Volcanos

Though I loved the Muppets growing up, I was terrified of the muppet Crazy Larry.

I had a storybook where he used dynamite to set off a volcano. I remember having an anxiety freak out – I kept asking my grandmother, in her 1950s living room decor, whether or not there was a volcano in Chicago. She told me no, but I kept thinking she was lying. I was 5; I lived near midway airport, and I believed there was a volcano on “The North Side” (this is how alien North Siders were to us growing up).

So I may be bias, but I think volcano monitoring is an excellent investment.

Wikipedia:

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, a stratovolcano located in Washington state, in the United States, was a major volcanic eruption. The eruption was the most significant to occur in the contiguous 48 U.S. states (VEI = 5, 0.3 cu mi, 1.2 km3 of material erupted), in terms of power and volume of material released, since the 1915 eruption of California’s Lassen Peak….

By the time the ash settled, 57 people (including innkeeper Harry Truman and geologist David A. Johnston; a full list is available here: [1]) and thousands of animals were dead. Hundreds of square miles were reduced to wasteland, over a billion U.S. dollars in damage had occurred ($2.74 billion in 2007 dollars[2]), and the face of Mount St. Helens was scarred with a huge crater on its north side. At the time of the eruption, the summit of the volcano was owned by the Burlington Northern Railroad, but afterward the land passed to the United States Forest Service.[3] The area was later preserved, as it was, in the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

I’m not sure what to make of a GOP that thinks volcano monitoring is a stupid idea. Let’s see: non-rivaled and non-excludable. Sounds like a good thing for the government to be into; the libertarian critique would be that this takes away the ability for people who aren’t afraid of living in danger of volcanos to pay cheapers rents, in the same way monitoring rivers for pollution hurts though who don’t mind some pollution and don’t want to contribute to monitoring. I don’t buy that.

Tyler Cowen has more.

I like that when Jindal, a 40-year old Indian, is advised by professional GOP staff on how to present his tone, they tell him to talk as if he is talking to 8-year olds. Slow-bus ones at that. I am going to write more next week about the new “lowbrow” appeal of the GOP.

VMT

I don’t get the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax. Let’s assume we want to tax auto travel because there are costs not captured by the act of buying gasoline: (a) the burning of a gallon gas releases carbon, which contributes to global warming, as well as pollution more generally. It may also increase tensions related to international security. This can be captured in a gas tax. There is also (b) driving causes wear and tear on the roads, and heavier cars cause more wear and tear. There is also congestion on roads, which we expect since roads are a commons and people are prone to over-consumption.

The argument is that we should have a “vehicle miles traveled” tax to capture (b). However weight causes wear and tear, and weight looks like it is just a function of mpg:

(Source) If we know the mpg of a car, we know with a high probability the weight of the car. So if we want to tax weight, we should be able to just capture that by taxing the mpg – which is taxing the gasoline used by the car.

Now there are hybrids and electric cars out there – they sneak off that line there and cause more damage to the roads relative to the gas they burn. But from a quick google search, only 3% of cars/trucks sold in 2007 were hybrids, broadly defined. As a fraction of current auto stock, it’s going to be even less. Hybrids get about a third extra mpg relative to size, I’d estimate. So that’s a 33% margin on 1% of the auto stock that is escaping paying a tax on (b) above.

Is it worth the cost of setting up this taxing regime? Do we really want to have to force everyone driving to have a subpoena-able device tracking my car – or force them to go to the DMV another time every year to get their government-allocation of driving miles checked by a bureaucrat? Obama wisely said this was not being looked into; however Oregon appears to be considering it. I hope they don’t.

I trust men with the name Maynard.

I hate getting into discussions about the stimulus with friends and co-workers, because at the end of the day, if there was a line item that said “dig holes” and another line item that said “fill holes”, I’d be pretty happy with that stimulus package. I’m glad there are a lot of worthwhile investments related to energy and transportation, but if you argument against the stimulus package is that it buys condoms or streetlamps, that’s not shaking my confidence.

In other news, here is the music video for Tool’s Ænema:

Building up an Arizona Bay public works project would also push the aggregate demand curve out.

