Dave Friedman's Soul of Wit

On Welfare and Wealth

Charles Murrary writing in OpinionJournal, about how to solve the seemingly intractable problems of Social Security and welfare:

The place to start is a blindingly obvious economic reality that no one seems to notice: This country is awash in money. America is so wealthy that enabling everyone to have a decent standard of living is easy. We cannot do it by fiddling with the entitlement and welfare systems--they constitute a Gordian Knot that cannot be untied. But we can cut the knot. We can scrap the structure of the welfare state.

Instead of sending taxes to Washington, straining them through bureaucracies and converting what remains into a muddle of services, subsidies, in-kind support and cash hedged with restrictions and exceptions, just collect the taxes, divide them up, and send the money back in cash grants to all American adults. Make the grant large enough so that the poor won't be poor, everyone will have enough for a comfortable retirement, and everyone will be able to afford health care. We're rich enough to do it.

Consider retirement. Let's say that we have a 21-year-old man before us who, for whatever reasons, will be unable to accumulate his own retirement fund. We accumulate it for him through a yearly contribution for 45 years until he retires at age 66. We can afford to contribute $2,000 a year and invest it in an index-based stock fund. What is the least he can expect to have when he retires? We are ridiculously conservative, so we first identify the worst compound average growth rate, using constant dollars, for any 45-year period in the history of the stock market (4.3% from 1887-1932). We then assume our 21-year-old will be the unluckiest investor in American history and get just a 4.0% average return. At the end of the 45-year period, he will have about $253,000, with which he could purchase an annuity worth about $20,500 a year.

That's with just a $2,000 annual contribution, equivalent to the Social Security taxes the government gets for a person making only $16,129 a year. The government gets more than twice that amount from someone earning the median income, and more than five times that amount from the millions of people who pay the maximum FICA tax. Giving everyone access to a comfortable retirement income is easy for a country as rich as the U.S.--if we don't insist on doing it through the structure of the welfare state.

Whenevr an idea, which disintermediates government, is proposed, it is necessarily a good idea. (With the obvious exceptions, of course, of waging war and executing murderers.)

Kill Rent Regulation

Of one thing I am certain: landlords in New York City are the most unjustly vilified group of people in the City. The City, espousing the moroninc liberal creed that every person is entitled to subsidized shelter, saw fit to legislate rates at which many apartments could be rented, and, now, we have doddering grandparents renting penthouse apartments for a tenth of what they could be rented for on the open market.

One of the consequence of this execise in economic stupidity is that other tenants, who do not rent under such favorable terms, get screwed.

The solution: boot the bastards onto the street* and let landlords rent their apartments for market rates. Your need for subsidized housing should not trump my need for market rate housing. Here's more:

A recent seminar, sponsored by a landlord group cutely called Community Housing Improvement Program, brought together Manhattan moguls and mom-and-pops who may own a building or two in the outer-outer-boroughs to get a primer on putting their problem tenants out on the street. After paying $50 and making small talk over muffins and coffee one morning in the chandeliered conference room of the New York County Lawyers’ Association on Vesey Street, the sold-out crowd of 225 settled in to listen to the lawyers.

First up was nuisance-law expert Niles Welikson, who warned that these kinds of cases take a good deal of tenacity to win. He cited a litany of jaw-droppers, including a case in which an 86-year-old tenant charged his neighbors with a deer head, scampered through the halls with a bow and arrow, and still won his eviction case because his behavior was not sufficiently bizarre. (Audience members shook their heads and tut-tutted.) Next, chip chairman Andrew Hoffman, a building owner (“It just sounds nicer”) himself, introduced the talk on non-primary-residence cases with a heartbreaker of his own: a couple who retired to Florida but managed to retain the 45-year lease to their rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment so their grown kids can visit their childhood home on occasion. Next came a primer on succession or, as Hoffman explained in his introduction, “what to do when some grandchild appears out of the blue . . . in a penthouse that rents for $1,300 instead of $12,000, clearly hoping that the grandparent leaves feet first soon.” These are difficult, says attorney Sherwin Belkin, who further horrified the audience with a tale of a woman who’d been caught signing her grandmother’s lease renewals years after her death—and still emerged from court with the legal right to the apartment.

Apparently, getting them out is all about the evidence. Attorney William Neville recommended getting friendly with the postman to see whose name is on the mail and subpoenaing ATM records to see where the tenant banks. His biggest thrill? “Showing that [tenants] are lying.” Lawyer Lauren Popper said that it’s sometimes worth hiring a P.I.: Her favorite gumshoe once posed as a patient to catch a psychiatrist using his rent-stabilized apartment as an office while living elsewhere. Ultimately, they were steeled by the possibility of a jackpot—the flip side of the no-account-tenant horror stories. Belkin bragged that he might be able to get $10,000 a month for an apartment he recently wrestled out of rent control. The previous rent? Three hundred dollars. A ripple of excitement went through the audience.

