July 2006 Archives

Ilkka Kokkarinen of Sixteen Volts translates a theory about "the religion of women" originally propounded by Tommi (who is perhaps from Denmark?) (who is Finnish). In part:

The relevant universe consists of two things: Me and World. The World is considered to have a soul and is anthropomorphic: it has thoughts, preferences and motives behind its actions, just like humans do. (Let the World here be one thing for simplicity. It could also be understood, the way it usually is understood, as a complex that consists of many individual actors, but this has no effect on the basic idea.)

The most essential part of both Me and World is the personal experience, that is, emotions. In other words, the subjective experiences of the first person. The basic attitude towards the emotional sphere is utilitarian: negative emotions have a negative sign and the positive ones have a positive sign. The quality of your life is then measured as the sum of these emotions. ...

The success of My emotional life is the World's responsibility. If I don't have a good time, the World is evil and guilty. More precisely, it is mean i.e. hostile. Let me call this the Basic Rule of the ethics of the religion of women.

There's more, and more depth, and I offer it only to solicit further opinions. The comments on Sixteen Volts are interesting, both denigrating the theory and modifying it.

Luke Turf provides an utterly fascinating report about a Thailand marriage tour that starts with six single men from Denver and gets five of them engaged within a week. I can certainly relate to how these men were feeling about stereotypical American women... until I met Jessica, I never thought I'd meet the woman of my dreams. (And after meeting her, I knew pretty quick that she is the one for me. Complaints about "American women" go doubly for most women in Los Angeles, but Jessica was a shining exception.)

Update:
And here's an account of a Ukrainian marriage tour.

Here's the results of the Pacific Research Institute's study of economic freedom for 2004. Reassuringly, I moved from California, the 49th most free state, to Missouri, the 10th most free state. The rankings take a variety of factors into account and prefer low regulation, low taxes, and low spending (fitting with PRI's free market perspective on goodness).

The New York Times has a great article full of personal stories about working-age men who don't feel like working. The article portrays the men in a generally neutral light, but it's clear that these guys are pretty pathetic and/or beaten down.

Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay and fewer benefits than they once earned, and they have decided they prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met their needs.

"To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run," said Christopher Priga, who is 54 and has not had steady work since he lost a job with a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox in 2002. "There’s no point in hitting for base hits," he explained. "I’ve been down the road where I did all the things I was supposed to do, and the end result of that is nil."

That must be frustrating to feel like you've done all the right things and still can't succeed. It seems unwise, however, to neglect planning for the future by only trying for "home runs" when there are bills to pay.

It's a real blessing to have a job I enjoy, but I think I'd be compelled to get a job I didn't enjoy if I had to to support my family. Spending savings and incrementally selling the house wouldn't be enough.

(HT: Vox Baby.)

Although I don't put much credence in dire warnings about man-made global warming, it looks like Nobel Prize-winning Professor Paul Crutzen has come up with a way to slow or stop global warming that will be as much as 1000 times cheaper and far more effective than implementing the Kyoto Protocol.

Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research.

A fleet of high-altitude balloons could be used to scatter the sulphur high overhead, or it could even be fired into the atmosphere using heavy artillery shells, said Professor Crutzen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.

The effect of scattering sulphate particles in the atmosphere would be to increase the reflectance, or "albedo", of the Earth, which should cause an overall cooling effect.

Professor Crutzen emphasizes that he'd prefer for industrial nations to cut their carbon dioxide production, but he doesn't say (as quoted in the article) why that approach would be preferable. He estimates the costs of lacing the upper atmosphere with sulfer at between $25 billion and $50 billion, but even at the top of that range his proposal would cost approximately 0.1% as much as implementing the Kyoto Protocol. (And the Kyoto Protocol itself admits that it would have an unmeasurable effect on temperature, even were it fully implemented.)

I can't wait for environmentalists to start protesting the millions of pounds of garbage left in the desert by illegal immigrants. I will definitely hold my breath.

After three years of cleanups, the federal government has achieved no better than a 1 percent solution for the problem of trash left in Southern Arizona by illegal border-crossers.

Cleanup crews from various agencies, volunteer groups and the Tohono O'odham Nation hauled about 250,000 pounds of trash from thousands of acres of federal, state and private land across Southern Arizona in 2002 to 2005, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

But that's only a fraction of the nearly 25 million pounds of trash thought to be out there.

