links for 2008-09-30
2008.09.30 @ 06:00-
Jas' wedding banquet looks so delish I must give this place a swirly whirly
links for 2008-09-29
2008.09.29 @ 06:00-
As if GoDaddy mgmt team political donations to McCain weren't bad enough …
-
"It all boils down to our horrendous educational system, and, as a direct result, the lack of hope in our young people. With no possibility of receiving a quality education, and the prospects for a decent job virtually nonexistent, many of our youth see the dream of a stable and prosperous life as nothing more than an illusion."
-
This is pretty awesome
-
Still funny after all these years
Who doesn’t love babies?
2008.09.28 @ 20:53My best friend had her second baby yesterday, a big ole’ nine pound eleven ounce girl measuring 22″ long who popped in a week early. Welcome to the US and A, S.J.!
And for those of you who haven’t yet met him, here’s some video footage of S.J.’s older brother Adam, filmed when I roadtripped through Indy for Christmas 2006.
Congratulations, ALO. I love you!
links for 2008-09-28
2008.09.28 @ 06:00-
I'm in! That was easy. 1250?!? Geez, I thought this was a private club.
links for 2008-09-27
2008.09.27 @ 06:00-
"Thaler and Sunstein suggest that those who sell mortgages, issue credit cards, and market cell-phone plans (among other goods) should be required to disclose in simple and digestible terms the true cost of the service in question, including late-fees and other surcharges likely to be incurred, as well as a pattern of the customer’s own previous consumption of the product at issue."
Why the loan to a top university might be worth it
2008.09.26 @ 16:54Why eat beans and take out massive loans to attend a top university when your state school is offering you a merit scholarship?
Parents, significant others and acquaintances already working for a prospective employer are deemed to be the most influential contacts when making a career choice.
If you’re surrounded by people whose default options are careers whose average compensation is X vs. people whose default options are careers whose average compensation is X/2, then, all other factors equal (and by all other factors I include how comfortable one feels when they visit campus), wouldn’t it be optimal to surround yourself with the X-factor?
links for 2008-09-26
2008.09.26 @ 06:00The ethics of efficiency
2008.09.25 @ 10:56There’s a paragraph in “Queuing conundrums” in the September 13th issue of The Economist that gave me pause and made me reflect on the role of the state and, more specifically, the ends towards which the state’s activities are directed:
The researchers [three physicists] looked at how this equilibrium [”what game theory calls a Nash equilibrium” … “the point where no individual driver could arrive any faster by switching routes”] could arise is travelling across Boston from Harvard Square to Boston Common. They analysed 246 different links in the road network that could be used for the journey and calculated traffic flows at different volumes to produce what they call a “price of anarchy” (POA). This is the ratio of the total cost of the Nash equilibrium to the total cost of an optimal traffic flow directed by an omniscient traffic controller. In Boston they found that at high traffic levels drivers face a POA which results in journey times 30% longer than if motorists were co-ordinated into an optimal traffic flow. Much the same thing wa found in London (a POA of up to 24% for journeys between Borough and Farringdon Underground stations) and New York (a POA of up to 28% from Washington Market Park to Queens Midtown Tunnel).
I like how the delta used here is one baselined against the Nash equilibrium but I wonder if each and every driver suffered a POA, or if the numbers mentioned are in aggregate. Did anyone save time? Or does everyone suffer without Big Brother Traffic Controller?
I noticed this blurb as over the past few months I’ve been struggling in the back of my head with notions of a regulatory state and its Efficiency Imperative. Is it okay to impose artificial constructs onto the marketplace if the goal is a more efficient market? This is what Glaeser seems to argue in The Rise of the Regulatory State. At the time, I read it and thought, “Okay, yeah, maybe, I like efficiency.”
But then, I thought, “Wait a second. Efficiency for whom and at what cost?”
