Friday, May 25, 2012

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The high school freshman who was first suspended, then expelled, then unexpelled for a class project on bullying that involved creating a fake Facebook profile for the main character in a video has been reinstated and the suspension expunged. Cooler heads have prevailed, but there's an irony that she was institutionally bullied for making a video about being bullied by peers.
 
2) I'll be at the bar....until September!
 
3) This bar, specifically. McSorley's used to be the guidepost on the path to manhood in New York City, and while that's still partly true, if you can wend your way through the throngs of tourists and commuters that have turned it into a "destination," it's sad to see it become McSorley's Lite. Except for Geoff. And the cheese platter.
 
 
5) Y'know, I'm OK with this, provided we aren't setting up the next Al Qaeda. Could we please vet this carefully?
 
6) I'm sure it will be "worldclass" and "classy"....right?
 
 
8) With regards to the S E Cupp/Hustler blow job picture controversy: I don't condone the use of violent imagery involved here, but let's be quick to point out that Sippy herself has said some equally emotionally and sexually violent things in an attempt to get attention to her pathos. Karma exists, dearie.
 
9) There was a time, in my lifetime no less, when a typical CEO made about 40 times what the average worker made. That means, if the line operator in the factory made $10,000, the CEO made about $500,000. That seems to have changed. I'm sure the average worker in America doesn't make $250,000.
 
10) Moooooooooooooooooooooove away from the bar!

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Poor Facebook!

 
If it's not the stock that's creating an uproar, it's their idiotic standards and practices folks!
 
Worse, the idiots who got fleeced are suddenly shouting at anyone about how chilly it suddenly got.

Speaking Of Austerity

 
When you compare them head-to-head, the Obama and Romney tax plans are nearly identical:
Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, is offering a 20 percent tax cut for everyone. Given the mood of the conservatives in the United States today, that may not surprise you. But even President Barack Obama, who is routinely described as a socialist by his opponents, is peddling a plan under which 99 percent of Americans would pay less than they did under the last Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton.
A one percent difference really is no difference, unless you're in the one percent. But they can afford it, to be sure. But here's the interesting thing:

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2011, among the world’s 30 leading countries economically, only in New Zealand and in Japan was government revenue a lower share of gross domestic product than in the United States. Countries like Australia, Estonia, Ireland and Switzerland, which tend to favor low taxes and a small state, have government revenue that accounts for more of G.D.P. than does the United States.

The Internal Revenue Service is relatively restrained, too, compared with recent history. In 1945, at the close of World War II, federal tax receipts were 20.4 percent of G.D.P. (expenditures, by the way, were 41.9 percent, putting the federal budget deficit at 21.5 percent, compared with 8.7 percent in 2011). In 1952, the year the Republican Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, federal government revenue was 19 percent of G.D.P. In 1988, the last year of Ronald Reagan’s transformational conservative presidency, the federal tax take was 18.2 percent of G.D.P.

Compare those figures with that of today, when a Democrat is in the White House, nearly half of Americans think their taxes are too high, and both parties are promising to keep taxes low for all, or, in the case of the Democrats, 99 percent of Americans: In 2011, government revenue was 15.4 percent of G.D.P., lower than it was at any time during the Eisenhower or Reagan eras. Like anorexics, who think they are grossly fat when they are very thin, the American body politic is suffering from a national version of body dysmorphia, with nearly half the country believing taxes are high, when they are comparatively and historically low.

So everyone agrees that taxes are too high, except history.

Obama's plan at least has the weight of recent history on his side: when Bill Clinton lowered taxes on the middle class and poor but raised them (a whole 4%!) on the rich, the economy skyrocketed from the doldrums of the first Bush recession to have the greatest growth in human history AND created budget surpluses, something even the so-called "Reagan boom"-- which only happened after he raised the taxes he had lowered far too much-- could not achieve.

Indeed, Clinton's economy was so great that we very nearly paid off the national debt. Had those policies continued in place, had the three Bush tax cuts not been passed, and two insignificant little gnats not been invaded for few rational reasons-- meaning Bush would have taken the dire warnings the Clinton policy experts levelled seriously and prevented September 11-- we might still be on the path to prosperity even now.

See, here's the thing: to look at the economy now and forget those eight years of mishandling is to exam why a bridge collapsed without looking at the corroded metal braces. You might come up with some logical explanation-- too much weight, unsafe drivers-- but in the end, you've missed the point entirely.