Authorities estimate the 3.2 million-plus entrants caught by the Border Patrol dropped that much garbage in the Southern Arizona desert from July 1999 through June 2005. The figure assumes that each illegal entrant discards 8 pounds of trash, the weight of some abandoned backpacks found in the desert.

The trash is piling up faster than it can be cleaned up. Considering that the Border Patrol apprehended more than 577,000 entrants in 2004-05 alone, the BLM figures that those people left almost 4 million pounds of trash in that same year.

That's 16 times what was picked up in three years. And that doesn't include the unknown amounts of garbage left by border-crossers who don't get caught.

And yet I get excoriated if I throw my gum out the car window!

One activist seems to miss the whole philosophy behind illegal immigration:

But a Cochise County activist who has been photographing garbage and other signs of damage from illegal immigration for five years said she is appalled the federal government is spending tax dollars to pick this garbage up.

Illegal entrants should pick up the trash themselves, said Cindy Kolb, who helped found the group Civil Homeland Defense.

"Our mothers did not pay someone to pick up our trash," Kolb said. "We were taught to pick it up ourselves and to practice civic pride as law-abiding citizens."

Yeah well, illegal immigrants don't seem too concerned with that sort of thing.

Literally. I've read a bit about Ian McKellen's anti-Christian views from press reports of his various movie junkets, but I didn't see it widely reported that he actually rips pages out Gideon hotel room Bibles.

The next time you're hanging out in a hotel room killing time before you drift off to sleep, open the room's complimentary Bible and see if there's something missing.

If you find just a frayed stump where Leviticus 18:22 used to be, Ian McKellen may well have laid his head on your overstuffed pillow before you.

"Whenever I stay in a hotel I always check to see if they have a Gideon Bible, and if they do I tear out a page," the veteran actor told New York gossipist Baird Jones at the premiere party for the film "Iris," which stars both Kate Winslet and Judy Dench as the late writer Iris Murdoch. "I turn to Leviticus 18:22 and rip out that page which is directed against homosexuals; it is one of the Leviticus Laws. I don't know if anyone ever even notices, but I really take exception to that section and I think by now I must have ripped out a few hundred pages."

This morning Jessica and I visited our third church in Missouri, and the first we've really liked: First Baptist Church of Harvester. The buildings were absolutely packed to the seams and the people were all friendly, energetic, and happy to be there.

We sat near the back and observed as inconspicuously as possible, but we were quickly drawn in to the heartfelt worship service. The songs were very contemporary and the musicians were skilled, but more importantly we could tell that the people at the church were excited about praising God and glad to be together.

We weren't keen on hugging people near us during the greeting before the sermon started, but everyone was friendly enough and we escaped with hand-shaking. The sermon itself was very relevant and the pastor was passionate in his love for the people in the community and for our country. During communion I almost cried when they sang "That Old Rugged Cross", which is one of my favorite songs.

So, we're definitely going to visit again and probably check our their membership classes. On first blush we really liked the church, and we're very excited to meet some more of the people and see how we can get involved in service. The people looked like us: a lot of young people, casually dressed, and eager to serve God. The bulletin showed a lot of stuff going on each week, so we should be able to find some places to plug in. Let's see what happens!

Crunchy Con recounts his encounter with encounter with Abdullah Zainal Alireza, the Saudi Minister of State. I had a longer post about this, but the Firefox crashed and I lost it. Sigh.

Abdullah Zainal Alireza, the Saudi minister of state, came calling today here at the paper. He was in Texas this week speaking at the US-Arab Economic Forum in Houston. Abdullah came across as a highly sophisticated diplomat, and he had some interesting things to say. He said, for example, that the US cannot think of withdrawing from Iraq. For one thing, it would destroy our credibility internationally, because the US went in and destroyed the controlling institutions of Iraqi life, and can't walk away from them. For another, said Abdullah, Iraq would collapse into a massive civil war that would likely draw in Turkey, Iran and neighboring Sunni Arab states.

On Iran, he said that the US cannot allow Iran to get the Bomb. Well, I asked, what if it happens anyway? He repeated, firmly, that it must not be allowed to happen. Period. The end. ...

They particularly complained about the connection between Islam and terrorism. One of the associates, whose name I didn't get, said that there is no connection between Islam and terrorism, because by definition a terrorist is not a Muslim, so why do we in the media keep acting like there is a connection? Etc.

I'm not sure how much was posturing and how much they really believed, but they sound a little disconnected from reality.

(HT: Spengler.)

I'm blogging this from my Cingular 8100 phone/pda. There's a "severe thunderstorm warning" here now, but the power is still on thankfully. In other news... uh... the end.

