Credit is not a substitute for progress

This Weekly Standard article ostensibly is about Neil deGrasse Tyson's dishonesty, but on that subject it's a mere re-hash of a sordid record and a banal career.  The fresher material is this quotation from Peter Thiel:

Like technology, credit also makes claims on the future. "I will gladly pay you a dollar on Tuesday for a hamburger today" works only if a dollar gets earned byTuesday. A credit crisis happens when earnings disappoint and the present does not live up to past expectations of the future.

The current crisis of housing and financial leverage contains many hidden links to broader questions concerning long-term progress in science and technology. On one hand, the lack of easy progress makes leverage more dangerous, because when something goes wrong, macroeconomic growth cannot offer a salve; time will not cure liquidity or solvency problems in a world where little grows or improves with time. On the other hand, the lack of easy progress also makes leverage far more tempting, as unleveraged real returns fall below the expectations of pension funds and other investors.

This analysis suggests an explanation for the strange way the technology bubble of the 1990s gave rise to the real-estate bubble of the 2000s. After betting heavily on technology growth that did not materialize, investors tried to achieve the needed double-digit returns through massive leverage in seemingly safe real-estate investments. This did not work either, because a major reason for the bubble in real estate turned out to be the same as the reason for the bubble in technology: a mistaken but nearly universal background assumption about easy progress. Without fundamental gains in productivity (presumably driven by technology), real-estate values could not go up forever. Leverage is not a substitute for scientific progress.

Handcuffs

Common Core remains a mystery, but there's no mystery about how disturbing it is to see two parents arrested and led out of school board meetings, or to see the rest of the crowd put up with it.





I may have mentioned before that I support vouchers and home schooling, not to mention casting an informed ballot in school board elections.

End Jedi Privilege

A heartfelt plea.

Beheaded in Oklahoma

No link to terror groups say the authorities, which is plausible given some definitions of what it means to be "linked to terror groups."

Good shooting by the COO, though.

Privacy

Should we be outraged that Apple is making virtually unbreakable encryption a default option on iPhones?  I'm not seeing it.  Allahpundit argues that law enforcement should be able to get into your phone with a warrant.  I'm content to let people expose themselves to penalties for contempt if they refuse to unlock an encrypted phone and a warrant holds up on appeal.  Also, it's a little hard to take seriously claims that an encryption technique will stay unbreakable for long.

Sheep & Horses

Especially for Tex, but also anyone interested in her course on the history of English, some a tale from the Proto-Indo-European.

Cop shootings no one cares about

Some weeks back I posted about a fishy shooting of a black man by cops in a WalMart, which got practically zero coverage or comment.  Every time I found a brief update in the news, the story got a little uglier for the cops, but for some reason the event didn't resonate with the American public and now has dropped into a deep, dark hole.

This week videotape has surfaced of a white cop shooting a black guy in South Carolina about three weeks ago under nearly inexplicable circumstances.  Again, little apparent interest.

What in the world makes a murky case like Ferguson fertile ground for race riots and national posturing while these other two shootings fall right off the radar?  A cynical view might be that the Ferguson cop wasn't immediately disciplined, while the South Carolina cop was promptly fired and may face 20 years in prison, but that theory doesn't quite work:  as far as I could tell no one has suggested any disciplinary action in the WalMart shooting, which seems hunky-dory with both Al Sharpton and Eric Holder.

It's pretty clear no one should put me in charge of propaganda.  I lack the touch.

So That's How They Do It!

If, like me, you've been wondering how smugglers so easily pass by the US Border Patrol, at last there is video exposing their methods!

Three Hundred Percent

One of my old Iraq comrades used to be a big fan of a play called "Avenue Q." It was a kind of parody of Sesame Street. This was his favorite song:



I was thinking about this because of a headline I saw that suggests that 'Every man's a little bit rapist.'

To say that a frat boy is 300% more likely than other men on campus to rape a woman is to say that your control group is at least a little bit likely to rape a woman. After all, if a frat boy is 300% more likely than I am to rape a woman -- or even if he were three hundred times more likely -- nevertheless there's no problem. Zero multiplied by anything yields zero, which is the appropriate number of rapes.

It's only if any given man in the control group can be assigned a 'little rapist' factor that you can get the multiple to work. So, in pushing these numbers, we really need to conceptualize every man in college as having at least some rapist in his constitution.

How much? Well, according to the study you can read if you track back a couple of links, the figure for frat boys who admitted to rape or attempted rape is nine percent. Now one way of expressing that is that 91% of frat boys are not rapists. That means that 97% of the general population of college men are not rapists. That's a pretty substantial percentage. We may not be all the way to where we want to be, but we've still established that the overwhelming majority of these men don't commit rape.

But if we express it the way the headline expresses it, we can condemn all frat boys -- including the 91% who haven't raped anyone -- for being more rapist than the general population of men. By the same logic, we can condemn the whole population of college men -- 97% non-rapist -- as being part of a group that includes a statistical number of rapists.

Alternatively, you could say that your 97% of college men who never rape women are the norm. Then, of course, you can't make a statistical claim about how much more likely frat boys are to rape than normal college men -- presumably you would have to say that they are infinitely more likely to do so!

Fun with statistics. But there's a serious consequence to the way we end up conceptualizing college. Is it a place of tremendous sexual danger, with college men who are as a class statistically likely to rape young women? Or is it a place where, actually, almost every man you meet is the kind of man who doesn't rape? A lot hangs on that answer.

