Bookmarking

(Or: Simplicity and Alternatives)

A couple of months ago, I purchased a smart phone for two main reasons: My old cell phone was decrepit, and I wanted something that was more useful (and professional-looking) for business. I have been continually amazed ever since by how useful it has been, and in how many areas of my life, including blogging.

I certainly wouldn't browse the Internet very much on a smart phone if I had viable alternatives, but so much of my time is currently occupied by taking care of our daughter that if I didn't have a way to do this while she is not-quite-feeding/not-quite-sleeping/not-really-in-the-mood-to-play, or catnapping in my lap, I'd have had to even further reduce my blogging output -- or stop altogether -- long ago. Like so many other things I do with my phone, one of the things most integral to the usefulness of searching for material on the web has been the ability to easily save my output for later, when I have both hands, my full focus, a decent chunk of time, and a "real" computer. For keeping track of web links for later use, be it for blogging, networking, or work-related research, the social bookmarking site, Delicious, had been invaluable. I was a latecomer to the site, adopting it only when I started to notice how much I was using the phone to browse the web. The simplicity of entering and categorizing links is what I liked about the site.

With its recent, botched re-launch -- which seems to have broken the APIs relied upon by any related mobile phone app I can find -- the Delicious site is much less convenient to use for adding new bookmarks now. (Currently, I'm pasting URLs into a to-do list application and adding them to Delicious later. This is tedious, and wastes precious moments of computer time.) On top of this, the process of using a browser pointed at the full site to add or edit bookmarks is now less convenient. These, and other changes, like the heavily-promoted "stacks" ("playlists for the Web") have me echoing ZDNet's Violet Blue, in wondering, "[D]id anyone at AVOS actually use Delicious?"

I want to keep track of content I have found. It should be easy to add, easy to categorize and annotate, and easy to find again. That's all I want. I should at least be able to easily avoid all the new bells and whistles. Who knows? Maybe a graphics-heavy, Yahoo!-like destination site will grab a bigger audience. I won't be part of that audience, though, because if I wanted a television set or an image gallery, I wouldn't be visiting a site whose stated purpose is to organize information.

My own advice to the people at AVOS would be to suck it up, like the folks at Sitemeter did a few years ago, and roll back to its old system. It is less flashy, but its great appeal, at least to me, was its simplicity. That's what I wish they would do, but looking at the site is discouraging, in that the new ownership seem too bedazzled by what they've come up with to listen. So, I'm exporting my bookmarks and looking for alternatives to Delicious, in the likely event that the new proprietors continue to fail to see simplicity for the gem it really is.

Your suggestions, gentle readers, are welcome!

-- CAV

Read more...

His Own Counterexample

According to the New York's paternalistic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, "mak[ing] healthy solutions the default social option [such as by forcing people to adhere to some official's notion of a healthy diet --ed] ... is ultimately government’s highest duty."

Government, as Ayn Rand once explained in, "The Nature of Government," "is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area." Bloomberg plainly understands this much, since he sees it as the best "solution" to the consequences he finds troublesome of the choices other people make.

What Bloomberg fails to grasp or evades is the nature of the rules that government is meant to enforce. Rand addressed that issue, too, elsewhere, in a novel made popular by the current administration, which shares Bloomberg's view of paternalistic government:

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his. [minor format edits, links and bold added]

Rand's view of morality (linked above) as rational self-interest is crucial to understanding a why government is so destructive when it dictates the choices we make -- no matter how minor -- when said choices do not pick the pockets or break the legs of others (except, as in the case of health expenses, when the government forces Peter to pay Paul's medical bills): We have the government, instead of making it possible for us to freely make and act on our own judgements, making it difficult or impossible for us to do so.

This is a big problem when the government is wrong about some guideline, but the precedent for that to happen is set even if some rule, like wearing seatbelts in cars, is actually a good, life-promoting idea. With that in mind, it is interesting that Bloomberg brags about leading, "a national salt reduction initiative and engag[ing] 28 food manufacturers, supermarkets and restaurant chains to voluntarily commit to reducing excessive amounts of sodium in their products." (With the threat of regulations hanging over their heads, their "voluntarism" is much like that you and I show on Tax Day.)

Too bad it seems that it's "time to end the war on salt."

[A] meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine -- an excellent measure of prior consumption -- the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous. [format edits, bold added]

Nutrition is a young science, and it is far from rare for yesterday's wisdom to become today's folly. The best way for the government to help me ensure my own well-being would be for it to get out of the business of making me pay for everyone else's bad choices (and them, any of mine), and to get out of the business of forcing me to take questionable or bad advice, whether I agree with it or not.

The best I can say for Michael Bloomberg regarding my health is this: With friends like him, who needs enemies?

-- CAV

Read more...

"They just don't think about it."

Gary Fields and John Emshwiller of the Wall Street Journal write a must-read article (alternate, non-paywalled link possibly here under "Age-Old Legal Principle Declines") that discusses the decline of the mens rea standard for finding criminal guilt. This unfortunate trend goes a long way in explaining why so many people are finding themselves in legal trouble for doing things that common sense would say are not wrong or, as I once put it, "It's all a federal case:"

... In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.

As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time. ...

The article illustrates the problem well by relating the tale of a trapper who was legally required to sell certain types of animals only to indigenous Alaskans. He was convicted and penalized after making a sale to people he believed were indigenous Alaskans, but who were not.

This problem is so out of hand that our Congress sometimes even compounds illegitimate, rights-violating legislation with carelessness about basic legal protections.

The erosion of mens rea is partly due to the "hit or miss" way American legislation gets written today, says Jay Apperson, a former Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Some lawmakers simply omit criminal-intent provisions when they draft legislation. "Lots of members don't think about it, not out of a malevolent motive," he says. "They just don't think about it." [minor format edits]

This is no coincidence and, really, not surprising: Both the kinds of laws that are being passed and the indifference to the legal protections Americans should enjoy are what you would expect from lawmakers who see their main consideration as something other than protecting individual rights.

-- CAV

Read more...

Two On Practice

It might seem odd to step back and take a fresh look at the merits of something so incontestably beneficial as practice, but a couple of things I ran across recently make me want to do just that.

First, I ran across a trick comedian Jerry Seinfeld used to overcome mental inertia on days he did not feel like writing jokes:

[Seinfeld] told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

The technique strikes me as akin to the tactic of breaking large tasks up into smaller, achievable steps, or of finding "next actions" as productivity guru David Allen repeatedly advises, except that here, a short-term goal is grafted onto an ongoing chore, and serves the same motivating role as a next action or a small sub-goal.

Making the chain grow -- or if you find some other way to make performing a practice session into a game, otherwise "scoring" or "winning" -- is an immediately achievable goal that is relatively easily reached. Rather than simply missing some practice session that would not, alone make or break his slim chance of having a rewarding comedic career, Seinfeld would break the chain now if he failed to write. This is a rather clever way to make a tendency called hyperbolic discounting work to one's own advantage.

