tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25522798798805395432024-03-05T05:18:23.061-05:00Tim StuhldreherTim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.comBlogger149125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-4349152439998742032016-05-22T18:00:00.000-04:002016-05-23T11:06:38.546-04:00Mother's Day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgjdE5SrCIX1d1jbsF1QmxQ7BPhoaaY1ZjHQc7D1OWLsV_kCv-v3Aoc46sTLwn4eNOicWJtzVwxt_42aKiySxYd2W89CkNpN2ASNnGFgwxNqhh45rqPtEheYFYe99sQr-an1CEmajrNnJo/s1600/tombstone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgjdE5SrCIX1d1jbsF1QmxQ7BPhoaaY1ZjHQc7D1OWLsV_kCv-v3Aoc46sTLwn4eNOicWJtzVwxt_42aKiySxYd2W89CkNpN2ASNnGFgwxNqhh45rqPtEheYFYe99sQr-an1CEmajrNnJo/s400/tombstone.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
When I arrived mid-morning two Sundays ago at Philadelphia's Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, I found myself in the midst of a traffic jam.<br />
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It makes sense as soon as you think about it that Mother's Day would be a big day for a graveyard, but I still was taken aback. There were cars everywhere, inching along the narrow paths past their stationary fellows, whose occupants were milling around nearby headstones. It was like an oddly morbid tailgate party.<br />
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My mother was sitting in my passenger seat; or more precisely, her urn was. For the past two years, she, or it, had been sitting on a shelf in my home office, patiently awaiting final disposition. You're not supposed to take that long to bury someone, but my plans to meet at Holy Sepulchre with Uncle John, her younger brother, kept getting put off for one reason or another. We're both busy, he lives in Maine, and he's had some health problems lately. The funeral service in Pittsburgh had been timely; this last step, not so much.<br />
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As I'd learned a couple of days earlier, her interment wasn't going to happen today, either. I had finalized all the arrangements with the sales manager, only to have him call me back and explain that it's against canon law for Catholic cemeteries to bury people on Sundays. "But I told you we were coming May 8!" I protested. "I didn't realize you meant Sunday," he said: "How about Saturday?" "No, my uncle and I both have conflicts. And we can't do it Monday, either." Eventually, we agreed that my uncle and I would just visit the grave on Sunday and leave it at that. The cemetery could handle the actual interment later, at its convenience.<br />
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I weaved my way through the cars and met John at the cemetery office. The sales manager took us out to the McDevitt plot — McDevitt being my mother's side of the family. John noticed the headstone was a little askew. "It probably got bumped by our mower," the manager said. They'd nudge it back, he assured us. His unconcerned tone bothered me. Does this happen often? Are Holy Sepulchre's tombstones perpetually spinning like turnstiles, getting pinged and dinged by disrespectful groundskeepers hot-dogging its fleet of John Deeres?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5u0EhM5_tutrxF99wzo1saY34vML9OngseENQZplNeAiltZWwNSGoBQLyd8V6_a2tNfAZyfDvvTLQG3fMYVKYWnDhmeJM2FD-R-chyphenhyphen0cbh8SER5k21GHnFH3kMJ5mxQCoa7kGf6pNasIY/s1600/Mom+1940s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5u0EhM5_tutrxF99wzo1saY34vML9OngseENQZplNeAiltZWwNSGoBQLyd8V6_a2tNfAZyfDvvTLQG3fMYVKYWnDhmeJM2FD-R-chyphenhyphen0cbh8SER5k21GHnFH3kMJ5mxQCoa7kGf6pNasIY/s320/Mom+1940s.jpg" width="209" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My mother in her boy-snogging days.</td></tr>
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The manager left. Uncle John laid lilacs on the grave and we took a few pictures. I tried seting the urn in front of the headstone, but it looked silly, so I moved it aside.<br />
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I prodded John for recollections of his big sister. "She was always out on dates and bringing boys home," he said. "They'd be necking in the parlor, and I'd sneak downstairs with my Brownie camera and try to take a snapshot. She'd get so mad! 'Johnny, go back to bed!' she'd yell, and throw something at me. I'd run back upstairs ..."<br />
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I liked that story.<br />
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Back at the cemetery office, we made arrangements to have my mother's name engraved on the headstone. "Do you want the whole last name?" the manager asked. "Why wouldn't we?" "Well, just so you know, we charge by the letter."<br />
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I imagined shortening mom's inscription to "M. STHLDR." to save a few bucks. If anything would rouse the wrath of her spirit to haunt my every moment, it would be that. "The whole name, please," I said. It came out to a little under $900. The manager promised they would spell STUHLDREHER right. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCheoRjkPsd8uCAueYY_ONe6-FwKl6X-pF2Yx6a_7VW_xbGLqGCAvn7qmY0x0X-w-H2W8yERfIploDPVW4JJmHw8TuLKqNkaTc7e9ewD3ix-eisT0AuVvNImhQMxBT8ZuI6Ad0V6UTQDdt/s1600/pond.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCheoRjkPsd8uCAueYY_ONe6-FwKl6X-pF2Yx6a_7VW_xbGLqGCAvn7qmY0x0X-w-H2W8yERfIploDPVW4JJmHw8TuLKqNkaTc7e9ewD3ix-eisT0AuVvNImhQMxBT8ZuI6Ad0V6UTQDdt/s320/pond.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">The Swan Pond at the Morris Arboretum.</span></td></tr>
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In the afternoon, John and I went to the Morris Arboretum. My mother would have loved it there — all those beautiful, well-tended gardens. It was a glorious day. The sky was a shade of blue so sharp you could slice tomatoes with it.<br />
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Near the end of our visit, we came across a bronze statue of St. Francis, my mother's favorite saint. He was seated cross-legged with his left arm outstretched. Someone had put a sprig of real flowers in his hand.<br />
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As we admired it, a butterfly landed on the flowers. There was a moment of utter stillness. The butterfly flexed its wings a couple of times, then flitted off. I suppose if you were the sort of person who believed in such things, you could consider it a sign.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-29817591696241219752016-03-11T22:01:00.000-05:002016-03-11T22:32:00.541-05:00Is life good? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGJC8g_krKIvM4RhYghJW6mWh3agPtVPaZHSvQumcAFBnL5sT1qoLzuQji4QEl6aLeXqe541D2ThKf0fqt9XnyeMXvEDdTf5_LbgRIsoSM0t901Koq1yAV7OujWqZxgn9JKQtTtTMe0B2-/s1600/Memento+mori.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGJC8g_krKIvM4RhYghJW6mWh3agPtVPaZHSvQumcAFBnL5sT1qoLzuQji4QEl6aLeXqe541D2ThKf0fqt9XnyeMXvEDdTf5_LbgRIsoSM0t901Koq1yAV7OujWqZxgn9JKQtTtTMe0B2-/s320/Memento+mori.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
My guess is that most people have a strong visceral response, one way or the other, to the question, "Is it good to be alive?" and that for a majority, the response is, "Of course it is!"<br />
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I myself have that reaction. A couple of years ago, I had a bicycle accident and came fairly close to being run over by a pickup truck. As I lay on the asphalt, eye level with a tire tread, I was genuinely surprised at how happy I was not to have been run over, and to have escaped unscathed (give or take a bruised rib and skinned knuckles).<br />
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Looked at as a whole, however, the notion that life is essentially good is hard to justify, given the likelihood of pain and suffering and the inevitability of eventual annihilation. It's a grim fate to be a creature designed and built to desire life, yet to know with utter certainty that the universe that created you will rub you out in a few short years: <br />
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<i>Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. ... All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it. </i></blockquote>
We never win; we just delay losing long enough to produce the next generation, which delays losing long enough to produce the next generation, and so on.<br />
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So do I believe that existence is bad? Of late, I'm more inclined to the view that it's meaningless to call existence as such either good or bad. Consider: Isn't it meaningless to call temperature, as opposed to a <i>particular </i>temperature, hot or cold?<br />
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While we exist, our instincts paint the world around us with a range of values, including the supposed value of life itself. When we're cheerful and healthy, the world seems good; when we're morbid, it seems bad. But the seeming is in us, not in the world, as are the inferences we draw. When we are not, the seeming is not: Nonexistence includes (so to speak) the absence of any perceiving subject.<br />
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Existence isn't good or bad, but to the extent our wayward feelings and thoughts permit, it contains goodness and badness and everything in between.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-52543774359235369422016-01-31T16:09:00.000-05:002016-02-01T08:44:52.042-05:00No, Dennis Roddy, Corbett's shale gas numbers really were bullshit<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifwY0xbPzn4RLaDrkTXEGcAiB6ITHpXN6HSH-AXmE4gfsOgpbyi6Z0aJSQ3GOJ_0e3Cp7YDmDMvPebgsLMkezPxR-Vz9Iq6RwlXH5gTMReHrbZTyFQ_Ux-lNj2SZ5cthpM0G9ERxZSHSql/s1600/Marcellus_Shale_Gas_Drilling_Tower_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifwY0xbPzn4RLaDrkTXEGcAiB6ITHpXN6HSH-AXmE4gfsOgpbyi6Z0aJSQ3GOJ_0e3Cp7YDmDMvPebgsLMkezPxR-Vz9Iq6RwlXH5gTMReHrbZTyFQ_Ux-lNj2SZ5cthpM0G9ERxZSHSql/s400/Marcellus_Shale_Gas_Drilling_Tower_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>(Image: Wikimedia)</i></td></tr>
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Dennis Roddy sure loves him some mendacious hackery.<br />
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In a<a href="http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2016/01/with_shale_jobs_data_everythin.html" target="_blank"> recent op-ed column on PennLive.com</a>, the former speechwriter for one-term Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett rends his garments and gnashes his teeth over the current governor, Tom Wolf, whose administration recently had the temerity <a href="https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/tag/jobs/" target="_blank">to revise the state's Marcellus Shale jobs numbers</a> and bring them roughly into line with reality.<br />
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The Corbett administration, you may recall, constantly touted <a href="https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2013/11/06/economists-question-corbetts-marcellus-shale-jobs-claims/" target="_blank">the hundreds of thousands of jobs</a> the shale gas jobs industry supposedly was creating, generally settling on a figure of 200,000 or more. The industry's explosive growth, the argument went, meant it was too valuable to be taxed.<br />
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Now that the explosive growth has driven natural gas prices down to an ant's eye level, you will note, we are told the industry is in too fragile a state to be taxed.<br />
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Anyway, Roddy is pissed off because under the Wolf Administration, the Department of Labor & Industry has revised those jobs figures down to 29,000.<br />
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But what about the broader economic effects, Roddy complains. He enthuses about a team of "statistical wizards" from Corbett's L&I who instructed Roddy in the higher mysteries of indirect and induced employment.<br />
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"It was, basically, a mathematical calculation as to how the general economic buzz taking place in the gas fields and their surroundings, affected the general economy," he writes.<br />
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"General economic buzz? Ok, whatever. But here's the thing: If you do that calculation honestly — as a number of researchers not connected with the Corbett administration did at the time — you reach a total of about 80,000 to 90,000.<br />
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Not 200,000. Not close.<br />
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Note, by the way, that Roddy never, you know, delves into the numbers in his op-ed. He merely asserts they were plausible because, you know, the Marcellus Shale was BIG. Besides, those L&I guys, they knew what they were doing!<br />
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"I trusted L&I," Roddy whines, "because they could explain the wider meaning, using tools they'd assembled years before Tom Corbett was elected, and which they continued to fine-tune as the evidence warranted."<br />
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No, Dennis, actually they abandoned their claim to credibility and just made s*** up. To explain the details, let me turn to somebody <i>I</i> trusted, and still do: myself.<br />
