Comments by jomiku

I read Cowen's piece with amusement: is he really saying that Americans are simply different from Europeans? I read it several times and decided he meant this more as a bomb than as an idea he would defend. I hope so because "he's different" is the argument used to define racism and every other kind of hatred. It's a version of "you know, they aren't like us". It's even used for the same kind of effect: there is no reason to work for more opportunity - not equal outcomes but more opportunity - because well, you know, they're different.

Remember that Apple bought up all the air cargo space they could when the iPod was new and Xmas was coming. They were able to service demand.

I like to think of Roman roads: they bound together the Empire and allowed swiftish communication and transport. The modern roads are shipping and that has two basic channels, one very old. The old is the ship but it takes a new form in huge container ships that can be loaded and unloaded efficiently. The other is air. As everyone knows, you order something and it is made in China and arrives on your doorstep a few days later. That pays for relatively expensive things and the traffic has meant all sorts of things tag along.

I had this brought home to me some years back when my child needed medicine. She was living in Xian, China, very far from the eastern US and not a main port of any sorts. Xian is mostly known as the first imperial capital, where the terra cotta warriors were discovered. It is a good 700+ miles SW of Beijing. I was able to go to FedEx on Friday, stick some pills in an envelope and it was at her door early on Monday morning - for a very reasonable cost. That meant Xian was as close as anywhere in the US. Not for everything of course but for anything small enough that had sufficient value.

A refrigerator comes by boat. A computer comes by plane. Different roads.

It looks to me that he's continuing to bring ideas into his work. The most recent material combines his own styles with modern Japanese art. I mention that because some of his pieces are clearly riffs on traditional impressionism and that was informed by the Japanese art of that day. A number of his more recent pieces could be old impressionist works filtered through the modern Japanese style. Sort of a revisiting of the old.

Another thing about Hockney is his devotion to working through a project. He doesn't do a picture. He does enough to work out all that he has in that project. But he isn't obsessive; he has the discipline to explore fully but the restlessness to move on.

There are too many examples of government subsidy to list. Some are dumb. A recent example is Kentucky cut $50M in education funding while giving a creationist amusement park with extremely dubious financial projections some $53M in tax breaks and infrastructure improvement. The state will end up paying for the failure of this place too, likely causing more cuts to education.

Some are choices. Ohio is known for subsidizing distribution centers through special real estate tax rates while Michigan gives incentives based on labor costs. Each pursues what it sees as its advantage and both rank similarly in competitiveness, just in different ways. These differences allow the politicians to claim something is wrong: "Ohio is more competitive!"; "Michigan is more competitive!" and to use that to force some bad idea through.

Some are misapplied reasoning. The mantra is that government needs to act like business, but business takes risks, loses money and may go out of business or be sold while governments have to stay around. Harrisburg, PA did the business thing; they built an incinerator designed to attract lots of business, make money and solve their solid waste problem. Not a good investment, but they can't go out of business, can't write off the loss, and so the people of Harrisburg suffer. (It is strange perhaps that the same people who argue public pension funds need to be valued at a risk free basis, dramatically increasing funding needs, also argue government should operate as a business. Take risk out with one hand, stick it in with the other.)

RA, I thought the better quote from the article was about the economic cluster. It shows how government supports development of a cluster of industries, which is true to some degree in every country. It doesn't, however, mention that other Asian countries participate in this supplier cluster. That is also true for clusters everywhere. Here's the quote:

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

Markets have difficulty dealing with insanity.

It is better to have talks about this kind of thing than to expect that anything can be published without talking about the wisdom of doing that.

The estimates of revenue loss are highly exaggerated. I say that because they refuse, as far as I've found, to disclose the methodology. That is a sign of picking the biggest case they can find.

Example: I have a copy of The Forbin Project that I ripped off a library DVD. I would not buy a copy of the movie. It's silly, but I'm fond of it, particularly the scene where Colossus announces, "This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."

I see this movie would cost about $12 to buy. I wouldn't spend the money. It doesn't matter to me if I have the thing or not.

Perhaps Newt does best represent the "authenticity" movement that's so important in the current GOP. Authenticity as I use it means "my beliefs beat your facts because my beliefs are authentic". It's a version of good old-fashioned American Know-Nothingism and what may be the last refuge of people whose belief systems are confronted every day by contradictory facts. This is a big part of America.

Need to eliminate the Dept of Education so we can teach our beliefs, meaning we don't want our kids exposed to facts about evolution because our beliefs MUST trump those. Need to make the judiciary knuckle under - no matter that it would then also knuckle under to Democratic regimes as well - because no elitist judge can tell me that what I believe is wrong. We need to assert our beliefs more and more and more because, well, just look at the world and how badly things are going for us: our only salvation is our beliefs. People deeply believe this kind of nonsense.

As much as these supposedly devout Christians shy from Mitt because he's Mormon, they are also repulsed by his obvious inauthenticity.

Come on, the reason it doesn't matter is the GOP is desperately looking for Anyone But Mitt. Newt is ABM. But to say it doesn't matter is to say it doesn't matter much now, with emphasis on those two words. You win elections by turning out people and by getting one sex to vote in very large numbers for you. How many women are turned off by Newt's philandering and then his lying about it? (It seems he polls negatively among women in general.) Can't win if women won't vote for you. Can't win if people don't turn out for you. A primary is a weird sort of closed election in which turnout isn't an essential issue and in which in most cases you have to be registered as a voter in that party to vote at all.

Remember when they announced their big plan late last year. It included a goal that banks raise a huge amount of capital. They were instructed to raise it on their own, but the plan included a provision that they could get sovereign support if they couldn't raise the money but some date (like April). As I remember, the reference was not to the ECB.