Formulas

My boss, who sits behind me, is in charge of dealing with issues related to this equation:

I’m being trained into the specifics this quarter to take it over for our team; I am familiar with the equation from when I interned at State Farm (it comes to finance from actuarial modeling).

You can read all about how that equation probably destroyed 150 years of financial capitalism, mostly the current global economy, and certainly your 401(k) here. It’s a fantastic article by Felix Salmon, whose blog you should be reading.

Though when the angry mob comes for me and my team, I’ll point at community organizers and the CRA.

No English, No Money.

In honor of that last post, I am going to post this video of Shellac playing II Porno Star. Because I wanted that to play after the national anthem, right around the time we could hear sad noises coming from the bedroom where a girl full of cocaine was being debased as badly as our poker penny currency had already been.

Il porno star arrives -
No English, no money.
Two things: a cock like a stallion and an iron will.

He becomes famous.
It’s a kind of fame you can never understand -
full of cocaine and cosmetics, (????????) and prosthetics.

(???????) bucks!

USA Mottos

Freakonomics’ Blog wants a new six word motto for the USA. I’ve been wanting to blog this story for a while.

So I was at a dive bar at last call. Now I’ve been know to enjoy an afterhours party here and there. People starting talking about getting a poker game together that would go from 2am to about 5am. I was definitely in. Where to hold it? I couldn’t, nor could anyone else. But someone knows a guy, an Irish carpenter who was out at another bar, who would have the space and it was a short trip. Phone calls were made, and soon half the bar were all inbound there.

Poker started. 4 of us has put in $50 each, and were given 50 pennies, each representing a $1. Actually two of us had put in $50 – two of the others were good for it. Play started, and I was not doing half bad.

After a while the host came to the poker room, incredibly intoxicated. He had been making out with a women of questionable reputation (many people had shown up to this afterhours for nonpoker reasons), but decided he wanted in on the poker. However he was drunk to the point where he couldn’t understand anything. He wanted to be dealt in the full ante, but had no cash on him. However he was the host.

So 50 more pennies entered the table, but no additional currency was in the bank. It is a terrible and uncertain thing to feel instant inflation as we saw the currency on the table grown 20% with no extra reliable currency in our treasurers’ hands, but there it was (my senses were supplemented, but not overridden, by the alcohol).

The real concern was that, no matter how much we told him, the host was not aware we were playing for real money. He’d throw in 5 pennies and go “I raise you 5 pennies.” We’d respond “You know that that is 5 dollars, right?” He’d respond “Sure….[pause]…so 5 pennies to you.” It was discouraging from a monetary point of view.

He went through money quickly. Very quickly. Soon he was out, but still referring to what he owed the table as pennies. Finally he went all in on a pair of sevens, which he lost against a straight. The girl he was making out with earlier came into the room, clearly after ingesting some cocaine in the bathroom, and beckoned the host into his bedroom. As he was being lead away from the room he had a quick moment of clarity, at which point he looked at us and asked “Wait, were we playing for real money?”

At which point I wanted an American Eagle to land by the window and for the National Anthem to play. A carpenter immigrant, right before hooking up with a cocaine girl of questionable reputation, looks at his 50-to-1 leveraged gambles at 4am and asks “Were we playing for real money?”

I think that is a good metaphor for the 2001-2008 investment era. I also think “Were we playing for real money?” should be our national motto in deference to the Bush era that just preceded us. That is my submission to the contest.

Abortion and Polite Liberal Dudes

So this article, “Why Are Even Smart, Liberal Men Freaked Out by Abortion?”, is circulating around. Apparatchicks says the tone undermines the whole pro-choice movement. (The comments to the original post explode with all kinds of big reactions.) What follows is a string of thoughts that don’t necessarily find a conclusion.

The article is about a 20s women who had an abortion, and how various pro-choice guys react when they learn. Her tone is important – here is a key sentence: “My abortion had basically been the uterine equivalent of minor knee surgery, annoying and a bit painful, but not soul-destroying or existentially angsty.”

