TD4W

The Real World V. The Imaginary One Government "Manages"

A microcosm of the pointlessness of most of what government does:

I am underconfident that the 17 agencies participating in the Pollinator Health Task Force, starting their deliberations a mere eight years after the problem became apparent, will add much value, although I'm sure National Honey Board could use some support for its grant program to study bee health. Maybe the task force should have some actual private-sector beekeepers and pollination customers, not just government officials? Or is that crazy talk?

Whole article here

The Great Harvard 4th of July Road Races

I was hoping to break 7:00/mile since the course is only 5 miles*. What I forgot is that being in July, it is warm and this course is very hilly (There is a greater than 200 vertical foot climb in the middle--most of which happens in about 1/4 mile).

In addition, there was a shoe malfunction: I was undecided on keeping the inserts in my racing shoes since they are a little tight. As I left home, I kept them out of my shoes but brought them with me and only single-tied my shoes so I could put them in easily if I decided to do it later. Once I got to the race, I forgot all of this, until the race started. Then I noticed that my feet were sliding around inside and were still single-tied and could come untied at any time.

As it was, I ran at a pace of 7:22. This turned out to be enough for third place in my age group and I would have had to be well-under 7:00 to have caught the 2nd place finisher. Also, last time I ran this--back in 2011, I took 1:37 longer. It was hotter on that day but comparing the times, it looks like the heat may have accounted for 10-15 seconds.

MALE AGE GROUP: 50 - 59
1 8 JON SCHOENBERG 51 HARVARD MA 31:04
2 14 DOMINIC GOLDING 54 PRINCETON MA 34:17
3 29 DAVID PECCHIA 51 CHELMSFORD MA 36:46

Added: In the middle of the race, at the end of the big hill, still climbing but not as steeply, I was chatting with another racer--Bob. We figured out that both of us were in the 50 year old group and he speculated that we were dueling for 5th and 6th place. I had checked the previous year's results and we were actually on track to be competing for 2nd and 3rd if all the same people were running. It turned out that reality split the difference: Last year, I would have taken 2nd but this year I got 3rd. Bob got 4th this year and would have placed the same last year with that time.

*My longest run in the modern era (when I took up running again at 40), in which I was sub-7 is 6k, which is a bit less than four miles.

Update 2: 2 races into the Nashoba Valley Grand Prix, I am in 5th place and there is nobody ahead of me who is older. Full results here:

Added: I am actually pretty tan from running outside most days but I have to admit that I look like Casper the exhausted ghost in these pictures. LOLOLOLOL

Is An Ounce Of Prevention A Compelling Governmental Interest?

Justice Ginsburg thinks so:

It bears note in this regard that the cost of
an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for
workers earning the minimum wage

The IUD is one of those things which have a high upfront cost, but they last a long time and so will "pay for themselves" eventually. This alone might pull some weight in the "a compelling governmental interest" area, but she doesn't seem to make this point. Her gist is that it is a form of contraception that some women want but they opt out when faced with the expense.

Life is full of these kinds of trade-off: A washer and dryer are expensive but their convenience and cost savings over a laundromat make them worthwhile. That does not mean the government should buy them for us, or especially; to force our employer to buy them for us.

The whole opinion is here:

Love these Sabo street-art posters

Added: He also has a clever "Abortion Barbie" poster, which I like the idea of, but the above two have a design style I can get behind.

My Metaphoric Peril Sensitive Sunglasses*

It is a long drive back from Niagara Falls to Chelmsford and my wife sensibly suggested that our newest driver get in some highway time. I could not argue against her logic but was not looking forward to watching her drive--she is safe enough but few meet my standards of highway driving and it would be irritating.

My solution was to repair to the 3rd row of our GMC Yukon XL and take a nap. The truck is so large, quiet and solid that one cannot help but feel safe; even hurtling down I90 at 75 MPH.

It was great, for me: I had a two hour nap which primed me for the rest of the trip, the girl got in some driving and my wife got the stress of observing it all.

Into each life a little rain must fall. And it was her suggestion.

*Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses

Groton Road Race 2014

Picture from Jim Rhoades of Cool Running

I came in 46th out of 426 finishers with a time of 44:23 which is 7:09/mile. 39th out of 202 men and 8th out of 50 men in my age group. I was nine seconds slower than the last time I ran this, which was in 2012, but I got 66th then out of a field of close to the same size. I actually came in 46th before, back in 2009. All results are collected here.

Port Townsend

In case you have never been and if you are a Washingtonian there really is no excuse, Port Townsend and its environs are well-worth a visit. I haven't gone there in years but when I was stationed at NAS Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, I would often go there with friends.

It was a day-trip kind of place, not known for its nightlife but quaint and Victorian in appearance. Nearby, there are even naval gun emplacements that guard the entrance to Puget Sound--these too date from the Victorian era. Also in day-trip range is Victoria BC, which given the name should not surprisingly be quite Victorian. The Empress Hotel and Butchart gardens take one back to what one might imagine those times looked like.

The one flaw to the whole scene was the people: It is hard to feel like you are in Victorian times when all the tourists are dressed in t-shirts and shorts. I recently heard of a couple who live there and have adopted Victorian dress styles. They are very charming and the woman has even written a book:

Victorian Secrets: What a Corset Taught Me about the Past, the Present, and Myself by Sarah A. Chrisman

Their very presence adds, at no charge to the local community, to the allure of the place.

Here is an image from their website:

It is clear from what I have read about this couple that they have not only taken up the appearance of Victorian people but much of the same outlook. I say much, because so far they do not appear to have done the thing Victorians were most famous for, which is have a large family. They are young so if they choose it, there is time for this . I am hoping that they do have kids and pass-on their ways to another generation.

To some extent they already are spreading their outlook, but in dilute form. Depending on how famous they get, they may touch millions of lives, but how much difference will one book or a television appearance make? On the other hand, one can only have only a fairly finite number of children but a much higher influence over them than with consumers of your creative output.

If you have an idea or a way of living that is valuable, shouldn't one want to have it carried forward into the future? Take Henry David Thoreau, in Walden he made an economic case for living a simple life. His point was that if you dispensed with much of what people spend their time working for, you would have much more time for what you really want to do. All fine and well, but if an able bodied man in his prime years only works hard enough to sustain himself, there will be no second generation to live this kind of life. His plan was not sustainable. An author who has ideas more fully-baked than Thoreau and also happens to hail from the Pacific North West is Neal Stephenson, who wrote a story about a future containing neo-Victorians. In The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer the neo-Victorians form communities in various locations and can raise their children, work and live all within a community that re-enforces their values. I do not think this is too far-fetched: Isn't this more-or-less what the Amish do now?

Added: Like most of Stephenson's works, I think his main goal is to take the reader on a tour of his imagined world, the plot is just a tool to move you from scene to scene. The device is a "book" which I put into quotes since it is really a supercomputer that teaches its owner whatever they need to learn. A neo-Victorian plutocrat commissions the book for his daughter, with the idea that their civilization for all its laudable ideas, can be too conformist and book is to introduce a bit of subversiveness into its reader. The upper middle class engineer sees the value in this and secretly makes an extra copy for his own daughter. This copy falls into the hands of a neglected girl living in a slum. The story revolves around this girl who would have been doomed by her circumstance to a base existence and early demise, but instead is taught skills and an outlook (the Victorian outlook) that allows her to survive and thrive.

Rather Like A Gold Coin Once Held In Julius Caesar's Pocket--If Romans Had Pockets

Here is a philosophical question:  If you had a gold coin that had once been owned by a famous ancient statesman and somehow this could be proven, would it be more valuable than an otherwise identical coin?*

I think most people would understand that this particular coin would be worth more than an otherwise identical coin that lacked such provenance.  There is nothing intrinsic about the coin that makes it different, it is only how we feel about it which is different.

* Seems pretty unlikely but how about this:  The statesman was found buried in Pompeii and had the coins on his person.  There had been an unbroken chain of custody since the discovery.

