured high levels of physical excitement, and they listed words like lively, busy, and socializing. "The holy grail in urban design is to produce some kind of novelty or change every few seconds," Ellard said. "Otherwise, we become cognitively disengaged." The Whole Foods may have gentrified the neighborhood with more high-quality organic groceries, but the building itself stifled people. Its architecture blah-ness made their minds and bodies go meh.

First, as mentioned before, there are lots of reasons to worry about the homogeneity of the people conducting this research, making these proposals, and writing these articles.

With apologies for the snark, if you were to fund grants in the field of "first world problems," I can't imagine anything better than the psychological effects of the lack of architectural charm of a Whole Foods in the middle of a picturesque Manhattan street.This also brings up familiar social science concerns about unrepresentative populations and generalizing from outliers, but, putting all of that aside, let's assume the results (which seem reasonable enough) are valid and see where they lead us.

Given the numbers being thrown around, it would seem that street-accessible retail, having limited capacity to build up, would largely be forced into one of two models: high price or high-volume.
Either way, retailers will have to make every expensive square foot pay for itself. We've already seen something like this in gentrifying neighborhoods where longstanding and often beloved mom-and-pop businesses are forced out to make way for chain stores and high-end boutiques. Barring some fairly draconian regulation (which would very much go against current conventional wisdom), it's hard to imagine the proposed hyper-dense cities not taking these trends to a new extreme.

Would this be a bad thing? That depends. I don't want to get all nostalgic about some neighborhood pizza joint (if anything, getting New Yorkers to stop going on about their neighborhood pizza places would be a national good). Antiquated and inefficient business model are supposed to go away. I'm not prepared to take a policy stand based on charm and sentimental appeal.

But, of course, I'm not a utopian urbanist. I've always been highly skeptical of these narratives, generally finding them to be overoptimistic and sometimes mutually contradictory. Increasingly dense cities are often held up as a panacea, curing all of our ills be they economic, environmental or cultural. That alone makes me nervous. Add on to that a romanticized, idyllic quality -- music in the cafes at night and innovation in the air – that has been seldom actually observed and is not at all the direction some of these policies seem to be headed.

At least not for the bottom nine deciles. firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-16924476644812374442016-04-28T09:00:00.001-04:002016-04-28T09:00:35.002-04:00Damn, apparently Krugman has gotten to the College Humor staffI was going to save this for later, but events seem to be picking up speed...

One of the things that impresses me about College Humor that, though they very much come from a millennial point of view, they are more than willing to satirize millennial culture. email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-56663636716831051132016-04-27T09:00:00.000-04:002016-04-27T09:00:32.180-04:00The Monsanto House of the FutureMore on the retro-future thread.

Maybe "thread" is too strong a word. So far, it has mainly been fragments. Hopefully, this is building up to a coherent thesis about attitudes toward technological progress, particularly about how the huge advances of the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the Post-War era lead people to internalize the idea that every aspect of the world was changing at an ever-accelerating pace. (I also want to tie in the closing of the Western frontier with the opening of the technological one, but that's definitely a topic for another day.)

I've argued that for almost a hundred years, technological progress reliably outpaced prediction while for the past thirty or forty, it's been the opposite. Though it's dangerous to pin these things down,1967 is around the time when our expectations started exceeding our advances.

From Wikipedia:

The Monsanto House of the Future (also known as the Home of the Future) was an attraction at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, USA, from 1957 to 1967. It was part of Disney's Tomorrowland

It was sponsored by Monsanto Company. The design and engineering of the house was done jointly by Monsanto, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Walt Disney Imagineering. The MIT faculty members were architects Richard Hamilton and Marvin Goody, and building engineer Albert G. H. Dietz. The fiberglass components of the house were manufactured by Winner Manufacturing Company in Trenton, New Jersey, and were assembled into the house on-site.

The attraction offered a tour of a home of the future, set in the year 1986, and featured household appliances such as microwave ovens, which eventually became commonplace. The house saw over 435,000 visitors within the first six weeks of opening, and ultimately saw over 20 million visitors before being closed.

The house closed in 1967. The building was so sturdy that when demolition crews failed to demolish the house using wrecking balls, torches, chainsaws and jackhammers, the building was ultimately demolished by using choker chains to crush it into smaller parts. The reinforced polyester structure was so strong that the half-inch steel bolts used to mount it to its foundation broke before the structure itself did.