*Why I could never work in politics: who the hell would ever get elected on a "boot Grandma out of her rent stabilized penthouse" campaign?

A 35 Year Old Who is Less Mature than Me

Man, the rest of the country is going to love this one. Apparently, there is a breed of urban parents called "yuppie hipster":

Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?

I don't really understand much of what's being contemplated in this paragraph of urbane sophistication, and I'm a native New Yorker. But then I'm only 30, too wise to have kids, and, plainly, too much of a simpleton to chill with the hip kids. Me? I'm just interested in having a job and living in the greatest city in the world.

Staying out till 4AM and listening to obscure bands? Well, that seems a tad cliche, no?

Business Needs Skilled Immigrants

Lost in the debate about illegal immigration is the basic fact that many of our nation's companies are desperate for skilled workers. When the United States makes it easy for foreigners to study here, but then severely restricts how many of those foreign-born students can work here after graduation, what we have is a perfect example of government ineptitude. The Wall St. Journal explains:

According to a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy, our broken system for admitting foreign professionals also contributes to outsourcing. Since 1996 the 65,000 annual cap on H-1B visas has been reached in most years, sometimes only weeks into the new year. This leaves employers with the choice of waiting until the next fiscal year to hire workers in the U.S. or hiring people outside the country.

"Many companies concede," says the report, "that the uncertainty created by Congress' inability to provide a reliable mechanism to hire skilled professionals has encouraged placing more human resources outside the United States to avoid being subject to legislative winds." Last week computer maker Dell Inc. announced that it hopes to double its workforce in India to 20,000 within three years. There's another such announcement by some company nearly every day.

This weekend's big-city immigration demonstrations focused on the debate over the estimated 11 million illegals already in the country. But the U.S. labor market has also long been a magnet for highly skilled and educated foreigners, many of whom attend school in America at some time in their lives. In a world where these brains have more options than ever in Asia and Europe, we drive them away at our economic peril.

Protectionists will argue that these foreigners will just take jobs that Americans could otherwise have. But these people tend to be doctors, engineers, architects, computer chip designers, and other highly skilled professionals, for whom there has always been a greater demand than supply. That the demand for these workers outstrips the supply of such workers explains why many doctors, engineers, architects, and computer chip designers earn income far in excess of what members of Congress earn; were the war for talent on Capitol Hill as fierce as it is in growing industries, one would expect similarly talented American citizens to pursue legislative jobs.

A Brit Takes on the French

Via Arts & Letters Daily:

I’m not being hasty. Like all English women (probably women everywhere) I was raised with the certainty that French women were the most stylish, and that if I could only get them to stop scowling at me, they would share the secret. At 16 I fell madly in love with Paris, and on the basis that even the concièrges would look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade went to live there three years later. Big mistake. The concièrges did not look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. In fact, no one looked like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. This is probably because Hepburn was a woman of Dutch/Anglo-Irish heritage working in America. The real French looked like Japanese tourists with bad Burberry habits. I realise now, of course, that upping sticks to Paris at 19 was as misconceived a plan as entering Celebrity Big Brother to disseminate one’s political beliefs about Saddam Hussein. No one should take up residence in Paris before the age of 40 — it is such an innately bourgeois city that you cannot truly appreciate it (nor it you) until you are sufficiently established and well heeled to acquire your own Burberry habit, plus an Hermès Birkin, after which le snottiness extraordinaire, which all the best Parisian sales assistants go to sales-assistant school to master, becomes easier to quell.

From The London Times.

Give me Shakespeare and beer and brie and wine. I don't care about the rest of either Britian or France.

New Applications of Google Technology

First: A map of public restrooms in Manhattan.

Second: Google Finance, showing information for Pfizer. A very cool application of Google technology. Seems more interactive than other finance sites, such as Yahoo.

Idiot

A "practicing Wiccan," whatever the hell that is, has joined a union in hopes of securing better benefits from Starbucks:

Suley Ayala, a barista at a Starbucks in New York City, didn't know what a "Wobbly" was before she joined the IWW in September. The 23-year-old is a practicing Wiccan, and the union has also filed a religious discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Starbucks on her behalf. She's worked at Starbucks for four years and she says signed up with the union because she wanted steadier hours to help ensure that she earns enough at her current wage of $9.37 an hour to support her four children.

While her hours have become more consistent thanks to the union, she says "their health care is way too expensive for me, so I took Medicaid."

