TSA Guy: Stop! You need a boarding pass to go through.

Me: I don't think we do. We fly all the time.

TSA Guy: Ok, go ahead.

But while I'm sympathetic to students finding it harder to attend college, I'm not sure what they think is supposed to happen. There's no money. This is not some question of reallocating resources from bad uses to good--everything is being cut because their institutions are under serious financial duress. When administrators point this out, the students reiterate how hard it all is, as if doing so will spur the administration to shake the money tree harder until extra cash falls from the skies.

I mean, they might protest the core business model, in which so many employees are effectively unfireable, meaning that everyone else has to take a disproportionate share of the cuts. But other than that, what is all this protesting going to accomplish?

Brings back memories of my old student protest days....

Whether or not you like my sign, at least I could spell.

(HT: Instapundit.)

(HT: Marginal Revolution.)

When it comes to great truths, each generation shouldn't have to work them out by itself. They don't have to be written down, any more than the English constitution is. Every boy soon learns that women seem to know intuitively what the weaker male sex may grasp only by effort and education. Which is why it requires marriage and family to civilize the male animal. He needs a woman's tutelage.

Brighter boys learn the lesson of female superiority early; dimmer ones may never catch on.

I can only assume that Greenberg wrote this drivel because he's in the doghouse with his wife or because he's seeking just the sort of head-slapping attention that I'm giving him by linking. In any event: women are great! But so are men. Civilization needs both to thrive, and it does no one any good to degrade either sex.

From what I've seen, many families would be better off if the husband accepted more of a leadership role and quit submitting himself to the whims and demands of his wife.

(HT: Dr. Helen.)

Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he'd get it and you wouldn't, it's rationing.

After two years of development, the game, called America's Army, was released at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a sort of annual pilgrimage for video-gamers that draws some 60,000 people to the Los Angeles Convention Center. What happened next surprised all: The Army didn't just have a new recruiting tool, but an actual market hit. It quickly became one of the top 10 most popular games on the Internet, and within its first five years, some 9 million individuals had signed up to join America's video-game army, spending some 160 million hours on the site and making it one of the top 10 of all video games, online or otherwise.

From the Army's perspective, commercial triumph was secondary. Its goal was to recruit. And at this, too, the game proved to be a wild success. To log on to the game, you have to connect via the Army's recruitment website and fork over your information. Gamers can also check out profiles of current Army soldiers and video testimonials of why they joined. Just one year after America's Army was released, one-fifth of West Point's freshman class said they had played the game. By 2008, a study by two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "30 percent of all Americans age 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined." Notably, this is from a game that the Pentagon has spent an average of $3.28 million a year developing and promoting over the last 10 years -- compared with the military's roughly $8 billion annual recruiting budget.

Playing a game is different than actual combat, but the level of competence that can be achieved virtually is amazing.

America's Army quickly expanded from a potent recruiting tool into a valuable training system for soldiers already in the military. Military contractor Foster-Miller's Talon robot, for example, is used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan to dismantle roadside bombs, the most deadly weapon used against U.S. troops there. The game's Talon training module cost just $60,000 to develop, but took training in how to operate robots in war to a whole new level. "Prior to this, the only way to train was to take the robot and the controller to the trainees, give them some verbal instruction, and get them started," Bill Davis, head of the America's Army future applications program, told National Defense. "This allows them to train without breaking anything."

But with these advances, it's getting harder to figure out where the games end and the war begins. In Talon the game and the real-life version, soldiers are watching the action through a screen and even holding the very same physical controllers in their hands. And these controllers are modeled after the video-game controllers that the kids grew up with. This makes the transition from training to actual use nearly seamless. As one Foster-Miller executive explained to me, describing the game's training package for the Talon's pissed-off big brother, the machine gun-armed Swords robot, "With a flip of the switch, he has a real robot and a real weapon." Because of "the realism," he said, the company is finding that "the soldiers train on them endlessly in their free time."

I've read in other places that these sorts of games can also teach players important tactical lessons, such as how to properly clear a building, advance under cover, provide covering fire, perform flanking maneuvers, and so forth.

Simply put, the 200-year track record of the chart says that stocks are likely to produce better returns than their historical long-term average until they "catch up" to the trend line. Maybe not this year, or next, or for the next 5-10 years even. But time after time those two lines have separated and then converged, and it's likely to happen again before too long. It could take a decade, but long-term investors have time on their side.

