Cab Thoughts 12/14/13

"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen....Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil."
- From an essay by Frédéric Bastiat in 1850, "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen"

 

The Jodi Arias trial was the single most searched Internet topic in 2013.

 

Neuroscientists have determined that the same part of the brain that processes physical pain -- a cut or a punch -- also processes emotional pain such as exclusion, rejection or lost love. It is known as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). A relationship or event can be painful.

 

Social scientists are very interested in the human shift from country to city, rural to urban. There are ninety cities in China alone that have a population of greater than one million. In 1950, there were two cities in the world with a population of more than ten million, by 1975, there were three. In 2007, there were nineteen, and by 2025, the United Nations estimates that there will be twenty-seven. This growth will not occur in North America. People seem frightened by this as we are being removed from basic needs the rural community produces. But we are not frightened by medical specialists, accountants, even shoemakers all who do things we cannot do for ourselves.

 

"Monster" has many meanings, an imaginary creature, a cruel or wicked person, of huge size, malformed thing. Interestingly the British use it as a verb, "to criticize," which hints at its origin. Its origin is from "warning" or "demonstrate" and some have theorized that "monsters" were symbolic of current problems or anxieties. It has the same root as "money."

 

A new book with interviews of Hannah Arendt on her writings is arriving. She remains a lightening rod for her “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a book fascinated with the nature of evil and how little it takes for evil to emerge and be victorious. She excoriates intellectuals for the creation of complex ideas that take on a malignant life of their own.

In one section the interviewer says:"Let’s return to your book, Frau Arendt. In it, you referred to the way that the Eichmann trial laid bare the total nature of the moral collapse at the heart of Europe, among the persecutors and the persecuted alike, in every country." A horrifying question. The moral collapse at the heart of Europe. And the perpetrators and victims on the same moral footing.

 

Who was....Iris Chang?

 

We humans share more than half our genomes with flatworms; about 60 per cent with fruit flies and chickens; 80 per cent with cows; and 99 per cent with chimps. This sounds like a cocktail party note but is actually quite important to current biology. The book of genetics is big with a lot of common script. What is crucial is how it is read.

 

When an organism dies, its DNA breaks down into smaller and smaller fragments, while also becoming contaminated with the DNA of other species like soil bacteria. This makes reconstruction particularly difficult.

 

The first fossils of the species H. erectus were found on Java, Indonesia, in 1892 by Eugène Dubois, called Java man. Nearly 30 years later, more H. erectus fossils were found thousands of miles away during excavations of the Zhoukoudian cave system just outside of Beijing. This was Peking man. These caves turned out to be "one of the most important Paleolithic sites in the world." After the first fossil was found, anthropologists eventually turned up skulls and bones representing at least 40 H. erectus individuals, other mammal fossils and tens of thousands of stone artifacts. Amazingly, no one knows what happened to the original Peking Man fossils. They disappeared during the Japanese invasion of 1941. Fortunately, the American Museum of Natural History holds an almost complete set of casts made from the originals before the war.

Zhoukoudian, with the cave sites to the left.

 

Rose Williams, Tennessee Williams' schizophrenic sister and the inspiration for The Glass Menagerie, underwent a frontal lobotomy for her illness, one of the first. Another reason to be careful about being too avant garde.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/05/bin-laden.html

 

Federal, state and local governments hired a net additional 338,000 workers in November, equaling 41 percent of the total of 818,000 net additional jobs created in the United States during the month.

 

AAAAaaaannnnndddddd.....a drawing on a map of St. Brendan celebrating mass on a whale:

Childhood Experts: The Art of the Plausible

 

The world is awash with "Good Ideas." There are models for global warming and global cooling, growth stimulus with both raising and cutting taxes, the advantages and uselessness of pre-school.

Truth is hard to reach; what makes each of these disparate ideas appealing to its faithful is a coherent, consistent narrative. We are truly creatures of the campfire.

Education is a pretty soft area of investigation. What does the community hope to achieve anyway? And what works?

And how does one evaluate success? How does one separate out genetic influences, home and environmental factors, diet, distractions...the list could go on forever.

But ours is a time of unprovable notions mixed with indignation; education is a perfect area where provocative guesswork can be planted and grow to the sky. One is that every child, beginning grade one, be assigned a topic like oranges or Easter Island or bracelets that the student would gradually learn and expand upon until grade 12. This would develop in him an expertise (more than his schoolmates) and the confidence it brings. It would also develop a perspective about depth in a topic which he could compare to popular presentations in news and conversation.