This kind of meaning is where pretty much all of the value, to the extent that there is positive value, comes from when we concern ourselves with the provenance of our food.  So terms like halal,  kosher, GMO free and organic are mostly alike as a category.*

*If I feel like it, it does seem pointless to spell-out things which should be obvious to anyone with a rudimentary education in biology, I will explain why there is no intrinsic differences between the above rarefied categories and regular food.

There are real differences in how special foods (the above categories) are produced and handled.  In the religious categories, the differences in how the foods are handled is important to the observant because they put some value into following the commands laid out by their faith.  The organic and GMO free are similar in that there are very real differences in how the food is produced:  Organic will not use GMO seeds, nor chemically derived fertilizer or most pesticides.  In general, it takes more land and more labor to produce such food and this accounts for the higher prices.  One can debate the relative value of refraining from adding artificial chemicals to soil versus using chemicals but leaving more land uncultivated.  It becomes more of a metaphysical question if one tries to differentiate between nitrogen supplied by horse manure or the Haber process. A growing plant can't tell the difference, because there is no difference between these molecules.

Kristen Schaal And Sandra Bernhard

A generation apart but really similar in several ways:

Kristen Schaal

Sandra Bernhard

1. Both work in comedy

2 Neither are pretty.  Not ugly or even homely either, just not pretty in any conventional sort of way--though perhaps contradictorily  they both have enormous sex-appeal.

3. The parts they play are just creepy enough to make them both a little intimidating.

Driverless Cars and Trucks

First, let's assume away the most likely outcome:  Massive resistance by professional drivers will kill the adaptation of the technology.  Why take this step?  Because if the technology is not adapted then there is nothing to speculate about and that is boring.

1. It will be less common to own your car.  The main reason people own their car is that they want to have one available.  Even if you wanted to share your car, it is not always convenient to do this.  A person could use my car for the ten hours I am at work or the 13 hours I am at home on a normal work-day, but they would have to live near one of those places and have to restrict their use to those windows of time.  But what if my car could drive itself?  It could go and pick-up someone who works later than I do or drive around a mom who has some mid-day errands to do.

There is a lot of trouble and expense in owning and maintaining a car.  All of that cost provides me with an hour per day of use.  For only a marginal increase in cost, the car could be kept busy all day long.  A company can operate and maintain a fleet of cars for less per car than individuals could do.  If they can do this and make sure that subscribers have a car when they need one, why would people bother to own one?  Some people would remain attached to an old car or one which is special to them in some way but a lot of the fun of driving will be gone because:

2.  It will become illegal, or very expensive to manually drive.  The software and sensors are improving all the time and it won't be long before computers are much, much better at it than any human.  The temptation will be to outlaw the risky behavioral of manual driving.  My kids, or maybe theirs, will be the last generation to know how to drive.

3.  Long range travel by car will be much more tolerable and therefore more common.  Computers would allow for faster driving and could save fuel by networking with other cars on the road to tailgate each other and thus save on wind resistance.

Shocking! Surgeon General Nominee Opposed Due to His Polarizing Stances

By all accounts, Dr Murthy is a fine physician and if that were the only qualification needed to be "America's doctor"  he would be a shoe-in for the post.  He has been busy with arguably non-doctor type activities though:  He co-founded and was president of Doctors For America which advocated for the ACA (Obamacare) and for gun control.

People of good faith can argue about the merits of each of these, but what is not debatable is that both are hot issues that divide the country pretty evenly--I would say that the doctor is on the somewhat less popular side of both issues.

Is it right to oppose Dr Murthy for the post of America's doctor for his political views?  Well, yes.  And it would hardly be unprecedented:  Feminists and other liberals opposed C. Everett Koop because of his views on abortion.  They failed, obviously, but one cannot deny they had a right to try.

As an aside, the NRA is often derided as having out sized influence given its meager numbers, but compared to say NOW, it is rather more representative:  

NOW has some 500,000 members and there are about 150 Million women in the USA, so the ratio is 1:300 

NRA has 5,000,000 members and there are about 75 Million gun owners in the USA, this gives a ratio of 1:15, which is 20 times more representative of the group they supposedly speak for.