Since the settlement, Ms. Ayala has been wearing as many as three union pins during her shifts at a Manhattan Starbucks. Some customers have asked if the workers are forming a union, and when she answers that they are, "Most of the time, they say 'good luck,' " she says.

A couple of questions jump out at me:

1) What the hell is a 23 year old doing with four kids?

2) What the hell is a poorly paid barista doing with four kids?

3) What the hell does one's Wicca practices do to help pay the bills?

4) Is there no shame in going on the dole to support you and your four kids?

Close your fucking legs, pay your bills, and get a responsible job that pays better than slinging lattes to yuppies.

Mantra: All that I ask of the religious is that they consider the depths to which religious belief has sunk man.

Gates on Immigration

Bill Gates on immigration:

Mr. Gates said that Microsoft does 85% of its R & D work in the United States because it wants its computer scientists interacting directly with its program managers and its marketing people on its own campus. He said he has a hard time understanding the logic of those who decry the outsourcing of American jobs, yet are reluctant to facilitate bringing the high-skill people who are catalysts for economic growth. "People just shake their heads at what kind of a central planning system would say having 65,000 smart people come in, that's OK, but 70,000 smart people, no."

More:

Unemployment among computer and mathematical operators is less than 3%. Mr. Gates said, "If you're graduating from a reasonable university in this country, with a degree in computer science, you have many job offers." The House has responded to public pressure to close the borders to illegal immigration and seems incapable of distinguishing that problem from the value of encouraging high-skill workers to bring their talents to the United States.

USDOJ vs Google

The Wall St. Journal's Jason Fry summarizes why government lawyers are faced with a hopeless mandate in protecting kids from porn:

t's worth arguing about how COPA's "community standards" should be interpreted, or whether the law would bar teens from health-related or artistic sites. But that ignores a basic flaw with COPA: Even if it were perfectly constructed and didn't catch non-porn sites in its net, it would hardly keep kids safe online. Among those porn purveyors not affected: run-of-the-mill commercial porn sites run from Amsterdam or the Azores; dodgy overseas porn merchants who've thrown up sites full of dirty pictures and laced with malware; fly-by-nights creating and abandoning ad-laden porn blogs at speeds that far exceed court filings; and people whose hobby is collecting or making porn and who don't mind sharing. That's a lot of porn sites right there -- too many to rest easy if you've got a 12-year-old using the PC unsupervised. A typical Justice Department release on COPA promises that "the department will continue to work to defend children from the dangerous predators who lurk in the dark shadows of the World Wide Web." But COPA doesn't venture into those dark shadows -- it polices the comparatively well-lit precincts in which U.S. commercial enterprises dwell. [Emphasis mine.]

It goes without saying that if you want to protect your kid from seeing Jenna Jameson in all her splendor, the US Department of Justice is not your answer. Controlling your kids' behavior online is a better answer. If you don't know how to control your kid's behavior, do one of the following: (1) put your kid up for adoption (the cost efficient option), (2) eliminate computers from your household (the option that inculcates in your children ignorance about a tool on which they will have to depend for the rest of their lives), or (3) install monitoring software on your PC and configure it (the option which requires independent thinking on the part of the parent.)

People being rather stupid and lazy, it is doubtful that many parents want to have to think about what sites their children can and cannot visit, but option 3 is the only one that poses a realistic chance of keeping from juvenile eyes those sites that are more appropriately viewed by me.

Cory Booker

The New York Times, trying to prove its digital savviness, has started a blog chronicling the mayoral race in Newark, New Jersey, between the anti-Semitic, Sharptonesque Sharpe James, and the football-playing, Rhodes Scholar Cory Booker.

Both James and Booker are Democrats, so I would never support them, given that the Deomcrats support causes such as public education and higher taxes.

But Booker is a smart man; he is, unlike Obama, a genuine rising star in the Democratic party, and his political future has horizons far beyond the fetid dump that is New Jersey politics.

Note to the New Yorker: You Don't Own Your View

Moron at the New Yorker, bitching about the Bank of America building going up next to the Conde Nast building:

"I'm on the 21st floor, and I have a beautiful view of Bryant Park and the library and a little corner of the Chrysler Building and the Pan Am Building, now the MetLife, and I get tons of sun," said Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer for The New Yorker. "Soon it's going to be a view of some law firm associate doing his work. My view will be entirely swallowed."

Flighty fucking liberals. You don't own that view any more than you own the view of the Grand Canyon.

Even better: this moron, who thinks "his" view is being eliminated, has a J.D. from Hahvahd. Certainly a lawyer should be able to discern fact from fiction, no?

Can Studies "Flurry"?