We were in the midst of a mild recession when George W Bush took office. After the dot-com bubble burst, we had growth of less than 2% and finally dipped into a contraction as Bush took office. But by that summer, we had nearly reversed that and started growing slowly.

And then we double-dipped in 2002. Despite the tax cuts. Despite the spending on ramping up for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the private sector panicking that Al Qaeda was looking over our shoulders for an opportunity to strike again.

Indeed, it wasn't until the 3rd quarter of 2003 that the US began a recovery.

We were almost out in 2001! And you'd think that all the economic stimulus of three tax cuts AND two wars AND all the homeland security spending-- on the scale of billions when you include private and public sector spending-- would have pulled an already recovering economy straight back up.

And you'd be wrong. Indeed, and here's where we get to this current recession, it turns out that the prime motivator in ending the Bush recession was the move by the Federal Reserve to drop its discount rater (the federal funds rate) from 1.75% to 1%, in steps. This dropped the prime rate to about 4% or so (it generally runs three percent above the federal funds rate, which is the overnight rate that banks can borrow money from each other), and then came all those mortgage refinancings.

Which begat more refinancings. Which begat the "ownership society" of Bush's second term. Which begat subprime mortgages. Which begat derivates of CDOs and CMOs and all those lovely acronyms to represent meaningless valueless gambles disguised as "investments".

And so here we are, still talking about lowering taxes when what we need is a little fiscal discipline and a little fat over the meat on the bone. We need to raise government revenue and have that government spend it to benefit the greater good of all us, get rid of the rust and make the bridge stronger so that we don't grit our teeth and grip the wheel tightly each time we drive over it.

 

Austerity, Bitches!

 

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Liberals Are Fapping

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Poorly Played

 
Well, I mean, you knew a lawsuit over the Facebook IPO was forthcoming. Unless the stock did gangbusters out of the chute (few do) then someone was going to feel screwed.
 
The claim that investors were misled is interesting, intriguing even, as is the fact that just a week before the formal offering, the asking price was tweaked up almost ten bucks a share. It certainly lends credence to the claim that the issuance was less than honest.
 
On the other hand, you'd have to be a fucking idiot to have bought Facebook on its opening trading.

Kewl B's! (Also A's C#'s and Dmin7's!)

 
Not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a thing. I suppose on balance, it's good.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

It's Sad To See

 
Apparently, Megan McArdle's column is contagiously idiotic: meet guest-blogger Laura McKenna, who's thinly-disguised bigotry is given a patina of "We can't fix the problem so let's move on."

There's no way to go back to busing or 70s integration methods. Racism might be a factor, but the biggest problem is self-interest. People worry that integration will harm their kids and their property values. 

One has a hard time discerning whether McKenna is talking about society at large or her own mind.

 

Why Picturephones Never Took Off

 
The technology to broadcast video alongside a telephone call has existed for decades. Indeed, data transmission in the form of faxes actually predate telephones, and that's before you think about telegraphs. 
 
And yet, picturephones were always kind of a sideshow, trotted out at World's Fairs and expositions, never really taking off.
 
Maybe if they had turned the camera around... 

Is Not Aging Anti-Evolution?

That's the pretty interesting, if simplistic, question posed by The Atlantic:

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out the difficulties now.

But there is another, deeper argument against life extension---the argument from evolution. Its proponents suggest that we ought to avoid tinkering with any human trait borne of natural selection. Doing so, they argue, could have unforeseen consequences, especially given that natural selection has such a sterling engineering track record. If our bodies grow old and die, the thinking goes, then there must be a good reason, even if we don't understand it yet. Nonsense, says Bennett Foddy, a philosopher (and flash game developer!) from Oxford, who has written extensively about the ethics of life extension. "We think about aging as being a natural human trait, and it is natural, but it's not something that was selected for because it was beneficial to us." Foddy told me. "There is this misconception that everything evolution provides is beneficial to individuals and that's not correct."

The short answer to this silly conundrum is, evolution is designed for survival of the fittest, which implies adaptation not talent or ability. If our intelligence is the key to unlocking almost-permanent longevity-- I figure I have a 60% chance of living to 200, and a 10% chance of immortality-- then evolution is not going to make a value judgement on this. It's either going to encourage it or discourage it through the interplay of evolutionary factors.