The second productivity hack relates to overcoming a tendency to not have presence of mind in certain stressful situations. Carolyn Hax, advising a woman who found being stared at in public to be unnerving, says the following:

Ask yourself, now, what you can realistically hope to do in these situations, then prepare the words, gestures and/or actions. Say your plans out loud in the shower (seriously); repeat them to your friends by telling them the restaurant story and spelling out what you wish you had done. Even when practicing feels stupid, use repetition to teach your brain where the path is. In time, you'll be able to find it no matter how rattled you get.

I did something similar long ago to overcome a childhood fear of medium-sized to large dogs. Looking back, it seems that the automatized beginnings of a rational course of action give the mind a sort of anchor, and this, in turn, enables increasingly longer periods of freedom from the paralysis caused by overwhelming emotion. That freedom permits one to think and, therefore, better deal with the upsetting situation successfully -- which will build confidence and result in more calmness the next time. I don't recall how long it took me to overcome that fear, but there eventually came a day when I walked past a pretty large dog and remembered how scared I used to be of such encounters, regardless of whether the dog seemed friendly or not.

Both techniques involve establishing beneficial habits by overcoming emotional hurdles to performing small actions whose real benefits will accrue only over time, and after multiple repetitions. Practice may make perfect, in terms of skill, but it also creates good habits, and without those, all the talent or skill on earth can come to naught.

-- CAV

Read more...

Skepticism Is Not "Denial"

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe writes a column about a rhetorical tactic taken by global warming alarmists that makes the nuisance of registering for access to his paper worthwhile. [Update: The column is also available on Jacoby's web site.] In "Climate Skeptics Don't 'Deny Science'", Jacoby relates the following interesting piece of news:

You don't have to look far to see that impeccable scientific standards can go hand-in-hand with skepticism about global warming. Ivar Giaever, a 1973 Nobel laureate in physics, resigned this month as a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) to protest the organization's official position that evidence of manmade climate change is "incontrovertible" and cause for alarm. In an e-mail explaining his resignation, Giaever challenged the view that any scientific assertion is so sacred that it cannot be contested. 

"In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves," Giaever wrote, incredulous, "but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

Nor does Giaever share the society's view that carbon emissions threaten "significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security, and human health." In fact, the very concept of a "global" temperature is one he questions... [format edits]

There is more in the column, and Jacoby makes a good, although imperfect attempt to explain why AGW deserves so much skepticism.

In truth, global-warming alarmism is not science at all -- not in the way that electromagnetic radiation or the laws of planetary motion or molecular biology is science. Catastrophic climate change is an interpretation of certain scientific data, an interpretation based on theories about the causes and effects of growing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is not "denying science" to have doubts about the correctness of that interpretation any more than it is "denying economics" to have doubts about the efficacy of Kenyesian pump-priming. 

To avoid giving real science-deniers from the religious right any help, I might have added something like, "This is not to say that solid conclusions about complex, interdisciplinary questions are impossible. For example, biologists regard evolution as a fact." I'd also perhaps have explicitly noted that it is the AGW alarmists, with their bullying tactics, who deny the spirit of science while paying it lip-service.

That said, I think a bigger issue in this debate bears repeating: Endlessly debating this scientific question, while ignoring the political principles behind what (if anything) to do about it, assuming it is happening at all, is a mistake.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Someone has finally gotten around to studying why some languages sound faster than others.

Even Richard Feynman has experienced burnout. Fellow fans of his will want to know how he shook it off.

Jeff Carter, on coming out of the conservative closet in Chicago:

When people find out that I am a conservative, there are three reactions. One, they can't believe it and think I am kidding them, but then talk to me and we become friends. The second is abject horror, they sort of tolerate me but behind my back they insult me. The third is they start pigeon holing me into the most radical of conservative classes. 

The second two, in any kind of "coming out" type of situation, are clues (read: potential warnings) about that person's psycho-epistemology. ("This [pertains] to the method by which he acquires and organizes knowledge -- the method by which his mind deals with its content.") Ignore such information at your own peril.


Updates

 Today: (1) Added link to freely-accessible version of Jacoby column. (2) Two minor format edits.

Read more...

9-24-11 Hodgepodge

How did they get that number?

Suppose you and everyone in your neighborhood were robbed of a significant portion of your assets, including your identity, by a criminal gang. Suppose further that you were all made privy to the gist of how that gang was spending the proceeds, including money borrowed in your name. Suppose you were told that the gang claimed that the spending spree was being performed for your benefit. And finally, suppose someone called you at home to ask what percentage of that money you thought the gang was wasting.

What would you do? I'd hang up.

The fact that Gallup had no trouble generating a completely meaningless poll result (Americans Say Federal Gov't Wastes Over Half of Every Dollar) shows that too many people accept massive government theft as a given, or at least excuse it on the flimsy grounds that it is supposedly for the benefit of "society."

Weekend Reading

"If they really thought all that much of themselves, they wouldn't need to prove it." -- Michael Hurd, in "Achieve for Your Own Sake," at DrHurd.com

"Because intervention creates a systemic risk, the benefit of diversification has shrunk as Washington's control over the economy has grown." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Federal Actions Create Fear, Correlation," at SmartMoney

Highway Robbery

The fact that the phrase "speed trap" is an idiom tells us that the following type of thinking from government officials is very common. What is significant about the example below is just how far -- to the point of a blatant disregard for human life -- such reasoning can go at all levels of government.

Eventually the absurdity of the 55 mph speed limit [as a safety measure] sunk in and in 2006 MassHighway traffic engineers recommended a speed limit increase [on a road that had been rebuilt for high speed]. State Police vetoed the change, preferring the 99% violation rate that let them write tickets at will. Police have no legal role in setting speed limits. Somebody in the Romney administration weighed the risk of losing ticket revenue against the risk of being blamed for accidents. Police won.

Keep this in mind the next time a chance to get the government's nose out of ensuring our "safety" comes up.
 
The Oatmeal on Netflix

Whether the recent Netflix decision to spin off its DVD business is poorly-executed foresight or complete stupidity, only time will tell. And only The Oatmeal can get a good laugh out of its customers in the meantime.

-- CAV

Read more...

Friday Four

1. There's a fun piece about Non-Bavarian German Beer styles over at Slate. It even manages to include one I'd never heard of (or, possibly, had merely forgotten about):

Gose is an obscure style of beer with an unusual set of ingredients, including coriander and salt, which may sound bizarre to some drinkers. Rooted now in the charming, former East German city of Leipzig, the cloudy, unfiltered wheat beer has a 1,000-year history that almost ended in the Cold War. Communist functionaries saw no place for the odd beer in their conformist society, and the style all but disappeared in the aftermath of World War II.

Luckily, there's been a revival in recent years and a small amount of it is bottled and exported. The beer laughs in the face of the Reinheitsgebot, Germany's famed beer-purity law, which allows only water, barley, and hops in beer. The Reinheitsgebot is no longer technically the law of the land, which is good in this case, because Gose's offending ingredients are the very things that make it special.