For a firsthand account, check out this post by Ken Levine.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-3643006214502529422016-04-26T09:00:00.001-04:002016-04-26T09:00:32.281-04:00The "Prisoner's Dilemma" moratorium[Perhaps the nicest thing about having a blog is being able to shoot off an angry post when a news story annoys you.]

I'm not sure what the best way to get the ball rolling here would be (perhaps a kickstarter?) but we need to have a strictly enforced rule that no journalist or pundit is allowed to mention the prisoner's dilemma for the next five or ten years, however long it takes to learn to use it properly and, more importantly, discover that game theory consists of more than that one concept.

If we could just get writers to stop mistaking a stag hunt for prisoner's dilemma, it would be a massive improvement. I see this all the time and it drives me crazy.

Then there are ideas like Schelling focal points. As mentioned before, while most political commentators have had what can only be described as a humiliating season, a handful (notably Josh Marshall, Jonathan Chait and Paul Krugman) have actually enhanced their reputations. One of Krugman's best posts of the year was this game theory-based analysis of the over-reaction to the results in Iowa (more on my reaction here).

Not to name any names, but a lot of writers would be looking better now if they had spent more time thinking about focal points and less time claiming to see inflection points. firstname.lastname@example.com


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In scrats village in version 1.1.2 there is an area of columns and an acorn fountain in the middle, but it is not in the shop. Is it an unlockable or just a custom item for scrats nook
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Yea I have the same thing. also the Xmas reindeer in Ellie's village.
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Hospice Services near Wells, Minnesota
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More explanation on why Jerry Buss wasn't in Orlando
LOS ANGELES -- Back when it became apparent that Jerry Buss wasn't going to Orlando for the possible Lakers clincher in the NBA Finals, I asked Lakers spokesman John Black what was up with that. Buss' response, via Black, was meant for amusement: "It's no fun going to away games when the crowd is cheering against the best team."
Buss explained his absence further Sunday night, when he and son Jim sat down with reporters.
"I'm getting a little older, and I guess during something like that I become very animated and use sometimes questionable language," Buss said. "In this particular case, I thought it was going to be a very tough tussle and I wanted to be kind of free to jump up and down and scream and kick things.
"I talked Jimmy into staying with me, and I had (daughter) Jeanie with me. It became kind of a family affair in our room where we could all shout and holler without making a spectacle of ourselves."
Buss' son, Joey, wound up accepting the trophy for the family after Game 5 in Orlando.
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Jeb a 'strong and steady hand' for president: George W Bush
George W. Bush, campaigning for his brother for the first time, says Jeb has the backbone and optimism to be president.
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Former US president George W Bush was launching into the caustic Republican nomination fray Monday in support of his candidate brother Jeb, whose rival Donald Trump unleashed a new round of invective at his challengers.
On Muslims, Democrats find an unlikely ally: George W Bush
Taunted by Republicans to declare war on ``radical Islamic terrorism,'' Democrats are turning to an unlikely ally: George W. Bush.
Donald Trump criticizes George W Bush over 9/11, Jeb Bush hits back
Trump, who has made no secret of his dislike of the Bush family and has frequently baited rival candidate Jeb Bush, George W.'s brother, made the comment in a television interview.
George W Bush pitches in for Jeb Bush as 2016 heats up
Jeb Bush might be his own man, but he showed Thursday he won't hesitate to enlist his brother George, the former president.
George W Bush kept the US safe, says his brother
The national security and foreign policy of George Bush came in for support from two Republican presidential candidates including his own younger brother.
George H.W. Bush critical of son's handling of 9/11 in biography
George H.W. Bush has criticised two top aides of his first son in "Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush" by Jon Meacham.
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Donald Trump may be the presumptive Republican nominee but Hollywood superstar George Clooney is confident that he will not be elected as the next US president.
Former US president George W Bush returns to New Orleans for 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
George W Bush returns to New Orleans to tout the region's recovery from the nation's costliest natural disaster on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
George W Bush more popular than Barack Obama: Poll
Former US President George W Bush is now more popular than his successor Barack Obama, according to a CNN/ORC poll released.
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text:
Art 120 and The Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga is bringing a unique art car to town just in time for the holidays. Dubbed The "World's Largest Motorized Radio Flyer Wagon," the 11-passenger red wagon was transformed from the chassis of a 1987 ambulance by retired vocational arts teacher, Ted Mangum.
Mr. Mangum's wagon arrives Thursday, and will be in town for few days, visiting a few Hamilton County elementary schools as part of Art 120's in-school field trip program.
Their goal is to reach as many of the 29 elementary schools without an art program as possible.
"Basically, it's all about A.R.T.- Awareness, Reaching, and Teaching," said Kate Warren, executive director for Art 120. "Art teaches children to think for themselves, boosts self esteem, and instills confidence. It's no surprise that the six Hamilton County schools recognized by the state for having the highest overall achievement on their TCAP tests also have a full time art program."
In April 2013, Art 120 brought 14 artists from across the country to share their creative contraptions with over 2600 children for the Art-Car-A-Van. Known as art cars, these mobile creations come in all forms: bikes, trucks, and even wagons. During the visit, artists provide experiential learning opportunities on subjects such as recycling, craftsmanship, design, theme, and story. Because their art is mobile, they can reach schools that lack the logistical support for field trips or art classes.
May 28, 2016
May 27, 2016
The Chattanooga Police Department will be partnering with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and other local agencies within Hamilton County to step up DUI enforcement this Memorial Day holiday. ... (click for more)
Whitfield County will hold a public meeting on June 13 at 9 a.m. at the Whitfield County Emergency Management Office located at 804 Professional Blvd. in Dalton to review and discuss a draft ... (click for more)
The soldiers of Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, 1-181st Field Artillery Regiment returned to their home station armory in Chattanooga after completing a successful annual training exercise ... (click for more)
The Chattanooga Police Department will be partnering with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and other local agencies within Hamilton County to step up DUI enforcement this Memorial Day holiday. "This is about preventing irresponsible and reckless driving," said Lieutenant Adrian Gibb of the Chattanooga Police Department's Traffic Division. "We strongly believe highly visible, ... (click for more)
Whitfield County will hold a public meeting on June 13 at 9 a.m. at the Whitfield County Emergency Management Office located at 804 Professional Blvd. in Dalton to review and discuss a draft of an update to the Whitfield County Hazard Mitigation Plan. A draft copy of the plan can be found at www.whitfieldcountyga.com for review prior to the meeting. This Plan is required by ... (click for more)
The Bradley County Sheriff's Office is investigating a child who was bitten by a dog. While saturating an area in Bradley County, a deputy observed a vehicle traveling on the roadway with a child not restrained and sitting in a passenger's lap inside the vehicle. Once the deputy approached the vehicle, he noticed a child bleeding which was the result of a dog bite. ... (click for more)
Rescue personnel started the Memorial Holiday weekend at the Pocket Wilderness hiking trails on Saturday morning. A man had been camping on the trails with friends Friday night when the accident occurred. They had been gathering branches for firewood when he tripped and fell on a branch which impaled his thigh. With no cell service and having no daylight, the group waited ... (click for more)
I have been teaching for 21 years now, so I've been through my share of school leaders. Every one of them taught me something important. Whether it was Don Bishop from Red Bank High School who, after almost 30 years at Red Bank, taught me to invest in the longevity of my career, Wade Kelly who taught me to thoroughly weigh options before making a decision, Gail Chuy who taught me ... (click for more)
I have seen a lot of human beings who have gotten themselves in terrible messes in my time and more self-induced agony than I want to recall. Will Rogers famously said, "Give a man enough rope and he'll hang himself." That's the truth and if you ever didn't think that "Politics corrupts," consider the genius behind the line, "It ain't long those who get elected … begin to think ... (click for more)