The whole idea that Israel's response to Hezbollah's rocket attacks has been "disproportionate" is plainly ludicrous and can only be believed or proclaimed by someone with either no concept of morality or no understanding of history. This plain on the face. There's little hope for those who denounce Israel because of their own amorality, but for those who need instruction in the history of war I suggest you go read Charles Krauthammer's explanation of how Israel's moral scrupulousness is being paid in blood.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a cinder, and turned the Japanese home islands to rubble and ruin. Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal and moral — to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest land invasion in history that flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

Read the whole thing, learn a little, and hopefully adjust the calibration on your moral compass if necessary.

(HT: David Bernstein, who also points to a video of a United Nations ambulance giving terrorists a lift during a firefight in the Gaza Strip.)

It's strange to me that some clothing fabrics distinctly change color when I wipe my wet hands on them, while others do not. For instance, I can wipe wet hands on bluejeans and it's completely unnoticable, whereas if I wipe water onto a cotton shirt it makes the shirt look wet. Both the jeans and the shirt are cotton, but they take water differently. There seem to be several factors that affect how clothing looks after being wiped with water:

- Material -- cotton, silk, polyester, etc.

- Texture -- weave(?), thickness, roughness

- Color

Are there some unifying characteristics involved that I'm not noticing?

I know that Germans love David Hasselhoff, but only slightly less well-known is this: St. Louisans love the Beach Boys. Really love them. I've never heard more Beach Boys than I've heard standing in elevators and lobbies in St. Louis. Every restaurant, every store, every parking garage: the Beach Boys.

The New York Times has an article by Damon Darlin about how foolish consumers subsidize sophisticated consumers. The piece is pretty vague, but the idea behind it is one that I do my best to take advantage of in my business dealings.

The two economics professors — Mr. Laibson at Harvard and Mr. Gabaix at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton — have looked at how companies hide fees and costs. They found that sophisticated consumers have somehow learned how to game the system by having enough naïve consumers around to subsidize them.

The smartest strategy, they say, is for the sophisticated consumer to choose the service with the most hidden charges and highest add-on prices, but then avoid paying those added costs. "The sophisticated consumer takes advantage of that," Mr. Gabaix said. "The naïve pay all the fees." ...

For example, you see an offer for a room at Nontransparent Hotel for $75 (which costs the hotel $100 to provide). The guy checking in behind you also rents a room, but will rack up $70 in fees from the minibar, the phone and garage parking (all of which cost the hotel $20 to provide). You, on the other hand, were not tempted by the minibar, used your cellphone for calls and took public transportation to the hotel. The other guy subsidized your room.

Smart consumers now have a strategy. They should go to the company offering the discounted product even if the company has loads of hidden fees. The sophisticated consumer then exploits the company by taking the below-cost product and shunning the fees. "It’s a perpetual battle between the firm that fools consumers into paying fees and the smart consumer who can avoid them," Mr. Laibson said.

Every time I call a creditor -- be it a utility, cellphone provider, credit card company, or whomever -- I always ask them to waive fees, cancel charges, or upgrade my service for free. Most of the time they will. I get new, free, top-of-the-line phones from Cingular all the time, and I get interest rate reductions and fee waivers from my credit card companies several times a year. Ask and thou shalt receive. Plus, I never pay the outrageous prices for food from hotel minibars or movie theaters.

(HT: Sound Mind Investing Blog.)

Slate has posted a great cheat sheet for anyone interested in exactly who's buddies with whom in the Middle East: The Middle East Buddy List. Good stuff.

While some people are working two jobs to put food on the table and others are fighting for freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, some Americans are whining because they've got to pay for their own master's degree in "public administration". That sounds like a major designed for people who want to live their lives on the government payroll, which isn't surprising considering the tenor of this editorial.

Is access to graduate education in America exclusively for the upper class?

As a first-year graduate student struggling to make ends meet, I believe the answer is yes. In my experience, searching for funding to pay the extensive costs of my higher education has been an upward climb leading only to dead ends.

I am a single mother who qualifies for the maximum amount in federal aid for graduate students. But this amount barely covers my tuition; paying for housing, books and living expenses is up to me.

I have no college fund, trust or inheritance. I don't independently qualify for private student loans because I lack the substantial credit or employment history that is required, and I do not have the luxury of having a willing and eligible co-signer. Furthermore, I can work only part-time jobs while in school; otherwise I would not qualify for child-care assistance.