Not to fight the gun control fight here but let's have a look as some of the proposals the good doctor put his name to:

Specific approaches should include:

A federal ban on the sale of assault weapons and ammunition – to stop weapons
from being added to the existing stock.

It is well known that only a vanishing small fraction of murders are committed by long guns of any type (mostly shotguns). By far, most crimes (that involve guns) are committed with pistols.  Also, well known among people who know anything about firearms, is that the ammunition used in so-called assault weapons is also very commonly used in regular rifles.  It is also well known that the differences between normal rifles and assault weapons are almost all cosmetic rather than functional.  Some anti-assault weapons proposals and laws go after certain pistols and shotguns too, but the assault versions use exactly the same ammunition as the regular ones.  The upshot of all this is that the guy makes proposals which would curtail the rights of millions of law-abiding Americans and yet can't be arsed to know the first thing about fire arms or bother to look at easily obtainable data such as FBI crime statistics.  These stats would show him that the lion's share of murder is committed with one type of gun, pistols.  And it would show him that "gun deaths"* have been on the decline for decades.

*In my view, the murder numbers have gotten so low that advocates like to use the term "gun deaths" instead.  The bulk of this number comes from murder and suicide, with suicide being about twice as common as murder.

Hey, I thought all good progressives were in favor of suicide--maybe only if it is assisted.

Too much time in Washington rots your mind.

" She earned a B.A. in political science from Yale University in 1972, followed by a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1975. "


AND

Thinks the US Constitution is 400 years old.

What Does Russia Get From This?

Kiev had already granted Russia the right to use bases in the Crimea, which is the only warm-water port Russia has available.

Now what?

If Russia annexes the Crimea, they get the status of international pariah and gain bases they already had.

If Ukraine manages to kick the Russian troops out of the Crimea then they are also likely to end the Russian basing privileges too.   After all, they can say, "Last time we let you keep troops here, look what mischief they got into"?

How Many Gears?

My driver took the Autobahn between Darmstadt and Frankfurt.  He showed up in a Volkswagon, which did not dismay me since it was the same giant, powerful type I had been brought in.

He only hit around 125 mph but I looked over at the tach and it was only reading about 3,300!

I hope that was his top gear!

The Information In These Two Offices Vary

Both of these sites give the dates of Lake Champlain Closing (due to ice), both are tagged with NOAA and have the following address listed:

National Weather Service
Burlington
1200 Airport Drive
S. Burlington VT 05403
(802)862-2475

But one gives a closing date of Feb 12th and the other has no date listed.

The question I have is what they will say 6-months from now?  Will they agree on the date or claim the lake never froze?

I will update when and if there is a change to either site (I have screen-shots of what is there now).

Note:  Just playing with the font and background color for kicks--this will not persist.  Probably.

The curious and irregular conception of Obamacare

Read the whole thing by Noemie Emery

 “Current and former administration officials .  .  . have been surprised at how steadfast the opposition has remained,” the Washington Post reported last summer, quoting MIT economist Jonathan Gruber saying, “It used to be you had a fight and it was over, and you moved on.” But few have moved on, for reasons which are not all that hard to tease out: It’s not working out, in fact it’s a disaster; it’s blowing holes in the federal budget; the win-to-lose balance is way out of kilter, as many more people are hurt than helped by it. Obamacare may collapse on its own for practical reasons, but there is a fourth strike against it that adds a dimension of weakness no comparable measure has faced: Much of the country believes it’s a fraud, passed dishonestly, and not deserving of moral authority. In short, they find it nearly illegal, highly immoral, and possibly fattening. And their minds won’t be changed.

Germany, Traditional and Modern

A typical street in Darmstadt.



An artsy apartment building: It was horseshoe shaped with one end at ground level and the other end about six stories tall. All of the top is covered with trees and other plants.



The circular building is one ward of a hospital complex.