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Back in November 2013, I wrote <a href="http://timstuhldreher.blogspot.com/2013/11/pas-claim-of-200000-marcellus-jobs.html" target="_blank">a lengthy blog post</a> on L&I's claim of 200,000+ jobs:<br />
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At first, people assumed these were actual Marcellus-related jobs. Then someone realized the agency was just reporting statewide category totals, without making any effort to determine what fraction of them actually had a connection to the gas industry. Think about that: It's like measuring the effect of building a stadium in Pittsburgh by including all the construction workers in Philadelphia, Altoona and Scranton.</blockquote>
Or as John Hanger, Wolf's policy secretary, says in <a href="http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/01/corbetts_office_cooked_the_boo.html" target="_blank">the article that set Roddy off</a>, "Every sewer employee counted as a gas worker? That makes no sense to any reasonable economist or analyst."<br />
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I went on to point out that 200,000 is roughly the number of jobs Pennsylvania had recovered since the bottom of the recession:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8EA8KfoOb29TE8sXsxn7KG_DlQ1h_hQJ_5RM_Kv5zdYAQPQ9fiFNOITT26PwjEdRCEqcm0Enp2KOR4ngUqLLeG9vEOXfRqmWLFWiknzOBZX5hemb2ur4oROceVc26S2UY0frEhgcx6KqO/s1600/Pa+total+nonfarm+jobs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8EA8KfoOb29TE8sXsxn7KG_DlQ1h_hQJ_5RM_Kv5zdYAQPQ9fiFNOITT26PwjEdRCEqcm0Enp2KOR4ngUqLLeG9vEOXfRqmWLFWiknzOBZX5hemb2ur4oROceVc26S2UY0frEhgcx6KqO/s320/Pa+total+nonfarm+jobs.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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"In other words, if the Corbett administration’s assertion is correct, than to a first approximation, all of Pennsylvania’s post-recession jobs gains are Marcellus jobs. ... [B]y attributing 200,000 jobs to the Marcellus industry, the Corbett administration is essentially accusing itself of disastrously mismanaging the rest of Pennsylvania’s economy!" </blockquote>
Roddy accuses Wolf of "intellectual vandalism" and "economic change denial" — the latter phrase a curious echo of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial" target="_blank">another kind of denial</a> much beloved of the fossil fuel industry. <br />
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But Roddy is defending the indefensible. When Hanger, in the comment that set Roddy off, <a href="http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/01/corbetts_office_cooked_the_boo.html" target="_blank">said Corbett's administration "cooked the books"</a> on shale jobs, he was speaking the plain truth.<br />
<br /><b>Update</b>: A friend points out that Roddy <a href="http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2015/06/disappearing_down_wolfs_shale.html" target="_blank">argued this point in June, too</a>. We even get the same Richard Wilbur verse. C'mon, Dennis, give it up already.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-78543503298045676282015-12-06T17:19:00.001-05:002015-12-06T17:46:41.186-05:00Amish Paradise<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmoupvIOGdbSaKaJuVZ6YytcjDohjFv7ZrtCeFoBMAieo_gsTRDYkXMYG-NKAu2TJXBvKREJe2OUPfn4iZ7wLragrM6F6EU_qIQ-Iv4dJmrDakvDcZitWkng90MOlU42gJrL4uU7tVg4rO/s1600/P1030312+%2528800x600%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmoupvIOGdbSaKaJuVZ6YytcjDohjFv7ZrtCeFoBMAieo_gsTRDYkXMYG-NKAu2TJXBvKREJe2OUPfn4iZ7wLragrM6F6EU_qIQ-Iv4dJmrDakvDcZitWkng90MOlU42gJrL4uU7tVg4rO/s320/P1030312+%2528800x600%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amish men work at a barn raising. Note the crane at right,<br />
run by a non-Amish worker to lift the trusses into place.</td></tr>
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A couple of days ago, Adam Ozimek of the blog <a href="http://modeledbehavior.com/" target="_blank">Modeled Behavior</a> stumbled on <a href="http://lancasteronline.com/news/local/plain-growing-amish-population-doubles-every-years-now-totaling-in/article_caa902dc-8fb3-11e5-b08a-c33a7cce45ff.html" target="_blank">an article I wrote</a> about Amish population trends. (Short version: They're having lots and lots of kids. Specifically, they're at 300,000 and counting, and are growing at more than five times the overall U.S. rate.)<br />
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Adam tweeted a tongue-in-cheek comment:<br />
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If my math is right, this means the U.S. is 200 to 300 years from being 100% Amish <a href="https://t.co/URTg1Q9cDT">https://t.co/URTg1Q9cDT</a></div>
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior) <a href="https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior/status/672919213552623618">December 4, 2015</a> </blockquote>
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Which yielded a bunch of followups:<br />
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<a href="https://twitter.com/mattyglesias">@mattyglesias</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior">@ModeledBehavior</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/tstuhldreherLNP">@tstuhldreherLNP</a> great news for climate change tho</div>
— Chas (@chassIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/chassIII/status/672932730225696768">December 5, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior">@ModeledBehavior</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/tstuhldreherLNP">@tstuhldreherLNP</a> after which there's an overall population explosion, leading to a reconsideration of mass transit</div>
— Curtis Michael Brown (@MisterBossy) <a href="https://twitter.com/MisterBossy/status/672927431632777216">December 4, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior">@ModeledBehavior</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/tstuhldreherLNP">@tstuhldreherLNP</a> Should help save on our defense budget.</div>
— The Taupe Avenger (@TaupeAvenger) <a href="https://twitter.com/TaupeAvenger/status/672919830668906497">December 4, 2015</a></blockquote>
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Your basic humorous Twitter riffing, clearly not meant to be taken seriously ... but also illustrative of a couple of stereotypes of the Amish that just plain (so to speak) aren't true. Amish scholar Donald Kraybill occasionally uses <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg" target="_blank">a certain famous Weird Al song</a> as a jumping-off point for serious discussions of Amish life; so, in that spirit:<br />
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<b>1. "Troubling implications for innovation": </b>Yes and no. True, the Amish end schooling after eighth grade, and they go light on the biology and science because they don't want students asking awkward questions about the veracity of Scripture. But the Amish don't oppose technology per se. Rather, they evaluate technology based on its effect on family and community life. They reject innovations they think are too disruptive, but others they embrace. Sometimes they modify them <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/02/217287028/amish-community-not-anti-technology-just-more-thoughful" target="_blank">to mitigate the perceived harm</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Stoltzfus is among the Amish businessmen who have entered the computer age. A company that outfits computers for Amish people touts in its advertising what the machines do not have: "no Internet, no video, no music."</blockquote>
Donald Kraybill has documented an Amish business that uses 3-D printers to make energy-efficient LED lights for buggies. That doesn't sound like an anti-innovation mindset to me.<br />
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<b>2. "Great news for climate change, though": </b>Sadly, not so much. The Amish are farmers, and they're not especially cutting-edge farmers, so they do their share of ecological damage. Worldwide, agriculture contributes <a href="http://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat-methane-CO2" target="_blank">about 18 percent</a> of total greenhouse gases. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess the Amish are probably about average in terms of per-acre emissions. (They do a lot of dairy farming.)<br />
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In Lancaster County, a major ecological concern with the Amish is manure runoff from their farms, which contributes to the degradation of the Chesapeake Bay. Officials are trying hard to get the Amish to improve their practices, <a href="http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/01/the_amish_and_the_chesapeake_1.html#incart_story_package" target="_blank">with some success</a>, but it's an uphill battle. <br />
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<b>3. "... leading to a reconsideration of mass transit":</b> The Amish don't oppose mass transit. They're quite happy taking buses, trains, subways <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-ok-for-the-amish-to-run-etsy-stores" target="_blank">and even airplanes</a>, as needed. Their objection to modern vehicles isn't the technology per se (see item 1), but the way car ownership promotes independence and weakens community ties.<br />
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On the other hand, the Amish reject dense settlement and the kind of centralized organization you need to run mass transit systems. So they probably wouldn't want them after they took over, and if they did, they'd have to keep a few thousand of us English around to run the networks for them.<br />
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<b>4. "Should help save on our defense budget":</b> Um, yeah, can't really disagree with that. The Amish commitment to nonviolence is deep-rooted and non-negotiable. Full marks there.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-25323295285206848892015-06-24T08:28:00.001-04:002015-06-25T19:40:15.349-04:00The Rolling Stones play Pittsburgh<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I had no intention of seeing the Rolling Stones this past weekend. They're old, the tickets were expensive, I'd already seen them once, in 1998 at the Tokyo Dome <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">—</span> and so on. I was in Pittsburgh to see my father for Father's Day, and that was that. Their only effect on my trip, I thought, was that their fans had soaked up every hotel room in town, pushing my Airbnb booking out to Regent Square. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDALI81NGxjSCOluS5eWPsFyPk9Jsykit73O_S-YtpIyGfr3yhfzDu1LgI7J5GUmFN0OtHmQjdIrz1939bSLUywoQ2BOe0PUQA5105ykxQyI7Gu1keZBZFvvN6hWJV83grUNJU7hHE6-7D/s1600/Rolling+Stones+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDALI81NGxjSCOluS5eWPsFyPk9Jsykit73O_S-YtpIyGfr3yhfzDu1LgI7J5GUmFN0OtHmQjdIrz1939bSLUywoQ2BOe0PUQA5105ykxQyI7Gu1keZBZFvvN6hWJV83grUNJU7hHE6-7D/s320/Rolling+Stones+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-align: center;">Mick on the big screen at Heinz Field, June 20, 2015.</td></tr>
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But Dad and Carol keep early hours these days, and by 8 p.m. Saturday, we were all done. WDVE-FM, true to its muse, had been playing nothing but Stones all day. Heinz Field is a "C" shape opening onto the river, and if you drive over the Fort Pitt Bridge, you can catch a glimpse of the stands. It was only a few minutes out of my way. Why not have a peek? So I did.<br />
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My first thought was "That stadium is not full."* My second thought, as I zipped into the tunnel, was, "It's been raining all day. That has to have kept at least a couple of people away." My third thought was, "You'll kick yourself for weeks if you don't go over there and at least try to get in." So I drove back into town, parked, walked over the Roberto Clemente Bridge and made my way toward Heinz Field. Twenty minutes later I was settling into peanut heaven, also known as section 527 in the upper deck, as the opening chords of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" rang out.<br />
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Never have I been so glad to part with an unreasonable sum ($98.50) for an evening's entertainment. Sure, they played songs I've heard hundreds of times before. Sure, from where I sat, Mick Jagger was half the height of a fingernail. No matter. The Rolling Stones are The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World (tm) and they put on the best goddam show you will ever see.<br />
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In support of which assertion I offer a Top 10 list of notable points about <a href="http://www.rollingstones.com/2015/06/21/zip-code-pittsburgh-15212/" target="_blank">Stop No. 15212</a> on the Zip Code Tour:<br />
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<b>10. Hello, Cleveland!: </b>Sure, it demonstrates nothing more than the canniness of their marketing team, but from Mick's cheerful, "How yinz guys doin'?!" to Charlie's black and yellow bumblebee socks, the Stones made a point of stoking Pittsburgh's hometown pride. The black-n-gold tongue logo was an especially nice touch. As was Keith's pithy economium, which went roughly like this: "Nice to be in Pittsburgh. Great town!" Pause. "I remember when it was hell."<br />
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<b>9. Big Hits ... : </b>The tour I saw in '98 was for "Bridges to Babylon," and as I recall, we got three songs from the new album, all of them mediocre and forgettable. On Saturday, apart from a perfunctory "Doom and Gloom," it was nothing but the old, good stuff.<br />