I’ve had some discussions recently with a pro-choice friend who is really unhappy with that tone in the pro-choice rhetoric. He feels that “legal, safe and rare” isn’t rare enough, and that women should feel that kind of soul-destroying existential angst. When pressed, he feels it should be legal and safe, but that women should really feel torn up about the decision. I counter that “it is not the end of the world but we should rub her face in it” is advice better suited for when the dog shits the carpet, not for human beings expressing autonomy over their body.

This conversation counters that an existential, angsty, and intellectualized discourse should pervade the decision. To this I am reminded of JM Coetzee’s Youth; it’s his autobiography of his 20s, told from the same dramatic and self-important viewpoint he had as a literary polite liberal dude. The book is highly recommended – it is him writing his own viewpoint in the third person of an insufferable artistic depressive in his 20s after becoming a great Booker-prize winning author (“In a perfect world he would only sleep with perfect women, women of femininity yet with a certain darkness at their core that will respond to his own darker self. But he knows no such women.”). Ending my 20s this year, it is a real trippy read, since I’ve been at least half of this productive decade as that douchebag. At one point in his early 20s he gets a girl pregnant:

He gets one of them pregnant…There is the tiniest pause, long enough for him to accept the opening and speak. ‘I will stand by you’ he could say ‘Leave it all to me’ he could say. But how can he say he will stand by her when what standing by her will mean in reality fills him with foreboding, when his whole impulse is to drop the telephone and run away?

The pause comes to an end. She has the name, she continues, of someone who will take care of the problem…

Now that disaster has struck, she does not hide away in her room pretending nothing is wrong. On the contrary, she has found out what neds to be found out – how to get an abortion in Cape Town [where it is illegal] – and has made the necessary arragenments. In fact, she has put him to shame….

[After] Every few hours she takes one of the pills the woman has given her, followed by water, glass after glass. For the rest she lies with her eyes closed, enduring the pain. Sensing his squeamishness, she has hidden from his sight the evidence of what is going on insider her body: the bloody pads and whatever else there is…

He sleeps on a mattress at the bedside. As a nurse he is useless, worse than useless. What he is doing cannot in fact be called nursing. It is merely a penance, a stupid and ineffectual penance…

She has issued no reproofs, made no demands; she has even paid the abortionist herself. In fact, she has taught him a lesson in how to behave. As for him, he has emerged ignominiously, he cannot deny it. What help he has given her has been fainthearted and, worse, incompetent. He prays she will never tell the story to anyone.

His thoughts keep going to what was destroyed insider her – that pod of flesh, that rubbery manikin. He sees the little creature flushed down the toilet at the Woodstock house, tumbled through the maze of sewers, tossed out at last into the shallows, blinking in the sudden sun, struggling against the waves that will carry it out into the bay. He did not want it to live and now he does not want it to die. Yet even if he were to run down to the beach, find it, save it from the sea, what would he do with it? Bring it home, keep it warm in cotton wool, try to get it to grow? How can he who is strill a child bring up a child?

He is out of his depth…If he has nothing to say, it is because he has not the courage to ask what is happening to her, in her. Is it like a sickness, he wonders to himself, from which she is now in the process of recuperating, or is it like an amputation, from which one never recovers? What is the difference between an abortion and a miscarriage and what in books is called losing a child?

The difference in tone – the women knows what has to be done, while the man runs around as both a navel-gazer and a hysteric, still amazes me when I read it. He is terrified by what is going on, but also wants to intellectualize it. He wants to nurse the clump of cells from the sewer, but also wants to run away from the phone calls. Though on a quick glance, he seems to be the intellectualized one – full of the Big Questions about Life and Responsibility, her with the narrow pragmatism – his intellectualization is a sign of his immaturity and anxiety in the face of these conditions.

She simply goes into a woman space where she knows what needs to be done. This idea of the woman’s space, safe from the disastrous intellectual frettings of men, is also in Coetzee’s masterpiece Disgrace – where the Professor isn’t allowed to be part of his daughter’s safe space in the wake of her terrible assault.

