Moving!

Hi everybody!  I'm starting a new blog, in collaboration with a couple of friends, and as such will no longer be posting to this one. You can check out the new digs at Poliglut.

The Stock Market Is Evil

Damn. Jon Stewart scooped me. But I'd like to expand on one part of his interview with Jim Cramer in which Jon questioned the very idea of sitting back and making 10% - 30% margin on an investment.

First of all, I'd like to qualify headline. The stock market doesn't have to be evil; it's just its current manifestation is. Most of the market's action is in the secondary market — that is, not IPOs in which you buy from the company in question — and dividends are a minor, or often nonexistent, part of the deal. That's the evil part of the stock market; it's also the main part of the stock market.

When you buy stock in a company, you're almost never buying it from that company. Instead, you're buying it from some third party, and you're probably doing it in the hope that the stock's price will go up so that you can sell it to another third party at a profit.

The problem with this transaction is that you've made money without adding any service or product of value. That's an inherently untenable system: it's a bubble.

The rest of this post is just more ranting; the above paragraph is the crux of my argument. When you get money without contributing anything of value to anyone, there's a problem. It's always a moral problem, and it almost always ends up in a pragmatic one, too.

Like any other bubble, the stock market works great until it breaks. When things are going well, the market has the general understanding that stocks should generally go up; when people freak out, the stocks generally go down. But whether the stock market is losing money or gaining it has no direct affect on its underlying companies cash, operating efficiency, product line or anything else core to the business. That disconnect is a problem.

How did we come to this? Abstraction.

At IPO, stocks that earn dividends make perfect sense. The company needs capital, and to raise that money it offers partial ownership in the enterprise. You buy a small part of the company and are thus entitled to a share of its profits.

Here's where it gets interesting. When a company is young or not doing well, the risk in that trade is high. To make shares more alluring, and to reflect the fact that you're taking a risk, companies offer their stocks at a low price. That makes sense, and it also makes sense that if the company starts doing well and you want to sell your stock, you should expect to sell it at a higher price; that reflects the smaller risk involved in partially owning the company, which is now stable and doing well. After all, its profits are higher and more regular, and that makes it more valuable to have a claim to a portion of them.

But it doesn't take long for that to get out of hand. Soon enough, most of your profits come from buying low and selling high, with the dividends — the share in the company's profits — getting eclipsed in the transaction. Before you know it, companies abstract away those dividends, and the market is now buying and selling shares that are actually virtually meaningless except insofar as they can be bought and sold at fluctuating prices.

Shares have now become a highly volatile fiat currency: they're only worth whatever we consider them to be worth. Fiat currencies are prone to fluctuations in value, and that's usually seen as a necessary evil; most money is fiat, for instance, and governments spend a great deal of effort in trying to keep its value as stable as possible by curbing inflation and the like.

Keep in mind that I'm by no means against all financial systems. If the main value in stocks were their profit shares — that is, if they were really treated as partial ownership in the company — then I'd be in favor of the system. Likewise, I think loans are a great idea: if I have a bit extra cash, and someone else needs a bit of cash, it's perfectly reasonable for me to give him my surplus and for him to not only pay me back later, but to add interest to make it worth my while.

We just need to remember the fundamental value of what we're holding. A share should represent part ownership in a company; a loan should represent one party helping another with the understanding that the backscratch will be returned. When abstraction lets us forget that, and trade on items not based on their intrinsic value but only in the hope that we can trade them again later for a magical profit, that's when we have a disaster waiting to happen.

Hockey fights and the Bruins: a case study

Those of you who know me may be aware of the fact that I am a fan of hockey. Just a bit.

But one aspect of hockey that's never really captivated me is the fighting. I know, I know — fighting's one of the great parts of hockey, it shows how raw the emotions are, blah blah.

Yes, hockey's a very fast-paced, emotional sport. And if you get pissed off at a guy enough to throw the gloves down, I'm fine with that. What I don't like is the staged crap that starts with circling and has as much hugging as punching. If you have enough patience with the guy to "size him up" for 15 seconds before you try to land your first blow, my philosophy is to just forget the fight and give him an extra hard hit next time around.

The pro-fighting crowd always points to how it energizes the players and can give your team the one-up. To test that theory, I looked up all of the Bruins' fights for the season and looked at each one game by game. For each fight, I looked at what the score was before the fight, who scored the next goal and who won the game.

The tabulated results show that fights don't help the Bruins. My guess is that fights don't have much effect either way, but if you want to really nitpick the stats, they seem to show the Bruins at a slight disadvantage when fighting.

The Bruins are 15-10-4 for scoring after a fight. That is: 15 times they scored next after a fight, 10 times the other team did, and 4 times nobody did. The Bruins' overall goals for/against is 197-131, which is almost the exact same ratio as 15-10 (1.500 compared to to 1.504). So, no advantage there.