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<b>8. ... and Fazed Cookies:</b> The old, good stuff included some deep cuts, most notably "Moonlight Mile," which they're doing in honor of the Sticky Fingers re-release. (Mick duly gave a shout-out to Pittsburgher Andy Warhol, who designed the cover.) We also got "Bitch" and a killer (so to speak) "Midnight Rambler," dusted off and every bit as vicious and weird as it was on the '72 tour.<br />
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<b>7. You Got the Gold: </b>The Keith-on-vocals portion of the show is always a crapshoot. Half the time he can't be bothered to sing, and when he does try, he can barely carry a four-note tune he penned himself. On Saturday, though, he gave us "Before They Make Me Run" and "Happy," probably his two best songs, and he spared us the Andy Kaufman/Bob Dylan routine and played them straight. "That's rock n' roll," he said after "Happy." Damn right.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFRDG3sUZiAIQLNoRMBECiON5XGv-F9pCQA4-RXwiE1h4Tk8bG8zkv49bjwOeKgTp21JK5ZEjirsnv47eMfLPA2DUViZpViMQGWfJOn7McA2pnWoJR09nF2MtLFypZMuIgPlfuFJpGuFQW/s1600/Rolling+Stones+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFRDG3sUZiAIQLNoRMBECiON5XGv-F9pCQA4-RXwiE1h4Tk8bG8zkv49bjwOeKgTp21JK5ZEjirsnv47eMfLPA2DUViZpViMQGWfJOn7McA2pnWoJR09nF2MtLFypZMuIgPlfuFJpGuFQW/s320/Rolling+Stones+2.jpg" width="240" /></a><b>6. Moves Like Jagger:</b> I have no idea how he does it. No matter how carefully he eats and exercises (there's a rock lifestyle for you), no matter how carefully he husbands his energy, a man his age should not be able to put on a show like that. His voice sounds better than it did in the 1980s. My goal when I turn 50 in a couple of years is to be in as good shape as Mick Jagger is at age 71.<br />
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<b>5. Lisa Fisher, et. al.:</b> As soon as you hear the opening notes of "Gimme Shelter," you know Lisa's voice is going to head into the stratosphere on the "Rape! Murder!" bridge, but it still makes your hair stand on end when she does it. She is the most coruscatingly impressive of the Stones' backup musicians (RIP Bobby Keys), but they are all brilliant.<br />
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<b>4. Believe It Or Not, They Can Still Play:</b> OK, Keith, not so much, but Ronnie surprised me with his solos on "Before They Make Me Run" and especially "Midnight Rambler." There were some fast, clean licks in there, and they weren't just the notes off the record. There was music being made in real time.<br />
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<b>3. Even Their Stumbles Are Cool:</b> For my money, they've never gotten "You Can't Always Get What You Want" right live. Most of it sounds listless, then the last part goes too fast. This time, the main part sounded better than usual (Nice job, Penn State Choir), then everything went off the rails for a good five seconds getting into the double-time part. No matter: It's how you know it's the Stones.<br />
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<b>2. They Can Still Play, Part Two:</b> I've heard enough Stones covers to have learned that the music is more subtle than you think. Keith and Ronnie play guitar like an old married couple telling stories and finishing each other's sentences. Keith is constantly toying with those famous riffs, dropping a given chord in here, then there, finding interesting spaces between the notes. Last December I heard Joe Grushecky <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">—</span> no slouch of a musician <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">—</span> play a cover of "Brown Sugar," and it sounded flat, a little boring. Too much on the beat. When the Stones play "Brown Sugar," it sounds supple. Keith has said that Charlie follows him, not vice versa, so there's a tension in the rhythm that you don't hear in bands where the drummer sets the pace (which is most bands). It's a free-floating bar-band groove, and it fills a stadium. No mean trick, that.<br />
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<b>1. They Invented It: </b>The "Satisfaction" riff. That cowbell at the start of "Honky Tonk Women." The "Woo Woo!" that 55,000 people started singing on Saturday the moment the rhythm track began on "Sympathy for the Devil." Those guys on that stage down there created all that and more, defining rock stardom for a generation, influencing artists from Jack White to Cassandra Wilson. It should be kids' music, but they anchored it in the blues, and against all odds it and they have turned out to be surprisingly ageless. In their hands, on a good night <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">—</span> and June 20, 2015, in Pittsburgh was a very good night <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">—</span> those songs come extraordinarily and stunningly alive.<br />
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*I was wrong about that, of course.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-91510358920014075942015-05-05T07:39:00.000-04:002015-05-05T07:39:13.963-04:00Still here (sort of)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"I can't take him like that. It's against regulations."</td></tr>
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Despite appearances (no new posts since March 2?!), this remains an active blog, in my mind, at least.<br />
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At some point I hope to prove it. Even by writing a couple of new posts, if that 's what it takes.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-24726927363172124542015-03-02T23:31:00.002-05:002015-03-02T23:40:40.466-05:00Thomas Jefferson, father of economic instability<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSRo6mHDRrrudTOG2NdMrUrEtUwB3IQnNAKvG_m0fWby1VZ-v3Xm_hQKBMRC6s1b9ZWf2CFj5WkgU0SkWKTuaj2_mnowuupPeuhdhm8fn9FPRwLr2DcjZzHIOwc8rFxY4pbfrCIWENWKqT/s1600/Empire+of+Wealth.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSRo6mHDRrrudTOG2NdMrUrEtUwB3IQnNAKvG_m0fWby1VZ-v3Xm_hQKBMRC6s1b9ZWf2CFj5WkgU0SkWKTuaj2_mnowuupPeuhdhm8fn9FPRwLr2DcjZzHIOwc8rFxY4pbfrCIWENWKqT/s1600/Empire+of+Wealth.png" height="320" width="212" /></a></div>
For the past week or so, I've been reading "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Wealth-Rise-Economy-1607-2000-ebook/dp/B0015WAOS0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425357133&sr=8-1&keywords=empire+of+wealth">An Empire of Wealth</a>," by John Steele Gordon. It's an economic history of the United States, and it's vastly more entertaining than that sounds.<br />
Gordon is a vivid, energetic writer, and he has a knack for combining swift summary with well-chosen, arresting details.<br />
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One learns, for example, that the Erie Canal was the largest public works project in Western civilization since the Pyramids. Its budget, $7 milllion, "was equal to more than one-third of all the banking and insurance capital" in its home state of New York. One learns not only that in the 1880s New England was the center of a flourishing worldwide ice trade estimated at eight million tons a year, but that the ice business created a robust market for sawdust. It was an ideal insulator, which was convenient, as the discovery of a use for the stuff gave sawmills an incentive to stop dumping so much of it in the nearest stream.<br />
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One learns that banking and money creation in the early 19th century were often indistinguishable from straight-up fraud. "Fully half the banks founded between 1810 and 1820 had failed by 1825," Gordon writes. Which brings me to Thomas Jefferson.<br />
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I vaguely knew Jefferson had opposed Alexander Hamilton insistence on creating a national bank and that this was generally considered regrettable -- an unfortunate consequence of Jefferson's "the U.S. should be a nation of simple yeoman farmers" ethos -- but I had understood the dispute as an isolated historical incident. Gordon, however, argues that Jefferson's intransigence had far-reaching consequences, setting up America's financial system for a future of chronic dysfunction:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Unfortunately, Thomas Jefferson was a better politician than Hamilton, and a far better hater. ... The party forming around Thomas Jefferson would seize the reins of power in the election of 1800 and would not lose them for more than a generation. In that time, they would destroy Hamilton's financial regulatory system and would replace it with nothing. ... As a direct result, economic disaster would be visited on the United States roughly every 20 years for more than a century.</blockquote>
How bad was it? The depression of 1837 didn't reach bottom until 1843, let alone start to recover. In its early days, 90 percent of U.S. factories closed, and federal revenues fell by half. (Admittedly, the federal government was a much smaller fraction of the U.S. economy than it is now.)<br />
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The depression that began in 1873 lasted six years as well. There were others.<br />
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For what it's worth, Brink Lindsey at the libertarian Cato Institute <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/book-review-empire-wealth">thinks Gordon argues "somewhat simplistically,"</a> on this point, noting that if you have a central bank, its policy mistakes can screw up an economy quite as effectively as not having one.<br />
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Still, having a central bank at least creates the <i>possibility </i>of having effective countercyclical policy. And it's needed. (I am not impressed by arguments that laissez-faire markets naturally and rapidly self-correct; there's far too much counter-evidence.)<br />
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So I agree it's a pity Jefferson was so stubborn and so influential. Who knows, if we'd had a central bank since the 1790s rather than starting fresh in 1913, that extra century or so of policy experience might have come in handy.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-14787143028384905042015-01-14T23:29:00.002-05:002015-01-15T00:41:08.575-05:00Stephen Hawking's voice<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbudN5x6gcfkdTZUFGcHefI8TzgcCC0yAbsM9Q5obpg8a39eDqjQTA5RpCLKdyJuS82WquR0K_P0ZgBc4CkJ7EComXlShunK1GXfFlkJi4luJM32VfYuQVXpc_u2KBYiSRl2Lsc651gFO9/s1600/Stephen-Hawking-1980s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbudN5x6gcfkdTZUFGcHefI8TzgcCC0yAbsM9Q5obpg8a39eDqjQTA5RpCLKdyJuS82WquR0K_P0ZgBc4CkJ7EComXlShunK1GXfFlkJi4luJM32VfYuQVXpc_u2KBYiSRl2Lsc651gFO9/s1600/Stephen-Hawking-1980s.jpg" height="320" width="222" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stephen Hawking in the 1980s</td></tr>
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I learned something interesting today: I am among the last people who ever heard Stephen Hawking's real voice.<br />
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On Tuesday, April 23, 1985, Hawking gave a talk titled "Why Time Goes Forward" at Mandel Hall at the University of Chicago. I was a freshman that year, and I was in the audience.<br />
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In 1985 (30 years ago!), Hawking was pretty much the figure you see on the cover of "A Brief History of Time," published three years later: wheelchair-bound, bone-thin, as twisted as tree roots. He spoke in a hoarse, squeaky whisper. Essentially unintelligible, except to people in his inner circle, he was accompanied on stage by an English graduate student, bluff and robust, albeit with slightly thinning blond hair, who "translated" him phrase by phrase.<br />
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It was like listening to an oracle. Hawking would laboriously emit 30 seconds or so of rasps and squawks. These were in fact sentences, well-crafted and dense with thought, which the grad student would render in plummy Oxbridge tones. There were some jokes mixed in. To my great elation, as the talk progressed and my ear grew attuned, I was able to discern a couple of phrases amid the squawks, confirmed by the ensuing repetition.<br />
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What I did not know until now is that Hawking lost his voice just a couple of months later. Via <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/01/features/giving-hawking-a-voice">Wired's great article</a> on Hawking's IT and voice synthesizer setup (HT The Browser), I learned that he caught pneumonia in summer 1985 while visiting CERN in Geneva, and had to have an emergency tracheotomy. Since then, according to Wired, his voice has been that of "Perfect Paul," a voice developed for an early text-to-speech synthesizer by an MIT engineer, Dennis Klatt, who used his own voice as a model.<br />
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I remember Hawking's Mandel Hall talk fairly well, which is good, because the journal entry I wrote afterward gives maddeningly little detail, (though I did note for posterity that the grad student sported a yellow necktie). Hawking began by showing us a short film of plates falling off a table, then ran the same film in reverse. In real life, shards don't leap off the floor and reassemble themselves into chinaware, but why not? You can't find time-directionality in physics equations as such. They're all time-symmetric.<br />
