MyATMPinIs1234

My idea for an iPhone app: Turn your iPhone into a scale. Of course it wouldn't actually do that, I just want to see how many people I can trick into stepping on their iPhone.

Guy standing in front of my building: Hey are you from Landmark Realty?

Me: No, Sorry.

Couple in lobby clearly waiting for same Realtor: Hey are you from apt 6D?

Me: 6D! Thank goodness no. A real shame what happened to that lady. It took 3 weeks to clean up the crime scene.

Just in case you need another reason to not ruin a perfectly good Jack Daniels and a perfectly good Coke by mixing them together....

"When fructose reaches the liver," says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose. (via)"

The last thing you need when taxing your liver with alcohol is a heavy dose of high fructose corn syrup.

"Roughly 47 percent of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax for 2009, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. That's good news for most of us."

In other news, CNN.com copy editors think 47% is "most of us."

Did you know that in the space travel industry there is a wide gulf between "haves" and "have nots?" Only a handful of employers provide space travel to their employees, and even they reserve this benefit to certain high level employees.

I find it curious then, that Obama apparently wants to privatize space travel. I mean to some extent it makes sense. Here we have an industry driven by complicated science and bleeding edge technology that has the ability to extend the life of our species, so opening up the industry to the free market would dramatically increase the quality and slash costs.

But what about the millions of Americans who don't have space travel options and would have to then negotiate with greedy corporations? Are they no less worthy of avoiding the next asteroid strike?

I think that is the wrong approach to take. Instead we can learn from what I'm sure will be his highly effective plan for the healthcare industry. First, we should upgrade the information technology currently in use in the space program. The flight systems on the space shuttle were installed in 1990 and have one MB of storage!

Second, we need more research into what works and what doesn't work. Currently we waste too much money on items pushed by lobbyists from Lockhead Martin without knowing if they are indeed the best.

Third, we need to focus on prevention. This doesn't really apply to space travel, but since it doesn't make sense for healthcare either I'm leaving this one in.

Once these measures have been implemented and trillions of dollars have been saved, the government will be able to provide space travel to everyone. This will be way better than private companies, who have no incentive to help consumers, other than needing to repeatedly provide something that these consumers are voluntarily willing to hand over their hard-earned money for.

I think the government should start with an easier problem than giving out healthcare. For example, they could try starting with issuing people cards that give them the authority to drive a car. That should be pretty easy. Once we see how well they handle that we can give them more responsibility.

Listen, we all want cheap, high quality healthcare that everyone can afford. But trying to repeal the laws of economics to get us there is about as effective as trying to repeal the laws of gravity to reduce hip fractures in the elderly.

Timing

I bet David Blaine is pissed he wasn't born 2010 years ago...

Why are there fat people at pet stores? How big IS their emotional void?

This post combines two of my favorite things, the insanity of the current consensus belief on nutrition, and the massive ignorance of most journalists.

Seriously crazy stuff. Even if the journalists know nothing about nutrition or science or medicine, shouldn't they, being journalists, be able to do a little research and find someone on the other side of the story? Or know that perhaps they should compare the outrageous meal to a normal meal instead of a fasted state?

This is why TV & Newspapers are in trouble. Why get a story from someone who knows nothing about the subject but who is a "trained" writer when you can get the same story from a blogger who is a subject matter expert and writes almost as well and sometimes better?

BTW, ABC reporter Yuji de Nies does the ridiculous journalist voice they make fun of on the Simpsons.

Dr. Michael Eades should be Surgeon General. Or Secretary of HHS. Or both. Obama should make that "change."

I was recently favorably impressed with the meal options on a domestic flight in Croatia, on Croatia Airlines.

Asian Vegetarian

Baby Food

Bland

Child

Diabetic

Fruit Platter

Gluten Free

High Fibre

Hindu (non-veg)

Kosher

Low Calorie

Low Fat

Low Protein

Low Sodium

Moslem

Non-lactose

Oriental

Low Purine

Raw Vegetarian

Seafood

No Special Meal

Vegetarian (non-dairy)

Vegetarian (lacto-ovo)

Hi. I'm a Democrat.

I think it's a bad idea that the government is taking over General Motors, because political interference will make it hard to make good business decisions and the government is generally really bad at running things.

Oh, and I also think that the government should take over health care, because the government can do a better job running things than those profit-seeking capitalists -- and don't worry, tough decisions won't be handled politically, and there won't be rationing or price controls.

I can't figure out whether to file this in the "What could possibly go wrong" folder, or the "We're from the government, and we're here to help" folder.

A few projects are decidedly low-tech. Take the plan to flood the border with a particular breed of wasp with a taste for Carrizo cane, a massive weed that grows in dense stands along the Rio Grande, providing cover to smugglers. Ms. Duong's scientists, working with the Department of Agriculture, tracked down the wasps in Spain and have spent two years watching the critters in a secure greenhouse -- gauging their appetites, assessing their role in a swampy ecosystem and finally breeding them into a swarm suitable for deployment on the Texas border.

Nobody begrudges a starving man who desperately seeks food.

Nobody belittles a man dying of thirst who will do anything for some water.

So why is it the sleep deprived man who endeavors to catch up by sleeping late or taking naps is scorned and viewed as lazy?

The complete lack of sleep will kill a person well before starvation and only slightly behind dehydration.

Skipping a night of sleep will hamper mental and physical performance way more than skipping a few meals.

Chronic sleep deprivation might be more detrimental to your health than a crappy diet.

So next time your employee is late to work because his alarm clock didn't go off -- rather than looking down upon him, give him your admiration as you would someone who drinks 8 glasses of water a day or eats many servings of fruit and vegetables.

Peter Orszag, Obama's Director of OMB, has the whole healthcare crisis figured out. In today's WSJ, he lays out his plan.