Gose's sour taste will appeal to fans of Belgium's Gueze style. And the bready, citrusy flavor could draw fans of farmhouse beers. It's not for everyone, but it's a must-try for any serious beer drinker. Its revival is good news for beer lovers; hopefully it sticks around this time. [format edits, link dropped]

I'm one of those strange birds who likes the Belgian style normally spelled Gueuze, so this is high on my beer hunting list.

2. The man behind the recent changes in the Ayn Rand Lexicon has posted about them at Objectivism Online. He has responded to at least one reported glitch and may announce new features there in the future.

3. If you're in the Northeast, you should consider attending the NYOS Conference 2011 (HT: HBL) this November.

Saturday and Sunday attendees will be immersed in an intellectual universe created by some of the best minds in their respective fields. Andrew Bernstein will speak on "Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil", Harry Binswanger will speak on "Psycho-Epistemology: How the Mind Operates the Subconscious", Yaron Brook will speak on "Ayn Rand's Free Market Revolution: How the Ideas of Atlas Shrugged Can End Big Government", Eric Daniels will speak on "The Virtue of Judicial Engagement", Shoshana Milgram will speak on "Ayn Rand's 'Top Secret': An Inspiring Original Screenplay about the Development of the Atomic Bomb", and Jean Moroney will speak on "How Understanding Your Emotions Helps You Think Logically". [minor edits]

The $100.00 discount for the weekend conference ends on September 25.

4. The name just about says it all: USBTypewriter. Now, all any technophobic would-be author of the next Great American Novel needs for inspiration is a packet of printer -- excuse me -- typewriter paper he can wad up periodically to really get his creative juices flowing.

-- CAV

Read more...

What's (really) wrong here?

The following headline appeared this morning at The Drudge Report: "City Orders Couple To Stop Home Bible Study..." Although I am an atheist, I advocate individual rights, and oppose efforts by the government to prevent the free exercise of the rights to both speech (which includes religious speech) and property (which includes using one's home as a church). If a couple wants to hold regular meetings at its house, and does not interfere with the rights of others in the process, these meetings are nobody's business but their own.

This story will doubtless raise the hackles of many people, but I think it does so for the wrong reasons. The emphasis of Matt Drudge's headline, as well as a statement on the web site of the Pacific Justice Institute, which is taking legal action on behalf of the couple, make the case sound tantamount to religious persecution. Property rights (for everyone), the real issue, sound like an afterthought.

The PJI statement makes a perfunctory reference to a legitimate issue the meetings could be raising: whether having fifty people meet each week in a residential neighborhood might interfere with the property rights of the couple's neighbors.

There was no noise beyond normal conversation and quiet music on the home stereo system. They met inside their family room and patio area. Many neighbors have written letters of support, denying they were disturbed by the presence of the Bible study.

So far, so good, but omitted are some issues that the news story brings up:

"The Fromm case further involves regular meetings on Sunday mornings and Thursday afternoons with up to 50 people, with impacts on the residential neighborhood on street access and parking,: City Attorney Omar Sandoval said. [bold added]

This is a legitimate concern. Unfortunately, the city government seems ill-equipped to deal with it properly. Instead of, say, stepping in to enforce something like a restrictive covenant or pursue the parking problem (if there is one) through nuisance law, it is resorting to illegitimate zoning laws:

An Orange County couple has been ordered to stop holding a Bible study in their home on the grounds that the meeting violates a city ordinance as a "church" and not as a private gathering.

Homeowners Chuck and Stephanie Fromm, of San Juan Capistrano, were fined $300 earlier this month for holding what city officials called "a regular gathering of more than three people".

That type of meeting would require a conditional use permit as defined by the city, according to Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), the couple's legal representation.

Running a church does not, in and of itself, violate anyone's individual rights, and thus the government has no business telling people whether they can do so.  It is unclear to me that PJI sees the issue this way, which is ironic, since the best way to protect religious freedom would, in fact, be to do whatever best promotes government protection of property rights for everyone.

The problem isn't just that the law is preventing a homeowner from religious activity in his own home. The problem is that the government is telling us how we can use our own homes at all, regardless of how that use might affect others.

-- CAV

Read more...

A Chuckle from Miss Manners

I have always admired Judith Martin's rational approach to etiquette, which often lends itself to humor in her columns.

Recently, a question revealed that some coward was attempting to "game the system" -- to treat the rules of etiquette as if they had to be followed regardless of any context.

[E]tiquette does not consider a wedding invitation to be equivalent to an invoice. If a present were required from those invited to weddings in which they have little or no interest -- or, as in your case, actually find offensive -- greedy people would be inviting everyone whose address they could find.

...

No, no, no. A wedding invitation requires an immediate response, accepting or declining it. Anyone who accepts presumably cares enough to comply with the convention of sending a present. Those who also care but are prevented from attending may want to send something, but need not.

Those who are the targets of extortion, as you are, should not succumb. You may want to pass this word around the office. [bold added]

I can't stand people who choose to take politeness as a sign of weakness, and I love seeing someone who invariably knows exactly the right way to deal with that annoying problem.

I don't think Miss Manners was joking in that last line, but her understated, yet very clear recommendation to promote etiquette -- and aid justice -- still made me chuckle at the prospect of all parties following through.

-- CAV

Read more...

Netflix: Disrupting Itself?

Farhad Manjoo of Slate looks at the recent, bizarre-sounding decision by Netflix to make its DVD rental and online streaming services into separate businesses. He starts off by ticking off the many reasons the move looks so boneheaded -- and then manages to make a decent case for why it may be a good move after all.

The key advantage of Netflix's new model is that it will give each side of the business -- the DVD side and the streaming side -- flexibility to manage its service in a way that pleases its own customers. As a combined service, any move to strengthen one side of the company over the other would have been perceived negatively by one group of customers. Netflix believes that its DVD shipments will peak in 2013; after that, as fewer and fewer people subscribe to DVDs, it's going to have to raise prices to support the physical infrastructure needed to ship out the discs. Now it will be [Netflix DVD spin-off] Qwikster that will suffer the negative reaction to all future price hikes -- and Netflix that will benefit from the customers getting rid of their DVD plans.

This plan is also straight out of The Innovator's Dilemma: "With few exceptions," [author Clayton] Christensen writes, "the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms' managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology." Christensen argues that setting up a separate organization allows the disruptive side to ignore customers who like the mainstream side. "There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers," he writes. [link for "disruptive technology" added, format edits]

In essence, Manjoo argues that Netflix founder Reed Hastings sees the writing on the wall for DVD rentals and wants to get out while the getting's good -- but continue making money on them in the meantime. This will be inconvenient for those of us who want to use both formats, but I bet many people will pick one or the other. Hastings will get lots of people off the fence that way, have a lock on the streaming subscribers, and have name recognition with the DVD subscribers when that method of home entertainment finally shrivels up.