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That led into a discussion of the various "arrows" of time. Hawking mentioned three: the entropic (the direction of increasing disorder), the psychological (which points in the same direction as the entropic, since brain processes are physical processes) and the cosmic (the direction taken by the universe).<br />
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When the universe is expanding, the cosmic and entropic arrows point in the same direction. When the universe is contracting, however, entropy is decreasing, so the entropic arrow flips. This raises the unsettling possibility that sentient beings in a contracting universe could believe themselves to be living their lives forward from birth to death, making choices and controlling their fate, when in fact the universe is rolling serenely in the other direction scrolling them backward from death to birth. If that were the case, those sentient beings -- us, for example -- would never know the difference.<br />
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Hawking closed by suggesting that the universe could be a "smooth" space-time object, without a tell-tale singularity (i.e., the Big Bang) that you could point to and say, "This is where it started." It wouldn't need a beginning, it would just be.<br />
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Heady stuff -- "mind-blowing," says my skimpy journal entry. A lot of it is in "A Brief History of Time." How much of it physicists currently consider tenable, I haven't a clue.<br />
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A few years later, I listened to an audiobook narrated by Hawking in his synth-voice, and I remember thinking what an extraordinary evening that night at Mandel Hall had been. I now know I was even luckier than I realized.<br />
<br />Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-66371025469063128182015-01-03T14:55:00.000-05:002015-01-03T15:52:27.503-05:00How to lie about flu vaccines in one easy step<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVE5vq6HjUHjHucWw5EwM4tIli7gsG4_BQIqXsLlrIIYKPWrR0TPs2v6XrMw_KdJIL1y1oz4zKcFK7_Gmb3w28Q5oMDGsqB2kaRtn9qu1aIvG4ChgYohXdIGna-QIGpEH5Tc4DLXg886i1/s1600/Flu+vaccination.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVE5vq6HjUHjHucWw5EwM4tIli7gsG4_BQIqXsLlrIIYKPWrR0TPs2v6XrMw_KdJIL1y1oz4zKcFK7_Gmb3w28Q5oMDGsqB2kaRtn9qu1aIvG4ChgYohXdIGna-QIGpEH5Tc4DLXg886i1/s1600/Flu+vaccination.jpg" height="263" width="320" /></a>I wrote a news article on flu the other day, and a reader emailed me asking, "How many people who get the flu got a flu shot?" I did a couple basic calculations and discovered something interesting (well, interesting to me anyway): The more people get the flu shot, the more easily the resulting statistics can be used deceptively to imply the vaccine doesn't work!<br />
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Why? I believe it's known as "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability">conditional probability</a>." Anyway, here are the numbers I ran:<br />
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the flu shot cuts people's chances of getting the flu <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/vaccineeffect.htm">by about 60%</a>. (It depends on your age and health status, the accuracy of the vaccine that year, and so on, but we're talking back-of-the-envelope numbers here.) WebMD says your odds of getting the flu <a href="http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/flu-statistics">are 5% to 20%</a>. I used 10% as my baseline (i.e., pre-vaccine) risk. For population, I chose 500,000, roughly the number of people in my county.<br />
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<b>CASE A:</b> Suppose 50% of the population gets a flu vaccine. (<a href="http://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1314estimates.htm">The actual 2013-14 rate was 46.2%.</a>) That means 250,000 people are unvaccinated, while 250,000 get the shot. Of the first half, 10%, or 25,000, will get the flu. Of the others, 25,000 would have gotten the flu, but they have protection that's 60% effective, so only 40%, or 10,000, actually come down with it. That still gives us 10,000 people complaining that the vaccine didn't do them a lick of good, but our population of 25,000 people who didn't get vaccinated and subsequently got sick is 2 1/2 times larger. Clearly, vaccination is doing its job.<br />
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<b>CASE B:</b> Now suppose that 90% of the population, 450,000 people, get a flu vaccine, and only 50,000 don't. We're protecting a lot more people: The vaccine will really show its worth now, right? Let's see.<br />
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Among our 50,000 unvaccinated people, 5,000 (10%) will get sick. As for the vaccinated majority, 10% of 450,000 is 45,000, but they have 60% protection, so only 40% get sick. Unfortunately, 45,000 times 0.4 is 18,000. Horrors! Among or population of sick people, the number who got vaccinated vastly exceeds those who didn't. To be precise, the vaccinated group accounts for 78% of the total. Clearly, vaccines are dangerous and make you more likely to get flu!*<br />
<br />
<b>CASE C: </b>If the CDC could achieve 99 percent vaccination compliance, then in my hypothetical population of 500,000, there would be 20,300** flu cases, and 19,800 of them - <i>over 97%!!</i> - would be people who got the shot.<br />
<br />
When you work it out step by step, it's easy to see what's happening here - a smaller portion of a large number can be (much) bigger than a larger portion of a small number. But if you're innumerate, a writer of clickbait headlines, an anti-vaxxer, or some combination of the three, you write <b>PATIENTS SICK WITH FLU 97% MORE LIKELY TO BE VACCINATED THAN NOT</b> and all hell breaks loose.<br />
<br />
The moral: The worse the stats look, the better off we are!<b> </b><br />
<br />
The follow-up moral: Get a flu shot.<br />
<br />
*In case it isn't sufficiently obvious, this "inference" is 100% wrong.<br />
<br />
**Note that our total case numbers drop as vaccination spreads: 35,000 to 23,000 to 20,300. Even at 60% effectiveness, vaccination works.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-48031859527167008172014-12-06T07:10:00.001-05:002015-01-03T16:42:38.883-05:00A trio of Sentences to Ponder<span style="font-family: inherit;">All three encountered this week in articles that are well worth reading in full. (HT for No. 3 to <a href="http://mikethemadbiologist.com/2014/12/05/links-12514-2/">Mike the Mad Biologist</a>.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">From <a href="http://theweek.com/article/index/273012/sorry-new-york-times-the-state-of-marriage-in-america-is-not-good">"Sorry <i>New York Times, </i>the state of American marriage is not good"</a>: "A married upper class and an unmarried peasantry is exactly what you see when you look at the British Isles in the early 20th century."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">● From <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/01/is-ubers-rider-database-a-sitting-duck-for-hackers/">"Is Uber's rider database a sitting duck for hackers?"</a>: “Most people,” Lewis said, “have really bad operational security.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">● From <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/schizophrenia-identity/">"What schizophrenia can teach us about ourselves"</a>: "In Europe, people are generally more comfortable with the ambiguity between psychosis and religion ..."</span>Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-28606388520911345982014-11-22T14:06:00.001-05:002014-11-22T14:15:37.125-05:00A negative argument in favor of human rights<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYW24PUOlEWWhW0zNFwUd84h3kBa0i5PGH27sXMQ0lRRfZuFlWkYuFkFGxD1_PTDyEsyJBSuhTtezck2W47bo1RPB93S_iXBwTzD5epAnt6_-No-RmcRS3C6FpWibfFFbX0tCYmDyw3nLN/s1600/Thomas_Jefferson_by_Rembrandt_Peale,_1800.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYW24PUOlEWWhW0zNFwUd84h3kBa0i5PGH27sXMQ0lRRfZuFlWkYuFkFGxD1_PTDyEsyJBSuhTtezck2W47bo1RPB93S_iXBwTzD5epAnt6_-No-RmcRS3C6FpWibfFFbX0tCYmDyw3nLN/s1600/Thomas_Jefferson_by_Rembrandt_Peale,_1800.jpg" height="320" width="268" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Jefferson: Smart dude. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I had a discussion with a colleague this week that touched on the question of human rights. My colleague said that in in his view, the concept necessarily has a religious underpinning: You can't have human rights without presupposing a God who grants them. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness ...</blockquote>
Far be it from me to cast aspersions on Thomas Jefferson, indisputably one of the greatest intellects of his age, or any age. But we have learned a few things since 1776. We know that the human species wasn't created; it evolved. And while many people believe that at some point, God turned up and inserted souls in us ... I can't see it. We're primates, natural and mortal, down here all by ourselves. Sad but true. Deal with it.<br />
<br />
How then can I justify my belief in universal human rights? I do so negatively, by noting how bad the arguments against them are. Here's how it goes:<br />
<br />
When I look inside myself, I find I have certain desires and goals, as well as certain aversions. I'd like to keep living, I'd like to have some scope of action to achieve my desires and goals, and I'd like to, you know, actually achieve them. I'd prefer not to suffer pain, despair and death. Let's call this a general preference for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."<br />
<br />
Looking at other people, I can rationally conclude they have similar desires, goals and aversions, broadly speaking. I know this because (a) they act that way; (b) biology and psychology tell me they're built basically the same way I am.<br />
<br />
Now, it turns out, human life being what it is, that those other people and I will have a better chance of achieving our goals if we cooperate. No man is an island, and all that. We have to form teams. OK, what kind of team should I be willing to join?<br />
<br />
Consider the simplest case of a team: a dyad. Two people, A and B, can relate in one of three ways: A outranks B, A and B are equal, or B outranks A.<br />
<br />
If I'm A, it's pretty clear which of these arrangements I prefer. Suppose I propose to B the setup "A outranks B." I get to order him around, and dispose of the goodies our team obtains as I see fit. B objects, naturally enough.<br />
<br />
What answer can I offer? I basically have two choices. I can either say (a) "This arrangement will work out better for you than the alternatives," or else (b) "My wellbeing counts for more than yours."<br />
<br />
The success of (a) depends, ultimately, on whether it's true. Maybe it is! B may survey his desires and goals and decide it's in his interest to use his powers of free action to follow my lead. I believe we call this "the just consent of the governed."<br />
<br />
(Communism and fascism, by the way, were failed (and coercive) arguments of type (a). "Follow us and we'll make your life better." Didn't work.)<br />
<br />
How about my argument (b)? To put it plainly, it sucks. B has no reason whatsoever to prefer me achieving my goals and desires to him achieving his; quite the opposite. He's he and I'm me. I sure wouldn't accept that argument if he made it! And we're basically the same kind of entity, so if I wouldn't buy it, I can't argue that he should.<br />
<br />
But what if he's not the same kind of entity? That, historically, has been the justification for granting human rights to some people but not others. "We're fully human, you aren't." To me, one of the great achievements of naturalism is to show how terrible those arguments are. To a first approximation, everybody's human, so everybody deserves human rights. It's not metaphysics, it's straight-up empiricism.<br />
<br />
Pushing that thought a little further, I don't think it's coincidence that the "my wellbeing counts for more than yours" argument tends to come wrapped in a thick layer of self-interested theology. "My God says we are his Chosen People." "This is my Promised Land." "I rule by Divine Right." And so on. I think it's a great step in grounding human rights to realize what terrible justifications those are. "I made up an imaginary friend, and he tells me my narcissism is A-OK." R-i-i-i-g-h-t.<br />
<br />
So there's my argument: Human rights exist because I want to have them, and from my naturalistic standpoint, I don't have any coherent justification for awarding them to myself without awarding them to everyone else, too. QED.<br />
<br />
One final point. I do think it's the case that the concept of human rights arose out of the Christian tradition. But how could it not? <i>All </i>social thinking in early modern Europe was saturated with Christianity. It was used to justify everything, from the Brotherhood of Man down to slavery, torture and murder. And for a good reason: There wasn't anything else to work with.<br />
<br />
Now there is, and we should use it. Contingent history doesn't imply conceptual necessity. We don't have to ground our social systems in medieval theology any more than we have to build planes with canvas wings, just because that's how the Wright brothers got into the air.<br />
<br />