How can we move toward a high-quality, lower-cost system? There are four key steps:

1) health information technology, because we can't improve what we don't measure;

2) more research into what works and what doesn't, so doctors don't recommend treatments that don't improve health;

3) prevention and wellness, so that people do the things that keep them healthy and avoid costs associated with health risks such as smoking and obesity; and

4) changes in financial incentives for providers so that they are incentivized rather than penalized for delivering high-quality care.

If this is the plan, we are all fucked. If you think about these points for 5 seconds, you realize:

1) Ah yes computers. It's actually brilliant. They'll solve the healthcare problem just like putting them in classrooms fixed our public schools.

2) First of all, HMOs tried to do this and got pilloried by politicians. Also, doctors don't recommend things that don't improve health because they don't know any better, they do so because if they don't run every test and perform every procedure the trial lawyers that fund the Dem party will sue them.

3) The US Government has a pretty dismal record getting involved with prevention. The blew the single most important contributor to good health -- diet. By spending 20 years recommending people avoid fat at all costs and eat like 57 servings of grains, they f'ing caused the obesity epidemic they are now whining about. I shudder to think how they'll screw it up next.

4) The free market would accomplish this goal very easily. Incentives to deliver high quality at low prices are exactly what happens when you have to convince people to trade their money for your particular service over someone else's. But I doubt this is what Orszag has in mind. I'm sure it's some kind of monstrous technocratic jumble of taxes and subsidies that will only cause more distortions.

Detroit

I have a plan for fixing the auto industry. Make every member of Congress transfer their retirement savings into a mutual fund holding GM, Ford, and Chrysler stock. I have a feeling the myriad rules and mandates that are now crushing the industry would vanish as quickly as you can say "ha ha we were totally kidding about that ridiculous electric car."

Am I the only one who is tempted to fill out wedding invitation reply cards like this?

Person Name :
_x_ will    __ will not        be attending

_3_   steak
_0_   fish
_1_   vegetarian

Advertising FAIL

The following is an actual transcript of an Apple iPhone commercial currently running:

"What's great about the iphone, is that if you want to check snow conditions on the mountain, there's an app for that.

If you want to check how many calories are in your lunch, there's an app for that.

And if you want to check exaactly where you parked the car, there's even an app for that."

So basically, the iPhone target market is people who can bail from their job to "shred" when there's good powder on mountain, then hit the lodge for some skinless chicken breasts for lunch, and then can't remember where the fuck they parked their Prius. Where is the app for the BLACK FUCKING TURTLENECK SALE with goatee trimming instructions and Gossip Girl updates!?!

Unfortunately, I just want to toss a football around, and I don't care how many calories are in my bacon cheeseburger, and my mental acuity is better than a Alzheimers patient... so at this point the AD WIZARDS have not really done a good job making the case for me to purchase an iPhone.

"Out of the Office" automatic email replies should be, for the most part, extinct. It's 2009, and you should have an iPhone or Blackberry at this point.

If you are even remotely diligent about your work ethic, you will respond to important emails at night, on the weekends, when you are on business trips, when you are on vacation, etc.

When I get an OOO message, I assume the person:

1) Doesn't have a phone that can read email. This is a FAIL person.

2) Thinks "work" occurs at a physical location during a set time. FAIL person.

3) Neither 1 or 2, but still does OOO messages because that's what people used to do and they never re-evaluate whether certain processes are necessary. FAIL person.

Not the Preferred Nomenclature

I can't believe I have to tell you people this, but apparently I do. When you are using a document versioning system based on creation date, it is imperative that you use the following format for the date portion: yyyy-mm-dd.

If you don't put the year first it won't be sorted properly if it lasts more than one year. And if you don't zero-pad the dates less than 10, it'll put October before February.

TPS-Report_10-01-2025.xls
TPS-Report_10-02-2009.xls
TPS-Report_2-01-2009.xls
TPS-Report_4-01-1999.xls

If you look at who is currently residing in the White House you'll realize that our country has come a long way with tolerance. Because even as far back as 10-20 years ago, whole books were written about how people like this are sneaky and evil. Back in the 1950's these people were systematically sought out and blacklisted from certain careers. Yes, I'm talking about the fact that we can have a girl with a Russian name, Natasha (Sasha) Obama, living in the White House, is truly progress. F you Joe McCarthy.

Ratings Agencies [i.e. skip this post]

Some of you know that the ratings agencies (Moody's, S&P, the other one) pretty much caused this whole financial disaster. A combination of incompetence and conflicts of interest caused them to rate garbage bonds as AAA, without which investors wouldn't have bought them, thus banks wouldn't have created them, thus mortgage brokers couldn't have made insane loans, and thus housing prices would've stayed sane.

So the question is what to do now. Obviously having bond issuers pay for the ratings doesn't work. There are some other proposals being floated around to have a big pool of money from the buy side pay for "independent" ratings. This is an even worse idea, for the same reason that there is no good credit analysis coming out of Cuban financial firms.

So here's my idea:

Keep the status quo, whereby issuers pay the ratings agencies, but add a clause to all the bonds creating a put option requiring the ratings agencies to buy it back from the investor if certain accuracy metrics are not met. The put option could be capped at maybe 5x times fees collected by the ratings agency in the first place, so they would still have some incentive to issue a rating, but this would counter-act the conflict of interest with an even stronger incentive to hire smart people and do a good job.

Facebook, When You're in Your 30's

Is half a diary of your friends' unfortunate ability to breed, and the other half a journal of people desperately trying to convince others they are still cool.

All in all -- pretty sad. But I can't get enough of it.

Seriously though, I don't really want to see pics of your kid, or updates on your parenting mishaps. I also don't want to see what cool bar you're DJing at tonight.

Liberals Believe

A higher cigarette tax will encourage people to stop smoking.

A carbon tax will encourage people to shift away from carbon-emitting, and toward "green" energy sources.