-- CAV

Read more...

What Traction Looks Like

Taking a look at Instapundit this morning, I found Glenn Reynolds asking whether the U.S. entitlement system is "morally bankrupt". My first reaction was, "That's nice. An ARI article got an Instalanche."

Not to downplay Instalanches, but it turns out that the link leads elsewhere than to Yaron Brook and Don Watkins's recent Forbes piece: It takes the reader from a somewhat sympathetic blogger to a mainstream media site, Yahoo Finance, instead. There, Henry Blodget presents the gist of the argument reasonably well, and notes that he asked Brook about his views:

But if the money for Social Security is being stolen from citizens who don't believe in it, why isn't the money to pay for the military also being stolen from pacifists who don't believe in war?

Because, says Brook, the collection and spending of the latter money is in everyone's interests and is therefore justified.

Hmmm. Social Security certainly has its problems, as does the United States as a whole. But it seems inconsistent to suggest that some money collected and spent by the government is "stolen," while other money isn't.

As someone who is pretty familiar with Rand's ideas, I know that Brook's answer isn't the whole picture here -- but it's impossible to present such a complex argument in an answer to a question, and off the top of one's head in a  conversation. I'm impressed because the answer was still thought-provoking, as evidenced by the last paragraph.

Ayn Rand's ideas have gone, over the course of the last couple of decades, from being actively ignored in major news media to sometimes getting a respectful (if sometimes puzzled) hearing; and from being smeared a la Whittaker Chambers to being asked about thoughtfully. I'm always grateful when her ideas are noticed by sympathetic commentators, but their success will ultimately hinge on being heard by a broader audience than conservatives and libertarians. That's what I like about the Yahoo Finance piece.

Any mention of Rand brings with it the possibility that someone receptive to her ideas will become curious and start reading her. (A snide remark about "selfishness as ... virtue" in a college newspaper did this for me.) But when Rand's ideas are actually given fair treatment, the chances of this happening increase exponentially, both in terms of the number of people who might become curious and in terms of how likely someone might be to decide that that curiosity is worth satisfying.

Contrast this to how the intellectually dead Left "communicates," and it is clear that the battle to change minds is winnable. (As a bonus, you'll also laugh for several reasons.)

-- CAV

Read more...

9-17-11 Hodgepodge

HPV Vaccination Debate Doubly Bad

Michele Bachmann's ridiculous claim about the dangers of HPV vaccination is the wrong way to attack Rick Perry's attempt to force schoolchildren to take the vaccine. First of all, the real reason Perry's proposal was wrong is because the government has no business doing anything except protecting individual rights. Making people do something, even if it is generally a good idea, sets the precedent for the government to decide (correctly or not) what is "good" for us and to make us do it. (This argument doesn't need "extra teeth.")

Bachmann's ridiculous claims about the vaccine can easily make it seem like what Perry wanted to do would have been just fine had the vaccine merely been safe. (Which it is, effectively yanking "teeth" from the argument to many muddled minds.) Second, Bachmann risks causing concern with individual rights to be coupled in the popular mind with similar discredited notions. (These are not the only problems using a poor argument for a good point can cause.)

I'm glad there's now a $10,000 reward being offered for proof of her claims.

Weekend Reading

"The entitlement state is geared to the unwilling at the expense of the willing and able. What could be greater evidence that it is morally bankrupt?" -- Don Watkins and Yaron Brook, in "The Entitlement State Is Morally Bankrupt" at Forbes

"You can't help people who don't consider their behaviors to be a problem." -- Michael Hurd, in "Criminals Are Not 'Regular Folk'" at DrHurd.com

"The only market manipulation is actually practiced by the regulators themselves, who artificially limit where and how much one can invest, along with how much nearly every market can rise or fall. " -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "What's Wrong with Painting the Tape" at SmartMoney

"So it seems America has a greater capacity than a will to fight jihadists, while the jihadists have the reverse -- a greater will to fight than a capacity, and yet they are bolstering the latter, as is obvious in Iran's pursuit of nuclear weaponry." -- Richard Salsman, in "Why Washington Resists Victory in a Post-9/11 World" at Forbes

"When is rationing not rationing, a mandate not a mandate, and price-fixing not price fixing? When the government says so." -- Beth Haynes, in "Health Care Rationing, George Orwell-Style" at Townhall (via Amit Ghate)

My Two Cents

Richard Salsman's piece includes extensive comments regarding America's weak response to the September 1, 2001 Atrocities from historian John Lewis, author of Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History.

Good Article on the Loeb Classical Library

As  have noted in the past, the Loeb Classical Library is a triumph of capitalism and scholarship, although the reported attempts on its part to make their translations more up-to-date concern me. (I hope the classics aren't becoming littered with he-she, or similar egalitarian nonsense.) Other than that, I enjoyed this article about Loeb at The Barnes and Noble Review.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added link to article on Loeb. 

Read more...

Friday Four

1. Proud Father Note: Last night, I reclined in our glider and seated our baby daughter on my chest. In the course of talking to her, I told her she looked "spiffy" in the pink-striped Polo onesie she received as a gift. This earned me my first laugh. I said it again and got another laugh. Oh, and when she's not happy, she has a priceless pout, too.

2. Over the course of taking my turn holding the baby for long stretches during her first few weeks, I entertained myself with the following one-handed computing activity: I got a more up-to-date (albeit less slick) version of a portable Ubuntu Linux to work. I mention this here because my old post on Portable Ubuntu still gets a trickle of hits and that project is poorly-supported, if it is supported at all. (And Portable Ubuntu Tres didn't work so well for me, even after I fixed its startup script.)

Follow these steps. I recommend using at least an 8 GB USB storage device.

1. Download to the pen drive all files noted here, but ignore  the instructions for now.
2. Download to the pen drive the ISO file for the latest "live", long-term-support version of Ubuntu.
3. Use the Univeral USB Installer to install the Ubuntu ISO to the pen drive. Due to the maximum FAT32 file size limitation, you will be able to have at most only a 4 GB virtual hard drive image on your USB storage device.
4. Extract the VirtualBox archive to the root directory of the pen drive.
5. Start your new installation by clicking the "Virtualize this Key" icon in the "VirtualBox"  directory and following the pertinent instructions from the site linked above.

Changes you make, like adding users or system updates will be persistent (i.e., remain in force upon the next "boot." This runs more slowly than Portable Ubuntu does, and it runs within a VM window, rather than dispensing with its own window manager and simply using an application launcher within Windows. But you can run an updated version of Ubuntu from a pen drive under Windows, if you're in a pinch.

3. I have a working copy of the above on the storage media of my smart phone, too. Minus the need to rely on an external processor (rather than just use the one in my phone), my computing life is now even closer to where Eric Raymond once said his might look like in 2014. Oh, and my personal files are encrypted, and backed up that way in the cloud.