I recognize that this is difficult to accept for many people who look at the long-term challenges facing our economy and our country. But keep in mind that all of the problems we see are already known and factored into the stock market's current valuation. The stock market is a forward-looking discounting mechanism that has all that known bad news already baked in.

That forward-looking discounting, coupled with the tendency shown in the chart for the market to revert to the mean, causes the market to continually deliver the exact opposite of what most investors expect. That's why in hindsight, a time like 1999 and early 2000 can be a poor time to invest, despite the fact that the external conditions seem to look great. And it's also why hindsight may well show the current period to be a good time for long-term investors to invest, despite external conditions seeming to look poor.

Emphasis mine.

If a loan officer’s initial decision required sign-off by a majority of 100 other bankers, his own judgement would have little effect on the final outcome. So he would have little incentive to think hard about the application and the likelihood that the loan will be repaid. Since this would be equally true for each of the other 100 bankers, none would bother to think hard. Why struggle to make the right decision when your decision will have no effect?

This is the position of voters in a general election. Each individual’s vote makes no difference to the outcome. Even marginal districts are won with majorities of hundreds. If you had stayed home instead of voting, the same candidate would have been elected. ...

So what is the best way to improve modern politics? The answer is not to increase voter turnout. On the contrary, the number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district should be about right. If you were one of these 12 voters then, like one of 12 jurors deciding if someone should be imprisoned, you would take a serious interest in the issues.

These 12 voters should be selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress – 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate – there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed relative to the general population: the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day. All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.

Love it. I'm not sure if all the numbers are right, but the general idea is spot-on. As a side benefit, the entire issue of "campaign finance reform" and "special interests" would be completely negated. The role of money in politics would be vastly lessened.

(HT: American Digest and Instapundit.)

(HT: AK.)

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - A former Nigerian state governor who serves as ranking member of the nation's ruling party was arrested for allegedly embezzling $100 million of government money meant for public projects, an anti-corruption official said Tuesday.

Agents from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission arrested Abdullahi Adamu on Monday after a more than yearlong investigation, agency spokesman Femi Babafemi said. Agents seized Adamu's passports and have asked him for his personal financial records to try and find the money they claim he stole, Babafemi said.

You'll never find it! After we hooked up via email, GovernorOfNigeria@yahoo.com transferred all the money to my personal account. I knew that if I kept helping those poor Nigerians with their money problems it would eventually pay off!

I recently spoke with the Scottish photojournalist Harry Benson, who is known for his images of world leaders, Hollywood icons, rock stars and everyday Glaswegians. (He is, as I found out, also an amiable character and a charming raconteur.) Mr. Benson’s photos, particularly his early black-and-white images, are masterly studies in the use of natural light, and I wanted to ask him for tips on shooting in low-light situations. Here’s what he had to say. ...

Any tips on using flash in low light?

I prefer not to use flash because it tends to control and take over the photo. I lose a lot of humanity with flash. I don’t want to use it in a position when I can use my brain instead. Without flash, pictures can take on a grainy feel. And if you take a photo of someone with a light in the background, the light gives a lovely warm tone to the photography. ...

If you had one tip for taking better night or low-light photos, what would it be?

Don’t be afraid. You’ll be surprised just how good your photos will be. Make sure there is some light on your subject’s face. But be brave about it. The thing about is that I’ve been awakened to see just what digital cameras can do in low-light situations. It digs right into spaces that I never thought a camera could penetrate.

Amen! Please turn your auto-flash off.

(HT: Lifehacker.)

(HT: RB.)

Most women claim to be attracted to tall, dark and handsome men, but a new study has revealed that facial stubble and a geeky personality are their biggest secret turn-ons.

Despite complaining that it looks unkempt and feels rough to touch, the unshaven look on a man is actually a turn-on for 41 per cent of women.

A slightly geeky personality came second, proving that women really do like a guy who knows their stuff when it comes to technology. ...

The poll of 2,500 women also revealed that 91 per cent would actually prefer a guy who had a few flaws over someone who is perfect.

And more than half would rather a guy who was soft and cuddly instead of toned and muscly.