An increase on the tax for charitable giving will reduce the incentive for donations.

and also...

A higher tax on the outcome of capital investments will not stop people from investing in the future of our means of production and employment, and even if it did those are rich people who can afford it.

A higher tax on the most valuable work being done in our economy (as set by a free market) will not cause those people to shift their time away from this work and towards leisure.

and therefore...

taking money away from the fruits of the most valuable capital and labor in our economy, and spending it on things we wouldn't even approve when the economy was booming, will actually somehow increase our country's output.

Hope that helps clear up any confusion.

General Motors' auditor expressed doubts over the auto maker's survival. Apparently having full access to their books and management made Deloitte & Touche the LAST TO FUCKING KNOW THAT.

Workflow

When you take a taxi ride, you sit there for the duration of the ride with nothing to do but look out the window, then when you arrive at your destination, and are blocking traffic, you must scramble to calculate the tip and pay the driver.

That is stupid. NYC Taxis now take credit card. You should be able to swipe your card at any point during the trip and enter a percentage tip. The system could pre-auth some amount on your card, and when the ride is over you'd just have to, at most, hit a confirm button and hop out. This would save both you and the driver time and minimize traffic disruption.

Friday the 13th, 2004 was a day like any other. I had nothing to do at work. So I started this blog. Which means today is the 5th year anniversary!

I'm sure you are wondering about some key stats about this blog. Well, they are 428 total posts (net) and 8731 hits, which if you are a fan of meaningless ratios and unnecessary precision is 20.399953 hits per post.

In celebration, I'm going to link back to the post that started it all, and is probably still the best one. Enjoy.

For spending our nation's resources,

"The market" : Congressional Appropriators

is most similar to, for entrusting your household budget,

a) Your Jewish accountant : Your toddler
b) Your Goldman private banker : A heroin addict
c) Your Fidelity broker : Bernie Madoff
d) All of the above

New Idea for iPhone App

When you download it, it automatically sells your iPhone on eBay and orders you a blackberry.

New Business Idea [probably already exists]

Sell a high quality notebook that comes with a sturdy but removable binding and a prepaid envelope to mail the notebook back when it is full. When the notebook is returned, it will be scanned and OCR'd (to the extent possible based on the content), and you will get a searchable PDF emailed to you.

I really would've liked to have this product/service in college and grad school. Instead of having all of my notes readily available, I either threw out the notebooks after the class ended or it's in a pile of crap somewhere I will probably never look at again.

This would also be great for professional services firms. Upon starting a new project each team member gets a notebook. At the end of the project, or when a team member "rotates off," the notebook is scanned and added to the project's digital files, for compliance purposes and retention of institutional knowledge.

With some of those industrial Google library scanners, it would probably be fairly cheap to implement the service.

Thought Experiment

There is some disagreement about how effective the stimulus package currently winding through Congress will be. Some economists think the government should spend a crapload of money, while others think they should give a crapload of money back to taxpayers.

I don't know. They both sound good to me. How can I figure out what I think they should do?

Imagine if Obama said that if you live west of the Mississippi, you will get $400B of spending on union construction projects, extended welfare and global warming research -- but no tax cut. If you live on the east side of the Mississippi, you will get a big tax cut but no money for the National Endowment for the Arts and all of your bridges will have to go to somewhere.

If you were in a boat going down the river when you heard this announcement, looking for a place to live, which bank would you head towards?

Newspapers

For decades Kodak sold film. Then one day, the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 29, Working Group 1 invented JPGs and film rapidly became obsolete. Kodak now sells digital camera and does quite well I think, despite being located in backwards Rochester, NY.

Newspapers are in a similar situation. Their current business is going to zero as fast as you can say "wait keep standing there smiling I need to load another roll of film." It's idiotic to have yesterday's news printed on paper, loaded on a truck, thrown in your driveway, probably not read, placed in the recycling bin, and picked up by another truck.

The brightest minds in the business are racing to figure out what to do before their lenders shut off the lights. Unfortunately, these people, while well suited to report on the fact that they are going out of business, are not well suited to prevent the same. Even the normally saavy Silicon Alley Insider's plan is a weak attempt to delay the inevitable.

Fortunately, I am unencumbered by any actual understanding of the newspaper business, nor the humility to avoid displaying this fact, which allows me to suggest the following course of action.

There are clearly many people who still value receiving a hard copy of the newspaper and are willing to pay, whether it's because they want to read it while traveling, they are old people, or they just hate plants...like vegetarians.

Someone needs to create a standalone printer that end users could obtain, connects to the internet, and prints the daily newspaper in the user's home in the form factor of a traditional paper (large pages double sided, etc). Wireless inkjet printers are like $100, and I can't imagine designing one that meets those specifications would cost much more than that.

These devices could be sold to users, or given to them in exchange for their subscription, similar to a cable box. It would bring the following advantages to newspapers:

1) Almost free distribution (no factories and trucks)

2) International reach (you could print the paper from your home town if you wanted)

3) Removal of timing issues. You could, with no additional cost create an evening issue, or set the dang thing to print a few pages every hour if the user wanted.

4) Digital delivery without relying on [what will later be found to be ineffective] advertising, or online subscriptions fees, which do not work unless you are offering something useful like the WSJ or porn.

The New York Times is the ideal candidate to implement this plan. They have already done most of the work brainwashing their readership about the erroneous risk of global warming, and thus this can be pitched as some kind of premium-added-cost-plant-saving-CO2-reducing-Al-Gore-fellating version of the normal paper.

I think people who are into auto-erotic asphyxiation should always write a suicide note before doing their thing, so in case they go too far and accidentally kill themselves it just looks like they were sad, not a perv.

The Rules

When filling up your bowl at self-serve Mongolian BBQ, acceptable items are meat, fish, and vegetables. Unacceptable items are rice and noodles.