Sounds reasonable to me.

The Alcolytes of Uwe Reinhardt Before the Altar of Health Care

The majority of insurance plans being sold on the new health care exchanges in New York, Texas, and California, for example, will not offer patients’ access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer centers, or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the top research and teaching hospitals in the country. This is being broadcast as a defect in the proposed health plan, perhaps Obama's omission or the ACA's fault when, in fact, there is much more--or maybe less--at work here. The effort to control medical care in this country is an effort at cost control, not the delivery of health care. This has been true in Europe, in the writings of Uwe  Reinhardt the early health care theoretician and architect, and in the original plans of Hilary's health care failure.

In the U.S. the decision is simple: Health care costs must come down and no group must suffer disproportionately when it does. The motive here is adherence to some economic model and the protection of certain economic groups at the expense of others.This is a matter of faith as deep--and perhaps as unprovable--as the Trinity. The specifics--you can keep your own doctor, you can continue your current insurance plan, you will have no increase in costs despite more people will be covered--are all meaningless. FOX News spends each day finding inconsistencies in the promise and the delivery, in the picture and the reality, of the ACA. All nonsense. The Western leaders have, gradually, all come to the same position on health care (and many other common notions are not far behind.) Health care costs too much. Period. An experiment based upon this theory will follow. Whatever can be done to cut the cost of health care will be done. Salaries of health care workers will drop. Use of health care technology will drop. Medication costs will drop. And when prices arbitrarily drop, providers of the things that have a lower return start making decisions because the costs do not drop. Doctors will become disenchanted with taking night call, nurses will debate swing shifts in favor of more family-friendly work, medications will be less available, technological research will move to areas other than health.

What is happening here is that lawmakers and think tanks, all well isolated from their decisions, have come to some philosophical positions and are going to act upon them. The citizens and their opinions are quite peripheral. Health care will be the lead dog in this country. Other "Good Ideas" will follow. But this first shot is gigantic. It will pull untold amount of information and influence under the government umbrella, profoundly influence the health of its citizens, dramatically curtail research and technology and most importantly place this power in the hands of naive, arrogant, migrant leaders who specifically exclude themselves from the experiment only to move on later to consultancies, professorships and hedge funds leaving the detritus of the experiment behind.

Cab Thoughts 12/11/13

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power--Daniel Webster

 

In the 1960s, the U.S. federal government spent $3 on "investments" like infrastructure, schools and financial aid for education for every $1 on entitlements. Today, the ratio is flipped. In 10 years, we will spend $5 on the three major entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) for every $1 on public "investments."

 

Trying to explain the Greek monsters in mythology, John Boardman has argued in his book The Archaeology of Nostalgia (2002) that the Greeks were attempting to make sense of dinosaur bones they found in the landscape, and he convincingly compares the bone-white sea monster on a vase, lurking in a cave and ready to pounce on Hesione, with the fossil skull of a Samotherium, or Miocene giraffe, such as was found around Troy.

 

Betz law states only 59.3% of the energy in wind in the swept area can be extracted, regardless of technology.

 

The average price a residential customer paid for natural gas in 2012 was $10.68, while the average price of gas at the well was $2.66. The difference is in infrastructure costs and, remarkably, long term contracts where the company bet on rising prices. When they are wrong they never pay; we do.

 

Who is.....Hesione?

 

The IMF expects that in advanced economies the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product will reach a historic peak of 110% next year, 35 percentage points above its 2007 level. One of the bureaucratic solutions of the IMF, an organization with a lot of Old World Socialist baggage, is a wealth tax, a tax on what people have, not earn, after taxation. This incredible remnant of the old days of aristocracy and kings is not as far fetched as one might think. Remember Cyprus, an EU country? Holders of bank accounts larger than 100,000 euros had to incur losses of up to 100% on their savings above that threshold in order to "bail-in" the bankrupt Mediterranean state.

A 2012 study in the Southern Economic Journal concludes that "it is unusual to find any other occupation where cash wages have a stronger negative effect" on hiring than for tipped workers. Economist David Neumark, an expert on minimum-wage economic studies, says that an economic rule-of-thumb is that every 10% increase in the minimum wage reduces teen employment by about 1% to 3%. In October the U.S. teen jobless rate was 22.2% and for black teens it was 36%. The Obama minimum wage combined with the health mandate could mean up to a 10% reduction in jobs for the poor and young. But it will rally the Democrat base and thus will be a worthy sacrifice.