Sorry ladies, I'm taken!

“Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.”

Michael Ramirez points out that substituting "debt" for "alcohol" pretty well captures President Obama's view of the world.

(HT: Power Line.)

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Thursday unveiled a government report which she said “shines a light on the urgency for health reform,” and pins the rise of premiums in the individual healthcare market squarely on the profit margins of large insurance companies. ...

The report, which is titled “Insurance Companies Prosper, Families Suffer: Our Broken Health Insurance System,” says that increases of that magnitude are not unique. It cites Anthem of Connecticut for requesting a 24 percent rate hike in 2009; Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan for a requested 56 percent rate increase last year; and Regency Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon for a 20 percent premium increase.

“The five largest insurers in America have declared more than $12 billion worth of profits in 2009,” Sebelius said. “[Anthem Blue Cross of California] alone posted a $2.7 billion profit in the fourth quarter of 2009, just a week before they filed for a 39 percent rate increase.”

So... when General Motors and Chrysler go bankrupt the government nationalizes them, and when the health care industry makes a profit the government wants to nationalize them. It's almost like our government wants to nationalize industries under any and every circumstance!

The New York Times puts the insurance profits into perspective.

The insurance industry said the report was incomplete. “Comparing the profits of individual companies today to where they were at the bottom of a recession a year ago does not tell the whole story,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group.

Historically, Mr. Zirkelbach said, the average profit margin for the industry has been relatively low, 3 percent to 5 percent. For example, he said, if a company made a 2 percent profit last year during the recession and is making 4 percent now, its profits would have increased by 100 percent but the profit would still only be 4 percent.

“For every dollar spent on health care in America, less than one penny goes toward health plan profits,” he said. “Health plan profits are well below other industries within the health care sector.”

David Palombi, a spokesman for WellPoint, said Anthem’s profit margin in California “is in line with, or below, many of its competitors, including our two large not-for-profit competitors.”

I'm pretty sure Sebelius and her ilk believe what they're saying, but sincerity is no defense against the appearance of insanity.

The deeper problem, widely recognised but seldom addressed, is how to free people from bad rules. I floated a provocative idea. Instead of focusing on poor nations and how to change their rules, we should focus on poor people and how they can move somewhere with better rules. One way to do this is with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new “charter cities,” where developed countries frame the rules and hundreds of millions of poor families could become residents.

How would such a city work? Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges. It could create economic opportunities and encourage foreign investment, and by using uninhabited land it would ensure everyone living there would have chosen to do so with full knowledge of the rules. Roughly 3bn people, mostly the working poor, will move to cities over the next few decades. To my mind the choice is not whether the world will urbanise, but where and under which rules. Instead of expanding the slums in existing urban centres, new charter cities could provide safe, low-income housing and jobs that the world will need to accommodate this shift. Even more important, these cities could give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under. ...

There are large swathes of uninhabited land on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa that are too dry for agriculture. But a city can develop in even the driest locations, supported if necessary by desalinated and recycled water. And the new zone created need not be ruled directly from the developed partner country—residents of the charter city can administer the rules specified by their partner as long as the developed country retains the final say. This is what happens today in Mauritius, where the British Privy Council is still the court of final appeal in a judicial system staffed by Mauritians. Different cities could start with charters that differ in many ways. The common element would be that all residents would be there by choice—a Gallup survey found that 700m people around the world would be willing to move permanently to another country that offers safety and economic opportunity.

Author Paul Romer cites Hong Kong as the archetype and compares its success under British rules to the decades of failure experienced by mainland China.

Why won't this happen? Despite the billions of average people who would benefit, consider the long list of powerful interests who would end up losers if charter cities took off: existing despots and their inner circles; the United Nations; zillions of Non-Governmental Organizations who parasitically exploit aid streams; socialists; nationalists; and probably many more. These loser groups would all band together to prevent the average people of the world from moving en masse into charter cities with better rules.

But anyway, here are two sites that review the various Super Bowl ads. Super Bowl Commercials is mostly user-generated content. Entertainment Weekly attempts to round up the five best and five worst ads. My main disagreement is that I hated the "I'll put my socks in the basket" Dodge Charger commercial. I get the premise, but the ad is too long and the emasculating things the men list out is too PC to really nail it.