4. Allow me to make a very strong mobile app recommendation: Todo.txt Touch, by Gina Trapani. This is my kind of application, because it provides the convenience of mobile technology, while retaining the many virtues of the old, reliable, and standard ASCII text file format. I'd used Todo.txt for years from my laptops and workstations, so the big adjustment I had to make with the phone app was to relocate my to-do text file into another directory on any computer I normally use.

-- CAV

Read more...

Range Anxiety

As I recently noted (and, to set aside the validity of the goal), electric cars are a such a ridiculous way to reduce the burning of fuel that even children could figure this out. But that little detail is hardly where the risibility of the idea ends. Adults who actually drive could, with some knowledge of how electric cars work vis-a-vis their own needs, easily anticipate any number of the other difficulties Louis Woodhill of Forbes discusses. My favorite is "range anxiety:"

On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C.  Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours.  If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead.  And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.

...


The short and highly variable range of a BEV [(battery-electric vehicle)], coupled with its very long recharging time, creates the phenomenon of "range anxiety".  The car takes over your life.  You are forced to plan every trip carefully, and to forgo impromptu errands in order to conserve precious electrons.  And, when you are driving your BEV, you are constantly studying the readouts worrying about whether you are going to make it through the day.

Reviews of the [Nissan] Leaf are filled with accounts of drivers turning off the A/C in the summer and the heat in the winter.  Some drivers even decided that they couldn't risk charging their cell phones, using the radio, or turning on the windshield wipers.

I guess "thought experiments" are okay if you intend to scare yourself silly about how your "emissions" are dooming "the planet," but they are taboo when considering the problems you need to solve in order to live your own life.

I saw an electric car -- it might have been a Chevy Volt -- at a car show, once. For all the  wailing and gnashing of teeth about global warming I keep hearing, I expected the person showing the car to have some idea about its operating costs and capabilities, but she was unable to give me a coherent answer about how it would stack up, cost-wise, against a gas-powered car in an urban setting. Perhaps the automakers who go along with this trend realize on some level that it's all about getting government loot, and parting fools from their money. In the face of such massive stupidity, that would actually be comforting in a perverse way.

-- CAV

Read more...

Easier to Catch

The title of a recent posting by John Cook over at the Endeavour indirectly raises a question. In "Bad Science Is Tolerable, but Resume Padding Is Not," Cook discusses a scandal in cancer research conducted by Anil Potti that took the finding of resume padding on Potti's part to set off. Of course, no one but a fraud  would really "tolerate" bad science, so the first question, "Why?" that comes to mind is wrong, or perhaps rhetorical. This quickly becomes evident in Cook's post from the fact that some scientists have been crying foul ever since 2007.

The real question is this: "Why does it often take something unrelated to bad science to draw attention to bad science?" Cook quotes Keith Baggerly, one of the scientists who worked to expose Potti: "I find it ironic that we have been yelling for three years about the science, which has the potential to be very damaging to patients, but that was not what has started things rolling."

An important part of the problem I think lies in the nature of scientific research itself. How many members of the general public are going to be capable of critically analyzing a new result in a highly specialized field, or even understanding a calling-into-question like that Baggerly helped perform several years ago, and that Cook describes as "extraordinary" in another post? Often, peer review is hard enough for scientists in a position to understand the results and how to think about them.

Published analyses of complex data sets, such as microarray experiments, are seldom exactly reproducible. Authors inevitably leave out some detail of how they got their numbers. In a complex analysis, it’s difficult to remember everything that was done. And even if authors were meticulous to document every step of the analysis, journals do not want to publish such great detail. Often an article provides enough clues that a persistent statistician can approximately reproduce the conclusions. But sometimes the analysis is opaque or just plain wrong.

... Baggerly explained the extraordinary steps he and his colleagues went through in an attempt to reproduce the results in a medical article published last year by Potti et al. He called this process "forensic bioinformatics," attempting to reconstruct the process that lead to the published conclusions. He showed how he could reproduce parts of the results in the article in question by, among other things, reversing the labels on some of the groups. (For details, see "Microarrays: retracing steps" by Kevin Coombes, Jing Wang, and Keith Baggerly in Nature Medicine, November 2007, pp 1276-1277.)

But the fact that science, unlike philosophy, is not always accessible to the layman is hardly the whole picture. Cook goes on to explain that Baggerly and his colleagues went out of their way to make it easy for others to reproduce their analysis of the disputed result. The Economist article Cook points to in his first post discusses some other aspects of the way the peer review process works that can result in shoddy work flying under the radar for some time.

I suspect that another piece of the puzzle is cultural. It would take effort to understand what Potti's opponents did, no matter how easy they made it to do this (and probably no matter how well-described they might be in popular science media). Many laymen might not make the effort to understand what was going on, and perhaps many popular science reporters, responding to the prevalence of this type of reader, stick to stories that sound exciting, as Potti's results did when they were first reported. The bright and shiny new result can be exciting to anyone, but few have the patience for real-life detective work.

When most people are not in the habit of integrating their knowledge, too many things people could actually grasp end up getting neglected, and the only "arguments" many people ever engage in are of the pointless, "bike shed" variety. And all too often, the term "bike shed argument" would be generous to a fault. In such a cultural atmosphere, the lie on the resume gets the headline.

I am left wondering: Had critical thinking deeper prevalence in our culture, would the "Australian Rhodes Scholar" who perpetrated this fraud ever been hired in the first place?

-- CAV

Read more...

How to Think about Batches

You have a stack of, say, a hundred letters and envelopes to mail. You must process these by hand. Is it faster to do each step of the process for all the letters before progressing to the next step (again, for all the letters), or is it faster to everything for each letter, one letter at a time?

The answer may surprise you:

Why does stuffing one envelope at a time get the job done faster even though it seems like it would be slower? Because our intuition doesn't take into account the extra time required to sort, stack, and move around the large piles of half- complete envelopes when it's done the other way. It seems more efficient to repeat the same task over and over, in part because we expect that we will get better at this simple task the more we do it. Unfortunately, in process-oriented work like this, individual  performance is not nearly as important as the overall performance of the system.

Another writer elaborates further, in response to people who were skeptical of this claim:

The shorter stuff and seal times, though, are due to the fact that you are already holding the item from the previous step. You gain 1 second each time from not having to find and pick it up...

You lose between 2 and 5 seconds every time you move the pile around between steps. Also, you have to manage the pile several times during a task, something you don't have to do nearly as much with [one piece flow]...

Returning to the first post, there are other advantages that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the process:

[I]magine that the letters didn't fit in the envelopes. With the large- batch approach, we wouldn't find that out until nearly the end. With small batches, we'd know almost immediately.

There are other advantages to doing work in small batches that apply even for processes that are, or can be, automated:

All these issues are visible in a process as simple as stuffing envelopes, but they are of real and much greater consequence in the work of every company, large or small. What if it turns out that the customers have decided they don't want the product? Which process would allow a company to find this out sooner?