This plan was the height of silliness; it read to me, "Hang on and if things get really bad we'll help, but for now we'll pretend." Thank heaven they realized the foolishness.

I mention this because recognizing foolishness once is a precedent these politicians can use to do it again.

The thing that really got to me about the Tiger Mom book was that her husband is Jewish and she could have chosen another obviously successful model. Is there any argument that Jews are highly successful in the arts, business and science? (I could count Nobel and various arts prizes.) That model obviously works, despite the many hurdles Jews face in this world. But she chose the one which is crueler, which tends to dictatorship and punishment, rather than the model of nurture.

The post has this line: "You can argue, for example, that high capital-gains taxes don't actually produce that much more revenue, because they just lead people to hold assets for longer."

But that is a good result. We want long term investment. You get 15% tax now on 1 year holds. This means an investment that lasts 12 months and a day can be mathematically worse and still be better after tax because that extra day lowers the taxes. This doesn't encourage long term investment or thinking; it encourages investing in worse things that happen to be accounted for in 12 months plus a day.

I think the better argument would be that actual long term capital gains should be favored. Like 3 years or 5 years. If an investment pays after 5 years, maybe it shouldn't be taxed at all. (I'd have to do the math to see what rate that would require for a good return; it might be that 5% or 3% makes more sense.) We want people to invest in things that generate real, not purely financial results. That is how we build things in this country.

My patent law teacher told a story about defending a water treatment patent. They had a working scale model built that could fit on a table. It looked disgusting because, as I remember the story, they included see through panels on at least one side. Muck and water. They also put a spigot at one corner. During the trial, the lawyers would conspicuously fill their drinking glasses from that spigot. That was the 2nd best story he had.

1. It isn't ebooks but ebooks with tremendous functionality such as embedded movies and interactive graphics. I assume there will be ways to write notes on them.
2. The license agreement is odd and I find it difficult to believe it can be enforced effectively if applied to individuals. It allows any and all distribution for free. All. But if you charge, they want their cut. I assume this is meant to apply to actual publishers using the tools.

100 years is a good run.

George Eastman founded University of Rochester & Eastman School of Music. He gave the money to build MIT's main campus, and for years refused to be identified other than as Mr. Smith. He also gave substantial money to Tuskegee. He set up dental clinics in a number of cities to care for children. He gave away perhaps $125M, a huge sum even today. He gave stock to his employees. That is a legacy.

The much reviled Bell Curve book talked about a "cognitive elite" with a big side effect: this group tends only to talk to and listen to other members of the group. This is of course true of all groups: skateboarders talk to skateboarders, Scientologists talk to Scientologists. Belief reinforces itself.

But when I think of intelligent, informed people, I wonder how much they talk to ordinary people. Not in passing but in enough depth to hear their weirdnesses. I do. It's a quirk: growing up in an intellectual house, mostly in expensive schools, identified as gifted, etc. I find myself drawn to hear what regular people say, to understand what they do and what they think. At least 1/3 hold some insane beliefs: the car companies have a 200MPG car they've hidden; aliens from outer space live among us; the President is a secret Muslim. I've heard those in the last few weeks and I mean directly from people.

Intelligent people are nutty too. (And of course some of the "ordinary" people are perfectly intelligent, just less educated. The differences are often the circumstances of birth and a handful of choices made when young.) What can you say? I read a piece by John Cochrane in which he linked Keynes to India's rigid state controlled economy - the kind of place where you needed a permit to buy or dispose of a machine. That is nutso in the extreme, comparing demand side stimulus in emergency situations to Stalinist state control. But in his mind there is a connection. I could say something similar about Noam Chomsky; he lost the thread of reality some decades ago. This isn't a problem of right or left.

Funny thing is we're all wrong all of the time. Feynman had a great description: only when he'd failed so completely at understanding, when he convinced himself he was the stupidest person alive, only then would he find a way to solve the problem at hand. It isn't that we're wrong but that we persist in being wrong. This becomes delusion when we persist at being wrong about the same thing over and over and over.

A key will be whether Darvish adapts to American training. Dice-K has been at odds with the Red Sox over training for most of his time in the US. He throws all the time. US pitchers run on a different schedule, pitching every 5th day not every 6th and concentrating more on other conditioning than on constant throwing.

Another key will be how Darvish adapts to the smaller repertoire of pitches thrown in the US and whether he'll become a nibbler - like Dice-K - or whether he'll pitch US style to contact.

As a side note, a Korean pitcher for a US team threw so much the team ordered him to throw less and tried to supervise his workouts closer. I ran into him at a local running track, throwing incognito to his translator. Must have thrown for an hour.

In Blazing Saddles, when the townspeople gather in Church to discuss their options, a weathered old man - Gabby Johnson - delivers an unintelligible tirade. Howard Johnson then says: "Now who can argue with that? I think we're all indebted to Gabby Johnson for clearly stating what needed to be said. I'm particulary glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age."

Thank you Mel Brooks for rendering America as it so often is today: authentic frontier gibberish.

There used to be a "Dress for Success" column by John Molloy, who also wrote books on that topic. The column was a middle-manager's insecurity blanket: don't let your heels show wear, don't let your socks be seen bunched at your ankle, don't have the wrong knot in your tie. The advice was for all those people who feel they have no choice but to fit in - and there are lots of those: join the herd, dress like the herd, talk like the herd, walk like the herd. The advice wasn't for significant achievers because those people have more ability.

Times have changed. You don't need to fit into the herd in such superficial ways. You still need to be in the herd, but you do that by actually fitting in with your personality and competence.