The New York Times, trying to wax poetic about the plight of uneducated black men, notes that a "flurry" of new studies suggests that a lack of education hinders black males' progress:

Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.

Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.

Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.

Ignore for a moment the Time's unfortunate word choice here: studies, of course, are not snow, and therefore can't properly be said to "flurry" even if one were trying to be poetic about the amount of studies. No matter. A more pertinent question is: why does it take studies, or even a study, to conclude that black men who fail to become educated face problems being part of mainstream society? Ours is an increasingly educated society: to the victors, as the freemarketers would have it, go the spoils.

The problem here is not so much that blacks' illiteracy is a newfound problem but rather, government has failed to fix the schools to which poor blacks are consigned. Kill public education, especially the unions that highjack education from its consumers, and there may suddenly be a flurry of studies suggesting that black men are at a distinct advantage because they have become so well educated.

That, of course, will never happen, because public education will never be fixed.

Multi-Culturalism in the UK

One Brit is upset at his nation's museums:

Why is it that so often when I visit a museum these days, I leave feeling ever so slightly cross? I’m thinking, say, of those wretched animatronic dinosaurs we parents have to queue for at the Natural History Museum, completely ignoring the genuine prehistoric skeletons either side. And of that display cabinet at the National Maritime Museum where nautical objects have been plonked apparently at random in the same glass case in order to illustrate a curator’s trendy post-modern point about the hopelessness of trying to extract meaning from artefacts so far removed from our own time and place.

But, hey, why pick on those two? Pretty much everyone in the museum world is at it these days and has been for some time: the exhibition at the Horniman, which proudly claimed - though with no supporting evidence, that voodoo was one of Africa's "great contributions to world culture"; the Gainsborough exhibition whose curator presumed to judge the mores of 18th century society by the PC standards of modern Britain; the decision by Manchester City Art Gallery to hang its paintings lower, the better that they might be enjoyed by children and the disabled; Palmer Majority Report (of which more later); the National Gallery's campaign to the keep Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks apparently less on the grounds of its artistic or historical merit than on its subject's status as a single mother; almost anything containing the words "access", "relevance" or "inclusivity."

What all these diverse irritants have in common is that they are part of the same worrying, hidden debate. "Hidden" because its arguments, though familiar to the point of cliche to anyone who works in the museum industry, are pretty much unknown to the people outside it. "Worrying" because the conclusions reached by these self-serving guardians of our national heritage are so often dangerously at odds with the needs of the public they claim to serve.

Someone in the audience of scholars, curators, directors and other museum professionals made this point rather well at an Institute of Ideas debate at the Wallace Collection last year on the subject Should We Junk Collections? "Most of us here are quite used to this sort of talk," she said, "But if it were to be overheard by the people who actually visit our museums a lot of them would be quite horrified."

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

"Lawyers' Reputation Soaked"

Overlawyered:

"Mutually assured character destruction": that's what Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam says to expect from a trial that started March 7 in Portland, Me. federal court that pits some of the country's better-known members of the plaintiff's bar against each other. Among the cast of characters: Jan Schlichtmann, of "A Civil Action" fame, Steve Berman of Seattle-based Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, and Massachusetts tobacco litigator Thomas Sobol of the same firm, and Alabama's Garve Ivey. At issue is whether lawyers breached legal ethics or sold out the interests of class members in their sharp-elbowed maneuvers to control the process of litigation and reach a lucrative settlement with Poland Spring's parent company, Nestle.

Let's quit the exercise in delusion implicit in this post, which delusion is that lawyers normally comport themselves in ways that garner public respect and support.

If lawyers want more support from the public for their good deeds, they should start by developing less avaricious practitioners. No profession that has the likes of William Lerach as one of its most well known, and physically unattractive, practitioners, can be well thought of by the public.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, Or, Conservative Don't Want to Risk Their Capital

Conservatives, never known for cogency, bitch and moan about Hollywood and its liberal values till they're blue in the face. And yet, a tried and true conservative, and possible anti-Semite, Mel Gibson, has proven there is a market for movies palatable to conservatives' wordlview, namely, the Passion of the Christ.

Althouse comments on a Time article about Gibson's newest project. This prompted me to comment on her site:

Here's what I don't understand.

Gibson has proven that there is a market for religious movies that attract conservatives. And of course Hollywood doesn't seem interested in these types of movies. So why don't the conservatives who are interested in these movies put their money where their mouths are and finance more of these movies?

Clearly, there are a number of very wealthy people sympathetic to conservative views (Philip Anschutz comes to mind, but I know there are others).

Seems it's time for the conservatives to quit complaining about Hollywood, step up to the plate, and lay their own money on the line. Or is risking one's own money too conservative a notion?