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Friday, November 9, 2012
Hood River County Christmas Project provides assistance with food and children's gifts, during the Christmas holidays (Dec. 21-22 delivery), to low-income families in Hood River County.
Christmas Project is available to families meeting State of Oregon Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) standards, although they do not need to be receiving benefits.
Families wishing to apply will need to bring proof of income and residency. Eligible children in the family must be living at home. Christmas Project applications will be taken this year at these locations:
n Cascade Locks — FISH, Cascade Locks City Hall, 2-4 p.m. on Nov. 28,.
n Hood River — Oregon Department of Human Services, 1610 Ninth Court, on Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Nov. 9, 16, 30 and Dec. 7; and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Nov. 10, 17 and Dec. 1 and 8
n Parkdale — Parkdale Community Church during food bank hours (4-6 p.m.) on Nov. 12 and 26
n Odell — Odell food bank, 3440 Odell Highway, 4-6 p.m. on Nov. 15 and Dec. 6.
Applicants may sign up at whichever location is most convenient for them.
To contribute to the Christmas Project, checks may be mailed to PO Box 872, Hood River, OR 97031. All donations are tax-deductible (501 (c)(3) organization).
For more information on how to get involved or sponsor a needy family, call Kym Zanmiller at 541-386-5153.
Details are also at www.hoodrivercountychristmasproject.com
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