<br />Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-60680852133449637562014-10-18T10:55:00.000-04:002014-10-18T11:05:18.832-04:00Ramen and cholesterol: I am a world authority!<div class="tr_bq">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbthd_aOsYQ9ICDjH8_Hl7I8qUR_2K8wkwQgezXFGEeD9pH6L1lsO93jsdb4ebG2UOC3JD3UtuEU1ABwrkjys9T4VCUCrkzPzucFxLEjyNBBcA1EosU4HuRbuxeKc7ag9cPNh0SGLz4rIk/s1600/Nissin+Top+Ramen+-+nutrition+-+sml.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbthd_aOsYQ9ICDjH8_Hl7I8qUR_2K8wkwQgezXFGEeD9pH6L1lsO93jsdb4ebG2UOC3JD3UtuEU1ABwrkjys9T4VCUCrkzPzucFxLEjyNBBcA1EosU4HuRbuxeKc7ag9cPNh0SGLz4rIk/s1600/Nissin+Top+Ramen+-+nutrition+-+sml.jpg" height="188" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mind the palm oil.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post titled "<a href="http://timstuhldreher.blogspot.com/2013/09/ramen-my-cholesterol-levels-and-history.html">Ramen, my cholesterol and the history of the world</a>," explaining how I'd been blithely treating instant ramen noodles as a health food, when in fact they're chock-full of palm oil, which is basically the stuff you put in your veins when your goal is to help your local cardiac surgeons pay off their student loans early. </span></div>
<div class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The post got a fair number of hits, which is always nice. Then, a</span> couple of months ago, I noticed something weird: It had become the No. 1 result for the Google search on the words "ramen" and "cholesterol." <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=ramen%20cholesterol">Try it!</a> As of this writing, it was still the case. </div>
<br />
That should tell you something about the reliability of the Internet. I'm not a nutritionist, and make no pretense of being one. Nor have I delved deeply into the ramen-cholesterol link: I read <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/08/16/212671438/ramen-to-the-rescue-how-instant-noodles-fight-global-hunger?ft=1&f=1053&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed">one NPR article</a>, photographed the back of a package, and wrote a single post. But as far as Google's search algorithm is concerned, I'm your go-to guy.<br />
<br />
So, on Tuesday, I get this:<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Hi,</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">I hope all is well with you. Healthline just published an infographic detailing the effects of high cholesterol on the body. This is an interactive chart allowing the reader to pick the side effect they want to learn more about. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">You can see the overview of the report <a href="http://www.healthline.com/health/cholesterol/effects-on-body">here</a>. </span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Our users have found our guide very useful and I thought it would be a great resource for your page: "<a href="http://timstuhldreher.blogspot.com/2013/09/ramen-my-cholesterol-levels-and-history.html">Ramen, my cholesterol levels and the history of the world</a>."</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">I would appreciate it if you could review our request and consider adding this visual representation of the effects of high </span><span class="il" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 204); color: #222222;">cholesterol</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"> to your site or sharing it on your social media feeds.</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Please let me know if you have any questions.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">All the best,</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Maggie Danhakl • Assistant Marketing Manager</span></span></blockquote>
<br />
Become a scare-quote "expert," and you get solicitations from real ones! I went and checked out <a href="http://www.healthline.com/health/cholesterol/effects-on-body">Healthline's site</a>. Their cholesterol graphic is indeed attractive (click it to visit the original):<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.healthline.com/health/cholesterol/effects-on-body"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY76jgJlodvJ3r62FO_zLgIgPRImdeqh2vBrn7tPkmvceGKOhA-7YdEqsn69rY-Vpk7iMVkrP3BVAMWKe0He1cwDj-qOYq6xync7LJ2tOlPhKK97IgiSTBqePHKvXb8312qM6vaP1G5nGh/s1600/Cholesterol+on+body.png" height="400" width="307" /></a></div>
On their site, when you point to the various organs, you get a popup with more information. Also, their information, unlike mine, has been medically reviewed by an actual doctor, George Krucik, MD, MBA.<br />
<br />
So by all means, check out Healthline. Happy to oblige, Maggie! Also, go easy on the instant ramen.<br />
<br />Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-56059469758491649632014-09-09T22:10:00.001-04:002014-09-09T22:21:57.992-04:00Notes on cooking<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3oxSJDiH-R86yfSNhDnT5fTrf6tNop8R5k9CB32a-LKMWiqP1BTYs_D12awkzPtjLXxpL5oS45Rjz1wPIeY_rlmfB4zTEVYxzj6LgmbER0p6JKqI58GCBK3NFwWmsLqTlC1BkntcJDmRX/s1600/mofo+(640x360).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3oxSJDiH-R86yfSNhDnT5fTrf6tNop8R5k9CB32a-LKMWiqP1BTYs_D12awkzPtjLXxpL5oS45Rjz1wPIeY_rlmfB4zTEVYxzj6LgmbER0p6JKqI58GCBK3NFwWmsLqTlC1BkntcJDmRX/s1600/mofo+(640x360).jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Four plantains yielded nine <br />
mofongo patties. Here's one of 'em.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've been cooking for myself for a couple of decades now. I'm no one's idea of a great chef, but I get by. With few exceptions, I stay comfortably inside my area of expertise (basically, Asian food, plus various kinds of vegetarian stew and goulash) and all is well.</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One nice thing about sticking to what you know is that you learn how the recipes work, so you can improvise if need be. To wit, on Monday night, I finally got around to using the plantains in my refrigerator. I'd bought them to make mofongo, a Puerto Rican dish. It's straightforward: You boil them, mash them up with some garlic, salt and pepper, form them into balls and fry them. Very tasty. (And yes, I realize they're neither Asian nor goulash.) </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Unfortunately, I added too much stock during the mashing stage, so the plantains were too goopy to fry properly. What to do? Well, if you want to wring moisture out of something, baking works nicely. And if I pan-fried the goop beforehand and let it absorb some oil, I figured it would taste about the same in the end. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So it did. Fried the goop, spooned it into some muffin pans I happened to have, baked for 10 minutes at 425 degrees, and voil</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">à</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">. I actually like this approach better, because deep-frying uses so much oil. It's messy, and the plantains suck it up like crazy. I think this will be the new SOP.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
The plantains were four for $1, and it looks like I'll get three meals out of them. That's about as cheap as it gets. Which brings me to <i><a href="http://www.leannebrown.ca/good-and-cheap.pdf">Good and Cheap</a>,</i> the free downloadable cookbook aimed at people in SNAP, aka food stamps. You should try it! Apparently it's reaching its target audience (<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/08/01/337141837/cheap-eats-cookbook-shows-how-to-eat-well-on-a-food-stamp-budget">NPR says</a> it's been downloaded more than 200,000 times), and it should. It's a fine cookbook, and very practical.<br />
<br />
I've liked the <i>GandC</i> recipes I've made, and I was delighted to find I'd already stumbled on my own onto many of author Leanne Brown's helpful hints for shopping and eating. (Though I have to say, I don't feel anywhere as nearly as strongly as she does about freshly ground pepper.) Fundamentally I agree with her basic attitude: If you do it right, you can eat within fairly tight time and money budgets and still eat very well. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Don't know that I'd give my own cooking the honor of that "very," but I'm getting there. </div>
Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-14953226731212640492014-08-28T07:44:00.000-04:002014-08-28T07:50:05.022-04:00Bad compatibilism<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>(<b>Note</b>: Written in February, but I never hit "publish.")</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Phil Plait, the author of the Bad Astronomy blog at
Slate.com, <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/02/05/creationism_debate_should_we_engage_anti_science.html">is distressed</a> that America has such a major hangup when it comes to
evolution: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Roughly half the population of America does believe in some
form of creationism or another. Half. Given that creationism is provably wrong,
and science has enjoyed huge overwhelming success over the years, something is
clearly broken in our country. </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKencVNnhhium72mvL6p2MHSoGIIosI0KoyFjcgJDfk_Ctel8SpCjQpOiQn2rPpvbl6BTMbYknNiFojxIZPbp_U1CBQe4V_vs4lHUjdW9YdbYWAUGIoNX9Z007gL4jxEvPJGtV1lBNWbH_/s1600/Galaxy+Hubble_view_of_barred_spiral_galaxy_Messier_83.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKencVNnhhium72mvL6p2MHSoGIIosI0KoyFjcgJDfk_Ctel8SpCjQpOiQn2rPpvbl6BTMbYknNiFojxIZPbp_U1CBQe4V_vs4lHUjdW9YdbYWAUGIoNX9Z007gL4jxEvPJGtV1lBNWbH_/s1600/Galaxy+Hubble_view_of_barred_spiral_galaxy_Messier_83.jpg" height="208" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Provably wrong.” A bracing phrase, and an accurate one. But if
that’s the case, then why do millions of Americans embrace said belief, why do conservative politicians constantly scheme to have it taught in classrooms?
The problem for us rationalists, says Plait, is the messaging: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The people who are attacking evolution are doing so because
they think evolution is attacking their beliefs. But unless they are the
narrowest of fundamentalists, this simply is not true. </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Pope John Paul II acknowledged evolution’s reality, Plait notes, so
surely religion and evolution can be harmonized. Sadly, many Americans associate evolution with atheism, which they revile. So break that link!
More religious people should speak up for evolution, Plait says, and show it’s
not a threat:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[I]f we can show them that the idea of evolution is not contrary to their faith, then we will make far, far more progress.</blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Plait then attempts to show just that ... and falls flat on his face: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Whether you think life originated out of ever-more complex
chemical reactions occurring on an ancient Earth, or was breathed into
existence by God, evolution would take over after that moment. It’s a bit like
the Big Bang; we don’t know how the Universe came into existence at that
moment, but starting a tiny fraction of a second after that event our science
does a pretty fair job of explanation.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">That's what's known in the trade as </span>the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps">“god of the gaps” argument</a>, and it automatically earns you an "F."<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Tucking</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> God into a couple of early moments in the universe that we can't quite explain might look like an innocuous way of keeping the supposed Omniscient Author of the Universe in business. But c</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">onsider: What happens if and when we find explanations for those moments, too? Does Plait really think the God's-breath theory of life's origins has a chance of beating out the complex-chemical-reaction theory? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">More to the point, Plait is basically conceding that we don't need God as an explanatory factor for roughly 99 percent of the history of the universe. That's quite a lot, and rather more than a believer is likely to be happy with.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
Listen, for example, to the believers cited in <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/12/new-darwin-documentary-shows-creationists-arent-dumb-theyre-fearful/">this post</a> about the HBO documentary "Questioning Darwin" (my italics in what follows): <span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I think a lot of rationalists tend to fall into thinking
creationists are just dumbasses. What I really liked about the documentary was
that it didn’t hesitate to show how creationists can be articulate and actually
quite persuasive, if you accept their premises. Indeed, a lot of them talked at
length about how their belief <i>in a loving god</i> who <i>specifically created the
universe for them</i> is fundamentally incompatible with evolutionary theory (and
other scientific theories based in astronomy, physics, and geology that
demonstrate that the universe and our planet are very, very old—Ken Ham at one
point tries to argue down the idea that light from stars is millions of years
old when it gets to us), and you know what? I found that argument persuasive.