I’m thinking about the fact that my default experience in school, pre-Academy, and in the workplace, excluding Blink and the Terrence Thomas Era, has been one of exclusion and limitation. Which is to say: I was excluded from the benefits accorded to the majority and asked to, in one way or another, limit my talents so that I didn’t disrupt the classroom / make people in the office feel dumb. (I should probably put that last part in quotation marks as it’s not a paraphrase.) I was asked to hold myself back and not perform at my top levels for the sake of the efficient functioning of the enterprise as a whole.
Which makes me think: efficiency is great, in theory. You sum things up, and then you perform an optimization process, bodda bing. But this is so State Enterprise, so Stalin, so Hegel-revolutionary-history. This is communism! Why not optimize for each unit and then sum? That is, instead of
Optimize sum of units
why not
Sum optimized units
???
Seems the communist, I mean regulatory, state seems to be horny for the former, whereas I’m feeling the latter. Hence my take on libertarian maternalism: I want to market optimized decision-making at the individual, unit level. Very targeted marketing. Not blanket policies that apply to all in all situations. But intelligently engineered (sorry; eat it ;) human-centered programmes (I’m feeling a mite The Economist at the moment, Sirs) that optimize units, so that society, in its sum, kicks more ass than ever.
Without forcing me to bind my wings.
(Hmm, equation to prove: is “sum optimized units” > “optimized sum of units”?)
That said, I’m still working things out in my head, and am open to different takes on this.
What say you in the matter of being bossed around and told what to do for the sake of an efficient state?
links for 2008-09-25
2008.09.25 @ 06:00-
C'mon, a sample set of 46? Surely we can do better than extrapolating from less than four dozen cornhuskers.
-
How is it that Ben Edelman is still taken seriously?!? "often provide" … Define "often"? This clown needs to be stopped, yesterday.
-
My friend Andrea's review of 'Audacity of Hope' is A+
-
Drawing conclusions from a study of 46 people? Suspicious. They need to explore what makes someone fear-driven vs. not fear-driven if you ask me.
We are all mixed
2008.09.24 @ 11:44As a kid I got picked on for a number of reasons, the top two being my non-whiteness and my then-atheism. As I flummoxed (solecism alert!) into adulthood, I reworked my victimhood badge in one of honor, and made myself feel special because I Was A Member Of The Brown People’s Club. My membership has made me feel anything from smug haughtiness at its worst to gentle relief (that I can wiggle my way out of ever feeling White Guilt) at its best. Add to this the Woe Is Me I Am A Misfit Toy dirge of the half-n-half and what you get is a very flat view of self and humanity.
Which is to say: the notion that competing loyalties exists only in the domain of race is nincompoopery. Of course I don’t actually feel that way, but it’s easy for me to forget that just as my life’s journey is and continues to be a complex one, so too is your journey and the journeys of all our fellow humans.
I was reminded that being mixed does not just mean checking more than one race box whilst sucking down coffee and reading Kathleen Spivack’s nonfiction piece “Language” in the Winter 2007 issue of The Massachusetts Review:
Half German and half American, we had acquired a split which allowed us to be totally comfortable in neither realm.
She continues by sharing a childhood fantasy of metaphorically receiving a trophy for her victimhood:
We were Americans really, after all. We wanted to be sloppy and free.
I invented the persona in which I was an American girl who went to war and killed Germans and Austrians, and I put myself to sleep at night with that fantasy. The fantasy always concluded with me lying, wounded and bleeding, bayonet still in hand, on top of a pile of dead Nazi soldiers, and my mother sobbing over my impending death, realizing what a true heroine her daughter was. In my fantasy she begged God for forgiveness for not appreciating my true heroic nature, her only daughter, and for having constantly bothered me with such trivia as bad posture, table manners, and general disorderly conduct. “How could I have wronged you so, my darling daughter?” In the final delicious scene I would close my eyes, a true American patriot, and expire. When that did not give me enough satisfaction I would proceed to the funeral scene, a fantasy in gorgeous color. And I would sob myself deliciously to sleep, in mingled sorrow and delight, imagining how much my family would miss me.
I am split, torn! I suffer for this! See my suffering! Love me for it!
If and when I feel myself starting to re-mount the high horse of I Am Mixed And Have A Monopoly On Feeling Different, I need to remember: we are all mixed.