Fortunately few people follow this rule, which allows my BBQ to be cheaper than it would have to be if they did. I like to take advantage of stupidity subsidies.

Others include:

1) New Years resolution gym contracts make membership cheaper for the rest of us.

2) People who buy electric and hybrid cars at great expense to themselves lower demand for gasoline making it cheaper for SUV owners.

How do they convince people to be the requisite "witnesses" at Mafia weddings?

It turns out that my ATM pin is the 4th most common password of all time. I think I'm going to have to find something further down on the list.

New Business Idea

Everyone hates going on vacation and walking around holding a guide book in your hand. Every few blocks you have to stop and examine it while the locals step around you rolling their eyes and petty thieves size you up as easy prey.

That is why I would like to start a new line of tourism guide books. I will take currently existing guide books, and bind them with a new cover in the local language of the destination saying, for example, "Ulan Bator Ninja Academy - Official Rules and Regulations." The picture will not be of the main tourist spot or the country's natural wonders, it will be of a scary looking guy with nun chucks or maybe even a bow staff.

Now, if you need to look for a place to eat or consult the guide book's map, you can hold the book up proudly and glare at the locals walking by.

In today's WSJ, we learn about a Pakistani journalist who escaped from a kidnapping.

"As negotiations dragged on for weeks, his guards relaxed. They gave Mr. Afridi scissors to trim his moustache. Eventually, he used the scissors to pick the lock that chained him to his bed."

This Magnum PI Macguyver mother fucker used a MOUSTACHE Trimmer to escape! I hereby induct him into the MyATMPinis1234 Moustache Hall of Fame.

Next time you buy a new car, don't waste the opportunity.

Buy a large red bow, place it on top of the car, and spend at least a week parking it in front of random neighbors' houses.

My New Year's resolution is to get 1000 more resolutions. I bet you suckers wasted it on something like losing weight!

Says this guy...

"I have faith that Obama's [stimulus] plans will ultimately bolster the economy in some way, shape, or form."

As a reminder, faith is what's required to believe in something in the absence of any logical or reasonable basis for doing so. It's usually used in the context of believing in a supernatural power that controls human destiny, so I guess it's apt, since that is what we will need to avoid economic calamity.

Because you can't remove $850 Billion from the productive economy, throw it at a bevy of politically motivated but highly unproductive uses, and call that a stimulus. It's actually almost exactly the opposite of that.

By contrast, think about what else we could do with that money. In 2007 the IRS collected a total of $1,117,599,983,000 from personal income taxes (xls). Obama could forego the current plan and give back 76% of all income tax and capital gains tax dollars paid by Americans next year. That would be one HELL of a stimulus.

Google helpfully provides phrase completion when typing in search terms. Most people apparently use Google to find out information about drugs. Should I know what "implantation bleeding" is? I was too afraid to click on the search...

If the only thing you knew about me was the list of books Amazon thinks I might be interested in, you would think that I was a king-sized douche bag.

Everyone knows that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a terrible thing. For example, at concentrations of 7%, which is only 6.97% higher than the current level, people experience "dizziness, headache, visual and hearing dysfunction, and unconsciousness within a few minutes to an hour (reference)." So clearly we need to do something about the problem now, before unconsciousness happens.

The question is what to do. The internal combustion engine in most cars today runs at about 20% efficiency. That means for every 10 energies that are produced, 8 of them are wasted. 8 of them!

In contrast, consider electric cars. Most electric power in the U.S. is produced by coal fired power plants, the turbines of which run at about 35% efficiency. This is higher than 20%, and in this context higher is better. Of course, your car isn't plugged in to the turbine, so when the power is transmitted it loses another 7% along the way. Oh yeah, and then batteries are only 80% efficient, so then it loses another 20%. And I almost forgot, coal produces way more CO2 per pound of energy than gasoline.

Wait a second, actually now that I think about battery powered cars don't seem to be that great of an idea.

There has been much in the news lately about the piracy epidemic off the coast of Somalia, affecting the important shipping lanes to the suez canal.

Many people point out that it is a very large area to patrol, and even when pirates are captured it is a confusing legal problem of what to do with them. This has prevented the Navies of the world from stamping out the problem.

I would like to propose a solution.

We should give each cargo and cruise ship a satellite phone and an AN/PED-1 Lightweight Laser Designator Rangefinder. When a pirate ship begins to attack, they would simply call up the US Navy and use the LLDR to act as their own personal forward air controller.

After the first few times a pirate ship got hit by a Hellfire missle from a predator drone circling the area, I imagine piracy would become a lot less appealing.

Economics

If a pharmaceutical company invented a hangover cure pill, what would they be able to charge for it?

If you are really hungover, you would pay pretty much anything for it, but unfortunately you would probably be too hungover to go out and buy it.

If you are not [yet] hungover, you would be able to go buy it, but probably wouldn't be willing to spend too much for it.

People who have defaulted on their mortgage and still go to Starbucks should be sent to debtors' prison.

I am confused. Should I go to Zales, Kay, or Jared?

General Motors is losing money hand over fist. Their executives and many Democratic congressmen are running around pleading for the government to write billion dollar checks to help them pay their bills and re-tool to produce more fuel efficient cars.

This whole thing is going to make my head explode.

1) I have seen many claims about the number of jobs that will be lost if the auto industry "goes under," ranging from several hundred thousand to several million if you include the dealer network and suppliers. Really? Does anyone think they will just shut off the lights, lock the doors, and say "we had a good run."

Because that is not what happens in a bankruptcy. Obviously some people will lose their jobs, starting with management, but the factories will stay open, cars will get built, and everything will still chug along. When Macy's went bankrupt did the stores close down? When Delta Airlines when bankrupt did they ground all the planes and close the airports? No, that didn't happen. So why is everyone running around saying a million people are going to lose their jobs? Even if that did happen, those people would all just get jobs, in America, at Toyota, because Americans will still need to purchase cars.