Hi quantum LiquiGlas should be available in retail form in 201o.

Best wishes,

[N]

So... I'm guessing we'll be able to buy it soon.

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.

But I'm not aware of any Constitutional Amendments that have been ratified since President Obama took office, or since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006. I remember President Bush passing a lot more bills than Obama has, even when Bush had far fewer votes at his disposal in Congress (setting aside the question of whether or not those bills were good).

The smarter voters are starting to realize that America is not ungovernable, America is ungovernable by Democrats.

More from Ed Morrissey and Glenn Reynolds.)

California's Institute for Regenerative Medicine came into being five years ago, fueled by a conviction that the Bush administration's restriction on embryo-destructive research in the National Institutes of Health was stifling the progress of science.

But after years of fruitless work, the Institute has now quietly diverted funds from embryonic stem cell research (ESCr) to adult stem cell research - which has already produced dozens of treatments and all-out cures for maladies ranging from spinal cord injury, to Alzheimer's, to type I diabetes.

The California government - which is again teetering on the brink of bankruptcy - in 2004 passed the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, or Proposition 71. The initiative pumped $3 billion into research seeking some medical use for stem cells harvested from human embryos, which are killed in the process.

But an editorial in the Los Angeles-based Investor's Business Daily magazine January 12 pointed out the abysmal failure of the state's massive investment in research that has procured no effective treatments to date.

"Five years after a budget-busting $3 billion was allocated to embryonic stem cell research, there have been no cures, no therapies and little progress," notes the IBD editors.

"ESCR has failed to deliver and backers of Prop 71 are admitting failure."

Too bad for all those dead babies, but at least the researchers made a boatload of money.

(HT: Adam.)

No one has officially announced that Social Security will be cash-negative this year. But you can figure it out for yourself, as I did, by comparing two numbers in the recent federal budget update that the nonpartisan CBO issued last week.

The first number is $120 billion, the interest that Social Security will earn on its trust fund in fiscal 2010 (see page 74 of the CBO report). The second is $92 billion, the overall Social Security surplus for fiscal 2010 (see page 116).

This means that without the interest income, Social Security will be $28 billion in the hole this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

Why disregard the interest? Because as people like me have said repeatedly over the years, the interest, which consists of Treasury IOUs that the Social Security trust fund gets on its holdings of government securities, doesn't provide Social Security with any cash that it can use to pay its bills. The interest is merely an accounting entry with no economic significance.

To elaborate on the last sentence, the Social Security fund has been earning huge amounts of interest for decades, but that interest hasn't been put back into the fund, it has been spent by Congress to pay for other things. Instead of that cash being put into the fund, Congress has put IOUs into the fund, and when Social Security goes cash-negative those IOUs will have to be repaid out of current taxes.

The net effect of this is that not only is my generation paying the payroll tax to fund Social Security for current retirees, we're also paying BACK the interest those retirees spent on themselves decades ago. It's a double-whammy of generational theft, and the retiree generation should be ashamed by the debt they're imposing on their children and grandchildren.

The Department of Labor and the Department of the Treasury (the "Agencies") are currently reviewing the rules under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and the plan qualification rules under the Internal Revenue Code (Code) to determine whether, and, if so, how, the Agencies could or should enhance, by regulation or otherwise, the retirement security of participants in employer-sponsored retirement plans and in individual retirement arrangements (IRAs) by facilitating access to, and use of, lifetime income or other arrangements designed to provide a lifetime stream of income after retirement. The purpose of this request for information is to solicit views, suggestions and comments from plan participants, employers and other plan sponsors, plan service providers, and members of the financial community, as well as the general public, on this important issue.

I.e., the government is considering nationalizing your IRA, Roth, and 401(k) and replacing the money there with some new form of Treasury bill that will pay a "guaranteed" "lifetime stream of income".

Homework questions:

1. Isn't this what Social Security is already supposed to be doing?

2. China doesn't think t-bills are a good investment anymore... do you?

The fact that the message of this billboard is obvious to all viewers, despite lacking an explicit subject, certainly means something.

OK, this sign on Interstate 29 is over the top. For the record, I don't think President Obama is a Marxist. But what's funny is that it's instantly clear to whom the sign refers, which makes it, literally, a sign of the times.