Certainly more persuasive than the typical attempt to reconcile the obvious
fact that evolution is true with the desire to believe in a loving god, which
is usually some variation of, “Well, God created the universe through
evolution.”</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To believe that, the creationists point out, you have to
believe their god <i>is a complete and utter moron, </i>that he spent billions of
years spinning out galaxies and stars and let the Earth lay dormant for
billions of years before sparking a single-celled life into being and then
spending the next billion years carefully guiding evolution until finally he
got what he wanted: A human civilization that is literally only a few thousand
years old. If you’ve ever been to a museum where they put a piece of paper on
top of a rock formation to show how insignificant we are in terms of time—or if
you’ve ever pondered how tiny our planet is in the great expanse of space—then
this is beyond idiotic. It’s like taking multiple generations of people tending
an oven to make a cupcake.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ex-ACT-ly. Nine times out of 10, if people say they've reconciled science and religion, it's either because they don't understand the former or they've rendered the latter into vague, formless mush. To take Christianity as an example, surely St. Peter, St. Paul and the rest of the church fathers thought their doctrine amounted to more than "be nice to each other and feel a sense of wonder about the world." But allow pretty much any substantive metaphysics into your Christianity </span>— the personal God, the divinity of Jesus, the immortal soul, miracles, the resurrection of the dead — and you bump up against major contradictions with the scientific worldview. Conversely, if you pay attention to what the scientific method tells us about coherence, falsifiability, standards of evidence and so on, theology becomes very hard to take at all seriously. Just wishing these two intellectual disciplines could play nicely with each other, won't make it so. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-17809161585609959052014-08-14T07:52:00.000-04:002014-08-14T07:56:17.316-04:00The apotheosis of the kleptorporation<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjhGlzSCrB7QpjwaUs30T5YB2MAfFPoWDlQyFzangKUNtqa62mf0gjwaajX5hGdqlq607-MPeGA9OpzogIIdlaQ9eJN8MQNkze1I5pCeZ2aVyQisvKNpQmo-nQ__mmFXT41k1BkDiUKu8S/s1600/comcast-eats-babies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjhGlzSCrB7QpjwaUs30T5YB2MAfFPoWDlQyFzangKUNtqa62mf0gjwaajX5hGdqlq607-MPeGA9OpzogIIdlaQ9eJN8MQNkze1I5pCeZ2aVyQisvKNpQmo-nQ__mmFXT41k1BkDiUKu8S/s1600/comcast-eats-babies.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not far off.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Comcast is the nation's largest cable provider and it is<a href="http://www.cinemablend.com/television/Comcast-Voted-Worst-Company-America-63298.html"> a notoriously horrible company</a>. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/we-need-real-competition-not-a-cable-internet-monopoly">Its products are overpriced</a>, and its customer service is <a href="http://mic.com/articles/95988/this-horrible-customer-service-call-proves-comcast-is-the-worst-company-in-the-world">barely distinguishable from extortion</a>. It gets away with this because it has <a href="http://www.shanghaidaily.com/Opinion/biz-commentary/Comcast-How-to-win-at-monopoly/shdaily.shtml">de facto monopoly power</a> vis a vis customers and <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/21/us-usa-comcast-monopsony-analysis-idUSBREA1K1VI20140221">monopsony power vis a vis media companies</a>. It maintains that power by lobbying all levels of government <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/comcast-pac-gave-money-to-every-senator-examining-time-warner-cable-merger/">wth feral intensity</a>. Internally, <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/11/5978481/comcast-confessions-there-is-no-one-comcast#story">Comcast is a dysfunctional mess</a>. For running this dog's breakfast of a company, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/comcast-ceo-brian-roberts-earned-695535">was paid $31.4 million</a> in 2013.<br />
<br />
Comcast has honed its modus operandi to a fine point, but its basic strategy is hardly unique, notes Matt Stoller in "<a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/08/summer-rerun-lazy-corporate-monopolies-america-cant-nice-things.html">Lazy Corporate Monopolies Are Why America Can't Have Nice Things</a>," reposted at Naked Capitalism earlier this month (my emphasis):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Without restraint on behavior, corporate executives will work to grab as much market and political power as possible, because only market power and political power allows them<b> to have pricing leverage without investment, risk, or innovation</b>. ... Since this dramatic shift in antitrust enforcement, corporate power in every industry from cable to railroads to rental cars to banking to health insurance to pipelines has skyrocketed. The result has been <b>inefficiency and price gouging</b>.</blockquote>
The other day, I was reading a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse">New Yorker article about Vladimir Putin</a> that made reference to Russia's reputation as a "kleptocracy." I think it's high time we had an analogous word for companies. I hereby propose "<b>kleptorporation</b>." It's as ugly and clunky as what it refers to, yet clear in meaning. Also, it has "torpor" in the middle, which nicely captures the "lazy" part of the package.<br />
<br />
Down with kleptorporatism! Fight the kleptorporocracy! It's a word whose time has come.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-28378332291794737762014-08-08T10:11:00.001-04:002014-08-08T10:14:37.540-04:00Behavioral economics, the coffee edition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbz9hiGND-AtksEaSRbHVBGbU-vqyy7HgDNBtxqBDPyCmyHO8U6Qa_MzOk_alLtrb4C65PgWWFlVlr-d4eYZcanXpu2aGSJHd3CexCWw_7MYsPOXOhPRQ_4DomwrnYHiL_QW0LOmpp4z2q/s1600/coffee-cup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbz9hiGND-AtksEaSRbHVBGbU-vqyy7HgDNBtxqBDPyCmyHO8U6Qa_MzOk_alLtrb4C65PgWWFlVlr-d4eYZcanXpu2aGSJHd3CexCWw_7MYsPOXOhPRQ_4DomwrnYHiL_QW0LOmpp4z2q/s1600/coffee-cup.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
Back in January, I received a gift card for my birthday to <a href="http://www.coffeelancaster.com/">Cross Keys</a>, a coffee shop about half a block from where I work. They're valid for 15 coffees: You get the card stamped each time, filling up the little grid on the back. It's very good coffee, by the way.<br />
<br />
I liked using the card instead of fiddling with cash (I've never gotten into the habit of using credit cards for purchases that small) so after I used it up, I bought another one. And here's the thing: Even though I know perfectly well that I paid for it, it feels like I'm getting a free coffee every time.<br />
<br />
It really does. And what a psychological difference there is between <i>giving </i>money and <i>getting </i>a stamp. The latter feels almost like an accomplishment: a coffee merit badge.<br />
<br />
I've noticed a similar thing with EZPass: The payment is invisible. When I zip through a tollbooth, I know I should think, "There goes $7.43," or whatever it is, but I don't. Contrast that with feeding quarters into a vending machine to get a $1.75 soda. "Crap, is this thing expensive. @#%& inflation!"<br />
<br />
The subjective friction of transactions matters a lot. It's nuts that I get more pleasure out of a gift-card coffee than a cash coffee, but I do. It's nuts that spending $1.75 at a vending machine irks me more than spending $17.50 on a restaurant meal, but pulling out a $20 bill or a credit card is quick and easy, so it does.<br />
<br />
This is why I will never set up automatic bill pay, and it is no doubt why the utility companies keep insisting I should.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-81752052423848317712014-07-25T09:54:00.000-04:002014-07-25T10:05:26.699-04:00We could fund Social Security with the output gap<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEDPrIgFtygQ_kJ4EYmZ6L8-tU53CpUKtK0LojmlxazxwwTDDHd0QB6AHve5Zl97EVvUkZqc_hSyYriebrwn-bWidZY5vj8SAOk1GOw01b3ZSigsSXTpR6qUKTkV5HuqsTrkwQJCnTs7IO/s1600/output+gap.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEDPrIgFtygQ_kJ4EYmZ6L8-tU53CpUKtK0LojmlxazxwwTDDHd0QB6AHve5Zl97EVvUkZqc_hSyYriebrwn-bWidZY5vj8SAOk1GOw01b3ZSigsSXTpR6qUKTkV5HuqsTrkwQJCnTs7IO/s1600/output+gap.png" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Via the Economic Policy Institute</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This was going to be part of a larger post, but I think it's so striking that it deserves a post of its own.<br />
<br />
Very briefly, the estimated output gap in the U.S. economy in 2013 was <a href="http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/output-gap-real-gdp-compared-to-potential-gdp-2000-11/">$868 billion</a>. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security outlays that year were <a href="https://cbo.gov/topics/retirement/social-security">$808 billion</a>.<br />
<br />
In other words, we could pay in full for our single largest federal program, and have billions of dollars left over, with all the wealth we're <i>not </i>generating because we can't get our economy running properly.<br />
<br />
That's something to keep in mind the next time you hear someone going on about how extravagant and unsustainable <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/21/why-rich-guys-want-to-raise-the-retirement-age/">our retirement programs are</a>.<br />
<br />
Last month, I wrote a post called "<a href="http://timstuhldreher.blogspot.com/2014/06/every-year-we-waste-spain.html">Every year, we waste Spain</a>." I should probably title this one, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)">Last year, we failed to produce Turkey</a>." (Its nominal GDP in 2013 was $821 billion.)<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty_unconditionally_belongs_to_the_Nation"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhegG93ZUm74qhJuFtTfnkWvrawHpWGeg2eUFuSqDTJF7qQnb87laRSBdOG62iozPMsxTGKKXcc78YQNML7Mwsh8k2ZucI8ypCFZQol4BFDUnIZi_1vTIW2WOYqAIKcD86Jx9asGHwbDw_1/s1600/Turkish+flag.png" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty_unconditionally_belongs_to_the_Nation"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Egemenlik, kayıtsız </i></span></a><br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty_unconditionally_belongs_to_the_Nation"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>şartsız Milletindir. </i></span></a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-75325546998215571712014-07-20T23:58:00.000-04:002014-07-21T00:06:04.752-04:00Oh, Lorde<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Am I the only fencer who, however briefly, saw the title of "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-0TEJMJOhk">Foil</a>," Weird Al's parody of Lorde's
"<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlcIKh6sBtc">Royals</a>," and thought he'd written a song about our sport? Well,
probably yes. It's a wonderful parody as usual, but if only Al had skipped down<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/foil">i</a>n his <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/foil">Mirriam-Webster</a> from definition 3 to definition 5. Then we'd have had ... well ...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">... maybe something like this:</span><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<iframe frameborder="no" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/159591503&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-56759724589857198012014-07-19T11:00:00.001-04:002014-07-19T11:17:31.333-04:00On re-reading the Euthyphro<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-0HPoSSmPRr4bu-N_46b8Sf50GMUHKF0mE43xyLsFXfhZ-ypsOvuvejkZ69Loa_tfnngY7ZaKU06EPenJBK-OX6UovY6YFqb-rfy7aXYX-OmnU4vSwPvzyOK3aW5Z2Qf6MygRzty5EDRy/s1600/Socrates_Louvre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-0HPoSSmPRr4bu-N_46b8Sf50GMUHKF0mE43xyLsFXfhZ-ypsOvuvejkZ69Loa_tfnngY7ZaKU06EPenJBK-OX6UovY6YFqb-rfy7aXYX-OmnU4vSwPvzyOK3aW5Z2Qf6MygRzty5EDRy/s1600/Socrates_Louvre.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Socrates: No sock-puppet, he</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I have long considered the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma">Euthyphro dilemma</a> - posed by Socrates in Plato's <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html">dialogue of that name</a> - one of the peak moments in Western thought, one of the best insights anyone has ever had about anything. What with one thing and another, it's been on my mind lately (<a href="http://popmusicandphilosophy.blogspot.com/2014/07/no-church-in-state-of-nature.html">it's been on Jay-Z's mind</a>, too, apparently) so I thought I should reread the dialogue, for the first time in forever.<br />
<br />
It's short - 15 pages in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Collected-Dialogues-Plato-Including/dp/0691097186/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405777177&sr=8-1&keywords=plato+collected+dialogues+hamilton">the Hamilton-Cairns edition</a> - and pretty amusing. The famous bit leaps out at you the way such things always do (like "nasty, brutish and short" in Hobbes, the one quoted sentence in a roughly 600-page book).<br />
<br />
But so do other elements. In particular, I was struck by poor Euthyphro, who gets increasingly frustrated as Socrates punctures one definition of piety or holiness after another. In a lot of dialogues, including more than a few of Plato's, there's a "sock-puppet" feel, but the Euthyphro reads like a well-made play, with both characters allowed free rein to be themselves and react naturally, like real people.<br />
<br />