Lean manufacturers such as Toyota discovered the benefits of small batches decades ago. When I teach entrepreneurs this method, I often begin with stories about manufacturing. Before long, I can see the questioning looks: what does this have to do with my startup?

But the theory that is the foundation of Toyota's success can be used to dramatically improve the speed at which startups find validated learning.

This last point is impressive, and it reminds me of how an engineer once solved a challenging problem by learning how to "fail faster".

I have to admit that I was highly skeptical that stuffing one envelope at a time could outpace batch processing, but I suspect that it was my passing acquaintance with the great advantages automated manufacturing can offer in  terms of time savings. It is interesting to learn that batch processing not only doesn't always save time, but has other disadvantages.

This post is a reminder that our thinking about even simple things like stuffing an envelope can be limited by implicitly-held premises or assumptions. Checking against reality can very easily refute one's "wisdom," and discovering why one was wrong can both correct and lead to new  knowledge, including about matters that are not obviously related to one's original query. 

-- CAV

Read more...

Spring? In What Sense?

Via HBL comes an ominous report about things on the ground in Egypt. The title just about says it all: "Egypt's Military Rulers Ignored Pleas from US as Mob Attacked Israeli Embassy."

Israel was forced to send military aircraft to Cairo to evacuate its ambassador and more than 80 diplomats after a mob, angered by the killing of three Egyptian border guards by Israeli forces last month, laid siege to the embassy. As the Egyptian police and army stood by, unwilling or unable to intervene, the rioters broke through the mission's defences and ransacked the building. The incident has plunged relations between Israel and its oldest Arab ally deep into crisis.

Fresh details disclosed yesterday showed how narrowly an even more serious incident was averted. Both Israel and America appeared concerned that the indecent could spiral into a repeat of the US embassy siege in Tehran after the Iranian revolution of 1979, when 42 US diplomats were held hostage for 444 days.  

Regarding this news story and the so-called "Arab Spring," I commend you to the last two comments of a post at this very blog after the uprisings in Tunisia and Obama's admonition to Hosni Mubarak.

--- In Other News ---

Another round of Jean Moroney's "Tap Your Own Brilliance" teleclasses is starting up soon and space is limited. It's also a steal at less than a couple hundred smackers. I'll quote the participant review she cites in the mailing list announcement I received: "This class makes it easier to face difficult decisions, to more quickly find paths to better solutions, and to overcome obstacles such as overload, confusion and lack of ideas. The time and money I spent thinking about thinking was a solid investment that will pay dividends for decades." All I can add to this is, "And you can use it now."

A conservative commentator makes quite a few amusing and trenchant remarks about the Obama Presidency. I disagree with the title of the article, however, which calls Obama's agenda "Obsolete." As I once said of Social Security during a "man-on-the-street" interview ages ago, "That's not an 'obsolete' idea: It was never a good idea in the first place." I was quoted, but that gem was left out. Nevertheless, I was happy to see that I was not so heavily edited as to sound like a buffoon.

Is Apple disrupting disruptive technology? This blog posting on "The New Apple Advantage" makes the best case I have ever seen for why, despite vendor lock-in and a lack of control by end-users, Apple has a competitive advantage. All that control comes at a price that people are less and less willing to pay. There is a lesson for any high-end vendor here.

Read more...

9-10-11 Hodgepodge

My hands are tied and I have a full plate today, so not much new from me. Enjoy the links!

Weekend Reading

"When it comes to excessive behaviors, the issue isn't only, 'How much is too much?' The issue is also how one thinks, based on his or her particular context." -- Michael Hurd, in "How Much Is Too Much?" at DrHurd.com

"[W]hile I generally avoid catching 'falling knives' or picking bottoms in weak stocks, a recent jump in one notable indicator has me once again taking a shot at shipping." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Smoother Waters Ahead for Shipping Stocks? " at SmartMoney

" In the past decade [the 23] states with right-to-work laws have seen jobs increase by 3 million, while the other states have seen a net job loss of 1 million." -- Richard Salsman , in "The Jobs Speech Obama Dares Not Deliver" at Forbes

"Speaking of which, we need to start renaming muggings as 'mugger-victim partnerships.'" -- Paul Hsieh , in "Let's Model ObamaJobs After ObamaCare!" at PajamasMedia

My Two Cents

The Salsman piece is one of the best and most informative on unemployment I have ever read. Thank you, Barack Obama, for deciding to babble about jobs the other day.

Hurd's discussion of "excessive behaviors" is the antidote to the pernicious ideas that we either have to be, say, (a) slobs or neatness freaks, or (b) find some kind of "golden mean" between slovenliness and sterility. Principles and algorithms are not the same thing.

-- CAV

Read more...

All Three Buttons!

One of the happy surprises that has come with fatherhood has been that, much to my astonishment, I am really beginning to enjoy dressing my daughter each day. I suspect that the main reason for this is that the changing table makes it much easier to interact with her. My hands are free and we're close enough to make eye contact easily. It also helps that I am not on the floor (and uncomfortable) as during playtime, and neither of us is constrained by some kind of contraption or other, like a baby seat or a Bjorn.

The fun began when, a few weeks ago, I noticed upon taking over from Mrs. Van Horn in the early morning, that the baby's onesie often had only two of its three snaps fastened. As it turns out, working in low light while trying to keep the baby quiet during diaper changes would sometimes prompt Momma to take the shortcut.

Since I usually provide some sort of narrative to the baby as I go about my time with her (and I like to give my wife a hard time over things like this), I began having fun with it as I buttoned up the baby's bodysuit. "All three buttons! Accept no substitutes!" After my "competitor" turned up the heat by buttoning them all, I began adding, "and beware of imitators!" to this. Once, for a onesie with additional buttons down the front, I said, "Eight whole buttons! This would have been a disaster if 'Momma two-snaps' had tried to put it on you." Mrs. Van Horn was, of course, within earshot for the ribbing on that one. (For the record, Mrs. Van Horn is a very good mother, and, has a good sense of humor. And Dad will lay off a little when the baby starts picking up English.)

The joking has gradually transformed the task into a game for me, and I began giving "fashion reviews" of whatever I change the baby into some time ago, usually tracing out or lightly tapping whatever I am describing at any given moment, like the fringe of a collar or elements of any decorative patterns. Before we took her to the beach recently, for example, I assured her that her bathing suit -- which looked like a wet suit with broad pink and white horizontal stripes and a bright green zipper down the front -- would instantly evacuate the entire beach of "all the other women" as they scrambled to go out and find more fashionable beachwear.

I get some of the best smiles in the world out of her when I dress her, now, and there's nothing like a smile to a Dad.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected "Mamma two-buttons" to "Momma two-snaps." 

Read more...

Holt on Leadership

I wasn't particularly looking for inspiration today, but found it anyway. Over at Lifehacker, Adam Dachis posts a quote on leadership from John Holt:

Leaders are not what many people think -- people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. 'Leadership qualities' are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the 'charisma' that we hear so much about.