 

Obama devised a sequester--remember, the sequester was his gambit--that requires 50% of total cuts to come from national security that is 17% of the budget, but no cuts from income-transfer programs that account for well over half the budget. The Rube-publicans are considering a budget fight to increase defense spending, a notion certain to fracture their base. This proposed truce might by-pass it.

 

In an interview, the crime novelist Ian Rankin tells The Telegraph that it took "a good 12-14 years, and many books" before his writing began to pay.

 

University of Michigan data shows improvement in auto fuel efficiency, up from 20.4 mpg in November 2007 to 24.8 mpg in November 2013 or 23%. And it is still steadily rising.

 

Rube Goldberg: adjective: Absurdly complex or impractical. After cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) who was known for his intricate drawings showing fantastically impractical contraptions to accomplish simple jobs. Earliest documented use: 1928.

 

In 2030, a typical couple reaching the eligibility age of 65 will have paid $180,000 in lifetime Medicare taxes but will get back $664,000 in benefits.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/01/medical-fees.html

 

The Chinese restrict driving on days of bad pollution. In China, 8 is a lucky number, 4 is an unlucky number, so on days when air quality is particularly bad and cars with licence plates ending in 8 can’t drive, traffic is relatively light — because so many people prefer plates with that number — while on the days when the 4′s are sidelined, it’s heavy, because relatively few people accept a licence plate ending in 4.

 

AAAAaaaaannnnnndddddd......a graph:

Hit and Run: A Fable

A man coming home from the swing shift at work stops behind a car at a red light at about midnight. Suddenly, the reverse lights on the car in front of him go on and the car backs into him. The driver stumbles out, clearly drunk. She apologizes profusely and begs the man not to call the police. She has a violation already and if found drunk and in an accident, it will go hard for her. She asks the man to take her name and insurance and let her pay for the accident.
 
The man feels sorry for her and after inspecting the car damage and finding it manageable, agrees. He takes the woman's name and insurance numbers and continues home.

The next morning he is awakened by a state policeman who tells him the driver of the car has reported him as a hit-and-run and he is arrested and held responsible for the accident.

Moral: Kindness is golden, but never extend the hand of kindness to an unknown dog.

The Limits of Racism and its Enemies

A hallmark of racism--and racism's opponents--is it is general and static in its thinking. Yet the objective results are anything but. Currently the school test scores of American children, black vs. white, shows significant disparities; blacks generally do poorly in comparison. Yet in the 1940s there was no such gap on test scores between black schools in Harlem and white, working-class schools on New York's lower east side (according to results reviewed in the fall 1981 issue of "Teachers College Record," a journal published by Columbia University.)

Not only do bad testing results not travel over time well, they don't cross borders. In his book "Life at the Bottom," British physician Theodore Dalrymple said that, among the patients he treated in a hospital near a low-income housing project, he could not recall any white 16-year-old who could multiply nine by seven. Some could not even do three times seven.

The Nov. 9-15 issue of the British magazine "The Economist" reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England's schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school academic tests nearly 60% of the time — as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50% of the time.
At the bottom, bottom, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30% of the time.

This problem is a lot harder than any of the combatants think.

Sunday Sermon 12/8/13

This morning at about 1:30 I was awakened by a piercing, pulsing alarm. At first I thought it the house alarm but, through the sleepy haze, figured out it was my phone. I had never heard this sound before and quickly discovered it was an "Amber Alert." It was a signal. Somewhere a child was missing. The alert noted the area, gave a make  of a car that was suspected to be involved and its state license number. I had not signed up for any participation in the "Amber Alert" program; this program was simply assigned to all the community.

There are some interesting aspects here. Somehow, somewhere, someone or some group decided that everyone in the area should be awake, perhaps should look out the window or run out in the street to find this child. Somehow everyone within the phone's broadcast area should be responsible--regardless of where they are or what they are doing--and should mobilize for the betterment of this child, despite the accuracy of the report or the validity of the charge or the distance involved. It is reminiscent of the jackdaws' response to a hunter or the bees' response to the intruder or some sci-fi collectivist species.

Actually, it sounds a lot like John the Baptist today.