2) The even more boneheaded thing is the universally agreed upon "true fact" that the U.S. auto manufacturers need to redesign their product lines to be more "green."

HOLY FUCKING SHIT IS THAT STUPID. Americans have already demonstrated time and time again that they don't want shitty little cars that have no power and get great gas mileage. Yeah, there were short-lived blips where this was not so, caused in the 1970's by the Sheiks and in 2008 by the Federal Reserve, but other than during exceptional times, Americans want trucks and cars that go fast. Are BMW and Mercedes running out of cash? No. Do they make fuel efficient cars? Not really. In fact, they don't even follow the current CAFE fuel efficiency standards, electing instead to just pay the fines.

So how is it going to help American auto manufacturers by forcing them to build cars that Americans want even less? They should call this plan the "Japanese and German Automotive Industry Full Employment Act of 2008." Yes, it will be awesome for our country when American cars are as reliable as MY FUCKING LAPTOP BATTERY. Or run off used Chinese restaurant cooking oil.

Gay Marriage

The 14th Amendment says no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Which makes the gay marriage issue all the more perplexing. Why should gay people be the only ones to be protected against marriage? That is why I'm announcing that I will be filing a lawsuit against the state of New York to extend this protection to straight people and have all marriage banned.

"We'll create two million new jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and laying broadband lines that reach every corner of the country."

- Barak Obama, WSJ, Nov 3, 2008

You probably are thinking that this guy has some good ideas. New jobs, repaired infrastructure, and broadband for all... who could be against that?

Me.

Because it demonstrates that Obama is either happy with shamelessly spouting populist nonsense, or completely ignorant of economics. Either way it's not good.

For one thing, rebuilding infrastructure and laying broadband lines is either the most efficient use of our scarce CAPEX funds, or it's not. Building infrastructure is not the worst thing that we could do, but when you spend money on it, you are reducing the amount you can spend on the private sector. So you are in essence trading 2 million (Davis-Bacon) new jobs in public infrastructure for >2 million jobs in the private sector. This creates a NET JOB LOSS. That's fine if society wants to pay those costs for better infrastructure, but don't tell me you are creating jobs! It is the most simple economic theory, very well described by Henry Hazlitt's Broken Window fallacy (con'd).

As for laying broadband lines to every corner of the country, that pretty much ensures a sub-optimal use of funds, and by extension, us getting worse broadband service than without intervention. Have you ever noticed that in many developing nations most people still do not have reliable land-line service, yet they prettty much all have cellphones? That's because the market decided the most efficient way to get these people connectivity was NOT to dig trenches and run lines to rural and sparsely populated places. In our country, and with the rapid pace of innovation in telecomm, it is just a boneheaded idea to run lines to every corner. We have Satellites, WiMax, and other new technologies coming very soon that makes laying broadband lines a very expensive, broken window, method of getting people high speed connectivity.

And BTW, I chose that sentence from Obama's op-ed because it was one of the least egregious examples of his distrust or lack of understanding of free markets.

Not like McCain understands it either. They both seem to know very little. The difference is that McCain admitted he didn't understand it well. On the other hand, you get the sense that Obama and his followers (especially the college students) (and journalists) are so damn sure they know everything. A quintessential Dunning-Kruger effect if I ever saw one. And there's nothing in the world more dangerous than someone unaware of his shortcomings. Just ask my ex-girlfriends.

Repeal Humphrey-Hawkins!

Engineers know that catastrophes are usually caused by a chain of cascading failures that eventually overwhelm the checks and margins of error.

For example, if the railroad company hadn't decided to save money by eliminating the backup conductor, and the conductor hadn't gone to a bachelor party the night before and stayed up all night, and the conductor's wife hadn't packed him a thermos of warm milk for his lunch, perhaps he wouldn't have fallen asleep at the wheel. But all that wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't built the tracks leading into the side of the fireworks factory to begin with.

Schlep Gone Bad

Recently I was told about this interesting program called The Great Schlep, which aims to have Jewish grandchildren go down to Florida to inform their grandparents about Barak Obama to help swing the state in his favor.

Since I will basically do anything Sarah Silverman tells me to do, I accepted the challenge with alacrity, and booked my flight.

I sat down with my grandfather, and I was only a few minutes into my spiel about how we need change for the sake of change, and how the McBush cabal is terrible because they are stupid / old and frequently use malapropisms in their speeches, and how Bush is not legitimate anyway because he somehow tricked Gore into litigating his election loss and then tricked 7 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices into upholding the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment thereby “anointing” Bush as a false President.

My grandfather stopped me, and pointed out that having been born in 1917, and having nothing to do all day but read newspapers and watch news broadcasts, he was actually already aware of all the points I was making, and would like to point out a few things that perhaps I had not considered when all my favorite celebrities and I decided that Obama was right for America.

He asked me if I knew why he and Grandma always re-used the tin foil they stored leftover food in. I said I thought it was because they were old and batty. That’s when he told me the story of what happened to our economy when he was a teenager.

Apparently, starting in September 1929 the stock market took a steep dive because of some poor advice given by Joseph Kennedy’s shoe-shine boy. By April of the following year, the market was 30% below its previous peak. I was shocked by this, noting that now our stock market is about 30% below its peak from last year, just like in 1930!

He had me enthralled with this story, so I begged him to tell me what happened next. Apparently, some Congressmen named Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley wrote a crazy law that raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods. This caused a collapse in global trade and drove a stake into the heart of the American economy that lasted for years.

I asked Grandpa why they would do that, since over a hundred years prior, David Ricardo wrote Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, and taught the world how comparative advantage causes free trade to be highly beneficial to economic prosperity.