Scientology is Not a Religion

Note to law professors everywhere who feel a need to prattle on about South Park and religion: Scientology is not a reiligion but rather a cult. To refer to it as a religion is to profane religious belief.

And you never thought I would defend the religious, did you?!

Random Observation on the State of Motherhood

I need your expert opinion here.

I was on the subway yesterday, waiting for the train, and I saw a mom drag her kid down the stairs, in a stroller, as one would drag a piece of luggage. In other words, rather than picking the stroller up she just bounced it down the stairs on the back wheels.

This kid was an infant. Cranial damage? I see this kid in special ed in a few years if that's how the mother treats the kid. It goes without saying the mother did not seem to be well heeled.

Conservatives Apoplectic

The New York Times Magazine's cover story is about single women who buy sperm from sperm banks and impregnate themselves:

Looking for Mr. Good Sperm: They're single women. They've decided to have babies on their own. And they're developing some very weird relationships with the guys who fill the test tubes.

What Irish Gays Have in Common With Neo-Nazis and Prostitutes

The organizer of the St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York City has compared gay Irish activists to prostitutes, Neo-Nazis, and, for good measure, the Ku Klux Klan:

"If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow Neo-Nazis into their parade? If African Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade?"

Referring to the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, Dunleavy said, "People have rights. If we let the ILGO in, is it the Irish Prostitute Association next?"

No word on how Irish gays compare to Pol Pot.

"There's so much hostility toward cab drivers"

So says one hack.

Well, no shit. Cabbies don't speak English, are rude, are terrible drivers, are always yapping into their cell phones, etc., etc.

You want respect? Act less like Travis Bickle and more like someone who provides a service, and see if New Yorkers' attitudes toward you change. Until then, shut up, do your damn job and quit bitching.

Naismith, Etc.

Not being much of a college basketball fan, this is all I will say about my alma mater's team: they will get crushed by the Harvard of the South tomorrow.

Me, I will have better things to do than watch basketball. I get to go to Masa for sushi and not pay for it!

Good Advice, or, Tourists Should Defer to Locals

A friend emailed me, saying his family was coming into town from London and he wanted to give them info about NYC.

Did I know of any good sites?

Wikipedia has so-called wikitravel pages, which aim to give visitors to various cities pertinent info. Their page for New York has this very relevant, and accurate, info:

Jaywalking is common. If you do not wish to jaywalk, be considerate of New Yorkers by not blocking them from crossing at an intersection while you are waiting for your signal. If you do jaywalk, driving is on the right-hand side of the road on two-way streets so remember to look left to check for on-coming traffic on your side of the road. Be aware that most streets are one way, so you may have to look right. Most New Yorkers who know which streets go which way will only look in the direction traffic is coming from rather than looking in both directions. Be aware of any bicyclists unlawfully going against the proper flow of vehicular traffic. [Emphasis mine.]

Idiot

Words of a A VC:

I hate spam in all of its forms and the people who engage in it are in the same category as murderers and rapists in my book.

This guy, who I thought had an interesting perspective on the world of technology and capitalism, is a first class idiot and moral coward.

UPDATE: Our confused moralist now recants his equivalence:

i didn't mean that spam is an equal crime to rape or murder, just that its a hateful and intentional crime in the same category.

Rape and murder are not in the same category as spam, whatever you think of the "hatefulness" or "intent" of the spammer. Recall that this blogger is a fairly prominent venture capitalist. Do you want a man who draws these kinds of moral equivalences investing in your company? I would hope not.

Rant

The Wall St. Journal's new web page sucks.

Too cluttered/confusing.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Innumerate Journalists

Reuters claims in a story that in order to spend 1 trillion dollars, a person who lives 77 years would have to spend $35 million per day, every day.

All well and good, but they quote a math professor to give this information.

This is actually a quite simple equation: 1*10^12/(77*365)+(77/4) = $35 million. (The 77/4 calculation accounts for leap years.)

Wikipedia Woes

The New York Military Academy's Wikipedia entry is apparently written by some P.R. flunky for the Academy:

An intensive college placement program administered by our guidance department has ensured that in recent years, NYMA graduates have been accepted to some of the nation’s most selective schools including: Boston College, Lehigh, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, Rochester Institute of Technology, the United States Military Academy, and the United States Air Force Academy. [Emphasis added.]

So much for the integrity with which New York Military Academy prides itself. Talk about not understanding the intent of collaborative encyclopedia making. Someone has too much cordite on the brains.

I Do Pretension

Dan Drezner brings us the very important international relations news that Sarah Jessica Parker, of Sex and the City Fame, is planning to do a show on HBO about the Washingtonienne.

To which news I commented:

It is a fact universally acknowledged among men that New York has an elan and sophistication utterly absent in D.C.