1st ID HQ to Deploy to Iraq for a Year

This is a really interesting deployment decision. In a way they're pushing the command down, since currently the ARCENT Deputy Commander is doing what the 1st ID CG will now be doing. In another way, although they're falling in on some existing structures and duties, it's very odd to split the headquarters the way they're going to do.

A serious commitment, though, and one that could very easily expand outward. Once you have a division headquarters in place, you have everything you need to insert several Brigade Combat Teams. 1/1 ID is in Kuwait already.

Cory Gardner goes too far

The DSCC has strong words to say about this vicious attack ad from Cory Gardner, the republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Colorado, who is running against Democratic incumbent Mark Udall.

It’s clear Congressman Cory Gardner’s campaign is struggling to overcome the damage done by his support for laws that could block a woman’s access to common forms of birth control, take away women’s personal health care decisions even in cases of rape or incest, and roll women’s health care rights back decades. It’s disgusting that Congressman Gardner would stoop as low as attacking Senator Mark Udall’s late father and it is beneath a candidate running for the U.S. Senate. Congressman Gardner should apologize to Senator Udall and his family and pull the ad off the air.

And yet if you watch the actual ad, you'll see that Gardner says his opponent, Mark Udall, is a nice guy who will never change the Senate, that he comes from a political family, and that his father ran for President.  Did you ever hear such a scurrilous attack?

Holder is out

I won't miss him, but this NPR article is a little valentine to his career.

Sound the Pibroch

Since we were talking about the Clancy firm, and lately have spoken much of Scotland, here is their retelling of Culloden:



The Highland Clearances were the great betrayal of the late 1700s, to which we owe a kind of debt for the good we got from those who came here. They were a grave betrayal, all the same.

'America & The Cycle of Neverending War'

I was kind of disappointed by the article, which I had hoped would refer to something a little more like this:

Finding out what's in it

Obamacare's been around for more than four years now, and I should have thought the many, many people who hate it like death would by now have discovered everything incredibly stupid that's written right into it.  But it turns out that massive new insanities are surfacing as the tens of thousands of pages of implementary regulations gradually come to light.  Here's a fabulous one:  all new plans must be Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum, defined by their actuarial valuation.  Bronze means the average plan pays 60% of bills, Silver pays 70%, Gold 80%, and Platinum 90%.  I'll bet you would have assumed that Bronze was really 60-69% and so on.  Nope!  The "safe zone" is only 2% in either direction.  If your plan turns out to pay 65% on average, it's neither Bronze nor Silver and must be cancelled at the end of the year.  No problem, you'll just sign up for a new one, right?  Sure, but it will have all new terms to learn, and there's no guarantee that you'll keep your doctor or your hospital.  Not that there was any guarantee of that anyway, since we can all expect our networks to degrade steadily.

I really have to ask myself:  what kind of moron thought it was a good idea to make all plans fit within four bands and outlaw big chunks of actuarial rating that fall between them?

Speaking of things that aren't science

Never liked Tyson.  Liking him less and less, and shame on Wikipedia.

Cracks in ivy walls

There's getting to be so much education available on the Internet that I don't feel there are enough hours in the day to stuff into my head even the things I'm most interested in.  It's a shame how much time I wasted in school.

I'm interested to see what kind of market can be developed in selling education now, with so much of it free.  Of course the credentials are irrelevant to me, but not to a big potential market, so it should be feasible to charge for those.

Cupcake outlaws

Good to know I could start selling bread without breaking the law here in Texas.

Nine lives

Just as the main facade of this hotel is starting to tip over into the street, at 0:17, you can see a cat appear in an opening about halfway up, to the left of the "S" in "Towers."

The Strangest Civil War Argument I've Ever Heard

At the end of this piece on that pro-secession poll, the author posits a cause of the war that I've never heard anyone float.

Much of the fervor for war in 1860 was driven by a moral crusade against slavery. Some of it was fueled by patriotism, and some by state, local, and even just family affinities.

At the highest level, however, Lincoln recognized that the cosmopolitan North—teeming with immigrants, churning with class conflict, surging into the prairie and mountain west—would have lacked a logic of unity if the South were permitted to break off in peace. The Southerners had history, ethnicity, culture, slavery, religion, and a quasi-aristocratic honor society to hold them together.

What did the North have?

Not much more than we have today. Although the spell of American superpower and an almighty government is in some ways more dominant than ever, the moment that spell is broken, many will find themselves in a kind of freefall of political principle.

So Lincoln fought the war because the North lacked any other organizing principle?

I understand the argument for slavery as cause. I understand the argument for economics as cause. I understand the argument for culture as cause. My own sense is that all of those things were factors in the tension that led to the conflict, but that the proximate cause -- the thing that made a war necessary, and a peaceful secession impossible -- was the union of technology and geography. No President of the United States in 1860 could accept control of the port city at the mouth of the Mississippi river passing to the hands of a foreign power. Before the proliferation of railroads, before trucks and interstates, before airplanes, there was no alternative to the Mississippi to move the wealth of the middle of the country to market. It was as critical a national interest of the United States then as access to warm-water ports has always been to Russia.

Quite possibly it still is.

It would never have occurred to me, though, that the North couldn't have held itself together except on the principle that the Constitution was a suicide pact. Nobody gets out alive, because then the whole thing would fall apart!