Toward the end, Socrates asks Euthyphro to explain the fruits of piety: Farmers produce food, generals produce victory in war, so what is produced by propitiating the gods? By this time, Euthyphro knows that anything he says will be shot down; he answers with this <i>cri de couer</i> (my bold):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Just a little while ago I told you, Socrates, that the task is not a light one, to learn precisely how all these matters stand. I will, however, simply tell you this. If anyone knows how to say and do things pleasing to the gods in prayer and sacrifice, that is holiness, and such behavior <b>saves the family in private life together with the common interests of the state</b>. To do the opposite of things pleasing to the gods is impious, and <b>this it is that upsets all and ruins everything</b>." </blockquote>
Take that, Richard Dawkins! Seriously, though, doesn't that 2,400-year-old outburst sound <a href="http://www.theacorn.com/news/2007-11-21/Faith/046.html">eerily contemporary</a>? Sure, you have to change "gods" to God and make a few other adjustments to the rhetoric, but isn't that the emotional heart of it? With God, all things are possible; Without God, all goes to rack and ruin.<br />
<br />
I think many people deeply believe that. And considered, not as a metaphysical assertion, but a psychological one, I would be hesitant to say it's entirely false. (As would Jay-Z.)<br />
<br />
Curiously, editor Edith Hamilton (the front half of Hamilton-Cairns) is somewhat dismissive of the Euthyphro. In her prefatory note, she writes: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[The dialogue] is chiefly an attempt to define piety, and comes to nothing, but in the course of it Socrates makes a distinction fundamental in reasoning and often disregarded, that the good is not good because the gods approve it, but the gods approve it because it is good. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The real interest of the dialogue, however, is the picture of Socrates just before his trial. </blockquote>
I beg to differ. The reason we still look to Socrates to this day is because he freely and happily died in service of the right to pose goofy yet unsettling philosophical questions like the Euthyphro dilemma. So how can <i>the very kind of question he died for</i> not be "the real interest of the dialogue"?* Plato wrote a dialogue, not an Attic personality puff piece. He didn't have to stick the dilemma in there. That he did strongly suggests he thought it was crucial and essential and worth thinking about. You can't just flick it away like soot off a marble bust.<br />
<br />
Sheesh.<br />
_______________<br />
*Not to mention that Hamilton completely begs the question of how accurate Plato's fictionalized account is. That "picture of Socrates" may have as much connection to a real person as Dickens' picture of Sydney Carton.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-62843187388570236702014-07-10T18:24:00.002-04:002014-07-10T18:24:58.307-04:00Paperbug<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgApzOZcTUrh4byGnIWexk8LtKKzhlNd65yFOnFI-QxVlVoY1HQv1O8jqGYzApfnNdH6MIWP_g_x9M4KHTzaNRqrzQdqgrwnvDukqOJ_GllU7h1BANreV-hxoqG1S-1B4iMkUzxyJdtK_RY/s1600/20+dollar+bill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgApzOZcTUrh4byGnIWexk8LtKKzhlNd65yFOnFI-QxVlVoY1HQv1O8jqGYzApfnNdH6MIWP_g_x9M4KHTzaNRqrzQdqgrwnvDukqOJ_GllU7h1BANreV-hxoqG1S-1B4iMkUzxyJdtK_RY/s1600/20+dollar+bill.jpg" height="136" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fight the powers that be.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Over at The Automatic Earth, a blogger named Raul Ilargi Meijer has a piece titled "<a href="http://www.theautomaticearth.com/debt-rattle-jul-8-2014-the-future-of-banking-is-pay-cash-only/">The Future of Banking Is Pay Cash Only</a>," in which he riffs off a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/james-gorman-on-the-future-of-finance-big-banks-will-get-bigger-1404762062">Wall Street Journal column</a> (<b>Note</b>: paywall) by Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Mostly, Meijer grumbles about big banks' ever-growing clout and about Gorman's warped vision of our Brave New Banking World. And fair enough, banks <i>are </i>too powerful and Gorman's vision <i>is </i>warped. But at the end, Meijer says this: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; line-height: 20.799999237060547px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">If and or when all our financial transactions are electronic – excuse me, digital - they’re all traceable too. Is that what we want? For many of us, I’m sure, it’s not. Which means that at some point someone will be smart and driven enough to start a “campaign” calling upon people everywhere to pay cash as much as they can. Most stores still accept cash, though perhaps not in all aisles. Dollars and euros and zloty’s and what not are still legal tender. There are plenty businesses, second hand cars etc., that accept only cash.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; line-height: 20.799999237060547px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.799999237060547px;">We find it comfy and easy to pay with plastic. But the more we do that, the more the power and wealth of the Mr. Gorman’s of this world increases. Literally at our cost, don’t forget that. And the power of the NSA and related global “services” increases at the same time, they can trace our whereabouts and purchases.</span> </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In a certain limited way, I suppose the suggestion makes sense. There's a reason most dope dealers don't take Visa. But seriously, do you really think bankers gain an edge when they discover you paid $26.99 for a pair of pants at JC Penny? Of course not. They couldn't care less. Rather, banks' power comes from defining what $26.99 <i>is.</i> How much purchasing power it represents, and how that compares to its value yesterday and tomorrow, how many yen or dinar it buys. That's what gives them their mojo. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
Decades before bonus points, APRs and minimum monthly payments, J.P. Morgan had no difficulty turning a big chunk of the U.S. economy into a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Looking at the other end of the power spectrum, ordinary Germans in the 1920s and ordinary Zimbabweans in the 1980s had abundant opportunity to strike a blow against The Man by paying cash. From what I can tell, it didn't help. <br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Money, as <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-economy-grinds-to-halt-as-nation-realizes-money,2912/">the best Onion article ever</a> points out, is just a symbolic, mutually shared illusion. It does not matter whether that illusion is embodied in shiny pieces of stamped metal, pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, or bits and bytes on a hard drive somewhere. What matters is who sets the rules for the illusion, who decides on interest rates, lending standards, bank capitalization, money supply and so on. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>I can sort of understand why someone might think gold is the "really real" money - it's shiny and heavy and looks valuable and all - but c'mon, cash? Meijer is arguing that the use of <i>fiat paper </i>returns power to the people. That's like saying you're president because you own a flag.Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-21180779425320043862014-06-29T18:02:00.001-04:002014-06-29T18:16:45.369-04:00A remarkable outburst of civility<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp_bdxBiL3oVGz1Y-1IYPPVZfLg5wOL6C5pZotyBsOROsVdJV418j5TauQqICYTFhNKp3qC4I1DLMsyTY89dUETyJmvbA_gxhp-YtJEtS0WLhrWGnKbA-8KU-z1coZnNfTEjayzQK5MErO/s1600/seidman-michael_1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp_bdxBiL3oVGz1Y-1IYPPVZfLg5wOL6C5pZotyBsOROsVdJV418j5TauQqICYTFhNKp3qC4I1DLMsyTY89dUETyJmvbA_gxhp-YtJEtS0WLhrWGnKbA-8KU-z1coZnNfTEjayzQK5MErO/s1600/seidman-michael_1.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Louis Michael Seidman</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Via the usual roundabout way (one click leading to another), I came across <a href="http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/seidman_on_the.html">this 2013 item</a> on the Library of Economics & Liberty website in which libertarian economist Russell Roberts interviews Constitutional scholar Louis Michael Seidman. Seidman had recently published a book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Constitutional-Disobedience-Inalienable-Rights-ebook/dp/B00AWB5AC0/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404077611&sr=1-1&keywords=louis+seidman">On Constitutional Disobedience</a></i>, arguing, as Roberts puts it, "that we should ignore the Constitution in designing public policy, relying instead on the merits of policy regardless of their constitutionality." Roberts has little sympathy with this thesis, to put it mildly.<br />
<br />
The two delve deeply into what it is that the Supreme Court is really doing when it declares a law constitutional or unconstitutional, and what would happen if the justices and the rest of us admitted how little the Constitution constrains interpretations, whether liberal or conservative; that is, how badly the "<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/12/roberts.statement/">calling balls and strikes</a>" model fits the facts. It's an intense back-and-forth between two well-informed debaters on a topic about which they deeply, fundamentally disagree. But there's this delightful aside (my bolding):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Roberts</b>: I'm going to push back on that in a second, but before I do that, I want you to talk about Constitutional Disobedience generally, which you've written about; and you invoke it in your article, arguing that it has a long history. You mention Jefferson. Talk about some other examples that you might want to refer to. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Seidman</b>: Before I do that, I hope you won't mind if I just say <b>it is a real pleasure to have an intelligent conversation with somebody who is skeptical about my argument</b>. Over the last several weeks, I've gotten something over 1000 abusive emails, many of them anti-semitic, some of them threatening violence. So this is a pleasure. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Roberts</b>: Ditto. I get to do it every week, so I'm lucky. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>(<b>Note</b>: Roberts and Seidman are referred to as "Russ" and "Guest" in the original.) </i></blockquote>
Indeed, the discussion is thoughtful and respectful throughout, and (to me, at least) extremely interesting and productive as a result. At the end, both men say they learned something; I did, too.<br />
<br />
If only more of our political discourse looked like this.<br />
<br />
<b>Addendum: </b>It's a more of a traditional Q&A than the above, but <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/06/24/a-conversation-with-ralph-nader/">Tyler Cowen's interview with Ralph Nader</a> strikes me as another good example of two well-informed people actually talking substantively with each other, not just scoring points. The full, unedited version is <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/06/cowen-nader.pdf">here</a>. (PDF)<br />
<br />Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-59314509323629469282014-06-26T20:06:00.000-04:002014-06-26T21:16:32.128-04:00Teatopia, my eye<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikuy9EFiUjDFd-EJoTGDCDcruqQ5Xzrmna7M0V09ZkZs83ydJ4JooEfjzmf3wOAI4k_o10OD-wxh2nd_TKMXSOA_PI4bajxLrt2sRWGuI0DEusJnfzPQ5hrK4-_9HWNPxekCHBCaFcBxdE/s1600/reihan_salam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikuy9EFiUjDFd-EJoTGDCDcruqQ5Xzrmna7M0V09ZkZs83ydJ4JooEfjzmf3wOAI4k_o10OD-wxh2nd_TKMXSOA_PI4bajxLrt2sRWGuI0DEusJnfzPQ5hrK4-_9HWNPxekCHBCaFcBxdE/s1600/reihan_salam.jpg" height="288" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reihan Salam has a dream.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">When I read Reihan Salam's "<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/06/president_rand_paul_what_would_happen_if_the_tea_party_controlled_american.html">Teatopia</a>" essay last week, I assumed the blogosphere would be drawn to it like wolves to a lame caribou, eager to rip it apart and spray its blood across the tundra. For some reason, though, <a href="http://www.salon.com/chromeo/article/tea_partys_embarrassing_irony_how_its_ideal_nation_rejects_basic_american_beliefs/">with the exception of Salon</a>, the wolves have stayed away. (Perhaps they're World Cup fans.) It's a shame, because the piece deserves merciless drubbing. It also raises the question: Has Salam ever met a real Tea Partier?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For starters, Salam asserts that the Tea Party's principal tenet - the thing that gets Tea Partiers out of bed in the morning, the hill they're prepared to die on - isn't the notion that we are Taxed Enough Already, even though that's what "Tea" stands for. Rather, it's something called "subsidiarity":</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Deep divisions notwithstanding, there are a number of principles that unite the movement. The most important of them is a devotion to subsidiarity, which holds that power should rest as close to ordinary people as possible. In practice, this leads Tea Party conservatives to favor voluntary cooperation among free individuals over local government, local government over state government, and state government over the federal government. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Is that so? Then why is this alleged devotion to a finely nuanced view of federalism indistinguishable from a rabid and indiscriminate hatred of government at all levels? Seriously, have you ever met a true believer who said, "Why, yes, that's a fine government program. It just needs to be handled at a more grass-roots level"?! One who was any happier paying his property taxes than his payroll taxes? These are people who seriously doubt whether education and roads should be core government services. Or for that matter, public safety: I heard a guy ask our mayor awhile back why he didn't privatize the police.