Taking a very brief look at the Wikipedia entry about the man, I am not sure I would agree with much else that he had to say, but the above is worth remembering during difficult times.

-- CAV

Read more...

California's "Green Bowl"

Joel Kotkin, like many other recent commentators, notes the rapid deterioration of California's state-run economy. The following passage about the systematic destruction of its agricultural sector by "greens" struck me as particularly ironic, given the state's historical role as a destination for "Okies" fleeing the Dust Bowl back in the Great Depression, and who is causing it to happen:

Nowhere was California's old technological ethos more pronounced than in agriculture, where great Californians such as William Mulholland, creator of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and Pat Brown, who forged the state water project, created the greatest water-delivery system since the Roman Empire. Their effort brought water from the ice-bound Sierra Nevada mountains down to the state's dry but fertile valleys and to the great desert metropolis of Southern California. Now, largely at the behest of greens, California agriculture is being systematically cut down by regulation. In an attempt to protect a small fish called the Delta smelt, upward of 200,000 acres of prime farmland have been idled, according to the state's Department of Conservation. Even in the current "wet" cycle, California's agricultural industry, which exports roughly $14 billion annually, is slowly being decimated. Unemployment in some Central Valley towns tops 30 percent, and in cases even 40 percent.

And now, notes my friend, Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue, green regulators are imposing new groundwater regulations that may force the shutdown of production even in areas like his that have their own ample water supplies.

As with anything else that promotes human life, so it is with water: If we don't have it, we're supposed to do without it, and if we have it, we're supposed to do without it.

-- CAV

Updates


Today: Corrected spelling of "Okies."

Read more...

Good Question

Niall Ferguson asks a thought-provoking question at The Daily Beast: What if the September 11, 2011 Islamist atrocities had never happened? After noting that, contrary to what one might expect, polling data show very little movement of American opinion on several matters related to the war, Ferguson turns around and forgets the lesson he just taught regarding how things have shaken out in the Arab world.

Some time after Bush foils the attacks and our leftist media expose his methods, Ferguson imagines the Arab world catching fire:

The government of Qatar -- gone. The government of Kuwait -- gone. Above all, the government of Saudi Arabia -- gone. True to form, the experts are soon all over network TV explaining how this fundamentalist backlash against the U.S.-backed oil monarchies had been years in the making (even if they hadn't quite gotten around to predicting it beforehand). "Who lost the Middle East?" demands Kerry, pointing an accusing finger at George W. Bush. (Remember, prior to 9/11 Bush favored a reduction of U.S. overseas commitments.) The Democrats win the 2004 election, where-upon bin Laden's new Islamic Republic of Arabia takes hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh…

In other words, if things had happened differently 10 years ago -- if there had been no 9/11 and no retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq -- we might be living through an Islamist Winter rather than an Arab Spring.

Has Ferguson not noticed the large Islamist factions in Libya and Egypt? Does  history not offer us numerous examples of disciplined Communist or Islamist factions taking over the reigns after similar revolutions in the recent past? I, for one, am very hesitant to call this "spring" in an Arab world where popular opinion, only ten years ago, was so anti-American. (I'll abstain from commenting on whether the Arab regimes Ferguson calls allies really are, or whether our actions in the Middle East have been better than doing nothing.)

Ferguson, until he starts gushing about an Arab "spring" seems about to make a point similar to one once made by Ayn Rand about long-term historical trends:

There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man's rational faculty -- the power of ideas. If you know a man's convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man's choice.

If American opinion is essentially unchanged ten years on, why would Arab opinion be any different? And why would a society of people acting from the same premises suddenly make big changes?

Had the particular atrocities of ten years past not occurred, others or none might have taken place. Different regimes or none might have fallen. Our immediate situation might be better or worse. But long-term historical trends don't change unless men and cultures change. America is mainly pragmatic and the Arab world mystical. Neither culture will maintain or achieve freedom for long until it changes for the better.

-- CAV

PS: Above, I mention Communists taking over revolutions. It should be obvious that I am not worried about that particular thing happening. Rather, it is small, disciplined factions like them (such as Egypt's Moslem Brotherhood) who can win out in the aftermath of blind revolts that concern me.

Updates

Today: Corrected source to Daily Beast and added a PS. 

Read more...

Absurd and Dangerous

Rachael Larimore of Slate epitomizes a serious problem among Americans, including many who are beginning to realize just how absurd many nanny-state laws (in force or proposed) really are: She fails to appreciate how dangerous such laws really are, when considered in the context of other, similar,  laws and the enormous, intrusive, and often improper reach of our government.

State assemblyman Tom Ammiano (shockingly, a San Francisco Democrat) has introduced legislation that would require worker's comp and substitute caregivers to provide break time for all domestic workers, and by domestic workers, he is including the teenager you hire to come watch your kids so you can catch dinner once a month at a restaurant that doesn't offer crayons with its menus. 

Larimore sees the absurdity, and correctly realizes that something like this is basically impossible to enforce -- uniformly, anyway. But with only the conspiracy theory-like fears of social conservatives as a foil to her conventional, altruistic focus on the "little people" most obviously affected by the law, she remains oblivious to its actual danger.

I suspect that even teenagers are smart enough to know that if they go around demanding detailed pay stubs and worker's comp insurance that parents they work for will be only to happy to find someone else. So enforcement won't likely be high. But why pass legislation that is unlikely to be enforced? It could still have a chilling effect [on parents hiring babysitters and result in poor teenagers].

That chilling effect won't end with date night, however. Suppose a parent gets on the wrong side of some government functionary with enforcement power (or a favor to call in with someone who does), or someone with a good lawyer? How hard would it really be to establish the use of an illegal baby-sitter or, worse, a pattern of such activity?

Laws like this -- and there are plenty -- serve as a means for people in government to arbitrarily hassle people, with the added benefit (but not for the people whose rights government is supposed to protect) that any example of enforcement will make others more timid in the face of a government with its hands in everything.

Speaking about arbitrary laws, Ayn Rand once had this to say:

The threat of sudden destruction, of unpredictable retaliation for unnamed offenses, is a much more potent means of enslavement than explicit dictatorial laws. It demands more than mere obedience; it leaves men no policy save one: to please the authorities; to please -- blindly, uncritically, without standards or principles; to please -- in any issue, matter or circumstance, for fear of an unknowable, unprovable vengeance.

Granted, this law does spell out what it forbids, but with so many prescriptive laws already on the books that nobody can keep track of; and with so many things that are illegal that shouldn't be, and so aren't apparent to common sense; and so much capricious enforcement, this proposed law might as well be arbitrary. Consider how an average Joe might see this: If something so blatantly stupid as worker's comp for baby-sitters is on the books, God only knows what other mundane activities can get you in trouble!