(Inspiration for the pretention and elan of this comment comes from Jane Austen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.")

Unfortunate Name

Anurag Dikshit is an Indian online gambling entrepreneur.

No word on how his kids have faired in school.

Proulx Apoplectic

Annie Proulx, from whose short story the Oscar contender Brokeback Mountain came, is apoplectic that it was not awarded Best Picture at this year's Oscars:

Academy members who vote for the year's best film are "out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city," Proulx writes.

Yes, you read that right: the alleged shifting culture in America is properly compared to a loaf of bread rising.

And to think that some consider her writing the apotheosis of literary aesthetics.

Blogging

Readers will notice that my posting frequency has diminished markedly over the past few weeks.

Readers should expect my sporadic posting to continue for the foreseeable future.

On Judiciousness

One reason I do not read many of the right's favored blogs, such as Powerline, Malkin, and Little Green Footballs is that their capacity for outrage is exceeded only by the lack of judiciousness they exhibit when reporting on conterversies that pique their ire.

Instapundit takes on the case of the Muslim student who tried to mow down a bunch of college kids:

There's no question that this angle is being downplayed. But it's arguable that the papers are doing this to reduce the likelihood of copycats. This doesn't appear to have been any sort of organized attack, just a lone-wolf effort by a guy who's not too sharp. It's still terrorism, of course, of a sort -- after all, Eric Rudolph was a lone-wolf guy who wasn't too sharp, though he seems to have been considerably sharper than Taheri-azar -- but in some ways it's more like the school shootings of the 1990s than real Al Qaeda type terrorism. Hyping those shootings led to copycats, and made the killers look like martyrs to disturbed potential imitators. There's a pretty good argument that the same applies here, and that it's more responsible to address this in fairly muted tones.

I suspect he is right.

Sportswriters

The Wikipedia entry for Roger Bannister contains this curious, and accurate, assessment of sportswriters:

The claim that a four-minute mile was once thought to be impossible was and is a myth cooked up by sportswriters -- never the most rigorous of thinkers -- and debunked by Bannister himself in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile, 1955.

Seems to me that I recall more than one sportswriter making the claim that Michael Jordan's infamous leaping ability was due to his musculature. The implication being that the sufficiently well-muscled have greater leaping abilities than we mere mortals. Were this line of reasoning cogent, it should follow that Dorian Yates and Arnold Schwarzenegger could also dunk basketballs from the foul line.

It seems more plausible to assert that Jordan's unusual leaping ability is a function of his unusually well-developed spatial awareness. This would be true of other dunkers as well, or even those soccer players such as Freddy Adu, who are renowned for their uncanny footwork.

But I digress--sportswriters are, as a lot, rather incoherent and lazy in their thinking.

France & Germany Are Dying

How best to resurrect Germany and France?

Certainly not through Soviet-style central planning:

“WE MUST take the offensive and muster a massive effort,” said Jacques Chirac, the president of France, who went on to warn of the dangers of losing the battle for “the power of tomorrow” in a speech made last April. Standing beside him was Gerhard Schröder, then chancellor of Germany. In response to the formidable challenges posed by America, Japan and the emerging powers of China, India and Brazil, the two men announced that they had decided to step up their co-operation in a technological programme of vital strategic importance. A new fighter jet, perhaps, or a satellite surveillance system? No, the two heads of state were endorsing a plan to build a Franco-German internet-search engine, to be called Quaero (Latin for “I seek”).

The project would, said Mr Chirac, be undertaken with the help of government funds “in the image of the magnificent success of Airbus”. In a series of further speeches over the past few months, he has warmed to his theme: “We must take up the global challenge of the American giants Yahoo! and Google”; “Culture is not merchandise and cannot be left to blind market forces”; “We must staunchly defend the world's cultural diversity against the looming threat of uniformity”; “Our power is at stake.”

In July Mr Chirac noted that while French research has traditionally been good, it “now needs encouraging”. The following month the French government, the main financier and developer of Quaero, duly created the Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII), based in Paris, largely to oversee the project. The AII received an initial endowment of €1.7 billion ($2 billion). Michel Lemonier, a senior administrator at the AII, refuses to discuss how much of the budget is being allocated to Quaero because, he jokes, the leaders of other AII-funded programmes would be “very jealous”. Quaero is expected to be finished before any of the other planned AII projects, and may be online before the year is out.

None of these initiatives will create jobs if labor markets and economies are not freed.

Europe will drown in its wine and beer if it does not heed the imperative of free markets. It also bears mentioning that a few decades hence we may well be saying the same thing of China, if it fails to open its economy.