But it's actually worse than that for the B's. Most fights didn't have an effect on the game's outcome, in that the team that was winning before the fight ended up winning the game. Of the Bruins' 29 fights, only seven could be argued to have ended up changing (or setting) the game's momentum. In all of those games, the score was tied before the fight; four of them ended up as losses for the Bruins. Even if you account for OTLs, a record of 3-1-3 isn't too great when your overall record is 40-10-8.

The lesson: if a guy's getting chippy at you and you feel the urge to throw the gloves down, fine. But don't pretend it's going to help your team, and don't do it just for the sake of doing it.

Multiverse theory and the two die allegory

In my last post, I described an allegory I'd created that illustrates why life on Earth, even if it is extremely unlikely, does not serve as evidence that God exists. (I emphasize "if" because there is actually no empirical data I know of that has established this probability.)

The same allegory can be used to understand a thought experiment which is one of my favorites. I forget where I read it and who it's by, but it serves as a proof of multiverse theory. That's the theory that says that there are infinite parallel universes. At each moment, every decision or random act that's possible happens in one of those multiple universes.

So, here's the thought experiment: Find a reliable pistol, load it, put it to your head, and pull the trigger. There is a high probability that you'll have just killed yourself, but a small probability that the gun will fail. Repeat this several times. For good measure, after you've pulled the trigger a few times, fire it at the wall to make sure that the gun really works; then put it to your head and pull the trigger a few more times.

If the multiverse theory is wrong, you're almost definitely going to die. In fact, you probably died at the first pull of the trigger.

But if multiverse theory is right, then at every pull of the trigger, you die in the vast majority of universes — but live in the very few in which the gun failed. "Very few" of infinity is infinity, so you're still alive in infinite universes. Moreover, you only go on testing out the experiment and analyzing its results in those [rare] universes in which you're alive. (That's where the evolution allegory comes in.)

The result is that, if you're still alive after having tried to kill yourself a couple hundred times, you can be relatively sure that multiverse theory is correct. You'd have a very, very small chance of being alive if it's not correct, but a 100% chance of being alive if it is.

The kicker, of course, is that you can't communicate with any of the other parallel universes. So while you can be fairly sure that multiverse theory is right, that information doesn't help the versions of you that are dead. Also, since outside observers haven't eliminated all versions of themselves in which you're dead, they won't be able to share your knowledge: even if multiverse theory is right, the chance that an outside observer is in the right universe to see you alive is the same as the chance that the gun has failed. So even if they do see you live, there's no way for them to know if that's because multiverse theory is right or if you're just very, very lucky.

Needless to say, for both your sake if multiverse theory is wrong and for your loved ones' sakes even if it's right, I highly recommend not trying this out.

Evolution and chance: to live, perchance two die

I recently came up with an allegory in a discussion over at Economist.com on evolution that I'm a bit proud of. The question it seeks to address is: If God didn't create life on Earth, then how did it come about, given the minuscule chance of life evolving on its own?

For life as we know it to exist, you have to have the right mix of situations — a suitable solar system, a planet with liquid water, atoms that can form amino acids, amino acids that can self-replicate, etc. The chance of any one of these things happening is very small, and the chance of all of them happening in the same place is virtually nil. Only God, the argument goes, could have tipped the balance to create life here on Earth.

I should preface the allegory by stating that although I do believe in evolution (though I also believe it'll have to be amended, and possibly significantly, as any theory is), the following isn't a proof that God doesn't exist. As an agnostic, I don't believe such a proof exists. But I do treat this allegory as an illustration of the fallacy that God must exist for humans to have formed.

So, now: An allegory two die for

Imagine a simple game involving two players and a 100-sided die (hence the pun in the title, for which I apologize... kinda). The players each roll the die, and if one rolls higher than the other, the player with the higher number wins. Otherwise, they both lose.

Now consider a single-elimination tournament with a million players. At each round, you kill the losers and put the winners in the pool for the next round, randomly seeded. For simplicity, let's say that anyone who isn't matched in a given round (ie, the "odd man out") dies before the round starts. There's a minuscule chance that any one person will win the tournament, but a very high (99%) chance that somebody will win.

At the end of the tournament, you interview the remaining player, if there is one (if the last round was a draw, there's nobody left). Sure enough, that player says he's extremely lucky to be alive. There was less than a million-to-one chance he'd live, and it wasn't even guaranteed that there would be anyone alive at all. He's so lucky, in fact, that only the existence of God explains it.

In fact, God doesn't explain it. It's just that by the very nature of the game, you only get to interview the fortunate winner. God may exist and he may not, but the existence of a survivor isn't evidence one way or the other.

It's the same with us coming from evolution, except that the losers (those without suitable solar systems, or who didn't have water, or who didn't create amino acids, etc) didn't die — they never existed in the first place. We're left with us, the fortunate few survivors in a game of chance, who look at our situation and are fooled into thinking that the question was "will humans evolve on Earth" and not "will something evolve somewhere."