Boohoo. I paid my way though grad school the old-fashioned way: I got a job! If you can't afford to go to grad school, get a job, save up some money, and build the credit and employment history necessary to get some loans. I'm sure the author has plenty of debt she's already used to buy a car, clothes, vacations, and all the other nonsense Americans put on their credit cards, so why can't she save up a few years for school? Next thing you know she'll be expecting the government to buy her a house, which are expensive for all the same reasons.

Plus, here's a tip for Sui Lang Panoke: keep your legs closed for a while so you don't have any more kids you can't afford to take care of.

(HT: James Taranto.)

Although there are a ton of jobs available in the video game industry, they tend to be the computer science equivalent of the Southeast Asian sweatshop. Game developers work extremely long hours, under tight deadlines, and for comparatively little money. Still, there's a movie star sort of status associated with working on a popular game, which is why video game camps are sprouting up around the country for aspiring game slaves.

While some 12-year-olds spend the summer playing video games, Alex Sanford learned how to create them.

Alex, who's a student at Dana Middle School in Hawthorne, was one of a handful of South Bay kids who participated in the two-week video game design camp at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

"I want to be a movie director," Alex said Friday, the last day at camp. "Some of this stuff helps to figure out special effects."

Most of the students had no programming experience before the camp, said course instructor Jacob Thompson, who is a USC undergraduate majoring in interactive entertainment.

"They've really grown in knowledge of programming," Thompson said. "And actually having to finish a project by a deadline is impressive by any standard."

Well, as opposed to "having to", actually finishing a project by a deadline is impressive.

Even my little brother is in on the action.

Andy Kaneda, 11, has plans to become a video game designer and wants to learn more about the industry. The incoming Dana Middle School student, the youngest in the program, has been playing video games since he was 7.

I can attest to that!

I just felt an earthquake here in St. Charles, MO. It felt very weak, but lasted about 30 seconds. I supposed it could have been someone moving something heavy in the hotel, but I haven't felt anything like it over the past month we've been here. I think it was an earthquake.

Update:

Well, nothing from the USGS, so I guess I was wrong!

Pete Du Pont has a great editorial detailed the ways in which tax cuts benefit everyone.

Mr. Bush signed the most recent tax cuts into law in the spring of 2003. In the past 33 months the size of America's entire economy has increased by 20%--or, as National Review Online's Larry Kudlow put it, "In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy."

In the 2 1/4 years before the 2003 tax cuts, economic growth averaged 1.1% annually; in the three years since it has averaged 4% per year, and in the first quarter of this year it was 5.6% on an annualized basis. Inflation-adjusted per capita GDP has grown 7.8% from 2003 through the first quarter of this year.

According to the government's establishment survey, in the 36 months since the tax cuts became law, 5.3 million new jobs have been added to the economy. According to its employment survey, 288,000 jobs were added in May and 387,000 in June. The unemployment rate dropped from 6.1% when the bills were signed to 5.4% at the end of 2004 and 4.6% today, and the rate has gone down for men, women, blacks and Hispanics. Hourly wage rates for workers are up 3.9% in the past year, and they increased at an annualized rate of 4.6% in the second quarter of this year, the highest quarterly rate in nearly 10 years.

Incomes are up too. As Stephen Moore noted in The Wall Street Journal, "the percentage of Americans earning more than $50,000 a year rose from 40.8% to 44.2%" between 2002 and 2004. As for very wealthy families, the portion of total income "captured by the richest 1%, 5% and 10% of Americans is lower today than in the last year of the Clinton administration."

All this has been good news for the government. Federal tax receipts increased by 15%-- $274 billion--last year and 13%-- $206 billion--in the first nine months of this fiscal year, which, as the Journal points out, means the nine-month increases for the past two years represent the highest growth rates in 25 years. Looking ahead to the end of this fiscal year, total inflation-adjusted government receipts will likely be 23% above 2003 when the Bush tax cuts were signed into law.

Reducing the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 15% increased capital gains tax receipts by 79% from 2000 to 2004. Cutting the dividend tax rate by more than half--from 39.6% to 15%--increased dividend tax receipts by 35% from 2002 to 2004. And corporate tax receipts have nearly tripled since 2003, reaching $250 billion for the past nine months, 26% higher than the same period last year.

So why have Democrats promised to "roll back President Bush's tax cuts" (i.e., increase taxes) if they're elected in November? Because the Democratic party can only survive when people are forced to depend on the government; when people can provide for themselves, they don't need leftist "compassion". The Democrats have a vested interest in keeping as many people as poor and as dumb as possible.