Scalability

Wal-Mart's competitive advantage has been scale: it buys in such quantities from vendors that it can extract concessions from vendors that want to use it as a sales channel.

Any business that wants to grow big has to have a scalable product; Microsoft is an exercise in scalability as well.

So why aren't there more windmills generating power from the wind?

Scalability:

Today's largest horizontal-axis turbines produce around five megawatts, and are proving difficult to scale up. Each blade has to be more than 60 metres long, and the bigger the blade, the greater the stress it experiences as it turns: the blade's own weight compresses it at the top of the cycle and stretches it at the bottom. As a result, blades must be made and transported in one piece, which is expensive. Reinforcing the blade to enable it to withstand these forces further increases cost and reduces efficiency.

The blades of a [windmill that rotates about its vertical axis], in contrast, do not have to undergo this repeated stretching and compression. Nor does their cross-section vary from top to bottom, which makes them cheaper to manufacture than windmill blades, the shape of which must be painstakingly engineered. VAWT blades can also be made in pieces and joined together on site. So vertical-axis designs should enable wind turbines to be scaled up more easily, resulting in cheaper electricity, even for VAWT designs of similar efficiency to conventional turbines. “If we can build a ten megawatt turbine for only slightly more than other companies build five megawatt turbines, then the efficiency question goes out of the window,” says Steven Peace of Eurowind.

"Buck Fush" or "Art"

"Art".

Gallery run by Ivan Boesky's daughter.

Parochialism, Bureaucracy

When I was in my mid-20s I worked for an international company.

There were three people between me and the CEO; it was a flat organization. The CEO and his inner circle were sufficiently close to the grunts--me and others in my age group--so that we understood the strategic imperatives under which the company was operating. We had a sense of purpose, and the company did well.

Not so for GM. In an article about its poor attempts at relating to customers outside its Midwestern base, the Wall St. Journal explains:

GM employs 325,000 people, almost as many as the population of Miami itself. At various times there have been as many as six layers of management between top executives in Detroit and those in the field. GM's general manager for the Southeast has 38 teams reporting to him, overseeing relations with the region's 1,400 dealers, among other things.

In addition to these geographic units, the company is divided along functional lines, with global groups overseeing areas such as marketing, product development and human resources. GM calls this "the Matrix." To explain how the two chains of command interact, GM has produced a chart that shows them overlapping in a pattern that resembles a basket weave.

It's a system that's confusing even to insiders, especially midlevel employees who often feel as if they have two bosses. Marketing ideas often get lost as they bounce between departments.

If a company's employees can't navigate its bureaucracy how the hell does the company expect to attract customers? I went to Indiana once, during college, to visit a friend. The town was a blue collar town on the shore of Lake Michigan. I noticed that everyone drove domestic cars; you would had to have driven northwest to Northwestern University to see well-heeled professors drive imports. I remarked to my friend, "Where are all the Volvos?" "Oh, those cars would get keyed here. Even management drives American."

Not so in the rest of the country.

Ford and GM are doomed; I say kill them off now.

How Not To Market Your Services

Wouldn't you think that a company, which is not exactly a brand name company, would want to explicitly state on its web site what its business is?

Well this company certainly seems uninterested in explaining itself.

Introversion

Once, when flying out to LA on business, I found myself seated next to a voluble, and rather obnoxious, saleswoman. She was not particularly attractive, and not especially interesting, but she spent the first twenty minutes of the flight trying to engage me in conversation, until such time that I feigned sleep.

Upon awaking from my fake sleep, I opened my carry on bag and pulled out the Economist, a magazine which all intelligent people should be reading.

This prompted our dear saleswoman to ask "Are you an economist?"

To which I responded, in my mind, "What the fuck are you talking about?" And then I suddenly realized that this poor woman made the stupid assumption that one who reads a magazine called the Economist must be an economist.

I feigned sleep again to avoid having to engage with this idiot.

In any event, the point of this post is introversion: Tyler Cowen links to this interesting interview with Jonathan Rauch about introversion. Rauch of course, penned this infamous article about introversion.

Oscars

Somewhere there is a joke about Dolly Parton's surgically enhanced face, her surgically enhanced chest, and her annoying voice.

I don't know what that joke is but she should shut up.

Creationists Are Stupid

Althouse notes that some idiot proponent of the creationist* idea--the idea that the Biblical account of Genesis is a literal one, and therefore, the universe is less than empirical observation says it is--has been eulogized thusly: "All of us in the modern creationism movement today would say we stand on his shoulders."

Althouse post here. Story from which that quote was taken here.

This prompted me to comment:

OK....so here's the irony. This dude invokes Newton's claim that "if I have achieved great things, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"--those giants being scientists like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.