When people look out to the universe and ask, "if it's all just luck, how come we don't see any other life forms?" they're missing the point. The winner in our allegory could ask the same question, especially if he didn't understand the rules of the game he just played.

What Obama means to me

My quick thoughts on the inauguration, and what Obama signifies to me.

This election left me feeling very vindicated. Even though I'm obviously not black, I felt that one of mine had been elected: an intellectual, left-of-center pragmatist. For just about all of my (admittedly short) political life, I have been a left-wing nutjob. Between Obama, my Congressmen (who were shoe-ins, but still) and Massachusetts' three ballot questions, I was, for the first time, 100% mainstream on every issue I had a say in. It's nice to know I haven't been taking crazy pills.

I thought Obama's speech was okay. Not great — I'd have liked to hear a specific call to action — but moving. The one word that I loved: "nonbelievers." Okay, so it's probably not the preferred nomenclature, but I was thrilled to see that Obama remembered that we exist. He's also putting his money where his mouth is, in that all signs point to Obama restoring science to the White House.

It got me thinking: will I live to see an atheist or agnostic sworn in? Or will I even live to see an inauguration not kicked off by a benediction and capped with "God bless you, and God Bless the United States of America"? To some believers out there, this may seem like a minor trifel and a harmless tradition. But let's say the tables were switched. What if the inauguration ceremony started with a scientist getting up and saying, "there is no God" and the inauguration speech ended with "we'll get through this without God's help, since He doesn't exist." Wouldn't you be offended?

As a strongly secular, humanist, agnostic-bordering-on-atheist, I can't help but feeling like an outsider when nearly every significant political event incorporates God so closely, and often implies that it's only thanks to Him that we are where we are. To me, that greatly demeans the efforts and struggles of countless humans (including mine). Now, I don't think it'd be appropriate to alienate believers with "there is no God," but by the same token, I don't think it's appropriate to alienate non-believers.

Well, that was my one rant for this post. I now leave you with a conundrum to ponder. My friend Abbey wondered whether, for the couple minutes between Biden's inauguration and Obama's, Biden was technically Bush's VP. My sister Tamar suggested that maybe the switch happens exactly at noon, regardless of when the actual oath is taken. But in that case, is Obama legally allowed to try to undermine the Constution in the few minutes between noon and his swearing in, given that he hadn't actually taken an oath to defend it yet?

My humble suggestion for a fix is to affix onto each oath, "... effective upon the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America saying, 'beep.' " Both inaugurations should take place before noon, and at exactly noon, the justice should leant towards the microphone and say, with much somberness and weight, "beep!"

An economy based on free junk

Loss leaders are hardly a new concept, but they seem to be growing in importance. The idea behind a loss leader is that a company gives one product or service at a loss, or minuscule profit margin, in the hope that it'll attract customers who will then also buy more lucrative products. For instance, the price of a ticket at a movie theater barely covers the theater's expense of showing you the movie. Their profit only comes in when you buy concessions.

There are times when a loss leader is appropriate, but in many cases, the consumer ends up losing. Moviegoers have to deal with the sounds of popcorn being crunched and candy wrappers being rustled during quiet parts of a movie.

Part of the reason that loss leaders are gaining in momentum is that the Internet has come with a culture of free things. Try to think of how many sites' services you pay for on the web — I'll bet you could count them on one hand, and probably on one fist. Or, think of how many times you heard music, legally or not, without paying.

But someone still has to get their money, and the mechanism for them to do so sometimes hurts the product. Consider music. I've already complained that music numbs our brains, but now that artists are finding it harder to sell tracks, they're starting to use them as marketing tools. Snoop Dogg's Landy in my Egg Nogg was commissioned by Landy's maker to promote the drink, for instance. A platform already skilled in numbing our minds is being tuned towards manipulating them.

Newspapers have had a loss-leader model for years: they made almost nothing from selling newspapers, and instead got most of their revenue from advertisements and classified ads. That created conflict (or at least the potential for it) between the papers' editorial and sales departments. It also meant that newspapers were vulnerable when classifieds moved to craigslist, which is one of the biggest reasons that newspapers are struggling even as our thirst for news is at an all-time high.

Sometimes the loss-leader model makes sense. Cell phone service providers heavily subsidize phones and make their money through your phone bills. That works because you're essentially taking a loan for an expensive piece of hardware and paying it off as you pay for the service.

Generally, the loss-leader model makes the most sense when the loss leader and the profitable product are closely related — when they're both used for the same common end-goal. This is the case in cell phones, printers (where the money is earned in selling you ink) and Shai Agassi's plan for electric cars, in which the cars themselves are free but the electricity costs you. The end goals there are communicating, printing and driving, respectively.