That’s when it dawned on me what grandpa was driving at. Obama and his party want to unilaterally renegotiate the NAFTA treaty, are against a similar pact, CAFTA, with Central America, and are stridently opposed to reducing barriers with our closest ally in South America, Colombia. It also occurred to me that since my beloved Democrats are a virtual subsidiary of the labor unions, they’re not likely to support any free trade.

Grandpa had me scrambling, but luckily I remembered what one of my friends was saying about those trade agreements after the Trotsky themed poetry slam we went to in Brooklyn. So I smugly asked him how he can support free trade without environmental and labor protections for those poor workers.

But again the old man had me outclassed. He patiently explained how environmental protection and workers’ rights rise mostly when a nation can afford it due to increasing prosperity and that by limiting trade with these developing countries we were actually working against the stated goal.

He had me. I finally agreed with Gramps that my man Obama was dead wrong on trade, but heck, at least his tax plan was way more fair, right?

Grandpa’s face turned a little red, his knuckles white, and he took a couple deep breaths, whispering faintly something about “serenity now.” “That discussion will have to wait until your next trip down here,” he said. I agreed, even though I really wanted to discuss it right then, because deep down I was panicked that when I got home and started to really look into the issues one by one, I would have to pull the lever for John Bush II McOldyOld.

Marcus Marketor, a Greek Tragedy

How much is your house worth? Even in normal times it’s a difficult question to answer, and people looking to sell pay hefty commissions to real estate professionals to help set the sale price. You bought yours a few years before the peak for $200k, so you figure it’s probably dropped 15%, to $170k. But the reality is, although it would be interesting to know, you don’t really care how much your house is worth, because you can afford the payments and plan on living there a long time raising a family.

Your neighbor, however, is in a different situation. He desperately needs to move out of state for personal reasons and must sell his house now. Unfortunately for him, everyone else is too scared to buy houses right now, and the best he can do is find a savvy investor to take it off his hands for $100k, even though it’s very similar to your house and probably will be worth a lot more when the market recovers.

The situation is lousy, but hardly the end of the world. Until the government got involved.

You see, a few years back some bad dude energy traders from Houston lied about some things. And instead of just punishing those guys, the government went bananas passing new rules on the entire world.

So now when your neighbor sells his house, his price automatically becomes the value of your own house. Not only that, but in order to “protect” your kids from being thrown out onto the street, the government says that you have to put up new collateral on your loan to make sure you have a reasonable cushion and aren’t over-extended.

Bottom line: you now have to raise $100k of cash money, and just keep it in your bank account, because the government is protecting your kids by making sure you don’t owe more than you have.

You argue that it’s ridiculous, because you have a good job and can afford to pay your bills, and the value of your house is not really important because you live there. But the helpful guy from Washington says “Too bad, so sad. Sell everything you have that isn’t bolted down to come up with the $100k.”

As if by magic, you’ve gone from being in pretty good financial shape to completely buggered.

But you stay up all night working out a plan, selling your cars and your stamp collection, and getting money from your aunt. You think you might just make it! You tell your kids that everything is going to be all right.

Unfortunately your neighbor on the other side doesn’t have a rich aunt, and now he has to sell his house. But this time, even the savvy investors are too scared, because the government has another plan to “help.” The government announced a plan to compete with savvy investors, buying the exact houses that they were in the process of scooping up.

So the government buys your neighbor’s house for $50k. And now guess what they want you to do?

[Six months later]

You have no house. Unfortunately, you told your kids everything would be OK - by EMAIL! You are the lowest of the low. Lying to your kids when you knew things were not going to be fine. You are informed that the government will provide you with a new house (a big one). It’s very secure, you have a nice roommate, and they provide you with three meals a day.

* This story is fictional. Any resemblance to real events and/or persons is purely coincidental.

The is now a version of the erectile dysfunction medicine Cialis, that is meant to be taken every day. How in the fuck is there a market large enough of old people who are getting laid that often? Thanks Eli Lilly, for making me feel great about myself.

Disaster

In a blatant attempt to lower morale and increase the attrition rate to avoid layoffs, my employer has started blocking blogger.com and facebook. Blog posts and status updates will be sporadic for the time being.

Why I'm Not In Charge

"They" say that obesity is the biggest public health problem since smoking. Of course, most of the problem stems from the fact that the FDA, medical community, and diet industry are most likely completely wrong on what is a healthy diet. Gary Taubes points out many counter examples to the orthodoxy's hypothesis that eating less and exercising more is the answer, in this amazing video.

As a quick aside, the NYT has a ridiculous article about a girl who can't afford to go to fat camp. This puts the establishment weight loss theorists in the untenable position of saying this girl is too poor to eat less!

Whatever. I know most of you can't get past the massive cognitive dissonance inherent in what you think you know about the subject, so I would like to propose a way to answer the question once and for all.

It, like many of my ideas, involves prison. Why not take several prisons, divide the populations in half, and put half the population on a typical american diet, and the half on Zone /Atkins /Primal / Weight Watchers / Special K / etc diets.

Resolving this would benefit society immensely. Prisoners owe society. Prisoners would have 100% compliance. It's a no f-ing brainer.

There are some of you who will probably have a problem with experimenting on prisoners. To that I say, first, fuck you, and second, do you think it will be hard to convince them to voluntarily give up prison chow for a year?

The only problem I see is that the weight watchers prison will have to be a women's prison, because no man in his right mind would do that diet.

The bar manager did a great job printing out, laminating, and posting the sign in the bathroom instructing patrons to hold the handle down until the toilet flush is complete. Of course, it would've been faster to just replace the $.50 gasket and fix the problem. Nice clip-art on the sign though.

Success!

I can chalk up another victory in my quest to cherry-pick data that confirms my previously held beliefs on climate change. We already know that the climate models conform to reality worse than Halo 3. Now it turns out that even the actual temperature numbers have to be tortured to show the dramatic warming in the IPCC report.