For instance, if it's an inefficient strategy for the population as a whole, then we'll either not achieve it or we'll find the cons to achieving it more than outweigh the pros. Whether we pay attention to those signals is irrelevant: if another species finds a way to become the dominant one on this planet or we begin to die off, evolution will have had its say.

However, the argument of a value judgement as to whether extreme longevity is a good thing, a wholly human argument, is a good one to have.
 
One thing extreme longevity could bring about, which is implied but unstated in the article, is a radical shift in our attitudes towards money: with more and more people outliving their money-- something that is already happening-- society will be forced to make decisions about the structure of private wealth. Indeed, the backlash we see now against the strawman of the "welfare state" raised by conservatives is the expression of a desperate fear that they, too, will not have enough to live off indefinitely.
 
One thing evolution encourages is the preying of the strong upon the weak.
 
It's not that aging is a bad thing, but you have to take a long view to see it as a good thing: aging allows diversity in a slow-growing population and a more efficiant allocation of resources. If I'm 80, my gene-pool is draining, and I am less productive than a 30 year old (right now. I'll get to a non-aging scenario in a second.) Less productive from a conception orientation (I'm less attractive to women who would be breeding), less productive from a work perspective (I tire easily and lose focus), and less productive in a child-rearing scenario.
 
I'm old, to put the point bluntly. But notice the positives to the population as a whole. In removing my breeding capacity, a younger pool of breeding males can step up, males with genetic material significantly different from mine and this adds to the long-term survival of the species. I haven't been exposed to many of the challenges these men and their ancestors have, so my genes may not be the best defense against, say, a bird flu.
 
Not aging changes this dynamic substantially. Suddenly, I can be competitive with younger men, particularly if I keep my boyish good looks and athletic stamina.
 
Suddenly, my gene pool is replenished.
 
On a societal basis, this puts pressure on the next generations. From an evolutionary basis, pressure leads to adaptation as those younger men develop strategies to circumvent whatever competitive advantages I might have (experience, for one thing, confidence, there are any number I might accrue over time.) And while it's hard to prove that my not aging is a bad thing, we can infer from the evidence that aging is a good thing for the population that not aging may not be a good thing, too.
 
Since we're talking about time frames that span millenia if not eons, it would be hard to say. And that's assuming non-aging isn't ultimately fatal to the species first.
 
From my perspective, I'd prefer not to die: the world is too interesting and I want to see how some things play out. Uncertainty principle suggests that by seeing them play out, I immediately alter how they play out.
 
And THAT'S the interesting question from this silly scenario.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Interesting Reaction

 
Tyler Clementi committed suicide last year by jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson valley. While it has never been definitively established that Clementi's suicide attempt was directly tied to an ugly incident where one of his roomates, Dharun Ravi, broadcast a sexual encounter between Clementi and another student, it's seems to have been the straw that broke Clementi's back.
 
Ravi has been tried and convicted on multiple counts of bullying and hate crimes, and is scheduled to be sentenced today. He faces up to 10 years in prison and therein lies an interesting tale: many gay advocates and advocacy groups do not want him to be jailed.
 As a result, some gay advocates are calling on the court to give Ravi probation instead of prison time.

Among them is Aaron Hicklin, editor of Out magazine, who said in an article that Ravi was being made a scapegoat for Clementi's suicide.

Another, E.J. Graff, who writes about gay and lesbian issues, said in her column in The American Prospect, "I fear that Ravi is an easy scapegoat for a complicated problem."

Jim McGreevey, the gay former governor of New Jersey, and Dan Savage, a gay columnist, are others who say that Ravi's behavior, while wrong, is being dealt with too harshly.

At least one gay advocacy group, Garden State Equality, is pressing for prison time for Ravi, although less than the maximum 10 years.

"Justice is best served by his serving some jail time for the crime committed," Garden State CEO Steven Goldstein said. "The moderate position is not to throw the book at this young man, nor should he get off Scott free."
I fall onto the side of moderation here. I do not think that ten years in prison is justified...he doesn't seem to have had malicious intent in trying to hurt Clementi...on the other hand, he invaded an innocent person's privacy. We all worry about the government doing this, but governments are at least nominally responsible to the voters. A private citizen is not so to let him off with just a warning seems out of balance.
 
It would send the wrong message to let Ravi off without some strict punishment, and certainly this should include deportation (he is here on a student visa). But I think a year in prison would set an example that this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.
 

75 Years Ago Today

 
Lindy landed in Paris, thinking it was Ireland.

Careful Readers of This Blog

Saw this coming.