But even in these cases, there's a potential for the system to hurt consumers. Apple's iTunes store is a loss leader for the iPod (Apple still profits from iTunes sales, but not nearly as much as it does from the iPod). For years, this made Apple consenting if not complacent to record companies' insistence that the music come with anti-piracy encryption — which also, as it happened, meant it was only possible to play that music on iTunes or an iPod. Apple was happy, record labels were happy, and consumers had less freedom.

Of course, the proliferation of loss-leader models isn't just companies' fault. We the consumers buy into it, sometimes insistently. We'll go to a movie theater and pay $10 for a ticket and $7 for a popcorn and soda, but we'd refuse to buy $15 tickets and $2 snacks. That's maybe the saddest part about this system: we're losing out not because some CEO is trying to bilk us, but because we wouldn't have it any other way.

NASA should stop making rockets

A colleague of mine at work sent me a link today about an astronaut losing a tool bag in space during a space walk to work on the international space station. That seems as good a lede

lead[ing sentence]

as any to introduce a thought I've had for a while: NASA needs to be gutted.

Now, I like scientific research as much as the next guy — probably more than the typical next guy, actually. And despite my general preference for a small federal government, I do think the federal government needs to play a major part in funding science. Some of the most interesting and useful things we enjoy in the modern world have their origins in pure scientific research, and that's the kind of research that individuals and private companies have the least to gain from in terms of ROI.

My problem with NASA isn't that the government is spending so much money on research, it's that we're getting virtually nothing in return. We're not even trying to do real research anymore; manned missions these days are just excuses to fix whatever piece of the shuttle broke on the way up, and maybe pop another module to a space station that seems to be its own raison d'être.

In fact, one of NASA's points of pride is that its rovers and probes now use cheap, off-the-shelf parts. NASA sees that as proof that it's learning to work on a budget; I see it as proof that its innovative days are over. I'd rather spend $500 million and have learned something new than spend $100 million for what is, essentially, an expensive toy.

And while I'm trying my best to bite my tongue and not delve into a rant about the agency's all-consuming obsession to find water on Mars, suffice it to say that my world would be not be rocked in the least if they found ice there, or even evidence of Martian bacteria.

Where does that leave space research? At the risk of shedding my usual pinko hue for a deeper red, it's time for government to just get out of the private sector's way. The X Prize produced more innovation in space travel in eight years than NASA has since inventing the shuttle in 1981. If we want to make space travel a part of daily life, NASA's space missions should be gutted and the money appropriated to incentives in the private sector.

To be fair, there is still a substantial amount of pure research the government does through NASA. In particular, space telescopes and probes are giving us fascinating new insights to the universe. We've all but confirmed that black holes exist, and much of that research has been in the past decade; we're seeing farther and farther out, and thus farther and farther back in time. NASA should keep these research projects; but it should start shifting away from the job of getting the satellites themselves into orbit.

And please, can we stop talking about manned missions to Mars until we have a reason to go there? "Because it is there" is a great reason to go where no man has gone before, but George Mallory didn't cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

McCain's and Obama's speeches

It's late (I'm starting it at 2:15 AM)., so please excuse me if this isn't well written or thought out. Tomorrow (ie, "later today") or Thursday I'll follow up with some more reflections, but for now, I'd like to scratch out a quick note on my take on McCain's concession speech and Obama's victory speech.

I thought Obama's speech was very, very good. It was definitely celebratory (especially near the beginning, where, as my mom pointed out, it was even somewhat self-aggrandizing), but especially towards the end, had some very good points. His call to arms, as it were, was not as succinct or powerful as Kennedy's "ask not," but it resonated strongly with me. And while I usually dislike personal anecdotes, I (begrudgingly) liked his story of Ann Nixon Cooper. It drove through the message that the world has changed over the last 100 years in literally unimaginable and unpredictable ways, and it's up to us to make sure that the world 100 years from now will be better, even if we know we cannot begin to predict how it'll look. The big challenge will be to get people to actually commit to that commitment.

I also thought McCain's speech was very good. It was disturbing, of course, to hear the boos and taunts, but I can't be sure Obama's supporters wouldn't have done the same had they lost. And although I was a bit torn at first about McCain's focus on Obama's ethnicity, I now think it was appropriate. Clearly, this is a huge leap forward for the black community, and it's important that we have an official voice (not just the media) declare it as such explicitly. Obama say that, though; it would make it look like he really had been running as a black candidate, not just a candidate, and would strongly undermine and alienate his broad-based support. McCain had the grace to say what nobody else could: everything else aside, the fact that America was able to elect a black president is a huge deal and represents phenominal progress from a dark past.

Finally, a thought on cheers. I've never been one for the 1-2-3 cheers. But as I was listening to the speech in my car, it occurred to me that if you have to have one, "yes we can" isn't bad at all. It carries no jingoist message (c.f. "U S A!"), nor does it mindlessly focus on any one issue (I'm looking at you, "drill baby drill"). But most importantly, it's a very versatile message. The "we" can be practically any subset of the group that cheered it at the various Obama rallies -- youth, blacks, optimists, liberals, the elderly, whites, etc -- and the things "we" can do are just as mutable. The scariest part of unified cheers, to me, is that they dehuminize the cheerers and unify them into a mob; but "yes we can" inherently counteracts that tendency.