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Salam goes on:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Teatopia would in some respects look much like our own America, only the contrasts would be heightened. California and New York, with their dense populations and liberal electorates, would have even bigger state governments that provide universal pre-K, a public option for health insurance, and generous funding for mass transit. They might even have their own immigration policies, which would be more welcoming toward immigrants than the policies the country as a whole would accept. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Again, Salam asserts a level of moderation and reasonableness that is nowhere evident among the movement faithful. Once you're committed to the Tea Party view of government, it doesn't matter where that government is, or whether your fellow citizens endorse it and would like more of it. Tea Partiers in Texas and Arizona aren't about to go all <i>laissez faire</i> when it comes to the socialist cesspools of California and New York. A subsidized expansion of health insurance anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">According to Salam, schools and roads would be defunded only in Teatopia's "more conservative states." Nonsense: They'd be defunded anywhere the movement could manage it. To repeat: Nowhere outside Reihan Salam's head does the Tea Party's proclaim, "Let's strike the right balance locally." Always and everywhere, it's "Stop taking my damn money, you lazy bums."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Let's continue:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To get to Teatopia, we’d have to revisit the fact that almost all states are subject to balanced budget requirements, which are a big part of why state governments have lost ground to the federal government over the years, particularly during recessions. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We'd also have to revisit the Civil War, the outcome of which is a suspiciously sore point for many in the movement. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And that bit about "revisiting" balanced budget requirements? That's Salam's euphemistic way of admitting that countercyclical fiscal policy, also known as deficit spending, can really come in handy in fighting recessions. You remember how supportive Tea Party types were of the stimulus, right? </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Having your own fiat currency helps, too. I thought Tea Partiers were mostly hard-money, goldbug types, but for Salam, those folks who chanted "End the Fed" actually meant, "Let Rhode Island set its own exchange rate."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">On military policy, Salam enthusiastically endorses two Cato Institute scholars' proposal to have the government prefund veterans' benefits through outside contracts:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Military personnel would be given enough additional pay to purchase benefits at actuarially fair rates from private insurers. If war is looming, it is a safe bet that private insurers would jack up their rates to account for the fact that service members would face an elevated risk of death and dismemberment. Suddenly the federal government would have to pay for its war-waging ways even before the first shot is fired. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And this program would work exactly as planned, according to the guy proclaiming his deep distrust of government. </span>C'mon, Salam, we just fought two wars <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/11/us-public-defrauded-hidden-cost-iraq-war">largely off the books</a>, funded through supplemental appropriations; you really think Washington couldn't fudge a few insurance policies?<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The insurance industry would help with the fudging. In the real world, unless you're very careful, you don't get market prices when the private sector bids on a military contract; you get $400 toilet seats and $400 billion airplanes </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/aerospace/la-fi-f35-fighter-jet-fire-20140623-story.html" style="font-family: inherit;">that catch on fire when they try to take off</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">. The government didn't get fair rates when it ran its student loan program through private lenders; it got a bunch of unnecessary middlemen </span><a href="http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/03/30/how-the-banks-student-loan-gravy-train-finally-got-halted/" style="font-family: inherit;">skimming themselves a generous cut of the take</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> It's also worth noting that Salam is making a very cynical and morally icky argument: He's basically saying voters will notice (and and get angry about) deficits and/or higher taxes faster than they'll notice (and get angry about) dead soldiers, aka the blood of their children and fellow citizens. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Salam passes over in silence the Tea Party's cultural sensibilities, its white Christian chauvinism; indeed, he conspicuously cherry-picks his examples to appeal to liberals. ("See, with the Tea Party you'd have less war, and more pre-K, at least in certain limited jurisdictions. You guys like that stuff!") Overall, "Teatopia" is remarkably disingenuous. Or, in plain English, it's a bait-and-switch.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">At the end, Salam makes some sense, when he says the Tea Party is a real political movement, not a passing fad. That it is, to be sure. Which makes this off-hand comment worth of notice: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We’re talking about the Tea Party’s long-term vision, whether or not it’s particularly realistic.</blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, what if it <i>isn't </i>particularly realistic? What if at root the Tea Party is, say, a fundamentally reactionary crusade fueled by an aggressively revisionist reading of America's political heritage, transmuting legitimate anger at the cronyism of big business and big government into seething rage at anything more communitarian than a bill of sale? If so, then it's exceedingly important to the country's civic health that it be portrayed realistically, understood realistically, and therefore, that apologias like "Teatopia" be recognized for the humbug they are. </span>Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-41201400770450318482014-06-18T21:14:00.001-04:002014-06-18T21:29:02.459-04:00Every year, we waste Spain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSzUo0U8_HrY488NnONyMxgS99YlfQrw0b2B8Ghk-hLrEA38oizNHQghhSlEAJ7Fnc0tsqulc9R_8zMYQhVeW5-g7BU47bye4YpeCZsdVfoRXuU_3Um5MaTgMb7ABuwA9Z4ZRVgjRN-CCe/s1600/Spanish+flag.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSzUo0U8_HrY488NnONyMxgS99YlfQrw0b2B8Ghk-hLrEA38oizNHQghhSlEAJ7Fnc0tsqulc9R_8zMYQhVeW5-g7BU47bye4YpeCZsdVfoRXuU_3Um5MaTgMb7ABuwA9Z4ZRVgjRN-CCe/s1600/Spanish+flag.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">The other day I posted a link to <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/us-healthcare-most-expensive-and-worst-performing/372828/">this Atlantic article</a> on Facebook. I can't offer a pithier summary than the headline: "U.S. Healthcare: Most Expensive and Worst Performing." </span><br />
<br />
In my post, I said a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows we waste more than $1 trillion a year on health care spending. A blog isn't quite an envelope, I suppose, but here are the numbers:<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">U.S. GDP was $16.7 trillion in 2013, according to the CIA World Factbook (</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">via Wikipedia</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">). According to the article, 17.7 percent of that is spent on health care, far above the portion spent by other countries. Judging from the chart in the article, 9.7 percent would count as middle-of-the-pack, more or less. Well,</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"> 17.7 - 9.7 = 8.0, and 8 percent of $16.7 trillion is $1.336 trillion. QED. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">How much money is $1.336 trillion? A lot. If our wasted spending were an economy, it would be the 14th largest in the world, just behind Spain. (</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">Wikipedia again</a>.<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">) Spain, in other words, manages to feed, clothe and house <a href="http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/spain-population-2013/">47 million people</a>, maintaining most of them in reasonable First World comfort, and manages to build all the roads, power plants, airports and so on that they need, not to mention hospitals, with what we spend on excess administration and paperwork, redundant and/or pointless procedures and drugs and services that cost way more than they should. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">Every year, in our health care industry, we waste Spain. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">You've got to admit, it's kind of an impressive achievement. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></span>Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-68419638885333765692014-06-11T08:12:00.000-04:002014-06-11T08:16:35.544-04:00My father vs. the stapler"I broke my stapler," my father said the other day.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1_2deYUM9eS8EuY9a4-dSqHci_HEebmb-Rs7Zbd9pTdEjTNRrWgNx7qFpzk2vxSfPsixu28JCmuD55Cy23TDaDY06NSFl-DAAyt4MI3jaGNpMGAV5LwF0yZ3uJCqnOvbf7Rw90MhypzZz/s1600/stapler.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1_2deYUM9eS8EuY9a4-dSqHci_HEebmb-Rs7Zbd9pTdEjTNRrWgNx7qFpzk2vxSfPsixu28JCmuD55Cy23TDaDY06NSFl-DAAyt4MI3jaGNpMGAV5LwF0yZ3uJCqnOvbf7Rw90MhypzZz/s1600/stapler.jpg" /></a></div>
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<div>
"That's too bad," I said.</div>
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<br /></div>
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"So I was taking it to get it repaired ..." </div>
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"Why wouldn't you just buy a new one?" I said. "Staplers cost, like, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stanley-Bostitch-Economy-Capacity-B515-BLACK/dp/B001CXWHS2/ref=sr_sp-atf_image_1_6?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1402488199&sr=1-6&keywords=stapler">five bucks</a>."</div>
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"Oh, they do?" my father said.</div>
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"Give or take," I said. </div>
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"I didn't know that," he said. "But anyway ..." </div>
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"So you took it to get it repaired," I said. "Where did you go?"</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Staples," he said. </div>
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<br /></div>
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"Of course," I said. "How did it go?"</div>
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"I showed it to the young man at the counter. He took a look at it, and he tried this and that and the other thing. Lo and behold, in about 15 minutes he got it working. So I asked him how much, and he said no charge."</div>
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<br /></div>
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"That was nice of him," I said. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
"Well, I wanted to tip him. I took $10 out of my wallet, but he said, 'Sir, I can't accept that.' I said, 'Why not?' He said, 'We aren't allowed.' I said, 'Call your manager over here.'</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
"So the manager came over," he went on, "and I said to her, 'Ma'am, this young man has just won a bet with me. I bet him $10, and I believe when you lose a bet you should honor it. Is that OK with you?' The young man didn't know what to think."</div>
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<br /></div>
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"I bet he didn't."</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
"She said, 'I don't see any problem with him taking that $10.' So he did, and I got the stapler in a bag and drove home."<br />
<br />
"Well, that's a story," I said. </div>
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<br /></div>
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"And then I dropped the fucking thing getting out of the car," he said. </div>
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<br /></div>
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"You're kidding me," I said.<br />
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"Busted it worse than before. I've just spent two hours trying to fix it."</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Two hours?!" </div>
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<br /></div>
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"Two solid hours and no luck at all. I just threw it in the trash can. Tomorrow I'm going to Staples to buy a new one." </div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
"Jeez, Dad," I said. </div>
</div>
Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552279879880539543.post-57456749882167615332014-05-25T12:11:00.001-04:002014-05-25T12:11:12.849-04:00Duly noted<p dir="ltr">Seen on Route 222 North today: A black Range Rover with the license plate "ROI CEO." </p>
<p dir="ltr">For me the first part keeps flipping between English and French ...</p>
Tim Stuhldreherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00405090830214017595noreply@blogger.com0