I enjoy when this framing of abortion is used – as something women do, when they know they need to do it, and the intellectualizing of men ranges from fretting to control. Consider this review of The Culture of Death by arch-conservative John Derbyshire: “I wonder again: Who, actually, is the Party of Death? Here I see a woman who, having missed her period and found herself pregnant, has an abortion, comes home, downs a stiff drink, and gets on with her life. With her life.” This notion, of action without justification to your judgers, which is indistinguishable from flippancy at times, is the characteristic of genuine autonomy.

Or so it strikes this polite liberal dude, who often intellectualizes away the autonomy of others. But for all I know I’ve just turned the issue 180 degrees. But I’m trying.

GOP Futures, 1

It’s a shame that David Frum has been exiled from USA commentary corners. From what I understand he’s left the National Review after criticizing Sarah Palin, and is currently involved with some Canadian projects (where he is from). These two quotes are the right way to be the party out of power, and if he was in charge of the Republican Party I could see it being competitive with people like me:

One

A few days ago, a senior Republican shared with me a private email he’d received from another senior Republican. The email angrily denounced President Obama’s “march toward socialism.” I have to stress: this was a private message, not a rant on talk radio, not a fundraising letter from a congressional candidate.

My friends who think this way will see corroboration in yesterday’s news: stocks slumped on fear of a federal bank takeover.

A federal bank takeover is a bad thing obviously. I wonder though if we conservatives understand clearly enough why it is a bad thing. It’s not because we are living through an enactment of the early chapters of Atlas Shrugged. It’s because the banks are collapsing. Obama, Pelosi, et al are big-spending, high-taxing liberals. They are not socialists. They are no more eager to own these banks than the first President Bush was to own the savings and loan industry – in both cases, federal ownership was a final recourse after a terrible failure. And it was on our watch, not Obama’s, that this failure began. Our refusal to take notice of this obvious fact may excite the Republican faithful. But it is doing tremendous damage to our ability to respond effectively to the crisis.

Two

Have you heard about the marsh mouse? The little swamp critter that got $30 million of stimulus bill spending thanks to Nancy Pelosi? Of course you have! The mouse was highlighted on Drudge and chortled over by Glenn Beck. One Republican congressman actually dandled a toy mouse in debate.

The story’s not false exactly. The stimulus money really does contain money for wetlands restoration. One of the wetlands that might benefit really is located on San Francisco Bay. And the marsh mouse really does live there.

So the Republicans who promoted the mouse story came closer to the truth than Nancy Pelosi’s spokesmen did when they blasted the story as a “fabrication.” I’m prepared to bet my share of the Obama tax cuts that the mouse will indeed get its money in the end.

The problem with the story is not that it was false. The problem with the story is that it was stupid.

The US economy has plunged into severe recession (94% of Americans describe economic conditions as “bad,” according to the Feb 2-4 CBS poll, and 51% say conditions are getting even worse).
…
And facing all this – we’re talking about mice?

Could we possibly act more inadequate to the challenge? More futile? More brain dead?

We in fact have a constructive solution to offer, one that would deliver more jobs faster: the payroll tax holiday, an idea endorsed by almost every reputable right-of-center economist. But that’s not the solution being offered by Republicans in Congress. They are offering a clapped-out package of 1980s-vintage solutions, including capital gains tax cuts. Capital gains! Who has any capital gains to be taxed in the first place?

Of course he’s not in charge. And the people in charge are acting like a total liability to the future of their own party.

Your World in Pictures

San Francisco people protesting the opening of an American Apparel store in The Mission neighborhood. “Are you being sarcastic?” “I don’t even know anymore.”

Story: Klingon sword used in two Colorado Springs heists.

A man wielding a “Star Trek Klingon-type sword” robbed two Colorado Springs convenience stores early this morning, police said.

The first robbery happened at about 1:55 a.m. at a 7-Eleven at 145 N. Spruce St., Colorado Springs police said in an incident report. The second robbery happened at about 2:20 a.m. at a 7-Eleven store at 2407 N. Union Blvd.

Witnesses told police that a man wearing a black mask, black jacket and blue jeans entered the stores carrying a sword. The armed robber took an undisclosed amount of cash and fled on foot from both stores, police said.

Officers searched the area but didn’t find the robber or the weapon, which was described as a “bat’leth.”