Does anyone actually adjust the water temperature when they wash their hands in a public restroom? I always just use the coldest setting so that I don't accidentally burn myself, so I never use the hot water. Even at home I almost always use only cold water to wash my hands.

I suppose the title of this post could be more specific, but I was just reading about Willie Horton last night so I thought a generic statement of fact would suffice. In this instance, Michael Dukakis reveals that he completely and fundamentally misunderstands some of the most basic principles of logic and economics by arguing that raising the minimum wage would decrease illegal immigration.

Millions of illegal immigrants work for minimum and even sub-minimum wages in workplaces that don’t come close to meeting health and safety standards. It is nonsense to say, as President Bush did recently, that these jobs are filled by illegal immigrants because Americans won’t do them. Before we had mass illegal immigration in this country, hotel beds were made, office floors were cleaned, restaurant dishes were washed and crops were picked — by Americans.

Americans will work at jobs that are risky, dirty or unpleasant so long as they provide decent wages and working conditions, especially if employers also provide health insurance. Plenty of Americans now work in such jobs, from mining coal to picking up garbage. The difference is they are paid a decent wage and provided benefits for their labor.

However, Americans won’t work for peanuts, and these days the national minimum wage is less than peanuts.

But illegal immigrants work illegally and aren't paid the minimum wage -- only legal workers are. If we were to raise the minimum wage it would only create a greater incentive for employers to hire illegal aliens. The proposal is completely backwards. If we want to make Americans competitive with illegal immigrants, we should eliminate the minimum wage and flatten the playing surface. Eliminating the minimum wage would perhaps erase the market distortion that drives a large amount of illegal immigration.

Now, illegal immigrants also seem willing to live more cheaply than Americans, and our record-low unemployment numbers indicate that just about every American who wants a job has one, so it's not clear that changing the minimum wage in either direction would have much practical effect. Despite the forlorn cries of Democrats, the only people who actually make minimum wage are entry-level workers or students, and they're the ones who would be hurt most if the minimum wage were increased, because some of them would lose their jobs.

(HT: James Taranto.)

The ongoing nationwide power distribution crisis is a perfect illustration of how monopolies can hurt consumers.

LOS ANGELES · Days of tropical heat and humidity have driven demand for electricity to record highs in California and other states. If people can't take the weather anymore, neither could transformers and other equipment, which sputtered and shorted out and left tens of thousands of people without power.

Authorities issued a warning Monday that the high demand could lead to rolling blackouts, a dreaded term in California that brings reminders of widespread blackouts in 2000 and 2001 during an energy supply crisis.

In other parts of the country, thunderstorms have compounded problems, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in the St. Louis area without electricity since Wednesday. Thousands of people in Queens, N.Y., entered the second week without power after equipment failures there at one point left about 100,000 people without electricity.

Unfortunately, because power distribution (and to a lesser extent, power generation) is typically a "natural" monopoly, there isn't much that can be done to improve the situation over the long term -- i.e., this just about is the best we can do.

In economics, a natural monopoly occurs when, due to the economies of scale of a particular industry, the maximum efficiency of production and distribution is realized through a single supplier.

Natural monopolies arise where the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, has an overwhelming cost advantage over other actual or potential competitors. This tends to be the case in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale which are large in relation to the size of the market, and hence high barriers to entry; examples include water services and electricity. It is very expensive to build transmission networks (water/gas pipelines, electricity and telephone lines), therefore it is unlikely that potential competitor would be willing to make the capital investment needed to even enter the monopolists market.

It may also depend on control of a particular natural resource. Companies that grow to take advantage of economies of scale often run into problems of bureaucracy; these factors interact to produce an "ideal" size for a company, at which the company's average cost of production is minimized. If that ideal size is large enough to supply the whole market, then that market is a natural monopoly.

Some free market-oriented economists argue that natural monopolies exist only in theory, and not in practice, or that they exist only as transient states.

Natural monopolies should generally be closely regulated by the government for the best possible performance, but just imagine how awful every other sector of our economy would be if they were similarly under centralized control! Thankfully, most other industries aren't natural monopolies and thrive under competition, not regulation.

California tried deregulating its electrical distribution and generation in the 1990s, but the plan was really only partial deregulation since it set a ceiling on the price producers could charge customers; as you can imagine, the plan led directly to California's power crisis in 2000 - 2001. I believe that some other states have tried deregulation with more success, but there's going to be a limit on how well competition can work for natural monopoly industries in "small" markets.