And now, enough ramblings. It's bed time.

McCain's health insurance plan

One of the central tenets of McCain's health insurance plan is to let Americans buy insurance from any state, regardless of the state they live in. This might be a good idea if health insurance were a fully free-market commodity, but it guts the power of any state to set its own regulations or subsidize policies. Any state that tries to set minimum coverage or cap prices will be undermined by policies in states that don't, and any state that subsidizes health insurance policies will suddenly find itself paying for the whole country with the tax revenue of only its own residents.

Here in Massachusetts, we're embarking on an interesting plan to provide nearly universal coverage. It's by no means a fool-proof plan, and it looks to me like it'll probably fail. Not just that, but I knew even back when it was still being proposed that it would probably end up failing; the bar was incredibly high, and the state had no precedent from other states that it could learn from. Still, I always supported the plan, because I'm confident that even if it fails, what we'll learn from it will be invaluable as we set up its successor. My hope is that, in a couple decades, Massachusetts will hit on an iteration that really works.

Given America's current health insurance system, there's no way any state — or the federal government, for that matter — will get it right the first time. What the country needs is 50 independent laboratories, each trying its own way to provide the best coverage to the most people. Some states will go the free market route, and I can only hope that at least one or two try to nationalize (state-ize?) health care, taking as their model some of the very successful Western European countries.

Here's the crux: McCain's plan would eradicate those 50 laboratories. We'd have just one place to try policies, and it would be at a level so high — the federal government — that any experiment would be politically and economically impossible. Health insurance policy would fester under McCain's plan.

Of course, Obama's plan also works at the federal level; that's what a president's plan does. But he wouldn't strip power from local governments. His plan would largely keep regulation in the states' hands, except for the mandate to insure all minors — a reasonable floor to set, I think. At the core of it, Obama is proposing to set up a parallel health insurance system: if the regulations set by your state don't provide you a good option, you can go for the health insurance that federal employees get, which by all accounts is a very good one.

In other words, McCain's plan would strip states of their ability to control health insurance; Obama's would set a minimum bar for them, and in doing so would create an upwards pressure for them to create an environment that begets even better policies.

I would actually like Obama's plan more if it gave states more control. If a state provides a health insurance policy that's roughly equivalent to the federal government's, it should be able to petition the federal government to have it (the federal government) withdraw its coverage from that state's citizens. This would increase the state's pool of insured, allowing it to provide cheaper plans with better coverage, without undermining the minimum coverage that the federal plan was meant to provide.

States' rights? What states?

In some optimistic corner of my mind, I still cling to the idealized notion that the GOP is a small government, states' rights party; I like to think that its current policies represent a temporary if horrible corruption of their real position.

Of course, I know I'm deluding myself. Republicans today aren't about small government, and they're certainly not about states' rights. What's mildly interesting is that the party actually still pretends to be in favor of states' rights when it suits it: specifically, with the abortion issue. But McCain's insurance plan is a great example of the GOP's complete comfort with trampling over states in nearly every other matter.

Palin, the small-town mayor

Despite what they claim, the GOP have presented Sarah Palin almost purely as a nice storyline. There's little talk about the fact that as mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire the town's librarian after asking her to ban books, that she asked the town's top officials to resign as a loyalty test, or that she wants to teach creationism in public schools. People should give her credit for reining in big oil in Alaska and cutting down on government spending, but those efforts came at the expense of nearly everything else, according to Gregg Erickson, a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News.

And let's be clear, she's no centrist. Palin is against abortion even in cases of rape and incest, supported a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage in Alaska and is no friend to the environment.

I would love the discussion to focus around these issues, but instead, Palin and others in the party have focused on her being a "hockey mom" we can all relate to, an average Jill who's just a hard-working mayor from a small town. This is somehow being spun as a plus.

I know plenty of nice people. I know plenty of people who are hard-working. But I don't know anyone who I'd consider ready to be president of the United States of America. And I'm sorry, but hunting moose is no qualification for conducting international politics — it's a completely orthogonal skill.

Have people forgotten that we're picking a leader here, not a pal? Imagine if GM were looking for a new CEO and picked one of their shift managers because she "understood blue-collar issues" and was "a down-to-earth candidate." Given that McCain is 72 years old, this is not just a rhetorical point; his VP must be qualified to be a good president.

Granted, Obama doesn't have a lot of political experience. But his now-derided "community organizer" role was in a city with a population literally more than four times greater than all of Alaska — and that's not counting the metro region outside Chicago proper. He's demonstrated his approach to foreign affairs. He's also run a large and extremely successful campaign for more than a year now, so his experience has been somewhat tested and highly scrutinized, as Republican Joe Scarborough pointed out (at 2:00 into the clip). Palin is coming out of left field.