If Rachael Larimore wants to know why some lawmakers make such asinine proposals, this is her answer.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

An excellent and very accessible essay about the role of natural selection in evolution by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin recently came to my attention. I highly recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in understanding that subject. 

I love my new smart phone, but find the atomization of much of the web into individual "apps" a little odd. Apparently, that's not the way things are done everywhere. One writer who visited Taiwan with a WebOS phone learned from his experience that, "As long as you have a good browser, your device won't become a brick."

An article in the Wall Street Journal defines several commonly-cited measures of our national debt and makes the following valuable point: "[T]he intra-governmental debt should be counted as though it were publicly held debt, as that's exactly what it will be in the fullness of time." (via HBL)

Read more...

9-3-11 Hodgepodge

Private (and Temporary!) Post-Boxes

In our current apartment, Mrs. Van Horn and I enjoy the benefit of a staff who will sign for package deliveries and keep the packages until we are able to pick them up, making us able to take full advantage of the convenience of on-line shopping.

But what happens after we eventually move? Amazon and 7-Eleven may have an answer:

According to a source with knowledge of the project, the idea is simple: these nondescript boxes will be in 7-Eleven stores across the country and act as a sort of P.O. box for Amazon purchases. Once a customer makes a buy on Amazon's website he can select a 7-Eleven close to work, or on the way home and have the package dropped off there.

When the package is actually delivered, the customer receives an email notification along with a bar code to his smartphone and heads to the 7-Eleven. There he'll stand in front of the locker system, which looks like the offspring between an ATM machine and a safety deposit box. The machine will scan the bar code on his handset to receive a PIN number [sic]. He'll punch that PIN number [sic] and retrieve the package. 

What a great (and well-timed) idea!

Weekend Reading

"Make a cost-benefit analysis. You'd never buy an expensive appliance without first investigating the facts about it and your need for it." -- Michael Hurd, in "Go All the Way" at  DrHurd.com

"Because everything feeds into the stock market, investors often become overwhelmed when trying to decipher all the various indicators and inputs." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "How to Watch the Market" at SmartMoney

"How odd -- that the world's most famous investor doesn't believe investing is a job." -- Richard Salsman, in "Warren Buffett and Other Anti-Rich Capitalists" at  Forbes

"The patient may never know if the doctor is giving his best objective medical advice, or being swayed by the latest memo from the ACO administrator demanding greater cost savings." -- Paul Hsieh, in "How ObamaCare Plays Games with Your Life" at PajamasMedia

My Two Cents

As a side-benefit, Michael Hurd's column has helped me better understand something that has puzzled me generally about how I have seen some people cast long-term changes in their lifestyles in reaction to others around them who are not. Building from Hurd's example of smoking cessation, we can all recall people who might say to a smoker something like, "Aw, c'mon! One cigarette isn't going to kill you!"

Barring truly bizarre circumstances, this is completely true, and yet I sometimes see, as an answer, something to the effect that smoking just one cigarette, period, and even regardless of an individual's context, violates the principle that life is the standard of value for any action. This is ridiculous because the same process of cost-benefit analysis that might help a chronic smoker remember why he wants to quit might tell the once-in-a-blue-moon cigar smoker to go ahead and light up on occasion.

The problem for the smoker trying to quit isn't that smoking is intrinsically evil, or that lighting up, always and for everyone, violates the principle that life is the standard of value (in a rationalistic, context-free sense). The problem is that in his particular case, a cost-benefit analysis would remind him that his habit is harming him (probably in more than one way) and that lighting up will further the harm, not in the least by making it harder for him to quit.

"Smoking just one cigarette is bad," is not a principle. It might, however, be a correct application of the principle that life is the standard of value to a smoker's particular life due to the enormous difficulties the activity presents to him versus whatever pleasure it might offer. (Let me stress that pleasure can be a rational value.)

PS: The above is not to say that just because an action doesn't kill you at once that it can't always be wrong to perform it. Refusing to think about some issue -- provided you know you need to do so -- is always wrong. On the other hand, the list of things for which this is true may be smaller than meets the eye. Is taking poison always wrong? Some poisons, like botulism toxin, have beneficial uses, and even taking lethal doses isn't wrong if you intend to commit suicide because you have concluded that, for whatever reason, that continuing to live would be worse than the alternative.

Bombastic Art

Recently, Snedcat emailed a link to a hilarious set of "18 particularly ridiculous prog-rock album covers" over at the AV Club.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added a PS to "My Two Cents." 

Read more...

Friday Trio

In no particular order, here are three things that amused me, or struck me as good news, over the past week. (It was to be four, but we're having family over and people are showing up as I write this...)

1. Actually, this was over a week ago, but I never slipped in a Proud Father Update here. At two months of age, Baby Van Horn gave us her first real smiles!

Yeah. I know: Welcome to life as a marionette, Dad!

2. Not because I think that sitting is necessarily the harbinger of death (or that they cure "the 3 o'clock slump" I never get), but because I find sitting continuously to be extremely uncomfortable, I am glad to see that standing desks are becoming more popular in the workplace. 

3. The Futility Closet takes a look at two historical errors by The New York Times. In the one I hadn't heard about before, the Grey Lady attempts to dissuade a scientist from wasting his time experimenting with flight, one week before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. I remember reading about the second error in grade school, but did not know that it was the Times that tried to school Robert Goddard on physics.

-- CAV

Read more...

This Needs a Column?

Tuesday, I noted that, in a more rational culture, superstitions -- such as the fear, endemic and unique to South Korea, that sleeping in a room with a running electric fan can be a fatal proposition -- would quickly die out:

In particular, anyone with the habit of relating one item of knowledge to another would quickly reject any of the "explanations," if he somehow ended up considering them seriously at all, regardless of his level of scientific training.

Today, I ran across a column about "green" technology that busts a few myths about electric cars. Among the myths, Margaret Wente addresses a couple I can only attribute to magical thinking about the origins of electricity:

Here's another catch: Electric cars aren't necessarily green at all. Electric vehicles require large amounts of electricity -- so much that Toronto Hydro chief Anthony Haines says he doesn't know how he'd get it. "If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails," he said recently.

And if the extra electricity isn't generated by renewable energy, then overall carbon dioxide emissions will go up, not down, Prof. Smil says. "The only way electric cars could reduce global carbon emissions would be if all the additional electricity needed to power them came from carbon-free energies." He also makes the essential point that the world's energy infrastructure is based on fossil fuels. ...

All true, but it strikes me as incredible that anyone is having to say this at all and, now that Wente mentions it, it positively blows my mind that so much development of this blatantly questionable technology is going on. Electric cars use electricity, and electricity has to come from somewhere.

Philosophical ideas have consequences. Neither the collectivism that justifies the government interventions behind electric car development nor the altruism that says we must sacrifice prosperity to nature have rational justifications. Is it any wonder that when we keep tossing reason out at the ballot box, we wake up one day to find our society making mistakes schoolchildren could have anticipated decades ago, and on a massive scale at that?

-- CAV 

Read more...