Big Mac At Home and in Germany

I just had to know: Are they the same everywhere?

Difference #1 Price: 6.49 Euros comes to $8.87, so that is more but I really do not know how much more since I usually just buy the burger itself--or more usually, just whatever burger is on the value menu. This is not entirely cheapness on my part; I just feel like the fries and soda are much worse for me than the burger.

Sameness #1 The burger was, as far as I could tell, exactly like what I get in the United States. The fries were the same too. The coke tasted perhaps slightly better but this is hard to tell since I usually get Dr. Pepper and I am used to having ICE! please. It is possible that they use sucrose here instead of corn syrup and that would account for the Coke tasting better.

Difference # 2 The ketchup packet was much larger than the ones in the US. It takes three of the US ones at home while this larger one was plenty. Also, they offered me Ketchup OR mayonnaise. Neither was available to take as one pleased. Lately, the McDonald's in the US have pumps available or packets upon demand.

Labor Participation Rate and Bad Cancer Cures

One might be sanguine about our economy if you look at the unemployment rate: It has gone from about 10% back in 2010 steadily downward to 7.5% now. If you look at the labor force participation rate, the story takes on a different hue: We have steadily dropped from around 66% between 2003-2008 to about 63% now. Back in 2006, 66% of the people wanted to work, there was 5% unemployment and so 62.7% were actually working. Now, we have 7.5% unemployment and only 63% participating, so that leaves 58.275% working. If we calculated unemployment using the former participation rate,we would get:

(1-(58.275/66)) X 100 = 11.7%

Some might say that decreased labor participation is good because it gives us a better unemployment rate. I will show why I disagree below.

Unemployment rate: From BLS



Labor force participation rate: From BLS



The recent CBO report on the impact of "Obamacare" says:

CBO estimates that the ACA [Affordable Care Act] will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.

(People like Greg Mankiw (and many others) saw this coming from a long-way off.)

This has been greeted by some as a good thing. Certainly it is possible that some individuals will benefit: Let's say there is a guy who hates his job, doesn't need the money, but did need the health insurance. Let's further assume that now he can get his coverage for free or so cheaply that he could afford it easily. Okay, he is gaining from the new law. But what about society? We lose in two ways: 1. He will no longer provide the valuable work he had been doing. 2. We as a society are now paying for what he had previously provided for himself. Bear in mind that the above was a best-case-scenario. He could have been forced to quit because his employer had cut his pay to provide added benefits due to mandates or because of higher taxes or any number of reasons that leave him worse-off now.

The whole idea of society being better off with fewer people working reminds me of good and bad ways to decrease mortality from cancer.

A good way would be prevention: Get people to stop smoking and lung cancer rates will go down. Another good way is earlier detection and better treatments. But here is a bad way of reducing the rate of cancer deaths to zero: Execute anyone who is diagnosed with cancer. It is a ridiculous idea and yet one cannot deny that it eliminates death from cancer. The problem with it is that it doesn't leave anyone better off than they were before. Similarly, organizing our economy such that fewer people want to work deprives us of productive activities.

All of this leaves aside the non-economic value of work: This was well summed-up in a comment to this post over at MARGINALREVOLUTION: How happy should we be about ACA supply-side responses to work less?

Turkey Vulture February 5, 2014 at 12:06 pm
I really dislike working. I don’t like being tied down, and want to pursue other activities. But at points in my life when I haven’t worked, or have worked minimally, I have tended to just waste time doing nothing of use. And I want to do things, accomplish things, I just don’t. I am lazy, and especially so when I have no immediate need to do anything. This lowers my life satisfaction. But still, even knowing this, if I have a way to get by without having to work, I will be tempted to take it, and probably lose the good habits a regular job can bring.

I think most people are like this, which is why even though I will never pray at the alter of the protestant work ethic, I think that programs that encourage idleness can lead people into a rut from which they won’t have the wherewithal to escape. But hey, maybe everyone else is more of a go-getter than me, and I’m completely off base.

I think Turkey Vulture is correct--and far more honest than most people are about themselves.