So, to recap:

1) We really know next to nothing about the future of the climate.
1a) Including, btw, whether any climate change would cause net harm or good.
2) Even if we did know, it would really not be possible to fix the problem without returning to an agrarian society or solving cold fusion.
3) Even if we could fix the problem, it would probably be way less expensive to mitigate the result.
4) Even if we wanted to spend the money to mitigate the result, it would be much more cost effective to solve other problems first, such as child immunization and nutrition.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. True, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and got DDT banned, she did save about 14 birds. But then a couple million African children died from Malaria. Oops.

User Interface Fail

Someone recently asked me to take a look at a post on this website. I will not comment on the site content, but the major innovation here seems to be that you read posts from left to right (like a book! it's so natural!).

Except for the fact that since I switched from Gopher to the WWW in 1992, my internet perusal muscle memory has been conditioned to down-arrow/Pg-Dn when I wish to obtain additional content from a website.

Not that I'm a Luddite or locked into a particular navigational methodology. A few years ago I added the mouse scroll wheel to my repertoire. Which is useless on this website. It's pretty rad when your website design cripples standard input device hardware.

But lest anyone say my criticism is not constructive, I have a recommendation (other than the obvious, rm -f /). Trap the keypress event for spacebar and automatically scroll right to the next post.

The escalator in my building isn't broken. But its functionality has degraded gracefully to a staircase.

When you purchase something, you are trading something of value, namely money, for some good which you value even more. It’s called your consumer surplus. The person selling the item is in the same situation, making the trade a win-win for both parties.

Except, apparently, when it comes to the purchase of foreign oil. That particular trade is described by the media and politicians as a “wealth transfer,” and it is seen as being harmful to one of the parties (Americans). Jerry Brown says that “we must stop the hemorrhaging of our national treasure, and we need to do it now (WSJ, 8/11/2008, p. A15).” I find it odd that we would voluntarily enter into a transaction that makes us worse off, and I don’t recall seeing Saudi warships forcing us to buy their crude.

Maybe people think it’s not fair because they just pump the stuff out of the ground. This fails to recognize the incredible technological expertise this requires, as well as massive amounts of capital expenditures. And that is no different from any other thing manufactured and sold, which involves the application of technology to transform a country’s natural resources into something useful which can be sold. Besides, when America sells billions of dollars of Kansas wheat abroad, is that a wealth transfer?

Not surprisingly, the solution to the so-called problem also requires the willful disregard of economics. It’s called energy conservation, and if you’re not in favor of it, you will never get laid again. I am a strong proponent of it.

Although I do recognize that when implemented as government standards for automotive, appliance, and building efficiency minimums, you are reducing the consumer surplus, by forcing people to accept a higher initial purchase price and lower level of quality in exchange for a theoretical future reduction of operating costs. This is known in the economic journals as the “thanks to government water rules I now have to flush twice when I take a shit so my water bill isn’t even lower” theory of efficiency by fiat.

"Wehner and two engineers, Lenny Oliker and John Shalf, also of Lawrence Berkeley, have proposed perhaps the most powerful special-purpose computer yet. It is intended to model changes in climatic patterns over periods as long as a century. Specifically, it should be able to remedy today's inability to model clouds well enough to tell whether their net effect is to warm the world or cool it (IEEE Spectrum, Sept 2008)."

But other than not knowing how clouds work, the climate models are perfect.

I'm no hedge fund manager like T. Boone Pickens, nor a venture capitalist like Al Gore, but seeing as how both of these gentlemen are proposing to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by changing our vehicle fleet to use natural gas/electric, I have one [two-part] question for these economic luminaries.

What will happen to the price of oil if we reduce global demand by 25% or so, the amount currently consumed by the US, considering the average yearly change in demand is only 1.2%? If this change in demand were to cause the price of oil to crash back to $12 a barrel, where it was last time demand was that low, do you think this might complicate your ability to convince Americans to stick with your plan?

Today's List of Pet Peeves

1) Not sure if you heard about this feature, but my phone has a missed call log, so if you leave a voicemail saying, "Hey it's Allan. Give me a call" you have provided no new information and wasted everyone's time.

2) You found the most hysterical article on Salon.com and want to forward to everyone. Instead of sending the URL, or copy/pasting the article into an email, you use the built-in "send this article" feature whereby you enter all your friends' email addresses into some shady database somewhere. There is a reason I have a separate junk account I use to enter into web forms, and I would appreciate it if my webtard acquaintances didn't screw up my legit address. I don't care if it's the NY Times. Pretty soon at the chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation auction they will be selling the NYTimes mailing list to the highest bidder.

3) I can't believe that I can't think of a third one. I remember being pissed off several times this morning. Oh well.

I was alarmed to find out recently that wearing flip-flops is now contraindicated for foot health. They apparently do not have the proper cushioning and support that is required when the human foot makes contact with the ground.

Which makes me very glad I was born when I was. Because before the 1980's when the Nike Air was invented, shoes had very little cushioning and support, and people must've been constantly getting injured. And before the 1920's, when the first real sneakers (keds and chuck taylors) came about, walking and running must've been next to impossible.

It's quite a wonder our species survived at all. Because for 250,000 years, from the time modern humans emerged, until 1979 when Nike invented the modern athletic shoe, we would've had no choice but to just sit there and let lions eat us, because we were apparently unequipped to run until recently.

Some of you might be thinking that this can't possibly be true, that the need for shoes with cushioning and microchips, must be something we've been conditioned to believe because of the thousands of hours of shoe commercials we've all seen.

But the historical record bears this out. The one person who ran before modern times, Pheidippides, died immediately after running from Marathon to Athens, undoubtedly from massive foot trauma.

And how glad am I that I'm not a podiatrist? With all these advances in the past 30 years, they must be right around the corner from curing foot pain forever and putting all of those guys out of business. Well, in America at least.