Besides, Obama isn't pretending that his lack of experience is somehow a good thing, as Palin is.

Obama's failing, and why it shouldn't matter

It’s funny how a flip-flop can look like a betrayal if you’re on the wrong side of it.

Since he secured the Democratic party’s nomination, Obama has made a well-documented dash to the center. He’s tempered his 16-month pullout from Iraq by saying he’d adjust the timetable as needed, putting him fairly close to McCain’s (also new) position that timetables are irrelevant but that we should be out by 2013. With regard to oil, Obama now supports tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a reversal of his earlier position. He also did a 180 on FISA; ditto public campaign financing, and he’s not even relying on small donations as much anymore.

Now, each of those shifts is arguably the sensible thing, and one could be tempted to just shrug it off and say, “that’s politics for ya.” The problem is that Obama started out with — and still maintains — the notion that he’s somehow a new class of politician, and that’s turned out to be a lie. If we wanted a standard centrist, we had Hillary.

Don’t get me wrong — I’d still pick Obama over McCain. Obama has stayed firm on his tax brackets, which redistribute wealth more to the have-nots. I’d also prefer to see Obama picking the next one or two Supreme Court justices, and Obama’s certainly a more charismatic leader. Electing Obama would be a show of good faith to the rest of the world, although my guess is that it would be a fairly short-lived honeymoon. When it comes down to it, Obama is left-of-center, and McCain is right-of-right-of-center. I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

Obama's rush to the center reminds me of why I’m in favor of states’ rights. America will never elect a truly innovative class of politician as president, because it’s just too big and diverse. If you average out a rainbow, you get a muddy, unexciting color.

America should strive to work a bit more like the European Union: a tight union of separate, independent states. Each state should be responsible for its own moral compass, governmental initiatives and much of its own administration; the federal government should primarily be a coordinating body, distributor of wealth and guardian of a few basic human rights.

The argument might come back that the EU suffers from a disconnect from its citizenry, slow political movement caused by various countries’ hesitations at one point or another, and a general confusion as to the path it should take. I would respond: exactly.

In other words, I would like to see more of an “agree to disagree” attitude within America. Texas and Massachusetts are going to differ on a lot of things, and there’s no reason to let Ohio and Florida decide, every four years, whose opinion gets to rule supreme.

Wall-E Surprise

I know I usually post only once a week, but I wanted to get a short entry in today, before July's Month o' Music starts.

I just saw Wall-E and was pleasantly surprised. I came in thinking it would be a cute, fun movie, but it turned out to have a good message as well. I'm not talking about the environmentalism, which turned out to be a relatively minor element.

The rest of this post has mild spoilers, so I'm hiding it. Click here to show it.

If you're looking at this through an RSS reader, you'll have to actually click through to the article. Or you could just run the rest of this post through a rot13 decoder, I guess

Bs gur inevbhf gurzrf va Jnyy-R, gur bar gung uvg ubzr zbfg sbe zr jnf gur vqrn gung jr'er urnqvat gbjneqf n frys-oenvajnfurq shgher va juvpu gur yrnqref bs gbqnl — pbecbengr nf jryy nf tbireazragny — jvyy pbageby gur haguvaxvat shgher. Erzrzore jura rirelbar va gur zbivr jnf mvccvat nebhaq va gurve ubirepunvef, ybbxvat ng gurve cebwrpgrq fperraf, boyvivbhf gb gur jbeyq nebhaq gurz?

Jryy, ercynpr gubfr fperraf jvgu rneohqf naq vg'f whfg yvxr ubj zhfvp vf nyernql gheavat hf vagb qebarf. Gung'f evtug, gur vCbq bs gbqnl jvyy oerrq gur zvaqyrff-UHQ-va-n-ubirepunve bs gbzbeebj. Lbh urneq vg urer svefg!

An environmentalist's manifesto

July is special, so I'm going to devote it entirely to a fun subject. No environmental stuff, no political junk, just my thoughts on music and why all these young whippersnappers with their "hip hop" and "rock 'n' roll" should get off my lawn.

To compensate, I'll leave you, my faithful reader(s), with my militant and proselytizing manifesto.

There's a lot of focus within the environmental movement on conservation: we take for granted that it's our right as humans to consume and consume, and if we've committed any sin, it's that we've consumed inefficiently. We should rethink that mindset.

I would submit that we never had a carte blanche in the first place; we've been taking luxuries as fundamental necessities without thinking, like some character out of The Great Gatsby who's slowly starting to realize that his money isn't coming from a deep trust fund but from a line of credit.

Let's take driving, because it's always fun to beat a dead horse. According to one site I found that lists carbon emissions by mode of transportation, a 180 lb man creates about 200 lbs of CO₂ every mile he drives alone in a car. It won't go away for thousands of years.