And here is this idiot--this creationist--co-opting the language of one of the progenitors of modern, empirical science, Newton, for praise of the work of a man whose mission in life seems to have been to repudiate all that empiricism and scientific observation can tell us about the world.

Not only are these creationists idiots, they are abjectly so.

*Creationism should properly be separated from a related idea, Intelligent Design, though both arise from the same set of ignorant, anti-science belief system that seems so popular among some religious groups today. Intelligent Design makes no claim about the age of the Earth or the Universe but rather claims that life is too complex to have arisen by anything other than an intelligent designer, whereas creationism claims that all the evidence necessary to determine the age of the Earth and hence the Universe can be found in Genesis. While both theories probably have overlapping adherents, they are nonetheless distinct phenomena of religious belief.

Kill Public Education

The New York Times reports that competition for admissions to New York City's elite private schools is heating up--especially among the kindergartners. The Times tries to explain this demographically, and misses the point entirely:

"We're feeling it," said Ellen Bell, an admissions official at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an elite private institution. "It's a real problem for us to deal with the number of applicants and deal with them properly the way we want to, to be fair with every family. These numbers are just becoming overwhelming."

"I see a greater angst in the parent, and that troubles me, and my heart goes out to them," she added. "We're sending out more news that people don't want to get."

Part of the problem is that the number of twins and triplets born to women in New York City has increased, according to city Health Department statistics.

In 1995, there were 3,707 twin births in all the boroughs; in 2003, there were 4,153; and in 2004, there were 4,655. Triplet births have also risen, from 60 in 1995, to 299 in 2004. Because preschools strive for gender and age balance in generally small classes — and also, some parents suspect, as many potential parental donors as possible — it is harder to get multiple slots in one class.

This is a naive and ignorant, to say nothing of liberal, interpretation of a market. The market in question is education, and the consumers in question are highly educated, high net worth people who want their children to get good educations--and who can and are willing to pay for it.

If education were treated as any other market, the number of high level private schools would explode, given the enormous amount of wealth created in Manhattan over the past decade. The paucity of slots in private schools has nothing to do with women bearing children later in life and hence having more twins and triplets. The paucity in slots for children of such families has everything to do with the failure of this country to treat education like a market.

Kill public education; it is robbing us blind. Fuck the unions, the teachers, the principals; most are incompetent. Consumers with the money to spend wisely want a better alternative.

All such New Yorkers should have that choice, not just the ones who vacation at Vail.

Abstractions Can Neither Be "Palpable" nor "A Powerful Force"

Some liberals are up in arms about the fact that Justice Alito sent James "Gays are sinners!" Dobson a note.

The note seems harmless to me, though one must question Alito's competence:

As I said when I spoke at my formal investiture at the White House last week, the prayers of so many people from around the country were a palpable and powerful force.

Prayers are neither palpable nor a powerful force; to believe that they are is to repudiate empiricism and embrace superstition and ignorance. Equating prayer with that which is either "palpable" or "forceful" is to show an ignorance of what those terms mean.

Overheard in a Deli

Irate customer: "Why can't I use my debit card?"

Proprietor: "They're too expensive. Cash only."

Customer, skeptical: "Expensive? And cash isn't expensive?"

The customer, of course, is correct. Anyone who assumes that a cash business is less expensive to run has not considered the costs associated with securing cash, counting it, and moving it from physical location to physical location.

The US Mint, I am sure, spends a large portion of the cash value it moves around every month on security and other logistical matters. Casinos, as wel, devote a large percentage of their operating expenses to securing cash. Cash is not necessarily cheaper than credit cards/debit cards. Cheap is a relative term, after all, and some of the benefits associated with electronic forms of payment, such as security, may outweigh costs associated with electronic payment forms, such as merchants' fees.

This is a stupid proprietor.

Take Some Ambien and Call Me in the Morning

So I just watched the first ten minutes of the movie Sleepless in Seattle.

What a trite piece of shit.

RICO Suave

Odds are, NOW's mebership overlaps significantly with antiwar and animal-rights groups' memberships.

Odd, then, that NOW argued that protesters at abortion clinics violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). As the Wall St. Journal astutely observes:

RICO was designed to go after Tony Soprano, not church groups passing out leaflets on a sidewalk. But NOW claimed the latter were engaged in racketeering to "extort" the "property" of abortion seekers by demonstrating in front of clinics. Since RICO violators are subject to treble damages, the plan was to bankrupt protesters or frighten them from ever exercising their First Amendment rights.

Had that strategy worked, it would have quickly become a favorite of anyone trying to stop acts of legal civil disobedience. Antiwar protesters and animal-rights activists would have been prime targets, to name just two liberal causes.