There is an article in today's WSJ (page 1) about suicide bombing in the war in Afghanistan, containing this nugget:

"Suicide attacks were virtually unheard of in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. That started to change after the U.S.-led occupation in 2001."

Perhaps my inference mechanism has gone haywire, and they never outright state it, but it seems they are implying that there is something about our country and our prosecution of the war that enrages people enough to blow themselves up. That we are somehow worse than the Soviet invasion.

But I think this is more a statement about how effective our military is. During the Soviet invasion, they didn't have to blow themselves up, because they were fighting a demoralized conscript army with mediocre equipment and tactics. And they had CIA backing.

Today they are facing well trained and highly motivated special forces soldiers who are one radio call away from having an A-10 Warthog pour down depleted uranium shells on an enemy. Suicide bombing and IEDs are their only options now, so it's no surpise they are way up.

I'm Just Sayin

What happens when you put an exposed 190MW nuclear reactor core near a whole lot of ice? My computer model predicts that the ice will melt.

What if I told you there was such a reactor close to the arctic circle? It is inside what used to be the Soviet Mike Class K-278 Komsomolets submarine.

Does Al Gore ever mention this fact when he preaches about the melting ice caps? Of course not, because it doesn't fit with his thesis, the verity of which he has some credibility riding on.

He also probably doesn't mention it, because I just made this whole thing up right now, and it's a ridiculous association.

But I can't wait to launch this into the discussion next time someone starts talking about the arctic ice melting.

I would like to congratulate my colleagues on reaching a new milestone in their attempt to justify our headcount by making each team member less productive.

Since last Wednesday afternoon, I have received 1200 emails, 11 of which contained information relevant to me. Most were automated alerts for things I don't deal with, improperly broad carbon copies and distribution lists for things I don't deal with, and compliance emails for things I don't deal with.

In case you were wondering, this translates to a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of -41.5 decibels. To put that in perspective, if my Outlook inbox were a radio station, it would be blasting almost pure static.

If left unfiltered, email would no longer be a viable information channel with a SNR that low. And by the way, this doesn't even count any externally generated spam.

Why does Windows even care if I have unused items on my desktop?

Look around your house. Is there too much stuff lying around? Do you have to go to the Container Store this weekend?

Then why are you working so hard to get even more stuff?

Lately I've read a couple articles about the need to have a disaster supply kit on hand in case something really bad happens. You know, critical stuff like a whistle, aluminum foil, pencils, and a map of the area and compass.

The problem is, 99% of the time the "disaster" amounts to a bit of inconvenience until the Walmart reopens the next day, or FEMA relief supplies show up a few days after that. And in the other 1% of the time, a building has fallen on your head, or you live in Bhopal, in which case your disaster supplies are conveniently within reach of your corpse.

Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of people will never be in a disaster in the first place. So a widespread policy of stockpiling useless items seems to me to be a waste of resources.

But for the sake of argument, I would like to present my disaster supply kit, designed for the intermediate scenario where some catastrophic event causes the temporary or permanent breakdown of law and order and societal functioning, but does not actually kill you.

An example of this would be some kind of super virus that infects and brings down the google and wikipedia data centers, removing humanity's ability to access all knowledge, aside from the no longer vital and rapidly outdated content of the US Weekly on your coffee table.

During the widespread panic, looting, starvation, and death that would ensue, I believe the following items would be useful:

• A rifle and ammunition, for self-protection and eventually hunting for food.
  
• A NIOSH N95-N100 rated particulate respirator, for protection against infectious diseases that either caused, or resulted from the given calamity.
• An ample supply of offline, paper-based pornography. Remember, in a disaster, the internet and even your electricity may fail.
  
• Several months supply of canned food. If you don't have this or run out, you can alternatively use the first item in the list to obtain it.
  
• A water filtration unit with spare filters.
  
• A fire starting kit.
  
• Optional: According to most social networking profiles' "about me" section, very few can live without their iPod. These people will want to include an iPod hand-crank charger in the kit.
  

Today's Global Warming Post

If you look at it the right way, this global warming thing could end up being a heads-i-win-tails-you-lose situation.

On one hand, if global warming ends up happening, those pricks in Saudi Arabia have to live in a country that's 140 degrees instead of 120.

Alternatively, we could invent some incredible alternate energy production and distribution system, and then we would be able to tell the Kremlin, Hugo Chavez, and the Middle East where to shove their fucking oil.

I, for one, would be willing to pay a princely sum for option 2. I guess it's all in the way you sell it.

It's amazing how often major economic decision making, when discussed by politicians and the media, ignores or downplays the most crucial dimension in financial analysis -- timing.

"Should we open ANWR and the US coastline for more oil exploration?"

You see this headline all the time. I guess the implication is that the decision is whether to do so right now. But without actively bringing time into the equation, it's difficult to see that the real question is:

"When should we open ANWR and the US coastline for exploration (including never)?"

People are constantly whining about how we are unnecessarily shipping billions of dollars into the coffers of middle eastern tyrannies to pay for all the oil.

Which is true. Except if you believe in the Peak Oil Theory, under which these stupid dictators have been busy for 50 years shipping us dirt cheap oil, and now that they are running out, we can tap (the rest) of our own sources at sky high prices. In this admittedly oversimplified (and probably incorrect) analysis, the perverse incentive is to leave it in the ground, even if your goal is economic maximization.

Especially since it's not like any country (including USA) invests the proceeds of the oil in something to benefit the future like infrastructure or education. Most countries would blow it on palaces for the rulers, or in our case, pork and entitlements.

My point is not to answer the question of when to drill for oil, because I frankly have no idea. I just don't understand why people can have 19 spreadsheets to figure out when and what Plasma TV to buy, but on important things like what to do with our country's natural resources or when, if ever, to address climate change, all rigor goes completely out the window.

And by the way, fuck it, lets pump it all out now.