Okay, cars pollute — nothing new. But the crux is that driving isn't a basic right, it's a huge convenience. Humans survived tens of thousands of years without more than feet, horses and wheels, but we've forgotten all that in the last century. Suddenly, it's not driving that's fast and easy; it's walking or biking that are slow and hard.

It would behoove us all to remember that when we drive, use a computer, turn on the A/C or do any number of other activities that consume power, we're going above and beyond what nature was designed to let us do. We're spending what we were never given to spend.

I'm guilty too; I drive several times a week, use a computer for hours a day and enjoy the A/C at work. But I feel guilty about it, which makes me think every time I do something that pollutes, which makes me do it a lot less. It may be melodramatic and smack of self-flagellation, but I think it's one case where a bit of guilt is deserved and well placed. To put it bluntly: every animal has to pollute a bit, but we might ask ourselves what gives us the right to so grossly exceed our allowance.

And when you stop and think about it, taking an extra half-hour to use public transportation instead of driving isn't really that inconvenient. You're still saving a lot of time compared to having to walk those 6 miles. And if you bring a book or a magazine or manage to grab a seat and doze off for a few, it can honestly be a nice experience.

Hmm, that last graf

paragraph

wasn't too manifesto-esq, was it? Don't tell Marx.

On an unrelated note for anyone who's holding their breath for the answer to the math question I posed a while back: I haven't crunched the numbers yet, but I will at some point. The suspense will keep you coming back!

The international price of nuclear power

With oil prices and CO₂ on everyone's minds, America is looking for other sources of power. Nuclear energy is one option that comes up a lot: it doesn't pollute the air, and we know how to make a lot of it economically and ubiquitously; the latter can't yet be said of wind, hydro or solar power. There are of course concerns about safety — accidents are rare, but they're devastating when they happen — and nuclear waste, but there's another issue I haven't heard much about.

America is the world's superpower, and where it goes, others may follow. But nuclear technology can be used for bombs as well as power plants, and the line separating them is neither wide nor necessarily visible. Every time America has accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons, Iran has countered that it's only after power plants. The technologies are close enough that proving either side right has been difficult. Nuclear bombs and power plants use the same ingredients, enriched uranium and plutonium, and plutonium is in fact synthesized in nuclear reactors. Even without enriching nuclear fuel to weapons-usable quality, a country could easily use radioactive fuel or waste to make dirty bombs.

If America touts nuclear energy as its energy solution, it will be in a tough place telling other countries they can't do the same. Iran and other countries will have much greater political leverage for pursuing a strong nuclear energy program, and that would put them within dangerous reach of developing a nuclear weapons program.

Even if no country uses the nuclear bombs it develops, we run the risk of coups, corruption, under-the-table support or even just bureaucratic negligence putting bombs in the hands of those who will. And nuclear waste will be around when every government now in existence is long gone; it's irresponsible to leave it for the terrorists and governments of the 60^th century to find. Soviet Russia wasn't all that careful in cleaning up its nuclear waste, and who are we to say that no new nuclear power would be as bad?

We need to develop alternatives to energy other than fossil fuels, yes. But we need to examine each option carefully if we're to avoid jumping out of the frying pan and into the incinerator. It may be worth spending a bit more time and money developing the truly clean and safe technologies instead of investing heavily in a technology that could bite us hard later.

Math puzzle: which station? (part 1)

Whoops, looks like I missed this week's regularly scheduled posting. It's late now and I don't feel like typing anything too involved, so here's a neat little math question I've been wondering about.

Environmentalist that I am (or "greentard," as my girlfriend likes to call me¹), I like to take the T to work as often as I can. My 90-minute trek starts with a walk to the red line, which I take in to Park Street.² There are two T stops, Porter and Davis, roughly equidistant from my house; the train going my direction hits Davis first, then Porter. The question is: does it matter which I take?

Here's my thinking. On the one hand, trains run through each station at the same pace, so it shouldn't matter where I wait. If I have to wait an average of X minutes at Porter, I should have to wait the same X minutes, on average, at Davis.

On the other hand, let's imagine that I walk to Davis and get there just in time to see the train pulling out; I missed it by 30 seconds. It takes a minute or two for the train to get to Porter, so if I'd instead gone to that station, I'd get there just before the train; perfect timing!

My hypothesis is that if my schedule and the trains' schedules were completely random, everything would even out and it wouldn't matter which station I went to. But neither one of them is totally random; the trains are relatively regular (every 7 or 8 minutes), and so am I (I try to leave around 7:45 am). If I assume that my time is somewhat synchronized with the trains' — with some randomization, since neither of us are flawless — I bet Porter is the better station. My time cost for being a bit ahead of the train isn't high (30 seconds or a minute), but if I'm a bit behind, I'll catch a train at Porter that I'd miss at Davis.

I'll run some simulations; stay tuned for the results next week.

Apologies if this post is badly written; the timestamp is my excuse.

[1] She stole this term shamelessly from Fake Steve Jobs.
[2] Sic. Remind me to write about my conundrum regarding "in to" and "into" soon.

Casinos in Massachusetts

Back in the old days, before I had a blog, there was some talk about bringing casinos to Massachusetts. The idea was squashed by house Democrats in March, but state Senate Republicans are now trying to bring it back up.

I'll admit, the idea of a casino that close to my hometown puts me ill at ease. I have a bit of an issue with the fact that gambling is an industry predicated on profiting off of people's false hopes, but the main issue is NIMBY

Not In My Back Yard

. I don't like the idea of people putting Boston and Atlantic City in the same breath.

On the other hand, I've always had a bit of a libertarian streak in me; I think people should generally be trusted to make their own decisions, and I'm very wary of the government legislating morality. Gambling can cause problems for some people, but for many others it's a harmless and occasional distraction. The government should help those who develop gambling problems — and probably force the industry to pay for it, as they do with cigarettes — but those problems do not justify outlawing the industry altogether.

So I'm putting my money where my mouth is: I'm in favor of allowing casinos in Massachusetts, not because I see a valid reason for legalizing them, but because I don't see a valid reason for banning them.

What frustrates me is that the ideas of freedom and self-determination are hardly ever brought up in the debate. The pro-casino side focuses almost exclusively on the jobs Massachusetts casinos would bring and the tax revenue they'd generate. The revenue issue, at least, seems dubious at best; I've heard of several studies that report that after you factor in extra police, medical and other municipal services, states break about even on casinos. The jobs are more significant, but they still shouldn't be the only issue.

The irony is that the state says gambling is immoral enough to warrant banning casinos, but at the same time runs its own lottery. There's no reason for the government to be in the business of running lotteries in the first place, but to bar the private sector from running its own gambling services on moral grounds is plain hypocrisy.

Education won't solve poverty

When people talk about making the world a better place, they frequently start with bringing education to those who can't afford it. We take it as a given that people's lives will be better if they graduate high school or, better yet, college. But education alone is a short-term fix.

The problem is in the very reason we think of education as the panacea to poverty: it's a way of getting out of low-paying jobs. We try to get it through people's heads that if only they get a degree, they won't have to work as janitors, factory workers, rice patty farmers or other undesirable positions.

But the world will always need janitors, factory workers, rice patty farmers and the rest. If everyone had a high school degree, you'd need a college degree to move up the socioeconomic ladder. If everyone had a college degree, you'd need a master's. This has already started to happen in America; even unskilled white collar positions often require an undergraduate degree.

The crux is that educating someone doesn't stop the exploitation of the world's poor; it just lets that person do a bit of the exploiting.

Instead of pretending that we can rid the world of unskilled jobs, we should work to ensure that the people who work those jobs can still lead good lives. Education is a piece of that puzzle because it effects social mobility for those who have the desire and natural abilities. It can also expand minds and give us new ways of thinking about the world, which is good in itself.

But at the end of the day, someone has to clean the floors and work factory machines. Those people should be happy even if they never make it to shift manager.

Music is our soma

I make no secret of the fact that I don't like the direction music's been taking the last couple decades. Modern music is repetitive and shallow, and even the simplest sonata would eclipse it in complexity. But what really scares me is that music isn't just meaningless, it's mind-numbing — and purposely so.

Not to sound like a fanboy, but just try and compare a rock song to a symphony. Tchaikovsky's 5th is just over 45 minutes long, and any given 30 seconds have more development than, say, Smells Like Teen Spirit has in its 5-minute entirety. That's not an exaggeration.

Don't get me wrong. I love rock. It's fun to listen to, and it often moves me emotionally. But in terms of musical sophistication, it doesn't hold a candle to jazz or classical music. It's not meant to; it's is an intellectual escape, and the same is true of pop, hip-hop, country and most other modern genres.

The problem is that people listen to this music all the time. Next time you're walking in the park, taking the subway or just sitting in a cafe, take a look around at all the people drowning out the world with the same 8 bars of "THUNK chss THUNK THUNK chss" blasting over, and over, and over, and over, and over.

For those who don't remember or never read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, one of the more jarring elements of his dystopia is the legal, socially acceptable drug soma. Soma helps people go on "holiday" for a few minutes whenever they want, and it's one of the strongest symbols of Huxley's fear for our world: that society would brainwash itself. In contrast to Orwell's 1984, Huxley saw that the greatest danger we face isn't that a privileged few would subjugate the masses, but that the masses would subjugate themselves. If there's no inner party, there's nobody to overthrow.

We're there yet, and I'm certainly not saying that iPods have destroyed civilization. But the path to the Brave New World is traversed with baby steps. We should take a look to see how far we've gone in just the last century.

Cheater!

That's what I am, a big fat cheater. Any post below this was backdated; I copied them from my facebook account.